Deros Vietnam (16 page)

In our reverie, we'd lost track of just how fast the cattle car was moving and arrived back at our company headquarters, the entire cattle car belting out “Yellow Submarine” at top volume. The guys at headquarters must have known we were coming for miles because we were singing really loud.

Finally, Charles heard the banging on the side door and opened it, only to encounter a very pissed-off Master Sergeant Willie Brown and First Lieutenant Cory Watkins staring him in the face. Oddly, Charles didn't shout “ten-hut” or anything. He just greeted them warmly and said, “Come right in.”

This nonchalant welcome made Brown and Watkins madder. They ordered us to stop singing, which we did, but we kept banging our M-16s on the floor of the cattle car. It sounded like a minor earthquake. It was hard to hear everything they were saying, but I was able to pick out parts of it. They accused us of being insubordinate, told us we were guilty of gross disciplinary infractions, and that the Army would deal harshly by giving us all an Article 15.

They also called us names, like jerk-offs and douche bags. After a while, their putdowns reminded me of the parents in “Bye, Bye Birdie” who complained about their kids being “disobedient, disrespectful oafs.”

That's how I started playing their taunts in my head. It was a movie, and they were challenging us for being
“noisy, crazy, dirty, lazy loafers.”

“You can talk and talk till your face is blue,
” Brown and Watkins seemed to harmonize,
“but they still just do what they want to do.”

Yep, I was singing to myself,
“why can't they be like we were/lifers in every way/what's the matter with draftees today?”

You knew something would have to give and that somebody, us, was going to have to pay for this, but for that one brief moment, we had them by the balls because we'd fucked up their schedule and done something they didn't expect us to do. Hell, if they would have thought about it for a minute and gotten over being pissed, Brown and Watkins might have realized that they'd accomplished their mission with us—we were acting as a team, not as individuals. We were singing and protesting, but we'd come together as a group which was the whole fucking objective of basic training, no?

They told us our punishment would be three-fold. First, after we got our asses off the cattle car, we'd stand in formation, at attention, in complete silence, for an hour. Then we'd hand over our M16s without cleaning them and do a forced march back to our barracks.

After that trek, we'd return to reclaim our weapons—and then clean them—at 0400 hours. Meaning, of course, we'd get all of about two hours of sleep before we'd have to pack up and head out for the company's 10K footmarch to the bivouac site for our final field training exercise.

To top it off, at the upcoming graduation ceremony, as everybody else in the company would be presented their Army insignia and mementos by their Drill Sergeants, we'd be served with our Article 15s. In front of our friends and family, no less.

That's when it hit all of us that we needed you! You know as much about military law as anyone—you used to repeat that funny Groucho Marx line “Military justice is to justice as military music is to music” —and Collins says you're planning to go to law school some day. Plus, everybody remembered those late-night “legal seminars” you used to hold, the ones where you told us about Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and Part V of the Manual for Courts-Martial. In other words, you woke us all up to the fact that when it came to law and authority, the Army was holding all the cards.

“An Article 15 gives a commanding officer power to punish individuals for minor offenses,” you explained, pointing out that the term “minor offense” was a source for concern in the administration of nonjudical punishments. But, as you reminded us, the final determination as to whether an offense is minor, and I quote (I even wrote this down), “is within the sound discretion of the commanding officer.”

In fact, my brother, you might have taught us too well. Doc claims you opened his eyes to a loophole in the entire process which is why we're having this debate. According to Doc, “Subsection (a) of Section 815, Article 15 of the Commanding Officer's Non-judicial Punishment regs states that Article 15s may not be imposed upon any member of the armed forces under this article if the member has, before the imposition of such punishment, demanded trial by court-martial in lieu of such punishment.”

If he's right, some of us think that if all 50 of us were to choose a court-martial instead of an Article 15, we could really fuck the Army up. Shit, they would have to hold individual court-martial proceedings for each of us, and it would cost them a shitload of time and money.

Of course, the counterargument—and more of the guys are on this side—is that if we even dared to this, the Army would really fuck us over. They'd probably apply a different definition to “minor offense” and try us by general court-martial, meaning we all could receive dishonorable discharges or get locked up. Where the fuck's Perry Mason when you need him? Probably in his office making time with the lovely Della Street.

Lamont, the guys asked me to write and get your opinion on the Article 15-court-martial question, but I'm guessing it's too late for that. Regardless of what we decide to do, we know that they'll throw the book at us. At a minimum we'll all be made 11 Bravos once this is done. Which means we'll all be in ‘Nam within four months and some of us won't be coming home.

But that's not why I'm writing. Don't tell the rest of them, but I'm writing because I need you to tell me if any of this makes a goddamn difference. I mean, if we'd raised our voices sooner, and louder, if we'd joined in with other GIs who were, would that have made a difference? Changed anything?

I'm not asking you if we did the right thing with our “Yellow Submarine” stunt, but I'm asking if what we did is really enough? And if it isn't, what can we do, what choices do we have, if we want to change the way things are going? If we want to save a life, say Sgt. Cannon's life?

Have we deluded ourselves into thinking that we had any choice at all?

Sorry for the long letter and all the heavy questions. We're meeting with our defense counsel in a few minutes. Some young JAG officer from Manchester, New Hampshire. Hope he likes the Beatles.

Peace,

Rick

Race Against Time

Once upon a time they called him Aubrey Moore. That was the slave name he inherited, growing up in Val-dosta, Georgia, USA, where he was shown his place and stayed put.

Head down. Eyes lowered.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once won second prize in a high school oratory contest in Valdosta. Aubrey's English teacher remembered King's being there, and told Aubrey's class how the young Reverend's voice fillied the halls, his words piercing the quiet classrooms like a warrior's sword.

Now King was dead.

And so was Aubrey Moore.

Malik Hekalu
(Translation: King Temple) was who he was, rising from the jungles of Southeast Asia, a mixture of Arabic and Swahili. Muslim and African. King, servant no more.

Malik demonstrated his new station every day in Vietnam by the ritual greeting he gave his brothers. It started with eye contact, then slight hand contact, and suddenly a flurry of rapid gestures—a complicated routine of shakes, slaps, snaps, grips, and bumps familiar only to Malik and his greeter.

Four black hands in constant motion—slapping, snapping, wiggling fingers, mutual knuckle bumps, and ever so slight finger waves.

Black GIs called it dapping. White soldiers said the term DAP was an acronym that stood for “dignity and pride,” mimicking the black power movement back in the world. Malik and his brothers laughed at this and said it was a “blackronym,” an explanation thought up by whites after the fact.

Truth is, if you watched, if you listened, you could actually hear the message in a dap greeting—anything from
life is good
to
shit is fucked up here
to
you better watch your ass.
The pulling of the slightly cupped hands of the greeting participants against each other would send echoes across the base.

Malik Hekalu dapped his way through the rest of his tour in Vietnam. He even taught some of the Vietnamese how to dap. They told Malik that
dap
sounded like the Vietnamese word for beautiful. The women especially thought he was beautiful.

Which is why he decided to walk away from the Army and hang out with the Vietnamese who referred to him as
Midan,
or black man.

With them, he was able to be Malik. He loved being Malik. And he always talked with his hands, his strong, swift, black hands.

One day he started telling the story of the scores of African Americans from his hometown of Valdosta—farmers, craftsmen, and cotton pickers—who had left Georgia in the 1850s and 1860s for a better life in Liberia, Africa.

Telling that story to the Vietnamese took Malik a long, long time.

Ticket to Soulville

Dwight Johnson held tightly to his father's right arm at the elbow. Tethered this way, the two men meandered through a display of photos, letters, and military artifacts. Dwight's attempt to steer his father through the exhibit served to steady them both. He hadn't realized until now how skeletal his father's arm was, that there were fragments of something, maybe bone, floating around underneath his skin at the elbow.

“Pops, slow down,” he said almost sweetly to his father. Reggie Johnson kept right on walking, eyes locked straight ahead. His son quickened his pace to stay with him.

“We need to stay with the rest of the group, Pops.” Dwight was directing his voice to his father's good ear. He gestured toward a cluster of folks—the tour group they came with—standing at ease behind them, a mix of old and young, large and small, firm and infirm. People of all shades, from beige to brown to black.

A distinguished-looking man with a thick mustache, crisp white shirt, and bright bow tie was pointing to a military jacket that hung behind a plate of glass. Dwight escorted his father back to the group, his arm again pressed at the elbow. He felt his father flinch at the pressure.

“This is a Marine poncho-jacket,” the bow-tied tour guide explained. “It was worn by a decorated Marine named James Anthony who served two Vietnam tours of duty between 1967 and 1969. I want you to notice the personal embroidery over the breast pocket. Can anyone see what it says?”

Silence. Until now, they'd only shared whispers, afraid if they raised their voices they might raise the spirits of dead soldiers, or resurrect buried memories.

“No one knows what this brother is talkin' ‘bout?” The guide's lapse into vernacular elicited a ripple of laughter. A tall young man in the back, his baseball cap turned backward and his t-shirt sporting an image of the rapper Ludacris, raised his hand.

“It says ‘black and proud.' It's a shout out to James Brown's hit song ‘Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud' that was huge in the late ‘60s. My granddaddy was in Vietnam around that time. Said he saw James Brown in person!”

“You and your grandpa will have to tell us more about that later,” the guide smiled and signaled the group to move along. “James Brown's trip to Vietnam comes up several more times in this exhibit.”

“What'd he say?” Reggie asked Dwight, a mixture of frustration and alarm in his voice. “What did Mr. Lewis just say?”

“He was talking about the Marine's poncho,” he shouted into his father's right ear, “and about James Brown's performing for troops in Vietnam.”

“Entertaining,” his father shot back, almost defiantly. “James Brown might have entertained white GIs. He performed for us brothers.”

Before he could ask for clarification, Dwight realized the young man with the Ludacris t-shirt was standing next to them. His two hands rested on the back of a wheelchair where a white-haired man sat, looking intently at his father.

“Ain't that the truth, brother,” the white-haired gentleman said, his voice raspy. “Hell, if they hadn't talked James Brown into going to Vietnam, the shit would have really hit the fan.” The old man's eyes jumped as he spoke, punctuating his sentences. He stretched his hand upward toward Reggie's.

“Earl Floyd,” he offered, “1968-69.” As Earl's hand drew near Reggie's, it began to dip and snap and crack in what looked to Dwight like a sorcerer's wave.

“Reggie Johnson, Monkey Mountain, 1967-68,” his father replied. Dwight and the younger man watched dumbfounded as Reggie returned the smacking and snapping and various hand gestures.

“Camp Tien Sha,” Reggie smiled at Earl. “You there with the Mau Mau Brothers.” Less question than statement.

Earl nodded. Dwight felt as if he was eavesdropping on something he shouldn't. A quick glance at Ludacris t-shirt confirmed that he shared the same feeling.

“That's what makes this exhibit so important,” Earl spoke loud enough for Reggie, and probably the rest of the group, to hear. “Most folks don't know nothin' about what brothers had to deal with in Vietnam.” He paused and brushed the hand that rested on the top of his wheelchair. “This is my grandson Sharif.”

Heads nodded all around.

“We come down from Pittsburgh. That's where all this,” Earl waved at the exhibit, “started out. Interest was so high at the Heinz History Center that they put a travelin' show together last year. Been to Dallas, Philadelphia, Richmond, Chicago, and Birmingham.”

“And now Memphis,” Sharif volunteered. Earl threw him a look that said
mind your manners.

“It's not about the firefights and battles,” Earl continued. “It's a whole damn history of Black, with a capital B.”

Both Dwight and Sharif tensed up at the term blackness.

“You remember that brother wrote for
Time
or
Life
or one of them? Wallace Terry. He called the frontlines ‘Soulville.'” Reggie's head nods accelerated as Earl spoke. “Told some truth about how we brought that back home. People talk about the Panthers and Malcolm. All that grew up right there in Vietnam.”