RELEARNING WAR: KICKING THE LEAVES/TOWNIES

Kicking the Leaves

     It was mid-August when I left Vietnam; by the end of the month I was on campus at Colorado College. It was the biggest culture shock of my life, except maybe for the one I'd felt on arrival at boot camp. I was free! and it was terrifying. I didn't know how to act. I was used to deferring to certain people, having others defer to me. Here, everybody just sauntered around, wore whatever they pleased, talked to one another like - well, like civilians. I remember standing in bright sunlight on the curb outside the student union at Rastall Center. A pretty young woman pulled up in a Jaguar or BMW, jumped out, and greeted a friend she hadn't seen since Spring. I stood there with mouth agape, staring at and listening to two foxy coeds compare their summers in Europe and South America. Goddamn, I thought. Anybody wanna hear about my summer in Southeast Asia?

     I was the first Vietnam vet on campus. I remembered the conversation in the staging tent at Danang, and walked around stiffly, looking over my shoulder, waiting to be accosted, surrounded, yelled at. The opposite happened. As word got around, people began approaching me, tentatively, with sincere questions. Mostly, just "How is it over there?" No one showed me the slightest disrespect; several people expressed admiration for what I'd done. Some questions had a political content, but nothing that felt accusatory. The questions centered around the war's human cost: simply, were those numbered hills and rockpiles worth the blood they cost? 

        And they would ask for stories. 

     Sometimes I‘d tell the story of Howard's Hill, or my story of the fight at the well in Tho An, or of trying to get a medevac chopper in to a radio operator's wounded buddy and being told "you're too late." Reliving those stories, against the background of (now, fellow) students' questions about whether those fights were worth what they cost, continued the process of recalibrating the way I looked at the world, and my place in it, that had begun at the well in Tho An. The context of our interactions was one I hadn’t expected: instead of being attacked by these people, and looking around for fellow Marines to cover my back, as I’d expected upon leaving Vietnam, I’d been welcomed, if tentatively at first, by the people I’d expected to be my enemies.  We took classes together.  Some were now my friends. Though I would never lose my intense loyalty to fellow Marines, these were now my people. I wanted them to like me.

     One evening that fall I was studying in my dorm room, alone as usual. I put aside the philosophy or history or politics assignment I was working on, and just sat and thought for a while. I drifted back to the moment in August when I’d thrown my seabag and weapons and web gear aboard the truck, taken one last look around at the olive drab tents and red dirt and the new outhouse on the ridge, said goodbye to a couple of off-duty buddies who’d come out to see me off, and promised myself to study this mess until I could see a way out of it. 

     I was studying, all right: I was already known on campus as the Nam vet who always had three to six books under his arm, and was actually reading all of them. But I wanted to learn more. Always more. If I was to answer, or even speak intelligently to, the question Why war?, what great lever could I get my hands on to move my mind, or the world, or whatever it was that needed to be moved? 

     I opened an atlas to a map of the world. Shit, it was big. Look at all those countries. Look at all those people.

     Communication. I can’t understand all these people unless I can talk to them, understand what they’re saying. I decided that evening that I had to study languages, beginning with those that would allow me to communicate with the most people, over as much of the globe as possible. I was already in a Spanish class. With English and Spanish, I could talk with most of the people in the Western Hemisphere, except Brazilians. 

     Good start, but what else? Looking at the map, I thought: China. It had a great land area, and an even greater population, proportionally. China already loomed very large in world history; its presence was only bound to become greater. The next day I approached Professor Frank Tucker after a history class and asked him if Chinese language study was offered on campus. He said no; we had Spanish, French, German, and Russian, besides classical Greek and Latin.

     I went back to my map and looked again at land area and political significance. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, and the hot war in Vietnam, which was very much entangled with the Cold War, had the whole world scared, and with reason. The following academic year I would continue in Spanish and begin studying Russian. And I would study French my senior year.

     I had a tiny single room in "Superdorm," our monicker for a big brick building that hadn’t yet been formally named. On my R and R to Hong Kong earlier in the year I'd bought a massive stereo system with two big speakers, a reel to reel tape deck, tuner, turntable, the works. I'd even bought my favorite tapes and records, at the PX on Okinawa, and shipped them home: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Percy Faith, Mantovani. The Ray Conniff Singers. Henry Mancini was a special favorite: "Moon River, wider than a mile/I'm crossing you in style...." That stuff soothed me, and I needed soothing.

     The guys in the dorm didn't know what to do with me. Who was this strange bird, holed up in his little amplified cave with this strange music? They were listening to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel.

     Marines, whisper whisper. Vietnam, whisper whisper. Still, I didn't seem dangerous. One guy named Cy, who was at CC from Minnesota on a football scholarship, actually thought it was kind of cool that I'd been to Nam. You know, ballsy. After a few weeks, when I'd leave my door ajar hoping somebody'd say hello, maybe even invite me to take part in the horseplay in the hall, Cy would cautiously poke his head into my room and ask how the hell I was doin'. Cy and I went to town one night and got drunk together, and became running mates for a while. Once when we were walking back from town, pretty well oiled, he threw his arm around my shoulders and said, "Dean, how'dja like to become a Kappa Sig?" 

     Being asked was a hell of a compliment, and I told him so. But though I was only a couple of years older than Cy, I felt a generation apart. My right hand still curved reflexively, wanting to hold a rifle stock. I said No, but thanks a lot for asking.

     

     Tom Gould came up to me one day after Spanish class. He said something like, "You look like somebody who's been around a little." Then: "Maybe spent a little time on your uncle's farm?" He said it with a knowing grin, and I knew he meant Uncle Sam. Tom had been a Force Recon Marine, and had gotten out just before most of his unit shipped out for Vietnam. He invited me over to meet his roommate, Mike Taylor, with whom he shared a basement apartment. Mike had served a hitch in the Army, but was sent to Germany instead of Vietnam. They reintroduced me to civilian life: macaroni dinners and medium priced wine in a messy kitchen shared with dogs and cats and even with actual human females. Later, the three of us rented a house off-campus with a Navy vet named Jim Martin and a Special Forces vet named Mark Streuli. The five of us became friends for life. 

     One predawn morning that fall of 1966, I was walking across the campus lawn between the library and Rastall Center, to my job washing pots in the cafeteria. That would earn my breakfast, and a little more. Heading out that early, in that cold, to that job and that food is not normally a set of circumstances to make the heart leap. But mine did. The lawn was covered with threefatfingered maple leaves in a layer so thick that my feet began to plow up piles of them as I walked. I laughed, and kicked the crackling leaves across the lawn. Everything was so wonderfully dry and cold, welcome opposites to hot and wet. I stopped in one of my kicked-up leaf piles and looked at the sky. I noticed the stars for the first time in a year, startled to realize that they had no relation to the war, that I was looking at them not to determine whether it was clear enough to dispatch aircraft on a mission of killing or mercy, but just to look at them. 

     I romped on across, kicking leaves and howling at the stars, delirious that I could walk this far, alone, unarmed and upright, making all this noise, and no one would try to kill me. 

Townies

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

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

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

      No.

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

      Fine. I will kill at least one.

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

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

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

        “Let’s go,” he said.

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

TAM KY

Tam Ky

     Angelo Walters and I decided we had to get laid. Tam Ky was a good place, we'd heard. There were lots of bars where the girls worked; you just made the rounds till you found one you liked.

     We needed an official reason to go. Even in the Marine Corps, you can't tell your commanding officer, "Look, sir, I need to go get laid." He may know what you're up to, but you have to cover his ass by giving him a story in case you get busted.

     Joe was an electronics technician. He'd go to Tam Ky “to check out some equipment.” I was just a radio operator, so couldn't use that excuse. I'd go as his security. Joe showed up ready to go, carrying nothing but his tool box, which he'd emptied of most of the heavy stuff. "Jesus, Joe," I said, "where's your rifle? What if we get shot down on the way? What if the VC corner us in a bar?" 

     "I don't wanna carry all that shit," he said. He grinned.  "You're my security man, right? I'll let you handle it." I went to the guard shack and loaded up with fragmentation grenades and 100 rounds of ammo for my M14. We went out to the helipad and hung around and asked a few questions till somebody pointed to a chopper revving up. We ran up and yelled "Tam Ky?" over the engine's roar and the door gunner waved us aboard.

     Tam Ky that day was like some Western boom town with all the miners either out working, or sleeping off hangovers. We went into a bar with one lone GI drinking in a corner. A bartender showed up and we ordered beers. A couple of bar girls came around, and we abandoned our beers and each went upstairs with one of the girls. 

     She was tiny. She was a grown woman, midtwenties or so, but just tiny. Short, and very slim. Couldn't have weighed over ninety pounds. She had her dress off, and her quickrelease bra and panties, by the time I'd taken off my soft cover - as we Marines called our cloth utility cap - hung it on a chair post, then found a safe place to lean my rifle against the wall where it wouldn't fall over and where I could get to it in a hurry by diving out my side of the bed.

     She sat on the bed and smiled as I undressed. She was trying to be pretty and inviting, trying to do her job. But fear was mixed in. I could see it. I had no idea what her life was like, how long she'd been a prostitute, how she'd been treated by her customers, how she'd been treated by the guy who was her last customer before me.

     Whatever that history was, she certainly had a history, and it flickered in her face as she watched me undress. I thought that part of her nervous smile was a plea for a sort of social contract: I'll be very nice and sweet to you and give you good sex if you'll be nice to me too, or if not nice, then at least not too mean.

     Watching her watch me undress - disarm would be a better word - I got the distinct feeling of seeing myself in a mirror. I began to see my movements as with someone else's eyes:

     I weighed about twice as much as she did. I wore glasses. I leaned a large, heavy, fully loaded automatic rifle against the wall where I could reach it easily. I took off my boots. I unhooked two fragmentation grenades from my belt suspender straps, set them carefully on their small flat bases on a little table a few feet from the bed, making sure their fuses were screwed all the way in. Then I looked at the large window that opened on the street, took the grenades off the table, moved the table farther from the window and closer to the bed, and put the grenades back on it. I checked the other grenades in my cargo pockets to make sure their fuses were screwed all the way in and their pins were bent over and hadn't caught on anything and started to straighten or pull out. I unbuckled my cartridge belt, which carried four 20-round magazines of 7.62mm ammunition, two one-quart canteens of water, a first aid packet with battle dressing, and a sheathed bayonet. I lifted it off by the belt suspender straps which hung its weight from my shoulders, and lowered it carefully to the floor. I unbuckled the khaki web belt that held up my trousers, slipped its buckle back through the first belt loop to the left of my fly, and slid my sheath knife from the belt: the custom made, hand tempered, Randall #1 fighting knife with a seven inch blade with its top edge sharpened a third of the way up from the point, a double fighting hilt, a handle of stag antler with customcarved finger grips, a sharpening stone in its own pocket on the sheath, and this engraved on the blade: 

DEAN METCALF 

                                                       2033406 USMC

     I set the knife on the table by the grenades, its handle toward the bed. I took off my jungle utility jacket, trousers, socks. Like most GIs in Vietnam, I wore no underwear. Too sweaty: it gave you crotch rot. I took off my dog tags, taped together with black vinyl electrical tape to eliminate noise, and set them on the little table by my knife and grenades. 

     Now we were both naked.

GOING OVER

Going Over

     Lieutenant O’Neill herded his little gaggle of Marines, most of whom were eighteen- and nineteen-year-old radio and radar operators who had never been far from the small towns or urban neighborhoods where they grew up, let alone to the other side of the world, aboard the AMERICAN CHARGER. Our equipment van was craned over the side and lowered into a hold along with other supplies bound for Vietnam.

     All the ship’s cargo was materiel for the war. Those NCO’s among us who, like me, had had extended excursions aboard troop ships of the “gator navy,” the fleet of vessels designed and built specifically to deliver American troops and equipment to enemy-held beaches, were flabbergasted by the difference. The ship was crowded with cargo, but not with men. Lieutenant O’Neill was the only military officer aboard, and he wasn’t one of the frenetic martinet types who could make such a hell of a two-week crossing. So passage was, to me, startlingly different from the two Pacific crossings I’d made before.

     The evening of our first day at sea we were led into a small but rather nicely appointed dining room. Not mess hall: dining room. A waiter with a white jacket and quiet manner approached our tables and asked what we’d like for dinner.

    Those of us who’d been at sea at all were used to lining up with dozens, or hundreds, of other young sailors and Marines, grabbing a steel tray off a stack as we moved quickly through the line, and eating what was slopped onto it.

     “Tonight we have a choice of two entrées, roast duck or filet mignon.” The guy said that, and still had a straight face.

      Hunh?

     We had stumbled into a situation which none of us had encountered before, and which I personally had never heard of happening among enlisted men of the US military at sea, in all my three years in the Marine Corps. Our detachment consisted of a handful of men put aboard to accompany our gear, some of which – the TPQ-10 radar, specifically - was Top Secret. The equipment had to be watched over by someone with the proper clearance, which some few of us had, Lieutenant O’Neill and I among them. 

     They had to feed us on the way over, and the only facility for doing that was the crew’s mess. The crew’s mess was run according to the rules of their union, which included a choice of two entrées for each dinner. Apparently union rules also stipulated that such meals be prepared not just by whichever crew member might be on duty as cook that day, but by a trained chef. We shut our mouths, ate, and grinned. We knew things would be different where we were going.

     After a Cinderella liberty in Honolulu, with no destination before us but Vietnam, the mood changed. There would be no more port calls. Though O’Neill wasn’t anything like a brand-new Second Lieutenant trying simultaneously to establish his authority and his manhood, he still had the responsibility of preparing us to do our jobs as Marines when we went ashore. We had the occasional rifle inspection, to make sure we weren’t letting the salt air rust our weapons, and even did calisthenics in the limited space available among the room-sized crates that were packed with the stuff that war requires and chained or strapped to the decks.

     A couple of days out of Hawaii, Lieutenant O’Neill called us together for a lecture which didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but which I would have cause to remember the rest of my life. He gathered us in one of the cargo holds where the crates weren’t stacked all the way to the deck above, and picked a space where he could sit on one crate and the rest of us could spread out on others, being sure that we were all close enough to hear him clearly. This was important.     

     His lecture was about SEATO, the South East Asia Treaty Organization. It was the reason we were going, he said. About all we’d heard to that point was that Communists controlled North Vietnam, and our allies controlled South Vietnam. SEATO, the Lieutenant told us, was a multinational organization of countries in the area organized for mutual security. Australia belonged, he said, and Thailand and the Philippines.The United States was also a signatory, along with Britain and France. When one of us raised the obvious question of how the United States fit into a group of nations so distant from our own (by now even the least educated among us knew that Vietnam was half a world away; after all, they’d already told us it would take two weeks to get there), O’Neill replied that the situation we were entering was especially important because South Vietnam was a small democratic country with a small and weak army, and they were threatened with being overrun by their Communist neighbor to the North, who was being supported with weapons and money by the Soviets. The South Vietnamese were fragile at present, but they were our friends, and had asked for our help. Our country had signed that treaty, and a deal’s a deal. He also said that the agreement specifically stated that an attack on any signatory would be considered an attack on all. (Actually, that wasn’t true, though we weren’t told so at the time.) What SEATO meant in practice was that the United States had a legal justification to intervene as our leadership saw fit. This was bolstered by the 533-2 vote in the U.S. Congress in support of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed on August 7 the previous year, about three days after my Naval Gunfire section sailed for the same Gulf.      

    We were going to Vietnam to honor a solemn commitment.          

     Most of us thought the Lieutenant wasn’t such a bad guy, for an officer. He did his job and made us do ours, but for the most part didn’t hassle us just to flaunt his rank, like some officers did. So we were a little surprised at his seriousness as he gave us that history lesson in the hold of the AMERICAN CHARGER. But we listened. At least I did. It was good enough for me: let’s go; let’s get the job done. It would be many years before I learned that SEATO, and even the specific leadership of the South Vietnamese Government itself, were creations of the U.S. Government, under President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The reason for the very existence of SEATO, and for the leadership put in place in the South Vietnamese government, was to ratchet up U.S. presence in Southeast Asia. 

     I’m pretty sure O’Neill knew little or nothing besides what they’d told him, which he passed on to us. That’s how it all works.

     We had good weather most of the way across: tropical sun on blue water punctuated by the occasional whitecap. As we approached the Orient, flying fish with four pectoral fin/wings could be seen staging their takeoffs in the clear water, accelerating into a wave as it crested, surfing on its energy, then at just the right moment, bursting from its side to set its wings and glide on the trough of air also being lifted by the wave. They could coast on the air currents between crests of waves, like an albatross, for a hundred yards or more. I never tired of watching them.          

     We were bored. Not long after Hawaii but days before the end of our voyage, our incessant prowling of the ship produced a revelation. The same hold which contained our precious communications van also carried beer: pallets upon pallets of canned beer. Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon are the ones I remember. “Wonder where all this beer’s goin’?” “Same place we are, I guess.”

     “So it’s beer for the troops, right?”

     “Hey! That’s us!”

     “Right... this is our beer!”

     “Y’know, I’m not sure it’s safe, out here in the open, all by itself. What if that deck leaks, seawater gets in here, gets everything soakin’ wet? Seawater’s bad for metal, like beer cans, gets it all rusted ‘n’ corroded ‘n’ shit.”

     “We can’t allow that to happen. That’d be dereliction of duty.”

     Our communications van was always locked. One NCO among us always had the key, in order to unlock it, go inside, make sure nobody had picked the lock and entered to pilfer or vandalize, then lock it again.

     Sometimes that NCO was me. I’ve always had a knack for organizing people to move quantities of things; it had come in handy aboard the CAVALIER and the PICKAWAY the year before in the Tonkin Gulf and the South China Sea. 

     We formed a chain gang, standing four or five feet apart with every other man facing the opposite direction, from our chosen pallet to the door of the van. Two men attacked the designated pallet, alternating as first one then the other slid a case of beer off the top course on the pallet and handed/tossed it to the first man in the chain. Our technique of facing opposite directions meant that no one had to turn completely to the side to pass a case of beer to the next man in line.      

     I unlocked the door. Two men went inside, one to catch the most recent case arriving from the last man in the chain, and one to stack, with specific instructions on how to do that so the stack would fit in the narrow aisle between rows of electronic equipment, with the cases interlocked in a modified version of how they’d been stacked on the pallet. We were done in a few minutes, the van door was re-locked, and we’d all disappeared above decks and were diligently cleaning our rifles, or feigning sleep in the sun, so as to appear the same as we would on any other day.

     A couple of days later, with Hawaii now a distant memory and Asia still invisible, we plowed the seas in a world which contained nothing but ocean, horizon, and sky. A few us were lounging around in the hold near our van, conjecturing about a future filled with combat and beer.

     “I wouldn’t mind a wound or two, nothin’ serious, just enough to make me look salty.” 

     “Maybe one right on the face, so the chicks could all see it...”

     “But not enough to make you ugly.”

     “Or right here, on the arm, a real nasty-lookin’ one, but it just peeks out from under the sleeve o’ your t-shirt, but looks real impressive when you take your shirt off.”

     “Right, I hear women go crazy for a wounded guy...”

     “Y’know, this beer’ll go down mighty good when we come in off a patrol.”               

     “I don’t give a fuck if I get a leg blown off, long as my cock and balls are still intact.”

     “Right, that’s the main thing...”     

     “Whaddaya mean, patrol? We’re wing-wipers. We ain’t goin’ on any goddamned patrols.” “Wingwipers” was a derogatory term used by division Marines, like I had been for most of my hitch, for those in the Marine Air Wing. There was no talk of death, but its shadow had hung a little lower over us as each day brought us closer to the end of our voyage.     

     The ship’s Merchant Marine officers had mostly left us alone. But now one approached. “How are you men doing today?” he asked, a little nervously.

     “Oh, fine, sir... just keepin’ an eagle eye on our equipment, here.”

     “Well, that’s good... say, there seems to be some cargo missing, or... moved. Actually, some beer is missing. Anybody know anything about that?” he searched our faces.

     “No, sir, I haven’t noticed anything... any o’ you guys?” Exchange of innocent looks, shrugs. “No sir.” “Me either.” “Not a thing. Sorry, sir.”

     “Well... I need to see inside that van.” He nodded at ours, the one we were loosely clustered around.

     “You got a Top Secret Clearance, sir?” 

     “Of course not. I’m an officer in the Merchant Marine; we’re not involved in that sort...”         

     “Sorry, sir...” (nodding toward the van) “... the equipment in there...” (nodding again) “...is not only secret. “It’s TOP secret. “Our orders are not to allow anyone without the proper clearance to even SEE inside it.”

     By this time the half dozen or so of us who had quietly been hanging around the van had moved from slouches to more vertical positions. A weapon or two appeared, casually. I turned my left side, with unambiguous Randall fighting knife, toward him.

     “I really must...”

     Softly, but a little sharply: “Sir. We are United States Marines on sentry duty.”(pause) “Nobody..but..us..touches..that..lock.”           

     Nobody did, either.     

          A few days later we pulled into the harbor at Danang. It was a maelstrom: Navy warships, Navy and civilian cargo ships, and Vietnamese sampans all trying to fulfill their obligations without getting run over. We came to a floating stop in the middle of the harbor, as if the ship herself was bewildered. Apparently the skipper was on the radio trying to find out where to park. A U.S. Navy warship – a destroyer escort, as I remember - hove to abreast of us, and began blinking its signal lamp directly at us. 

     Lieutenant O’Neill found me and told me to come with him to the bridge. It turned out that none of the CHARGER’s communicators knew Morse code. O’Neill asked if I could read the naval signaler’s transmission. I knew Morse; my weeks of Radio Telegraph Operator’s Course in 1963 had included intensive training in that, and I’d used it in training with Naval Gunfire on Okinawa, and in the Philippines and Japan. In those situations we’d tapped out Morse on a “knee key,” which was a Morse key attached to a large spring steel clip that slipped over the operator’s leg just above the knee.

     I said I’d give it a try, and pretty soon I was able to tell the Lieutenant that I was missing some that was apparently Navy jargon, but that the guy wanted us to identify ourselves.

     Oops. Up to then my experience with these signal lamps had been watching short scenes in war movies, but that at least had taught me basically how they worked: you grabbed this handle and flicked your wrist – quickly for a dot, a little longer for a dash. 

     With that for starters, I was able to tell the Navy signalman “I am USMC,” thereby letting him understand my relative clumsiness with his native instrument, and “We are SS AMERICAN CHARGER.” We were plenty close enough for them to see that we were an unarmed freighter, not a warship.

     Between my blinking and whatever was transpiring on the ship’s radio, we were allowed to proceed, and to tie up at a dock. We walked down the gangplank with our personal gear, and stood around anxiously watching the unloading process until we saw a dockside crane lift our van, still locked and with our contraband beer safely inside, over the side and into a waiting six-by. We all grinned like the fools we were. Shit. We were geniuses: we’d planned it so well we didn’t even have to offload our own beer. 

     We clambered aboard and drove away, beer and all. We were in Vietnam.

OAKLAND

Oakland

     We were at Oakland Army Terminal, a detachment of about a dozen Marine radio and radar operators under Lieutenant John O’Neill. It was September, 1965. We were getting ready to ship out for Vietnam aboard the commercial freighter S.S. AMERICAN CHARGER, which the Defense Department had chartered to help make up the deficit in military shipping during the buildup.

     We’d had our last Stateside liberty in Oakland the night before, and a friend of mine, Martin Luther Ealy, took a couple of us white boys bar-hopping in a black section of Oakland that was, shall we say, nitty-gritty enough that we’d never have ventured there unescorted. I’d gone upstairs at one of the bars to a prostitute, who’d matter-of-factly and bemusedly received my unschooled motions as her man sat with his back to us a few feet away. When I complained that I hadn’t gotten very much time for that amount of money, she shrugged: "You came, baby. That’s what you paid for; that’s what you got." She began filing her nails. I went back downstairs to approval mingled with jokes about how quickly I’d returned.

     But this story isn’t about that. It’s about tossing Harris his rifle. He was a black PFC a good three years younger than I, an ancient 22-year-old corporal with three years in "The Crotch," headed for my second overseas tour. The only thing Harris took seriously was his reputation for refusing to take seriously anything to do with the Marine Corps, military discipline, or his job. It was all pretty funny to him, an alternately boring and amusing hiatus between parts of his civilian life.

     It was a glaring afternoon. We were hanging out in a paved open area in front of a warehouse, watching military and civilian vehicles pull up to and away from the warehouse’s loading dock, that nexus of commerce and war. Lieutenant O’Neill was off somewhere finding out what we were supposed to do.

     We were engaged in the usual taunts and grab-ass when someone first glanced, then stared, at what a departing military six-by had left behind. We followed his stare and were struck quiet. We’d heard of body bags; even had an idea what they looked like, courtesy of the hyperactive rumor mill that was the source of most of our information and misinformation about what was going on in Vietnam.

     What we hadn’t heard anything about was aluminum caskets. But there they were, three jewels from the Grim Reaper’s trove, radiating sunlight from the loading dock. Our guys. We stood, mesmerized, staring at them wordlessly for I don’t know how long. It was long enough for the odor to reach us from the caskets. Our nostrils flared with it; each of us turned away quickly but as quickly turned back, baby warriors electrified and repelled by our first whiff of death. That was my first awareness that a dead human smells different from a dead animal. I still haven’t sorted out what the difference is, because I’ve never been able to decide how much is physical and how much is emotional.

     Lieutenant O’Neill came up huffing, in a hurry: "Let’s go!" He didn’t notice the caskets until our unwonted slowness in responding to his order jolted him into a barked repetition of it. If what was happening could be said to have a rhythm, O’Neill’s noticing of the caskets interrupted it. He skipped a beat, slowed, lowered his voice: "Get your rifles. Get on the bus." It was his turn to stare at the caskets as we snapped out of our shared reverie and moved to pick up our M14 rifles from where they leaned in a row against the building behind us. I took my rifle in my left hand and stood aside as the others grabbed theirs. That happened quickly, until one rifle leaned alone against the building. Harris was still standing where we’d all been, frozen, staring at the caskets.

     "Harris!" I shouted. He came to, spun around, jogged toward me with an adrenaline-induced bounce to his steps and a wild-eyed look on his face, part grin and part pre-game stage fright. I’d never seen him so alert, so alive. I picked up his rifle in my right hand, gripping it at the balance point just forward of the receiver. I tucked the rifle up under my armpit, threw it out hard, horizontally, in Harris’ direction, with no warning except what passed between our eyes.

     He didn’t break stride. Running straight at the flying rifle, his eyes followed it as a good infielder’s eyes will follow a line drive, reading its flight. Just before the rifle would have smacked him across the chest, he raised his left hand – languidly, it seemed – and snapped it around the rifle, at the same balance point by which I’d thrown it. Our eyes clicked together: here we go. He jogged past me, spun the rifle to vertical, and bounced up the steps into the bus.

TONKIN

     Tonkin

     We spent a lot of time in the Philippines. Luzon, of course, home of Olongapo, favorite liberty port of sailors and Marines for many years. Mindanao, where we had an extended stay in a sprawling tent camp during a SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization(

) exercise. We had an idyllic sojourn there because the senior Marine officers seemed to think we were in the Navy and left us alone. The most important thing we learned was that Australians could drink more beer, and faster, than we could. 

     It was in one of those tents that I operated on Greg Larson’s foot with my fighting knife. For a few days, the higher-ups either forgot about us, or that segment of the training exercise didn’t involve naval gunfire, so we were left pretty much alone with continuous access to San Miguel beer at ten cents a bottle.

     One midnight, in our tent which was dark but for a couple of flashlights, Greg started to complain about his foot. When his ship was crossing the Pacific bound for Okinawa, he’d gone swimming off Honolulu, and had stepped on some coral in the water. He’d gone to see a Navy doctor who had probed the wound, removed something, and sent him on his way. But now, some weeks later on Mindanao, he complained that there was still something in there, and it hurt. Even the tiniest piece of coral tends to infect a wound.

     We were all drunk. Ever the problem solver, I piped up: “Greg, I can take that coral outta your foot.” 

   “How? That goddamned Navy sawbones couldn’t get it.”

     I pulled the Randall out of its sheath on my left hip. All the guys knew about that knife, how sharp I always kept it. I’d had it made by W.D. Randall Jr. of Orlando, Florida(

). His knives for hunting and fighting were world famous. I still remember a testimonial in one of his brochures from a Korean War vet: “Here’s $25. Need another fighting knife. Had to leave my last one in a troublesome Red behind enemy lines.” 

     “All I need is somebody to hold the light, and pour some San Magoo on the blade to sterilize it,” I bragged. Whether beer would actually sterilize the blade was a question we didn’t discuss.

            As I said, we were all drunk.

     Finally, the boredom was relieved. We gathered around Greg’s cot. Somebody – Gene DeMine or Flood or Cianflone – volunteered to hold the flashlight, and surgery began. I stropped the knife on the top of my combat boot – still leather in those days – somebody held Greg’s foot, somebody poured beer over the foot and the knife and the cot and onto the ground below. Greg poured beer into his gullet, to reinforce what was already there. I got down close, made a tiny incision with the double-edged point, and squeezed blood from the wound, spread it thin on my hand, and there it was: a tiny piece of coral. In fairness to the Navy doctor, a small pocket of infection had formed around the piece and isolated it, apparently needing only to be lanced to be spit out.

     We also went to Mindoro, where there was a Naval gunnery range, and we actually got to call in live fire from destroyers and cruisers offshore. One target was Tabones Rock, and we would watch as the high-explosive shells from 5- and 8-inch guns landed in the water near the rock, and Filipino fishermen in their bonca boats, hiding in the lee of the rock, would paddle quickly out after an explosion, pick up the dead fish, and scurry back into the shelter of the rock to await the next volley.

     We were on another exercise in the Philippines, this one only battalion-size. We were saddling up for a forced march with the battalion, which was nothing new; most of us had been doing this sort of thing for the better part of a year. Then a ripple of excitement hit our section: Eddie Kessler and I would lead the entire battalion on the march. Eddie was a wiry kid like me, and we were both runners. We usually came in first in the 3-mile run with packs and rifles that was a regular part of our physical training.

     Then a bigger ripple hit. At first we thought it was more of the same: hurry up, wait, change the gear in our packs, change the marching order, change the time. But no: Pack all your gear. Leave nothing behind. Carry your own gear, load the jeeps to board ship. There is no training march. We are going. Now. – Where we goin’, Sarge? – The North Vietnamese fired on two of our destroyers, the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy. Someplace called the Gulf of Tonkin. Guess we’re goin’ there. Let’s move it. Now.

     It was August 4, 1964. We boarded the attack transport USS CAVALIER. The old ship shuddered through the night, heading north. Scuttlebutt had it that the ship’s crew had “turned off steam to everything but the screws, to make better speed.” Daylight showed us to be a flotilla of amphibious warfare ships carrying a battalion of Marine infantry, a battery of artillery, combat cargo, fuel, ammo... exactly what we had always trained for, but never believed we’d be ordered to do outside of exercises.

     We moved close enough to shore to see the green hills inland. If we saw any boats, they were small fishing boats, under sail. No military craft. Nobody shot at us. We wondered if the commanders who ordered the movements of our ships were baiting the North Vietnamese to do so, but anybody who knew the answer to that wasn’t telling us.

     We moved back and forth: port side to the shore, starboard side to the shore. We did calisthenics on deck. We cleaned our rifles and had rifle inspections. Our weapons-cleaning sessions began to draw a few onlookers, swabbies who were off duty or passing by as they chipped paint and repainted, greased machinery and spliced cables, the neverending chores of warding off the attacks of salt air on steel. Part of my ritual was to sharpen and strop the Randall, ending each session by shaving a small patch of hair from my forearm and letting it drift away on the breeze. Nobody laughed.

     Soon after we arrived on station, some of us were put on a detail to unload ammunition from the hold. The hatch covers were opened by cables suspended from the ship’s rigging, and we got burns on our hands manhandling ropes on pulleys and lifting crates of 7.62mm machine gun and rifle ammo; 60mm, 81mm, and 4.2” mortar ammo, and hand grenades: fragmentation, concussion, willy peter (white phosphorus), tear gas, and different colors of smoke grenades. No blanks this time.

     Days became weeks, and being Marines, we started having regular, mandatory haircut sessions on deck. Portable radios appeared, and we heard sounds of what sounded to us like whiny stringed instruments and equally whiny voices coming from stations on shore, and the occasional shortwave broadcast in English. “Hanoi Hannah” made her appearance, a woman who spoke better English than most of us, naming our ships and units and describing our movements and denouncing our imperialist ambitions. Greg Larson pulled out a cheap guitar he’d bought on Taiwan, and, with snatches of the half-dozen tunes he knew parts of, became, to us in Naval Gunfire, the most important man on the ship. 

     Greg knew several bars of the Spanish instrumental tune “La Malagueña,” which attracted a widening circle of sailors and Marines. He would play what he knew, then stop and shrug apologetically and say, in his strong Boston accent which reminded me of President Kennedy’s speech to assembled Marines a year earlier at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at San Diego, “Sorry, boys... that’s all I know.”

     “Then play it again.”

     Another shrug. He’d play it again, and there would be that contemplative silence as each young man reached inside himself for some part of his reality that had nothing to do with rifles or ships or oceans, in a way that perhaps only music can inspire. “Play it again,” and he would, over and over, until a discernible chunk of the day had passed, his fingers would get too sore, or a Sergeant would find something more military for us to do. Greg taught me what he knew of that tune, and it came to mean so much to me that I’ve returned to it over the years to the point that I can still find it on the guitar.

     Although we were never told what to expect, what we would be doing, or what was going on in the world, we could divine, from the nature of orders given us, something of the concerns of our superiors. Sometime in late August, and periodically again after that, “swim call” was announced. Overboard discharge was cut off so we wouldn’t have to swim in our own shit, the ship would come to a dead stop, and a Marine with a loaded rifle would be placed on watch in case any sharks were tempted by all that fresh meat in the water. A cargo net, one of those we had climbed down so many times in training exercises, would be lowered over the side to climb down to the water and climb back up. Pretty soon some were jumping from the main deck, a distance of thirty feet or more. Then some of us, to prove we were Marines, would stand on the rail around that deck and dive. Hey, it was the ocean: we weren’t worried about hitting bottom.

     About the same time we were ordered to wear skivvies to the shower. No explanation. We guessed that the consequences of confining several hundred young men on a single ship for weeks at a time had a history in the Marine Corps, and our leaders must have been trying to ameliorate those consequences. This of course led to endless “faggot” jokes.

     The troop compartments below decks were a hellish place that stank of diesel fuel, salt water, old and new sweat from hundreds of bodies cramped into tight spaces, and old and fresh vomit from seasickness. Some of us elected to sleep topside unless the ship had entered one of the infrequent rain squalls that scooted across the sea. I nearly always slept on deck, and developed a way to configure my body in a modified fetal position so that my hip, ribs, shoulder, elbow and ankle on the side against the steel deck were padded by muscle. Many nights on deck were actually quite pleasant, with a tropical breeze sliding across the surface of the blue-green sea and stars, unobstructed by clouds, clustering low and bright overhead.

     Finally, we had been on station so long that, since we couldn’t go into a port to refuel and re-supply, UNREPs entered our lives. Underway replenishment: our ship and the one resupplying us would steer parallel courses at equal speed, and we could see the faces of the sailors lining the rail of the supply ship. When the two Captains had decided that courses and speeds were sufficiently synchronized, a shot would be fired from one ship to the deck of the other, the small line attached to the projectile would be used to haul over a cable, and bundles would begin to pass from the supply ship to us: food, mail, fuel (through a great black hose suspended from the cable), and once – in the other direction – a man. Rumors said he was a sick sailor who needed hospitalization, or someone going home on emergency leave. He was strapped into a stretcher, and jounced along just above the frothing white seas resulting from the colliding bow-wakes. Reluctantly, we admitted that these deck apes might have some balls after all.

     We left that station and sailed south, until we were off the coast of South Viet Nam. Again, we were close enough to see the green hills inland, and sometimes we could see red machine-gun tracers etching their parabolic arcs in the night sky.

     I was wearing new Corporal’s chevrons (actually, a pair of used ones I’d borrowed from JJ Leath until we got to the next PX) when, after 68 days and nights of never setting foot off the ship, we pulled into Hong Kong for 5 days of R&R. For me, it was revelatory: I got myself purposely lost, alone, and wandered for hours in back streets of Hong Kong Island and took the Star Ferry across to Kowloon and did the same thing there. Some of us from Naval Gunfire went to a fish restaurant where, after being shown to our table, we were invited to a ceramic pool in the center of the room where a variety of fish were swimming, and each asked to choose the fish he wanted to eat, whereupon those people would catch, kill, clean, cook, and serve that fish to us. 

     Then it was back aboard ship, back to the South China Sea, back to the coast of Vietnam. We were off Da Nang for a while, cruising back and forth, back and forth, within sight of the beach, within sight of the war.

     Something happened in Saigon, a coup or an attempted coup. We sailed south, being told that we might be sent ashore there, to “protect American lives and property,” but once on station it was more card games on deck, more weapons cleaning and inspections, more calisthenics, more rumors. Our captivity aboard ship this time was shorter: 45 days and nights.

     The South China Sea was beautiful: clear green close to shore, a clear deep blue farther out. Once, the ship crossed a sharp line delineating green from blue, and we clustered at the rail and stared as the ship broke the line. We saw sea snakes swimming miles offshore, and were told that their venom could kill a man very quickly. We saw flying fish: in the clear water, you could track one as it headed for the surface, exploded out the side of a wave, set its wings (pectoral fins, actually), and glide along on the air currents pushed up by the motion of the waves. I never tired of watching them.

     I cast the first vote in a Presidential Election of my young life from one of the two attack transport ships we were aboard during those months, by absentee ballot. I voted for Barry Goldwater because I thought Lyndon Johnson was a liar (for once I got something right). What I knew absolutely nothing about was the unique significance of the months between August and November in an election year, and of the habit of Americans historically to rally around a president in time of war or national emergency, and of presidential candidates to exploit that tendency.

     We spent Thanksgiving aboard that second ship, USS Pickaway, in the South China Sea, playing Bullshit Poker as we waited for hours in the chow line for our dinner. Ashore, the war was becoming what it would soon be. Most of us would be back. 

     But for now, we were headed for Subic Bay.

BANNING

Banning

     Poor people and servicemen on leave traveled by Greyhound. So the trip through the January night to my first permanent duty station after boot camp was just an extension of my childhood. Except for how I smelled: twentyfour hours in a closed bus wearing the same dress green wool uniform works its own alchemy, a brew of stale sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, and dry cleaning fluids which has to be stored in the synapses of every veteran.

     It grew bitingly cold as the bus moved deeper into the January night and the California desert. Sometime in the middle of the night we were disgorged at the bus stop in Banning. There either was no bus station, or it was closed. Two or three of us on our way to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms had to wait outside for the local stage that would take us on our next leg. There was a bench to sit on, and a concrete wall to lean against. The bench was occupied by two old men. I was puzzled that they weren't home in bed, since they weren't waiting for the same stage we were, and there didn't seem to be anything else happening in Banning that time of night. 

     I wasn't interested in sitting anyway. I was too cold. My wool overcoat was near the bottom of my seabag, that monster of design inefficiency that is long and narrow and opens only at one end, so anytime you want anything that isn't on top, you have to unpack the goddamned thing to get what you want, then repack it. This usually occurs when a drill instructor is yelling at you to hurry up, or when your bus is leaving.

     Besides being cold, I was sleepy and hungry and homesick and needed a shower. My uniform was rumpled, and, I was sure, twisted all around my body. I felt like shit.   

    One of the old men was eyeing me. I wasn't used to traveling in uniform; later I would find that some people would avoid even eye contact with you, while others would talk your leg off. But this time, I simply noticed that I was being watched. I felt too miserable to care why.

     The old man finally spoke: "Look at you, boy," he said to me. "You don't know how lucky you are. Just look at you. Young, strong, proud... got your whole life in front of you. And just look at how you fill out that uniform."

     I grumbled that I sure as shit didn't feel very proud at the moment, and as far as how I filled the uniform, I'd probably get my ass chewed for it if an officer saw me right then.

     "Well, I still say, you don't know how lucky you are," the old man insisted. He turned his face away, speaking now more to his own past than to me: "You can complain all you want, but I'd give anything in the world to be in your shoes right now."

Darkskinned Warriors 1

Darkskinned Warriors 1

     I was sitting in the waiting area of the Colorado Springs airport, watching people walk by on the concourse. 

      Some soldiers were walking from my right to left. They were black, wearing dress green uniforms, with Combat Infantryman Badges on their chests above their ribbons, and, on their left shoulders, the gold shield with black horse's head of the First Air Cavalry. 

        A similar group approached them from the opposite direction. Something passed through all the men that was visible to me. It was the way they walked, and the way they recognized one another. They emanated a pride that fairly crackled in the air around them. Though all wore uniforms of the United States Army, the uniform very definitely was not the source of their pride. Rather, it seemed to come from deep inside the uniform. Their walk was not a regulation, head erect, shoulders-stiffly-drawn-back walk. It was a rolling thing, with shoulders turning in front of the body with each step, right shoulder with left foot, left shoulder with right foot. And the body dipped slightly with every other step, a kind of willful breaking of the rhythm, a sassy falling-behind only to quicken the last part of the step in order to arrive in perfect time. 

     I had learned to recognize the walk in boot camp, when our drill instructors told us to watch another platoon in our regiment when they were on the "grinder," which is what Marines call the parade ground. That platoon had a black drill instructor who had a certain lilt to his cadence, and a slightly swooping march step that he was able to impart to his whole platoon. His cadence and step had so little difference from regulation Marine Corps drill that his superiors couldn't make him stop doing it because they couldn't describe the difference in words or point to a regulation which it violated. Besides, the man was a squared away Marine and an excellent drill instructor. So he got away with his little one man cultural revolution. 

     At least one DI snickered about that Sergeant and his "dittybop" platoon, and some of the recruits chimed in. Phrases like "jigaboo outfit" tumbled into the ice plant around the Quonset huts. But there was respect too, even among the mutterers, when the seventy-man platoon, mostly white boys, took the grinder and performed a close order drill that had a rhythm, a visual musicality, that was beautiful to watch, and which no other platoon on the grinder could match. 

     These black soldiers in the airport had that walk, with an added edge: they were all back from Nam. It was a black man's walk, but also a black warrior's walk. As the two groups came abreast, a couple of soldiers in each group raised small, black enameled swagger sticks, each with a chromed .50 caliber cartridge casing capping one end and a chromed .50 caliber bullet capping the other end, in smart salutes. It had nothing to do with Old Glory or the United States Army. It said, I salute you, brother. We have been through the fire. We have lost some brothers. We have kicked some ass. 

     And this black warrior's walk also said, Don't nobody fuck with us. 

        And it said Watch out, Whitey.