On the perimeter of the village, the company began returning fire, blindly, spraying the hedges with M-16 and M-70 and M-60 fire. No targets, nothing to aim at and kill. Aimlessly, just shooting to shoot.
Norwegians and Swedes and Germans had taken the [Minnesota] plains from the Sioux. The settlers must have seen endless plains and eased their bones and said, “Here as well as anywhere, it’s all the same.”
I declared my intention to have no part of Vietnam. With delightful viciousness, a secret will, I declared the war evil, the draft board evil, the town evil in its lethargic acceptance of it all.
Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.
“Mama has been kissed good-bye, we’ve grabbed our rifles, we’re ready for war. All this not because of conviction or ideology; rather it’s from fear of society’s censure […] Fear of weakness. Fear that to avoid war is to avoid manhood.”
We laughed. We congratulated ourselves. We felt smart. And later—much later—we wondered if maybe Blyton hadn’t won a big victory that night.
“If you accept, as I do, that America is one helluva great country, well, then you follow what she tells you. She says fight, the you go out and do your damnedest. You try to win.”
Later two or three more men straggled out. No helmets, no weapons. They laughed and joked and drank. The first sergeant shouted something, but the men just giggled and sat on sandbags in their underwear.
Enemy rounds crashed in. The earth split. Most of Alpha Company slept.
[N]o one in Alpha Company gave a damn about the causes or purposes of their war: it is about “dinks and slopes,” and the idea is simply to kill them or avoid them.
I asked if the North Vietnamese were not the aggressors in the war. [Li] laughed and stated that of course the opposite was the case. They were defending Vietnam from American aggression.
We stood straight up, in a row, as if it were a contest. I confronted the profile of a human being through my sight. It did not occur to me that a man would die when I pulled the trigger of that rifle.
I neither hated the man nor wanted him dead, but I did fear him.
More Combat Assaults came in the next days. We learned to hate Colonel Daud and his force of helicopters. When he was killed by sappers in a midnight raid, we head the news over the radio. A lieutenant led us in song, a catchy, happy, celebrating song: Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead.
In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good.
[The old men] were only a few feet away, hanging to their saplings like the men at Golgotha. I went to the oldest of them and pulled his gag out and let him drink from my canteen.
I was not at My Lai when the massacre occurred. I was in the paddies and sleeping in the clay, with Johansen and Arizona and Alpha Company, a year and more later. But if a man can squirm in the meadow, he can shoot children. Neither are examples of courage.
Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It's acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear—wisely.
Captain Johansen helped to mitigate and melt the silliness [of the war], showing the grace and poise a man can have under the worst of circumstances, a wrong war.
The next day we blew up tunnels and bomb shelters. A piece of clay came down and hit a man, slicing off his nose, and he drowned to death in his own blood. He had been eating ham and eggs out of a can.
Thirty-three villagers were wounded. Thirteen were killed […] Certain blood for uncertain reasons. No lagoon monster ever terrorized like this.
We weren’t the old soldiers of World War II. No valor to squander for things like country or honor or military objectives. All the courage in August was the kind you dredge up when you awaken in the morning, knowing it will be a bad day.
Needless to say, I am uncomfortable in my thoughts toady. Perhaps it’s that I know I will leave this place alive and I need to suffer for that.
But, more likely, what I see is evil.
“When you go into My Lai you assume the worst. When you go into My Lai, shit, you know—you assume—that they’re all VC [Viet Cong]. Ol’ Charlie with big tits and nice innocent, childlike eyes. Damn it, they’re all VC, you should know that.”
The stewardess comes through the cabin, spraying a mist of invisible sterility into the pressurized, scrub-filtered, temperature-controlled air, killing mosquitoes and unknown diseases, protecting herself and America from the Asian evils, cleansing us all forever.
You add things up. You lost a friend to the war, and you gained a friend. You compromised one principle and fulfilled another. You learned, as old men tell in front of the courthouse, that war is not all bad; it may not make a man of you, but it teaches you that manhood is not something to scoff; some stories of valor are true; dead bodies are heavy, and it’s better not to touch them; fear is paralysis, but it is better to be afraid than to move out and die […]