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.
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, but 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 long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I’d 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 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.
