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Daniel Ellsberg with author and activist Kay Boyle in San Francisco, 1975. / Photo by Janet Fries/Getty Images. Dan Ellsberg passed away last Friday—not sure I can get away with the word “peacefully” since Dan spent most of his adult life working for peace and found it mostly in his personal life. He was never discouraged—pained, yes, but never discouraged.
Dan wrote often and brilliantly about the dangers of nuclear weapons. He never despaired, even as the number of nuclear-armed nations grew and as the recent war between Russia and Ukraine, really a proxy war between Washington and Moscow, led to talk of possible nuclear intervention. His 2017 study of that madness, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, is required reading for those who worry about the bomb, as any rational person should.
Dan and I began our friendship bitching about the stupidity and horrors of the Vietnam War and the immense “collateral damage”—a phrase out of a Zombie dictionary, where words no longer resemble their actual meanings—that led to hundreds of thousands (by American estimates) or as many as two million (by Vietnamese estimates) noncombatant Vietnamese deaths. I made what turned out to be a huge mistake in the 1980s by taking Dan to see Oliver Stone’s Platoon. There was a brutal scene of a Vietnamese ambush in the making that had Dan twisting and turning in pain with memories. He kept on saying, “No, no, sir,” and stayed bent over, unable to watch as the scene unfolded. Last weekend I was glad to read an essay by his granddaughter Catherine noting that tears came to Dan often when the two of them went to the movies.
Dan and I never went to the movies again. Instead, we occasionally traded stories of the murderous policies in Vietnam that he had witnessed firsthand, while the war was running hot and cold, and I had unearthed in my reporting from the safety of the United States. We rarely talked about the novels or memoirs that were written about the war simply because I was convinced no one knew as much about the realities as did Dan and, as I think about it, we always stayed in the present when talking about Vietnam. It was a missed opportunity.
Lots of powerful fiction and literary nonfiction has been written about the war, and much of it is replete with horror (I’m thinking of the books of Tim O’Brien and Michael Herr), but the one book that embraced all of it—the murders, the lack of leadership, the racism, the need for constant drugging—is Meditations in Green by Stephen Wright. I’d call the novel searing but that adjective is not hot enough. It’s very close to a literal account of a tour of duty by a draftee who, because of his high IQ, was flung into an army intelligence unit late in the war, perhaps in 1969 or so.
Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green was published by Scribner in 1983. It took Wright years to get the novel, the first of many he would write, published in 1983, after he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I thought of forcing it on Dan, but I never did. He had his own night horrors from the war.
Wright’s main character, Specialist Four James Griffin, is assigned as an interpreter of overhead film, radar data, and other intelligence about possible enemy targets. His unit’s area of operations is somewhere in hotly contested central South Vietnam. Wright makes clear that the last thing any intelligence analyst wanted to do was to go anywhere on the ground with a combat unit full of draftees who hated and feared the war, as anyone would. Inevitably, they took out those fears, as happened at My Lai, in the murder and rape of the peasants living in the rural areas.
Later, Wright depicts the sordid adventures of Sergeant Kraft, another intelligence officer in the unit who was ordered to deploy on a command patrol deep into enemy country. A GI is killed early on by a sniper. “The man had a silver whistle on his dog tag chain that he liked to blow during fire fights, claimed it scared the gooks,” Wright writes. It was the unit’s second combat death in three days: “First they had lost the company clown, now the company idiot. Huge holes in the communal bond. The Bush was reaching in. The company’s nerves had thinned to wire and judging by the current Kraft could feel now there would almost certainly be a blackout when they hit Ba Thien.” Blackout meant payback, as Kraft understood, and the village would suffer.
Once Kraft senses what’s going to happen at the village, he asks the company leader, Captain Brack: “Save me a talker”—someone who would survive long enough to be interrogated. The Captain responds: “Well now, I don’t believe it’s gonna be as bad as all that.” Kraft worries Brack filled his canteen with whiskey instead of water. He suggests: “All we need is a little war dance around the campfire.” But the captain replies: “We supposed to be taking this with a smile?” Kraft levels with him: “You know as well as I do that nobody left in the ville had anything to do with this.” “Maybe,” the captain says, with a wink. ”You just take care of yourself and I’m sure we can find a souvenir of some kind for you to take home.”
“Ba Thien was easy. Occupied but placid,” Wright writes. “The soldiers moved through the hootches in a grim fever. A grenade was dropped down a hole. Tear gas and coughing women and children poured out. The people were herded together with rough hands and sharp voices.”
I could not imagine myself sharing this novel with Dan, who would have known by this point in the passage, as I did, what was going to come. It would be worse than I thought.
The captain orders all the villagers into a ditch. Kraft watches the scene, sitting on a log:
A skinny old man with a blindfold across his eyes, hands tied behind his back, was kicked in the ass, sent sprawling into the dirt.
“Leave him alone,” someone shouted.
“Shut up,” someone answered.
Two laughing soldiers were pissing into a rice jar. A woman ran up, protesting. Arcs of urine swung simultaneously towards her. . . .
“Shit,” mumbled a blond corporal. “These bitches is too ugly to rape.” . . .
Some of the hootches were already burning. Lines of fire raced up the thatch walls like released window shades. Thick smoke unwound into the cloudy sky. . . .
The villagers were still crouching in the ditch, grandfathers tied to one another with strips of torn T-shirt, the women mostly silent, even their crying eerily inaudible. It was like watching the news on television with the sound off. When the muzzles of M-16s occasionally swung toward them, the people looked away. The children’s eyes were huge and black as olives, the eyes of waifs in cheap paintings. . . . Someone called [Kraft’s] name. He turned. Captain Brack pointed to a pair of old men squatting on splayed feet amid a restless green forest of American legs.
“Lieutenant Lang caught these two didiing out the back door.”
One man was almost totally bald; the other had a short white goatee. Both had bruises on their cheeks, blood smeared around their mouths and noses Kraft said something in Vietnamese. The bald one responded.
“Doesn’t know nothing,” Kraft said. “Doesn’t know VC, VC don’t know him.”
“Shee-it,” said Lieutenant Lang and spat on the ground.
“What do you think?” asked Captain Brack.
“They’re old and scared and sick. That one looks like he has a tumor on his neck.” . . .
[Lieutenant Lang] tugged long on the goatee. “This one looks like ole Ho Chi Minh himself.” He turned, glaring at Captain Brack. “It’s time we did something.”
Avoiding his gaze, Captain Brack stared intently into the dark jungle. “’Bout time for a break,” he said. . . . “I guess I’ll go across to those trees there and rest in the shade for a few minutes, the miles get into these bones awfully easily now.” . . .
Lieutenant Lang turned to a PFC who was missing his front teeth. “Morrelli, take these two out into the field. I think they’re gonna require further interrogation.”
Lieutenant Lang studied Kraft. “You want in on this?”
“No thanks,” said Kraft. “I guess I’m gonna sit down on this here anthill or tomb or pile of dung and I’m gonna eat my lunch.”
The lieutenant glared at him and walked away. . . .
[Kraft] was opening a can . . . when someone sat down beside him. A skinny milk-faced kid with brown freckles and bright blue eyes and glasses held together with paper clips. And a rifle with a peace symbol scratched on the stock. And a machete in a leather holster under his left armpit. And a ring in his ear. . . .
“You’re with the CIA, aren’t you?” asked the kid suddenly.
Kraft continued chewing, then swallowed carefully. “Now that’s the kind of question that can have only one answer.”
The kid thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “But like I was thinking when I get out I might want a job. . . . I just thought I could be pretty good.”
“At what?”
“Like that intelligence stuff, you know, spying and like killing.”
Kraft laughed. . . .
Out in the field behind them soldiers milled around the prisoners. The old men sat together on the ground, arms and legs tightly bound with wire. . . . The soldiers looked as though they were attempting to launch a model plane that wouldn’t start. Then another soldier walked over with packages and several men began tying the packages to the prisoners’ chests. C-4. Kraft turned around. He had seen this number before. Sometimes, before detonating the explosive, they would place cash bets on which body would jump the furthest.
“So how much experience this blade of yours got? Kraft asked
“Five, six if you count the one I finished with the rifle butt.”
“You like your work?”
“I’m the best there is.”
“Why not stay in the army?
“This war ain’t going to last forever.”
Kraft chuckled. “But the civilian killing never ends, huh?”
The kid smiled.
Behind them came the shock and echo of a huge explosion. Then another. Gookhoppers.
I ended up thinking that the brilliant and edgy “Meditations in Green” was not for Dan. I’m not sure it was for me, either. I thought I had heard it all in my days of reporting on Vietnam, including horrific stuff about American helicopter pilots who, after a brutal day of ferrying Americans wounded and slain in combat, would run down itinerant Vietnamese farmers and try to collect heads by tilting their rotor blades at an insanely dangerous angle. But Stephen Wright told of another Vietnam War game—one I chose not to share with Dan. And I’m glad I didn’t. He would have cried too much.
