The Sympathizer, a first novel by Vietnamese-born associate professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, Viet Thanh Nguyen, is generating substantial buzz–assuming that glowing reviews in the Washington Post and the New York Times are buzz generators.  The blurb on the book’s cover would have the same effect, calling it “A magnificent feat of story telling. The Sympathizer is a novel of literary, historical, and political importance.” (Maxine Hong Kingston)

The Washington Post review, “‘The Sympathizer’: A cerebral thriller about Vietnam and its aftermath,” by book editor, Ron Charles, called attention to the book’s pluperfect timing of the book’s appearance: “Forty years ago this month, after a long, deadly release of flatulence from American politicians, the United States evacuated its personnel from Saigon in an operation appropriately code-named Frequent Wind. Whether you were alive then or not, the images of those panicked Vietnamese crushing the U.S. Embassy are tattooed on our collective consciousness … In the opening ­pages of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s extraordinary first novel, “The Sympathizer,” that terror feels so real that you’ll mistake your beating heart for helicopter blades thumping the air.” (What veteran ever lifted into a hot landing zone hasn’t felt that sensation?-av)

Vietnam War Marine Corps veteran-turned-author Philip Caputo reviewed The Sympathizer in the April 2nd issue of the NY Times.  I could not help but pay attention to this review because Caputo’s memoir about his time in Vietnam,  A Rumor of War (1977), was the first such book about the war I could bring myself to read. Though I didn’t like it, many considered it important as an early entry into the genre and still do.

I quote Caputo’s opening paragraphs at length, because they drove me to return to Rummaging after an overly long absence.

The more powerful a country is, the more disposed its people will be to see it as the lead actor in the sometimes farcical, often tragic pageant of history. So it is that we, citizens of a superpower, have viewed the Vietnam War as a solely American drama in which the febrile land of tigers and elephants was mere backdrop and the Vietnamese mere extras.

That outlook is reflected in the literature — and Vietnam was a very literary war, producing an immense library of fiction and nonfiction. Among all those volumes, you’ll find only a handful (Robert Olen Butler’s “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain” comes to mind) with Vietnamese characters speaking in their own voices….

Which brings me to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s remarkable debut novel, “The Sympathizer.” ­Nguyen, born in Vietnam but raised in the United States, brings a distinct perspective to the war and its aftermath. His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light.

In any case,  the highlighted paragraphs caught me up short. How, I asked myself, could Caputo have overlooked some truly important and truly Vietnamese voices that have appeared in beautiful English translations in the United States? So, other than to agree with Caputo that the opening chapters (taking place in April 1975) are powerful indeed (my Kindle tells me I am 17-percent into it), I want to call attention to a couple of those Vietnamese “voices” resident on my bookshelves, voices that have moved me intensely.

The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam, by Bao Ninh, appeared in English translation in London in 1993, two years after it appeared in Hanoi. The translation was hugely well received in Europe, winning awards and frequent comparisons to Erich Marie Remarque’s classic All Quiet on the Western Front. They were richly deserved in my view. Indeed, Bao’s opening line was, to me breathtaking; “On the banks of the Ya Crong Poco River, on the northern flank of the B3 battlefield in the Central Highlands, the Missing in Action Remains-Gathering Team awaits the dry season of 1975.” How different from us really was that enemy soldier we tended to dehumanize? Maybe not so much?

While Bao Ninh’s work was accepted and well-received in Hanoi, the work of a woman, also a combat veteran of the war in Southeast Asia, Duong Thu Huong, was not. With the exception of her first novel, Paradise of the Blind, her work was banished in Vietnam and she was jailed for a time.  I have four of her books, all of which are powerful and speak in the Vietnamese voice. To me, the most affecting were Paradise of the Blind and Novel Without a Name. When published in the United States in 1993, Paradise of the Blind was said to be the first Vietnamese novel ever to be translated and published in the States. It was originally published in Vietnamese in 1988. Because the book depicts the extremely difficult and, as the title suggests, ideologically guided recovery from the war, its writing and publication in Vietnam were acts of real courage.

Duong Thu Huong’s second book, Novel Without a Name, goes to combat itself–and has also been compared to All Quiet on the Western Front. The author had led a youth brigade into the battlefields, serving and fighting in tunnels, trenches, and jungles for seven–count’em–seven years. She writes that she was one of the four (of forty) volunteers to survive the experience. (Bao Ninh above spent ten or so years in the war zone, and an equally small percentage of his comrades lived to the end.) Novel With a Name is searing reading, especially as it involves women at war.  The other two novels of Duong Thu Huong’s that I have read, Memories of a Pure Spring (2000) and No Man’s Land (2005), like Paradise of the Blind, speak to life after “peace.” One other, Beyond Illusions (2002), I have missed, but I can guess its themes. The dust jackets say that four of her novels had been published in Vietnam, though they are no longer permitted. I would guess, however, they are still quietly making the rounds–as such things tend to do in tightly ruled societies.

I would add to the above the memoir of a North Vietnamese Colonel who left Vietnam and a job with a Communist Party newspaper in 1990, Bui Tin. His work, Following Ho Chi Minh, appeared in translation in 1995.  Finally, on my bookshelf I have a collection of poems, Flowers from Hell, by a Vietnamese poet, Nguyen Chi Thien, who spent many years in North Vietnamese prison camps. Published in 1984 by Yale’s Center for International and Area Studies, it is grim reading into the Vietnamese communist experience.

Back to The Sympathizer and Viet Thanh Nguyen: If I were to return to commenting on Nguyen’s book, I would say that the Vietnamese voice has been out there for decades now–if one only looked around for it (and I’m sure on looking harder one would find much more than the few above that have spoken to me).  But this particular voice—the  voice of the Vietnamese refugee, the voice of the Vietnamese displaced—is a distinct and powerful contribution, I will say confidently even if I am only 17-percent into the work.

I will close with appreciation of Nguyen’s life story, which resonates with my own rummagings into the past. From terror (my mother’s), to uncertainty, to rebuilding, to restoration of purpose and passion.

And given the enduring power of the images noted in the Washington Post review, I guess one could say Nguyen’s story (and the stories of all refugees and displaced persons) also resonate with this weekend. Perhaps in the survival stories growing from such experiences, there is reason to hope for the futures of those millions suffering in similar ways today. Would that such suffering were not on going.

A cause to pray for, as it always has been, these Holy Days.

Postscript (added on April 5, 2015 (Easter Sunday):  In Nguyen’s book,  The Sympathizer,  his prime characters were transported from Guam to the sprawling Marine Corps base in Camp Pendleton, California. Stationed there until June 1970, my last 18 months in the Corps , I couldn’t help but poke around the web. Indeed, Camp Pendleton took note of the 35th anniversary of the refugee resettlement in April  2010 with a photo exhibit. KPBS in California covered the story through an interview with a base historian. 

I expect some of my Marine Corps friends, those who stayed in at least, may well have been part of the effort to set the place up and to support the 50,000 refugees the story said were housed there.

Today, graphical works are very much in vogue.  So let me offer a bit of Lima 3/1 history in graphical mode, courtesy of Sgt. Hornsby, though I know he didn’t have us in mind.  These recollections are tied to Operation Cochise and offer, at least to me, a kind of window into life in mid-1967 in the southern end of  Military Region I of Vietnam.

 Arrival in a hot and soggy LZ. As Bud Eckert and I described earlier, our landing into a (somewhat hot) LZ at the beginning of Cochise occasioned some worrisome moments as helicopter pilots reconsidered the wisdom of settling into the wet rice paddies chosen for our assault. We didn’t work our way down ropes to land, but the picture of uncertainty is clear enough in this cartoon. “Do we really want to put down here???” Well, we did, and we marched on.

Forced Provision of Food for NVA forces.  As we moved through the mountainous terrain, we spotted signs of Viet Cong and NVA activity, some of which spoke to the suffering the VC and NVA imposed on the people of the region. Though this cartoon speaks to forced recruitment, which we did hear of, what we saw most of was forced levies of rice on farmers in the substantial stores of it we encountered along our route through 2nd NVA Division territory. These storage vats (about the size of the Pod storage containers one can rent these days) well exceeded the kind of storage farmers had for themselves. They could only have been intended for NVA troops.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness–So God Seemed Remote. The helicopter landing mentioned earlier in the Cochise story put me into a flooded rice paddy, up to my armpits in mud and rice seedlings. This was neither good for the rice nor me, as a bath and change of clothing was not in my near-term future and I doubted the seedling could be replanted. I was mud-caked and filthy. And so I would remain until my combat clothing actually began to come apart. Somehow new uniforms arrived weeks later. Still, the cartoon had my diagnosis–and that of others in Lima right. We were a pretty cruddy lot in this journey.

Put another way, I suppose we could have been said to be pretty skuzzy, witness the images left and right. But such is the way of war—not at all tidy. And so it was for many, many, many of us, Marines, Sailors, and Soldiers alike. Sgt Mike nailed it in this as in so many things. (More to follow, eventually.)

I generally thought of the Pacific Stars and Stripes as an official military voice of US forces in Vietnam and in the Pacific theater generally.  I have made no attempt to confirm this–today’s official-sounding papers like the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps Times are commercial enterprises.

Stars and Stripes somehow appeared at our compounds in regular intervals. The most pleasurable aspect of the paper—beyond the occasional kind report on our operations (see earlier post on Cochise) —was the series of cartoons entitled “With Sgt. Mike.” Drawn by former Marine Corps Sergeant Michael T. Horsnby,  the series  featured the slovenly “Sledge,” the fresh brown bar “Lieutenant Frisby,” and the relatively seasoned “Sgt. Mike.” The cartoons, according to Amazon.com originally appeared in the Army, Navy and Air Force Times, Saigon Press, Okinawa Morning Star, San Francisco Examiner, and other newspapers. (Amazon forgot Stars and Stripes, which is where I clipped the examples you will see in this and the next posts.)

Horsnby’s cartoons spoke to my experience–and, I’m sure to many, many others–so very, very well. This and another post or two will feature a number of Hornsby’s drawings that spoke most directly to me.

The “Boot Loootenant” In the beginning of his memoir, Bud Eckert alluded to the new platoon commander (me) who seemed so remote. This first image on the left speaks to a “first impression” one supposes a new platoon commander is obliged to make.   I went in with plenty of uncertainties. A couple I did have included the belief that I would have to care for my Marines in every way possible, but I could not grow so close to them that I could not bear to send them on missions that might cost them their lives. I may have been obliged to look tough—and remote—as this cartoon implies. But I also knew that others had been there longer than I, and I was obligated to learn from them.

“Don’t be Stupid, Loootenant!”  I have no doubt Hornsby would have sketched this scene differently had he been with me and my First Platoon on my first major operation in January 1967, Operation Stone. Captain Gibbs had put Lima 1 on the point of a regimental (or so I imagine today–let’s say it was more than just Lima Company) walk to a position we had to occupy to block enemy forces being pushed into an anvil (us) by other units in the region. It was important we got to the right place at the right time, and so, in a moment of doubt, I pulled out a map to check our location. So what if I was out in the middle of an open rice paddy? Who would think to spot me (with map spread out before him) as anybody worth shooting at? Duh.

So, wrong. Gunfire erupted from our right. An AK-47 round clipped my right eyebrow—resulting in a very bloodied map; a Marine on the right flank of our formation took a round through his neck; a corpsman collapsed unable to help, going down to the ground in fear—shouting a basic truth (straight out of Catch-22), “They’re trying to kill me!.” Irrefutable. Still, a cause for medical evacuation.

Maybe none of that would have happened had I kept my map in my pocket.

More with Sgt. Mike in a day or two. It’s almost midnight here.

Preface

I own only three things I carried with me in Vietnam in 1967: a pair of well-worn, scuffed combat boots–today they are hard as cardboard; a precious poncho liner–a symbol of safety (and for emergency use) I keep in my car at all times; and two map sheets (taped together in 1967) I used during visits to a forbidding place, a place in which many–military men of both sides and civilians–died, were hurt, and suffered. The map will help with this two-part episode, as will Bud’s remembrance of it from his January 2015 visit.
(photo above courtesy of Ltc. Joe Gibbs, USMC-Ret)

* * *

Part I: Introduction

Of the many books written about the Vietnam War—30,000 by one, probably iffy, estimate—and in particular of the books written about Marines in that war, I dare say the majority have dealt with the bloody, conventional war-like fights in the northern tier of I Corps, the combat zone abutting the “Demilitarized” Zone separating the two Vietnams.  First Platoon, Lima Company, would find itself there in December 1967.

Until then, as I’d noted before, Lima patrolled territory just below Danang, serving as part of the shield protecting our major facilities in Danang, which was located along the South China Sea about in the middle of I Corps.

The units then assigned to that part of Danang’s shield,  Lima and the other three companies of the 3rd Battalion, First Regiment of the First Marine Division, were regularly pulled out to participate in large regimental or even division-sized operations in areas thought or known to be occupied by major North Vietnamese units. For the First Marine Regiment, most of these operations took place well south and somewhat west of this patrol area. It was territory usually patrolled by the Fifth Regiment of the First Division. (Don’t ask about the numbering system—the explanation is historical.)

At least twice during Bud’s and my tours, Lima was brought into such operations. In each case the territory was in and around the Que Son Valley (also the name of a village in it), which, more or less, is thought of as the space between and above two communities almost worthy to be called cities, Hiep Duc and Tam Ky (see my combined two sheets, “Map 1,” below [give it time to load; it is a large file, and once opened it can be enlarged and scrolled around. And forgive the wrinkles of the folds; it hasn’t been opened in some decades before now.]).

Both the territory—mountains, foothills, and paddies—and the enemy were unfamiliar to us, putting us in something of a disadvantage on each visit—at least at a greater disadvantage than the 5th Marines, who had worked the region, painfully, for months.

We were also at a bit of a disadvantage because the full strategic picture wasn’t totally clear to us, at least it wasn’t in my memory of those days. Perhaps I knew better then, but for years I wondered many times about the larger meaning of our, Lima’s, relatively brief operational efforts in the Que Son region. These were efforts that felt different, very much more important than the toings and froings in the mortar and rocket belts around Danang.  We were really part of something much bigger. Still, even though we experienced a notable, even newsworthy, win, I have felt for years that in the case of Operation Cochise, we really missed a big opportunity to damage beyond repair one of the NVA’s best fighting units, its Second Division. And although Operation Pike is hardly worth talking about—only legal trouble would follow me from it months later—Cochise was memorable.

The more memorable to follow in the next installment (together with some references for further reading).

* * *

The recently reported killing in Syria of Kayla Mueller by the despicable ISIS (ISIL in official US government parlance) murderers brings me back to distant memories of undergraduate and later days at the University of Rochester and the Vietnam War era.

The love of my last two years of life at the University of Rochester (1964-66) was a smart, beautiful, redheaded, English major named Sandra Lee Taplin.  She was from Clarence, a town near Buffalo, New York.  That she cared for me at all is, in retrospect, a little hard to understand. She took her studies seriously (a straight A student, while I scrapped along at a few hundredths of a percentage point above a passing C), didn’t drink much (I was a fairly typical frat bozo who kept too many empty beer bottles on display to prove manliness), and spent much time in Rush Rhees Library (where I regularly joined her in studying–most likely the only reason I possessed those few hundredths of a percentage points noted above).

As my first posts noted, I was destined for the Marine Corps— provided  I graduated (thank you, Sandy.) At some point during the five months of training after my commissioning to be an officer in Quantico, Virginia, Sandy wrote to tell me that our relationship was over. I don’t possess her “Dear John” letter any longer, but my memory of it ties her decision to my impending  involvement in the war in Vietnam and her inability to support it. I could be wrong in remembering it that way, and even if that is what she said, there may have been other reasons of her own, but it doesn’t matter. I accepted it. Anger toward her was simply not possible for me. I did love her.  Love is not “ownership” and love allows for parting.

I did look Sandy up after my tour ended  in February 1968. She was a senior then. I recall meeting her, with others, in Todd Student Union on campus and talking about the war. Knowing she had come to oppose it, I remember defending it. I told her of the acts of the Viet Cong–stealing the harvests of the peasants and forcing young men to join their forces and of their atrocities on the battlefields. It was our last conversation. I can’t say it ended badly or well. It just ended.

I suppose we all think back on past relationships and wonder where those acquaintances, friends, and loves have gotten to. A couple I have had the good fortune to reconnect with–and I am happy for reconnections.

This would not happen with Sandy. Somewhere along the line I learned she went into the Peace Corps after graduating and on her first assignment (I wrongly thought in El Salvador) she had died. I had details wrong—the location and the reason. But she had died for a serious cause in Bolivia, a seriously good cause. One source: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19690920&id=RfRNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=sYoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5994,2267724

I recount this story here because I want to make plain that sacrifice for a greater good takes many forms—not all of them having to do with warfare and arms. English-major Sandra Lee Taplin turned to the Peace Corps, and she made the “ultimate sacrifice.”

I often wonder if a conversation Sandy and I had about the study of English (English literature, actually) had anything to do with her decision. We shared the major. She majored in the subject because it was her passion. I majored in it because I couldn’t succeed in (or like) biology, psychology, or math. I had told her the major was pointless. What effect could one ever have on anything by studying that field? It was a tearful exchange for her. It was easy for me (hatefully so in repeated, involuntary recollection). English mattered little to me as a field. I managed a BA and a commission in the Marine Corps and–it turned out–a living. The major mattered almost nothing in that equation.

Did Sandy’s decision to go into the Peace Corps in any way grow out of that conversation? I’ll never know.

But I admire and hold her in great esteem for having made the decision.

These days the talk of “ultimate sacrifice” comes easy and has become kind of trite sounding when applied to those who have died bearing arms.

In Sandra Lee Taplin’s case, her dying in Bolivia is not at all so. I was and continue to be awed.

So, in June 1967, from 3/1’s base area on the beach–where “Circumference’s” companies had patrolled an area within range of mortars (inside the “Mortar Belt”)–Lima was detached and assigned westward to a more distant protection zone, the “Rocket Belt.”  Our new, company-sized base area, Hill 41,  was located on a piece of high ground just east of a mountain range that provided safe haven for Viet Cong and North Vietnamese units.

We were now well-removed from the beach and sand that defined the topography of our lives during the late “winter” and early “spring” of 1967.  We were done with a period of experimentation with a new weapon–the Stoner weapon system, another story entirely–but we were still in a life of patrolling.  Here, at the edge of territory owned by main force enemy units, we tended to patrol in larger, platoon-sized units. Our goal: stumble on (that is, in more formal language, “engage”) enemy units looking to infiltrate Danang’s defenses and attack, directly or through mortar or longer-range rocket fire, the major installations of the city.

Indeed, we patrolled, and we patrolled, and we patrolled. And much of that patrolling took place at night. What sleep we managed was most often achieved during the hot days of June–to say it was fitful and unsatisfying sleep is an understatement. At night, we moved, we watched, we stopped, we listened, we moved, and hoped we were alert enough to the other dangers, the booby traps, the mines, the ambush, etc. And as Bud will recall below, we took casualties.

Each meant a helicopter medevac, usually with me in the middle of a rice paddy guiding a Huey helicopter to a night-landing, as a corpsman and Marines prepared to rush the wounded to the bird—always anticipating sniper fire from a nearby tree line. Somehow, this impossible scenario always worked out. Those pilots were heroic wonders!

Of course, Lima wasn’t alone in this defensive mission inside the “rocket belt,” and at least once Lima 1 came within a hair of taking under fire a nearby patrolling Marine platoon from another zone within the belt. (I remember some very fiercely spoken four letter words in a radio exchange with a platoon leader of another unit that had strayed into our territory, and which we were poised to wipe out on my command.)  It was a period of extraordinarily high tension and great fatigue.

And, even though I had come to believe that, as fighting units, Lima Company and Lima 1 really worked and moved magnificently well together, by mid-month, one could argue we had failed our mission, as Bud’s remembrance of the period will show:

Woke up early this morning [January 2015] and travelled about twenty miles to the vicinity of Hill 41 where Lima spent the month of June. Memories from that month:

SSgt Dean lost his foot to a booby trap and insisted on trying to walk on his own power to the helicopter. SSgt Dean was hard Corps. He had captured the last Japanese soldier on Guam in 1964.

Don Lappegaard was wounded by a booby trap and had about 100 shrapnel wounds including the loss of part of his foot

USMC had run out of M26 grenades and issued us old pineapple grenades which had shorter fuses than the grenades we were accustomed to. One night I was in a foxhole with Harry Gross, he pulled a pin on the grenade and let the spoon fly. He held the grenade too long before he threw it. The grenade exploded too close and Harry got a good-sized hunk of shrapnel into the bridge of his eye. It was pitch black and no one had a flashlight. Harry spent the rest of the night moaning and did not appreciate my muffled laughter.

My squad was detached to a CAC Unit [these were small Marine entities assigned to villages that were important to perimeter defenses to help prevent   takeovers of them] which Intel said was supposed to get hit by an attack. Sure enough the next night the V.C. started pushing about 100 civilians carrying lanterns in front of them as cover for the attack. I put some M79 rounds around the flanks of the crowd which resulted in the people dispersing and the V.C. calling it a night.

On June 18th the platoon was set up in the jungle. About 2000 , I took four Marines out to set up listening posts. About 50 meters outside of our position I saw three or four figures moving toward us. We ended up having a running gunfight. We had just returned to our platoon night time position when the ground started vibrating. It turned out that an NVA rocket position was less than a click away. Their first salvos hit the bomb storage area at the airbase in Da Nang. It was pure bedlam and probably the most costly attack on an airfield during the history of the Vietnam conflict. More than twenty aircraft were destroyed and the runways were shut down for days. As we rushed towards the NVA position our own aircraft nearly got us. I had a smoking pipe I had picked up on R and R and never saw it again. It was my only creature comfort.

Bud is right. That night defined “bedlam.”  World War II seemed to have erupted again: the rockets, the mass of artillery fire from Danang directed toward the not too distant rocket firing place (but seemingly toward us!!)  — the rocket shooters were tucked in a draw at the foot of the mountain range to our west. Then came “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” a C-47 equipped with machine guns that exploded onto the scene.  No July 4th scene has ever surpassed the power of what we witnessed, and heard, that night.

I know we ended that night frustrated beyond words. Even though we had a fix on the origins of the rockets, we were not allowed to run them down. A big disappointment, as I remember it.

And, as to Bud’s reference to creature comforts, yes, they were few, amounting only to whatever precious things one might have carried. In my mind, it was a matter of basics: field rations, cigarettes included, a poncho and a nylon poncho liner–a most precious piece of my gear that I possess and treasure, for symbolic reasons, to this day.  It is wrapped up and fixed to my belt, behind me, in the below image.  Now, I carry it with me in my car, wherever I go,

Enough for now. More reflections next time.

(And as usual, these are my and Bud’s memories so many years later. Corrections, different perspectives, and different interpretations from Lima 3/1 Marines are most welcome. –Lima One Actual sends)