Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  Bear is the second son of a proud, hardworking family in a Boston multiethnic neighborhood. His father was a foreman, his mother, a health professional.

  He joined the U.S. Army in December 1965, out of high school after learning that an older, admired friend in the ------ Airborne had been killed in Vietnam. Bear’s father, a Silver Star honoree tank sergeant in Europe in World War II, opposed his enlistment, but acquiesced. His father was later to tell the Department of Defense official who [erroneously, as it turned out] notified him of Bear’s death: “Go to hell! You got the wrong Mercer.”

  Bear served one combat tour in Vietnam as a “grunt” forward observer sergeant. He was honorably discharged in December 1968. He never missed time, was never subject to disciplinary action, and was eligible to reenlist. He was honored with the Combat Infantry Badge, the Air Medal, and the Army Commendation Medal for Valor with Oak Leaf Cluster, which denotes a second separate act of bravery.

  After his first month as the radioman for the 81mm mortar at the center of the perimeter, Bear felt like he was simply a helpless target for enemy rockets and mortars that fell in the perimeter. He knew that in theory he was safer in the center than outside it patrolling and waiting in ambush, but he had come to fight, not to cower under bombardment. So he volunteered to serve as a forward observer, to patrol with the grunts and call in mortar, artillery, and air strikes in their support. He takes pride in the fact that he was never responsible for an artillery error that caused American casualties.

  Sergeant Mercer did, however, see the results of the fires he called in on the enemy. His patrol found a Viet Cong, dying after his legs had been blown off by a strike Bear had called in. Over the radio, the CO refused to call a MedEvac for the enemy and ordered Bear to kill the wounded enemy soldier. Unwilling to order anyone in his squad to do it, he performed this mercy himself, and believes that the dying Vietnamese assented to it by gestures. Now in nightmares and flashbacks the color of his blood, changing from bright red to almost black after Bear cut his throat, comes back again and again, as does the evil grin of a man in his squad who crushed the dead man’s chest with a boulder, drenching Bear with blood that squirted out of the severed neck arteries. Bear felt the enemy had “paid his dues” and is enraged at the disrespect shown by the other American soldier.

  Four days later in the same patrol a friend named Kennedy, known for his joking and cheerful disposition, volunteered to throw the smoke grenade in a clearing to guide in a helicopter. He stepped out of the concealment of the jungle and Bear heard an “Uh!” sound and saw Kennedy fall back on a bush. “I ran over and took him off the bush. His front tooth was gone. I put my hand behind his head to lift him off the bush, and felt this warm sensation. I had part of his brain on my hand. I looked back and saw blood pouring down off the bush.” This scene, too, repeats endlessly in Bears nightmares. He knows there was nothing he could have done to save Kennedy.

  Bear is also haunted by the death of a new forward observer, whom he had been breaking in for three months by going out on patrols with him. One night when Bear was “just so frigging tired” that he stayed behind, the new FO went out with a patrol on a night ambush. The ambushers were ambushed, and the men inside the perimeter could hear the wounded (including Bear’s best friend) screaming all night. The next morning they found two dead with the wounded survivors, but two were missing. A distance away they found the headless bodies of the missing two. Following a blood trail, they came to a clearing where the two heads were set up on stakes, with their eyelids pinned back with vine thorns. One of these heads was that of the new FO. “I see the head just staring at us. If I hadn’t been so frigging tired and gone myself, he wouldn’t be dead.” These dead eyes stared at Bear during the times he tried to kill himself by driving his car off the road in 1974 and 1975.

  After this enemy atrocity Bear’s platoon went berserk, “just went nuts—started cutting heads off, collecting ears. They called us the ‘head hunters.’” The berserk state leaves a permanent imprint on the physiology of a person who has been in it—a permanent hyperarousal of the autonomic nervous system and adrenaline secretion. Mercer suffers repeated adrenaline storms, with racing heart, sweats, and most of all, rage.

  He recalls that for six months, the captain who had ordered Bear to kill the wounded prisoner was the company commander. This captain was dangerously incompetent. During one operation he ordered the company to reconstruct an old night position abandoned by the ------ Infantry. All the seasoned NCOs told the captain not to do it, because GIs always left booby traps behind. One “chow hound” in the company nicknamed Teddy because of his size and hairiness, who always scarfed up any C rations that the other men did not eat, spotted a C ration can in the sump of the abandoned position. When he picked it up, an American grenade with its pin pulled fell out, releasing the safety spoon that had been tucked against the inside of the can—a classic GI booby trap. Teddy died instantly. This same captain, apparently motivated by no more than idle curiosity, ordered a man nicknamed the Italian Stallion to pull the pin on a found Chinese Communist-manufactured grenade and throw it so the captain could see what it was like. All the seasoned NCOs shouted at the man “You don’t have to do it—some of them are rigged!” but the captain’s insistence overcame his reluctance. He pulled the pin and it detonated instantaneously, blowing off both his arms. The Vietnamese enemy had removed its time-delay fuse. Bear recalls screaming in rage at this CO that he was an “incompetent son of a bitch—lucky to be alive [i.e., close to being fragged by his own men].”

  Bear remembers one instance in which his lieutenant ordered him to take his squad into a senseless death trap in a rice paddy and he refused. The lieutenant found three other men more compliant and sent them across the rice paddy, rather than around as Bear had advised. All three died from mines. In another incident, after Bear heard sounds of heavy movement ahead and advised the officer to call in an air strike, the disbelieving lieutenant sent a squad to “make contact—if Charlie’s there at all.” The whole squad was wiped out and the platoon was pinned down on that hill, Hill ------ near ------, for two days.

  Any incompetence Bear encounters in civilian life arouses the same feelings of fear, rage, and grief. When he yanked his general supervisor at the post office across his own desk and screamed at him, he screamed exactly the same words he screamed at his incompetent CO.

  He feels profoundly tainted by the pointless risks and senseless cruelty he participated in while taking prisoners for interrogation. He received his Air Medal for highly dangerous “in and out” helicopter insertions to snatch prisoners for interrogation by U.S. Army intelligence. He particularly recalls that one Viet Cong “catch” his team had captured at great risk was refused as unneeded by Army intelligence. They were told to give him to the ARVN “Tigers” whose base adjoined that of the Airborne. Bear had witnessed these South Vietnamese “elite” troops behave with a contemptible blend of cowardice and sadism. After three hours of listening to the man’s screams, Bear’s whole team walked into the Tiger compound to find the man bleeding from hundreds of little cuts, particularly around the genitals. They shot him through the head, so enraging the Tigers that a firefight almost ensued.

  Bear received his Army Commendation Medal for Valor for an action where he called in artillery on his own position (which necessarily was observation distance from the platoon he was working with), to permit the platoon he was serving as forward observer to escape encirclement. He received a second such award, but has complete amnesia for the action for which it was given.

  Bear is a proud man. He is proud of supporting his family, but is profoundly apprehensive that he is “losing it,” now more than thirty years after the war.

  His wife has taken to sleeping on the sofa. Bear always sleeps with a knife under his pillow, despite her pleas not to. He lives a long way from Boston in a rural community where few people lock their houses, no one locks the car, and many leave the key in the ignition. Bear is fanatical about bo
th—forcing his family to lower the blinds at sundown, and he “walks the perimeter” every night before bed looking for snipers and ambushes. He rarely gets more than two hours of sleep a night because of nightmares. Four hours sleep is a good night.

  After Vietnam he took a job in the Department of Corrections as an officer in a maximum-security prison. Clearly his background as a combat sergeant in the Airborne made him appealing to the prison authorities. He says he was motivated by a desire to help the many incarcerated veterans. But he also loved the sense of being alive that came from being the only guard on a prison tier, where only his cunning, his will, his comprehension of the psychology of the moment stood between him and a shank (homemade knife blade) between the ribs. He reveled in his ability to “mind-fuck” the prison administration when they mistreated Vietnam vet inmates.

  He recalls with relish various strategic deceptions that he pulled off against prisoners and administrators alike. In one episode, he feigned a regular, predictable pattern of sleeping while on duty in one of the prison towers, drawing a contraband operation to the apparently safe spot in plain view beneath his tower. He loved this job and only left it because he rebroke the ankle he had broken in a post-Vietnam parachute jump at Fort Bragg.

  Now at work in the post office he feels he no longer is able to pick his targets, but rather engages in physical violence before he even knows he is doing it. This hurts his pride because he has always counted on his self-control and self-discipline. Along with his understanding of combat veterans, these were his major assets when he worked as a prison guard.

  On one occasion Bear confused a Vietnamese co-worker at the post office with the Vietnamese enemy. He grabbed the man and told him he was going to cut his throat just like his comrades. Bear finds these episodes hateful, because he despises racism and recognizes that the man he terrorized is “a nice guy, by the way.”

  Co-workers say that sometimes he just stands and stares. No one dares to interrupt him at these moments, or to come up behind him unannounced.

  Thirty years after military discharge he has in one year used up four weeks of vacation time, 150 hours of sick time, and 80 hours without pay, mainly having to leave work in order to prevent himself from killing somebody, but also to receive treatment at the VA.

  Many, like Bear, who joined uniformed services quit or were fired after relatively short careers. Unlike Bear, some found civilian policing too boring, too dictated by rules that made them feel unsafe, too full of “chickenshit” authority relationships and apparently meaningless administrative tasks.

  A career that war exactly prepares veterans for upon return to civilian life is a criminal career, symbolized here by Odysseus’ pirate raid on Ismarus. Even though piracy had a certain cachet, even respectability, much as privateers, from Sir Francis Drake to the American brig Yankee in the War of 1812, have had in more recent times, I shall use it as a metaphor for a criminal career.8 For obvious reasons, the veterans I work with do not tell me crimes they have committed for which they were never caught and punished. I wouldn’t want to know. It would both impair my personal safety to know these things, as well as lower the level of safety felt by the veterans in the treatment program. One veteran, asked if he had ever “done time,” replied without a flicker of emotion, “Not under this name.” A significant number of the men I have worked with have been incarcerated, which is not statistically unusual. According to the massive, congressionally mandated National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, 11.6 percent of Vietnam-theater veterans who still met criteria for PTSD in the mid-1980s when the interviews were done disclosed to the interviewer that they had been convicted of a felony.9

  Active criminals live in a world that surrounds them with dangers, but even more so does prison. Combat veterans who are unable to leave combat mode are in a sense perfectly adapted to these hideous conditions. “They’re fine there. They know exactly where they stand,” says Navy veteran Wiry (a pseudonym), one of my patients who has been incarcerated repeatedly. He continues, “I sleep better there than I do here. You hear that door [to solitary confinement] close on you and you know you can’t hurt anyone and nobody can get at you.”

  Veteran Wiry served twenty-two months in the United States Navy on assault support patrol boats (ASPBs), in the Mobile Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta. During this service his boat, including four sailors and the bosun’s mate captain, received the Presidential Unit Citation. This unit citation is considered equal to the Distinguished Service Cross (second only to the Medal of Honor) for individuals.10 He was also individually honored with the Bronze Star Medal, with V device for valor, and a cluster, denoting a second separate honor of the Bronze Star. He received one Purple Heart for combat: wounds.

  Wiry was born in a Boston Irish neighborhood to Roman Catholic parents. He joined the Navy out of his senior year in 1965 and completed his high school education in the Navy. The oldest of many siblings, he was the first person in his family to enter military service.

  Initially Wiry was trained as a cook and served in this capacity during the unopposed Marine landing at Da Nang in 1965, but after his return, he volunteered for the newly forming Mobile Riverine Force to fight in the Mekong River Delta.

  Training for this force was very rigorous. The men trained as five-man crews, where everyone was cross-trained in all the weapons and everyone else’s specialties: in radio, in engine mechanics, in language and interrogation, in the tasks of the medic, and as steersmen. All were trained in counterinsurgency warfare, psychological warfare, hand-to-hand combat, and in the art of making and disarming booby traps. The climax of the training was the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course (SERE) during which the trainees were persuaded that they never wanted to be taken alive, by being starved, beaten, subjected to mock executions with a gun in the mouth, kept naked in cold rain, being held upside down in a barrel of water. The training was also effective instruction in methods of torture—this is how you do it.

  Wiry’s specialty was weapons and explosives. After training, the five-man crews were introduced to their fifty-foot assault support patrol boats designed for river warfare, specifically to remain afloat after the most violent mine explosion. As Wiry recalls it, the boats were heavily armed with twin.50-caliber machine guns in the bow, a swivel-mounted M-60 in the driver’s position, and a 20mm belt-fed cannon on the roof with an automatic grenade launcher. In the stern, the boat carried a.30-caliber machine gun and a belt-fed, hand-cranked 40mm grenade launcher (“Thumper”). In addition the crews carried on board an arsenal of individual weapons ranging from light antitank weapons (LAWs), M-16s and shotguns, to.38 Special Smith & Wessons in rib holsters.

  The crews went over in March 1967, to be joined by their boats about a month later. Wiry’s squadron of ten ASPBs were assigned to ------, on the ------ arm of the Mekong River as it forms its delta entering the South China Sea. The main arms of the river are connected by a maze of thousands of miles of natural and man-made waterways, which also extend away from the river in each direction as it flows south out of Cambodia. The area is the most productive rice-growing area in Vietnam and heavily populated along the banks of the waterways. It was a Viet Cong stronghold.

  “Our job was to go in first to find the enemy, keep them busy, until the troops were landed to flush them out…. The rivers were our homes. Helicopters came out to fly orders to us…. We’d beach and take prisoners—we’d do our own interrogations.” They patrolled in narrow waterways where the Viet Cong controlled both banks, and built dug-in, well-concealed ambush positions. Large command-detonated mines were placed underwater at the enemy’s leisure, sometimes creating such large explosions that the bow or stern of the fifty-foot boat would be blown sideways onto the bank, immobilizing the boat and killing some or all of the crew.

  “Every time we went out, five guys had to die—this was from four to six boats…. Out of the original fifty of us, seventeen are alive. Two or three are paraplegic and a couple others are in VAs all their life
[psychiatric casualties]…. One shot from a village and we took everybody out. We’d go in and wipe out a fucking village—completely.” Wiry served on two ASPBs in his time on riverboats in Vietnam. He is the sole survivor of the first crew, and only one other man is alive from the second. “Sometime we didn’t have no MedEvac, we carried our own dead and our own wounded…. In my nightmares I can’t stand the screaming.” The screaming is sometimes that of wounded crewmates and sometimes of prisoners being tortured.

  One particular incident figures strongly in Wiry’s life since Vietnam: flashbacks, intrusive memories, and intrusive thoughts related to the twelve-day period during the Tet Offensive. On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1968, two direct hits from rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) separated by a brief time ambushed his boat in a narrow waterway in the Delta. The first rocket killed the other men in the boat and the second blew Wiry onto the riverbank, where, wounded and unconscious, he was apparently left for dead by the enemy. The Navy also apparently left him for dead, because there was no effort to rescue him. He feels deeply betrayed and enraged by this abandonment, and has lost control of his rage subsequently in civilian life under conditions that seem to repeat this abandonment. During the next twelve nights he made his way on foot through enemy territory, hiding during the day, putting maggots on his infected wounds to clean them, and killing everyone who spotted him or had food to be taken.

  Other flashbacks and nightmares relate to the earlier deaths, one by one, of the crew he trained with. “One was an old-time bosun’s mate who had been in the Navy sixteen years. He got hit, a direct hit with an RPG. I was holding a dressing on his stomach and I could feel the blood squishing under my hand every time he took a breath…. One guy lost his arm. He was screaming and screaming, and I picked up his arm and threw it at him—‘Shut the fuck up!’