Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

by Robert Stone

  With its runways and supply facilities restored, Khe Sanh would function as the forward support area for the American forces. The at- tack itself, the penetration of the Laotian border, was to involve ARVN ground troops and American air support. Reporters haunt- ing the border, looking for a ride in and a closer look, kept encoun- tering that strange Army-colored stenciled sign that looked so incongruous in the jungle, NO U.S. PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. There were some officers, though, unwilling to let their Arvins go it completely alone. And there were reporters, at least one press pool, of which I was not a member. In the U.S. Congress, a law called the Cooper-Church Amend- ment had been passed, limiting presidential war powers. No funds would be authorized for American expeditions to Cambodia or Laos. General Creighton Abrams wanted very much to interdict supply routes on the Ho Chi Minh Trail inside Laos while the weather was still dry enough to keep them operational. Mac Vee thought, cor- rectly, that the Communists were planning an offensive at the first opportunity. It was hoped Arvin troops might be able to cross the border and close the trail down. One January midnight, “Lam 719” sent fifteen thousand Arvin troops along Route 9 toward the border of Laos. What happened then is well known. Heavy rains and cloudy skies, arriving early, limited the capacities of American air support. Route 9 inside Laos was slow going in any weather. But the Arvin persevered. Then, for political reasons now obscure, the Arvin field commander was or- dered to slow his advance. (Increasingly mired, they lost all the nec- essary elements—initiative, surprise, confidence.) The skies stayed dark. Gathering around the Arvin positions, the Communists mus- tered sixty thousand men, as large a concentrated force as they had ever put in the field. Eventually prodded by General Abrams (who 218 robert stone

  apparently made an authorized visit over the border) the Arvin forces reached the Laotian town of Tchepone in March. It had been largely abandoned. “Take a piss and go home,” President Thieu ordered his CO on the scene. But there was hardly time for a piss. Where the empty muddy street of Tchepone had been, and the ruins of Route 9, sixty thou- sand North Vietnamese appeared. The debacle was wholesale and horrible. Americans of an age will remember the picture of the Arvin soldier clinging to a medevac helicopter tread as it ascended, desperate to get away. Other soldiers clung to chopper treads trying to go home. Some pulled the helicopters out of equilibrium, causing them to crash. Some lost their purchase and fell to their deaths. (Some were beaten to death by tree branches, rocks, thorns, pulverized by the forest.) So it was not a victory this time. The Arvins lost about ten thou- sand. Even the American air support troops took heavy casualties from North Vietnamese T-35 radar-guided antiaircraft tanks. The war correspondent François Sully, a longtime veteran of Southeast Asia and a much-decorated former French officer, died there. And Larry Burrows, the great photographer. Of course Khe Sanh and Apbac Peak, Lord of Ashau (Hamburger Hill to us), had to be abandoned. No other American strategic plans were offered in the course of the war, except for the final bombings, Linebacker III. Those in Washington who had so feared the ghost tigers at Khe Sanh, the wolves of Dien Bien Phu, had brought those creatures to their door. After Lam Son 719, everyone said in Saigon, things changed. One afternoon, it seemed there was going to be a race riot out in front of the old opera house that the example of American democracy had prime green: remembering the sixties 219

  transformed into the National Assembly. Vietnamese in the street seemed to be turning on passing foreigners, foreigners of any kind. Arguments over cab and cyclo fares tended to get physical. There were rapes in the city of Saigon. To this news the reaction was uniform: unheard of. Rapes were unheard of! Muggings were unheard of! People liked to blame such crimes on the Korean troops in town. The Korean troops were tough, God knows. But they were hardly responsible for as much as people required. This also was when I saw American armed forces I did not recog- nize. Posters espousing racial or ethnic contentiousness appeared at the Enlisted Men’s Club at Ton Son Nhut. Panthers, Many Smokes Native Americans, La Raza. If all these enmities had been practiced in the field it would have been a horror story. They were not, out in the line. They were, in the barracks, at Bien Hoa and Long Binh Jail. There, robberies of marines by marines, sailors by sailors, all over the country at the big bases. Just like the robberies of Ford assembly- line workers in Dearborn, Michigan, by other line workers during the same era. All against all. Years before, I had regarded my uni- form as an absurdity. Now I felt proud to have worn it, and ashamed. Drugs were everywhere in the military, among enlisted personnel and among officers. People like Lieutenant Calley, who presided over the massacre at My Lai, were being commissioned. It was over. I was leaving. I was glad I had not succeeded in getting over for Lam Son 719. I regretted I had not. Waiting for my Air Vietnam bus on Tu Do Street, I saw that the day of my flight out would be like the day of my arrival. The sky was black with monsoon clouds, lightning broke with Olympian force. At Ton Son Nhut there was a crazy American soldier staring at people. His uniform was unbut- toned and no one seemed to be in charge of him. He walked from person to person, from group to group, staring, furious. You could 220 robert stone

  see people waiting for civilian transport out wondering whether this demented soldier was going to attack them. Is this how I’m going to die here? You could see people wonder- ing that, I’m sure of it. After everything, is this crazy GI going to kill me? A couple of hours later I was in Bangkok, the Bangkok of the Ori- ent. I had bought a bathing suit at a shop down Phya Thai Road, the smallest size I could find. It was much too big for me. When I dived into the pool, the suit came off and floated around my ankles. When I surfaced, everyone in the place was convulsed with laughter. The Japanese businessmen seated at the pool’s edge, the senior female ex- ecutives from the sex industry, the Korean tourists—all, all burst into applause. I paddled to where I could stand up, climbed into the trunks, and waddled out of the pool. The next morning I left for the Buddhist monastery at Ayutthaya. In a temple beside it, a gargantuan gold-painted Buddha contem- plated with an antique smile the farmers and fishermen imploring his compassion. Around the monastery, monks drank beer like Friar Tuck. Small boys in saffron robes with shaved heads scampered through the silkwood branches. I obtained and drank a bottle of Mekong whiskey. “Weakness of the strong man,” the chief monk said merrily as he prodded me awake. For a place pledged to Lady Poverty, they were charging me quite a lot for a few days’ lodging. “There it is,” I said. Who knew what I meant by that? It was what everybody said in Vietnam when they thought they had glimpsed the dark antic spirit of the war. Two days before I left, a monk tied a saffron band around my wrist. I stopped drinking and spent a night in meditation. I drew breath to the reverberation of gongs. On the flight back to London I prime green: remembering the sixties 221

  still heard them. I had acquired a taste for the examined life and fo- cused on my saffron band. A woman beside me—a tourist, I sup- pose—sat fidgeting in the next seat. Finally I turned toward her and presented a friendly aspect. She asked me whence I had come and whither I was bound. At the word Vietnam she froze. “I hope you had nothing to do with the war.” “Very little,” I told her. And to my own surprise, I cut her dead for the rest of the trip. 222 robert stone

  EPILOGUE During the four years of our expatriation in England, news came to us through the distanced lens of foreign media. His- tory seemed America-driven, occurring—exploding—across the Atlantic or in reaction to some scheme hatched there. The shaken newsagent on West Heath Road who sold us the Guardian headlining the murder of Martin Luther King seemed about to say something beyond “k’yew” as he folded the paper and handed it to us. Or rather, as my wife, who actu- ally bought the paper from him, said, he seemed to be waiting for us to say something. We had nothing to say, however, no

  words of illumination, no comment. Nor could we shed light on the pattern of riots that beset the country in the wake of the murder or the assassin’s extended evasion of arrest. And in north Wales a few months later, a boy ran into our
parlor from the rolling, sheep-razed meadow outside, shouting and waving the morning’s newspaper: “Robert Kennedy is dead, look!” Shot, of course, whacked in the American manner. We could not be helpful. Sorry. Guns are pretty easy to get in the U.S.; if you re- ally want one you can get it. So if you want to shoot someone and take no thought for the morrow, you can figure out a way to do it. This should have been well known to readers of the British press of any age by then. One principle of international reportage familiar to any traveler or expatriate must be that newspapers try to tell their readers what those readers believe they already know about the countries reported on. Rarely do stories appear in which Frenchmen, Britons, Ameri- cans, Germans, Russians, et cetera behave in a manner utterly differ- ent from the national character that has been established for them (no doubt with a degree of their own collaboration) by decades of journalistic vaudeville, cartoons, and accent comedy. This is only one aspect of the newspaper business strategy of making a reader feel as knowledgeably at home in the great world as he is in his favorite living-room chair. Vietnam dominated the international picture to such an extent that classically attuned commentators compared it to the Athenian expedition against Syracuse. Athens destroyed its democracy in the course of besieging, at great cost, a stubborn Spartan ally. Along with democracy, it sacrificed its reputation for probity and wise pol- icy, and its treasure. In the analogy, the United States was cast as Athens. 224 robert stone

  I thought that if I went to Vietnam as a veteran of the American military, living in Europe and sufficiently liberated from America’s imagining of its own blameless and heroic role in Asia, I might learn a few things. I would be going, after all, as the correspondent of a British publication. As it happened, the publication went out of business while I was still there, and I ended up writing mainly about bar scenes and rock concerts. However, I got around a bit, enough to see that answers to some questions—such as those concerning the moral justification for a war—are better pursued through the techniques of fiction than through any work a reporter can do. For one thing, facts unexam- ined can be made to subvert fundamental truth. Questions of this sort can be debated endlessly. But the intersection of facts and the truth was one of the problematic junctures I learned something about in Vietnam, which, I believe, made my going worthwhile. I saw some unpleasant aspects of the United States in Vietnam that were familiar to me from home. I had never witnessed them brought to bear on such a scale. The war had distended them into a mistake ten thousand miles long, technologized beyond anyone’s control. I will say I never saw anything in Vietnam that deeply scan- dalized me as an American, though I know that others did. From my own time in the military I knew a few things about military villainy and brutality that under the pressure of inept or desperate leader- ship can lead to inhuman behavior. Much of the time, my wife and I thought, it didn’t matter where we lived. Our children, by default, became beneficiaries and victims of our principal life decisions. But going to Vietnam had in fact made me curious enough about America, its conditions, and the manner in which it contrived to live at home—while purporting to export a way of life desirable for all humanity. prime green: remembering the sixties 225

  Considering our next move, we listened to the available wisdom. A few weeks after I got back from Ton Son Nhut, Janice and I were flying over the Mediterranean coast of France. Our pilot, whose pri- vate plane it was, was a woman who had lived for many years in Provence. When I told her that we were deciding whether to return to America or not, her reaction was so intense that for a moment I thought something had gone wrong with the aircraft’s engine. There was nothing wrong. Only that she felt strongly that we should not take our children to America, where they would become Americans. Back in London, I met a visiting professor from Princeton Uni- versity, Edmund Keeley, who offered me a teaching position for the 1971–72 academic year. I decided to accept. That amounted to de- ciding on permanent return. Our children, aged eight and eleven, having spent four years in London, were indistinguishable from Lon- don children of the middle class. At a party thrown by one of our neighbors, I decided to announce what it seemed would become of us. “We’ll take them back,” I said. “They’re American. They should know that that’s what they are. It’s a great thing to be British. But I think they should know their Americanness. Live there. Have the experience.” And so on, said I. My neighbors were cool, by which I mean they were poised and polite. Only for the fraction of a moment did the face of the man I was speaking to fix itself in shock. Then he blinked and was at ease. “Oh, absolutely,” he said. The other people in the room had also fallen silent for a second or two. They too rallied quickly. “No question!” “Of course. They must.” 226 robert stone

  It is certainly true that our neighbors, good sports all, from the days of Ken Kesey’s visit to the day we departed, were probably not too distressed at the prospect of a little more quiet in the building. But in fact I think they were truly disturbed at what they saw as our wrongheadedness, the mistake we were about to make, the depriva- tion to which we intended to subject our children. The day we got back to the United States the governor of New York State quelled a prison riot by shooting down the rebellious prisoners and the guards they had taken hostage. Nelson Rockefeller looked pretty bad after that, but no one looked good. Not the politi- cians who seized the opportunity of the riot to advance their faces and fortunes. Not the radical lawyers who had encouraged the pris- oners to continue their mutiny by falsely assuring them that repre- sentatives of the Third World were en route by UN helicopters to spirit them away to sanctuary. Everyone lied, there were killings. More to be sure than were “necessary.” The California of our youth, whose very name was magic, had been transformed into a neat industrial landscape. The orchards that had not been good enough for us as we found them, that we had felt the need to illuminate and gild with the wine of astonishment and hang with acid lilacs, were orchards no more, they were Silicon Val- ley. Their magic was artificial intelligence, the terrifying stuff Pro- fessor Lederberg had warned us against long before. Some of the changes we had hoped for, that we had professed to see even then mystically resolving the imbalances of the old worn imperfect world, had been hammered halfway into place with much compromise and considerable ill will. The drugs which we believed so important a part of our liberation, the key to the music, the doors of perception for an elite, became a mass youth phenomenon. They caused much suffering and parental anguish, and they forged a prime green: remembering the sixties 227

  weapon for the use of the darkest forces in American society, the witch-hunting, punitive-minded hypocrites who promptly gave us the War on Drugs as they had given us Prohibition. As young bohemians with artistic pretensions we used drugs in imitation of the European decadents. We may not have had any choice, but in the end we allowed drugs to be turned into a weapon against everything we believed in. Admittedly, we imagined ourselves, we students in California and such places, as an elite. By providing the enemies of freedom and in- sight with a drug menace to hype in their yellow press, we gave aid and comfort to the greatest argument for elitism since Edmund Burke went to Parliament—American populism, notorious as a pi- ous front for venal corruption, the curse of this nation, and now, em- powered by American wealth and resources, a worldwide plague. To the bleating of their politicians and preachers, the venal pop- ulists were able to turn a provision of the health code into an im- measurably costly game of cops and robbers that made our difficulties with drugs, a marginal problem in most civilized coun- tries, into an endless pep rally for repression of all sorts. My generation left the country better in some ways, not least by destroying the letter of the laws of racism and sexual discrimination. We were one of the generations to which the word “Romantic” might be applied—the offspring of a period inclined by history to highly value the Dionysian and the spontaneous, to exalt freedom over order, to demand more of the world than it may reasonably pro- vide. We saw—may we not be the last to see—this country as blessed in its most generou
s hopes. The Road was the revered totem of our generation. The teeming Open Road, the idea of it, was beloved of poets such as Whitman, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Ken Kesey too. It signified optimism, joy- 228 robert stone

  ous expectation, an anticipation of the best in possibility. It em- braced risk in an attitude of faith that looked forward to the ad- vancement of everything within us that was nobler, more generous, and more just. Our expectations were too high, our demands excessive; things were harder than we expected. Kesey’s wise maxim about offering more than what he could deliver, in order to deliver what he could, described his life’s efforts—and not only his. It is true, I believe, of every person, or any group of people who ever set out to advance anything beyond their own personal advantage. We must believe in the efficacy of our own efforts. Maybe we have to believe in it to the point of excess. Excess is always a snare for those who demand much from themselves or from life. Excess, in fact, is characteristic of ro- mantics, of romantic generations. In our time, we were clamorous and vain. I speak not only for my- self here, but for all those with whom I shared the era and what I think of as its attitudes. We wanted it all; sometimes we confused self-destructiveness with virtue and talent, obliteration with ecstasy, heedlessness with courage. Worshipping the doctrines of Heming- way as we did, we wanted constant grace under constant pressure, and stoicism before a disillusionment that somehow never went stale. We wanted to die well every single day, to be a cool guy and a good-looking corpse. How absurd, because nothing is free, and we had to learn that at last. Every generation must—be it romantic or pragmatic, spiritually striving or materialistic as a copper penny. We learned what we had to, and we did what we could. In some ways the world profited and will continue to profit by what we succeeded in doing. We were the chief victims of our own mistakes. Measuring ourselves against the masters of the present, we regret nothing ex- cept our failure to prevail. prime green: remembering the sixties 229