Lieutenant Dangerous

by Jeff Danziger

  No recognizable provision had ever been made for a person like Jack running his own operations even though what he did was in the best spirit of self-defense. The local villagers should have had the means to defend their own homes, but not on an ad hoc, disconnected basis, run by someone like Jack, who was, by that time, in a war movie starring himself.

  I thought a bit and then wrote up a short report saying that Jack had gone off the rails and should be relieved. For a month or two, until he actually was recalled to his advisory headquarters in Saigon, he was at large in the Phuoc Vinh metropolitan area. I feared his anger at me personally might cost me something, and I was even more watchful than usual. Then he left, and I never saw him again.

  The underlying fault was in the way the American effort was set up, which was not to fight civil wars. The American army command was arranged more or less on the design of the German General Staff with a bit of the French army thrown in, good God. There were four basic tasks: command, intelligence, operations, and supply. The second in the list, intelligence, was named the G-2 or the S-2, or in French the Deuxième Bureau. Or in Vietnamese Phong Hai, literally “the second room.” I was becoming more valuable to the 1st Cavalry S-2 because, through no enthusiastic effort of my own, I was regaining my Vietnamese vocabulary. I could even understand conversations with some of the older farmers. Older Vietnamese in the countryside spoke their own concoctions of the language in which the tones, higher and lower, modulated and variegated, were strung together on a steady moan. It sounds like the underlying moan of a bagpipe.

  I lived again with the hopelessly corrupt 9th ARVN during which time my fears for the end were strengthened. The 9th was more or less welcoming, but it wasn’t sure about me. The ARVN had their families along. The American upper command hadn’t thought about this. Our generals put on a show of being tough-minded and dismissive of anything that looked like careful consideration and analysis, especially if it originated in younger, non-infantry officers. They hadn’t known that ARVN bases included wives, grandparents, and children. Outside the limits of their bases, the ARVN families set up transient villages. ARVN soldiers got time off in between patrols to help construct an odd style of housing for their families, out of wood and steel planking. They were given sheet metal that had been printed with the labels of American beers. Back in the States, aluminum cans had taken over the market, and tons of surplus pre-printed steel beer can material showed up in the war zone.

  Only some time later did I think that having your base surrounded by families, who were forced to live in makeshift villages, with babies being born, and children crying, and relatives mourning the daily toll of dead, was a form of defense. This was a civil war, fought to gain the support of the populace, winning their hearts and minds. North Vietnamese soldiers hated the ARVN, but not the innocent and suffering women and children with no place else to live. Maoist thought protected the people, and one didn’t shoot them if it could be helped. In addition, just about every South Vietnamese soldier was experiencing a declining dedication to the South Vietnamese government with its corruption and self-preservation. If they lost a wife or a child in the fighting, they were more likely to blame the Americans or the avaricious officials in Saigon than the communists. The next war I am in I will not permit any allies to have their families build villages around the combat bases. I could not shake the comparison between my own baby son back home in Denver and the plight of the Vietnamese children living almost totally unprotected in shacks made of beer can metal.

  The ARVN gave me an ARVN uniform, with my rank and name sewn on. It was, of course, the largest size they had, but still too small. I couldn’t get into any of it, except the hat, also very snug. Luckily, I didn’t have to explain why I wouldn’t have put it on under any circumstances. In a box in a closet somewhere, I still have it. And the hat.

  What I had learned, almost immediately living with the ARVN, was the difficulty, maybe the impossibility, of an alliance in a war. The South Vietnamese did not want to fight. They didn’t value democracy very much. They didn’t care whether they got to vote for their leaders. Their government had been so distant and criminal for so long that it might as well have not existed. So all the guns and vehicles and stuff we turned over to the ARVN were not immediately put to military use. Much of it was left in the weather, unassigned to any of the smaller units. Nor was the underlying reason for all these gifts a secret. The US was leaving as soon as it found a rationale. In 1969 the mood was desperation. And the ARVN were prescient in their lack of enthusiasm. The war would go on for five more years. Then the North would invade, and the remaining ARVN troops would take off their uniforms and run for it. It was said that Nixon and secret agent Kissinger were doing what they could to prolong the war so that Nixon would not be the first president to lose a war. Not a great reason to lay down your life. The final American situation would be as close to defeat as makes no difference. The only Americans who cared that Nixon and Kissinger would get blamed for the defeat were Nixon and Kissinger.

  The assignments using my improving language skills were interesting but increasingly chancy. I nervously concluded that as the combat situation grew more confused and directionless, ideas about where to send Lieutenant Danziger, or Lieutenant Dangerous as he was mispronouncedly known to the ARVN liaisons, had less to do with logic and more to do with the flailing hope that new things should be tried simply because something had to be tried. Most attempts had failed. Support for the war at home had disappeared. Pentagon spokesmen had always given off the air of confidence and a can-do spirit. That was gone. A late decision was made to get rid of General Westmoreland, the man and the public relations disaster, and replace him with Creighton Abrams. Abrams was a tanker and thus a shorter man, compact and taciturn. I met him once, and for what it’s worth I liked him. But Abrams took command of the army in Vietnam with the assignment to get out with something resembling that strange concept — honor. Nobody knew exactly what it meant, and more probably no one cared so long as it ended. We first began to hear the Einstein definition of insanity.

  As I said, the overall plan was to Vietnamize the war. We would build up the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN, and then they would be responsible for the defense of South Vietnam, and democracy, and capitalism, and so on, and so forth. Then we could leave, announcing Peace with Honor. The lowest infantry rank could see that this dishonest stringing together of abstractions — peace and honor — was not going to work. Death with honor maybe, but any attempt to leave things to the South Vietnamese would be a disaster. The plan was mainly devised to shift the blame. It was a plan unequaled in misery, cowardice, and cruelty. A few diplomats objected but they were shouted down.

  To fully appreciate the waste of war you had to visit an area near Saigon called Long Binh. Long Binh had grown rapidly with the war from a series of rice fields to an open scar on the earth where all the American detritus was left. There was some order to this dump. Things were put in piles labeled and fenced. By the end of the 1960s the fences had collapsed and the mountain of unusable artillery tubes bled into the mountain of junked helicopters. Children scrambled through this hellish range of piles, sent there to collect anything of removable value. The wrecked helicopters had been brought by other helicopters and dropped. A helicopter mountain grew to probably a hundred feet high. It was unstable as well. One item that had souvenir value was the clock from the Hueys. These could be, with skill and perseverance, removed and sold to GIs for about ten dollars. From time to time the unstable mountain of helicopters would shift and some little Vietnamese kids would be trapped in the mass.

  Other areas of interest at Long Binh included an area called axle valley. The bodies of old trucks, deuce and a halfs, either worn out or blown up were left there with no value except their wheel bearings. In the army scheme of supply, bearings were to be salvaged and used to keep other trucks on the road. Consequently, bearings were not in the supply chain. New bearings cost very l
ittle so the savings here were completely fictitious, and thoroughly ineffective, except as they further convinced everyone that idiots were running things.

  The idiots also required that vehicles lost in combat had to be accounted for. Missing vehicles could be charged against unit commanders, who presumably had other things to worry about. Vehicles from the largest tractor trailer down to the compact motorized four-wheel platforms known as mules all had to be accounted for. Each had a plate riveted inside with a serial number. These plates were all removed and stored in some safe place so that any vehicle missing could be safely reported as a combat loss.

  Obviously, I am going on and on about these incidents of military stupidity much too long. You have my apologies. (You could skip ahead to the end, but it just gets worse.) The details tell the progress of my own descent into the maelstrom of hopelessness. You simply could not think of the war as anything good or decent, as anything intelligent or logical, as anything that any sane person could defend. If you were raised to think of the past American war efforts as containing at least a portion of salvation, of being labors against evil, of being attractive to honest-if-simple men who were called forth, then all that was reversed by the sight of the waste and detritus of American war garbage.

  Long Binh was also the site of an army jail, cells made of steel shipping boxes. Here Americans who had been court-martialed, or who were remanded for other reasons, were kept. It wasn’t pleasant. The steel boxes were shipping containers, hot in the tropical heat, so miserable that if prisoners weren’t mad going in they were when they came out. Long Binh Jail, abbreviated “LBJ” appropriately, was investigated by some journalists who had a hard time finding words.

  Trucks arrived daily at Long Binh, dumping the war junk, and trucks left daily, taking scrap steel and other resalable material off to the markets of Saigon. One of the largest market areas was called Cho Lon, which literally means “big market.” It was almost exclusively Chinese. It was here in this brawling, crowded intricacy of Chinese men, women, and children, scratching through old batteries for the lead plates, pulling apart telephones for the copper, cutting smaller panes of glass out of larger broken panes, pounding anything made of stainless steel, anything made of aluminum, anything made of copper into measurable lumps to be weighed. It was here that I first thought that the Chinese were better capitalists than anyone thought and that they had no love for communism. Tires were cut up into sandals, cut into strips and made into mats, into roofing tiles, into irrigation pipes, even into an odd form of jewelry. I made only one trip to Cho Lon, which was enough.

  Part of the Vietnamization plan was a period in which the American forces continued to fight and keep the North Vietnamese from advancing into the South, at least not visibly, at least not before the Vietnamization plan shifted the blame to the ARVN. The fighting went on. The American deaths were reduced, but the American wounded grew. Only the decline in US deaths was made public, not the many wounded. When I was called back to the 1st Cavalry headquarters, I was asked what the ARVN troops thought of Vietnamization. I had learned by this time to mumble and look around, and then to disappear. It made no difference what I said because the ARVN condition was already fully known. The only American officers who really worried about the outcome of the war were the West Point graduates, for whom the army was a career. (West Point teaches history probably better than most universities.) West Pointers were, by that time, a gloomy group, comparing their lives to Wehrmacht officers in the last days of World War II, realizing that there was no way out, no salvation, and that if they were lucky, they would be alive, and barely that, at the end. And with any luck they could get a promotion and a few medals to impress people who were impressed by medals.

  12

  At the 1st Cavalry headquarters there were three generals. The main guy was a lieutenant general, a three-star, helped by two one-stars, brigadier generals. One of these brigadier generals, sensing that time was running out and that he should make whatever progress in rank he could as quickly as possible, decided to get himself a rather important medal — a Silver Star. The Silver Star means you have really done something, possibly heroic, possibly dangerous. The verbiage is pretty specific, calling for places and dates and names. The brigadier, thinking he could operate unseen under the shroud of combat confusion, made up some exploit starring himself. At the headquarters one of the adjutant clerks had a book with the exact words needed for each medal, up to and including the Medal of Honor. Each medal specified the conditions of bravery or lack of fear, willingness to sacrifice, possibly beyond the call of duty. It specified further how far beyond the call: way beyond, a little bit beyond, right there at the precise amount of duty, and so on. The general, who probably went into advertising after the war, wrote of an instance in which he was right there at the Silver Star level of performance. It turned out that, in the democratic American way of thinking, anyone could put anyone else in for a medal. Anyone — including himself. I wish I could tell the exact situation, but the whole enterprise blew up. The adjutant or someone was suborned in some way to enter the application. Then word got out to a journalist from Time magazine. The general disappeared in a cloud of ass saving.

  I had access to this book of required descriptions for each level of medal and read it briefly. It fit into the Catch-22 mode of thinking growing in my mind. For non-army people such a book seems unnecessary, but the army tries to pre-think everything.

  On Phuoc Vinh base, in the heat and the nightly mortars, there was a USO hut that provided coffee and donuts and other pastries sent by well-wishers back in the States. The coffee and donuts were served by very brave young women, recruited for the war zone for three-month stays. They were a welcome sight, lovely or not, and some of them were very pretty. They served the soldiers and made small talk. At the USO hut an enlisted man fell madly in love with one of the women and was driven mad by her presence. The woman was due to leave soon. The poor man would probably never see her again. He tried to express his love, but he could see that the whole thing was impossible. Besides, and this is important, she had been courted at the same time, if that’s the right word, by an officer, a major, somewhat older and probably married with children. He worked in a sort of Quonset hut with sides open to the weather. One day the enlisted man, driven even madder by the unfairness and inequity of rank and the immediacy of his ardor, threw a grenade into the open side of the building, into the major’s office.

  But here was something the medal manual did not fully foresee. Fragging — that is, throwing a fragmentation grenade at an officer — was a frequent and rather serious means of expressing protest against commanders. Sometimes a gas grenade would be used. Tear gas didn’t kill anyone, but it did make the protest known, and it lasted several days. Sometimes a claymore mine, which shot a wall of steel balls at the target, was placed pointed at the offending commander but not exploded. Just the sight of one was a sort of memento mori. In this case the lovelorn enlisted man had only wanted to scare the major. He did not remove the pin in the grenade. The thing came through the window, thudded on the floor, and before anyone could think, a heroic soldier in the office, who probably could not have seen that the pin remained, threw his body on the grenade to save the others. If the grenade had exploded, he would have been killed almost surely, or grievously wounded, and the reward for such a sacrificial lack of self-concern would have been the Medal of Honor, the highest award the United States provides. Reports of soldiers in foxholes who jumped on grenades to save their buddies in World War II were well known. It does seem an act of extraordinary sacrifice.

  No suggested award descriptions seemed to cover the slightly less sacrificial situation in which the grenade does not explode. A judgment solely on the basis of mental heroism should result in the same medal rewarded, and gratitude from everyone. The division commander thought so, but as the report of this odd circumstance went up the line, asking for the highest medal, some exceptions were noted. Did the hero
know that the pin was still there? If he didn’t know, how do we know that he didn’t know? And so on. In the end, the hero was awarded a Silver Star, impressive but not the highest level. If it had been me I think I would have felt cheated by events. But then, if it had been me, the question wouldn’t have arisen at all.

  13

  You will read that by statistics 1968 was the deadliest year of the war. More Americans were killed during that year, as well as more South Vietnamese and more enemy. Some careless analysts will call 1968 the most dangerous year. But the years after 1968 were very dangerous in a different way, a way worth analyzing even this far beyond in time and in American policy. In short, from 1968 on the thinking about what to do entered a confused and almost hopeless state. It dawned slowly and painfully on American politicians and American voters that a victory was not only doubtful, but unidentifiable even if it did come along. Some concepts — victory, truth, love, wealth — reach a point where they are made manifest as either possible or impossible. Americans thought, or were made to think, that they had been victorious in the Second World War, but what was the real truth? Maybe it was victory and maybe it was something far less. The superiority of American forces was mostly a Hollywood version since Americans don’t want to see movies in which the US loses. We want to be happy and to leave the theater happy.