It’s an amazing thing. It’s not hard to explain, but it takes some time to explain. It’s a nanosecond of feeling every possible emotion that you could possibly feel, and it’s something that you just do. And after you do it, you tend to live with it forever. I don’t think that I live with it like, “Oh, what a horrible thing I’ve done.” I also don’t live with it as, like, “Oh, what a wonderful thing I’ve done.” I have to put it in the context of what the situation was.
The events of that day stay with him in ways that he can’t always articulate. Sometimes the anniversary sneaks up on him. For example, July 4, 2005, Kenny recalls, was just a nasty motherfucker—something was just going on. I really couldn’t even put a pin on it, and then it occurred to me, because I spoke with Phineas and he said, “Yeah, you know, it is the Fourth.” That’s the day a guy named Franklin Delano Ratliff got killed. A big black kid. I recall him physically. It’s also the day I got my definite first confirmed kill.
January to July is almost six months; Kenny acknowledges he may well have killed prior to July 4.
When you see a guy and you fire and ten other people are firing and the guy gets dead, the question is, Did you get him? I got him? Who got him?
He doesn’t know. But July 4, 1968, was different.5
On that particular day, while the platoon waited in position, the lieutenant sent out a patrol. They heard shots, and then—nothing. Soon they got word that a medevac was needed. Members of his squad came struggling back into the perimeter carrying a soldier by the name of Ratliff. He had been hit in the chest. Based on what Kenny was told, I’m sure he was dead before he hit the fucking ground.
Tensions were running high. They had no idea what they had run into: a random soldier sitting on a trail, a listening post for an entire regiment—they just didn’t know.
They tightened up the perimeter. Right outside, there was a steep drop-off into a ravine, so the platoon did something slightly unorthodox: they placed the machine gun outside the perimeter, to cover that ravine. Just inside the perimeter, a young Marine sat reading. An NVA sniper must have spotted him with his back to the perimeter line, and without warning a bullet split the back of his head. Now two Marines were dead, and they still didn’t know what they were dealing with.
Kenny and his gun partner, Ronnie Marsala, were covering the ravine. Marsala decided to go take a look around. Kenny was left with the machine gun to cover the area.
I’m sitting there and I looked down the ravine, and then I see a helmet pop up from behind a rock. And I’m looking at this. I can’t really tell who this is, friend or foe. Is this one of our guys who went out and is trying to see if somebody is right in front of the position, or is it the guy who was doing the shooting? I don’t know.
The man stepped out from behind a boulder.
He’s got shorts on, and he’s got Ho Chi Minh sandals on. Now I know exactly what he is. As it turns out, he’s looking right at me. I don’t believe he saw me, but he stepped out in front, and I saw that he had his AK-47. And he stood directly in front of me, and my comment was “Goodbye, motherfucker.” That’s exactly what I said. And I cranked off—I hit that fucking thing. I had a starter belt with either fifty or eighty rounds on it. I was right on this motherfucker.
And—and—an eternity—an eternity went by. I just let the whole burst go with the starter belt.
Kenny simply kept firing. But while doing so, he remembers that he focused on much more than just his trigger, his ammunition supply, and his target. He felt as if he were aware of everything else that was going on around him. His visual recall of the killing remains especially vivid.
And it was as if he stood and accepted each round. It was as if he waited to accept them. And I was watching each round go into him, and I was watching each round come out of him, and I was watching, you know, the blood and whatever else [as he was] getting blown away. This guy was taking a serious motherfucking shellacking. And it seemed to go on forever. But in fact it was seconds, and he fell out of my sight.
As quickly as it began, it stopped. Kenny grabbed a weapon and ran forward to find out what had happened and to secure the ground in front of the gun. Suddenly something landed next to his knee, and it was smoking.
I reached down to grab it. I almost had it in my hands, and I said, “Gas!” Thornton, who had moved down parallel to me, was real close; he said, “It’s a fucking Chicom!”—which is a Chinese Communist grenade. It was on the little bamboo stick, and I was like, “Shit.” I just tried to crawl inside my helmet, and I pulled back my hand and the fucking thing went off … Thank God for quality control. If it was one of our grenades, we are not having this conversation, as sure as there is a God. I got dirt and ringing in my ears. So I said, “Well, fuck this,” and I started throwing grenades down, and we threw in about eight grenades, and it was pretty fucking horrific. You just kind of hug the ground, but we were above it. After that when I was able to get down there, and you’re picking up AK-47s, it looked like … Did you ever work in a butcher shop and see what a pound of steak looks like when it goes through a grinder? That’s what it looked like; these guys were fucking mangled—fucked-up mangled. Which one I shot, I can’t tell you; we weren’t taking names.
Kenny then tried to make peace with his God.
One of the things which makes me the person I am today, I have a sense of my own spirituality. I don’t know if that’s the word. My own soul, a sense of my own soul, like, what I had done. I had killed another human being; I had killed this guy. There was no question about it. It was my kill. There was no denial of the ownership of who killed this guy. There were three or four of them down there, and maybe I killed all of them, or some of them, but I knew for certain that the one confirmed was the guy that I had laced into with that machine gun. There was no fucking way that this guy was walking away. I mean, he must’ve taken twenty-five, thirty fucking hits.
And when I got down there, I kneeled down—I actually, literally knelt down—and I said the Lord’s Prayer, and I said an act of contrition, and I was asking God to forgive me for what I have done, because there is a realization; you just took another human being. You have taken another life; you—you have done that, there’s no question now, my friend, that you’ve crossed this threshold. There’s just no question about it; it’s done.
Kenny relates what took place in therapy when he tried to explain his behavior that day, getting angry even as he does so.
When I shared that in the group therapy, some of them mocked me about that, and they would say, “Oh yeah, are you going to say a prayer for him? Ha-ha-ha.” It bothered me on one level, but on another level it didn’t bother me, because the bottom line was, I can bare my soul and I can be at peace. The fucking demons inside your head, they own you. If you can’t understand that you took somebody’s life—that there’s a price to go with it—then I don’t even know if you’re fucking human anymore.
It’s not so easy to kill a human being. It’s not so easy to kill somebody looking them in the eye. So we have redcoats and rebels and Tories and gooks and Nazis to hide this; we have whatever the fuck we want to have, because it’s not killing a person. But killing somebody, I can tell you, is leaving a part of your fucking heart and soul there, if you’re a human being.
So killing somebody is something that I can talk about. I can talk about it openly and honestly. It takes something from your heart and from your soul, from your spiritual condition, to do that when you own it one-on-one. Killing from above, dropping bombs, is different; you may know it, but you don’t have the ownership of it.
It’s very easy to be the Rumsfeld of “Kill them all”—and I’m not picking on Donald Rumsfeld; I’m just using him as an image—[or] John Lennon, “Don’t kill anybody,” or … Gandhi. Those are the extremes; the reality is, you’re the nineteen-year-old kid looking at a nineteen-year-old kid and you just whacked this motherfucker, and I’m going to tell you something: he would have fucking killed me if I didn’t kill him. And if you do
n’t believe me, go ask that guy who was reading the book that day, and go ask Franklin Delano Ratliff. Oh, that’s right—you can’t have that conversation.
Kenny will tell anyone who asks that he has killed people but is quick to add that he has never murdered anyone. He says he tries to find words to express the feelings the incident left him with, but sometimes the feelings can’t be expressed. Many veterans would understand this. Those veterans who don’t, like the men in group therapy who mocked Kenny for his act of contrition, well, he says: I wonder whose soul is in disarray. I don’t think it’s mine, but I’m not here to save the fucking world.
In October 1968, Kenny was slated to attend a ceremony for his promotion to corporal. He had arrived in-country as a private first class, and the promotion represented an acknowledgment of his skill and service. Ordered to clean himself up as best he could, he was to present himself to the company captain at 1400 hours—2:00 p.m.—the next afternoon. He found his cleanest dirty shirt, walked down to the river to scrub it out, and placed it on a bunker to dry. As he waited, he heard the radio inside the command bunker, “Be advised, Kilo, November, Juliet, 1649. There is a jeep coming and it will meet him on the road. It will be there right away.” It took Kenny a couple of moments to figure out what he had heard, because the words sounded somewhat familiar but didn’t make sense. “Kilo, November, Juliet” stood for “Kenny, Neil Joseph,” and 1649 were the last four digits of his service number.
A moment later, someone came out of the command bunker and told him that Lieutenant Meegan, his platoon commander, wanted him to gather his gear and get on the road. Kenny’s mind raced. He had recently sent his brother back home a box of the finest Vietnamese herbs that he could find. He recalls enclosing a note saying, “Save some for me!” He says: I thought somebody had grabbed the box of herbal medicine.
He was terrified that he had just been busted for shipping home marijuana. Kenny climbed into the jeep and asked the driver what was going on. The jeep driver had no idea. The tension mounted when they arrived at their destination. Kenny recalls: I never saw so many generals. You could see the sun shining off all their emblems, and they were having some big-ass powwow. And the jeep came in, and this guy came over to me. He says, “Corporal Kenny?” I said, “Yeah.” And he says, “Come with me.”
Kenny saw his former company commander, Captain Bennett, give a little shake of his head, and Kenny thought he was in serious trouble. He was walked over to a landing zone, and the lieutenant there asked him to unload his shotgun, seemingly fearful of what Kenny might do when he heard the news. It was then that he learned that his grandfather—listed as his closest male relative, or “in loco parentis,” on his personnel forms—had died. His one anchor at home was gone.
I remember Captain Bennett came up to me and he said, “Neil,” and that’s when I knew they wanted to get my attention—when they used my first name. [Emotionally laughs.] He said, “Neil, I’m really sorry, but they are sending you home.” He said, “You must have—you lived with your grandparents?” I said, “Yeah; yeah, I did.” He said, “I hate to see you go home this way, but go home. Your war is over. You’ve been a great Marine.”
Even the battalion colonel, J.W.P. Robertson, approached and told him very much the same thing. His war was over, and he was going home. Kenny recalls the moment with both shock and anguish. He wanted to go home, make no mistake. But he never imagined it would happen this way—due to emergency leave.
The only problem was that Kenny, like all Marines, was slated to serve a thirteen-month tour of duty in Vietnam. So far, he had served approximately nine and a half months. As he rode in the helicopter that afternoon, he felt certain that he would be coming back to both Lima Company and Vietnam. He knew in his bones, he says, that his war was, in fact, not over.
Others in the Marine Corps knew it too. As he was being processed for his leave, a lieutenant gave Kenny the date he was due back in Vietnam. Kenny told him that his commanders in the field had said he was headed home for good. He recalls the lieutenant saying, “Well, the regulation states that if you have 90 days or less on your tour, you do not return to Vietnam. You have 107 days left for a full thirteen-month tour.” Kenny argued back.
“Wait a minute. I think I can answer this. I may have been a high school dropout, but I know this much; 90 days or less and I don’t come back here. You’re giving me 15 days emergency leave. Ninety plus 15, even when I went to school, was 105. So for forty-eight motherfucking hours you’re bringing me back here after the colonel and the captain told me I was going home?”
A sympathetic first sergeant standing nearby intervened. He insisted that the lieutenant sign the orders for Kenny’s emergency leave while at the same time convincing Kenny to keep his cool. Soon, Kenny was on his way home but with the understanding that he would have to return.
After a long trip from Da Nang, with stops in Okinawa, Alaska, and then South Carolina, Kenny finally arrived at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. Twenty-four hours after leaving the field in Vietnam, he was at his grandmother’s apartment on Eighty-Sixth Street in Bay Ridge. He hadn’t showered or changed. He was bloody, dirty, and smelled bad. After a shower and a shave, he put on a dress blue Marine Corps uniform a neighbor had arranged for him to borrow from someone stationed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It would be the first and only time in his life Kenny would wear a dress uniform.
His recollections of his leave recall the issues many New York soldiers faced when they returned home from Vietnam for good.
Conflict with family members began almost immediately. One uncle offered Kenny a drink, which he understood as an acknowledgment of his maturity and a gesture of respect toward his military service. An aunt immediately objected, claiming that the last time family members came home from a war, World War II in this case, “the boys” drank and “went crazy.” After all he had been through, Kenny saw this remark as an affront. He stormed out, walked to a nearby watering hole, and began to drink. His trip from Vietnam to the corner bar took just over twenty-four hours and began a pattern of drinking that would last until Kenny was thirty-two years old.
The funeral service took place at McLaughlin Funeral Home on Ninety-Seventh Street and Third Avenue in Bay Ridge. Kenny says: This is where my story starts, because it’s the beginning of the end, in many ways.
As he sat smoking a cigarette in the funeral home, Kenny listened to the conversations around him. A family member who had made money in the stock market, “Uncle Bill,” a man Kenny describes as a “captain of industry,” began to offer his opinions on the war in Vietnam.
Then Bobby Looney, a great name, said, “Oh, Uncle Bill, I don’t know, Uncle Bill. If I was going to try to figure out what to do in Vietnam, I’d ask Aunt Regina’s son; he’s sitting over there. He just came back.” And I heard this—I was in earshot and I heard this, and I kind of looked at him and I was kind of like, Well, that was cool. There was some recognition from Bobby. And Uncle Bill goes [mimics puffing on cigar], “What the fuck does he know? He’s only a fucking kid.”
I’m telling you something, I will never forget that: What the fuck do I know? I’m only a kid. You made a million fucking dollars while this kid was fighting. This kid went and fought that fucking war because growing up and listening to you at Thanksgiving, the Christmas parties, the weddings, and the wakes, you always told us what the right thing to do was. You were just part of the whole bandwagon, “Do the right thing.” You were hot dogs, apple pie, and Mom; you were everything—you were Yankee Doodle fucking Dandy. And now I go and I do your dirty work, and then you’re going to come back and tell me I’m just a fucking kid; I don’t matter for much. To me that was just total devastation … that I’m sitting there … my grandfather never would have said that; I know that.
He returned to Vietnam ten days later to complete his tour. He was convinced, he remembers, that God had sent him home to make peace with his family. In contrast to his first trip to Vietnam and the sense of adventure it had, he fel
t this trip would be the end. As it turns out, he was just in time to be part of Operation Meade River.
The official U.S. Marine Corps history of operations in Vietnam states that Meade River “was to be a cordon and search operation under the First Marines, like many which had been conducted previously, but on a much grander scale. Rather than surround and search single hamlets or villages, the division planned a cordon around 36 km2 in the Dodge City area, south of Da Nang.” The Dodge City area was so named because of its Wild West gunslinging atmosphere. Between November 20, 1968, and December 9, 1968, Marines from the First Marine Division, supported by tactical air, artillery, and helicopter gunships, killed a reported 841 enemy soldiers, capturing 164 weapons. In the twenty-day operation, 106 Marines were killed and 523 wounded.6 Whatever the reports say, Kenny has his own interpretation. It was horrific, he recalls. We got our asses kicked.
According to the official report, veterans of earlier wars who were present stated that it “was the fiercest fighting they had ever seen.”7
The Marines took heavy casualties, but Kenny distinguished himself, earning the Navy Commendation Medal for his actions on November 23. The first platoon of Lima Company had gotten into trouble; three machine gunners had been shot by North Vietnamese troops, and one machine gun was lost. Despite the presence of a higher-ranking officer, Kenny took charge of the situation.
I took the machine gun, and we took like two thousand rounds of ammo—it was like ten cans of ammo. I said, “You, come with me,” and the fucking guy did; there was no question. I went into the middle of this rice paddy with this guy. They still had at that point fire superiority to us.
The lieutenant said, “What are we going to do?” And I said, “Here,” and I opened up all the ammo and I said, “Link these rounds.” The water was like—like to mid-thigh, the water we were in. He was kind of lying on the bank with half his ass in the water, and he looked at me. It was probably his baptism of fire, so to say. And he was with a guy who didn’t give a fuck. It was like, “I’m a dead man; it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m already dead.”
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