Most of my memoir has now been posted. But people have read “bits and pieces,” because of the periodic nature of the blog. I hope when the entire book is published – in paper, between covers, in its entirety – that the experience of reading it as a whole clarifies some things that might at this point still be unexplained. For now, I want to make some posts, and comment on them. My comments will be presented in this type, so readers can distinguish them from the text. As always, comments and/or questions from readers are welcome. There’s a box for comments at the end of each post.
I have thought – and said, and repeated, more than some folks have wanted to hear – that I am the luckiest combat vet alive. One good friend, also a Marine, had a bayonet buried in his side by an NVA soldier. He was left for dead. Earlier, he’d been shot in one knee and one elbow, to the point where the woefully overworked surgeons were going to amputate both, until he threatened suicide if they did so. He also had a head wound. Another friend lost about half his right hand to a Rocket Propelled Grenade… and on, and on…
Lucky me. I was shot at and narrowly missed (see the full chapter “Tho An,” in the Archive). I caught a near-fatal dose of Falciparum malaria, but happened to land in California a couple of days before it struck, which would have left me alone to die in a roadside ditch in Cambodia (see the chapter “Spook Hunting in Laos, also in Archive).
So I’ve had an up-close and very personal look at war – not just in Vietnam, but also in Central America, and for a few days, in Palestine and Israel.
All that doesn’t mean that my opinions are correct. There are veterans who have seen much more combat than I have, who disagree violently with me about what it all means.
It does mean that my opinions are grounded in experience. And for what it’s worth, that experience has compelled me to study, as if my life depended on it, the conditions and ideas which led to the events I’ve lived through, and led me to put myself into those situations.
Three days in and near the village of Tho An, in April, 1966, formed the turning point in my life. Everything I’ve ever done, witnessed, thought about, studied… oh yes: and dreamed… is clearly located in my (now, 68 years long) life, as either before or after one long moment in Tho An. Since that moment, one baby boy, his screaming mother, one old man, and some other children and adults from the village, have been my teachers. Every day, they’ve been my teachers.
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.
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.
As babies, we get our first impressions of the world from watching our parents – those beings closest to us, who feed us and wrap us in blankets and change our shitty diapers. As our vision widens, we begin to know the world our parents know. As language arrives, so do emotions: worries, delights, confusions… and, in the lives of poor children, fears… and resentments. They breathe the air – the physical air, the emotional air – which their parents breathe. Here’s a whiff of the world I was born into…
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 1
st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal(
) 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 502
nd day, of 872. Tatyana Savicheva(
) was 5 months dead. Treblinka(
) 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.(
) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.
In mid-1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson sent elements of the 1st Marine Division to South Vietnam, the beginning of the long buildup of regular troops that was to give 10 years of war to the people of the United States, Vietnam (North and South), and the world. I arrived at Division Headquarters at Chu Lai in late September…
Ky Hoa
Ky Hoa was an island just off the coast of South Vietnam near Chu Lai. We were posted on its seaward side, along the top of a cliff that dropped steeply to a narrow rocky beach.
One afternoon I had sentry duty on the cliff. With the rest of the outfit at my back, my orders were to watch the cliff and beach below me, making sure no Vietnamese climbed the cliff toward our position, or moved along the beach past a point even with my post. If anyone was moving along the beach (it could only be approached from the mainland side of the island), I was to halt them. If anyone continued after I'd given the command to halt, I was to repeat it, and wave them back. If they still didn't stop, I was to fire a warning shot just in front of them, in the forbidden direction. If they still refused to stop, I was to shoot to kill.
A Vietnamese man came around the corner, clambering along the slippery rocks just up from the water's edge. He seemed to be looking for something in the tidepools. He was barefoot; his only clothing was something wrapped around his hips. He carried nothing in his hands.
He saw me standing on the cliff, rifle at the ready, watching him. He kept moving across my front, with a cautious eye in my direction. I held up my hand. He saw it, but kept moving. “Dung lai!” I yelled. "Halt!"
He kept moving, looking among the rocks, looking up at me. I yelled again. He moved again. Sergeant Vance leaned across three years and nine thousand miles to speak in my ear: "Nobody gets by a marine sentry who's not supposed to." I lowered the muzzle of my rifle, pointed it at the beach in front of him. He gestured earnestly toward the rocks ahead of him as he moved past the point to my front which I wasn't supposed to let him cross. I challenged him again; he kept moving forward.
I jacked a round into the chamber of my M14, put the rifle to my shoulder, braced my feet along my line of aim, and sighted at a point one foot in front of him. I picked out a rock situated so that, if I fired at it, my shot would - if he were lucky - throw rock fragments into the man's lower leg, then ricochet out to sea. If he were unlucky, it would ricochet into his vitals and kill him. I tightened my right hand's hold on the rifle's grip so as to be able to support its whole weight with that one hand, and slowly, threateningly, waved the man back with my left hand. He paused.
He said something in Vietnamese, and pointed again at the rocks in front of him. There was something there he really wanted. I brought my left hand back to the forearm of my rifle, quickly checked the elevation setting on my rear sight, lowered my cheek to the stock, sighted on the rock at the man's feet, began to squeeze the trigger - that crisp light slip of steel on steel - and braced myself for the kick of the rifle butt.
The man turned and walked dejectedly back the way he'd come. My trigger finger eased forward as slowly as it had been squeezing back. I lowered the rifle without firing, clicked the safety on, and began years of thinking how close I'd come to shooting, how close he'd come to being wounded or killed… and how some part of me had desperately hoped the man would reach under a rock and pull out a weapon so I could finally do what I was there to do.
From the moment I lowered my rifle, just before I squeezed off a shot, and for the 40+ years since, I have thought about what had just happened to me, what I had done, what I hadn’t done… and what I had wanted to do. That very day, I began tracking, backward in my life, the powerful emotion that had been present as I sighted on the rock in front of that man: I had wanted to shoot.
Why had I wanted to shoot? For some reason, even later that same afternoon, in moments between events as I was on radio watch in the Direct Air Support Center (DASC), on guard duty at night on the Division perimeter (see the chapter “Sergeant of the Guard,” in Archive), or when I found moments to myself, I tracked that desire to shoot back to accumulated resentments. I tracked it back to fears of the enemy lurking in darkness while on sentry duty, to not making the varsity football team in high school, to rejections by girls and women, to playground insults, all the way back to my parents’ not being able to afford a single Christmas toy for us when I was 4 or 5 years old, and we lived in the war-surplus housing project.
Toys
We were living at 32c Navy Homes, the World War II housing project built for enlisted men and their families, now rented as apartments to poor people, sprawled along the railroad tracks out at the edge of Pasco, Washington. Our dad was still with us. It was the late 1940’s. I was four or five and my brother Darrell two and a half years younger, so neither of us had started school.
It was Christmas time. Darrell and I had begun asking for scooters, toy gun sets, I don't know what all. There wasn't money for any of that, so each time we'd pestered Mom she'd tried to trim our expectations. Santa Claus must have been in the discussion somewhere, but that's not what I remember.
I remember one night when Mom was putting us to bed. Again, she was parrying our questions about Christmas. But Christmas was only a couple of days away, and this time I wouldn't let it go. I wailed "Look at our toybox!" Each time she tried to soothe me, I wailed "Look at our toybox!" again, shattering her apologies and her attempts to comfort me in my boy's unhearing rage. She gave up with a sigh heavy with resignation and the deep sadness of poor mothers everywhere.
She turned around to the closet and pulled out our toybox. It was a small cardboard grocery box with two or three old, broken toys in it.
"See, Mom, see?" I accused her.
"I know, son... I know," she said, trying to comfort all three of us, not being able, tucking us in and fleeing the room.
