The Vietnam Reader (16 page)

As mentioned in the introduction to
Chapter 2
, Tim O’Brien’s
Going After Cacciato
(1978) won the National Book Award. Grittily realistic in places, the book also serves up absurd and deadpan humor, earning comparisons to Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22.
One section included here, “The Things They Didn’t Know,” neatly shows the reader the relationship between U.S. troops and Vietnamese civilians, as well as hero Paul Berlin’s feelings of guilt and complicity.

While these five pieces use a range of literary styles, they all purport to contain some deep and significant truth about the war. Technically, Kovic, Herr, and Caputo are writing nonfiction, yet all three use novelistic details and tactics, and Herr’s language often takes on a jaunty “I dare you to believe this” tone. Webb, while writing fiction, seems to cram as much factual detail about life in the bush into his scenes as they’ll hold, relying on the reader’s thirst for firsthand knowledge to sustain interest, and O’Brien pointedly undercuts his own grave use of realism with hilarious routines right out of some cosmic vaudeville. Yet no matter how odd the materials they use, these authors pointedly question the reality of the war. Like the American reader of the time, they have a desperate need to find out exactly what happened. What is true and what is a lie? What are the facts, and how did it really feel?

There are any number of instances in these pieces where these veterans attempt to relate their experience in Vietnam to people in America. Again and again, we see the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility,
of bridging that gap. Herr, as a bystander, not a true participant, has a great deal of insight on this, as does Kovic, separated from everyone (and maybe even himself) by what he’s been through.

It is worthy of note that several of these writers/veterans were in Vietnam for more than one tour, an occurrence less rare than the public, schooled to accept the typical vet as a reluctant draftee, might think. Both Kovic and Caputo comment on the allure of combat and Vietnam, weighing it against their mundane lives in America. Some of Herr’s grunts have interesting things to say on this point as well.

Most important, though, like the early works, the first wave is interested in the moral questions surrounding the individual soldier’s participation in war—in this particular war, and in war in general. Is there a difference, and if so, what?

Born on the Fourth of July
R
ON
K
OVIC
1976

The bus turned off a side street and onto the parkway, then into Queens where the hospital was. For the first time on the whole trip everyone was laughing and joking. He felt himself begin to wake up out of the nightmare. This whole area was home to him—the streets, the parkway, he knew them like the back of his hand. The air was fresh and cold and the bus rocked back and forth. “This bus sucks!” yelled a kid. “Can’t you guys do any better than this? I want my mother, I want my mother.”

The pain twisted into his back, but he laughed with the rest of them—the warriors, the wounded, entering the gates of St. Albans Naval Hospital. The guard waved them in and the bus stopped. He was the last of the men to be taken off the bus. They had to carry him off. He got the impression that he was quite an oddity in his steel frame, crammed inside it like a flattened pancake.

They put him on the neuro ward. It was sterile and quiet. I’m with the vegetables again, he thought. It took a long while to get hold of a nurse. He told her that if they didn’t get the top of the frame off his back he would start screaming. They took it off and moved him back downstairs to another ward. This was a ward for men with open wounds. They put him there because of his heel, which had been all smashed by the first bullet, the back of it blown completely out.

He was now in Ward I-C with fifty other men who had all been recently wounded in the war—twenty-year-old blind men and amputees,
men without intestines, men who limped, men who were in wheelchairs, men in pain. He noticed they all had strange smiles on their faces and he had one too, he thought. They were men who had played with death and cheated it at a very young age.

He lay back in his bed and watched everything happen all around him. He went to therapy every day and worked very hard lifting weights. He had to build up the top of his body if he was ever going to walk again. In Da Nang the doctors had told him to get used to the idea that he would have to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He had accepted it, but more and more he was dreaming and thinking about walking. He prayed every night after the visitors left. He closed his eyes and dreamed of being on his feet again.

Sometimes the American Legion group from his town came in to see him, the men and their wives and their pretty daughters. They would all surround him in his bed. It would seem to him that he was always having to cheer them up more than they were cheering him. They told him he was a hero and that all of Massapequa was proud of him. One time the commander stood up and said they were even thinking of naming a street after him. But the guy’s wife was embarrassed and made her husband shut up. She told him the commander was kidding—he tended to get carried away after a couple of beers.

After he had been in the hospital a couple of weeks, a man appeared one morning and handed him a large envelope. He waited until the man had gone to open it up. Inside was a citation and a medal for Conspicuous Service to the State of New York. The citation was signed by Governor Rockefeller. He stuck the envelope and all the stuff in it under his pillow.

None of the men in the wards were civilian yet, so they had reveille at six o’clock in the morning. All the wounded who could get on their feet were made to stand in front of their beds while a roll call was taken. After roll call they all had to make their beds and do a general clean-up of the entire ward—everything from scrubbing the floors to cleaning the windows. Even the amputees had to do it. No one ever bothered him, though. He usually slept through the whole thing.

Later it would be time for medication, and afterward one of the
corpsmen would put him in a wheelchair and push him to the shower room. The corpsman would leave him alone for about five minutes, then pick his body up, putting him on a wooden bench, his legs dangling, his toes barely touching the floor. He would sit in the shower like that every morning watching his legs become smaller and smaller, until after a month the muscle tone had all but disappeared. With despair and frustration he watched his once strong twenty-one-year-old body become crippled and disfigured. He was just beginning to understand the nature of his wound. He knew now it was the worst he could have received without dying or becoming a vegetable.

More and more he thought about what a priest had said to him in Da Nang: “Your fight is just beginning. Sometimes no one will want to hear what you’re going through. You are going to have to learn to carry a great burden and most of your learning will be done alone. Don’t feel frightened when they leave you. I’m sure you will come through it all okay.”

I am in a new hospital now. Things are very different than in the last place. It is quiet in the early morning. There is no reveille here. The sun is just beginning to come in through the windows and I can hear the steady dripping of the big plastic bags that overflow with urine to the floor. The aide comes in the room, a big black woman. She goes to Willey’s bed across from me, almost stepping in the puddle of urine. She takes the cork out of the metal thing in his neck and sticks the long rubber tube in, then clicks on the machine by the bed. There is a loud sucking slurping sound. She moves the rubber tube around and around until it sucks all the stuff out of his lungs. After she is done she puts the cork back in his throat and leaves the room.

There are people talking down at the end of the hall. The night shift is getting ready to go home. They are laughing very loud and flushing the toilets, cursing and telling jokes, black men in white uniforms walking past my door. I shut my eyes. I try to get back into the dream I was having. She is so pretty, so warm and naked lying next to me. She kisses me and begins to unbutton my hospital shirt. “I love you,” I hear her say. “I love you.” I open my eyes. Something strange is tickling my nose.

It is Tommy the enema man and today is my day to get my enema. “Hey Kovic,” Tommy is saying. “Hey Kovic, wake up, I got an enema for you.”

She kisses my lips softly at first, then puts her tongue into my mouth. I am running my hands through her hair and she tells me that she loves that. She is unbuttoning my trousers now and her small hand is working itself deep down into my pants. I keep driving my tongue into her more furiously than ever. We have just been dancing on the floor, I was dancing very funny like a man on stilts, but now we are making love and just above me I hear a voice trying to wake me again.

“Kovic! I have an enema for you. Come on. We gotta get you outta here.”

I feel myself being lifted. Tommy and another aide, a young black woman, pick me up, carefully unhooking my tube. They put my body into the frame, tying my legs down with long white twisted sheets. They lay another big sheet over me. The frame has a long metal bar that goes above my head. My rear end sticks out of a slit that I lie on.

“Okay,” shouts Tommy in his gravel voice. “This one’s ready to go.”

The aide pushes me into the line-up in the hallway. There are frames all over the place now, lined up in front of the blue room for their enemas. It is the Six o’Clock Special. There are maybe twenty guys waiting by now. It looks like a long train, an assembly line of broken, twisted bodies waiting for deliverance. It is very depressing, all these bodies, half of them asleep, tied down to their frames with their rear ends sticking out. All these bodies bloated, waiting to be released. Every third day I go for my enema and wait with the long line of men shoved against the green hospital wall. I watch the dead bodies being pushed into the enema room, then finally myself.

It is a small blue room and they cram us into it like sardines. Tommy runs back and forth placing the bedpans under our rear ends, laughing and joking, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Okay, okay, let’s go!” he shouts. There is a big can of soapy water above each man’s head and a tube that comes down from it. Tommy is jumping all around and whistling like a little kid, running
to each body, sticking the rubber tubes up into them. He is jangling the pans, undoing little clips on the rubber tubes and filling the bellies up with soapy water. Everyone is trying to sleep, refusing to admit that this whole thing is happening to them. A couple of bodies in the frames have small radios close to their ears. Tommy keeps running from one frame to the other, changing the rubber gloves on his hands and squirting a tube of lubricant onto his fingers, ramming his hands up into the rear ends, checking each of the bodies out, undoing the little clips. The aide keeps grabbing the bedpans and emptying all the shit into the garbage cans, occasionally missing and splattering the stuff on the floor. She places the empty pans in a machine and closes it up. There is a steam sound and the machine opens with all the bedpans as clean as new.

Oh God, what is happening to me? What is going on here? I want to get out of this place! All these broken men are very depressing, all these bodies so emaciated and twisted in these bedsheets. This is a nightmare. This isn’t like the poster down by the post office where the guy stood with the shiny shoes; this is a concentration camp. It is like the pictures of all the Jews that I have seen. This is as horrible as that. I want to scream. I want to yell and tell them that I want out of this. All of this, all these people, this place, these sounds, I want out of this forever. I am only twenty-one and there is still so much ahead of me, there is so much ahead of me.

I am wiped clean and pushed past the garbage cans. The stench is terrible. I try to breathe through my mouth but I can’t. I’m trapped. I have to watch, I have to smell. I think the war has made me a little mad—the dead corporal from Georgia, the old man that was shot in the village with his brains hanging out. But it is the living deaths I am breathing and smelling now, the living deaths, the bodies broken in the same war that I have come from.

I am outside now in the narrow hallway. The young black woman is pushing my frame past all the other steel contraptions. I look at her face for a moment, at her eyes, as she pushes my frame up against another. I can hear the splashing of water next door in the shower room. The sun has come up in the Bronx and people are walking through the hallways. They can look into all the rooms and see the
men through the curtains that never close. It is as if we are a bunch of cattle, as if we do not really count anymore.

They push me into the shower. The black woman takes a green plastic container and squirts it, making a long thin white line from my head to my legs. She is turning on the water, and after making sure it is not too hot she hoses me down.

It’s like a car wash, I think, it’s just like a big car wash, and I am being pushed and shoved through with the rest of them. I am being checked out by Tommy and hosed off by the woman. It is all such a neat, quick process. It is an incredible thing to run twenty men through a place like this, to clean out the bodies of twenty paralyzed men, twenty bloated twisted men. It is an incredible feat, a stupendous accomplishment, and Tommy is a master. Now the black woman is drying me off with a big white towel and shoving me back into the hallway.

Oh get me back into the room, get me back away from these people who are walking by me and making believe like all the rest that they don’t know what’s happening here, that they can’t figure out that this whole thing is crazy. Oh God, oh God help me, help me understand this place. There goes the nurse and she’s running down the hall, hitting the rubber mat that throws open the big green metal door with the little windows with the wire in them. Oh nurse please help me nurse, my stomach is beginning to hurt again like it does every time I come out of this place and my head is throbbing, pounding like a drum. I want to get out of this hall where all of you are walking past me. I want to get back into my bed where I can make believe this never happened. I want to go to sleep and forget I ever got up this morning.