What it is Like to Go to War (5 page)

I looked up as the stuff was still coming down, settled the stock of the rifle into my shoulder, and waited for the other NVA soldier to stand up to throw his next grenade. I had switched the selector on my M-16 to single shot instead of automatic. Don’t ask me why. Somehow in my addled brain I decided to take this guy
with one clean shot. The fighting hole was in plain view about 15 feet above me. There was the dead crumpled soldier. Apparently one of our grenades had connected. I didn’t feel anything. Thinking of nothing else, I waited for that unseen grenade thrower to pop up.

Then he rose, grenade in hand. He was pulling the fuse. I could see blood running down his face from a head wound. He cocked his arm back to throw—and then he saw me looking at him across my rifle barrel. He stopped. He looked right at me. That’s where the image of his eyes was burned into my brain forever, right over the sights of my M-16. I remember hoping he wouldn’t throw the grenade. Maybe he’d throw it aside and raise his hands or something and I wouldn’t have to shoot him. But his lips snarled back and he threw it right at me.

As the grenade left his hand I pulled the trigger, trying to act as if I were on the rifle range. And just like on the rifle range I “bucked my shot.” I jerked the trigger instead of squeezing it and, anticipating the recoil with my shoulder, caused the tip of the rifle to lower just slightly as the shot went off. The bullet struck the lip of the hole in direct line with the kid’s chest, spraying dirt right into his face and body.

My feeling? I felt
embarrassed
that I’d bucked my shot and it wasn’t a clean hit. I felt chagrined that I had been foolish enough not to put my rifle on full automatic. I knew instantly that, had I not switched off automatic to play Deadeye Dick, the continuous recoil of automatic fire would have ridden the front of the barrel upward, putting several bullets in a straight line right up through the kid’s chest and head.

I fired off two or three very hasty unaimed follow-up shots as I was rolling and moving because the grenade was now bouncing right over the top of me, about to explode. My first shot, right in line, almost certainly went into his body. So too could any of
the three other wild shots. I’ll never know for sure if any of them actually killed him, because Ohio came tearing around from the right side of the nose and, with
his
rifle on full automatic, sprayed the soldier with half a magazine, diving for the dirt himself as the Chi-comm went off just below me down the steep hill.

My feelings then? It felt pleasurable and satisfying to see Ohio ripping that kid apart on full automatic. I was alive! That certainly felt good. Another obstacle was out of the way of achieving our mission. That felt good too. But it also felt just plain pleasurable to blast him. Take
that
, you (choose a name that describes anything but a fellow human). In combat you are already over some edge. You are in a fierce state where there is a primitive and savage joy in doing in your enemy.

Jane Goodall once talked quite movingly about watching her little tribe of peaceful chimpanzees declare war on another tribe and savagely and ruthlessly exterminate it.
⁸
Up to that point in her studies of chimpanzees she had concluded that chimps were somehow above humans in this regard. But in a dispute over territory she watched what can only be described as atrocities—chimps being savagely dragged on the ground, clubbed, whirled by their limbs to smash their skulls—not in order to just drive them away from the territory but in order to exterminate them. I’m afraid I know how the winning chimpanzees felt. There is a very primal side to me. I suspect we all have this, but are so afraid of it that we prefer to deny its existence. This denial is more dangerous than acceptance because the “killer,” that mad primitive chimpanzee part of us, is then not under ego control. It’s why a good Baptist can get caught up in a lynching. It’s why a peace advocate can kill a policeman with a car bomb.

My radioman and I both survived the explosion, although I was hit with small bits of shrapnel in the back of the legs. They felt like bee stings, hot and many. I was so pumped up with adrenaline they didn’t even slow me down. When I looked up after the explosion, the Vietnamese kid was dead. My feeling? I felt relief. “Phew, no more grenades.” I churned up the steep slope to take on the next position and quickly forgot even that feeling. I didn’t even think about the incident until years later.

I now have all sorts of feelings. Suppose it was one of my sons, Peter or Alex, trapped, filled with fear as these huge American Marines, known to be ruthless, even crazy, came relentlessly from out of the jungle, swarming up the hill, killing his friends in their holes around him. Then two are just below him. Desperately, he tries to lob a grenade into the unseen dip in the hill where the two Marines disappeared. Two grenades come flying back from unseen hands, exploding around the hole. Again, he and his friend each toss a grenade. Again, two come back. The cycle repeats. One of the grenades kills his friend and stuns him, bloodying his face. Now he’s totally alone. To leave the hole is to die. To stay in the hole is to die. Death is coming in a crummy hole hundreds of miles from his family, and he has never made love with a woman and he will never know the joys and trials of a family of his own. Then, there is the enemy, lying in plain view just below the hole, rifle ready, his brown eyes staring at him over the barrel, the eyes the only living color in a face that is a pallid mask of dried clay smeared with smoke smudges, terrible and gaunt with exhaustion and fighting.

“Throw the grenade! Try and save yourself, Peter!” But two rifles spit white-orange light. Peter is dead... my son.

My feeling now? Oh, the sadness. The sadness. And, oh, the grief of evil in the world to which I contributed.

What is different between then and now is quite simply empathy. I can take the time, and I have the motivation, to actually feel what I did to another human being who was in a great many ways just like my own son. Back then, I was operating under some sort of psychological mechanism that allowed me to think of that teenager as “the enemy.” I killed him or Ohio did and we moved on. I doubt I could have killed him realizing he was like my own son. I’d have fallen apart. This very likely would have led to my own death or the deaths of those I was leading. But a split occurred then that now cries out to be healed.

My problem was that for years I was unaware of the need to heal that split, and there was no one, after I returned, to point this out to me. That kid’s dark eyes would stare at me in my mind’s eye at the oddest times. I’d be driving at night and his face would appear on the windscreen. I’d be talking at work and that face with its angry snarl would suddenly overwhelm me and I’d fight to stay with the person I was talking with. I’d never been able to tell anyone what was going on inside. So I forced these images back, away, for years. I began to reintegrate that split-off part of my experience only after I actually began to imagine that kid as a kid, my kid perhaps. Then, out came this overwhelming sadness—and healing. Integrating the feelings of sadness, rage, or all of the above with the action should be standard operating procedure for all soldiers who have killed face-to-face. It requires no sophisticated psychological training. Just form groups under a fellow squad or platoon member who has had a few days of group leadership training and encourage people to talk.

There are other feelings associated with killing. On this particular assault the battalion staff and another company being held in reserve had set up on a hill about a kilometer to our east. Normally upon seeing the first Marine break through the
last defenses on an assault, something I experienced only three times, I had the same wonderful feeling—an explosion of relief that made me want to run forward with savage joy. We’d won! We would be safe. The organism, we, me, would be here tomorrow. But this time we were being watched, and when we finally broke into the open across the top of the hill we heard cheering coming from the battalion headquarters group and the company placed around them for security.

I turned murderously angry.

This seems odd, given that I was feeling savage joy myself just moments before. I think the anger came from the fact that we and not they had paid the price for this victory—and it was very steep. Human sacrifice had been turned into spectator sport. I now don’t blame those who were cheering. They were unconsciously responding to a built-in psychology, no different from that of any spectator vicariously getting the “touchdown feeling.” I probably would have done the same. But then I was enraged about it. I’d very nearly died. Some of my friends and my respected enemy had indeed died, while others would be maimed for life. It felt wrong that the guys on the other hill should be enjoying the same feeling they’d get watching a football game back home. I felt profaned. I felt something sacred had been stolen from me, my friends, and my enemy—our very real sacrifice. I felt had.

I’m aware that our bodies, the result of millions of years of evolution, do what they do. They have certain evolved responses. The choice before us is whether we are ever going to have the self-discipline and awareness necessary to guide these responses into productive channels or continue to allow them to overpower our sense of decency.

People who actually fight and win battles are in fact unlikely to cheer when they get the touchdown feeling, no matter how
powerful it is. I never once heard anyone cheer who was actually involved in fighting. This is because the predominant feeling, when you win in battle, is numbed exhaustion.

One night Grandpa Axel and I pushed it just a little too far. We were catching fish, lots of them. And a storm was coming. Just one more drift... just one.

We laid out several hundred yards of gill net in the darkness. The water was moving in short harsh chops, the wind freshening. The net always seemed miles long to me, even in good weather, since I was that part of the two-man crew called the “boat puller.” Grandpa Axel was the part called “the captain.” A gill-net boat is about thirty foot long, open in the bow, with a cabin in the back and sunk in the middle of the cabin a four- or six-cylinder Marine or old tractor engine, depending upon the relative wealth of the fisherman. In a boat this size you don’t actually pull the net into the boat. The net is far too heavy. You actually pull the boat along, sliding it
under
the net, to get the heavy water-laden net into the boat—hence the name boat puller.

We got the net laid out, tied the boat to one end of it, and sat drifting, waiting for the salmon.
Punk. Punk
. You could hear the satisfying sound of the cork line going under the water as a fast-moving salmon hit the net.

The rain started coming hard. Visibility closed.
Punk
. More money. Sockeye salmon were getting thirty-three cents a pound. Every
punk
was a buck or two.
Punk
. It was like a money machine.
Punk. Punk
.

Suddenly a large swell lifted the little boat, tipping it dangerously close to the gunwale because the bow was tied to the net. The wind came slashing down on us with a cold rain and the
already dark night went totally black except for the dim white of the little battery-powered mooring light on top of the cabin. You could no longer hear any
punks
. You could hear only trouble.

Being only fourteen, I hadn’t been through a lot of bad weather. Axel had. Even then, I noticed a grimness, a set of jaw, when he came limping forward to untie the bow from the net. The limp was a measure of that man. He’d been poling logs several winters earlier when the fish weren’t running and slipped between two giant log rafts, crushing both legs. He swam to shore, then crawled nearly two miles to his car. He drove himself, using a stick shift with a clutch, to the hospital, where they amputated one leg just below the knee. Did I really learn to ignore pain in boot camp?

When Axel got worried, I got damned scared.

We started hauling in the net. The boat was corkscrewing like a bucking horse. We’d climb up a near-breaking swell, a curl of white water on top, and I’d almost be pulled overboard, trying desperately not to lose my grip on the net. Then we’d crash down, and I’d haul as fast as I could to keep the boat from going over the top of the net and tangling the prop. Axel was cursing in Swedish, untangling fish from the net, throwing them anywhere he could except out of the boat.

We both knew that the wind was driving us onto the rockbound lee shore only a few hundred yards beyond us, a shore we couldn’t see or hear in that howling air. Rain and cold spray from the waves slashed almost horizontally into our faces. The boat would plunge downward and hit a swell with a shock, and water would come smashing over the gunwales, sloshing at our feet, making the boat wallow, inviting even more water in the next time.

Axel ran aft to get the pump going and try to maneuver the boat so I could haul in the net faster while he also tried to slow the boat’s drift toward the shore. I was left alone, afraid I’d be
pulled overboard if I hung on to the net and afraid to let go of the net because it was what was saving me from a wave that could take me overboard. Axel rejoined me, rushing between hauling in net and trying to steer using the auxiliary controls just beneath the bow. I hauled, net and salmon tangled together into a huge jumbled pile on the deck. We fought the foaming stallions for what seemed hours.

Finally, the last of the net came in over the side. We didn’t know how close to shore we’d drifted. Axel scrambled to the back, gunned the engine, and headed on a compass bearing away from shore.

I collapsed on the wet net, chest heaving, staring upward into black nothing that sprayed water on my face. The boat bucked and heaved through the swells, but I was too exhausted to care. I just lay there on that wet seaweed-smelling net, flopping salmon dying around me, and stared into wet black nothingness. Totally exhausted. Feeling lucky to be alive.

Winning a battle feels like that. Only you don’t get to flop on the net because you’re fourteen and Axel is there to take care of you. You have to set up defenses immediately in case there’s a counterattack. And it’s not salmon that are dying around you.