Rattlesnake Dreams: An American Warrior's Story
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....
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Saturday, July 2, 2016
Monday, June 27, 2016
GUATEMALA: LA VIOLENCIA
Guatemala:
La Violencia
In the late 1980’s,
my friend Roger Bunch and I were in southern Mexico, on our way to Guatemala.
Roger had been spending considerable time there – often more than a year at a
time – and had developed a number of close friendships, including some among
the indigenous Mayan people. That gave him a record of acquaintances with
people who had known and trusted him since before la violencia, which was the
name commonly applied specifically to the years 1981-82, and more generally to
the entire decade, as continued resistance by leftist guerrillas gave the
Guatemalan military an excuse to prosecute a near “scorched earth” campaign in
some of the regions primarily occupied by indigenous Mayan people –
historically, the poorest people in the country. They were also the majority of
the population.
Our idea was to use
Roger’s contacts and familiarity with the country to introduce me to people who
had stories to tell about the history of systematic killing and repression,
particularly under General José Efraín Rios Montt, the Roman Catholic-cum-Evangelical
minister-cum de facto President and trusted friend of, and recipient of
military aid and public praise from, U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
Roger had friends in
San Cristobal de las Casas, a lovely Mexican town in the state of Chiapas, near
the Guatemalan border. We stayed there for a couple of days, then went off the
beaten path to a smaller town – I think it was Las Margaritas - nearer the
border, and eventually to a small cluster of thatched makeshift homes of
Guatemalan Mayan refugees who had managed to escape across the border during la
violencia.
Roger now asked in
the refugee camp for a specific Mayan man, by name. After a few minutes’ wait,
a man appeared and approached us cautiously. Roger introduced us and we sat on
stools in one of the huts.
Roger had a
photo, several years old, of himself with a Guatemalan Mayan man.
By itself, it meant
nothing. But both men were readily identifiable, and Roger’s friend, the other
man in the photo, had written a note about Roger on the back, and signed it.
Roger handed the photo to this man, and sat quietly. The man looked at the
photo for a long time. Then he turned it over and read the note on the back for
a long time. Then he turned it back over and looked at the picture, again, for
a long time. Then he looked up at Roger. His nod was the acknowledgement: I see
that you are a friend of someone I trust. His face was now a question: what
do you want?
Roger introduced me
again, this time into a human situation that was categorically different from
what it had been a few minutes before. He said that I could be trusted. He said
I was a writer, a journalist who could get stories published about things that
had happened in Indian towns in Guatemala. I could be trusted to name no names,
to tell no details, that would endanger the life of the teller of a story, but
that I could still tell the story to people in the United States, the same
people who elected the presidents who were instrumental in giving military aid
to Guatemala. The rest went unsaid; didn’t need to be said. It would have been
like telling an Iowa farmer that too much rain at the wrong time might damage
his corn crop.
The man was quiet.
His head was bowed. He was sad. His sadness filled the hut. His sadness made us
quiet, made us parishioners in the church of his sadness. He took a deep
breath, let it out, spoke. I don’t have his exact words. But this is what he
said:
The
soldiers came to our village. They gathered the young men who were there at the
time. They tied their hands behind. They lined them up in front of the rest of
us, their families. They painted them - their hair, their faces, all over -
with gasoline. Then they lit them... Some of them we could only identify by
their belt buckles....
I have seen – we all
have seen, those of us who have been so lucky as to have a few decades of life
behind us – a number of American Presidents, speaking with utmost sincerity, on
national television, appealing to us to believe their explanations of things,
of what was happening to all of us, of what must be done in the face of the
events of a particular time.
I have never seen, on
the face of any one of those Presidents – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon,
Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama - anything that made me
believe he was telling the truth as that Mayan man in an unofficial refugee
camp near the Guatemalan border made me believe that he was telling the truth.
I have read numbers
from 100,000 to 200,000 Mayans who were killed in this virulent attempt to
eliminate “subversivos,” which often came to mean
anyone who lived in a village where even one person was suspected by the army,
or by any informer, of being supportive of the leftist guerrillas.
Friday, June 17, 2016
Monday, May 2, 2016
HAULING ANCHOR IN SHELTER COVE
A SHORT NOTE: As the story makes clear, things described here happened during the early 1970s; I'm writing this note May 4, 2016. The first paragraphs tell of my leaving grad school, and my chosen career as a philosophy professor-to-be, after having one of my worst-ever post-combat nightmares. That nightmare is included here, because it occurred during the period of my life when, out of anger, I was writing them down. That nightmare is Dream: A6 and Wolves.
I think, or at least hope, that the writing here is pretty dense. Like the events I'm writing about. But if anyone finds any phrase or paragraph opaque or unclear and wants to ask what it means, I would welcome your questions by email: 3dmetcalf@gmail.com.
THIS IS A CHAPTER from my memoir, Rattlesnake Dreams(c)2010. After 4 years (1,450 days) of the Marine Corps, then visits as a journalist in 1968 to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, I was discharged from the Marine Corps and entered a UC Santa Cruz (CA) Ph.D. program.
Dream: A6 and Wolves
I am sitting at the top of a mountain of wolves. Its surface writhes as they attack me. Though they are so numerous as to form a moving mass that stretches down the hill as far as I can see, I do not experience them as a mass, but rather as an infinity of giant individual wolves, each of which is making a heroic, fiercely intentional effort to kill me. I see each wolf with perfect clarity. They are all identical. They are bigger than any wild or domestic canine, the size of a horse colt too tall to walk under its mother's belly. And all are of that perfect obsidian blackness that absorbs most light yet throws off highlights like electrical sparks. Their heads are the size of a bear's head. Their jaws are all open wide enough to take my head inside, which is what they are trying to do. Their teeth are pure white, and throw off glints of light like the highlights thrown off by their churning obsidian bodies. Their fangs are the size of my fingers. Their eyes and tongues and the tissue in their open mouths are crimson, like arterial blood. I am firing a machine gun at the wolves. It's a U.S. model A6 .30 caliber, aircooled, tripod mounted weapon with a pistol grip, the kind used in the Korean War by people like Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers, one of my drill instructors at boot camp. It is also the same machine gun I'd used as a pillow in the hut in the jungle in Laos. The hill itself, and the way it's covered by waves of wolves attacking me, also spring from the pictures my imagination painted when Gunny Rogers told about human wave attacks against Marine positions by Chinese soldiers at the Chosin reservoir, and the slaughter that ensued. I am killing the wolves like those Marines killed the Chinese. They are piling up in front of the gun. Each time I kill a wolf, it drops, snarling, on the pile of its dead brothers. Before I have time to recover, a new lead attacker takes its place, climbing the pile of dead and writhing wolves with that swift, murderous intentionality I once saw in the movement of the legs of a pit bull terrier that was chasing me as I passed a farmstead on a bicycle. I am allowed to waste no instant. Each wolf moves so that the death of his brother shields his approach, and he is springing for me even as I swing the gun. No wolf dies until I see his wild red eyes up close, until I feel the shock of his great teeth snapping shut barely in front of my face, until I look into the cavernous red maw, open now to take my face inside it, until I feel his hot breath, until I see the bullets slam into his throat and mouth and skull, just in front of the gun's muzzle. So it goes, into the night, wolf after attacking wolf, each attack a new mortal emergency, made more urgent by requirements to change ammunition belts and to unscrew and replace overheated barrels with my bare hands, with never a moment to make a slip, to waste an instant, or to call for help; and no help to call for.
I awoke from the dream, dressed, rode my bicycle to campus, and told Professor Wolin that I would be leaving at the end of the quarter. The evening before the dream, I'd had no inkling that I would be leaving graduate school. The dream had blasted me bodily out of the life I had known, the academic future I had planned.
We must haul it. Ella and I look at Dick, at each other. We all know. I move my hand up and down, in the same rhythm as the seas. Dick nods. He comes out of the wheelhouse. The engine is at idle, which means we are drifting toward shore. The three of us lean over the cable, wait for the bow to drop into a trough, then scramble to beat gravity, to take advantage of the momentarily lesser weight of the anchor and chain and cable to take in a few feet more, then brace for the moment when the bow starts up the sea on the far side of the trough, making the weight we're holding multiply itself. The plummeting weight crunches us against the bulkheads, against each other, slams us to our knees on the plank deck, steals some of the cable we've just earned.
I think, or at least hope, that the writing here is pretty dense. Like the events I'm writing about. But if anyone finds any phrase or paragraph opaque or unclear and wants to ask what it means, I would welcome your questions by email: 3dmetcalf@gmail.com.
THIS IS A CHAPTER from my memoir, Rattlesnake Dreams(c)2010. After 4 years (1,450 days) of the Marine Corps, then visits as a journalist in 1968 to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, I was discharged from the Marine Corps and entered a UC Santa Cruz (CA) Ph.D. program.
Back at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1970, I got a job as teaching
assistant in Political Philosophy for Professor Sheldon Wolin, a
nationally known professor and writer whose best-known book was Politics and Vision.
During the winter quarter, Wolin had decided to include works by
Asian writers, because the Vietnam war was still such a big factor in
everyone's lives. Readings from the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung were on the list, in particular On Protracted War,
Mao's treatise stressing the importance of the relationship between
political and military factors in conducting revolutionary or
anti-imperial war.
I had devoured much of that material - obsessively, as usual - along with People's War, People's Army,
by Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who had commanded the forces
which defeated first the French, then us Americans. As Wolin and I
talked, he decided that, although he always lectured to the entire class
and the job of teaching assistants like me was to lead discussion
groups of a smaller number of students, in this case I should give the
lecture to the class as a whole, because of the combination of my
experiences in Vietnam, reading, and journalism in Southeast Asia.
I re-immersed myself in the writings of Mao and Giap, even going back to Sun Tzu's thousands-of-years-old classic, The Art of War.
When the time for my lecture came, I think I was too overwrought to do
as good a job as I might have. What I tried to say was that Mao and Giap
had invented a new calculus, which performed a new kind of summation of
historical factors to make the answer come out in their favor. I drew
on the blackboard a rough outline of the map of China, then put in
symbols to represent the massive buildup of Japanese military power
there during the 1930's. The map showed that the Japanese Navy
controlled the coastal waters of China, and had strong garrisons
guarding major port cities, rail lines, highways, et cetera. The Chinese
fighters for independence, which at that time - the buildup to WWII -
included both Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Nationalists), had a tiny fraction of the weapons the Japanese possessed.
But, in spite of Mao's famous saying that "power grows out of the
barrel of a gun," he taught that guns weren't the whole story. With the
proper political organization, political will, and military strategy and
tactics, China's huge population could overcome the Japanese
occupation. Since they didn't have enough weapons but had so many
people, they'd use people to get the weapons. Attacks would be planned
on isolated Japanese outposts, with all the weapons the Chinese could
gather in the hands of the leading attackers, who would overwhelm a
small number of well-armed Japanese and escape to fight again, next time
with more weapons.
I used, as an example, Gunny Rogers' tales in boot camp of waves of
attacking Chinese soldiers being slaughtered by U.S. Marines' machine
guns at the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, noting that
although the Chinese took huge losses, they drove Allied forces back
south of the 38th parallel.
I don't know what effect my lecture had on the class. But soon after I gave it, I had this dream.
Dream: A6 and Wolves
I am sitting at the top of a mountain of wolves. Its surface writhes as they attack me. Though they are so numerous as to form a moving mass that stretches down the hill as far as I can see, I do not experience them as a mass, but rather as an infinity of giant individual wolves, each of which is making a heroic, fiercely intentional effort to kill me. I see each wolf with perfect clarity. They are all identical. They are bigger than any wild or domestic canine, the size of a horse colt too tall to walk under its mother's belly. And all are of that perfect obsidian blackness that absorbs most light yet throws off highlights like electrical sparks. Their heads are the size of a bear's head. Their jaws are all open wide enough to take my head inside, which is what they are trying to do. Their teeth are pure white, and throw off glints of light like the highlights thrown off by their churning obsidian bodies. Their fangs are the size of my fingers. Their eyes and tongues and the tissue in their open mouths are crimson, like arterial blood. I am firing a machine gun at the wolves. It's a U.S. model A6 .30 caliber, aircooled, tripod mounted weapon with a pistol grip, the kind used in the Korean War by people like Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers, one of my drill instructors at boot camp. It is also the same machine gun I'd used as a pillow in the hut in the jungle in Laos. The hill itself, and the way it's covered by waves of wolves attacking me, also spring from the pictures my imagination painted when Gunny Rogers told about human wave attacks against Marine positions by Chinese soldiers at the Chosin reservoir, and the slaughter that ensued. I am killing the wolves like those Marines killed the Chinese. They are piling up in front of the gun. Each time I kill a wolf, it drops, snarling, on the pile of its dead brothers. Before I have time to recover, a new lead attacker takes its place, climbing the pile of dead and writhing wolves with that swift, murderous intentionality I once saw in the movement of the legs of a pit bull terrier that was chasing me as I passed a farmstead on a bicycle. I am allowed to waste no instant. Each wolf moves so that the death of his brother shields his approach, and he is springing for me even as I swing the gun. No wolf dies until I see his wild red eyes up close, until I feel the shock of his great teeth snapping shut barely in front of my face, until I look into the cavernous red maw, open now to take my face inside it, until I feel his hot breath, until I see the bullets slam into his throat and mouth and skull, just in front of the gun's muzzle. So it goes, into the night, wolf after attacking wolf, each attack a new mortal emergency, made more urgent by requirements to change ammunition belts and to unscrew and replace overheated barrels with my bare hands, with never a moment to make a slip, to waste an instant, or to call for help; and no help to call for.
I awoke from the dream, dressed, rode my bicycle to campus, and told Professor Wolin that I would be leaving at the end of the quarter. The evening before the dream, I'd had no inkling that I would be leaving graduate school. The dream had blasted me bodily out of the life I had known, the academic future I had planned.
I lived in a tiny apartment in San Francisco for a month, got rid of
everything I owned except what I could carry in a backpack and two small
boxes of books I stored with my friend Peter Balcziunas, and hitchhiked
to Oregon.
I had no luck, because I wasn't an experienced deck hand. I started hanging around the bars in Astoria, asking about work on the fishing boats that docked there. One day in the Mermaid Tavern, I got to talking with the man on the next bar stool. His name was Dick Matthews, and he and his wife owned a tuna and salmon boat, the Anna Marie.
I had no luck, because I wasn't an experienced deck hand. I started hanging around the bars in Astoria, asking about work on the fishing boats that docked there. One day in the Mermaid Tavern, I got to talking with the man on the next bar stool. His name was Dick Matthews, and he and his wife owned a tuna and salmon boat, the Anna Marie.
Quartet: Fish
1. Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove
The albacore, and a small fleet of jig boats following them, were off
the California coast outside San Simeon, where William Randolph Hearst
had his castle built. It began to blow, with gusts in the range of
thirty to forty knots. That made the seas too nasty for fishing from
these boats. The wind itself made the trolling lines pretty useless
anyway; they flailed about and jerked the lures out of the water too
much of the time.
A dozen or so boats made for the anchorage at San Simeon. Dick Matthews pointed the bow of the Anna Marie a
little north of east, and we pulled in among the other boats already at
anchor about midafternoon. He found a space open enough for the boat to
swing on its anchor cable with a change in tidal current, and we
dropped the hook. I stayed on deck to keep watch, lest we or a nearby
boat should drag anchor and head toward its neighbor. Dick and his wife
Ella went into the wheelhouse and relaxed with the two kids, taking
their time and making an evening meal for all of us on the galley's
diesel cook stove.
Shelter Cove was a good enough anchorage, but it wasn't perfect. It
offered only partial protection from northwest winds, which was what we
were trying to escape. And as darkness came, more and more boats slipped
into the cove from outside, so that it would have been considered
pretty crowded even in calm weather.
The weather wasn't calm. Though we'd escaped the brunt of the blow
that was still howling offshore, the wind in the cove itself was over
twenty knots, which is a little gnarly for being at anchor anyway. And
the swells from outside continued to roll in under us, slide up the
beach, and turn into a surf that pounded the rocks well within sight and
hearing. No one, on any boat in the cove that day, could have been
without some fear of dragging anchor and being swept onto the rocky
beach. Dick got on the “Mickey Mouse” - the short range CB radio - and
talked with skippers of a couple of boats near us. We all agreed to keep
a continuous watch.
We ate our dinner as it got dark, and took our time cleaning the
dishes and galley. Dick and Ella put the kids to bed in the forecastle,
and we sat and talked awhile. Our conversation ranged here and there, to
people we knew, places we'd been, schools we'd studied at - Dick had
graduated Summa Cum Laude after three years at Harvard - but the
talk kept circling back to where we were, and to the wind. We kept
hoping the wind and seas would die down, but they didn't.
Our anchor was holding in the sandy bottom. So, apparently, were
those of the boats near us. Things looked not great, but not terrible
either. We all agreed that we could sleep, which we needed badly after
bucking several days of heavy weather outside, but that I should bring
my sleeping bag up and roll it out on the hatch cover, to keep a closer
eye and ear on the boat, the weather, and the sea.
Sometime during the night, I started awake, feeling something wrong
but not knowing what. Dick burst from the wheelhouse door, half
dressed.
The anchorage was a snarl of frenetic activity. The wind had suddenly
picked up, and just as suddenly changed direction 180 degrees. Boats
pivoted too fast and too far on their anchor cables. Diesel engines
roared into the wind as skippers maneuvered their boats up to
now-dragging anchors and raised them, while trying to avoid collisions
with other boats attempting the same maneuver. Radio channels crowded
with urgent voices as men shuffled who should move through which opening
first, in the scramble to get under power and out of the cove. Too
preoccupied to go into detail, Dick said something about having heard
about occasional contrary winds that would swoop down one of the canyons
that footed on the cove, then quickly die out and give way to another
such wind howling down a different canyon from a different direction.
Dick started the main engine. Ella and I went forward to the bow to
watch for other boats and make sure the anchor cable coiled properly
onto its drum. Dick engaged the anchor winch. Nothing happened. The
winch whirred, but the cable didn't move, didn't pull the Anna Marie toward her anchor, not a foot.
Just when we needed it - desperately - the anchor winch had failed. There had been no warning.
The kids woke up. An emergency at sea sends shock waves through a
small vessel; something beyond unwonted noises or motions of the boat
will snap sleeping humans back from any momentary forgetfulness that
they are, after all, at sea, and that the combined power of wind and
water can take you down quickly, without warning.
Dick and Ella at first thought to put the kids back in their bunks
below decks, so we'd be free to work. But they looked at each other and I
could see agreement pass between them. Hunh-uh. Not below decks,
not now. Ella got them into their life jackets and told them to wait in
the wheelhouse, where they could see us through its forward windows,
and we could see them.
While she did that, Dick had been looking over the winch, trying to
find the problem. He turned to us with apology, and the beginnings of
panic, on his face. He directed a questioning look at me. "I'm not much
of a mechanic," I said. I'd spent time at sea in the service, but as a
Marine aboard ships of the "gator navy," not as a seaman. The Anna Marie was my first experience as a deckhand, and I'd only been aboard a couple of weeks since Dick and I met at the Mermaid Tavern.
We knelt at the winch, while Ella made nervous trips from rail to
rail, watching for other boats, pausing to reassure Christina and Alec
at the wheelhouse window, tow heads sprouted from orange life jackets. I
felt her conflict: one instinct told her to stay with the children, to
hold them, to shut out the world for them. Her knowledge of that world
told her in equally strong terms that the survival of her children
depended more on avoiding a collision with another boat than on
comforting them. So she had to endure the yawning distance of several
feet from them, had to bear their pleas like a cross.
"What's wrong with it?" I asked Dick as we knelt by the winch
housing, the size of a kneeling man, bolted to the foredeck immediately
in front of the wheelhouse. "What's supposed to happen isn't happening,"
he said. I didn't know if I could help with the mechanical situation,
but it was becoming apparent that Dick was beginning to be afraid that
his spirit of adventure had gotten him in over his head, and that his
life and that of his wife and their two very young children might be in
the balance. But he was still the skipper, the only one who could really
handle the boat. Somehow, I would have to help him, to inject some
calmness into his bloodstream so that we didn't lose what was still our
most valuable resource: our captain. As we knelt by the anchor winch,
neither of us could avoid hearing the surf crashing on the rocks not far
astern; nor could we shut out the knowledge that the wind was dragging
us toward them.
"These two are supposed to engage," Dick was saying, putting his hand
on the side of the winch where a heavy cylinder about a foot and a half
in diameter rotated freely in the housing. The rotating part was
connected to the winch's motor, and was turning fine. But the larger
ring that was concentric with it, with a separation of an eighth of an
inch, wasn't moving. That ring was the drum that, when the lever was
thrown to engage the winch, was supposed to rotate along with the
cylinder at its core, and reel in the anchor cable with enough power to
haul the Anna Marie up to her anchor.
The winch housing was a smooth casting, with no way to even see
inside it short of unbolting the whole thing from the deck and lifting
it off, a job that would require a crane, and much more time than we
had. That was drydock work.
"So, if this..." I pointed to the spinning cylinder – engages
this..." – I put my hand on the larger stationary ring – "...and turns
it, then the winch will work?" I asked. "Should," Dick said.
"Do you have any of those little steel wedges we use to drive into
the end of a hammer or axe handle, to tighten a loose head?" I asked.
"No."
"Got any spikes, or big nails, or any other soft steel?"
He brightened a little. "Nails, I've got nails."
"Got a cold chisel?"
"Yes."
"Get me nails, cold chisel, hammer, hack saw if you got it, a pair of channellocks or visegrips to hold the nails."
He disappeared below, obviously grateful to be doing something, and for the appearance of another shoulder under his load.
I knelt on the deck by the large steel cleat between the anchor winch
and the bow. Dick came back with the nails - 16 penny bright commons -
and the tools.
"These your biggest nails?"
"Yes."
"They'll have to do."
Ella continued her patrol, slipping past us as she moved from one
rail to the opposite one, stopping where the kids still had their heads
and arms stuffed through open windows of the wheelhouse. She made an
occasional quick detour aft to check for danger there.
I shut out the world of wind and seas and other boats. They were
Ella's responsibility now; she would handle it. The world narrowed,
slowed. Long instants, like fat ripe fruits of time, floated before me
to be picked. The universe was a small ellipsoid with two focal points:
the cleat and the winch. I used the cleat for an anvil.
"Dick. Hold this nail with the pliers, here." I hammer end of nail
into wedge, cut it off with cold chisel. One blow, one cut. Quick,
deliberate. Each piece a wedge. Blacksmith rhythm now, WHAMPta, WHAMPta, WHAMPta....
A small pile of steel wedges. "Dick, disengage the winch. Drive these
wedges into the crack, the ring between the cylinder and the cable drum.
Ella. Need another hammer. Dick. Place each wedge across the circle
from the last one; always opposite pairs, points of a compass. Try it
now, engage the winch. "It turns! ah, slips again. Okay. Disengage. More
wedges. Try it again. It turns, it turns!"
But it turned with only enough power to pull in slack cable. When the
slack was taken up, and the boat's tonnage straightened the cable, it
slipped again.
Ella, Dick, and I talk about options: we can hacksaw the cable, kiss
off thirty or forty fathoms of cable, the anchor chain, the anchor, get
the fuck out of this maelstrom. But then we'd be back out in the
weather, with no anchor to get us behind shelter somewhere else, in case
the wind out there gets even worse than it is now.
Can we pull it in by hand? Can we get a few feet at a time, use the
winch to take up the slack cable, pull again? The cable has to go on the
winch. If we just take it up and drop it on deck, it will turn into an
unmanageable snarl. A coil or two falls overboard, slides aft, gets
caught in the propeller, rips the drive shaft out through the hull, down
we go, glub glub.
In a safe harbor, in quiet water, one strong person can get a line on
a piling and brace against a boat's rib or a deck cleat and lean into
it and move – very slowly - a boat the size of the Anna Marie. With no opposing force but the friction of the water, and no hurry, it can be done, a foot at a time.
In Shelter Cove, we were in a frenzy of forces so much bigger than
our physical selves that we were toys, rag dolls tossed by a nasty sea.
What source of power do we have? We have the engine. "Ella. We're
stronger. Take the wheel." (This is Dick talking now, he is the captain
again). "Pull us forward, slowly, a little bit, till I say stop. We'll
pull a few yards of cable onto the forecastle by hand, then you hold
that position while we coil the slack cable with the winch. Then we do
it again."
Ella tried mightily, concentrating, forcing herself to ignore her
children in order to save them, trying to feel the wheel and the
throttle and to translate our shouts into the right movements of her own
hands. But Dick had always handled the boat in harbors and
in any touchy situation, that's the captain's job.
She couldn't do it, she hadn't been trained. She missed the timing, the Anna Marie
lurched against her cable and made our wedges slip; or she went too far
forward and the cable looped down in the water, slid aft along the
gunwale, too close to the propeller. Dick would have to take the wheel.
Ella and I would have to pull the cable. There was no other way. They
traded places, remorse smudging both faces as they passed.
Dick got on the horn, tersely told nearby skippers our situation.
They took responsibility for staying clear of us. They all hauled their
anchors and turned out to sea. They kept in touch with us. One or two
pulled away but stayed within sight, using their engines and rudders to
buck this way and that into winds that would change direction ninety
degrees or more in a minute.
O what a nice touch Dick had. He became inspired, a poet of throttle
and kingpin. He relaxed, he rode the seas, he read the seas, he felt the
tension on the cable, he watched the meager coils of cable we'd dump to
the deck, he took my shouts and headwags as if made by parts of his own
body, turning them into just the right easing forward, just the right
holding of a position relative to the anchor. He timed the rhythm of his
throttling with the rise and fall of the seas, so that when the bow
dropped into a trough, Ella and I would have several feet of slack that
we didn't have to fight for, and when the bow started to rise on the
next sea, he'd ease off so we wouldn't get yanked overboard, or have our
hands slammed into the bowstem, or lose all the cable we'd just
earned.
Ella pulled cable like John Henry's wife drove steel. We bent beside
each other, on either side of the cable, each bracing both feet against
the point where the two sides met at the bowstem, and we pulled, four
gloved hands on the cable. She didn't care about the leather of the
gloves tearing, she didn't care about her hands tearing on the broken
steel strands, she just pulled, she didn't care about the slamming of
her kneecaps against the bow, she didn't care about the ominous
compaction of her vertebrae when her refusal to slide her grip, to give
up cable earned, suddenly transferred the pull of a tricky wave along
the cable to our coiled backs. She wanted every inch of that cable, she
would by God have it, she didn't care about the hair in her eyes, she
didn't care how she looked, she didn't seem to care about the fact that
we were both pulling on the same cable, and that the bulkheads we were
braced against formed a sharp corner at the bow which made a tight pile
of our four rubber-booted feet and jammed her body against the body of a
man she hardly knew, she didn't care that she mingled straining arms
with me, she didn't care that she butted heads with me.
That, she laughed at. She laughed and pulled.
We would get some coils on deck; Ella would jump over and engage the
winch. Dick would keep us steady. I’d hold the cable to keep it from
sliding back overboard. We'd reel the slack cable onto the drum. Then
we'd pull in more cable, and dump it in slack coils on the fo’c’sle
deck.
Slowly, over the minutes or centuries or whatever game Time was
playing then, the angle of the cable, where it snaked down into the
water from the bow, changed. It steepened.
Finally, the cable pointed straight down. We were directly over the anchor. Shit.
We hadn't thought this far. It was one thing - one groaning, tearing,
tissue-sacrificing thing - to haul fathoms of cable aboard the Anna Marie
till she was above the anchor. But could we lift the anchor? "What does
it weigh?" "175 pounds." "What does the chain weigh, the fathoms of
heavy links between the cable and the anchor?" "I donno. Probably more
than the anchor."
But now we have to raise it. We're no longer anchored- the pick is
bobbing up and down in the blackness above the ocean floor - and we
can't get under way either, because our forward motion would sweep the
anchor aft, now hanging free on fifteen fathoms of cable and chain, and
draw the cable into the prop. We can't stay in one place; the seas will
put us on the rocks.
We must haul it. Ella and I look at Dick, at each other. We all know. I move my hand up and down, in the same rhythm as the seas. Dick nods. He comes out of the wheelhouse. The engine is at idle, which means we are drifting toward shore. The three of us lean over the cable, wait for the bow to drop into a trough, then scramble to beat gravity, to take advantage of the momentarily lesser weight of the anchor and chain and cable to take in a few feet more, then brace for the moment when the bow starts up the sea on the far side of the trough, making the weight we're holding multiply itself. The plummeting weight crunches us against the bulkheads, against each other, slams us to our knees on the plank deck, steals some of the cable we've just earned.
The Anna Marie,
no longer under power, turns slowly sideways, lying in the trough, her
bow shaking side to side like a terrier killing a rat. We can't handle
the combined violence of up and down and side to side. Dick has to go
back to the controls, has to wrestle the throttle and the rudder and
the wind and the seas and the position of the cable and himself until we
are again facing into the seas, with the anchor dangling directly below
the bowstem. He must stay there. Ella and I must haul the anchor and
chain. We are drifting closer to where the surf is crashing on the
rocks.
Ella and I work with the rhythm again, stealing precious feet of
cable from the ocean as the bow drops. One of us has an idea. Just
before the boat starts to climb the side of a new sea, multiplying
gravity's effect and tearing the cable through our hands, we push down
hard on the cable just inside where it crosses the bowsprit, so that it
crimps just enough to give us a mechanical advantage. We become a
two-human ratchet, able to hold against the extra weight.
We are pulling the cable and it stops dead, before we hit the bottom
of the trough. Something's wrong, something mechanical. We crimp it and
wait for the next trough, poke our heads over the bow, look down. The
first fat link of the anchor chain is lodged against the steel plate at
the point of the bow. "Dick, the chain! the chain!" We're
only a few fathoms from the anchor now. There is plenty of space
between the protective plate and the ring that arches over it like a
ferrule on a fishing rod to keep the cable or chain in place. But the
increased diameter of the chain means that we'll have to get the first
link of the chain several inches higher, and without tension, to pass it
through the ring.
For that we need slack.
"Ella. Next trough, I'll reach over, lift chain and anchor from
outside, give you slack. Get the first couple of links through the ring,
then crimp it down and hold for your life, that's all we need the first
time is two links inside and hold."
We do it, I heave one lunge, she drops the links inside the bowstem
and holds them, risking her hands. I swing one hand inside to hold with
her, the weight tears the chain out of my other hand as the Anna Marie hits the far side of the trough and lunges skyward.
But we have captured the beginning of the chain. We keep working that
way, pulling in the chain. It is very different from the cable. It
gives us a better grip, and holds more surely when crimped. But slippage
of a chain that size, pulling a committed grip across a steel plate,
does not mean torn tissue. It means mangled hands, missing fingers.
More of the weight is coming aboard now. Our load is lightening. The
coils of cable on the anchor winch are covered by coils of chain. Now
comes the anchor, rusted flukes dipping in and out of the water. Ella
and I lean over and just haul, straight up, knowing this is it, knowing
that the few feet of chain still out aren't enough to reach the
propeller and foul it, that our remaining danger is to leave the anchor
dangling from the bow where it could knock a hole in the planking, but ho,
there is no fucking way that fucking pick is not coming afuckingboard
now, we reach down and grab the anchor together and heave it like Judo
wrestlers up and over the bowstem, we fall in a wet clanking heap with
it to the fo'c'sle deck. Dick guns the engine, the Anna Marie
shakes her fanny at the rocky beach, we head for open sea, one woman,
two men, a little girl named Christina, a little boy named Alec, and one
Jimmy 671 diesel engine all screaming into the wind.
Weeks later, after I was hired aboard another boat, Dick and I ran
into each other in the Caravan Bar in Monterey. We got to swapping
stories. After he'd told me about putting Ella and the kids ashore in
Bolinas and fishing alone for a few days, I told him about my new
skipper and boat, Doyl Myers and the Dora B. We paused. Dick wanted to talk about the night in Shelter Cove.
He said he'd been scared, that he hadn't had a clue as to what to do
about the anchor winch, that mostly he'd just had this dreadful feeling
that things were falling apart, and that nothing he could do as skipper
or husband or father would be able to hold his world together. But I had
found a way, he said.
"How did you do that?" he asked.
I thought for a long moment. My answer surprised both of us.
"Vietnam," I said. What did I mean, he asked. I said it had been like
combat. I told him about things moving in slow motion, about there being
enough time to move, about getting inside the fear and snuggling it and
about making the situation into a technical problem rather than an
emotional one. I told him about the time after Tho An when our company commander
had told us to be ready to assault with fixed bayonets into a village
which sounded like it had two or three .50 caliber machine guns on the enemy side, and I'd slept soundly for eight hours so I'd be ready.
The other thing I learned about war that night in Shelter Cove I
don't think I told Dick during our talk in the bar. It came to me
gradually over the years. It was that working as we had on the boats,
especially as Ella and Dick and I had done hauling the anchor, had
satisfied some of the deepest hungers in me, needs that I've come to
know had sent me to war more surely than the reasons I'd been given, and
which I had given to myself at the time: the need to be in danger and
to perform my way out of it, to save something or someone precious, and
to be recognized for having done it.
Saturday, April 30, 2016
ANY LITTLE THING (poem)
This poem happened one evening in front of the wood stove in my log cabin on Old Ski Run road, above Joseph, Oregon. The day before, looking out the cabin window, I saw something which I still remember, years later.
Copyright(c) Dean Metcalf
3/20-21/2000
Any Little Thing
In any thing
in
any one tiny thing – choose,
say,
one of the firewood chips scattered across
the
dark brown band of the goat hair rug
on
my cabin floor, or choose the red fox
I saw out this window yesterday
stopping,
turning its head so alertly
that
it seemed to be radioactive, sitting
long
enough to allow me to admire it, then
darting
off across the same crust of snow
I
would break through
when
I walked up to see
its
dainty doggy tracks. Choose
the
chip, choose the fox,
choose
the empty Gatorade bottle
lying
on its side
on
this same rug. I
don’t
give a shit: choose
anything
you want. In that
chip
of lodgepole pine, in that
red
fox glittering like some new red sun
against
the twilit snow,
in
that plastic jug, or in this
goddamned
little keychain, guitar pick,
chopstick,
moth, you name it,
in
any one small thing you
care
to name, there is a window
a
clear enough window
on
everything.
Copyright(c) Dean Metcalf
Saturday, October 17, 2015
There's a new way to get RATTLESNAKE DREAMS in both paperback and ebook versions. NOTE: My intention is not to completely remove myself from Amazon. Instead, I want to inform my readers that the latest version of Rattlesnake Dreams (both paperback and ebook) is no longer on Amazon. It's now being offered on INGRAM, instead of Amazon.
The direction in which I want to move, by offering my books on INGRAM, is to put my books in BOOKSTORES. (YAY!) It's taken me a long time to get to this point, but it's time. I won't close off sales through Amazon, because they have developed the easiest way for readers to buy books. But they also don't offer readers to buy clients' (in this case, me) books in, or from, bookstores. So I'm offering MY books (Rattlesnake Dreams, both paperback and ebook) on KINDLE, as before. But my emphasis is now shifting to INGRAM, so my books can be found, bought, and ordered in BOOKSTORES. Wish me luck!
Click to see the list of bookstores to find Rattlesnake Dreams
The direction in which I want to move, by offering my books on INGRAM, is to put my books in BOOKSTORES. (YAY!) It's taken me a long time to get to this point, but it's time. I won't close off sales through Amazon, because they have developed the easiest way for readers to buy books. But they also don't offer readers to buy clients' (in this case, me) books in, or from, bookstores. So I'm offering MY books (Rattlesnake Dreams, both paperback and ebook) on KINDLE, as before. But my emphasis is now shifting to INGRAM, so my books can be found, bought, and ordered in BOOKSTORES. Wish me luck!
Click to see the list of bookstores to find Rattlesnake Dreams
Monday, September 8, 2014
INTERVIEW WITH BILL GANDALL
Interview with Bill Gandall
NOTE: I interviewed Bill Gandall March 2, 1988, at the Veterans' Memorial Building in Santa Cruz, California. He gave his dates of service in the U.S. Marine Corps as November 9, 1926, to November 9, 1930.
I tape recorded the interview, then transcribed it myself, editing for brevity only. Here, I have changed the order of some things he said, to spare the reader some of the jumping back and forth that Bill did as he talked. Other than that, this is what he said, the way he said it.
BG: My father was a railroad worker, and I lived in a lot of these towns as a kid, like Savannah, Georgia; Jacksonville, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky; Chicago...and I lived among mostly Catholic Polish people, Chechoslovakian people, other mixtures, on the West Side of Chicago. I grew up as a typical midwesterner. I left Chicago after grammar school, and went to junior high in Cleveland, and high school in New York and in Palm Beach. I ran away from home when I was 16.
And I joined the Marine Corps at 18, not to fight, but I liked those South Sea posters.
I always thought that all the Marines were bastards. Because the ones I was with, 3,200 of us, were a pretty rough bunch. It was 100% white, and all racist. 70% were from the South, a lot of 'em from Appalachia, with ingrained hatred, built in by the years of attitudes towards considering Indian people inferior, considering Hispanics... calling 'em spics, gooks, and black people were called niggers, and Jews were called sheenies and kikes. And I'm Jewish. But I was so immersed in the Christian culture, by growing up in the West Side of Chicago, that that didn't mean anything to me.
I had just finished doing duty at the Boston Navy Yard. And I was manning a machine gun at a mass demonstration in front of Charlston Prison, when I was on a roof, with a machine gun, ready to shoot into a 100,000 people that were protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. ...and I was told by my officers that we were gonna 'fry a few wops today,' you know, we were gonna execute 'em, fry 'em.
And not being educated, I just thought that they were telling the truth, that these were bombthrowers, and foreigners who were trying to overthrow the government. And I went along with it until I read about it in high school, and then in universities, that they were really martyrs for labor.
[In 19]27, '28 I was in Nicaragua.
DM: First of all, I'd like to hear the circumstances surrounding your being sent there. What were you told by your chain of command?
BG: I was told that we were going to Nicaragua to protect American women and children, who were being threatened by this bandit named Sandino. 'Course, Sandino was a nationalist hero, but we weren't told that. But he was 'endangering American lives and property,' especially, they'd bring in that violin concerto, 'women and children.' I was shipped out on a minelayer; it was the second contingent to land at Corinto.
Then I met a hotel owner that was a paraplegic, played chess with him, and one day I said, We're gonna catch that bandit Sandino. He said, Bill, he says, You've been brainwashed - that was before brainwashed was a common term - and he said, You have been so misguided, he said. If Sandino gets in, I'm gonna lose my hotel, because I think there'll be a real revolution, to dispossess some of us. But he's still a patriot, because he wants to be free. And he says, So do I. He said, I'm not supporting the American invasion. If I could help Sandino, I would. I said, I'll turn you in. He says, No you won't; fundamentally, you're a good guy. So of course, I never squealed on him, or anything. So he gave me some ideas.
But I was an animal, and I did what I was told, and I killed a lot of people - innocent people - I committed rape there, with a group... group rape...that was usually out in the boondocks, where nobody could see us, out in remote areas, like around Matagalpa, Jinotega, and other places on patrol. We'd come across a girl swimming, or cleaning...they'd wash clothes by pounding them on the rocks, because they didn't have soap, in the river. And the honcho guy in our group, usually a Sergeant, a brute, would attack her, and the rest would follow, it became a mass hysteria thing. Sometimes, you know, you'd just kill the girl, just by overusing her. She'd die from it.
There was no pity, there was no sympathy. We'd take an alcalde, a mayor of some village, and we'd get him up, and his family, in front, and say, Where's Sandino? They didn't know, most of the time they were just ignorant. They didn't know where Sandino was...and we still thought that they did know, or some stooge would report it, 'cause we offered money, and we'd hang him up by his ankles and cut his throat or his private parts, and torture him until he died. And then if there was any objection, we'd kill anybody who would object. We'd shoot 'em with our...and I would too, you did it, there was no feeling that they were people. They were in the way, kill 'em. There was complete brutality. We were committing genocide, as far as I'm concerned now. But at that time, I didn't have the intelligence or the empathy with people to know it. I was completely brutalized.
You know, like when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, and the second day on the drill field, the Sergeant says, Whaddya think of this problem, and I said, ‘I think...’ being the volunteer type, and he hit me with [the side of] the sword, this heavy saber, right against the cheek, he knocked me to the ground, he hit me so hard. And as I'm lyin' there thinkin', what the hell am I into, he points the saber right at my nose, within an inch, and he says, No sonofabitch thinks in the Marine Corps. You obey. Period. Obey, obey, obey. No thinking. No thinking allowed.
So I didn't think. I became just an animal responding to stimuli. And the stimuli was all wrong.
And then we burned villages...everything we did in Vietnam we did there first, but the American people didn't know about it; there was no radio, there were no reporters, and of course there was no television in those days. I'd say that 99 99/100% of the American people didn't know where Nicaragua was, and furthermore, they didn't care.
DM: Where were you stationed down there?
BG: All over. But mainly Managua. Managua was the center of our operation.
Calvin Coolidge promised the Nicaraguan people, in 1928, that they would get a fair and open election. And a fair and open election was as follows:
I was put in charge of the biggest district in all of Nicaragua, 'cause I spoke about 20 words of Spanish, most of which were connected with sex or food. And the Colonel in charge said to me, Bill, I want you to run a fair and open election. But just make sure that General [Jose Maria] Moncada wins. Moncada was our candidate. He was a stand-in for the guy who was most cooperative with us, a guy named Somoza. He was a boyhood friend of Sandino, by the way, and he was completely corrupt.
So I had six Marines, a detachment, to help me. They had rifles, and I had a .45. And I walk in, my Marines are outside, sitting on a bench, I walk in, I throw my campaign hat down, you know what it's like, a Boy Scout hat...
DM: Smokey the Bear.
BG: ... and I'm in khaki, and I've got a lanyard attached to my pistol, and I detach it, and I pull it outta my holster, and slam it on the table, as I look at the [election] Board - there's five of 'em there; two were absent. I says, "Es la ley." It's the law. And they look amazed, you know, at my absolute stupidity for sayin' that, when I'm runnin' a 'free and open election.' They'd believed the President [Coolidge]. Unbelievable that they should believe him, after all the rapes and....
And I says, Furthermore - I picked up the gun and I pointed it at each one individually, and said, in broken Spanish and English, - “if any of you bastards cross me, you're dead.” As I pointed the gun at 'em.
And they shook their heads in amazement. And one guy, a big peasant with immense shoulders and a great big walrus mustache, he leaned back and said to the little guy next to him - they were from different [political] parties - and he says to him, "¿Es loco, no...?" and the guy shook his head dolefully and he says, "No es loco. Es muy loco."
And they went about their business, and they ran a fair and open election. Every voter had his hand dipped in mercurochrome, so he wouldn't be able to vote twice, as if it made any difference....
DM: So was it a free and open election?
BG: Are you kidding? You must be kidding, I mean, we ran nothing fair. When the election results were in, we counted 'em, and I verified it, but I didn't sign the statement. What I did was I took the 72% that the Conservative candidate [got; he] really won the election. Moncada only got a few votes; all the other candidates got more votes than he did.
So I just took those [conservative] votes, and transferred them to the [Moncada] column, and then verified it, for General Moncada. And I told my group to take the majority of the ballots, that were for the Conservative candidate, who was a fairly decent guy...he owned a lotta coffee fincas, and he wanted some benefits for his people, he didn't want all the profits to go into the banks of the United States.
So I told 'em to take those boxes fulla ballots that were against us, and dump 'em into Lake Managua, which was nearby. And Lake Managua is a freshwater lake, and it's got freshwater sharks, which is unusual. And the [laughs] ballot boxes didn't sink, even though they were loaded with paper, and I said, Well, I'm in charge here, so you guys go in and get those boxes.
So they timidly went in with poles, got the boxes, and burned 'em, so there was no evidence to show.
So that's one of the great things we did. The other terrible thing we did was ruin their cemetery, desecrated it. One night - all of us were pretty drunk. Liquor was very cheap there, wonderful Scotch liquor by the bottle for a few pennies.
...we hadda march down, after busting open the graves and distributing the bones as if it were a bowling alley, knocking off the heads of statues - a lot of those statues were done by the civilization ...Quintana Roo, in Guatemala, what is the race...
DM: Maya?
BG: ...Mayan. There were Mayan statues in there, in a Catholic cemetery; they had mixed their own myths with Catholic saints. These were irreplaceable. There is no record now of these Mayan statues; they were just knocked about by us. We destroyed every statue in the whole cemetery, and opened the crypts, and insulted the whole people. To the Nicaraguan people, who had this theology, and this history, of worship of ancestors, and revering the dead, and the afterlife, and all that... this was the most horrible thing we could do.
And we marched, 300 of us, from Campo de Marte, in the dust, up to our knees, got down there, we had to kneel down, and present arms. That's very difficult to do, when you're kneeling...and our general spoke, and asked...we were apologizing for our terrible insult to the Nicaraguan people.
And you know what the 300 of us were doin'? Muttering under our breaths: What are we apologizing to these gooks for? Let's shoot 'em. And including that general. We were ready to shoot the bastard, is the way we put it, because he's makin' us apologize to these inferior....
DM: Your own general?
BG: Yeah. We were ready to shoot him. And I think if we'd had a leader that was stupid enough, we woulda shot him. Because we were animals. Here he's makin' us apologize to these inferior gooks, these nothings, and...we really resented it, so we went out and did another pillage of some kind. We burned a village just for the hell of it, because of that. We were rankled. Our manhood, or machoism, was being insulted. We were being made to feel shame, and we didn't feel shame. We felt anger, at these stupid college guys tellin' us what to do.
So it was a horrible thing, and I didn't understand it, and didn't care. I didn't have any conscience or any feeling about it; I just was getting drunk most of the time, carousing around, tryin' to get laid, counting the days when I would go back home in rotation.
We trained [the Guardia Nacional] in brutality, just like the Marine Corps, it was like a Parris Island, or a Camp Pendleton down there. We brutalized them; they mistreated the Indians....
DM: Were you hearing, in the early '30's, Smedley Butler going around and talking about...he also had a change of heart about the Marine Corps.
BG: Yeah. Oh, yeah, that helped me...after [Butler] got out, he issued some terrific statements, about bein' a collection agency and a gangster for American banks, how we coulda taught Al Capone a thing or two, he only operated outta three districts outta Chicago; we operated outta three continents. I thought he [Butler] was one of the great heroes of our time. Little man, real little, but a lotta guts.
[Much later] I picketed a lotta Marine Corps recruiting offices, calling for the courtmartial of Colonel [Oliver] North, and they came out, all of 'em, and said, Good for you, boy, we wish he would go to jail.
NOTE: I interviewed Bill Gandall March 2, 1988, at the Veterans' Memorial Building in Santa Cruz, California. He gave his dates of service in the U.S. Marine Corps as November 9, 1926, to November 9, 1930.
I tape recorded the interview, then transcribed it myself, editing for brevity only. Here, I have changed the order of some things he said, to spare the reader some of the jumping back and forth that Bill did as he talked. Other than that, this is what he said, the way he said it.
BG: My father was a railroad worker, and I lived in a lot of these towns as a kid, like Savannah, Georgia; Jacksonville, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky; Chicago...and I lived among mostly Catholic Polish people, Chechoslovakian people, other mixtures, on the West Side of Chicago. I grew up as a typical midwesterner. I left Chicago after grammar school, and went to junior high in Cleveland, and high school in New York and in Palm Beach. I ran away from home when I was 16.
And I joined the Marine Corps at 18, not to fight, but I liked those South Sea posters.
I always thought that all the Marines were bastards. Because the ones I was with, 3,200 of us, were a pretty rough bunch. It was 100% white, and all racist. 70% were from the South, a lot of 'em from Appalachia, with ingrained hatred, built in by the years of attitudes towards considering Indian people inferior, considering Hispanics... calling 'em spics, gooks, and black people were called niggers, and Jews were called sheenies and kikes. And I'm Jewish. But I was so immersed in the Christian culture, by growing up in the West Side of Chicago, that that didn't mean anything to me.
I had just finished doing duty at the Boston Navy Yard. And I was manning a machine gun at a mass demonstration in front of Charlston Prison, when I was on a roof, with a machine gun, ready to shoot into a 100,000 people that were protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. ...and I was told by my officers that we were gonna 'fry a few wops today,' you know, we were gonna execute 'em, fry 'em.
And not being educated, I just thought that they were telling the truth, that these were bombthrowers, and foreigners who were trying to overthrow the government. And I went along with it until I read about it in high school, and then in universities, that they were really martyrs for labor.
[In 19]27, '28 I was in Nicaragua.
DM: First of all, I'd like to hear the circumstances surrounding your being sent there. What were you told by your chain of command?
BG: I was told that we were going to Nicaragua to protect American women and children, who were being threatened by this bandit named Sandino. 'Course, Sandino was a nationalist hero, but we weren't told that. But he was 'endangering American lives and property,' especially, they'd bring in that violin concerto, 'women and children.' I was shipped out on a minelayer; it was the second contingent to land at Corinto.
Then I met a hotel owner that was a paraplegic, played chess with him, and one day I said, We're gonna catch that bandit Sandino. He said, Bill, he says, You've been brainwashed - that was before brainwashed was a common term - and he said, You have been so misguided, he said. If Sandino gets in, I'm gonna lose my hotel, because I think there'll be a real revolution, to dispossess some of us. But he's still a patriot, because he wants to be free. And he says, So do I. He said, I'm not supporting the American invasion. If I could help Sandino, I would. I said, I'll turn you in. He says, No you won't; fundamentally, you're a good guy. So of course, I never squealed on him, or anything. So he gave me some ideas.
But I was an animal, and I did what I was told, and I killed a lot of people - innocent people - I committed rape there, with a group... group rape...that was usually out in the boondocks, where nobody could see us, out in remote areas, like around Matagalpa, Jinotega, and other places on patrol. We'd come across a girl swimming, or cleaning...they'd wash clothes by pounding them on the rocks, because they didn't have soap, in the river. And the honcho guy in our group, usually a Sergeant, a brute, would attack her, and the rest would follow, it became a mass hysteria thing. Sometimes, you know, you'd just kill the girl, just by overusing her. She'd die from it.
There was no pity, there was no sympathy. We'd take an alcalde, a mayor of some village, and we'd get him up, and his family, in front, and say, Where's Sandino? They didn't know, most of the time they were just ignorant. They didn't know where Sandino was...and we still thought that they did know, or some stooge would report it, 'cause we offered money, and we'd hang him up by his ankles and cut his throat or his private parts, and torture him until he died. And then if there was any objection, we'd kill anybody who would object. We'd shoot 'em with our...and I would too, you did it, there was no feeling that they were people. They were in the way, kill 'em. There was complete brutality. We were committing genocide, as far as I'm concerned now. But at that time, I didn't have the intelligence or the empathy with people to know it. I was completely brutalized.
You know, like when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, and the second day on the drill field, the Sergeant says, Whaddya think of this problem, and I said, ‘I think...’ being the volunteer type, and he hit me with [the side of] the sword, this heavy saber, right against the cheek, he knocked me to the ground, he hit me so hard. And as I'm lyin' there thinkin', what the hell am I into, he points the saber right at my nose, within an inch, and he says, No sonofabitch thinks in the Marine Corps. You obey. Period. Obey, obey, obey. No thinking. No thinking allowed.
So I didn't think. I became just an animal responding to stimuli. And the stimuli was all wrong.
And then we burned villages...everything we did in Vietnam we did there first, but the American people didn't know about it; there was no radio, there were no reporters, and of course there was no television in those days. I'd say that 99 99/100% of the American people didn't know where Nicaragua was, and furthermore, they didn't care.
DM: Where were you stationed down there?
BG: All over. But mainly Managua. Managua was the center of our operation.
Calvin Coolidge promised the Nicaraguan people, in 1928, that they would get a fair and open election. And a fair and open election was as follows:
I was put in charge of the biggest district in all of Nicaragua, 'cause I spoke about 20 words of Spanish, most of which were connected with sex or food. And the Colonel in charge said to me, Bill, I want you to run a fair and open election. But just make sure that General [Jose Maria] Moncada wins. Moncada was our candidate. He was a stand-in for the guy who was most cooperative with us, a guy named Somoza. He was a boyhood friend of Sandino, by the way, and he was completely corrupt.
So I had six Marines, a detachment, to help me. They had rifles, and I had a .45. And I walk in, my Marines are outside, sitting on a bench, I walk in, I throw my campaign hat down, you know what it's like, a Boy Scout hat...
DM: Smokey the Bear.
BG: ... and I'm in khaki, and I've got a lanyard attached to my pistol, and I detach it, and I pull it outta my holster, and slam it on the table, as I look at the [election] Board - there's five of 'em there; two were absent. I says, "Es la ley." It's the law. And they look amazed, you know, at my absolute stupidity for sayin' that, when I'm runnin' a 'free and open election.' They'd believed the President [Coolidge]. Unbelievable that they should believe him, after all the rapes and....
And I says, Furthermore - I picked up the gun and I pointed it at each one individually, and said, in broken Spanish and English, - “if any of you bastards cross me, you're dead.” As I pointed the gun at 'em.
And they shook their heads in amazement. And one guy, a big peasant with immense shoulders and a great big walrus mustache, he leaned back and said to the little guy next to him - they were from different [political] parties - and he says to him, "¿Es loco, no...?" and the guy shook his head dolefully and he says, "No es loco. Es muy loco."
And they went about their business, and they ran a fair and open election. Every voter had his hand dipped in mercurochrome, so he wouldn't be able to vote twice, as if it made any difference....
DM: So was it a free and open election?
BG: Are you kidding? You must be kidding, I mean, we ran nothing fair. When the election results were in, we counted 'em, and I verified it, but I didn't sign the statement. What I did was I took the 72% that the Conservative candidate [got; he] really won the election. Moncada only got a few votes; all the other candidates got more votes than he did.
So I just took those [conservative] votes, and transferred them to the [Moncada] column, and then verified it, for General Moncada. And I told my group to take the majority of the ballots, that were for the Conservative candidate, who was a fairly decent guy...he owned a lotta coffee fincas, and he wanted some benefits for his people, he didn't want all the profits to go into the banks of the United States.
So I told 'em to take those boxes fulla ballots that were against us, and dump 'em into Lake Managua, which was nearby. And Lake Managua is a freshwater lake, and it's got freshwater sharks, which is unusual. And the [laughs] ballot boxes didn't sink, even though they were loaded with paper, and I said, Well, I'm in charge here, so you guys go in and get those boxes.
So they timidly went in with poles, got the boxes, and burned 'em, so there was no evidence to show.
So that's one of the great things we did. The other terrible thing we did was ruin their cemetery, desecrated it. One night - all of us were pretty drunk. Liquor was very cheap there, wonderful Scotch liquor by the bottle for a few pennies.
...we hadda march down, after busting open the graves and distributing the bones as if it were a bowling alley, knocking off the heads of statues - a lot of those statues were done by the civilization ...Quintana Roo, in Guatemala, what is the race...
DM: Maya?
BG: ...Mayan. There were Mayan statues in there, in a Catholic cemetery; they had mixed their own myths with Catholic saints. These were irreplaceable. There is no record now of these Mayan statues; they were just knocked about by us. We destroyed every statue in the whole cemetery, and opened the crypts, and insulted the whole people. To the Nicaraguan people, who had this theology, and this history, of worship of ancestors, and revering the dead, and the afterlife, and all that... this was the most horrible thing we could do.
And we marched, 300 of us, from Campo de Marte, in the dust, up to our knees, got down there, we had to kneel down, and present arms. That's very difficult to do, when you're kneeling...and our general spoke, and asked...we were apologizing for our terrible insult to the Nicaraguan people.
And you know what the 300 of us were doin'? Muttering under our breaths: What are we apologizing to these gooks for? Let's shoot 'em. And including that general. We were ready to shoot the bastard, is the way we put it, because he's makin' us apologize to these inferior....
DM: Your own general?
BG: Yeah. We were ready to shoot him. And I think if we'd had a leader that was stupid enough, we woulda shot him. Because we were animals. Here he's makin' us apologize to these inferior gooks, these nothings, and...we really resented it, so we went out and did another pillage of some kind. We burned a village just for the hell of it, because of that. We were rankled. Our manhood, or machoism, was being insulted. We were being made to feel shame, and we didn't feel shame. We felt anger, at these stupid college guys tellin' us what to do.
So it was a horrible thing, and I didn't understand it, and didn't care. I didn't have any conscience or any feeling about it; I just was getting drunk most of the time, carousing around, tryin' to get laid, counting the days when I would go back home in rotation.
We trained [the Guardia Nacional] in brutality, just like the Marine Corps, it was like a Parris Island, or a Camp Pendleton down there. We brutalized them; they mistreated the Indians....
DM: Were you hearing, in the early '30's, Smedley Butler going around and talking about...he also had a change of heart about the Marine Corps.
BG: Yeah. Oh, yeah, that helped me...after [Butler] got out, he issued some terrific statements, about bein' a collection agency and a gangster for American banks, how we coulda taught Al Capone a thing or two, he only operated outta three districts outta Chicago; we operated outta three continents. I thought he [Butler] was one of the great heroes of our time. Little man, real little, but a lotta guts.
[Much later] I picketed a lotta Marine Corps recruiting offices, calling for the courtmartial of Colonel [Oliver] North, and they came out, all of 'em, and said, Good for you, boy, we wish he would go to jail.
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