…I don't know the names of the Vietnamese dead, but I do
know the names of some American dead, 16 altogether, and
the names merge in my memory into a single name, as the
faces merge into one face of a young marine who will never
know the indignities of old age:
GautierGuzmanFankhauserFernandzLevy
LockhartManningMuirPageReasonerSissler
SimpsonSnowSullivanWarnerWest.
Their ghosts are here, along with another, and its name is
Phil Caputo: the ghost of who I used to be, a 23-year-old
rifle platoon leader in the Third Marine Division, a man I am
sometimes proud of and sometimes ashamed of, but proud
or shamed, a man I must accept as he was then, a warrior, a
killer, carbine in his hand, knife and pistol hanging from his
belt, his rucksack and cargo pockets filled with the
implements of his lethal trade—hand grenades, smoke
grenades, flares, compass, maps in acetate covers with patrol
routes and checkpoints and concentrations of pre-planned
artillery fire marked in grease pencil.
I am here to make my peace with him, and with the biggest
ghost of all, the ghost of a past that haunts me still.
* * *
I made my peace with my former enemies nine years ago,
when I and seven other American veterans who had become
novelists and poets were invited to Vietnam by the
Vietnamese Writers Union to meet with Vietcong and North
Vietnamese Army veterans who had become novelists and
poets. "We are writers of blood and fire," said one of our
hosts at the opening conference in Hanoi, sounding a note of
brotherhood. "We saw war with the naked eye, but holding
a pen is a thousand times more difficult than holding a rifle."
Da Nang was where the war began for me, on March 8,
1965, and I had a strange feeling of homecoming when our
group of warriors-turned-writers traveled to that crowded,
noisy port on the South China Sea. That evening, at a dinner
hosted by the local chapter of the writers union, a poet
named Ngan Vinh made a brief speech and then read one of
his works, "After the Rain in the Forest." He was a striking
man, tall for a Vietnamese at five feet nine [1.8 meters], with
a lean, muscular build and a shock of thick, black hair
graying at the temples. During the war, Vinh had been a
platoon leader like me, commanding 42 men in the first
battalion, 40th brigade of the North Vietnamese Army, and
his poem was about carrying a wounded comrade to safety
after a battle in the monsoon in 1967. The words and
imagery—the weight of the man on his shoulders, blood
mixed with rain spilling into the mud of the
trail—astonished me because they were so like the words
and images of a poem I had written in 1966. It was called
"Infantry in the Monsoon," and it was about carrying
wounded comrades in the rain. I mentioned this coincidence
to Vinh after the meal. He asked me to read the poem, but I
didn't have it with me; nor could I remember more than a
few lines, which I recited at his request. We got to talking,
discovered that his battalion and mine had operated in the
same valley southwest of Da Nang in early 1966, and
though we determined that we had never fought each other,
that was close enough.
Vinh filled two glasses with vodka and said we had to drink
together. We tossed our glasses back, and then Vinh
embraced me and said, "You and me, Philip, we are
brothers in arms," and that night, June 21, 1990, was when
the Vietnam War ended for me.
Get the full story—and an ADVENTURE Guide to
Vietnam—in the Winter 1999/2000 issue of
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE.
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Philip Caputo, U.S. Marine, Vietnam
