A couple of weeks later, he gave the pistol back to me because he didn’t want me to get into any trouble.
When we were out in the jungle, we lived on the ground, slept under a tank or track. But the real scene was going to the latrine. Especially at night. It was a scene. Every time.
You could piss anywhere. But if you had to go to the latrine, you’d always try to plan it so you didn’t have to go at night. You could always go in the daytime. But you always seemed to need to go in the middle of the night.
And then, there had to be this big preparation. You start off by asking, “Is there any toilet paper around?” Then you try to find something that’s suitable and not too scratchy. Then you have to remember where the goddamn thing is. Usually away from everybody else and with no security. When you find it, it’s usually sitting out there like a throne.
The moon made things so bright that you were so obvious out there. You’re scared, first of all, of being shot. When you think everything is cool and don’t see anything moving in the bushes, you actually had to sneak up on it.
Then, when you pull your pants down, you are not only dealing with the mosquitoes, you’re concerned about whether or not there’s a scorpion underneath the seat and you’ll get your nuts bitten off. Or get your ass bitten off. Or you’d get up there and bang, something blows up under the seat. And there you are, wounded with your pants down, and you’re crapping all over yourself.
Once you get there, you try to make things happen as fast as possible. You try to relax yourself real fast. You sit with your piece loaded. And you’re looking around, saying, Gee, I wish everything’d hurry and come on off, so I can get outta here. Finally, everything happens. You immediately jump up. You don’t button your pants up. You just kind of hold them on and scurry off to some safe place.
Guys would get real horny out in the field, especially when there are no women. Then when you would get near a village, a little boy would approach you about his sister or someone.
“Hey, GI. How you doin’?”
You’d rap a little.
He would say, “Hey, you wanna boom boom?”
And if you said yeah, he would say, “Oh, man, I got beautiful, beautiful, my sister. She right down street.” Or wherever.
“How much is it gonna be?”
“Five dollar.” Three dollars, or whatever.
“Aw, she really beautiful.”
And you go wherever the person may be. Down in a ditch off the side of the road, behind a house, behind a tree, or next to a water buffalo.
“Okay. Five dollar.”
And you go ahead and take care of business.
But when you get there, there’s this little, scared Vietnamese woman sitting on her ankles, nervous. She takes down her black pajamas. She doesn’t have much pubic hairs, because she’s so young or they don’t grow much. You’re s’posed to have sex with her, and you kind of have this sinking feeling like this is just the worst ever. Nothing really attractive that I wanna sleep with. And then I’m scared of some kind of venereal disease. Then you try to figure out how you’re gonna do this. Or can you even get it up to do it, because you’re not even excited. The girl doesn’t speak English, and she’s just trying to do it as fast as she can and get the hell outta there.
One day I was first in line. The girl was laying on the side of a ditch. She takes her pajamas off, and I’m about to screw her. But she has this pained look on her face. Her eyes are closed in a grimace, because she isn’t into it at all. She wants to make the money. And I started laughing, because of her reaction. I couldn’t do it.
Of course, she felt embarrassed because she thought I didn’t think she was attractive. I had to tell her, “Listen, I’m really sorry. I just can’t do it.”
When I went back, I told her brother or whatever, “It was okay.”
And he said, “Yep. She beautiful.”
Our guys wanted to know how it was. This is a communal thing between all guys who were in the war. I said, “It was all right.” I didn’t say that I couldn’t do it. Partly because of pride. Partly because I didn’t want to blow their heads about it and turn them off so they didn’t get any. A lot of troops came to Vietnam, eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, and had never slept with a woman before. And they could die before they ever did. Or that girl would be the last one any of us would ever screw.
When all of them came back, some of them said, “Yeah, she was nice.”
There was a girl in Qui Nhon I liked. I really had a good time with her.
She wasn’t terribly attractive, but she had a really beautiful body.
She worked in a PX, and I met her through a buddy. She wasn’t aggressive. She wasn’t into profiteering from American GIs. The people in Vietnam liked the GIs. They were not into the government, but they were into us as people. Like she asked me what I did back home, what my hometown was like, what I felt about her people. I felt she sincerely liked me.
She lived in one of the old French houses. It has a flush toilet. I was in heaven. And the first night seemed so exotic, because there was a mosquito net over the bed. I was in paradise.
We ate some river lobster. I played my tapes. John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, the Beatles. And she gave me pastel-blue pajamas to wear.
The next morning, I told her, “Wow, this is really nice. I really like being here with you.”
She said, “This has been great for me, too. I’ve been with other GIs, but I really like being with you.”
I gave her money. I gave her gifts, poncho liners, some blankets. And I saw her again.
Towards the end of my tour, people started getting very hostile towards each other, because it was getting late in the war. And there were a lot of drugs around. And a lot of people were taking them. The Communists were making sure the American soldiers got them. And others were making sure drugs were available, because they could make a lot of money. Drugs took a great toll on all soldiers.
Some guys were choked to death in their sleep, because they drank too much alcohol or were taking drugs. Some ODed. They were mainly not really smoking grass so much anymore, but taking “number tens,” which are something like Quaaludes, and speed. And that was devastating, taken together. Of course, there was the scag. And whether you smoked it or snorted it, you got really fucked up.
One night, two white guys were playing this game in a bunker along the perimeter checkpoint as you leave the base camp at An Khe on the way to Qui Nhon. They had been taking speed and number tens. So they began to play with this grenade. Taking the pin out and putting it back in. They did it for a time, until one of ’em made a mistake and dropped the pin. When he found it, he was so nervous he couldn’t quite get it in, and the grenade exploded. It killed him. And his partner was critically injured.
Another night, we had come in for a stand-down. I was laying in bed, just about to go to sleep. We hear this burst, and the bullets went through the tent. Everybody jumped off on the floor. We didn’t have any weapons, ’cause they’d always disarm us when we’d come in. What happened was this black soldier had taken some drugs, and he just sort of went crazy. A lot of his anxieties and hostilities came out. He got an M-16, and he sprayed a sergeant, killed him and two others.
After another stand-down, we lost a second lieutenant. A white guy. He had been in country about six months. And he had made a lot of enemies because he was really tough on some of his people in the field even though the pullout had started. Someone wired a claymore mine to the door of his hootch.
When I went over to the 101st Airborne, I heard stories that the white guys would stay close to the black guys in the field because they thought the VC and NVA didn’t shoot at the blacks as much as the whites. And there were signs the Communists put up in the Ashau Valley which told the black soldier this was not his war. Finally, in the 3rd of the 506th, about 20 black guys refused to go to the field for a good week. They thought more blacks were going to the field, because blacks were less likely to get sho
t at. They were confined to quarters and threatened with Articles 15 until they ended their protest.
A few of us black soldiers were able to get into positions where we could have some freedom, make our lives a little better, even though we were in a war that we didn’t really believe in. But most blacks couldn’t, because they didn’t have the skills. So they were put in the jobs that were the most dangerous, the hardest, or just the most undesirable. A white soldier would probably get a better position. And Hispanic soldiers and Jewish soldiers and Polish soldiers would catch some flak, too. But not as much as a Blood.
I couldn’t escape it completely with my skills. I wanted to do combat art. But they wouldn’t let me do it. I ended up redoing maps out on reconnaissance patrol, or painting emblems on tanks. I painted a lot of panthers. Our unit was called the Black Panthers.
I came home the day after Christmas When I changed planes in Seattle, I put on some civilian clothes. But I felt so uncomfortable that I put the Army clothes back on. Before I returned to New York, I went to see my parents in Gary. It really made Christmas for ’em. They told me that I was right in protesting the war and that they felt bad telling me to go. Then they made a bed for me upstairs in my old room. But I didn’t really feel comfortable sleeping aboveground in a bed. So I moved down into a corner of the basement and put everything around my bed. Gun here. Stereo here. All your pot right here. Just like in the war. Then I could go to sleep.
At first I would wake up with my arms and hands all scarred from hitting the walls. I was having dreams in which I would run out of ammunition and we were getting overrun. And this VC is coming at me with a machine gun. I jump him, and I’m killing him.
Then one night, I was sleeping with my lady, Fern. I’m having the same dream. I sit up in the bed, and I am getting ready to kill Fern in my dream. But she felt me go through this stuff and screamed. I woke up in time to pull my punch, and I yelled out, “What in the fuck am I doing?”
And the dream was gone.
When South Vietnam started to fall. It was a drag. Watching the ARVN run to the sea on television. That was a drag. I couldn’t see it. I kept saying, these cats want what we want. To be able to express yourself. They know the Communist thing doesn’t work. But they were fleeing. And when I saw them driving all those tanks and shit into the ocean, I felt bad, real bad. Especially ’cause I had to dig those motherfuckers out so many times back in ’Nam.
I don’t think we failed to win the war, because we didn’t fight a war.
When Ho Chi Minh asked us for help against the French, we should have told him we can’t help him militarily against the French but we can use pressure to get the French out. Once the French were gone, we should have dealt with Ho Chi Minh, instead of letting the country get divided and backing puppet government after puppet government which did not work. We would have saved a lot of money, a lot of lives.
But if we were really gonna fight a war against Ho Chi Minh, we should have gone to Hanoi. We should’ve gone into Laos and Cambodia immediately. The American fighting forces are superior. The war would’ve been won in that sense of winning and losing.
One night in 1981 I got a call.
“Hello, is this Bob Holcomb?”
“Yes.”
“This is Felice Mosley.”
“Holy smoke.”
She had run into a mutual friend of ours.
“This is great. Do you wanna go out for a drink?”
She said no. She was not in New York. She was living in Washington.
I began to think, Why is she calling me after eleven years?
She said, “My son is eleven years old now, and he’s really a good boy. His name is Christian.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
She was telling me that this was my kid. When I went into the Army, I was under the understanding that our relationship was over. She assumed that I had died in the war because I didn’t come to look for her after the war.
I agreed to come to Washington to see him.
So I take a room at the Hyatt, and a knock comes on the door. There she stands. This is the same woman.
“This is your son, Bob.”
There he is. He walks in and says, “Hi.”
I am pretty speechless.
She gives me a kiss and says, “Hi.”
And her fiancé comes in and says, “How’re you doin’?”
“Fine.”
We have a drink. Her fiancé leaves. And the three of us sit and stare.
“I got a couple of gifts for you.”
I give her some flowers and one of my paintings. And I give him two paintings. And we go downstairs to eat dinner.
I’m just sitting there. I don’t know if I’m interested in her anymore. I’m in love with my lady in New York. What’s going on? My head is just kind of blown. What the hell am I doing down here in Washington with her and meeting my son for the first time?
So we finish eating. And Christian asks if he can spend the night with me. I say sure. And I get her a taxi to take her home.
Christian and I decided to stay up late. We walk for about four or five hours all over Washington, talkin’ and tryin’ to get to know each other.
I asked him, “What did you think happened to me?”
“Mom wasn’t sure. I thought you got killed in the war, ’cause you didn’t come to visit me. But all my friends are really gonna be jealous, because you’re alive and my father was a soldier in Vietnam.”
Then he told me that at school he was taught that we won the war. I told him that’s not what happened.
Then he said, “Did you win any medals in the war?”
I was not into that, but I did not want to squash his pride. I’m glad I did eventually go and serve my country, even if the war was not in my best interest. But I was not proud of those medals. They had no meaning. I couldn’t remember the actions they were for. I was gonna burn ’em up. But I was glad when Christian asked about them that I had given them to my mother to keep. Now I could give them to him.
As time went on, we got warmer and closer to each other. We now got a pretty good relationship. We tell each other we love each other.
The next year Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America, asked me to join the second group of veterans going back to Vietnam. They wanted a black person in this delegation, and they knew I agreed with their efforts to open channels of communication with the Hanoi government to get its help in returning the remains of missing Americans and to assist in reuniting American fathers with children they left behind.
I felt excited about going. Other Americans had been there since the war, but we were the first veterans.
We flew into Hanoi from Thailand in an old Russian propeller-driven plane. It was so small you’d bump your head going in the doorway. Some of us were a bit nervous when we landed, because the guards on the airfields carried AK-47s.
The officials in Hanoi read statements that we were all—Vietnamese and Americans—victims of the war. And that the war wasn’t the fault of soldiers like us.
One of the interpreters, named Quang, asked me how many people I had killed over there. He had worked with the VC. I told him that was a terrible question to ask. “I don’t really know. I never shot anybody face to face. And I didn’t go around making body counts after a fight.” He thought I was offended, and he apologized.
Later, I met another interpreter, Duc Lu. I asked him, “What were you doing during the war?”
He said, “I had been in grade school, but I couldn’t finish because of all of your bombing. It blew up the school, and I had to go to school in underground bunker in countryside.”
Now, I felt embarrassed.
You could see in Hanoi a few black Russian limousines, a few Russian planes, and the military hardware. But there was no evidence the Vietnamese were getting the technology from the Russians for factories, schools, and hospitals. They are not industrialized yet. They are still pretty much out there in the field.<
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Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, was bustling. The bars on Tu Do Street are closed, but the Majestic is open. They were selling Jordache jeans on the streets. You had to be careful of your watch riding around on a cyclo. But you didn’t see computer games and television sets. The economy is down 80 percent. And people are still making it with old pieces of cars and other materials from the war days.
One day I was sitting at an outside café, when two people acting like lovers came by and shoved a big wallet down my shirt. They gave a real fast rap and walked away real fast. They were brother and sister. Their father was an American. And they wanted me to get some letters and their picture to him. The mail had been cut off by Hanoi since ’75.
In Saigon, we got some smiles, some expressions of surprise, and some hostile looks. Hardly anyone in Hanoi though gave us a look of contempt. Mostly stares. I think it’s because the North Vietnamese never really saw us that much, experienced us that much.
On May 30, our Memorial Day, our delegation shared a moment of silent prayer for our fallen comrades. I prayed that the effort had not been wasted and that it wouldn’t be if we could have some economic and cultural exchanges with the Vietnamese despite the Communist takeover. I thought those in the North are starved for contact with the rest of the world and those in the South have still got that big taste for the West.
When I left, Duc Lu asked me for some film. He was gettin’ married, and he wants to take some pictures. All he is guaranteed is his kilos of rice and his job in the government. With the economy being what it is, he can’t get any film.
He noticed that I had been drawing along the trip, and he said how much he liked them.
He said, “You know, Bob. If you come back to Vietnam and stay a while, I can make you a rich man with your art.”
I said, “Duc Lu, you’re really not suppose to think like that.”
“What you mean?”
“That’s free enterprise.”
He was real embarrassed.
He said, “I’m sorry. Please not to tell anyone.”
I smiled.
And he kissed me good-bye.
Bloods Page 24
