Lieutenant Dangerous Read online

  3

  Toward the end of basic training, when my loathing for my situation and myself had ebbed only slightly, I faced transfer to advanced infantry training. An inner voice warned me against having anything to do with the infantry, not out of fear necessarily, but out of the self-realization that I was not a fighter, not an attacker of enemies, not likely to join readily in assaulting anything. Most probably this would be discovered in an infantry unit pretty quickly. Then I would have to either fake being aggressive or suffer the lonely life of an identified partial coward. There was a solution, or at least I thought so at the time.

  It was possible to sign up for special schools and gain stature as a specialist in a non-infantry role. The signal corps specialized in communication; the military police maintained traffic flow; the quartermaster corps took care of supplies and housing. Any of these beat the hell out of ground-pounding jungle warfare. There were other specialties — artillery, helicopter maintenance, transportation, and even finance, which seemed extremely safe for some reason. And there were areas where your civilian training qualified you to not get shot at — the medical corps, the judge advocate, public affairs, and lastly, intelligence.

  Wags say that military intelligence is a contradiction in terms, but it is in some ways the most important of the army’s activities. For example, and this is serious, the people in military intelligence are supposed to be able to answer the question, “Where is everybody?” Not just the enemy, but our own people as well. Where were our units at any given time, and did they know where they were? In a war like Vietnam, without GPS or instant communication, small units of our boys tended to get lost. They were, after all, out there in triple-canopy jungle. For guidance they had maps, more or less accurate, originally produced by the French, and they had compasses. But from then on the technology of self-direction disappeared. If a general asked where’s such and such a platoon patrolling, someone had to know. Or pretend they knew.

  The role of pretending to know where everyone was fell to the military intelligence people, or the MI corps. Army units got lost in civilized, well-mapped Germany, so the potential for loss was multiplied in a place like Southeast Asia. This was true unless you were a native, and even then the native Vietnamese actually knew very little about their country beyond their immediate village. But the military intelligence people had another crucial role, one that is celebrated in many movies and in a good many books. They were supposed to know what the enemy was doing. They had to listen to what the enemy was planning. And here is where I came in, listening to the enemy’s signals and conversations.

  Sitting safely listening to the radio all day and making reports about enemy movements and secret stuff overheard seemed like a good, safe job. It was more dependent on the radio than on a gun, and it required that the surroundings be quiet. So therefore, it had to be done at a distance from artillery and explosives. There was only one problem, and I loved this problem. One had to be able to understand Vietnamese. I had been fairly adept at languages, at least Romance languages. And the language course in Vietnamese had another advantage. It was a year long. It would cost me another year in the army, but one sometimes tends to make decisions based on personal safety. At about that time, March 31, 1968, to be precise, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for president again and that he would turn all his attention to securing peace. At the language school some of us theorized that we would never have to use our new language because the war would be over in a matter of months.

  The language school was near San Francisco, on a base called the Presidio of Monterey, a beautiful place, or so I had been told. Except that it wasn’t. It was actually on Biggs Field, Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas. El Paso may have a lot of valuable features, but it is not San Francisco.

  The school itself was part of a joint set up by the army and the air force. Our quarters were at air force standards — in other words, an improvement. Curiously, the air force lives better, anywhere in the world, than the army, and good for them. There was a swimming pool, a crafts shop, an air-conditioned movie theater, a well-stocked PX, gyms, and tennis courts. The usual army drilling and nitpicking were dispensed with since we were supposed to be involved in intellectual attainment. Classes were six hours a day with a language lab for two hours every night.

  I have mentioned that I could understand several Romance languages even if not fluent. I thought this would help. To get into the school I had to take a language aptitude test, something the government gave to potential students, not only in the armed forces but also in the consular service and the CIA. This test presented a fake language based on cartoon strips and captions that got progressively more complicated as the test went on. But if you were sharp, you began to dope out the grammar and vocabulary of this fake language. It was almost, but not quite, amusing. And if you were familiar with any Romance or Slavic languages you could catch on quickly.

  Ah, but Vietnamese is not a Romance or Slavic language. It is in fact an uneven combination of Chinese vocabulary and a phonetic alphabet invented by the French while they were enslaving the locals during their incredibly cruel colonization of the country. Early in their colonization they introduced the truck-mounted guillotine. Vive la France. The most difficult aspect for normally thick Americans is that Vietnamese is tonal, like Chinese. A word spoken in one tone, up or down or with a lilt, will have a distinctly different meaning from the same word in another tone. The Vietnamese phonetic alphabet was devised by the French missionary Alexandre de Rhodes, may he fry in his own fat. To get the pronunciation right he added seven vowels and six tones, plus two d’s and a number of other oddities that had no counterparts in Romance languages. In addition, over the centuries three distinct accents had developed: one in North Vietnam, clipped and precise; one for the middle part of the country, not as clipped; and one for the South, slurred and imprecise. In further addition, the Vietnamese themselves thought it amusing to add their own personal accents and peculiarities to the conversation. They took what amusement they could from daily life, understandable in a country in constant conflict for centuries.

  I add all this language about language to back up the conclusion that for Americans who were smart enough to pass the test, meaning smarter than most but not much, learning Vietnamese was a slow process. But since the war was still going on, it was not all that unattractive. To learn enough of this melodic tongue to be able to figure out what intercepted enemy messages meant was difficult, close to impossible. In addition, the army had screwed this up as well. We were taught the southern dialect, somewhat lazy and singsong. There’s the letter d, for example. There are two d’s. One has a little dash across the upright, and the other one doesn’t, and it’s called the soft d. In the South the soft d is pronounced as a y in English. In the middle part of Vietnam, it is pronounced as a j sort of sound. In the North it is pronounced as a hard z as in zip. I beg your indulgence.

  By the end of the 1960s most of the enemy were North Vietnamese natives and spoke the northern dialect. Could we understand the northern dialect? Well, I couldn’t. Examples of messages intercepted by the listening posts, and then transmitted by the technology of the day, were scratchy, inexact, and garbled. The language labs in the evening proved all that. We were given sample recordings from the field. About halfway through the course I realized that I could barely understand the gist of what was said in the radio transmissions, let alone accurate details.

  If the army at any time questioned how effective their language instruction was, they did nothing about it. The contract for the school was held by a sloppy consortium of American language schools: Lacaze, Sanz, and Vox. They hired native Vietnamese-language teachers from France and Montreal who, evidently desperate for work, found themselves in the wastes of West Texas teaching groups of sullen enlisted men in prescribed rote lessons. The teachers were instructed by the contractors’ management to stick strictly to the lesson schedule. The teaching method was endless repeti
tion, and I suppose for some people, perhaps very young children, this method works. It didn’t work for us. There are grammatical and syntactical rules in Vietnamese, but these were not to be revealed. Not intentionally anyway. If we figured out the strange system of classification characteristic of many Asian languages, we would be able to more easily, more quickly learn. But the method was repetition not understanding. The secret ingredient was time, and since the Lacaze, Sanz, and Vox contract paid by hours taught, there was no shortage of this secret ingredient.

  There were other means of getting assigned to the language school, even more suspicious than the language aptitude exam. In my class there were several students with no aptitude at all. The army’s assumption that the contractors could teach anyone was based on the contractors’ solemn guarantee that they could teach even the least able soldier to understand an Asian language. One such example was an affable fellow named Sergeant Herman McKern. He outranked us all with some promotions he had received in a reserve unit back in his native Minnesota. His affability shielded him from a full understanding of the fun that was made of him as he tried to learn any vocabulary. But the truth was, he had no facility in this field. None. He stumbled through the daily repetition exercises, taking twice as long as anyone else, blissfully unaware of how painful the delay was for the rest of us and certainly for the instructor. One gets used to having time wasted in ridiculous ways in the army, but Herman McKern was something special. He also specialized in Yogi Berra–like sayings having to do with the history of the universe. He once opined that the earth was larger than the moon, but they were both about the same distance apart.

  Minor rebellions were staged against the constant flow of idiocy. But the students were interested, as I was, in using up as much time as possible. We hoped the war would end without our direct participation. The result was dull acceptance of a moronic situation. There were two ameliorating factors. First was that about half the teachers were extremely pretty women, either Vietnamese or French Vietnamese. They wore the traditional garment, the áo dài, a pair of close-fitting silk pants under a long blouse, also close-fitting. The men wore, well, I don’t remember what the goddamn men wore. But the women, girls actually, were a serious problem. They were graceful, dewy, with glistening black hair and lovely voices. I was very happily married and endlessly worried about my wife’s security back home in our drafty old Vermont farmhouse. But if I hadn’t been married, I would have suffered the desperate frustration of many of my fellow warriors. At the end of the yearlong course my roommate disappeared, AWOL, with one of the teachers and was never heard from again, at least not by me. Her name was Nga.

  A second relief from the endless tedium of the school was a sharpening, almost a vicious honing of our sense of humor. Our targets were, of course, the upper ranks, officers and so on. In one part of the classroom building there were shorter courses, ten weeks or so, for officers and non-commissioned officers of the Green Berets. The Green Berets were an elite unit, or so they had been told. They were trained in tactics, medicine, civil affairs, and other things useful in winning hearts and minds. They needed to know enough language to get the confidence of the local population. But they were not any smarter than us devalued enlisted men. Of course, being elite they were more dedicated to the glorious mission of anti-communism in Southeast Asia. During the breaks we all mingled outside to smoke. My friend Steven Shackles was a partner in subtle insult creativity. Private Shackles devised a bit of theater in which we would pretend to be speaking very fast, very skillful Vietnamese. These were actually all nonsense noises that sort of sounded like the real thing. We did this purposely within earshot of the Green Berets. We would rattle off a bunch of utter blither that sounded like Vietnamese. Shackles would argue with me about some obscure point of grammar that he had just made up. And then to rub salt in the joke he would turn to a major, who was listening, lost and dumbfounded, and ask him a deadly serious question about the meaning of a word Shackles had just created. The extent of Shackles’s creativity was boundless. The words he made up to confuse the baffled officer would be extra silly, something like boo ba bah. We then argued back and forth about the correct pronunciation or usage or tone of boo ba bah. Shackles had an incredibly valuable skill, at least in this context, of not laughing when things were beyond hysterical. I got better at this with practice.

  The purpose of this silliness was to make the officers feel bad that we lesser enlisted mortals were so adept at Vietnamese, whereas they, who outranked us, were hopelessly behind. The problem with the whole act was that we were the only ones who got the joke. We were so desperate for amusement that we had to make up dim-witted pranks and play them on the easily victimized, all to absolutely no effect. Even so, I remember that at the time the effect of demoralizing those who outranked us seemed to be worthwhile. I don’t know what happened to Shackles, but he must have had a future in something clever and funny and cruel.

  But I would add in mitigation that neither Shackles nor I was abnormally mean. We were driven nuts in a subtle way by the situation, cooped up in West Texas with total strangers who didn’t want to be there any more than we did, learning a goofy unnatural language, standing in lines every morning for attendance to be taken, having our heads shaved to military length, having our living quarters inspected for invisible dust, and, for most of us, having no social life. Plus being cooped up with Sergeant McKern. The more of this situation we accepted, the odder our thinking became. We thought of ways of torturing the officers because we felt justified. In a society with military ranks, you tend to blame people who outrank you as responsible for the way things are: the weather, the loneliness, and the war.

  Shackles, for example, had no girlfriend or wife, and the celibacy was driving him crazy in another way. I remember him as tall and good-looking. He gawked at the local girls when we went to the movies or the ball games, but he had no money to take anyone out on a date. I didn’t want local dates, and my money was sent home to help my wife pay the bills. What happened to Shackles’s money I don’t know, but he was suffering. The worst effect came from the young Vietnamese women who taught us. They were the subjects of countless dreams. We were warned to treat them with utmost respect, but that was nigh impossible. In the novel Catch-22 the men begin groaning every time a woman walks by. My fellow students would pretend to go into paralytic shock if one of the teachers showed up in particularly fetching clothes. The teacher would ask a student to repeat some sentence in Vietnamese, and he would comically collapse, his arms limp and his eyes closed, his mouth lolling open. It was certainly amusing. God knows what the poor teachers thought was going on. Shackles also indulged in idiotic acts of how much he was smitten by one of the teachers. He would stare at the teacher and stick out his tongue and make noises. He would snap his fingers and say, “That’s what I’m fightin’ for!” He made up alliterative descriptions of his devotion. I shamefully remember two examples — “I would eat the peanuts out of her turds.” And “I would low-crawl across broken glass to hear her fart over a field phone.”

  The Vietnamese teachers were an odd group. Many were French Vietnamese and from middle-class families but now forced to work. Some were transplants to Quebec and for all intents and purposes nearly stateless. The US State Department wanted them here, but when and if the war ended they would have to find new homes. We were together for a long time and got to know one another fairly well. Ong Dien was one teacher, French Vietnamese, who realized that to keep his students awake he had to be interesting and animated. This also kept him awake because he enjoyed an active social life, not an easy accomplishment for an Asian in El Paso. El Paso was, however, a border town, and the population was mixed. Anyone Asian was Japanese in the simplified Texas view of the world. Ong Dien had dates, not just with the other Vietnamese teachers but with a variety of locals. He may have been bisexual. At the time I had no way of judging. But he was also an excellent cook. He made French specialties and was a wine expert. He had us to h
is house, a little southwestern bungalow with a roaring swamp cooler on the roof, for dinners. He ran cooking lessons on entry-level Vietnamese cuisine, spring rolls and pho. He also liked to drink, something I learned later was a strong Vietnamese trait. His fellow teachers gathered and got blotto, taking advantage of the cheap prices for tequila and scotch. The favorite was Johnnie Walker, which led to questions about who was this genius, Johnnie Walker, what did the name mean, was there actually such a person? I provided the translation — Ong Johnnie Di Bo, literally, Mr. Johnnie Goes By Foot.

  4

  Fort Bliss and El Paso are on the Texas–Mexico border. We had Saturday afternoons and all day Sundays off from the language training, and since we had very little money, Mexico had great appeal. Ciudad Juarez back then was not the drug-related bloodbath it has become today. It was a lazy entrepôt where one could get a steak dinner and lots of beer for three or four dollars. I had resolved meatlessness and alcohol abstinence while in the service on the wise advice of my father. Mess hall food was greasy and questionable, and his advice was good. I drank no alcohol. (For the record, I have made up for my military abstinence in the years since.)

  The border economy had other attractions from which I also abstained. But I went with friends to Juarez, and in particular with a friend named Larry Fitchhorn. A bar and brothel named the Navy Rose had a social program for lonely GIs, and Larry fell desperately in love with one of the staff. An evening with…well, I don’t remember her name…was ten dollars. The price was reducible if she felt some attraction beyond strict business. Fitchhorn was no Adonis, in fact he was a rather tough-looking specimen from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. But the girl had a calming effect on him, even though he was tortured by ideas of how to get her out of her current career. She was pretty and spoke enough English to understand what he wanted, and how it might benefit her. What drove him substantially crazier was that during the week, when he was supposed to be learning a language that had no value and no meaning, and that might actually get him killed, the girl was still trying to earn money in her job. This made it difficult for him to concentrate.