Vietnam
So, I’m in the most strange and exotic and scary land of Vietnam, playing at
war, most confused about most everything about me and my very strange, though
at the time, I thought it was very boring life. I’m a supply officer assigned
as the Platoon Leader of the 1st Platoon, responsible for 03 Bin
Storage and the Security Section, which became Brinson’s 3-Ring Circus, of the
629 Supply & Service Company (Repair Parts) in the Qui Nhon Depot on the
seacoast of the beautiful Vietnam Central Highlands, not exactly my ideal image
of the swash-buckling wannabe warrior I fancied myself. However, everyone wore
uniforms, carried guns, and at night particularly the surrounded hills
reverberated with air strikes and artillery missions and the horrific racket of
Puff-the-Magic Dragon. Also, daily Med evac Hueys streamed in to the adjacent
67th Medical Hospital, bringing their
loads of young men blown apart in horrible ways but not enough to kill them,
only maim them.
My very first night in the company I talked down a huge, hulking black dude
who had assaulted a couple of bunkmates and who I found with a bloodied bunk
adapter back in the shadows of one of the storage yards. Grace was with me from
the very start, though consciously I didn’t want any of it. One of my first
tasks was to write dear ole mom and dear ole dad to tell them they had a
daughter-in-law and come November they would be Grandparents. Nope, I didn’t
let them know I was marrying K. before I left for Vietnam a couple of days later. It
was surreal being married; it really didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t feel
any love, in fact, due to the copious amounts of booze I was daily drinking, a
six-pack for breakfast, a six-pack for lunch and at least a couple of six packs
at night with a bottle of Drambue chasers most nights in the O-Club, and later
the sweet-smelling, big, ole juicy Thai-sticks, opium-laced joints, from
Momma-san, I wasn’t feeling much of anything.
Early on I put in requests to do other kind of duty. Run convoys, be
assigned to a Task Force out in the field, ride shotgun on the Med Evac ships.
Each one was turned down. Take the volunteer assignment to ride shotgun on the
Med Evac ships, for example – I went through a couple of hour training and
orientation and on the day I was manifested for my first assignment, a
directive came down from 1st Log Command in Saigon forbidding
Lieutenants from doing such duty because too many of them were being blown
away. Drat – just what I wanted. In the fall, when a new company commander was
assigned, Captain Parker, quite a wonderful man, opposite in every way from the
total asshole of a previous CO, Captain Lauck, assigned me a gun jeep, because
we were in the process of moving our section of he Depot out to a new location
in the valley of Long My about half-way between Qui Nhon on the coast and An
Khe, once of 1st Calvary fame, now the headquarters of the ROK Tiger Division.
Mean little fuckers. They played the war game the way Charlie did. They took no
prisoners, but left mutilated VC and NVA to die horribly. I once saw a
Lieutenant yelling at a troop, then pull out his .45 and blow away his young
brains.
So with my gun jeep fully outfitted with an M-60 machine gun and a PRC-9
radio from which flew my Rose Flag that used to elicit lots of comments from
strac-ass Captains and Majors: “Lieutenant.” “Yes Sir.” “What the fuck is with
the Rose Flag. Are you some kind of pansy?” “No Sir.” “Then why a rose flag,
and what's that plastic rose doing on your jeep.” “Well sir, you see, I subscribe
to the theories of Edward Albee, you know in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’,
the love/hate relationship kind of a thang.” “What the fuck does that have to do with
killing Charles, Lieutenant!” “Well, I suppose nothing, Sir, except I like to
mix my firepower with a little flower power, and besides, with all due respect,
Sir, there’s nothing in the regs against me flying whatever in the fuck kind of flag I
wanna fly on my gun jeep. Sir.”
This is me in my gun jeep eating C-rats in one of the most god-awful places
I’ve ever been, on top of the Mang Yang pass between An Khe and Pleiku, a
burnt, ravaged piece of real estate filled with carcasses of trucks, jeeps,
tanks, helicopters, etc. that hadn’t survived frequent ambushes and fire
fights. I never experienced one in the 30 or so odd times I went through the
Qui Nhon to Pleiku run and on up to Dak To and Kontuum, rather amazing odds.
So, I kept on surviving despite myself. In November my daughter, Rebecca was
born. I found out several days after she was born that the Army had turned down
a request from the Red Cross that I be granted compassionate leave to be with
Kathy who was in a difficult birth process. A couple of weeks later when I
finally got a very fuzzy black and white birth picture of her, very drunk in
the hootch one night, I went in to such a deep dissociative state that I put a
lit cigarette out on my left arm to pull me back into some such semblance of
sanity. My only physical scar from Vietnam I have, except possibly for the scar
on my right-hand from the surgery to remove the dead bones in my right hand
from Kleinbock’s disease, which I am convinced started the night I got blown
out of my jeep and landed in the sewage ditch hard on my right shoulder when
Charlie blew the ammo dump.
I visited the girls in boom-oom villes lots of time, including one time when
Mamma-san hastily hid me and my driver, a good ole boy from Arkansas, in huge, smelly rice baskets one
night when the VC tax collector made a visit. One night I got caught downtown
off-limits during an alert coming out of a whore house drunk about 2:30 in the
a.m. by the MPs, behavior most unbecoming of an Officer and Gentleman, but
quite common nevertheless. The Army kept me on tender hooks for several weeks
determining where or not they were going to court martial me. Instead, I was
summoned to the office of the Battalion Commander, another good, ole boy from
Arkansas, a Lieutenant Colonel, who informed me that instead of court-martialing
me, which would have been most tacky because I was guilty as a mortal sin
against the 6th Commandment, they would not give me the Bronze Star
they were going to recommend me for. Big whoop, but I was most grateful, even
managed to shed a tear, of relief, not the sadness I faked for the good Colonel.
I did have one significant one-night romance with a bargirl my last night in
Hong Kong on R&R. Thanks goodness I met her my last night and not my first
night, else I may very well have been tempted to go AWOL and disappear in the
teeming masses of the Orient, and today be listed among the Missing in Action
or unaccounted for in that long forgotten war as we continue doing it again so
foolishly in Iraq and the Middle East. Here is a poem I wrote about that
magical, soul-mated night:
a love lament
love--even slight and shared through a short space,
a tiny moment--is,
perhaps, a magical potion and precious . . .
she turned her tawny face
and leaning closer
kissed my shoulder
with just the tip
of a delicate finger
we rested
in early evening's dusk light
limbs and spirits joined
quietly anticipating
the next
sensitive explosion
to come
underneath the satin sheets
musing upon
the slow undulations
of the ceiling fan
and the smell of long flowing dark hair
i traced a perfect circle
upon the curvature
of her thigh
later
while walking the deserted streets
we paused to laugh
through our broken words and gestures
at the delicious wonder
of chipped starlight
but tears swiftly followed at daybreak
and neither of us could quite understand
what compelled me to return
like others she had spent time with
to the urgencies of killing
now in my state of duty
surrounded by
strewn earth
incessant confusion
and the sweet stench of burnt flesh
as behind me
the never-ending booms
tear away at the living
scattering bits
of the distant blue ridge line
in lazy haphazard arcs
all i can do
is regretfully bask
in fading memory
and the tenuous worlds
of if only and maybe
Winter, 1968
Qui Nhon, Vietnam
I survived the Tet Offensive of 68, getting sniped at a number of times
delivering supplies to the thousands of refugees in camps north and west of Qui
Nhon, and not dealing with the death and horribly wounding of a number of
children I had befriended at the An Nhon Orphanage while the Battalion Civil
Affairs Officer. And, it came to pass very much against my will that after 366
days (I was there the leap year of ’68) I returned home, flying in to
Washington, D.C.’s National Airport in the late afternoon about three hours
after Martin Luther King had been assassinated, trying to figure out what the
fuck that year in Vietnam had been all about and how come I survived, because I
really did not relish the life of a young married officer with wife I didn’t
even like, much less love, and young child.
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