If I Die in a Combat Zone
Page 15
Everyone drank. Most of us drank in excess, but the colonel would kill one beer and stop there.
Then the climax came. The men, roaring drunk and with tears in their eyes, would plead with the stripper—beg her, bribe her—to finish the job. But nothing ever came of it. We went away exhausted.
“Jesus,” Bates moaned, sitting down behind his typewriter, dripping with sweat. “Jesus, this isn’t healthy.” He vowed never to watch a stripper again, not unless it was a personal, command performance. Near the end of our tours, Bates and I stopped going to floor shows altogether.
Nights: If you have no friends, if you don’t know the right officers, if you’re unlucky, you pull bunker guard. You stare into the wire, the same hunk of hillside, night after night. But if you work in battalion headquarters, you’re home free. You spend your nights in the office, sleeping on a cot or reading or writing letters or writing a book. You’re there to answer the telephone, but no one calls. Unless it’s a casualty report. In which case you jot down the man’s name, his serial number, the extent of injuries, the grid coordinates, the hospital he’s been taken to. For a moment, just as you hang up the phone, you remember. But you go to sleep again, or return to your book. Or you just sit in the office and listen. The sounds at night are different on a firebase than in the field. There’s rhythm to the sounds. Artillery fire booms out across the hill, huge guns firing in support of the field companies. Mortar tubes pop out illumination rounds over the firebase, lighting things up for the bunker guards. It all disturbs your sleep sometimes, and you find yourself cursing the guns, forgetting and ignoring how they helped you once upon a time, long ago, back in the old days when you were a soldier.
LZ Gator was attacked only once while I finished out my tour. Sappers were inside the wire before anyone knew it. With perfect cunning, perfect timing, they slipped in, blew up a pile of ammunition, killed a man, hurt some others. In the morning, we combed the hill. Altogether, six dead Viet Cong. Some officers loaded them into a truck and drove them down to a village at the foot of LZ Gator and dumped them in the village square.
R & R: like going home. Sydney, Australia. Buddy Greco sang songs for me in the lounge of Sydney’s Chevron Hotel: once upon a time, very long ago. You know the atmosphere? Dark club, girls strewn about like so many loose flower petals. Greco’s sweet, slow, caressing music, backed by muted trumpet and sax and piano and crystal champagne glasses. I had a girl with me. The R & R Center lined her up when I arrived. I got off the plane, listened to a lecture on decorum, then went to a row of desks where old ladies sat with huge card files full of eager Australian girls.
An old woman picked out a name and dialed the number: “Hello, Sally? This is Hilda de Grand, here at the R & R Center. I have a nice young man here, he’d like to know if you’re busy this evening? No? Yes? Oh, yes. A nice, handsome young man. Yes, black hair, just as you had down on your card. Here, I’ll put him on.”
“Hi, Sally.”
“How do you do.”
“Fine. Thanks.” I forgot how to do it. “I, uh, just got in. From Vietnam.” This is ridiculous. Doesn’t she know?
“Oh, how nice.”
“Yes.”
“And do you like Sydney? Beautiful city, don’t you think?”
“It’s great. Anything is great, you know.” Anything. She could look like a dachshund.
“I suppose so. All the boys say Vietnam is a positively ghastly place.”
“Ghastly.”
“You’re a soldier? Some are navy people.”
“Army.”
“Well, you’ll like Sydney.”
“Haven’t seen much of it yet. Actually, all I’ve really seen is the R & R Center. And the airport. The weather’s nice.”
“Chilly—terribly chilly for this time of year.” The pause, a cue.
“Well, perhaps we can warm it up together.” Starting to get back in the groove, a long time away.
“Fine, perhaps we can.” She didn’t laugh, but she didn’t back away either. “What do you have in mind?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” It didn’t seem possible. What did she think I had in mind, for Christ’s sake? But I was civilized, I remembered that. “Buddy Greco? Dinner. Drinks.”
Sally turned out to be nice. Buddy Greco, though, was superb. The club—all the warm feelings, the cordialities—was better.
I didn’t fall in love. I spent most of my time alone, searching out the libraries, hitting bars at night, going to the ocean once. Then, for the last night, I visited the old ladies again and celebrated my departure with a girl named Frances.
After R & R, Vietnam was no longer even an adventure. Returning from R & R was something like walking out of one of the floor shows. Sweating, drained, blood boiling. Then back to the second-class war of the rear area.
After a long lapse in our correspondence, I began writing to Erik again. His tour in Vietnam was nearly over:
I’ll be taking a flight, that phoenix we both dream of, and I keep thinking how proper it would be for us to take it together. Leaving this land is an experience to be shared. But, for now, I wait, as you too must be waiting. Along with waiting, however, I try to keep a certain perspective—my old perspective as a watcher of things—and what I see lately is no good. This morning, coming out of the hooch, I watched as a junior officer literally kicked a Vietnamese woman out of the company area adjacent to ours. I watched. The observer, the peeping tom of this army. Doing nothing. I was suddenly sickened by the thought of the near two thousand years that separate my life and that of a Roman centurion who stood by a narrow alley leading to Golgotha and who also watched, doing nothing.
What difference then? What earthly change have centuries of suffering and joy wrought? Is it only that Christ is become a yellow-skinned harlot, a Sunday-morning short-time girl?
Needless to say, I am uncomfortable in my thoughts today. Perhaps it’s that I know I will leave this place alive and I need to suffer for that.
But, more likely, what I see is evil.
With letters and Scotch whisky and with a comfortable but confining blanket of rear-area security, I settled down to wait.
Twenty-one
Hearts and Minds
The Chieu Hoi, a scout for Charlie Company, came into the headquarters building. He stood in a corner and waited for a captain to notice him. Then he said: “Sir, my baby is sick. She is in Tam Ky, twenty miles from here. I must have a pass for three days to see her.”
The captain said: “Is your baby sick now? I wonder. Or are you afraid to go to the field with Charlie Company tomorrow? How come your baby gets sick just when Charlie Company’s going to the field?”
Quietly and unassured, the Chieu Hoi persisted: “Sick.”
The captain pushed back in his chair, tilting it onto its back legs. “Look, you’re a valuable man for us. You’ve got knowledge we GIs haven’t got—all about mines and booby traps, how to find the stuff without blowing a leg off. Right? A guy like you can spot ambushes in time to save some lives. You’re needed out there. You’re getting paid to go to the field tomorrow, not to run away on pass.”
Abashed, the Chieu Hoi said: “Not so. The baby is sick. The doctor—”
“See here,” the captain said, stern and fed up. “What do I do when my baby gets sick? Hell, my wife and kid are thousands of miles away. The kid gets sick, and my wife takes him to a doctor, simple as that. Or she goes down to the drugstore, buys some pills. Nothing to it. That’s how things work. But I don’t skip out on the first plane if I hear the kid’s got a high temperature.”
The Chieu Hoi said: “Not many good doctors here. Wife is afraid.”
“Now, damn it,” the captain said, “this here’s your goddamn war. I’m here to fight it with you and to help you, and I’ll do it. But you’ve got to sacrifice too. Tell me how this war’s gonna be won with you and others like you running off when things get tight? How? Hell, you’re an ex-VC, you know how they think, where they hide. If I come over here and bust my ball
s, well, shouldn’t you take the shit with everyone else?”
The Chieu Hoi said: “You are here for one year. I’ve been in war for many billion years. Many billion years to go.” He was embarrassed, not quite distraught. He turned to look for help from others in the office. A fellow’s pride will suffer when he pleads for favor. A fellow suffers when he is a suspect coward.
“Now, listen here, I want to help you, really,” the captain said. “But I’m a soldier, so are you, so’s everyone around this place. Sacrifice—it’s the name of the game. Why not just go down to Charlie Company and saddle up for the field. Have a beer or two, your kid will make it.”
“Baby very sick, maybe die. My wife is afraid.”
“Well, the soldiers down at Charlie, they’re afraid too. Maybe you can save some of them. You ain’t gonna save the baby.”
“They don’t like me, the people in Charlie Company.”
“Well, now it comes out. How come? There must be a reason?”
“I’m Chieu Hoi, old VC.”
“Shit, you save their asses, and they’ll fall in love with you,” the captain said. “Look, if you do a job and help out, they’ll like you just fine. Get their respect, and no sweat. Charlie Company will like you just fine. And your kid will be okay too.”
The Chieu Hoi mumbled “Never happen,” and he succumbed. He left by the front door, and it wasn’t a day before he was AWOL.
Twenty-two
Courage Is a Certain Kind of Preserving
“So a city is also courageous by a part of itself, thanks to that part’s having in it a power that through everything will preserve the opinion about which things are terrible—that they are the same ones and of the same sort as those the lawgiver transmitted in the education. Or don’t you call that courage?”
“I didn’t quite understand what you said,” he said. “Say it again.”
“I mean,” I said, “that courage is a certain kind of preserving.”
“Just what sort of preserving?”
“The preserving of the opinion produced by law through education about what—and what sort of thing—is terrible …”
PLATO, The Republic
Book IV, 429b-429c
Major Callicles looked like an ex-light-heavy weight champ. He had a head like a flattened 105 round, a thick, brown neck, bristling stalks of hair, bloodshot eyes, a disdain for pansies. He was the battalion executive officer—second in command. He bragged that he’d started out as an NCO, thrived on the discipline, and gone on to become an officer, avoiding West Point and doing it the hard way.
Barrel-chested—staves and beer and all—he was a last but defiant champion of single-minded, hard-boiled militarism. He listed his hates in precise order—moustaches, prostitution, pot, and sideburns. And since all four were either tacitly or explicitly permitted in Vietnam, he harbored a necessarily silent hate for the new, insidious liberality infecting his army.
Moustaches, while authorized by new regulations, were quickly outlawed. It was rumored he carried a dull and bloody razor to be used on even a wisp of overnight hair.
Next was prostitution. It was an all-consuming outrage. A whorehouse flourished at the very foot of LZ Gator, the battalion firebase, and he muttered he would get rid of it.
He pursued pot and sideburns like an FBI agent; he prosecuted violators with inquisitorial zeal.
“Guts,” he would mutter. “This army needs guts. GI Joe’s turned into a pansy. O’Brien, you show me a soldier with guts, and you can have this job.” He hunched his shoulders, stood stiff-legged, held a cigarette like a pencil, and turned to look at me out of one eye, scowling and squinting.
Three months after Major Callicles took charge, Time and Newsweek and every other scrap of paper blowing into Vietnam heralded the My Lai massacre.
The massacre happened in March of 1968. That was one year before I’d arrived in Vietnam; over a year and a half before Callicles took over the executive officer’s job; long before our battalion had taken over the Pinkville—My Lai area of operations from Lieutenant Calley’s Eleventh Brigade. But Major Callicles stuffed the burden of My Lai into his own soul. He lost sleep. He lost interest in pot and prostitutes, and his thick, brown face became lined with red veins hemorrhaging with the pain of My Lai. Like the best defense attorney, he assumed the burden of defending and justifying and denying—all in one broad, contradictory stroke.
At first he blamed the press: “Christ, those rags—you don’t really believe that crap? Jesus, wake up, O’Brien! You got to learn the economics of this thing. These goddamn slick rags got to sell their crap, right? So they just add together the two big things in this hippie culture: People like scandal and people hate the military, not knowing what’s good for them. It’s knee jerk. So they look around and choose My Lai 4—hell, it happened over a year ago, it’s dead—and they crank up their yellow journalism machine; they sell a million Times and Newsweeks and the advertisers kick in and the army’s the loser—everybody else is salivating and collecting dollars.”
But for Callicles it was more than an outrage, it was a direct and personal blow. “Christ, O’Brien, I’m one of hundreds of executive officers in the Nam. This battalion is one of hundreds. And they got to pick on us. There’s a billion stinking My Lai 4s, and they put the finger on us.”
When Reuters, AP, CBS, ABC, UPI, and NBC flew in, Callicles took them into his little office and repeated the same grimacing, one-bloodshot-eye-in-the-face, shotgun argument he perfected with us privately. “Look, I thought the press was supposed to be liberal—liberal. Maybe I’m no liberal, but I know something about it. I never went to college, but I can read, and I know the press isn’t supposed to try a man in print. That’s what we got juries for, you know, they do the trying, it’s the law. That’s liberal, isn’t it? Just be quiet one minute—isn’t that what the liberals say? You don’t insinuate guilt until you’re in the courthouse and everyone’s got evidence ready and there’s a judge and a jury and a court reporter to take it all down.”
A reporter said they were just printing the allegations of other soldiers, former GIs.
“Hell, you don’t believe them? Some pipsqueak squeals, and everyone runs to make a national scandal. We’re trying to win a war here, and, Jesus, what the hell do you think war is? Don’t you think some civilians get killed? You ever been to My Lai? Well, I’ll tell you, those civilians—you call them civilians—they kill American GIs. They plant mines and spy and snipe and kill us. Sure, you all print color pictures of dead little boys, but the live ones—take pictures of the live ones digging holes for mines.”
A reporter asked if there isn’t a distinction between killing people you know to be the enemy and slaying one hundred people when no one is shooting and when you can’t distinguish the mine-planters from the innocent.
“Now, look here, damn it, the distinction is between war and peace,” Callicles said. “This here is war. You know about war? What you do is kill. The bomber pilot fries some civilians—he doesn’t see it maybe, but he damn well knows it. Sure, so he just flies out and drops his load and flies back, gets a beer, and sees a movie.
“Just answer this: Where’s the war in which civilians come out on top? Show me one. You can’t, and the reason is that war’s brutal—civilians just suffer through it. They’re like unarmed soldiers—they’re dumb and they die; they’re smart, they run, they hide, then they live.” Callicles pushed the words like moist worms through his teeth.
A reporter asked if there isn’t a distinction between the unintentional slaying of civilians from the air, when there’s no way to discriminate, and the willful shooting of individual human beings—one by one, person to person, five yards away, taking aim at a ditch full of unarmed, desperate people.
Callicles snorted and told the reporter to ask the dead people about the distinction.
Maybe the dead people don’t see the difference, the reporter said, but what about the law. Shouldn’t guilt have something to do with intentionality?
Major Callicles herded groups of reporters out to My Lai 4, flying them over the hamlet and giving them a peek at the dank, evil-looking place: white mounds showing the gravesites; a cluster of huts that seem to have been there a thousand years, identical in squalor and with a kind of permanence that makes them just a fixture of the land; utterly lifeless; thick, dark green splotches where the land is low; yellow-brown craters where artillery rounds have hit. Even in stark mid-morning daylight the place looks a monotonous gray from the air. Your eyes can stay on the place for only seconds; then you look away to the east, where the sea is so much more appealing.
The My Lai scandal did not go away. Major Callicles was charged with heading a task force to secure the village and prepare the way for General Peers, Lieutenant Calley, and the investigative team. He attacked the job of blowing mines and marking out safe paths and digging defensive positions. Haunted by what he was doing, he began to drink heavier than ever, his eyes shifted from detail to detail, searching out stability in his world; other times he glared into dead space.
The investigation ended, and Major Callicles was awarded a letter of commendation. But he read it and gave a sly grin and tossed it into a pile of wastepaper. He spent more time than anyone at the officers’ club on LZ Gator, playing poker—winning and losing big pots of military currency—and drinking. Afterward he came down to his office and debated with us.
“What do people want when they send men to fight out there?” he would ask, growling.
“To search out and destroy the enemy.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know that. But what do they want when the enemy is ten years old and has big tits—women and children, you know. What then? What if they’re the enemy?”
“Well, you kill them or you capture them. But you only do that when they’re engaged in combat, sir. It’s a civil war, in part, and even if some of them come down from North Vietnam, they look like the South Vietnamese. So you’ve got to assume—”