PROLOGUE: THO AN

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, 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.

BANNING

Banning

     Poor people and servicemen on leave traveled by Greyhound. So the trip through the January night to my first permanent duty station after boot camp was just an extension of my childhood. Except for how I smelled: twentyfour hours in a closed bus wearing the same dress green wool uniform works its own alchemy, a brew of stale sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, and dry cleaning fluids which has to be stored in the synapses of every veteran.

     It grew bitingly cold as the bus moved deeper into the January night and the California desert. Sometime in the middle of the night we were disgorged at the bus stop in Banning. There either was no bus station, or it was closed. Two or three of us on our way to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms had to wait outside for the local stage that would take us on our next leg. There was a bench to sit on, and a concrete wall to lean against. The bench was occupied by two old men. I was puzzled that they weren't home in bed, since they weren't waiting for the same stage we were, and there didn't seem to be anything else happening in Banning that time of night. 

     I wasn't interested in sitting anyway. I was too cold. My wool overcoat was near the bottom of my seabag, that monster of design inefficiency that is long and narrow and opens only at one end, so anytime you want anything that isn't on top, you have to unpack the goddamned thing to get what you want, then repack it. This usually occurs when a drill instructor is yelling at you to hurry up, or when your bus is leaving.

     Besides being cold, I was sleepy and hungry and homesick and needed a shower. My uniform was rumpled, and, I was sure, twisted all around my body. I felt like shit.   

    One of the old men was eyeing me. I wasn't used to traveling in uniform; later I would find that some people would avoid even eye contact with you, while others would talk your leg off. But this time, I simply noticed that I was being watched. I felt too miserable to care why.

     The old man finally spoke: "Look at you, boy," he said to me. "You don't know how lucky you are. Just look at you. Young, strong, proud... got your whole life in front of you. And just look at how you fill out that uniform."

     I grumbled that I sure as shit didn't feel very proud at the moment, and as far as how I filled the uniform, I'd probably get my ass chewed for it if an officer saw me right then.

     "Well, I still say, you don't know how lucky you are," the old man insisted. He turned his face away, speaking now more to his own past than to me: "You can complain all you want, but I'd give anything in the world to be in your shoes right now."

"YOU'RE TOO LATE."

            "You're too late."

(Note: In this chapter, I’ve used “BULLRUSH” as the call sign of the battalion I was working with. BULLRUSH was indeed one of the infantry battalions based in the same 1st Marine Division Command Post as my outfit, Direct Air Support Center, at Chu Lai. What I don’t know is whether it was the same battalion we were working with during the events described in this chapter. I’ve used it here because it was one of the battalion call signs we used in that place at that time.)

     We were on watch in the Direct Air Support Center at Chu Lai. There were two or three enlisted men under me, radio operators and air traffic controllers. There was a watch officer, in this case a Lieutenant who kept his nose in a book "so I can stay out of Corporal Metcalf's hair while he runs the DASC." We were the air traffic control shop for the First Marine Division: we coordinated and dispatched helicopters on courier flights, trooplifts, medevacs, gunship missions, and whatever else they did; and also sent out our own jets - A4 Skyhawks, F4 Phantoms, and F8 Crusaders - on air strikes either by themselves or in support of Marine infantry units in the area. 

     A situation had been developing before I came on watch. A few kilometers from us, a Marine rifle platoon was surrounded by a superior number of Viet Cong. In the early part of our 4 hour watch, neither side had yet gotten the upper hand. But the VC ring around the platoon tightened, and things sounded grim. I was talking directly with the platoon commander’s radio operator, and I could feel the heightening tension in his voice. I could also hear rifle and automatic weapons fire and grenades going off when he keyed his mike to talk to me. 

     The VC tightened the ring again, and it became clear that the infantryman's greatest fear was staring them in the face: they were in imminent danger of being overrun.

     The only thing that had prevented this all along had been artillery. Now, whoever was adjusting artillery fire for that platoon - he must have been a real ace - walked the impacting rounds in closer and closer to his own men until everybody in the fight, Marines and VC, was pinned down by the artillery. The platoon commander had hoped this would break up the attack and send the VC fleeing, but instead it produced an awful stalemate, one of a kind that was to recur often during the coming years of war: the VC tightened their ring even further, to the point where the artillery couldn't be brought any closer without hitting our own men. The fact that they were dug in was the only thing preventing that now.

     So a few miles from where we sat in an air conditioned bubble, two concentric rings of desperate young men were hugging the planet as hot metal ripped the ground and air around them. Grenades were being rolled into foxholes, sometimes with enough time left on the fuses to throw them back, sometimes not. I began to hear screams on the radio. 

     "Landshark Alpha, this is Bravo two six...I need an emergency medevac, NOW, HURRY! over." The radio operator was screaming at me: "He's my best friend, for God's sake! He's bleedin' bad! He's gonna die! GET..ME..A..MEDEVAC! ..MEDEVAC!..NOW!..OVER!" The sheer will in that man's voice comes back to me, even now, across the years.

     Fluttery things happened in my stomach, along my spine. Everyone in the DASC had heard that, and we knew that by now, that grunt battalion's entire chain of command, including the battalion commander himself, was monitoring our net.

     "Two six, Landshark...." I was shaving call signs now; seconds could mean lives. Anyone else using this net, having heard what we'd just heard, would shift their traffic to another frequency and give us the air. "Roger your request emergency medevac. Hang on. Out." I wanted to try to comfort the guy somehow, but comfort takes time, and comfort wasn't what he wanted. He wanted a helicopter to come out of the sky and carry his bleeding friend to a hospital. He wanted that and nothing else in the whole world, and I was the only one he could ask for it. 

     While all this was developing, I'd felt the presence of the infantry battalion commander. I hadn't talked to him yet, but orders coming out from him had been few, succinct, and had obviously come from a cool head who cared deeply about his men but wasn't about to panic and lose one or two helicopters and half a dozen men trying to save one. 

     I got on another radio and called the battalion's call sign. The Man himself came on: "Landshark Alpha, this is Six Actual. I heard. You may not, I repeat, you may not send in a medevac at this time. The artillery fire is continuous, and must remain so or those men will be overrun. The bird would just be shot down by our own artillery. Repeat that back to me. Over."

     I repeated it. 

     Then: "Sir?"

     "Go."

     "I have a medevac bird with a gunship escort ready on the airstrip, engines running. Can I get them in the air and have them circle near the platoon, so they can drop in if there's an opening? Over."

     "Some of those arty rounds have proximity fuses. They could knock the birds out of the air on their way to the target. Over."

     He hadn't told me to shut up. He knew I was trying to find a way. He didn't think there was one. But he wanted for there to be one, I guess even worse than I did. He would write the letter to the next of kin of guys who got killed, not me.      

     "Sir, I’ve been a Forward Observer for both artillery and naval gunfire. I have a radio on the arty net. I can plot the position of the guns on our board, and we already have the platoon's coordinates plotted. I can plot the trajectory of the artillery rounds, including their maximum altitude. I know what the guns will do, and what the fuses will do. I can keep the birds near the platoon, and still clear of the artillery. I know how to do that, sir. I will take responsibility for it. And the air crews want to do it, sir. They know the drill, and they've all volunteered...." 

     I left the mike keyed without speaking for half a breath, then changed my tone from that of a Corporal speaking to a Lieutenant Colonel to one of two Marines speaking to one another in combat, just trying to find a way: "...they're Marines, too."

     It was a stupid, insubordinate thing to say to an officer who had been working with Marine pilots for the better part of twenty years. But it touched him, I could tell. That was the beautiful thing about the Marine Corps: a Lieutenant Colonel, even a General - the good ones, anyway - was a Marine first and an officer second, so that what bound us together was stronger than what separated us. In combat, anyway.

     I heard a hint of relief in his voice, even a touch of brotherly gratitude for my help in carrying his load: "Landshark Alpha, Six Actual. You may proceed. You may put the birds in the air, on standby. Their location is your responsibility. You will keep me informed about everything you do. And you will not, repeat, will not, lift the artillery fire or send the birds into that landing zone without personal clearance from me. Over." 

     "Wilco, sir." Will comply. Left unsaid was what we both knew, that a Corporal can't relieve a Lieutenant Colonel of responsibility for anything.

     All this took a lot less time to do than to tell. A few seconds on another radio got the medevac chopper and its gunship escort into the air and vectored to a position aloft where they could see the besieged platoon but were clear of the artillery's trajectory.

     I got back on the horn to the platoon's radio operator. "Two six, Landshark Alpha. Medevac bird and gunship escort are in the air. But I have direct orders from your own battalion commander not to lift the artillery around you. He will lift it if the situation allows. Until that happens, the birds are on standby, circling near you...I'm sorry, man. That's the best I can do."

     "...you...God...FUCK! MEDEVAC...you gotta...I'm holdin' 'im, he's bleedin' all over me, you gotta...." He was sobbing and screaming and pleading all at once, blaming me, the only person he could blame, for what the world was doing to him.

     "Stand by, Two Six." Pathetic words. At that moment I wanted only two things in the world. The first was to be able to say to him, “Here comes your help: your friend will be safe now.” Since I couldn't say that, I wanted to be there with him. I sincerely felt that I would rather have shared the danger than be blamed for not relieving it.

     "Bullrush Six Actual, Landshark Alpha, over."

     "Six Actual, go."

     "Sir, can I replace the arty with air strikes? If I can, I think we can get those birds down to that platoon."

     "The VC are thirty meters outside that perimeter. Our people will be overrun within a minute if that artillery lifts."

     "Not if there's no gap between arty and air, sir."

     "How will you keep from shooting your own birds out of the sky?"

     "Timing, Sir. It would have to be an instantaneous handoff. I can get my birds in position so they can be strafing within a few seconds of the last arty rounds."

     "Set it up, then talk to me again. You may not do this without my clearance. Out."

     "Uh, sir?"

     "Yes."

     "Sir, this can only work if I can work directly with arty. They would have to cease fire directly at my command. If we have to wait for two or three radio transmissions, there'll be too long a gap."

     "That's right. Good. I will give that order. Set it up. Check with me. Out."

     The platoon had already taken several casualties when I inherited the situation, but they had all been wounds that weren't immediately life threatening. The radio operator's buddy was the first to be critically wounded. By now, casualties were mounting in number and gravity. The stalemate was shifting in favor of the VC; if things kept on this way until nightfall, what the VC couldn't accomplish by frontal assault would happen by attrition. In the face of that, a risk now was less risky than a couple of hours ago. Or even one hour ago.

     The table in front of me was piled with radio remote consoles, microphones with their cords snaking in all directions, and the handsets of EE8 field telephones. The Lieutenant had long since put down his book, and had taken direct control of all the missions in progress besides the one I was working on. He had been listening as I spoke with the battalion commander. Knowing he was responsible for everything I did, I looked a question at him. He nodded. 

     I would begin by organizing the aircraft, giving the Colonel time to notify the arty battery that I would be giving the command to check fire. I swept the desk clear of anything but what was necessary for this mission, unplugged the microphones, unsnarled their cables, plugged them back in with their cables in neat parallel lines across the desk from the consoles to me, mikes resting on the forward edge of the desk. There was one mike for choppers, one for jets, one for artillery, one for the pinned-down platoon's radio operator, one for the battalion commander. If I got my wires crossed - if I said the wrong word to the wrong party, I could get a lot of the wrong people killed. It went without saying that by saying the right thing to the right party, I would get a lot of the right people killed. That was what we were there for.

     The original medevac chopper and its gunship escort had long since run low on fuel and been replaced. I replaced those again, with freshly fueled aircraft, and sent up another pair of gunships, orbiting them above the medevac birds. We used the word "angels" to denote altitude; "angels ten" meant ten thousand feet. I scrambled a pair of A4 jets with a full load of strafe and rockets aboard, then put a series of similar pairs on standby, to take off at regular intervals so they could replace the attacking pair on station as soon as they were out of ordnance. The pilots, talking with one another, would set their own timing so there'd be no gap over the target. I got on the horn with the artillery battery. The Colonel had talked to them. I told all these people, the cannoncockers, the air crews, exactly what the plan was. Everyone understood that timing was everything: if there was a gap, the grunts would be overrun. If there was an overlap, our artillery would be shooting down our own aircraft, and they would be crashing into one another above the platoon's position, killing more of our own people.  

     "Bullrush Six Actual, Landshark Alpha, over."

     "Six Actual, go."

     "Sir, everybody's ready. All the pilots know the plan. It looks good up there. Over."

     When two radios were near the limit of their operation range, all you got was the basic content of the communication, if that. But the battalion commander was just down the road; communication was 5 by 5: loud and clear. So the Colonel's deep breath was audible before he spoke: "Okay, Landshark. Do it."

     The arty people told me their Time of Flight, the number of seconds between the firing of the guns to the  projectiles’ impact on target. I told that number to the A4 pilots; I think it was seven or eight seconds. Artillery and I agreed that their next fire mission would be the last. 

     I remembered one time in 1964 when my section of naval gunfire spotters were doing crosstraining as Forward Air Controllers in Japan, working with Marine jet pilots. They had wanted to show us just what they could do, if things ever got really tight. It was risky, but wildly effective. My section had been set up on a low hillock in the foothills near the base of Mount Fuji. We'd asked one pilot what was the most coverage he could put on a target in an emergency. "That'd be what we call 'gear down, flaps down, low and slow'," he said. "Like this." He rolled in, landing gear down and flaps at their steepest angle to slow the aircraft and increase its time on target. He just missed clipping our radio antenna; I remember pressing the side of my face into the dirt, and still clearly seeing the pilot’s face and helmet as he passed. The thundering presence of the aircraft alone was enough to keep an enemy's head pinned down. 

     "Can you give me gear down, flaps down, low and slow?" I asked the A4 flight leader. "That will probably get you into some ground fire," I added. Dumb, I said to myself. The pilot knows there's a war on.

     "Yoooobetcha, Landshark. Say when."

     "Shot," arty said to me, meaning the last mission had just left the guns. "Shot," I said to the A4 pilots. We'd set them up so they could begin their run-in just before the artillery rounds landed. The first bird was strafing along one side of the platoon's perimeter within seconds of the final artillery impact. As soon as he passed beyond the target, he pulled up sharply to clear the way for his wingman, coming behind him, to strafe a line along the opposite side of the perimeter. Several flights of A4s tore up the ground around the infantry with 20mm cannon fire and rockets; we added 250-pound bomb runs at a little greater distance, once the pilots got close looks at our guys and their guys on the ground.     

     Time for the second shift. I said "stop" into one microphone; "go" into another. The A4s pulled away as a series of Huey helicopter gunships, which had been circling directly above the area, dropped down to strafe. Their machine guns were less powerful, but they had the advantage of being able to bank in a tight circle, and completely ring the platoon with fire. We had the gunships stacked up to follow one another in as they ran low on ammo, so there was never more than a few seconds without intense fire being put on the ground. 

     The other reason for switching to gunships was that, by tightly circling the platoon (which jets couldn't do), they left the sky open above it. I now had the medevac chopper move into position directly above the center of the platoon's position. There was no way for it to approach from the side. The pilot said he could drop her straight down. 

     "Bravo Two Six, this is Landshark Alpha. Get your emergency ready. Here comes your bird, straight down from above you." Nothing in my life had ever felt so good as saying that.

     Two Six keyed his mike, but waited a long moment to speak. The panic was gone, replaced by a calm, bitter voice: "You're too late." 

     Nothing in my life had ever felt so bad as hearing that. I still hear it.

DRESS BLUES 1

My mom married five times, still never got it right. My favorite stepdad was a Wisconsin farm boy as a kid who taught me to hunt and fish in the mountains and streams of eastern Oregon. His name was Bill Gano. This is for him...

Dress Blues 1

     Bill took me to a gun shop in Klamath Falls. We couldn't afford anything, not even a used rifle. We went there to dream. Maybe they'll give me some overtime, Bill said. And we'll pick spuds together on weekends when they come ripe. Maybe we can get a good used .30-30, not this year, but in time for next deer season. We could sure use the meat, save on groceries. Gotta tell your ma that, or she won't let us spend money on a rifle. .30-30's not the best gun for this country, though. Good brush gun, but short range. Need somethin' that'll reach out farther in this open country, .300 Savage maybe. That's a real nice rifle, got a good long barrel, you get a peep sight on the back, with that long distance between sights, you can be real accurate. Bill liked peep sights. He'd gotten used to them during World War II, when he'd fired the Springfield 1903 .30-06, and later, the M-1 Garand. Ought six's a good caliber, he said. You could get a lot of different loads for it, and you could buy ammo anywhere. 

     We were talking like that, and the store owner, who knew we didn't have any money, was letting me handle a used .300 Savage off the rack. He wasn't busy. "Boy handles a rifle real nice," he said, knowing that'd puff me up, which it did. Puffed Bill up a little too, because he'd taught me. 

     The little bell over the door jingled, and a man walked in. Instantly, the three of us were breathing different air. The man wore a striking blue uniform, topped by - of all things in a dusty logging and cattle town - an immaculate white cap with a brown leather brim and a shiny brass emblem. He removed the cap and tucked it under his left arm as he entered. The dark blue uniform tunic had brass buttons and a funny high collar that closed at the throat, and red piping at the sleeves and pockets. There were medals - some shiny silver, some multicolored cloth - on his left breast. The silver medals seemed to represent rifles and pistols. There was a broad crimson stripe down each leg of the blue trousers. 

     The man knew the gun shop owner; they greeted each other. I could sense a subtle change in Bill, even though he was behind me, looking over my shoulder at the man in the strange uniform. 

     The man in the uniform was watching me, seemingly   with approval, handle the .300 Savage with all the aplomb a skinny kid with glasses could muster. He nodded over my shoulder at Bill. "There's a young man I'll be talkin' to one of these days," he said to all of us. Then, to me: "Ever hear of the Marines, son?" He smiled. I was thirteen or fourteen. I knew nothing of him or his world. 

     I did know that both Bill and the gun shop owner had changed when he walked in. 

     "No," I said.

     The man might have said something else. I don’t know. I just remember how he looked, and the feeling he brought into the room. And Bill saying with a testy voice, "He's a little young for that." 

     The man in the glittering blue, white and red uniform did his business and left. I could feel the air in the room return to something like it had been before he came in, though a part of his presence remained. 

     I looked at Bill's face with my question. Part of his answer was already in his face; it contained some mixture of awe and disapproval, with a hint of myth or mystery.

     "Marine recruiter, I guess," Bill said, looking at the gun shop owner, who nodded as he leaned on the counter. I asked who Marines were, lobbing the question for both of them to catch. The store owner said something that confirmed the awe in Bill's face, about Marines being the best fighters. There was more awe in his reply than I saw in Bill's face, with none of the disapproval. 

     I was surprised at the anger in Bill's voice. He said something like, Sure, Marines have a lot of guts, but they don't care, they do all this crazy stuff, just stand up and fix bayonets and walk right into it instead of trying to do the job with less casualties. They get a lot of guys slaughtered just to prove how brave they are. 

     As we walked back to the Studebaker Bill said, very pointedly, that when my time came, I should join any branch of service but the Marines.

     I never forgot Bill's admonition. But the man in blue had done his work.

TOWNIES

Townies

    Jim Price and I met at the college track. He was on the team, and I went there to run laps after classes. We were on north Nevada Avenue, walking back to campus after a late movie in Colorado Springs. There was no one else on the sidewalks and, at the moment, no cars on the street.

     A car turned onto Nevada Avenue and approached us. It slowed, passed us with heads hanging out the windows on our side, then its tires yelped as the driver veered to the curb. Five or six "townies" jumped out, young men out of high school who hadn't gone to college, who liked to rough up college guys for fun. 

     "Let's go!" wasn’t out of Jim's mouth before he was gone, sprinting up the street towards campus.

      No.

   I was just back from Nam. I was home, among the people I had fought for, or so I wanted to believe. The thought that those same people would try to re-immerse me in the fear I was trying to leave behind sparked in me an immediate, dedicated fury. Not hot fury. Nah. Cold fury. 

      Fine. I will kill at least one.

  The townies rounded both ends of their car and approached the sidewalk. I made no sound, no gesture. I unsnapped my corduroy jacket lined with synthetic fleece and stepped to a nearby fire hydrant. I draped the jacket over it and stepped back. Oh so methodical. In my mind was the handtohand combat stuff from boot camp: Be an animal. Attack, attack. Speared fingers on one side of the trachea, thumb on the other, plunge, pinch the grip closed, rip his throat out. Or break the bridge of the nose, then ram the broken bone up into the brain. A fist to the temple, with enough force, also kills. Or a speared finger through the eye into the brain.... 

     They were on the curb. Still I had made no sound or gesture. I remember folding my hands in front of me, at arm's length, looking at the townies and waiting. I leaned forward a little. 

     They stopped, each individually yet all nearly together. They seemed to recoil, like cartoon germs bouncing off that "invisible Colgate shield" we used to see in television toothpaste commercials. The apparent ringleader, now standing at arm’s length from me, looked me over carefully, then spoke:

     “Let’s go,” he said.

     They got back in their car and drove off. I put my jacket back on and walked along the sidewalk toward campus. I did not hurry. 

OKINAWA: WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE

With God on Our Side

     Steve McLaughlin and I had been buddies at 29 Palms, had both gone through radio telegraph school at San Diego, and both ended up on Okinawa in 1964. My new outfit was the Twelfth Marines, an artillery regiment headquartered at the US Army's Camp Sukiran. Steve was in another outfit on Sukiran.

     One day I ran into Steve at the camp library. "C'mere," he said, and led me into the listening room where you could play records from the library's collection. He showed me an album cover; I looked at it while he put the record on and set the needle down on the song he wanted me to hear. The album was by this beautiful young folk singer with long, flowing black hair. Her name was Joan Baez. I'd never heard of her.

     The song Steve wanted me to hear was "With God on Our Side." It was by some guy named Bob Dylan. Never heard of him either. Steve wasn’t sure what the words of the song were getting at, and wanted to know what I thought. We played it, talked about it, played it some more. We were trying to figure out what it meant. It was clearly a song about war, about what an important thing war is, about how important it is to get it right if you do it. It seemed, on the one hand, a very reverent song. "...but you don't ask questions/when God's on your side." That made sense to us. It went perfectly well with how we'd been brought up, and with how the Marine Corps had trained us: Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die....

     But was there something else? The question nagged at us as we played the song again and again. The singer and the words were so sincere that we tended to take the song at face value. She was clearly pointing out that in wars, both sides often claim to have God on their side. What that seemed to us to mean was that one side had to be wrong, since God wouldn't be on both sides at once. So it must be a song about how important it was to be on the right side. That would be us, of course. 

     But would it? Could she actually be saying that both sides might be wrong? Wow. We didn't think so, but maybe. We left the library without coming to a conclusion that satisfied either of us about what the song intended. What we did agree on was that we'd sure like to meet that babe on the album cover.

1963: MIDNIGHT IN BANNING

Banning

     Poor people and servicemen on leave traveled by Greyhound. So the trip through the January night to my first permanent duty station after boot camp was just an extension of my childhood. Except for how I smelled: twentyfour hours in a closed bus wearing the same dress green wool uniform works its own alchemy, a brew of stale sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, and dry cleaning fluids which has to be stored in the synapses of every veteran.

     It grew bitingly cold as the bus moved deeper into the January night and the California desert. Sometime in the middle of the night we were disgorged at the bus stop in Banning. There either was no bus station, or it was closed. Two or three of us on our way to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms had to wait outside for the local stage that would take us on our next leg. There was a bench to sit on, and a concrete wall to lean against. The bench was occupied by two old men. I was puzzled that they weren't home in bed, since they weren't waiting for the same stage we were, and there didn't seem to be anything else happening in Banning that time of night. 

     I wasn't interested in sitting anyway. I was too cold. My wool overcoat was near the bottom of my seabag, that monster of design inefficiency that is long and narrow and opens only at one end, so anytime you want anything that isn't on top, you have to unpack the goddamned thing to get what you want, then repack it. This usually occurs when a drill instructor is yelling at you to hurry up, or when your bus is leaving.

     Besides being cold, I was sleepy and hungry and homesick and needed a shower. My uniform was rumpled, and, I was sure, twisted all around my body. I felt like shit.   

    One of the old men was eyeing me. I wasn't used to traveling in uniform; later I would find that some people would avoid even eye contact with you, while others would talk your leg off. But this time, I simply noticed that I was being watched. I felt too miserable to care why.

     The old man finally spoke: "Look at you, boy," he said to me. "You don't know how lucky you are. Just look at you. Young, strong, proud... got your whole life in front of you. And just look at how you fill out that uniform."

     I grumbled that I sure as shit didn't feel very proud at the moment, and as far as how I filled the uniform, I'd probably get my ass chewed for it if an officer saw me right then.

     "Well, I still say, you don't know how lucky you are," the old man insisted. He turned his face away, speaking now more to his own past than to me: "You can complain all you want, but I'd give anything in the world to be in your shoes right now."

RE-READING HISTORY...AND MY OWN

  Recently I was re-reading “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders(64). The book's title is a phrase handwritten into the photo album of one Kurt Franz, from his days as deputy commandant, then commandant, of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka. 

     The book contains reproductions of a number of black and white photographs, from Treblinka and other camps and execution sites. Many are so grainy and badly focused as to show very little. Yet they show everything: Jewish women being forced to undress before the eyes of their 

captors, trying to cover their nakedness with their hands, being shot, lying dead in crumpled piles as the few only wounded by the first volley are finished off by a soldier standing among them with a submachine gun. 

     As I turned the pages, one of the pictures stopped me.

64 Edited by Ernst Klee, et.al., Op.cit. 

I shuddered. The shudder settled in my stomach and became a vague nausea, a physical feeling of dread. This photo shows a single soldier, his rifle slung underarm, guarding a cluster of Latvian Jews who have been gathered for execution. The photograph is too grainy to be sure, but the prisoners look to be all women and children.

    That photo isn't nearly so horrible as some of the others in the book.

    What caused the physical nausea in me was not so much the ill-focused image of the women who were seated on the ground, with their children, who would all be shot minutes after the picture was taken. 

   It was the angle at which the rifle of the soldier guarding them hung under his arm(65). It was the same as 

the angle of my M14 rifle as I guarded the women and children and one old man near the village well at Tho An. The angle was the same for a simple reason: both of us soldiers had our rifles slung underarm with the muzzles down, which soldiers often do to keep the rifle’s action and trigger ready to hand; or when it’s raining, to keep rainwater out of the barrel. 

     It's especially convenient when we’re guarding people who are sitting, or kneeling, on the ground.

     The awful click in my mind when I noticed the angle of that soldier's rifle (I don't know whether he was a Latvian policeman collaborating with the Nazis, or a German soldier), while it proves nothing, can point to a whole hidden universe, or at least did for me.                                

    That hidden universe is the continuum of male violence. I've seen that continuum in things I've done and witnessed, from shooting the robin as a boy with my bow 

65 ibid., p. 130.

and arrow, to my need to become adept with guns, to be

a hunter as the men I knew were hunters, to the fun-seeking scrappiness of the "townies" I nearly tangled with in Colorado Springs, to my readiness to "kill at least one” of them, to the spark of agreement that arced around our circle of Marines' faces at Chu Lai when one said, "I'd sure like to kill just one gook before I leave this fucking place," to the beatings by angry husbands and fathers of the women and children I met at the battered women's shelter where one little girl asked her sister if I was going to hit them, to the gleam in the eye of an American mercenary in Central America as he told his story of “reloading face to face,” to superpower-induced guerrilla warfare in Central America. 

     A major portion of the human male spirit has been woefully, cruelly, out-of-balance for millenia. We all know men who would never think of reaching for a weapon to solve a problem, who simply work hard to support families, raise their kids as best they can, and go fishing on weekends if they’re lucky. But the world also knows many more who do, or have, reflexively resorted to force, or offered their persons to an armed group who used force. And force is the boss in human affairs. Force owns a terrible leverage: it magnifies itself until patently baseless arguments and ideas carry the day.     

     Another way of saying this is that it’s easier to destroy than to build. It takes months of sweaty work to build a house; to destroy it, all you have to do is light a fuse. Throughout history, men have been both builders and destroyers. Too often, the latter.

     When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a 

Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.        

MOMENTS: 2 - DIVINE COUNTRIES

from Rattlesnake Dreams, pp. 515-516:


     In her wonderful Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, the Iranian professor of English literature Azar Nafisi writes of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini as conducting a “war against women....(60)” She also notes 

that during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, Iran used child soldiers to clear minefields ahead of tanks by walking over them. P.W. Singer, in Children at War, quotes Khomeini as saying that the children’s sacrifice in that war was “helping Iran to achieve a situation which we cannot describe in any other way except to say that it is a divine country(61).” Singer also notes that the young boys walking over mines wore keys around their necks “to signify their pending entrance into heaven.” A military history website lists the ages of those Iranian volunteers who cleared minefields by walking over them as “from only nine to more than fifty(62).”

     Divine country. 

     

60 Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Random House, 2008, p.111

61 Singer,Children at War.Op. cit., p. 22.

62 http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/iran-iraq.htm

     Just now I am remembering lines from the “Rifleman’s Prayer” we learned in boot camp:

To God and Country, Home and Corps

     Let me be faithful evermore.

                                   Amen(63)

     It will anger some that I draw a parallel between U.S. soldiers and their Nazi enemies wearing GOTT MIT UNS 

belt buckles. Or a similar parallel between us Marines being marched to chapel in boot camp to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” led by a chaplain with officer’s insignia

on one point of his shirt collar and a cross on the other, and Islamist extremists who call our soldiers “infidels” and “crusaders.” 

    But that’s my point. “Divine country” says it all: 

Your country will send you to war. We will give you a reason. The reason may or may not be true, or it may be a mixture of some truths and some outright lies. But the truth or falsity of those reasons is not your concern. Your job is to do what you’re told, without question, attack the people we tell you to attack, and risk or give up your life as you do this. Your country thanks you for your sacrifice. If you do not come home alive, we will thank your mother. We will give her a folded flag and a prayer to replace you.

63 From the Marines’ “Rifleman’s Prayer.” See above, p. 83.    

PROLOGUE

Prologue

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 the 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.

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 1st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal( ) 5½ months earlier; Americans had invaded North Africa 2½ months earlier. 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 502nd 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.


NEXT: Table of Contents, and a story or two from childhood.

ADESTE FIDELIS, SEMPER FIDELIS

               Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis

One of my strongest memories of the Marine Corps has my bayonet scabbarded, rather than parting the air in front of my rifle's muzzle as I and others walk through waisthigh grass in search of someone to kill. This memory has my rifle unloaded and slung underarm, muzzle down against the entry of December's Camp Pendleton mist into the barrel. Our enemies were the wet cold, sore feet, tired legs, not being able to sleep, not being HOME. 

     Grey gunmetal of ancient M1s, showing through worn blueing, was cousin to the fog. Steel rifle butt plates clanked black plastic canteen caps; the canteen caps' flat aluminum chains clinked. Soggy canvas packs disbalanced; straps chafed. Steel helmets weighed on stiff necks and caught our bodies' steamy heat and fogged the glasses of those of us stuck by tradition with the "foureyes" monicker. The column caterpillared to gravity's commands: men descending into a ravine slid and hurried and opened the distance between them only to bump against the bunched up men grunting up the other side. 

     It was some indeterminate part of the night, closer to dawn than to last evening's muddy dusk. We were a company of novitiates, already considering ourselves legendary because we'd finished Marine boot camp. But we were unblooded privates, marching in tired column toward the quonset-hut, fuel-oil-stove end of one of the last exercises of the three-weeklong Infantry Training Regiment (ITR), where we learned to fire, and to maneuver with, all the machine guns, mortars, grenades, automatic rifles, and rocket launchers in our nation's arsenal. 

     Every boyman of us was tired. We all wanted to lie down - the mud would have been fine - and sleep.      

     Some one along the accordioning column of homesick nascent heroes began to sing. At first the singer mumbled; the song stumbled. Then what always happens, in life and  at death’s door, happened: another Marine helped. The song spread along the column: "O come all ye faithful..." 

     Chins came off chests. Each of us began to judge footing by the bobbing of the faint silhouette of the helmet in front of him rather than by the dark-shrouded ground underfoot. "...joyful and tri-um-phant..." 

     The pace quickened. The column, which before the song had been an aggregation of tired blue adolescents, became a unit. Spacings evened; we got in step to the rhythm of the song. 

     We ran out of words we knew, but marched in a still attentive silence, keeping in step by the sound of our footfalls, reluctant to reenter the previous loneliness. A new wave rippled along the column: "Adeste fidelis..." Sure. Same song, words remembered now by youngsters brought up Catholic.

     My teenager's bones felt ancient. I felt myself to be one of a column of soldiers that was all soldiers, from all times, marching in mud, marching in snow, marching in hot sand, marching in jungles, marching on narrow trails clinging to mountains' shoulders, carrying weapons and packs, sweating and cursing, marching to a rhythm older than all of us, a cadence set by those before us, stepped off and chanted by us in our turn, to be followed after us by boys now still crawling, too young to walk, but who would be marching not many years after they learned to walk, to be followed after them by boys born of women not yet born themselves, all as we marched now. 

     I did not particularly like what I was doing, this marching in history's infinite column of young men. But I felt a stirring in me, as I imagine a Canada goose feels when autumn triggers something in its body saying it's time to fly south. So we rolled, swimming in our song, swapping languages as we ran out of what we knew, and learning more each time as, with the strength a group can give to one of its own, some isolated voice would bellow a remembered phrase into the now expectant fog ....

     "...come ye, O co-ome ye..." "I'm comin', honey, I'm comin'!" Laughter yelped along the column and flattened "...to Be-e-th-lehem." Those of us who'd never yet come inside a woman laughed loudest. 

     Sergeants, grinning into chinstraps, did not bark. They knew what we all knew, even if we didn't have words for it, even though we'd have mocked the words then had we heard them: that the United States Marine Corps is one of the core repositories of American patriotism and maleness; that it is, like the values it represents, an emotional rather than a thoughtful entity; that its primary attribute is faithfulness in the face - not just of death, but of plentiful, bodyripping, terrorborne, messy Death -and that the lineage of that faithfulness has much less to do with country and flag than with each man's loyalty to the man on either side of him when the combat would become so fierce and otherworldly that none but they could have the slightest notion of what it was about. 

     In my memory, it was that night that I entered the brotherhood of warriors.

WHAT IS GOOD

     A major portion of the human male spirit has been woefully, cruelly, out-of-balance for millenia. We all know men who would never think of reaching for a weapon to solve a problem, who simply work hard to support families, raise their kids as best they can, and go fishing on weekends if they’re lucky. But the world also knows many more who do, or have, reflexively resorted to force, or offered their persons to an armed group who used force. And force is the boss in human affairs. Force owns a terrible leverage: it magnifies itself until patently baseless arguments and ideas carry the day.     

     Another way of saying this is that it’s easier to destroy than to build. It takes months of sweaty work to build a house; to destroy it, all you have to do is light a fuse. Throughout history, men have been both builders and destroyers. Too often, the latter.

     When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a 

Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.        

     Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” which was falsely made to look like it had been necessary, and which needlessly cost 4 million human lives, give or take.

     We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us. 

     The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.

     The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with the reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.     

     Evil isn't what we have to fear. It isn’t “terrorism,” or “communism,” or “al Queda,” or Osama bin Laden, or some other designated evil. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, especially including our deepest  beliefs. 

     These are the beliefs and ideas we are willing to fight over. They are the beliefs and ideas which inspire us to send our sons - and now, some of our daughters - to war. They are the ones which cause us to be willing to trade the lives of kids barely out of high school for a piece of red, white, and blue cloth folded into a tidy triangle. 

     Those deep beliefs constitute the human mechanism which we use to slaughter our young. Doing this, we create committed and powerful enemies around the world, eager to do battle with a new generation of our youth.

     This set of deeply held beliefs about what is good-especially that deadly nexus of religion and patriotism - is what we should study until it breaks open to the light.

END