Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds Read online

  I’m tempted to say that once you visit that world, you never come back from it. The truth is less dramatic. It’s more like the memory of a home town: easily recalled, not far below the surface, but not profoundly present in everyday life. At least not for me, at least not any more.

  After that eventful day we did have the gruesome chore of searching and disposing of bodies, the description of which I will spare you, and we did draw fire occasionally, but it was obvious that things were cooling down. After a few weeks, I came to realize that it might be possible to survive the whole year. We had significant contact with the enemy only a couple of times a month. The death rate was high, a lot higher than news reports indicated, but it looked like you had about a fifty-fifty chance of leaving the country alive. As it turned out, of the thirteen people who joined the company the day I did, only three were left after a year. Two of us had spent months hospitalized for wounds. I had been the sole survivor of a squad.

  These disproportions were unusual. But not unique, of course. I’ve talked to a number of Vietnam veterans who had this experience: loud noise, look up…you’re the only one left.

  And what about the machines? It became obvious that there were two ways to die in Vietnam. Either you ran out of luck and got killed by the enemy, or you did something stupid and got killed by your own equipment. Stories abounded. The guy who scratched behind his ear with the .45. The guy who jumped aboard a personnel carrier with hand grenades safety-pinned to his tunic. The guy who leaned too far out of a helicopter or tried to fire a weapon full of mud or dropped an armed mortar round or slept under a tank. My demolition outfit circulated a warning picture of what was left of a man’s face after he’d tried to crimp a blasting cap with his teeth. We lost one man in a bizarre chainsaw accident and another (just before I got there, actually) who had gotten blasé about explosives, neglected to take cover, and was killed by a piece of debris from his own blast, a wood chip that struck between his eyes at the speed of sound.

  (This doesn’t even count the problems caused by the septic and hostile natural environment. One man was bitten by a Russell’s viper and died before antivenin could be dropped, another was mauled by a tiger, and people were constantly being poleaxed by malaria and gruesome intestinal parasites. During the rainy season we tended to look like refugees from a George Romero movie, covered with suppurating leech wounds and green patches of jungle rot.)

  The machines were not simply, or primarily, dangerous, of course. They were the only thing between you and the enemy, and you got pretty close to them. The relationship with the M-16 was a love/hate one, well documented, because it was too delicate a weapon for the conditions (and how it wound up that way is a fascinating study in bureaucratic incompetence and greed)—but there were other weapons that could always be counted on to do their job, and soldiers’ attitudes toward them covered the spectrum from approval to veneration. In my experience, those were the new Army hand grenade, the size and shape of a baseball; the workhorse .45 automatic, the M79 grenade launcher, and the LAWS one-shot rocket launcher. Some unofficial weapons, like the Soviet AK47 assault rifle, the Thompson submachine gun, and the Colt Python .44 Magnum, commanded respect for relative rarity as well as dependability.

  And you had to love napalm. We walked around the jungle in small groups, trying to make contact with the enemy. Once we succeeded in getting pinned down, we would call in artillery and air support, attempting to kill more of them than they killed of us. (This is an admittedly myopic version of what was probably a more sensible, or at least more grand, overall strategy.) A common situation for us was being outgunned and surrounded, so we were always glad to hear that help was on its way. Air support was more welcome than artillery, though, because we knew that jets or helicopters would make the enemy flee. Artillery sounds impressive, but if you have a trench only a foot deep, you’re safe from even a surprisingly close hit. You can hear it coming, duck down, and then pop back up and shoot at GI’s.

  You can’t duck from napalm, though. The forest turns into an inferno and you don’t even have time to scream. The first intake of breath kills you. Therefore it was also supposed to be a pretty humane weapon, or at least a quick one, however hideous the remains were to look upon. For whatever reason, the enemy sensibly tended to fade into the woods when the “fast movers” came; when it started to rain jellied gasoline.

  Napalm proper is not flammable; it’s the name of a soap powder (a mixture of naphthenic and palmitic acids, in case you want to go out and whip some up before finals) which, when added to gasoline, forms a sticky syrup. I hadn’t known that before, but one morning we walked back into fire base from a search-and-destroy sweep and found dozens of drums of gasoline stacked around. A sergeant rounded up all us engineers and showed us how to make “foo-gas” bombs (I later learned it was a French word, fougasse). First you put a measured amount of this purple powder, napalm, into the large drum of gasoline, then stir it around for a few minutes, until it has the consistency of thin Jell-O. Try not to let anybody near who’s smoking. Then you take a white phosphorus grenade and tape it to a brick of plastic explosive—this was starting to sound real dangerous—and you carefully unscrew the detonator from the grenade, and carefully screw in an electrical blasting cap, and most carefully lower the whole thing down to the bottom of the drum of jellied gasoline. Then put the top back on the drum, and with the help of a few other guys, carry it carefully to the perimeter, trying not to stumble over the trailing wires; dig a deep hole at a 45-degree angle, and bury the damned thing. For this we got an extra $50 a month, demolition pay. Then you splice the trailing wires to a Claymore plunger and deliver it to the machine gun bunker overlooking the site. Tell the guy in charge not to squeeze the plunger until he sees the whites of their eyes.

  It’s sort of like the Strategic Defense Initiative: you don’t get to test it and you can only use it once.

  This hilltop base had been graced with foo-gas because Intelligence had divined that it was going to be the target of a so-called “human wave” attack, like the Japanese banzai raids in World War II. Intelligence was usually wrong, fortunately, and no one had actually experienced a human wave attack, so people weren’t too worried. There was no doubt that the enemy concentration was increasing, though; there were lots of small-unit contacts in the area, and almost nightly mortar and sniper harassment on the hill.

  I was called over to an adjacent hill to do some emergency demolition, and wasn’t able to get a helicopter back by nightfall, and so was condemned to sleep on the cold hard ground, for which I was most grateful, because that night Intelligence proved to be right for a change: the artillery on my new hill started pounding away, and I asked what was up, and someone said, “Human wave attack on Brillo Pad.” I watched it through binoculars from about ten miles away. You couldn’t see any individuals, just a kind of boiling mass of humanity, but you could see the flashes from weapons, and especially the pyrotechnic display of the foo-gas, which seemed to work perfectly. I took a kind of a craftsman’s pride in it, assuming that one of them was the one I had put together.

  Which circles back around to MIT. It was some weeks before it occurred to me that, in a sense, I was now an accessory to murder. I had refused to kill people directly, but wasn’t reluctant to apply technology and expertise to the same end. The twenty or thirty people who were engulfed in flames at that moment died as much from my actions as from those of the infantryman who triggered the bomb. Of course if I hadn’t done it, some other demolition man would have; the outcome would have been the same. But following that line of reasoning carries you back to the moment you open your draft notice and have to decide between the army or prison or exile. Even if the army uses you for typing or rolling bandages, you have freed another pair of hands for killing.

  Of course you can go even further, as radical rhetoric did in the sixties, and point out that merely paying income tax made you an accessory to the murder of Vietnamese; civil disobedience was the only moral alternative. If I�
�d known then what I know now, that might have been the route I’d taken. Speculation is idle, though. There are no time machines and history doesn’t quite repeat itself.

  A month or so later, I was severely wounded and spent five months in a couple of hospitals, the second of which introduced me to another alien world, the mundane one of drug dependence. There were over a hundred bullet and fragment wounds, more than twenty serious ones, and the army wouldn’t give me enough painkiller to dent a migraine. Army hospitals have more pushers than doctors, though, and I floated through three months on a cloud of hashish, Demerol, marijuana, opium, amyl nitrite, and alcohol. I could have had all the heroin I wanted, cheap as beer, but I tried it and, fortunately, didn’t care for it.

  Through all this succession of alien worlds I was aware of being a stranger in a strange land, moving through physical, emotional, moral, and existential terra incognita. What I wasn’t ready for was returning home and finding yet another alien world.

  Part of it was political. Having been away for the year 1968, I missed most of the events that polarized the country over Vietnam. A larger part, though, must be something that anybody goes through who has learned to survive combat, and by learning I don’t mean the business of remembering to clean your rifle and not light a match at night. You become attuned to danger, living every second as if you were in somebody’s gunsights. And you can’t turn it off simply by traveling ten thousand miles. For a couple of years I treated the real world as if it were a suburb of the war; land mines between the sidewalk cracks, ambush lurking behind McDonald’s. It was absurd, but that’s not an argument you can use with your subconscious. What it takes is years of the sidewalk not blowing up and Ronald McDonald not opening fire.

  So I was okay after a few years, and then not okay again, with a classic case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which yielded either to two years of psychotherapy or two years, period; I’ll never know.

  I guess that’s my solar system, the alien worlds that I’ve explored and reported back about, in the form of novels. Most novels that are any good are “about” a lot of things, not all of them accessible to the author, but for the record and for the hell of it, let me record which is where. War Year is a realistic, naturalistic novel simply about Vietnam. The Forever War is an extended metaphor on Vietnam, mainly about the alienation of soldiers and veterans from the culture they risked their lives to protect—and also about the tendency of powerful weapons to bite their owners. All My Sins Remembered is about guilt associated with socially condoned murder. Worlds and Worlds Apart are about stress and survival. A novel in progress, 1968, is about all these things—and more.

  I’ve been out of uniform for nearly twenty years, but in a way you never stop being a soldier, any more than you stop being a mother after your children leave home, or you stop being a child yourself when you begin to shave or menstruate, or even when your hair turns white or falls out. All of us are everyone we’ve ever been. Being a lot of people is probably a good thing for a novelist; it certainly seems to be an easier and more natural occupation for an Ernest Hemingway than an Emily Dickinson.

  Let me close with a coda: an observation that a friend made. I was at the University of Iowa, studying at the Iowa Writers Workshop, walking down a hall with Vance Bourjaily. Vance’s first novel was Confessions of a Spent Youth, a memoir of his World War II experiences. We’d been talking about Melville or someone, when all of a sudden he asked, “Do you know if any of the other men in the Workshop are Vietnam veterans?”

  I told him I was pretty sure they weren’t; nobody had said anything about it.

  He looked thoughtful. “What the hell are they going to write their first novels about? Graduate school?”

  Not Being There

  January was the start of a promising year for space buffs. My wife and I flew up to Pasadena, midmonth, to “be there” at Jet Propulsion Laboratories when Mariner flew by Uranus. There was a little disappointment at the planet’s nearly total blankness, but exciting returns from the rings and satellites.

  It wasn’t as mind-boggling as the Jupiter and Saturn flybys had been, but well worth the trip. We watched the pictures come in, shmoozed with the other space types, picked up all the NASA goodies. Killed a couple of days doing what writers do in Hollywood, and got back to Florida in time for the shuttle launch.

  We’d moved to Florida to be near Cape Kennedy, back in the Apollo days, and I covered the moon launches, Skylab, Apollo/ Soyuz, and the shuttle for a variety of magazines and newspapers. The journalism didn’t pay as well as the usual business, fiction and drama, but reporters can get press passes and watch from the firing line, the press area: 3.5 miles from the pad, just outside the hairy edge of the radius of destruction.

  We were always a little nervous about that, and made obvious morbid jokes about it. After all, if the reporters were slightly inside the radius of destruction, nobody could file any negative stories after a disaster. The papers would be full of reporters’ obits; no room for investigative journalism. And who would be left to investigate?

  Maybe it was less of a joke for me. I’d been a demolition engineer in Vietnam, and one day in 1968 spent an instant quite inside a small radius of destruction, and followed it with five months in a hospital. I knew how loud and hard those things could be, explosions, and how slowly flesh and bone grow back. Any good-sized spaceship is sitting on top of a tactical nuke’s worth of high explosive. Was 3.5 miles really far enough? There wasn’t even a hole to jump into or anything to hide behind; just a lowest-bidder windbreak of flimsy sheet metal and lumber. So I was always a little bit ready to die when the countdown numbers got small, despite NASA’s assurances and my own suspicion that it would be more dangerous to ride the IRT or eat fast food.

  After the first few shuttle launches we stopped going through the hassle of getting press passes. We could drive a mile to the beach and watch the things go up. It wasn’t quite as exciting, fifty miles outside of the radius of destruction, but it was still being there.

  So we bundled up against the unusual January chill and drove out onto Daytona’s hard smooth beach, to join the horde of shivering tourists. It seemed to go without a hitch, one short hold and then blastoff. My wife took a dust-jacket picture of me with the rocket going up in the background, and then I returned to the car, so I could steady the heavy binoculars against the door. I focused on the shuttle and watched it explode.

  It was surreal. I said “Oh shit,” or something equally profound, and my wife burst into tears, but the inexperienced people around us were cheering and chattering excitedly, thinking they had just witnessed booster separation. Most of a minute went by before they realized what had happened. We stood in the cold and watched the pieces fall and the smoke drift and then, like everybody, went home to live the canned reality of it over and over.

  Not quite “like everybody,” of course, but not just because of writing a few articles and books. In some parallel, or slightly divergent, universe, I could have been one of the seven who died. I tried to get a ticket three different ways.

  Back in the sixties, NASA had a “Scientist as Astronaut” program. Anyone with a Ph.D. in a physical science or engineering could apply; they would train you as a pilot and put you in the Apollo program. I got my bachelor’s in astronomy and was accepted to graduate school in physics, aiming for the program. In between, though, I got drafted and went to Vietnam, where I suffered the above-mentioned explosion and hospitalization. I came back nominally disabled and deeply rattled—not the kind of person you want to put in charge of a gliding brick.

  So I sat around writing books while the Apollo program went its way and NASA pasted together the shuttle. They sent out a call for Mission Specialists, and I was surprised to find that I could meet the preliminary requirements. But when I got the application, the damned explosion came back to haunt me again. The only physical requirement was in hearing; I’d returned from Vietnam with big blocks of frequencies permanently missing or masked by roaring and whis
tling tinnitus.

  Then a third chance presented itself. When Carter was President they talked about sending up a writer. They weren’t sure whether it would be a novelist, journalist, or poet—but y’all write, hear? Hell, I’d done all those things—I’ve won awards in all those things. I put in two applications, one solo and one as half of a writer/artist team with friend Rick Sternbach.

  Of course no administration is bound by the promises of its predecessors. Besides, if you send up a poet or a novelist, he’s liable to write any damned thing. So Reagan’s people decided on a journalist, probably a television journalist, definitely one with a tame track record. But first let’s send a couple of politicians, yeah, and then how about a teacher? We make the teachers happy, we can jack them around another four years. Maybe they won’t notice the Department of Education has gone desaparecido.

  I suppose it is still possible for a left-leaning Vietnam vet writer to get a ticket on the shuttle. Maybe a special flight, along with labor leaders, former budget directors, and senators from Massachusetts. You can put a lot of extra people in there with the weight you save by taking out the landing gear.

  Reflex sour grapes aside, brave talk aside, I have to wonder whether I really would say yes if they asked me now. A couple of hours after the Challenger exploded, I was interviewed by a local reporter who knew I had tried to get aboard, and she asked the obvious, and I gave the obvious answer: sure, I’d go on the next flight out. They’ll analyze what went wrong this time and fix it, and fix a few other things, and it’ll be safer than ever. One in 25 is long odds anyhow, I told her; like cutting a deck of cards and hoping not to come up with a red ace.