Deros Vietnam (12 page)

I flipped my butane lighter, grabbed a stack of Shortimer Sam-addressed letters and set them ablaze. I tossed them back inside the box and watched that catch fire, too.

The smoke rose ever so slowly, making lazy little clouds.
Words are made up of letters that are really symbols which are supposed to carry meaning,
I told myself. But the letters that make up the words don't stand for shit, really.

All we've really got,
I determined,
is our own experiences and interpretations.
Mine were still forming. Sam's were over.

Watching the smoke trying to climb into the humid Vietnamese night struck me as a metaphor, and I laughed because that's the kind of thing I'd just denounced by setting the box on fire. I listened for the sound of the Long Binh fire truck but instead picked up the strains of “We Gotta Get Outta This Place,” either in my head or out there in the great Southeast Asian silence.

Delta Lady

“Take a hit off this.” Specialist Four Charles handed me one of his tightly manicured marijuana cigarettes. I had no idea where he got these, but Charles always had a pack of joints on him, cellophane and all. It was by far the strongest dope I'd ever smoked.

We crept our way along the shortcut to our office, through brambles and brush and sometimes sandy terrain, passing the joint. It wasn't a long walk, and it was partly illuminated by lights from basketball and tennis courts. Every time I took this route to USARV headquarters, day or night, I tried to envision this place as the rubber plantation it once was. The Michelin tire guy was about the best I could come up with.

Before you knew it, we'd arrived at the big, bright sprawling “H.” Ours was the north building of the H, the two-storied metal one that looked out over most of Long Binh. There were more people out there than in my hometown. Most nights, we would sneak back into our office, put on our headphones, turn on our reel-to-reel tape decks and listen to music as we typed letters home to our wives and sweethearts and family.

Nights like those when we took that trek we were so goddamn high it was as if we weren't even in Vietnam. Those few special minutes transported us elsewhere—back to college or away on R&R—any fucking where but Vietnam. Sometimes, that sense of being someplace else lasted long into the night, since the music and the typing kept us aloft even as the dope wore off.

And some nights the dope never wore off.

“Procuring marijuana in Vietnam is easier than getting a beer at a keg party,” I remembered the JAG officer telling us during our in-country orientation. He looked like one of the Beach Boys—shiny blonde hair, toothy smile, square jaw, perfect features. I kept waiting for him to burst out in surfer tunes.

“In every camp in country,” he lectured to a roomful of us newbies, “a GI can get a joint within five minutes.”

I was seated near the front, so I started taking notes.

“The weed grows wild. It is cultivated by the Vietnamese, who rarely use it themselves,” he went on. “They understand marijuana's proclivity as a new cash crop.”

Even though I wasn't exactly sure what proclivity meant—it sounded kind of dirty—I burst into a grin. Hell, this was the best lecture ever, since we were finding out all we needed to know about the weed we already knew and loved.

Now the Beach Boy major pulled down a map of Vietnam with big Roman numerals on it and armed himself with a pointer. “With three harvests a year, the Mekong Delta is the marijuana bowl of Vietnam.” He thrust the tip of the pointer on IV Corps. “Recently, police moved in to destroy these crops because many of the local farmers were giving up rice and turning to cannabis.”

Momentary frowns.

“But the destruction urged—and supported—by the Army and United States federal agents hardly touches the supply.”

I looked around. All the guys were smiling the big shit-faced grins that can mean only one thing.

And then I was back at the typewriter, high as a fucking kite, writing to my old lady back home, complaining about how terribly awful Vietnam was and how I couldn't wait to get back home. The music had stopped.

Blue Ribbon

Before he was drafted, Stevie Potter was studying to be an Ag Extension agent. He wanted to follow in the muddy boot prints of his father and grandfather and help every Iowa farmer grow bigger and better crops.

Stevie was always more at home in a field or a barn. He excelled in FFA and 4-H and usually won the soybean competition at the Chickasaw County Fair.

Stevie lived for the feel of soil in his hands, the smell of dirt, the texture, the minerals, the possibility. The farm was his classroom, and he was passionate about spreading the gospel of growing things.

Maybe that's why, as the Army ramped up its pacification efforts in Southeast Asia, they sent Stevie into the villages first. The Vietnamese farmers welcomed him, and Stevie'd learned enough about growing lowland rice that he'd join them in the rice paddies during the harvest. That was a strange sight, Stevie, built like a fireplug and not much taller than the scrawny Vietnamese, using a knife to harvest the rice. He'd top that off by accompanying the farmers as they walked their water buffalo over the rice to take out its grain.

It wasn't Iowa, but as long as he was in Vietnam, Specialist Four Stevie Potter was the unofficial expert on Vietnamese farming and the Army's chief authority for telling the difference between farmers and guerillas.

“Look here,” he'd tell his fellow grunts, holding up his buddy Morgan's hand. “All you need to do is look at their hands. Soldiers aren't like farmers. They have one callus, right here, on the trigger finger,” he pointed to Morgan's finger. “See?

“Farmers, they've got hands just like me,” Stevie continued. “Fucking calluses everywhere.”

Stevie Potter and his farmer hands no longer work the fields of Vietnam. He, and they, are in Long Binh Jail. Stevie lost it the day the company headed south and the M113 tracks cut through some rice paddies. When the Vietnamese farmer got pissed and started hitting the lead track with his rake, the Troop Commander got out to calm him down and the old guy hit him, too.

Next thing you knew, the tracks were going sideways instead of single file, destroying everything this old peasant lived for since way before Uncle Sam ever got there. The long file of American ingenuity, sporting nicknames like
Fortunate Son, Easy Rider, Babysan, Spooky,
and
Boonie Rat,
steamrolled side by side through the old peasant's fields.

Little Stevie Potter walked up to the TC, pulled out a M1911A1 .45 automatic pistol and pointed it in his face. Stevie's callused, farm boy's hands caught on the trigger and the gun kept shooting, the TC's brains joining the other seeds in the soil's rice seedbeds, awaiting the next harvest.

The Art of War

Most nights I lie awake, imagining I'm hiding in a bunker. It's pitch dark and so fucking quiet that I can hear the heat.

Without warning, sparks fly, weapons erupt, and waves of Viet Cong attack my position. I shit my pants as they come full speed, AK-47s blasting, bayonets yearning for my flesh. My hands freeze, and I can't pull the trigger. I hear voices shouting, cursing, begging me to shoot.

“Pussy! Coward! Traitor!” they scream. But I recoil. Torrents of blood breach the bunker. It runs hot and smells of iron and copper. It's above my head, and I'm choking until I finally roll out of the bunker somehow. It's so dark that I can't see my body, but I reach down with my right hand and discover my leg is gone. My other hand is shattered in pieces, and my senses are overcome by the scent of my own blood, at first sweet and then fouler, rotten.

My flesh is ripped by AK-47 rounds and punctured by bayonets. I'm falling, tumbling, crying, pissing, moaning
—
seeing the face of the colonel's driver or the post barber looking down on me, a knife in his mouth, a black headband on top of his head. He's smiling malevolently as he begins to slice my ears and then my eyes and.…

“You still writin' that shit?” Edwards asked. I jump, and then pretend I'm adjusting my BVDs so he doesn't think he's startled me.

“Yes, sergeant, I'm still writing this.…” I respond matter-of-factly.

“Son, when are you gonna put down that pen and join this man's Army?” Edwards loved playing this game with me, but I wasn't rising to the bait. We both knew what he was really interested in was learning why I write in the first place.

“Didn't you hear me, boy?” he bellowed like a drill sergeant. “Time's a wastin' and you best get your college-educated head out of your ass.”

I sighed. Edwards and I were the same age, the same build, the same background—hell, we were damn near the same person, except that while I matriculated at Kenyon College, he was washing cars, getting married, joining the Army and doing tours in Germany and I Corps. Vietnam, more than the lives we lived in the USA, had finally brought us together.

“Can we not play this game just now?” There was a slight begging in my voice which surprised and disappointed me. “I've told you a hundred times before—I write because it helps me to deal with this shit, to get by. It's like my therapy.” I paused. “It's like you frequenting the whores at Cholon.” I made my pretend Chinaman face. “Same same.”

“Can I help it if the slopes find me irresistible?” Edwards said turning his back and twisting his arms around his neck, making it look as if someone was lustily embracing him. Fucking guy had to be double-jointed. I had to admit it was one of his funnier moves.

“What they find attractive is your MPC.” I held out some Army script in his direction. “If you're out of money, you don't get no honey.” I pulled the bill back from his hands.

“Okay, let me get this straight.” Edwards sat down on the edge of my bunk. “I fight the enemy, put my ass on the line, and sign my life away to Uncle Sam while you smoke dope, read books, and write in your journals. So, you're the model soldier and I'm the fuck up?”

That was so good I had to write it down. I figured Edwards would be pissed if I quoted him verbatim, so I waited until our hooch maid Bau Mau walked by because I knew he'd forget about me and start flirting with her. I needed to get his words down when I could because Edwards was the only guy in our office of college grads and would-be journalists who'd actually seen any combat. In my stories, I changed his name to Sergeant Cannon because I thought it was a funny pun.

As I watched him teasing Bau Mau, I kept thinking that we were both acting our parts—me the innocent, wet-behind-the-ears college boy and Edwards the grizzled, uneducated combat soldier. He was Aldo Ray and John Wayne; I was Montgomery Clift and James Dean.

“Just what are you doing, Specialist?” His inflection triggered a change in our exchange. For the moment, Edwards had resumed his role as the higher ranking NCO.

I didn't answer.

“Spec. 5 Bailey, I asked you a question.”

“Yes, Sergeant Edwards, I heard your question,” I replied in a soldierly fashion. “And I do not have an answer. Sir.” I added the “sir” to piss him off. It worked.

“Look at these stripes, Specialist,” he pointed to his sergeant's insignia. “I work for a goddamn living, son. Don't ever call me sir!” He was smiling again.

“And if you're going to write down something about me,” he winked, “make sure to start with how Vietnamese women find me irresistible.”

Edwards got up from my bunk and started to walk out of my cubicle. He stopped abruptly, wound his arms back around his neck and shoulders, and started cooing in a pretend Vietnamese woman's voice. “Ooh, sar jen Edwarz, you veery veery big and strong …oooh, sar jen …”

As Edwards exited the hooch, I wrote down his earlier comments:
“I fight the enemy, put my ass on the line, and sign my life away to Uncle Sam while you smoke dope, read books, and write in your journals. So, you're the model soldier and I'm the fuck up?”

* * *

I was telling Edwards the truth about my writing, sort of. The war was so astoundingly cruel and surreal that I relied on writing to center me, if that was even possible in Vietnam. Otherwise, I'd be constantly reminded of what a shit show this place was. Over time, I'd grow numb like everybody else, eventually not batting an eye when we took
Chieu Hois
out for one-way chopper rides, fudged on the numbers of KIAs, or didn't say squat about the fragging epidemic at Long Binh and all over fucking Vietnam. Shit, if we couldn't find and kill the Viet Cong, we'd kill ourselves.

Yeah, I needed my writing more than it needed me. At times, I'd just sit back and take it all in, seeing things as if I were some character in a Fellini movie. I mentioned that to my buddy Ward when we were having a beer at the 90
^th
Replacement Battalion last week, and kept seeing this same GI walk by with a live snake coiled around his neck.

“Jesus, will you look at that,” I nudged Ward when snake man passed us for about the hundredth time. “That shit is right out of a Fellini movie.”

Ward had no idea what I was talking about.

“I've never seen a movie about cats,” the flat-footed E-4 from Buffalo, New York replied, “but that fucking snake is scary.”

The writer in me mined film analogies for all they were worth. Mainly because they were true. Not a day in Vietnam went by when you didn't hear somebody talk about a GI “pulling a John Wayne” or “pretending to be Audie Murphy.” For sure we all knew we were smack dab in the middle of the ultimate Vincent Price horror movie.

Adding an even more bizarre aspect to this was the fact that a lot of nights we'd blow a number, grab our lawn chairs (yes, lawn chairs in Vietnam) and head over to watch an outdoor movie. We'd sit out in the Southeast Asian night, scores of America's finest, drunk and stoned, watching
MASH, I Never Sang for My Father, The Baby Maker, Easy Rider
and whatever other celluloid the brass had decided might help build morale. When the credits rolled and the lights came up, it was like getting a two-by-four upside your head—you're not at a drive-in back home trying to unhook Nancy's bra, numbskull; you're in fucking Vietnam with umpteen days to go.