Deros Vietnam (18 page)

“Rick!” Charlie brought me back to the airport. “Are you following me?”

“Sure. I just can't help getting off on that day at the Continental Palace. We stayed there through the night, drinking and talking and singing and reciting poetry. It was one of the best fucking days of my life.”

Both Charlie and I were struck by how serious I sounded. It was hard for us to believe that even one goddamn day in Vietnam had been good for anybody. It was one of those things we never talked about, that ‘Nam had, in fact, been good for me. Unlike Charlie, I found myself in the Army. I belonged with guys like Nevin and Miller and the rest. Charlie belonged home with his family. For him, Vietnam was a uniform he'd worn for 365 days. When he got back, all he had to do was change his clothes.

“Anyway,” Charlie continued. “Nevin and I are almost passed out and I causally say something like, ‘Too bad about fucking Miller' or whatever and Nevin stops me cold. ‘What about Miller?' he asks me.

‘What do you mean what about Miller?' I shot back.

‘What the fuck happened to him!' Nevin shouted, grabbing me by the shirt.

‘Jesus Christ, Nevin,' I shoved him away. ‘He's dead. Killed. In Vietnam. Official explanation: ‘friendly fire.'”

“I'd never seen anything like it,” Charlie spoke more slowly now, his voice barely audible against the arguing at the nearby table. “Nevin literally shrank before my eyes. He fell on the floor, shriveled up into a ball no bigger than a bunker sandbag, and started crying.”

“You mean he didn't know?” I stupidly asked.

“What do you think?” Charlie snapped. “You figured he did. Hell, we all thought Nevin knew because it sure seemed as if he was behind our getting totally wasted the night we found out about Miller's death—the champagne toast, the dramatic reading of
The Quiet American,
the acapella version of ‘Fortunate Son' at the top of our lungs.

“But Nevin wasn't there,” Charlie's voice quieted. “Maybe his spirit was, but he'd DEROS-ed two days before Miller's ‘accident.' Somehow he never found out. I sure as hell killed his fucking spirit by telling him about it that night.”

“What did you do?” I couldn't believe what Charlie was telling me.

“This is the weird part,” Charlie confessed, grabbing my wrist and staring me in the face. “I hit him.”

“You what?”

“I hit him. I sucker punched one of my best friends. And I kept on hitting him. Over and over. God, I busted him up pretty bad.”

Tears welled in both our eyes. I couldn't speak.

“I hit that little sonuvabitch and he whimpered. I hit him again and he cried. Then I kicked him and he just started whimpering. I grabbed stuff off the table and threw it at him. Hitting. Cursing. Kicking. Again and again and again.”

I placed my hands over my ears and turned away. The Vietnamese at the next table were looking straight at me. What did they see? Did they know me from before? From back then?

“I left Nevin on the floor of that bar and never saw him again,” Charlie went on. “I casually tell one of my closest pals that one of his friends was killed in Vietnam, killed by his own fucking self when he tripped and fired his own goddamn M-16 as he was going to take a shit—and then I beat the fucking daylights out of him.”

“The Quiet Americans,” I mumbled to myself.

“Do you know why I'm telling you this?” Charlie bullied me. “Do you understand why?”

I shook my head. The Vietnamese had stopped paying attention to us and were getting ready to leave.

“You're fucking clueless, aren't you?” Charlie snarled. “I'm telling you this because I slugged my priest the other day and took a swing at my wife, too. I can't stop.”

I couldn't think of anything to say. I thought Charlie had everything worked out. If he didn't, where did that leave me?

“I've gotta catch a plane,” I started to get up.

“Go ahead,” Charlie mumbled.

“You wanna walk me to my gate?”

“Forget it,” he waved me off. “I'm not leaving yet.”

As we stood, the Vietnamese smiled in our direction.

“Fucking dinks,” Charlie muttered. He sat back down and turned his back on them, and me.

* * *

I caught my plane to Chicago. That was almost a year ago. Before Cheryl. And the nightmares. And the uncontrollable weeping.

But I haven't called Charlie and talked to him about all this. We don't talk anymore.

Test Drive

“Where's the mutt?”

No response.

“Where in God's name is the mutt?” The question was noticeably louder this time.

“Say what?” a voice muttered.

“
Who in the hell took the mother fucking mutt
?”

Man, there was heat behind that question, and its incendiary source was Sergeant Carl Cassidy. Cassidy didn't just ask a question, he punched you with it.

There he was. Perfectly square shoulders, locked jaw, Popeye forearms, crew cut, penetrating eyes. Cassidy was the quintessential MP. And he had an air of Steve McQueen about him, the take-no-prisoners McQueen of
Wanted Dead or Alive
who dispensed his own brand of justice.

The mutt in question was our unit's M151 Jeep, its Army acronym identifying it as a “Military Unit Tactical Truck.” Mutts were as Army as GI Joe and as American as Henry Ford. In fact, Ward had told us they'd been tested and prototyped by Ford and manufactured by the Willys-Overland Motor Company.

Ward also reminded us that whenever he drove a mutt in Vietnam, with its split windshield and horizontally-slotted, stamped-steel front grille, he felt like bursting into a chorus of “Fun, Fun, Fun.”

And that's probably just what Ward was doing. He'd unofficially requisitioned the mutt for the weekly IO run to the PX for beer and cigarettes for the hooch and cognac for Bau Mau, and, more likely than not, a pit stop at Cholon for a quickie.

Cassidy, however, needed the mutt “A-SAP” as he reiterated in a voice that sounded like used sandpaper and suggested a belief that increased volume would cause the vehicle to materialize. Colonel Brock, it turned out, required immediate transportation to the squash courts for his late afternoon match.

No mutt. No Ward. No match.

Someone nervously started to whistle. Then another. Nevin added some quiet crooning. You could almost hear the voice of Frank Sinatra singing about an irresistible force, an immovable object, and that something had better give:

“Atten-hut,” came a summons from the rear of the hooch. Footsteps scurried, zippers zipped, jungle boots replaced flip flops.

Colonel Brock strode into the IO hooch, sunglasses at 12 o'clock high.

“Gentlemen, I have some bad news…”

Confessions of a REMF

They called us REMFs, short for Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. Sweet, isn't it? The “they” were the grunts, the GIs in the bush, the ones who humped the boonies and were in the shit.

That's how it was in Vietnam. Acronyms. Shorthand. Crudity. In your face. That's how it still is, too.

Sure, guys like me—there were some women too—were REMFs. Hell, all we did was fly and fix the choppers and the planes, drive the trucks, build the roads and the bridges, eavesdrop, interpret, supervise, and heal.

Some of us wrote the stories and some of the stories didn't get written and some of the truth never came out. That's the Vietnam I'm still dealing with. It makes me worse than a REMF. It makes me a fraud and a liar. It makes me responsible.

Now that the journalist Hersh has come out with the truth about My Lai, I feel like I have to tell my truth, too. It's not as horrible and huge as My Lai, but it eats me up. I'll bet if you added up all these little things from everybody's time in Vietnam, it could amount to a whole bunch of My Lais.

And who pays the price for all that guilt and shame? We do. The REMFs and the grunts do.

* * *

I started my tour seated in a windowless box in a remote radio compound somewhere near Cambodia. There was a black guy with me, Moore I think his name was, and we spent our shifts there, tuning a radio dial, headphones clamped on, secretly eavesdropping on enemy communications—ever vigilant, always hoping to intercept that one piece of intelligence that could make the difference in a battle or in the whole fucking war and let us all go back home where we belonged.

After a while, they gave me a new MOS and sent me down to Long Binh, near Saigon, where I pounded away on an ancient typewriter, edited a bunch of bullshit stories, and fought the unrelenting boredom. My bosses, and there were a bunch of them, kept reminding me to get a haircut and trim my mustache. They also explained that while I was performing a job that wasn't very glamorous, what I was doing was very, very necessary.

So what did I do that was so wrong? Besides being in the Army that is? Two things really. I copped out on letting a big, important story see the light of day.

And I turned my back on a fellow soldier because I was a coward and, well, somebody had to pay for my mistake. More or less in that order.

I still have a copy of the piece I wrote but was afraid to leak to a civilian reporter. I knew who to give it to and how and when to hand it off. His name was Sheridan and he wrote for
Newsday.
A bunch of us 71Q20s—that's military-speak for Army information specialist/journalist—had sneaked some stories to him over time, small shit mostly designed to give the lifers heartburn like the fancy bowling alley they were building for the brass at Long Binh or the extra bronze stars the Army was passing out like candy so all the career soldiers could get promoted.

We always worried about getting caught, but we trusted Sheridan—with the small stuff at least. Then why not give him the bigger stories, more access? Chickenshit I guess. Which is why I sit confessing this to you, and Sheridan is in jail somewhere for protecting his sources and some innocent people are dead.
Fuck me
is about all I can say.

It's time I owned up to the story I wrote back then about all the shit that was going down at what we affectionately referred to as LBJ. No, not the president. LBJ stood for Long Binh Jail. And if ever there was a hell on earth, it was LBJ.

* * *

DATELINE: Long Binh, South Vietnam—The anger of EMs imprisoned in Vietnam by the Army brass has finally exploded. Hundreds of GIs fed up with military oppression have rebelled at the Army's largest stockade at Long Binh, twelve miles north of Saigon.

Known as “LBJ,” the U.S. Army Vietnam Installation Stockade (USARVIS) at Long Binh was the primary incarceration center in Vietnam. Designed to house the Army's malcontents and criminals, LBJ placed imprisoned GIs on a daily diet of lousy food, overcrowding, long delays before trial, and inhumane treatment.

Thus, when the Army introduced a new policy of strip-searching inmates in an effort to stem the proliferation of drugs, LBJ inmates took this as the ultimate act of degradation. And on the night of August 29, the lid blew.…

* * *

Jesus, no wonder this article never went anywhere. Even an Army lifer could have written a better lead. Get to the fucking point, GI!

Truth is, I didn't know that the point was, and if I did, I wouldn't know how to get to it. And who would give a flying fuck anyway? I was just another in a long line of Vietnam whiners, short on maturity and objectivity, grousing about the Army and Vietnam.

My other predicament was that this wasn't really my story since the brass wouldn't let us journalist types into LBJ until they had control of the situation. Which means I had another source for this scoop, an inside man, Specialist Four Billy Turner, who was new to LBJ and had a deep sense of right and wrong. What he saw that night bothered the shit out of him—which is why, I think, he brought his story to me.

So, the LBJ saga is actually Turner's story, as told by yours truly. But the bored, tired, and intimidated me forgot the old Sgt. Joe Friday rule of “changing the names to protect the innocent.” Not that any of us are really innocent, but you get the picture. I fought the law and the law won, and I screwed Spec. 4 Turner in the process.

* * *

I can still see his bright eyes and tightly-clipped mustache. Everything Turner took in struck him as uniquely special, and when it didn't comply with his world view, he'd crinkle his forehead and let out a whistle, a sound that signaled “Man, this isn't right.”

I met Turner on his first day in country. He'd just been assigned to Company A, 720th MP Battalion, 18th MP Brigade, and it took him forever to arrive at the Long Binh compound. The minute he hit his cot, he was told to report to the unit armory. From there, Turner and his brothers-in-arms made a quick pit stop at the nearby mess, and that's where the Vietnam gods brought us together.

I was delivering the
Morning News Roundup,
our office's daily dose of propaganda—one page, front and back—that we delivered to the mess halls on post. I noticed Turner looking lost and forlorn. I gave him one of those “Newbie, I know the kind of bullshit you're dealing with” looks and handed him a copy of the
Roundup.

“What's this?” Turner asked.

“All the news that's unfit to print,” I shot back, smiling.

Some of the guys in line with Turner laughed, but he didn't get it.

“Did you ever hear the saying ‘military justice is to justice as military music is to music'?” I asked Turner. He shook his head vigorously, so hard that you could almost hear all the noise inside.

“Think about it a minute,” I paused, a slight look of recognition appearing on Turner's face. “It's the same with the news. We write what they tell us to write. So do most of the civilian reporters. It's not real, any of it, because the stuff we write and publish makes us look like heroes—kicking Charlie's ass, winning the hearts and minds of all the natives. Shit, as the Vietnamese themselves would say: ‘Nevah happen, GI.'”