by Joe Haldeman
War Year
Joe Haldeman
INTRODUCTION:
YOU HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE
I actually started writing my first novel while I was still in combat in Vietnam. I’d gotten a bound blank book from my mother for my birthday, and so I started to fill it up.
The novel wasn’t about Vietnam itself, though; that would be far too direct. It was a fantasy romance set in some sort of Conanesque imaginary battlefield. It wasn’t prose, either; that would be too easy. It was in linked rhymed quatrains, ABAB/BCBC/CDCD and so on.
A North Vietnamese literary critic delivered his opinion in the form of a 122-millimeter rocket. It hit our bunker and totally destroyed it. American letters lost a curiosity of dubious value, but I also lost my other birthday presents, a neat chromatic harmonica and a Swiss Army knife the size of a potato, with everything from a swizzle stick to a decoder ring.
My three squad-mates and I should have been killed. In the late afternoon we’d been ordered away from our not-too-comfy bunker on Brillo Pad, onto a chopper with chain saws and gas cans, and flew to an adjacent hill to cut down a bunch of trees that were bothering the artillery battery there.
We stayed too late to get a ride back, and so had to sleep on the cold ground, bitching. We didn’t get much sleep, though, because sometime after midnight the artillery started pounding away as fast as it could shoot. We shouted at them, asking what was up, and a guy pointed across the valley and shouted back, “Human wave attack on Brillo Pad!”
I got some 7X35 binoculars and looked at our erstwhile home, about a mile away, and in the light of flares and explosions it did look like there were an awful lot of enemy soldiers. I’m not sure how many people it takes to make a “human wave,” but it was far and away the most Vietnamese I’d ever seen, and they got over the multiple strands of concertina barbed wire we’d set out, some close enough to be incinerated by the “foo-gas” defensive devices we engineers had buried in front of the machine-gun positions. A few even got inside the fire base, and lived long enough to raise some hell.
By dawn, the Americans had won the day, though there were a lot of casualties. Talking to people who were actually there, later, most agreed that a lucky coincidence may have saved most of them: people had dug a deep garbage sump in front of a good-sized artillery piece, I think 155-mm, and the crew was able to push the gun down into it at an angle, so that it would actually fire downhill, straight into the enemy charge. They had canister rounds, like huge shotgun shells, for the purpose, and just traversed left and right, delivering mayhem.
That I had lost my first novel didn’t really loom very large. My outfit left Brillo Pad a week or so later, under heavy fire, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to leave a place, even if I did have to leave a manuscript buried behind there.
I wrote a lot the year I was in Vietnam, roughly half in combat and half in hospitals, but it was almost all in the form of letters. The idea was to sort of kill two birds with one stone: I would write home to my wife every day, each letter containing something like a diary entry, and she would keep them in chronological order, material for my eventual Vietnam novel.
That worked, but it didn’t work.
I hadn’t written many letters before really horrible things started happening, no surprise, but what I hadn’t thought through was what the effect would be of sending back an accurate record of it all to a woman who was powerless to do anything but worry. So I toned them down.
I had two older friends in science fiction fandom, Ray and Joyce Fisher, to whom I said I’d write the unalloyed truth, no holds barred, and they promised to keep it secret until I came home or died. But after the one letter establishing that premise, I couldn’t bring myself to follow up on it. I wrote an occasional column for their fanzine, Odd, instead—“Notes from the Jolly Green Jungle” or “Atheist in a Foxhole.” But they didn’t really express how terrified and hopeless I felt. At this distant remove I can’t say honestly whether I was ashamed to admit it. My excuse at the time, in the vernacular of the time, was that I didn’t want to “lay a bad trip” on friends and loved ones.
I took pictures and sent them home to my wife to be developed, but never pictures of the dead or maimed. On one occasion, I did shoot a roll of the aftermath of a firefight, and sent it to my brother (who worked in the trauma ward of a hospital), asking that he develop them and keep them hidden till I came back. He later said he never got them.
So I had lots of material for a novel, about 500 pages, but most of the interesting stuff was self-censored, so I had to reconstruct the truth. Maybe that was just as well. Hemingway pointed out that journalism was interesting because it told you what had just happened, but it was less interesting the next day and useless a year later. He thought that to make fiction work, you had to forget the things you had experienced, and then reinvent them to make them more real, with a reality that lasted longer than a simple recitation of facts could.
I had already written the first two stories I would publish; in the thirty days’ “compassionate leave” the army gave you when you returned from combat (so your family could deal with you, rather than the army). I rewrote those stories and sent them out to magazines. One sold while I was still in the army, three months later.
I kept writing stories after I left the army, while doing graduate work in mathematics. Most of the stories sold, but I considered them serious beer money rather than a profession. I kept tabling the novel, putting it off until I had time.
A lot of writers sell their first book because they met the right person at the right time, and that definitely happened to me. I was invited to the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference, a roundtable workshop that typically comprised fifteen or twenty experienced writers with two or three newcomers.
The experience was life-changing. Here I was surrounded by people I’d been reading for years—Damon Knight, Harlan Ellison, Gordon R. Dickson, Kate Wilhelm—and they were treating me provisionally as an equal. Just as important, I saw they were all making a living just by their writing, and if they could do it, maybe I could too.
One of the last nights of the conference, I was having a beer with Ben Bova, and I told him about the Vietnam novels I wanted to write, one mainstream and one science fiction. He was interested in the idea, and offered to read a couple of chapters and an outline; if he liked them, he’d send them along to his editor with a note.
That was a tremendously generous favor. I wrote the outline and two chapters as soon as I got home, and then went back to being a graduate student. I only enrolled half-time, to give myself some time to write. The first day of classes, though, I found out that my most important course, Artificial Simulation of Physical Systems, was going to be taught by a graduate student who would try to stay a week ahead of us, reading the departed professor’s notes. I decided, hell, I’d drop out for a semester and concentrate on writing.
Just then I got a letter from Bova’s editor, agreeing to buy War Year. I never went back to mathematics.
War Year was meant to be part of the publisher’s Pacesetter series, a line of books destined for adult education programs. The idea was to provide books with adult themes that were not difficult to read, so that people going back to school later in life could have material that had meaning for them. The restrictions were that the novels had to be short, and they had to be written using Basic English (a list of 500 of the most common words) plus whatever technical vocabulary was needed.
That sounded like a good idea, and still does, but the program fizzled out before War Year was finished. Nobody told me, though. I wrote the novel in a white heat, six weeks, and the final result of those constraints was that critics called my writing “Hemingwayesque.”
War Year did well critically, a full page in the New Y
ork Times Book Review, which surprised the publisher. It was the last remnant of an abandoned series, so they had only printed a couple thousand copies and dumped them with no publicity or promo.
The nadir of my disappointment came the month after the book was released. I went incognito to the American Bookseller’s Association book fair, which was being held in Washington, D.C., where I lived at the time. An editor friend couldn’t go, so he sent me his nametag, to save me the registration fee.
I went straight to the Holt, Rinehart and Winston booth. They must have had a hundred titles on display, but not mine. I asked the salesman about War Year by Joe Haldeman.
“Hey, I read that,” he said. “Damned good book. But nobody wants to read a novel about Vietnam. We didn’t bring any copies.”
I went back to writing science fiction.
WAR YEAR
ONE
I almost slept through that first enemy attack.
I’d been on KP all day, washing dishes, on my feet from dawn to dark. When it was over, I went to my bunk and just slept like a rock. So I didn’t hear the sirens when they went off. I woke up with this big guy shaking me.
“Incoming, man, wake up! Goddammit, incoming!” And he made for the door.
I didn’t know what “incoming” meant, but he looked pretty shook. Then I woke up enough to hear that the sirens were blasting the way they warned us would happen in case of an attack on Cam Ranh Bay. I jumped out of bed and nearly caught that guy at the bottom of the steps.
I could hear something going crump—crump off in the distance. I didn’t know how far off they were, but at least I couldn’t see any explosions. Followed the big guy to the nearest bunker—that’s just a big sewer pipe sitting on the ground, covered with sandbags—and crawled in after him.
It was right crowded, and the pipe wasn’t big enough for a tall Oklahoman, like yours truly, to sit without cracking his head on the top.
“You fellas are a little late for the party. Decide to catch a few more minutes shut-eye?”
“Man, I was on KP all day,” I said. “Never even heard the sirens until this guy woke me up.”
“Maybe he should’ve let you sleep. Those’re 122’s comin’ down—one of ’em hits this bunker and we’ll all be blown away anyhow.”
“Tell ’em all about it, hard-core,” somebody else said.
I got this weird feeling in my stomach. I guess everybody who goes to Vietnam knows there’s some chance he’ll get killed. But the first week? For Christ’s sake!
There was a high, thin whistle. You could hardly hear it over the sirens. Then a loud crump!
“Gettin’ a little closer. Like I say, those’re 122-millimeter rockets from China; they’ll go through ten layers of sandbags just like they weren’t there. This bunker’s got four, maybe five layers. So if one hits us, we won’t even know what happened.”
I was so scared I wanted to puke. Wanted to run, too, but I knew there wasn’t any place safer than here.
There was another loud one, and then they stopped. The sirens stopped, too, after a while. In about half an hour, a guy stuck his head in the bunker and said, “All clear, boys.” We got out of the bunker and went back to our bunks. But I was still too nervous to sleep.
I was still awake, just staring at the ceiling, when they called the first formation of the day. It was about ten o’clock.
There were a couple of hundred of us lined up on what they called the “hot sheet.” Sheets of steel soaking up the Vietnam sun and pushing it back through the soles of your boots. You stand at attention while a sergeant yells at you through a bullhorn.
“Following named personnel,” he yelled, “line up over in the shade. You’re goin’ to Play-koo tomorrow morning, 14 January, uh, 1968.”
Pleiku, I thought. It’s been in the papers.
“Adams, Donald, RA 67948563. Barnes, Abraham, US 23746894. Brown, Leon…”
I stood and waited for the F’s to come up. We’d done this for over an hour every day for nearly a week, and my name hadn’t been called yet.
“… Farmer, John, US 11575278.”
That’s me. I broke out of the formation and carried my gear to the bunch standing in the shade. Off the hot sheet it must have been thirty degrees cooler. A buck-sergeant—three stripes, nothing to be afraid of—was in charge of us. When they finished the alphabet, he led us away. We went into a big white-painted shack, same kind as I’d stayed in the past week.
“This is your billet for the night, men. Tomorrow morning at 0400 you’ll be leaving for Pleiku. You’ve been here long enough to know the rules—if you hear the siren, high-tail it into the bunker next door. If you hear shots and no siren, take the mattress off the bed and roll up in it and pray. No John Wayne stuff, right? You’ll get your chance, where you’re headed.”
He really knew how to make a fella feel good.
I didn’t feel like waiting in the chow line, so I went over and waited for the club to open. The club was just another white shack, but you could get hamburgers and beer there. I was getting used to beer—in Oklahoma a nineteen-year-old can’t get it, but here, nobody asks how old you are.
There were about a dozen of us waiting when they opened the door. I got a hamburger and a warm beer and sat down at a table. Took out a tablet and started to write a letter to my girl, Wendy.
“Mind if we sit down here?” Two guys; dark tan and shaggy moustaches showed they must’ve been in Vietnam a while.
“Suit yourself.” I went back to writing my letter.
“You a new guy?” one of them asked after a minute.
“Yeah, I’ve only been here a week.”
“Where you headed—got your orders yet?”
I took the orders out of my pocket, unfolded them, and laid them on the table. “Pleiku—Fourth Administration Battalion.”
They both laughed. “You poor fucker—you might wind up in our outfit!” the taller one said. “Fourth Engineers—I’m Smitty and this runt’s Shakey; we’re both in Company C.”
“What makes your outfit so bad?”
“Oh, there’s nothin’ wrong with it—if you don’t mind gettin’ shot at.”
“Come on, Smitty, it’s not that rough.”
“Sure, it isn’t—you tell him how you got the name Shakey!”
“So I get nervous sometimes…”
“Nervous is the only way to be—” I noticed something a little stronger than beer on Smitty’s breath—“be first in the hole and last out. Behind a tree if there’s no hole, diggin’ a hole if there’s no tree…”
“Cut it out, Smitty, you’re plastered. You’re gonna scare the poor guy to death. It’s not all that bad, buddy.”
“Name’s John Farmer.”
“Way you talk, they’ll call you Tex.”
“I’m from Oklahoma…”
“Man, this is the army—they’ll still call you Tex.”
Smitty got up from the table and walked away, not too steady. “Back in a minute,” he mumbled.
Shakey watched him wander out the door and shook his head. “He’s gonna go pass out. He’ll wake up sick in the morning and be hittin’ that bottle again before noon.”
“He do this all the time?”
“Nah—for one thing, there’s no liquor out in the boonies. Even if there was, Smitty wouldn’t get drunk. Not too many people would. Everybody depends on everybody else.”
“But Smitty’s on vacation—he’s headed for Bangkok for R & R.”
“R and R?”
“Yeah, rest and recreation—didn’t they tell you about that? After you’ve been in Vietnam long enough, you get a week’s vacation. Bangkok, Hawaii, Australia—there’s a couple of dozen places you can go. Can’t go back to the world, though. Guess they’re afraid you’ll stay.”
We sat for a minute without saying anything. “Shakey, if you don’t mind me asking—why do they call you that?”
“Good reason. The first fuckin’ day I was out with the company, they ran into an ambush, lost t
hirty men. I didn’t see how anybody could live through a week of that, let alone a year. Things are pretty cool most of the time, everybody told me, but I couldn’t make myself believe it. I was pretty shook for a month or two.”
He took out a pipe and started loading it with tobacco. “I learned, though. Doesn’t pay to sweat it. You’ll either make it or you won’t. Most people do make it.”
He lit the pipe. The warm sweet smoke reminded me of my father. “I’ve been kind of hoping they’d make me a clerk,” I said. “I took typing in high school; passed the army typing test.”
“Wouldn’t bet on it. What’s your MOS?”
Yeah, that was the bad part. My MOS, Military Occupational Specialty. “Combat Engineer.”
“Hmmm…you might wind up in our outfit, at that. But I don’t think they’ll make you a clerk. Hell, we’ve got a college graduate out there humpin’ the boonies with us.”
“Humpin’ the boonies?”
“Man, don’t you know anything? Humpin’ the boonies—that’s what you’ll probably be doing the next twelve months. You put a monster pack on your back, a gun in one hand and a shovel in the other, and you go out in the woods—the boondocks, man, the boonies—lookin’ for trouble. Find it, too, sooner or later.”
“Really bad, then?” and he was talking about Smitty scaring me.
“Oh, I dunno.” He smiled. “I got through a whole year of it without a single scratch.”
“What, you’re headed home?”
“That’s right, man, I’m a real short-timer. Really short. Two more days and I get on that bird and kiss this hole goodbye. You might even be my replacement.”
“That’d be funny.”
“No, happens all the time. You figure everybody goin’ to Pleiku spends a week here at Cam Ranh Bay first, and everybody leavin’ has to hang around here for a week… a guy’s replacement almost has to be here when he’s checkin’ out. Just a question of running into him.”
“You ever meet the guy you replaced?”
“Nah.” Shakey drank the rest of his beer in one gulp and set the empty can down carefully. “He went home in a box.”