The Vietnam Reader (53 page)

Before I went there I remember thinking that if I lost anything, a finger, an arm, my face, my teeth, my nose, anything, I’d rather die than come back. After the first casualties I was convinced I wanted to come back. And there are so many things that I thought were important before I went there. I want to do this, I want to do that. I missed this club, I didn’t see this movie, read this book. By the time I came back all I wanted to do was see America. I wanted to travel, wanted to see what it was all about. I just wanted to see the rest of life. God, how you value things …

When it came to survival, we just avoided stuff. I didn’t kick off ambushes when I could have. There was no reason to. Killing them meant nothing. It was just stupid. I mean, they saw us walk past them during the day, they could walk past us at night. I walked in a very distinctive formation. The VC knew who I was, and if they didn’t shoot at me during the day, I wouldn’t shoot at them at night. We just survived.

When I left the field after being there for ten months, I came to Bien Hoa-Long Binh for the first time. When we came to the gate at Long Binh I was still into carrying my rifle wherever I went. It was a very uncomfortable feeling not to have a rifle with you. We came to this gate, and I’ll never forget it, the first thing we saw was a taco stand. Then I saw a soft-ice-cream truck—you know, one of those guys that drives around the streets in the suburbs. And then we got to MACV headquarters. We walked in and they had a water fountain, a cooler. You stand there and you just drink until your body is distended and you faint from all the water. And you’re just staring because there are women with round eyes. I don’t know where they came from, but they were there. I didn’t ask. Didn’t matter—I mean, I didn’t give a shit, they were there. I couldn’t touch them, couldn’t talk to them.

Once I went on an in-country R & R to Danang and I had the personal effects of a man to deliver. I was in my fatigues and I went to where I was supposed to stay for three-day R & R. The guard said, “Check your rifle.” I responded, “Wait, I want to keep it.” Gotta check your rifle, so I checked it. I said, “Well, what are we going to eat?” They gave me directions. One day you’re fighting and the next day you’re in another sector. It was like living in New York City, where there’s poverty and right across the street an opulent town house.

I went down to the river and there was a big barge and these naval officers going to the Marine Corps naval club. It was a special launch for officers. So I remembered from the books, the movies, to salute the flag. I went aboard and thought, “This is ridiculous. I want to be with my men.” We never did things separately. We always drank together, ate together. My father was the same way. He was an officer in the Naval Reserve. I met him there in Danang.

The cab to the officers’ club was called the Pink Elephant, appropriately so. My XO and I were there together. Jungle fatigues, cleanshaven. We’d been fighting for almost three months. We go in there and see a big buffet, just like my first day in country. The plates were china. No C-rations, no paper plates. This is a naval club.

We sat down and we looked at each other. We didn’t say a word. We were shoveling the crap into our mouths. Both of us looked up simultaneously—the plates were clean. I mean, I don’t even know what I ate. Clean. We looked at each other, and you didn’t have to say anything—you knew. And then there were the stares. I looked around and there were all these Navy officers, Marine Corps officers and some Army officers. Dress whites. Dress uniforms. Women with round eyes. Danang. Blond, blue eyes. And they’re looking at us not like you expected—”Ah, there are some men from the field”—but “What is that scum doing in here?” I couldn’t believe it. They didn’t want us there at all. The only person that was nice to us was an enlisted man who was a waiter, who came over and offered to take us out to the patio for dessert. I said, “Dessert? What dessert? Peaches?” He says, “Well, I recommend the vanilla ice cream with crème de
menthe.” “I’ll take it.” I never had ice cream with crème de menthe. My parents don’t drink. I never had any alcohol around my house. It was delicious. We got thoroughly plowed and watched them dance. And of course, no one ever came over and asked us to dance with them. They were all escorted.

All these Americans—well, round eyes. I was just totally blown away. And it wasn’t like a whorehouse. It wasn’t like a Saigon bar or a club upstairs. This was really legit. I mean, I didn’t think these guys were fighting. This was maybe how the French fought the war: all the officers standing around the hotel balcony while all the men swept below. They’re drinking and talking about the old days, when the war was going to end real quickly and people would come out from Washington and sit on a hill and watch the war going on in the distance.

This was the war and these were the people who controlled the war. This was MACV. It blew me away.

We were told that you could call home. It was on the MARS phone line [military satellite radio]. This was probably a sick way of dealing with something—my uncle had died in Korea. I called home. I hadn’t written any letters yet. This is right after Tet, after most of the shit was done. My mother answered the phone, which is not unlikely because my father is never home. He’s out at sea all the time. I can tell she’s pissed off. “Hello.” She sounds like a drill sergeant. I said, “Mother, this is Robert. Now relax. Don’t say anything. You have to follow military radio procedures. Now I’ll say something, and when I stop I’ll say ‘Over.’ Then you can speak, and when you stop you say ‘Over’ and that way we can continue. Do you understand it? No, no, no. Try it again. Over.” Okay, second try she got it. I said, “Look, I’m fine. I’m healthy. I have no problems. I’ve been taken as a prisoner of war, but they’re treating me real well, Mom.” You could feel a thud. You could hear her heart. She didn’t want to believe it. “No, no, I’m just joking, Mom. I’m just joking.” She was all excited: “Where are you? Where are you?” I told her Danang and I explained the whole bit to her. But I could never tell her up front—I always had to pull a little twist to it. It’s my own personality. I always do the reverse, you know,
the sick way of doing it, but it was in a sense kind of funny. I thought, “Ho, ho, ho, yeah, she’d think of the worst and then she’d be relieved to find out I’m alive.”

Being the kind of guy that I was, not really following orders, I decided, since my first duty there was to deliver personal effects, to go to the fucking morgue. The military term for it was “G.R. Point” [Graves Registration]. I remember walking into it—it was in a hangar in this huge fucking building—I remember walking in and going past a room. It had these contoured fiberglass chairs, like a futuristic barbershop. I looked over and there were guys in these chairs. Dead bodies, all naked. They just had big stitches. I mean, they were like Frankenstein. A guy’s face had been blown apart. They just stitched it, a job you wouldn’t put on your face for Halloween. But what they did there was put them back together as far as stuff them and—the word escapes me—embalm them. Then they were going to go back and get cosmetic later on.

There was a guy trying to get a ring off a hand, because they stiffen up and everything swells and it’s tough. This was like a Gahan Wilson cartoon. These morticians looked like they were embalmed themselves. They were inhaling these fumes, whatever they use to embalm them, and it does something to your skin. Talk about waxy-looking people. The receding hairlines … These guys really looked like they were undertakers. They were probably just a bunch of soldiers who got assigned burial duty. And I remember them saying to me, “Hey, take it easy. Nice talking to you. Maybe you’ll come around again. See you again.” I said, “I doubt it. I hope to God I never see you. And if I do, I’m sure I won’t be looking at you. I don’t ever want to be here.” And I left.

I said, “Look, that ruined my fucking day. They owe me a day.” So instead of going back on Tuesday, I went back on Wednesday. I said, “If I get into trouble, I’ll just tell them I missed the fucking flight. I tell my men to say that. What the hell.”

Tuesday night the company was out in the field, the mountains. My platoon lacked an officer. They sent another platoon out on ambush. This was the thing I didn’t realize—my platoon was always sent out on ambush. We were always point platoon when it came to combat
or contact. And I think part of it was because my last name was Santos. I had the blacks in my platoon. I had the guys who had been fuck-ups. I just thought we were really good. I thought we were kind of a Dirty Dozen. We had tough guys. We were good.

But they sent this other platoon out. The platoon made a mistake. Instead of holding their perimeter, they went into a horseshoe and were wiped out. I thought my platoon would have been pissed at me for not coming back, but their response was “Boy, we were glad you weren’t here. We were really lucky. Because we knew what you would do, where you would sit or where you would dig in when we’d start setting up.” My replacement was sitting there, and the first round that came in took him out. We never found him. We just found the book he was reading.

You can’t translate it or explain it to people. I try to explain post-Vietnam syndrome by saying, you know, it’s trauma. Going through war is trauma. You lose your arm, you lose your uncle, you lose your mother, you lose your father, it’s trauma. You go through a period of depression. I mean, it didn’t just tell me I lost something. It told me a whole bunch of things about myself I probably never would’ve found out. I probably in some respects would be far more successful if I’d never known. On the other hand, I’d probably be less developed and less wise. But maybe that’s the way I should go through life, ignorantly happy and successful. Instead I struggle and I do what’s important and I always have to fight with myself to go out and push Robert. And it’s a real pain in the ass.

One of the sad things about being an officer was that you never knew that doing the right job meant that you’d earn the hatred of your men. What you did saved their lives, but they hate you for it. I mean, often I’ve heard these people talk about how doctors think they’re God. I was looking into med school after I got out of the service and I used to hear them talk about this shit, and I said to myself, “You really think it’s going to be great. You really think this is going to be something. That you’re going to be God, you’re going to cure people, save people, and your ego is going to be so inflated and you’re going to be so fucking important.” But they just don’t realize how lonely it is.

I never had the opportunity to directly save lives. My responsibility was to kill and in the process of killing to be so good at it that I indirectly saved my men’s lives. And there’s nothing, nothing, that’s very satisfying about that. You come home with the high body count, high kill ratio. What a fucking way to live your life.

        7        
Second Wave of Major Work

1966. American casualties in the field.

The second wave of major work coincides with the dedication of the Wall and the oral history boom. Interest in the war and the veteran peaked here, between 1982 and 1987. In addition to works written by veterans and directly addressing the war and its immediate issues, a surprising number of literary and mainstream novels and story collections by nonveteran writers included veterans as emblematic characters and used the Vietnam experience as either backdrop or backstory. The vet had become an American character in his or her own right, the experience shared with the rest of the country. This of course had its pitfalls, in that the gap between veterans and civilians was still in effect, and often authors unfamiliar with the territory gave the reader the same old clichéd vets and overwrought atrocities, only this time with the understanding that the reader’s sympathies would be with the veteran.

The second wave also marks the last time American mainstream publishing would consider Vietnam a viable commercial subject, at least in fiction. After 1988, the number of new Vietnam novels released by major houses dwindled to a trickle. The time to celebrate the veteran and question the war, it seemed, was up.

The 13th Valley,
101st Airborne vet John M. Del Vecchio’s first novel, is a large, sometimes sprawling attempt at a realist epic. The book follows the men of Alpha company during a large-scale operation in 1970. A best seller in 1982, it relies on an avalanche of technical
detail and a modicum of heavy symbolism. Del Vecchio uses maps and official after-action reports to augment his storyline; he contrasts the unemotional, euphemistic language of the official version with his grunts’ ground-level view of combat.

Stephen Wright served in Army Intelligence in 1969-70. His
Meditations in Green
(1983) is a dense, metaphorical novel that looks at the rear-echelon Vietnam experience of Spec. 4 James Griffin and his equally strange existence as a heroin user after the war. This is a selfconsciously literary book, an ornate, high-energy performance. Wright’s use of both form and language is startling, and Griffin’s position and skewed view of the world gives the author space to make funny and cutting observations about America. His first book,
Meditations
immediately established Wright as a literary novelist.