Al Santoli’s Everything We Had does give a nod in that direction, interviewing a few nurses and support people in intelligence and communications as well as the combat troops. It’s my favorite of the oral history books, possibly because of Santoli’s obvious sympathies, since he was a grunt rifleman himself, and Stateside he worked with amputees as a physical therapy assistant. He’s horrified by the war but not by the soldiers, and if he has an axe to grind it’s this familiar one: the enemy is not really those little devils shooting at me. It’s the faceless people safe from harm who pulled the strings that put me here. The Green Machine, we called them.
Santoli’s book gives the most accurate mosaic of what Vietnam was like. But the one that works best as a document, the one I would choose to put in a time capsule and say, “Here’s the evidence; judge it in your own way”—that has to be Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us. It’s not as universal and compact as Everything We Had; not as heartsickening as Bloods; not as artful as Nam. What it does have that all the others perforce lack is a structure that compels some measure of objectivity. In 1981 a team of Newsweek reporters set out to track down all of the veterans of a single Vietnam company. Their criteria were that it must have been an infantry company, that they must have served in “the crucible years” 1968 and 1969, and that they had seen heavy combat. So their story will be a priori more dramatic than, say, that of a quartermaster company. But the reporters were out to find everyone’s story, not just the ones that were most interesting or that best fit a predetermined pattern, consciously arrived at or not. Everyone they could track down had his say. They also interviewed the families of those who were killed during the war and, sadly, of a couple who survived the war but couldn’t live with what came afterwards.
The result is interesting in both aspects of the men’s stories: what happened in Vietnam and how they adjusted to life back in the World; what measure of material success and what measure of peace. The war stories are most interesting in the present context, though, and the most revealing. Because they were all in the same place, but they all fought in different wars.
For most, that’s just a reflection of a universal truism. For a couple, it was something else. Something particularly significant in interpreting Vietnam war stories.
A couple of the veterans of Charlie Company reported memories of interesting things that somehow escaped everybody else’s notice. One of them had bragged to his local buddies of murdering a captain he didn’t like (none of the company’s CO’s died during his tour) and “the landscape of his Vietnam was blighted by heads on pikes and napalm-broiled babies that, however real to him, nobody else in Charlie Company appeared to have seen.”
I have the strange feeling I met this guy a few times in the other books. I know I’ve met people like him in person several times, because when they find out you’re a writer “from the ’Nam” they have to come over and tell you their strange story. It often owes as much to Apocalypse Now as to reality. The scary ones aren’t actually lying; for them, the membrane between invention and memory has disintregrated. We all succumb to a degree of this as we age, editing our memories to give our life coherence, meaning, interest. Some are better at it than others. Some people make it their life’s work.
So how can you tell truth from fabulism? If you were there, or if you’ve made an exhaustive study of Vietnam, you might catch some storytellers in inconsistencies—but that might only mean that the guy hadn’t paid attention to the same details that engaged you. And if he has everything absolutely right, it could mean that he’s truly and gloriously bent; warped to the extent of spending every spare minute making sure his stories are believable and consistent.
Even the lies contain truth, and not in a mystical way, not as long as some of us listen and believe, and think we see our own dark nature reflected there. They may be made up to attract attention or elicit pity, or to sell newspapers or movies. But they have the force and innate veracity of myth.
1 The Big Fight, by Capt. David Fallon, M.C. (W.J. Watt & Co., 1918)
2 Combat: Pacific Theater, Don Congdon, Ed. (Dell, 1958)
Photographs and Memories
I was prepared to dislike the gallery show “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment” on several grounds, or several levels. I don’t like my art mixed with hype, I don’t want to be expected to like something because it’s politically correct; because the wrong people dislike it. And the Mapplethorpe photographs I’d seen in books hadn’t impressed me, most of them blatantly aggressive homoerotic challenges to my conventional sexuality. My impression of his work—again, from browsing books—was that he did good conventional art-school photography, using outrageous subjects.
So I was wrong. In the first place, only a small fraction of the work displayed was homoerotic; most of the pictures were still life compositions (usually flowers), portraiture, and figure studies that were “only” figures, not challenges. To me the portraits were the most impressive—hard-edged, unsparing, startling with their instant revelations of character. (I later found out that Mapplethorpe got $10,000 and more for a portrait, and the artist, not the sitter, chose the final result out of the hundreds of shots.) The pictures of children are startling, too, showing them in postures of grave defiance or startled candor, attractive but not at all cute.
It’s obvious that he was a man of obsessions. Obsessed with naked black men, true, but also with flowers and pure geometries and faces, and one woman, Lisa Lyon, a body-builder whose musculature is so highly developed that in some pictures she seems androgynous or even male (in other pictures she is conventionally female and more than adequately sexy).
All of the pictures are impressive in terms of concrete professionalism. There are no happy accidents. This is obviously a man who will burn up yards of film in search of just the right nuance. And then he takes it into the darkroom and fiddles and tweaks until the paper and light and chemicals give him just what he’s aiming for. This is what you can’t see in a book: the exquisite surfaces of the prints themselves, whether a soft platinum print on linen or laser-garish Cibachrome. The obsessive personality revealed in his subject matter is just as well revealed in his attitude toward lens, emulsion, darkroom, matting, and framing. Anyone who knows photography has to be impressed with his technique, even if repelled by some of the subject matter.
An illustrative example that sticks with me is a superficially conventional picture of a woman walking through surf, casually naked, a neutral introspective expression on her face. It’s a pretty picture. The pose and setting could have come straight out of any men’s magazine pictorial, although the woman would probably have a more provocative expression.
There’s something about the picture that seems odd, though; unsettling, and a moment’s inspection shows that it’s due to the combination of lens setting, exposure time, and emulsion choice. It goes against our expectations about glamour photography (not to say soft-core porn): a conventional shot would have been around f/2.8 with a fast shutter speed, about 1/1000, and pretty fast color film, so you would isolate the woman’s image with shallow depth-of-field and add drama to the picture with the sensuous time-frozen splash of surf around her calves. Mapplethorpe shot the black and white picture on slow fine-grained film with a slow shutter speed, 1/60 or even 1/30, and the lens cranked ’way down, f/16 or f/22. (No technical data were given with the pictures, so I have to infer everything from the result.) The picture is surgically crisp, and the depth of field is so generous that the surf is in focus from the bottom edge of the picture to the top, perhaps ten yards of water. The water splashing around her calves is blurred. It’s hard to use words to describe the difference that this makes, but it gives the woman and the sea equal dignity, equal reality. It’s objective, but the exact opposite of pornography’s “objectification” of the female body. It is a perfect moment, perfectly captured. This woman will grow old and die. Some day the sea will die. But now is all that matters; now is real.
Eventually you do have to de
al with The Pictures, the ones Christian groups mail around to politicians; the ones that raise Jesse Helms’s blood pressure (not high enough to finish him off, unfortunately). They’re presented at the end of the show, as part of a group of 8x10 glossies under glass.
Five of them are outrageous. One is a picture of urinaglia, a man urinating into another man’s mouth. One is a self-portrait of the artist with the handle of a whip inserted into his anus. One shows a man’s genitals harnessed in a metal contraption, spattered with blood. One is a weirdly abstract photo of “fisting.” A clinical close-up of a man using a vibrator. There are other pictures of people dressed in bondage restraints that are disturbing without being pornographic.
(There are two other pictures that bother bluenoses. One is the torso of a man in a polyester three-piece suit with an elephantine penis incongruously hanging out. It’s a joke, guys. A joke. Another is a little girl in a frock, rocking away from the camera, unintentionally disclosing her lack of underwear. Anyone who finds erotic content in that ought to seek counseling.)
Some apologists for Mapplethorpe claim The Pictures are not pornographic because the artist’s intent was serious. I don’t see where one attribute makes the other impossible, if you think of pornography not as a legal term but as an everyday description of an everyday phenomenon. There are bookstores in every town of any size full of magazines wherein none of those pictures would seem remarkable except for their quality. The artist knew they were pornographic when he took them, though he might have described them with some more flattering and intellectually acceptable euphemism. I suspect and hope not; the impression you get from the show is of a man fiercely open and honest.
The pictures belong in the show for two reasons, not even counting the very real reason that the gallery would have made about a tenth as much money without them. One is that this ultraviolet end of the sexual spectrum was an important part of the artist’s life for many years, and he was not the kind of artist to hide it. The “But why make us look at it?” argument is ludicrous; I laid out a good chunk of a ten-dollar bill and most of an hour of waiting in line to see those pictures. Nobody held a gun to my head.
Second, those pictures are shocking, but an artist has the right and sometimes the obligation to shock his patrons. “The Anatomy Lesson” was shocking in its time; “The Disasters of War” outraged some of its audience. Rembrandt and Goya could have painted or drawn pictures like Mapplethorpe’s, but they probably would have had more than their NEA funds cut off. We live in more interesting times; we’re harder to shock.
More to the point is Mathew Brady. Brady could have stayed up north and continued to make a good living in studio portraiture. Instead he took his cameras and plates and chemicals down into hell, and sent back a travelogue. It would be simplistic to say that none of Mapplethorpe’s photographs approaches the obscenity of those images of young bodies shattered, rotting open-mouthed in sunlit meadows; it would be invidious to compare the courage of Brady with the up-yours defiance of Mapplethorpe. In both cases, though, the artists made consciously political decisions—and I suspect that in both cases the prospect of fame, or notoriety, was at least as much of a factor as a desire to seek out truth in art.
It was an odd coincidence that PBS was showing the Brady photographs at the same time I went downtown to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art to be challenged by Mapplethorpe. Brady probably hurts me more than he hurts most people, because I spent 1968 watching a dozen friends drop one by one in the jungle, protecting an irrelevant country from an obsolete doctrine, and when I see the Brady photographs I can smell the roadkill rot and hear the flies buzzing, and know that last night those guys were shooting craps or writing home or worrying about their nonexistent futures.
Mapplethorpe relates to that on a visceral, personal level, because like most people in the arts I have a lot of openly gay friends—and in the two decades since Vietnam I’ve lost half as many friends and acquaintances to AIDS as I lost to enemy fire. In my mind the guys who wasted away because of their sexual preference were as innocent as those other boys—who are dead now longer than they were alive, just because they went along with the program and let themselves be drafted.
There is no conclusion. Brady didn’t stop the next generation from bounding down to Cuba to die in the sun, or the next from going to France to die in the mud, and so on et sequentes. Mapplethorpe’s brutal images will not deter any man from seeking out another man, if that’s the way he’s built, and won’t make him sensible about what he does there if he’s not otherwise inclined to be sensible.
But there is the woman frozen forever in beauty, in harmony with the sea. There are the boys who will litter the Pennsylvania battlefield for thousands of years to come. Most pictures are not worth ten well chosen words, let alone a thousand, but there are others that speak volumes. They are worth seeking out even if they’re going to hurt.
Story Poems
Saul’s Death
1.
I used to be a monk, but gave it over
Before books and prayer and studies cooled my blood,
And joined with Richard as a mercenary soldier.
(No Richard that you’ve heard of, just
A man who’d bought a title for his name.)
And it was in his service I met Saul.
The first day of my service I liked Saul;
His easy humor quickly won me over.
He confided Saul was not his name;
He’d taken up another name for blood.
(So had I—my fighting name was just
A word we use at home for private soldier.)
I felt at home as mercenary soldier;
I liked the company of men like Saul.
(Though most of Richard’s men were just
Fighting for the bounty when it’s over.)
I loved the clash of weapons, splashing blood—
I lived the meager promise of my name.
Saul promised that he’d tell me his real name
When he was through with playing as a soldier.
(I said the same; we took an oath in blood.)
But I would never know him but as Saul;
He’d die before the long campaign was over,
Dying for a cause that was not just.
Only fools require a cause that’s just.
Tools, and children out to make a name.
Now I’ve had sixty years to think it over
(Sixty years of being no one’s soldier).
Sixty years since broadsword opened Saul
And splashed my body with his precious blood.
But damn! we lived for bodies and for blood.
The reek of dead men rotting, it was just
A sweet perfume for those like me and Saul.
(My peaceful language doesn’t have a name
For lewd delight in going off to soldier.)
It hurts my heart sometimes to know it’s over.
My heart was hard as stone when it was over;
When finally I’d had my fill of blood.
(And knew I was too old to be a soldier.)
Nothing left for me to do but just
Go back home and make myself a name
In ways of peace, forgetting war and Saul.
In ways of blood he made himself a name
(Though he was just a mercenary soldier)—
I loved Saul before it all was over.
2.
A mercenary soldier has no future;
Some say his way of life is hardly human.
And yet, we had our own small bloody world
(Part aches and sores and wrappings soaking blood,
Partly fear and glory grown familiar)
Confined within a shiny fence of swords.
But how I learned to love to fence with swords!
Another world, my homely past and future—
Once steel and eye and wrist became familiar
With each other, then that steel was almost human
br /> (With an altogether human taste for blood).
I felt that sword and I could take the world.
I felt that Saul and I could take the world:
Take the whole world hostage with our swords.
The bond we felt was stronger than mere blood
(Though I can see with hindsight in the future
The bond we felt was something only human:
A need for love when death becomes familiar).
We were wizards, and death was our familiar;
Our swords held all the magic in the world.
(Richard thought it almost wasn’t human,
The speed with which we parried others’ swords,
Forever end another’s petty future.)
Never scratched, though always steeped in blood.
Ambushed in a tavern, splashing ankle-deep in blood;
Fighting back-to-back in ways familiar.
Saul slipped: lost his footing and our future.
Broad blade hammered down and sent him from this world.
In angry grief I killed that one, then all the other swords;
Then locked the doors and murdered every human.
No choice, but to murder every human.
No one in that tavern was a stranger to blood.
(To those who live with pikes and slashing swords,
The inner parts of men become familiar.)
Saul’s vitals looked like nothing in this world:
I had to kill them all to save my future.
Saul’s vitals were not human, but familiar: