by Tom Bissell
“And I'm badly hurt, okay? And the Viet Cong were pounding the outskirts of Nha Trang. And this gunnery sergeant comes in and says, ? need some good fuckin’ Marines. We're gonna go fight those motherfuckers.’ I'm saying, ‘Well, that's great, but at the moment I'm quite unable to complement your platoon.’ He says, ‘What's wrong, Lieutenant, don't you have any balls?’ I actually got out of bed, but I fell down. He says, ‘Shit, you'll be of no use whatsoever.’ I'd always admired gunnery sergeants, but I said, ‘All of us here in this ward got banged up doing the real thing, and now you're gonna round up a patrol of cripples to go out and fight the enemy? What chance would we have?’ He abruptly left. But you see—I admire the training, the instinct, the drive. I am full of total admiration. And I know you're sitting there thinking, ‘How much of this is bullshit? Or brainwashing?’ But there's no bullshit. The Marines change your mind-set. They change you from a civilian into a military person. Call it brainwashing? Okay. But they turn you into a person who can kill people, hold a unit together, look at the man next to you and say, ‘You and I are brothers, and we will—we'll do it together,’ and if you go down someone else comes up, and that's the marvelous part of the Marine Corps. The men who trained us … nothing prepares you for actually shooting at people, seeing people die. And the best advice I ever got was from a couple of master sergeants, men who never got any further in their … they were Marines. That was it. You have no idea. You would not have gotten along with them. They were not English majors, not writers, not poets. I'm not making any judgments. I'm just saying that's why I'm alive today. They taught me. We fought for our wounded. And the Vietnamese, the bad guys—they're all good guys now, yeah—but they'd pick us off. Red Cross, anyone with an arm patch, they'd shoot. None of us wore any insignia. Radio operator? We put him behind four other people, because he was Death. Anyone who had a radio could call down Death. We'd hide our radios, hide it on a guy's ass, so they couldn't see it. Most courageous people I've ever known.”
My father is a Marine. He could be cruel. After a high school party that left his house demolished and our Christmas presents stolen, I sought him out to tell him I was sorry, that I loved him. “No,” he said, not even looking at me as he swept up the glass from a broken picture frame. “I don't think you do.” We owned a large stuffed diplodocus named Dino, which became a kind of makeshift couch we used to prop ourselves against while watching television, for my father was the kind of father who got down on the floor with his children. Once, resting against Dino while we watched Sands of Iwo Jima, I asked my father what it felt like to get wounded. He looked at me, grabbed the flesh of my forearm, and pinched me so hard sudden tears slickened my eyes. I returned fire by callously asking him if he had ever killed anyone. I was ten, eleven, and my cold, hurt little stare drilled into his, sheer will being one of the few human passions ungoverned by age. He looked away first. But he is a Marine. To this I attributed much of the insanity of growing up with him. One Fourth of July he and my uncle destroyed a neighbor's garbage cans by filling them with fireworks and a splash of gasoline, my uncle igniting the concoction by tossing in a cigarette smoked down to its filter. Another neighbor deposited half a dozen garter snakes into our bathtub; my father responded by taking the snakes over to the neighbor's house and calmly stuffing them under his bedspread. Once, at dinner, Phil Caputo recounted a story that saw my father drunkenly commandeering a tour bus in Key West, Florida, and flooring it across a crowded parking lot while his passengers, about seventy touring seniors, screamed. Only later did I realize that Caputo had not lived in Key West until the early 1980s—which would have made my father a forty-year-old bus thief.
“I went out to California once on a special trip; I took your mother there. And I tried to go see a lot of my officer friends at the officers’ club. But with me were a bunch of enlisted men, so we could not enter the officers’ club. I told the guy at the door, the staff sergeant or whatever he was, ‘This is a travesty on their honor. Two years ago they fought for their nation, for the whole world! I was with them! And today, because they're enlisted, they can't enter. Do you really mean to tell me that after all the shit we've been through, we cannot, together as a group, come into this officers’ club?’ He said, ? cannot let you in. I know what you're saying, sir, but no, I can't.’ I said, ‘It's sick, isn't it?’ And he said, ‘Yes, sir, it certainly is fuckin’ sick.’ You see, and you won't understand this, to be a good combat leader you have to love and respect your men. You have to love them. And you also have to be able to sacrifice them—for a piece of land, for a hill, sometimes for nothing but position. You have to make that decision. You have to be able to…. Goddamnit, Tommy, quit looking at that thing. Turn the fuckin’ thing off. I can't talk with that fuckin’ thing on.”
Because, perhaps, my father is a Marine, I joined the Peace Corps after college. When I washed out and returned home, the mansion of his disappointment had many rooms, and even years later I could not much stand to reread the letters he sent me as I was preparing to come home. They are loving, they are cruel, they are the letters of a man who fiercely loves his son, and whose own past is so painful he forgets, sometimes, that suffering is a misfortune some of us are forced to experience rather than a human requirement. But what had I done with my life? I had become a writer greatly interested in sites of human suffering. And lately it had occurred to me that this might have been my attempt to approximate something of what my father went through.
“So anyway, I leave my troops down there, and Christ—we had a convoy of two thousand Marines. A big operation. I'm part of the operation and the South Vietnamese rangers led first. And these were good troops, we thought. It was a wood line—the wood line was a thousand yards away. Well, these ARVN rangers shot off all of their ammunition doing reconnaissance fire. Didn't have any ammo left. And they said, ‘Good, now the American Marines can go investigate.’ So I went out ahead on foot. Everywhere I turn I'm looking for spider holes, tunnels, trenches. They almost always put themselves in villages, thinking we wouldn't attack. And for many—we didn't always attack, a lot of times. And we'd get slaughtered because of it. So anyway, we advance, and I'm on foot because we had to find out where the trucks and the tanks could go. So I'm through the water, with the radio, thank God, I had communications with the airplanes and with the helicopters, and halfway there I said, ‘Start hitting the tree line, please, now.’ lust about after I said that, those fuckers began to fire. And it was devastating. They began to kill us. It was a full regimental assault. And guess where the Vietnamese were? They were fuckin’ rearming. They always said, ‘Let's let the Americans do this.’ And we bled, we bled so much. But those Hueys came in, the best aircraft we had. God, they were good. We had Marine jets, you know: A-4s and F-4s. They'd cruise in and drop their bombs and ask us, ‘How we doin’?’ And I'd say, ‘That's really neat, except you missed everything.’ An F-4 Phantom was useless when it came to supporting ground troops. They came in too fast. They couldn't drop the ordnance in the right place. They couldn't see where we were. Once in a while they fired too short and that killed us. Other times they fired too far, did nothing, and that killed us in a different way. But those Hueys. They were wonderful. They'd stay, they'd be above us. I was the convoy commander, and I'd say, ? need some help here,’ and they'd say, ‘Roger, we're comin’ in.’ They did the most marvelous job. God.”
During the war in Afghanistan, I got stuck in Mazar-i-Sharif with dangerously low funds and one friend, Michael, a Danish journalist I had followed into the war. On our way out, despite our having all the proper credentials, the Uzbek border patrol turned us back three times in a row. We had brought only enough money for a few days, and at fifty dollars a cab ride from Mazar to the border, we were running out of options. After striking out with the American Embassy in Uzbekistan (“Well,” the press officer I spoke to reasoned, “it is the Uzbeks’ bridge”), I dialed my father on the borrowed satellite phone of an Associated Press journalist, a call that cost seven dollars a
minute. It was Christmas Eve in Michigan, and he and my stepmother were alone, probably waiting for my brother or me to call. He had no idea I was in Afghanistan, since I had more or less promised I was going to stay in Uzbekistan. My father picked up after one ring. Where was I? How was it going? His voice was edged with joy. “Dad,” I said, “please listen because I don't have much time. I'm stuck in Afghanistan. The Uzbeks won't let us back into the country. I don't have any money. I may need you to make some calls. Did you hear me?” The link was quiet but for a faint, cold static. While I waited for him to answer I felt, out of habit, the hidden money belt I wore against my skin. Normally it held a papery, reassuring bulge. It now felt as insubstantial as a garter. “Dad?” “I heard you,” he said quietly. At this, at hearing him, my eyes went hot. “I'm in trouble, I think.” “Have they hurt you?” In a moment I went from boyishly sniveling to nearly laughing. How could I tell him that the people of Afghanistan were extremely kind? That, at least in terms of safety, things actually could not have gone better? That I was not in any immediate danger at all? How could I then explain that I was so frightened I was nearly shaking? “No one's hurt me, Dad. I'm just worried.” He asked, “Are you speaking code? Tell me where you are.” His panic, preserved perfectly after its journey through cloud and space and the digital guts of some tiny metal moon, beamed down and hit me with all the force of an actual voice. “Dad, I'm not a captive, I'm—” But he was gone. The line was silent, the satellite having glided into some nebula of link-terminating interference. I chose not to ponder the state in which my father would spend the remainder of his Christmas, though I later learned he spent it falling apart. And for a short while, at least, the unimaginable had become my life, not his. I was him, and he was me.
“And then I told that fucker, ‘We need to do better. We have to get better—’ “
“Dad,” I said. The food on our plates had barely been touched, and the Nha Trang Sailing Club was rapidly filling up: in the wind were a dozen different perfumes and colognes. I no longer had any wish to be the poor American boy being browbeaten by his father. “Let's go back to the hotel.”
He turned sullen, but there was shame in his eyes. He looked at his food. “I don't want to go back to the fuckin’ hotel.”
“Dad, come on. Let's go.” I walked around to his side of the table and lifted him out of his chair. Holding his arm I walked him out front, paid for our meal, and booked us a cab back to our hotel. Outside its lobby was a surreal nocturne. A Western woman walked her pit bull past several loitering Vietnamese men, scooters were parked at every angle, and a pair of young women wearing “Tommy lean” T-shirts attempted to earn some form of attention. I hurried my father past all of them. In the elevator (which was equipped with something called “an emergency elevator landing device,” about which the less I knew the better) we did not speak. In the quiet, vacuumed-smelling hallway outside our rooms we did not say good night. He staggered off toward his door as though seasick; the last I saw of him he was struggling with his room key.
I sat on the hard edge of my bed for a long time, soaking in the weak-light loneliness peculiar to hotel rooms. After twenty minutes I scouted the minibar for something with which to wash down my useless anti-malarial pills (my father had insisted we bring them) and found a tall slim can that contained something called “Bird's Nest.” Its apparent active ingredients were “white fungus” and “nature.” I returned the can to the minibar and walked back to the Nha Trang Sailing Club. I was not sure why, but it felt good to be outside, and I tried to tell myself the tears in my eyes were from the wind, which was blowing quite hard.
Query: What was the Soviet Union actually attempting to accomplish in Vietnam?
One characteristic of proxy wars is their tendency to erase questions of motivation on one side while horrendously complicating the same questions on the opposing side. A U.S. soldier had to work through the logical calisthenics of fighting the Vietnamese because the Vietnamese were Communist, which was necessary because Soviets and Chinamen were Communist, trying to take over the world, and using Vietnam as a staging ground. The average Vietnamese—who in John Kenneth Gal-braith's words “understood the intervention of a seeming colonial power much better than they understood the difference between Communism and democracy”—had a far shorter psychic path to travel before pulling the trigger. (“We Vietnamese have a long tradition of heroism,” a PAVN soldier in Duong Thu Huong's Novel Without a Name exults. “And now, on top of it, we're armed with the dialectical materialism of Marxist thought. Who can beat us?”) In short, the proxy war the United States believed it was fighting was not the same independence war many Vietnamese believed they were fighting, wherein Communism was a weapon, not an end. The U.S. war was substitutive and abstract; the Vietnamese war direct and historically familiar. One was hard to justify dying for, the other far less so. This leads to one of the war's focal paradoxes: while most Vietnamese would not have agreed, the conflict that tore their nation apart really was, in important ways, a proxy war.
The nature of the Soviet Union—its stated fraternity with revolutionary movements around the world, its steadfast opposition to capitalism— led the United States to see the clouds’ red lining wherever storms of insurrection gathered. Yet for years the Soviet Union only fitfully aided such movements. Stalin was too fatally inward-looking, Khrushchev too addled and inconsistent. Regardless, it seemed to many observers, not all of whom were Red Scare hysterics, that the Soviets were puppet mastering every Communist movement, whether Greek, German, Persian, Filipino, Cuban, or Vietnamese. But inspiration and support were different properties. One of the singular brilliances of Communism is its adaptability. Marxist Communism was not Soviet Communism, which was not Chinese Communism, which was not Cuban Communism (even Castro locked horns with his Soviet sponsors), which was not Vietnamese Communism. Many have argued, with varying degrees of plausibility, that Vietnam's Communism, given its unique qualities, might have gone down a different road had not the binary involvement of the planet's most powerful nations excessively polarized the Vietnamese themselves.
The Cold War had a system of checks and balances made possible by the fact that most U.S. and Soviet decision makers understood that a direct military confrontation could destroy half the world. The clashes between the United States and the Soviet Union could thus take only two forms. The first form was political, cultural, Olympic. The second form was military, but only in places so peripheral to either nation's main interests that there was no chance for direct military confrontation. These boundaries were always more sensed than actively charted out. The times when this tacit policy was nearly voided, such as during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the results were alarming. Leaders of both nations knew that if one wanted to plunge one's nation directly into a peripheral conflict upon the greater canvas of the Cold War, the intervention would have to be short, relatively cheap, and above all successful. Despite the warnings of men such as George Ball, who believed that Vietnam offered the likelihood of being costly and unsuccessful, and the predictions of men such as Pham Van Dong, who said that “Americans don't like long, inconclusive wars—and this is going to be a long, inconclusive war,” the leaders of the United States believed they could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and transform a peripheral victory in South Vietnam into a beacon for all nations that sought shelter beneath an American umbrella of liberty. In the midst of America's long, costly failure in Vietnam, one understanding was that the Soviets cheered and aided the United States down its disgraced and chosen path. “Soviet policy, it turned out,” Ilya V. Gaiduk writes in The Soviet Union and the Viet nam War, one of the only English-language histories available on the subject, “was not as straightforward and one-dimensional as Communist propaganda had tried to suggest.”