I fired off two or three very hasty unaimed follow-up shots as I was rolling and moving because the grenade was now bouncing right over the top of me, about to explode. My first shot, right in line, almost certainly went into his body. So too could any of the three other wild shots. I’ll never know for sure if any of them actually killed him, because Ohio came tearing around from the right side of the nose and, with his rifle on full automatic, sprayed the soldier with half a magazine, diving for the dirt himself as the Chi-comm went off just below me down the steep hill.
My feelings then? It felt pleasurable and satisfying to see Ohio ripping that kid apart on full automatic. I was alive! That certainly felt good. Another obstacle was out of the way of achieving our mission. That felt good too. But it also felt just plain pleasurable to blast him. Take that, you (choose a name that describes anything but a fellow human). In combat you are already over some edge. You are in a fierce state where there is a primitive and savage joy in doing in your enemy.
Jane Goodall once talked quite movingly about watching her little tribe of peaceful chimpanzees declare war on another tribe and savagely and ruthlessly exterminate it.8 Up to that point in her studies of chimpanzees she had concluded that chimps were somehow above humans in this regard. But in a dispute over territory she watched what can only be described as atrocities—chimps being savagely dragged on the ground, clubbed, whirled by their limbs to smash their skulls—not in order to just drive them away from the territory but in order to exterminate them. I’m afraid I know how the winning chimpanzees felt. There is a very primal side to me. I suspect we all have this, but are so afraid of it that we prefer to deny its existence. This denial is more dangerous than acceptance because the “killer,” that mad primitive chimpanzee part of us, is then not under ego control. It’s why a good Baptist can get caught up in a lynching. It’s why a peace advocate can kill a policeman with a car bomb.
My radioman and I both survived the explosion, although I was hit with small bits of shrapnel in the back of the legs. They felt like bee stings, hot and many. I was so pumped up with adrenaline they didn’t even slow me down. When I looked up after the explosion, the Vietnamese kid was dead. My feeling? I felt relief. “Phew, no more grenades.” I churned up the steep slope to take on the next position and quickly forgot even that feeling. I didn’t even think about the incident until years later.
I now have all sorts of feelings. Suppose it was one of my sons, Peter or Alex, trapped, filled with fear as these huge American Marines, known to be ruthless, even crazy, came relentlessly from out of the jungle, swarming up the hill, killing his friends in their holes around him. Then two are just below him. Desperately, he tries to lob a grenade into the unseen dip in the hill where the two Marines disappeared. Two grenades come flying back from unseen hands, exploding around the hole. Again, he and his friend each toss a grenade. Again, two come back. The cycle repeats. One of the grenades kills his friend and stuns him, bloodying his face. Now he’s totally alone. To leave the hole is to die. To stay in the hole is to die. Death is coming in a crummy hole hundreds of miles from his family, and he has never made love with a woman and he will never know the joys and trials of a family of his own. Then, there is the enemy, lying in plain view just below the hole, rifle ready, his brown eyes staring at him over the barrel, the eyes the only living color in a face that is a pallid mask of dried clay smeared with smoke smudges, terrible and gaunt with exhaustion and fighting.
“Throw the grenade! Try and save yourself, Peter!” But two rifles spit white-orange light. Peter is dead... my son.
My feeling now? Oh, the sadness. The sadness. And, oh, the grief of evil in the world to which I contributed.
What is different between then and now is quite simply empathy. I can take the time, and I have the motivation, to actually feel what I did to another human being who was in a great many ways just like my own son. Back then, I was operating under some sort of psychological mechanism that allowed me to think of that teenager as “the enemy.” I killed him or Ohio did and we moved on. I doubt I could have killed him realizing he was like my own son. I’d have fallen apart. This very likely would have led to my own death or the deaths of those I was leading. But a split occurred then that now cries out to be healed.
My problem was that for years I was unaware of the need to heal that split, and there was no one, after I returned, to point this out to me. That kid’s dark eyes would stare at me in my mind’s eye at the oddest times. I’d be driving at night and his face would appear on the windscreen. I’d be talking at work and that face with its angry snarl would suddenly overwhelm me and I’d fight to stay with the person I was talking with. I’d never been able to tell anyone what was going on inside. So I forced these images back, away, for years. I began to reintegrate that split-off part of my experience only after I actually began to imagine that kid as a kid, my kid perhaps. Then, out came this overwhelming sadness—and healing. Integrating the feelings of sadness, rage, or all of the above with the action should be standard operating procedure for all soldiers who have killed face-to-face. It requires no sophisticated psychological training. Just form groups under a fellow squad or platoon member who has had a few days of group leadership training and encourage people to talk.
There are other feelings associated with killing. On this particular assault the battalion staff and another company being held in reserve had set up on a hill about a kilometer to our east. Normally upon seeing the first Marine break through the last defenses on an assault, something I experienced only three times, I had the same wonderful feeling—an explosion of relief that made me want to run forward with savage joy. We’d won! We would be safe. The organism, we, me, would be here tomorrow. But this time we were being watched, and when we finally broke into the open across the top of the hill we heard cheering coming from the battalion headquarters group and the company placed around them for security.
I turned murderously angry.
This seems odd, given that I was feeling savage joy myself just moments before. I think the anger came from the fact that we and not they had paid the price for this victory—and it was very steep. Human sacrifice had been turned into spectator sport. I now don’t blame those who were cheering. They were unconsciously responding to a built-in psychology, no different from that of any spectator vicariously getting the “touchdown feeling.” I probably would have done the same. But then I was enraged about it. I’d very nearly died. Some of my friends and my respected enemy had indeed died, while others would be maimed for life. It felt wrong that the guys on the other hill should be enjoying the same feeling they’d get watching a football game back home. I felt profaned. I felt something sacred had been stolen from me, my friends, and my enemy—our very real sacrifice. I felt had.
I’m aware that our bodies, the result of millions of years of evolution, do what they do. They have certain evolved responses. The choice before us is whether we are ever going to have the self-discipline and awareness necessary to guide these responses into productive channels or continue to allow them to overpower our sense of decency.
People who actually fight and win battles are in fact unlikely to cheer when they get the touchdown feeling, no matter how powerful it is. I never once heard anyone cheer who was actually involved in fighting. This is because the predominant feeling, when you win in battle, is numbed exhaustion.
One night Grandpa Axel and I pushed it just a little too far. We were catching fish, lots of them. And a storm was coming. Just one more drift... just one.
We laid out several hundred yards of gill net in the darkness. The water was moving in short harsh chops, the wind freshening. The net always seemed miles long to me, even in good weather, since I was that part of the two-man crew called the “boat puller.” Grandpa Axel was the part called “the captain.” A gill-net boat is about thirty foot long, open in the bow, with a cabin in the back and sunk in the middle of the cabin a four- or six-cylinder Marine or old tractor engine, depending upon the rel
ative wealth of the fisherman. In a boat this size you don’t actually pull the net into the boat. The net is far too heavy. You actually pull the boat along, sliding it under the net, to get the heavy water-laden net into the boat—hence the name boat puller.
We got the net laid out, tied the boat to one end of it, and sat drifting, waiting for the salmon. Punk. Punk. You could hear the satisfying sound of the cork line going under the water as a fast-moving salmon hit the net.
The rain started coming hard. Visibility closed. Punk. More money. Sockeye salmon were getting thirty-three cents a pound. Every punk was a buck or two. Punk. It was like a money machine. Punk. Punk.
Suddenly a large swell lifted the little boat, tipping it dangerously close to the gunwale because the bow was tied to the net. The wind came slashing down on us with a cold rain and the already dark night went totally black except for the dim white of the little battery-powered mooring light on top of the cabin. You could no longer hear any punks. You could hear only trouble.
Being only fourteen, I hadn’t been through a lot of bad weather. Axel had. Even then, I noticed a grimness, a set of jaw, when he came limping forward to untie the bow from the net. The limp was a measure of that man. He’d been poling logs several winters earlier when the fish weren’t running and slipped between two giant log rafts, crushing both legs. He swam to shore, then crawled nearly two miles to his car. He drove himself, using a stick shift with a clutch, to the hospital, where they amputated one leg just below the knee. Did I really learn to ignore pain in boot camp?
When Axel got worried, I got damned scared.
We started hauling in the net. The boat was corkscrewing like a bucking horse. We’d climb up a near-breaking swell, a curl of white water on top, and I’d almost be pulled overboard, trying desperately not to lose my grip on the net. Then we’d crash down, and I’d haul as fast as I could to keep the boat from going over the top of the net and tangling the prop. Axel was cursing in Swedish, untangling fish from the net, throwing them anywhere he could except out of the boat.
We both knew that the wind was driving us onto the rockbound lee shore only a few hundred yards beyond us, a shore we couldn’t see or hear in that howling air. Rain and cold spray from the waves slashed almost horizontally into our faces. The boat would plunge downward and hit a swell with a shock, and water would come smashing over the gunwales, sloshing at our feet, making the boat wallow, inviting even more water in the next time.
Axel ran aft to get the pump going and try to maneuver the boat so I could haul in the net faster while he also tried to slow the boat’s drift toward the shore. I was left alone, afraid I’d be pulled overboard if I hung on to the net and afraid to let go of the net because it was what was saving me from a wave that could take me overboard. Axel rejoined me, rushing between hauling in net and trying to steer using the auxiliary controls just beneath the bow. I hauled, net and salmon tangled together into a huge jumbled pile on the deck. We fought the foaming stallions for what seemed hours.
Finally, the last of the net came in over the side. We didn’t know how close to shore we’d drifted. Axel scrambled to the back, gunned the engine, and headed on a compass bearing away from shore.
I collapsed on the wet net, chest heaving, staring upward into black nothing that sprayed water on my face. The boat bucked and heaved through the swells, but I was too exhausted to care. I just lay there on that wet seaweed-smelling net, flopping salmon dying around me, and stared into wet black nothingness. Totally exhausted. Feeling lucky to be alive.
Winning a battle feels like that. Only you don’t get to flop on the net because you’re fourteen and Axel is there to take care of you. You have to set up defenses immediately in case there’s a counterattack. And it’s not salmon that are dying around you.
Killing in war isn’t always the morally clean “it was them or me” situation which we so often hear about and which I have described. The more technically sophisticated we get, in fact, the less common this situation will become, and the more problematic the morality. The more common situation in the future will be that of people quite distanced from the actual killing they are doing, their own lives not remotely in danger. I’ve never done this sort of killing, but I do have some perspective on it, having killed from the air, albeit where I could still see the damage I was doing, unlike the crew of a B-52 or a submarine.
Late in my tour, after being wounded two times, I’d been attached to division intelligence as an air observer. A five-man-Marine reconnaissance team had been discovered by an NVA unit in the mountains that border Laos just south of Khe Sanh. In the ensuing fight one member of the team had been badly wounded and now the team was trying desperately to escape but was severely hampered because of having to carry the wounded man. The Marines were a good 20 kilometers from the nearest friendly unit and out of artillery range. My pilot and I were already airborne in a little single-prop O1-Charlie spotter plane when division diverted us to answer the team’s call for help.
When we made contact with the team, I directed the Marines toward a clearing on a hilltop I had spotted. From there we would try to get a chopper to lift them out. Packing their wounded teammate on slippery slopes, they made slow progress. They would have to turn to fire on their pursuers every so often, then scramble upward some more, only to turn and fight again. Because they were outside artillery range, all we could do was scramble some Marine A-4s9 from Da Nang, well over 100 miles to our south, hoping that they’d arrive in time and the constant clouds and rain showers wouldn’t make it impossible for the fast-moving jets to be effective. To fill in for the missing artillery and jets, in the meantime, the pilot would bring the O1 right over the team’s head and I’d lean out of the little plane’s window and shoot at the pursuing NVA with my M-16. I’d watch my tracers dropping earthward as if the ground were sucking them into itself, trying to place them into the winking bright points that I knew were NVA automatic rifles firing back at us. I felt good helping. I also felt curiously excited. What from the air looked like winking lights I, in fact, reacted to like winking lights. I focused on them as indicators of the origin of the fire, not as automatic weapons fire that was trying to kill me. It is like becoming so present focused that you are pure observer. You know from experience that to allow the mind to get involved with future, nonpresent issues like “this could kill me” will only make it more likely that you will be killed. (By this time I’d been in Vietnam nearly a year.) I was actually more apprehensive that we weren’t going to be able to pull this one off and would lose the team. The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission. There was no time now. I was trying to keep map coordinates going to the pilot, warning him when we’d get too close to cloud-hidden peaks that I was trying to locate through reading my map, talking to the Marines on the ground, trying to direct them around obstacles that they couldn’t see and which would slow them down, talking on another frequency to the division recon staff in Dong Ha, who kept wanting to know what was going on, and trying to spot the pursuing NVA and shoot them with my M-16 from the shot-out windows of the airplane. Meanwhile the pilot was talking to the now scrambled Marine jets on another frequency; talking to the incoming evacuation bird on yet another frequency; trying to keep the plane spinning around only a couple of hundred feet off the ground to help maintain my M-16 fire directed at the pursuit, while at the same time trying to keep us from crashing into the numerous unseen peaks, guessed at by me, that surrounded the smaller hill the team was climbing; planning the approach paths of the attacking aircraft when they arrived; and doing the math to figure out how much time was left before we ran out of fuel—oh, and not stall the airplane. In combat your mind is jammed.
Eventually the team reached the summit and set up a hasty perimeter defense. Between us, we now concentrated on keeping the NVA at bay until help arrived.
The NVA had spread halfway around the perimeter and were closing in, peppering us and the small recon team with automatic weapons fire. Everyone in the air
was worried; everyone on the ground was scared.
Two Marine A-4s arrived from Da Nang armed with “snake and nape.”10 Clouds obscured the hill, sometimes for minutes at a time, making it nearly impossible for the jet pilots to locate the target and making the helicopter rescue a real problem. We went in low. I remember everything going gray white as we entered a swirling low cloud and wondering if we’d hit the ground before we could see again. It seems remarkable to me now, but I simply trusted we would. That was the pilot’s job, not mine. I leaned out of the window with my rifle ready to fire. Like a sudden curtain going up on bright daylight the green-gray ground rushed up at us. We were coming in parallel to the front of the team’s defense on the same heading we’d given to the jets and my pilot fired one of our phosphorous smoke rockets into the enemy that ringed the team, marking the target for the much faster and higher-flying A-4s. He twisted the plane over to port and downhill trying to get it safely back into some altitude. I remember seeing pieces of burning phosphorous flying through the air leaving brilliant white smoky arcs from where the rocket had exploded among the enemy soldiers. I didn’t think about the burning phosphorous on their skin.
Almost immediately, braving the same intermittent clouds, the two A-4s, guided by my pilot over the radio and the brilliant white smoke of our burning phosphorous, were on top of the now running NVA soldiers. They delivered their snake on the first pass and blasted out large open patches in the jungle just below the team. I could see the stunning waves of concussion shaking trees in concentric circles, as if a huge rock had been thrown into a dark green pond. We then directed the two jets back in with their napalm and lit everything on fire.
In those smoking clearings I could see the charred burning bodies of the NVA who’d died or were still dying. Some were crawling for the cover of the unblasted jungle, trailing smoke from their clothing and skin.