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During my 3 years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not 1 of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.
Another thing I learned in high school that was helpful in Vietnam: Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.
It was manna from Heaven that I came into this world with a gift for moderation in my intake of mood-modifying substances.
Hitler, of course, thanks to the advanced technology of Germany, was among the first human beings to turn their brains to cobwebs on amphetamine. He actually chewed on carpets, they say. Yum yum.
This library is full of stories of supposed triumphs, which makes me very suspicious of it. It’s misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm. It is unfair to youngsters particularly to leave them wholly unprepared for monster screw-ups and starring roles in Keystone Kop comedies and much, much worse.
Whatever the infection was, it cleared itself up without my doing anything about it. It couldn’t have been gonorrhea, which never stops eating you up of its own accord. Why should it ever stop of its own accord? It’s having such a nice time. Why call off the party? Look how healthy and happy the kids are.
Everything, and I mean everything, was a joke to him, or so he said. His favorite expression right up to the end was, ‘I had to laugh like hell.’
moment be telling about how his life suddenly stopped in Hué, and then adding, without even smiling, ‘I had to laugh like hell.’ That was the thing: Patton would tell about some supposedly serious or beautiful or dangerous or holy event during which he had had to laugh like hell, but he hadn’t really laughed. He kept a straight face, too, when he told about it afterward. In all his life, I don’t think anybody ever heard him do what he said he had to do all the time, which was laugh like hell.
Dancing until she dropped wasn’t nearly as loony as wanting to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, or bombing anyplace back to the Stone Age. My
The enemy could have shot down the helicopters and come up and captured or killed us, if they had wanted. But all they had ever wanted from us was that we go home.
I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them. In terms
Me? I was in show business, trying to get a big audience for the Government on TV by killing real people with live ammunition, something the other advertisers were not free to do.
since poor and powerless people, no matter how docile, were no longer of use to canny investors. What they used to do was now being done by heroic and uncomplaining machinery. So an appropriate sign to put over the gate to Athena might have been, instead of ‘Work Makes Free,’ for example: ‘Too bad you were born. Nobody has any use for you,’ or maybe: ‘Come in and stay in, all you burdens on Society.’
The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren’t funny or scary, or couldn’t make you rich, the heck with them.
He hadn’t killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn’t had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government.
He was a sociopath, I think, in love with himself and no one else, craving action for its own sake, and indifferent to any long-term consequences, a classic Man of Destiny.
I knew people like that in Vietnam. Jack Patton had that sort of courage. I could be as brave as Jack over there. In fact, I am pretty sure that I was shot at more and killed more people. But I was worried sick most of the time. Jack never worried. He told me so. I asked him how he could be that way. He said, ‘I think I must have a screw loose. I can’t care about what might happen next to me or anyone.’ Alton Darwin had the same untightened screw. He was a convicted mass murderer, but never showed any remorse that I could see.
What in fact will happen to me in 9 more years? That is like worrying about a cheese spoiling if you don’t put it in the refrigerator. What can happen to a pricelessly stinky cheese that hasn’t already happened to it?
Also, I didn’t think Mildred’s craziness was as unbearable as they did. In the Army I had grown up used to people who talked nonsense all day long. Vietnam was 1 big hallucination. After adjusting to that, I could adjust to anything.
There I was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor. Where to go? What to do?
The only sort of woman who excites me is an older one in uncomfortable circumstances, full of doubts not only about herself but about the value of life itself.
