Drafted

by Andrew Atherton

  Relative to infantry units, we have few combat casualties. Those that occur at night are from attacks on the base camp. Those that occur during the day are from snipers and booby traps at construction sites on the road. We’ve had a few “holy shit” exceptions to the rule, including a booby trap planted in one of our six-hole shitters—more about that in a minute.

  While we don’t have as many combat casualties as infantry units do, we have construction accidents infantry units don’t have. Oh, and we have our share of meaningless, stupid deaths common to all military units in a combat zone.

  But regardless of how our men die, we always, in our letters of condolence, describe a dead GI as having died in the performance of his duty, no matter how remote from duty his death might be, like the aforementioned classic of walking into a known minefield to take a leak. Any idiot who did that in our unit, we’d give him a Purple Heart. Not for stupidity, but for death caused by enemy action—the planted enemy land mine—and we wouldn’t mention that the minefield was known or marked. Here’s a real-life example of what I’m talking about.

  One of our guys got killed by a boom-boom girl. We gave him a Purple Heart for death by enemy action “while investigating hostile activity in a hooch near his work site.” The whore didi-maued out a back window, but we know how it happened because his work buddies knew why he went in there and they went after him when he didn’t come out. They found him with his pants down and his throat slit. The guy’s buddies won’t expose our “cover-up” because they liked the guy and they hope the same kindness will be shown to their families, too, if needed.

  We typed our worst batch of condolence letters soon after I joined the battalion. It was one of those “holy shit” incidents. Four men were killed and three injured by a booby trap planted in Bravo Company’s six-hole shitter located near one of Bravo’s pissers. The bomb went off one evening after supper. Two of the injured men were standing near the pisser. The bomb was a quart-sized orange juice can filled with plastic explosive that was planted and triggered under the crapping hole opposite the door to the shitter, a hole seldom used unless most holes are already occupied. This location for the booby trap provided reasonable assurance that the bomb would not go off until after supper when the crapper was in maximum use and the VC bitch who planted the bomb would be safely off the base camp with all the other Vietnamese day workers.

  We think we know how the device was triggered. But first a few words about shitters and pissers.

  A shitter (some guys call it a “crapper”) is not equipped to handle a lot of liquid, so a soldier on a base camp is supposed to piss, when at all convenient, in a pisser, not a shitter. A pisser is a fifty-five gallon steel drum open at both ends and buried vertically within two or three inches of its top edge. Water is then poured in the barrel and topped off with several inches of oil. Streams of urine sink through the floating oil and gradually soak, with the water, into the soil below. Each pisser is surrounded, for privacy, by shoulder-high corrugated galvanized sheet-steel with an overlapping entry way or a spring-hinged door.

  The holes in the battalion’s six-hole shitters are about four feet off the ground. Steps lead up to a door somewhere in the middle of the front wall of a six-hole shitter. Between the waist-high front wall and the six-hole seat-box there’s a narrow walkway that runs the length of the building. The waist-high front wall allows for a little privacy, and comfort level is increased by a mosquito screen that runs from the waist-high wall up to the roof. Guys sitting in the crapper can look through the screen and see anybody in the area, but people in the area can’t easily see the seated guys through the screen. So you can read and relieve yourself at your leisure, with a little privacy, and without too many mosquitoes except for those pesky little devils who come up the back way and bite you in the ass.

  Shitter buildings are fully enclosed except in back, below the crapping holes, where cut-off ends of fifty-five gallon drums, one for each hole, collect droppings. Butt cheeks and balls can be seen pooching down through the crapping holes by mama-sans who, once a day, bend over and look up at each crapper hole to make sure it’s not occupied before using long steel hooks to pull out full barrel ends and replace them with empty ones. The mama-sans haul the full barrel ends on a flatbed wagon to a far corner of an equipment yard, at the edge of the base camp, and burn the shit with kerosene.

  A conscientious practice for a GI about to take a shit during the day (when the mama-sans are on the base camp) is to look through his selected crapping hole to ensure a mama-san isn’t in the process of removing the shit can. If he sees a mama-san through the hole looking up or pulling out a full can, as sometimes happens, the man uses another hole or, if he’s a mean bastard, he calls hello and turns around and does his business.

  The center holes are never used during the day because the door, when opened, exposes the bare legs and pants-at-the-ankles of any man sitting there. But all six holes are occupied many evenings after our men come in from a hard day’s work, eat a big supper, and go for a leisurely crap.

  The bomb was set off, or so we believe, by three or four wires stretched close together and roughly parallel across a shit can under one of the center holes. Those wires were attached to a triggering device on the orange juice can that was positioned out of sight under the crapper’s walkway. The wires—not easily seen in the shadows—were jerked by crap falling from a height of four feet. That’s what triggered the bomb.

  I talked to a man who was in the shithouse, seated at the end, at the time of the explosion. He miraculously escaped serious injury. He told me, months later when he could hear again, that after the explosion he felt a thick silence (probably from damaged eardrums and the residual tactile effects of blast pressure). And as he lay with his pants around his ankles amidst the smoke and scattered boards and bodies in this thick molasses silence, he saw the man next to him look in astonishment at scattered pieces of himself before he died.

  After the injured were medevaced and driven to hospital units, men from other companies went over to help Bravo clean up the mess. They burned what was left of the shitter and built a new one.

  The colonel wrote up a letter of condolence for the four families of the men who were killed. But when the head clerk got the handwritten draft, the rest of us agreed it needed revision. The colonel was so outraged he couldn’t keep his language in check. He alluded to the circumstances of the deaths in ways that would prompt readers to ask too many questions, and this was one story we definitely didn’t want the families of those men to hear. So the head clerk typed up another version that included our recommended changes, most of which the colonel accepted.

  The final letter included sentences like the one I mentioned earlier: “Specialist Jones died proudly serving in America’s military struggle against communism and for the preservation of freedom for the South Vietnamese people and the citizens of the United States of America.” I’d like to put a footnote of apology on every letter of that kind I type, but I also understand the need for boilerplate phrases that honor the dead while hiding the details that no sane family wants to know.

  We clerks typed that bullshit over and over. We had to produce one original and four duplicates for each of the four letters. That meant each letter had to be typed perfectly two times, once with two carbons and once with one carbon, since four sheets of carbon paper and four sheets of typing paper under a master sheet won’t stay aligned when the typewriter’s platen rolls up the paper for the next line of type.

  Typing those condolence letters was tedious and emotionally exhausting. Of course, that’s true for all condolence letters. I know grieving family members will hold and read the very piece of paper I’m typing and rolling out of the typewriter, so I’m fully sympathetic to the fact that condolence letters can’t have a single mistake or white-carbon correction on the original.

  And since I’m the awards clerk, I was responsible for typing three Purple Heart recommendations for the surviving injured men. As I mentioned earl
ier, Purple Hearts for our dead GIs would be awarded and sent to the families by higher headquarters.

  Even though I understand the need to shield family members from the truth, I was outraged by the obfuscating dishonesty of the condolence letters and I was incensed by the ludicrous nature of the Purple Heart recommendations. Giving a medal to a soldier for being wounded or killed while taking a crap is an affront to the man’s dignity. That’s why we fudged the details in the condolence letters. How could a grieving parent, wife, brother or sister, tell friends something like that about the man they loved? Or the guy’s kids? It’s not something any man would want them to know. There’s no good way to tell a man’s family he was blown up while taking a leisurely shit and reading a magazine.

  I’m not sure what it was—nerves? rage?—but I’d screw up the typing of those letters and recommendations on my Remington Manual Typewriter time after time. I’d get close to the end of a perfectly typed letter, and then, in the last line or in the colonel’s signature block, I’d fuck it up again. Or I’d forget to wipe the damned sweat off my hands and forearms—we work in the tropics without air conditioners, so I keep a rag in my desk for that little chore—and I’d leave a sweaty thumb print on the original or drip sweat off my forearm onto the letter when I laid the letter on the desk to separate out the carbons.

  The mama-san everybody thought set the booby trap was caught three days after the explosion. An officer from Charlie Company, Lieutenant Archie Armstrong—a weasel of a man with thin, hairless arms and thin fingers with long nails—told three of us clerks about the captured mama-san a week later when he made an unusual visit to our hooch with a bottle of Jack Daniels.

  Since officers seldom fraternize with the troops, the whole situation was odd and made us uncomfortable. We figured he wanted to do some bragging and wanted us enlisted men to boost him up and be in awe of what he helped to do. What can I say? He’s an asshole. Anyway, we laid around on our cots, drank his booze and listened. He didn’t spare any details, and the drunker he got, the more he talked.

  Archie said he’d gone over to Bravo Company’s headquarters office to talk with Captain Larson about the explosion in Bravo's shit house when Colonel Hackett charged in. Hackett, who has deep-set dark eyes and a jutting lower jaw that make him formidable when angry, told them the mama-san responsible for the booby trap had been caught on a road we were repairing near Tay Ninh. Two men from Bravo Company recognized her and chased her down the road and across a field. Hackett said she was being held in battalion headquarters and that he was taking her on a chopper ride. He poked his finger at Larson and said he needed to come along and do his duty for the men he’d lost.

  Then Hackett looked at Archie as though he’d just noticed Archie was in the room. Hackett said Archie should come along because he might be needed. Archie said okay and away they went.

  Hackett was pumped, Archie said. The whole time they were getting Mama-san out of the office and into the jeep, and then on the way to the chopper, he kept talking about justice being served. But Larson said nothing. He kept looking at Mama-san and frowning, shaking his head.

  Archie didn’t know why, but Hackett didn’t have Mama-san tied up or shackled, so when they arrived at the air field, she pushed away and refused to get on the chopper. She kept saying, “Mama-san no go, Mama-san no go.”

  Hackett and Archie gave their M16s to Larson and they tried picking up Mama-san to throw her through the Huey’s open side door. But she wiggled and squirmed and rolled and grabbed at their shirts or anything she could get her hands on to keep from being thrown in that chopper.

  Finally, Hackett pulled away from the struggle with Mama-san and she fell to the ground. He pulled his .45 semi-automatic from his holster, locked and loaded, and aimed it at her chest.

  “You bitch, you fight us one more second and I’ll blow a hole the size of my fist between your fucking tits. Now climb on that chopper or so help me God I’ll kill you right now.”

  Mama-san remained on the ground staring at Hackett. Silent. Unmoving.

  “Larson! Archie! Pick this bitch up and throw her on the chopper. Punch her in the face if you have to. Break her jaw.”

  Captain Larson was trembling. His thin lips, sensitive eyes, and steel-rimmed spectacles were those of a frightened librarian. Hackett looked at him. “What the fuck’s wrong with you? Help Archie! Larson?” But Larson was focused on Archie.

  Archie had pulled Mama-san to her feet and slugged her, knocking her to the ground. He dragged the limp and dazed sixty-pound woman to the chopper. Hackett went over and helped Archie pick her up and roll her through the open side door of the Huey. They pushed her to the middle of the floor in front of the four canvas seats attached to the motor housing.

  Hackett and Archie retrieved their M16s from Larson and waited for Larson to hop on the chopper. Then they followed him and strapped themselves in. Mama-san was still dazed and lying on the floor in front of them. Hackett yelled at the pilot to take off, and the chopper started its run and lifted into the sky.

  Once they were in the air, Archie said he was positive Hackett was going to dump Mama-san out one of the open side doors of the Huey. Hackett kept kicking her, from his belted seat, toward one open door and then the other open door as she rolled about, trying to get oriented. He yelled at her, calling her a goddamned murdering bitch who ought to suck air. But throwing her out would have been difficult, even dangerous, because she had fought them like a wild cat, and she could take one of them over the edge with her.

  As it turned out, Hackett had already talked to the pilot about where to go. The pilot set the chopper down in a field not far from Cu Chi. Hackett jumped out of the chopper and turned around and yelled at Larson.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  But Hackett didn’t wait for Larson to reply. He walked away from the chopper, looking here and there, acting as though things were taking place behind him in accord with his implied order. But Archie, Larson, and the Mama-san stayed put. Archie said he lost sight of Hackett when Hackett walked back behind the chopper’s tail rotor.

  Mama-san couldn’t understand or speak English very well, but she understood the situation. Her face was smeared with dirt and tears, and a red-veined lump had swelled from her nose and eye to her left ear. Her eye was swelling shut.

  She locked her arms around Larson’s leg and rocked back and forth. She cried out above the whump-whump-whump of the chopper blades and roar of the motor: “Big GI no hurt Mama-san! No hurt Mama-san!” Then, “Big GI fuck Mama-san? You like fuck Mama-san!”

  She yelled that over and over. Archie said her voice started cracking and went all high and squeaky. Within moments her voice was gone, or the chopper drowned out whatever voice she had left.

  But here’s the kicker, Archie said. The moment Hackett disappeared behind the Huey, Mama-san started caressing Larson between his legs. Larson pushed her hand away, but Mama-san didn’t let up.

  Archie said it was the damnedest thing he ever saw. He figured Larson had been humping Mama-san since he’d arrived incountry.

  Moments later, when Hackett came back from behind the chopper, he saw what Mama-san was doing. His lips pulled back from clenched teeth and he leaned through the door of the chopper and hit her on the head with the butt of his M16. She rolled on the floor moaning, holding both hands to her head.

  Hackett yelled at Larson. “So what’s it gonna be?”

  Larson yelled back, “I’m not sure, Sir.”

  “What the fuck do you mean you’re not sure?”

  “I know what I want to do, Sir, but I’m not easy about it.”

  “You think you’re going to let this VC bitch go?”

  “But how can we be sure Mama-san did it?”

  “What kind of candy-ass are you?” Hackett was twisting and turning with rage. “Get your fucking ass out here and do what you need to do for the honor of your men!”

  Larson didn’t move. Archie said Larson’s hands were porcelain white from gr
ipping his M16. His eyes were bugging out at Hackett.

  Hackett turned and walked straight away from the chopper’s open door. He looked up through the whirling chopper blades and held his hands out, palms up, as if beseeching God. Then he did an about-face and stormed back to the chopper.

  Larson yelled as Hackett approached. “We can’t know she’s the mama-san who did it!”

  “She’s the only goddamned Vietnamese day worker assigned to Bravo Company’s shit house who didn’t show up the day after the explosion or any day since, you fucking jackass! And that’s by your own goddamned account.” Hackett was going hoarse from all the yelling.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, man, this woman murdered four of your men and sent three young boys out on medevac! You have responsibility to seek justice for dead men, butchered men, men who trusted you as their officer. God damn it, Larson, do something about it!”

  Hackett’s face had turned purple.

  Larson didn’t move. Mama-san didn’t move. All they heard, said Archie, was the whump-whump-whump of the rotor blades and the roar of the chopper’s motor.

  Suddenly Hackett lunged and grabbed Mama-san’s ankle and yanked her off the chopper. She slashed her arm on the edge of the floor and thudded her head on the chopper’s runner.

  Hackett kicked her. “Get up. Stand up.”

  He locked and loaded his M16.

  “Get up you fucking VC cunt! Start running!”

  Mama-san got up and stood shaking within arm’s length of Hackett. Her head was bloody and her arm was bleeding. She wasn’t crying anymore. Her one open eye was round with fear. The bottom of her dress was wet, but not with blood.

  Hackett palm punched her shoulder, and her arms swung like a soggy rag doll. Hackett pointed across the field. “Run, you cocksucking VC!”

  Mama-san jumped past Hackett, stumbled, caught herself, and ran.