by Chris Lynch
If the Army has decided to make it their business to please me, then they are off to a fine start. Putting me in the Marksman Program not only shows very good sense but has the added bonus of creating one mighty happy soldier.
And one ecstatic soldier’s dad.
“Exactly!” The Captain says when I call him from the pay phone as soon as I read my posting. There are a lot of guys waiting to use this phone, but despite the staring and grumbling I still want to stretch this moment as much as I can. “Exactly, Ivan. See, the United States Army does indeed know just what it is doing despite what that know-it-all Walter Cronkite says. They spot talent, they don’t mess around. They put that talent in position to flourish. You are going to go far in this career, boy, you just mark my words.”
I am marking his words with a smile so big it hurts. Childish is what I am being, and so what.
My comrades don’t completely agree with the so what part and begin actually rocking the phone booth.
“Dad, listen,” I say, laughing probably more than I should with an angry mob watching me so closely, “I have to give up the phone to some of the other guys now.”
“The other guys,” he says, allowing himself to be a little bit less of the Army team player he normally likes to be. “How many of the other guys have been assigned to the Marksman Program? Answer me that.”
“I can’t answer you that, Dad, since I don’t have the answer. I will try and find out for you for next time, though.”
The rocking gets more furious now, and so does the pounding on the glass. I am feeling pressure on my back as I try to hold the bifold door closed. It is still good-natured enough, the harassment, but it feels like it could possibly be turning. And, marksmen or not, these are now trained soldiers I am ticking off.
“Okay,” Dad says, though, really, hanging up now is not okay, and we both want it to go on forever. “I’ll let you go, son. Go on, go on …”
“Thanks, Dad. Listen, I’ll call —”
“I love you, Ivan,” he blurts.
I stop smiling like a monkey. My heart pounds and, jeez, my eyes get all kinds of watered up. I just didn’t see it coming at all, and now look at me, in front of all the men and everything.
It’s just not done. Not like this. Not between us.
The whole Army seems to feel it, too, and the howling, pounding, rocking stops.
“I am very proud of you, son,” he says, sniffing. Cripes. Sniffing.
“Yeah, Dad,” is the absolute best I can do right now, but I know my best is good enough right now. “Yeah, Dad.” Then, “Mom, huh?”
“I will,” he says. “Of course.”
It was eight hours a day on the rifle range during that last week and a half of basic that got me my assignment. I went straight from there, Fort Riley, Kansas, to my AIT — that’s Advanced Individual Training — at Fort Benning in Georgia.
But while it was my shooting at Fort Riley that got me into the Marksman Program, it was my shooting from much earlier that got me where I am now.
“Where on earth did you learn to shoot like that, soldier?” asks my instructor, Sergeant Bing. I am lying on my stomach, shooting at targets on the five-hundred-yard range. “Boys from Boston don’t show up shooting like that.”
“New Hampshire, sergeant,” I say, continuing my shooting. “With my dad. He was an Army captain in World War Two. A hero. We have a small shack of a place way up in the woods there. I’ve been a shootist since I was five years old.”
“Good hunting?”
“Mostly just small stuff. Squirrels, rabbits, coyotes. And hippies trying to run to Canada.”
“Ha!” Sgt. Bing says. “Fire away, son. Fire away.”
I do fire away, every day. I enjoy every minute of it and get better and better until it makes no sense to keep me any longer on American soil.
After the long, long flight, we can smell it as we get nearer to the action in Vietnam.
I have been watching all the news and listening to all the stories and imagining my actual self there in the battle zone, but I have to admit this is not at all what I expected. The scent came into the plane during the last twenty minutes of our approach, but now as we come to a stop and the door opens and we take the stairs down to the airfield, it’s even more of a shock. It smells — it tastes — like if you took all of high school during the last week of classes, put it into a blender, and boiled it on the stove. The sweat and hormones of gym mixed up with all the leftover grease and garbage of the Dumpsters outside the cafeteria, mixed with any and every chemical you could get together from the physical sciences lab — the ones they always told you were not to be combined under any circumstances. Plus the parking lot smell at the end of the day, with guys peeling out and leaving doughnuts of rubber, and three-quarters of the old rustboxes the seniors drive burning oil enough to give every student his own personal toxic cloud for keeps. All that blended together in the hottest, sweatiest heat under the sun combines to smack the face of every lucky soldier stepping off the plane.
I only get more excited.
We are led to a bus sitting baking on the asphalt by a noncommissioned officer who shouts and points and does not seem at all pleased to see us. The news keeps saying how badly the Army claims we are needed, but from the faces all around you would swear we were crashing a party we were not invited to.
It is a long ride in a bus with no air-conditioning and cage-lined windows. I have never traveled out of my time zone except for training in Kansas. This is so different in every way that I am sorely tempted to borrow from The Wizard of Oz and tell the guy next to me we ain’t in Kansas anymore. But among the many fine tips my dad sent me off with was how easy a guy picks up a nickname in the service, and I do not want to spend the next four years as Dorothy.
But my, this ain’t no Kansas. And for the first time I truly understand the meaning of jet lag.
So I look at that guy next to me, white-blond hair and six foot two of lanky. I see the same brain-dead, where-am-I-never-mind-don’t-tell-me expression that I must be wearing. Without a word, I lean my head on the window and let it rest there.
“You know that wire is for Vietcong guerillas throwing grenades into buses like this one, don’tcha?” my lanky pal says. “They don’t look no different from the regular civilians walking by.”
I calmly pull my head away from the window and fall asleep with my chin on my chest.
I wake up when the bus ker-thunks to a stop and the troops start trooping, thumping their gear down the stairs into the bright sunshine.
“This ain’t us,” Lanky says as I shake my head and start out of the seat.
“Well, it ain’t you,” I say, a little put out by this, “but how do you know it ain’t me?”
Lanky reaches out and fingers my dog tags in a strangely familiar gesture.
I slap his hand away instinctively.
“I read your name, man,” he says, laughing. “They called out by name, and I thought since you were sleepin’ so heavy I’d just leave you to it.”
“Oh,” I say. “Well, thanks.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Ivan,” he says, holding out a big bony hand.
“Pleasure to meet you …” I say, shaking with one hand and checking his tags with the other, which he apparently wants me to do. “… Laurence. I guess I’ll be calling you Larry, then.”
“Only if you want me smacking your butt all over Vietnam, Ivan,” he says happily.
“Laurence,” I say through a gritted smile.
Three-quarters of the population of the bus unloads at the base in front of us, a sprawling, flat, ugly, disposable-looking collection of buildings. The driver yanks the door shut, jams the old bus into gear, and tells us we have only a short way to go yet. As we pull away I watch the base fade behind us and think, That is exactly what I expected the base to look like in every respect.
Then, shortly as advertised, we pull up to our own new home.
And it is nothing at all what I expected it to look li
ke.
“It’s a boat,” Laurence says flatly.
“It’s a boat,” I say flatly.
“Yo, driver, there must be some mistake,” Laurence yells out as the man yanks the door open once more. “We are Army. Infantry. We don’t live on no boats.”
The driver laughs. “Well, you don’t live on no bus, so get out. All of ya, come on, out ya go.”
We all pile out and into the light and stand there staring.
“Welcome to the USS Benewah,” says the sergeant, standing wide-legged in front of us with his hands clasped behind his back.
Instinctively, the twenty of us fall into a line, side by side by side, with our belongings at our feet.
“But it’s a BOAT! SIR!” Laurence calls out, prompting muffled laughs up and down the line.
“Officer material,” the sergeant says calmly.
Calmly? This surprises me a little bit. I expect a certain level of harshness, especially in the early going, from the noncommissioned officers. The NCOs are really the whips in the whole operation, making the vast numbers of lowly troops do the bidding of the Army — which you can trace all the way up the line right back to the brain of the commander in chief himself. And the usual way of keeping troops in line is with a constant barrage of verbal violence bordering on brutality. I expect it and almost feel a little let down here at not getting it.
Wrong-footed right off the bus. Can’t be wrong-footed. Have to be ready for any-any-anything, even if it is an ambush of niceness.
“Yes, people, this is indeed a watercraft. The Benewah is your station. It is part of the Ninth Division’s collaborative effort with the Brown Water Navy, a barracks ship that functions just the same as a regular land-based barracks, housing approximately thirteen hundred personnel, including officers if you choose to include them — which I, personally, do not.”
Again there is a ripple of laughter, this time more open as guys get quickly more relaxed about it.
Except that I don’t. Discipline is what the Army is about, what it stands for. What it stands on. I don’t need the NCO to be my buddy, I need him to be my leader. And as for making jokes about the officers in front of these brand-new raw recruits …
“There a problem, private?” the sergeant screams in my face.
That’s more like it.
“No, sir!” I shout.
“Well, then, why are you not laughing at things that I say that are obviously of a humorous nature?” he shouts.
“Because I am a trained soldier at attention, sir!”
The volume of the conversation drops when he sees I am taking this whole war thing kind of seriously.
“Fair enough, private,” he says. “At ease, men.” He starts walking up and down in front of us, then one by one shakes hands. “Now, you are going to encounter a great variance in the responses you get here in Vietnam, and I think it is an important part of my job to prepare you for some of that. Now, I, like all of you here, have been through CI school. That’s why you are here. The soldiers stationed on the Benewah are largely involved in Counter Insurgency. You are going to have to figure out, on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, on a minute-to-minute basis, who are the friendlies, and who are the animals you have to blast right off the face of the earth on sight.
“But enough about the Marines …”
Now there is a joke I can laugh at. Wish Dad could have heard it.
“Seriously, though, this is a message you are not necessarily going to receive from a lot of other NCOs around here, so do listen up, take note, and do what you will with the knowledge.”
Suddenly, even with the sweat beginning to run down along where my sideburns should be, I get a little chill.
“The men around you are among some of the finest you will ever want to meet, but to be frank, the experience of fighting here for an extended period has a big effect on even the toughest soldiers. There are fewer lifers in this Army than there are in the regular force, because of the need to staff the war and still rotate people out of here within twelve months’ time. So you may find some people a little suspicious of you until they get to see what kind of soldier you really are. And, by the same token, you may feel the same way about the men you are required to fight alongside.
“There is going to be one primary thing about you, something that you are going to decide or that is going to be decided for you in the heat of action. And this quality is going to be figured out, in a hurry, by the men fighting shoulder to shoulder with you in the face of — let me tell you from personal experience — an astoundingly fearsome opposition. The question you have to answer is this: Do you want to kill for your country, for your fighting brothers? Do you want to fight your way through this or just get through it until your twelve months are up? You’re going to be asked, in so many ways, are you a shooter or a shaker?”
I don’t know if I will ever meet a simpler question my whole life. I am here to kill, and I know that. I am fine with that. I am all over that.
Sergeant stands there, looking us over, back in his troop-reviewing, semiofficial, wide-legged stance, hands clasped behind his back. He smiles broadly. Meanwhile, the bus that has brought us in is rapidly filling with soldiers it is bringing right back out again. There seems to be less tension in that population than in ours.
Suddenly, there is another, stiffer sergeant standing right behind him, carrying a full duffel bag. He starts nudging Smiling Sarge with the bag. Smiling Sarge does a quarter head-turn to look at Scowling Sarge, who scowls.
“What are you doing with my recruits?” asks Scowling Sarge.
“Toughening them up,” says Smiling Sarge.
“Last call!” shouts the bus driver. “Destination: Oakland, California!”
The bus erupts with cheering. Smiling Sarge turns and grabs the bag from Scowling Sarge, who gives him a strong and — if it is possible — warm salute. Smiling Sarge simultaneously grabs him in a painful-looking crush of a hug around the neck.
“This is not Standard Operating Procedure, sergeant,” says the sergeant, slightly strangulated.
“That’s because I am no SOP, sergeant,” says the smiler, before breaking away with a big wave and a “good luck” to all of us.
I believe we solved the mystery of the uncommonly happy noncom.
Which is not what we face now. Oh, no we don’t. No mystery, and no uncommon happiness.
“STOP! SMILING!” are the first two words we get from our new leader.
It feels like an order that is supposed to last exactly twelve months.
MORRIS,
I CANNOT BELIEVE IT. ALL THIS TIME, MY WHOLE LIFE, REALLY, I WAIT TO FINALLY ARRIVE AT WAR WITH THE ARMY … AND IT TURNS OUT TO BE THE NAVY! NO JOKE, MAN, I AM STATIONED ON THIS BIG MOTHER OF A BARRACKS SHIP CALLED THE BENEWAH THAT IS PART OF YOUR NAVY’S RIVERINE ASSAULT FORCE. THEY DID PAINT THE SHIP OLIVE GREEN, WHICH IS A NICE TOUCH AND REMINDS US THAT THE NINTH DIVISION IS STILL ARMY, JUST HERE TO BAIL YOU BOYS OUT WITH STUFF YOU CAN’T HANDLE.
AND ANOTHER THING. TURNS OUT THIS TUB IS A CONVERTED LST — THAT IS LANDING SHIP, TANK, JUST IN CASE THEY HAVEN’T TAUGHT YOU THAT IN THE NAVY — FROM WORLD WAR II. I MEAN, IT JUST MIGHT BE THAT I AM LYING HERE INSIDE A SHIP THAT BROUGHT MY DAD AND HIS MEN OVER TO SAVE THE WORLD TWENTY-WHATEVER YEARS AGO. AND EVEN BETTER, THE THING WAS BUILT AT THE NAVAL SHIPYARD RIGHT IN BOSTON.
IT ALL FEELS SO RIGHT, DOESN’T IT, MORRIS? LIKE WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW?
HEY. WHAT ABOUT RUDI? SHOULD I FEEL GUILTY
I tuck the letter under my pillow. I will finish it later. Or not, maybe. Sometimes you feel like you have done a letter just by writing it, maybe, and sending it’s not so important. Sending it is kind of weak, even.
And anyway it’s not time for yakking, it’s time for work.
We are stationed at a port called Vung Tau, which is on a peninsula in the South China Sea. It is the point at which all the fun of this war just begins to open up. But there is an undeniable crossroads feel to the place that
tells me this is a transitional area, a Navy area, and that we, the Ninth Infantry, are intended for bigger and better things farther in-country.
So the initial days and duties have the feel of one last bit of on-the-job training before we get into the deep heat somewhere else.
I am assigned to a patrol. We have two express objectives, which are commonly referred to as H&I. That stands for Harassment and Interdiction. One of the greatest problems the American forces have been encountering, especially in these two most southern zones, 3 and 4, has been the consistent, successful, relentless supplying of insurgent cells down deep within the territory of South Vietnam. These fighters exist unseen within the dense jungles and riverbanks of the region and seem to be equipped with an endless supply of munitions to assault our forces with. We know the general supply lines that exist from the North on down, but the system is so sophisticated and cunning that the only effective way for us to deal with it is a constant infusion of men and weapons of our own right into the very arteries of the country: the big river ways and the small ones. The foliage, the hills and mountains and swamps.
So my home, my office, Region 4, is where we patrol, at the bottom end of South Vietnam. It contains sixteen different provinces, the whole of the mean Mekong Delta, and over fifty percent of the country’s entire population. In the midst of all this life, we sneak in, look for secret supply deposits, and sit in ambush for the guys responsible for this whole big, bloody mess.
If a guy can’t get motivated for that last part, then he’s got no blood running through him.
“I do hope you are ready for everything and anything,” Lieutenant Systrom says as our boat is lowered into the river. There are twenty-five of these fiberglass assault boats attached to the Benewah for the use of the Army exclusively.
“If we get anything less than everything and anything, lieutenant, I will be very disappointed,” I say, to his apparent pleasure.