Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay Read Free Book Online Page A

launcher (“Thumper”). In addition the crews carried on board an arsenal of individual weapons ranging from light antitank weapons (LAWs), M-16s and shotguns, to.38 Special Smith & Wessons in rib holsters.
    The crews went over in March 1967, to be joined by their boats about a month later. Wiry’s squadron of ten ASPBs were assigned to ------, on the ------ arm of the Mekong River as it forms its delta entering the South China Sea. The main arms of the river are connected by a maze of thousands of miles of natural and man-made waterways, which also extend away from the river in each direction as it flows south out of Cambodia. The area is the most productive rice-growing area in Vietnam and heavily populated along the banks of the waterways. It was a Viet Cong stronghold.
    â€œOur job was to go in first to find the enemy, keep them busy, until the troops were landed to flush them out…. The rivers were our homes. Helicopters came out to fly orders to us…. We’d beach and take prisoners—we’d do our own interrogations.” They patrolled in narrow waterways where the Viet Cong controlled both banks, and built dug-in, well-concealed ambush positions. Large command-detonated mines were placed underwater at the enemy’s leisure, sometimes creating such large explosions that the bow or stern of the fifty-foot boat would be blown sideways onto the bank, immobilizing the boat and killing some or all of the crew.
    â€œEvery time we went out, five guys had to die—this was from four to six boats…. Out of the original fifty of us, seventeen are alive. Two or three are paraplegic and a couple others are in VAs all their life [psychiatriccasualties]…. One shot from a village and we took
everybody
out. We’d go in and wipe out a fucking village—
completely.”
Wiry served on two ASPBs in his time on riverboats in Vietnam. He is the sole survivor of the first crew, and only one other man is alive from the second. “Sometime we didn’t have no MedEvac, we carried our own dead and our own wounded…. In my nightmares I can’t stand the screaming.” The screaming is sometimes that of wounded crewmates and sometimes of prisoners being tortured.
    One particular incident figures strongly in Wiry’s life since Vietnam: flashbacks, intrusive memories, and intrusive thoughts related to the twelve-day period during the Tet Offensive. On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1968, two direct hits from rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) separated by a brief time ambushed his boat in a narrow waterway in the Delta. The first rocket killed the other men in the boat and the second blew Wiry onto the riverbank, where, wounded and unconscious, he was apparently left for dead by the enemy. The Navy also apparently left him for dead, because there was no effort to rescue him. He feels deeply betrayed and enraged by this abandonment, and has lost control of his rage subsequently in civilian life under conditions that seem to repeat this abandonment. During the next twelve nights he made his way on foot through enemy territory, hiding during the day, putting maggots on his infected wounds to clean them, and killing everyone who spotted him or had food to be taken.
    Other flashbacks and nightmares relate to the earlier deaths, one by one, of the crew he trained with. “One was an old-time bosun’s mate who had been in the Navy sixteen years. He got hit, a direct hit with an RPG. I was holding a dressing on his stomach and I could feel the blood squishing under my hand every time he took a breath…. One guy lost his arm. He was screaming and screaming, and I picked up his arm and threw it at him—‘Shut the fuck up!’
    â€œWe were there to die, and I
didn’t
die…. I always have that thought, why am I alive? Look at what we did to them people…. Keeping me alive so they don’t forget…. What happens is, I like pain…. Pain