Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

Sometimes you have to fight the city. It’s a city of shapes that bang together and rearrange themselves in an all consuming, never ending sculptured stockade that stretches from the Bronx to Brooklyn, and towers over the Hudson River from Queens to New Jersey. In the summer months in down town New York your very soul can melt with the heat.

Odessa was going to the chapel to pray for her soul. She was going to offer sentiments to the Lord Jesus that he may show her the way of salvation, for she had sinned because of her neglect. She had sinned because she had tried to live in the world without His word and now she was going down to Central Harlem to join her ‘sisters’ and her ‘brothers’ in their crusade, in the hope that she could also capture some of His love so that she could share it with the people in her life.

It is Sunday morning in Harlem and the heat is so intense that fire hydrants have been turned on to cool the kids. Odessa watched them play, running and screaming in and out of the fountain that shot twenty feet into the air soaking their bodies in cooled river water.

Inside the church the service as already started and Sister Moore is in the pulpit looking down over a young woman who is holding a child before the Altar. Odessa was pleased to be back. There have been a few looks of surprise from some of the congregation who have recognised her, but their eyes are smiling welcome and that is all that matters to her now. Sister Moore asks the woman her name.

“My name is Jackson. Ida Jackson.”
People were quietly saying “Bless her bless the lord.”

“And what’s the name of that little one?”

“His name is Daniel. He been sick Mam and I want you to pray for him.” And with that the woman began to weep.

“Dear heart, don’t you weep this morning. I know that empty feeling and it will pass. What is ailing your baby?”

“I don’t know. I took him to the doctor and he don’t know either. He keeps nothing on his little stomach and he cry all night, every night, and he’s getting real puny. Sister I already plum lost one baby already and I don’t wanna lose another one. Please pray the Lord to make this baby well.”

“You poor little thing. You ain’t no more than a baby yourself, is you? Sister, is you trying to lead a life that is pleasing to Him?”

“Yes Mam I’m trying every day.”

Throughout this the congregation kept saying “Amen bless her, bless the Lord!” Odessa’s soul filled up with love. The warmth of their love around her was pleasing and it gladdened her to be back inside of His love that welcomes all sinners.
Then she remembered her brother and the last time she had seen him. She knew that he would be sitting looking out of his window now on the twentieth floor of his apartment block crippled by the war. But not only crippled on the outside but crippled inside too. And all day he just stares out into space, cursing sometimes, seems to be still fighting something. And she had come here to pray for him too, because this is where they came as children, this is where they once found the Lord together, here in this very church and now he was saddened and she was afraid for him and she wanted God’s hand to guide him and bring him back to her.

Sister Moore is now holding the baby and the woman is kneeling before the Altar.

“Dear Lord we come here this morning to ask you to look down on this woman and her baby. This baby is sick Lord and I pray for you to touch his little body and drive those demons out… You said lord that if we just ask for you and trust in you, you promised Lord that you would answer our prayers… In the name of the Father… and in the name of the Son… And in the name of the blessed Holy Ghost… Amen!”

“Amen.” They called. “Amen! Hallelujah! Blessed be His name.”

“God bless you daughter. You go your way and trust the Lord. That child gonna be all right.”

“Thank you sister. I can’t tell you how much I thank you.”

She came back to her seat close by Odessa holding her small baby and Odessa looked at her and saw the belief in her face, and she wanted to believe as well. She wanted to believe that her brother Buddy could be saved too. She wanted his soul to soar above his heartache and misery, and to cast aside his torment, and for him to start living again in the world. She was thinking how much love there was in the church for the Lord. And how she too nearly never came back. But she was there now and that’s all that really mattered. She was there now and fighting. The piano started to play and Sister Moore held up her arms.

“Children let us pray.”

They got down on their knees, those that could, and began singing,

“Once I was a sinner treading a sinful path;
Never thought about Jesus or the fate of His wrath…

She said her own prayer then for her brother, kneeling there beneath the whirring fans. Sister Moore was saying,

“Blessed be the peacemakers. Blessed be the soothsayers. Bless them O lord and give them strength to quell the troubled waters. We leave you today with love in our hearts for you, and trust that you will guide us, and protect us, these coming days. Amen.”

“Amen!” they cried.

Odessa left by the side door because at that moment she wanted to be with her brother. She knew then that she would come back and say hello to those that she knew. But now she was nearly running in the heat of mid-day, through the shadows and dust that swirled through the near empty streets. She just wanted to give her love to Buddy, to hold him real close, and tell him that they were not alone in the world.
She let herself into his apartment.

“That you Odessa?” he called. He was sat by the open window in his wheelchair; a bottle of bourbon was on a small table by his side.

“I been thinking Odessa.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek.

“I was thinking of the time when mamma was alive. I remember the sacrifices she made for us. How she worked hard so that we could have a decent upbringing. How every morning in all weathers she would go clean them darn offices down in Times Square... How she struggled to feed us and bring us up right. How she protected us from the wrong doings that we encountered in our daily lives…how she stopped us running with the gangs.”

“Buddy don’t torture yourself anymore please…You’re tired and drunk again and it’s barely noon. I came by to say how much I love you… To ask you to come out with me into the park so we could talk…”

“Shit! I ain’t going nowhere!”

“But you’ve been indoors nearly all summer and today I thought we could go sit by the lake down in Central Park and maybe it would be like it used to be! Buddy I’m pleading with you. Please come with me now. I’ll push you for as long as it takes. I’ve been to church today Buddy. I saw hope, and love, and believe once more, and I want you to start believing in yourself again and to stop all this drinking…it’s doing you no good.”

He sighed and turned to her and he was crying. He had wet himself.

“You see I can’t even go to the fucking rest room on time. I’m a fucking cripple man! And I’m trying. I really am trying… Trying to get back into the world. To get back what I lost out there!”

“Buddy if mamma was here she wouldn’t let you torture yourself like this.” Odessa’s tears just flowed down her cheeks and they held each other.
Outside the voices of children drifted up from the streets…

Vague images of grief and tragedy flickered in her mind. Somewhere a butterfly was flying out to sea: lost. La Fontaine’s duck had loved the white hen, yet after escaping together from the dreadful farmyard through the forest to the lake, it was the duck that swam: the hen, following, drowned.

All Buddy knew in 1970-71 was that they were north of Hue City and south of Kha Sanh after the Tet offensives of the previous year, and that they had been some god awful killings going on for sometime up there. They had driven the communists out of the Citadel and towards the border or so they were led to believe, and now this was a mop up operation. Only the enemy didn’t quite see it like that. The 800th, 802nd and the 804th battalions of the North Vietnamese regular army, along with assorted VC had different plans and they forgot to tell them what they were.

They went to ground a hundred yards up the trail after the guy on point had turned and put his finger up to his blistered lips. Swartz moved into the jungle and took up a firing position, when he did that they all scurried off the track sideways, like silent crabs. Sweat poured from Buddy’s sore ass. He desperately wanted a crap. He thought, ‘not now! Why can’t this happen some other time! Why can’t the 'gooks,' just for once, march into some classic ambush so we can kill the fuckers and then all go home and be decorated with medals, kiss the girls, and shake hands with the President like conquering heroes?’ But ‘Charlie’ he wouldn’t do that. No he fired and killed and disappeared and ran, and they hated him for the unfairness of it all. They wanted ‘High Noon,’ to face one another like gun - slingers! But the VC was having none of that.

These guys had been fighting for their country for years before the Americans ever set foot there. They had been fighting the Japanese, the French, the Chinese, the Mongols, and each other for generations. The wily old fox, Ho Chi Minh, was a realistic military thinker who was well read in various areas of thought, from Clausewitz, to Sun Tzu a Chinese military thinker from 400bc. They had generals like Vo Nguyen Giap whose fighting gospel was T.E.Lawrence’s ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom.’ By the time they arrived, they had already defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu with a strategy never even considered or understood by their own leaders.

They lay there for three hours. They lay there and watched the darkness come crawling, and listened to some shit coming down on the heads of Baker Company way off to the right of them about a mile away. Flashing mortars and star shells lit the distant jungle like the neon lights that flickered across the water from Coney Island. And then silence…

The clicking beasties came under a moonless, starless, bible – black, hunched - backed, jet - black, crow black night, only there was no fishing boat bobbing sea to send a cool breeze through the land. Hills upon hills of malaria and swampland, and snakes and spiders that could take you down in minutes in some agonising death spiral more contemplative than any mortar bomb. Buddy lay deep in gloom and darkness. So deep that when he heard the sound of a crying baby drifting through those hills he thought he was back in the womb and that that was his voice crying to be born again. A crying, sobbing baby, that wanted its mama. Wanted to feed from the milk of her breast. Wanted the soft comfort and warmth from the rich, life giving sweet milk that would let it live for a few more hours, and maybe that’s what Buddy wanted too, to live!

Dawn broke with the dull rain sheeting down. It showed little respite, soaking through their ponchos, running down their necks and giving sugary comfort to the leeches that sucked their blood and grew fat on their bodies. They would not let go.

There had been poor visibility for hours, so no Choppers could fly in or out, and the swampy ground that covered their ankles, sucked their strength, and stifled any progress. They lay there dreaming in the mist and rain, listening to the distant thumping of ‘Charlie’s’ artillery down the valley and wondering when it would be their turn…

It was night time in New York City, and once more Buddy had woken from bad dreams and crazy thoughts. He looked out of his window. It was down town summer in the city, and out across the Hudson River there were the myriad lights of a thousand skyscrapers that stretched off into the early morning mist that crawled across the water. It seemed to hold him real tight.

He wondered then if there was anybody else out there from the First Battalion, Ninth Marines, looking on the river that morning, thinking what a crazy fucking world they lived in! Hell Sucks, Born to Die, Time is on My Side, Swinging Dick, growing old and forgotten in tenement blocks up and down this big beautiful country, waiting for a storm to break.

He couldn’t smell the earth anymore. The window had become his only source of seeing anything, like he was looking through the wrong end of a telescope into the world, and everything that meant anything, was out there, and all he was doing was biding his time, waiting for a tornado. Only the tornado never came!

The baby started crying again… Buddy couldn’t help thinking how all babies sounded the same, and yet when they grew older their voices changed and they spoke in different tongues. Like there was some point when they all sound the same. When all mother’s and babies were the same, and they looked for the first time on their child, and saw the miracle of birth and beauty, and listened to those first cries and maybe they cried as well, like most parents do that are tuned into the universal language. You don’t need education, or wealth, or status, to recognise the value of those first utterances. The experience of all them women creating life, and all those men now trying to take it away by the foulest means possible. All those men in that jungle being freaked out by the sound of a crying baby that reminded them of their own life, and how dehumanised they had become. Men who had blasted away the lives of others in the carnage of a firefight had not cared about the flying limbs and torsos, just as long as it wasn’t them.

Some even took their brutality one step further, and cut off the ears of the dead 'gooks' and made chains around their necks, and bragged, and pointed at their valour, trying to cover their fear with symbols of power. You could see it in their eyes sometimes. The bottoms of mysterious oceans where they lived alone like primordial predators, scuffling for survival. Fighting in a fearful world of shadows, afraid of the soft searching limbs of something bigger that was coming for them, like the bent, hooked talon, of a death so terrible that they walked in fear for the rest of their natural days!

Mechanised road sweepers went by in the night, flashing yellow beacons under the city lights. The gulls were awakening. They’d started calling to one another across the rooftops. Another night was passing into day, and all that Buddy ever knew before he left New York was now gone, the joy, the laughter, and the innocence.

The oppressive heat of the sun mixes in a swirling whirlpool of hopes and dreams, and nobody seems to know right from wrong anymore, except the bible-bashers. The Jesus freaks. They know the way to redeem sins. They know how to bring survival and salvation. They know every ailment that afflicts humankind. They know so fucking much it makes Buddy want to puke his guts out of the window onto the swirling ants below.

He remembered they brought a young guy in, barely eighteen years old, he was full of morphine and his legs were gone. He kept saying to the priest, ‘Father! Father! Am I all right are my legs all right!’
‘Sure you’re all right my son! Everything things all right! God will see that you are all right!’ Later that morning he died never knowing. The war goes on.

There was no love in that jungle. Oh! The commanders would say different. How they loved their men. They would talk in terms of how they loved their Marines and how they were winning the war, whilst they circled in helicopters a thousand feet above the action. They barked orders down the intercom like rabid coyotes, about moving this way or that way, only to lead them into some fire-fight where guys were zapped under spitting phosphorous bombs that burned holes right through the body of death conscious, teenage kids, fresh from the two bit towns of middle America.

…And the Gooks played the sound of crying babies that drifted across no man’s land, and there wasn’t a man there who was not affected. Sometimes they would cover their ears and hope the baby would stop. In the Highlands of the jungle, out in the rainy nights, listening alone to a sobbing baby, afraid of the dark, something was stirring in the sub-conscience then that would make the death filled dreams that would awaken Buddy from the deepest sleep from that moment until eternity. Something that would come crawling back on those hot, humid nights downtown, when the sweat would fill his eye sockets, and run down his cheeks like tears, when he sat bolt upright in bed, searching in the darkness for Charlie, Charlie that he knew was there somewhere. Only in his dream he had no gun. No M16 to blast the fuck out of something that he felt sure was searching for him in that magical mystery, valley - highland, nightmare!

They waited until daybreak. Swartz signalled for them to rise and they rose to their feet, like the dead rising from the grave. Men came out of the jungle all the way down the valley, like grey spooks on Halloween. The rain had ceased.

They pissed against the trees and watched the steam rise in the cold air. Buddy looked across at Joey Mendoza, and he looked back at him, and gave him the thumbs up sign, they nodded and grinned like a couple of school kids playing hooky. When they got further up the trail the overhead cover from the jungle just disappeared and they were struck with the light of redemption. Shafts of sunlight shot down from the glorious heavens and lifted the wetness from their bodies and they were glad another day had come to them. They always felt better in the daytime. Clear, crisp, mornings brought air-cover and support from the thousands of rounds of ultra modern technology that lay in wait to be summoned by those who knew best.

They had so much bullshit coming at them; it was little wonder they would cling to anything that may give them hope. Hope that would lead them through all of this, and take them back to the real world where they belonged! They wanted a guide, an exact method they could cling to, something that would rid them of the gnawing fear.

When Joey Mendoza was shot dead, all the odds against Buddy’s own death reduced rapidly. Joey Mendoza was his friend. He was a good, kind, kid who grew up with him in Brooklyn, and he was not supposed to get killed. Seeing his death white, blue-lipped face, disappearing into a body bag along with his gurgling chest wound struck deep into Buddy’s senses, and did more to him than any other incident in that fucked up war. He was a kind loving boy that lived with his sister and mom, who would help anybody he thought was less better off than himself. He didn’t want to be anybodies hero. He was a tough streetwise kid that ran with the young gangs of the Bowery and was not afraid of jack-shit. But bullets didn’t discriminate. There was no discrimination out there. A thousand doors could open to your death, and they all waited for you in Vietnam.

They trudged forty miles through that jungle to get to the relative safety of a fire support base called Rosa. Two days of withdrawing from something they were not even sure they had arrived at in the first place. Yes they found some tunnels and some ammunition, and two dead bodies, and the VC made them suffer for their efforts. Made them suffer for every mile they got closer to his assembly areas. Made them fearful for their journey into Laos, into his parlour, into his den.

There was fatalism present in the Highlands. A surrealism of death and struggle under a blood red sky with splashes of the rainbow brought by the incoming. Maybe Buddy should have died also; maybe he was riddled with the bullets of guilt and grief at having survived.

Something happened slowly and gradually to all of them out there and nobody noticed. For him it started with Joey’s death. That came hard. It hit him so intensely that after that when guys started getting zapped he couldn’t feel the same. It was like callousness fell over him because he couldn’t deal with all that suffering. He couldn’t deal with the agony of being unable to help anybody. It was too much of everything. Guys died around him under shellfire almost every day. He entered the forbidden realm of killing to survive. He crossed over into thoughts and feelings where people in so called civilised society seldom or never go. They were not there so how could they understand?

He was made to feel like a serial killer when he came back, like a fugitive in his own country. The people he knew before he left had stayed the same, only he had changed and he could never go back to being what he was. Nobody seemed to ask the right questions nor were they interested in what really happened. Nobody understood what they did over there. It was like they were getting some kind of buzz off the numbers they supposed he’d killed. “So what was it like man, killing I mean?’ ‘Fuck you!’ he would shout.

He was 22 years old when he went out there. He had strong religious beliefs. He thought he knew the difference between good and evil. Everything that was good God wanted. The Devil only wanted evil. He lived in a simple world. To him Vietnam was all evil. Real evil. He looked back with horror at what he turned into out there, like it was somebody else, and now he couldn’t back to where he once was.

The day was sultry and overcast, and Buddy knew that above this bank of heathen cloud lay a pure virile day of sunshine where a man could breathe more easily, if only they could escape the plain and get to the hills. They pressed on in the clinging dust clouds that stuck to their bodies like shit to a blanket, and like shit, a million flies must be right, so they ate it, they had little choice.

The conditions they had to live under were animal, purely animal. Their thoughts went the same way. Living like an animal, thinking and eating like an animal. The situation was bad, just as bad as facing the enemy. Jungle rot, dysentery, dehydration, hunger, fatigue, despair, all the time. Almost wishing sometimes they’d get hit so they cold lay on the ground and rest.

The command chopper was hovering at a thousand feet, out of range of any small arms fire. In Buddy’s headphones he could hear some young Captain fresh from West Point, giving out co-ordinates to Delta Company who were down by the river. To some of the men in the platoon it was a crying shame he was up there, no chance to frag the bastard.

“Wilco so far Big boy! Keep pressing on you are approximately two miles from contact. Good man! Keep going we must wind this up soonest. Come in ten four can you hear me? Ten four this is your Sunray calling…over.”

Buddy had the strangest, most thrilling kind of illusion there, looking at those hills and thinking about the death and secrecy that was in them. And in his head over and over played ‘The Magical Mystery Tour, “It is waiting to take you away, dy-ing to take you away…coming to take you away.”

It was pure unadulterated fear that soaked his fatigues. Fear: the cold, dread, sickly fever of looming badness. Fear: breathed in with each sunset, filling lungs and minds, with total mortality. Fear of the heat, the mosquitoes, the malaria and dysentery, and every cold, black, scabby disorder that crawled around hill 875.

Then a voice beseeching him...imploring him…

“Kill everybody, every fucking thing!” It was the captain inside his head. “Kill! Kill! Kill the fucking lot, shoot the scum!”

There was gunfire. Rapid-fire off to his left coming from the paddy field, and then an old man broke cover and was limping towards him out of a clearing, he was carrying a young baby in his arms…”Johnny, Johnny please! Help me Johnny!”
The stink of sweat…he could feel the ground shaking. Artillery was thundering in, smoke was rising from above the trees everything was on fire. ‘Help me to my knees. Can you not smell the burning?’ Paint it black! 19th Nervous Breakdown!

It was night again. Buddy could hear the pop, pop, pop, as magnesium flares were fired above the perimeter. They burned slowly, igniting the sky before dropping to the dark earth. Where was the world?

The soil was a parasite, sucking the blood, feeding off the blood of everybody out there…and there wasn’t anything they could do about it.

Fires were eating at everything. Trees on hillsides miles away were on fire. Nobody could sleep. In the dull, chilly dawn, of the misty morning, Buddy could see the dead, inflated body of the old man, and a few yards away the unwrapped, blood red baby lay sleeping…

Day drifted into night.

“Hey Buddy get up its mid - night, your turn for duty.” He woke to Smoky Robinson shaking his boot. He was whispering, “Come on Buddy. It’s your turn.”

“Okay Okay.” He shook the sleep from his head.

“Everything quiet?”

“Its so dark out there the fuckers could come and slip right up here, tap you on the shoulder, give you an engraved invitation to your own funeral, and you still wouldn’t know where he was. You wake me if you think you see something. Okay?”

Buddy slid into the foxhole and checked the box of fragmentation grenades, the M - 60, and the claymore wires, all by feeling. He made sure his safety catch was on, on his M - 16. He could see nothing.

It was very dark now. There was no way to distinguish the ground from the sky. No moon, nothing, just the sound of beasties clicking their legs. In the paddy field before him several spots seemed darker than the surrounding blackness. He groped for the M - 60 and aimed it at one of the spots, looking down the barrel. It did not move.

Smoky had already lain down and was snoring lightly. Buddy turned and looked at him. He was a spot only a little darker than the ground. He turned towards his front, and looked back at the dark spot, which now seemed to be in the perimeter concertina wire. The spot changed shape. Very slowly he moved forward. Noiselessly he picked up his M -16 and clicked the safety catch off. He shouldered the weapon, sighted it on one dense spot and froze on it for what seemed like an hour.

Then he switched his aim to another spot. The darkness crept slowly. There was no way to distinguish a target. He could feel the pulse beating heavily in his neck and wrists. He was thinking…

‘What the hell am I supposed to do? Somebody could come up here and drop a frag right here in this stinking hole with me in it, and I’d never know. Maybe I ought to check with control…Fuck I hope there’s nobody out there. Should I blow a claymore first? That way I wouldn’t give my position away. No. Throw a frag first or pump out some rounds on the M -60.’

He stood waist deep in the hole, the protective earth surrounding him. His hands searched the ground for a fragmentation grenade. He found one and lifted it getting the feel of its weight. He found the pin. He just held it and stared into the darkness, slowly sweeping his gaze back and forth in a 180-degree arc like he’d been taught in training, sweeping from left to right and back again.

The night went by in a cold sweat. His body was taut with tension, but his mind was very alert and awake, and his eyes were open, staring out into the misty blackness, seeing no more than if they were shut.

The night passed without incident.

.