DREAM: RATTLESNAKE AND PISTOL

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 told him to go piss up a rope: “Forget it, buddy. Those are my dreams, and I already know what they mean.”

     I decided then and there to write this book, and what its title would be.

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 stepdad 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. 

EXCERPT: MERCENARY 2

Mercenary 2

     I got my film from the Rus Rus trip developed - nearly thirty rolls of 35mm - and invited Mickey up to the house to look at the pictures. When he came into the cottage Annie and I shared, he took off the rain jacket he was wearing. He immediately noticed that I'd noticed how he handled the jacket, and how it looked: he'd shucked his arm out of the left sleeve first, then slid the right sleeve off more carefully. The bottom right coat pocket hung heavily toward the floor; that was what had caught my eye. Mickey smiled, almost appreciatively. He said something like "Yes, there is something heavy in there," meaning, of course, his pistol.

     He was visibly surprised by my photos: the Miskito and Sumo fighters with their M16s and AK47s and G3s and assorted uniforms; the incongruous, sweaty Texans; the visible tension in the bodies of the youthful warriors as they clambered out of the dugout canoe ahead of me on the Nicaraguan bank of the Río Coco; the carefully arranged skulls at Tulin Bila.

     I saved the clear photo of Flaco for last. "Recognize this guy?" I asked. Mickey smiled: "What's he calling himself these days?"  

     "Colonel Flaco. So you know him?"

     "Oh, yeah. Flaco and I go way back."

   ”What's his real name?" Mickey just smiled again and shook his head. Then: "Dean, you'd have made a hell of a soldier." 

     Mickey and I continued talking every few weeks for another year or so. A story unfolded about the junior-high school son of the woman Mickey was living with. I never met the boy, but I heard about him repeatedly from what became two sides of a struggle for his soul. He'd grown up mostly without a father, and suddenly there appeared in his life this cocksure figure, Mickey, who was wildly fluent in the manly arts: he could take anything apart, explain its workings, fix it, build it, destroy it, blow it up, kick the shit out of it, or shoot it. 

     Especially shoot it. The boy, of course, went for that immediately. So Mickey, liking the idea of being a hero to the kid, soon had him out in the woods with pistols and rifles, burning up ammunition. But, Mickey told me, there was little of the breathe-in, breathe-out, hold 'em and squeeze 'em accuracy that I'd been taught by my stepfather and uncle and Marine marksmanship instructors. No: what Mickey taught the boy was combat shooting, two hands on the pistol, crouch, aim quickly with the entire body at the center of mass of your target, shoot rapid-fire until the man was down, then quick! on to the next target.

     A simultaneous attempt was being made to make an opposing claim on the boy's future. Mary Duffield, a peace activist who lived near Santa Cruz, owned a seaworthy sailboat and was a serious ham radio operator. She would organize local and longer-distance sailing trips for youngsters, as well as providing instruction in ham radio operations and equipment. Sometimes she would combine the two. The ax she had to grind was international peace. She felt, and taught, that getting children from different countries to talk with, and to meet, one another was one way to reduce the level of violence in the world. Mickey snorted at that idea, but the boy happened to be infatuated with ham radio as a hobby, and his mother apparently encouraged him to spend at least some of his free time with Mary. Besides being an experienced open-ocean sailor, she was also a qualified operator of international short wave radio equipment.

    Many months later, in 1986 or '87, I would get a worried call from Mary. Mickey, the woman and the boy had disappeared suddenly and without leaving a hint of where they had gone. She was worried about the boy, and asked if I'd see if I could locate them. I tried, but had no luck. Dropping out of sight was one of Mickey's professional skills. All we heard was a rumor that the three of them had been witnesses to "something really awful," and had to disappear. After still more months had passed since Mary's call, she got a cryptic note from the boy, with no return address, saying that he wouldn't be in touch anymore but wanted her to know that he was all right. None of us ever heard from them again.

     Before that last episode, I asked Mickey for a favor. I'd done him a few smaller ones, like getting him a free appointment with my wife, a dermatologist, to treat a fungus he'd brought home from one of his adventures in Central America.

     It was late 1985. News reports were coming out about contra raids in southern Nicaragua. Apparently a "second front" was being opened, to force the Sandinistas to divide their resources and relieve some of the pressure on the main contra units operating out of Honduras in northern Nicaragua. This meant to me that contra groups must be operating out of Costa Rica, raiding into southern Nicaragua, then jumping back across the border for sanctuary. Yet Costa Rica's policy of neutrality forbade the use of its territory for any such activities. There seemed to be an opportunity to break significant news here, but major news organizations had done next to nothing about it. 

     What I asked Mickey for was information about contra base camps in northern Costa Rica, and crossing points the raiders used to get into Nicaragua.

   Now, this is an interesting thing to try to describe. Mickey and I were just flat on opposite sides. Mickey was a mercenary, an admitted CIA operative - contract, not career - a "professional soldier," as he called himself. I was a veteran with a chip on my shoulder, a small-time crusader against the very type of operations by which he made his living. Yet we had, after a fashion, become friends. This was, in part, because we had a soldierly respect for one another in matters of nerve and heart and experience, which at times matter more deeply among men than does what separated us: that is, conscience.

     There was something else to it. I was never able to put my finger on it until a couple of years later, when Doyle McManus (of the Los Angeles Times' Washington, DC, bureau) and I were in Miami doing interviews to follow up the story of the Rangers allegedly having parachuted into Nicaragua. Doyle and I were driving in a rented car on our way to an interview, and talking about the quirks involved in chasing down stories about covert military operations. We had both found sources, a couple of them very good, within the covert operations community who had been willing to talk, on a limited basis, about what they knew. And the reason they'd talk was because we already knew things which we weren't supposed to know. We agreed that there was a certain gamesmanship involved here, which made how much you knew more important than which side you were on. It amounted to a form of cooperation among enemies, perhaps even in the interest of richening the experience of the fight itself.

     I asked Mickey for the help over a beer in one of those places that was so crowded and noisy a dozen people could meet and plot a terrorist bombing and nobody'd be the wiser. He got quiet, and looked at me for a long time with the soberest expression I ever saw on him. It was clear that he was looking into me, trying now to see past all our war stories and repartee, trying to see my very bones, who I was down deep. 

     Then he leaned over the table, onto his elbows, halving the distance between our faces. "What are you prepared to do?" he asked.

     "Huh?

     "Costa Rica es un fogón," he said, Costa Rica was a bonfire of covert operations activity.

     "It's gotta be," I said. There was no other way they could do those raids, repeatedly, on the Sandinistas' own ground, without getting caught.

        "So. Can you help me?"

    Mickey shrugged, then sighed, having come to his decision. He said he would call Langley (Virginia: CIA Headquarters), give his account number, and ask that a courier be sent with information about camps and border crossings. It wouldn't be all of them, he said, only a few, maybe only one or two.

     "But it won't mean shit unless you follow through," he said.

     "What does that mean?"

     Mickey looked at me in a way that told me, as no form of documentary evidence could have, that he was who he said he was: a serious player in a deadly game. 

     He told a story. He'd been on an operation in the Dominican Republic in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines ashore there. He and a partner had been flown inland in a C47, and told to hang loose for a few days, near the airplane, until they were contacted. That evening, they got bored, decided What the hell, we're Latinos, we can find our way around, let's walk down to that little town. They passed three peasants on the road. All nodded, said “Buenas noches,” walked on. As they passed, Mickey and his partner looked at each other and simultaneously concluded that their operation was compromised. Without a word, both turned, pulled their pistols, and killed the three men. "Pah, pah, pah," Mickey said, imitating the shots, and shrugged. "They're only peasants."

     He asked the question again, this time parsing out his words and sliding each one along the conduit between our eyes: "What...are...you...prepared...to do?"

     His words, borne upon that look, made me shudder. "What do I have to do?"

     "I will give you the name of a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. You will go there and wait in the room. When the man comes, you stand behind the door, knock him in the head, take what he brought you, and split."

     I thought for a long moment. I did believe in what I was doing, believed that many human beings would live or die depending on the quality and quantity of information to reach the mainstream press about covert operations in Central America, believed that the work was not being thoroughly done, that I could contribute. I also believed that, if I so much as nodded at this moment, Mickey would do what he said he'd do, or at least try. And I believed that the chance of a breakthrough story about illegal covert operations, involving agents of the U.S. Government or private U.S. citizens, compromising the neutrality of Costa Rica, was worth some serious risk. It might even be worth fighting for.

     I spread the thing out in my mind. Most of my friends, I knew, saw me as someone who'd lived an eventful life, done difficult and dangerous things, was capable of doing more such things, if perhaps a little nuts for having done so many. I treasured, in myself, that part of me that had pulled the old woman from the canal in Klamath Falls when I was still a teenager, while everyone else looked on; the same part which had run across the clearing by the well in Tho An with my automatic rifle because the First Sergeant had called for such a rifle, and I was the only man present who had one; the same part that had caused me to be instrumental in hauling the anchor in Shelter Cove.

     But Mickey was from a different world. In his world, the man coming through the door was an impediment, to be removed. But what if he were very alert, very strong? I didn't have the skill to be sure of knocking him out, without killing him. But wasn't he an enemy, a bagman for people who ruined families and nations for fun and profit? Wasn't I on the right side? But what if I had a moment of moral hesitation? I could be killed, then and there. The man coming through the door would be more like Mickey than like me.

     He had asked the right question. I wasn't prepared to do that.

     He'd told me his real name. At least, to my knowledge it was his real name. He’d even showed me his driver's license. At first I wondered why he had done so. But by the time our association ended, I understood that part of his communication to me had been unspoken, had been contained between the lines of his stories, in the expression on his face when he said certain things, in the fact that he was always armed and that using his weapon was the core of his way of being in the world. Put into words, that part of his communication would have been something like this: You know what world I live in. You understand its basic rules, and the penalties for breaking them.

     I do. That's why his real name is not used here.

FINDING JESUS, AND EB HOGUE'S KNIFE

Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue's Knife

     We were living in a little rented house on Conklin Avenue in Grants Pass [Oregon]. Darrell and I met a kid named Eugene Wright, who was my age and lived a few houses up the street. He'd come around trying to sell Cloverine Brand Salve, some allpurpose ointment that magazine ads said you could sell door to door and make a lot of money. It came in tins the size of a snuff can. He didn't sell many. 

     Something had happened to Eugene's parents; there was some reason they couldn't raise him. He lived with his grandparents, the Hogues. He was an only child, a chubby kid who wasn't very strong. He'd been labeled a sissy, and took a lot of shit from other kids. He was very religious. 

     He and I became friends for a while. He didn't do much that I liked, like playing football or baseball, but he did read books, so we had that in common. He talked a lot about Jesus. I got bored with that, but everybody said it was the truth so I figured it must be so. He worked at converting Darrell and me. I remembered a time in Pasco when I'd asked, "Mom, is there a real God 'n' Jesus?" She'd just said, "Yes, dear," as if I'd asked if the sky were blue. I wanted more of an answer, but none came.

     Mom had been praying a lot more lately. It was pretty much in the air we breathed. In the small towns where we'd always lived, whenever somebody was born or died or got married, the seriousness of the occasion meant that it was a religious one. Heads would bow, some old man would pray out loud, and you had to be still. 

     Eugene kept after us to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal savior. He warned that we'd go to Hell if we didn't, and we knew he was right because everybody else said the same thing. The difference was that most people only said that if you asked them, and Eugene said it without being asked. Darrell and I shrugged and said, Well, guess we better do it, sure don't want to go to Hell. (Back then, you always capitalized nouns like heaven and hell and any pronoun or adjective that referred to God or Jesus.) 

     So one time when Eugene was talking about Jesus we asked him how you went about doing this.

     "It's easy," he said. We'd need a special place, one that was sort of secret and private. We were at his house. He led us out back to a shed that had a partial attic and we all climbed up there and knelt down, which we'd have had to do anyway because there wasn't space under the roof to stand. This was perfect, Eugene said, because Jesus didn't care where you accepted Him as long as you did it, and He could see everywhere, so you didn't have to be in church. (Pretty good, seeing through walls. Wish I could do that.... I imagined myself walking down Conklin Avenue watching women bathe.) Darrell and I hoped Eugene was right; we didn't want to go around thinking we were saved and then end up in Hell because we'd gone about it wrong. 

     So we knelt on the boards in that shed's attic and Eugene Wright asked us if we accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and we said we did, and we all bowed our heads and Eugene said a prayer and that was that. We were Christians. Eugene was excited. Lots of preachers don't do that good, he said, getting two in one week.

    Some time later Ebenezer Hogue, Eugene's grandfather, put a .22 rifle to his head and killed himself in their living room. Eugene and his grandmother couldn't bear to stay in that house, so they moved a short distance away. Mom rented their house. She let us see the bloodstain on the wooden floor once, then put a rug over it and we moved in. It was the best house we'd ever lived in, with a back yard big enough for a vegetable garden. We’d learned in school that Indians had taught the Pilgrims to plant corn and beans in the same hills so the beans climbed the cornstalks. I planted ours the same way, and sure enough I didn't have to put in poles for the beans to climb. 

     Eugene gave me a hunting knife that had been his grandfather's. He didn't want to keep it because it saddened him, and he wasn't a hunter anyway. It was pretty old, with a small brass hilt. It had had a handle of two pieces of some early plastic, one riveted to either side of the tang. One side had fallen off. It had a crude sheath that Eb had made. He'd told Eugene it was the Indian kind. (The old man had told Eugene about seeing real wild Indians as a boy. When Eugene retold the story to me, I was so thrilled I could see a file of dusky figures, moving among the trees like a warm breeze, disappearing over a ridge.) The sheath had leather covering the blade but also wrapping around most of the handle. That way you didn't need a keeper strap, which brush could unsnap anyway when you walked through it, plucking out the knife without your even knowing it. Plus you didn't have to unsnap anything to draw the knife; you just grabbed the top of the handle and pulled it out. The hunting knife I carry to this day has a sheath I made the same way. 

     It wasn't a pretty knife, but it was mine. I didn't like that it was missing part of the handle until one day when I was throwing it in the front yard. Most hunting knives are heavier on the handle end, making it harder to control how they turn in the air, thus harder to stick. Having half its handle missing gave Eb's knife a nice balance. 

     I practiced. There was a tree in our front yard that was big enough that I could hit it every time, and its bark was soft and even, so the knife would stick easily when I could make it hit point first. I became a kid zen knifethrower. I would spend hours a day standing back from that tree, throwing the knife, retrieving it from the tree or wherever it had bounced to, walking back, throwing it again. 

     It was a matter of grip, release, and distance. It worked best to grip the knife by the blade and throw it overhand so the knife made a half turn and arrived at the tree point first. Once I saw the principle involved, I chose a favorite grip, the one with most of the blade in my hand, and settled in at the distance from the tree where that grip would give me a nice half turn and stick in the bark. I threw and retrieved and threw and retrieved. After a few days I could stick it almost every time at my chosen distance. I began to throw harder, and that changed things for a while but when I found the right combination it became even more consistent. Then I chose a spot in the bark for a smaller target, and before long I could throw the knife hard, stick it most of the time, and often very near that spot. Then I no longer seemed to be throwing the knife; it just flowed out of me as I let it go. 

DEATH OF KRIP AT MANGBUK + DREAM

1968:  Much of this second part is about Tin, a Montagnard warrior who had a history of switching sides in the war, but who was so  valuable to the Americans that they kept him on their team.

     Krip, the young Montagnard who is one of the two children to whom this book will be dedicated, appears near the end of this chapter…

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 zig‑zag 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, tin‑roofed 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 fear‑sweat, which has a much stronger and more acrid smell than sweat that comes with 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 tail‑rotor lights on the choppers and one blinding white floodlight on the parapet which shone straight down in front of the gate.

     The rotors whack‑whacked 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 semi‑automatic, 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 emphesema would, because his people didn't put smoke‑holes in the roofs of their huts.

     The longer I was in or around that war, the more I noticed – or was bludgeoned by – the racially lopsided makeup of the groups of people around me. It showed up, of course, in my dreams.                       

                                       

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, rifles ready, up and downstream. 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 dark‑haired 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 dark‑haired young man, is close behind the first. As my eyes change focus and sweep upstream, I see the creek is filled with bodies of dark‑haired 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?

TELL THE MEN (POEM)

Tell the Men              

                                                                 

                                                                   ©2012 Dean Metcalf

I.   I am the dream commander.

All around me

along the smoky runway

men fall, strafed

spinning

                bloody

               down.

I scream, but

they will not believe:

our own

     top‑secret

     quiet‑rotor

     radar‑guided

     night‑vision

     heat‑seeking

     dream‑metal dragonflies

have returned

to kill us.

II.  "But they're ours!" men scream

as they stand, are hit, and fall

     spinningbloodydown.

Running, my body floats above the runway

among thumb‑size neon‑red tracers

borne upon their own wind: puffs of it

pass between my ribs.

III. In this dream, only I know:

words

are weapons.

All around me, men see,

trying not to see.

Men fail to aim their words

at the real enemy.

Men drop their books

or read absently

standing in the open

as if life were not dangerous.

IV.  Sergeant!

Work your way along the line.

Tell the men:

Fill sandbags with words.

Build a parapet to fight behind.

If they are the right words

you live.

Tell every man:

Dip each fifth word

in your own blood,

so your shots will glow red:

tracers to locate your targets

in the dark.

Tell every man to sharpen one word.

Say, You must choose:

"yes" or "no."

Snap it onto your rifle,

for when this gets down to bayonets.

Tell all the men:

It's not the men of darker skin

who broadcast our blood upon the land

as a poor shopkeeper tosses water

from a red plastic pail

to settle dust on an unpaved street.

Tell the men:

We toss our own blood in the dust

where crimson arterial spurts of it

roll into powdery skins

like water in flour

no longer recognizable as blood

it could be any dark liquid:

it could be used crankcase oil.

Tell them:

We live and die

     by what we think

     by what we write

     by what we say

     by what we do.

Tell the men:

     Get your words.

     Get in the trenches.

Here they come.

                                                               Dean Metcalf

                                                               P.O. Box 548

                                                               Joseph OR 97846

                                                             3dmetcalf@gmail.com

This poem was first published several years ago in the online journal RIVEN, edited by Michael Spring. Tell the Men© 2012 Dean Metcalf

HOWARD'S HILL

Howard's Hill

     June, 1966. Staff Sergeant Jimmie Earl Howard was in command of an 18-man patrol of Marines from the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. These were the guys we’d see trooping past our tent on their way to the nearby chopper pad on their way to make an insertion like the one today, where a chopper would drop them on an isolated hilltop and they’d call in artillery and air strikes on enemy activity they could see below them. 

     I had come on duty for the midnight to 0400 watch at the Direct Air Support Center. Howard and his seventeen men had been surrounded since dusk on top of Hill 488, named Nui Vu on Vietnamese maps, near Chu Lai. The surrounding force was a highly trained, well equipped North Vietnamese Army (NVA) battalion. 

     Apparently the NVA wanted to eliminate one of the recon units which had caused them so much grief by entering their territory and calling in strikes on their training and staging areas. So they committed over two hundred men in the attempt to kill eighteen Marines whose perimeter was less than twenty meters across.

     The fight went on all night long. The Marines held the crest of the hill; the Vietnamese assaulted again and again with automatic rifles, mortars, machine guns, grenades, bayonets. Several of those charges ended in short, violent, handtohand fights. By the time the second charge was beaten back, every Marine on the hill was wounded, and ammunition was so low that they had to fire semiautomatically. By the middle of the night, the Recon boys could see, by flarelight, NVA reinforcements swarming in the valley below. PFC Joseph Kosoglow said later it had looked "just like an anthill ripped apart."(

) 

     We sent up flight after flight of helicopter gunships and jets to strafe and rocket the steep slopes around our men. An Air Force flare ship orbited above the hill to drop parachute flares; it was always supposed to be relieved on station when it was low on fuel. We coordinated that relief from the DASC. On the radio, I heard one Air Force pilot say he had to leave before his relief arrived because he was low on fuel, and heard a Marine piloting one of the helicopter gunships - I later heard he was a major - tell the Air Force pilot that he would personally shoot down the flare ship if it left before relieved. The major didn't live to be courtmartialed. He was killed before morning, flying rocket runs again and again down the throat of one of four NVA .50 caliber machine guns that were tearing up the men on the hill. The gun got the major. I don't know if the major got the gun, but he sure kept it busy for a while.

     When I left the DASC just before dawn, I could see the fireworks over Hill 488: flares, rockets, the long lovely parabolic arcs of red tracers. With dawn came better visibility, more air strikes, an airlifted company of Marine infantry. Later, we heard stories from the Recon guys, whose tents were near ours in the 1st MarDiv compound. 

     One Marine and one NVA soldier were found dead with their rifle muzzles touching each other's chests. Two of the Marines' entrenching tools were found, bloody, in a circle of "mangled" NVA. One dead Marine was embracing the last man he'd killed, still gripping his KABAR knife where he'd buried it in the back of the enemy soldier in his embrace.(

)

    But they'd held Hill 488. Of the eighteen Recon Marines, twelve were still alive. All were wounded. They had eight rounds of ammunition among them. The hill was called Howard's Hill by Marines after the fight. It still is, among those who remember. But the Marines left the hill the day they won it.

     Jimmie Earl Howard got the Medal of Honor. Years later, I talked with Jack Shulimson, a Marine Corps Museum historian who said that Howard’s hair had turned white within days after that fight, that he’d been a decorated veteran of Korea before he ever went to Vietnam, but had had a rough time of it after Nui Vu.

     Howard's call sign, by the way, was "Carnival Time."