DREAMS
An American Warrior’s Story
Dean Metcalf
This book is dedicated to
KRIP
who was killed at the US Special Forces camp at Mangbuk,
June 18, 1968. He was 18 years old, or so they said…
and to
TATYANA SAVICHEVA
who watched her extended family starve and freeze to death around her during the siege of Leningrad, September 1941 – January 1944. She was eleven years old when her last surviving family member died, leaving her alone. She was evacuated with other children through the blockade in August 1942, and died of disease resulting from the siege on July 1, 1944.
and to
the Marines who waded the lagoon at Tarawa, November 20-23, 1943.
Copyright© 2010 Dean Metcalf All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-578-08809-9
CONTENTS
I. Prologue 1
Tho An
II. Learning War 5
Cowboys and Indians 8
Toys 8 Cartoon 9 Roy Rogers 10 Atomic Stove 12 Mumblypeg 13 K’reans 14 First Blood 15 Hunger 1 17 Rogue River 1 19 Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue’s Knife 20 A Rifle, A Pistol 24 Dress Blues 1 29
Almost a Cowboy 31 Canal 39
Dogs of Eberlein Street 42
Rogue River 2: Rattlesnake Air 44 Sunset Over Klamath Lake 55 Second Buck 56 Crater Lake 59
Semper Fidelis 67
Gunny Rogers 1: Mama’s Boy 67 Sergeant Vance 69
Man and Rifle Reaching 71
Gunny Rogers 2: The Most Powerful Weapon 74
Dress Blues 2 77 Marine Corps History 80
Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis 84 Banning 87
29 Palms: Ungentle 89 Old Enough to Bleed 91
Footprints 92 Okinawa 94 With God On Our Side 98 Tonkin 100 Olongapo 108 Put Me In, Coach 110
III.War 112
Oakland 113 Going Over 115 Ky Hoa 124 Gunny Rogers 3 126 Phantom Pisser 127 Hunger 2 131 To Kill a Gook 131 Tam Ky 132 “You’re Too Late” 135 An Tan 144 Request Mast 148 Tho An 150 Man and Pistol 167 Rats 169 Marines in Skivvies 175 Howard’s Hill 178 Sergeant of the Guard 181 Wartime Is Wonderful 184 Danang 189
IV. Relearning War 193
Kicking the Leaves 194 Townies 198
Missouri Squirrels 200 Hunger 3 204 Dark-Skinned Warriors 1 205 Packing 206 Seminar 208 Cho Lon 210
Interlude: A Veteran’s Dreams: 215
Dream: Nazi Pursuit 216
Dream: Money Man Pursuit 217
Mangbuk: The Camp 219 Soldier Tin 227
Dream: Bodies of Water 235 Dalat 237
Saigon
1. LA Cop 239
2. Kids 240
3. Dream: Vietnamese Children 242
Spook Hunting in Laos 243 Mark 269
J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac 271
Leningrad, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague 278
Samaritan in Los Angeles 308 Chinese Soldiers 309
Dream: A6 and Wolves 311
Tumalo 313 Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove 320
Triptych
The Clubbing 333
Bait 335
Dream: Vietnamese Women 337
Spider and Fly 338 Fear 340 Guard Dog 342 Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle 343
Zen Warrior Bass Player 345 Sandinistas 346
Missing Man 356 Dark-Skinned Warriors 2 368
Dream: Guts 369
Indians and Cowboys 370
Mercenary 1 370
Rus Rus
1. Maco Stewart’s Letter 375
2. Flaco and Luque 378
3. Babes in James Bondland 380
4. Rus Rus 384
5.The Tape 391
6. Lasa Tinghni 395
7. Red Chief, White Chief 399
8. In Camp 399
9. Border Crossing 402
10. Skulls of Tulin Bila 406
11. Perico’s Garrote, and Other Stories 410
12. Meeting 416
13. Out of the Woods 425
14. Aftermath 428
Dream: Deadribs 437
Mercenary 2 437 Guns in Costa Rica 444
Interview with Bill Gandall 457
Guatemala: La Violencia 465
At the Battered Women’s Shelter 467
Palestinians and Israelis and Americans 469
Ants 488
Dream: Dance of the Arrows 489
The Rattlesnake Dream 491
Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol 492
The Last Nightmare 494
V.The Web (Essay) 496
APPENDIX: FAVORITE BOOKS AND WRITERS...533
Acknowledgments 535
I. Prologue: Tho An
Tho An
Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began. Others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the F-4 Phantoms - sharks of the air with high triangular tails and turned-down black snouts - finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.
Attached to “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, I was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements or attempts to flee.
They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot Company's combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C4 from the blast. A Sergeant cursed the engineer for using too much explosive. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.
I'd imagined battle, but I'd never imagined this. The children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers' arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, 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 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 even 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(1) 5½ months earlier. Americans had invaded North Africa 3 months after that. 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(2) was 5 months dead. Treblinka(3) 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.(4) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.
1 Twenty-three years later, I would stand in the open, off to the side of the village well in Tho An, side by side with a veteran of Guadalcanal, other island battles in the Pacific, and Korea. He was by then First Sergeant of “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. He leaned close to my ear to be heard above the firing and said calmly, “You be the last man out.”
2 See below, “Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague” p.271ff.
3 The reader who may have seen Treblinka listed as a “concentration camp” should clarify that notion: the only things concentrated at Treblinka were corpses, ashes, and huge piles of clothing and shoes taken from the people who were reduced to ashes. Treblinka was an extermination camp.
4 http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8381413.stm (Published Nov. 27, 2009, by BBC.)
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