Bombs Away...Boom! Boom!! Boom!!!

This essay is dedicated to my beloved Sarah who has been an unfailing infuence in the creation of it...

I was born (7 October 1944) in the now DisUnited States (Brooklyn, New
York). From my earliest years, I was disciplined to be a warmonger during
my informal, formal, social, and religious indoctrination—even the Roman
Catholic church was complicit in sending me to Vietnam in August, 1967.
John Wayne imbued in me the killer instinct. There is no doubt about it in
my mind. Watching his movies on the “Early Show,” “The Million Dollar
Movie,” and “The Late Show,” inoculated my disposition with the diseased
germ of ducking bullets, tossing hand-grenades, running for cover, hitting
the dirt, smelling for the enemy, anticipating the attack with all fve senses
keyed to war's main event and, fnally, offering the toast to celebrate not so
much the victory of battle but to celebrate the end of the tension and
danger which accompanies it.

When I was ten years old, I practiced “war” in Keansburg, New Jersey. My
cousins and our friends played at war during summer vacation. It was our
favorite pastime next to stick-ball playing on the macadamized roadway in
front of my aunt and uncle's gray-shingled summer bungalow. We fought
in the “jungles” of neighboring lots, we took hills of sand piled high by the
wind, we mowed down the “enemy” and assigned his sudden fate with a
“You're dead!!!” screech—and when the “battle” was over, we slugged
down gulps of water from our Army-Navy-store-issued aluminum canteens.
We “played war.” And war is hell. It was hell in Keansburg and Okinawa
and Iwo Jima and London and Pyongyang and Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor;
and, it remained hell, for me, in Pleiku and Dak To and Duc Pho and
Kontum and the Ia Drang Valley.

I had performed in a war-like manner for many years of my life before I

would have my own real war to fght in; when it came, I was emotionally
prepared. I was ready. Years of psychic simulation had put me in top-notch
form. It would take the United States'Army to add the necessary
accruements of materiel which would mold me into a fghting, combat-
ready soldier. (I regret that I had not been readied as any United States'
Marine might have been.)

But I soon found out that I was not as emotionally primed as I thought I
was. Four years of philosophy and literature in an upstate New York men's
Roman Catholic university had cast a shadow of doubt over my Keansburg
war maneuvers. I thought this not being self-righteous or self-possessed. I
really believed that my conduct in war was something that was going to
come to comfort or haunt me in my future life. I was aware of the sufferings
many war veterans in my own family had to sustain throughout their lives
especially from the psychic tumults imposed upon them during the Second
World War. I wondered—very much—why I had to be indeed careful in
Vietnam if I did not want to carry with me forever the emotional scars and
dreams of inescapable fear, horror and distress. Rule One: Make no friends
in a war zone.

It was not enough to keep me from going to war, when actually a good
percentage of my classmates and friends were contrary to their country's
involvement in Vietnam—they having resorted to any means, licit and
illicit, to keep from going to Southeast Asia. However, I would not become
a Jack Daniels/drug crazed Vietnam veteran or a murderer, and I certainly
winced at a possible career in the military (Marcel Proust: “...the
peacefulness of a life where one's occupations are more strictly regulated
and one's imagination less trammeled than in any other, where pleasure is
more constantly present because we have not time in rushing about looking
for it to run away from it...”) being so disgusted with the slimy, racist twerps
in the U S Army offcers' corps—many of whom would be “fragged” in
Vietnam—primarily concerned with advancing their promotional
opportunities by seeking the best assignments that would procure favors for
them. My sword was double edged when I went to Vietnam. I had the
“killer instinct” in me, but it was tamed with a remarkable degree of
moderateness that would keep me in good stead throughout a grueling
year's tour in Vietnam. Mens agitat molem. For more than most men I met
and worked with in Vietnam, I could admit—and still say today—I had a
good share of common sense and a tough, questioning mind that would
keep me from accepting, blindly, unethical, indecent, irregular, insane,
unjust, stupid, useless suggestions and/or orders. General Westmoreland
himself, one of the most stupid military commanders I ever had served
under, could have told me to shoot infants, women and the elderly, and I
would have told him to go f**k himself. I was not going to carry his
depraved emotional baggage for the rest of my life. (The reader must
empathize with me that the average age of Vietnam soldiers was, it is said,
nineteen years old! Remember how stupid you were when you were 19!))
I must acknowledge that when I returned from Vietnam, I was so relieved
and happy that I had not been wounded, I was almost grateful for the
opportunity of having been there simply because I now valued my life so
much more because others—including Americans—had tried to take that
life from me. And then there was that fascinating experience I would never
had been able to have had I not served in Vietnam: I was assigned as an
artillery forward observer in the Central Highlands near the Cambodian
and Laotian borders; and, I underwent such a grand Rousseauvian odyssey
there that part of which I now wish to share with you, my dear reader:

“As one trekked through the “boonies” there was the overpowering feeling that vacation
time had come round once again. The pleasantries of the beautiful woodlands instilled
in us a distinct presentiment of peacefulness. Butterfies—an enormous range of colors
characterizing their diverse species—crowded pathways hacked away by machete-
bearing pointmen. Birds chirped away in treetops and reminded one of agreeable
moments had in one’s youth during springtime strolls through shaded timberlands with
the loved one—hand in hand. There was that matchless sound of bacon and eggs—
traded, if not robbed, from local Montagnard villagers—crackling on a frying pan over
an early-morning fre, the aroma scenting its way through trees and bushes into two-
man hootches where rested soldiers recharged by a ten-hour sleep on an army-issue
gray air mattress turned over to reach for the frst butt of the day and stalled, in a lazy,
contented way, the beginning of a day’s march up the side of a comely mountain.

Canteens were flled with fresh, diseased-free water from tributaries which had directed
the cool refreshment for miles over rocks and through vegetation effecting Nature’s own
purifying process and ridding one of the need to plunk iodine tablets into canteens and
then, to kill the taste, slide in cherry-favored KOOL-AID granules, pre-sweetened, P-L-
E-A-S-E!!! from the funnelled edges of those small, pre-packed envelopes. Canteen
cups were used to boil hot water for shaving, and steel-potted helmets served as
washbasins into which soapy razor blades were dunked to make ready the next scrape to
the chin.

C-ration cans were heated over small blue pellet heating tabs—yells going up in quest of
an extra can of peaches, or “Who likes ham and lima beans? (no one), I’ll trade you for a
spiced beef.” When breakfast was completed, packs—some weighing eighty pounds
with mortar rounds, M-60 ammo belts, and prick-9 radio batteries busting a man’s back
—were hoisted to ft a comfortable position, rifes were grabbed, helmets were arranged
at their most comfortable tilt, and pistol belts with loaded canteens and ammo pouches
were clicked into place. The “humping” was begun.

One looked up to the verdant mountain and was discouraged by its imposing height.
The moans and groans once expelled, the men went about their hiking frst considering
it to be a chore, then looking to what good could come from it. A bamboo pit viper or
two wiggled and glided on the roots of a huge tree. Every month or so, a python to catch
and wrestle with in patches of grass—machete-bearing soldiers on guard to prevent
strangulations. Wild water buffalo were avoided altogether, when not shot, because they
were too vicious and unpredictable in their behavior. No one appreciated the trouble
leeches brought, and in certain areas, especially where the soil was unusually rich and
moist and ensconced from adequate air circulation by ravines, heavy underbrush or
land depressions, the leeches seemed to cultivate exceedingly well requiring us to douse
our boots with mosquito repellent to keep them from crawling up our legs into our
crotches.

It was gratifying to walk into a friendly village without going in to destroy it and fnd
villagers hard at work building homes or preparing meals for their families. And if the
inhabitants were not frightened by our presence—all the better. G. I.’s teased and
playacted with the tribe. Gifts might be exchanged. C-rations might be tossed to
scrounging kids begging for food. A charred-wood smell was diffused throughout the
village. Bare-breasted women, nipples chunky and frm, cradled children in their arms
possessing them maternally and offering protection to them from the unstableness of an
army which offered them food by day but at night might bomb them to bits and pieces.
There was no promise of peace and quiet for these people and their country set in
political turmoil for decades. The village now became a memory to the soldier’s past.

The company pushed on farther to a night position where foxholes might be dug and
artillery defensive concentrations were certain to kindle small brush fres and intimidate
neighboring villagers. The security of the night perimeter was much like the fetal
posture. The unit drew itself into itself and felt safe when it covered its head and body
with the security blanket of a circular encampment, with guards watching over it
throughout the night, with radio contact for any emergency, with men well-armed and
fortifed with a flling dinner, with an air force at their beck and call, with helicopter
gunships to whip in and out to sting an attacking enemy.

The moon lit the night. Radios blared, portable record players played popular music.
Chats abounded within the boundary of the secured area. Chinese communist disc-
jockeys beamed romantic soul music, but G. I.’s ignored their political messages happy
to hear familiar tunes from back home. Chilled winds blew in the later part of the day
and early part of the evening, and it was cozy to squat into one’s hootch constructed of
two rain ponchos and there position oneself in the center of the blown-up air mattress
—its rubber aroma foating up to be whiffed at during the night. The body was tired,
aching. Yet, it was frm, resilient from the suffering it was being put through. It did not
take long to fall asleep. One might go to catch Z’s earlier than usual hoping that the
hootch-mate one was assigned to would not enter during an ecstatic masturbation taken
under a poncho liner.

There were other comforts. A good book; a re-read of the letters from home; the latest
issue of Playboy to escape from reality; a good cigar; the knowledge that the M-16 had
been cleaned earlier that day; and, dry, clean socks.

At night, when the noise of one hundred and twenty men abated, one set off to sleep
listening to the sounds of the jungle: its animals, its trees swishing in the wind, its own
powerful presence occasionally disturbed by the clock-clocking of a Huey or the
explosion of an harassment and interdiction (H&I) artillery round sounding off in the
distance with a tremendous pounding to the ground. Nature, in its beauty and splendor,
was too strong even for the United States’ Army which, while despoiling and B-52-
carpet-bombing It, could not take away the time which would come to replenish It in all
Its green brilliance and vitality.

Always a strict creature, Nature was even severer in Vietnam. For all the punishment It
had inficted upon It, It parcelled out Its own. Nature knew It would survive, yet It
yielded high malarious temperatures. It slapped down villagers and soldiers with
tuberculosis, cholera and typhus. Its billowy, dark clouds—bulging their way through
the skies—dropped oceans of rain on roads muddying them, on bodies diseasing them,
on fghter bombers grounding them. When the clouds full of rain scattered at the end of
their season, the hot sun came to parch throats and cake roads to a powdery dust which
blew in the faces of men and clogged the oil-smooth-running machinery of the world’s
most powerful army.

The Sun to the east, the Sun to the west. It was magnifcent in the morning warming
the body after a chilled sleep. At dusk, it set behind gorgeous mountains, its fare
lighting up the skies in posh hues of red, orange, blue white and purple. Cirrus,
cirrostratus, cirrocumulus and altostratus clouds beamed dazzling colors bounced off
them by that sinking luminous celestial body around which the Earth and other planets
revolve, from which they receive heat and light, which has a mean distance from Earth
of 93,000,000 miles, a linear diameter of 864,000 miles, a mass 332,000 times grander
than Earth, and a mean density about one-fourth that of Earth.

I fantasized a champagne breakfast at sunrise in St. Augustine on Florida’s east coast,

and a seafood platter feast at sunset in Cedar Key on Florida’s west coast. The Vietnam
experience would not always be with us, but the Sun would be. And what a gracious,
friendly Sun! The company is drenched with gallons of monsoon rain when then, and
only then, the Sun pops out to steam heat away soaking helmet camoufage covers,
waterlogged fatigues, and sloshing wet boots—those boots Nancy Sinatra keeps
reminding us, as if we did not know, were made for none other than walking!

The chill leaves the body when the heat rays of the Sun pierce their way through army-
issued green santeen duds. The body becomes dry again. Sweat begins to seep through
the fne pores and small openings of the body’s protective garments. The Colt Rife
Company’s famous—but overrated—M-16 is speckled with reddish brown rust particles
which will be removed easily with tiny cloth patches sopped with cleaning oil, one each,
for external use only.

The humping assumes a new, refreshed mood. Stomachs are beginning to growl from
the extra duty imposed on the digestive system to keep the body pushing on through
drafty rains and hot Sun. One must now seek shade from the midday Sun under whose
torrid warmth lunch will be taken. The rucksack is tossed to the base of a tree, the
helmet plunked down on the ground, the rife put to the side close at hand, the pistol
belt is unlatched, the canteen reached for with both hands in a caressing gesture and
swigs are had from the olive drab plastic container which holds that precious liquid
refreshment more pretentious than a good bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape.
A pleasant intermission comes to us. Within the inventory of the Universe there is a
large stream one-hundred meters from our lunch break position, and our company
commander has “tender-heartedly” given us permission to bathe and wash clothes in
the shadiness of the spread of a richly-vegetated idyllic forest scene. The winsomeness
of the area is incomparable. Trees and colourful shrubs abound. The current fows
coolly and its sparkling, crystal-clear waters lower the body temperature and revive the
mind to make it as translucent and alive as the colorless, glass-like surface of the
charging brook. The spirit of the men becomes brisk. There is horseplay. There is fun.
The only grim reminder of the war is the fve naked guards who have been placed on
duty to protect the splashing, frolicking infantrymen. Soap suds begin to dull the upper
boundary of the stream as men scrub at socks and fatigue shirts and their very own
bodies. More than a hundred nudes. There is little modesty, shame. The release from
the oppressing load of the rucksack has encouraged all of us to forget our slavery and
enjoy, as much as we can, this little grab at joy. There is no bitching when the call to
regroup is made. The men want to savor this encounter with Nature for at least the rest
of the day, and rather than fght or pick at their plight, they permit their disciplined
bodies and minds to respond automatically, involuntarily, to the command of that army
they disrespect and despise. The rucksack, harnessed to strong backs for the umpteenth
time, feels lighter than was once imagined in the frigid waters of the river.

The men head out, in single fle, in silent resolve. Whatever their thoughts are, they are
personal, intense. The men intertwine with Nature. They have taken comfort from
Nature’s powerful ability to stand and endure. They look up to the blue and know that
those fuffy white cottony nebulas will turn blackish gray by late afternoon and pour
down huge droplets of water condensed from vapor into the boundless atmosphere
which infltrates the Vietnamese countryside, the hearts and minds of all men and
women and even the United States’ Army. They look to the ground and sense the
frmness of the Earth—its hardened exterior always waiting to take without recoil or
echo the hammering of that steel-plated-in-the-sole jungle boot, two each, green-
canvassed at their sides. Soldiers look to the right, to the left. There are only green trees
and lush jungle bushes to catch the eye. The company has reached a level of Platonic
Transcendentalism. They have superseded, for a short time, the yoke of their own
inhibiting prejudices and the preconceived judgements of others, and in unity, the
fellowship of infantry fght specialists have intuited the truth about their fellow man and
have felt, while not intellectualising it, the value of virtuous conduct. Chained to their
rocks as Prometheus, the “grunts” have begun to stop warring with their oppressors.
They have taken the steps to understand and pity them. They have found hope in the
possibility of a better order of Life, and they have sought, through the simplicity of
Nature, to seek peace and good will among all men on Earth without recrimination and
penalty.”

(Taken from my Husky: A Vietnam “War” Imbecile)

After a short time in Vietnam, I was to discover that Romanticism in war is

an obsolete advantage—even though it had not been so for me personally.
In Vietnam I read 72 books; many of them had been banned by the Roman
Catholic church lacking its nihil obstat stamp of approval. Helicopters would
send with our unit's mailbag another huge nylon sack crammed with
hometown newspapers, skin mags, bibles, sports magazines, Shakespeare,
Aristotle, Sartre, Stendhal, et alia. Even Chairman Mao's The Little Red
Book. Not a word was said to me about it, but when my sister sent me a
subscription to The New York Times, I was called a communist! I get on my
knees, even now, and thank the American Red Cross for giving me the
opportunity to educate myself without being browbeaten by priests in black
cassocks who favored St.Thomas Acquinas' three good reasons for waging
war—not peace! I was not going to let the US Army, and its religious
fanatics, have me sink into their throes of despair.

The atomic bomb had made any fght, battle, contact, engagement,
encounter or war a futile endeavor. One cannot feel achievement of mastery
or success in a struggle against odds or diffculties when the outcome one
contributes to is mediocre for you but devastating for your enemy. Any
military victory when compared to the totally withering effect of that
mushroom-shaped cloud, is of no consequence whatsoever. This is one fact
of modern military philosophy that was understood better in Vietnam by
the illiterate grunt from the green hills of Tennessee, than it was
comprehended by the most sophisticated high-ranking offcials from the
U S Army's Staff College, and the war closets of the nation's battle-
planning executive offces in the Pentagon. Many feld grade offcers I knew
in Vietnam, off the cuff, yearned for the use of atomic weaponry in
Vietnam, especially North Vietnam, to “blow to smithereens those bastard
gooks!” And the troops, especially the grunts, questioned why and what
they were doing in Vietnam when the atom bomb could send them home
lickety-split.

I suppose it would be logical for someone to ask the question “Well, if this
artillery frst lieutenant had been sent to Vietnam to fght a war, how was it
possible for him to traipse through the mosquito-infested jungles of the
Central Highlands on a Romantic kick, and read 72 books while doing so?”
The answer is extremely simple: The Vietnam “War” was not a war; it was
a “war!” DUS citizens were brainwashed to believe the Vietnam “War” was
a war, when it defnitely was not. To learn more about why I think the
Vietnam “War” was an exercise in logistics, and the almost perfect
amalgamation of the industrial complex with the military complex, a dream
come true for large corporations and the New York Stock Exchange,
gripped in a horrifc 1962 recession, please refer to my extremely
interesting, unsavoury (for you!) article, The Vietnam “War” Laid Bare—
Finally!, www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior and fnd out for yourselves! You
might be shocked.

If one would count the casualties, dead and wounded, of the enemies of the
DisUnited States in Vietnam, the actual total amount would be outweighed
by the bombings North Vietnam had to sustain from B-52s many of which
had been stationed on the island of Guam. It is necessary to include the
victims of the dioxin (Agent Orange) sprayings that even today haunt
Vietnamese families many of whose children have been born with birth
defects caused by these chemical warfare instruments that injured civilian
men, women, children and the elderly. (Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell,
Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn [A People's History of the United States]
have documented very assiduously the crimes committed by the DisUnited
States government in Vietnam. More bombs were dropped on Laos and
Cambodia than all the bombs dropped during the Second World War.)

Americans love war. They are good at it. And bombing is their specialty.
Let it be said that Americans are a wonderful people—if they are not
bombing you.

Authored by Anthony St. John

25 April MMXVIII
Calenzano, Italy
www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior
anthony.st.john1944@gmail.com
Twitter: @thewordwarrior

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