My Detachment Read online

  I felt my upper lip curl. “If you do it again, I’m going to give you an Article Fifteen,” I said.

  That night in the lounge Spikes addressed me as “sir.” I got him aside and asked him what was wrong.

  “An Article Fifteen? That’s pretty hard.”

  “I was pissed,” I said.

  He looked away. “Well, I didn’t like it.”

  A couple of weeks later, the company commander insisted that Spikes return to Chu Lai and that I receive a new buck sergeant. Neither Spikes nor I objected. We shook hands. He said, “See ya around, Tracy.” Just as well, I thought. Except for Schulzie, he was the only one by then who still called me by my first name.

  SHORT

  THE NEW COLONEL INVITED ME FOR DINNER AT THE FIELD GRADE officers’ mess. I told a few stories of the old days here in LZ Bayonet. I told the colonel that he’d had a predecessor who sometimes made me feel like the messengers in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra whom the queen would punish for bringing her bad news. He laughed. Not caring if you make a good impression often helps you make one. All through the meal the provost marshal kept trying to question me about the metal roof that had gone missing from my detachment when we’d torn down the surplus hootch.

  “I fail to see, Lieutenant, how someone could take an entire roof off one of your buildings and you not notice it.”

  “I know it, sir. I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

  I had a clear memory of Pancho and the other men from Baldy stripping off the metal. Even in his absence, Pancho remained a presence. And then, late in April, I got a call from Chu Lai. Pancho was due to return from his second R & R and would have only a week or so left in country when he got back. Evidently, he wanted to spend that time at my detachment. Did I have a problem with that?

  “No, I guess not,” I said.

  THE COMPANY’S FIRST SERGEANT HAD FINISHED HIS TOUR SOME TIME AGO. A new “top” had arrived, and the word on him had traveled fast from the enlisted men in Chu Lai to mine. They said this new first sergeant, Sergeant Harb, measured the men’s mustaches and sideburns with a ruler to make sure they weren’t longer than regulation size. They also said he’d lengthened the workday of the men back at the company headquarters, mainly by making them paint the company’s hootches when they got off duty. I’d also heard about a commotion back at the company, something about a booby trap being found in the new first sergeant’s hootch, and maybe some people thought Pancho was involved somehow. But I rejected all rumors out of hand now, and I went to Chu Lai as little as possible, so I didn’t hear the whole story.

  The new first sergeant came to visit us on a hot afternoon at the end of April; he was a skinny, leathery-looking man with a southern accent. He told me he was going to “he’p me out.” He was going to help me decide which of our hootches we should paint first. I wondered to myself if this had something to do with Major Great. Word must have spread. They thought they could do as they pleased with me now. And they probably could have, except that by this time I’d have been the one who did most of the painting.

  I was standing there in the sun, sweat was rolling into my eyes, and the first sergeant was smiling and I was smiling back at him, trying to think of a way to outmaneuver him, but wasn’t coming up with anything. And then, glancing over the first sergeant’s shoulder, I saw a deuce and a half stirring up dust out on the base camp street. The truck pulled in, and a red mailbag came out of the back, followed by a short, trim, black-haired figure in gold-framed sunglasses. The first sergeant was still talking away at me. I went on smiling at him, while from the corner of my eye, I watched Pancho saunter over toward us.

  “Hey, Lieutenant!” He punched my arm. “I just got back from Taipei.” He was grinning. “Man, it feels shitty bein’ back in the ass-licking lifer Army, doesn’t it, sir?” He laughed, and then, brushing his hair off his forehead, he made a quarter turn and said, “First Sergeant Harb! I didn’t see ya! How you doin’, First Sergeant?”

  Harb glowered. “Fine till you got here,” he muttered.

  Clearly, there was something between them, some history I hadn’t witnessed. Standing there on that baked and dusty yellow ground, I thought my hands might be shaking if I took them out of my pockets, because I felt so nervously excited and helpless to prevent whatever was about to happen. And in my mind I made one of those vows: I’m going to remember this.

  The first sergeant was glaring at Pancho. Pancho was grinning at him. “Hey, First Sergeant! You’re short!” Pancho cried. “I’m short, too! Maybe we’ll go back on the same plane together!” Pancho laughed his hearty-sounding laugh, his round chest bouncing.

  He went right on: “Yeah, I’m gettin’ out of this flatdick Army, going to Fort Home. Maybe I’ll come and see ya when I get out.” Pancho lifted a hand. Did the first sergeant flinch? With the hand, Pancho again brushed his sleek, black hair, much longer than it should have been, off his forehead. “You live on …” Pancho rattled off the first sergeant’s home address. He’d probably gotten it from a clerk-typist friend. “Yeah, maybe I will. Maybe I’ll come and see you after I get out, First Sergeant. Got any kids?”

  The scene, as I preserved it, dissolved soon afterward. Pancho sauntered away, calling in an alarmingly loud and cheerful voice to the other men that he was back, but not for long because he was short, so short he was afraid that when he got out of bed in the morning someone would step on him. And meanwhile, the first sergeant was saying something to me about having to get on down the road to headquarters, and he’d get back to me about painting the hootches.

  Briefing the new brigade commander, I felt as if I were sleepwalking, it was all so familiar. Every morning I’d hear Pancho sounding off inside the EM hootch. “Short! I’m so short my feet don’t touch the floor when I get out of my rack!” Doubly short, doubly enviable, because his DEROS was the same as his ETS, his estimated date of separation from the Army. He’d cry out, “ET-fucking-s-ing!” I had noticed in the mirror that my hairline had receded, and the boils on my shoulders would not go away. I’d visited the brigade dispensary, and a pleasant young doctor there had told me that the best thing to do for the boils was to DEROS. AS for my slightly receding hairline, there was nothing at all to be done. “But it is a sign of virility,” he’d added. “If that’s any consolation.” I’d made the mistake of telling Pancho my worries about my hair. Every time I ran into him around the detachment now, he’d say, “Short, Lieutenant. Hey, how’s your hair?” Then he’d laugh and saunter off, saying, “Shaky.” I was asleep in my hootch when he left for Fort Home.

  I went on a second R & R, alone this time, and to Sydney, Australia. Round-eyed girls didn’t meet me at the plane. I tried to pick one up who was tending bar. I even took my glasses off to talk to her. She agreed to meet me later that night on a street corner. I stood there for an hour, then wandered into another bar, where I got conned in a shell game, an actual shell game—but I complained to the manager and got my money back. I spent most of the rest of that R & R in my hotel room.

  On the flight back to Vietnam, I sat beside an infantry lieutenant from the brigade. When I mentioned Colonel Mahoney, he told me that some grunts used to take shots at the colonel’s chopper. The man was a lunatic, he said. The colonel would actually drop notes from his helicopter to squads and platoons down on the ground. He’d do this instead of simply giving them orders over the radio.

  I said I thought I might know the reason for that, but I didn’t try to explain. Mostly I listened, raptly, to the lieutenant’s stories, of the many deprivations of grunts, of the suicidal missions his commanders tried to assign his platoon, of his efforts to keep his men safe. I might have doubted some of this, except that several of his men were riding in the back of the plane, and when we got off they eyed me suspiciously and crowded around him, each one, I recall, giving him a manly punch on the arm, as if each felt it was necessary to touch him.

  When I came back to my detachment, I had only three weeks left. One of the men, a commo op,
had only three days. After dark, I wandered into the operations hootch and found him furiously typing out a message to company headquarters. I looked over his shoulder. THIS UNIT IS UNDER ATTACK. THIS UNIT IS UNDER ATTACK. The usual instruments were playing in the night, insects and big and little guns, but all the shells were outgoing.

  “Don’t send that message.”

  Another story often told, probably in all wars, was the one about the soldier who died with only a day or two left in country. I understood the commo op’s fearfulness. He probably was afraid not of getting injured or killed—after all, he was even younger than I—but of what that would mean: that he wouldn’t get to go home.

  I tried to remember the last time I’d feared for my physical safety. Maybe over six months before, on the night when some sappers got into the base camp. But they’d gone after the brigade staff and had managed only to blow a few harmless holes, one in the floor of the field grade officers’ mess hall, one in the floor of the field grade officers’ hootch, and one in the eardrum of the S-3, who took his wound philosophically. (He said of the sappers, “I’d give them an A for planning and an F for execution,” and he smiled, a wad of cotton sticking out of one ear.) I realized I’d never been in real danger, and I had a feeling that I was going to regret it.

  In early June a letter arrived addressed to “Lt. Col. John Tracy Kidder.” It began without a salutation:

  Short! Well Lt. how does it feel? Good I bet. Well Lt.

  Sorry I have taken so long too write but I hate it, too write. Well I sorry I didn’t wake you up when I left but you had such a long time too go and you were losing your hair I just didn’t have the heart too wake you since I knew you needed your rest. Well How is everyone, Tex, Melvin and Schulzie and the new 05G (sucker).

  Well I have heard in the paper that things go bad over there, I hope it’s not true, but It’s not my bag anymore.

  Well I just hope all of you guys are fine and well. Well here’s my address in case you need something.…

  I’m staying home untill July then I go too D.C. too work for the CIA.

  Well Bye for now don’t forget write back and let me know how all is

  Your friend

  El Pancho

  excuse the writing because this is the second letter I’ve written in a long time the other was to Harris

  The tall, young lieutenant who arrived to take over my detachment carried a photo of the Porsche he had bought before leaving home, and he said friends wondered which he’d miss more, his young wife or his car. I tried to give him a good start, for a few days. But he had ideas of his own, and one day he told me politely that he understood how I felt about tearing down part of the operations hootch, but he was going to do it anyway. I shrugged and walked away. Fucking asshole, I thought. Coming in here, into my detachment, saying he’s going to do things his way. Screw him. The next morning he said he’d like to brief the colonel alone. Lying on my cot late in the morning for the first time in almost a year, I cheered up a little. Schulzie got me aside in the lounge later on and said, “This new guy lieutenant acts like a puke.” I forget what the issue was—filling sandbags or painting hootches or getting haircuts.

  I made a face for Schulzie’s benefit. Then I shrugged. “Short,” I said.

  Schulzie got up early the morning I left for good. We shook hands. We exchanged home addresses. He said he’d look me up once he got out of the service and had dealt with his Army recruiter.

  I still had a few days left in Chu Lai, and on one of them I, along with some other lieutenants, was to receive my Bronze Star. I thought a good monograph might be written about the debasement of medals during the Vietnam War. In ASA anyway, virtually every officer got one, just for showing up. In my mind, I was already halfway home, and I was preparing my new self. I told my company commander that during the ceremony I was going to wear a set of love beads I’d purchased.

  “Please don’t,” he said.

  I wasn’t going to admit it to him, but he’d been good to me. I didn’t wear the beads. The company, all the EM, had to stand in formation while the medals were pinned on. I accepted mine. I thought to myself, What a disgrace, making all these EM stand out in the sun.

  And I grew a mustache. It was risky, I thought, as I trimmed it. Really risky. I had to go through Nha Trang on my way out of country. Colonel Riddle wouldn’t like the mustache. Neither would Major Great. But they were both away when I passed through. I stayed with the other officers at the villa, built, I imagined, by the French. On the rooftop patio, over cocktails, the executive officer said, “Officers in the five-oh-nine Radio Research Group don’t wear mustaches, Lieutenant Kidder.”

  I’d met this officer once before. He’d visited my detachment, but he’d said when he arrived, “I’m not interested in inspecting the men’s quarters.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said to him now. “But Army regulations permit mustaches.”

  He looked at me, and he smiled. Then he shook his head.

  My last night there I shared a room with a soft-spoken lieutenant, another southerner. He told me he envied me the year I’d had. He’d been stuck here in Nha Trang the whole time. Early on, Colonel Riddle had called him “boy,” and he’d lodged a formal complaint. Since then he’d been obliged to spend every evening running the movie projector for the colonel. “Nasty movies. I mean nasty,” he said. “But I won’t let him get to me,” he drawled, and he smiled. I liked him as much as anyone I’d ever met in the Army, but I have misplaced his name, of course.

  And then days of travel began again—airplanes with slings for seats and no windows, wooden benches in the back of a big truck and a view of tin-roofed shacks on the outskirts of Saigon, and strange bunks and olive-drab blankets at the transit camp where they fitted you with a khaki uniform and where, on the last day, I realized I lacked a garrison cap. I couldn’t find one and had a dream on the perimeter of sleep that for the lack of a hat I wouldn’t be allowed to go home. There was a bus in the dark before dawn, which I could have sworn was motoring through villages in France, and finally there was the Freedom Bird. A great cheer went up in the cabin when the wheels left the ground, and soon afterward there was another cheer, not quite as loud, and I wondered, groggily, what that second cheer was for, until I looked out the window and saw the coast of Vietnam passing below us. I turned to the soldier in the seat beside me. He seemed to be asleep. His eyes were closed. He was smiling.

  A VISITOR

  A SOLDIER RETURNS FROM VIETNAM AND AT THE AIRPORT RUNS INTO a bunch of antiwar demonstrators, who welcome him home by spitting on him. This became one of the most common stories from the war. I don’t believe it actually happened very often—if it had, there would have been an alarming increase in mayhem at civilian airports. I think the tale acquired wide currency because it neatly expressed the feelings shared by a part of a generation of American boys.

  For the minority who had seen combat, the myth surely expressed a figurative truth. Among them were the soldiers who came back permanently wounded and ended up in the wards of VA hospitals, some of which were rat-infested. There were the African American veterans I interviewed in Birmingham who had been promised vocational training in the Army and wound up in combat in Vietnam and now couldn’t find jobs (one of whom said of his homecoming: “People didn’t treat you no different. It was like, ‘Hey, I ain’t seen you in a long time. Where you been? You been in jail?”). And there were the former grunts who slipped back as quietly as they could into houses on suburban streets, carrying secrets that only their girlfriends and wives would discover, when they found the carving knife under the bed in the morning. But for the majority of the three million Americans who went to Vietnam, the REMFs, I think the myth spoke mainly about disappointed expectations.

  I took a cab with a couple of majors from Travis Air Force Base to San Francisco Airport. On the way we passed the campus of Berkeley, long a principal site of antiwar fervor. “I went there,” said one of the majors, gazing out the cab window. “It was a go
od place back then.” Despising all majors now that I was heading home, I thought to myself that if he felt that way, Berkeley must have greatly improved.

  Maybe if we’d stopped and walked around that campus in our uniforms, we’d have found someone to spit on us. I wonder if I would have preferred that to the scene at the airport. Men and women in suits, families on vacations. I kept expecting that someone would accost me. I’d heard the stories. In fact, no one seemed to notice me. I wasn’t offended, exactly. The camera had started running again. Soldier returns home in anonymity. He’s been away a long time. He has changed. At the same time, I didn’t want anyone, anyone at all, to see me in uniform. I felt ashamed, of the uniform itself, of almost everything I could remember doing in it, and of everything people would think I had done in it but, sad to say, I hadn’t done. Meanwhile, I was happy. I was going home. And I was still a little worried that I hadn’t been able to find a garrison cap. Could an MP on patrol in the airport arrest me for being slightly out of uniform?

  SAM WAS WAITING FOR ME AT MY PARENTS’ HOUSE. WE DRANK CHAMPAGNE and didn’t talk about the war. I went to Cambridge and stayed with David Riggs. He told me, “You know, before you went to Vietnam, I found a letter you wrote to your brother. You must have dropped it in the hall outside my door.” He smiled. He said he had destroyed it after reading it. “I was afraid an undergraduate would find it and have a nervous breakdown.”

  I called Mr. Fitzgerald from a pay phone. He invited me to lunch at his house the next afternoon. Of course, I didn’t tell him this, but I wanted something from him, mainly hope for the novel I was going to write. He had prepared sandwiches. I’m not sure he made them himself, but I like to think that he did, and that he was responsible for cutting the crusts off the bread. It seemed a sweet gesture, a way of making me feel I was important to him. It also made him seem old, older than I’d remembered him.