Wandering Souls

Homer stared in astonishment. "At first it was almost surreal. I mean, we're all in green fatigues, muddy and sweaty, and really looking like guys in the field. Here this guy comes around the corner, and he's got on a light khaki uniform, a clean light khaki pith helmet. You've seen the red Pleiku mud. You can't stay clean up there. You're tinted red. Your uniforms are red, your fingers are red, it's just—it gets everywhere. And here's this guy that's walking down the trail perfectly clean. Perfectly—not a wrinkle anywhere. I mean, not a hair out of place. I must be hallucinating, the heat's gotten to me."¹

The soldier he was confronting was a twenty-five-year-old medic named Hoang Ngoc Dam, from the village of Thai Giang in Thai Binh Province—a fact the lieutenant would not discover for over three decades. There was no time then for more than a quick glimpse of each other. As soon as Dam saw Homer, he snatched his weapon off his shoulder and began to bring it around. Later, Homer would recall how he shouted, "Chieu Hoi," the phrase he thought meant "surrender."² "But he continued to draw down on me," Homer says, "and then he started pulling his weapon off his shoulder. My weapon was already down at my waist, so it was ready to fire. I hollered at him, and he didn't stop. He tried to get that weapon down, and just before he got it level on me, I fired. In my total abject fear of that moment, I just cut loose and killed him instantly. I could look in his eyes, we were so close together. We were probably thirty feet apart, and then later I looked at him, and he was so young."³

For a time he stared at the body, dazed. He noticed more details. Not only was the young man's uniform starched, but the SKS rifle clutched in his hands still had the greasy cosmoline used as an antirust agent congealing on its bayonet hinge. Someone new to the war, Homer concluded, probably an officer; in his description of the incident in a letter home, he called the dead man a major. He was wrong on both counts. Dam, whose rank was sergeant, had already been in the war for over five years by that time; he had survived the Tet Offensive and many other major battles.

Homer bent down and went through the dead man's pockets, drawing out a notebook with a colorful picture on the front cover of a man and woman in what he took to be traditional or ancient Vietnamese dress, and on the back cover, a daily and monthly calendar grid, labeled with the English word "schedule"; a smaller black notebook; and a number of loose papers—letters, ID cards, and some sort of certificates. The spine and corners of the first notebook had been neatly reinforced with black tape.

Homer sent the documents to the rear area, where he knew they'd be assessed and then burned. But later that evening he changed his mind. He contacted a friend in S-2, intelligence, and asked him to bring everything back. Homer couldn't bear to have the documents, the last evidence of the life he had taken, be destroyed.

Later in the novel, in "Good Form,"⁵ O'Brien the writer (as much a fictional character as Tim the soldier) describes the origins of "The Man I Killed," explaining that as a soldier, he could never bring himself to look at the faces of the (enemy) dead, and as a result he has been left with feelings of "faceless responsibility" and "faceless grief." But, he writes, he wants to tell his readers "why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth." He is enabled by writing the story, permitting himself that wrench to the side that fiction allows, to create a young Tim who does what O'Brien did not, could not, do during the war: look into the face of the dead and see himself and mourn.⁶ To re-form his own face in the mirror, he has to discover his features in the glimpsed and shadowed face of the enemy.⁷

The same need exists as well for the Vietnamese who were once our enemies. In 2007 Mike Archer, a marine veteran of the siege of Khe Sanh, read an article I'd written about Homer and Dam and asked me for some contacts in Viet Nam to help him investigate what had happened to the remains of one of his friends. Archer had written a memoir, A Patch of Ground, in which he described the death of a high school friend, Tom Mahoney, who had also gone into the marines. He was just nineteen, and photos of him reveal a heartbreakingly young face. Mahoney was ambushed and killed during the withdrawal from Hill 881, at the end of the siege. His body was dragged to the front of their position by the People's Army of Viet Nam (PAVN) troops who had killed him in order to lure other marines into an ambush when they tried to recover the body. His friends did try just that, but finally had to call in an air strike, and as a result, Mahoney's remains were never found—they were either dragged off by the North Vietnamese or obliterated.

Years later, while an American and Vietnamese MIA recovery team was searching for clues about the disposition of the body, they found in the Hanoi archives an after-action report from the five-man squad that had ambushed Mahoney. It describes the action and Mahoney: "The five-person team . . . waited for the enemy all night long. At 1400 on the following day (6 July 1968) we saw one American walking outside the entrance of the outpost. He wore a cement-colored uniform. His face was red and his eyes were blue like a mean animal [emphasis added]. He was looking towards Mr. Luong's team. The sounds of AK weapons roared immediately and the American fell. Mr. Luong and Mr. Long jumped out of their positions and dragged the American's body down. They placed the body in front of them to create an ambush for the other Americans coming out of their bunkers."⁸ To the PAVN soldiers, it was easier to kill someone seen not only as an invader of their country, but also as a mean animal. Inhuman. Meat for bait.

Mahoney was shot in the chest. In 2005 I sat in a room in Hue, across the river from the Citadel, that crucible on which American and PAVN and NLF and ARVN troops—all the acronyms of the war—had slaughtered each other, and the inhabitants of the town, during the 1968 Tet Offensive. It was a battle in which Mahoney had fought. The poet Lam Thi My Da had been there then also, on the other side. She did not know of Thomas Mahoney, but after we met and had the inevitable cups of green tea, she told me she wanted to read one of her poems, "Khuon mat an kin" ("The Face Beneath"),⁹ which was dedicated to "the American soldiers who died in the war in Viet Nam":

A year later, when I read Mike's description of Tom Mahoney and saw his photo, then read the PAVN document describing his eyes "blue like a mean animal," the poem sprang into my mind with a shock of recognition and grief. My Da's poem could have been the lost voice of Thomas Mahoney, a poem coming out of the poet's recognition of how war transforms our perceptions of ourselves and of each other, out of her need to rediscover her own innocent heart by seeing beneath the skin of the wolf.

In 1993, when I first met Vietnamese writers who had been on the other side of the war, I sat across a breakfast table and looked into the eyes of a woman who had once been in the Youth Volunteers Brigade of the PAVN, one of the teenage girls who worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trails, repairing craters after our bombings, defusing or exploding unexploded bombs, and even burying the dead. The times, and some of the places, we had been in the war had overlapped, and looking at her face, I knew that if I had seen her there when I was flying as a helicopter gunner, I would have killed her. She had been a target and threat to me, the ghost under the canopy of leaves, and I had been monstrous and mechanical to her, the sky elementally reconfigured into noise and terror. Now we could suddenly see each other's faces. We had been translated to each other; we sat at that small table where we could look into the eyes of all we had not known or had ignored or hated and feared, and see instead reflection and revelation. See what Homer had seen when he once again retrieved that diary from the man he'd killed, after it sat in thirty-six years of darkness, and opened its pages to reveal the precise drawings of a young man who had wanted to be a healer.

It was an instant when everything came together, not just because of where we had been in the war, but because we had both become writers after it; we understood that the moment, when our stories had wrapped together had embodied the latent power of stories to save our own hearts by allowing us into the narratives of other human beings. As Tim had done in imagination. As Homer would try to do in life. The journey I eventually made to Viet Nam to help him return the documents to Dam's family included plans I'd had to interview some of the Vietnamese writers I knew, veterans of the other side of the war. Their stories, from their lives and their art, and the stories of others, friends, other writers and veterans, or traveling companions met along the way, wove into and helped to illuminate the entwinement of Homer's and Dam's stories, as I came to feel they needed to do in this book.

"What stories can do," O'Brien writes, "is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again."¹⁰

It was what Homer Steedly decided he needed to do. By refusing to let go of the notebooks he'd taken from Dam's body, Homer somehow understood, though he could not put it into words or coherent thoughts until years later, that he was hanging onto a grief that was the price of remaining human. He needed to find and mourn what had been cut out of his heart. He needed to find Dam's story and his own.

The Hoang family today is certain that there was and is a spiritual connection between Dam and Homer. Even with all that has happened since, I don't know if I believe that. But each did carry in his blood the history of the hard lands from which he came; it was the tide that carried them toward each other. Bamberg, South Carolina, has always given its sons to the nation's wars, though usually the sons have been eager enough to give themselves, and the definition of what their nation was sometimes shifted. The town sits astride a highway and (former) railroad junction in the marshy scrub pine, loblolly pine, and palmetto country of the South Carolina midlands. Its first inhabitants, the Edisto tribe of the Muskogian Nation,¹ knew it as a cypress swamp, and the occasional alligator still lumbers about near town, as if pulled by a dim ancestral memory of that ancient slough. The country is blessed with an indolent beauty best appreciated by those, like Homer, who know its secret deli cacies: the sway and sigh of the pines, the lush hang of Spanish moss draped on the huge spreads of live oaks hundreds of years old, the brush of a breeze silvering the marsh grass, shivering the dew-jeweled filigrees of spiderwebs, touching the skin and nostrils with the fecundity of the country. The swamps the Edistos knew were still extant when Homer Steedly was growing up; as they did for the Edistos, they still allowed boys to hone skills they would need as men: "I spent most of my childhood in the country, surrounded by woods and cypress swamps, most notably Lemon Swamp," Homer recalls. "I spent all my free time in these woods and swamps hunting, fishing, and just exploring. I became quite accomplished at stalking deer and even observed bobcat and fox on several occasions. I learned how to move si lently through the woods and keep downwind of those I sought to locate. I ran most of the time barefoot in cut off blue jeans with no shirt, or only a t-shirt. Often while running through the swamps and woods I would step on snakes, but they never bit me. Moving quietly and learning to search the environment for shapes and movements while hunting were my strong points in jungle warfare, as was my skill with a rifle."²

But if Germany lay back in Bamberg's white history, the topography and history of the American South formed the town more powerfully, and its sons grew up the way the Edisto Indians' sons had, as expert hunters and gatherers, whether in swamp, forest, river, field, or trade, and with the need of a war to initiate and mark their comings of age. Homer's call sign in Viet Nam would be Swampfox, after the Revolutionary War hero and guerrilla fighter Francis Marion, another swamp-raised boy. When Fort Sumter was fired upon, most of the eli gible white male population—the town only had 250 people then—immediately signed up to fight for the Confederacy. Capt. Isaac S. Bamberg formed a company called, unsurprisingly, the Bamberg Guards. Another Bamberg, the wonderfully named Seaborn, became a major, and his brother, Francis M. Bamberg, enlisted as a private and eventually retired as a general.

Among the other Bamberg men who enlisted at the beginning of the war was a Private Richard J. Steedly.

Each male in the Steedly family subsequently would be given the first or middle name Richard, in honor of Captain Dick. A photograph of Homer when he was a lieutenant in Viet Nam—his head cocked to the side, thin-faced, serious, the pipe he had decided to smoke to make himself look older and wiser dangling from his mouth—could be a daguerreotype of his own ancestor or any of a hundred other Confederate soldiers, posing perhaps a little more stiffly, their collars buttoned high, their hands on the handles of the Bowie knives or pistols in their belts, looking grim, competent, and deadly. These are the typical rural southern troops, always disproportionately represented in the American military: the equivalent of the sturdy, patriotic peasantry from the hardscrabble farmlands of Thai Binh, Nam Dinh, and Nghe An in northern Viet Nam, or Quang Tri and Quang Ngai in the South. They were tough country boys who went to be slaughtered or redeemed in what they and their progeny—Homer once correcting a Yankee teacher in his high school about the name—would only call The War of Northern Aggression. They were kids like Homer, who learned how to use a rifle and stalk the woods and swamps from the time they could walk, and they were followed by other generations of warriors, whenever the reunited country gave them the chance to kill and die for it. World War I cost the tiny town twenty men killed in action, and when Homer's father went to fight in World War II, another twenty from the town were lost, as if this figure had become the accepted tithe to the god of war or the needs of the nation.