Remember me

By Bruce Jones

On the top of a little hill rising from the floor of the Que Son Valley, in the northern part of what was once South Vietnam, stands a large, jarring stone statue commemorating the North Vietnamese defeat of the United States. Like most of the memorials in what is now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the artistic style of this one is pure Late Soviet. The heroic figures portrayed atop the monument are thick and blocky, physically unlike any Vietnamese that has ever been born, with upraised fists and weapons that proclaim their stirring victory here in the foothills southwest of Da Nang. For the record, of course, that victory never happened, at least not until the U.S. withdrew its ground forces in 1973, but who is there now to tell them that they got it wrong?

The hill, actually two adjacent knolls, has long

been reclaimed by nature, intensive human scavenging and the monument’s construction. Scarred and ugly, there is little left to suggest that it was at one time LZ Ross, a small landing zone and firebase occupied in 1969 and 1970 by elements of the United States Marine Corps, and before and after by the U.S Army.

I returned to LZ Ross for the first time in the summer of 2005, and for a second visit in the spring of 2007, both times because it lay along the route of an American tour company taking American Vietnam veterans back to the places where they served 40 years ago. The location was familiar to me, for in a former life I did some time at LZ Ross with the 7th Marines as a lowly Army enlisted man—in Marine Corps slang, a dogface, lower than dirt.

I was part of a little Army psychological operations team that was attached to the 1st Marine Division. That late in the war, we were of little or no use to them, and, in fact, we were probably a liability. I, for one, had spent nine sheltered months at Ft. Bliss, Texas, learning to speak Saigon dialect, citified Vietnamese, and had undergone almost nothing in the way of infantry training, life in the bush or contact with noncitified Vietnam­ese. But it wouldn’t have mattered if the guys in our detachment had been Delta Force. The Marines have always been scornful of the other services: Any real expertise we might have had would have been rejected out of hand as inadequate, or worse. So instead, and only because they were ordered to, the grunts took care of and looked after us much as they did the mongrel puppies that they adopted. In their salty opinion, we were clumsy, stupid, too helpless to fend for ourselves, and we required frequent abuse.

For me, their assessment was probably accurate. Early in my tour, my American PSYOPS partner, our Vietnamese interpreter and I hopped a helicopter resupply flight off the LZ once, landing a short time later on a grassy hillside high on the side of the valley. We were to move with a Marine platoon on patrol, plying our hearts-and-minds shuck in what was then a futile effort to convince the enemy to give up, to surrender for happy rehabilitation and a farm in the South. According to our bosses, that was the dream of every North Vietnamese. Our stay with the platoon was short. I mistakenly lit up a cigarette after dark, got a quick, brutal admonition from a nearby grunt and, not surprisingly, we were on the first chopper headed home the next morning. That outfit already had enough problems without having to nursemaid me. My recollection of LZ Ross is thus not very pleasant, nor is it one that I’m proud of. But back in the day, I was there.

The tour passengers disgorged from the air-conditioned bus into the blasting afternoon heat. We squinted at the monument, and then, because we had already seen several like it that day, we began to wander, looking for anything that might remind us of the time three or four of us had spent there. Only a few scraps remained: some shredded green sandbags, the filter from a U.S. gas mask.

But as we straggled over the barren little hill, side-stepping the heavy equipment that was gradually mining away the coarse red soil, we came upon a small vestige of America that had somehow escaped systematic erasure by that newly minted, finally united country. A huge, gray boulder, half buried in the earth. On the side of the boulder, almost obscured by brush, we could still read the faint block letters, once painted in white: FORGET ME NOT.

Preliterate societies, those without a formal written language, pass information from one generation to the next by word of mouth and by ritual, elders imparting to the young members messages of practical and not-so-practical stuff, like group origin and history, how and where to obtain food and water, maps of the known world and theories of the unknown, together with important rules for acceptable and unacceptable behavior. This is often accomplished through reiteration of stories and tales. The forms that these stories take vary from group to group, but the themes are usually similar, and our own literate societies do the same thing, as parents and grandparents attempt to advise the young on how to avoid pitfalls and achieve success.

I flew to Germany several years ago with an elderly uncle to revisit the places where he had been held as a prisoner of war in World War II. We traveled with a half-dozen other men of like age and circumstance, together with wives and grandchildren, and listened as they recalled their remarkable experiences. Through my father, I had previously heard fragments of my uncle’s tale. But I heard the whole story on this trip, as my uncle repeated it in larger segments, the same way each time, using the same words and phrases to describe the events each time he repeated the story. I eventually began to see the words that he spoke and the points that he made as prayer beads, devices that facilitated a formalized chant or recitation, one word or phrase reminding him of the next.

Eventually, over the course of the 10-day trip, I heard the same pattern in the other men’s stories, too. I didn’t know if I was seeing a reflection of the elderly mind at work or whether I was onto something else … that we always pass on remembrance, in the same way, by patterned, oft-heard and oft-repeated words that become, through repetition, a kind of code embedded in our memory. The devil take the other details; the salient information is still recalled.

Few of us will have, by accident or design, reason to be remembered for very long after we are gone. In both foreign cultures and our own, we tend to commemorate with statues and monuments the leaders, the prime movers. Western cultures, America in particular, give a bit more acknowledgement to the individual, though usually in a kind of caricature, like Rosie the Riveter or pioneer statues in the local parks, unnamed representatives of events or movements. But most of the world’s population, who throughout history have primarily served as the grist for that for which the great are commemorated, may be recalled only in the memories of friends and family, really only for a generation, and sometimes for less than that.

James Lee Burke wrote that during moments when we think about death in a serious way “…you have one urge only, and that is to somehow leave behind a gesture, a cipher carved on a rock, a good deed, some visible scratch on history that will tell others you were here, and that you tried to make the world a better place.” The young man who painted the plaintive message on the boulder at LZ Ross did so at a time when many of his contemporaries, myself included, were miniscule components of a very large, albeit hotly argued, national endeavor. One that ran on its own massive momentum and was oblivious to individual thoughts, wishes and opinions, certainly from our low level.

If his experience was anything like my own, the young man at LZ Ross was sometimes scared stiff and at other times bored to death. He was usually dirty, frequently hungry or thirsty. He was often ordered to do things that he thought were pointless, and if he questioned those directions, he was reminded that his own opinions mattered not. Though surrounded by his comrades, from time to time this young man surely felt utterly insignificant, truly lost in the cogs of a giant green machine.

I think he would be happy to know that, while he is nameless to us now, he reminds me of me, and I will certainly remember him in my time. His message is now my own prayer bead, and in my way, I will honor him.

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