Larry's Vietnam Narrative

Song Cau

A Vietnam War Narrative

by Lawrence V Fairchild

2004

© 2003 Lawrence V. Fairchild, San Diego, CA

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Introduction

I want to explain why it took a long time to write this down.

I have never expressed any complete part of it to anyone, not even to my own family. Mainly because it is just so alien to American sensibility. I think that communication requires an inferred sense of shared experience. For an American survivor of serious combat, that inference seldom can be made.

I think it reflects the naivety of peace more than the brutality of war.

I ask that you forgive my avoidance of giving face to the men I served with, both American and Vietnamese. Lieutenant Lee Anh Tuan, my counterpart and Commanding Officer of the Coastal Group and Navy Base. Lieutenant Junior Grade Brooks Alexander… All American basketball player and the gentlest man I have ever known. Petty Officers Whipple, Pearl and Odom. They are good men, but I cannot speak for them. Combat is intimate. Near as they were, they weren’t there. They experienced something else.

References to my rank may be confusing. The Vietnamese used Army terminology for all services, including the Navy. So I will use “Lieutenant” when expressing myself in English, and “Captain” (“Dai Uy”) when translating from Vietnamese.

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I was sorting through boxes of stuff in my parents’ basement and ran across letters, clippings and photographs that motivated me to write this down. It is an account of my tour in Vietnam in 1970.

I was a Navy Lieutenant, 26 years old. I had served tours in two ships operating offshore Vietnam. We provided gunnery support to Marines in South Vietnam, dueled with shore batteries in North Vietnam, directed the extraction of downed pilots and tried to shoot down MIG's with our missiles. Blue water Navy things, in which I was deeply involved.

But it was different than the combat I experienced on the ground.

In 1969 I was "drafted" to be an advisor to the South Vietnamese Navy. It was a sort of honor to be chosen.

We were trained to speak the language. Also to operate autonomously. We were pretty much on our own, sent out to do whatever we thought needed to be done with minimal direction from above.

We were told that we suffered the highest casualty rate of any organization in Vietnam. I don't know if that is literally true. But it may well be. We were extraordinarily vulnerable.

Our safety depended on the South Vietnamese sailors we advised. We were in remote places with little backup. Many of us, including me, didn’t even have radio contact with American forces. We had virtually no “logistics tail.” We were on the line without clerks, cooks, technicians or logistic support.

We relied a lot on “cumshaw,” which is making do by creative and less than legal means. We traded lobsters for truck parts.

Almost none of us worked in safe places. We seldom participated in massive campaigns but we were constantly exposed and never enjoyed sanctuary.

I was assigned as Senior Advisor to Coastal Group 23, part of the South Vietnamese “Junk Force.” They patrolled coastal waters in 40-foot wooden junks, lightly armed and capable of no more than 8 knots. They were often featured in the U.S press, I think partly because the large eyes painted on the bows of their boats made them photogenic. Even National Geographic did a feature on the Junk Force.

I was based in a village on the central coast of South Vietnam. Song Cau, in Phu Yen province. My American advisory team consisted of only four men. There were about seventy Vietnamese sailors, plus their wives and children, who were housed on the base.

Song Cau (“River Mouth”) is beautiful and remote. It is on a small bay with blinding white beaches, crystal clear water, tall coconut palms and low green mountains hard up against a narrow coastal strip.

Song Cau is a fishing village. I am guessing that its population was over a thousand. It was the District Headquarters, roughly equivalent to a county seat.

The open-air market was large, serving many smaller villages in the area. It was colorful… with squealing piglets trussed up in wicker and tuna laid out on planks to be cut to order by the whack of a cleaver.

Most of the locals were Roman Catholic; the military were mostly Buddhist.

Nuoc mam was manufactured there, a fermented anchovy sauce used in Vietnamese cuisine. The far, shallow end of the bay (a few miles north) had salt flats, salt in large quantities being essential for producing nuoc mam.

If you want to know what nuoc mam is to a westerner, read the ingredients on a bottle of Worcestershire sauce.

In recent years I have been prone to browse Vietnam travel guides whenever I visit a bookstore. I look for Song Cau in the index. Usually it is not listed. But in a few it is, and is described as being located on a remote bay alongside the coastal highway with a resort that has its own generator, providing the only electricity available for many miles in any direction. That resort is, precisely, the South Vietnamese Navy base where I served.

I arrived in Song Cau in January 1970. My early months, I realize now, were relatively easy compared to the experience of many other Vietnam veterans. There were no North Vietnamese forces to deal with. The Viet Cong in the area seemed like lethal juvenile delinquents. The danger was minimal and the sense of right was with us. I would compare it to being a policeman in a dangerous neighborhood.

We conducted visits to isolated coastal villages to distribute basic medical assistance. But our main goal was to provide a positive sense of government to people who had little loyalty to anyone but their neighbors.

I, and my men, occasionally went on weeklong patrols in the boats. That was mostly symbolic; we couldn’t help much. We went on land operations, usually night insertions into hostile areas along the coast to set up ambushes. But we never made contact while I was there. We conducted night patrols along hostile beaches in our black Boston Whaler. But no contact there either.

It felt to me as if we were hunting a couple of mountain men in Yellowstone National Park.

I have just summarized my first four months in Vietnam. Perhaps I’ve over-summarized, or even trivialized, as I also did in describing my earlier shipboard experiences.

I wasn’t doing nothing before this story. I had logged almost three years in the combat zone.

But this story isn’t that story. And this story, which involves just a few weeks, was life altering for me.

Things began to change that spring.

In April there was an incident; the memory of it chokes me up even now. I didn’t realize then that it was an indication of things to come.

But first, try hard to absorb this scenario.

Our base was an old French police compound located on a large sand spit. Visualize: The spit tended northeast, sort of like the Yucatan peninsula, except that the total area was only an acre or two. The landside was a small harbor created by the mouth of a small stream. The seaward side was the bay itself. This seaward side of the spit included the District Headquarters, actually a separate Militia compound with a few U.S. Army advisors. The base was surrounded by a substantial wall of sandbags topped by rolls of barbed wire. The landside boundary at the head (bottom/south) of the spit was hard up against civilian homes.

Vietnamese Highway One was a gravel road in Song Cau and it ran right up against our main gate at the head of the spit, across a short timber bridge over the stream and then on up the coast. Of particular relevance to this incident, there were civilian homes lining the landside of the road as it continued north beyond the little bridge.

We had a big diesel generator. It was an Air Force unit designed to support remote airfields. It was the only electric generator for more than 20 miles. We used it only at night, its primary purpose being to power perimeter lights. These were common streetlights mounted on tall poles all around the base. It will become significant later in this narrative that they focused a lot of light on the road and on the small inner harbor.

The incident: I will describe it as I experienced it, and then explain what I later learned had happened.

I was awakened in the early morning by the sound of automatic AK-47 fire, very close by. This, in that environment, generated very much adrenaline. It came from the general direction of our main gate. There was a pause and then two grenade blasts in quick succession.

I reached the main gate in less than a minute. I always slept clothed and booted. I had my M-16, locked and loaded, and a bandoleer of fresh 20-round clips around my neck. The entire base was at battle stations.

It was eerily quiet. Then a small boy, about four years old, came out of the dark into the bright perimeter lights about fifty yards up the road. He was wearing underwear shorts. His right leg was bloody. He stood in the middle of the road facing back toward me, extended his arms stiffly down at an angle, as if warding something off, and began to wail.

Just the sound of it would have torn the heart out of anyone.

I hesitated. I opened the gate and ran up the road to grab the boy.

It is clear, in hindsight, that the enemy were gone. But I did not know that. So it was probably the riskiest thing I have ever done in my life.

The boy, surely because he saw an armed, uniformed, foreign adult running at him, turned and ran screaming into the darkness. I stopped.

My action had activated the Vietnamese sailors and a few of them came running behind me, then on into the darkness in pursuit of the boy.

I returned to the gate, devastated by the boy’s frightened response.

A few minutes passed and the sailors came back down the road into the light leading an older boy, about seven years old, who had the wounded boy by the hand. It was his older brother, uninjured.

We treated the wound, which turned out not to be serious.

Here is what had happened: The enemy, probably the Viet Cong, had sent a two man assassination team to kill the boy’s father. He was a Hamlet Chief from an outlying village visiting the District Chief in Song Cau. He and his family had been put up in a house for the night. It was the first house beyond the small bridge just across the road from our gate.

The family included father, mother, infant daughter and two sons. They had been lined up against a wall and machine-gunned. Then two grenades had been tossed in as the assassins made their retreat. The two boys had escaped by pushing through a woven mat wall to the outside. The father, mother and infant girl were killed outright.

What haunts me is how that child in such need ran from me in such terror. That is what makes tears well up whenever I talk about it.

I also remember how his grim-faced, dry-eyed older brother took charge. That seven-year-old was braver than I was on the bravest night of my life.

What we were to learn was that the assassins were conducting operations to intimidate the locals in preparation for the arrival of North Vietnamese Army regulars, who would soon rock Song Cau in a big way.

Years later, history books have revealed to me what was happening in 1970. I knew none of this at the time.

U.S. forces were massing on the Cambodian border in preparation for what would become known as the Cambodian Incursion, or “Nixon’s Invasion of Cambodia.” The North Vietnamese ordered small units to infiltrate eastward to attack easy, isolated targets along the coast. The idea was to trick the Americans into diverting forces from the Cambodian border to the coast, which, in reality, was not then threatened by North Vietnamese strategy.

So Song Cau was one of those easy, isolated coastal targets. It was a one shot deal, a diversion, a historical footnote if even that. Nonetheless, it was lethal to many of us who lived and served there.

OK… back to my story as I saw it on the ground.

The exact time span is fuzzy… but I think that about a week went by. Through Vietnamese channels we were hearing about enemy activity inland. Mostly brief nighttime occupation of small hamlets by armed, uniformed Viet Cong. I guess we were a little more nervous than usual, but not much really.

A Chinese Opera company came to s. It was a big deal in Song Cau, an annual event.

They were to perform in the town theater.

The theater was a source of civic pride. It sat on a grassy lot about two blocks from our base. An electric line had been strung to the theater. This allowed them to run a projector to show movies on Saturday nights. There was even an American style, glass enclosed popcorn machine… a true oddity and treasure.

It intrigued me that everyone’s favorite actor seemed to be Robert Taylor. Whenever I went to a Vietnamese barber, he would insist on shaving my hairline so that I would look like “Bobby Taylor.”

The theater itself resembled a large barn. It had a timber frame with corrugated metal roof and sides. Inside, it had a dirt floor and a raised wooden stage. There were some folding metal chairs but most of the audience just squatted or stood.

The night of the Chinese opera, in early May, I was invited to attend as a local dignitary along with the District Chief, Head Priest, School Principal and Navy Commander. We all sat in a row of folding chairs at the front of the audience.

A Chinese opera is bewildering to a westerner. All gaudy costumes, extreme makeup, flags and banners, exaggerated dancing and singsong music. The closest most Americans have seen is films of grandiose Red Chinese operas celebrating Mao and communism. I had no clue as to what was going on onstage, but the Vietnamese enjoyed it.

In retrospect, a brief hubbub at the entrance should have raised a red flag. An eleven-year-old boy was caught trying to enter with a hand grenade in his pocket. His target was probably those of us sitting so conveniently in a compact group at the front of the theater.

In what I perceived to be an annual tradition, members of the opera company were invited to dinners hosted by each of the local dignitaries. Four of them came to the Navy base.

It was a nice party, held in the Officers’ Mess… a screened-in structure perched on stilts over the inner harbor.

My counterpart toasted me in Vietnamese and I replied in Vietnamese with a pun. He said “Captain! Do you like beer very much?” And, by transposing “very much” to “much very” (“qua nhieu” to “nhieu qua”), I replied “Captain! I like beer too much!” A big hit with the opera crowd, who didn’t know that I spoke the language.

The party broke up around midnight. My counterpart asked me to drive the opera company members back to the theater where they were to spend the night.

We arrived at the theater, got out of the jeep and exchanged pleasantries and good nights.

The night was suddenly full of the sound of incoming mortar rounds. It is a loud whistling sound caused by a small turbine-like propeller on the projectile that prevents it from detonating prematurely. It is just like, but louder than, the sounds you have heard in overdramatic war movies.

Then they hit with sharp “whomps.” On about the third or fourth explosion, the metal wall of the theater beside us sounded a “braang” and a couple of holes appeared in the windshield of my jeep… small holes with radiating, starburst cracks.

My jeep being the best cover in the immediate area, we all got behind it. I was in civilian clothes but I had a Colt 45 in my waistband. I pulled it out and chambered a round. Suddenly I was surrounded by more Vietnamese opera persons who had been, similarly, bidding good night to their hosts.

They knew a firearm when they heard it.

The frightened part of me was frozen in anticipation of North Vietnamese soldiers charging from the shadows. A mortar barrage can be prelude to a ground attack, and I was not adequately armed or positioned to ward them off.

But it soon became apparent that the Navy base was the target and that the theater was safe.

The barrage ended and our counter-barrage began. I waved the opera people back into the theater, jumped into the jeep and raced back to the base.

I slid the jeep to a halt in front of the advisors’ quarters and ran to get my M-16.

Suddenly the lights went out. They had hit the generator. The radiator had been punctured and the cooling water reservoir ran dry. I was blind, groping.

When the lights went out loud splashing sounds erupted in the inner harbor. I worried that it was sappers swimming across the short distance to blow us to smithereens. More unneeded adrenalin.

I finally found a flashlight and then my M-16, bandoleer and equipment belt. I ran to the command bunker.

The inner harbor quickly quieted down. We later concluded that the noise was sea life, probably shrimp, reacting to the sudden absence of light.

It became apparent that the attack was over. So I left the bunker to see where I could help.

The first place I went was to the Vietnamese officers’ quarters, a converted French jailhouse. The Vietnamese were gathering casualties there.

In the first heart-wrenching experience of the night, I found a sailor’s dead wife there. She was pregnant. Nine months I reckoned. In any case she was very big. She had a through and through head wound, yet her face was clean and composed. Her husband was kneeling beside her, holding her hand and sobbing.

I unsheathed my knife to go after the baby. A Vietnamese officer grasped my shoulder very firmly and discretely shook his head “no.” So I backed off.

I sometimes think about that decision. Should I have persisted? I know that I could have. Was the baby even alive? Could I have pulled it off with no medical knowledge, a Puma knife and a flashlight?

Meanwhile, one of my advisory team had been working on the generator. He smashed some truck batteries to obtain tar, patched the radiator, refilled the reservoir and got the generator back on line. The lights came back on.

I returned to the command bunker and the second trauma of the evening.

My focus was to establish radio contact with American authorities to report the attack and request support. This meant that I had to catch a ship at sea to relay for me. As I began that effort they brought in a severely injured sailor and laid him next to me. It could not have been anyone worse.

He was a young man I had become very close to.

I first met him, months before, when he knocked at my door and asked me to help him learn English. I agreed and he came by every evening to practice his lessons. He became functionally fluent.

Then he invited me to his wedding. He married a girl from a small village near Qui Nhon, a city about 40 miles north of Song Cau.

I went to the wedding and it was a memorable experience. I was the only foreigner there.

I drove to the village. Arriving at mid-morning, I was escorted to a dining hall, seated as the guest of honor among about half a dozen elderly Vietnamese men (most of whom looked a lot like Ho Chi Minh) and began eating a “Nine Course Chinese Banquet.”

There was an engraved menu. It included courses like “Heavenly Dove Soup”… which was a boiled pigeon in a bowl of broth, head hanging out one side, feet out the other and a raw egg floating in the middle. There were other delicacies like braised chicken feet and cilantro with fresh duck’s blood.

I was very polite and ate everything. I finished course nine and they brought out course one again!

The deal was that all the honored male guests were expected to eat continuously until mid-afternoon, when the wedding party (already married, I do not know where) arrived to beg approval. Even that was an impressive ceremony. It was the only time that I got a glimpse of my friend and his bride.

That young sailor had returned from leave the very day of the mortar attack. He was up late in the mess hall telling his friends about his wedding and leave.

When the barrage hit he ran out toward his battle station and right into an exploding mortar round. His face was destroyed. His left eye was definitely gone. His left shoulder was pulverized and his arm would probably be amputated later.

They laid him next to me in the command bunker, where I was busy trying to find a radio relay.

He was frantic. He begged me personally, in English, for help.

“Helicopter Dai Uy. I need helicopter. Please Dai Uy. Get helicopter.” Over and over and over. It didn’t help that I couldn’t even find a relay, much less get a helicopter.

It was ripping me apart. I had to shut him up.

I ran to my quarters and opened my safe to get morphine. I had a package of a dozen or so doses. I knew that you are not supposed to give morphine to a man with a head wound but I had decided that I had to do it.

You have to understand this, which I did not: A military morphine dose comes in a small foil tube, like a miniature toothpaste tube. On the top is a short hypodermic needle covered by a rigid, bubble-like plastic protector. You have to push on the protector to drive the needle back through the seal on the foil tube before you remove it to inject the morphine. I didn’t know that.

I pulled the protector off of the first tube, shoved the needle into his shoulder and squeezed the tube until it ruptured, spraying morphine all over both of us. I tried again. Same thing. And again. And again.

I don’t remember how it ended. I was sobbing and slamming needles into him one after another with such force that it must have seemed like I was beating him. I think the Vietnamese officers must have thought I was going crazy and pulled him out of there.

I was just nuts for a while.

The next thing I remember is that helicopters started arriving. I don’t even know if I got them or somebody else did. My friend and about four dozen other wounded got their helicopters.

By the time our work was done the sun was coming up. I climbed out of the bunker and lay on my back on the roof. It was very hot. I was still in civilian clothes… chinos, polo shirt and deck shoes. I was completely soaked in my own sweat and stained by other people’s blood.

The Vietnamese Commanding Officer climbed out and flopped down beside me. Then he turned and wrapped himself around me like a woman. I had been in Vietnam long enough that it didn’t bother me. The Vietnamese don’t share our sense of personal space nor our sensitivity to male-male contact. It was appropriate, at that time and in that place. I hugged him back.

The final tally was 14 dead and 47 wounded. The dead were 6 sailors, 3 wives and 5 children. None of my advisors were injured.

A few days after the attack a South Vietnamese Navy “Casualty Assistance Team” arrived from Saigon. It consisted of nearly a dozen people… nurses, clerks, counselors, a mortician and journalists.

The four journalists were unusual for such a team and probably came because a good friend of mine was the Public Affairs advisor in Saigon. A few months before, he and the same Vietnamese Navy journalists had visited our base and done an article on us that was published in the U.S. Navy newspaper in Saigon.

Of significance in this story: Journalists, even military journalists, traditionally are not armed.

All of our wounded and dead had been taken to a Vietnamese hospital in Qui Nhon. A multiple funeral was scheduled. The Navy Commander, District Chief and I were pretty much obligated to attend. We also were eager to visit the wounded.

In retrospect, our trip to Qui Nhon was way too much telegraphed to the enemy in advance.

The only jeep we had was mine and it couldn’t carry all the people required to attend.

Coincidentally, a State Department advisor was conducting one of his periodic visits to District Headquarters.

He had a brand new jeep… a General Motors “151.” Up a stump for transportation, I asked him to loan his jeep to me for the trip. He was reluctant but my argument was persuasive. He agreed on the condition that only I would be allowed to drive it.

We saddled up the next morning for the trip to Qui Nhon. My counterpart would drive my jeep with the District Chief and a few others. I would drive the 151 with the journalists.

As I climbed into the jeep I noticed that the journalists had no weapons. I questioned this, knowing the hazards of the road we were about to travel. They insisted that they were not allowed to carry weapons and I gave in, if for no other reason than that they didn’t even have any weapons to carry.

Personally, I was carrying three weapons: A stubby World War II vintage “grease gun” which I could lay on my lap with the wire stock collapsed, an M-16 and a holstered Colt 45 pistol. As was my usual practice I folded my bulletproof vest and sat on it.

We set out with me in the lead. Compared to my Korean War vintage Willys, the 151 was a Ferrari. The Vietnamese sailors called me “Dai Uy Di Mau” (“Captain Go Fast”). I had the philosophy that to be a fast moving target was safer than to be a slow moving target and was in the habit of driving as fast as possible.

Soon I was way ahead of the Willys.

The day before, a U.S. Army convoy had passed through Song Cau. One of the tanks, a tracked howitzer actually, had broken down and was left behind overnight. A recovery team had been dispatched and left town just ahead of us with the tank in tow.

I came up on the tank and was slowed to a crawl, looking for an opportunity to pass.

That’s when it happened.

My world went black and silent… dirt and ruptured eardrums. A tremendous concussion.

The jeep went up on its right wheels, almost to the point of rollover, and then slammed back down upright.

When the darkness cleared I saw that my left arm and uniform were sprayed with atomized blood. It reminded me of when I was in kindergarten and made a handprint by splattering paint over my hand with a toothbrush. But I couldn’t see a wound anywhere and I felt no pain.

My left ear had gone deaf. There was a loud, high pitched squeal in my right ear which has not changed one bit from then to now. It was because, I learned later, my right eardrum did not actually rupture to prevent nerve damage, whereas my left eardrum was completely blown out and therefore able to heal without permanent damage.

Then I looked around. The jeep was empty except for a young photographer, who was a teenager. He looked unharmed but unconscious in the back seat.

Most shocking of all, my weapons were gone. All three. That made me angry. Very angry. Furious! I was unarmed, disarmed, in a life-threatening situation. Those non-gun-toting journalists had stolen my weapons and hightailed it. I couldn’t even try to do what I felt it was my duty to do… to get up and over the roadside embankment and try to engage whoever had detonated the explosives. I think that “angry” was the definition of my emotion at that moment.

Vietnamese artillery, 105 millimeter howitzers I think, began tearing up the hill behind the ambush site. They were impossibly quick.

It took me years to figure it out. It was not possible for the interval between the explosion and disappearance of the weapons to have been only the few seconds I experienced. In fact, I must have been stunned unconscious for a few or several minutes. They took me for dead and collected my weapons before running to cover. They were all wounded too.

I got out, ran to the other side of the jeep and wrestled the young photographer out onto the road. He seemed untouched but had no pulse. I pounded on his chest. Then I saw a small wound square in the middle of his forehead. A couple of drops of blood. No more than a paper cut. But he was stone dead.

I saw a lot of that in Vietnam: Dead people who looked like they should be alive and live people who looked like they should be dead. It seemed to go like that. It is mainly, probably, because dead people don’t bleed.

Then I heard someone shouting “Sit down!” It was a U.S. Army Officer who was in a jeep leading the tank, the officer in charge of the tank recovery team I imagine. He was crouched next to his jeep about twenty yards ahead.

I turned to shout back. It was then that the gravity of my situation became all too apparent.

I couldn’t speak. When I tried there was just a gurgle and a spray of atomized blood. I had been hit under my left ear and was breathing through the wound. My throat was almost entirely blocked off.

I remember having the specific, incongruous thought that if I could ever speak again I might sound like Andy Devine.

I sat down. Dropped is more like it. The realization turned me to spaghetti. I think a doctor would say that shock set in.

I took another inventory of myself and saw that the top of my left forearm had been filleted like a trout. The muscles in my left shoulder and elbow weren’t responding right. There was a bloody hole in my trousers over my left thigh.

I laid back flat on the road… weak as a baby.

Soon my counterpart and the district chief appeared and carried me out onto a salt flat. What they had found out on their radio was that the weekly U.S. Army mail helicopter had just landed at Song Cau and was being diverted to pick me up.

As I lay on the salt flat, an elderly Vietnamese woman appeared over me. She lived near the ambush, and therefore must have been aware of it being set up the night before. She had a towel wrapped around her head. As the helicopter approached she removed the towel and covered my head and neck to keep the rotor wash from contaminating my wounds.

Those people lived a constant dilemma.

What had happened, as nearly as I have been able to reconstruct, is that there was construction in progress on the road. It was being widened in preparation for paving. At the point of ambush, near the salt flats, the landside embankment had been dug out, back deeper to make room for widening. Because of the fresh dirt the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese had been able to bury a series of five howitzer projectiles upright in the embankment, about fifteen feet apart, without it being detectable. They were wired up for detonation. When we came abreast they set it off.

I later learned that the detonator was left behind, booby-trapped. A Vietnamese soldier clearing the site later that day was killed.

The jeep was destroyed. The gas tank under the driver’s seat was gone. My guess is that sitting on my armored vest was a good idea, at least that day.

I have always hoped that the poor State Department officer didn’t get into too much trouble for loaning it to me.

The helicopter was a slick Huey, rigged for cargo. The aircrew had to straddle me on their hands and knees on the bare metal deck.

They took me to the Army 67th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon.

We circled for quite awhile before landing. It turned out that the Cambodian Incursion was underway and overcrowded hospitals in the south were causing casualties to be dispersed to less crowded hospitals all over the country. We had to wait in line to land.

They took me on a stretcher into a big open room. I was put on sawhorse type supports along with about half a dozen other wounded.

Two or three nurses descended on me, cutting all my clothes off. They peppered me with questions like who I was and where I came from. But I couldn’t answer. I could get out, in a whisper, maybe one syllable per breath.

There was a male doctor pacing the room with his arms folded over his chest. He would give a nod and the nurses would disappear. Then he would nod again and they would reappear.

I knew what he was: The triage supervisor. He was deciding who should have priority. When he sent the nurses away it meant either that somebody else needed them more or that I was already as good as dead and working on me was a waste of effort. I had no way of knowing which it was.

I hated him.

I couldn’t talk. But if a cartoonist could have written my thoughts in a balloon over my head, it would have said “FIX ME!”

I would have gladly agreed to surgery without anesthesia. I am as afraid of needles and dental drills as anybody you could meet but I had a genuine, profound sense that I was dying. I had a new perspective on doing whatever it took to stay alive.

Still, I never felt pain.

They took me to another room and rolled me around on a cold table for a few minutes, taking X-ray’s.

Then I was in surgery.

I woke up in a crowded intensive care ward. I was on a clicking green Plexiglas ventilator hooked up to a tracheotomy by a corrugated plastic tube. I was totally mute, my throat blocked by rubber balloons so that it would heal round and smooth. I was woozy and feeling pretty sorry for myself. My ear was ringing with alarming intensity. Bags of fluids were hanging from a metal stand, feeding tubes into my wrist and arm. There was a tag with “GRAVE” written in bold magic marker.

Then, over my bed and much too close to my face a very large, loud Army Sergeant appeared.

“Sit up Lieutenant!” he said.

I tried but my left shoulder wouldn’t respond. It seemed like I was pinned down to the bed.

“Sit up Lieutenant!” he said, louder.

I tried again and managed to sit up.

“Stand up Lieutenant!” he said.

This was starting to get unfair. I didn’t feel good at all. I was swollen and sore. I’d just had surgery. I was full of shrapnel holes, debrided and stuffed. I was still fuzzy from the anesthesia. My parts weren’t all working right. The tag said that I was in grave condition. I couldn’t complain or respond in any way. I couldn’t even groan.

I was a Lieutenant and he was a Sergeant.

I was developing a strong dislike for this guy.

“Stand up Lieutenant!” he said, louder.

I stood up, sliding down onto the floor. I grabbed the IV stand for support.

“There…” he said, more soft and friendly-like, “you’re OK Lieutenant.”

In the next few days I saw him repeat this routine. It was his job.

I watched many guys rolled in from surgery. The ones with abdominal wounds were the worst to look at. Their surgery consisted of opening them up, repairing the damage, taking their insides out for washing and replacement and sewing the incision back up again.

They looked like Frankenstein, with huge “L” shaped, undressed incisions on their front and/or back, stitched up with thick sutures and oozing body fluids.

They looked like people who would not be waking up at all.

When a nurse saw that one of them was regaining consciousness she would send for the Sergeant.

He would lean over the bed and say,

Sit up soldier!”

“Stand up soldier!”

“There… you’re OK soldier.”

And they were OK.

Just like me.

It seemed strange to me that my condition was classified as “grave.” As I was transferred from hospital to hospital, I saw many men who were less severely classified with far more serious wounds. Amputees, for example… even multiple amputees.

Later I was told why. I had a large hematoma… a blood clot… in my neck. They were concerned that a piece of it might slough off, go to my brain and kill me.

It didn’t happen. The hematoma healed into harmless scar tissue.

Then I had an experience that changed my politics.

I was flown from Tachikawa Air Force Base Hospital in Japan to Travis Air Force Base, near Sacramento. From there I was transferred by ambulance to Oakland Naval Hospital.

There is a story that probably approaches the status of urban legend… that people spit on veterans returning from Vietnam. A lot of those stories are, probably, exaggerated or not true.

But it actually happened to me.

Demonstrators outside the main gate at Travis spit on the windows of the ambulance.

I think they should not have the right to vote.

[Narrative Ends]

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