Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 5)

We Are Attacked: I Start Smoking Cigarettes

I have, for years, equated my smoking habit to a particular evening in Vietnam when the Viet Cong dropped a few more than twenty mortars into our camp in the middle of Engineer Hill. The 330th RRCo. was, in non-official Army nomenclature I’ll leave to the imagination, pretending to be part of the world’s most advanced fighting force. Of the linguists and code breakers and radio intercept operators there, I believe more than 50%, like my friend Allen Hallmark and me, had college degrees; while many others, like my friend Don Mohr—who remained at Chu Lai when Allen and I were shipped out as undesirables from the 601st Radio Research Detachment—were on their way to a degree and later became lawyers, college professors and other namby-pamby professionals. We were, basically, not fit—as Arlo Guthrie suggested in “Alice’s Restaurant”—to serve our country in its military wing. We were not, let me hasten to add ever found guilty of littering,

But still and all, on a few nights when we were being entertained by Asian strippers and rock bands (all incredibly fond of singing "We gotta get out of this place / if it's the last thing we ever do..." or watching a movie about the war, or maybe even sleeping,some nights when we least expected it (we never really expected it), the VC had the sheer gall to drop mortars on our hootches. Some of those mortars even sent shrapnel into the linguist’s hootch—some people claim that that “t” in the middle of “hootch” is a French affectation and should be deleted, thereby making the word “hooch,” but that seems barbaric to me, much as “punji” must be the one and only correct way to spell those sharpened sticks the VC had the bad habit of dipping in shit and planting in holes where our grunts in green could step on them and get major infections—, and could have done serious damage to our refrigerators or even punctured our beer cans, but I digress.

The minor cut I received on my right big toe that night could have come from flying shrapnel or from the haste with which I slid under my cot. I should explain that “hiding under your bed” rarely is a good way of avoiding childish monsters, nor is pulling the blankie over your head, but that in this case I did have a sheet of ¾ inch plywood under my mattress. It is quite conceivable that I cut my toe on the metal of the cot. At any rate, I never reported it, just bandaged it—possibly with one of those little Mickey Mouse band aids that were so popular back then.

I’m determined to get back on topic: Smoking. I have often seriously suggested that I started smoking that night when—with my big toe dripping all of six or seven drops of blood and my stoically refusing to put myself in for a Purple Heart, with people yelling and screaming and quoting Yeats and Shakespeare ("Once more onto the breech" and all that), my heart beating rapidly from fear, and my dismay at the misquoting going on all around me—I could borrow but a cigarette (no cigars handy) from a friend standing, or perhaps lying, nearby and suck it down to the very butt. And so I propose a semi-heroic reason—man in extremis, defending his homeland—for taking up the habit. This was the very heart of Marlboro country—a place where rugged men (almost all college graduates, many, like me, English, theatre ["drama majors almost always affect the British 'theatre' instead fo the American 'theater'] or language majors) had to smoke amidst the hellacious fog of his country’s wars. Well, yes, that is all true. But it is merely a shadow of the truth

SIDEBAR: some years earlier, way back before I had graduated from college and had spent two very earnest years teaching English back in the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas to what we then, with no pretense, called remedial students and not developmental students, I had essayed to work on a film with my good friend J. D. Feigleson, now head of Feigleson Productions in Hollywood. Yes, that Hollywood, the one near the City of Angels in California. J.D. and I were both speech and drama majors at Lamar Tech… which has since changed its name quite pretentiously, just as every other college and tech college seems to have done, from Tech to University (Texas Tech has gone all of them one better bny calling itself Texas Tech University). J.D.—who had much more money than I—was making a movie: full color and sound, set in medieval England, about a man who carries a bow and whose son is kidnapped for some reason that is never made quite clear.

That was not unusual among filmic auteurs of the day. And for the purposes of this Facebook note/essay, quite irrelevant. What is relevant is that J.D. was making a film that would serve as a kind of portfolio for his eventual triumphs in Hollywood. And I was his “associate” everything. I worked on the plot with him, took a small part in the film, scouted for sites, did a little bit of everything.

So, together, big-shotting it as if we were really Hollywood producers—a title J.D. would eventually earn for himself legitmately—we smoked cigars. Mostly, in my case, cheap cigars. But we smoked: in his car as he accelerated and smushed me back against the seat of his racing competitive stock Fairlane Ford, in the Thicket as we prepared for the day’s shooting, at J+J’s Steak House as we readied the next day’s shoot over chicken-friend steak. In his makeshift home studio as we edited the film, and finally, in the five different movie houses owned by his uncle that debuted the film to an audience of supportive friends and relatives; and later to Beaumont, Texas, and later still, to Houston strangers. Damn but that was exciting! And the whole trail was accompanied by smoking.

“The Bowman” was about thirty minutes long. It was pointless, and therefore some critics today might say, "brilliant." It had no clear point of view. It followed the bowman on his quest for his son, way out into the boonies, until he killed the pair of heartless thugs who had kidnapped the boy for no apparent reason. And then he and his son continued down the trail to wherever they were going in the first place.

This was all just soooo Vietnam a few years before we had even heard of that small country. It was far enough ahead of its time that it won a ciné gold eagle in the amateur class at Cannes. Or at least, it won a gold eagle from some film festival—the name of which I have conveniently forgotten. And me? I learned to smoke. J.D.? He’s got his own studio now and has produced and directed a few films that have appeared on PBS and in your local theaters. I became a college professor, librarian and poet/essayist and a confirmed smoker.

I did not, though, have my first actual cigarette until that night mortars fell on Engineer Hill and I cut my foot and was totally out of cigars. Sad, sad, sad. Now? I no longer smoke, but it took me decades to finally break the habit. Those of you who used to see me cut out of conferences to take a quick drag will no longer have that pleasure. It has been over now for five years. After way too many years. Fini. Hết rôi. Es todo.