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A common prayer for the over-attached: You’ll let it go sooner or later, why not do it now?
There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.
That fall, all that the Mission talked about was control: arms control, information control, resources control, psycho-political control, population control, control of the almost supernatural inflation, control of terrain through the Strategy of the Periphery. But when the talk had passed, the only thing left standing up that looked true was your sense of how out of control things really were.
Every day people were dying there because of some small detail that they couldn’t be bothered to observe. Imagine being too tired to snap a flak jacket closed, too tired to clean your rifle, too tired to guard a light, too tired to deal with the half-inch margins of safety that moving through the war often demanded, just too tired to give a fuck and then dying behind that exhaustion.
A lot of people knew that the country could never be won, only destroyed,
in Vietnam an infatuation like that with violence wouldn’t go unrequited for very long, it would come and put its wild mouth all over you.
So you learned about fear, it was hard to know what you really learned about courage. How many times did somebody have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?
What about those acts that didn’t require courage to perform, but made you a coward if you didn’t?
Was it possible that they were there and not haunted? No, not possible, not a chance, I know I wasn’t the only one. Where are they now? (Where am I now?) I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet. Disgust doesn’t begin to describe what they made me feel, they threw people out of helicopters, tied people up and put the dogs on them. Brutality was just a word in my mouth before that. But disgust was only one colour in the whole mandala, gentleness and pity were other colours, there wasn’t a colour
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From outside we say that crazy people think they hear voices, but of course inside they really hear them. (Who’s crazy? What’s insane?)
Vietnam was a dark room full of deadly objects, the VC were everywhere all at once like spider cancer, and instead of losing the war in little pieces over years we lost it fast in under a week.
It was on one of those days that I realized that the only corpse I couldn’t bear to look at would be the one I would never have to see.
Many Americans considered them to be nomadic, but the war had had more to do with that than anything in their temperament. We napalmed off their crops and flattened their villages, and then admired the restlessness in their spirit.
The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in nature could have been born here, where even on the coldest, freshest mountaintops you could smell jungle and that tension between rot and genesis that all jungles give off.
They killed a lot of Communists, but that was all they did, because the number of Communist dead meant nothing, changed nothing.
Six shades of green, motherfucker, tell me that ain’t something beautiful.
I got up then and went outside, any place at all was better than this, and stood in the dark smoking a cigarette, watching the hills for a sign and hoping none would come because, shit, what could be revealed except more fear?
The space-time continuum, time as matter, Augustinian time: all of that would have been a piece of cake to Day Tripper, whose brain cells were arranged like jewels in the finest chronometer.
A lot of us believed that exhaustion and fear could be smelled and that certain dreams gave off an odour. (We were regular Hemingway gypsies about some things. No matter how much wind a chopper would put out as it landed, you could always tell when there were body bags around an lz, and the tents where the Lurps lived smelled unlike any other tents anywhere in Vietnam.)
The far side of the hills around the bowl of the base was glimmering, but you could never see the source of the light, and it had the look of a city at night approached from a great distance.
The nights were very beautiful. Night was when you really had the least to fear and feared the most. You could go through some very bad numbers at night.
If they did, when they did, it might not matter that you were in the best bunker in the DMZ, wouldn’t matter that you were young and had plans, that you were loved, that you were a non-combatant, an observer. Because if it came, it would be a bloodswarm of killing, and credentials would not be examined.
They were always doing things like that for you, the way Mayhew had tried to give me his mattress, the way grunts in Hue one day had tried to give me their helmets and flak jackets because I had turned up without my own. If you tore your fatigues on the wire or trying to crawl for cover, you’d have new or at least fresh ones within minutes and never know where they came from. They always took care of you.
(You didn’t meet that many who were deeply religious, although you expected to, with so many kids from the South and the Midwest, from farms and small rural towns.)
There were some Marines stretched out a few feet from us, passing around war comics and talking, calling each other Dude and Jive, Lifer and Shitkick and Motherfucker, touching this last with a special grace, as though it were the tenderest word in their language.
Then, it didn’t matter that we were dressed exactly as they were and would be going exactly where they were going; we were as exotic and as fearsome as black magic, coming on with cameras and questions, and if we promised to take the anonymity off of what was about to happen, we were also there to watchdog the day.
The first few times that I got fired at or saw combat deaths, nothing really happened, all the responses got locked in my head. It was the same familiar violence, only moved over to another medium; some kind of jungle play with giant helicopters and fantastic special effects, actors lying out there in canvas body bags waiting for the scene to end so they could get up again and walk it off. But that was some scene (you found out), there was no cutting it.
(That office had been created to handle press relations and psychological warfare, and I never met anyone there who seemed to realize that there was a difference.)
Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history. And the very best correspondents knew even more than that.
some correspondents fell into that, writing their stories from the daily releases and batdegrams, tracking them through with the cheer-crazed language of the MACV Information Office, things like ‘discreet burst’ (one of those tore an old grandfather and two children to bits as they ran along a paddy wall one day, at least according to the report made later by the gunship pilot), ‘friendly casualties’ (not warm, not fun), ‘meeting engagement’ (ambush), concluding usually with 17 or 117 or 317 enemy dead and American losses ‘described as light’.
I was no more superstitious than anyone else in Vietnam, I was very superstitious, and there were always a few who seemed so irrefutably charmed that nothing could make me picture them lying dead there;
Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too, that’s a little history joke.
At a hundred feet we began drawing fire. Groundfire reflex, clench your ass and rise up in your seat a few inches. Pucker, motherfucker; you used muscles you didn’t even know you had.
