my finger in and felt tissue inside. First I thought, How the fuck am I alive?
Then I thought, Am I alive?
I didn’t have a mirror. I couldn’t look inside my head. I had to deal with it. I took green leaves off the ground and pressed them into the opening. I tore off my pant leg and wrapped it around my head to hold the leaves in place.
Then I saw the chunks of meat on the ground. That was George. His head was sitting by a pile of intestines. I saw Steve in one piece, sleeping on the ground a few feet away. His foot was moving on the ground like he was pedaling a bicycle. I rolled him over and saw the side of his face was gone. His nose and half his jaw were missing. He had one eye, and it looked at me, like he might be awake.
I wasn’t sure if he could hear, but I said, “You’ve got no face left.”
He put his hand to his head and made it like a gun, motioning for me to finish him off. I said, “If you can’t stand up, I will blow your head off. But if you can stand and walk, you’re coming with me.”
I pulled him onto his legs, and he was okay. I’m not telling you he could catch a ball and run down a field, but he held his ownweight. I tied a T-shirt over his head and cut a hole in it for his one eye and his mouth—what was left of it. We started to walk. That’s when I felt the pain. With every step, it felt like somebody hitting my head with a hammer.
It took us a day to find an army patrol. We scared the shit out of them. Can you imagine seeing me with fucking leaves on my head and Steve with one eye sticking out of his shirt? When they got us into a camp and lifted Steve’s shirt, one of the soldiers puked. They wouldn’t give me morphine because they were worried about my blood pressure dropping. I wanted to kill them. “I got a hole in my head. Blood pressure is not high on my list of worries.”
Steve and I went out on separate medevacs. I went to Japan, then to Long Beach Navy Hospital in California. I was out of it for a couple of weeks because of a bad infection. Finally they put a metal plate in my head. When I got good enough to talk, I asked about Steve. They told me he was at a rehab hospital somewhere else.
They let me send him a note. He wrote back weeks later, “You should have blown my brains out.”
I didn’t see Steve until a year later. They had remade his jaw and given him a mouth, but he could barely form words. They couldn’t fix his nose, so they gave him a plastic thing with snaps that covered half his face. He looked disgusting. But his attitude had changed. He was planning to live in the woods in New Hampshire, and that made him happy.
I loved Steve, and he loved me. I would never judge him. I did say to him, “Maybe what happened to us is payback for all the things we did to people out there.”
“It’s possible,” Steve said. “But so what? We enjoyed every second of it.”
* While the specifics of Jon’s accounts of prisoner abuse cannot be confirmed, in The Valley of Death , published by Random House in 2010, author Ted Morgan notes that from its start the Vietnamese conflict was notable for the grotesque atrocities committed on captive soldiers by the Vietminh and later the Vietcong. As Morgan writes on page 93: “Captured soldiers were impaled, sawed up, emasculated, drowned, buried alive.”
* At this point in the interview, Jon had me stop the recorder as he appeared to struggle with emotions. Given that Jon often describes himself as a “sociopath,” I am never certain if his emotional displays are genuine or part of an effort to manipulate his audience, but here and at other points in his interviews on Vietnam, Jon stopped to cry.
11
J . R .: I had problems getting out of the hospital. I got more infections in my head. When I would stand, I would fall over. Weak as I was, I went crazy one night and beat up a male attendant. They moved me into a locked ward. They tied me to a table. I tried to chew through the restraints. They sent a new doctor,
Then I thought, Am I alive?
I didn’t have a mirror. I couldn’t look inside my head. I had to deal with it. I took green leaves off the ground and pressed them into the opening. I tore off my pant leg and wrapped it around my head to hold the leaves in place.
Then I saw the chunks of meat on the ground. That was George. His head was sitting by a pile of intestines. I saw Steve in one piece, sleeping on the ground a few feet away. His foot was moving on the ground like he was pedaling a bicycle. I rolled him over and saw the side of his face was gone. His nose and half his jaw were missing. He had one eye, and it looked at me, like he might be awake.
I wasn’t sure if he could hear, but I said, “You’ve got no face left.”
He put his hand to his head and made it like a gun, motioning for me to finish him off. I said, “If you can’t stand up, I will blow your head off. But if you can stand and walk, you’re coming with me.”
I pulled him onto his legs, and he was okay. I’m not telling you he could catch a ball and run down a field, but he held his ownweight. I tied a T-shirt over his head and cut a hole in it for his one eye and his mouth—what was left of it. We started to walk. That’s when I felt the pain. With every step, it felt like somebody hitting my head with a hammer.
It took us a day to find an army patrol. We scared the shit out of them. Can you imagine seeing me with fucking leaves on my head and Steve with one eye sticking out of his shirt? When they got us into a camp and lifted Steve’s shirt, one of the soldiers puked. They wouldn’t give me morphine because they were worried about my blood pressure dropping. I wanted to kill them. “I got a hole in my head. Blood pressure is not high on my list of worries.”
Steve and I went out on separate medevacs. I went to Japan, then to Long Beach Navy Hospital in California. I was out of it for a couple of weeks because of a bad infection. Finally they put a metal plate in my head. When I got good enough to talk, I asked about Steve. They told me he was at a rehab hospital somewhere else.
They let me send him a note. He wrote back weeks later, “You should have blown my brains out.”
I didn’t see Steve until a year later. They had remade his jaw and given him a mouth, but he could barely form words. They couldn’t fix his nose, so they gave him a plastic thing with snaps that covered half his face. He looked disgusting. But his attitude had changed. He was planning to live in the woods in New Hampshire, and that made him happy.
I loved Steve, and he loved me. I would never judge him. I did say to him, “Maybe what happened to us is payback for all the things we did to people out there.”
“It’s possible,” Steve said. “But so what? We enjoyed every second of it.”
* While the specifics of Jon’s accounts of prisoner abuse cannot be confirmed, in The Valley of Death , published by Random House in 2010, author Ted Morgan notes that from its start the Vietnamese conflict was notable for the grotesque atrocities committed on captive soldiers by the Vietminh and later the Vietcong. As Morgan writes on page 93: “Captured soldiers were impaled, sawed up, emasculated, drowned, buried alive.”
* At this point in the interview, Jon had me stop the recorder as he appeared to struggle with emotions. Given that Jon often describes himself as a “sociopath,” I am never certain if his emotional displays are genuine or part of an effort to manipulate his audience, but here and at other points in his interviews on Vietnam, Jon stopped to cry.
11
J . R .: I had problems getting out of the hospital. I got more infections in my head. When I would stand, I would fall over. Weak as I was, I went crazy one night and beat up a male attendant. They moved me into a locked ward. They tied me to a table. I tried to chew through the restraints. They sent a new doctor,
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