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.