CHO LON

                                             Cho Lon

     When I studied, when I read a book, when I talked with friends and teachers and classmates about politics, I did it with the same urgency I'd felt when I left my outfit at Chu Lai. One day in the Spring of 1968, as the aftermath of the Tet offensive in Vietnam dominated the news, the availability of a small grant for a student to travel to "an underdeveloped country" was announced in classes. In separate classes, at the same hour, Jim Martin and I heard the announcement and had the same idea: Vietnam was an underdeveloped country.

     We became joint recipients of the grant. I didn’t know anything about cameras, but Mike Taylor did, and became my photography teacher. He told me I either had to have a camera with a light meter, or to get a separate, hand-held meter. Our classes consisted of a couple of hours on the porch and lawn of the “Shell House” at 524 East Cache La Poudre in Colorado Springs, with Mike, ever generous with his friends, patiently explaining F-stop, shutter speeds, film speeds, focal lengths. I took some pictures of the lawn, trees, and the rusting green panel truck that Tom and I had bought cheap because it was old and almost done for.

     So for the summer between our junior and senior years, Jim and I were accredited, by the Denver Post and the Colorado College Tiger, to the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) in Saigon, the official agency for the dissemination of information about American operations in Viet Nam to the news media. We got to Saigon in late May.

     We hooked up with Lee Dembart, a student reporter like ourselves who had come to the country some months earlier with a credential from New York radio station WBAI and then found other work as a journalist. Lee knew the lay of the land as far as reporting in Vietnam was concerned. He knew how to deal with government information bureaucracies, who was who in the journalism community, how to get places.

     A couple of days after our arrival Lee took us to Cho Lon, the Chinese district of Saigon where there was still fighting left over from Tet. We hopped into a small taxi and headed out into Saigon's wartime maelstrom of motor scooters, rickshas, jeeps, and Army trucks.

     The traffic gradually thinned, and the noise with it. First there were only a few vehicles and the odd hurrying pedestrian or bicyclist. That number dwindled to none as war's damage began to appear: corners of buildings blown out, masonry tumbled into the streets, blackened re‑bar twisted against the sky, Renaults overturned, burned, dimpled with bullet holes.

     The driver stopped; this was as far as he'd go. Jim and I got out. Lee stayed to return with the taxi; he'd already reported the Cho Lon story, and had another commitment that afternoon. He pointed us in a direction, with the war correspondent's parting shot: "Keep your heads down." The taxi turned around and left.

     Nothing is as noisy as a crowded city, or as eerily quiet as a deserted one. We walked a world of rubble, shattered glass, silence.

     But soon, up ahead, we heard the guns: the snap snapsnap of rifle fire, then the throbbing staccato of a heavy machine gun, then the crash of a much larger weapon.

     The scene we arrived at was one of two ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) tanks, parked a few yards apart in the middle of a wide street in the business district of Cho Lon, their turret guns angled down and across the street at what had been a sizeable brick building. A unit of ARVN Rangers hung out on the sidelines, in no particular hurry to move up the street.

     Jim and I took cover in a doorway and watched. I'd been shot at before, but street fighting was new to me, except for a little training at ITR six years earlier. Jim, a Navy vet who had served on an icebreaker in the Antactic and then volunteered for duty in Vietnam but was never sent there, was under fire for the first time. He did well, though. In fact, he moved ahead a little more quickly than I thought was wise.

     There were other journalists around. Peter Arnett, the AP reporter, and his frequent partner Horst Faas, the photographer whose Vietnam pictures for Life magazine were already famous, were standing on a street corner where Arnett conversed in Vietnamese with some local people. They were both wearing flak jackets and helmets. In the years since 1968, whenever I saw Arnett’s byline, or saw him on television, I would jump to his defense if sarcastic remarks such as “opportunistic reporters” or the like surfaced from the gallery. This happened frequently when Arnett stayed behind to report for CNN on the bombing campaign against Iraq during the first days of the Gulf War in 1991. I’ve always considered him the real deal, in a profession where lots of people weren’t.

     Everyone, including the ARVN infantrymen, was watching the tanks. We learned that there was, or had been, a sniper in the brick building the tanks were firing at. During the time we were there, there may (or may not) have been a round or two of return fire come up the street in our direction. There was so much muzzle blast, so many ricochets, so many pieces of flying masonry that it was impossible to tell. Return fire or no, the tanks were systematically destroying the building. Each tank had a .50 caliber machine gun up front, and a 90mm cannon mounted on its turret. One .50 caliber gunner would open up and traverse the top row of bricks on what was left of the building. When his can of ammo ran out, the machine gunner on the other tank would take over while he reloaded. Periodically, one or the other of the tanks would cut loose with its 90mm cannon on a stubborn section of the building. Then the .50's would go back to work.

     Storefronts all along the street were demolished, their contents spewed onto the sidewalk. Plastic shoes and small electric appliances covered the sidewalk where we knelt, hugging the wall with our right shoulders.

     I began to feel that less was happening here than met the ear, that the sniper had long since left the brick building, that what we were witnessing was the expenditure of ammunition, the destruction of a building, and Vietnamese soldiers taking advantage of the opportunity to vent their racial enmity towards the Chinese merchants of Cho Lon.

     I let my attention drift away from the tanks. A few feet away from me, some of the ARVN Rangers had wandered into a store with its glass front shot out, helping themselves to the merchandise. A soldier who emerged next to me seemed pretty pleased with the small electric fan he'd procured.

     I turned around, peered into the gloom to my rear. I was crouched in a corner formed by the elevated sidewalk, the storefront at my shoulder, and a low wall behind me, at right angles to the storefront. The low wall sealed the end of a long space enclosed by the raised sidewalk which extended down the street behind me, about three feet above street level.

     As my pupils dilated, I saw a roughly circular hole in the masonry of the low wall behind me, blown open by some large ‑ caliber ordnance. I duck-waddled over and peered inside. At first it was too dark to see into the space beneath the sidewalk. Gradually I made out the form of a corpse, a Chinese woman in her middle years. She seemed to have recently died. I assumed she had been killed in the fighting, though I could see no wounds. She had been carefully laid out on the rubble that defined the floor of the space, until the fighting ended and her relatives could retrieve her. She looked very dignified. Looking at her, I thought of the phrase, "lying in state."

     As I looked ‑ she was just inside the hole in the wall, with her feet near enough for me to touch, and her body extended away ‑ the body let out a long, loud, slow, putrid fart right into my face.

     We walked out of Cho Lon the way we'd come in, away from the tanks, past blocks of blown‑out buildings, back to where there was again traffic in the streets, back to the land of the living, and caught a taxi downtown just in time to catch the "Five O'clock Follies," the daily press briefings at JUSPAO. Some journalists did all their reporting from there, scooping up the official handouts, re‑writing them a little or a lot, shooting them off to their stateside editors, and collecting a regular paycheck for it. Some of the better ones, like Arnett, preferred to get their news where it happened, and seldom went to the briefings except to compare them with reality.

     The gallery of reporters sat through the U.S. Army major's recital of recent encounters between their side and our side, giving comparative body counts. During the question‑and‑answer period, things got more animated when people began asking about whether some helicopter gunships working over Cho Lon in recent days had caused any civilian casualties. I don't remember the outcome of that exchange, except that it was both confrontational and inconclusive.

     What I do remember was the evening's final question. A reporter asked the briefer to comment on reports that the ARVN Rangers had been looting during the fighting in Cho Lon. The major was emphatic. Nonono, he said. The Rangers were the South Vietnamese Army's elite. They had all been trained by U.S. officers and NCO's. They would never do that.

SPECIAL POST: END OF RATTLESNAKE DREAMS(C) by Dean Metcalf

RATTLESNAKE DREAMS© (end) by Dean Metcalf

When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.       

     Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in Tonkin/Vietnam.

     We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us.

     The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.

     The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.    

     Evil isn't what we have to fear. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, and should study until it breaks open to the light.

                                                  END         

School in Wartime, War in Schooltime

Missouri Squirrels

     That December of 1966 I decided to visit my Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank Hickman in Wheaton, Missouri. They'd made another of their moves between Oregon and Missouri. I'd go by Greyhound, of course: even the accumulated wealth of a year's overseas pay, combat pay, and a corporal's wages was quickly gobbled by the cost of life at an expensive private college; a plane ticket was out of the question.

     The bus didn't go through Wheaton; it was too small and out of the way. It was nearly dark when I got off the bus. I asked directions. There were no local buses, no taxis. Bessie and Lank lived several miles from where I stood.

     I walked half the night along rural Missouri roads. Dogs would awaken with the crunching of my boots on gravel, bay their alarms, passing awareness of my presence to the dogs at the next farm. It was a little scary, but none of the dogs came after me. Sometime in the night I got lost, and had to knock at a farmhouse, waken someone, and ask directions. I apologized. They said it was no trouble.

     A few days later I was stacking firewood on Bessie and Lank's porch. An old man was walking by out in the street. He stopped to watch me. At least, that's what I thought at first, that he was just watching me stack wood, to pass the time like old men will, maybe to pass judgment on my ability to lay up a neat and stable rick of wood, which is a recognized art among country people. I began to be more careful.

     Then I realized that he wasn't so much watching me work as looking at me personally, at who I was. I straightened, nodded. "Howdy," I said.

     "You kin to Bob Metcalf?" he asked. No preliminaries, no introductions, no chitchat about firewood or the rare skift of snow that had Wheaton drivers sliding all over Main Street. "He was my dad...." A dozen questions bubbled in me, but none formed quickly enough. "Y' look just like 'im. I delivered mail in these parts for thirty years." He turned and walked on.

     We were going out to see Dan Metcalf, my grandfather, who lived near Monett, a town even smaller than Wheaton. He'd long since separated from my grandmother Elizabeth, a woman who'd had long flowing black hair as a young woman, who my dad had always claimed, with some pride, was part Indian. Maybe Cherokee;([1]) she'd come from Oklahoma.

     Dan's current wife was Rose, who was always spoken of (though never in her presence) as "a reformed prostitute." Even out of her presence, people never said "prostitute" without "reformed" being attached. They were trying to be generous to her because, they said, she was good to old Dan. But you could tell they were working at it. And you could tell she felt it, but she just went about her business. I wasn't quite twenty‑four, but had probably seen more prostitutes than most of the Metcalfs and their neighbors combined. Rose didn't look like the ones I'd seen. She looked more like Aunt Bessie to me: a plain‑spoken, plain‑looking, hard‑working country woman. Except for an extra air of worldliness about her - a tinge of sadness, it seemed to me, at knowing and having lived a truth that everyone else also knew (some more directly than others) but would never say aloud.

     Dan was a lean, kindly old man who was glad to see me but was clearly holding back. He didn't say much. Bessie and Lank figured later that I reminded him too much of his son, dead only six years. My dad had committed suicide at age 40, in 1960.

     Dan and Rose both looked to be people who had cleaned up their acts considerably from the way they'd lived until well into their middle years. Dan came from a long line of moonshiners. The story had it that one night he'd come home likkered up and blasted a hole in his own roof from inside the house with his shotgun, just for fun.

     I wanted to go hunting. Something in me needed to close that circle, to carry a rifle meant to put meat on the table instead of to kill another human and leave him to rot in the mud. Bessie and Lank thought about it a while, and said, Well, we might go out and visit Lank's sister and brother‑in‑law, Dorothy and Floyd Jennings, who lived in Thomas Hollow, one of those folds in the Ozarks like those where most of my extended family grew up. (They spelled the word h-o-l-l-o-w, but everyone said "holler". Bessie and my mother were born and raised on a 160-acre homestead in "Star Holler".

     They were a little reluctant to drop in on the Jenningses, especially Floyd. They seldom saw this man. He kept to himself, didn't have a lot to do with relatives and even less with outsiders. Don't expect him to cotton to you, they warned. He's just that way.

     We drove out to Thomas Hollow. Lank brought along his slide‑action Remington .22 rifle, which was very accurate, for me to use in case Floyd could be talked into a hunt.

     We all sat down in their cabin's small living room. Dorothy busied herself offering us coffee and cookies. Bessie and Lank introduced me, said I was just back from Veet Nam. Floyd lit up, started rocking animatedly in his chair. "I was there durin' the war," he said. "Well," he went on, "guess I should say, durin' the other war, or World War II, or whatever." Actually, he said, he'd never been ashore in Veet Nam. But he'd been aboard a Liberty ship in those waters. "Yup. Spent quite a spell thar. Hell, most people 'round heah never had no idy they was such a place, let alone whar it was. Leastwise till this war come along. I'd say somethin' about it, an' a body'd just shrug. But I knowed. I was thar. Durin' the war."

     Lank and Bessie had relaxed. Lank chimed in that he'd told me Floyd had a pretty good squirrel dog. Still got 'im?

     "Oh yeah, he's gettin' on, but still does pretty good, for a collie." That was the first I'd heard of a collie being a hunting dog. I'd had two collies as a kid, Mike and Buddy, so we talked about collies for a while. Pretty soon we were up in the hardwood grove behind the cabin, Floyd and the dog and I. Lank said he'd not go this time, he'd let me do the huntin' 'cause I hadn't been in so long.

     The tree limbs were bare, their leaves now a crunchy mattress we walked on. With that noise, we'd never have seen a squirrel, but for the dog. The collie would run ahead, making a big circle out in front of us. Pretty soon he began to bark. "He's got one treed," Floyd said. We walked toward the tree where the dog was, and stopped a few yards away. Floyd motioned, Be still. Squirrels, when they hear a threatening noise, will go around the tree, putting it between them and the noise. After we'd stood still a while, the dog slowly circled the tree, moving away from us, barking and making a racket in the dry leaves. When the collie got to the far side of the tree, we saw, up high, just the head of a grey squirrel peek around the tree. I looked at Floyd. He nodded back at me. I raised Lank's rifle, pushed off the safety, took my time, got just the sight picture Lank had described to me, put the front bead where its top was at the center of the head, where the squirrel's eye would be if I could have seen it at that distance. I squeezed off the shot. There was a long pause. The squirrel slid, tumbled over a couple of branches, fell to the ground.

     We walked over. Floyd knelt and picked up the squirrel and examined it. He stood and looked at me, went so far as to raise his eyebrows. "Right in the eye," he said. "Don't waste no meat thataway."

     We shot four or five squirrels ‑ "just enough for a mess of 'em" was how Floyd put it ‑ and walked back to the cabin. His wife made us all a big pot of squirrel and dumplings. All the while Floyd and I sat and talked about Viet Nam, even though he'd never been ashore. We talked about the South China Sea, how there were flying fish that would bust out the sides of waves and glide, and sea snakes swimming close to shore.

     After all, we'd both been there, durin' the wars.

                             

                                               Hunger 3

     Mike Taylor and I went to dinner at the cafeteria in Loomis Hall. He was sitting across from me, and next to him was another student with whom we both were slightly acquainted. We'd almost finished dinner when the guy next to Mike, without saying anything, reached over to take some food from my tray. Reflexively, I turned the fork in my hand downward and stabbed the back of his hand. Four small roses of blood appeared around the tines of the fork. The guy turned pale. Mike’s jaw dropped. They looked at each other, then at me. I shrugged: "Don’t fuck with my food," and went on eating with the slightly bloody fork.

                                       Dark‑skinned Warriors 1

     I was sitting in the waiting area of the Colorado Springs airport, watching people walk by on the concourse.

     Some soldiers were walking from my right to left. They were black, wearing dress green uniforms, with Combat Infantryman Badges on their chests above their ribbons, and, on their left shoulders, the gold shield with black horse's head of the First Air Cavalry.

     A similar group approached them from the opposite direction. Something passed through all the men that was visible to me. It was the way they walked, and the way they recognized one another. They emanated a pride that fairly crackled in the air around them. Though all wore uniforms of the United States Army, the uniform very definitely was not the source of their pride. Rather, it seemed to come from deep inside the uniform. Their walk was not a regulation, head erect, shoulders-stiffly-drawn-back walk. It was a rolling thing, with shoulders turning in front of the body with each step, right shoulder with left foot, left shoulder with right foot. And the body dipped slightly with every other step, a kind of willful breaking of the rhythm, a sassy falling‑behind only to quicken the last part of the step in order to arrive in perfect time.

     I had learned to recognize the walk in boot camp, when our drill instructors told us to watch another platoon in our regiment when they were on the "grinder," which is what Marines call the parade ground. That platoon had a black drill instructor who had a certain lilt to his cadence, and a slightly swooping march step that he was able to impart to his whole platoon. His cadence and step had so little difference from regulation Marine Corps drill that his superiors couldn't make him stop doing it because they couldn't describe the difference in words or point to a regulation which it violated. Besides, the man was a squared‑away Marine and an excellent drill instructor. So he got away with his little one‑man cultural revolution.

     At least one DI snickered about that sergeant and his "ditty‑bop" platoon, and some of the recruits chimed in. Phrases like "jigaboo outfit" tumbled into the ice plant around the Quonset huts. But there was respect too, even among the mutterers, when the seventy‑man platoon, mostly white boys, took the grinder and performed a close‑order drill that had a rhythm, a visual musicality, that was beautiful to watch, and which no other platoon on the grinder could match.

     These black soldiers in the airport had that walk, with an added edge: they were all back from Nam. It was a black man's walk, but also a black warrior's walk. As the two groups came abreast, a couple of soldiers in each group raised small, black enameled swagger sticks, each with a chromed .50 caliber cartridge casing capping one end and a chromed .50 caliber bullet capping the other end, in smart salutes. It had nothing to do with Old Glory or the United States Army. It said, I salute you, brother. We have been through the fire. We have lost some brothers. We have kicked some ass.

     And this black warrior's walk also said, Don't nobody fuck with us.

     And it said Watch out, Whitey.

                                                        Packing

     It was the summer of 1967, between my sophomore and junior years. Dave Miller, an oboist friend who played for the Air Force Academy Band, had gotten me a job working with him installing underground lawn sprinklers in Colorado Springs with a man who called his company Modern Mole, because he had this little rig that we pulled behind a small tractor that sank a bullet‑shaped piece of steel below the sod and pulled the irrigation tubing along behind it under the sod, instead of having to dig a trench and replace the sod.

     One day Dave and I were having lunch in this one‑notch‑up‑from‑fast‑food place on Nevada Avenue. The dining area consisted of one big open room. Most of the tables were full. We were sitting at a table near one of the restaurant's three doors. I should say here that, although it was nearly a year after I'd left Vietnam, and those months on a bucolic private college campus that was as unlike Vietnam as I could imagine had begun to drain the habitual fear out of me, I still had my share of a combat veteran's instincts. (For that matter, even as I write this in 1992, I prefer to sit near a door in public places. Corners with a view of the whole room and all doors are best.)

     A man opened the door behind Dave and stepped inside, just out of the traffic, and stood there unobtrusively. That is, he was trying to be unobtrusive. He wouldn't have startled me more had he been wearing a clown suit and leading a rhinoceros on a sequined leash.

     He was tall, and had the combined thickness of limb and physical grace of a pro football running back. The picture rounded out: conservative business suit ‑ tailored, not off the rack ‑ and "high and tight" haircut. My eyes swept over him once; the slight bulge in his suit coat just above the right hip was more confirmation than surprise.

     His eyes scoured the room with an utterly amoral professionality. He was looking for someone who didn't want to be found. My brain scanned that information and prompted me to look at the other two doors. Again, more confirmation than surprise: each was filled by a clone of the man who stood behind Dave, including the bulge at the waist.

     "Hey, Dave, look! Those guys are all packin' guns!" I almost shouted. My voice carried across the room, splitting the hubbub of lunchtime conversation.

     Dave dropped his fork and looked at me with wide eyes. I pointed with my chin over his shoulder. He spun around, his nose almost bumping into the bulge at the man's hip. He spun back around. I pointed at the other two doors. At the instant of my remark, the three had made eye contact with one another across the room. The man behind Dave gave a slight twitch of his head, and they were gone.

     I looked around the room. Not a fork dropped, not a conversation was interrupted, not a head turned to notice the three armed men who had had the room sealed off, looking for someone among them.

                                                             Seminar

     In the Spring of 1968, David Finley, my Soviet Politics professor, began inviting Political Science majors (I had a double major with Philosophy) to his house for informal seminars. One evening Jim Martin and I were there, along with several other students and one or two professors besides Dave Finley. We were talking about Vietnam.

     The conversation got around to who was fighting the war. Colorado College is an expensive, private liberal arts college, so was topheavy with kids from families with money. This included some students whose parents were just flat wealthy, whose last names were on products we all used: Zellerbach, Seeburg, Coors, Grace are some I remember. I was there because I’d saved up combat pay and overseas pay for a year, I worked, earned scholarships, and took out student loans.

     But as an institution, the college never seemed to me to be a place where snobbery or elitism or the arrogance that so often travels with wealth and power were the dominant tone. In the discussion on this particular evening, the feeling had already been expressed, then repeated, that the process of deciding who would go to Vietnam and who would stay in school was unfair. Some of the male students who were in the room by virtue of student deferments spoke with genuine emotion about feeling that, though they thought the war was wrong and had no intention of going, it was unjust for them to be able to have that choice, while the sons of poorer families did not.

     The student body, and in particular the number of Poli Sci majors, were small enough that all of us in the room had been in at least one class together, and a small one at that.  Of the male students in the room, only Jim and I had already served our hitches. We were both regarded as being among the top students in our class, and what happened next didn’t seem accidental. At least not to us.

     One young man, an average student from a wealthy Eastern family, spoke up: "I don't see why we don't just let the peasants fight our wars for us. Isn't that what we've always done?"

     I was coming up out of my seat as he finished speaking, but so was Dave Finley, who knew me well. He'd graduated from West Point, decided not to make the army his career, and went on to get a doctorate in Soviet studies. He was, and is, a thoughtful, gentle, and thoroughly fair man. He would later become Dean of the college.

    Professor Finley stepped in front of me, gently but firmly putting his hands on my chest. I couldn't throw him aside because I had too much respect for him, and because we were in his home. I sat back down as several others glared at the speaker in disbelief and contempt.

---

[1] In the fall of 2010, my aunt Ruth Metcalf, my father’s sister, gave me a photocopy of a photo of my great grandmother Widders, grandma Elizabeth’s mother, whose mother was full-blood Cherokee.

DANANG TO COLORADO COLLEGE

                             Danang

     I loaded my rifle, seabag and 782 gear (a Marine's pack, web gear, canteens, etc.; so called for the number of the receipt form we signed when it was issued to us) aboard the truck that would take me to the airstrip at Chu Lai, where I'd catch a C123 or C130 to Danang, then another plane to Okinawa, then another plane back to The World. The guys who weren't on duty over at the Direct Air Support Center came out to see me off. They were envious, but they were also glad for me. They asked me to study for them, and of course to get laid for them. I promised to do my best.

     The strongest thing they said to me came when somebody mentioned student anti‑war demonstrations back in the states. They said to tell those fucking jerkoff wimps just what the war was about, on behalf of the guys who were fighting it. Everyone present, including me, loudly agreed that I should do that.

     But there was another moment. It was more private, in fact intensely private. Along with the awareness that had come as I lowered my rifle just before firing on the Vietnamese man on the beach at Ky Hoa, and the shift in awareness that had come over me when the transparent veil dropped in front of my eyes as I was guarding the women and children and old man at the well in Tho An, this slap of suddenly shifting awareness that entered my skull as I climbed aboard that truck were among the experiences that I brought home from Vietnam that have most determined the course of my life during the forty-odd years since then.

     I was angry. I was angry about losing the young Marine when his buddy told me “You’re too late” getting the medevac to them. I was angry about our loss of those Recon boys who’d fought all night, hand to hand, on Howard’s Hill, as I sat in a relatively safe place and tried to send them help. I was angry about being too hot and too cold and too wet and too hungry for too long, angry about being terrified too many nights, and about having my body invaded by ants and mosquitoes and rats and snakes and centipedes like horror-movie monsters. I was angry about the loss and the guilt. I was angry about having kept the faith with people who did not keep it with me. With us.

     So what is still with me now, at this moment in late June, 2008, in a 12’x16’ log cabin three miles outside Joseph, Oregon, is the promise I made to myself as I climbed over that tailgate to begin my trip home. That promise was to study and study whatever it was I had to study until I understood the causes of the misery I had been a part of. And then I would fix it.

     Yup, that’s the promise I made to myself. This book is the result, whatever that’s worth. Of course, the problem isn’t fixed. If anything, it’s worse. No wonder I’m so angry. That’s a lot to carry, and a long time to carry it.        

     At the staging area in Danang, where Marines who had finished our tours were being processed out of the country, I got a cot in a 12‑man tent, and turned in my rifle and 782 gear. I suddenly felt naked, but tried to reassure myself that I was going where I wouldn't need a weapon.

     All this, and waiting for the scheduled bird to Okinawa, took a few days. We sat around the tent and talked about what we'd do back in The World. Women, cars, jobs, school. Student demonstrations came up again. Others in the tent had heard more about them than I had. One guy said he'd heard about a vet who got to the states, thinking he was safe at last, and was followed into an airport bathroom by several civilians who beat him up just because he'd been in Vietnam.

     The tent pounded with anger. One Marine, who'd seen more combat than some of us, was furious. "I'm takin' a piece back with me," he said, meaning a pistol. He deserved to be done with danger, he said. But if those pukes wanted a fight, he'd show 'em one, by God. He'd kill 'em. Period.

     I was the only one of the group who would be going straight to a college campus. The guys expressed concern for me; they said to watch my back. I'd be unarmed, and there'd be no Marines to back me up. And those cowards always ran in packs.

     That was what I took to school with me, mixed with the elation of being able to live my own life after one thousand, four hundred and fifty days of following other people's orders, and a focus, tinged with rage, on studying just what had caused this whole mess and others like it, and trying to find a way out. I fully intended to study so hard that I could answer, at least for myself, the question Why war?

IV. Relearning War

A. Back to School, Back to War

Kicking the Leaves

     It had been mid‑August when I left Vietnam; by the end of the month I was on campus at Colorado College. It was the biggest culture shock of my life, except ‑ maybe ‑ for the one I'd felt on arrival at boot camp. I was free! and it was terrifying. I didn't know how to act. I was used to deferring to certain people, having others defer to me. Here, everybody just sauntered around, wore whatever they pleased, talked to one another like ‑ well, like civilians. I remember standing in bright sunlight on the curb outside the student union at Rastall Center. A pretty young woman pulled up in an expensive car ‑ a Jaguar or BMW ‑ jumped out, and greeted a friend she hadn't seen since Spring. I stood there with mouth agape, staring at and listening to two foxy co‑eds compare their summers in Europe and South America. Goddamn, I thought. Anybody wanna hear about my summer in Southeast Asia?

     I was the first Vietnam vet on campus. I remembered the conversation in the staging tent at Danang, and walked around stiffly, looking over my shoulder, waiting to be accosted, surrounded, yelled at. The opposite happened. As word got around, people began approaching me, tentatively, with sincere questions. Mostly, just "How is it over there?" No one showed me the slightest disrespect; several people expressed admiration for what I'd done. Some questions had a political content, but nothing that felt accusatory. The questions centered around the war's human cost: simply, were those numbered hills and rockpiles worth the blood they cost? And they would ask for stories.

     Sometimes I would tell the story of Howard's Hill, or my story of the fight at the well in Tho An, or of trying to get a medevac chopper in to a radio operator's wounded buddy and being told "you're too late." Reliving those stories, against the background of (now, fellow) students' questions about whether those fights were worth what they cost, continued the process of recalibrating the way I looked at the world, and my place in it, that had begun at the well in Tho An. The context of our interactions was one I hadn’t expected: instead of being attacked by these people, and looking around for fellow Marines to cover my back, as I’d expected upon leaving Vietnam, I’d been welcomed – if tentatively, at first – by the people I’d expected to be my enemies, and I spent my days with them in classes. Some were now my friends. Though I would never lose my intense loyalty to fellow Marines, these were now my people. I wanted them to like me.

     One evening that fall I was studying in my dorm room, alone as usual. I put aside the philosophy or history or politics assignment I was working on, and just sat and thought for a while. I drifted back to the moment in August when I’d thrown my seabag and weapons and web gear aboard the truck, taken one last look around at the olive drab tents and red dirt and the new outhouse on the ridge, said goodbye to a couple of off-duty buddies who’d come out to see me off, and promised myself to study this mess until I could see a way out of it.

     I was studying, all right: I was already known on campus as the Nam vet who always had three to six books under his arm, and was actually reading all of them. But I wanted to learn more. Always more. If I was to answer, or even speak intelligently to, the question Why war?, what great lever could I get my hands on to move my mind, or the world, or whatever it was that needed to be moved?

     I opened an atlas to a map of the world. Shit, it was big. Look at all those countries. Look at all those people.

     Communication. I can’t understand all these people unless I can talk to them, understand what they’re saying. I decided that evening that I had to study languages, beginning with those that would allow me to communicate with the most people, over as much of the globe as possible. I was already in a Spanish class. With English and Spanish, I could talk with most of the people in the Western Hemisphere, except for Brazilians.

     Good start, but what else? Looking at the map, I thought: China. It had a great land area, and an even greater population, proportionally. China already loomed very large in world history; its presence was only bound to become greater. The next day I approached Professor Frank Tucker after a history class and asked him if Chinese language study was offered on campus. He said no; we had Spanish, French, German, and Russian, besides classical Greek and Latin.

     I went back to my map and looked again at land area and political significance. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, and the hot war in Vietnam, which was very much entangled with the Cold War, had the whole world scared, and with reason. The following academic year I would continue in Spanish and begin studying Russian. And I would study French my senior year.

     I had a tiny single room in "Superdorm," our monicker for a big brick building that hadn’t yet been formally named. On my R and R to Hong Kong earlier in the year I'd bought a massive stereo system with two big speakers, a reel‑to‑reel tape deck, tuner, turntable, the works. I'd even bought my favorite tapes and records, at the PX on Okinawa, and shipped them home: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Percy Faith, Montovani. The Ray Conniff Singers. Henry Mancini was a special favorite: "Moon River, wider than a mile/I'm crossing you in style...." That stuff soothed me, and I needed soothing.

     The guys in the dorm didn't know what to do with me. Who was this strange bird, holed up in his little amplified cave with this strange music? They were listening to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel.

     Marines, whisper whisper. Vietnam, whisper whisper. Still, I didn't seem dangerous. One guy named Cy, who was there from Minnesota on a football scholarship, actually thought it was kind of cool that I'd been to Nam. You know, ballsy. After a few weeks, when I'd leave my door ajar hoping somebody'd say hello, maybe even invite me to take part in the horseplay in the hall, Cy would cautiously poke his head into my room and ask how the hell I was doin'. Cy and I went to town one night and got drunk together, and became running mates for a while. Once when we were walking back from town, pretty well oiled, he threw his arm around my shoulders and said, "Dean, how'dja like to become a Kappa Sig?"

     Being asked was a hell of a compliment, and I told him so. But though I was only a couple of years older than Cy, I felt a generation apart. My right hand still curved reflexively, wanting to hold a rifle stock. I said No, but thanks a lot for asking.

    

     Tom Gould came up to me one day after Spanish class. He said something like, "You look like somebody who's been around a little." Then: "Maybe spent a little time on your uncle's farm?" He said it with a knowing grin, and I knew he meant Uncle Sam. Tom had been a Force Recon Marine, and had gotten out just before most of his unit shipped out for Vietnam. He invited me over to meet his roommate, Mike Taylor, with whom he shared a basement apartment. Mike had served a hitch in the Army, but was sent to Germany instead of Vietnam. They re‑introduced me to civilian life: macaroni dinners and medium‑priced wine in a messy kitchen shared with dogs and cats and even with actual human females. Later, the three of us rented a house off-campus with a Navy vet named Jim Martin and a Special Forces vet named Mark Streuli. The five of us became friends for life.

      One pre‑dawn morning that fall of 1966, I was walking across the campus lawn between the library and Rastall Center, to my job washing pots in the cafeteria. That would earn my breakfast, and a little more. Heading out that early, in that cold, to that job and that food is not normally a set of circumstances to make the heart leap. But mine did. The lawn was covered with three‑fat‑fingered maple leaves in a layer so thick that my feet began to plow up piles of them as I walked. I laughed, and kicked the crackling leaves across the lawn. Everything was so wonderfully dry and cold, welcome opposites to hot and wet. I stopped in one of my kicked‑up leaf piles and looked at the sky. I noticed the stars for the first time in a year, startled to realize that they had no relation to the war, that I was looking at them not to determine whether it was clear enough to dispatch aircraft on a mission of killing or mercy, but just to look at them.

     I romped on across, kicking leaves and howling at the stars, delirious that I could walk this far, alone, unarmed and upright, making all this noise, and no one would try to kill me.

                                                                Townies

    Jim Price and I had met at the college track. He was on the team, and I went there to run laps after classes. We were on north Nevada Avenue, walking back to campus after a late movie in Colorado Springs. There was no one else on the sidewalks and, at the moment, no cars on the street.

     A car turned onto Nevada Avenue and approached us. It slowed, passed us with heads hanging out the windows on our side, then its tires yelped as the driver veered to the curb. Five or six "townies" jumped out, young men out of high school who hadn't gone to college, who liked to rough up college guys for fun.

     "Let's go!" wasn’t out of Jim's mouth before he was gone, sprinting up the street towards campus.

     No.

     I was just back from Nam. I was home, among the people I had fought for, or so I wanted to believe. The thought that those same people would try to re‑immerse me in the fear I was trying to leave behind sparked in me an immediate, dedicated fury. Not hot fury. Nah. Cold fury.

     Fine. I will kill at least one.

     The townies rounded both ends of their car and approached the sidewalk. I made no sound, no gesture. I unsnapped my corduroy jacket lined with synthetic fleece and stepped to a nearby fire hydrant. I draped the jacket over it and stepped back. Oh so methodical. In my mind was the hand‑to‑hand combat stuff from boot camp: Be an animal. Attack, attack. Speared fingers on one side of the trachea, thumb on the other, plunge, pinch the grip closed, rip his throat out. Or break the bridge of the nose, then ram the broken bone up into the brain. A fist to the temple, with enough force, also kills. Or a speared finger through the eye into the brain....

     They were on the curb. Still I had made no sound or gesture. I remember folding my hands in front of me, at arm's length, looking at the townies and waiting. I leaned forward a little.

     They stopped, each individually yet all nearly together. They seemed to recoil, like cartoon germs bouncing off that "invisible Colgate shield" we used to see in television toothpaste commercials. The apparent ringleader, now standing at arm’s length from me, looked me over carefully, then spoke:

     “Let’s go,” he said.

     They got back in their car and drove off. I put my jacket back on and walked along the sidewalk toward campus. I did not hurry. 

SERGEANT OF THE GUARD/WARTIME IS WONDERFUL

                             Sergeant of the Guard    

     Those days, besides my job in the DASC, I regularly pulled Sergeant of the Guard duty, which meant that I didn't stand watch down in our machine‑gun bunker. But instead of the four‑hour shifts those men stood, I was on duty from dusk till dawn, and had to stay awake all that time and be responsible for security along our section of the perimeter, which included supervising the changing every four hours of the two‑man bunker details, making sure one man was always awake in the bunker, making sure their EE8 field phone to the guard shack was working, making sure they had the proper weapons and ammo and that everything was working right.

     This was about the time of the centipede. One night, in the wee hours before dawn, I rang up the bunker: "I'm bringin' down some coffee." I always called before I approached the bunker from behind in the dark, so that if the sentries were especially jumpy, they wouldn't shoot me, and so they wouldn’t hear an unexpected noise behind them and have to deal with any more fear than they already had to: fear of what was beyond the razor-wire in the dark.

     I walked down the trail to the bunker, picking my way by starlight and memory, taking my time but not trying to walk quietly. When I got close, I saw the two sentries and their M60 machine gun silhouetted atop the bunker against the bright light cast beyond the barbed wire by the floodlights mounted off to either side of the bunker. "What the fuck are you guys doin' up here?" I growled in my best NCO's voice. "You're sittin' ducks, against that light...."

     One of the sentries answered in a voice more resolute than mine: "I ain't goin' back in there."

     "Why not?"

     "'Member that centipede?" Just after they'd come on watch, they'd found, on the steps leading down into the bunker, a centipede about seven inches long and as thick as a man's thumb. It had a leathery shell, segmented like the curved plates of a medieval knight's armor. They'd killed it with a rifle butt, then called me down to show me.

     "Yeah?"

     "Have a look." He jerked his head toward the bunker's entrance.

     I stepped over to where the steps were carved into the earth, and turned on my flashlight, absorbing most of its beam with cupped fingers. The centipede was almost gone, replaced by a violently active swarm of ants that were ripping the last bit of the centipede's armor plate into pieces small enough to carry away.

     We’d been having trouble with a "boot" lieutenant, one who had just recently come to Nam from officer's training, didn't know shit from Shinola about Vietnam, and was trying to make up for it with that great old killer of warriors, the combination of career ambition, ignorance, and arrogance.

     Officer of the Day (OD) duty rotated among several small outfits like ours that each manned a bunker or two along that section of the 1st MarDiv perimeter. The boot lieutenant who was OD on this particular night had a favorite trick: he'd walk around in the dark and sneak up behind the bunkers, as quietly as he could instead of letting his presence be known, trying to catch sentries asleep.

     Sleeping on guard duty in wartime is an offense which carries severe punishment, and necessarily so. But our line had been probed several times lately, and we were jittery. This one night when I was Sergeant of the Guard, two of our younger guys were in one of the bunkers. They'd heard that the "boot" had OD that night, and had been jawing about him during their watch. That was the last straw: they had rats, they had VC, they had bamboo vipers whose bite could kill you before you took a dozen steps. They had centipedes right out of horror movies, and they had ants that could eat such a centipede down to nothing in four hours. Now they had to worry about noises behind them.

     They howled all this at me. In the Marine Corps, especially in combat, rank works both ways: you do what the man above you tells you to do, but you also are responsible for the performance and wellbeing of those below you, who can and will demand that you buck The Man if they're doing their jobs and are still being jacked around.

     I was as pissed as they were. It was three in the goddamned morning. We were sleepy and scared and cold and frustrated.

     Well, fuck it, I thought. I'm Sergeant of the Fucking Guard. These are my people. This is my ground. My job is to manage these people and their weapons in such a way that my ground is not penetrated by any unfuckingauthorized personnel until I'm relieved in the morning.

     "Okay, listen up," I said. "Here are your orders. I ain't gonna stutter, so get it right. Your job is to protect your front. I will be responsible for keeping anybody from approaching you from behind. From now on, the only person who may approach you from behind, for any reason, is me. I will not come down unless I call first. That means that any noise you hear behind you is an enemy noise. As your immediate superior, I authorize you, in fact, I hereby fucking order you, to throw a frag grenade at any sound you hear behind you. Do not challenge, do not say, Oh excuse me Sir, is that you?, do not say a fucking thing. Just throw the grenade. Be sure to pull the pin first. If you kill some chump who wasn't supposed to be there, and there's an investigation, just tell 'em what your orders were. It'll be my ass. Don't even worry about it. Now. Grenades only. You may not shoot behind you, because you could hit someone in our tents, or you might hit me.

     "Any questions?"

     Both guys grinned their thanks: awright: man wears his stripes.

     I got on the phone and called the OD shack. "We've been having some activity around here," I said. I described in detail the orders I'd given.

     I called our own Staff NCO tent and woke up the duty SNCO and told him the same thing. I didn't ask for permission; I just told him what I'd done. He chuckled and went back to sleep.

     That was the last we heard from the boot lieutenant.

    

                                                 Wartime Is Wonderful

When we first occupied the section of the First Marine Division perimeter overlooking the Song Tra Bong River, we used to shit in a slit trench, which you'd straddle and squat over and do your business as fast as you could to minimize the number of big black flies that buzzed up your asshole. And we pissed in piss tubes: they were empty, olive drab, cylindrical steel powder canisters ‑ the ones from 155mm howitzers or 8" Long Tom self‑propelled guns were best ‑ with one end buried in the ground. We'd place them at a slight angle to the ground, with the top of the canister just below dick level. You just walked up, unbuttoned your fly, and pissed in it. As time went on, and the occasional Navy nurse or Red Cross "donut dolly" would pass by in an open jeep on the way to the Division CP, we were ordered to drive three tall stakes in the ground, forming an angle between the piss tube and the road, and stretch an old poncho around them at waist height. The road was too far away for the women to actually see our dicks (though some guys would argue that theirs were big enough to be seen from twice that distance). And since the piss tube and our boots were clearly visible between the poncho and the ground, the poncho wasn't concealing the activity. Modesty was a creation of the command structure. Some guys think that that kind of thinking was probably what lost us the war. Funny, but then war is funny. Funny as the rest of what we do.

     A couple of weeks before my tour was up, the troops' complaints to me, as senior corporal in the outfit, rose in frequency and volume: Couldn't we have a decent place to shit? Couldn't we have something with walls, something to keep out at least some of the flies, a little privacy for that private act? (Unspoken: a little privacy too for that more private act, the midnight sojourn with Playboy centerfold or girlfriend's snapshot).

     I took the complaints to our skipper, a fat ineffectual lifer captain who'd been passed over for promotion to major so many times that only the war had saved him from being mustered out before he was eligible for a pension. He bounced it back to me in the Marine Corps way: ‑ Take charge, Corporal: form a detail, build a shitter. How? ‑ Figure it out. Take charge. From what? ‑ Find something. Figure it out. You're in charge. Take charge. Charge!

     Everybody knew that the Marine Corps had nothing but a lot of men (or, as the brass would have outsiders see it, A Few Good Men), some weapons, some ammo, a few vehicles, a lot of canvas gear our ancestors in the brotherhood carried ashore at places with now‑totemic names like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima. Gear the U.S. Army had replaced with newer, lighter, quieter stuff: plastic canteens, nylon ponchos, canvas‑topped boots, fiber helmet liners.

     The Marine Corps had nothing. The Navy, on the other hand, had everything. They gorged the bowels of their great grey ships and brought everything a bush-weary warrior could dream of (except home): hot chow, movies, nurses, building materials.

     So we stole from the Navy.

     It's not that paperwork, and the legions of peculiar humans required to type and sort carbon copies and file and log, didn't come to Vietnam. There were more of them than there were of us. But that was one system, whose function was, as we saw it, to keep the lifers occupied and out of our hair. The other system was the rest of us, operating under the umbrella of, and with the blessing of, combat exigency.

     Wartime is wonderful that way. It cuts through the bullshit, the pettiness, the insufferable claptrap of everyday life (this is one of the most important reasons why we go to war), reducing one's choices to lean, clear alternatives. Success rules. You pull it off, you don't have to explain. You fuck up, and you fall back into the bureaucratic morass.

     Our detachment was down the red dirt road from the 1st MarDiv command post. The Navy's Construction Battalion (Seabee) unit that supported the division was in that command post. They'd have what we needed. It would have to be a "midnight requisition," of course. But we wouldn't start that way. Too inefficient. I made a list of what we needed ‑ 2x4's; plywood if we could get it, planking if we couldn't; nails; some kind of roof covering ‑ including preferred sizes. I took a vehicle and one other man, and we drove over there one afternoon, parked a little ways from the Seabee compound, and walked up to the wire fence separating their materials dump from the rest of the CP.

     Most of their lumber was stacked pretty close to the fence, and the rest of it was close enough for us to evaluate. I pulled out my list and started checking things off. The sentry saw us, interrupted his circuit of the compound, and made his way halfheartedly in our direction. He wasn't stupid. It was his job to run us off, but since we weren't yet doing anything illegal, and weren’t on his side of the wire, all he could do was glower. Besides, he knew how things really worked, knew that one of the Seabees' real jobs was to haul in vastly more of everything than their own jobs required, so Marines could steal what we needed and go on making war with a minimum of paperwork. The office pogues had forms they could fill out and turn in so some staff officer somewhere up the line could make his numbers match.

     Time came for our midnight requisition. We had my sketch of the locations of what we needed, and a plan. Lights off, we backed the truck up to the wire, and three or four of us crawled under, leaving one man behind to load, and a second just inside the wire to slip the stuff under. The rest of us fanned out, each with a specific assignment: so many 2x4's from such and such a stack, and so forth. We were out of there in minutes with everything we needed, or a reasonable substitute.

     Hegel wrote ‑ I believe it was in the "Master and Slave" section of his Phenomenology of Spirit ‑ that the man who is forced by those who hold power over him to work on the world with his own hands has a more immediate relationship with the world than does the master, and therefore, paradoxically, has a more empowered position in life than does the master himself. As soon, that is, as he, the slave, understands the true nature of his activity. The slave doesn't need the master to work the land, because he knows how. But the opposite isn't true: the master needs the slave to accumulate wealth from the land, because he can’t do the work himself.

     I knew that then, though I didn't know Hegel had said it. I think that, in a way, every private soldier knows it, and every factory worker and farm hand and deck hand and seamstress and cook and waitress. Women especially know it, and people whose skin is not white, even though Hegel didn't spend any more words on any of those groups than did the founding fathers of our country.

     We made that knowledge work for us. It had to do with where we'd put the shitter. Militarily speaking, the officers would have been duty bound to locate it off in the brush behind the tents we lived in, and far below the ridgeline which went through our position and which was the tactical reason for our having been stuck there.

     But the captain didn't tell me where to put the shitter; he just said, "You're in charge, Corporal, get it done and don't bother me with details."

     "Well, guys," I says, "where do we want this fine new shitter we're gonna build?" We discussed military exigency, and we discussed our own social priorities, and we discussed beauty and convenience. Over the next few days, between radio watches and sentry duty, we built the shitter. We scraped the red dirt at four corners until the tops of four pyramidal concrete piers were level, and built a plank floor on them. The two end walls were trapezoidal, so the roof would slant enough to carry off the rain. The bottom half of the back wall was hinged, so the halves of 55‑gallon diesel drums ‑ four of them, one under each hole ‑ could be pulled out and their contents doused with diesel fuel every few days and lit up to produce the bilious clouds of black smoke and the stench that, to this day, clings to the nostril hairs of every Vietnam veteran. (Scholars, please see Bruce Weigl's excellent poem, "Burning Shit at An Khe".) We ruined all manner of saw blades trying to cut the steel drums in half, before we went at them with an ax, driving it blow by blow through the steel with a sledge hammer, taking turns with the relentless sweaty pounding until the two drums were cut into four jagged‑topped halves.

     The front had ‑ get this ‑ an actual door, steel hinges and all, that could be closed, and a coil spring to keep it closed.

     When I left the outfit a few days later, there it stood, our fine new four‑holer, right smack on the ridgeline, with a golf‑course quality view ‑ screened, of course ‑ of the Song Tra Bong River valley, where you could sit and shit in peace, read, beat your meat, or just enjoy the view. It was especially nice at sunrise. The breeze that came up the valley ventilated it as well as an outhouse can be ventilated. It was convenient to the enlisted men's tent, but quite a longer hike from the officers' tent. Xin loi, sorry 'bout that.

     A couple of months after I left, I got a letter from Martin Luther Ealy, who was still there at Chu Lai. He said that after I'd left, they'd had an official opening ceremony. The captain had cut the ribbon himself, thereby making his first contribution to the project.

     I still have Martin's letter. He was from New Orleans. He always told me to look him up there, after the war. I wonder if I could still find him. I wonder if he's alive. Martin, are you out there?

HOWARD'S HILL

Marines in Skivvies

     "Metcalf, get the five‑ton and organize a shower detail."

     I spread the word in the enlisted and NCO tents, stripped to my trousers, grabbed my rifle and cartridge belt, and pulled the truck up near the tents and waited while eight or ten Marines in glaring white boxer skivvies straggled out with towels over their shoulders and climbed in the back.

     "If it isn't too fucking much trouble, would a couple of you gentlemen mind bringing along a rifle and at least one loaded magazine?"

     Fucking tight‑ass corporal, grumblegrumble.

     Fucking dumbshit candyass wingwipers don't know there's a war on, I grumblegrumbled back.

     Aloud: "Alright, folks, I realize this is kind of sudden, seein' as how we've only done this once a week for a coupla months now. Harris. Get your rifle, and a magazine. Magazine in rifle, safety on, chamber empty. In case you didn't recognize it, that's a fucking order. Yes. Sorry to disturb you. Garza. Same order. Do it now, not sometime this week. I don't want us comin' back along this road in the dark, and you don't either. One rifle on either side, facing outboard. You might even watch for VC, if it's not too much trouble."

     I pulled out onto the main road. The six‑by towed a giant snake of red dust behind us. We got to the shallow channel between the mainland and Ky Hoa Island just at low tide; the ford was easy. I drove around the end of the island and parked at the base of the cliff, where the wide, light waterfall splashed onto the rocks. This had been our favorite shower since we'd been outposted on Ky Hoa; we organized shower details whenever weather and tide and VC activity allowed.

     It was the end of a sunny tropical day; the sun's dropping behind the top of the cliff drove its shadow across the rocks, the beach, out onto the bright water of the South China Sea. Shower‑time banter was mostly about what a pity it was to have to share such a perfect place with a lot of ugly assholes like you guys instead of a bunch of babes in bikinis, hey, how 'bout babes without bikinis, I ain't proud ‑ that kind of thing.

     I drove back slower, trying to kick up less dust on us now that we were clean and still half‑wet. We piled out of the truck and straggled up the hill to where our tents were pitched just below the ridgeline. A certain languor had settled over us: the waterfall shower, the bright daylight, the waning afternoon that was balmy rather than hot, had seemed to put the war at some distance. Cold and dark and fear and shivers are of a piece; warmth and relaxation and being able to see a long way are their opposites.

     So we weren't ready for the surprised yelp that caused us to raise our heads and notice the neon‑red, thumb‑sized orb that floated by just over our heads. More came, seeming to come at a lazy speed as they barely cleared the ridge, then accelerating wondrously as they passed overhead.

     For me, it was slow‑motion time again. The next instant stretched itself, took up all the space and time it wanted, wandered out to the horizon in all directions, then wandered back and settled into my synapses forever. I had known immediately, but the softness of the evening light had disarmed us all. Besides, I assumed that all the other men would know as I knew, and move as I was now moving.

     But: Hunh. Men? I looked around, and saw a gaggle of high‑school boys, fresh from the locker room, standing in their clean white skivvy drawers and shower shoes, their chins dropped, mouths open, their most innocent imaginable faces upturned, watching the .50 caliber tracers pass a few feet above their heads like kids staring at the lights of the first Ferris wheel ever to come to their town.

     The shout came from deep inside me. I meant it to be an explosion that would shatter their reverie.

     "Get rifles, boots, helmets, flak jackets, nothing else. Get in the holes. There's no time. They're at the perimeter."

     I was moving as I shouted, snagging my helmet from my cot. Since the time when, as a kid, I'd badly cut my foot on broken glass playing barefoot in the sand, I'd had a fear of walking around with my feet unprotected, so I never left my cot without boots on.

     They couldn't believe it, or else the instant stretched even longer than I'd thought. They were still standing, mouths agape, when I tore through them on my way up the hill. I bumped two people hard with my body, shouted into their ears “MOVE!...

MOVE!”  knowing that the stunned mood was somehow a single organism that had settled over them all, and that once I had chipped one or two of them loose from their communal reverie, the rest would follow.

     There was no time for more than that. The VC must be at the wire. Fuck! they never do this in daylight. But... I'd have to hold alone for a very long time, maybe two, three minutes, way longer than it takes to die. Oh, they'd come. They were kids, but they were Marines. But they were nearly naked, and this was their first time. The tents would be a sea of flailing bootlaces and flak jackets and "Where the fuck's my helmet?"

     I desperately wanted a machine gun, but they were unloaded and put away. There just wasn't time. I slammed myself into the Conex‑box guard shack, grabbed an ammo can we used to store fragmentation grenades, and sprinted over the ridge and down its other side thirty yards or so to the line of fighting holes we'd dug as a last‑ditch line to fight from if the enemy ever got through the wire. This is it. I dumped out the grenades on the berm in front of me, jacked a round into my rifle's chamber, and looked down toward the wire for muzzle flashes. I would just have to hold. That was all.

     It was a false alarm. A South Vietnamese gunboat operating below our position on the Song Tra Bong River had strafed a suspected VC position on the near riverbank, and the .50 caliber bullets had glanced up the hill and arced directly over us.

                                                    Howard's Hill

     June, 1966. Staff Sergeant Jimmie Earl Howard was in command of an 18-man patrol of Marines from the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. These were the guys we’d see trooping past our tent on their way to the nearby chopper pad on their way to make an insertion like the one today, where a chopper would drop them on an isolated hilltop and they’d call in artillery and air strikes on enemy activity they could see below them.

     I had come on duty for the midnight to 0400 watch at the Direct Air Support Center. Howard and his seventeen men had been surrounded since dusk on top of Hill 488, named Nui Vu on Vietnamese maps, near Chu Lai. The surrounding force was a highly trained, well‑equipped North Vietnamese Army (NVA) battalion.

     Apparently the NVA wanted to eliminate one of the recon units which had caused them so much grief by entering their territory and calling in strikes on their training and staging areas. So they committed over two hundred men in the attempt to kill eighteen Marines whose perimeter was less than twenty meters across.

     The fight went on all night long. The Marines held the crest of the hill; the Vietnamese assaulted again and again with automatic rifles, mortars, machine guns, grenades, bayonets. Several of those charges ended in short, violent, hand‑to‑hand fights. By the time the second charge was beaten back, every Marine on the hill was wounded, and ammunition was so low that they had to fire semiautomatically. By the middle of the night, the Recon boys could see, by flarelight, NVA reinforcements swarming in the valley below. PFC Joseph Kosoglow said later it had looked "just like an anthill ripped apart."([1])

     We sent up flight after flight of helicopter gunships and jets to strafe and rocket the steep slopes around our men. An Air Force flare ship orbited above the hill to drop parachute flares; it was always supposed to be relieved on station when it was low on fuel. We coordinated that relief from the DASC. On the radio, I heard one Air Force pilot say he had to leave before his relief arrived because he was low on fuel, and heard a Marine piloting one of the helicopter gunships ‑ I later heard he was a major ‑ tell the Air Force pilot that he would personally shoot down the flare ship if it left before relieved. The major didn't live to be court‑martialed. He was killed before morning, flying rocket runs again and again down the throat of one of four NVA .50 caliber machine guns that were tearing up the men on the hill. The gun got the major. I don't know if the major got the gun, but he sure kept it busy for a while.

     When I left the DASC just before dawn, I could see the fireworks over Hill 488: flares, rockets, the long lovely parabolic arcs of red tracers.

     With dawn came better visibility, more air strikes, an airlifted company of Marine infantry. Later, we heard stories from the Recon guys, whose tents were near ours in the 1st MarDiv compound. One marine and one NVA soldier were found dead with their rifle muzzles touching each other's chests. Two of the marines' entrenching tools were found, bloody, in a circle of "mangled" NVA. One dead Marine was embracing the last man he'd killed, still gripping his KABAR knife where he'd buried it in the back of the enemy soldier in his embrace.([2])

     But they'd held Hill 488. Of the eighteen Recon Marines, twelve were still alive. All were wounded. They had eight rounds of ammunition among them. The hill was called Howard's Hill by Marines after the fight. It still is, among those who remember. But the

9 West, Ibid.

Marines left the hill the day they won it.

     Jimmie Earl Howard got the Medal of Honor. Years later, I talked with Jack Shulimson, a Marine Corps Museum historian who said that Howard’s hair had turned white within days after that fight, that he’d been a decorated veteran of Korea before he ever went to Vietnam, but had had a rough time of it after Nui Vu.

     Howard's call sign, by the way, was "Carnival Time."

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[1] “Small Unit Action in Vietnam, Summer 1966”  by Captain Francis J. West Jr., USMCR.  History and Museumss Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington,  D.C. Printed1967, reprinted 1977.

[2]