The Boathouse Pirates

My Holden Caulfield Id awakens first.  Jypsi is out of bed running about the bedroom, to make her morning contribution to the minefield of my path-to-the-kitchen.  With the metaphorical horse out of the barn, I go to release her through the pet gate, to begin her Morning Frolic with the night-night excludees.

Holden sleepily wonders why he doesn’t just set the fricking pot for 5:30 and be done with it.  He overrides the timer; then steps to the office to fire up the PC and leave Bill Gates to do his thing unattended.  Lighting the two office lamps, he looks down to see that he has stepped on a dark brown land mine.

Retreating to the bath, he climbs in the running pool of scalding water and, with a brush, scrubs the brown shit off the bottom of his foot.  He thinks of the catholic ritual of The Washing of the Feet (Maundy Thursday? St. Trinian’s Day?) And immediately dismisses the runaway thread as sacrilegious tripe.

Returning to the bed to dangle, smoke and wait out the coffee perk, my own consciousness wriggles up to greet the day.  Holden has left my feet to air dry. Too late, I remember that there are these devices called towels.

I muse and linger there, resting my arm on snoozing Goofy, who has, in my fleeting absence, shifted from his nighttime wifely repose on the wifely side of the bed…to mine.  He has burrowed under my pillow.  I listen to his penny-whistle breathing through the cushion.  The sound is soothing, a far cry from his basso-bellowing bark of a hunter, which is a familiar sound in our neighborhood. 

When you see Goofy, a battleship compared to the dingy-sized miniatures, it becomes crystal clear that the original Dachshunds were bred to hunt badgers: to burrow, flush and kill.

Search and destroy.  The pinnacle of the American War. 

Frequently successful in its tactical execution (If one considers it a success--the commingling of young men’s’ blood), it was ultimately a strategic failure.

The geeks and the brass in the pentagon and the field never got it.  They were glued to the logic that overwhelming firepower raining down on those skinny little gooks with nothing but their superior AK-47’s, mortars and SAM’s to defend themselves would surely bring the bastards to their knees. 

Supplicant surrender to follow in the rail car. 

They thought of their foe as always defending his turf.  What a monumental blunder!  

The Vietnamese were not defending; they were ever on the attack.  Grimly resolved to throw the enemy out of their country, as they had done for the preceding four hundred years, they matched tactics to meet our shifting strategies, always focused upon total victory.

I believe today that a Communist takeover was quite secondary to the desire; the imperative to be restored to an autonomous sovereign state.  We persisted in our deluded belief that Democracy should prevail over the hated Commies.  No one on our side took in the consideration that these tough minded cadres of jungle fighters were not disciples of John Foster Dulles.

Those skinny little gooks, squatting in the bush, were willing to die to the last man to achieve the goal of driving one more hated invader from their soil.

We were not.  Colonel Kurtz was absolutely goddamned right: we could not bring ourselves to become friends…with horror.

So far in these monologues, I have portrayed myself as what I was: a Rear Echelon Mother Fucker--the acronym R.E.M.F. being the conventional term.  Perhaps I didn’t carry the fight into the jungle like my combat brethren; but as one of the ten support troops who had the back of every singular combatant, I, along with the other thousands of REMF’s must accept my share of the universal culpability for the American War.

When I returned to the world, I reduced everything to a distraction: girlfriends, wife, kids, family, pets, jobs, cars, sports, TV, movies, trips, vacations, drugs, alcohol.  In the isolation of my terrible secret, I could tell no one of my plight.  Everyone and everything were foils to my memories.

My shame and guilt buried, first by necessity, then by choice, tainted everything and everyone I touched in my life.  My only saving grace was that I just didn’t know what was wrong with me.

I regret the redundant history lecture above, I truly do. More than that, I regret the grim reality of the truth as I see it. The confrontation with the War makes me doubt myself; that I can make lasting amends for an unraveled existence--to all I inadvertently harmed.

But hope springs eternal with faith in the Divine Plan.  I will triumph over Doubting Thomas (Yes, I am Thomas—my Confirmation name.)  Please allow me to twist off here in yet another OCD explanation designed to lead you down the rabbit hole of my thinking:

Some of you older (Ahem!) readers may recall the 1976 BBC series, ‘I, Claudius’, with Derek Jacobi in the title role. It was a twelve-part television stage play of the politically insidious and evil connivance by all of the Roman hierarchy.

It is a worthy harbinger to the mendacity of present-day American politics.  Check it out for yourself, if you think me a lying scut.

Anywazs, that is not the point (Are any of these tedious digressions of mine ever straight to the point?  Where’s the sport in linear progression, enyhoo?).

What I wish to bring to the fore is an earlier production of ‘I, Claudius’, a 1937 production of Alex Korda’s (WTF was he?), starring Sir Charles Laughton, the consummate actor of his day. 

The production went in the shitter when another star, Merle Oberon (WTF was she?) was involved in a debilitating car crash. Only 40 minutes of black and white film remains.  But that is not the point, either.

(If I hear even one of you yahoos sing out “What’s the POINT?” I’m gonna hunt you down and kick some syrriazz bootie!)

In order for an actor to get into a role, he must struggle to get ‘inside’ the character; a mental feat akin to pulling on a glove one size too small (If the glove does not fit, the jury must acquit!) Shit: if the glove does not fit, the audience will git.

Laughton could not get into the character of Claudius.  For three weeks before the cameras could roll, he descended into a black depression, isolating himself from the cast members, the director, the entire company.  They had no choice but to wait on the great man; everything else being set to go.

Finally, he emerged from his dressing room and announced, “I have found the MAN!”  He stepped onto the set and performed one of the most sterling portrayals of his long career.  As you watch and listen to Claudius played as a crippled stuttering introvert, the larger-than-life Laughton of Captain Bligh fame…submerges…to leave only this reluctant heir to Caligula on the silver screen.

Brilliant!

Finally (whew!) I have diddley-bopped my way to the point of this tiresome lecture:

I have found the MAN; rather, the diminished boy who became the damaged man.  Without this recent plunge into the stellar black hole of my PTSD, I would have been cast to live out the remainder of a miserable existence and no  one among you—the people who thought they knew me—would have ever been the wiser.

My self-perception is that of a loner-isolator, an overt overbearing braggart--intent on pontification like some Buckley-wannabe-- an uncalled for, unasked for speaker of nonsensical wit, transparently attempting to obfuscate his feelings to avert you from grasping my inner self.

There. I’m doing it to you now, as I prattle on.

Does anyone out there have a perception of me contrary to my own?

If you see altruism, kindness, empathy, humility, or compassion in me, what you really perceive is a codependent core the size of a V-2 Rocket.  I fully accept that the causes and conditions that have created this charlatan called Corky were implanted long before Viet Nam. 

 Well, one has to begin the search for clarity somewhere; and these monographs depicting a year in my life are as good a springboard as any. 

Later, I will write a play on hypocrisy, with myself in the starring role.

And now, back to the Shew:

The days drifted by from the ‘dry’ summer of August into the ‘wet’ summer of monsoon season.  In Viet Nam, hot and dry was simply followed by hot and wet; there being no other noteworthy change in climate.  One day in late November, the temperature went down to 50 degrees.  We felt like we were going to freeze.  The artic front moved quickly through and we all resumed sweating like pigs before sundown.

(I’m not really so stupid as to make out that pigs sweat.  Pigs merely perspire.  Grant me a little literary license here for chrissake, and climb down off of my ass!)

I think of them now as the Boathouse Pirates, but that is only my mind’s depiction of them.  Besides Oertling and I, there was Franklin and Lebreaux who actually worked in the boathouse.  There was Delancey and Earl, both snipes.  

Larry and Ray, assigned to Security Division hooked up with me later when I acquired the hooch.  They were nightly party attendees who bunked at Tien Sha.  I didn’t permit sleep-overs.

Delancey was a tall square-faced bloke, from Phoenix.  A star of an engineman, he fixed whatever was broke.  His mechanical skills were indispensable to EN-1 Byrd just as my talents were appreciated by CBM Rodriguez.

The significance of this was significant. 

Rodriguez gave the snipes short shrift.   Byrd didn’t like anyone but his crew of wrench monkeys.  Byrd especially had it in for me, as later tales of woe will disclose; but because Bobby Oertling, John Delaney and the blond headed yeoman palled around, the senior non-coms on the causeway left us alone.

Earl, as I have mentioned was on his second tour, up from the Mekong.  He too was from San Antonio and seemed happiest when he would look up, grinning, from the engine compartment of a pusher boat, a Jimmy 671 dismantled; and man and machine black with grease and oil.  He grinned a lot.

Franklin was another blond yeoman; and dutiful like Bobby and I were.  He was the only one of us married.  Quiet and astute, he wasn’t a stoner; but none of the rest of us held that against him.

Lebreaux had the swarthy looks characteristic of a coon-ass.  Adorned with a thick fumanchu grown below his chin, he was quiet and reserved. I believe he was from Shreveport.   He and I shared a love for literature and politics.

In the day, he and I espoused to the views of the anti-War movement back in the world.  This commonly held view could best be summarized as, “Fuck this War!  Fuck the lifers! Fuck the ARVN gooks! Fuck my job! Oh God, please don’t let me die before my freedom flight!” Or words to that effect.

Whereas I was demurely mute around the lifer caste, Lebreaux was quite vocal.  His reward for unshakable honesty earned him re-assignment for the last half of his tour in Dong Ha, the asshole of I Corps. 

I had a much clearer idea of where to make a stand.  Getting in the face of a lifer and spouting my politics was not one of those places.

We all dressed the same like pre-teen girls, but our standard outfit was not a fashion statement.  Following morning muster, we would strip down to the uniform of the day: cut-off fatigues and jungle boots.  When I first came in-country, this attire struck me as downright peculiar; especially so for all those hairy legs protruding from canvas-topped boots.

The practicality of this ensemble became instantly apparent.  No longer deluged in rolling perspiration after my first three weeks, I continued to sweat night and day unrelieved of the oppressive heat.  The schoolboy garb was as much relief as I could get.

The whole of Da Nang’s ratings ascribed to shorts and boots. We resembled a mob of Huckleberry Finns.   If we had to go out from our station, we would don our fatigue caps, shabby replicas of the cover worn by Marines.  Never mind, the cover made us fully ‘dressed’ for the excursion.

When Admirable Blop-Blop came on board, the killjoy killed our joy with the new long-pants rule.  Well, every cloud yada-yada-yada.  His arrival portended my being handed the skatin’est skatin’ duty that a lowdown shlub could have. 

Scott walked into the Boathouse one day soon after and announced my assignment to skimmer coxswain to the Chief of Staff.  What did that entail, I wondered? 

I did not have to wonder for long…