One of the many rumors I heard when I was in Vietnam was of an American super soldier armed with an AK-47 assault rifle fighting side by side with the Viet Cong. From my experience with the man who deserted with that declared intention, it’s easy for me to see how rumors like that got started, though I have seen no evidence to back them up. On the contrary, the logic of that story about the American soldier who killed or captured other Americans at will but could not be killed or captured himself, was unsupportable. In the version I heard from a black soldier who served his tour in 1968-69, he was a black man who called for blacks to join him and killed or captured everybody in their unit if they didn’t. During my tour, the black soldier had been replaced by a white one, a redhead, who made his appeal to all of the Americans he confronted before moving in for the kill.

The distinctively American turncoat with the distinctively enemy weapon had to be a symbol for something too threatening to acknowledge directly. The only super soldiers I knew well enough to gain their trust, believed in him the way a child might believe in the bogeyman. I saw their fear, their conviction and their respect for the phantom trooper whose exploits could be told only by dead men, as they confided their belief in him to me and asked furtively if I’d ever heard of him. I think I know why this myth seemed so real to grown men with less reason than anybody who ever wore the uniform of the United States Army to fear an enemy in the field. At some level of consciousness, they must have known that they were up against a foe that no amount of military prowess could conquer, a metaphorical super soldier who they might one day see confronting them in a mirror.

American combat veterans were, in effect fighting on the side of the Viet Cong every time they showed up on television to denounce "Johnson’s war" or "Nixon’s’ war." It wasn’t necessary for them to join a Viet Cong combat team. American television, the decisive field of battle, made their words some of Hanoi’s best weapons against anyone who tried to oppose them.

What happened to the men who deserted in Vietnam, I don’t know. By what route deserters ended up in Paris speaking as one with the Viet Cong, I don’t know either. They didn’t confide in me. They confided in Jane Fonda.

Through FTA, Jane spoke for all of America’s GIs and ex-GIs who thought the way she did about our government’s involvement in Vietnam. They, in turn, spoke for her—the way a dummy speaks for a ventriloquist. After all, it was her show.

While Jane’s FTA was bringing her into her own in the peace movement, which was otherwise dying from apathy, I was too busy ducking bullets to notice. Where I was, there were no TV sets, so the pictures I carried in my head of peace activists speaking through combat vets were from old news segments I’d seen at home. The GIs in those shows may have chosen to sit on the knees of celebrated doves like Dr. Spock and say all of the things the doves wanted to come out of their mouths. But they were being manipulated all the same, because they were not on the program for their insights. They were there for their bodies, their uniforms and their names on the side of the famous peace activists who invited them.

The vets who stood there with medals for heroism were very hard to argue with. They were obviously brave men whose motives of conscience could not be questioned. It was harder still to argue with the ones in wheelchairs. They brought tears to your eyes and made you feel personally responsible in some way for putting them there. How in the name of suffering humanity could you give abstract political justifications for the war with its flesh and blood victims telling you it was senseless? Their voluntary presence alone, on the same platform as famous peace activists, argued persuasively that the peace movement was right. It said: I know the truth because I’ve been there and paid the price for somebody else’s folly.

One group of veterans with impeccable combat credentials could not be argued with at all. They didn’t even have to show up at a "PEACE NOW!" demonstration to cast their vote with the peace movement. All it took was a dove with a famous name to read their names and weep. They had no choice about how their bodies were going to be used. These men were what I thought I was that day in 1984 when I woke up in the hospital and forgot what time and place I was in. They were dead.

Dead is what you’re supposed to be when you go into a kill zone and, for a time that morning in the recovery room, I remembered going in but not coming out. It would happen in my dreams, where my worst fears of what could have happened would become real. But I, along with half of the other 14 men involved had in fact escaped with no physical injury. Therefore, the actual experience did not seem to rate the full fledged kicking screaming torments I was up against in my sleep—until I remembered the whole story....

Good Friday, 1971, just outside of the kill zone: When the man on the ground stirred and I made up my mind what to do, I wasn’t trying to be a hero. I was not trying to get myself killed. I was trying to avoid being a coward. I was trying to keep a fellow soldier from being killed on the cheap, from being shot full of holes just because his bare white back in the wide, flat clearing was such a clear and easy target to hit. Once I’d seen him move, I couldn’t pretend it was all right to do nothing and I couldn’t wait even a fraction of a second to make up my mind. Doing what I had to do as a soldier in this truly fucked-up situation was the second worst thing I could imagine. Not doing it was the worst.

With my vision of the Grim Reaper before me and my vision of myself as a coward running the other way, I bolted forward into the kill zone.

It was like making a parachute jump with no reserve and a strong suspicion that the guy who packed your main chute was a homicidal maniac. Regardless of how I felt about my tenuous situation, I was committed.

For one short-lived moment my "charge up the middle idea tried to reassert itself. But, having now rounded the corner so that the entire grassy field and the jungle covered high ground to the left were in view, two gaping holes in the plan were immediately apparent: First of all, you can’t attack the bad guys if you can’t tell where they are. I couldn’t tell where they were. Worse than that, I couldn’t tell where most of the good guys were either. In the unlikely event that the ones up front had survived the initial outburst of fire, I may have fired up one or two of them myself from behind while an unseen bushwhacker in the high ground off to the side was drawing a bead on me.

I was, so to speak, all charged up with no place to go. No place that is, except for a bald earth clearing the size of a little league baseball diamond. There, the hooded specter with the bloody scythe was in clearer focus than ever, tapping his bony toe to the heart-thumping tune of AK-47 automatic rifle fire.

A part of me did some fast stepping across the clearing while another part stayed behind to watch, like a dreamer seeing himself in his dream. I could see my right hand clutching my M-16, my left hand holding my steel pot to my head, and my legs pumping away as the bandoleers crisscrossing my chest bounced and clanged heavily against my body. A few bad bullets cracked around me and I wondered dimly when I’d feel them ripping through my flesh. In the seven eons before I reached my destination, I thought I heard some good bullets too. And I thought I saw a dark spherical object sailing through the air in my direction. I dismissed both perceptions immediately as fear-induced hallucinations; the first to ease the fear, the second to justify it. I refused to believe in them. And they disappeared.

It was much harder to dismiss the reality of the dead man lying face up on the forward edge of the clearing with his throat and chest shot away. I hadn’t seen him until I pulled to a stop beside Wilson, the wounded RTO. I was glad I didn’t have to go after him and very much ashamed of feeling that way. More bad bullets zinged by, some of them sending up puffs of dirt and chipping off pieces of the boulder that our other RTO was crouched behind, still calling for a dustoff.

My mind went blank as my body continued to do its thing, so I can’t be as precise as I’d like to be about what happened next.

I know for a fact that there was a real cessation of fire from time to time. I’m also pretty sure that the clown shooting at Wilson and me was by himself and too excited or inept to take careful aim. He should have killed us both. Be that as it may, Wilson should have bought it with the rocket that slammed into his back, totally disintegrating his radio telephone, ripping the shirt completely off of his back and leaving the metal frame of his rucksack laying off to the side in a twisted, smoking heap.

He had a nasty tear in his left shoulder which looked as though someone had tried to sever his arm with a vicious swipe of a meat cleaver. Only the wound wasn’t nearly as neat. It lay open, gaping like the torn sleeve of an old suit jacket, giving the hideous impression that a good tug would pull it completely off. Around the edge of the wound was a purple tatter of skin. Inside I could see severed fat, muscle and blood vessels. Surprisingly little blood was visible, but the smell of it was overwhelming. The most remarkable thing, though, was the unmarked skin on his back and neck. Not a scratch, Not one tiny scratch.

Facing away from the dead man toward the rear of the kill zone, I bent down over Wilson, laying my rifle on the ground and banging a bandoleer smack into the open wound. He moaned softly. At the same time, I sprang back aghast, cursing myself and slinging the offending ammunition belts off over my head. Is this what I was playing dodge the scythe with the Grim Reaper to accomplish?

Something exploded five or six feet to my right, doing about as much damage as an elephant fart. It made me jump but it didn’t rate a second thought and I didn’t give it one.

The sporadic gunfire ceased altogether for several seconds. Not knowing how long it would last, I wanted to work quickly. Remembering how swiftly and efficiently a soldier in a training film had moved a wounded buddy out of the line of fire, my own clumsy inefficiency stood out in bold, mocking contrast. In the film, the wounded man had been dragged out of the way on his back, the rescuer pulling him by the armpits. Wilson was on his stomach. Flipping him on his back was out of the question, and only one armpit was in good enough shape to take hold of. When I tried that, the unbalanced weight of his long, slim body turned into the wound, causing him to moan again and making me wonder if he was conscious of what was happening.

Turning this way and that, wondering whether I would catch a bullet in the head or the ass, I tried lifting him up by the beltline of his pants. It didn’t work. I tried slipping an arm under his chest and lifting him straight up. That didn’t work either. I tried as many moves and combinations of moves that I could think of, somehow managing to hurt him every time while getting him no more than three feet from where we started. All I did was bloody myself up and piss myself off.

In a perverse way I could not have anticipated, the lack of steady fire directed at the clearing now that I was there, made the problem worse. Had the firing been continuous, I would not have hesitated in grabbing him anywhere and hauling him behind the rock. But, having seen the wound and knowing what caused it, I had to consider the possibility that a jagged piece of one thing or another might be in position to slice into a vein or an artery. If that was the case, the wrong sudden movement could have the same effect as a bullet in his brain. On the other hand, if the shooting started again Wilson, the white RTO, and I, the black "pick and shovel, were almost certain to wind up like Nook, the brown corpse who had been a living "Kit Carson" scout less than two minutes before.

Somehow, I managed to drag Wilson a little closer to the protective rock.

Looking to my left at Nook and then at Wilson, the question of whether it was better to be killed or maimed was instantly decided for me in favor of being maimed. I don’t know why, but the quick answer to the question I’d asked myself for years struck me as funny. Despite everything, I smiled. A good fifteen or twenty seconds had passed since the last shots rang out and I assumed that an enemy soldier on our flank would have killed us by then if one had been there. It followed that no one was there, so I looked at Nook once more to see if I could tell by my line of sight to his body if Wilson and I were out of the forward line of fire.

Then I felt the presence of someone behind me and looked around to see our machine gunner without his gun or his helmet standing there in a daze looking down at us. His dark skin and the smoky haze left over from the explosions, made it hard at first to see that he had been wounded. He appeared confused, in need of direction more than anything else. So, doing to him what Bradbury had done to me, I reached over and picked up my M-16.

"Take this," I said.

It wasn’t until he took it in his hands that I realized he was bleeding heavily from a gash on his forehead. Without saying a word he turned and walked back into the elephant grass. God, I thought, this is some bizarre shit.

All was quiet.

Following the sleepwalking gunner with my eyes, I caught some movement on the grass just on the edges of the clearing near our dead Vietnamese scout. It was the LT, the lieutenant in charge of the patrol. He was belly down in the short grass just ahead of the clearing behind a short fat log, which seemed to have come out of nowhere just to give him cover. I saw him change his magazine, which told me where some of the good bullets had come from. He may have even nailed the guy who had been shooting at us, which would explain why those bullets had stopped flying our way.

From that point on, I got one surprise after another as the Americans I had presumed to be dead started popping up all over the place. Through the smoke, I saw two of them thirty or forty meters ahead stand up together with something big and heavy between them. They dropped back down and two others came into view, one carrying the other piggyback as he walked swiftly toward the rear. He stayed as close to the wall of foliage on his right as he could and rounded the bend where it became the wall of dirt I had come from to get to Wilson. Watching him, I got a different idea of where the forward line of fire might be and worried anew that Wilson might still be exposed.

I was now on line with Bradbury who was continuing to call for help, and a badly shaken sergeant on the far side of him who was fumbling with a map. A moment later, I looked up and saw, to my amazement, the same guy who had carried the wounded trooper to safety on his back. He gave me the strangest look, as if to say, it’s all over pal. What the fuck are you trying to do with him? Nevertheless, I asked for his help and he gave it to me, lifting Wilson up by his good armpit and balancing his weight with a hand under his chest while I took hold of his legs. Together we were able to move him quickly and easily behind the rock—just before the AKs opened up on us again.

Why the enemy waited so long to start up again is beyond me. But the idea that some Viet Cong or NVA soldier may have been playing cat and mouse with us in his sights all along, sent an icy bolt of terror to every nerve ending in my body. I was on the exposed side of the rock, without a weapon, hearing enemy rounds going who knew where and seeing no way out. It seemed likely that the enemy was moving from place to place, firing a few bursts and moving again. Depending upon the paths they had been able to cut through the jungle high ground in advance of our arrival, they could have been anywhere at any time. They could have been looking directly at us and lining up whatever weapons they had to wipe us all out the way they should have done in the first place. This is it, I thought, Sp4 Jasper Garrison is a dead man.

In that instant, I was assaulted by images of the television war back home and the use to which my body would be put if I did get wasted. A terrible rage welled up inside of me along with a terrible frustration. Yes, the enemy was out there, in the high ground foliage somewhere and even if I had been armed, I couldn’t shoot at them for fear of hitting our own people. But they were back home on televisions everywhere hiding behind the bodies of dead and wounded GIs and blasting away. What’s more, a weapon did not exist with which to shoot at them without hitting our own people. The tube was mightier than the M-16 or the AK-47. And it was proudly on the side of the enemy.

Eventually, we got out of that mess, but not before my uniform was stained with more warm blood, none of which was mine. In subsequent encounters with the enemy in the field, I discovered the ecstasy of shooting back and making the sound of bad bullets go away. It worked for me every time.

The longer a real battle lasted when we were in Vietnam, the stronger our military position became. That was a rule which applied to the Army of the United States in general, for one elementary reason: Regardless of any success the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army could score in the short run, in the long run, they were up against more sustained firepower than they could withstand. In strict military terms it wasn’t the Americans who couldn’t win, it was the North Vietnamese. In fact, the American Army in Vietnam never lost a single major battle—not one. Unfortunately, for us, the folks back home were losing the psychological battles that make the battlefield victories count. In the long run, the sustained persuasion power of the peace movement was more than they could withstand.

You never know until a war is over which battle or succession of battles made the crucial difference in the outcome. In Hanoi’s war for Indochina—deceptively labeled, "the Vietnam War," it was the accumulation of word and picture battles won by the peace movement from 1967 to 1975.

If our patrol had been completely wiped out or even our entire company, it would have merited no more than a minor historical footnote on The Battle of Nui Chung Chap. As it actually happened, who the fuck has ever heard of The Battle of Nui Chung Chap, and who the fuck cares? I saw it on paper only once and I’m not even sure how it’s spelled. Militarily, it proved to be of no consequence whatever. But if one high profile peace activist had read the name of one fallen American on television, that event could have become the equivalent of a significant battlefield defeat.

Cowering helplessly behind that rock in something called a kill zone in a country which no longer exists, I heard the enemy fire and looked for where it was coming from. I saw all the way across the ocean to America, where a made for television antiwar show was in progress. I saw thousands of white people and a smattering of "others" in the participating audience united by common visions of war and peace, and a common sense of their collective goodness.

They were people of conscience, worshiping themselves and reaching out in sorrow for the corpse of a black soldier on stage. It was wearing blood soiled jungle fatigues with a 173rd Airborne patch on the right shoulder. It sat cold and stiff on the knee of a celebrated peace activist whose face kept changing from Dr. Spock to Tom Hayden and back again. The dove with two faces spoke with one voice through the mouth of the corps, moving its lifeless jaw with his hand, through a neat surgical slit in its back.

No two ways about it, it was a hell of a show, the good dove weeping and whaling as the body appeared to speak the compelling words of a GI against the war. It seemed to be pleading for our government to end its senseless war against the Vietnamese people. The black jaw moved up and down and it seemed to be saying, "Peace now! Peace now!"

The crowd was deeply moved, cursing the evil American government for its racist war and crying in sympathy for all of its victims. They looked at the stiff with compassion, listened to the words he appeared to be saying with reverence and pledged themselves anew to stopping America’s war.

The lifeless body on the knee of the dove was mine. But it was the doctor’s show—or was it Tom Hayden’s? In either case, I was in no position to object. Meanwhile the leaders of North Vietnam’s war were watching from the wings and laughing their asses off.

The dummy and dove act I saw in the kill zone was as real to me as the rockets and the bullets and the blood. It had been more real to me at the time than the hand grenade I saw flying im my direction when I ran into the kill zone. For sanity’s sake, I had not wanted to believe that either of those nightmarish visions had substance.

It was easy enough to deny the reality of the grenade until Hamilton and I went back later and found it near the rock without the pin, but with a newly-developed safety wire still in place. By then I was no longer in imminent danger of being killed by one of our own weapons, which had somehow wound up in the hand of an enemy bushwhacker. But it was still easier on the reigns of sanity to pretend that it belonged to Wilson or Nook who lost it when they were hit. For the same reason, I could pretend that the doves in America weren’t using the bodies of Americans killed in action to help Hanoi win its war.... But they were. The two-faced motherfuckers were doing exactly that!

I guess that even nightmares you have at high noon contain some elements that are hard to figure out, like the two faces of the dove, neither of which I thought of as evil. In fact, I tried not to think about the dummy and the dove at all for reasons that were clear only when I did think about them fourteen years later and felt what I felt then.

Consciously, I had always thought of activists like Benjamin Spock and Tom Hayden as essentially different. The Spock’s, I thought, were self-deluded good deed doers who could not see the relation between opposition to the United States and support for Hanoi. The Hayden’s, I thought, were no less honorably motivated to end the war but were deliberately working toward the extinction of South Vietnam. Before my emergency leave exposed me to what was going on in the war back home, I had placed Jane Fonda in the Spock category. Afterward, I moved her into the fold of the Haydens. The dove holding the dummy now had three faces, which would soon become one.

The dummy and the dove. The most horrifying and infuriating vision ever to invade my mind. I had been trying at the time to prepare for death, to see some ultimate dignity in my ultimate sacrifice even as I trembled like a frightened rabbit searching blindly for the enemy.... And there it was, the dummy and the dove—the kind of picture a political cartoonist might have come up with to speak volumes in an instant, but no "responsible" American publication would ever print in deference to the dove. In deference to all of the celebrated doves it symbolized. It was a nightmare within a nightmare, a symbolic representation of an invidious and insidious reality.

The only way an American serviceman could influence the course of the war was to join the celebrated citizens of the peace movement or to die in action and get drafted into their ranks. Either way, the peace movement won. When the peace movement won, so did Hanoi.

Unconsciously, I must have known that the motives of the dove working the dummy were no more important than the motives of the NVA working the AK-47s. The important thing was, they were doing it. They were using GIs, living and dead, to win the war for the communists. They were in every sense of the word, the enemy. But it was socially unacceptable to say that and psychologically dangerous to so much as think it.

For most Americans in 1971, the war wound down with the number of troops committed to battle. With our steady withdrawal of troops in 1972 reducing the total to a foreseeable zero, public concern for our MIAs and POWs was at an all time high. How many MIAs were in fact prisoners of war? How were they being treated? What would happen to them when we left? What was the best way to get them back?

In other wars, the last two questions would not have been asked. Never before has the greatest military power on earth simply "left" a major military conflict. Never before was there reason to wonder whether all of our POWs would be released when the war was over. Vietnam was different, because our ideas as a nation of how best to end it ran in opposite directions, as well as our collective sense of what would constitute an end.

Educated hawks believed that North Vietnam wanted all of Vietnam only as a first step in taking over all of Indochina. It followed, therefore, that the war would end only when Hanoi was convinced that it was up against an immovable object in America’s commitment to South Vietnam’s survival. Educated doves saw Hanoi as Vietnam’s only legitimate government. They believed that the war would end only when the United States realized it was up against an irresistible force in Hanoi’s commitment to reunification.

The logical application of those views to the POW/MIA question for hawks, was to bring maximum pressure to bear on Hanoi. For doves, the logical thing to do was to bring maximum pressure on Washington. If the hawks had things their way, the United States would give Hanoi "an offer it could not refuse." They would present the communists with generous peace terms and launch sustained bombing strikes against key targets in the North. The bombing would continue until Hanoi found it in its own best interest to release our POWs and to make the fullest possible accounting of our MIAs.

The doves saw this line of reasoning as ridiculous. They believed that American bombs and bullets were effective only in killing innocent civilians and strengthening the Vietnamese people’s resolve. Therefore, we should bomb less, not more. Since Saigon was destined to fall sooner or later anyway, the best way to get our people back was to keep it from happening later, by accepting Hanoi’s peace terms. We should admit that the communists were right and extend a hand in friendship to the brave, just, kind and truthful successors of Ho Chi Minh.