War opens up a disconnect between those who actually fight, the grunts, and those officials who try to spin that fighting into tales of domination and perpetual success. Herr illustrates better than anyone else I’ve read about Vietnam, the impossible gulf between those two realities.
He strips away all romance about the seedy, corrupt demiworld behind the front lines:
“Saigan and Danang were alive with Lurps, seals, recondos, Green Beret bushmasters, redundant mutilators, heavy rapers, eye-shooters, widow-makers, nametakers, classic American types: point men, isolatos, and outriders like they were programmed in their genes to do it, the first taste made them crazy for it, just like they knew it would (34-35).”
In Saigon, “the tables are crowded with American civilian construction engineers, men getting paid $30,000 a year [in 1968 dollars] from their jobs on government contracts and matching that easily on the black market. Their faces have the look of aerial photos of silicone pits, all hung with loose flesh and visible veins (170).”
He was covering our first hallucinatory war, one without front lines, one permeated with lies, one that floated on a lake of weed, heroin, booze and rock ‘n roll. His prose captures that quality of borderline madness and unreality.
Out in the bush and jungle, the killing went on and Herr does not spare us the brutality of the place and the voices of the men who were shaped by that brutality:
“Oh, it ain’t so bad. My last tour was better though, not so much mickeymouse, Command gettin’ in your way so you can’t even do your job. Shit, last three patrols I was on we had fucking orders not to return fire going through the villages, that’s what a fucked-up war it’s gettin’ to be anymore. My last tour we’d go through hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can’t shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here (29).”
“During Tet I heard a doctor bragging that he’d refused to allow wounded Vietnamese into his ward. “But Jesus Christ,” I said, “didn’t you take the Hippocratic Oath?” but he was ready for me. “Yeah,” he said, “I took it in America.”
”In I and II Corp it was “loose policy” for gunships to fire if the subjects froze down there; in the Delta, it was to shoot if they ran or “evaded,” either way a heavy dilemma, which would you do? “Air sports,” one gunship pilot called it, and went on to describe it with fervor, “Nothing finer, you’re up there at two thousand, you’re God, just open up the flexies and watch it pee, nail those slime to the paddy wall, nothing finer, double back and get the caribou (62).”
Herr is always honest about his reaction to such barbarity, but he was also often protected by these same men. He saw how they took care of each other. He witnessed their humanity and their cruelty and their position in the jaws of a trap they had never set, never wanted, never volunteered for and one that had clapped shut on them:
“I stood as close to the grunts [them] as I could without actually being one of them, and then 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 color in the whole mandala, gentleness and pity were other colors, there wasn’t a color left out. I think that those people who used to say that they only wept for the Vietnamese never really wept for anyone at all if they couldn’t squeeze out at least one for these men and boys when they died or had their lives cracked open for them (67).”
One Marine “hadn’t been anything but tired and scared for six months and he’d lost a lot, mostly people, and seen far too much, but he was breathing in and breathing out, some kind of choice all by itself. He had one of those faces, I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out of the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips. Life had made him old, he’d live it out old (16).”
I remember a Vet who worked as a custodian at my HS – tall, covered in tats, long iron gray hair, rangy, quiet, but we worked out at the same gym and struck up a friendship and later I helped him put in his retirement papers.
I never asked him questions. To do so would have been somehow disrespectful. In prepping his pension application, he told me that he had been there in ‘68 and had been wounded 3 times and carried a plate in his head and received 40% disability payments as a result of what had happened to him.
One day at the gym, out of nowhere, he looked at me and said shyly that he had collections of comic books. He told me that when he retired, he wanted to go into the children’s ward of a hospital and read to them from his comics. He paused for a long time and then looked at me directly and said, “Maybe that will make up for what I did there.”
He never spoke of what he had done. He never spoke of Vietnam again.
