|
|
Column |
|
|
|
The last novel I read was Catcher In The Rye, while sitting
in a helicopter in the Central Highlands of Vietnam back in 1968. An
image from it has stayed with me ever since and has come back to my mind
through the years. It is the image of a boy who is not so much a boy anymore as
he is a worried young man. And yet there is something of the boy about
him. He is standing guard at the top of a sheer cliff, catching the
little kids as they come running through the rye, keeping them from
going over the side. It’s a dream that the main character has at the end of the
book, and sort of symbolizes the theme of it, for me - protecting the
innocents and thereby protecting our own innocence as we let go of
childhood and take on the ways of the grown up. The transition from boyhood to manhood is not without pain
and conflict, and even horror. Especially if the transition is occurring
while you’re struggling to stay alive during a war a long way from
home, which was the case for me and a lot of other boys who were over
there with me. A boy by the name of Pushis – the most innocent,
good-hearted and likable one of us all, I thought – was the first to
get it. I’m not sure that that was the way he spelled his name, but
it’s the best I can do from memory. Before going over, he and I sat in
the grass, drinking and laughing and making a funny tape which he sent
home to his mother. We were both crew chiefs but he ended up in a
different company and I think that was the last time I had talked with
him. His helicopter was shot down and he burned up with it, shot
up and unable to get out of his seat, a friend told me, and there
wasn’t anything that could be done about it. And then came the others, one or two at first and then more
and more. Sometimes it would be a kid you had just given a cigarette to
that morning and hardly knew, and at other times it would be someone you
felt as close to as a brother. Nothing makes a boy grow up quicker than war, and nothing
has such a complex and long-lasting effect on a person, especially a
person that’s been in combat and had their friends shot to death by
bullets that could have just as easily found them. Long after you’ve lived through it, you still wonder why
it was that you lived and the others died. You were no better than they
were. Why couldn’t they have been allowed to live out their lives? Why
did they have to die so soon? And who was to blame for it? The enemy or
the United States government that sent them there? Or was it the American people themselves, dumb as hell as a
mass, waving their flags and believing that we were fighting for freedom
and dying for American glory and our tradition of believing it’s our
duty to kick ass anywhere in the world where there are folks that need a
good ass kicking. Even to this day I still get a sick feeling in the pit of my
stomach on Veteran’s Day. Just because of the hypocrisy and stupidity
of it. American soldiers stopped dying for freedom and liberty in World
War II. Since that time, the idea that they died to preserve freedom and
liberty in America or anywhere else is both stupid and a lie. There’s not a newspaper in this whole country that
doesn’t restate that lie every Veteran’s Day. There’s not a
patriotic gathering anywhere, from school kids to old veteran’s clubs,
that doesn’t drip with the same lie. The only way to truly honor dead soldiers would be to tell
the truth. They died because they were soldiers doing their duty.
Period. The 58,000 soldiers that gave up their lives in Vietnam didn’t
trade it in for liberty or to maintain the American way of life. They
were soldiers doing their duty. They were misused by the government that
sent them there and they were misused by the flag waving, dumb masses
that cheered from the grandstands like it was some kind of football game
in which there would be no substitute for victory. Period. Regardless of
the sense of it or the justice of it. I remember after getting drafted, how I admired Cassius Clay
for refusing to accept it. I remember after arriving in Vietnam, how I
appreciated the college kids and the hippies who protested against the
war. As for myself, I wasn’t willing to go to jail or leave the
country. There was no choice left for me but to accept it and do my duty
and hope that I would be able to live through it. I was a crew chief of an LOH (light observation helicopter),
a scout ship, with B Troop, 7/17 Air Cavalry, stationed at Pleiku. We
were a self-contained outfit with our own infantry, scout ships, gun
ships and lift ships, and we could be inserted quickly wherever we were
needed just about anywhere in the Central Highlands. The very first helicopter that went down in our outfit,
killing everyone in it, was assigned to me. The second helicopter that
was shot down, killing everyone in it, was also assigned to me. As was
the third helicopter that was shot down, killing everyone in it. The only reason I wasn’t in any one of them at the time
was because it happened to be on a day when I wasn’t assigned to fly.
I was pulling maintenance, or just happened to be on kitchen police or
some other duty, such as burning crap out behind the outhouse. After the third one was shot down, I decided that the odds
of me escaping death the fourth time were too much, so I went to the top
sergeant and told him I had had enough and wasn’t going to fly
anymore. I told him that LOH crew chiefs weren’t required under Army
regulations to fly anyway, but were being used in the place of
door-gunners and co-pilots. If that was the way I wanted it, he said he would make sure
that I got transferred to the infantry and that I would never come out
of the jungle. I told him that that was fine with me because I felt my
chances of staying alive would be a lot better with the infantry in the
jungle than flying around in a tin can and getting shot to hell. He then
told me that I would have to get approval from a major who was in charge
of all aerial combat operations, and sent me to his tent. After hearing my story, the major promised me that if I was
not on the flight line and ready to fly as usual at 5 a.m. he would have
me court-marshaled and that I would still be in prison long after
everyone else had gone home. I was at my helicopter as usual that morning and flew
everyday for about a month, until one day out in the AO (area of
operation), my pilot received word that the major had been shot down and
we went looking for him. It didn’t take us long to find him. He was on the ground
burning. Staff Sergeant John Hood was laying against a tree and appeared
shot up but still alive. I heard my pilot speaking into his head set and volunteering to get as low to
the trees as possible and that I would then drop down on top of a tree
and climb down through the branches and stand guard over Sgt. Hood and
the major until the infantry could be brought up the mountain. After a minute or so, and with no answer apparently from
whoever he was talking to, my pilot turned to me and asked,
"Don’t you think we can do that?" "No, I don’t think so," I said. And I didn’t
think so. There were too many trees and I couldn’t see how we could
get close enough to the top of any one of them that would allow me drop
down on it like a squirrel. Maybe a braver man could have. Maybe my
friend Hoyt Inman could have. But I couldn’t see it. Apparently the commander somewhere high above us couldn’t
see it either, because we were ordered to fly around and around the site
until the infantry could be dropped off down the mountain and work their
way up. It was a place where two mountains, or high ridges, merged.
North Vietnamese soldiers were firing at us from the side of the ridge
on our left. We didn’t see them but we could see their tracer bullets
crossing directly in front of us, coming from the left. Within a few
seconds we were making our turn to the right and flying in the other
direction, flying in a big circle around the downed helicopter. The thing that made it especially intense for me was that we
knew our infantry was working their way up the ridge to our right as we
were receiving fire from the ridge on our left. I was sitting in the
co-pilot’s seat, directly over the mini gun. My finger was on the
trigger of my M-16. While we were passing the ridge on our left, my finger was
constantly on the verge of applying that last bit of pressure it takes
to fire the weapon. I was looking for the slightest bit of movement
among the trees and undergrowth that was closest to us at any point in
the circle. The point where we made our turn to the right only took a
second. That meant that I only had a second between deciding if it was
enemy movement or friendly movement. The fact that we kept flying around
and around with no let up made it more difficult because it seemed that
I was always at that critical point of my concentration where there was
no room for error. Even with all this going on, I remember a point when it
flashed through my mind, even as the tracers were flashing by in front
of us, if there was ever going to be a time in my life to pray, this was
it. I had quit believing in God when my daddy got killed the way
he did. And I had written the Bible off as human stupidity, full of
ignorant threats of hell if a man didn’t follow every rule in it, even
if he was a good person just for the sake of it and didn’t need the
carrot of heaven dangled in front of his nose, or the fires of hell
licking at his ass. And even if God had been real, if he couldn’t keep my
daddy from getting killed by a drunk driver hopped up on pills and
whisky, what use was he? But now, with the prospects of being killed any
second, it struck me, should I pray for God to come to my rescue and
keep me alive, or not? The answer flashed through my mind quicker than I can tell
it. I would not. The fact was that in my deepest heart, I still didn’t
believe in God. If I prayed to a God that I didn’t honestly believe
in, it would make me a liar. And then what if I were to die in the next second anyway? I would die a liar. The only thing I had
of my own out of my whole life was the fact that I always told the
truth, regardless of the harm it caused me. Why throw my honest heart away, after all the trouble I had
gone through just to keep it intact, just because I was afraid of dying?
That would have made my whole life meaningless. So that was it. I didn’t pray and I was completely
satisfied and ready to accept whatever happened. Within seconds after that had been settled in my mind, I saw
the bushes and the shape of something human between the leaves. As yet I
had not fired a single shot. It had always been my way to never fire at
anything unless I actually saw the need for it with my own eyes. The
reason for that was because I had heard of guys getting killed because
they had run out of ammunition and couldn’t fire back. I waited another split second. And to tell the truth, we had
been flying in that circle for so long that we were running low on fuel
and I was not, in that moment, absolutely sure beyond a shadow of a
doubt which ridge I was looking at. I was pretty sure it was our side,
that’s why I held back, but things happen to the mind at times like
that which is hard to explain after you’ve been through it, even to
yourself. Suddenly I caught enough of the uniform to realize for sure
that it was one of our guys and I eased the pressure back off the
trigger. In another second I could see part of his head and chest and
parts of the shapes of a couple of other soldiers following behind him. Within a couple of minutes I was looking at the other ridge,
straining my eyes for anything that moved. It was never my habit to look
toward the distance. I always figured there was nothing I could do about
that. It was always the trees and undergrowth close at hand as we
flashed by that I was concerned with. It was the fire that came from
close by that was more likely to kill you. I was never fighting for
American freedom, it was always to stay alive. Things continued this way, for some time, applying pressure
on the trigger and then releasing it, applying the pressure and then
releasing it, letting out a breath and then holding it in, breathing and
dying, breathing and dying, until we were ordered to go back to our
fueling outpost and gas up. By the time we got back, other helicopters were flying
around the position of the downed helicopter like circling buzzards, and
a Chinook was hovering just above the tree where Sgt. Hood was still
laying motionless on the ground. A body basket was being lowered and
there were shapes of soldiers moving about. We hung around for a while until we were ordered to head
back to our base camp near Pleiku. I was never asked to fly another
combat mission. The man who had been so determined that I should fly on
every mission until I was dead, was himself now dead. They gave me the Air Medal and put me in charge of all the
scout helicopters that were down and in need of maintenance. That’s
where I was, sitting in a helicopter waiting for parts and maintenance
crews, when I found the copy of Catcher In The Rye which some officer
had left in the seat. That job gave me a lot of time to sit and think and boil
down the cabbage in terms of what life was about and what was going on
around me; and who these people were that we were killing, and who were
killing us back as much as they could. One night I awoke from my sleep to the sounds of air raid
sirens going off and the tremendous firing of what sounded like giant
mini guns in the air. I grabbed my rifle and headed for the flight line.
The sky was lit up with so many tracer bullets and the noise was so
thunderous that it kind of reminded me of the 4th of July. It was all over in about an hour. The next morning, just
across the road that bordered the flight line, I saw a dead Viet Cong
laying face-up on the ground. I walked over to him. He looked to me like
he was about 13 or 14. He could have been a little older, but not much. The flies were beginning to find him out. Later I found out
that about a half dozen had made it to the wire before they were killed.
Their bodies were no where in sight. I was told that this Viet Cong was
left where he fell in order to make us all aware of just how close they
had gotten to the helicopters. For the rest of that morning I sat in a helicopter and
watched as a line of company clerks, cooks, carpenters, maintenance
crews and all sorts of other types whose job descriptions didn’t
involve actually facing the enemy in combat, come up to the body of this
dead, young boy and take a good long look. A number of them even took pictures, which I figured they
would send back home to show that they had been to war and seen some
killing. It gave me a sick feeling in my stomach and a sense of
disgust that I’ll never forget. It was clear to me that it was this young boy that had been
fighting for his country and dying for it. Not me, and not any of us. We
were just doing our duty as soldiers, following orders and trying to
stay alive. There wasn’t any honor to it. It was just another dirty
fact of life, like this dead, young body covered in flies. One of the things that changes your personality when you are
at war and facing the real possibility that each day might be the last
day of your life, is that you pretty much lose that front that you show
to others as a free civilian living the great American life. When you’re sitting around with your fellow soldiers at
night after a mission, knowing that you will have to do it all again
tomorrow, there is no need or desire to be phony or to impress anybody. That person across from you might be the last person you
ever have a conversation with. You want to know him as he is, for real,
and you want him to know who you are. It’s the only thing you’ve got left to give and the only
thing of any worth that you can receive. It’s the real deal. Face to
face, eye to eye, human to human. Probably the toughest soldier and the best soldier in our
whole outfit, in terms of killing the enemy and staying alive, was a
big, hefty farm boy out of North Georgia. He had a great, big wide face.
If there was ever a person who looked like they could walk through a
brick wall, he was it. He was the coolest under fire and to me he was
among the coolest in camp. He didn’t do a lot of talking, but when he did, there was
wisdom to it and irony, and even a sort of dry humor, underplayed and a
little beneath the current. I don’t remember him laughing, but he made
me laugh and I enjoyed his company. He was one of our infantry guys and I don’t even remember
his name. But he was the best when it came to recalling the details of
what happened down on the ground while we crew chiefs and door gunners
were up in the air. He carried a heavy M-60 machine gun most of the time and was
usually the point man of his squad. When the fighting got rough, the
other soldiers learned to look to him. Even the officer in charge
learned that the best way to stay alive was to ask him first before
giving orders. That got started early on. One of our lift ships had dropped
North Georgia and his bunch off in the rear of an area in which,
reportedly, a large group of North Vietnamese regulars were supposed to
be gathering. Their mission was to sneak in from behind and check it
out. If they got into trouble, we were prepared to run in and lift them
out in a hurry. Their first obstacle was a big clearing, about 100 yards
across and surrounded by woods. The lieutenant gave the order to
low-crawl. But before anyone could get down on their bellies and start
low-crawling, North Georgia was charging across the field at full
gallop. He knew by common sense that they would all be dead men if they
were spotted crawling across that field on their bellies. "What did the lieutenant say about it?" I asked. "As soon as I hit the ground on the other side and
looked back, his big foot was the first thing I saw, followed by the
rest of them. I nearly got trampled." "So he didn’t say anything about you not following
orders?" "Not a word." A little later on they were walking down a path. North
Georgia was in the lead, but carrying an M-16 instead of his normal
machine gun. He stopped at a place where the path began to rise up
toward a small hill a short distance away. He aimed his rifle and waited
a moment, listening. Suddenly a North Vietnamese soldier topped the hill,
carrying his rifle over his shoulder. He looked at North Georgia and
kept walking. North Georgia opened fire. The young soldier just kept
walking down the hill toward him without even bothering to bring down
his weapon. North Georgia kept firing. The North Vietnamese soldier kept
walking straight at him. "Weren’t you hitting him?" I asked. "Yeah, I was hitting him, but he just kept on walking
at me, bud." "Well, what did you do, what happened?" "I just walked him on down," said North Georgia.
He said it matter-of-factly, and yet I thought I detected something in
his tone, just beneath the surface of his words, that I can still hear. As it turned out, the area was being used as a training camp
for new recruits. I think North Georgia was impressed with the North
Vietnamese soldier and the way he died. Facing death and knowing that
there wasn’t a thing he could do about it, he just kept walking. It
was his duty. And North Georgia, doing his, just walked him on down. I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things since then. I
now believe in God. I still don’t understand why God allows some to
live and some to die. I do believe that I was given a greater duty by
the fact that I survived. I’ve got to make payments on my survival for as long as I
live and speak out against the type of war that killed them. I’ve got
to speak for their voices which cannot be heard and speak for their
hearts which cannot be known. No, they didn’t actually die for American freedom. They
didn’t die for any good reason really. There was no legitimate
justification for America’s involvement in that country’s civil war. The Vietnamese were engaged in a war for national
unification. What one side wanted was its own country, free from
ownership and political control from any outside sources, including
France, first, and then the United States. The leaders on the other side wanted to keep their control
and their political arrangements with the French and the United States.
The French eventually gave up the fight and left, and for some unknown
reason America stepped right in, replacing the French. The Communists, Russia and China, sided with the North
Vietnamese and helped supply them with weapons and other friendly
support. The Americans and their allies began tugging on the other end
of the bloody bone. This tug of war went back in forth in accordance with the
way the political winds blew in the U.S. government, and in accordance
to the particular brains and egos of the American presidents as they
pulled their stints and strutted their stuff. President Lyndon Johnson’s ego was as big as Texas. He and
his advisors decided there was no way in hell that America was going to
allow that bunch of gooks to kick their ass out the way they had done
the French. So the game was on and the winds of war blew until President
Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon finally ordered the bugler to call
retreat in 1973. The Vietnamese people were united into one people with
one land and one government. They had their freedom. The freedom they
had been fighting for since before I was born in 1945. Did our 58,000 young men and women die for American freedom?
No, their lives were used up by the American government in an effort to
deny the Vietnamese people their freedom. What a heartbreaking irony. Our soldiers died because they were soldiers doing their
duty. They were used badly by the American government and its people. What makes the story even sadder is the fact that the
majority of Americans today still do not have a clue as to what the
Vietnam War was about. Most now agree that it was wrong for us to have
engaged in that war and the rest think that the only thing wrong about
that war was that we didn’t bomb the gooks back into the stone age and
add another notch to our big pistol. But I’m not going to let that stop me. When I think of my
dear friend Pushis and all those boys who died – and that’s what
they were, mostly, just boys, used as canon fodder and denied the right
to live out their lives – there is something inside of me that won’t
let me be satisfied with the notion that they died for nothing. As long as I’m alive, I’m going to speak in their place
and cry out to the world to give them a reason for giving up their
lives. I’m going to say to America and the world, be Catchers in the
Rye. Stand up and catch these young children before they go over
the side. If the American government is truly of, by and for the people,
then the American people are at fault for every war we’ve had since
the ending of World War II and all the wars we’re going to have. If the people are not at fault, then the phrase, "of,
by and for the people," is a lie. I believe it’s the truth. The
people are at fault. And it’s the people who are going to have to
change. The people are going to have to somehow become more
intelligent. They are going to somehow have to quit being such
hypocrites. They are going to have to rise up and demand that America
changes its ways and gives up war as a means of having its way. They are going to have to quit being such stupid, lying
hypocrites and truly start studying peace instead of war. They are going
to have to learn what Democracy means. They are going to have to realize
that we have no right to attack another nation and stick our long noses
into their business. They are going to have to quit being hypocrites and start
realizing that all the peoples of the world are part of the same family
we call humanity. They are going to have to realize that wars and more
wars are moving us at the speed of light to the final war and the end of
humanity. Somehow, they are going to have widen their minds into
accepting the idea of world-wide peace, and how to bring it about where
all people have a bit of ground to walk on and can feel safe and free
from outside forces and the ambitions of other nations. America owes a debt to all those young men and women who
have died in our wars. And the only way to pay that debt is to bring an
end to unjust war and the unjust use of our soldiers. Before we ask them to kill and give up their lives, we
should really give them an absolutely perfect good reason for it, other
than just ignorance, stupidity and lies. Americans are going to have to
grow up and become Catchers in the Rye. It’s a debt we owe that cries up from the graves of all
our dead soldiers all over the world. "Stop doing us this way. Stop treating us like this.
Give us a good reason to die." We owe them that, and we owe ourselves that, and the world.
And not just a good reason to die, but a good reason to live. That’s
what really should be the American way.
|
