by Gil Hogg
I packed hastily, leaving the combat gear which would go back to the store, and went outside. The MP had taken shelter in the shadow of the opposite doorway.
“I want to see some people, before we go,” I said to him.
The MP nodded, indicating he would not be far behind. I went in search of Blake. I saw some fellow officers in the distance; they seemed to look twice to see if it really was me and then resume their tasks, but they were probably too far away. The news would have travelled. I met Peter Weston on the road and faced his curious, questioning eyes. We talked for a moment about the detail of my departing arrangements, both of us too diffident to refer to the court martial.
When we came to part, Weston said: “You could never have got away with this, Bob. It would have ruined Vaughan and screwed up the Regiment. The Army doesn’t work that way. But you’ve done fairly well by any count.”
“Oh, well. A half-win. I’ll probably be declared crackers.”
*
I found Blake surrounded by his men. He broke away from them and put an arm round my shoulders quite openly. “You look a little thinner. I heard what happened, Bob. Everybody here knows.”
I tried to smile. Blake left his sergeant in charge and we walked a short way down the road, out of earshot, including that of the discreet MP.
“I didn’t see how you could get off, Bob, and then I wondered if you wanted to.”
“You think I’m trying to get out of the Army?”
“I’ll get your kit returned to the store.”
“Does Gail know?” I asked.
“Yes, and she understands. You need a rest and treatment and you’ll be a hundred percent.”
I knew Gail would be pleased at the outcome. I thought she suspected that I was suffering from a trauma. “I’ll get in touch with her from the hospital.”
Our conversation was awkward and short, partly because the day was too hot to spend talking in the sun, but we finished with handshakes and smiles. I was still unable to determine whether Blake was a friend, an enemy, or a man who didn’t care.
I returned along the tarmac in the direction of the barracks, with the MP, and we were overtaken by Sergeant Lucas, streaming sweat.
Lucas saluted. “Wanted to say goodbye, sir. The men send their best wishes. We heard about it – don’t understand it. If you have time, sir, to come and see the men… ”
My heart expanded uneasily. I had been thinking what to do about the men. I wanted at least to see them, but I suddenly decided against it. “Thanks, Sergeant. I appreciate it. I don’t think I can come. I’m… not up to it.”
Lucas retired with a shocked look. I asked myself whether my decision showed cowardice, or an understanding that there was nothing to say. What I couldn’t explain clearly to myself, I couldn’t justify to my men.
32
I was admitted to an assessment ward at Hoi An, and given a small sleeping cubicle. I had to wait a day or two until my file arrived from Saigon and the doctors had had a chance to study it. In the meantime, I received a whole suite of medical tests – blood pressure, heart, kidneys, liver and eyes – and was questioned closely about my headaches and memory. When I was asked about events on the last patrol I genuinely couldn’t remember them precisely or clearly, and I gave different doctors different accounts. The immediate past had retreated into a haze in my mind that I couldn’t penetrate.
When the physicians had finished with me I was passed to the psychiatrists. They used different techniques. One, Dr Mazengarb, seemed to play the bad guy. He was an ugly man and he had no difficulty in showing rage, contempt and cynicism on his bulbous red face. He sneered at me and questioned my motives. “This is an easy way out, isn’t it? Get into civvy street via a nice rest in hospital?” What would an unbalanced man say in response to such prodding?
I said, “What happened, the massacre at Kam Sung, the argument with Vaughan, the court martial, they were things beyond my control. They happened to me.” I wasn’t going to be unduly defensive about my motives; I didn’t need to be; my motives were completely confused.
Dr Mazengarb said, “You lose your case. You come here. Next best thing. If you’d won, you wouldn’t be seeking psychiatric help, would you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I would. I seem to have lost the plot.”
I began to think that the only way of convincing this guy that I was crazy was to get down on my knees and start barking. But I didn’t. I felt too tired and overcome by the examination process. Mazengarb left me with the feeling that he was convinced that I was here on a ruse and had admitted it.
The other group of doctors were the good guys, the friendly ones. They wanted to talk about school and university and Gail and my future. I suppose I gave them a more or less coherent account but even here I had lapses of memory, and so many things I wasn’t sure about. It was as though my head had been kicked, and my thoughts, feelings and memories hadn’t re-ordered themselves. The doctors particularly wanted to know whether I blamed myself or someone else for what had happened. All I could say was I didn’t blame myself or anybody else. I said that as far as I understood it the events all seemed to have their own dynamics and I was merely an onlooker. And now that I was looking back I had to look a very long distance, although Kam Sung was only a couple of months past.
A lot depended on the assessment for me. If I was found to be fit, that is a malingerer, I would be sent back to the Court for sentence.
Gail visited me while I was in the unit. To me she looked fresh and beautiful, although I could see the war’s mark on her, a more controlled calm, a more strained smile. She was very affectionate. She seemed pleased that I had been referred for a report and made no comment about the ignominious result of the case. She may not even have known the exact details. The ‘story’ of what happened no doubt existed in different versions.
“You’re in the best hands possible, Bob.”
“They may send me back for sentence.”
“I don’t think so. Nobody can go through your kind of ordeal without suffering trauma.”
“That’ll mean I’m nuts.”
“It’ll mean you need a rest, a few months, and some therapy.”
I couldn’t see the way through to this promised land. The doctors were picking at me, finding every small vulnerability, like vultures pecking at a dry corpse. And the medical onslaught added to a body of dull hurt deep within me. I sought consolation by trying to understand the suffering of some of the other inmates. I couldn’t sit down with them and talk; they were creatures in dressing gowns with yellow faces and bandaged bodies who passed me in the hall without seeing, or were wheeled past on gurneys, or lay in their cubicles with the door open, groaning, surrounded by doctors and nurses. They cried out, horrible, hopeless noises. They seemed so much more pitiable than I was, but it came to me after a few hours or days, that I was no different.
“There are some classy specialists in the unit, Bob,” Gail said. “You’ll be alright. And they’re terribly busy. There’s no let-up. They’ve got to make their decisions quickly.”
I had detected no hurry or pressure amongst the doctors. They approached me as though they had the whole day to consult. “Maybe there are risks in that hurry for me.”
“No, they’re humanely cautious. One look at your active service record and the fact that things have gone a bit haywire is enough.”
Gail left me, apparently highly confident. Having served for two years I was entitled to be declared crazy!
33
I found my relationship with Dr Meadows, my psychiatrist at the Rochester, New York, Veterans’ Hospital, quite congenial. That was presumably what Dr Meadows aimed for. He was a diffident character, but skilled at getting me to talk without being judgmental himself.
In one of our recent sessions, Dr Meadows had told me that I would be fit to be released in a few months. I was taken by surprise. I had become used to the gentle structure of days in the home. I was uncertain what would happen when that framework
was removed, or rather I had declined to think what would happen. With Dr Meadows’ words, I was once again on the edge of an abyss. It was now more than a year and a half since the Saigon Court had made its finding referring me for a psychiatric report and the Army psychiatrists had diagnosed me as a case of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.
We were in one of the sun rooms, quiet with thick pastel carpet and deep, soft chintz-covered chairs; it was a gentle and hopeful room. Dr Meadows, not much older than me, was sprawled opposite, tieless, with the sleeves of his pale blue shirt rolled to the forearms. He wore white cotton slacks and soft tan shoes. He had fair hair and a nondescript boyish face, which made me think I might be talking to any young man I met in the supermarket. I suppose I was expecting my psychiatrist to have gravitas.
I realised that these meetings were carefully staged, and I had come to appreciate them; they were a kind of weekly psychological gym session, and presumably therapeutic.
Dr Meadows had let me talk over the months, often crossing and re-crossing the same ground, usually increasing the depth of my perceptions. He often steered me to find in all that had happened a point of decision, or a point when the die was cast, or a point when the blame for the consequences was clear; a fulcrum for action.
“Why do you do that?” I asked, slightly exasperated on this latest occasion.
“We need to understand what happened, or understand that what happened can’t be understood.”
“That’s the medicine, is it? The serum which will make me well?”
“Yes, if you’re unwell.”
“How can you cure me if you don’t know whether I’m sick?”
“It’s the insight you need to move forward, sick or well.”
“But is there a hinge, something, one particular event or action which caused everything to happen?”
“If there is, we need to find it, Bob.”
“But you think we can’t, and if we can’t, you want me to understand and accept that?”
“Exactly.”
“When I went to see Vaughan to try to get Trask’s punishment quashed, I was just going to ask him. In hindsight it was a stupid move. The CO had made his decision; he wasn’t going to reverse it. I wasn’t boiling over with rage. In fact I was apprehensive. Peter Weston tried to persuade me not to do it. I didn’t intend the physical contact that happened. I sure as hell didn’t see myself as a heroic fighter for human rights. It was just that a man to whom I owed a duty as his superior officer was being blatantly screwed. Events got out of control.”
We sat, doctor and patient, watching each other for perhaps half a minute. “Uh-huh. Events out of control,” Dr Meadows said. “Any feelings of anger against anybody? Do you want to blame anybody, Bob? Vaughan, Blake, Ann James, Vale, Amherst?”
Dr Meadows had no notes on this occasion; he often surprised me by his mastery of the file, and I had to suppose that behind the boy-next-door look was a penetrating intellect. Eventually, I said, “No. They did what they did, what they could be expected to do, being them. Vaughan was a neurotic, Blake a monster, James a whore. Vale and Amherst, typical lawyers. It was my reactions I guess.”
“Your reaction. Do you blame yourself then?”
“I don’t feel guilty.”
“What do you feel?”
“I accept responsibility. It’s my mess. I made it and I should have done better.”
“Would you have done better in the trial if you’d handled it in a different way?”
Dr Meadows knew in detail about the trial, but he let me grope around for answers.
“My failure to tell Amherst the truth about my meetings with Ann James? It ruined Amherst’s strategy, but it’s difficult to admit stupid indiscretions, especially when they have a sexual angle.”
“The case was lost because you were unable to admit your drunken adventures?”
“More than drunken adventures. More embarrassment than shame at what I’d done. I am engaged to another woman. I care for her. I feared my doings would be noised around the courtroom and outside. It’s not easy to say in court, ‘Yes I was in bed with this woman, drunk, a venture paid for by a buddy. No, I didn’t actually fuck her, I just dozed with my hand on her bare ass for a while.’ Not easy to say that. Blake would hear. Gail would hear. I thought we could win without getting into all that shit.”
“You thought you could win. What do you think about Amherst’s warning to tell him everything?”
“I guess I didn’t take it on board. I now see that he couldn’t present the best case without knowing the facts.”
Another long pause followed. I became aware of the sun beating on me, but a benevolent dry sun, not the torch of Vietnam; and there were yellow begonias in the boxes outside the window.
“Or was it that the events in the jungle had seeped into and undermined your judgment?”
“Maybe. That’s where the downhill spiral starts, with me lacerating myself, trying to find the nerve to deal with what happened.”
“Or maybe one could put it all down to the fact that you had the bad luck to face a rather relentless and suspicious prosecutor?”
“Sure… any of these,” I agreed.
“Or all of them to some degree – and some we haven’t mentioned.”
“I gather then that you’re not interested in analysing the cause, Doctor?”
“I’m very interested, if you can find a cause. I just want you to see that the interpretation of past events can be endless, depending on your point of view. So many reasons, so many motives. Think how Vaughan would see it, or General Mason.”
“So there’s no point in letting causes bother me?”
“Precisely. It’s done. Accept. Move on.”
“Not so easy.”
Meadows smiled. “But worth working for. The past is only a fragment in your memory, and a different fragment in the memories of others. We each live in parallel universes.”
“I’ve almost put this behind me.” In a way, I was trying to show the doctor how responsive I was to his efforts, but the reality was that I hadn’t put the jungle or the trial behind me; they continued to torture me and promised to inflict the gravest emotional damage that I could suffer: the loss of Gail.
“Good. Then I almost have a cure.”
Another silence. The doctor used silence as a medical instrument. I felt the pressure of these silences, and often started my explanations hurriedly, before I’d thought them through.
“When I’m with Blake I’m also with the Vietnamese woman and the children.”
“I understand. So?”
“I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to be a friend of his or a relation.”
The doctor agreed reluctantly. “It makes sense.”
“I don’t know whether he’s a murdering maniac or a hero. You’ve met him. He looks like a model soldier, doesn’t he?”
“He seems a fine man to me. Doesn’t his explanation deserve any weight at all – that he was interrogating suspects?”
“Gang rape? Killing children? I was there, Doctor, and with the most liberal view possible, only a little of what happened could be down to legitimate interrogation.”
“And yet you didn’t intervene.”
“I should have, but you don’t understand what a dominating presence Jim Blake has.”
The sun slanting in the windows had raised the temperature, and faded the light colours of the room. Our shirts showed patches of damp.
“I can’t understand how a gifted person like Blake could do what he did,” I said.
“He’s not necessarily a twisted man, merely a different one. He sees it differently. He wasn’t the one who came upon an atrocity committed by another. You think you were. He came upon a bunch of VC or sympathisers who had information that could save lives on his side.”
“Children?”
“Children are sometimes soldiers.”
“That’s a cold, pragmatic way to explain their presence.”
“Not necessarily. The heat
of battle makes it a real possibility.”
“Rape?”
“War is rape. Hasn’t every soldier who has had experience of actual hand-to-hand fighting got memories of cruel and inhuman events he’d never have countenanced as a peaceful citizen?”
“Possibly. So standards of behaviour change with the context, but that doesn’t justify rape or murder.”
“I’m not suggesting that; only that your take on what happened isn’t exclusively right, if there is a right one. The experience of life is that we make misjudgements and have misunderstandings, particularly in moments of stress. Often, we don’t have the time or space to make corrections. You don’t need to hold what happened at Kam Sung against yourself. You effectively made a decision not to intervene. That may have been the right one. What would have happened if you had? It was, from what you tell me, a potentially explosive situation as far as Captain Blake was concerned. You would be challenging his authority. A dangerous thing to do in a dangerous place.”
“So I ought to let the past remain inconclusive and move on in the present?”
“Yes. It will help you with Gail. You know life is unpredictable, Bob; that’s why it’s both terrifying and wonderful. Everything is chaning all the time.”
“But the fact of what Jim Blake did is not inconclusive. And the fact that he’s Gail’s brother and confidant isn’t inconclusive. These facts can’t be left behind; they are here now, in the present. And it places a barrier between Gail and myself; invisible, but I feel impenetrable.”
“Why?”
“These links mean that I can’t have her as my partner without welcoming him.”
“Seeing Gail is as painful as seeing Jim?”
“No. She’s innocent and ignorant of what happened. But if I love her and marry her I have to embrace her brother.”
Dr Meadows scanned the lawns and gardens outside. Servicemen passed the windows: the bent, the lame with their walking frames, the wheelchair borne. What we could see of men, looking out, was pathetic enough, but what was worse was what was going on inside their heads.
