In the Lake of the Woods (15 page)

 

Q: Can you describe what you saw?
A: There was a large mound of dead Vietnamese in the ditch.
Q: Can you estimate how many?
A: It's hard to say. I'd say forty to fifty.
Q: Can you describe the ditch?
A: It was seven to ten feet deep, maybe ten to fifteen feet across. The bodies were all across it. There was one group in the middle and more on the sides. The bodies were on top of each other.
⁵⁰

—Richard Pendleton (Court-Martial Testimony)

 

Q: How did you know they were dead?
A: They weren't moving. There was a lot of blood coming from all over them. They were in piles and scattered. There were very old people, very young people, and mothers. Blood was coming from everywhere. Everything was all blood.
⁵¹

—Charles Hall (Court-Martial Testimony)

 

Q: Did you see any bodies shot?
A: Right, sir.
Q: Women and children?
A: Right, sir, women and children, about twenty-five of them in the northeastern part of My Lai (4).
Q: Did you see any other bodies?
A: Right, sir. About ten of them, in that place north of My Lai. They were all women and they were all nude.
Q: Were there any soldiers from your platoon there?
A: Right, sir. Roshevitz, he was there. He had an M-79. Those women, they died from a canister round from his M-79.
⁵²

—Leonard Gonzalez (Court-Martial Testimony)

 

Exhibit Eight: John Wade's Box of Tricks, Partial List
Deck of playing cards (all the jack of diamonds)
Thumb tip feke
Photographs (12) of father
Pack of chewing gum
Bronze Star with V-device
Purple Hearts (2)
Army Commendation Medal
Combat Infantryman's Badge
Waxed rope
Adhesive false mustache
Vodka bottle (empty)
Book:
Mental Magic
Book:
Feats of Levitation

 

Q: What were they firing at?
A: At the enemy, sir.
Q: At people?
A: At the enemy, sir.
Q: They weren't human beings?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: They were human beings?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Were they men?
A: I don't know, sir. I would imagine they were, sir.
Q: Didn't you see?
A: Pardon, sir?
Q: Did you see them?
A: I wasn't discriminating.
Q: Did you see women?
A: I don't know, sir.
Q: What do you mean, you weren't discriminating?
A: I didn't discriminate between individuals in the village, sir. They were all the enemy, they were all to be destroyed, sir.
⁵³

—William Calley (Court-Martial Testimony)

 

It is a crucial moment in a soldier's life when he is ordered to perform a deed that he finds completely at variance with his own notions of right and good. Probably for the first time, he discovers that an act someone else thinks to be necessary is for him criminal ... Suddenly the soldier feels himself abandoned and cast off from all security. Conscience has isolated him, and its voice is a warning. If you do this, you will not be at peace with me in the future. You can do it, but you ought not. You must act as a man and not as an instrument of another's will.
⁵⁴

—J. Glenn Gray (
The Warriors
)

 

The violation of human connection, and consequently the risk of a post-traumatic stress disorder, is highest of all when the survivor has been not merely a passive witness but also an active participant in violent death or atrocity.
⁵⁵

—Judith Herman (
Trauma and Recovery
)

 

Q: Did you receive any hostile fire at all any time that day?
A: No, sir.
⁵⁶

—Frank Beardslee (Court-Martial Testimony)

 

Q: Did you obey your orders?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: What were your orders?
A: Kill anything that breathed.
⁵⁷

—Salvatore LaMartina (Court-Martial Testimony)

 

John! John! Oh, John!
⁵⁸

—George Armstrong Custer

 

Fucking flies!

—Richard Thinbill

 

I just went. My mind just went. And I wasn't the only one that did it. A lot of other people did it. I just killed. Once I started the ... the training, the whole programming part of killing, it just came out ... I just followed suit. I just lost all sense of direction, of purpose I just started killing any kinda way I could kill. It just came. I didn't know I had it in me.
⁵⁹

—Varnado Simpson (Charlie Company Second Platoon)

 

Q: Then what happened?
A: Lieutenant Calley came out and said take care of these people. So we said, okay, so we stood there and watched them. He went away, then he came back and said, "I thought I told you to take care of these people." We said, "We are." He said, "I mean kill them." I was a little stunned and I didn't know what to do ... I stood behind them and they stood side by side. So they—Calley and Meadlo—got on line and fired directly into the people ... It was automatic. The people screamed and yelled and fell. I guess they tried to get up, too. They couldn't. That was it. The people were pretty well messed up. Lots of heads was shot off. Pieces of heads and pieces of flesh flew off the sides and arms.
⁶⁰

—Dennis Conti (Court-Martial Testimony)

 

The dismounted troopers then ran downhill and slid into the ravine where their bodies were found ... [T]hey must have felt helplessly exposed and rushed toward the one place that might protect them. Yet the moment they skidded into the gully they were trapped. All they could do was hug the sides or crouch among the bushes, looking fearfully upward, and wait. A few tried to scramble up the south wall because the earth showed boot marks and furrows probably gouged by their fingers, but none of these tracks reached the surface.
⁶¹

—Evan S. Connell (
Son of the Morning Star
)

 

Q: Can you describe them?
A: They was women and little kids.
Q: What were they doing?
A: They were lying on the ground, bleeding from all over. They was dead.
⁶²

—Rennard Doines (Court-Martial Testimony)

 

Q: Did you have any conversation with Lieutenant Calley at that ditch?
A: Yes.
Q: What did he say?
A: He asked me to use my machine gun.
Q: At the ditch?
A: Yes.
Q: What did you say?
A: I refused.
⁶³

—Robert Maples (Court-Martial Testimony)

 

Q: Did you ever open your pants in front of a woman in the village of My Lai?
A: No.
Q: Isn't it a fact that you were going through My Lai that day looking for women?
A: No.
Q: Didn't you carry a woman half-nude on your shoulders and throw her down and say that she was too dirty to rape? You did that, didn't you?
A: Oh, yeah, but it wasn't at My Lai.
⁶⁴

—Dennis Conti (Court-Martial Testimony)

 

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away ... Man is bound to lie about himself.
⁶⁵

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (
Notes from Underground
)

 

Married veterans or guys who married when they got back had difficulties, too. Waking up with your hands around your wife's throat is frightening to the vet and to the wife. Is he crazy? Does he hate me? What the hell's going on?
⁶⁶

—Patience H. C. Mason (
Recovering from the War
)

 

Like I told you, he used to yell things in his sleep. Bad things. Kathy thought he needed help.

—Patricia S. Hood

 

Something was wrong with the guy. No shit, I could almost smell it.

—Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson

 

... the crimes visited on the inhabitants of Son My Village included individual and group acts of murder, rape, sodomy, maiming, assault on noncombatants, and the mistreatment and killing of detainees.
⁶⁷

—Colonel William V. Wilson (U.S. Army Investigator)

In late November of 1968 John Wade extended his tour for an extra year. He had no meaningful choice. After what happened at Thuan Yen, he'd lost touch with some defining part of himself. He couldn't extricate himself from the slime. "It's a personal decision," he wrote Kathy. "Maybe someday I'll be able to explain it, but right now I can't leave this place. I have to take care of a few things, otherwise I won't
ever
get home. Not the right way."

Kathy's response, when it finally came, was enigmatic. She loved him. She hoped it wasn't a career move.

Over the next months John Wade did his best to apply the trick of forgetfulness. He paid attention to his soldiering. He was promoted twice, first to spec four, then to buck sergeant, and in time he learned to comport himself with modest dignity under fire. It wasn't valor, but it was a start. In the first week of December he received a nasty flesh wound in the mountains west of Chu Lai. A month later he took a half pound of shrapnel in the lower back and thighs. He needed the pain. He needed to reclaim his own virtue. At times he went out of his way to confront hazard, walking point or leading night patrols, which were acts of erasure, a means of
burying one great horror under the weight of many smaller horrors.

Sometimes the trick almost worked. Sometimes he almost forgot.

 

In November of 1969 John Wade returned home with a great many decorations. Five months later he married Kathy in an outdoor ceremony, pink and white balloons bobbing from the trees, and just before Easter they moved into the apartment in Minneapolis. "We'll be happy," Kathy said, "I know it."

John laughed and carried her inside.

They decorated the place with hanging plants and printed fabrics stretched over wooden frames. They had fun shopping together, picking out cheap furniture and rugs and a portable television; they used the floor for lovemaking until Kathy found a decent secondhand bed.

"There, you see?" she said. "I was right."

John began law school that fall, which was part of the plan, and in late August of 1973 he passed the bar on his first try. A week later he went to work as an assistant legislative counsel with the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party. It was nuts-and-bolts work, with a salary next to nothing, but he was prepared to bear the sacrifices. For more than three years he herded legislation through the statehouse, where he discharged favors and tucked away IOUs for future redemption. The war seemed light-years away.

 

On the morning of their fifth anniversary, John carried Kathy's breakfast into the bedroom on a plastic tray. He caused five red roses to appear under cover of a dish towel.

"It's funny," she said, "you seem different somehow. More relaxed or content or something."

"You think so?"

"Yes. And I'm glad."

John nodded at her. He showed his empty hands, made a move, and displayed a pair of glass earrings. He caused a pair of new white tennis shoes to appear; on the insteps he had written
JOHN
+
KATH,
encircling this combination with hearts. All the tricks were working. In the early spring of 1976 he announced his candidacy for the Minnesota State Senate.

 

"You want to win?" Tony Carbo said. "Obviously."

"I'm talking real wanting. Stomach-wanting."

"It's there," Wade said. "Exactly there, in the stomach."

Tony nodded and pinched a roll of flesh at his chin. They were not close friends, and never would be, but there was a compatibility between them, a precise matching of opposites. Lock and key, Tony called it. They'd met at a party fundraiser two years earlier. A few dinners, a few lunches, and afterward things were assumed.

"Well, beautiful," Tony said. "You're hungry, that's a start. Nothing beats a healthy appetite."

He stared dubiously at one of Kathy's wall hangings, then deposited himself on the couch and looked up at John with a pair of small slanted eyes. As a human specimen he wasn't much. Obese and jowly and yellow-skinned. Now, as always, he wore his standard green corduroy suit and stained red tie. His breath came in shallow gusts.

"So how about it?" John said. "On board?"

"Oh, sure." Tony grinned and glanced over at Kathy. He lit up a cigarette. "Handsome candidate. Spectacular wife."

"I'm not running on handsome."

"Oh, my," Tony said. "Woe is us."

Kathy looked at him with distaste. Tony beamed at her. "So what's the pitch? War hero?"

"No heroics," John said. "Straight issues."

"Oh, I see." Tony leaned back heavily and aimed a smile at Kathy through the smoke. "Well, listen, we've got a problem then, a big one, because you won't find this Mister Issue listed on the ballot. Other guys, sure, but not him." He chuckled. "Thought you wanted to win."