What it is Like to Go to War (6 page)

Killing in war isn’t always the morally clean “it was them or me” situation which we so often hear about and which I have described. The more technically sophisticated we get, in fact, the less common this situation will become, and the more problematic the morality. The more common situation in the future will be that of people quite distanced from the actual killing they are doing, their own lives not remotely in danger. I’ve never done this sort of killing, but I do have some perspective on it, having killed from
the air, albeit where I could still see the damage I was doing, unlike the crew of a B-52 or a submarine.

Late in my tour, after being wounded two times, I’d been attached to division intelligence as an air observer. A five-man-Marine reconnaissance team had been discovered by an NVA unit in the mountains that border Laos just south of Khe Sanh. In the ensuing fight one member of the team had been badly wounded and now the team was trying desperately to escape but was severely hampered because of having to carry the wounded man. The Marines were a good 20 kilometers from the nearest friendly unit and out of artillery range. My pilot and I were already airborne in a little single-prop O1-Charlie spotter plane when division diverted us to answer the team’s call for help.

When we made contact with the team, I directed the Marines toward a clearing on a hilltop I had spotted. From there we would try to get a chopper to lift them out. Packing their wounded teammate on slippery slopes, they made slow progress. They would have to turn to fire on their pursuers every so often, then scramble upward some more, only to turn and fight again. Because they were outside artillery range, all we could do was scramble some Marine A-4s
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from Da Nang, well over 100 miles to our south, hoping that they’d arrive in time and the constant clouds and rain showers wouldn’t make it impossible for the fast-moving jets to be effective. To fill in for the missing artillery and jets, in the meantime, the pilot would bring the O1 right over the team’s head and I’d lean out of the little plane’s window and shoot at the pursuing NVA with my M-16. I’d watch my tracers dropping earthward as if the ground were sucking
them into itself, trying to place them into the winking bright points that I knew were NVA automatic rifles firing back at us. I felt good helping. I also felt curiously excited. What from the air looked like winking lights I, in fact, reacted to like winking lights. I focused on them as indicators of the origin of the fire, not as automatic weapons fire that was trying to kill me. It is like becoming so present focused that you are pure observer. You know from experience that to allow the mind to get involved with future, nonpresent issues like “this could kill me” will only make it more likely that you will be killed. (By this time I’d been in Vietnam nearly a year.) I was actually more apprehensive that we weren’t going to be able to pull this one off and would lose the team. The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission. There was no time now. I was trying to keep map coordinates going to the pilot, warning him when we’d get too close to cloud-hidden peaks that I was trying to locate through reading my map, talking to the Marines on the ground, trying to direct them around obstacles that they couldn’t see and which would slow them down, talking on another frequency to the division recon staff in Dong Ha, who kept wanting to know what was going on, and trying to spot the pursuing NVA and shoot them with my M-16 from the shot-out windows of the airplane. Meanwhile the pilot was talking to the now scrambled Marine jets on another frequency; talking to the incoming evacuation bird on yet another frequency; trying to keep the plane spinning around only a couple of hundred feet off the ground to help maintain my M-16 fire directed at the pursuit, while at the same time trying to keep us from crashing into the numerous unseen peaks, guessed at by me, that surrounded the smaller hill the team was climbing; planning the approach paths of the attacking aircraft when they arrived; and doing the math to figure out how
much time was left before we ran out of fuel—oh, and not stall the airplane. In combat your mind is
jammed
.

Eventually the team reached the summit and set up a hasty perimeter defense. Between us, we now concentrated on keeping the NVA at bay until help arrived.

The NVA had spread halfway around the perimeter and were closing in, peppering us and the small recon team with automatic weapons fire. Everyone in the air was worried; everyone on the ground was scared.

Two Marine A-4s arrived from Da Nang armed with “snake and nape.”
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Clouds obscured the hill, sometimes for minutes at a time, making it nearly impossible for the jet pilots to locate the target and making the helicopter rescue a real problem. We went in low. I remember everything going gray white as we entered a swirling low cloud and wondering if we’d hit the ground before we could see again. It seems remarkable to me now, but I simply trusted we would. That was the pilot’s job, not mine. I leaned out of the window with my rifle ready to fire. Like a sudden curtain going up on bright daylight the green-gray ground rushed up at us. We were coming in parallel to the front of the team’s defense on the same heading we’d given to the jets and my pilot fired one of our phosphorous smoke rockets into the enemy that ringed the team, marking the target for the much faster and higher-flying A-4s. He twisted the plane over to port and downhill trying to get it safely back into some altitude. I remember seeing pieces
of burning phosphorous flying through the air leaving brilliant white smoky arcs from where the rocket had exploded among the enemy soldiers. I didn’t think about the burning phosphorous on their skin.

Almost immediately, braving the same intermittent clouds, the two A-4s, guided by my pilot over the radio and the brilliant white smoke of our burning phosphorous, were on top of the now running NVA soldiers. They delivered their snake on the first pass and blasted out large open patches in the jungle just below the team. I could see the stunning waves of concussion shaking trees in concentric circles, as if a huge rock had been thrown into a dark green pond. We then directed the two jets back in with their napalm and lit everything on fire.

In those smoking clearings I could see the charred burning bodies of the NVA who’d died or were still dying. Some were crawling for the cover of the unblasted jungle, trailing smoke from their clothing and skin.

My feeling? I had been elated! I shouted to the team, “We got Crispy Critters all over the hill!” Crispy Critters was a popular breakfast cereal at the time.

If, back then, I had been who I am today I would have felt differently. There would have been no elation. But back then I was just like the battalion staff that had cheered our victory on the hill. I identified with the reconnaissance team, whose lives were very much in doubt. Psychologically I had become identified with the threatened group, and the advancing enemy was no longer human. I didn’t kill people, sons, brothers, fathers. I killed “Crispy Critters.” It could have been krauts, nips, huns, boche, gooks, infidels, towel heads, imperialist pigs, yankee pigs, male chauvinist pigs... the list is as varied as human experience. This dissociation of one’s enemy from humanity is a kind of pseudospeciation. You
make a false species out of the other human and therefore make it easier to kill him. The touchdown feeling combined with dissociating the enemy was in full glorious effect.

We directed in one more pass of snake and nape, but this one was hardly necessary. The NVA were now content to fire at the aircraft from the cover of the surrounding jungle rather than go after the team. The first flight returned to base. We got a second flight of A-4s up and kept them on station until a very brave chopper pilot from MAG-29 got into the zone.
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Everyone on our side made it out safely. We were delighted.

I’m still delighted. Do I delight over this out of some sort of depravity? Some sort of warping in my childhood? I don’t know. I may just be built this way. I can feel that old excitement as I write this. How similar I am to others I also don’t know. Few will ever have to run the test. I suspect I am not very different. All I know for sure is that, at the time, I didn’t feel sickened or horrible about it. I was doing a good job of saving some fellow Marines.

And how do I feel now? I can still indulge in the excitement—and it is indulgence. It sells billions of dollars worth of entertainment. But I can also bring some consciousness to this past action of mine, and when I do, I find myself amazed at the many
other
feelings lying hidden there that this excitement masks and helps us deny.

Primarily it’s a matter of identity and age. I am now in relation to both the team and the enemy. I now think of what was “the enemy” as human beings, so I find it hard to crow about burning
them to death. I’m also very aware of the genuine cost being paid by those NVA soldiers and that reconnaissance team for me to get those feelings of excitement and pleasure.

I’d still do the same thing, only I would be aware of a horrible dilemma. I would be much more reluctant to use napalm now, knowing I could get the job done a lot more humanely with bombs. But scrambled aircraft arrive on station loaded with what they’re loaded with. Once I had decided to be in that situation, I couldn’t then decide that the team should sacrifice itself for my misgivings about using napalm. I wouldn’t let the team down. I would have chosen to be on their side, totally. I don’t believe in pulling punches during a fight to the death. But there would certainly be no excited calls over the radio, no Crispy Critters language. I’d hope that I’d remember to respect my enemy’s pain and agony.

Could I empathize like this while up in the airplane? Unlikely. Empathy comes with years, and most fighters are very young. This is why politicians and generals need to see these kids as
their
weapons and use them with care and consciousness. Ideally, I would hope that, in spite of the adrenaline, I’d at least stay conscious of a terrible sadness while I burned these people. But burn them I would.

The ideal response to killing in war should be one similar to a mercy killing, sadness mingled with respect. A few years ago I came across a sick seagull on the beach. Dogs were harrying it. Both its wings were broken. Still, it defended itself, bravely slashing with its beak to try to keep the barking dogs away. People kept walking by, not wanting to look at it. I chased the dogs off and wrung the bird’s neck. I felt no elation, only regret for the events
that led up to the situation, and a sort of wistful “Why me, Lord?” as I did what no one else wanted to do.

When my German shepherd, Sancho, grew old, he got overly protective of the front porch. My kids would bring in their little friends, who would occasionally trip on him. Sancho started to snap and snarl, something he’d never done with kids when he was younger. (I can relate.) One day he snapped and snarled at a three-year-old who was trying to get out of the car. The mother freaked out, grabbed her child, and slammed the car door. Later she phoned to tell us that she wasn’t coming over anymore. It’s hard to blame her. Sancho weighed 134 pounds. We tried everything we could think of. Took him around kids on a leash. Talked to behavior experts. Moved his food away from the front door. Had him checked out for hearing problems, eye problems. I lay down next to him in the little mudroom where he slept one night and talked to him, tears in my eyes, asking him to change. He didn’t change. One day Alex, my youngest son, then three, tripped and fell on him. He snapped at Alex, biting him on the cheek.

I took Sancho to the vet and lay next to him with my arms around him as she injected him with sodium pentothal. I made a tombstone out of concrete and we buried Sancho down by the trees at the edge of the field.

As I said, it is unlikely young soldiers will feel about killing in war the way I felt, decades older, on a beach with a seagull or at the vet’s with my dog. It just goes against the nature and level of development of the mostly young people who will do our nation’s killing. Still, I think we fall far short of our potential. We don’t even strive for it with the youngest, and we can definitely instill a great deal of this sensibility in the older professional noncommissioned and commissioned officers. Even then it is difficult because the oldest people who are likely to be directly involved
with killing the enemy, or directly supervising those who kill, are still usually in their twenties or early thirties. My company commander in Vietnam was twenty-three.

In war, we have to live with heavy contradictions. The degree to which we can be aware of and contain these contradictions is a measure of our individual maturity. You can’t be a warrior and not be deeply involved with suffering and responsibility. You’re
causing
a lot of it. You ought to know why you’re doing it. Warriors must touch their souls because their job involves killing people. Warriors deal with eternity.

My first encounter with knowing this consciously came during an operation where the company was dropped by itself into a barely known area of thick jungled mountains just below the extreme western part of the DMZ.
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Three days into the op we’d stumbled into an NVA outpost. The NVA triggered a command-detonated mine that had been lashed to a tree at waist height, killing our point man. He always kept a picture of his girlfriend, who was a year younger than he and still in high school, in his breast pocket for good luck. The piece of shrapnel that stopped his heart went right through her face. Somehow, when I pulled the picture from his pocket and looked at it, it stuck with me, this beautiful, young face obliterated by the same random piece of steel that had stopped her lover’s heart.

A series of firefights ensued while the NVA tried to keep us at bay. We kept probing forward in the jungle to get at what they were protecting. Normally, with nothing at stake, the NVA would have pulled back to escape the inevitable artillery fire we would call in.
Two hours of off-and-on firefights and several artillery missions later, we came to the edge of a very steep drop-off above a small beautiful valley. We followed a steep zigzag path to the bottom, where we found underground bunkers containing tons of ammunition, food, and other supplies and half a dozen large thatched-roofed open-air sheds that served as meeting places, mess halls, and so on. There was a pretty little stream running right through the center of the camp. There were smaller bunkers with the sleeping pads and personal items still lying around and hastily abandoned cook sites with half-prepared food. In the bunker I occupied were two bowls of half-eaten rice and a still-smoking bamboo water pipe neatly placed on the floor, as if the occupants had stepped outside for a pee or something. The whole thing gave me the impression of a macabre bamboo Brigadoon just waiting for the hundred-year return.