Lieutenant Dangerous

by Jeff Danziger

  How then did the army get people to do what it wanted them to do? To a large extent it simply didn’t. In some cases it pretended that things were better than they appeared. It pretended that its training was effective when it wasn’t. It pretended that orders were obeyed when they weren’t. It pretended that the resistance to the war had little effect when it was loud and powerful. And it continued to pretend that the army itself was convinced of the rightness of the mission in Southeast Asia, at the very same time the highest ranks were riddled with doubt.

  I began to pay attention to all this disorganization and indirection while still at Fort Belvoir, carefully slipping sideways into discussions with other young officers about what the hell was going on. Most of these discussions were seeking support for the increasing doubtfulness we all felt. Again, we found examples of outright lunacy in our superior officers, certainly in those who remained steadfastly convinced that the US would come out of the war victorious. The most convinced were reserve officers, majors and lieutenant colonels, called up for a stint of active duty. I suspected that these temporary officers, insurance managers and midlevel corporate executives back home, had agreed to or sought active-duty service to relieve the tedium of their civilian jobs. Some were simply looking for or hoping for adventure.

  In contrast, the officers with almost no conviction of the rightness of the war were the regular army officers. Many were from West Point. They had promised the army many years of service, and the army promised them the same in return. West Point cadets are taught political history, military history, including the way political and cultural mistakes get armies in trouble. I came to appreciate the education a student gets at West Point, including a strong introduction to reality. I never had any desire to apply to a service academy and probably would not have gone, even if accepted. But if they teach nothing else at West Point and Annapolis, they teach some hard truths. For example, they teach army cadets never to trust the air force.

  The days were slow and almost meaningless. I spent free time biking around the city of Washington, spending time at the Smithsonian, the memorials, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the outer suburbs, and the wastes of DC’s poor black northern areas. I sat in the House and Senate, sometimes hearing rationales for military operations that I later discovered were complete fabrications. It was a time when senators and congressmen often showed up and gave speeches drunk, and when spittoons still graced the floor.

  Supposedly if I got down to around one year remaining in my promised time, the possibilities of being sent to Vietnam were much less, and the rumor was that there was no possibility of overseas orders if you owed less than twelve months. I showed up for duty, day-to-day, looking over my shoulder at the calendar. The coastal Virginia summer miasma settled, deadening the desire to do anything worthwhile. I befriended a fellow from northern Vermont who had reenlisted and bought a new Chevrolet with the bonus. He was amusing and didn’t ask a lot from life. I can’t remember how I met him, because he was a cook, an E5, in one of the Belvoir mess halls. He was cheerful and loved to drive his new car home for the weekend. It was a long, pounding drive, reaching Vermont around midnight at St. Johnsbury, where my wife would meet me. My friend the cook had been in hellish fighting in Vietnam, wounded three times. He laughed this off with a sort of rural toughness, pointing out that they tried but they couldn’t kill him, and wasn’t that amusing. The army declined to send him back to the infantry after three woundings, offering him what I thought was a crappy choice of being a drill instructor or going to cook school. He had enlisted to see more of the world than his hometown, a tiny Vermont village called Kirby, but after seeing the world, and getting shot three times, he just wanted to see Kirby.

  We drove the nearly six hundred miles from Fort Belvoir to St. Johnsbury at as high a speed as we dared, beating his new car pretty badly. And then Sunday night we’d beat it back again to be there in time for Monday duty. He had to cook and be there early. I had to do nothing but sit behind a desk and wait for the day to end. In all this driving, however, we never grew close. He was still suspicious of officers and people with college degrees. As unobtrusively as I could I tried to ask him about his opinion of his experience and his relationship with the army. He would first give me a silly answer, broadly accepted enlisted humor, tough but self-deprecating. Beyond that, even when I got a little more incisive, he admitted that the army had probably been shitty to him and that he should have demanded more. And beyond that, he admitted that the war was stupid and worthless. Worst admission of all was that he really liked the Vietnamese people, and he was sorry to have shot some of them. There was a problem in our conversations, and it was that he associated the mission of whatever we were doing in Vietnam, whether worthwhile or plain rotten, as more my fault, as an officer, than it was his as just a soldier. I accepted this and didn’t much like it. And the overall effect was that I resolved to be as ineffectual an officer as I could be.

  But then, shit. When I was down to about fourteen months left, I got orders for Vietnam. I can remember being called into the colonel’s office and handed the paper. I stood and stared at it. The colonel who ran the office waited for some sort of response, and I was determined that he wasn’t going to get one. I simply gave him a noncommittal salute and thanked him. But later I stared at the paper and wondered what it actually meant. I had to tell my wife, which was not going to be easy. But other complications were in wait.

  My younger brother had been drafted after dropping out of college. He had applied for officer candidate school and had made it through, awarded a commission as an infantry officer. Not the world’s most coveted commission. Infantry second lieutenants had the shortest life expectancy of any officer in Vietnam. They were assigned as platoon leaders and led patrols in the jungle. There was equal risk of being shot by the North Vietnamese or, if he pushed his platoon too hard, being shot by his own men. It’s not too much to say that it was a jungle out there. My brother was a cheerful person, and he suffered from the twin characteristics of charm and carelessness. He probably would be greatly liked by his men, but that didn’t mean he was safe. He was stationed in Texas, and his orders for Vietnam arrived at the same time as mine.

  There is a general rule in the army, now known inaccurately as the Private Ryan rule, dating from the Second World War, which states in effect that two siblings will not be assigned to the same war zone at the same time. Private Ryan, at least in the Hollywood version, the story of which is almost totally contrived, was the last of four brothers, three of whom had been killed in the European Theater. Tom Hanks is sent to find Ryan before he is killed, which would have wiped out an entire generation of the Ryans. In this rule, there are equal parts concern for an unlucky family and concern for bad publicity. In a popular war like World War II, publicity was a secondary worry for the army. But in Vietnam killing off the oldest, me, and the second oldest, my brother, might involve bad press and congressional inquiry. I knew this, but my brother, in his perfected carelessness, wasn’t worried.

  I could have drawn attention to us both being on orders, but it was complicated. I was in a relatively safe, or so I thought at the time, role in the army. I still thought that my language skills would land me in a headquarters job in Saigon where the loudest noise would be the air conditioner. My brother, an infantry officer, would without doubt be on the ground going after the bad-tempered North Vietnamese, leading his equally bad-tempered men. In addition, I had a child by that time. My brother wasn’t even married. To bring this to the attention of the army personnel people would be to ask for a decision that might put him at risk and spare me the war zone. We talked about this once briefly, and we decided…nothing. He had been through one tour in Korea and was by this time a captain, in helicopter school in Texas. He had found Korea duty dull and annoying, and probably would have welcomed the idea, if not the reality, of going to a shooting war. As I say, he was careless about many things, including himself. So we decided, and we did, the
aforementioned nothing.

  Someone in the vast reaches of the Pentagon personnel offices caught the fact that we both had been assigned to the war. They ordered him to a second tour in Korea and let my Vietnam orders stand. No one was happy, which is often the way the army likes it.

  I had a two-week leave to get my things together, rent the house in Vermont, put the car in storage, and get my wife situated with her parents in Denver. She planned on finishing a master’s program so the time would be used to some advantage. I got an issue of jungle fatigues and boots and loaded everything in an old duffel bag I found in the house and that still had my father’s name stenciled on the side. We flew to Denver, saw some old friends, and spent a night at the Brown Palace Hotel. The conversations were stilted and pretty much ignorant of what was happening. There was a small gathering at the airport to say good-bye to me. And then I left.

  7

  On the plane, after it was clearly too late to do anything about anything, I was almost impressed at how little I understood of what I was doing. I was not depressed. My ignorance of my situation, at least of the reason for my situation, was almost like some sort of ether. The first flight was to San Francisco, and there I boarded a contract airline to Saigon, Air America or Flying Tiger or some company with a lucrative Pentagon contract to deliver soldiers to the war. There were stewardesses, and they smiled but didn’t make a lot of eye contact. There were no movies on the plane. And almost no conversation. If there was a common emotion among the soldiers it was one of failure. Somehow, we had been stupid enough to get caught in this trap. We were in an unfolding misfortune that we should have done something about years ago.

  Any number of soldiers, draftees and otherwise, simply did not show up for their port calls. This was a serious infraction, punishable with imprisonment for something like desertion or cowardice or a combination. But if you really wanted to fail to report for your flight to Vietnam, you could disappear into a city, or to Canada, or Mexico, or Sweden, or to any one of the many countries that had declared their opposition to the Americans’ war in Southeast Asia. Rumor had it that France and the Nordic countries would welcome American deserters and help them get situated. As usual, people believed what they wanted to believe. More intriguing than that was the rumor that the young women of those countries thought highly of Americans who had obeyed conscience and taken great risk to protest the war. Their approval was demonstrated eagerly. Knowing, or assuming, all that, you could feel at least sad and sorrowful sitting on a plane to Saigon, rather than to Stockholm. Sad and sorrowful, and in many cases, foolish.

  The flight stopped in Hawaii, and we had a five-hour wait. To make sure no one acted on their doubts, we were kept in a separate part of the Honolulu Airport. Thoughtlessly, this holding tank had a view of part of the rest of the airport. From there we could see American vacationers and their children, all kitted out for fun in the sun. When they chanced to stop and look at us, there was no evidence that they appreciated our efforts to defend their way of life and ensure that they could continue being free from the scourge of communism. Some were men about draft age.

  The army had faced a cataclysmic fall in morale by that time. Morale is not an afterthought in the American army as it might be in more brutal armies. The Russians, for example, in the Great Patriotic War, positioned units behind the forward units to make sure that no one tried to retreat. Stalin joked that it took a brave man to be a coward in the Soviet army. The American military did not do that. Americans willingly fought to defend the country and the way of life. We put ourselves on the line because we believed in democracy. Or so the popular notion held. But still, given the opportunity to include any number of small acts that would have made people feel a little better or a small degree more appreciated, the army failed. It chose to add any little degree of thoughtlessness it could think up.

  On the plane the finance corps collected any money you had and replaced it with military scrip. No US money was allowed in Vietnam, a policy based on the fear that it would add to wartime inflation. The finance corps lieutenant came down the aisle collecting money and issuing scrip, all in paper, down to paper five-cent bills. The bills featured illustrations of a nuclear submarine on one side and the moon landing on the other. This exchange added to the already miserable feeling that things were changing for the worse. I didn’t like it, but I accepted the situation and handed over my money. Others on the plane objected and three or four fights broke out between the finance corps lieutenant and the soldiers. I didn’t know exactly what these fights on the plane meant, fights between men supposedly involved in the same mission, to control the spread of whatever it was. It could have been handled better, but it wasn’t. The American money said IN GOD WE TRUST. The military scrip left that off.

  At points during any wartime experience there are subtle hints at what the real power structure is. Your rifle is stamped with the name of the manufacturer, Colt or Remington; your C-rations were made by some contract outfit in Arkansas; your fatigues were stitched together in Alabama; and your boots were made by the lowest bidder for a contractor in Pennsylvania. You are being paid nearly nothing, but everywhere else someone is making money. And then there are the aircraft and military vehicle manufacturers, sidelines for the mammoth commercial manufacturers. Ford made all the jeeps, Chrysler made the trucks, and Bell made the helicopters. I knew how the prices were structured. All the costs to make these things were added up, and then a set profit was added as a fixed percentage. So to make more money the manufacturer increased its costs. The excuse was the emergency or exigency of war in which the government and the nation needed a great many things in a hurry to ensure victory. But of course, Vietnam was not like that. The only victory being pursued with a sense of urgency by that time was Richard Nixon’s reelection.

  Still, a portion of us, from New York anyway, were a little shocked to see a huge sign at Tan Son Nhat Airport in Saigon when we deplaned that said YOU HAVE A FRIEND AT THE CHASE MANHATTAN BANK. We were either conscripts or soldiers of misfortune, and we didn’t have many friends. But at least the Rockefellers liked us.

  The first days in country were spent in some last-minute training to explain that all the training you had received back in the States was wrong. So wrong, in fact, that it might even get you killed. We were given several days of retraining with weapons and shown the major failings of the M16 rifle. The M16 was designed to be light enough for the smaller Vietnamese troops to carry, with many of the parts — the stock and the barrel grip —made from plastic. It was the most unconvincing weapon ever designed. The rounds were only slightly larger than a .22 bullet although of much higher velocity. To make up for the poor design, a panic plunger had been added to the earliest models. The precision was too high for jungle fighting, so that when used in the rain, or dropped in a rice paddy, they often jammed. The panic plunger provided a second chance to force a new round into the chamber. The Vietnamese soldiers, who turned out not to be too small and weak to carry a heavier weapon, preferred Kalashnikovs, the Russian-made 7.62 mm rifles, made with far less precision but unaffected by water.

  We were exposed to explosions so we could distinguish between incoming mortars and outgoing artillery. I became friends with another officer, a scared-to-death doctor whose name I recall was Bczyk. Dr. Bczyk was in the army because the Pentagon had helped him pay for medical school and he promised them some years in return. But Dr. Bczyk, a disastrously tremulous fellow, was not cut out for wartime duty. Explosions of both kinds — mortars and artillery — made Dr. Bczyk become extremely nervous; in fact he became almost totally destabilized, barely able to stand. In his destabilization he gripped my hand and buried his head in my chest. He was very embarrassed, and on one terrible occasion, after taking his first anti-malaria pills, beshat himself. I helped him to get cleaned up, not feeling at all continent myself. We had begun the yearlong ingestion of quinine pills and para-quinone pills that turned one’s bowels to uncontrollable liquid. Whe
ther this prevented malaria I don’t know.

  I told one of the trainers during these first days that I thought Dr. Bczyk should be reevaluated and perhaps kept away from explosions. But I don’t know if my comments were at all helpful. Wherever Dr. Bczyk is now I wish him luck. Besides his odd name and unmilitary bearing, he also wore his hat with the bill off to one angle. All I remember with any accuracy is his head buried in my chest, gripping me during the exposure to explosions. I am pretty sure he was weeping. After those first four days I never saw him again.

  My theory that I would be assigned to some safe and comfortable offices at the army headquarters or the American consulate, translating documents, was soon put to the test, and it failed. Nothing in the folders of orders I carried with me made any mention of the language school, or any of my enlisted service. I was an ordnance officer and was almost immediately assigned as an executive officer to an ordnance detachment of about two hundred men, part of the 1st Cavalry Division, at a base near Tay Ninh, north of Saigon and close to the Cambodian border.

  The major task of the detachment was replacing artillery tubes on firebases. After a number of firings the tube of the gun became worn and slightly expanded by the explosives driving the shells. This altered the accuracy of the gun, a very undesirable effect. The artillery batteries fired hundreds of shells every day at targets called in by infantry units out in the jungle. The angle of elevation and the degree of azimuth were critical, as was the amount of explosive propellant placed behind the shell itself. Worn tubes meant shortfalls, often very close to the Americans who had called in the targets. There were instances when artillery batteries had hit American troops. This was a very bad thing to happen. It made the infantry units hesitant to call for artillery until they were well out of the way, and it made the artillery units add extra distance to the target to be sure they didn’t kill Americans. With all these corrections and safety measures, chances were that the enemy, wherever he had been, was not there any longer. There was one way to correct for all this inaccuracy, and that was to shoot lots of shells. Maybe hundreds for a target that could eventually be hit with a few dozen. The one factor the enemy, both the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese, respected was American artillery. Even if not accurate, it was plentiful. The term carpet bombing was not applied to artillery, but it could have been. Our artillery was noisy and scary, even if not accurate.