by Kevin Sites
“Go ahead, shoot him,” Saal said to his men. With three shots his Marines brought the man down. They retrieved the body and, after going through his clothes and belongings, discovered he was a North Vietnamese Army officer. They also found photographs of his wife and children.
“It made me realize we had killed a human being,” says Saal.
That realization was not in step with the wartime necessity of dehumanizing the enemy, enabling soldiers to kill in battle without paralyzing regret. To the American soldiers and Marines, the Vietnamese were “slopes” or “gooks,” names seeming to denote something more animal than human.[22] Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman addressed that phenomenon in his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. He wrote, “It’s so much easier to kill someone if they look distinctly different from you. If your propaganda machine can convince your soldiers that their opponents are not really humans but are ‘inferior forms of life,’ then their natural resistance to killing their own species will be reduced. Often the enemy’s humanity is denied by referring to him as a Gook, Kraut or Nip.”
Killing an enemy in this context was not taking life, but rather stopping a threat, which might save the lives of your brothers in arms. And since the dead enemy wasn’t human to those who bought into this belief system, then their bodies could be considered trophies of the kill just like hunted animals, as Saal would soon discover.
“I felt terrible [after the shooting], so I took a short power nap and woke up to see what my men had done to his body. It was fucked,” says Saal. What they did to their dead enemy became an image that Saal could never shake for all his days and nights thereafter.
“They got bamboo that was lying around, made a cross and… they fucking crucified him. My men crucified the soldier after they stripped him naked. That was my platoon under which I thought I had control.”
“Take him down! Take him the fuck down,” Saal remembers shouting at them.
“Come on, Lieutenant. They’d do the same thing to us if the situation were reversed,” one responded.
“I don’t give a good goddamn fuck! We are not them!”
This body hanging from the cross was not just his enemy, not just a “gook” or dangerous animal. He was a human being, a North Vietnamese officer with a wife and child, just doing his job as they were doing. The pictures Saal found on him made that clear. And this triumphalist crucifixion had seemed to strip away his and his men’s humanity, not that of this dead soldier, as it was intended. Saal says he felt a profound emptiness, as if he had lost a part of himself forever.
“I knew that’s where I left my soul… I lost my humanity. I saw it fly over my head. I’m sure there’s a lot of souls like mine, flying over the Iwo Jimas and the Gettysburgs.” It was a moment in war that Dr. Jonathan Shay characterized in Achilles in Vietnam as life-altering bad luck: “Battle creates inexplicable events that soldiers experience as luck,” wrote Shay. “These run from astounding good luck to crushing bad luck that taints the very soul.”
Saal walked away and sat on the edge of a clearing of elephant grass. As he hung his head, his radioman snapped a picture of him. He says when he saw the photo years later he knew exactly when the moment was. It inspired him to write a poem with these lines:
CRUCIFIXION
Later, depressed, angry, isolated and staring blankly
over the brown, dry and desolate rice paddy
where I had ordered the kill,
I watched my soul, a never regained part of me,
fly with wings, not those of an angel,
but as a dark and sad object,
wondering how this could ever have happened.
Saal explains the actions of his men in this way: “They had been there that entire fall, the war escalated to its peak. A lot of those guys had been through some heavy fighting and after their lieutenant was killed—they had motive for revenge. They were chomping at the bit to kill… and to get a body was a rarity. That was a high point for us to bring in the body. He had been NVA [North Vietnamese Army] officer which made us look good.”
Saal’s platoon command was marked by moments of moral betrayal where an enemy could be crucified and friends turned into enemies. It was the kind of bad luck, so easily roused in war, that did indeed taint the soul. Part of his journey back from the trauma of his wartime experience has included writing poetry to provide context and narrative to what was formerly just memory. He e-mails me a poem that he says was the most difficult one for him to write. This is an excerpt:
NAMELESS WOMAN
I remember seeing you with your long, black hair as if it were yesterday.
You were standing there waiting for me the next morning.
Waiting for me to enter what was left of your village.
We had split up, paired up, my men and I, and we had made friends with your friends.
Had eaten with you the afternoon before, eaten the food you had offered.
Shared with you, laughed and joked with you.
Good times, happy times during a war where there was little or no trust.
During a war where there were no friends, only enemies.
And then at dusk, we left and prepared an ambush close by your village.
It was rumored enemy soldiers were using it as a staging area for night patrols.
And the rumor proved true.
At midnight, a patrol came through and tripped our ambush.
A firefight ensued, the enemy retreated into your village and I did as I was so well-trained to do.
I called for an artillery strike, not once, not twice, but three times,
until the shelling stopped and all was quiet again.
Just the smoke and the dust filled the air and the only sounds were those of the jungle night.
At daybreak we swept through to see the results
and there you were, there you were, staring at me, preventing me from passing.
Standing in front of me with riveting eyes which penetrated my heart to the very depths of my soul.
I pretended you weren’t there with those glaring eyes that I have seen time after time in my dreams,
Night sweats that I have had over and over, so often that I’ve lost count,
Night howls that haunt me as do murdered ghosts seeking vengeance.
During his tour, Saal saw some of the most savage fighting of the war, including the January 1968 Tet Offensive, in which eighty thousand North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops staged a coordinated wave of attacks against a hundred cities. Saal himself became a casualty of that fighting, which ended his duty in Vietnam.
One of his friends, another lieutenant named Jack, had been killed the day prior, after stepping on a land mine.
“After Jack died on the twenty-eighth [of February] I didn’t care,” says Saal. “I was taking some real serious risks. I would walk on point or check places by myself with just my forty-five. We were being watched the entire time.”
There had been several battalions of NVA inside the city of Hue and when they were driven out by other units of Marines, Saal’s unit ran into retreating elements on a mountainside and they gave pursuit. “The objective was to get to the top,” Saal says, “and sweep down the mountain hoping to trap the NVA battalion against a Marine force coming up from the other side.”
Saal remembers pushing hard up the mountain, so hard that his radioman could barely keep up with him. It had been raining all day, and mud stuck to the treads of their boots and the rocks were slippery. When he reached the top, he found it had been cleared of bushes and shrubs. He wanted to get a better vantage point to catch a glimpse of the retreating NVA. Instead, when he reached for a rock outcrop as a handhold to pull himself up, he found himself floating through the air. The impact of his body falling against the rock face slammed him back into real time. One boot had been blown off and he was spurting blood from his hands and feet. He had tripped a notorious “bouncing betty,” a type of bounding mine, which, when trigger
ed, launches three to four feet in the air, followed by a secondary blast propelling ball bearings at the individual unlucky enough to have triggered it and anyone in the immediate vicinity. It was left by the retreating NVA to slow down the advancing American troops.
“I remember what a mess it was,” Saal says. “I grew up Catholic so I started saying the Act of Contrition, apologizing to my parents, and I remember the corpsman [medic] talking to me as he was trying to bandage me up. ‘Lieutenant, you son of a bitch, you’re going home.’ I tried not to go into shock but I passed out. I woke up in a hospital in Da Nang after being medevac’d out.”
Saal spent the next two weeks unable to get out of bed. His injuries were serious and plentiful. He had shrapnel everywhere, but the worst damage was to his legs and feet, where large swaths of muscle were torn away. The fact that the hospital at Da Nang was shelled by the NVA nightly didn’t help his healing process. Saal said the mortar fire was often more terrifying than combat, since he couldn’t move and all he had for protection was a pillow a nurse gave him to cover up his body during the attacks. He was finally sent to Japan for more intensive surgery, where, he said, his injuries were met with even more insult.
Because of his transport time to Japan his bandages had not been changed for two weeks, and the blood and other fluids glued the gauze fibers into his wounds. He said one sadistic doctor chose to rip them off without giving him an anesthetic or even wetting them first to make them easier to remove.
He later recounted this experience too, in a short essay in his personal diary.
Stop, Stop. Please Stop
Behind the curtain separating the doctor, corpsman and soldier from the forty odd soldiers on the rest of the ward, the doctor states firmly and directly that the bandages have to be cut away from the soldier. In turn, the soldier asks for some Demerol. “Please, can you give me something for the pain? These bandages have been on me for two weeks and I know because of the dried blood that they are glued to my skin. I’ve gone through this process in DaNang once before and the doctor gave me Demerol and wet the bandages with warm water before taking them off.” With no emotion, the doctor replies, “No, I can’t do that. I’m in a hurry and this won’t take but a few minutes. You’ll be all right.” With that, the doctor begins pulling the adhesives from the soldier’s wounded right arm. “Oh, my God!” cries the soldier, “Then at least wet me down with warm water first!” “I don’t have time for that. There are other soldiers on this ward who need help. You are not the only one in my charge.” The doctor once again commences tearing at the taped right arm and this time the soldier screams louder. “Please, dear God! Stop, please stop! Goddamn it, please stop!” The corpsman tries to hold him down and this time the doctor pulls the tape from the soldier’s left arm. He tries to wrench himself free screaming louder and louder as the doctor pulls the tape from his chest, then begins to move on to the badly mangled and blood encrusted legs which are the receivers of the most damage from the explosion. “You fucker! You gotta stop! I can’t take this shit!” “Listen, you’re an officer! Now act like one! I expect you to behave in a more professional manner! There are enlisted men on this ward who can hear you! How do you think your screaming and cursing is going to affect their morale? Now stop your swearing and control yourself!” “I’ll stop cursing when you give me something for this pain.” “Oh, fuck, please stop!” screams the soldier as the doctor tears the tape along with the soldier’s skin from the left and then the right leg. “You fucking bastard!” “That’ll be enough, lieutenant! Just a little more—one last pull. There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” The soldier is then taken from behind the curtain to his bed amongst the rest of the wounded where he passes out from exhaustion.
After his surgery in Japan, the Marines sent Saal back to the United States for more surgeries and to recuperate. To burn off the eight months he still owed the Marines following his recovery, Saal began teaching at the Marine lieutenants’ basic school in September of 1969. He would pick up a class of second lieutenants,” he said, “teach them, then watch them get shipped off to Vietnam and die.” (Democratic senator Jim Webb was one of his students.)
Despite what he’d gone through, Saal says he remained a staunch supporter of the war effort, so much so that after the Kent State shootings, Saal yelled at his brother, a Guardsman not involved in the shooting, “Why did they only kill four?” Over time, Saal says, his feelings evolved.
“I became totally antiwar,” says Saal, “but it was a process.”
Saal was discharged from the Marines two weeks after the Kent State shooting and actually became a student there himself. He had horrible nightmares about Vietnam but pushed through it and got a master’s degree in English. He threw everything away from his time in the war and resolved to never talk about it. For the next thirty-five years, he never did.
In fact, he pretended like it never happened. He got a job teaching English in his hometown of Akron, got married and eventually had four daughters. But the thoughts and memories of Vietnam never really went away. How could they when he believed that was the place where he lost his soul? Instead Saal just obscured his thoughts of Vietnam in a dense blanket of smoke that went on for decades.
“I was a pothead,” says Saal, which might be considered a huge understatement considering that toward the end of his addiction, he was lighting up nearly a pound of weed every month at a cost of $2,000. Ironically, Saal was getting $2,000 a month from the Marines in disability payments, using, in essence, the entire amount in an effort to forget or suppress everything that happened to him while he was in Vietnam. And though pot was his drug of choice, Saal said he would also sometimes binge-drink tequila or vodka on weekends when he needed to. Yet while he was, in his own words, chain-smoking joints up to five minutes before he entered the school during his final year of teaching, Saal was more than just fully functional; he was considered one of the hardest-working, most dedicated teachers at the school. He was active in the teacher’s union and graded papers until late into the night. And despite the injuries to his legs and feet, he took up running again, as he had in high school, running ten miles a day and even competing in half marathons. In between, he smoked dope and avoided his family—and his past.
While he refused to think about his own war, Saal became increasingly agitated by the new wars he was reading about and watching on TV, in Afghanistan and Iraq. He says his nervous breakdown began in the summer of 2005 when a large number of Marines from a reserve unit in Ohio were killed during fighting in Iraq. He became further enraged when Marines in Haditha were accused of war crimes and called criminals due to allegations that they had killed civilians in response to an ambush on the unit that left five Marines dead.
“It’s Bush and Cheney that were criminals,” says Saal, “not these Marines.”
By May of 2006, Saal could no longer keep his war hidden in a cloud of pot smoke. He had been feeling more unsteady over the last four years, and America’s newest wars ramped up the mix of anger, sadness, emptiness and denial. It overtook him and he voluntarily admitted himself into the psychiatric ward of Akron’s Saint Thomas Hospital. On the advice of the hospital’s doctors, he retired from teaching and went through the hospital’s six-month post-traumatic stress disorder program. It would be his first step in pursuit of the soul he says he lost thirty-six years prior in Vietnam.
“I got in the psych ward and cried for two weeks,” says Saal. “I hadn’t cried for forty years. But the luckiest thing that happened to me was to have that breakdown. It gave me an opportunity to quit [pot and alcohol]. If that hadn’t happened you wouldn’t be talking to me now. It was just a matter of turning my steering wheel.”
After quitting his addictions and establishing a clear head for the first time in decades, Saal began coming to terms with the war that almost killed him and that he believed had certainly taken his soul.
But his life-changing decisions came with their own consequences. When Saal’s post-traumatic stress lid came off,
so did the problems in his marriage. Years of neglect couldn’t be repaired with apologies. His and his wife separated in 2007.
“I did what addicts do,” Saal says. “I ignored her and the girls.”
But despite that loss, he still feels his life is getting better, having reckoned with the past.
“I don’t want to die anymore and I don’t want to go back to the sad angry person I was. When our president chose to send thirty thousand men back to Afghanistan after he said he was going to end it, I didn’t let it drive me crazy. I still have nightmares, but they don’t bother me as much now that I’m not drinking tequila and smoking pot.”
He no longer teaches high school English but now fills his days working at Freedom House, a homeless shelter for war veterans. He also volunteers at the detox and psychiatric wards of Saint Thomas Hospital. He said while some veterans like him finally do break down and ask for help, so many others don’t and continue a downward spiral of drug and alcohol abuse as a form of self-medication.
“For every one who comes in, ten don’t. For every ten who come in, eight relapse. The mind starts yapping to you, ‘Sobriety isn’t very fun, I’m going back down to the bar.’ I talk to people every day that relapse.”
Saal has been clean six years in May 2012, exactly forty-two years after he was discharged from the Marines.
“You don’t come home from war the same way you went,” he says. “I’m doing a lot of writing now. I could never write poetry myself until the last three months. Now it comes out like crazy. I’m getting to do this stuff today all because I quit drinking and drugging and turned my life around. I sponsor recovering addicts, giving back. I want to do this work until I die. It works if you live it. I don’t wake up wanting to get high. It’s primarily because I try to live the program. What else the fuck can I ask for? I still teach, but now I teach veterans and others and, in turn, I continue to teach myself the process of recovery from the effects of trauma.”