Prairie Spy

by Linda, Alan

  It’s July, not the hottest month in Vietnam, but not bad. The humidity is so high that our jungle fatigues won’t dry if they’re washed. So the mama-san whom we pay to do our laundry is washing it in lord-knows-what and hanging it up in a small hooch, where she burns dried water buffalo shit to smoke it dry.

  When you sweat, you smell like water buffalo shit.

  Tex smelled, which I noticed as we drove on down Highway 1. We were soaked with sweat, what with the green truck roof over us soaking in the hot sun, and the engine in front. One way or another—either sweat when it was hot, or rain in the monsoons—you were always wet. If you weren’t careful, weird stuff grew on your feet, crotch, and armpits. The grunts called it “chicken gumbo.” It was really gross.

  The country around us, up here in the northern end of South Vietnam, was speckled with isolated small rice paddies, whereas down south, much like agriculture here in the States, the fields got bigger. The north end of this country was full of very big hills, one of which, Hamburger Hill, was up around us at Quang Tri. It became famous for the three times the Marines bloodily took it, each time only to give it back to Charley. That way they’d have something to do the next year, I guess, when the new guys and the new officers came in. Hundreds of GI’s died in this particular bit of military idiocy.

  By now, when we drove through small villages, Tex on his side of the truck watched the children quite warily. A couple of times, we had young men leap into the back of the deuce-and-a-half, hoping for something they could sell on the black market, like cigarettes, or booze.

  They’d take one look at the messed up stuff back there—shot up electronics, and jump right back off. “Get ready,” I told Tex. “You’ll have to crawl back there and throw those guys off if they come back.” Mostly I told him that to worry him, which seemed like suitable revenge for the amount these 19-year-olds worried me. And Tex, who was big, could have thrown them off, but he just kind of eyed me, knowing that if they wanted that junk back there, what with most of them having the technical level of third-graders, they could well have it. He didn’t care. He was happy riding along. No worries.

  As we turned the curve into Hue, I saw the instant mixture of old world charm and architecture and at the same time, the bombed out rubble, too. There’d be a remarkable old citadel—what we’d call a kind of religious fort—and next to it, the rubble of brick and mortar from a thousand-pound American bomb, dropped back during Tet several months ago.

  Most wonderful of all was the tall brick wall that encompassed the old part of Hue, with vines and flowers growing out of it. Once we crossed the Perfume River, it felt like a sight-seeing tour, except for the exploded buildings.

  Up ahead, the South Vietnamese Army had a road block going for vehicles. All the other stream of foot traffic went right on through, the peasants in their conical rice straw hats, the promenading young girls arm-in-arm in their white outfits and parasols, the monks in their long robes, farmers carrying tied-up pigs for market, bicycles and bicycle taxis and small Honda motorcycles—a veritable sea of people flowing into Hue.

  One of the Vietnamese soldiers pulled us over and spouted Vietnamese at me, waving his rifle at me and at the back of the truck. Then there were two of them. Then three. They jumped up on the back of the truck and began throwing stuff around back there. We got out.

  Tex looked at me and said: “What the hell’s this about?” Like I knew. I knew about three words in Vietnamese, none complimentary. I could swear and say I was sorry, that was it.

  “Well, I told them you were from Texas, and they just went crazy,” I said to Tex, in an attempt at humor that went south almost immediately as two of the Arvins (Army of Vietnam) backed us up against the truck with their 16’s in our face. I found out later that they’d lost a slug of guys the night before in an ambush when the U.S. Air Force didn’t respond to their request for air support, and they were now really upset with us. “Blame Nixon,” I would have said to them.

  Just when things really looked tense, two young teenage Vietnamese boys riding on a small Honda motorcycle went through, and in the process of waving and flirting with all the young girls promenading along the side of the road, lost control of their bike and veered off the road into triple high concertina wire.

  Concertina wire has double razor blades every six inches. These boys were about to pay an awful price for their youthful lack of attention. The Vietnamese soldiers immediately left us and ran to help, although, lacking leather gloves and heavy wire cutters, I don’t know what they thought they could do.

  Tex and I jumped into the truck and sped away. I have to believe those two kids bled to death in that wire. I wanted to think I felt bad about that, and wondered where and when I had lost all empathy for those people. I wanted to go home.

  It’s Vietnam, July, 1969. We’ve been headed south on Highway 1, and I’ve got 39 days left.

  §

  Burning Prayer Paper

  From Quang Tri Combat Base we came down to Phu Bai, me and Tex, with a deuce-and-a-half truck full of shot-up electronics. It was July. You haven’t seen hot until you’ve seen July in Viet Nam. You wore the heat and humidity the way you’d wear a giant C-clamp screwed to your chest, one you knew would squeeze you, at that time, for 228 more days. The heat smothered you; the days left ahead of you dragged you down.

  Some of those days were just bound to be longer than some of the others. Today was going to come out pretty okay, because we’d safely made it here. We’d pulled out of Quang Tri Combat Base in the near-dawn haze, real early. It was so early and so quiet as we slipped through Quang Tri City that you could almost forget what the night before had been like, with its sirens and 122s exploding and us running around like rats in a sandbag-walled trap. Charley was going to try and blow you into little pieces that could be sent home in a bag.

  On real bad nights Charley came through the concertina wire, laid bamboo poles on it to hold it down while he slipped through.

  Charley. That came from Viet Communist, then Viet Cong, then V.C., then Victor Charley. Really, from Charley’s twisted point of view, he didn’t want to kill you, just wound you real good, which would cause a lot of disruption that kept two or three more GIs busy hauling your ass out, too busy to shoot back.

  You wore two dog tags for a reason. If you bought it, they’d stick one in your mouth and tie one to your boot, either or. The Army studied death the way a third-grader studied cursive, real focused in their study, and odds were, you’d have either a head or a foot left to tag.

  Combat searchlights, Prick 25 back-pack radios, hand-held mine detectors, and other miscellaneous stuff rattled around back there in the open bed of that truck. It’s how many years and nightmares later that it still rattles around in my head, and if I didn’t know the exact details of what happened to each of those individual pieces of equipment, the various bullet holes and shrapnel gouges in them told enough of the story so you didn’t want to know the rest of it.

  At that point in time, I knew enough already. One thing about Vietnam in 1969, there was plenty of story to go around, especially up north where we were. Maybe Saigon with its Dairy Queens and McBurger joints was considered bullet proof, but Quang Tri and Dong Ha, with the Marines still bloody a few klicks out at the Rock Pile and Camp Carroll, and 19-year-old GIs just south of us hanging on to Firebase Betty against the NVA (North Vietnamese Army), in weather that kept air support from flying in to even haul out the wounded and worse. We were pretty busy, ducking and praying and trying to fix this stuff for the warriors.

  But we couldn’t fix it all, which was why we were trucking it down to Phu Bai. “Okay,” our Chief Warrant Officer said yesterday, “who’s going to drive the equipment evac down tomorrow?” Exactly how he got in charge of our electronics squad is something I still haven’t figured out. He didn’t know a voltmeter from his backside. If you need one more reason to explain why Vietnam was so
screwed up, you could start with promoting people like him.

  Nobody was clamoring for the truck job. Highway One, which wound its way down country, wasn’t exactly a pleasure drive at that point in time. Yeah, the holes blown in it from the Tet offensive last year had been repaired, but current thinking was don’t send a convoy, that’s just more targets. Let’s just send’em down one truck at a time. Less paperwork that way, you lose one at a time.

  He looked at me, said “Take Tex with you.” And that was that. Tex and me and two rifles and two magazines of ammo were in it now, that was for sure. Tex thought it was going to be fun. At least he wouldn’t be trying to pet Vietnamese kids on the head as we eased through villages. They’d stolen his watch last time he tried it.

  We pulled in through the gates of Phu Bai Combat Base, and saw half a dozen double-blade Chinook helicopters staged up to haul a bunch of 1st Cav GIs and tiger-stripe garbed ARVNs (Pronounced “arvin,”Army, Republic of Viet Nam, our side) out into the boonies on some FUBARed attempt to win the war again. They all milled around, waiting to get started, stooped over with fear and battle packs and all the ammo they could carry.

  That was when I saw the Vietnamese soldiers burning small pieces of paper, holding them up into the air like little candles.

  I asked later what they were doing. It turns out that the Vietnamese thought that their ancestors would answer their prayers if they wrote them on paper and burned them; that their ancestors could read the smoke and keep them alive.

  From what I heard, what with them avoiding battle every chance they got, they didn’t hold a hundred percent faith in those prayers.

  I didn’t blame them.

  With the hindsight of years gone by, it is now clear to me that prayers written on burning paper had just as much chance of success as we did.

  §

  The Wrist Rocket

  I pulled back on the wrist rocket slingshot, and let go into the tall grass behind the bunker line in Vietnam with about a quarter ounce of lead solder. In the darkness of night, I heard the ripping sound of the more or less round ball as it tore through the bamboo grass. I immediately picked up the starlight scope to see if my shot had found its mark.

  It hadn’t. I loaded another round and aimed at the last place I had seen in the scope the shimmering outline of a human crawling up behind me, maybe two house lengths away. It was hot. Sticky jungle humid, and miserable. I let the second round go, and checked again with the night scope.

  Again I had missed. I saw through the scope that the person I was shooting at was frozen motionless, trying to figure out what that sound was. So I was missing pretty close, judging from the reaction. I readied another round.

  OK, you’ve figured out by now that this isn’t just another hunting story. In fact, it was 1969, I was pulling 24-hour bunker duty at Quang Tri Combat Base, about 8 klicks south of the DMZ, and it was about midnight. In other words, dark. I was on top of what really looked more like a child’s fort than anything else. It was a bunker made out of sandbags, like everything else in my world there, with a three-foot wall around the top, where one might expect Charley to come calling, should he be able to get through the concertina wire, the elephant wire, and the Claymore mines that were woven into the entire formation.

  I at that point didn’t care much about what was going on in the jungle out front; I was more interested in Sgt. Rust, a lifer whose sole goal seemed to be to catch someone sleeping on bunker duty, steal his rifle, and report this to the officer of the guard. Having done so, he would apparently feel that his efforts toward the war were achieved.

  He was a jerk, an uneducated, ignorant lifer, a lot like most of the noncommissioned officers that the army was full of during that time. They’d feel good to put in 20 and get out an E-7. They’d be lucky to get out an E-6. You may not know much about army rank, but I’ll tell you, neither of those life goals set the mark very high. These were the leaders upon whom we bet our lives, and I found out very quickly that getting out of Vietnam alive depended upon figuring out how these guys were most likely to get you killed and avoid it.

  I was at the moment enjoying avoiding Sgt. Rust. See, the way bunker duty worked was three soldiers looked at a roster, saw their names up there, and reported for duty at 5:00 pm. During that time, you were up on top of the bunker two hours, then off for four. We ate the old world war 2 C-rations that we were issued, and only left the bunker to defecate or urinate, which we did in that tall grass behind us.

  During the four hours you were off, you depended upon the guy on top to stay awake, the sum result of which kept you from getting your throat cut like happened to the soldier three bunkers down from the one I was on a few nights previously.

  No, that wasn’t Sgt. Rust. They found the concertina wire cut, along with the kid’s throat, and a satchel charge that hadn’t gone off behind the bunker that housed the officer of the guard. Of course, when the alarm was sounded in the middle of the night, suddenly everyone is trigger happy and very excited, and you’re just as liable to get yourself shot as you are to shoot the enemy. It’s not a good situation.

  One of the pieces of equipment that I, due to a top secret civilian clearance, was assigned to work on was the starlight scope, and in the process, I had assembled my own. A major no-no, should I get caught with it.

  I let another slingshot round go into the grass, loaded another one quick as I could, and let that one rip too. I grabbed the scope and checked out Sgt. Rust. Once again, he was confused, looking around. Boy, if he only knew I had this scope, he’d have busted me back to LBJ in a heartbeat. Lon Bien jail. Bad place.

  I hit him in the tin pot with the next shot, and he stood up and took off running. I later heard that he was heard to say as he was drinking in the NCO hootch that he’d been hit by a spent round.

  I wrote the folks for some real steel balls for the slingshot. I figured I’d at least have something to defend myself with, if Charley came through.

  All our ammunition was locked up.

  It’s hard to win a land war in SE Asia when the ammo is locked up.

  §

  Chapter 7

  The Tornado

  I wrote this short story while still back in college, after I got back from Vietnam. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons or places is accidental, but there is no doubt that parts and pieces of it came from my life. I didn’t write any more like it. They weren’t any fun, frankly.

  Out behind the farmhouse in which I grew up, planted by my great grandfather as protection against the bite of bitter northwest Iowa winter winds, stood the grove. It was large enough to be, and felt like to me, a little world all its own. It had rabbits and pheasants to hunt, and places for them to hide in the old abandoned horse machinery rusting peacefully away there, like a history lesson of our family. It had wood to buzz saw into firewood. It had box elder and elm and green maple trees that grew close enough together that you could climb up into one and leap to the others from branch to branch. In a way that is both easy to feel and yet hard to describe, I grew up in that leaf-sheltered world, its double center rows of smooth limbs with their fingers laced overhead like a roof against not only hot summer days when the air crackled with humidity, but against anything bad from the rest of the world .

  My younger brother Matt and our cousin Robert Michael and I learned the things out there in the grove that weren’t included in any school curriculum. Maybe, looking back, we learned things you don’t need to know. Or don’t want to. Maybe we learned too much.

  I guess Robert Michael must have really hated his name, because one day—I remember we were building straw-bale forts up under the laminated arched rafters of the haymow’s ceiling—he told us he had decided to change it. Since he was the most creative and proactive of the three of us when it came to play, we agreed with him when he decided Slade suited him better. It was just a name, at a time when each f
arm morning brought arms that climbed trees higher, legs ran faster, and minds seemed to find no end of new variations of play to act out. Just a name.

  But Matt and I would never have come up with something like that. We liked our names. Subconsciously, looking back, I knew even back then that Robert Michael was somehow different. That he somehow didn’t like his name. It would, however, have never occurred to either of us that maybe he didn’t like himself. Or even that he just visited us, but grew up in another world that was somehow different from ours. Anyway, he changed a lot through those last days of adolescent play.

  But the grove never changed. It went along with the seasons, sure, but summer sun or winter snow—those hindered us at our play not in the slightest. The games we played out there changed. We changed. The grove didn’t.

  We had a small shack of sorts out there, just a bunch of old barn boards nailed against some conveniently located trees, with some sort of roof, maybe old corrugated tin, or something. I can’t remember what the roof might have been made of. Not much, most likely.

  Slade came up with a pack of cigarettes during one of his summer visits, and I remember how sick Matt and I got, smoking them inside our cramped, dirt-floored shack. How wretchedly crappy I felt, like I’d been spun around in a circle too long, a circle led by Robert Michael, as usual.

  L.S.M.F.T. I remember sickly seeing that written on that pack of cigarettes—“cigs” we called them, like abbreviating them made us cooler—where they lay crumpled up on the dirt floor. Even today, the smell of a Lucky Strike reminds me that Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. That smell will come out of a crowd and punch me right between the eyes, right where you get dizzy.

  That’s one picture I have, one that is still left. Slade with a snow-white Lucky hanging crookedly from the corner of his mouth, his head tipped expertly to one side to allow the smoke to miss his eyes, all while he described Molotov cocktails and how they were made and how they were best used. While he drew in the dirt floor with one hand, his other hand idly picked a flake of brown tobacco from his lip. Neither Matt nor I could even talk and keep the cig in our mouth, and, rather than reveal our weakness, mostly let Slade have the floor.