This Memorial Day

My dad was a big World War II history buff. He was more than that, actually. He veered close to being an amateur historian. I remember very well his bookshelves lined with tomes on it. Some were accounts of the war while others were about the machinery. Accounts of the Battle of Iwo Jima stood next to books describing all of the tanks Germany made during the war. One book had a picture which I'll never forget. It was of the face of a Japanese soldier who was caught coming out of one of those tunnels they had on Pacific islands - I can't remember which one. The guy began to climb out of the hole and there were U.S. Marines waiting for him. He got a blast from a flame-thrower and burnt to death. I don't think I'll ever forget his charred face. I also remember one book which described the difference between Panzer and Panther tanks. The illustrations showing how the turrets differed is stuck in my head for some reason. As a kid, I read bits and pieces of some of the books. The story of Pearl Harbor, the great chase of the Graf Spee, hunging down the Bismarck, et al. My dad's specialty was the Pacific Theater. He once rattled off body counts from each major action in the Battle for Guadalcanal to me.

Here in 2005, my grandfathers are long dead and the last relative that I knew to any degree who was in World War II died about a year ago. A couple of my mom's uncles were in the Air Force during the war and were tailgunners on B-17s and they told me stories of fending off Messerschmitts. But most of my experiences with veterans comes from talking to men who served in Vietnam.

When I was a cook, I worked with, Johnny, a Vietnam veteran. He was one of the few who talked openly about his experiences. "My CO told me that no one is to move past this treeline," he once told me. "Then two old women were out foraging or looking for water. They moved past the treeline..."

"And," I asked.

"And I shot them in the dead," he replied. "Those were my orders."

He and I cooked at The Towers, a private dormitory. Several of the Badger football players lived there. (I got to cook for Ron Dayne!) One day, several offensive linemen came down for breakfast and bitched or did something to piss off Johnny, who was the breakfast cook. He came back into the kitchen grumbling to himself about the football players. Don't forget, these guys huge and all hopped up on steroids. So I tell him, "Johnny, don't mess with those guys - they'll kick your ass." He got one of those vaguely serious looks on his face and replied, "Between being stuck in a foxhole by myself for 14 days and having the same old lady for 12 years, ain't nothin' they can show me that I haven't already seen." Then there was the time when one of the RAs, who was 20 at the oldest, burst into the kitchen barking orders and yelling at Johnny about there not being enough water hoolies up in the lobby. Johnny said to him calmly, but firmly, "You know, the last time some kid came up to me like that, he was yelling 'Die G.I.!' and I spit in his face as I was guttin' him." The RA did a quick turnabout and left.

I don't want to forget the Korean War vets I've known. A few years ago, I had a roommate who dad was in it and he lived across the street from us with a friend of his, Luigi, who also served in Korea. One night my roomie and I went over there to find that they were both sloshed and had cooked up a big batch of spaghetti. After eating, they started talking about the war. Luigi broke down in tears describing how he held his best friend in his arms and he died. He looked up through his tears at me and said, "We went there to fight for YOU! So you wouldn't have to fight!"

On this Memorial Day, I'm gonna be thinking about a lot of people. About Johnny and the friends of his that died in his arms. I'm going to be thinking of Miss Pamela's dad, a Vietnam vet who refuses to talk about the war, and his fallen comrades. I'll also be thinking of the vet I met at the Paradise one night who started balling like a baby when we talked about the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. and the friends he lost. (If you've never been there, do go. It is incredibly moving.) I'll be thinking about Mark's old man, Luigi, and their friends who died across the ocean. My family too - my grandfather and great uncles to did their parts to defeat Hitler. Finally, I'll be thinking about the 1600+ men and women who died in Iraq and those that fell in Afghanistan.

Over at the Library of Congress site, you can read and hear the stories of veterans in their own words.

You can read Gustav Hasford's The Short Timers, the story on which Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is based upon, at his webpage.

And here's an excerpt from Michael Herr's Dispatches:

A Chinook, forty feet long with rotors front and back, set down on the airstrip by Charlie Med, looking like a great, gross beast getting a body purchase on some mud, blowing bitter gusts of dust, pebbles and debris for a hundred yards around. Everywhere within that circle of wind men turned and crouched, covering their necks against the full violence of it. The wind from those blades could come up strong enough to blow you over, to tear papers from your hands, to lift tarmac sections weighing a hundred pounds in the air. But it was mostly the sharp fragments, the stinging dirt, the muddy, pissed-in water, and you acquired a second sense of when it would reach you, learned to give it only your back and your helmet. The Chinook had flown in with its rear hatch down and a gunner with a .50-caliber machine gun stretched out flat on his stomach peering over the edge of the hatch. Neither he nor the door gunners would relax their weapons until the chopper touched the strip. Then they let go, the barrels of the big guns dropping down like dead weights in their mounts. A bunch of Marines appeared on the edge of the strip and ran to the chopper, through the ring of harsh, filthy wind, toward the calm at the center. Three mortar rounds came in at three-second intervals, all landing in a cluster 200 meters down the strip. No one around the chopper stopped. The noise from the Chinook drowned out the noise of the rounds, but we could see the balls of white smoke blowing out away from the strip in the wind, and the men were still running for the chopper. Four full litters were carried at a run from the rear of the Chinook to the med tent. Some walking wounded came out and headed for the tent, some walking slowly, unaided, others moving uncertainly, one being supported by two Marines. The empty litters were returned and loaded with four poncho-covered figures, which were set down near some sandbagging in front of the tent. Then the Chinook reared up abruptly, dipped horribly, regained its flight and headed north and west, toward the covering hills. "One-nine," Mayhew said. "I'll bet anything."

Four kilometers northwest of Khe Sanh was Hill 861, the hardest-hit of all the sector outposts after Langvei, and it seemed logical to everyone that the 1st Battalion of the 9th Marine Regiment should have been chosen to defend it. Some even believed that if anyone but 1/9 had been put there, 861 would never have been hit. Of all the hard-luck outfits in Vietnam, this was said to be the most doomed, doomed in its Search-and-Destroy days before Khe Sanh, known for a history of ambush and confusion and for a casualty rate which was the highest of any outfit in the entire war. That was the kind of reputation that takes hold most deeply among the men of the outfit itself, and when you were with them you got a sense of dread that came out of something more terrible than just a collective loss of luck. All the odds seemed somehow sharply reduced, estimates of your own survival were revised horribly downward. One afternoon with 1/9 on 861 was enough to bend your nerves for days, because it took only a few minutes up there to see the very worst of it: the stumbles, the simple motions of a walk suddenly racked by spasms, mouths sand-dry seconds after drinking, the dreamy smiles of total abdication. Hill 861 was the home of the thousand-yard stare, and I prayed hard for a chopper to come and get me away from there, to fly me over the ground fire and land me in the middle of a mortar barrage on the Khe Sanh pad - whatever! Anything was better than this.

On a night shortly after the Langvei attack an entire platoon of 1/9 was ambushed during a patrol and wiped out. Hill 861 had been hit repeatedly, once for three days straight during a perimeter probe that turned into a siege that really was a siege. For reasons that no one is certain of, Marine helicopters refused to fly missions up there, and 1/9 was cut off from support, re-supply or medical evacuation. It was bad, and they had to get through it any way they could, alone. (The stories from that time became part of the worst Marine legends; the story of one Marine putting a wounded buddy away with a pistol shot because medical help was impossible, or the story of what they did to the NVA prisoner taken beyond the wire - stories like that. Some of them may even have been true.) The old hostility of the grunt toward Marine Air became total on 861: when the worst of it was over and the first Ch-34 finally showed over the hilltop, the door gunner was hit by enemy ground fire and fell out of the chopper. It was a drop of over 200 feet, and there were Marines on the ground who cheered when he was hit.

Mayhew, Day Tripper and I were walking near the triage tent of Charlie Med. In spite of all the shrapnel that had fallen into that tent no way had been found to protect it. The sandbagging around it was hardly more than five feet high, and the top was entirely exposed. It was one reason why grunts feared even the mildest of the Going Home wounds. Someone ran out of the tent and took photographs of the four dead Marines. The wind from the Chinook had blown the ponchos from two of them, and one had no face left at all. A Catholic chaplain on a bicycle rode up to the entrance of the tent and walked inside. A Marine came out and stood by the flap for a moment, an unlighted cigarette hanging from his mouth. He had neither a flak jacket nor a helmet. He let the cigarette drop from his lips, walked a few steps to the sandbags and sat down with his legs drawn up and his head hanging down between his knees. He threw one limp arm over his head and began stroking the back of his neck, shaking his head from side to side violently, as though in agony. He wasn't wounded.

We were here because I had to pass this way to reach my bunker, where I had to pick up some things to take over to Hotel Company for the night. Day Tripper wasn't liking the route. He looked at the bodies and then at me. It was that look which said, "See? You see what it does?" I had seen that look so many times during the past months that I must have had it too now, and neither of us said anything. Mayhew wasn't letting himself look at anything. It was as though he were walking by himself now, and he was singing in an odd, quiet voice. "'When you get to San Francisco,'" he sang, "'be sure and wear some flowers in your hair.'"

We passed the control tower, that target that was its own aiming stake, so prominent and vulnerable that climbing up there was worse than having to run in front of a machine gun. Two of them had already been hit, and the sandbags running up the sides didn't seem to make any difference. We went by the grimy admin buildings and bunkers, a bunch of deserted "hardbacks" with crushed metal roofs, the TOC, the command latrine and a post-office bunker. There was the now roofless beer hall and the collapsed, abandoned officers' club. The Seabee bunker was just a little farther along the road.

It was not like the other bunkers. It was the deepest, safest, cleanest place in Khe Sanh, with six feet of timbers, steel and sandbags overhead, and inside it was brightly lit. The grunts called it the Alamo Hilton and thought it was candy-assed, while almost every correspondent who came to Khe Sanh tried to get a bed there. A bottle of whiskey or a case of beer would be enough to get you in for a few nights, and once you became a friend of the house, gifts like that were simply a token and very deeply appreciated. The Marines had set up a press "facility" very, very near the strip, and it was so bad that a lot of reporters thought there was a conscious conspiracy working to get some of us killed off. It was nothing more than a narrow, flimsily covered, rat-infested hole, and one day when it was empty an incoming 152 shell sewed part of it up.

I went down into the Seabee bunker, picked up a bottle of Scotch and a field jacket, and told one of the Seabees to give my rack to anyone who needed it that night.

"You ain't mad at us or anything?" he said.
"Nothing like that. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Okay," he said as I left. "If you think so."

As the three of us walked toward the 2/26 positions, two batteries of Marine artillery started firing 105's and 155's from the other side of the base. Every time a round was fired I'd flinch a little, and Mayhew would laugh.

"Them're outgoing," he said.

Day Tripper heard the deep sliding whistle of the other shells first. "_That_ ain't no outgoin'," he said, and we ran for a short trench a few yards away.

"That ain't outgoing," Mayhew said.

"Now what I jus' say?" Day Tripper yelled, and we reached the trench as a shell landed somewhere between the 37th ARVN Rangers compound and the ammo dump. A lot of them were coming in, some mortars too, but we didn't count them.

"Sure was some nice mornin'," Day Tripper said. "Oh, man, why they can't jus' leave us alone one time?"

"'Cause they ain't gettin' paid to leave us alone," Mayhew said, laughing. "'Sides, they do it 'cause they know how it fucks you all up."

"Tell me you ain' scared shit!"

"You'll never see me scared, motherfucker."

"Oh no. Three nights ago you was callin' out for your momma while them fuckers was hittin' our wire."

"Boo-sheeit! I ain't gettin' hit in Vietnam."

"Oh no? Okay, mothafucker, why not?"

"'Cause," Mayhew said, "it don't exist." It was an old joke, but this time he wasn't laughing.