Ulysses Dream

by Tim White

  According to the 2010 US Census, 150,000 American Indian veterans were living in the United States. There are more Native Americans in the military proportionally than any other minority. This was true even before 1925 when Natives finally became citizens of the nation that had conquered them. This paradox of patriotism for the US by a conquered people reveals timely truths about real American exceptionalism.

  There was a nobility and a crucible ahead for every Marine. During this period, Ulee felt that he discovered the background to the Sundown philosophy.

  They had eight weeks for boot camp and then four weeks for infantry training school. Ulee lost his hair, as did each of the other recruits. It was a rite of passage when they went through the humiliation of the Marine haircut. Ulee couldn’t wait to see what that M-16 could do. It was like Christmas from Uncle Sam. He may have been the only one who dreamed of war in his sleep. But when they had to get naked to shower as a group, the other men saw the scarring on his chest from his vision quest.

  The first time they stood for inspection, they were berated by the hats (drill instructors). Sergeant Daugherty swore at him, but Ulee didn’t move his eyes, just as his family had trained him. Every answer was in the third person. “Yes, Drill Sergeant—No, Drill Sergeant. This recruit is happy to be here, Drill Sergeant.”

  Sergeant Daugherty was a big-boned, muscular man of over six-feet two and 220 pounds.

  “Do you come from Marine stock?”

  Ulee reported, “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

  “How did you lie your way in here; you must be just a baby,” growled the DI.

  “Yes, Drill Sergeant,” Ulee said in a manly voice.

  “I hear you think you are an Indian.”

  “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

  “You look like a white boy to me. Your daddy better check to see who your momma has been sleeping with.”

  “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

  “So you are not an Indian?”

  Ulee replied as if his family had prepared him. “No, Drill Sergeant. I am a Nez Perce.”

  “You think you are a Nez Perce, but you look more of a white than redskin to me.”

  “I am all Nez Perce.

  “Well, if you are all Nez Perce, then how are you going to be a Marine?”

  “I will be a fine Marine, Drill Sergeant. Just like my dad, my uncles, and grandfather were all Nez Perce and all Marine.”

  Sergeant Daugherty kind of liked this kid. He definitely stood out in his squad as a leader. But the sergeant wondered how he was going to break him. He had to be broken to be built up as a Marine and to be a team player.

  There were few letters from Ulee; while in boot camp they were cut off from home so that they could be remade as Marines. Stupidly, I still hoped I would hear from him. When I did get a letter from him, it felt like Christmas. I got the mail every day, fumbling through the letters looking for one with his handwriting. His first letter made me cry. I read it at the mailbox at our house in Finley. I trembled as I read his words:

  Beautiful, I love you and miss you. My time here is pretty much like I thought it would be. A lot like football. I am so sorry I got myself into this. You deserve the very best. I feel like God has abandoned me sometimes. But it is nothing different from what my people have faced through the centuries. I still love Jesus and am trying to figure out how to serve him in my present predicament. I pray for you daily, you are so smart and the best person I know. I know you will be a doctor someday. Keep studying. I love you. Your friend for the rest of my life, Ulysses Looking Glass Sundown.

  I kneeled each night by my bed and prayed for him, shedding a few tears as I looked at his sophomore football picture. During this period, I was saying no to other guys asking me out. I spent a lot of time on my studies and no time for social life.

  On Firing Week at boot camp, recruits were awakened early in the morning to prepare for the rifle range. They spent all day running through a distance course of fire in order to practice their marksmanship with live rounds. Recruits had to qualify with a minimum score in order to earn a marksmanship badge and continue training. Ulee helped his squad to qualify as Marine marksmen. The first time they put the rifle in his hands the gunnery sergeant knew this boy was a prodigy. When Ulee shot, the DI (Drill Instructor) said, “I have never seen a recruit fire so fast and accurately in my whole life.” Everything the Marines did was instinctive to Ulee. Just as he was a record setter in sports growing up, everything he did at boot camp was a new record. And it did not go unnoticed. The boot camp DIs let the word out that they had a very special weapon in this Nez Perce warrior. Even in hand-to-hand combat training, he volunteered to take on the drill sergeant after he had hurt his friend Luau. Ulee broke the DI’s leg. As the other DIs ran to help, Ulee took on five of them with his martial arts skill and ended up in the brig. The master sergeant had a long talk with Ulee and told him they had special plans for him but he had a lot to learn. He was third-generation Marine hero, and more than that, he was extremely gifted in the business of war.

  On the ten-day leave, Ulee came to visit the Tri-Cities, and he came to Kennewick High School to see me. He spotted me as I walked from one building to another. And then Ulee decided not to see me; he couldn’t bear to hold me in his arms, convinced that he would undoubtedly die in Vietnam.

  Ulee turned with tears in his eyes to walk away and never speak to me, the love of his life. As he walked to his parents’ Volkswagen bug, there I was waiting for him.

  “You were not going to even say hi?”

  “I love you,” he said tearfully, “more than anything I have ever loved in this world.”

  “I know, you romantic sap.”

  And then we kissed. It was a kiss that if I lived a thousand years I would never forget. We walked hand in hand to the city park; I cut class. We sat down holding hands under an oak tree. The green grass mixed with clover smelled so good. Even in the winter in the desert Tri-Cities some days were springtime. I thanked him for what he did to save Belen and me from MS-13. I asked him about his faith in our Lord, and he told me that he knew Jesus was with him but that it was hard to be a Christian in a violent environment.

  He told me that he still had a real problem with his temper. I prayed with him for forgiveness asking that he could stay close to Jesus, even in Vietnam. It was the longest eight days and the shortest of my life. I can’t remember saying goodbye very well. We both did not know what to say. He told me to move on with my life—that he did not think he was going to come back alive. I yelled at him, swearing and calling him a SOB. It just came out and it didn’t make any sense. Then we kissed. I don’t remember much after that.

  Ulee’s squad was selected to receive training as a reconnaissance unit. Upon graduation, they each were awarded the MOS 0321. Ulee also spent time with the sniper school and the infantry squad leader’s course. He was the only one who was receiving this kind of cross training.

  By the time Ulee graduated from infantry training battalion (ITB), he was a corporal. Then these newly trained Marines were assigned to their first unit, a Marine fire squad.

  Ulee landed at Da Nang on April Fool’s Day: April 1, 1969. As they got off the transport, bodies were being shipped back and the living troops looked like death warmed over. No discipline—all attitude. They shouted out insults, referring to Ulee and his squad as fresh meat and bullet stoppers. Ulee’s friends became a part of First Battalion, Fifth Marines. They were moved to Quang Nam province and met their new gunnery sergeant Hilton. His eyes looked tired; I guess they call it the thousand-yard stare. He treated his men like they were not real people. He didn’t ask about them or their families. He left Ulee to be their nursemaid.

  Ulee was commanded to lead them into battle and try and come home with as many as possible. It was fourteen days of search and clear operation. Sixteen Marines would die with 162 wounded. The first sign of conflict was no sign. They were walking through a rice patty. It was really quite beautiful—the land was so green. The peasants wor
king the field seemed so enchanting to Ulee. A crack rang out, and Sergeant Hilton died from a sniper’s shot. Six of the peasants rose up from their bent-over position of working in the rice and with AK-47s (supplied by the Russians) and opened up on the platoon. Eight of the sixteen killed in this action died in the first moments of this ambush. The experienced Marines soon put down the peasants in the ambush. That was when a mortar opened up on them with extreme accuracy. A Russian-made machine gun fired from about 150 yards pinned everyone down.

  Ulee, seeing his friends die, jumped up and ran. One of the other sergeants got ready to shoot him for running, but before he could react, Ulee was out of sight in a ditch and running back to a tree line. It took him about five minutes to make the one-mile run to circle the enemy emplacement. He broke in on two Viet Cong on the machine gun and two on the mortar, and another three firing AK-47s at the pinned-down Marines. Ulee ran in the middle of them just as if he were breaking into a herd of deer to get his family meat for the winter. He fired single shots at all seven enemies—before any of them returned fire.

  Ulee had a gift from hunting as a child. Everything would slow down for him. He and his brothers could shoot four ducks with three shots while a friend with a semi-automatic would miss everything. Sometimes he could reload and fire three more shells, dropping three more ducks before the friend knew what was happening. This is just how it felt as he shot in the middle of the Viet Cong. It was slow to him, but his actions were far too fast for them to react: one shot each, pause and access, then deliver the kill shots just as rapidly. Twenty shots all together from his twenty-round magazine. He walked over to one of the bodies and turned it over to see a young woman.

  Ulee let out a cry that sounded Native American, “Ahhhhyeeee!” and fell to the ground crying. He kept saying, “I am sorry Jesus.”

  The pinned-down Marines did not know what had taken place, but they all moved toward Ulee’s position. A sergeant from the platoon kicked him. “Swallow it, Marine. Get used to it, Marine. You kill them or they kill you and your fellow Marines.” Luau picked up Ulee. “Come on brother, you just saved all our lives.”

  That was the first action that Ulee saw, and he killed seven people. All of them looked like neighbors—not warriors. Soon there was a helicopter coming in to take away the dead and wounded, and then they resumed formation and kept their search and patrol. This sort of routine continued from April 6 through April 20, 1969.

  As Ulee saw his friends from boot camp die, it changed him. Ulee was like the little brother and big brother of every man in the squad. For example, Ulee had made sure that the overweight friend had made it through each phase of the training. Bruce had slimmed down and muscled up. Ulee loved Bruce’s dark sense of humor. Big Bruce hated everything about the Marine experience, and the way he described it just made Ulee fall on the ground laughing. Bruce had married just before he left for Vietnam and they announced that they were expecting a baby. He carried a picture of his wife in his wallet. Her name was Cindy, and she was cute. Bruce was twenty-four and acted like an offensive lineman who wanted to protect his quarterback—Ulee. Ulee was Bruce’s best man at his wedding. Now he carried a picture of their baby in his pocket.

  There was a lot more time spent bored than in action. Even for Ulee, who seemed to be picked for every mission that turned into a firefight. On one of their more boring moments in Nam, Big Bruce stepped on a land mine. The blast took off both of his legs and ripped open his intestines. Ulee held his hand as Big Bruce screamed and then grew quiet.

  Big Bruce whimpered. “I don’t want to die.” Then he sighed his last breath. Ulee just got up, determined that he would do the fighting for his men from now on.

  He asked to stay at point man. He was the best at it by far anyway. Ulee walked carefully, like a Native, and he used his tracking skills. It was not hard for him to spot the land mines that others might step on. The master sergeant was right; Ulee was a killer by heritage, and Ulee concluded he could save a lot of his friends if he just took out the enemy by himself. He continued on point but took it to a new level. Forget the teamwork; these good-hearted hippies were not ready for warfare. They were being sent to slaughter; they were bullet catchers. Ulee did not expect to come back alive, but his focus was not on dying but on killing the enemy to save his friends.

  News of mission Operation Muskogee Meadows made it into the newspapers. Ulee had been awarded the bronze star for his heroics. The Tri-City Herald ran a big story on their hometown Kennewick boy, Ulysses Looking Glass Sundown, who killed seven and saved his fellow Marines.

  I came home from school and Mama Elicia asked me, “Did you see the paper this morning?” There was a picture of lance corporal Ulysses Looking Glass Sundown in his dress blues and an article about how he was cited for heroism in Vietnam and saving his company as he took out a machine gun nest that had his squad all pinned down. I didn’t want to see it, but mamma Elicia saved the article in a scrapbook for me. She believed this was all I might have left from my first love. I wrote a letter to him with my homecoming picture in it. I told him how much I loved him and was praying for him to come home safe from the terrible war he was involved in. I wrote the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians out for him in calligraphy style.

  Just as in ancient times, Ulysses went away to a just war in Troy to retrieve Helen of Troy with the other allied Greek heroes, and the war grew to a stalemate, dragging on and on until the meaning of the war was lost to everyone concerned. Ulee was intermeshed in the quicksand of Vietnam, unable to pull himself out.

  Most service during a war is filled with times of long boredom, but Ulee was reassigned to a new mission on April 22, 1969: Operation Putnam Tiger. This time he came in as a sniper to assist Second and Third Battalions. This conflict was in the Kon Tum and Pleiku Provinces. Lieutenant Colonel Gary Carter commanded the battalion , and they were attached to LZ (Landing Zone) Nicole with Charlie Company. They operated out of an attached firebase. Their mission was to patrol and set up listening posts (LPs). They were to call in fire on enemy activity. Most companies while out on patrol were attached a forward observer. Ulee was told that he was created by God to be a forward observer and that they needed an Indian brave to do this job. They didn’t know that their attempts to play off his heritage were demeaning, and he didn’t tell them. Ulee ate Vietnamese food so that his feces smelled like Viet Cong. He applied some of the swamp smells of the jungle to eliminate his scent. Unlike the patrols, he moved silently off the path through the jungle. This was uncommon, as the trails seemed the safest and the easiest.

  Ulee had spent his life bushwhacking while he was hunting, and he was hunting again. He made sure they moved against the breeze, and he learned the local animals and bugs that would give away the position of the enemy. He applied camouflage and got rid of his helmet; it was a dead giveaway for the shape of a Marine. He had to be careful because he was equally afraid of being fragged (killed by his own troops) He taught his men his bird whistles so they knew it was him. This operation was bloody business; 563 Americans were killed and 435 wounded.

  Ulee grew used to living out on his own. He traded his M-16 in for a Garand 30-6. He learned the bugs and small vermin that he could eat. He seemed to be immune to malaria and dysentery. Maybe it was all the mountain survival he had done as a child. Mosquitoes never did like his taste. He would sleep in the midst of monsoons by building his bed off the ground with three poles between trees that were wrapped in leaves so that he felt invisible and comfortable. Ulee got used to killing. He would spot a small sortie coming after his platoon and would set up booby traps that he copied from the VC or had learned from the Nez Perce. He then would take a position and ambush them with a bow he had made—just like at home. He instilled fear in the enemy, which dubbed him “người giận dử” (The Savage). He would catch them grouped together and take out ten at a time as they crossed a river. His platoon would hear Ulee’s fire and would set up a defensive position. Ulee would return with his whistles and tell them
they were all safe and that he had gotten them.

  One day, I was sitting in the Kennewick High School cafeteria, something I rarely did. Everyone started to yell, “Somebody do something!” I turned around, and one of the big senior football players, who was maybe 300 pounds, had fallen into his food face first. He was an African-American, and his skin had changed to an ashlike color. He wasn’t breathing. I ran to the table and asked his friend what had happened. A teacher came in a complete panic.

  The teacher yelled, “Go get the school nurse!”

  As the teacher yelled at me to wait for the school nurse, I said, “I need to save this guy’s life.” I checked his mouth and saw it had food in it. I cleared what I could with my hand. I tried to reach around him and do the Heimlich maneuver, but he was too big. I was only five-two, 115 pounds. But I am a Honduran girl and very tough, so I formed a fist with one hand on his solar plexus and picked the guy slightly up and slammed him on the table. That put my back in a spasm. No one would help, so I just kept slamming this guy into the table with the corner aimed at his solar plexus. A few times and I was done for. I started breathing hard and feeling like I was about ready to pass out.

  “Someone else take over!” I yelled. “Where is the dang school nurse?” No one stepped up to help, not even his friend. “Don’t let Pete die!” someone yelled. So I jumped back up filled with adrenaline and started slamming him against the table.

  A chip flew out and big Pete took a breath. The big man sat there in the chair while I took his pulse, and an ambulance team showed up. We were only two minutes from Kennewick General Hospital.

  Pete turned to me and said, “You saved my life.”

  The teacher said, “You are going to be one fine doctor.”

  I walked back to my books and everyone in the cafeteria gave me a standing ovation. I was very embarrassed. The rest of the week, the boys in the school kept faking like they were passing out and telling me they needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.