13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  Friday, 13 August 70

  Ab,

  So your old lady wants you to marry her. No sweat, GI. Want me to discourage it? Can do. Can do it in a very tactful way. Tell her first you can’t wed til I get back, which really you can’t. I gotta be there. That’s about five months off and nobody gets married in January so you got it made at least til spring. I’ve got a year after I leave here and no telling where they’ll send me that I won’t be able to get back from so that puts it in winter again. Maybe what you should tell her is like this—tell her you want to get married in Europe while you’re racing formula 3 or 2 (if you can rob a bank). What could possibly sound more romantic than getting married in the pits at Monte Carlo just after your oil cooler’s sprung a leak and put you out of the race? The cars are still zinging by. You are covered with oil and depressed. Your bride is in a white leather suit of hot pants and vest (no bra) and boots. Just the sound of the whole thing will make your lady want to put the ceremony off til then. And that is, at least, a stay sent from the governor himself.

  Now then, to the business at hand. What are the specs on the Hawke Super Vee? Is it a good car? Have you seen the new Lola and all the others? I find myself rather anxious over this buy. You salesmen can be sold anything. Are you going to drop down to 145 pounds? I’ve a feeling this could be a big year. I don’t mean big money-wise, but big for the breaks for the rest of your career.

  I’m seriously thinking about joining Uncle Jake in business. He wrote to me with a real nice proposal saying he wants me to get my travel business license and open up an agency for him and me. I could really get into that, I think. I have got to have my own place or a place that is like half mine but where the other half doesn’t come around.

  I’m going to enclose some notes on the Southeast Asia situation as I see it. Maybe you’d like to read them to some young ladies and then have them meet me at the airport with their panties at their knees. Two months to R&R. I’m going to fuck myself to death in Bangkok.

  More later,

  Leon

  First Lieutenant Rufus Brooks sat alone on the edge of the landing strip, staring west. The heat of the sun was on his back and on the light black skin of his neck. He stared beyond his men’s restless shifting in the trenches, beyond the rice farms where peasants had appeared seemingly from nowhere, beyond the foothills with their clump greenbrown brush, staring at the mountains. Had there been a thousand more troops surround-ing him or none at all, it is inconceivable he would have noticed. I had her convinced that she was inadequate?! he thought. He sat still but in his mind his head shook woefully back and forth.

  “Hey, L-T,” Egan said softly. He had come from the end of the strip where he’d been sitting, writing. Egan sat down beside Brooks. He looked toward the object of the L-T’s gaze. “What’s happenin?”

  Rufus Brooks did not look at Egan. After a short silence he said, “I was just thinking about last night.” He did not want to mention his wife.

  “Yeah,” Egan said. “That got to be a pretty heavy rap.”

  “Yeah,” the lieutenant agreed. They were both silent for a moment. Brooks knew Egan had come to console him but he was not yet ready to talk about it with anyone. Brooks said, “Do you know what causes war?”

  “Yeah,” Egan said relieved. He also was not yet ready to talk though he felt a duty to their friendship. “It’s when people shoot at each other over land. If they just do it, it’s a feud but if they got some crazy mothafucker leadin them, then it’s a war.”

  “No,” the lieutenant said. “It’s how we think. People think themselves into wars.” He was happy to talk about war causation.

  “I didn’t think me into this one,” Egan said.

  “That’s not what I mean,” the lieutenant smiled though he was still looking at the mountains. “I was thinking mostly about cultural differences and how they affect our thought patterns and perceptions and actions.”

  “Yeah,” Egan answered. “You can see it. I don’t know if I ever really thought a lot about it before.”

  “You know, the causes of war are very deeply seated in white American culture and black America is being assimilated by that culture. This is an impossible war for black Americans to understand.”

  “It aint too easy for whites either,” Egan said instinctively defending his race. They were silent again.

  “What I mean,” Brooks said mildly, “is that the roots of war are in mankind, in each individual and the individual is manufactured by the traditions of his culture, A man is like a rough casting entering a machine shop. He’s already made but the culture he’s brought up in is going to sharpen his edges. That culture is going to re-form him, cut away at his humanity, mill him down to size and get rid of what the culture doesn’t think is necessary or efficient or beneficial.” Brooks was sounding like a professor again. “Traditional black culture,” he said, “cuts out the warcausing metal; traditional white culture accentuates it and sharpens it.”

  “Hey,” Egan countered defensively, “you’re the L-T. You’re the boss man. You tell me.”

  “Oh Danny, I don’t mean you and me specifically. I’m just talking. I want to think this out. If I go back to school, maybe I’ll write it all down. I kind of started on it last night. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Fuck it, L-T. Don’t mean a fuckin thing. Now, what’s happenin? We goina get this clusterfuck in the air?”

  “Yeah, soon. How’s your cherry doing?”

  “I don’t know. He’s goina be okay. I’ll go talk to him. Get him psyched up.”

  As Egan rose Sergeant First Class Jonnie Randalph came toward him and the lieutenant. Brooks continued sitting, staring to the west. Behind him Egan gestured to Randalph. Egan’s hand was at his own temple and his head was cocked toward Brooks, his hand twisted back and forth indicating that the L-T might have a screw loose.

  “Mornin, Sir,” Randalph said as he sat next to the lieutenant. “Somebody said yer ol gal sent ya a Dear John. Thought I’d come by an cheer ya up some.”

  Jonnie Randalph, platoon sergeant of the 2d Platoon, was at the midpoint of his third tour in Vietnam. He was thirty-six years old but looked sixty. He had been with the 7/402 on and off for fifteen years and had spent all his Vietnam time with the ‘SKYHAWKS’ battalion. In a society where the youngest man is eighteen and the mean age is twenty-one, a man of twenty-five seems old and a man over thirty is ancient. It was uncommon to find a man as old as Randalph humping a rucksack. The boonie-rats called him ‘Pop.’

  “Pop, you old drunk,” the lieutenant smiled, “have you got your platoon all squared away?”

  “Yea Sir. They been fine for a long time now so I thought I’d just come over heah and git ya fine too.”

  “Thanks,” Brooks said laughing.

  “Yea Sir. Happens to bout everabody. Happened ta me bout six weeks inta my first tour. Just bout the best thing evera did happen ta me.”

  Brooks could not keep from chuckling as the small leathery old soldier slapped his knee, rolled his head around and chattered softly. “That gal a mine, why when I got back I looked at her and you know she’s got her legs crossed like this”—Pop flopped his right leg over his left—” like her cunt’s made a gold an I’m bout ta steal it. Well, Sir, we done it up right. There’s just one way ta do it, Sir. When you get back you an ye ol gal jump on one a them dee-vorce charters ta Alabam. Ya just go there with everabody else one weekend an they pro-nounce ya all dee-vorced. That’s what we done. Lordie! Then ya all come back on the same flight an ya all are a’ready dee-vorced so ya can party. Dang best ol party me an my ex eva went ta. Regular downhome orgy.”

  The sun seared the staging area. Soldiers clustered. Leon Silvers, Doc, Minh and Whiteboy formed a closed foursome.

  “Whut do you find ta write about au the time?” Whiteboy asked Silvers.

  “Everything,” Leon said.

  “Naw, Ah mean lahk whut?”

  “Everything, Man. If you just let your mind use itself, you’d hav
e hundreds of things to write about. I just write about what is or what I see and what I think.”

  “You mean like you write bout this place all the time?” Doc asked.

  “Shee-it,” Whiteboy laughed. “We aint done nothin in Ah doan know how long cept hump them fuckin-trails up en back. Up en down them fucken mountains. Humpin til one hill doan look no different from no othah hill en one NDP doan look no different from the las.”

  “Whiteboy,” Silvers said, “just because there isn’t somebody there every minute to tell you how to think or what you’re seein doesn’t mean yer mind is supposed to stop. Look at this strip. We’ve never left on a operation like this one.”

  “Yeah? Whut about Ripcord when we was gonna go in there en bail em out?”

  “Damn,” Silvers said. “You remember that mothafucker?”

  “Yeah,” Doc said. “We was gettin the word second-hand all the time. Man, dint nobody know what the fuck was happenin.”

  “Yeah,” Whiteboy said. “Ah remember they sayin theah was fifteen dink reg’ments out theah. They was s’pose to be like ants movin up the side a the hill. They was losin whole comp’nies.”

  “That is the way it was,” Minh entered the conversation. “I talked with a scout who was there. They had human wave attacks.”

  “Yeah,” Doc concurred. “They say when the last bird was leavin that sucka the dinks was on top throwin smoke grenades tryin ta get the birds back in. That sucka was completely overrun, Mista. OVERRUN.”

  “They lost some artillery tubes up theah and Ah heard the gooks got em.”

  They were speaking to pass the time, entertaining each other with old tales. Chelini could hear the discussion. He wanted to be part of it but he did not know how to get their attention. He listened for an opening.

  “They spiked them tubes with thermite grenades,” Silvers said authoritatively.

  “Yeah,” Whiteboy agreed. “But they dint destroy em all. Ah heard the gooks got some of em off the top.”

  “No,” Silvers insisted. “They brought in the fast movers and bombed the entire hill and destroyed everything. Shee-it. Remember those days when it was bein overrun. It was supposed to be any minute and we were goin out.”

  Doc said emphatically, “We sat there fo three days. Three days, Mista.”

  “Yeah. Shee-it.”

  “When they give each a us a plastic bag a plasma Ah near shit mah pants. Ah was so scared sittin theah Ah was shakin lahk a leaf in a twister.”

  “Man, when they finally told us Ripcord’d been overrun I was one fully relieved mother. I think I wrote a dozen letters in those three days.”

  “Ah’ll tell you, that was the only time Ah ever heard a the 101st losin men. But Ah wasn’t gonna write home about it. The way Ah heard it, theah was wounded left behind.”

  “Yeah,” Silvers said. “That’s somethin that should be written about. Man, I just write notes to myself so I’ll remember what this place was really like. I don’t want to be spreadin any bullshit when I return. That’s the whole trouble with this war. Everybody’s tellin war stories and nobody’s tellin it the way it is.” Silvers paused. He turned to Minh. “Hey, Minh, what’s the word you got about where we’re goin?”

  “I think I only know what you already know,” Minh said.

  “Come on, Fucka,” said Whiteboy. “What do the othah scouts say about wheah we goan?”

  “They say it is a bad AO. But you have already heard that.”

  Until 1968 Le Huu Minh had never supported any of the numerous governments of South Vietnam. He had not supported the communist National Liberation Front or the North Vietnamese infiltrators or the American presence in his country. Until 1968 he had been an anarchist. Like many of the young men from the city of Hue and the surrounding province of Thua Thien, Minh was highly educated and believed strongly in the autonomy of his region. As a student he was fond of quoting the ancient Vietnamese saying, “The authority of the government stops at the hamlet gate.” To Minh that saying had many facets. A national government had authority only down to the province, a province government only to district, district only to hamlet and hamlet only to the doors of a man’s home. No one had the right to intrude upon a family and no member of a family had the right to intrude into the thoughts of an individual. That was the natural course of the universe.

  Minh had been born in the village of Phu Thu, twelve kilometers south of Hue. Like most peasant boys he worked in the rice paddies from the age of four and by six he was responsible for his family’s two water buffalo.

  In 1958 most schools in South Vietnam were still segregated between Europeans and Asians, a vestige of colonial days. For Europeans education was universal, for Vietnamese it was nearly universally prohibited. Unlike most of the boys of his village who never received any formal schooling until conscription forced them into military training, Minh, at ten, was enrolled into the French-built Catholic school in Phu Luong. At fourteen Minh left his family and entered Quoc Hoc High School in Hue, the same school that had been attended by Ngo Dinh Diem, Ho Chi Minh, Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap. In 1966 Minh became a student at the University of Hue, one of three universities in South Vietnam. The school had five colleges—Law, Medicine, Letters, Science and Pedagogy—scattered throughout the city, and it served some 3000 students. Minh was enrolled in the School of Letters, a very big step for a peasant boy.

  Hue University was the Berkeley of Vietnam, a center of political activism and controversy, a haven for Vietnamese draft dodgers and a source of falsified identifications. As long as a male had identification proving he had not yet reached his eighteenth birthday, the military would not, could not draft him. At the university there were men who had been seventeen years old for years.

  Hue itself was a beautiful city and the most independent city in all of Vietnam, North or South. The old Imperial City with its Palace of Perfect Peace, its villas and gardens, temples and ancient palaces, embodied the glory and traditions of the past. Wide boulevards paralleled the beautiful parks along the River of Perfumes, an ancient name derived from the choking lotus that thrived in the deep meandering waters. Old French Citroens rolled past tile roofed houses inside and about the Citadel and past the long villages of sampans floating in the sweet smell of the river.

  Hue was established in 1687 by Nguyen dynasty warlords, who built two great walls stretching from the sea to the mountains designed to help them defend the South from the Trinh warlords of the North. The walls were built just north of the present DMZ, a line that had traditionally divided the countries. In the late 1700s Quang Trung, who united all of Vietnam and drove the Chinese out of Hanoi and the North, proclaimed himself emperor and ruled from Hue. The city became the national capital. In 1802 Gia Long captured Hue with French assistance and he re-established the Nguyen dynasty which lasted for 81 years. Under Gia Long the impressive, nearly impregnable Imperial City, the multi-walled Citadel, was constructed. In 1883 the French bombarded the Citadel and captured the royal court. From then until 1939 Vietnam was ostensibly ruled from Hue by emperors condoned by the French colonialists and then until 1945 by emperors condoned by the French, who were in turn controlled by the Japanese. In August 1945 the last Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai, renounced his throne to the Viet Minh revolutionaries. The French returned only to be ejected in 1954. Over the next six years lines were re-drawn for the North-South conflict.

  No longer a national capital, Hue became the scene and center of dissent, the heart of the 1963 Buddhist uprising against the Catholic regime in Saigon and the center of the Vietnamese intelligentsia. The spirit of Giai Phong, liberation and independence, increased and fostered numerous political factions. It was to one of these factions Le Huu Minh attached himself and developed his own strong political beliefs and it was with this splinter group that in the fall of 1967 Minh joined the alliance of the Right Bank Resistance. As he plotted for the general offensive and uprising that would liberate Hue from the oligarchy of Americans and Catholics and the Saigon puppe
ts, Minh never thought that a replacement machine of northerners might be both more repressive and more exploitative. It never occurred to him that the northern political machine might fully replace the current regime and exclude his faction. As a member of a splinter group Minh knew little of the plans for the offensive, but as an activist he was able to state the needs and reasonings behind it. The TET Offensive against the city of Hue, against his city, by the NVA 800th, 802d and 804th Battalions began his cruel awakening to the realities of power.

  Chaos, that most wonderful word to an anarchist, became terror. The NVA and Viet Cong, in control of the Right Bank from early morning 31 January 1968, systematically hunted down and executed an unexpectedly long list of targeted people, a list that included apolitical doctors and missionaries, Buddhists, Catholics, university professors and students. By the end of the first week of the Year Of The Monkey Le Huu Minh found himself sheltering enemies of the people. The city was in shambles. Virtually every building south of the river had been smashed jagged by mortars or rockets from the opposing armies. Triangulated steel truss bridges over the River of Perfumes lay twisted as if they had been constructed of rice paper and bamboo. Behind the heavy walls of the Citadel the fighting raged. Minh was exhausted, nauseous, for weeks. The land and city he loved had been devastated.

  In July of ’68 Minh hoi chanh-ed to an American MP. He was interrogated and released. Peace had returned to the lowlands and American memories are very short. But peace was not in Minh. He convicted himself of war crimes. Again Minh gave himself to an American MP and again he was interrogated. He pleaded to become a scout and was finally accepted into the Loc Luong 66 program, a program for ex-VC and ex-NVA who had ‘rallied’ to the GVN.

  Minh was shipped to Saigon for indoctrination and then to Tam Ky for training. From Tam Ky Minh was assigned to the 10lst where he underwent additional indoctrination at Camp Eagle. Minh was shipped to Camp Evans, buddied-up with an American line unit soldier and “oriented” for eight more days. Finally Minh and his buddy went through the standard SERTS training. Upon completion of the program Minh was assigned to the unit of his buddy, to the Reconnaissance Platoon of Company E, 7/402, as a Kit Carson Scout. As his ability to speak English improved he moved up to better jobs, first to S-5, Civil Affairs, where he worked as interpreter for MEDCAPs and then to Senior Scout for Headquarters Company. With the arrival of higher ranking Vietnamese soldiers Minh was demoted and became the scout for Company A.