My Generation: Collected Nonfiction

by William Styron

  Page after page is filled with his animadversions, if such they may be called, on the Communist menace. These passages alternate with those which express his terror of the civilian populace, his frantic suspicion that each innocent-appearing Vietnamese may in truth be a Vietcong concealing a weapon or ready to throw a bomb.

  Curiously, when describing his fear, Calley is sometimes rather effective. His fear is certainly real enough, and understandable; and in his reflections on this fear and on the omnipresence of death amid the Vietnamese landscape he achieves on one or two pages, almost as if by accident, a kind of slovenly eloquence. Surely no one acquainted with the demoralizing character of the war in Vietnam would deny the legitimacy of such a fear.

  Yet long before the book's halfway point—where Calley in his inimitably charmless way has even begun to invoke General Sherman's tactics in Georgia to justify atrocities against civilians—his tone has become so hectoring, so shrill, that we simply know he is out to hoodwink us into believing that he honestly thought the Vietcong were his victims that day at My Lai. It is an ineffably shabby performance; and by the time we arrive at the end, cringing as we observe Calley try to discredit the witnesses who had appeared against him at Benning, we are able to see why he inspired in Richard Hammer such healthy revulsion.

  Certainly the loathsome and festering nature of the war in Vietnam provided fertile ground for such a catastrophe as My Lai. It is a particularly iniquitous war, this criminal venture which has implanted in the hearts of our apple-cheeked young warriors such a detestation of “slopes” and “slants” and “gooks.” That there have been other atrocities and other My Lais may be painful to accept but not difficult to believe. To those numerous letters he received from other servicemen confessing to their own atrocities, Calley points with distorted pride, failing to realize—just as millions of people have failed to realize—that one outrage does not expunge another. Neither does the obvious culpability of others in this horror absolve Calley, whose trial and conviction may be one of the most critically significant events of recent times, in that it has been able to show in vivid outline the extent of the degeneracy to which this war and its leaders have brought us.

  Mankind is sick nearly unto death of warfare, but until that remote day when its abolition is achieved, the wars our folly leads us to will have to be fought within the framework of those sometimes inadequate but necessary laws we have shaped to govern their course. In abstract, at least, it is obedience to this principle which has so far prevented our reaping the whirlwind of nuclear destruction. It is the depth of moral stupor to assume that in the pursuit of war, barbarous as it may seem to be, we must not be bound by rigorous codes.

  Few of us may be enamored of the military, but the military is both a fact of life and an institution; and like any institution—like law or business or government itself—it must stand guard against the venal, the felonious, and the corrupt. Thus to ignore the lesson of Lieutenant Calley is to ignore a crucial reality: that war is still steadfastly a part of the human condition, and that our very survival as human beings continues to depend on accommodating ourselves to ancient rules of conduct.

  [New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1971.]

  * * *

  * The reduction of Calley's sentence from life to twenty years, probably influenced by President Nixon's sympathy for the lieutenant, and which occurred after this review was written, tends to undercut any such venerable premise about the military service, and may simply be an indication of how corruptible it has really become.—W.S. (1982)

  Arnheiter

  Neil Sheehan's The Arnheiter Affair is a lively and thoroughly fascinating account of one of the most important controversies in modern American military history. The central figure of this true story, Lieutenant Commander Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter, was a naval officer of questionable ability in all departments when he was somehow given command of the destroyer escort Vance in the latter part of 1965. An Annapolis graduate, a fatuous worshiper of Lord Nelson, an ambitious, overbearing, thick-skinned man, he appeared to have almost none of the lambent human qualities that even the most zealous military officer must possess if he is effectively to command men, and his behavior from the outset was something less than auspicious. He made it plain that he knew little and cared less about the mechanics of running a ship, and soon established aboard a regime that Sheehan aptly describes as one of “whimsical tyranny.” This extended from his insistence on saluting and upon immaculately clean daily dress—items of routine usually dispensed with on a small ship at sea—to the humiliating impromptu lectures he required of his officers after dinner, on such recherché subjects as how to use a finger bowl. A Protestant himself, he enforced (against regulations) strict attendance at his Protestant-oriented religious lectures, to the chagrin and outrage of the many Catholics among the crew. Sedulous in regard to his own creature comforts, he smoked cigars bought with money paid to a “Boner Box” by officers guilty of small infractions of the rules, and enjoyed twenty-minute showers with preciously hoarded water while the rest of the crew, bathless, sweated in the dreadful heat of the Gulf of Siam.

  Arnheiter's lack of sensitivity about the nuances, the proprieties inherent in rank and privilege was almost boundless, but his official behavior as commanding officer of the Vance while patrolling the Vietnamese coast was even more bizarre. In a zone of the sea relatively far removed from any important enemy activity, Arnheiter was forced to resort to ever more quixotic maneuvers in order to satisfy his bellicose fantasies. He once nearly ran his ship aground as he invented targets and emplacements onshore which he claimed were “demolished” by his three-inch guns. He “annihilated” detachments of Vietcong guerrillas (they turned out to be a flock of chickens), and dangerously set out to stalk a Red Chinese submarine. Also, in a desperate spasm of machismo, he radioed a series of false position reports in order to give the impression of intrepid seamanship. Finally, to cap it all, the relentless skipper fabricated an engagement with the enemy in which he claimed to have performed personally with conspicuous gallantry, and dictated a totally spurious commendation, the intent of which was to award himself the Silver Star. At this point, mercifully, the Vance and its by now despairing and morally bedraggled crew were spared further misery. The cumulative effect of Arnheiter's conduct could not go disregarded for long even in a navy that tends to insist that its officers can do little wrong. Arnheiter was relieved of his command at Manila Bay, some four months after the excruciating, hair-raising, sometimes wrenchingly comic odyssey began.

  On the level of a nautical adventure alone, Sheehan's book makes an engrossing tale. The parallels with Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny are, of course, obvious. Like Queeg—indeed, like all fanatics—Arnheiter seemed cursed with a fatal humorlessness. Whimsy, yes, but no humor. One feels that even a vestige of a real sense of humor might have allowed the bedeviled captain some insight into the more ludicrous consequences of his own monomania; and his dire self-obsession and its tragicomic effects are unfolded by Sheehan with the skill and subtlety of a first-rate novelist. But examined on another level, The Arnheiter Affair tells us some important and disturbing things about the American people and their relationship to the military establishment. The Arnheiter affair did not end with the captain's relief from his command in the Philippines: it only began there. For with the single-minded self-righteousness of his breed, Arnheiter disclaimed the accusations against him and mounted a vociferous campaign to exonerate himself, protesting that he had been victimized by his subordinate officers, who had slandered him with trumped-up charges. For a brief but agreeable period it must have seemed to Arnheiter that his efforts in his own behalf would bear fruit. Valiant support chugged up to his side from the left and right, from the middle, from every hand. Americans have never fully understood the role of the military in their own society, and perhaps it is their native egalitarianism that has caused the citizenry to harbor an inane and nearly indefatigable passion for whoever appears to be the underdo
g—witness the example of Lieutenant William Laws Calley.

  Initially, Arnheiter was made to look like a martyr by the press and the other media. (Sheehan covered the story for The New York Times, and one of his winning points is a gentlemanly admission of his own knee-jerk liberal reaction to what then seemed Arnheiter's beleaguered plight.) Yet the captain also found some of his most ardent defenders among the high Navy brass, including an illustriously placed officer who risked and ultimately ruined his career by campaigning in Arnheiter's defense. As usual it was a case of feverish wish-fulfillment—the captain as symbol satisfying every immediate and shoddy fantasy while failing to instill in anyone the desire to inspect the hard moral and legal aspects of the issue at hand. “To the liberals,” Sheehan writes, “he was a little man who was victimized by an impersonal military institution. To the conservatives, the mutinous behavior of Arnheiter's subordinates was a manifestation of the general disorder and mockery of authority that was polluting the qualities of national life.” But an official review of Arnheiter's case and Sheehan's own careful investigation amply demonstrated that neither of these situations was the case. To put it in the simplest terms, the captain was exposed as a fraud and a menace.

  Unlike the actions of Lieutenant Calley, Arnheiter's conduct did not result in injury or the loss of any human lives (although it clearly contributed to the mental breakdown of a crewman and helped wreck the career of at least one of the ship's officers), and consequently the case lacked some of the sensational aspects of the more recent scandal. Yet just as one of the revelations of Calley's court-martial lay in the shocking fact that a man of the lieutenant's wretched caliber and qualifications should never have been made an officer in the first place, so the Arnheiter affair demonstrated that the Navy likewise had much to answer for in justifying the promotion of an Arnheiter to such a delicate position of command. Arnheiter often appeared to be a simple clown, and the story as Sheehan has put it down does contain much comic flavor of the Mister Roberts variety—this is what helps make the book so consistently entertaining—but the narrative is also filled with somber and sobering overtones. The author is not being at all facetious when he speculates upon how Arnheiter's imbecilic game of hide-and-seek with the Chinese submarine might easily have helped precipitate another world war. On this plane, the Arnheiter affair no less than that of Calley demonstrates the potential for disaster that exists for us when at any level of authority there is a crucial abdication of personal responsibility, and shows the danger that is always present when even one small device in the grotesque, precariously balanced supermechanism of war we have fashioned for ourselves is handed over to cranks and fanatics.

  [American Scholar, Summer 1972.]

  The Wreckage of an American War

  The marines who fought in the Pacific during World War II had much to fear, for the fighting was often lethal and barbaric. Yet because they were marines, with an intense feeling of identity, and were caught up in that mysterious group trance known as esprit de corps, they really did assume that they were invincible. Some of this hubris came from their brutal and very efficient training, but a great deal of their deepest confidence flowed from their leaders. Their officers, both commissioned and noncommissioned, were arguably the best in the world, and of these leaders no marine commanded more admiration than a colonel with a beguilingly menacing countenance and a pouter-pigeon strut named Lewis Burwell Puller.

  Puller—the father of the author of Fortunate Son, a dark and corrosive autobiography—was nicknamed Chesty for the aggressive thrust of his carriage; he was and still is a legend, an embodiment of the Marines in the same way that Babe Ruth embodies baseball or that Yeats stands for Irish poetry.

  A native of the Virginia Tidewater, Puller was born at the end of the last century, close enough to the Civil War to be haunted by it and to be mesmerized by its Confederate heroes and victims. Like many of the high-level marine officers, disproportionately Southern by origin, who helped defeat the Japanese, Puller learned his infantry tactics while chasing and being chased by the guerrilla forces of Augusto Sandino in the Nicaraguan jungles; his spectacular exploits there won him two Navy Crosses.

  During World War II, the last truly just war fought by Americans, Puller was awarded the Navy Cross two more times for gallantry under fire, at Guadalcanal and at Cape Gloucester, and his legend blossomed. Stories about him abounded. Respected extravagantly, he was also greatly feared, especially by very junior officers. It was rumored that he literally devoured second lieutenants; after all, at the gruesome battle of Peleliu, a derelict shavetail was summoned into Chesty Puller's tent and never a shred of him was seen again—he plainly had been eaten.

  Puller exhibited little tact, especially with the press. In the aftermath of the deadly Guadalcanal campaign, an asinine journalist inquired, “Colonel, could you tell the American people what it is you're fighting for?” Puller replied, “Six hundred and forty-nine dollars a month.” His fairness and concern for his troops were celebrated and were never so evident as during the retreat from Chosin Reservoir, during the Korean War, when as a regimental commander he led a rearguard action of such tactical mastery that it manifestly saved countless American lives; this feat won him a fifth Navy Cross and promotion to brigadier general.

  As Burke Davis portrays him in his fine 1982 biography, Marine!, Chesty Puller, despite the glory he gained in the mechanized setting of modern warfare, was a God-fearing fighting man of the old school, cast in the mold of Lee and Jackson, both of whom he idolized. Amid the most foulmouthed body of men in Christendom he was, if not prudish, restrained in speech. Some of the letters he wrote to his wife from various exotic hellholes are poignant, old-fashioned utterances that touch on the horrors of war but speak of a longing for repose in tones of spiritual anguish reminiscent of Stonewall Jackson. After he retired to his Tidewater village, nearly two decades before his death in 1971, he was proud when his only son, born when he was nearing fifty, went off as a second lieutenant to combat duty in Vietnam. That twenty-year-old man, his namesake—the “fortunate son” of this bitter though redemptive narrative—became one of the most grievously mutilated combatants to survive the ordeal of Vietnam.

  The catastrophe happened on a blazing October day in 1968, when Lewis Puller, Jr., was leading his platoon on a routine patrol through an especially sinister area of the countryside nicknamed the Riviera, a strip of rice paddies and wooded hills bordering the South China Sea. Mr. Puller had served in the combat zone for less than three months, but his activity had been intensely concentrated and appallingly violent. He had seen marines wounded and killed, had engaged in fierce firefights, had been exposed to booby traps; during an attack on a local village one of his men had inadvertently blown off the arm of an eight-year-old girl.

  Mr. Puller is a gripping writer when he describes the heat and exhaustion, the physical brutalization, the incessant anxiety and danger suffered by young men engaged in that demented strife nearly a quarter of a century ago. Not without good reason he may be at his most vivid when he tells what happened to him.

  That October day he stepped on a booby-trapped howitzer round and was rocketed sky-high. He “had no idea that the pink mist that engulfed me had been caused by the vaporization of most of my right and left legs. As shock began to numb my body I could see through a haze of pain that my right thumb and little finger were missing, as was most of my left hand.” In addition, the explosion destroyed massive parts of both buttocks, ruptured an eardrum, split his scrotum, and sent slivers of shrapnel through most of the rest of his body.

  Hovering near death for many days, Mr. Puller developed a stress ulcer that required the removal of two-thirds of his stomach, augmenting the already intolerable pain. Transported stateside, he remained for nearly two years at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, where, through the early phases of his stay, he was utterly helpless and so dependent on morphine that when he was briefly taken off it he was, as he says, “quickly reduced to the level of a snarling anima
l.” When his weight dropped to less than sixty pounds and his stomach resisted food, he was given nourishment through a nasal tube.

  These pages exude the whiff of authentic hell and are, accordingly, sometimes difficult to read. But because Mr. Puller writes with simplicity and candor, with touches of spontaneous humor, his outcry of agony and isolation, while harrowing, leaves one primarily overwhelmed with wonder at the torture a human being can absorb this side of madness.

  Slowly the worst of the torment receded and slowly the recuperative process began: skin grafts, reconstructive surgery, endless hours on the operating table, all enacted in a continuum of diabolical pain. He regained some extremely limited use of his mangled hands, but the efforts to restore mobility to his legs through prosthesis, while tireless, were in vain; he would have to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. There were compensations, however, for his sacrifice: his face was unscathed and his basic senses, including his eyesight, remained intact. So did his sexual functioning. His young wife, who was pregnant when he went off to Vietnam, presented him with a son. Escaped like Ishmael from the vortex of oblivion, he had a future and also, clearly, a tale to tell.

  Fortunate Son is an amazing tale, but in many ways an artless one, with great cumulative power yet more compelling as a raw chronicle than a work offering literary surprises. If its prose does not resonate as does Philip Caputo's eloquent Rumor of War, if the book lacks the surreal wackiness and scathing insights that made Michael Herr's Dispatches such an original tour de force, its act of bearing such passionate witness to a desecrated moment in history has its own importance and gives it a place among the meaningful works on the Vietnam nightmare.

  As for Mr. Puller's future, it seemed in certain respects almost as calamitous as the experience of war. He acquired a law degree and an ambition to run (as a Democrat) for a congressional seat in Virginia. By this time he had undergone the same traumatic insult as numberless veterans whose brother and sister Americans detested them for an event they conceived to be the handiwork of the warriors themselves. Smarting at this mad response but in a rage at the war and its real instigators in Washington, he made his feelings public, proclaiming that if he were called up again he would refuse to go.