“Call me Coop, and there ain’t no maybe about it. If we hadn’t thrown in the towel, if we’d kept bombing up north—really bombing ’em—if Uncle Ho thought we were still in there for the win after the losses he suffered in Tet… well you can bet your sweet ass the peace delegation in Paris would have been talking ‘bout something besides the shape of the fucking table!”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Coop.”
“But we didn’t lock our commander in chief in the woodshed,” he continued, an anguished look about him. “And if the message he sent to Uncle Ho was the wrong one, the message he sent to snuffie was a hell of a lot worse. I mean what’s snuffie supposed to think when his supreme commander, the president of these United States, says, ‘Hey, guys, I’m calling it quits. Ain’t gonna be no victory, ‘cause we’re getting out soon as I can find a way to do it without winning. In the meantime, I’d like you to just keep on fighting and dying same as if I weren’t saying any of this, okay?” Well, Jim, you cannot expect an American field army, any field army, for that matter, to fight very well or very long on guidance like that. Mark my words: the Army’s gonna tear itself apart in Vietnam.”
“Yeah,” I responded, “Sergeant Sullivan said it’d turn itself inside out if something like this happened. And, Coop, he predicted it would happen, right after Tet!”
“Well, the Bull was right,” Cooper said. “Hey, by the way, you hear that Naple got hit?”
“Yeah, but don’t know much about it. What happened?”
“Not sure myself. Heard the U.S. Navy put a salvo of rockets in Charlie Company’s NDP not long after you caught your dust off. You know our Navy. Probably mistook your company for a Viet Cong submarine lurking about a mile or so inland. Understandable mistake.
Anyway, Naple got hit bad, but last I heard he still had all his limbs and all his senses and was on the mend. Uh… remember that black point man of his, Wester? Think the two of ’em, Naple and Wester, pulled you out of the paddy north of Hue.”
I nodded, fearing the worst.
“He got hit bad a short time later, think it was up in the A Shau. Head wound, heard he lost his eyesight.”
“Fuck,” I said, suddenly wishing I could be the one to lock our commander in chief in a woodshed.
“Yeah, the blind ones are the worst,” Coop commented.
In May of 1969, a year and two months after being felled in that putrid rice paddy, I departed Walter Reed. As the taxi wound its way through Silver Springs, I suddenly realized I’d been mistaken in my initial assessment of duty at the hospital. It had not been “just another tour.” It had been a tour of unpleasant excesses. Too much pain, trauma, tears, blood, and drugs. Too many saddened mothers and fathers, uncomprehending children, shocked—and in some cases adulterous wives, and plainly disinterested but duty-bound relatives. And too many crippled warriors who would have to go through life wondering if their sacrifice had been in vain.
However, if not an uplifting experience, it had in many ways been a positive one. I had seen my fellow patients, the pit crew, daily display a bravery, a heart-rending courage, that one only occasionally sees on the battlefield. And I had witnessed a hospital staff routinely demonstrate a compassion and dedication that would have put Florence Nightingale to shame.
Nearly three years after limping out of Walter Reed’s front portals, on the eve of my fourth and final tour in the Nam, I received an invitation from the hospital’s staff asking that I attend the formal closing of the snake pit. The war, for all practical purposes, was over, and there was no longer a need for the pit.
I did not attend. I wish I had.
25. Fort Benning, Georgia: Spring 1970
I spent the next couple of years doing what many other Indochina returnees were doing—recuperating from wounds, ending marriages, and pondering what in the hell had happened to the world we once knew. These were harsh years—harsh on those of us who remained in uniform and just as harsh, perhaps more so, on those who returned to America’s civilian community. Collectively, we searched in vain for something meaningful to hang onto. However, contrary to what most of our fellow countrymen now believe, we were not looking for some mythical meaning to the war we had fought or wishfully seeking a grateful nation’s thanks for having done so. We knew the meaning of the war, if not the reason for it. We were searching instead for some purpose in the society we had served, a society that seemed to be casting asunder what many of us thought of as rock-solid, eternally enduring values.
Unable to find what we sought, our malaise often turned to bitterness, and many of us distanced ourselves from an American populace that somehow seemed foreign to us. Of course, our society had not changed—we had. The war had put us in touch with those values others merely speak of. That is the way of war and is perhaps one of its few positive consequences.
Soon after reentering the military’s mainstream, I discovered that our Army, as an institution, was beginning to exhibit many of the same symptoms of apathy and purposelessness that its Vietnam returnees were experiencing as individuals. In 1970, the military’s outlook on the war was undergoing a dramatic change. “Can do, sir!” was rapidly becoming “don’t make waves, sir.”
Not surprisingly, the sentiments of those soldiers preparing to go to war and of those training them to do so had also changed. An atmosphere of inertia and indifference, a “wait-and-see” attitude, had begun to settle over much of the Army’s rank and file. There was little talk of kicking Charlie’s ass. Younger soldiers talked instead of surviving their tour, while older ones spoke of resignation and early retirement before their next tour. Both looked in vain for some direction from above.
For whatever reasons, the Army was in trouble. As the Bull had predicted while sitting atop his mermite two years before, the Army was indeed “turning itself inside out.”
26. Auburn University: Spring 1972
I don’t quite know how it happened. I never intended to return to Vietnam. Still, in the spring of 1972, while finishing up my bachelor’s work at Auburn and after having spent a brief tour as a battalion S-3 at Fort Benning and undergoing its officer’s advanced course, I found myself on the phone with Infantry Branch, once again requesting duty in the Nam.
“Well, Jim, I quite candidly don’t advise that,” the assignments officer, a major whom I had never seen or talked to before, said in response to my request. “I mean, frankly speaking, we no longer look upon duty in Vietnam as career enhancing, especially repeat tours. And this would be your fourth.”
“Major,” I replied, “I quite candidly don’t give a tinker’s damn about career enhancement at the moment. At the moment, I want to go to Vietnam.”
“Well, Major, if that’s what you really want, I’ll get the orders working this very morning. We still honor voluntary requests for Southeast Asia, and if you insist on so callously ignoring my advice, it’ll just save me from sending some reluctant major back involuntarily on a second tour. Okay?”
Okay. Once more into the breach.
When I made that call, North Vietnam was once again wreaking havoc on its southern neighbor. This time it was the Eastertide offensive, and although I could do little to change the battle’s course, it seemed only fitting that I again heed the trumpet’s call or so I told myself at the time.
Later I concluded that the call was not nearly so noble. In reality, I had simply suffered a mild recurrence of “yellow fever” and wanted to go back because the Nam, if not the most stable, was the most comfortable environment for me. I had spent most of my previous ten years in Vietnam, training or training others to go to Vietnam, or recuperating from having been in Vietnam. And we all feel most comfortable in that world with which we are most familiar. Moreover, it seemed to me that inasmuch as combat was a rarity in a thirty-year career, one ought to spend as much of his time in it as opportunity afforded.