In Country
In Country
by Michael Andrews
and David Widup
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-072761
Copyright © 1994 Michael Andrews and David Widup
ISBN 0-941017-28-1
6x9, perfect bound with Black & White cover.
192 pages set with Goudy and Korinna.
$10.00
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTIONS
99% PACIFIED - Andrews
IN MY BONES - Widup
THE WORLD BEFORE THE NAM
AT THE DAWN OF THE NUCLEAR AGE - Andrews
I HAD NO IDEA - - Widup
THE FAT MAN - Andrews
GRADUATION DAY - Widup
SPUTNIK - Andrews
18 SEPT. 1968 - Widup
GUNS & CRUTCHES - Andrews
RAINBOW - Widup
THE DRAGON LADY AND THE NUN - Andrews
ORDERS - Widup
THE DRAFT EXAM - Andrews
RED HORSE - Widup
IN COUNTRY
BLACK AND WHITE - Widup
FNG - Andrews
INCOMING - Widup
THE OLD HAND - Andrews
THE NAM - Andrews
MR. TRI - Andrews
VICTOR DUMMICK - Andrews
SEXUAL HOLOCAUST - Andrews
SGT. BIGELOW - Widup
WAR IS HELL - Andrews
THE LONG BINH TRAIL - Andrews
99% PACIFIED - Andrews
HONG KONG R&R - Andrews
KOWLOON TO HONG KONG - Andrews
IN COUNTRY - Andrews
SHOOTOUT AT THE CERCLE SPORTIF - Andrews
DYSENTERY 1 - Andrews
DOUGHNUTS - Widup
AN EMPTY MAILBOX - Widup
MINNIE AND MICKIE - Andrews
TEA GARDEN GIRLS - Widup
CHILD BEGGAR - Andrews
REVOLUTIONARIES IN NAM - Widup
BOQ1 - Andrews 65
THE PICTURE SHOW - Widup
COFFIN LUMBER - Andrews
THE POET'S HEART - Widup
CAO DAI TEMPLE - Andrews
MY MAMA SAN - Widup
CENTRAL MARKET AND THE WORM DOCTOR - Andrews
FLO AND THE CYCLO RIDE - Andrews
ON THE PERIMETER - Widup
YOU CAN SEE BY MY OUTFIT THAT I AM A GRUNT - Andrews
SANDY - Widup
THE GECKO AND THE BEANIE WEANIES - Andrews
FLARES, TRUTH AND THE COLD BLACK NIGHT - Andrews
THE BLACK TIGER - Widup
HOME LEAVE - Andrews
A STOLEN MOMENT - Widup
CO TRINH WATCHES FROM THE TREES - Andrews
FLO'S PEE AND THE NEARLY DEAD - Andrews
THE FREEZING SWEATS - Andrews
THE EGRET - Widup
THE XTIAN MONTAGNARD - Andrews
STARING AT THE MAP - Widup
CHOPPERS - Andrews
THE TIGER CAGES OF CON SON ISLAND - Andrews
UGLY PUSSY - Widup
BODY COUNTS - Andrews
THE FISH AND I - Widup
DEAR JOHN - Widup
SHORT TIMERS
SHORT TIMER - Widup
STARS & STRIPES - Andrews
LAOS - Widup
JERRY TABASKI LEAVES TOWN - Andrews
READING THE LAMPOON - Andrews
BUYING BALLOONS - Andrews
XMAS GOES TO WAR - Andrews
THE MISSING GUNS - Widup
WILLY PETER - Andrews
THE ROOT CANAL - Andrews
ROCK 'N ROLL WAR - Andrews
THE BUNKERS - Widup
TIES - Andrews
OATMEAL COOKIES - Andrews
THE FIRE ANT OFFENSIVE - Andrews
AERIAL PORT - Widup
BODY BAGS - Andrews
IN THE WORLD
BACK IN THE WORLD - Andrews
COMING HOME - Widup
DRYING OUT - Andrews
PEACE CORPS PRINCESS - Andrews
LOOKING BACK - Andrews
WHAT I LIKE, WHAT I CAN, WHAT IS EASY AND WHAT IS HARD - Andrews
THE BOYS - Widup
THE PLACE WE ARE AT LOOKS LIKE HOME BUT I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING AND THE SHOES DON'T FIT - Andrews
BACK IN THE WORLD - Widup
THE POW'S SITCOM - Andrews
THE BARRACKS - Widup
4DAY TIRE STORE - Andrews
COMBAT BOOTS - Widup
PATCHES - Widup
BETWEEN A PIG AND A BABY - Andrews
WHISPERING AT THE WALL - Widup
WARS, BLOODY WARS - Widup
THINGS THAT BREAK - Andrews
Authors' Biographies
"...it is important to remember, to spell the names correctly, to know the provinces, before we are persuaded that none of it happened, that none of us were in such places." Gloria Emerson, Winners and Loosers
This is Saigon, 1969 to 1971. It is not Vietnam from the footsoldier's point of view, but from the perspective of a civilian working and dying in the mortal chaos of Saigon. It is certainly not about the colonels, generals, spies, ambassadors, presidents and other such riff-raff that historians automatically tag as Important Persons. Not only is it a false theory that such human debris create history but they are almost exclusively, in my experience, idiots. And dangerous idiots to boot.
There was a very large population of civilians in the Nam, 350,000 from 1965 to 1973. There are no stories about their lives; there is no acknowledgement of their work, suffering, and insanity; they have no clubs, associations, Federal or private assistance or any other kind of benefit. They received no medals, have no Wall, and aside from the journalists who are always willing to massage one another with press coverage, they are rarely written about. They could not collect unemployment. They got no parade, no indictment, no forgiveness and no welcome home. And yet, on a lesser scale, they were exposed to the same war, bullets, bombs, death, Agent Orange and post traumatic syndrome as the military and indigenous population were. They were there to do all the work that the military is incapable of -- that is everything but murder.
On 16 January 1969 I got on the big silver bird for Vietnam. It was raining. Noah would have been impressed. I was younger than anyone I have ever known. In a sense, I was not even me. In fact I died in Vietnam. Another Michael was born; smarter, tougher, sadder, different.
No one is born at some particular moment. We die and are born each particular moment by moment. But some moments are bigger, last longer and bite deeper. I was born in Saigon and my life became a new thing. It changed fast and hard and, sometimes, I didn't know it was happening. It took me ten years to look back.
When I did, I cried.
This is a story about a war, two peoples, a place called Vietnam, a cast of characters, and me.
Mostly this is a book about War and its related subsets of cultural insanity. Naturally it includes soldiers and civilians, both the rapists and the victims. It is a story which I have been contemplating for over twenty years. It is a personal matter -- it is a matter of burying ghosts.
In the Nam I was stuck in the middle. GIs were dying like flies all around me. The Medivacs flying into 3rd Field Hospital unloaded the meat, living or dead, and hosed down the cement pad. I could understand how they hated an enemy they never saw, shot old women and children, raped, burned, pillaged, and killed their own incompetent leaders. I knew all about male bonding and hunting packs. My guts rumbled with the anger and the Fear, capital F, as constant as death and taxes, and the garbage that drools from the lips of colonels, generals and ambassadors. These are deeply pathological men.
But I was a civilian. I talked to Vietnamese. Some of them were friends of mine. I saw the rape of a culture. I saw an entire matrix of religion, language, education, economics, social fabric, family structure and way of life rattle its last breath, roll over, die and resurrect itself as a caricature imitation of Western culture, vicious and cruel and gobbling up the world. I saw people who were not gooks, slants, slopes, or dinks, but just people like any three-year-old starve to death; ten-year-olds beaten; and sixteen-year-old girls who should have been plucking daisies and playing look-but-don't-touch with the boys become whores with scalpels for eyes and a hard used sixty in just five years of social service.
It was a war of cultures. One of the cultures was Vietnamese. The other was the USA and Saigon. Saigon was a US sub-culture based on class. In essence no culture is based on geography, but on borders that are often economic. Saigon was an upper middle class and elite culture based on the business of war profiteering. And business was good.
The Vietnamese lost all the battles and won the war. They proved that no one can beat a guerrilla army. The only and final solution to a guerrilla war is genocide. That is the solution the generals wanted the USA to deploy. As the economic fantasies of the free market pyramid scheme fail globally, as population continues to explode, as resources dwindle, genocide will indeed become the solution -- sooner or later.
In their attempt to survive, the Vietnamese killed their culture. It has gone the way of Aborigines and Eskimos.
The USA also died. It went bankrupt. But it did continue to spread its monocultural fungus into Asia. Communism, they say, is dead. The world monoculture is the sad fact. The earth is a barrel full of fish waiting for the gun. The only culture left is the Corporate culture, disguised as free market democracy. It is not free. It is not a market. It is certainly not a democracy. It is a cultural fungus that is the natural outgrowth of population explosions and not enough rice.
It's just the way things go -- not good, not bad.
The overwhelming fact for the American in Vietnam was isolation. For the grunt, the generals and for the civilians there was no more team, no common cause or fellowship -- there was only survival.
And there was alone. No matter how many friends die to cover your backside, when you die, you die alone.
What makes alone so awesome are those few moments when a human being is almost not alone. But survival and fear stick their tongues in your ear and whisper, "You ought to know better."
The observable outcome of this is that no one who was in Vietnam, military or civilian, for any appreciable length of time came out untouched. Every one of us was changed to one degree or another. Changed forever. Call it used. Call it rape. It was the experience of a pile of leaves in a hurricane. No one could change a thing. No one had the power. No one got out alive.
We are the fringe people. We live in that pale, cultural no-man's land on the edge of the abyss. The edge demarcates the abyss from the main line culture junkie; the eight to fiver, the mortgaged family man with dog and Chevrolet. In the abyss is hard core death and smack, alcohol and crack, insanity and crime. Often we are expatriates strung out in foreign lands because we can't live here and we can't live in the abyss and we can't stand being on the edge and if the foreign employment dries up we suffer and if we can, we come home and suffer more.
A polite name for us in Vietnamese is My, beautiful -- we are the beautiful people.
2,800,000 grunts saw the end of the male myth. 350,000 civilians witnessed the logical conclusion of free market rapaciousness. Many of these people are not admirable. Many are just totalled up under the column labeled "lost souls." Many never knew what hit them. Most of them have managed only survival. More grunts have committed suicide, or died of Agent Orange than were killed in the bush. One out of three are divorced. One out of two are on drugs or alcohol. The best that can said is that some of them managed a peace with themselves, even a dignity. Others only managed the compromises of rationalization. The least that can be said of most is that they were victims, and they kept on breathing.
Shortly after the United States of America died in the Tet Offensive of 1968, I worked as a programmer-analyst for Control Data Corporation, who had a contract with CORDS/MACV, who worked for the U.S. military industrial complex. I worked on a program called Phoenix, whose job it was to assassinate Vietnamese civilians without proof or trial. Naturally, being the military, it was mostly incompetence and bluff, but they did manage to get rid of a few children and some village chiefs who showed a propensity to think for themselves.
We had another system called HES. That stood for Hamlet Evaluation System. It totalled up all the Friendly Hamlets, all the Unfriendly Hamlets, and all the Unknown Hamlets and did a lot fancy arithmetic. In the end it spit out a piece of paper that would say something like "89% Pacified."
One day, the evil emperor Nguyen Van Thieu needed a new Cadillac and a larger Swiss Bank account. Since such wealth was only acquired by convincing the electorate that we were winning a righteous war, and since the only way we could ever win such a war was in the computer, he called the great chief, Tricky Dick, who called his generals, who called MACV, who called a Colonel, who called the CDC Project Manager, who called the chief of programmers, who called my boss, who called me. It seems that Nguyen thought that 89% Pacified wasn't good enough to win hearts and minds. So we threw a switch in a program and counted all the Unknown hamlets as Friendly.
Overnight, Vietnam was 99% pacified.
I can't remember what it feels like to not have the war in my bones. When I think back on my high school days, it's like looking at a story book. I recognize the people and faces - me, Dad, Cec, Sherron, Mike, Kathy - and the events like Graduation Day, my last day at the plastic bottle factory, my trip to Tennessee the week before I went into the service, even Boot Camp. I recognize them all, but I can't feel me in them. It's like I never had an existence before the war. And now I carry it with me wherever I go, all the time.
It's really bad when I'm tired. I'm afraid to be tired, because when I get tired is when I get blown away. I don't see the things I need to see. I forget to watch where I put my boots down. I don't see that small flash ten clicks out. I miss the glance of a old native woman as she passes by, black teeth, black hair, black pajamas, black death. I have woken up afraid almost every morning since I went to Vietnam over 25 years ago. There have been years when the only time I've slept well was when I was drunk or stoned. Hung over and coming down is much, much better than scared to death of a monster that looks just like me.
I was in country for a year beginning in September 1969. I didn't eat for the first six weeks. I couldn't keep food down. I was on duty every night from an hour and a half before sunset to an hour and a half after sunrise. About 14 hours -- every night. Sometimes, I'd be sent out with a small construction crew to an outpost. I'd be responsible for securing the construction area around the clock. If it was hot in the area, we'd go four or five days without sleeping. I gave up booze my first week there and just smoked -- cigarettes all the time and dope when I felt it was safe. I sold my booze ration to the lifers and used the money to buy dope. Money for nothin.........drugs for free.
I remember many times being struck by the beauty of Vietnam - the blue, warm sheen of the South China Sea; the black sky highlighted by a huge moon, laying low on the runway, some nights it looked as big as a rising sun; the mountains just west of Phan Rang, dense green with trees and ferns. I swear, I could hear the VC in the sound of the wind in those trees. It was a beautiful country, sometimes quiet and calm unlike any place I've ever been.
I was happy there. I learned the fine art of denial and deflection -- how to suppress every fear. Fine tuned senses never let me down. I was a happy, self sufficient animal. The longer I was there, the happier I was. Until the end, when I faced into leaving. Then all the horrors I had seen and done, all the overwhelming fears and anger began to pour out of me. It took most of my energy for the next decade to manage the streams of filth and degradation that ran out like rivers in hell. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS) is about the horror of trying to heal while the months in hell play out almost visually, like shapes in an early morning, foggy playground. I remember my first anxiety attack. It was in 1978 after seeing Coming Home. I was paralyzed -- stuck in my movie seat for what seemed like hours. I didn't sleep for days. My hands shook. At night, in bed, my whole body shook so bad I had to get up and lay on the living room sofa. I remember the feel of the fabric pattern on my skin and how it felt cold and unwilling. It was dark green. I hated it.
Vietnam was not like Apocalypse Now. I have never read a poem, read a story, or seen a movie that tells what it was like to be there. Many are true as impressions, but they are false in tone, fact and mood. Others are lacking in the details, the specifics. And I know why. It is those details that pull the trigger that drag us back into hell. It takes a crazy person to pull them out like a rotted skeleton and put them on a page and make them real again -- for all the world to see and smell. I have made myself sick writing about Vietnam. And I haven't even started. Not really.
April 13, 1993
Michael Andrews
The plane burrows into the steam
and hits dirt in the Filipino night.
It is dark and hot and sweat
drips from the light bulbs
in the airport bar.
I sweat with all the dignity
an idiot can muster
wearing a tweed suit in the tropics.
In an hour or two the plane
will haul my naive self to
the Republic of Vietnam.
I drink something cold and sweet
like real men are supposed to do.
The older guy sitting next to me
is dressed in a frayed and crumpled
Hawaiian shirt, baggy pants
and dusty exhaustion.
He just came from the Nam,
going home with his dead eyes,
empty wallet and dying adrenals.
His voice echoes out of a hollow
tunnel, leading to alien landscapes.
We talk civil nonsense until
I find the crack to slip in my
only question, "What's Nam like?"
I can't see what he sees when
he looks at me, first mad, then sad.
He lets out a lungfull of tired breath,
swallows his drink and says,
"It'll grow on you,"
and walks out into the night.
Michael Andrews
I have a brand new Suzuki 50 cc motorcycle --
it's time for high adventure and Mike Petrale,
Wayne Brady and I haul out the maps.
We are going to Long Binh the hard way.
We're not interested in the four lane highway,
we are taking the back roads and the scenic routes.
We can't even find our way out of Saigon
so Petrale stops some kid by a beer-tin shack.
Petrale has told us all about how he can talk Vietnamese.
He babbles on to the kid, who motions us
to follow him down the alley where he shows
us his sister who is a virgin and desperately
wants to get fucked by three Americans,
one at a time or all together, so long as
we can pay the mortgage and feed the chickens.
So much for Petrale's language skills.
I find a road on the map and we plunge
into the boonies. It's only ten miles out
but they say that Charlie owns it.
I wouldn't be surprised. All our side can do
is secure the tea bars and the sit-down toilets.
I stop everywhere in the jungle,
by the rivers, in the rubber plantations
clicking the shutter and horsing
around with the kids.
Children understand war better than you think.
The average Vietnamese ten year old
is more savvy than the whole voting population
of the U.S. -- but then, so is a parakeet.
It takes a lot of hours on the back road.
Every now and then some young male
gives us the eyeball, wishing it were night
and he was in his black jammies.
By some coffee and cream river I shoot the plantation.
It is made of beer sheets and has a bridge
across Old Muddy. The kids stand on the veranda
and smile and laugh and wave.
It doesn't take long for a small army of them
to cluster around the bike.
They fool around with my watch,
touch the Levis and stare at themselves in the mirrors.
I take a picture of a boy whose palette
is so badly cleft that there is a canyon
cracking his face in two.
I don't believe any of them has yet
had the opportunity to kill someone.
I don't believe they have a reason to want to.
I snap old papa-san squatting in the weeds.
He smiles and puffs away at his joint.
Mostly everyone is friendly
and mostly I take snaps of the kids.
Two small boys pose on their buffalo cart.
When the shutter slaps closed
they want to be paid with cigarettes.
I give them a few hundred P.
It is nothing to me and a lot
to a kid in the bush.
Taking their pictures is my way
of not letting them break my heart.
The tiny girl has black oceans
in her eyes, staring deep and wide
at my face, until finally she reaches
up a hand no bigger than a small apricot
and runs it along my cheek.
Her mouth is cracked open with concentration
and her eyes follow every motion of my face.
I am the first American she has ever laid eyes on.
Her hair is the shape of a coconut.
Two dimples bracket her smile.
She puts her hand in mine.
We are in love as pure as a mother's milk.
This little girl teaches me
what other guys die for and never learn.
Some guys kill to learn it.
Some guys watch best friends die to learn it.
Some guys become a lifelong bleeding
wound and never learn it.
And when the war stalks us in the night
and the dreams ambush us in our sleep
some men dream of the face they killed,
or the mutilated face of a best buddy,
or the plea for life in the eyes of a dying man.
I dream of the face of a four year old girl.
She weighs thirty pounds and she
is dressed in rags and barefoot in a jungle.
Her eyes are two black oceans.
She shows me --
the face of war.
David Widup
My first meal in Vietnam
at a Mess Hall
the size of my High School,
I eat peas and carrots,
mashed potatoes
and sliced mystery meat.
I vomit it all up
on a chopper pad,
hundreds of black winged,
metal spiders clawing at the air.
I don't eat for weeks and weeks.
Strong is gone from me,
I'm shaking cold in the heat,
sweating rivers in the cold.
I have a knife in my belly.
When I think about removing it,
some monster digs it deeper,
and turns it hard into me.
I am afraid.
In October,
Lou Ferrara arrives,
and in November,
he starts baking doughnuts.
A few weeks later,
he stops in the armory,
on his way to bed at 3 AM,
and asks if we want doughnuts.
He has a bag full of them.
The rest eat.
I think of dying
and my dead mother
and the reason why Mars is red and not blue.
The next night,
Lou says
"Eat one, it's good food."
I try one
and return to my dark self.
The next night,
I eat two,
with a cup of coffee.
My pulse, slow and steady,
becomes my friend.
I think about home
for the first time in months.
I eat Lou's doughnuts every night
for weeks and weeks.
I get stronger, I'm awake.
I start cleaning my M-16,
go to base security briefings and try to understand.
I make friends with my guards,
I start to learn Vietnamese.
Doughnuts are my only staple.
Lou goes on R&R in Hawaii,
he meets his wife Di there,
I get sick his first night gone,
and don't eat anything for a week.
He comes back depressed
so all he does is sleep and work.
No more of Lou's doughnuts.
I lose twenty pounds.
I pick a fight with a lifer
and put the barrel of my .38 in his mouth
and pull back the hammer.
Bruce and Jonesy pull me off
just in time.
I drink Jack Daniels' straight
from the bottle at 9 AM
and scowl at the wall.
My empty stomach rebels at the alcohol.
I think about soft skin and red hearts,
worry about being alone,
kick the table over,
curse my headache and my heart,
full of pain, and empty,
and crawl to bed
in the hot, wet daytime.
Michael Andrews
Minnie and Mickey
are what the grunts call them.
They don't have real names
and they are brother and sister.
Minnie is 13 and once had a doll.
Mickey is 9 and used to be a child.
The grunts all took Minnie into the bush
for some quick pussy
and Mickey ran errands,
cleaned weapons, shined boots
and smoked with the GI's.
One day Minnie stepped on a mine
and they put all her parts
in a small plastic bag.
No one could find her pussy
for one last punch in the bush
but a few days later
Mickey is hit by a rocket
while smoking with the guys
and both his arms are blown off.
The medic tries to treat him
but the cigarette is still burning
in the fingers of the severed arm
and when it burns down to fingers
and burns them into charcoal
Mickey screams that he can
feel the burn and the medic
shoots home the morphine
and now the grunts
have to shine their own boots
and go in the bush
with five finger Mary.
David Widup
Think of me in jungle fatigues
sitting on the perimeter
during Tet 1969 -
the sky on fire
and the smell of burning flesh
full in the air.
Think of my soul,
lost and floating
like the scent of the newly dead
and those still dying,
think of the spear through it,
thick and wooden and honest.
Words, too, pierce
like a knife through meat,
penetrating, excising,
not as a sacrifice,
but searching, like the soldiers
and the home they longed for.
Think, too, of Hemmingway's gunshot mind,
bleeding in the Cuban rocking chair,
that reached out to touch
the poet's heart.
The poet's heart,
what the guns and lies
could not kill.
Michael Andrews
1969, The Nam
Along the Long Binh Highway there is a temple.
It's as big and splashy as an uptown Baptist church
and we ride in just to see what the local color is.
She is at least ninety and she doesn't
do English. Why should she?
She couldn't make a dime in a tea bar,
the army can't draft her
and many gods are on her side.
She tours us around and show us the holy stuff.
There is a mural above the door.
It shows all their saints doing their
saintly bits. There is Moses
and Jesus and Buddha and Mohamed and Confucius --
the stench of gods is pretty rank in here.
The Cao Dai used to be one of the best
fighting machines in the land of Nam.
That's because they were believers.
Diem put them out of the fighting business.
Now they believe in free market enterprise
and they run the biggest opium and gun
running markets along the Laotian border --
a Sunday market for the heavy hitters.
I'd say they have covered
their bases,
their bets
and their asses.
Better safe than sorry.
David Widup
My Mama-San is short,
with dark skin covering
her broad, open face.
She is handsome,
perfect posture,
even, white teeth,
ever polite,
always smiling,
only her eyes show the pain,
her black oval eyes
radiating the hurt that
reaches beyond tears,
she doesn't cry anymore,
her tears would be an acid
burning the ground black.
My Mama-San calls me "Mr. David",
she knows I'm in charge of the armory,
and security for our Squadron,
and the first three times
she tells me the V.C. are coming tonight,
I don't say or do anything different.
The first two times we get rocket attacks
and the third time satchel charges and mortars.
I ask her why she tells me
and she says because she likes Mr. David,
doesn't want him to be hurt.
My Mama-San washes the clothes,
shines the boots,
makes up the cots,
cleans the barracks,
for me and twenty other
Red Horse enlisted men,
on the perimeter at Bien Hoa.
She comes early in the morning
while I'm still in the armory
or up in the tower on the Hill.
She leaves after dark,
after she wakes me up with coffee,
talking very fast Vietnamese to me
that we both know I don't understand.
For a long while, I wonder what she is saying,
and after several months I don't care anymore,
I pretend her smiling words,
spoken at machine gun speed,
are gentle greetings and news of the day,
like a old married couple would exchange
in front of the fire at night.
My Mama-San drinks with the other Mama-sans
in Morton's cube with a few other guys
on New Year's Eve.
They all go off to get more drinks
and she sits on my knee
straddling it and kisses me hard,
her tongue deep in my mouth.
Before I get fully hard,
she stands up,
hugs my head to her breast,
says "Good-bye Mr. David",
and is out the cube,
down the aisle,
her black pajamas moving
at double time speed.
My Mama-San never comes back.
We are told she was killed
by V.C. in an attack against her small village
just northwest of Bien Hoa.
I know better.
She didn't get killed by them,
or beat by them,
she joined them.
I know,
her eyes told me
on New Year's Eve -
there were tears in them,
and they didn't burn the ground.
My Mama-San launches
mortars and rockets
at me and my buddies.
I think of her when I'm sitting in the bunkers,
loud explosions rocking the ground,
some of the young guys shaking
at their helplessness,
the smell of rot and sweat strong
in the sandbag huts we sit in,
night after night.
I think of her then, late at night,
kissing me hard, tears on her cheeks,
and her pajamas moving double time
down the barracks aisle on New Year's Eve.
Michael Andrews
In country only two weeks
and Bill finds a GI in the bush
with his ears cut off
and his cock jammed down his throat.
He watches the mutilated body until the choppers come
and the rotten black smile
crawls with the rictus of pearly teeth
and the chuckle of the maggots
and the biggest fear is not dying --
the biggest fear is killing.
That is, until death taps Bill on the shoulder.
Until Bill imagines his own death
he can't imagine killing.
It makes a guy hesitate the first time he pulls the trigger.
And that moment stuffs many a New Guy into a plastic bag.
Bill needs to see his best buddy die.
He has to be as near to death as a razor is to his chin.
Then he understands that his own death is as real
as the mud in his toes, as the rot in his crotch.
Bill understands he wants to live.
He understands he has to kill to stay alive.
The first enemy a soldier kills is himself.
The sergeant is a short timer
with a heart turned as hard as last year's fruit cake
and a terminal case of the thousand yard stare.
He knows that Bill needs
to kill his humanity to stay above ground.
He has to eat his heart to get out alive.
And he does.
After that Bill goes home and the war begins.
He has to find a reason why he should be alive.
He finds it at the bottom
of a fifth of Johnny Walker
and begins to kill the last living thing he knows.
David Widup
Sanderson is on the Hill tonight.
I leave the Armory and
drive along the perimeter
in the jeep.
It's clear and quiet
in the middle of the night.
I watch the perimeter where
nothing moves.
On the Hill,
Sanderson is sitting on the floor of the Tower.
I'm an idiot to put him up here,
he's worthless.
Busted down to the bottom,
a Black Panther,
dope smoker,
big,
black,
angry.
I ask Sandy for some dope.
He asks me for a cigarette.
I give him three.
He twists out the tobacco
and sucks in the grass.
I light one,
put two in the plastic cigarette case
I keep in the thigh pocket
of my jungle fatigues.
"Sandy, why are you here, man,
this ain't your war."
He's still on the floor.
I'm now staring out the tower,
searching for light, motion.
The compound looks dark tonight,
darker than usual.
I notice one of the generator lights out.
"I came to learn how to kill White boys.
Now I'm just waiting to get thrown out and sent home."
He says the same thing
every time I ask.
I ask when the North generator went out.
Sandy's quiet,
I'm thinking he's asleep.
I lift the hatch in the center of the tower floor
to climb down the stairs.
Five steps down,
I reach up to close the cover
(wouldn't want Sandy to fall through)
and he says
"I sold the generator to Charlie.
Don't mean nothin."
Michael Andrews
It is good luck to have geckos in the house.
They are green and fat and can walk
upside down across our ceilings.
They pop out of the most unexpected places,
crawl along the ceiling, knock out a few
upside down push-ups perilously close
to the whaping fan and stalk moths and roaches.
The roaches are the size of child's fist.
And these days we need all the luck we can get.
It takes a few months for Flo to get used to the
idea of green lizards crawling around her kitchen.
In the end she decides that they are pets.
One of them lives behind the stove.
Flo has taught him to sprint up the table
and whisk away bits of food that she leaves
like sacrificial offerings near the table edge.
He is not so crazy about stalking roaches now.
This evening I am sitting in peace, locked away
from the war, reading and writing and ignoring life.
I do not want to leave this couch, ever.
Flo is in the kitchen, bustling over beanie weenies.
This is a major treat for me, straight out of
the deli section of the commissary.
"Yum, yum," I think, "beanie weenies."
"Michael. Come here, watch this gecko."
No response comes to mind, so I ignore it.
No way am I moving off this couch for a gecko.
A few pages go by. "Michael," she yells,
excited as a kid watching kittens being born,
"he eats beanie weenies."
"Less for me," I think, turning the page.
Finally she runs into the living room bouncing
and jiggling in her underwear, and for a moment
the idea of the bed sounds better than the couch,
but she blathers on about this magic gecko.
"He's eaten seven beanie weenies," pulling me
by the arm, "come and watch. So cute."
So much for peace, or even a sweaty toss in the sheets.
Who cares about some gluttonous gecko.
"Geckos," I pontificate, "do not eat beanie weenies.
Besides, seven of them would pop his stomach."
So here I am, standing in the kitchen, a solemn witness
to a hitherto unknown event in the behavior of geckos.
Flo puts a single beanie weenie, sopping with
sugary tomato sauce on the edge of the table.
Sure enough, his head pops over the edge,
rotates left, then right, then twists clockwise,
counter-clockwise, looks up and then down,
then right at the beanie weenie, his tongue flicking
in and out and whipping around in
a frenzy of beanie weenie lust.
He suddenly leaps onto the table top,
grabs the beanie weenie in his jaws and jumps
over the edge, disappearing down the back.
"I don't believe it," I say.
Flo is triumphant. "I will feed him
beanie weenies every night."
A sudden sense of impending doom prompts me
to investigate this gecko scientifically.
It is either that or face a long
and serious beanie weenie shortage.
"If I let go of the beanie weenies today,"
I think, "tomorrow it will be the Oreo cookies."
I move the stove and look beneath the table.
I find seven naked beans and the gecko
licking the sauce from the eighth.
"You have addicted this poor innocent lizard
to junk food," I say, presenting her with the evidence.
I head back to the relative calm of the couch
while Flo scolds the gecko for tricking her.
She is not so pissed at the gecko
as she is at me for being right.
If I dare to chuckle she will throw
cans of beanie weenies at me all night long.
As it is, my sex life tonight is in jeopardy.
I keep my chuckles to myself and go back to my book.
The gecko goes back to roaches.
>
Michael Andrews
In the black, Saigon sky
the flares float like slow motion
stars, acetylene and phosphorus
painting the night with truth
about the earth below.
I had a heart then, just like yours
and just like yours, it thought
the world was a picture of the sun
reflecting in a puddle
left by the afternoon rain.
On the morning patrol
the Bouncing Betty
leaps into the air
like an insane Jack in the Box
springing up from Pop Goes the Weasel,
traumatically amputates Pierce's left leg
and leaves the right a shredded beef Hero sandwich.
He screams until the morphine
brings peace to the jungle birds,
asks Doc about his balls
and falls into an ice-cold shock.
They radio for a dust off
and set off the smoke to guide the pilot
when an AK-47 punches holes in Sanchez
like a Singer sewing machine stitches a hem
and the Medivac veers away
and even though Sanchez could die
from the sucking chest wound
sergeant Dunne thinks about how
he hates the little prick when he
mooches someone else's fruit cocktail.
Co Trang's tunnel entrance is big enough for her,
but a tight squeeze for the overfed American's.
She sits in the black cool of the tunnel,
shaking with the fear and adrenalin.
She is waiting around the second bend
for what she guesses must come next.
She plugs wax and cotton in her ears
to muffle the concussion of the grenades.
Her family is a cold, black ghost.
Her father was killed by hungry ARVN
pillaging the farm for chickens.
Her brothers were killed by napalm and bad luck.
Her mother starved to death in a relocation
camp and didn't seem to mind.
The frozen, black ghost lives in her bowels,
which are loose and watery and angry.
It is turning her heart into shiny, black plastic.
The VC gave her food, weapons and a purpose.
She knows the frozen, black ghost
wants to eat many, many hearts
and she knows she can pass it on to others
just like a curse, a cold or a case of dysentery.
She wants to plant the ghost
in the hearts of big, pasty colored Americans.
In the green flaming jungles north of Saigon
a six year old girl reaches up and touches my face
like a flare penetrating a black sky and in the deep,
brown pools of her eyes, she saves my life.
I am sure her heart has never turned black and frozen.
I am sure that we have both kept the promise
made by my face and her small, brown hand,
that our hearts will always pump blood,
that our hands make only love,
that our tears keep the memory.
By lot sergeant Dunne sends Hayes into the tunnel.
It is a relief not to send his best friend, Wilson,
and Hayes is as smart and experienced as
an eighteen year old virgin can be.
He lowers himself into the entrance
and where his toes just reach the floor
his chest gets wedged and Co Trang drives
her knife up into his balls and penis,
deep into his bowels, while Hayes kicks and screams.
She twists the blade and levers it from front to back
and scrambles away from his thrashing legs.
She leaves the knife because she knows
that with it goes a little bit of the black ghost
and she scrambles back into the safety of the tunnel.
Sergeant Dunne holds Hayes down while Doc
pulls out the knife and Hayes passes into
that tiny paradise where pain takes us
when the world finally tells the truth.
Sanchez and Pierce are dead, but the dust off
takes Hayes away where a doctor
with a frozen, black heart will save his life
to spend wondering how things might have been
if only he could get an erection.
By noon it is over a hundred degrees
when they flush Co Trang from the tunnel,
bleeding from her ears and already
deep into her death trance.
Hayes has a buddy named Pritchard
who is dumb, loyal and way beyond crazy.
He beats Trang for a while, then spreads her legs
and rapes away his fear and joy and the last
shreds of his sanity, and two more
follow Pritchard while Co Trang
dreams of her family and of passing on
the hungry, black ghost.
Sergeant Dunne loses his erection when she
doesn't scream or fight or even pay attention.
His eyes fix forever at a thousand yards
and his mind seizes up in rust and sludge,
clanks to a stop and his eyes go blind
with the red and green flames that burn
the earth black and blue and dead, dead, dead.
He puts his flare gun into Co Trang's pussy,
jerks her hair so he can look into her eyes
and the moment that he pulls the trigger
his dreams will swear forever that she smiles.
Sergeant Dunne does not pause to consider
what brings him the joy -- the pain,
the love, the hate or the cold, black indifference.
The frozen, black ghost settles into his
lower intestines and reaches up to squeeze
his heart in its strong, black fist.
Sergeant Dunne does not believe that he is going
to live through the day, and
sergeant Dunne does not give a rusty fuck.
Waiting for the traffic to cross Nguyen Hue
a hard faced whore in a blood red miniskirt
puts her hand on my ass and whispers hot,
wet words in my ear, "Fuck you, suck you
numbah one. Ten dollah MPC,"
and her smile almost takes the edge off her eyes
while my prick leaps to attention.
It's the nicest thing someone has said to me
all day long, but I cross the street instead,
looking for a place the change my money.
I shoot this poem into the ice black sky
trying to paint the truth about the earth below.
There are things about war that you don't want to know.
We know that the frozen, black ghost stalks us
in the night, waits in the shadows of a back alley.
We can pass on the disease,
but we can't pass the cure.
This poem can not transmit the truth of it.
And even if it could --
you could never get it.
David Widup
Once, I stole a moment from death,
not knowing it would be taken back
one hundred, no one thousand fold.
I stole it for Sam, dressed in jungle fatigues,
his legs coved in the blood that ran like rivers of pain,
streams of ending life from wounds in his belly
that now held as much metal shrapnel as life.
The path we sat on was worn down
by the marches of death that had gone on
for centuries, endless lines of tired men
walking with weapons through the thick humid air
from the jungles across the small rice paddies.
We sat in the small gutter in the center of the path,
I held his shoulders in my arms
the way I now hold my teenage boys,
too big for me to hug but too needy for me to leave alone.
My arms ached and quivered as flashes and sulphur
filled the early morning air.
Sam felt no pain, but was very thirsty,
he emptied his small canteen
and was working his way through mine
when the blood first started falling
from the corner of his mouth, first just one small drop
so I thought maybe he had just cut his lip.
But no, no he was dying and I knew it
when the drops came too close together,
they filled the space in time between one another
and formed a thin red line down his chin.
He couldn't remember my name,
kept calling me Tom, and his name, Sam,
looking backward over his head,
as if there were something worse
than dying in a Vietnam jungle
at the beginning of the day.
He kept licking his lips with his dry tongue,
they were chapped and cracking.
I wondered if they would open up and bleed too.
He looked through me and called me Sam,
Sam help me stand up,
I want to stand up just one more time.
I took off my fatigue jacket and made tourniquets
to stop the blood from coming out of the slashes
in his thighs and wrapped the rest around his stomach,
open for all the world to see
like he was on an Operating Room table
or maybe being made by God in the morning mist.
I grabbed him from behind and lifted him
by unbending my knees,
him leaning into me like the weight of life.
He was barely up and staring at the horizon facing us
before his last breath went out, slow and very, very long
and he seemed a little lighter
once there was no life left in him,
and he collapsed like a bag of meat at my feet.
There was nothing left of Sam for me,
nothing at all alive at my feet.
Last night, I was alone and sick
and my dreams come in short waves
like the angry ocean into a narrow bay.
In them, I'm Sam.
There is no one to pick me up,
no one to lift my eyes to the green edge of the earth,
no one to hold me as my life goes away slowly,
my sight going narrow, blurry and then gone.
No one to feel me as I go away one last time.
I die alone in the war path gutter.
My blood filling it for no one.
Michael Andrews
Co Trinh watches him from the tree
sweating over her body
like a water buffalo
stuck in the mud.
He surprised her after they burned the village.
She was hiding in the forest
out of her mind with the fear
that her mother or her sister had been killed
and when he came crashing through the brush
shooting insanely at an escaping pig
she couldn't keep the whimper
from exploding from her throat
and he jumped on top of her
smashing her into the ground
with that immense weight
and she saw the light in his eyes
flicker from insanity to rape
and she began to scream when he tore
away her pants, but his fist
crashed into her temple so hard
that she could not move and the limbs
of the trees swirled like a kaleidoscope
against the sky and when his raging
cock tore into her private thoughts
she suddenly found herself sitting --
high in this tree watching him
buck and thrust against her body,
scraped and jerked along the ground.
They are so far and so far away
that they might as well be two
strangers fucking in the forest.
The dance of the clouds in the sky
seems more important at the moment,
but she remembers whose body it is
bearing that immense rage of weight
and she looks down just as
he flexes rigid as a gutted pig
and with a small groan collapses
like a snake along a limb.
He sits up on his knees
arranging his pants with his clumsy hands
and reaches for his rifle
and for a moment Co Trinh can see
the murder that crosses his eyes
before he notices that she is unconscious
or perhaps already dead
and then she sees the thing in his eyes
that makes it possible for her to live
a long, long time -- the sudden realization
of all the nightmares that will hunt
him in his dreams, the guilt he will
never acknowledge eating holes
in his belly, the women who will never
know about this moment in a jungle
but who will know anyway
and leave him with his raging penis
and his broken heart.
When her body calls her back
she doesn't want the pain.
She remembers that she has to find her mother.
She tells herself that
if she has a child she will kill it.
But if she cannot kill it, she knows she will not love it.
And even if she does love it,
she will teach it to hate the Americans.
If it is a girl she will teach her to hate men.
If it is a boy,
she will teach him
to hate himself.
David Widup
I was lucky.
I didn't have a girlfriend when I went to Vietnam,
so I didn't get a Dear John letter.
But most of the guys did.
They started just weeks after we got there.
The "Johns" never came right out and said
"I've just been dumped by my old lady",
instead they'd drink all night
and take mescaline and speed and acid
all at once,
come back to the hutches
and throw their locker against the wall,
they'd shoot off clip after clip
of their M-16 at the black sky.
Bruce slammed his fist into the engine cover
of a deuce and a half
and shattered his hand.
It hung from his wrist like a wet towel.
Morton threw his reel to reel
against the wall until there was nothing left
except small pieces.
He put the pieces into his pillow case
and banged it against the wall
over and over and over again.
Most everybody got a letter.
Husbands, boyfriends, friends, sons.
Mothers left,
wives first fucked around - then left,
girlfriends left - then fucked around,
friends didn't write at all, or worse,
wrote to say how they hated us
for what we were doing.
Moms and Dads saw atrocities on TV
and wrote to say that they knew
we weren't doing the things they saw,
even though we did much worse
and dreamed of even more violent acts.
Schmidty, who taught me how to win at Hearts
gloated for most of ten months
about how he was going to come out of this,
his third year in hell over the last ten,
with wife and family intact.
He got his letter in August,
just six weeks before going home.
She ran away with his brother
whose wife left him
when he was in Nam
two years earlier.
He quit eating and sleeping.
A week later, I go with him
to Tuy Hoa to repair the hole
Charlie put in the perimeter fence,
the third time in my eleven months.
Schmidty heads up the construction,
me the security.
Two weeks into the job
and Schmidty is walking in the minefield every night.
I lose two ARVN guards trying to rescue him.
He walks out there with no clothes,
walking in a fucking minefield
and doesn't get shot
and doesn't blow up.
We med evac him out later on,
he's down to 135 pounds
and has circles under his eyes
you could mount on a jeep as tires.
Michael Andrews
in war the first casualty is the truth -- Aeschylus
In the Pacific Stars & Stripes
Lt. Calley was just doing his job,
there is a chicken in the pot of every
free market, democracy loving citizen
of South Vietnam, there is only goodness in our hearts
and that someone named Nixon
gets to speak in my name.
It is also the final toilet
for the world's worst poetry.
The truly bad poetry is okay
with me, even the rhymers
and the bad greeting card verse
riddled with cliches and wrong words.
At least it isn't as infantile as the Rod
McKuen poem I keep above my desk to
remind me that things can always get worse.
No sense reading the Stripes for news.
That comes straighter from Newsweek
or Ramparts and down the rumor trail.
It does tell me when Mission Impossible
is on American Forces TV in Pleiku.
It is often sandwiched between Star Trek
and The Monkees and is often printed
just below the weekly bikini girl
wearing the Jacki Kennedy hairdo
and a smile only the suicidal would
slip his dick into.
Mostly the Stripes is used to wrap bread and fish
by the local free market entrepreneurs.
And when I am under siege by dysentery
or the PX is out of reliable toilet paper
it is better than tin foil and wax paper.
Always remember to crumple it well.
It's softer that way and wipes away
more of what it is designed to spread.
Try to use older, outdated copies
otherwise the inky fabrications
may still be too wet, and there you are
walking around all day with the major
lies of our times printed on your ass.
David Widup
Laos
The Stars and Stripes says
"Nixon promises no war in Laos!"
I stand in the Aerial Port,
on my way to Nah Trang,
and there's a line of grunts
a mile long,
a snake full of killing evil,
waiting in line.
I've never seen a line like this,
in eleven months,
and ask a friendly looking,
blond grunt,
"What's happening?"
He says,
"Laos"
and spits at my feet,
looks the other way
so I know he's had enough
of talking about the War.
They all died.
Every one of them died,
before anyone knew they were there.
Michael Andrews
The Majors all hate me more than anyone
else they hate and more than anyone else hates me
because I have long hair, an attitude and I outrank them
and Ambassador Bunker hates me because
I won't prove they are winning the war on green bar
computer paper with neat perforations along the side
and the bosses hate me because I am the best
programmer that ever darkened their door
but I'm more or less out of control
and the CIA guys from Phoenix hate me
because I have Chairman Mao books on my desk
and a poster that says I'd rather be red than dead
and the grunts in green hate me because
I make good money, wear civies
and have a woman with round eyes
and I don't take shit from Majors
and the old men expatriots hate me because
I'm young and I have a woman with round eyes
and the Vietnamese hate me because
I'm an American imperialist with too much money
and the whores hate me because
I have a woman with round eyes
and I am saving too much money
and the French expatriots hate me because
I can't speak French and they hate everyone in general
and the brain-dead flag wavers
who love war hate me because I don't
and because I say so and because I think it's silly
but I do have a few friends.
Also, I'm not entirely sane anymore.
I've most definitely been in country too long
and some gear has slipped between my ears
and I say unkind things about President Nixon
and the idea of Vietnamization
and I have a satirical attitude toward uniforms
and a cynical one about anybody's authority
and everyone who hates me and everyone that doesn't
knows I can't last much longer.
In the PX I get the November 1970 National Lampoon
because it is saner than anything we make the computer
spit up and because it has a 1896 Sears Roebuck Sex Catalog
and because I need a laugh and because it pisses off
the grunt who sells it to me and who hates me
because I can read without moving my lips.
When I get it back to the office I start reading
a farce on macho men's magazines and war horseshit
called "The Dink Patrol and the Love Slaves of Xuyen Tan Phu."
In two paragraphs I'm out of control, running
between the desks full of drunk or dozing programmers
up to the front where I find Flo and Linda
actually trying to earn their salaries
and where all the Majors hang around
like hall monitors hoping someone will drop
a combat medal or a fifth of vodka
and I scream, "Listen to this,"
choking on my words because I can't stop
the insane guffawing and belly laughing
and I stomp up and down the office reading out loud
about the slaughter of every man, woman and child
in an unarmed village because they were dink terrorist
and about raping the women because they really wanted it
and then killing them because they were spies
and how hard it is to target a toddler
and how dangerous frail old men armed with false teeth are
and how disgusting cowards are groveling in the dirt
begging for their lives and how the hero
has to protect himself from the little kid
begging for chocolate by firing a warning shot
right between his eyes
and how the mothers used their own infants
as human shields but the hero sees through
that old trick and shoots them both anyway
and how the Cong use tiny soldiers
just because they make bad targets
and how the hero has to chase the Geneva Convention Observer
through the jungle and kill him in brutal hand to hand combat
and just to make sure he cuts off his head
and when he gets back to the demolished village
the medic asks, "Are you okay, chaplain?"
and this is where I lay down on the floor
and laugh until I choke green and blue
and the programmers go back to dozing
and Flo and Linda conspire how to save me
from myself and the majors start plotting
on how to get my name on a Phoenix hit list.
All afternoon I chuckle about that dumb Lampoon article
and wait for the clock to turn me loose.
The fact is I'm insane.
I know why nobody loves me.
I really don't hate anybody at all.
How dumb can you get.
Michael Andrews
"It fuckin' goes right through ya,"
Vinny shrieks at Peacenik
while his hands shake and fumble
at the compress wrapper
and Dinky watches a cloud
sail past the green, leafy canopy
his eyes have just faded away
the picture of the star burst
the white phosphorous blooming
like a time lapsed movie
of a fireworks flower
unfolding to the sun.
A case a friendly fire
his mind rolls around slowly.
The air strike was too close,
but then so was Charley
and he can hear Vinny screaming
about it goes right through ya
and he guesses that it has
something to do with him
but the cloud is somehow
the most profound thing that
he has ever seen, way beyond
the merely beautiful,
the way it drifts,
a galleon charting the seas
of heaven and he can feel
Vinny pushing on his chest
and the sucking way he breathes
but in the end
the cloud just
takes him
away.
Michael Andrews
It's 99% humidity
and 99% pacified
and 99 degrees in the shade
and it's raining
and it's raining bullets
and it's raining sweat
and it's raining tears
and the Generals
who are losing the war
want our bosses
who have lost their minds
to tell us
who have lost our souls
to wear ties to work
where no one can see us
in the cold fog
of the air conditioned
cigarette smoke
and the green meat
of the fluorescent lights.
Now we know we have lost the war.
They have built white picket fences
and they want spit-shined civilians
and they want ties.
They tell us that we are
capital P Professionals.
When professionals lose
they lose with decorum.
Most guys fall into their ties
like a pig in shit
and they don't care as long as
the pussy doesn't dry up
and the pay checks roll in.
But Mike Brown can't stand it
any more than I can
and he finds the world's ugliest tie,
green, red and puce
and he dips it in mustard and catsup
for politically correct stains
and crusts it up with
beany weanies and when he
picks his nose
he wipes the buggers
where a tie pin ought to be.
I can't beat that
so when the memo comes my way that says
that I have been naughty
about wearing a proper uniform and a tie
and that they are serious about this
I find a piece of acetate and cut
out an invisible tie
and put it around a blue chambray
work shirt with a collar
with a ring inside the neck
and strangle myself with a rubber band.
I take a red grease pencil and
down the front of the tie
I write in big block letters
T
I
E
so it has an appropriate design
and so the generals
will know whose side I'm on
and the bosses
will have their asses covered
and their necks in a noose.
It just won't cut it
and Control Data Corporation
writes me an official memo
that defines the concept of tie
as excluding acetate and
grease pencils of any color
and in the end I have to send
away to the Sears and Roebuck catalog
for a huge bow tie
with bright, hallucinogenic colors
and just a proper dose of fuck you.
Old Benjamin almost got it right --
in the end it's death and it's taxes
and it's tow the line.
So never spit into the wind.
Don't rock the boat.
Be a team player
and never let your tie
clash with the tie
of the guy that
tap dances on your face.
Today's forecast is --
14 KIA,
38 wounded,
4,237 neutralized enemies
and 1 AWOL somewhere
between the ears.
Michael Andrews
The day is not digesting well.
I remember the noodle factory
with clotheslines of drying noodles
flapping in the hot wind
like a cheap curtain in a bad movie.
I remember the fish, slightly rotten.
I remember the heat,
the exhaustion and dehydration.
I can recall my impatience and depression.
I remember a man who wrapped packages
as if it were some kind of an art.
I remember the hungry, the industrious,
the tired and the ambitious.
The massage parlors are not big business yet.
The locals only hate Australians on sight.
The bar girls and the whores
do not have the eyes of combat veterans yet.
The obscene tourists with their busy cameras
and corrosive money haven't arrived here yet.
The people still remember how to smile.
We are eating in a cheap restaurant.
The food is vaguely Chinese and not too bad.
The walls need paint but the geckos are busy.
The air is tropic hot and moonless black.
No one is shooting in the streets.
We are talking and eating with a bunch
of Peace Corps workers from Burma and India.
They are serenely confident, doing the right thing.
They have lived poor, eaten bad, got dysentery,
helped the downtrodden,
and never had a bad day in their lives.
A young girl with rich genes
and flaming self righteousness
accuses me of immorality
for having been a civilian in Saigon.
She is sure that I have personally murdered infants,
burned villages, raped women and tortured prisoners.
She doesn't know a thing about me.
She doesn't know that I have made mistakes
but I have never done a wrong thing twice.
She gets up and says she can't
eat with scum like me.
My stomach goes sour.
I just look down at my hands,
force the tears down the back of my throat.
I can't eat the not too bad Chinese food.
I can't talk anymore.
She is a rich princess bitch and she is right.
She doesn't know that if she is right then she is wrong.
She doesn't know that she is a parasite too.
She doesn't know she squats on the top of a culture
that squats on the top of many less powerful cultures.
She doesn't know that the Peace Corps
is the first step of Imperial conquest.
She doesn't know that she bought the downtrodden
for whitewash to paint over her own guilt.
She doesn't know that we are all guilty.
She doesn't know that only the most successful parasites
can afford guilt, good deeds and indignation.
She doesn't know she is worse than the most brutal soldier.
And she never will.
Michael Andrews
"He (the District Chief) told them specifically that if they did not personally see an incident, then it did not occur."
Gloria Emerson, Winners & Losers
The rain boils on the pavement
like a sizzling monsoon in a distant jungle
in a war far, far ago.
It wept when it killed our joy there.
It weeps now as we rot
in this stinking, wet desert
while the rich folk scream in their canyons
about mud on the carpets,
rain in the mansion
and rust on the Beamer.
A child sits in the hot, green rain
in that far, far war ago.
Her stomach is an overripe mellon.
Her eyes are as dead as a sun baked trout.
Her legs are broken pencils.
Her clothes would not survive a modest washing.
Her death doesn't make a sound
as it falls in the forest of broken lives.
No one hears her final sigh,
so no one asks if a someone really died
until the rain boiled the pavement today
and I looked out the window.
David Widup
We're sitting in Conference Room C,
fifteen of us around four rectangular tables
of white formica with oak trim on the edges
arranged to make an even bigger rectangle,
the four corners in the middle not quite the same height,
so it looks more like a volcano
than a small white plain.
We're here to learn to solve problems together,
my associates and I,
on this warm, sunny late fall day in LA,
and I'm hoping my problems can be solved,
and don't think too much about my other work today.
To break the ice,
we take turns talking about ourselves.
We state our name, job and
something about ourselves
the others are not likely to know.
It's already sounding strangely like
name, rank, serial number and date of birth.
My companions are a boring, predictable bunch.
One plays basketball,
another's an ocean swimmer
and another coaches kid's soccer.
The Pakistani plays classical guitar
and the Spaniard plays the flute.
I'm the next to last to go
and tell them my name, job
and that I'm a musician -
a 12 string blues guitarist.
I don't tell them I'm a poet,
after all, I work with these jerks.
The last to go is Mel.
His big secret is that
he does volunteer work with his son
through the church, and now
they are focused on our servicemen in the Middle East,
sending packages and, more importantly he says,
letters to Americans in the Gulf,
and they've already received some of the things
he and his son have sent,
and one of the servicemen over there even
sent a letter back to his son
(and by now, old Mel's chest is really full,
he's proud and strutting his stuff!)
and, he adds, his son even got a patch
from this serviceman who wrote back
after getting a package with their letter in it.
I'm deaf now,
and watch Mel's lips move
with no sound coming out.
He's smiling and there's
a distinctive sharpness in his gaze
as he talks to the seminar leader
at the other end of the four table rectangle,
and it's way too big now,
longer than a football field,
larger even than the rice paddy,
just south of Tuy Hoa;
way too big to be in this room.
Without thinking,
I stand up so quick
I knock my chair over,
and grab Mel by the nape of the neck,
slam the side of his head into the formica.
His mouth opens,
his eyes roll back in his head
and his alcoholic red cheeks turn white,
but I feel a strong pulse
in the palm of my right hand.
He's not dead.
And where the fuck were you
on December 25th, 1968
Mr. Mel!?!?!?
Where the fuck were you
and your God damned
cards, letter and packages?
When I was alone and crazy in RVN,
where was all your religious,
1990s caring bullshit?
And why,
dear God in heaven, why
are you so proud of
your son's patch?
Patches tell where we belong,
which company, which division.
We wear them even in the field,
it's the only thing on our jungle fatigues,
even our God damned, worthless rank
is missing from our armor -
but not our patch -
it tells us where we belong,
it allows the lifers to keep us
in line, in formation, in our death place,
it's our prison
right there
on our left shoulder
for all the world to see.
We put our patches
in the mouths of whores
and on the bodies
of our dead buddies.
I'm ripping the patch
from my shoulder,
my hand shaking bad,
pulling my nails away from the quick,
pulling, tugging
until it pulls free
in my bloody fingers
and I throw it in Mel's face
and it sticks there.
My lips are just a hair breath away from Mel's ear.
I'm screaming now.
We smoke dope in patches.
They go places
in the dead and dying
no son of yours belongs!
Your son got a patch!
Tell him to burn it,
throw it away.
It will do him no good,
it's bad luck.
Patches aren't meant for young boys
who go to church with Dad
on Sunday mornings and fill packages
with Girl Scout cookies and letters
for our soldiers in the Gulf.
Mail it to your Congressman
and have him take it to the Wall.
Patches. Jesus H. Christ!
On December 25th, 1968,
I sat alone in
a hot, wet connex bunker
on the south perimeter
of a small compound
on the Black Virgin Mountain
called Nuy Bah Dihn.
I had been there, awake
for several days and nights.
We had all been real aware it was Christmas.
There was no shuckin and jivin,
no "Don't mean nothin",
no "Screw it, it don't matter"
that day - it was bad quiet.
The sky was blue black with
sharp stars and it was way too warm
to be Christmastime.
I had been nowhere for a very long time
with my 823rd CES Red Horse buddies.
What I wanted for Christmas
was a soft, warm breast
to rest my face against,
a strong hand
gently touching my temple
stroking my pain away,
taking the weight in my chest
somewhere else.
But alone, with wet feet,
I would have killed,
I mean killed,
for a box of Girl Scout cookies
and a friendly letter
from a strange kid
in Yorba Linda, California.
None came,
but we did anyway.
David Widup
The black polished wall
gleams even in the dark
after the lights are put out.
Lincoln, perched stiffly
in his huge chair is
reflected against the names
of the boys killed in 1967,
between June and July -
a whole panel of names -
it was a deadly summer.
She is dressed in a long, red winter coat,
a stocking cap, black gloves and tall boots,
her cheek and palms pressed against the Wall,
she's whispering so quietly even she cannot hear.
Her lips never stop moving
except when she
bends down a little,
from time to time,
and kisses a name,
the same name
all night long.
She whispers mutely with hands
pressed against the Wall
the way a woman puts her hands
on her man's chest,
and bends and kisses
just below Lincoln's beard
reflected against the black, hard granite,
and keeps on
whispering at the Wall.
Michael Andrews
Ship Ahoy your baby boy is home from Vietnam. - John Prine
I am eating a chili dog in the Pier Sandwich Shop.
FOOD TO GO it says in mirror
image on the inside of the window.
I look out at Pier Avenue.
The traffic never lets up;
cars and bodies and bikinis and dogs and roller skates.
I am thinking about things that break;
clocks and volkswagons
marriages
and glass.
The curious thing about glass
is that it comes two ways --
windows and mirrors.
Windows make you free.
Mirrors let you know.
I got my first wrinkle in Vietnam.
In Nicaragua the bullets fluttered like gnats
and the gray hairs sprouted on my chest
like a cash crop.
I am watching the people go by on Pier Avenue.
I don't know who they talk to.
I don't know what they talk about.
When I get my second chili dog
with mustard and onions
some old lady says that it's
because the food is so good.
Conversation, I guess.
I don't say a thing.
I don't know what to tell her.
I remember jungle and heat and rain
like Noah never dreamed
and I think --
No, lady, there is something empty
way down here.
What have they got to talk about?
What I want to say is that I hurt.
The world on the other side of that glass hurt me
and I am thinking about things that break
mirrors and minds
windows and backs.
Some of them were friends of mine.
Don't ever
Don't ever
Don't ever
send me to another war.
Don't send my friends.
Don't send my children.
Don't tell me any goddamn reason
for any goddamn
bullet.
Next time
I'll know who to kill.
I eat my chili dog
looking out the window.
FOOD TO GO.
I damn near cried
on a perfectly beautiful day.
Michael Andrews, co-founder/publisher/editor with Jack Grapes of Bombshelter Press and ONTHEBUS, is living, for the moment, in L.A. and getting by. He has published 7 books of poetry, and 3 fine print poetry/photography portfolios. He has traveled around the world twice, spent time in Vietnam and Iran, rode a motorcycle to Peru, ran the San Juan River and recently spent a month in the Peruvian Amazon. His leg was seriously damaged in a motocycle accident in 1987. He is currently working on two novels, a book of speculative philosophy, and creating photographic and poetry montages as digital images. He works as a computer programmer/analyst. He worked a civilian in Vietnam from 1969 through 1971.
David Widup was born in Riverside, California and now lives in Studio City, California. He co-authored a book of poetry with Stellasue Lee, Over To You (Bombshelter Press). He is on the staff of ONTHEBUS. He served in the Air Force in Vietnam in 1969-70.
