Casualties of War Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Part One

  Chapter One: The View from Here

  Chapter Two: Only You Can Prevent Forests

  Chapter Three: Eyes of the World

  Chapter Four: Death’s Own Bubble Gum Card

  Chapter Five: Transference

  Part Two

  Chapter Six: Tour of Many Duties

  Chapter Seven: You Can Go Home Again. Briefly.

  Chapter Eight: Back to Cat

  Chapter Nine: Da Nang

  Chapter Ten: I’s of the World

  Chapter Eleven: Allegiance

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Rudi doesn’t write. Ivan doesn’t write. Morris writes, but two of the three guys I saw practically every day of my life since I was nine have disappeared from my sight and sound. Despite the fact that we all four have flown to the opposite side of the world to be in this together. We haven’t dispersed to the four corners of the earth. We have all dispersed to this same sweaty corner. We stood up to everything together when the biggest threat we faced was having some tough guy look at somebody sideways. Now that the threat is having a tough guy fixing you in the crosshairs of his assault rifle or laying a booby trap to blow all your limbs off, we can’t manage to keep in regular contact.

  Rudi said all along he wouldn’t write to me. Said he was afraid of how I would judge his letter writing. Afraid. The numbskull was preparing to slog his way with the US Marine Corp through some of the bloodiest fighting the world has ever seen, and he was afraid of my editorial eye.

  But then, he broke down and he wrote. Which was good.

  But then, he just stopped. Which was very bad. Better if he just never started than if he started and stopped again. Makes me worry.

  Ivan. He never said he wouldn’t write. Never said he would, either. I’m not surprised, I guess. Nothing would surprise me about Ivan.

  You would think Ivan and I are about as opposite as friends can get, and you’d be essentially correct. But there’s more to us than that. If you cut us open and counted our rings you’d find there’s a lot more alike about us than different. Like most people, I fear and respect Ivan, which is pretty much exactly what he would like to hear. But I also know him, which he might find a little less welcome of an idea.

  He is, more than anybody I have ever met, the true sensitive brute. He’s the only person I know who could, and would — and has — beat the daylights out of a guy for hurting his feelings. I would strongly suggest to the North Vietnamese that they not hurt Ivan’s feelings.

  It’s hard to explain Rudi and me. Hard for me, that is — Rudi’d never be able to manage it. Probably the thing that says the most with the least about us is that, when Rudi was threatened with getting kept back — for a second time — toward the end of seventh grade, he didn’t tell his hero, Ivan, or his unofficial nanny, Morris. He came to me. He had to get respectable grades for the final two months of the year, homework and exams, in science and math. Not only did we work side by side like the Wright brothers hammering thoughts into that head of his. Not only did I basically do approximately seventy percent of the homework assignments just to ensure he made the minimum. Not only did I give countless hours of time that could have been spent thinking about Evelyn DelValle.

  On top of all that, I did C-level work. I hated myself for two months.

  And we are the only two people who know about it, to this day. By mutual agreement.

  And then there is Morris.

  Morris is at the other end of the communication scale. He is a Navy man, radioman, and self-appointed guardian angel for our group. Morris is the guy who holds the four of us together. It was his idea to make the one-for-all-and-all-for-one pact that if one of us was going to Vietnam then we all were. And it was his stated aim right from the start of this great and awful experiment that he was going to watch over the rest of us. First from his ship, the USS Boston stationed off the coast. And now, in a different way, over the airwaves and from a much smaller boat, a river monitor. He’s the friend monitor, on the river.

  The reality, though, is somewhat different. We all know that, if anybody’s watching over anybody else here, it’s the Air Force. And that’s me. I’m flying over everybody, and watching.

  And I don’t much like what I see. Because what I see is danger and destruction in all its variety and in every direction. This country is gorgeous — I mean, gorgeous — to the point where I spend half my time thinking I could come back here and live once the war is over.

  If there’s anything left of it, when the war is over.

  What I would like to see is the four of us. Together again. Morris — of course, Morris — has a grand plan to make this happen. Not just eventually, when we get home. But soon, here in Vietnam.

  It’s a long shot, but if it is possible to get something accomplished by pure will and goodness, then Morris is the guy to get it done.

  Meanwhile, the rest of us will proceed with fighting this thing.

  Maybe part of the problem is that they make war sound so cool.

  I was delivered by Hercules to Phu Cat.

  That is a true factual statement, and every time I say it, it gives me a small flutter of thrill because I’ve never said anything that sounded so slick in my life. It sounds far cooler than “a plane dropped me off in South Vietnam,” which would be civilian-speak for the same operation. I was delivered by Hercules to Phu Cat. The guy who can say that about himself gets style points just for living, and I can say it.

  There is a lot of that kind of thing, in the military generally, and in the United States Air Force specifically.

  Operation Rolling Thunder. How does that not grab you? It grabs me, and I don’t even want to be here. How about Operation Arc Light? Steel Tiger? Barrel Roll, Eagle Thrust, Bolo, Flaming Dart? A guy’s got to feel charged up knowing he is flying as part of something that sounds so sure of itself and potent, doesn’t he? Especially if he goes riding in on, say, an F-4 Phantom, a Super Sabre, or a Thunderchief. If you’re dropping tonnage on people from a B-52 Stratofortress it’s a wonder those people don’t just surrender out of sheer awe and intimidation before the bombs even hit the ground.

  But, they don’t.

  It’s almost the scariest part of the whole war. And that is saying something, with all the scary, scary parts of this war. Nobody over on their side appears to be quitting or even thinking about quitting, no matter how much we shoot and blast and bomb and torch their coast, their highlands, their riverbanks, their open plains, and their jungles.

  I know this, because I’m seeing it. Because I’m doing it.

  I’m fighting my portion of the war from the sky, aboard a C-123 “Provider” aircraft, which right away defies the notion that the military doesn’t have a sense of humor. What the Provider provides is Agent Orange, one of a range of defoliants we use to burn the life out of the vegetation of this dense and lush place. Without the vegetation, the enemy cannot hide out there and move supplies around and kill our guys at will. I understand the aim. The aim, anyway, I understand.

  We always get shot at. Always. Operation Ranch Hand involves flying big aircraft, slowly, at low altitude, into areas that are by definition hot with enemy combatants. I know, where can I get some of that, right?

  My father and my mother and my sisters all thought I was an idiot for giving up my student deferment to volunteer to fight in Vietnam. We are a university-proud family. I think my dad graduated from Tufts when he was about twelve or something. I have one cousin who went to a technical college back in Boston and the family only speaks of him in hushed tones, like he went to the Walpole State Prison rather than the Wentworth Institute of Technology.

  “We’re not better than anybody else, Hans,” I said when explaining my enlistment to my father. He’s always been Hans to me. He, like most everybody, calls me by my last name, Beck.

  “Hnnn,” he said.

  “What does that mean? Hnnn?”

  “It means don’t do it. Don’t be a foolish kid, Beck, because you are not a foolish kid. It is nice that you have friends, and that you are loyal to those friends …”

  Hans is not the type of father who leaves spaces in his speech casually.

  “But …?”

  “The universe has better plans for you, Beck.”

  “Better than it has for the other guys, is that it?”

  The bigger the pause, the less the casual.

  “Hans? Honest, now. Please.”

  “Fine, maybe it has other plans for Morris. But war has always been the plan for Ivan. If war didn’t exist, it would have to be invented to give him something to do. As for Rudi …” He sighed, exhaling long enough for three lungs. “He’s a good boy.”

  “He’s a good boy, right. They’re all good boys. I’m a good boy.”

  “You are,” he said, and there was a slight crack in his normal certainty about everything, always. “You are a good boy, my boy.”

  “And we good boys made a pledge to one another and good boys keep their word to one another, don’t they, Hans?”

  What occurred then was not a pause. It was a stop. My dad leaned forward, looked at the floor, clasped his hands together with his index fingers upright like he was going to do Here is the church, and here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.

  “I am not antiwar, son,” he said as if he was having his blood drained off at the same time. “I am anti-you in this war.”

  I had no strong comeback to that.

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; “We are a family of logic,” he went on. “Sense is what we believe in, and this makes no rational sense. This … is kids’ stuff. I’m sorry, but this — pledges and promises and bad decisions, it’s all boyhood dreaming and nothing to do with the real world.”

  We are a family of logic. It is one of the things I am proudest of. Which is why, again, I had no comeback here that would explain this well enough.

  “I know,” I said. “I understand. Still, I have to go.”

  “I know,” he said. “I understand. Still, I had to try.”

  We shook hands. My father is a hugger. It was the saddest moment of my life when I had to trade that in for a handshake. Then we agreed that we were both too cowardly to tell my mom and sisters so weeks went by before suspicious-looking mail came for me and my mother stood there in my bedroom doorway, the letter in one hand and her other hand pointing determinedly up through the ceiling and the roof and the sky, to the sky beyond that sky.

  “You should not be over there fighting. You should be up there, on Apollo missions to the moon.”

  I came very close to pointing out that all those astronauts started out just where I was starting out. But my mother has sharp debating skills and I didn’t want to hear about how the Vietnam War was not the Korean War. The quickest way to get killed would probably be to doubt your mission before you start it.

  Instead, I went for optimism, and my University of Wisconsin–Madison scholarship which was being held for me while I served.

  “Madison will still be there when I come back, Ma,” I said.

  Which did not turn out to be the comfort I had intended, since it hinted at things being or not being, people coming back or not. Which set off all kinds of everything.

  That is how I still see her all the time. Frozen there, wheezing, weeping, her fears spilling onto my rug, her finger pointing to her hopes in the sky.

  I am in the sky.

  But just barely. It is early morning and we are low, barely above the treetops. We have to spray the stuff before the murderous Southeast Asian sun really heats up. Because then the ground cooks and what we get is our own potent herbicide rising right back up to us on a cloud of misty Agent Orange nastiness.

  It’s not actually orange. The name refers to the canister it comes in. To differentiate it from its pals Agents White, Purple, and Blue. They are all fine, effective products as these things go, but there is no question, Orange is the star.

  Despite our best efforts, we get some of it back anyway. It’s unavoidable that some of it wafts back up to us. If we empty our entire one-thousand gallon tank of the stuff and a little bit comes back to us, well, what’s a few gallons of poison among USAF comrades?

  But we all agree we would like to defoliate ourselves as little as possible.

  This crew and I flew our first sorties out of Phu Cat farther north before they moved us down deeper into the south of the country, where we could help out the poor saps fighting on and around the rivers. The Mekong Delta had become a kind of shooting gallery where Vietcong guerillas would unload day and night on the thousands of smaller craft we had working the waterways. There was just too much heavy leafy cover there. And with the 315th Special Operations Wing operating out of both Phan Rang and Phu Cat, it was easy enough to call on my squad, the 12th Special Operations Squadron — we’re all in the same SOS family — to come on down and lend a hand.

  So here we are. Ranch Hands, lending a hand.

  And I still can’t believe what I’m seeing, and doing.

  We are a four-man crew on the 123, the pilot and copilot up front and the other two of us rattling around the spacious accommodation of the aircraft sometimes lovingly referred to as “Thunder Pig.” It’s a fat plane, and the two junior crewmen, myself and a guy named McGuire — who everyone just calls “Fingers” because his thumbs look like extra fingers — do a variety of jobs. We are loadmasters, making sure whatever is on board is placed and balanced so that the plane can fly right. We are mechanics, making small-to-medium repairs and adjustments to the gear. Above all, we see to it that our payload gets squirted where and when it’s supposed to be.

  We tend to have more work to do on the ground before we take off and after we land than we do when it’s spray time. So what happens a lot of the time is, we watch.

  “Whenever we’re up here I feel it a little bit more,” I say to Fingers as we watch the white streamings of Orange spread over the canopy from our five rear jets.

  “Please, Beck, no,” he says, staring off. “This job is hard enough without you narrating everything we do while we’re doing it.”

  “But look at it, Fingers,” I say.

  “I’m looking at it. Doesn’t it look like I’m looking at it?”

  “It’s just so gorgeous,” I say. It’s not even like I am seeing it for the first time every time. It’s like I’ve been here for a thousand years. Second time up, I felt like I knew this countryside like I knew my backyard.

  We are practically skimming the tops of the trees we’re killing. I can just about feel it, like a dog getting his belly rubbed.

  I can just about forget what we’re doing … except I can’t.

  Ping! P-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-ping-bang-crack.

  We are hit. We are hit lots, and it keeps coming. Machine-gun fire, mostly, though now and then a surface-to-air missile whizzes past close enough to whistle in my ear.

  This is routine. This is standard. This is my life.

  Bu-hooom!

  That one was deadly close, and reminds me of another of the 123’s nicknames: “Mortar Magnet.”

  The jets are off now, and we are banking hard to get out of the area as quickly as the big bird can manage. We have one A-1 Skyraider for escort, and I watch from the side as he pours fire down on one of the positions hitting us. But it’s just a diversion to buy us time, to get us up and out because, really, it sometimes seems the 123 is nothing but target practice for these guys.

  Once we have climbed to a safe height and are headed back to base, I steal another minute to just peer down at the country once again.

  From a great height it takes on still another level of beauty. The foliage is so dense and lush, right up to the banks of thousands of miles of rivers, it looks like a green nature jigsaw puzzle down there.

  But it’s starting to show, too. As we return to areas we have showered before, I can see the difference, the effect we are having. There’s a brown patch, and a black patch where it was green a few weeks ago. There is a bald patch where before it was full, overgrown.

  Courtesy of the Providers.

  On the ground, the four of us take a small tour of the aircraft, inside and out. Some of those rounds have torn clear through one side of the fuselage and out the other.

  “Huh,” Captain Avery says, sounding both surprised and matter-of-fact. He has three fingers stuck in a hole in the plane’s underbelly. “This job is dangerous after all.”

  Lieutenant Hall, the copilot, chimes in, “Good thing we’ve got the seamstresses on duty.”

  He means Fingers and me. Because we spend so much of our time doing “patches.” Our plane already has so many sheet-metal Band-Aids — without them, we’d sound like a giant clarinet flying through the air.

  “Yes, sir,” I say to the indirect order. The pilots are already headed back to quarters by the time I answer.

  “You know,” Fingers says to me as we sit together in the cockpit, “if I was as smart as you, I sure would have figured out a way to be somewhere else at this point in time.”

  I am replacing a gauge on the pilot’s side of the instrument panel. A bullet appears to have come right up through the floor between the two seats and shattered the thing without the captain even saying boo about it. Capt. Avery has been flying since Korea, and he acts like his job is nothing more complicated than being a milkman.

  I have the new dial snapped into place but I pause before securing it with the screws. I am in the captain’s seat. I look over the scores of dials and switches, miles of wires, and bunches of buttons and levers. Then I look past all that, through the glass and out over the airfield ahead and the wild countryside beyond that.