Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds

by Joe Haldeman

  Later I berated myself for being unprofessional. I’d written one book about Vietnam already, and was working on another, and this guy could have been a valuable resource. War stories.

  Let’s take a look at that story. I’ve related it as accurately as I can, but that was more than ten years ago and of course I didn’t have a tape recorder. I do remember that he used Vietnam slang like strack (meaning “in the best possible condition,” eponymously from “Strategic Army Command”; gook and mamasan are not anachronisms). He probably didn’t tell the tale quite so compactly. He probably didn’t use the line “got to keep it absolutely secret from the gooks,” which I belatedly see is almost perfect trochaic septameter, and the reinforcement by repetition in the last paragraph is suspiciously literary in its artlessness.

  Is that good or bad or neutral? Whenever you read a war story, unless it’s a mechanical transcript, there’s been some imposition of literary sensibility and structure. Sometimes, naturally, what you see is the end result of a series of translations: the soldier himself has refined the story over dozens or hundreds of retellings; the writer restructures it unconsciously to conform to what he or she knows about narrative effectiveness; the writer further changes it to adapt it to the specific needs of the article or book—and then the editor and copy editor get to stir it around as well. (Now hand it back to the soldier and be prepared to wince.)

  This article is about Vietnam war stories and a safari I just made through a jungle of them. For reference, here is my own story, compressed:

  I was drafted soon after graduating from college and landed in Vietnam the month of the first big Tet offensive, on 29 February 1968. There was a lot of nervous joking about that date, since with a twelve-month tour, Army people leave the same day they arrive, a year later. We were sure the Big Computer would strand us in Vietnam until the next leap year.

  But the computer worked, and if our luck had held, all thirteen of us who had been sent to the Fourth Division, Pleiku, would have been back standing in line the next February 28th. As it turned out, there were only three of us left. Ten had been killed or Medivac’ed with injuries serious enough to preclude return. Of us survivors, one was unscratched, one had been shot in the chest and spent several months in Japan, and one, me, had absorbed multiple bullet and shrapnel wounds and had spent five months in various hospitals.

  At that time during the war, they said line troops were suffering about 33% casualties. It seemed like more to us.

  Yet we knew there were outfits to the north and south that had it much worse than we did. Fighting in the sparsely inhabited mountainous jungle terrain of the Central Highlands, we had contact with the enemy only a few times a month. Our adversaries were normally NVA, North Vietnamese regulars, rather than the elsewhere ubiquitous Viet Cong. The NVA weren’t Boy Scouts, but they were less likely to skin you alive and mail your tattoos home to Mother.

  Like anyone, when I left the war zone I was an expert about war in general and Vietnam in particular. I’d only been exposed to actual combat for six months (not counting rocket and mortar attacks, which we dismissed as weather, and two combat assaults on hospitals where I was a resident bystander), but it seemed to me that I knew enough.

  Imagine how it felt to come home and find that I knew nothing at all. I must have been to some other war.

  One of the first magazine articles I remember reading after coming back to the World was something with the title “What Every Vietnam Veteran Knows.” It was a chamber of horrors: rape and murder of women and children, taking ears and worse from dead bodies, burning down villages just to watch the glow.

  Everyone I knew in Vietnam had heard of such things—but no one had actually seen a necklace of ears or Zippo urban renewal or such. My own combat diary comes no closer than this, for the period of March through September, 1968, in the corner of the Fourth Division that my outfit inhabited:

  1. Rape. There was one incident of rape reported; the man was court-martialed, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment. (Realistically, one reason for our sterling record was that we rarely saw any women except when we had passes to go into Pleiku or Ban Me Thuot.)

  2. Villages torched. Never happened. We passed through a number of villes but generally left them standing; we did wreck a bridge once with a tank, but the engineers went back and repaired it. I’m sure it would have been different if the enemy had ever engaged us in town; the ones we fought stuck to the jungle.

  3. Prisoners mistreated. On one occasion a South Vietnamese interpreter started to pistol-whip a prisoner. An American officer disarmed him and sent him away. We rarely held prisoners for more than a couple of hours, though, before sending them back to the rear. And everyone did understand that prisoners would be killed rather than left behind, if we were attacked and had to move. But it never happened.

  4. Killing women and children. We once killed a woman old enough to be a grandmother, but not until after she had killed two of us with a machine gun. Perhaps less justifiably, we killed two children who came snooping around the perimeter after midnight. We’d sent word to the local ville, telling them where we were and to stay away, but the children may not have heard. The tank gunner who blasted them with a canister round felt bad about it but said that, in the darkness, there was no way he could have told they were children. and if it happened again he would do it again. Nobody disagreed.

  5. Grisly stuff. After a battle some of the boys—they were boys—would wander around taking pictures of corpses, and a few of those got their kicks rearranging the bodies and parts of bodies into ghastly amusing postures. Most of us took souvenir weapons and hardware. No ear necklaces, no castrations, no pulling of gold teeth. Once a traumatically decapitated NVA lieutenant’s head became the object of an impromptu game of kickball. Indelicate behavior, to put it mildly, but I think it was more hysteria and whistling-in-the-dark bravado than atrocity. People with a misplaced reverence for corpses might disagree.

  None of these incidents looms very large in my memory, not compared to the mundane daily horror of seeing friends maimed or killed, or the sudden epiphanies of blood in my own woundings. But there’s no new story in the daily grind of suffering and death that’s modern warfare—nothing as interesting as the EC-Comics perversities that facile journalists and moviemakers served up to the public as being the common currency of Vietnam.

  For years, then, I thought there was an unspoken, implicit conspiracy among the press, to selectively show the Vietnam War in the worst light possible. Gradually that attitude evolved to a forgiving but cynical acceptance that the truth does not sell magazines and newspapers; a reporter who described the war the way it actually was, to most of us, wouldn’t have his job for long.

  And eventually, a further evolution, or re-evaluation—admitting that the war I experienced, as murderous and painful as it was, was less brutal and less terrifying than what most combat soldiers went through. That’s hard for me to admit; hard for me to believe, but years of talking to other veterans and reading their books forces that conclusion.

  Some of the books, anyhow; not all. Let’s look at the latest crop:

  Bloods, by Wallace Terry (Random House, 1984). Subtitled “An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans.” A truly harrowing book of interviews, concentrating on grunts, but also interviewing a few officers, pilots, Navy types.

  Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us by Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller (Ballantine, 1984). The final document from a project done by Newsweek magazine, with six reporters interviewing 58 veterans and the surviving families of six who died, reconstructing the war as it happened to one company in 1968–1969.

  Everything We Had by Al Santoli (Ballantine, 1981). Another “oral history” of interviews with 33 soldiers, arranged in rough chronological order, 1962–1975.

  Home Before Morning by Lynda Van Devanter (Warner, 1983). Memoir of an Army nurse, from training through Vietnam to trying to adjust afterwards.

  If I Die in a Combat Zone by
Tim O’Brien (Dell, 1984 reissue). An educated, literate draftee describes basic training and his year in Vietnam, stationed near My Lai a year after the massacre.

  The Killing Zone by Frederick Downs (Berkley, 1983). A vivid, straightforward account of the author’s four months as a platoon leader in heavy combat.

  Nam by Mark Baker (Morrow, 1981). A mosaic of interviews from dozens of anonymous veterans.

  The Van Devanter, O’Brien, and Downs books are more or less traditional war memoirs, a la Goodbye to All That or Guadalcanal Diary, and I recommend them all, though for quite different reasons.

  In Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves’s World War I masterpiece of horror and irony, Graves notes that he made the usual mistake of coming home and writing a novel about his war experiences, which fortunately did not see print. Later he wrote the nonfiction memoir, and it worked.

  Tim O’Brien reversed Graves’s order, eventually writing Going After Cacciato, winner of the National Book Award and arguably the best novel about Vietnam. Almost a decade earlier, though, he produced the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, which at the beginning zigzags effectively from Vietnam to Stateside and back, combat vignettes investing the rituals of basic training with drama and foreboding, and then grinds through the rest of his unwilling year in combat with unsparing accuracy. I read it when it first came out, a few years after returning from Vietnam, and to this day I remember the weird double-vision feeling, being snowbound in Iowa but seeing green and smelling the rank jungle and acid powder smell. A fine book, real.

  Frederick Downs was a lieutenant in the Fourth Division, my old outfit, about a year before I got there. From the evidence in The Killing Zone, I’m sort of glad he wasn’t my lieutenant.

  Not that he was a bad officer; quite the contrary. If a division had six men like him, they could spot the enemy a dozen tanks and John Wayne and still wipe them off the map. But the guy was a bullet magnet. When the shooting starts, you want to be on some other acre.

  The Killing Zone is obviously expanded from Downs’s combat diary (perhaps, like mine, in the form of letters home); there are chapter divisions for convenience, but the narrative, dated, rarely skips more than a day or two of the four months he spent in Vietnam, from getting off the plane to the horrifying moment when a Bouncing Betty mine goes off waist high and shreds his body.

  I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in Vietnam or in the conduct of modern warfare. It’s not particularly well written, and was evidently copy-edited by a victim of progressive education. But Downs was and is the kind of doughty blood-and-guts officer who most people think became extinct sometime between Hiroshima and the Tonkin Gulf Incident, able to be wounded twice the same day and refuse to leave his men; crawl through withering fire to retrieve a shot private, not knowing whether he’s dead or alive (he’s dead)—and if he doesn’t let false modesty get in the way of a good story, neither does he flinch in detailing his errors, even when they resulted in men being needlessly maimed or killed. (Downs’s sequel Aftermath [Berkley, 1985] is a better book, detailing his rehabilitation after Vietnam, but is beyond the scope of this review.)

  Lynda Van Devanter’s Home Before Morning has quite a different viewpoint from the bellicose give-’em-hell attitude of The Killing Zone or the intellectualized but tough horror of If I Die in a Combat Zone. Van Devanter, like Downs, joined the army out of patriotism, and also wound up in the Fourth Division, about two years after Downs. (If all of us keep churning out books, they’ll have to change the name of the division from the Fighting Fourth to the Writing Fourth.) Her patriotism, at least the military side of it, didn’t survive Vietnam. Of all the bloodcurdling books reviewed here, the middle part of Home Before Morning is by far the goriest—some of it told with the grisly detachment of the medical professional (Van Devanter was a nurse assisting surgery) and some of it with the barely contained hysteria of a normal human being almost tapped out, overloaded with death and suffering. Less than half of the book actually takes place in Vietnam, the rest being divided between her late girlhood prior to going there and the slow recovery from the shattering depression she brought back.

  The tenderness and unselfconscious horror make this a unique book about war. If for some reason, like me, you wind up reading several Vietnam books in a row, you must include this one for balance.

  The other four are all collections of interviews, which is a particularly appropriate way of approaching Vietnam.

  For objective value, as historical and anthropological resource, Charlie Company wins hands down. Nam flunks. Bloods and Everything We Had occupy the same middle position, for the same reasons. The criteria are selection procedure and verifiability.

  Nam, which is the most dramatic and most entertaining of the four, is all but useless as a serious document. It’s a montage of first-person accounts subtitled “The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There,” claiming 150 informants. But none of them is identified; there’s no way to check up on Baker’s accuracy. That accuracy is suspect because of the book’s novelistic virtues in terms of language and structure. There is material from many different people here (perhaps fewer than 150), but the unifying intelligence of the single author is too strong.

  Bloods shares this problem to a certain degree. Most of the people talk in short dramatic declarative sentences, with a lot of breathless paragraphing. Opening the book at random, I find:

  “It was Kelly. The chief hospital corpsman. Short, fat guy. The typical hospital corps chief.

  “I said, ‘What are you doing out there?’

  “I had almost shot him.

  “I said, ‘Get out of there. Get out of there.’”

  There’s also a uniformity of adventures and reactions that I find suspect in a book covering the experiences of black veterans who went through the war in many different circumstances of preparation, motivation, assignment, and rank. Of particular interest to me was the record of atrocities. Every ground combat soldier save one spiced up his story with one or more tales of ritual mutilation, torture, murder of civilians, rape—once, the rape of a recently murdered civilian. The only one who didn’t have such stories was a man who served two tours as a platoon leader and company commander. He said explicitly: “The nation heard stories of atrocities…[but] that generalization is unfair to apply to all the people who were there. In two tours I just did not experience any atrocities. Sure, you shot to kill. But personally I did not experience cutting off ears from dead bodies or torturing captured prisoners.” If a person were to reconstruct the Vietnam experience from just this one book, the inescapable conclusion would be that this officer is lying, and atrocity was the order of the day. I don’t think so.

  Not that the other people were necessarily lying. A natural journalistic selection procedure is partly to blame, and partly it’s the psychology of interviewing and being interviewed.

  I’ve interviewed about a dozen colleagues, friendly literary conversations, and have been subjected to a few score newspaper and magazine writers myself, some of whom turned out not to be so friendly. I’ve belatedly learned caution—and having been hunter as well as prey, I’ve learned a few stalking tricks.

  One of the most powerful tools is silence—the neutral nod that says, “Okay, go on. That’s not all, is it?” The informant does want to give you a good story. Let him elaborate.

  There are more manipulative techniques, such as asking leading questions, asking the same question in various ways until you get the answer you want, or the classic have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife structure that assumes the answer to the real question: Did you report atrocities to your company commander, or keep them secret? Techniques that would net the reporter a dry smile or a horselaugh from an experienced politician, or even another writer, could work well on a man who’s never been interviewed before, no matter how intelligent he is—especially when the interview is about something as emotionally charged as his wartime experience.

  This is not to say that Terry or an
y of the others did use these various tools. In none of the books can we tell. We never see the questions; only the answers.

  The other factor, the journalistic selection procedure, is an obvious constraint on material. Terry did not interview twenty random black veterans and then sit down and type out his book. No; he found the ones with interesting stories, interviewed them, and then winnowed through the interviews to find the twenty best. What other procedure could a writer use?

  To me the most valuable aspect of Bloods is its record of racial tensions and injustice in Vietnam. Most of the combat soldiers note that racial differences disappear among “line” troops; one of them even had a KKK good-ole-boy as his best friend. None of them fails to notice, though, that there is a disproportionate number of black people around, and an awful lot of them being killed. Blacks accounted for 23% of American combat deaths, while comprising only 11% of young American males. The word for that is genaesthenia: the selective weakening of a race. The army didn’t do it as a matter of policy, which in a way is a pity, because policy can be changed. The social forces that resulted in the disproportion are still with us, and lately we seem to be taking two steps backward for every step forward. So when the American war machine slides toward its next target, Central America or the Middle East or Trinidad, too much of the blood that greases it will be the blood of black men and boys.

  The army told us that for every one combat soldier in Vietnam there were nine or ten support troops—“clerks and jerks,” we called them in ironic envy—but you see very few interviews with that large majority. A book called Nothing Happened: An Oral History of Cooks and Clerks in Vietnam wouldn’t sell many copies. But the Platonic-ideal Vietnam interview book, at least the one with maximum value as an anthropological document, would be topheavy with stories from rear echelon people, and those stories might not be dull. My platoon’s perception of base-camp commandos was that they were a lot crazier than we were: more narcotics, more “attitude” problems, more likely to flip out—possibly because they had to sit through the rocket and mortar attacks and live with the threat (rarely enough realized) of human-wave ground attack, without ever being able to do anything about it. We could at least shoot back; we could retreat, we could look forward to the temporary relative safety of a fire base or base camp. They had one year of being passive targets.