(The opening part of 1968)



First week



A world of dirt


Spider was on a planet far away, a world better than this one. There was a beautiful princess involved, and a reluctant hero, and dragons and swords, but it was science fiction, not fantasy. A big book called Glory Road, by Robert Heinlein.

"You still readin' that flyin' saucer crap?" Batman dropped two heavy boxes of C-rations, raising a cloud of red dust.

Spider didn't look up. "Bite my crank."

"Whip it out." Batman's face was a big black moon. He wiped it carefully with a green bandanna. "Let me see your sixteen."

Spider started to frame a smartass reply, but let it go. "I'll do it." He unfolded his six-foot-two skinny frame, stretched and yawned, stuffed the fat book into a side pocket. Spider was white, nominally; like all the other white boys and men at the fire base, he was actually red, his unwashed skin deeply stained with ground-in laterite dirt.

Spider retrieved his M16, which he had never fired, from where it was propped up against a low bunker. The flash suppressor on the end of the barrel had three prongs that served as an adequate wire-cutter for the baling wire that bound the boxes C-rations came in: you slip the prongs around the taut wire and give the rifle a quick twist; the wire gives way with a satisfying snap.

What Spider didn't know was that if you do this often enough, with enough force, you will begin to unscrew the barrel. Then you can squeeze off a round and have the receiver explode in your face. This would happen to a lot of soldiers before the army changed the design of the flash suppressor. But it's not what happened to Spider.

Batman shouted "Chow!" while Spider snapped open the boxes.

"Happy fucking New Year," Spider said. "Get laid?"

"Sure I got laid. Didn't get off the fuckin' base." The boxes were deliberately upside-down. Batman kneeled and opened them. Inside each were twelve meals in light brown cartons. If you exposed them label-side-up, nobody would take Scrambled Eggs (which the army called Ham & Eggs, Chopped) or Ham & Lima Beans (which the soldiers called Ham and Motherfuckers). This way, choosing your meal was pot luck, often the most exciting event of the day. "Didn't even get any beer. Had to pull fuckin' guard while the clerks an' jerks partied."

Spider felt ambiguous about that term. He had been a certain kind of clerk for his first two weeks in Vietnam. He hated the job, and lost it by shouting at a sergeant, and attempting to land a punch. In his new position, Combat Engineer (Pioneer), he got to work with more congenial men, but other than that it was dirt everywhere, unrelenting heat, hard labor, bad food, and the possibility of people shooting at you. He didn't yet realize how dangerous it could become. Not many did. It was 29 days before Tet, 1968.



Religious holidays



Christianity

The week before, the fire base had been temporarily transformed with red and green bunting and a plastic Christmas tree. Doughnut Dollies, Red Cross workers, came out in a helicopter with a carefully wrapped and perfectly random gift for each soldier. Spider got a 250-piece jigsaw puzzle of a snow scene in Vermont.

A Methodist chaplain in clean starched fatigues offered some prayers and a sermon that put Spider to sleep. He woke up when the Doughnut Dollies turned on a tape recorder, loud and tinny, and led the boys in a ragged half-hour of Christmas carols. The man whose code name was Moses knew all the words and sang with a clear, strong voice. Nobody else was very good, and the excruciation was cut short when the 8-incher behind the Dollies started a sudden fire mission, the shells about as loud as Hiroshima, blasting every twenty seconds or so.

Spider was deeply depressed by the travesty; Christmas had always been the big family get-together, a warm and loving time. He would have cried if he could have had some privacy. Some men and boys did, the tears making temporary mud streaks on their permanently dirty faces.

(Spider had opened his presents from home early. A book of poetry, Palgrave's Golden Treasury, from Beverly; a cross on a chain and a tin box of moldy Rice Krispies cookies from his mother, and from his father, a Swiss Army knife that had everything, including a magnifying glass and a toothpick.)



Judaism



Moses had grown up Reform, and hadn't been noticably devout since he started high school. But like a lot of men, he suddenly became Orthodox when he arrived in Vietnam. Every Jewish holiday, the army sent out a helicopter to take him to the nearest synagogue, 150 miles away. He would come back with a bag of Hebrew National salamis and Mogen David wine from the Kosher PX, and share them with his less fortunate gentile brethren.



Buddhism



The Vietnamese lunar holiday of Tet was sort of a combination of Christmas and New Year's, and throughout the war it was customary to declare a cease-fire for that day. 1968 was no exception.



Whys and wherefores



"Flat ... busted that mother." Spider rocked the little P-38 can opener around the soft-metal lip of the green can, Peaches, Cling. Aggressively.

"Stupid asshole thing to do." The other guy, Tonto, was half writing a letter, half listening to Spider. He'd heard the story before, second-hand, slightly different.

Spider drank off part of the juice and crumbled a piece of pound cake into the peaches. "Oh, man. You shoulda been there. Take just so much shit off a lifer."

Tonto set down his pencil and looked at Spider. "I could take a lot."

"You don't know, man. Drive you outa your fuckin' gourd."

"I was a clerk stateside. Wasn't so bad."

"Shit, stateside." Spider slurped at his peaches-and-pound cake mixture. "It's another world over here. Screw up one form, they put a pack on your back. Wise-ass lifers. They're safe."

Spider had attempted to strike his company's First Sergeant and, rather than go through the formality of a court martial, they had taken away his typewriter, given him a rucksack and a rifle that didn't work, and put him on a helicopter. All this was subsequent to the First Sergeant having given him two black eyes, a split lip and several loosened teeth. Spider was impressed by the asymmetry of the exchange (see "Entropy"). All he had done was misspell a name in a signature block.





Entropy



Entropy was a buzzword in 1968, a perfectly good thermodynamic term captured and put in thrall by those who traffic in metaphor. When something changes the entropy of a system, that change is, innocently enough, the heat absorbed in the process, divided by the system's temperature. The entropy of a system measures the availability of energy in it; energy to do work. The more entropy, the less useful energy available.

What makes this concept dramatic and literary and symbolic of futility, perversity, anomie, is that any change in a real system results in an increase of entropy. When the dust settles, you have less to work with than when you started.

So the entropy of a system is said to be an indicator of the degree of disorder in that system. In any change worked upon a closed system, entropy, thus disorder, must either (trivially) remain constant or increase.

One familiar secular statement of this basic thermodynamic principle is Murphy's Law: if anything can go wrong, it will. That was one of the things Spider had written on the camouflage cover of his helmet.



Names (I)



Spider was named Darcy after a rich uncle who unfortunately left all his money to other people.

He got the name Spider partly because of the abnormal length of his arms and legs. He'd had the name since the seventh grade, and was very good at drawing spiders. He drew a large black one on the top of the camouflage net of his helmet.

The army let him use Spider as his code name (see Names(II)).



Human relations



"I can get along with most anybody." Spider said. He tossed the can away and sat down in the inch-thick dust. He lit up a Lucky Strike. "I mean that sergeant had to go some."

"I know what you mean." Tonto was writing again, trying to describe his surroundings to his wife:

Were in a clearing about the size of a football feild. There's a old stone farmhouse in the middle, all bombed out. We got six 155s and a 8-incher and four or five tanks and three compnies of infantry. No way in Hell Charlys gonna mess with us.

"Spelled the fuckin' sergeant's name wrong at the bottom of a letter. I woulda typed it over. But he started hollerin' and callin' me names. I don't have to take that kind of shit."

"Damn straight." Theres a rubber plantation all around us. I guess were at one end of it. You can see the jungle off to the west. We got patrols out all day and ambushes all night. We got 3 layers of barbed wire and 50s all around the permeter. This place has been here for a year and never got hit. So you dont have to worry.

"Better out here anyhow. Nobody fucks with you."

"Nobody but Charlie."

"Ah, shit. What do you know about it?" The other man had only been in Vietnam for one month.

"Just what I hear. Same as you."



Dust



Laterite is a ferruginous mineral, brick-red in color, that makes up much of the soil of the Central Highlands of Vietnam. If the brush is cleared from an area during the dry season, this laterite manifests itself as a fine red dust, like gritty talcum powder, that gets on and into everything.

In semi-permanent installations, the dust is often several inches deep, piling up in drifts like hot dry snow. It's constantly air-borne; making breathing difficult, dyeing the skin, fouling machinery, giving food an interesting texture.



First Blood



That night a squad of enemy sappers cut their way through the barbed wire and set a satchel charge under the 8-inch howitzer. Returning through the hole in the barbed wire, one tripped over a string that set off a magnesium flare. All six of them were slaughtered by a .50-caliber machine gun, operated by the guard whose drowsiness had let them through the perimeter in the first place. Their return fire was valiant but only succeeded in amputating a cook's earlobe. The satchel charge went off but it was too small, and only knocked a wheel off the howitzer. The NVA squad that had been waiting for the sappers' return fired five hasty mortar rounds toward the American camp. All five rounds fell short (see "Entropy").



Attitudes



"God, you see them dead gooks?" The man who said this, grinning, had earned his nickname "Killer" by single-handedly zapping an unarmed North Vietnamese soldier who'd come crashing through the woods, shouting deleriously, a few months before. The first round, a head wound, had probably been sufficient, but Killer had walked over to him, switched the M16's selector to full auto, and put seventeen more rounds in a line across the man's back, point blank, almost cutting him in two. He'd never killed anyone before or since.

"Yeah." Spider had seen them from a distance. "Big shit. I seen worse."

(Spider wasn't lying. When he'd tried to slug the sergeant he had been employed as a clerk at "Graves Registration" in Kontum. Besides typing and filing, he had tagged the bodies of American soldiers, inventoried their personal possessions, and sent them along to Cam Ranh Bay inside a plastic bag inside an aluminum casket. He hadn't liked the job and after two weeks it had driven him a little crazy.)

"Monday." The medic Doc, walking by, gave Spider and Killer each their weekly malaria pill, an orange disc just smaller than a cookie. This was in addition to their daily Chloroquine.

"God." Killer made a face and, gagging, washed the thing down with half a canteen of water. Spider belonged to the other school of thought: he broke it into four more-or-less equal pieces with his Swiss Army knife, and took each piece separately. Killer watched him with the righteous contempt of a man who has seen a physical challenge and faced it directly.

"Yer gun clean?" Killer asked. His was immaculate, always.

"All I ever do is clean my fuckin' gun." He knew it was probably pretty dusty, but he hadn't checked it this morning. "What's it to you?"

"Gonna saddle up. Search an' destroy."

"'Saddle up,'" Spider mocked him. "Will you get off that shit?" Every morning of the week Spider had been at the fire base, somebody said they were going to be moving out.

"No shit. Captain's been in the command tent all morning."

"Playin' cards."

"Uh uh, Miller says it's for real this time." Miller was their platoon sergeant, a greybeard of forty who had actually fought in Korea.

"Well." Spider got up and brushed the dust from the seat of his pants, a futile instinctive gesture. "Maybe I'll go get my shit straight."

"Maybe you better." Spider really hated the guy when he was on that hard-core kick. When he wasn't playing John Wayne he was all right. He read books, even science fiction sometimes.

Spider went to the fuel dump and sloshed a couple of inches of gasoline into his helmet. He carried it back to his hooch and picked up his M16 and sat down cross-legged on a sandbag.



The Black Death (I)



Soldiers in Vietnam were told that the enemy, primitive superstitious devils, called our M16 "the Black Death." It did appear menacing: sleek, dull black, efficient-looking, modernistic. A great deal of thought had gone into the visual aspect of its design. But it had its drawbacks.

For some reason, the magazine only held twenty rounds. The weapon's cyclic rate of fire was such that if you held the trigger down for 3/4ths of a second, you'd be suddenly out of ammunition. Also, the spring-feed would jam if you tried to fill the magazine completely; most people carried only 18 rounds per magazine.

It was mechanically as cantankerous as a cheap watch. If there was any dirt or rust inside the receiver, it just wouldn't work. And it was too light to make a good club.

It fired tiny bullets whose effect on the human body was inconsistent.

If you cocked it too fast you'd lose a fingernail.

The rear peep-sight kept filling up with crud.

The sling was useless.

When you tried to sneak through the jungle, the hollow stock made loud clacks and scrapes against the brush. The sling swivels (unless you'd taped them or taken them off) made jolly little squeaking, snickering sounds.

It was very disconcerting to American soldiers when, after a battle, they would collect enemy ordnance and find that the primitive superstitious devils had been returning fire enthusiastically with weapons that were dirty, rusty, and held together with wire and friction tape. Whereas GI's often had to scrunch down behind a tree in the middle of a battle, and take their beautiful weapon apart and try to figure out why it had stopped working.

A graffito often found scratched on the stocks of M16s was "Made by Mattell, it's Swell."



Hygiene (I)



Scratched on the stock of Spider's M16 was the disconcerting legend "This machine doesn't work." The supply sergeant who had issued him the weapon said not to worry about it.

Spider cleaned his hands with a little bit of the gas, then worked over the external metal parts of the gun with a piece of toilet paper moistened with gas.

"Good morning, Mr. Spider." Wilkes, buck sergeant, Spider's squad leader.

"Pull up a chair." Spider worked the little toggle free and the gun swung open. He dropped the slide, bolt, and trigger assembly into the helmet to soak.

"Know you're not supposed to use gasoline." Wilkes sat down across from him. "Fire hazard."

"That a fact." Spider threaded a patch of cotton the size of his thumbnail through the eye of a cleaning rod. He soaked the patch with gas and ran it through the barrel.

"Yep. If you try to shoot the gun when it's full of gasoline vapor, it'll blow up in your face.

Spider showed him what was written on his stock.

"Guess you're safe." Wilkes broke open his rifle. Can I bum some?"

"Go ahead." Spider ran the cleaning rod through again, this time with a few drops of LSU light grease. He took the soaking parts out of the gasoline and lined them up on a strip of clean toilet paper on his knee, then offered the helmet to Wilkes. "Save me some for my ammo."

He didn't want to go through the hassle of taking apart the bolt and trigger assembly. They looked clean enough, so he just wiped them off and gave them a thin coat of LSU. "True we're goin' out today?"

"Shit, I hope not. I had early guard last night. Didn't get two hours' sleep." The fire base had gone on "100% alert" after the abortive sabotage: everybody up and standing guard in bunkers around the perimeter, until dawn. If you were already up, you had to stay up.

Spider started to put the thing back together, which always took as long as all the rest of the cleaning operation. It was like assembling one of those carved-wood Chinese puzzles.

He got it back together, carefully propped it against his rucksack, out of the dust, and then stepped away from the gas to light up a cigarette.

"It won't be so bad, though, if we do go out. Right?"

"Depends," Wilkes was ostentatiously taking apart his bolt assembly. "All we ever do is walk, practically. Walk all day, dig a hole at night. Fill up the hole in the morning and start walkin' again." He made a face, concentrating so as not to lose the little spring when it popped out. "Some guys like it better. You know that. No dust, no officers to speak of."

"No dinks."

"Not in over a month. And the last one wasn't even a fire-fight, just a little argument. One casualty."

"Yeah, I heard --"

"Poor ol' Smiley. Got it right here." He indicated a point midway between his own sternum and navel. "Haven't heard anything since we put him on the Medivac, guess he's dead." He got the spring out, without its flying into the dust. "Ah. Son of a bitch owed me almost a hundred bucks."

"You and everybody else."

Wilkes laughed. "We oughta get together and hit up his ol' lady for it. Hire a bill collector or somethin', shit, he was such a hard ass ... " The trigger assembly come apart more easily. He swished them around in the gasoline.

"I like fire base better. Like right here, three hots a day, beer, sleep on a cot -- "

"You've got a cot?"

"Hell, yes. Don't seem so safe since last night, though, shit. Fuckin' gooks just walked in, all it takes is one asshole asleep at the switch."

"They find out who?"

"Nah. Prob'ly Bravo, if they went out the same way they came in." He dipped a toothbrush into the gasoline and worked over the outside, all around the receiver. "Trouble with a fire base is that you're a bigger target. Liable to get a whole fuckin' regiment attack at once. Human wave, man, bad shit."

"Like a banzai--"

"I guess. Never been in one myself, but God ... bloodbath, that's all. They just keep comin'. Happened down Plei Djarang, was it? Couple of months ago, two and a half." He shook his head and started fishing pieces out of Spider's helmet.

"Heard about it. Said we had a lot of work at Graves."







The enemies





Spider soon learned that the GI had four enemies in Vietnam. They had four distinct ways of killing him.

The NVA were green-uniformed North Vietnamese Regular Army troops. They were the GI's counterparts, a mixture of career soldiers and draftees. They moved in relatively large units through the jungle and engaged the Americans with "conventional" weapons: rifles, grenades, machineguns, artillery, and sometimes even tanks. They occasionally employed small airplanes for reconnaissance, but didn't have jet fighters in the south.

Most GIs had some sympathy for the NVA. From policing up bodies after a battle, or taking an occasional prisoner, a composite picture emerged of the NVA private as young, scared, ill-equipped, and undersupplied. A sixteen-year-old drafted out of high school would walk a thousand miles and go into battle with a taped-together rifle older than his father, a cloth sack with a couple of dozen loose cartridges, and a plastic bag of rice and dried fish heads. He could kill you with one of those two dozen bullets, but it would take a lot of bad luck on your part.

There were two varieties of Viet Cong. The ones you encountered in the boonies were guerilla fighters who set ambushes, littered the landscape with boobytraps, harrassed you with hit-and-run mortar and rocket engagements, and sometimes came charging out of the night bent on suicidal mayhem. They tortured prisoners and mutilated the dead. If a village tried to resist them, the village chiefs would be found castrated and/or disemboweled and/or beheaded. The GIs saw them as dangerous maniacs, and so did some of the Vietnamese.

The other VC were civilians, women and children and old men, who would walk up to you smiling with a basket of soft drinks or a sexual proposition or a hand out, begging. Inside the basket or under the clothing would be a hand grenade or satchel charge or just a loaded pistol. When the smoke cleared and the bodies were tallied, the GIs would shake their heads in wonder. How could they hate us so much? How could they value their own lives so little? And the lesson constantly fed back was this: Every slope is an enemy; they don't care whether they live or die; they don't see you as a human being at all. Never turn your back on one.

The fourth enemy was the army, the lunatics that had sent you to Vietnam in the first place, the ones that ordered you out of the relative safety of base camp or bunker to go produce a body count. This implacable enemy was personified by officers and noncoms, who sometimes perished from a perceived lack of empathy with those beneath them. Vietnam was not the first American war where a significant number of officers were killed by their own men, but it was the only war that produced a verb describing the action: to "frag," because the preferred weapon for assassination was the fragmentation grenade, ubiquitous and impossible to trace.



Love letter



January 3, 1968

Dear Spider,

Happy birthday to me! There's not much happening here. I hope you can say the same!

We're just hanging around, waiting for the new semester to start. Still just working afternoons. We went down to the Roma for pizza last night, and I got served without using my ID. They've got a really awful band. So we went down to the Zebra and watched Tommy Cole and the Belvederes, we went there with the St. Andrews crowd before you got drafted, remember? They're funny. "Passengers will please refrain from using toilets while the train is in the station Darling I love you." We sang it all the way home. Guy asked for my ID but didn't really look at it, good thing.

There's not much on the TV about Vietnam, so I guess things are pretty quiet. Hang in there.



Love,



Beverly





Excrement (I)





When he was working at Graves Registration, Spider was twice punished by being assigned the shit-burning detail. This was the lowest-caste job in the army, and Spider pretended outrage and disgust when it fell to him. Actually, he rather enjoyed it.

The latrines at his base camp were four-holer outhouses. Instead of emptying into a pit, though, the droppings dropped into old fuel containers, 55-gallon drums, with their top thirds cut off. Every couple of days they would fill up, and whichever enlisted man was in least favor would be assigned shit-burning detail.

You were given a pair of gloves reserved for the purpose. You locked the latrine and propped up the swinging door at the rear that allowed access to the 55-gallon drums. The smell was Olympian in the tropical heat. You dragged the heavy drums to the side of the road and sat upwind, if there was wind, which was rare.

In a few minutes or hours, a fuel truck would come by, and top off the drums with diesel. You would float a gasoline-soaked crumpled piece of paper on top of the noisome mess and light it, and with luck, that would coax the diluted diesel fuel alight, and soon you would have four festive bonfires pouring forth choking black smoke with an aroma that is difficult to describe. They would burn for a couple of hours; your job was to watch them.

As unpleasant as the detail sounds, it did give you lots of time to read. And it wasn't unreasonable for Spider to enjoy it, at least on those days when his normal employment would have entailed the manipulation of decomposed bodies and fractions of bodies.

While he was hauling the barrels of shit, Spider would sing, at the top of his lungs, "Passengers will please refrain/from using toilets while the train/is in the station Darling I love you," to the tune of "Funiculi, Funicula."



Life is but a dream (1)





It's a place that Spider visits almost every night. It is very cold and smells bad, bad like a butcher shop with roadkill inside. Grace notes of Lysol and body wastes. The lights are bright and blue. There are three barber chairs and in one of them a naked man sits dead and white, his hide sewn together in big clumsy stitches that close his half-emptied body. One eye is a fish eye and one eye is gone.

The skinny black man who is Spider's guide stops at the corpse and shakes its hand. "Good evening, Major." He giggles and moves the hand down, forcing against rigor mortis, so it modestly covers shrunken genitals. "An officer and a gentleman."

Six dark green body bags are lined up next to a white porcelain-clad table with blood gutters. "Every day is just like Christmas," the black man says. "Give me a hand here."

Spider helps him wrestle a heavy, lumpy body bag up onto the table. The black man undoes the clamp and cable that holds the bag closed, and starts to skin the plastic back. A head rolls out and falls on the floor with a wet smack.

"Ah, shit." He picks up the head by the hair and sets it on the table facing Spider. A man or beast has flayed the skin off the face; it looks like a grinning anatomy illustration crusted with clotted blood. Tne eye sockets are dark holes. A shiny black millipede scurries out of one of them. Spider screams and wakes up.


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Here are a few pictures of the author being intrepid in, or avoiding duty in, Vietnam ---