by Barry Fixler
My mother is a very gaudy person. My father, because he was a jeweler, had access to fine china and silverware and crystal chandeliers, and my mother liked beautiful paintings, so I grew up in a house that I considered very gaudy.
Around November of 1967, the guys in my platoon were relaxing in the safety of our hooches in Phu Bai when I received a bunch of pictures from home of my family celebrating Jewish holidays such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
The base at Phu Bai was relatively safe. We still ate C-rations, but it was very secure and we got hot food, too. The dozen or so of us in my platoon slept on cots that we kept our war gear underneath.
Occasionally we’d get a little free time for reading mail, and I was thumbing through the pictures my mother had sent. The family was gathered around the nice, long dinner table that came out for the holidays. The china, crystal glasses, the chandelier…that stuff didn’t really register with me. All I really saw was my family.
The guys were lounging all around me, just eating and bullshitting.
“Hey, you guys, you want to see pictures of my family?” I said. “My mom just sent me pictures of my family.”
“Sure!” they all answered, and everyone gathered over my shoulders.
I started pointing out people. “This is my sister, and that’s my cousin, and…”
Then one of the guys piped up.
“Wow, Fixler, you are rich! Look everyone! Fixler is rich!”
I was taken aback, shocked. I never considered myself rich. I was a normal, middle-class kid who grew up in a typical house like you see on Long Island or here, where I live now, in Rockland County, New York. I wouldn’t consider anybody around here rich. My parents were middle class; I’m middle class; everybody’s middle class.
The guys didn’t see it that way.
“You’re rich! Oh my God! Hey, Fixler’s rich!”
I looked at the pictures again, and then all the nice china and tableware stood out.
“No way, no way,” I said. “Forget it. Forget it, man. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
There was no way that the guys in my platoon came from homes that had long dining room tables, chandeliers, crystal and fine china. They just didn’t.
“Fuck that shit, me being rich.” I didn’t want to be branded as rich. I thought it would have been a horrible thing. Who the hell wanted to be branded as rich?
“Bad move, Barry,” I told myself. “Bad, bad move.”
It’s just like I wouldn’t throw my combat experience at another Marine who hadn’t seen combat but was just as good a Marine as I was, or act like I was a notch above. I despise things like that. That’s just not me.
When I first got into boot camp, about ninety of us were sitting around an instructor and he asked who had graduated college, and no hands went up. “Who attended college?” Maybe two hands went up.
“Who graduated high school?”
I had never known a soul who hadn’t graduated high school. It was like eating, I thought, something that everyone just did.
I raised my hand, figuring that everybody would raise theirs, too. No. Out of ninety of us, only six to ten other guys raised their hands.
“Holy shit!” I thought, half pulling my hand down. “I can’t believe this.”
The instructor continued. “OK, who dropped out of high school?”
Then everyone’s hands shot up.
“Wow,” I thought. “What a learning experience.”
* * *
Vietnam taught all of us, though, just how well off we are in America, and what a great country we have. It made me the patriot that I am today, and I may have first realized my devotion to this country on the day when I saw a simple gesture from a Vietnamese baby.
I used to like riding on convoys. Not that they were safer; it was just that we didn’t have to hump gear, so for that reason, they were great.
I used to watch the vehicles in front of us to see what parts of the roads they used, and I would cringe when a driver of our truck would deviate from the tire tracks of the vehicle in front of us.
If it looked to me like we were going to veer out of the forward truck’s path by even an inch, I would think, “Uh-oh,” and I would cringe and sort of brace myself, expecting an explosion. It was probably like what our Marines face now in Iraq and Afghanistan: roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices. We just called them land mines.
One day we were on a huge operation and were going from Phu Bai all the way north to Hue City. It was a pretty serious mission, 100 percent on alert, all of us ready to pull our triggers if anything happened. It was so easy to get ambushed.
The drive lasted three or four hours and passed through dozens of villages, stop-and-go the whole way.
In each village, children came out and chased us, begging us to throw cans of C-rations to them, but what they wanted most was candy.
“G.I.! G.I.! G.I.!” they screamed, hands held out.
People may have heard rare stories about American soldiers killing or assaulting Vietnamese civilians, but I never saw anything like that. Never. If anything, we Marines went out of our way to do kind things. Good Marines are proud and have a natural instinct to protect, and children bring that instinct out even stronger.
We carried little Hershey’s bars to throw to the Vietnamese kids. They loved it, and all of us enjoyed doing that for them. We didn’t have much candy with us on the Hue City mission, and in each village, maybe twenty kids came running parallel to the convoy, ten on each side, with their hands out. Only one or two out of the twenty would get candy because that was all that we had.
“G.I.! G.I.! G.I.! American Number One! American Number One!”
As we slowed to a stop in one village, I looked down and saw a young kid carrying a baby that probably was only ten or eleven months old. The kid stopped and set the baby on a large rock beside the road so that he could approach us for candy.
The baby was too young to walk and just lay there on its belly. As I was studying it, the baby stuck out its hand like the older children.
“Oh my God,” I thought. “This baby can’t even walk yet, but it already knows how to beg.”
For some reason that image of the begging baby embedded in my brain: The infant knew how to beg before it knew how to walk.
Someone could have shot at me and I wouldn’t even have been able to react, I was so engrossed in that thought: The child couldn’t even walk yet, but already knew how to beg.
That summed up Vietnam. The country wasn’t poor, it was starving.
It was a reality check, a lesson to a nineteen-year-old Marine about how cruel life can be, and it made me very sad. That child grew up thinking that food, or things such as candy that passed for food, didn’t come from its parents, it came from G.I.s.
But it made me think about how great America is and how lucky we are. Ninety-nine percent of the people in America have never experienced anything like that . . . and never will. It made me want to do something so that children wouldn’t have to experience anything like that again. Not children.
It was a powerful image and a significant moment in my life. I’ve had only a handful of experiences in my life that hit as hard. Like when that thug came into my store and put the gun in my face to rob me. Time stopped, and my brain processed everything instantly: “This is the real deal.”
17
‘This is the Real Deal’
“This is the real deal. I HAVE to kill these two guys.”
It is amazing how quickly the brain can work under stress. Three thoughts darted through mine on Valentine’s Day morning, 2005: “This is the real deal; this is an automatic pistol, which I do not like;” and, “I HAVE to kill these two guys.”
I slapped the gun away from my face. I only know from watching the store videotape later that I used my left hand. I had no time to contemplate; I reacted.
I’m a jeweler, like my father. I keep guns in my store. Bad guys with bad ideas rob jewelry stores, as he knew, and I am prepared
in case they try mine. My store was prepared that day when those two guys came, and thankfully, so was I. I didn’t know it at the time, but they had a body bag waiting for me in the getaway car.
I knocked the gun out of my face, ducked behind the counter and lunged the six feet to where I kept one of my pistols, which was holstered under the counter about eighteen inches above the floor.
I had to concentrate, do everything right. My life was at stake.
“Barry, you have to do this perfect. Snap open the holster. Use two hands. Pull out the pistol. Come up killing.… Come up killing.”
The two robbers followed my movements as I dove under and around the counter. My brain registered: “One exactly parallel; one to my right.”
I was so anxious to get my holster away from my gun that I flung it like a Frisbee, and it bounced off of the wall and next to my safe. Detectives who watched the videotape said that the flying holster distracted the crooks for a split second, and that was the advantage that I needed. I sprang up blasting.
I knew better than to stand still. That guy with the automatic locked eyes with me, and we tried to shoot off each other’s faces, but both overshot.
I immediately went from defensive to offensive. I let go two rounds, and in my brain, the first guy was dead. Next jerk. I moved to my right and shot the guy in the white in the chest. Both of them went down.
The robber in black was stunned, but to my surprise he shook it off and popped up and ran for the door. I found out later that he wore a bulletproof vest under his trench coat, but the force of my round was enough to knock him down. The guy in white tried to crawl to his feet and run, but he wore no vest. My bullet was in him.
The front door glass of the store shattered from one shot, and the one in black raced out while his partner collapsed near the door and tried to drag himself away.
I kept my cool. I maintained self-control. I acted like the Marine that I am.
“Don’t shoot, Barry!” I told myself. “Don’t shoot! You’re on the offense; you just won! Don’t shoot again, Barry! They’re running! DO NOT SHOOT! You won!”
I had no intention of shooting them in their backs, but I also had no intention of dying. For all I knew, they would regroup outside and come back to get me. I only had two rounds left and didn’t want to be cornered in the store, so I moved toward the front door in a military shooting stance. If there were going to be another shootout, I wanted it to be outside. I wanted to control the situation and keep them on the defensive.
In reality, I had no rounds left. My brain counted three shots, but I had really fired all five rounds.
From the storefront, I saw a brown minivan scream past in the parking lot. I looked for a front license plate, but it had none. I did see the eyes of the driver, and it gave me great satisfaction. His eyes were about three inches wide, and the look on his face said, “What the fuck just happened?!”
Two of my fellow business owners in our shopping center were opening their stores at precisely that moment and saw the brown minivan speed away, just like I did. They called 9-1-1 within thirty seconds of each other and gave descriptions of the getaway vehicle.
The guy in the black trench coat who had shoved an automatic pistol in my face was gone, and his accomplice in white was face down in the doorway, half in my store and half out. One of my shots had felled him, and that was as far as he made it trying to get away.
“Don’t let this guy crawl out,” I told myself. “I don’t want the cops to think I shot him in the street.”
I totally forgot that I had everything on tape.
I kept my gun trained on the guy.
“Don’t move! Don’t you fucking move!”
I looked around for help, not knowing that the owners of other stores were dialing 9-1-1 at that moment, and I saw a woman jogger and yelled for her to call the cops, but she ignored me.
“Who the fuck are you?!” I yelled at the back of the bad guy’s head. “Who the fuck are you?!”
I had the situation well in hand, so I wasn’t panicked or scared. I was more pissed than anything, and I vented on the guy.
“Who the fuck are you?! You think you’re good enough to rob me?!”
I never hit, kicked or so much as even touched him, and the police respected that.
Yell and curse at him? Hell yes, I did.
“You think you guys are good enough to get over on me?! Who the fuck do you think you are?! You think that you can rob me?”
I do have to tell the truth. I was on an extreme adrenaline high, and in the back of my mind, I thought, “Fuck, man, this is cool! I fucking love this that somebody tried to rob me and I fucking won! I just fucking love this! This is cool!”
When the police came, I had to downplay things and act regretful about the whole situation because I wanted the cops on my side. I couldn’t be cocky or show the wrong attitude. I didn’t want the cops thinking, “What, do you just go around shooting people?”
Then again, anyone who really knew me could’ve told them that I have a much longer history of people shooting at me.
18
Nervous Meal,
Doomed Bridge
When we were ordered to guard a bridge in the Phu Bai area that wasn’t very strategic for us, the way I saw it, my job was to throw grenades in the water and not get killed by villagers who we hoped were friendly.
Villagers used the bridge to get back and forth, and we were guarding it more for them than for the U.S. military. But it was a nice bridge—steel, not bamboo—that you could drive a truck across, and my platoon was given orders to protect it 24/7 for a week.
We knew absolutely and positively that either the NVA or the Viet Cong wanted to knock down the bridge, but for us, it was pretty easy duty. We had thirty or forty guys and just took turns on duty and off duty guarding the bridge.
It beat humping twenty or thirty miles a day in the field constantly on the lookout for booby traps and ambushes. We weren’t going to step on anything that would explode, and the odds were less that we would be used for target practice. It was pretty nice, a relatively comfortable assignment.
The bridge was the most modern thing about the village, and the first thing we had to do was set up a perimeter and then establish the best place for guys in our squad to sleep when they weren’t on watch. The shifts were two hours on, two hours off, two on, two off. We also needed the spot to stash our packs, ammo and C-rations, and just to chill.
Ike, our squad leader, found what looked like a great area with shade right next to a hooch, but an old lady stormed out of it scolding us.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no!”
“What the fuck, no?”
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no!”
We could tell she was flipping out, but we didn’t understand what she was trying to tell us. “Fuck her,” we told ourselves, and we went about our business. But she knew how to make her point.
“No, no, no, no! Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo! Ssssshhhhhhhhh! Ssssshhhhhhhhh!” She wrinkled her nose, but about then our own noses caught up with her message.
We were about to move into the village’s public shithole, the public head. We found another spot quick.
We got friendly with the villagers in short time and gave the kids candy and things like that. One of the villagers must have taken a liking to me. By evaluating his hut and his demeanor, I could tell that he held some sort of authority in the village, and he must have seen me with the children and thought that I was a pretty easy-going Marine, or just naïve.
He approached me and in very crude English asked if I would have dinner with him and his family. I felt honored, so I said yes. It wasn’t like I would be walking away from my duties. I would be right there in the village.
I told Tom, and he didn’t give a shit.
“You gotta have dinner, fucking have dinner. We’ll see you!”
He liked things a little risky, and to him it was just a joke.
“If they feed you a razor blade, we’ll know this is
not a friendly village.”
That was the thing. We all had heard stories about kids giving Marines Coca-Cola with razor blades in it, and the Marines sucking the razor blades into their throats and bleeding to death. We’d heard about Vietnamese giving Marines hot tea laced with acid.
So I was on edge when I arrived at the hut that evening for dinner, and I didn’t know what to do with my M16. The villager offered nicely to let me prop it by the door, but I politely said, “No way.”
I thought, “Could he lunge for it and get me? Who would be closer to it, me or him?” I imagined several possibilities, none of which were good for me. The man was friendly, kids were playing with me, and his wife scurried around saying “Thank you” more times than I could count, but I thought of them as if they were snakes. A snake is good, good, good, indifferent, and all of a sudden it will turn on you.
I was suspicious of the tea, so at first I just dipped the tip of my tongue into it. I half expected my tongue to evaporate, just vanish right out of my throat.
I tried to act as sociable as possible, but all of these thoughts ran through my head: “Will the food be poisoned? What if I get cramps? I’ll know they poisoned me, right?”
I only ate a little food, and the family kept giving me funny looks. They had no idea what was going through my brain. They must have thought, “Wow, this American is one fucked up guy. He eats slowly; he drinks with his tongue like a dog. He’s licking the bowl!”
The whole time, I thought, “Barry, you’re in a jam now. You gotta be careful. You wanted to be friendly with this family, and now you gotta lick your bowl so that these people don’t kill you.”
I had propped my M16 against the table, just out of my reach, and I kept thinking, “Who could lunge for the rifle quicker, him or me? What did I get myself into? Can you imagine if he somehow gets up in front of everybody and shoots me? What a way to go!”
I was under pressure. Are you kidding me? From acid, to razor blades, to everything that I could think of, to him shooting me with my own rifle because he said, “No, put it over there, put it over there.” The mother could pick up my M16 real quick and throw it to the father so that he could shoot me. At that point, anything seemed possible.