by Doug Bradley
He was gone.
* * *
Later on, I was back in my hooch, sitting on the edge of my bunk. Night had finally descended upon Vietnam and all my hoochmates were asleep. I grabbed a towel and toothbrush and stumbled down to the latrine. I brushed my teeth slowly, replaying my conversation with Sam. Did I misunderstand him? Offend him? Miss some signal that I was supposed to pick up? Or did I just imagine the whole thing?
Back by my bunk, I knelt down like I did every night to pray to whoever was out there watching over me. I noticed a large brown box, almost the size of my foot-locker, stuffed under my bunk. There was an envelope with my name on top of it. I tore it open.
“Dear Soon-to-be Shortimer Sam:
Your time is at hand ‘cause I’m outta here. And that’s how it goes—no goodbyes, no hand-offs, no “this is my last column” b.s. Our soldiers need to believe that Shortimer Sam is constantly here for them, always listening and advising. Never DEROS-ing!
You’ll find everything you ever wanted to know about Army regs and protocols and procedures in this box. Apply it at your own risk. But realize that what passes for communication is nothing but acronyms, abbreviations, titles and shorthand.
Trust your instincts, your human instincts, not your Vietnam-invented ones. You know the rights and the lefts. You know where the bodies are buried, and you know who’s holding all the cards.
So, keep your head up, GI, not down, and remember these reporter’s rules of editorial engagement:
1. If a soldier complains about feeling bad, he either has malaria, the trots, VD, or all three.
2. Answers always raise more questions.
3. Never drink Agent Orange for breakfast.
4. Gonorrhea is just a four-letter word.
5. Ribbons are for typewriters, not uniforms.
6. When Army lifers shake their heads to tell you no, listen for all the noise inside.
7. Recess is what GIs want more than anything.
8. You have no idea what a quagmire is.
9. You’ll get at least one letter every week signed by The Beaver.
10. Words can pile up like dead VC—save a life, drop an adjective!
Yours is the most important job in the Army because you give our troops truth, hope and humor. All the Shortimer Sams who have gone before you expect you to regard that old Smith Corona typewriter in the USARV IO office as your keyboard, your umbilical cord, and your elixir. Now, give it everything you’ve got!
- Sam IV
So, this is what Sam had handed me tonight? It sure seemed un-Sam like. How did he come by the wit and the wisdom? How could he be so consistently accurate, in-charge, mocking, and entertaining all at once? How in the hell would I do that?
Rummaging through the box, I uncovered some answers. For one, it was organized a helluva lot better than the Base library. There were categories for everything from awards to citations and medals, from discharges to R&R and hold baggage. And the fucking replies were there, too, already crafted, with just that right touch of Shortimer Sam irreverence and humor.
There was more. Endless sheets of paper with scribbling in ink and pencil, letters and notes signed by guys calling themselves “Ed the Head,” “Tokers for Truth,” and “GIs for Justice.” There were also plenty of copies of an anti-war GI newspaper that we’d only heard stories about.
The more I dug down into the box, the more letters I discovered. Ones that asked questions like: “Why is it that the little man gets all the shitwork and hassles while the higher-ups get their asses kissed and tickets punched?”
Even more notes and letters that sang the praises of pot and getting high. None of these ever saw the light of day, or a response from any Shortimer Sam.
As if that wasn’t enough, cartons of expertly wrapped Pall Mall packs of marijuana cigarettes sat at the bottom of the box. The note on top read:
Sam:
You’ll be flying high in the friendly skies. Trust us—a joint a day will keep the blues away.
Peace & Love,
The Central “High” land High Rollers
I opened a pack and admired the tightly manicured marijuana joints. I walked outside and lit up.
Does it make any fucking difference? I asked myself, if I write what’s real or simply repeat the party line? Everybody, myself included, knew what was going on by now, and I doubted if they’d believe anything that was written in a goddamn Army newspaper.
I shook my head. It wasn’t just the marijuana talking. I fetched Sam’s box and hauled it back outside. In less than three minutes, I figured somebody was going to be in my face, asking me what in the hell I’m doing. But that was still three minutes away.
I flipped my butane lighter, grabbed a stack of Shortimer Sam-addressed letters and set them ablaze. I tossed them back inside the box and watched that catch fire, too.
The smoke rose ever so slowly, making lazy little clouds. Words are made up of letters that are really symbols which are supposed to carry meaning, I told myself. But the letters that make up the words don’t stand for shit, really.
All we’ve really got, I determined, is our own experiences and interpretations. Mine were still forming. Sam’s were over.
Watching the smoke trying to climb into the humid Vietnamese night struck me as a metaphor, and I laughed because that’s the kind of thing I’d just denounced by setting the box on fire. I listened for the sound of the Long Binh fire truck but instead picked up the strains of “We Gotta Get Outta This Place,” either in my head or out there in the great Southeast Asian silence.
Delta Lady
“Take a hit off this.” Specialist Four Charles handed me one of his tightly manicured marijuana cigarettes. I had no idea where he got these, but Charles always had a pack of joints on him, cellophane and all. It was by far the strongest dope I’d ever smoked.
We crept our way along the shortcut to our office, through brambles and brush and sometimes sandy terrain, passing the joint. It wasn’t a long walk, and it was partly illuminated by lights from basketball and tennis courts. Every time I took this route to USARV headquarters, day or night, I tried to envision this place as the rubber plantation it once was. The Michelin tire guy was about the best I could come up with.
Before you knew it, we’d arrived at the big, bright sprawling “H.” Ours was the north building of the H, the two-storied metal one that looked out over most of Long Binh. There were more people out there than in my hometown. Most nights, we would sneak back into our office, put on our headphones, turn on our reel-to-reel tape decks and listen to music as we typed letters home to our wives and sweethearts and family.
Nights like those when we took that trek we were so goddamn high it was as if we weren’t even in Vietnam. Those few special minutes transported us elsewhere—back to college or away on R&R—any fucking where but Vietnam. Sometimes, that sense of being someplace else lasted long into the night, since the music and the typing kept us aloft even as the dope wore off.
And some nights the dope never wore off.
“Procuring marijuana in Vietnam is easier than getting a beer at a keg party,” I remembered the JAG officer telling us during our in-country orientation. He looked like one of the Beach Boys—shiny blonde hair, toothy smile, square jaw, perfect features. I kept waiting for him to burst out in surfer tunes.
“In every camp in country,” he lectured to a roomful of us newbies, “a GI can get a joint within five minutes.”
I was seated near the front, so I started taking notes.
“The weed grows wild. It is cultivated by the Vietnamese, who rarely use it themselves,” he went on. “They understand marijuana’s proclivity as a new cash crop.”
Even though I wasn’t exactly sure what proclivity meant—it sounded kind of dirty—I burst into a grin. Hell, this was the best lecture ever, since we were finding out all we needed to know about the weed we already knew and loved.
Now the Beach Boy major pulled down a map of Vietnam with big Roman numerals on it
and armed himself with a pointer. “With three harvests a year, the Mekong Delta is the marijuana bowl of Vietnam.” He thrust the tip of the pointer on IV Corps. “Recently, police moved in to destroy these crops because many of the local farmers were giving up rice and turning to cannabis.”
Momentary frowns.
“But the destruction urged—and supported—by the Army and United States federal agents hardly touches the supply.”
I looked around. All the guys were smiling the big shit-faced grins that can mean only one thing.
And then I was back at the typewriter, high as a fucking kite, writing to my old lady back home, complaining about how terribly awful Vietnam was and how I couldn’t wait to get back home. The music had stopped.
Blue Ribbon
Before he was drafted, Stevie Potter was studying to be an Ag Extension agent. He wanted to follow in the muddy boot prints of his father and grandfather and help every Iowa farmer grow bigger and better crops.
Stevie was always more at home in a field or a barn. He excelled in FFA and 4-H and usually won the soybean competition at the Chickasaw County Fair.
Stevie lived for the feel of soil in his hands, the smell of dirt, the texture, the minerals, the possibility. The farm was his classroom, and he was passionate about spreading the gospel of growing things.
Maybe that’s why, as the Army ramped up its pacification efforts in Southeast Asia, they sent Stevie into the villages first. The Vietnamese farmers welcomed him, and Stevie’d learned enough about growing lowland rice that he’d join them in the rice paddies during the harvest. That was a strange sight, Stevie, built like a fireplug and not much taller than the scrawny Vietnamese, using a knife to harvest the rice. He’d top that off by accompanying the farmers as they walked their water buffalo over the rice to take out its grain.
It wasn’t Iowa, but as long as he was in Vietnam, Specialist Four Stevie Potter was the unofficial expert on Vietnamese farming and the Army’s chief authority for telling the difference between farmers and guerillas.
“Look here,” he’d tell his fellow grunts, holding up his buddy Morgan’s hand. “All you need to do is look at their hands. Soldiers aren’t like farmers. They have one callus, right here, on the trigger finger,” he pointed to Morgan’s finger. “See?
“Farmers, they’ve got hands just like me,” Stevie continued. “Fucking calluses everywhere.”
Stevie Potter and his farmer hands no longer work the fields of Vietnam. He, and they, are in Long Binh Jail. Stevie lost it the day the company headed south and the M113 tracks cut through some rice paddies. When the Vietnamese farmer got pissed and started hitting the lead track with his rake, the Troop Commander got out to calm him down and the old guy hit him, too.
Next thing you knew, the tracks were going sideways instead of single file, destroying everything this old peasant lived for since way before Uncle Sam ever got there. The long file of American ingenuity, sporting nicknames like Fortunate Son, Easy Rider, Babysan, Spooky, and Boonie Rat, steamrolled side by side through the old peasant’s fields.
Little Stevie Potter walked up to the TC, pulled out a M1911A1 .45 automatic pistol and pointed it in his face. Stevie’s callused, farm boy’s hands caught on the trigger and the gun kept shooting, the TC’s brains joining the other seeds in the soil’s rice seedbeds, awaiting the next harvest.
The Art of War
Most nights I lie awake, imagining I’m hiding in a bunker. It’s pitch dark and so fucking quiet that I can hear the heat.
Without warning, sparks fly, weapons erupt, and waves of Viet Cong attack my position. I shit my pants as they come full speed, AK-47s blasting, bayonets yearning for my flesh. My hands freeze, and I can’t pull the trigger. I hear voices shouting, cursing, begging me to shoot.
“Pussy! Coward! Traitor!” they scream. But I recoil. Torrents of blood breach the bunker. It runs hot and smells of iron and copper. It’s above my head, and I’m choking until I finally roll out of the bunker somehow. It’s so dark that I can’t see my body, but I reach down with my right hand and discover my leg is gone. My other hand is shattered in pieces, and my senses are overcome by the scent of my own blood, at first sweet and then fouler, rotten.
My flesh is ripped by AK-47 rounds and punctured by bayonets. I’m falling, tumbling, crying, pissing, moaning—seeing the face of the colonel’s driver or the post barber looking down on me, a knife in his mouth, a black headband on top of his head. He’s smiling malevolently as he begins to slice my ears and then my eyes and.…
“You still writin’ that shit?” Edwards asked. I jump, and then pretend I’m adjusting my BVDs so he doesn’t think he’s startled me.
“Yes, sergeant, I’m still writing this.…” I respond matter-of-factly.
“Son, when are you gonna put down that pen and join this man’s Army?” Edwards loved playing this game with me, but I wasn’t rising to the bait. We both knew what he was really interested in was learning why I write in the first place.
“Didn’t you hear me, boy?” he bellowed like a drill sergeant. “Time’s a wastin’ and you best get your college-educated head out of your ass.”
I sighed. Edwards and I were the same age, the same build, the same background—hell, we were damn near the same person, except that while I matriculated at Kenyon College, he was washing cars, getting married, joining the Army and doing tours in Germany and I Corps. Vietnam, more than the lives we lived in the USA, had finally brought us together.
“Can we not play this game just now?” There was a slight begging in my voice which surprised and disappointed me. “I’ve told you a hundred times before—I write because it helps me to deal with this shit, to get by. It’s like my therapy.” I paused. “It’s like you frequenting the whores at Cholon.” I made my pretend Chinaman face. “Same same.”
“Can I help it if the slopes find me irresistible?” Edwards said turning his back and twisting his arms around his neck, making it look as if someone was lustily embracing him. Fucking guy had to be double-jointed. I had to admit it was one of his funnier moves.
“What they find attractive is your MPC.” I held out some Army script in his direction. “If you’re out of money, you don’t get no honey.” I pulled the bill back from his hands.
“Okay, let me get this straight.” Edwards sat down on the edge of my bunk. “I fight the enemy, put my ass on the line, and sign my life away to Uncle Sam while you smoke dope, read books, and write in your journals. So, you’re the model soldier and I’m the fuck up?”
That was so good I had to write it down. I figured Edwards would be pissed if I quoted him verbatim, so I waited until our hooch maid Bau Mau walked by because I knew he’d forget about me and start flirting with her. I needed to get his words down when I could because Edwards was the only guy in our office of college grads and would-be journalists who’d actually seen any combat. In my stories, I changed his name to Sergeant Cannon because I thought it was a funny pun.
As I watched him teasing Bau Mau, I kept thinking that we were both acting our parts—me the innocent, wet-behind-the-ears college boy and Edwards the grizzled, uneducated combat soldier. He was Aldo Ray and John Wayne; I was Montgomery Clift and James Dean.
“Just what are you doing, Specialist?” His inflection triggered a change in our exchange. For the moment, Edwards had resumed his role as the higher ranking NCO.
I didn’t answer.
“Spec. 5 Bailey, I asked you a question.”
“Yes, Sergeant Edwards, I heard your question,” I replied in a soldierly fashion. “And I do not have an answer. Sir.” I added the “sir” to piss him off. It worked.
“Look at these stripes, Specialist,” he pointed to his sergeant’s insignia. “I work for a goddamn living, son. Don’t ever call me sir!” He was smiling again.
“And if you’re going to write down something about me,” he winked, “make sure to start with how Vietnamese women find me irresistible.”
Edwards got up from my bunk and
started to walk out of my cubicle. He stopped abruptly, wound his arms back around his neck and shoulders, and started cooing in a pretend Vietnamese woman’s voice. “Ooh, sar jen Edwarz, you veery veery big and strong …oooh, sar jen …”
As Edwards exited the hooch, I wrote down his earlier comments: “I fight the enemy, put my ass on the line, and sign my life away to Uncle Sam while you smoke dope, read books, and write in your journals. So, you’re the model soldier and I’m the fuck up?”
* * *
I was telling Edwards the truth about my writing, sort of. The war was so astoundingly cruel and surreal that I relied on writing to center me, if that was even possible in Vietnam. Otherwise, I’d be constantly reminded of what a shit show this place was. Over time, I’d grow numb like everybody else, eventually not batting an eye when we took Chieu Hois out for one-way chopper rides, fudged on the numbers of KIAs, or didn’t say squat about the fragging epidemic at Long Binh and all over fucking Vietnam. Shit, if we couldn’t find and kill the Viet Cong, we’d kill ourselves.
Yeah, I needed my writing more than it needed me. At times, I’d just sit back and take it all in, seeing things as if I were some character in a Fellini movie. I mentioned that to my buddy Ward when we were having a beer at the 90th Replacement Battalion last week, and kept seeing this same GI walk by with a live snake coiled around his neck.
“Jesus, will you look at that,” I nudged Ward when snake man passed us for about the hundredth time. “That shit is right out of a Fellini movie.”
Ward had no idea what I was talking about.
“I’ve never seen a movie about cats,” the flat-footed E-4 from Buffalo, New York replied, “but that fucking snake is scary.”
The writer in me mined film analogies for all they were worth. Mainly because they were true. Not a day in Vietnam went by when you didn’t hear somebody talk about a GI “pulling a John Wayne” or “pretending to be Audie Murphy.” For sure we all knew we were smack dab in the middle of the ultimate Vincent Price horror movie.