TONKIN

     Tonkin

     We spent a lot of time in the Philippines. Luzon, of course, home of Olongapo, favorite liberty port of sailors and Marines for many years. Mindanao, where we had an extended stay in a sprawling tent camp during a SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization(

) exercise. We had an idyllic sojourn there because the senior Marine officers seemed to think we were in the Navy and left us alone. The most important thing we learned was that Australians could drink more beer, and faster, than we could. 

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

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

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

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

     I pulled the Randall out of its sheath on my left hip. All the guys knew about that knife, how sharp I always kept it. I’d had it made by W.D. Randall Jr. of Orlando, Florida(

). His knives for hunting and fighting were world famous. I still remember a testimonial in one of his brochures from a Korean War vet: “Here’s $25. Need another fighting knife. Had to leave my last one in a troublesome Red behind enemy lines.” 

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

            As I said, we were all drunk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     “Then play it again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     But for now, we were headed for Subic Bay.