Bringing It All Back Home (9 page)

Every dusk and every dawn, we would do a thing called stand-to, where every Marine would get in his fighting hole and face outboard, and we would remain that way until it was stand-down. But when we stood down, you couldn't smoke. You couldn't have any fires. I mean, they could see you light a cigarette from half a mile away. And they would shoot at the flame. So, you know, we would run silent. Stand to for a while and then stand down, smoking lamp is out. Nothing.

Well, I ordered stand-to, and every Marine got in his fighting hole and faced outboard. This is what we did every dusk. And I went over to the 81-millimeter mortar position, which was in the center of our position on the hill. And I walk up to the sergeant, the section leader, and I said, “Fire mission.” And he looked at me and he said, “No can do. You can't do this. You need battalion's permission.” And I said, “Sergeant, I'm the commanding officer on this hill. You follow my orders. Fire mission.” He figured it out pretty quick, I think. I gave him a fire mission and I gave him the coordinates and everything, and he fired the mission, heavy explosive, and he fired away. So I had four heavy mortars firing ten rounds apiece. That's forty rounds.

And while these rounds were starting to hit, battalion called. It was the executive officer. He wanted to know basically what the fuck is going on. And I said—they called him Five—“Five, I've got buku movement out here.” And he said, “Lieutenant, you know, what do you mean by ‘buku'?” I said, “Well, I've got a hundred enemy troopers advancing on us.” He said, “Are you sure?” He said, “Because you're in a lot of shit. You know you can't do what you're doing. You have to go through the battalion fire control.” I said, “I'm sure I've got enemy coming straight at us.” He says, “You better be sure because you're in a world of shit [if not].”

Got off the radio. I went back over to the platoon section sergeant, and I said, “Fire again.” So that's another forty rounds. And then all of a sudden the rounds were hitting. It was four tubes. Each one, ten rounds. Eighty rounds had hit, high explosive. I ordered stand-down, and the Marines got out of the fighting holes, and they all were facing northeast. They were facing northeast looking at the village. It was burning. And the same sergeant who had had the puppy walked up. Sergeant King. He walks up to me and he says to me, “Lieutenant.” I looked over at him, and the fire was making his face glow. And he said, “You know, Lieutenant, I didn't kill that pup.” I said, “Okay, Sergeant.”

Then he said, “Lieutenant.” I said, “What, Sergeant?” He says, “Payback is a motherfucker, isn't it?”

The narrative conveys the ambiguity Giannini found in Vietnam. Who was paid back, and for what? Did the Vietnamese get what they deserved because Baker stepped on a land mine? Was Baker's death payback for Giannini's order to kill the pup? Morality in Vietnam, for Giannini, was not clear in that moment. All those meanings are possible, and Giannini is describing himself as someone every bit as compromised as the officer who ordered Marines to shoot a woman. He was angry and made angry decisions that intended destruction. This is what war did to him, and why now he is against unnecessary wars.

Giannini returned to the United States and eventually got a law degree. He remains a practicing criminal defense attorney to this day. Vietnam and his ability to draw on his experiences there continue to shape his life and work.

As he tells the story,
September 1989, we were out here [in the Hamptons] for the weekend, and my sister had come out with us.

A police officer had been shot in Brooklyn. They were claiming that a Panamanian drug dealer had killed a police officer that was on [an] anticrime [task force] and they'd tried to murder his partner too. I'd been listening to it all day long, and I made a remark to Nikki, my second wife, and my sister, Flo, that it sounded like the police version was bullshit. Well, Flo got really angry at me: “How can you say that? What do you know? You weren't there.”

About a half hour later I got a call, and it was a friend of mine who'd actually been a client; now he was a friend. He said, “Have you heard about the police officer getting killed?” He said, “They've arrested Renaldo, and you know Renaldo.” I said, “Renaldo?” He said, “Yeah. Renaldo Rayside.” He said, “You know him.” I said, “I don't know him.” He said, “Yes, you do. He was in your office—he came to your office. One of his friends was accused of a murder. You represented his friend and got him off. He was in your office. His family is looking to retain you.”

They do.

It turns out when he gets arrested for this Murder One—Attempted Murder One—he actually has my business card in his wallet. So I get on the case, and it's the biggest case of my life. It's really high profile. I mean, it's on the front page almost every day. Geraldo Rivera gets behind it.

It turns out that the officer who was killed is married. His wife is pregnant. She goes on all these TV shows. If it's a son, he's going to be a police officer. And everybody is rallying around this case to bring back the death penalty, which had been suspended for a while. So I get on this case, and to me it was a—it was a challenge. It was the most serious case I've ever taken on. This case actually went on, from the time of the shooting till the time of the trial was a whole year. And it was constantly, I call it on the front burner—on the front page. And they really ridiculed me. They were ridiculing me and my client.

I was putting this case together to go to trial, and my theory was that my client was innocent, that the police had been involved in this thing somehow. But I had no story. I'm sitting in the living room. And I had the case file sitting on the living room table, and it's huge. It covers the whole living room table—stacked. And I'm sitting there and it's like 3:00 a.m. in the morning and I'm trying to figure out, what am I going to say to this jury? How am I going to show them that he's innocent?

They have the two eyewitnesses: they have the surviving officer, and they have this young black kid, both claiming they saw my client do it. I'm sitting there, and then all of a sudden it just clicks. I had cross-examined the surviving officer, and I had really gone after him. He was crying on the stand. They had to stop my cross-examination to let him compose himself. He was crying on the stand. He wasn't angry. He kept crying. So I kept going after him; he kept crying. I kept going after him. I wouldn't let him go. And as I'm sitting there, trying to think, what am I going to say?

Something just hit me. I had run into this surviving officer, I'd say, maybe four or five times during the year leading up to the trial. For some reason when they were preparing the trial, they had these special offices in this high-rise office building. And I would go over there to talk to the prosecutors to get additional discovery—to look at evidence—back and forth all the time. And every time I went there, he was there. And my reaction was, what is he doing here? And the other thing, every time I walked in, they had him in the reception area, and I had to walk by him to go to where they were. And every time I went in there, he'd look at me and put his head down real fast. And I would say to myself, “That's a really strange reaction.” If I was him, I'd be saying, “You're a fucking scumbag. You're defending a guy who killed my partner.” He just put his head down and turned away from me, every time I walked in.

And then all of a sudden I'm sitting at my table, and I said to myself, “I know where I've seen that reaction before.” It was the night that machine gunner was killed by friendly fire.

What happened is, a listening post had panicked, and they ran back, and as they were running back panicked, they were firing at us. And a machine gunner was shot in the head. When the listening post came in, they were standing there—why? This Marine was dying. And we had surmised now that he'd been hit by a small-caliber round because there was a small hole in his helmet. The round came straight in, then it deflected a little bit and went right in his eye. He's dying. These Marines are standing there, and I walk over to them and I just said one thing to them: “Did you receive any incoming?” I was trying to give them a way out. On occasion, the enemy would pick up our weapons and use them. That's what we were told—I never saw it happen. They would pick up our M16s and fire them at us. I was trying to give them a way out. And they just, all four of them just put their head down, and they wouldn't look at me. A few moments later I learned that this Marine had completed his tour and was due to rotate home on the next chopper.

I knew right then and there that one of them had killed this Marine. The same reaction that this guy had to me every time I saw him. Guilt. So I decided that night while I was sitting alone with this huge file that that was my story. I would summarize the evidence, but this is what it would come down to. I would tell the story—I wouldn't use the term “friendly fire.” And this is how I would end my summation about an incident that happened in Nam. I was the one who started the cover-up. I wouldn't tell the truth.

I went to court that morning, and I started to sum up and it's a very long summation because they had called about fifty witnesses—between crime scene, ballistics, the officers who responded, the interrogation, hair evidence, fiber evidence, this and that. Fifty witnesses who testified, and the defense had called about six witnesses. And I was going through my summation, a very long summation. I was taking breaks. Every once in a while, maybe every forty-five minutes to an hour, I would take a break. And now I was into my last hour [or so] and I got up to my last hour, I told the jury, “I'm going to take you back to August 1967, Vietnam.” The prosecutor jumped up and objected. He wanted to approach and talk to the judge.

So we went up to the judge, and [the prosecutor] said, “Mr. Giannini is about to tell a story about Vietnam. It's not appropriate for him to do that.” And the judge, who was a really tough judge, had been the head of the homicide bureau in Brooklyn before he became a judge, he said, “You know something, it's been a really long trial, and if Mr. Giannini wants to tell some stories, he can tell some stories.” So I went up and told that jury—I tried to tell it in the third person—in detail what happened on August 12, 1967.

I gave them the whole account of what happened and that I made a decision right then and there not to tell the truth. How could I? These parents are waiting for him to come home—to walk through the door—and he's dead. I actually told [them] the enemy killed him. He got killed by small-arms fire. And that was the official story. So I told that story—the whole story—to the jury.

I said that it was a cover-up, “and that's what happened here, and there's guilt.” I pointed to the surviving officer. And you could see the guilt on his face. You could see him squirming. You could see it. There was the guilt.

The jury deliberated, I think for two days, and they found him, Renaldo, not guilty on everything—the murder, all the serious charges. I won the case. I won it because, I think, of that story. And I only could tell that story because from what I experienced in Vietnam.

One New York newspaper wrote: “One juror, who asked not to be identified, said the verdict was ‘agonizing but the evidence did not support a conviction … It was a very upsetting case.'”
3

A few weeks after this verdict was rendered, Giannini testified as a witness for the defense in the murder trial of the ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran Reuben Pratts. Pratts, a Brooklyn resident, had been charged with killing a man he found breaking into his sister's car and with wounding an accomplice. Giannini's testimony made direct reference to both the booby trap and the friendly-fire incidents he described to me, and the traumatic nature of those episodes. In what was believed to be the first successful use of a PTSD defense in New York state, Pratts was found not criminally liable for the shootings on July 11, 1990.
4

Vietnam continued to be relevant, and Giannini believes the meaning of the war endures. During the recently ended war in Iraq, he participated in a number of antiwar demonstrations, and he hosts a local public access television program called
East End Veterans
, which airs on Long Island TV four times a week. The program aims to connect the lessons of Vietnam to the present global war on terror. I've been a guest on the show.

Reflecting on the experience of Vietnam, Giannini said:

It had an effect on me, of course, but it didn't make me bitter and it didn't make me angry. It made me more caring. Being so close to death and watching people die, in the end I came out caring more. I care more. I don't know if I would be this caring if I hadn't gone through that experience. I have a feeling there's a lot of people like me who came out on the other end and they were more human for what they've been through. I mean, we almost lost our humanity. I'm telling you it was a struggle. But in the end, it seems like we're more human.

5

FOLLOW ME: ANTHONY WALLACE

Like Richard Eggers, Anthony Wallace fought with the First Cavalry Division (though four years later, in 1970). Eggers was a white college-educated officer. Wallace, by contrast, was a noncommissioned officer, a black man, and a draftee. As such, he saw the war from a very different angle than Eggers did. Yet, like Eggers, he stresses that his experience in the Vietnam War was shaped by the leadership training he had received in his youth.

Wallace is a tall, strong, broad-shouldered man in his early sixties, with silver sideburns, a mustache, and a powerful handshake. In our interviews he has a tendency to lean in as he speaks, which lets you know he is fully engaged, intent, and focused. He is a natural teacher and an articulate speaker, with a gravitas that has something to do with his long connection to one of the most prominent Baptist congregations in New York: Brooklyn's Cornerstone Baptist Church. The church and its worship music have shaped and guided him his entire life, he says. He works to live by Christian principles, to preserve the teaching with which he was raised.