FIRST BLOOD

First Blood

     As a kid I loved Indians. It started with some illustrated books in the school library. One book about the Iroquois tribes became especially totemic for me. There were earth-toned renderings of the insides of longhouses, with sleeping platforms of poles lashed together with sinew and piled with robes of animal skins, with the space and the duskyskinned people and the implements of their lives - the beaded moccasins, the deerskin leggings, the obsidian knives, the stout bows and hide quivers of feathered arrows - lit only, but magically, by firelight. I began to live in a fantasy world. I wanted to wear those skins, carry those weapons, live in a space as richly textured, as warm, as right as the interiors of those longhouses. I wanted to be one of those people.
     I saved the cardboard cards out of Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes, the ones that separated the layers of biscuits. Each card had instructions from the comic-book character Straight Arrow on how to make some kind of Indian artifact: how to lash on a flint arrowhead, or how to carve a spearhead out of wood and harden it in fire.
     I made my own bow out of a seasoned branch and some heavy string, and it worked pretty well. Arrows were a different matter. I searched every tree in my life - there weren't many, there in the project - but couldn't come up with a single stick straight enough to fly at all true.
     I saved my allowance and collected pop and beer bottles till finally I could afford a storebought arrow. I shot and shot. I got to where I could hit with some regularity a pretty small target, if it wasn't too far away.

     One day I took my bow and arrow outside and started for the end of our building, to shoot in the sagebrush out along the railroad tracks. I saw a robin hopping on the grass in our yard. It was hopping away from me with its head down, absorbed with whatever it was trying to catch to eat. I stalked it from behind. It never saw me. I got close enough, aimed, let fly. The robin screamed, a sound I had never heard a robin make, and ran clumsily along the grass, dragging the arrow which had entered its ass, right under the tail. It screamed and ran, wobbling desperately until the arrow dropped out on the grass. The robin hopped and finally flew weakly out of sight. My heart pounded; I felt blood pulsing in my throat and head. I didn't understand what had happened. I didn't understand why I had shot at the robin - people didn't eat robins - or why I had hit it, or why it didn't die, or what I would have done if it had died.

K'REANS

K'reans

     We were playing war in the housing project yard, Darrell and I and a few other kids whose families lived in the parallel, five-apartment wooden structures. It was 1950 or ’51. 

     We were choosing up sides: You guys be Japs, we'll be 'Mericans. Wait, somebody said. Aren't we fightin' somebody else now? Krauts, right? You be Krauts. No, somebody else. I forget.

     I'll ask Mom, I said. I ran for the kitchen door of our apartment, the middle one in row 32. I hit the screen door on the run. I still remember the combined smells of dust and rust as my face rushed toward the screen. It had one of those long black coil springs to keep it closed; it slammed shut behind me. 

     Mom was in the kitchen. She was pissed. "Son, how many times have I told you not to slam that screen door?"

     I had more important things on my mind. "Mom! Who're we fightin' now? Is it Japs 'r Germans?"

     "Neither one, son. We're fighting Koreans now." Our older brother Lance was in high school at the time, soon to graduate. That had to have been on her mind, as Vietnam would be on her mind ten years later when Darrell and I came of military age. 

     But none of that was on my mind. "Thanks, Mom!" I yelped, and again hit the screen door on the run. It slammed shut behind me, and I heard her scolding "Ronald Dean!" follow me across the yard as I returned, courier bearing important information, to my huddled playmates. 

     "K'reans," I said between gulps of breath. "Mom says we're fightin' K'reans now."

     Puzzled looks. Some faint glimmers in boys' faces who had heard the word begin to replace Japs and Krauts and Germans in their parents' conversations.

     "Don't matter. That's who we're fightin'." 

     "You guys be K'reans. We'll be 'Mericans."

THE WORLD I WAS BORN INTO

   I first saw the world on January 23, 1943. Pearl Harbor was 13½ months in the past; the United States was at war with Japan and Germany. The 1^st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal(1) 5½ months earlier. Americans had invaded North Africa 3 months after that. The Soviet Army had counterattacked Axis forces outside Stalingrad, trapping 91,000 German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian troops inside a pocket. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would surrender all those troops a week after I was born, and the Japanese would begin evacuating Guadalcanal a day later. Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term as President of the United States. The blockade of Leningrad was in its 502^nd day, of 872. Tatyana Savicheva(2) was 5 months dead. Treblinka(3) had been in operation 6 months, with 10 gas chambers working full time. In October of that year, Jewish slaves 

at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland, would stage a sufficiently successful revolt that the Nazis destroyed the camp for fear that the escapees would tell the world what had happened there, which they did(4). Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.

1 Twenty-three years later, I would stand in the open, off to the side of the village well in Tho An, side by side with a veteran of Guadalcanal, other island battles in the Pacific, and Korea. He was by then First Sergeant of “F” Company, 2^nd Battalion, 7^th Marines. He leaned close to my ear to be heard above the firing and said calmly, “You be the last man out.”

2 See below, “Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague” p.271ff.

3 The reader who may have seen Treblinka listed as a “concentration camp” should clarify that notion: the only things concentrated at Treblinka were corpses, ashes, and huge piles of clothing and shoes taken from the people who were reduced to ashes. Treblinka was an extermination camp.

4 http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8381413.stm (Published Nov. 27, 2009, by BBC.)

TITLE PAGE/ TABLE OF CONTENTS/PROLOGUE (3/12/2012)

RATTLESNAKE
DREAMS
        An American Warrior’s Story


             Dean Metcalf




This book is dedicated to

KRIP

who was killed at the US Special Forces camp at Mangbuk,
June 18, 1968. He was 18 years old, or so they said…

and to

TATYANA SAVICHEVA

who watched her extended family starve and freeze to death around her during the siege of Leningrad, September 1941 – January 1944. She was eleven years old when her last surviving family member died, leaving her alone. She was evacuated with other children through the blockade in August 1942, and died of disease resulting from the siege on July 1, 1944.

and to      

the Marines who waded the lagoon at Tarawa, November 20-23, 1943.



Copyright© 2010 Dean Metcalf         All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-578-08809-9
CONTENTS

I. Prologue                                              1
Tho An
II. Learning War                                       5
Cowboys and Indians                                         8
Toys 8  Cartoon 9  Roy Rogers 10  Atomic Stove 12  Mumblypeg 13  K’reans 14  First Blood 15  Hunger 1 17  Rogue River 1 19  Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue’s Knife 20 A Rifle, A Pistol 24  Dress Blues 1 29
Almost a Cowboy 31  Canal 39
Dogs of Eberlein Street 42                        
Rogue River 2: Rattlesnake Air 44                              Sunset Over Klamath Lake 55  Second Buck 56           Crater Lake 59

Semper Fidelis                                                67
Gunny Rogers 1: Mama’s Boy 67  Sergeant Vance 69
Man and Rifle Reaching 71
Gunny Rogers 2: The Most Powerful Weapon 74
Dress Blues 2 77  Marine Corps History 80
Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis 84  Banning 87
29 Palms: Ungentle 89 Old Enough to Bleed 91
Footprints 92  Okinawa 94  With God On Our Side 98 Tonkin 100  Olongapo 108  Put Me In, Coach  110



III.War 112
Oakland 113  Going Over 115  Ky Hoa 124               Gunny Rogers 3 126  Phantom Pisser 127  Hunger 2 131  To Kill a Gook 131  Tam Ky 132  “You’re Too Late” 135 An Tan 144  Request Mast 148  Tho An 150                  Man and Pistol 167  Rats 169  Marines in Skivvies 175  Howard’s Hill 178  Sergeant of the Guard 181        Wartime Is Wonderful 184  Danang  189

IV. Relearning War 193
Kicking the Leaves 194  Townies 198
Missouri Squirrels 200  Hunger 3 204                         Dark-Skinned Warriors 1 205  Packing 206  Seminar 208  Cho Lon 210

Interlude: A Veteran’s Dreams: 215      

       Dream: Nazi Pursuit 216                                      
       Dream: Money Man Pursuit 217                            

Mangbuk: The Camp 219  Soldier Tin 227                          
Dream: Bodies of Water 235  Dalat 237                
Saigon
       1. LA Cop 239
       2. Kids 240
      3. Dream: Vietnamese Children 242                            
Spook Hunting in Laos 243  Mark 269                            
J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac 271
Leningrad, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague 278
Samaritan in Los Angeles 308  Chinese Soldiers 309
Dream: A6 and Wolves 311                                      
Tumalo 313 Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove 320                            
Triptych
The Clubbing 333
Bait 335                    
Dream: Vietnamese Women 337
Spider and Fly 338  Fear 340  Guard Dog 342                                                 Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle 343                                        
Zen Warrior Bass Player 345  Sandinistas 346                    
Missing Man 356  Dark-Skinned Warriors 2 368                      
Dream: Guts 369

Indians and Cowboys 370

Mercenary 1 370

Rus Rus
1. Maco Stewart’s Letter 375
2. Flaco and Luque 378    
3. Babes in James Bondland 380
4. Rus Rus 384
5.The Tape 391
6. Lasa Tinghni 395
7. Red Chief, White Chief 399
8. In Camp 399
9. Border Crossing 402
10. Skulls of Tulin Bila 406
11. Perico’s Garrote, and Other Stories 410
12. Meeting 416
13. Out of the Woods 425
14. Aftermath 428
Dream: Deadribs 437

Mercenary 2 437  Guns in Costa Rica 444
Interview with Bill Gandall 457
Guatemala: La Violencia 465
At the Battered Women’s Shelter 467                      
Palestinians and Israelis and Americans 469
Ants 488
Dream: Dance of the Arrows 489
The Rattlesnake Dream 491
Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol 492
The Last Nightmare 494

V.The Web (Essay)                                496

APPENDIX: FAVORITE BOOKS AND WRITERS...533
 Acknowledgments                                                      535






I. Prologue: Tho An




  Tho An

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

     But it wasn’t just my present and future which I saw differently. That day in Tho An, a process began of re-seeing my entire life, from as far back as I could remember, and of realizing that a gradual accretion of boyhood experiences, beginning long before I entered Marine Corps boot camp, were what had made me a warrior.


II. Learning War


     I first saw the world on January 23, 1943. Pearl Harbor was 13½ months in the past; the United States was at war with Japan and Germany. The 1st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal(1) 5½ months earlier. Americans had invaded North Africa 3 months after that. The Soviet Army had counterattacked Axis forces outside Stalingrad, trapping 91,000 German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian troops inside a pocket. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would surrender all those troops a week after I was born, and the Japanese would begin evacuating Guadalcanal a day later. Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term as President of the United States. The blockade of Leningrad was in its 502nd day, of 872. Tatyana Savicheva(2) was 5 months dead. Treblinka(3) had been in operation 6 months, with 10 gas chambers working full time. In October of that year, Jewish slaves at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland, would stage a sufficiently successful revolt that the Nazis destroyed the camp for fear that the escapees would tell
the world what had happened there, which they did.(4) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.

1 Twenty-three years later, I would stand in the open, off to the side of the village well in Tho An, side by side with a veteran of Guadalcanal, other island battles in the Pacific, and Korea. He was by then First Sergeant of “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. He leaned close to my ear to be heard above the firing and said calmly, “You be the last man out.”

2 See below, “Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague” p.271ff.

3 The reader who may have seen Treblinka listed as a “concentration camp” should clarify that notion: the only things concentrated at Treblinka were corpses, ashes, and huge piles of clothing and shoes taken from the people who were reduced to ashes. Treblinka was an extermination camp.

4 http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8381413.stm (Published Nov. 27, 2009, by BBC.)

TOWNIES

Townies

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

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

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

      No.

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

      Fine. I will kill at least one.

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

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

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

     “Let’s go,” he said.

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

OKINAWA: WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE

With God on Our Side

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

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

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

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

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

1963: MIDNIGHT IN 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."