Blood: Killer

It Was Dark and Wet, Tom Dunn, Bougainville, 1942

28

Varieties of religious experience; good news and bad news; a lot of men found their compassion in the war, some found it and couldn’t live with it, war-washed shutdown of feeling, like who gives a fuck. People retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair, some saw the action and declared for it, only heavy killing could make them feel so alive. And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years. Every time there was combat you had a license to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

1969

The most dangerous man I ever encountered was an Australian. We never would have met, probably, except that we were fellow passengers on a flight through several province capitals, beginning at Nha Trang, dropping south to Phan Rang, then to Dalat, Ban Me Thuot and finally to Pleiku. It was an overly circuitous route for me since it was an easy direct hop from Nha Trang to Pleiku. I would not have taken it if it had been my choice, but I had been tagged with a courier task while at IFFORCEV headquarters. I carried thick sealed envelopes in a canvas bag at my feet on the deck of the Air America C-47 and got a receipt in exchange for an envelope at each stop we made.

Dangerous was the first adjective that came to mind when the Australian took the seat next to me in the nylon webbing that lined the side of the fuselage. The man dropped a well-worn kit bag on the deck and leaned a Belgian FN rifle against the bag. His floppy hat was down over his forehead shading watery blue eyes. He was a thin man. His tiger-striped jungle fatigues draped down from the points of his shoulders. He was also a still man. He glanced at me as he dropped his kit, mumbled a “g-day”, and settled into his seat seeming to notice everything and nothing.

He was quiet on the first leg, until we flew over the tracings of irrigation canals and squared dikes that marked the remnants of the Champa kingdom. “Know anything about those chaps?” he asked as we were both looking down at the ground.

“Only what I’ve read. Remnants of the old Champa kingdom who were defeated by the Vietnamese when they pushed down from the north a couple of centuries ago.”

“Smart buggers,” he allowed, “but no match for the Vietnamese. Something like you chaps, I reckon.” He said the last with what he probably thought was a friendly smile, a thin quivering of the corners of this mouth.

“Those chaps (he meant the North Vietnamese), aren’t any more comfortable in the jungle than you are. Ya got to make them fear the jungle, fear the night.”

He meant doing what he had been taught to do and had done as a young soldier in Malaya. The same skills he was now teaching to the Special Forces and their Montagnard allies in the highlands. 

On the leg from Phan Rang to Dalat, I, who’d read my Mao, Che, Ho, Giap, Sir Robert Thompson, and Magsaysay, pointed out that the Emergency had been different. They had had the advantage of exploiting ethnic differences. In Malaya it was much easier to separate the “fish” from the “sea.” The insurgency could be confined to a mainly Chinese sub-group. The Malay Peninsula was easier to isolate from sources of arms shipments. Vietnam, on the other hand, was inevitably part of the larger Cold War where Chinese and Soviet factors were much more important.

The Australian would have none of that, or so it seemed — in those still blue eyes it was hard to read anything like anger. He had no sense of politics, only war, his kind of war. He rapped the wooden stock of his rifle and then gave a contemptuous look at the plastic of my M-16.

“That’s not a real rifle,” he said. “Ya can’t trust it. Wouldn’t have one. My chaps,” meaning his Montagnards, “have some of your old M-14s and it’s a better rifle.”

He was quiet for a long time as the plane droned over the textured mountains. “Ghurkas, that’s what you need here.” 

Ghurkas had been his mentors in Malaya, and they seemed to be the only soldiers he really respected. They hadn’t understood the jungle either, not when they first came down out of their mountains. But they understood soldiering and stealth and terrorizing their enemies. Put Ghurkas on patrol in a region and pretty damn quick you didn’t have any living opponents.

It was the cold stillness that marked the man, not the words. There was no real emotion in his voice. Nor was there any connection between him and the people he talked about. He was telling  stories he’d told before. He didn’t expect anyone to care or even understand. He was isolated and self-contained. A pure assassin. It was easy to imagine him on the edge of some jungle trail west of Ban Me Thuot, his hat down over his eyes, his rifle in his arms, just waiting for a target. He was a hunter, a killer. He was no longer part of an army.

That man had long since separated himself from any purpose larger than his own narrow satisfaction in killing, if it can even be said that he was moved by anything like an emotion. Even on the airplane in his washed-out tiger-striped fatigues he seemed to fade into the background. On the ground he would drift like morning fog through the elephant grass and bamboo groves, like smoke from a Montagnard cooking fire, like one of those spirits they propitiate with bowls of rice wine set into bamboo tripods erected on the edge of their villages.

That kind of man was not created by a training program. He was born to it. What shaping had occurred was done by forces outside the drills and rituals of ordinary soldiering. He did not seem to be a man who could be comfortable in a city. He did not even seem to be a man who could be comfortable in a foxhole with other soldiers. He was a ghost, a ghost that one could only hope was on our side, because people like him did not seem to be bound by ordinary rules.

I shivered as the aircraft flew high over the plateau. The distance between me and the man beside me was uncrossable, and neither had an interest in crossing it. I would like to have his respect, his acknowledgement that we were fellow soldiers, but I knew that was impossible. And when I thought about it later I knew that I would never want to walk the path that had made that man whatever he was.

The Australian left the plane at Ban Me Thuot. A battered jeep driven by a Montagnard in loose fitting jungle fatigues and a bush hat was waiting.