What For?

By Patrick Flanagan

“Do you ever ask or think about why we are here? “  There was a momentary silence as Andy looked at me, quizzically and clearly had to stop for a moment to think about what he would answer.

Then he answered, “Well, I was drafted and our country needed us to fight back.  I guess it is patriotism and my love for my country.”

The sun was beginning to set in the western hills of jungle as evening came closer and Andy and I settled down into our night-time position as a listening post, listening for the enemy in the dark and act as a defense against an enemy who was trying to kill us all.  I hated this duty and wished I was back somewhat in the safety of my bunker at our firebase.  But somebody had to do this.  I’m just not sure why.  Usually this duty rotated and tonight was our turn.  It was dangerous as only the three of us were outside the protection of the base, hidden in the bush, the jungle, listening until dawn once again came back to the world.  Another day for us to live.  We didn’t have a dugout here, or a trench to cuddle up into.  Just our army green ponchos laying on the ground to act as a ground-cloth, our faces blackened so that we would just fade into the jungle and become invisible.  I often thought we were really hiding from the enemy.

“Yeah, but we are in their country fighting them.  They aren’t in our country.  They never attacked us.  We are blowing up their villages, their homes, their schools.  And it all seems to be the right thing to do, but I’m not sure just why.  Oh, sure, I know tonight a few of them might try to sneak up on us, surprise our brothers in the base, and try to kill them all.  I certainly don’t want that to happen, so I guess we have to stop them, kill them before they get that far.  But why are they doing this?  How did we all get here trying to kill each other off?” as I posed the question a bit deeper.

“Well, they are Communists,” Andy responded.  “Their main philosophy is to make us all communists and make us all live like they do, get rid of capitalism and democracy.  They want to destroy our way of living and make everyone live the same way.  We can’t allow that to happen.”

Brent had been quiet as he listened to our lowered voices.  He added his two cents: “Well, I’m here just trying to stay alive.  I know I have to spend a year doing what I was told to do, and then hopefully go home, back to my wife and kids and try to just live a comfortable life.  I guess somebody has to fight in order to make the world a better place.  It just was my turn.”

“Well, how do we know whose system is the best?  I’ve never lived under communism, but I do know they have schools, hospitals and cities just like we do, and we seem to be trying to destroy it all in the name of democracy.  To date, the U.S. hasn’t lost one school or hospital to the North Vietnamese.  Oh, yeah, maybe those friends of ours in the south of Viet Nam have lost some, but we haven’t, yet here we are away from our families and risking our lives.  Does this really make any sense?  Brent, time to call the base and give them a Sit-Rep so they know we are setup for the night and still alive out here.”

Brent nodded his head, picking up the handset on the radio and began to call in our situation.  It was the custom to call into the base on a regular basis.  That way they knew we were still alive.  If we didn’t call on schedule, then they would try to call us.  Maybe we were the silent dead.

“Andy, before it gets real dark, check all the Claymores to make sure they are facing right and not towards us.”  Brent had put them all out but it was always good to double-check.  God help us if they were facing the wrong way.  Weapons don’t care who they kill; it is up to the person firing them that really matters.  I always felt it was good to double-check everything and make sure that safety was the priority.  More died from friendly fire than from the enemy.

“Andy, remember when I had to kill the sapper using the Starlight Scope?  That was such a strange evening.  That poor North Vietnamese soldier was doing everything by the book, but he didn’t know I had a machine that let me see him in the night.  He crawled so slowly and quietly with his explosives strapped on his back.  He was doing exactly the same things we were taught.  Thank God for the cross-hairs in the scope but I was amazed that it took many minutes for him to move off of it.  Up until then, he just blended in with the jungle.  He was moving so slow toward the barbed wire defense that surrounded the other platoon.  If I hadn’t had that machine, he would have succeeded on his suicide mission.  Clearly he was going to blow himself up so that they could attack.”  I paused for a minute as I retraced that night.  The Starlight Scope was brand new and I was one of the first to field test it in actual combat situations.  It was huge in those days, and I was sworn to secrecy on it as I had security clearance.  It made night turn to day.  As good as that soldier was, technology was making it meaningless.

“Yeah, I remember, “ Andy replied.  “That was a hell-of-a-night.  I remember you calling me up to take a look as you just weren’t sure you were seeing what you were seeing.  I wasn’t even sure; it just all looked like jungle blowing in the slight wind that night.”

“Amazing to think that it took about three hours of watching the cross-hairs on that man before I was even sure that it was a man and his intent was to blow us all up and kill us.  Patience and just watching that the scope didn’t move off the target.  It seemed like it took forever.   A lot of time to just think about how good he was in what he was doing.  He had no idea that he was being watched by an unbelievable machine.  How many times in those hours did I think he was like me?  He might have had a wife, a family, back home and here he was, going to blow himself up and give that all up.  Why?  And then, he didn’t know that I was watching him move, and that I was going to have to try to kill him.  I admired his skill and how good he was.  I imagined myself doing similar things yet it all just came down to each of us trying to kill each other.  What bothered me a lot was that he must have had family too, family at his home.  And it was all going to be gone in a brief moment of time.  Why were he and I both doing this?  Willing to give it all up.  I guess we were both doing our job as well as we both could.  But somebody was going to lose.  For what?”

“Yeah,” Andy said.  “That was quite some night.  You were really good in discovering him.  You had to kind of use the scope to look all around and you caught him.  And even then, you weren’t really sure.  Good eyes, Pat.”

Once I was sure, we then had to call the lieutenant to notify him.  It was clear that we had to stop the sapper and that meant we had to fire our weapons on him to stop him.  We couldn’t fire until we got permission or unless we were being fired upon.  So far, we still were all safe but I knew time was running out.  We had to kill him before he got much closer to our barbed-wire defense.  There had to be others behind him just waiting to rush the base once the defenses were down.  I knew where we were heading and it wasn’t so nice no matter what.

“So is that what this is all about,” I reminisced.  “That I was saving democracy and killing communism?  In my own small way.  Is that how I justify taking this man’s life away from his parents, his wife, maybe his kids.  They will all get some of his medals, I guess.  He surely will get some medals for having given up his life.  Was he also fighting to save communism?  It was the “big picture” and all of this was just a small snapshot of what we were all doing?  Maybe some of our brothers will get some medals too.  Just because I get him doesn’t mean that it is all over.”  I remembered my fear that night, that some of my brothers might still be killed or wounded.

The sun now was setting in the foothills as darkness started to spread around where we had set up for the night.  It got so dark so fast in the jungle as all the green vines turned to black.  Hopefully no moon tonight, let alone a full-moon.  Full moon’s seemed to reflect against our green ponchos and potentially could give away our position.  It would be over eight hours of guarding now until we could get up and go back to the base, our job of an outpost done for the night.

“Brent, are you sure there aren’t any of those damn ant hills around.  I don’t want to have to get up during the night and change position because I happen to be in their way,” I asked.

“Yep, Pat.  I checked.  No anthills and no snakes that I could see.”  Brent was good at that.  Nothing worse than being in the way of Vietnamese Red ants in the middle of the night or getting bit by a snake.  Only good thing is that snakes usually don’t move in the night.  Brent seemed like he could always smell the critters out like that.  Pretty soon it would be total darkness and the time for talking would end.  Voices travel further in the night and in the dark as the jungle seems to go into deep slumber with its own kind of silence.

“You know Pat, sometimes I think you think too much.  It happens.  It’s war.  We try to kill them and they try to kill us,” Andy responded.  “Then, we believe in God; they don’t.  Maybe that’s why; we are fighting for God.”

“Yeah, all I want to do is stay alive,” Brent said.  “That’s my priority.  If I have to kill to stay alive, I will, quick, and sweet.  I’m good at it.  And I’m still here as proof.  I don’t know ‘nuthin’ about democracy or communism; just that it’s either me or them.  It’s that simple.  Nothing else really matters except me going home.  And all in one piece.”

I had to think about the God comment for a moment.  It was true that I felt it wrong for a government to get involved in whether I believed in God or not.  I felt that everyone could make their own decision in that area, even atheists, but they shouldn’t try to make me like them.  Maybe that was why we were here doing all of this.  There were a few moments of just silence, and then the jungle moved in front of us with a rustle.  Now just silence as all three of us looked at each other in response to the swishing of jungle leaves up ahead.  A small twinge of being alert and fearful.  Our senses more alive than normal.  A trace of adrenalin pumping.

“What’s that,” I whispered, looking at Brent.  Brent was good at explaining the sounds of the jungle.

Brent whispered back: “I think it’s just a few monkeys trying to find a place to safely spend the night.  It’s coming from the top of the jungle.  Something that monkeys like to do and be above the other animals out here.  Not the NVA, they’d be making more noise and it would be different.”  One could see the relief on Andy and my face as it all made sense.  Just monkeys.

“Well, time for us to get sleep.  Brent has the first watch, then me and then Andy,” I reminded them.  “One thing that still bothers me.  We got the sapper that night, found blood in the area the next morning and it was all over.  We didn’t even get attacked.  His body was gone but there was the blood all over the jungle vines where he had been.  It was all over.  But it really isn’t.  I still think about him, his family, his life and how it was all gone for him.  And that it could have been me instead, or you, or one of our brothers in that platoon.  I still wonder today just why?  Why are we all here, doing this?  Why couldn’t we just stay at home, send our kids to school, be with our families, maybe work on our houses or on our cars.  Do the fun things.  Build something; be constructive, instead of this.”

In his plain home-grown St. Louis wisdom, Andy replied with the last final words for the night: “Yeah, I guess, but we wouldn’t get any medals for doing that.  Good night, and sleep safe.”

Imminent Death

By Patrick J. Flanagan

Once born, we must all face the time of inevitable death.  It is inescapable and given as a preordained certainty.  As I grow older and closer to that time in my life, I am amazed at the vagaries and verisimilitudes of the event itself.  We really have no choice in this, yet it can be different for us all.  Death will happen but how it happens is just so varied and imaginative, but the final outcome is the same.  We no longer exist in the world as we know it.  That is the constant.

Just the very phrase, “He was close to death”, raises interesting possibilities as to outcome.  “He had a close brush with death,” is yet another.  Just so many stories in our lives but the final moment of death is always the same for all of us.  It is how we get there that is so varied and often out of our control.  Sometimes we can cause this, sometimes it is caused by other events.

Thinking back, the first time I came close to death was at an early age of eight.  We were visiting friends with a swimming pool and I couldn’t swim yet.  I was playing in the pool with a rubber inner-tube and it flipped accidentally.  All of a sudden, I was trapped under water and in danger of drowning.  My mother immediately noticed but she didn’t know how to swim either.  I started to drown and became very scared as I struggled to get to the surface.  I began to take in water, when, all of a sudden, the rubber tube righted itself and I could breathe once again.  A lot of coughing up water as my lungs cleared and I acquired an inordinate fear of water from that day on.  After a very long battle with swim instructors, I was finally able to swim without fear or close to it.  I have always carried a deep respect for water since that day.

It was years later that I began surfing on the beaches of Santa Cruz.  A number of times, I would be caught in a rip-tide and repeat once again that fear of drowning.  I am sure that I could have drowned under the right conditions, but I didn’t and continued to take this risk as nothing feels quite so good as when one is “riding” a wave.  Still, I continued with my fears.  For years, I had a difficult time with snorkeling or swimming underwater with an air tank.  I just got claustrophobic and fearful of being underwater for extended periods of time.  It wasn’t until years later that I worked hard with a trainer that I was finally able to stay under water for long periods of time.  Still, my fear remained and my respect for the vagaries of swimming became an integral part of my very being.

I would have to say that the next major confrontation with death was my involvement in the Viet Nam War.  Unlike other events of confronting the “moment” of death, this experience lasted for days, months, even a year.  It was to be expected to such a degree that one counted the days of just living.  Death was ever-present and always a part of one’s day.  Sometimes unexpected, and yet on other days it was ever-present and immediately threatening.  Death surrounded us each day as we witnessed others die or come close to death while we lived.  The daily question, “Why them and not me,” haunted us more often than not.

This was a period of my life when death was ever-present, but three events are etched into my very being after so many years have passed.  In war, death is ever-present and a given, but some days are engraved deeply into our very being.  One was when a fellow soldier accidentally shot his M-79 and the high-explosive round hit me in my shoulder but didn’t go off.  Just a stroke of luck, but we were alive with just a sore shoulder.  We should have all died right then and there.   

Another was in the jungle with three others and the enemy came within a few hundred yards of us.  We were clearly outnumbered and our only hope was to call in heavy artillery upon our position, hopefully killing them but letting us survive.  Whether I survived now came down to my knowledge of geometry and prayers that the first round flew above us and not on top of us.  I can still hear that artillery round buzzing above our heads as it hit the target and then the dozens of rounds which followed.  We were all still alive.  But it was close.

The third time was toward the end of the battle to keep Fire Support Base 29 in the hands of our unit and out of the hands of the North Vietnamese Army.  Again, we were outnumbered and this event was one of daily death and trying to just stay alive.  It started with just sniper fire and daily intensified to rocket and artillery attacks from mortars and enemy fire.  Our casualties were growing each day and we finally were coming to the realization that we were losing.  We fought hard as our brothers fell, wounded and some dead.  Two helicopters crashed into our base as we struggled to get them medical aid, but we just asked for more air support and artillery from the friendly bases around us.  The moment of death and life was often only seconds away from each other toward the end of the battle when we realized that we had to retreat and escape.  We had to all go down a cliff in order to leave the base, as the enemy started to overwhelm our bunkers and trenches.  It was then, an incoming mortar round buzzing above me, that I knew I was near death.  Luckily, I jumped into a dugout as the round hit, but my dog which was with me was gone.  He was dead and gone.  And then the struggle to go down the cliff with full battle gear in order to get to safety and away from the enemy.  There were moments that day that I did not think I was going to make it.  Yet I did and the memories are just as vivid again about how close I came.  There were many events of death during that time in my life but I survived.  Yet these three events are still so vivid in my mind to this day.

Then it was years later, driving home from Virginia City, that I hit a patch of black ice and lost control of my automobile.  In seconds, I hit the mountain and totally flipped the car 360 degrees, totally destroying it.  It all happened so fast yet all I had was a few scrapes and cuts.  I had only been going about 35 m.p.h. but realized that it was again a very close call between life and death.

Now 68 years have passed.  I’m sure that there were many other events in my life where it came close to being ended, but some moments just are so clear and so etched into our very being.  One cannot forget.  All I can do is wonder why I survived, why I’m still alive to live on, to go on with life.  In this process, my friends are all dying.  We are all getting older and time seems to be running out.  It can be so sudden, or it can take time, but the moment of death is still just that, a moment when we are gone.  As we age, it becomes imminent.  The process is what seems to be continuing as that inevitable moment gets closer.  Recently, my cousin died unexpectedly.  He was healthy and younger, but, with no warning, he died.  I could never have imagined this.  Then I still have some friends in their 90’s, still alive and alert, but I’d be a fool to not expect that call to come about their demise, if I’m still alive.  Death is just so imminent as we age, but how many times we escape it is not.  So we continue on, and on, until that brief moment which must come and the journey is over.  Enjoy it while one can and don’t complain as you continue to live and escape the inevitable a bit longer.