My Generation (26 page)

A
short time ago, while talking to a group of students at a college in Virginia, I was seized by a dismal insight. The subject of war literature had come up and I said that it occurred to me suddenly that at the age of fifty-one—perhaps a mellow age but one I refused to regard as being advanced or venerable—I had lived through three wars, in two of which, both as an officer and as an enlisted man in the Marine Corps, I had been an active participant. I reviewed the wars in reverse order. Although I had been spared the war in Vietnam, except as an outraged and frustrated onlooker, I had been involved in the war against the Chinese and the North Koreans as well as the Japanese in World War II (the Marines have in recent years specialized in Oriental foes); as a matter of curiosity I threw in the fact that World War I—that pointless and heartrending conflict—ended only seven years before my birth.

The Virginia springtime was peaceful and bright as I brooded in this fashion, but I wondered aloud on the illusory nature of this peace. Was it going to last? Was it really peace? The students appeared to be perplexed, maybe a little bored. I reflected that given the almost cyclical nature of these terrible conflicts in our century—the seemingly inexorable pattern of their recurrence—no one could imagine an experienced oddsmaker like Jimmy the Greek or, let us say, a sound actuarial mind regarding as anything but an outside chance the notion that war of serious magnitude involving
American forces would not happen again. Perhaps soon, certainly within your own lifetime, I concluded somberly to the students—but since on those fresh young faces I saw nothing but incomprehension, we talked of other matters. I had the feeling that the battles of Vietnam for them were as remote as Shiloh or Belleau Wood.

It was with the memory of this episode that I turned to Philip Caputo's remarkable personal account of the war in Vietnam,
A Rumor of War
, and experienced from the very first page a chilling sense of déjà vu. Caputo and I are separated in age by approximately twenty years, and although there were significant differences in his Marine Corps experience and mine, I was struck immediately by the similarities. Born like me into a middle-class family, Caputo joined the Marines in 1960 (as I did during World War II) for the glory and the adventure, for the need to “prove something—my courage, my toughness, my manhood.” In my own case, the Japanese were already our sworn enemy and it may be that patriotism inspired by war against a proven aggressor helped to motivate my choice; to wait and be drafted into the
Army
was unthinkable.

Caputo, enlisting in a time of nominal peace, concedes that “the patriotic tide of the Kennedy years” was an element for him in choosing the Marines (early in the book he bitterly, and correctly, speaks of John Kennedy as being “that most articulate and elegant mythmaker,” who was as responsible as anyone for the Vietnam enterprise and for his own final disillusionment), but Caputo and I shared, quite unequivocally, I think, the quest for war's heroic experience: “war, the ultimate adventure, the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.”

In the opening passages of his book, Caputo describes how directly from his classes in English literature he entered Marine Corps training at Quantico, where as an officer candidate he learned to slaughter people with rifles and knives and explosives or to blast them to pieces with rocket launchers. These passages could serve almost perfectly (excepting one or two trivial technological details) as the introduction to my own youthful military reminiscences. We went through virtually the same training ordeal, which in the Marine Corps remains unchanged to the present moment: the remorseless close-order drill hour after hour in the burning sun, the mental and physical abuse, the humiliations, the frequent sadism at the hands of drill sergeants, all the claustrophobic and terrifying insults to the spirit that can make an
outpost like Quantico or Parris Island one of the closest things in the free world to a concentration camp. (I have learned that revolutionary changes have taken place, but only in recent months.) Yet this preparation, a form of meat processing which I do not think it hyperbolic to call infernal (it has on too many occasions actually maimed or killed), is intended to create an esprit de corps, a sense of discipline and teamwork, above all a feeling of group invincibility which sets the Marine Corps apart from the other branches of the service. And that the training has been generally successful can be demonstrated by the fierce pride with which it stamps its survivors.

It is for me a touchstone of the Marine Corps' fatal glamour—that training nightmare—that there is no ex-Marine of my acquaintance, regardless of what direction he may have taken spiritually or politically after those callow gung-ho days, who does not view the training as a crucible out of which he emerged in some way more resilient, simply
braver
and better for the wear. Another measure of the success of that training is that it could transform Philip Caputo of Westchester, Illinois, from an ordinary, bright suburban lad with amorphous ambitions into a highly trained technician in the science of killing, who in March of 1965, during those palmy “defensive” or “expeditionary” days of the war, landed at Danang eager for the fight, for the excitement, for medals, anxious to prove himself as a Marine officer, above all drawn to war with “an unholy attraction” he could not repress. One of the indispensable features of Caputo's narrative is that he is never less than honest, sometimes relentlessly so, about his feelings concerning the thrill of warfare and the intoxication of combat. At least in the beginning, before the madness. After sixteen months of bloody skirmishes and the ravages of disease and a hostile environment, after the psychological and emotional attrition, Caputo—who had begun “this splendid little war” in the jaunty high spirits of Prince Hal—was very close to emotional and physical collapse, a “moral casualty,” convinced—and in 1966!—that the war was unwinnable and a disgrace to the flag under which he had fought to such a pitch of exhaustion.

There is a persuasive legitimacy in this hatred of a war when it is evoked by a man who has suffered its most horrible debauchments. But perhaps that is why we are equally persuaded by Caputo's insistence on a recognition that for many men, himself included, war and the confrontation with death can
produce an emotion—a commingled exultation and anguish—that verges on rapture. It is like a mighty drug; certainly it approaches the transcendental. After becoming a civilian, Caputo was engaged for a long time in the antiwar movement. But, he says, “I would never be able to hate the war with anything like the undiluted passion of my friends in the movement.” These friends, he implies, could never understand how for him the war “had been an experience as fascinating as it was repulsive, as exhilarating as it was sad, as tender as it was cruel.” Some of Caputo's troubled, searching meditations on the love and hate of war, on fear, and the ambivalent discord that warfare can create in the hearts of decent men, are among the most eloquent I have read in modern literature. And when in a blunter spirit he states, “Anyone who fought in Vietnam, if he is honest about himself, will have to admit he enjoyed the compelling attractiveness of combat,” he is saying something worthy of our concern, explaining as it does—at least in part—the existence of preparatory hellholes like Quantico and Parris Island, and perhaps of war itself.

Of course no war can be reckoned as good. Yet aside from the fact that for the Marines in the Pacific, World War II was at least a struggle against aggression, while the war in Vietnam was a vicious and self-serving intrusion, what finally differentiated the two conflicts from the point of view of the dirty foot soldier? Caputo's war and mine? As the earlier war recedes, and the Pacific battlefields become merely palm-shaded monuments in the remote ocean, there is a tendency to romanticize or to distort and forget. Bloody as we all know that conflict was, it becomes in memory cleaner and tidier—a John Wayne movie with most of the gore hosed away for the benefit of a PG-rated audience. The Marines in that war seem a little like Boy Scouts, impossibly decent. Could it be that the propinquity of the unspeakable horrors of Vietnam forces us to this more tasteful view? Yet it should be noted that World War II produced its own barbarities. As a young Marine lieutenant I knew a regular gunnery sergeant, a mortar specialist, who carried in his dungaree pocket two small shriveled dark objects about the size of peach pits. When I asked him what they were he told me they were “Jap's nuts.” I was struck nearly dumb with a queasy horror, but managed to ask him how he had obtained such a pair of souvenirs. Simple, he explained; he had removed them with a bayonet from an enemy corpse on Tarawa—that most hellish of battles—and had set them out at the end of a dock under the
blazing sun, where they quickly became dried like prunes. The sergeant was highly regarded in the company and I soon got used to seeing him fondle his keepsakes whenever he got nervous or pissed off, stroking them like worry beads.

I have been prompted to set down this vignette because of its resemblance to Caputo's Vietnam, where in a trance of comparable horror the young officer, still innocent and untried in battle, watches one of his Australian allies display a couple of mementos taken from the Vietcong—“two dried and bloodstained human ears.” With his tough fair-mindedness Caputo is quick to point out in a somewhat different context how ready the Vietcong and ARVN were to commit similar desecrations; and the cruelty of the French in the earlier Indochinese war is too well documented to dispute. Nonetheless, there is a continuity of events, a linkage of atrocity from war to war, that forces the conclusion that we are capable of demonstrating toward our Asian adversaries a ruthless inhumanity we would doubtless withhold from those less incomprehensibly different from us, less likened to animals, or simply less brown or yellow.

Racism was as important, ideologically, to the conduct of the Pacific war as racism was to the war in Vietnam. As a matter of fact, racism may have been more important to the Marines in the Pacific, since there was no such propagandistic cause as anti-Communism to impel those peach-cheeked youngsters to wage a war against an enemy caught up in the thrall of a fanatical, even suicidal nationalism. Pearl Harbor was a powerful incentive—as were the Japanese cruelties on Bataan—but still, these were not enough. Racism in warfare had already been initiated by the Germans, who, imputing to them a subhuman status, had begun to exterminate hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners of war (many gassed at Auschwitz) while in general treating their Anglo-Saxon foes with acceptable decency. As for the Japanese, it was enough for us to establish an anthropoid identity and thus, having classified them as apes, we found it easy to employ the flamethrower—that ghastly portable precursor of the napalm bomb used in Vietnam—and fry them in their bunkers and blockhouses. (“They sizzle like a bunch of roaches,” I remember being told by a flamethrowing corporal, who was delighted with the weapon.) There was also a normal amount of casual murder, torture of prisoners, and other crimes. (A friend of mine admitted to having slit the throats of two prisoners while he was a sergeant leading a patrol on
Guam, though he later expressed honest remorse for the deed. A retired colonel now, he lives in La Jolla, where he grows prize dahlias.)

Psychologically, however, the Pacific war differed from Vietnam in that the Marines had not only a clearly defined commitment, a sense of purpose, but a decisive, freewheeling (albeit at times badly flawed) strategy which almost never allowed them to feel that they had settled into a pointless morass. The Marines were too busily on the go, too happy at their lethal task, to dabble in atrocity. After Guadalcanal the Marine Corps was constantly on the offensive (a state most conducive, for the infantryman, to that sense of qualified bliss Caputo dwells on), in battle not against a guerrilla enemy maddeningly lurking in the jungles of a huge landmass but against soldiers immured for the most part within plainly visible fortifications on plainly visible islands where there were few or no civilians.

Behind the fighting men, too, was a perpetual surge of national pride. It was a madly popular war. It was a war which accomplished successfully what history demanded of the Marine Corps: the almost total annihilation of the enemy—more bliss. That is what fighting men are for, to kill, but to kill purposefully and with a reasonably precise goal in view—not as in Vietnam to produce mere bodies for General Westmoreland's computer. And certainly not to get fouled up with civilians.

Thus the Pacific war may be viewed in retrospect as a discussible moral enterprise. It was an awful war, one of the worst: in it one could experience battle fatigue, unconscionable misery and pain, insane fear, deprivation, loathsome disease, stupefying boredom, death, and mutilation in places with names like Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima—arguably the most satanic engagements in which men have been pitted against one another since the birth of warfare. But those who fought in the Pacific war, whatever the nature of their wounds or their diminishment, could emerge undefiled. What Philip Caputo demonstrates by contrast in his ruthless testament is how the war in Vietnam defiled even its most harmless and well-meaning participants. His is the chronicle of men fighting with great bravery but forever losing ground in a kind of perplexed, insidious lassitude—learning too late that they were suffocating in a moral swamp.

I have said that one of the most remarkable features of
A Rumor of War
is the fact that Caputo's bitter disaffection with the Vietnamese war and all it represented came when the war was in its infancy, 1966. Not that the war
was anything but corrupt to begin with; still, there is something almost phenomenal in Caputo's microcosmic sixteen-month odyssey, as if compressed within its brief framework was the whole foul and shameful drama of the conflict which was to drag on for many more years.