Born Fighting (33 page)

The basin was one of the most heavily contested areas in Vietnam, its torn, cratered earth offering every sort of wartime possibility. In the canopied mountains just to the west, not far from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North Vietnamese Army operated an infantry division from an area called Base Area 112. In the valleys of the basin, main-force Viet Cong battalions whose ranks were 80 percent North Vietnamese Army regulars moved against the Americans every day. Local Viet Cong units sniped and harassed. Ridgelines and paddy dikes were laced with sophisticated booby traps of every size, from hand grenades to 250-pound bombs. The villages, where many battles took place, sat in the rice paddies and tree lines like individual fortresses, crisscrossed with trenches and spider holes, their homes sporting bunkers capable of surviving direct hits from large-caliber artillery shells. The Viet Cong infrastructure was intricate and permeating. Except for the old and the very young, villagers who did not side with the communists had either been killed or driven out to the government-controlled enclaves near Da Nang.

In the rifle companies we spent endless months patrolling ridgelines and villages and mountains, far away from any notion of tents, barbed wire, hot food, or electricity. Luxuries were limited to what would fit inside one’s pack, which after a few “humps” usually boiled down to letter-writing material, towel, soap, toothbrush, poncho liner, and a small transistor radio. We moved through the boiling heat with sixty pounds of weapons and gear, causing a typical Marine to drop 20 percent of his body weight while in the bush. When we stopped, we dug chest-deep fighting holes and slit trenches for toilets. We slept on the ground under makeshift poncho hootches, and when it rained we usually took our hootches down because wet ponchos shined under illumination flares, making great targets. Sleep itself was fitful, never more than an hour or two at a stretch for months at a time as we mixed daytime patrolling with nighttime ambushes, listening posts, foxhole duty, and radio watches. Ringworm, hookworm, malaria, and dysentery were common as was trench foot when the monsoons came. Respite was rotating back to the mud-filled regimental combat base at An Hoa for four or five days, where rocket and mortar attacks were frequent and our troops manned defensive bunkers at night.

We had been told while in training that Marine officers in the rifle companies had an 85 percent probability of being killed or wounded, and the experience of “Dying Delta,” as our company was known, bore that out. Of the officers in the bush when I arrived, our company commander was wounded, the weapons platoon commander was wounded, the first platoon commander was killed, the second platoon commander was wounded twice, and I, commanding the third platoon, was wounded twice. The enlisted troops in the rifle platoons fared no better. Two of my original three squad leaders were killed, the third shot in the stomach. My platoon sergeant was severely wounded, as was my platoon guide. By the time I left my platoon I had gone through six radio operators, five of them casualties.

These figures were hardly unique; in fact, they were typical. Many other units—for instance, those that fought the hill battles around Khe Sanh, or those with the famed Walking Dead of the 9th Marine Regiment, or that were in the battle for Hue City or at Dai Do—had it far worse.

When I remember those days and the very young men who spent them with me, I am continually amazed, for these were mostly recent civilians barely out of high school, called up from the cities and the farms to do their year in Hell and then return. Visions haunt me every day, not of the nightmares of war but of the steady consistency with which my Marines faced their responsibilities, and of how uncomplaining most of them were in the face of constant danger. The salty, battle-hardened twenty-year-olds teaching green nineteen-year-olds the intricate lessons of that hostile battlefield. The unerring skill of the young squad leaders as we moved through unfamiliar villages and weed-choked trails in the black of night. The quick certainty with which they moved when coming under enemy fire. Their sudden tenderness when a fellow Marine was wounded and needed help. Their willingness to risk their lives to save other Marines in peril.

In July 1969, I was hit by two grenades while clearing a series of bunkers along a streambed in a place of frequent combat called the Arizona Valley. The first grenade peppered me lightly on the face and shoulders. The second detonated behind me just after I shot the man who threw it and a second soldier who was pointing an AK-47 at me from inside the same bunker. I was hit in the head, back, arm, and leg, and the grenade’s concussion lifted me into the air and threw me down a hill into the stream. I still carry shrapnel at the base of my skull and in one kidney from the blast. But the square, quarter-sized piece that scored the inside of my left knee joint and lodged against the bone of my lower leg would eventually change the direction of my life.

I did not pay much attention to my wounds. I had seen dead Marines, multiple-limb amputees, high-arm amputees, severed spinal cords, bladders ripped open by shrapnel, sucking chest wounds, even one Marine who had been shot between the eyes and out the jaw only to come back to our company after three months in a Japanese hospital. Like so many others during this woefully misunderstood war, I rejoined my unit as soon as possible. I belonged in the bush. Returning to my company before the leg wound had completely healed, it soon became infected. I ignored the infection and the joint itself eventually became septic, complicated by a small, razor-sharp piece of shrapnel that migrated into the joint’s open spaces and chewed on the cartilage whenever I walked or ran. I would not learn the full extent of this damage until I completed my tour and returned to the United States.

There followed two years of surgeries and physical therapy as I tried to rehabilitate my leg and remain in the Marine Corps. In 1971, I was put on limited duty and assigned to a desk job on the secretary of the navy’s staff. Following a surgery in early 1972, the joint unexpectedly swelled and drained heavily through the stitches, an indication of continuing infection in the bone, and I was finally referred to a medical board. The operating surgeon wrote that, because of the infection, the articular cartilage “was so markedly destroyed that one could easily indent it with a hemostat” and commented that “It is remarkable to note the amount of weight he has succeeded in lifting when one considers the condition of his knee pathologically, indicative of the motivational factors that have sustained him as a Marine officer.” He then concluded that “This man is highly motivated and wishes to excel in what areas he can perform in the Marine Corps; however he has diligently exercised for three years with no improvement; indeed, with worsening.”

I had recently become one of 16 first lieutenants out of a group of more than 2,700 to be promoted a year early to captain. I loved commanding infantry troops. I had never given any thought as to what I might do if I became a civilian. And now I was one.

2

The Invisible People
                              

THE MARINE CORPS,
which took 103,000 killed or wounded out of some 400,000 sent to Vietnam, represented one extreme of that volatile era. The better academic institutions such as the Georgetown Law Center, which I entered in August 1972, represented the other. Moreover, the divide between these two extremes was nearly total. In the Marine Corps, virtually everyone I knew had pulled at least one tour in Vietnam. While at Georgetown Law, among a student body of eighteen hundred people who were largely the same age, I can recall meeting only three other students who were combat veterans. There may have been others. If so, they were not anxious to share their experiences in the law school’s bitterly antiwar environment.

It is often said that Vietnam was a draftee’s war, fought by the poor and the minorities. More accurately, it was a war fought mainly by volunteers, including two-thirds of those who served and 73 percent of those who died, who came heavily from traditionalist cultures such as the Scots-Irish. Minorities were well represented, but not overly so. African-Americans made up 13.1 percent of the age group, 12.6 percent of the military, and 12.2 percent of the casualties. And most glaringly, the generation’s academic elites largely sat out the war. Harvard had lost 691 alumni during World War II,
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but in Vietnam, Harvard College lost twelve men from the 12,595 who made up the classes of 1962 through 1972 combined. Princeton’s 8,108 male undergraduates during this same period lost six. MIT’s 8,998 lost two.
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The differences between these two extremes went much further than the war. In the eight years since that 1964 summer, when the Civil Rights Act had first been signed and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution signaled the beginning of a major escalation in Vietnam, the nation had been sundered by war, urban violence, massive protests, and political assassinations. Along the way the baby boomer generation suffered a schizophrenic divide that has yet to fully mend. And forget all the talk of the “generation gap”; this rupture was largely along cultural and class lines, with racial issues sometimes blurring class distinctions. On one side were self-described political radicals, peaceniks, Black Power activists, flower children, and others who believed the American system was irretrievably broken. On the other were the traditionalists who were fighting the war, working in the coal mines and the factories, studying in less eminent colleges and universities, and worrying that the American system as they knew it was being destroyed by the forces of dissent.

Eight years of turmoil had created an irreversible inertia in both camps. This bifurcation of viewpoints had accelerated since the pivotal nightmare of 1968, which had seen the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, and the street riots during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The national uproar following the shooting deaths of four students during antiwar protests at Kent State in 1970 accelerated it even further. To the antiwar movement and even in popular culture, the Kent State tragedy represented the actions of a government gone gruesome and mad. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young warned darkly in a huge hit song of “tin soldiers and Nixon coming,” and opined that “we gotta get back to where soldiers aren’t gunning us down,” as if antiwar protesters were somehow being hunted on a daily basis by the army. Among those who had served in combat, the incident was tragic but hardly emblematic, and the media attention given to it seemed disproportionate if not absurd. The ill-trained National Guardsmen, hounded and physically assaulted by protesting crowds for days, had fired above the heads of those who were pursuing them, their bullets accidentally killing innocent bystanders. And how many U.S. soldiers were killed in Vietnam that week? No one in the media seemed to know or care. The bitterness over this disparity in media treatment ran deep. Long after the war ended, many Vietnam veterans kept bumper stickers on their cars that read “Vietnam / Kent State. 58,000 to 4.”

At Georgetown Law, the overwhelming preponderance of students and faculty came heavily from America’s better universities and were clearly among the dissenters. Years of intellectual conditioning had taught them that the government was corrupt, that the capitalist system was rapacious, that the military was incompetent and even invidious, and that the WASP culture that had largely built America had done so at the expense of other ethnic and racial groups. To many of them the Vietnam War was largely an extension of a racist, colonialist, capitalist system that had its origins in the evils of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans during the nation’s westward expansion. And by implication, in their eyes the ones who had agreed to serve in Vietnam were either criminal or stupid.

By August 1972 one could understand the nation’s war weariness, although a Harris Poll taken that very month indicated strong support for continued bombing of North Vietnam (55 percent to 32 percent) and for mining North Vietnamese harbors (64 percent to 22 percent), and, by a margin of 74 percent to 11 percent, it showed an overwhelming agreement that “it is important that South Vietnam not fall into the control of the communists.”
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What one could not easily comprehend was the unthinking viciousness of so many among those who had not gone when they spoke of the government and of those who had stepped forward to serve. These were not America’s downtrodden sitting in the classrooms of Georgetown Law. Radicalism was an elitist, largely intellectual phenomenon, and America’s best and brightest were at the height of their disaffection with their own society.

The mood at the law center was outrageously out of step with the rest of America and yet filled with an unbending, adamant certainty. In a straw poll just before the 1972 election, Richard Nixon received eight votes out of more than a thousand students who voted and was endorsed by no one on the faculty, yet despite the turmoil of Watergate he would receive two-thirds of the votes in the actual election. Nixon was routinely compared to Hitler. Words like “fascist” and “pig” echoed through debates about the war. A few students wore the Viet Cong flag on their jackets in the same manner that others wore college or pro team logos. Professors began discussions with little jokes about “contradictions in terms, such as military intelligence,” or humorous analogies such as “military justice is to justice as military music is to music.” In criminal law class, the concept of consent in rape was introduced with an example of an American soldier in Vietnam walking into a village, carrying his weapon, and choosing a random female victim who acquiesced in sexual intercourse. “You know how our guys are in Vietnam,” the professor winked. “She sees the gun. Did she consent?”

Sometimes it became more personal. Our final exam in criminal law, worth 100 percent of one’s grade, began with a supposedly humorous fact pattern about a platoon sergeant named “Jack Webb” who lost two of his fellow soldiers dead while leading a combat patrol in Vietnam. “Sergeant Webb” then decided to smuggle jade that he had bought on the black market in Bangkok by stuffing the gems inside his soldiers’ wounds before escorting their remains home for their funerals. And the question: To what extent did the Fourth Amendment allow customs officials to search inside the holes of the dead bodies in order to find the jade? To state the obvious, after all the broken bodies and the nights spent in the rain and the blood-filled operations and the dead friends whose lives to me were sacrosanct, this personalized approach to the constitutional issue of search and seizure did not exactly strike me as funny. I could not bring myself to reread the question, and it was a difficult challenge to finish the rest of the exam.

Nor was this simply an insensitive, unthinking act. I had recently won the law school’s first-year legal writing competition with an article about a young black Marine who had been wrongly convicted of a war crime in Vietnam. Six years later I would clear Sam Green’s name, although by then I was doing it for his mother, as Green had taken his own life halfway through the process. My professor, only three years older than I and clearly on the other side of the cultural divide, knew of my Marine Corps background and how strongly I felt about those who had fought in Vietnam. The same professor who had defined consent in rape with a wink toward “how our guys are in Vietnam” was now dropping a big one on my lap.

Not wishing to cheapen the memory of the friends and fellow Marines I had lost in combat by protesting my grade, I instead wrote a letter to the dean of the law school pointing out that the professor knew of my background, used not only an odious Vietnam analogy but also my name, and thus at a minimum lacked the judgment to teach at such a prestigious school. If such a fact pattern had been written after World War II, the professor would have been drawn and quartered, probably by the students themselves. At Georgetown Law he was given tenure.

Debates about the shape and direction of American society were similarly skewed. The very legitimacy of so-called WASP America was under relentless attack, both for the supposedly authoritarian society that the WASPs had created and for the unfair advantages that its members allegedly held. Affirmative action programs were in their infancy, and ethnocentric retreat was replacing old notions of America’s melting pot, defining the very nature of government benefits to an age group. In this convenient, pseudo-Marxist scenario, anyone who was not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant had grounds for complaint about his or her people’s collective “struggle.” And anyone who was a WASP was by default a privileged, less-than-deserving whipping post. As one Ivy League graduate said in my presence, “You don’t need the W because they’re all white, and you don’t need the P because they’re all Protestant. That leaves you with nothing but an ASS.”

Over time it became clear that, at bottom, this vitriol was not really about the war or even about simple political disagreement. It was instead a larger battle between the cultural forces that were supposedly behind the creation of a mercantile, racist American society and thus had brought us into war, and a collective group of opposing forces that wished to diminish their power while a new America was being created from the ashes of their past glories. History, as the poet T. S. Eliot once wrote, has many cunning passages, and certainly is not as clear-cut as the activists were trying to make it. But the WASPs, forever on the defensive, were losing big-time. And in this academic stratosphere where the attitudes of future policy-makers were being formed, the Scots-Irish culture, like the Vietnam veteran, was largely invisible.

To be of Scots-Irish heritage as this debate raged on was to lose twice, for in these arguments the culture’s historical journey was both unknown and irrelevant. First, since the dominant forces in American society were by assumption the WASP hierarchy, to be white, Protestant, and of British heritage immediately lumped one in with the New England Brahmin elites. In this perverted logic, those who had been the clearest victims of Yankee colonialism were now grouped together with the beneficiaries. All WASPs were considered to be the same in this environment, as if they had landed together on the same ship at Plymouth Rock and the smart ones had gone to Boston while the dumbest had somehow made their way to West Virginia.

And second, it was impossible to argue the distinctions among the cultures that had originally settled the South and Border South. To be of Southern descent brought with it an immediate presumption of invidious discrimination and cruelty dating back to the slave system and the unequal, segregated society that followed it. Through a false reading of history that focused only on the disadvantages that had accrued to blacks, the white cultures whose ancestors had gained the least benefit from the elitist social structure of the Old South were being grouped together with the veneer that had formed the aristocracy. The occasional Southerners who had studied alongside these students and professors at the better universities typically reinforced this premise, either through their own privileged origins, or by ducking the debate, or by becoming self-hating stereotypes who deflected criticism by denouncing the culture that had spawned them.

These debates and the presumptions that fed them were based on an enormous, palpable falsity fed by the reality that few who were advancing such ideas had ever experienced the intricacies of the cultures in America’s heartland with any degree of intimacy. These bright but inexperienced intellectuals had never seen with their own eyes the culture that they were ignoring, and instead were forming hard opinions based on unrealities that were as mythical as the shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave. But it was almost impossible to argue against their presumptions. To speak of one’s family journey was dismissed as anecdotal if not unrepresentative of a culture’s true journey. And for all the minute details that went into socioeconomic data based on race, there was no available data that would show the vast distinctions among white Americans. And yet it was intuitively obvious to the casual observer, as our professors liked to say in other matters, that the statistical straw man of “white America” being used to determine minority inclusiveness was nothing more than an imaginary facade. Indeed, white America is so variegated that it is an ethnic fairy tale.

In 1974, toward the end of my second year at Georgetown Law, the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) published a landmark study, dividing American whites into seventeen ethnic and religious backgrounds and scoring them by educational attainment and family income.
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Contrary to prevailing mythology, the vaunted White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were even then not at the top. The highest WASP group—the Episcopalians—ranked sixth in family income, behind American Jews, then Irish, Italian, German, and Polish Catholics. Other white Protestants, principally the descendants of those who had settled the Midwest and the South, constituted the bottom eight groups, and ten of the bottom twelve. Educational attainment and income levels did not vary geographically, as for instance among white Baptists (who scored the lowest overall) living in Arkansas or California, a further indication that these differences were culturally rather than geographically based.