AN TAN

An Tan

     An Tan was the nearest village to our base at Chu Lai. Now and then a junior officer would organize an afternoon liberty detail, and we'd round up whoever wasn't on duty, jump in a six‑by, and head for the ville. It wasn't that great, just a little Vietnamese town with hot dusty streets ‑ or muddy, during the monsoon season. But, except for five days of R&R which each of us got once during his 13‑month tour, this was about all we had to cut the drudgery of life in the compound, and the nights of sentry duty in our machine gun bunkers on the perimeter which alternated between sheer drudgery and moments of surreal terror.

     Word had come down: don't even think about trying anything with the women. The village mayor was unusually strict about prostitution, and for some reason, he'd been able to make it stick. But at least we could buy Cokes and "33" beer, though we were pretty leery of them because we'd heard rumors of VC putting broken glass in drinks sold to GI's. We'd stand around filtering Coke and beer through our teeth, hoping to catch any broken glass in our lips instead of our throats. Sometimes they even had ice.

     There was a spectrum of what we wanted when we visited a village that was, in a way, continuous. First, of course, we wanted to get laid. Since that couldn't happen in An Tan, we'd move down the list: something to drink besides warm, heavily chlorinated water; something to eat besides B‑ration chow; someone to talk to: human contact outside of You got midwatch in the bunker; You got DASC 0800 to noon.

     I met this kid on one of our trips into An Tan. His mother, who looked ancient but was probably in her thirties, had a little kiosk on the side of a dirt street where she had a piece of plastic stretched over bamboo poles for shade, and sold sodas and beer and mysteriously-wrapped things to eat that most of us never touched. I was standing in the shade swigging a beer when this little guy wandered over and looked up at me.

     The kid was a mess. One eye was radically crossed. He had open sores on his face and body that the flies wouldn't leave alone, and his hair, though cut short, was patchy like that of a dog with mange. His arms and legs were skinny, and his belly was beginning to show that swelling which comes with malnutrition.

     His mother introduced him to me proudly: "Ong," she said, pointing at him. Actually, the sound was a cross between "ong" and "om". "Hello, Ong," I said, and pointed to my chest. "Dean. My name...Dean." That was the extent of our verbal communication, except that I had learned Vietnamese numbers well enough to bargain with his mother and the other merchants. I found out later that Ong wasn't his name; it was Vietnamese for "man" or "male". His mother had been telling me - with pride - that her child, the one who had taken a liking to me, was a boy. So I spent those liberty afternoons walking around with this kid saying, "C'mon, Manchild," thinking I was calling him by name.

     That first time we met, he took some packet of food from his mother's little store of stuff and approached me with it and a questioning look. We were all accustomed to being inundated by pushy kids and had built up defenses against them. But this little guy was actually very shy, and I could tell he was hungry. I bought it for him. His mother seemed grateful.

     I had my guard up, twice: once against the hidden grenade or satchel charge which VC had been known to strap to children who would then walk into a group of GI's and detonate; once against forming an attachment that could only end in separation.

     The next time we went to An Tan I went over to Ong's mother's place and gave him and her some cans of C‑ration food I'd stuffed in my pockets. Like a lot of Americans, I would gather up cans of Ham and Lima Beans, or "Ham 'n' Slimeys," bartering or making points with the Vietnamese. In my four years of service I think I met only one American who would actually eat Ham 'n' Slimeys if he didn't absolutely have to. It was the thick layer of congealed grease that greeted you when you opened the can that revolted us. But they seemed popular with the Vietnamese, most of whom were so poor that meat in any form was a luxury.  

     After that, Ong would always know when our truck had come to the village and would run up to it and greet me and grab my hand and drag me back to his mother's stall. Then he began to take me through other streets in the village. At first I thought he was proud of the village, and was showing it off to me. And sometimes I thought that he was proud of me, and was showing me off to the people of the town.

     One afternoon he took me by the hand and led me away from the center of the village and down some narrow back streets where there were no GI's or even any businesses that catered to us. We got odd looks from people there; I wasn't sure if it was hostility or just surprise. I disengaged my left hand from Ong's and put his hand on the flap of the big cargo pocket on my left trouser leg so he could still feel like he was holding onto me. I swung my rifle around in front of me from where it had been hanging under my right arm by its sling, and cupped its forearm with my left hand. I felt safer now.

     So did Ong. I'd come to realize that the other kids in the village picked on him because of his odd eye and who knows what else, and that there were parts of An Tan where he never went, except when I was with him. I could sense a change in him, a hint of gloating, as we passed a group of tough‑looking boys who glowered at him as he passed with his personal Marine bodyguard.

     Word came down that An Tan would soon be put off limits for liberty. VC activity, or some such. Anyway, we would have one more visit. We were told that if we'd made any acquaintances there, this would be our last chance to say goodbye. I took in some extra food this time, and spent more money than usual at Ong's mother's stall. When the lieutenant herded us to the six‑by to head back to the base, Ong followed me. I knelt down and looked into his one good eye. How do you say goodbye to someone whose language you don't speak at all?

     I just said it the best I could, in English and with my hands: Goodbye, take care of yourself, I won't be seeing you anymore. I climbed over the tailgate as the truck took off.

     I looked back. The truck raised the usual thick cloud of red dust above the street. There was Ong in the dust, running after us. The truck got a slow start out of town because of its low gearing and because there were people in the way. Ong was able to keep up, staying close behind for a long time. We could see his face through the dust. He was crying, screaming, holding his arms up in the air as he ran, reaching for me, pleading for me to pick him up and take him with me. He'd understood goodbye.

TONKIN: WHERE THE WAR BEGAN

                                             Tonkin

     We spent a lot of time in the Philippines. Luzon, of course, home of Olongapo, favorite liberty port of sailors and Marines for many years. Mindanao, where we had an extended stay in a sprawling tent camp during a SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization([1]) exercise. We had an idyllic sojourn there because the senior Marine officers seemed to think we were in the Navy and left us alone, and the most important thing we learned was that Australians could drink more beer, and faster, than we could.

     It was in one of those tents that I operated on Greg Larson’s foot with my fighting knife. For a few days, the higher-ups either forgot about us, or that segment of the training exercise didn’t involve naval gunfire, so we were left pretty much alone with continuous access to San Miguel beer at ten cents a bottle.

     One midnight, in our tent which was dark but for a couple of flashlights, Greg started to complain about his foot. When his ship was crossing the Pacific bound for Okinawa, he’d gone swimming off Honolulu, and had stepped on some coral in the water. He’d gone to see a Navy doctor who had probed the wound, removed something, and sent him on his way. But now, some weeks later on Mindanao, he complained that there was still something in there, and it hurt. Even the tiniest piece of coral tends to infect a wound.

     We were all drunk. Ever the problem solver, I piped up: “Greg, I can take that coral outta your foot.”

     “How? That goddamned Navy sawbones couldn’t get it.”

     I pulled the Randall out of its sheath on my left hip. All the guys knew about that knife, how sharp I always kept it. I’d had it made by W.D. Randall Jr. of Orlando, Florida([2]). His knives for hunting and fighting were world famous. I still remember a testimonial in one of his brochures from a Korean War vet: “Here’s $25. Need another fighting knife. Had to leave my last one in a troublesome Red behind enemy lines.”

     “All I need is somebody to hold the light, and pour some San Magoo on the blade to sterilize it,” I bragged. Whether beer would actually sterilize the blade was a question we didn’t discuss.

     As I said, we were all drunk.

     Finally, the boredom was relieved. We gathered around Greg’s cot. Somebody – Gene DeMine or Flood or Cianflone – volunteered to hold the flashlight, and surgery began. I stropped the knife on the top of my combat boot – still leather in those days – somebody held Greg’s foot, somebody poured beer over the foot and the knife and the cot and onto the ground below. Greg poured beer into his gullet, to reinforce what was already there. I got down close, made a tiny incision with the double-edged point, and squeezed blood from the wound, spread it thin on my hand, and there it was: a tiny piece of coral. In fairness to the Navy doctor, a small pocket of infection had formed around the piece and isolated it, apparently needing only to be lanced to be spit out.

     There was also Mindoro, where there was a Naval gunnery range, and we actually got to call in live fire from destroyers and cruisers offshore. One target was Tabones Rock, and we would watch as the high-explosive shells from 5- and 8-inch guns landed in the water near the rock, and Filipino fishermen in their bonca boats, hiding in the lee of the rock, would paddle quickly out after an explosion, pick up the dead fish, and scurry back into the shelter of the rock to await the next volley.

                                                     

     We were on another exercise in the Philippines, this one only battalion-size. We were saddling up for a forced march with the battalion, which was nothing new; most of us had been doing this sort of thing for the better part of a year. Then a ripple of excitement hit our section: Eddie Kessler and I would lead the entire battalion on the march. Eddie was a wiry kid like me, and we were both runners. We usually came in first in the 3-mile run with packs and rifles that was a regular part of our physical training.

     Then a bigger ripple hit. At first we thought it was more of the same: hurry up, wait, change the gear in our packs, change the marching order, change the time. But no: Pack all your gear. Leave nothing behind. Carry your own gear, load the jeeps to board ship. There is no training march. We are going. Now. – Where we goin’, Sarge? – The North Vietnamese fired on two of our destroyers, the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy. Someplace called the Gulf of Tonkin. Guess we’re goin’ there. Let’s move it. Now.

     It was August 4, 1964. We boarded the attack transport USS Cavalier. The old ship shuddered through the night, heading north. Scuttlebutt had it that the ship’s crew had turned off steam to everything but the screws, to make better speed. Daylight showed us to be a flotilla of amphibious warfare ships carrying a battalion of Marine infantry, a battery of artillery, combat cargo, fuel, ammo... exactly what we had always trained for, but never believed we’d be ordered to do outside of exercises.

     We moved close enough to shore to see the green hills inland. If we saw any boats, they were small fishing boats, under sail. No military craft. Nobody shot at us. We wondered if the commanders who ordered the movements of our ships were baiting the North Vietnamese to do so, but anybody who knew the answer to that wasn’t telling us.

     We moved back and forth: port side to the shore, starboard side to the shore. We did calisthenics on deck. We cleaned our rifles and had rifle inspections. Our weapons-cleaning sessions began to draw a few onlookers, swabbies who were off duty or passing by as they chipped paint and repainted, greased machinery and spliced cables, the neverending chores of warding off the attacks of salt air on steel. Part of my ritual was to sharpen and strop the Randall, ending each session by shaving a small patch of hair from my forearm and letting it drift away on the breeze. Nobody laughed.

     Soon after we arrived on station, some of us were put on a detail to unload ammunition from the hold. The hatch covers were opened by cables suspended from the ship’s rigging, and we got burns on our hands manhandling ropes on pulleys and lifting crates of 7.62mm machine gun and rifle ammo; 60mm, 81mm, and 4.2” mortar ammo, and hand grenades: fragmentation, concussion, willy peter (white phosphorus), tear gas, and different colors of smoke grenades. No blanks this time.

     Days became weeks, and being Marines, we started having regular, mandatory haircut sessions on deck. Portable radios appeared, and we heard sounds of what sounded to us like whiny stringed instruments and equally whiny voices coming from stations on shore, and the occasional shortwave broadcast in English. “Hanoi Hannah” made her appearance, a woman who spoke better English than most of us, naming our ships and units and describing our movements and denouncing our imperialist ambitions. Greg Larson pulled out a cheap guitar he’d bought on Taiwan, and, with snatches of the half-dozen tunes he knew parts of, became, to us in Naval Gunfire, the most important man on the ship.

     Greg knew several bars of the Spanish instrumental tune “La Malagueña,” which attracted a widening circle of sailors and Marines. He would play what he knew, then stop and shrug apologetically and say, in his strong Boston accent which reminded me of President Kennedy’s speech to assembled Marines a year earlier at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at San Diego, “Sorry, boys... that’s all I know.”

     “Then play it again.”

     Another shrug. He’d play it again, and there would be that contemplative silence as each young man reached inside himself for some part of his reality that had nothing to do with rifles or ships or oceans, in a way that perhaps only music can inspire. Play it again, and he would, over and over, until a discernible chunk of the day had passed, his fingers would get too sore, or a sergeant would find something more military for us to do. Greg taught me what he knew of that tune, and it came to mean so much to me that I’ve returned to it over the years to the point that I can still find it on the guitar.

     Although we were never told what to expect, what we would be doing, or what was going on in the world, we could divine, from the nature of orders given us, something of the concerns of our superiors. Sometime in late August, and periodically again after that, “swim call” was announced. Overboard discharge was cut off so we wouldn’t have to swim in our own shit, the ship would come to a dead stop, and a Marine with a loaded rifle would be placed on watch in case any sharks were tempted by all that fresh meat in the water. A cargo net, one of those we had climbed down so many times in training exercises, would be lowered over the side to climb down to the water and climb back up. Pretty soon some were jumping from the main deck, a distance of thirty feet or more. Then some of us, to prove we were Marines, would stand on the rail around that deck and dive. Hey, it was the ocean: we weren’t worried about hitting bottom.

     About the same time we were ordered to wear skivvies to the shower. No explanation. We guessed that the consequences of confining several hundred young men on a single ship for weeks at a time had a history in the Marine Corps, and our leaders must have been trying to ameliorate those consequences. This of course led to endless “faggot” jokes.        

     The troop compartments below decks were a hellish place that stank of diesel fuel, salt water, old and new sweat from hundreds of bodies cramped into tight spaces, and old and fresh vomit from seasickness. Some of us elected to sleep topside unless the ship had entered one of the infrequent rain squalls that scooted across the sea. I nearly always slept on deck, and developed a way to configure my body in a modified fetal position so that my hip, ribs, shoulder, elbow and ankle on the side against the steel deck were padded by muscle. Many nights on deck were actually quite pleasant, with a tropical breeze sliding across the surface of the blue-green sea and stars, unobstructed by clouds, clustering low and bright overhead.

     Finally, we had been on station so long that, since we couldn’t go into a port to refuel and re-supply, UNREPs entered our lives. Underway replenishment: our ship and the one resupplying us would steer parallel courses at equal speed, and we could see the faces of the sailors lining the rail of the supply ship. When the two captains had decided that courses and speeds were sufficiently synchronized, a shot would be fired from one ship to the deck of the other, the small line attached to the projectile would be used to haul over a cable, and bundles would begin to pass from the supply ship to us: food, mail, fuel (through a great black hose suspended from the cable), and once – in the other direction – a man. Rumors said he was a sick sailor who needed hospitalization, or someone going home on emergency leave. He was strapped into a stretcher, and jounced along just above the frothing white seas resulting from the colliding bow-wakes. Reluctantly, we admitted that these deck apes might have some balls after all.

        

     We left that station and sailed south, until we were off the coast of South Viet Nam. Again, we were close enough to see the green hills inland, and sometimes we could see red machine-gun tracers etching their parabolic arcs in the night sky.

     I was wearing new Corporal’s chevrons (actually, a pair of used ones I’d borrowed from JJ Leath until we got to the next PX) when, after 68 days and nights of never setting foot off the ship, we pulled into Hong Kong for 5 days of R&R. For me, it was revelatory: I got myself purposely lost, alone, and wandered for hours in back streets of Hong Kong Island and took the Star Ferry across to Kowloon and did the same thing. Some of us from Naval Gunfire went to a fish restaurant where, after being shown to our table, we were invited to a ceramic pool in the center of the room where a variety of fish were swimming, and each asked to choose the fish he wanted to eat, whereupon those people would catch, kill, clean, cook, and serve that fish to us.

     Then it was back aboard ship, back to the South China Sea, back to the coast of Vietnam. We were off Da Nang for a while, cruising back and forth, back and forth, within sight of the beach, within sight of the war.

     Something happened in Saigon, a coup or an attempted coup. We sailed south, being told that we might be sent ashore there, to “protect American lives and property,” but once on station it was more card games on deck, more weapons cleaning and inspections, more calisthenics, more rumors. Our captivity aboard ship this time was shorter: 45 days and nights.

     The South China Sea was beautiful: clear green close to shore, a clear deep blue farther out. Once, the ship crossed a sharp line delineating green from blue, and we clustered at the rail and stared as the ship broke the line. We saw sea snakes swimming miles offshore, and were told that their venom could kill a man very quickly. We saw flying fish: in the clear water, you could track one as it headed for the surface, exploded out the side of a wave, set its wings (pectoral fins, actually), and glide along on the air currents pushed up by the motion of the waves. I never tired of watching them.

     I cast the first vote in a Presidential Election of my young life from one of the two attack transport ships we were aboard during those months, by absentee ballot. I voted for Barry Goldwater because I thought Lyndon Johnson was a liar (for once I got something right). What I knew absolutely nothing about was the unique significance of the months between August and November in an election year, and of the habit of Americans historically to rally around a president in time of war or national emergency, and of presidential candidates to exploit that tendency.

     We spent Thanksgiving aboard that second ship, USS Pickaway, in the South China Sea, playing Bullshit Poker as we waited for hours in the chow line for our dinner. Ashore, the war was becoming what it would soon be. Most of us would be back.

     But for now, we were headed for Subic Bay.

---

[1] We still operated on the principle “Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.” But when we were given a reason for where we were and why we were doing a particular type of training in the area, SEATO was about it: it was a commitment, and  we were honor bound to keep it. That was all.

[2] I’d had the seven-inch, double-edged blade engraved with DEAN METCALF 2033406 USMC. A few years after I left the war and the Marine Corps, in a fit of trying to deny my war experience, I gave the knife away to a man of less than excellent repute. Since then I’ve lived in fear that someday I’d receive a visit from law enforcement officers telling me they’d recovered it from a crime scene. Now I’d give a lot to have it back.

   

29 PALMS

Banning

     Poor people and servicemen on leave traveled by Greyhound. So the trip through the January night to my first permanent duty station after boot camp was just an extension of my childhood. Except for how I smelled: twenty‑four hours in a closed bus wearing the same dress green wool uniform works its own alchemy, a brew of stale sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, and dry cleaning fluids which has to be stored in the synapses of every veteran.

     It grew bitingly cold as the bus moved deeper into the January night and the California desert. Sometime in the middle of the night we were disgorged at the bus stop in Banning. There either was no bus station, or it was closed. Two or three of us on our way to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms had to wait outside for the local stage that would take us on our next leg. There was a bench to sit on, and a concrete wall to lean against. The bench was occupied by two old men. I was puzzled that they weren't home in bed, since they weren't waiting for the same stage we were, and there didn't seem to be anything else happening in Banning that time of night.

     I wasn't interested in sitting anyway. I was too cold. My wool overcoat was near the bottom of my seabag, that monster of design inefficiency that is long and narrow and opens only at one end, so anytime you want anything that isn't on top, you have to unpack the goddamned thing to get what you want, then repack it. This usually occurs when a drill instructor is yelling at you to hurry up, or when your bus is leaving.

     Besides being cold, I was sleepy and hungry and homesick and needed a shower. My uniform was rumpled, and, I was sure, twisted all around my body. I felt like shit.    One of the old men was eyeing me. I wasn't used to traveling in uniform; later I would find that some people would avoid even eye contact with you, while others would talk your leg off. But this time, I simply noticed that I was being watched. I felt too miserable to care why.

     The old man finally spoke: "Look at you, boy," he said to me. "You don't know how lucky you are. Just look at you. Young, strong, proud... got your whole life in front of you. And just look at how you fill out that uniform."

     I grumbled that I sure as shit didn't feel very proud at the moment, and as far as how I filled the uniform, I'd probably get my ass chewed for it if an officer saw me right then.

     "Well, I still say, you don't know how lucky you are," the old man insisted. He turned his face away, speaking now more to his own past than to me: "You can complain all you want, but I'd give anything in the world to be in your shoes right now."

                           

29 Palms

1. Ungentle

     I had midwatch, midnight to 0400, walking post around our 155mm howitzers in the battalion's gun park. "Twentynine Stumps," California. Desert, my ass: deserts were supposed to be hot. This place of sand and rock was cold, knuckle‑numbing fucking cold.

     I walked around and around the guns. My boots crunched the cold sand. For diversion I broke the ice on shallow puddles left from a recent winter rain. Toward the end of my watch, a new skin of ice would form where I had kicked the holes by the time I made the next pass. The hawk was out.

     The cold made the stars seem closer. They glittered, along with the frost crystals and the silvery steel barrels of the cannons, the galvanized metal of the quonset huts and the glass headlight lenses of the dark hulking trucks.

     And cold was clear. The air had nothing in it: no blowing clouds of gritty powder, as came in summer sandstorms; no billows of blue‑black diesel exhaust we'd kick up above the motor pool when we worked on our vehicles in the daytime.

     There was no one to talk to, no sound to hear except what I made. But seeing... the fierce clarity of the air seemed to demand everything around me to jump at my eyes. I stopped to look. What was around me ‑ the big guns, quiet now but pregnant with awful noise, the hulking unlovely trucks with their starkly utilitarian knobby tires ‑ seemed peculiarly visible in the cold clear air, seemed to be broadcasting a special silent demand to be seen, just now and just as they were, by me.

     I took off my right glove. The cold bit deeper, but for a moment I experienced the feeling more as sharp than cold. I touched things. I walked up to where the inclined barrel of a 155mm howitzer pointed off toward the low jagged ridge that formed the base's horizon to the east. The combined light of cold stars and cold moon and cold floodlight crept into the cannon's dark maw and disappeared.

     I reached up and put my bare fingers into the howitzer's mouth, just over six inches in diameter. The steel's deep cold bit my fingers. I looked at the steel ridges of the rifling that spiraled down into the barrel. The ridges were square and sharp.

     The canvas covering lashed over the cannon's breech was frozen stiff, rough to the touch. I kept touching cold rough things: the howitzer's tractor‑like tires, the steel wheels, the lug nuts big as a medium-sized dog’s paw, the sharply threaded studs onto which the nuts were tightened, the gun's two I‑beam ways that converged at the tow‑ring, the angular fenders of the trucks, the crude steel grates that guarded their headlights, the frozen ropes, the canvas, the chains. I touched my own uniform, my equipment: the hard angles of the grooves in my rifle's flash suppressor, the machined edges of its receiver and operating rod handle, the serrated windage and elevation knobs on either side of the rear sight, the grooved plastic canteen cap with its flat keeper chain, the rough web belt, the checkered bayonet handle with its machined slot for my rifle's bayonet lug, my canvas field jacket, more rough than warm; the webbed rifle sling that cut its groove into my shoulder, the inhospitable steel pot on my head. Snaps, buckles, zippers, eyelets, all with their clear signal of what was to come. My mind scanned the words I knew, feeling that one word, and one only, was trying to insinuate itself into a prominent position before me. It came: ungentle. I had, through the simple succession of my own choices from among life's options, landed myself in a situation where nothing soft or gentle or comfortable or comforting was to be found.

     I put my glove back on, slapped my hands together, and went back to walking my post.

2. Old Enough to Bleed

     It was Monday. In the squad bay of Headquarters Platoon, "K" Battery, 4th Battalion, 11th Marines, we were hashing over the weekend's liberty. This was about the time I remember a Pfc named Waymire coming back from his weekend announcing something really new, really big. There was this hot new group, four guys from England, played this great music, wore their hair clear down to here (putting his hand on his shirt collar). Called themselves the Beatles.

     "Beetles?!" we howled. "What a stupid fucking name! That’s just an ugly bug.”             
     "Naw," Waymire corrected. "Beatles, b-e-A-t-l-e-s. As in 'beat,' or 'beatnik,' get it?" He was feeling pretty smug with his knowledge of the latest hot civilian thing.                   
     Two of the guys, lance corporals, were buddies who went out together to San Bernardino or Riverside or one of the other towns that were within driving distance if you could get your hands on a car that worked. I was nineteen; they were a little older.

     They were talking about their girl friends, two girls who were both fourteen. Both had just said they'd finally gotten to fuck the girls. It had been touchy, with nervous parents not liking the age difference. The guys said they'd played it just right, being patient with both the parents and the girls themselves. They were embarrassed talking about it, too proud not to.    

     Someone made a crack about cradle robbing. One of the guys - the taller one, is all I remember - answered, "Hey. If they're old enough to bleed, they're old enough to butcher."

3. Footprints

     It was a weekend. I either didn't have off‑base liberty, or didn't have any money. I decided to go for a hike in the desert that stretched out behind the barracks to the ridge and beyond.

     Some of the guys wondered at that... Jesus Christ man, there's nothin' out there, it's like the dark side of the moon, you could get lost and never found, it’s just artillery range, you could set off an unexploded round and be found in pieces. Still, somebody offered to go along, one of the others trapped like I was by rules or by the fact that last payday was long gone and it would be a while before "the eagle shit" again.

     I wanted to go alone. I've always had moments like that, when I've needed to separate myself from those around me, to go off and listen to my own voice and to the voice of the world and to a conversation between those two voices without the presence of everyday loyalties and concerns.

     There was no trail; I just plodded through the sand toward the rocky ridge that made a jagged dark‑blue line against the crystalline blue of the sky to the East. It wasn't quite summer, so it was hot but without that killing heat that would soon come. (Later that summer, we had a week when the temperature hit 125 degrees every day, when you were conscious of sweating but never felt moisture because it dried so fast, when walking outside made your utilities feel like when you were a kid and your mom had just finished ironing your jeans and you put them on fresh off the ironing board and they burned your legs.) I had my cartridge belt with two canteens, and a couple of candy bars. I'd be okay as long as I kept my bearings, which I'd grown up doing, though not in country like this.

     Approaching the ridge, then crossing it, didn't seem as dramatic as it should have been. I just kept walking, and the terrain gradually changed, the ridge looking bigger as the omnipresent sun signaled midday, then receded into a blue shape that looked much like it did from the base on its other side. The land beyond the ridge may or may not have been very different from the land where the base's buildings, which I now imagine would have appeared as rows of Monopoly real‑estate assets if viewed from the air, were laid out in rectilinear rows. It seemed that, perhaps less for its total lack of human constructions than for the fact that without buildings to look at, and without the skull‑occupying concerns that went with those buildings, I was now forced to look at the land itself, and not at the next street corner, the movie marquee, the shaved brown legs and halter tops of the officers' wives and daughters as they walked in and out of the PX.

     The land beyond the ridge was just big and empty. Vegetation was low, sparse: struggling to get enough water and not too much sunlight. Arroyos etched by flash floods lent occasional textural relief, but in the picture now bounded by my horizons, plant life and geological features dissolved into the vastness.

     I walked and walked, keeping the ridge at my back. Sometime in the afternoon I stopped to drink from my second canteen, and to look around. There was nothing but the sameness of the desert, the empty sunblasted distance capped by a skyfull of sun. I continued my slow turning, then pulled the canteen away in mid‑swallow. I must have been standing on a slight rise, though I hadn't noticed climbing one, still hadn't noticed any significant change in the empty landscape. I saw, off near the western horizon, a lone set of human footprints. They startled me, both by their mere existence and by the fact that I could see them from so far away. I speculated that the angle of the sun must have been low enough to cast a shadow into each footprint, making them visible against the bright sand for a long way.

     What wandering fool, what lonely soul, had been walking there? I let my eye follow the prints: slowly, slowly... as my gaze followed the meandering trail closer to where I was standing, I saw that it was heading in my direction. I followed, as if in dream, the approach of the prints to my hillock, looked down, and was adrenaline‑jolted into the realization that the footprints, the only visual interruption of the desert's emptiness, were mine. I was quite startled when I looked down at my boots and saw them standing in the final pair of prints.

     It was one of the most naked feelings I've ever had. I turned again, looking in the direction I'd been headed, half hoping that the trail would continue there so I'd have something to follow. But no: as much of the world as I could see was emptiness, and I was but a speck in it. I had arrived at no particular place, and with no signal by which to continue.

     I was chastened, even scared. I turned and followed my tracks back to the base, walking faster than I had on the way out. 

Life at Chu Lai

                                                                Hunger 2

     I grabbed my mess kit and walked to the chow tent. We hadn't been getting much to eat lately; someone said the VC had cut the highway between us and Danang harbor, where our supplies came through. There was only one thing to eat: SOS on fried potatoes. At least it wasn't Spam, which was what we mostly had at that time. I remember two kinds of "shit on a shingle." The Navy kind was billed as "creamed chipped beef on toast," which we called "foreskin stew." This was the Marine Corps kind, basically just thick white gravy with bits of hamburger in it. A ladlefull of it was glopped over fried potatoes.

     It looked good, and they filled my tin with it. Hot damn: real food. I threw my legs across a bench and dug in. A blue-bottle fly nearly as big as the one that had spooked my team of horses in the hay harvest a few years before [see "Almost A Cowboy, posted 7/9/2010] came zooming in like something radar‑guided, and immersed itself in my SOS.

     I was pissed. I scooped the fly to the edge of the mess tin with my fork, and used the fork to clean as much gravy as possible away from the fly. Then I ate it all except what little was still sticking to the fly.

                                                             To Kill a Gook

     Four or five of us were in a tent, standing around a map table. A couple more guys came in from the last watch of the night in our machine gun bunker. They checked in with me; I had been Sergeant of the Guard for the night. Someone asked how their watch had gone.

     One expressed frustration. He said he was getting short, that he was fed up with all this guard duty where you're always on edge but nothing really cuts loose. Said he'd sure like to kill just one gook before he leaves this fucking place.

     There it was: the spark of recognition, of vigorous agreement, that arced around the circle of our faces; the darting of eyes as each of us recognized that all the others had been feeling the same thing. I did it too. I felt it; I meant it.

     "Right," I said. Grunts. Nods. Smiles.

                                                        Tam Ky

     Angelo Walters and I decided we had to get laid. Tam Ky was a good place, we'd heard. There were lots of bars where the girls worked; you just made the rounds till you found one you liked.

     We needed an official reason to go. Even in the Marine Corps, you can't tell your commanding officer, "Look, sir, I need to go get laid." He may know what you're up to, but you have to cover his ass by giving him a story in case you get busted.

     Joe was an electronics technician. He'd go to Tam Ky to check out some equipment. I was just a radio operator, so couldn't use that excuse. I'd go as his security. Joe showed up ready to go, carrying nothing but his tool box, which he'd emptied of most of the heavy stuff. "Jesus, Joe," I said, "where's your rifle? What if we get shot down on the way? What if the VC corner us in a bar?"

     "I don't wanna carry all that shit," he said. He grinned.  "You're my security man, right? I'll let you handle it." I went to the guard shack and loaded up with fragmentation grenades and 100 rounds of ammo for my M14. We went out to the helipad and hung around and asked a few questions till somebody pointed to a chopper revving up. We ran up and yelled "Tam Ky?" over the engine's roar and the door gunner waved us aboard.

     Tam Ky that day was like some Western boom town with all the miners either out working, or sleeping off hangovers. We went into a bar with one lone GI drinking in a corner. A bartender showed up and we ordered beers. A couple of bar girls came around, and we abandoned our beers and each went upstairs with one of the girls.

     She was tiny. She was a grown woman, mid‑twenties or so, but just tiny. Short, and very slim. Couldn't have weighed over ninety pounds. She had her dress off, and her quick‑release bra and panties, by the time I'd taken off my soft cover ‑ as we Marines called our cloth utility cap ‑ and hung it on a chair post, and found a safe place to lean my rifle against the wall where it wouldn't fall over and where I could get to it in a hurry by diving out my side of the bed.

     She sat on the bed and smiled as I undressed. She was trying to be pretty and inviting, trying to do her job. But fear was mixed in. I could see it. I had no idea what her life was like, how long she'd been a prostitute, how she'd been treated by her customers, how she'd been treated by the guy who was her last customer before me.

     Whatever that history was, she certainly had a history, and it flickered in her face as she watched me undress. I thought that part of her nervous smile was a plea for a sort of social contract: I'll be very nice and sweet to you and give you good sex if you'll be nice to me too, or if not nice, then at least not too mean.

     Watching her watch me undress ‑ disarm would be a better word ‑ I got the distinct feeling of seeing myself in a mirror. I began to see my movements as with someone else's eyes:

     I weighed about twice as much as she did. I wore glasses. I leaned a large, heavy, fully loaded automatic rifle against the wall where I could reach it easily. I took off my boots. I unhooked two fragmentation grenades from my belt suspender straps, set them carefully on their small flat bases on a little table a few feet from the bed, making sure their fuses were screwed all the way in. Then I looked at the large window that opened on the street, took the grenades off the table, moved the table farther from the window and closer to the bed, and put the grenades back on it. I checked the other grenades in my cargo pockets to make sure their fuses were screwed all the way in and their pins were bent all the way over and hadn't caught on anything and started to straighten or pull out. I unbuckled my cartridge belt, which carried four 20‑round magazines of 7.62mm ammunition, two one‑quart canteens of water, a first aid packet with battle dressing, and a sheathed bayonet. I lifted it off by the belt suspender straps which hung its weight from my shoulders, and lowered it carefully to the floor. I unbuckled the khaki web belt that held up my trousers, slipped its buckle back through the first belt loop to the left of my fly, and slid my sheath knife from the belt: the custom‑made, hand‑tempered, Randall #1 fighting knife with a seven inch blade with its top edge sharpened a third of the way up from the point, a double fighting hilt, a handle of stag antler with custom‑carved finger grips, a sharpening stone in its own pocket on the sheath, and this engraved on the blade:

                                              DEAN METCALF                   

2033406 USMC

     I set the knife on the table by the grenades, its handle toward the bed. I took off my jungle utility jacket, trousers, socks. Like most GIs in Vietnam, I wore no underwear. Too sweaty: it gave you crotch rot. I took off my dog tags, taped together with black plastic electrical tape to eliminate noise, and set them on the little table by my knife and grenades.

     Now we were both naked.

NIGHT MARCH

                                                   Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis

One of my strongest memories of the Marine Corps has my bayonet scabbarded, rather than parting the air in front of my rifle's muzzle as I and others walk through waist‑high grass in search of someone to kill. This memory has my rifle unloaded and slung underarm, muzzle down against the entry of December's Camp Pendleton mist into the barrel. Our enemies were the wet cold, sore feet, tired legs, not being able to sleep, not being HOME.

     Grey gun‑metal of ancient M‑1s, showing through worn blueing, was cousin to the fog. Steel rifle‑butt plates clanked black plastic canteen caps; the canteen caps' flat aluminum chains clinked. Soggy canvas packs disbalanced; straps chafed. Steel helmets weighed on stiff necks and caught our bodies' steamy heat and fogged the glasses of those of us stuck by tradition with the "four‑eyes" monicker. The column caterpillared to gravity's commands: men descending into a ravine slid and hurried and opened the distance between them only to bump against the bunched‑up men grunting up the other side.

     It was some indeterminate part of the night, closer to dawn than to last evening's muddy dusk. We were a company of novitiates, already considering ourselves legendary because we'd finished Marine boot camp. But we were unblooded privates, marching in tired column toward the quonset‑hut, fuel‑oil‑stove end of one of the last exercises of the three-week‑long Infantry Training Regiment (ITR), where we learned to fire, and to maneuver with, all the machine guns, mortars, grenades, automatic rifles, and rocket launchers in our nation's arsenal.

     Every boy‑man of us was tired. We all wanted to lie down ‑ the mud would have been fine ‑ and sleep.     

     Some one along the accordioning column of homesick nascent heroes began to sing. At first the singer mumbled; the song stumbled. Then what always happens, in life and in death, happened: another Marine helped. The song spread along the column: "O come all ye faithful..."

     Chins came off chests. Each of us began to judge footing by the bobbing of the faint silhouette of the helmet in front of him rather than by the dark-shrouded ground underfoot. "...joyful and tri-um-phant..."

     The pace quickened. The column, which before the song had been an aggregation of tired blue adolescents, became a unit. Spacings evened; we got in step to the rhythm of the song.

     We ran out of words we knew, but marched in a still attentive silence, keeping in step by the sound of our footfalls, reluctant to re‑enter the previous loneliness. A new wave rippled along the column: "Adeste fidelis..." Sure. Same song, words remembered now by youngsters brought up Catholic.

     My teenager's bones felt ancient. I felt myself to be one of a column of soldiers that was all soldiers, from all times, marching in mud, marching in snow, marching in hot sand, marching in jungles, marching on narrow trails clinging to mountains' shoulders, carrying weapons and packs, sweating and cursing, marching to a rhythm older than all of us, a cadence set by those before us, stepped off and chanted by us in our turn, to be followed after us by boys now still crawling, too young to walk, but who would be marching not many years after they learned to walk, to be followed after them by boys born of women not yet born themselves, all as we marched now.

     I did not particularly like what I was doing, this marching in history's infinite column of young men. But I felt a stirring in me, as I imagine a Canada goose feels when autumn triggers something in its body saying it's time to fly south. So we rolled, swimming in our song, swapping languages as we ran out of what we knew, and learning more each time as, with the strength a group can give to one of its own, some isolated voice would bellow a remembered phrase into the now expectant fog ....

     "...come ye, O co-ome ye..." "I'm comin', honey, I'm a‑comin'!" Laughter yelped along the column and flattened "...to Be‑eth‑lehem." Those of us who'd never yet come inside a woman laughed loudest.

     Sergeants, grinning into chin‑straps, did not bark. They knew what we all knew, even if we didn't have words for it, even though we'd have mocked the words then had we heard them: that the United States Marine Corps is one of the core repositories of American patriotism and maleness; that it is, like the values it represents, an emotional rather than a thoughtful entity; that its primary attribute is faithfulness in the face ‑ not just of death, but of plentiful, body‑ripping, terror‑borne, messy Death ‑ and that the lineage of that faithfulness has much less to do with country and flag than with each man's loyalty to the man on either side of him when the combat would become so fierce and otherworldly that none but they could have the slightest notion of what it was about.

     In my memory, it was that night that I entered the brotherhood of warriors.

KY HOA

                                                      Ky Hoa

     Ky Hoa was an island just off the coast of South Vietnam near Chu Lai. We were posted on its seaward side, along the top of a cliff that dropped steeply to a narrow rocky beach.

     One afternoon I had sentry duty on the cliff. With the rest of the outfit at my back, my orders were to watch the cliff and beach below me, making sure no Vietnamese climbed the cliff toward our position, or moved along the beach past a point even with my post. If anyone was moving along the beach (it could only be approached from the mainland side of the island), I was to halt them. If anyone continued after I'd given the command to halt, I was to repeat it, and wave them back. If they still didn't stop, I was to fire a warning shot just in front of them, in the forbidden direction. If they still refused to stop, I was to shoot to kill.   

     A Vietnamese man came around the corner, clambering along the slippery rocks just up from the water's edge. He seemed to be looking for something in the tidepools. He was barefoot; his only clothing was something wrapped around his hips. He carried nothing in his hands.

     He saw me standing on the cliff, rifle at the ready, watching him. He kept moving across my front, with a cautious eye in my direction. I held up my hand. He saw it, but kept moving. “Dung lai!” I yelled. "Halt!"

     He kept moving, looking among the rocks, looking up at me. I yelled again. He moved again. Sergeant Vance leaned across three years and nine thousand miles to speak in my ear: "Nobody gets by a Marine sentry who's not supposed to." I lowered the muzzle of my rifle, pointed it at the beach in front of him. He gestured earnestly toward the rocks ahead of him as he moved past the point to my front which I wasn't supposed to let him cross. I challenged him again; he kept moving forward.

     I jacked a round into the chamber of my M14, put the rifle to my shoulder, braced my feet along my line of aim, and sighted at a point one foot in front of him. I picked out a rock situated so that, if I fired at it, my shot would - if he were lucky - throw rock fragments into the man's lower leg, then ricochet out to sea. If he were unlucky, it would ricochet into his vitals and kill him. I tightened my right hand's hold on the rifle's grip so as to be able to support its whole weight with that one hand, and slowly, threateningly, waved the man back with my left hand. He paused.

     He said something in Vietnamese, and pointed again at the rocks in front of him. There was something there he really wanted. I brought my left hand back to the forearm of my rifle, quickly checked the elevation setting on my rear sight, lowered my cheek to the stock, sighted on the rock at the man's feet, began to squeeze the trigger - that crisp light slip of steel on steel - and braced myself for the kick of the rifle butt.

     The man turned and walked dejectedly back the way he'd come. My trigger finger eased forward as slowly as it had been squeezing back. I lowered the rifle without firing, clicked the safety on, and began years of thinking how close I'd come to shooting, how close he'd come to being wounded or killed, how some part of me had desperately hoped the man would reach under a rock and pull out a weapon so I could finally do what I was there to do. 

GOING OVER

III. War

Oakland

     We were at Oakland Army Terminal, a detachment of about a dozen Marine radio and radar operators under Lieutenant John O’Neill. It was September, 1965. We were getting ready to ship out for Vietnam aboard the commercial freighter S.S. AMERICAN CHARGER, which the Defense Department had chartered to help make up the deficit in military shipping during the buildup.

     We’d had our last Stateside liberty in Oakland the night before, and a friend of mine, Martin Luther Ealy, took a couple of us white boys bar-hopping in a black section of Oakland that was, shall we say, nitty-gritty enough that we’d never have ventured there unescorted. I’d gone upstairs at one of the bars to a prostitute, who’d matter-of-factly and bemusedly received my unschooled motions as her man sat with his back to us a few feet away. When I complained that I hadn’t gotten very much time for that amount of money, she shrugged: "You came, baby. That’s what you paid for; that’s what you got." She began filing her nails. I went back downstairs to approval mingled with jokes about how quickly I’d returned.

     But this story isn’t about that. It’s about tossing Harris his rifle. He was a black

PFC a good three years younger than I, an ancient 22-year-old corporal with three

years in "The Crotch," headed for my second overseas tour. The only thing Harris took

seriously was his reputation for refusing to take seriously anything to do with the

Marine Corps, military discipline, or his job. It was all pretty funny to him, an

alternately boring and amusing hiatus between parts of his civilian life.

     It was a glaring afternoon. We were hanging out in a paved open area in front of a warehouse, watching military and civilian vehicles pull up to and away from the warehouse’s loading dock, that nexus of commerce and war. Lieutenant O’Neill was off somewhere finding out what we were supposed to do.

     We were engaged in the usual taunts and grab-ass when someone first glanced, then stared, at what a departing military six-by had left behind. We followed his stare and were struck quiet. We’d heard of body bags; even had an idea what they looked like, courtesy of the hyperactive rumor mill that was the source of most of our information and misinformation about what was going on in Vietnam.

     What we hadn’t heard anything about was aluminum caskets. But there they were, three jewels from the Grim Reaper’s trove, radiating sunlight from the loading dock. Our guys. We stood, mesmerized, staring at them wordlessly for I don’t know how long. It was long enough for the odor to reach us from the caskets. Our nostrils flared with it; each of us turned away quickly but as quickly turned back, baby warriors electrified and repelled by our first whiff of death. That was my first awareness that a dead human smells different from a dead animal. I still haven’t sorted out what the difference is, because I’ve never been able to decide how much is physical and how much is emotional.

     Lieutenant O’Neill came up huffing, in a hurry: "Let’s go!" He didn’t notice the caskets until our unwonted slowness in responding to his order jolted him into a barked repetition of it. If what was happening could be said to have a rhythm, O’Neill’s noticing of the caskets interrupted it. He skipped a beat, slowed, lowered his voice: "Get your rifles. Get on the bus." It was his turn to stare at the caskets as we snapped out of our shared reverie and moved to pick up our M14 rifles from where they leaned in a row against the building behind us. I took my rifle in my left hand and stood aside as the others grabbed theirs. That happened quickly, until one rifle leaned alone against the building. Harris was still standing where we’d all been, frozen, staring at the caskets.

     "Harris!" I shouted. He came to, spun around, jogged toward me with an adrenaline-induced bounce to his steps and a wild-eyed look on his face, part grin and part pre-game stage fright. I’d never seen him so alert, so alive. I picked up his rifle in my right hand, gripping it at the balance point just forward of the receiver. I tucked the rifle up under my armpit, threw it out hard, horizontally, in Harris’ direction, with no warning except what passed between our eyes.

     He didn’t break stride. Running straight at the flying rifle, his eyes followed it as a good infielder’s eyes will follow a line drive, reading its flight. Just before the rifle would have smacked him across the chest, he raised his left hand – languidly, it seemed – and snapped it around the rifle, at the same balance point by which I’d thrown it. Our eyes clicked together: here we go. He jogged past me, spun the rifle to vertical, and bounced up the steps into the bus.

                                             Going Over

     Lieutenant O’Neill herded his little gaggle of Marines, most of whom were eighteen- and nineteen-year-old radio and radar operators who had never been far from the small towns or urban neighborhoods where they grew up, let alone to the other side of the world, aboard the AMERICAN CHARGER. Our equipment van was craned over the side and lowered into a hold along with other supplies bound for Vietnam.

     All the ship’s cargo was materiel for the war. Those NCO’s among us who, like me, had had extended excursions aboard troop ships of the “gator navy,” the fleet of vessels designed and built specifically to deliver American troops and equipment to enemy-held beaches, were flabbergasted by the difference. The ship was crowded with cargo, but not with men. Lieutenant O’Neill was the only military officer aboard, and he wasn’t one of the frenetic martinet types who could make such a hell of a two-week crossing. So passage was, to me, startlingly different from the two Pacific crossings I’d made before.

     The evening of our first day at sea we were led into a small but rather nicely appointed dining room. Not mess hall: dining room. A waiter with a white jacket and quiet manner approached our tables and asked what we’d like for dinner.

     Hunh? Those of us who’d been at sea at all were used to lining up with dozens, or hundreds, of other young sailors and Marines, grabbing a steel tray off a stack as we moved quickly through the line, and eating what was slopped onto it.

     “Tonight we have a choice of two entrées, roast duck or filet mignon.” The guy said that, and still had a straight face.

      Hunh?

     We had stumbled into a situation which none of us had encountered before, and which I personally had never heard of happening among enlisted men of the US military at sea, in all my three years in the Marine Corps. Our detachment consisted of a handful of men put aboard to accompany our gear, some of which – the TPQ-10 radar, specifically - was Top Secret. The equipment had to be watched over by someone with the proper clearance, which some few of us had, Lieutenant O’Neill and I among them.

     They had to feed us on the way over, and the only facility for doing that was the crew’s mess. The crew’s mess was run according to the rules of their union, which included a choice of two entrées for each dinner. Apparently union rules also stipulated that such meals be prepared not just by whichever crew member might be on duty as cook that day, but by a trained chef. We shut our mouths, ate, and grinned. We knew things would be different where we were going.

     After a Cinderella liberty in Honolulu, with no destination before us but Vietnam, the mood changed. There would be no more port calls. Though O’Neill wasn’t anything like a brand-new second lieutenant trying simultaneously to establish his authority and his manhood, he still had the responsibility of preparing us to do our jobs as Marines when we went ashore. We had the occasional rifle inspection, to make sure we weren’t letting the salt air rust our weapons, and even did calisthenics in the limited space available among the room-sized crates that were packed with the stuff that war requires and chained or strapped to the decks.

     A couple of days out of Hawaii, the lieutenant called us together for a lecture which didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but which I would have cause to remember the rest of my life. He gathered us in one of the cargo holds where the crates weren’t stacked all the way to the deck above, and picked a space where he could sit on one crate and the rest of us could spread out on others, being sure that we were all close enough to hear him clearly. This was important.    

     His lecture was about SEATO, the South East Asia Treaty Organization. It was the reason we were going, he said. About all we’d heard to that point was that Communists controlled North Vietnam, and our allies controlled South Vietnam. SEATO, the lieutenant told us, was a multinational organization of countries in the area organized for mutual security. Australia belonged, he said, and Thailand and the Philippines.The United States was also a signatory, along with Britain and France. When one of us raised the obvious question of how the United States fit into a group of nations so distant from our own (by now even the least educated among us knew that Vietnam was half a world away; after all, they’d already told us it would take two weeks to get there), O’Neill replied that the situation we were entering was especially important because South Vietnam was a small democratic country with a small and weak army, and they were threatened with being overrun by their Communist neighbor to the North, who was being supported with weapons and money by the Soviets. The South Vietnamese were fragile at present, but they were our friends, and had asked for our help. Our country had signed that treaty, and a deal’s a deal. He also said that the agreement specifically stated that an attack on any signatory would be considered an attack on all. (Actually, that wasn’t true, though we weren’t told so at the time. What SEATO meant in practice was that the United States had a legal justification to intervene as our leadership saw fit. This was bolstered by the 533-2 vote in the U.S. Congress in support of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed on August 7 the previous year, about three days after my Naval Gunfire section sailed for the same Gulf.)     

     We were going to Vietnam to honor a solemn commitment.         

     Most of us thought the lieutenant wasn’t such a bad guy, for an officer. He did his

job and made us do ours, but for the most part didn’t hassle us just to flaunt his rank,

like some officers did. So we were a little surprised at his seriousness as he gave us

that history lesson in the hold of the AMERICAN CHARGER. But we listened. At least I

did. It was good enough for me: let’s go; let’s get the job done. It would be many years

before I learned that SEATO, and even the specific leadership of the South Vietnamese

government itself, were creations of the U.S. Government, under President Eisenhower

and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The reason for the very existence of SEATO,

and for the leadership put in place in the South Vietnamese government, was to ratchet

up U.S. presence in Southeast Asia.

     I’m pretty sure O’Neill knew little or nothing besides what they’d told him, and he

passed it on to us. That’s how it all works.

     We had good weather most of the way across: tropical sun on blue water

punctuated by the occasional whitecap. As we approached the Orient, flying fish with

four pectoral fin/wings could be seen staging their takeoffs in the clear water,

accelerating into a wave as it crested, surfing on its energy, then at just the right

moment, bursting from its side to set its wings and glide on the trough of air also being

lifted by the wave. They could coast on the air currents between crests of waves, like

an albatross, for a hundred yards or more. I never tired of watching them.         

     We were bored. Not long after Hawaii but days before the end of our voyage, our

incessant prowling of the ship produced a revelation. The same hold which contained

our precious communications van also carried beer: pallets upon pallets of canned beer.

Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon are the ones I remember.

     “Wonder where all this beer’s goin’?”

     “Same place we are, I guess.”

     “So it’s beer for the troops, right?”

     “Hey! That’s us!”

     “Right... this is our beer!”

     “Y’know, I’m not sure it’s safe, out here in the open, all by itself. What if that deck

leaks, seawater gets in here, gets everything soakin’ wet? Seawater’s bad for metal, like

beer cans, gets it all rusted ‘n’ corroded ‘n’ shit.”

     “We can’t allow that to happen. That’d be dereliction of duty.”

     Our communications van was always locked. One NCO among us always had the

key, in order to unlock it, go inside, make sure nobody had picked the lock and entered

to pilfer or vandalize, then lock it again.

     Sometimes that NCO was me. I’ve always had a knack for organizing people to

move quantities of things; it had come in handy aboard the Cavalier and the Pickaway

the year before in the Tonkin Gulf and the South China Sea.

     We formed a chain gang, standing four or five feet apart with every other man

facing the opposite direction, from our chosen pallet to the door of the van. Two men

attacked the designated pallet, alternating as first one then the other slid a case of beer

off the top course on the pallet and handed/tossed it to the first man in the chain. Our

technique of facing opposite directions meant that no one had to turn completely to the

side to pass a case of beer to the next man in line.     

     I unlocked the door. Two men went inside, one to catch the most recent case

arriving from the last man in the chain, and one to stack, with specific instructions on

how to do that so the stack would fit in the narrow aisle between rows of electronic

equipment, with the cases interlocked in a modified version of how they’d been stacked

on the pallet. We were done in a few minutes, the van door had been re-locked, and

we’d all disappeared above decks and were diligently cleaning our rifles, or feigning

sleep in the sun, so as to appear the same as we would on any other day.

     A couple of days later, with Hawaii now a distant memory and Asia still invisible, we

plowed the seas in a world which contained nothing but ocean, horizon, and sky. A few

us were lounging around in the hold near our van, conjecturing about a future filled

with combat and beer.    

     “I wouldn’t mind a wound or two, nothin’ serious, just enough to make me look

salty.”

     “Maybe one right on the face, so the chicks could all see it...”

     “But not enough to make you ugly.”

     “Or right here, on the arm, a real nasty-lookin’ one, but it just peeks out from under

the sleeve o’ your t-shirt, but looks real impressive when you take your shirt off.”

     “Right, I hear women go crazy for a wounded guy...”

     “Y’know, this beer’ll go down mighty good when we come in off a patrol.”              

     “I don’t give a fuck if I get a leg blown off, long as my cock and balls are still

intact.”

     “Right, that’s the main thing...”    

     “Whaddaya mean, patrol? We’re wing-wipers. We ain’t goin’ on any goddamned

patrols.” “Wingwipers” was a derogatory term used by division marines, like I had been

for most of my hitch, for those in the Marine Air Wing. There was no talk of death, but 

its shadow had hung a little lower over us as each day brought us closer to the end of

our voyage.    

     The ship’s Merchant Marine officers had mostly left us alone. But now one

approached. “How are you men doing today?” he asked, a little nervously.

     “Oh, fine, sir... just keepin’ an eagle eye on our equipment, here.”

     “Well, that’s good... say, there seems to be some cargo missing, or... moved.

Actually, some beer is missing. Anybody know anything about that?” he searched our

faces.

     “No, sir, I haven’t noticed anything... any o’ you guys?” Exchange of innocent looks,

shrugs. “No sir.” “Me either.” “Not a thing, sorry, sir.”

     “Well... I need to see inside that van.” He nodded at ours, the one we were loosely

clustered around.

     “You got a Top Secret Clearance, sir?”

     “Of course not. I’m an officer in the Merchant Marine; we’re not involved in that

sort...”         

     “Sorry, sir...” (nodding toward the van) “... the equipment in there...” (nodding

again) “...is not only secret. “It’s TOP secret. “Our orders are not to allow anyone

without the proper clearance to even see inside it.”

     By this time the half dozen or so of us who had quietly been hanging around the

van had moved from slouches to more vertical positions. A weapon or two appeared,

casually.

     “I really must...”

     Softly, but a little sharply: “Sir. We are United States Marines on sentry duty.

(pause) Nobody..but..us..touches..that..lock.”           

     Nobody did, either.    

    

     A few days later we pulled into the harbor at Danang. It was a maelstrom: Navy

warships, Navy and civilian cargo ships, and Vietnamese sampans all trying to fulfill

their appointed obligations without getting run over. We came to a floating stop in the

middle of the harbor, as if the ship herself was bewildered. Apparently the skipper was

on the radio trying to find out where to park. A U.S. Navy warship – a destroyer escort,

as I remember - hove to abreast of us, and began blinking its signal lamp directly at us.

Lieutenant O’Neill found me and told me to come with him to the bridge. It turned out

that none of the Charger’s communicators knew Morse code. O’Neill asked if I could

read the naval signaler’s transmission. I knew Morse; my weeks of Radio Telegraph

Operator’s Course in 1963 had included intensive training in that, and I’d used it in

training with Naval Gunfire on Okinawa, and in the Philippines and Japan. In those

situations we’d tapped out Morse on a “knee key,” which was a Morse key attached to a

large spring steel clip that slipped over the operator’s leg just above the knee.

     I said I’d give it a try, and pretty soon I was able to tell the lieutenant that I was

missing some that was apparently Navy jargon, but that the guy wanted us to identify

ourselves.

     Oops. Up to then my experience with these signal lamps had been watching short

scenes in war movies, but that at least had taught me basically how they worked: you

grabbed this handle and flicked your wrist – quickly for a dot, a little longer for a dash.

With that for starters, I was able to tell the Navy signalman “I am USMC,” thereby

letting him understand my relative clumsiness with his native instrument, and “We are

SS American Charger.” We were plenty close enough for them to see that we were an

unarmed freighter, not a warship.

     Between my blinking and whatever was transpiring on the ship’s radio, we were

allowed to proceed, and to tie up at a dock. We walked down the gangplank with our

personal gear, and stood around anxiously watching the unloading process until we saw

a dockside crane lift our van, still locked and with our contraband beer safely inside,

over the side and into a waiting six-by. We all grinned like the fools we were. Shit. We

were geniuses: we’d planned it so well we didn’t even have to offload our own beer.

     We clambered aboard and drove away, beer and all. We were in Vietnam.