PAGE 6
MEMORIAL DAY
The first night ashore at Chu Lai, after a day of
unloading LSTs, the sky rusty orange from flares shot off in
the jungles and hills a few miles from the beach, Paine had
said to his friends," I can't believe there are people out in
those bushes waiting to kill me." Less than two months after
Memorial Day he was dead, his right arm and half his head
blown off by a booby trap hanging in a tree. His mother in
California requested what was left of him be buried at the
Punchbowl National Cemetery in Hawaii.
"It makes me sick to my stomach thinking about
flowers on my grave," Paine said to his friends. "If I get blown
away some Goddamn politician's going to say I died for my
country and he's going to look at some poor clown and tell
him he should die for his country like me. If I could I'd come
screaming out of my grave and break his stupid lying neck
and tell that kid to get the fuck home."
"Nobody cares anyway," another man said. "Why
should anybody living give a damn about the dead?”
"Just an extra day off work," another said.
"When I get home," Paine said, "Every Memorial Day
I'm going to piss on a military grave."
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
There’s only one reason for Memorial Day and that's
to get more soldiers off to more wars and get them killed," a
man argued with some of his friends.
"Bullshit!” one of them snorted. "You always got to put
some political bullshit into everything you say. Memorial Day
is just remembering people who got killed, that's all. There
ain't nothing more to it."
Another shook his head and agreed with the first man.
"When I was a kid my mother used to take us every year to
see my father's grave and put flowers on it. American Legion
guys were always there, making speeches and smiling at my
mother and patting me and my brother on the head They
always told her what fine little soldiers we were."
"That's it exactly," the first man said. "More meat for
the butcher. They got your old man, now they got you. If you
make it out of here and ever have a kid, they'll get him too."
They were in Vietnam, part of a USMC infantry squad,
and it was Memorial Day Except for the usual patrols, there
were no operations. The division commander had made a
speech in his headquarters for the press about “The Marine
Corps Mission." The men were relieved, as usual, that they
were too far forward for the general to visit them. The people
in headquarters were not so lucky. They were forced to stand
at attention in the very hot sun while the general and a visiting
senator preached duty, honor and patriotism.
For the grunts it was a day off, which was about the
best any of them could say about Memorial Day. Some of
them tried to get the sand and rust off their rifles, others
played poker or snuck off into one of the off-limits villages to
drink beer and pay for lovemaking This particular group, at
least for the time being, sat around and shot the shit, drinking
warm beer one of them had bartered from a Vietnamese
vendor on a bicycle. Later they would roll some dope, but they
had to be careful, more careful than the years that followed
when almost everybody smoked.
"I'm not even going to think about what we're doing
here to these people I'm just thinking about what's been done
to us," the first man said. He was tall and bony, with thick
glasses and a nose that hooked so prominently he was called
Eagle Beak. His name was Victor Paine, and he was a 19 year
old Lance Corporal in the USMC. He had been in the war
several months. Death had become a preoccupation with him,
essentially a doomed sense of his own. Friends were dead,
their bodies torn apart. Sometimes they were picked off one
by one by snipers, sometimes in startlingly sudden and terrible
firefights that killed many on both sides: more often than not
booby traps and landmines killed them.
What Paine didn't want to think about was the horror
they visited upon the Vietnamese. The villages burned to the
ground, the old women and children whose bodies were
scattered like leaves, napalmed or shot, gushing blood and
bringing flies. Like the others he felt trapped in a whirlwind and
didn't know how to get out of it except do his job and hope he
lived until rotation back to the world. There hadn't been a war
when he enlisted, at least not like it was now. Hardly anybody
ever heard of Vietnam until they were loaded aboard ships
and told this was what they trained for.
The subject of death was common, as was that of
fear. They talked about the ways they preferred to die and
were unashamed of being afraid. Like Paine, most of them
didn't like to think about what they were doing to the Vietnam
ese, though they often got angry at what the Vietnamese did
to them. Most of them simply wanted to do their time, stay
alive and go back home. Some of them, those who got back,
began to finally think about it. They were wracked by night
mares of horror and guilt. Alcohol and drugs briefly quieted
the torment. A few went out into the streets in protest of the
war. Enough of them got together and formed the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War and threw their combat medals
at Congress. But that crusade faded as most of the former
soldiers drifted away from anything that had to do with the
military, even an organization formed against it. Though it
was the reverse side of the mirror, antithesis of the American
Legion and VFW — and although it gave a positive political
definition to a shared negative experience — it was still part
of the same thing.
Of the other men who drank warm beer and talked
the endless trivia of grunts' that Memorial Day (1966), one
was later a blob in a VA hospital, the same kind of vegetable
Dalton Trumbo wrote about in Johnny Got His Gun. Another
was crippled and another missing an arm. Some were killed
later on in the months that followed and a few more made it
home in reasonable shape, physically at least.
Five of Paine's friends had a reunion of sorts in
Chicago, summer of 1968. They were all members of the then
fledging WAW. One of them was still on active duty, but he
was AWOL. All of them, during that furious week of the Demo
crStic National Convention, ran up against the clubs and gas
« t ; : of (he Chicago Police and Illinois National Guard, and one was
■:
hurt. But they were happy to be together again and felt they
Paine talked about it often, but he wasn’t sure what
were doing something right for a change. "Sure wish Paine
to do about it. The lives of his friends had become his only
was here," one of them said. "He’d want to do this."
meaning. "We've got no right to say we don't want to die," he
A few years later one of those five ex-USMCs lived
said. "We have no choice or freedom to protest the way we're
for awhile in Honolulu. The place he stayed was built on the
being used. When the honcho says go, we gotta go or he'll
shoot us or maybe we'll end up in the brig the rest of our lives
bottom slope of the hill called Punchbowl. He knew thousands
of other Marines, soldiers, sailors and flyers from Vietnam and
(I still don't have the guts to be called 'coward'). There isn't
earlier wars were buried up there, but he was conscious only
anybody here I know wants to die in this fuckin' place, but the
of Paine. The memory and presence haunted him, though he
way you hear the generals and politicians say it, we're as
never climbed the hill to visit his friend or put flowers on his
happy as pigs in shit for the chance to get killed for our
grave, or to piss on it either.
country."
i
THE HIGHEST PATRIOTIC ACT
UNIONTOWN
218 WEST MARINE DRIVE
ASTORIA, OREGON 97103
(503) 325-8708
TONY S TAVERN
1313 MARINE DR., ASTORIA
(503) 325-5069
It is very hot and lonely in the world's deserts, the
burnt scarred wastes ruled by sand, which moves, slowly
over the millennia, to cover all living things except for a
straggly few, covering even the bodies, how many were there?
hundreds? thousands? in that desolate pass, left to the carrion
after the jets fell upon them with tons and tons of napalm.
The cremated bodies looked like barbecued wood
when Barry Spatz stumbled upon them in June 1967, two
weeks after the Six Day War fought and won by Israel. Most
of the Egyptian Army had been found and trapped in the three-
mile Mitla Pass in the Sinai Desert and the Israelis filled it with
napalm until the ground was black and smoking and tanks
melted and fused and nothing was left alive.
Spatz saw the broken pyres of mangled, incinerated
bodies and smelled their rot in that giant charred oven, some
thing even the pilots who killed them could not do.
"I saw exactly and forever what war is — and thank
God I saw it without being involved, trapped into it as one of
the murderers. .." he tried to explain, his voice quiet and devoid
of irony.
The irony was his situation, a 23 year old college
graduate with a bachelor's degree in political science, returned
to this country apprehensive of the draft during the Vietnam
War. The same day he registered as a conscientious objector
he voluntarily applied for the two year civilian service program
which is an alternative to military service.
"I knew I was obligated — I wasn't trying to duck it,"
Spatz said. "But I thought of doing some work of humane
service, possibly as a teacher in the ghettoes..."
The draft board said no.
Spatz did not know what sort of job he would be given.
"It could be as a hospital orderly in Cleveland for all
I know — they had suggested that I drive a Goodwill truck,"
Spatz said "That's all well and good — but I've got a degree
and I'm reasonably intelligent and I think the government
should use that to good purpose. I want to do something to stop
this madness of murder and slaughter — I guess you could say
something that I could do and feel and know what is being done
helps another person and more.”
Why did he choose the hard road of conscientious
objection? That ghostly corpse strewn pass in the Sinai Desert
was not just the shocking realization of what he calls insanity, it
was the reality and culmination of what he had been working up
to for a long time.
"I was confronted with what I thought I am," he said.
"I am by nature nonviolent. I cannot accept violence, it is to me
insane. The whole idea of organized warfare is mass insanity
— organized murder. I had been all for Israel — I have to admit
that — but I can never justify or rationalize what had been done
to those men, those hundreds, thousands; I don't know how
many. I felt like I was every one of them, and I felt like I was
the killers too and...I can't find the words....l felt...sick! Sick in
my heart, my stomach, my head...."
He was afraid after that to return to the States. But he
felt the draft was an obligation he had to face.
“I am entirely against war for so many reasons, and I
imagine some would call me a communist," Spatz said. "I don't
think people in this country can understand — even the soldiers
are forced to conform and keep quiet about the slaughter and
horror. We haven't had a war destroying our homes and our
lives, and those who are killed die in some far off place and
their families don't even see them until the mortician has
painted them up and made them look nice. If they are too
mangled, the families are advised to keep the coffin closed and
most probably never see the dead if they're that bad.
"Television isn't the same as the gut level experience
and it's just too late once you're in it — what can you do? I was
lucky to have the insanity and butchery right before my eyes
without having been corrupted by it.
"I'd rather live for my country," Spatz concluded.
"That's the highest patriotic act. Dying is so useless and self-
defeating, and really, so easy to do. It takes more guts to live
for what you believe, to work every day through whatever
hardship to help people understand and cherish brotherhood."
-MICHAEL McCUSKER
(slightly rewritten from 1 June 1969)