by Tobias Wolff
My Tho was lucky in another way. Almost no Americans were allowed in town, only a few AID people and those of us who were assigned to the Vietnamese military. By some stratagem My Tho had managed to get itself declared off-limits to regular American troops, and that was its deliverance, because there were several thousand of them up the road at Dong Tam just dying to come in and trash the place.
I was glad the American troops were kept out. Without even meaning to they would have turned the people into prostitutes, pimps, pedicab drivers, and thieves, and the town itself into a nest of burger stands and laundries. Within months it would have been unrecognizable; such was the power of American dollars and American appetites. Besides, I didn’t want my stock watered down. I took pleasure in being one of a very few white men among all these dark folk, big among the small, rich among the poor. My special position did not make me arrogant, not at first. It made me feel benevolent, generous, protective, as if I were surrounded by children, as I often was—crowds of them, shy but curious, taking turns stroking my hairy arms and, as a special treat, my mustache. In My Tho I had a sense of myself as father, even as lord, the very sensation that, even more than all their holdings here, must have made the thought of losing this place unbearable to the French.
So the American grunts had to keep to their base in Dong Tam, but even in that miserable shithole they had some advantages over those of us who lived with the Vietnamese. They were more secure, as long as they stayed inside the wire. Outside the wire was another story. But inside they were fairly safe, protected by their numbers and by a vast circle of minefields, heavily manned bunkers with interlocking fields of fire, tanks, mobile artillery, and any kind of air support they wanted, in any quantity, at any hour of the day or night. The situation at my battalion was very different. We were stuck by ourselves—one hundred fifty or so men and six howitzers—in a field surrounded by rice paddies. A canal ran along one leg of our perimeter. The water was deep, the muddy banks sheer and slick; it would be hard to attack us from that side. But the canal was the only help we got from topography. Otherwise the land around us was flat and open and laced with dikes, enough of them to move an army over while another army marched up the road to our front gate. It was a terrible site, chosen for reasons incomprehensible to me.
The troops at Dong Tam were better protected than we were, and better supplied. We were expected to live like our Vietnamese counterparts, which sounded like a noble project, democratic, right-minded, the perfect show of partnership with our hosts and allies—a terrific idea, really, until you actually tried it. Not many did, only a few advisers in the way outback who went the whole nine yards, sleeping in hammocks, eating rats, and padding around on rubber sandals that they swore up and down were better than boots. I admired them, but my own intention was to live not as a Vietnamese among Vietnamese but as an American among Vietnamese.
Living like an American wasn’t easy. Outside the big bases it was a full-time job. When Sergeant Benet and I first arrived at the battalion, the advisers we were supposed to replace were living very close to the bone, or so it seemed to us. They ate C rations. They slept in sleeping bags, on field cots. For light they used oil lamps borrowed from the Vietnamese quartermaster. Sergeant Benet and I agreed that we owed ourselves something better.
We started to scrounge. There wasn’t much else to do. We were advisers, but we didn’t know exactly what advice we were supposed to be giving, or to whom. We rarely saw Major Chau, the battalion commander, and when we did he seemed embarrassed, at a loss as to why we were there. At first he seemed suspicious of us. Maybe he thought we were supposed to be keeping tabs on him. He had good reason to fear scrutiny, but then so did every officer of rank in that unhappy army. All of them were political intriguers; they had to be in order to receive promotion and command. Their wages were too low to live on because it was assumed they’d be stealing, so they stole. They were punished for losing men in battle, therefore they avoided battle. When their men deserted they kept them on the roster and continued to draw their pay, with the result that the losses were never made up and the units turned into scarecrow remnants hardly able to defend themselves, let alone carry the war to the enemy. Our own battalion was seriously understrength.
I was a pretty good scrounge. Not of the same champion breed as Sergeant Benet, but pretty good. We became partners in horse trading. I was lonely and callow enough to have let friendship happen too, even across the forbidden distance of our ranks, but he knew better and protected me from myself. He never forgot that I was an officer. Even in anger, and I sometimes brought him to anger, he called me sir. This was partly out of habit, the old soldier respectful always of the commission if not the uncertain, hopelessly compromised man who held it. But it was also his way of staying out of reach so he could have a life apart. Still, I could make him laugh, and I knew that he liked me, probably more than he wanted to.
We couldn’t mooch off the Vietnamese, because they didn’t have anything. We had to do our business with the Americans at Dong Tam. At first we simply begged, presenting ourselves as orphans at the gate, hungry, unsheltered, defenseless. This didn’t get us very far. As more than one supply sergeant said, they weren’t running a charity. If we wanted to play we had to bring something to the party. What we ended up bringing were souvenirs. Most of the men at Dong Tam were support troops who rarely left the base. They never saw any action, nor for that matter did most of the soldiers who did go into the field. The letters they wrote home didn’t always make this clear. In their boredom they sometimes allowed themselves to say things that weren’t strictly true, and in time, as they approached the end of their tours, a fever came upon them to find some enemy artifacts to back up the stories they’d been telling their friends and girlfriends and little brothers.
This stuff was easy enough for us to come by. Sergeant Benet mentioned our needs to some of the battalion officers, and for a consideration in the form of Courvoisier, Marlboros, Seiko watches, and other such goods, cheap in the PX and dear on the street, they set up a pipeline for us: Vietcong flags and battle standards, all convincingly worn and shredded, with unit designations and inspiring communist slogans in Vietnamese; bloodstained VC identity cards; brass belt buckles embossed with hammer and sickle; bayonets similarly decorated; pith helmets of the kind worn by the enemy; and Chicom rifles. Major Chau himself never demanded anything in so many words, and he always accepted what we gave him with a gracious show of surprise. He seemed relieved to find us willing to forgo the steel-jawed American rectitude practiced on him by our predecessors and get down to the business of business. This wasn’t just cynicism and greed. One of our transactions at Dong Tam netted us a haul of claymore mines, each packing hundreds of ball bearings. If we got attacked they would help fill the holes left by our missing men. We also brought home sandbags, cement, and barbed wire to beef up our perimeter, beehive rounds for the howitzers, and more mines—you could never have too many mines. Fifty thousand wouldn’t have been too many for me. Given the chance, I’d have lived smack in the middle of a minefield twenty miles wide. Anyway, in Major Chau’s situation, which was now our situation, making deals was how you got by.
Chicom rifles were our most valuable stock-in-trade. The other stuff could be faked, and probably was. Why not? What can be faked will be faked. If the locals could put together movements for watches, even ones that ran funny, they wouldn’t have any trouble turning out Vietcong flags and identity cards. In fact some of them must have been producing these things for the VC all along, which put the whole question of authenticity in a new light: if made by the same hands, would enemy equipment be any less real because it was ordered by us instead of them?
We never accused our suppliers of dealing in counterfeits, nor did our agents at Dong Tam accuse us. But they employed a certain tilt of the head when handling fakable items, and allowed their pursed lips the faintest quiver of suppressed mirth. They took what we offered, but at a discount. Only the Chicoms commanded their respect.
The Chicom was a heavy, bolt-action rifle with a long bayonet that folded down along the barrel when not in use. It was manufactured in communist China—hence its nickname. Vietminh soldiers had carried it against the French, and the Vietcong had carried it against us when this war began. They didn’t use it much anymore, not when they could get their hands on AK-47S or M-16s, but the Chicom was a very mean-looking weapon, and indisputably a communist weapon. The perfect trophy. Some of the guys at Dong Tam even had them chromed, like baby shoes and the engine blocks of their cars.
By the end of the year Sergeant Benet and I were living in a wooden hooch with screens on the windows. We had bunks with mattresses. We had electric lights, a TV, a stereo, a stove, a refrigerator, and a generator to keep it all running. But the TV was a black-and-white portable. It was okay for the news, but we really felt the pinch when Bonanza came on. We were Bonanza freaks, Sergeant Benet and I. They were broadcasting a two-hour Bonanza special on Thanksgiving night, and we meant to watch this properly, on a color TV with a big screen. Sergeant Benet had arranged a deal that would significantly upgrade our viewing pleasure, a Chicom for a 21-inch set. Everything was set. That was why he and I were on the road to Dong Tam the day I ran over the bikes, Thanksgiving Day, 1967.
I DROVE fast. We’d started late, after trying all morning to find a convoy we could attach ourselves to. There weren’t any. Driving there alone would be dangerous, stupid, we both knew that, and we agreed to call the trip off until we had some other people around us, some padding, but I couldn’t get my mind off that Thanksgiving special. I fooled around with paperwork for a couple of hours after lunch, then gave up and said the hell with it, I was going.
Sergeant Benet said he’d go too, and though I could see he didn’t like the idea I made no effort to talk him out of it.
He held hard to the handle on the dash while I slithered in the ruts and splashed through muddy holes and found impossible paths between the people on the road. As I drove I indulged a morbid habit I couldn’t seem to break, picking places in the distance ahead and thinking, There—that’s where I’m going to get it … seeing the mine erupt through the mud, through the floorboard, the whole picture going red. Then I was on the place and past the place, and everything that was clenched and cowering opened in a rush. A few minutes later, not even thinking about it, or pretending not to think about it, I chose another place and thought, There—
Sergeant Benet fiddled with the radio, which wasn’t working right. No radio in Vietnam ever worked right.
The VC had blown the bridge a few months back, so we had to take the old ferry across the river. Then up past another hamlet, and another, and the blackened ruins of a militia outpost, and on, and on.
How far was it to Dong Tam? Hard to say, all these years later. But it would have been hard to say then too, because distance had become a psychological condition rather than a measurable issue of meters and kilometers. A journey down these roads was endless until you arrived at the end. No “seems” about it: it was endless until it was over. That was the truth of distance. The same with time. Our tour of duty was a year, but neither I nor anyone else ever used the word. You never heard it at all. The most we dared speak of were days, and even a day could lose you in its vast expanse, its limits stretching outward beyond the grasp of imagination.
Indeed, just about everything in our world had become relative, subjective. We were lied to, and knew it. Misinformed, innocently and by design. Confused. We couldn’t trust our own intelligence, in any sense of that word. Rumors festered in our uncertainty. Rumors, lies, apprehension, distant report, wishful thinking, such were the lenses through which we regarded this terra infirma and its maddeningly self-possessed, ungrateful people, whom we necessarily feared and therefore hated and could never understand. Where were we, really? Who was who, what was what? The truth was not forthcoming, you had to put it together for yourself, and in this way your most fantastic nightmares and suspicions became as real to you as the sometimes unbelievable fact of being in this place at all. Your version of reality might not tally with the stats or the map or the after-action report, but it was the reality you lived in, that would live on in you through the years ahead, and become the story by which you remembered all that you had seen, and done, and been.
So, once again, how far was it to Dong Tam? Far enough. And how long did it take? Forever, until you got there.
We turned a corner and were on the final approach. The road was lined with beer shanties and black market stands. Red-mouthed girls in fishnet stockings and miniskirts squawked from the doorways, wobbling on high heels. Out beyond the line of hovels I could see farmers in watery fields, some astride buffalo, most on foot, bent down like cranes, pant legs gathered above their knees, working right up to the edge of the minefield.
Sergeant Benet unloaded our rifles as we pulled up to the gate. The sentries usually waved us through when they saw we were American, but this time we got stopped. A big MP captain came out of the guard shack and stuck his head inside the window. He was one of those pink-skinned people who disintegrate in daylight. His nose was peeling, his lips were blistered, his eyes bloodshot. Without due ceremony, he asked me what our business was.
I said, “Just visiting.”
“Sir,” he said.
“You didn’t say ‘lieutenant’ to me.”
Sergeant Benet leaned over and looked at his name tag. “Afternoon, Captain Cox. Happy Thanksgiving, sir.”
The captain didn’t answer him. “Get out,” he said.
“Get out, Lieutenant,” I said. “Get out, Sergeant.” But I got out, and so did Sergeant Benet, who came around the front of the truck and walked over to the captain. “Is there a problem, sir?”
The captain looked him up and down and said, “What’ve you got in there, Bennet?”
“Benet,” Sergeant Benet said. “Like the writer, sir.”
“What writer? What are you talking about?”
“Stephen Vincent Benet, sir.”
“What did he write? Spirituals?”
The other MP, a private, shook his head: Don’t blame me. The captain went to the back of the truck and lifted the canvas flap. Then he dropped it and walked up to the cab, where we had the Chicom jammed behind the seat. He found it right away. “Well, well, well,” he said, “what have we here?” He turned the rifle over in his hands. “Very nice. Very nice indeed. Where’d you get it?”
“It’s mine,” I said, and reached out for it.
He pulled it back and showed me his teeth.
“Come on,” I said. “Give it here.”
“You’re not allowed to bring enemy weapons onto this base. I’m taking this into custody pending a full investigation.”
“In answer to your question, sir,” Sergeant Benet said, “that rifle is a gift from our division commander, General Ngoc, to General Avery on the occasion of the American national holiday. General Avery is expecting it at this very moment. If you like, sir, I’ll be more than happy to give him a call from the guard shack and let him explain the situation to you.”
The captain looked at Sergeant Benet. I could see him trying to figure all this out, and I could see him give up. “Take the goddamn thing,” he said, and pushed the rifle toward me. “Let this be a warning,” he said.
“Sir, I apologize for the confusion,” Sergeant Benet said.
After we drove away I asked Sergeant Benet just what he thought he was doing, taking a chance like that. Say the captain had actually gotten General Avery on the phone. Then what?
“That outstanding officer isn’t going to bother a busy man like General Avery. Not on Thanksgiving, no sir. Never happen.”
“But what if he did?”
“Well, sir, what do you think? You think the general’s going to insult our Vietnamese hosts by turning down the offer of a number one gift like this?”
“As simple as that.”
“Yes sir. I believe so, sir.”
I followed the muddy track through the base. The
base was nothing but mud and muddy tents and muddy men looking totally pissed off and brutal and demoralized. In their anger at being in this place and their refusal to come to terms with it they had created a profound, intractable bog. Something was wrong with the latrine system; the place always stank. They hadn’t even bothered to plant any grass. At Dong Tam I saw something that wasn’t allowed for in the national myth—our capacity for collective despair. People here seemed in the grip of unshakable petulance. It was in the slump of their shoulders and the plodding way they moved. A sourness had settled over the base, spoiling and coarsening the men. The resolute imperial will was all played out here at empire’s fringe, lost in rancor and mud. Here were pharaoh’s chariots engulfed; his horsemen confused; and all his magnificence dismayed.
A shithole.
Sergeant Benet and I stopped at the PX to buy a few things for Major Chau before going on to pick up the television. We sat down for some burgers and fries, then had seconds, then got lost in the merchandise, acres of stuff: cameras and watches and clothes, sound systems and perfume, liquor, jewelry, food, sporting equipment, bras, negligees. You could buy books. You could buy a trombone. You could buy insurance. You could buy a Hula-Hoop. They had a new car on display in the back of the store, a maroon GTO, with a salesman standing by to stroke the leather seats and explain its groundbreaking features, and to accept cut-rate, tax-free orders for this car or any other you might want—ready at your local dealer’s on the scheduled date of your return home, with no obligation to anyone if, heaven forbid, some misfortune should prevent your return home.
We must have spent over an hour in there. We had the place almost to ourselves, and later, as we drove to the signal company where our TV was waiting, I noticed that the base itself seemed strangely empty, almost as if it had been abandoned. I smelled turkey baking. There must have been a bird in every oven in Dong Tam. The aroma contended with the stench of the latrines, and made me feel very far from home. That was always the effect of official attempts to make home seem closer.