by Tracy Kidder
At night when you’re sleepin’
Charlie Cong comes a-creepin’
All arow-ow-ow-ow-a-ound.
A captain instructing us, just back from the war, got angry at some of the class because they’d given up during the escape-and-evasion exercise. He snarled, “I’d shoot some of you dickheads if I had you in my company in Nam.” I was glad I belonged to Intelligence. About a third of us were intelligence officers with reasonable chances of stateside assignments, and the rest were infantry, virtually all of whom could expect orders for combat. The two groups mixed but in general felt scornful of each other. The Infantry’s crest was a bayonet over the motto “Follow Me.” One young intelligence officer affixed to his door a picture of a broken bayonet and the words “Follow Him.” The infantry colonel in charge tore it down in a rage and punished the joker.
Our class contained about two hundred second lieutenants. We had no enlisted troops to practice on, so we took turns commanding one another, lieutenants marching other lieutenants, usually out of step, especially if an intelligence officer called the cadence. We marched down the streets of Fort Benning past the post stockade. A taunting voice made me look to the side. A young prisoner-soldier, an enlisted man no doubt, was laughing at us from behind a chain-link fence. We passed right next to him, a young man in a white T-shirt slapping the fence and glaring while he laughed. When I glanced back moments later, from inside the formation, he had laced his fingers through the links in the fence and was shaking the tall metal barrier that separated him from us. His mouth was opened, his teeth bared. What was coming out looked like a red-faced scream, but all I could hear at that distance were the sounds of boots on pavement and lieutenants barking commands. If you looked, you had the impression he was screaming just at you. So if you looked, you quickly looked away.
One afternoon while I was standing outside a classroom in a little circle of intelligence lieutenants, something slammed into my shoulder, hard enough to knock me back a step. I turned and saw an infantry lieutenant with close-cropped sandy hair and wide shoulders sauntering away. He knocked into me that way at least twice, and once, when it was my turn to play lieutenant, he yelled at me from across twenty yards of parade field from his place in formation, saying, “You fucking dud!” I pretended to ignore him. I didn’t feel like fighting him. I didn’t feel angry. I’d never spoken to him. I didn’t know what I’d done to provoke him. He was like the weather, like the Army, like the war, like the wild prisoner behind the fence, part of the collective, impersonal forces of a world I’d blundered into.
Toward the end of the course we had a live-fire exercise, a mock battle with live ammunition. By lot, I became platoon leader for a day. I gathered the men (all fellow lieutenants), reviewed the plan of attack (a standard fire-and-maneuver), and warned them to be careful not to shoot one another. This was a real possibility, and I was very nervous, until the exercise began and bullets started flying. Then a peaceful feeling flooded me, memorable because so rare. The battle came off perfectly. Without a live enemy, granted. But I remember thinking, as I stood on a hilltop with my radioman and calmly directed my squad leaders, that maybe I could have done this after all.
SEVERAL OF US INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS CELEBRATED WITH GIN FIZZES AROUND dawn, before formation, the morning after our orders came. I would serve the balance of my enlistment on the other side of the world from Vietnam, at a place called Arlington Hall, in Virginia. First, the Army ordered me back to Massachusetts, to Fort Devens and ASA (Army Security Agency) school, where I would study basic communications intelligence. But my top-secret crypto security clearance hadn’t arrived, and the class wouldn’t start for several weeks, so I was given a clerical job at the post’s ASA headquarters.
Fort Devens was situated in a region of remnants, of Massachusetts farmland that had gone back to forest and of towns that the Industrial Revolution had built and long since left behind. Compared to Fort Benning, it was sedate. It contained the usual rows of enlisted barracks and whitewashed rocks but also sections where neatly trimmed lawns surrounded stolid-looking, slightly run-down buildings made of brick. I felt at times as if I’d gone back to boarding school.
I’d made friends with a young English professor at Harvard named David Riggs, who had led me through Joyce and the English Romantic poets. Through my parents I’d also met the writer Sam Toperoff, who lived on Long Island. Both David and Sam loathed the Vietnam War, and Sam was writing articles and giving speeches against it. They knew much more than I did, and I’d listened to their arguments. The war was unnecessary, futile, and racist. Here we were, the world’s greatest superpower, intervening in a civil war thousands of miles away, setting up corrupt governments, trying to bomb a long-suffering people into submission, all in the name of a ridiculous idea, the domino theory. By the time I had been joined to the Army on active duty, I felt I’d also joined David and Sam’s side. It was an easy conversion, really no conversion at all. I hadn’t felt strongly about the war before, and it wasn’t exactly the war I felt strongly about now. Vietnam was far away. I wouldn’t be going there. I felt as if I’d made a social blunder and now languished in a place where I didn’t belong, wearing clothes that didn’t represent me. I drifted around Fort Devens among uniformed strangers, waiting for my security clearance, talking about nothing that seemed important, afraid to give myself away.
My temporary commander, a colonel at headquarters, took a shine to me. He was a tall man with remarkably white skin, not pink but powder white. He seemed slightly feminine and kindly. About two weeks after I arrived, he called me into his office and said, “My wife and I were wondering if you’d like to come to dinner, Lieutenant Kidder. We’d like you to meet our daughter.”
My drill instructor, Sergeant Fisher, hadn’t covered this contingency. Suppose you didn’t like your commanding officer’s daughter, and she liked you? I declined the invitation. “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. But, sir, I have a fiancée.”
The weekend loomed. On Friday night I went to the Officers Club. Only older men were there, all hollering and laughing. I sat at the end of the bar and watched TV. I spent most of the next two days in my room at the Bachelors Officers Quarters, gazing out the window. Now and then some troops marched by. On Sunday I called David Riggs and asked if I could spend the next weekend with him and his wife, Susan, in their apartment at Adams House, my old Harvard home.
Looking back, I know that Cambridge had begun to change while I was a student there, searching for golden combs and writing stories with characters who spoke like Hemingway’s. But while I remember a student saying he’d just smoked marijuana, I also remember not having any idea what that would be like. I’d been away only a year, but the city I drove into now seemed utterly transformed, both more frivolous and more serious. Old hierarchies were teetering. One elderly professor, I was told, had made up jingles to teach his students chemistry. Meanwhile, the students were rallying on the steps of Widener Library, their leaders denouncing ROTC through bullhorns, denouncing the war, denouncing all authority. Parietal hours were about to be swept away. Posters read, “Make love not war.” In Harvard Square, men wore beards and ponytails. I glanced at my reflection in the windows of the Harvard Coop. My hair was barely long enough to part. I wandered down to the Charles. It was springtime. Couples lay on the grassy banks. Girls wore thin Mexican blouses, the sort with drawstrings at the neck. I coveted every pair of lolling breasts.
I had separated myself from my social class, from my student generation. Now I found myself looking in from the outside at my old life, and everyone there, on the other side, seemed to be having a great time, while opposing the war—by opposing the war. Didn’t something like this happen in Lysistrata, the ancient antiwar play, which I’d read in boarding school? India-print skirts went swishing by, short as tennis dresses. To me, they seemed like invitations. I thought I’d gladly trade my uniform for sex. I ran into a friend at the Casablanca (“the Casa B”). I followed him to a party. He introduced me to
the host, who looked at my cropped hair and wouldn’t shake my hand. I put my hand back in my pocket and smiled manfully. But others there were more forgiving. I sat on a cushion on the floor. A pipe was being passed around the room. It came to me. “Here you go, man.” I drove back to Fort Devens late that night, imagining that the MP at the gate would arrest me for red eyes. But my parking sticker identified me as an officer, and he saluted crisply, then waved me on, back inside the Army.
Classes began. My training went indoors. At moments I almost missed Fort Benning’s thumping boots, its smells of canvas and cordite. It was hard to stay awake in the classrooms, though learning how to break the code of a make-believe message was entertaining, like a party game.
Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, called the Army the “largest single educational complex” in the history of the world. Maybe he believed this, but he said it in order to justify lowering the “intelligence standards” for admission to the Army. He said he wanted to give underprivileged, undereducated boys a chance to learn marketable skills. The actual effect, of course, was to keep children of the wealthier classes out of the draft and safely in college, while the lower-class, “marginally qualified” draftees went on to learn how to fire machine guns and mortars. To me, the Army seemed like the world’s largest factory, because of the interchangeability of its human parts. ASA school was like a college with a curriculum designed so that virtually anyone could teach it. After classes, Friday afternoon, I hurried back to Cambridge.
Saturday morning I took a stroll with Susan Riggs. A tall blond woman waved to her. “Oh, look, it’s Joanie,” Susan said, waving back. Susan introduced us. We shook hands. Joanie’s hands felt not limp but very gentle. She had fragile-looking wrists. I liked her simple ponytail. The miniskirt she wore wasn’t right for her. It made her thighs look heavy. I didn’t mind. I glanced away, determined not to stare, and when I turned back, I saw that she was biting her lip, looking me up and down.
“You look like Hamlet,” she said. She made a little laugh, almost a giggle. And then, turning her face slightly away, she said, “I bet you have a lot of girlfriends.”
“No, not really,” I said.
Joanie had a peaceful, quiet, wistful quality, and a cooing voice, but she was very direct. We had our first date at her apartment, not far from Harvard Yard. Her rooms were full of batik fabrics and hempy things, and they had a sweet smell, a mixture of dried eucalyptus and, faintly, marijuana smoke. This was the place I regretted losing to the Army. She said I could stay there for the weekend, but we couldn’t make love until the following one. So much for the wrestling matches on couches in undergraduate rooms. She was several years older. She seemed like a grown-up, like an experience I was supposed to have and almost hadn’t, and I was missing her already—her cooing voice, her graceful hands, her ponytail—and regretting the moment when I would go away for good. She asked nothing of me, though sometimes she’d say she wished I’d act less boyishly.
I drove back to Fort Devens very early Monday morning. In the classrooms, the instructors droned on about ciphers and codes and communications networks. I closed my eyes, remembering the scent of Joanie’s apartment. I opened my eyes and looked around and saw a room with gray steel desks and young officers with crew cuts, taking notes about the constituent parts of the “intelligence community.” I liked many of these guys, these fellow lieutenants, but I wasn’t like them, I thought. They didn’t seem to mind being numerals in the Army’s vast tables of organization and equipment. Maybe they just didn’t realize that the Army could assert its rights of ownership in all of us, at any time, in almost any way it wanted. I had escaped the worst. In a couple of months I’d go to Arlington Hall. I would spend the two years of my enlistment in the States, keep my mouth shut, get an honorable discharge, and never look back. Meanwhile, this Friday night, I’d go to Joanie’s pad.
I doodled in my notebook. Two years, I thought. That seemed like an entire future. I hadn’t even talked to Mary Anne for months but was still seeing myself through her eyes. Wouldn’t my plan seem too tame to her? Would I seem too timid? I wouldn’t have minded something dramatic happening to me, as long as the local authorities didn’t take away next weekend’s pass and keep me from going to Joanie’s. They did that now and then, I knew, when for instance they needed some lieutenants to march troops in a parade.
I walked toward my next class down a hallway through an administrative building, along a worn but shiny floor. No doubt some private was forced to wax and buff it every night. A captain coming the other way, someone I had never met, peered at my name tag. I glanced at him and walked past. “Kidder,” he called to my back. “You’re going to Vietnam.”
“No,” I told him, turning around. “No, I’m going to Arlington Hall.”
“You’re going to Vietnam, Lieutenant. I just got your orders today.”
“You’re kidding!” I said.
He drew back and stared at me. I have a clear but impossible recollection of myself standing there in my green Army suit, brass buttons and insignia, shiny black low-quarter shoes, with my mouth wide open and my eyes grown enormous behind my glasses. I remember feeling scared all at once that this captain could see into my mind. “Oh, okay, sir. That’s great, sir.” And he walked away, looking back at me once.
In my class there was an odd, birdlike lieutenant. I don’t remember his name. He looked like an intellectual but didn’t seem very smart. Then again, I’d decided that no one my age who had joined the Army could be very smart. When he heard about my reassignment, he took me aside and said indignantly that the Army shouldn’t send me to Vietnam; they had no business wasting educations like mine. My opinion of him rose immediately. I hadn’t thought of that, but obviously he was right. He said I should call the colonel I had worked for. He told me the colonel would feel outraged, too, and would probably get my orders changed. I called him from my room at the BOQ. Maybe I should have gone to dinner with his daughter after all.
I said I thought the Pentagon might have made a mistake, and if so, perhaps he could rectify it.
It must have been an astonishing phone call for him, but he replied calmly. He didn’t think he could do anything about my orders. “And I wouldn’t even if I could, Lieutenant Kidder.” He added, “I’d be clicking my heels with joy if I were you.”
I backed right off. “Oh, well, in that case, sir, I am glad I’m going. I was just wondering, sir, and thanks a lot for setting me straight.”
I had decided that everyone who fled to Canada, and better yet burned his draft card, had pure motives. I believed in Muhammad Ali’s sacrificing his championship to refuse induction (“Ain’t no Vietcong never called me nigger,” he’d said, supposedly.) For a month or so, I’d heard rumors about a young officer right here at Fort Devens who had committed his own dramatic act of conscience and disobeyed orders for Vietnam. I knew the story must be true, because his name had come up in class not long ago, and our instructor, a field grade officer, had said, “Well, the guy’s got a pair, I’ll give him that.” I made a few discreet inquiries. The outlaw’s name was Dennis Morrisseau. He now languished under arrest in our Bachelors Officers Quarters, just two doors down the hall from my room. And yet I’d never even seen him.
The BOQ had floors of gray linoleum tile and cement block walls painted cream. It was always very still inside. The place reminded me of one I’d visited before, maybe in my dreams, a place like a dentist’s office building after hours. I made sure the hallway was empty. I had every right to visit the renegade lieutenant, but my hand trembled when I lifted it to knock on his door.
“What do you want?” said an angry-sounding voice from inside.
“I live down the hall,” I answered, in a hoarse and hurried whisper to the doorjamb. I didn’t want to say my name aloud. “I just want to talk.”
“Yeah. Sure you do,” said the voice.
I walked quickly away.
But I decided to try again a few days later, and this time he let me in
. He locked his door behind us. His room was exactly like mine, except that his was lived in. He had a hot plate and a small refrigerator, which he opened, offering me a beer. We sat facing each other in Army-issue easy chairs. I made some notes of this encounter about four years after the fact. In them, I put words in his mouth that I can’t now be sure were his, but I know I got the gist. “Sorry about last week,” he said.
“Three days ago?” I said.
He pointed at me to indicate that I was right. “I thought you were an MP. I was thinking they were coming to haul me out of here and charge me officially. And I’m not going to let them in.”
He was smaller than I had expected. He had dark hair, and he wore green dress pants and an Army-issue light brown dress shirt, which looked too small on him, especially around the waist. He must have put on weight. He huddled in his chair.
For a moment I wondered if he was lost in paranoia. But no. He told me the lieutenant who had moved in next door to him a few weeks ago seemed like a real nice guy. That lieutenant had called on him to say hello and had told him right off that he belonged to the local MI detachment. That is, this new neighbor of Morrisseau’s worked in Military Intelligence, the other arm of Intelligence from mine, the arm that spied on people directly. Morrisseau told me he didn’t think the MI lieutenant in the next room was spying on him, because if he were, he wouldn’t have identified himself, and besides, he really did seem like a nice guy.
