My Detachment My Detachment

by Tracy Kidder

  “Hey, Lieutenant!” a voice called out.

  I looked around. Several stools away, a pair of young men in civilian clothes were leaning over the bar, their faces turned toward me.

  “Hey, Lieutenant,” said one of them. “I’m gonna buy you a drink.”

  The voice had a false, harsh friendliness. They were probably antiwar people who wanted to have a little sport with a baby killer. I bent over my glass. I’d ignore them.

  But then the two young men moved onto the stools next to mine. They wore summery-looking, short-sleeved oxford shirts. They looked like teenagers. They probably were. I envied them their shirts. The one who had called out, the handsomer boy, the one who did the talking, sat on the nearer stool.

  “You too good to drink with us, Lieutenant?”

  “No.” I gave him a hard stare.

  “Yeah, well, we’re soldiers, too, you know. We just want to buy you a drink, Lieutenant. Okay?”

  I said I was sorry. I hadn’t known they were soldiers.

  “You going to Nam?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “We just got back from Nam. You better let me buy you a drink. Watch your ass over there, Lieutenant, all right?” His voice still didn’t sound friendly.

  I said I wasn’t worried. I’d heard Nam wasn’t all that dangerous.

  Almost in unison, each of the young men lifted a single wooden crutch from the floor and held it up for me. I looked at the crutches, then at their faces. They were grinning at me. Then one pulled up a trouser leg, then the other did the same. It could have been a dance routine. Turning, I looked down under the edge of the bar at two identical, flesh-colored, plastic ankles. I asked what had happened. Each, the spokesman said, had lost a foot and shin in Vietnam and was going home now on his brand-new prosthesis.

  They must have been doing this for hours, hanging around the bar, looking for chances to tell people who they really were, looking for a little recognition. I had my own troubles, but this didn’t seem like much to ask from me.

  “But how come you aren’t in uniform?”

  “You think the fucking government lets people on crutches go home in uniform, Lieutenant?”

  The one who did the talking turned to his friend, and they shared a sardonic laugh. “You think they let wounded soldiers wear their uniforms in a place like this?” said the spokesman.

  “Yeah, we might upset the civilians,” said the other.

  The war was wrong, but how could their story be true? Our government was misguided, but it wouldn’t make wounded soldiers travel out of uniform just for public relations, would it? “That’s wrong,” I told them. “That’s very wrong.” To myself I said that none of this would happen to me. I wasn’t coming back with a plastic foot.

  ALONE, LIEUTENANT DEMPSEY MOVES, A DRY RANGY WEED with ghostlike eyes. Alone, he stares dumbly at faces, sees faces in uniform, of privates and sergeants, and frankly, he is afraid. No one ever said what getting there was like.

  Where there are tropical trees, white sand and a giant airfield full of silver planes and in the distance purple hills over which the sun is hung.

  The smell of Asia is creeping on the evening air, torpid, heavy air, though the sea is near. There are smells of unwashed bodies in the phalanx of men that moves disordered from the plane. The Lieutenant’s face is lost in green.…

  The plane, a Flying Tiger Line 707, which I would later come to know generically as a Freedom Bird, was landing in Bien Hoa. That was all they told us. I assumed we’d be under fire when we hit the ground. I imagined us running across a dirt airstrip. Why didn’t they issue us helmets?

  It was midday when we filed out the door into Vietnam. The heat was impressive. It made me catch my breath. I walked across the asphalt runway, not knowing where I headed, in a crowd of officers and enlisted men, all dressed alike in shiny shoes and khakis and garrison caps, the kind that drill instructors liked to call “cunt caps.” We passed another crowd of soldiers dressed like us. But their formation was much more neatly edged and faced the other way. As we approached, silently, they started yelling. I glanced at them, received an impression of grinning faces, and looked away. They hooted at us.

  “There goes my replacement!”

  “Eat your heart out, new guy!”

  A voice thrown through a bullhorn, almost intimately close—but it wasn’t meant for me—declared, “Flying Tiger Lines announces the immediate loading and departure of Flight”—a cheer went up behind us, drowning out the flight number—“for Travis Air Force Base, California.” Another cheer.

  No one near me in our crowd said anything. We arrived at what might have been a picnic site, a bunch of folding chairs arranged beneath a huge tent roof. I sat down in the front row, looking out at the airfield, and watched the Freedom Bird depart. A major sitting next to me fanned himself with his garrison cap and sighed. I sat for a long time, wondering what would happen next. I remember thinking, I don’t know anybody here.

  Soon a little group of soldiers, maybe six of them, entered my field of vision. They looked as though they’d been rolling in dust. They wore camouflage bandannas and round-brimmed camouflage hats. Some wore bandoliers of glinting, sharp-pointed bullets, strapped like crisscrossed suspenders over their chests. They carried huge knives in scabbards strapped to their legs and black M-16s. One had a shotgun and another a kind of rifle I’d never seen before, with a curved banana clip. They sauntered by and seemed to make a point of not noticing us. I had the feeling they were passing in review, a symbolic changing of the guard, though they were probably heading for one of the helicopters across the airfield. I should notice everything and keep a journal, I told myself, but a voice I couldn’t control kept saying, “I wish I could go home.” I didn’t keep a journal.

  I had imagined that the Army changed my orders and rushed me off to Vietnam to fill a vacant job. But when I reported to Personnel at ASA headquarters near Saigon, a captain behind a desk looked puzzled. “Lieutenant Kidder? We weren’t expecting you.”

  He told me to report the next day to the office of the commander of ASA in Vietnam, of the 509th Radio Research Group, a full colonel (a “bird” or “full-bull” colonel) at precisely 0800 hours. You will be there on time, Lieutenant. The next morning I filed into the commander’s office with half a dozen other new-guy lieutenants. The colonel had a broad face. He sat at a metal desk, a bouquet of flags behind him. He had his hair clipped to stubble and shaved to “white sidewalls” above his ears. One of the first things he told us was that some lieutenant had recently disgraced this command by losing classified information. “Gross carelessness,” he called this. “You will not commit similar infractions.” Then I heard him say, “What is your opinion of the ASA school at Fort Devens, Lieutenant Kidder?”

  I was thinking about that lieutenant who had lost the classified material, wondering what the colonel was going to do to him. I tried to frame an answer. “It was very challenging, sir,” I said. But I must have mumbled.

  “What?” he yelled. “What did you say? Speak up!”

  Before he dismissed us, he talked about facial hair. The Army high command had recently authorized mustaches, of precise measurements, not much larger than Hitler’s. But in the colonel’s opinion, this was a mistake. “Mustaches are dirt catchers. They’re disease spreaders. I expect that officers in the five-oh-nine will not grow facial hair.”

  I didn’t dare smile. I didn’t feel like smiling. This seemed like a solemn occasion. I hadn’t planned to grow a mustache anyway.

  Back in Personnel, the captain said he’d found a job for me—to write the secret code-word history of the ASA in Vietnam. I wondered why anyone would want a history so secret it couldn’t be read.

  Saigon was full of tiny panhandlers. After rain showers the streets actually steamed. There was barbed-wire fencing in the sidewalk outside the St. George Hotel, where I languished in a room by myself, reading Joseph Conrad under an archaic, slowly turning ceiling fan.

  But I stayed on
ly five days in Saigon. Personnel had changed its mind. “You’re going up-country, Lieutenant,” I was told. I left Saigon for Tan Son Nhut airfield in the back of an Army truck, among a bunch of enlisted men. We drove down Tu Do Street past the racetrack. “Remember Tet?” one soldier said to another.

  “Fuckin’ A!”

  Listening in, I gathered that the Vietcong had set up mortars right there on the racetrack. “Did they really?”

  The soldiers looked at me. I didn’t know about that? I must be cherry. I must still be pissing stateside water. I wrote to my parents:

  Riding down the streets of Saigon in an open truck in the morning’s twilight was very strange, eerie. I am struck by a welter of contrasts. Good-looking, delicate little people and ruins where the bombs have fallen. Garbage and rubble in the streets, stifling heat and humidity, and then those great huge clouds billowing in from the Pacific. As if somehow there were room for awe and romance in the hovel. I’m afraid not, though. Here even murder isn’t performed conscientiously.

  Now I am sitting in the hot, steamy waiting room of Tan Son Nhut Airbase, waiting for a plane to take me to Nha Trang. The coast! Oh, yeah. I am, as they say, going up-country. But I will stay at Nha Trang in an administrative job, or so I have been told—it pays to go to Harvard.

  Boils began to sprout on my shoulders. I wrote home begging for a fan. In Nha Trang, I hooked rides in three-quarter-ton trucks to the beach. I stayed at what was called “the villa,” the officers’ quarters for the radio research battalion in that city. In the bar on the roof, a captain said I wasn’t staying there after all. I was going up to Chu Lai and then out to one of the radio research detachments. What were they like? “The boonies,” he said. I’d find out. A spec. 4 was raking the grass outside the headquarters Quonset huts in Nha Trang the next morning. Maybe he knew something. Yeah, he knew about those detachments. They went out with the grunts. Didn’t I know about that? Those were the boonies, those detachments, they were the bushes. I pictured tents and jeeps and files of men moving across the dusty coastal plain, toward jungle.

  I traveled north in a big-bellied, prop-driven plane, sitting in a sling chair, just waiting for the flight to end because there were no windows, and wondering if this time we would land under fire. We didn’t. I climbed out onto another airfield, and a flight supervisor asked me where I was going, then pointed at a helicopter and told me to get on it. The propellers were already whacking the air, and the cabin was full except for the seat nearest the open doorway. I sat down. I couldn’t find the other half of my seat belt. The chopper was lifting off, and the other half of my seat belt was missing. The chopper rose, then banked steeply to my side. I looked for something to grab on to. Out the doorway I saw the tarmac about a hundred yards below. I was going to fall out. I couldn’t believe it. I was going to fall down there. I felt alone in a way I never had before. It was as if I’d just been taught another rule for Vietnam: Over here, cherry, no one gives a shit if you live or die. Suddenly, the soldier in the seat beside me (a lieutenant colonel, I’d noticed, and he looked about my father’s age) put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me toward him. Of course, I felt relieved. He’d saved my life. But a moment ago I’d almost lost it. Just because of a missing seat-belt half! This was no way to travel.

  The helicopter leveled off, and the colonel relaxed his grip but left his arm over my shoulders. It was comforting to feel it there. It also made me uneasy. When training camp sergeants had gotten really angry, they had called us “girls.” I’d heard that if another man offered to light a West Pointer’s cigarette, the West Pointer would knock away the hand, because only a woman would let a man do that for her. I didn’t look at the colonel, not even to nod in thanks. I didn’t dare to look at him. He might get the wrong idea about me.

  I sat beside the open doorway on the brink of the sky, gazing down, the stranger’s arm around my shoulder. We flew very high, much too high to throw a shadow that I could see on the land below. The noise of the engine and propellers and air rushing past made even shouted conversation impossible, and as I sat alone with my thoughts, staring down, I felt as if I were flying on my own, as I sometimes flew in dreams that I refused to believe were merely sexual, out the bedroom window and all around my old hometown. Flying, I looked down on a monochrome in green. Everywhere below was forest canopy. The whole world had turned green, every dark and brilliant shade of green. Where is this? I wondered, but I didn’t worry for a while. I was sorry when the helicopter landed in Chu Lai, the gigantic base camp of the Americal Division.

  I had thought going up-country meant traveling into wilderness. The base camp had paved streets. It looked like just another huge and ugly Army base, except that it was situated on the shore of the South China Sea. I spent a couple of weeks at the radio research company’s compound. Enlisted men on police call groomed the premises daily, just as in basic training. Nights were hot and noisy. I lay awake listening to jets and distant big-gun fire, and wondered about my detachment. Soon, for the first time in my military career—no, for the first time in my life—I’d be giving orders. In training camp after training camp, I’d been lectured on the duties of command and been told to memorize them in this order of priority: “Mission, men, self.” I would see to the mission because I had no choice, but would redeem myself in the eyes of people like my mentors Sam and David by putting my men first. Sam had written a good and moving book, called All the Advantages, which in part described his time in the Army as an enlisted man. I sympathized with my men already, having to call a bunch of college kids with crew cuts “sir.” My men and I would respect one another.

  I wrote to my mother, “We are not (I repeat) not going to the DMZ as I had feared for a number of weeks. Hallelujah.” No one in authority had even suggested that we might be destined for the dreaded, inaptly named Demilitarized Zone, which separated North and South Vietnam. It was just a rumor I’d heard and, being new in country, believed. I wouldn’t have invented a scary lie for my mother, would I? Her letters sounded worried in spite of my assurances. I wrote back:

  Dear Mom and Dad, One thing which I would like to set you straight about is the question of physical danger. I am always in a base camp, either division or brigade. They are literally impenetrable, and the only danger I incur is from rocket or mortar attacks, of which I have seen, or rather heard, only one. Once you hear one, no one will ever have to tell you again that it’s incoming. Now everywhere I’ve been, there are bunkers for just this contingency. It takes a frightened man about 2/10s of a second to make it in, and once there you are safe from everything, except perhaps a direct hit by one of those rockets.…

  From the captain just then commanding the radio research company in Chu Lai, I received special orders. “Clean up that detachment, will you, Lieutenant?” he said. It was the worst detachment in the captain’s command. The place was a goddamn mess, and Lieutenant Pease hadn’t done a goddamn thing about it. “You need any help, you let me know,” the captain said.

  I HAD ALREADY BEEN ISSUED MY .45 AND OTHER BATTLE GEAR. AROUND NOON on a hot day in July, glad that I would finally have something to do, I strapped on my gun belt, donned my camouflage steel helmet and my flak jacket, tossed my electric fan, which had at last arrived from home, and my duffel into a jeep, and was driven away from Chu Lai. We went out the base camp’s main gate and turned south on Highway One, South Vietnam’s and the war’s main road. It ran from Saigon to Hanoi, they said. Along this stretch at least, it was two lanes wide and well-paved, a comfort to a mind looking for familiar things. On one side lay the huge Chu Lai airfield. On the other, I remember rice paddies and women with pointy-topped hats at work, a boy with a switch walking behind a pair of water buffalo, and also provisional-looking settlements, hovels made of packing crates and flimsy metal with the names of American soft drinks stamped on them. In my mind I composed fierce lines, fiercer than I felt, for a letter to Sam or David about the real Vietnam, the pastoral Vietnam that our war debased.

  To
my disappointment and relief, the drive was short, only ten or fifteen minutes. Just beyond the southern edge of the airfield, the jeep turned right and passed through a gate in barbed wire, a wooden arch with a sign affixed, a picture of a bayonet surrounded by flames, the emblem of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade. Spotting an officer, the black MP on guard came smartly to attention and raised his right fist. It looked like a crisply executed version of the black power salute. I wondered, Why is that permitted? I felt a momentary impulse to return it, but I replied in the usual way, my opened right hand snapping up to my right eyebrow.

  Inside Landing Zone Bayonet, the streets were made of oiled dirt. The camp wasn’t huge; it looked as though I could walk its barbed-wired and bunkered perimeter in about fifteen minutes. It was a patch of mostly denuded, dusty, ocher-colored ground, a fortified American shantytown. To the west, on the inland side, those thickly wooded hills hovered above us, green and forbidding. To the east, the sandy coastal plain stretched out toward the sea. The enlisted driver left me standing in the sun in the midst of my detachment.

  I looked around. I was going to spend a long time in this place. If I close my eyes, I can see it now, as clearly as the bedroom of my childhood. To my right was a row of four one-story hootches, unpainted, walled with screen and plywood, roofed with corrugated metal anchored down by sandbags. In front of me was a somewhat larger wooden building, the operations hootch. A tall fence of concertina wire surrounded it, and above the doorway in the wire a sign read RESTRICTED AREA KEEP OUT. A latrine and outdoor shower lay over beyond the hootches, beside a small, steep wooded hill with antennas sprouting from the top.

  There was nobody in sight. I stood beside a garbage pail overflowing with beer cans and empty C-ration containers at the near corner of a hootch. I lit a cigarette. I bit at a fingernail, that old habit flourishing again. In a moment, a young man came out of the operations building and turned toward the enlisted hootches, glancing at me. He wore a T-shirt and no helmet. It looked as though he hadn’t shaved. I thought I must look preposterous to him, standing there sweating under my steel pot and flak jacket.