Gaines had not gone the route of grad school deferment, nor the National Guard, nor the reserves; he did not cite opposition in principle, nor from some religious or ethical stance, nor from some real or imagined medical status; he did not think of running away or hiding in Canada or Mexico. On Thursday, February 9, 1967, he received his Order to Report for Physical Exam. He attended the exam. On Wednesday, May 10, he received his Order to Report for Induction. He simply read the draft notice carefully, read it once again, and then returned it to the envelope. So that’s it, his mother had said. Yes, Gaines had replied. That’s it.
Even now, looking back, he could remember the expression on her face. I lost my husband to war, that expression said, and now I will lose my son. She had been born Alice Devereau in Pointe à la Hache, Louisiana, in January of 1915. She met her husband-to-be, Edward, in 1937. Within two years, they were married. John, their only child, was born in June of 1940. When John was two, his father left for Europe. He served with the First Army, and was killed near Malmedy and Stavelot on the road to Liege, Belgium, on December 23, 1944. Alice Gaines had been all of twenty-nine years old.
So she looked at her son, two years younger than she herself had been when she’d lost her husband, and she asked him if there was any other way.
“No,” John had said. “There is no other way.”
Five days later, John Gaines reported for Basic Combat Training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Boots, bed, hygiene, weaponry and maintenance, C rations, first aid, land navigation, rules of war, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, marching in ranks and parade, inspections. He graduated in July, moved on to Advanced Individual Training. He learned how to hide from people. He learned how to follow people. Then he learned how to kill them. In September, he graduated to Republic of Vietnam Training. Toward the end of the month, he took a week’s leave, went home to see his mother, helped her move to Whytesburg, Mississippi, so as to be nearer an old friend, and then he shipped out. Fort Benning to Saigon, Saigon to Đà Lat, Đà Lat and onward into the Central Highlands. Two weeks’ in-country orientation and training, and he was set.
Back then, back in the real history of the thing, there were smaller empires. Vietnam was a world all its own, and included the territories of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, out to Laos and Cambodge sat Siam in the west. Now it was all North and South, nothing more. Before the Second World War, the French maintained Indochinese colonies. They occupied Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia until they were overrun by the Japanese. After the Japanese surrender, the French came back. They wanted a new French Union. Ho Chi Minh wanted complete independence. The United States supported France, but when the fortress of Dien Ben Phu fell in May of 1954, it was all over.
They should have learned then, but they did not. It would never be size or influence or money that would win a war in the jungle. It was knowledge. It was being there. It was understanding the land. Only the Vietnamese possessed this, and thus they would never lose.
The history of the place was important to Gaines. He had wanted to know why he was fighting. Because your president and your country needs you to had never been sufficient for him.
After the French defeat, they just cut the country in half where the South China Sea became the Gulf of Tonkin. North Vietnam would be governed from Hanoi by the Vi
A year later, the South Vietnamese elected a new leader. Ngô Đình Di
These were the people that Gaines had been trained to kill.
Back in ’54, Eisenhower had promised that noncommunist Indochina would never fall to the Reds. It was a matter of principle. America, the mightiest of all, had been outwitted and overthrown by a gang of sandal-wearing Russian collaborators. Eisenhower’s pride had been hurt. He had defeated Nazi Germany, and yet he couldn’t take out a strip of land that was half the size of Texas. Eisenhower was a Texan. Vietnam was a nothing place in the middle of nowhere. He was galled.
In November of 1963, just three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, South Vietnamese president Ngô Ðình Di
By the end of ’65, there were one hundred and eighty thousand American soldiers in Vietnam. By 1968, there were well over half a million. They carried orders to run offensive attacks against NLF guerrillas. Napalm rained down on Viet Cong outposts and guerrilla units in the south. Johnson went great guns. He threw more bombs at Vietnam than the combined total of all bombs hurled at Europe between ’39 and ’45. But this was no European engagement. The enemy the United States fought was faceless, without uniform, familiar with the terrain, its anomalies and idiosyncrasies, and thus they always possessed the upper hand. The United States had fire-power, air cover, strong supply lines, an almost inexhaustible source of men, but they did not have an enemy they could see. They fought ghosts and shadows. They fought a nightmare.
And it was into this nightmare that John Gaines arrived, a twelve-month tour of duty, and it was from this arena of horror that he would bring things that would dictate and define the rest of his life. He had known that within a week.
Afterward, there would be stories. Some lavish, some exuberant, some exaggerated; others brief, succinct, to the point. Those who were not there grew tired of the telling; questioned veracity, questioned the purpose of the stories. The reason for telling the stories is to join the seams together, a fellow veteran once told Gaines. To see if the past cannot belong to the present again … but it’s like trying to stitch the sea to the sky. You know they are somehow made of the same thing, but they will always and forever be incompatible. For Gaines, it had simply been a matter of trying to understand how the boy he had once been had become the man that he now was. The past was a different country, and if you returned, you soon realized that they spoke a language you no longer understood. War stories. If it did not seem surreal, it probably never happened. If it centered on trust and bravery and self-sacrifice, on some unquestioning loyalty to a man, a unit, a detachment, a mission, it was probably a lie. If it spoke of duty to God, to nation, to a religion, a belief, it was almost certainly a falsehood.
If it appeared unbelievable, you were safe to believe it. If you listened to the telling and even the teller seemed to doubt the story himself, then that was the one you could bet your house on.