Dispatches (31 page)

Just before I went back to Saigon to begin arrangements for flying home, the three of us met at a place called Tam Ky, near the mouth of the Perfume River, where Page was trying out his fish-eye lens on the airboats that had just come back to Vietnam after an earlier failure in the war. We rode ground on those for a day and then took a boat downriver to Hue, where we met Perry Dean Young, a reporter for UPI who came from North Carolina. (Flynn called him “the fullest flowering of southern degeneracy,” but the closest to degeneracy any of us ever came was in our jokes about it, about what bad, dope-smoking cats we all were. We were probably less stoned than the drinkers in our presence, and our livers were holding up.) Perry had a brother named Dave who ran the small Naval detachment that had been set up during the battle, directly across from the south wall of the Citadel. For months now, Flynn and I had been living vicariously off of each other’s war stories, his Ia Drang stories and my Hue stories, and Perry’s brother got a Navy truck and drove us around the city while I gave a running commentary which would have been authoritative if only I’d been able to recognize any of it now. We were sitting on the back of the truck on folding chairs, bouncing around in the heat and dust. Along the park that fronted the river we passed dozens of lovely young girls riding their bicycles, and Page leaned over and leered at them, saying, “Good mornin’, little schoolgirl, I’m a li’l schoolboy too.”

When I’d been here before, you couldn’t let yourself be seen on the riverbank without machine guns opening upon you from the opposite bank, you couldn’t breathe anywhere in Hue without rushing somebody’s death into your bloodstream, the main bridge across the river had been dropped in the middle, the days had been cold and wet, the city had been composed seemingly of destruction and debris. Now it was clear and very warm, you could stop by the Cercle Sportif for a drink, the bridge was up and the wall was down, all the rubble had been carted away.

“It
couldn’t
have been
that
bad,” Page said, and Flynn and I laughed.

“You’re just pissed because you missed it,” Flynn said.

“That’s you you’re talking about boy, not Page.”

And I was realizing for the first time how insanely dangerous it had been, seeing it in a way I hadn’t in February.

“No,” Page said. “It got awfully exaggerated, Hue. I know it couldn’t have been that bad, I mean look around. I’ve seen worse. Much, much worse.”

I meant to ask him where, but I was already in New York when I thought of it.

III

Back in the World now, and a lot of us aren’t making it. The story got old or we got old, a great deal more than the story had taken us there anyway, and many things had been satisfied. Or so it seemed when, after a year or two or five, we realized that we were simply tired. We came to fear something more complicated than death, an annihilation less final but more complete, and we got out. Because (more lore) we all knew that if you stayed too long you became one of those poor bastards who had to have a war on all the time, and
where was that? We got out and became like everyone else who has been through a war: changed, enlarged and (some things are expensive to say) incomplete. We came back or moved on, keeping in touch from New York or San Francisco, Paris or London, Africa or the Middle East; some fell into bureaus in Chicago or Hong Kong or Bangkok, coming to miss the life so acutely (some of us) that we understood what amputees went through when they sensed movement in the fingers or toes of limbs lost months before. A few extreme cases felt that the experience there had been a glorious one, while most of us felt that it had been merely wonderful. I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

During my first month back I woke up one night and knew that my living room was full of dead Marines. It actually happened three or four times, after a dream I was having those nights (the kind of dream one never had in Vietnam), and that first time it wasn’t just some holding dread left by the dream, I knew they were there, so that after I’d turned on the light by my bed and smoked a cigarette I lay there for a moment thinking that I’d have to go out soon and cover them. I don’t want to make anything out of this and I certainly don’t want sympathy; going to that place was my idea to begin with, I could have left anytime, and as those things go I paid little enough, almost nothing. Some guys come back and see their nightmares break in the streets in daylight, some become inhabited and stay that way, all kinds of things can trail after you, and besides, after a while my thing went away almost completely, the dream, too. I know a guy who had been a combat medic in the Central Highlands, and two years later he was still sleeping with all the lights on. We were walking across 57th Street one afternoon and passed a blind man carrying a sign that read,
MY DAYS ARE DARKER THAN YOUR NIGHTS
. “Don’t bet on it, man,” the ex-medic said.

Of course coming back was a down. After something like that, what could you find to thrill you, what compared, what did you do for a finish? Everything seemed a little dull, heaviness threatened everywhere, you left little relics lying around to keep you in touch, to keep it real, you played the music that had been with you through Hue and Khe Sanh and the May Offensive, tried to believe that the freedom and simplicity of those days could be maintained in what you laughingly referred to as “normal circumstances.” You read the papers and watched television, but you knew what those stories were really all about beforehand, and they just got you angry. You missed the scene, missed the grunts and the excitement, the feelings you’d had in a place where no drama had to be invented, ever. You tried to get the same highs here that you’d had there, but none of that really worked very well. You wondered whether, in time, it would all slip away and become like everything else distant, but you doubted it, and for good reason. The friendships lasted, some even deepened, but our gatherings were always stalked by longing and emptiness, more than a touch of Legion Post Night. Smoking dope, listening to the Mothers and Jimi Hendrix, remembering compulsively, telling war stories. But then, there’s nothing wrong with that. War stories aren’t really anything more than stories about people anyway.

In April I got a call telling me that Page had been hit again and was not expected to live. He had been up goofing somewhere around Cu Chi, digging the big toys, and a helicopter he was riding in was ordered to land and pick up some wounded. Page and a sergeant ran out to help, the sergeant
stepped on a mine which blew his legs off and sent a two-inch piece of shrapnel through Page’s forehead above the right eye and deep into the base of his brain. He retained consciousness all the way to the hospital at Long Binh. Flynn and Perry Young were on R&R in Vientiane when they were notified, and they flew immediately to Saigon. For nearly two weeks, friends at Time-Life kept me informed by telephone from their daily cables; Page was transferred to a hospital in Japan and they said that he would probably live. He was moved to Walter Reed Army Hospital (a civilian and a British subject, it took some doing), and they said that he would live but that he’d always be paralyzed on his left side. I called him there, and he sounded all right, telling me that his roommate was this very religious colonel who kept apologizing to Page because he was only in for a check-up, he hadn’t been wounded or anything fantastic like that. Page was afraid that he was freaking the colonel out a little bit. Then they moved him to the Institute for Physical Rehabilitation in New York, and while none of them could really explain it medically, it seemed that he was regaining the use of his left arm and leg. The first time I went to see him I walked right past his bed without recognizing him out of the four patients in the room, even though he’d been the first one I’d seen, even though the other three were men in their forties and fifties. He lay there grinning his deranged, uneven grin, his eyes were wet, and he raised his right hand for a second to jab at me with his finger. His head was shaved and sort of lidded now across the forehead where they’d opened it up (“What did they find in there, Page?” I asked him. “Did they find that quiche lorraine?”) and caved in on the right side where they’d removed some bone. He was emaciated and he looked really old, but he was still grinning very proudly as I approached the bed, as if to say, “Well, didn’t Page step into
it this time?” as though two inches of shrapnel in your brain was the wiggiest goof of them all, that wonderful moment of the Tim Page Story where our boy comes leering, lurching back from death, twin brother to his own ghost.

That was that, he said,
fini Vietnam
, there could be no more odds left, he’d been warned. Sure he was crazy, but he wasn’t
that
crazy. He had a bird now, a wonderful English girl named Linda Webb whom he’d met in Saigon. She’d stayed with him in the Long Binh hospital even though the shock and fear of seeing him like that had made her pass out fifteen times on the first evening. “I’d really be the fool, now, to just give that one up, now, wouldn’t I?” he said, and we all said, Yes, man, you would be.

On his twenty-fifth birthday there was a big party in the apartment near the hospital that he and Linda had found. Page wanted all of the people to be there who, he said, had bet him years ago in Saigon that he’d never make it past twenty-three. He wore a blue sweat suit with a Mike patch, black skull and bones, on his sleeve. You could have gotten stoned just by walking into the room that day, and Page was so happy to be here and alive and among friends that even the strangers who turned up then were touched by it. “There’s Evil afoot,” he kept saying, laughing and chasing after people in his wheelchair. “Do no Evil, think ye no Evil, smoke no Evil.… Yesh.”

A month went by and he made fantastic progress, giving up the chair for a cane and wearing a brace to support his left arm.

“I’ve a splendid new trick for the doctors,” he said one day, flinging his left arm out of the brace and up over his head with great effort, waving his hand a little. Sometimes he’d stand in front of a full-length mirror in the apartment and survey the wreckage, laughing until tears came, shaking his
head and saying, “Ohhhhh, fuck! I mean, just
look
at that, will you? Page is a fucking hemi-plegic,” raising his cane and stumbling back to his chair, collapsing in laughter again.

He fixed up an altar with all of his Buddhas, arranging prayer candles in a belt of empty .50-caliber cartridges. He put in a stereo, played endlessly at organizing his slides into trays, spoke of setting out Claymores at night to keep “undesirables” away, built model airplanes (“Very good therapy, that”), hung toy choppers from the ceiling, put up posters of Frank Zappa and Cream and some Day-Glo posters which Linda had made of monks and tanks and solid soul brothers smoking joints in the fields of Vietnam. He began talking more and more about the war, often coming close to tears when he remembered how happy he and all of us had been there.

One day a letter came from a British publisher, asking him to do a book whose working title would be “Through with War” and whose purpose would be to once and for all “take the glamour out of war.” Page couldn’t get over it.

“Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do
that?
Go and take the glamour out of a Huey, go take the glamour out of a Sheridan.… Can
you
take the glamour out of a Cobra or getting stoned at China Beach? It’s like taking the glamour out of an M-79, taking the glamour out of Flynn.” He pointed to a picture he’d taken, Flynn laughing maniacally (“We’re winning,” he’d said), triumphantly. “Nothing the matter with
that
boy, is there? Would you let your daughter marry that man? Ohhhh, war is
good
for you, you can’t take the glamour out of that. It’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones.” He was really speechless, working his hands up and down to emphasize the sheer insanity of it.

“I mean, you
know
that, it just
can’t be done!”
We both shrugged and laughed, and Page looked very thoughtful for a moment. “The very
idea!”
he said. “Ohhh, what a laugh! Take the bloody
glamour
out of bloody
war!”

Breathing Out

I am going home. I have seen a lot of Vietnam in 18 months
.

May Lord help this place. DEROS 10 Sept 68
.

Mendoza was here. 12 Sept 68. Texas
.

Color me gone
.
(Mendoza is my buddy.)

Release graffiti on the walls at Tan Son Nhut airport, where Flynn, almost overtly serious for a second, gave me a kind of blessing (“Don’t piss it all away at cocktail parties”) and Page gave me a small ball of opium to eat on the flight back; stoned dreaming through Wake, Honolulu, San Francisco, New York and the hallucination of home. Opium space, a big round O, and time outside of time, a trip that happened in seconds and over years; Asian time, American space, not clear whether Vietnam was east or west of center, behind me or somehow still ahead. “Far’s I’m concerned, this one’s over the day I get home,” a grunt had told us a few weeks before, August 1968, we’d been sitting around after an operation talking about the end of the war. “Don’t hold your breath,” Dana said.

Home: twenty-eight years old, feeling like Rip Van Winkle, with a heart like one of those little paper pills they make in China, you drop them into water and they open out to form a tiger or a flower or a pagoda. Mine opened out into war and loss. There’d been nothing happening there that hadn’t already existed here, coiled up and waiting, back in
the World. I hadn’t been anywhere, I’d performed half an act; the war only had one way of coming to take your pain away quickly.

It seemed now that everybody knew someone who had been in Vietnam and didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe they just didn’t know how. People I’d meet would take it for granted that I was articulate, ask me if I minded, but usually the questions were political, square, innocent, they already knew what they wanted to hear, I’d practically forgotten the language. Some people found it distasteful or confusing if I told them that, whatever else, I’d loved it there too. And if they just asked, “What was your scene there?” I wouldn’t know what to say either, so I’d say I was trying to write about it and didn’t want to dissipate it. But before you could dissipate it you had to locate it, Plant you now, dig you later: information printed on the eye, stored in the brain, coded over skin and transmitted by blood, maybe what they meant by “blood consciousness.” And transmitted over and over without letup on increasingly powerful frequencies until you either received it or blocked it out one last time, informational Death of a Thousand Cuts, each cut so precise and subtle you don’t even feel them accumulating, you just get up one morning and your ass falls off.