SAIGON TRIPTYCH 1968

Saigon 

1. LA Cop

     Some things from that summer are a continuum in my memory: I recall traveling to the place, who was there, where I went next. Other things are isolated, like one of those oldfashioned photographic portraits with just a face in an oval: no background, no past, no intimations of the future. 

     This story is like that. Somewhere in a hallway of MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) Headquarters in Saigon, I was talking to a man, a stocky middleaged American. He wore civilian clothes and a sidearm. He was telling me that he was a cop; he'd been walking a beat in Los Angeles when opportunities opened up for American policemen to go to Saigon and work as advisors to the police there. 

     I told the man I was a journalist. He gave me this strange look, from deep within himself, then said something like, "...huh. You want a story...." and hinted that he knew one that would curl my hair. I said I was all ears. He said he couldn't really tell it, that it was secret. But he wanted to tell it, I knew by the way he stayed rooted where he stood, the way he quickly and repeatedly engaged and disengaged my eyes with his. I said we could go somewhere and talk. I said I could keep his name out of it. He said he couldn't do it. But he wouldn't move to leave, and I wouldn't either, so we both just stood there. I leaned against the wall. Casual. I gave little prompts: "So, police work?" That kind of thing. He would shift his weight, start to turn away, then turn back and say one more thing. This went on for a while. Police work, well, yeah. They would go out at night. They would go to villages, towns. Just a few men. They had a list. Suspected VC. Big shots. Sometimes names get added to the list. He paused, shifted, spoke to me with his eyes, pleading with me to understand what he was saying but not saying: Lotta names get crossed off the list. 

                     

2: Kids

     I was walking alone in Saigon, in the outskirts of the city where refugees had put together shanties from the heavy cardboard sleeves that bound cases of C rations, wood from ammunition crates, and other detritus of war. It was hot. No. It was hot: the sun seemed a huge cymbal from the devil's own band, clanging out waves of molten brass that all but banished blue from the sky. The sun, and foot and vehicular traffic, had pulverized the dust of the street into the finest powder, which, with the passing of any foot or wheel or furnace-breathed breeze, rose in gritty ubiquitous clouds and hurried to stick itself to anything that claimed kinship with moisture: skin, eyes, teeth. No young men were present. (In Vietnam, it seemed you were mostly in places where there were no young men, or only young men.) The eyes of women caught just enough sunlight to reflect it from the shanties' dark interiors. Children owned the streets.

     I came upon a little girl standing alone in a wide dusty street. She wore filthy bib overalls, and a plastic bracelet on her left wrist. Snot was running from her nose; tears from her eyes. She was holding Black Label beer cans to her ears with both hands, in the way kids all over the world will hold sea shells to their ears, listening to the ocean. She held the pose as I photographed her; the picture has been published several times.

     I was walking down a very wide street, if that is what we should call a flat dusty strip bounded by refugee shacks. Children rushed out from within, between, behind the shacks in twos, threes, hordes. They surrounded me, shouting in shrill voices in the language they'd learned from GI's: "Hey, you! Fuck you! You give me money!" Small hands curled into claws worthy of predatory birds and tore at my wrist watch, skin, clothes. My notebook was yanked from my hip pocket. It was important. I wheeled and bent over to retrieve it. Business cards of journalism contacts fell from my shirt pocket; a child's hand darted in and plucked my pen from the same pocket. They worked together like coyotes, front and back. 

     Later that day, a friend and I caught an Air Viet Nam Boeing 727 to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. That night, I dropped into an exhausted sleep in my bed in the Hotel Mondial, and had a nightmare about the Vietnamese children. Like a two part television special, it began with a recap of the day's events, then continued beyond what had happened that afternoon.

Dream: Vietnamese Children 

I'm walking down the Saigon street. A few of the children are running up and tugging at my hands and clothes; then one stops squarely in front of me on the sidewalk and cups his hands and sticks them in my face and says, "You! Fuck you! You give me money!" I say no but they won't step aside so I just keep moving through them. There are so many now that I am wading as in hipdeep surf, and there is more tugging and I push them away and yell "didi!" and they yell back at me with their shrill angry voices and more of them come and they get closer and finally one of them snatches the Vietnamese phrase book from my back pocket. I turn quickly and it falls to the ground. The kid backs up. I bend over to pick it up and a notebook and a pen fall out of my shirt pocket and some loose papers begin to scatter as the wind flips the pages of the notebook. I reach for them quickly but the children are all over me grabbing for my things. A kid behind me has my wallet almost out of my back pocket and I drop everything else and turn to grab him and, turning, I fall. I'm on my back now in the deep dust of the street, clutching the wallet to my gut with both hands. Smaller, clawed hands with terrible strength wrench it from me and the sky is lost in a cascade of leering children's faces. Sticks and rocks come at my face from among those smaller faces and the sticks get bigger and the faces blur together and I see nothing else and feel only the now painless thudding about my head and the dust in my lungs, and the children's shouts fade into a cacophony of shrieking laughter and that stops suddenly and there is only the thudding and then the barking of a dog out in the darkness. 

CRATER LAKE

Crater Lake

       A few days after high school graduation in 1961, I got a summer job as busboy in the cafeteria at Crater Lake National Park. The concession company hired mostly college students to work in the cafeteria and lodge. Mr. and Mrs. Griffin, the owners, felt that all those bright young faces were good for business. And we were cheap labor, willing to work six or seven days a week. A majority of the students hired were girls, because most of the jobs had to do with waitressing, maid service, and operating souvenir stands. 

     So there were a lot of pretty, unattached females around. I was eighteen, but still hadn't had much experience with girls. I'd always been really shy around them. Scared might be more like it. But now I was going to college, I had scholarships, I had a job, I was out on my own. This would be my big chance.

     There were two sisters on the staff, so near in age that they often were mistaken for twins. I fell in love with the older sister. She would be a senior in the fall, which made her three years older than me, a huge gap. I didn't care. I thought she was beautiful, but in a relaxed sort of way, with a low, easy laugh that said she didn't take her looks as seriously as many women do, didn't want to taunt you with her beauty. 

     It wasn't hard to get acquainted, on an Ohhello, Iknowwhoyouare basis. All the staff ate in the cafeteria where I bused tables. Employees ate in our own section, and were supposed to bus their own dishes. But we would always cruise the section with our buscarts anyway, to banter with the others. Sometimes if we weren't too busy we'd do somebody a favor, if they were stuck at the end of one of the tables against the wall, and get them a dessert or whatever from the food counter. We had some stature because we controlled the music, and they'd have to ask us if they wanted to hear a certain song. The Ray Conniff Singers were big then, and we all had our favorites. "Harbor Lights" was one of mine. It spoke of parting, of a love more frustrated than realized. Maybe that's what attracted me, the longing to go down to the harbor and depart, in the dark amid strange sounds and smells, for unknown parts of the world, connected to, but not bound by, a love at home. And maybe, after some odyssey that left you scarred but whole, you'd come back and she'd still be there for you. 

     When my secret love would come in I'd think of something to get her to notice me, like making sure the place she wanted to sit was clean. Without crowding her, I'd eavesdrop if she and her friends got to talking about music they liked, and I'd go over and play something I'd heard her mention. If she noticed and smiled in my direction, I'd clean tables like a whirlwind the rest of the day.          

     Sometimes we'd have to stay after closing, clear the cafeteria, and scrub and wax the floor. We’d be lucky if we got done by midnight. Mr. Griffin would give each of us a chit for a meal in the main lodge's dining room for that chore, since it was extra work. Those meals were pretty snazzy - tablecloths, real silverware, wineglasses, the works - and expensive. And there weren't a lot of the chits around. So any guy with a couple of them in his pocket was considered pretty good date material. 

     I saved up two chits and gathered my courage. Normally I wouldn't have had the nerve. She was so beautiful, so grownup - so... well, womanly. But I was feeling like pretty hot stuff. The way that happened was I'd gotten a day off, and since I liked to run, I'd jogged the ten miles around the rim to where the trail went down to the boat docks, and got a ride around the lake on one of the launches operated by a Coast Guard vet for the park concession owners. It was a great day, and when I got back up to the rim it was still before noon. What the hell, I thought, and took a right turn instead of a left. That would take me the rest of the way around the rim, instead of the short way back: a day's run/walk of roughly thirty-six miles instead of twenty. 

     It was wonderful for a while. I'd had lunch and water down at the lake. I was on top of the world, jogging along at 7,000 feet, on a bright day, topping a ridge where the road was a bridge leading right up into the lone white cumulus cloud anointing the blue of the rest of the sky. That lasted a few more miles, then reality set in. 

     Several kids from the staff were hanging out in the lobby of the lodge when I stumbled in, well after dark - feet blistered, badly sunburned, woozy from dehydration and electrolyte depletion. They just gawked at how fried I was. There was quite a buzz about it for a while, about how it was a crazy thing to do, but great that I could pull it off. I was a temporary star in our galaxy.

     I wrapped my newly bolstered confidence around me and went up and asked that dream woman if she'd like to have dinner with me in the lodge dining room. I had two chits. Got 'em for waxing the cafeteria floor, I told her as I proudly offered her the fruits of my hard work. 

     She looked at me for a moment - rather a longer moment for me than for her, I think. I will never forget her look. She smiled. It was, as always with her, a genuine smile. She seemed pleased, and a little surprised, that I had asked. She even seemed to like me, but, I began to sense, in a kid brother sort of way. To this day, I think of the word "bemused" when I recall her look. 

     "No thanks, Dean," she said. "But really, thanks for asking." Damn. The usual class: no phony excuses, just... No, thanks.

     Harold Lawrence, the boat crew chief, had a special presence among us. He was older, all of twenty-six or so. He'd been in the Coast Guard; he'd been around. He drove boats for a living, entrusted with people's lives out on waters that could get dangerously rough, while the rest of us drove buscarts and sold souvenirs. Ashore, he loved his fun, and could kick-start a party by walking into a room. He also carried a certain edge; there was a detectable aura of danger about him at times.

     Women especially seemed to notice him. He wore sunglasses with lenses that curved around to the side to protect the eyes from sunlight glancing off the water, but he still had faint crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, enough to make him look salty but not old. He was always sunburned, and his dark blond hair was bleached and blown about by the wind whenever he came in off the lake.

     I had a pretty serious run-in with Harold. He was sitting in the employee section of the cafeteria, regaling younger workers with some story. He had a few beers aboard; he was feeling his oats and enjoying his status as star of the current show. 

     I came by with my buscart. Harold turned and told me to go get him something from the kitchen. Didn't ask me. Told me. 

     "I'm a busboy, not a waiter, Harold," I said. "Get it yourself." 

     The party was over in an instant. Harold sat and looked at me a long moment. He let that dangerous part of him that we'd only seen hints of come right out through his face. He lifted his chin at me. 

     "Go get it," he said. 

     "No," I said. 

     Everyone just stared at us, staying clear of the sparks. I stood there in front of him, as resolute as I was scared. Still skewering me with his eyes, he finally understood that, however badly I might come out of it, I was ready to go the distance rather than have him order me about like that. He let it drop. Sometime later, he apologized to me, in front of some of the same people who'd been there when it happened. I thought that showed real class.

     Some time after that, and after I had asked the woman for a date to the lodge dining room, I was walking along the hall in the first floor of the lodge, and happened to look in through the door of the cocktail lounge, that exotic place forbidden to eighteen-year-olds like me. She and Harold were sitting opposite each other at a small table, their elbows almost touching. They didn't see me stop for a moment. They didn't see anyone but each other. They weren't all moony and romantic; they were just two intense adults interested in each other. In fact, I thought that she took Harold with a grain of salt, that though she found him interesting, she seemed to have a boundary in place that wouldn't let him too close for too long. Still, I would have given anything, or done anything, to have her look at me the way she looked at him.

     That fall, I entered Oregon State University as a freshman in engineering. I got good grades, my scholarships were renewed, and I was re-hired the following summer, 1962, for my old job at Crater Lake.

     By midsummer I was restless. Crater Lake was a beautiful place, but busing tables wasn't the most adventuresome way to spend a summer. And Oregon State began to seem a less attractive place to go back to. I liked the engineering classes, but there were no women in them, just a bunch of guys like me with glasses and 24-scale loglog split bamboo slide rules. Besides, I had a yen to study foreign languages, or poetry; something that had less to do with things and more with humans. I decided to collect my pay, buy a good bicycle, ride around the Western states with the most beautiful mountains and rivers, and find a new college.     

     The kids on the staff threw a party for me, with a cake that said "Happy Bicycling Dean". I rode down into northern California to visit a buddy in Yreka, then headed back across Oregon to visit my mother in Pasco, just across the line in Washington. My older brother Lance had settled back there after his Army hitch; Mom had taken Darrell and moved back there to be near Lance and his wife and the grandkids, after I graduated from high school.

     South of Lapine, Oregon, the railroad tracks crossed the highway at a sharp angle. My front tire caught in the groove beside one rail; the bike and I went down hard. One crank was bent so badly the bike was unrideable. I went to the library in Bend while I was waiting for a Greyhound to take me and my busted bike to Spokane, up in Washington near the Idaho line. I found a reference book of colleges and universities, and went through all the listings in mountain states, and culled out the ones with strong liberal arts programs. Colorado College sounded best.

     When my bike was fixed, I pedaled east out of Spokane, crossing the Idaho panhandle in a day. That night, I slept in a campground at the base of the long climb to the summit, which was the Montana state line. The next morning I started the long grind, switchback after switchback of steep mountain highway, all in the lowest gears of the 10-speed Raleigh. A freight train was making the same climb, and often the tracks came close to the highway. The engineer and I began to wave to each other; got to be pretty good buddies, in fact. It turned out that the mechanics of his engine and the mechanics of my engine yielded the same average speed all the way up that mountain. So we developed a sign language, encouraging one another, then making fun of the one who momentarily fell behind. This went on for half a day. 

     Finally that freight train and I rolled onto the summit, crossing the Idaho/Montana line together. The engineer leaned out and gave a halfwave, halfsalute, and I was gone. Mileposts, the second hand on my watch, and a brain that was still number-happy from engineering classes, said I was making fifty miles an hour down into the St. Regis River valley. I made it beyond Kalispell, where I got so many flat tires that I couldn't keep moving. Money was running low, and at this rate I'd never make it to Colorado College in time to start school in the fall. I got on a train for Colorado Springs.

     The college was just what I was looking for. The campus was beautiful, the Rockies behind it were beautiful. They studied English and poetry and philosophy and all that good stuff. And there were girls all over the place. But it was a private college, and much more expensive than I could afford. Transfer students couldn't get scholarships in their first year. You had to pay your own way for that year, and if you did well enough, you could apply for scholarships.

     I'd been thinking about getting my military obligation out of the way anyway. I'd rather have gone to college, but didn't have the money to do it the way I wanted to. I told the admissions officer I'd just get the service out of the way, and see him in three or four years. "Fine," he said. I could almost hear "yeah, right" under his breath.

CHO LON

Cho Lon

     When I studied, when I read a book, when I talked with friends and teachers and classmates about politics, I did it with the same urgency I'd felt when I left my outfit at Chu Lai. One day in the Spring of 1968, as the aftermath of the Tet offensive in Vietnam dominated the news, the availability of a small grant for a student to travel to "an underdeveloped country" was announced in classes. In separate classes, at the same hour, Jim Martin and I heard the announcement and had the same idea: Vietnam was an underdeveloped country. 

     We became joint recipients of the grant. 

     I didn’t know anything about cameras, but Mike Taylor did. He became my photography teacher. He said I needed a camera with a light meter, or a separate, hand-held meter. Our classes consisted of a couple of hours on the porch and lawn of the “Shell House” at 524 East Cache La Poudre in Colorado Springs, with Mike, ever generous with his friends, patiently explaining F-stop, shutter speeds, film speeds, focal lengths. I took some pictures of the lawn, trees, and the rusting spray-can-painted green panel truck that Tom and I had bought cheap because it was old and almost done for. 

     So for the summer between our junior and senior years, Jim and I were accredited, by the Denver Post and the Colorado College Tiger, to the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) in Saigon, the official agency for the dissemination of information about American operations in Vietnam to the news media. We got to Saigon in late May. 

     We hooked up with Lee Dembart, a student reporter like ourselves who had come to the country some months earlier with a credential from New York radio station WBAI and then found other work as a journalist. Lee knew the lay of the land as far as reporting in Vietnam was concerned. He knew how to deal with government information bureaucracies, who was who in the journalism community, how to get places. 

   Lee took us to Cho Lon, the Chinese district of Saigon where there was still fighting that had begun during Tet. We hopped into a small taxi and headed out into Saigon's wartime maelstrom of motor scooters, rickshas, jeeps, and Army trucks.

     The traffic gradually thinned, and the noise with it. First there were only a few vehicles and the odd hurrying pedestrian or bicyclist. That number dwindled to none as war's damage appeared: corners of buildings blown out, masonry tumbled into the streets, blackened rebar twisted against the sky, Renaults overturned, burned, dimpled with bullet holes. 

     The driver stopped; this was as far as he'd go. Jim and I got out. Lee stayed to return with the taxi; he'd already reported the Cho Lon story, and had another commitment that afternoon. He pointed us in a direction, with the war correspondent's parting shot: "Keep your heads down." The taxi turned around and left. 

     Nothing is as noisy as a crowded city, or as eerily quiet as a deserted one. We walked a world of rubble, shattered glass, silence.

     But soon, up ahead, we heard the guns: the snap snapsnap of rifle fire, then the throbbing staccato of a heavy machine gun, then the crash of a much larger weapon.

     The scene we arrived at was one of two ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) tanks, parked a few yards apart in the middle of a wide street in the business district of Cho Lon, their turret guns angled down and across the street at what had been a sizable brick building. A unit of ARVN Rangers hung out on the sidelines, in no particular hurry to move up the street. 

     Jim and I took cover in a doorway and watched. I'd been shot at before, but street fighting was new to me, except for a little training at ITR six years earlier. Jim, a Navy vet who had served on an icebreaker in the Antarctic and then volunteered for duty in Vietnam but was never sent there, was under fire for the first time. He did well, though. In fact, he moved ahead a little more quickly than I thought was wise. 

     There were other journalists around. Peter Arnett, the AP reporter, and his frequent partner Horst Faas, the photographer whose Vietnam pictures for Life magazine were already famous, were standing on a street corner where Arnett conversed in Vietnamese with some local people. They were both wearing flak jackets and helmets. In the years since 1968, whenever I saw Arnett’s byline, or saw him on television, I would jump to his defense if sarcastic remarks such as “opportunistic reporters” or the like surfaced from the gallery. This happened frequently when Arnett stayed behind to report for CNN on the bombing campaign against Iraq during the first days of the Gulf War in 1991. I’ve always considered him the real deal, in a profession where lots of people weren’t. 

     Everyone, including the ARVN infantrymen, was watching the tanks. We learned that there was, or had been, a sniper in the brick building the tanks were firing at. During the time we were there, there may (or may not) have been a round or two of return fire come up the street in our direction. There was so much muzzle blast, so many ricochets, so many pieces of flying masonry that it was impossible to tell. Return fire or no, the tanks were systematically destroying the building. Each had a .50 caliber machine gun up front, and a 90mm cannon mounted on its turret. One .50 gunner would open up and traverse the top row of bricks on what was left of the building. When his can of ammo ran out, the machine gunner on the other tank would take over while he reloaded. Periodically, one or the other of the tanks would cut loose with its 90mm cannon on a stubborn section of the building. Then the .50's would go back to work.

     Storefronts all along the street were demolished, their contents spewed onto the sidewalk. Plastic shoes and small electric appliances covered the sidewalk where we knelt, hugging the wall with our right shoulders. 

     I began to feel that less was happening here than met the ear, that the sniper had long since left the brick building, that what we were witnessing was the expenditure of ammunition, the destruction of a building, and Vietnamese soldiers taking advantage of the opportunity to vent their racial enmity towards the Chinese merchants of Cho Lon.

     I let my attention drift away from the tanks. A few feet away from me, some of the ARVN Rangers had wandered into a store with its glass front shot out, helping themselves to the merchandise. A soldier who emerged next to me seemed pretty pleased with the small electric fan he'd procured.

     I turned around, peered into the gloom to my rear. I was crouched in a corner formed by the elevated sidewalk, the storefront at my shoulder, and a low wall behind me, at right angles to the storefront. The low wall sealed the end of a long space enclosed by the raised sidewalk which extended down the street behind me, about three feet above street level.

     As my pupils dilated, I saw a roughly circular hole in the masonry of the low wall behind me, blown open by some large caliber ordnance. I duck-waddled over and peered inside. At first it was too dark to see into the space beneath the sidewalk. Gradually I made out the form of a corpse, a Chinese woman in her middle years. She had recently died. I assumed she had been killed in the fighting, though I saw no wounds. She had been carefully laid out on the rubble that defined the floor of the space, until the fighting ended and her relatives could retrieve her. She looked very dignified. Looking at her, I thought of the phrase, "lying in state." 

     As I looked - she was just inside the hole in the wall, with her feet near enough for me to touch, and her body extended away - the body let out a long, loud, slow, putrid fart right into my face. 

     We walked out of Cho Lon the way we'd come in, away from the tanks, past blocks of blownout buildings, back to where there was again traffic in the streets, back to the land of the living, and caught a taxi downtown just in time to catch the "Five O'clock Follies," the daily press briefings at JUSPAO. Some journalists did all their reporting from there, scooping up the official handouts, rewriting them a little or a lot, shooting them off to their stateside editors, and collecting a regular paycheck for it. Some of the better ones, like Arnett, preferred to get their news where it happened, and seldom went to the briefings except to compare them with reality. 

     The gallery of reporters sat through the U.S. Army Major's recital of recent encounters between their side and our side, giving comparative body counts. During the question and answer period, things got more animated when people began asking about whether some helicopter gunships working over Cho Lon in recent days had caused any civilian casualties. I don't remember the outcome of that exchange, except that it was both confrontational and inconclusive. 

     What I do remember was the evening's final question.  The briefer was asked to comment on reports that ARVN Rangers had been looting during the fighting in Cho Lon. The major was emphatic. Nonono, he said. The Rangers were the South Vietnamese Army's elite. They had all been trained by U.S. officers and NCO's. They would never do that.

Interlude: A Veteran's Dreams

     Every veteran of ground combat has his own set of these dreams, usually for the rest of his life. Some are nightmares that are so horrible that they launch the dreamer bodily out of sleep, then clamp his mind shut, in forgetfulness, against what he just saw. Often only fragments remain. Or a dream will be repeated so often that it can't be forgotten. Sometimes, as with my dream about the wolves, it sears the brain so deeply, that one time, that it can't be forgotten. 

     Since the war, my dreams have included an ongoing series of pursuit nightmares. Over the years, two things happened. I got weary of, and angry at, waking up terrified. I also realized that however scary the dreams were, they were also amazing pictures (in full color) and stories. I decided that if I had to put up with them, I should at least get some use out of them.

     I made a conscious decision to try, when I was having a nightmare in which I was being pursued, to do two things: to turn, in the dream, and confront my pursuers; and to remember the dreams instead of forgetting them. After all, I was a storyteller, and I was missing out on the use of material which was among my strongest, and for which I had paid the highest price. I began to write them down. The dreams related here are told exactly as they occurred to me, except that some have been shortened either by me or by that great editor, forgetfulness.

     In more recent years, my dreams – some, anyway - have become friends, except for the rare visitation of a nightmare as graphic and terrifying as the first two presented here. Along the way I learned an interesting thing: that while dreams inhabit the most fearsome recesses of the human soul, dreams themselves are brutally unafraid. They will go anywhere, reveling in deepest fears and unmentionable desires. Allowed to travel unfettered and then to haul their stories into the light of morning, they will do work - especially for a writer - which simply cannot be done by the awake mind. 

SOLDIER TIN / DREAM: BODIES OF WATER

SUMMER 1968 Out of the Marine Corps... for the summer, Jim Martin and I returned to Southeast Asia as student journalists. I spent a week in a US Special Forces "A" team camp near the Laotian border. This is the second of two chapters about that week:

2. Soldier Tin

     Master Sergeant Robert F. Williams (home of record: Las Vegas, Nevada) was showing me around the compound. The trenches had been dug in a zigzag pattern so that an enemy grenade or man would only be effective for a short distance should it or he make it over the revetment and into the trench. The trench was punctuated at strategic points by flimsy blockhouses which doubled as machine gun emplacements and homes for Montagnard families. 

     Of the low, tinroofed buildings similar in construction to the team house, one was a dispensary, and another, in Williams' words, was "the Yards' chow hall". The last syllable of the French word "Montagnard" sounds like "yard", so that's what the Americans called them.

     We went inside the chow hall. It was dark, cool, and smelled and felt of bare wood timbers and earth. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see dim figures squatting about on top of rough wooden tables, eating rice and boiled meat from metal pots with their hands. Williams was telling me how a Special Forces "A" Team and a CIDG unit worked together.

     "We're s'posed to be mostly just advisors, but you know that's bullshit. We command, and it turns out, we do most of the fighting. What we do is send out Yard patrols, anywhere from a squad to a comp'ny with one American along to run the show and keep radio contact with the team house...here's Tin. You heard about him yet?"

     The dark figure stood and saluted as we came up to him. (The Montagnards at Mangbuk saluted all Americans regardless of their dress or status; it was as if they assumed that we were all soldiers, just as they were all soldiers.) In the dark, I couldn't see any difference between Tin and the others.

     "He was with the VC for four years," Williams was saying as we went out into the sunlight, blinding now against our enlarged pupils. "Then he came over to us. Some of the Yards still don't trust him; they say he's different. For that matter, some of the guys on the team won't turn their backs on him. Hell, I trust him. Absolutely the best man on a trail I ever seen. Never wears shoes, walks like a cat in the jungle, sort of feels it when we're gettin' close to somethin'. 'Fact, he is half animal. But he sure knows that goddamned jungle." 

      All the Montagnards were primitive people, and there seemed to be an openness and absence of guile in their faces which I associated with their primitiveness, and which I liked them for, as did most Americans who knew them. It was as if their looks cut across cultural barriers with a bridge of pure humanity. By "looks", I mean both the way they appeared when we looked at them, and the way they looked at us, the way their eyes communicated who they were. 

     I saw Tin later out in the compound, in the daylight. He had a primitive look about him too, but it was somehow startlingly different from the simplicity which I saw in the eyes of the others. Williams was right. Tin was wild: in the way he moved, in the way he stood still, and most of all in his eyes.

     I stayed with the team about a week. One night, the night I especially remember, started out pretty much as usual: the orphan children who cooked and cleaned for the Americans had cleared away the dishes, a routine squad sized patrol of just Montagnards was sent out for the night, and the team members sat around the team house playing cards, cleaning weapons, listening to the tape recorder, or just talking. 

     I was downstairs, or in the kitchen or somewhere out of the way, when I felt that something was wrong. By the time I got to the team room, every motion and every sound by every man there was tersely professional. 

     Captain Moroney was talking to the man who had been on radio watch to keep contact with the security patrol. The Montagnard was excited, confused, and having a hard time with his pidgin English. Moroney was trying to calm him down and get the story about what had happened. 

     "Tin, he shoot...pow!...he...CIDG...he...."

     "Looks like we've made contact," Moroney was saying. The other Americans were already moving to their weapons: magazines slid into receivers, bolts clicked home; men shrugged into flak jackets and buckled on cartridge belts. Moroney told his American radio operator to advise Kontum of the VC contact and stand by for details.

     "Anybody hit?" Moroney asked the Montagnard. "CIDG  he hit?"

     "Yeah, Tin, he shoot...CIDG, he hit...two, t'ree, four...Krip, he dead."

     "Oh, fuck...look, you tell CIDG he come home, okay? Right now." The Montagnard hurried out, stumbling. "Well," Moroney said to his own men, "let's get out there." Suddenly remembering that he had an atypical factor to consider, Moroney looked over at me. He reached behind himself, snatched a .45 pistol with its belt and holster from its peg on the wall, and tossed it to me. "You were a Marine, right? You'll know how to use this, then." I buckled it on.

     The patrol had not been far away, and had started back right after the shooting. Moroney and his men met them in the jungle on the far side of the airstrip. We could tell from their flashlight beams that they were soon on the way back in, and that for some reason Moroney expected no further contact with the VC, or he would not have used the lights. 

     "Well, mister reporter, looks like you get a story after all," the medic said to me on his way out of the team house. "Wanna come down to the dispensary and watch me sew 'em up?" I followed him out.

     Down in the dispensary, we started clearing off the operating table and the benches for patients who could sit. Tucker, the medic, got out a bottle of intravenous solution and hung it on a stand above the operating table. "Always need that, no matter what else happens," he grinned. "We ain't got any blood, but at least we can replace some of the fluid...wonder how many are hit...fuck, I hope this don't keep me up all night."

     First we heard excited voices coming from the direction of the camp gate, then shuffling and scraping noises. Then they burst into the room. One man had a shattered hand, one had a bullet through his leg, one had a bullet through his groin, and one had a bullet through his head: it had entered under his chin and come out through his left temple. He should not have been alive, but he was. It was Tin.

     Tucker looked quickly at each of the four wounded. It was triage time. He paused for a moment between Tin and the man with the bullet through his groin, trying to decide which one to see to first. 

     Moroney came in and pointed at Tin. "Keep that bastard alive," he said. "He shot 'em."

     Tucker motioned for the stretcher bearers to get Tin onto the operating table; the other wounded were laid on benches behind the partition. 

     "What?" Tucker asked. "What happened?"

   "I donno yet, exactly. But there were no VC. He shot 'em." Moroney pointed again at Tin. "That's why I want him alive. I want to talk to him."

     The team's second medic was seeing to the three other wounded in the adjoining room, and was being helped by a couple of Montagnard boys who were still too young to fight but who had been taught to assist in the dispensary. I was the only man in the room who wasn't busy. 

     "Does this sort of thing make you nervous, or can you give me a hand?" Tucker asked. Tin was writhing and groaning and tearing the IV needle out of his arm; he smelled of mud and blood and fearsweat, which has a much stronger and more acrid smell than sweat that comes from exertion. I recognized it from having smelled it on myself many times during my own Vietnam tour. 

     Tin was hard to handle; his fear made him strong. I cut his clothes off and we lashed him to the operating table with thick hemp rope. Then we had to lash his arms down too to keep him from tearing the needle out, and when Tucker finally got some sulfa powder and a dressing of sorts on the messy part of the head where the bullet had come out, a Montagnard boy and I took turns holding his head against the table so he wouldn't turn it sideways and tear off the dressing and the mangled tissue that protruded from the exit wound low on his left temple. I had to lean over him to hold his head; I saw the wound up close and felt his pulse thundering through his temple above the wound and saw his left eye, cocked crazily because the bullet had passed just behind it. When he shuddered, I wondered if it was like having ahold of an electric eel. The Montagnard boy looked at me across the shuddering Tin with eyes which were curious, but otherwise showed no emotion. 

     "Any bets?" Tucker said aloud. "I bet he don't last till morning." He slapped Tin on the belly. "Fucker don't deserve it anyway," he said. "If the skipper wasn't so hot to talk to him, I'd pull the tube on him right now."

     I went back to the dispensary to help with the stretchers when the medevac choppers came. It was dark, moonless. A Huey sat down on the airstrip just beyond the gate, but kept its rotors going at full power in case we were attacked and a quick liftoff was necessary. The gunship escort clattered about in the nearby night sky. The only points of light in our universe were the blinking red tailrotor lights on the choppers and one blinding white floodlight on the parapet which shone straight down in front of the gate. 

     The rotors whackwhacked and the red lights blinked and the white light blinded and the dust from the rotor wash swirled and the engines roared and men shouted in four languages and we ran through that gumbo of sight and sound with the stretchers. 

     I was carrying one end of Tin's stretcher. A group of angry Montagnards were waiting for us at the gate, but Moroney and some other Americans were there too and held them back as we ran through. As we were sliding Tin aboard the chopper, one of the Montagnards broke away and came running toward us waving his carbine. 

     The little soldier was enraged. "Why you med'vac Tin? Tin kill CIDG! I KILL TIN!" Two Special Forces men put their bodies between him and us and disarmed him, as gently as they could manage in the face of his rage. Now I knew why they wanted me to help with the stretcher: they needed every one of their own to deal with the angry Montagnards.

     The choppers took off and we turned back to the team house; Moroney stayed to cool off the montagnards. "We should've given 'im to 'em," somebody spoke into the darkness.

     The story was pieced together: the squad had settled down for the night, and they had all lain down in the trail to sleep, leaving Tin on watch. 

     It had not been long since the Montagnards did their fighting with spears and crossbows; they still did not understand something which any infantryman in a modern army is taught from the beginning: the closer together you are, the better target you present for automatic weapons fire, or for grenades or any other fragmentation device.

     That night, the members of the squad on patrol were huddled together on the trail, asleep in the illusion that their closeness gave them security, when Tin, who was on watch, for no reason that anyone could ever find out, raised his carbine and fired a long burst on full automatic, starting at one edge of the huddled sleepers and moving to the other. That burst killed one man and wounded four others; the man with the bullet through his groin also died later.

     The soldier Moroney was questioning in the operations room had wakened just as Tin started to fire, and had squeezed off one quick burst at Tin. It was one of those bullets which caught him under the chin and passed behind his left eye and out his left temple. 

     "How you shoot?" Moroney was asking. "You shoot t-t-t-t-t... or you shoot pow, pow, one time, two time?"

     The soldier made as if to hold his weapon and imitated the way it would jump when fired on full automatic. "God damn it!" Moroney threw his pencil down and turned away. "I keep telling these people to learn to fire their weapons on semiautomatic, but they never remember when they get scared. Makes 'em feel safe to throw out a lot of lead." He turned back to the soldier: "Well, okay, you can go now. But you stay here Mangbuk, so I can talk to you. Okay?"

     Later, in the team house, Moroney gave his instructions about how the incident was to be handled. Since Special Forces Headquarters at Kontum already knew there had been an exchange of fire, and since wounded CIDG soldiers would be showing up at the hospital there, a report would have to be made. Moroney did not want to lie and say that there had actually been contact with a VC force large enough to inflict five casualties, because then false information about the presence of enemy troops would be disseminated to other units in the area. But he had been warned about trusting Tin; he also feared outside meddling in a situation which he thought he could handle better himself. He decided that, after all, his official report would describe the incident as contact with a VC force, and instructed his men to keep quiet about it to outsiders. 

     "Oh yeah, and where's that reporter?" he turned and pointed an admonitory finger at me. "I don't want one word printed about this, you hear? It would cause too much trouble; they wouldn't understand."     

     The next day, small brown soldiers buried one of Tin's victims in a small coffin made of plain raw lumber. Stapled to one end of the box was a sheet of 8-1/2" x 11" typing paper with a grease pencil epitaph: 

     

                    NAME: KRIP

                    AGE: 18

                    NATION: MONT

                    LOCATION: MANGBUK

                    DATE DIED: 18 JUNE 68

     I stayed at Mangbuk two or three more days. The last I heard from the hospital was that Tin was still alive. 

     Sometimes, even now, I think of Tin. I will think that he is probably still alive, because he has already lived through what should have killed him. Other times, I think he must be dead, because he had no place to go from the hospital but back to Mangbuk, where the Sedang were waiting to kill him; and if the Sedang didn't kill him, the VC would, because he left them for the other side; and if the VC didn't get him, the emphysema would, because his people didn't put smokeholes in the roofs of their huts.

                        

Dream: Bodies of Water

I am a soldier again, but not in the Marine Corps this time. It's a more irregular force. We drop from higher ground toward a village. It is somewhat familiar; it may or may not be our village. It seems deserted, but we feel other presences. As we march wearily and warily down into the village, there is an inevitability to our marching, that feeling in the body which my dream has borrowed from my Adeste Fidelis march at Camp Pendleton years before. This inevitability is a property not just of our column of dusty, sweaty men. It is a property of the very movements of our limbs, of our muscles and bones, even of our cells. We might as well be insects hatching. The air is thick with risk. Is the village deserted, or are the people (our people? people loyal to the enemy?) hidden in the rude houses behind shuttered windows? Is the danger from them, or from someone else who will come? This land could be the rocky ridges of the West Bank, say an Israeli or Palestinian settlement or village near Jerusalem and Bethlehem; or it could be an open rocky area of the Guatemalan highlands, near where the road forks between Todos Santos Cuchumatán and San Miguel Acatán, only less green; or Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where Ollie North and his cowboys built their secret airstrip for the contras. A small creek, less than three feet wide, runs through the village. The banks of the creek are lined with stones placed by human hands. Some of us kneel to drink; some look warily around, up and downstream, rifles ready. Even we who drink are looking, peering out from under our eyebrows. As I drink, the creek floats a human body beneath my face, almost touching. The creek is barely wide enough for the body to pass. The body is a darkhaired young man. The head, shoulders, hips, feet, all bump jerkily against the creek's rocky sides as the water carries it along. The body floats face up. His hands are bound behind his back. I look upstream. Another body, another darkhaired young man, is close behind the first. As my eyes change focus and sweep upstream, I see the creek is filled with bodies of darkhaired young men in civilian clothes, crowded head to foot, hands bound behind, bumping between narrow rocky creekbanks propelled by a stream of clear water. They clog, jam up, bump into one another like wastage from a doll factory. But the same inevitability which infuses our movements unsticks the bodies, moves them bumpily on downstream. I look farther upstream, lowering my face until it is just above the stream of bodies and clear water. I now can see under the stone-lined culvert from which the stream emerges. In the light that comes through the tunnel, I see legs of soldiers standing on the creekbanks beyond the culvert. They are wearing blue jeans, other civilian pants, boots, tennis shoes, the odd bit of uniform. I see only their legs, and the muzzles of their rifles at the ready. Their legs look like the legs of the bodies in the creek. They also look like our legs. Or they could be the legs of the players, seen through a broken horizontal slat in the fence around any inner-city basketball court in the world. Are they the killers? Are they coming for us? Are they reinforcements for us? Or are they a fresh supply of bodies for the water?    

HUNGER 3

Hunger 3

[My first semester at Colorado College after discharge from the Marine Corps, recently out of Vietnam.]     
     
     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.

TOWNIES

Townies

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

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

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

      No.

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

      Fine. I will kill at least one.

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

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

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

     “Let’s go,” he said.

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

PACKING

Packing

     It was the summer of 1967, between my sophomore and junior years. Dave Miller, an oboist friend who played for the Air Force Academy Band, had gotten me a job working with him installing underground lawn sprinklers in Colorado Springs with a man who called his company Modern Mole, because he had this little rig that we pulled behind a small tractor that sank a bullet‑shaped piece of steel below the sod and pulled the irrigation tubing along behind it under the sod, instead of having to dig a trench and replace the sod.

     One day Dave and I were having lunch in this one‑notch‑up‑from‑fast‑food place on Nevada Avenue. The dining area consisted of one big open room. Most of the tables were full. We were sitting at a table near one of the restaurant's three doors. I should say here that, although it was nearly a year after I'd left Vietnam, and those months on a bucolic private college campus that was as unlike Vietnam as I could imagine had begun to drain the habitual fear out of me, I still had my share of a combat veteran's instincts. (For that matter, even as I write this in 1992, I prefer to sit near a door in public places. Corners with a view of the whole room and all doors are best.)

     A man opened the door behind Dave and stepped inside, just out of the traffic, and stood there unobtrusively. That is, he was trying to be unobtrusive. He wouldn't have startled me more had he been wearing a clown suit and leading a rhinoceros on a sequined leash.

     He was tall, and had the combined thickness of limb and physical grace of a pro football running back. The picture rounded out: conservative business suit ‑ tailored, not off the rack ‑ and "high and tight" haircut. My eyes swept over him once; the slight bulge in his suit coat just above the right hip was more confirmation than surprise.

     His eyes scoured the room with an utterly amoral professionality. He was looking for someone who didn't want to be found. My brain scanned that information and prompted me to look at the other two doors. Again, more confirmation than surprise: each was filled by a clone of the man who stood behind Dave, including the bulge at the waist.

     "Hey, Dave, look! Those guys are all packin' guns!" I almost shouted. My voice carried across the room, splitting the hubbub of lunchtime conversation.

     Dave dropped his fork and looked at me with wide eyes. I pointed with my chin over his shoulder. He spun around, his nose almost bumping into the bulge at the man's hip. He spun back around. I pointed at the other two doors. At the instant of my remark, the three had made eye contact with one another across the room. The man behind Dave gave a slight twitch of his head, and they were gone.

     I looked around the room. Not a fork dropped, not a conversation was interrupted, not a head turned to notice the three armed men who had had the room sealed off, looking for someone among them.

A COLLEGE ROOMMATE, AND ABRAHAM AND ISAAC, AND VIETNAM

                                                               Mark

     Four of us vets rented a house a few blocks east of campus on Cache la Poudre. Mike Taylor, who had been raised partly in Europe, thought the place needed a little something, so he unfurled a three‑foot by twenty‑some‑foot banner he'd been saving for a special occasion, and we hung it across the front of the house. It had a big yellow Shell Oil emblem and the words "C'est SHELL que j'aime." Basically, "I love Shell." The neighbors were afraid it signified some kind of cult, but we didn't care. We liked the notoriety.

     So the place became known around campus as "the Shell house." Mark Streuli wasn't living there at the time because there weren't enough rooms. But he was one of us. Of the five of us, Mark and I had been in the military in Vietnam, and Jim and I had spent the summer of ’68 there as journalists.

     Mark had been in Army Special Forces in Viet Nam. He was a quiet, wiry, intense man who seemed to have a bemused attitude toward the political passions and idealisms of the rest of us. He is the only man I've ever heard refer to combat as a game, and he was serious. I, ever the idealist, had angry words with him at the time; later I came to believe he’d been more right than I had wanted to believe.

     When Jim and I had returned from our trip to Southeast Asia in the fall of 1968 and began telling our stories to our roommates, Mark was astonished to hear that I'd spent a week at Mangbuk. "I built that place!" exclaimed this man who prided himself on not getting visibly excited. He went on to qualify himself, saying that he had supervised the initial construction of the camp at Mangbuk during his time as a demolitions specialist and combat engineer with the Special Forces.    

     Once in a while when Mark was over and the five of us, plus whatever visitors had happened by during the evening, stayed up late partying or just talking half the night around the kitchen table, Mark would crash at the Shell house instead of walking back to his rented room half a mile away.

     One morning I got up when the rest of the house was still in bed to find Mark asleep on the floor in the hall outside the door to my room. Mark was one of those vets you didn't startle awake because you didn't know what he might have been dreaming, and he had the reflexes and training to react and do some real damage before he became fully awake.

     I stepped over him as carefully and quietly as I could. I watched his face so I could speak if he started awake. What I saw instead was a barely perceptible change in his breathing, then an ever‑so‑slight lifting of one eyelid. He was awakening the way we had learned to when we were in the boonies: you let your mind and then your senses come awake without giving any outward sign of it in case someone is trying to slip up and kill you. You let your mind remember where you are. You mentally locate your hands and feet; you remember whether you are wearing boots. You remember where your weapons are in relation to your hands. You listen for movement around you. You crack open an eyelid just enough to see out between the lashes but not enough to seem awake. You check out the area. If everything you see and hear is normal, then you can open your eyes.    

     I knew Mark was now awake, watching me between the lashes of one slightly opened eye.

     "Mornin', Mark," I said.     

     He grunted and went back to sleep.

                                 J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac

     In our last semester before graduation in the Spring of 1969, a small group of philosophy majors met at Professor Gray's house for a seminar in Modern European Philosophy. We met there because Gray had been recovering for some time from a serious heart attack. Some of us were going on to graduate study in philosophy. Jim Martin was in the class too, because although he was a political science major, he'd taken enough philosophy courses, and taken them seriously enough, that Gray welcomed him into the seminar. Jim later married Gray's daughter Sherry.

     J. Glenn Gray was an icon on campus, and indeed in the national community of students, teachers, and writers of philosophy. His best‑known book, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, about his experiences as an intelligence officer in Europe in WWII, has such a word‑of‑mouth reputation that it keeps slipping back into print, though it was first published in 1959.

     We did readings in Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers; and maybe one or two others. Gray had spent considerable time with Martin Heidegger, and had translated his Was Heisst Denken? as What Is Called Thinking?, which was on our reading list.

     He assigned me a paper on Kierkegaard's dialectic of faith, partly because Gray knew of my interest in Hegelian dialectics, which I'd studied with Professor Harvey Rabbin (who also attended this seminar along with Gray, and helped teach it, because of Gray’s weakened condition). Gray’s doctoral thesis, Hegel and the Greeks, continued to be reprinted in paperback for many years after its initial publication. Kierkegaard's essay which I was to write about was “Fear and Trembling”. It dealt with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. I remember Professor Gray using the word "sublime" to describe Abraham's faith, which was so deep that he was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, for his God.

     Sublime? I was furious. I read Kierkegaard's essay. It in no way abated my fury. My assignment was to make a copy of my paper for each student in the seminar, and one each for Gray and Rabbin. I did so, with this title at the top of each mimeographed copy: "Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Faith: Or, How to Eat Shit and Like It."

     When we gathered for the class, I had the butterflies, as if I were about to start in my first high‑school football game, or, for that matter, about to enter a firefight. Professor Gray passed around the copies of my paper. It wasn't hard to see that this man, whom we all revered for his wisdom and fairness and his thoroughly warm and gentle nature, was angry. When each person in the circle of fewer than ten people had received a copy of my paper, he spoke, with a sternness that I, at least, had never before seen in him: "The first thing I want everyone to do is to take Dean's paper and cross out the title." His face was in profile to me as he said it (I was to his left); he seemed to be speaking to everyone but me. Then he turned his beloved, stern, disapproving, wounded old man's face to me and, barely meeting my eyes, mumbled words to the effect that, no matter what our opinions were, and no matter how strongly held, there was absolutely no excuse for using that kind of language in this class.

     Everyone except me took out a pen and bent over the paper, pressed on the floor or a book or a clipboard, and crossed out the title of my paper. The room seemed soaked in pain. Professor Gray said I could go ahead and present my paper.

     I was as angry as he was, and as committed to my state of mind as he was to his. Here I have to say that I feel now([1]) as I felt then, and I think now as I thought then. But what I remember after Professor Gray told people to cross out my title is jumbled. I know that I made my case, and that I so strongly felt myself to be right that I was willing to risk censure, even total ostracism, from these few people whose opinions of me, along with those of my roommates, meant more to me than those of anyone else in the world. Well. Except for the Marines I’d served with. But they were scattered about the world, and these people were here, in Dr. Gray’s living room.

     I’m sure I spoke in an overwrought, choke‑throated, stumbling, almost tearfully pleading sort of way. However well or ill I made my case then, these were its elements:

     I have seen, and been a party to, the killing of men, women, children. I have walked through people's homes with a bayonet fixed on the end of my automatic rifle, and have used it to guard those people while my comrades burned their homes. That is obscenity. The use of the word "shit" is not only trifling by comparison; it is at times the only accurate word to describe the reality before us. It is among the few words we have in the American language to signify the obscenity which I witnessed and perpetrated. I came here, to the study of philosophy and to this class, to attempt to understand, and then in some small way to rectify, what I have done, what other men have done before me, what still other men are doing now, as we speak, and will do in the future. I take this work, and my expression of it, most seriously. I cannot do this work without the uncompromising use of the clearest language I can call to mind. That is what I did here. I did it from a sense of mortal and moral urgency, and in good faith. I insist that my sincerity, and my accuracy, be recognized.

     Your sense of propriety is a significant part of a mental construct which is the very reason why we do, have done, and will do the murderous things that we do.

     You asked me to write about faith. I know something about faith. I was willing to die to keep the faith, and nearly did. Whether or not you agree with me, that gives me the right to speak and write as I do, and to demand that you listen. I was among the very most faithful. Our motto, as Marines, was Semper Fidelis, Always Faithful. We did not question this, as Abraham did not question his God. We had a more popular, more vulgar version: Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die.

     You must, you absolutely must, hear me now, on this subject; or, even if I must stand alone against you, Professor Gray, and against the rest of you, my friends whom I love, I will judge your efforts at philosophy as being insincere, irrelevant, and fundamentally and humanly dishonest. What I am saying to you is that, as a faithful soldier, I was Isaac; and as a small unit leader in combat situations, I was also his father, Abraham. Younger men than I, boys really, trusted me when I ordered them into the fight, trusted that the reasons for my orders to them justified their sacrifice. That sacrifice was, or easily could have been, so great that for you to express anger or displeasure at my use of a word most of the world uses anyway, which all kids learn on childhood playgrounds, is for you to break the deeper faith, the one that springs from our common humanity.

     Goddamn you, listen: it's no accident that they call us "infantry." We are the manchildren who, now and forever back in time, provide the sinew of armies, provide the blood and decomposing tissue the death of which, in most wars in most times, serves no purpose more noble than the fertilization of the soil on which we die, which could have been accomplished by the spreading of manure, or of bone meal or some other by‑product of the slaughterhouses from which we get the steaks and chops we barbecue on patriotic three‑day weekends.

     We are too young to judge the rightness or wrongness, or the odds of success or failure, of the demands which send us, first to the recruiter, then to boot camp, then to armies, then to war, then to some bullshit little roadway or village or bridge or snowy hillock on the wrong side of the world, to slaughter, and be slaughtered by, human beings who are more like us than we are like the leaders who sent us into the fight.

     It is only by luck, by a mathematically serendipitous circumstance that had me standing in a certain randomly chosen place instead of a few inches to the right or left when the bullets came past my ear at Tho An, that I am alive, and here, to say this to you.

     What I survived to say to you is that faith is not enough. Faith, by its very nature, does not question. So the faithful soldier does not know whether the government he fights to save is really democratic, or even whether that government truly asked for his help. He doesn't know whether the soldiers he fights against represent a truly evil cause, or are just simple, faithful, unquestioning "INFANTry" like himself. He doesn't know whether inaccuracies in the information which is the basis of his marching orders result from faulty intelligence or from lies. Often it comes from both, as was the case in the Gulf of Tonkin, and more recently in the run-up to the current war in Iraq.

     Goddamn it, listen: Abraham's responsibility is not to his God, but to his son. For if he chooses his God over his son, then he will forever be sacrificing his own blood and that of his children for the sake of schemes hatched by men in long black robes, or odd‑shaped hats, or colored sashes. I bring this to you direct from the well in the village of Tho An, where the difference between what I was doing and what I had been told first appeared to me in such startling clarity.

     However well or clumsily that is expressed, what I said to J. Glenn Gray and Harvey Rabbin and my fellow students that Spring evening in 1969 was much clumsier. It was no less deeply felt.

     It didn't cut much ice. Gray was stern toward me the rest of the evening.

     Now, as I go back through his wonderfully thoughtful book, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, I see again his reaching, with all sincerity and with carefully reasoned and stated reservations, for religion as the sole possibility for limiting the violence which we humans visit on one another in wars.

     I still can't agree. Religion was more effective in supporting the pointless carnage of Vietnam, and in the preparation of us faithful young warriors to fight there, than in stopping it. I still think that, of the human impulses, religion, far from being a way out of the violence, has the bloodiest hands of all.

     Gray and I stayed friends, but never really returned to the conversation which had been so painful for me, and I think for him as well. He wrote glowing letters for me, which helped get me admitted to the History of Consciousness Ph.D. program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whence Harvey Rabbin had come. They certainly also contributed to my receiving a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and a full scholarship my first year of graduate school.

     Each of us had been as sincere, and as certain, as the other. I think that the difference between us regarding faith showed, more starkly than anything else, the difference between what the soldiers of his war experienced and what the soldiers of my war experienced.

     I think that Professor Gray was, in his bones, too kind, too decent a man to truly understand the murderousness to which he sometimes put his mind and pen. I mean this only as concerns the role of faith in human affairs, when it comes to the institutional killing done by the world’s armies. I thought so then; I think so now. Thanks to the aggregate of Vietnam, my studies (including 3 years of philosophy courses from Dr. Gray), my reading, my experiences as a journalist in other wars, and to the limitations of my own character, I no longer have that problem.

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[1] “Now” in this case is March 24, 2009, as I write and edit  the final pages of this book.