Armistice Day

Scott Ely

The country in southwest France is not unlike the Vietnamese highlands, at least on the wet side of the mountains. Even on an early November morning, colder than any night I ever spent in the mountains near Pleiku, there is a feeling of sameness, the terrain vaguely familiar. But perhaps I carry that landscape everywhere, and it is just watching the thick clouds drop down, truncating the tops of the mountains, that makes me feel this way. Perhaps someone from the region who fought at Dien Bien Phu has had this same feeling. But I have never met such a person. The paratroopers in red berets on the streets of Carcassonne are much too young.
    On Armistice Day Susan and I walked into the village where there was to be a ceremony around La Monument aux Morts. Mort pour la France is the inscription on the simple marker in the village square.
    We saw a machine on the road by the lake, a plume of bluish smoke rising from its smokestack.
    “It’s a still,” Susan said.
    “A paving machine,” I said. “They’re fixing the road.”
    I could imagine a still in some deep, inaccessible valley in the mountains. In Mississippi we would come upon the ruins of one from time to time while out bird hunting. We would call the dogs away from the tangle of metal and wood that was once the apparatus, dynamited by treasury agents.
    But Susan turned out to be right. It was a still with a copper coil and cooker. They were distilling prunes, and they offered us a drink. A man, who, with his thin, lean-assed build, looked like he came out of the Tennessee mountains, turned a spigot and filled a small glass alarmingly full of a colorless liquid.
    “Moonshine,” I said.
    I drank first, feeing it burn all the way down. Susan drank too. The men laughed and encouraged us. We both had another drink.
    “We’re drunk,” Susan said as we walked toward the village.
    “I believe we are,” I said.
    We arrived in the square just as the ceremony was starting. The owner of the local café, dressed in a military uniform and carrying a French flag, led a procession of villagers around the square.
    The liquor had made me feel warm and easy. I put my arm around Susan and watched the ceremony.

I arrived at a base camp near Saigon in 1969, just after a nasty Tet. I walked up to an ice-cream stand with another soldier, who was dressed in faded jungle fatigues and carried a rucksack and a rifle. He was tall and thin and did not look like he had an ounce of fat on his body. He could have been my double. I was dressed in shiny new fatigues I had been issued at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
    After we bought vanilla ice-cream cones from the Vietnamese vendor, I asked him what he was doing in base camp. He licked his dripping cone and pointed at his teeth.
    “Sniper shot the guy in front of me in the head,” he said. “I caught his skull fragments in the mouth. Man, I got a week in base camp. And new teeth.”
    Then for the very first time I realized what it was going to be like, the randomness of it all. We had practiced ambushes in basic training. Sometimes I was told that I had lived because of a good reaction and sometimes I was told that I was dead because I had reacted too slowly or had made a mistake. One of the training cadre had been the sole survivor of a unit bombed by mistake by American planes. He had pointed out with a smile that at the time of the bombing he was on R & R. I had not paid much attention to him. Instead I had listened to my instructors, counting on surviving because I would be quick and smart. Now suddenly I was not sure I could deal with losing control of my fate.
    I told him that I was going up to Pleiku, located in the mountainous region of the country. I asked him what to expect.
    “It’s not so bad,” he said. “Up and down, up and down.”
    He walked away with a bounce in his step, like one of my drill instructors who carried a rucksack full of Styrofoam instead of a combat load. I wondered what this young soldier was carrying in the rucksack. Whatever it was, it could not be heavy, perhaps a change of clothes, a book, or food he bought at the PX. I had no books. On the plane ride over I had read Dostoevski’s The Devils. I donated the book to the Red Cross girls when I stepped off the plane. Something for soldiers to read in hospitals, they said. Later they handed out brand new books, and I chose a copy of Howard’s End. I began reading it, sitting cross-legged on the steel floor of a C-I 30, packed in with other soldiers. When I reached the middle of the book, the novel started over again. The publisher had dumped these defective copies on the troops. I wondered how many soldiers never even got to the middle. Soon some infantry unit would give the ice-cream soldier a heavy load to carry: frags, rations, ammo, flares, mines. A similar one was waiting for me.

A few weeks later I lay in a clump of bamboo outside of Pleiku and watched the shell fragments, glowing red in the night, come sailing toward us. They cut down the bamboo above our heads, and the stalks fell across our bodies. It was harassment and interdiction fire, our guns, fired at random points in the bush. It was a game we played with the enemy, designed to make his free movement uncertain and difficult. Theoretically we were safe, our position marked on a map down in some bunker. But sometimes the gunners made mistakes, and tonight we were within the kill radius of the rounds.
    As I raised my head higher, the glowing fragments jumped out at me. I knew I was making myself vulnerable, but I was fascinated with the colors. None of us wore helmets or flak jackets. We were a recon team. We needed to be able to move fast and make no noise. We were soft targets, softer than the underside of a woman’s breast. The fragments jumped out at me, and I was mesmerized the way I was as a child when I watched a 3-D movie in Atlanta, peering at the screen through a pair of special glasses as spears leaped out of that one-dimensional surface.
    Someone pushed my head down into the bamboo leaves, which had a pleasant dry smell, like old newspapers.
    “You gonna get your damn head blown off,” a voice whispered in my ear.
    I did not know that I was being drawn to the beauty, the sensuousness of the war, my heart quickening to the power that could propel those shells to that spot in the bush. And I did not know that to admire that power, to give oneself up to it, held any danger at all, the least of which was having a shell fragment pierce my brain. It was akin to a pyromaniac’s love of fire leaping through a wooden house.

We were pulling duty on the mountaintop observation post, located on a plug of granite five hundred feet above the plain. Below were the lights of the base camp and the air base and Pleiku. We were shooting a heavy machine gun at a Lambretta on the road between the mountain and the base camp. A Lambretta is a three-wheeled vehicle. I imagined pretty girls dressed in white ao dais riding behind the drivers on Saigon streets. But I had never been to Saigon. I had been to Pleiku only once. Now it was off-limits. The Lambretta in the free fire zone was fair game. We were obligated to kill anything that moved in that space between the base camp and the Montagnard village.
    Something was wrong with the gun. It was firing too slowly. The soldier manning it complained about the headspacing. The mortars in the base camp shot too. They were shooting white phosphorus shells, which sounded different from high explosive. They made a soft whump at impact. I looked down and saw white clouds spreading out around the impacts, as if we were lobbing loads of sperm onto the dark countryside. The base camp sent up parachute flares. They drifted about. We could see nothing but scrub and the red road. They sent up more flares. We could see nothing.
    Once the mortar section had a direct hit on a Lambretta with a white phosphorus shell. The driver was incinerated in his seat. Nothing was left of the Lambretta but the steel frame.
    Someone took pictures and one soldier sent copies home to his wife. At about that time my wife had stopped writing to me. We had fallen out over my coming R & R. She did not seem eager to meet me in Hawaii. We had had our first daughter just before I left for Vietnam, and she told me that traveling with the baby to Hawaii would be too difficult for her. She never told me that she was going to stop writing. She just stopped. And I never wrote back to complain. I suppose I was numb from my work, the terror pushing everything else out of me. Soon afterward I lost the ability to visualize her face. She appeared in my imagination as a woman whose face was a smooth, polished surface, devoid of human features. ‘When I returned home neither of us ever spoke of the unwritten letters, as if they and the war had been some sort of bad dream.
    When the soldier sent the pictures home, I wondered what my wife would have thought if I had sent them to her. For some reason I imagined her showing them to a lover, strange tokens from a man she could hardly remember. But in reality there was no lover. That would come years later, as if what the war had planted was like one of those bombs with a delayed fuse that would explode days or weeks later when everyone thought the area was safe. Maybe that soldier, even though the gesture was a crazy one, was trying to make his wife understand the terrors he faced.
    That one hit was a lucky one, for the road was out at the maximum range of the heavy mortars, almost five miles, and there was little chance of hitting a moving target. More illumination went up. The Lambretta was spotted again. The machine gun fired in slow motion, the red tracers floating off leisurely into the darkness. Mortar rounds dropped in, dotting the plain below with their soft, white impacts.
    I remembered crawling up to a neighbor’s bathroom window. My friend and I were in our early teens, and so were the girls inside. We saw them both naked. They were comparing the size of their breasts, hefting them with their hands and giggling. My friend tapped on the window. The girls screamed and we ran off into the darkness. Later that night we almost got run over by a car while playing in the white cloud put out by the DDT machine, which traversed the Jackson, Mississippi, streets on summer nights. Much later, after his tour as a platoon leader in Vietnam, my friend was busted for growing marijuana on a large scale in south Mississippi. He went to the Parchman Prison boot camp program and was released. Another childhood friend, crippled and blind from his wounds, spent most of his time sitting alone in his room in his mother’s house. We had played war together as children. His father had been in World War II and had brought home a beautiful German rifle with a sniper scope. The father had passed the rifle on to his son. Often I sat in his room with him and ran my hands over the weapon as we wondered how many men had been killed with it and if his father had killed the German who once owned it. I know I am lucky to be whole.
    “What are they doing out there?” someone asked.
    “Being gooks,” another voice said.
    I wondered if the people in the Lambretta were drunk or high or if this putting themselves at risk was simply a game. The gun fired again along with the mortars. I imagined us being attacked and overrun. That night, after my turn on watch, I slept uneasily while the geckos barked from the rocks. In the morning the plain below was littered with white parachutes from the illumination rounds, like strange night-blooming flowers. The Montagnards would gather them up to sell in Pleiku.
    Now I knew war as a game. And those sexual images connected with killing had begun to float about in my mind. That was the bond among us young men. Together we would skull-fuck the enemy.

Last May I talked with a young archaeologist at a graduation party, the son of a fellow faculty member at the university. He was home on a visit from digging for bones in Laos and Vietnam. He had become an expert on downed aircraft. We talked of F-4s, AIHs, and AC47s. I was comfortable speaking with someone who knew the names of these things. He was intimately familiar with the ordinance the planes carried and the mines they dropped. The needlelike BLU 43 and 44 were known as “dragon teeth.” American pilots dropped enormous quantities of these mines, so many that they indifferently referred to them as “garbage.” The mines could be dropped from the air without detonating and packed enough explosive power to blow off a foot. And there was the BLU 42, known as a “spider mine,” which threw out eight tripwires upon impact. To this day the spiders still lie in wait for the unwary.
    He worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail at major arteries where the action was hot during the war. There were plenty of North Vietnamese bones, but few American remains. Whatever the team found was shipped to Hawaii for identification.
    He told me how they made field identifications of skulls and teeth. Oriental incisors are wedge shaped. But then so are the incisors of Native Americans, so he could never be completely certain. And you can stick a pencil up the nasal cavity of an American skull, but it will not fit into a Vietnamese skull.
    He surveyed the sites and supervised the dig. Instead of using a computer, he made his maps of the site by hand. He told me that if he took the time, he could make a beautiful map. I imagined him sitting in a tent at night and working on the maps in the light from a gasoline lantern, charting the location of those bones.
    He told me about unexploded cluster bomblets and how Vietnamese have built houses out of the containers. He talked about the heat and malaria and how he was recently cured, by massive doses of antibiotic, of a parasite no one was able to identify.
    Then we talked about how he and I looked at the world differently from most people. How we were beyond the reach of things that trouble ordinary people. And I wanted to tell him to beware, to be careful, that there was a line he should never cross, that once you go over you cannot go back.
    I saw him hovering close to it as he told me (once his parents had wandered out of earshot), his voice rising with excitement, how he had seen Vietnamese workers blown apart by unexploded mines. They were after the metal and the high explosive, which they used for cooking. I could remember watching soldiers heat up C-rations with pieces of TNT, the explosive burning with an intense white heat.
    And then the image appeared in my mind of me sitting in the dark on an ambush. I was putting on mosquito repellent when the trip flares went off, and then someone began to blow the claymore mines, filled with ball bearings. The machine gun directly to my front began to track upwards while the gunner was screaming hysterically, the red tracers going up through the bamboo above our heads. I thought the enemy was in the bush with us; I thought I was going to die. But none of us died that night. A single North Vietnamese soldier had come through the ambush. He was the only one who died. I was afraid the squad leader was going to give me the machine gun (making me a prime target) after the gunner’s poor performance, but he laid it on someone else.
    I wondered if the young archaeologist felt invulnerable as I do now. I think that if I went to cover the war in Bosnia nothing could harm me, that I would lead a charmed life. But when I was in Vietnam I imagined that every night ambush would be my last. I came to fear being killed as I slept, the sort of death some might hope for. I suppose it was a desire to be in control, to avoid a random death like that of the soldier whose skull fragments removed the ice cream eater’s teeth.

Unbelievably, I gained weight in Vietnam. I had always been thin, particularly in my upper body. But I could walk forever and the tropical heat did not bother me. In a picture of me with my shirt off, dressed in jungle boots and faded fatigues and squinting into the sun, my ribs barely show. I ate everything I could get my hands on. I traded cigarettes in the c-ration packs for the ham and lima beans nobody wanted. When in base camp, I stole steaks from the mess hail, sliding through a narrow window. Although I began to fill out, I did not become fat. I had moved from skinny to thin. After the mess hail incident, the other boys (for we were boys, not really men yet) began to call me Snake.
    The officers and NCOs shot deer and peafowl out of the observation helicopter, using riot guns and buckshot rounds. I liked to watch the chopper come in to the pad, the pilot flying it at an angle to compensate for the weight of a deer tied to a skid. Later we would smell the scent of barbecue from the pad, and I would wish I had been on that hunt and was eating with them.
    Now I wonder if that physical change meant that soldiering was my true vocation, that somehow I had absorbed the Southern military tradition as I grew up in Georgia and Mississippi. If so, it was a call I ignored, for I hated the army and the war and the change I knew was occurring within me. I never wanted to become a killer. I just wanted to finish my year and get home alive, to return to exactly the same person I had been before the war.

One evening, just as we were setting up an ambush on a trail, a young Montagnard about my age rode by on a bicycle. We took him prisoner. He sat next to me handcuffed. When I checked in with the base camp, whispering into the handset, he turned and watched me. Some wanted to kill him, an addition to the body count. But he was still alive when I woke in the morning. We released him, and he pumped up his bicycle tires and rode off. I wondered if he would in exasperation join the Viet Cong and kill me one day. I knew that if the others had decided to kill him, I would have watched his execution without saying a word against it.
    People were being maimed and killed around me. In the tent where I lived, I slept on the cot of a soldier who had shot himself in the head with a forty-five. He lived, but the round had destroyed one of his frontal lobes. If the round had not been steel-jacketed, it would have taken off most of his head. He was sent home. A soldier with a dragon tattooed on his back shot his hand off with a grenade launcher that had a buckshot round in the chamber. No one was sure how he had managed to do it. There was some talk of a self-inflicted wound, but then the colonel decided that the lost hand was the result of the soldier’s own incompetence. He was sent home. Someone lost a foot to a cluster bomblet. Another free trip to the States. A patrol was ambushed by an unseen enemy, one of whom, it turned out, was using a Thompson machine gun. Jokes were made about a Vietnamese Al Capone. We killed a North Vietnamese tax collector. He ran an unbelievable distance with a ball bearing from a claymore mine in his right temple. A patrol killed three Vietnamese civilians for the fun of it. Another addition to the body count.
    Then unexpectedly, unbelievably, I was safe. I worked in a bunker doing fire direction control for the base camp’s heavy mortars. The people down there liked to play Scrabble and had requested me, an English major and a college graduate, because of the many strange words they assumed I knew.
    From this post I directed the killing of fifteen Vietnamese during a Christmas truce, the order to fire on them coming down from II Corps. We caught them in the open, riding their bicycles through the scrub. I directed one gun to traverse to the left and one to the right. Everyone died. The patrol that went out to retrieve the bodies assured me that it was a beautiful pattern. Everyone assumed they were Viet Cong. But deep down I did not believe that. Someone in a spotter plane might have given the order on a whim. I felt no responsibility; I felt neither sad nor happy. It was not long after Mai Lai, and everyone had sympathy for those soldiers. I sensed that something dark had been unleashed in all of us, but paid scant attention to its stirrings.

It was the beginning of the monsoon. On the shore of a lake ten kilometers away, a giant figure with outspread arms had been constructed of bamboo, its back to the base camp. The builders had covered it with white rice paper. I was never sure if it was a Christ or a Buddha or a combination of both. The lake was on our plotting board map, just outside the range of the mortars. From time to time I climbed the tower next to the bunker and looked at the figure through field glasses. In a few days the wind shredded the wet rice paper, strips of it streaming in the wind, leaving only the bamboo frame, and the figure disappeared. I wondered if God too had undergone a metamorphosis, had been transformed into some unknowable creature full of con- tradictory meanings, who could do nothing for us, who perhaps could not even help himself.
    I knew that I was no more substantial than that rice paper figure, even down in the safety of the bunker. A few weeks before, a rocket had sliced through the packed sandbags of a command bunker in Dak To, killing everyone inside. No place was safe. But sometimes I tempted fate. We had a shower in camp that consisted of a small water tank and a diesel fuel heater. I knew that the flame from the heater was visible to the North Vietnamese gunners. In spite of that I took an occasional shower at night. The shower was not even sandbagged, so it was a vulnerable target. I stood under the water, listening for the sound of incoming, while harassment and interdiction fire impacted out in the bush, the light from the illumination put up by our mortars flickering through the wire screen that ran all around the top of the shower. Everyone in the country—Vietnamese, Montagnard, and American—was part of a huge board game. If you were unlucky enough to be on the wrong square at the wrong time, you died.

I saw snow-capped Mt. Rainier as the plane made an approach to Fort Lewis, Washington. It was late March and cold. We shivered as we walked beneath the dark fir trees.
    We began our separation physicals. Then we were told that the machine used to analyze our blood had malfunctioned. We would be held over an extra day so the tests could be run again. Immediately, there was talk about the “black syph,” a persistent rumor we had all heard before about an incurable strain of syphilis. Those unlucky enough to have contracted it were said to be condemned to spend the rest of their lives (until a cure was found) on an island in the Pacific. We were loaded on a bus and dispersed among several barracks. We were orphans. There was no room for us. It was dark and cold. I wished I had my fatigue jacket, but someone had stolen it from under my head when I was sleeping on a bench at Cam Rahn Bay.
    I was the last one off the bus.
    “Watch yourself, man,” the driver said.
    I did not bother to ask him why. I had not been able to sleep on the plane. I felt like I could sleep for days.
    When I walked inside the barracks, I immediately understood his warning. The barracks was full of soldiers who were being given dishonorable discharges. It was like one of Dante’s scenes of Hell. A fight was going on. Peopie were smoking marijuana and shooting up with speed and heroin. And there were no sheets.
    I went down to the orderly room and demanded sheets.
    “Sorry,” the sergeant said. “No sheets for that barracks.”
    “I just got back from Vietnam,” I said.
    “No sheets for that barracks,” he said.
    Then he added that he could put me on all night KP if I did not want to sleep there.
    I returned to the barracks. Outside there was a border of bricks set on end. I pulled one of the bricks out of the ground and went inside. I told the soldier in the top bunk, who was dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, and a fringed jacket, that I would kill anyone who touched me. This seemed to amuse him, and he promised that he would pass this information on for me. I went to sleep with one arm through the strap of my duffel bag, my billfold in my underwear, and my hand around the brick. If I killed someone, I wondered if I would be able to plead self-defense. I was not concerned about another man’s life, just the possibility of punishment. I supposed that was how criminals view life. I wondered if I was now no different from them, just lucky enough to have committed murders sanctioned by my government.
    I woke early in the morning to absolute silence. Everyone was asleep, lying beneath blankets on those sheetless bunks. I could have been in a barracks full of corpses wrapped in graveclothes, waiting for burial. I showered and shaved and went out of the barracks without seeing or talking to anyone.

Susan and I watched a young girl place flowers on the monument. Then the mayor made a speech. I understood none of it, but Susan translated bits for me. Then we wandered back to our house, our legs unsteady. The men at the still called out to us and offered more moonshine. They laughed when we declined.
    At our house my daughter, who was in her early teens, was amused by us. We tried to appear sober, but it was hopeless. We built up the fire in the big open fireplace in the living room. As we huddled close to the fire, snow began to fall up on the shoulder of the mountain near a spot where we liked to go for picnics, past the place where the Germans killed a group of resistance fighters, now marked by a cross. It fell hard for a few minutes, dusting the firs.
    I imagined a mortar shell falling on the mountain, the white phosphorus singeing the tops of the firs and melting the snow. I savored the strangeness of the image for a few moments before it started to fade. Then Susan asked me a question and it was gone. I knew I was not safe, that the only thing I had escaped was early death.
    Would I recognize the ice-cream soldier in Memphis or New York or Paris? I am still much the same physically, but he could have thickened with middle age or he could have been killed the day after I watched him walk off with that springy step. If he lived, I believe that he would have emerged from the war much the same as I did, as all of us did, whether we were conscious of it or not. I would like to have a drink with him in some sun-drenched café. I do not imagine us talking about the war. We would talk about baseball or tennis or the women passing by, while the strange blood of the war would sing in our veins, whispering those dark things.

Scott Ely was born in Atlanta, Georgia, but moved at an early age to Jackson, Mississippi.  He received his MA in English from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He has published a number of collections of short stories and novels including his first novel, Starlight (1987) which draws heavily from his Vietnam War experiences, and a later novel, A Song for Alice Loom (2006), and several collections of short stories, including Pulpwood (2003).

“Armistice Day” appears in our Autumn 1996 issue.