Basketball (1)

Suddenly, I was Manager Rollie.

The quality of play was surprisingly good, and the $150 for team uniforms gave me a jersey of my own, with MANAGER silk-screened across the back. It was a pass to sit on the players’ bench, and, in a way, a ticket to a sense of recovered youth—a sense of being back in the way it once WAS.

I had grown into the television age with everybody else. I had forgotten what it was like to go to a live basketball game—the slap and pounding of rubber soles on the floor, the grunts as players lunged for a loose ball, the roar of the crowd in a closed auditorium. That’s the way it WAS. I was so taken by the experience that I began writing up game results to send as e-mail to friends in America.


JOSON ARENA, San Isidro—The Running Rollies came from behind and rabbit-punched Manga 70-67 Saturday night, and remain undefeated in the interbaranguay basketball league. The Running Rollies now stand 2-0.


All of the games were reported as accurately as anything you might pull off the Associated Press wire, but liberties would begin to creep in.

The string of wins grew longer, and my Reports To America more comprehensive and self-indulgent. I had been pressed into writing some sports before as a newspaper reporter, and I felt like I was working again. But this time it wasn’t just a job, a chore, I was enjoying myself so much that I had quite unexpectedly developed an imaginary friend and colleague--Fernando Rodriguez.

Fernando had the very real hope of every Filipino of moving up in the world. Even journalism looked like a respectable profession in the Philippine provinces In time, Fernando would want pointers. He would gain from me, and I would gain from Fernando. I could speak frankly to Fernando, and he to me..

“Now, take that name, Fernando—The Running Rollies. That’s not their real team name. Should we be calling them that?”

“What is their name?” Fernando asked.

“They don’t have one. It’s just the name of the baranguay (neighborhood) across the front of their jersey, and a number on the back.”

“Would you buy them a beer?” Fernando asked.

“Of course.”

“Then they couldn’t care less.”

And the Running Rollies were winning. Things were going our way.



GAME 4: DON’T TIE YOUR CHICKENS TO YOUR BENCH

JOSON ARENA, San Isidro—The Running Rollies swept across the basketball court like a typhoon gone berserk in a specially scheduled game Monday afternoon, leaving the team from Alua lifeless and shambling in despair by the late fourth quarter.

The Running Rollies now lead the league 4-0 after the 84-60 win.

Despite the savagery of the Running Rollies’ attack, Monday’s game was uniquely cerebral in character.

Manager Rollie had stepped onto the arena floor through a portal that bore words of guidance on a sign above the door: WAG MONG ITALI ANG MANOK SA BANKO. They were words not only to play by, but to live by.

As a typhoon can grow from a tiny wisp of air given spin through the rotation of the earth above the waters of a tropical sea, so grew the Running Rollies that Monday afternoon. They began by missing shots. They booted balls out of bounds. They were scarcely a breeze, and with little direction.

Then, Manager Rollie remembered the words over the door to the court.

WAG MONG ITALI ANG MANOK SA BANKO.

“What the hell does that actually mean?” Manager Rollie asked Fernando, who found himself back on the bench after his play as a basketball guard looked more like he was kicking 60-yard punts for the Denver Broncos.

“Don’t tie your chickens to the bench,” Fernando translated.

Manager Rollie pondered the philosophical subtleties. That was it, he decided. They were putting their chickens before the egg.

“Tell ‘em, Fernando.”

“That’s a specious question which has diverted mankind from meaningful thought since the dawn of philosophy,” Fernando screamed to the team. “Penetrate, and then shoot.”

Fernando looked toward Manager Rollie for confirmation. Manager Rollie nodded. Penetrate and shoot they did. The momentum turned. The wisp grew into a Force Five horror for Alua. The Wag Mong principle worked.

Manager Rollie was wondering how he could pad Wag Mong into a pamphlet that he could sell for $3.95 near the cash registers in sporting goods stores, and then asked Fernando for advice. Fernando shot the hell out of the whole idea.

The arena was used principally for cockfights, Fernando explained. That’s why the Running Rollies were playing a special game on Monday, and wouldn’t play the next game for another 23 days. “They use the floor for chicken fights, Manager Rollie.”

Well, still, the philosophy was right.

As owner Al Davis is once told his Oakland Raiders, “Win, baby, just win.”

The Ship Model

Rezie, friend and philosopher, holds my model of the SS United States before casting off for the front porch for grog.

Philippines (2)

Philippines (2)

We didn’t move into the house at the end of the road on our drive past Smoking Mountain. We dallied, and someone else jumped at the chance.

And it was a wonderful house they snatched: A wide black marble veranda—marble to me, tile to someone who knew what he was doing—fronted the house. The entire porch was protected by a delicately formed, lacy, wrought-iron security grill that was painted a crisp white. The interior was cool, split-level, and spacious. I had lived in bachelor apartments the size of the kitchen. The servants quarters would have served nicely as a home office from which to run a global export business. It was such a grand house that for the moment, I had begun to see myself as another Sir Stamford Raffles. The grounds even supported a water tower—my water tower.

To be honest, the house fell short of being a mansion, but, still, it left the general impression of being the abode of a colonial trade supervisor in the glory days of empire. Buy or lease. You could own it outright for a price that would have bought a mobile home on an acre of Northern Nevada ground so barren that it barely supported sage brush.

We spent nearly a year back in the States, regretting that we failed to act.

My wife, Maria, is a Filipina, and when we returned to the Philippines the following year, we were ready to pounce. Again, we made Maria’s sister’s house in the country our home base.

A man knocked at the door.

“You’re looking for a house? I have a house.”

So finally the dream had come true. Our own coconuts grew from our own coconut palms in our backyard. We had guava, we had papaya. And, when the monsoon crept in for the rainy season, we would lie in bed at night listening to the rain crashing against the steel roof as the stereo played our favorite tapes. My wife would sometimes sing along in the dark. It was a warm, wonderful feeling to be lying there.

The ranchero was home, instant home.

A water heater had been wired for hot showers, and a cable television feed installed. Satellite TV was added to that, and a gasoline generator installed to power the big refrigerator-freezer when the local electrical system went down. It went down often. We were now so nicely appointed that—inside the house—it was almost like living in America. At times I seemed to be living ON the Philippines, and not IN the Philippines. All of that changed one afternoon.

“I was talking to some of the boys in the neighborhood. They want you to be the manager of their basketball team.”

“I don’t know, Maria….I’m no Bobby Knight. Besides, they have a coach, don’t they?”

“But they want you.”

“What would I have to do?” I asked.

“Buy the uniforms.”

OPEC's Worst Nightmare

Philippines (1)

We wanted a house abroad—a new life abroad—in some cheap, warm country where coconuts dangled from palms in the backyard, and papayas could be seen just feet from a bedroom window on a sunny tropical morning. After all, Paul Gauguin did it.

So, we started looking, and that is why we found ourselves in an open-air jeep, barreling down a boulevard crossing Manila on the way to look over a house for sale in the Philippines. Our drive took us past what the 10-million people in Mania call “Smoking Mountain.”

Some even call it home.

As we swooped down a hill, it looked as if our jeep was about to crash-land on a pile of rubbish that could take up most of the Amazon Basin—a seemingly country-sized heap of garbage being slowly engulfed by a smoldering and enormous forest fire.

Gray human shapes lumbered through the acrid smoke like the living dead in an old black-and-white movie. But it wasn’t a movie. Smoking Mountain was a very real fog of burning rubber, tattered motorcycle seats, ripped clothing that no longer could be used even as rags, banana peels, and just about everything else the residents of a third-world economy decided to discard as finally useless. The wretches on the mountain were scavenging for what the urban poor had thrown away.

Oddly, Smoking Mountain reminded me of the pictures I had seen of the Caribbean.

Lean-to’s and crude shacks had been fashioned from cardboard and steel roofing that already was so rusted through that it, too, had reached the city dump. These hooches of the poor sat perched on the side of this mountain of garbage like the pastel homes of the Caribbean rich on the side of a green island bluff overlooking the clean blue waters of the Caribbean.

I wanted to get out of the jeep, and look around. “No…no,” the others in the jeep insisted. So, we drove on. The jeep’s engine howled like a sonofabitch as we screamed out of hell, and up a road that climbed to the purgatory of a more fortunate quarter of town. Our heaven—our house—still lay miles away.

We had a future in the Philippines, my wife said. We had some money. We had some prospects for making more money. If the wretches on Smoking Mountain could at least survive, we would do wonderfully. The cliff dwellers on Smoking Mountain weren’t doing that badly, were they?

She continued to press.

“See what a good life they have?” my wife argued. “No rent.”

The Great Imposter Returns to Los Angeles

Mearchant Seaman & Friend, Hong Kong, 1969

Old Man & Granddaughter

Vietnam (4) The Moon

The choppers in Vietnam either stayed above 3,000 feet, and out of the range of .50 cal. machine-gun fire, or raced over the ground at tree-top level. By the time the enemy could get a bead on you, you were gone. And gone from this world if the pilot flew a little too low.

But choppers usually got you there, and usually got you back. And you saw things out that open door when you looked past the door gunner. You saw the shell craters that looked like California swimming pools, and triple-canopy jungle that stretched on for miles and miles until it might be broken by the brown thread of a river.

Life went on down there. Monkeys raised families, and venomous snakes did what poisonous snakes do; they hunted jungle rats so that serpents begat serpents. GI’s ate C‑rations, and fighters from the North boiled rice. These bands would bump into each other, and lower the level of life in the jungle in sudden, savage bursts of automatic weapons fire.

But death fed life.

Rats gnawed at bodies—and parts of bodies—whose owners’ names would be chiseled into the wall of the memorial that was to rise in Washington. Even larger life forms grew and flourished on death.

The tiger population in Vietnam was on the rise, according to a colonel back at the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) in Saigon. In fact, he said, the way to find a tiger—if you really wanted to—would be to fire off a machine gun, and then wait. He said that the rattle of automatic-weapons fire was a dinner bell, of sorts. The sound meant food. If you waited, and if there were any tigers in the area, they would come.

All of this was invisible from 3,000 feet. Life continued, and ambushes were set, under the soft, green, velvety carpet of the jungle.

Enter Agent Orange:

The defoliants were sprayed over ground by “ranch hands” flying C-127’s. They weren’t that much different from crop dusters spraying wheat in Kansas. But, given a little time, you knew the ranch hands had been there.

It was like looking down at the moon. Everything, everything, was a cinder gray. It looked very much like the television pictures transmitted back to earth when American satellites began surveying the moon. Even the earth seemed to have died.

I have every sympathy with those who claim their cancers were caused by Agent Orange, used in the defoliants. Perhaps they are wrong. Perhaps they are right. But one thing I do know is that many who fought in those one-time jungles would willingly have accepted the risk of cancer for the certainty of denying ambush cover to the enemy. It wouldn’t an attractive choice, would it? But the immediate concern down there was to live another day, another week, another month. Maybe even make it home.

The pressure weighed even more heavily on those who had to call Vietnam home.

We visited the house of the Man With No Nerves at night. An American colonel who worked in special operations of some sort had invited me along. The Man With No Nerves lived in what was called a “free-fire” zone. Puff the Magic Dragon—twin-engine C-47’s fitted with miniguns—shot at anything they could see. Even things they couldn’t see. You didn’t need a target-okay in a free-fire zone.

How we got in, I don’t know, or at least don’t remember. I do remember that the village chief, or ward chief, whatever he was, wanted out. His nerves were shredded. He clung to what must have been his wife like a terrified child clutching his mother’s leg as he watched his father drown in a lake during a Sunday picnic in June.

The noise was part of it. Just the goddamned noise. It was like the neighbor’s kid who worked on his car all day, and then revved the engine without a muffler. A little like that, but it was so much worse. And it had gone on for years now. It was simply Numbah Ten Beaucoup Way-Say. And the Americans just kept pouring in machinegun fire and rockets. Everyday. His odds were getting shorter and shorter.

We flew out. I would never see the chief or his wife again, of course. I hope he made it. He probably never did. It was simply too Numbah Ten Beaucoup Way-Say. The colonel would rotate home—if he made it—and if he kept flying into free fire zones at night, his chances weren’t that good, either.

Some people never know they died, from what we-the-living know, anyway. Their death is a bullet in the brain, or vaporization from mortar round. Fear is a kind of death, too. It wraps its hands around the psyche and squeezes until its eyes bulge. Fear, over time, is terror. Fear a terrible way to die. The strength to cope leaks like gasoline from an unseen crack in your tank, and leaves you stranded in a desert fifty miles from a gas station outside Needles, California. You die slowly and watch any buzzards daft or desperate enough to brave the sun.

There are different grades of fear, though, like different grades of smooth and crunchy peanut butter on grocery shelves.

One of my most vivid memories of Vietnam is the girl in an almost luminescent green dress on the stage of an officers club in what probably was Bien Hoa. How about that, I remember the dress so vividly, but I’m not sure I can remember how to spell Bien Hoa, after all these years. Maybe it was Da Nang. Probably was.


She was singing Tom Jones’ “Detroit City” to the grind of a Vietnamese band. The audience was almost exclusively pilots. Many would be hitting targets the next day, or taking troop-laden Hueys into hot landing zones. They sat quietly, and drank lightly—almost carefully.

As a picture in the mind, death can be captivating when it’s your own. You see the groundfire as it’s coming up at you. The vision is more real than the girl in the green dress. You try to stop the part where your aircraft explodes in a ball of flame. And sometimes you do, almost do, anyway. Only the barest peep leaks through.

God, I want out of here.

Fear over time gnaws at you. In time, it kills you. It’s just that your heart keeps beating.

Even the pilots would have said they had it better than the grunts in the bush. Grunts lay in foxholes, and hung empty beer cans from concertina wire so that the cans would tinkle and rattle when an infiltrator snagged the wire on his way in. Grunts couldn’t GO anywhere. They stayed there and took it. Sometimes it was only the breeze that rattled the cans, and that tight feeling would grow in their testicles.

At least a pilot could scream into a target at mach 0.7 and barrel-ass the hell out of there when he released the napalm. At least a pilot had steak sandwiches and gin-and-tonics at the club. The pressure lessened, but never really went away as the gin seeped into his system, and the Vietnamese band played on.

God, I want out of here.

But then the pilot would think, too: Those grunt bastards got it lucky. There’s a lot of dirt between them and the next guy. But when I go in, they SEE me. They fire AT me. One lucky burst and I’m all over the landscape. Those grunt bastards don’t know how good they got it.

God, I want out of here.

And that tension oozed out into the cities, even up to the top-floor bar of the Caravelle Hotel.

The bartender sniffed constantly—a quick, sharp, short pull of breath through his nose. War, probably. But it could have been an allergic reaction to the soap the Caravelle used behind the bar. Did he need an antihistamine, or an ocean between him and all of this. Had he crept in from the fighting, lucky enough to be alive, and even luckier to find a good job in a good hotel? Was he Viet Cong, planted there to eavesdrop on officers and technical specialists sent out from IBM and North American Rockwell to hop-up America’s high-tech weapons.

You never knew.

I was spending a couple of nights somewhere, and was cautioned to keep an eye on my wrist watch. The watch wasn’t valued because it could tell the wearer when to go to lunch. They were stolen because they could be modified by the Viet Cong to detonate bombs.

So why were so many Vietnamese civilians working in military compounds? Why were they being used as typists in offices that had information on the disposition and movement of American troops. Nobody really had an answer.

Surely some of them had been recruited by the enemy. The enemy would have to be pretty goddamned stupid not to try. And, as the public executions of village chiefs had shown, the Viet Cong wouldn’t be reluctant to use threats against a person or a family to recruit. Who was who, and why were they there?

I was at a very isolated fire base—essentially an artillery platform—when I heard a woman’s voice behind me. Here? A young Vietnamese woman who couldn’t have weighed one hundred pounds was standing there in tiger-stripe camouflage and eating the ass out of two Vietnamese soldiers. Who was she? What was she doing here?

Things get strange, and then eerie.

I was a visitor, a tourist for crissakes. I could leave on a chopper any time I could catch one. I wasn’t a grunt forced into a hole who had to wait until the insanity of the moment passed. But even I must have been feeling pressure I hadn’t known was there.

A few years later, when I was living in Hawaii, a neighbor who had asked me for drinks on the lanai of her condominium had asked, “Rollie, we’re you in Vietnam?”

“Yes…why?”

“We heard you screaming last night. ‘I’m all right…I’m okay…’ You kept screaming that.”

And that never happened in Vietnam. I know that never happened.

I never screamed “I’m Okay,” to anyone. But, that’s the thing about fear, about the possible and immediate threat of violent death. Fear, growing over time. You begin to visualize—imagine—what never really was. So, now, I would never buy the “recovered memory” of a victim who has been molested. Other evidence, yes, but not that. Things happen in the mind, and some minds aren’t as careful and as ordered as others.

Too many people who were born in, or sent to, Vietnam are not okay.

I watched the Fall of Saigon in 1975 on American television. I thought about all of those pretty girls on Honda 50’s, and what their future would be now. The communists no doubt would want to “re-educate” Rae, a bar girl after all. The village chief with no nerves must be a babbling wreck by now, if he was metabolically functioning at all. I hoped the old man whom I had almost shot finally sold the Colt .45 pistol he’d picked up somewhere, and tucked the cash away. It occurred to me that the boy with no legs and no arms and no eyes might not be able to even hear.

Who had died? Who hadn’t? Who knew?

There had been a theatrical unreality to it all.

I didn’t start shaking again until about a month after I was back in Los Angeles. I had taken my anti-malaria pills at every breakfast, but four weeks later I was breaking into heavy sweats and suffering sudden flashes of fever. As I recall, muscles ached.

I looked out my kitchen window. There was a doctor’s office next door, and I looked down into the parking lot where he had parked both of his Rolls-Royce automobiles. You’ve paid the piper for all of this, I thought: Malaria is no joke. I dragged myself downstairs and over to his office.

He charged me $10.

“Ohh, that’s not malaria,” he said. “It’s an allergic reaction to all that malaria medicine you’ve been taking.”

Summer Cruise on a Swift Boat

Another day in the ville

Heavily sandbagged officers club, Vietnam, 1969

Vietnam (3) The Stroll

Funny things happen in sad places.

I didn’t see this anywhere but in my own mind, but the details came from the San Francisco Chronicle back when American deaths in Vietnam could be counted in the hundreds.

The American military was courting the Montagnards, trying to get them to join the fight against the North and Vietcong. A group of officers had brought two tribal chiefs into Saigon, and was taking them to dinner at a rooftop restaurant.

The Caravelle Hotel is in the old French style. The elevators are very small, taking maybe four skinny guests and their shaving kits.

An American officer pushed the call button on the first floor. They waited. The elevator door opened, and an American officer or two led one of the Montagnard chiefs inside. The door closed, and the elevator took them to the top floor

When the elevator got back down to the lobby, the door opened. The remaining officers started to escort the other Montagnard chief into the empty elevator.

No way!

You have to see things from the second Montagnard’s point of view. The elevator opened its mouth, and when the elevator door closed, it ate his friend. By the time the elevator had opened its mouth again, it had swallowed him. Or, to use Joseph Heller’s wonderful expression, it “disappeared him.”

The surviving Montagnard was having none of that.

Cultural Difference is what makes Asia interesting to Westerners, and the West interesting to Asians. It’s not so true anymore—maybe—but we grow up with these supposed truisms. One from my generation has been “Life is cheap in Asia.” Life isn’t cheap, it’s just more easily lost.

But that has changed. More dams prevent more floods and light the factories that produce penicillin and the steel to make automobile engine blocks. But the change seems more noticeable, more perceptible, in the production figures on paper waved by crowing government officials than what the traveler feels, sees, and smells.

My wife and I were having a picnic lunch on a grassy slope in a park overlooking Northern Nevada’s Washoe Valley with a Filipino couple we know who now live in Reno. He can look like an aging mandarin, or a Buddhist monk who’s meditated his life away in a monastery.

“It’s so clean, you know? You Americans are so lucky.”

Asia rots, often openly. It’s the weather that allows bacteria to grow. The rain, the inadequate drainage systems. There’s a stickiness to Asia if you’re from the arid cowboy country of the American West—cowboy country that is now air-conditioned behind the plate glass windows that overlook manicured laws carefully watered by automatic sprinkler systems. Rural Asia is…elemental.

I can’t remember the title of the book offhand—and I can’t look it up in a library over here—but James Michener was writing about the arrival of the American forces in New Guinea in their long, slow push toward Japan in the Forties.

High technology to the natives was a steel machete. And then came the Americans, unloading bulldozers from huge ships to make the landing strips that took roaring B-17’s and buzzing P-38’s. Yet the people on New Guinea found one jewel in this basket of technology that was truly wondrous—running hot water.

Imagine that, they would say. They would all but ignore a passing B-17, to troop over to a faucet that passed hot running water. I’m sure it was the same sense of awe that came over us when Neil Armstrong stepped on the surface of the moon.

I have loved some GI Bars.

I wish I had spent more time in the Louvre than in the Royalty Bar when I was stationed in Paris at the close of the Fifties, but the Royalty was where I listened to Marie-Ange tell the American stranger who had walked in off the street that she was going on a trip to Italy, where surely she would find a new—if temporary—boyfriend.

“Oh, I am not a bad girl,” she added to protect her honor, but then she laid her hand on his arm and said in that charming French-accented English, “…but zen I am not a good girl, either.” I may have fond memories of the Modigliani and Renoir and Cézanne and the rest of them, but I have sweeter memories of Marie-Ange.

Rae worked at the Mi-A-Mi Bar, just minutes by foot from the Caravelle Hotel to Tu-Do Street in Saigon. She lived in a room over in the Chinese district of Cholon and slept under the cover of an American camouflage poncho while she watched Vietnamese TV on a PX television set, and fried canned Spam packed in Minnesota for breakfast. She didn’t use lumps of C-4 plastic explosive. The little gas burner was made in some city like Manchester or Birmingham. It was one of the few articles in the room that wasn’t American.

I didn’t get to see Rae as much as I’d have liked. I didn’t have a whole lot of time. Even though the company had retained a room at the Caravelle Hotel, I didn’t do much in Saigon except change helicopters at the airport.

Nice to see you again, too, but I gotta go again tomorrow.

She squinted up at me with those very Chinese eyes.

I was six years old when the Japanese signed the surrender on the Battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. But WWII was food and fuel for Hollywood in the ensuing ten years. Loose Lips Sink Ships, the message had been. I learned. I didn’t get too specific—just the province.

That’s when she summed up the Twentieth Century history of her country.

“Numbah Ten, beaucoup way-say.”

It is difficult to capture that sentence in print. The Numbah Ten was a Vietnamese girl’s pronunciation of the English words, Number Ten—which was a bastardization of the Japanese expression, Ichi-ban. Ichi-ban meant Number One, so, of course, Number Ten was “very bad.”

Beaucoup was simple French for “much, or many,” a straightforward French word that had been there since Admiral Such-and-Such had landed French marines a century or two ago.

Way-Say, was the way Rae pronounced the initials, VC.

So the sentence could accurately be translated as, “Very bad, very many VC (there.) It was one of the most memorable sentences I’ve ever heard. Sitting there at one of the tables in that scruffy bar on Tu-Do Street, I got this sense of too many armies marching back and forth over a land that still hasn’t recovered. But she was coping—surviving under the camouflage poncho while she watched TV on a PX television set, and cooking Spam packed in Minnesota over a gas burner made in Manchester.

She was right. There were a lot of VC around.

I was so green that I didn’t know “Air America” was an airline owned and operated by the CIA. I had flown someplace by helicopter, and then boarded a short take-off and landing fixed wing airplane made in Switzerland or Sweden. It was a Porter-Something.

I had picked up a cold.

When we came into our destination, the pilot of our little 10-passenger airliner turned the Porter on one wing, and corkscrewed down to the ground. I wanted to scream from the pain in the ears from our sudden change in air pressure. Maybe I did. I’m sure I grunted.

Why the hell’d you do that?

Three thousand feet was above the reach of .50 cal. ground fire, the pilot explained. You want to go in comfortable, or hit the ground like chopped sausage scrap?

This was the trip to that naval M*A*S*H. This is where the boy with no legs and no arms and no eyes was beginning to teeter upright in eternal darkness. This is where I would begin to sleep with a loaded .45 under the folded jacket I used for a pillow, and where my greatest luck came in not blowing my own head off with my own sidearm. What a stupid place to put a loaded gun. But, I was still new.

Mason von Henner, Capt. USN., came to the door shortly after I was billeted. He was an interesting man who was interested in almost everything. He had finished one correspondence course, and had started another, this time in accounting. He carried the first shirt-pocket tape recorder I’d ever seen to make notes. And, he carried an M-16. He was taking me to chow.

“Where’s your weapon?” he asked, as casually as he might caution, “Don’t forget your keys.”

“I don’t have one.”

He frowned.

“You have to have a weapon.”

“But I’m a correspondent—a civilian.”

“You have to have a weapon,” he said again. He seemed to have a very limited vocabulary for a doctor.

“We get attacked almost every night,” he added.

Well, at least he was explaining himself.

We didn’t get hit that night, or the next, and by that time I had been through the horribly mangled boy on the plywood mattress, my own violent shaking the next morning, and several other field surgical operations.

The surgeon was no reluctant draftee. In fact, he was no draftee at all. He had been a successful surgeon in Dallas (he told me his annual income, but in confidence), and had tried to join the Army at the age of nearly forty. He was a patriot. The Army had turned him down as “too old.” He finally talked the Navy into taking him. The Navy so valued its catch that they made him a full captain, even though he hadn’t a day of prior military experience. And that is how Capt Mason von Henner turned up at my door to take me to chow. The next morning, he took me to surgery.

I had never seen surgery. He showed me a pail where I could vomit if the gore sickened me. Instead, I found myself being elbowed in the ribs when I crept too close to the operating table.

My reaction to surgery was a lot like my reaction to the war in Vietnam.
When you’re sitting on a barstool in Los Angeles, war is an abstraction. It is a series of arguments over its geopolitics, its economic folly or necessity, or the likelihood of the Commies marching up Pennsylvania and knocking on the door of the White House with gun barrels.

But being in a war isn’t like that, or at least I didn’t find it so. The abstract tone of it all quickly fades, and suddenly it is “us” against “them,” and you can take it very personally when they try to kill you in their random, nothing-personal way.

And so it was with the bodies on the operating table. I didn’t see people, as much as I saw parts. The sheet covering the patient would have been pulled back. It reminds me now of a mechanic skinning back the aluminum hatch on the fuselage of an F-86 Sabre Jet, and working its hydraulics with wrenches. Captain von Henner simply seemed to have substituted scalpels and hemostats to work on different plumbing.

And it was so fast; that was the surprising part of it all. Fast—but of course not too fast, was the safest. Get it done, get them sewn back up, and don’t let complications through the door. This was a field hospital, not the a major urban hospital with all of its life-support equipment. Pell-mell surgery, and then nothing.

Intensity, and then languor. The sweet softness of the Vietnamese countryside drying out as the monsoonal rains ebbed.

I went for a walk.

The brass at the M*A*S*H were very firm about it. No gun, no walks. I had Captain von Henner’s M-16 on my shoulder, and the Inspector General’s .45 on my hip. We still hadn’t been hit, and maybe every VC in the province was enjoying the warm freshness of the recent days, a chance—if you will—for everybody to lie back and contemplate just what it was we were all fighting for. Peace is wonderful, especially in a war.

The old man walking toward me on the road was as quiet and unthreatening as a flower. He smiled as he approached, that semi-toothless grin that old people often give you in a land without dental insurance. Be happy. Like the Beatles sang, Be Happy. We are one world, one people, after all. Let’s just love each other.

And then he pulled the .45 from under his shirt.

I knew I was dead.

Von Henner’s M-16 was strapped to my shoulder. The Inspector General’s .45 was still holstered on my hip. I was dead, and I knew it.

That’s when he asked if I wanted to buy the gun.

I have been grateful for many things in life—disgruntled by the lack of others. But I have thought over the years that if there’s a God to be thanked, then Thank God that the M-16 was on my shoulder that afternoon, and the .45 was on my hip.

If either had been in my hand, I might have shot the man. I probably would have, and everybody there would have agreed that it was the right thing to do. Even the old man might have called down from a heavenly cloud, saying, “Don’t feel bad, son. Pulling a gun from under my shirt was a foolish thing to do.”

Life is hard in Asia, sometimes harder than others. And when there’s a war on, life is very uncertain.

I was having a warm beer with two or three grunts, and one of them was telling the story of when a mortar shell had hit while one man was in the latrine—“blew him right out of the shitter, and he barely got a scratch.”

The men laughed.

It’s a wonderful life when you’re still alive to enjoy it.

Pals, Vietnam, 1969

Vietnam (2) The Mountain

The tankers were gone—dead to the last man—and I was still playing at war correspondent.

What was the justice in that? The tankers had made it as far as my arrival that September day. They hadn’t blown off a foot heating C-rations with hot-burning lumps of C-4. They had attacked, and been attacked. Every rotten day that passed had brought them closer to climbing aboard a “freedom bird” in Da Nang for Travis AFB and home.

I didn’t know it then, but I was missing the real story in Vietnam. The real story was me—the little things that were going on around me, and affecting me. That realization would hit me decades later. The networks and the “real” newspapers were covering the battles and the politics. I should have been writing about the 12-year-old bartender that first day back from the field.

“How much for beer?” I had asked.

“Two-hundred Pee (piasters).”

“Bullshit,” I roared, and before I could feel guilty about bullying the kid, he knocked some pesos off the the price.

“Okay, then, forty Pee.”

And, later, there was that afternoon over in Saigon’s Chinese district, Cholon. I spent two hours avoiding the local water by drinking 33 Beer with a Vietnamese truck driver who spoke French. The beer was warm, so we dropped chunks of ice in the glasses. Bouncing along over a bumpy road the next day with a case of almost painful diarrhea made me conscious evermore that ice was made of water.

I wasn’t as bad off as the kid on the plywood, that’s for sure.

There’s an atmospheric sweat that slides off the South China Sea as the monsoon rains begin to ebb. A surgeon was leading me through a small American naval hospital that cared for Vietnamese civilians who get caught in the middle once the shooting starts.

The wards were clean, but spare—white walls and narrow military metal bunks covered with nothing but sheets of unpainted plywood. We were in the children’s ward, and women in white blouses and black pajama bottoms were fanning their wounded children with conical straw hats. No sound broke the total silence, except for the occasional buzz of big, flat, black flies.

“She’ll be dead in ten days,” the surgeon said, nodding toward an energetic and clear-eyed girl who looked to be about nine years old. She didn’t speak English. He could speak bluntly. We didn’t get into why she would be dead in ten more days.

We went down the line of bunks. Some children would die, some would live.

And then we came to the boy I remember so vividly. He was a village chief’s son. Two Viet Cong had ridden by on a 50 c.c. Honda motorbike, and dropped a hand grenade in the boy’s lap. The Navy surgeons had pulled him through, and I seemed to be seeing their work in slow motion.

The first thing that caught my eye was that the boy had lo legs. He was sitting upright, balanced on the bare sheet of plywood that covered his bunk. My eyes moved upward. He had no arms, just tiny stumps sticking from his thin, bare shoulders. My gaze moved to his face. The grenade had blown his eyes away.

Why didn’t you let him die? It was remarkable goddamned surgery, but why didn’t you just let him die?

I climbed out of bed early the next morning, and sat down at my Remington portable typewriter. I started shaking. Violently. I stepped outside to calm myself down, and almost collided with the command inspector general. He was a nice guy, in for a quick tour of the hospital, a gentle man with intelligent eyes who’d fought in World War II, through Korea, and now he was in Vietnam.

He understood. There wasn’t much he could do. About anything. He gave me a .45 sidearm, a gun belt, and a second clip of ammunition. I suppose he had extra. That’s one thing about an American combat zone. There are a lot of guns and grenades around.

I wish I had understood then—after only two years in the news business—that the real stories in a war are the little people with big problems.

My morning, the shaking, had been bad enough. Two hours later I was standing at a metal trough in the latrine, when a young Vietnamese woman came in to clean. I zipped up. We chatted. We walked out and sat in the sun on a low-lying branch that formed a bench of convenience.

She was a widow. I don’t know her name, anymore. I’ll never see it in any history anyone will ever write. She was just one of the realities of Vietnam: There were an awful lot of widows. When you were drafted into the Army of South Vietnam, you were in for the duration, and there was no end in sight. The odds ate you up each passing day, and you knew it.

But, she said she had a new life.

She had since met this American sergeant, and he loved her. He was in Da Nang on some errand, and they would begin building their new life in earnest when he returned. He would marry her, and apply for permission to bring her to America.

The more she talked, the more I could map out his “errand” in my mind. He was in Da Nang, all right, clearing country and getting aboard one of those shiny chartered jets that took troops back to Travis AFB or Los Angeles. He wasn’t coming back. I knew it, she didn’t. She didn’t know it yet, but she had become just another Vietnamese war widow with no future and no hope.

Why hadn’t I seen the story? Who cared what the bosses wanted. The story was in little people with big problems.

It had turned into a miserable goddamned day.

But I was better off than the kid on the bunk. Her, too.


***

When I mentioned in e-mail to a former co-worker that I wanted to get a little of this down on paper before I carried the experience to the grave, she wrote back, “Why do men like war?”

Most men do like playing at it.

Military machines are built for performance, fast and nasty things that Americans in the Forties might call “hot rods.” And the government even buys the gas.

An airline pilot I know—who now would be well past the mandatory retirement age for pilots—often mentioned that Naval flight training in the Fifties, followed by duty postings in the Mediterranean, were the best years of his life. Carrier landings, machine‑gunning target sleeves towed behind another aircraft. This was fun.

What is not so fun is seeing a surface-to-air missile climbing into your flight path. Joyriding around Fort Benning in an M-48 tank is fun. Taking a hit from a rocket‑propelled grenade outside Pleiku is not.

And that is why the major who was sitting at the bar of some officers club somewhere in Vietnam had managed to wriggle off flight status before he even left the States. He had been supplementing his Air Force pay by giving civilians flying lessons.

“But, Christ, don’t say anything about that.”

(As far as the Air Force was concerned, if he could teach some dentist how to fly a Cessna 172 over Santa Barbara, he could goddamn well duke it out with the surface-to‑airs ringing Haiphong. The major wasn’t having any of it.)

I knew much less about fear when I arrived in Vietnam, than when I left. I’m no expert but I know now grinding fear is linked very closely with exposure over time.

I remember taking a Chinook helicopter (one of those big things, with rotors at each end) carrying a platoon or two to field positions. Across the aisle, and maybe ten jump seats down sat this rifleman—a good looking kid, clean-cut for a bush infantryman. He could have played Bud on “Father Knows Best.” At one time, anyway. But now he was developing that thousand-yard stare I’d heard about. A little too much growing fear over too long a time.

Sometimes, one attack is one attack too many. But, a very small number of men like it—after it’s over, anyway. They get addicted to it. It’s the adrenaline rush, I suppose. That and the intense pleasure that floods body and soul when you find that you’re still alive. You could call some of the guys who did long-range reconnaissance patrols crazy. Some were. But, you never got bored way the hell out there in the jungle, with an enemy army all around you. Who could go to work in the billing department of the power company after that?

I was just a tourist—The Great Imposter—passing through.

One day, I went out with a team of medics on a huey. We landed on the top of a mountain, and then hiked down to a village that had been largely flattened by somebody’s air force. Ours, or South Vietnam’s, I never knew. I don’t suppose it makes much difference.

The village at the bottom of the mountain wasn’t a bloody combat scene. No bodies lay rotting on the ground. The medics were treating villagers for problems like eye or ear infections. The villagers looked a lot like rural Filipinos showing up for treatment at an improvised, traveling government clinic where I live now. I slid the borrowed M-16 off my shoulder, and started walking around. For a bit too long.

Each half of the medical team thought I was with the other half of the medical team. It was growing late in the afternoon, and here I was, reportedly seven miles from Cambodia with night coming on, without radio communication. Not that the radio would have done a hell of a lot of good.

I started running. Up that mountain trail. I was joined by a medic who somehow had been left behind. Two civilians were coming toward us down the trail Two women, one at each end of a long bamboo pole, carrying something. A dead Navy medic? We ran right past them, up, and up, and up. They had given us a curious stare, no hostility, just curiosity.

My God, will you look at that? Two crazy Yankees running up a mountain, and they call us dinky-dau.

I was young then. I hadn’t run a marathon yet, but I was in pretty good shape for an office worker. The medic stumbling along beside me looked like he was about to fall dead from a heart attack. But, we kept running. No prison camps, or slow summary executions by machete, for us.

Two miles before you reach the finish line of the Honolulu Marathon, you climb Diamond Head. You’ve already run twenty-four miles. I was staggering as I crested Diamond Head. I remember seeing someone in a passing car pointing at me. But that ordeal was nothing like the last quarter-mile of that mountain trail.

I had to crawl through the still-open little passage in the barbed wire. I was spent, totally spent. I could no longer stand. Vietnamese soldiers were pointing at me and laughing. Funniest goddamn thing that happened all day. Brass cartridge cases covered the ground behind the barbed wire like gravel. I finally reached the steps leading down into the bunker. I slid down the little stairway on my stomach.

An American GI popped a can of Coke, and handed it to me.

My blood-sugar was so depleted—I was so close to blackout—that the sugar in the Coke hit me like a jolt of heroin, or what I imagine a jolt of heroin would be like. Suddenly, it felt like there were hundreds of tiny champagne bubbles popping inside my blood stream.

I lay there, letting the sugar in the Coke bring me back into the real world.

I looked around the bunker. There wasn’t much to see. It wasn’t very big. A candle burned atop a makeshift table, and behind the table sat a black American soldier with captain’s bars—not the nickled metal, but the scarcely visible embroidered kind, that don’t alert snipers to the presence and target of an officer.

He peered through the light of the lone candle at me. I lay there, looking back at him. We must have nodded. As I grew visibly stronger, he asked me, “How much are they paying you to do this?”

I told him my monthly salary in Los Angeles.

”No…I mean how much extra are they paying you to do this?”

“Nothing,” I said…”nothing extra.”

“Nothing…nothing extra at all?”

“No, nothing.”

The flame from the candle on the rude little table would flicker from the puffs of his breath as he talked. His eyes widened, the sclera now startlingly white against sweaty patches of his Congo-black skin. He stopped talking.



“You mean you’re doing this for FREE?

(This must be one dinky-dau sonofabitch.)

“Well, in a way, I guess. I never thought about it that way before.”


***


The people on the mountain top probably got hit that night. The attacks almost always came at night, when the enemy couldn’t be seen easily by American fighter bombers dropping napalm and firing rockets. The mountain seemed too far from supporting artillery. The huey that lifted me and the lost medic off the mountaintop just before night fell had us back on the ground in Tam Ky within thirty minutes.

I had a few beers with another medic I had come to know.

The Marines called the medic “Doc,” predictable, almost a cliché, I suppose, but the nickname that was really more of a title than a name wasn’t taken casually.

“They look after me, because they know they need me to look after them,” Doc said. And, it was true. No doctor at any medical center will ever feel a greater sense of respect and need than Doc, sitting there with a beer in one of those quick-mix kind of bars which pop up seemingly instantly in any war zone that can furnish a plank for a bar and canvas for a roof.

And girls, of course.

They weren’t prostitutes. They were simply simple country girls giving teen-aged Marines some sense of normalcy. They laughed delightfully at jokes they didn’t understand. Understanding the American joke didn’t matter. It was the feminine laughter the young Marines needed. The girls were taken home at closing time in an American jeep, carted away as safely and securely as if the Marine driver had been the Mother Superior taking a load of novitiates back in the convent station wagon.

There was a luxurious sense of comfort to be back in Tam Ky. The mountain was probably getting hammered at that very moment, but I had crawled into real sheets under a US military, Grade A, corrugated steel roof.

The rocket hit later that night.

The 122 m.m. Soviet-made rocket struck and exploded in the tree branches above the roof, making shrapnel of the roof that somehow missed me. I don’t think I “heard” the rocket hit in the pre-dawn hours; I do know I couldn’t hear anything until about two that afternoon.

I could hear the door gunner/crew chief almost clearly by the time we lifted off and set course for Saigon. It had been a hell of a trip, so far, and I was still alive. I could even hear again.

Flying over the outreaches of Saigon in 1969 was a lot like flying over an affluent patch of Southern California. The landscape was dotted with pretty blue swimming pools, but they weren’t swimming pools at all; they were shell craters that had filled with water, and now shone blue with the reflected light of a sunny Vietnamese sky.

The generals said we were winning. The reporters said we were in deep doo-doo. We were minutes now from Saigon, from my own reserved room at the Caravelle Hotel, and a short walk to the little bar where I had barked at the 12-year-old bartender. “Li” worked there, too.

I would have to ask “Li” about it all. She seemed to know more than the generals, or at least more than the generals were willing to say.

Me at the Bottom of the Mountain (Photo)

Little girls go to school

Saigon on one leg in the rain