Deros Vietnam (4 page)

The best one was: “Lt. Col. Fraser is a thespian.” I laughed when I read it and then forgot about it, like everybody else. Little did we know that Sgt. Baker was copying these daily messages and showing them to Fraser. A few days later, Baker hauled us all into his highness's office.

The Lt. Col. was standing with his back to us, rehearsing his speech when we walked in. He spun around, pissed as all get out. Most days he looked like a ruffed grouse, all puffed up and preening, but today he was a raging bull.

“GIs, atten-hut!” he shouted at us. “Let me get right to the point. Some of you assholes have taken to scribbling slogans about me on the latrine walls. I thought it was funny at first.” He paused for effect, and his face moved from scarlet to crimson. “But it's crossed a line and will not be tolerated. Sgt. Baker, will you read the ‘messages' from the past few days?”

Baker took a deep breath. “Lt. Col. Fraser is in love with a nig-crow-filly-ache.” Everybody in the room started to giggle as we translated the word
necrophiliac
from South Carolinian into English. Baker continued: “Lt. Col. Fraser thinks Vietnamization is a shot you take for gonorrhea.”

We burst out laughing. Everybody except Murphy. He just stood there twirling his dog tags and smiling.

Fraser and Baker were righteously pissed off. Fraser was a deep crimson as he told us all, slowly and deliberately: “These slogans represent the ultimate in disrespect to the United States Army. No one is going to leave this office until somebody is man enough to own up to writing this bullshit. NO ONE! It's 1700 hours. We'll stay the whole fucking night if we have to.”

I felt like I did in third grade when Freddie Lambert had thrown a spitball at Sister Francesca Regina and we all had to stay after class. We'd still be standing at silent attention in Fraser's office if General McCaffery hadn't come by. Not wanting his commanding officer to think he'd lost control of his troops, Fraser immediately dismissed us.

The battle lines were drawn. On one side of the hall sat Sgt. Baker, Baker's pretty little Vietnamese typist Miss Tran, and Lt. Col. Fraser. On the other side a dozen 71Q20s behind our typewriters, armed with bad attitudes and a fierce determination to thwart the enemy. We pretended not to hear orders. We “misunderstood” everything from A to Z. We developed terminal writer's block. We put typos in Fraser's name and messed up news items he especially wanted to include. If the asshole wanted incompetence, we'd provide it in spades.

The final crisis began on August 19, one month to the day after Fraser's first ass-salt as we came to call his daily posting of Army regulations. We'd thrown a wild DEROS party the night before for Ward who was scheduled to fly out of Tan Son Nhut at 0800 hours the next morning. As we crawled into bed after gallons of beer and bales of reefer, Ward promised, or maybe threatened, to rouse us at the crack of dawn for a farewell drink. I was sure he was kidding.

When Ward actually appeared beside my pillow at five the next morning, I was too wasted to resist, so I obediently crawled out of bed and followed him down to the bar area of our hooch. I didn't expect anyone else would have been stupid enough to answer his call, but goddamned if the whole fucking crew wasn't there—sleepy-eyed, hung over, and mostly dressed in their skivvies. Before I knew it, we were all drinking Bloody Marys—hair of the dog—and toking up. It was like yesterday's party had never ended.

I'm not sure we ever actually said goodbye to Ward, because the next thing we knew, Lt. Col. Fraser's Vietnamese chauffeur, Mr. Trung, arrived with orders to drive us all to the office. It was past 9 a.m. and we were all two hours late for work! Mr. Trung waited outside the hooch while we laughed ourselves silly. Conroy, wearing only his boxers, walked out to the car and gave the driver the word.

“
Dites mon Colonel,
”
Conroy slobbered in his best high school French,
“que nous ne travaillons pas ce jour.”

I doubt if Mr. Trung understood a word, but he caught the drift and drove the empty car back to the office.

By early afternoon the dope was starting to wear off, we were out of booze and it was hot as hell, so we decided to wander by the office and cool off in its AC. We dressed, hopped a base shuttle bus, and headed in.

We must have looked a sight. Conroy had shaving cream in his hair, even though all of us were unshaved and wearing yesterday's dirty fatigues. Every one of us needed a haircut. Only Murphy appeared fit for duty, but he wasn't talking much.

The second we staggered into the office, Sgt. Baker ordered us across the hall. Fraser shouted at us to stand tall, but Baker did most of the talking. Speaking in his sweet South Carolinian accent, he informed us that we were a bunch of hippy jerk-off scumbags. His ass chewing was still in high gear when Fraser burst in and escalated the verbal war. He zeroed in on Murphy, shouting into his face.

“Never in my twenty-three years in the military have I met such a sorry bunch of mother-fuckers. You're a disgrace to your uniforms. You're not fit to be called soldiers. You're not fit to be members of Uncle Sam's team. You're not worthy of being wasted by the goddamn gooks! You're a sorry bunch of spoiled, pampered, goldbricking mama's boys. You make me want to puke. I'm going to see to it personally that every last one of you hand-jobs is court-martialed and fined for this morning's insubordination!”

Before the color in Fraser's cheeks had faded, Murphy began to speak quietly. His voice had a poetic rhythm to it, rising and falling as he introduced each point with a punctuated “with all due respect, sir.” At first, Baker and Fraser just stood there. We shared their confusion. No one had ever heard Murphy talk this way.

“With all due respect, sir, it was you who embarked on a sustained program of harassment through petty discipline like haircuts and shoe shinings.

“With all due respect, sir, you have never once set foot across the hall to …” Murphy's mouth kept moving but we couldn't hear the words because Fraser had grabbed him by his dog tags and was choking him. We could make out a couple more “with all due respect sirs” but we were all stunned by the intensity of Fraser's visible hatred. If he'd directed that venom at Sir Charles, we could have ended the war in a heartbeat.

The longer Murphy kept trying to talk, the madder Fraser got. He shoved his face right into Murphy's and pulled him even harder by the dog tags, accusing him of everything up to, and including, fornication with the base canine population. Murphy simply smiled.

For some reason, Sgt. Baker didn't say a goddamn thing. He knew, like the rest of us, that Murphy had whipped the Lt. Col.'s ass, had spoken the truth about what separated us enlisted men from the brass. As we were leaving Baker's office, he mumbled something almost apologetic about not thanking us for all our hard work.

Before long, Fraser stepped up his counterattack, adding military leaves and R&R plans to his list of targets. He made sure Murphy pulled guard duty every night. Everybody felt like we should do something. None of us had a clue what.

The “Dog Days” memo came down from Fraser on August 24. Nevin pulled it down from the hooch bulletin board and read it in disgust.

“ATTENTION ALL UNITS. From: Lt. Col. Walter Fraser, OIC. To: All IO, PIO and CI personnel. SUBJECT: BARRACKS HYGIENE. It has been brought to my attention that absences due to illness have been interfering with CI and PIO production. Captain Bonner has informed me that this is a result of the diseases being transmitted by the excessive numbers of dogs roaming the base area. Effective immediately, all personnel will commence with the orderly removal of these animals. Be advised that as of 0900 hours on 29 August, dogs not properly tagged and vaccinated are to be shot. Hooches and surrounding areas will be inspected to confirm that this directive has been carried out.”

“The slaughter of the innocents,” Conroy snorted from the rear of the hooch. Everybody laughed.

Except for Murphy. When I looked his way, he was standing by his cubicle, one hand around his dog tags, the other rubbing his chin.

Later that night, as I walked to the latrine to brush my teeth, I saw Murphy next to the Evac chapel with the dogs. I walked closer, but stopped dead in my tracks when I realized he was giving the dogs some sort of instructions. I eased myself closer to listen.

“Kilo, Lifer, Tripod, sit,” Murphy said. The dogs sat. “You guys are going to have to leave the hooch for a few weeks. I know you'll be lonesome and I'll miss you, but it's better this way. Tomorrow I'll walk you over to the bunker line by the bowling alley. You'll stay with my buddy Spec. 5 Davis. I'll come see you every day. But you must stay there. Got that?”

Those goddamn dogs barked right on cue. Murphy kneeled and placed his hands on their backs, like St. Francis blessing the beasts. I shook my head and walked on to the latrine.

Five days later we gathered up all the dogs, loaded them into one of those cattle cars the Army uses to haul GIs, and drove them to the firing range where, every four months, we would take “weapons familiarization,” an Army euphemism for target practice. They penned up the dogs and told us to fire our M-16s. I don't think any of us wanted to shoot those lousy dogs. But if we refused, Captain Bonner and his men would and we'd be deeper in the shit. The dogs were going to die anyway, regardless of who pulled the trigger.

I never really liked dogs. As a city kid I hadn't grown up around them much. But that one brief moment gave me a sense of how you could love them. The dogs wagged their tails and barked as if we were their masters. But then they seemed to smell the presence of death. Before we started shooting, they began to throw themselves against the concertina wire, and to wail, a piercing, high-pitched howl that sent shivers up my spine. And then, with nowhere to run, they turned around in circles two or three times and lay down, their eyes crying out for mercy. Then the M-16s took over.

Nevin was right. It really was the slaughter of the fucking innocents.

I can still hear the howling and wailing. I hadn't expected it to be all that bad. After all, they were just dogs. But it got worse and worse as the dogs kept on yelping and whining and crying. Some of them took forever to die. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion, even the tumbling of the M-16 bullets as they pierced the dogs' bodies and burst out their backs. There was blood and fur and dog shit all over the place. And there was a stench of puke from guys who couldn't stomach what they were doing. I did my part.

Murphy wasn't with us the day we shot the dogs. He told Bonner and Fraser he was sick and walked out of the office before they had time to give him a direct order. He wasn't at the hooch or infirmary after we got back. A note pinned to his footlocker from Spec. 5 Davis read: “Murphy, where the fuck are your dogs?”

Two days later Murphy tried to frag Lt. Col. Fraser. He waited for the old man to return to headquarters after lunch at the officer's club. He'd made sure that Mr. Trung wouldn't be in the car. Like a good soldier, Murphy was armed and ready.

The fucking grenade Murphy lobbed in front of Fraser's car didn't explode right away. That gave some sorry-ass private from Amarillo on guard duty time to pull a John Wayne imitation by diving on top of it.

“All you could see after that,” Murphy told me from inside his cell at LBJ, “was this poor s.o.b.'s dog tags bursting high into the sky and drifting back down in slow motion. Fuck.”

Murphy dropped his eyes. I wondered what he was thinking. That some poor, innocent kid from Texas was killed by “friendly fire” from a crazy-ass private from Minneapolis who was trying to kill his commanding officer?

“I knew that Fraser wouldn't stop unless somebody stopped him,” Murphy's voice broke the stillness of the Army stockade. “He isn't an educated man. He doesn't read. He doesn't care. He isn't like us or Colonel Brock. He understands only force. Brute force. The dogs proved it. I knew I had to get rid of him before he hurt somebody bad.”

As much as I wanted to feel sorry for Murphy, I wanted to get as far away as I could from him and LBJ and the Army and this goddamn war.

“Jesus Fucking Christ!” Murphy had started weeping. “This fucking place has ruined us all. Every last one of us.”

I hear the despair in Murphy's voice every night as I walk past the 45th Evac chapel on my way to the latrine. Last night I noticed three small graves next to the bridge. A carefully lettered inscription reads: “Kilo, Lifer, Tripod: The best dog soldiers the Army ever had.”

I do miss Private Dwayne Murphy. And I still miss Colonel Brock. I even miss Sgt. Baker now that he's been transferred up north. But mostly I feel sorry for myself and count down the 96 days I've got left in country under Colonel Fraser's command. That's right. Motherfucker finally made colonel. They promoted him for tackling Murphy after the attack.

To mark the occasion, I scrawled some graffiti on the walls of the latrine.

Brass Tact

Lieutenant Colonel Al Brock sat high atop the cavernous classroom, his senses on full alert. Directly overhead, two large tubes shaped like howitzers spewed recycled academic air, reminiscent of the Tan Son Nhut tarmac on a monsoon Monday. Like a good sentry, Brock observed the shaggy-haired, unkempt students taking their seats in worn wooden chairs with makeshift swing arms that doubled as miniature desktops. Backpacks cluttered their individual LZs. Muted voices delivered coded messages about meetings and Mary Jane and beins. Chalkboards stood at attention at 12 o'clock.

Brock glanced down at his copy of Professor Stuart Culver's
Advancing Public Relations
textbook, thumbing through chapters titled “Adjustment and Adaptation” and “Communication and Public Opinion.” These were empty titles to him, not strategies he could apply as an officer, a soldier. He caught a glimpse of Culver out of the corner of his eye, giving orders to his teaching assistants and preparing to start the day's lecture.