Breathing In
There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in
Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd lie
out on my bed and look at .it, too tired to do anything more
than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially
now that it wasn't real anymore. For one thing, it was very
old. It had been left there years before by another tenant,
probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in
Paris. The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the
wet. Saigon ~eat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it
depicted. Vietnam was divided into its older territories of
Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, and to the west past
Laos and Cambodge sat Siam, a kingdom. That's old, I'd tell
visitors, that's a really old map.
If dead ground could come back and haunt you the way
dead people do, they'd have been able to mark my map CURRENT and burn the ones they'd been using since '64, but
count on it, nothing like that was going to happen. It was late
'67 now, even the most detailed maps didn't reveal much
anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of
the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to. read the wind.
We knew that the uses of most information were flexible,
different pieces of ground told different stories to different
people. We also knew that for years now there had been no
country here but the war.
The Mission was always telling us about VC units being
engaged and wiped out and then reappearing a month later
in full strength, there was nothing very spooky about that, but
when we went up against his terrain we usually took it defini.,.
tively, and even if we didn't keep it you could always see that
we'd at least been there. At the end of my first week incountry I met an information officer· in the headquarters of
the 25th Division at Cu Chi who showed me on his map and
then from his chopper what they'd done to the 80 Bo
Woods, the vanished 80 Bo Woods, taken off by giant Rome
plows and chemicals and long, slow fire, wasting hundreds of
acres of cultivated plantation and wild forest alike, "denying
the enemy valuable resourcesatzd cover."
It had been part of his job for nearly a year now to tell
people about that operation; correspondents, touring· congressmen, movie stars, corporation presidents, staff officers
from half the armies in the world, ahd he still couldn't get
over it. It seemed to be keeping him young, his enthusiasm
made you feel that even the letters he wrote home to his wife
were full of it, it really showed what you could do if you had
the know-how and the .hardware. And if in the months following that operation incidences of enemy activity in the
larger area of WarZone C had increased "significantly," and
American losses had doubled and then doubled again, none
of it was happening in any damn Ho Bo Woods, you'd better
believe it. . . .
Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine
breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar. I never saw the
need for them myself, a little contact or anything that even
sounded like contact would give me more speed than I could
bear. Whenever I heard something outside of our clenched
. little circle I'd practically flip, hoping to God that I wasn't
the only one who'd noticed it. A couple of rounds fired off in
the dark a kilometer away and the Elephant would be there
kneeling on my chest, sending me down into my boots for a
breath. Once I thought I saw a light moving in the jungle and
I caught myself just under a whisper saying, "I'm not ready
for this, I'm not ready for this." That's when I decided to
drop it and dq something else with my nights. And I wasn't
going out like the night ambushers did, or the Lurps, longrange recon patrollers who did it night after night for weeks
and months, creeping up on VC base camps or around moving columns of North Vietnamese. I was living too close to
my bones as it was, all I had to do was accept it. Anyway, I'd
save the pills for later, for Saigon and the awful depressions I
always had there.
I knew one 4th Division Lurp who took his pills by the
fistful, downs from the left pocket of his tiger. suit and ups
from the right, one to cut the trail for him and the other to
send him down it. He told me that they cooled things out just
right for him, that he could see that old jungle at night like he
was looking at it through a starlight scope. "They sure give
you the range," he said.
This was his third tour. In 1965 he'd been the only survivor in a platoon of the Cay wiped out going into the Ia
Drang Valley. In '66 he'd. come backwith the Special Forces.
and one morning after an ambush he'd hidden under the
bodies of his team while the VC walked all around them with
knives, making sure. They stripped the bodies of their gear,
the berets too, and finally went away, laughing. After that,
there was nothing left for him in the war except the Lurps.
"I just can't hack it back in the World," he said. He told
me that after he'd come back home the last time he would sit
in his room all day, and sometimes he'd stick a hunting rifle
out the window, leading people and cars as they passed his
house until the only feeling he was aware of was all up in the
tip of that one finger. "It used to put my folks real uptight,"
he said. But he put people uptight here too, even here.
"No man, I'm sorry, he's just too crazy for me," one of the
men in his team said. "All's you got to do is look in his eyes,
that's the whole fucking story right there."
"Yeah, but you better do it quick," someone else said. "I
mean, you don't want to let him catch you at it."
But he always seemed to be watching for it, I think he
slept with his eyes open, and I was afraid of him anyway; All
I ever managed was one quick look in, and that was like
looking at the floor of an ocean. He wore a gold earring and
a headband torn from a piece of camouflage parachute material, and since nobody was about to tell him to get his hair
cut it fell below his shoulders, covering a thick purple scar.
Even at. division he never went anywhere without at least a
.45 and a knife, and he· thought I was a freak because I
wouldn't carry a weapon.
"Didn't you ever meet a reporter before?" I asked him.
"Tits on a bull," he said. "Nothing personal."
But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant
as any war story lever heard, it took me a year to understand it:
"Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He
died before he could tell us what happened."
I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of
story; when I asked him what had happened he just looked
like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he'd waste time telling
stories to anyone dumb as I was.
His face was all painted up for night walking now like a
bad hallucination, not like the painted faces I'd seen in San
Francisco only a few weeks before, the other extreme of the
same theater. In the coming hours he'd stand as faceless and
. quiet in the jungle as a fallen tree, and God help his opposite
numbers unless they had at least half a squad along, he was a
good killer, one of our best. The rest of his team were gathered outside the tent, set a little apart from the other division
I
units, with its own Lurp-designated latrine and its own exclusive freeze-dry rations, three-star. war fooc:I,the same chop
they sold at Abercrombie & Fitch. The regular division
troops would almost shy off the path when they passed the
area on their way to and from the mess tent. No matter how
toughened up they became in the war, they still looked innocent compared to the Lurps. When the team had grouped
they walked in a file down the hill to the lz across the strip to
the perimeter and into the treeline.
I never spoke to him again, but I saw him. When they
came back in the next morning he had a prisoner with him,
blindfolded and with his elbows bound sharply behind him.
The Lurp area would definitely be off limits during the interrogation, and anyway, I was already down at the strip waiting for a helicopter to come and take me out of there.
"Hey what're you guys, with the USa? Aw, we thought you
was with the usa 'cause your hair's so long." Page took the
kid's picture, I got the words down and Flynn laughed and
told him we were the Rolling StOnes. The three of us traveled
around together for about ~ month that summer. At one lz
the brigade c,hopper came in with a real foxtail hanging off
the aerial, when the commander walked by us he almost took
an infarction.
"Don't you men salute officers?"
"We're not men," Page said. "We're correspondents."
When the commander heard that, he wanted to throw a
spontaneous operation for us, crank up his whole brigade
and get some people killed. We had to get out on the next
chopper to keep him from going ahead with it, amazing what
some of them would do fora little ink. Page liked to augment
his field gear with freak paraphernalia, Scarves and beads,
plus he was English, guys would stare at him like he'd just
Breathing In
come down off a wall on Mars. Sean Flynn could look more
incredibly beautiful than even his father, Errol, had thirty
years before as Captain Blood, but sometimes he looked
more like Artaud coming out of some heavy heart-of-darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input! The
input! He'd give off a bad sweat and sit for hours, combing
his mustache through with the saw blade of his ,Swiss Army
knife. We packed grass and tape: Have You Seen Your
Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows, Best of the Animals,
Strange Days, Purple Haze, Archie Bell and the Drells,
"C'mon now everybody, do the Tighten Up ....
" Once in a
while we'd catch a chopper straight into one of the lower
hells, but it was a quiet time in the war, mostly it was lz's and
camps, grunts hanging around, faces, stories.
"Best way's to just keep moving," one of them told us.
"Just keep moving, stay in motion, you know what I'm
saying?"
We knew. He was a moving-target-survivor subscriber, a
true child of the war, because except for the rare times when
you were pinned or stranded the system was geared to keep
you mobile, if that was what you thought you wanted. As a
technique for staying alive it seemed to make as much sense
as anything, given naturally that you were there to begin
with and wanted to see it close; it started out sound and
straight but it formed a cone as it progressed, because the
more you moved the more you saw, the more you saw the
more besides death and mutilation you risked, and the more
you risked of that the more you would have to let go of one
day as a "survivor." Some of us moved around the war like
crazy people until we couldn't see which way the run was
even taking us anymore, only the war all over its surface with
occasional, .unexpected penetration. As long as we could
have choppers like taxis it took real exhaustion or depression
near shock or a dozen pipes of opium to keep us even appar-
I 9
ently quiet, we'd still be running around inside our skins like
something was after us, ha ha, La Vida Loca.
In the months after I got back the hundreds of helicopters
I'd flown in began to draw together until they'd formed a
collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it waS the sexiest
thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left
hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human; hot steel, grease,
jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming
up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gunfire
in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly
an intruder. Men on the crews would say that once you'd
carried a dead person he would always be there, riding with
you. Like all combat people they were incredibly superstitious and invariably self-dramatic, but it was (I knew) unbearably true that close exposure to the dead sensitized' you
to the force of their presence and made for long reverberations; long. Some people were so delicate that one look was
enough to wipe them away, but even bone-dumb grunts
seemed to feel that something weird and extra was happening
to them.
Helicopters and people jumping out of helicopters, people
so in love they'd run to get on even when there wasn't any
pressure. Choppers rising straight out of small cleared jungle
spaces, wobbling down onto city rooftops, cartons of rations
and ammunition thrown off, dead and wounded loaded on.
Sometimes they were so plentiful and loose that you could
touch down at, five or six places ina day, look around, hear
the talk, catch the next one out. There were installations as
big as cities with 30,000 citizens, once we dropped in to feed
supply to one man. God knows what kind of Lord Jim phoenix numbers he was doing in there, all he said to me was,
"You didn't see a thing, right Chief? You weren't even here."
There were posh fat air-conditioned camps like' comfortable
middle-class scenes with the violence tacit, "far away";
Breathing In
camps named for commanders' wives, LZ Thelma, LZ Betty
Lou; number-named hilltops in trouble where I didn't want
to stay; trail, paddy, swamp, deep hairy bush, scrub, swale,
village, even city, where the ground couldn't drink up what
the action spilled, it made you careful where you walked.
Sometimes the chopper you were riding in would top a hill
and all the ground in front of you as far as the next hill
would be charred and pitted and still smoking, and some. thing between your chest and your stomach would turn over.
Frail gray smoke where they'd burned off the rice fields
around a free-strike zone, brilliant white smoke from phosphorus (''Willy PeteJ,"/Make you a buh liever"), deep black
smoke from 'palm, they said that if you stood at the base of a
column of napalm smoke it would suck the air right out of
your lungs. Once we fanned over a little ville that had just
been airstruck and the words of a song by Wingy Manone
that I'd heard when I was a few years old snapped into my
head, "Stop the War, These Cats Is Killing Themselves."
Then we dropped, hovered, settled down into purple lz
smoke, dozens of children broke from their hootches to run
in toward the focus of our landing, the pilot laughing and
saying, "Vietnam, man. Bomb 'em and feed 'em, bomb 'em
and feed 'em."
Flying over jungle was almost pure pleasure, doing it on
foot was nearly all pain. I never belonged in there. Maybe it
really was what its people had always called it, Beyond; at
the very least it was serious, I gave up things to it I probably
never got back. ("Aw, jungle's okay. If you know her you
can live in her real good, if you don't she'll take you down in
an hour. Under.") Once in some thick jungle comer with
some grunts standing around,a correspondent said, "Gee,
you must really see some beautiful sunsets in here," and they
almost pissed themselves laughing. But you could fly up and
into hot tropic sunsets that would change the' way you
/
II
thought about light forever. You could also fly out of places
that were so grim they turned to black and white in your
head five minutes after you'd gone.
That could be the coldest one in the world, standing at the
edge of a clearing watching the chopper you'd just come in
on taking off again, leavillg you there to think about what it
was going to be for you now: if this was a bad place, the
wrong place, maybe even the last place,and whether you'd
. made a terrible mistake this time.
There was a camp at Soc Trang where a man at the lz
said, "If you come looking for a story this is your lucky day,
we got Condition Red here,'" and before the sound 'of the
chopper had faded out, I knew I had it too.
.
"That's affirmative," the camp commander said, "we are
definitely expectmg rain. Glad to see you." He was a young
captain, he was laughing and taping a bunch of sixteen clips
together bottom to bottom for faster reloading, "grease."
Everyone there was 'busy at it, cracking crates, squirreling
away grenades, checking mortar pieces, piling rounds, clicking banana clips into automatic weapons that I'd never even
seen before. They were wired into their listening posts out
around the camp, into each other, into themselves, and when
it got dark it got worse. The moon came up nasty and full, a
fat moist piece of decadent fruit. It was soft and saffronmisted when you looked up at it, but its light over the sandbags and into the jungle was harsh and bright. We were all
rubbing Army-issue nightfighter cosmetic under our eyes to
cut the glare and the terrible. things it made you see.
(Around midnight, just for something to do, I crossed to the
other perimeter and looked at the road running engineerstraight toward Route 4 like a yellow frozen ribbon' out of
sight and Isaw it move, the whole road.) There were a few
sharp arguments about who the light really favored, attackers or defenders, men were sitting around with Cinemascope eyes and jaws stuck out like they could shoot bullets,
moving and antsing and shifting around inside their fatigues.
"No sense us getting too relaxed, Charlie don't relax, just
when you get good and comfortable is when he comes over
and takes a giant shit on you." That was the level until morning, I smoked a pack an hour all night long, and nothing
happened. Ten minutes after daybreak I was down at the lz
asking about choppers.
A few days later Sean Flynn and I went up to a big firebase in the Americal TAOR that took it all the way over to
another extreme, National Guard weekend. The colonel in
command was so drunk that day that he could barely get his
words out, and when he did, it was to say things like, "We
aim to make good and goddammit sure that if those guys try
anything cute they won't catch us with our pants down." The
main mission there was to fire H&I, but one man told us·
that their record was the worst in the whole Corps, probably
the whole country, they'd harassed and .interdicted a lot of
sleeping civilians and Korean Marines, even a couple of
Americal patrols, but hardly any Viet Congo (The colonel
kept calling it "artillerary." The first time he said it Flynn
and I looked away from .each other, the second time we blew
beer through our noses, but the colonel fell in laughing right
away and more than covered us.) No sandbags, exposed
shells; dirty pieces, guys going around giving US that look,·
"We're cool, how come you're not?" At the strip Sean was
talking to the operator about it and the man got angry. "Oh
yeah? Well fuck you, how tight do you think you want it?
There ain't been any veecees around here in three months."
"So far so good," Sean said. "Hear anything on that chopper yet?"
But sometimes everything stopped, nothing flew, you
couldn't even find out why. I got stuck for a chopper once in
some lost patrol outpost in the Delta where the sergeant
chain-ate candy bars and played country-and-western tapes
twenty hours a day until I heard it in my sleep, some .sleep,
Up on Wolverton.Mountain and Lonesome as the bats and
the bears in Miller's Cave and I fell into a burning ring of
fire, surrounded by strungout rednecks who weren't getting
much sleep either because they couldn't trust one of their 400
mercenary troopers or their own hand-picked perimeter
guards or anybody else except maybe Baby Ruth and Johnny
Cash, they'd been waiting for it so long now they were afraid
they woulqn't know it when they finally got it, and it burns
burns burns ....
Finally on the fourth day a helicopter
came in to deliver meat and movies to the camp and I went
out on. it, so happy to get back to Saigon that I didn't crash
for two days.
Airmobility, dig it, you weren't going anywhere. It made you
feel ·safe, it made you feel Omni, but it was only a stunt,
technology. Mobility was just mobility, it saved lives or took
them ali the time (saved mine I don't know how many times,
maybe dozens, maybe none), what you really needed was a
flexibility far greater than anything the technology .could
provide, some generous, spontaneous gift for accepting surprises, and I didn't have it. I got to hate surprises, control
freak at the crossroads, if you were one of those people who
always thought they had to know what was coming next, the
war could cream you. It was the same with your ongoing
attempts at getting used to the jungle. or the blow-you-out
climate or the saturating strangeness of the place which
didn't lessen with exposure so often as it fattened and darkened in accumulating alienation. It was great if you could
adapt, you had to try, but it wasn't the same as making a
discipline, going into your own reserves and developing a real
war metabolism, slow yourself down when your heart tried to
punch its way through your chest, get swift when everything
went to stop and all you could feel of your whole life was the
entropy whipping through it. Unlovable terms.
The ground was always in play, always being swept.
Under the ground was his, above it was ours. We had the air,
we could get up in it but not disappear in to it, we could run
but we couldn't hide, and he could do each so well that sometimes it looked like he was doing them both at once, while
our finder just went limp. All the same, one place or another
it was always going on, rock around the clock, we had the
days and he had the nights. You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was
provisional, that early death, blindness, loss of legs, arms or
balls, major and lasting disfigurement-the whole rotten
deal-could come in on the freakyfiuky as easily as in the socalled expected ways, you heard so many of those stories it·
was a wonder anyone was left alive to die in firefights and
mortar-rocket attacks. After a few weeks, when the nickel
had jarred loose and dropped' and I saw that everyone
around me was carrying a gun, r also saw that anyone of
them could go off at any time, putting you where it wouldn't
matter whether it had been an accident or not. The roads
were mined, the trails booby-trapped, satchel charges and
grenades blew up jeeps and movie theaters, the VC got work
inside all the camps as shoeshine boys and laundresses and·
honey-dippers, they'd starch your fatigues and burn your shit
and then go home and mortar your area. Saigon and Cholon
and Danang held such hostile vibes that you· felt you were
being dry-sniped every time someone looked at you, and
choppers fell out of the sky like fat poisoned birds a hundred
times a day. After a while r couldn't get on one without
thinking that r must be out of my fucking mind.
Fear and motion, fear and standstill, no preferred cut
there, no way even to be clear about which was really worse,
the wait or the delivery. Combat spared far more men than it
wasted, but everyone suffered the time between contact,
especially when they were going out every day looking for it;
bad going on foot, terrible in trucks and APC's, awful in
helicopters, the worst, trav:eling so fast toward something .so
frightening. r can remember times when I went half dead
with my fear of the motion, the speed and direction already
fixed and pointed one way. It was painful enough just flying
"safe" hops between firebases and lz's; if you were ever on a
helicopter that had been hit by ground fire your deep, perpetual chopper anxiety was guaranteed. At least actual con~
tact when it was happening would draw long raggedy strand~
of energy out of you, it was juicy, fast and refining, and
traveling toward it was hollow, dry, cold and steady, it never
let you alone. All you could do was look around at the other
people on board and see if they were as scared and numbed
out as you were. If it looked like they weren't you thought
they were insane, if it looked like they were it made you feel
a lot worse.
r weht through that thing a number of times and only got
a fast return on my fear once, a too classic hot landing· with
the heat coming from the trees about 300 yards away, sweeping machine-gun fire that sent men head down into swampy
water, running on their hands and knees toward the grass
where it wasn't blown flat by the rotor blades, not much to be
running for but better than nothing. The helicopter pulled up
before we'd all gotten out, leaving the last few men to jump
twenty feet down between the guns across the paddy and the
gun on the chopper door. When we'd all reached the cover of
the wall and the captain had made a check, we were amazed
to see that no one had even been hurt, except for one man
who'd sprained both his ankles jumping. Afterward, r re-
membered that I'd been down in the muck worrying about
leeches. I guess you could say that I was refusing to accept
the situation.
"Boy, you sure get offered some shitty choices," a Marine
once said to me, and I couldn't help but feel that what he
really meant was that you didn't get offered any at all. Specifically, he was just talking about a couple of C-ration cans,
"dinner," but considering his young life you couldn't blame
him for thinking that if he knew one thing for sure, it was
that there was no one anywhere who cared less about what
he wanted. There wasn't anybody he wanted to thank for his
food, but he was grateful that he was still alive to eat it, that
the motherfucker hadn't scarfed him up first. He hadn't been
anything but tired and scared for six months and he'd lost a
lot, mostly people, and seen far too much, but he was breathing in and breathing out, some kind of choice all by itself.
He had one of those faces, I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth
sucked out of the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold
white lips, you knew he wouldn't wait for any of it to come
back. Life had made him old, he'd live it out old. All those
faces, sometimes it was like looking into faces!at a rock concert, locked in, the event had them; or like students who were
very heavily advanced, serious beyond what you'd call their
years if you didn't know for yourself what the minutes and
hours of those years' were made up of. Not just like all the
ones you saw who looked like. they couldn't drag their asses
through another day of it. (How do you feel when a nineteenyear-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he's
gotten too old for this kind of shit?) Not like the faces of the
dead or wounded either, they could look more released than
overtaken. These were the faces of boys whose whole lives
seemed to have backed up on them, they'd be a few feet away
but they'd be looking back at you over a distance you knew
you'd never really cross. We'd talk, sometimes fly together,
guys going out on R&R, guys escorting bodies, guys who'd
flipped over into extremes of peace or violence. Once I flew
with a kid who Was going home, he looked back down once
at the ground where he'd spent the year and spilled his whole
load of tears. Sometimes you even flew with the dead.
Once I jumped on a chopper that was full of them. The
kid in the op shack had said that there would be a body on
board, but he'd been given some wrong information. "How
bad do you want to get to Danang?" he'd asked me, and I'd
said, "Bad."
When r. saw what was happening I didn't want to get on,
but they'd made a divert and a special landing forme, I had
to go with the chopper I'd drawn, I was afraid of looking
squeamish. (1 remember, too, thinking that a chopper full of
dead'men was far less likely to get shot down than one full of
living.) They weren't even in bags. They'd been on a truck
near one of the firebases in' the DMZ that was firing support
for Khe Sanh, and the truck had Iiit a Command-detonated
mine, then they'd been rocketed. The Marines were always
running out of things, even f()od, ammo and medicine, it
wasn't so strange that they'd run out of bags too. The men
had been wrapped around in ponchos, some of them carelessly fastened with plastic straps, and loaded on board.
There was a small space cleared for me between one of them
and the door gunner, who looked pale and so tremendously
furious that I thought he was angry with me, and I couldn't
look at him for a while. When we went up the wind blew
through the ship and made the ponchos shake and tremble
until the one next to me blew back in a fast brutal flap, ~
uncovering the face. They hadn't even closed his eyes for
him.
,
The gunner started hollering as loud as he could, "Fix it! '
Fix it!," maybe he thought the eyes were looking at him, but
there wasn't anything I could do. My hand went there a
couple of times and I couldn't, and then I did. I pulled the
poncho tight, lifted his head carefully and tucked the poncho
under it, and then I couldn't believe that I'd done it. All
during the ride the gunner kept trying to smile, and when we
landed at Dong Ha he thanked me and ran off to get a detail.
The pilots jumped down and walked away without looking
back once, like they'd never seen that chopper before in their
lives. I flew the rest of the way to Danang in a general's
plane.
II
You know how it is, you want to look and you don't want to
look. I can remember the strange feelings I had when I was a
kid looking at war photographs in Life, the ones that showed·
dead people or a lot of dead people lying close together ina
field or a street, often touching, seeming to hold each other.
Even when the picture was sharp and cleanly defined, something wasn't clear at all, something repressed that monitored
the images and withheld their essential information. It may
have legitimized my fascination, letting me look for as long
as I wanted; I didn't have a language for it then, but I remember now the shame I felt, like looking at first porn, all
the porn in the world. I could have looked until my lamps
went out and I still wouldn't have accepted the connection
between a detached leg and the rest of a body, or the poses
and positions that always happened (one day I'd hear it
called "response-to-impact"), bodies wrenched too fast and
violently into unbelievable contortion. Or the total impersonality of group death, making them lie anywhere and any way
it left them, hanging over barbed wire or thrown promiscu-
ously on top of other dead, or up into the trees like terminal
acrobats, Look what I can do.
Supposedly, you weren't going to have that kind of obscuration when you finally started seeing them on real ground in
front of you, but you tended to manufacture it. anyway becaUse of how often and how badly you needed protection
from what you were seeing, had actually come 30,000 miles
to see. Once I looked at them strung from the perimeter to
the treeline, most of them clumped together nearest the wire,
then in smaller numbers but tighter groups midway, fanning
out into lots of scattered points nearer the treeline, with one
all by himself half into the bush and half out. "Close but no
cigar," the captain said, and then a few of his men went out
there and kicked them all in the head, thirty-seven of them.
Then I heard an M-16 on full automatic starting to go
through clips, a second to fire, three to plug in a fresh clip,
and I saw a man out there, doing it. Every round was like a
tiny. concentration of high-velocity wind, making the bodies
wince and shiver. When he finished he walked by us on the
way back to his hootch, and I knew I hadn't seen anything
until I saw his face. It was flushed and mottled and twisted
like he had his face skin on inside out, a patch of green that
was too dark, a streak of red running into bruise purple, a lot
of sick gray white in between, he looked like he'd had a heart
attack out there. His eyes were rolled up half into his. head,
his mouth was sprung open and his tongue was out, but he
was smiling. Really a dude who'd shot his wad. The captain
wasn't too pleased about my having seen.that.
There wasn't a day when someone didn't ask me what I was
doing there. Sometimes an especially smart grunt or another
correspondent would even ask. me what I was really doing
there, as though I could say anything honest about it except
"Blah blah blah cover the war" or "Blab blah blah write a
book." Maybe we accepted each other's stories about why we
were there at face value: the grunts who "had" to be there,
the spooks and civilians Whose corporate faith had led them
there, the correspondents whose curiosity or ambition drew
them over. But somewhere all the mythic tracks intersected,
from the lowest John Wayne wetdream to the most aggravated soldier-poet fantasy, and where they did I believe that
everyone knew everything about everyone else, every one of
us there a true volunteer. Not that you didn't hear some
overripe bullshit about it: Hearts and Minds, Peoples of the
Republic, tumbling dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium
of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching
Doodab; you could also hear the other, some young soldier
speaking in all bloody innocence, saying, "All that's just a
load, man. We're here to kill gooks. Period." Which wasn't
at all true of me. I was there to watch.
Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a
role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war
covered me; an old story, l:lnless of course you've never
heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that
you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I
acted on it and went, crude because I didn't know, it took the
war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything
you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem
was that you didn't always know what you were seeing until
later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at
all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information 'isn't frozen,
you are.
Sometimes I didn't know if an action took a second or an
hour or if I dreamed it or what. In· war more than in other
life you don't really know what you're doing most of. the
time, you're just behaving, and afterward you can make up
any kind of bullshit you want to about it, say you felt good or
bad, loved it or hated it, did this or that, the right thing or the
wrong thing; still, what happened happened.
Coming back, telling stories, I'd say, "Oh man I was
scared," and,"Oh God I thought it was all over," a long time
before I knew how scared I was really supposed to be, or
how clear and closed and beyond my control "all over" could
become. I wasn't dumb but I sure was raw, certain connections are hard to make when you come from a place where
they go around with war in their heads all the time.
"If you get hit," a medic told me, "we can chopper you
back to base-camp hospital in like twenty minutes."
"If you get hit real bad," a corpsman said, "they'll get your
case to Japan in twelve hours."
"If you get killed," a spec 4 from Graves promised, "we'll
have you home in a week;"
TIME IS ON MY SIDE, already written there across the first
helmet I ever wore there. And underneath it, in smaller lettering that read more like a whispered prayer than an assertion, No lie, GI. The rear-hatch gunner on a Chinook
threw it to me that first morning at the Kontum airstrip, a
few hours after the Dak To fighting had ended, screaming at
me through the rotor wind, "You keep that, we got plenty,
good luck!" and then flying off. I was so glad to have the
equipment that I didn't stop to think where it had to have
come from. The sweatband inside was seasoned up black and
greasy, it was more alive now than the man who'd worn it,
when I got rid of it ten minutes later I didn't just leave it on
the ground, lsnuck away from it furtive and ashamed, afraid
that someone would see it and call after me, "Hey numbnuts,
you forgot something ....
"
That morning when I tried to go out they sent me down
the line from a coionel to a major to a captain to a sergeant,
who took one look, called nie Freshmeat, and told me to go
find some other outfit to get myself killed with. I didn't know
what was going on, I was so nervous I started to laugh. I told
him that nothing was going to happen to me and he gave my
shoulder a tender, menacing pat and said, "This ain't the
fucking movies over here, you know." I laughed again and
said that I knew, but he knew that I didn't.
Day one, if anything could have penetrated that first innocence I might have taken the next plane out. Out absolutely.
It was like a walk through a colony of stroke victims, a thousand men on a cold rainy airfield after too much of something I'd never really know, "a way you'll never be," dirt and
blood and torn fatigues, eyes that poured out a steady charge
of wasted horror. I'd just missed the biggest battle of the war
so far, I was telling myself that I was so~ry, but it was right
there all around me and I didn't even know it. I couldn't look
at anyone for more than a second, I didn't want to be caught
listening, some war correspondent, I didn't know what to say
or do, I didn't like it already. When the rain stopped and the
ponchos came off there was a smell that I thought was ~oing
to make me sick: rot, sump, tannery, open grave, dumpfire-· awful, you'd walk into pockets of Old Spice that made
it even worse. I wanted badly to find some place to sit alone
and smoke a cigarette, to find a face that would cover my
face the way my poncho covered my new fatigues. I'd worn
them once before, yesterday morning in Saigon, bringing
them out of the black market and back to the hotel, dressing
up in front of the mirror, making faces and moves I'd never
make again. And loving it. Now, nearby on the ground, there
was a man sleeping with a poncho over his head and a radio
in his arms, I heard Sam the Sham singing, "Lil' Red Riding
Hood, I don't think little big girls should, Go walking in
these spooky old woods alone ....
"
I turned to walk some other way and there was a man
standing in front of me. He didn't exactly block me, but he
didn't move either. He tottered a little and blinked, he looked
at me and through me, no one had ever looked at me like
that before. I felt a cold fat drop of sweat start down the
middle of my back like a spider, it seemed to take an hour to
finish its run. The man lit a cigarette and then sort of slobbered it out, I couldn't imagine what I was seeing. He tried
again with a fresh cigarette. I gave him the light for that one,
there was a flicker of focus, acknowledgment, but after a few
puffs it went out too, and he let it drop to the ground. "I
couldn't spit for a week up there," he said, "and now I can't
fuclcirlgstop."
III
In Saigon I always went to sleep stoned so I almost always
lost my dreams, probably just as well, sock in deep and dim
under that information and get whatever rest you could,
wake up tapped.of aU images but the ones remembered from
the day or the week before, with only the taste of a bad dream
in your mouth like you'd been chewing on a roll of dirty old
pennies in your sleep. I'd watched grunts asleep putting out
the REM's like a firefight in the dark, I'm sure it was the
same with me. They'd say (I'd ask) that they didn't remember their dreams either when they were in the zone, but on
R&R or in the hospital their dreaming would be constant,
open, violent and clear, like a man in the Pleiku hospital on
the night I was there. It was three in the morning, scary and
upsetting like hearing a language for the first time and somehow understanding every wont, the voice loud and small at
the same time, insistent, calling, "Who? Who? Who's in the
next room?" There was a single shaded light over the desk at
the end of the ward where I sat with the orderly. I could only
see the first few beds, it felt like there were a thousand of
them running out into the darkness, but actually there were
only twenty in each row. After the man had repeated it a few
times there was a change like the break in a fever, he
sounded like a pleading little boy. I could see cigarettes being
lighted at the far end of the ward, mumbles .and groans,
wounded men returning to consciousness, pain, but the man
who'd been dreaming slept through it ....
As for my own
dreams, the ones I lost there would make it through later, I
should have known, some things will just naturally follow
until they take. The night would come when they'd be vivid
and unremitting, that night the beginning of a long string, I'd
remember then and wake up half believing that I'd never
really been in any of those places.
Saigon cafarde, a bitch, nothing for it but some smoke and a
little lie-down, waking in the late afternoon on damp pillows,
feeling the emptiness of the bed behind you as you walked to
the windows looking down at Tu Do. Or just lying there
tracking the rotations of the ceiling fan, reaching for the fat
roach that sat on my Zippo in a yellow disk of grass tar.
There were mornings when I'd do it before my feet even hit
the floor. Dear Mom, stoned again.
In the Highlands, where the Montagnards would trade you
a pound of legendary grass for a carton of Salems, I got
stoned with some infantry from the 4th. One of them had
worked for months on his pipe, beautifully carved and
painted with flowers and peace symbols. There was a reedy
little man in the circle who grinned all the time but hardly
spoke. He pulled a thick plastic bag out of his pack and
handed it over to me. It was full of what looked like large
pieces of dried fruit. I was stoned and hungry, I almost put
my hand in there, but it had a bad weight to it. The other men
were giving each other looks, some amused, some embarrassed and even angry. Someone had told me once, there
were a lot more ears than heads in Vietnam; just information. When I handed it back he was still grinning, but he
looked sadder than a monkey.
In Saigon and Danang we'd get stoned together and keep
the common pool stocked and tended. It was bottomless and
alive with Lurps, seals, recondos, Green-Beret bushmasters,
redundant mutilators, heavy rapers, eye-shooters, widow-
makers, nametakers, classic essential American types; point
men, isolatos and outriders like they were programmed in
their genes to do it, the first taste made them crazy for it, just
like they knew it would. You thought you were separate and
protected, you could travel the war for a hundred years, a
swim in that pool could still be worth a piece of your
balance.
We'd all heard about the man in the Highlands who was
"building his own gook," parts were the least of his troubles.
In Chu Lai some Marines pointed a man out to me and
swore to God they'd seen him bayonet a wounded NV A and
then lick the bayonet clean. There was a famous story, some
reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women
and children?" and he'd answered, "It's easy, you just don't
lead 'em so much." Well, they said you needed a sense of
humor, there you go, even the VC had one. Once after an
ambush that killed a lot of Americans, they covered the field
with copies of a photograph that showed one more young,
dead American, with· the punch line mimeographed on the
back, "Your X~rays have just come back from the lab and we
think we know what your problem is."
Beautiful for once and only once, just past dawn flying toward the center of the city in a Loach, view from a bubble
floating at 800 feet. In that space, at that hour, you could see
what people had seen forty years before, Paris of the East,
Pearl of the Orient, long open avenues lined and bowered
over by trees running into spacious parks, precisioned scale,
all under the soft shell from a million breakfast fires, camphor smoke rising and diffusing, covering Saigon and the
shining veins of the river with a warmth like the return of
better times. Just a projection, that was the thing about choppers, you had to come down sometime, down to the moment,
the street, if you found a pearl down there you got to keep
it.
By 7 :30it was beyond berserk with bikes, the air was like
L.A. on short plumbing, the subtle city war inside the war
had renewed itself for another day, relatively light on actual
violence but intense with bad feeling: despair, impactedrage,
impotent gnawing resentment; thousands of Vietnamese in
the service of a pyramid that wouldn't stand for five years,
plugging the feed tube into their ow~ hearts, grasping and
gorging; young Americans in from the boonies on TDY,
charged with hatred a:1dgrounded in fear of the Vietnamese;
. thousands of Americans sitting in their offices crying in
bored chorus, "You can't get these people· to do a fucking
thing, you can't get these people to do a fucking thing." And
all the others, theirs and ours, who just didn't want to play, it
sickened them. That December the GVN Department of Labor had announced that the refugee problem had been
solved, that "all refugees [had] been assimilated into the
economy," but mostly they seemed to have assimilated themselves into the city's roughest corners, alleyways, mud slides,
under parked cars. Cardboard boxes that had carried airconditioners and refrigerators housed up to ten children,
most Americans and plenty of Vietnamese would cross the
.street to avoid trash heaps that fed whole families. And this
was still months before Tet, "refugees up. the gazops," a
flood. I'd heard that the GVN Department of Labor had nine
American advisors for every Vietnamese.
In Broddards and La Pagode and the pizzeria around the
corner, the Cowboys and Vietnamese "students" would hang
out all day, screaming obscure arguments at each other, cadging off Americans, stealing tips from the tables, reading
D I SPA
T C H E S
/
40
PIeiade editions of Proust, Malraux, Camus. One of them
talked to me a few times but we couldn't really communicate, all I understood was his obsessive comparison between
Rome and Washington, and that he seemed to believe that
Poe had been a French writer. In the late afternoon the Cowboys would leave the cafes and milk bars and ride down hard
on Lam Son Square to pick the Allies. They could snap a
Rolex off your wrist like a hawk hitting a field mouse; wallets, pens, cameras, eyeglasses, anything; if the war had gone
on any longer they'd have found a way to whip the boots off
your feet. They'd hardly leave their saddles and they never
looked back. There was a soldier down from the 1st Division
who was taking snapshots of his friends with some bar girls in
front of the Vietnamese National Assembly: He'd gotten his
shot focused and centered but before he pushed the button
his camera was a block away, leaving him in the bike's backwash with a fresh pink welt on his throat where the cord had
been torn and helpless amazement on his face, 'Well I'll be
d.ipped in shit!"; as a little boy raced across the square,
zIpped a piece of cardboard up the soldier's shirtfront and
took off around the corner with his Paper Mate. The White
Mice stood around giggling, but there were a lot of us watching from the Continental terrace, a kind of gasp went up
frop] the tables, and later when he came up for a beer he
said, "I'm goin' back to the war, man, this fucking Saigon is
too much for me." There was a large group of civilian engineers there, the same men you'd see in the restaurants throw~g food at each other, and one of them, a fat old boy, said,
You ever catch one of them li'l nigs just pinch 'em. Pinch
'em hard. Boy, they hate that."
Five to seven were bleary low hours in Saigon, the city's
energy ebbing at dusk, until it got dark and movement was
replaced with apprehension. Saigon at night was still Viet..;.
nam at night, night was the war's truest medium; night was
when it got really interesting in the villages, the TV crews
couldn't film at night, the Phoenix was a night bird, it flew in
and out of Saigon all the time.
Maybe you had to be pathological to find glamour in
Saigon, maybe you just had to settle for very little, but Saigon had it for me, and danger activated it. The days of big,
persistent terror in Saigon were over, but everyone felt that
they could come back again any time, heavy like 1963-5,
when they hit the old Brinks BOQ on Christmas Eve, when
they blew up the My Canh floating restaurant, waited for it
to be rebuilt and moved to another spot on the river, and
then blew it up again, when they bombed the first U.S. embassy and changed the war forever from the intimate inside
out. There were four known VC sapper battalions in the
Saigon-Cholon area, dread sappers, guerrilla superstars,
they didn't even have to do anything to put the fear out.
Empty ambulances sat parked at all hours in front ?f the new
embassy. Guards ran mirrors and "devices" under all vehicles entering all installations, BOQ's were fronted with sandbags, checkpoints and wire, high-gauge grilles filled our
windows, but they still got through once in a while, random
terror but real, even the supposedly terror~free safe spots
worked out between the Corsican mob and the VC offered
plenty of anXiety. Saigon just before Tet; guess, guess again.
Those nights there was a serious tiger lady going around
on a Honda shooting American officers on the street with a
.45. I think she'd killed over a dozen in three months; the
Saigon papers described her as "beautiful," but I don't know
how anybody knew that. The commander of one of the Saigon MP battalions said he thought it was a man dressed in an
ao dai because a .45 was "an awful lot of gun for a itty bitty
Vietnamese woman."
Breathing In
Saigon, the center, where every action in the bushes hundreds of miles away fed back into town on a karmic wire
strung so tight that if you touched it in the early morning it
would sing all day and all night. Nothing so horrible ever
happened upcountry that it was beyond language :fix and
press relations, a squeeze fit into the computers would make
the heaviest numbers jump up and dance. You'd either meet
an optimism that no violence could unconvince or a cynicism
that would eat itself empty every day and then turn, hungry
and malignant, on whatever it could for a bite, friendly or
hostile, it didn't matter. Those men called dead Vietnamese
"believers," a lost American platoon was
black eye," they
talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigor.
It seemed the least of the war's contradictions that to lose
your worst sense of American shame you had to leave the
Dial Soapers in Saigon and a hundred headquarters who
spoke goodworks and killed nobody themselves, and go out
to the grungy men in the jungle who talked bloody murder
and killed people all the time. It was true that the grunts
stripped belts and packs and weapons from their enemies;
Saigon wasn't a flat market, these goods filtered down and in
with the other spoils: Rolexes, cameras, snakesldn shoes from
Taiwan, air-brush portraits of nude Vietnamese women with
breasts like varnished beach balls, huge wooden carvings that
they set on their desks to give you the finger when you
walked into their offices. In Saigon it never mattered what
they told you, even less when they actually seemed to believe
it. Maps, charts, figures, projections, fly fantasies, names of
places, of operations~ of commanders, of weapons; memories, guesses, second guesses, experiences (new, old, real,
imagined, stolen); histories, attitudes-you could let it go,
let it all go. If you wanted some war news in Saigon you had
to hear it in stories brought from the field by friends, see it in
"a
/
43
the lost watchful eyes of the Saigonese, or do it like Trashman, reading the cracks in the sidewalk.
IV
There were times during the night when all the jungle sounds
would stop at once. There was no dwindling down or fading
away, it was all gone in a single instant as though some signal
had been transmitted out to the life: bats, birds, snakes,
monkeys, insects, picking up on a frequency that a thousand
years in the jungle might condition you to receive, but leaving you as it was to wonder what you weren't hearing now,
straining for any sound, one piece of information. 1 had
heard it before in other jungles, the Amazon and the Philippines, but those jungles were "secure," there wasn't much .
chance that hundreds of Viet Cong were coming and going,
moving and waiting, living out there just to do you harm.
The thought of that one could turn any sudden silence into a
space that you'd fill with everything you thought was quiet in
you, it could even put you on the approach to clairaudience.
You thought you heard impossible things: damp roots
breathing, fruit sweating, fervid bug action, the heartbeat of
tiny animals.
You could sustain that sensitivity for a long time, either
until the babbling and chittering and shrieking. of the jungle
had started up again, or until something familiar brought you
out of it, a helicopter flying around above your canopy or the
strangely reassuring sound next to you of one going into the
chamber .. Once we heard a really frightening thing blaring
down from a Psyops soundship broadcasting the sound of a
baby crying. You wouldn't have wanted to hear that during
daylight, let alone at night when the volume and distortion
came down through two or three layers of cover and froze us
all in place for a moment. And there wasn't much release in
the pitched hysteria of the message that followed, hyperVietnamese like an icepick in the ear, something like,
"Friendly Baby, GVN Baby, Don't Let This Happen to
Your Baby, Resist the Viet Cong Today!"
Sometimes you'd get so tired that you'd forget where you
were and sleep the way you hadn't slept since you were a
child. 1 know that a lot of people there never got up from
that kind of sleep; some called the~ lucky (Never knew what
hit him), some called them fucked (If he'd been on the stick
. . .), but that was worse than academic, everyone's
death got talked about, it was a way of constantly touching
and turning the odds, and real sleep was at a premium. (I
met a ranger-recondo who could go to sleep just like that,
say, "Guess I'll get some," close his eyes and be there, day or
night, sitting or lying down, sleeping through some things but
not others; a loud radio or a 105 firing outside the tent
wouldn't wake him, but a rustle in the bushes fifty feet away
would, or a stopped generator.) Mostly what you had was on
the agitated side of half-sleep, you thought you were sleeping
but you were really just waiting. Night sweats, harsh functionings of consciousness, drifting in and out of your head,
pinned to a canvas cot somewhere, looking up at a strange
. ceiling or out through a tent flap at the glimmering night sky
of a combat zone. Or dozing and waking under mosquito
netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn't
99 percent moisture, one clean breath to dry-sluice your
anxiety and the backwater smell of your own body. But
all you got and all there was were misty clots of air that
corroded your appetite and burned your eyes and made your
cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked
alive, crackling and wet. There were spots in the jungle
where you had to have a cigarette going all the time,
whether you smoked or not, just to keep the mosquitoes from
swarming into your mouth. War under water, swamp fever
and instant involuntary weight control, malarias that could
bum you out and cave you in, put you into twenty-three
hours of sleep a day without giving you a minute of rest,
leaving you there to listen to the trance music that they said
came in with terminal brain funk. ("Take your pills, baby,"
a medic in Can Tho told me. "Big orange ones every week,
little white ones every day, and don't miss a day whatever
you do. They got strains over here that could waste a heavyset fella like you in a week.") Sometimes you couldn't live
withthe terms any longer and headed for air-conditioners in
Danang and Saigon. And sometimes the only reason you
didn't panic was that you didn't have the energy.
Every day people were dying there because of some small
detail that they couldn't be bothered to observe. Imagine
being too tired to snap a flak jacket closed, too tired to clean
your rifle, too tired to guard a light, too tired to deal with the
half-inch margins of safety that moving through the war
often demanded, just too tired to give a fuck and then dying
behind that exhaustion. There were times when the whole
war itself seemed tapped of its vitality: epic enervation, the
machine running half -assed and depressed, fueled on the
watery residue of last year's war-making energy. Entire divisions would fllllction in a bad dream state, acting out a weird
set of moves without any connection to their source. Once I
talked for maybe five minutes With a sergeant who had just
brought his squad in from a long patrol before I realized that
the dopey-dummy film over his eyes and the fly abstraction of
his words were coming from deep sleep. He was standing
there at the bar of the NCO club with his eyes open and a
beer in his hand, responding to some dream conversation far
inside his head. It really gave me the creeps-this was the
second day of the Tet Offensive, our installation was more or
less surrounded, the only secure road out of there was littered with dead Vietnamese, information was scarce and I
was pretty touchy and tired myself-and for a second I imagined that I was tallcing to a dead man. When I told him about
it later he just laughed and said, "Shit, that's nothing. I do
that all the time."
Some people just wanted to blow it all to hell, animal vegetable and mineral. They wanted a Vietnam they could fit into
their car ashtrays; the joke went, "What you do is, you load
all the Friendlies onto ships and take them out to the South
China Sea. Then you bomb the country flat. Then you sink
the ships." A lot of people knew !hat the country could never
be won, only destroyed, and they locked into that with
breathtaking concentration, no quarter, laying down the
seeds of the disease, roundeye fever, until it reached plague
proportions, taking one from every family, a family from
every hamlet, a hamlet from every province, until a million
had died from it and millions more were left uncentered and
lost in their flight from it.
Up on the roof of the Rex BOQ in Saigon I walked into a
scene more bellicose than a ::firefight,at least 500 officers
nailed to the bar in a hail of chits, shiny irradiant faces
talking war, men drinking like they were going to the front,
and maybe a few of them really were. The rest were already
there, Saigon duty; coming through a year of that· without
becoming totally blown out indicated as much heart as you'd
need to take a machine-gun position with your hands, you
sure couldn't take one with your mouth. We'd watched a
movie (Nevada Smith, Steve McQueen working through a
hard-revenge scenario, riding away at the end burned clean
but somehow empty and old too, like he'd lost his margin for
regeneration through violence); now there was a live act,
Tito and His Playgirls, "Up up and awayeeyay in my
beaudifoo balloooon," one of those Filipino combos that
even the USO wouldn't touch, hollow beat, morbid rock and
roll like steamed grease in the muggy air.
Roof of the Rex, ground zero, men who looked like they'd
been suckled by wolves, they could die right there and their
jaws would work for another half-hour. This is where they
asked you, "Are you a Dove or a Hawk?" and "Would you
rather fight them l1ereor in Pasadena?" Maybe we could beat
them in Pasadena, I'd think, but I wouldn't say it, especially
not here where they knew that I knew that they really
weren't fighting anybody anywhere anyway, it made them
pretty touchy. That night I listened while a colonel explained
the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of highprotein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice
and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to
death with our meat; what could you say except, "Colonel,
you're insane"? It was like turning up in the middle of some
black looneytune where the Duck had all the lines. I only
jumped in once, spontaneous as shock, during Tet when I·
heard a doctor bragging that he'd refused to allow wounded
Vietnamese into his ward. "But Jesus Christ," I said, "didn't
you take the Hippocratic Oath?" but he was ready for me.
"Yeah," he said, "I took it in America." Doomsday celebs,
technomaniac projectionists; chemicals, gases, lasers, sonicelectric ballbreakers that were still on the boards; and for
back-up, deep in all their hearts, there were always the
Nukes, they loved to remind you that we had some, "right
here in-country." Once I met a colonel who had a plan to
shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the
North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of
mega-death.
"Come on," the captain said, "we'll take you out' to play
Cowboys and Indians." We walked out from Song Be in a
long line, maybe a hundred men; rifles, heavy automatics,
mortars, portable one-shot rocket-launchers, radios, medics;
breaking into some kind of sweep formation, five files with
small teams of specialists in each file. A gunship flew close
hover-cover until we came to some low hills, then two more
ships came along and peppered the hills until we'd passed
safely through them. It was a beautiful operation. We played
all morning until someone on the point got something-a
"scout," they thought, and then they didn't know. They
couldn't even tell for sure whether he was from a friendly
tribe or not, no markings on his arrows because his quiver
was empty, like his pockets and; his hands. The captain
thought about it during the walk back, but when we got to
camp he put it in his report, "One VC killed"; good for the
unit, he said, not bad for the captain either..
Search and Destroy, more a' gestalt than a tactic, brought
up alive and steaming from the Command psyche. Not just a
walk and a firefight, in action it should have been named the
other way around, pick through the pieces and see if you
could work together a count, the sponsor wasn't buying any
dead civilians. The VC had an ostensibly similar tactic called
Find and Kill. Either way, it was us looking for him looking
for us looking for him, war on a Cracker Jack box, repeated
to diminishing returns.
A lot of people used to say that it got fucked up when they
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made it as easy for us to shoot as not to shoot. In I and II
Corps it was "loose policy" for gunships to fire if the subjects
froze down there, in the Delta it was to shoot if they ran or
"evaded," either way a heavy dilemma, which would you do?
"Air sports," one guns.hip pilot called it, and went on to
describe it with fervor, "Nothing finer, you're up there at two
thousand, you're God, just open up the flexies and watch it
pee, nail those slime to the paddy wall, nothing finer, double
back and get the caribou."
"Back home I used to fill my own cartridges for hunting,"
a platoon leader told me. "Me and my father and my
brothers used to make a hundred a year between us maybe. I
swear to God, I never saw anything like this."
Who had? Nothing like it ever when we caught a bunch of
them out in the open and close together, we really ripped it
then, volatile piss-off, crazed expenditure, Godzilla never
drew that kind of fire. We even had a small language for our
fire: "discreet burst," "probe," "prime selection," "constructive load," but I never saw it as various, just compulsive
eruption, the Mad Minute for an hour. Charles really wrote
the book on fire control, putting one round into the heart of
things where fifty of ours might go and still not hit anything.
Sometimes we put out so much fire you couldn't tell whether
any of it was coming back or not. When it was, it filled your
ears and your head until you thought you were hearing it
with your stomach. An English correspondent I knew made
a cassette of one of the heavy. ones, he said he used it to
seduce American girls.
Sometimes you felt too thin and didn't want to get into
anything at all and it would land on you like your next-to-last
breath. Sometimes your chops for action and your terror
would reach a different balance and you'd go looking for it
everywhere, and nothing would happen, except a fire ant
would fly up your nose or you'd grow a crotch rot or you'd
lie awake all night waiting for morning so you could get up
and wait on ,your feet. Whichever way it went, you were
covering the war, your choice of story told it all and in Vietnam an infatuation like that with violence wouldn't go unrequited for very long, it would come and put its wild mouth
all over you.
"Quakin' and Shakin'," they called it, great balls of fire,
Contact. Then it was you and the ground: kiss it, eat it, fuck
it; plow it with your whole body, get as close to it as you can
without. being in it yet or of it, guess who's flying around
about an inch above your head? Pucker and submit, it's the
ground. Under Fire would take you out of your head and
your body too, the space you'd seen a second ago between
subject and object wasn't there anymore, it banged shut in a
fast wash of adrenaline. Amazing, unbelievable, guys who'd
played a lot of hard sports said they'd never felt anything like
it, the sudden drop and rocket rush of the hit, the reserves of
adrenaline you could make available to yourself, pumping it
up and putting it out until you were lost floating in it, not
afraid, almost open to clear orgasmic death-by-drowning in
it, actually relaxed. Unless of course you'd shit your pants or
were screaming or praying or giving anything at all to the
hundred-channel panic that blew word salad all around you
and sometimes clean through you. Maybe you couldn't love
the war and hate it inside the same instant, but sometimes
those feelings alternated so rapidly that they spun together in
a strobic wheel rolling all the way up until you were literally
High On War, like it said on all the -helmet covers. Coming
off a jag like that could really make a mess out of you.
In early December I came back from my first operation
with the Marines. I'd lain scrunched up for hours in a flimsy
bunker that was falling apart even faster than I was, listening
to it going on, the moaning and whining and the dull repetitions of whump whump whump and dit dit dit, listening to a
boy who'd somehow broken his thumb sobbing and gagging,
tbinking, "Oh my God, this fucking thing is on a loop!" until
the heavy shooting stopped but not the thing: at the lz waiting for choppers to Phu Bai one last shell came in, landing in
the middle of a pile of full body bags, making a mess that no
one wanted to cleanup, "a real shit detail." It was after
midnight when I finally got back to Saigon, riding in from
Tan Son Nhut in an open jeep with some sniper-obsessed
MP's, and there was a small package of mail waiting for me
at the hotel. I put my fatigues out in the hall room and closed
the door on them, I may have even locked it. I had the I
Corps DT's, livers, spleens, brains, a blue-black swollen·
thumb moved around and flashed to me, they were playing
over the walls of the shower where I spent a half-hour, they
were on the bedsheets, but I wasn't afraid of them, I was
laughing at them, what could they do to me? I filIed a water
glass with Armagnac and rolled a joint, and then I started to
read my mail. In one of the letters there was news that a
friend of mine had killed himself in New York. When I
turned off the lights and got into bed I lay there trying to
remember what he had looked like. He had done it with pills,
but no matter what I tried to imagine, all I saw was blood
and bone fragment, not my dead friend. After a while I
broke through for a second and saw him, but by that time all
I could do with it was file him in with the rest and go to
sleep.
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