Beyond Survival. Gerald Coffee

and the smoke was incredibly thick. The air and water around me erupted with the deadly barrage so I could hardly tell the difference between the two. I couldn’t believe that I, too, wasn’t already riddled with bullets. I could feel their impact in the water, vibrating through my body. I had a sudden image of my own red blood swirling together with the bright green of the dye around me in wavy, concentric patterns.

      In another agonizing instant, the reality of my situation crystallized: This wasn’t a fuzzy dream. My aircraft had been hit. I had ejected but I was still alive, miraculously alive. Yet, how could I be? My plane had been plummeting into the Tonkin Gulf at just less than the speed of sound. Although more than eight years of military flying had prepared me to face a myriad of “what ifs” such as actually ejecting from a tumbling aircraft, my post-ejection actions must have been as much intuitive as trained.

      Finally, I caught a glimpse of Bob floating low in the water between me and the boats. He was surprisingly close by, only a hundred yards or so away. He seemed to be inflating his tiny rubber raft as plumes of white water bracketed his position as well. Even if he had been conscious the whole time, he appeared to be too far away to have assisted me.

      Yes, it had to have been almost instinctive: Somehow I had removed my oxygen mask and thereby hadn’t suffocated. I had released the clips on my parachute harness, thereby—except for the entangled shroud lines that had almost done me in—allowing it to sink harmlessly away. And I had pulled the toggles on the CO₂ cartridges that had inflated my flotation gear. All the training and practice had left indelible patterns in my subconscious, and had assured my survival—even while unconscious and incapacitated. The survival instinct!

      Now, could I evade? Could I keep from being captured? Could I resist? It was clear that to resist would be crazy. Obviously I couldn’t outswim the boats even though they appeared to be no more than crude dug-outs, powered by single oarsmen sculling astern. With my arm apparently broken, weighted by the survival gear in the pockets of my torso harness and cutaway G-suit, and with the bulky flotation gear up under my arms, I could barely thrash away from them.

      I was strangely oblivious to the threat of being torn to shreds by the continuing hail of lead. Just the thought of resisting drew my hands to the .38 pistol holstered firmly to the left breast of my harness. Grandpa had carried it for years as a deputy sheriff and had solemnly presented it to me before I left. “I’ve never once had to use this, son [he was very proud of that], and I hope and pray you won’t have to either.” He and I had been especially close when I was just little.

      Every summer he’d put me to work with his migrant work crew in the peach orchards of the San Joaquin Valley. Sometimes I rode with him on his “ditch tender” rounds, scheduling irrigation water for the neighboring farmers. He’d talk politics with his cronies at each stop, and usually end up with “I tell ya the gov’ment’s goin’ to hell in a handbasket and we’re gonna rue the day! You and I might not live to see it, but I feel sorry for this little kid here” as he poked the chewed-up end of his cigar in my direction. Is this what you had in mind, Grandpa? As if preprogrammed but still with a pang of regret, I slipped the steel-blue weapon from its leather holster and released it into the water. Better the deep than them, Grandpa. I watched it swirl down and down; it seemed to take forever. I still had that final image in my fuzzy consciousness as I realized the shooting had stopped.

      The enveloping sound of the shooting had been replaced by the cacophony of words and shrieks in a language I realized I’d never heard before but might soon come to know well.

      Regaining consciousness to find myself injured, confused, and so totally out of my element had been bad enough. But now, confronted by this hostile flotilla of natives, I felt like I’d been transported into some sinister world from which I might never return. Had I been able to think clearly, I would undoubtedly have felt the first pangs of fear, maybe even terror.

      I was startled to realize how quickly they had drawn so near; they were only a few yards away now. Still they shouted excitedly, either to one another or at me; I couldn’t tell which, and it would have mattered little even if I could. I just stared back into a couple of dozen pairs of eyes, all glaring widely above the muzzles of their rifles and machine guns.

      For the first time now, I confronted my enemy face to face, an enemy that until now had been an abstract collage of Viet Cong, headlines of war, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, green jungle tops, road junctions on maps, and toy sampans on counterpane mirrors below. Now he had come alive and was real. These were men and boys of flesh and blood making hostile animal noises and gestures at me.

      I felt more confused than ever. War was supposed to be clean— mechanical and technical, soldier versus soldier, rocket against tank, missile against plane, all crisp and decisive. Instead, I felt like some helpless cornered prey about to be pounced upon by a pack of savage animals as soon as they had sniffed out my fear.

      Suddenly they were as hushed as the air itself as they contemplated their enemy. Had I until now been as abstract to them as they had been to me?

      In how many movies, books, and dramas had I seen this first-time confrontation between foes, one with the drop on the other? How many times had I seen the intensity of their calculation: To kill or to spare? Revenge or forgiveness? Cruel bravado or compassion? What were the factors in their process now? The expression on my face? The emotion in my eyes? Would civility overcome the darkest animal instincts in us all, the hatred that I could see clearly in their eyes? But it was not hatred alone. Their eyes also reflected the same excited curiosity, and even some of the fear that I knew must be clearly evident in my own. Would I look into those eyes and kill if I had the upper hand? Could I?

      In that instant of transfixion, we seemed to distill—they and I—all the centuries of human conflict of which we were now a part.

      In a flash the deadly muzzle of an AK-47 automatic rifle erupted in blue flame and the water exploded in my face. This time the impact through my body was heavy and breathtaking. I was sure I had been shot. Two more shots in rapid succession. I felt the stunning CRACK! on my helmet as my head was knocked backward and a huge piercing strobe light seemed to bleach my brain. The image of the swirling blood and dye flashed hot across my mind. There she was again swimming down through the water, down and away, eluding the crimson and green swirls, down, down into the deeper blue—lending her own flowing grace to the thinning specks of sunlight and the spiral of silvery bubbles from her hair. The tiny silvery bubbles spiraling up around me were all that remained. Oh, God, Baby, I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!

      When I opened my eyes my left arm was extended out of the water and over my head. “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”

       2

      The Enemy’s Other Face

       The absolute tests are those we face alone, without the support of others who believe as we do. There the beliefs we hold most dear are challenged—some to be strengthened, some to be tempered, others to be abandoned—but all to be examined. From deep within we claim the values that we know to be our own. Those are the ones by which we are willing to live or die.

      My eyes opened and I was wide awake. I sensed my surroundings more than I could see them—dark, dingy, and unfamiliar—so I closed my eyes and thought for the next five minutes or so. The sounds and smells were familiar, from many, many years past; they were almost comforting. How many hours had I played and daydreamed in the hay-loft of our old barn on the ranch, sharing the lives of my barnyard friends? Never before had that era of my life seemed so distant as now.

      The scent of the fresh straw on which I was lying was very strong. I could hear more straw being sorted softly and munched by a nearby animal: a cow, my nose told me. I could feel a light chill in the musty air—unmistakably early morning. I heard two low voices nearby; one was that of my guard of the previous day, the other of a stranger. They were discussing who knows what. Their conversation was interrupted occasionally by the guttural bubbling of the water pipe they shared. The sweet, exotic smell of the opium mingled with the barnyard smells around me. The strange pipe sound seemed almost an extension of the conversation itself. I had decided by now that when spoken without anger, the