Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
The Last Full Measure (55 page)
THE MUTILATION AND
denigration of the enemy dead—something usually associated with ancient and tribal cultures—is another atavistic need from which modern warfare is not exempt: “The Hardcore troopers wore their black metal Recondo arrowhead pins with pride, but as I found out recently the VC sometimes had the misfortune to wear the Recondo pin too.… ‘We used the Recondo pins to let Charley know we took them out,’ a Hardcore platoon sergeant says. ‘We hammered them into VC dead bare chests and sometimes their foreheads.’ ”
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When a GI in Vietnam is taught to desecrate enemy bodies, one is reminded of the way hunting animals have their young play-kill on already-dead prey in order to become acquainted and comfortable with killing. There is purpose to the macabre:
The first patrol we went to where some Marines had ambushed a bunch of Viet Cong. They had me moving dead bodies. VC and NVA. Push this body here … Flip a body over. See people’s guts and heads half blown off. I was throwing up all over the place.
“Keep doing it. Drag this body over there.… You’re going to get used to death before you get in a fire fight and get us all killed.” …
Next, I had to kick one dead body in the side of the head until part of his brain started coming out the other side.… “Kick it,” they said. “You are starting to feel what it is like to kill. That man is dead, but in your mind you’re killing him again. Man, it ain’t no big thing. Look-a-here.” And they threw some bodies off the cliff and shit.
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But it is not only the echo of ancient curses and murderous screams that the modern warrior hears. Occasionally, out of the primeval sludge of combat, someone finds a diamond, perhaps a
poor justification for the whole sorry bloody mess but something precious nevertheless.
In the Twelfth Evac of the Twenty-Fifth Division in Vietnam: “We saw men who came in who displayed feelings of love, gentleness, affection, closeness, and behavior we had never seen between two men before. Not in a homosexual way but in a brotherhood way—closer than brotherhood. Men coming in messed up telling us to work on their friends first. Guys concerned about each other. ‘See Smitty down there, how’s Smitty doing?’ Smitty might be fine compared to the guy who’s asking, who might be dying.… To see two men love each other made me wonder why we can’t be like that in the civilized world. Why does that only exist in the war zone?”
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Or this, north of Dak To in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, June 8, 1966:
I had a lot of holes in me and was sort of groggy, but I knew damn well that I wasn’t going to die. And there were people on the ground that were just a hell of a lot worse off than I was. There was an army sergeant there named Pellum Bryant who really saved us that day. If it hadn’t been for him, the whole thing would have been gone in fifteen minutes. By all reckoning we should have been wiped out—the whole platoon should have been killed. But watching him maneuver, I swear to Christ, it was almost like watching a ballet dancer move back and forth. All of us are strung out on this trail, some at the high end, some at the low end, and I’m in the middle with the command post. Bryant is moving back and forth, left and right, firing as he goes. And not firing blindly—firing with purpose.
It was somebody with superb confidence in himself and what he was doing. Just as a great musician must understand the importance of what he is playing, Pellum Bryant must
have had an understanding in the back of his mind that his actions were going to save a lot of people. And all the time he was doing this kind of dance, back and forth, he did not speak a single word.
All of this stands totally separate from whether you like the Vietnam War or don’t like it. This is not a word I toss around lightly, but it was
inspiring
to see him in the middle of this stupid damn war. Not to get too elaborate, but it approached the vicinity of the spiritual.… A few weeks later he was blown up by a mine.
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And in a letter left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC:
18 November 1989
Dear Sir
,
For twenty two years I have carried your picture in my wallet. I was only eighteen years old that day we faced each other on that trail in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Why you did not take my life I’ll never know. You stared at me for so long with your AK-47 and yet you did not fire. Forgive me for taking your life, I was reacting just the way I was trained, to kill V.C. or gooks, hell you weren’t even considered human, just gook/target, one in the same
.
Since that day in 1967 I have grown a great deal and have a great deal of respect for life and other peoples of the world
.
So many times over the years I have stared at your picture and your daughter, I suspect. Each time my heart and guts would burn with the pain of guilt. I have two daughters myself now. One is twenty. The other is twenty two, and has blessed me with two granddaughters, ages one and four
.
Today I visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C. I have
wanted to come here for several years now to say goodbye to many of my former comrades
.
Somehow I hope and believe they will know I am here, I truly loved many of them as I’m sure you loved many of your former comrades
.
As of today we are no longer enemies. I perceive you as a brave soldier defending his homeland. Above all else, I can respect that importance that that life held for you. I suppose that is why I am here today
.
As I leave here today I leave your picture and this letter. It is time for me to continue the life process and release my pain and guilt. Forgive me Sir, I shall try to live my life to the fullest, an opportunity that you and many others were denied
.
I’ll sign off now Sir, so until we chance to meet again in another time and place, rest in peace
.
Respectfully
,
101st Airborne Div. Richard A. Luttrell
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F
OR
P
ITY’S
S
AKE
A Brief History of Battlefield Medicine
If you have two wounded soldiers, one with a gunshot wound of the lung, and the other with an arm or a leg blown off, you save the sonofabitch with the lung wound and let the goddamn sonofabitch with an amputated arm or leg go to hell. He is no goddam use to us anymore.
—A medic remembering advice given by General George S. Patton Jr.
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Were it not so tragic there would be something comical in the way man invents machines to kill and injure, then uses his ingenuity to provide methods of repairing damages caused by his own destructive genius.
—Mabel Boardman, Red Cross historian, 1915
2
I
T IS A
peculiar thing, this juggling between our relentlessly destructive inventiveness and our redemptive determination to fight against the dark side. Our technological and logistical
genius, so brilliant at the harming, can also put back together what we have undone. We kill and we save, reveling in both.
In the ancient world any kind of serious wound would almost inevitably lead to the soldier’s death. There was no way to control this inexorable mortality. Little was known of the mechanisms and chemistry of the body—how the torn could be repaired, or the insidious workings of infection. Only the kindness of comrades, the limited effectiveness of herbal medicines, and above all, the fervent appeals to the gods, put up a fragile barrier between the doomed and the saved. Most were doomed.
This doleful state of affairs persisted pretty much until the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century began the process of putting less emphasis on appeals to the deities and more on scientific inquiry and medical organization. During the American War of Independence, for example, about a quarter of all patriot soldiers admitted to hospital died.
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In the Civil War it dropped to around 14 percent,
4
but by the First World War the American soldier’s chances of surviving hospitalization for wounds had increased dramatically: Slightly over 6 percent were lost; in World War II, 4.5 percent; in Korea, 2.5 percent, and in Vietnam, 1.8 percent.
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What accounts for such a dramatic improvement? Several factors had to come together, each making a massive individual contribution but not a decisive one, until they acted in concert. They were the organization of medical services, the control of infection, blood transfusion, surgical procedures, and anesthetics.
Medical services, no matter how crude or sophisticated, have first to be delivered to the wounded soldier. For this to happen, there must be some kind of organization. Whether it is the provision of first responders working at the front line of combat, a system of more permanent hospitals with specialist medical staff, or simply the fundamental—and massively important—issue of transportation, there has to be the will and the wherewithal to create a medical organization.
In the ancient Greek world, care of the wounded was primarily the responsibility of comrades-in-arms, who in most instances were obligated by the tribal and familial bonds on which the army was built. Nothing much could be done other than the most basic remedial care of wounds: washing and binding, some anesthetizing with wine, and perhaps the use of natural soporifics and analgesics. The outcome was in the hands of the gods.
Imperial Rome brought its bureaucratic genius to the salvage work of the battlefield. Taxes were levied to finance the army. Permanent military medical personnel worked in the thick of combat. Specialist wound surgeons (
medici vulnerarii
) and a sophisticated system of hospitals (each military camp had its
valetudenarium
) tended to the wounded with a surprising awareness of the need for cleanliness to inhibit infection. Organizationally, the Roman soldier was afforded a level of care that would not be emulated until the nineteenth century.
A casualty of the dissolution of the Roman Empire’s brilliant bureaucracy was organized care for wounded and sick soldiers. (Pestilence was the greater killer for most of history. Not until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 did battle deaths outnumber those dying from disease.) In the medieval West there was hardly any provision for the care of ordinary combat troops. Nobles were attended by their retinue, which might include a physician, but even so, their life expectancy from any kind of serious wound would have been on the short side. A historian of medieval epics has reconstructed the ministrations given to a badly wounded knight:
We see the wounded knight laid upon the ground, his wounds examined, washed and bandaged, often with a wimple from a woman’s forehead; the various practices of giving a stimulating wound-drink to relieve faintness, of pouring oil or wine into wounds, of stanching hemorrhage
or relieving pain by sundry herbs, of wound-sucking to prevent internal hemorrhage; the mumbling of charms over wounds; the many balsams, salves and plasters used in wound-dressing; the feeling of the pulse in the cephalic, median and hepatic veins to ascertain the patient’s chances of recovery; the danger of suffocation or heat-stroke from the heavy visored helmet and coat of mail; the eventual transportation of the patient by hand, on shield or litters, on horseback or on litters attached to horses; the sumptuous chambers and couches reserved for the high-born, and the calling in of physicians, usually from the famous schools of Palermo or Montpellier in grave cases.
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For the ordinary soldier there is little evidence that the armies of the Middle Ages had any effective organization to deal with casualties.
It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that Western nations established institutionalized medical care for their armies or, indeed, for their civilian populations. The first permanent civilian hospital in America, for example, was established in Philadelphia in 1751 and the second in New York twenty years later. Military hospitals, including the fairly general provision of mobile field hospitals to accompany the army on campaign, did not guarantee effective treatment for a number of reasons: inadequate facilities, low-grade staff (in the British Army, for example, there was no army medical school until 1858),
7
lack of ambulances, and a general ignorance (by no means limited to military hospitals) of the principles of hygiene. Although two great military “hospitals” (Les Invalides in Paris, founded in 1676, and the Royal Hospital Chelsea, London, 1682) were established, they were not hospitals in the sense of treating the full range of combat wounded, but more like rest homes for a select number of wounded or aged
ex-soldiers. The problem was the inadequacy and scarcity (often nonexistence) of hospitals proximate to the fighting.
