What it is Like to Go to War (4 page)

I’m not against hot turkey at Thanksgiving. I would have loved some. What I’m arguing is that the chances of transformative psychological experiences are decreased enormously when you wage war with all the comforts of home. You have no easy way of knowing when you are in the sacred space of Mars and death or coming home from it. In World War II it usually took months to both go to and come back from war. In Vietnam we put people on airplanes and had them returning from combat in some cases in only a matter of hours. Today a soldier can go out on patrol and kill someone or have one of his friends killed and call his girlfriend on his cell phone that night and probably talk about anything except what just happened. And if society itself tries to blur it as much as possible, by conscious well-intended efforts to provide “all the comforts of home” and modern transportation and communication, what chance does your average eighteen-year-old have of not becoming confused?
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My own R&R was typical of this confusion of two worlds and the lack of psychic and temporal space between them

We were in the mountains north of Khe Sanh providing security for an artillery battery that was supporting two infantry companies in combat to our west, right on the Laotian border. The two companies ran into more trouble than they could handle alone and we were dropped in as close as we could to join the fighting.

I was scheduled to go on R&R the next day. I was pissed.

I had been in-country a long time. I still had fear, but after seeing so much dying a numb fatalism had masked it. Honestly, the foremost thing on my conscious mind was not the impending combat but that we’d soon be in the shit and I’d have to miss my R&R to Hong Kong, a destination for which quotas were often jammed and for which I had waited a long time.

We had to move hard and fast to reach the other companies, so we climbed a steep ridge where the jungle was still on fire from napalm. Bare trunks oozed boiled sap and smoke. All the leaves had been burned away, exposing us to a fierce tropical sun that oppressed us with white heat through the acrid greasy air. We were soon covered in black soot. It was in our throats, lungs, and eyes. We were under strict water discipline because when working up a ridgeline you’re above the streams. We waded in ashes over our boot tops. The suffocating air smelled like oil. Sweat mixed with soot and glued our shirts and trousers to our skins. The water in our plastic canteens felt hot to the tongue.

Late that morning we reached the fighting. I lost more friends.

By midmorning the next day the skipper said I could make my R&R if I could find some way out of the bush on my own. I helped pack some wounded up to an LZ
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hoping to get a ride
in with them on a medevac chopper. The LZ was taking sniper fire and occasional mortar rounds. Unless the wounded were declared emergencies, the highest priority, no one was going to fly in for them, much less take some grunt out on R&R.

I sat there, stuck and despondent, trying to imagine Hong Kong, fuming because the company with the mission of eliminating the NVA snipers and mortars hadn’t gotten its goddamn job done.

Then one kid got hauled in who was bleeding very badly in places the corpsmen couldn’t stop, so the priority for the medevac got pushed up. Fifteen minutes later a lone Huey
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worked its way up the steep ridgeline, the heat and altitude-thinned air making climbing difficult. As the chopper flared in I heard tubing, the popping explosions mortars make as the shells leave the tube to start the high arc to their destination. I had a feeling where that destination was going to be.

I wasn’t going to be deterred. As the shells started exploding around the chopper, I helped pile all the wounded aboard, dragging them underneath the rotor blades, shoving the last Marine in like some mad train pusher in Tokyo. Then I just stood there, dumbfounded. There was no room left for me. I faced a wall of wounded men nearly falling out of the side opening of the Huey.

The corpsmen and stretcher-bearers ran for their holes and the chopper’s rotor blades started picking up speed. The last Marine I’d pushed into the chopper had one arm in a sling. Since we’d sat together on the hill bitching, waiting for a bird, he knew I’d miss my plane out of Da Nang. R&R is sacred time to
a grunt in quite another way. He shouted out, “Grab my hand. Ride on the skids.”

I jumped for the door, trying to find the long metal landing skids underneath the Huey, locking my left arm with the wounded man’s good arm. The bird was already in the air, the pilot unaware I was trying to get on. He was too busy figuring out how to get the overloaded chopper off the mountain and not get shot out of the sky. I managed to grab something in the door frame with my right hand. My M-16 was dangling from that arm by its sling and my legs were kicking empty space as the chopper tipped forward, heading for the edge of the landing zone. I knew the drill. With heavy loads in low-oxygen mountain air the pilots had to put the birds into a steep fast fall, falling downhill with the slope of the mountain instead of rising upward off the landing zone. This way they hoped to pick up speed in order to get sufficient lift and get safely airborne. Over the side we went in a rush, my body and legs dangling out of the chopper’s side. I scraped the top of a splintered tree, painfully bruising my ankle.

The chopper made a tight banking turn, tipping to the right, and the Marine trying to hang on to me started to slip out of the open doorway into space. My own legs swung out away from the body of the chopper. Another wounded Marine managed to wrap an ammo sling around my helper’s legs to stop him. Finally other wounded passengers tied their canteen belts around both of us, taking the strain away. I rode the entire distance to the hospital with my feet dangling over the jungle. When we touched down, since my feet were below the skids, I touched down before the chopper. Hermes landing with winged feet—and with trousers crusted from dried diarrhea and cum.

Six hours later, new clothes, new haircut, I was in an air-conditioned club in Da Nang called the White Elephant. No
need for winged feet here; there were plush carpets on the floor. There were also American women in miniskirts and American men in short-sleeved white civilian shirts or starched and pressed uniforms. Ice tinkled in heavy glasses. For excitement, people rolled dice to see who would pay for drinks.

I sat at the bar squeezing pus from jungle rot and infected leech bites onto a paper napkin printed with the logo MACV, Military Assistance Command Vietnam. I felt a growing anger. Today, I know the anger had to do with the profanity of people carrying on drinking and schmoozing while my friends were, at that moment, dying. It also had to do with a tint of puritan anger at the decadence of it all and the fact that I was doing exactly the same thing they were. To numb all the conflicting feelings, I proceeded to drink too much.

Drawn by false courage and desire, I tortured myself further by moving as close as I thought wasn’t rudely obvious to a Red Cross woman and her date, an overweight man who worked for AID.
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They were talking about buying cars without paying duties. There was a German woman who’d set up an agency for Mercedes-Benz and was making a fortune. Then I heard the AID man tell the Red Cross woman he was getting hazardous duty pay for being in a combat zone.

This was months after my encounter with the chaplain. By this time in my tour I wasn’t cool about anything. I was still a long way from enlightenment, but you don’t have to be Jesus Christ to know when someone is pissing on the church floor. The rage came boiling out. I wanted to kill him for profaning and demeaning the words “combat zone.” I made a fuss.

I was escorted from the club by a tight-lipped manager and a couple of Army MPs who took down my name, rank, unit, and serial number, all of which I lied about. I never thought until this moment that all they needed to do to catch the lie was look at my dog tags. I’ve never been accused of being calculating. A few hours later I was on a Boeing 707 with stewardesses serving Cokes
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and peanuts in little plastic cups. Three hours later I was getting drunk in the Venus bar in Kowloon, trying to decide which prostitute I wanted to take back to my hotel room.

At the very end of my tour I cajoled a clerk who’d been in the bush with me before he was badly wounded and given a desk job into losing the record of my R&R to Hong Kong. I could then take a second one to Sydney, which I did, with the same bizarre juxtaposition of worlds. Two days after being in combat, I was in Australia, where I stole a car because I wanted to go to a party and there was no transportation. It never even occurred to me that I was stealing it. I needed it and figured that when the party was over I’d bring it back. I was unbelievably lucky, because the man I stole it from was a combat veteran of the North African campaign and didn’t press charges. Three days earlier, I had been killing people. Taking someone else’s car to a party without asking was nothing. Three days after stealing the car, I was back in combat.

The definitively contained battlefields that George Patton experienced in World War II got blurred in Vietnam and today are becoming increasingly merged with the civilian world. In the past, combat was an initiatory experience traditionally differentiated from normal life. Today, those who engage in killing through high
technology take no personal risk, so the initiatory experience is basically nullified. It’s a job. Even for those who do risk their lives and confront their own deaths on a more traditional battlefield, modern communications increasingly blur the battlefield with normal life. While on the one hand everyone is glad to be able to strike their enemy with impunity, and ten minutes later call home and have a Coke, there is a psychological and spiritual price to pay. When it comes time to leave the world of combat behind for the world of “ordinary life,” it is going to be more difficult to do the more we blur the two worlds together. How can you return home if you’ve never left?

Killing someone without splitting oneself from the feelings that the act engenders requires an effort of supreme consciousness that, quite frankly, is beyond most humans. Killing is what warriors do for society. Yet when they return home, society doesn’t generally acknowledge that the act it asked them to do created a deep split in their psyches, or a psychological and spiritual weight most of them will stumble beneath the rest of their lives. Warriors must learn how to integrate the experience of killing, to put the pieces of their psyches back together again. For the most part, they have been left to do this on their own
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I’m occasionally asked, “What’s it feel like to kill someone?” Sometimes I’m not asked what killing someone feels like; I’m told. “It must feel horrible to kill someone.” And, infrequently, but harshly enough to sting, I’ve been judged. “How could you ever kill a fellow human?”

When people come up to me and say, “You must have felt horrible when you killed somebody,” I have a very hard time giving the simplistic response they’d like to hear. When I was fighting—and by fighting I mean a situation where my life and the lives of those for whom I was responsible were at stake, a situation very different from launching a cruise missile—either I felt nothing at all or I felt exhilaration akin to scoring the winning touchdown.

I used to hesitate to say this, worried it would only further fuel the accusation that we Vietnam veterans were the sick baby
killers we were being told we were. Maybe some veterans did feel horrible and sick every time they killed another man, just the way many people think they ought to. I’m also sure some of the people telling me they’d feel horrible and sick could very well feel that way if they ever had to do it. But they didn’t have to. I did. And I didn’t feel that way. And it makes me angry when people lay on me what I ought to have felt. More important, it obscures the truth.

What I feel now, forty years later, is sadness.

There was one particular NVA soldier whose desperate fearful eyes I still vividly recall, standing out like black pools in an exploding landscape of mud and dying vegetation. With my mind’s eye I can still see him rising from his hole to throw a hand grenade at me. The wild desperation, the animal cornered, looking for a way out, and there was no way out. The panic. The lips pulled back showing his teeth. His friend crumpled over next to him, dead. He was a teenager, like my radio operator.

My platoon had just broken through a line of bunkers that circled a hill. The fighting was fierce. What now lay before us was a band about 30 meters wide of interconnected fighting holes and trenches that circled the top of the hill. Fire would suddenly come from one side or the other or directly above us. The hill was so steep we could see only pieces of the system at a time, the uphill positions always hidden from our sight.

Ohio, my radio operator, and I kept moving upward. Fire teams of three or four individuals would go after each position as it was discovered. Our turn was announced by Ohio, screaming, “Chi-comm!”
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I looked directly uphill and saw the dark shape
of the grenade tumbling in an arc against the silver-gray cloud cover, coming right toward us.

We scrambled
up
the hill to try to get underneath the arc, hoping the grenade would hit behind us and bounce a little farther down the steep hill before exploding. We buried our faces in the mud; pulled up our legs, trying to stuff ourselves into our flak jackets; and waited for the explosion. It went off below us without hurting us. We both pulled grenades out and tried to do the arc in reverse. Again we buried our heads against the clay as the two explosions pounded our eardrums. We looked up. Out of the smoke above us two more Chi-comms came tumbling through the air.

This exchange went on three times.

It seems incredible that it took me three times to figure out that one time the unseen grenade throwers above us were going to get lucky. It probably occurred to me because I was down to one grenade. Immediately after the explosion of the third Chi-comm, instead of throwing another grenade back, I took off around a small nose on the hillside. It immediately hid Ohio and me from each other’s sight. I scrambled up the muddy hill, falling on my elbows and knees, churning with my legs. I remember seeing Ohio’s grenade sailing over my head a little to my right and hoping he’d given it a good throw. With the grenade in midflight I caught a glimpse of the hole. A dead NVA soldier was crumpled forward in it, his upper body sprawled over the lip of the hole. I threw myself flat as Ohio’s grenade exploded next to the hole. Shrapnel, rocks, and dirt whammed over the top of me.