DRESS BLUES 1

Dress Blues 1

     Bill [Bill Gano, my step-dad] took me to a gun shop in Klamath Falls. We couldn't afford anything, not even a used rifle. We went there to dream. Maybe they'll give me some overtime, Bill said. And we'll pick spuds together on weekends when they come ripe. Maybe we can get a good used .30-30, not this year, but in time for next deer season. We could sure use the meat, save on groceries. Gotta tell your ma that, or she won't let us spend money on a rifle. .30-30's not the best gun for this country, though. Good brush gun, but short range. Need somethin' that'll reach out farther in this open country, .300 Savage maybe. That's a real nice rifle, got a good long barrel, you get a peep sight on the back, with that long distance between sights, you can be real accurate. Bill liked peep sights. He'd gotten used to them during World War II, when he'd fired the Springfield 1903 .30-06, and later, the M-1 Garand. Ought six's a good caliber, he said. You could get a lot of different loads for it, and you could buy ammo anywhere. 

     We were talking like that, and the store owner, who knew we didn't have any money, was letting me handle a used .300 Savage off the rack. He wasn't busy. "Boy handles a rifle real nice," he said, knowing that'd puff me up, which it did. Puffed Bill up a little too, because he'd taught me. 

     The little bell over the door jingled, and a man walked in. Instantly, the three of us were breathing different air. The man wore a striking blue uniform, topped by - of all things in a dusty logging and cattle town - an immaculate white cap with a brown leather brim and a shiny brass emblem. He removed the cap and tucked it under his left arm as he entered. The dark blue uniform tunic had brass buttons and a funny high collar that closed at the throat, and red piping at the sleeves and pockets. There were medals - some shiny silver, some multicolored cloth - on his left breast. The silver medals seemed to represent rifles and pistols. There was a broad crimson stripe down each leg of the blue trousers. 

     The man knew the gun shop owner; they greeted each other. I could sense a subtle change in Bill, even though he was behind me, looking over my shoulder at the man in the strange uniform. 

     The man in the uniform was watching me, seemingly   with approval, handle the .300 Savage with all the aplomb a skinny kid with glasses could muster. He nodded over my shoulder at Bill. "There's a young man I'll be talkin' to one of these days," he said to all of us. Then, to me: "Ever hear of the Marines, son?" He smiled. I was thirteen or fourteen. I knew nothing of him or his world. 

     I did know that both Bill and the gun shop owner had changed when he walked in. 

     "No," I said.

     The man might have said something else. I don’t know. I just remember how he looked, and the feeling he brought into the room. And Bill saying with a testy voice, "He's a little young for that." 

     The man in the glittering blue, white and red uniform did his business and left. I could feel the air in the room return to something like it had been before he came in, though a part of his presence remained. 

     I looked at Bill's face with my question. Part of his answer was already in his face; it contained some mixture of awe and disapproval, with a hint of myth or mystery.

     "Marine recruiter, I guess," Bill said, looking at the gun shop owner, who nodded as he leaned on the counter. I asked who Marines were, lobbing the question for both of them to catch. The store owner said something that confirmed the awe in Bill's face, about Marines being the best fighters. There was more awe in his reply than I saw in Bill's face, with none of the disapproval. 

     I was surprised at the anger in Bill's voice. He said something like, Sure, Marines have a lot of guts, but they don't care, they do all this crazy stuff, just stand up and fix bayonets and walk right into it instead of trying to do the job with less casualties. They get a lot of guys slaughtered just to prove how brave they are. 

     As we walked back to the Studebaker Bill said, very pointedly, that when my time came, I should join any branch of service but the Marines.

     I never forgot Bill's admonition. But the man in blue had done his work.

MISSING MAN

Missing Man

     The first time I met Bill Motto was on the street outside the Veterans' hall in Santa Cruz. He was holding forth on some book or newspaper article or recent event that, to him, was yet another confirmation of the depths to which U.S. imperialism had sunk in the 20th century. His talk was brilliant, informed, and delivered so fast that even those of us who read a lot and pretty much shared his judgments about U.S. foreign policy had a hard time keeping up with him. Jesus Christ, I thought as I listened to him, this guy's wound too tight for his own good.     

     We got to be friends. But like most of the other vets, I could only handle being with Bill in limited doses. He didn't live anywhere; he "crashed around": he'd stay at a friend's house, keeping as low a profile as possible and helping with chores where he could, but finally just being too jarring a presence in a person's, or a family's, life. He'd either be asked to move on, or would get the hints and do it on his own. Sometimes he'd disappear for a few days or weeks, hang out in San Francisco or his old haunts up the coast around Guerneville, then show up again. I let him crash at my place for a few weeks, but it was a tiny three room rented house and when Bill was camped out in the living room, it wasn't even mine anymore. 

     "Bill," I said to him one day, "this...."

     "It's time, huh?"      

     "Yeah."

     He nodded, smiled a resigned smile, thanked me, and took off.

     One night a few weeks later I came home from a late night in town, and there was Bill, in his sleeping bag, on my living room floor. He was awake when I turned the light on. He shrugged. "I tried," he said. "There wasn't any other place. I'll be gone tomorrow."

     Bill and I were in a Vietnam vets' rap group. There were seven of us, plus a counselor named Greg Anderson who coordinated the group. Greg had been a Marine Sergeant in Nam. 

      Once a week, we sat in a little upstairs room in the Vets' Hall and poured our guts out: combat, nightmares, alcohol, drugs, sex, relationships. A man listening as his lover took hours to die screaming in a foxhole under a mortar barrage. Bill, who was an airborne medic with a deeply ingrained ethic about saving lives, telling about walking across the top of a bunker and being shot in the back from within it, to find out after the bunker was blown up that he'd been shot by a North Vietnamese Army nurse who looked a lot like his first lover, a Filipina girl in East Los Angeles. The nurse died when the bunker was blown. One vet told of killing his first man before he even went to Nam, in a fight with another soldier in a holding cell after a wild weekend pass from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I told about Tho An (see above, Prologue and chapter “Tho An”), and about the Marine radio operator who blamed me for his friend's death (chapter “You’re Too Late”). 

     We talked about the years since the war, about the forms our rage took, against ourselves and those we loved, or those we wanted to love but couldn't, or those we didn't even know; about too much alcohol, too many drugs, never wanting to be without a weapon; about not being able to sleep, or sleeping with one eye open and a pistol under the pillow, about checking every room you entered for dangerous people and exits, about always preferring a seat in a restaurant with your back in a corner and a door nearby. We learned that we'd lost more vets since the war than the 58,000-plus who were listed as killed there: self-inflicted gunshot wounds, drug overdoses, single car crashes... the Medal of Honor winner who committed suicide by holding up liquor stores with an unloaded gun until one of the owners finally killed him. 

     By the end of each rap session, the eight of us would be wound as tight as if we were about to go on patrol in enemy territory. As we got to know each other better and better, sharing our weaknesses and rage, one thing that kept coming up was how many guys we'd all seen go down because of alcohol, and how most of us faced that danger too. So in letting one another see parts of ourselves we'd mostly kept from others, we became closer, really tight after awhile. 

     So we went drinking together.     

   Most often, we'd walk out the front door of the Vets' Hall after a rap session, cross the street and turn a corner and walk up a flight of stairs to the Teacup, a dark, cozy little bar attached to the Chinese restaurant owned by Don Yee. Sometimes we were pretty wild in the Teacup, sometimes we'd just get drunk and morose. But we talked a lot, letting our defenses down, with the help of alcohol, even more than we did during the rap sessions. 

     During those drinking sessions, Bill and I would often gravitate toward each other. We were the readers of the group, the ones who would devour history books about Vietnam and other wars in U.S. history, and come up with more and more reasons for our anger, convincing ourselves that it wasn't we who were fucked up, it was the world we lived in; and that any sane person who'd seen what we'd seen would be as crazy as we were.

     I thought I'd read a lot. But Bill Motto flabbergasted me with his knowledge. He hadn't even been a Marine  -he'd been with the army's 173^rd Airborne Brigade for one of his tours in Vietnam and in an armored unit for the other - but he was the one who first told me the other side of Smedley Butler's story: that, after retiring as a Lieutenant General with 34 years of the most illustrious service in Marine Corps history, Butler had written a book titled War Is a Racket. He had gone on a lecture circuit, using his status as a war hero to denounce U.S. imperialism, saying that during his years of service he had spent most of his time being a strongarm for Brown Brothers Bank and other U.S. corporations.

     Bill told me something else about the History and Traditions of the Marine Corps that I hadn't learned in boot camp. The Battle of Chapultepec, commemorated by the crimson stripe down the trouser leg of officers' and NCOs' Dress Blues – I could have worn such a stripe, had I wanted to spend the money for the uniform - was fought against boys, cadets of the Mexican military academy at Chapultepec - and was thought by some in the U.S. forces to be so unjust that a number of men from an Irish unit in the U.S. Army, the Saint Patrick's Brigade, switched sides and fought for the Mexicans. Some of them were captured and hanged. A friend of Bill's and mine, Chris Matthews, wrote a play about the incident called "A Flag to Fly"; it's been produced in Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

     It was from Bill that I first heard about Bohemian Grove. In the Teacup one night, we both already had several beers aboard, and were swapping historical anecdotes. Bill told me about Shell Oil trucks being able to drive freely about Vietnam without being ambushed because they paid off the VC, and about other U.S. and international corporations that supported the war because they had interests there. He recalled Eisenhower's speech justifying aid to the French in their efforts to retain Indochina as a colony. Eisenhower noted the value of Vietnam's tungsten, rubber, and other resources that would be lost to the West if Vietnam fell to the communists. I'd come back with my story about Cho Lon and the "five o'clock follies."(see chapter “Cho Lon”). Bill would come back: "Oh! Oh! Have you read this book? The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia? By this guy...." He snapped his fingers to engage his memory. "McCoy! That's it!" He leaned in close with his wildeyed intensity. I took a deep breath. Bill was wired now; it could only end when the bar closed at two a.m. 

     "Alfred..W..McCoy...you gotta read this book. You won't believe this book. Well. Of course you'll believe it. It was, get this, the guy's fucking Ph.D. thesis. The guy went to Nam, went to Laos, went to France. He interviewed all these people. The thing is rigorously documented...." He launched into a synopsis of McCoy's book, beginning with the U.S. Army's deal with Lucky Luciano, the Mafia boss, during World War II. According to McCoy, the Army sprung Luciano from prison and gave him his freedom in exchange for Luciano's use of his connections to provide intelligence and other assistance to pave the way for the allied invasion of Sicily. After the war, the recently freed Luciano went back to heroin dealing, organizing a route that began in the poppy fields of Indochina and ended on the streets of New York, with Marseille as its hub.

     Still according to McCoy, Luciano's network hooked up with French military intelligence in a Mephistophelean bargain: the French officers turned a blind eye to the drug trade in exchange for help against the communists. That help began with using mob thugs to break up dockworkers' strikes in Marseille, then spread to Vietnam and Laos when the drug traffickers showed themselves able to provide intelligence about Ho Chi Minh's independence movement. Then after the French were defeated at Dienbienphu in 1954 and the United States took over the anticommunist crusade there, U.S. intelligence operatives inherited, from their French counterparts, an in-place network of intelligence sources. Later, during the 10-year American chapter of the Vietnam story, pilots for Air America, the CIA's covert air operations company, tacitly admitted hauling opium for the Hmong tribesmen in Laos who made up their mercenary army there(

). In a similar mood another night, Bill began with, “You know who Archimedes Patti is, right?” 

     I was silent for too long a second. “Fuck! How come nobody knows about Archimedes Patti? ... Oh! Shit! This guy..." He leaned closer. His intensity was always high, yet could always be doubled: “...this guy... was a fucking Captain in the OSS – you know, the Army guys in World War II who were clandestine operators, the precursor to the CIA? His job was liaison with General Giap and Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese in World War II... he wrote this book, man...Why Viet Nam?: Prelude to America’s Albatross(16). You gotta read this book. Oh shit man, you gotta gotta gotta read this book. There’s a photo(

) in there, in a jungle clearing in 1945, with Ho’s officers declaring national independence, and their declaration of independence is based on ours ‘cause Thomas Jefferson was a fucking hero of Ho’s, and all these guys are saluting an American flag! Giap, OSS guys, the whole fuckin’ nine yards...”     

     Patti had worked with Ho’s Vietnamese to rescue downed Allied pilots and to conduct anti-Japanese operations in Indochina during WWII, and had an acute sense of the politics of that time and place. He writes that Ho Chi Minh knew his independence movement couldn't survive without his siding with one or the other of the two behemoths already jockeying for position in the post-war world, and tried to ally himself with Uncle Sam.         

   I came back and told Bill about hitchhiking through Laos, bumping into Air America pilots, and having some of that material censored in an article I wrote for the Colorado College Magazine(

). I was told it might offend some of our alumni.  

    Giap, of course, was the general who later commanded the forces which defeated both the French and us Americans in Vietnam. 

     Bill went on to say -  this is borne out in Patti's book   -that the Declaration of Independence read by Ho on September 2, 1945, was modeled on our own, and that Ho appealed to Harry Truman to accept his government as legitimate. But countries which had been major allies of ours during the war - especially Britain, France, and the Netherlands - wanted their Asian colonies back after the war. Truman sided with the colonialists - and the war Bill and I and two and a half million other Americans fought in grew out of that choice.

     I couldn't match Bill's intensity, or his speed at spitting out facts, names, dates. But in my thirst to know more, and in my anger upon learning it, I was right with him.

     By then, we were reeling on our barstools. We talked about the men who had led us into that mess, and how much we hated them: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, McNamara, the Bundys, the Lodges (we spoke of the latter name in the plural because of roles played by Henry Cabot Lodge's relatives in such adventures as Eisenhower's CIA-led coup in 1954 against the elected president of Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company).

     Our drunkenness and our anger reached a point where they began to converge, and we began to wish that there were some justice in the world, that the rich old men like those who sent poor young men like us off to fight their wars, lying to us to get us to do it, could be made to suffer some of the same things that they had caused us to suffer, that our comrades whose names were on the Wall in Washington had suffered.

     Bill began telling me about Bohemian Grove, the retreat not too far up the California coast where rich and powerful men, the country's power elite, gathered once a year for their secret self-congratulatory shenanigans.

     "They're all there," Bill said, "every fuckin' one of 'em." He started counting fingers: Reagan, Bush, Meese, Kissinger, McNamara, Schultz, Weinberger, plus the corporate heads whose names we didn't know but who had such influence on our lives. Heads of oil companies, tire companies, auto companies, insurance companies, banks, investment firms....

     "Wouldn't it be great to hit that place? To kill all those bastards in one nice, clean operation?" Bill was leaning in close again, his eyes glittering with the deliciousness of his thought.

     I allowed as how the security must be pretty tight.

   "Hunh! No shit...." He went on to say they had guards all over the place, with submachine guns and walkietalkies and leashed guard dogs.

   Still, it could be done, he said. There's no place that can't be busted, if you have the right people and equipment and you plan it right.

   We talked about how it could be done. You'd have to have intelligence. You'd have to bribe one of the prostitutes or strippers they hired to come in and amuse them. It wouldn't be easy; they paid them a lot and made them sign a secrecy oath and threatened dire consequences if any of them ever talked to outsiders about what went on at Bohemian Grove. But it could be done, with patience and money. Let's say we had the money. Here's the other thing. People like that always screw over people. That's what you'd hafta do, find somebody they really fucked over, take your time, get 'em to talk: what's the layout of the place? What's the electronic security setup? What gates, what wire, what sensors? How many security patrols, how many men each, what weapons, when does the guard change? And what are the billeting arrangements. Where, exactly, does Nixon sleep? Kissinger? Too bad LBJ's already dead.

  We discussed weapons, silencers, equipment, camouflage. Bill, as I remember, was partial to a certain model of Hechler and Koch submachine gun: superb workmanship, reliability. I remember thinking about the problem of being given away by noise, and saying, "What about just a few intense people with knives?" I told Bill about the Randall fighting knife I'd carried in Nam, that I'd since given away.

     Sure enough, we closed down the Teacup. I got home, beery-eyed but in one piece. I stumbled into my bedroom and there, on the desk I'm now using to write this piece, was a bouquet of flowers from my new lover, Annie, who would become my wife of fourteen years. She'd left a note signed "Yer sweetie, A." with a heart beside her initial.

     At times, over the years, I’ve thought that Annie might have saved some lives that night, though probably only mine. Bill and I would never really have done it. We wouldn't have been able to pull it off, and wouldn't have tried even if we'd thought we could. Not once we were sober. But there was another outlet for my rage that she might well have saved me from. I became increasingly angry about U.S. interventions in Central America, especially in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. And I became frustrated that so little of the truth about those situations was known – or acknowledged - by the American people, and further frustrated that probably no amount of truthtelling would make any difference. Reagan and his cowboys just did what they wanted anyway, Congress and public opinion be damned. I even considered going to Central America to fight, this time on the right side. I was just that frustrated, that angry. It had a logic to it: if it truly was as wrong as I knew it to be, and was so deadly to so many innocent people, and if I knew about it and nothing else was working, wasn't I duty bound to put my life where my ideas were?

     A tourist saw his body on the rocks at the base of West Cliff. The autopsy said heart attack. (Bill was in his late 30s or early 40s.)  We learned from his mother, when she came up from Los Angeles for the funeral, that he'd had a history of medical exams showing some mild dysfunction of the heart. But it hadn't been enough to keep him from the Army, or from coming home from Nam with two Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts (or the other way 'round; I'm not sure which). 

     Anyway, Bill was dead. His body was cremated, and a group of us – including his mother, a sweet lady in her late fifties who immediately adopted us - took his ashes out past the cliff where he'd died to Natural Bridges, to scatter them in the surf. A wooden fence had been erected several feet back from the cliff’s edge, and a sign on the fence said that crossing the fence was prohibited. The State Park Ranger on duty there explained that some people had fallen down the cliff onto the rocks below, and had been badly injured or, in one case, died. We told the Ranger our story and begged him to let us go out to the cliff’s edge. 

     Amazingly, he gave his permission. We climbed the fence, tenderly boosting Mrs. Motto over into several pairs of waiting hands. We walked out and sat on the rocks at the top of the cliff and looked down past our dangling feet to where the surf came in and pounded the rocks and eddied around them.

     Shit. Were we blue. Bill had been a pain in the ass at times, always wanting to crash at our houses, always in your face or in your ear with his intensity. But we all knew that some precious, deeply buried part of each of us had been taken by Bill and lived right out in the open, on the edge of life, to the nth degree. We loved him, and all we had now were a few photos, and the painting Kenny Walker had done of Bill, in long hair, beard, shades and beret, showing off the Combat Medic's badge and jump wings he’d pinned to his leather vest.

     And we had these few handfuls of ashes, with their obscene/holy pieces of charred but recognizable bone. It was a clear, bright afternoon, with little wind. As we tossed the ashes out from the cliff, we could see them float down to the rocks and spume below, taking a long time because of the updraft, swirling about and finally descending like little clouds of autorotating butterflies. 

     Then, for a couple of long minutes, we just sat, silent except for the occasional shit! - which was all any of us could come up with to express how we felt.

     Something moving to the right, northwest of us up the  coast, caught my attention. I turned to look. It was a flight of pelicans, moving toward us, surfing easily along the updraft that climbed the cliff in front of us. "Here comes the honor guard!" I shouted into the wind. 

     The pelicans, flying in as perfect a V as those clumsy/graceful birds can pull off, passed directly in front of us, right at the height of our heads, so close we could see the individual feathers on their wings, even their eyes. I could  hear, as one or two birds made just enough wing movement to maintain both steady altitude in the updraft and their position in the formation, a slight sibilance as feathers slipped across one another.

     As the leader came abreast, I yelped: "Missing Man! Look! They're flying the Missing Man formation!" And so they were, a good V formation with one bird's place vacant on the seaward leg of the V, signifying, when it's flown by military aircraft, the absence of a comrade who's crashed or been brought down by enemy fire.

       We cheered as they passed.     

KITCHEN POEM

12/16/01

Bacon:

pops and sizzles for the ears,

aroma for the nose. For the nose,

aroma of coffee, burbling in the

percolator, fat blue scent of milk.

Brown smell of hot yellow butter. Warm

yellow butter and hot bread. Good greasy

bacon gravy. Hot fried eggs, busted

runny yellow yolks.  Strong female voices

laugh, lie, whisper, scold, cajole,

teach

pie-crust

secrets.

                                    © 2001, 2013 Dean Metcalf

LLOVIZNANDO EN CHINAMECA

LLOVIZNANDO EN CHINAMECA

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013. My wife and I were having coffee this morning in our apartment in Chía, Colombia. We saw a few tiny raindrops speckle the concrete outside the window before us. “Está lloviznando,” she said.

       Her words slapped my mind back to the moment I first learned the word for “it’s starting to sprinkle.” Summer 1970, I’d just finished the first year of graduate school, and discovered I’d hoarded enough from my fellowship to get me the 300 miles to Mexico, maybe even stay there for the summer, if I didn’t eat much, and traveled “a ventones,” which we usually expressed by the universal gesture of sticking one’s thumb out into the wind. Hitchhiking.

       I carried one book: John Womack’s masterful history Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. I read the book as I hitched around Morelos, the state south of Mexico City where “El Caudillo del Sur,” the Chieftain of the South, El General Don Emiliano Zapato, had lived, fought, and died.

       What had jolted me back in time was a moment from that summer of 1970 when I had been sitting in the dirt beside the highway that crossed Morelos, waiting for my next ride. A Mexican peasant squatted beside me, also waiting for a ride.

       A few sparse raindrops made tiny puffs in the dust and disappeared, leaving not enough sign of their arrival to moisten anything, including us. My campesino acquaintance spoke, casually announcing the raindrops’ simultaneous arrival and disappearance into the roadside dust: “’sta llovisnando, he said.

       The moment didn’t seem significant, yet has stayed with me for 40+ years, because of the details it carried:sitting in roadside dust beside a Morelos highway, reading Womack’s book about Zapata’s life and death in and near the places were he had lived and died. Libraries are good, but this was better.

       A couple of weeks later, I had been to Zapata’s birthplace (Anenecuilco), and followed his hoofbeats  about Morelos. (He was a horseman, a general of the rebel cavalry. I don’t think he walked much). I spoke with some of the viejitos, the old ones, who had been alive during the 10 year conflagration that was the Mexican Civil war, 1910-1920. (I have moved many times since then, including losing my home in Oregon to the bank, in the process also losing nearly all my books, including Womack’s. So I apologize for not having those names at hand.)

       But Chinameca stuck. Buses didn’t go there, because few travelers did either. But trucks hauling livestock did, and one slowed beside the stockade while I stepped down with my mochila and waited for the dust of the departing truck to clear before walking up to the gate. The fort was something out of an old western movie, still very much in use. It was a square structure built of logs, big enough to enclose the soldiers’ barracks, a cookhouse, a tack room, and a stable, as I remember.

       A sergeant was in charge of the entire establishment. I approached him with my questions, told him I was a student following and studying the trail of Zapata’s life, and asked his advice about where I might find a room to rent for the night (while hoping he would offer something that was free). The answer to my question about a rental room was visually obvious before he answered: there was no hotel, rooming house, or anything of the sort in sight. The Chinameca stockade stood alone in the Mexican countryside. It was a military fort, and nothing else.) I then asked his permission to spread my GI poncho on the ground outside the stockade wall.

       Without losing his friendly demeanor, the sergeant shook his head. He said it was a bad idea for me to sleep outside, because of “los borrachitos,” drunks who hung around the stockade and mooched enough tortillas and bottles of oh-so-cheap muscatel wine from passers-by to keep them alive. He made it clear that their behavior couldn’t be vouched for; that thievery was the gentlest thing I could expect from them, and that as the night wore on, weapons would likely appears. Didn’t sound like a good night’s sleep to me. He said I should bring my mochila inside the fort, and spread my poncho on an empty bunk in the soldiers’ quarters. I happily complied.

       Chinameca was not a tourist destination. But the sergeant seemed mildly pleased with my interest in the history of the place, and not at all threatened by my inquiries. While he had nothing like a bookish preparation for questions about what had happened there, every Mexican who lived in the southern part of the country knew, or at least had a close idea about, what that history had been.

       On April 10, 1919, Zapata rode with some 100 of his men to Chinameca, to keep an appointment to negotiate a peace with opposing forces. The two sides agreed on a pact which promised safe passage to soldiers of both sides. Zapata and his men camped just outside the walls of the fortress. Unknown to them, the very rooftops of the fort were covered with opposition soldiers, lying flat on their bellies with loaded carbines, at point-blank range from anyone inside the fort, with the added military advantage of firing down on their targets.

       Shortly after dawn, at a pre-agreed signal, Zapata and his men rode through the gate of Chinameca. But instead of remaining open, per agreement, the gate was quickly shut behind them. The “neutral” opposing forces opened fire from their advantageous position on the rooftops just above Zapata and his soldiers.

       They were slaughtered, including their noble chieftain, El General Emiliano Zapata, El Caudillo del Sur: the Chief of the South.

       The night I spent in Chinameca, I slept on a Mexican Army cot, protected by the fortress walls, beneath the same roof that had hidden Zapata’s killers. (Between 1919 and 1970, it that roof probably been replaced once or twice.)

     That evening in the barracks, I read Womack’s account of the ambush that had taken place, literally, where I sat, walked, and lay down that night.

DARK FIR SPIRES (HAIKU)

                  In my cabin, two

guitars. Wood fire flares. Outside -

         dark fir spires, bright stars.

                          

©1998, 2013                           Dean Metcalf                  

CRUZ COVER STORY

Rattlesnake Dreams: An American Warrior's Story

RATTLESNAKE DREAMS is a memoir of half a century or so of trying to understand why we go to war. Stories from my time as combatant and journalist in Vietnam, and journalist in Cambodia, Laos, Leningrad, Moscow, Baku, Kiev, Prague, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, East and West Jerusalem, Gaza, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Miami....

 20,088

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Cruz story

                                           RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: COVER STORY

     In the early 1980s a group of veterans, artists, musicians, poets and ne’r-do-wells would hang out, drink beer, and tell stories. Some were true, some were not so true… and some were too true to be endured, but unforgettable all the same.

     Chris Matthews was the owner of our meeting place, the Poet and Patriot Irish pub, in an alley just off Cedar Street in Santa Cruz, near the mall.

He was a beefy Irishman with a booming voice, a giant heart, and a well developed political consciousness. He was also a veteran of the 82^nd Airborne Division, which he never allowed us mere mortals to forget. RIP, Chris. Also among us was Tim McCormick, who had been a Navy medical corpsman patching up wounded Marines near the DMZ in South Viet Nam. Kenny Walker had been a Marine Sergeant in Nam, and was also one of the best natural artists I’ve met. He once mentioned in passing that he’d been standing next to a buddy during an NVA attack on their position when an enemy rocket, sparks trailing, came into their position. Kenny stood up to find his friend still standing, but without his head, which had been taken off by the rocket and replaced by twin crimson fountains spurting from his carotid arteries.

     There was Bill Motto, a wiry, intense, scraggly-bearded two-tour Nam vet (one with 173^rd Airborne), who read more books and articles about the kind of US foreign policy failures and deliberate deceptions of the sort that had led us into Viet Nam, than anyone else we knew. He died too soon (he was about 39) in a fall off a beach cliff near Santa Cruz. RIP, Billy.

     There was Cris DiMaio, who is part Cheyenne, and who as a young Navy doctor had the incredible bad luck of being assigned as Battalion Surgeon to 1/9, 1^ST Battalion, 9^thMarines. 1/9 was reputed to be the infantry battalion that took the highest casualties, among Army and Marine units, in that war. Chris was in our rap group of 7 or 8 vets who met once a week and spilled our guts and hearts and our rage out in a small room in the Vets Hall in Santa Cruz. He wasn’t in the group as a health professional; he was there like the rest of us, trying to heal his own wounds. I had the good luck to visit him, along with my wife, in Santa Cruz in 2012. It was very fine to see him, in his home on the beach near Santa Cruz.

     It had been through Chris DiMaio, by way of one of his Native American connections (Michael Joseph, of the Santa Rosa Ranchería near Fresno) that I was connected with Maco Stewart, the oil millionaire who financed a trip by some North American Indians (and 3 mercenaries) among whom I was included as a journalist in January 1985, to Contra camps in southern Honduras. We made a couple of illegal armed crossings into Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua, crossing the Río Coco in Miskito Indian dugout canoes. (There’s a large section (“Rus Rus”) of stories from that trip in Rattlesnake Dreams.)

     I was one of the vets, occasionally one of the poets, often enough among the ne’r-do-wells, storytellers, and beer drinkers, who met often at the Poet & Patriot.

     Another regular was Cruz Ortiz Zamarrón, a Chicano artist who was about half Chris’s size, but with booming voice and heart and political consciousness to match.   

     And talent to over-match.

     My wife and I split the blanket in 1994. We’re still friends; we both have married again). I moved to Oregon, near where I’d grown up. (There are several Oregon stories, from both before and after the war, in Rattlesnake Dreams.) Chris Matthews, the founding owner of Poet & Patriot, died a couple of years ago, from a lifetime of smoking cigarettes. We could always hear it in his gravelly bass voice. Many of us drifted apart… but not really. Now we had the Internet, and gradually we found one another again.

     Also in the ‘80s, I began writing the stuff that had been clawing at my insides to get out into the air since I’d thrown my gear into the back of the truck to leave Chu Lai in 1966.

     With the writing came the dreams and nightmares.

     They pissed me off. No. They terrified, enraged me. They scalded my soul. Hah. I’ll show ‘em: I’ll capture them and use them. Those nightmares were kicking my ass on a regular basis, and like all combat vets, I wanted to escape them.

     Sometime in the early 1980s, after waking too many times drenched in sweat and terrifying my wife with startling transitions from sleep to wakefulness, I decided two things: One was that I would train myself to turn, in sleep and during a nightmare, and confront my pursuers, instead of continuing to flee them.

     And I would learn to write the dreams down.

     For a few years, the process of forcing myself to remember and record the dreams made things worse. Convincing myself that in the long run it was worth it to capture the dreams instead of fleeing them is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, given the fact that I had lived through the Viet Nam war and, in any case, I could not escape it.

     I do not know of, nor have I read of or been told about, any combat vet who has actually reached the end of his string of post traumatic dreams. I’m sure there are some; I just haven’t met them. This is why I say – perhaps more often than people want to hear – that I’m the luckiest combat vet I know.

    

   Cruz Ortiz Zamarrón, our artist friend from Poet & Patriot days, had grown up in San Antonio, Texas. He now had relocated to Lake Tahoe, on the California/Nevada line. I had been writing all the time, and a book was shaping up. It was the project I’d promised I would do, as I tossed my gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai. It had stories about growing up in Oregon, because I had begun to see that soldiers – or, in my case, Marines – didn’t come out of nowhere, but were boys who came from American homes, broken or otherwise.

     I had many dreams. Some I remembered, captured, wrote down. Some I lost. But sometime during the Poet & Patriot days, while working as a carpenter and contractor, I had a long dream which was clearly from the string of post Viet Nam nightmares. But it was also different. It was very long. It was very clear. In fact, translucent. It was very powerful. It told a story. And it ended well, for me, as one of the two central characters in the dream.

     The other main character was a rattlesnake the size of my arm, but much more powerful. And it spoke to me in the dream. We talked, eye to eye, as the howling circle of my people urged me to kill the snake with the pistol they had given me, and which I now held in my hand.

     That dream is the title piece for this book: Rattlesnake and Pistol.

     I got in touch with Cruz. We exchanged email addresses. I sent him the narrative I’d written about the conversation between the rattlesnake and me, told him I wanted that to be my book cover, and asked him to paint it. He said he couldn’t do it. His body wouldn’t perform; he could no longer hold a paint brush properly with his right arm. I begged him to do it, because of what I knew about him and his art, his relationship with art and life. Please, I said.

He said he’d try to do it with the computer.

     He exceeded my expectations, surprising me in a revelatory way: his painting depicts me, as a young Marine with a pistol, confronting the grandaddy of all rattlesnakes, being urged on by the crowd behind me… all reflected in the rattlesnake’s eye. 

OH, BY THE WAY: look at me. I mean, look at the dream image of the young Marine holding the pistol. That's me, reflected in the rattlesnake's eye, with my people, crowded around behind me, urging me to "Shoot the snake!" Now look at the figure of Dean, as painted by Cruz. Look at my hair. See the letters Cruz painted into my hair, starting over my right ear: "P..E..A..C..E"

I didn't see that, until he told me: PEACE. Cruz told me before he published the painting, so I could have the option of taking it out. I threw back my head and laughed at the sky: "No, Cruz...leave it in. Leave it in!" 

That's our cover. Thank you, Cruz.

Rattlesnake Dreams is available in paperback from Amazon - 398 pages, $22; or as ebook from createspace.com, $8; or ebook from kobo.com, also $8. Your choice.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: 3dmetcalf@gmail.com

MARINE CORPS HISTORY

Marine Corps History

     Most of the time in boot camp we spent handling weapons and sweating and running and yelling. But we had classroom lectures, too. One subject taken most seriously by our trainers was History and Traditions of the Marine Corps. 

     We learned that the Marine Corps was older than the country we served, having been founded in 1775, the year before the Declaration of Independence, at Tun’s Tavern, in Philadelphia. Mostly, we learned about Marine battles and heroes, like Lt. Presley O'Bannon, who led a detachment overland through what was thought to be impassable desert to surprise from behind a pirate garrison that had been impregnable because it was on a high seacliff and had complete control of its approaches. O'Bannon and his men made history by taking the fortress after all other attempts had failed, and got a line - "to the shores of Tripoli" - added to the Marines' Hymn. 

     We learned about First Sergeant Dan Daly, who got his boys to charge into heavy firing during the Battle of Belleau Wood in World War I by growling "Come on, you sons o' bitches, do you want to live forever?" Marines were so ferocious in that war, we were told, that the Germans nicknamed us "Teufelhunden," or “devildogs.” There was Smedley Butler, hero of countless engagements in Haiti and Nicaragua and China, the only Marine besides Dan Daly ever to win two Medals of Honor. There was perhaps the most legendary Marine of all, Lewis B. Puller, winner of five Navy Crosses, the nation's second highest award for military heroism. "Chesty" Puller, like many officers of the generation that was to lead the Marines in WWII in the Pacific, learned his trade and made his reputation fighting "bandits" in Nicaragua in the 1920's. Then he achieved the status of legend on Guadalcanal fighting against the Japanese in World War II, and led the First Marine Regiment's historic withdrawal from Chinese encirclement at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea. ("Retreat, hell. We're just attacking in the opposite direction.") Sometimes at night, when we were lying at attention in our racks and the Duty Drill Instructor was about to order "lights out," he'd have us shout in chorus, "Goodnight, Chesty, wherever you are." The disrespect involved in recruits calling a retired Lieutenant General by his nickname was forgiven; this was a higher form of respect. 

     The names of the battles became our mantra: Guadalcanal, Tarawa (where Gunny Rogers' older brother had been killed), Peleliu, Saipan, Bougainville, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. And the men: O'Bannon, Daly, Butler, Puller, Manila John Basilone... and there was David M. Shoup, the Colonel who had the bad luck to be assigned as commanding officer of forces ashore at Tarawa, when some planning snafu had sent the assault waves, first in amphibious vehicles and then wading, into chestdeep water, wave after wave across an open lagoon into the teeth of interlocking machinegun and artillery and mortar fire. Shoup, seriously wounded on the beach and with the issue in grave doubt, staying at it, all those men not quitting when almost any human would have quit, carrying the day, taking Tarawa, that shitty little chunk of Betio atoll, writing its name in history forever. Shoup now wore four stars and was Commandant of the Marine Corps, our highest officer except for the President of the United States, who didn't really count because he was a civilian. These, we were taught, were the breed of men in whose footsteps we had asked to follow. Only the best would do. 

     The Marine Corps motto was "Semper Fidelis": Always Faithful. This signified more than duty to God and country. We heard it over and over. The simplest expression of this faithfulness was Gunny Rogers' “Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die.” It meant that we were to believe, without question, in who we were as Marines, in the non-coms and officers who gave us our orders, in those orders themselves, in the reasons for those orders, in the national leaders who gave them. 

     It meant, to judge by the symbols and trappings and language that accompanied the motto's presentation to us, and interpreted its meaning for us, that being a Marine was at its core a holy thing, that the mission was holy, therefore worthy of those two attributes normally reserved for religion: it was beyond question (indeed, beyond our ability to understand), and it was worth dying for.

     Sundays we'd be marched to, and into, the base chapel. A man would take the podium, a chaplain in ceremonial robe. He wore rank insignia on the right point of his shirt collar, indicating its seniority over the small gold cross on the left collar point. The placement of these two small pieces of metal on the chaplain's body showed how much distance we placed between the holy and the warlike: about three inches if the collar was buttoned, slightly more if open.

     The chaplain stood in the focal point where the very shape of the building directed the attention of all who entered: in front of the altar, which was in front of the huge cross on the wall behind him, and directly beneath the huge eagle, globe and anchor that is the emblem of the United States Marine Corps.

     We sat on command (“Ready, Seats!”), and listened. We were told that our work as Marines was blessed because we fought for a righteous nation. Quotations from the Bible proved this. 

     We stood on command, and sang: "Onward Christian Soldiers," the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." We grinned as we sang the second verse of the "Marines' Hymn" (what other service calls its anthem a hymn?):

If the Ar-my and the Na-a-vy

ever look on Heaven's scenes,

they will find the streets are guar-ar-ded

by United States Marines.

And we prayed our own Rifleman's Prayer:

     Dear God, my Father, through thy Son

     Hear the prayer of a warrior son

     Give my eyes a vision keen

     To see the thing that must be seen

     A steady hand I ask of thee

     The feel of wind on land or sea

     Let me not ever careless be

     Of life or limb or liberty      

    For Justice sake a quiet heart

     And grace and strength to do my part

     To God and Country, Home and Corps

     Let me be faithful evermore

                                   Amen

     The "why" was somebody else's job. If we as combat men got to wondering what we were fighting for, we'd die sooner rather than later. We had to trust that the men whose job it was to figure that out would do their jobs as well as we must do ours.

     Semper Fidelis was shortened, among Marines, to "Semper Fi." They told us we would be hearing, and saying, "Semper Fi" for the rest of our lives. That was truer than we knew, though they didn't mention the layers of irony that would attend its use, by some of us, in years to come. 

     There was a whole canon of lore. Salt and pepper and sugar and ketchup were "sidearms." Rumors were "scuttlebutt," so named because a scuttlebutt was a drinking fountain, which was where a lot of rumors got passed. We (once we became Marines, should we be so lucky) were called "jarheads" because of our haircuts, and "leathernecks" because of the high leather collars worn by shipboard Marines in the times when Marines were still used to board enemy ships during naval engagements. The collars were worn to shield against cutlass blows, and were progenitors of the high buttoned collar of the modern day dress blue tunic. The wide crimson stripe down the blue trouser legs of that uniform, the stripe which could only be worn by officers and noncommissioned officers, was a commemoration of the blood shed by Marine officers and NCO's at the Battle of Chapultepec, during the Mexican-American war. 

     It would be twenty years and more before I learned the darker side of some of those stories.