SENSE MEMORY: PLATOON THROUGH A VETERAN'S EYES

B Y J I M B E A V E R



I remember sitting very still. Not moving at all.



From the blackness arose, quickly, an unconscionable bright light.



I sensed, dully, around me, some vague, vaporous semblance of the real world, of people moving, speaking mutedly with each other, of motion and sound. Yet it was at a great remove, and it seemed separated from me and my thoughts and feelings, the way conversations and arguments bleeding dully through a wall from a neighbor’s apartment are at once heard, but isolated from one’s own existence. I sensed the presence on my right of my friend Tom and, on my left, of my wife Cecily, both of them silent, unmoving, attentive but desperately unobtrusive.



I sat for a very long time. Two minutes? Ten? Twenty? I don’t know.

I had just seen Platoon for the first time.

I joined the Marines in 1968.

I was sent to Vietnam as an infantry radio operator in 1970. My tour of duty in country lasted from June of that year until April of the next. I came home with my body intact, save for a small scar on my hand from where I’d been bayoneted accidentally by an idiot from Corbin, Kentucky who was trying to kill a rat. My time in Vietnam was largely a mild time. The old saying about war being long periods of boredom interrupted by occasional flashes of terror was true, but my flashes were remarkably rare: Some early transits through enemy-rich territory, a few times when rockets came closer than comfortable, a night alert when the entire valley leading into Chieu Hoi Pass outside Da Nang lit up with a thousand parachute flares to illuminate the hordes of attacking VC who never got around to showing up, and a single firefight when sappers were discovered in the wire at a battalion command post on an isolated hill. The rest of my war, insofar as the terror/tedium ratio went, was exclusively tedious.



Far more disturbing than my own brushes with combat were my experiences visiting a boyhood friend at a nearby Marine medical unit. On virtually every visit, our conversations and low-level carousing would be interrupted by medevac choppers coming in with loads of freshly wounded and dead. At such times, it was all hands on deck, base personnel and visitors alike, unloading the choppers, and my experiences of the screams and blood and horror in Vietnam were largely confined to the LZ at 1st Med Battalion. Stretcher after stretcher went either left off the LZ to triage or straight ahead to Graves Registration. I never saw anyone shot or blown up in Vietnam, but I saw a good deal of what was left afterwards.