"WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE"

With God on Our Side

Sometimes I think this little story comes across as funny. In fact it even does to me, at times. But remember: it takes place in 1963, before many of us even learned to spell "Vietnam." In fact, properly written, it's two words: "Viet Nam." But looked at from a certain slant, it tells a lot about how armies are made. It describes us when we were "young and dumb...."

     Steve McLaughlin and I had been buddies at 29 Palms, had both gone through radio telegraph school at San Diego, and both ended up on Okinawa in 1964. My new outfit was the Twelfth Marines, an artillery regiment headquartered at the US Army's Camp Sukiran. Steve was in another outfit on Sukiran.

     One day I ran into Steve at the camp library. "C'mere," he said, and led me into the listening room where you could play records from the library's collection. He showed me an album cover; I looked at it while he put the record on and set the needle down on the song he wanted me to hear. The album was by this beautiful young folk singer with long, flowing black hair. Her name was Joan Baez. I'd never heard of her.

     The song Steve wanted me to hear was "With God on Our Side." It was by some guy named Bob Dylan. Never heard of him either. Steve wasn’t sure what the words of the song were getting at, and wanted to know what I thought. We played it, talked about it, played it some more. We were trying to figure out what it meant. It was clearly a song about war, about what an important thing war is, about how important it is to get it right if you do it. It seemed, on the one hand, a very reverent song. "...but you don't ask questions/when God's on your side." That made sense to us. It went perfectly well with how we'd been brought up, and with how the Marine Corps had trained us: Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die....

     But was there something else? The question nagged at us as we played the song again and again. The singer and the words were so sincere that we tended to take the song at face value. She was clearly pointing out that in wars, both sides often claim to have God on their side. What that seemed to us to mean was that one side had to be wrong, since God wouldn't be on both sides at once. So it must be a song about how important it was to be on the right side. That would be us, of course. 

But would it? Could she actually be saying that both sides might be wrong? Wow. We didn't think so, but maybe. We left the library without coming to a conclusion that satisfied either of us about what the song intended. What we did agree on was that we'd sure like to meet that babe on the album cover.    

PROLOGUE

Prologue

Tho An

Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began; others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the F-4 Phantoms - sharks of the air with high triangular tails and turned-down black snouts - finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.
Attached to “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, I was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements, or attempts to flee.
They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot Company's combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C4 from the blast. A sergeant cursed the engineer for using too much explosive. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.
I'd imagined battle, but I'd never imagined this. The children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers' arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, yet feared my rifle and bayonet more. They wailed in awful concert with their children. The older women joined.
But the old man: he didn't wail, cower, try to flee the explosions or shrink back from my bayonet. He just stared at me, afraid but with that resigned, calculated, limited fearfulness of one who is going to die before too long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I had ever seen on a human face.
Something happened, as I looked down my rifle and bayonet at the old man and the women and children I was holding captive, which would determine the course of the rest of my life. I looked at those people, then looked around me. I saw, in the bright noon light, a veil dropping. There was a feeling of the veil's movement having a direction: top to bottom, sky to earth. The veil seemed transparent, leaving the artillery-blasted fronds of the palm trees, their napalm-charred trunks, the flaming thatch and skeletal bamboo frameworks of the huts, the urgent movements of the Marines of "F" Company, the terrified people at my feet, all looking exactly as they had a moment before. Yet they also looked completely different. I can't explain that, except to say that suddenly, and ever after, I saw the world through different eyes.
But it wasn’t just my present and future which I saw differently. That day in Tho An, a process began of re-seeing my entire life, from as far back as I could remember, and of realizing that a gradual accretion of boyhood experiences, beginning long before I entered Marine Corps boot camp, were what had made me a warrior.

II. Learning War
I first saw the world on January 23, 1943. Pearl Harbor was 13½ months in the past; the United States was at war with Japan and Germany. The 1st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal( ) 5½ months earlier; Americans had invaded North Africa 2½ months earlier. The Soviet Army had counterattacked Axis forces outside Stalingrad, trapping 91,000 German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian troops inside a pocket. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would surrender all those troops a week after I was born, and the Japanese would begin evacuating Guadalcanal a day later. Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term as President of the United States. The blockade of Leningrad was in its 502nd day, of 872. Tatyana Savicheva( ) was 5 months dead. Treblinka( ) had been in operation 6 months, with 10 gas chambers working full time. In October of that year, Jewish slaves at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland, would stage a sufficiently successful revolt that the Nazis destroyed the camp for fear that the escapees would tell the world what had happened there, which they did.( ) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.


NEXT: Table of Contents, and a story or two from childhood.

YOUNG MEN... AND YOUNGER

YOUNG MEN, AND ... YOUNGER

     War is the way our species eats our young. It’s been so at least since Homeric times – three thousand years, give or take - but probably much longer. The Iliad is considered by many to be the first great work of Western literature, and is, of course, a war story. But reading Homer’s Iliad  and Odyssey turns up no mention of 8- or 12-year-old warriors. The warriors in the story were young men, not children. Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Patroclus, 

Odysseus, Paris, Greater and Lesser Ajax - they were all fully grown – if not always grown up. By 1579, the practice of recruiting and conscripting adolescent boys into Europe’s armies had grown to the point that the word used to name groups of foot soldiers was Middle French/German infanterie, Old Italian infanteria, Spanish infantería. Though combat has always been a young man’s game, the phenomenon of child soldiers has acquired a whole new meaning in recent decades. There are now an estimated 300,000 combatants in their early teen and pre

teen years(43) in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and,especially, in Africa(44). The youngest soldier I’ve read about was a combatant with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), in Uganda. He was 5 years old. Not 15; he was 5(45). The AK47 is a bit heavier and more awkward than the M16, but even a young child can carry one. And anyone has the strength to pull a trigger.

     So far, not many U.S. soldiers have been younger than 

17(46); just the ones who lied about their ages. But our 

soldiers have lately met children in combat. P.W. Singer

43 See “Child Soldiers: The New Faces of War,” by P.W. Singer. http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter05-06/singer.htm; also Council on Foreign Relations, “Child Soldiers Around the World,” http://www.cfr.org/publications/9331/ by Eben Kaplan

44 P.W. Singer, Children at War, Pantheon, 2005. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, cites such references as UNICEF and Human Rights Watch reports, John Keegan’s A History of Warfare, etc.

45 ibid., p. 20.

46 The youngest U.S. soldier on record as having been killed in Vietnam was 15. His name was Dan Bullock. The Website for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“The Wall”) (http://thewall-usa.com) in Washington, D.C.says that 5 Americans aged 16 were killed there, and 12 aged 17. The same site says that more than 25,000 aged 20 or under were killed in that war.

writes in his book on child soldiers: “U.S. Marines fighting in the battle to retake Falluja [Iraq] in November 2004

reported numerous instances of being fired upon by ‘12 year old children with assault rifles’ and wrestled with the dilemmas it presented.(47)” 

     Among the many instances of child soldiers cited by Singer is the Indonesian island of Ambon, where “thousands of Muslim and Christian boys have formed local paramilitary units that protect and raid against the other community.” He quotes an aid worker: “’They are so proud of their contribution. It’s a common thing for them to say they’ve killed. Since the government can’t seem to do anything, they all say they have an obligation to protect their families and their religion.’” 

     During the 1980’s contra war, with President Reagan leading the anti-communist crusade, re-institution of the draft was being widely debated. Because I had written articles in local newspapers about my own military experience and my two trips to Nicaragua as a journalist, more than one young man of draft age asked me for advice about what he should do if the United States went to war in Nicaragua and the draft were reinstated. Part of my response was always that if they enlisted in, or were drafted into, the military, they should be prepared to be looking at 12 year old boys across their rifle sights, based on the ages of some of the kids I had seen under arms in Nicaragua and southern Honduras during the contra war.

     It is this deadly mix of young men – or boys - and big ideas which I want to address. With us Marines it was Semper Fidelis: always faithful. It was “ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.” 

47 P.W. Singer, Children at War, Op. cit. University of California Press, 2006; p.24.

     I boarded the chopper with the Marine grunts bound for Tho An, having virtually begged to go on the mission, and joined the line of Headquarters Platoon, F/2/7, as we approached the village. I already had my bayonet out of its scabbard and was sliding its ring over the flash suppressor on my M14 rifle to engage the bayonet lug when Captain Love, the “F” company commander, a few paces in front of me, turned around to check on the new guys who had been attached to his company for this operation, saw me fixing my bayonet, and said “That’s it, that’s what I like, gimme some steel on the end of it.”

     I was there because of my faith: faith in that confusing entity variously known as God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit; in my country, and in the United States Marine Corps. Sure, I was nervous and afraid. The firing had already begun in the village, not many paces in front of us. I had been a Marine for 3½ years, but that meant nothing if I did not perform as a Marine today, my first time directly under fire. I was ready to fight. I wanted to hold up my end of the Great Bargain.

     The night before, I had prayed as I always did, with that truncated childhood prayer I used because it was the only prayer I knew: “...if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take....” It wasn’t much, but I hoped it would make up the difference between my own level of personal courage and whatever might be required of me this day. And of course to get me into heaven if I died. That was what prayers were for, right?

     A few hours later, after the long moments with the screaming baby boy and the screaming mothers and the 

silent old man with his stare of hatred and after the firefight when I was ordered to move up(48) because I 

had the only automatic rifle in the group, and to stand alone in the open and cover the other Marines as they pulled back, that cloak of faith had already begun to slip from my shoulders. Not because of fear, but because my experiences were showing me that faith wasn’t working. 

     The cloak of faith would continue to slip for the rest of my tour. The burst of rounds from an automatic weapon that snapped past my ears – they were close enough to hit one man standing nearby, and to puncture at least one of the canteens held by a Marine standing near me at the well – had contributed to my loss of faith. So, earlier in the year, had my failure to get a medevac chopper to the desperate platoon when my efforts had been met with an accusing “You’re too late,” meaning we had lost a man, and his buddy the radio operator blamed me.

     My faith would take an especially big hit two months after Tho An during the night-long mutual slaughter between Staff Sergeant Jimmie Earl Howard’s 18 Recon Marines(49) and two battalions of NVA, a few kilometers from our base at Chu Lai. I had the midnight-0400 watch in the DASC (Direct Air Support Center) that June night. We helped coordinate helicopter and fixed wing air support for Howard’s men. When I

48 I wasn’t directly ordered to move up. In those days before 1^st MarDiv units in my area were issued M16s, one man from each infantry squad would be issued a selector for his M14, and be designated that squad’s automatic rifleman. As far as I knew, neither Captain Love nor the First Sergeant who had just now called for an automatic rifleman to move up knew that I, a stranger to their company as of that morning, had the selector on my rifle. Since the detail was a pickup group of guys who had volunteered to return to the well for water, no provision had been made to include specific weapons in the group, because Tho An was considered secured. No matter. The order applied to me because I had a selector, and if nobody else present knew this, I did.

49 Actually there were 16 Marines including Howard, and two Navy Medical Corpsmen. That night, they were all Marines. See Wikipedia, “Jimmie E. Howard.”

stepped outside our radio shack shortly after four in the morning, I saw flares and tracers from the firefight off to the west, still at its height.

     One man standing near me at the well in Tho An had been hit; I had not. Some people find Jesus, or some other holy being, in similar situations. Others, even in the same group, have that connection violently and forever severed. I was among the latter. The 23-year-old who had

prayed his final childhood prayer the night before looked around for his Christian God during the firing at the well 

and saw that such a being either did not exist or was very, very far away. This was because I was doing something

which I suddenly saw to be wrenchingly, brutally wrong, while acting precisely on my values as a Christian, a patriot, and a United States Marine. 

   

     When I threw my weapons and 782 gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai in August of that year (1966), I was a troubled, angry, and nearly faithless young man. By the end of the year, some months into my intensive studies at Colorado College, I was a “born again atheist,” a state of mind and heart that had begun to exist while guarding the  women and children and the old man at the well in Tho An earlier in the year. I’m still an atheist. Of the many instances of phenomenal luck that have allowed me to survive being both a combatant and a journalist in the Vietnam War, hitchhiking up the Mekong through 

Cambodia and Laos at the height of that war, through 

some close calls at sea aboard fishing boats, and later in construction work, as well as some dicey journalism situations in Central America, that day in Tho An was the luckiest of my sweet life. Not because I escaped death – that’s happened many times - but because of what I learned.                                            

     More importantly, because of what I unlearned.

     

     Since those days, when I see a public appearance by anyone in garb intended to impress people with the sacred, therefore exalted, therefore authoritative, status of the wearer - I call them “long robes and funny hats” - the cynic in me says, “Okay, here comes the bullshit.” 

     I am a cynic, but of a certain ilk.

  I get itchy and edgy whenever anyone talks about “pride.” I feel that way when I’m in the bank parking lot in my home town in northeast Oregon surrounded by the red, white, and blue bumper stickers handed out as freebies by the bank that say “Proud to be an American.”

   Don’t get me wrong. I’m okay with being American. I love the stubbornness of our independence, our rascality, the creativeness that has given the world jazz, Motown, and Elvis; some great and many pretty good movies, some great and a lot of good literature, Walt Disney cartoons (50).  I especially love that shining gift our people gave to the world, the United States Constitution. I love and am inordinately proud of the circumstances of the American 

Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence and other events in the desperate time which birthed that Constitution. (Yes, I too am painfully aware that that great document conveniently left out women, people of minority races...in fact, everybody but propertied white males. What, and whom, it left out constitutes the task currently before us. That task is monumental, and many of us worry whether we’ll ever succeed.) 

50 Upon arrival in Managua, Nicaragua, in October 1983, I caught a ride into the city from the airport on the back of a flatbed pickup driven by some Sandinista teenagers. I noticed as I climbed aboard the truck that it had Bugs Bunny mudflaps. The boys’ antics as we drove through the city seemed to have more in common with the mudflaps than with either side in the 4-year-old war between the fledgling Sandinista government and the Reagan-backed contras.

Paragraphs After the Wars 3 - TONKIN: WHAT WE DIDN'T KNOW

     My buddies and I – some of us – call our younger selves “young and stupid.”

     There’s some of it: we were young. And if not stupid, then ignorant of the ways of the world, of what we were signing up for, of the reasons behind our reasons for enlisting, and behind the reasons our elders gave us for joining.

     In the case of my war, we didn’t know that Ho Chi Minh and his top commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, had been our allies in World War II against the Japanese, and repeatedly asked President Truman to remain allied with us([1]). This fact and others about the war’s origins have caused me to believe strongly that we need never have fought the war that killed 58,000+ of us and 3 or 4 million Vietnamese.

     We didn’t know that SEATO([2]) (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), the alliance that “asked for our help in Vietnam”, had been created at the urging of our own government([3]), in the person of President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles([4]), a devout Christian and anticommunist - and an early supporter of Adolf Hitler. Dulles had been instrumental in overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran (1953, Mohammad Mossadegh([5])) and Guatemala (1954, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán([6])). In 1958, attending the inauguration of Mexico’s new president Adolfo López Mateos, Dulles was quoted as saying “The United States of America does not have friends; it has interests([7]).” His brother Allen Dulles was head of the CIA during those years.

     We didn’t know that the second “Tonkin Gulf incident” – the one that Lyndon Johnson told the American public took place on August 4, 1964, the one we went to war over, the one he used to stampede a nearly unanimous (533-2) Congress into passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving him virtually unfettered war powers and giving the world ten years of war - did not even happen. This is according to James Stockdale([8]), squadron commander of the A4 Skyhawk attack aircraft flying cover for the U.S. destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy([9]) on that August 4^th, when my Naval Gunfire team of Marines was sent immediately into the area along with a battalion of infantry, a battery of artillery, and all the supporting units and supplies([10]).

     We also didn’t know that South Vietnamese naval personnel, using U.S. patrol boats, intelligence, and targeting, had been conducting raids against the North Vietnamese coast since February of that year, carrying out a covert action program named OPLAN34A([11]). The program was planned and directed by the CIA and the Pentagon, under close supervision by the White House. Nor did we know that the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy were part of the DeSoto intelligence-gathering mission, one of the duties of which was to “electronically simulate an air attack to draw North Vietnamese boats away from the commandos” who were attacking the North Vietnamese islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu as part of OPLAN 34A([12]), though the United States denied any connection between the destroyers and the PT boats, or with the PT boats themselves, or between the United States itself and the attacks against the Vietnamese coast.             

     All those claims were false.    

     They were false, but truth wasn’t part of their purpose. Their purpose was “plausible denial,” a phrase which I wouldn’t learn until years after the war was over, but the reality of which I would begin to be acquainted with during the course of the war. Plausible denial was the government’s practice of lying about its decisions and policies and practices. These lies were sometimes believable, in the absence of accurate information; or they were more or less transparent, but not immediately provably false. Thus they worked: the public spotlight was a fleeting thing, and by the time – often, after years had passed – some enterprising journalist or congressman dug up an uncomfortable truth and made it public, the public’s interest had moved on to a newer crisis. That was how the system worked. And it did work: the war went on. And on.         

     Perhaps the biggest void in our understanding of the causes of the situation we Marines and sailors were entering that fateful August of 1964 was in our awareness of election year politics in the United States. I cast the first vote of my life in a presidential election by absentee ballot from the deck of the USS Cavalier in the waters of the South China Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin([13]). I voted for Barry Goldwater. I was a newly promoted Marine Corporal, I didn’t trust Lyndon Baines Johnson, and I was ready to go to war to protect my country and her ally from the Communists. Goldwater seemed the better choice: a warrior himself([14]), and a straight talker. Now I doubt that a Goldwater victory would have made much difference: Goldwater, like Johnson, seemed blind to the fact that Ho Chi Minh was primarily a patriot. The opening sentence of the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence which Ho had proclaimed to a crowd of 500,000 people in Hanoi on September 2, 1945, was this: “All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The quotation marks are Ho’s; he was deliberately borrowing from his hero Thomas Jefferson([15]), in our own Declaration. Ho might have been a formidable ally to the U.S. in Southeast Asia, and on the evidence, quite sincerely wanted to be. When Truman repeatedly refused his friendship([16]), he certainly became a formidable opponent. No matter: he was a communist. Ho was a communist, and France, a United States ally during WWII, wanted her former colony Indochina – including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos - back. Truman sided with the colonialists instead of the small Asian nation seeking independence from its colonial master much as the Americans had sought independence from England two centuries before.

---

[1] See http://www.ichiban1.org/html/history/bc_1964_prewar/first_indochinawar_1945_1954.htm1945.htm; also Archimedes L.A. Patti, Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America’s Albatross; also http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/series/pt_01.html

[2] It wasn’t just my outfit that was “taught” about SEATO. See my chapter "Mangbuk," in Archive.

[3] But it was presented to us, aboard ship on the way to Vietnam, as the reason we were going. See my chapter "Going Over," in Archive.

[4] http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/10126-SEATO.html; also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles

[5] See Michael Streich, “Kermit Roosevelt and the Iranian Coup of 1953: How the CIA Toppled Mossadegh and Put the Shah in Power”: http//modern-us-history.suite101.com/article.cfm  Kermit Roosevelt was a CIA officer, and Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson. On the coup, he worked closely with John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, along with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the general who led Allied forces in Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991. Also see All the Shah’s Men, John Wiley & Sons, 2003 by former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer.

[6] For an excellent book on the 1954 Guatemala coup, see Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer. Revised and Expanded Edition, Harvard University Press. Kinzer has been a hero of mine since I first read Bitter Fruit, then shortly afterward crossed journalism paths with him in northern Nicaragua in 1983. (We did not meet.) See above, p.403. Allen Dulles had been on the board of directors of United Fruit Company, the main beneficiary of the Guatemala coup staged by President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers.

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles

[8] VADM James Stockdale and Sybil Stockdale, In Love and War. There are also two lengthy interviews with Stockdale, which I found very informative, available on the Internet: One is at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-11/stockdale; and there is a 9-part interview with Stockdale at academyofachievement.org.

[9] On August 2, the Maddox was on a DeSoto Patrol just off the coast of Vietnam. Both the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy were mentioned immediately by name to us on August 4 when word was passed hurriedly through our squad bay in the Philippines to get our gear aboard ship: “We are going. Now... some place called the Gulf of Tonkin....” Also see John Prados: “Essay: 40^th Anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident”: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAAEBB132/essay.htm. Dr. Prados is a Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive, and has written more than a dozen books on national security and intelligence issues.

[10] Jack Jennings, whose article is quoted in note 12 below, was “cargo officer on the USS Chemung (AO-30)...”, the oiler that refueled our troop transport USS Cavalier in the South China Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin told me in an email (July 29, 2009) that “there must have been a couple hundred ships involved. They cleared Japanese ports as well as Subic Bay within a few minutes and all headed for the Tonkin Gulf.”

[11] See Jack H. Jennings and Tran Do Cam, “Operation 34A and the Nasty Class PT Boats,” http://www.mrfa.org/Operation34A.htm. Both authors were officers in Oplan34A, Jennings with USNR and Do Cam with the South Vietnamese Navy. Both saw duty in PT boat units conducting raids against the North Vietnamese coast. Jennings also points out here that Operation 34A grew out of covert PT boat actions against the North Vietnamese coast put in motion by President John F. Kennedy, a PT boat commander himself during WWII, before his assassination in 1963.

[12] Prados, “Essay: 40^th Anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” p. 3. See note 9, above.

[13] We were never completely sure. We’d been told as we left the Philippines that we were going to the Gulf of Tonkin, and some days later, I remember our ship traveling south from our original position off the beach of Vietnam, to arrive on station off Danang. Our superiors were never specific. A common expression of ours was “We’re mushrooms: they keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit.”

[14] Goldwater had been a U.S. Army Air Force transport pilot during WWII, flying routes in much of the world, including the famous “hump,” crossing the Himalayas to resupply Allied forces in the China-Burma-India theater. He retired as a Major General in the Air Force Reserve. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater

[15] http://rationalrevolution.net/war/collection_of_letters_by_ho_chi-.htm

[16] In a letter to President Harry Truman dated February 16, 1945, Ho reminded Truman that his Viet Minh soldiers had fought on the side of the Allies against the Japanese, and pleaded for US support against the French colonizing. The letter (see note 15, above) was never answered.

Also http://www.ena.lu: In a telegram to Truman on February 28 (12 days later), Ho notified Truman of the return of French troops to Vietnam and of their intention to take back control of the government from Ho and his provisional government. “I therefore earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people to interfere urgently in support of our independence....”

ALONE IN LAOS

     I was alone in southern Laos. Manyon had crossed the Mekong to Thailand; I was headed back to Phnom Penh for a flight to Saigon and another to the States. Fall semester would be starting soon.

     I'd come to an unmarked crossroads and taken the wrong fork. I was lost. All I saw was a narrow road and two walls of jungle that nearly closed out the sky above it. No humans, no peasant huts, not even a blown bridge or an abandoned guard shack. I walked the road. Finally a large building of weathered boards came into view. I stepped onto its high porch, halloed. No answer. The building was open, but no one was around. It seemed there hadn't been anyone around for a long time, though it was clean and in good repair. There was no hint of what the building had been used for. Maybe meetings, maybe classes... I couldn’t tell.

     Looking through an open window, I saw the only evidence, besides the building itself, of human presence: a life-size, nicely framed, official portrait of U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

GUNNERY SERGEANT ROGERS: BOTH SIDES NOW

People who haven’t gone through intensive military training sometimes look quizzically at those who have. The more intensive the training – Marine Corps boot camp, for example – the wider the chasm between us and “regular folks.”

     Here’s a glance inside, at how “The Brotherhood” is formed; and how we become separated from the rest of society, even as we become an important element of that society.

     Each one of us who has gone through this training and gone on to “serve,” has stories like this to tell.

     After a war like Vietnam, some of us now question exactly what was served. And some of us, myself included, are beginning to insist that we – that is, all citizens, all people – consider a new definition of “service.” This, even as we continue to recount our stories of living through a war that was terrible and unjust for nearly all of the millions of people who lived through it… or didn’t.

B. Semper Fidelis

                                       Gunny Rogers 1: Mama's boy

     We were in formation on the platoon "street," the narrow asphalt strip between the Quonset huts that were our billets at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers was the Duty Drill Instructor. He was strict about boot camp's spit‑and‑polish regimen, though not as strict as the others. You could see that he pushed it more for the sake of discipline than of "military appearance," a phrase we heard a lot. Gunny was a combat man. He was said to carry a bayonet scar across his chest from the First Marine Division's great battle at the "frozen Chosin," Korea's Chosin Reservoir. Some of the guys in the platoon said they'd seen it one day when they'd been in the Duty Hut on cleanup duty, and "Guns" had his shirt off.

     His older brother had been killed in one of the first tanks to make it to the beach at Tarawa, a name that resonated among us like Mecca does among Muslims or Calvary among Christians. So he'd enlisted in the Marines as soon as he was seventeen, and sure enough volunteered for tanks. I didn't get the impression that he did it out of a desire for revenge so much as just wanting to continue the bloodline, but revenge was probably in there too. Japs had killed his brother, and there would probably be more gooks to fight before he retired, if he made it that far.

     I had done something wrong. Wrong, or at least inadequate, according to the Gunny's way of thinking. He was squared off in front of me. How could he make me feel so small, when he was several inches shorter than me?

     But he did. I can't even remember what I did, or didn't do. Gunny had decided it was time to get in my face because he had sensed some weakness in me, some hesitation about our common enterprise that could cause me to fail in combat, and he was just using some excuse to get his personal welding torch inside my machinery and plug the leak before it was too late. "You're weak." His voice growled from beneath his Smokey Bear hatbrim, that icon of Marineness. The brim nearly touched my nose. His force field was overpowering. I had to struggle just to keep standing at attention, which of course was the point.

     I was a mama's boy, he said. He couldn't figure how I'd made it this far; he'd had me figured for one of the washouts. He said I was one of those pussies who write complaints about mean ol' Drill Instructors home to their mommies, and their mommies write letters to their congressmen, and their congressmen send some civilian puke out here to fuck with My Marine Corps.

     "Do YEW write letters like that back home to YER mommy?" Gunny Rogers sneered into my face.

     "No sir."

     "I can't hear you."

     "NO, SIR."

     "Are yew SURE?"

     "NO SIR!"

     "You're not sure?"

     "Sir, I mean YES SIR!"

     His left hand came up and cuffed me on the right side of the head, knocking my glasses askew.

     "So, you been writin' letters home to your mommy, sayin' bad things 'bout My Marine Corps?"

     "SIR, NO SIR, I HAVE NOT WRITTEN ANY BAD THINGS HOME ABOUT THE MARINE CORPS, SIR."

     I hadn't, either.

     "Will yew ever in the future write such letters home to yer mommy, like for instance telling her that mean ol' sonofabitch Gunnery Sergeant Rogers hit her precious little puke of a son?"

     "SIR, NO SIR, I WILL NOT WRITE ANY LETTERS LIKE THAT, SIR."

     The Gunny kept at it a while longer. He went to great lengths to let me know, and in the process let the whole platoon know, that mothers, and mamas' boys, were the biggest problem the Marine Corps and, for that matter, the whole goddamn country, had. He said that if the Marine Corps wasn't allowed to operate in its own good goddamn time‑honored, battle‑tested fashion, the country might just as well forget about defending itself.

     The real point he was making, of course, was that if I could stand up to him, I might be able to stand up in combat. After a while, he seemed satisfied that he’d gotten his welding done, and moved on down the line.

         Gunny Rogers 2: The Most Powerful Weapon

     We were on the platoon street between the tents that were our billets at Camp Matthews, sitting on our upended buckets cleaning rifles. Each of us had a towel which had been designated part of our rifle‑cleaning gear spread out between his feet in front of the bucket. M14 rifle parts were laid out on the towels. Toothbrushes scraped blued steel. Hoppe's #9 solvent crowded other smells from the air.

     Gunny Rogers was supervising. He stood quietly, looking us over. Of our five drill instructors, he was the one who really took it upon himself to disabuse us of the romance so often tagged onto war stories, to forge us into warriors. One phrase we heard from him often was "Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die." That was what we were here for, he said. Kill or die. And since some of the people we'd be going up against were very good killers on their own, and wanted to stay alive at least as much as we did, we had to be better at killing than they were, or each of us ‑ or, what would be worse, the comrades who depended on us ‑ could die. And that would be against Marine Corps regulations. Sometimes he would paraphrase General Patton, who was the only Army general who was ever worth a shit, as far as Marines were concerned: Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to make that other poor sonofabitch die for his country.

     "Listen up," Gunny said. Buckets and boots scraped; rifle bolts and operating rods clinked onto towels. Silence.

     He waited a long time to speak, looking up and down the rows of us, letting us look at him. That was his signal that what he was about to say was important, real Marine Corps "straight scoop" rather than "petty shit," and we had goddamned well better pay attention. He didn't raise his voice. Once in a while he would bellow, but more often he would let his medals and scars and combat record and personal charisma ‑ the whole totemic package of his stature as a warrior among warriors ‑ speak for him. At such times he would speak softly, and we would lean forward and scoop up his words like a dying man just arrived at a desert oasis scoops water, which was what he intended.

     It came as a question. "What is the most powerful weapon in the world?" he asked softly. It was repeated in urgent whispers to recruits at the ends of the formation who hadn't heard. Necks craned; glances danced.

     It was always better to avoid answering a question unless you were sure of the answer. These were the times when abuse and extra duty were handed out if you guessed wrong. But this was an easy one; the answer was obvious. A recruit raised his hand. "Yes, Private," the Gunny recognized him. The kid stood to attention. "Sir! The most powerful weapon in the world is the atomic bomb, sir!"

     Gunny waited another of his long pauses, paced slowly, shaking his Smokey the Bear campaign‑hatted head in an expression that was intended to come across to us as a mixture of profound disappointment and disgust. How could they ever expect him to make Marines of such imbeciles, his body language said.

     He turned and faced us. His face would have made the four on Mount Rushmore look like a bunch of wimps: car salesmen, or the like.

     "B‑u‑l‑l‑s‑h‑i‑t." The word rolled out like far-off thunder. We looked at each other in puzzlement. My mind flipped through everything I knew, looking for the answer he wanted. One of two guys in the platoon with some college behind me, I had actually read quite a few books. Aha, I thought. He must mean the hydrogen bomb. I was about to raise my hand when Gunny gave the correct answer, parsing out his words: "The most powerful... weapon...in the world...is a Marine...and his rifle."

     Pause.

     "Think about it. Carry on, Privates."

     Each of us, squatted there on his bucket, bore a look on his face of perfect astonishment. We looked at one another, whispered. "Gaww-awwd damn!" Delighted grins appeared as we went back to cleaning our rifles.

                           Gunny Rogers 3

     I was on watch in my radio jeep at Chu Lai, listening for traffic from Landshark, our main outfit in Danang. The radio was a powerful Single Side Band set, with a transmitting range of several thousand miles. I was told that, with the right relay connections, it would be possible to communicate all the way back to the States.

     That reach also meant that we could sometimes hear very distant stations. The traffic we had with Landshark was usually just routine equipment checks and gossip about who had brought the clap back from R&R. So sometimes I'd tune around and try to pick up music from the world outside Vietnam. I had the best luck with "Rydio Austrylia," which was the first place I ever heard Nancy Sinatra sing "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'".

     I was set up at the edge of the motor pool next to the tank park, a few feet away from the nearest tank, sitting there listening to the music through my earphones and trying not to wiggle or tap my feet. The combined noise of the jeep's engine, which always had to be running to power the radio, and the radio set's cooling fans, made it necessary to always wear the earphones anyway. So if I could keep my body still, usually no one was the wiser.

     A Marine was walking by. He'd had to come right next to my jeep to get between it and the tank. I'd have known that rolling bear-like walk anywhere. Of course. Tanks.

     "Gunny Rogers!" I yelled. He was startled; he jumped, searched warily until he saw me grinning at him. With the music blaring in my ears, I'd shouted louder than was necessary. He walked over as I turned down the volume and stripped off the heavy, cushioned earphones. He looked at me quizzically. I stuck out my hand: "Dean Metcalf, Gunny. You were my DI at Dago, back in '62. Platoon 164? We were Regimental Honor Platoon."

     "Oh yeah," he nodded, smiling slightly. He seemed to remember me. We chatted awkwardly for a minute, neither really having much to say. He glanced at the black metal chevrons on my shirt collar. "I see you made corporal."

     I wanted him to say more. And I wanted to say more. I wanted to say, Look Gunny, I'm here. With you. You know. Tarawa. Chosin Reservoir. Chu Lai. Here's my rifle. Here's my bayonet. I'm ready, Guns. Tell me what to do. Let's go win this fuckin' war.

     All I said was, "Oh, yeah, I got goin' on two years in grade. I guess I'm eligible for sergeant now." I was pretty proud of that; most guys didn't even make corporal on their first hitch.

     Gunny was in a hurry. "Well, good to see ya," he said. We shook hands again and he turned to walk away.

     "Hey, Gunny...." He paused, looked over his shoulder.

     "Thanks for the training."

     He nodded, walked on.

     Later I realized that the startled look in his face as he turned, generated by the unintended sharpness of my call to him, may have come from fear of fragging, though not much of that was yet happening in the Marine Corps as early as 1966. He damn sure wouldn't have been the first ex‑DI to die that way, or the first Gunnery Sergeant either. Men like him always have somebody who hates them. But I never hated the Gunny.

SPIDER AND FLY

Spider and Fly

     I came home one afternoon in late 1976 to my house on Chestnut Street in Santa Cruz. I'd been working in the building trades since leaving the boats, and was trading work for rent, building my first complete house behind the one I lived in. I had recently gotten my general contractor's license.

     I walked across the living room, past the fireplace, and into the kitchen where sun was streaming in through the windows. I started putting groceries away in the fridge. The windows faced south, so that the afternoon sun warmed the red quarry tile floor and threw shadows of the windows' wooden bars and muntins into parallelogrammed patterns across the sink, stove, and countertop.     

     I lived alone; the kitchen was quiet. But I had just closed the refrigerator door when a loud buzz caught my attention from a lower corner of one of the windows. It was a big bluebottle fly, buzzing with such intensity that the sound filled the room. The fly was having trouble with a spider's web that was spun across the corner of the window. A small spider came scooting across the glass, waved its legs near the fly, backed away. I got a kitchen chair and moved it up to just beyond arm's length and sat down.

     Obviously, it would be no contest. The web was no more than a few frail strands, not yet ready for a quarry several times larger than the spider, whose legs were nearly as delicate as the strands of its web. The fly still had both wings free, and was buzzing loudly, trying to get enough lift to pull its legs free of the web.

     The spider darted out again, near the fly but just out of reach of its great thrashing wings. The spider waved its forward legs again, as if giving some arachnidic benediction, but from this close I could see the spider stretching a strand of web between its two forward legs, and offering that strand to the sacrificial buzz saw of the fly's wings.

     The fly instantly snapped that strand, seeming not to notice it. It continued to struggle to free its legs, but could only free one leg by pushing at the web with another, which trapped the liberating leg. The spider pulled back, seeming to rest or to give up. But then it scooted forward again, and again offered its nettlesome benediction. As before, the fly snapped it immediately; as before, the spider backed just out of danger to rest, and to spin another strand.

     The world's time ‑ that is, time outside of what was happening in one corner of one pane of that old twelve‑light double‑hung window ‑ began to dissolve for me. Minutes, or hours, might have passed. The battle became a ballet, a pas de deux between the raging fly and the tiny, impudent, darting spider, coming in with its frail monofilament offerings. The force‑field generated by their antagonistic movements drew me closer to the battle, seeming to magnify the two creatures. I began to see the motion of the spider's legs, as it attempted to lasso the fly with puny strands, as similar to the parenthetic arcs of a ballerina's arms in opposing crescents above her head during a pirouette. The fly became a furious neomechanical monster with blue and green and black metallic glints flashing off its segmented head and thorax, the translucent but formidable wings the instruments of its rage.     

     I leaned in closer. Now, among the flinty pulses of light being emitted by the writhing of the fly's body, a new source of color appeared. As the fly revved its wings, trying to get enough lift to pull itself free of the web that still held its legs, a quick tiny flash of rainbow would appear along the top edge of the fly's left wing, the one nearest the spider. The spider kept moving back, spinning, darting in with a new strand that the thrashing wing would instantly break. But the rainbow glints of light, refracted by the strands' residue on the fly's wing, came more often, lasted longer, and grew in size until a strand of web became visible between the wing and the body of the fly, darting violently with the wing's motion, snapping but then reconstituting itself as the spider added more material, until the strand became a cable, then a net, and that wing suddenly stilled, lashed now to the fly's body. The roar of the fly's wings was cut in half. The spider moved cautiously up on the disarmed side, threw a few more strands in place to make sure the wing was secure, then circled around to the fly's opposite side, patiently repeating the process until the great blue fly was trussed, immobile, silent.

     "There it is," I said. "Vietnam." 

HEALING

This post should have more parts than I can put in it. It should have several nightmares so violent they turn the soul to jelly, like “A6 and Wolves” and “Money Man Pursuit.” It should have dreams like “Dance of the Arrows,” which combine mortal danger, fear, and laughter. It should have a long chain of dreams that bust through terror into laughter.

     But we’ll start with the rattlesnake dream.

     Sometime in 1991, I was walking down a back street in a Guatemalan town – either Guatemala Antigua, the old Spanish capital; or Panajachel, on the shore of Lago de Atitlán. I was with my friend Roger Bunch, who’d spent years in Guatemala, and a friend of his who was interested in dream interpretation. That friend asked me to tell some of mine. So while walking down that back street in Guatemala, I told him about “Dance of the Arrows” and “Rattlesnake and Pistol.”

     Roger’s friend was agog, and asked me to write them down so he could interpret them for me. In good Marine Corps fashion, I said, “Fuck you, buddy. Those are my dreams, and I already know what they mean.”

     I decided then and there to write this book.

         Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol

People come running up to me: people I know, friends, family, the human community. They're all afraid. They scurry and bump into one another in their urgency to summon my help: "Dean! Dean! There's a snake... you have to shoot it. Hurry!" I follow them. They form a wary circle around the snake, a rattler with powerfully writhing body as thick as my forearms, and triangular head the size of a fist. I'm in the circle, between the people and the snake. Someone hands me a pistol. It's a Hi Standard .22 semiautomatic with a 5" barrel. I recognize it in the dream, and later when I waken, as the first real pistol I ever held, the one my step‑dad Bill Gano taught me how to shoot when I was a kid, setting up bottlecaps on a log to represent snakes' heads. The pistol is totally familiar: the purposeful weightiness, the dully glinting, no‑nonsense machined surfaces, the knurled metal grips, the thumb safety and the blade front sight and the notch rear sight at the rear of the slide, even the screws, all as I remember them, in their proper places. The people become more frightened, their urgings more frantic: Hurry, they say, and shoot the snake. You're the only one who can do it. The snake throws its body into a coil of scaly, muscular loops. It cocks its head. It emanates power. The people surge back, their entreaties swelling to an ever higher pitch. I take the pistol and look down at the snake. It's in position to strike, but something is missing, which I notice more viscerally than visually. What is missing is that last critical increment of muscular readiness, the quiver of surgical tubing under tension. As I look closer, I notice that the head, instead of hovering just above the coils, tracking its target in readiness to strike, is still resting on the topmost coil, in a physical attitude which suggests both threat and a certain reluctance. And the mouth, which, if open to strike, would have been a terrifying maw in a snake that size, is still closed. I remember that a rattlesnake ready to strike flares its jaws open to almost 180 degrees in order to point all four fangs at its target. And this snake's eyes are not the cold, unblinking eyes with vertical black pupils I had stared into from six inches away, on the Rogue River, as a teenage boy. They are much larger, softer, moist, and brown, more like a dog's, or even a human's, eyes. The snake looks back at me. Its eyes convey ferocity layered with a deep wisdom; and with more layers of warmth, menace, accusation, resignation, regret, and a slight admixture of pleading. Though the snake does not have a voice, what it says with its eyes reaches my brain, not in words exactly, but still in a form akin to language. Ah, the snake says with its eyes. I guess you have to shoot me. I am, after all, a snake. And yes, I am dangerous. I wish I could promise never to bite any of these people, but I can't. I am what I am. But I'm not that different from you. And if you kill me, what does that make you? The urgings of the people in the circle around the snake and me have become a cacophony. They're aware of the eye‑to‑eye conversation between me and the snake, and want me to shoot before I have time to think about it. The snake is lying in its coils, its eyes now conveying only sadness and a deep reserve of dignity that says it will not demean itself by trying to avoid its fate. I reach down, pick up the snake, and put it in a burlap bag. I leave the circle. The people howl in surprise and protest, but express relief that the snake is no longer free among them. I walk down a road that leads away from the circle of the snake's accusers - the circle of my people - with the rattlesnake in the bag in my left hand, and the pistol, still loaded and still unfired, in my right.

In my anger and confusion upon leaving Vietnam, I had promised myself to study the war, and the human condition, until I understood the workings of the monstrous situation I had just lived through. I even promised myself that I would fix it! (see earlier post “Danang,” in Archive.)

     I have been engaged in that study since then, and this book is the result, so far. What I didn’t know when I made the promise was that the arc of that study would parallel the arc of the healing of my emotional wounds from the war (I was never hit by bullets or shrapnel, only narrowly missed). In fact, the arc of my personal healing was the SAME as the arc of my awareness. I began to feel the war moving from a place deep inside me to a place outside, where I could see it, and myself, for what it was – for what I was.

     I’m still angry, of course. (see posts “Townies,” “Hunger 3,” “Seminar,”
“J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac,” in Archive)

     That’s how I moved from nightmares to laughter, or from nightmares with no relief to nightmares in which I would waken in a fit of laughter so violent it would hurt my gut.

     The “Rattlesnake Dream” was the pivot point in that process. In the dream, my own people were pleading with me to do their killing for them, and I was ready. I was good with weapons; I performed well in dangerous situations. But my conversation with the snake taught me the deep wrong in my warrior’s assignment from my people, as the baby boy I was holding at bayonet point had begun to teach me that April day in Tho An (see “Prologue,” in Archive).

     So I turned and walked away.

Before dawn one morning in 2009, my wife and I were still asleep in our apartment in Colombia. I was sitting upright in the bed. She was behind me, shaking me, shouting in my ear: “Dean! Dean! Que está pasando contigo?!”( What’s happening to you?!)”

     I was shaking violently, still not awake. She thought I was having a heart attack.

     But I was laughing. I was laughing violently. I was dreaming this:

     A group of rich old men had a mansion on a hill. The entire exterior was large plate glass windows. The old men stayed inside, keeping company only with themselves.

     But one other old man – me – was outside. He was scurrying about, laughing, placing large mirrors close to the mansion, one in front of each window. The old men inside would see their own reflections in the mirrors, would be horrified and frightened, and would fire at their own reflections with shotguns. Each time the old man outside would place another mirror, the old men inside would blast away, destroying another section of their own house.

     The old man outside was having a high old time, placing the mirrors and cackling and howling with laughter as the rich old men destroyed their mansion.

     Finally, Patricia was able to waken me. She was terrified that something awful was happening to me, and that she couldn’t get through to me, couldn’t communicate.

     I woke up and fell back in the bed, still laughing, and told her the dream. We laughed together for a long time.

A VETERAN'S DREAMS

In RATTLESNAKE DREAMS, as in my life and in this blog, my nightmares were spread out through the years, through the chapters. I’ve presented them that way. Now I’m going to do a couple, or a few, posts of dreams only, with notes in this larger type referring to events in my life, and in the manuscript, that I know produced or inspired the images in the dreams.

     In recent years, my dreams have turned a corner as they, and I, have tried to move away from death and toward life. I try to show that movement. The appearance of laughter in some nightmares may also help to make a string of them more readable.

     You may want to keep these away from your kids. Or you may want to let them see them, in case you should want to dissuade them from joining a military outfit.

     In any case, these dreams are offered with no apology, as I dreamed them. One, Rattlesnake and Pistol, was an emotionally and spiritually triumphal experience in my life, and is the title piece for the book. I hope the reason for that will be apparent when the reader has read the entire manuscript.

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 – well, 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.

         Dream: Nazi Pursuit

I am alone. A battalion of Nazi SS troopers are after me. They are focused entirely on finding and killing me. They are all big, strong men, definitely not parade‑ground troops. Their uniforms are dirty. They march with the cadence of our Adeste Fidelis column at Camp Pendleton (see post “Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis” in Archive), sweating as they march. All are armed with fully automatic weapons: submachine guns and heavier. Everything about them says: fit, experienced combat men. We are in a town that has been shot up in earlier fighting. They are near. They know the area; I do not. They spread out, searching expertly. I scurry like a rat. I duck into a dark place under a raised sidewalk, like the one I looked under in Cho Lon at the corpse of the Chinese woman. (see post “Cho Lon” in Archive)  I clutch my rifle, which is a single‑shot .22 like the one I hunted rabbits with as a kid. I have one or two .22 cartridges to go against the SS battalion. Their big black boots are close enough to touch as they march past my face.

                                        Dream: Money Man Pursuit

A man, one man, is after me. He's decided I'm between him and what he wants. It has nothing to do with me personally, with who I am or with anything I've done. I try to dissuade him, but he won't listen. Only my death will clear his way. There is a long pursuit. Part of it is over the rooftops of the human community. I do good tricks to get away but he always picks up the trail again. I go through a library with all human knowledge in it, in such a way as to leave all that knowledge in the form of impediments for him. But he comes through it all, picks up my trail. Along the way, some people try to help me, but can't. Others are afraid to try. He has an AK47 which he fires at me whenever he comes within range, barely missing me. I hear the bullets snapping around my head like the bullets snapped near the well in Tho An in 1966. (see post “Tho An” in Archive)  I meet a friend, a fellow combat vet. He says, "Remember that time...?" and recounts my telling him of our shelling and bombing a battlefield after a firefight until nothing recognizable was left but mud blasted into tortured shapes. My friend connects that story to the pursuit I'm now enduring, but I don't know why, unless just for its implacability, its inevitable movement in the direction of death. He says he'll be a lot more reluctant now, after a battle, to do his usual job of walking the ground and looking for survivors and for evidence of what happened there. I'm weary of dreaming this dream. I know I can't escape this man who pursues me. I know he'll kill me if I don't kill him. I lie in wait. I get up close. Fear and strength struggle in my body. The fear and the strength stop fighting, come to an agreement. The only way out is for me to become a more focused killer than he is. I become that. He comes. His eyes are maniacal, yet more cold than wild. Methodical. (see post “Townies” in Archive) I now have a pistol. I aim carefully. A good head shot takes out one eye, goes into his brain. He keeps coming. I shoot again, take out the other eye. He will not die. I shoot and shoot, all brain shots. I'm aware of a wonderful, terrible ability to focus, like when I shot the rattlesnake on the Rogue River (see post “Rattlesnake Air” in Archive), or like standing in the open under fire at Tho An. This focus allows me to compartmentalize my being, putting my revulsion at killing off in a corner with my fear of death and the physical distractions of my environment and of my pursuer's movements. His head recoils crazily with each shot. Still he comes; he won't get it through his head. I grab a short sharp stick. Bullets are not enough; it has to be more personal. I thrust, put all my body's strength behind it, with the butt of the stick against my palm, and drive the point into one bloody eye socket, through his head, out the back of his skull. He finally gets the point. He dies, but not before he gets what he came for. We are in a fast food joint, behind the counter. Dying, he falls toward the cash register, grabs a wad of greenbacks the size of a large man's fist, too large to swallow, but rams it into his mouth anyway, his face a swamp of gore as he falls dead, still trying to swallow the money.

I always know when I’m having, or have just had, a “pursuit nightmare.” The house where they all live is a house where I know all the rooms. Sometimes it’s not all that cozy, but compared to the everyday (and every night) experience of many combat vets who’ve had it rougher than I, I consider myself a very lucky man.

     This next dream is not exactly a cake walk, but it’s the first nightmare I remember that contained laughter, and it was mine.

 

Dream: Dance of the Arrows

I'm standing alone in the center of a wide, barren plain that stretches to the horizon in every direction. The sky is clear, and sits like a hemispheric blue cap over the plain. I look at the horizon, follow it around. It is featureless... but wait: there is a solitary figure, a speck on the horizon. That figure and I are the only visual interruptions of the universe bounded by earth and sky. I'm invigorated by the feeling of spaciousness, but recognize that I must be watchful. Sure enough: the figure on the horizon is an archer. He draws a powerful bow. Alarm, my warrior's antennae say. The archer shoots an arrow into the sky. The arrow's trajectory says that it is perfectly aimed at me. The arrow disappears from sight, but I must track its flight. I do so by moving my head as though my initial observations had actually programmed the arrow's trajectory into my nervous system. I track the arrow forward, from the point where it disappears from sight in the sky until it reappears, a deadly dot in the blue, now on its way down to kill me. I jump around. I try to dodge it. But it never wavers: no matter how I move, I feel the tingle of its anticipated penetration just below my navel. The arrow swoops toward me, visually accelerating in the way I've seen machine-gun tracers appear to speed up as they come nearer (see post “Marines in Skivvies” in Archive), after having seemed to be moving quite slowly toward me as I observed them from a distance; or the way the ground swoops up toward a parachutist during the last seconds of fall. Just before the arrow hits me, I make one final, quick sidestep. The arrow's feathers brush my belly; it thunks into the earth. Alarm. I look up. Comes another. Again I am able to dodge it only at the last instant. Again the feathers brush my abdomen. Again the arrow stabs the ground at my feet. There is an infinite succession of them. I have figured out that the arrows, while seeming to remain perfectly aimed at my center, never waver in flight, no matter how I jump and dodge. This, I learn, is because the arrow simply knows where I will be when it arrives three and a half feet off the ground, and is aimed there. So my jumping about as the arrow descends is irrelevant. I learn that, with each shot, I am given one, and only one, chance to save my life. This is what Japanese martial artists call suki, or "opening": that tiny window in time ‑ often far less than a second ‑ when an opponent's attention is interrupted or distracted, when only an instinctive, forceful, and unhesitatingly intentional motion will be quick enough and sure enough to enter the opening. So I must watch each arrow as it leaps out of the sky to kill me, and I must wait. I must let it come. As the arrows continue to come and I tire from exertion and fear, I must force myself to relax so that in dodging one arrow I don't overexert and fail to recover in time for the next. Each time, I must wait, closing out the fear that tries like a pack of howling dogs to crowd my mind, to panic me. I must wait until the steel of the broadhead is about to puncture my belly. Then I must perfectly ‑ without protest, without excuses, without appeal to fairness or justice, without asking for help ‑ execute the one quick movement I'm allowed for dodging that arrow. Then I must forget that arrow, allowing no thought of relief or victory or pride in accomplishment, and be ready for the next. The arrows come in a perfect rhythm. So my side‑steps adopt the same rhythm, thereby becoming, of necessity, a dance. I'm never released from the mortal urgency of the situation, but it begins to strike me as funny. At the end of the dream, I'm still dodging the arrows, which never relent in accuracy or intention. But I'm laughing, as at something in a Chaplin movie, funny but urgent, as I dance my dance of survival.