YOU EVER HAVE everything turn inside out? Where one minute it’s one world, and the next second it’s a whole other world.
Tell you what I mean. About what the feeling is. 1967, Vietnam. There’s a bunch of us, fresh from Parris Island. Marines are going to I Corps. This is the area at the north end of South Vietnam, it includes five provinces from Quang Tri up to the DMZ. The city of Hue, the old imperial capital, and Khe Sanh are both in I Corps. We’re lean and mean, all balls, no brains. We’re a John Wayne movie—the Marines have landed and we’re here to kick ass. Of course, the first thing that happens is that we sit in Danang for a week while they sort us out. Doing nothing. Getting bored, getting drunk, getting in fights, getting the clap, watching the body bags go by, figuring the guys in them were probably careless. Probably not Marines.
Finally, we get assigned. We get sent up north, to Khe Sanh, which is an airstrip in the northwest corner of the country. This is not what is later called the “siege of Khe Sanh.” That occurs in January ’68.
We get sent out on patrol. Usually a day at a time. Sometimes two or three days. It’s wet. Rain and fog. The country is rain forest, triple canopy. Steep mountains. Lots of ravines. The only thing that happens is that four guys, they start to drip and they need penicillin shots, and everybody, their feet start to rot, but nobody knows what to do about that. Here I am sixteen, most of the guys are eighteen, nineteen, the LT, he’s all of twenty-two or -three. All of us are loaded with testosterone, machismo, whatever you want to call it, and this is dumber and duller than being back home and broke on a Tuesday night.
Our third week of patrols. By this time they’re letting new guys walk point. Third day, it’s my turn. It’s tense. But nothing happens. Except its raining. Everything gets wet. We’re climbing up and climbing down. We’re slipping and sliding and like every other day discomfort increases, fear and alertness grow dim. But, we get back to the perimeter. Alive. Now I know I’m immortal. Wet and bored, crotch and toes itching, but immortal. Fourth day, I’m second man, oh, maybe a yard or two behind point. All morning, same damn thing. It’s just drizzling. If we were out of the foliage, visibility might be twenty, thirty feet. In the forest, it’s five, maybe ten, feet.
I’m a yard or two behind point. Suddenly, I see right in front of his foot—trip wire. That moment freezes. I know that the wire is connected to a grenade. Just like I know that the grenade is connected to an NVA patrol, killers like us, and they are connected to an army and all of us are in this thing that has its own existence, like a giant beast, which is called war. From that moment on, everything is forever different.
The wire on the telephone is, somehow, the same thing. It is a small piece of wire, one that I cannot see but can detect with an instrument, and that wire, I know, is connected to a listener, that listener is connected to an organization, maybe Universal Security, which is connected to something else, probably larger, because U. Sec. does nothing for itself, it is always employed, an agent of another organization. There is a power out there, a great beast, watching. I have just glimpsed its existence.