Twenty Flight Rock

All I knew in 1970-71 was that we 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 we were led to believe, and now this was a mop up operation. Only I don’t think they saw it quite like that. The 800th, 802nd and the 804th battalions of the North Vietnamese regular army, along with assorted VC had different plans I guess and they forgot to tell us what they were.

We 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 we all scurried off the track sideways, like silent crabs. Sweat poured from my sore ass. I desperately wanted a crap. I 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 we hated him for the unfairness of it all. We 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 we 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 some guy called 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. Who by the time we had arrived had already defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu with a strategy never considered or understood by our own leaders.

We lay there for three hours. We 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 us about a mile. 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. I lay deep in gloom and darkness. So deep that when I heard the sound of a crying baby drifting through those hills I thought I was back in the womb and that that was my 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 I wanted too, to live!

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

There had been poor visibility for hours, so no Choppers could fly in or out, and the swampy ground that covered our ankles and sucked our strength, stifled progress. We 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 our turn…

It was nighttime again. Nighttime in New York City and one more time I had woken from bad dreams and crazy thoughts. I looked out of my window on the twentieth floor.

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 river. 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 and locks you in real tight.

I wondered then if there was anybody else out there looking on the river this morning thinking what a crazy fucking world we 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 of ours,and maybe sitting, waiting for a storm to break.

My problem is I cannot smell the earth anymore. This window has become my only source of seeing anything, like I’m looking through the wrong end of a telescope into the world, and everything that means anything, is out there, and all I’m doing is biding my time, waiting for a hurricane. Only the hurricane never comes!

The baby starts crying again… I 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’s some point when they all sound the same. When all mother’s and babies are the same, and they look for the first time on their child, and see the miracle of birth and beauty, and listen to those first cries and maybe they cry 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 these men now trying to take it away by the foulest means possible. All these men in this jungle being freaked out by the sound of a crying baby that reminds them of their own life, and how dehumanised they have become. Men who have blasted away the lives of others in the carnage of a fire-fight and not cared about the flying limbs and torsos, just as long as it’s not them. Some even take their brutality one step further, and cut off the ears of the dead 'gooks' and make chains around their necks, and brag, and point at their valour, trying to cover their fear with symbols of power. You can see it in their eyes sometimes. The bottoms of mysterious oceans where they live alone like primordial predators, scuffling for survival on the seabed. Fighting in a fearful world of shadows, afraid of the soft searching limbs of something bigger that is coming for them, like the bent, hooked talon, of a death so terrible that they walk in fear for the rest of their natural days!

Mechanised road sweepers go by in the night, flashing yellow beacons under the city lights. The gulls are awakening. They’re starting to call to one another across the rooftops. Another night is passing into day, and all that I ever knew before I left this city is now gone. The joy, the laughter and the innocence.

My sister Odessa comes round now and then. She puts her arms around my neck and kisses my cheek, and tells me how much she loves me. She goes to church to pray for my soul. She tries to interest me in the ways of the Lord, but somehow I cannot muster up any belief.

‘Come on!’ she cries. ‘Listen Buddy! Blessed be the peacemakers. Bless them O Lord! That they quell the trouble waters! Hallelujah Amen!’
And she would laugh the prettiest laugh and drag me to my feet and get me to stand in front of the window.

‘Look! New York in summer spreads before ya…come on lets go down to the lake in Central Park and feed the birds, like we used to when we were kids. Ya should have been at church today Buddy…it was so good. I know its tough on ya since mama died but she wouldn’t like you sitting up in this room all the time alone.’

‘Yeh I know sweet sister but its hard. I get so afraid even now.’

‘ Ya need help Buddy. Ya can’t go on like this, this is no way to conduct your life.’

In Harlem they turn the fire hydrants on to stop the kids from going crazy with the heat. I watch them play, running, screaming, laughing, in and out of the fountain of water that shoots twenty feet into the sir soaking their bodies with cool river water.

‘There’s a doctor over in Queens that I feel sure could help ya. He deals with combat trauma? I mean would you be interested Buddy if I made an appointment?’

‘Yeah maybe sister, maybe.’

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 our sins. They know the way for our existence and salvation. They know every ailment that afflicts humankind. They know so fucking much it makes me want to puke my guts out of the window onto the masses below.

I remember 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 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 we 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 us 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 you would cover your 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 you from the deepest sleep from then until eternity. Something that would come crawling back on those hot, humid nights downtown, when the sweat would fill your eye sockets, and run down your cheeks like tears, when you sat bolt upright in bed, searching in the darkness for Charlie, Charlie that you knew was there somewhere. Only in your dream you had no gun. No M16 to blast the fuck out of something that you felt sure was searching for you in that magical mystery, valley - highland, nightmare!

We waited until daybreak. Swartz signalled for us to rise and we rose to our 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.

We pissed against the trees and watched the steam rise in the cold air. I looked across at Joey Mendoza, and he looked back at me, and gave me the thumbs up sign, we nodded and grinned like a couple of school kids playing hooky. When we got further up the trail the overhead cover from the jungle just disappeared and we were struck with the light of redemption. Shafts of sunlight shot down from the glorious heavens and lifted the wetness from our bodies and we were glad another day had come to us. We 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.

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

When Joey Mendoza was shot dead, all the odds against my own death reduced rapidly. Joey Mendoza was my friend. He was a good, kind, kid who grew up with me 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 my senses, and did more to me 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 don’t discriminate. There was no discrimination out there. A thousand doors could open to your death, and they all waited for you in Vietnam.

We 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 we were not even sure we had arrived at in the first place. I mean how can you pick out a spot in all that jungle and say you have arrived?

Yes we found some tunnels and some ammunition, and two dead bodies, and the VC made us suffer for our efforts. Made us suffer for every mile we got closer to his assembly areas. Made us fearful for our 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 I should have died also. Maybe I’m riddled with the bullets of guilt and grief at having survived. Something happened slowly and gradually to all of us out there and nobody noticed. For me it started with Joey’s death. That hit me hard. It hit me so hard that after that when guys started getting zapped I couldn’t feel the same. It was like callousness came over me because I couldn’t deal with all that suffering. I couldn’t deal with the agony of being unable to help anybody. It was too much of everything. Guys died around me under shellfire almost every day. I entered the forbidden realm of killing to survive. I crossed over into thoughts and feelings where people in so called civilised society seldom or never go. They were not there so how can they understand?

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

I go to sleep with words written by a Limey…'you know it was not the Boche that worked me up, nor the explosives, but it was living so long by Cock Robin (as we used to call 2nd Lt. Gaukroger) who lay not only nearby, but in various places around and about, if you understand.’ I hope you don’t…