At last, though, there is something—“no, I don’t want to do that or no, I won’t think that”—most of my men have it and I am braver and more defiant than I thought I would be, and yet I still do my job.
I have a girlfriend in one of the villages, who is inscrutable but lovely. Sometimes we go there (it’s off limits) and sit around and talk. She does my laundry. It’s quieter there, too.
A huge storm is brewing over the mountains. I have all sorts of things to say but no time now and not quite the words. I hope that I could hate any man Oriental, Western or Venetian, or like one and all on similar grounds. The important thing is not to choose sides, because then you are at war, and I don’t choose to be.
Evening is nigh.
Outside my hootch, the sky was clear and full of stars. I didn’t have a Vietnamese girlfriend. I hadn’t been to the ville in many months. I didn’t mail the letter.
Sam wrote every week. Letters from him and David meant a lot to me. I’d take them to my hootch, and even the thwacking of choppers, nearby and incessant, would recede. I’d be carried to a place where I felt I belonged, to the midst of the kind of conversation that seemed impossible here, conversation about literature and values, gentle and genteel. But I found the letters hard to answer.
I wanted to share my older friends’ outrage at this war. At the same time, I wanted to suggest that I was more knowledgeable than they. I wanted to portray a rugged guy with smudges on his face from sleeping in a foxhole—one hand holding an M-16, the other resting protectively on the shoulder of a Vietnamese boy, named Go or Hanh. But I really did know some things they couldn’t know, things I could not say. I knew how close you could get to this war—I was never more than a few miles away from a village being bombarded or a platoon caught in an ambush—and yet have it remain an abstraction, dots on a map. I also knew how to be confused.
I’d called myself “brave” and “defiant” in the unsent letter to David, finding words for exactly those qualities I thought I lacked. What would bravery and defiance look like here? Should I have described Colonel Chamberlain in my letters? I liked him. He was a decent, honest man. Did I expect him to stand up in that briefing the other day and say, “This war is wrong. We bombed a village by mistake, so I’m ordering an immediate halt in operations”?
Years later, when I traveled around the United States interviewing Vietnam combat veterans, I asked repeatedly what they thought they’d been fighting for. In Birmingham, Alabama, I spoke to a group of young African American men for whom, of course, no part of Vietnam had ever been an abstraction. One said, “We weren’t fighting for anything. The war was only a way of making money for the civilians.” Another said, “And to decrease the population of the United States.” He added, “But we had a cause. Yeah, stay alive.”
This was the commonest answer I heard from former combat soldiers. For myself, I think it might have sufficed if I’d been an infantry platoon leader. As it was, I felt, increasingly, that everything I did was worse than pointless. And still, perversely, I wanted the war, with all else it had to do, to lend my life some meaning.
CASSIUS
MY SUIT HAD ARRIVED FROM SINGAPORE. I’D ORDERED IT IMAGINING myself at a garden party in The Great Gatsby. It wasn’t what I had expected—tight, pegged pants, narrow lapels, padded shoulders, a suit, I worried, fit for a bookie or a pimp. I wore it anyway on New Year’s Eve in our lounge. When I woke up the next morning, I thought I remembered a contretemps with Pancho at the party, not the cause of the argument but only his saying to me before I staggered to my hootch, “Some people didn’t grow up in a fucking mansion, Lieutenant.” Maybe I only dreamed the incident. If not, he seemed by morning of the new year, 1969, to have forgiven or forgotten whatever I had said.
I was working at my desk in the operations hootch. It was a hot, fly-buzzing, dusty afternoon. I heard voices out in the front room, where the comsec guys worked—when they worked. I looked up and listened. The voices had a quality like a wrong smell in the house where you grew up and also a familiar quality that made me angry even before I placed it. Somebody, some person with an unfamiliar voice, was chewing out one of my men.
I walked to the doorway. The enlisted man sat at the comsec desk, his shoulders bent, as if beneath the weight of the person who stood over him, a young man fully dressed in fatigues with the brown bars of a second lieutenant on the points of his collar. He was a pudgy man, with the same quality that I saw in Colonel Riddle’s face, faintly exuding that feeling of sinister weakness held together by starch, but in his case incipient, not fully formed, or maybe imagined. I’d met him recently, back at company headquarters in Chu Lai. He was a brand-new second lieutenant, in charge of comsec for the company. I stood in the doorway for a moment, listening.
“I expect better work from you, soldier. Keep goofing off and you’ll be back in Chu Lai on KP.”
The enlisted man, my man, was also fairly new in country, which was why he looked so cowed. He had spotted me in the doorway and was looking at me sidelong, questioningly, I thought.
“Hey,” I said.
The lieutenant turned, and he smiled. “Hey, Lieutenant Kidder. How you doin’?”
I smiled back. “Could you come in here a minute?”
The Teletype in the back room was rattling away. A couple of the commo ops were back there, talking. But the map room was empty. I lowered my voice. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Just doin’ my job.” My comsec men’s output was grossly insufficient, he said.
“You got a problem with my men, you come to me,” I said.
“I was just tryin’ to help you out,” he said.
The commo ops in the back room had stopped talking. Everyone in the operations hootch was listening, a sound all its own. I kept my voice low. “Don’t you ever come out here and chew out my men. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
We lieutenants didn’t usually sir each other. How quickly I’d forgotten the way it felt to be a new guy. Was it memories of boarding school, how easy it was to be a successful bully, that made me want both to knock someone down and to help him up afterward? If comsec wasn’t being done satisfactorily, I told the new lieutenant, I’d see that it was in the future. I walked him to his jeep. I clapped him on the shoulder as he climbed in beside his enlisted driver, who gave me a look behind the officer’s back—a quick smile, a lifting of the eyebrows.
A few days later, on a routine trip to Chu Lai in the truck, just Schulzie and me in the cab, we passed an MP on Highway One.
“Hey, you! Put on your helmet!” the MP yelled at Schulzie.
Disciplinary orders from on high all seemed bizarre to me by then, pure malevolence toward soldiers.
“Stop the truck, Schulzie.”
I put on my helmet and jumped out the door. I strode toward the MP, a young enlisted man. I must have looked fierce, because he came to attention.
“If you could see that my driver wasn’t wearing his helmet, you could see that I’m an officer, and you should have saluted me,” I said.
“Yes, sir.” He saluted.
I saluted back, that crisp salute in which the flattened right hand is taken away from the forehead with a quick turn of the wrist.
Schulzie was grinning all the way to Chu Lai. “I guess you chewed his ass. I guess. Heeee.”
At dawn a few days later, I trudged up the hill with my toilet kit on the path through tall grass. One night not long before, my men had gone to Chu Lai to see the new John Wayne movie about our war, The Green Berets. They had told me that the hundreds of GIS who were watching, in a grandstand outdoors, all started hooting and booing and hissing when the movie showed a scene of ocean and the sun setting over it. I mounted the stoop of the operations hootch and paused a moment, looking toward the sunrise over the sea. Then I looked down at the table where I shaved. The gray basin was there as usual, but someone had already filled it with water. The commo op on duty came to the doorway. “I heated it up fo
r you, Lieutenant. On the hot plate.”
“Hey, thanks.”
I understood the message. I was getting a lot of credit for a couple of small acts in defense of my men.
Later on that day, I was alone in operations with Rose, the commo op. You could always count on him not to keep a secret. “You know what the guys call you?” he asked me.
I made a face. I thought, Here we go again.
“Cassius,” he said. “You know, like Cassius Clay?”
I didn’t let him see me smile.
THE CONFIDENCE THAT CAME FROM WARM SHAVING WATER! CONFIDENCE bred certainty, which was always useful, as on the day when my one essential man, Spikes, came to me and said, “Lieutenant, they’re sendin’ us a nigger.”
Racial strife, like combat, was an issue I hadn’t had to deal with. The vast majority of young Americans sent to Vietnam and assigned to the combat arms came from the country’s lower economic tiers, but a recruit with black or brown skin stood the greatest chance of being assigned to fight. The Defense Department’s own statistics would later prove this. Black enlisted men made up about 8 percent of the armed forces and suffered about 15 percent of the casualties. But it was already obvious enough to everyone in Vietnam. There weren’t many African Americans assigned to safe jobs like radio research. None were assigned to my detachment, and so it had been easy to ignore Spikes’s habit of calling people in his drawl “Boy,” then adding jocularly, “I don’t mean Roy.” I had never been to a civil rights demonstration, not even in the North. I knew only a few black Americans personally. But I knew I should be on their side. Without question, Sam and David would insist that I stick up for a black soldier under my command.
“Stoney,” I said to Spikes, “you can’t use that word again.”
His jaw was set. I appealed to his sense of community. “This guy is going to be part of our detachment.” I appealed to his patriotism, which I knew was strong. “He’s an American just like us.”
“Where’s he gonna sleep?”
Pancho was sitting nearby. “He can sleep in my place.”
Spikes shrugged. So far as I knew, he never mistreated the new guy. I think that after a week or so he actually thought of him as one of us. Melvin Harris. It would have been hard not to like him, even though he didn’t drink. He was small and quiet and didn’t shirk the communal chores. I think he believed first of all in staying alive. When he went outside our hootches, he always wore his steel pot, with the two chin straps dangling. I had several long talks with him, alone at night in operations when he was on duty. He told me a little of his past, a sad story of an alcoholic father in the slums of Philadelphia, a familiar story but one I’d never heard firsthand before. I remember arguing with him about the Black Panthers, who seemed menacing to me, and trying to get him to denounce them, but he wouldn’t. Like Spikes, he seemed to feel he’d ended up in the wrong place, in his case because everyone else was white. He didn’t want to be “Tomish,” he’d say. He didn’t want to be “a gray.” But he fit in at my detachment. In my mind, I didn’t shrink from taking most of the credit.
A MONTH OR SO AFTER SCHULZIE AND I HAD RETURNED FROM SINGAPORE, A truck, a deuce and a half, pulled into our parking area. As usual I went to the front of operations to check out the visitors. They were soldiers from the radio research detachment up north on LZ Baldy. They’d just come back from R & R, one of my men told me. I lingered there, watching, because something seemed to be going on. An enlisted man, heading back to Baldy, was standing in the open bed of the truck, leaning down and speaking to Schulzie. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then Schulzie was walking back toward the enlisted hootches, with his head down.
Well, my men had their secrets. I wouldn’t intrude. I went back to the map room. Another hot day dragged by. “Where’s Schulzie?” I asked when, as was usual now, we met up and walked together to the H-Troop mess hall for dinner.
“Ahhh, he’s shaky today,” said Pancho. For once, he seemed to use the word literally.
I had a clear sense that night that I should avoid the lounge. I could hear voices coming through the screen walls, and some anguished-sounding yelling. I went to my hootch. I was lying on my cot, reading, on the olive-drab poncho liner, under the olive-drab mosquito net, when I heard a knock on the door. Schulzie, slurring his words, asked, “Mind if I come in, Tracy?”
“Sure.” I felt reflexively uncomfortable. A drunken soldier in my hootch, calling me by my first name. We weren’t in Singapore.
Schulzie sat down on my footlocker. “She’s still working,” he said. “A friend of Pancho’s was in Singapore, and he found out she’s still working.”
“Who?” I said. “Oh, yeah. Jesus, Schulzie, I’m sorry.” I thought of saying but didn’t, “Well, she’s a whore, Schulzie. I mean, they have to live, too.”
“And I sent her money so she wouldn’t have to work.”
“Oh, God, that makes it worse.” I put some indignation in my voice. “Fucking women, you know, Schulzie.” Then I asked, “You sent her money? How much did you send her?”
He didn’t want to say exactly. Hundreds anyway, that was clear.
I let him talk. I didn’t have much choice. I kept thinking I could understand his feelings if the girl in question weren’t a whore, or were at least good-looking. It was a hot night, murmurings of insects punctuated now and then by thumps from the mortars nearby. He sat with his head bowed, his barrel chest bare. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t think you should send her any more money, Schulzie. She’s a whore.”
“I know! I know she’s a fucking whore! I know.”
“And she’s still working.”
“But, see, this is the thing.” Suddenly, he was crying. “I don’t care. I still love her.”
It felt odd to be on the other side of such a conversation. I felt like telling him to forget it. She looked too much like a chicken to worry about, and besides, she was clearly not a person of good character. But I felt I owed him sympathy. I felt I owed all disappointed lovers sympathy, being one of the brotherhood.
“I don’t care! I still love her.” He had stopped crying. He looked up at me. “The thing is, I’m worried it won’t work out.”
“I think you’re right, Schulzie.”
“I don’t care what my parents would think.”
“Think they’d disapprove?”
“If I brought her home for a wife? Yeah, they wouldn’t like it.”
“You mean because she was a whore?”
“No, ’cause she’s a zip. I don’t care what they’d think. But the thing is, see, I’m afraid it might hurt my chances of becoming governor of Alaska.”
I remember feeling so surprised I almost laughed, and then I wasn’t tempted. Schulzie had told me he’d visited Alaska once, and that he loved the wide-open feeling it gave him, and that he planned to go back there when he got out of the service. I hadn’t taken him very seriously. Lately, though, I had been writing in my letters that I was going to buy a boat and sail around the world. I hadn’t worked out the finances yet, but it seemed important to have a dream like that. “I didn’t know you wanted to be governor of Alaska,” I said.
He was rolling his shoulders from side to side, hands clasped, head down. “I know it sounds fucking stupid.”
“No, no. It doesn’t sound stupid.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“I don’t know, Schulzie. I don’t know if it really would hurt your chances of being governor, but if you’ve been sending her money, and she’s still working …”
“But I forgive her!”
This went on for a while. Finally, I told him, “I think you should go to bed. You’ll feel better tomorrow. Anyway, I’ve got to go to sleep now.”
He stumbled out the door, thanking me profusely.
I didn’t see much of him the next day, because he was sleeping it off. The other men covered for him. The day after that I saw him moping around, grumbling when the others tried to
talk to him. It seemed very important to me that I find a way to cheer him up. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I could imagine his unhappiness. But I knew that feeling of something warm gone out of your life, the thing you hung on to, more an idea than a fact, when people yelled at you or you were wishing you were anywhere but in this place or on this training camp march or in this infernal Army kitchen, sergeants shouting, Sounds like a personal problem to me! I understood. I was glad I wasn’t the only one. Then I had an idea.
I went to work in my hootch right after lunch. I wrote to Schulzie’s girl in Singapore:
I am sorry to have to write to tell you bad news. I knew your fiancé Schulzie well. I was his platoon leader. Yesterday while we were out on patrol, he was gravely wounded. He was trying to save the lives of his comrades, and he jumped on a live hand grenade that would have killed us all. Before he died, your name was on his lips, and he gave me two hundred dollars, and he asked me to send it to you. But lately my grandmother has been very sick and my cousin, too, and I knew from what Schulzie said about you that you would understand.
I went looking for Schulzie and gave him the letter. “I don’t know, it’s just something that came to me. You can use it if you want to.”
His eyes widened as he read, and for a moment I thought I’d made a mistake. Then he yelled, “This is great! This is fuckin’ great!” He laughed, head back, arms opened to the sky. He ran off carrying the letter, to show it to the other men. A little later, he came back wondering if we could rewrite the part about the hand grenade and make it a Bouncing Betty mine. I think Bouncing Betty mines figured now and then in episodes of Combat!
The next day I saw Schulzie walking around the compound with his shirt off and his arms raised in the air, as if someone invisible were holding a gun to his back and marching him over to the vehicles, marching him into the lounge, marching him up to the operations hootch. The other men just shrugged and walked around him. Finally I went out and said, “Schulzie, what are you doing?”