Drafted

by Andrew Atherton

  Archie said she got no more than twenty feet away when Hackett shot from the hip and emptied a full clip on automatic that started in her ass, climbed up her back, and blew open her head. Hackett reloaded, walked up to the body, and pulped her with another clip.

  Larson unbuckled and jumped out the other side of the chopper and threw up.

  ****

  Back in the hooch, we clerks waited for Archie to continue his story, but he stopped and looked at the floor. He reached for the bottle of Jack Daniels, poured himself a quarter tumbler of whiskey, and slowly recapped the empty bottle. He appeared to be reflecting on something. Then he chugged the booze in one swallow as though it were beer.

  I grimaced. “You okay, Archie?”

  “Yeah, I’m … ah….” He waved his hand as though I were far away. “Woozy, that’s all.”

  “You talk to Larson since this happened?”

  “Nope. Larson won’t … talk. He’s history around … anyway. He’ll be … he’ll … shhhhipp off soon as….”

  I waited for Archie to collect his thoughts. Then I asked, “You think Mama-san planted the booby-trap?”

  “Huh? Wha…?”

  “You think she really did it? Maybe another mama-san did it and your mama-san knew about it and didn’t show up the next day because she knew how the guys might react. Maybe the real VC is still pulling shit cans from Bravo Company’s new shitter.”

  “I … ah … humm.” Archie shook his head to clear his eyes and his confusion over his inability to read his watch. Finally he looked up.

  “The mama-san? Fuck … I dohnn know.” His tongue and lips weren’t working right. “Good sssstory for the kids back home, though.”

  Archie got up and staggered out the hooch door. He stumbled into the waist-high wall of sandbags and fell to the ground in a drunken stupor.

  We decided to let him sleep it off.

  “He’ll be okay out there.”

  “Yeah, bring him in the hooch and he’ll throw up on our cots.”

  After Archie collapsed outside there wasn’t much of anything we wanted to talk about. I walked to my bunk and lay down with my boots on and stared at the tin roof overhead. The other men went to their bunks, too. One man turned off the overhead lights at our end of the hooch, so all the hooch lights were off.

  As soon as the lights went out I knew I’d had too much to drink. I needed light to keep my head from spinning.

  I got up, staggered in the dark to the screen door, and stepped outside.

  The moonlight was blue and the air chilly. I looked up at the sky. I quickly stepped back, unsteady, and walked to the end of the hooch and threw up.

  I sat on the sandbags awhile. How long I don’t know.

  At some point I must have scooted down between the hooch and the sandbags and fallen asleep. That’s where I found myself in the morning. Archie was gone.

  ****

  Saturday, Mar. 8, 1969 - Cu Chi Base Camp

  Dear Janice:

  Happy Birthday! I forgot until this morning that today is your birthday. Sorry. But I’ll make it up to you with presents fit for a queen! Let me explain.

  There’s a giant PX commissary on the base camp and they sell everything a soldier could possibly want. Jim Beam. Crown Royal. Wild Turkey. Smirnoff. Beefeater. All for the equivalent of four dollars a quart. Not a fifth. A quart!

  Har har, me matey, and a wee bit of rum, too!

  But seriously, they have toothpaste, deodorant, bars of soap, shaving lotion, all basic-needs stuff I can buy with my monthly pay … which comes in Military Payment Certificates (MPC) so the VC and NVA don’t acquire American greenbacks for use on the international black market.

  That reminds me. When I signed up for my pay, after getting assigned to the 182nd Engineer Battalion, I specified that half my month’s pay be automatically sent home to you. If we save all of it while I’m over here, we should have enough to buy a used car for me and you can use your Mustang for whatever you want.

  Now back to your birthday presents.

  The PX has a mail-order catalog in which high-quality merchandise is half-price or less with free shipping. Charges are deducted from my pay here in Vietnam. So I’ll order for delivery to you an eight-place set of Noritake China (black rimmed white porcelain with gold edges), eight gold-rimmed lead-glass water goblets, a moonstone bracelet, and four yards of heavy silk cloth of shimmering green and gold for a sexy, sleeveless, sheath dress. I’ll let you know when you can start looking for the Parcel Post truck.

  You asked about my sleeping quarters. We call it a hooch. It’s a wood-frame building with a galvanized tin roof, a cement floor, and it’s divided by interior plywood walls into two-man rooms. Each room has enough space for two cots, two footlockers, and two upright steel lockers. One end of the room is the outside hooch wall, and the other end opens to the hooch’s center walkway. Most guys hang bead curtains across those openings for additional privacy.

  Love, Andrew

  BRONZE STARS & PURPLE HEARTS

  Real heroes deserve more than medals. They deserve open-mouthed wonder and quiet, heartfelt thanks and praise. There’s no meaningful comparison between a medal and what some of these men do. But standing them in front of a formation and pinning a medal on their chests is what we have to give them.

  Bronze Stars. Purple Hearts. Army Commendation Medals. Those are the most common medals we award our men. Sometimes I have stacks of them on my desk waiting for our official awards ceremonies. You’d think the ceremonies—the most revered ceremonies of all time, honoring war heroes—would be the high point of my work, but they’re not. For me, they’re a time of deep embarrassment.

  The medals we hand out are cheap alloy and plastic hanging on a ribbon with a safety pin on the back. It isn’t that the medals should be made better or the metal should be more expensive or the ribbon of higher quality. It’s that there’s something ludicrous—inherently absurd—about giving a man a little medal for having his leg blown off or risking his life for his buddies or killing an exceptional number of VC while putting his life in great danger.

  The ceremonies are phony, too. More than once I’ve stood next to the colonel in front of rows of men standing at attention and looked down at my awards list and the medals I’m holding to make sure I’m handing the colonel the right medal for the right man—he seldom knows who’s getting what—and my helmet slides down my sweaty forehead. I always catch it with the hand that’s holding the awards list and push the helmet back on my head, but I have visions of it falling and rolling between the colonel and the winner of a Bronze Star for Valor.

  And the men standing in formation? They’re hot, sweaty, and bored out of their fucking minds. In the opinion of most draftees, an award is like a little gold stick-um star on the foreheads of chumps who’ve risked their lives in a war we can’t win, can’t manage, and shouldn’t have entered in the first place. That might be irritating or upsetting for some people to hear, but it’s how most of the men in our battalion see these medals—unless they’re awarded one.

  As for myself, even if I set aside my low opinion of this ridiculous war, I’m still ambivalent about these medals. I don’t see how these cheap things can represent what heroes do. So the bottom line of my rant is that I’m proud to do my job to the best of my ability and help get meaningless medals for true heroes.

  The guy who did this job before I got here didn’t care at all about the work he did. He had no filing or tracking system whatsoever. When I first arrived, all I had to work with was a disorganized pile of carbon copies of the original award recommendations he forwarded to higher headquarters. I found the pile in one of my desk drawers.

  The problem wasn’t only that the copies were disorganized. The guy left no indication of their current status: pending, rejected, or approved. Some copies had big X’s scrawled on them and some did not. Some had little checks at the top and some did not. Some were dated recently, some almost a year ago. He apparently discarded the original copies t
hat came back from higher headquarters with “approved” or “rejected” checked in the appropriate boxes. Why discard them? I guess because they were rejected (so why keep them?), or, they were approved and came with the medals requested (so, again, why keep them?).

  I don’t know how he got away with it.

  On the third day I worked in S-1, Colonel Hackett came out of his office early in the morning, walked over to my desk, and stood looking at me. I hesitated a moment, then I jumped up, knocking over my chair, and stood at attention.

  “Yes, Sir?”

  “How many awards we got pending, young man?” Hackett was so close he was looking at the pores on my nose.

  “I don’t know, Sir, but I’ll—”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” His jutting jaw and dark eyes were fearsome.

  “I mean—”

  “Isn’t that your job?”

  “Yes Sir, but the filing system is screwed up, and it’ll—”

  “Then unscrew it. I want that information after lunch.”

  I worked through the morning and my lunch break frantically studying a year’s worth of paperwork, trying to detect some kind of sorting system. I was interrupted every few minutes when I had to answer one of three phones on my desk—an assignment the other clerks gave me as a “learn-the-ropes” job. They had the same phones on their desks, and they answered a phone only when two calls came in at the same time. I scrambled for information, misdirected phone calls, and randomly punched buttons. I was scared out of my wits. Any problems created by my confused phone work were directly attributable to me, of course, and by the end of the day I’d been reamed a new asshole by several sergeants and a couple officers. I also finished a priority typing assignment for Major Roberts given to me by Adjutant Harris. I didn’t dare ask the other clerks for help during my first week on the job for fear of creating suspicion I was trying for a short-cut to paying my dues.

  After a couple of hours sorting through the pile of award recommendations, I finally concluded there was no way to know, judging from the papers in my desk, how many were pending. I asked Adjutant Harris about it. He said the only award records S-1 had should be in my desk. The personnel office had records, he went on to say, both of submitted recommendations and received awards, scattered throughout the personnel files. But locating them would entail a week’s worth of searching, and Chief Warrant Officer Prescott, the man in charge of personnel—an all business and no-nonsense guy—would never allow it. Not for me, anyway. A newbie.

  I had no choice but to call the awards office in Group Headquarters at Long Binh and find out from them how many awards were pending for our battalion, and assume that neither Roberts nor Hackett were sitting on award recommendations not yet sent to higher headquarters.

  The sergeant in the awards office at Group Headquarters expressed contempt for my “newbie ignorance”—he thoroughly rattled me—but he gave me what I thought was sufficient information to satisfy Hackett. I typed it on a piece of paper and had it ready to hand Hackett when he walked in the door.

  But Hackett didn’t return to the office after lunch or later in the afternoon.

  Just before quitting time at 6:00 p.m., David Connors, S-1’s legal clerk, told me that Hackett had scheduled the afternoon for inspecting road construction sites and had no intention of returning to the office any time after lunch. So I placed the memo on Hackett’s desk.

  He never mentioned it.

  But the problem wasn’t solved. The sergeant at Group Headquarters only gave me the number of awards still pending. I was so nervous and intimidated I forgot to ask him the names of the men and the medals for which they’d been recommended.

  The next day I told Adjutant Harris about the mistake I’d made and asked him what I should do about it. He said I had no choice but to call Group Headquarters again and get the missing information.

  The sarcasm and verbal abuse I took during that second phone call were withering.

  After the reaming I got that first week, I swore I would never be caught without complete and correct information again. So I created a kickass filing system using one file drawer in my desk and one wooden card catalog on top of my desk.

  The file drawer holds the carbon copies of award recommendations, each in its own manila folder, filed alphabetically by the man’s last name.

  The card catalog has five sections corresponding to each ascending stage in the award assessment process: (1) Major; (2) Colonel; (3) Higher Headquarters; (4) Approved; and (5) Rejected. Each of those sections is subdivided into medal titles: Army Commendation Medal, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, etc. I make a 3x5 card for each man recommended for a medal and file it in the appropriate medal subdivision starting in the major’s section. If and when the major approves it, I move it forward to the appropriate subdivision of the colonel’s section—and so on—as the assessment process proceeds. Using this system I can easily track and count every award recommendation throughout the assessment process.

  After two months on the job, Hackett ordered me to start screening award recommendations. That kind of pre-judging for rejects ordinarily should have been done by an awards officer or NCO, but S-1 didn’t have one because we were understaffed.

  So Hackett called me into his office one day and upbraided me for passing on to Roberts and himself award recommendations he said I “damn well knew” were poorly written or cited actions inappropriate for the medal being recommended. He said he wanted me to bounce those recommendations back to the recommending officer or NCO with suggestions for improvement.

  Thanks a lot.

  A SPC-4 clerk needs United Nations level diplomatic skills to tell officers and NCOs they don’t write well, or that the award candidate’s actions, described in the recommendation, aren’t worth a medal.

  But that’s what I’ve been doing. Following Hackett’s guidelines, I’ve been screening and sometimes editing every award recommendation received by our office. I reject, with explanatory notes and suggestions for improvement, award recommendations that fail minimum standards of coherent writing or that fail minimum standards of meritorious action (as specified by Hackett and Army REGS criteria). If I have doubts about a submitted recommendation, I check with Hackett or Roberts. Any officer or NCO can bypass me and submit an award recommendation directly to Roberts or Hackett, but they have to justify to Hackett why I’m being bypassed.

  It takes a lot of time writing a diplomatic explanation for a recommendation’s rejection and then suggestions for improvement. I think I’m getting better at it. One of my standard openings has become, “Thank you for your concern that (man's name) be recognized for his (bravery / performance). Unfortunately, for this recommendation to be approved, we need … Perhaps when you resubmit it, you might….”

  All the officers and NCOs in the battalion know what I’m doing and many of them deeply resent it. I’ve been told my rejections have ignited fury in some of our seasoned sergeants and officers that should frighten the hell out of me. It’s a wonder I haven’t had the crap kicked out of me behind the shitters. Hackett’s support of my editorial decisions is my only protection.

  After being awards clerk for awhile and returning and editing quite a few award recommendations, I typed up a list of adjectives that headquarters officers like to see in award recommendations, words like outstanding, unrelenting, and extreme diligence. I titled the list Our Dictionary of Army Superlatives. Believe it or not, adding a handful of grandiose superlatives increases the number of approved awards.

  Before I realized the importance of superlatives to the awards granting process, Roberts and Hackett were bouncing back award recommendations on which they’d written, “More outstandings!” or “Punch up the adjectives!” When I told the submitting officers and NCOs about it and we added superlatives to a handful of rejected recommendations, they were approved all the way up the line. No other wording was changed.

  So now I give Our Dictionary of Army Superlatives to officers and NCOs who are writing up re
commendations. It’s a just single page I staple to an additional page of suggestions for writing vivid and detailed descriptions of what a soldier did to merit a medal. The superlatives don’t add any content to good descriptions—in fact they clutter them with bloated verbiage—but that’s what the top brass want so that’s what we give them.

  Occasionally I receive a poorly written award recommendation for a cited action that appears to have merit. When that happens, I get approval to interview the recommended medal recipient and I try to write a better account of the guy’s actions. Then I submit my edited version of the recommendation back to the initiating officer or NCO for his approval.

  Every three weeks—give or take a few days—our courier returns from Long Binh with a canvas bag full of medals. Often I have on my desk ten or even a dozen Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts, and Army Commendation Medals. Each medal comes in its own presentation box with an accompanying green plastic folder that contains an award citation suitable for framing. I double-check each citation for correct spelling of the man’s name, and then I double-check each medal to make sure the safety pin in back is functional and all the parts are intact and properly constructed.

  One time a Bronze Star arrived with one of its points missing. Occasionally the ribbons the medals hang from are frayed or creased. One of the Purple Hearts had its purple plastic chipped. When I discover flawed medals like that, we delay the ceremony for those awards, ship them back, and wait for a new batch.

  When we award Purple Hearts in our ceremonies, reaction among the ranks is sometimes unpleasant because they don’t know the criteria for that award. When draftees arrive incountry, they think a man has to be killed or gut-shot, or lose an arm or a leg to get a Purple Heart, but that’s not true. Any injury that requires medical treatment and that results from interaction with the enemy under combat conditions can earn a man a Purple Heart. Concussions and hearing loss can merit Purple Hearts. A lightly injured man can return from the dispensary the same day, or from the camp hospital within a day or two, bandages showing and sometimes not, and weeks later have a Purple Heart pinned on his chest while his buddies are smirking at the rear of the formation. Purple Hearts for superficial wounds in the ass are classic for generating smirks in formation and hilarity back at the hooch. Regardless, some guys still want those Purple Hearts. Why, you ask?