Vietnam Notes (2) Garbage detail again. Damn. Oh well, better that than burning shit. Burning shit was much worse. Our latrines were outhouses with the bottom half of an oil drum used in place of a hole in the ground. Disgust and disease prevention demanded that we pull the drums out, pour diesel fuel into the mess inside, light it up and stand there stirring it up occasionally to make sure it all burned away. Lots of fun and fragrant too. Like I said, garbage beat shit anyday. We would load up four or five large metal trash cans brimming with rotting garbage and trash and heavy enough to need three men to comfortably lift one high enough to slide into the bed of a truck. Then we'd drive out of the firebase about a mile to the dump area where a crew of Vietnamese would be kind enough to unload it for us and put the empty cans back in the truck. Of course they did get paid. Their pay was that they got to eat that slimy, stinking, rotting garbage, swarming flies and all. And that they did, handful over skeletal handful in a horrible, frantic, disgusting way. These people were starving to death. We'd bring a little food along to help them, but it didn't make much difference. There were just too many of them. As I'd stand there watching all this with a sickened fascination I'd wonder how they could live like that. They were the homeless in a place where "homeless" was a deadly serious thing. I came to the awareness that the reason I was in the truck with a full belly and a place to sleep, and they were just feet away actually dying of hunger with no place to go, had nothing to do with deserving anything. It was fate. Or God's will. Or luck. Whatever you called it, it had little to do with "fair". There are always those wanting something for nothing, or feeling that the world owes them something. I'm not speaking of them, and I certainly don't have all the answers. But years later when I came close to taking our version of homelessness as my only option to deal with a life I'd turned into a nightmare, I felt those feelings of frustration with mankind's selfishness even more. Anyone can end up there. But most of us have to end up there ourselves, or come very close to it, in order to see that truth in our hearts. Maybe someday we'll evolve far enough to feel enough compassion to actually do something about the unnecessary suffering of a large part of humanity without having to suffer ourselves to do it. But that isn't how it is now. And although I have much more faith in our future now than I once did, it just isn't going to change anytime soon. I pulled the truck up next to a bunker out on the perimeter. It was an unusual vehicle. It was a 3/4 ton truck with armor plate welded to the front of the bed rising above the cab. A machine gun mount was placed in the middle allowing the gun to fire over the top of the cab. I had been ordered to take the truck to the bunker line to add the firepower of the machine gun to the already formidable line of weapons facing the rice paddies and cane fields outside the wire. On hindsight this wasn't a very good idea. While far from impregnable, a bunker is a very hard structure to destroy and can be rebuilt quickly and cheaply. A truck on the other hand is a relatively valuable, easy to destroy, and very tempting target. I got out and hopped up into the bed to get things ready for the night. Since I had to pull guard duty anyway, the thought of spending the night in a nice, dry, relatively clean truck sounded much better than the usual damp, dirty, rat infested bunker. I loaded a belt of ammunition and settled back to begin another long, tense night. The gun mount had a spotlight on both sides of the gun so you could see what you were shooting at in the dark. This was undoubtedly designed by someone who had never thought the situation through. I had no intention of ever using them to aim, as doing so would be about the same as drawing a bull's eye on your nose and shining a light on your face. But the lights were good for surveillance. I would duck below the armor plate, flip on the lights and look through a small hole drilled in the plate while swinging the gun back and forth to illuminate the landscape. The night was very dark. I had just flipped on the lights and started moving the gun, when right in front of me almost to the concertina wire a VC sapper jumped up and started running. I was startled for a second, but yanked the charging handle, swung the gun around on him, and totally forgetting what an easy target I made, started shooting. As the tracers caught up to him, he dove below one of the dikes of a paddy. By this time someone had popped a hand flare, and the landscape was bathed in the eerie Halloween glow of its flame. The only sound was the hissing of the flare drifting down from far above on its little parachute. Suddenly the man jumped up a short distance from where he had disappeared and began zig-zagging away across the landscape. I started firing, following him with tracers, but every time the rounds caught up to him he would dive and disappear again. This went on for quite a few minutes until he finally made it into the cover of a cane field and was gone for good. If I'd hit him he never showed it. I yelled out at the night "Motherfucker, you DESERVE to get away!" and really meant it. I was laughing with the stress and adrenaline rush, but was absolutely furious at myself for missing him. I was a pretty good shot and I wanted that bastard DEAD! He had been only seconds away from lobbing a satchel charge or two into my truck, and that could have very easily ended in disaster for me. That, plus the sick and all too common conviction men are subliminally taught from boyhood, that killing a man would make me more of one, only added to the anger. Very quickly those feelings were tempered with the awareness that I had just witnessed the bravest thing I had ever seen. That guy had single-handedly crept up to a perimeter of barbed wire, claymore mines and trip flares, backed by bunkers filled with soldiers equipped with quite an array of deadly weapons, and all for the purpose of destroying one lousy truck. Or he had possibly not been alone, but had taken the heat on himself to save his friends. Either way it was amazing. I think we were all stunned by the display of courage and skill we had just seen. It had been something totally outside my previous experience. Then as I began to realize how close I had skirted death, the raw reality of our situation set in once again. It was impossible for me to stay aware of how dangerous Vietnam was on a continuous basis and still maintain the ability to function. But every so often a reminder would jolt me back into the paralyzing fear, and once again I'd just have to hang on and wait until it slowly drifted away. The anger that I'd felt on failing to kill that man, along with many other terrible memories ate at me for years. But slowly as time passed, my mind began to heal, and I found my heart opening to a more loving, kind, and spiritual way of life. The anger turned to acceptance, and then one fine day to gratitude. I am so very glad I don't have the death of another human being on my conscience. He was an enemy soldier fully intending to kill me if he could, and if I had killed him I'm sure I could accept it as just another part of my life and a necessary action at the time. But on those nowadays rare nights when I wake up feeling lost, alone, and afraid, with Vietnam all around me, the relief of not having killed him helps me find my way back to my warm, safe bed a lot sooner than those old feelings used to. Love and kindness are such beautiful, healing things. "Harris" was a friend of mine. He was a tall, lanky, soft spoken black man with an easy smile. A gentle man with a kind disposition and a wry sense of humor. Sometimes we'd pull guard together and talk quietly in the eerie silence of the bunkers at night. Solving the troubles of mankind, or talking about what we were going to do when we got back to "The World" helped ease the fear and tension of our situation and also helped keep us from falling asleep. Harris somehow transmitted confidence to me just by being around. He was one of those people it was hard to imagine God allowing anything bad to happen to, and being around him just felt somehow "safer". He was in one of our bunkers that VC sappers blew up one night. He was also one of the few wounded "lightly" enough to come back to the company out of all the guys that had been in those bunkers. I never saw most of those guys again, but old Harris came walking back one day and I was so very glad to see him. But something was wrong. He was distant and cold. It was like he didn't even know me. He was scary and alien, and from then on I kept my distance. It hurt, but he had been through an experience I hadn't, and looking at him I knew that it must have been much stranger and more horrible than I could imagine. Months later, a few of us had been drinking beer and celebrating our soon to be homecoming. We were staying in a large, relatively safe basecamp at Pleiku in a sandbagged shack my company used as a transit barracks. We were processing out to go home! Home! We couldn't believe it (we had yet to experience the "Welcome Home" of the 1960's for Vietnam Vets). The other guys had gone somewhere, and as I was sitting alone reveling in the awesome feeling that it was almost over, who should walk in but Harris! It was great to see him before I left, and I greeted him with a smile and feeling of love in my heart. He looked at me with a funny smile, then came over and sat next to me on the bunk. He stared at me for a minute and then said "I knooow who you are! I knooow about your kind!" in an eerie, wavering voice. He sounded so much like an actor in a scary movie I thought he was kidding and waited for the punchline. But what happened next was so quick and surprising, I didn't realize what had occurred until it was over. I suddenly found myself with a choking arm around my neck, and a knee in my back with the pressure steadily increasing to the level of very serious pain. Harris began to laugh. But the sound he made was like a horrifying caricature of someone insane. It dawned on me then that this was no joke. He wasn't kidding. He was really, truly out of it, and I might be in terrible trouble. I still couldn't believe it. Then he said "I'm going to kill you now! I'm going to snap your spine! I know who you really are!" and that's when the terror kicked in. He began to slowly push in with his knee while choking me tighter, and the pain became unbelievable. The shock of what was happening was almost worse than the pain. All of a sudden the pressure was released, and I dropped to the floor. My buddies had returned, and seeing what was happening had crept up behind Harris and yanked him off of me. He didn't even fight or say anything, just sat on the bunk and stared at me looking totally vacant and emotionless. He was the most frightening person I've ever seen, then or since. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know what weird place his mind went after the attack that awful night. And I never will know. It's just one of those things I've had to learn to accept. But something I find much harder to accept is that Harris wasn't alone. What happened to his mind happened to many, many more than just him. Who knows how many? And who knows what kind of torturous horrors they've lived with since, and may live with until the day they die? Those thoughts I sometimes find very hard to accept. But as with so many things, I'm powerless over it all. I just try to be thankful to God for the life he's given me. Thankful that I wasn't in that bunker with him. It was very close. Harris was a kind and loving man. I like to think he found his way back. He was my friend, and I miss him. Dust. It was everywhere and in everything. In our eyes, mouths, hair, clothes, food, and water. It was from the medevac helicopters. As the Tet offensive raged on, the choppers just kept coming in one right after the other, many times all day long, bringing in the dead and wounded from everywhere. Sometimes three or four helicopters would be waiting their turn to land so they could go back and tempt fate again to go get more. They were a constant reminder of what could happen to any of us at any time. There had always been medevacs coming in, but never anything like this. It never stopped. Whether we were building bunkers, eating chow, or trying to catch a little sleep, the unending river of pain, agony, and death kept right on coming. The wounded were quickly helped or carried off the choppers in their bloody bandages and shredded fatigues, some quiet, some moaning, some screaming, most just curled up and lost in an agony of pain and morphine. So many of them handicapped and disfigured for the rest of their lives. Then there was the neverending train of bodybags. Bags and bags full of dead men, sometimes only parts of dead men. Hauled off the choppers, dragged out of the way, and laid in a row at first, then stacked as room ran out. Tents with their sides rolled up with surgery tables running down their centers were at the focus of all this. Medics were in constant motion from chopper to table and back again as the worst cases that had a chance, but probably wouldn't make it to a real hospital, were cut and drained and patched and sewn in a kind of horrible, extremely bloody ballet. This went on for days, and days, and days. Be all you can be. Numbing exhaustion. Aching back, arms, legs, and mind. Suffocating tropical heat draining every ounce of motivation. Eye stinging sweat starting at my head, running down my body, and ending up in my burning, soggy boots making the heat rashes sting and burn. It's too humid for sweat to evaporate and cool like it should. How much longer can this miserable day last? Hours later these thoughts must have rolled through my mind a hundred times. Digging holes, filling sandbags, stacking them into bunker walls, digging, filling, stacking, digging, filling, stacking. And the same tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow... Flies… they swarmed through the air by the millions, their size halfway between a housefly and a gnat, their high pitched, infuriating bzzzzzz fraying everyone's nerves and tempers to the edge as they crawled all over our exposed skin, into our eyes, noses and ears, and tried to get between our tightly closed lips. Our arms got so tired from swatting we finally had to just let them crawl. We had been in Kontum for weeks now and the heat, humidity, dust and flies made us all feel somewhat insane. But we did have lots of company there. I met them when I first arrived and began digging a trench for our fuel cans. We put the cans in the ground to protect us from a self-made napalm attack that would have resulted from the cans being hit by one of the incoming mortar rounds that peppered the area every so often at night. The idea was that if hit, the blast and fireball would blow up, not sideways into people and materials. Fortunately they were never hit so we didn't have to find out how well the theory stood up to reality. Anyway, as I began digging, the sickly sweet and familiar stench of death wafted up from the hole. The shovel struck some roots which were somehow covered in cloth. As I tried to cut through the stubborn obstructions, I suddenly saw hair, and became aware that what I thought were roots were actually bones and clothing. The hole I'd dug was a grave. I began digging around the edges trying to find a clear area, but soon realized I was standing in the middle of a mass grave which had resulted from the carnage of a battle fought during the Tet Offensive a few months earlier. I got out and tried again nearby with the same result. I finally found an unoccupied patch and finished the now grisly job. It turned out that the whole area was a site of several mass graves, exactly how many we never knew. The bodies tended to rise to the surface in the monsoon rains, and we were made aware of their presence again and again. A dog chewing on a rotted hand, a thighbone strung on the mess tent sign by a prankster attempting to make light of it and preserve his sanity, a skull unearthed and grinning on the trail to the perimeter, and of course the flies… always the flies… the ceaselessly swarming flies of a corrupted graveyard. Nights on the bunkers when I was pulling my shift as the only one awake, was a surreal, lonely, and sometimes terrifying experience. When there was a break in the clouds and enough of a moon to see, the vegetation would become sinister, seemingly in motion, with strange sounds drifting through the dank, humid darkness. Along with the ever present fear of a real attack would come the eerie feeling that if I were to turn around, my frightened gaze would be met by the leering visage of a rotting skull and skeletal body clothed in the tattered fatigues of one of the residents upon whose grounds we were trespassing. It was strange times. That kind of environment breeds disease, and I began feeling weak and sick one day. A concerned friend said I actually looked yellow and mentioned jaundice, so I went to see the medics and collapsed onto a cot in the sweltering heat of the hospital tent. I was in and out of it for about a week, losing quite a few pounds in the process. One night the survivors of a very bad ambush were helicoptered in and I was laid on the dirt floor to make room for the wounded. I remember drifting in and out of an agonizing world of screaming and crying men and shouts of rushing medics, while the roar of the choppers and shuddering of the tent in the dusty wind from the blades created a memory of being locked into a neverending nightmare that didn't even seem real the next day. But it was. I was very glad when I began feeling better and could finally leave that place. One day we heard a burst of automatic fire coming from inside the perimeter. We found out that a newly arrived replacement had fired a burst from an M16 into his foot. He was flown back out before any of us had even met him. Maybe he was the smartest of us all. His chiseled features and steely gaze were matched by his powerful physique. His eyes appeared to miss nothing as they traversed the terrain. The impression conveyed was one of immense strength and competence. He was a Westpoint graduate, a Captain in the United States Army, and he also happened to be an idiot. A very dangerous idiot. He had been my company commander and in Vietnam for a very short time. At present my company was moving from the outskirts of a town named Kontum, located on a plateau in the Central Highlands, to a new firebase on the side of the mountains about eight miles away. Most of the move had been accomplished, but some assorted sheet metal and other items of possible use to the VC was still laying around and had to be moved up the mountain to our new area. Several of us had been chosen to drive our trucks back to the old area and do the job. There was quite a bit of junk to load, and by late afternoon it was obvious to us that we would have to finish the job the next day if we were to make it back to the firebase with some daylight to spare. This was very important because Charlie owned the night, and to be on the road after dark was an open invitation to be ambushed and killed. For some reason the Captain had chosen to oversee this job in person, and I mentioned to him that it was getting late, and we'd better be heading out soon. The infantry had dug in to secure the area, and there was no need to worry about the items that would be left. He told me it was none of my concern, and to get back to work. As the sun dropped lower, I figured he planned on staying the night and started constructing a ring of old sandbags to bed down in for the evening. He noticed this, and came over saying "Just what the hell do you think you're doing?" I said "I'm building my bed for the night." He replied "Where did you get the idea we were staying the night? As soon as these trucks are loaded, we're heading back up the mountain!" I couldn't believe it. He was serious! I tried to appeal to his sense of efficiency by suggesting that if I stayed until morning I could police the area and have some good light to make sure we'd gotten everything. He told me to shut up and get my ass in gear if I didn't want to end up in LBJ for refusing an order (LBJ stood for Long Binh Jail, a prison near Saigon where your time toward the mandatory year in Vietnam was suspended until your sentence was completed. This threat was fine motivation). That was when I realized what he was up to. He was out to live up to his fantasy of what a brave soldier did in war, and in his own mind he was going to be the epitome of that soldier. He'd be damned if he was going to let a few little slanty eyed gooks scare him. And what better way to show it than to drive alone through the dangerous night with no more protection than a tough expression, his superior intellect, and a 45 automatic. Now this was what it was all about for a real soldier! I can't describe the chill that went through me at the realization of this insanity. He was enjoying my obvious fear, and so chose me to join him in his juvenile and irresponsible folly in order to savor it all the more. I'm sure that in his twisted mind, my fear proved his bravery. He made sure that the other trucks were loaded and left with just enough time to spare to make it back before dark while holding me back to watch me watching the sun go down. As the sun dropped below the horizon he got into his jeep and said "Follow me!" in a strong and unwavering voice of command. We pulled out toward the road very slowly, and continued at probably 15 mph toward the town. I wondered what he was up to, but figured he'd speed it up once we got onto the road so we could get back to the relative safety of the firebase as soon as possible. It didn't happen. By now we'd reached the center of the pitch black town, and he was still driving at the same speed. Several bursts of automatic rifle fire suddenly erupted a short distance away to my left, and that was the end of this bullshit for me. I sped up and got right on his ass trying to get him to move faster. He wouldn't. Okee doke, I figured. Better to face his wrath later than to continue to tempt fate now. I ran him off the side of the road, hit the throttle, and began one of the most nerve wracking rides of my life. I drove like a bat out of hell with my lights off when the road was relatively straight, but had to use them now and then to see when it got curvy in places. With all the racket that poor truck was making, I don't know how much good my blackout would have done if someone had actually been waiting around to waste any moron stupid enough to be out at night, but it gave me a small sense of security anyway. As I drove, the road and vegetation formed a surreal nightmare of flowing, creeping shadows, and every one of them seemed to make my hair stand on end. There was a Green Beret firebase between me and home, and I was hoping they might let me stay the night and save me the drive into the mountains until daylight. The base was constructed in a circle, and the road went in one side of it and out the other. During the day, the gates were guarded, but open. Now they were closed tight and I was met by chain link fence, concertina wire, claymore mines, and bunkers bristling with barrels and full of Montagnard (the mountain people of Vietnam) troops. A Montagnard soldier appeared and began waving me off and yelling at me in what I suppose was his language for "Get the fuck out of here you stupid GI!". I began yelling back that I couldn't turn around, and needed to be let through the gates to get back to my base. A green beret sergeant walked up and yelled at me to get the hell out of there, he couldn't let me through. I said "Fine, lock me up for the night if you want to, just let me in until morning and I'll be out of your hair". After a few minutes of haggling, he said "Let the sonovabitch through, but make it quick!". I pulled through the base and continued on my way.
Copyright © 2001 Robert Flynn |