She was a typical Vietnamese girl. Coal black hair. Cinnamon brown skin. Dark narrow eyes. Breasts mere bumps on a thin cage of ribs under a white cotton blouse. Her head barely reached my chin.
But my vision of her in sunlight changed to a vision of her in darkness. She was lying in the back of a covered truck. Her blouse was pulled up to her neck and her pants were pulled free of her feet and lay crumpled on the floor of the truck. One GI after another crawled over the truck’s tailgate and felt for her bare legs. Then they pulled down their pants and pushed into her without a word. They laid heavily on her. They bounced her head with the force of their thrusts. I wondered how sore she was. I wondered if her flesh was tearing. I wondered how she would feel in the morning about her father and her brothers, her mother and herself.
Then the girl’s arms, legs, and breasts began to swell with soft flesh, smooth and cool to the touch. She began whining and moaning and begging for more as men pushed into her and other men cheered them on.
I could feel a loosening in my groin and a swelling between my legs as I watched the girl’s torment twist into pleasure. I knew this was wrong. I knew a fourteen-year-old girl could not enjoy intercourse with ten men. I shook my head to clear my mind. I tried to focus on the drums, the hacking, the tar, but it did no good.
The scene changed again. I saw her struggling to free herself. She was fighting a stocky, blond-haired GI. He laid his full weight on her. His lips curled back from teeth he clenched against her head. His saliva sprayed her hair as he pounded her into submission.
I was like a dog cowering in the corner of the truck. Watching. Trembling. Smelling the semen. Seeing the shine in the eyes of the men. Hearing them pant and grunt and push against the body of the little girl.
I found myself sitting on the tar-covered platform in front of the furnace pushing with my boots against a drum. When the drum reached the hot grating, it slid smoothly into the furnace. I got up, my trousers pulling free of the tar on the floor. I walked slowly to where Waller was standing on the drumheads hacking another drum.
It will soon be my turn and I don’t think I can do it.
Waller stopped hacking and stared down at me for a moment with a puzzled look on his face. He looked at my pants and grinned.
“You’re not keeping your mind on your work, are you big guy? You should’ve got some pussy last night. Is that what you’re thinking about? Huh?” He grabbed his crotch and jiggled it up and down. “You need a little poontang?”
Blood thudded in my neck from humiliation. I shook myself as if preparing for an obstacle course. I focused on Waller’s question. My arousal was gone.
“You’re right. I’ve been thinking about the prostitute. But not because I wanted to fuck her. How can anybody do that to a fourteen-year-old girl?”
“Do what?”
“Gang-rape a fourteen-year-old girl.”
“She wasn’t raped,” Waller said. “Nobody held her down. She got paid for it. Hell, her own mama-san was standing at the end of the truck collecting money.”
“A fourteen-year-old girl does not decide to become a prostitute.”
“Says who? You? Lots of girls that age get married in these Asian countries, so why can’t they decide to be prostitutes, too?”
“Those are arranged marriages. Their parents make those decisions.”
“So this was arranged prostitution. What’s the difference?”
“How could you possibly know the mama-san was the girl’s mother and not some old whore that got her hands on a kid?”
“Because she told us, you dumb ass. Why would she lie about something like that?”
“So you were part of this? You got in line to fuck a fourteen-year-old girl?”
Waller looked at me, stone cold. He dropped the ax on the drums where he was standing and jumped to the floor. He removed his gloves and crouched down on his haunches.
“We really didn’t know how old she was.” He looked at the palm of his right hand and pulled at a broken blister. He looked up. “It was hard to tell.”
“Why was it hard to tell?”
“Well, we didn’t have a goddamn night-light in the truck, you know.”
“And she was laying naked, on her back, on the floor of the truck?”
“No, she was on a mattress. What the hell difference does it make to you?”
“Was she crying?”
“No.”
“Did she say anything?”
“What the fuck…? No, she didn’t say anything. What difference does it make to you?”
“Did you say anything?”
“What kind of dumb question is that? What would I say to her?”
“So you crawled in there and felt around until you found this little girl with her legs spread apart and you fucked her without even acknowledging she was alive?”
“Hey, she got her money. She and her mama-san got enough money in one night to buy food and clothes for six months, probably enough for their whole family.”
“That was a little girl you screwed.”
“Hey, fuck you!” Waller stood up and faced me. “I’m not proud of what I did, but I didn’t force myself on her. It wasn’t rape. And I paid for what I got.”
“You better hope you don’t get VD.” I grabbed the ax off the barrels. “You use a rubber?”
“Didn’t have one.” Waller looked off in the darkness of the equipment yard. “Most of us didn’t.”
“Jesus Christ.” I grimaced and shook my head. “If I were you, I’d get shots or something from the medic in the morning.”
“You think shots will knock out VD if you get them in time?”
“Depends.”
Waller stared at the floor and started nodding his head. “It was pretty disgusting.” He looked up at me while feeling the back of his head for his stubby ponytail.
“So why did you go through with it?”
“It started out as a joke. Somebody said there was a prostitute in Delta Company, so a bunch of us walked over there. Mama-san was outside the truck collecting money. Some of us got in line. She kept smiling and saying, ‘Baby-san boom-boom.’ Somebody asked how old the girl was and Mama-san counted fourteen on her fingers.” Waller threw up his hands. “Who knows what she meant? But the girl wasn’t tied down or anything. And her mother was collecting the money so it seemed okay. And I wasn’t about to back off at the last minute. So I did my thing and got out.”
I stared at Derek Waller.
“Hey, the hell with you,” he yelled. “Who made you the judge and jury of everybody else? If you’re so righteous, why are you in Vietnam? Nobody even knows why we’re here. You came over here ready to kill women and children because otherwise you’d go to jail. Right? And now you get high and mighty because I fucked a prostitute and gave her the money she asked for? I didn’t kill her. I fucked her. But you, you asshole, you won’t fuck her. Oh, no, but you come over here ready to kill her. And then you get a hard-on thinking about what you condemn the rest of us for doing. At least I’m not a fucking hypocrite. God, you make me sick.”
I studied Waller’s pale moist face several moments before I realized I had nothing to say. I turned and tossed the ax on the drums and hiked myself up on a lid. I grabbed the ax, positioned myself, and swung as hard as I could. The blade cut a two-inch gash in the steel drumhead.
“This ax is fucked up.”
Waller lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the rafters overhead. “Hell, the whole Army’s fucked up.”
“Don’t forget the U.S. government.” I swung the ax so hard I grunted when it hit the drumhead.
“You got that right.” Waller spit out a fleck of tobacco.
We didn’t talk much after that. We worked through the night on a platform floating in darkness. We cursed and swore at the drums, the war, and each other while flames from the furnace danced on our faces and drained from the drums the black tar for the roads of Vietnam.
****
Tuesday, June 10, 1969 - Cu Chi Base Ca
mp
Dear Janice:
A few days ago we had our battalion’s yearly AIG inspection by higher headquarters at Long Binh. “AIG” stands for Army Inspector General.
We in S-1 and Personnel made sure all our files were ready for inspection. We couldn’t be sure what they’d inspect in depth, so everything had to be properly organized, straightened, and cleaned.
There’s a rumor that sergeants in one of our companies wanted a small-bucket excavator they couldn’t get through the ordinary procurement process, so, sometime in the previous year, they traded with a unit outside our battalion in exchange for a couple trucks. But the ID number on the excavator wasn’t listed on the company inventory, and inventories are difficult to jigger because they specify sources and procurement dates that can be checked. In preparation for the AIG Inspection, according to the rumor, the sergeants buried the excavator and claimed one truck they traded away was destroyed by a mortar shell and the other truck was destroyed by a land mine alongside the road.
Our hooches got a bad gig. Remember the plywood walls I told you about that separate each hooch into two-man rooms? Well, those walls have to go. The hooches aren’t to have any impediment to us “moving out” fast when the attack siren blows.
Love, Andrew
Monday, June 16, 1969 - Cu Chi Base Camp
Dear Janice:
We’ve had racial fighting in Delta Company. David Connors, our legal eagle and head clerk, is typing court-martial documents against three men—two blacks and one white—involved in a brawl over Martin Luther King’s death and the riots back home. Several other men drew knives on each other. Fortunately nobody was seriously injured.
We don’t have anything going on like that here, but there is a down side to HQ Company’s racial mix. Most of our men are white. That’s because far more whites than blacks have the education and requisite skills for working in an office. There are reasons for that, of course, which have nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of being black or white. Doesn’t make any difference. The imbalance could stir up emotions between us and other companies. A few officers voiced their worry, here in S-1, about a battalion-wide race riot among heavily armed men!
Love, Andrew
Wednesday, June 25, 1969 - Cu Chi Base Camp
Dear Janice:
Hi beautiful. How are things at home?
Back when I helped Adjutant Harris hook up his new hi-fi equipment, I began thinking about buying my own stuff and sending it home. Otherwise I’ll never be able to afford the quality hi-fi equipment I can buy over here through the PX catalog.
I decided I’d order an Automatic Record-Changing Garrard Turntable. An Akai Reel-to-Reel Auto-Reversing Tape Deck. A Pioneer Tuner/Amplifier. And two sets of Pioneer Speakers, one set small enough to rest on bookcase shelves in my study, and the other set big enough to double for lamp tables in the living room. I’ll place my order in a couple months.
Love, Andrew
R & R
Jerry Maener and I walked over to the EM Club for a few beers and to see a rock-and-roll band of four Filipino girls swing their tight little butts to the beat of the music. But when they started singing Tom Jones’ “Green, Green Grass of Home” in squeaky, Asian-accented voices to the discordant sounds of a lead guitarist who couldn’t lead and a drummer who couldn’t drum, Jerry and I got up and walked out without saying a word.
We walked slowly in the moonlight—slapping at mosquitoes—toward the headquarters company formation yard. We were at loose ends. Disappointed. Unsure what to do with ourselves.
Jerry is a good friend. He works in the personnel office down the hall from where I work in S-1. He’s thin, medium height, and has sandy brown hair. Gold-rimmed spectacles frame his brown eyes that look out at the world with quiet, unassuming intelligence. There is a gentleness in appearance and manner about Jerry that makes him appear more fragile than he really is. He got his bachelor’s degree in classics from the University of Chicago and is, for me, an oasis of intelligence and sensitivity in a desert of ignorance and machismo. We’d probably spend more time together if we weren’t such obsessive readers.
I do an enormous amount of reading and writing in the evenings. As soon as I get off work at six o’clock (1800 hours military time)—unless I’m assigned KP, guard duty, CQ runner, or de-drumming detail, and if I’m not chasing information so I can rewrite an award recommendation—I immediately take a shower and head to the mess hall for dinner. Then I go down in an underground bunker with a lawn chair, a thermos of coffee, my M16, a bandoleer of ammunition, a book, and a notepad. I turn on the bunker’s electric lights and read and write into the night. Down here, beneath the worst of the humidity and heat, is the only place I can get away from all the loud talking and rock-and-roll and country-western music blaring from hi-fi speakers the size of end tables. Even down in the bunker I can feel a thudding beat when somebody cranks up Iron Butterfly’s “Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida.”
Early in my tour, after I realized I’d be a clerk on a secure base camp, I wrote and asked Janice to send me paperback books of one specified kind or another. I also subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club and asked them to send me Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization. I’ve read half of Durant’s ten-volume history, as well as novels by Updike, Faulkner, Mailer, Dickens, and many others. I’ve read quite a few short story anthologies, and right now I’m reading the philosophical essays of William James. At lunch or dinner, or an occasional evening at the EM Club, I meet Jerry to talk about books we’ve been reading or the Army’s latest fuck-up.
We’d both read about the cruelty and insanity of the world around us, but at some deep level we both continued to believe that intelligence, hard work, and good intentions could overcome the world’s pain, poverty, and injustice. The Army, Vietnam, and the realities of war popped that naïve idealism like an overblown balloon.
“Did you hear what happened to that poor asshole in Delta Company?” Jerry asked. We were walking across the company formation yard after leaving the EM Club. It was eight o’clock at night and electric lights on telephone poles spaced around the yard created a bubble of illumination in darkness that swallowed the base camp.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I typed the condolence letter to the man’s family. I never found out exactly what happened, but you’re the second person I’ve heard describe the guy as an asshole. Was he some kind of jerk?”
“I don’t know. But I guess he was acting like a macho hotshot, sitting on the edge of his truck bed while it was being loaded under the asphalt chute. Apparently he lost his balance, and in all that noise and confusion, nobody noticed. They filled his truck and looked around for the driver, but he’d disappeared.”
Jerry and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.
“But if he hadn’t slipped,” I said “he’d still be a macho hotshot. Is this true?”
Jerry pondered the question. “I believe you’re right.”
“That means we’re calling him an asshole because he was clumsy, maybe even drunk. Now there’s a question for you. Why does clumsiness, whether inherited or from booze, make him an asshole?”
“An excellent question, my dear Watson,” Jerry puffed on his corncob pipe, his eyes bright with the pleasure of relegating me to second fiddle. “Indeed, it strikes at the heart of our Vietnam experience.”
“Watson?” I exclaimed with feigned outrage. “I beg your pardon. I was interrogating to illuminate and inform, not seek enlightenment from a superior. Besides, you’re smoking a corncob, and Holmes never smoked a corncob.”
“I believe he did.”
“Doyle wouldn’t have made him stoop so low. Holmes smoked a calabash.”
Jerry suddenly became very serious. “Not once. Not in a single story.”
“That’s beside the point anyway.” I waved hello to Connors, the head clerk in S-1, as he walked past us in the direction of the EM Club. “Why does my question about calling a man an asshole go to the heart of our Vietnam experience?”
“Elementary, my dear Watson—”
“I wish you’d stop acting superior. It’s the worst kind of posturing because it’s true and we both know it.”
Jerry turned and looked at me with a grin. “Touché.”
I shot a fake smile back at him.
“As I was about to say, before your rude interruption,” Jerry lifted his chin above the rude interruption but dropped the faux-British tone and talked normally again. “Similar clumsiness elsewhere would not qualify a man as an asshole.” Jerry puffed thoughtfully on his pipe.
“Go on,” I said, “I’m waiting.”
“Well, if a man doesn’t understand, prior to coming over here, that we’re fighting without clear strategy or rationale, those facts become obvious to him when he sees firsthand that we’re not fighting a war we can win, and the only criteria for success—the kill count—is wholly unreliable. Even the ARVN’s have no stomach for this war. The South Vietnamese government is thoroughly corrupt, a dictatorship feeding at the trough of American wealth and power, and it’s not worth dying for.”
“I presume we’re coming to the point where the clumsy man becomes an asshole?”
Just then Doug Stevens, who works in personnel with Jerry, walked past us about twenty feet away. Doug was wearing a flower-embossed Hawaiian sport shirt billowing loose from red Bermuda shorts. Jerry waved.
“How was R & R?” Jerry called. “When’d you get back?”
“This afternoon,” Doug shouted, and gave a thumbs up without interrupting his walk to the EM club.
“Please continue,” I said to Jerry. “I need amusement.”
Jerry stopped walking and looked down at the ground in concentration. I waited a few feet ahead of him. We had crossed the formation yard and stood under a floodlight at the beginning of the path to our hooches among the trees.
“The soldier in Vietnam,” Jerry said, “now fully aware he has no moral justification for being here, should lay down his weapon and say: ‘this killing is wrong because I no longer know why I’m doing it.’ But he doesn’t do that. He continues his part in the war. He thereby compromises himself in the most fundamental way possible.”
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