I recently posted some photos on Face Book, of a family
gathering in the Texas Hill Country, circa 1973. There are my parents, both deceased. There is my first wife (OK! Her name is
Linda!). There are babies splashing in a
makeshift pool out on the driveway; now grown into engineers, economists,
marketers and drunken wastrels. Some are
married with babes of their own. Some
are not.
There is me; blond hair to my shoulders, rail thin, holding
a beer and a pack of Marlboro Reds, a shadow among my own people. I had been
back in the world for three years already; and to quote one of my mentors, I
was a lost ball in tall weeds.
1973 was the year I got married, the year I left
broadcasting, the year I finished undergraduate, and the year when it was
becoming increasingly clear that I had my head lodged up my ass. Clear to me at any rate. One of those smiling faces in those photographs
was my boss; handed a job to me at Bexar County Hospital District. Good job too.
I was pointed towards a promising career after acquiring the necessary
graduate degree. For my generation,
getting the Master’s Degree was the brass ring that would assure success. I was awarded that brass ring five years after
those pictures were taken.
I was married to a woman from an affluent Ohio family. Married that sweet girl with some half-baked
notion that this was what I was expected to do:
sliding downward on an icy slick slope towards that suburban ranch-style
with the white picket fence, a scruffy mutt and 2.5 kids. The Best Years of Our Lives were just ahead;
coming into view on the horizon.
I didn’t want that life.
I didn’t want any life that emulated the path of my parent’s generation;
but that was precisely where I was headed.
In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola introduced Viet Nam to us with
his masterpiece movie, Apocalypse Now.
Loosely an allegory of Conrad’s River of Darkness, most
moviegoers saw only a series of bizarre events unfold on the big screen. I saw the Viet Nam of my nightmares so vividly
portrayed that I became fixated; eventually purchasing the video when it was
released and watching it endlessly, the scenes unfolding over and over. I lost count of the number of times I watched
it.
I would hopelessly, sometimes pathetically, explain to
friends, or any willing ear, at bars or parties, that this was exactly the way
it was; that if I had not personally tasted of that insanity, I knew someone
who had. But the horror of our
‘indiscretion’, had ended four years earlier; had slipped into a shroud of Coventry,
not to be mentioned in polite company ever again. Ever.
The protagonist, a young Army captain, on a mission to
assassinate a Special Forces colonel who had gone berserk out in the jungle,
repeatedly asserts throughout his narrative that we, all of us, continued to squat
back there in the bush, and that none of us had ever really come back to the
World.
That was precisely my dilemma.
This is not going to devolve into an some speech about my
fall and redemption from the evils of booze and mind-blowing drugs, but I must
face the consequences that did not begin, but surely were exacerbated, by that
year in Viet Nam.
Up to this point I have spun some humorous yarns about our
hero’s exploits--the boy that I was all those many years ago. Do not be dismayed, my dear readers, friends,
family and casual voyeurs alike; the humor is still to come, because if I can’t
laugh at my own absurdities, I will be condemned to go on living in this la-la land
of wallow-in-the-mud-of-my-own-devising.
Some of you may recall a mention of one Dickhead who almost
got me killed; actually, as my memory keeps popping up hidden scenes from then,
he almost got me killed...twice. This is
the tale of the first mishap.
I’m going to retain his Dickhead alias. As these monographs have progressed, I have
begun using real names less and less, not for fear of libel suits, more because
this is my story and I don’t want Dickhead or anyone else lunging at the set of
Jerry Springer intent on ripping out my jugular.
You may take this on faith: I pray daily to remain an
undiscovered disembodied voice which celebrity never stains. I want to remain a literary Phantom of The Opera;
my chi left the fuck alone.
Laugh all you want, callused purviewers of my addled wit;
this is serrrizz bizzness happening here. If I get locked up in Looney Bin, I
will carry on in the solitude of my stone cell, smearing my words in excrement upon
the walls, to round out my soliloquy. If
the Marquis de Sade could do it, so can I.
(A brief timeout in the powder room: I cannot adequately
convey my delight at right-clicking all these red squigglies on the screen and
clicking ‘add to dictionary’ as I giggle like a schoolboy. Come on down here, Bill Gates, Mother Fucker,
and let me rip YOUR jugular out!!!)
I was just starting to rip into Dickhead’s jugular, when
another of my rambling digressions took over the keyboard. He who stands with me on this St. Trinian’s
Day will forever be my brother; or sump’in like that. Still with me?
Why?
As the U.S. military lounged from Korea to Lebanon to Viet
Nam, the lifer was spawned. I do not
speak here of the many many dedicated career folks who stood watch and guarded
our country between wars; there can never be enough gratitude or honor bestowed
upon them.
I’m talking about Dickhead and his breed. These miserable excuses for humanity enlisted
or wangled a commission somewhere in the mid-fifties, and squandered their
lives, always on the lookout for what we call Skatin’ Duty in this Man’s
Navy. A soft berth and an easy slide
into retirement, following a drunken debacle of twenty years duration: that was
the career ambition of all the Dickheads.
These were the whiners, the snivelers, the malcontents, the
loafers, the connivers (when they had enough smarts), the asslickers, the
asswipes and the deadweights that couldn’t make in civilian life on a
dare. They permeated all service
branches to the chagrin of all those honest people trying to do their jobs.
Back then, the lifer caste protected its own. You had to commit Manslaughter to be kicked
out. The most tried and true method of
containment was, paradoxically, to transfer them elsewhere, until they plopped
themselves down where they couldn’t be budged.
Way too many lifers like DH made it to the shores of Viet
Nam. Da Nang, Dong Ha and Cua Viet were a
few of the Navy places that DH and his ilk got stationed.
Out on the ocean with the Fleet, there were fewer places to
avoid duty and the hard work it entailed; but Viet Nam provided two choice
opportunities. First, it was classified as sea duty on the books. Second, it
was a ‘hardship’ posting which gathered points on a lifer’s record to meet the
criteria for retirement.
A lot of these guys were serving out their last tour of duty
before putting on the old civvies and sidling up to the bar in their hometown
VFW (Sorry, you VFW guys: this is not meant to malign the greater majority of
you. You know exactly who I am talking
about, and most of you know who they are).
Enough blah-blah-blah about lifers: on with the Show.
I have managed to post a few old slides, dug out from the
dusty closet. The last one to date is
the YG-56, taken as we labored out to sea, to dump all that dirty fuel. Look to the left of the pic—you can just see
the stern of one of the barges. The
shadowy figure in the wheelhouse is none other than Rambo himself.
Grrrrrr.
Now we are back at Service Craft, one of the barges has been
beached on a small sandy cove between the gangway and the road. I have no pictures of that place, so you will
just have to rely on my telling of events to imagine the scene. See the barge, listing to port on the beach,
the keel on that side barely touching the water.
See six wind devils (small portable fans to draft an
enclosed space) running at top RPM for five days straight, atop this giant tank. A largely routine protocol because diesel is
very difficult to ignite. You can throw
a burning match on it, and the flame will probably fizzle out. So the vapor of gas posed no real hazard, in
the conventional wisdom of The Navy. ‘Noh
mattah, Gee Eye: yoo bro gas anyway! Do
yoo yob!!’
At this juncture I must inform you that Boatswain’s Mate
Second Class Dickhead was assigned to oversee all the fuel barges in the
Division, perhaps ten or twelve of them.
Used for transferring fuel from the inbound tankers at Deep Water Piers,
to sub stations up and down the coast, they were held in reserve at Da Nang, mostly
floating idle, lashed together and anchored in some backwater. Far removed from harbor traffic to avoid the
risk of collision; at capacity, only a foot of the of the hull rose above the
water.
By now, you are recalling that ‘someone’ left the hatches
open before a squall, contaminating all the fuel. I can still hear him whining to the Chief how
he had no idea how something like that could have happened. Everyone from the Chief on down knew quite
well how ‘something like that could have happened’.
DH had two things in his favor. He was a card-carrying member of the lifer
caste, and he had numerous subordinates at whom to point the finger. Skatin’ Duty meant never getting your hands
dirty, because you had serfs at your disposal (yes, disposal is the germane
choice of word here). It also meant
sloughing off as much responsibility as could easily be laid on another.
Now back to the beached barge. After making damn sure every whiff of vapor
was sucked from the holds, the next step was to make any repairs while standing
still and empty. Dickhead squinted from
the shade of the Boathouse 50 yards away, and declared the craft ready. He wouldn’t climb a ladder and stick his head
down in those open hatches, no siree.
That was working out in the heat, clearly below his station. So, the work got underway by the serfer
caste.
The wind devils were disengaged, but left in place on the
deck, extension cords running every which way.
Now look across about fifty feet of water to the leading
part of the gangway, see four skimmers, tied at the bow to their stanchions in
a pretty well-spaced row. Their engines
are all running. These were my
boats. They might be attached to HQ, but
they were damn well my boats nonetheless.
I am standing in one of them, rubber wellingtons on my feet,
swabbing out the salt, preparatory to the last part of my morning chore: pull
the drain plug in the transom, cast off, and go cavorting on the foaming waves
full out, to run the water out of the bottom, before replacing the plug and
returning the little boat to its berth.
I performed this act for each skimmer every morning. I relished this part of the job, like a schoolboy
playing hooky and getting away with it.
Back again to the barge.
Wilson, a skinny lanky kid, was one of only two certified welders in the
Division. He was also the only
proficient welder in the Division because (you guessed it) the other was a
lifer.
The scheduled repairs were to be accomplished with first, an
acetylene torch to cut away the damaged areas of decking; then second, new
plate welded in place with a welding rod.
Simple enough; piece of cake for Wilson.
With his welding helmet, a quiver of rods and his striker
hanging off his utility belt He scampered up the ladder, the acetylene tanks
already standing by the first of several repair spots.
For those of you who have never seen someone cutting or
welding metal, the striker is a gadget resembling half a giant diaper pin, one
end with a small cup on it and the other with a piece of flint. Squeeze the striker to produce a healthy spark:
the torch ignites in a whuump! of flame.
That is the usual expected result.
I can vaguely sense Wilson up there on the barge deck; the
barge looking akin to some dead metal whale, the hull reaching up fifteen feet
to topside. That was one big hunk of yard
craft, the small cove barely able to accommodate all of it.
I’m not paying attention to Wilson, being focused on my own
work, when there comes a deafening WHUUUUMP!!!!!!! That was not the crack of a
torch lighting up. I spin around to look up at a column of roaring flame,
erupting from the forward hatch. The
pillar of fire is blowing sixty feet above the deck. Sixty fricking feet.
When something like that happens, one of two things
occurs. Either time is accelerated into
nanoseconds; or, time simply stops. This
was the latter. I stand frozen in the
hull of my boat watching the flame and watching Wilson scramble backward on his
butt and all fours, to unceremoniously tumble, in a dreamlike slow-motion,
ass-over-end, down to the water.
The pillar and Wilson’s macabre ballet are only there for
seconds, but I mark in hours the moment of that scene. It still unravels before my eyes. I can still
clearly see that pillar of fire, two feet in circumference, the open round
hatch the womb of its birth, reaching to the sky.
The scene reverts to normal time. Now the whole division is in motion like an
anthill kicked. People are running
everywhere. I can hear Byrd bellowing to
Roy to get his fireboat the fuck over there.
Roy is not a coxswain; like his boss, Byrd, he is a snipe. He was one of the few good lifers in the
Division.
When Oertling got his medal for valor in the Mekong, the
ceremony conducted by Rambo, Roy got one too, for remaining at the helm of his
boat following a rocket attack on Korean Piers and likely saving the place from
burning to the ground. The gooks and the
Koreans hadn’t a fireboat between them.
Roy commanded two and saved the day.
That all went down last year, during Tet.
Back to the aftermath of explosion, Roy edges his bright red
converted pusher boat into the cove and a steady stream of water is cascading
onto the deck of the barge. Of course,
by the time he is maneuvered into position, the crisis is over. The fire is snuffed out as if an enormous
iron lid had been slammed down on the hatch, a macro version of putting out a
kitchen grease fire.
Later, after all the hullabaloo had subsided, there was
another whining performance by Dickhead, in the boathouse, standing in front of
the Chief’s desk: “Chief!! I have no
IDEA!!...” blah-blah-blah. Whiney whiney
snivel; a repeat performance of when 700,000 gallons of the taxpayer’s money
was dumped into the Bay.
This time around, the SNAFU was of a far more serious nature. Had the barge not been leaning so far over to
one side, the gas would have been evenly distributed below decks, its violent
ignition totally uncharacteristic of diesel fuel. The whole enchilada could
have gone up: large chunks of metal shrapnel flying in all directions driven
outward by an expanding ball of fire. A
clip straight out of every action movie.
Dickhead was really scared now. At a minimum, Wilson and I would have been
the first two casualties. There would have been no egress for us from a fiery conglomeration
of hurtling death. There might have been
much more resultant damage to life and limb; but I, the blond headed yeoman
from Texas, and Wilson, the skinny snipe from Idaho, would have departed this
life, no longer concerned with the consequences of Dickhead’s blundering
oversight.
This might have gone right over a Captain’s Mast, straight
on to a court martial; but once again, the brotherhood cradled this drunken bum
in a protective circle of wagons. No
true evidence of the apparent malfeasance of duty, he got off with nothing more
than a two-minute ass-chewing by the Chief in front of the Boathouse
Pirates. And life in Da Nang resumed its
languid course towards quittin’ time.
Modern military service has no shrift for the lifers of that
misbegotten era. If today they manage to
slip by the recruiters and the fierce scrutiny of pre-enlistment, their
inebriated lifestyle immediately marks them for rehab…or discharge, assuming
they don’t respond to treatment. Zero
Tolerance is a good thing.
As my life passes into sunset, this memory has lost its
power to haunt me as it once did. It has
become as benign as the voyage on the YG-56.
The Divine Plan did not devise death for me on that hot
bright morning so long ago. Perhaps it
was to keep me for the salvation of revealing my Viet Nam days in this series
of rambling monologues.
But what the hell do I know?
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