War was different than I had expected. I had years of experience on nuclear alert pads in Europe and in Asia. Baby-sitting A bombs: two planes (F-100s, the “lead sled”) uploaded and on the pad. Ready to go when the whistle blew. Three other F-100s we flew daily keeping the bugs out of them until rotation to the pad. It was good duty. The bases were small, tiny even. The food was good. In both Asia and in Europe, alert pads were in rural areas where life carried on as it had for centuries with little encroachment of the benefits and ills of industrialization. I liked it, and I liked working on those war-machines in the open air. In all kinds of weather: subzero cold and a thirty-knot wind, one hundred degrees plus and no breath astir; keep them flying. It was a rewarding robust life for a young man, and one in which I came to realize a world of rings within rings of total nuclear devastation just waiting for the right mistake to be made. I couldn’t imagine the Russians so stupid as to set off the unstoppable cascade of devastation, and I knew that the US would never precipitate the conflagration; but what if…….and what about all those innocent people.
One day word came down that a squadron of RF101's in northern Japan would deploy to Vietnam. They were asking for volunteers to go with them. I had been trained on the system, and what the heck: hazardous-duty pay and check out a real shooting war. It seemed like the thing to at the time.
I arrived in Vietnam in July of 1966. I was 21 years old. I had volunteered. I left the following July. I have never gotten over that year, and I don’t care to. I can't forget the crushing stupidity, the wanton destruction a powerful nation can bring down upon a hapless population emerging from 19th century colonialism. I found out later that Ho Chi Min had fought at the head of an indigenous army alongside the British in the struggle to drive the Japanese out of then French Indochina. In South Vietnam Ho Chi Min’s birthday was a big deal. I asked a Vietnamese acquaintance what that was all about. She said, “You know George Washington? Ho Chi Min Vietnam's George Washington.” I asked, “Then what's this war about?” She shrugged her shoulders. And what about that Pacific-Rim domino theory? We haven’t heard much lately about the irreversible falling of those communist dominoes have we?
Once the killing starts there are plenty of reasons to stay at it. Anyone who is in favor of building guns and bombs rather than textbooks and pencils is deeply misguided. If was spent half the money building schools as is spent preparing to kill people; half the money building infrastructure as is spent preparing to destroy infrastructure; half the time inveighing for dignity and understanding as is spent proselytizing for an at best morally neutral mercantilism, the world would without question be a better place.
I still see the dead. I don’t want to forget the dead. It would be shamefully wrong to forget the dead. The dead I met were mostly enemy dead; shot dead while doing their dead level best to see me dead. And dead is dead and the killing goes on with newly minted enemies and new and more efficient tools of killing. There are no new justifications; only newly killed human beings.
Youth at War
A youth at war
I was one once
Volunteering for adventure, to serve my curiosity
Adventure’s appetite can be sated
Not so an inquiring mind
Bar fights
Fire-fights
Heroes and braggadocio
For all that I most remember
An old and naked man
A skeleton draped with shrunken skin
Weakly pawing atop a mountain of trash and garbage
And a fine athletic friend on the Saigon River
Drenching sampans with the slalom ski
Haunched in black pajamas they sat expressionless
Under their coolie hats
And I remember thieving children
Running the streets
Like packs of wild dogs
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