Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (26 page)

I am afraid I ceased thinking of Germans as human beings from that time. I may as well frankly admit that through all my experiences in trench fighting since then, my habit became that of calling into a dug-out [of surrendering Germans]:

“How many men are down there?”

If the answer came (let us say) “Six,” we would throw three bombs into the dug-out and call:

“Here—share these among you.”
¹

An American officer describes the way the Japanese cared for American prisoners who collapsed during the Bataan death march:

Skulking along, a hundred yards behind our contingent, came a “clean-up squad” of murdering Jap buzzards. Their helpless victims, sprawled darkly against the white of the road, were easy targets.

As members of the murder squad stooped over each huddled form, there would be an orange flash in the darkness and a sharp report. The bodies were left where they lay, that other prisoners coming behind us might see them.

Our Japanese guards enjoyed the spectacle in silence for a time. Eventually, one of them who spoke English felt he should add a little spice to the entertainment.

“Sleepy?” he asked. “You want sleep? Just lie down on road. You get good, long sleep.”

On through the night we were followed by orange flashes and thudding shots.
²

And this one is from an American paratrooper:

For about six months I'd been living with this mamasan and her three kids. We got along real well; she was a good fuck and did all the cooking and cleaning and kept my uniform strack.

Well, we get the word we're moving out before dawn, flying north for a drop. Got to keep it absolutely secret from the gooks.

So what the hell can I do? I can't tell her. I can't just leave, because she'll know something's up and might pass the word. So what I do is wait till after midnight and sneak in and cut all their throats, just kill them in their sleep, then go join my unit. Made me feel like shit, but what the hell can you do?

This last anecdote was told to me in the early '70s by a middle-aged sergeant, killing time in a bar in O'Hare International, stranded overnight by a snowstorm. I had long hair and a beard but was wearing the brass bracelet that serves as a recognition signal for Vietnam veterans; he was in dress greens with a chest full of fruit salad bespeaking valor and woundings during service in Korea and Vietnam.

It's significant to me that the story comes from Korea, in 1952. Not Vietnam.

Why did he feel he had to confess this atrocity to a total stranger? We had talked enough for him to know that I was a combat veteran, slightly decorated and disabled, and perhaps he thought that that would make me sympathetic to cold-blooded homicide, so long as they were gooks being killed. It didn't. I tried to be civil but finished my drink quickly and left, even with noplace to go but another airport bar.

Later I berated myself for being unprofessional. I'd written one book about Vietnam already, and was working on another, and this guy could have been a valuable resource. War stories.

Let's take a look at that story. I've related it as accurately as I can, but that was more than ten years ago and of course I didn't have a tape recorder. I do remember that he used Vietnam slang like
strack
(meaning “in the best possible condition,” eponymously from “Strategic Army Command”;
gook
and
mamasan
are not anachronisms). He probably didn't tell the tale quite so compactly. He probably didn't use the line “got to keep it absolutely secret from the gooks,” which I belatedly see is almost perfect trochaic septameter, and the reinforcement by repetition in the last paragraph is suspiciously literary in its artlessness.

Is that good or bad or neutral? Whenever you read a war story, unless it's a mechanical transcript, there's been some imposition of literary sensibility and structure. Sometimes, naturally, what you see is the end result of a series of translations: the soldier himself has refined the story over dozens or hundreds of retellings; the writer restructures it unconsciously to conform to what he or she knows about narrative effectiveness; the writer further changes it to adapt it to the specific needs of the article or book—and then the editor and copy editor get to stir it around as well. (Now hand it back to the soldier and be prepared to wince.)

This article is about Vietnam war stories and a safari I just made through a jungle of them. For reference, here is my own story, compressed:

I was drafted soon after graduating from college and landed in Vietnam the month of the first big Tet offensive, on 29 February 1968. There was a lot of nervous joking about that date, since with a twelve-month tour, Army people leave the same day they arrive, a year later. We were sure the Big Computer would strand us in Vietnam until the next leap year.

But the computer worked, and if our luck had held, all thirteen of us who had been sent to the Fourth Division, Pleiku, would have been back standing in line the next February 28th. As it turned out, there were only three of us left. Ten had been killed or Medivac'ed with injuries serious enough to preclude return. Of us survivors, one was unscratched, one had been shot in the chest and spent several months in Japan, and one, me, had absorbed multiple bullet and shrapnel wounds and had spent five months in various hospitals.

At that time during the war, they said line troops were suffering about 33% casualties. It seemed like more to us.

Yet we knew there were outfits to the north and south that had it much worse than we did. Fighting in the sparsely inhabited mountainous jungle terrain of the Central Highlands, we had contact with the enemy only a few times a month. Our adversaries were normally NVA, North Vietnamese regulars, rather than the elsewhere ubiquitous Viet Cong. The NVA weren't Boy Scouts, but they were less likely to skin you alive and mail your tattoos home to Mother.

Like anyone, when I left the war zone I was an expert about war in general and Vietnam in particular. I'd only been exposed to actual combat for six months (not counting rocket and mortar attacks, which we dismissed as weather, and two combat assaults on hospitals where I was a resident bystander), but it seemed to me that I knew enough.

Imagine how it felt to come home and find that I knew nothing at all. I must have been to some other war.

One of the first magazine articles I remember reading after coming back to the World was something with the title “What Every Vietnam Veteran Knows.” It was a chamber of horrors: rape and murder of women and children, taking ears and worse from dead bodies, burning down villages just to watch the glow.

Everyone I knew in Vietnam had heard of such things—but no one had actually
seen
a necklace of ears or Zippo urban renewal or such. My own combat diary comes no closer than this, for the period of March through September, 1968, in the corner of the Fourth Division that my outfit inhabited:

1. Rape. There was one incident of rape reported; the man was court-martialed, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment. (Realistically, one reason for our sterling record was that we rarely saw any women except when we had passes to go into Pleiku or Ban Me Thuot.)

2. Villages torched. Never happened. We passed through a number of
villes
but generally left them standing; we did wreck a bridge once with a tank, but the engineers went back and repaired it. I'm sure it would have been different if the enemy had ever engaged us in town; the ones we fought stuck to the jungle.

3. Prisoners mistreated. On one occasion a South Vietnamese interpreter started to pistol-whip a prisoner. An American officer disarmed him and sent him away. We rarely held prisoners for more than a couple of hours, though, before sending them back to the rear. And everyone did understand that prisoners would be killed rather than left behind, if we were attacked and had to move. But it never happened.

4. Killing women and children. We once killed a woman old enough to be a grandmother, but not until after she had killed two of us with a machine gun. Perhaps less justifiably, we killed two children who came snooping around the perimeter after midnight. We'd sent word to the local
ville
, telling them where we were and to stay away, but the children may not have heard. The tank gunner who blasted them with a canister round felt bad about it but said that, in the darkness, there was no way he could have told they were children. and if it happened again he would do it again. Nobody disagreed.

5. Grisly stuff. After a battle some of the boys—they
were
boys—would wander around taking pictures of corpses, and a few of those got their kicks rearranging the bodies and parts of bodies into ghastly amusing postures. Most of us took souvenir weapons and hardware. No ear necklaces, no castrations, no pulling of gold teeth. Once a traumatically decapitated NVA lieutenant's head became the object of an impromptu game of kickball. Indelicate behavior, to put it mildly, but I think it was more hysteria and whistling-in-the-dark bravado than atrocity. People with a misplaced reverence for corpses might disagree.

None of these incidents looms very large in my memory, not compared to the mundane daily horror of seeing friends maimed or killed, or the sudden epiphanies of blood in my own woundings. But there's no new story in the daily grind of suffering and death that's modern warfare—nothing as interesting as the EC-Comics perversities that facile journalists and moviemakers served up to the public as being the common currency of Vietnam.

For years, then, I thought there was an unspoken, implicit conspiracy among the press, to selectively show the Vietnam War in the worst light possible. Gradually that attitude evolved to a forgiving but cynical acceptance that the truth does not sell magazines and newspapers; a reporter who described the war the way it actually was, to most of us, wouldn't have his job for long.

And eventually, a further evolution, or re-evaluation—admitting that the war I experienced, as murderous and painful as it was, was less brutal and less terrifying than what most combat soldiers went through. That's hard for me to admit; hard for me to
believe
, but years of talking to other veterans and reading their books forces that conclusion.

Some of the books, anyhow; not all. Let's look at the latest crop:

Bloods
, by Wallace Terry (Random House, 1984). Subtitled “An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans.” A truly harrowing book of interviews, concentrating on grunts, but also interviewing a few officers, pilots, Navy types.

Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us
by Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller (Ballantine, 1984). The final document from a project done
by Newsweek
magazine, with six reporters interviewing 58 veterans and the surviving families of six who died, reconstructing the war as it happened to one company in 1968–1969.

Everything We Had
by Al Santoli (Ballantine, 1981). Another “oral history” of interviews with 33 soldiers, arranged in rough chronological order, 1962–1975.

Home Before Morning by
Lynda Van Devanter (Warner, 1983). Memoir of an Army nurse, from training through Vietnam to trying to adjust afterwards.

If I Die in a Combat Zone
by Tim O'Brien (Dell, 1984 reissue). An educated, literate draftee describes basic training and his year in Vietnam, stationed near My Lai a year after the massacre.

The Killing Zone
by Frederick Downs (Berkley, 1983). A vivid, straightforward account of the author's four months as a platoon leader in heavy combat.

Nam
by Mark Baker (Morrow, 1981). A mosaic of interviews from dozens of anonymous veterans.

The Van Devanter, O'Brien, and Downs books are more or less traditional war memoirs, a la
Goodbye to All That
or
Guadalcanal Diary
, and I recommend them all, though for quite different reasons.

In
Goodbye to All That
, Robert Graves's World War I masterpiece of horror and irony, Graves notes that he made the usual mistake of coming home and writing a novel about his war experiences, which fortunately did not see print. Later he wrote the nonfiction memoir, and it worked.

Tim O'Brien reversed Graves's order, eventually writing
Going After Cacciato
, winner of the National Book Award and arguably the best novel about Vietnam. Almost a decade earlier, though, he produced the memoir
If I Die in a Combat Zone
, which at the beginning zigzags effectively from Vietnam to Stateside and back, combat vignettes investing the rituals of basic training with drama and foreboding, and then grinds through the rest of his unwilling year in combat with unsparing accuracy. I read it when it first came out, a few years after returning from Vietnam, and to this day I remember the weird double-vision feeling, being snowbound in Iowa but seeing green and smelling the rank jungle and acid powder smell. A fine book, real.

Frederick Downs was a lieutenant in the Fourth Division, my old outfit, about a year before I got there. From the evidence in
The Killing Zone
, I'm sort of glad he wasn't my lieutenant.

Not that he was a bad officer; quite the contrary. If a division had six men like him, they could spot the enemy a dozen tanks and John Wayne and still wipe them off the map. But the guy was a bullet magnet. When the shooting starts, you want to be on some other acre.

The Killing Zone
is obviously expanded from Downs's combat diary (perhaps, like mine, in the form of letters home); there are chapter divisions for convenience, but the narrative, dated, rarely skips more than a day or two of the four months he spent in Vietnam, from getting off the plane to the horrifying moment when a Bouncing Betty mine goes off waist high and shreds his body.

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in Vietnam or in the conduct of modern warfare. It's not particularly well written, and was evidently copy-edited by a victim of progressive education. But Downs was and is the kind of doughty blood-and-guts officer who most people think became extinct sometime between Hiroshima and the Tonkin Gulf Incident, able to be wounded twice the same day and refuse to leave his men; crawl through withering fire to retrieve a shot private, not knowing whether he's dead or alive (he's dead)—and if he doesn't let false modesty get in the way of a good story, neither does he flinch in detailing his errors, even when they resulted in men being needlessly maimed or killed. (Downs's sequel
Aftermath
[Berkley, 1985] is a better book, detailing his rehabilitation after Vietnam, but is beyond the scope of this review.)