Excerpts

One – Learning to Be a Soldier
Two – Policy versus Results
Three – Support the Troops
Four – “Take Me in Your Arms, Rescue Me”
Five – Health Care
Six – Death and Remembering
Seven – Massacre at Dai Loc
Eight – Heroism
Nine – The Weight of Memory
Ten – Mentoring
Eleven – Doing the Blend
Twelve – How Long Is a War?
Thirteen – Home at Last
Postscript

LEARNING TO BE A SOLDIER

April 1966

My last military ID card

A severe three-day storm hit our troop ship as we departed Long
Beach, California, leaving most of us weak with seasickness. At
the storm’s end, the clear Pacific air and salt spray cooled us.
Crowded onto a ship with more than a thousand other men, I sought
out a quiet place to read and found a hidden spot in the bow of the
ship, where I spent my free time reading Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

POLICY VERSUS RESULTS

Trying to Justify My War

My father, Martin Merson, at Guadalcanal in 1943.

My platoon sergeant asked for volunteers to protect Vietnamese
surveyors for several days. I saw the assignment as a good chance
to meet local people, so I volunteered. One surveyor was a young
man about my age. Huy was a student on summer vacation from the
University of Saigon. He was tall, slender, enthusiastic, and fluent in
English. We discussed school, courses, family, and friends. I was curious
about life in Saigon and at his university. I knew an American
woman who had taught English at the University of Saigon three
years earlier. Did he know her? No, but he had heard of her. Eventually
I asked for his views on the war. Is it a civil war? Or are foreigners
from the North invading South Vietnam?

SUPPORT THE TROOPS

Why Soldiers Go to War and
What They Want from Citizens at Home

Visiting Buon Ma Thuot, 1996

In the summer of 1966, our platoon moved farther west from Chu
Lai into dense forests. I was assigned to a four-man listening post
about 50 yards in front of our lines. We were human trip wires. A
Viet Cong assault team probing our platoon’s positions would first
run into us. If we were overrun, we might at least make enough noise
to alert the rest of our platoon.

My teammates on the listening post were Clayton Durant Turner,
Billy Treasvant, and William Matthew Bethea. Clayton and Billy
were from Detroit; William was from Philadelphia. All three of them
were black; I began to feel really white. I had seen frequent racial
conflicts during my first year in the military; most Marines were
urban blacks or southern whites. Fights between blacks and whites
had been common in U.S. barracks and on board ship, yet they were
rare within a team or squad. In small groups, people had too great a
need to help each other and too much time to get to know each other
as individuals. I depended for my survival on my relationships with
these three men.

“TAKE ME IN YOUR ARMS, RESCUE ME”

Why Soldiers Go Crazy

Visiting coffee plantation, 1996

July 1966 was a good month. Billy made it out of the field and into
the kitchen, just as he’d planned. Our platoon got a new leader, a
young lieutenant fresh from training. And our new platoon commander
picked me as his radio operator, which got me off the listening
post.

When Lieutenant Wylie Mosey Vickery left home for Vietnam,
the number one song on the radio was “Rescue Me” by Fontella Bass;
Vickery sang it endlessly. Though his voice cracked, there was something
endearing about Vick’s wailing, “Take me in your arms, ’cause
I’m lonely and I’m blue, rescue me.” It made him seem more human
and less like the recruiting poster Marine he resembled. Vick had
grown up in the Florida Panhandle, a country boy. He got along with
everyone who worked alongside him and rode hard on anyone who
tried to skate. He’d graduated from Austin Peay State on a football
scholarship and was powerfully built, fit, and intense. When he arrived
in Vietnam, he was determined to win the war.

HEALTH CARE

When Less Is More

Vietnam's first arabica coffee trees

In November 1966 our platoon moved north to Dong Ha, near the
temporary border between North and South Vietnam. We occupied
an old stone French-built fort on the coast. Again we followed
in the footsteps of the French, a pattern that surely didn’t surprise
the Viet Cong. The fort stood at the end of a small peninsula overlooking
the mouth of a river, leaving us exposed to sniper fire from
three directions. The weather was cold and wet; the fort’s location
between the river and the sea meant it was always damp. It was an
ideal spot for catching malaria. Within a few weeks, I had chills and
a high fever. Our hospital corpsman gave me the best present of my
year in Vietnam, an all-expense-paid cruise on the hospital ship Hope,
starting with a helicopter ride. I left the fort during a rainstorm with
high winds buffeting the flimsy chopper.

DEATH AND REMEMBERING

Good-bye, L. B.

Drinking (something) with Nung people

In January 1967, we moved south into Quang Ngai province. Our
truck convoy drove through Quang Ngai City and continued to
the base of a steep hill near the coastal village of Duc Pho. Our
positions were on a large, flat peak with commanding views in all
directions. To the east lay the South China Sea, to the west the dark
green of thickly forested mountains, and to the north and south the
light green land was flat with rice paddies divided by thick hedgerows
and scattered villages. Our superior view of the terrain seemed to
promise an ability to control the countryside that stretched around and
beneath us. We moved our packs and extra ammunition into deep
bunkers that had already been dug into the top of the hill, the most
heavily fortified positions we had ever occupied. We wondered why
such deep bunkers were necessary: we had mortars and artillery on
the hilltop; offshore were Navy ships whose big guns we could call
on for supporting fire; airfields to the north meant that jets and helicopter
gun ships were just minutes away. None of these weapons
were available to the people we were fighting—how could we lose?

MASSACRE AT DAI LOC

Near Dai Loc in 1967

By April 1967, I had been with my infantry platoon in Vietnam for
a year. During the day, we patrolled the area around Dai Loc, a
small village west of Da Nang. In Dai Loc, we benefited from
staying in the same place and becoming familiar with its villages, terrain,
and the traffic along its roads. We searched homes for weapons,
explosives, and supplies stored by our enemy. Often we destroyed
homes and killed animals in the course of searching through villages.
We tore apart thatched-roof houses and blew up rice storage bins
while looking for evidence that the homeowners might be helping
Viet Cong guerillas. At night, we set up ambushes on the trails leading
into Dai Loc and along the river running past our hilltop foxholes
and bunkers. Every few weeks we left by helicopter for
large-scale operations to the west and north.

HEROISM

Coming Home

Biking from Buon Ma Thuot to Nha Trang, 2007

In May 1967, I completed thirteen months as a soldier in Vietnam.
It was time to go home. I was “short,” our favorite subject for jokes:
I’m so short I can’t see over the tops of my boots; I’m so short I
haven’t got time to go on this operation, on that day patrol, on any
night ambush, or simply, I’m too short for this. The obsession with
time and with time left was a way to fill time, to make time pass.
Everyone knew exactly how many days he had left. You could start
every day by saying, I’ve got seventy-seven days left, or seventy-seven
and a wake-up, or seventy-seven and a sky hook, or seventy-seven
and a silver bird. To me, keeping time felt like bad karma. Why tempt
fate by giving it a target: you could get killed as easily on the last day
as on the first. But when May rolled around, it was time for me to
leave.

THE WEIGHT OF MEMORY

My First Trip Back to Vietnam

John, Carol and Minh near Nha Trang, 1996

In 1995, at the age of fifty-one, I returned to Vietnam for the first
time in twenty-eight years. Arriving in Hanoi, I stepped off the
plane with a jarring sense of unreality. My country’s relationship to
Vietnam was just beginning to normalize; my personal relationship to
Vietnam was a tangle of unresolved feelings. Was I visiting a country
or trying to revisit the war of my youth? The thick air wobbled with
the heat of a pre-monsoon afternoon. A Vietnamese official inspected
my passport and waved me into a maelstrom of taxi drivers and tour
guides. I felt lucky to be accompanied by good friends.

MENTORING

My Vietnamese American Son

Tony Dao and John Merson in New York

In December 1995, I made my second trip back to Vietnam. This
time, my wife and I went to Saigon, officially named Ho Chi Minh
City, and stayed at the Majestic, an old hotel near the Rex and the
Continental, where American journalists had stayed during the war.
We spent several days exploring Saigon, visiting museums, parks, the
zoo, the former South Vietnamese President’s Palace—now the Reunification
Palace—and the old U.S. embassy from whose roof helicopters
evacuated Americans and Vietnamese to ships waiting in the
South China Sea. We also visited art galleries and made our first purchases
of modern Vietnamese art and propaganda paintings created
during the war.

The focus of modern Saigon is on new buildings rising all over
the city—hotels, office buildings, apartments, shopping centers, and
even a bowling alley. The energy and modernity of Saigon stand in
sharp contrast to the placid elegance of Hanoi, where old villas and
tree-lined boulevards are being preserved. In 1995, most of the vehicles
on the streets were bicycles and pedal-powered cabs, with a sprinkling
of motorbikes and an occasional automobile. This mix of vehicles
made street crossings safe, if nerve wracking; cyclists would open an
envelope around each pedestrian, creating an undulation through
the traffic like a school of passing fish around a diver.

DOING THE BLEND

Working in Postwar Vietnam

Karen, Minh and Carol in Saigon, 1996

In 1996, I spent a month working with a computer-software company
in Saigon. I had met the company founder, Tran Ha Nam, on
a previous trip, and we had compared notes on the difficulties of
developing and marketing software in Vietnam and the United States.
When I volunteered my services to Dr. Nam, he offered to keep me
busy. He also located a family with whom I could live to avoid the
cost of a hotel and also to get a better picture of everyday life in
Saigon.

HOW LONG IS A WAR?

Visiting Ankgor Wat in 1997

In 2006, forty years after I first arrived Vietnam as a soldier, my wife
and I went hiking in the country’s northwestern mountains near
the village of Sa Pa. The little village my friends and I had visited
eleven years before had grown into a small city. Sa Pa’s popularity
with tourists and its proximity to the border with China were the
twin engines of its prosperity. The old dirt road from the city of Lao
Cai up to Sa Pa was now paved; backpackers’ hostels had been replaced
by elegant hotels and fancy restaurants. Climbers now came to scale
Mt. Fan Si Pan; tourists flocked to visit the minority villages and the
battlefield at Dien Bien Phu. Seeing all of these changes, I wondered
if the war were finally over.

When does a war end? Does it end when the killing stops? If so,
it might have ended when the last American pilot was shot down in
1972. But some Americans stayed until the U.S. embassy was evacuated
in 1975. Vietnamese were still dying until the fighting between
North and South ended in April 1975. After the fall of Saigon, many
Vietnamese were sent to reeducation camps, where they died from
overwork, disease, torture, and starvation.

HOME AT LAST

Father and son

This final chapter presents my personal views on the use of military
power in an increasingly fractured and fractious world. There
is no reason why my views on these subjects should carry any special
weight, only that I approach armed conflict from my experience
as a foot soldier and as one who lived among the villagers whose lives
were destroyed by war.

My starting place is Ho Chi Minh’s house on stilts in Hanoi’s public
gardens. In the center of a grove of cypress trees, near a quiet pool
filled with colorful fish, tourists from throughout Vietnam and across
the world come to visit the personal residence of Bac Ho, or Uncle
Ho, the father of modern Vietnam. I was born not far from Mount
Vernon, Virginia, home of the father of my country, and home to
slaves as well. Vietnam, too, under Chinese and French domination,
has known slavery. From Mount Vernon to the house on stilts is a
long way, and not only in miles. From the majesty of one to the quiet
simplicity of the other is a journey of the spirit. Why is the house on
stilts so inspiring?

POSTSCRIPT

Dr. Viet, Karen and Minh in Buon Ma Thuot

When I left my infantry platoon and Vietnam in 1967 at the age of
twenty-three, I felt sadness at the damage I had done in the
villages where we had been fighting. I felt guilt for having survived
while some of my friends had not and for coming home while
others stayed behind. And I felt a profound sense of futility over an
effort so massive, blundering, and ineffective. If it is true that one
learns the most from failures, I had a lifetime of learning to do. I
could not have written this book when I returned from Vietnam. Had
I thought then about war lessons, I could have written about the war
but not about the lessons. The lessons came both from growing older
and from returning to Vietnam. But the process of trying to understand
my experience began almost as soon as I returned home.