The Ragged Edge of the World (2 page)

Those living memories are testament to the quixotic priorities of the unconscious. Though it proceeds in unknowable ways, the unconscious is no fool. Perhaps these powerful memories of past travels are also its missives, delivering a message about what we have lost and are losing.

Before diving into the ragged edge, perhaps I should say a few words about the events that launched me on my travels. My first trip to Vietnam was a turning point in my life. I left for Southeast Asia only a few weeks after receiving an honorable discharge from the Navy. I should have been elated, but I was twenty-four and a walking monument to self-doubt.

To this day I remember those months before my departure as a low-water mark for my self-confidence. This is saying something given my subsequent career choice of journalism and writing, an occupation that delivers grievous injury to one's self-esteem with tidal regularity. (Happily, nothing that has happened to me since then has come close to that nadir.) I felt that I had wasted my college education, an opinion that I'm sure would have been endorsed enthusiastically by a wide range of Yale professors. I'd gone AWOL on a once-promising athletic career as a wrestler; I had uncertainties about my own position on the war; and I had serious qualms about whether I could deliver on my promise to do an investigation of fragging, which was the reason I was heading to Vietnam.

Fragging (as I later wrote) was a macabre ritual of the Vietnam War in which soldiers tried to blow up or otherwise kill their superior officers. It occurs in all wars, but fragging became pandemic in Vietnam, increasing dramatically even in the relatively safe rear echelons as American involvement in the fighting wound down. When I'd first heard about it from friends who'd returned from the war, I couldn't stop thinking about the notion of troops turning on their own officers. What did it mean? I was highly motivated to find out, as the phenomenon had received scant attention in the press. More important, a couple of years earlier I'd been well on my way to becoming one of those officers myself.

Perhaps fragging was the agon I'd been looking for, an event that would help me understand and integrate the various tensions of the war. I needed to know whether the misgivings that led me to leave the military and oppose the war were justifiable or merely convenient. An extraordinary encounter in Vietnam provided a spectacularly direct answer to this last question, and the journey itself changed my life.

I had an odd military history, to say the least. I had competed for and had been offered congressional appointments to all of the academies. My congressman urged me to choose West Point, because that year was another constituent's last shot at Annapolis. I agreed, but then ended up going to Yale on an NROTC scholarship.

Vietnam was only beginning to bubble to the surface as an issue when I entered college in the fall of 1965. Even when I was a sophomore, the biggest demonstrations were in favor of the war. The conflict escalated very quickly, however, and by the end of 1967, the antiwar movement was in full swing. Many fellow Elis began to develop a previously unnoticed interest in teaching, or started limping from long-forgotten injuries, or, in the case of George W. Bush (who was a class ahead of me), looked ahead to the possibility of war with Mexico and joined the Texas Air National Guard.

At that point, my own problems with the military were more personal. While I felt—and still do—that fighting for the defense of the country or one's family was the obligation of every able citizen, I had not really thought through the implications of the idea of unquestioning obedience. If a legitimate superior ordered you to kill someone in an authorized military action, it was your duty to carry out that order, regardless of your private opinion about whether the action was legitimate or the enemy posed a genuine threat.

But what if the war in question was undeclared, and what if U.S. involvement was based on a cascade of hypothetical events deriving from an unproven theory? Vietnam vividly framed this problem. No one had ever argued that Viet Cong were going to attack the United States, and some of us wanted something more convincing than the domino theory if we were going to accept orders to kill people.

I began trying to get out of the NROTC beginning in my sophomore year—not an easy task, given that I was on scholarship and officially in the Navy reserves. After I did very well in Marine training, however, the Navy officers in the unit apparently decided I wasn't a goldbrick and supported my efforts. I gave up my scholarship and was released from the unit. I was not, however, released from the Navy reserves. A few weeks later I got a letter from the Navy calling me up to active duty.

I immediately filed for discharge as a conscientious objector.

I insisted on doing this straighforwardly, without citing pacifism or other standard arguments used by conscientious objectors. In my statement I did not invoke religious prohibitions or even a repudiation of all wars. I wrote that, while I believed in the use of force to defend country and family, I also believed that life was sacred, and that I could not kill someone I did not know because of some abstract policy objective.

For reasons never explained, the Navy decided to grant me an honorable discharge (though it did not come about until after I graduated from college). Almost immediately thereafter I began thinking about going to Vietnam, wanting to see for myself whether my reservations about the war were justified. And so, with a document that allowed me to go to Vietnam unarmed, I set about putting myself in harm's way.

This was not easy. I was twenty-four, unpublished and completely broke. A friend told me about an organization called the Fund for Investigative Journalism, which had provided the money for Seymour Hersh's reporting on the My Lai massacre. I sent a letter to the fund and got a reply offering support if I had a commission. I managed to talk Norman Cousins of the
Saturday Review
into assigning me an article. I was going.

I arrived in Saigon with the remnants of giardia and other tropical bugs I'd picked up in Tahiti—more about that later—and I was continually drenched in sweat. I found a room at a modest hotel, which at that point was little more than a cathouse (the maids would come in to clean the room in the morning, then casually linger at the end of the bed and bat their eyes), but it was cheap.

Armed with a letter from the
Saturday Review
and another assignment I'd picked up from the
Overseas Weekly
(you needed two commissions to get accredited as a freelancer), I donned a lightweight suit and set off to get credentials from the Vietnamese and the American Military Activities Command Vietnam (MAVC). Still racked with fever, I looked within seconds of leaving the hotel as though I'd been thrown into a swimming pool. Although I got curious stares, I did get my credentials.

One piece of good fortune was an introduction to Kevin Buckley, then the
Newsweek
bureau chief. Kevin is one of the great raconteurs, and in 1971 his house was the wartime version of a salon. He generously included me in a lot of his gatherings, where drunken correspondents would challenge me with bewildering statements like, “You can't seriously believe that the U.S. can maintain its security commitments with less than five carrier groups, can you?” I regularly staggered back to my hotel well after curfew. The eye-batting maids became a de facto wake-up service, since they would come into the room whether I answered the door or not.

At that point Saigon was a wide-open city. Everybody knew the war was as good as lost, and that knowledge played out in different ways. Some were looking for a big score. I once hitched a ride in a rickshaw with two sergeants who were checking up on their investments in brothels and bars.

I was new to reporting and looked ridiculously young. I don't think that any of the great correspondents who trooped through Saigon paid me the slightest attention, but this turned out to be a tremendous asset. I was there to report a story that the military did not want to see reported, but they did not take me seriously enough to stop me. Moreover, since I was in Vietnam only for this assignment, once I got the story I did not care whether I was eventually thrown out of the country.

I discovered that my inexperience was usefully disarming. When I was given the name of a man jailed in Long Binh Stockade after being convicted of attempting to kill his superior officer, I simply showed up at the stockade (nicknamed LBJ) and asked to visit him. The Marine guard at the gate assumed I was a lawyer, took my credentials (which clearly identified me as a journalist), and had me brought to the man's cell. There, the young man told me the whole story of his attempt to kill his officer—in this case because the officer had volunteered the unit for patrol duty that deprived them of a hot shower! All the while I feared that the guard would actually read my identification more carefully and that I'd end up sharing a cell with my easily riled new buddy.

I did have enough sense to realize that once I started interviewing judge advocates general (JAG) prosecutors, shrinks and other officers, word would get out about what I was up to. When that happened, the MACV would soon tighten the leash. Consequently, I saved those interviews for the very end and spent most of my first few weeks talking to enlisted men.

If there was one overwhelming impression left by Vietnam, it was the randomness of the violence and the role of luck in one's survival. You might be the best-prepared soldier on earth, but if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time your number was up. Of the raft of Vietnam movies that followed the war,
The Deer Hunter,
whose central metaphor was Russian roulette, captured this best.

It was at Camp Eagle that I had the first of my spooky encounters. I had heard that a West Point-educated captain (whom I called Burke in the article) had survived a fragging attempt, and I asked to speak with him. The interview turned out to be one of the central stories of my article. The attack on the captain had grown out of racial tensions and his attempts to crack down on drug use in his unit. (One of the pithier quotes that came out of the investigation of this attack was a black soldier's comment to Burke before the fragging: “Why should I be here in Vietnam fighting a white man's war killing Vietnamese when I should be back in the States fighting a black man's war killing whites?”) By all accounts the captain was a responsible officer who did not subject his men to needless risks at this late date in the war. For this reason, his story perfectly illustrated the bizarre factors that contributed to rear-echelon fraggings in Vietnam.

During the encounter I discovered things about Burke that made the interview even more compelling for me. Captain Burke had graduated with the class of 1969 at West Point. He had also wrestled varsity for the military academy, and had in fact wrestled against Yale. I felt as though I were meeting some version of my destiny had I not decided against West Point at the last minute.

In the bizarre, invisible world of quantum mechanics a particle has many equally valid destinies until some event channels it along a particular path. That's how I felt meeting Burke. Both of us were in Vietnam, but while he had felt the full brunt of the war, I had the luxury of examining it as a journalist.

Given my history, I suppose it makes sense that going to Vietnam would raise the probabilities of encounters charged with this quantum irony. The next one was even more pointed. It took place when I flew down to Quang Nai province to visit the 11th Brigade at firebase Colt 45, the last American fighting force still actively engaging the enemy.

The brigade, part of the Americal Division, lives in infamy as the perpetrator of the My Lai massacre. I caught a ride to the base with a Lieutenant Finnegan, who was piloting a two-man LOACH (a Hughes light observation helicopter). The lieutenant demonstrated some aerobatic tricks on the way out, which I might have enjoyed more were it not for the possibility that his showmanship might catch the attention of some bored North Vietnamese with antiaircraft capability.