THE LAST NIGHTMARE

The Last Nightmare

In my anger and confusion upon leaving Vietnam, I had promised myself to study the war, and the human condition, until I understood the workings of the monstrous situation I had just lived through. I even promised myself that I would fix it! (See earlier  chapter “Danang.”) 

     I have been engaged in that study since then, and this book is the result, so far. What I didn’t know when I made the promise was that the arc of that study would parallel the arc of the healing of my emotional wounds from the war (I was never hit by bullets or shrapnel, only narrowly missed). In fact, the arc of my personal healing was the SAME as the arc of my awareness. I began to feel the war moving from a place deep inside me to a place outside, where I could see it, and myself, for what it was – for what I was.

     I’m still angry, of course. (see chapters “Townies,” “Hunger 3,” “Seminar,”
“J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac.”)

     That’s how I moved from nightmares to laughter, or from nightmares with no relief to nightmares from which I would waken in a fit of laughter so physically intense it would hurt my gut.

     The “Rattlesnake Dream” was the pivot point in that process. In the dream, my own people were pleading with me to do their killing for them, and I was ready. I was good with weapons; I performed well in dangerous situations. But my conversation with the snake taught me the deep wrong in my warrior’s assignment from my people, as the baby boy I was holding at bayonet point had begun to teach me that April day in 1966 in Tho An (see “Prologue,” and the chapter “Tho An.”).

     So I turned and walked away.

     María Patricia Fajardo Valbuena and I met on the Internet in July, 2008. We were married in March, 2009, in the office of the alcalde in Cota, the town next to Chía, Colombia, where she was born and grew up.

     Before dawn one morning in 2009, my wife and I were still asleep in our apartment in Chía. I was sitting upright on the bed. She was behind me, shaking me, shouting in my ear: “Dean! Dean! ¿Qué está pasando contigo?!”( What’s happening to you?!)”

     I was shaking violently, still not awake. She thought I was having a heart attack.

       But I was laughing. 

   I was laughing as violently as if I were having an epileptic seizure, shaking the entire bed. I was dreaming this:

 A group of rich old men have a mansion on a hill. The entire exterior is plate glass windows. The old men stay inside, keeping company only with themselves. But there is one other old man outside: I am scurrying about, laughing, placing large mirrors close to the mansion, one in front of each window. The old men inside see their own reflections in the mirrors, become horrified at the sight, and fire at their own reflections with shotguns. Each time the old man outside places another mirror, the old men inside blast away, destroying another section of their own house. I, the old man outside, am having a high old time, placing the mirrors and cackling and howling with laughter as the rich old men destroy their own mansion.

     Finally, Patricia was able to waken me. She was terrified that something awful was happening. She was trying to get through to me, but couldn’t.

     I woke up and fell back in the bed, still laughing, and told her the dream. We laughed together for a long time.

     The violent catharsis I felt upon waking from that dream was a feeling the like of which I had never before experienced in my life. It felt as if my body had physically split open. I haven't had a nightmare since; it's been at least four years. That process will be the subject of my next book.

MOMENT (POEM)

                                   MOMENT

1964: South China Sea

It is hours

into the night.

We are in the bowels

of the attack transport

USS Pickaway.

We are Marines: young

warriors, powerful, and

think we are stronger yet.

Vietnam is a word

we barely know. Soon, and

forever, Vietnam will be

the only word we know. A gale

slaps the ship about

like a volleyball.

Our bunks are

tubular steel and canvas,

side by side,

six high. There are

two hundred of us

in a compartment the size

of your living room

if you are moderately

well off. The walls are

half inch steel plate

painted battleship gray. The light

is from single bulbs, each

inside a heavy glass globe

inside a steel cage.

This is to protect the light bulb

from the kind of men we are, and from

heavy things which fly across the compartment

when the ship is at sea

on a night like tonight.

The battleship gray walls

and the glass globes in their steel cages

drip beads of sweat

from saltwater showers. The smells are

sweat, saltwater and puke.

We can’t sleep

for being slammed into

one another. The ship

is hammered

by a heavy sea,

shudders,

nose-dives

into the next.

“Je-sus Christ!”  is uttered loudly

by one of the grunts

from Delta Company.

From another bunk comes,

shouted, “Jesus Christ

blows elephants

for a nickel a herd!”

The laughter is chopped

by a silence, as we wonder

whether the power

that’s just been insulted

is the same as that

which threatens the ship.

Then, from a third bunk:

“Hey. Knock that shit off.”

Now another silence, as

each of us signs

a secret document saying

he is afraid of the wind.                                                      ©Dean Metcalf

                                                                                   11/26/2002

IA DRANG

IA DRANG

     I enlisted in the Marine Corps September 4, 1962, before most of us knew the war had already started for US forces. LBJ sent the first regular USMC units to Danang early in 1965. I’d served a 13 month tour in the Far East with 3^rd Marine Division, and wasn’t supposed to go overseas again until I had a year Stateside, after which I’d be too “short” to go again. My enlistment would be up in September ’66.

     Legally, I’d already served in Viet Nam. Aboard 2 different troop ships (USS CAVALIER and USS PICKAWAY) in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Tonkin, I had been with one of the Marine units aboard ship as part of the flotilla that was present in waters just off the Vietnamese coast when Johnson bamboozled the US Congress into passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and starting our 10-year war. The vote was 533-2, or close to that.

     In those days it seemed the war would never touch me, much as I wanted it to at the time.

TODAY, SEP 25, 2013, I WAS SHARPLY REMINDED OF OTHER EVENTS IN MY LIFE DURING THOSE DAYS. THE REMINDER CAME IN THE FORM OF A STORY PUBLISHED ON THE WEB ABOUT THE DEEDS IN NOVEMBER 1965 OF CAPTAIN ED “TOO TALL” FREEMAN, A HUEY PILOT WITH THE FIRST CAVALRY DIVISION (AIRMOBILE) IN VIET NAM’S IA DRANG VALLEY.

IA DRANG!! I AWOKE FROM MY HISTORICAL STUPOR.

     My part in those events was, in the scheme of things, tiny. But it was intense at the time, though it was infinitely more intense for the soldiers and pilots of the 1^st Cav, on the side of the US; and the elite North Vietnamese division, on the other side.

     It was the first battle of the war between major units of the armies of the United States and the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam.

     I had arrived in Viet Nam in late September or early October, 1965. Then quite suddenly in early November, a few of us were suddenly shifted to Camp Holloway, a small US Army chopper base just outside Pleiku, in the Vietnamese highlands. I was a radio operator. Though we were part of the 1^st Marine Air Wing, I had spent most of my hitch in artillery and Naval Gunfire units, and wasn’t yet the skilled aircraft controller I would soon become.

     I know more now than I did then. Part of our equipment was the TPQ-10, a sophisticated (yep! In the Marine Corps, no less) radar set which could connect electronically with equipment in the cockpit of an A4 or F4 fighter-bomber of one of our Marine squadrons and, once the pilot had maneuvered his bird to a certain position, speed, heading, and altitude, our radar could “lock on” to the aircraft’s controls and, for the brief time required to get over the target, control the bird’s flight and drop its bombs.

     Now, I think that was the main reason we were at Pleiku. Captain Ed “Too Tall” Freeman, LtCol Hal Moore (Battalion Commander of 1^st Cav troops on the ground), and the rest of our boys fighting for their lives not far away in the Ia Drang Valley, apparently needed all the air support help they could get, including ours.

     As I say, all this was more than I knew at the time. It did seem odd that we weren’t allowed off base unless we were dressed in civvies, and that we ate in the mess hall at Holloway, served meals that were a far cry from usual Marine Corps “chow” we’d become used to at Danang and Chu Lai. Fresh-baked rolls with every meal? Wow! With hindsight, I can see that our sudden transfer to Holloway, and our seemingly special treatment there, weren’t because we were special guys (hah! In the Marine Corps?! are you kidding?) Our special treatment was because we had suddenly, though temporarily, fallen into the same category as people who were, under normal circumstances, much more important than we were. But the Marine Corps giveth; the Marine Corps taketh away.

     Well before Christmas, we were back in our tents at Chu Lai, making, buying, and stealing booze to prepare for Christmas in a war zone.

Here, I need to eat some humble pie. I am accustomed to carrying myself with a certain attitude which is often seen by members of the other services as an undeserved air of superiority among Marines.

     But I went through the Battle of Ia Drang – albeit on its fringes – and have since read authoritative accounts, most notably We Were Soldiers Once, and Young, by LtCol Hal Moore (later LtGen), and Joe Galloway, who was a UPI journalist on the ground with Moore during the Ia Drang battle. The performance of those 1^st Cav troopers, and the superior leadership exhibited by their officers and NCOs, were second to none, at least that I know of. I salute them. That is one of the best books about Viet Nam combat, by two men who truly know.

     I personally did nothing more heroic there than fight off the rats in our machine gun bunker, and scare the shit out of a second lieutenant who was trying to sneak up from behind and catch us asleep on sentry duty.

TELL THE MEN (POEM)

                                                             Tell the Men              

                                                                 

                                                                   ©2012 Dean Metcalf

I.   I am the dream commander.

All around me

along the smoky runway

men fall, strafed

spinning

                bloody

                           down.

I scream, but

they will not believe:

our own

     top‑secret

     quiet‑rotor

     radar‑guided

     night‑vision

     heat‑seeking

     dream‑metal dragonflies

have returned

to kill us.

II.  "But they're ours!" men scream

as they stand, are hit, and fall

     spinningbloodydown.

Running, my body floats above the runway

among thumb‑size neon‑red tracers

borne upon their own wind: puffs of it

pass between my ribs.

III. In this dream, only I know:

words

are weapons.

All around me, men see,

trying not to see.

Men fail to aim their words

at the real enemy.

Men drop their books

or read absently

standing in the open

as if life were not dangerous.

IV.  Sergeant!

Work your way along the line.

Tell the men:

Fill sandbags with words.

Build a parapet to fight behind.

If they are the right words

you live.

Tell every man:

Dip each fifth word

in your own blood,

so your shots will glow red:

tracers to find your targets

in the dark.

Tell every man to sharpen one word.

Say, You must choose:

"yes"

          

or

"no."

Snap it onto your rifle,

for when this gets down to bayonets.

Tell all the men:

It's not the men of darker skin

who broadcast our blood upon the land

as a poor shopkeeper tosses water

from a red plastic pail

to settle dust on an unpaved street.

Tell the men:

We toss our own blood in the dust

where crimson arterial spurts of it

roll into powdery skins

like water in flour

no longer recognizable as blood

it could be any dark liquid:

it could be used

crankcase oil.

Tell them:

We live and die

     by what we think

     by what we write

     by what we say

     by what we do.

Tell the men:

     Get your words.

     Get in the trenches.

     Here they come.

                                                               Dean Metcalf

                                                               P.O. Box 548

                                                               Joseph OR 97846

                                                             3dmetcalf@gmail.com

This poem was first published several years ago in the online journal RIVEN, edited by Michael Spring. Tell the Men© 2012 Dean Metcalf