Both “Red Flags” and “Play the Red Queen” are mysteries about murders that take place in the midst of war. Juris was well aware of the paradox: “Because really what war is is this lawless state. For all the talk about the laws of war, the only law there is is your right to kill somebody legally and your right to survive. Almost everything seems permissible under that heading. Everything is unleashed once a state of war comes into being.” He also knew what having lived in that lawless state meant for returning veterans: “The elevation of such aggression and violence with pomp and admiration is what I find so odd. We honor them perhaps to make ourselves less guilty about what they’ve done for us in sacrificing themselves to the consequences of their acts. Maybe truly honoring them might be accepting that war makes wrecks of its victims and victors.”
Juris’s skeptical view of war news arriving from the States–from his vantage point on the ground in Viet Nam: *“Slow but sure progress they keep telling us, but it’s a little hard to see any change when you are up this close to it. Who knows, maybe McNamara has a better view from his plane when he hops over now and then.” *“Johnson and everybody in the Pentagon seem to think we are finally winning the war but I wonder if the VC have found it out yet. Radio Hanoi is putting out quite a pitch too. The way they talk Reagan will never even run for the presidency because they’ll be in California before November.” *“Much talk and nothing being done. I don’t know, it sounds like such a sideshow. The president, Ho Chi Minh, Joan Baez, the Pope, and Joint Chiefs of Staff too. Hell everybody. GI’s are very democratic that way. Sounds like a football game or something. Johnson running around waving Gallup polls and casualty lists. Hooray, we’re winning. Quite a spectator sport this hawk-and-dove business. Alas.” *“We haven’t reached another turning point, have we? They’ve turned so many corners already that I’m getting dizzy from it all. Rather suspect we’re going around in a circle.” *”I keep thinking how nice it would be to open a newspaper and see by the headlines that the postman lost a spoke on his bicycle yesterday and fell over while on his rounds. Earthshattering stuff like that.”
Juris first noticed the “rust dust” of Viet Nam even before he shipped out, when he was assigned to process returning soldiers at Travis AFB, north and west of San Francisco. This comes from the diary he started at Travis and took with him to Viet Nam: “The closest we come to Frisco is the damp chill from the bay. Restricted to the tiny debarkation point. The trick, of course, is to duck the daily formations and the details that go invariably with them. A real drag in themselves too, the roll called for those who will ship, the chaplain’s welcoming message—the same hearty spiel each formation, and then the details. “The place is overflowing with GIs going out, over a thousand in the daily formations. Only a handful, it seems, coming in. They trickle in at odd hours of the night, shivering in their khakis, tanned with white eyes, their uniforms and boots tinged with orange, dust perhaps. We are detailed to help process them. Health check, showers, new green uniforms and out. “They seem such a passive lot, oblivious to the snap-to-it stateside manner. Some of the young, green GIs pulling detail are downright brash and rude, but their cocky ill manners go unnoticed by the higher ranked veterans killing the last few hours before freedom. Leaves, separation for many—home. “At five the beer halls fill up quickly. The whole place is so small and seems so removed from the rest of the world. We are close to the pier and physically it is not a small spot but so much of it seems idle. “Sleeping in the warehouse the last night. Like something out of an old D-Day movie—one vast hall full of bunks and milling bodies, packing, sleeping, bent over books, dog tags jingling, the snap of metal lighters, jittery bravado and solitary contemplation of the ceiling that envelops the entire scene like a second sky. Huge and ominous.”
Juris’s sense of the absurdities and waste — on all sides — of the Viet Nam War wasn’t the result of later reflection and research — although God knows he did plenty of both. It was there from the start. In his diary, the 23-year-old Juri describes his last day on American soil: “Spent the day waiting for a plane at Travis AF Base, drinking coffee and watching the prophetic hot dog machine. It seems like another omen. Poetic. Tropic heat, sweltering row upon row, rising and falling, skewered in ranks.” Two days later he writes: “Viet villages make U.S. shanty slums look good. These poor people. God save those the U.S. sets out to save.”
Not surprising to anyone who knew him, Juris became attached
to children of all ages in Viet Nam. “Every other day I go down and tutor a
Vietnamese kid in English. He’s a bright kid—seventeen—and unusually open for a
Vietnamese, perhaps because he’s bounced around so much. Both his parents died
some time ago so he has done quite a bit of that. Finally wound up here in Cheo
Reo where his older brother (19) runs a small shop. I’ve gotten him some books
(Viet to English) that they use in Saigon and a Viet-English dictionary. He’s
an intelligent kid but his books and the stumbling efforts of his teachers are
not too good so it’s awfully hard to tell how much he has learned. All I know
is that he downright surprises me at times. I will soon have to leave him to
his books and his own resources.”
A few lines from letters Juri received from his former
student, who signed his letters “Your affectionate brother,” and “Your young
brother” and “Your young brother Vietnamese”:
“My dear brother. You returned your country that is American one rich region. Do you have the please or the sorrow when you good-bye Phu Bon? I will be the sorrow, because the come day I do not see you, when I will go to New York? I don’t know. “When you lived in Viet Nam what you saw the shadow of the war, you saw the wreckage because the bombs and the bullets. “We are the people Vietnamese. We life on the small rigion of world. But we have the war, our house fall many persone die. Before day we have many rice, today we have few rice. That is a sorowfall shadow. It’s a war. The war is a hill. That day we will have the shadow of the war, the husband will to forget the wife, the baby will to die. “VN’s war needing many soldiers. I may go to army in the vacance this year! My grand mother worry me too much.” After Juri returned home, he tried to maintain contact, but after the fall of South Vietnam, he feared that any association with an American would put his student’s life in danger, and stopped.
In many ways, Juris’s experience in Viet Nam was atypical, including the “unwritten understandings” between Americans and VC in the neighboring town: “The war seemed far away. We were miles from the border where major American units tried to interdict the arms and infiltrators dripping into the nation’s lower half. Unlike the major theaters of the Indochina conflict, in the little province capital, unwritten understandings with the enemy existed. The town and surroundings were, to the unarmed, a safe and neutral zone. A truce prevailed that allowed wary GIs to stroll without rifles into the village for a strong Vietnamese beer or a haircut at the town’s leading barbershop run by a Francophile sentimentalist whose key ring was anchored by a hard coin of the French era. Even while the war roiled all around, only rarely were shots fired out of anger in the city limits, and even then the odds were that a jealous South Vietnamese had popped off a round at a mongrel American ally, not that a member of the opposition, home on leave, had been interfered with in his peaceful pleasures in the bosom of his family. Indeed, we sometimes sat in the dizzying heat of the afternoon drinking an American bottle of pop from Bangkok watching a pajama-clad stranger enjoying a mentholated cigarette and iced beverage, each patron eyeing the other, and the telltale bulge of a sidearm under the other’s shirt, across the empty café.”
Juris was completely devoid of machismo. Here he is at 24, writing about Viet Nam: “Nearly twelve months I’ve been here and the biggest, most protruding, obvious truth I yet discovered is that men are never such little boys as when they are playing war. Incredible all this bravado and banality. And I thought Hollywood war was bad. The worst John Wayne flic is a sober documentary compared to the show these people put on with such embarrassing enthusiasm.”
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.”
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.”
