Deros Vietnam

by Doug Bradley

  Tears welled in both our eyes. I couldn’t speak.

  “I hit that little sonuvabitch and he whimpered. I hit him again and he cried. Then I kicked him and he just started whimpering. I grabbed stuff off the table and threw it at him. Hitting. Cursing. Kicking. Again and again and again.”

  I placed my hands over my ears and turned away. The Vietnamese at the next table were looking straight at me. What did they see? Did they know me from before? From back then?

  “I left Nevin on the floor of that bar and never saw him again,” Charlie went on. “I casually tell one of my closest pals that one of his friends was killed in Vietnam, killed by his own fucking self when he tripped and fired his own goddamn M-16 as he was going to take a shit—and then I beat the fucking daylights out of him.”

  “The Quiet Americans,” I mumbled to myself.

  “Do you know why I’m telling you this?” Charlie bullied me. “Do you understand why?”

  I shook my head. The Vietnamese had stopped paying attention to us and were getting ready to leave.

  “You’re fucking clueless, aren’t you?” Charlie snarled. “I’m telling you this because I slugged my priest the other day and took a swing at my wife, too. I can’t stop.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. I thought Charlie had everything worked out. If he didn’t, where did that leave me?

  “I’ve gotta catch a plane,” I started to get up.

  “Go ahead,” Charlie mumbled.

  “You wanna walk me to my gate?”

  “Forget it,” he waved me off. “I’m not leaving yet.”

  As we stood, the Vietnamese smiled in our direction.

  “Fucking dinks,” Charlie muttered. He sat back down and turned his back on them, and me.

  * * *

  I caught my plane to Chicago. That was almost a year ago. Before Cheryl. And the nightmares. And the uncontrollable weeping.

  But I haven’t called Charlie and talked to him about all this. We don’t talk anymore.

  Test Drive

  “Where’s the mutt?”

  No response.

  “Where in God’s name is the mutt?” The question was noticeably louder this time.

  “Say what?” a voice muttered.

  “Who in the hell took the mother fucking mutt?”

  Man, there was heat behind that question, and its incendiary source was Sergeant Carl Cassidy. Cassidy didn’t just ask a question, he punched you with it.

  There he was. Perfectly square shoulders, locked jaw, Popeye forearms, crew cut, penetrating eyes. Cassidy was the quintessential MP. And he had an air of Steve McQueen about him, the take-no-prisoners McQueen of Wanted Dead or Alive who dispensed his own brand of justice.

  The mutt in question was our unit’s M151 Jeep, its Army acronym identifying it as a “Military Unit Tactical Truck.” Mutts were as Army as GI Joe and as American as Henry Ford. In fact, Ward had told us they’d been tested and prototyped by Ford and manufactured by the Willys-Overland Motor Company.

  Ward also reminded us that whenever he drove a mutt in Vietnam, with its split windshield and horizontally-slotted, stamped-steel front grille, he felt like bursting into a chorus of “Fun, Fun, Fun.”

  And that’s probably just what Ward was doing. He’d unofficially requisitioned the mutt for the weekly IO run to the PX for beer and cigarettes for the hooch and cognac for Bau Mau, and, more likely than not, a pit stop at Cholon for a quickie.

  Cassidy, however, needed the mutt “A-SAP” as he reiterated in a voice that sounded like used sandpaper and suggested a belief that increased volume would cause the vehicle to materialize. Colonel Brock, it turned out, required immediate transportation to the squash courts for his late afternoon match.

  No mutt. No Ward. No match.

  Someone nervously started to whistle. Then another. Nevin added some quiet crooning. You could almost hear the voice of Frank Sinatra singing about an irresistible force, an immovable object, and that something had better give:

  “Atten-hut,” came a summons from the rear of the hooch. Footsteps scurried, zippers zipped, jungle boots replaced flip flops.

  Colonel Brock strode into the IO hooch, sunglasses at 12 o’clock high.

  “Gentlemen, I have some bad news…”

  Confessions of a REMF

  They called us REMFs, short for Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. Sweet, isn’t it? The “they” were the grunts, the GIs in the bush, the ones who humped the boonies and were in the shit.

  That’s how it was in Vietnam. Acronyms. Shorthand. Crudity. In your face. That’s how it still is, too.

  Sure, guys like me—there were some women too—were REMFs. Hell, all we did was fly and fix the choppers and the planes, drive the trucks, build the roads and the bridges, eavesdrop, interpret, supervise, and heal.

  Some of us wrote the stories and some of the stories didn’t get written and some of the truth never came out. That’s the Vietnam I’m still dealing with. It makes me worse than a REMF. It makes me a fraud and a liar. It makes me responsible.

  Now that the journalist Hersh has come out with the truth about My Lai, I feel like I have to tell my truth, too. It’s not as horrible and huge as My Lai, but it eats me up. I’ll bet if you added up all these little things from everybody’s time in Vietnam, it could amount to a whole bunch of My Lais.

  And who pays the price for all that guilt and shame? We do. The REMFs and the grunts do.

  * * *

  I started my tour seated in a windowless box in a remote radio compound somewhere near Cambodia. There was a black guy with me, Moore I think his name was, and we spent our shifts there, tuning a radio dial, headphones clamped on, secretly eavesdropping on enemy communications—ever vigilant, always hoping to intercept that one piece of intelligence that could make the difference in a battle or in the whole fucking war and let us all go back home where we belonged.

  After a while, they gave me a new MOS and sent me down to Long Binh, near Saigon, where I pounded away on an ancient typewriter, edited a bunch of bullshit stories, and fought the unrelenting boredom. My bosses, and there were a bunch of them, kept reminding me to get a haircut and trim my mustache. They also explained that while I was performing a job that wasn’t very glamorous, what I was doing was very, very necessary.

  So what did I do that was so wrong? Besides being in the Army that is? Two things really. I copped out on letting a big, important story see the light of day.

  And I turned my back on a fellow soldier because I was a coward and, well, somebody had to pay for my mistake. More or less in that order.

  I still have a copy of the piece I wrote but was afraid to leak to a civilian reporter. I knew who to give it to and how and when to hand it off. His name was Sheridan and he wrote for Newsday. A bunch of us 71Q20s—that’s military-speak for Army information specialist/journalist—had sneaked some stories to him over time, small shit mostly designed to give the lifers heartburn like the fancy bowling alley they were building for the brass at Long Binh or the extra bronze stars the Army was passing out like candy so all the career soldiers could get promoted.

  We always worried about getting caught, but we trusted Sheridan—with the small stuff at least. Then why not give him the bigger stories, more access? Chickenshit I guess. Which is why I sit confessing this to you, and Sheridan is in jail somewhere for protecting his sources and some innocent people are dead. Fuck me is about all I can say.

  It’s time I owned up to the story I wrote back then about all the shit that was going down at what we affectionately referred to as LBJ. No, not the president. LBJ stood for Long Binh Jail. And if ever there was a hell on earth, it was LBJ.

  * * *

  DATELINE: Long Binh, South Vietnam—The anger of EMs imprisoned in Vietnam by the Army brass has finally exploded. Hundreds of GIs fed up with military oppression have rebelled at the Army’s largest stockade at Long Binh, twelve miles north of Saigon.

  Known as “LBJ,” the U.S. Army Vietnam Installation Stockade
(USARVIS) at Long Binh was the primary incarceration center in Vietnam. Designed to house the Army’s malcontents and criminals, LBJ placed imprisoned GIs on a daily diet of lousy food, overcrowding, long delays before trial, and inhumane treatment.

  Thus, when the Army introduced a new policy of strip-searching inmates in an effort to stem the proliferation of drugs, LBJ inmates took this as the ultimate act of degradation. And on the night of August 29, the lid blew.…

  * * *

  Jesus, no wonder this article never went anywhere. Even an Army lifer could have written a better lead. Get to the fucking point, GI!

  Truth is, I didn’t know that the point was, and if I did, I wouldn’t know how to get to it. And who would give a flying fuck anyway? I was just another in a long line of Vietnam whiners, short on maturity and objectivity, grousing about the Army and Vietnam.

  My other predicament was that this wasn’t really my story since the brass wouldn’t let us journalist types into LBJ until they had control of the situation. Which means I had another source for this scoop, an inside man, Specialist Four Billy Turner, who was new to LBJ and had a deep sense of right and wrong. What he saw that night bothered the shit out of him—which is why, I think, he brought his story to me.

  So, the LBJ saga is actually Turner’s story, as told by yours truly. But the bored, tired, and intimidated me forgot the old Sgt. Joe Friday rule of “changing the names to protect the innocent.” Not that any of us are really innocent, but you get the picture. I fought the law and the law won, and I screwed Spec. 4 Turner in the process.

  * * *

  I can still see his bright eyes and tightly-clipped mustache. Everything Turner took in struck him as uniquely special, and when it didn’t comply with his world view, he’d crinkle his forehead and let out a whistle, a sound that signaled “Man, this isn’t right.”

  I met Turner on his first day in country. He’d just been assigned to Company A, 720th MP Battalion, 18th MP Brigade, and it took him forever to arrive at the Long Binh compound. The minute he hit his cot, he was told to report to the unit armory. From there, Turner and his brothers-in-arms made a quick pit stop at the nearby mess, and that’s where the Vietnam gods brought us together.

  I was delivering the Morning News Roundup, our office’s daily dose of propaganda—one page, front and back—that we delivered to the mess halls on post. I noticed Turner looking lost and forlorn. I gave him one of those “Newbie, I know the kind of bullshit you’re dealing with” looks and handed him a copy of the Roundup.

  “What’s this?” Turner asked.

  “All the news that’s unfit to print,” I shot back, smiling.

  Some of the guys in line with Turner laughed, but he didn’t get it.

  “Did you ever hear the saying ‘military justice is to justice as military music is to music’?” I asked Turner. He shook his head vigorously, so hard that you could almost hear all the noise inside.

  “Think about it a minute,” I paused, a slight look of recognition appearing on Turner’s face. “It’s the same with the news. We write what they tell us to write. So do most of the civilian reporters. It’s not real, any of it, because the stuff we write and publish makes us look like heroes—kicking Charlie’s ass, winning the hearts and minds of all the natives. Shit, as the Vietnamese themselves would say: ‘Nevah happen, GI.’”

  Turner let out one of his knowing whistles before he was hurried off to be outfitted with a flak jacket, a fully-loaded M-14—complete with an unsheathed bayonet, no less—tear gas, grenades, and a gas mask. Next thing you knew, he was on his way across the base to the notorious LBJ to quell an uprising by American GIs.

  Five days later, Turner was standing next to my bunk, telling me his incredible story and begging me to write it all down. And to get it out.

  “No matter what,” he told me, his forehead doing that honesty crinkle, “no matter what, this story has to get out.”

  What Turner saw and experienced in those five days changed his life forever, and mine, too. But I’m rambling, probably because I’m afraid to keep going, to get to the nub of all this. Something inside me knows that my confession alone can’t relieve all the fucking guilt and responsibility, that it won’t save lives or turn back time.

  Still, it’s important to come clean, to seek absolution, if only from myself. It matters that somebody, some time realizes what the fuck we had to do over there and what we did to one another. Maybe it can help explain why things are so fucked up back here. That’s what the LBJ “disturbance” epitomizes—a mini-drama on the big stage that was Vietnam, one that opens a window to the putrid air we had to suck into our lungs for 365 days.

  Shit, we still can’t exhale.

  * * *

  So, what was LBJ like? Our office had done some earlier stories about it, puff pieces mainly, the latest one pumping up the new light bird the Army brought in to run the place in July. I wrote that pile of shit, too. Vernon D. Johnson was his name. Arkansas born and bred.

  Otherwise, our access to LBJ stories, especially LBJ prisoners, was totally off-limits. But even a fucking blind lizard could stumble upon an LBJ turd. Mind you, these were America’s finest young men: guys who’d answered the call and took up arms, but were now branded as “inmates,” spending their days in tedium and humiliation.

  For those not inclined to follow the LBJ rules, there was the glorious “Silver City,” the maximum confinement area made up of converted Conex shipping containers. I know for a fact—because we stored copies of our weekly Army newspaper in these things—that temps inside those boxes exceeded 120 degrees. Who can live like that? Nobody. No wonder imprisoned GIs saw this as a form of torture and why Silver City helped nail LBJ’s reputation as the worst fucking place to be in ‘Nam.

  To top it off, just like my old neighborhood back home, you could cut the racial tension in this eight-acre compound with a government-issued can opener. The fucking overcrowding was the coup de grâce. When I interviewed Lt. Col Johnson he admitted that LBJ was designed to only hold about 400 inmates and the number had exceeded 700 and was still climbing. I was ordered not to put that in my article.

  We knew the other numbers but never reported those either—that black GIs made up almost 90 percent of LBJ’s inmate population, that they displayed their defiant identity with “Black Power” signs and intricate hand gestures, while the predominantly white—and racist—guards didn’t have a clue how to deal with an angry, dapping GI with an Afro.

  In short, LBJ had been a booby trap since it opened. But thanks to the Army’s public relations campaign—aided and abetted by lazy civilian journalists—most of what went on at LBJ remained essentially quiet, despite uprisings in 1966 and 1967.

  * * *

  There it is. By August 1968, (here’s the best line from my story) “the embers of the flames from the American cities that had burned the previous two summers, intensified by the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., finally ignited the smoldering environment at the Long Binh Jail.” Definitely Pulitzer caliber, wouldn’t you say?

  The way the official story goes—and it’s out there for anybody to read—a small group of black “militants” got high on drugs and attacked the LBJ fence guards in the admin sector. From there, total chaos ensued as the rebels burned mattresses, tents, and trash. Within minutes, the mess hall, supply building, latrine, barber shop, and administration and finance buildings were ablaze.

  Everybody not rioting was taken by surprise, especially the guards. Turner said that by the time the guards realized what was happening, more than 200 prisoners had joined in the riot, systematically destroying the camp and beating guards and other white inmates with wood planks and bars from dismantled beds.

  Around midnight, Lt. Colonel Johnson and his aide-de-camp entered the compound, expecting to calm the rioters. While addressing the mob, Johnson was sucker punched, kicked and pummeled, sustaining a major head wound before he escaped.

  By that time, Turner and the other MPs were help
ing the prison guards shore up perimeter security, with a platoon of fire trucks standing by. A significant number of those who’d opted not to join in the riot were escorted by the MPs to a secure field adjoining the prison where they waited out the night under close guard.

  By now it was August 30. Turner and his unit were ordered to hustle to the stockade front gate and assemble in a V formation. He watched and waited.

  “Every time the front gate opened,” he told me, “we formed a barrier to follow whatever vehicle went in. We did this all day and all night.”

  By the 31st, the mood of LBJ prisoners, according to Turner, had swung from racial discord to revolt against the Army. In unison, black and white inmates threw rocks and debris at him and the other 720th MPs who were hunkered down on the outer perimeter. The smell of burning debris from the fires was so strong and pungent that Turner had to put on his gas mask.

  Once the perimeter guard was established, the waiting game began. Turner said it felt like some heavy duty poker game, with the Army holding all the cards. They could just sit back and wait you out because they’d stacked the deck. Hell, they owned the whole fucking casino. Turner’s hand was pretty shitty too, pulling 12-hour shifts, constantly being cursed at, and baited into approaching the fence.

  “If you happened to venture too close,” he admitted, “the inmates would spit or piss on you.”

  Later that evening, several truckloads of blankets, cots, and food were brought in for the prisoners. Turner and the MPs formed a skirmish line at bayonet point so the gates could be opened to get the trucks inside, unloaded, and removed. That was when everything fell apart for him.

  “It was just too weird,” Turner told me, whimpering, “too weird and too un-American to be holding a bayonet-tipped and loaded rifle pointed at a fellow soldier, a brother no less, knowing you’d have to kill him if he rushed you. I mean, why wasn’t I pointing my weapon at Charlie?”

  Turner never went back to his post at LBJ. He came looking for me.

  Eventually, the number of holdouts dwindled to a dirty dozen, and by the end of the week, they surrendered too. Those sorry SOBs realized, I think, that anyone who didn’t give up, or give in, would be charged with attempted escape. Trust me, nobody in ‘Nam, not even these guys, wanted any more time added to their sentences, or to their tours.