My Detachment Read online

  Men landed on the moon for the first time during my thirty-day, post-Vietnam leave. I was riding in the car of a young woman whose surname I don’t remember—if I did, I would write her a letter of apology—and we were driving toward Cape Cod, when the news came over the radio. “Bastards!” I yelled. “Why don’t they leave the fucking moon alone!”

  She said, “I think it’s great. What’s the matter with you?”

  After leave I went to Fort Holabird, a post in Baltimore devoted to Army Intelligence, to serve the last months of my two-year enlistment. I was assigned to an African American colonel who needed someone to write up a short biographical essay about Nathan Hale, an early American spy, supposedly the country’s first intelligence officer. The colonel said he realized I’d been in Vietnam and didn’t have much time left until my ETS. He was very kind. He told me I didn’t have to come to the post, just write up a story about Hale that he could use for some upcoming ceremony. I lived in a houseboat with several intelligence officers I’d known at Infantry School at Fort Benning. But I got lonely there. So I put on my uniform and went to the post, and a colonel I’d never laid eyes on before stopped me on a path and made me stand at attention while he examined me. He ordered me to get a haircut. I went to the barbershop right away. And the next day I had to go to the post in uniform to get my pay, and the same colonel stopped me again.

  “I thought I told you to get a haircut, Lieutenant.”

  “I did, sir.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I held my tongue while he examined my belt buckle. “This brass is turning green. Look at your shoes. What the hell do you think you’re doing, Lieutenant?”

  “I ETS in a month, sir,” I said. The minute I said it I knew I’d made a bad mistake. How idiotic, to tell this powerful lifer I was about to leave the Army.

  “You’re not going to ETS or any other damn thing if you don’t shape up, Lieutenant.”

  Fear, real fear, shot through me. I wanted to bite my fingernails. I think that, for the first time in my life, I had homicidal thoughts. The odd thing was I didn’t feel angry. I felt that if this person stood in my way, I’d have to get him out of my way. Even odder, I thought that I had shined my brass. I thought I’d shined my shoes. Yet, looking down at my uniform later, I didn’t see how I could have. I knew I’d gotten a haircut. This choleric colonel must know something about me, I thought. Maybe he knew something about me that I didn’t know.

  I didn’t go back to the base again, not until my last day in the Army, when I had to visit its various offices for out-processing. At headquarters a clerk handed me a “Command Information Fact Sheet.” I glanced through it, and, coming to the end, I read: “For some, the return to civilian life may make the Army seem remote; but some things from your service will be with you forever—not unpleasant things which the mind tends to reject—but good, worthwhile memories. If you were in Vietnam, such memories may include a village scene, a child, a girl, a buddy …”

  I tucked the pamphlet in among all the other papers I’d collected. My last acts in the Army were administrative. Now I was done with them, released, finished with wearing a green suit. All that remained was a walk to the parking lot and the used sports car I’d bought with the pay I’d saved in Vietnam. The post was a warren of old brick buildings that reminded me of American high schools of a previous era. I was walking along an asphalt path, looking down at my shoes and watching shinier ones go by, when someone spoke to me.

  “Lieutenant Kidder?”

  I looked up, right into a face I knew I recognized, that ever so ordinary face, gold oak leaves on the collar of his greens. “Major Great.”

  He was staring at the left side of my chest, the place where soldiers wear those little ribbons that represent medals. I was wearing mine. He shook his head and made a short laugh, half a snort, half a cluck. “You’ve got your Bronze Star on upside down,” he said. “Here, let me fix it.”

  “No, that’s all right, sir. I’ll do it myself.”

  “All right, Lieutenant.”

  I saluted him, he saluted back, and we went our separate ways.

  I thought that I was done with him then and with all he represented for me. As I walked away, out of the Army, I thought of him walking the other way, pursuing his undistinguished career inside that vast, malfunctioning clockwork. I tried to imagine the life in front of him. Paperwork and acronyms and young men who wouldn’t get dressed right. Too bad he wasn’t a more prepossessing villain. But what a horrible life. Incomprehensible, really. And, of course, he probably walked off still shaking his head, thinking much the same thing about me.

  I had planned to throw my hat in the air when I drove out of the gate of Fort Holabird, but I didn’t feel like doing that when the time came. There wasn’t much of an audience, only an MP, a private, in the guardhouse.

  I took off my uniform when I got back to the houseboat. I was alone. I lit a fire in the Franklin stove and stuffed in my pants and shirt. They wouldn’t burn. Finally I gave up and dropped them in the trash.

  MARY ANNE CAME TO SEE ME AT MY PARENTS’ HOUSE IN OYSTER BAY. I’D carried a photograph of her in my wallet to and from Vietnam. A picture taken on my father’s catboat, when she was about sixteen. She didn’t look much different now. Once again, she had the freckles near her nose that always appeared in summer. But the expression on her face wasn’t mischievous. It was sad. We sat outside, the hem of her skirt spread on domesticated grass, beneath an immature dogwood tree. I knew she’d come to let me know that I wouldn’t see her again. I felt a keening trying to escape from my throat, knowing that I would always miss her, the first girl I’d loved. A familiar doubleness came over me, as if inward tears split my vision so that in one half I was seeing myself suffering and enjoying the spectacle.

  I knew she wanted to make a clean end. I might have made it easy for her if I had let myself remember all her gifts to me—not just the good times without number or her many kindnesses, but what she had awakened in me. She had enlarged my sense of life, both its sorrows and its joys. But I wanted this to cost her. I was going to tell her some of the contents of the unmailed letter I’d written before R & R. I’d say that when her letters stopped, I got so angry and cared so little about anything that I volunteered for dangerous missions, just so I could kill people. “I killed people because of you,” I planned to say. I wasn’t sure why, any more than I was sure why I’d saved that unmailed letter, or why it seemed romantic to be someone who had killed people. I picked at the grass and said that, after her letters dwindled, I did some terrible things, and then I stopped, ashamed.

  She said, “I ruined everything, didn’t I.”

  And then I realized that, for effect, the hint of a terrible war story was the best war story of all.

  I FINISHED IVORY FIELDS ABOUT A YEAR LATER, IN BOSTON’S SOUTH END, ON the top floor of a building under renovation, where I got free room in return for unskilled labor.

  I began the last chapter with a portrait based on Harris, a character I called Casey, a member of the now-deceased Lieutenant Dempsey’s platoon. He’s been wounded (“at that little fight we had down near Quang Ngai City”). An Army psychiatrist has decided Casey is no longer fit for combat duty. That particular psychiatrist always makes this diagnosis: “He thought that all combat soldiers belonged in nuthouses.” Casey now works at the Chu Lai dump, known to soldiers as the “black plague.” I’d seen the actual place, and the Vietnamese picking through the garbage. Casey has an epiphany there. He gives a kid his boots, then spends all his pay at the PX to buy more stuff to give away at the dump. He tells his nasty boss, a spec. 5 named McGuire, “Man, watch out. One of these days you come back and this truck’s gonna be gone. It’s going to be gone. I might have to give it away.” I wrote: “Casey’s old white eyes watched McGuire turn away. He smiled secretly. And that is not all.”

  Seated at a makeshift desk in my temporary g
arret lodgings, I wrote: “Although that is not all and many fates still hung in the balance, including that of Ivory Fields, it must do for now. Larry Dempsey’s body is home and underground. There is an end. May his soul rest in peace.”

  At the bottom of the page I wrote, “1970.” Finishing, I recall, seemed like a good way to begin a new decade.

  THE WORKING CLASS OF AMERICA HAD LONG BEEN AMONG THE WAR’S staunchest supporters, at least in part for a tragic reason: It was their sons, mainly, who were obliged to go to Vietnam and who did most of the fighting and dying there, and one could not expect them easily to disown the cause to which they’d sacrificed so much. But over the years, memories altered, softened, faded. For many, even some of those directly responsible for it, the whole enterprise came to be viewed as misbegotten at best. Others held fast to the notion that if only it weren’t for “politics,” the war could have been won. But no one blamed the veterans anymore.

  Almost all the movies about Vietnam, the ones I saw anyway, treated American soldiers sympathetically—and all but a few made war seem attractive, even the movies that didn’t mean to, maybe those especially. By the early 1980s, I noticed that mentioning my service in Vietnam often produced long faces and murmurs of sympathy. It still does on occasion, from people of various ages. Sometimes I’m happier if I don’t answer and remain in the warmth of the misconception. Usually I say that I didn’t have a bad time, that I and most of the soldiers who went there weren’t in anything like combat. And sometimes I feel transported into memories of the kind of soldier I was, and this in turn is apt to lead me into silent colloquy with literary critics. Now and then, over the years in which I’ve written and published nonfiction books, I’ve been accused of being too soft on the people I’ve tried to depict. I want to say to my critics that if the flaws in those people were obvious to them, they were also obvious to me. But, I want to add, I’d like to avoid being judgmental, and I have reason to try.

  I’m a decade more than twice as old as the lieutenant who commanded the Radio Research detachment with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade of the disgraced and long disbanded Americal Division. For me, almost all that remains of the colonels and majors and captains I met, and of the enlisted men I lived with, are memories. I lost touch with all of them—or nearly all.

  Over the years, from time to time, I heard from Pancho. In 1970, after I’d moved to Boston, he called my parents’ house. My mother described him as “a strange young man, but very polite.” Twice over the next decade he called my home in western Massachusetts, but I was away on each occasion. Near the end of 1985, I found an envelope in my mailbox addressed to “Shakey Kidder,” with a return address in Saudi Arabia. He had written inside, “Shakey & Family Merry Christmas!” Then, one morning in 1986, he came to visit me. Unexpectedly, which I suppose was to be expected. The phone rang, and a familiar voice said, “Hey, Lieutenant Colonel Kidder.”

  “Pancho!” I said.

  I heard that low, sneaky laugh. “Heh heh. You remember my name.” Actually, he said, someone had given him the nickname when he got to Vietnam. No one had ever called him Pancho before or since, but he didn’t mind if I did.

  A few minutes later he arrived in a rental car. He’d put on a lot of weight, but I think I would have recognized him on a street. We sat around my house for a while, comparing memories. I asked him, for instance, if he remembered the guy who refused to believe he couldn’t travel at the speed of light and how dour he’d become in his last weeks at the detachment.

  “Yeah, something happened towards the end,” Pancho said. “He was leaving, I don’t know. Maybe he was getting sad. That happened to a lot of people. When I left, I almost re-upped.”

  “You did?”

  He was in an out-processing center in Oakland, and a bunch of officers and sergeants were trying to get ETS-ing soldiers to reenlist. “Here I am, a young kid, no real education, and all I know is the Army. But then, it was funny, this lieutenant, he said to me, ‘Tie your tie. Your tie ain’t right, trooper.’ I’m getting out in one minute and they’re makin’ me tie my tie again, and I’m saying to myself, ‘Get out, dummy, don’t stay around.’ ”

  He’d gone back to St. Louis, his hometown, he said. He worked there for a month in a grease factory. “Pushin’ fifty-five-gallon drums of oil around. I’m serious. This is hard labor, slave labor.” Through a series of coincidences, he got a job working for the CIA. “So I’m being briefed and the guy’s going through all the old code words and I noticed one old one, the same on the message we lost. SUNDAE I think was the word. I said, ‘Hey this doesn’t exist anymore.’ He said, ‘That’s right, some fool lost a message or something.’ I said, ‘You’re looking at him.’ ”

  I let the story go. “You know, Pancho,” I said, “they could have busted you for losing that message.”

  “They couldn’t have busted you,” he said. “You were a second lieutenant. You couldn’t go any lower, could you? They could have promoted you, and then busted you.”

  We laughed.

  He said he’d quit the CIA when he found himself deskbound. Soon afterward he’d gone back to Vietnam as a civilian, and worked there for four years as an electronics technician for military subcontractors.

  I said it must have been frightening near the end of the war.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Places got blown up, people tried to rob you now and then. But I guess I’m a lucky guy. Most people didn’t bother me because I’d just look at them and I guess they figured this guy might just do something. And I always carried my weapon where I could get at it and I carried two grenades just in case, ’cause you don’t know. I’m not that brave of a man. I was pretty lucky. I was up with Air America, just the pilot and me flying to places where nobody else was at, and it was a little scary sometimes, but then you’re young, you say to yourself, Ah, don’t worry about it, just keep movin’, just keep goin’ forward.”

  Subsequent jobs had taken him to Morocco and Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He was in Iran, he said, when the Shah fell. “I stayed there for the revolution. In fact, I kind of helped them a little bit. But that’s another story.”

  We went out to lunch, in the college town of Northampton, at a rather fancy restaurant now vanished, called Beardsley’s. We sat in a booth—the benches in the booths, it’s important to say, had cushions on them. He clarified some memories.

  “Okay, what happened was, we got together, all of us. I was the ringleader.” He paused. “Lunch is on me for this, by the way.” He laughed. “I planned this down to—I even emptied out your fire extinguisher. Then I opened up the back of your latrine and poured the kerosene and continued to pour it on, and then I waited until the whole latrine was burning. So then I went ahead and I came into your hootch and you were kind of half asleep, and you came running out and you grabbed the fire extinguisher and you went out there. Shhh. It didn’t work.” He laughed and laughed. Then he said, “It was not meant to be mean to you. The problem was we didn’t have the manpower to run two latrines.”

  He talked about his past, and I realized with surprise how little I’d known of the basic facts of Pancho. He’d grown up in a proper Chicano family, where instant obedience to one’s father was law. One day when he was eighteen, his father told him to cut the grass. The right thing to say would have been “Como me mandas”—in effect, “Yes, sir.” But Pancho said, “In a minute,” and his father slapped him. “I walked back in the house, took a duffel bag and the five dollars I had, and I didn’t say a word to my parents, and I walked down to the office of the Army recruiter.”

  He told me: “I was just a rebellious person, and I refused to bend into certain things. In the Army, I knew if I didn’t cross the line, they couldn’t do anything to me anyway. Send me to Vietnam, right?”

  Had there been something between him and that second first sergeant? I asked.

  “Yeah, he wanted my AK-47.”

  “I didn’t know you had an AK-47. I thought you just had that Swedish K.”

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p; “Oh, you remember that? No, I had an AK-47, too. The first sergeant wanted it, and I wouldn’t give it to him. He went out to get the MPS. The other problem was, the other guys, they were egging me on. Your honor, Pancho. They’re all talking. So I left. I snuck around. The first sergeant had his own hootch there in Chu Lai. I said, I’m gonna fix this sonofabitch. I took a grenade. I always carried grenades, and one of them was a dummy, which I always carried, just in case I wanted to do something to somebody. So I went ahead and I wired up his door. The next day they had a full alert because they thought the VC had come in there. Remember that?”

  “I remember something sort of like that.”

  “That was me.” He laughed.

  It was one of the laughs I remembered, from deep in the chest, a throbbing laugh. I had a question I wasn’t sure I wanted answered. But the sound of that laugh was reassuring. “Do you remember when that major came? Major Great? There was this horrible inspection and I fell all apart?”

  He laughed again, just as heartily.

  “I’m curious as to how I appeared to you,” I went on. “It won’t hurt my feelings. Don’t worry. It was a long time ago.”

  “You gotta remember something,” he said. “I wouldn’t have wrote you a letter saying Lieutenant Colonel Kidder for nothin’. I personally liked you, that was the main thing. If I like somebody, they’re gonna know fast enough. We were young. I’d already been in the Army a lot longer than you. I was gettin’ out, I knew they couldn’t do anything to me as long as I didn’t go over the edge. Sometimes I’ve actually thought about some of the things we did to you. For me, the most famous was burning your latrine. I put the snake over you. I used to sneak up on you.”

  He laughed, his shaky laugh this time—“heh heh”—and said, “I had a lot of freedom, simply because I made it that way.”

  We went on talking, and at one point he said, “I never had any great plans to being anybody, but when I’m involved in something, I’m always scheming, because I don’t like things to be the normal everyday drudgery.”