Lieutenant Dangerous Read online

  At one point he wanted to borrow money from me so he could marry her and send her back to Michigan to live with his family until the war was over. He calculated that a sum of around two hundred dollars would do it. He had a detailed plan. They would get married in Juarez. She would go to Michigan by Greyhound. She had no money to contribute because, as she assured him, all her earnings went back to her tiny village in the mountains to help her poor mother and siblings. Larry was moved by this story, and I was, too, sort of. Just not two hundred dollars’ worth. I am a little foggy on this, but I think I contributed $50, a considerable expression of my faith in the human heart since I was making barely $140 a month as a Specialist Four, and my own wife needed the money. But Larry was grateful and assured me that he would pay me back, and he promised to name their firstborn son after me, and so on.

  I am ashamed to say that I can’t remember the end of the Larry Fitchhorn story, and I apologize for having gone on this long only to have nothing more. Love may have conquered all, or maybe not. I stopped going to Mexico and began a strict regime of running and biking and reading. I bought a bicycle and took long rides all by myself, planning my routes so that the West Texas wind was always behind me. I became a lonely authority on the subject. The wind changed throughout the day. In the morning it was easterly, and the opposite in the evening. Wind is the main weather factor in West Texas, howling day after day. Why people live in West Texas is a mystery to me, as it is to most Texans.

  In addition to biking and running I began a self-directed program of reading. I read all of Thomas Hardy, all of Arthur Conan Doyle, the entire King James version of the Bible, and all, or nearly all, of Shakespeare. I read The Good Soldier, and Catch-22, and The Leopard. I even read the dictionary and made cards for words I didn’t know. I grew more solitary and was of less and less interest to my friends. Supposedly you make close friends in the army, but it’s not so, not even in the actual war part. The army, as William Manchester said, is like an empty room. People come in and go out, some having no idea why they’re there and simply wanting to leave and forget. Most of my fellow soldiers were draftees — that is, they were in this metaphorical room under duress — and our interest in one another was never very strong.

  If you have studied the period in American history, or lived through it, you will remember that outside the military the country was tearing itself apart. Riots roiled political conventions; National Guard troops fired on students. Vietnam was the most visible point of contention, and the older American national diseases — race, inequality, religion, sectional hatreds, and generational suspicions — were gaining strength beneath the surface. Strangely, inside the army the mood was characterized by resentful acceptance and nearly palpable disobedience.

  Most of these effects were increased in the actual war zone when it became gruesomely evident how the benefits and costs were distributed. Stateside, the fault lines were made flagrantly visible by the press, some accurately, others blown out of all proportion. I became aware that, in general, I disliked everyone who outranked me, and felt pity for everyone I outranked, which was almost no one. Men of my own rank I didn’t care about, and in a military sense, I had little interest in myself.

  The enlisted men hated the commissioned officers, the draftees hated the enlistees, the junior officers hated majors and above, the lifers hated the civilian contractors. The army hated the air force as flyboys and pansies; the air force hated the army right back as slobs and killers; the infantry hated the rear-echelon motherfuckers; soldiers from rural America hated smart-asses from New York and LA. The smart-asses hated themselves for being lumped in with goobers and droolers. Draftees hated those who escaped the draft; escapees hated anyone who reminded them of their cowardly good luck. And of course blacks and whites, even those who could get along in civilian life, hated each other. I suppose some Protestants hated some Catholics, and somebody had to hate the Jews.

  In general, everyone in the army hated the army, and thus by the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s the army came slowly to realize that the real damage was being done not to the enemy, but to the army itself, by itself. Discipline not only went to hell but in some units disappeared. Promotions, especially to command positions, carried such personal danger that they were not sought after as they should have been. A sort of command avoidance occurred so that the best commanders did not always rise in rank. Some didn’t want to. It became apparent that the age-old guiding principle of all military effort was not only distant — it was probably impossible. This principle was, and is — and I guess should be — victory.

  Typically, the generals can read the overall success or failure of the army’s efforts and determine its chances for ultimate victory sooner than the lower ranks. But Vietnam was an upside-down situation. The generals lied, not only to the country and to the president, but to themselves as well. Division commanders and brigade commanders continued to seek the enemy, continued to plan huge operations with troops and helicopters and artillery and bombing missions. Men were shot, wounded, lost, driven crazy, and had their lives ruined, as in every war, but the goal grew indistinct and farther distant. Good morale, where there was any, was not lauded; it was suspect.

  Meanwhile, my own plan to hide out in the language school until the war was over was failing, along with so many other plans. Waiting until everyone else came to the conclusion that there wasn’t going to be a victory was not working. The language course came to an end. I was scheduled for another short course in how to work a radio and then deployment to Vietnam. In quiet desperation, I decided to apply to be an officer. I knew I didn’t particularly want to be an officer, and that I would probably be a very bad officer, but officer candidate school was six months long. Commissioning supposedly also meant an additional stateside assignment of an additional six months. Surely, I thought, the damn thing would be over by then.

  My younger brother, who left college early for reasons unclear, had become an infantry officer, and I thought that since I had already finished college, I would be accepted. My company commander at the language school did some research and told me that unfortunately I would not be accepted. My language training was considered too valuable not to be used in the war. Officer training could wait until I had completed a language utilization tour. This was bad news. All that remained was the six-week course in how to run a radio, and then off to the war zone. But there might be an exception. I could apply for a direct commission, no OCS, no running around and learning leadership skills. There was an outside chance that they would simply bump me up to being a lieutenant. Of course any stall in the inevitable was welcome. I filled out the paperwork, got pictures of myself standing at attention, and underwent a security check. I turned in the application and waited. Nothing happened.

  During this time I had developed an unusual, or maybe understandable, interest in salvation, or at least I thought about it. Was there some sort of salvation? Could I be saved, maybe from being shot at. This was partly due to fear of violence in Vietnam, and partly due to the search for any comfort gained by thinking that good fortune favored good people. It was, as it usually is, more hope than conviction. My mother had an Irish sense that reading the Bible kept children, especially boys, from bad behavior, or at least made them worry while doing bad things. What I did enjoy, and still enjoy, was the language of the King James Version, the thees and the thous and the doths and the minatory admonitions and graceful proverbs.

  I, along with most of my language class, and Fitchhorn by the way, was sent to study radio intercept at an air force base near San Angelo, Texas, a town smaller than El Paso, and lonelier and dustier. Then orders came, just as the course began, that I’d been approved for a direct commission.

  This was good news. My pay would be increased. The only remaining hurdle was a board interview by a panel of three officers to test my moral worth and intelligence. I was taken off the roster for the radio class, although it was the first thing in my army care
er that I had looked forward to. The board was convened, and I showed up, starched to a fare-thee-well, shoes polished and brass gleaming. For someone who hated the army as much as I did, this act was nothing if not high theater. The head of the board was a colonel, flanked by two lesser humans, a major and a captain. I planned to answer the questions as I imagined a highly spirited young officer would. But as the interview came to a close, the colonel wanted to know what I would do if it became necessary to get some information out of a prisoner of war. Since I probably would be given a military intelligence role, I might have to face the question of torturing or otherwise encouraging an enemy to give up useful secrets.

  The fact was that virtually no valuable information was ever gained from prisoners in the Vietnam War. The lines of combat were so diffuse, hidden here and there in the dense forests, that not only did the Americans not know where the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were, but in many instances neither did they. I answered the question with some convincing blather, and later I reflected about how good I’d become at blather. In no other organization than the army is it so necessary to be able to sound like you know what you’re talking about. This is valuable training, and it has served me well since.

  But the colonel turned out to be a Baptist or something, and a thoughtful man. Obviously, he detected that I was better with words than actual thought, and he pursued my inner convictions. He asked if I prayed and if so how. This was a telling question, and you have to realize that I was still fairly young, or in other words I had no convictions worthy of the term. But rather quickly I was saved by memory. I said I followed the advice “When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”

  There was a moment of silence. Well, if it was good enough for Jesus it should be good enough for the colonel. And it was, although looking back, I see that I actually dodged the question.

  Orders to make me an instant lieutenant were coming, and in the meantime there was nothing for me to do. My wife had joined me in San Angelo, about seven months’ pregnant. We got an apartment in town and attended some of the San Angelo cultural events. Traveling orchestras were a big feature at the opera house, and the audiences were polite and appreciative. Each concert began with a trooping of the colors and the singing of the national anthem. I suspected Texas patriotism as being more for show and out of habit than from a genuine conviction. Sometimes the audience broke into some sort of Texas song, and once we all sang “Vaya con Dios.” The young soldiers or Boy Scouts carrying the flag exuded youthful military enthusiasm.

  I waited for more orders. So to eat up the time I was assigned as an orderly since I was still an enlisted man, making coffee and buffing the hell out of the floor, twenty-four hours on duty and forty-eight hours off. My wife had to go home to Vermont, in part because the airlines refused to carry women near childbirth, and partly because, for some dopey reason, we didn’t want our child born in Texas. I didn’t dislike Texas, but I found the large, loud, boastful people annoying and insincere. After my wife went back home I was left with two-day periods with nothing to do. There wasn’t a lot to amuse me in San Angelo. There were go-cart tracks and miniature golf and a bowling alley, but I had very little spendable money. A man at the local church suggested that I might like to do some part-time work, helping tend the huge herds of sheep and angora goats he owned that roamed unsupervised in the endless miles of prairie outside the town. The owner lived in town, but he arranged for me to help his foreman, doing fence repairs and maintaining the windmills that pumped water for the herds.

  Like a lot of Texas, the lands around San Angelo were windy, flat, treeless expanses. When it rained the grasses sprang up, and the sheep and goats had good fodder. During the dry spells they waited for rain. They were watered at large tanks that were steadily filled by windmill-driven pumps. The wind was constant and the windmills pumped steadily, gushing water into the tanks. When the tanks were filled, the excess water ran back down into the well. My job was to climb the towers and check on the machinery, replace any windmill blades that were ready to fail, and fill the little gearboxes with oil. The windmills went around, raising and lowering the column of pipes that went down into the well. The machinery was mildly fascinating. The sections of pipe were joined by clever couplings that contained a sort of flapper valve. The water was raised to the top sections, where it overflowed into the tank. I found this pretty amazing since the entire thing ran on wind, for free, without ceasing. The sheep and goats took it all in stride.

  The foreman was happy to show me how to replace the windmill blades. He pronounced me a fast learner. I think his name was Ron, but maybe not. He was about sixty, wiry and bowlegged. He lived in an extremely small trailer with two or three guns. He cooked for me and the other herdsmen on the back of a genuine chuck wagon pickup truck. Ron rarely went into town, due to his suspicion of city cupidity and sloth. He gave me a few disquisitions on what was right and wrong with America, which were not as verbose as his solitary life would have justified. Most of the other herdsmen were Mexicans and had limited English. I was a fresh set of ears. He liked the life he was leading and seemed very healthy. He admitted that this life wasn’t for everyone, and he was pleased if other people would stay in their cities. He had been out in the Texas sun and wind for a long time, maybe most of his life. The skin of his face and neck were not only dark brown but also had the texture and sheen of fine shoe leather. His eyes were the palest blue and his teeth glowed white. Most impressive was his skill in rolling a cigarette with one hand. This takes a lot of dedicated practice, producing many failures and a lot of spilled tobacco. I hadn’t smoked for years, but I started again because of the challenge.

  I only worked for Ron for about five weeks, and then my orders came through. I told Ron that I would be leaving and that I had enjoyed working with him and would always remember my windmill experience. I said I had more training ahead, and maybe shipment to the war. Ron said that I should be careful — he had been in the navy and hated it. He said that he hated officers and that I should never trust an officer under any conditions. Okay. On my last day he said that when I had finished my duty, if I needed a job, I should come back down to San Angelo and look him up. If he had an opening, I was sure of employment. I tried to give him my car, but he didn’t want it. None of the Mexican guys wanted it, either.

  I had only a day or two to prepare to leave. My car had to be disposed of somehow. I quickly sold it to a fellow soldier for twenty-five dollars — fifteen down and the remaining ten to be sent if it was still running after one month. It was a nineteen fifty-something DeSoto, and it leaked every known fluid, including but not limited to brake fluid, steering fluid, oil, antifreeze, wiper fluid, and several other liquids known only to the Chrysler Corporation. In the trunk were potions that promised to free sticky lifters, prevent gas tank corrosion, improve mileage, seal radiator leaks, and stop valve clatter. The ten dollars never showed up.

  So that was almost fifteen months in Texas, expended for the sole purpose of avoiding getting shot at in a war no one wanted or understood. It took me awhile to get over my distaste for Texas, and it may not be gone yet. My conclusion was that Texans, and American southerners in general, have a more ready acceptance of military solutions than do northerners. This is probably not completely true, but it seemed that way. Of the people I met in the army, stateside and overseas, southerners seem more attracted to going to other people’s countries and shooting at them. Southern officers and senior NCOs accepted the role of beating the hell out of people who couldn’t really defend themselves. There was a strain of bullying and pushing people around if you could, and a reluctance to think of others as deserving of equal status. God was involved somehow, with the explanation that if God wanted a fair deal for people in the benighted countries of the world, He should have given them a better break than He provided for us in the United States.
Some Texans I met disliked equality in their fellows.

  But not all Texans. In El Paso, I befriended a family of extraordinarily gentle and accommodating people who welcomed me and other soldiers for wonderful dinners out at their ranch in the Pima cotton fields. The head of the family agreed that there was a hidden strain of superiority just under the surface in Texans, not in everyone to be sure, but enough to make it worth watching out for. This is a human trait, but it’s stronger in the individual when it’s held by a large quotient of the group. In addition, there was a curious type of lawlessness as well, maybe left over from the frontier days, but still alive in finance and jurisprudence. Illegality, in the Texas culture, was simply what you got caught at. If you didn’t get caught, then it was legal. The law was being constantly tested to see where it applied and what it meant. Texas was wild, less comfortable with itself despite its boasting. It seemed resolved to meet the world as a fight.