13th Valley (87 page)

“Life is motion,” Minh said. “Life sways between plus and minus. You view this as conflict. Why?”

“I'm not imagining conflict,” Brooks defended his thoughts, his thesis. “It's there. Personal, interracial, international. Jesus, Minh! We're in the midst of a war and you ask me why I view it as conflict?”

“You have asked for weeks everyone the same thing. Everyone gives you an answer. You still ask. Perhaps you do not seek the answer. Perhaps you are more satisfied with the question. It is a good question.”

“Perhaps.” Brooks was thinking furiously, trying to make a connection.

“Yes, perhaps,” Minh said. “The ultimate reality is not static matter but the motion of physical existence.”

“Say that again,” Brooks said.

“Reality ultimately is not static matter but the motion of physical existence,” Minh said. “The most essential thing about life is that it is not static. If it does not flow, if you place emphasis on having instead of doing, you will miss the essence of life.”

“Wow!” Doc said rolling on his side to look at Minh. “Wow! That's heavy Mista.”

“I have learned very much with Americans,” Minh said. “I have learned much by watching you and thinking about you.” Minh was gazing at the roof of the hootch, looking as though through it to a very distant point. “You Americans,” Minh said. “You have so much. You think you can do everything. You think you can control nature with your words and your theories. I think sometimes you miss the point.”

“Words are important to me,” Brooks confessed. “I want to find out, if, first, our thoughts control our actions. Then, if our thoughts are determined by the language we learn and finally, are the determinants of conflict, of war, built into the structure of our language. Can't you see? If all that is true, we would be able to restructure human languages to eradicate war.”

“Oh, L-T,” Minh sighed. “You are more intelligent than most Americans but that only makes your plans more complex. You are like them all. You think you can do anything.”

“It can be done, Minh.”

“L-T Brooks, man does not control nature with his scientific theory or with his engineering principles or with his history or with words of any kind. All he does is seek to explain nature. We seek to know how it works. Perhaps to be able to forecast the future from the past. We can arrange elements but we are one with nature and perhaps nature has simply had us arrange the elements for her. Things happen. People die. That is the flow of reality.”

“Do you accept war, Minh?” Brooks was agitated. He tried to hide it by speaking even more softly than usual. He still sounded accusing. “Do you accept a war that has ripped your country apart for thirty years?”

“I can do nothing else but accept it. It is. Perhaps it is not all evil. We go to war. America sends her technology to my country and we learn and we will never again be so backward. Maybe this war is good.”

“Egan said something about that. He said technology only thrives in cultures where the religion and … what did he say? Wait one. Let me look.” Brooks flipped back through several pages of his notebook and scanned his writing. “He said some cultures are passive and believe a man must bend with the wind and flow with nature while other cultures are active. Active cultures have active religions and beliefs and think they can control their own fate. Industrialism only grows in active cultures for it requires those active thoughts as a base.”

Minh did not say anything for what seemed like a long time. Brooks and Doc remained silent. They listened to the spattering rain on the poncho above them and to the slight breeze in the vegetation. At a far distance, perhaps at the firebase, a lone helicopter was landing. Earlier Brooks had received the report and forecast. A storm had come in from Laos. The rain would last forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Then it would clear. The valley would remain in intermittent fog.

Minh broke the pause by asking Brooks what he meant by activist culture and activist religion. They discussed this lethargically for some time.

“No L-T,” Minh said. “You make a mistake. I am Taoist and Zen but they are not my religion. They are not religion in your western use of the word. Maybe my Tao is more close to being principles of consciousness. It is what I live by. How I see myself and people around me and nature around people. Occidentals have no knowledge of their principles. Your principles are based only on not dying. The most terrible thing ever to an occidental is to die. You will do anything to live a day longer. What may be worse than dying is living without dignity or without … I do not know how to say it in English … without Tao. You have moral codes and religious laws and civil laws imposed on you but it is unusual to find an American with principles of living inside him. All Vietnamese know this. There is nothing in your culture to lead you to develop your inside principles. That is why you require outside laws. We are just the reverse. Then Europeans came and conquered our land and brought us their true religions and their true gods and their god-made laws. Now we have that too.

“The problem with your active church,” Minh continued, still staring up through the poncho, “is that you propose to have all the answers. All you really have is a systematic format on which to pose the questions. Your answers are rhetorically achieved and predetermined from the format and thus are only true within the framework of your system. Your religion has no more meaning, no more real answers, than the Tao did twenty-five hundred years ago. And the Tao did not then and does not now have a rigid format or a firm construction so its answers were not and are not conceived in the asking. Do you understand, Sir?”

“That's exactly it,” Brooks said. “That's what I've been saying about war. War is predetermined from the format of languages and culture. If we could unstructure the language then restructure it on a less rigid format … see? War would not be conceived in our speech.”

They talked for hours. Brooks left several times. For two hours he was gone—over to FO's lowslung hootch to study the maps of the valley and to piece together the intelligence reports from the rover teams and from battalion and brigade. Brooks consulted with El Paso and Cahalan. After each tactical consultation he returned to Minh and Doc. They talked to the hour where, beneath a rainsky, day and night are indiscernible.

Doc Johnson had been becoming more melancholy and contemplative all afternoon.
“Yea, though I walk through this valley of the shadow of darkness and death
,” he quoted the 23d Psalm,
“I shall not fear, for thou art with me.”
Doc looked at Minh and the L-T. “That mean somethin to me, Mista,” Doc said.

“Nor shall I fear,” Brooks said, adding a common boonierat paraphrase of the psalm, “for thy arty and thy B-52s are on call to comfort me.”

“That fucked Mista,” Doc said sadly.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Brooks said. “But we're only a tiny part. Somebody else is running the show.”

“A man should control himself,” Minh said. “It is not the rightful pursuit of any man to try to control the life of another. And each village must be responsible for its own internal affairs. The provincial government must stop at the village gate and the national government should control only interprovince relations. No nation should control another.”

“You both educated men,” Doc said. “This makes me feel sad. I feel sad, Mista. My country fuckin with yours. I don't know why. You tell me why?” Neither Minh nor Brooks answered. They had been over it many times before. “You know somethin, Mista? We can do most anything. In fifty years we increased life expectancy in America by fifty percent. That's right. If we keep goin, average dude in the World in fifty years gonna live to one hundred twenty years old. We wipe out typhus, smallpox, polio, diphtheria. Why, Mista? Why? Like the L-T wanta know. Why caint we wipe out war?”

“I have a solution for my country,” Minh said.

“Well, what the fuck you doin here?” Doc asked harshly. “You belong in Saigon.”

“What is your solution, Minh?” Brooks whispered.

“No one,” Minh said staring straight up again, “no one will accept a national election of the North and the South with the winner-take-all result. But we could reunite at a very high level similar to your federal government over your state governments. We could still maintain a government in Saigon and a government in Hanoi. Then we would have a neutral federal national government in Hue. That government would stop at the next level down. We would have our harmony restored.”

At 0200 hours Rover Team Danielle spotted an enemy force approaching their position. The NVA were moving slowly up a medium-use trail. The point and slack each carried American rucksacks. The third soldier carried an American PRC-25 radio.

They all had rifles which they carried in tight against their bodies. The pointman advanced cautiously, raising and lowering a bulky tube to and from his face between each movement. It appeared to be a scope of some kind. Five meters behind the lead element were four soldiers, two pushing two pulling a small cart. The cart looked much like the market place carts of Da Nang or Hue with their bicycle wheels at the sides and their wooden traces. It was overflowing with supplies but in the dark neither Moneski nor Beaford could distinguish what comprised the load. They woke Gorwitz and Smith silently and pointed out the advancing enemy. The NVA were perhaps ten meters down the path. Rover Team Danielle had occupied an old NVA fighting position a meter off the trail. They waited. Moneski wanted the cart. He wanted to engage the unprepared cartmen with their weapons in the cart. Danielle waited. The NVA approached. Beaford's hands sweated on his machine gun. The enemy squad used five minutes to cover ten meters. When the point was opposite Moneski he stopped. He put his weapon down and turned to the slackman and said something very quietly. There was a pause then they laughed quietly and proceeded. Beaford urinated in his pants. The cart passed. The laborers were breathing hard, forcing the wheels through the mud of the trail. Moneski waited until they were up the trail to a point where it bent. Rover Team Danielle opened up with two M-16s and Beaford's 60. All four cartmen were shot and killed. The other enemy soldiers fled. They did not return fire. The rover team decided to abandon the cart. They backed out of their position and retreated to a secondary position they had chosen earlier.

An hour later Paul Calhoun of Rover Team Ellen killed a lone NVA soldier as the enemy rose from a riverwatcher position not ten meters from Calhoun, Pop Randalph and Jim Woods. Then Rover Team Laurie ambushed and killed three enemy soldiers next to the river. Pop Randalph's second MA, set up between RTs Laurie and Ellen, killed two soldiers fleeing Laurie's ambush. The night had settled down for only a short time when Cherry's MA exploded.

“Get em all,” Cherry pleaded from his hidden muck-filled trench. “One for the Garbageman and one for Ridgefield. Get one for Silvers and … oh shit … get em for anybody.” Cherry moved to rise. He wanted to count the dead. Egan grabbed him, held him still. “I gotta see,” Cherry whined.

“I don't wanta put ya in for a Purple Heart,” Egan answered.

They waited. They waited until half an hour after first light. Cherry fidgeted. His eyes were glassy. He had not slept. He rolled over and with his back to Denhardt and Egan he fondled himself. He thought of the stewardess on the flight from New York to Seattle who had been pleasant and he imagined her naked. Then he thought about Linda. His girl. Not anyone's girl. She made him angry. Off to Boston. Off to New York. Philadelphia. They had never made love yet he could picture her naked too. He could see her fine legs and her soft muff. Cherry rolled his tongue inside his mouth and imagined it in Linda's vagina. That bitch, he thought. I bet she's screwin like a rabbit. I bet she always has. Been screwin guys left and right even when we were goin out. Never gave me none. Bitch. Cherry's anger raised his excitement. Christ, he thought. I need a girl. I need someone to fuck. I got so much jizz stored up if I fucked right now I'd shoot so hard I'd blast her ovaries up to her sinuses. Oh, get em all.

Egan allowed Cherry to recon the MA site while he and Denhardt pulled security. They had killed three NVA soldiers. All three had been carrying rifles. One had had an old infrared-night scope. Later, when Cherry packed it back to Campobasso, FO identified it as French, vintage 1954. The scope amazed everyone in Alpha because they had all been led to believe the US Starlight scopes, technically and in concept, were very recent developments.

Brooks' mind had been working all night. By first light he believed the NVA knew Alpha was on the valley floor and within range of the knoll and NVA guns, but he also believed the enemy did not know Alpha's specific location any better than Alpha knew the enemy's. No enemy troops harassed Alpha's base, nor did mortar rounds impact on or near Campobasso. Bravo and Delta companies had both been hit. Firebase Barnett was mortared. Two Americans were killed, three wounded.

Brooks spent the day of 23 August much as he had spent the day before except that instead of talking he wrote. Occasionally he left his hootch. He spent an hour with FO and several shorter periods with each Doc, Minh, El Paso, Cahalan and Brown. Brooks spoke via krypto radio with the GreenMan. The operation was going well, and the GreenMan encouraged and advised him. When Lt. De Barti returned with Rover Team Joan Brooks briefed and debriefed him thoroughly yet he always returned to his notebooks. He wrote for the best part of ten hours and in that period he completed the rough draft of his thesis on conflict.

AN INQUIRY INTO PERSONAL, RACIAL AND INTERNATIONAL

CONFLICT—RUFUS BROOKS—AUGUST 1970

We think ourselves into war. The antecedents are in our minds
.

Conflict, major conflict, does not just happen. It evolves. It may explode over a particular incident but the tension evolves leading gradually to the incident and the explosion. The elements of any conflict, whether it be between individuals or between nations, must form, grow, approach, collide and ignite. Let us here explore the causes and dynamics of conflict and of ultimate conflict—WAR.