Slapping themselves silly

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One of the many ways the tiny outpost where Juris served was unlike the rest of Viet Nam was the lack of a certain type of organized commercial venture: “The Vietnamese were just as entrepreneurial as in the big cities, but some of the universal signals were not there. You could go to the perimeter of any major base and slap yourself in the chest with a twig and some vendor would pop up offering you dope of some variety, either bags of marijuana or perfectly rolled marijuana cigarettes, in the carton, perfectly sealed as though it had never been opened. I think they were called Buddhas or some slang reference like that. In Cheo Reo, even that signal wasn’t there. On occasion we were visited by large units of Americans who were slapping themselves silly at the perimeter wondering where the hell were the vendors?”

Our nominal allies

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As is apparent in both “Red Flags” and “Play the Red Queen,” Juris knew from his own experience that the American relationship with our nominal allies was far more complex than our relationship with the enemy: “Ostensibly we were there to advise the South Vietnamese military presence, which was one battalion across the street from us, only four hundred strong, who were not very interested in us and very resentful, which was true throughout the country – there was tremendous resentment between the Vietnamese and the Americans. The Americans were critical of the South Vietnamese for not listening to the advice, for not engaging the enemy, not being bold warriors and not sticking it to the Viet Cong. We were ostensibly advising them but of course they didn’t listen to us at all. We’d say, “The North Vietnamese are over there,” and they’d say “Thank you“ – and go in the other direction. Or if they went – reluctantly—with your suggestion, they were very noisy about it, very slow about it, so by the time they got there, there was nothing. In all fairness, they had orders from their central command to avoid contact, to keep their casualties low.
“I was there in ’67. In ’65, they had gotten really hit and suffered 300 casualties in a single day, and the memory of that kept them close to home, close to their barracks. They did have some artillery pieces they would fire every night, firing H&I: harassment and interdiction. That never seemed to hit anybody. Which was also very odd. But at a hundred bucks a shell, they were laying those out there.”

Just a fish in the net

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Juris on the sickening absurdity of war: “I don’t think wars are ever black and white. Usually it’s dozens of vying parties that clash and sometimes secretly cooperate. And then there is you in the belly of it, unobtrusively occupying a small patch, and along comes a total stranger with no apparent reason to wish you harm attempting to remove you from the planet. It made me feel ill — like a fish someone was pursuing for sport. There’s no discussion, no symposium, no meeting of the minds. Just you, hooked, and the fisherman with the net and club working you toward shore.”

A little red helicopter

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In civilian life, hands down, Juris’s favorite mode of transportation was his bicycle. In the army he had to drive of course (although I’m pretty sure he’d not yet actually gotten his license). “I’m still unenticed by the automobile,” he wrote, “but slowing falling in love with my jeep. Spend a lot of time in that jeep—fixing lines, going down to the river, making the courier run to meet the plane. But I’m going to give up driving after this. Any kind of traffic would petrify me. Not too much opposition on these roads except for an occasional stubborn cow or stray water buffalo. About the only thing you have to worry about is running out of road unexpectedly, especially now with the rains coming on. They tend to disappear overnight. At times during the rain it’s like trying to drive in a river—upstream. Still we get there in our slow but reliable buggy. Not bad for a lousy driver—and shift no less. Nope, driving’s not for me. I’m considering, however, investing in a little red helicopter. It’s not riding and it’s not flying, either – sort of like floating.”

Boredom or madness

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Juris on the reality of war — “boredom, booze, and an occasional boom”: “If there is a banality to evil, there is certainly a banality about war. Contrary to the Dick Lit that passes for war fiction and the furious shoot’ em up films and video games, a lot of the time war is actually boring beyond belief. Drudgery. The sun shines and cooks your brain, it rains, you walk, you look, you do your job and any additional work you’re assigned. You sleep, you make your one independent decision of the day – to eat or not to eat – and then you sleep again, and do it all over the same way the next morning. The film that most honestly depicts what war is like might well be Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. Picture him going nuts repeating the same day of his life over and over. And then, imagine when he is the most tired and least alert, something whistles or clacks past his head, something explodes in the barbed wire or falls into the compound and goes crump and all hell breaks loose. The real thing doesn’t come with a soundtrack to give you any warning or a big buildup to a crescendo. Not if they do it right. Then it’s fifteen minutes of utter fear followed by a return to boredom.
“What we didn’t know going there was how long an undeclared war would hold us prisoners. Boredom or madness—take your pick.”

Just reacting

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Juris didn’t have many obvious lingering signs of his Viet Nam experience, but he first got back readjustment to city life was tough: “I had trouble sleeping. I got a walkup apartment on First Avenue and 58th Street – UTB, Under the Bridge. I found it hard to sleep, so I’d have to go to the park overlooking the river. There I could sack out. I had to be outside. All these things you don’t expect. Manhole covers make this clunk-clunk that sounds just like a mortar coming out and you find yourself on your knee suddenly tying your shoe because you want to be in the ground. You’re not even thinking, you’re just reacting. There’s almost no fear with it, just a reaction. It’s that fast. And then, the ridiculousness that on the Upper East Side in Manhattan they still had DC current running through some kind of cables under the ground, which generated a tremendous amount of heat, and in the summer, the manhole covers would go bang straight in the air and then come clanging down. Some of the manhole covers right by my little walkup apartment decided to do this and I found myself halfway into the wall one night. I couldn’t sleep and had to go back to the park where there were no manhole covers.”

An incomparable sense of loss

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The name on the wall below was Juris’s commanding officer, whose unexplained death became the impetus for “Red Flags.” Yet even when speaking to an interviewer from West Point, Juris was able to mourn the American dead without ever losing sight of the toll the war had taken on the North Vietnamese: “Westmoreland had that whole attrition idea: that body count really mattered, that they’d simply run out of bodies if we killed enough of them. So the report card became the bodies. That became its own kind of ridiculousness. If you brought in some guy, even for questioning, and his wife and child, all three of them were Viet Cong on the numbers. The non-coms would twit the intelligence people about the infants being logged as Viet Cong. There was an essential silliness, because as we found out after the fact, they had stopped caring – I don’t mean that the North Vietnamese were lacking in some moral way – but they realized that they’re up against someone with an Air Force that they haven’t got, they’re up against someone with tanks they haven’t got, they’re up against helicopters they don’t have, they don’t even have the boots. They don’t have steel pots on their heads. All they’ve got is themselves, and their bodies. And they would in some way have to compensate for the superiority of their enemy – us – by simply accepting more casualties. They suffered unbelievable casualties. I mean we are, to this day, mourning those 58,000, and some of us will mourn them until we ourselves check out – the 58,000 on our wall – their wall would hold two and a half million. It was just an incomparable sense of loss.”

Hearts and minds

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Here’s Juri on the idiocy of using other people’s countries to fight our wars and believing that we can ever win hearts and minds that way: “I had no resentments against the kids at all with the anti-war stuff. I obviously had mixed feelings myself. I mean, I wasn’t against the war. I thought it was in the wrong place. Literally. Originally it was supposed to be in Laos. I didn’t think that was the right place. They moved it to Viet Nam, really, because of the supply problem, and the access from the sea. But nobody wanted that war to be there. I thought the time to go to war is when the North Vietnamese are landing in Los Angeles. It’s not even a joke. To go to somebody else’s country to have your war, there’s something basically stupid and wrong about this. Forget about the moral question, which is obvious. But the lack of familiarity. You are going off into a culture of which you have no knowledge. A country with 54 minority groups. All of them at each other. Plus all the competing ideologies. A complete vortex.
“The expression I’d always hear was, ‘Well, it’s much better there than here. We don’t want to do this in California. Let’s do it in Korea, let’s do it in Viet Nam.’ What kind of moral position is that, to go and blow up somebody else’s country? Once you bring in artillery and bombing, all hope of winning over a population really ends. There’s no way to control the damage from that. You are creating as much opposition as you are destroying. In fact, I would venture to say you’re probably creating more opposition. The people who survive that, whose families have suffered under the bombing or the artillery, are going to come get you. The politics don’t matter anymore. It’s simply a personal thing.
“The brilliant [North Vietnamese] General Giap had been a history professor turned general who defeated the French. I don’t know how much he’s driven by ideology or by the memory of his beloved dying in a French prison. On the Southern side it was equally bad. Diem had lost his oldest brother and the oldest brother’s son to the Communists, who executed the father and the son by burying them alive. That kind of thing digs much deeper than any ideology. Once the bombs drop and the flesh is rent, no concept is going to hold back the animosity or the opposition of a people.”

Dick Lit

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After the publication of “Red Flags,” Juris spoke about the reality of war versus the literature of war: “The ugly truth is that most of the time it’s boring as hell. Your biggest decision is what you’re going to have for lunch: the thousand-year-old omelet or the powdered eggs. And then it’s just like chores around the house. You know, you go out to put out the garbage and and then somebody stands up out of the garbage can and tries to kill you. And suddenly you have twenty-eight seconds you’re going to tremble over for the next day or more. It bursts out very quickly. But the rest of it’s very ordinary.
“I had to add fiction in – about ten percent – so that nobody would get arrested, and to try and dramatize it. Because the real truth is that most war fiction is incredibly romanticized. There’s almost a pornography of war literature, which I unfortunately refer to as Dick Lit. I’ve been advised not to call it that…. In the war literature, and especially in films, you can always see everything, even at night, everything’s visible. But really, you’re in total blackness. If something happens, about all you see is nothing. And you pull the trigger. And then people ask you, ‘What was it like to kill somebody’ – who? You’re just blasting away.”

Fatalism, reflex

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Juris held unorthodox views for a veteran about the meaning of war and its consequences for those who serve: “I distrust nationalism. Patriotism? It seems juvenile, literally: the abstract nostalgia of teenagers mimicking their elders. Courage in war feels like fatalism, reflex. Shell someone with artillery and there is just blind terror. No space for an impulse, much less a thought.
“The popular idea is that you fight for your buddies and yourself. True, I suppose. You cling to whatever is not alien around you that’s not trying to kill you. When you are being bombarded you ratchet down to some reptile brain where there is awareness, but no thought. Worse yet, after several such moments of utter terror, some slip into the experience like swimmers, comfortable and floating and find an odd joy there. They find their calling.
“I’m not a liberal. I’m a pagan. I think if you train people to have disdain for a living enemy, don’t be surprised that it doesn’t go away when they’ve killed the enemy.”