Beyond Survival. Gerald Coffee

Gulf, where the wreckage probably had been and where they thought we would be as well.

      I had pulled myself up along the shallow gunwale of the boat watching the A-l Sky Raider aircraft roll in pass after pass, their bullets raining down. White plumes of water walked their way across our bow and then close aboard the stern. My captors never flinched, and returned the fire with their own weapons. The acrid smell of cordite stung my nostrils.

      I couldn’t imagine how the boat I was in made it safely to shore. The instant the bow had touched the sandy beach, we jumped into the shallow surf and ran toward the safety of the berm on the far side of the beach. The next strafing attack caught us halfway. With my bright yellow flotation gear left in the boat, there was nothing to differentiate me from the enemy. I scrambled like hell just as they did.

      As others were frantically half dragging, half pushing me across the beach between wooden fishing boats and fan-shaped nets spread to dry, two or three went down around us. The mere sound of steel impacting flesh and bone seemed to slam their suddenly lifeless bodies to the sand.

      I tried to coordinate my steps with the two who were jerking and pulling me across the soft sand. I would gladly have run like hell, but they wouldn’t allow it. They were out of sync with each other, too, so we stumbled and scrambled toward the far side of the beach. God, it took forever. As the geysers of sand erupted around me, I instinctively tightened my sphincter as if to suck myself in and disappear. At least the tensing seemed to make me feel like a smaller target. Small comfort! Cradling my injured right arm tightly to my body, I had flung myself behind the levee, rolling as I hit the soft earth.

      With my brain still numb from the concussion, I was in a strictly reactive mode. I seemed to be on the outside of all this—a detached observer—no pain, no fear, no other emotion, just a body trying instinctively to survive.

      Just before they pushed my face down into the mud, I followed the terrified, over-the-shoulder glances of the last stragglers across the beach. There, boring down straight toward us, was the head-on view of an A-4 Skyhawk—the smallest and deadliest light-attack aircraft in the Kitty Hawk’s air group. In the space of a second I half-saw, half-imagined the face of my shipmate up there. Had we passed each other in the passageway that morning? Had he sat across the white-linened table in the wardroom last night? Right then in my mind’s eye I saw his right eye quadrisected perfectly by the glowing crosshairs of a gunsight between us. I took into the mud with me the rapidly enlarging image of the warbird, wing roots engulfed by blue flame and smoke from his cannons. With my eyes closed, the sudden, rending scream of the 2.75 rockets was unexpected and even more terrifying—like the violent ripping of a sheet but magnified a million times. The rippling explosions were immediate. Four times in quick succession my body convulsed upward with the earth around me, my face making a new print in the mud each time I crashed down. The rain of sand kicked up by the 20mm slugs was replaced by heavy dirt clods and bits of wood and smoldering net. A rusted oarlock still threaded through a jagged piece of wooden gunwale plopped down on its edge a few inches from my face.

      I remained still for a long time with heaving lungs and pounding heart, my body unwilling to release its straining clutch on the ground. The Vietnamese on either side of me were in no hurry to let go either, and I was aware of the commonality of our instinctive response to the prospect of instant, violent death.

      Long after the last decibel of jet engine had faded into the distant sky, the Vietnamese who seemed to have assumed my charge eased off on the pressure of his rifle, which had pinned my neck and shoulders to the ground. Tentatively, I raised my head and looked down the levee to my left. We seemed like turtles, heads poking from shells, testing the air for more danger. The beach was strewn with the smoldering splinters of several boats and debris of fishing paraphernalia. It was scarred by deep craters, the damp sand yielding to the rapid seepage from the sea. But I was conscious mostly of several bodies that seemed to jump out at me in vivid color from this otherwise black-and-white war movie I was observing.

      Strange, I had thought, here I am thirty-two years old and, not counting funerals, these are the first dead people I have ever seen. One was rocking gently in the shallow waves, while others were partly obscured by sand and wreckage. I still seemed to be detached, and they registered to me only as other people, people like me whose blood made the sand red and sticky.

      With much shouting and jabbering, and with no one in particular in charge, they led me roughly along the edge of the beach toward the little fishing village and up what appeared to be its central lane. Others were running, wide-eyed, past us toward the water to aid their wounded and gather the dead. The villagers were hostile and excited. Spontaneously they formed a corridor lining the little dirt path up from the beach, clubbing me with whatever was handy: shovel and hoe handles, bamboo shoulder poles and a few rifle butts. As I stumbled and winced along through their gauntlet, each seemed to take his cue from the earlier one in line so that any natural restraint or compassion was overcome by the mob’s momentum. Some threatened—or perhaps only feigned—fatal blows with pitchforks and scythes, but were restrained, sometimes at the last instant, by a uniformed cadre who emerged from somewhere to take charge. He walked ahead of me, half sideways and half backward, always watching for such threats from the people, even while inciting them with some sort of singsong chant. Although I only blinked and stared back dumbly, I was aware of the emotional extremes reflected in their faces and voices—men and women, children, even grubby little toddlers riding the hips of their mothers or older sisters. There was curiosity, uncertainty, fear, pity; but mostly there was hatred in them. Aside from those casualties on the beach, how many more of their fathers and brothers were drifting lifelessly out in their placid little bay where the fight for my capture had taken its toll? Which others of their sons and uncles would gradually be rolled and nudged up from the depths and carried up finally onto the beach by three or four successive waves, just like the ones they had played in as children? I was lucky these villagers were having at me right then, before the frenzy of their victory celebration gave way to the full realization of its cost.

      Somewhere in the middle of the village, we turned off the lane and walked through a courtyard to the back of someone’s house. There was a small shed, rows of green vegetables on two sides, and the fence and shack of an adjoining yard on the other. In the shed were various gardening and farming tools hanging on the walls and stacked in corners. A rack of sun-dried fish hung overhead, and the little hut smelled of fish and manure. The cadre motioned for me to sit on a pile of burlap sacks, and while one of the young militiamen took off my boots, he demanded my dog tags and my wallet, which held only my military ID card, my Geneva Convention card, and about ten dollars. This was my “combat wallet,” the cards to identify me as an American Fighting Man—a combatant as opposed to a spy—in case of capture, and the money to buy a meal or a couple of beers should I have to divert from landing aboard the aircraft carrier to some military airfield in South Vietnam. My “blood chits”—which consisted of a written explanation in several Southeast Asian languages and dialects of who I was and the reward to be expected if turned over to friendly forces (a silk American flag, and several taels of gold for immediate incentive)—had been stripped from me in the boat. Fat chance of being turned over to friendlies by these hornets, I thought.

      The loss of my dog tags and ID cards had been devastating to my morale. It would take a long time to realize that it had been only the first small step in the incremental peeling away of my identity, an identity built up over a lifetime but condensed on my dog tags to name, rank, serial number, date of birth, blood type, and religion.

      The confiscation of my boots—probably in part to discourage me from escaping—increased my vulnerability, further compounding the sense of helplessness caused by my injuries. Under the crude scrutiny of the villagers, who took turns crowding up to the half-open door of the shack, I had never felt more naked and vulnerable.

      Indeed, by then my brain was beginning to recover sufficiently from its trauma to comprehend more fully the real danger I faced. I was now beginning to feel considerable attachment to the situation; this was no dream or war movie. I was beginning to understand that all of this was real.

      As darkness fell and the crowds became sparse, I was jolted from my simple prayers for strength and courage by the flat, metallic, nerve-rattling sound of a gong close by. Someone was beating on a