CHAPTER EIGHT
Next morning Jim Ed and Lou got up
for their ten o’clock classes. Bump staggered to his feet. I was pretty
well awake. He went out to his car and got a pair of slacks which he put
on over his cut-offs. Then we drove to the city library. Bump sat there
for several hours reading books on local history - the Indians, the pioneer
farmers, the cowboys, the oil well drillers - and Fort Clay. He got in
a friendly chat with the gray-haired librarian like he was with her at
a reception of the State Historical Society.
We then drove to a coffee shop and that’s
all we got - cups of coffee. I didn’t like the stuff. I had never had a
cup of coffee in my life until a few months before when I had been hitch
hiking all night, campus traveling for the Organization, and I ducked into
a gas station to get out of the cold, wet night, until morning broke. The
owner gave me ten cups of coffee. I had been drunk, smoked pot and taken
LSD before I ever drank a cup of coffee.
I drowned my coffee in cream and sugar. We
finished and got back in the car and drove around. Bump looked up and down
the streets intently at everything. He drove slowly past the south side
of Fort Clay. He looked like somebody examining real estate he was going
to buy.
It was nearly six in the evening when we went
back to the Barrage. Soon Will came in with Pete Yoder and Stan Bennett,
the other G.I. he had first come to Clu’s house with. Will was in civilian
clothes with his sagging old T-shirt. I could see how the court martial
had been. Pete’s crooked teeth were showing in a grimace of pain - as he
dropped into a chair at our table. Still, I wanted the specifics. "What
did they give you?"
"Thirty days hard labor, a fine of two thirds of a month’s pay and
I’m busted down to private E-1."
Stan went to the bar to get a pitcher of beer
for out table.
"You know what?" Pete said. "They didn’t even
bring the Hog in to testify against me! Nobody testified against me! They
just asked me what I had to say for myself. I said that I spoke my words
at Will’s court martial only to the person Henry Hogue, not to Lieutenant
Hogue. A lot of good that did!"
"When does the hard labor start?" I asked.
"It starts the twenty-second of the month,"
Pete said.
That pitcher went fast and another pitcher,
and another one. Pete kept shaking his head and blinking his eyes.
"I’ve never been drunk before in my life,"
he said. "My dad was a minister." He poured another glass and downed it
quickly. "I took the easy road and that’s destruction!" he said. "I should
have taken the hard road!"
Between glasses of beer he kept muttering, "I should have taken the
hard road." Finally he went to the bathroom to vomit. When he came out
his knees started to buckle under him. Stan ran over and grabbed him and
said, "I’ll get him on the bus back to the post!"
We were left in the bar with Will. He looked
up from his beer at me and Bump. "I’ve had enough to drink" he said. "There’s
some things I think I want to talk about now. Would you like to go some
place else? There’s a road to the top of Gray Mountain. I’d just like to
go up there and tell some things."
"What about?" I asked.
"I was on the phone to Clu," Will said. "We
discussed the speech I’m gonna make up at the university Saturday night.
I told her the things that I want to tell. She said I ought to tell some
of them - how shitty the US is acting in Vietnam and all that, but the
things that are the most important to me, she said I shouldn’t talk about
them now, maybe not for a long, long time. She said the army might use
what I said against me - and when the speech gets in the papers a lot of
people might think I’m a traitor.
"But look Dale," Will went on, "people need
to know more than just that the war is bad! I have something more important
to say and I can’t get it out of my mind. It’s the reason I went through
all this court martial shit and put Pete through all of it. It’s OK, I
won’t talk about it in the speech, but I’d like to tell the whole thing
to somebody."
We went out to Bump’s car. He drove us out
of town and Will pointed out the turn to take until we got to the road
that spiraled to the top of Gray Mountain. There was a big paved area on
the flat top. We could see way out over the prairie beyond the lights of
Pronghorn and the sky was full of stars.
"The Indians used to come up here to have
visions," I said. Over the other side of the paved area there were a couple
of cars. Some G.I.’s and their girlfriends were standing by the cars, talking,
laughing, drinking beer, passing around a joint. A disc jockey was babbling
on one of their car radios.
I am writing down Will’s story as I wrote
it down in my notebook the next day, without all our interruptions and
questions and comments or the time the G.I.’s and their girlfriends came
over and shared one of their joints with us. I have put it in more of a
chronological order than he told it. He asked me and Bump not to discuss
this story with anyone until the right time might come.
WILL’S STORY
I learned what villages in Vietnam
are like growing up on my home island of the Atlantic coast. There are
five hundred of us on the island and for most of us there are only six
family names. Our six families have lived there since 1700 and not many
new people have moved onto the island. The old folks have to tell the teenagers,
"You can’t date so-and-so. We got so married up back yonder it would be
like dating your first cousin." It’s all dirt roads and no running water.
People can recognize each other’s tire marks because they know what shape
everybody else’s treads are in and how they drive their cars.
For a long time the men would go off as fishermen
or in the coastal shipping trade or salvaging wrecked ships. There are
empty coffins buried in the graveyard - men that were lost at sea. Even
the young people come sometimes and leave flowers on the graves of folks
that died over a hundred years ago.
Back during the American Revolution the British
controlled one side of the bayou island is on. All the other side of the
bay belonged to a big nobleman in England. His tenant farmers all rebelled
and joined the revolution. So the people on our island smuggled goods back
and forth between the British and the American sides of the bay - same
as later we smuggled whiskey during the prohibition.
But the fishing and the coastal shipping are
getting all played out now, so most of the young people have to leave for
who knows where. That’s why I joined the army when I was 17. Also I thought
I was defending my country - which to me was the people on my island -
from somebody out there that wanted to get us.
You all are supposed to be in the Student
Freedom Organization. I guess that would be SFO. Well I trained to be an
FO - forward observer. That means I go out and locate where enemy troops
are and call in artillery fire on them. Well, starting in FO school I heard
gook this and gook that - all gooks are the same, you’ve got to watch out
for them, not just the Viet Cong.
They flew us to Saigon. All I could tell was
it’s a big city, the first one I’ve ever been in. Since then I’ve been
in Tokyo and San Francisco and Oakland, California, and they all look the
same to me - except Saigon has a lot more beggars. Just lots of traffic
and big crowds of people - they may be a different race in Saigon, but
big cities are all the same. I remember me and a bunch of other guys going
in the back of a truck to a place called Bien Hoa. And some guys in the
truck with us who had been in Nam awhile started throwing their beer cans
at the people riding their bicycles down the road. And I said, "What are
you doing that for? You could hurt somebody!"
And they just laughed and said, "They’re gooks!"
Some of the new guys started imitating - you
know how folks are - throwing cans at the people on bicycles.
Then they took me from Bien Hoa on a plane
to the Black Hill base camp. I went to the village outside the camp to
look around like a bunch of G.I.’s did - all looking to buy grass and soda
pop and beer, looking to get laid. And I walked by a graveyard. People
go there and put little balls of rice in a hollow place on the tombstones
- leave them there for their ancestors, the way we leave flowers on our
island. I went back in the village, and bought a bag of weed - the first
time I had ever done that in my life and I went around trying to get to
know the local people. And when it was getting dark and I was going past
the graveyard, I saw a G.I. squatting on a tombstone taking a crap into
one of those hollow places where people leave food. So I called out, "Hey,
what the fuck are you doing?"
This guy finished his dump and got up and
said, "Well, it’s safer taking a shit here than going out in the woods."
I said, "But this is a graveyard!"
And he said, "But it’s just gooks!"
Well several things happened in the next month
- I don’t know where to start. Patrols were getting fired on, guys were
killed. I was sent to check where the fire was coming from. I had good
binoculars. I checked out this village way out in the bush. There were
men in civilian clothes with rifles - and some women with rifles. And they
had a mortar. I called in artillery fire and got out of the area. I got
to see what it was like the next day - houses all burnt to ashes, bodies
all fired black and stinking - men, women and children. But I didn’t want
them firing on our people. I had started to have friends like brothers
and I didn’t want them killed. I just didn’t want anybody killed.
By then I had started hanging out in a small
village about an hour’s walk from the big village outside the base camp.
That’s where my girlfriend lived. She had come to the big village and tried
to be a prostitute but the girls who had been at that longer were louder,
pushier, knew the whole whore routine better. They just crowded her out
and got the G.I.’s business. Everybody called her Monkey.
The big village was too much like a city when
the G.I.’s were there, so I went home with Monkey. From then on I would
give her money now and then, but not as a prostitute. She needed it bad.
Her parents were dead and she lived with her brother. He was always in
bed, wrapped up in bandages and missing his right arm. I figured out pretty
quick he wasn’t a wounded South Vietnamese soldier. People would come to
visit him and rap with him and I figured out where they were from. Even
Monkey was part of their whole Viet Cong trip. The first time I went there,
she asked me a whole lot of questions, trying to get information. She didn’t
know any more about being a spy than she did about being a prostitute.
But everybody knew a whole lot about us anyway. They could recognize a
lot of us as individuals, they knew what our orders and our plans were
by what they saw us doing. They had seen G.I.’s doing their thing for years
now and they knew all about it. It’s like people on my island when strangers
come.
So I learned how to behave myself proper.
If you’re an American and you’re in a house with a guy in the Viet Cong
and all these Viet Cong characters are coming to visit him, and you’re
sleeping with his sister, you learn how to get along with people. Also
I could see that the G.I.’s in the base camp who were really shitty to
the Vietnamese didn’t last long. People knew who they were. We found one
of them with his throat cut and his balls stuffed in his mouth. It was
the guy who took the crap on the tombstone.
I started to learn some of their language.
I found that when G.I.’s used Vietnamese words, the way the G.I.’s said
them, some of the Vietnamese thought they were speaking English. Like dinky
dow which is supposed to mean crazy. Actually it’s dien cai dau which means
"electric head". Some of the people in the smaller village thought dinky
dow was an English word. They never called anybody an "electric head".
In that village, who had electricity?
You have to hold your mouth in just the right
position to say their words. When it comes out right it sounds like metal
ringing and each word has a little tune and if you’re off-key it means
something else. And all these little marks they put on letters when they
write - when I went to this old mama-san and showed her my design for this
BLACK HILL FOREVER T-shirt I’m wearing, she laughed. What I wrote in Vietnamese
the first time was BLACK HILL WANTS TO LAY DOWN.
I know I never would learn all their language,
but there was one old man, he wasn’t the official leader, but everybody
in the village looked up to him. They had a big get-together at his place,
then he brought his grandson over to me and said he wanted the boy to get
a job with the US army as an interpreter.
Well, this was the boy the Americans called
Tommy. In the village they called him Tom, which is Vietnamese for shrimp.
He was thirteen years old and he looked about ten. He had been hanging
around the base camp begging candy from the G.I.’s for a couple of years
and he had gotten where he could take apart an M-16 rifle and put it back
together blindfolded. He would do all kinds of magic tricks for candy with
plastic coke cups and playing cards and stuff. And he had learned a whole
lot of English. The old man explained through him that he had a plan to
make peace in the area.
So first we had to get Tommy admitted to the
South Vietnamese government’s Regional Forces. A lot of the teenager boys
in the village belonged. One of them was just 14 - his rifle was almost
as tall as he was. But Tommy was the youngest. He got in and got assigned
as an interpreter, and his mother got his pay check. She needed it. His
dad had been killed in the war.
Tommy was assigned to me. We went and talked
to people in all the villages around there. Tommy had kin folks in all
of them. I remember we walked in one old lady’s house and she started to
take her picture of Ho Chi Minh off the wall. I laughed and had Tommy explain,
"You don’t need to do that. All we need from you is to know that this village
won’t fire on the G.I.’s." I went around with him and explained that in
all the villages around there. They dug it. They were like the folks on
my island - they wanted to be able to trade with both sides.
The word got around that Tommy had been turned
over to me by the old man to make sure his village and all his kin folk’s
villages didn’t get destroyed. Like Monkey, my girlfriend, and her brother
and some others had checked me out and told everybody I was cool. People
even let me be around when a woman had a baby, as she squatted on the dirt
floor of her house. I brought some disinfectant for her.
I spread the word to my brothers around the
base camp. We all got BLACK HILL FOREVER T-shirts stenciled by the mama-san.
We would leave empty cigarette cartons on the ground so the VC patrols
would know we were around and go the other way. They would break a bunch
of branches to make it real obvious they were there and our patrols would
go the other way. Tommy had done a lot of explaining to a lot of people.
So everything got pretty mellow for a little while. I even came across
a Viet Cong patrol once. They didn’t want to shoot - that would bring more
Americans. They just sat down with me and gave me a long pipe full of pot
and opium to smoke and we played a card game - something like fan-tan.
During that time, we only got fired on once.
A South Vietnamese unit came and camped next to our base camp. They were
pissed off to see G.I.’s with Vietnamese woman. They had a song that went:
"I flunked my
exams, got drafted, became a sergeant
Wife, stay home,
lay G.I.’s to feed our kids
And when mountains
are square and rivers are round
I’ll come home
and see G.I. kids in my house."
That night a mortar shell from them landed
in our base camp and killed a couple of men. We were completely unprepared
because the South Vietnamese were supposed to be the friendly soldiers.
Their commanding officer made a big apology the next day, said it was all
just an accident.
Well, that was our only problem but soon my real close brothers and
myself got sent away from Black Hill. Before I left, my girlfriend, Monkey,
and her brother told me "You’ve gotta go back and organize among your own
people in the US to stop this war." And me and all my blood brothers, we
had the birthday party for one of us that I told you about when I met you
at Clu’s. We all had our BLACK HILL FOREVER T-shirts on and we all said
we gotta do something to stop all this shit.
We had a good time at the party but then they took us to this place
a long ways from Black Hill and it was all fires and explosions and I got
wounded and sent home and here I am.
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