This is the incident – in the village of Tho An, near Chu Lai – that changed, in one long moment, the way I saw the world. Religious explanations for human behavior, including my own, fell away in a heap. Ditto political loyalties, including patriotism. Those explanations for things simply no longer worked in the bright noonday light shaded by smokes of napalm, burning bamboo, and exploding munitions.
Still, I continued to do my job as a Marine for the rest of my tour. But I was confused. And I was thinking…
I. Prologue
Tho An
Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began. Others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the F-4 Phantoms - sharks of the air with high triangular tails and turned-down black snouts - finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.
Attached to “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, I was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements or attempts to flee.
They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot Company's combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C‑4 from the blast. A sergeant cursed the engineer for using too much explosive. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.
I'd imagined battle, but I'd never imagined this. The children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers' arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, yet feared my rifle and bayonet more. They wailed in awful concert with their children. The older women joined.
But the old man: he didn't wail, cower, try to flee the explosions or shrink back from my bayonet. He just stared at me, afraid but with that resigned, calculated, limited fearfulness of one who is going to die before too long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I had ever seen on a human face.
Something happened, as I looked down my rifle and bayonet at the old man and women and children I was holding captive, which would determine the course of the rest of my life. I looked at those people, then looked around me. I saw, in the bright noon light, a veil dropping. There was even a feeling of the veil's movement having a direction: top to bottom, sky to earth. The veil seemed transparent, leaving the artillery-blasted fronds of the palm trees, their napalm-charred trunks, the flaming thatch and skeletal bamboo frameworks of the huts, the urgent movements of the Marines of "F" Company, the terrified people at my feet, all looking exactly as they had a moment before. Yet they also looked completely different. I can't explain that, except to say that suddenly, and ever after, I saw the world through different eyes.
But it wasn’t just my present and future which I saw differently. That day in Tho An, a process began of re-seeing my entire life, from as far back as I could remember, and of realizing that a gradual accretion of boyhood experiences, beginning long before I entered Marine Corps boot camp, were what had made me a warrior.
Those people I was guarding with my rifle and bayonet, especially the infant boy, his mother, and the old man, are still with me, 40+ years later. They are my teachers. Every day, they are my teachers.
The following paragraph gives a few details about the world I was born into – the human atmosphere I breathed for the first years of my life.
II. Learning War
I first saw the world on January 23, 1943. Pearl Harbor was 13½ months in the past; the United States was at war with Japan and Germany. The 1st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal([1]) 5½ months earlier. Americans had invaded North Africa 3 months after that. The Soviet Army had counterattacked Axis forces outside Stalingrad, trapping 91,000 German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian troops inside a pocket. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would surrender all those troops a week after I was born, and the Japanese would begin evacuating Guadalcanal a day later. Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term as President of the United States. The blockade of Leningrad was in its 502nd day, of 872. Tatyana Savicheva([2]) was 5 months dead. Treblinka([3]) had been in operation 6 months, with 10 gas chambers working full time. In October of that year, Jewish slaves at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland, would stage a sufficiently successful revolt that the Nazis destroyed the camp for fear that the escapees would tell the world what had happened there, which they did.([4]) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.
Mid-August, 1966: After a few days shy of four years in the Marine Corps, I was about to go home, which in my case meant back to school, albeit a different one from the engineering program at Oregon State University I’d left a lifetime (it seemed) ago. Loading my gear aboard the truck that would take me to the airstrip where I’d catch a flight to Danang, I made a promise to myself that would result, 40+ years later, in this book.
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[See earlier post, “Ky Hoa,” in Archive.], 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.
[1] See below, “Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague” p.335ff.
[1] The reader who may have seen Treblinka listed as a “concentration camp” should clarify that notion: the only things concentrated at Treblinka were corpses, ashes, and huge piles of clothing and shoes taken from the people who were reduced to ashes. Treblinka was an extermination camp.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8381413.stm (Published Nov. 27, 2009, by BBC.)
[1] Twenty-three years later, I would stand in the open, off to the side of the village well in Tho An, side by side with a veteran of Guadalcanal, other island battles in the Pacific, and Korea. He was by then First Sergeant of “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. He leaned close to my ear to be heard above the firing and said calmly, “You be the last man out.”
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