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.
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