Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds Read online

  “Who can we bribe?” I asked.

  He kept staring at the glass. “No one. We can try, but I doubt that it’s worth the effort. Not with Hartford fighting for its life. Its corporate life.”

  “I know lots of pilots we could get, cheap.”

  “Pilots,” Chaim said without too much respect.

  I ignored the slur. “Yeah. Hartford programs the main jump. Nobody’d get a jump to Rigel.”

  We sat in silence for a while, the too-sober pilot and the Martian-Russian Jew who was the richest person in the history of mankind. Less than too sober.

  “Sure there’s no other ship on Faraway?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Took me half a day to find someone who remembered about the Bonne Chance.”

  He considered that for a minute. “What does it take to build an interplanetary ship? Besides money.”

  “What, you mean could they build one on Faraway?”

  “Right.”

  “Let me see.” Maybe. “You need an engine. A cabin and life support stuff. Steering jets or gyros. Guidance and commo equipment.”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know. The engine would be the hard part. They don’t have all that much heavy industry on Faraway.”

  “No harm in finding out.”

  I called Faraway. Talked to the mayor. He was an old pilot (having been elected by popular vote) and I finally reached him at the University Club, where he was surrounded by other old pilots. I talked to him about engineering. Chaim talked to him about money. Chaim shouted and wept at him about money. We made a deal.

  Faraway having such an abundance of heavy metals, the main power generator for the town, the only settlement on the planet, was an old-fashioned fission generator. We figured out a way they could use it.

  After a good deal of haggling and swearing, the citizens of Faraway agreed to cobble together a rescue vehicle. In return, they would get control of forty-nine percent of the stock of Mazel Tov Corporation.

  Chaim was mad for a while, but eventually got his sense of humor back. We had to kill two months with six already-read books and a fifty-bottle case of gin. I read War and Peace twice. The second time I made a list of the characters. I made crossword puzzles out of the characters’ names. I learned how to drink gin, if not how to like it. I felt like I was going slowly crazy—and when the good ship Hello There hove into view, I knew I’d gone ’round the bend.

  The Hello There was a string of fourteen buildings strung along a lattice of salvaged beams; a huge atomic reactor pushing it from the rear. The buildings had been uprooted whole, life support equipment and all, from the spaceport area of Faraway. The first building, the control room, was the transplanted University Club, Olde English decorations still intact. There were thirty pairs of wheels along one side of the “vessel,” the perambulating shanty town.

  We found out later that they had brought along a third of the planet’s population, since most of the buildings on Faraway were without power and therefore uninhabitable. The thing (I still can’t call it a ship) had to be put on wheels because they had no way to crank it upright for launching. They drove it off the edge of a cliff and pulled for altitude with the pitch jets. The pilot said it had been pretty harrowing, and after barely surviving the landing I could marvel at his power of understatement.

  The ship hovered over Mazel Tov with its yaw jets and they lowered a ladder for us. Quite a feat of navigation. I’ve often wondered whether the pilot could have done it sober.

  The rest, they say, is history. And current events. As Chaim had predicted, Hartford went into receivership, MTC being the receiver. We did throw out all of the old random bastards and install our own hand-picked ones.

  I shouldn’t bitch. I’m still doing the only thing I ever wanted to do. Pilot a starship; go places, do things. And I’m moderately wealthy, with a tenth-share of MTC stock.

  It’d just be a lot easier to take, if every ex-bum on Faraway didn’t have a hundred times as much. I haven’t gone back there since they bronzed the University Club and put it on a pedestal.

  Essays

  Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds

  Every fall semester, I teach workshops in science fiction and genre writing at MIT. It’s an interesting environment, as you might imagine: most of the students are hyperintelligent, hyperactive, unpredictable, and not overburdened with social graces. Last semester one of them asked me, out of the blue but not completely irrelevant to the classroom context, “How many people did you kill in Vietnam?”

  I don’t think anybody had asked me that in twenty years. My pacifist sympathies are pretty obvious, at least to my friends and most of my students—even to most of my readers, I hope. (Reading is funny, though; a novel is a projection test. People have written me about The Forever War, for instance, praising it for being anti-military, which I think is simplistic, or pro-war, indicating a lack of reading skills—and in one case, even for being anti-Semitic, which I’m still trying to figure out.)

  How many did I kill in Vietnam? Technically, the answer to the question is “none.” (In fact, I once refused a direct order to kill a man, which is another story.) But the actual answer, as far as the victims themselves were concerned, is twenty or thirty people, North Vietnamese Regular Army troops. Maybe more. The next question, which my student refrained from asking, is “How did you feel about it?” And the terrible, true answer is “Neutral.”

  That requires some amplification. In real life, a person who kills twenty or thirty people and feels neutral about it will cop an insanity plea, go to jail, and get a best-seller out of the experience. I’ve only done one of these things.

  Actually, I never killed anybody in the sense of pointing a weapon at him and pulling the trigger. In fact, I tried to forestall the necessity of finding out whether I could or would do that, at several levels.

  First, I tried to register as a conscientious objector. The draft board required a letter from a minister. Atheists don’t have ministers, though, and I was politically naive enough to let it go at that. (A year later, the law was challenged in the courts and of course was declared unconstitutional.) I tried for alternate service in the Peace Corps, preferring six years digging ditches in Africa to one, digging foxholes, in Vietnam, and got drafted while the papers were being pushed.

  In response to a bulletin board notice at Basic Training camp, I waved my physics degree at the Army and offered to sign up for four years of nuclear power plant operation. True, I’d have to spend two years, maybe three, in a radioactive underground bunker in Antarctica, but again, that sounded better than the bunkers in Vietnam. They said I was “overqualified” for the position.

  Finally, sent to Vietnam, I found that you could volunteer to be an unarmed combat medic, or assistant medic, and tried to be reassigned. But they said they didn’t need medics; they needed combat engineers. When I finally got to the field, I told the sergeant that I couldn’t kill anyone. He said, in effect, “Okay. Just carry this weapon and see what happens.”

  What does all this have to do with science fiction? There is a connection. Because I got through the war with a clean conscience. I didn’t realize—or admit to myself—that I had killed those twenty or thirty people until long after they were dead. You could be fanciful and say they were for a while simultaneously dead and not dead, like Schrödinger’s Cat. But what generated the paradox was not quantum mechanics. It was a very science-fictional aspect of modern warfare.

  Let me digress a little bit about science fiction. You can’t compel any two scholars, or any two readers, to agree on a definition of science fiction, even though the energy expended on arguing over it since Hugo Gernsback’s day would power a space ship to the Moon. Most people would be willing to concede that it has something to do with science, and something to do with human nature—and here’s a list of two hundred exceptions to whatever you were going to say.

  Well, the science part is just wrong, as is occasionally pointed out, even if you first disqualify s
tories set in the future that have only to do with history, religion, politics, or other nonscientific stuff. With few and interesting exceptions, even “hard” science fiction deals not with science but with technology, which relates to humanity in a totally different way. In the physical sciences, if you are limited to a natural human language you can only approximate truth; the actual verities have to be expressed in the various dialects of mathematics. As the life sciences move into smaller and more subtle realms, this becomes true for them as well. Even the behavioral sciences move away from natural language as they evolve toward precision, or at least the appearance of it. So it’s extremely difficult to write a science fiction story about science that has both literary value and scientific rigor.

  Technology is another matter. Plenty of cold numbers and equations are used up in design and manufacture, but a finished product radiates a kind of secondary humanity, because it was designed for human needs. We sense this radiation even when we’re not sure of the thing’s function, as is often the case with obscure medical or scientific equipment, or the arcane utensils of the chef, the mechanic, the artisan—and we become nervous around artifacts that are patently anti-functional. Dadaist sculptors and their descendants have capitalized on this tension, and there’s a comical avatar of it in the Boston Museum of Science: a machine the size of a small room that is constantly busy, with hundreds of moving parts, and no observable function whatsoever. It’s interesting to watch people watching it. They giggle, and point things out to each other: watch what happens when the ball gets to the bottom of this spiral ramp. See? Now the bell’s gonna go off.

  This childlike, more or less boy-like, fascination with machines is a dominant motif in science fiction, especially the subgenre of military sf. Can you think of a single military sf story of any length that doesn’t describe, usually in loving detail, the tools of the future soldier’s trade? I can’t offhand, though it’s such an obvious direction for a story that I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been done more than once. But I’m no expert; I don’t often read military sf novels any more, or mainstream military novels, for that matter. They don’t seem to speak to my experience.

  The machines, though. Like most American boys of my generation and previous ones, I had a childhood dominated by weapons-oriented play. Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, soldiers. Some enlightened parents nowadays try to prevent their children from acting out these unhealthy fantasies; I would be inclined to do the same, if I were a parent. But I suspect that prohibition, predictably, just makes it that much sweeter when he sneaks out to do it in secret.

  When he grows up somewhat—assuming history cooperates—and steps off some olive-drab bus to get his head shaved, his eardrums bruised by a surly sergeant, and his identity excised in a hundred large and small ways, the Army does have one positive thing to offer the confused man-child: guns that actually shoot. That’s no small boon for the majority, who never handled the country boy’s .22 or the inner-city boy’s zipgun. I was not exactly a boy, having been sheltered from the draft by academe up to the ancient age of 24, but I liked this new thing of shooting almost as much as the impressionable kids did. Rifle marksmanship was a physical and mental challenge, and the occasional experience with more exotic weapons—bazooka, machine gun, grenade launcher—was a flamboyant exercise in pyrotechnic power. I don’t recall even once contemplating what these things would do to human flesh, which I suppose is what psychologists call “avoidance,” but until I actually received orders for Vietnam, I was sure the Army would find a computer, or at least a typewriter, to put me behind.

  Instead, wading through the snow of a hard Missouri winter, they taught us how to construct hasty bridges, build roads, tie knots, use a jackhammer and a Skil saw, and various other things that the book says an Army Engineer should be able to do. We never even saw the only things we would, in a few months, actually be using in the jungle heat: pick, shovel, axe, machete, chain saw, plastic explosive, M-16, napalm.

  People think that napalm is something dropped from airplanes. It’s not always. But let me not get ahead of myself.

  It’s an eighteen-hour flight from the West Coast to Vietnam, and we were about an hour from landing when I first had the sense of entering an alien world. It was about one in the morning; I woke up from a light nervous sleep and looked out the porthole. I couldn’t recognize any of the stars. That was profound: I had been interested in astronomy, sometimes to the point of fanaticism, since I was a Cub Scout, and the constellations were as familiar to me as the faces of family members. But I’d never been to the tropics. For the first time in my life I was looking at the Southern Cross, Alpha Centauri, the Magellanic Clouds. I stared for a long time, transfixed, and the plane began its descent. Soon there were lights on the ground as well, the red spray of tracers and smoky orange billowing napalm. The base where we were landing was under attack.

  We landed without incident—the fighting was going on at the other end of the large base, several miles away—and entered yet another alien world, a surreal one. They herded us into a mess hall and someone handed me a large spoon, and for an hour I served instant mashed potatoes to hundreds of people who didn’t seem to notice that there was a war going on outside. I felt like I was caught in the middle of a Pinter play. After my shift I spent a couple of hours sitting behind the mess hall, sipping warm beer and watching the helicopters bob and weave, spitting flame, firing rockets. Men dying under alien stars, literally.

  There followed a couple of weeks of growing tension while people tried to cram into us the training we should have had in the States. In jungle warfare in the sixties, the main function of a combat engineer in the field was to carry on his person enough high explosive to level a city block. It was a dead dangerous weight until you ran into the enemy. Then, ideally, while the fighting raged, you would take a couple of riflemen and drop back a ways in order to clear a landing zone for helicopters, which would evacuate the wounded and bring in supplies. To do this, you affixed explosive to the largest trees and blew them down, then cleared out the smaller stuff with axe and machete, hoping that it hadn’t occurred to the enemy to circle around and see what was going on. It wasn’t the safest job in the world, but at least for me, it was psychologically easier to endure than most combat positions, since you could tell yourself you were engaged in saving life rather than taking it.

  (But we also learned how to use other people’s weapons—even Russian and Chinese weapons that we might scavenge on the battlefield—and how to call in artillery and air support. Because if enough of the infantry were killed, we’d have to take their place.)

  The next alien world was alien primarily in an existential way, though the surroundings were strange enough. That was when I was first sent out into combat.

  I was sitting in a fire base, a semi-permanent camp in a secure valley, learning how to take apart and clean chain saws. The sergeant came running up and said you, you, and you, saddle up and get down to the pad. I was given 500 extra rounds of ammunition and a case of beer, and told we were going to a “hot LZ”; a landing zone that was under fire, so the helicopter wouldn’t actually land. It would come within a few feet of the ground, and we were to jump out and land running.

  It was terrifying. As we descended, you could hear the gunfire even over the throbbing of the helicopter’s straining engine and blades. I didn’t know that the gunfire was all from our side, trying to keep the enemy’s collective head down while the chopper came in. It was no more than twenty yards from where we jumped out to where a GI was waving from behind a stack of sandbags; I don’t believe my feet touched the ground three times in those twenty yards.

  None of us was hurt coming in. I hunkered down behind the sandbags and passed out the beer and ammunition, both appreciated, and tried to will myself to relax. I couldn’t. The firing stopped but the smell persisted. They had been in the same position for two days, and the jungle around them was full of enemy dead, rotting in the damp tropical heat. We had a few dead ourselves,
decently tucked away in body bags, including the man I’d been sent to replace. With less than a month left in Vietnam, he’d been shot through the heart by a sniper.

  The guy who told me that, as if to even things up, took me off to see the latest treasure, a freshly killed enemy scout whose body and gear they had dragged inside our perimeter. I’d never before seen a dead person who hadn’t had the benefit of an undertaker’s ministrations. I steeled myself for the experience—but someone had moved the body, which made me feel relieved and annoyed and obscurely weirded out. The Walking Dead and all. But I got to hold his rusty, bloody rifle and sort through the sad mementos he’d left behind. A letter, presumably from home, unfolded and refolded many times, a wallet with a little useless currency, a military ID that said he was only sixteen years old. He had walked down from Hanoi, two thousand miles of jungle trail, to cross over into South Vietnam and spend his first and last day in combat absorbing one American bullet.

  Then the enemy machine guns started up again, from a new angle, and we ran for cover, bullets whirring around. I spent the rest of the afternoon in or near shallow makeshift bunkers while sporadic gunfire probed the invisible perimeter. Just before dark the artillery started, a salvo coming in every few minutes to protect us, crashing just beyond that perimeter. But it was a double-edged sword; the shrapnel sometimes whined overhead, and a piece the size of a dessert plate opened up the back of a lieutenant’s hand as he slept, a few yards from me. I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to get much sleep that night, and I was right.

  That’s when I visited another alien world, and as I’ve said, it was an existential one as much as physical. The other soldiers helped; they all said some version of “Hell, this is nothing; you should’ve been here last week”—and I didn’t know enough about human nature to realize I was being hazed. In fact, it was the heaviest action they’d ever seen. To me, though, lying there wide awake while the jungle shook and flashed with explosions, while the air sang with bullets and fragments and stank of the dead, while wounded men cried and muttered, desperate men whispered into radios and bellycrawled from position to position—I was seized with an absolute conviction that I was going to die. Nobody could live through a year of this. It was just as certain as the doctor snapping on the X-ray viewer and saying maybe a year, maybe a month, maybe tomorrow; there’s nothing we can do.