That Dirty Little War

You're 19 years old and you're never had a job your family is God fearing and practice to the core. Perhaps and Perhaps your dad works on an assembly line, and so will one day. In either case when your slight number camas up you'll go. There's no doubt about it.

You get to Name look around see an alien country and other 19 year olds who should be back in the Sheets going to school driving cars drinking beer. They give you a gun--"Final goods kill them" This won't what was thought it would be like. These gooks want to kill you more than you went to kill them.

These hundred and sixty-five days-that's how long you have to live in this hell-hole. General West-more band wends to keep the troops morale up and generate support for the war back home. You want to stay alive. There's are winning for your unit, only surviving. You found up your time, either whole or in a government make and at last to same miracle it's time to go home to family, friends a warm reception. Wrong people are cold and uncomprehending; bitterness and drink fall your life. The pain is hard to erase; only time can herd it.

The scenario may be a cliche by now but it is still tact--as documented clearly movingly and with a new immediacy in Charlie Company What Vietnam Did to Us. Three years ago Newsweek reporters Peter Gockman and Tony Fuller sought out surviving members of the "gook-hunting, dirt-eating, dog-soldiering" typical combat unit known as Charlie Company. They found 54 veterans, flung far and wide since their return to the States at the end of the 1960s. They were postmen, statisticians, woodcutters, drunkards, narcotic detectives who had never before been asked about the Vietnam portion of their lives. Unlike with the country's earlier, more popular battles, nobody had cared. People wanted to forget.

Goldman and Fuller first told Charlie Company's saga in an excellent 1981 Newsweek cover story, the longest in the weekly's history. There, they explored the men a harrowing exploits in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 and their subsequent cold homecoming. Charlie Company the book is an expansion of that effort Eleven more members of the original company of 120 have resurfaced. And the authors have added previously unpublished material from their original interviews.

Bigger does not always mean better, and parts of the new version are unnecessarily long-winded and could be chopped. In particular, descriptions of some of the fighting, though gripping, are hard to follow: the reader is sucked into a vortex of almost incomprehensible battlefield jargon.

Nonetheless, the book improves on the original article. Given the extra space, the authors are able to flesh out their major contribution to the corpus of Vietnam accounts--a critical and usually overlooked sense of moral ambiguity about the war effort. It is no easy task to avoid automatically sermonizing about Vietnam's rights and wrongs, especially in an era where so much political discussion tends toward excessive moralizing--just consider the nuclear debate. But Goldman and Fuller eschew an easy judgment either way, whether it be outrage or the wrong-headed "noble cause" nostalgia that a sympathetic warrior's tale could fall prey to.

Instead they present the "Nam straightforwardly, flatly, through Charlie Company's eyes. The writing is intentionally crude, almost comically earnest. Goldman and Fuller actually want to make us feel like khaki-clad grunts, humping through the jungle in search of gooks:

Johnson shot him, once in the heart, and went back to Reid. Reid was fucked up bad, the gook had dropped a grenade into the bunker, practically on top of him, and the blast had laid open a shoulder, an arm and a leg. The arm was spouting blood from a main artery. Johnson stuck his fingers in the holes to slow the hemorrhaging long enough for him to get a pressure bandage in place. Stop the bleeding, treat' em for shock, get 'em to a chopper. It wasn't pretty, and it wasn't textbook medicine, but Reid was going to make it.

As a result, we see the war the way the boys of Charlie Company saw it--bloody, discouraging, futile. We live through their acclimation to normal life following the war--the screams in the middle of the night for many, the checking into VA mental hospitals for some, but mostly the attempts to come to peace with themselves about the horror they lived through

What becomes most frustratingly clear is that for the groundtroopers, our nations about the war's morality or immorality were moot from the start. In Charlie Company, as Goldman and Fuller tell it, the was as fought was simply futile. "It could have been over in six months," recalls one angry survivor. "Easy We could have took the 57,000 troops that got killed and put them all in a line behind tanks and APCs instead and just started at one end and walked on across the country."

Nothing could have been that simple, but the people in Washington sure went to the other extreme. There were ridiculous body counts. Charlie Company would take a useless piece of real estate one day, only to hand it back over to the enemy by nightfall. The inept leadership allowed soldiers to lob mortar and shells on their own men. And all during this time, politicians argued about the shape of the table in the Paris "peace" conference. "We're in the jungle with two canteens and two C-rations," one soldier remembers, "and they're arguing about what kind of fuckin' table they going to talk around. If these guys were walking about the fuckin jungle, they'd forget the shape of the table and sit down right now and make peace."

It's fashionable these days to feel guilty about the treatment of Vietnam vets and the cold welcome these unwitting pawns in a global chess game got. If Charlie Company's experiences are representative, guilty is how we ought to feel. The litany of broken homes, drunken rampages, joblessness--in short, as the authors write, the palming off of a national shame on the vets--is real, and it's time to start remembering.

Charlie Company doesn't make amends for the Vietnam War. It simply tells a side of the story we've tried to shut out--the story of the people who were actually there. The tale is particularly important on a college campus whose 19-and 20-year-olds can scarcely imagine what that story was like, and whose predecessors a mere 15 years ago refused to believe the truth. Charlie Company can't help the people who found out the hard way. But it can keep our memories--and our consciences--awake