Grace: Thanksgiving

"Thanksgiving in camp sketched Thursday 28th 1861,” by Alfred R. Waud. Library of Congress.

41

For themselves they were a self-contained universe, a sub culture with its own routine, its own ceremonies, its own music and dress and habits; that whole tedious but obsessive way of life known as ‘soldiering’....

Michael Howard, War in European History

1974

It was Thanksgiving Day. I was commanding an infantry company and I was participating in one of the rituals of my trade. The company was gathered in the mess hall, a wooden building built during the surge of construction in the 40’s. That era’s buildings were all alike and I had lived and worked in them, and would live and work in them, for years. The building was heated by coal-fired boilers’ steam. The company’s First Sergeant meticulously maintained a duty roster of fire guards whose sole task was to spend their windblown winter nights walking from boiler to boiler looking for the fire which, if it came, could sweep through these buildings in a storm of heat and light. Outside a late fall wind rattled the loose window panes.

The mess hall was bedecked with crepe paper streamers and I was in my dress blues. In that time I had three dress uniforms — dress blues, mess blues, and mess whites. The uniforms were, all of them, anachronistic, of another time, of almost another century. I wore a white shirt with a black four-in-hand tie. If it had been evening time, I would wear a bow tie, also black. My trousers were royal blue with a broad yellow stripe down the side. They did not have front pockets, but they did have a watch pocket along the waistband where I carried my grandfather’s Illinois pocket watch. My coat, my “blouse,” was dark blue with shoulder boards encrusted with gold braid. Insignia made of tightly coiled silver wire designated my rank on a light blue background. The light blue background declared me to be an infantryman. On my lapels were pinned small brass and highly polished crossed rifles that also declared me to be an infantryman. I had gold buttons on my coat that could be removed for polishing (and to keep the dry cleaners from screwing them up). I had a plastic name tag on the flap of my right breast pocket and above that the ribbons my unit had been awarded for various campaigns in various wars over the years. On the flap of the left breast pocket were my silver jump wings, polished for this occasion, and above the pocket were the rows of ribbons that I had been awarded. Above the ribbons was my Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

This was my mess hall and I was obligated to be there on this day. The cooks had been there since well before daylight preparing the meal. An immense variety of food — turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, rolls, salads, vegetables — was about to be placed on the serving line. My four lieutenants, also in their dress blues, and also with the light blue inserts in their shoulder boards, were present. I held the hand of my young daughter. She shone with innocence and beauty in her red gingham dress. She burbled with laughter and shook the ribbons in her hair. My wife stood nearby and kept an eye on her as she chatted with the wives and girlfriends of my officers and men. 

The First Sergeant’s dress blues were a resplendent display of gold stripes that almost covered his arms from shoulder to elbow. He was being watched very carefully by the mess sergeant, since it was the First Sergeant’s opinion that really mattered that day. The rest of the sergeants and all of the soldiers were in Class A uniforms of green wool. Sergeants were not required to have dress uniforms and none except the first sergeant had them. Light glanced off polished brass buttons and spit-shined shoes. A few of the sergeants had collections of ribbons and badges (one or two with quite a few more than I) but most did not.

The chaplain stood beside me. The inserts in his shoulder boards were black, the color of the chaplain corps. He had small crosses on his lapels, which meant he was either Protestant or Catholic; a Jewish chaplain would have had Stars of David. Behind me, near the entrance, was a small table for our dark blue hats with their golden eagles attached.

The real color in the room came from the dresses of the wives and girlfriends and the holiday garb of the children swirling about and spilling the punch from the bowl on a side table set with an elaborate display of fruit and nuts. The music came from a hi-fi. Steam billowed out of the kitchen. This was all, for the length of my command, mine. The cooks delivered the filled pans of food to the serving line. I asked the Chaplain to say grace. The Chaplain stood to the front of the room and the First Sergeant said, in a voice that easily carried over the noise and clamor, “At Ease!” The room was instantly quiet, even the children. Someone took the needle off the record. The Chaplain offered a brief prayer. The meal began.

Army ritual and custom demanded that sergeants and officers eat after the men, so I and my family were the last through the line. The mess crew was sweating and proud of what they had done in the early-morning hours. They made sure the “old man” and “his lady” were served well.

We joined a table of privates and junior NCOs. One very young wife cooed over my daughter, but the rest were uncomfortable around the “old man.” That was appropriate, that was the way it was supposed to be. 

I was only able to have a few bites before the mess hall echoed with a shouted “At Ease!” that was quickly followed by a brisk “As you were!” from a different voice. I looked up to see that the Battalion Commander and his family had arrived, making their rounds of the battalion’s mess halls. I went to greet them. I introduced them to the First Sergeant and his Japanese wife and, at the commander's urging, returned to my meal. They made their way from one long table to another shaking hands and chatting before leaving with a shouted, “Happy Thanksgiving!”

I noticed how very diverse and “American” the room was. One of the cooks was from Mexico and went to special pains to introduce his wife and six children. His English was barely comprehensible and his wife had none at all. Other wives were German, Korean, and Japanese. In a few more years I expected that some of them would be Vietnamese. The men were of all shapes and skin colors. What they had in common was their fitness and, except for the First Sergeant and the Supply Sergeant, their youth. I could take this group of men and turn out an above-average softball team, a so-so flag football team, a not-very-good basketball team, or a brigade-championship volleyball team. They could march twenty-five miles a day for day after day after day — and had done so. They were above average in a bar fight — or so I’d been given to understand.

The really interesting thing was that I could take these men, even into the somewhat civilized former farmlands of the training area, and disappear. We could fade into the landscape. The process would be a stripping down. It would be a peeling off of the badges, the gold and the blue cloth, and anything else that caught the light. It would be a building up of layers of clothing that were baggy and mottled in shades of green and brown. It would be a fastening and taping of everything metal so that nothing clinked or rattled. It would be taking creams and putting them on their hands and faces and necks to mottle and change the reflectivity of the skin. It would be, finally, a stillness.

Or we could be sent to a piece of ground, a piece of dirt, and claim it. We could position our rifles, our machine guns, our mortars, our anti-tank weapons. We could register artillery. And we could dig our foxholes and clear our fields of fire. We would establish our lines of communications to the left and to the right. We would own that dirt. That is what infantrymen do.

This day was the other side of that. This day was the glitter and badges. These men who were like peacocks in their displays in front of their women and children were the same men who would glide silently in the night or dig like foxes into the ground. They must be the same men. It all somehow fit together and made sense.

Grace: Homecoming

40

Si monumentum requiris circumspice

(If you wish to see his monument, look about you) 

It signifies that those who desire to behold a proper memorial to Kurban Sahib must look out at the house. And, Sahib, the house is not there, nor the well, nor the big tank which they call damns, nor the little fruit-trees, nor the cattle. There is nothing at all, Sahib, except the two trees withered by the fire. The rest is like the desert here — or my hand — or my heart. Empty, Sahib — all empty!

Rudyard Kipling, A Sahib’s War

1973

At the end of my second tour I left Sóc Trăng and traveled to the out-processing center outside Saigon. On the morning of January 31, 1973 I was lying on a steel-framed cot under an olive green mosquito net. There were a couple hundred other men like me staying in one-story buildings inside the fenced compound. Giving up on trying to sleep, I grabbed my shaving kit, slipped on my flip-flops and walked to the latrine to shave and shower and get dressed for my trip back to The World.

Through sheer happenstance, or a very odd kharma, my DEROS — date of reassignment from overseas, 365 days from the moment I’d been ordered to be in country — was also the official date of the cease fire agreed to by the United States, the Republic of South Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. I felt oddly detached from this coincidence of history, except that it did have some small effect on me: As I’d left my team I had had no one to whom I could transfer my duties. I was just leaving, in fact, I was one of the last to leave.

Back from the latrine, I stuffed my shaving kit into the top of my duffle bag that was filled with bits and pieces of the preceding year. On the floor beside my bunk were the shoes that only a few days earlier had been covered with mildew. Now they had a high polish thanks to one of the Vietnamese hooch maids back in Sóc Trăng that would soon be out of a job. A cotton khaki uniform was hanging from the mosquito bar, freshly laundered and stiffly starched. Light glinted from the Combat Infantryman’s Badge and polished jump wings pinned to the shirt. All around me men like myself were finishing their packing or sitting on their cots, stunned to numbness by the reality that they were going home, back to The World. They did not reflect on why they were going home.

I felt uneasy about what I would not be putting on that morning, by what I was not wearing. I would feel that uneasiness for weeks, months. There was no .45 and knife to strap to my belt. The .45 had been turned in and the knife was deep inside the duffel bag. I’d thrown away most of my jungle fatigues and all except one pair of my jungle boots. Most of the green underwear was also gone. 

I put on a clean white t-shirt and white boxer shorts, put on my new sunglasses and strolled outdoors still wearing my shower shoes to smoke a cigarette. It felt odd to stand in the sun without either a helmet or my jungle hat on my head. The heat beat down on packed earth, but I didn’t notice it. My hands were free. I had no M-16 to carry or hang from my shoulder. My ears — trained to filter messages from the whispering hiss of radios, alert to the metallic click of a rifle bolt, the snap of a branch breaking, the slithering snick of a booby trap, the distant whop whop whop of helicopters — could make no sense of the normality of flight announcements, rock and roll radio, howling jet engines.

I went back inside and put on my uniform. It would be very rumpled before this day was done. In a pile on my cot was a pile of crumpled paper money, Military Payment Certificates, fake dollars in lurid colors, and Vietnamese đong. They had no meaning for me. They were currencies for an economy that no longer existed, except in my mind.

As an infantryman, in this place I could not stand. Whatever small victories I and the men I’d worked with had won; whatever small hamlet I had once walked through like a king, safe and secure; whatever we had earned was now spent and was as worthless as these torn and frayed scraps of paper. I had filled up my foxhole and moved on. And now I was without even my team. These men around me, even though they were in the same uniform, were not my brothers. They were just waiting for the ride home.

The loudspeaker announced my flight. I hoisted my duffel bag and left.

Victory in battle ultimately comes down to a small group of men, usually an infantry squad, possessing a place on the earth. What is extraordinary is how men responsible for the conduct of war, who once may have known this truth, seem to lose sight of it. At the end of December 1944, little squads of men owned the dirt in the Ardennes. When the truce was declared in Korea, each point in the irregular line across the peninsula was owned by infantry squads. After its great sweep across southern Iraq in 1991, the tanks of VII Corps idled their engines. The Bradley fighting vehicles drew up alongside, dropped their ramps, and infantry squads rushed out. Those men stood on the ground not far from the banks of the Euphrates and declared by their presence that they owned the land. In every case they knew, or would come to know, that they would eventually leave. But they could all, each of them, remember that moment and know that they had done their jobs, accomplished the mission. Almost twenty years later it would happen again.

Hours and hours and hours later I stepped out of the hatch of the chartered jet airliner and was stunned by the bright California sunlight. Near the bottom of the metal stairs was a cluster of television cameras recording this first flight of soldiers coming home after the cease fire. My ears cleared from the depressurization and the reporters’ shouted questions seemed to bounce off the concrete and slap me in the face. Behind the chain link fence at the terminal were men and women, boys and girls, waving signs scrawled with obscenities and symbols. I stumbled slightly on the last step down to the concrete and it disoriented me. My head went skyward and I momentarily felt as if I had just hit the ground and was looking for fellow paratroopers. I felt a shivering fear that I must have jumped out all alone. I was on the ground and I could not see my squad, my platoon, or my company. My men were not gathering about me. We were not coming together on the ground to protect each other. I turned and turned and looked for them, but they were not there. 

I pushed past the reporters and went into the terminal where I found my duffel bag and got a shuttle to San Francisco International. As I had been advised, the first thing I did at the airport was find a men’s room and change out of my uniform into civilian clothes. 

I have never quite forgiven them, my country, even elements of my Army, for that day. I wondered later when I finally visited the memorial if anyone understood that it was, at least for me, anger and resentment that motivated me to donate my money and effort to its creation. I wanted the memorial to tell those television crews and demonstrators, and those bastards who’d called my wife in the middle of the night while I was gone, and the sonofabitch who’d bragged to her about how much money he was making on the war as she flew to meet me in Hawaii in the middle of one of my tours, to go to Hell — we will remember our comrades.

At that moment, however, it was more important that I was going home. I flew to my family and took them with me back to the infantry.

Grace: Filled With Grace

Vendor, Dalat, Vietnam, Photo Courtesy of The Cape Club

39

Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end. Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Saviors of God

1972

They sent me up out of the Delta to Đà Lạt. Maybe they thought I needed a break. Maybe it had something to do with my time in country. Or maybe I was just on some roster kept somewhere and my name came up. I packed my AWOL bag with an extra uniform, clean socks and underwear, spare ammunition, and went where I was told to go. This was not an operation, so under the loose jungle fatigue shirt I wore only my .45 and a knife. Instead of a helmet I wore a floppy jungle hat with the three lotus-blossom symbol of my rank. 

I was driven to Cần Thơ where I caught a ride on an Air America C-47. I strapped in and they took off. The Delta began to flow below me, the flatness marked by irregular stream beds and the ruler-straight canals. The long flight took me over the rubber plantations of III Corps and up into the soft-looking mountains surrounding Đà Lạt.

The airstrip was set on a small plateau. As we turned on the final approach I saw the orderly rows of crops, very different from the rice paddies I was used to. Ambitious Vietnamese truck farmers were raising produce for the Americans scattered up and down the country. But on the drive in there were the same black-eyed water buffalo and their child herdsmen.

I was driven through the town where the streets were filled with a frantic clutter of bicycles and cyclos, past fragrant marketplaces and up to an old resort hotel. When I stepped out it was as if I had fallen into a Somerset Maugham story. A porter grabbed my bag and led me up a wide set of stairs and into a high-ceilinged lobby. Broad-bladed fans hanging far overhead slowly turned. I walked on wide planks of polished wood through a room defined by upholstered furnishings, oriental carpets, brass ash trays and potted palms. Small men in starched white coats scurried about. A distinguished-looking Vietnamese man dressed in black noted my reservation and room assignment. He gave the porter an old fashioned key attached to a wooden fob that reminded me of the tops I used to spin on my grandfather’s driveway.

A stately four-poster bed dominated my room, the diaphanous mosquito netting rippled from the air blown by a ceiling fan and swayed in the breeze that came through a tall open window. The view from that window was of a green lawn and the peculiar spindly trees left behind when the jungle was cleared. In the near distance were green rumpled hills. 

My dinner was sautéed trout, new potatoes, and fresh green beans, with ripe strawberries and cream for dessert. On the veranda after dinner I felt out of place in my loose green fatigues smoking unfiltered Luckies. I thought I should be in a white linen suit and smoking a thin black cheroot or perhaps an Algerian briar pipe filled with a blend of cured Virginia tobaccos flavored with latakia and perique. The conversation should have been of the fate of Empires, the British or the French or, for the older Southeast Asia hands, the Dutch. Or of rubber production and markets, of shopping trips to Paris, of tigers bagged or Eurasian women available to share one’s room. Instead, even though the coffee was strong and French, the conversation was about Provinces and Corps, VC infrastructure and HES reports, of time in-country and DEROS, of the status of peace talks and the Vietnamese response, of the prospects for promotion and the possible location of the next war, the next place for us.

As I watched, the sky shifted abruptly from a cloud-streaked blue to purple, then black. In the very far distance a flare blossomed and drifted down over the forest. It reminded me of where I was, the time I was in, as I sipped my coffee and smoked my cigarettes.

The conference was just for one day. So I only had two evenings on the cool veranda before I stuffed my underwear and spare ammunition back into my bag and was driven back to the airstrip. This time my ride to the south was in an old C-123, the two-engined predecessor to the C-130. I got on board by walking up the ramp that dropped down at the back and took a seat along the side. Pallets were strapped down the length of the cargo bay, a shipment to the Americans at Cần Thơ and elsewhere in the Delta.

The engines were running. Over them I heard the high-pitched whine of the electric motor for the ramp. The ramp rose up and shut out the sky until with the final thump I was enclosed in a noisy darkness broken only by the light from the scattered port holes. 

My nostrils flared and filled with the scents flowing from the lashed-down pallets. They were loaded with the produce from the fields nearby. In the coolness and darkness around me were lettuce, strawberries, cucumbers, cantaloupes, and watermelons. I breathed in deeply, again and again and again, not even noticing that we had left the ground.