Fishin' : A Vietnam Vet's Story

Editor's Note:  This is a fictional story by a retired U.S. Army LTC based on an amalgamation of true stories of Vietnam Veterans.

Not aware yet of his wound, he went forward to inspect the body to see if the Charlie was a courier. He was shocked to see long, lustrous black hair flared out on the trampled grass. He ripped open the black pajamas.

“Shit.”

Right then, his LRRP platoon came under heavy fire from the jungle. The survivors, carrying their dead and wounded, exfiltrated under the cover of air strikes to an LZ where a Huey medevac came in under fire and mortar attack to pluck them to safety. He had taken two more rounds, one in his right side just below his rib cage and one in the left thigh. The wounded man whose left leg was gone that he carried saved his life by taking a fatal round for him. The chopper, shot up, trailing fuel and hydraulic oil from numerous bullet holes, staggered along at treetop level, the door gunners pouring fire into the jungle. When one of gunners was hit, he pulled the guy’s body out of the way and took his place.

He’d grown up in the Florida swamps, was in his element in the jungles of Vietnam, so he was always point man on patrols.  He was a quiet man, didn’t talk much ever. His eyes picked out traps and hazards that other troops couldn’t see even when he pointed them out. The snake hanging on branch overhead, the tiger slinking along beside them in the undergrowth, the trip wires, the punji stakes, the mines, the disturbed duff where somebody had tried to hide his tracks, the spider holes.  He knew how to catch fish, snakes and rodents to supplement their C-rats.

The Army was good to him. He re-upped and about decided to stay in for a career. When he returned to Nam on his second tour, he was a staff sergeant. His LRRP team was inserted near the Laotian border to track an NVA convoy on the Ho Chi Minh trail near the DMZ when he received orders to find a fighter pilot shot down in the area. Unknown if the pilot had ejected. The next day they found the F-4 wreckage. The pilot had not gotten out, was incinerated with his aircraft. A few minutes later, an NVA squad also found the site. Expecting a full assault from the NVA at company strength, possibly the entire battalion they had been tracking, he led his men on a fighting withdrawal. They eliminated the NVA squad, but he lost two men in the firefight. He radioed in the coordinates of the crash on the way to an extraction site for his dead and wounded. Close airstrikes covered their movement and dropped napalm around the extraction site before the medevac came in hot, escorted by two gunships laying down suppressive fire.

A month later he received chest and abdominal wounds.  A few days to stabilize him at Landstuhl, then to Walter Reed for months. Another Purple heart. A year later, he was back in Nam. Six months into his third tour, he got a battlefield promotion to second lieutenant. He’d hardly known the LT who got killed. He hardly knew anyone in his company anymore. Casualties had been heavy, and replacements came and died.

He had few personal needs. He had his paychecks sent to his mother. The local general store owner cashed the checks for her, taking a fee for the service. The bundle of bills she had in her hand every month was the most money his family had ever seen at once. Most of it was spent at the general store for necessities.

The day before his 17^th birthday, he’d stolen a boat. Not that birthdays mattered. His family was too big and too poor for his parents to fuss over any of the kids’ birthdays. The judge gave him his choice: jail or the Army.

The Army gave him mentors who something in the tall, lanky, taciturn kid. After Basic they taught him to read better, raising him from a second grade level to sixth in a few weeks. He was a corporal in no time. He read better and better as the Army sent him to one school after another to learn the necessary technology of killing. Got his jump wings, was selected for Ranger training and graduated in the respectable middle of his class. 

He had a captain and a first sergeant who pushed him to keep improving himself, told him he had the potential for great things. His captain, the day before he was killed, had given him two books to read. He still had those books. One was called “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington, the other was “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain. A chaplain had given him a tiny Bible with an olive-drab cover that fit in his breast pocket. He still had that, too.

For too short a time he had a buddy who was studying engineering in college, had let his grades and semester hours slip, got caught by the draft. Engineering sounded interesting. He’d always liked tinkering with stuff, figuring out how things worked. Got his GED, started thinking about going to college. A vague thought, pie in the sky. His parents couldn’t read or write, and all his brothers and sisters dropped out of school as soon as they could—or never started. Wasn’t a whole lotta government where they lived, deep in the Everglades. Nobody kept much track of the numbers of children born out there.

The kids cleaned fish as soon as they could handle a knife without cutting off their fingers. When they got big enough--11 or 12--the boys helped their dad fish or went to work for other two-bit commercial fishing operations around the Everglades. His sisters helped their mother, got married young and started having their own babies when they were 13 or14. One of his sisters got eaten by an alligator.

But the idea of college had been planted in him by his captain. After the Army, he went to school on the GI Bill, got a BS degree in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering.  He met a girl and got married. They had kids. NOAA hired him. What he loved most about his job was oceanographic research vessels. He was busy with his family and absorbed with fascination in the complex challenges of his job, so much so that he wasn’t sure when the ghosts started showing up.

He became aware one afternoon that someone was looking over his shoulder and suggesting a fix for a vexing mechanical problem on his ship. He turned around to talk to the man and found himself looking in the eyes of his buddy, the guy who was studying engineering. “Kyle?” he breathed. “Kyle—you’re dead, man. I saw you blown to pieces by a grenade. On that trail…” He reached out to touch the man, but nobody was there.

His wife said he needed to get help because of the nightmares. One night when he was thrashing and screaming in bed, she moved into one of their kids’ bedrooms. She said she loved him, but was afraid to sleep with him anymore. She made all the kids lock their doors when they went to bed.

More ghosts came to visit over time. His captain, who died as he tried desperately to staunch the officer’s femoral artery bleeding. His first sergeant, whose brains splattered all over him. Others. He  quit making friends with the replacements who came into his unit because they died too soon. They came back over and over, day and night, their numbers growing. He loaded the wounded and dead onto medevac choppers on a closed memory loop.

At his daughter’s thirteenth birthday party in their garden, a somber Asian girl came to stand beside his child. He didn’t know her. He was about to ask his wife when he recognized her, saw her long, lustrous black hair spread out in a fan behind her, her Non La, her conical hat, beside her, the red pool spreading out from her black pajamas, the AK-47 still clutched in her right hand.  He left the party, ran down the trail to his dock, climbed into his boat and rowed.  

The VC girl moved in with his family, was there in front of him with his daughter, always, staring mutely at him. There was no accusation in her eyes, no expression at all, just a penetrating gaze that followed him. He wished he knew her name. He tried to give her one, couldn’t. He tried to talk to her, tried to say he was sorry, but she didn’t answer. Just watched him.

He retired from NOAA, and ghosts were there, came to the retirement party. His captain and first sergeant flanked him at the podium as he gave his farewell speech. His family, now expanded with grandchildren, sat at the tables at the front. He faltered, his voice choking when he saw the nameless Cong girl sitting beside his daughter and her children.

Grizzled now, still fit and lean, he found refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp, where he’d built their retirement home. He had come to terms with some of his ghosts. His wife shared his bed again. His ghosts fished with him, joined the team when he played ball with his sons, ran with him. Out alone on his skiff, fishing, he talked with them. They’d drink beer out there on the water and tell war stories. The Cong girl still followed him, mute and watching, appearing among his granddaughters when they came to visit.  

But he had his team with him now, his ghosts whose wounds he’d treated, the ones whose bodies he’d loaded on the extraction choppers, the ones whose bodies he had to leave behind. He wasn’t at peace, but he had peace out in the swamp, fishing.

Karen McKay is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. She is a Foreign Area Operations Officer (Middle East/SW Asia), and Airborne, Civil Affairs, and Psyops qualified. Her PhD dissertation at Hebrew University in Jerusalem was on the failure of Allied air forces to bomb Auschwitz and the rail lines transporting Jews to death camps. She was the Executive Director of the Committee for Free Afghanistan, and president of Americans for Freedom, an NGO supporting the Contras, especially on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua.