The Devil and the River

Gaines had not gone the route of grad school deferment, nor the National Guard, nor the reserves; he did not cite opposition in principle, nor from some religious or ethical stance, nor from some real or imagined medical status; he did not think of ru

Even now, looking back, he could remember the expression on her face. I lost my husband to war, that expression said, and now I will lose my son. She had been born Alice Devereau in Pointe à la Hache, Louisiana, in January of 1915. She met her husband-to-be, Edward, in 1937. Within two years, they were married. John, their only child, was born in June of 1940. When John was two, his father left for Europe. He served with the First Army, and was killed near Malmedy and Stavelot on the road to Liege, Belgium, on December 23, 1944. Alice Gaines had been all of twenty-nine years old.

So she looked at her son, two years younger than she herself had been when she’d lost her husband, and she asked him if there was any other way.

“No,” John had said. “There is no other way.”

Five days later, John Gaines reported for Basic Combat Training at Fort Be

Back then, back in the real history of the thing, there were smaller empires. Vietnam was a world all its own, and included the territories of Tonkin, A

They should have learned then, but they did not. It would never be size or influence or money that would win a war in the jungle. It was knowledge. It was being there. It was understanding the land. Only the Vietnamese possessed this, and thus they would never lose.

The history of the place was important to Gaines. He had wanted to know why he was fighting. Because your president and your country needs you to had never been sufficient for him.

After the French defeat, they just cut the country in half where the South China Sea became the Gulf of Tonkin. North Vietnam would be governed from Hanoi by the Vit Minh. South Vietnam would be governed from Saigon. On the throne would be the French ally, Emperor Bo Ðại. The United States did not agree.

A year later, the South Vietnamese elected a new leader. Ngô Đình Dim was a tyrant, a corrupt and dishonest man, but he was Catholic and an anticommunist, and the United States wanted to keep him in place. But then rebellion came in 1957, communists and nationalists in the south receiving their orders from the north. They coalesced, grew stronger, and three years later they became the National Liberation Front. Vietnamese communists. The Viet Cong.

These were the people that Gaines had been trained to kill.

Back in ’54, Eisenhower had promised that noncommunist Indochina would never fall to the Reds. It was a matter of principle. America, the mightiest of all, had been outwitted and overthrown by a gang of sandal-wearing Russian collaborators. Eisenhower’s pride had been hurt. He had defeated Nazi Germany, and yet he couldn’t take out a strip of land that was half the size of Texas. Eisenhower was a Texan. Vietnam was a nothing place in the middle of nowhere. He was galled.

In November of 1963, just three weeks before Ke

By the end of ’65, there were one hundred and eighty thousand American soldiers in Vietnam. By 1968, there were well over half a million. They carried orders to run offensive attacks against NLF guerrillas. Napalm rained down on Viet Cong outposts and guerrilla units in the south. Johnson went great guns. He threw more bombs at Vietnam than the combined total of all bombs hurled at Europe between ’39 and ’45. But this was no European engagement. The enemy the United States fought was faceless, without uniform, familiar with the terrain, its anomalies and idiosyncrasies, and thus they always possessed the upper hand. The United States had fire-power, air cover, strong supply lines, an almost inexhaustible source of men, but they did not have an enemy they could see. They fought ghosts and shadows. They fought a nightmare.

And it was into this nightmare that John Gaines arrived, a twelve-month tour of duty, and it was from this arena of horror that he would bring things that would dictate and define the rest of his life. He had known that within a week.

Afterward, there would be stories. Some lavish, some exuberant, some exaggerated; others brief, succinct, to the point. Those who were not there grew tired of the telling; questioned veracity, questioned the purpose of the stories. The reason for telling the stories is to join the seams together, a fellow veteran once told Gaines. To see if the past ca