I should have known it was going to be a rough year when I woke up dead.

My one sensory connection with what was going on was the cloying smell of blood. Lots of it. Only the smell wasn’t registering in my nostrils because I didn’t have any. I didn’t have a head. Or a torso. Or any other body part I could identify as mine. I was lost somewhere outside of my body; blind, deaf, mute, unfeeling, immobile, and alone.

Weird...

So, this is what it’s like to be dead, I thought. Bummer. Serious bummer.

The worst of it was, it was all my fault. I should never have run into that kill zone. Given the sound of all those bad bullets going in and no sound of good bullets going out, it hadn’t been one of my better ideas.

Fuck!

Right about here I should probably tell you that I wasn’t really dead. You’ve no doubt guessed that already. You may have also guessed that I was pretty confused and that I may have been doing some pretty heavy drugs. Actually, I was very confused, and I was doing one very heavy drug—sodium penathal. Nobody told me it was going to be like that.

In reality, if I might be permitted the use of so loose a term, it was January 4, 1984. I was in Detroit’s Metropolitan Hospital for minor surgery to clear up a bad sinus infection.

The procedure was common enough in Michigan that there were plenty of people around to tell me what it was like. The part about having a yard or two of gauze shoved up my nose for two weeks after the operation didn’t sound any different from the way I’d felt for months, so that didn’t bother me. Compared to the monster headaches I was having, I was sure the pain of recovery would be no big deal either. And the prospect of regaining my sense of smell, although not guaranteed, was a nice extra to look forward to.

I’m telling you all of this to give you some feel for why I got caught so far off base. No one even hinted that sodium penathal could do to anybody what it did to me.

The problem had to do with the drug’s effect on my sense of time and place, not to mention my sense of identity. It may have also involved a miscalculation on the part of the doctor who put me under. A man you are trusting your life to is a man you have to take at his word. I did. And he lied to me—not in so many words, but in so much his words implied.

"...Start counting backward from 100," he said. Sure.

Before I got to 98, I felt my consciousness slipping rapidly and unnaturally away to some deep dark hole it had never been in before. It was happening so fast that my heart didn’t even have time to pound with the ferocity called for by my sudden alarm. Something had obviously gone wrong. But my mind had already lost command of my body, so I was unable to say a word or make a gesture to let the doctor know. I had no experience to draw on to tell me what was happening and no time to consider all of the possibilities.

I thought I was dying. Cashing in my chips. Heading for the last roundup. I wanted desperately to go with a little class. But again, there wasn’t time. I made my exit like a bound and hooded horse thief, swinging by his neck at the end of a rope with his feet kicking in space—still fighting for life.

Then there was that thing about time, place and identity. Not knowing where you are in time and space can play havoc with getting a grip on who you are. We are, after all, different people at different times and places in our lives. As a man coming out from under anesthesia, whose last clear thought was of imminent death, I was in limbo, all information tapes of my life on Earth wiped clean. I was invisible, even to myself.

Nothing existed at first but a vague sense of emotionless, disconnected being adrift in a feelingless sea of utter darkness. Eventually, the light of truth would penetrate the darkness. But first came the smell of blood and a flash of memory from thirteen years before—my last memory of who I was. And where I was. And when...

I was a soldier in Vietnam.

It was mid-day on Good Friday, 1971. The 15-man infantry patrol that I was attached to, as a demolition specialist, was filing into a shallow plain of waist-high elephant grass. To the left and right of the men ahead of me, gently sloping hills of grass turned abruptly to jungle and who knew what lay ahead. I knew what that area just in front of me and around the bend to the left looked like because I had seen it earlier that day while searching for water with three other men. The narrow gully from which the column was entering the valley formed a high, almost vertical wall of earth to my left, on top of which was jungle. A tiny stream to the right pooled at the mouth of the valley and trickled off somewhere just beyond. On the right of the stream lay a thin, moist strip of sand and beyond that, more jungle.

I was pulling drag on the column, which is to say I was on the tail end. The only man I really knew was a fellow engineer named Hamilton. He was scuffling, just as I was, to shift the bulky weight of his rucksack to a more comfortable position on his back as he trudged along behind a radio man who was fighting the same losing battle.

A big gap had opened between Sgt. Hamilton and the RTO. I took a quick mental note of that because the space between the sergeant and me was much too tight. It was the result of everyone walking at a slightly different pace, making it impossible for us on the end to keep from bunching up and stringing out from time to time. I was waiting for Hamilton to move up on his man so I didn’t have to run to keep the right distance. He must have been daydreaming or something or he certainly would have.

Anyhow, he didn’t. And I didn’t say anything to him. And I would not have backed off of his heels at that moment if I hadn’t noticed that my watch had stopped. I can’t tell you why I stopped in my tracks to wind it. But I did. In the next few seconds, all of these insignificant things would combine to keep me from getting my head blown off.

The RTO, whose name I’d learned that morning on the water run was Bradbury, disappeared around the bend. Half a dozen steps into the valley, he became the 13th olive drab duck in an NVA shooting gallery. Hamilton was almost to the corner of the twelve-foot wall of earth to our left when the enemy opened fire with AK-47s, the chilling sound of them momentarily freezing him and me in place.

"Ambush!" shouted an excited voice on the other side of the wall of earth. Hamilton whirled in my direction, prepared, as I was, to drop his rucksack and do whatever the situation called for.

Before we could do anything, we heard a loud explosion inside the kill zone, followed by another one we could see on the back side of the pool, no more that 12 feet away. Close enough for us to feel the hot, wet blast pushing us against the embankment. It felt like a gentle but insistent nudge, more than anything else. An illusion, no doubt, created by the warp speed with which my mind was working. Our bodies were undoubtedly flying away from the blast very quickly, he and I forming mirror images of each other’s "slow motion" reach for the sky (trying to get skinny) as we fell against the wall. I could actually see big pieces of the exploding rocket flying towards us slightly faster than we were moving away from them. Jagged fragments blew in all around us, failing, inexplicably, to find company in the muddy water dousing us from head to foot or the tiny pebbles stinging our exposed skin and pinging off of our rifle butts and steel pots.

I was as scared as I had ever been, but not yet to the point of absolute terror, even as I watched the oil can-sized, four-fin tail assembly of the B-40 rocket whoosh between my bulging eyes and Hamilton’s. It didn’t seem real.

All at once events were again proceeding at normal speed as Hamilton and I dropped our muddy rucksacks and thumbed the selector switches on our M-16s off of the "safe" position. We heard the shooting in the kill zone, all of it from five or six AKs. Some of our men should have been sprinting out of there about then. None did.

A sudden silence as frightening as the sudden noise came and went a few seconds later in another high pitched hammering of enemy fire.

A quick burst of M-16 fire, and then another, told me that some of the troopers, most of whom should have bought the farm in the first five seconds, were as inexplicably alive as Hamilton and I were and making a fight of it. It was the wrong thing to do in an ambush situation according to everything in the book. But the guy who wrote the book wasn’t there. It may have been the only thing to do. I was in no position to judge. I’d had no previous combat experience and I was outside of the kill zone. All of that could have changed at any instant if a third rocket should hit anywhere near the spot the second one had.

Propelled in five different directions at once, by five different kinds of mounting apprehension, I surrendered to the dominant ones: the fear of standing where I was and getting blown to pieces by a rocket barrage; the fear of running away and finding myself alone against the NVA’s main force; the fear of winding up on somebody’s MIA list while rotting my life away in an enemy prison; the fear of staying alive at the expense of the other men like me in steel pots by doing nothing to stop the men in pith helmets trying to kill them. I decided to attack.

It was the first in a rapid succession of silly-ass notions which seemed to make perfectly good sense at the time.

What you have to remember is the swiftness with which each critical bit of information supplanted the next, each new development calling for an entirely different physical and emotional response, most of which were contradictory and all of which were dreadful. The total elapsed time from the NVA’s surprise attack on us and my decision to attack them could not have been more than ten seconds.

Each second lost in formulating a plan and carrying it out could cost another GI his life. That was the one undeniable constant in every conceivable option. So, in the end, the only option I could possibly live with was to try to do something, anything—even if it got me killed. Which seemed just as likely to happen whether I did anything or not...

I must have thrown away another precious second or two going over that territory the second time, while beginning a feeble attempt to scale the embankment toward the sound of enemy fire. An image flashed across my mind of other soldiers in another war wearing Union blue uniforms and cowering in a hole while their comrades were fighting and dying.

Where are they now? I thought.

Dead. All dead, the only survivor being the historical record of how and why they fought.

I ignored Sgt. Hamilton who still seemed to be waiting for our people to come out of the valley of death on their own. He had his problems and I had mine. Being that he was a professional soldier who had seen combat before, I figured that he knew better than I did what to do. But the demons of the mind pushing me this way and that recognized only their own authority.

They tried to prod me up the wall and into the jungle on top, even though I knew full well that it was too steep and the dirt too loose to permit it. Then the demons urged me to backtrack to a dip in the ravine I could climb over, forgetting the fact that the tangle of vegetation it led to would have been no easier to penetrate than a tightly packed tangle of braided hemp fifty feet high and fifty yards wide. No way.

In the back of my mind, I could hear a recorded message playing back a story which one of the more experienced troopers told me a few days earlier about "this black guy" getting killed accidentally by his own men who "didn’t know he was there trying to play hero." A moot point. I couldn’t get through anyway...

I was going in circles again, blowing another four or five seconds to the terrible tune of AK-47 rifle fire. I heard another explosion somewhere farther away than the first one, then two more—these, very far away. I heard the RTO calling of an emergency dust-off. He seemed very far away too, although I knew he couldn’t have been. "We have a lot of badly wounded men..." he was saying, the sound coming through as though I was wearing an ear plug in my right ear.

Once again, I was eyeball to eyeball with Sgt. Hamilton, who was obviously very shaken up, although he seemed to be in better command of himself than I was

"Don’t go in there," he said sternly, but without much confidence behind it, as though he was reading the mind of the biggest fool in all of creation. He didn’t physically restrain me, though, nor did he attempt to, as I crept past him in the only direction left for me to go.

I was still thinking "attack" all the way, going so far as to reach down to my ankle for a long-lost bayonet to affix to the barrel of my M-16—another monumentally stupid idea whose only redeeming value was its short life span.

For several reasons, none of them logical, the thought of making a charge up the kill zone without a fixed bayonet poured more white hot fear into my belly than anything that had happened so far. With a fixed bayonet, I could imagine myself dashing up the kill zone, yelling like a madman and blasting away until I ran out of bullets, then plunging the cold steel home. As ridiculous as that scenario was under the circumstances, it was real enough to me—a picture which had come to me many times as a kid playing Army and as an Army Reserve instructor demonstrating bayonet drill and pugil stick fighting, which I was very good at.

I could see myself in a desperate struggle with two or more enemy soldiers and coming out a winner because I had done it successfully so many times in my mind. But without a bayonet, all I could see was some asshole in my body running halfway up the valley, emptying his magazine, and getting shot to death while trying to reload.

Another ten or fifteen seconds gone.

My hand retracted from the empty scabbard and I rechecked the selector switch on my M-16 to be sure it was set on semi-automatic to stretch out the bullet supply. Although I had two dozen 20-round magazines in the bandoleers crisscrossing my chest, the image of being wasted while reaching for one kept them from being of any comfort to me.

The AK fire tapered off considerably as I inched farther along the rounded corner expecting to see bodies and parts of bodies all over the place. Then the AKs started exploding like deadly pop-corn again and I braced myself for more rockets. It was like being blindfolded in a madman’s playroom, preparing to duck as a bunch of pissed-off maniacs drew back to throw razor sharp knives and hatchets at you.

By now I was pretty sure I was a dead man, and damn sure that I didn’t want to be. So, there I stood, having decided to charge up the middle of the kill zone, peeking around the corner like a reluctant swimmer testing the temperature of the water with his big toe.

In that eternal instant, I thought about a zillion things, all related to my mortality and the world as it might exist without me. I thought of my family and friends: my brother George, who had survived his tour in the Republic of Vietnam and a friend, David Riley, who had not. I thought of how David, the younger brother of my childhood girlfriend, had been killed early in the war almost as soon as he got here. I thought of Dennis Hammon, a friend since kindergarten, who was missing in action and about whom I had entertained fantasies of discovering as a POW and bringing home with me alive and well.

It occurred to me now that Dennis might be dead, too, and that I might be seeing him and David very shortly in another life. If there was another life. If the God I learned about in Sunday School had any validity. Which I doubted. But I couldn’t help reconsidering a plan I’d devised when I was about ten to get into heaven, which was to sincerely repent of my sins just before biting the dust.

Then I thought... Fuck it.

I wasn’t dead yet. And if there was any chance of keeping myself or any other GI alive, that kind of thinking wasn’t going to get it done. I had to think Kill! Kill! Kill! I had to see myself as the wild-eyed, fire-breathing US Army paratrooper I was supposed to be.

I had the wild-eyed part down cold, but there was nothing behind it but terror, or what I thought was terror until I got my first peek into the kill zone.

About twelve yards away, I could see two of our men crouched behind a boulder the size of a medicine ball with a third of the air let out. It sat on the far side of a clearing, which extended all the way back to me. The man nearest to me was Bradbury, the RTO, his radio receiver in his right hand, his left hand reaching futilely for the other RTO, Wilson. Wilson lay face down on the forward edge of the clearing, a full body length away from Bradbury, without his radio, his rucksack, his helmet or his shirt.

Bradbury looked up and saw me peeking around the corner. "Get him," he said, without thinking. If he had been thinking, he would never have said anything that dumb. If I had been thinking, I would have said, "You get him." I stared at the prostrate body and found myself hoping that he was dead so I wouldn’t have to do anything about him one way or another. From where I stood, he sure as hell looked dead.

Then the son of a bitch moved!

And so it was, with the AKs popping off and a helpless GI laying fully exposed to their fire, that my options had at last narrowed to one. I couldn’t tell for sure where the rounds were impacting. But I knew for sure that unless the ambushers were distracted, my movement would draw fire to me and there would be no cover for me before or after I reached my destination. I knew I might actually be making things worse for Wilson by trying to get him behind cover. I knew I was going to try it anyway. And I knew that the true meaning of terror was something I could never before have begun to imagine.

There, in the kill zone, standing between me and the wounded trooper, was the Grim Reaper himself, daring me to get past him. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there, staring at me through the bony sockets of his shrouded skull, grinning his deathly grin, his bloody scythe held high, a long bony finger inviting me to come forward.

And I did.

...It was Wednesday, January 4, 1984. I was a design sculptor on temporary leave from Ford Motor Company to have some polyps removed from my nose. The anesthesia was wearing off as I lay in the Detroit Metropolitan Hospital recovery room, remembering absolutely nothing about my life since that bad Good Friday so many years before. As near as I could tell, it was still Good Friday, 1971 and I was still in the kill zone.

Nothing was clear to me on my first steps back to consciousness except for the only logical conclusion that could be drawn from the available evidence. I had been a soldier in Vietnam. I had done something stupid which should have gotten me killed. And here I was... wherever here was. Rather than fighting against my apparent fate, I decided early on that I might as well get into it and concentrate whatever kind of perceptors dead people have on checking things out.

Already, the odor of blood, which I presumed to be the last remnant of my living senses was fading, but it seemed as though I was acquiring other channels of input from whatever world I was in. It was like being reduced to scattered bits of matter and learning how to see and hear all over again within a vortex of meaningless sight and sound. As the swirling slowed, the information coming—or going (I could not tell which) to my disembodied mind became more distinct. A dark haze shrouded what I presumed to be the kill zone and it seemed... it seemed as though someone was crying out in distress.

Yes! That’s exactly what it was. If there had been any doubt before about the extreme condition of my health, that was no longer the case. I wanted to say to the poor devil who was having such a hard time, I wish I could help you, buddy, but how much can you expect from a dead guy?

I laughed.

"Yep, I’m dead," I said, enjoying immensely the fact that I could think and say what I thought and hear myself saying it, just as though I had a brain and at least one ear and a mouth. Maybe being dead wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

Straining to absorb more of what was going on, I tried to see through the dark haze, without success. But my attempts to hear were being rewarded with a flood of information that might very well be coming from a radio news program. News? Radio?

"And Jesse Jackson has succeeded in securing the release of Navy flyer Robert Goodwin shot down over Lebanon..."

Very odd. Goodwin? Goodwin?

Goodwin. Jackson. Assad. POW!

"He did it!" I heard myself shout with unbridled joy, a part of me understanding the whole story at once, another part of me recognizing only that an American serviceman who had been in enemy hands was coming home. Coming home. "Coming Home." Jane Fonda.

"Fuck’n bitch!" I shouted. "Dennis isn’t coming home! Dennis is dead! But he wasn’t dead then! Not then! Not like David! Not like Nook! Not like..." Me? Wait a minute. I’m not dead. How embarrassing.

I was in equal measure profoundly disappointed and relieved by the realization that my life had continued past 1971: disappointed in not having accomplished anything since then to justify it, relieved that there was still something I could do. Indeed, there was much I had to do, if only to keep the demons at bay.

The same demons that forced me into the kill zone were living in my dreams—but only when I pretended that the war was over. I knew better. I could still hear the shooting. I could still smell the blood. I could not ignore the fact that it was not all in my head despite what I saw and didn’t see on television.

In the nearly ten years between the fall of Saigon and the morning I woke up dead, precious little news of war and politics in Indochina appeared in the American press. Such events in that part of the world had become "old news." Stars and would-be stars of the popular press were in the "fresh news" business. The fresher the better.

Old news was history and the history business had its own stars. The history of Vietnam came out of books like Fire In The Lake by Francis Fitzgerald, The Best And The Brightest by David Haberstam, Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow; and Sideshow by William Shawcross. Every nationally recognized journalist in the country without a right-wing label stamped to his forehead referred to those books the way Baptist ministers refer to the Gospels.

The Gospels according to Haberstam, Fitzgerald, Karnow and Shawcross taught that The Great Satan in Indochina was the United States. It was not the communists. It was not Hanoi with it’s ambition to take over in Indochina where the French left off. That, according to the Gospels, was what the United States tried to do. Dissenting opinions were accordingly treated as proof of ignorance or right-wing bias or both. They were not to be taken seriously by anyone looking to win a prestigious award in journalism. And they weren’t.

Not even when Vietnamese boat people were considered fresh news, nor when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, was it possible to make Hanoi’s politics or Hanoi’s war the issue. Instead, the boat people were the issue, then Pol Pot was the issue. After that, it was starving Cambodians and the efforts of various private and governmental relief agencies to save them. All of these proverbial trees in Indochina’s dying forest of freedom got attention, but never the dying forest itself or the communist war machine that was killing it.

If you were gathering every scrap of information you could about Indochina during the "post-war" decade, the dying forest may have been more evident. You would have learned, from a bit here and a piece there, that Hanoi’s political system had something to do with the boat people tragedy. You would have known about the Khmer Rouge long before Vietnam invaded Cambodia and you would not have had to guess who was responsible for the near extinction of the Cambodian people. Nor would it have been necessary to wait for the book about the CIA’s "nefarious" involvement in Laos to learn that Hanoi conducted a war of genocide against the Hmong. But you would have had no easier time of fixing the principle blame on any government other than our own for any of the atrocities committed in Indochina since 1945.

Putting together a coherent picture of the Vietnam War is, at best, a bugger of a job. Unless, of course, you start with your conclusion and work backwards. The infamous CBS memo written before the network collected its evidence for "The Uncounted Enemy" represents the only documentary evidence of a major news medium’s intent to do just that. However, if you take a close look at any of the award-winning documentaries on the war, you will see that all of them begin with the same conclusion: The real uncounted enemy was us.

Each carefully researched and cogently structured episode of "Vietnam: The 10,000 Day War" and "Vietnam: A Television History" is held together by that one theme: The enemy was us. That was the only rational conclusion one could draw from the quality, the quantity, the context and the order in which the information was presented.

A competent producer could ironclad the opposite conclusion with only a few "minor" changes in the original material. Either way, a substantial number of people with predisposed points of view would see an objective account of the war. They would find what they were looking for by ignoring the little things that didn’t quite fit and emphasizing the big things that did. They would infer information which was neither given nor implied to fill in the gaps. My right-wing acquaintances who thought the series was excellent did exactly that—every one of them.

In short, it is possible to watch "The 10,000 Day War" and "A Television History" without concluding that the enemy was us. But there is no rational way you can do it on the basis of what is and what isn’t there.

The most impressive television documentaries on the war feature "representative samples" of the people who experienced it directly: the planners, the implementors, the dissidents and the victims. Those of us who served in the military, from the highest to the lowest levels, show up in all four categories. You see "us" in action and you hear what "we" have to say. If you’re not one of us, you might come away thinking you have gotten some special insight into how it was to have been there. If you are one of us, you might wonder why so many of those people fall into so few categories and why none of them represents you.

I used to wonder why I could never find my thoughts and feelings about the war on the lips of anybody in those award-winning documentaries who I would have chosen to speak for me. That is, I used to wonder, until the feedback I got from a class of preponderantly dovish college students I was asked to speak to about blacks in the military gave me the answer.

I knew going in that I would be asked questions about Vietnam. I knew I would have to "seek and destroy" some formidable, well entrenched stereotypes before any real thought could be given to my answers. And I was amazed in the end at the extent to which I succeeded. Then, analyzing all of the conceivable factors responsible for what happened, I arrived at four essential elements:

1) Time. I had a full hour to articulate my position.

2) Freedom. I had the power to say pretty much what I wanted to. I could ask of anyone in the room, at any time, whatever questions I thought were relevant and to structure the exchange along preset paths toward predetermined conclusions.

3) Knowledge. Sure, I had some first-hand experience that only a veteran of the war in Vietnam could talk about. But I was also a veteran of the Vietnam debate in America, where the real war was fought and won by the peace movement. I knew what they knew, what they thought they knew and more than enough beyond that to fill a thick book of thin pages and eye-straining type. I was thoroughly prepared to handle any question that arose.

4) Authority. Just standing there in front of the class looking out over the many white faces and the few black ones, I could feel the power of my position as the announced "expert." There was one white Vietnam vet in the class, and he was on my side. As long as I could grab the others’ attention and hold it, I could create all kinds of dissonance in their dovish preconceptions and force them to listen—if only to escape confusion.

Confusion sucks.

People automatically accept ideas that blend harmoniously into their established patterns of thought. I learned from that group of college students what happens when that harmony is disrupted and someone in a recognized position of authority steps in to offer credible solutions.

Before "The 10,000 Day War" hit the airwaves, confusion about what happened to us in Vietnam was the norm. As a nation that had voted overwhelmingly in the polls to cut off military aid to our allies when some said they needed it most and others said it would only prolong the agony, we felt uneasy. We felt uneasy about how we got involved, about what we did when we were there and about how we left. We felt uneasy about things we couldn’t pin down.

We had refused to talk about it for too long. We had forgotten too much too soon. We knew that it would have a profound effect upon us forever but we were unwilling to look it in the eye. It just didn’t feel right. We watched "The 10,000 Day War" and we were appeased—for awhile. Something still wasn’t right.

Despite all of the time and pains that were taken to make it accurate and balanced, and in spite of all the high marks it got from the moderate left and right, its substantive omissions gave it a noticeable tilt to the left. Only spokesmen for the extreme right could dare to say so publicly without fear of being stigmatized by an extreme right-wing label. However, the inferior source of public criticism notwithstanding, the series could not be called complete and serious students of the subject were forced to take note.

By then, another multi-part documentary, "Vietnam: A Television History," showed up and grabbed all kinds of industry awards for being accurate, balanced and complete. Many prominent Vietnam veterans and the most prominent Vietnam veterans group endorsed it, and Stanley Karnow’s "Vietnam: A Television History" had become Gospel.

One right-wing group, called Accuracy In Media, raised so much hell that PBS finally gave in to a documentary rebuttal proposed by them. The PBS executives who agreed to let the conservative group have its say on public television became the subject of more controversy than the program did. In fact, I never saw nor heard nor read another thing about it. They were given their say, so they had to shut up. And what could I say? That nobody has a monopoly on the truth? That some of us who say we fought in Vietnam for good reason are knowledgeable and socially aware and no more enamored of our fascist right than we were of Vietnam’s communist left?