What it is Like to Go to War (15 page)

Kill ratios and body counts were the prime example of how “normal” became abnormal in Vietnam. Or was it vice versa? Take a typical squad-level firefight on a routine security patrol, Lance Corporal Smithers in charge. All sorts of shit breaks loose. Teenagers get killed and maimed. The radio nets go crazy with artillery missions, sit-reps, mortar missions, anxious platoon commander, anxious company commander, anxious battalion commander, S-3, S-2—all wanting to know what’s happening. Good communication is definitely a two-edged sword. When the shooting stops,
the pressure begins for the most important piece of information, the sole justification in the Vietnam War for all this sorrow: the body count. Smithers, what’s the score?

The teenage adrenaline-drained patrol leader has to call in the score so analysts, newspaper reporters, and politicians back in Washington have something to do. Never mind that Smithers and his squad may have stopped a developing attack planned to hit the company that night, saving scores of lives and maintaining control over a piece of ground. All they’ll be judged on, and all their superiors have to be judged on, is the kill ratio.

Smithers’s best friend has just been killed. Two other friends are missing pieces of their bodies and are going into shock. No one in the squad knows if the enemy is 15 meters away waiting to open up again or running. Smithers is tired and has a lot of other things on his mind. With scorekeepers often 25 kilometers away, no one is going to check on the score. In short, Smithers has a great incentive to lie.

He also has a great
need
to lie. His best friend is dead. “Why?” he asks himself. This is where the lying in Vietnam all began. It had to fill the long silence following Smithers’s anguished “Why?”

So it starts. “Nelson, how many did you get?” Smithers asks.

PFC Nelson looks up from crying over the body of his friend Katz and says, “How the fuck do I know?”

His friend Smithers says, “Well, did you get that bastard that came around the dogleg after Katz threw the Mike-26?”

Nelson looks down at Katz’s face, hardening and turning yellow like tallow. “You’re goddamn right I got him,” he almost whispers. It’s all he can offer his dead friend.

“There’s no body.”

“They drug the fucker away. I tell you I got him!” Nelson is no longer whispering.

“We can call it a probable,” says Smithers.

“Do what you fucking like, but I tell you I got him. I saw him jump. Half a fucking magazine. He’s dead. He’s greased. Now fuck off.”

The patrol leader doesn’t have a body, but what are the odds that he’s going to call his friend a liar or, even more difficult, make Katz’s death meaningless, given that the only meaning now lies in this one statistic? No one is congratulating him for exposing the enemy, keeping them screened from the main body, which is the purpose of security patrols.

He calls in one confirmed kill.

Just then PFC Schroeder comes crawling over with Kool-Aid stains all around his mouth and says, “I think I got one, right by the dogleg of the trail after Katz threw the grenade.”

“Yeah, we called that one in.”

“No, it ain’t the one Nelson got. I tell you I got another one.”

Smithers thinks it was the same one but he’s not about to have PFC Schroeder feeling bad, particularly after they’ve all seen their squadmate die. Then there’s still the problem of getting them all out alive, and who the fuck cares if it was the same one, and he’s on the radio about the medevac anyway, so. “Wait one, Delta. I got another probable here. Now, I copy, the bird can pick up our Coors and Pabst
⁵⁵
at Pall Mall plus two point two, Winston minus...” The last thing on Smithers’s mind is the integrity of meaningless numbers.

The message gets relayed to the battalion commander. He’s just taken two wounded and one dead. All he has to report is one confirmed, one probable. This won’t look good. Bad ratio. He knows all sorts of bullets were flying all over the place. It was a
point-to-point contact, so no ambush, so the stinkin’ thinkin’ goes round and round, so the probable had to be a kill. But
really
if we got two confirmed kills, there was probably a probable. I mean, what’s the definition of probable if it isn’t probable to get one? What the hell, two kills, two probables.

Our side is now ahead. Victory is just around the corner.

Then the artillery commander calls in. “How many kills did we get in support of that firefight?” The infantry commander knows how important the kill ratio is to the artillery commander’s career, and here he has only two kills and two probables to share out. But you don’t want the artillery to feel demotivated, and maybe you played football together at West Point or Quantico. There’s only one decent thing to do. Give the artillery credit for a kill. (But really, the infantry did do the killing, so why change the infantry numbers?)

So a kill goes up from the artillery battery, through the artillery regiment. One kill, and... What’s this? One probable. It only makes sense. After all, we were dropping in 105mm high explosives with timed air bursts and that new cluster round with the flechettes, and, man, that combination is some kind of lethal and, besides, you know how the sneaky bastards haul their dead away to fuck up our damage assessments. We, of course, do it to properly bury our dead.

By the time all this shit piles up at the briefing in Saigon, we’ve won the war.

Imagine the scene in ancient Greece if the Greeks had the same attitude. Word has just reached Greek headquarters that Leonidas and the three hundred Spartans have all died defending the pass at Thermopylae.

“Good Zeus! They’re all dead? What was the body count? What do you mean you didn’t think it was important? If you think
I’m going to take this news to Themistocles with nothing to show for it but a bunch of dead Spartans, you’d better think again. Now either I want this goddamn thing hushed up quick or you get your ass back up to that pass and get me a body count we can take to Athens. I don’t care if you have to include Persian chickens...”

Why don’t decent people stand up and scream? It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’re in a system in which they wish to survive. Assume you’re a decent soldier, like me. You and I are decent, aren’t we? You know there’s a bunch of lying bastards, the other guys, who will do anything to get ahead and who aren’t decent at all. If you naively turn in only one probable, when you
know
that under similar circumstances the other sobs are going to turn in at least five of one kind or the other, well, who’s going to end up running the place? A bunch of lying bastards. It’s actually your moral duty to keep up.
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When Norman Schwarzkopf told reporters during Desert Storm that estimates of how many Iraqi soldiers had been killed were meaningless, I raised my fist in the air and shouted for joy. The pressure for numbers and statistics comes from people who don’t have anything to do, don’t know what it’s all about or how it happens, and are frustrated because they’re left out of what looks to be, at a safe distance, something exciting. The press people are constantly pushing briefers with inane questions like “What percentage of the Republican Guards is destroyed?” Suppose I just told you that half of my platoon had been destroyed but didn’t tell you the remaining half is so goddamned mad we’re going to fight twice as hard. What meaning will be conveyed by statistics like
“50 percent destroyed”? The only meaningful statistic in warfare is when the other side quits.

This nonsense went on in Vietnam for several reasons. Probably the most important was that the president and a group of advisers insisted on running things from Washington with no clear military objectives to pursue. So they had to have something upon which to make decisions, because, after all, if they didn’t make decisions, what the hell were they doing in charge? The second factor was military careerism, in both competing with statistics and not blowing the whistle on their stupidity. This happened all the way up the line. And finally the lying took place because the kill ratio statistics were so totally out of line with the ordinary grunt’s psychology that lying about it was a trivial and meaningless act for him.

When the system starts seeking goals that are out of line with individual values, the individual, who is usually trapped in the system, can either get hurt or survive by lying. We all like to survive and people lie all the time because of this. People in oppressive state systems learn to lie as a normal part of their lives, simply to get along. People raised in alcoholic or other kinds of dysfunctional families learn to lie as a normal part of their lives, simply to get along. People in fear of losing their jobs learn to lie, simply to get along. It should come as no surprise that in Vietnam people learned to lie, too. It should also come as no surprise to find out that lies or partial truths were told in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We kid ourselves when we think lying is abnormal behavior. Lying may be bad, and we can even believe it is bad, but it is quite often the norm.

Although I blame the top military and political leaders for not squaring this system up from the top, a massive moral failure, it’s just too comforting to think that it was a bunch of
brass trying to get ahead who did all the lying in Vietnam. I also blame all of us who participated in it for falling into cynicism rather than trying to stop it. Cynicism is simply the flip side of naïveté. You’re no more mature, just more burned.

Even so, it isn’t so easy to just say lying is wrong and shouldn’t be done. Sometimes lying was good. It takes a very mature person to know when one or the other is appropriate.

Sophocles writes about this in his play
Philoctetes
. A warrior, Philoctetes, carries the magical bow of Heracles, the great immortal now departed from the earth to live with the gods. It has been foretold that only with the magic bow will the Achaeans defeat the Trojans. On his way to fight the Trojans, however, Philoctetes is severely wounded by a snake. The wound festers and rots. It stinks. It drives everyone on his ship mad. Finally his shipmates can’t stand it any longer and they maroon him on a deserted island, hoping he will die quickly. In Greek and Roman mythology the snakebite is a metaphor for consciousness. Most people can’t stand having someone with a new and different consciousness in the same boat. Society does often isolate people like this.

After nine years of getting nowhere the Achaeans remember the prophecy and decide to send two men to get the bow back, however they can. The only person who can use the magic bow is Neoptolemus, the young son of Heracles. But he is inexperienced and naive. They send Odysseus, who is neither, with him.

The story revolves around the enormous unfair suffering that Philoctetes has endured, his anger against his fellow Achaeans, and how very unfair it would be to take the bow from him, since it is his only source for getting food. Neoptolemus befriends him, according to Odysseus’s scheme, which is basically to lie about everything in order to trick the bow away from Philoctetes. But at the last minute
Neoptolemus wavers, feeling sorry for Philoctetes. Then, Odysseus steps in and deceives Philoctetes with a bold lie and gains the bow for the ultimate victory against Troy.

I lied in Vietnam but, unlike Odysseus, I was never consistently in control of my lying. My lying fell into two very distinct categories: the lie as a weapon and the lie of two minds.

Prairie Dog, or, more often, P-Dog, was an eighteen-year-old black machine gunner from one of our eastern seaboard ghettos. He and I had been in the same platoon. P-Dog got his name saving a squad that was pinned down in the DMZ. He took off on his own at a rapid crawl, cradling the heavy and cumbersome M-60 machine gun in his arms. Elbows and knees flying, he outflanked the enemy and blasted them with his machine gun, freeing the pinned squad. Such a maneuver, under heavy fire, takes more than just raw courage. The name came when a friend of his, talking about how low and fast he’d been crawling, said, “Like a prairie dog with his ass on fire.” It stuck.

P-Dog had about ten days to go before he was due to rotate back to the States. He’d managed to wangle his way out of the bush back to Quang Tri to sit out his last week at the same time I was there awaiting reassignment to the air-observer squadron.

About eleven o’clock one night we got a call from another battalion up the road. Three of our guys had been picked up smoking marijuana. Could the duty officer come over and take them into custody? That was me.

Smoking dope in those days meant a mandatory court-martial and dishonorable discharge. Any kid with a dishonorable discharge would lose his GI Bill benefits, and typically this meant also losing any chances for further education. In addition he would never be able to join a union and would therefore never be able to get a decent job. Color that kid black and you’ve just
shut him out of normal society for life. In short, these three kids were had. So much for serving their nation.

I sighed and said I’d come over. I left the duty NCO, a career gunnery sergeant, in charge and took the sergeant E-5 who was in charge of the battalion office and a driver along with me.

I walked into the other battalion’s headquarters hooch and there I saw P-Dog and the two other kids under armed guard, squatting on the floor, their hands stretched out on a bench. When P-Dog saw me he turned his head away. He would look only at the floor. I began shaking inside, knowing the consequences that were going to have to follow. Applying military justice to strangers is a lot easier than applying it to a friend. We’d been through a lot of shit together, and now this was the way we’d say good-bye, with me sending him to jail and then a lifetime’s purgatory.

The other battalion’s duty officer, an old mustang, said he hadn’t searched these guys yet, because they weren’t in his battalion, but they hadn’t had their hands anywhere near their pockets. He’d already searched his own guys and they’d been put away. He was giving me an out. I took it.

I ordered the three of them into the jeep and took off. I turned to the driver and the sergeant when we were well down the dark road and said in a very loud voice that I had to piss, didn’t anyone else? We all three walked away from the jeep and stood in the dark with our backs to it. After about a minute or two of muffled scrambling and whispers from the three in the jeep, we all turned around and climbed back in.