American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  They flew me to Hau Nghia,* a province by the border with Cambodia. It was only fifty miles from Saigon, but in a primitive country fifty miles can take you back a thousand years. There were paddies and woods everywhere. People said you could see tigers at night, but I never saw one. Since I like cats, I would have liked to see a tiger in Vietnam.

  I was put in an LRRPs platoon.* LRRPs didn’t do a normal one-year tour. Guys in my unit were already in their second or third tour. One of them was an E-5 named Steve Corker.† He came up to me and said, “I heard you came from jail. Guess what, bro? Everything you thought you knew don’t mean shit out here. There are Communists out in the trees who want to kill you. You got that, Little Mafioso?”

  “Little Mafioso” was what Steve called me. He was a few years older than me and had grown up out in the woods in New Hampshire. Normally I wouldn’t take a person talking to me the way he did, but I’m out in the fucking woods with armed Communists and tigers. Steve obviously knew how to survive.

  A Green Beret who was training our unit saw me talking to Steve. He came up to me later on and said, “I’d avoid Steve if I was you.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s out of his mind. When you see him go into a village, he leaves a trail of bodies.”

  My thought process was I want to be with the person leaving that trail of bodies, because that’s the most evil motherfucker in the woods. I followed Steve from then on. Steve taught me the basics. We had to patrol through high grass, and they gave us machetes to cut through it. Steve taught me don’t just slash your machete like an idiot. It’s a fine tool. Maintain a razor edge on it. Make it an extension of your hand. Use it to feel the trail as you cut. Most important, always move very slow. Take your time. You can’t hear when you’re moving too fast. The slower you move, the more you see, the more you understand, the better you control the situation.

  The other thing Steve taught me was, stay low. You get very sore and uncomfortable crawling on your belly, but you need to be low to see trip wires and one-step snakes. Steve was the one who told me about the one-step snake.

  “What the fuck is a one-step?”

  “That motherfucker bites you, you take one step, and then you’re history. That’s all you need to know, Little Mafioso.”

  Hau Nghia was pretty quiet when I got there. One of the jobs we did in LRRPs was screen regular army companies. When they moved into a village, we would go ahead of them off the main trail and look for enemy—Viet Cong [VC] or North Vietnamese Army [NVA]. The VC were the sneakier ones who wore the black pajamas, and the NVA were like a regular army. We called them all gooks, but that wasn’t a racist term to us. It was like calling Germans krauts. Americans respected gooks—how persistently they fought. I later started to believe the Americans overrated the gooks.

  Our patrols lasted a couple days to a week. The first few we did, I didn’t see a single enemy gook. All I saw was mud. Even if there was two inches of water on the ground, we carried reeds to breathe through. That way you didn’t suck mud into your mouth. From being wet all the time, your skin would shrivel up and peel off.

  A few months into this, we’re in the slime one day, and I hear splash splash splash—footsteps. Steve could count the number of people by listening to the splashes. He holds up his fingers—it’s five to ten gooks. Our tactic was to wait until they moved past—then when they got their backs to us, we would start shooting. That was the plan.

  I’m lying there waiting, and suddenly I can’t get enough air from the reed I’m breathing through. I want to spit it out, but I don’t want to raise my head or make bubbles in the mud. I feel like I’m choking. My heart is pounding. And even though I’m in slime, I’m sweating my balls off. The sweat’s running in my eyes, so my vision is blurry. I don’t give a fuck how brave you are, your heart pounds like a maniac when you’re waiting to attack someone. When I actually see the first gook maybe twenty-five yards away, the splash he makes sounds like a boom to my ears.

  The gooks don’t see us. When they get so their backs are to us, Steve shoots one guy in the middle of their column. Me and the other guys working with us do our best to pick off the soldiers on either end as they scatter. We shoot the motherfuckers in the back. I’ve never done anything easier.

  I can’t say we killed all ten NVA. We put them down and scattered them, then radioed the army platoon following us. They spent an hour firing machine guns and LAWs* rockets—everything they carried—at the gooks. Then we pulled back and called in artillery strikes. Steve laughed. “What do you think about this now, Little Mafioso?”

  I will admit, that first firefight was the biggest kick I’d ever had in my life. I was pretty sure I killed at least one of the guys I shot at—meaning the first time I killed someone, I was paid by the government to do it. That’s a kick, isn’t it?

  Before I got to Vietnam, I heard guys talk about how good the North Vietnamese could fight. But a lot of their infantry did stupid shit. Their platoons didn’t always have guys looking behind them. When we moved, we looked in all 360 degrees. The gooks would march straight ahead, never look back. We shot a lot of them in their backs because of this. Some of the gooks were very good, but we saw many who were more like coolies than soldiers.

  I was lucky that Steve was like a real-life Rambo. He didn’t look like a Rambo. He looked like a normal person. Nothing stood out about him physically, but he was fucking crazy. This shit was fun to him. He loved using his knife.

  It’s much harder to stab a person than shoot him. When you stab, you get close enough to smell and hear the person you’re killing. You stick a knife into someone, and you feel their skin tearing. Skin makes a sound like vishhh when you cut it. You get their blood on you. You feel their gristle on your blade. It’s very personal.

  Steve enjoyed it when we caught a straggler—a lone gook on the trail—that he could knife. For me, stabbing a guy to death was a whole new world. My first was a little VC in pajamas who came at us on a trail. Because there were others nearby, we didn’t want to make noise by shooting him. I couldn’t reach high enough to get his neck, so I grabbed a leg and sliced his Achilles tendon. I nearly cut my hand when I brought him down, and he screamed his head off. So much for silence. Even after I sliced his neck, he was rasping and gurgling so loud, I drove my knife into his eyeball to shut him up. Even then, the little fucker was flopping around, trying to throw me off. Steve crawled over, laughing. The man was long dead. I was so jumpy, I was the one flopping. I did not like killing with a knife. I’d rather shoot somebody. That’s just me.

  The other guy who worked with us was a guy named George,* a Greek kid from New York. George was an orphan raised by his aunt in Lower Manhattan, not far from Little Italy. But George grew up the opposite of me. He had been a straight kid. He’d been a New York Boy Scout. All that merit-badge thinking went out the window in Vietnam. George was not wacked out of his mind like Steve, but he did whatever it took to live another day. The three of us were always together. Sometimes we worked with other guys, but we were the core. We were a wrecking machine.

  The first time we went into a village together, I had my eyes opened. We came in with a regular infantry unit. We walked into the village without a shot being fired. As we approached the first hut, Steve said, “Hey, Little Mafioso, we’re gonna kill everybody in the room.”

  I still thought this was a normal war. You kill gooks if they got guns. Not kids and old ladies. But I was trying to build trust with Steve and George, so I didn’t say nothing. The first hut we went into, they shot everybody in the room—a couple women and some kids. Steve trained me, when you clear a room, to make sure somebody isn’t faking being dead, you step on their eye socket. If they’re alive, they will definitely squirm, and if they do, you pull your foot back and put a bullet in their brain. I walked through that hut putting my boot in the eyes of these little dead kids, old ladies. I’ll tell you the truth, I felt nothing. There was no shock to me the first time we killed a hut full of normal people.
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  Many army units we worked with had rules against shooting villagers. Even if they found tunnels or radios or weapons in the village, they wouldn’t shoot women and children. They’d get uptight if we acted too aggressive. Steve would find other ways to fuck with the villagers. He’d blow up their pig with a grenade or set their rice on fire. Steve was a wacko. One time we went into a hut, and he pulled his dick out and pissed on the women. He wanted to rile them up so they would rebel and we could shoot them. But they just cowered.

  When we left, George asked Steve, “Why’d you do that shit?”

  “Well, you got to change things up,” Steve said. “It gets boring doing everything the same way.”

  “Let it get fucking boring, then,” George said.

  George acted disgusted, but when he got his chance to leave Vietnam, he signed for another tour. Normal soldiers had to go home after a year. Not us. As LRRPs, we could sign up as many times as we wanted. I re-signed, too, when my year came up. I forgot what the outer world looked like. None of us smoked weed out there like other soldiers, but my whole body went numb. I felt nothing in a gunfight. Adrenaline still pumped in me, but there was no fear left. We spent days together with nobody talking, just crawling in the mud. My first couple months there I still thought about things back home—girls, friends, nice cars, movies. But that went away. My brain shrank until all I could think about was whatever was in front of me. If I got a leech on my ankle, that would be the focus of my mind: burning the leech, shooting the gook, taking a crap—whatever I did, that was my universe. Because I couldn’t imagine the real world anymore, it became the unknown, and Vietnam became the normal, familiar thing.

  Once you go into a room and shoot a grandmother, a teenage girl a few times, it’s not like you feel worse and worse. You feel the same nothing every time. I did not want to go home anymore. What the fuck was I going to do? Be a maniac in the street? After living like we did, you become uncivilized. You become an animal, I guess. A person like me could stay in Vietnam forever.

  * In 1976, after the fall of Saigon, the Communist leadership dissolved Hau Nghia and absorbed it into its neighboring provinces.

  * LRRP stands for Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol. Soldiers in LRRP units were organized in companies but worked in small teams similar to Special Forces.

  * The M72 Light Anti-tank Weapon (LAW) was a small, powerful rocket sometimes carried by infantry in Vietnam and used against a variety of targets.

  * George’s surname has been removed. He is no longer alive and so is not able to counter Jon’s depiction of the unit’s actions. He is honored on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall.

  † An E-5 is a sergeant. Steve Corker is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s friend.

  10

  J.R.: I was nineteen on my second tour in Vietnam. I felt a hundred years old. Steve and George and I had become very good. They attached a Green Beret to us and a gook translator so we could do something new. The American government got it in its mind that the best thing we could do to beat the Communists was to assassinate the military leaders in the field. The idea was if you took away a major or colonel, the men under them would be like chickens without a head.

  Instead of ambushing gooks, our job was to hang back and watch when other American army units got into fights. Then we’d try to follow any gooks who survived. We’d grab one of these fuckers and make him talk. Or we’d take the radio and try to listen in with our translator. We’d try to find out where the leaders were—their base camps, tunnels, their weapons and ammunition caches, and destroy these by calling artillery or air strikes.

  We’d wait at our base camp until they’d come to us and say something very basic like “A hundred ten degrees west, ten clicks out, we got two platoons engaging NVA.” They’d put us in a helo and drop us off to the side of the fight. Nine out of ten times, when the NVA fought our army, they would break off and sneak back to a rear camp. They would start to move their guys out even while they had other guys up front still fighting.

  We’d follow the guys who were leaving first. Some would be in uniforms, others in the pajamas and hats. Some would be dragging out wounded, or carrying baskets with shell casings they picked up. They’d clean up everything from their fights and reuse it. We’d focus in on any stragglers carrying shit, and grab as many as two or three at once. We’d kill one or two of them right away and keep one to talk.

  For us this was a game, like when Jack Buccino and I competed to rob college kids. In Vietnam we’d call first dibs on who got to kill which guy. It was like, Steve will get the coolie dragging the wounded guy. George will finish off the guy on the stretcher. I’d have to grab the guy we wanted to keep alive. We’d get into arguments over who would get to kill someone. “You went last time! It’s my turn to kill!”

  To us, we were just killing the boredom. But the tactics worked. The guy we kept alive would show us where their camps and tunnels were and who was in charge. Sometimes, we’d keep him alive for a few days. We’d set up an observation point and call in artillery strikes. We’d have our captive tell us what they were saying about the strikes on the radios, so we could adjust the targeting of the artillery and hit them again. Then, when we got everything we could, we’d kill him.

  The Green Beret we worked with was a half-Jew from Chicago named Lou. He thought we were out of our minds. He wasn’t against killing gooks. We succeeded in our missions, which made him look good. But he acted like he was above our mentality. If you laugh when you kill somebody, or cry, it makes no difference to the guy you’re killing. So why not have fun? But Lou thought he was superior because he didn’t laugh when he killed a gook. Plus, he was a Green Beret, and they looked down on everybody.

  The Vietnamese interpreter we had, he was as sick as we were. He’d giggle and egg us on in his high-pitched squeaky voice. When we’d capture a guy who didn’t want to cooperate, our interpreter would be the first one cutting him with a knife, or burning him. Forget lit cigarettes, our interpreter would take a Zippo and burn the guy’s ears and nose and eyelids with the flame. He’d be giggling and squealing like a teenybopper on American Bandstand.

  When we got a guy who lied to us and gave us attitude, he would pay. Our interpreter called these guys “snaky tongues.” They’d say they were innocent, and we’d find maps on them. A few times we listened in on their radios as the gooks talked about how stupid the Americans were, how they captured an American kid and had done this or that to him. When we ended up grabbing guys from one of those units, our thought was, We can’t just kill him. If you shoot somebody four times, and then another guy a hundred times, what fucking difference does it make?

  Our amusement was finding new ways to make the bad ones suffer. Our interpreter would cut their tongues or sometimes their dicks. There was a gook we picked up who made Lou really angry. He hid a blade and jabbed Lou in his thigh next to his dick. Lou snapped. He pulled out the guy’s dick and tried to cut it off. But he didn’t do it right. It was flopping around, bleeding.

  “He a snaky tongue!” our interpreter said, pointing and laughing in his squealy voice. “Snaky tongue. Tee-hee.”

  I shot the captive gook just to put his misery out of my face.

  Sick as we were, the gooks would do the same to us if they could. The VC skinned people alive. They did it to villagers they didn’t like. They did it to Americans.* We spent weeks following a company of VC who on their radios had bragged about torturing Americans, saying what morons Americans were. We picked off stragglers, and instead of shooting them when we were done, we started skinning them. Steve had done it before. We stripped them naked and hung them upside down from a tree. When you hang a person upside down, it makes his heart pump faster. All the blood flows into the person’s head. It makes everything much more painful when you start skinning him.

  We’d start with little slices in the guy’s scalp. You cut his chest, his back, his stomach. Let his intestines pop out and hang in his face. You work your way up. This could tak
e hours. Eventually, the whole body slides out from the skin. Even with his ankle tied to the tree, everything starts to slip out from the skin. People will stay alive for hours like this. Their eyes would be moving even if there’s no skin left anywhere. Steve would lean over that fucker, look into his crazy eyes, and say, “You think I’m a moron? Who’s the moron now. I took your skin.”

  Our evil was as strong as theirs. There were dozens of teams like ours roaming around in the woods. Not everybody would act the same as us. But we killed a lot of gook officers. We called many strikes on tunnels and weapons caches. The government needed people like me and Steve and George. They didn’t want to know we were out there skinning people, but we were all cogs in the same machine. You can’t expect to fight a war and not use evil on your side if you want to win.

  In Vietnam I came to dislike the American government. They got their power in the war by using people like us, but the officers looked down on us. They were like the Green Beret who worked with us. He’d always tell us how sick we were, but he was out doing the same things. He told himself he was better than us because he didn’t enjoy what he did, as if having a conscience made him superior. When a country goes into a war, it acts like a sociopath. It sends people like me out in the woods to do the most evil things we can think of, but everybody else pretends like they’re on the side of the angels. The reality is, if the angels want to win, it takes the devil to succeed.

  WE SPENT so much time in the woods that Steve went out of his mind. You couldn’t take him back into civilized places. We were in Saigon once. George and I saw him walk up to a man in the street and slice off his ear. We had no clue what started it. It’s the middle of the day. We’re outside a restaurant. Suddenly, people are screaming bloody murder, running everywhere. Steve had his knife out and an ear in his hand. He was laughing. George and I hustled his ass out of there so he wouldn’t get arrested.