Yours,
John
Puff, the Magic Dragon
Saturday, February 25, 1967
Saigon
Dear Alicia:
IT IS TIME for us to continue our journey on to Thailand. We made the reservations to Bangkok and said goodbye to many friends. I know that I have not written to you about everything I have seen. That would take a lifetime. But I have been six weeks here, about five of them in the field, and perhaps my years tell on me a little. I have often wished that if a war is necessary, it might be fought by men of my age rather than by boys with their whole lives ahead of them. The difficulty is that we wouldn’t do it very well. Our bones would creak and our eyes might not have the clear sharpness required. Let’s face it, Alicia, I get tireder quicker than the kids do and I don’t recover as fast.
It was my last night and I had reserved it for a final mission. Do you remember or did I even mention Puff, the Magic Dragon? From the ground I had seen it in action in the night but I had never flown in it. It was not given its name by us but by the VC who have experienced it. Puff is a kind of a crazy conception. It is a C-47—that old Douglas two-motor ship that has been the workhorse of the world since early on in World War II.
The one I was to fly in was celebrating its twenty-fourth birthday and that’s an old airplane. I don’t know who designed Puff but whoever did had imagination. It is armed with three six-barreled Gatling guns. Their noses stick out of two side windows and the open door. And these three guns can spray out 2,800 rounds a minute—that’s right, 2,800. In one quarter-turn, these guns fine-tooth an area bigger than a football field and so completely that not even a tuft of crabgrass would remain alive. The guns are fixed. The pilot fires them by rolling up on his side. There are cross hairs on his side glass. When the cross hairs are on the target, he presses a button and a waterfall of fire pours on the target, a Niagara of steel.
These ships, some of them, are in the air in every area at night and all night. If a call for help comes, they can be there in a very short time. They carry quantities of the parachute flares we see in the sky every night, flares so bright that they put an area of midday on a part of the night-bound earth. And these flares are not mechanically released. They are manhandled out the open door by the flare crew. I know the technique but I have never flown a night mission with Puff. I had reserved it for my last night in South Vietnam. We were to fly at dark and hoped to be back by midnight.
My lady-wife Elaine, who has taken everything in her proud stride to my admiration, did not want to sit alone in the Caravelle Hotel waiting for me, so Johnny Floyd, Regular Army, third hitch, recently wounded but recuperating, asked her to have dinner with him in a small restaurant near the hotel to wait out my return.
I went by chopper to the field where the Puffs live, met the pilot and his crew and had supper with them. Our mission was not general call. A crossroad area had been observed to be used after dark recently by Charley, who was rushing supplies from one place to another for reasons best known to Charley. We were to be directed by one of the little Forward Air Control planes I spoke of in an earlier letter.
Because it was hot and no wind in prospect, I wore only light slacks and a cotton shirt. We flew at dusk and very soon I found myself freezing. Puff is not a quiet ship, her door is open, her gun ports open, her engines loud and everything on her rattles. I did not wear a headset because I wanted to move about, so one of the flare crew, a big man, had to offer me an extra flight suit and he said it in pantomime. I accepted with chattering teeth and struggled into it and zipped it up. Then they fitted me with a parachute harness and showed me where my pack was in case of need. But even I knew that flying at low altitude, if the need should arise, there wouldn’t be much time to get out even if I were young and clever.
Forward of the guns and aft by the open door were the racks where the flares stood, three feet high, four inches in diameter. I think they weigh about forty pounds. Wrestling two or three hundred of them out of the door would be a good night’s work. The ship was dark, except for its recognition lights and a dim red light over the navigator’s table.
They gave me ear plugs. I had heard that the sound of these guns is unique, so I put the rubber stoppers in my ears but they were irritating so I pulled them out again and only hoped to get my mouth open when we fired.
There was a line of afterglow in the western sky, only it was not west the way Puff flies. Sometimes it was overhead, sometimes straight down. Without an instrument you couldn’t tell up from down but my feet were held to the steel floor by this centrifuge of the turning, twisting ship. Then the order came and a flare was thrown out and another and another. They whirled down and the brilliant lights came on. We upsided and looked down on the ghost-lighted earth. Far below, us almost skimming the earth, I could see the shape of the tiny skimming FAC plane inspecting the target and reporting to our pilot. We dropped three more flares, whirled and dropped three more. The road and the crossroads were very clearly defined on the ground and then there was a curious unearthly undulating mass like an amoeba under a microscope, a pseudo-pod changing its shape and size as it moved. Now Puff went up on its side. I did know enough to get my mouth open. The sound of those guns is like nothing I have heard. It is like a coffee grinder as big as Mt. Everest compounded with a dentist’s drill. A growl but one that rocks your body and flaps your eardrums like wind-whipped flags. And out through the door I could see a stream, a wide river of fire that seemed to curve and wave toward the earth.
We flared and fired again and once again. Out on the edges of darkness there were the little winking lights that were ground fire aimed at us.
During the last five weeks, I guess I have been in areas and under conditions of danger. I’ve had a good normal fear that makes one keep his head down and take cover when it offers, the tenseness and crystal awareness danger brings. I guess it is fear all right but it brings compensations. But now, on the last night, with the mission completed and only the winking ground fire and that receding behind us, I was afraid. More than that—I was scared. I could see the stray and accidental shot hit a flare and the whole ship go up in a huge Roman candle of incandescent searing light. I thought how silly it would be on my last night. I think it was the first time I had thought of myself, me, as being in danger. And then curious memories came to me like movie shorts. I had a drink with Ernie Pyle in San Francisco. Ernie ordinarily dressed like a tossed salad but now he was wearing a new Eisenhower jacket. I said, “Just because you’re going to the Pacific do you have to be a fashion plate?”
Ernie said, “It’s new. I shouldn’t have bought it. I’m not going to need it.” And his first time on the line he got a bullet between the eyes.
And Capa leaving Paris for the war in East Asia. We made a date for dinner in Paris a week away. And Capa said, “I hate to go on this one. If I didn’t need the money, I wouldn’t go. I’ve had it. I tell you this is the last time.” And it was.
And only last week lying in the bunker with a boy who said, “Five more days—no, four days and thirteen hours, and I’ll be going home. I thought the time would never come.” And it didn’t. He was killed on the next patrol.
I was cold all over and trembling maybe somewhat from the grinding of the guns. And already we were landing and the mission was done and we were back early.
I got to the hotel at a little before ten and of course Elaine was not back from dinner. So I went around the corner to the restaurant. She and Johnny Floyd were sitting quietly and when they saw me come in they both jumped up. “How was it?” Elaine asked.
We have our privacies but not in big things.
I said, “I was scared.”
“So was I. I had three martinis and they didn’t help.”
And Johnny Floyd said, “I kept telling her you were all right, but I guess I oversold it. Because I was scared too.”
Isn’t that funny and strange the way the mind works? But that’s the way it works.
And soon we wil
l be in Bangkok and it will be very different.
Yours,
John
An Open Letter to Poet Yevtushenko
My dear friend Genya:
I HAVE JUST NOW read those parts of your poem printed in the New York Times. I have no way of knowing how good the translation is, but I am pleased and flattered by your devotion.
In your poem, you ask me to speak out against the war in Vietnam. You know well how I detest all war, but for this one I have a particular and personal hatred. I am against this Chinese-inspired war. I don’t know a single American who is for it. But, my beloved friend, you asked me to denounce half a war, our half. I appeal to you to join me in denouncing the whole war.
Surely you don’t believe that our “pilots fly to bomb children,” that we send bombs and heavy equipment against innocent civilians? This is not East Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, nor Tibet in 1959.
You know as well as I do, Genya, that we are bombing oil storage, transport and the heavy and sophisticated weapons they carry to kill our sons. And where that oil and those weapons come from, you probably know better than I. They are marked in pictograph and in Cyrilic characters.
I hope you also know that if those weapons were not being sent, we would not be in Vietnam at all. If this were a disagreement between Vietnamese people, we surely would not be there, but it is not, and since I have never found you to be naive you must be aware that it is not.
This war is the work of Chairman Mao, designed and generaled by him in absentia, advised by Peking and cynically supplied with brutal weapons by foreigners who set it up. Let us denounce this also, my friend, but even more, let us together undertake a program more effective than denunciation.
I beg you to use your very considerable influence on your people, your government, and on those who look to the Soviet Union for direction, to stop sending the murderous merchandise through North Vietnam to be used against the South.
For my part, I will devote every resource I have to persuade my government to withdraw troops and weapons from the South, leaving only money and help for rebuilding. And, do you know, Genya, if you could accomplish your part, my part would follow immediately and automatically.
But even this is not necessary to stop the war. If you could persuade North Vietnam to agree in good faith to negotiate, the bombing would stop instantly. The guns would fall silent and our dear sons could come home. It is as simple as that, my friend, as simple as that, I promise you. I hope to see you and your lovely wife Galya soon.
With all respect and affection,
John Steinbeck
VIII.
AMERICA AND AMERICANS
JOHN STEINBECK’S stature as a writer was solidified in the 1930s by three searing books about California migrants; his career closed with an equally stringent trilogy, books not about marginalized Americans but about mainstream America: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley (1962), and America and Americans (1966). In the decade since publication of East of Eden in 1952, Steinbeck had declared with some regularity that he wanted to leave the past behind, to write about something other than his California childhood or his apprenticeship on Monterey’s Cannery Row. He had not been entirely successful, since Sweet Thursday carried him back, as did a projected short-story cycle, never completed, about his Salinas boyhood. But with increasing insistence, he declared that the past was the “disease of modern writers.” “If this is a time of confusion, then that should be the subject of a good writer if he is to set down his time” (Benson 759). If confusion is the subject, however, a form to contain confusion is not easily found. He was drawn to the “hard discipline of play,” the drama’s “iron discipline of form,” and throughout the 1950s he started a number of plays, all aborted. The more relaxed form of the letter served, as in “Letters to Alicia,” for he could move from subject to subject. Brief journalistic pieces recorded impressions. But the longer works—a travel narrative, a novel capturing America’s converging voices of past and present, and a collection of essays—most clearly indicate Steinbeck’s struggle to contain the present.
It’s not true that Steinbeck failed to understand America after World War II; it’s not true that he swerved to the right politically; but it may be true that in trying to locate the source of American malaise, he could not find an adequate form or a convincing tone to contain his discontent. “The better tone for a book such as [America and Americans],” observes Warren French, “is one that shares unique experiences rather than universalizing one’s own” (110). Indeed, the essays in America and Americans, lacking Charley, lack a certain humor and charm; not fiction, they lack plot and character and setting. But they are impassioned pleas from a man who cared deeply about his country. They are jeremiads, exhorting America to take heed.
The writing of America and Americans came to him almost by accident. He was discouraged by his failure to make progress in his ten-year project of transforming Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur into modern English. He wrote to his agent that “the words sound pretentious and sour and unreal. It just makes me sick. Maybe the fire has gone out” (23 July 1964). He was rescued from despondency by an offer from his publisher. Viking’s Thomas H. Guinzburg came to him with a collection of photographs that he had commissioned to be taken all over the country and suggested that the author write an introduction to the collection. Guinzburg’s idea was to present the American spirit, to show Americans at work and play, in every corner of the country.
But what had started out as a thin volume of pictures was transformed into a collection of essays with the photos grouped together at various places in the text. The essays spring not from the photos, however, but from Steinbeck’s recent tour of the country for Travels with Charley. He had a number of things he had wanted to say in that book which the form did not allow. The frustration of working on Le Morte d’Arthur pushed him forward to a more thoughtful and extensive job than he had originally agreed to, but also his thoughts about Arthur gave him a basis for developing his America and Americans essays.
A “cut version of the Caxton Morte d’Arthur” (Benson 21) had been his favorite book as a child, and he had used it as a framework for telling the story of the paisanos in Tortilla Flat. What attracted him as a child was its sense of mystery and adventure, but what attracted him as an adult was its sense of values—honor, duty, trustworthiness, and courage—as well as the sense of community as demonstrated by the knights of the roundtable. “The American,” he writes in the last of these essays, “has never been a perfect instrument, but at one time he had a reputation for gallantry, which, to my mind, is a sweet and priceless quality. It must still exist, but it is blotted out by the dust cloud of self-pity.” He would seem to have wanted to do the Arthur as a way of commenting indirectly on what he perceived was going wrong in American society, primarily its growing materialism and dishonesty. Frustrated with the translation, he took his concerns to express them in America and Americans, but he was led to go further, to discover just what the American was and how that person developed. He wrote to John Huston while the manuscript was in progress, “I may have to run for my life when it comes out. I am taking ‘the American’ apart like a watch to see what makes him tick and some very curious things are emerging” (SLL 807).
Few had tried to identify the American in such a way since St. John de Crèvecoeur had done it in Letters from an American Farmer at the time of the American Revolution. “What, then, is the American, this new man?” (63) Crèvecoeur asks and goes on to idealize him as the yeoman farmer, industrious, community-minded, family-centered, and optimistic. He is a new breed, having “arrived on a new continent; a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different from what he had hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in Europe of great lords who possess everything, and a herd of people who have nothing” (63). Two centuries later, this was no longer a country that depended on the farmer and the opportunity to own land in order to ensure democracy, but John Steinbeck found it still inimi
table and matchless: “I believe that out of the whole body of our past, out of our differences, our quarrels, our many interests and directions, something has emerged that is itself unique in the world: America—complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.”
At the same time both writers found much to criticize. For Crèvecoeur one of the central problems in eighteenth-century America was the wild man, the frontiersman who has left behind all civilizing restraints. Without rules, examples, or a sense of morality, these “men appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals when they can catch them, and when they are not able, they subsist on grain” (66). Two centuries later, Steinbeck saw a society that suffered from a similar lack of morality, but not because it was without resources out in the wilderness—just the opposite. Americans have food, shelter, transportation, and leisure, but have compromised values:
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Page 35