After about a half hour, a guy came in looking wide-eyed and scared. He said "Flynn, the Captain wants to see you right now, and he looks ready to kill you! You'd better get over there quick!" I headed to the command tent figuring that I'd be leaving in the morning for LBJ. I was scared, but so enraged at what he had done to me that I really didn't care. I ducked through the flap and entered his lair.

"He began a tirade about cowardice, insubordination, patriotism, and anything else that came to mind that lasted long enough to make me nauseous (I suppose the warm beer and weed didn't help). He then grabbed my rifle, inspected it, said it was filthy, and told me to get my ass out of his sight, clean it spotlessly, and be back in front of him damn quick."

He was sitting behind his desk talking to the first sergeant, and made a point of ignoring me for a minute or two. Then he slowly turned a seething gaze on me and just stared awhile, absolutely furious, but also trying to put the fear of God into me. It was somewhat successful, but I'm sure my anger was at least equal to his, so it came far from achieving the desired effect. He began a tirade about cowardice, insubordination, patriotism, and anything else that came to mind that lasted long enough to make me nauseous (I suppose the warm beer and weed didn't help). He then grabbed my rifle, inspected it, said it was filthy, and told me to get my ass out of his sight, clean it spotlessly, and be back in front of him damn quick. I cleaned my rifle and returned, having downed another beer or two in the process. He grabbed the rifle again, didn't even really look at it, and told me it was still filthy and to clean it again. This process went on for four or five times until I had become so enraged with what had happened to me, and fed up with the childish tantrum he was throwing, that when he told me to go clean it again I said, "No sir, it's clean." His eyebrows rose in an incredulous face, and he said "WHAT DID YOU SAY, MISTER???" I repeated, "No sir." He then began blasting me with threats ranging from bodily harm to jail, and finally wound down, telling me again to go clean my rifle. I said, "No sir." and he just sat there looking amazed. After a moment he said "Are you DRUNK?" I said "Yes sir, I imagine I am." He then said "Get out of my sight!", and that was the last I ever heard of what had happened.

"I think of how much of that destruction was unnecessarily caused by people like the Captain. People guided by childish, self-centered egos, wanting to be some kind of hero to themselves and the world, almost always at the expense of others."

Sometimes in quiet moments I think of what happened that night. And then visions of all the dead, wounded, and mutilated bodies of the casualties of every war ever fought drift through my head. Visions of human beings and the unique mosaics that made up their lives. All of the precious and lost memories of good times, loved ones, and dreams of the future that existed inside every individual who was ever destroyed by war. I think of how much of that destruction was unnecessarily caused by people like the Captain. People guided by childish, self-centered egos, wanting to be some kind of hero to themselves and the world, almost always at the expense of others. And when I think of that, I feel very sad.

"Ouch, damn it!" I thought, as the truck hit another deep pothole. Years of removing VC mines and filling the holes of the ones that worked had made the dirt roads bumpy beyond belief. My back and arms are killing me and the choking dust has caked around the goggles on my face and feels gritty and pasty in my mouth. I can't take one more bounce (but of course I'll take that and more because there's no way out). The roar and rattle and banging of my truck has long since numbed my ears to the outlandish racket around me. Driving long enough puts me into a kind of nightmarish trance. Common sense tells me to keep an eye on my surroundings and watch for patches of dirt which could be mines, but it's getting harder to do anything but hang on to the wheel and keep the damn truck on the road. The sides of the road are usually steep dirt walls dropping off into rice paddies and cane fields, so losing it for a second or two can spell real disaster, especially when the roads are slick with mud or a convoy coming the other way forces us over to the edge of the dropoff. Pulling over doesn't exist, and you don't "stop" in the middle of a fast-moving convoy with trucks in front and rear and potential ambushes always possible. My God, how many more months will I be here? Will it ever end? I guess I'd better watch what I wish for.

"As my truck was mostly filled with high explosive mortar ammunition, grenades, and rifle and machine gun ammo, I knew that if I hit a mine, there was a good chance it wouldn't hurt. Nothing would ever hurt again. It was actually kind of comforting in a weird way."

"LET'S MOVE 'EM OUT!" was loudly relayed down the long line of trucks and tanks ready to begin the convoy from our base at LZ Baldy to firebase Ross, a little south of Da Nang. It was during the Tet offensive in February 1968. The Tet offensive was a very bad time for everyone in Vietnam. The communist forces launched the biggest offensive of the war and the whole country fell into total chaos for about a month. The effect on my unit was mainly mortar and rocket attacks many times a night, very hazardous convoy duty to supply a tiny firebase nearby, and the most ominous event to us, the halting of mail delivery for several weeks. The lack of mail in itself was a hardship, but for circumstances to be bad enough to halt something with as high a priority as mail, we knew that something horribly bad had to be happening everywhere. I'm certain that the folks back in "The World", as we called home, had a much better picture of the situation through the news than we who were actually there did. In movies and books, soldiers always seem to have a handle on the situation. In real life, I remember not knowing what was happening from day to day, and waking up totally disoriented in pitch blackness to the screaming of "INCOMING!" while trying to figure out where I was and where to go as I grabbed for my rifle and bandoliers of ammo. Many times we slept with our boots on for several days, as to keep trying to find them and put them on every time a mortar attack came in was just too time-consuming and exhausting. I got to the point where I'd just roll off my cot and huddle in the sandbagged corner of my tent rather than run across an open area with mortar rounds exploding here and there to find "safety" in a bunker. That didn't seem so safe to me. Not to mention the terrible feeling of claustrophobia I felt when packed into a tiny sandbagged space in pitch darkness with a bunch of guys between me and the door who would pack in tighter and tighter each time the VC would walk the rounds in close. Anyway, as the convoy moved out, the tension increased, and once again I'd find myself thinking of how long it would be before I'd see home again if I ever did at all.

The fifteen-mile or so round trip to Ross took from early morning to late afternoon. Out front of the convoy was a jeep, and in front of the jeep were guys on foot with sharp eyes and metal detectors. By the time we got to Ross they would have blown quite a few mines in place, and filled part of the bed of a truck with mines that they'd dug up. The landscape we drove through looked like the moon in places with the hundreds of huge bomb craters saturating the area. Gunships constantly flew low and fast over us, startling, but reassuring us with their roaring presence. As my truck was mostly filled with high explosive mortar ammunition, grenades, and rifle and machine gun ammo, I knew that if I hit a mine, there was a good chance it wouldn't hurt. Nothing would ever hurt again. It was actually kind of comforting in a weird way.

Once they found a mine out front of a little house next to the road. Why anyone would be living in that nightmare place I couldn't imagine, but there they were, right next to my truck, a family of several women and children with one old man in their midst. A few of our guys were questioning them about the mine, and apparently they didn't like what they heard. They knocked the old man down and began beating him with rifle butts and kicking him while the women and children screamed and screamed with fear and anger, wanting to stop them but knowing they couldn't. It was very vicious and thorough, and he looked dead or close to it by the time they finally stopped. Then they lit the house on fire and walked away. As we moved out I looked back in the mirror. The family was just huddled by the old man's body and crying as they watched their home go up in flames. All that was left on our return trip was a little blackened and charred area with nobody there at all.

I walked up and sat down beside him like I'd known him for years. I felt sure he wouldn't mind. We looked at each other for a while and then sort of struck up a conversation. The reason I'd singled him out was because he scared me. For the past few days whenever I had to go down to the bunker line at night, passing by him was a bit unnerving. Maybe if we got to know each other a little better the fear would go away. I hoped so, because I'd always been afraid of people like him even though the fear seemed unfounded. Getting over those feelings would be well worth the effort. There were too many of his kind around to let my fear and prejudice rule me.

As we spent a little time together, I began to feel empathy for him. I knew that before my tour in Vietnam was over we might have a lot more in common than we did now. But I hoped not. His life was a story like my own. He'd known happiness and sadness, love and anger, fear and strength. He'd held a girl's hand at night and watched the moon and stars reflecting off the water, thinking of how beautiful life was going to be from now on. Felt all the things we all feel. He'd marveled at a beautiful sunset, and laughed at a silly joke. We were from different countries, but he'd felt alot like me in many ways.

As I sat there, his appearance began to be a bit of a burden. The wispy hair, and whiteness of his face. The hollows where his eyes had been, and bits of leather still stuck to the bone. The time he'd spent in a muddy mass grave before one of my buddies tripped over his slightly protruding skull and unearthed his rotted face hadn't done much for him. Still, I was glad I'd taken the time to have an imaginary conversation with him. He wasn't so scary any more. He was a person now. Just another guy like me who wanted to live his life the best he could. That was over for him now, but not for me. It made me want to do a little better. Be a little nicer, maybe smile a little more. After all, things could always be worse.

YOU were in Vietnam? I didn't know you'd been to Vietnam. You've never mentioned it before.

I guess it just never came up before.

It was pretty bad over there, huh?

It wasn't good, but it could have been a whole lot worse.

Were you at the front doing the actual fighting?

There really was no "front". I mostly drove a truck and filled sandbags.

Oh, so you weren't in actual combat. That's good. The guys who were really in combat came back pretty screwed up. That kind of stuff can really screw up your mind. You're lucky you got to drive a truck. I've got a friend who was up at the DMZ most of the time. He's really messed up over all that shit. All of his friends got killed while he was there. He was the only one left out of all the guys he went over there with. He still gets pretty bad dreams about it, his buddies dying in his arms and all, but he sure wasted a bunch of gooks to make up for it. Made 'em pay for it real good. Those gooks were really mean, cruel fuckers. You had to watch out for those sneaky bastards. They'd cut some guy's dicks off and stick them in their mouths while they were still alive. I've seen alot of books and movies about it, and stuff like that happened all the time.

Yeah, a lot of bad things came out of the war. There was some pretty good exaggeration about some of that stuff though. A lot of cruelty and horrible things definitely went on on both sides, but some of the stories you hear weren't very typical of everyday reality. And sometimes, exaggerated or not, that's all you do hear because of a vet's overwhelming desire to get things off his chest combined with the knowledge that so many people don't really want to hear what's important to him. They just want to feed their fantasies. It's a hard realization when you find that the painful baring of your soul is really just cheap entertainment. One of the reasons people don't talk about it much is because unless you babble stuff full of blood and guts, nobody seems to listen. The important things, the things that tear you apart and really matter to you, just aren't very interesting to most people. It's too uncomfortable for them. As they say, the first casualty of war is truth. And the truth fades as the "boring" things are left out.

Oh, I know some guys bullshit, but this guy I know doesn't lie. He really had it rough there.

I didn't mean your friend was a liar, I just meant that it's a good idea to have an open mind, but take everything with a grain of salt. And to try to listen to the underlying messages; that war isn't romance, glamour, and excitement, with music in the background and tough guys saying tough and humorous things at just the right time. That love and compassion for others is the true and final solution to every one of our problems. The sad fact is that unless you've been there yourself, it's sort of hard to imagine what "tough" can be. If a story isn't pure, distilled carnage, it sometimes doesn't make much of an impact on people who haven't had a similar experience, and who have been conditioned all their lives by books, television, and movies pushing different versions of "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out".

I know what you mean. Did you see Platoon? Man, that showed some of the really gory action that happened to the guys over there! Most Nam movies are crap, but that one showed what it was really like. I've read a lot of stories about it, and Platoon really showed some truth. A lot of stuff you see is like the old John Wayne hero junk. John Wayne was a really good actor, but his movies were made a long time ago. Nowadays movies show a lot more real stuff. The good ones do, anyway.

Well, I'm just glad to be home. And I'm glad your friend made it home too. Mostly I'm glad the war is pretty well over for most folks.

What? Oh yeah. Me too. Be glad you weren't in combat. You were lucky. Alot of guys like my friend are still real screwed up! Well, take it easy.

Yeah, you too.

This was written quite awhile ago. Since then I have found that most of the time, the pain of Vietnam is, if not gone, at least tolerable. Life today is good. A great part of that is due to a profound spiritual change, but a considerable amount can be attributed to the writing of the above. I don't know how it works, but putting things down on paper has proven to be an amazingly therapeutic activity for me. If you, like many of us, have memories that seem to eat away at all the good things in your life and keep you from enjoying the blessings that you may not even know you have, try writing about them. Then maybe you too will be able to finally seize your life back from the demons of the past and strive to walk in awareness of the grace of God.

Copyright © Robert Flynn 2003