The Snowfly (8 page)

The Chickermans came in the company of a dark-haired beauty with wild blue eyes and sharp features. It was Raina and I could not take my eyes off her.

Father Luke read a prayer and once stopped to pick a large yellow stonefly off the Good Book. He held it up and examined it studiously before flicking it away. When the prayer was done, he looked up.

“Anyone care to speak?”

There was an astonishingly large crowd at the ceremony. My mother had done good deeds all her life and only then, at her funeral, did I realize the impact her life had had on others. People began stepping forward one after another and after a while I had to sit down. My mother hadn't been a queen; she'd been a saint.

When the last person had spoken, the priest looked expectantly at my father.

“Poor bastard,” my old man muttered.

“Who?” Father Luke asked. He looked worried.

“God. She'll turn Heaven to Hell.”

“You have no cause to say that,” the priest said.

“What do you know?” the old man shot back. “I lived it.”

Lilly and I just smiled at each other. After we got through greeting mourners, I looked for Raina and the Chickermans but they were gone. I drove over to the store hoping to catch them, but they weren't there either.

Raina's sudden appearance and disappearance left me wanting to reconnect with her. I didn't care what Lilly thought of her. She had been my friend. I knew that in my heart. In the years to follow I would learn that what's in our hearts may not be in others'.

4

It was early August 1966, nearly midnight on a Saturday night. The temperature had been in the nineties for ten days, humidity thick as Saran Wrap, unrelenting even after sunset. I was working part time at an auto parts store called Sulac Automotive and also getting sporadic assignments from the
Lansing State Journal.
It was stringer's work, paid by the published inch, but I thought it would look good in my portfolio. Other professions emphasized résumés and academic records, but if you wanted a reporting job you had to have proof that you could write. And the only proof that mattered was what actually made it into print.

A small flat roof outside my bedroom served as a porch. Some nights I slept right there, where a little movement in the night air made the humidity tolerable. I had a phone installed illegally by an acquaintance in electrical engineering.

I was in no mood to go out when the call came, but neither was the heat conducive to sleep.

“Rhodes?”

“Talking.”

“Madill. Get your ass down to the Bellamy Building. You know where that is?”

“Yep.” Madill was an assistant city editor and my benefactor at the
­Journal.

“Got your credentials?”

“Somewhere.”

“Find them and go get me a story, Rhodes.”

The Bellamy Building was the major landmark a few blocks north of the Capitol. The area had once been home to Lansing's elite. Now it was the anchor of a sort of quasi-middle-class neighborhood, a mix of black and white families, some on their way up, others headed in the opposite direction. I found trucks and buses unloading dozens of cops who formed a serpentine single file, making their way past dozens of anodized trash cans stuffed with new ax handles. They looked like cans of kindling. Each cop took a handle out of a can and moved on. The cops wore military helmets with stainless-steel covers, heavy black leather jackets, and black gloves. Shoulder patches told me that the officers were from departments all over the area. Something big and sinister was unfolding. There is no sweeter scent to an aspiring reporter.

I saw Reg Bernard, a Lansing cop I knew.

“What's up?” I asked him.

“Race riot.”

“What's that mean?”

“It means some boofers have fucked the pooch. There was a party. It got noisy and out of hand. Deputy Chief Williams went over there to tell them to keep it down and some splib hit him with a brick. Fractured his skull.”

There were cops strung out to the left and right of me. Every fifth or sixth man carried a powerful flashlight. The cops with the ax handles were banging them on the asphalt.

“What're you going to do?”

“Sweep the area,” he said with a shrug. “Our orders are to disperse the crowd and collar resisters.”

The area west of us looked dark. House lights were out and many streetlights weren't working.

“Don't get out in front of the line,” Bernard warned me. “This will not be pretty.”

The sweep commenced with a babel of whistles to my left and right.

The cops continued to hammer their clubs on the street, against trees, on everything in their path. The vibrating clamor reminded me of a rattlesnake's final warning to intruders.

Cops in the street waited for those going through yards to re-form the line, which advanced quickly and relentlessly.

To my right I heard shouts and some shrieks, and the ever-present tattoo of ax handles.

Ahead there was darkness.

Eventually I left the main formation and worked my way into a group of cops moving through backyards; from there I raced ahead of them to see what it was they were actually after.

I ran to get breathing room and didn't stop until I was a block ahead.

“What the hell you doin', kid?” a voice asked nervously from a driveway.

“I'm a reporter.”

“You fucked. Shiny hats be catchin' your ass out here.”

“What's going on?”

“It got to have a name? It the same thing always goin' down here.”

“I heard a deputy chief got hurt.”

“Hear lotta shit when big sticks be goin' bip-bap, man. Ain't no hurt depatee chief. They just got the bloods worked up. You best step on over here wid us.”

What happened next has never been entirely clear to me. Behind me there was a fracas, several scuffles, curses, the sounds of sticks. Police lights knifed through the darkness. I had always imagined that a head struck by something solid would have a mushy, hollow sound. It didn't. It sounded like the ax handles were striking oak beams.

The sound of struggles grew steadily like a night hatch of skittering flies and hungry fish. Shadows melded with shadows. I sensed hurried movement all around me, but no sounds of fear. Men cursed and shouted, grunted and barked, all the sounds muted and workmanlike, the sounds of commitment. On both sides.

A light beam swept me seconds before someone shoved me from behind, knocking me down, then there was the leaden stamp of feet around me and I could smell hate and sweat and a light beamed into my face and an angry and surprised voice said, “
Rhodes?
You piece of shit! Still porking that good old southern poon? Hold that asshole right there.”

There was no mistaking the voice or the message. Rick Fistrip. I had no time to contemplate my recognition because fire erupted in my forearms. Then in my head.

I awoke in white. A man in white speckled with blood sat in a chair nursing an unlit pipe. “How you feelin'?”

“I'm not.”

“That's the dope,” he said. “You will. Concussion. Both your arms are broken. No ID. Who are you?”

I gave my name, explained that I was a reporter.

“How'd you get caught in that mess?”

I wasn't sure I could explain it. I had pushed out ahead and gotten myself enmeshed.

“Gonna have to get positive ID on you,” the man said apologetically.

I gave him the name of my contact at the paper.

Madill showed up with his tie tucked between the third and fourth buttons of a starched white shirt. He had yellow-green sweat stains under his arms. “He's mine,” he told the doctor and a cop, who was standing at the door.

He turned to me. “I said
get
the story, Rhodes. Not
be
the story. They really worked you over, son.”

I told him to write down what I said. The lead began, “Tonight police swept side by side through West Lansing, using pristine ax handles to club anybody in their path. They came, they claimed, to restore peace. From where I stood, it looked like they destroyed it. A lot of people are concerned about our deepening involvement in Vietnam, but it looks to me as if the real war could be right here, and just as nasty.” It was one of the most prophetic statements I ever authored.

Madill looked at me. “Jesus Christ, kid. I like the ‘me' angle. Keep it rolling.”

I did.

The story made the
Journal
's front page. It wasn't the precise story I wrote, but my facts and most of my observations were there and I got a check for fifty dollars and a prognosis of full recovery, casts off in eight to twelve weeks. I left out the part about Fistrip. I wanted to handle that separately.

The paper covered all my medical bills. The morning I got out of the hospital I went directly to the police station and learned that Fistrip, who was part of some sort of police auxiliary that had been mobilized for the event, had indeed been involved. I filed a complaint. I told a lieutenant that Fistrip had put a light in my face, spoken my name, and then I had been beaten. I also told him what Fistrip had said about reporters when we first met at Discount City. I said nothing about Spruce Graham. The lieutenant nodded with mock interest and nothing more came of it. At least not then.

I had seen the heart of two mobs in my short life; I didn't like either one and had no inkling that the worst was yet to come.

 

•••

 

Labor Day week I got my draft notice and called home. The old man talked to a friend at the local draft board, told him what had happened, and got my government physical postponed until I had a medical release from the riot injuries.

A week later I had another visitor.

Grady Yetter wore a suit like it was a vise. The fingers of his left hand were yellow from nicotine, his voice hoarse.

“You Rhodes?”

I nodded.

“Madill called me. We did Korea together. Read me the story you wrote. Piss you off, they didn't use it the way you wrote it?” He didn't pause for my answer. “That's a local rag for you,” he said with a sarcastic chuckle. “Guard the status quo like a virgin's cherry. The first-person wrinkle threw them for a loop. It was a damn good story, Rhodes. I talked to Joe Lawler out at the college. He said you've got talent. You want a job?”

Joe Lawler was my academic adviser at MSU. “Doing what?”

“UPI, Rhodes. War correspondent. You say yes, we'll ship your young ass to Vietnam. Nothing like a war to kick-start a career. I should know.”

“I got my draft notice.”

“Good, that makes your decision easier. Either way, Rhodes, when your arms heal, your ass is headed for Asia. You can go and find out what the fuck is going on, or you can go over there and have some pimple-faced brown bar from Bumfuck, Iowa, lead you through the jungle.”

“If they draft me, I've got to go. That's the law.”

“Horseshit. The law don't apply to everyone equally. You say yes to us and we'll take care of Uncle Sam. Whaddya think?”

“How much does it pay?”

Yetter grinned crookedly. “Some days you'll wonder why you're not paying us. Other days you'll think about coming back and slicing my throat.” He cited a figure and detailed benefits and other arrangements. He also gave me the name of another doctor who would look after my injuries.

“Don't you need a transcript of my classes and grades?”

“We're hiring talent, Rhodes. Not sheepskins.”

I accepted. Trout and white flies were put aside. I was moving on.

I called my old man and broke the news to him.

“Are you crazy?” he asked, not wasting words.

“I'm not going in uniform.”

“Going is the problem,” the old man said curtly, “not what you'll be wearing.”

5

It was 1967, I was twenty-three and in the second year of my war. Most of the details don't matter now. They didn't then, either, but I had to learn that for myself. I had no big picture to orient me; my war amounted to a series of snapshots, most of them unpleasant and out of wider context, much less any real focus. I met other correspondents, many of whom had spent their entire professional lives chasing wars, and even they were at a loss to explain the mess. I operated out of Saigon but spent as much time as I could in the field.

UPI was a screwed-up organization. The Saigon bureau chief had been medevacked back to the States the day before I arrived. Bloody hemorrhoids took him home and left me reporting to a telephone voice in Manila. UPI had a half-dozen reporters and several contract photographers dispersed around the country. I think I drew Saigon as my operating base because I was new and would need an overseer, but my would-be boss's medical problem left me pretty much on my own. UPI kept telling me a replacement bureau chief was on the way, but one never arrived.

The Manila voice belonged to Del Puffit, who gave me orders and assignments without a clue of what I was facing every day. I met him only once, in a skin bar in Manila. He was obese, inebriated, and spewing projectile sweat. This graduate of some small private college in St. Louis kept telling me that I needed to develop an intellectual's view of the world and grow out of the rubber-stamp education I got at a state farm college. To my credit, I held my tongue and my fists and after one drink, I paid the tab with my own dime and left him perched precariously on a barstool.

His telephone contacts were erratic. I'd hear from him four days in a row, then nothing for weeks on end. The calls had a set script.

He'd bark, “Find the outrage. We need to tug heartstrings.” This was the intellectual view I was supposed to aspire to?

I almost always countered, “Come on over and show me what you mean.”

He never did. Outrage in Vietnam had no context when you were in Manila. Was it spending a hundred grand to mine a dirt road the NVA cleared with water buffalo dragging garbage can lids? Was it a squad of Marines wasting eighty-three old folks, women, and children in a village in II Corps? Or was it a squad of VC wasting eighty-three old folks, women, and kids in a ville in the Delta? There were no reliable points of reference and good and evil defied definition.

Morality was a moving target.

The South Vietnamese government lied. The North Vietnamese government lied. The American government lied. Reporters lied. Civilians lied. The way I saw it, only I dealt in the truth, but now I realize that, because I never knew what was really true, my presumed truths were also lies.

Only the South Koreans (ROKs) seemed forthright. They were renowned for their methods of pacifying areas that MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) briefers labeled “politically ambiguous.” The Koreans would ride American-flown slicks into an area, dismount in force, and kill the first twenty or thirty locals they encountered. There were no interrogations, just summary executions. They were not seeking truth, only symbols. The heads were staked around the area as warnings to the politically unambiguous. The Koreans did not suffer OLs—op losses—because their brutal arrivals assured that all folks of differing political flavors would expeditiously relocate to safer, more ambiguous environs. Korean efficiency was recognized by all sides, if not universally admired.

I interviewed an ROK captain one rainy afternoon in a camp not far from the Mekong Delta.

“Why are Korean troops here?”

“U.S. is our ally. They ask help, we come. Someday we will kill North Korea communists. We practice now on South Vietnam communists.”

The essence of war is simplicity.

I found myself spending longer and longer periods of time in the bush and, afterward, longer and longer intervals rejuicing to return to the bush. It got more difficult every time. Harder to pull myself out, harder to put myself back in. The first year was bad, the second worse.

The things I saw in the war sometimes defied description, but still live in my mind. I do not have night sweats or nightmares, but I have plenty of ugliness floating around in my subconscious.

I went out with the troops every chance I could finagle, and over time my stories reflected my state of mind.

 

•••

 

Today was like yesterday for Bravo Company. Captain Walter Stiff led his company slowly through a reptile-infested swamp searching for Viet Cong storage sites. Two men were bitten by poisonous snakes. One man had heat-induced convulsions. One man got lost and remains missing. And one man was wounded in what he told his captain was a one-on-one encounter with the enemy; the company commander is calling it a wound of unknown origin, which means a Purple Heart is unlikely. Just before sundown, Bravo's survivors shotgunned a colony of reddish black monkeys that were declared a potential “nocturnal security threat.” Human casualties were medevacked out. Primate casualties were roasted for dinner. Tomorrow will be just like today, only one day closer to each soldier's ticket to the Freedom Bird. The noblest cause in this war is getting out with all your parts intact. Said a platoon sergeant, “We're all in this war separately together.”

 

•••

 

About the time I got to thinking I had seen everything I discovered I had barely scratched the surface.

In September 1967 I arranged a hop out to the USS
Snow,
a hospital ship named for a Korean war surgeon who had died as a POW in that so-called police action. The hospital ship operated south of Da Nang in the South China Sea; I had heard that the ship's surgeons out there were doing new procedures that were producing miraculous medical results. In any war, all miracles are welcomed, real or imagined. I'd also heard something else, and that's what pushed me to take a look. If my leads on this were solid, Del Puffit would have the outrage he wanted.

The ship was a brilliant white and glowed as my chopper approached just after sunrise. We came in high and my first view of the
Snow
was a white speck on a blue-green carpet; as we got closer she looked like a toy. For some reason I thought of a snowfly rising off a smooth river.

Everything in and on the ship was scrubbed clean and white, including the medical personnel, which was just as I had been told. The doctors on the ship were said to be very good, pushing the envelope of risk with their patients, all of whom were black men. I had learned this from an enlisted medic I met during one of my field excursions. He claimed that two men from his company had been wounded and flown out of the field and moved onto the
Snow,
and that there they had died.

I uttered my sympathies, which made the man angry. He grabbed the collar of my jacket and nearly choked me.

He said, “You don't get it, man! They only take brothers out there and a lot of them don't make it.”

“How badly hurt were the guys from your company?”

“They were fucked up, but not ready to buy the farm, dig? I'm just a medic, see, but I know when a man is going to die. My brothers shoulda made it, man.”

I began asking around in other outfits after this and heard enough similar stories that I wanted to go out to the
Snow
and see for myself.

“You Are My Sunshine” was blaring from the ship's loudspeakers as the chopper waddled onto the helipad. The song played over and over in a closed loop. The noise from the ship's belly was a soft and steady hum. Pungent salt spray and disinfectants permeated every corner of the vessel.

I had breakfast with a Marine surgeon, Colonel Johnson Quick, the ship's lead thoracic surgeon, a tanned, muscular man who neither smoked nor drank and made sure everybody knew about it. Over eggs Benedict and fresh whole milk he talked me through all kinds of surgical procedures, addressing me as if I had fifth-grade comprehension. He told me repeatedly that “his people” were “results oriented” and that back in the States he had enjoyed a “hugely successful” practice, which I interpreted as his having made a lot of money.

The surgical procedures were interesting, but not my main reason for visiting the
Snow.

“Colonel, why are all the medical and ship's personnel on board white, and all the patients black? Don't wounded white soldiers need your help?”

He stared at me and joined his hands to make a small wall between us. “We do not pick our patients.”

This seemed a fair-enough answer. “Who does?”

The joined hands grasped each other tighter. “This is an egalitarian service. We take care of who is sent to us. Surgery, Mister Rhodes, is color blind and all humans are the same color inside.”

I changed directions. “What you and your colleagues do here is largely experimental, am I correct?”

“Not to us,” he said.

“But all the procedures you've described to me aren't used in hospitals back home. They're not standard, right?”

The colonel's lips pursed and his neck turned red. “Here is here,” he said. “There is there. We set standards here that will eventually become the standards there.”

I kept my voice calm. “If you are experimenting here, doesn't that require the patients' permission?”

“This is the military,” he said. “There is no time to ask permission of a dying man. And . . . it would be unethical to do so. Out here, time is life.”

I would not be swayed. “What's your overall success rate?”

He blinked and scowled. “We have achieved
unprecedented
successes.”

“Granted. I've heard lots of good things about your team, but what about an overall percentage?”

He kept blinking.

“For example,” I said, “what is the survival rate for a kind of procedure you do here, versus a similar procedure done at field hospitals in-country—or back home?”

He said, “You can't compare durians and mangos.”

I said, “Okay, just give me an overall percentage, a batting average. Of the men who come to the
Snow,
how many leave alive?”

“All we are capable of saving,” he said.

I never did get answers to my questions and was invited to leave and placed on a chopper heading back to Da Nang before lunch.

I didn't need an answer or a number to write my story. The USS
Snow
was black and white to the eye, but all gray ethically.

My story about the
Snow
ran and created a brief furor back in the World. One of the information pukes from MACV's Information Office made a point of sending me a message letting me know that “the general” (name unspecified) considered my story an act of treason and that while my credentials were not being pulled, I could not count on a great deal of cooperation from the military.

Del Puffit called me and threatened to “have me fired” if I pursued “any more stories of this ilk.”

Have
me fired? This meant he couldn't do it himself and somehow I knew Yetter would be in my corner. “I thought you wanted me to find outrage?”

“You cannot destroy confidence in the medical service,” he blared, lecturing in his most officious voice. “The boys in uniform need to believe that if they're injured, they'll be made whole again.”

I said, “Goddammit, Del, they're taking black kids out to that ship and using them as lab rats.”

“There is no government conspiracy against Nee-grows,” Puffit said. “Don't do this again.”

“The story ran. Didn't you review it?”

“I was indisposed.” He had been drunk. This story and phone call freed me from following any further direction from Puffit.

In 1972, a few years after I left Vietnam, Americans were shocked to learn about the federal government's forty-year-long “Tuskegee study.” Black men diagnosed with syphilis had been intentionally not treated so that doctors could study the natural course of the disease. The
Snow
's outrage had not been the only one against some of our own people.

During my two years in Vietnam, the hospital ship story was the only one I wrote with real political intent. Before and after that I tried to keep my focus on what the individual soldiers were doing to stay alive and get home.

I met some genuine crazies and too many assholes to count, but mostly I met duty-bound young people doing what they thought their country wanted and doing it the best they could.

I hated the war. But I hated what America was doing to our soldiers even more. The troops had a word to cover the situation there and back in the World:
FUBAR,
Fucked Up Beyond All Reality.

 

•••

 

In November 1967 I caught a hop on an air force C-130 to Da Nang in I Corps, in the northern part of the country. I wanted to spend time with a Marine unit that made long-range reconnaissance sorties into enemy-­controlled territory. The long-range recon guys were called Lurps. They were taken by helicopters into the bush and left in place until their mission was done or their food ran out and their clothes rotted off, even their jungle boots. I wanted to go out with one of these teams and tell the story of what they did, but my request initially had gotten mired between Saigon and Da Nang. The military made an art of delays. After pressing several times, I was told that I could visit the base, but would have to remain there, for “safety and security reasons.” I accepted. In northernmost South Vietnam, the war featured fixed lines and was more like the classic them-against-us scenarios of previous conflicts; down south was more of a guerilla and terrorist business, which made it impossible to draw distinctions. From Da Nang I rode west into the mountains to the Marine operation at Camp Jolly with ten taciturn Marines in a lumbering, yawing CH34C Choctaw. Until I got clearance to go out with the troops, it was better than nothing. I always hated sitting around.