(from Vietnam Sketches)
(“Clarence Go, Boom” was awarded 5th Place in the First Annual T Paulo Urcanse Prize For Literary Excellence. As the year concludes, we’ll be featuring the rest of our contest awardees’ writing, each week on Sunday. We hope you enjoy these pieces just as much as we have.)
By Roger Ellis
Camp Eagle, Phu Bai, Vietnam 1970.
The night air in our hootch was 95 degrees at least. And it was acrid; you could taste it. About a dozen of us were swatting mosquitoes and watching a high-stakes poker game being played on a makeshift game board under a slow-turning ceiling fan. We were wearing casual fatigues; one or two guys were in their underwear, and everyone was green-looking from smoking or drinking or both. I was watching my Appalachian happy-go-lucky friend Clarence sitting at one corner of the board clad in a camo wife-beater and tac pants and boots, He wasn’t playing, because was stoned and drunk as usual, with one eye on the board and the other on the grenade he was fiddling with, sliding the pin in and out, in and out—until it dropped and clinked on the floor.
Everyone froze.
‘Awwww shit!’ Clarence giggled as he set the grenade on the game board. We scattered, as the grenade rolled and exploded.
Fortunately it wasn’t the more common fragmentation grenade, designed to kill anyone within spitting distance. It was the flare type that went off with a blinding light and deafening roar, spraying searing magnesium in all directions. Two guys who weren’t quick enough began screaming like stuck pigs. They were toasted head to crotch. Clarence had taken a blistering hit across his back. The rest of us were randomly scorched as we scrambled away. I felt the force of the blast against my skin and thought I was a goner. Then I left my body.
I found myself elevated just below the still-rotating ceiling fan, looking down at my physical body scuttling toward the door. So I knew that I wasn’t really dead when the grenade exploded, but the feeling was both uncanny and familiar like one of those flying dreams where you just accept what’s happening as real. I’d had a similar experience ten years before when I was knocked unconscious during a football game and found myself floating above the field. I could see and hear my teammates who were standing around my body, talking excitedly, making bad jokes, and slapping my face to bring me back.
But there was something markedly different about this out-of-body experience. For one thing, I wasn’t alone. Spirits were watching me. I knew they weren’t normal physical forms that I was seeing, but I sensed that they were real people. Although they appeared somewhat as vague shapes, I discerned that they were men, women, and children wearing shabby full-length robes. Some of their faces appeared hoary, some had shaggy grey and brown hair, and some were bearded. Civilian war-dead I guessed? They leaned and swayed as if trying to get a better view of the chaotic drama playing out in our hootch below. Despite my proximity to the scene, I was experiencing it at a distance. The frantic sounds of screaming and cursing were muffledandgarbled. I was simultaneously in two worlds. What surprised me was that I was calm and rational, given the terrifying scene I was viewing in which I was still physically embedded. I had no interactions with either the panicked soldiers or with the placid spirits, other than an awareness that the spirits were looking at me with some kind of recognition and empathy, and that I was looking at them as physical people do. And I somehow intuited by their demeanor that they were present as witnesses.
When I shifted my focus, I recall watching others—real living soldiers–helping my body to its feet after it clumsily rolled down the wooden steps outside the hootch in its attempt to escape. I saw everyone who could run piling-out as fast as possible, crowding the exits. I remember that nothing registered emotionally, however. And time had somehow slowed, I was enjoying the sensation of flying and hovering. I was literally above it all. It felt exactly Iike those cliché comparisons to watching a movie, or like the flying sequences in dreams that I had before. I had a sense of confidence about everything, a lack of fear. Even though I tried to reason and figure things out afterward, I wasn’t feeling anything of the sort at the time. I was aware that something instinctive was happening to me, but it wasn’t frightening. I could drift above the scene or move about if I wanted to. I could change my viewing position, although for some reason I couldn’t speak, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t know how to communicate with the spirit beings, and I recall wondering if I should try, but I didn’t because I hadn’t the foggiest notion of anything I wanted to say. If communication were possible, it seems in retrospect that it somehow had to be something along the lines of telepathy, which may actually explain how I got the idea that they were empathic witnesses to my condition, as well as the scene they were viewing.
Belief in ghosts is widespread not only in Vietnam, Cambodia, and more intensely in Laos, but in all of Asia. Yet, in true fashion, our military Corps of Engineers witlessly built structures like Camp Eagle in Phu Bai on ancestral gravesites. Even our hootches butted up against family burial plots, many of which were simple concrete structures with knee-high walls about twelve feet square containing inscribed brightly painted headstones. The British novelist Colin Cotterill caught the sense of ubiquitous Asian spirit presence in his comedic stories that many others have remarked on as well.
Vietnam was an alien place and, as young teenagers and twenty-somethings, we gave its shrines and gravestones little thought or respect. We lounged on cemetery monuments eating snacks, smoking, and using gravesites as end zones for our soccer games. When I first arrived in ‘Nam, I was stationed with the 101st Airborne in the south at the huge Bien Hoa airbase outside Saigon. The base was surrounded by miles of farmland and rice paddies, with little enemy contact. On patrols we did area “sweeps,” cleared tunnel systems, flushed snipers, occasionally engaged small enemy units, but fought no pitched battles. Six months after my arrival, however, the 101st packed us up and moved north to Phu Bai near the coast just north of the big port of DaNang close to the DMZ, where there was jungle and where enemy insurgents were lethally active.
Maybe simply moving to a zone of greater danger, which increased my chances of being killed, made me subliminally more sensitive to death and the uncanny. But the dense and fathomless rainforest close by where much of the fighting took place also had something to do with it. The jungle was unsettling, both on patrol and at a distance. Joseph Conrad referenced “sinister jungle environments” in several of his stories, especially in Heart of Darkness, as did Coppola when speaking of his experiences in the Philippine jungles where he filmed Apocalypse Now based on Conrad’s work; and even more so Werner Herzog’s unnerving accounts oftheeffect the Peruvian jungle had on him when filming Fitzcarraldo. They precisely captured the menace and mystery that many of us experienced in the jungles of Vietnam. The escalating pitched battles near Hue and the alarming numbers of kills on both sides may have contributed to the eerie atmosphere at another level—more spirits crowding the landscape? In any case, I had become conditioned to sensing that liminal world well before Clarence’s exploding grenade launched me into their presence.
Although many war veterans have remained silent about their out-of-body and paranormal experiences, others have not, and not only those who served in Asia. Tales go back as far as ancient Greece. I’m not alone. In fact, we Vietnam vets often still refer to our time there as the “Magical Mystery Tour,” not as an ironic reference to the Beatles, or drugs, or the war per se, but as an allusion to our uncanny and paranormal experiences.
Not surprisingly, I found these unsettling experiences occurring more frequently and intensely on night patrol, where weird things happened anyway. One may readily attribute them to the effects of pulling watch at three a.m. covered in a soggy rubber poncho with eyes and ears exposed to biting insects and jungle noises, and the threat of the VC somewhere in the dark creeping up in ambush. True, these conditions may be sufficient in themselves to explain these altered states of consciousness, which often began with an odd sensation that made one feel strangely bagged-up, with one’s senses sharply heightened at the same time. Hearing became exasperatingly acute. It exaggerated the sounds of Ironwood and monkeypod trees shedding water, along with the excited rattling of cicadas and the chorusing of barking tree frogs, sounds that readily took on ominous significance, typical of being in a life-and death situation. They contrasted with the soundless sleep you imagined the rest of your patrol was experiencing as they dozed close by. That said, I can testify to the fact that some things sensed out there transcended their explainable origins in fear and survival.
I also want to make clear that these experiences were not drug-induced fantasies. Contrary to popular lore, most of us never smoked weed or took drugs when on missions. I certainly didn’t. The same applied to liquor. It was a rule. Missions were dangerous and physically challenging having to hump seventy or eighty pounds of gear on patrol, through godawful terrain. My friend Clarence was an anomaly. I can’t for the life of me remember one day when I was certain he was straight and behaving normally. He was drunk or high all the time. He broke the rules, and occasionally he put all our lives in danger.
When I finally reached my “DEROS date,” that magical calendar day when my tour of duty officially ended, my orders moved me south to the big Tan Son Nhut airbase near Saigon for travel back to the States. DEROS mandated spending one or two days in an airbase holding area until a flight became available, which usually meant sleeping in a two-story barrack with lots of strangers.
After 14 months in combat zones, I found the base a frenzied but welcome sight. I was finally safe. I noticed that the varied conditions of our clothing were testaments to the radical differences in our ‘Nam experiences, from uniforms that were starched and pressed, belonging to the cologne-class of administrative scribes and paper-pushers, to those that were faded and torn as if worn the entire tour of duty, belonging to the more fetid caste of jungle combatants and their support teams. But the one commonality that unified everyone was the knowledge that we survived, we were going home, that against the odds we’d lived through the ‘Nam.
It was precisely then, when militarily I felt the most safe and secure, that I had my final and most consequential paranormal experience. I had been assigned a bunk on the barrack’s first floor, and was sound asleep when around two in the morning I woke suddenly to the voice of one of my oldest friends back in the States clearly and emphatically saying to me: ‘Roger, get out, and go to the bunker, now!!’ The urgency of her command was unmistakable, even though “the voice” I heard was not really a sound but more of a thought, a certainty, an instant of unspoken understanding. Suddenly I was in motion. Once outside, running in my shorts and T-shirt, I reached the bunker just as a rocket attack hit us, one of the missiles striking the hootch where I’d been sleeping, turning the structure into a burning pile of rubble. When I returned Stateside, my friend Susan told me that she had no conscious memory of having warned me, which I learned later is not unusual in reports of psychic life-and-death messaging.
Today, I don’t find these things troubling, and since that time fifty years ago I’ve had similar experiences in my life. Ishmael’s refrain in Melville’s Moby Dick, “I alone am escaped to tell thee,” even now often comes to mind. Needless to say, my military out-of-body experience, although confusing at the time, was life-changing. It was startling to realize, contrary to my cultural and religious upbringing, which speaks of individual spirituality in terms of souls and resurrected physical bodies, that my one self may actually inhabit two bodies, one physical and the other etheric or spiritual, a premise I learned later is common to most other non-monotheistic spiritual traditions, and may be closer to the truth than my own Christian one.
My long-time college friend, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, who has had his own out-of-body and other anomalous experiences from early childhood, has been interdisciplinarily investigating these phenomena for more than forty years. His conclusion, contrary to most in his profession, is that they are objectively real. I now think the same, and after reading hundreds of similar accounts of out-of-body phenomena in clinical studies of veterans of the Vietnam and the Gulf Wars, I’m beginning to understand why it often takes decades to speak about such “crazy” experiences.
It’s all a puzzling and seductive memory to me now. Shakespeare, I think, got it right when, in the first act of Hamlet, he also spoke of ghosts, saying to his best friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
After military service in Vietnam, Roger Ellis pursued a professional career in California as actor, director, and acting coach with professional theatre companies and different universities. In Michigan he built a theatre program at one of the state universities, established a social issues program in theatre, and founded the state’s oldest and largest Shakespeare Festival that flourished for 27 years. As an arts scholar he has published seventeen books and dozens of articles in the arts field. He is currently retired as an Emeritus Professor and spends his time writing and fly fishing in Michigan.
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