Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (27 page)

Lynda Van Devanter's
Home Before Morning
has quite a different viewpoint from the bellicose give-'em-hell attitude of
The Killing Zone
or the intellectualized but tough horror of
If I Die in a Combat Zone.
Van Devanter, like Downs, joined the army out of patriotism, and also wound up in the Fourth Division, about two years after Downs. (If all of us keep churning out books, they'll have to change the name of the division from the Fighting Fourth to the Writing Fourth.) Her patriotism, at least the military side of it, didn't survive Vietnam. Of all the bloodcurdling books reviewed here, the middle part
of Home Before Morning
is by far the goriest—some of it told with the grisly detachment of the medical professional (Van Devanter was a nurse assisting surgery) and some of it with the barely contained hysteria of a normal human being almost tapped out, overloaded with death and suffering. Less than half of the book actually takes place in Vietnam, the rest being divided between her late girlhood prior to going there and the slow recovery from the shattering depression she brought back.

The tenderness and unselfconscious horror make this a unique book about war. If for some reason, like me, you wind up reading several Vietnam books in a row, you must include this one for balance.

The other four are all collections of interviews, which is a particularly appropriate way of approaching Vietnam.

For objective value, as historical and anthropological resource,
Charlie Company
wins hands down.
Nam
flunks.
Bloods
and
Everything We Had
occupy the same middle position, for the same reasons. The criteria are selection procedure and verifiability.

Nam
, which is the most dramatic and most entertaining of the four, is all but useless as a serious document. It's a montage of first-person accounts subtitled “The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There,” claiming 150 informants. But none of them is identified; there's no way to check up on Baker's accuracy. That accuracy is suspect because of the book's novelistic virtues in terms of language and structure. There is material from many different people here (perhaps fewer than 150), but the unifying intelligence of the single author is too strong.

Bloods
shares this problem to a certain degree. Most of the people talk in short dramatic declarative sentences, with a lot of breathless paragraphing. Opening the book at random, I find:

“It was Kelly. The chief hospital corpsman. Short, fat guy. The typical hospital corps chief.

“I said, ‘What are you doing out there?'

“I had almost shot him.

“I said, ‘Get out of there. Get out of there.'”

There's also a uniformity of adventures and reactions that I find suspect in a book covering the experiences of black veterans who went through the war in many different circumstances of preparation, motivation, assignment, and rank. Of particular interest to me was the record of atrocities. Every ground combat soldier save one spiced up his story with one or more tales of ritual mutilation, torture, murder of civilians, rape—once, the rape of a recently murdered civilian. The only one who didn't have such stories was a man who served two tours as a platoon leader and company commander. He said explicitly: “The nation heard stories of atrocities…[but] that generalization is unfair to apply to all the people who were there. In two tours I just did not experience any atrocities. Sure, you shot to kill. But personally I did not experience cutting off ears from dead bodies or torturing captured prisoners.” If a person were to reconstruct the Vietnam experience from just this one book, the inescapable conclusion would be that this officer is lying, and atrocity was the order of the day. I don't think so.

Not that the other people were necessarily lying. A natural journalistic selection procedure is partly to blame, and partly it's the psychology of interviewing and being interviewed.

I've interviewed about a dozen colleagues, friendly literary conversations, and have been subjected to a few score newspaper and magazine writers myself, some of whom turned out not to be so friendly. I've belatedly learned caution—and having been hunter as well as prey, I've learned a few stalking tricks.

One of the most powerful tools is silence—the neutral nod that says, “Okay, go on. That's not all, is it?” The informant does want to give you a good story. Let him elaborate.

There are more manipulative techniques, such as asking leading questions, asking the same question in various ways until you get the answer you want, or the classic have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife structure that assumes the answer to the real question:
Did you report atrocities to your company commander, or keep them secret?
Techniques that would net the reporter a dry smile or a horselaugh from an experienced politician, or even another writer, could work well on a man who's never been interviewed before, no matter how intelligent he is—especially when the interview is about something as emotionally charged as his wartime experience.

This is not to say that Terry or any of the others did use these various tools. In none of the books can we tell. We never see the questions; only the answers.

The other factor, the journalistic selection procedure, is an obvious constraint on material. Terry did not interview twenty random black veterans and then sit down and type out his book. No; he found the ones with interesting stories, interviewed them, and then winnowed through the interviews to find the twenty best. What other procedure could a writer use?

To me the most valuable aspect of
Bloods
is its record of racial tensions and injustice in Vietnam. Most of the combat soldiers note that racial differences disappear among “line” troops; one of them even had a KKK good-ole-boy as his best friend. None of them fails to notice, though, that there is a disproportionate number of black people around, and an awful lot of them being killed. Blacks accounted for 23% of American combat deaths, while comprising only 11% of young American males. The word for that is genaesthenia: the selective weakening of a race. The army didn't do it as a matter of policy, which in a way is a pity, because policy can be changed. The social forces that resulted in the disproportion are still with us, and lately we seem to be taking two steps backward for every step forward. So when the American war machine slides toward its next target, Central America or the Middle East or Trinidad, too much of the blood that greases it will be the blood of black men and boys.

The army told us that for every one combat soldier in Vietnam there were nine or ten support troops—“clerks and jerks,” we called them in ironic envy—but you see very few interviews with that large majority. A book called
Nothing Happened: An Oral History of Cooks and Clerks in Vietnam
wouldn't sell many copies. But the Platonic-ideal Vietnam interview book, at least the one with maximum value as an anthropological document,
would
be topheavy with stories from rear echelon people, and those stories might not be dull. My platoon's perception of base-camp commandos was that they were a lot crazier than we were: more narcotics, more “attitude” problems, more likely to flip out—possibly because they had to sit through the rocket and mortar attacks and live with the threat (rarely enough realized) of human-wave ground attack, without ever being able to do anything about it. We could at least shoot back; we could retreat, we could look forward to the temporary relative safety of a fire base or base camp. They had one year of being passive targets.

Al Santoli's
Everything We Had
does give a nod in that direction, interviewing a few nurses and support people in intelligence and communications as well as the combat troops. It's my favorite of the oral history books, possibly because of Santoli's obvious sympathies, since he was a grunt rifleman himself, and Stateside he worked with amputees as a physical therapy assistant. He's horrified by the war but not by the soldiers, and if he has an axe to grind it's this familiar one: the enemy is not really those little devils shooting at me. It's the faceless people safe from harm who pulled the strings that put me here. The Green Machine, we called them.

Santoli's book gives the most accurate mosaic of what Vietnam was like. But the one that works best as a document, the one I would choose to put in a time capsule and say, “Here's the evidence; judge it in your own way”—that has to be
Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us.
It's not as universal and compact as
Everything We Had;
not as heartsickening as
Bloods;
not as artful
as Nam.
What it does have that all the others perforce lack is a structure that compels some measure of objectivity. In 1981 a team
of Newsweek
reporters set out to track down all of the veterans of a single Vietnam company. Their criteria were that it must have been an infantry company, that they must have served in “the crucible years” 1968 and 1969, and that they had seen heavy combat. So their story will be
a priori
more dramatic than, say, that of a quartermaster company. But the reporters were out to find
everyone's
story, not just the ones that were most interesting or that best fit a predetermined pattern, consciously arrived at or not. Everyone they could track down had his say. They also interviewed the families of those who were killed during the war and, sadly, of a couple who survived the war but couldn't live with what came afterwards.

The result is interesting in both aspects of the men's stories: what happened in Vietnam and how they adjusted to life back in the World; what measure of material success and what measure of peace. The war stories are most interesting in the present context, though, and the most revealing. Because they were all in the same place, but they all fought in different wars.

For most, that's just a reflection of a universal truism. For a couple, it was something else. Something particularly significant in interpreting Vietnam war stories.

A couple of the veterans of Charlie Company reported memories of interesting things that somehow escaped everybody else's notice. One of them had bragged to his local buddies of murdering a captain he didn't like (none of the company's CO's died during his tour) and “the landscape of his Vietnam was blighted by heads on pikes and napalm-broiled babies that, however real to him, nobody else in Charlie Company appeared to have seen.”

I have the strange feeling I met this guy a few times in the other books. I know I've met people like him in person several times, because when they find out you're a writer “from the 'Nam” they have to come over and tell you their strange story. It often owes as much to
Apocalypse Now
as to reality. The scary ones aren't actually lying; for them, the membrane between invention and memory has disintregrated. We all succumb to a degree of this as we age, editing our memories to give our life coherence, meaning, interest. Some are better at it than others. Some people make it their life's work.

So how can you tell truth from fabulism? If you were there, or if you've made an exhaustive study of Vietnam, you might catch some storytellers in inconsistencies—but that might only mean that the guy hadn't paid attention to the same details that engaged you. And if he has everything absolutely right, it could mean that he's truly and gloriously bent; warped to the extent of spending every spare minute making sure his stories are believable and consistent.

Even the lies contain truth, and not in a mystical way, not as long as some of us listen and believe, and think we see our own dark nature reflected there. They may be made up to attract attention or elicit pity, or to sell newspapers or movies. But they have the force and innate veracity of myth.

¹
The Big Fight
, by Capt. David Fallon, M.C. (W.J. Watt & Co., 1918)

²
Combat: Pacific Theater
, Don Congdon, Ed. (Dell, 1958)

Photographs and Memories

I was prepared to dislike the gallery show “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment” on several grounds, or several levels. I don't like my art mixed with hype, I don't want to be expected to like something because it's politically correct; because the wrong people dislike it. And the Mapplethorpe photographs I'd seen in books hadn't impressed me, most of them blatantly aggressive homoerotic challenges to my conventional sexuality. My impression of his work—again, from browsing books—was that he did good conventional art-school photography, using outrageous subjects.

So I was wrong. In the first place, only a small fraction of the work displayed was homoerotic; most of the pictures were still life compositions (usually flowers), portraiture, and figure studies that were “only” figures, not challenges. To me the portraits were the most impressive—hard-edged, unsparing, startling with their instant revelations of character. (I later found out that Mapplethorpe got $10,000 and more for a portrait, and the artist, not the sitter, chose the final result out of the hundreds of shots.) The pictures of children are startling, too, showing them in postures of grave defiance or startled candor, attractive but not at all cute.

It's obvious that he was a man of obsessions. Obsessed with naked black men, true, but also with flowers and pure geometries and faces, and one woman, Lisa Lyon, a body-builder whose musculature is so highly developed that in some pictures she seems androgynous or even male (in other pictures she is conventionally female and more than adequately sexy).

All of the pictures are impressive in terms of concrete professionalism. There are no happy accidents. This is obviously a man who will burn up yards of film in search of just the right nuance. And then he takes it into the darkroom and fiddles and tweaks until the paper and light and chemicals give him just what he's aiming for. This is what you can't see in a book: the exquisite surfaces of the prints themselves, whether a soft platinum print on linen or laser-garish Cibachrome. The obsessive personality revealed in his subject matter is just as well revealed in his attitude toward lens, emulsion, darkroom, matting, and framing. Anyone who knows photography has to be impressed with his technique, even if repelled by some of the subject matter.