The Interrogation: No Water-Boarding Here
(to “honor” the publication of George Bush’s memoir, a tissue of lies: a moment of truth)
One of those large eight-man tents, not far from the smaller tent where I was staying for a few weeks. Beautiful Dak To: high hills ringing the small base camp—Some of the hills with names: Ngok Ring Rua, Ngok Rao. I didn’t know what the names meant. They were in the local montagnard dialect and I didn’t speak the language. No one could tell me what the words meant except for the one word “ngok”—mountain. But the landscape as landscape was beautiful—thick triple canopied jungle covered the highest of the hills though sometimes there was a bald spot at the very top. And there were clear spaces, places where our bombs had fallen, places where napalm had cleared the underbrush, places that looked as pock-marked as an adolescent’s face. Other than that, the whole area was lovely.
This isn’t about the Battle of Dak To, nor is it about the death of a scout/spy named Bao: enough has been written about the battle and I've written more than enough about Bao. Army historians wrote a detailed account of everything that happened at Dak To and published it in a full-length, book-sized government document. The Battle of Dak To was the first of the three major battles that divide the whole 1967-1968 war year, like Gaul, into three major parts: Dak To, the Tet Offensive and Khe Sanh. Those names are now, for better or worse, a part of our cultural memory though it is doubtful that, a hundred years from now, anyone will remember what happened near the small town of Dak To.
But I believe that was the crucial year on the war, the year that marked a turning point in the history of the war, the climax of the war. The rest, from after Tet 1968 to the Fall of Saigon, those long eight years, were merely denoument.
What I want to talk about today, though, is what happened in that tent I mentioned back in the first sentence. When I read about the extreme interrogation techniques we used in the Bush era of the Iraq/Afghanistan War, I am always, aways thrust back to Dak To in November of 1967: the only time I participated, if only for one day, in an interrogation. Some MI guys from the 4th Infantry Division had a prisoner: a Viet Cong, not a North Vietnamese Army soldier, Jim and I got a chance to meet with the prisoner the day before we were scheduled to leave Dak To.
It was always hard for me to determine the age of some youngish Vietnamese men. This particular prisoner looked no more than fifteen, but could easily have been in his young twenties. He had a bandage on his head, some blood showing through. When I first saw him I got flashes of Henry Fleming from Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: the bloody bandage, the false bravado, but all bravado is, by definition, false in some way.
I confess that I felt some sympathy for the man/boy. He was on a small blanket on a dirt floor, surrounded by men who were much larger than he was, unable to speak their language even when they shouted at him in slower and slower English or tried rudimentary Vietnamese…so rudimentary and wrong that he could not understand a word of it. All of the tones were wrong and if you don’t get the tones right in Vietnamese you aren’t using the right words.
I will say this up front: no one was mistreating him. There was no torture. No one was hitting him. No one used extreme interrogation techniques. But just being there in the tent, lying on a small blanket on a dirt floor, surrounded by big men who did not speak his language and who must have wanted some kind of vengeance, must have felt to him like some light form of torture. I suspect the sense of certainty that some form of torture is going to happen is a kind of self-inflicted torture in and of itself.
The prisoner was asking for water, but none of the men around him could understand what he wanted. I told them he was thirsty and one of them brought a canteen. No torture, just a failure to communicate. I handed him the canteen and he drank thirstily. If this were fiction, the canteen with its water might seem like some symbol of communion: take, drink…this is my blood. But this is not fiction and the water was simply…water. No conversion, no spontaneous belief in all things red, white and blue. Merely thirst quenched. He looked better after drinking.
Jim and I were there because we had some use of the language after more than a year of language school: like being able to tell the VC was thirsty, for example. The 4th Infantry Division guys wanted the prisoner to answer questions and they did not know how to ask the questions or comprehend the answers. They had had twelve weeks of Vietnamese language familiarization. That obviously had accomplished nothing.
The boy, because he was not old enough to be called a man, though his wounds might have made up for his age, was perfectly willing to talk, seemed almost eager to do so. I do not remember all the questions, all the answers, but he did tell us which unit he was with and confessed that he did not know much about the area. He was not an officer, not in on any plans that might help the 4th ID succeed in its mission. So, he spilled everything he knew but knew nothing. I remember one of the questions. I was told to ask him if his unit had helmets. I shrugged and asked. His answer: “If we had helmets, I would not be here.”
So, that’s it. I suppose if they had had helmets we would have lost the war even sooner. Or, maybe if we had taken a colonel or general prisoner, we would have gotten more important information from him. You know, plans, major intelligence, but we were stuck with the equivalent of a buck private and like E-1s everywhere, he didn’t really know anything of value. I mean he knew that he was hungry and thirsty and that he was in a shit load of trouble. But that’s about it. And we already knew that. We would have known that without asking him anything. He also told us his unit numbers and designations, but we already knew that unit was in the area. We had known it for some time.
That all happened a long time ago, back in 1967, but I still remember it well: remember the sight of the high hills around the base camp, remember the smell of the camp, the filth, the dead-tired grunts who had recently been fighting for their lives, and, yes, one small prisoner huddled on a blanket on the dirt floor of an eight-man tent surrounded by large men who must have terrified him though they did no physical harm to him.
I don’t know what happened to him after I left the camp and, really, I would prefer not to know. That’s the only prisoner interrogation I was ever a part of and it was fairly mild. I have no doubt that most such interrogations were less friendly than this one, though I'm also fairly certain American soldiers did not torture captured enemy soldiers during the Vietnam War. Whether the ARVN did or not might make us somehow complicit, but I don't know what happened after he was turned over to them. What I do know is that we had a prisoner who obviously could give us very little information. And I also know that we were not unkind though he could not have sensed much kindness from any of us.
I suspect that, right now, he is an aging farmer somewhere in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and sometimes tells a story about the time he was held prisoner in a little out of the way American camp in Kontum Province. He might even mention the American soldier who spoke enough of his language that that soldier was able to know to give him a canteen of water.
Sometimes, that's enough.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 20.5)
Thanksgiving, 1967
I am grateful that at this stage in the Vietnam War I remain fairly apolitical. This is the day of Thanksgiving dinner and the Army has good-sized portions of turkey with all the trimmings. The mess hall smells….great! A few of my more politically sensitive brethren boycott the meal. I am perplexed. I fail to see how not eating good food will bring the war to an end more quickly than devouring turkey will. I am either a rationalist or a hypocrite or...maybe, I'm just hungry.
Most of the truces in the war revolved around Christmas and Tet, but there was also a Thanksgiving Truce in the iconic war year of 1967-1968. The odd thing was that the dirty, godless commies pretty much stuck to that 1967 Thanksgiving Truce. Oh, there were a few shots here and there (possibly because the Viet Cong communications net didn’t quite reach everyone out in the boonies), but, generally, the truce held. That was also true the next month for the Christmas Truce. I assume the VC were trying to lull us into a sense of complacency: two truces, no major violations. Surely the upcoming Tet Truce would be similar, no? Well, no, Tet Truce, 1968, was violated everywhere.
But that Thanksgiving in 1967 was, yes, sweet. In the Central Highlands, up in the more civilized area of Engineer Hill (home of the 555th Combat Engineers), we kicked back and enjoyed a quiet evening. Well, relatively quiet, a few jokers fired the fifty calibers and even set off a Claymore, and the combat engineers shot a few rockets into the sky that night. Even the radio traffic was fairly quiet (both theirs and ours). Some of us sat on the VC side of our berm and drank wine and beer, smoked legal and illegal substances, and stared out into the dark, cool night that, to me, most represents the high hills of the province of Pleiku, Vietnam, now called (I think) Gia Dinh or Gia Lai Province.
Sometimes, evenings in the highlands of Vietnam were like that. You could lie down on the berm that surrounded the camp, 3 or 4 clicks from the giant air force base down in the valley, and see the same stars that lit up the sky over southeast Texas, and think of home. Some evenings, Orion, so clear and crisp as it rose above the guard posts, almost brought tears to my eyes. It was all just so damned peaceful! At other times, you could hear fighting off in another section of the valley and see rivers of red tracers piss down on the VC from our guys in what we called Puff the Magic Dragon (after the Peter, Paul and Mary song--we were not divorced from popular culture back home) and a few green tracers flying back up at them. On those nights, the sky was sometimes lit by bright, amber flares floating beneath small parachutes as we looked out into the same valley we enjoyed on this Thanksgiving evening.
Nothing worth reporting happened that day or night: the normal rounds of laughing and bitching, cool breezes, a crisp moonlit sky. Not really worth writing about: a day of relative peace in the middle of ten years of warfare. Hardly worth noting. Not at all.
I am grateful that at this stage in the Vietnam War I remain fairly apolitical. This is the day of Thanksgiving dinner and the Army has good-sized portions of turkey with all the trimmings. The mess hall smells….great! A few of my more politically sensitive brethren boycott the meal. I am perplexed. I fail to see how not eating good food will bring the war to an end more quickly than devouring turkey will. I am either a rationalist or a hypocrite or...maybe, I'm just hungry.
Most of the truces in the war revolved around Christmas and Tet, but there was also a Thanksgiving Truce in the iconic war year of 1967-1968. The odd thing was that the dirty, godless commies pretty much stuck to that 1967 Thanksgiving Truce. Oh, there were a few shots here and there (possibly because the Viet Cong communications net didn’t quite reach everyone out in the boonies), but, generally, the truce held. That was also true the next month for the Christmas Truce. I assume the VC were trying to lull us into a sense of complacency: two truces, no major violations. Surely the upcoming Tet Truce would be similar, no? Well, no, Tet Truce, 1968, was violated everywhere.
But that Thanksgiving in 1967 was, yes, sweet. In the Central Highlands, up in the more civilized area of Engineer Hill (home of the 555th Combat Engineers), we kicked back and enjoyed a quiet evening. Well, relatively quiet, a few jokers fired the fifty calibers and even set off a Claymore, and the combat engineers shot a few rockets into the sky that night. Even the radio traffic was fairly quiet (both theirs and ours). Some of us sat on the VC side of our berm and drank wine and beer, smoked legal and illegal substances, and stared out into the dark, cool night that, to me, most represents the high hills of the province of Pleiku, Vietnam, now called (I think) Gia Dinh or Gia Lai Province.
Sometimes, evenings in the highlands of Vietnam were like that. You could lie down on the berm that surrounded the camp, 3 or 4 clicks from the giant air force base down in the valley, and see the same stars that lit up the sky over southeast Texas, and think of home. Some evenings, Orion, so clear and crisp as it rose above the guard posts, almost brought tears to my eyes. It was all just so damned peaceful! At other times, you could hear fighting off in another section of the valley and see rivers of red tracers piss down on the VC from our guys in what we called Puff the Magic Dragon (after the Peter, Paul and Mary song--we were not divorced from popular culture back home) and a few green tracers flying back up at them. On those nights, the sky was sometimes lit by bright, amber flares floating beneath small parachutes as we looked out into the same valley we enjoyed on this Thanksgiving evening.
Nothing worth reporting happened that day or night: the normal rounds of laughing and bitching, cool breezes, a crisp moonlit sky. Not really worth writing about: a day of relative peace in the middle of ten years of warfare. Hardly worth noting. Not at all.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 20)
We Get Our Man...boy...kid...whatever
You have to realize that I was a true and total REMF. I was frightened a few times by mortars, once by rockets. Aside from that, Vietnam was, for me (and I do apologize—I think I must—for this), fairly pleasant. I was able to speak the language well enough, thanks to the Defense Language Institute (East Coast) to actually converse with some folks who lived there. I could definitely read it well enough to sit down in an outdoor café and peruse the local newspaper while small children pointed at me in something akin to wonder that I could actually read their language.
What I am getting at is that Dak To, though I was in country, was totally alien to me. I was much closer to the war than I had any desire to be. The men I saw there had actually been fighting, had been in danger of dying, had killed other people...well, some of them.
The only way to get into the small town of Dak To was to hitch a ride on a laundry convoy (I don’t recall seeing any hootch girls at the base camp). The laundries of Vietnam were among the major places where soldiers could lease female companionship for a short-time. I wasn’t about to 1) lease female companionship at a laundry or 2) hitch a ride on a convoy through the hills of Dak To. Remember: Bao was out there reporting on convoys leaving the small base camp. Did I say “base camp”? There wasn’t even a PX!!!!
That first night, both Jim and I managed somehow to find our way through the dark to our two-man foxhole when mortars started falling in. Foxhole? Back on Engineer Hill, the 555th had used bobcats and other earth-moving equipment to dig out what seemed like palatial bunkers compared to this! The other thing we noticed was that the area around the camp there was not nearly as well fortified as had been the Hill. So, for this particular REMF, Dak To was a scary place. The mess tent the next morning was . . .a tent. Everyone lined up, got their breakfasts, and moved out quickly. I was told that mess tents are popular mortar targets at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Jim and I went back to our own tent and listened to the radio. Why? A convoy had just left and, sure enough: “hai xe dip,…” Bao was reporting in the clear on jeeps and other vehicles from the convoy. We knew Bao had to be nearby because the convoy had just left the gate as he started reporting. But he could have been anywhere in immediate area, somewhere on one of the hills surrounding the camp.
We did what we could to locate him. I was for a while, each morning we were there, something of a human locating device. . .triangular antenna in my hand, circling, searching for the signal in the few minutes Bao was up and reporting. We were able to get a straight line and Bao sat somewhere on that line. The line, though, circled the entire globe!!! We could narrow it down to points on the line within view of the front gates of the camp: Maybe a ten klick line leading up to hills on either side of the area. And we could assume he was on one of the two closest hills on that line. Why? He wouldn’t be at ground level for the camp because he couldn’t see well enough and he would have been in danger of being seen by almost anyone in the area. “Hey, Lieutenant, what’s that funny looking Gook with the antenna doing over there? See!” And then ZAP!!!!!!!! No more Bao. So, he had to be up in the tree line on one of the two hills: better spying area and better cover for him.
So, we located him--close enough for government work. One morning in the war, we let the camp’s C.O. know that Bao was up and broadcasting. He almost always came up at around 0800 hours. We stood in front of our tent, earphones on our heads, listening. It was like surround sound: Jets on the line extending to our rear dropping napalm; same thing in front, and then heard same sounds on the radio. And then? We saw Napalm: beautiful in its brilliant luminescence as it exploded into the air, licked up the surrounding vegetation, its tongues radiating outward. Smoke. Red-orange to black on the hills. And then a quick strafing run in front of us and behind us. A hissing sound on the radio. Silence.
This is part of why I wrote this villanelle, years later, some weeks after my first visit to our wall. The formality of the structure of the poem gave some distance from the event:
Not All the Names Are There
I said I would not write about the Wall,
two wings of black marble with 58,000 names.
I know not all the names are there, not all.
They say the Wall brings healing, peace,
understanding. They never mention rage.
I knew I should not write about the Wall.
A boy named Bao lay dying on a hill,
his body burned with napalm, his death my call.
I know not all the names are there, I cannot
see his name and face behind the marble sheen
neither on the west nor on the east, no trace.
No one carved his name upon the Wall.
No one ever mentions tears can fall and rage
Can dominate those wings of black, etched names.
I said I would not write about the Wall,
not all the name can fit there, hardly all.
Not one of my better poems: another reason I should not have written about the Wall. But Bao deserves some respect, some lasting memory. I cannot imagine the courage it took to sit out there on the side of a hill looking down at thousands of enemy troops and reporting on their movements. Our LRRPs did some similar things and I have a great deal of respect for them. But I can't recall hearing of anyone going out alone, getting close to a large concentration of troops and reporting back.
Bao's death was just one small incident in the deadly hills around Dak To that late November. But it remains the only death I actually heard happening on the radio during the war and the only death of an enemy soldier I was so closely involved in.
We left Dak To three days later. Two weeks later, some other VC cannonfodder was making similar reports on the camp. We kill someone, some thousands, and we count them, and then others are back. It's like the film version of Hamburger Hill: w e kill enough of them that they leave, we leave or continue what we were doing, they come back. Over and over and over again. We spent young people like some cheap currency and we say wonderful things about them, but in a situation like Vietnam the currency of life became seriously deflated.
(One last blog post about Dak To and then back to the security of Engineer Hill.)
You have to realize that I was a true and total REMF. I was frightened a few times by mortars, once by rockets. Aside from that, Vietnam was, for me (and I do apologize—I think I must—for this), fairly pleasant. I was able to speak the language well enough, thanks to the Defense Language Institute (East Coast) to actually converse with some folks who lived there. I could definitely read it well enough to sit down in an outdoor café and peruse the local newspaper while small children pointed at me in something akin to wonder that I could actually read their language.
What I am getting at is that Dak To, though I was in country, was totally alien to me. I was much closer to the war than I had any desire to be. The men I saw there had actually been fighting, had been in danger of dying, had killed other people...well, some of them.
The only way to get into the small town of Dak To was to hitch a ride on a laundry convoy (I don’t recall seeing any hootch girls at the base camp). The laundries of Vietnam were among the major places where soldiers could lease female companionship for a short-time. I wasn’t about to 1) lease female companionship at a laundry or 2) hitch a ride on a convoy through the hills of Dak To. Remember: Bao was out there reporting on convoys leaving the small base camp. Did I say “base camp”? There wasn’t even a PX!!!!
That first night, both Jim and I managed somehow to find our way through the dark to our two-man foxhole when mortars started falling in. Foxhole? Back on Engineer Hill, the 555th had used bobcats and other earth-moving equipment to dig out what seemed like palatial bunkers compared to this! The other thing we noticed was that the area around the camp there was not nearly as well fortified as had been the Hill. So, for this particular REMF, Dak To was a scary place. The mess tent the next morning was . . .a tent. Everyone lined up, got their breakfasts, and moved out quickly. I was told that mess tents are popular mortar targets at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Jim and I went back to our own tent and listened to the radio. Why? A convoy had just left and, sure enough: “hai xe dip,…” Bao was reporting in the clear on jeeps and other vehicles from the convoy. We knew Bao had to be nearby because the convoy had just left the gate as he started reporting. But he could have been anywhere in immediate area, somewhere on one of the hills surrounding the camp.
We did what we could to locate him. I was for a while, each morning we were there, something of a human locating device. . .triangular antenna in my hand, circling, searching for the signal in the few minutes Bao was up and reporting. We were able to get a straight line and Bao sat somewhere on that line. The line, though, circled the entire globe!!! We could narrow it down to points on the line within view of the front gates of the camp: Maybe a ten klick line leading up to hills on either side of the area. And we could assume he was on one of the two closest hills on that line. Why? He wouldn’t be at ground level for the camp because he couldn’t see well enough and he would have been in danger of being seen by almost anyone in the area. “Hey, Lieutenant, what’s that funny looking Gook with the antenna doing over there? See!” And then ZAP!!!!!!!! No more Bao. So, he had to be up in the tree line on one of the two hills: better spying area and better cover for him.
So, we located him--close enough for government work. One morning in the war, we let the camp’s C.O. know that Bao was up and broadcasting. He almost always came up at around 0800 hours. We stood in front of our tent, earphones on our heads, listening. It was like surround sound: Jets on the line extending to our rear dropping napalm; same thing in front, and then heard same sounds on the radio. And then? We saw Napalm: beautiful in its brilliant luminescence as it exploded into the air, licked up the surrounding vegetation, its tongues radiating outward. Smoke. Red-orange to black on the hills. And then a quick strafing run in front of us and behind us. A hissing sound on the radio. Silence.
This is part of why I wrote this villanelle, years later, some weeks after my first visit to our wall. The formality of the structure of the poem gave some distance from the event:
Not All the Names Are There
I said I would not write about the Wall,
two wings of black marble with 58,000 names.
I know not all the names are there, not all.
They say the Wall brings healing, peace,
understanding. They never mention rage.
I knew I should not write about the Wall.
A boy named Bao lay dying on a hill,
his body burned with napalm, his death my call.
I know not all the names are there, I cannot
see his name and face behind the marble sheen
neither on the west nor on the east, no trace.
No one carved his name upon the Wall.
No one ever mentions tears can fall and rage
Can dominate those wings of black, etched names.
I said I would not write about the Wall,
not all the name can fit there, hardly all.
Not one of my better poems: another reason I should not have written about the Wall. But Bao deserves some respect, some lasting memory. I cannot imagine the courage it took to sit out there on the side of a hill looking down at thousands of enemy troops and reporting on their movements. Our LRRPs did some similar things and I have a great deal of respect for them. But I can't recall hearing of anyone going out alone, getting close to a large concentration of troops and reporting back.
Bao's death was just one small incident in the deadly hills around Dak To that late November. But it remains the only death I actually heard happening on the radio during the war and the only death of an enemy soldier I was so closely involved in.
We left Dak To three days later. Two weeks later, some other VC cannonfodder was making similar reports on the camp. We kill someone, some thousands, and we count them, and then others are back. It's like the film version of Hamburger Hill: w e kill enough of them that they leave, we leave or continue what we were doing, they come back. Over and over and over again. We spent young people like some cheap currency and we say wonderful things about them, but in a situation like Vietnam the currency of life became seriously deflated.
(One last blog post about Dak To and then back to the security of Engineer Hill.)
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 19)
Still at Dak To
A long day though one of the shorter ones of the year, solstice just passed a few days ago. This Christmas Day, I continue to wrote about Dak To. This is taking almost as many days as Jim and I spent there back in 1967. Damn! 43 years ago. No, this is not about expiation, for though I often think about the whole matter of responsibility, the whole concept of responsibility is existential and is too large a thing to wrap up in our trip to Dak To. Perhaps this is some of what I learned from Thomas Hardy that deterministic writer who lived at the beginning of the existential movement in philosophy and, yes, even in politics. Listen to this, read it, say it aloud:
The Man He Killed
by Thomas Hardy
"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
"I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
No other reason why.
"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."
Quaint and curious. People are that. Wars are that. Hardy is not, of course, speaking of Vietnam, but of all wars. The people we shoot at, the people who shoot at us, are much like us. They have families, they have girlfriends, children, homes they want to return to. Since the war, a few diaries from dead VC and NVA soldiers have turned up, taken from their packs, stored and then translated. Not much different, I suspect, from what they might have found in our packs: letters from home, though not as efficiently delivered, love notes, fragments of poems, photographs of loved ones, mementos to carry through their war, good luck charms that didn't work.
We tried very hard to dehumanize them even if we did not think of it that way. The word “Gooks” was everywhere. Not just among the fighters but also those of us at the rear. Can we at least clear that up? Yes, there was a “rear.” It may not have been physically located in one geographic area; it was, instead, a number of places where people failed to be shooting at each other. It was a place like the 330th, like 4th ID Headquarters.
Yes, we were occasionally mortared; a few rockets dropped into out areas, but we were not out there in the dark setting ambushes; we were not pointing our rifles at other people and, in return, they were not pointing theirs at us; we were not flown out into the boonies in Hueys and dropped amidst an enemy to shoot and be shot at. There was a rear. That’s where I was most of the time. It detracts somehow, at least to me,from those who did go into danger to suggest that those of us who were in the rear were somehow not. It gives us, ultimately, some kind of recognition we do no deserve. Few of us ever said, Damn I wish I were out there with those men shooting at people who were shooting at me. I suspect most people out there did often think, Damn, I wish I was back there in what passes for “the rear.” That whole "There was no rear" thing is just another form of "borrowed," if not stolen, valor.
But, back to what I was saying. “Gooks, dinks, zips,” whatever—the point was to dehumanize them. But built into that was a kind of respect for the Viet Cong: Cong, Charlie, Chuck, Mr. Charles. “Mr. Charles, he’s a mean motherf*er!” And we killed them. If our own numbers were correct, if the scorecard we kept was correct, we killed them in huge numbers. They kept coming back.
Dak To had been an instance of that. Killing, killing, killing. Jesus Christ! There was no reason for Dak To to have happened. The only valuable thing there? Humanity. American humans and Vietnamese humans. We were like ancient Greeks and Trojans fighting for no reason other than that some strange gods set us to it. Gloucester was right in King Lear when he rages in Act IV, Scene 1: As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods,/ —They kill us for their sport.
At some point, right around November 22, 1967, the Viet Cong received some signal and faded back into the jungles and across the border. Did we win? We killed more of them than they killed of us. What did we win? What changed? I like to think that if we won we must have won something. What? When the fighting was over, we were in the same small base camp. Hundreds of VC and Americans and ARVNs were dead. Attrition requires a scorekeeper. The only thing we won was a higher score. It’s a children’s game played with real lives.
To day is Christmas Day and I will not write about Bao and the measures we took to kill him while we were at Dak To. I don’t mean Jim and me, personally, but the American Army. Bao was, when all is said and done, just one more number in a military scorecard.
A long day though one of the shorter ones of the year, solstice just passed a few days ago. This Christmas Day, I continue to wrote about Dak To. This is taking almost as many days as Jim and I spent there back in 1967. Damn! 43 years ago. No, this is not about expiation, for though I often think about the whole matter of responsibility, the whole concept of responsibility is existential and is too large a thing to wrap up in our trip to Dak To. Perhaps this is some of what I learned from Thomas Hardy that deterministic writer who lived at the beginning of the existential movement in philosophy and, yes, even in politics. Listen to this, read it, say it aloud:
The Man He Killed
by Thomas Hardy
"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
"I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
No other reason why.
"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."
Quaint and curious. People are that. Wars are that. Hardy is not, of course, speaking of Vietnam, but of all wars. The people we shoot at, the people who shoot at us, are much like us. They have families, they have girlfriends, children, homes they want to return to. Since the war, a few diaries from dead VC and NVA soldiers have turned up, taken from their packs, stored and then translated. Not much different, I suspect, from what they might have found in our packs: letters from home, though not as efficiently delivered, love notes, fragments of poems, photographs of loved ones, mementos to carry through their war, good luck charms that didn't work.
We tried very hard to dehumanize them even if we did not think of it that way. The word “Gooks” was everywhere. Not just among the fighters but also those of us at the rear. Can we at least clear that up? Yes, there was a “rear.” It may not have been physically located in one geographic area; it was, instead, a number of places where people failed to be shooting at each other. It was a place like the 330th, like 4th ID Headquarters.
Yes, we were occasionally mortared; a few rockets dropped into out areas, but we were not out there in the dark setting ambushes; we were not pointing our rifles at other people and, in return, they were not pointing theirs at us; we were not flown out into the boonies in Hueys and dropped amidst an enemy to shoot and be shot at. There was a rear. That’s where I was most of the time. It detracts somehow, at least to me,from those who did go into danger to suggest that those of us who were in the rear were somehow not. It gives us, ultimately, some kind of recognition we do no deserve. Few of us ever said, Damn I wish I were out there with those men shooting at people who were shooting at me. I suspect most people out there did often think, Damn, I wish I was back there in what passes for “the rear.” That whole "There was no rear" thing is just another form of "borrowed," if not stolen, valor.
But, back to what I was saying. “Gooks, dinks, zips,” whatever—the point was to dehumanize them. But built into that was a kind of respect for the Viet Cong: Cong, Charlie, Chuck, Mr. Charles. “Mr. Charles, he’s a mean motherf*er!” And we killed them. If our own numbers were correct, if the scorecard we kept was correct, we killed them in huge numbers. They kept coming back.
Dak To had been an instance of that. Killing, killing, killing. Jesus Christ! There was no reason for Dak To to have happened. The only valuable thing there? Humanity. American humans and Vietnamese humans. We were like ancient Greeks and Trojans fighting for no reason other than that some strange gods set us to it. Gloucester was right in King Lear when he rages in Act IV, Scene 1: As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods,/ —They kill us for their sport.
At some point, right around November 22, 1967, the Viet Cong received some signal and faded back into the jungles and across the border. Did we win? We killed more of them than they killed of us. What did we win? What changed? I like to think that if we won we must have won something. What? When the fighting was over, we were in the same small base camp. Hundreds of VC and Americans and ARVNs were dead. Attrition requires a scorekeeper. The only thing we won was a higher score. It’s a children’s game played with real lives.
To day is Christmas Day and I will not write about Bao and the measures we took to kill him while we were at Dak To. I don’t mean Jim and me, personally, but the American Army. Bao was, when all is said and done, just one more number in a military scorecard.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 18)
Going to Dak To #1
I didn’t often get too close to the actual war in spite of the fact that I was, as they say, “In Country” for almost a full year. I don’t know why the war didn’t come up to Engineer Hill very often in the months I was there. We were pretty much the most isolated American post in the area around Pleiku. Heading out from the city, you came to an ARVN encampment, then a major Air Force base and then a few klicks farther out, Engineer Hill, and then, even farther out, several klicks, a few Special Forces bases. After that: Cambodia. I confess that I would not have wanted to attack the Hill if I were VC: the engineers had done a hell of a job in protecting it with all that concertina wire and thousands of land mines. But still and all, I mean lobbing mortars over all that couldn’t have been terribly difficult and they only did that 2 or 3 times while I was there.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we were less significant than we thought. That’s an ego-shattering thought. They had to have known we were there. No base in the area had more antennae sticking up into the air than did the 330th. Those antennae surely screamed “Here we are!!!!!!!!!” and the VC couldn’t possibly have missed seeing them. If they did, some of the indigenous native personnel would surely have told them about us. “Lots of men in that there place speak Vietnamese, boss. Means something, no?” Among the barbers, bargirls, hootch maids, shit burners and others, some must have been VC in disguise, spying on us and reporting back to their superiors. And yet we were mostly ignored.
We were, also, pretty much ignored by the Army which frequently failed to believe or act on what we told them even though we were almost always correct. And we were ignored almost totally by the VC. Only one of those instances of being ignored was worthwhile: it was good to be ignored by the VC.
So, war did not come to the 330th. That means the C.O. would send some of us fairly close to the war, to Dak To. Let me explain very, very quickly, that the big battle of Dak To, 1967, was already mostly over. By November 22, nothing was left but the clean-up. The 173rd Screaming Eagles and elements of the 4th ID had fought terrifically and, often, heroically, in the hills around Dak To, especially on Hill 875. Enough people (on both sides) had died, been wounded, been permanently maimed that the VC had slunk back into the surrounding hills or across one of the borders that converged there into either Cambodia or Laos. When all the fighting was over, we had won — decisively. We had won? I’m not exactly sure now as I was not sure then of what that meant. “Do you know what you’re fighting for?”
What was the Battle of Dak To, one of the biggest and most celebrated battles in all of the war until that moment, actually for? PAVN forces gathered from all around to attack the camp, the worst fighting took place on Hill 875 (measured by its elevation above sea level and not named), and the 173rd and elements of the 4th ID drove them back. Or, they decided to stop fighting. Why? What for? We won…what? The right to stay there for a few more years? We “attrited” way more of them than they were able to “attrite” us. “To attrite”—wonderful word, isn’t it? Some referee somewhere counted their dead and then counted our dead (ours was a far more precise number) and declared victory for our side. Whoopee! Reminds me of the old W.C. Fields joke about Philadelphia. We got to stay in Dak To! And what happens in Dak To stays in Dak To.
Sidebar: Dak To’s current air strip was left behind by the Army and the Battle Monument to the North Vietnamese Victory sits on something called Charlie Hill. I wonder if Hill 875 finally got itself a name or if the battle monument is for 1975 or 1967.
Anyway, Jim Brow and I were sent to Dak To a week after the end of the battle because some small actions, mostly ambushes of convoys, continued for a few weeks after the main battle. We had, for some time, been translating messages from a VC observer who called himself “Bao” and mostly counted the number of jeeps, APCs, trucks and other vehicles leaving the base camp at Dak To. Sometimes, not always, those same convoys were ambushed a few miles out of camp, usually headed toward 4th ID HQ outside of Pleiku. Let me add that “Bao” was a man’s name (Jim Brow’s Vietnamese name was “Bao”; mine was “Hoang”) but that was also the word in Vietnamese meaning “reporter.” So that could either have been the name of the guy making the reports (unlikely) or his radio reporting handle.
We were flown off Engineer Hill on a Huey, lurching take-off, high ride. We sat in the open doors of the chopper hanging on to what were usually used to hold the door gunners who would fire machine guns if they were flying into a hot landing zone. We did sit on our flak jackets in case some VC fired up at the chopper, but it was an uneventful trip. I was a tourist, looking at place I had long seen on our maps, watching the highlands turn from cleared fields to dense jungle and mountains like Ngok Rinh Rua and others, seeing the pock-marked face of the land, craters made by artillery or bombs falling from B-52s or some other kind of weaponry. If you have read Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, the lakes that Christ-like man fished for souls in were made from similar craters.
The chopper pilot dropped us near the HQ of the Dak To camp and lifted off immediately. We reported in, explained out mission: to see if we could hear messages “in the clear”—meaning not encoded—and to locate Bao, the man reporting on convoys out of the camp. The C.O. sent us to an area of the camp near the closest hill. There we met Lieutenant Bernstein. “Call me Bernie,” he said, “unless regular Army types are around. You’re looking at the whole RRC unit at Dak To...me...and I’m so short you can’t even see me. Only a wake-up to go.” He pointed out the detachment bunker, a small foxhole with a few sandbags, and gave us a chance to look around. ASA was simply not very STRAC (maybe in larger ASA areas, but certainly not in Dak To and not very much in Pleiku). Bernie left Dak To the next day to go home and Jim and I became the whole detachment. After we left, two weeks later, there was no ASA detachment at Dak To.
[to be continued]
I didn’t often get too close to the actual war in spite of the fact that I was, as they say, “In Country” for almost a full year. I don’t know why the war didn’t come up to Engineer Hill very often in the months I was there. We were pretty much the most isolated American post in the area around Pleiku. Heading out from the city, you came to an ARVN encampment, then a major Air Force base and then a few klicks farther out, Engineer Hill, and then, even farther out, several klicks, a few Special Forces bases. After that: Cambodia. I confess that I would not have wanted to attack the Hill if I were VC: the engineers had done a hell of a job in protecting it with all that concertina wire and thousands of land mines. But still and all, I mean lobbing mortars over all that couldn’t have been terribly difficult and they only did that 2 or 3 times while I was there.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we were less significant than we thought. That’s an ego-shattering thought. They had to have known we were there. No base in the area had more antennae sticking up into the air than did the 330th. Those antennae surely screamed “Here we are!!!!!!!!!” and the VC couldn’t possibly have missed seeing them. If they did, some of the indigenous native personnel would surely have told them about us. “Lots of men in that there place speak Vietnamese, boss. Means something, no?” Among the barbers, bargirls, hootch maids, shit burners and others, some must have been VC in disguise, spying on us and reporting back to their superiors. And yet we were mostly ignored.
We were, also, pretty much ignored by the Army which frequently failed to believe or act on what we told them even though we were almost always correct. And we were ignored almost totally by the VC. Only one of those instances of being ignored was worthwhile: it was good to be ignored by the VC.
So, war did not come to the 330th. That means the C.O. would send some of us fairly close to the war, to Dak To. Let me explain very, very quickly, that the big battle of Dak To, 1967, was already mostly over. By November 22, nothing was left but the clean-up. The 173rd Screaming Eagles and elements of the 4th ID had fought terrifically and, often, heroically, in the hills around Dak To, especially on Hill 875. Enough people (on both sides) had died, been wounded, been permanently maimed that the VC had slunk back into the surrounding hills or across one of the borders that converged there into either Cambodia or Laos. When all the fighting was over, we had won — decisively. We had won? I’m not exactly sure now as I was not sure then of what that meant. “Do you know what you’re fighting for?”
What was the Battle of Dak To, one of the biggest and most celebrated battles in all of the war until that moment, actually for? PAVN forces gathered from all around to attack the camp, the worst fighting took place on Hill 875 (measured by its elevation above sea level and not named), and the 173rd and elements of the 4th ID drove them back. Or, they decided to stop fighting. Why? What for? We won…what? The right to stay there for a few more years? We “attrited” way more of them than they were able to “attrite” us. “To attrite”—wonderful word, isn’t it? Some referee somewhere counted their dead and then counted our dead (ours was a far more precise number) and declared victory for our side. Whoopee! Reminds me of the old W.C. Fields joke about Philadelphia. We got to stay in Dak To! And what happens in Dak To stays in Dak To.
Sidebar: Dak To’s current air strip was left behind by the Army and the Battle Monument to the North Vietnamese Victory sits on something called Charlie Hill. I wonder if Hill 875 finally got itself a name or if the battle monument is for 1975 or 1967.
Anyway, Jim Brow and I were sent to Dak To a week after the end of the battle because some small actions, mostly ambushes of convoys, continued for a few weeks after the main battle. We had, for some time, been translating messages from a VC observer who called himself “Bao” and mostly counted the number of jeeps, APCs, trucks and other vehicles leaving the base camp at Dak To. Sometimes, not always, those same convoys were ambushed a few miles out of camp, usually headed toward 4th ID HQ outside of Pleiku. Let me add that “Bao” was a man’s name (Jim Brow’s Vietnamese name was “Bao”; mine was “Hoang”) but that was also the word in Vietnamese meaning “reporter.” So that could either have been the name of the guy making the reports (unlikely) or his radio reporting handle.
We were flown off Engineer Hill on a Huey, lurching take-off, high ride. We sat in the open doors of the chopper hanging on to what were usually used to hold the door gunners who would fire machine guns if they were flying into a hot landing zone. We did sit on our flak jackets in case some VC fired up at the chopper, but it was an uneventful trip. I was a tourist, looking at place I had long seen on our maps, watching the highlands turn from cleared fields to dense jungle and mountains like Ngok Rinh Rua and others, seeing the pock-marked face of the land, craters made by artillery or bombs falling from B-52s or some other kind of weaponry. If you have read Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, the lakes that Christ-like man fished for souls in were made from similar craters.
The chopper pilot dropped us near the HQ of the Dak To camp and lifted off immediately. We reported in, explained out mission: to see if we could hear messages “in the clear”—meaning not encoded—and to locate Bao, the man reporting on convoys out of the camp. The C.O. sent us to an area of the camp near the closest hill. There we met Lieutenant Bernstein. “Call me Bernie,” he said, “unless regular Army types are around. You’re looking at the whole RRC unit at Dak To...me...and I’m so short you can’t even see me. Only a wake-up to go.” He pointed out the detachment bunker, a small foxhole with a few sandbags, and gave us a chance to look around. ASA was simply not very STRAC (maybe in larger ASA areas, but certainly not in Dak To and not very much in Pleiku). Bernie left Dak To the next day to go home and Jim and I became the whole detachment. After we left, two weeks later, there was no ASA detachment at Dak To.
[to be continued]
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 17)
Just About Us and About Justice
How can anyone do it justice? I mean the presence of so many millions of men and women shipped across a wide ocean to a small country most had never heard of just a few years earlier. I am reminded frequently of a series of questions the poet Marianne Poloskey asked me years ago: “How were you able to function as a soldier in the Vietnam War? What went through your mind then? Were you one of those who didn’t shoot? What did you have to do and how did you make yourself do it?” And I am reminded again of Green Day’s fine song called “21 Guns”: “Do you know what you’re fighting for? / Well, it’s not worth dying for.”
Finally, neither Marianne’s excellent questions nor Green Day’s poignant song apply. I went to Vietnam without very much thought concerning such questions. I went to Vietnam because I was young and did not really know where else I wanted to go. I don’t mean place so much as direction in time, a future I had not planned, things I had no idea that I wanted to do.
It would be glib and much too superficial to answer Marianne’s questions by saying that I rarely even carried my M-16, that even when I walked through the red dust streets to downtown Pleiku, I went in civilian clothes with no weapon in my hands, that I had no opportunity ever to point my rifle at someone and fire it, that I did not fly B-52s and rain bombs down on the waiting earth. All of that is factual and none of it is true…except for not knowing where I was going in time.
I had been teaching, yes, in a small high school in the Big Thicket. I had been to the World’s Fair the previous years where I had sold hotdogs and hung out in Times Square. I had had a girlfriend named Sharon. I had been admitted to the doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin. A brief past, a future laid out.
When I received my “Greeting:” in the mail, I gave only a brief thought toward going down to the Selective Service Board and arguing that I was between deferments. I did not even think very much about the war going on some thousands of miles away. Yes, I bargained with the recruiter not to go there and even signed up for two extra years to avoid doing so, but…honestly, even I knew not to trust recruiters. I had been drifting, fairly comfortably, for a few years, and the drifting led me, without my participating very much in the decision, into the Army, through language school and across the Pacific to a war I knew very little about.
And about not shooting at people. Yes, that’s factual, too. But it isn’t very truthful. Let me explain it this way:
For years, I have thought about the whole matter of responsibility. You see, among our jobs at the 330th RRC was locating concentrations of enemy troops. We did that fairly well and were even able to name the battalions and regiments and divisions we pinpointed on our maps of the Central Highlands. We put red pins in the maps for those units and made reports about where they were and, sometimes, what they were doing there. We pointed our fingers in their direction, some commander at 4th ID HQ coordinated attacks on those positions, air strikes were made there, infantry grunts in HU1As went out there and killed or were killed, Congress sanctioned the whole thing, the President bore some of the responsibility, tax payers bore some. But, ultimately, I suspect we’re the ones who aimed the weapons. We pointed the guns when we stuck pins in maps, the pilots and infantrymen were only the physical triggers, part of a much larger weapon. Anyone anywhere along that chain can take responsibility.
That’s true today, too. Jesus Christ! Some kid with a joystick is operating drones that fly into Pakistan and kill and maim people. Another one is setting out IEDs. Why? Because someone told them to. And both are responsible and neither is responsible. “Do we know what we’re fighting for?” Well…is it worth killing and dying for? We really ought to ask those questions, questions I did not ask when I let myself drift into that huge machine that we are, ultimately, all responsible for.
Sidebar: I suspect I am also responsible for what is going to happen once again some day soon when a man, perhaps with only one witness against him, perhaps who had an attorney who slept through much of the proceedings, perhaps who could be cleared with DNA tests since no other physical evidence convicts him, will have an IV inserted into one of his veins and will fall asleep and never wake up again.
I often thought, while marching in demonstrations against my war, almost as soon as I returned from Vietnam, that I was really marching for the people we killed as much as for the American soldiers who died and who continue to die in our wars. People, today, march frequently in Austin and in Huntsville, Texas, against another kind of government-sanctioned killing. I am not marching though I know I should. Perhaps it's age and cynicism, perhaps it's that there have been too many such demonstrations and too few results.
I came home from Vietnam in 1968, after the Tet Offensive had pretty much demonstrated that we were not going to win that little war and, only a short time later, a man running for president indicated that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. Fewer Americans, but more total people, died after he became president as had died before that date.
This is going nowhere. But it's what I'm thinking about, rambling though the thoughts may be on this day. The injections that take the lives of Texas death row inmates are not as spectacular as watching a whole hillside light up with deep red napalm blossoms to kill a single man, but the results will be identical. And next month, we will kill another man in Huntsville, Texas.
And yet, all this responsibility can be incapacitating. So, we push it to the backs of our minds, we move on, whether drifting or with some purpose in mind. We find a path and walk down it. Sometimes, we stand still, look out at whatever is in front of us, at a high hill in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, another in the Hill Country that Lyndon Johnson claimed to have loved, at waves washing ashore that remind us of ships lost at sea, at a highway sign showing the Huntsville exit or another pointing the way to Kent State, or we hear a song that haunts us and plays repeatedly in our minds and see red dust coating the edges of old books.
There it is. We continue. I taught a course on William Faulkner this past semester and I am struck by a description of Dilsey: “She endured.” Yes. That’s what we all do.
How can anyone do it justice? I mean the presence of so many millions of men and women shipped across a wide ocean to a small country most had never heard of just a few years earlier. I am reminded frequently of a series of questions the poet Marianne Poloskey asked me years ago: “How were you able to function as a soldier in the Vietnam War? What went through your mind then? Were you one of those who didn’t shoot? What did you have to do and how did you make yourself do it?” And I am reminded again of Green Day’s fine song called “21 Guns”: “Do you know what you’re fighting for? / Well, it’s not worth dying for.”
Finally, neither Marianne’s excellent questions nor Green Day’s poignant song apply. I went to Vietnam without very much thought concerning such questions. I went to Vietnam because I was young and did not really know where else I wanted to go. I don’t mean place so much as direction in time, a future I had not planned, things I had no idea that I wanted to do.
It would be glib and much too superficial to answer Marianne’s questions by saying that I rarely even carried my M-16, that even when I walked through the red dust streets to downtown Pleiku, I went in civilian clothes with no weapon in my hands, that I had no opportunity ever to point my rifle at someone and fire it, that I did not fly B-52s and rain bombs down on the waiting earth. All of that is factual and none of it is true…except for not knowing where I was going in time.
I had been teaching, yes, in a small high school in the Big Thicket. I had been to the World’s Fair the previous years where I had sold hotdogs and hung out in Times Square. I had had a girlfriend named Sharon. I had been admitted to the doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin. A brief past, a future laid out.
When I received my “Greeting:” in the mail, I gave only a brief thought toward going down to the Selective Service Board and arguing that I was between deferments. I did not even think very much about the war going on some thousands of miles away. Yes, I bargained with the recruiter not to go there and even signed up for two extra years to avoid doing so, but…honestly, even I knew not to trust recruiters. I had been drifting, fairly comfortably, for a few years, and the drifting led me, without my participating very much in the decision, into the Army, through language school and across the Pacific to a war I knew very little about.
And about not shooting at people. Yes, that’s factual, too. But it isn’t very truthful. Let me explain it this way:
For years, I have thought about the whole matter of responsibility. You see, among our jobs at the 330th RRC was locating concentrations of enemy troops. We did that fairly well and were even able to name the battalions and regiments and divisions we pinpointed on our maps of the Central Highlands. We put red pins in the maps for those units and made reports about where they were and, sometimes, what they were doing there. We pointed our fingers in their direction, some commander at 4th ID HQ coordinated attacks on those positions, air strikes were made there, infantry grunts in HU1As went out there and killed or were killed, Congress sanctioned the whole thing, the President bore some of the responsibility, tax payers bore some. But, ultimately, I suspect we’re the ones who aimed the weapons. We pointed the guns when we stuck pins in maps, the pilots and infantrymen were only the physical triggers, part of a much larger weapon. Anyone anywhere along that chain can take responsibility.
That’s true today, too. Jesus Christ! Some kid with a joystick is operating drones that fly into Pakistan and kill and maim people. Another one is setting out IEDs. Why? Because someone told them to. And both are responsible and neither is responsible. “Do we know what we’re fighting for?” Well…is it worth killing and dying for? We really ought to ask those questions, questions I did not ask when I let myself drift into that huge machine that we are, ultimately, all responsible for.
Sidebar: I suspect I am also responsible for what is going to happen once again some day soon when a man, perhaps with only one witness against him, perhaps who had an attorney who slept through much of the proceedings, perhaps who could be cleared with DNA tests since no other physical evidence convicts him, will have an IV inserted into one of his veins and will fall asleep and never wake up again.
I often thought, while marching in demonstrations against my war, almost as soon as I returned from Vietnam, that I was really marching for the people we killed as much as for the American soldiers who died and who continue to die in our wars. People, today, march frequently in Austin and in Huntsville, Texas, against another kind of government-sanctioned killing. I am not marching though I know I should. Perhaps it's age and cynicism, perhaps it's that there have been too many such demonstrations and too few results.
I came home from Vietnam in 1968, after the Tet Offensive had pretty much demonstrated that we were not going to win that little war and, only a short time later, a man running for president indicated that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. Fewer Americans, but more total people, died after he became president as had died before that date.
This is going nowhere. But it's what I'm thinking about, rambling though the thoughts may be on this day. The injections that take the lives of Texas death row inmates are not as spectacular as watching a whole hillside light up with deep red napalm blossoms to kill a single man, but the results will be identical. And next month, we will kill another man in Huntsville, Texas.
And yet, all this responsibility can be incapacitating. So, we push it to the backs of our minds, we move on, whether drifting or with some purpose in mind. We find a path and walk down it. Sometimes, we stand still, look out at whatever is in front of us, at a high hill in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, another in the Hill Country that Lyndon Johnson claimed to have loved, at waves washing ashore that remind us of ships lost at sea, at a highway sign showing the Huntsville exit or another pointing the way to Kent State, or we hear a song that haunts us and plays repeatedly in our minds and see red dust coating the edges of old books.
There it is. We continue. I taught a course on William Faulkner this past semester and I am struck by a description of Dilsey: “She endured.” Yes. That’s what we all do.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 15)
Preliminary Report: Dak To and Hill 875
Hill 875 and the small base camp at Dak To have always nestled somewhere in the back of my mind. That area was under constant attack, small skirmishes mostly, the whole time our ship pushed through the waters of the Pacific to get us to DaNang and then to Chu Lai. I was blissfully unaware of a place even called Dak To that whole time. But when I got to Pleiku and the 330th with Allen and Jim and Will, awareness of that small, I want to say cursed, but no, not really. That small place ringed by mountains and triple cover became almost my whole concern.
People died there almost every day for months. That’s not an exaggeration.
Americans died. South Koreans died. ARVN (men of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam) died and PAVN soldiers and South Vietnamese civilians…so many people…died. Some fought heroically and died. Some died for no real reason and with no heroic struggle except they were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some people perform heroically in war and live or die. Others just die...or live without displaying heroism. One of the great sins we perpetrate on truly heroic soldiers is to declare all soldiers heroic. If people become heroes just for putting on a uniform, then heroism is bought too cheaply.
I am reminded of a short Thomas Hardy poem, one of the poems I had memorized and quoted on dark nights when I was on perimeter guard:
Hap
IF but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan....
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
I looked at Dak To and Hill 875 from a distance greater than that of the B-52 pilots and navigators and bombardiers who participated in Rolling Thunder, flew over Kontum Province, and dropped tons of bombs on the surrounding hills, as dispassionately (and I wonder if, and don't truly believe that, a lack of passion could really have been possible) as the jet jockeys who napalmed and strafed the “enemy.”
I listened to parts of it on the radio as PAVN forces broke security and spoke in the clear, read bloody messages captured from dead and wounded PAVN soldiers. And it was all academic. I did not smell the napalm. I did not see the dead and wounded from either side. I did not see bomb craters, hear children crying. I listened, instead, to the living young men on both sides, listened to the American English and the North and South Vietnamese radio signals. It was, yes, very exciting to listen in on what was happening and then to read letters and messages from the enemy, almost like watching Spielberg's Pacific. My first little book was called From the Periphery and, in truth, I was always on the periphery…at least until Jim and I went to Dak To and that was a few weeks after most of the action was over.
Back at Pleiku, though, as the October fighting came to a close, we read messages about ambushes of convoys and not messages about intense fighting and maneuvering. We heard observers count the numbers and types of vehicles leaving the Dak To base camp or 4th Division HQ, or whatever. What happened after the big Battle of Dak To was dull, commonplace to those of us who were a hundred klicks away or so. People were still dying, just in smaller numbers.
War really isn’t very funny though funny things do happen. I mean schools get bombed, pagodas destroyed, women are sometimes raped, and everywhere, we see the results: children crying in the streets of Pleiku, Dak To, Kontum dirty, hungry. Our own troops (and this is a small, good thing the military did) tried to help them, to feed them, to give them much needed medical and dental care. . . care they might not have needed had we not been there.
I’ll talk later about Dak To and what happened when Jim and I finally got there. But even before we boarded our HUEY and flew, feet dangling over the edge of the chopper, to that small camp, Dak To had loomed large in our every day work experience. This was just one place in Vietnam, just one battle and series of skirmishes. I recommend reading Michael Herr’s Dispatches for what I consider to be the best account of that battle and then read the U.S. Army’s military history of the battle at most good government documents libraries. Both accounts are classic. What I have to say about it is only after most of the dying had already happened and, though I was there, remains distant from the pathos that was our war in Vietnam.
I wrote this little sonnet once after my wife asked me about the war, Dak To and napalm:
A Sonnet for Napalm
"Tell me something," she says. "Do any flowers look
just like that, those blossoms of black, orange, red?"
She points at the screen, napalm flowering in the dawn.
"Some strange beauty from far enough not to feel
or smell, riots of deep embers glowing like fierce clouds?"
He nods, cannot find the words, remembers that
one time. That moment on the mountain he looked down
into a too green valley, B-52s so high he could not see
the spot in the sky where bombs dropped, some odd
whistling noise, some in-rushing of air, down and down
until in one moment, one space of time, dark green
turned to some color it had never meant to be and the smell
of the morning changed to nothing anyone could love,
a smell of heat and decay and green things turning gray.
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 16)
What We Did for Kicks at Pleiku Work, teaching at the English school, dodging small dust devils (red because they were commie dust devils), walking or hitching down to the small city that was the provincial capital of Pleiku Province, all that sounds like a lot, but mostly we were bored, bored to tears if not to distraction, especially on those days and sometimes weeks when we were not allowed off the Hill. So, we devised distractions.
Getting drunk or high by some other means was always good. As with many units, we had two major groups of people: those who drank to distract themselves and those who smoked grass. A small group of folks did neither. As far as I can recall, back in 1967 and the first half of 1968, hard drugs were not a part of military life in Vietnam. Nor was overt racism or the kind of militant white/black confrontations we see in many of the later novels and movies of the war. Perhaps that was just a peculiarity of the 330th but the only real “anti” feelings we seemed to have were directed at the officers and NCOs by the enlisted personnel. I mean you have to have someone to be against, haven’t you? We had a few gay men in the company but no one cared. They did their jobs, laughed and joked just like everyone else. I suspect the 330th was more likely than the combat engineers of the 555th to have gays and potheads and not to have any repercussions from that, but I don’t know that to be a fact.
The heads had a bunker of their own, right outside the linguists' barracks. It had all the requisite paraphernalia of the sixties: wine bottles with coats of dripped multicolored wax from the candles, beadwork here and there, posters, and the ever-present reek of both tobacco and grass smoke. The music there was much better than the music in the club where the drinkers hung out. The bunker had Joplin and Hendrix and the Stones and the Beatles and Grace Slick and more. The club had country western music. I suppose whether the music was better there or not was a matter of taste.
We had visiting musical groups, mostly from the Philippines, mostly rock bands with strippers. I don’t think we ever had a USO troupe visit the Hill, but we might have. I do recall that when Bob Hope and his merry band of entertainers visited Pleiku and we were allowed to go, no one from the 330th chose to do so. Not exactly a boycott. I can’t recall ever having seen a Donut Dolly on the Hill either. We did have two Vietnamese women working at the EM Club and both were named Xuan. One of the Xuans had long hair and was beautiful. The other Xuan was kind of short and chubby and was rumored to put out for a few hundred piasters. I never found out.By the way, the Vietnamese called their money “dong”: 500 dong could buy a lot: a fake onyx chess set that would bleed dye onto your fingers, a china vase to send home to mom, a jacket claiming that “Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will fear no evil, because I’m the meanest MFer in the valley," or maybe a short time with one of the local whores. For some reason we translated “dong” into “piaster.” Maybe because that’s what the French called the local currency back when they wee the colonial power in charge.
We were not, however, paid in dongs/piasters but in Military Payment Certificates (MPCs). The local indigenous personnel downtown would take MPCs and give change in dongs: a form of speculation in the U.S. currency. Vietnamese working for us were paid in dongs.piasters, not in MPCs. Periodically, the US. military would change the currency and the MPCs held by the locals would become worthless. We had to turn ours in for new forms of MPC so, in the weeks before the change, those in the know would frequently go into town, let the natives know about the coming currency change and purchase MPCs from them for about a nickel or quarter on the dollar and then turn the old MPCs in on change-over day. I called it "Screw the Vietnamese/Get Rich Day."
On the Hill, poker was always a good way to earn or lose money and to pass the time. “Pass the time!” Wonderful little sentence, no? Pass the time until you go home, until you die, until someone wastes you, until you buy the farm. “Hot damn, we’re all gonna die!” A character in Catch-22 spends much of his time trying to be bored. Why? Because time passes more slowly, in a relative kind of way, when you’re bored; ergo, bored people live longer. Most of us lived a few years for our one year in Vietnam.
We bet on almost everything. We had gross-out contests and, as Allen Hallmark suggested, the grossest thing anyone in camp could do, aside from doing the short, chunky Xuan (rumored to be a guaranteed quick trip to the mythical island where the military kept those with the black syphilis), was to lick the piss tubes. Let me explain: piss tubes were 6” tubes stuck in the ground, the open, above-ground end covered with a wire mesh, into which the men of the company would urinate. Over time, the wire mesh would grow slimy with bacteria and whatever. The drinkers and the heads would dare each other to lick the wire mesh. Some really drunken GI would always take the challenge. The things men do for fun! In trouble once for some reason, I was put on a detail to remove the old piss tubes and sink new ones into a different piece of ground. Wearing heavy gloves, those of us on the detail managed to wrench the old tubes from the ground and the red dirt of Pleiku bubbled and foamed for some minutes afterwards. We covered the bubbling earth with more red dirt and it finally subsided. It could not have been much worse than trying to bury nuclear waste materials. I assume that those who licked the tube are now all dead, but perhaps not. Have I mentioned that we were the most highly educated group of enlisted men in the Army yet? The brightest, by military IQ testing? That does not mean the highest level of common sense.
One evening, one of the analysts (I’ve forgotten his name) stayed off base late. No one was alarmed. And then he was spotted the next morning outside the fence facing our area of the perimeter: naked and with his M-16 pointed in at us. I wish I had a photograph! One of the sergeants drove out and around the perimeter and talked him out of the rifle and into the jeep. I heard later that the analyst was discharged with a Section 8. Rumors! Whatever, he left the Hill that week. Fun! Entertaining!
What I did, mostly, was read: those Thomas Hardy novels and poems, the books I took with me, local newspapers, magazines shipped over from home. I played some chess, some poker, gin rummy. listened to music, learned to use the darkroom, watched TV…and drank. I hardly ever have even a beer anymore. I came much too close to becoming an alcoholic when I got back from Vietnam.
And that is, for the most part, what I did in the war and what we, as a group, did in the war when we were not on duty.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 14)
I Come Under Attack by the VC Air Force
The School was good and very much worthwhile, but the war did continue and we had our normal activities. I’d like, just for a moment to revisit guard duty—mostly because guard duty for us was not very much like the guard duty I have read about in hundreds of Vietnam memoirs and novels. Guard duty in a grunt unit was something very serious. Now, on the matter of Grunt guard duty, I cannot speak from experience and I suspect much of what I have read is exaggerated. Is it possible that our boys in camouflaged green clothing did not have flood lights pointed out from their camps so they could easily spot the guys in black PJs? Didn’t they all have colleagues viciously killed by sneaky VC because they nodded off a bit? That certainly was not how it was for me when I stood perimeter guard on Engineer Hill, but that's what I've read, so it must (in reverse Panglossian logic) be true.
Sidebar: What is a grunt?
Believe me, the only thing I know about this is from my reading and from the this is no shit war stories I have heard and read. And,m of course, there is the "MILTERMS" dictionary on the Internet: A US Army soldier - sometimes, but not always, specifically refers to an infantryman. Folklore has it that GRUNT was originally an acronym of Government Reject - Unfit for Normal Training.
I wrote a poem once about the East St. Louis guy I've spoken about before. To illustrate my own ill-conceived notions about the etymology of the word "grunts," I'll repeat it here:
Push-Ups
(Sgt. Smith, as the grunt's push up count went past 200: "He's gonna set the fuckin' batallion record")
That night, down on the floor
while we counted, your arms,
so fluid, pumped, stretched...
dropped your body an inch above
the tile, then lifted you so high
that something had to give--
the floor, the tiles, the sky--something
had to break. No sweat, just
repetitions, "100," "200," "299!"
and the you stopped.
I knew
why once: the time, the atmosphere,
the need to articulate something
that could not be grunted out
to prove something to yourself
and all of us. Goddamn but you
were cool when you held yourself so still,
looked up at all of us and laughed.
You lifted one hand from the floor, brushed
a drop of sweat from your lip, stood up
and walked away.
Perhaps other definitions: "the noise made by the RTO as he carried everything most people carried, plus a heavy radio, into the boonies. Or the sound the guy carrying the M-60 machine gun carried." Or the inability to express oneself in anything other than grunts. Kind of an insulting way to refer to the people who actually did the fighting and most of the dying, but there it is.
When I went on guard duty, I put on an old pair of fatigues, found my helmet and its liner, checked out my M-16 and filled my OD plastic canteen with wine, then strolled out to my assigned bunker. It was on the other side of the berm the engineers had thoughtfully circled the hill with and so was a bit more dangerous than being behind the berm. First thing we did on guard duty was climb to the top of the bunker (sandbagged metal container box that had been lifted from a ship— about the size of a small office cubicle with a smaller area on top that had a steel roof) and check the fifty caliber and the M-60 machine guns by firing short bursts. Then back down to make sure the Claymores were pointed the right way and armed. We did not test Claymores by firing them though that might have been fun to do.
After that, it was time to be bored, sip wine from the canteen, and stare out across three rows of concertina wire into the darkening night. Sometimes (well most times), if I had two canteens and enough wine, I would recite poetry into the dark after the other two guys at my bunker had fallen asleep. Usually, it was poems like Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Inisfree.” It begins, “I will arise and go now and go to Inisfree…” Or, maybe, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which begins, “Let us go then, you and I, / when the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table…” Or maybe Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and wonder what lies I might tell my grandchildren in some as yet unimagined future. If I had enough of a buzz on, I would lift my canteen to the sky and salute, as old Eben Flood did in the Robinson poem, the two moons I could make out quite clearly in the near drunken night. Most of the poems were about getting up and going somewhere else. In the same way, the most popular songs sung by the Filipina strippers who sometimes visited us were about leaving: “Ho-o-meward bou-ound…I-I wish I wa-as….” I would shudder at the failure to use the subjunctive but did join in on the refrain.
I didn’t always wake up the other guys if I got a bit too maudlin or was too happy in my own solitude. You didn’t get too many chances to be alone and think in Vietnam. Oh, we all did think, but usually, in the company of other people. Usually, I would watch the stars shining brilliantly above me in an area that had very little ambient light not made by the floodlights in front of me, and think about girls I knew back in Beaumont, Texas, and in Austin. Those were, I confess, sometimes erotic thoughts if not downright pornographic. Or about my high school students in Silsbee, Texas, many of whom were probably training to come to Vietnam as I stood out there on top of a bunker. In fact, some of my seniors from Silsbee, Texas, might well have already been in Vietnam. I had a full year and a half of training before being shipped over and that would have given them time to go through Basic Training and AIT. A few might have flown over me as the troop ship I was on waddled through the Pacific Ocean. I hope that somewhere at least one of them is reading this.
If, as happened on some nights, the VC fired rockets, the other two men standing (or sleeping) guard would wake up and climb up on top of the bunker. We rarely hunkered down behind the sandbags because they normally fired the rockets well over our heads and into the Air Force Base…we were much too small a target for anything except the occasional mortar attack. It was an interesting show, though, those nights when the VC came out to play.
At any rate, the sun would rise--it has a habit of doing so--and I would go back to my hootch and go to sleep for a few hours before walking over to the Ops Tent to get back to work.
One night, though, things were a bit different. My bunker came under attack.
Here’s what happened and to capture all the gory excitement, I'm shifting to present tense:
My normal state of boredom and mild wine-drinking is broken, but not by anything I can fire a weapon at. A horde of wasps has attacked. Back in the States, I know, wasps do not swarm like bees and certainly not at night. But these are VC wasps or may be some other flying critters that only look like wasps, and feel the night belongs to them. Ugly things. Within a few seconds, they have taken over the whole top of the bunker. Why? Because I desert my post. I jump off the side of the bunker at the first sting. I know damned well I can guard the perimeter just as well from the bottom of the thing. Besides, no one except these wasps has ever attacked us.
I go inside and call the OD (Officer of the Day? Why does he work at night?) to report enemy aerial infiltration and he refuses to believe me. I invite him to come down and take a look. He orders me back up to the top of the bunker and I tell him I will be happy to follow him. He drives his jeep down to the bunker and, while he does not exactly say, “Follow me!” does climb halfway up the ladder before being stung. “As you were,” he says and leaves.
So, that’s the story. One night in the war, my bunker was overrun by the VC Air Force and I shamelessly surrendered to superior forces.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 13)
Our School Outside Pleiku
One of the more delightful things that happened during my tour of the beautiful southern part of Vietnam is that the commander of the Air Force base down in the valley heard that the 330th had linguists. Well, his hearing that was not delightful but what he did because of it was. You see, most of the Air Force linguists were not stationed in Vietnam. A number of them were friends of mine, had been to language school with us at Fort Meade: Larry Ferguson, Joe Newbold, Skip Keating and others. Instead of sending them to Vietnam, the air force sent them to Thailand and bases like U Dorn [SIC?]. So, the commanding general of the Air Force base didn’t have any linguists.
Nor, as it turned out, did he have enough “indigenous native personnel” who spoke English to fill certain jobs on the base. So, he called our commander and suggested that he might want to do the air force a favor and lend him enough linguists to train Pleiku folks who wanted to work at the air force base but whose English skills were not quite good enough. Our C.O. ordered us to volunteer to do so when we weren’t on one of our normal shifts. We were more than happy to do so.
What we thought was going to be our first crop of students for six full months was a hand-picked group of eight students, young men and women who were probably among the elite of Pleiku. They were, for the most part, well-dressed when they came to class and most of the young men had their own bicycles. They were quite eager to learn to speak and write the English language. I was curious about this and asked one of the students. For the young men, he said, working for the air force of the USA was a deferment from getting drafted into the ARVN. It paid better and they didn’t get shot at. That was probably true right up to the day when forces of North Vietnam marched into Pleiku and onto the air force base.
We taught five days each week but only if we were on the swing or midnight shift at the 330th. The Army, of course, came first.
It just occurred to me that I have not yet said that the work we were doing was, officially, in support of the 4th Infantry Division. We were not, I hasten to add, a part of the 4th, but were detached from the 3rd RR to support that division. When we were with the 601st RR Company, we were detached in support of the Americal Division but were not a part of that newly reformed division. That meant that our command structure was not through the commanding generals of those divisions but was through the 3rd and back up through the ASA chain of command to the civilian-controlled National Security Agency.
Nonetheless, the best part of my job in Vietnam was teaching English as a second language to young Vietnamese adults. Some years later, I wrote a Christmas poem, something much like an unrhymed sonnet, for those students:
The English class at Lake Bien Ho
laughs, shouts, sings Christmas carols
in broken English, sing-songy, tonal
inflections that do not somehow fit
in this warm, green land. A small boy
talks about the Buddha. Not long ago
a bonze kindled himself in Saigon, burned
with intensity, no screams, a desperate
song, silence fell on a noisy city.
At Lake Bien Ho the teachers
have brought a Christmas tree, presents
for their students: books, candles,
cakes and candy. They sit on the bank
and sing of shepherds and their flocks.
An old man on a water buffalo watches.
All good things do come to an end and our little school ended on January 29, 1968. We had already sent a message to MACV that the Tet Offensive was going to happen and our students already seemed to know about it. They were getting out of Dodge City as quickly as possible. We had a quick ceremony on the 29th and gave each student a certificate of completion. I can’t recall seeing them again after that day. I hope most of them got out of the country in 1975 when they would have been in their late twenties, but some probably got re-educated. That happened to a lot of former South Vietnamese citizens who worked for us.
The loss of the South and the reunification of the two parts of Vietnam is, I think, probably a good thing in the long run though I would have preferred that the southern region had won and established a true democracy in the country. A good thing? Mostly because the actual fighting, the killing and maiming, ended. In the long run that is a good thing. People will disagree with me and I simply don’t care one way or the other.
I do care, though, about the people I met there and the people I did not meet. We lost more than 50,000 American soldiers in that little country. The Vietnamese must have easily lost ten times that many. And that doesn’t really include everyone who died. Some died years later through suicide or illness caused by Agent Orange or some other reason related to our lost war. We lament our soldiers exposed to a chemical defoliant like Agent Orange but how much worse it must be for those who live there.
So, while I would have preferred a different outcome; I am pleased that there was an end…regardless of the outcome.
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 12)
REMFs at War, #2
Most days in Vietnam were dull and uneventful. The VC mortared our compound a few times but no one else was ever injured and none seriously. We had none of the racial incidents that seemed to mark later years in the war. Drug use was mostly grass in 1967 and 1968. You could buy it in the market. Boredom was the major enemy along with news from back in “the World.”
Many of us in the 330th kept abreast of the latest news of unrest on the campuses where we had gone to college. We read newspapers from home or managed to watch the news on the Armed Forces Television Network (Yes, we had television on the Hill. The television show “Combat”--which we saw as a comedy--was a great favorite.) or received letters from home. Most of us realized that the protesters were not protesting against us but against government policy. I do wish people could get that straight in the current wars.
I was becoming a bit more politically aware than I had been when I had pretty much drifted into the Army back in December, 1965. I don’t mean that I would have gone to Canada or even to Sweden (both places are much too cold and actually have white stuff that falls from the sky), but I would probably have visited my Selective Service Board and argued that my student deferment was waiting for me. Seven years later, I would have completed the PhD and the war would have been over for all practical purposes.
In October, though, I was busy with the other linguists working on a whole series of messages heralding the formation of the “Provisional Revolutionary Government.” And I was very busy with Allen, Jim, and others in fighting what I have always called the “Refrigerator War.
And this, too, is no shit:
Not too long after we arrived on Engineer Hill, we finished building our new barracks. It was, truly, much too big and pre-fabricated, all lumber with concrete floors, to be called a “hootch.” We helped put the things together with ladders, hammers and nails (very Thoreauvian that, building our own houses). Inside were partitions that divided the place into two-man sleeping arrangements: cots, footlockers, tin wardrobe-type cabinets where we could hang clothes. Each of the partitions had electric outlets.
And, REMF that I am and have always been, what can I say? The PX sold mini-fridges like the ones most dorm residents have in their dorms now. The only people they could sell them to were soldiers on the Hill. Ipso Facto: they were meant for us. So, two by two, the linguies and others in the 330th bought fridges. Mostly, we stored beer and soft drinks in them, the occasional bottle of white wine. The reds were kept in racks above the fridge. Shameless, no? But we, sans dout, were the intellectual elite of the enlisted ranks. I say that, shamelessly, even though we had been dumb enough to go in the Army and, even dumber, to sign up for four years into of three. Why would we do that? Stupid of us, but we believed the recruiters who said we would not have to go to Vietnam.
In all of that frenzy of refrigerator buying, we had not counted on our company commander. “Shaky,” having received a medal for leading us into battle, mostly against each other,decided that since those of you Vietnam veterans out there who might be reading this and who were grunts could not have cold beer out in wherever in the boonies your battles happened to be, we should, in some kind of weird empathy with you guys, not be able to have cold beer in what passed for our hootches either.
We had not, then, heard of “fragging” and were non-violent enough that we would not have fragged him, but we had heard of peaceful and/or passive resistance. We read the order that was posted on our bulletin board and disregarded it.
A few weeks later, our fearless commander, winner of a non-valorous Bronze Star, shaky to the end of his tour, announced an inspection. On the day of the coming inspection, we took all of the beer out of the refrigerators and lined them up under our cots. When the C.O. came through, I (the ranking Spec-4 in our digs) shouted “Ten-Hut!” and we all snapped to.
SIDEBAR: Why I was the ranking Spec 4
Basically, what happened was that I didn’t have a car. You may well ask yourself what not having a car to do with getting a promotion and, had I not been there, I would be asking the same question. You see, I had had a car, a shiny 1965, pale yellow, Pontiac GTO (my first ever new car) before I got drafted and then enlisted. But that car was only five months old and I had to pay $87.95/month for it. I could afford that, barely, while I was teaching at Silsbee High School but E-1 pay was less than the total monthly car payment. I gave the car back to the bank and wound up doing monthly installments to pay the bank the difference between what I still owed on the car and what they were able to sell the “used, current-year car with 33,000 miles on the odometer” for and what I still owed. I paid them $10/month for the first two years of my Army life. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was more than 10% of my monthly salary as an E-1 and E-2.
Since I did not have a car, Allen Hallmark gave me a ride (I was the--*wink*--chaperon on the trip from Texas to Fort Meade because Allen was taking his then girl-friend, soon-to-be-wife, Molly, to Maryland with him). They dropped me off at Student Company, ASA, and then went house-hunting.
Okay and en fin, here’s what happened. I reported in on a Friday afternoon and Allen, Don, and everyone else reported in on the following Monday. The captain who was C.O. of student company had never come into contact with an E-2 enlisted man before (or at least had never had one in his company, until us. Most of student company was made up of sergeants and a few officers being re-trained as linguists. We were among the first folks in the call-up of 1965 when U.S. involvement in Vietnam began its rapid expansion with deployment of Marines to DaNang.). The Captain, a really good guy whose name I have forgotten, put through the paperwork immediately to have me promoted to PFC. The other students did not have their paperwork processed until the next week. As a result, like clockwork, I was always promoted a few days before all the rest of my cohort: to PFC, to Spec-4, to Spec-5).
So, there it is. On that day, because I had not had a car when I got to Fort Meade (I would have found something to do until the next Monday when we were supposed to report in if I had had one), I was the ranking enlisted man in our barracks and had to call everyone to attention out of what passed for respect for our C.O.
Back to the REMF War and I do hope Allen remembers this, if he’s reading it—he’s the only corroborating witness I have. When the C.O. got to our partitioned-off cubical and saw the fridge, he ordered us to open it. We did. There was no beer in it. Ever vigilant as our C.O. was, he did spot the cans of beer standing in perfect ranks under the cots. When he had the temerity to ask what those things were under our cots, either Allen or I said, “They’re cans of beer, sir!”
When he demanded to know why we had not gotten rid of the cans of beer as he had ordered us, one of us (I forget which one) said, “You ordered that we not have beer in our refrigerators, sir. These cans are not in our refrigerator, sir!” Shaky shook a little and, as I recall it, we filled sandbags for a while. But thanks to our skills interpreting poetry and other difficult missives, we could not be found guilty of anything. Allen would fill more sandbags before we left Pleiku, but those were my last bags.
For a few weeks, we had our beer in the EM Club and were able to view the occasional rock band/strip show, but then after a minor work slow down had our privileges reinstated. You see, some of us kept getting sick and were somehow unable to read Vietnamese message (unless they were really important). Shortly after that, Shaky decided we had learned our lessons and we were able to restock the refrigerators.
Most days in Vietnam were dull and uneventful. The VC mortared our compound a few times but no one else was ever injured and none seriously. We had none of the racial incidents that seemed to mark later years in the war. Drug use was mostly grass in 1967 and 1968. You could buy it in the market. Boredom was the major enemy along with news from back in “the World.”
Many of us in the 330th kept abreast of the latest news of unrest on the campuses where we had gone to college. We read newspapers from home or managed to watch the news on the Armed Forces Television Network (Yes, we had television on the Hill. The television show “Combat”--which we saw as a comedy--was a great favorite.) or received letters from home. Most of us realized that the protesters were not protesting against us but against government policy. I do wish people could get that straight in the current wars.
I was becoming a bit more politically aware than I had been when I had pretty much drifted into the Army back in December, 1965. I don’t mean that I would have gone to Canada or even to Sweden (both places are much too cold and actually have white stuff that falls from the sky), but I would probably have visited my Selective Service Board and argued that my student deferment was waiting for me. Seven years later, I would have completed the PhD and the war would have been over for all practical purposes.
In October, though, I was busy with the other linguists working on a whole series of messages heralding the formation of the “Provisional Revolutionary Government.” And I was very busy with Allen, Jim, and others in fighting what I have always called the “Refrigerator War.
And this, too, is no shit:
Not too long after we arrived on Engineer Hill, we finished building our new barracks. It was, truly, much too big and pre-fabricated, all lumber with concrete floors, to be called a “hootch.” We helped put the things together with ladders, hammers and nails (very Thoreauvian that, building our own houses). Inside were partitions that divided the place into two-man sleeping arrangements: cots, footlockers, tin wardrobe-type cabinets where we could hang clothes. Each of the partitions had electric outlets.
And, REMF that I am and have always been, what can I say? The PX sold mini-fridges like the ones most dorm residents have in their dorms now. The only people they could sell them to were soldiers on the Hill. Ipso Facto: they were meant for us. So, two by two, the linguies and others in the 330th bought fridges. Mostly, we stored beer and soft drinks in them, the occasional bottle of white wine. The reds were kept in racks above the fridge. Shameless, no? But we, sans dout, were the intellectual elite of the enlisted ranks. I say that, shamelessly, even though we had been dumb enough to go in the Army and, even dumber, to sign up for four years into of three. Why would we do that? Stupid of us, but we believed the recruiters who said we would not have to go to Vietnam.
In all of that frenzy of refrigerator buying, we had not counted on our company commander. “Shaky,” having received a medal for leading us into battle, mostly against each other,decided that since those of you Vietnam veterans out there who might be reading this and who were grunts could not have cold beer out in wherever in the boonies your battles happened to be, we should, in some kind of weird empathy with you guys, not be able to have cold beer in what passed for our hootches either.
We had not, then, heard of “fragging” and were non-violent enough that we would not have fragged him, but we had heard of peaceful and/or passive resistance. We read the order that was posted on our bulletin board and disregarded it.
A few weeks later, our fearless commander, winner of a non-valorous Bronze Star, shaky to the end of his tour, announced an inspection. On the day of the coming inspection, we took all of the beer out of the refrigerators and lined them up under our cots. When the C.O. came through, I (the ranking Spec-4 in our digs) shouted “Ten-Hut!” and we all snapped to.
SIDEBAR: Why I was the ranking Spec 4
Basically, what happened was that I didn’t have a car. You may well ask yourself what not having a car to do with getting a promotion and, had I not been there, I would be asking the same question. You see, I had had a car, a shiny 1965, pale yellow, Pontiac GTO (my first ever new car) before I got drafted and then enlisted. But that car was only five months old and I had to pay $87.95/month for it. I could afford that, barely, while I was teaching at Silsbee High School but E-1 pay was less than the total monthly car payment. I gave the car back to the bank and wound up doing monthly installments to pay the bank the difference between what I still owed on the car and what they were able to sell the “used, current-year car with 33,000 miles on the odometer” for and what I still owed. I paid them $10/month for the first two years of my Army life. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was more than 10% of my monthly salary as an E-1 and E-2.
Since I did not have a car, Allen Hallmark gave me a ride (I was the--*wink*--chaperon on the trip from Texas to Fort Meade because Allen was taking his then girl-friend, soon-to-be-wife, Molly, to Maryland with him). They dropped me off at Student Company, ASA, and then went house-hunting.
Okay and en fin, here’s what happened. I reported in on a Friday afternoon and Allen, Don, and everyone else reported in on the following Monday. The captain who was C.O. of student company had never come into contact with an E-2 enlisted man before (or at least had never had one in his company, until us. Most of student company was made up of sergeants and a few officers being re-trained as linguists. We were among the first folks in the call-up of 1965 when U.S. involvement in Vietnam began its rapid expansion with deployment of Marines to DaNang.). The Captain, a really good guy whose name I have forgotten, put through the paperwork immediately to have me promoted to PFC. The other students did not have their paperwork processed until the next week. As a result, like clockwork, I was always promoted a few days before all the rest of my cohort: to PFC, to Spec-4, to Spec-5).
So, there it is. On that day, because I had not had a car when I got to Fort Meade (I would have found something to do until the next Monday when we were supposed to report in if I had had one), I was the ranking enlisted man in our barracks and had to call everyone to attention out of what passed for respect for our C.O.
Back to the REMF War and I do hope Allen remembers this, if he’s reading it—he’s the only corroborating witness I have. When the C.O. got to our partitioned-off cubical and saw the fridge, he ordered us to open it. We did. There was no beer in it. Ever vigilant as our C.O. was, he did spot the cans of beer standing in perfect ranks under the cots. When he had the temerity to ask what those things were under our cots, either Allen or I said, “They’re cans of beer, sir!”
When he demanded to know why we had not gotten rid of the cans of beer as he had ordered us, one of us (I forget which one) said, “You ordered that we not have beer in our refrigerators, sir. These cans are not in our refrigerator, sir!” Shaky shook a little and, as I recall it, we filled sandbags for a while. But thanks to our skills interpreting poetry and other difficult missives, we could not be found guilty of anything. Allen would fill more sandbags before we left Pleiku, but those were my last bags.
For a few weeks, we had our beer in the EM Club and were able to view the occasional rock band/strip show, but then after a minor work slow down had our privileges reinstated. You see, some of us kept getting sick and were somehow unable to read Vietnamese message (unless they were really important). Shortly after that, Shaky decided we had learned our lessons and we were able to restock the refrigerators.
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 11)
REMFs at War #1
We were REMFs once and young, but we did occasionally have to stage battles of a sort. Was it Michael Herr in Dispatches who said a real war story always begins with “This is no shit…”? Well, this is no shit:
Once upon a time, on a day that was neither too hot nor too cold, a day like almost any of 365 minus the 21 or so we spent crossing the Pacific Ocean, on one late afternoon, the sun descending behind high hills that we called mountains, some imbecile reported that a sapper had crossed the three continuous circles of razor-sharp concertina wire, had crawled beneath other barbed wire obstacles, had managed not to set off any mines or make noise with jingling tin cans, and had, in short, managed to get in through all the barricades surrounding Engineer Hill and was thought to be lurking somewhere within our portion of the outpost.
Our company commander was not amused.
Historic Sidebar: Colonel Harry Summers, in his Vietnam Almanac, goes back into medieval wars to define what a sapper is: a special unit that worked with tunnels to undermine a castle-like fortification. He refines that for sappers in the Vietnam War to include units that mined roads, cleared mine fields and “breached defensive fortifications.” Henry V, in the play of the same name by William Shakespeare, famously exhorts his troops: “Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more!” or words to that effect. The “breach” in that case was the first opening bombed into the walls of a fortification. It was dangerous for the troops who went into the breach first; few of them survived. Those of you who read Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe novels will remember that Sharpe became an officer by being the first man into the breach at a battle in India. It’s kind of like all those movies where the first guy up the scaling ladder (unless he is our hero) almost always dies (see the orcs scaling the wall of Helm's Deep in the film version of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers). Our alleged sapper, though, was more like the Vietnamese communist who squirms under the wires as a demo for troops in The Boys in Company C: sly, dedicated, heroic, coated with mud, deftly lifting the concertina away from his body and rising silently with a bayonet to kill the dumb American soldiers.
We had heard recently about one sapper who came upon a three-man guard post, all of the soldiers asleep inside the sand-bagged Conex. The sapper had allegedly locked them into the thing before moving into the interior of the post and shooting up the hootches. Did that actually happen? I have no idea. I don't remember anyone saying "This is no shit..."
Anyway, a report made its way, more quickly than normal, to our company commander, from what source no one seemed to know--perhaps a note tied to a brick and thrown into the HQ Bunker?) that we had one (1) sapper suspected to be in our company area.
The C.O., visions of bronze stars undoubtedly dancing in his head, called all of us who were not otherwise engaged in secret doings in the Ops Tent into formation. I wold tell you what was going on in the Ops Tent but that would either be "R"-rated or the government would treat me worse than they have treated Julian Assange (not too badly, really) Back to the story: The C.O. divided us into two groups, lined us up on either side of the compound, M-16s loaded and locked (I have been told by experts that the popular phrase "locked and loaded" does not apply to M-16s), and marched us toward each other.
By then, the sun had almost set completely and shadows streaked the compound. All of us seemed slightly nervous—not because of a vicious VC sapper who might rise up with a bayonet and sever our heads from our necks, but because of the other dozens of men on the other side of the place marching directly toward us with M-16s loaded, locked, and ready to fire. Had some poor, befuddled sapper stood up in the middle of all that, we might well have fired at him and killed each other! If some rodent had raced by the same thing might well have happened and that would have played hell with the numbers game.
We finally all came together in the middle of the compound, looked around, said the F-word a few hundreds of times, aimed our fingers at each other and said "Bang! Bang! You're dead!" and wandered back to whatever we had been doing. It was a lot like those games we had played when we were kids: Korean War or even WWII, Asian people talking about being "educated in your country" before killing us.
The Aftermath:
A few months later, we had a parade. Please be aware that the 330th never had parades, but this one was for the awarding of medals. A few of us (not me!) had received minor shrapnel wounds from the mortars the VC must have accidentally dropped on us (or maybe they thought all the antennae we had actually signified something of importance and deliberately aimed their mortars at us). And we had one guy, his first name was Bill, who had been transferred to the 330th from my old unit at Chu Lai. He had actually done something worth receiving a medal for and that made me even happier that I had been transferred out of Chu Lai! Still, seven purple hearts to mildly wounded REMFs and then, drum roll please!!!!, a bronze star without a “V” device to our brave commander who had led us into action against a deadly sapper. Bill got the same medal, sort of: his had a "V" device for valor.
Medals? Except for the really important ones, they were handed out to officers like...well, anything not for heroism can pretty much be discounted most of the time.
We were REMFs once and young, but we did occasionally have to stage battles of a sort. Was it Michael Herr in Dispatches who said a real war story always begins with “This is no shit…”? Well, this is no shit:
Once upon a time, on a day that was neither too hot nor too cold, a day like almost any of 365 minus the 21 or so we spent crossing the Pacific Ocean, on one late afternoon, the sun descending behind high hills that we called mountains, some imbecile reported that a sapper had crossed the three continuous circles of razor-sharp concertina wire, had crawled beneath other barbed wire obstacles, had managed not to set off any mines or make noise with jingling tin cans, and had, in short, managed to get in through all the barricades surrounding Engineer Hill and was thought to be lurking somewhere within our portion of the outpost.
Our company commander was not amused.
Historic Sidebar: Colonel Harry Summers, in his Vietnam Almanac, goes back into medieval wars to define what a sapper is: a special unit that worked with tunnels to undermine a castle-like fortification. He refines that for sappers in the Vietnam War to include units that mined roads, cleared mine fields and “breached defensive fortifications.” Henry V, in the play of the same name by William Shakespeare, famously exhorts his troops: “Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more!” or words to that effect. The “breach” in that case was the first opening bombed into the walls of a fortification. It was dangerous for the troops who went into the breach first; few of them survived. Those of you who read Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe novels will remember that Sharpe became an officer by being the first man into the breach at a battle in India. It’s kind of like all those movies where the first guy up the scaling ladder (unless he is our hero) almost always dies (see the orcs scaling the wall of Helm's Deep in the film version of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers). Our alleged sapper, though, was more like the Vietnamese communist who squirms under the wires as a demo for troops in The Boys in Company C: sly, dedicated, heroic, coated with mud, deftly lifting the concertina away from his body and rising silently with a bayonet to kill the dumb American soldiers.
We had heard recently about one sapper who came upon a three-man guard post, all of the soldiers asleep inside the sand-bagged Conex. The sapper had allegedly locked them into the thing before moving into the interior of the post and shooting up the hootches. Did that actually happen? I have no idea. I don't remember anyone saying "This is no shit..."
Anyway, a report made its way, more quickly than normal, to our company commander, from what source no one seemed to know--perhaps a note tied to a brick and thrown into the HQ Bunker?) that we had one (1) sapper suspected to be in our company area.
The C.O., visions of bronze stars undoubtedly dancing in his head, called all of us who were not otherwise engaged in secret doings in the Ops Tent into formation. I wold tell you what was going on in the Ops Tent but that would either be "R"-rated or the government would treat me worse than they have treated Julian Assange (not too badly, really) Back to the story: The C.O. divided us into two groups, lined us up on either side of the compound, M-16s loaded and locked (I have been told by experts that the popular phrase "locked and loaded" does not apply to M-16s), and marched us toward each other.
By then, the sun had almost set completely and shadows streaked the compound. All of us seemed slightly nervous—not because of a vicious VC sapper who might rise up with a bayonet and sever our heads from our necks, but because of the other dozens of men on the other side of the place marching directly toward us with M-16s loaded, locked, and ready to fire. Had some poor, befuddled sapper stood up in the middle of all that, we might well have fired at him and killed each other! If some rodent had raced by the same thing might well have happened and that would have played hell with the numbers game.
We finally all came together in the middle of the compound, looked around, said the F-word a few hundreds of times, aimed our fingers at each other and said "Bang! Bang! You're dead!" and wandered back to whatever we had been doing. It was a lot like those games we had played when we were kids: Korean War or even WWII, Asian people talking about being "educated in your country" before killing us.
The Aftermath:
A few months later, we had a parade. Please be aware that the 330th never had parades, but this one was for the awarding of medals. A few of us (not me!) had received minor shrapnel wounds from the mortars the VC must have accidentally dropped on us (or maybe they thought all the antennae we had actually signified something of importance and deliberately aimed their mortars at us). And we had one guy, his first name was Bill, who had been transferred to the 330th from my old unit at Chu Lai. He had actually done something worth receiving a medal for and that made me even happier that I had been transferred out of Chu Lai! Still, seven purple hearts to mildly wounded REMFs and then, drum roll please!!!!, a bronze star without a “V” device to our brave commander who had led us into action against a deadly sapper. Bill got the same medal, sort of: his had a "V" device for valor.
Medals? Except for the really important ones, they were handed out to officers like...well, anything not for heroism can pretty much be discounted most of the time.
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