College America Phoenix Breathing in Article Discussion Why is new journalism equated to personal autobiographical narrative? Why was this type of journalism concerned with movement, or the story around the story? What are the pros and/or cons of this type of journalism? Breathing In
There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in
Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’d lie
out on my bed and look at .it, too tired to do anything more
than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially
now that it wasn’t real anymore. For one thing, it was very
old. It had been left there years before by another tenant,
probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in
Paris. The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the
wet. Saigon ~eat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it
depicted. Vietnam was divided into its older territories of
Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, and to the west past
Laos and Cambodge sat Siam, a kingdom. That’s old, I’d tell
visitors, that’s a really old map.
If dead ground could come back and haunt you the way
dead people do, they’d have been able to mark my map CURRENT and burn the ones they’d been using since ’64, but
count on it, nothing like that was going to happen. It was late
’67 now, even the most detailed maps didn’t reveal much
anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of
the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to. read the wind.
We knew that the uses of most information were flexible,
different pieces of ground told different stories to different
people. We also knew that for years now there had been no
country here but the war.
The Mission was always telling us about VC units being
engaged and wiped out and then reappearing a month later
in full strength, there was nothing very spooky about that, but
when we went up against his terrain we usually took it defini.,.
tively, and even if we didn’t keep it you could always see that
we’d at least been there. At the end of my first week incountry I met an information officer· in the headquarters of
the 25th Division at Cu Chi who showed me on his map and
then from his chopper what they’d done to the 80 Bo
Woods, the vanished 80 Bo Woods, taken off by giant Rome
plows and chemicals and long, slow fire, wasting hundreds of
acres of cultivated plantation and wild forest alike, “denying
the enemy valuable resourcesatzd cover.”
It had been part of his job for nearly a year now to tell
people about that operation; correspondents, touring· congressmen, movie stars, corporation presidents, staff officers
from half the armies in the world, ahd he still couldn’t get
over it. It seemed to be keeping him young, his enthusiasm
made you feel that even the letters he wrote home to his wife
were full of it, it really showed what you could do if you had
the know-how and the .hardware. And if in the months following that operation incidences of enemy activity in the
larger area of WarZone C had increased “significantly,” and
American losses had doubled and then doubled again, none
of it was happening in any damn Ho Bo Woods, you’d better
believe it. . . .
Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine
breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar. I never saw the
need for them myself, a little contact or anything that even
sounded like contact would give me more speed than I could
bear. Whenever I heard something outside of our clenched
. little circle I’d practically flip, hoping to God that I wasn’t
the only one who’d noticed it. A couple of rounds fired off in
the dark a kilometer away and the Elephant would be there
kneeling on my chest, sending me down into my boots for a
breath. Once I thought I saw a light moving in the jungle and
I caught myself just under a whisper saying, “I’m not ready
for this, I’m not ready for this.” That’s when I decided to
drop it and dq something else with my nights. And I wasn’t
going out like the night ambushers did, or the Lurps, longrange recon patrollers who did it night after night for weeks
and months, creeping up on VC base camps or around moving columns of North Vietnamese. I was living too close to
my bones as it was, all I had to do was accept it. Anyway, I’d
save the pills for later, for Saigon and the awful depressions I
always had there.
I knew one 4th Division Lurp who took his pills by the
fistful, downs from the left pocket of his tiger. suit and ups
from the right, one to cut the trail for him and the other to
send him down it. He told me that they cooled things out just
right for him, that he could see that old jungle at night like he
was looking at it through a starlight scope. “They sure give
you the range,” he said.
This was his third tour. In 1965 he’d been the only survivor in a platoon of the Cay wiped out going into the Ia
Drang Valley. In ’66 he’d. come backwith the Special Forces.
and one morning after an ambush he’d hidden under the
bodies of his team while the VC walked all around them with
knives, making sure. They stripped the bodies of their gear,
the berets too, and finally went away, laughing. After that,
there was nothing left for him in the war except the Lurps.
“I just can’t hack it back in the World,” he said. He told
me that after he’d come back home the last time he would sit
in his room all day, and sometimes he’d stick a hunting rifle
out the window, leading people and cars as they passed his
house until the only feeling he was aware of was all up in the
tip of that one finger. “It used to put my folks real uptight,”
he said. But he put people uptight here too, even here.
“No man, I’m sorry, he’s just too crazy for me,” one of the
men in his team said. “All’s you got to do is look in his eyes,
that’s the whole fucking story right there.”
“Yeah, but you better do it quick,” someone else said. “I
mean, you don’t want to let him catch you at it.”
But he always seemed to be watching for it, I think he
slept with his eyes open, and I was afraid of him anyway; All
I ever managed was one quick look in, and that was like
looking at the floor of an ocean. He wore a gold earring and
a headband torn from a piece of camouflage parachute material, and since nobody was about to tell him to get his hair
cut it fell below his shoulders, covering a thick purple scar.
Even at. division he never went anywhere without at least a
.45 and a knife, and he· thought I was a freak because I
wouldn’t carry a weapon.
“Didn’t you ever meet a reporter before?” I asked him.
“Tits on a bull,” he said. “Nothing personal.”
But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant
as any war story lever heard, it took me a year to understand it:
“Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He
died before he could tell us what happened.”
I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of
story; when I asked him what had happened he just looked
like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he’d waste time telling
stories to anyone dumb as I was.
His face was all painted up for night walking now like a
bad hallucination, not like the painted faces I’d seen in San
Francisco only a few weeks before, the other extreme of the
same theater. In the coming hours he’d stand as faceless and
. quiet in the jungle as a fallen tree, and God help his opposite
numbers unless they had at least half a squad along, he was a
good killer, one of our best. The rest of his team were gathered outside the tent, set a little apart from the other division
I
units, with its own Lurp-designated latrine and its own exclusive freeze-dry rations, three-star. war fooc:I,the same chop
they sold at Abercrombie & Fitch. The regular division
troops would almost shy off the path when they passed the
area on their way to and from the mess tent. No matter how
toughened up they became in the war, they still looked innocent compared to the Lurps. When the team had grouped
they walked in a file down the hill to the lz across the strip to
the perimeter and into the treeline.
I never spoke to him again, but I saw him. When they
came back in the next morning he had a prisoner with him,
blindfolded and with his elbows bound sharply behind him.
The Lurp area would definitely be off limits during the interrogation, and anyway, I was already down at the strip waiting for a helicopter to come and take me out of there.
“Hey what’re you guys, with the USa? Aw, we thought you
was with the usa ’cause your hair’s so long.” Page took the
kid’s picture, I got the words down and Flynn laughed and
told him we were the Rolling StOnes. The three of us traveled
around together for about ~ month that summer. At one lz
the brigade c,hopper came in with a real foxtail hanging off
the aerial, when the commander walked by us he almost took
an infarction.
“Don’t you men salute officers?”
“We’re not men,” Page said. “We’re correspondents.”
When the commander heard that, he wanted to throw a
spontaneous operation for us, crank up his whole brigade
and get some people killed. We had to get out on the next
chopper to keep him from going ahead with it, amazing what
some of them would do fora little ink. Page liked to augment
his field gear with freak paraphernalia, Scarves and beads,
plus he was English, guys would stare at him like he’d just
Breathing In
come down off a wall on Mars. Sean Flynn could look more
incredibly beautiful than even his father, Errol, had thirty
years before as Captain Blood, but sometimes he looked
more like Artaud coming out of some heavy heart-of-darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input! The
input! He’d give off a bad sweat and sit for hours, combing
his mustache through with the saw blade of his ,Swiss Army
knife. We packed grass and tape: Have You Seen Your
Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows, Best of the Animals,
Strange Days, Purple Haze, Archie Bell and the Drells,
“C’mon now everybody, do the Tighten Up ….
” Once in a
while we’d catch a chopper straight into one of the lower
hells, but it was a quiet time in the war, mostly it was lz’s and
camps, grunts hanging around, faces, stories.
“Best way’s to just keep moving,” one of them told us.
“Just keep moving, stay in motion, you know what I’m
saying?”
We knew. He was a moving-target-survivor subscriber, a
true child of the war, because except for the rare times when
you were pinned or stranded the system was geared to keep
you mobile, if that was what you thought you wanted. As a
technique for staying alive it seemed to make as much sense
as anything, given naturally that you were there to begin
with and wanted to see it close; it started out sound and
straight but it formed a cone as it progressed, because the
more you moved the more you saw, the more you saw the
more besides death and mutilation you risked, and the more
you risked of that the more you would have to let go of one
day as a “survivor.” Some of us moved around the war like
crazy people until we couldn’t see which way the run was
even taking us anymore, only the war all over its surface with
occasional, .unexpected penetration. As long as we could
have choppers like taxis it took real exhaustion or depression
near shock or a dozen pipes of opium to keep us even appar-
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ently quiet, we’d still be running around inside our skins like
something was after us, ha ha, La Vida Loca.
In the months after I got back the hundreds of helicopters
I’d flown in began to draw together until they’d formed a
collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it waS the sexiest
thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left
hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human; hot steel, grease,
jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming
up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gunfire
in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly
an intruder. Men on the crews would say that once you’d
carried a dead person he would always be there, riding with
you. Like all combat people they were incredibly superstitious and invariably self-dramatic, but it was (I knew) unbearably true that close exposure to the dead sensitized’ you
to the force of their presence and made for long reverberations; long. Some people were so delicate that one look was
enough to wipe them away, but even bone-dumb grunts
seemed to feel that something weird and extra was happening
to them.
Helicopters and people jumping out of helicopters, people
so in love they’d run to get on even when there wasn’t any
pressure. Choppers rising straight out of small cleared jungle
spaces, wobbling down onto city rooftops, cartons of rations
and ammunition thrown off, dead and wounded loaded on.
Sometimes they were so plentiful and loose that you could
touch down at, five or six places ina day, look around, hear
the talk, catch the next one out. There were installations as
big as cities with 30,000 citizens, once we dropped in to feed
supply to one man. God knows what kind of Lord Jim phoenix numbers he was doing in there, all he said to me was,
“You didn’t see a thing, right Chief? You weren’t even here.”
There were posh fat air-conditioned camps like’ comfortable
middle-class scenes with the violence tacit, “far away”;
Breathing In
camps named for commanders’ wives, LZ Thelma, LZ Betty
Lou; number-named hilltops in trouble where I didn’t want
to stay; trail, paddy, swamp, deep hairy bush, scrub, swale,
village, even city, where the ground couldn’t drink up what
the action spilled, it made you careful where you walked.
Sometimes the chopper you were riding in would top a hill
and all the ground in front of you as far as the next hill
would be charred and pitted and still smoking, and some. thing between your chest and your stomach would turn over.
Frail gray smoke where they’d burned off the rice fields
around a free-strike zone, brilliant white smoke from phosphorus (”Willy PeteJ,”/Make you a buh liever”), deep black
smoke from ‘palm, they said that if you stood at the base of a
column of napalm smoke it would suck the air right out of
your lungs. Once we fanned over a little ville that had just
been airstruck and the words of a song by Wingy Manone
that I’d heard when I was a few years old snapped into my
head, “Stop the War, These Cats Is Killing Themselves.”
Then we dropped, hovered, settled down into purple lz
smoke, dozens of children broke from their hootches to run
in toward the focus of our landing, the pilot laughing and
saying, “Vietnam, man. Bomb ’em and feed ’em, bomb ’em
and feed ’em.”
Flying over jungle was almost pure pleasure, doing it on
foot was nearly all pain. I never belonged in there. Maybe it
really was what its people had always called it, Beyond; at
the very least it was serious, I gave up things to it I probably
never got back. (“Aw, jungle’s okay. If you know her you
can live in her real good, if you don’t she’ll take you down in
an hour. Under.”) Once in some thick jungle comer with
some grunts standing around,a correspondent said, “Gee,
you must really see some beautiful sunsets in here,” and they
almost pissed themselves laughing. But you could fly up and
into hot tropic sunsets that would change the’ way you
/
II
thought about light forever. You could also fly out of places
that were so grim they turned to black and white in your
head five minutes after you’d gone.
That could be the coldest one in the world, standing at the
edge of a clearing watching the chopper you’d just come in
on taking off again, leavillg you there to think about what it
was going to be for you now: if this was a bad place, the
wrong place, maybe even the last place,and whether you’d
. made a terrible mistake this time.
There was a camp at Soc Trang where a man at the lz
said, “If you come looking for a story this is your lucky day,
we got Condition Red here,'” and before the sound ‘of the
chopper had faded out, I knew I had it too.
.
“That’s affirmative,” the camp commander said, “we are
definitely expectmg rain. Glad to see you.” He was a young
captain, he was laughing and taping a bunch of sixteen clips
together bottom to bottom for faster reloading, “grease.”
Everyone there was ‘busy at it, cracking crates, squirreling
away grenades, checking mortar pieces, piling rounds, clicking banana clips into automatic weapons that I’d never even
seen before. They were wired into their listening posts out
around the camp, into each other, into themselves, and when
it got dark it got worse. The moon came up nasty and full, a
fat moist piece of decadent fruit. It was soft and saffronmisted when you looked up at it, but its light over the sandbags and into the jungle was harsh and bright. We were all
rubbing Army-issue nightfighter cosmetic under our eyes to
cut the glare and the terrible. things it made you see.
(Around midnight, just for something to do, I crossed to the
other perimeter and looked at the road running engineerstraight toward Route 4 like a yellow frozen ribbon’ out of
sight and Isaw it move, the whole road.) There were a few
sharp arguments about who the light really favored, attackers or defenders, men were sitting around with Cinemascope eyes and jaws stuck out like they could shoot bullets,
moving and antsing and shifting around inside their fatigues.
“No sense us getting too relaxed, Charlie don’t relax, just
when you get good and comfortable is when he comes over
and takes a giant shit on you.” That was the level until morning, I smoked a pack an hour all night long, and nothing
happened. Ten minutes after daybreak I was down at the lz
asking about choppers.
A few days later Sean Flynn and I went up to a big firebase in the Americal TAOR that took it all the way over to
another extreme, National Guard weekend. The colonel in
command was so drunk that day that he could barely get his
words out, and when he did, it was to say things like, “We
aim to make good and goddammit sure that if those guys try
anything cute they won’t catch us with our pants down.” The
main mission there was to fire H&I, but one man told us·
that their record was the worst in the whole Corps, probably
the whole country, they’d harassed and .interdicted a lot of
sleeping civilians and Korean Marines, even a couple of
Americal patrols, but hardly any Viet Congo (The colonel
kept calling it “artillerary.” The first time he said it Flynn
and I looked away from .each other, the second time we blew
beer through our noses, but the colonel fell in laughing right
away and more than covered us.) No sandbags, exposed
shells; dirty pieces, guys going around giving US that look,·
“We’re cool, how come you’re not?” At the strip Sean was
talking to the operator about it and the man got angry. “Oh
yeah? Well fuck you, how tight do you think you want it?
There ain’t been any veecees around here in three months.”
“So far so good,” Sean said. “Hear anything on that chopper yet?”
But sometimes everything stopped, nothing flew, you
couldn’t even find out why. I got stuck for a chopper once in
some lost patrol outpost in the Delta where the sergeant
chain-ate candy bars and played country-and-western tapes
twenty hours a day until I heard it in my sleep, some .sleep,
Up on Wolverton.Mountain and Lonesome as the bats and
the bears in Miller’s Cave and I fell into a burning ring of
fire, surrounded by strungout rednecks who weren’t getting
much sleep either because they couldn’t trust one of their 400
mercenary troopers or their own hand-picked perimeter
guards or anybody else except maybe Baby Ruth and Johnny
Cash, they’d been waiting for it so long now they were afraid
they woulqn’t know it when they finally got it, and it burns
burns burns ….
Finally on the fourth day a helicopter
came in to deliver meat and movies to the camp and I went
out on. it, so happy to get back to Saigon that I didn’t crash
for two days.
Airmobility, dig it, you weren’t going anywhere. It made you
feel ·safe, it made you feel Omni, but it was only a stunt,
technology. Mobility was just mobility, it saved lives or took
them ali the time (saved mine I don’t know how many times,
maybe dozens, maybe none), what you really needed was a
flexibility far greater than anything the technology .could
provide, some generous, spontaneous gift for accepting surprises, and I didn’t have it. I got to hate surprises, control
freak at the crossroads, if you were one of those people who
always thought…
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