Reading Michael Herr’s Dispatches was an epiphany for me. I read it several years after I was discharged from the military, and was either making one last attempt at dealing with the cloistered, self-involved world of academia or, more likely, wandering about somewhere. But I do remember thinking the book cover looked pretty cool when I purchased it in whatever bookstore, and I remember staying up all night reading the damn thing, slept for a few hours, and then read it again.
Now, it takes a lot for someone’s writing to stop me cold. I would say, after dealing for so long with my own literary demons, I am no longer an entirely “good” reader. Too skewed, perhaps, separating my own wheat from the chaff to maintain my good reader’s perspective for the pleasures afforded. Still, I’ll never forget the feeling I had, listening to that ruminating, world-weary voice telling me about the really old map hanging on the wall of his Saigon apartment, and haunted dead ground, and faces like the wind, and thinking: Uh-oh. I knew immediately Herr was a special writer, and I, as quickly, knew he was going to take me to places I had never been, or even realized I wanted to go. Which, after all, was the reason for all of it, wasn’t it?
I had never been to Nam, and had no overriding desire to go there. In junior high I can still remember the headlines from the Napa Register, telling about the firefights and major battles and the changing American scene in relation to that war. It seemed unreal, somehow, as I suppose it should. Something far away and remotely bothersome, like a distant, uncomfortable noise, you can’t quite locate the source of, but you wish it would stop. In high school a couple of guys who were a year or two ahead of me did go there. And I can recall the obits in the Register chronicling their homecoming. When my draft number drew close (and not fortunate enough, in John Fogarty’s immortal words, to be a senator’s son), I enlisted. I was fortunate, however, in having taken some German in school, and a staff sergeant friend of mine, who knew someone from that mysterious and magical land known as Assignments, somehow snagged me a tour of duty in the land of my ancestors.
In Europe I was assigned to the Tactical Air Control Center (TACC), which basically was a mobile operations unit that became a sort of remote headquarters during NATO war-game operations. The way it worked was you would be sleeping soundly beneath six inches of soft German tic, when the alert sirens would begin, sounding like the haunted moaning of giant wandering spirits, fading in and out over the countryside. For some reason Brussels HQ never seemed to play their cat-and-mouse games with the enemy during nice weather. It always seemed, rather, a nice blizzard was in progress when we all climbed into our deuce-and-a-halves and drove in convoy to some remote mountaintop, where we set up our operations and began our war. For several days after, we would launch our reconnaissance and close-air-support sorties, and watch the ebb and flow of battle on the enormous plotting board of Europe. Then, after the last recon photo was taken and analyzed, the last bomb dropped, we would pack up and head home.
At the time, Europe was like a giant revolving door of soldiers rotating into and out of Vietnam. I worked with many who had been there, from grunts to pilots, all branches and national and religious affiliations. TACC Remote was like a thrilling magnet for soldiers with nothing better to do than come hang out and see how the war games were going. A riotous camp where the action was, and a certain edge-of-seat suspense filled the air, watching the flocks of missiles and squadrons of warplanes passing back and forth over the jagged, red ADIZ, or Air Defense Interceptor Zone, as the two superpowers clashed.
“Get some!” a buddy of mine named Louie would say. Louie was a short fat Mexican from Phoenix, who had been to Nam, and was finishing out his tour in Germany. We smoked a little hash and played guitar together, and Louie would talk about “the real war,” as he called it, and how he was having trouble dealing with it now. “It’s like a big fucking cluster of rattlesnakes, man, up inside my head, trying to unwind themselves.”
I had heard other such cryptic comments among the troops. And one time I went with Louie down to the German phone exchange so he could call his mom back in the states and tell her good bye. He just couldn’t handle it any longer, he told her, crying. It was late at night because of the time difference, and Louie didn’t say too much as we walked back to the barracks. There, he said goodnight, and went waddling off to his room, shutting the door. In the morning he was back to his same old joking self, saying things like, “I’m glad Kennedy bought it down in Dallas, man. Those rich fucking fat cats sending us off like that. Let them get a taste of it.”
While I knew him, Louie never did buy the proverbial farm. And I never did really understand much of that war-rummaged kaleidoscope swirling around me there. But when I got back to the states and read Herr’s book, I was able to start connecting a few of the dots.