Cowboys and Indians

Toys

We were living at 32c Navy Homes, the World War II housing project built for enlisted men and their families, now rented as apartments to poor people, sprawled along the railroad tracks out at the edge of Pasco, Washington. Our dad was still with us. It was the late 1940’s. I was four or five and my brother Darrell two and a half years younger, so neither of us had started school.

It was Christmas time. Darrell and I had begun asking for scooters, toy gun sets, I don't know what all. There wasn't money for any of that, so each time we'd pestered Mom she'd tried to trim our expectations. Santa Claus must have been in the discussion somewhere, but that's not what I remember.

I remember one night when Mom was putting us to bed. Again, she was parrying our questions about Christmas. But Christmas was only a couple of days away, and this time I wouldn't let it go. I wailed "Look at our toybox!" Each time she tried to soothe me, I wailed "Look at our toybox!" again, shattering her apologies and her attempts to comfort me in my boy's unhearing rage. She gave up with a sigh heavy with resignation and the deep sadness of poor mothers everywhere.

She turned around to the closet and pulled out our toybox. It was a small cardboard grocery box with two or three old, broken toys in it.

"See, Mom, see?" I accused her.

"I know, son... I know," she said, trying to comfort all three of us, not being able, tucking us in and fleeing the room.

Cartoon

I was in the first or second grade, which would have been in the period 1949‑51. Art was my least favorite class; most of the other kids could make drawings and paintings that even I could see were better than mine.

The assignment was to draw a cartoon. The teacher explained what a cartoon was, and the class turned to. The topic was Communism. If I ever heard the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy, I don't remember it. What I remember is a lot of emphasis in that class, as well as in others (social studies in particular) about Communism, how Communists, also called Reds, were very bad and didn't believe in God and were trying to take over the world and yes, even America. America was good and strong because we were Christian and free, but we wouldn't stay free unless we all fought hard against the Communists.

The teacher approached my island of stillness in the sea of flailing elbows and crayons. She was concerned and helpful. But I just couldn't do it. I couldn't think of anything to draw, or anything that I could draw that would be recognizable.

She wouldn’t give up. She hovered at my shoulder, kindly but insistent: Now, think. What have you learned about Communism? Can you draw that? Just try, Dean. Don't worry, cartoons aren't even supposed to be good drawings. They're supposed to make things look bad or stupid.

She asked what was the simplest thing I could think of that I'd learned about Communism. When that turned up nothing I thought I could draw, she asked whether I thought Communism was bad. Oh sure, I nodded. Then she asked, What's the simplest thing you can think of that's bad?

The phrase "snake in the grass" came to mind. I'd heard my parents say it about someone they didn't trust. Good, she said. Can you draw that? Go ahead. Draw that.

I drew a squiggly line to represent a snake, and a few pencil strokes for blades of grass. I lettered COMMUNISM underneath it in my kid's scrawl.

"See?" the teacher said. "I knew you could do it."

Rattlesnake Dreams: An American Warrior's Story

NOTE: This blog will be composed of chapters of my recently completed memoir, RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: AN AMERICAN WARRIOR’S STORY, by Dean Metcalf.

The book begins with this Prologue, which tells of some hours, and in particular one long moment, in the burning Vietnamese village of Tho An, a few kilometers inland from Chu Lai, in I Corps, South Vietnam. April, 1966.

That long moment turned my head around forever. It quite simply forced me to see the world, and myself – past, present, and future - through different eyes.

This book is the chronicle of that change in my way of seeing things.

Along the way, there are stories from my days as a freelance journalist in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Leningrad, Moscow, Prague, Baku, Vienna, Kiev, Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza.

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.