Entrapment and Other Writings (29 page)

And isn’t he also David Morrison, dying in order to show us what it is like to die by fire?

Unless we know who this boy on the bike is, we do not know who we are. Because he has gone to the wall before, in many lands under many names; and will go to the wall again.

He is Father Camilo Torres, the guerilla priest of Bogota, whose
demands for land reform forced him out of his church and into the hills, to be shot down in a battle with Colombian police.

He is also that Austrian peasant youth who refused to soldier for Hitler.

“People today come up with every conceivable argument,” this unsophisticated boy argued, “to put the issue and the conflict in a favorable light. For instance, one is simply fighting for the German State. Inasmuch as Christ commanded that one must obey the secular rulers even when they are not religious, this is admittedly true. But I do not believe that Christ ever said that one must obey such rulers when they command something that is actually wicked. Can I still say I have a Fatherland?”

Franz Jagerstatter was beheaded by the Nazis in Brandenburg prison on August 9, 1943.

And there he stands, an untutored Catholic peasant who refused the Act of Supremacy; who never received the Sword of Loyola; so strongly rooted in the Church of the Martyrs and his catechism that he could go to his death firmly, without even the knowledge that anyone else in the world was aware of his stand.

He, too, was the boy on the bike. And for all the paraphernalia of Public Relations we now employ to disguise a peasant insurrection for land as a Communist conspiracy, he has 450,000 American soldiers pinned down. For he is fighting the same type of war we ourselves fought, also against overwhelming odds, in order to gain our own land, our own culture; and recognition that we too belong to The Company of Men.

Perhaps that was why, when I received a phone call from a Boston newspaper on the day that a drifter of no trade slaughtered eight student nurses here, saying, “We want you to cover The Crime of the Century for us,” I answered, “I don’t want to go to Vietnam.”

And hung up.

Cordially yours,

Nelson Algren

1.
Mission with LeMay
, by Curtis LeMay.

2.
Chicago Tribune
.

3.
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
.

4.
Horst Faas for the AP.

5.
New York Times
Sunday Magazine, October 30, 1966.

6.
Marine Corps General Greene in
U.S. News and World Report
, September 5, 1966.

There’s a dog down the hotel alley who isn’t trying to win anyone’s heart nor mind. It’s all he can do to hold onto his own.

He hotel is the Catinat, off the street once named the
Rue Catinat
that is now the Duong Tu-Do. He’s a yellowy, almond-eyed dog, still young despite his Ho Chi Minh goatee. He gets up when the people of his hotel get up, trots warily down Tu-Do just far enough to get his breakfast: eats it fast then scampers back to the Catinat.

It isn’t other dogs of Tu-Do the yellow dog fears; nor the heat of the day from which he hides. It isn’t even the man on the Honda-50 with the python around his neck, a caged mongoose on his handlebars and a lemur riding behind. Pythons, as the yellow dog sees it, simply aren’t in it with people.

People on Hondas, Vespas, Ischias, Mobylettes, Suzukis, Yamahas, Bridgestones and Kawasakis, gunning their motors through exhaust fumes from Tu-Do to Cho-lon. The traffic doesn’t begin to slow till the first Spooky hangs the night’s earliest flare. Then the sky above Cho-lon goes bright with a spreading light, glows yet more bright, turning night-clouds to molten copper: that darken again, in a smoking wake, as the flare falls at last. For all the world a spaceship coming in for a landing.

Now, all night long, from the Ben Bach docks to Gia Dinh, gun-ship and fireship, looking for Charlie, will lighten river, paddy and
jungle. MP night-patrols will cruise the dark markets, the darker alleys and the bright boulevards. Looking for Charlie. Riverine patrols will run in the dark on the hawks for a sampan’s shadow: God help the fisherman stealing home late when the starlight-scope picks him out.

If he crouches in the sampan the helicopter-gunner will blast him. If he goes over the side he’ll be shot in the water. You can’t take chances with Charlie.

While the yellow dog sleeps in the door: and dreams of a breakfast-bone. Spookies guard him from Charlie.

I joined SP5 James O. Dollins, of Waco, Texas, and SP4 Russel Zoffka, of Spenser, Iowa, both of the 716th MP Battalion: one of the best MP battalions on the Tran Hung-Dao between the Central Market and the Restaurant Dong Khanh. On the south side of the street, anyhow.

SP4 Zoffka was driving. I sat behind, beside the radio, which kept giving me odes like “Mike Gulf Jeep Zero.”

SP5 Dollins told me not to worry about it. All the radio was saying was that their gun-jeep would meet them, in five minutes, in front of the Dai-nam BBQ.

The gun-jeep is a two-man machine-gun truck which follows the lead-jeep to afford it protection from ambush. To give the machine-gunner as great an arc of fire as possible, the gun-jeep is uncovered and has no windshield.

Curfew for soldiers in Saigon is eleven p.m. For civilians, midnight. We wheeled down market streets now shuttered, onto streets lit by old-fashioned French lamp-standards; then back to the darkened docks. The MPs weren’t looking for Charlie yet: it wasn’t yet ten. The hours just before curfew are the likeliest for spotting AWOLs. We swung down Tu-Do.

“Tu-Do Street,” says the guide-book, “is well known for its luxurious façade by day and its dream-like beauty by night. It is the nation’s shop-window anything from liqueurs and perfumes to precision goods and top-quality merchandise from all over the world.”

Actually, Tu-Do is an ugly avenue. The “merchandise from all over the world” consists of cheap watches, outrageously priced, machine-made souvenirs and lacquer wares. Everything has the mark of shoddiness upon it. And this is not entirely a matter of the difficulties that war has imposed. The fact is that the Vietnamese have no art of their own: it is all an imitation of Chinese art. The lack of Vietnamese art objects is due, not to the war, but to the inability of the Vietnamese to do anything original. They are the most
unoriginal
people on earth.

“Let’s check that one out,” Dollins suggested to Zoffka. Zoffka made a U-turn, the gun-jeep following, and curbed a moon-faced Negro of about twenty in an American Air Force uniform. Dollins examined his papers by the jeep’s headlights. The gun-jeep came up beside us.

“We’ll have to take you in,” Dollins informed the Air Force man.

There were no manacles. The soldier sat beside me, in the back of the jeep, with Dollins half-inclined toward him to make certain he wouldn’t make any funny moves. He didn’t look like he was planning to.

“Where you from?” I asked him. If he heard, he didn’t answer. Dollins and Zoffka turned him over to the Provost Marshal’s office and returned to the jeep.

“He was easier than some,” Zoffka assured me.

“How’d you pick him out?” I asked Dollins.

“Too many ribbons, for one thing.”

“How else do you spot an AWOL?”

“Wearing civilian clothes with army boots. Hair too long. Shoulder patches don’t match. And decorations—the longer they’re AWOL the more ribbons they put on, I’m sure I don’t know why.”

In the earliest break of the big smoky day, when night-patrols are going off-duty and the day-patrols are coming on, then the last
hanging flare begins turning to ash. The first steamed-rice jogger trots down Tran Hung-Dao and the yellow dog stirs in his door.

Now the watchful night is done: now the true war can begin.

For by eight a.m. the bike-riders are wheeling up on the walks to beat the lights. And an air of mischief mixed with desperation begins dividing Honda from Harley, Suzuki from Yamaha, pedicab from cyclo and trishaw from taxi. Trying to out-gun and out-ride each other, the cowboys
lean
their bikes from side to side: in the Vietnamese mind this gains ground.

These riders have caught the spirit of the morning papers: they waken to victories, won every night by somebody else, in The Delta or the DMZ.

The NVA is always walking into a trap. The VC forever being decimated. Heroics go on elsewhere all the time. So ten thousand motorbikes race one another down the Tran Hung-Dao in a kind of mobilized derring-do; and the sirening of an ambulance lends all survivors a sense of achievement.

At the intersection of Hung-Dao and Nguyen Cann Chan a Vespa is upended, its wheels still spinning slowly. A white-holstered policeman is looking languidly down at the rider whose face is now part of the pavement. It’s all part of the fight against Communism.

The hostility of rider toward rider, driver toward driver, of all toward the “White Mice”—the National Police—and of police toward foreigners; of civilians toward soldiers and of all toward the police intensifies as the morning wears on.

Racing down the Tran Hung-Dao from Cho-lon to Tu-Do, competing all the way yet coming back alive, lends a sense of participation to the defense of the Free World. The consequent uproar sounds like a lawnmower, with one blade missing, amplified a thousand times.

An American tank, trapped in a herd of Peugeots, Datsuns, Citroëns, Porsches and Toyotas, thrusts its gun-turret forward like a single dark tusk and moves on its tracks with enormous deliberation; as if deciding which, of the lesser brutes surrounding it, it will turn upon first. While whistles are shrilling, sirens are warning, horns are squawking, brakes are grinding, bumpers clashing and tires complaining; and human voices yet converse.

Now come copper-gong-beaters and old betel-chewers carrying umbrellas over their heads and spitting as they come. Now the shaved-head bonzes, in grey or orange robes, and the children hauling between the shafts, come crowding off bridges, buses and barges: they are coming in now from the outskirts of town. From Gia Dinh, Binh Hung, Khai Tri and Pham Thang.

From barrack, paddy and slum-canal.

Now the forenoon heat is beginning and the day’s black-market charts are on the street: green is up, MPC is down. The moneychangers are at their corners and the whores are back in their beds.

Beneath the Central Market’s morning commotion, a whisper follows, decibels deep, in and out of the noodle cafes: now here now there. Asking from alley and areaway: “MPC? MPC?”

MPC is what the National Police are looking for when they arrest a Vietnamese woman for walking hand in hand with an American. MPC is what the Security Police are shaking the PX girls down for.
MPC is what the Vietnamese woman is sitting close to the American in the taxi for. And MPC is what the
Daily News
, like every other, is in pursuit of the GI for.

“The mere fact that the younger American literary generation has come to the schools, instead of running away from them,” Professor Wallace Stegner, of Stanford, assures us about Creative Writing Workshops, “is an indication of a soberer and less coltish spirit.”

“Writers in groups are with few exceptions the most impotent and pernicious tribe to infest the planet,” playwright Ed Bullins says, flatly refuting Professor Stegner. “It would be healthier for a writer to socialize with drug addicts than with a claque of hacks.”

If the act of writing, like that of ministering to the sick, defending justice, or constructing decent housing, is performed to sustain society’s confidence in the rightness of its own rules, Professor Stegner is right. Mr. Bullins is wrong. If the act of writing is performed to sustain the reader’s conviction that his own society is the best of all possible societies, Mr. Stegner is right again. Mr. Bullins still wrong.

Yet strangely, from
The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and
Maggie
, through
An American Tragedy, The Grapes of Wrath
, and
Native Son
, the American novel has consistently challenged our society’s confidence in its sense of justice. Of those books written in the conforming attitude of a “soberer and less coltish spirit,” not one has lasted. While not a single enduring work, from
Moby Dick
to
Catch-22
, but has been written in alienation from society; and in denial of the justice of society’s rules.

It is true that, as Professor Stegner says, Creative Writers’ Workshops offer sanctuary: a sanctuary which is precisely the means of cutting off the writer from the real world. Can one imagine
Life on the Mississippi
being conceived in a literary workshop? Could anyone have developed
The Open Boat
from a field trip through a classics library?

Courses in photojournalism, in juveniles, whodunits, science fiction, or in how to train your chihuahua to be an attack dog may not only prove worthwhile commercially, but may be fun to attend as well. But what have such courses to do with “creative” writing?

Creativity, by its own essence, is a solitary enterprise: one in which the individual confronts actuality alone; takes his own chances and wins or loses off by himself.

The attraction of the Creative Writers’ Schools is that they offer the opportunity of becoming a “creative writer” while taking no risks at all. Anyone with the tuition can now register himself as a “creative writer,” gain the respect of other “creative writers” and go from there to a safe university post teaching “Creative Writing.”