Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  I worked all my life. As a kid, I started off going around collecting bottles and stuff like that, like everybody else does. When I was about eight, I got a job on a fruit truck. That was pretty cool because at the end of the day the guy would always have a couple extra baskets of fruit and vegetables. He’d say, “These are old and moldy, we don’t want them anyway. See if you can save some of them.” It was all good stuff—that was his way of paying me extra. After that I started selling papers on Randolph and Wabash, where the El tracks are. I had my own stand there with a guy named Red. I don’t know if he’s still alive or not. In my senior year, I worked for Montgomery Ward’s in their data-processing department—until I decided that due to the things that were going on during that time, all that atom bomb crap and everything else, and stuff like that . . .

  I used to read the paper all the time, I was always interested in the news, and it was like I was gung-ho. I wanted to go over and I wanted to kick some butt, and I wanted to be a damn Marine. I knew the Marines were going to be in the toughest place, and that’s what I wanted. When I say the word “warrior,” a warrior can be anything, OK. In my case, the warrior in me was putting my life on the line to accomplish—because I needed to prove to myself at that time that I was a man.

  Well, things happened real quick from there. I had already put my name on the volunteer list for Vietnam. As soon as I turned eighteen, the exact day, we mustered outside, they called my name, boom! Next thing I know, I was like packing up, getting all geared up. Me and these two other guys, one guy from the Appalachias, I forget his name, and a black guy, I forget his name—we had to go to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, to catch the plane.

  That’s the first time I saw discrimination, man. Halfway there we were hungry. Here we are just in our Marine Corps uniforms, and we told the taxi driver, “Pull over, we’re hungry. We’ll pay for your food.” And he said, “Well, why don’t I just go in and get you some sandwiches.” We said, “No, we’re tired from sitting.” Went in there and they wouldn’t serve us, everybody was looking at us.

  We were in American uniforms, Marine Corps uniforms. You’d think they would serve us. When I went to the washroom, that’s the first time I ever saw one of those signs: COLORED WASHROOM and WHITE WASHROOM. [Laughs] I came back to the table and I remember telling the black guy, I said, “Man, you know what? I think we’re in the wrong place.” So then the taxicab driver came in and ordered sandwiches for us and they wouldn’t even take the money. We ate our sandwiches in the cab. Caught the plane, went to Pendleton, went through some jungle-training crap like that, and I was on my way to Vietnam.

  When you’re a new guy, it’s like anything else except it’s worse: you have to prove yourself. In the military, under warlike conditions, people can really be mean, all right. I wasn’t really being utilized for about the first few weeks too much. I was so gung-ho, wanting to get into fighting and all that crap, that I was getting into fights with everybody else around me. So I was kind of a bad egg at first.

  Actually, we had bodies coming in all the time, we were unloading bodies all the time. Dead bodies, American bodies. My first reaction? That’s where I got my gear from, because they didn’t have gear for us. When they were dumping the bodies, they were just throwing them off the chopper and they were throwing all the gear off—like knapsacks, ammo, rifles. Hey, I wanted to get as much crap as I could get, you know? Besides, they were dead anyway. I didn’t really think about it much at that time. What did surprise me, though, was the very first time that happened, one of the body bags moved. It was some guy in there and when they unzipped the body bag he was swearing and swearing and swearing. They thought he was dead but he was alive. Somebody dropped him, and when they dropped him he came to.

  My outfit, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, we were the only unit in North Vietnam, up in I-Corps, DMZ [Demilitarized Zone] area, fighting against the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] up there and no VC [Viet Cong]—NVA, real troops. We saw too much stuff in too short of a time. You didn’t have time to even think about anything—It was like a survival thing. Death was on your mind all the time. It was for real. And I always had like a little thing in the back of my head: like when you’re born, you’re born with a disease, ’cause from the moment you’re born, you’re dying. [Laughs] I wasn’t like a holy roller over there like a lot of guys were—a lot of guys, they prayed. Me, I did a lot of crazy things over there. I had to, because it was my way. I didn’t want to be like anybody else. I really wanted to be a badass, I mean, the baddest ass there was around.

  I was a little guy, so I was a tunnel rat. I’d go crawl in the holes in the ground, all through the caves and stuff like that, because I was so small. That was interesting work because you don’t know what’s in there. Like, I heard guys talk about taking flashlights and a forty-five. And I say, “Nah”—we used to carry a K-bar and a light. When you’re in complete darkness, a light only goes about this far. [His hands span a short distance and he laughs.] You can’t see shit.

  Love motivates a lot of people; with me, fear motivates me. Fear for me is something really hard to explain, because, like, if you say it in the wrong context it’s weakness. No, I think you have to respect fear and understand it, accept it. Once it’s accepted, it ain’t nothing . . .

  Fear of death. Death after a while, it was a joke. Guys that had been there for a while it was like: “Hey, you know, before we go out, ‘Here, you can have my stuff.’ ” And all the joking around between the dudes about trading off their girlfriends and stuff like that . . . [Laughs] Giving pictures of their sisters. Because everybody knew that we had a very good chance of, like, a lot of guys not coming back. So that was pretty cool. And then sometimes when we came back, we’d split up the gear of the guys that didn’t.

  I can’t live without fear. I understand what fear is all about, and I will not allow fear to run my life, OK, except for the fact that I use it. Say, when you have an enemy, what’s the best thing to do with an enemy? Learn all about your enemy. Once you learn all about your enemy, it’s like everything turns into nothing.

  Hey, man, those guys have been fighting for thousands of years. They knew jungle warfare really, really, really good. It didn’t take us long to really get into it and learn just as well as they did. I have great respect for the North Vietnamese Army guys, OK. On the other hand, I’m not going to say that, yeah, I forgive everybody. No—they killed my whole squad. I had my whole squad wiped out on one particular operation I was on. The worst one, because I feel that it was my fault for making a wrong turn.

  The first time I met the enemy I was point man, and I was walking out of the jungle. Point man is the guy that leads, the front guy. You’re supposed to watch for booby traps and all kinds of crap, and pick a path to go. And I used to volunteer because I liked it. Other guys would say, being a point man, being a rifleman, you only have a life expectancy of like ten seconds. Nah, I kind of figured out for myself, I’m a little dude, and I says logicwise to me, why would they want to shoot me just walking out real quick when they could wait for everybody else to come out and get everybody in the middle? ’Cause that’s how you do an ambush.

  That time I didn’t actually see them, man. They were in these trees and they opened up on us. I just jumped in a rice paddy, but they got about maybe twenty-three guys on the first time. Not all of them died—there was more wounded than died. That was just one day. I went for two tours. In the first one, I was attacking a machine-gun nest that the NVA had, me and my partners were. And it wasn’t quite successful: they got me before I got them. So I got wounded, I got hit by thirty-caliber machine-gun fire in the lower back and the shoulder, through and through. Actually, I thought I was going home. Medical gunship comes in and takes you to Da Nang or one of the places offshore. This was ’67—what all the guys call “the shooting war.” The actual hand-to-hand-combat shooting war. I just blanked that out of my mind, it’s sort of like I blanked the whole Vietnam experience out of my mind. What I really was doing was masking
it, because at that time I was doing a lot of drugs and drinking. It was party time, early ’70s.

  This was my second tour. A big blank.

  Once I got there and I started losing people that I knew, then everything that I went there for went out the window and it was survive . . . and make no friends. I mean, except for your right-hand man—’cause they die. You don’t need that kind of stuff over there, man, ’cause you gotta be on your toes. We had guys that broke down and stuff like that, and sorry to say, but we had to slap the shit out of them and kick them in the ass and straighten them up . . .

  I was hardened. I faced death a lot of times over there. When I was a tunnel rat, you can run into just about anything: booby traps, people that are inside that tunnel. You’d be surprised—once you got to where you had to worm yourself in, they’d open up into big rooms, and you’d see American Red Cross supplies in there. [Laughs] That blew my mind. I was finding stuff from France and all the rest, all our alliances. It was like, Jesus! No wonder they keep on going . . .

  I killed many of them. Because that was my specialty. I knew several different kinds of weapons, I was also a demolitions expert, OK? I also dealt with the flamethrower. I burned up bodies so that they were crispy critters. When they were in the cave and they wouldn’t come out and stuff like that, you’d throw smoke grenades to try to get them out. And then you get up there with the flamethrower. That napalm will suck all the air out of that cave, so basically the people were asphyxiated before they get burned. And then I was told to throw more [napalm] jelly on them, because it was easier to carry them out. That would take all the liquids out of their body and they would be stiff. Like I said, crispy critters—you could stack ’em.

  The truth is that we made a lot of jokes, like crispy critter, and that was probably to hide our true feelings. Everybody dealt with it differently. In the Marine Corps we have this really tight bond, we’re all real brothers, not people who go around, “Hey, brother”—we are brothers. That’s the reason why we say “Semper fi.” And it’s like we had to be one. It’s just like life after death. I believe in life after death. I think we’re all one, OK?

  I was raised a Catholic and the whole bit, and I read the Bible and everything. But when I came back from Vietnam and I went to Holy Family, my first Sunday back I walked in there and they had these long-haired hippies sitting up in the front playing folk music and stuff. And people were standing in the aisles and clapping and, man, that blew my mind. [Laughs] And the people wanted to hug you and it was like, “Get away from me.” No, man, ’cause I couldn’t be hugged. After all this crap that I went through, you guys are gonna hug me?! No way!

  I don’t have any second thoughts because all I can do is talk about when I was there, and I knew in ’67 that we kicked their asses. Que Son Valley had not been touched since the French were there, OK? Large area, skinniest part of Vietnam. Stronghold, OK? We went into Laos, ’cause the elephant trail came right through there. We never had a base camp, we were always on the move, we were always out in the bush, all the time. I know what the hell went down over there. It would take us ten thousand hours to talk about this, but just to lay it on the line, everything that was done, all the way from the top down or the bottom up, everything was done for a specific purpose, and that purpose was a political purpose—and it was scripted. This is how I feel now. After all these years, I’ve had a lot of time to sit down and do that retrospect thing. There’s just too many times that we were sacrificed to bring the enemy out into the open. There was too many times that our own forces said they’d made mistakes and dropped bombs on us and crap like that. I mean, there was just a lot of shit. That was a crazy place. When they sent us out, all the morphine was gone. We didn’t have morphine to even give to our guys because the guys in the rear took it. They were into that dope scene. So I’m lucky that I didn’t get caught up in that. See, in my way of thinking, everything is scripted in life and it’s long-range planning. You’ve been around a long time, you should know that.

  Oh, war sucks, man. There’s no doubt about it. There ought to be other ways of handling situations—it’s just too bad. We’re human beings, we’re always going to be human beings, and as long as we have different religions, you know . . . We’re the most dangerous things on this Earth.

  Death’s on my mind every day. But I don’t fear death. You know what? I had several experiences. Like the time when I was caught between machine-gun fire and I went flying up in the air. I didn’t see no white light or anything, but when I got hit, I know I went flying. It was completely black but I was still aware. I could hear shit going on, and it seemed like it lasted a whole hour or more. I’m up there, and do you know what? You take away everything that exists right now, just try to imagine to yourself how good you would feel. Man, I felt so, like real freedom. I felt so at peace. Oh, so happy.

  I think that we have a spirit, OK, and that spirit is going to go wherever the hell it’s going to go. I don’t know, because I don’t know nothing about that. But I know that I’m going to like it. In the Marine Corps we have a saying and it’s “When you die, we’ll meet you down at Hell’s gates, we’ll regroup, and then we’re gonna call up God and say we’re coming up to guard the pearly gates.” [Laughs]

  Fear death? Hell, no. I’ve been through some of the worst crap in the world. Jesus, when you got something that people don’t talk about . . . One of the things they were interested in over there was a body count. If you didn’t have enough bodies, they’d go around, taking a machete, chopping off body parts, putting them in different bags so you have more bodies. Enemy bodies. Throw a couple arms in this one, a leg in this one.

  I justify it this way: they were the enemy, I was their enemy. They were the same as me, as far as I was concerned. I was on this side, they were on that side. We were very good at what we did. Us, we took great pride in being victorious. We won all the battles. We just supposedly lost some stupid way. And that’s because [President Lyndon] Johnson stopped the bombing in ’68.

  Do I have any regrets? No, I have no regrets. In fact, I’d go back right now. You know why? There’s an adrenaline, there’s a rush. Something that makes you feel really, really good. There’s nothing like it, nothing like it in the world. It’s like when guys start talking about hunting, I say, “Hey, you want to hunt? Put me on one side of the valley, you on the other side of the valley. Pick our weapons. I want a shotgun, I don’t give a shit what you take. And we’ll go after each other.”

  As for my fellow . . . I have not been able to speak to anybody. They’re all dead, basically. I just got in contact with the captain of my company, from Birmingham, Alabama. Him and I have been talking recently. And a couple more guys. These are all combat guys. We will not talk to people that weren’t in combat. These are real guys, I can talk to them. I learned a long time ago that once you start letting people into your life a little bit too much, for me anyway, I’ll regret that I opened up.

  I think my mother knows this, I’ve told my wife this, and other people, but I always tell the person that I meet, we may hang around, but there’s going to be a time that either three things are going to happen. You’re gonna get dead, I’m gonna hurt you, or you’re gonna be in jail. And you know what? It’s always happened. I’m getting used to it. I warn people now. So I figure, they ought to know when to back off—it’s their responsibility. They’re accountable for themselves.

  I haven’t slept straight through since ’67. Except in the seventies, when I was drinking real heavy, but that’s past now. I’m talking about real sleep. They just gave me some new sleeping stuff that’s supposed to be really powerful and I actually slept for five hours. That is a record for me since ’67. I’ll sleep five minutes to half an hour. I get a lot of flashbacks and then they turn into stupid dreams, and the dreams turn into, like, man, it’s like I got everybody in my life involved in the same crap. I keep a tape recorder and I keep a pad of paper with three sharpened pencils, and I never use the damn things.

  I ki
lled women over there. They were snipers, and they were chained to the tree. That’s what they used to do over there, they were so bad, man. They would chain people to keep us under fire until we overran them, and then we’d find these people all chained up. The first time I felt funny shooting someone, though, was when I found this big Chinese guy after an ambush. We saw this big foot sticking out of the ground, so we started uncovering it. And this guy had to be like six-foot-two or -three, so we knew he wasn’t regular North Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese are bigger than the South Vietnamese, but this guy was like twice the size. He had a little bag with him. It was the first time I went through somebody’s property. The guy had a wallet just like mine. You open it up and he had pictures in there, like I got pictures in mine—pictures of his family, notes.

  We all just looked at each other when we were passing it around. We had gone down there, what they call taking care of business: anybody alive, you take care of them right away. We started going through this guy’s wallet, we all sat down and we looked through his wallet and we were all making comments. “Wow, this guy had a good-looking chick.” And some of the pictures had kids. It was like the war didn’t even exist. We were going through this man’s personal life, and he was just like us. I thought that he was a good man. I thought that he put up a good battle. He just got fucked.

  I kept my mom out of the Vietnam thing till about 1992. Now I think sometimes she tries to handle me with kid gloves, which I don’t like—I would rather just be slapped around, you know? That I can understand. I have been working with a doctor, a psychologist, since 1991, going to therapy every week. He works with people with post-traumatic stress disorder. I have that and about twelve other things. It’s actually called combat-related stress disorder.