The Tank Lords (49 page)

My other contacts involved riding an armored vehicle past silent locals; searching a village whose inhabitants had fled (for good reason; the village was a staging post for the North Vietnamese just over the Cambodian border, and we burned it that afternoon); the Coke girls, hooch maids and boom-boom girls who were really a part of the U.S. involvement, not of Viet-Nam itself.

And of course there's also the chance that some unseen Vietnamese or Cambodian was downrange when I was shooting out into the darkness. That doesn't count as meeting people either.

I was in an armored unit: the 11th Armored Cavalry, the Blackhorse Regiment. Infantrymen probably saw more of the real local people, but not a lot more. The tens of thousands of U.S. personnel working out of air-conditioned buildings in Saigon, Long Binh, and other centers saw merely a large-scale version of the Coke girls, hooch maids and boom-boom girls whom combat units met. The relative handful of advisors and Special Forces were the only American citizens actually living among the Vietnamese as opposed to being geographically within Viet-Nam.

I very much doubt that things were significantly different for soldiers fighting foreign wars at any other period of history. Sensible civilians need strong economic motives to get close to groups of heavily-armed foreigners, and the needs of troops in a war zone tend to be more basic than a desire to imbibe foreign culture.

Soldiers aren't any more apt to like all their fellows than members of any other interest group are. In school you were friends with some of your classmates, had no particular feelings about most of the rest, and strongly disliked one or two. The same is true of units, even quite small units, in a war zone. The stress of possible external attack makes it harder, not easier, to get along with the people with whom you're isolated.

And isolated is the key word. We changed base frequently in the field. One day we shifted an unusually long distance, over fifty miles. The tank I was riding on was part of a group that got separated from the remainder of the squadron. We had three tanks, four armored personnel carriers modified into fighting vehicles (ACAVs), an APC with added headroom and radios (a command track), and a light recovery vehicle that we called a cherrypicker though it had just a crane, not a bucket. We ran out of daylight.

By this point three ACAVs and the command track had broken down and were being towed. The remaining ACAV and one of the tanks were going to blow their engines at any moment. All the vehicles were badly overloaded with additional weapons and armor, and the need to pack all the squadron's gear for the move had exacerbated an already bad situation.

We shut down, trying by radio to raise the new base camp which
had
to be somewhere nearby. The night was pitch dark, a darkness that you can't imagine unless you've seen rural areas in a poor part of the Third World. We were hot, tired, and dizzy from twelve hours' hammering by tracked vehicles with half of the torsion bars in their suspensions broken.

And we were very much alone. So far as I could tell, nobody in the group would have described himself as happy, but we were certainly a few. Personally, I felt like a chunk of raw meat in shark waters.

The squadron commander's helicopter lifted from the new base, located our flares, and guided us in. No enemy contact, no harm done. But I'll never forget the way I felt that night, and the incident can stand as an unusually striking example of what the whole tour felt like: I was alone and an alien in an environment that might at any instant explode in violence against me.

Don't mistake what I'm saying: the environment and particularly the people of Viet-Nam and Cambodia were in much greater danger from our violence than we were from theirs. I saw plenty of examples of that, and I was a part of some of them. I'm just telling you what it felt like at the time.

So Shakespeare was right about "few" and wrong about "happy." The jury (in my head) is still out about folks who missed the war counting their manhoods cheap.

I'd like to think people had better sense than that. The one thing that ought to be obvious to a civilian is that war zones are an experience to avoid. Nonetheless, I know a couple men who've moaned that they missed "Nam," the great test of manhood of our generation. They're idiots if they believe that, and twits if they were just mouthing words that had become the in thing for their social circles.

I haven't tested my manhood by having my leg amputated without anesthetic; I don't feel less of a man for lack of the experience. And believe me, I don't feel more of a man for anything I saw or did in Southeast Asia.

The people I served with in 1970 (the enlisted men) were almost entirely draftees. At that time nobody I knew in-country:

• thought the war could be won;
  
• thought our government was even
  
• trying to win;
  
• thought the brutal, corrupt Saigon
  government was worth saving;
  
• thought our presence was doing the
  least bit of good to anybody,
  particularly ourselves.
  

But you know, I'm still proud of my unit and the men I served with. They weren't exactly my brothers, but they were the folks who were alone with me. Given the remarkably high percentage of those eligible who've joined the association of war-service Blackhorse veterans, my feelings are normal for the 11th Cav.

Nobody who missed the Viet-Nam War should regret the fact. It was a waste of blood and time and treasure. It did no good of which I'm aware, and did a great deal of evil of which I'm far too aware. But having said that . . .

I
rode with the Blackhorse.

Dave Drake

Chatham County, NC