PROLOGUE

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, but 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 long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I’d 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 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.

FOOD CHAIN (poem)

                         Food Chain

or: The 52^nd Screaming Fish

of Thanksgiving Day, 1971

                              by Dean Metcalf

You, fish

I, fisherman

we are the Cain and Abel of muscle.

Your yellowfin tunabelly

full of lesser fish

that you have murdered,

you take my double hook

your yellow side thunders under water

slapping sunlight up through blue water

all the way back to the sun.

You fight for your life.

I fight for your life.

Braided nylon line

slices my hands with

the electromuscular force

of your fighting, then massages

sea water and diesel fuel and fish slime

into the cuts.

I, sunburned sinew, throw

silver, blue, and yellow

thrashing muscular you

screaming, bleeding

to the heaving bloody oily

     salt steel deck.

Your scream is tiny:

a squeak, like escapes the quick turn

of basketball shoe on maple floor

yet in my ear it makes the whole blue Pacific

resonate with your dying.

I reach into your slime‑slick,

     hard‑rubber jawed,

     finetoothed mouth

for the hook;

you bleeding screaming

staccato tail‑flap

sewing‑machine‑STITCH

the hook across my hand,

leaving perfect dots of blood.

My skipper's voice grapples with the voices of the wind

and the Jimmy 671 diesel engine:

"You got other fish on!

Get that hook

back in the water!"

My hand is trapped inside your mouth,

all wrenching teeth and hook‑points.

I raise the other hand,

shout into the wind,

make a fist,

hammer it down,

crush your skull.

Your eyeball,

the size of a small lemon,

scoots: does it transmit

the sight of triumphant bloody me

     aboard a dizzy deck

back to your squashed fishy synapses?

Your fifteen pounds of perfect muscle

shudders, lets go my hand.

Your blood and mine mix with diesel

and seawater, wash out the scuppers,

returning home.

I will unload your body

at the Star‑Kist Cannery.

I will walk to the hock shop in San Diego,

redeem my guitar, adding the fifty cents

your life means to me

to the dollar amounts of the lives

of your frozen kin

here in the hold of the Dora B.

Or I will fall overboard,

where sharks circle,

waiting.

TO KILL A GOOK

To Kill a Gook

     Four or five of us were in a tent, standing around a map table. A couple more guys came in from the last watch of the night in our machine gun bunker. They checked in with me; I had been Sergeant of the Guard for the night. Someone asked how their watch had gone. 

     One man expressed frustration. He said he was getting short, that he was fed up with all this guard duty where you're always on edge but nothing really cuts loose. Said he'd sure like to kill just one gook before he leaves this fucking place. 

     There it was: the spark of recognition, of vigorous agreement, that arced around the circle of our faces; the darting of eyes as each of us recognized that all the others had been feeling the same thing. I did it too. I felt it; I meant it. 

     "Right," I said. Grunts. Nods. Smiles.

BLUE IS (poem)

                         Blue Is

crystal deep

powder pale

edge of cloud

time of night

turn of smoke

birth of rain

noon of never

     blue is

saxophone

     filtered over

cobblestone

     blue is

half of black

     blue is

tongue of beast

     blue is

steel minus fire

     blue is

inside ice

     blue is

some kinds of motion,

some kinds of stillness.

Blue is woman's breath.

Blue is North,

hollow,

round.

                           ©2013  Dean Metcalf

                              3dmetcalf@gmail.com

THE LAST NIGHTMARE

The Last Nightmare

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

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

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

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

     The “Rattlesnake Dream” was the pivot point in that process. In the dream, my own people were pleading with me to do their killing for them, and I was ready. I was good with weapons; I performed well in dangerous situations. But my conversation with the snake taught me the deep wrong in my warrior’s assignment from my people, as the baby boy I was holding at bayonet point had begun to teach me that April day in 1966 in Tho An (see “Prologue,” and the chapter “Tho An.”).

     So I turned and walked away.

     María Patricia Fajardo Valbuena and I met on the Internet in July, 2008. We were married in March, 2009, in the office of the alcalde in Cota, the town next to Chía, Colombia, where she was born and grew up.

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

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

       But I was laughing. 

   I was laughing as violently as if I were having an epileptic seizure, shaking the entire bed. I was dreaming this:

 A group of rich old men have a mansion on a hill. The entire exterior is plate glass windows. The old men stay inside, keeping company only with themselves. But there is one other old man outside: I am scurrying about, laughing, placing large mirrors close to the mansion, one in front of each window. The old men inside see their own reflections in the mirrors, become horrified at the sight, and fire at their own reflections with shotguns. Each time the old man outside places another mirror, the old men inside blast away, destroying another section of their own house. I, the old man outside, am having a high old time, placing the mirrors and cackling and howling with laughter as the rich old men destroy their own mansion.

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

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

     The violent catharsis I felt upon waking from that dream was a feeling the like of which I had never before experienced in my life. It felt as if my body had physically split open. I haven't had a nightmare since; it's been at least four years. That process will be the subject of my next book.

MOMENT (POEM)

                                   MOMENT

1964: South China Sea

It is hours

into the night.

We are in the bowels

of the attack transport

USS Pickaway.

We are Marines: young

warriors, powerful, and

think we are stronger yet.

Vietnam is a word

we barely know. Soon, and

forever, Vietnam will be

the only word we know. A gale

slaps the ship about

like a volleyball.

Our bunks are

tubular steel and canvas,

side by side,

six high. There are

two hundred of us

in a compartment the size

of your living room

if you are moderately

well off. The walls are

half inch steel plate

painted battleship gray. The light

is from single bulbs, each

inside a heavy glass globe

inside a steel cage.

This is to protect the light bulb

from the kind of men we are, and from

heavy things which fly across the compartment

when the ship is at sea

on a night like tonight.

The battleship gray walls

and the glass globes in their steel cages

drip beads of sweat

from saltwater showers. The smells are

sweat, saltwater and puke.

We can’t sleep

for being slammed into

one another. The ship

is hammered

by a heavy sea,

shudders,

nose-dives

into the next.

“Je-sus Christ!”  is uttered loudly

by one of the grunts

from Delta Company.

From another bunk comes,

shouted, “Jesus Christ

blows elephants

for a nickel a herd!”

The laughter is chopped

by a silence, as we wonder

whether the power

that’s just been insulted

is the same as that

which threatens the ship.

Then, from a third bunk:

“Hey. Knock that shit off.”

Now another silence, as

each of us signs

a secret document saying

he is afraid of the wind.                                                      ©Dean Metcalf

                                                                                   11/26/2002

IA DRANG

IA DRANG

     I enlisted in the Marine Corps September 4, 1962, before most of us knew the war had already started for US forces. LBJ sent the first regular USMC units to Danang early in 1965. I’d served a 13 month tour in the Far East with 3^rd Marine Division, and wasn’t supposed to go overseas again until I had a year Stateside, after which I’d be too “short” to go again. My enlistment would be up in September ’66.

     Legally, I’d already served in Viet Nam. Aboard 2 different troop ships (USS CAVALIER and USS PICKAWAY) in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Tonkin, I had been with one of the Marine units aboard ship as part of the flotilla that was present in waters just off the Vietnamese coast when Johnson bamboozled the US Congress into passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and starting our 10-year war. The vote was 533-2, or close to that.

     In those days it seemed the war would never touch me, much as I wanted it to at the time.

TODAY, SEP 25, 2013, I WAS SHARPLY REMINDED OF OTHER EVENTS IN MY LIFE DURING THOSE DAYS. THE REMINDER CAME IN THE FORM OF A STORY PUBLISHED ON THE WEB ABOUT THE DEEDS IN NOVEMBER 1965 OF CAPTAIN ED “TOO TALL” FREEMAN, A HUEY PILOT WITH THE FIRST CAVALRY DIVISION (AIRMOBILE) IN VIET NAM’S IA DRANG VALLEY.

IA DRANG!! I AWOKE FROM MY HISTORICAL STUPOR.

     My part in those events was, in the scheme of things, tiny. But it was intense at the time, though it was infinitely more intense for the soldiers and pilots of the 1^st Cav, on the side of the US; and the elite North Vietnamese division, on the other side.

     It was the first battle of the war between major units of the armies of the United States and the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam.

     I had arrived in Viet Nam in late September or early October, 1965. Then quite suddenly in early November, a few of us were suddenly shifted to Camp Holloway, a small US Army chopper base just outside Pleiku, in the Vietnamese highlands. I was a radio operator. Though we were part of the 1^st Marine Air Wing, I had spent most of my hitch in artillery and Naval Gunfire units, and wasn’t yet the skilled aircraft controller I would soon become.

     I know more now than I did then. Part of our equipment was the TPQ-10, a sophisticated (yep! In the Marine Corps, no less) radar set which could connect electronically with equipment in the cockpit of an A4 or F4 fighter-bomber of one of our Marine squadrons and, once the pilot had maneuvered his bird to a certain position, speed, heading, and altitude, our radar could “lock on” to the aircraft’s controls and, for the brief time required to get over the target, control the bird’s flight and drop its bombs.

     Now, I think that was the main reason we were at Pleiku. Captain Ed “Too Tall” Freeman, LtCol Hal Moore (Battalion Commander of 1^st Cav troops on the ground), and the rest of our boys fighting for their lives not far away in the Ia Drang Valley, apparently needed all the air support help they could get, including ours.

     As I say, all this was more than I knew at the time. It did seem odd that we weren’t allowed off base unless we were dressed in civvies, and that we ate in the mess hall at Holloway, served meals that were a far cry from usual Marine Corps “chow” we’d become used to at Danang and Chu Lai. Fresh-baked rolls with every meal? Wow! With hindsight, I can see that our sudden transfer to Holloway, and our seemingly special treatment there, weren’t because we were special guys (hah! In the Marine Corps?! are you kidding?) Our special treatment was because we had suddenly, though temporarily, fallen into the same category as people who were, under normal circumstances, much more important than we were. But the Marine Corps giveth; the Marine Corps taketh away.

     Well before Christmas, we were back in our tents at Chu Lai, making, buying, and stealing booze to prepare for Christmas in a war zone.

Here, I need to eat some humble pie. I am accustomed to carrying myself with a certain attitude which is often seen by members of the other services as an undeserved air of superiority among Marines.

     But I went through the Battle of Ia Drang – albeit on its fringes – and have since read authoritative accounts, most notably We Were Soldiers Once, and Young, by LtCol Hal Moore (later LtGen), and Joe Galloway, who was a UPI journalist on the ground with Moore during the Ia Drang battle. The performance of those 1^st Cav troopers, and the superior leadership exhibited by their officers and NCOs, were second to none, at least that I know of. I salute them. That is one of the best books about Viet Nam combat, by two men who truly know.

     I personally did nothing more heroic there than fight off the rats in our machine gun bunker, and scare the shit out of a second lieutenant who was trying to sneak up from behind and catch us asleep on sentry duty.