The Ragged Edge of the World (3 page)

The scene at the firebase was surreal. The Kit Carson scouts had found a “hot spot,” meaning someone had shot at the GIs, and the officers were tremendously excited about the possibility of some real action. For the ambitious officer, combat experience was a prerequisite for rapid advancement. One major even effused, “Some boys are going to die tomorrow!”

The idea of an assault was less than wildly popular with the troops. Reactions ranged from fatalism to near rebellion. By this point no grunt wanted to be the last GI to die in Vietnam. Indeed, some soldiers told me outright that they had been planning to frag one particular officer because of his gung-ho attitude. (The same man had been pointed out to me earlier by the commanders as an exemplar of a good officer.)

I spent the afternoon getting opinions from both the officers and the troops, and what I discovered was one of the key factors in Vietnam's epidemic of fragging: The officers and the grunts lived in entirely different worlds, while the lifer sergeants who traditionally mediated between the two were as alienated from the troops as the officers were. If there was a lesson in this and, indeed, in my investigation of the demoralization of the Army as a whole, it was that troop morale is crucial for success in war. If political leaders can't credibly explain to soldiers why they are fighting, they will fight unwillingly and, ultimately, turn against their own.

Late that afternoon one of the officers asked me if I'd like to go along on the assault the next morning. I thought about the offer for a second. Though it wasn't technically relevant to my story, I'd also come to Vietnam to see what the war was really like—so I said, “Why not?” Then he asked whether I wanted a rifle.

My reaction must have mystified the group. Involuntarily, I burst out laughing. Once again I was being confronted with the quantum irony of my long journey to this spot at this time in Vietnam. Of all the possibilities of killing Vietnamese—as an infantry officer, as a pilot in the Navy, or as an enlisted man shelling them from a ship or gunboat—the one I hadn't considered was the possibility that I might have the chance to shoot one as a noncombatant reporter who had just gotten an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector.

I thanked the officer for his thoughtfulness but politely declined. Apart from my own history, I was concerned that if reporters started carrying guns, it would only reinforce the suspicion that we were all spies, and it would make every reporter fair game in the conflict. I never got the chance to regret that decision because in the end, the higher-ups decided to send the ARVN (South Vietnamese) troops on this mission and hold back the American soldiers.

By the time I got back to Saigon, the Army had figured out that I was onto a story that might prove embarrassing (by then I had spoken with psychologists and prosecutors as well as victims and perpetrators), and I was greeted with a welter of messages from press information representatives who wanted to “help” me with my reporting. I decided it might be best to gather my thoughts elsewhere, and so I made plans to head to Cambodia.

The night before I left, I had a drunken dinner with Kevin Buckley and a few others. Nick Profit (who died in 2006) was then just beginning his distinguished career as a war correspondent and urged me to “write the truth.” If such advice now sounds trite, it was profoundly moving in the circumstances, and it's counsel I've never forgotten. Wobbling back to the hotel, again after curfew, I ran into the editor of the
Overseas Weekly,
who immediately asked about the piece I'd promised him. I was astonished that he actually expected something, but said I'd give him an article before I left.

Back at the hotel I made the unfortunate discovery that I could write while drunk. I worked all night and was stone sober by the time I finished. I delivered the article early the following morning and gratefully took my $300 payment in Vietnamese currency as well as the editor's helpful advice about which black-market moneychanger to use to convert it to dollars before leaving the country.

I left Vietnam with my confidence restored and at least the beginnings of a career. The
Saturday Review
published the fragging article as a cover story, and it received a great deal of attention. I felt ambivalent about profiting from the war, however (I still retained some of my killjoy moral inflexibility), and made sure that I was out of the country and incommunicado the week the story ran. With the perspective of hindsight and the knowledge of how difficult it is to make a career out of writing, I regret that decision to avoid publicity. I've learned since how rarely the brass ring is offered. But these regrets are mild. Much more important was the certainty that my misgivings about the war were more than an artifact of convenience.

And then there were the ontological issues the war raised. A need to know whether I was right about the conflict got me to Vietnam, but once I was there, coincidence or some law of quantum destiny gave me the opportunity to observe my life as it might have been lived had I taken another path. As a journalist I could meet my West Point doppelganger; as a journalist I found myself in the field confronting the very situation that as a thought experiment had impelled me toward leaving the military. What is a career compared with that?

Vietnam put me on the road, but I had no interest in becoming a war correspondent. Rather than cover wars between nations or the war on terror, I devoted the next thirty-odd years to another conflict: the war on nature. The reporting I did in 1971 enabled me to pursue the questions that underlie most of my subsequent travels and writings: What drives the consumer society and where is it going? How are we different from animals and how is the consumer society different from other cultures? What is the price of material progress? In what manner does the way we think impact the natural world? What are we losing, and what can be saved?

I stopped in Cambodia, Thailand, Iran and Ireland on my way home. I did not get back to Vietnam for twenty-three years. When I did return, the threat to the land was not war, but peace.

F
rom the minute I arrived in Vietnam in 1971, I wanted to leave. During wartime any country will reveal its ugly side, and the conflict in Vietnam was one of the ugliest in which the United States had ever been involved. By that point we and the corrupt and incompetent regime we were propping up were well on the way to losing the war.

But the first thing that struck me about Saigon then was the heat: It was just impossibly hot and humid. Since that first trip I've been to many of the hottest and most humid places on the planet, and, until I returned to Vietnam in 1994, I had always wondered whether that initial experience reflected (a) a true measure of the heat or (b) the fact that in 1971 I really did not have much to compare it with. The answer, which became obvious as soon as I alighted in Hanoi in May, was (a): Vietnam has a combination of heat and humidity matched by few if any regions on earth.

If its climate was consistent, the Vietnam I encountered twenty-three years later was an entirely different landscape. Most of the surface scars of war had long since faded, and I was able to travel to parts of the country that would have been impassable three decades earlier.

I came back to Vietnam on assignment, in response to a series of reports that had come out of the country about discoveries of three new species of large animals in a lost world, a remote region high up in the cordillera that divides Vietnam from Laos.

The news of these findings was nothing less than astonishing, since only five new species of animals larger than 100 pounds had been discovered since the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the animals (variously called the Vu Quang ox, the pseudoryx or the saola) represented an entirely new genus, and only three other new genera had been documented in the century.

Since my visit in the early 1990s, other new species have been found in the region, and new species have surfaced in Borneo and the highlands of New Guinea as well. While welcome for science, this boom has an ominous side, as it is in part the product of disquieting forces at work around the world. The world's great wilderness areas have been so reduced that more and more animals are being forced into contact with humans. Similarly, with forests growing ever smaller and becoming more easily perforated by roads, humans, including scientists, are having a much easier time penetrating formerly impenetrable places.

To a degree this was the case in Vietnam, whose forest cover had been reduced from 50 percent to 10 percent during the previous half century. War played a complicated role in the discovery of these new species. One of the ironies of war is that while actual fighting takes a gruesome toll on both humans and wildlife—think about defoliation in Vietnam or guerrillas machine-gunning wildlife in the Congo—to the degree that animals can retreat beyond the reach of the troops, roaming armies do keep poachers away. Civil war in Nicaragua likewise stopped deforestation in its tracks for a number of years; in Suriname the presence of insurgent Maroons in the forests kept intruders out for decades, and whatever depredations the guerrillas themselves caused were more than compensated for by the recovery of its fauna and flora. The most intact ecosystem on the Korean Peninsula is in the demilitarized zone (DMZ), which is a perennial contender for the title of the place with the most land mines on the planet. (During the past fifty-five years the DMZ's big animals seem to have figured out ways of sidestepping the explosives.) The mention of such findings is intended not as an endorsement of war as a conservation strategy, but rather as an observation that nature takes her opportunities anywhere she can find them.

On the one hand, it could be argued that, but for the war, the new species in Vietnam might have been discovered years earlier, as the country's cadre of well-trained zoologists systematically explored its forests. In fact, biologists sometimes accompanied soldiers along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and some of the boxes of bones lying around in the Institute for Ecology and Biological Resources had been collected on these forays. There is no question, though, that the war interrupted the cataloguing of these bones as more pressing matters (e.g., survival) demanded the attention of the scientists. Casually stored, the bones gathered dust for decades before reports began coming in that Vietnam might host a wondrous collection of large animals previously unknown to science.

One of the earliest indicators that Vietnam might play a special role as a refuge of ancient and archaic species came in 1990 when the skeleton of a poached Javan rhino was found in the south. The most endangered of all the rhinos, the Javan subspecies had been thought to be extinct in Vietnam. (Only a few dozen remain in Java itself.) The Vietnamese rhino population, which separated from the Javan group between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, somehow held on, and now, with protection, a handful survive in the Cat Loc Reserve in a patch of southern lowland tropical forest.

That discovery whetted the appetite of field biologists to see what else existed in Vietnam's remaining forests. A particularly tempting target, revealed by a survey of satellite imagery, was the area surrounding Vu Quang, which constituted one of the last pristine patches of lowland evergreen forest in Asia. In May 1992, biologist John MacKinnon and a team of Vietnamese researchers set out on an expedition sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund to survey the animals of these moist, dense forests.

The area was especially active during the war, since its forests offered cover for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, by which the North Vietnamese moved men and matériel to the south during struggles with both the French and the Americans. It is hellishly hot, very steep, and, I was to discover, one of the most slippery places on the planet. Add leeches, malaria and the omnipresent threat of downpour, and it is easy to understand why the region was uninhabited until the 1950s, and not even the Vietnamese ventured there after the war wound down. Hmong and other tribes sometimes wandered in to hunt, but they had little interaction with the ethnic Vietnamese.

MacKinnon, a British expatriate, had worked as a field biologist in tropical Asia for twenty-five years, along the way doing pioneering studies of wild orangutans and authoring the celebrated
In Search of the Red Ape
(1974). While most of his early breakthroughs followed from painstaking research conducted over the course of many months, on this expedition he and the team found their first new species on the very first hike.

Returning from the forest, MacKinnon met up with Vietnamese zoologist Do Tuoc, who had spent the day talking with hunters from the nearby village of Kim Quang. The villagers had told him about hunting wild goats in the region, but when Do Tuoc asked to see one, they led him to a skull with long, curved, swept-back horns mounted over the front door of a local home. “You'd better show me,” said MacKinnon, who had never heard of a Southeast Asian goat fitting that description.