"You know how women are about being left alone," Stan continued. "I came home from that tour when it was half through. It was in February '68, when the Tet offensive was reaching its peak. I had her call and lie to the Red Cross so I could get out of the country on emergency leave. That is when she got pregnant with Thomas Lee. I feel horribly guilty about leaving that unit. The only reason I had my wife call was to save my own skin. We suffered a forty-five percent casualty rate in one unit of my battalion during the Tet offensive. The odds of my being killed or maimed were highest during that part of the war. A lot of soldiers tried to get emergency leave while the fighting became severe enough to inflict substantial casualties. I pulled rank on them. I danced out of the picture while men under my command suffered the highest casualty rate during any part of the war. Five men died in my platoon while I was back in the states for just those ten short days. I called it survival-oriented intuition at the time. When I look back I have to admit I was a coward. I could not face death in combat along with the men I was leading. If I could not see my wife and child, then honor and glory of our country and the welfare of my men meant nothing to me."
John made a quick, critical note of Stan's confession and continued to stray from his usually objective fashion of impersonal diagnosis. "What was the longest time you remained true to Peggy while you were in the Army?" He asked.
"From the time we met and got married in Monterey back in '65 till I was sent to Vietnam in August '67, Mister Hurst. Raising kids was just not part of my life style. It drove me crazy to go home and find my house destroyed. Peggy and I would get in fights. It was all I could do to keep from hitting her. I never abused the kids. I intimidated Peggy severely on occasions. I was eager to leave her the second time, when I returned to Vietnam in '71. She always took it, however. My God, it was unbelievable! She would bounce back from the worst kind of fits and mistreatment. Our dissension came on by Peggy's having to raise kids in the limited kind of living conditions the Army could offer us."
"What I am trying to get at, Stan, is what it was that prompted your extramarital activities?"
"You would not understand, Mister Hurst, unless you lived in a country like Vietnam or Korea during the war. The Chinese and North Vietnamese Communists were not fooling around. They would kill you while you thought about shooting back! It was safer to shoot back and worry about repercussions afterwards. The damned heat and insects never let you alone. Mosquitoes transmitted malaria that made your guts swell up and dengue fever that made your joints ache so you would not be able to walk or bend your elbows without screaming out in pain for weeks at a time. The ticks, ants, and leeches would eat you up if you slept on the ground. During Monsoon Season rains are oppressing, never ending torrents that wash garbage out of alleys onto the streets.
"Your boots, socks, and undergarments never dried out. They always stayed rotting and mildewed because of the deluge. There were rats the size of small dogs continually scurrying across the tops of buildings, under floors of houses, and crawling through anything eatable left close to the floor. The rodents would keep me from sleeping nights, drive me crazy with their damned claws clattering over roofs and across ceilings whenever I slept out in the village. I somehow got the feeling God did not like me during those dangerous months toward the end of that war. My own confidence worked against me. The Oriental people's faith was always present in one form of demonstration or another. It was a horrible thing to witness people burning themselves to death n the middle of a crowd. Several animistic extremists, in the sixties, took their own lives in that fashion. It was my original supposition that the conflagration was due to a reconciliation that monks expected with God for the pious act of martyrdom, after they reduced themselves to ashes."
"Why did you see their suicide as an act of martyrdom," asked Hurst?
"I think holy men saw, in their own death, the power of alteration," Stan went on. "They were not afraid of the complex consequences of the Americans' pulling out of their country. They knew that death of their kind would be the ultimate result of our withdrawal, and felt that martyrdom was more honorable than violence. They knew hatred, brought about by domination of their country by foreigners, would eventually run its course, after which their ideology would be reborn. The Vietnamese people took much abuse from French directorates, and later on from Americans. It was nothing compared with disregard for human life they experienced after American forces left their country and the Vietminh overwhelmed them.
"An entire generation, millions of people, lost their lives when we pulled out of Southeast Asia. I stood to one side of a group of people that was watching asi a holy man burned himself, and I asked one guy in the crowd why a madman would do such an insane thing as pouring gasoline on himself and striking a match. The man tried to explain to me that 'It was not an attempt to inflict death or agony on anyone.' It was a way of the bonze in expressing unwillingness to live in a world perpetually torn by war and religious repression; he felt repression to be the result of South Vietnam's nationalist government. Self-immolation by fire was to demonstrate that what he wished to convey was of utmost seriousness."
Hurst interrupted, "Do you suppose the monk was disseminating to followers his belief that no excuse exists for taking life of men in other men's names? Moses wrote in Genesis, 'he who takes the blood of man, by his own hand, so shall his blood be taken by man.' Maybe he wanted to draw attention to the plight of passive individuals unwillingly caught up in that war and subjected to its violence."
"Yes, I've heard that supposition before," answered Stan. "It makes sense in some respects, but I simply cannot abide with it completely. Is a man to stand idly by and watch his family and associates being mauled and hacked to death by madmen? Will you, as duty to your fellow human beings, do absolutely nothing when a lunatic who has no objective other than murderous revenge or riotous destruction of other human beings attacks a crowd of innocent bystanders? That is exactly what happened, Mister Hurst, to inhabitants of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, as a result of the United States' withdrawal from Southeast Asia."
"I agree with you on that point," Hurst conceded, and then asked, "what other incidents of this kind of pandemonium did you witness?"
"I saw bystanders resort to violence on a few occasions. A couple thousand of them rioted in Saigon. I think the uprising was, in essence, fueled by instigators in the National Liberation Front who received instructions from Hanoi. Demonstrators were protesting the Prime Minister's refusal to allow them to participate in free elections. The plan was to oust the Prime Minister in a free election and install Buddhist ethnic leaders in his place. The extremely militant ex-leader of South Vietnam's Air Force found the idea of his being replaced by a representative spokesman for Buddhist religion absurd and ineffectual in confrontations with the dangerously aggressive activity displayed by the Communist government in Hanoi. The Buddhist Youth Organization and students of the university in Saigon felt the Prime Minister's appointment was illegal; he was placed in office by South Vietnam's Armed Forces Council, not by a popular election."
"How did the Prime Minister get appointed?" The psychologist encouraged, impressed by his patient's knowledge of the sociological problems in Southeast Asia.
"Well, the way I understand it, Ngo Dinh Diem had originally been elected president of South Vietnam. President Diem was a devoutly religious Catholic; he had become, therefore, not respected as an ethnological mediator by the Buddhist bonzes. Members of the Buddhist faith, assuredly, had not hold the man, in high esteem. They viewed him, almost violently, as a traitor. Religious repression became highlighted by news media, characterizing Diem in his political strategy as being against the more radical spectators who advocated his violent overthrow. His complacency, in being an effective military leader against the Vietcong, later cost him his office. It finally cost him his life. President Diem allowed his power-hungry brother to run the government as Prime Minister, becoming virtually ineffectual when it came to military leadership, until the American Central Intelligence Agency backed the South Vietnamese generals who instigated a coup to overthrow him.
"Diem left office as result of a coup instigated by the South Vietnamese military adviser and his staff of general officers. With Diem gone the power structure in the South Vietnamese government collapsed. Years of conflict saw his presidential palace in a state of constant upheaval. Nguyen Cao Ky was later installed as the new prime minister by appointment of Nguyen Van Thieu (later to be elected president) and his Armed Forces Council. One day the crowds were residing peacefully in front of Hoa Dao Pagoda; the next day they were hurling rocks and overturning cars protesting Ky's refusal to let them participate in open elections against him."
Hurst paid close attention to Stan Bradley and hurriedly scribbled notes on their conversation.
"Vietnam was a real mad house." Stan continued. "I was indignant toward the world as our conflict came to an end. The reason we lost the war was the South Vietnam government's ineffectual establishment of their constitution and democratic system. Years of military power struggles within the South Vietnamese government preceded final election of their own president, General Thieu, through vote of citizens in that country. After fighting ended, during the Tet counteroffensives, in the North and along South Vietnam's western border with Laos and Cambodia, we were allowed to rest and recuperate. We recessed, on furlough, in temporary safety of the air base at Da Nang and in Saigon, the capital city to the south. I wanted to forget the war and the mean-green-machine I was living in at the time. I never forgot about Peggy. That was after the best part of our marriage was over and done with. Fighting the war demoralized me so much I would go to the villages and pick up on whatever woman was available. I simply lost track of my identity.
"Incessant disagreement with my wife is what interested me in a Vietnamese girl who worked at one of the nightclubs in Bien Hoa. It was while I was in the First Cavalry. That close to our air support in Saigon, we did not feel the immediate threat of Ho Chi Minh. It made me feel as if I had some kind of home life while I was eight thousand miles away from the United States. I didn't have much interest in getting high. Fools, messing their minds up on happy-smoke and opium! They caused enough destruction to the military without ever being attacked by the enemy. Because so many lives were lost as direct result of drugs, I stuck solely to booze."
More thoughts began to spill from Bradley, rapidly and approximately at random. "I couldn't count casualties to hapless noncombatants caught in our cross fires. Know something funny? It was usually guys who were straight that did most of the killing. Ones who were stoned died fast, lost an arm or a leg, or just got in the damn way. If they ever hit what they were aiming at, it was an accident. One thing that sorry bastard, Uncle Ho, could never admit was that it was the Americans who won the war against Japan. If it were not for our Allied Armies, Japanese would still be in his country. I hated Ho Chi Minh and his Communist-backed government. I used every capability I could devise to secure its defeat."
Again Hurst interrupted. "Let's talk some more about the havoc and violence that you've seen in war, Stan. Vietnam has certainly left an unforgettable impression on you. It has on most of us. You said a while ago that you deserted your men. Do you have any thoughts on why you had to do that?"
Bradley coldly avoided the question put to him. Then he continued his erratic discourse. "In '68, just after the beginning of the Tet offensive in January, we walked through a town that had been sympathetic to the Vietcong. Members of the unit killed everyone in the village. During that year Ho Chi Minh sent sixty thousand communist troops down from the North and attacked every large city and military base south of the seventeenth parallel. Death squads from the People's Liberation Army and regular Vietminh front line troops stormed the American Embassy and Presidential Palace in Saigon. Tet cost over five thousand Americans lives. Five thousand people murdered! The Vietcong destroyed hundreds of aircraft, a billion dollars worth of military equipment sitting on the ground.
