Is It Just a Dream?

 

Sadness weighed heavy on my gut, pressing my diaphragm, shortening my breathing when I read ...first firefight...1969...from an excerpt from Chuck Matheson’s book, The War Still Rages, sent to me by a friend.

We patrolled up and down the Guld of Tonkin. Invisible choppers roared over the jungle across the water. Narrow death rays glowed reddish yellow lines against the black night. All the while a constant rat tat that of the chopper's machine guns insulted my ears. A perpetual knot kept residence in my stomach. I waited, knowing our soldiers would give us coordinates, and then we'd fire our five-inch gun (22-foot-long cannon, with a 5 in diameter barrel).

Five-inch made it sound less lethal, but it was deadly accurate, up to 8 miles away.

Sure enough, the turret turned toward the shore and gut-wrenching blasts shot out of the five-inch gun.

Sometimes a white flare exploded on the land and manufactured daylight exposed everything underneath, as it floated slowly down on its little parachute.

Boys, we were all just boys, scattered on all directions, running for cover under trees and bushes.

My gut continued its slow twist as my jaw clenched tighter and the machine guns’ rat tat tatted death to unseen Viet Cong and US soldiers on the ground.

No escape.

So, all I could do was pray. I prayed, "Please dear God, let this be a nightmare.  Please let me wake up back in my own bed on Long Beach."

I said that prayer over and over every single night. God wasn't listening to me or anyone fighting this war. He was busy tending to the grieving mothers of the Vietnamese boys we killed.

My hands gripped the ship's safety line, as the sea breeze ruffled my hair. Gun smoke and diesel fuel fumes mixed with the salt air as I stared across the water, hoping we were out of range, hoping we didn't run aground.

 

4 years after I left Viet Nam I sat on a bluff above Pat Hurley Park in Albuquerque watching the 4th of July fireworks. In a lull between fireworks someone shot off a white parachute flare, like the ones in Viet Nam.

Boom. I was no longer watching fireworks. My whole body tensed. My mind blasted back onto the ship, off the shore of Viet Nam.

Denise asked me what was wrong. I told her I had to leave. I was terrified to go to sleep that night and for many nights after. I was afraid that my prayer had turned into a curse, a punishment for my going to war. I was afraid that if I went to sleep, I would wake up back in Viet Nam and that Albuquerque, Denise, and my boys were just a dream.  Even now, 50 years later, that feeling stops my breathing. Rationally I know it is 2022. But when that feeling hits, my body worries that the last 50 years were just a dream.

I Still Keep a Letter

 To The Parents of the Young Men That We Killed in Vietnam

by Mushroom Montoya
December 11, 1996

I still keep a letter that I wrote to my brother, John on his 17th birthday under my keyboard as a "memento" of my loss of innocence. I wrote to him on my first day on the gun line. On our first strike and our first of too many "targets" too high a body count. The letter starts off innocently enough, "Happy Birthday, John! Your being 17 makes me feel old. The USS Trippe killed her first VC today. Somebody's mother's child is dead and, unfortunately, I was part of that. It makes me sick just to think about it.  ... I can't tell you much though 'cause Mom's ears and eyes would hurt ...  Take care of yourself, Mushroom"

What I couldn't let my mother's eyes read is that on our very first strike, our very first shot, I watched three young men running on the beach carrying a wooden box. We fired! Screams, blood, body parts! Two of the young men got up and started running. Bam! Shot number two. No screams, just body parts. I was looking through the Big Eyes (huge binoculars).

The gunner jumped down from the gun ecstatic over the news of his "better than perfect" score. I stood there, still in shock over what I had just witnessed. I looked him in the eye, and yelled, "How can you be happy? You just killed three guys! and you don't know for sure who they really were. You just killed THREE guys!"

His eyes went wild as he screamed back, "Damn you, Mushroom! They are NOT people! They are just targets! If they were people, I couldn't do my job? Fuck You! Why did you have to go and spoil a perfect hit on a moving target?"

Too many "targets", too high a body count. Now my first-born son is dead. "And somebody's father's child is dead." He died in uniform, returning from lunch to the reserve center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I wonder if those three boys were returning from lunch so many years ago on the shores of Vietnam. Now I have a glimpse of the pain we caused to the mothers and fathers of those young boys that we killed in Vietnam.

Every night, in Vietnam, I used to pray and ask God to let me wake up from this nightmare and be back home. This HAD to be a nightmare, it couldn't possibly be real. But each time I woke up, the "nightmare" was still going on. Later, in 1978, while watching the fireworks, someone shot off white flares. For a small eternity, I was back in Vietnam. I was terrified that night. I was afraid that 1978 was a dream and that I would wake up on the ship and it would still be 1972.

Too many "targets" too high a body count. I was unable to watch and enjoy fireworks without the weight and fear associated with the war until I went to the Vietnam Memorial in 1992. The Memorial caused a healing through many tears. I had my younger son take a photo of me pointing at the place where my name should have been. Part of me died in Vietnam. Part of all of us who were there died.

We lost our innocence. We lost our sanity. We are plagued with ghosts that haunt us. We are all wounded too deeply from too many "targets" too high a body count. Mushroom Montoya HTFN USS Trippe DE1075 Rdiv.

After my second tour in Vietnam, I was granted a 6 month early out as a conscientious objector. War is not healthy for children, parents, and other living things. 

***          ***          ***

I submitted this to PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) in response to my visit to the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington DC in summer 1992:

http://archive.pov.org/stories/vietnam/stories4/thewall1.html

My Eyes Screamed, STOP

By Mushroom Montoya

My eyes screamed STOP!

As I stood my battle station watch

Aboard my ship on the Viet Nam gunline,

Bearing guilt-riddled witness

To teenage bodies we're blasting apart.

 

God have mercy on our souls!

 

Our five-inch gun turning mothers,

 And the few surviving fathers

Into forever grievers.

The Vietnamese farmers and fishermen

Are God's children Too

 

God have mercy on our souls.

 

I cry for those mothers and fathers

And can't help but wonder

Is my dead son the price I pay

Because "Thou shalt not kill"

I felt duty-bound to disobey?

 

God have mercy on our souls.

Even though more than 50 years have passed

A maleficent thought continues to slash

My sense of time and where I am,

Sending me back to Viet Nam.

 

God have mercy on our souls.

I have learned that war is hate,

And I will no longer take the bait

Into believing that anyone is less

Than God's child too.

 

But I am haunted by those teenage boys

Who should have been playing with their toys

But instead, I witnessed them being blown apart,

And forevermore breaking their parent's hearts.

 

God have mercy on our souls.

 

My Navy Badges, unofficial

 I served aboard the USS Trippe (1972) and the USS Truxtun (1973)

With a "tour" to Viet Nam on each one. Tour sounds like such a nice term, but it wasn't nice.

It has taken me 50 years to put these badges together and "feel" 

almost OK about it.

The experiences did their part in making me who I am. And for that, 

I am grateful.

1992 Karachi, Pakistan

Karachi Pakistan is near the mouth of the Persian Gulf

 In Autumn 1972 the USS Trippe sailed into Karachi, Pakistan. Philip Morris and I rented a Victoria (Horse-drawn buggy with driver) for $10 a day. We saw the sights at a slow pace, such as a camel caravan with the guy in charge riding in a cart behind the last camel. I asked our coachman why. The coachman had a kid with him during the day who acted as his interpreter and he told us the camels know where they are going.

One morning our Victoria coachman took us into town. As the horse pulled us by a park, I watched a truck stop ahead of us. The passenger got out and started kicking the people who were asleep on the ground. If they didn't move, he yelled to the truck driver who got out and helped him toss the body into the truck's bed. Our coachman's interpreter told us that the truck comes by every morning to remove the dead.

On our last night, our coachman, with broken English, asked us if he could stop at a building and be gone for a few minutes. He came out in about twenty minutes.  He was very stoned and could barely climb into his seat and grab the reins. He lifted his whip and yelled, "Hi-ho you fuckin horse."  Luckily, his horse knew how to get us back to the dock.

Navy Plumbing

 When I was in the Navy, and part of the repair gang for the USS Trippe, one of my jobs, as a Hull Maintenance Technician, was to be the ship's plumber. A ship's plumbing and a house's plumbing are similar, but not the same. I had been trained in Damage Control school and on the ship. I earned my training by getting lots of practice clearing clogged pipes. My knuckles smashed into steel bulkheads, and metal decks more often than anyone should endure. But that is how learning takes place sometimes. My fingers and knuckles would have preferred to play the guitar.

 Chief Landry, who was known as the Hulk, did not like me. He didn't like any non-white underling. But he did have his qualities. He was an excellent plumber. One day he sent me to the head (In the old sailing-ship days, the sailors peed and pooped at the head of the ship because the crew did not want the wind to push the farts into their noses. So, bathrooms on Navy ships are called heads.) The Chief sent me to the forward head on the 3rd deck to fix the clogged pipe that drained the urinals. This was not a bad job, I've had worse. Soon after I removed an elbow that would allow me to insert a snake, Chief Landry showed up, all smiles. I sensed a smirk, hidden in his teeth. He watched me insert the snake and pull it out. The paper and tobacco that the snake brought out of the pipe; fell into a bucket I had placed under the open pipe.

Chief Landry first asked me if I thought that the tobacco was really marijuana. When I told him I wouldn’t know, he glared at me, “I know you know, so, don’t give me that bullshit,” he said. And then he asked me to run the water before I replaced the elbow. As the water poured into the bucket, he appeared to put his finger in the water and then licked it. I was grossed out. "Urine is sterile," he said. "You should put your finger in the wastewater and taste it, after you have cleared the drain, to make sure that the water is clear."

 I knew he was hoping I would follow his lead. And I also suspected that he used a dry finger to lick. He was hoping I was dumb enough to lick wastewater from the urinals. I shook my head and said that I would not do it. He left.

 Chief Landry was not a nice man. The Viet Nam war was bad enough. He made it worse. In spite of that, I saved his life or at least prevented him from great physical harm when I found him surrounded by an angry mob of my African American shipmates in a bar in Mombasa, Kenya. But that's another story unrelated to plumbing.