The Snowfly Page 8

  “Don’t you need a transcript of my classes and grades?”

  “We’re hiring talent, Rhodes. Not sheepskins.”

  I accepted. Trout and white flies were put aside. I was moving on.

  I called my old man and broke the news to him.

  “Are you crazy?” he asked, not wasting words.

  “I’m not going in uniform.”

  “Going is the problem,” the old man said curtly, “not what you’ll be wearing.”

  5

  It was 1967, I was twenty-three and in the second year of my war. Most of the details don’t matter now. They didn’t then, either, but I had to learn that for myself. I had no big picture to orient me; my war amounted to a series of snapshots, most of them unpleasant and out of wider context, much less any real focus. I met other correspondents, many of whom had spent their entire professional lives chasing wars, and even they were at a loss to explain the mess. I operated out of Saigon but spent as much time as I could in the field.

  UPI was a screwed-up organization. The Saigon bureau chief had been medevacked back to the States the day before I arrived. Bloody hemorrhoids took him home and left me reporting to a telephone voice in Manila. UPI had a half-dozen reporters and several contract photographers dispersed around the country. I think I drew Saigon as my operating base because I was new and would need an overseer, but my would-be boss’s medical problem left me pretty much on my own. UPI kept telling me a replacement bureau chief was on the way, but one never arrived.

  The Manila voice belonged to Del Puffit, who gave me orders and assignments without a clue of what I was facing every day. I met him only once, in a skin bar in Manila. He was obese, inebriated, and spewing projectile sweat. This graduate of some small private college in St. Louis kept telling me that I needed to develop an intellectual’s view of the world and grow out of the rubber-stamp education I got at a state farm college. To my credit, I held my tongue and my fists and after one drink, I paid the tab with my own dime and left him perched precariously on a barstool.

  His telephone contacts were erratic. I’d hear from him four days in a row, then nothing for weeks on end. The calls had a set script.

  He’d bark, “Find the outrage. We need to tug heartstrings.” This was the intellectual view I was supposed to aspire to?

  I almost always countered, “Come on over and show me what you mean.”

  He never did. Outrage in Vietnam had no context when you were in Manila. Was it spending a hundred grand to mine a dirt road the NVA cleared with water buffalo dragging garbage can lids? Was it a squad of Marines wasting eighty-three old folks, women, and children in a village in II Corps? Or was it a squad of VC wasting eighty-three old folks, women, and kids in a ville in the Delta? There were no reliable points of reference and good and evil defied definition.

  Morality was a moving target.

  The South Vietnamese government lied. The North Vietnamese government lied. The American government lied. Reporters lied. Civilians lied. The way I saw it, only I dealt in the truth, but now I realize that, because I never knew what was really true, my presumed truths were also lies.

  Only the South Koreans (ROKs) seemed forthright. They were renowned for their methods of pacifying areas that MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) briefers labeled “politically ambiguous.” The Koreans would ride American-flown slicks into an area, dismount in force, and kill the first twenty or thirty locals they encountered. There were no interrogations, just summary executions. They were not seeking truth, only symbols. The heads were staked around the area as warnings to the politically unambiguous. The Koreans did not suffer OLs—op losses—because their brutal arrivals assured that all folks of differing political flavors would expeditiously relocate to safer, more ambiguous environs. Korean efficiency was recognized by all sides, if not universally admired.

  I interviewed an ROK captain one rainy afternoon in a camp not far from the Mekong Delta.

  “Why are Korean troops here?”

  “U.S. is our ally. They ask help, we come. Someday we will kill North Korea communists. We practice now on South Vietnam communists.”

  The essence of war is simplicity.

  I found myself spending longer and longer periods of time in the bush and, afterward, longer and longer intervals rejuicing to return to the bush. It got more difficult every time. Harder to pull myself out, harder to put myself back in. The first year was bad, the second worse.

  The things I saw in the war sometimes defied description, but still live in my mind. I do not have night sweats or nightmares, but I have plenty of ugliness floating around in my subconscious.

  I went out with the troops every chance I could finagle, and over time my stories reflected my state of mind.

  •••

  Today was like yesterday for Bravo Company. Captain Walter Stiff led his company slowly through a reptile-infested swamp searching for Viet Cong storage sites. Two men were bitten by poisonous snakes. One man had heat-induced convulsions. One man got lost and remains missing. And one man was wounded in what he told his captain was a one-on-one encounter with the enemy; the company commander is calling it a wound of unknown origin, which means a Purple Heart is unlikely. Just before sundown, Bravo’s survivors shotgunned a colony of reddish black monkeys that were declared a potential “nocturnal security threat.” Human casualties were medevacked out. Primate casualties were roasted for dinner. Tomorrow will be just like today, only one day closer to each soldier’s ticket to the Freedom Bird. The noblest cause in this war is getting out with all your parts intact. Said a platoon sergeant, “We’re all in this war separately together.”

  •••

  About the time I got to thinking I had seen everything I discovered I had barely scratched the surface.

  In September 1967 I arranged a hop out to the USS Snow, a hospital ship named for a Korean war surgeon who had died as a POW in that so-called police action. The hospital ship operated south of Da Nang in the South China Sea; I had heard that the ship’s surgeons out there were doing new procedures that were producing miraculous medical results. In any war, all miracles are welcomed, real or imagined. I’d also heard something else, and that’s what pushed me to take a look. If my leads on this were solid, Del Puffit would have the outrage he wanted.

  The ship was a brilliant white and glowed as my chopper approached just after sunrise. We came in high and my first view of the Snow was a white speck on a blue-green carpet; as we got closer she looked like a toy. For some reason I thought of a snowfly rising off a smooth river.

  Everything in and on the ship was scrubbed clean and white, including the medical personnel, which was just as I had been told. The doctors on the ship were said to be very good, pushing the envelope of risk with their patients, all of whom were black men. I had learned this from an enlisted medic I met during one of my field excursions. He claimed that two men from his company had been wounded and flown out of the field and moved onto the Snow, and that there they had died.

  I uttered my sympathies, which made the man angry. He grabbed the collar of my jacket and nearly choked me.

  He said, “You don’t get it, man! They only take brothers out there and a lot of them don’t make it.”

  “How badly hurt were the guys from your company?”

  “They were fucked up, but not ready to buy the farm, dig? I’m just a medic, see, but I know when a man is going to die. My brothers shoulda made it, man.”

  I began asking around in other outfits after this and heard enough similar stories that I wanted to go out to the Snow and see for myself.

  “You Are My Sunshine” was blaring from the ship’s loudspeakers as the chopper waddled onto the helipad. The song played over and over in a closed loop. The noise from the ship’s belly was a soft and steady hum. Pungent salt spray and disinfectants permeated every corner of the vessel.

  I had br
eakfast with a Marine surgeon, Colonel Johnson Quick, the ship’s lead thoracic surgeon, a tanned, muscular man who neither smoked nor drank and made sure everybody knew about it. Over eggs Benedict and fresh whole milk he talked me through all kinds of surgical procedures, addressing me as if I had fifth-grade comprehension. He told me repeatedly that “his people” were “results oriented” and that back in the States he had enjoyed a “hugely successful” practice, which I interpreted as his having made a lot of money.

  The surgical procedures were interesting, but not my main reason for visiting the Snow.

  “Colonel, why are all the medical and ship’s personnel on board white, and all the patients black? Don’t wounded white soldiers need your help?”

  He stared at me and joined his hands to make a small wall between us. “We do not pick our patients.”

  This seemed a fair-enough answer. “Who does?”

  The joined hands grasped each other tighter. “This is an egalitarian service. We take care of who is sent to us. Surgery, Mister Rhodes, is color blind and all humans are the same color inside.”

  I changed directions. “What you and your colleagues do here is largely experimental, am I correct?”

  “Not to us,” he said.

  “But all the procedures you’ve described to me aren’t used in hospitals back home. They’re not standard, right?”

  The colonel’s lips pursed and his neck turned red. “Here is here,” he said. “There is there. We set standards here that will eventually become the standards there.”

  I kept my voice calm. “If you are experimenting here, doesn’t that require the patients’ permission?”

  “This is the military,” he said. “There is no time to ask permission of a dying man. And . . . it would be unethical to do so. Out here, time is life.”

  I would not be swayed. “What’s your overall success rate?”

  He blinked and scowled. “We have achieved unprecedented successes.”

  “Granted. I’ve heard lots of good things about your team, but what about an overall percentage?”

  He kept blinking.

  “For example,” I said, “what is the survival rate for a kind of procedure you do here, versus a similar procedure done at field hospitals in-country—or back home?”

  He said, “You can’t compare durians and mangos.”

  I said, “Okay, just give me an overall percentage, a batting average. Of the men who come to the Snow, how many leave alive?”

  “All we are capable of saving,” he said.

  I never did get answers to my questions and was invited to leave and placed on a chopper heading back to Da Nang before lunch.

  I didn’t need an answer or a number to write my story. The USS Snow was black and white to the eye, but all gray ethically.

  My story about the Snow ran and created a brief furor back in the World. One of the information pukes from MACV’s Information Office made a point of sending me a message letting me know that “the general” (name unspecified) considered my story an act of treason and that while my credentials were not being pulled, I could not count on a great deal of cooperation from the military.

  Del Puffit called me and threatened to “have me fired” if I pursued “any more stories of this ilk.”

  Have me fired? This meant he couldn’t do it himself and somehow I knew Yetter would be in my corner. “I thought you wanted me to find outrage?”

  “You cannot destroy confidence in the medical service,” he blared, lecturing in his most officious voice. “The boys in uniform need to believe that if they’re injured, they’ll be made whole again.”

  I said, “Goddammit, Del, they’re taking black kids out to that ship and using them as lab rats.”

  “There is no government conspiracy against Nee-grows,” Puffit said. “Don’t do this again.”

  “The story ran. Didn’t you review it?”

  “I was indisposed.” He had been drunk. This story and phone call freed me from following any further direction from Puffit.

  In 1972, a few years after I left Vietnam, Americans were shocked to learn about the federal government’s forty-year-long “Tuskegee study.” Black men diagnosed with syphilis had been intentionally not treated so that doctors could study the natural course of the disease. The Snow’s outrage had not been the only one against some of our own people.

  During my two years in Vietnam, the hospital ship story was the only one I wrote with real political intent. Before and after that I tried to keep my focus on what the individual soldiers were doing to stay alive and get home.

  I met some genuine crazies and too many assholes to count, but mostly I met duty-bound young people doing what they thought their country wanted and doing it the best they could.

  I hated the war. But I hated what America was doing to our soldiers even more. The troops had a word to cover the situation there and back in the World: FUBAR, Fucked Up Beyond All Reality.

  •••

  In November 1967 I caught a hop on an air force C-130 to Da Nang in I Corps, in the northern part of the country. I wanted to spend time with a Marine unit that made long-range reconnaissance sorties into enemy-­controlled territory. The long-range recon guys were called Lurps. They were taken by helicopters into the bush and left in place until their mission was done or their food ran out and their clothes rotted off, even their jungle boots. I wanted to go out with one of these teams and tell the story of what they did, but my request initially had gotten mired between Saigon and Da Nang. The military made an art of delays. After pressing several times, I was told that I could visit the base, but would have to remain there, for “safety and security reasons.” I accepted. In northernmost South Vietnam, the war featured fixed lines and was more like the classic them-against-us scenarios of previous conflicts; down south was more of a guerilla and terrorist business, which made it impossible to draw distinctions. From Da Nang I rode west into the mountains to the Marine operation at Camp Jolly with ten taciturn Marines in a lumbering, yawing CH34C Choctaw. Until I got clearance to go out with the troops, it was better than nothing. I always hated sitting around.

  Camp Jolly sat within sight of the Lost Mountains, a name bestowed by Americans, not the Viets: The story was that if you wandered into the mountains, you were doomed to get lost. Most troops called the place Camp MagNo (for Magnetic North), because any iron shot in the air by either side’s artillery seemed to be drawn directly to the camp. Black humor kept more soldiers alive than prayers, never mind what the God pilots claimed. In two years, much of the time with troops, I never heard a soldier praying in a foxhole. Or a bunker. Or an APC. Or a chopper. They were too busy and scared to pray.

  I had been at the camp four days. My Marine hosts were polite, efficient, and aloof. Some of them spent time showing me how to rig night warning systems with snare wire, tin cans, and stones. And how to use camouflage. I knew they taught me these things so that I wouldn’t stand out and become a target. If I became a target, they might also get it. In war personal survival drives a lot of what goes on. I had a bunker to sleep in, complete with a python the marines kept to hold the rat population down. I had shelter, clothing, and food and not much to do while I waited for the brass to decide if risking a reporter’s life was worth the theoretically beneficial publicity.

  The troops at Camp MagNo were businesslike and on alert at all times. There was no dope that I saw and no booze. I could feel the continuous pressure of anticipation.

  There were rice paddies along the eastern perimeter of the camp. At times a wind would blow out of the north and, when it did, chubby yellow-and-green birds would dive into the water, carrying away small, silvery fish. As bored as I was, it was too much to resist.

  I scrounged a long piece of green bamboo, unraveled some parachute cord to make line, got a hook from a survival pack a jet jock had given me several months before, got some brea
d, made them into gluey little balls, walked down to the water’s edge, and waded in. It felt great to fish, but impulse can feel good and be all wrong.

  The fish were small, shaped vaguely like stunted bluegills. They turned their noses up at the bread. I tried bits of Vienna sausages from K-rats and they ignored these as well. I looked around to see if there was some sort of insect hatch. The wind, I figured, had pushed the fish into groups, which brought the birds. But what pushed the fish together? Wind, fear of predators? I loved trying to figure out the puzzle and I was in deep cogitation when a voice sounded behind me.

  “Hey, pal.”

  Two heavily muscled, shirtless Marines were squatting on dry land. One was black, the other white, and they were both huge. They had sawed-off shotguns across their thighs and reminded me of my old man and how he could hunker like that for hours. They wore helmets with camouflage-cloth covers and matching sunglasses with electric pink rims and yellow mirrored lenses.

  “Me?” I asked. They were about thirty yards away.

  “Catchin’ anything?” the white Marine asked.

  “Not yet.” Ever the optimist.

  “That’s ’cause there’s nothin’ to catch,” he said.

  He was probably toying with me, I decided, yanking my chain. Good-natured verbal and mental jousting were common fare between reporters and soldiers.

  “I saw birds catching fish out here.”

  “They can fly,” the man said.

  “The point is, there’s fish here,” I insisted with a nod toward the water, which extended above my knees.

  “Not for you.”

  I turned around to face my hecklers, lost my balance on the soft bottom, stumbled forward, and landed facedown, bracing the fall with a hand on the soft, mucky bottom. My two watchers threw themselves flat on the ground and covered their heads.