Sergeant Dickinson

“You won't know what hit you.
Sergeant Dickinson
takes no prisoners. It is merciless, concussive. It nails you to the ground; the next best thing to not being there.”

—John Westermann, author of
Exit Wounds
and
Ladies of the Night

“The grim resignation that replaces fear in the psyches of combat soldiers under fire is vividly dramatized in this latest from Gold…
Sergeant Dickinson
in fact hits every note quite convincingly: the book's hard to take, but it's harder to look away from it… This brief, swift tale's relentless fatalism and narrative momentum identify it as an authentic member of the company of Gustav Hasford's
The Short-Timers
and Michael Herr's
Dispatches
.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“A many-faceted jewel is the best description of this book because it forges humanity out of the most inhuman war situation. Gold has created a wry, war-worn character whose take on all that occurs around him will not be easily forgotten.”

—Beverly Gologorsky, author of
The Things We Do To Make It Home

“I could not put
Sergeant Dickinson
down. This from a guy who has a house full of partially read books. This is a book for those who were there. And especially a book for those in Special Forces. Jerome Gold's first two sentences took me back to Vietnam. To the grinding of latterite dust in my teeth. To the stench of the dead. To the fear as I had known it. This is a miracle of hard work done by a tough but sensitive man. Gold has captured the raw edges of those things that will be with us forever.”

—Rollo Moss, veteran

“This book says it all with perfect pitch. It captures the visual imagery, dialogue, and complex psychology of the combat experience in a way that is unlikely to be equaled… The sit reps from other outposts are simply brilliant. The elephant bombing, unknown Americans entering the perimeter, etc. These things really happen. They are not, as I read in a literary journal review, simply a metaphorical device through which the author describes the absurdity of war. The creative reach presented here in a short work is incredible… I thought that Michael Herr's
Dispatches
had realistic dialogue, but he was a journalist, not a soldier. If you could leave on any helicopter, you could never tell the whole story. I have always hoped that someone who fought in the war would get it right. This is it.”

—Dennis Wagner, veteran

“Gold has shaped a powerful, merciless novel from this raw material. He captures the exhaustion and waste of war from the point of view of the noncommissioned officer… The political issues of the war are never discussed; only the reality of the moment matters. A natural for readers of Tim O'Brien.”

—
Booklist

“A brooding, imaginative work that goes beyond many conventionally factual memoirs available. Highly recommended.”

—
Library Journal

“Elucidating the emotional wounds of combat is where Mr. Gold's prose comes alive. His novel doesn't depend on the titillating excitement of a firefight or the fear of a surprise attack to keep the reader engaged. It zeroes in on the psychologi cal battle soldiers faced after the war was over: how hard it was to reenter society after killing and seeing friends killed; the restless conscience that grapples with the worst in human nature…”

—
Asian Wall Street Journal

“Gold's technique has a directness that carries the reader through his slim volume almost as though the words had a physical force of their own.”

—
The Arizona Daily Star

“[
Sergeant Dickinson
] develops a compelling portrait of a soldier entangled in the ruinous affliction of violence and guilt that is both moving and disturbing.”

—
The Bloomsbury Review

“This book scares the hell out of me—and it should. It puts me in mind of
From Here to Eternity
and Michael Herr's
Dispatches
; the first, not a comparison in scope but because Jones depicted the Army as a place that, contrary to popular myth, made men no better than they were (sometimes, considerably worse); the second, because Herr's excellent reportage exactly conveyed the sense of how absolutely alone in war men can sometimes be… Jerry Gold isn't talking about the glory of war, nor the ‘romance' of death. [
Sergeant Dickinson
] could be—
is
—about any war. All enemies are the same and distinctions cease to matter and the only reality is that
men die
. As I said, this book scares me. This truth
should
terrify.”

—Andrew Gettler,
Chiron Review

“Few novels in any genre are as lucid, or as memorably spooky, as Jerome Gold's new book,
Sergeant Dickinson
; it belongs on the high, narrow shelf of first-rate fiction about battlefield experience… Gold, who served in Vietnam as a Special Forces sergeant, writes spare and elegant prose that belies the brutality and the claustrophobia he evokes here. His slim novel is a carefully chosen assortment of details and impressions; he expertly dismantles the myth—dear to civilians as well as to soldiers—“that if you do everything right no harm will come to you.”

—Dwight Garner,
The New York Times Book Review

BOOKS BY JEROME GOLD

FICTION

Sergeant Dickinson
(originally titled
The Negligence of Death
)

Of Great Spaces
(with Les Galloway)

The Inquisitor

The Prisoner's Son

Prisoners

POETRY

Stillness

NONFICTION

Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility

How I Learned That I Could Push the Button

Publishing Lives: Interviews with Independent Book Publishers

Obscure in the Shade of the Giants: Publishing Lives Volume II

Hurricanes
(editor)

Jerome Gold

Black Heron Press
Post Office Box 13396
Mill Creek, Washington 98082
www.blackheronpress.com

This work was originally published under the
title
The Negligence of Death
.

First Black Heron Press edition, 1984
Soho Press hardback edition, 1999
Soho Press paperback edition, 2001
Second Black Heron Press edition, 2011

Copyright © 1984, 1999 by Jerome Gold. All rights reserved. All of
the characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Gold, Jerome.

Sergeant Dickinson: a novel/Jerome Gold.

              p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-936364-12-1

1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975—Fiction. I. Title

PS3557.0352S47 1999            99-24563

813'.54—dc21                        CIP

Cover art and design by Bryan Sears.

Black Heron Press
Post Office Box 13396
Mill Creek, Washington 98082
www.blackheronpress.com

For Jack, David, and Leah

The first time I was wounded I fell down and I thought, This can't be happening to me, although I had always known that I would not live through the year. Then I had to crawl fifteen feet and it took a long time because it was such a long distance. “I'm going into shock, “I told the medic. “No, you're not. You're doing fine. Where are you from, Sarge?” the medic said. Then the medic gave me morphine and helped me to the rear. On the way, we came upon a huge hole that was two feet deep. “How am I ever going to get around it?” I asked. “We'll just walk around it,” the medic said. Then I fell into the hole. When they lifted me onto the helicopter I was in great pain and the medic on board gave me morphine. In Saigon they gave me morphine again. It was a wonder to me that I did not die of good care, but I kept my mouth shut and waited for them to administer each shot.

Now, in America, I dream of this and it is as though it is happening to someone else, for I see myself clearly and I do not feel the pain. The dream comforts me. I feel myself awakening and I resist. I want to sleep; I want to stay inside the dream.

By the sixth day the worst part was the bodies. They reeked, some were five or six days dead, and the troops who remained, Montagnards, Vietnamese, and Americans, did not like being reminded how negligent was Death. Each day we took more dead and at first we put them out of the way, in the ammunition bunkers, American dead in a different bunker from Montagnard and Vietnamese, to aid in keeping an accurate tally of each. But then the bunkers filled, and the helicopter pilots refused to come in to take out the bodies, one of their number lay burnt and smoking still, upside down, just south of the camp. After the bunkers filled we left the dead in the sun in rows of ten near where the dispensary had stood, and because we were soon out of rubberized bags we wrapped them in ponchos, and after the ponchos were gone we used strips of cotton parachute. The sun dried up everything, men and earth, everything but the dead, whose gases and fluids ate away the body bags and ponchos and the cotton parachute so that when the helicopters came in again the bags split when we lifted them to carry to the choppers and we were sick at the stench.

The helicopters came in again on the seventh day at dusk,
sliding in out of the sun, dipping and swinging like puppets on invisible wires, trying to evade the machine gun fire, and then dropped swiftly, suddenly, the last hundred feet, and stopped, hovering, ten feet from the ground, and then set down easily, tenderly, shining silver-gray in the sun. At first they took only the wounded but by the following day the stench was overwhelming and the Montagnards avoided those areas of the camp where the wind blew most freely, the wind contained the malevolent spirits of their unburied kinsmen, and we became afraid that the North Vietnamese would penetrate the areas that the Montagnards had left unprotected, so that finally we began evacuating the dead and cared for the wounded as best we could.

On the fourth day we were reinforced by thirteen Americans and a battalion of Arvin Rangers. Three American correspondents were with them, one dying, he had been shot in the eye in an ambush on the road. We were all relieved when he had lost strength enough to stop moaning. On the first day a Montagnard was shot through the skull. His eyes were pulled to one side and he urinated continually, and when the wind blew across the hole in his skull his arm jerked and he beat his thigh with his fist in a motion like masturbation. We placed the correspondent next to him on the floor of the command bunker, neither knew anything about anything. The Americans were commanded by a Major Breckinridge, he called everyone except his officers “stud” and his men were devoted to him. Breckinridge took command of the camp and everybody's morale went up, everyone felt like fighting again where before we had begun to lose purpose.
We lost more men and we killed more but there began to be sense to it.

One Montagnard was dead and stuffed into a rubberized bag. He had been dead for five days and his wife all that time had squatted beside him, as though keeping a vigil. She had accepted only water from the other women on the first day, before the water ran out, so that until we put the body on the helicopter she had had no more water and no food at all. When we carried the body to the helicopter the woman followed us silently but when we heaved it up on top of the others stacked inside the cabin she screamed and tried to pull it out. She became hysterical when the helicopter lifted off, screaming and beating her thighs with her fists until the other women went to her. “War is hell, as General Grant once said,” somebody said. Somebody else said, “I think it was Sherman who said that.”

There had been a village beside the Special Forces camp. When the listening posts were overrun the villagers moved into the camp and dug caves for themselves in the walls of the communications trenches. Inside the camp we knew the fighting at the listening posts was over when the automatic weapons fire stopped and we could hear single, intermittent rounds fired as the wounded were finished off. After the Rangers came to rescue the camp it became common to see Vietnamese Rangers and Montagnard women coupling in the trenches at night while the Montagnard Strike Force and the old men from the village made silent talk among themselves.

On the night of the seventh day we were reinforced by an
Arvin mechanized infantry battalion. They assaulted south of the camp, then withdrew and quit for the night, leaving their wounded lying in the brush and the red laterite dust. In the morning the APCs went out to retrieve those of their wounded who had survived the night, the dead were left to erode in the wind with the land. In one of the APCs was a dead crewman. He had been shot through the head, his brain and skull stuck in bits to the interior walls, the Vietnamese crew would not touch him. After we pulled him out the crew used oily rags to pick and rub the pieces of him off the walls. In another APC was a black man. I thought, “What's he doing here? this isn't his war.” On his left shoulder was the shield and horse's head patch of the First Cav, he was a forward observer. He had a belly wound, his groans came from down deep, he already looked small and flat like the dead look. We folded his arms across his belly and started to carry him out. When the stretcher was halfway out his right arm slid off his belly and lodged against the side of the APC. Somebody said, “Get his arm.” Then the black man raised his arm himself and placed it across his belly. “Get him to the medics!” somebody yelled, and we rushed him to the makeshift dispensary. For two hours, until he died, we deceived ourselves that he would live. When he raised his arm he became one of us.