No war is over when the truce is signed and all the fighters, refugees, and politicians whose words and “big ideas” started the whole thing, go home. The dead – in the case of the Vietnam War, 58,000+ of us, three to five million Vietnamese - before you count Cambodians and Laotians – all leave jagged, aching holes in the universes of families and friends.
And those of us who do make it home, come home to a country, a world, vastly different from the one we left.
And we ourselves are different. Warriors who left home as more or less innocent kids return there, having been trained with various weapons, and having necessarily acquired, to varying degrees, the abilities and instincts to damage or kill whoever threatens us.
This afternoon, I was snoozing on the couch. Something touched my head softly as I slept. I started, shouted, and swung my right hand. I almost hit my wife. I had cautioned her not to “sneak up on me” when I’m sleeping, but she thought I was awake.
That was over 40 years after the last time I left Vietnam. (She’s okay; I missed.)
Danang
I loaded my rifle, seabag and 782 gear (a Marine's pack, web gear, canteens, etc.; so called for the number of the receipt form we signed when it was issued to us) aboard the truck that would take me to the airstrip at Chu Lai, where I'd catch a C123 or C130 to Danang, then another plane to Okinawa, then another plane back to The World. The guys who weren't on duty over at the Direct Air Support Center came out to see me off. They were envious, but they were also glad for me. They asked me to study for them, and of course to get laid for them. I promised to do my best.
The strongest thing they said to me came when somebody mentioned student anti‑war demonstrations back in the states. They said to tell those fucking jerkoff wimps just what the war was about, on behalf of the guys who were fighting it. Everyone present, including me, loudly agreed that I should do that.
But there was another moment. It was more private, in fact intensely private. Along with the awareness that had come as I lowered my rifle just before firing on the Vietnamese man on the beach at Ky Hoa, and the shift in awareness that had come over me when the transparent veil dropped in front of my eyes as I was guarding the women and children and old man at the well in Tho An, this slap of suddenly shifting awareness that entered my skull as I climbed aboard that truck were among the experiences that I brought home from Vietnam that have most determined the course of my life during the forty-odd years since then.
I was angry. I was angry about losing the young Marine when his buddy told me “You’re too late” getting the medevac to them. I was angry about our loss of those Recon boys who’d fought all night, hand to hand, on Howard’s Hill, as I sat in a relatively safe place and tried to send them help. I was angry about being too hot and too cold and too wet and too hungry for too long, angry about being terrified too many nights, and about having my body invaded by ants and mosquitoes and rats and snakes and centipedes like horror-movie monsters. I was angry about the loss and the guilt. I was angry about having kept the faith with people who did not keep it with me. With us.
So what is still with me now, at this moment in late June, 2008, in a 12’x16’ log cabin three miles outside Joseph, Oregon, is the promise I made to myself as I climbed over that tailgate to begin my trip home. That promise was to study and study whatever it was I had to study until I understood the causes of the misery I had been a part of. And then I would fix it.
Yup, that’s the promise I made to myself. This book is the result, whatever that’s worth. Of course, the problem isn’t fixed. If anything, it’s worse. No wonder I’m so angry. That’s a lot to carry, and a long time to carry it. (RATTLESNAKE DREAMS is the result of that promise to myself.)
At the staging area in Danang, where Marines who had finished our tours were being processed out of the country, I got a cot in a 12‑man tent, and turned in my rifle and 782 gear. I suddenly felt naked, but tried to reassure myself that I was going where I wouldn't need a weapon.
All this, and waiting for the scheduled bird to Okinawa, took a few days. We sat around the tent and talked about what we'd do back in The World. Women, cars, jobs, school. Student demonstrations came up again. Others in the tent had heard more about them than I had. One guy said he'd heard about a vet who got to the states, thinking he was safe at last, and was followed into an airport bathroom by several civilians who beat him up just because he'd been in Vietnam.
The tent pounded with anger. One Marine, who'd seen more combat than some of us, was furious. "I'm takin' a piece back with me," he said, meaning a pistol. He deserved to be done with danger, he said. But if those pukes wanted a fight, he'd show 'em one, by God. He'd kill 'em. Period.
I was the only one of the group who would be going straight to a college campus. The guys expressed concern for me; they said to watch my back. I'd be unarmed, and there'd be no Marines to back me up. And those cowards always ran in packs.
That was what I took to school with me, mixed with the elation of being able to live my own life after one thousand, four hundred and fifty days of following other people's orders, and a focus, tinged with rage, on studying just what had caused this whole mess and others like it, and trying to find a way out. I fully intended to study so hard that I could answer, at least for myself, the question Why war?
IV. Relearning War
A. Back to School, Back to War
Kicking the Leaves
It had been mid‑August when I left Vietnam; by the end of the month I was on campus at Colorado College. It was the biggest culture shock of my life, except ‑ maybe ‑ for the one I'd felt on arrival at boot camp. I was free! and it was terrifying. I didn't know how to act. I was used to deferring to certain people, having others defer to me. Here, everybody just sauntered around, wore whatever they pleased, talked to one another like ‑ well, like civilians. I remember standing in bright sunlight on the curb outside the student union at Rastall Center. A pretty young woman pulled up in an expensive car ‑ a Jaguar or BMW ‑ jumped out, and greeted a friend she hadn't seen since Spring. I stood there with mouth agape, staring at and listening to two foxy co‑eds compare their summers in Europe and South America. Goddamn, I thought. Anybody wanna hear about my summer in Southeast Asia?
I was the first Vietnam vet on campus. I remembered the conversation in the staging tent at Danang, and walked around stiffly, looking over my shoulder, waiting to be accosted, surrounded, yelled at. The opposite happened. As word got around, people began approaching me, tentatively, with sincere questions. Mostly, just "How is it over there?" No one showed me the slightest disrespect; several people expressed admiration for what I'd done. Some questions had a political content, but nothing that felt accusatory. The questions centered around the war's human cost: simply, were those numbered hills and rockpiles worth the blood they cost? And they would ask for stories.
Sometimes I would tell the story of Howard's Hill, or my story of the fight at the well in Tho An, or of trying to get a medevac chopper in to a radio operator's wounded buddy and being told "you're too late." Reliving those stories, against the background of (now, fellow) students' questions about whether those fights were worth what they cost, continued the process of recalibrating the way I looked at the world, and my place in it, that had begun at the well in Tho An. The context of our interactions was one I hadn’t expected: instead of being attacked by these people, and looking around for fellow Marines to cover my back, as I’d expected upon leaving Vietnam, I’d been welcomed – if tentatively, at first – by the people I’d expected to be my enemies, and I spent my days with them in classes. Some were now my friends. Though I would never lose my intense loyalty to fellow Marines, these were now my people. I wanted them to like me.
One evening that fall I was studying in my dorm room, alone as usual. I put aside the philosophy or history or politics assignment I was working on, and just sat and thought for a while. I drifted back to the moment in August when I’d thrown my seabag and weapons and web gear aboard the truck, taken one last look around at the olive drab tents and red dirt and the new outhouse on the ridge, said goodbye to a couple of off-duty buddies who’d come out to see me off, and promised myself to study this mess until I could see a way out of it.
I was studying, all right: I was already known on campus as the Nam vet who always had three to six books under his arm, and was actually reading all of them. But I wanted to learn more. Always more. If I was to answer, or even speak intelligently to, the question Why war?, what great lever could I get my hands on to move my mind, or the world, or whatever it was that needed to be moved?
I opened an atlas to a map of the world. Shit, it was big. Look at all those countries. Look at all those people.
Communication. I can’t understand all these people unless I can talk to them, understand what they’re saying. I decided that evening that I had to study languages, beginning with those that would allow me to communicate with the most people, over as much of the globe as possible. I was already in a Spanish class. With English and Spanish, I could talk with most of the people in the Western Hemisphere, except for Brazilians.
Good start, but what else? Looking at the map, I thought: China. It had a great land area, and an even greater population, proportionally. China already loomed very large in world history; its presence was only bound to become greater. The next day I approached Professor Frank Tucker after a history class and asked him if Chinese language study was offered on campus. He said no; we had Spanish, French, German, and Russian, besides classical Greek and Latin.
I went back to my map and looked again at land area and political significance. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, and the hot war in Vietnam, which was very much entangled with the Cold War, had the whole world scared, and with reason. The following academic year I would continue in Spanish and begin studying Russian. And I would study French my senior year.
I had a tiny single room in "Superdorm," our monicker for a big brick building that hadn’t yet been formally named. On my R and R to Hong Kong earlier in the year I'd bought a massive stereo system with two big speakers, a reel‑to‑reel tape deck, tuner, turntable, the works. I'd even bought my favorite tapes and records, at the PX on Okinawa, and shipped them home: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Percy Faith, Montovani. The Ray Conniff Singers. Henry Mancini was a special favorite: "Moon River, wider than a mile/I'm crossing you in style...." That stuff soothed me, and I needed soothing.
The guys in the dorm didn't know what to do with me. Who was this strange bird, holed up in his little amplified cave with this strange music? They were listening to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel.
Marines, whisper whisper. Vietnam, whisper whisper. Still, I didn't seem dangerous. One guy named Cy, who was there from Minnesota on a football scholarship, actually thought it was kind of cool that I'd been to Nam. You know, ballsy. After a few weeks, when I'd leave my door ajar hoping somebody'd say hello, maybe even invite me to take part in the horseplay in the hall, Cy would cautiously poke his head into my room and ask how the hell I was doin'. Cy and I went to town one night and got drunk together, and became running mates for a while. Once when we were walking back from town, pretty well oiled, he threw his arm around my shoulders and said, "Dean, how'dja like to become a Kappa Sig?"
Being asked was a hell of a compliment, and I told him so. But though I was only a couple of years older than Cy, I felt a generation apart. My right hand still curved reflexively, wanting to hold a rifle stock. I said No, but thanks a lot for asking.
Tom Gould came up to me one day after Spanish class. He said something like, "You look like somebody who's been around a little." Then: "Maybe spent a little time on your uncle's farm?" He said it with a knowing grin, and I knew he meant Uncle Sam. Tom had been a Force Recon Marine, and had gotten out just before most of his unit shipped out for Vietnam. He invited me over to meet his roommate, Mike Taylor, with whom he shared a basement apartment. Mike had served a hitch in the Army, but was sent to Germany instead of Vietnam. They re‑introduced me to civilian life: macaroni dinners and medium‑priced wine in a messy kitchen shared with dogs and cats and even with actual human females. Later, the three of us rented a house off-campus with a Navy vet named Jim Martin and a Special Forces vet named Mark Streuli. The five of us became friends for life.
One pre‑dawn morning that fall of 1966, I was walking across the campus lawn between the library and Rastall Center, to my job washing pots in the cafeteria. That would earn my breakfast, and a little more. Heading out that early, in that cold, to that job and that food is not normally a set of circumstances to make the heart leap. But mine did. The lawn was covered with three‑fat‑fingered maple leaves in a layer so thick that my feet began to plow up piles of them as I walked. I laughed, and kicked the crackling leaves across the lawn. Everything was so wonderfully dry and cold, welcome opposites to hot and wet. I stopped in one of my kicked‑up leaf piles and looked at the sky. I noticed the stars for the first time in a year, startled to realize that they had no relation to the war, that I was looking at them not to determine whether it was clear enough to dispatch aircraft on a mission of killing or mercy, but just to look at them.
I romped on across, kicking leaves and howling at the stars, delirious that I could walk this far, alone, unarmed and upright, making all this noise, and no one would try to kill me.
This story speaks for itself: the first one who swung at me was going to die…
Townies
Jim Price and I had 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 hand‑to‑hand 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.
Veterans who find it hard to talk to non-vets, can talk to one another…
Missouri Squirrels
That December of 1966 I decided to visit my Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank Hickman in Wheaton, Missouri. They'd made another of their moves between Oregon and Missouri. I'd go by Greyhound, of course: even the accumulated wealth of a year's overseas pay, combat pay, and a corporal's wages was quickly gobbled by the cost of life at an expensive private college; a plane ticket was out of the question.
The bus didn't go through Wheaton; it was too small and out of the way. It was nearly dark when I got off the bus. I asked directions. There were no local buses, no taxis. Bessie and Lank lived several miles from where I stood.
I walked half the night along rural Missouri roads. Dogs would awaken with the crunching of my boots on gravel, bay their alarms, passing awareness of my presence to the dogs at the next farm. It was a little scary, but none of the dogs came after me. Sometime in the night I got lost, and had to knock at a farmhouse, waken someone, and ask directions. I apologized. They said it was no trouble.
A few days later I was stacking firewood on Bessie and Lank's porch. An old man was walking by out in the street. He stopped to watch me. At least, that's what I thought at first, that he was just watching me stack wood, to pass the time like old men will, maybe to pass judgment on my ability to lay up a neat and stable rick of wood, which is a recognized art among country people. I began to be more careful.
Then I realized that he wasn't so much watching me work as looking at me personally, at who I was. I straightened, nodded. "Howdy," I said.
"You kin to Bob Metcalf?" he asked. No preliminaries, no introductions, no chitchat about firewood or the rare skift of snow that had Wheaton drivers sliding all over Main Street. "He was my dad...." A dozen questions bubbled in me, but none formed quickly enough. "Y' look just like 'im. I delivered mail in these parts for thirty years." He turned and walked on.
We were going out to see Dan Metcalf, my grandfather, who lived near Monett, a town even smaller than Wheaton. He'd long since separated from my grandmother Elizabeth, a woman who'd had long flowing black hair as a young woman, who my dad had always claimed, with some pride, was part Indian. Maybe Cherokee;([1]) she'd come from Oklahoma.
Dan's current wife was Rose, who was always spoken of (though never in her presence) as "a reformed prostitute." Even out of her presence, people never said "prostitute" without "reformed" being attached. They were trying to be generous to her because, they said, she was good to old Dan. But you could tell they were working at it. And you could tell she felt it, but she just went about her business. I wasn't quite twenty‑four, but had probably seen more prostitutes than most of the Metcalfs and their neighbors combined. Rose didn't look like the ones I'd seen. She looked more like Aunt Bessie to me: a plain‑spoken, plain‑looking, hard‑working country woman. Except for an extra air of worldliness about her - a tinge of sadness, it seemed to me, at knowing and having lived a truth that everyone else also knew (some more directly than others) but would never say aloud.
Dan was a lean, kindly old man who was glad to see me but was clearly holding back. He didn't say much. Bessie and Lank figured later that I reminded him too much of his son, dead only six years. My dad had committed suicide at age 40, in 1960.
Dan and Rose both looked to be people who had cleaned up their acts considerably from the way they'd lived until well into their middle years. Dan came from a long line of moonshiners. The story had it that one night he'd come home likkered up and blasted a hole in his own roof from inside the house with his shotgun, just for fun.
I wanted to go hunting. Something in me needed to close that circle, to carry a rifle meant to put meat on the table instead of to kill another human and leave him to rot in the mud. Bessie and Lank thought about it a while, and said, Well, we might go out and visit Lank's sister and brother‑in‑law, Dorothy and Floyd Jennings, who lived in Thomas Hollow, one of those folds in the Ozarks like those where most of my extended family grew up. (They spelled the word h-o-l-l-o-w, but everyone said "holler". Bessie and my mother were born and raised on a 160-acre homestead in "Star Holler".
They were a little reluctant to drop in on the Jenningses, especially Floyd. They seldom saw this man. He kept to himself, didn't have a lot to do with relatives and even less with outsiders. Don't expect him to cotton to you, they warned. He's just that way.
We drove out to Thomas Hollow. Lank brought along his slide‑action Remington .22 rifle, which was very accurate, for me to use in case Floyd could be talked into a hunt.
We all sat down in their cabin's small living room. Dorothy busied herself offering us coffee and cookies. Bessie and Lank introduced me, said I was just back from Veet Nam. Floyd lit up, started rocking animatedly in his chair. "I was there durin' the war," he said. "Well," he went on, "guess I should say, durin' the other war, or World War II, or whatever." Actually, he said, he'd never been ashore in Veet Nam. But he'd been aboard a Liberty ship in those waters. "Yup. Spent quite a spell thar. Hell, most people 'round heah never had no idy they was such a place, let alone whar it was. Leastwise till this war come along. I'd say somethin' about it, an' a body'd just shrug. But I knowed. I was thar. Durin' the war."
Lank and Bessie had relaxed. Lank chimed in that he'd told me Floyd had a pretty good squirrel dog. Still got 'im?
"Oh yeah, he's gettin' on, but still does pretty good, for a collie." That was the first I'd heard of a collie being a hunting dog. I'd had two collies as a kid, Mike and Buddy, so we talked about collies for a while. Pretty soon we were up in the hardwood grove behind the cabin, Floyd and the dog and I. Lank said he'd not go this time, he'd let me do the huntin' 'cause I hadn't been in so long.
The tree limbs were bare, their leaves now a crunchy mattress we walked on. With that noise, we'd never have seen a squirrel, but for the dog. The collie would run ahead, making a big circle out in front of us. Pretty soon he began to bark. "He's got one treed," Floyd said. We walked toward the tree where the dog was, and stopped a few yards away. Floyd motioned, Be still. Squirrels, when they hear a threatening noise, will go around the tree, putting it between them and the noise. After we'd stood still a while, the dog slowly circled the tree, moving away from us, barking and making a racket in the dry leaves. When the collie got to the far side of the tree, we saw, up high, just the head of a grey squirrel peek around the tree. I looked at Floyd. He nodded back at me. I raised Lank's rifle, pushed off the safety, took my time, got just the sight picture Lank had described to me, put the front bead where its top was at the center of the head, where the squirrel's eye would be if I could have seen it at that distance. I squeezed off the shot. There was a long pause. The squirrel slid, tumbled over a couple of branches, fell to the ground.
We walked over. Floyd knelt and picked up the squirrel and examined it. He stood and looked at me, went so far as to raise his eyebrows. "Right in the eye," he said. "Don't waste no meat thataway."
We shot four or five squirrels ‑ "just enough for a mess of 'em" was how Floyd put it ‑ and walked back to the cabin. His wife made us all a big pot of squirrel and dumplings. All the while Floyd and I sat and talked about Viet Nam, even though he'd never been ashore. We talked about the South China Sea, how there were flying fish that would bust out the sides of waves and glide, and sea snakes swimming close to shore.
After all, we'd both been there, durin' the wars.
Hunger 3
Mike Taylor and I went to dinner at the cafeteria in Loomis Hall. He was sitting across from me, and next to him was another student with whom we both were slightly acquainted. We'd almost finished dinner when the guy next to Mike, without saying anything, reached over to take some food from my tray. Reflexively, I turned the fork in my hand downward and stabbed the back of his hand. Four small roses of blood appeared around the tines of the fork. The guy turned pale. Mike’s jaw dropped. They looked at each other, then at me. I shrugged: "Don’t fuck with my food," and went on eating with the slightly bloody fork.
We came home to a racially divided society. Of course: we’d come from one. That divide followed us to Vietnam, became magnified there, and came home with us.
Dark‑skinned Warriors 1
I was sitting in the waiting area of the Colorado Springs airport, watching people walk by on the concourse.
Some soldiers were walking from my right to left. They were black, wearing dress green uniforms, with Combat Infantryman Badges on their chests above their ribbons, and, on their left shoulders, the gold shield with black horse's head of the First Air Cavalry.
A similar group approached them from the opposite direction. Something passed through all the men that was visible to me. It was the way they walked, and the way they recognized one another. They emanated a pride that fairly crackled in the air around them. Though all wore uniforms of the United States Army, the uniform very definitely was not the source of their pride. Rather, it seemed to come from deep inside the uniform. Their walk was not a regulation, head erect, shoulders-stiffly-drawn-back walk. It was a rolling thing, with shoulders turning in front of the body with each step, right shoulder with left foot, left shoulder with right foot. And the body dipped slightly with every other step, a kind of willful breaking of the rhythm, a sassy falling‑behind only to quicken the last part of the step in order to arrive in perfect time.
I had learned to recognize the walk in boot camp, when our drill instructors told us to watch another platoon in our regiment when they were on the "grinder," which is what Marines call the parade ground. That platoon had a black drill instructor who had a certain lilt to his cadence, and a slightly swooping march step that he was able to impart to his whole platoon. His cadence and step had so little difference from regulation Marine Corps drill that his superiors couldn't make him stop doing it because they couldn't describe the difference in words or point to a regulation which it violated. Besides, the man was a squared‑away Marine and an excellent drill instructor. So he got away with his little one‑man cultural revolution.
At least one DI snickered about that sergeant and his "ditty‑bop" platoon, and some of the recruits chimed in. Phrases like "jigaboo outfit" tumbled into the ice plant around the Quonset huts. But there was respect too, even among the mutterers, when the seventy‑man platoon, mostly white boys, took the grinder and performed a close‑order drill that had a rhythm, a visual musicality, that was beautiful to watch, and which no other platoon on the grinder could match.
These black soldiers in the airport had that walk, with an added edge: they were all back from Nam. It was a black man's walk, but also a black warrior's walk. As the two groups came abreast, a couple of soldiers in each group raised small, black enameled swagger sticks, each with a chromed .50 caliber cartridge casing capping one end and a chromed .50 caliber bullet capping the other end, in smart salutes. It had nothing to do with Old Glory or the United States Army. It said, I salute you, brother. We have been through the fire. We have lost some brothers. We have kicked some ass.
And this black warrior's walk also said, Don't nobody fuck with us.
And it said Watch out, Whitey.
[1] In the fall of 2010, my aunt Ruth Metcalf, my father’s sister, gave me a photocopy of a photo of my great grandmother Widders, grandma Elizabeth’s mother, whose mother was full-blood Cherokee.
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