The Vietnam Reader (45 page)

They called me a shitbird, because I would stay in trouble. Minor shit, really. But they put me on point anyway. I spent most of my time in Vietnam runnin’. I ran through Vietnam ’cause I was always on
point, and points got to run. They can’t walk like everybody else. Specially when you hit them open areas. Nobody walked through an open area. After a while, you develop a way to handle it. You learned that the point usually survived. It was the people behind you who got killed.

And another thing. It’s none of that shit, well, if they start shootin’ at you, now all of a sudden we gonna run in there and outshoot them. The motherfuckers hit, you call in some air. Bring in some heavy artillery, whatever you need to cool them down. You wipe that area up. You soften it up. Then you lay to see if you receive any fire. An’
then
you go on in.

I remember the first night we had went out on patrol. About 50 people shot this old guy. Everybody claimed they shot him. He got shot ’cause he started running. It was an old man running to tell his family. See, it wasn’t s’posed to be nobody out at night but the Marines. Any Vietnamese out at night was the enemy. And we had guys who were frustrated from Korea with us. Guys who were real gung ho, wanted a name for themselves. So a lot of times they ain’t tell us shit about who is who. People get out of line, you could basically kill them. So this old man was running like back towards his crib to warn his family. I think people said, “Halt,” but we didn’t know no Vietnamese words.

It was like shootin’ water buffaloes. Somebody didn’t tell us to do this. We did it anyway. But they had to stop us from doing that. Well, the water buffaloes would actually attack Americans. I guess maybe we smelled different. You would see these little Vietnamese kids carrying around this huge water buffalo. That buffalo would see some Marines and start wantin’ to run ’em down. You see the poor little kids tryin’ to hold back the water buffalo, because these Marines will kill him. And Marines, man, was like, like we was always lookin’ for shit to go wrong. Shit went wrong. That gave us the opportunity.

I remember we had went into this village and got pinned down with a Australian officer. When we finally went on through, we caught these two women. They smelled like they had weapons. These were all the people we found. So the Australian dude told us to take the women in. So me and my partner, we sittin’ up in this Amtrac
with these women. Then these guys who was driving the Amtrac come in there and start unzippin’ their pants as if they gonna screw the women. So we say, “Man, get outta here. You can’t do it to our prisoners.” So they get mad with us. Like they gonna fight us. And we had to actually lock and load to protect the women. They said, “We do this all the time.”

One time we had went into this place we had hit. We was takin’ prisoners. So this one guy broke and ran. So I chased him. I ran behind him. Everybody say, “Shoot him. Shoot him.” ’Cause they was pissed that I was chasin’ him. So I hit him. You know I had to do something to him. I knew I couldn’t just grab him and bring him back. And his face just crumbled. Then I brought him back, and they said, “You could have got a kill, Edwards.”

The first time we thought we saw the enemy in big numbers was one of these operations by Marble Mountain. We had received fire. All of a sudden we could see people in front of us. Instead of waiting for air, we returned the fire, and you could see people fall. I went over to this dude and said, “Hey, man, I saw one fall.” Then everyone started yelling, “We can see ’em fall. We can see ’em fall.” And they were fallin’. Come to find out it was Bravo Company. What the VC had done was suck Bravo Company in front of us. ’Cause they attacked us and Bravo Company at the same time. They would move back as Bravo Company was in front of us. It was our own people. That’s the bodies we saw falling. They figured out what was happening, and then they ceased fire. But the damage was done real fast. I think we shot up maybe 40 guys in Bravo Company. Like I said, it was easy to get killed by an American.

The first time I killed somebody up close was when we was tailing Charlie on a patrol somewhere around Danang. It was night. I was real tired. At that time you had worked so hard during the day, been on so many different details, you were just bombed out.

I thought I saw this dog running. Because that white pajama top they wore at night just blend into that funny-colored night they had over there. All of a sudden, I realized that somebody’s runnin’. And before I could say anything to him, he’s almost ran up on me. There’s nothing I can do but shoot. Somebody get that close, you can’t wait to
check their ID. He’s gonna run into you or stop to shoot you. It’s got to be one or the other. I shot him a bunch of times. I had a 20-round clip, and when he hit the ground, I had nothing. I had to reload. That’s how many times he was shot.

Then the sergeant came over and took out the flashlight and said, “Goddamn. This is fucking beautiful. This is fucking beautiful.”

This guy was really out of it. He was like moanin’. I said, “Let me kill him.” I couldn’t stand the sound he was makin’. So I said, “Back off, man. Let me put this guy out of his misery.” So I shot him again. In the head.

He had a grenade in his hand. I guess he was committing suicide. He was just runnin’ up to us, pullin’ a grenade kind of thing. I caught him just in time.

Everybody was comin’ congratulatin’ me, saying what a great thing it was. I’m tryin’ to be cool, but I’m really freakin’ out. So then I start walking away, and they told me I had to carry the body back to base camp. We had a real kill. We had one we could prove. We didn’t have to make this one up.

So then I start draggin’ this body by the feet. And his arm fell off. So I had to go back and get his arm. I had to stick it down his pants. It was a long haul.

And I started thinkin’. You think about how it feels, the weight. It was rainin’. You think about the mist and the smells the rain brings out. All of a sudden I realize this guy is a person, has got a family. All of a sudden it wasn’t like I was carrying a gook. I was actually carrying a human being. I started feeling guilty. I just started feeling really badly.

I don’t feel like we got beat in Vietnam. We never really fought the war. People saying that America couldn’t have won that war is crazy.

The only way we could actually win the war was to fight everyday. You couldn’t fight only when you felt like it. Or change officers every month. Troops would learn the language, learn the people, learn the area. If you’re gonna be fighting in an area, you get to know everybody in the area and you stay there. You can’t go rotate your troops every 12 months. You always got new people coming in. Plus they may not get to learn anything. They may die the first day. If you take a guy on
patrol and he gets killed the first day, what good is he? See, if you have seasoned troops, you can move in and out of the bush at will. You get the smell of the country on you. You start to eat the food. You start to smell like it. You don’t have that fresh smell so they can smell you when you’re comin’. Then you can fight a war. Then you can just start from one tip of South Vietnam and work your way to the top. To China. Of course, if we had used the full might of the military, we’d be there now. We could never give the country back up. Plus we’d have to kill millions of Vietnamese. Do we want to do that? What had they done to us to deserve all that? So to do it would have been wrong. All we did was to give our officers the first combat training they had since Korea. It was more like a big training ground. If it was a real war, you either would have come out in a body bag or you would have come out when the war was over.

Sometimes I think we would have done a lot better by getting them hooked on our lifestyle than by trying to do it with guns. Give them credit cards. Make them dependent on television and sugar. Blue jeans works better than bombs. You can take blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll records and win over more countries than you can with soldiers.

When I went home, they put me in supply, probably the lowest job you can have in the Marines. But they saw me drawing one day and they said, “Edwards can draw.” They sent me over to the training-aids library, and I became an illustrator. I reenlisted and made sergeant.

When I went back to Quantico, my being black, they gave me the black squad, the squad with most of the blacks, especially the militant blacks. And they started hippin’ me. I mean I was against racism. I didn’t even call it racism. I called it prejudice. And by becoming an illustrator, it gave you more time to think. And I was around people who thought. People who read books. I would read black history where the white guys were going off on novels or playing rock music. So then one day, I just told them I was black. I didn’t call them
blanco,
they didn’t have to call me Negro. That’s what started to get me in trouble. I became a target. Somebody to watch.

Well, there was this riot on base, and I got busted. It started over some white guys using a bunch of profanity in front of some sisters. I was found guilty of attack on an unidentified Marine. Five months in
jail, five months without pay. And a suspended BCD. In jail they didn’t want us to read our books, draw any pictures, or do anything intellectually stimulating or what they thought is black. They would come into my cell and harass me. So one day I was just tired of them, and I hit the duty warden. I ended up with a BCD in 1970. After six years, eight months, and eight days, I was kicked out of the Corps. I don’t feel it was fair. If I had been white, I would never had went to jail for fighting. That would have been impossible.

With a BCD, nothing was happenin’. I took to dressin’ like the Black Panthers, so even blacks wouldn’t hire me. So I went to the Panther office in D.C. and joined. I felt the party was the only organization that was fighting the system.

I liked their independence. The fact that they had no fear of the police. Talking about self-determination. Trying to make Malcolm’s message reality. This was the first time black people had stood up to the state since Nat Turner. I mean armed. It was obvious they wasn’t gonna give us anything unless we stood up and were willing to die. They obviously didn’t care anything about us, ’cause they had killed King.

For me the thought of being killed in the Black Panther Party by the police and the thought of being killed by Vietnamese was just a qualitative difference. I had left one war and came back and got into another one. Most of the Panthers then were veterans. We figured if we had been over in Vietnam fighting for our country, which at that point wasn’t serving us properly, it was only proper that we had to go out and fight for our own cause. We had already fought for the white man in Vietnam. It was clearly his war. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have seen as many Confederate flags as you saw. And the Confederate flags was an insult to any person that’s of color on this planet.

I rose up into the ranks. I was an artist immediately for the newspaper. Because of my background in the military, obviously I was able to deal with a lot of things of a security nature. And eventually I took over the D.C. chapter.

At this time, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were in jail and people sort of idealized them. The party didn’t actually fall apart until those two were released, and then the real leader, David Hilliard, was
locked up. Spiro Agnew had a lot to do with the deterioration when he said take the Panthers out of the newspapers and then they will go away. And the FBI was harassing us, and we started turning on each other because of what they were spreading. And the power structure started to build up the poverty programs. Nobody was going to follow the Panthers if they could go down to the poverty program and get a check and say they are going to school.

We just didn’t understand the times. All we wanted to do was kick whitey’s ass. We didn’t think about buying property or gaining economic independence. We were, in the end, just showing off.

I think the big trip America put us on was to convince us that having money was somehow harmful. That building businesses and securing our economic future, and buying or controlling areas for our group, our family, our friends like everybody else does, was wrong. Doing that doesn’t make you antiwhite. I think white people would even like us better if we had more money. They like Richard Pryor. And Sammy Davis. And Jabbar.

Economically, black folks in America have more money than Canada or Mexico. It’s obvious that we are doing something wrong. When people say we’re illiterate, that doesn’t bother me as much. Literacy means I can’t read these books. Well neither does a Korean or a Vietnamese. But where they’re not illiterate is in the area of economics. Sure, we’re great artists, great singers, play great basketball. But we’re not great managers yet. It’s pretty obvious that you don’t have to have guns to get power. People get things out of this country and they don’t stick up America to do it. Look at the Vietnamese refugees running stores now in the black community where I live.

Right now, I’m an unemployed artist, drawing unemployment. I spent time at a community center helping kids, encouraging kids to draw.

I work for the nuclear-freeze movement, trying to convince people nuclear war is insane. Even when I was in the Marine Corps, I was against nuclear war. When I was a child, I was against nuclear weapons, because I thought what they did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was totally cold. There’s nothing any human being is doing on the planet that I could want to destroy the planet for future generations. I think
we should confine war to our century and our times. Not to leave the residue around for future generations. The residue of hate is a horrible thing to leave behind. The residue of nuclear holocaust is far worse.

I went to see
Apocalypse Now
, because a friend paid my way. I don’t like movies about Vietnam ’cause I don’t think that they are prepared to tell the truth.
Apocalypse Now
didn’t tell the truth. It wasn’t real. I guess it was a great thing for the country to get off on, but it didn’t remind me of anything I saw. I can’t understand how you would have a bridge lit up like a Christmas tree. A USO show at night? Guys attacking the women on stage. That made no sense. I never saw us reach the point where nobody is in charge in a unit. That’s out of the question. If you don’t know anything, you know the chain of command. And the helicopter attack on the village? Fuckin’ ridiculous. You couldn’t hear music comin’ out of a helicopter. And attacking a beach in helicopters was just out of the question. The planes and the napalm would go in first. Then, the helicopters would have eased in after the fact. That was wild.