To Vietnam in Vain by Edward A. Hagan

Author:Edward A. Hagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

The Smell of Pink Plexiglass

When I went down in the helicopter on February 23, 1970, the incident was the worst moment of my year in Vietnam, but it has never felt like any kind of denouement. Over the years since, an occasional whiff of propane or of wet rags has smelled vaguely like the congealed thick blood that coated my boots, and I do flashback to the moment I heard the sound of bullets snapping through the helicopter’s Plexiglas cockpit. I also recall the instant eruption of blood that turned the Plexiglass an odd tint of pink. My nose still twitches when I remember the noisome smell of the decayed vegetation along the canal in that VC-controlled area. But the memories do not convey any ability to offer a glimmer of insight into current realities. I have no words of wisdom garnered from a close encounter with a .51 caliber machine gun. The memories are, nevertheless, so strong that I have no sense of their pastness. Nothing had prepared me for the shock of being within arm’s distance of a man being shot through the head. And, deo gratias, I did not repeat the experience although I did see other dead and wounded up close in Vietnam. The one-time experience lasts a lifetime: it never ends.

The next day the old Vietnamese woman who shined our boots cleaned mine up for me. She was visibly upset when she saw me the next afternoon. She knew that something bad had happened. She spoke with great intensity and anxiety. My ten words of Vietnamese did not enable me to understand what she was saying specifically although she was talking about my boots and gesticulating toward them. I have wondered what she did when she went home that night. Did she tell her husband or other family members? Was she repulsed by having to clean up the boots? Should I have washed them off? (It never occurred to me that I should have, and I should have. She did not need to see the thick, coagulated blood, much less clean it off the boots.)

The sun had come up that next morning; the world did not stop. And Advisory Team 56 seemed not to notice what had happened on the previous evening. Team 56 lacked the intense brotherhood of the infantry platoon Sebastian Junger has described in great detail in War, an account of his year (2008–9) in the Korengal Valley with an army platoon during the Afghanistan war. Junger shows the intimate depth of caring of these latter day soldiers for one another: they could tell by the smell of a buddy’s urine whether he was hydrating properly. Drinking enough water was not just a personal matter: the consequence for the whole group of a guy who might pass out from heat stroke was unacceptable. Junger came to cherish a world in which even the smallest detail had consequence. He discovered how little we think about (or have reverence for) others in so-called normal civilian life.

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