In the early morning hours of January 31,1968 we were awakened by the sound of incoming mortar and automatic weapon fire. This was not unusual. We were accustomed to the VC dropping in mortar rounds in an attempt to do some damage but such attempts generally broke off once a couple gunships were up. I was surprised when it continued and intensified. Within a few hours it became apparent that this was a very different kind of enemy action, and not just for us. The Tet offensive, an extraordinary demonstration of secrecy, planning, and execution on the part of the NVR and VC was igniting all across South Vietnam.
Heavy and sustained attacks continued for three days. The field was completely surrounded and a portion of the runway had been over run. C-129 and Caribou crews were pushing pallets of supplies out of the rear cargo doors using parachutes as the field was too hot for fixed wings to land. A burned-out C-129 was smoking on the far end of the runway. During the day the F-105s and F-4s dropped white phosphorous and napalm around the permitter. Medivacs would come in when it was safe to land. The night sky was lit up yellow from hundreds of flares dropped by Army fixed-wing. At each nightfall the VC and NVR launched renewed attacks, pushing to penetrate more of our perimeter. Fall-back defensive positions armed with M-60s, .50 calibers, and mortars had been set up behind sand-bags and atop steel shipping containers to counter the loss of perimeter guard towers. Orders were simple: Shoot anything that moves. Nobody slept. After three days and nights of heavy fighting the attacks began to lessen. A few more nights and it appeared that we had held. It was close-run.
Late on the third or forth day several of us were standing by as the last Medivac lifted off. There was a lull in the noise and chaos as watched the helicopter disappear over the trees. It felt as if someone should say something, an acknowledgement, words. Maybe we were too exhausted and on-edge, too focused on listening for anyone to speak or know what to say when an Australian Infantry Officer spoke up. He had been catching hops across country, headed somewhere north, when Tet blew and free rides came to a halt. His bad luck. He said that if no one objected he would be honored to offer a eulogy. No objections.
‘It’s a bit of a poem,’ he said, ‘a custom among armies of the Commonwealth.’ We asked him to go ahead. It was short. I’d never heard it before. He took off his cap and spoke.
They shall not grow old,
As we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
But in the coming of the morning,
And the setting of the sun,
We who are left remember them.
‘That’s not quite the right words,’ he said, ‘but…..’ and his voice trailed off.
Attacks resumed at dusk. The first sound was the scream of 122 mm rockets. Topped with a substantial explosive charge, they came in so fast that by the time you heard the sound it was often too late to find cover. The had a range of 5000 yards, a kill radius of up to a hundred, and when added to motar and automatic weapon fire made for long nights. I forgot the poem spoken less than an hour earlier, forgot the eulogy. Decades would pass before I thought about that poem.
What do you remember about the war, people sometimes ask, a question you may ask of yourself. Answer? What you choose to remember, a sliver of what you chose to forget. I remember big skies with huge cumulous clouds and during the rainy season always a thunderstorm somewhere on the horizon. The delta was as flat and broad as the Georgia salt marshes and at an altitude of 500 feet the horizon was distant and blurred. Much of it was agricultural, farmers working fields crisscrossed by dikes, narrow straight sand road and footpaths, clumps and rows of trees, and through the center the Mekong’s ‘level drifting breadth.’
At 500 feet it could appear and often was peaceful. Tree lines and tall grass could hide a lot, however. It was a terrain that could absorb a lot of hits, small arms fire disappearing into the grass and mud and water, even the impact of artillery could green over after a rain. I was reminded of this much later by a line in ‘Heart of Darkness,’ and Conrad’s description of a French man-of-war firing its cannons at a forested coastline, “In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.” I didn’t know about Conrad at the time. The line of destruction that followed a B-52 strike would show longer.
I remember the importance of solitude. There were quiet times. Some guy described the war as long periods of boredom with regular interruptions of violence, a description said to describe most wars. When the time was available, I would find some place where I could just sit, watch, nap maybe, not talk, sometimes read. I was fortunate in this respect. I remember discovering Faulkner. In its mysterious ways the US Army had installed a one room library in a small building that had been built by the French. It contained a copy of Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner. I read it, not at a single sitting, it’s too long for that and, besides, there were other things going on, but I kept at it until I’d read it all. The effect was profound and lasting. It was as if Shreve McCannon’s request was answered, answered much more completely than the story told by Quinton Compson’s in the novel ‘Absalom, Absalom.’ Shreve, Quinton’s Canadian roommate at Havard, asked of Quinton. “Tell about the South. What’s it like there? What do they do there? Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?”
But that’s not quite right because, unlike McCannon, I was from the South, so reading it told me everything I already knew, already knew but not expressed in such detail. Or thought or imagined I knew. How much of our memories are cobbled together from listening to our parents, uncles and aunts, talk about their youth, made up from old photographs, living around the remnants of an older time? My memories follow a familiar quotation from Faulkner, again from ‘Absalom, Absalom,’ and again Quinton Compson, listening to his father speaking, “But you were not listening, because you knew it all already, had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and do.” Not all of it, of course, not everything. I did not come from a family degenerate from colonels on horseback, flags in the dust, broken plantation houses, duels in the street, ancient honor lost.
I was from a rural South of small towns that made their money on farming and timber, a little retail, the railroad, a bank. I suppose I had considered myself to be a Southerner, though not in the sense of a self-conscious identity, a badge. It wasn’t until I read The Portable Faulkner, stretched out on a bunk in Viet Nam, that I felt like I knew what that meant, and for the first time had a sense of what the South was. The South I came from, knew about, wasn’t Sutpen’s Hundred, Compson’s mile, or Sartoris’ South, it was Frenchman’s Bend, farmer’s sitting on the porch of Varner’s store talking about crops and the seasons. I immediately loved his language, even if sometimes overwrought. After the service I started taking classes at Georgia and did a project in a Latin class for which I picked words from Faulkner, maybe a hundred, identified the Latin root, and provided an example of its use in one of his stories. The instructor thought it interesting.
The language, descriptions of the landscape, and several short stories and episodes remain favorites. Young Ike McCaslin’s impression of the woods when he went first with the hunters to a deer camp deep in what was called The Big Bottom, “he saw the wilderness through a slow drizzle of November rain just above the ice point…..the tall and endless wall of dense November woods…..the surrey moving through the skeleton stalks of cotton and corn in the last of open country…” The brilliantly told MacCallum episode in ‘Sartoris’ where young Bayard Sartoris retreats after he drove too fast off a bridge, a wreck that killed his grandfather; Lena Grove, in ‘Light in August,’ nearing Jefferson after four weeks walking from Alabama, “behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes, from day to dark and dark to day again.” ‘Spotted Horses,’ perhaps Faulkner’s best told story, and, of course, ‘The Bear’ I have read and re-read, finding, imagining that the place he described, his postage stamp Yoknapatawpha, was just like home, the same woods, fields, the same cold winter mornings.
I understand that this was mush, the romanticism of youth but thinly read. Nevertheless, after long days and weeks of multiple missions, reading Faulkner was a reminder of a place, gave meaning to a place which existed perhaps largely in my mind yet solid as a pine post to lean on when much else was contingent.
Few months later I was back in the states. ‘Honky Tonk Women’ by the Stones and CCR’s ‘Green River’ on the radio. Weren’t they on the radio before I left? Anything happen while I was gone? It all looks the same. I looked the same. Took a couple of week’s leave when I was able and drove back to my home town for the first time in three years. ‘Long time no see,’ someone said, ‘What you been up to?’ What do you say? Tell how tracers look whipping their way toward you in the dark, the blank, helpless expression on the face of someone who just caught the blast of a mortar in their chest? Nobody wants to hear that. ‘Nothing much, just driving through.’ In ‘They Were Soldiers,’ a book about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the author Ann Taylor observes that war doesn’t end even when declared over. “Often it recedes from public to private life,” and, I would add, to rest in a quietly sealed interior life.
It does come out from time to time. Yeats is among the greatest poets of the 20th Century. Wilfred Owen, England’s finest WWI poet and a brave soldier, admired the great man’s poetry and cited him as an influence. Yeats returned the favor by excluding Owen’s from the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, saying that his poetry was “all blood, dirt, and sucked sugar stick…unworthy of the poet’s corner of a country newspaper.” He went further, writing that “In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies … If war is necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever …” Blood, dirt, and sucked sugar stick. Owens would have known about the blood and the dirt, having spent a couple of days lying unconscious among the remains of a fellow soldier after the explosion of a trench mortar threw them into the mud.
“Wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong,
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips,
Knit in the webbing of the rifle thong.”
As to Yeat’s views on tragedy, only a poet writing in comfort and at a great distance would believe death a joy to the man who dies. And again, ‘if war is necessary, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever.’ That is infuriating even as I type out the words. Owen was shot dead leading his men across the Sambre Canal a week before Armistice in 1918. Yeats suffered from the flu in 1918. He survived.
All of the men in my family had served in WWII in one way or another, the real war. On Sunday afternoons they would stand out in the driveway at my grandmother’s house, leaning against their cars, cigarettes, quiet conversations, a little laughter. Is war what they talked about? I believed I knew how it sounded and felt to the men in khaki dancing with their young wives and dates in the big room at Johnny Harris’ in 1944. No air conditioning, the sweat gleaming on their foreheads blending with the delirium of slide trombones, whisky and coke, and the hands of a pretty girl linked behind your neck. Standing out in the driveway, is that what they remembered?
Georgia Stories and Songs 
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