Just innocent horseplay between men at war.
Unless you know that the Army officer invited the naval officer back to his hootch at midnight to show him some “cool stuff” a friend had sent him from home.
One of those items was an audiotape his friend had secretly recorded in a movie theater. The movie was The Boys in the Band.
The other item was a magazine called Avant Garde with a poem by W. H. Auden called “A Day for a Lay,” a graphic account of a man-on-man blowjob.
The lieutenant was dropping hairpins like hand grenades.
This was certainly as literate an invitation as I had ever received, and probably the most obvious, as well. I didn’t take him up on it. I went back to my own hootch and jerked off on my cot before sleep. Had I been a little less terrified of a court-martial—and the lieutenant had been a little more irresistible, I suppose—there’s no telling what would have happened.
At the very least, we could have listened to the movie.
I HAD A friend in Chau Doc named Giles Whitcomb. As that suave name connotes, he was both a Harvard man and a spy. He worked in naval intelligence and often showed up at the morning briefings when the Army commandant, Colonel Horatio Hunter (another name I might have invented but didn’t), would bloviate at length while waving his baton at a map of the region. Giles and I would swap grins across the room whenever the colonel was interrupted by the fuck-you lizard that sometimes hid behind the map. The fuck-you lizard was named for its distinctive cry, a passable replication of someone shouting Fuck you. The first word was short and emphatic, the second drawn out to the point of becoming personal. Fuck yooooo. Giles and I found this hilarious; the colonel did not.
One day Giles wasn’t there anymore. This didn’t surprise me, since his official duties, unlike mine, didn’t seem to adhere to a routine of any kind. He was practically James Bond, complete with the silky good looks and an unflappable demeanor. When I heard from him again, he radioed to say that he was in Cambodia and would I mind bringing him his three-piece gray suit. He could meet me in a town called Neak Luong on the Mekong River, twenty-seven miles from the border. It would take me only a few hours to get there by Swift boat, and I would have a place to stay.
I knew better than to ask him what he needed with a three-piece gray suit in Cambodia. American and South Vietnamese troops had invaded that country a few weeks earlier, so intelligence was no doubt required. Maybe he needed business attire for Phnom Penh; maybe it wouldn’t be safe to look like an American GI.
At any rate, I went. I folded his suit into a duffel bag and headed up the river, past dusty villages so unused to the new American presence that young women bathing in the river saw no need to cover their breasts as they waved at the boats. Little children ran to the water’s edge repeatedly shouting something that sounded like Ah-Pa-Lo, which baffled me until I realized the word was Apollo. The moon landing was still our greatest ambassador there. They didn’t know to distrust us yet.
Meanwhile, back in the States, four students at Kent State University had just been shot dead by members of the Ohio National Guard. Those students, and the nine others who were wounded, had been protesting the Cambodian invasion. Nixon had actually announced the invasion on television, and half of all Americans polled had expressed support for it. They believed, as I still believe, that we were helping the South Vietnamese by cutting off the flow of Vietcong troops into their homeland.
America is always helping someone when it invades another country.
GILES GOT HIS suit when we docked in Neak Luong, and I got a new assignment: working the radio on a fifty-foot Tango boat moored on the Mekong River. Oly had kindly agreed to take my watches in Chau Doc, where things were relatively quiet. I stayed in Neak Luong for the duration of the Cambodian campaign. Radios are the last thing to go when military operations finally shut down.
There were thirteen of us on this little boat, a snub-nosed shoe box designed for landing troops. It was oppressively hot, so we wore cutoff fatigues most of the time. The locals wore sarongs, bright-hued, block-printed loops of cotton that set them vividly apart from the Vietnamese thirty miles down the river. Toward the end of our stay, we decided to make this fashion statement our own, so we swapped C-rats for sarongs in the village markets and wore them around the boat as we pleased. We thought we looked good in them, and I suppose we did.
We led a lazy, Huck Finn–ish existence there in Neak Luong. The river was the color of tea with milk, which meant it handily concealed a variety of swimming snakes, but that didn’t stop us from splashing around in it when the heat became intolerable. The radio was below deck, an airless, olive-drab sweatbox hung with short-timer calendars, most of them a lot more gynecological than the Playboy-based calendars back in Saigon. Naturally, I lived for the moment when my watch would end and I could enjoy a change of scenery on deck again. All of us lived for the weekly arrival of the mail boat and the ice boat. We would chip ice into our canteens and mix it with a packaged powder for a simulation of orange juice. (For the record, it wasn’t Tang, but something much tastier that my mother could buy at the Piggly Wiggly and mail to us. She was thrilled for a chance to help with the war effort.)
We saw nothing of battle, just the sound of it on the radio sometimes. During our stay, we fired a total of three shots, all of them at George, our mascot dog, who had suffered a seizure and was drowning in the river, too far away from us to be rescued. It broke our hearts, but we returned soon enough to the mundanity of waiting for a war to end. We reread letters from home and trimmed our Bostons.
A Boston, in case you’re wondering, was a haircut popular with the men of the Brown Water Navy. You grew your hair out in back and trimmed it straight across at the nape of your neck, forgoing the usual military taper. You could do this because there was no one around to check on you. I have no idea why it was called a Boston. The only hitch—though I can hardly call it that myself—was that someone else had to help you, standing behind you with scissors to make sure the line was straight.
We did this on the fantail of the boat. There was a shower back there, nothing more than a length of black hose that pumped water directly from the river. We were both naked, my buddy and I, having just showered at the end of the day with a bar of spicy, paper-wrapped Chinese soap I had bought at a stall in the village. I don’t remember his name all these years later; I can just barely remember his narrow, vulpine face. What does come back to me, time and again, is the soft mushroom kiss of his cock against my butt cheeks as he leaned in to trim my neck.
That I’ll remember forever.
ONE DAY TOWARD the end of June word came from a command post down the river that our boat was about to become the last American naval vessel to withdraw from Cambodia. That was made official a few days later when an ABC correspondent named Steve Bell (later to become an anchorman at that network) showed up at the riverside with a film crew and two crates of beer and told us he was going to make us “heroes on the six-o’clock news.” Even then, we didn’t really buy that line, since what we were doing amounted to a retreat. Americans had had enough of Nixon’s Cambodian adventure, and this would merely be the visual proof it had happened. Still, we were seduced by the beer and, let’s face it, the chance to be on TV.
So off came the sarongs and the frayed cutoffs and out came the camouflage fatigues festooned with grenades and jungle knives. As the cameras captured our historic withdrawal, a dozen men were shamelessly John Wayne–ing around the deck. I was not one of them. Please don’t give me credit for shame or modesty or anything like that. I wanted to be there, too, but I was stuck down below on radio watch, suffocating under an arbor of paper pussies still waiting to be colored in.
Meanwhile, the guys up on deck withdrew from Cambodia. Twice they withdrew. That is to say they pulled away from the riverbank twice, so that the cameramen could get the right angle on our war-torn vessel. There would have been plenty of chances for me to be seen had I actually been there. Before the watch schedule had fuck
ed me over, I had imagined my father at home in front of the TV with his Triscuits and his martinis, yelling, Goddammit, Diana, come look! It’s Teddy!
We had been under way for less than half an hour when the boat ahead of us—the one bearing the ABC television team and the public affairs officer from Delta Headquarters—radioed that she had just taken a B-40 rocket over the bow. To complicate matters, the public affairs officer had been wounded by a sniper bullet that had passed, somewhat unceremoniously, through a beer can in his right hand.
Our boat, less than a kilometer behind them, went to general quarters, which involved little more than becoming officially nervous. There was nothing else we could do. In the heat of that moment, the idea came to me. It was so idiotically simple, so solidly foolproof that I marveled it had not occurred to me before. I might have missed the big photo op, but the chance to claim my moment in history had not passed. The last American sailor to withdraw from Cambodia would be the man who was standing on the fantail when this boat crossed the border into Vietnam.
The border was an hour away, plainly marked by a flagpole flying the Vietnamese colors. I would get off watch in thirty minutes, leaving plenty of time to position myself. The only problem was how to hang out on the fantail without attracting attention, since I didn’t relish being caught in the act of self-glorification. The solution was to take a shower—that black hose back aft, where we trimmed our Bostons. So, when my watch was over and the shooting had stopped, I took off my clothes and strolled to the fantail, where I turned on the hose, soaped up, and sang “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” certain that victory was within easy reach.
The flagpole was less than two minutes away when something catastrophic happened. The ranking officer on the boat, a commander, appeared out of nowhere and walked aft of me, dawdling around the stern. I knew immediately that he was going for the title of Last Man Out. And he knew that I knew. Apparently he had no issues with self-glorification. He wanted his own story to tell back in the States.
There was no time to waste, so I dropped the soap (yes, I dropped the soap) and strode purposefully to the anchor winch, a metal structure extending rearward over the wake of the boat. As I passed the commander, I offered him a crisp salute, a courtesy he did not return. Son of a bitch was what he muttered as I mounted the winch and cantilevered my body over the churning brown water. My grip on the oily metal was perilously unsure. The commander, refusing to surrender, grabbed a nearby line, secured it with a sheepshank (or something) and began to lower himself off the stern. He was gaining on me, so I inched out even further on the slippery steel.
For one gruesome moment, I was sure I was about to fall.
I wondered in that moment how the Navy would phrase the letter to my parents. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Maupin: Your son died the way he would have wanted: stark naked and covered in soapsuds and desperately seeking attention.
I did not fall, however. As the flagpole at the border slid abeam of the boat I arched my back and flung my left leg in the direction of Cambodia. I must have looked something like a figurehead installed by a ship fitter on acid.
The commander left the fantail and never spoke to me again.
THERE WAS A name for what I was in Vietnam: straphanger. That term was coined by the Airborne troops, and it meant someone who wasn’t really part of a unit, someone who was just along for the ride. I don’t think I’m being hard on myself here. I did my job well enough when called upon, but I was mostly in it for the stories. That’s why I had volunteered for Christmas Eve duty on the canal—so I could write home about the red and green flares bursting over the rice paddies, and the choppers overhead blaring a grotesquely mangled “Silent Night.” That’s why I had asked my hootchmate, Lieutenant Flash Blackman (yes, real name), to take me on a mission along the border in his two-seater fixed-wing aircraft—so I could make jokes about “strafing the enemy” after I got airsick and vomited out the window.
While never a straphanger, Giles Whitcomb had a similar hunger for new adventures. I never saw him again after I left Cambodia. I know now that he died in 2003 after two decades of quiet humanitarian service with the United Nations, a job that took him to the aftermath of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, to the eruption of the Galunggung Volcano in Java, to the bloody interethnic massacres in Rwanda. His widow said he didn’t talk much about his service in Vietnam. He felt bad about it, she said, because he didn’t have nightmares like other people. I know exactly how he felt, though that war has, so far, never exacted from me the toll that Giles eventually had to pay.
Giles died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer attributable to Agent Orange, the “rainbow herbicide” that American forces sprayed across the jungles and rivers of Vietnam to obliterate hiding places for the VC. We know about that stuff now. Forty years later, there are still babies in Vietnam being born without eyes, babies with their thin limbs twisted like pretzels. When Giles died, Senator John Kerry, our former secretary of state, wrote a letter in support of full veteran’s benefits for Giles’s widow, saying that all Navy men in the Delta had been exposed to Agent Orange. Kerry had known Giles when they were training for the Brown Water Navy in Coronado. He remembers bicycling to the base with him, just the two of them, on bright-blue San Diego mornings. He seems to have loved Giles the way I did.
Here’s the kicker: the official who had authorized the use of Agent Orange, believing it would save the lives of American servicemen, was the very man who had sent me to Chau Doc, the man who had shipped that Jeep up the river, my beloved Admiral Zumwalt. His own son, Bud III, my drinking buddy on Tudo Street, had been doused with Agent Orange when commanding his patrol boat on the Ca Mau Peninsula. He died of lymphoma in 1988, by then a middle-aged North Carolina lawyer. Both he and his father had publicly attributed his cancer to Agent Orange. His father, nobly, had taken responsibility for his son’s illness, though his son had never blamed him for it. They had even written a heartbreaking book about it, which included the fact that Bud Zumwalt IV, the admiral’s grandson, had been born with a birth defect that made it difficult for him to concentrate.
My life was quite different by then. When I read about Bud’s death, I was in England on a book tour, speaking out on radio shows about Clause 28, Margaret Thatcher’s sinister effort to silence homosexuality. I felt heartsick for the whole Zumwalt family, especially Mouza, so I phoned my father in Raleigh, who had met the admiral at a Washington dinner in the early seventies when Zumwalt was serving as chief of naval operations. Pap had been tickled about the dinner, since the admiral had remembered me affectionately, but he had since grown disgruntled with Zumwalt’s efforts at modernizing the Navy, liberal measures that had put him on the cover of Time magazine. He had ordered an end to racial discrimination and championed issues like spousal benefits and updated enlisted uniforms. As far as my father was concerned, that goddamn tempus was fugiting all over again. I should have guessed how he would spin the news of Bud’s death.
“That’s very sad,” he said. “I’m sure he was a fine fella, and I know you liked him. But his old man was a damn fool.”
“For authorizing Agent Orange, you mean?”
I knew he didn’t mean that, but I wanted to make him spell it out.
“Hell, no! For taking the goddamn blame for it. What kind of a military leader is that? He was playing right into the hands of the enemy.”
“Jesus, Pap, they’re not even our enemy anymore. The war has been over for fifteen years. He just wanted to clear the record. His son was dying. It was an act of love.”
“That’s the silliest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard. War is hell, always has been. If you start getting softhearted every time there’s—”
“So that’s what you would have done?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“If I were dying and you had authorized the chemical that had killed me? Would you have covered that up for the sake of duty or the country or something?”
“Don’t twist my words!”
/> “How am I twisting them?”
In truth, I was twisting them, because I wanted to pick a fight with him. Not about that old fiasco of American imperialism, but about a horrendous new war he had so far refused to notice, despite my own very public words on the subject. My friends had been dying of AIDS for four years, ignored by Reagan, and shunned on a daily basis because of a horror they had never seen coming. The shamer-in-chief was Senator Jesse Helms, whose fund-raising and propagandizing arm, the National Congressional Club, was operated out of my father’s law firm by one of his partners. Thousands of direct-mail flyers flew out of that office every week. Helms had most recently tried to destroy a Senate bill meant to provide desperately needed funding for New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis. “We have got to call a spade a spade,” Helms said, “and a perverted human being is a perverted human being.”
Had my father thought of his own son, even briefly, when he heard those words?
Did it bother him that he never came to my defense, never told ol’ Jesse that enough was enough? Was he at all ashamed about that?
Maybe he cringed at Zumwalt’s candor about Agent Orange because it suggested that a father’s love for his son was more important than anything else.
WHEN I GOT back to Chau Doc from Cambodia, Oly had already returned to the States. He had been standing twelve-hour watches in the radio bunker in my absence. I wrote him up for several medals, since he certainly deserved them. I didn’t see him for another thirty years, when he showed up at the start of a new millennium with his pretty wife at a northern California book-signing for The Night Listener. He looked much the same—round-faced and smiling and blond, or at least silver reminiscing as blond. He ran a food brokerage company, which I took to be successful, since he lived in a gated community in the East Bay. I was stunned to see him again, and all the more so when he reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of ribboned medals, holding them out to me with a sheepish smile.
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