Authors: Tobias Wolff
So this personnel officer gave me a way out: if not with honor, at least with the appearance of it. But later that day, drinking in the bar at the receiving center, I changed my mind. After all, it was honor itself that I wanted, true honor, not some passable counterfeit but the kind you could live on the rest of your life. I would refuse the Delta post. I would demand to be sent to the Special Forces, to wherever the latest disaster had created an opening, and hope that by some miracle I’d prove a better soldier than I knew myself to be.
I strengthened my resolve with gin and tonic all through the afternoon. In early evening I left the bar and made my way back to the transients’ barracks. It was hot. A few steps out of the air-conditioning and I was faint, wilting, my uniform plastered to my skin. Near my quarters a party of newly arrived enlisted men sat outside one of the in-processing barns, smoking, silent, trying to look like killers. They didn’t. Their greenness was apparent at a glance, as mine must have been. They still had flesh on their cheeks. Their uniforms hung light on them, without the greasy sag of a thousand sweat baths. And their eyes were still lively and curious. But even if I hadn’t noticed these things I would have recognized them as new guys by their look of tense, offended isolation. It came as a surprise to men joining this hard enterprise that instead of being welcomed they were shunned. But that’s what happened. You noticed it as soon as you got off the plane.
That night we had an alert. I found out later it was just a probe on the perimeter, but I didn’t know this while it was going on and neither did anyone else. The airfield had already been hit by sappers. People had been killed, several planes and helicopters blown
up. It could happen again. You know that an attack is “just a probe” only after it’s over. I stood outside with other fresh arrivals and watched bellowing, half-dressed men run by in different directions. Trucks raced past, some with spinning lights like police cruisers. Between the high, excited bursts of M-16 fire I could hear heavy machine guns pounding away, deep and methodical. Flares popped overhead. They covered everything in a cold, quivering light.
No one came to tell us what was going on. We hadn’t received our issue of combat gear, so we had no weapons or ammunition, no flak jackets, not even a steel helmet. We were helpless. And nobody knew or cared. They had forgotten about us—more to the point, forgotten about me. In this whole place not one person was thinking of me, thinking, Christ, I better take a run over there and see how Lieutenant Wolff is doing! No. I wasn’t on anybody’s mind. And I understood that this was true not only here but in every square inch of this country. Not one person out there cared whether I lived or died. Maybe some tender hearts cared in the abstract, but it was my fate to be a particular person, and about me as a particular person there was an undeniable, comprehensive lack of concern.
It isn’t true that not one person cared. I cared. It seemed to me I cared too much, cared more than was manly or decent. I could feel my life almost as a thing apart, begging me for protection. It was embarrassing. Truly, my fear shamed me. In the morning I went back to the personnel officer and asked him to change my orders. He told me it was too late, but promised he would note my wish to be transferred to the Special
Forces. Later that day I boarded a helicopter for the Delta.
T
HE
V
IETNAMESE DIVISION
to which my battalion belonged was headquartered in My Tho, on the Mekong River. My Tho was an old province capital. The streets were wide and lined with trees. A reservoir ran through a park in the middle of town. The houses had red tile roofs, flowerpots on their windowsills and doorsteps. There were crumbling stucco mansions along the boulevard that fronted the river, their walls still bearing traces of the turquoise, salmon, and lavender washes ordered from France by their previous owners. Most had been turned into apartment houses, a few others into hotels. They had tall shuttered windows and wrought-iron balconies overlooking the street. As you walked past the open doorways you felt a cool breath from the courtyards within, heard the singing of birds, the trickle of water in stone fountains. Across the street, on the bank of the river, was a line of restaurants and bars and antique stores, also a watch repair shop famous in its own right for stealing the movements from Omegas and Rolexes and replacing them with movements of more neighborly manufacture. You could always recognize a fellow from My Tho by the wildly spinning hands on his Oyster Perpetual.
I’d never been to Europe, but in My Tho I could almost imagine myself there. And that was the whole point. The French had made the town like this so they could imagine themselves in France. The illusion was just about perfect, except for all the Vietnamese.
It was a quiet, dreamy town, and a lucky town. For a couple of years now there’d been no car bombs, no bombs in restaurants, no kidnappings, no assassinations. Not in the city limits, anyway. That was very unusual, maybe even unique among province capitals in Vietnam. It didn’t seem possible that luck alone could explain it; there had to be a reason. One theory you heard was that the province chief had been paying tribute to the local Vietcong: not only dollars stolen from the American aid program but American arms and medicine, which he then reported as lost to enemy activity. It was also said that My Tho was an R and R spot for exhausted and wounded guerrillas, their own little Hawaii, and that over time an arrangement had evolved: Don’t bother us and we won’t bother you. Either of these explanations might have been true, or both, but there was definitely some kind of agreement in effect. The town had a druidical circle around it. Inside, take it easy. Outside, watch your ass. My battalion was outside the circle, and I could feel the unseen but absolute gate slam shut behind me every time I left.
My Tho was lucky in another way. Almost no Americans were allowed in town, only a few AID people and those of us who were assigned to the Vietnamese military. By some stratagem My Tho had managed to get itself declared off-limits to regular American troops, and that was its deliverance, because there were several thousand of them up the road at Dong Tam just dying to come in and trash the place.
I was glad the American troops were kept out. Without even meaning to they would have turned the people into prostitutes, pimps, pedicab drivers, and
thieves, and the town itself into a nest of burger stands and laundries. Within months it would have been unrecognizable; such was the power of American dollars and American appetites. Besides, I didn’t want my stock watered down. I took pleasure in being one of a very few white men among all these dark folk, big among the small, rich among the poor. My special position did not make me arrogant, not at first. It made me feel benevolent, generous, protective, as if I were surrounded by children, as I often was—crowds of them, shy but curious, taking turns stroking my hairy arms and, as a special treat, my mustache. In My Tho I had a sense of myself as father, even as lord, the very sensation that, even more than all their holdings here, must have made the thought of losing this place unbearable to the French.
So the American grunts had to keep to their base in Dong Tam, but even in that miserable shithole they had some advantages over those of us who lived with the Vietnamese. They were more secure, as long as they stayed inside the wire. Outside the wire was another story. But inside they were fairly safe, protected by their numbers and by a vast circle of minefields, heavily manned bunkers with interlocking fields of fire, tanks, mobile artillery, and any kind of air support they wanted, in any quantity, at any hour of the day or night. The situation at my battalion was very different. We were stuck by ourselves—one hundred fifty or so men and six howitzers—in a field surrounded by rice paddies. A canal ran along one leg of our perimeter. The water was deep, the muddy banks sheer and slick; it would be hard to attack us from that side. But the canal was the only help we got from topography. Otherwise
the land around us was flat and open and laced with dikes, enough of them to move an army over while another army marched up the road to our front gate. It was a terrible site, chosen for reasons incomprehensible to me.
The troops at Dong Tam were better protected than we were, and better supplied. We were expected to live like our Vietnamese counterparts, which sounded like a noble project, democratic, right-minded, the perfect show of partnership with our hosts and allies—a terrific idea, really, until you actually tried it. Not many did, only a few advisers in the way outback who went the whole nine yards, sleeping in hammocks, eating rats, and padding around on rubber sandals that they swore up and down were better than boots. I admired them, but my own intention was to live not as a Vietnamese among Vietnamese but as an American among Vietnamese.
Living like an American wasn’t easy. Outside the big bases it was a full-time job. When Sergeant Benet and I first arrived at the battalion, the advisers we were supposed to replace were living very close to the bone, or so it seemed to us. They ate C rations. They slept in sleeping bags, on field cots. For light they used oil lamps borrowed from the Vietnamese quartermaster. Sergeant Benet and I agreed that we owed ourselves something better.
We started to scrounge. There wasn’t much else to do. We were advisers, but we didn’t know exactly what advice we were supposed to be giving, or to whom. We rarely saw Major Chau, the battalion commander, and when we did he seemed embarrassed, at a loss as to why we were there. At first he seemed suspicious of
us. Maybe he thought we were supposed to be keeping tabs on him. He had good reason to fear scrutiny, but then so did every officer of rank in that unhappy army. All of them were political intriguers; they had to be in order to receive promotion and command. Their wages were too low to live on because it was assumed they’d be stealing, so they stole. They were punished for losing men in battle, therefore they avoided battle. When their men deserted they kept them on the roster and continued to draw their pay, with the result that the losses were never made up and the units turned into scarecrow remnants hardly able to defend themselves, let alone carry the war to the enemy. Our own battalion was seriously understrength.
I was a pretty good scrounge. Not of the same champion breed as Sergeant Benet, but pretty good. We became partners in horse trading. I was lonely and callow enough to have let friendship happen too, even across the forbidden distance of our ranks, but he knew better and protected me from myself. He never forgot that I was an officer. Even in anger, and I sometimes brought him to anger, he called me sir. This was partly out of habit, the old soldier respectful always of the commission if not the uncertain, hopelessly compromised man who held it. But it was also his way of staying out of reach so he could have a life apart. Still, I could make him laugh, and I knew that he liked me, probably more than he wanted to.
We couldn’t mooch off the Vietnamese, because they didn’t have anything. We had to do our business with the Americans at Dong Tam. At first we simply begged, presenting ourselves as orphans at the gate, hungry, unsheltered, defenseless. This didn’t get us
very far. As more than one supply sergeant said, they weren’t running a charity. If we wanted to play we had to bring something to the party. What we ended up bringing were souvenirs. Most of the men at Dong Tam were support troops who rarely left the base. They never saw any action, nor for that matter did most of the soldiers who did go into the field. The letters they wrote home didn’t always make this clear. In their boredom they sometimes allowed themselves to say things that weren’t strictly true, and in time, as they approached the end of their tours, a fever came upon them to find some enemy artifacts to back up the stories they’d been telling their friends and girlfriends and little brothers.
This stuff was easy enough for us to come by. Sergeant Benet mentioned our needs to some of the battalion officers, and for a consideration in the form of Courvoisier, Marlboros, Seiko watches, and other such goods, cheap in the PX and dear on the street, they set up a pipeline for us: Vietcong flags and battle standards, all convincingly worn and shredded, with unit designations and inspiring communist slogans in Vietnamese; bloodstained VC identity cards; brass belt buckles embossed with hammer and sickle; bayonets similarly decorated; pith helmets of the kind worn by the enemy; and Chicom rifles. Major Chau himself never demanded anything in so many words, and he always accepted what we gave him with a gracious show of surprise. He seemed relieved to find us willing to forgo the steel-jawed American rectitude practiced on him by our predecessors and get down to the business of business. This wasn’t just cynicism and greed. One of our transactions at Dong Tam netted us a haul of
claymore mines, each packing hundreds of ball bearings. If we got attacked they would help fill the holes left by our missing men. We also brought home sandbags, cement, and barbed wire to beef up our perimeter, beehive rounds for the howitzers, and more mines—you could never have too many mines. Fifty thousand wouldn’t have been too many for me. Given the chance, I’d have lived smack in the middle of a minefield twenty miles wide. Anyway, in Major Chau’s situation, which was now our situation, making deals was how you got by.
Chicom rifles were our most valuable stock-in-trade. The other stuff could be faked, and probably was. Why not? What can be faked will be faked. If the locals could put together movements for watches, even ones that ran funny, they wouldn’t have any trouble turning out Vietcong flags and identity cards. In fact some of them must have been producing these things for the VC all along, which put the whole question of authenticity in a new light: if made by the same hands, would enemy equipment be any less real because it was ordered by us instead of them?
We never accused our suppliers of dealing in counterfeits, nor did our agents at Dong Tam accuse us. But they employed a certain tilt of the head when handling fakable items, and allowed their pursed lips the faintest quiver of suppressed mirth. They took what we offered, but at a discount. Only the Chicoms commanded their respect.