I didn’t meet Harley until I stood toe to toe with Death. A warrior, an Air Commando, he taught me how to laugh at it and fear it and quash it away and never quite ignore it. Nothing in my Boston childhood had equipped me for the realities of Southeast Asia—the smooth, cool pages of National Geographic magazines stacked in our attic in the outskirts of Boston made Indochina look like Eden. It was Harley who prepared me for combat, accidentally preparing me for monkhood along the way. But in my vision I knew that Tech Sergeant Baker was as doomed as President Kennedy. And I could see my own soul, lost in the void, lost along the sidelines of the Big Buddha Bicycle Race.
My mind skids past fading memories I want to recall and lands in catastrophe on days past I have forgotten just as vividly as days I never lived at all. It must have been the whiskey. Or the red-rock heroin. How did we survive the plane crash? It seemed so real when the North Vietnamese took us prisoner. Why do I still dream of fire and fear a candle burning in the night? Who was Tukada? Baker survived two crashes, but didn’t he kill himself shooting up speed? Why aren’t I certain? What has happened to my mind?
I too walked away from the burning wreckage. I too survived a SAM missile’s direct hit—or was it a Strela? Harley looked off a thousand yards into the tree line when he talked to you, often rambling and unable to make sense. I needed someone to tell me that I had escaped the thousand-yard stare, but how did you translate that into Laotian? Had I survived the crash or was I a ghost trapped in my own nightmare, unable to escape even to the Buddhist samsara of endless rebirths, never-ending cycles of worldly suffering and delusion? Was I living in hell or purgatory or just the twentieth century?
Sitting in that cave in Laos, I could not erase my memory-visions of Colonel Strbik and Captain Rooker—the best damned pilots in the unit. I could see them burning, their faces serene like the face of Saint Polycarp, except there would be no miracle—streams of their own blood would not put out the flames. My visions were seared by burning wreckage and smoldering villages and I could no longer distinguish the mangled corpses of war heroes from beauty queens, of Asians from barbarian invaders, of friends from enemies. I was haunted by grunts like Pigpen Sachs, the door gunner, and Jeff Spitzer, my fellow cameraman, who dreamed of being held in the arms of college girls as they died—and called out for their mothers. Reporters said that bodies were being stacked like cordwood in Vietnam, but in Laos nobody was going to that much trouble. Human beings were being chopped down like the weeds the hill-tribe Hmong dried out by the side of the dirt road to make into hand brooms. Only nothing could be made from something so useless as a dead human being. Cremation was merciful in the jungle.
In the distant days between college and monkhood, in the days when I failed as a draft-dodger and failed as a soldier, I would have been satisfied waking up in the boondocks of Thailand with day lilies filling the vase that sat on the rickety rattan table next to my bed at Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng. I would have been content with flowers that lived a single day, even though waking up with a tiny bar girl’s hand on my chest, whispers of “lovely, so lovely” alighting like soft petals, was what I really needed to put my mind at ease. In the boondocks of Thailand along the Lao frontier, Baker, Washington, Wheeler and Shahbazian usually got to the Corsair Club before me and I often went home from the bars alone because even in my days as a lover of whores I maintained certain standards. I had to know her name and where she was from and if her dad was a rice farmer or a sailor in the Royal Thai Navy, because whores were people too, just like GIs.
Vietnamese villagers prayed for us every September, wrapping the sculpted Buddhas that sat inside their pagodas with saffron to appease the souls of the unburied dead—the wandering restless souls of beggars, soldiers and prostitutes. But I fear those prayers were not enough. So many nights on the Lao frontier it was not until the first pink glow of dawn that I finally fell asleep, and even then it was not peace that came but my own private samsara. To this very day I ask: Will I wake up ten thousand times without awakening? Or will these cycles of rebirth become the path to my redemption?
January–April 1970
Mexico
I hadn’t gone crazy yet when I first went out to California, although I sometimes fear my madness started the day I was born. Sure, I’d been thrown out of the Pentagon. Something about my involvement with the GI contingent that walked at the head of a 250,000-person anti-war march on Washington called the Second Vietnam Moratorium. It might have cost me an automatic promotion from airman first class to sergeant, but it had been part of a plan. It got me assigned at last where my recruiter had guaranteed I’d be assigned all along—the 1361st Photo Squadron at Norton Air Force Base, California, headquarters of the Aerospace Audio-Visual Service, acronym AAVS (and pronounced “AVIS” in Air Force speak).
A year earlier I had been teaching English to Portuguese immigrants at a high school in Bristol, Rhode Island. It kept me out of the draft, but I was miserable. I could have blamed the fact I had no textbooks. Or I could have blamed my students—the boys had barely avoided being sent off to fight colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique only to discover when they got to America that they would be drafted to fight in Vietnam if they learned English. In the end, though, I had to blame myself—a dedicated career teacher or even a dedicated draft dodger would have made it work. Instead, my heart was three thousand miles away. I had been accepted for a master’s program in film production at the University of Southern California. I was ready to go, except Congress changed the rules for the Class of ’68 and eliminated draft deferments for grad school. Some of my friends talked bravely about Canada and Sweden, and I gave it some thought, but I couldn’t help noticing that none of them left. The head of the AV department at Bristol High had been a Marine cameraman in Korea. When he got wind of my story, he suggested I pay a visit to an Air Force recruiter he knew—Tech Sergeant Gallipeau.
Gallipeau seemed harmless enough, with a Pillsbury Doughboy body stuffed into his dress blues and a crooked grin that reminded me ever so slightly of Gomer Pyle’s. He enticed me into giving up my teaching gig by promising with great sincerity that I would be spending four years with a motion picture unit an hour from L.A. The son of a bitch had lied, of course. Thanks to something in the fine print about “Needs of the Air Force,” I ended up in a converted broom closet in Washington, DC, cranking out certificates of graduation for each and every attendee of DODCOCS, a semi-boondoggle Department of Defense computer school for field-grade officers. Thanks to its prototype 1937 Xerox machine, I got to singe my fingers in a pint-sized oven, baking the toner on each and every diploma. I shared one other job at DODCOCS with two fellow low-level enlisted men—keeping the massive urns in the officers’ lounge filled with enough coffee to make sure the majors and colonels didn’t snore during the lectures. I never wanted to see or smell coffee grounds again.
The experience was suffocating—pasting on a phony smile day after day for the powerful, blindly ambitious careerists who surrounded me. At the same time, my mind was being buffeted by what I could only describe as powerful forces of history. It was the summer of 1969 and Richard Milhous Nixon occupied the Oval Office. He promised in June to start bringing troops home, but more than two hundred a week were still coming home in body bags. Even more unsettling, stories started appearing in the GI underground press about an Army lieutenant named Calley being charged with the massacre of hundreds of unarmed women, children and old men in an obscure hamlet called My Lai.
I had never been able to sort out exactly what I believed about the war as a college student, even after the Tet Offensive in January of ’68 showed that the Johnson administration had been dead wrong about there being “light at the end of the tunnel.” In the spring of ’68 we learned at campus teachins how General Navarre, the French commander in Vietnam, had said exactly the same thing in 1950—four years before the Vietnamese crushed the Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu. As a college