Drafted

by Andrew Atherton

  Superficial wound or not, medals are no laughing matter to a lifer. For lifers, a medal is a big deal. ‘Lifer’ is a prejudicial term of contempt, when used by draftees, for any man who makes a career out of service in the military. Lifers hope for at least one medal during their tour in Vietnam because lifers returning from Vietnam without a Purple Heart or a medal for outstanding service or achievement, if not for valor, are assumed to be screw-ups and low achievers, and their chances for advancement are sharply reduced. Their hope of advancement is so strong that some lifers use the buddy system to help each other get medals. And since their claims are often difficult and awkward to confirm, they get their medals almost every time.

  The Army Commendation Medal is a favorite for lifers. ACMs are given for valor or for service. It was originally intended to be a serious award. Now it’s nothing special at all—at least not in our battalion. All our clerks, NCOs, and officers are given ACMs for service unless they have bad work records or they’ve been court-martialed. We hand out ACMs like candy to kindergartners on Halloween. So if a man is awarded an ACM for an act of genuine valor or legitimate achievement, it means very little, except to lifers who use it as a stepping stone to promotion.

  And then there’s the Bronze Star for Meritorious Service. We hand those out, too. We’re not talking about valor or heroics, but excellent work. Maybe I’m not sufficiently acquainted with the history of Army medals, and I guess I’m not, but in any account of warfare, or in any literature of any kind I’ve ever read that includes a discussion of awards granted to soldiers, a Bronze Star is spoken of with reverence and respect as a medal for bravery and heroism, not excellent paperwork or superior organizational achievement. We can canvas a thousand people in any western city in the world and ask them what merits a Bronze Star and they’ll say, unless they’re in the military and aware of the awards system, that it must be something brave and heroic. Period.

  The thing that really irritates me is that whatever recognition we can give a man who has done something genuinely and marvelously heroic, and granted I’ve already said that a little brass star strikes me as ludicrously inadequate, but if that’s the system of recognition we’re using, then we should not debase and cheapen that recognition by also giving it for excellent planning or superior office work.

  When I visited Long Binh not long ago for a briefing on award application procedures, I met an awards clerk from another unit who told me they give a Bronze Star for Meritorious Service to every officer who DEROSs from their battalion. I’d think a Certificate of Merit—something they can hang on a wall—would have greater legitimacy then a Bronze Star for good work. You’d have to explain your Bronze Star every time a civilian asked about it.

  “Oh!” they’d exclaim after hearing your explanation. They’d pooch out their lips and raise their eyebrows, and say, “I guess that’s a good reason for receiving a Bronze Star, too. I didn’t know you could get one for that.”

  Pretty soon you’d give up explaining it and let people come to their own conclusions.

  “Hey, I heard you got a Bronze Star in ’Nam! Wow. What’s it for?”

  “Nah. I can’t talk about it. Know what I mean?”

  Even I’ve been recommended for a medal! An Army Commendation Medal for Service. I’ll probably receive it at the end of my tour. The only thing I can say for myself is that I neither submitted nor processed the recommendation. That was the work of Command Sergeant Major Mollema.

  Mollema is short and soft-spoken. Thin lips. A little pudgy. Buttery-brown skin. I think he’s Pilipino. He always carries a tube of lip balm in his pocket. He pulls it out, uncaps it, and swipes his lips with a left-right movement a hundred times a day, even when he’s talking. I like him. He’s a decent lifer. He was so pleased when he told us he was recommending all the S-1 clerks for ACMs that I couldn’t show him disrespect by telling him what I thought about the idea. The other guys thought it was “cool.”

  The standard citation that comes with every Army Commendation Medal for Service says the soldier “distinguished himself by exceptionally meritorious service,” and goes on to say:

  …he astutely surmounted extremely adverse conditions to obtain consistently superior results. Through diligence and determination he invariably accomplished every task with dispatch and efficiency. His unrelenting loyalty, initiative, and perseverance brought him wide acclaim and inspired others to strive for maximum achievement. Selflessly working long and arduous hours, he has contributed significantly to the success of the allied effort.

  Yep, that’s me! And if that doesn’t prove the awards system is debased, here’s something that will, at least for our battalion.

  Not long ago Adjutant Harris was under pressure to get more awards granted for the men in our battalion. So he had me type up the following memo and send it for distribution to all our officers and first sergeants.

  1) One of the best ways to give credit for a man’s year of service in Vietnam is to recommend him for an award.

  2) The year 1969 should be one in which we can shake each man’s right hand while placing an award of commendation in his left hand.

  3) The following personnel under your command/supervision are leaving during the month of _____________. Request you forward their Recommendations for Award (USARV Form 157-R) to the S-1 Section.

  From now on, at the beginning of every month, I’ll have to go to personnel and get the names of men who will DEROS in two months and type those names into a form I’ll send to every officer and sergeant in command over them. That’s a hell of a lot of work. And notice, in the bottom line, the battalion adjutant is telling these officers and sergeants he’s expecting and requesting they comply!

  What a bunch of bullshit.

  Some of the real workers in our battalion sweat through sixteen-hour days building security revetments for helicopter pads or paving roads and landing strips vital to military transport activities. These men do this exhausting work while exposed to threat from enemy fire and booby traps. They deserve recognition far more than I do, but I sometimes wonder if a medal is appropriate even for them.

  Here’s why handing out medals for just doing your job sits wrong with me: if anybody—me or somebody on a paving crew—doesn’t do his assignments as ordered, putting out maximum effort, he’ll be written up for dereliction of duty. The guys out on the work crews do what they’re ordered to do under threat of an Article 15 or court-martial or dishonorable discharge.

  Maybe they merit a medal because they work with enthusiasm. I’m not sure anymore. I don’t begrudge them their medals. Not at all. And maybe I’m too involved in the award-granting process to make a fair judgment. But if I were told, back in the States, that I was about to meet a decorated war veteran, I would expect somebody who had done something more than pave roads with enthusiasm, even if he worked sixteen hours a day doing it. Granted, they’re working harder and in far more dangerous conditions than I am. No contest there.

  When I receive my medal—if I do—I won’t deserve it. Not for typing and filing forms in an office. I’ll be embarrassed having the thing pinned on my chest.

  But, like I said, there are real heroes out there doing genuinely heroic things—things that deserve to be written up in history books. In some cases, I’ll go out on my own time to interview the guy to make sure the recommendation is as thorough and well-written as we can make it.

  For example, Lieutenant Ferguson is a functional illiterate who submitted a recommendation for a Bronze Star for Valor for Raymond Landers. Once I understood what Landers had done, I knew I had to help him get a medal.

  So I got approval from Lieutenant Ferguson and went to Raymond Landers’ hooch one night with a few beers in a little blue and white plastic cooler I borrowed from the colonel’s driver. The plan was to talk with Landers and his work buddies about what had happened so I could get an angle or two that might enhance the narrative on the award recommendation. At the same time, I hoped I’d be spending an interesting evening w
ith a genuine hero. I wasn’t disappointed.

  ****

  Raymond Landers and his buddy Nitro were sitting in green vinyl-webbed aluminum lawn chairs backed up against the side of Landers’ cot. The cot was covered with a rumpled green Army blanket. Left of Landers, his short-timer’s calendar, two-thirds full, was taped to a gray metal locker standing against the wall at the end of his cot.

  Right of Landers and Nitro, I sat with Marvin Simmons on a wooden footlocker. We all had cans of beer from the plastic cooler I brought with me. My yellow legal pad was resting on my knees and I was scribbling notes.

  “I love my dozer and I love my job,” Landers said, his brown eyes proud and confident, daring me to mock him.

  Nitro nodded and grinned. “We been clearing jungle during the last couple weeks.” His long nose was greasy, his lips full, the upper lip line dented in the middle. “Ray goes crazy if the 25th Infantry Division’s mine sweeps delay us getting out there in the morning.” Nitro’s bare chest looked like a centurion’s breastplate covered with black hair.

  “We cut down whole jungles for the Man,” Marvin Simmons said in a low, gravely voice. We all looked at him. His open hand sliced the air like a black scythe cutting down wheat. His very black skin had a blue sheen like a skim of oil on a puddle of water. His eyelids drooped half-closed and his lower lip hung heavy from his half-open mouth. He looked bored, but that was his usual expression.

  Landers turned his attention back to me. “Guys like us get off on heavy equipment.” He took a drag on his cigarette and forcefully blew a stream of smoke high in the air. His face was broad and heavily pockmarked. His thick, tangled hair and even his eyelashes were bleached yellow from the sun.

  “We got Rome Plows on our dozers,” Landers continued. “Biggest damn blades you ever saw.” He looked with pride at Simmons and Nitro as if they were members of his private club. “We doze down underbrush, trees, cane fields, anything and everything. Scrape it clean to the ground. We get our dozers lined up, step-staggered in a diagonal line, sometimes five at a time,” Landers grinned and nodded as he spoke, “and plow the fuck out of the jungle. Trees and undergrowth rolling over in front of us and flat ground opening up behind us. Nobody hides or stages ambushes out there after we sweep through with”—and here he thrust his pelvis to the beat of the words—“our gallon-a-minute, turbocharged, diesel dozers.”

  “Man’s a poet, too,” Simmons said. He shook his head in mock amazement.

  Landers tipped back and howled like a dog baying at the moon. Then he chugged the remains of his beer. We toasted him with ours.

  I looked in my plastic cooler next to the wooden footlocker. “One can left,” I announced.

  Simmons and Nitro shook their heads no.

  “Hey, you got me there.” Landers held out his hands to catch the beer. I leaned over and handed it to him. I wasn’t confident about my left-handed tossing skills.

  “You hit any landmines? Booby traps?”

  “Hell, that’s part of the job description.” Landers held the can out from between his legs, popped the tab, and bent down and slurped the suds foaming up and out the hole. “We’re fucking mine sweeps.” He wiped beer froth off his mouth with the back of his free hand so his cigarette remained undisturbed between his fingers. “It’s like the colonel said at the work site the other day, ‘You got a better way to clear these woods?’ And then he said, ‘I appreciate you men.’”

  “The threat must be pretty high for him to come out and talk to you guys like that. I thought ambushes and snipers would be your biggest problems, not mines.”

  Simmons shook his head. “Anti-personnel go poof under the tracks.” At the word “poof” he spread his long black fingers parallel with the floor and gave a little upward bounce. “Beats walkin’ through that shit.”

  “Okay, sure,” Nitro waved to quiet Simmons while looking at Landers. “Tell this clerk, Ray, what you hit last week.”

  “Yeah, I hit a tank mine last week. Must have been a twenty-pounder. Blew five links off my right track and broke the drive chain.” Landers’ hands broke the drive chain. “Keeps us alert.”

  We nodded our heads and grinned at each other, all except Simmons. He studied Landers.

  “Our main worry when we’re cutting through a forest,” Nitro said, “is anti-personnel mines rigged in the trees.”

  “Haven’t hit any yet,” Landers said. He pressed his chin on his chest so he could look down and brush cigarette ashes off his green T-shirt.

  “Tha’s why we got mesh shit welded on our cabs,” Simmons said.

  “BOOM,” Landers whispered, all bug-eyed, leaning toward Simmons, his hands flying apart like an explosion.

  “Is that why Lieutenant Ferguson recommended you for a medal?” I asked. “Maybe I should hear more about the land mine thing so I can—”

  Landers shook his head. “That award shit don’t have nothin’ to do with mines.”

  “Oh, really? I didn’t bring the papers with me, but—”

  “Hell, all dozer operators hit mines,” Landers said. He pointed at Simmons. “You hit a big mine. When was that? June? July?”

  “Gradin’ side of a road,” Simmons said quietly, nodding his head.

  “I need to get this straight.” Looking at Landers, I pushed for more. “What happened that made Ferguson put you up for an award? Something about saving a woman?”

  He shook his head. “Listen. I dragged a gook into a ditch. She got caught in the line of fire. All that happened a long time ago.”

  “Five days ago,” Nitro said.

  “How’d the woman get in the line of fire?”

  “Happened in the morning,” Nitro said. He ran his hand through the curly black hair on his head and scratched his chest. “We were transporting our dozers in a convoy to the work site. Supposedly a friendly area. Had security from the 25th. APCs front and back of the convoy mounted with quad-fifties. Fuckers hit us from huts two hundred meters out from the road. Two rockets fell short, but one hit the lead APC. Then the VC opened up with automatic fire.”

  I turned to Simmons. “You there too?”

  “Miss’ all that shit, man.” He waved it from his face as though shooing away a fly.

  Just then whoops and yells erupted from a group of men standing in the aisle at the end of the hooch. They were passing around photographs. Landers and Nitro whooped and raised their fists in reply. Simmons smiled and raised his fist, too, but casually, without exuberance.

  Somebody turned up the volume on Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”

  “Go on,” I said, leaning toward Nitro. “What happened?”

  “We were passing a gook family on our left going in the opposite direction. Couple of them pulling one of those wooden carts piled with blankets and tools and shit, kids running alongside. But the VC in the hooches across the field didn’t care. They had their ambush set up and they opened fire anyway. We couldn’t get our carriers around the forward APC and we couldn’t back up fast enough, so we jumped out of our cabs and ran past the wooden cart to the ditch. The gook family got there first.”

  “It was crazy,” Landers said quietly. He looked at his boots. “Down in that ditch with all those gooks jabbering, kids crying, everybody shouting, returning fire. And the rear APC firing its quad-fifties. A regular circus.”

  “Water in the ditch?” I asked.

  “Hell no, not in the dry season.”

  “We could hear rounds pinging off our dozers,” Nitro said. “Hell, they popped several of my carrier’s tires. ‘Any more tires blow,’ I thought to myself, ‘and the carrier’s gonna roll over and bury me under my own dozer.’”

  “Gooks in the ditch right next to me.” Landers spread his arms, appealing to common sense, his cigarette in one hand and his beer in the other. “All of them jabbering, pointing to a mama-san on the road next to my carrier.”

  “Must have got confused,” Nitro said. “Ran toward the carriers.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Heading
for the ditch on the other side? Scared of being with GIs? Maybe hit right away and crawled to those big tires for protection? Who knows?”

  “Got hit in the leg,” Landers said to himself. He looked up. “I mean, I saw her … watched her dragging around. But I thought the gooks with me in the ditch, I don’t know….” He shook his head. “Or maybe … but that’s stupid, with the kids….”

  “Those fuckers are dedicated,” Nitro said. “Nobody knows what they might do.”

  “Some my women I know is like that,” Simmons chuckled. He looked over his shoulder at the men passing around photographs and hee-hawing together.

  Landers shrugged and looked at us. “So I ran out there and pulled her back in the ditch. Wasn’t any big deal.”

  “Huh,” Nitro snorted. He jabbed his finger toward Landers. “It was a fucking big deal. Hell, man, you ran out there without telling us what you were doing.” Nitro turned to me. “At first we just stared. ‘What the fuck?’ Then we laid down cover. But Jesus, I never saw anything like it.”

  Landers looked like he had indigestion. “It’s funny. All of a sudden I was out there. Wasn’t even afraid.”

  “Wha’ happen’ nex’?” Simmons’s eyes were big.

  Landers looked at Simmons. “You’d know what happened, wise guy, if you’d been there.” He looked at me and jerked his thumb toward Simmons. “Mama’s boy back here with phony diarrhea.”

  “So what did happen?” I asked.