Tag Archives: Viet Cong

Not much more than pea shooters

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Juris’s sympathy for the plight of the Viet Cong runs through “Red Flags,” but that, too, was evident from his earliest days in Viet Nam. He’d only been in country for a few weeks when he wrote this: “They were telling us how safe the replacement camp is the other morning when a mortar went off about 500 yards out. ‘As I was saying,’ the man continued, ‘the area is secure.’ Very funny. It really is safe though. 500 yards is about as close as those poor VC can get. They haven’t got the money to get closer. I guess that’s the advantage of being capitalists. I really feel sorry for these tenacious people. They’re holding off the whole big U.S. with not much more than pea shooters. And don’t let LBJ’s hearts and flowers speeches fool you, either. These GIs are trying their damnedest but at best they can make their own positions safe and maybe hold some of the country during the day. At night it all goes back to the Viet Cong while the Americans huddle together in their perimeters.
“You’ve got to respect these VC when you see how thick and ugly and barbed this thorny jungle is. It’s all the GIs can do to just cut the stuff down during the day. And the VC go right through it at night as if it weren’t there. How they do it no one knows, but it must be quite a grueling job to get through without cutting yourself to shreds. And every night they try — and get shot to hell as a flare goes off set off by a trip wire. The guards in the bunkers can’t even see them. They just spray everything and wait until morning to find out what or who they hit. And so it goes day in and day out – like some half-assed seesaw. If the sun just wouldn’t go down it would be okay. Too bad this isn’t the North Pole.
“And now to say my prayers and wish McNamara well. Heaven knows, he’ll need more than the old American dollar for this one. What a bill it is going to be.”
What a bill indeed. The American ‘solution’ to the problem of the jungle, Agent Orange, continues to take lives — both military and civilian — to this day. May, 2019, was the first Memorial Day we had to count Juris among the casualties of that war.

Unwritten understandings

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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.”

A big unfunny joke

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Clear-eyed from the start, only two months into his tour (April, 1967) Juris wrote: “I was just reading about the peace protests in NY and on the coast. Quite a picture, that mob of people at the U.N. I don’t know what they proposed as a solution, but I dare venture to predict something will break before Nov. ’68 and the election. For all of Johnson’s platitudes and pronouncements on the subject, this thing is going nowhere. He’s either going to have to throw in the towel gracefully – step off and make some big concessions and make it look like something other than saving face — or else step aside for the next poor sap to try his hand at this mess over here. Lyndon can announce and denounce all he likes but that jungle doesn’t budge an inch for all the rhetoric, and these people know their terrain. We hold what we sit on and waltz around during the day but come sundown it’s all “his.” Sometimes they even pop up during the day. The locals recently held their umpteenth holiday rally (very pathetic affairs) and the VC joined it with their own banners and people just to let us know who is really running the show and just how close they can get. And about all we could do was to scare them all off with a few rounds through the Red banners. This whole war is one big unfunny joke.”

Protein on the hoof

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Juris on the local fauna in Viet Nam, which he would refer to years later in “Red Flags” as “protein on the hoof”: “It’ll be a cold day in Long Bien before a bug ever scares me again with the specimens they have over here—mosquitoes, beetles, moths, carnivorous flies, bees, wasps, locusts. They’ve got bugs big enough to leash and keep as pets. Today a ‘grasshopper’ big enough to ride practically, at least eight inches long. One of the guys threw a hat on it hoping to trap it for a picture and the thing started walking away with the hat. If someone walked up and told me he had just seen a butterfly with teeth I would believe him. And I thought the beetles here were big. I could just about eat the damn things now, like the Montagnards. Small consolation: at least the VC have to contend with all the lovely monsters too.”

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.”