by Tom Bissell
Yet despite the long-standing expectation of many in the Pentagon that an American ground war in Vietnam was inevitable, very little work had been done to prepare for the Marines’ arrival. Equipment shortages and logistical snafus would plague the Marines for months. Part of the problem was the deceit that shrouded the Marines’ arrival. President Johnson, worried that most Americans would see the offensive use of Marines as a reckless escalation of the conflict, instructed Robert McNa-mara to downplay the deployment with the press, going so far as to suggest that McNamara claim that the Marines had been dispatched at the “request” of the South Vietnamese government—an overt lie. Secretary of State Dean Rusk assured reporters that the troops would only be guarding Danang's air base and some missile batteries. After a three-week moratorium on combat operations, that promise went out the window. Until a low-level bureaucrat accidentally spilled the beans a few weeks later that U.S. forces in Vietnam were taking part in “offensive killing operations,” few were aware of the Marines’ real purpose in Vietnam. General Westmoreland had been certain that an injection of U.S. troops would reverse South Vietnam's fortunes: “Introducing three U.S. divisions [about 60,000 men] onto the mainland of Southeast Asia,” he believed, “would so change the balance of power on the peninsula that the Communist choice would be limited to (1) whether they should sue for peace as quickly as possible to prevent the eventual loss of their present control over North Vietnam and northern Laos, or (2) take on the U.S. and its allies [sic] in a major war.” Many in the U.S. military failed to share this view, arguing that driving the NLF out of South Vietnam would require decades and as many as a million men. lohnson's decision to go ahead with the limited deployment that many believed would fail caused one member of the loint Chiefs, General Harold lohnson, to nearly resign. General lohnson later called his decision not to resign “the worst, most immoral decision I've ever made.” It would not be until lune 1965, four months after the Marines arrived, that anyone in the lohnson administration would admit to the American people that a major war had indeed begun.
It took us fifteen minutes’ worth of beachcombing to find the site of my father's landing: a thin stand of coastline palm trees, miraculously unaltered since 1965, hardened his memory into place. We stood looking out on the sea in a black grid of shadows cast by the cranes and scaffolds of the resort being built a few dozen yards away. I began asking him questions, but very gently he asked if I might not give him a moment. Instantly I realized my error. He could not talk right now, and he stared out at the ocean in both confusion and recognition. This was where the man I knew as my father was born. It was as though he were looking upon himself through a bloody veil of memory.
“They told us this was going to be a combat landing,” he said after a while, “to expect the very worst. The ships we were in flooded themselves, and the landing craft and amphibious vehicles swam off. We came ashore, heavily armed, locked, cocked, ready to go to war. We had tanks and trucks and Ontos.”
“Ontos?”
“Lightly armored vehicles mounted with six recoilless rifles. They shot all kinds of ammunition. Armor-piercing. Antipersonnel ammunition. Willy Peter, which is white phosphorous, one of the most deadly things you could ever get hit with. When the shell explodes, it sprays white phosphorous, and if you put water on it, it flares right up. It's oxygen-fed, and you have to take mud and smother it. Lovely weapon.”
I had read a description of white phosphorous once, how it exploded “with a fulsome elegance, wreathing its target in intense and billowing white smoke, throwing out glowing red comets trailing brilliant white fumes.” It burned through skin, through bone, though anything. I asked, “Didn't the Geneva Convention forbid the use of white phosphorous against troops? It was only supposed to be used against equipment, right?”
He did not even look at me. “Uh-huh. Right.”
“How old were you with all this at your disposal?”
He hesitated. “I was twenty-three years old. A platoon leader. Later I became a company commander, and I had all of the infantry and supply people under me. I was probably one of the youngest company commanders in Vietnam—if not the youngest.” Of this, I could tell, he was still proud. “So we hit the beach and we're peering over the gunwales of the landing craft, and all of a sudden I hear people swearing at me—in English.” He shook his head. “We had landed smack in the middle of a swimming hole for the United States Army. ‘Goddamn Marines, what the fuck are you doing here?’ “
“Quite an arrival.”
“It gets worse. On we went down the beach road”—he turned— “I guess over there, which I was told to do, and we went into the city of Qui Nhon and promptly came to a dead end. I missed the turn. Or the map was out of date. The whole Second Marine Battalion could have been destroyed—but there was no hostility. Everyone was cheering us. It was glorious. That's my biggest frustration when I talk to people who weren't here. They'll say, ‘Nobody really wanted us to come to Vietnam.’ Well, they sure as hell welcomed us with open arms.”
“When did it start to go bad?”
He pointed to the hills beyond Qui Nhon—an arcadia of rough, beautiful triangles of fuzzy jade and sharp spurs of exposed white rock, a few sparkling white waterfalls pouring down the hills’ faces. “Those look beautiful, but they're meaner than a son of a bitch to walk up and down. The VC was there, as we found out. It only took two days before we were fired on. The first six people we killed were all women—armed and shooting at us, mind you.”
He had never told me this before. “Dad. My God. What was that… how did you … ?”
“What was it like? It was like about what you'd expect it to be like. I threw up. No one joins the Marines to shoot women.”
Internally, the North Vietnamese and the NLF referred to their Kalashnikov-wielding women as “long-haired troops.” One can quibble, to little probable value, about the ethics of using women in guerrilla war, but women warriors were not unknown in Vietnam. Not a few of its most storied military victories were at least partially led by women, and one Vietnamese adage holds, “When pirates come into the house, even women must take up arms.” Despite Vietnamese Communists’ egalitarian view of warfare, however, the Politburo did not have a single woman member until 1996.
“But,” my father went on, “those women killed a couple of us, too. We were so inexperienced, we were shooting ourselves at first. One guy, tragically, fell asleep on watch and turned himself around in his foxhole. He woke up, saw people, and opened fire. Killed the rest of his fire team.”
“So what happened to him?”
“He went crazy. They shipped him off to lapan; that's the last we ever heard of him.”
“Were the parents of the guys who got killed told what really happened?”
“I don't know. I doubt it. They were probably told their sons ‘bravely died in combat.’ Who would want to know their kid died asleep in a hole?” Colonel David Hackworth, the most decorated Vietnam veteran and also among the war's most vocal and eloquent critics, has estimated that as much as 20 percent of American deaths in Vietnam were caused by friendly fire.
I left my father's side and walked toward the incoming surf, stepping around a beached jellyfish pulsatingly expiring in the sand, and tried to imagine myself, at twenty-three years of age, having to deal with the reality of my friends massacring my friends. Having to face that struck me, both intellectually and emotionally, as an extraterrestrial impossibility. My first quasi-experience with war was a terrifying game of college paintball, during which, at my first glimpse of the opposing army cresting a nearby hill, I climbed out of my two-man foxhole and sprinted back toward the rear line as fast as I could—leaving behind my best friend, Mike, who has since reminded me, many times, that I shouted “Sorry!” over my shoulder as I ran. My second, more substantial encounter with war occurred while I attempted to cover the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in December 2001.1 was in Afghanistan for five days, and while almost nothing happened to me, the psychic vise that
closed around my mind did not loosen when I stepped back across the Afghan-Uzbek border. Instead it grew worse. For months I talked endlessly of my five days of war. For months when I closed my eyes I saw the abandoned Soviet tanks and endless gray sands of northern Afghanistan's Dasht-i-Laili desert. But then the desert went away, and the only aspects of the experience I could any longer remember were the adumbrations of an expedient mind, which is to say, my imagination.
What, then, did real war do to a person? What had it done to my father, and what might it have done to me? Would I have been one of those dead American boys they found sometimes in Vietnam's jungles, whose M16 barrels were respectfully kicked out from beneath their chins so no one would know they had shot themselves in the middle of battle? Would I have been one of the “shitbirds” I had read about in so many combat memoirs? A coward, a fuckup? Had I been drafted, I might well have opted for a steady diet of poutine and Montreal croissants. Or would I have been an antiwar activist? Could I see myself among the young souls who tore down the Justice Department's American flag in 1969 and replaced it with the colors of the NLF? Or, would I, like Dick Cheney, have simply gone to my college classes and regarded with tepid annoyance the gallery of traitors between me and the Chemistry Building?
Many Americans still believe that antiwar activists were traitors. There is no doubt that those who protested the war were effective in frustrating the war's enactment. One U.S. admiral admitted after the war that the “reaction of the noisy radical groups was considered all the time. And it served to inhibit and restrain the decision makers.” North Vietnam's Vo Nguyen Giap called antiwar activists “a valuable mark of sympathy.” Some of North Vietnam's luminaries cabled antiwar movement leaders statements such as: “EARNESTLY CALL YOU MOBILIZE PEACE FORCES IN YOUR COUNTRY. CHECK U.S. DANGEROUS VENTURES IN INDOCHINA,” and Bui Tin once described how every morning “our leadership would listen to world news over the radio … to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement.” The postmaster general of the United States announced in 1969 that antiwar protestors were in effect “killing American boys.” What is wartime dissent, and is it still dissent when it is demonstrably bolstering enemy spirits? (The NLF used to caution its members from referring to Ho Chi Minh or North Vietnam directly, lest the American peace movement figure out that victory for one would be victory for the other. This was in retrospect a rather charitable assumption for the NLF to have entertained of many antiwar activists’ loyalties.) I did not think it fair to cover antiwar activity with a blanket of treason (even Tom Hayden, who once declared, “We are all Viet Cong now,” clearly believed he was acting in his nation's best interest), but the matter was surely more complicated than most wanted to admit—though not so complicated as to allow literally or figuratively spitting on American soldiers to achieve the status of coherent political expression. Today one often hears that one can oppose a given war but still support the troops. “Support,” it will be explained, means getting the troops home as quickly as possible. But the nature of soldiering creates men and women who expect, and in some ways even want, to fight and kill. How, then, does one oppose a war but support those fighting it? I was not sure one could. To oppose a war that soldiers were fighting meant that one opposed the soldiers. It had to.
It was also beside the point. War is its own country, and creates its own citizens. Many soldiers, when interviewed by military psychologists, have admitted that the bond that formed between themselves and their fellow soldiers during combat was the most intense they had ever felt: more vivid than the bond between them and their parents, siblings, children, even their spouses. As Philip Caputo writes in A Rumor of War, camaraderie in combat “does not demand for its sustenance the reciprocity, the pledge of affection, the endless reassurances required by the love of men and women. It is, unlike marriage, a bond that cannot be broken by a word, by boredom or divorce, or by anything other than death.”
These men: Who were they, really? Sometimes it seemed as though there were almost as many myths and countermyths about the men who fought in Vietnam as there were men who fought in Vietnam. The so-called Vietnam Generation numbered about 27 million men. Of them, 3.1 million (about 12 percent) served in Vietnam, and roughly 800,000 (about 3 percent) saw combat while there. Was Vietnam, in Frances FitzGerald's withering words, truly “a white man's war being fought by blacks, a rich man's war being fought by the poor, an old man's war being fought by the young”? The average soldier's age in Vietnam was nineteen, but FitzGerald's other assertions are belied by the facts. Black soldiers, for instance, made up 12.5 percent of combat deaths during the war, a full percentage point less than their share of the U.S. population at the time. (Early in the war, however, blacks’ deaths were massively out of proportion: 25 percent in 1965 and 1966, almost twice their general population.) Seventy-three percent of those killed in Vietnam were volunteers; 30 percent were Catholic, despite Catholics’ accounting for 23 percent of the U.S. population; and contrary to popular belief there was no great disparity of death by income level (though, again, the war's earlier years saw stark economic disparity among those killed). My father and Phil Caputo could surely speak to that: their friend Walter Levy hailed from a privileged New York City family.
The devastating aftereffects of the war upon its veterans were also routinely cited. But unemployment rates for veterans after the war were actually lower than those of nonveterans, and their rate of suicide was no different from that of the rest of the American populace. However, studies done on veterans that take into account the amount and intensity of experienced combat have suggested that those who saw an unusual amount of action have extremely high percentages of divorce, joblessness, alcoholism, and health problems. In all these discrepancies two things seem clear. The first is that the view that Vietnam veterans are subject to endless suffering is too indulgent. The second is that the view that Vietnam veterans are, by and large, well adjusted is too selective. A survey is not a mind, and a statistic is not reality. It seems clear that more highly educated officers and servicemen who saw service in Vietnam have coped well, psychologically speaking, whereas the less educated boys from the ghettos and farms of America—teenagers who believed that God was good, just, and American—were far less mentally prepared to deal with the confusions and ethical bonfires of guerrilla war in a country they knew nothing about. The trauma for them was far stranger, the questions unanswerable. Where did that leave my father? Here on the beach that had chopped his life in two, with a son who loved him but could not understand him, and whom he could not understand.
As we drove on to the village of Tuy Phuoc, I asked my father about the severance between the kind of fighting he had been trained to do and the kind of fighting the NLF forced him to engage in. During Vietnam, and especially throughout the war's opening innings, American soldiers experienced fighting unlike any they had ever seen before. General Giap instructed his cadres to “apply guerrilla warfare, which consists in being secret, rapid, active, now in the east, now in the west, arriving unexpectedly and leaving unnoticed.” Thus there was no land to take, no front to hold, and few opportunities to glory in the routing of the enemy. All-out battles were few and far between, and enemy combatants perpetually melted away into the forest only to reappear, in the minds of increasingly (and understandably) jittery American soldiers, in the form of putatively innocent villagers.
“The VC,” my father said, “would not close with us. They didn't have the firepower. And we knew that if they made a stand against us, they would lose ass, hat, and fixtures. So they would pick on our patrols, ambush us.” He was agitated now and stared with cool determination out his window. Tuy Phuoc, the village we were headed to, was where my father was wounded.
“And you were mostly in charge of running convoys, so …”
“We were the prime targets. I'd get called to provide transportation and logistics for missions. It was boring, boring, boring, and then it was terrifying. And you never knew what was going to happen, if the operation wa
s going to be totally uneventful, which many of them were, or if it was going to turn into a nightmare, as a few became.”
“So you were fired on … a lot?”
“Mm-hmm. Hien, what's this up here? Is this construction?”
“Dad. Come on.”
He was silent for a while. “Mortars,” he said finally. “They loved to mortar us. And they'd bracket a road. So we'd change routes all the time, take different roads.”
“Bracketing.”
“They'd shoot until they knew exactly where the shells would go, then they would click their mortar launchers up or down, left or right. That's called bracketing. ‘Bracketed’ means you're in deep shit.” He pointed out the window at the railroad track that ran contiguous to the road, on an elevated mound of packed sod perhaps eight feet high. “See that? That's what we used to hide behind, as a fortified position.” At this he enjoyed a small chuckle.
“How many firefights were you in?”
“A dozen, twenty. They would last anywhere from ten seconds to two hours. Then the VC would break off and run. We lost a tremendous amount of people trying to save our wounded and retrieve our bodies. And they knew it. They knew we would. That's how Walt Levy died, you know: trying to haul someone out of a rice paddy who was wounded.” “I'm sensing some anxiety here. You're sweating.”