Deros Vietnam (13 page)

I had two all-time favorite movie nights—
King Kong
and
The Green Berets.
The
King Kong
thing started as a joke between me and Ward, and then snowballed to the point where we forced everybody in our area to go—even bribing hoochmates like Richards and Mancini who never went anywhere. We put up signs all over the place with pictures of Uncle Sam and King Cong—we changed the K to a C—that read: “
We Want You!—at tonight's movie.”
Underneath in small letters we added
“Dance afterwards.”

We got totally smoked up and filled nearly half the outdoor pavilion. We cheered like crazy every time Kong appeared and booed the airplanes as they buzzed him on the Empire State Building. Everybody else thought we were crazy.

The Green Berets
night was even more intense. That's because while most of the audience were draftees or young enlistees like us, a good number of lifers showed up to watch John Wayne. Reminiscent of a high school mixer, we claimed one side of the pavilion; they camped out on the other. Their lawn chairs sat in perfectly straight lines and rows; ours resembled a Chinese fire drill. They were drunk; we were stoned. They cheered for Duke and the Green Berets; we jeered him and laughed at them, all of them.

Toward the end of the movie, as the sun was setting in classic Hollywood Western fashion, John Wayne's character patted the head of the little Vietnamese kid and said, “You're what this is all about.” Ward jumped up as if he'd been shot out of a cannon and shouted at the screen.

“You goddamn idiots; the sun don't set over the South China Sea!”

One of the lifers threw a bottle that barely missed Ward's head. Somebody tossed a chair at the lifers. The projection weenies stopped the movie right away. There was a lot of pushing and shoving and name-calling, but we were all too wasted to kick the shit out of one another.

Nights like that I imagined the VC spying on us, preparing to attack.
If I were them,
I thought,
I'd blow us away right there and then.
Shit, not even John Wayne could have held off the Indians with a fucking lawn chair.

* * *

Writing made Vietnam a book and not a movie. Vietnam was surrealistic, apocalyptic and euthanistic rolled into one, and words were the only way I could even begin to handle it. The war could be terrifying on paper, but it was an ugliness I could control since I was the one writing it down. I'd write it and read it without having to live it. I didn't have to kill anyone.

What this meant was … well, I'm not quite sure what it meant. I know it distanced me from the lunacy and enabled me to change points of view, altering names and dates and places, inventing dialog, even scripting happy endings where they didn't exist.

Edwards was the only one who ever paid any attention to what I was doing. Most of the other guys were college grads, 71Q20s like me, so they were always writing a lot, in and out of the office. Edwards was the exception. He wasn't a 71Q20, information specialist; he was the USARV Command Information office's very own supply clerk. Which was weird because none of the other hot shit USARV offices had one assigned to them.

Supply clerk wasn't his MOS either, but Edwards didn't seem to care. He'd enlisted right out of high school for some military job he never got. Faster than you could say “Ho Chi Minh,” the SOB was in ‘Nam, knee-deep in some pretty bad shit, got shot up and shipped statewide with a couple of medals. He spent a little time at Dix as a drill sergeant, did a brief hitch at Kaiserslautern, got divorced, then back to Vietnam, specifically our red, white and blue newspaper office and our little slice of the air-conditioned jungle.

* * *

Watching over us from his desk in the back of the office, Edwards was part Greek chorus, part Big Brother. Even though he was our chronological peer, he seemed older, sitting back there like an exam proctor with his cap on, his big dark rimmed glasses reminding me of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg in
The Great Gatsby.
A trio of us English majors in the hooch had this on-going argument about F. Scott Fitzgerald's good doctor, debating whether he represented God staring down upon and judging our society as a moral wasteland, or a symbol of the essential meaninglessness of the world.

Shit, all we would have had to do was open our own eyes to see how meaningless our fucking existence was. But we didn't. Edwards did, or at least he appeared to, from his perch in the back of the room. Of course, he didn't have a clue who Gatsby or Fitzgerald or Eckleburg were. But his eyes were always on us.

As far as we could tell, Edwards didn't do much work back there. He drank Coca Cola, smoked cigarettes, and flirted with our cute little Vietnamese receptionist. He was an expert at catching flies out of thin air. He'd snag them, throw them to the ground, killing them instantly. There was a huge fucking pile of them on the floor under his desk.

Every couple of weeks, Edwards would broadcast from the back of the room that we had better get our supply orders into him “pronto,” one of his favorite words, if we wanted any pica paper, glue, rulers, paper clips, autographed posters of Raquel Welch, or whatever. He always ended his broadcasts with some stupid ass joke none of us thought was funny.

“Papasan say ‘man who lose key to Tran's apartment get no new key.'” Give me a fucking break.

When we stood down back at the hooch, we rarely saw Edwards. He never smoked dope with us, never watched TV, never participated in the nightly Botticelli contests where we showed off the real benefit of our college educations—hoarding useless information. But we'd hear him, or rather we'd hear his flip-flops as he walked out the back of the hooch on his way to the shower.

I'm not exactly sure what the bond between us was—the fact that we were both from small towns in Ohio, that our fathers worked in the tire industry, that we both canonized Jim Brown as the greatest football player of all time—whatever it was, Edwards and I were kinda tight, although I didn't want any of the other guys to know it because Edwards was, for them, a never ending source of derision.

“Who sat downwind of Qui Nhon today?” Richards would say whenever Edwards passed by. The guys referred to him as “the Boy from Qui Nhon City,” blending his last assignment with the old Ad Libs' song “The Boy from New York City” to mock his personal hygiene.

“Jesus,” Richards usually went on, “that guy needs to change his fucking fatigues one of these days!”

“You know what that dipshit told me today,” Ward piped up. “He said that he'd personally corresponded with Hanoi Hannah and that she was really Nancy Kwan, the hot Asian actress who was on the cover of
Life
Magazine
back when we were thinking impure thoughts.”

We all laughed, and didn't stop until we heard the flip-flop of Edwards' thongs.

“Evening, gents,” he acknowledged us on his way back through the hooch. Richards hollered after him “Your fatigues were here a minute ago, looking for you. They need a bath too!”

Edwards didn't react. Funny thing was, he could have come down on us, outranking us all as he did, but there were more of us, and, well, sometimes bad shit went down.

* * *

No one knew that whenever I pulled guard duty, or got stuck with the overnight shift for the
Morning News Roundup,
I'd wake up to find Edwards in my cube, sitting on the edge of Moore's cot, thumbing through one of the many books I was reading. He had an especially hard time pronouncing the titles of Hermann Hesse novels.

Edwards would ask me about the plots and the characters. He was eager to learn more about
Magister Ludi,
the rite of passage in
Steppenwolf,
and Siddhartha's quest. I kinda enjoyed being the teacher and even looked forward to explaining the stories to him.

I didn't want the other guys to know.

That's because there were lots of not-so-great moments, times when Edwards did pull rank, when he felt that he had to remind us that he was in charge. The worst was the night he ratted us out to Lieutenant Nelson who paid a surprise visit to our hooch at 2 a.m. and subjected us to a fucking inspection. Shit, if any of us would have had access to a weapon that night—they took the guns away from us when we got off guard duty—somebody would've shot Edwards.

The SOB even had the gall to accompany Nelson on his hooch inspection, the two of them hoping like hell they'd catch us with our pants down, or more likely our pipes and pot out in the open. Why they never looked in the fridge, I don't know, but they didn't find squat. We knew the raid was Edwards's idea because it happened the day after Ward and a couple of other guys had swiped a pair of his fatigues, burned them, and put the ashes in his locker. Not to mention that Nelson, even though he was our direct command at the IO office, didn't even know where in the fuck we lived.

That incident made Edwards even more of a pariah with the guys, which explains why I'd only talk to him when nobody else was around. I was as pissed at him as anybody, but I lightened up after he gave me an authentic 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings baseball cap. Edwards knew I loved baseball even more than writing, and almost as much as getting high.

* * *

“Do you write down what really happens or do you just write down what you're thinking and feeling?” I opened one eye on an early monsoon morning to see Edwards holding my copy of
The Tin Drum.

“Whaddya mean?” I stretched out and put my feet on the cement floor.

“Are you writing a story or are you just keeping, like, a diary?”

“A little of both,” I half-smiled. “A lot of what I write is about what I'm doing here and how much I hate this place and which one of my buddies is sleeping with my girlfriend back home.” I paused. “Other times I read or hear about something that happened in country and I rewrite it, make a story out of it. Either way, I end up lost in my writing and forget I'm even in Vietnam.”

“Can I read some of your stuff some time?” Edwards asked, sounding almost normal. I didn't know what to say.
Was this the same guy who was riding my ass just a few weeks ago?

“I'd really like to read your stuff,” he repeated. “I don't know a lot about writing but I've been reading a lot of books, and I could tell you what I think.”

When I still didn't answer, Edwards reached across my bunk and put his hand on my arm. “Don't make me pull rank on you, son.”

Fucking A,
I thought to myself.
I don't owe Edwards shit, and I don't let anybody read my writing.
But then I got to thinking that Edwards could help me with the combat stuff I was always trying to write but knew next to nothing about.

Edwards kept looking at me.

“Let me think about it,” I told him. He didn't look pleased, so of course I kept talking. “If I go for this, I make the rules and you follow them.”
Where was I going with this?

“Rule number one,” I started. “Absolutely nobody, not a single swinging dick, knows we're doing this.” Edwards nodded. “Rule number two—you do not touch a word, a punctuation mark, nothing. Hands off!” I paused.

“I've got a rule number three,” he interjected. “Rule number three is you make sure the other guys go easy on me. I don't want to get into it with them because I might not be able to control myself.”

* * *

Most of the shit I gave Edwards was short stories with some occasional war reportage. I was trying to get into a Hemingway groove but kept lapsing into Thomas Wolfe. I never let Edwards read my journals. I didn't want him knowing how insecure or scared or depressed I was.

For weeks Edwards read my stories, the ones about guard duty and fraggings, the tales about Vietnamese spies and the black market. Even the thinly disguised ones about our office. He had some pretty good insights, particularly about maintaining a character's voice or how to show more and tell less.

What I wanted most was help writing about combat. It was around us every day, it defined this whole fucking war, but I'd never seen it. How could I capture its violence, its cruelty, its insanity, its fickleness?

I handed Edwards my lone combat story one day, a piece I'd written about a firefight. It was loosely based on a bunch of stories I'd heard from grunts I'd interviewed and articles we'd run in
The Army Reporter.

“Nobody I know talks like this,” he told me the next morning. “Nobody fights like this. Nobody dies like this.”

“Tell me how you really feel,” I joked. My sarcasm didn't register.

“I'll tell you what it was like for me,” he offered, “and you can try to write it into your story. It can't come out any worse than this.” He was serious.

I hesitated. “Okay, but you can't get pissed if I change anything or have one of the story's characters sound like you.”

He sat stoically. “Have you ever read
The Art of War
by Sun Tzu?”

I didn't know what to say. Never in a million years would I have imagined someone like Edwards reading the famous book by an ancient Chinese military strategist.

“No, I haven't.”

“You should,” he replied earnestly. “It would help your writing about combat. In one place he says ‘know your enemy and know yourself, and after a thousand battles you need never fear the result.'”

I looked right at him. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”

“Think about it,” Edwards got up to leave.

* * *

For the next week, Edwards gave me a grunt's-eye primer on combat, always coming back to the same story about the same firefight, the “crack, crack, crack” of automatic weapons, his squad leader's legs being blown off, the guy next to him—Morgan I think his name was—standing up too soon and getting zapped right between his shoulder blades. Every night I'd write a new version. I never could get it right, never could capture the authenticity.