Bloods (4 page)

Economically, black folks in America have more money than Canada or Mexico. It’s obvious that we are doing something wrong. When people say we’re illiterate, that doesn’t bother me as much. Literacy means I can’t read these books. Well neither does a Korean or a Vietnamese. But where they’re not illiterate is in the area of economics. Sure, we’re great artists, great singers, play great basketball. But we’re not great managers yet. It’s pretty obvious that you don’t have to have guns to get power. People get things out of this country and they don’t stick up America to do it. Look at the Vietnamese refugees running stores now in the black community where I live.

Right now, I’m an unemployed artist, drawing unemployment. I spent time at a community center helping kids, encouraging kids to draw.

I work for the nuclear-freeze movement, trying to convince people nuclear war is insane. Even when I was in the Marine Corps, I was against nuclear war. When I was a child, I was against nuclear weapons, because I thought what they did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was totally cold. There’s nothing any human being is doing on the planet that I could want to destroy the planet for future generations. I think we should confine war to our century and our times. Not to leave the residue around for future generations. The residue of hate is a horrible thing to leave behind. The residue of nuclear holocaust is far worse.

I went to see
Apocalypse Now
, because a friend paid my way. I don’t like movies about Vietnam ’cause I don’t think that they are prepared to tell the truth.
Apocalypse Now
didn’t tell the truth. It wasn’t real. I guess it was a great thing for the country to get off on, but it didn’t remind me of anything I saw. I can’t understand how you would have a bridge lit up like a Christmas tree. A USO show at night? Guys attacking the women on stage. That made no sense. I never saw us reach the point where nobody is in charge in a unit. That’s out of the question. If you don’t know anything, you know the chain of command. And the helicopter attack on the village? Fuckin’ ridiculous. You couldn’t hear music comin’ out of a helicopter. And attacking a beach in helicopters was just out of the question. The planes and the napalm would go in
first. Then, the helicopters would have eased in after the fact. That was wild.

By making us look insane, the people who made that movie was somehow relieving themselves of what they asked us to do over there. But we were not insane. We were not insane. We were not ignorant. We knew what we were doing.

I mean we were crazy, but it’s built into the culture. It’s like institutionalized insanity. When you’re in combat, you can do basically what you want as long as you don’t get caught. You can get away with murder. And the beautiful thing about the military is there’s always somebody that can serve up as a scapegoat. Like Calley. I wondered why they didn’t get Delta Company 1-9 because of Cam Ne. We were real scared. But President Johnson came out and defended us. But like that was before My Lai. When they did My Lai, I got nervous again. I said my God, and they have us on film.

I was in Washington during the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982. But I didn’t participate. I saw all these veterans runnin’ around there with all these jungle boots on, all these uniforms. I didn’t want to do that. It just gave me a bad feeling. Plus some of them were braggin’ about the war. Like it was hip. See, I don’t think the war was a good thing. And there’s no memorial to Cam Ne, to My Lai. To all those children that was napalmed and villages that were burned unnecessarily.

I used to think that I wasn’t affected by Vietnam, but I been livin’ with Vietnam ever since I left. You just can’t get rid of it. It’s like that painting of what Dali did of melting clocks. It’s a persistent memory.

I remember most how hard it was to just shoot people.

I remember one time when three of our people got killed by a sniper from this village. We went over to burn the village down. I was afraid that there was going to be shootin’ people that day, so I just kind of dealt with the animals. You know, shoot the chickens. I mean I just couldn’t shoot no people.

I don’t know how many chickens I shot. But it was a little pig that freaked me out more than the chickens. You think you gonna be shootin’ a little pig, it’s just gonna fall
over and die. Well, no. His little guts be hangin’ out. He just be squiggling around and freakin’ you out.

See, you got to shoot animals in the head. If we shoot you in your stomach, you may just fall over and die. But an animal, you got to shoot them in the head. They don’t understand that they supposed to fall over and die.

We were in a fire fight one morning. We had our mad minute at six o’clock. We received some fire, and so we just started shooting. I guess maybe about eight o’clock a dust-off came in to take out a wounded guy. And they came and asked for me, and they told me that I was rotating. Going home right in the middle of the fire fight. I hadn’t kept up with my days. I didn’t have a short-time calendar. So I was a little surprised. So they took me back to An Khe for me to clear base camp.

I went downtown and bought a few trinkets to give people. A opium pipe. Four or five of those little jackets that said on the back, “I know I’m goin’ to heaven, ’cause I done spent my time in hell.” I grabbed my stuff out of the connex and put it in two of those Air Vietnam suitcases and my two duffel bags. And I went to the airstrip for the Caribou that would fly me into Pleiku.

When I got to Pleiku, I guess it was about 4
P.M
. They
said the plane was gonna be comin’ in about seven. Then Pleiku started gettin’ hit, and the plane didn’t come in. And they had us in a secure area with no weapons while Pleiku was being mortared. So we had to spend the night.

The plane to take us to Japan got there the next morning. And it picked up two rounds as we were leaving. And this white guy got hit. Killed. And he was rotating home, too. And his body, it stayed on the plane until we got to Japan.

From Japan, they flew us to Oakland. Then they gave us uniforms, ’cause when I left ’Nam I was still in jungle fatigues. And I took a shower, put on my Class A’s, got my records. Finally they let us go, and I caught a bus over to the San Francisco airport and got home about three o’clock that morning.

My mother didn’t keep up with my days left either, so she was surprised when I called from San Francisco. She met the plane. I said, “Mom, I’m happy to be home.” And she said, “I’m happy to see you here with everything. It’s God’s blessing that you didn’t get hurt.” My father wasn’t there ’cause he worked at night, driving eighteen-wheelers.

I went right out into the streets in my uniform and partied. Matter fact, got drunk.

I wasn’t sleepy. I was still hyped up. And East St. Louis is a city that never closes. So I went to a place called Mother’s, which was the latest jazz joint in town.

A lot of people knew me, so everybody was buying me drinks. Nobody was asking me how Vietnam was, what Vietnam was all about. They just was saying, “Hey, happy to see you back. Get you a drink?” They were happy I made it back, because a lot of my friends who had been over there from my city had came home dead in boxes, or disabled.

Finally, I got guys that asked me what it was really like. And when I was trying to explain it, after a while, I saw that they got disinterested. So I just didn’t talk about it anymore. I was just saying, “I’m happy to be home. I hope I’ll never have to go back.”

I had six more months to go, so they sent me to Fort Carson in Colorado. There weren’t any more airborne soldiers on post but me and maybe five or six. We either
had come back from Vietnam or were getting ready to go.

Well, I ran into this officer. Second lieutenant. Just got out of OCS. He asked me if I was authorized to wear a combat infantryman’s badge and jump wings. I told him, “You damn right. I earned them.” He didn’t like that answer. So I said, “You can harass me now, sir, but you can’t go over in Vietnam and do that shit.” So he ended up giving me a Article 15 for disrespect. And I got busted one rank and fined $25.

That was just another nail in the coffin to keep me from reuping. I didn’t want career military nohow.

I told him taking my stripe away from me wasn’t shit. And he couldn’t do nothing to me, ’cause they couldn’t send me back to Vietnam. He didn’t enjoy that, so he tried to make it hard for me until
he
got shipped out. And when I heard he had orders for ’Nam, I went and found him and laughed at him and told him that he wasn’t gon’ make it back.

“Somebody’s gon’ kill you,” I said. “One of your own men is gon’ kill you.”

I enlisted in the Army to stay out of the Marines. I had went to college for a semester at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. But the expenses had gotten too much for my family, so I went and got me a job at McDonnell Aircraft as a sheet-metal assembler. About eight months later, two guys I went to high school with got drafted by the Marines. So I joined the Army so I could get a choice.

It was August of ’65. I was twenty.

My father was not too hot about it. He was in World War II, in France and Germany. He was a truck driver on the Red Ball Express, gettin’ gas to Patton’s tanks. He resented the Army because of how they treated black soldiers over there, segregated and not with the same support for white soldiers.

My left ear was pierced when I was nine just like my father’s left ear was pierced when he was nine. Grandmother said all the male warriors in her mother’s tribe in Africa had their ears pierced. Her mother was born in Africa. You can imagine the teasing I got in high school for wearing an earring. But I felt in this small way I carry
on the African tradition. I would go in the Army wearing the mark of the African warriors I descend from.

I did my basic and my AIT at Fort Leonardwood, Missouri. “Lost in the Woods,” yeah. Trained for combat engineer to build bridges, mountain roads. But we didn’t build too many bridges. Cleared a lot of LZs. Did a lot of demolition work.

I was sent to An Khe, 8th Engineers Battalion, and attached to the 1st of the 9th of the Cav. It was in February, after the first battle of the Ia Drang Valley, when 300 Cav troops got wiped out in the first real fight anybody had with the NVA. I was one of those replacements.

We probed for mines, blew up mines, disarmed and blew up booby traps. If you saw a trip wire, you could take a look at what was happening. You could see where the booby trap was, then throw a grenade at the beginning of the booby trap. Or shoot up the trail to make ’em go off. The land mines, ones you had to dig up, was the big problem, ’cause they could have another one planted somewhere next to it.

And you had to worry about crimping right and taking your time. You squeeze the blasting cap and the fuse together so they won’t come apart. Crimping, right. But if you don’t crimp right, like an inch high from the bottom of the cap, it will blow you up. And you can’t be rushed by some second lieutenant, telling you, “Hurry up, hurry up, so we can move on.” If you rush, something wrong would happen. We lost three guys from rushing or crimping wrong.

One time I had to get a guy off a mine. It looked like it was impossible.

This infantry unit was on a little trail. west of Pleiku, makin’ a sweep towards the Ia Drang Valley. This white dude had stepped on a mine. And knew it. He felt the plunger go down. Everybody moved away from him, about 20 meters. So they called for the engineers, and somebody asked for Light Bulb.

I have a nickname from the streets of East St. Louis. Light Bulb. Came from a friend of mine when we were growing up, ’cause he said I was always full of ideas.

When I got there on the chopper, he’s been standin’ there for over an hour. He really wasn’t in any panic. He
was very calm. He knew if he alleviated any of the pressure, both of us would have got destroyed.

I dug all around the mine with my bayonet and found out that it was a Bouncin’ Betty. I told him I was gonna try to diffuse it. But the three-prong primer on the Bouncin’ Betty had gotten in between the cleats on his jungle boots, so there wasn’t any way I could deal with it. So I said let’s see if we could kind of change the pressure by him takin’ his foot out of his boot and me keepin’ the pressure by holding his boot down. That way he could get out uninjured. But when he started doin’ that, I thought I was seein’ the plunger rise, so I told him to stop.

I guess maybe I’d been working with him for maybe an hour now.

Then I got the idea. I knew when the plunger would depress, the Bouncin’ Betty would bounce up about 3 feet and then explode. So I got the other members of his team together, and I tied a rope around his waist. And everybody, including me, moved off about 20 yards from the mine and him. And when I counted to three, everyone would pull on the rope and snatch him about 15 feet off the mine. And it would bounce up its 3 feet and then explode. And it did that. And the only damage that he received was the heel of his jungle boot was blown off. No damage to him.