If I Die in a Combat Zone (20 page)

“I didn’t quite understand what you said,” he said. “Say it again.”

“I mean,” I said, “that courage is a certain kind of preserving.”

“Just what sort of preserving?”

“The preserving of the opinion produced by law through education about what—and what sort of thing—is terrible …”

PLATO,
The Republic

Book IV, 429b-429c

Major Callicles looked like an ex-light-heavy weight champ. He had a head like a flattened 105 round, a thick, brown neck, bristling stalks of hair, bloodshot eyes, a disdain for pansies. He was the battalion executive officer—second in command. He bragged that he’d started out as an NCO, thrived on the discipline, and gone on to become an officer, avoiding West Point and doing it the hard way.

Barrel-chested—staves and beer and all—he was a last but defiant champion of single-minded, hard-boiled militarism. He listed his hates in precise order—moustaches, prostitution, pot, and sideburns. And since all four were either tacitly or explicitly permitted in Vietnam, he harbored a necessarily silent hate for the new, insidious liberality infecting his army.

Moustaches, while authorized by new regulations, were quickly outlawed. It was rumored he carried a dull and bloody razor to be used on even a wisp of overnight hair.

Next was prostitution. It was an all-consuming outrage. A whorehouse flourished at the very foot of LZ Gator, the battalion firebase, and he muttered he would get rid of it.

He pursued pot and sideburns like an FBI agent; he prosecuted violators with inquisitorial zeal.

“Guts,” he would mutter. “This army needs guts. GI Joe’s turned into a pansy. O’Brien, you show me a soldier with guts, and you can have this job.” He hunched his shoulders, stood stiff-legged, held a cigarette like a pencil, and turned to look at me out of one eye, scowling and squinting.

Three months after Major Callicles took charge,
Time
and
Newsweek
and every other scrap of paper blowing into Vietnam heralded the My Lai massacre.

The massacre happened in March of 1968. That was one year before I’d arrived in Vietnam; over a year and a half before Callicles took over the executive officer’s job; long before our battalion had taken over the Pinkville—My Lai area of operations from Lieutenant Calley’s Eleventh Brigade. But Major Callicles stuffed the burden of My Lai into his own soul. He lost sleep. He lost interest in pot and prostitutes, and his thick, brown face became lined with red veins hemorrhaging with the pain of My Lai. Like the best defense attorney, he assumed the burden of defending and justifying and denying—all in one broad, contradictory stroke.

At first he blamed the press: “Christ, those rags—you don’t really believe that crap? Jesus, wake up, O’Brien! You got to learn the economics of this thing. These goddamn slick rags got to sell their crap, right? So they just add together the two big things in this hippie culture: People like scandal and people hate the military, not knowing what’s good for them. It’s knee jerk. So they look around and choose My Lai 4—hell, it happened over a year ago, it’s dead—and they crank up their yellow journalism machine; they sell a million
Times
and
Newsweeks
and the advertisers kick in and the army’s the loser—everybody else is salivating and collecting dollars.”

But for Callicles it was more than an outrage, it was a direct and personal blow. “Christ, O’Brien, I’m one of hundreds of executive officers in the Nam. This battalion is one of hundreds. And they got to pick on us. There’s a billion stinking My Lai 4s, and they put the finger on us.”

When Reuters, AP, CBS, ABC, UPI, and NBC flew in, Callicles took them into his little office and repeated the same grimacing, one-bloodshot-eye-in-the-face, shotgun argument he perfected with us privately. “Look, I thought the press was supposed to be
liberal—liberal
. Maybe I’m no liberal, but I know something about it. I never went to college, but I can read, and I know the press isn’t supposed to try a man in print. That’s what we got juries for, you know, they do the trying, it’s the law. That’s
liberal
, isn’t it? Just be quiet one minute—isn’t that what the liberals say? You don’t insinuate guilt until you’re in the courthouse and everyone’s got evidence ready and there’s a judge and a jury and a court reporter to take it all down.”

A reporter said they were just printing the allegations of other soldiers, former GIs.

“Hell, you don’t believe
them
? Some pipsqueak squeals, and everyone runs to make a national scandal. We’re trying to win a war here, and, Jesus, what the hell do you think war is? Don’t you think some civilians get killed? You ever been to My Lai? Well, I’ll tell you, those
civilians—you
call them civilians—they kill American GIs. They plant mines and spy and snipe and kill us. Sure, you all print color pictures of dead little boys, but the live ones—take pictures of the live ones digging holes for mines.”

A reporter asked if there isn’t a distinction between killing people you know to be the enemy and slaying one hundred people when no one is shooting and when you can’t distinguish the mine-planters from the innocent.

“Now, look here, damn it, the distinction is between war and peace,” Callicles said. “This here is war. You know about war? What you do is kill. The bomber pilot fries some civilians—he doesn’t see it maybe, but he damn well knows it. Sure, so he just flies out and drops his load and flies back, gets a beer, and sees a movie.

“Just answer this: Where’s the war in which civilians come out on top? Show me one. You can’t, and the reason is that war’s brutal—civilians just suffer through it. They’re like unarmed soldiers—they’re dumb and they die; they’re smart, they run, they hide, then they live.” Callicles pushed the words like moist worms through his teeth.

A reporter asked if there isn’t a distinction between the unintentional slaying of civilians from the air, when there’s no way to discriminate, and the willful shooting of individual human beings—one by one, person to person, five yards away, taking
aim
at a ditch full of unarmed, desperate people.

Callicles snorted and told the reporter to ask the dead people about the distinction.

Maybe the dead people don’t see the difference, the reporter said, but what about the law. Shouldn’t guilt have something to do with intentionality?

“Come on,” Callicles said. “I’ll take you on out there. You judge for yourself. This is a war, and My Lai is where the enemy lives—you can see for yourself.”

Major Callicles herded groups of reporters out to My Lai 4, flying them over the hamlet and giving them a peek at the dank, evil-looking place: white mounds showing the gravesites; a cluster of huts that seem to have been there a thousand years, identical in squalor and with a kind of permanence that makes them just a fixture of the land; utterly lifeless; thick, dark green splotches where the land is low; yellow-brown craters where artillery rounds have hit. Even in stark mid-morning daylight the place looks a monotonous gray from the air. Your eyes can stay on the place for only seconds; then you look away to the east, where the sea is so much more appealing.

The My Lai scandal did not go away. Major Callicles was charged with heading a task force to secure the village and prepare the way for General Peers, Lieutenant Calley, and the investigative team. He attacked the job of blowing mines and marking out safe paths and digging defensive positions. Haunted by what he was doing, he began to drink heavier than ever, his eyes shifted from detail to detail, searching out stability in his world; other times he glared into dead space.

The investigation ended, and Major Callicles was awarded a letter of commendation. But he read it and gave a sly grin and tossed it into a pile of wastepaper. He spent more time than anyone at the officers’ club on LZ Gator, playing poker—winning and losing big pots of military currency—and drinking. Afterward he came down to his office and debated with us.

“What do people want when they send men to fight out there?” he would ask, growling.

“To search out and destroy the enemy.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know that. But what do they want when the enemy is ten years old and has big tits—women and children, you know. What then? What if
they’re
the enemy?”

“Well, you kill them or you capture them. But you only do that when they’re engaged in combat, sir. It’s a civil war, in part, and even if some of them come down from North Vietnam, they look like the South Vietnamese. So you’ve got to assume—”

“Assume, bullshit! When you go into My Lai you assume the
worst
. When you go into My Lai, shit, you know—you assume—that they’re all VC. Ol’ Charlie with big tits and nice innocent, childlike eyes. Damn it, they’re all VC, you should know that. You might own a diploma, for Christ’s sake, but does that mean you can’t trust your own eyes and not some lousy book? You’ve been there, for Christ’s sake!”

“But, sir, the law says killing civilians is wrong. We’re taught that, even by the army, for God’s sake.”

“Of course killing civilians is wrong. But those so-called civilians are killers. Female warriors. Poppa-san out in the paddy spying.”

“But with that philosophy, you’d have to waste all the civilians in Vietnam, everyone. I mean, how do you know when this Poppa-san or that Poppa-san is VC? They look alike. They all dress in black pajamas and work in the paddies and sell us Cokes. Hell, we might as well go down into Nouc Mau, the little village down by the gate, and just kill them all.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re exaggerating the argument.”

“Reductio ad absurdum. Logical extension, sir.”

“Bullshit! Nouc Mau sure as hell isn’t My Lai 4, you know that. It isn’t a goddamn minefield; kids in Nouc Mau don’t go around setting up booby traps and spying on us.”

“Now, that’s quite an assumption. Who knows? The whole town might be VC. We’d be the last to know it. But the point is, sir, we can’t say that those two-year-old kids were planting mines out at My Lai. Can’t prove that
all
those dead women were spying on Lieutenant Calley. Go ahead, how do you prove it? Or don’t you have to?”

“Look here,” Callicles said, “can’t you see we’re over here trying to win a war? Is that so goddamn hard to understand, just trying to win a war and go home? I want to go home, you want to go home, General Abrams wants to get his ass back to the world. But, Jesus, with the communists doing things like at Hue—killing and doing extortion, stealing rice and taxing the shit out of everyone, when they’re
living
in Pinkville—really living there, eating and sleeping and making mines—Christ, then you got to go after them. Show me a war …”

With the My Lai investigation complete, Major Callicles turned back to whores and dope smokers and malingerers, apparently with the hope of turning the army back toward World War II professionalism. “Professionalism,” at least, was the word he used most. But what he wanted and what he furiously went after was a return to the old order. Callicles’s suspicion and assumption, in the end, was that the massacre at My Lai may have in fact happened just as
Newsweek
reported it, but that dope and whores and long hair—all suggesting the collapse of discipline—were responsible. It conflicted with his other arguments, of course, but it was his belief. So he crusaded.

He assigned officers and NCOs to the firebase’s gates, and every jeep entering LZ Gator was searched for marihuana. Sometimes he stood out in the rain, spending hours peering into gas tanks and under seat cushions. “You don’t smoke dope, do you, troop?”

“No, sir!”

“You’d tell me if there’s dope in this vehicle, right?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Okay. But I’ll check, just to make sure some goddamn VC didn’t sneak some dope onto this vehicle. Get out.”

Long lines, sometimes stretching out fifty yards, waited while Major Callicles did his duty.

At night he would roam the firebase. He would check the perimeter bunkers and the barracks, go to the officers’ club and drink and gamble, and make another round.

One evening a medic shot himself in the foot. He’d been scheduled to go to the field the next day, and it was fair to guess it had been intentional. His friends carried him into the medic’s hootch and laid him out, and in thirty seconds Major Callicles was there.

“You bastard, Tully, you goddamn coward, you shot your ass, didn’t you, you dirty, sneaky little shit. You’re a coward. Well, goddamn it, you little shit, I’m reading your goddamn rights to you right now while you’re busy bleeding the pus and shit out, and you’d better tell me you understand what’s going on.” He snapped out a book and read Tully’s rights to silence and attorney and jammed the book back into his pocket and leaned over the table and glared into Tully’s face. “All right, you fuckin’ coward, you understand? I’m gonna question you while you’re bleedin’ an’ you don’t have to answer, but you sure as hell better answer, understand?”

“I understand,” Tully whined. The medics were cutting off his boot.

“Goddamn it, Tully, you know who the hell you’re talkin’ to, goddamn it, you little shit? This is Major Callicles, an’ you call Major Callicles ‘Sir,’ you understand?”

“Yes, sir, Jesus, it hurts, sir!”

“Shit, I’d like to bite the bloody little stump! What the fuck you expect, you little shit? You shoot yourself, you point an M-16 and blow off your toe ’cause you’re afraid to go out there and help guys getting shot up by Charlie, an’ you bitch ’cause it hurts. Aw, it hurts! Shit. Okay, Tully. Now, did you shoot yourself? You shot your goddamn self, didn’t you?”

“God, it hurts! I was just cleaning it. It hurts, Jesus, sir, I’d just—”