PROLOGUE W/ TRANSLATOR - PRÓLOGO CON TRADUCTOR

I. Prologue: Tho An 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 C4 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.

RATTLESNAKE DREAMS CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE/ TABLE OF CONTENTS/PROLOGUE (3/12/2012) RATTLESNAKE DREAMS An American Warrior’s Story Dean Metcalf This book is dedicated to KRIP who was killed at the US Special Forces camp at Mangbuk, June 18, 1968. He was 18 years old, or so they said… and to TATYANA SAVICHEVA who watched her extended family starve and freeze to death around her during the siege of Leningrad, September 1941 – January 1944. She was eleven years old when her last surviving family member died, leaving her alone. She was evacuated with other children through the blockade in August 1942, and died of disease resulting from the siege on July 1, 1944. and to the Marines who waded the lagoon at Tarawa, November 20-23, 1943. Copyright© 2010 Dean Metcalf All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-578-08809-9 CONTENTS I. Prologue 1 Tho An II. Learning War 5 Cowboys and Indians 8 Toys 8 Cartoon 9 Roy Rogers 10 Atomic Stove 12 Mumblypeg 13 K’reans 14 First Blood 15 Hunger 1 17 Rogue River 1 19 Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue’s Knife 20 A Rifle, A Pistol 24 Dress Blues 1 29 Almost a Cowboy 31 Canal 39 Dogs of Eberlein Street 42 Rogue River 2: Rattlesnake Air 44 Sunset Over Klamath Lake 55 Second Buck 56 Crater Lake 59 Semper Fidelis 67 Gunny Rogers 1: Mama’s Boy 67 Sergeant Vance 69 Man and Rifle Reaching 71 Gunny Rogers 2: The Most Powerful Weapon 74 Dress Blues 2 77 Marine Corps History 80 Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis 84 Banning 87 29 Palms: Ungentle 89 Old Enough to Bleed 91 Footprints 92 Okinawa 94 With God On Our Side 98 Tonkin 100 Olongapo 108 Put Me In, Coach 110 III.War 112 Oakland 113 Going Over 115 Ky Hoa 124 Gunny Rogers 3 126 Phantom Pisser 127 Hunger 2 131 To Kill a Gook 131 Tam Ky 132 “You’re Too Late” 135 An Tan 144 Request Mast 148 Tho An 150 Man and Pistol 167 Rats 169 Marines in Skivvies 175 Howard’s Hill 178 Sergeant of the Guard 181 Wartime Is Wonderful 184 Danang 189 IV. Relearning War 193 Kicking the Leaves 194 Townies 198 Missouri Squirrels 200 Hunger 3 204 Dark-Skinned Warriors 1 205 Packing 206 Seminar 208 Cho Lon 210 Interlude: A Veteran’s Dreams: 215 Dream: Nazi Pursuit 216 Dream: Money Man Pursuit 217 Mangbuk: The Camp 219 Soldier Tin 227 Dream: Bodies of Water 235 Dalat 237 Saigon 1. LA Cop 239 2. Kids 240 3. Dream: Vietnamese Children 242 Spook Hunting in Laos 243 Mark 269 J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac 271 Leningrad, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague 278 Samaritan in Los Angeles 308 Chinese Soldiers 309 Dream: A6 and Wolves 311 Tumalo 313 Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove 320 Triptych The Clubbing 333 Bait 335 Dream: Vietnamese Women 337 Spider and Fly 338 Fear 340 Guard Dog 342 Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle 343 Zen Warrior Bass Player 345 Sandinistas 346 Missing Man 356 Dark-Skinned Warriors 2 368 Dream: Guts 369 Indians and Cowboys 370 Mercenary 1 370 Rus Rus 1. Maco Stewart’s Letter 375 2. Flaco and Luque 378 3. Babes in James Bondland 380 4. Rus Rus 384 5.The Tape 391 6. Lasa Tinghni 395 7. Red Chief, White Chief 399 8. In Camp 399 9. Border Crossing 402 10. Skulls of Tulin Bila 406 11. Perico’s Garrote, and Other Stories 410 12. Meeting 416 13. Out of the Woods 425 14. Aftermath 428 Dream: Deadribs 437 Mercenary 2 437 Guns in Costa Rica 444 Interview with Bill Gandall 457 Guatemala: La Violencia 465 At the Battered Women’s Shelter 467 Palestinians and Israelis and Americans 469 Ants 488 Dream: Dance of the Arrows 489 The Rattlesnake Dream 491 Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol 492 The Last Nightmare 494 V.The Web (Essay) 496 APPENDIX: FAVORITE BOOKS AND WRITERS...533 Acknowledgments 535

FAITH AND FIGHTING

RATTLESNAKE DREAMS is a memoir of half a century or so of trying to understand why we go to war. Stories from my time as combatant and journalist in Vietnam, and journalist in Cambodia, Laos, Leningrad, Moscow, Baku, Kiev, Prague, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, East and West Jerusalem, Gaza, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Miami.... 11,279 THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2011 THE WEB part 3: LA FE AND EL COMBATE When I threw my weapons and 782 gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai in August of that year (1966), I was a troubled, angry, and nearly faithless young man. By the end of the year, some months into my intensive studies at Colorado College, I was a “born again atheist,” a state of mind and heart that had begun to exist while guarding the women and children and the old man at the well in the village of Tho An earlier in the year. I’m still an atheist. Of the many instances of phenomenal luck that have allowed me to survive being both a combatant and a journalist in the Vietnam War, hitchhiking up the Mekong through Cambodia and Laos at the height of that war (1968), through some close calls at sea aboard fishing boats, and later in construction work, as well as some dicey journalism situations in Central America, that day in Tho An was the luckiest of my sweet life. Not because I escaped death – that’s happened many times - but because of what I learned. More importantly, because of what I unlearned. Since those days, when I see a public appearance by anyone in garb intended to impress people with the sacred, therefore exalted, therefore authoritative, status of the wearer - I call them “long robes and funny hats” - the cynic in me says, “Okay, here comes the bullshit.” I am a cynic, but of a certain ilk. I get itchy and edgy whenever anyone talks about “pride.” I feel that way when I’m in the bank parking lot in my home town in northeast Oregon surrounded by the red, white, and blue bumper stickers handed out as freebies by the bank that say “Proud to be an American.” Don’t get me wrong. I’m okay with being American. I love the stubbornness of our independence, our rascality, the creativeness that has given the world jazz, Motown, and Elvis; some great and many pretty good movies, some great and a lot of good literature, Walt Disney cartoons([1]). I especially love that shining gift our people gave to the world, the United States Constitution. I love and am inordinately proud of the circumstances of the American Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence and other events in the desperate time which birthed that Constitution. Every year on November 10th, I celebrate the Marine Corps Birthday with a few buddies, in person or by email. Some of these guys I would die for, at the drop of a hat. We often combine that day with the next, Veterans’ Day. We thank entities from Jesus Christ to “shit-house luck” for the fact that we are still alive. I, of course, am in the latter group. The guys all allow me that; some agree with me and some disagree, with varying degrees of stridency, regarding questions of patriotism and religion. This is done with the same respect with which I allow some of them their continued belief in Jesus Christ: we all came by, or solidified, our deepest beliefs under the gun. In the presence of public patriotic celebrations, I get uncomfortable if there is more than one flag, or if it’s deliberately oversized; if the speakers’ voices seem overwrought with too much sincerity, or use too many over-generalized phrases that draw an ideological line in the sand between “us” and “them.” And I become downright angry when a speaker, especially a public official or clergyman, extols faith as something to sustain our soldiers in combat. Faith is what we use to take up the slack between what we know and what we hope for, or what we wish were the case. Or what we pray for. Of all the emotions along the spectrum from the most sincere to the patently phony, which constitute the fabric of human feelings and beliefs we use to send young men – and, now, young women – to war, faith is the killingest. Having viewed what we humans do for 40 years now from outside religion, what I see when organized religion is at play is people telling one another what to do: how to behave, whom to obey, whom to love and whom not to love, whom to hate, and whom to kill - all by claiming to speak for a higher power that is unimpeachable, yet at the same time non-specific. For me religion became like a greased pig at a carnival: impossible to get ahold of. Since no one, in my view, has ever seen the God who is the source of these commandments, it falls to God’s messengers to do the heavy lifting. To me, those people are nothing more than an ancient but ever-renewing parade of older males in long robes and funny hats who claim to have been sent by God, and to have been told by God how to instruct the lesser humans below them: do this, don’t do that. Pray. Obey. Do what I say, because God, or this or that Holy Book, told me to tell you to do so. I don’t believe any of that. But what continues to astonish me is that so many people do believe it, in the face of so much evidence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that the people we fight against are inspired by, commanded by, driven by, ideas which are nearly interchangeable with ours. Not mine any longer, but ours. Here I can’t help but note that Abraham, the religious patriarch featured in the Kierkegaard essay “Fear and Trembling”, is regarded as a prophet by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism: the very people who are now killing one another with such conviction in the Middle East. Kierkegaard’s essay is the one which got me in such hot water with J. Glenn Gray (see above, pp. 298-305), when I was so angered by Abraham’s being prepared to sacrifice his son because God told him to, and by Professor Gray’s use of the word “sublime” to describe Abraham’s faith. I even wrote my own version of Genesis, Chapter 22, where God commanded Abraham to kill his son: “And Abraham raised both fists to the heavens, middle fingers extended, whence had come the voice of God, and screamed at the sky: ‘FU-UUUCK YOU! What kind of god would command a man to kill his own son? C’mon, Isaac. Let’s go home.’” I downloaded from the Web a photo of the belt buckle worn by Wehrmacht soldiers in WWII. It has an eagle perched on a swastika, and the by now well-known motto GOTT MIT UNS: GOD IS WITH US. Hitler’s soldiers, the perpetrators of the Siege of Leningrad, of Treblinka, of Sobibor, of Babii Yar, of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald – were praying to the same god our soldiers prayed to. The same God I prayed to, the night before I entered Tho An with “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. The same god about whose loyalties Steve McLaughlin and I had been so confused as we listened again and again to Joan Baez sing Bob Dylan’s song “With God on Our Side.”

     We need to look at how we look at things.

     Combat is specific. It is excruciatingly specific. But faith is nonspecific. The moment a bullet or an explosive device rends tissue and separates life from death in a young person is the moment when, in this so-common human event, the specific and the general diverge, and somebody dies. The bullet is not aware. It has no faith, is not directed or deflected by faith. It goes where it goes. The bullets that snapped past me on April 19th, 1966, did not know or care where they were going. I simply happened to be standing in a lucky, rather than unlucky, place. That’s all there is to it. But faith is general: “The Lord will protect us.” “God’s will be done.” “Masha’allah (God has willed it)”. “There is a divine purpose....” Or that most general of all: “The Lord moves in mysterious ways.” Well. Bullshit. All that means to this very lucky veteran is that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, and we try to bridge the gap between reality and what we know of that reality with phrases that we cling to in desperate, willful ignorance, in the absence of knowing what we’re doing. It happens with 23-year-old individuals (and now, in some armies, with 8-year-olds), with squads, platoons, companies, nations, alliances... it is how humans have done business for these millenia. It is how history has been built.

 [1] Upon arrival in Managua, Nicaragua, in October 1983, I caught a ride into the city from the airport on the back of a flatbed pickup driven by some Sandinista teenagers. I noticed as I climbed aboard the truck that it had Bugs Bunny mudflaps. The boys’ antics as we drove through the city seemed to have more in common with the mudflaps than with either side in the 4-year-old war between the fledgling Sandinista government and the Reagan-backed contras.

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