Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (20 page)

I don't think anybody had asked me that in twenty years. My pacifist sympathies are pretty obvious, at least to my friends and most of my students—even to most of my readers, I hope. (Reading is funny, though; a novel is a projection test. People have written me about
The Forever War
, for instance, praising it for being anti-military, which I think is simplistic, or pro-war, indicating a lack of reading skills—and in one case, even for being anti-Semitic, which I'm still trying to figure out.)

How many did I kill in Vietnam? Technically, the answer to the question is “none.” (In fact, I once refused a direct order to kill a man, which is another story.) But the actual answer, as far as the victims themselves were concerned, is twenty or thirty people, North Vietnamese Regular Army troops. Maybe more. The next question, which my student refrained from asking, is “How did you feel about it?” And the terrible, true answer is “Neutral.”

That requires some amplification. In real life, a person who kills twenty or thirty people and feels neutral about it will cop an insanity plea, go to jail, and get a best-seller out of the experience. I've only done one of these things.

Actually, I never killed anybody in the sense of pointing a weapon at him and pulling the trigger. In fact, I tried to forestall the necessity of finding out whether I could or would do that, at several levels.

First, I tried to register as a conscientious objector. The draft board required a letter from a minister. Atheists don't have ministers, though, and I was politically naive enough to let it go at that. (A year later, the law was challenged in the courts and of course was declared unconstitutional.) I tried for alternate service in the Peace Corps, preferring six years digging ditches in Africa to one, digging foxholes, in Vietnam, and got drafted while the papers were being pushed.

In response to a bulletin board notice at Basic Training camp, I waved my physics degree at the Army and offered to sign up for four years of nuclear power plant operation. True, I'd have to spend two years, maybe three, in a radioactive underground bunker in Antarctica, but again, that sounded better than the bunkers in Vietnam. They said I was “overqualified” for the position.

Finally, sent to Vietnam, I found that you could volunteer to be an unarmed combat medic, or assistant medic, and tried to be reassigned. But they said they didn't need medics; they needed combat engineers. When I finally got to the field, I told the sergeant that I couldn't kill anyone. He said, in effect, “Okay. Just carry this weapon and see what happens.”

What does all this have to do with science fiction? There is a connection. Because I got through the war with a clean conscience. I didn't realize—or admit to myself—that I had killed those twenty or thirty people until long after they were dead. You could be fanciful and say they were for a while simultaneously dead and not dead, like Schrödinger's Cat. But what generated the paradox was not quantum mechanics. It was a very science-fictional aspect of modern warfare.

Let me digress a little bit about science fiction. You can't compel any two scholars, or any two readers, to agree on a definition of science fiction, even though the energy expended on arguing over it since Hugo Gernsback's day would power a space ship to the Moon. Most people would be willing to concede that it has something to do with science, and something to do with human nature—and here's a list of two hundred exceptions to whatever you were going to say.

Well, the science part is just wrong, as is occasionally pointed out, even if you first disqualify stories set in the future that have only to do with history, religion, politics, or other nonscientific stuff. With few and interesting exceptions, even “hard” science fiction deals not with science but with technology, which relates to humanity in a totally different way. In the physical sciences, if you are limited to a natural human language you can only approximate truth; the actual verities have to be expressed in the various dialects of mathematics. As the life sciences move into smaller and more subtle realms, this becomes true for them as well. Even the behavioral sciences move away from natural language as they evolve toward precision, or at least the appearance of it. So it's extremely difficult to write a science fiction story
about science
that has both literary value and scientific rigor.

Technology is another matter. Plenty of cold numbers and equations are used up in design and manufacture, but a finished product radiates a kind of secondary humanity, because it was designed for human needs. We sense this radiation even when we're not sure of the thing's function, as is often the case with obscure medical or scientific equipment, or the arcane utensils of the chef, the mechanic, the artisan—and we become nervous around artifacts that are patently anti-functional. Dadaist sculptors and their descendants have capitalized on this tension, and there's a comical avatar of it in the Boston Museum of Science: a machine the size of a small room that is constantly busy, with hundreds of moving parts, and no observable function whatsoever. It's interesting to watch people watching it. They giggle, and point things out to each other: watch what happens when the ball gets to the bottom of this spiral ramp. See? Now the bell's gonna go off.

This childlike, more or less
boy
-like, fascination with machines is a dominant motif in science fiction, especially the subgenre of military sf. Can you think of a single military sf story of any length that doesn't describe, usually in loving detail, the tools of the future soldier's trade? I can't offhand, though it's such an obvious direction for a story that I'd be surprised if it hasn't been done more than once. But I'm no expert; I don't often read military sf novels any more, or mainstream military novels, for that matter. They don't seem to speak to my experience.

The machines, though. Like most American boys of my generation and previous ones, I had a childhood dominated by weapons-oriented play. Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, soldiers. Some enlightened parents nowadays try to prevent their children from acting out these unhealthy fantasies; I would be inclined to do the same, if I were a parent. But I suspect that prohibition, predictably, just makes it that much sweeter when he sneaks out to do it in secret.

When he grows up somewhat—assuming history cooperates—and steps off some olive-drab bus to get his head shaved, his eardrums bruised by a surly sergeant, and his identity excised in a hundred large and small ways, the Army does have one positive thing to offer the confused man-child: guns that actually shoot. That's no small boon for the majority, who never handled the country boy's .22 or the inner-city boy's zipgun. I was not exactly a boy, having been sheltered from the draft by academe up to the ancient age of 24, but I liked this new thing of shooting almost as much as the impressionable kids did. Rifle marksmanship was a physical and mental challenge, and the occasional experience with more exotic weapons—bazooka, machine gun, grenade launcher—was a flamboyant exercise in pyrotechnic power. I don't recall even once contemplating what these things would do to human flesh, which I suppose is what psychologists call “avoidance,” but until I actually received orders for Vietnam, I was sure the Army would find a computer, or at least a typewriter, to put me behind.

Instead, wading through the snow of a hard Missouri winter, they taught us how to construct hasty bridges, build roads, tie knots, use a jackhammer and a Skil saw, and various other things that the book says an Army Engineer should be able to do. We never even saw the only things we would, in a few months, actually be using in the jungle heat: pick, shovel, axe, machete, chain saw, plastic explosive, M-16, napalm.

People think that napalm is something dropped from airplanes. It's not always. But let me not get ahead of myself.

It's an eighteen-hour flight from the West Coast to Vietnam, and we were about an hour from landing when I first had the sense of entering an alien world. It was about one in the morning; I woke up from a light nervous sleep and looked out the porthole. I couldn't recognize any of the stars. That was profound: I had been interested in astronomy, sometimes to the point of fanaticism, since I was a Cub Scout, and the constellations were as familiar to me as the faces of family members. But I'd never been to the tropics. For the first time in my life I was looking at the Southern Cross, Alpha Centauri, the Magellanic Clouds. I stared for a long time, transfixed, and the plane began its descent. Soon there were lights on the ground as well, the red spray of tracers and smoky orange billowing napalm. The base where we were landing was under attack.

We landed without incident—the fighting was going on at the other end of the large base, several miles away—and entered yet another alien world, a surreal one. They herded us into a mess hall and someone handed me a large spoon, and for an hour I served instant mashed potatoes to hundreds of people who didn't seem to notice that there was a war going on outside. I felt like I was caught in the middle of a Pinter play. After my shift I spent a couple of hours sitting behind the mess hall, sipping warm beer and watching the helicopters bob and weave, spitting flame, firing rockets. Men dying under alien stars, literally.

There followed a couple of weeks of growing tension while people tried to cram into us the training we should have had in the States. In jungle warfare in the sixties, the main function of a combat engineer in the field was to carry on his person enough high explosive to level a city block. It was a dead dangerous weight until you ran into the enemy. Then, ideally, while the fighting raged, you would take a couple of riflemen and drop back a ways in order to clear a landing zone for helicopters, which would evacuate the wounded and bring in supplies. To do this, you affixed explosive to the largest trees and blew them down, then cleared out the smaller stuff with axe and machete, hoping that it hadn't occurred to the enemy to circle around and see what was going on. It wasn't the safest job in the world, but at least for me, it was psychologically easier to endure than most combat positions, since you could tell yourself you were engaged in saving life rather than taking it.

(But we also learned how to use other people's weapons—even Russian and Chinese weapons that we might scavenge on the battlefield—and how to call in artillery and air support. Because if enough of the infantry were killed, we'd have to take their place.)

The next alien world was alien primarily in an existential way, though the surroundings were strange enough. That was when I was first sent out into combat.

I was sitting in a fire base, a semi-permanent camp in a secure valley, learning how to take apart and clean chain saws. The sergeant came running up and said you, you, and you, saddle up and get down to the pad. I was given 500 extra rounds of ammunition and a case of beer, and told we were going to a “hot LZ”; a landing zone that was under fire, so the helicopter wouldn't actually land. It would come within a few feet of the ground, and we were to jump out and land running.

It was terrifying. As we descended, you could hear the gunfire even over the throbbing of the helicopter's straining engine and blades. I didn't know that the gunfire was all from our side, trying to keep the enemy's collective head down while the chopper came in. It was no more than twenty yards from where we jumped out to where a GI was waving from behind a stack of sandbags; I don't believe my feet touched the ground three times in those twenty yards.

None of us was hurt coming in. I hunkered down behind the sandbags and passed out the beer and ammunition, both appreciated, and tried to will myself to relax. I couldn't. The firing stopped but the smell persisted. They had been in the same position for two days, and the jungle around them was full of enemy dead, rotting in the damp tropical heat. We had a few dead ourselves, decently tucked away in body bags, including the man I'd been sent to replace. With less than a month left in Vietnam, he'd been shot through the heart by a sniper.

The guy who told me that, as if to even things up, took me off to see the latest treasure, a freshly killed enemy scout whose body and gear they had dragged inside our perimeter. I'd never before seen a dead person who hadn't had the benefit of an undertaker's ministrations. I steeled myself for the experience—but someone had moved the body, which made me feel relieved and annoyed and obscurely weirded out. The Walking Dead and all. But I got to hold his rusty, bloody rifle and sort through the sad mementos he'd left behind. A letter, presumably from home, unfolded and refolded many times, a wallet with a little useless currency, a military ID that said he was only sixteen years old. He had walked down from Hanoi, two thousand miles of jungle trail, to cross over into South Vietnam and spend his first and last day in combat absorbing one American bullet.

Then the enemy machine guns started up again, from a new angle, and we ran for cover, bullets whirring around. I spent the rest of the afternoon in or near shallow makeshift bunkers while sporadic gunfire probed the invisible perimeter. Just before dark the artillery started, a salvo coming in every few minutes to protect us, crashing just beyond that perimeter. But it was a double-edged sword; the shrapnel sometimes whined overhead, and a piece the size of a dessert plate opened up the back of a lieutenant's hand as he slept, a few yards from me. I had a feeling that I wasn't going to get much sleep that night, and I was right.

That's when I visited another alien world, and as I've said, it was an existential one as much as physical. The other soldiers helped; they all said some version of “Hell, this is nothing; you should've been here last week”—and I didn't know enough about human nature to realize I was being hazed. In fact, it was the heaviest action they'd ever seen. To me, though, lying there wide awake while the jungle shook and flashed with explosions, while the air sang with bullets and fragments and stank of the dead, while wounded men cried and muttered, desperate men whispered into radios and bellycrawled from position to position—I was seized with an absolute conviction that I was going to die. Nobody could live through a year of this. It was just as certain as the doctor snapping on the X-ray viewer and saying maybe a year, maybe a month, maybe tomorrow; there's nothing we can do.