Drafted

by Andrew Atherton

  I looked behind me at the floor near the front wall. I could use one of their guns. I laid my M16 on the floor and swiveled on my knees toward the rifles at the front of the bunker.

  But what if the explosion damaged their rifles? Their rifles might not work any better than mine!

  Then it dawned on me. My safety is on! I flipped the safety on back on the road.

  I crawled back to my rifle and flipped off the safety. I repositioned the flashlight and raised the rifle to my shoulder.

  Ready. Aim—

  But now I couldn’t do it.

  I lowered the M16 and silently begged the man to die. I rocked on my knees at a loss for what to do. He slumped on his left side and stopped moving.

  “Hey down there!” yelled somebody at the top of the steps. “I’m coming down. Don’t shoot.”

  A voice of authority. Probably the Sergeant of the Guard. Or the Officer of the Guard. Somebody who knew what to do.

  “I won’t shoot,” I tried to call. But I found myself shaking so badly my teeth chattered. I couldn’t form the words.

  The sergeant cautiously stepped down and crawled into the bunker. I could see him in the spill light from my flashlight on the floor. He had a .45 semi-automatic in his holster and a flashlight in his hand. He turned it on as soon as he was down the steps and on his knees.

  “What the fuck!?” He crawled in further. “What happened here? Jesus God Almighty.” He turned to me. “Who the hell are you?”

  I tried to tell him who I was and what unit I was from and what I saw, but it all jammed together. I couldn’t stop shaking. I gritted my teeth to stop the chattering.

  He shook my shoulder with his left hand. “Pull it together buddy!”

  I stopped shaking.

  “Phone work? Why didn’t you call…?” He turned to look.

  I shook my head no, the phone didn’t work.

  “Stay put ’til I drive back with medics and replacements. I’ll radio ahead, but it might be ten or fifteen minutes before I return. You okay?”

  I answered in a hoarse whisper. “Yes, but I need to get out. I need to—”

  “You stay the fuck right here with these men until I get back or I’ll have your ass in a sling so high you won’t be able to see the ground. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  I waited what seemed like a very long time. I debated turning off the flashlight, but I didn’t want to be down there in the dark.

  Neither man moved. They didn’t appear to be breathing.

  I picked up my M16 and flipped on the safety.

  When the sergeant with two medics and two additional guards showed up, I told the sergeant what unit I was from and my assignment as roving guard. Then I got out of there and started walking the road behind my bunkers.

  I was stunned by what I’d seen and by what I’d almost done. I walked the road reliving the nightmare.

  A third of the way down our row of bunkers I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a man staggering out from a bunker toward the base camp. I raised my M16 and called, “Halt! Who goes there? What’s the password?”

  The man stopped. He held his arms out wide and hung his head. He had a nickel-plated revolver in his right hand. He wore blue-jean cut-offs.

  I lowered my rifle and walked up to him. All the emotion of the previous forty-five minutes came out as I yelled, “What the fuck are you still doing out here?”

  He flapped his arms. Helpless. “Couldn’t go back … firefight.” He’d had more to drink. I could smell the whisky from where I was standing.

  “Give me that pistol,” I ordered. He held out the revolver, muzzle first. I took it and popped open the cylinder, dropped the cartridges in my hand and threw them in the field. I handed the revolver back to him.

  He said, “Going now. Pleased to meet you.” He stepped forward and held out his hand, but then pointed at my pants. “You got shit all over you? Oil? Tar? You…?”

  I looked down at my fatigues. My legs below the knees were covered with it. It looked black in the cloud-filtered moonlight. How could it be oil? Or tar? I haven't been.... I reached down and touched my left pant leg. It was wet. Slippery and thick, like melted Jello. I smelled it. Nothing. So I tasted it, like I’d tasted water or gasoline from the garage floor at home.

  Copper. Tastes like….

  I gagged and started heaving.

  When I delayed my walk back to the hooch that morning most of the men had left for work. The remaining men took no notice of me. They assumed I’d been de-drumming or had some other job that entailed getting oil or tar on my pants.

  I removed my fatigues, put on clean ones, and threw my blood-soaked clothes in a trash barrel outside the hooch. I’d have burned them if I could. I returned to my cot and looked at my M16. I’d clean it later.

  I had the day to sleep, but I was too agitated to try. I grabbed my floppy hat and walked outside. I walked around the base camp the rest of the day. I was so disoriented I eventually got lost, but I didn’t, until dusk, ask anybody how to get back to the 182nd.

  That night I slept. Physically and emotionally exhausted.

  ****

  It’s been quite some time, now, since that night in the bunker. I still have nightmares. Fewer than before, but enough to tell me I’ll be bothered by that night the rest of my life.

  The image of those two men haunts me.

  I’ll be looking at a document or typing at my desk, and I’ll suddenly stop moving, immobile, like a statue, and I’ll stare unseeing through whatever’s in front of me. During those times my attention is sucked back inside that bunker and I’m aware of only the mangled bodies of those two men. Then I replay, over and over, what I tried to do and then didn’t do.

  I seriously tried to kill those two men. I pulled the trigger. Hard. Repeatedly. Why? Why did I do that? My reasons are no longer clear to me. And then, when I realized my stupid mistake, I didn’t follow through and pull the trigger. Why? What happened between the first attempt and the second attempt? I’m not sure.

  I wrote this story to objectify my experience. To get it out there so I could more clearly comprehend and evaluate what I saw and did. Maybe create a catharsis for myself. But it didn’t work. It's made it worse.

  After setting this story aside for many weeks, I’ve reread it and tried to imagine how others might read it. What I discovered is a misguided monster who tried to kill his wounded comrades. And a fool for the risk he was taking. Maybe a coward, too.

  So I’ve spent hours trying to find some small measure of honor, some redeeming value, in my behavior—something resembling good intentions that would be recognized as such by readers. But I haven’t succeeded.

  Euthanasia might be a dark business, yet at the same time well-intended. But I now wonder if I wanted to end the suffering of those men enough to pull the trigger. Far stronger, it now seems to me, was an insane desire to obliterate the horror, the deformity, from the face of the earth.

  I wanted to yell, “Stop this! Stop this! Stop this!”

  Hell, stop the world. Annihilate the universe.

  And when I work myself up to believing my overriding concern was to put those men out of their misery and stop the disfiguring horror for them, too, I find I’m a coward for not doing it. And a downward spiral of conflicting self-recriminations begins from which I fear no loved one, friend, or counselor will ever be able to free me.

  ****

  Wednesday, Dec. 31, 1969 - Lai Khe Base Camp

  Dear Janice:

  I’m doing the courier job again. Just for a week or ten days while the regular guy is on R & R in Thailand. It messes up my awards work, but I don’t care. I’ll do the best I can and what I can’t do … screw it. I don’t care anymore.

  Allowing the government to send me over here was a big mistake. I should have gone to Canada. Or prison. Or lied and claimed I’m a religious conscientious objector. I was so damned concerned about being honest and speaking with integrity. What a joke.

  I was on my layover in
Long Binh when Bob Hope put on his Christmas show. I saw some of it, but the humor was so 1940s and filled with cheap one-liners I finally left. That kind of entertainment cannot make this war palatable. It was insulting.

  Love, Andrew

  Tuesday January 13, 1970 - Lai Khe Base Camp

  Dear Janice:

  I’m back from being courier. Been back a few days.

  Hard to get motivated. Maybe it’s the new colonel, new legal clerk, and new adjutant. Adjutant Harris DEROSed while I was gone. The new adjutant knows nothing about editing or grammar or anything else.

  Jerry Maener’s girlfriend mailed him a newspaper article published by a reporter named Seymour Hersh about a massacre over here. You hear about it?

  Apparently an officer named Lieutenant William Calley led his men in a massacre of maybe hundreds of unarmed civilians in March of 1968 at a place called My Lai. Apparently Calley’s men suffered numerous casualties from mines they thought the villagers should have warned them about. So Calley and his men killed the villagers. All of them. Including women and children.

  Guys in my hooch are sick about it, but they think they understand how it happened and wonder if they might have done it, too, given similar circumstances. If you’ve seen your buddies blown apart, one after the other, again and again, then maybe….

  But I don’t know. Shoot little babies? Pregnant women? Young girls?

  Jerry Maener voiced a sobering thought about it. He said, “The only difference between Calley’s massacre and what the Army does every day is how close they were to who they killed. We bomb and napalm villages all the time without knowing who’s there or how many we might kill. Receive a few shots from a village and patrols call in artillery or bombers and level the place.”

  Love, Andrew

  Sun Jan 25, 1970 - Lai Khe Base Camp

  Dear Janice:

  You’re right. I’m depressed. And I think I have good reason to be.

  I was sheltered and nurtured by loving parents, a caring suburban neighborhood, a well-intended evangelical church, and good schools. But I’ve discovered my country and the world and other people—even myself—none of it is what I thought it was.

  Wholesale raping. Killing. Starvation. Slavery. Disease. Disfigurement. Racism and religious hatred. Military subjugation of entire tribes and nations. This stuff is going on every minute of every day in most of the world. I knew about these things before I came to Vietnam, but it was all head knowledge. Something I read about in books and magazines. But now I’ve seen some of it for myself. And let me tell you something. I’ve been living on the clean white rim of a worldwide sewer.

  I’ve walked through villages and driven past Vietnamese people who live in fear and torment and loss of loved ones all their lives—from the colonizing French, the VC, their own corrupt government, and from the good ol’ American GI sent to Vietnam to save America from communism. And I’ve participated in it by allowing myself to be part of the machine that’s grinding them down.

  This world is fucked up. I’m fucked up, too. I feel guilty for being part of this war, and I feel guilty for avoiding combat. I’m ashamed I allowed myself to be sent over here, and I’m proud of my work helping get tin medals for heroes. How screwed up is that?

  What will I be like when I come home? How will what I’ve learned fit into suburbia and a job for getting nicer stuff? I don’t know.

  Love, Andrew

  JIMMY BEAMIS

  Jimmy Beamis looked like a mama’s boy in military uniform for a junior high school play. You’d swear he couldn’t have survived basic training, but apparently he did.

  He had smooth white skin and light brown freckles and sandy red hair. His arms were the fleshy, hairless tubes of a little boy. Jimmy’s black framed glasses were always sliding down his sweaty pug nose in the tropical heat and humidity of Vietnam. He often slid his glasses back up by tipping his head back and squinching his nose and upper lip, thereby exposing his front teeth and gums. Unblocked by the rim of his glasses, but only for a moment, his soft brown eyes looked at you with unblinking and unguarded trust. Jimmy Beamis believed anything you told him.

  The men in Alpha Company enjoyed giving booze and dope to Jimmy, and he often accepted these gifts with a John Wayne impersonation by turning his shoulders, his hands on his hips, bending at the waist, and saying, “Well now, I’d be the last man to say a stiff drink and a good toke won’t improve the morale of the troops.”

  Jimmy was drunk or stoned night after night. His little-boy antics and tough-guy pretense made men laugh until they fell on the floor.

  At the suggestion of one of the men, Jimmy put a large tab of LSD or opium-laced speed—nobody knew what it was, except it was too intense—in a gob of peanut butter and fed it to a mangy black and white toothless mutt that hung around the hooch. The dog and Jimmy kept the men entertained all night long.

  The dog’s head wobbled after that, and he couldn’t walk straight, but it was a good lesson, everybody said, of the dangers of undisciplined use of non-prescription drugs. Always do a little before you do a lot, and know your dealer, so you know what you got.

  When drunk or stoned, Jimmy loved to pretend he was a soldier fighting gooks from behind cots and foot lockers. That was what made him so funny. A soldier was the one thing Jimmy would never be, at least in the minds of the other men and maybe in his mind, too. Nobody could imagine going into battle with Jimmy at his side. It would be like going into battle with your kid sister. You’d get yourself killed trying to protect the little shit.

  The last time I saw Jimmy was early one morning when he was sitting handcuffed in a jeep with two MPs waiting to be taken to the Long Binh Jail for trial on charges of murdering a Vietnamese civilian. I found out what happened after talking with several men in Alpha Company.

  Alex Beamis, Jimmy’s forty-nine-year-old father, served as a Marine in the bloodiest battles of Okinawa in World War II and was now working as a grain elevator operator in Salina, Kansas. He had told Jimmy that he wasn’t to come home unless he’d shot one of those pinko commie gooks for Dad. And since Jimmy had been assigned to the 182nd Engineer Battalion, he was afraid he’d miss his chance.

  So early one evening, when Jimmy Beamis was pulling perimeter guard duty, he got that chance, or so he thought. The time was 1815 hours (6:15 p.m.), according to Jimmy’s own account, fifteen minutes into “free-fire” time. He was alone in the bunker because his buddy had snuck back into camp for a portable radio so they could listen to the latest episode of “Chickenman” on Radio Saigon. It was then that Jimmy saw what he thought was a man riding a bicycle on the road outside Lai Khe’s base camp perimeter.

  The man was not supposed to be there. 1800 hours (6:00 pm) was the deadline for when the road was to be cleared of all Vietnamese who had been working for us on the base camp during the day. They had been warned, time after time, that anyone on that road after 1800 hours would be considered VC by perimeter guards who could fire at them without seeking permission from the Sergeant of the Guard.

  So Jimmy locked and loaded the bunker’s M60 machine gun and opened fire on the man who was furiously peddling away from Lai Khe Base Camp. Jimmy was surprised at how difficult it was to fire a M60 machine gun and hit such a tiny moving target that seemed, over the bouncing sights of the machine gun, so far away, so he strafed back and forth to get his man. Then he fired his machine gun up and down and back and forth again to ensure a positive body count.

  But the man Jimmy cut down turned out to be an eleven-year-old Vietnamese boy named Mai Thanh. He had illegally come to work on the base camp with his papa-san to help fill our sandbags and help burn shit in our shit cans. He had gotten separated from his father and missed the five o’clock truck that would drive him off the base camp and back to the nearby village. A soldier apparently discovered the boy and gave him a bicycle used by mama-sans during working hours and told the boy to hurry up and get the hell off the base camp.

  The case against Jimmy was difficult to contes
t. Evening light at the time of the shooting was still good enough to distinguish a child from a man, and firing on a single figure on a bicycle in plain view a mere fifteen minutes into “free-fire time” seemed a bit extreme.

  But what cinched the case against Jimmy was that he had been drinking beer and smoking grass on guard duty. Several beer cans and a couple roaches were on the bunker sandbags when Sergeant of the Guard Rapelli arrived at the bunker to find out what the shooting was all about.

  Sergeant Rapelli said Jimmy was talking nonsense as though he were a character in a Sad Sack comic strip reporting to an imagined officer and saying things like, “Yes, Sir” and “No, Sir” and “Up your thirty thousand bushel silo, Sir.”

  Once Jimmy was sober and he was told what he had done, he stopped talking. Weeks went by without Jimmy uttering a word, even to his defense attorney.

  Mr. Mai, the father of the dead boy, showed up at our battalion headquarters office two days after the killing, and Uncle Sam paid him the equivalent of forty dollars for his loss. I was there when Mr. Mai bowed and thanked Adjutant Harris for the forty dollars Harris handed him, which made us all feel a little awkward because Mr. Mai had been asking for his son’s body.

  I was also in the office when Mr. Mai came the second and third times. Each time he came, Mr. Mai bowed in thanks for the adjutant’s unsuccessful attempts to obtain the boy’s body from the Central Intelligence Division at Long Binh.

  Central Intelligence wanted the body so they could retrieve the bullets for the prosecution’s case against Jimmy. But an earlier U.S. military autopsy of a dead Vietnamese citizen had been publicized in the Saigon press as being illegal and sacrilegious, and that made Army doctors reluctant to extract the bullets from Jimmy’s victim for fear of further violating Vietnam’s religious beliefs and laws about the sanctity of a dead body.