Memories in Red and Green


I always wanted to tell this story, always. I wanted to tell my mother, but that would have been cruel. I wanted to tell my girl, but she had already given up on me. I tried to tell my friends, but they’d interrupt me and say, “Forget that crap, Joe, you’re home now.” I always wanted to tell it, and needed to tell it, and knew that if I could I would feel just a little better about what I had done. But nobody wanted to hear about a rotten war, in a rotten jungle, fought for the rottenest reason of all    none. All I could do was tell it to myself, over and over in dreams. I had to gag on this story for 14 years until it has become a part of me like the shrapnel in my arm and the malaria in my blood. This is an ugly story and when it touches you it makes you dirty, but I’ve kept it for 14 years and I’d really like to tell it now, if someone wants to listen.
I was an artillery FO (forward observer), attached to an infantry unit, “A” Company. We were in base camp for a few days of rest, which meant cold showers from aircraft wing tanks supported on wooden beams, morning eulogies for fallen comrades by a chaplain who didn’t even know who they were, and whisky. I was cleaning my gun; I had smashed it against a tree, then thrown it in the mud after Nickerson and Smith got killed. It turned out to be sturdier than it was reliable.
One of the infantry squad leaders approached me with an apprehensive look and a bottle of Old Granddad. He had a problem. “My squad’s got an ambush tonight, Kirkup.”
“It’s not my turn, take a mortar FO.”’
“They don’t know what they’re doing. If you come along we’ll let you sleep.”
On an 11 man ambush patrol, if you got in trouble at night, artillery was the only way out. I knew what I was doing and he knew I wouldn’t say no.
About two hours before dark we left base camp, 10 infantrymen, one artillery FO, eight automatic rifles, one 30 caliber machine gun, about 50 hand grenades, four claymore mines, two grenade launchers,11 bayonets and roughly 400 pounds of ammunition. We were on our way to commit homicide or suicide, depending on our luck.
We set up our ambush at the intersection of a dirt road in the forest. We dug foxholes, set out the claymore mines, linked the machine gun belts together and squeezed the ends of our hand grenade pins so they’d be easy to pull. Dusk turned to darkness and darkness gave way to brilliant moonlight. The road in front of us looked like a pearlescent strip through the black jungle.
As I sat there in silence I began to contemplate the absurdity of my circumstance. I was a half a world away from home in a dark forest with a loaded gun. I was waiting silently for a group of Oriental youths to walk past so I could unleash upon them the wrath of Satan, leaving their mangled and bloody and dead bodies in the warmth and the moonlight. I shook my head and tried to develop a logical rationale for the shrieking, screaming blood bath that might occur before morning. After failing at that I conjured up a vision of my friends Nickerson and Smith, dead in the morning sun. I was hoping for a flood of anger, but all I got was sadness and confusion.
If I were lucky, no one would come by and tomorrow I’d be able to regenerate my taste for cold blooded, point blank killing.
I wasn’t. We could hear them laughing and talking as they came. I reminded myself they would kill me if they could, then switched my safety selector to full automatic and wiped the sweat from my trigger hand.
Three young soldiers, rifles slung across their chests strolled happily past us. One pushed his buddy in jest, then we killed them.
In seconds it was over, the moonlight and crickets were ripped apart leaving the smell of cordite and a ringing in my ears. My heart pounded as I stepped from the brush and looked at the bodies in the road. The one near me twitched and gurgled as I watched his blood forma stain, still growing, on the moonlit ground. Someone tugged at my arm and we walked away.
I just knew that when I got home people would reassure me that I did the right thing and that there was no other choice and that I had taken a young life like my own for a cause that was worthy of his existence and my sanity. But no one offered any reassurance. All they said was, “Forget that rap, Joe, you’re home now.”
I heard a really sad bit of new this morning, that half as many Viet Nam vets have committed suicide as were killed in the war. It means that many thousands of us couldn’t get used to being blind, or couldn’t rationalize our paraplegia, or just never learned to live with the ghosts. The suicide rate among Nam vets is 23 per cent higher than for Americans in general. That statistic alone is an appalling commentary on the mental state of the afterbirth of the liberal revolution. What makes this gruesome piece of knowledge even more shocking is that only about one Viet Nam vet in 10 was involved in combat and it is surely from that physically and mentally mutilated 10 per cent that the bulk of the self destruction has come.
I was a lucky one. Every morning when the first light of day filters in my window I take a few silent moments to appreciate the fact that I can see and walk and hug my old mongrel with both arms. All I have to deal with is the ghosts, and if they haven’t killed me by now I guess I’ll make it.
Some of the ghosts have names. Joe Jones was a sandy haired, bright eyed hell raiser from Rhode Island. His wife had a baby while we were on the troop ship to Nam. I guess the kid is about 14 now, the same age as her father’s ghost.
“A” Company was stopped on a dirt road in the Michelin rubber plantation, west of Saigon. We were looking up the road as a group of Viet Cong crossed it about 800 meters away. There was no way to catch the VC on foot so the responsibility for taking their lives fell upon me and the awesome artillery power at my command. I took out my map and quickly estimated the coordinates of the enemy unit. Within a minute I had initiated a fire mission from a battery of huge 155 millimeter howitzers about 10,000 meters away.
The first volley exploded on the road where the VC had crossed, the second hit about 400 meters closer to us, the third ripped the heart right out of “A” Company’s forward platoon and right out of Joe Jones’ chest. I called for a cease fire and scrambled toward the front of the unit amid the screams and the smoke and the broken rubber trees.
We found Jones on the ground on his side like a dog that had been hit by a truck. He was covered with white powder and dust. There was a huge hole through the center of his chest from one side to the other. The shrapnel had smashed his rifle and carried parts of it into his body. I am still shaken the by the image of his red blood against the green foliage.
I looked down at his face, a face that had always worn a smile. His eyes and ears were leaking blood and his upper teeth protruded over his lower lip as death had taken him in the midst of agony. I have seen that face at least once a day for 14 years. I have seen his broken body in dreams where the face was replaced by those of friends and family. I have wished a thousand times that I hadn’t called for that artillery or that the gunners hadn’t been so stoned that they failed to recheck their sights. I wish that Joe Jones was alive, but he’s not. He’s only a ghost, my ghost.
The faces of death that live in my dreams and in my memories are mostly of my friends, but not all.
For countless agonizing days, “A” Company had moved slowly through the thick jungle. An hour of chopping and sweating and swearing would net about 400 meters of gained ground. My right arm was a mass of cuts from dragging my rifle through the thorny brush and the red lines of blood poisoning crept slowly from my infected hands toward my elbows. Dark patches of fresh blood stained the legs of my fatigues as it oozed from my scrotum and inner thighs, which had been rubbed raw from my sweat caked trousers.
Finally the company stopped and the CO ordered two of the infantrymen to check out a dirt road that, according to his map, was near by. About 100 meters away the two sweaty, bloody, unshaven ground pounders found the road and crept up to it cautiously from the thick jungle. As they peered from the brush they saw three VC carrying a Browning Automatic Rifle and walking toward them in the center of the dirt path. They waited for the Viet Cong to pass, then stepped into the road behind then and opened fire.
One of the enemy soldiers died in the road, the second made it into the rubber plantation on the other side and the third ran away wounded. After an hour of searching we found him. He was sitting on the ground with his back against a rubber tree. He abdomen was ruptured and the vicious Vietnamese red ants had already found their way onto his entrails.
We approached him warily with our rifles set on full automatic. He was conscious and obviously terrified. He was also obviously dying. We argued briefly about what to do. We couldn’t take him with us and if we called for a helicopter it would give away our position. The Cuban second lieutenant next to me (he was a mercenary) said that the man would die in any case and that we should kill him and keep moving.
No one agreed or disagreed as the lieutenant slowly and almost theatrically raised the muzzle of his M16, savoring the effect it had on the terrified soldier. It came to rest at a point inches from the bridge of his nose. Those horror struck, brown Oriental eyes turned and looked into mine. They were pleading for me to do something. I didn’t.
A rapid burst from the automatic rifle exploded the man’s head and left those pleadings eyes pointed grotesquely in different directions. Bits of bloody flesh stuck to my shirt and my whiskers. It feels as if they are still there.
To some people, those of us who wasted our time and our lives in Southeast Asia will always be murderers. A half million infantrymen will be remembered for half a dozen William Calleys. There are very few heroes from an Army that didn’t want to go to a place that no one cared about, to fight a war they wouldn’t be allowed to win anyway. But even in the midst of the butchery and the senseless death there were moments of honor and compassion.
“A” and “C” Companies had marched from noon one day till 5:30 the next morning. All through the moonlit night the exhausted GIs had plodded steadily along the narrow Viet Namese roads in order to surprise a VC tax collector unit as it left a tiny hamlet at the break of day.
The trouble began as we approached two houses about 100 meters apart near the village. Heavy automatic weapons fire erupted from the closest house. We scrambled for cover. Two helicopter gun ships were called in for support as the machinegun bullets whined over our heads and ripped the bark off nearby trees. As usual, I was terrified.
Whenever we entered a village we were ordered to separate the good guys from the bad guys. It wasn’t easy and any mistake could be fatal. The people in the house near us were obviously the bad guys.
As the gun ships made their approach we flattened out on the ground and waited for the results. In microseconds a fusillade of rockets left the pods on the lead gunship and ripped into the tiny farmhouse, the wrong farmhouse.
There were shouts and screams and people ran out of the burning structure in panic. Most were children; some were being dragged or carried by bloody women in a senseless dance of horror and agony. The VC in the other house darted toward the tree line and disappeared as the second gunship moved in for the kill.

A women ran toward us with a small girl in her arms. One of the child’s legs was completely gone and her eyes were open wide in disbelief. Everywhere, it seemed, were bloody children and screaming Viet Namese women. I felt helpless.
Almost immediately a flight of six helicopters landed in a field nearby and our unit was ordered aboard. Someone said what we all were thinking. “What about the kids?” We were told that more choppers were on the way to pick them up and that we had to move out, now. I don’t know who said it, but he said it for us all. “No way man, not till they take those kids.”
The Cuban lieutenant pointed his rifle at a man near me. “Move you son of a bitch,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Sorry about that sir,” the young soldier said to the black flash suppresser at the end of the officer’s M16, “but I ain’t going till they go.”
The officers gave up, and we put the Viet Namese on the choppers. The girl with one leg was put on first with other badly hurt children Her mother tried to hold on to the skid as the helicopter took off. Someone found the girl’s leg and we sent it on the next chopper wrapped in plastic poncho liner. I’m sure it was too late, too late for her and too late for us. I was sick that day, but I was proud of my friends.
Not every one that I remember died, not completely anyway. Some almost died and recovered and others died just a little and stayed that way. I think I belong to the latter and a rifleman named John Watson to the former.
In the spring of 1967, 90 or so teenagers and young adults tripped and struggled and cursed their way through an endless patch of Asian jungle somewhere between what is now Ho Chi Minh City and the Cambodian border. “A” Company was on the move.
The jungle floor was a living carpet of tangled vines and slippery moss. After trudging for hours with 50 pounds of C rations and ammunition jerking at the shoulder straps of my web gear, I had given up trying to walk gingerly and resigned myself to stumbling along numbly as each step was interrupted by the infuriating vines. My earlier daydreams of naked women and fast cars had given way to a singular preoccupation with the vivid image of a tall frosted glass of clear water. I knew it was too late for us to rendezvous with are supply helicopter, which meant no mail and no water, in that order. I hadn’t eaten since early morning and finally the gnawing hunger chewed its way through the walls of my consciousness. As we moved, I opened a can of “Beefsteak with Potatoes and Gravy.” The first inch of substance at the top of the can was solid, cold, white grease. Several of the vicious red ants, that dropped on us constantly, fell into my dinner, but at that point I was beyond caring. I finished eating and dropped the can quietly in the brush. Throwing the metallic object into the jungle might have produced a wild reaction from my jittery comrades.
A short time after sunset, we stopped and prepared our perimeter for the night. The ground was dry, hardened clay. My head throbbed as I tried to dig a foxhole with the tiny entrenching tool. For reasons unknown to me, an ambush patrol was sent out farther in the direction we had been traveling. As an artillery forward observer, I was almost always required to accompany ambush squads. This one was an exception.
After the patrol had left and the sound of digging had died away, we sat smoking cigarettes and writing letters in the failing light. The distant sound of rifle fire brought the brutal reality of our circumstance back into painfully sharp focus. We waited in absolute silence to receive word from the patrol.
Finally it came. A sniper had fired at the squad and hit one soldier in the lower back. He was bleeding heavily and in great pain. I soon learned it was the quiet young private named John Benton.
There were no landing zones nearby, which precluded even the thought of a helicopter rescue. John Watson would not survive till morning. His only chance was
a plan to carry him 2,000 meters in the pitch black jungle to a road where he would be picked up by an APC (armored personnel carrier)manned by some extremely brave or blatantly suicidal cavalrymen. The only catch was that the infantrymen were not accustomed to navigating in the jungle at night. If they became lost it would be necessary to guide them with an air burst artillery round timed to explode when it reached a prearranged set of coordinates. To use this method of self location successfully, they needed someone who spoke the language of artillery control and was familiar with the logic of the procedure. I was practically, if not happily, suited for the job.
As I and one infantryman tried to hurriedly work our way through the near dark jungle to the waiting ambush patrol, we couldn’t help but remember that somewhere nearby was a VC sniper on a hot streak. By the time we arrived, Benton had been placed on a stretcher fashioned from plastic ponchos and a pair of debranched saplings. It was roughly8 p.m. as we headed for our midnight rendezvous with the APC.
Basic wartime fatigue became physical exhaustion which finally gave way to a feeling of zombie like automatism as we chopped and thrashed and struggled to carry the wounded man on the litter which was now sloshing with youthful blood. Battered, sleep starved young solders took turns cutting a path in the thick jungle. Now and again an exhausted stretcher bearer would fall in a hole or trip on a vine. When this happened the wounded body of John Benton would drop agonizingly on the sharp newly cut stalks. Watson would cover his mouth to suppress the scream then say, “That’s all right, I’m OK. ”At one point, as I was manning the rear of the litter, Benton said, “I really appreciate you guys doing this. Why don’t you take a rest? I’ll be OK, really.” For him to say that as his life’s blood filled the plastic stretcher in a hostile jungle 10,000 miles from home is still completely beyond my comprehension.
By midnight Benton had been given all the morphine that was available. We still had a thousand meters to go and no one knew if the crew of the APC would dare to wait, unprotected, for our arrival.
They did. Some time just before 3 a.m., we came upon a narrow dirt road in the jungle. Within minutes we had found the box shaped track vehicle and the barely conscious Benton was loaded aboard. A week or so later we heard that Benton had nearly died from the bone jarring ride to base camp in the APC, and then later, like the ending to a TV melodrama, a letter came from a hospital in Japan, “I’m all right,” it said, and, “thanks again, John Benton.”
Thank you John Watson, for not dying and for showing me what courage really is.
Maybe it is the knowledge that he survived that helps me survive, and in writing of my survival I may help others of us who lost the war, but just need to win this one last battle, the battle to accept and to live with the fact that we will never be looked upon with pride as were veterans of the “real” wars. We will always be remembered as that half generation of fools turned drug crazed killers of children who lost a non war and then had the audacity to come home.