Newlin’s first patients were two barefoot boys about twelve years old. One boy wore a short-sleeved white shirt and tan shorts. The other boy wore a baggy red swimming suit. When Newlin asked them, through Phong, what was wrong with them, they both coughed loudly. Newlin checked their throats and ears. He instructed Tony Alvino to give each boy a cherry-flavored cough drop.
Newlin’s next patient was a shirtless boy, maybe eight years old, in ragged cut-offs. I assumed the woman who accompanied him was his mother. The boy’s right hand was wrapped in a bloody rag. The mother, wearing a faded calico dress, explained through translator Phong that the boy and his friend had been fighting over a bayonet they had found. Newlin called Garrett away from his set-up activities so Garrett could observe the examination.
Newlin unwound the rag from the boy’s hand. A gaping wound ran across the palm. Several fingers had wounds cut parallel with the cut in the boy's palm. Newlin inspected the wounds. He asked the boy, through Phong, to wiggle his fingers and open and close his hand. The boy did, but he winced and whimpered. Newlin conferred with Garrett. Garrett then guided the boy and the mother to his own treatment area. I followed them.
Jablonski—brown hair, wide face, and a tiny red and white metal flag of Poland pinned on his pocket flap—prepared a stainless steel basin of warm soapy water from a supply tank in the van. Garrett tried to wash the boy’s hand in the steel basin, but the boy cried out and pulled back his hand.
Garrett wasted no time coaxing the boy. He dried his own hands with a towel. He pointed to the boy’s hand and then to his own. He curled his fingers and bent his hand into a twisted claw and waved it in front of the boy, explaining in sign language what would happen if the boy continued to refuse treatment. Then he pointed to the exit space between the ropes.
“Didi mau, didi mau,” Garrett shouted. “Go on, get out of here.”
The boy’s eyes went wild. Startled villagers talked excitedly. The boy’s mother wailed and grabbed hold of Garrett’s arm. Garrett pulled away from her. The mother, waving her hands, turned to the boy and scolded him in staccato Vietnamese. The boy cried but nodded his head.
Garrett went back to work. He washed the cuts with a soft-bristled brush. Tears cascaded down the boy’s cheeks. He flinched and cried but didn’t pull back.
Garrett prepared a syringe, winked at the boy, and after Jablonski swabbed a couple spots with alcohol, Garrett injected painkiller into the boy’s hand. Then he applied antibacterial ointment and sutured the palm wound closed. While Garrett was bandaging the boy’s palm and fingers, I walked several feet over to the dentist’s office.
Calloway was injecting Novocain in the lower gums of a wrinkle-faced old mama-san wearing a white blouse and black slacks. Her black hair was pulled back in a stringy bun at the back of her head. She sat on a metal folding chair, her hands resting in her lap, her head tipped back.
Calloway’s hair was curly and golden. His eyes blue, face open and friendly. Shoulders broad, arms full without body building. A girl somewhere in the States was begging God to bring Calloway safely home to her.
When Calloway completed the injection, the woman didn’t close her mouth or move her head. She continued staring, unblinking, at the tin roof.
Calloway washed his hands in a stainless steel bowl, inspected the mouth of the next patient, washed his hands again, and returned to the old woman. He leaned over, grabbed hold of her jaw with his left hand, and with his right he reached into her mouth with dental pliers. He locked onto a molar in the woman's lower left jaw and twisted and turned the pliers and pulled hard. The molar came loose with a “plop.” He held up the brown tooth like a trophy. All the villagers in the dental section applauded.
“You do fillings, too?” I asked.
“Just extractions.” Calloway bent back, hands on his hips, and groaned.
“What happens if the roots are too long or the tooth breaks?”
“We take those people, if they let us, back to an Army hospital for oral surgery. If the tooth looks rotten, I don’t fool with it.”
I returned to Garrett’s treatment area. This time I stood among the villagers. I watched Newlin and Garrett examine a little girl. She wore faded yellow pajamas and was held by a young woman wearing a rice paddy hat tied to her head with a white scarf under her chin. The little girl—about two years old—was whimpering and crying quietly. Her left eye was missing. The socket looked like the pushed-in toe of a thick brown sock. A gash on the left side of her scalp was infected and swollen.
Newlin completed his examination, spoke with Garrett, and returned to the diagnostic area. Garrett took the crying girl in his arms. She looked at Garrett and cried louder.
“Get the mama-san to sit on a folding chair,” Garrett ordered Jablonski. “And get that damn hat off her head.”
When the woman was settled, Garrett set the crying child in the mother’s lap. He motioned for the woman to hold the girl’s arms down. Garrett looked up at Jablonski.
“Don’t just stand there. Hold the kid’s head still!” Standing behind the woman, Jablonski reached over her shoulders and held the girl’s head.
She started screaming.
Garrett began cleaning the girl’s head wound. With each gasp of air, the girl let out another steam-whistle scream. Scream after scream after scream.
“You can’t inject pain-killer?” I called to Garrett.
“Too risky with a head wound,” Garrett called back, “particularly a kid this young.”
I couldn’t stand the screaming.
“Would it be okay,” I called to Garrett, my voice breaking, “if I wander around a bit? Take some pictures of the village?” I held up the camera hanging from my neck.
“Put your valuables in your shirt pockets,” he replied without looking up. “Don’t be out of sight too long.”
I stuffed my wallet and watch in my left shirt pocket and my pen and pad of paper in my right shirt pocket and buttoned the flaps. I checked my M16’s safety and ammo magazine, slung the rifle over my shoulder, and walked away from the marketplace.
Within minutes a dozen children were walking with me. Three or four on each side held my hands and arms. Children behind me pulled on my uniform. Several walked backwards in front of me, keeping their eyes fixed on me, smiling and giggling. I felt little hands in my pockets, front and back. Thieves in miniature. These happy, excited, tawny little bodies, some of them trying to rob me, took me on a tour of their village.
They tried to take me inside a hut, but an old mama-san appeared at the entrance and shooed us away. The children guided me past several more huts to a wooden cage the size of two orange crates side-by-side. It contained a scrawny little pig. I had seen no dogs, monkeys, or chickens in the village. Translator Phong later told me the animals had been eaten.
“Dong Nho very poor,” he said. “VC scare men away long time.”
We looked at the pathetic animal a few minutes, and then the children pulled me toward the rice paddies at the edge of the village.
We stopped thirty feet from a huge water buffalo tied to a post. It was resting on its stomach in grass two feet high. The children talked quietly and pointed at the animal with awe and admiration. I assumed the water buffalo was used for plowing rice paddies. The children were showing me an essential and respected member of their community. Its horns were fifteen inches long, its eyes dark and intense.
I walked closer. I wanted to get a frame-filling photo, but when I looked through the viewfinder, the buffalo looked too far away. I took a few steps closer while looking through the viewfinder. No luck.
So I walked to within ten feet of the beast. I got down on one knee, and composed my shot so I could get tall grass in the foreground and the buffalo in the background. Then the water buffalo snorted and rose to its feet.
I grinned and turned to my left and right to see the reaction of the children. They weren’t there. I looked behind me. They were standing back where we first stopped. They weren’t smiling. They were
looking at me with a mixture of fear and admiration.
I stood up and turned back to the water buffalo. It was massive. Taller at the head than I was. I snapped a quick shot, unsure I even had the camera focused. The buffalo took several steps toward me and lowered and raised its head and pawed the ground.
Then I saw the thin cord that tethered the buffalo to its post.
I turned and dashed back to the children. They squealed and danced with laughter. The buffalo, no longer threatened, settled back down into its grassy bed.
Late that afternoon I returned with the MEDCAP team to Lai Khe Base Camp. The next day I wrote the MEDCAP article for our battalion newspaper and submitted a copy of it to Stars and Stripes. Several weeks later the editors sent me a note that said my article was rejected because they had already published numerous articles of a similar kind.
My MEDCAP article read like the rankest form of propaganda: it was a laundry list of minor medical procedures the Army performed for Dong Nho village while we bombed, burned, and relocated other villages. Major Roberts loved it. When I mimeographed and distributed the January edition of The Road Paver, which contained the article, Sergeant Garrett asked for eight extra copies.
****
I extended my twelve-month tour in Vietnam by two months to take advantage of a deal offered by the Army. If a draftee volunteered to extend his tour by two months, the Army canceled his remaining six months of active duty. Otherwise a draftee returned home after twelve months in Vietnam and served an additional eight months to fulfill his two year obligation (which included, of course, the initial two months of basic training and two months of AIT). Those eight months would be served under stateside spit-and-polish discipline. Boots and shoes shined to a mirror finish. Uniforms spotlessly ironed and starched into flat boards and crisp edges. Insignias positioned just so. Saluting like a robot. Mindlessly showing deference to half-brained NCOs and officers no matter how moronic their directives might be. The thought of living that way infuriated me.
If I returned to the States and an officer upbraided me for dusty boots or unpolished brass, I’d tell him to go to hell, or worse. I’d heard many draftees in Vietnam—all rear echelon—voice the same concern. After a year incountry, the last thing we wanted was to go back to strict military rules and regulations we’d learned to live without.
As a battalion S-1 office worker, my additional two months in Vietnam would be spent on a secure base camp where threats to my safety were minimal: random mortar rounds and occasional sappers, snipers, or ground assaults were the dangers I faced. It was worth the risk to get out early.
At the beginning of February 1970, the second month of my extended duty, my good friend Jerry Maener and I were promoted to Specialist 5th Class. Our promotions were not something we worked for or even wanted. Our battalion automatically scheduled our promotions to SPC-5 when we extended our tour of duty beyond the standard twelve-month assignment. In clerical ranking, SPC-5 is the beginning of professional military status, equivalent to sergeant, but without much authority to boss anyone around.
The good part was that our promotions eliminated our eligibility for de-drumming detail, CQ runner, KP, guard duty, and provided us with increased pay. Otherwise, being a newly anointed SPC-5 meant nothing to us. Actually, it embarrassed us. The promotion ceremony and shoulder patches made us look like lifers. And that was the last thing either of us wanted.
Sergeant Garrett was promoted to Staff Sergeant at the same time, and he and several other lifers threw a party for the three of us who were promoted in Headquarters Company. I was on my cot in my hooch reading a book around nine o’clock in the evening when I heard Garrett calling to me through the hooch screens from the raucous party between the hooches. The party had been going on for several hours.
“Hey, Newspaper Man, you comin’ to the party?”
I yelled back, “Thanks, but I’ve got reading I want to do.”
Twenty minutes later the hooch door flew open. Garrett staggered in with a beer can in his hand. He weaved around the empty hooch. I hoped, if I kept quiet, he’d leave without seeing me. Everybody was at the party between the hooches or drinking at the EM and NCO clubs—everybody except me and my friend Jerry Maener who bunked in another hooch. We decided we’d “celebrate” our promotions by reading rather than by getting drunk or stoned.
Then Garrett saw me on my cot. He bent down and peered at me from halfway across the hootch. His eyes were bloodshot. He spoke like a parent pleading with a spoiled child.
“You need to come … party. Everybody there.” He lurched past my footlocker and stopped next to my cot. He leaned against the metal siderail of the cot and looked down at me. “You wanna celebrate, don’t you?”
“Not this time, Sergeant. Drink one for me. I’d rather stay in my hooch and read.”
Before I could make a move to defend myself, Garrett jammed his right knee against my chest, grabbed my right wrist with his left hand and pressed it to the mattress. I was pinned like a bug to my own cot.
Garrett’s remarkable face, hanging over me, contorted into a show of rage unlike anything I’d ever seen. Big bloodshot eyes bulging with fury. Curled back purple lips. Face flushed with red blotches. Trembling with anger, he crushed his beer can—a full one—with his right hand. Beer cascaded over me and my cot.
“You don’t come out … join us … so help me….” He pulled back his fist, the one with the crushed beer can. But that backward motion carried his torso with it and he almost lost his balance. He swayed and quickly righted himself.
I realized I could knock Garrett off me, but it would lead to a fight that would go on until one of us was unconscious. Likely me. But I had more reason than that for not wanting to fight Garrett.
I didn’t want to hit him. The thought of hitting him in the face was inconceivably foreign and wrong to me. I wanted only to avoid associating with him and most of the men around him. I wanted, just once in my short military career, to announce my independence from all this shit I’d had crammed down my throat. I loathed and despised every bit of it.
“George,” I wheezed with his knee on my chest, “why make such a big deal out of this?”
“Goddamn you.” Garrett swung his head from side to side and almost fell again. “Don’t you understan’ anything?”
“George, what difference does it make whether I go to the party? You celebrate your way and I’ll celebrate mine.”
“You college fuckers turn everything….” He swayed and pulled back his fist again.
“Okay, okay, I’m coming.”
I followed Garrett outside. At least ten men, each with a beer can in hand, were out there laughing and telling jokes in the faint light coming through the screens of my hooch and the hooch thirty feet further down the dirt road. Some of the men were sitting on the waist-high walls of sandbags around the hooch and other men leaned on the sandbags or sat on the ground. None of the men were buddies of Jerry's or mine. Then I spotted Jerry without a beer in his hands. Apparently he’d been coerced out there, like me, and refused an offered beer.
“What the hell does it matter if I want to get drunk or read a book?” Jerry yelled at the men around him. “Why can’t you respect a difference of opinion?” Jerry looked fragile, even scholarly, in his gold rimmed spectacles.
One of the men crouched behind Jerry. Another man pushed Jerry backward, toppling him to the ground.
I yelled and moved in Jerry’s direction, but several men stepped in front of me and roughly pushed me back. More men gathered around me, including Garrett.
“You stay here, College Boy … this happy circle,” Garrett said, and he palm-punched my shoulder and staggered backward.
The cluster of men around Jerry wouldn’t let Jerry get to his feet, so he relaxed and sat on the ground. Then several men poured beer on us.
“That’s all?” Jerry asked from his cross-legged position on the ground. “Don’t we get more beer than that?”
Everyone laughed while several
men poured more beer on us. Our hair and clothes were drenched.
“I hope we’re happy, now,” Jerry said.
“That was fun,” I said. “Thanks for the good time.”
“Fuck you, Office Boy,” Sergeant Garrett shouted. “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.” He staggered into me and pushed me away. “Go back in the hooch, fucking asshole. Don’t want you … anyway. We’re havin’ a party. We’re havin’ a party!” Garrett bumped into another man and fell to the ground laughing.
They let Jerry get up, and the men who circled me drifted away.
“And a good time was had by all,” Jerry said to me, shaking his beer soaked head as we left the drunken men behind. He paused and smiled at me. “Know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here.”
Jerry returned to his hooch and I returned to mine. Water at the wash house was exhausted by this time of night, so I couldn’t take a shower. I threw my fatigues under my cot, toweled off, and put on clean underwear. My hair and skin were sticky. I changed the sheets on my cot, but the mattress was still wet with beer.
I lay on the damp cot and tried to read, but I couldn’t concentrate. My emotions were churning and so was my stomach. I was angry. Humiliated. And not just by the behavior of the other men. I didn’t feel right about myself either, but I couldn’t identify why.
The party disbanded around two o’clock and I finally fell asleep.
In the morning I was covered with malt-slimy night sweat. I smelled like a beer hog after a weeklong binge.
****
Friday, Feb. 27, 1970 - Lai Khe Base Camp
Dear Janice:
A little kid, in a field near one of our 182nd road repair crews, stepped on an anti-personnel mine. A foot popper. It blew his foot off.
Foley, part of the road crew, carefully walked across the field to the kid. Foley was sure he’d trigger a mine, too, but he said he couldn’t leave the kid alone in the field.
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