Vietnam Memory: The Summer of My Captain

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Vietnam Memory

The Summer of My Captain

by James D. Tantric Retired, USN

as related to John L. Godwin

Editor’s Note: Quite a few years have passed since I first met James Tantric in 1977 while traveling on the West Coast. I wrote his story out after hearing his larger than life experiences, which seemed stranger than most of what I heard from the returning veterans I met in those days. The Vietnam War experience at that time was still much debated. His story struck me then as, disturbing and yet also oddly inspiring. It is published here with his permission and is reprinted in its current form from the August 2003 issue of The People’s Civic Record.

Maybe it was just a dream. And so the way it all comes back to me is like something out of hell—about what you’d expect I guess from someone who’d survived a war. And wars, as you probably already know, give rise to strange stories. But with death so near and seeming to visit when least expected and with so many lives that hang in the balance, the point of human misery bears down. In their waking thoughts people move one shade closer to the realm beyond death.

I was US Navy Chief Petty Officer for the 6^th Reconnaissance Squadron, stationed in the Mekong River Delta within fifty miles of Saigon, and a good half hour by water to the South China Sea. The year was 1966, and I was a lot younger then, and very inexperienced.

Yes, it was hot that summer. Just stinking hot, so the sweat lingered in the pores of your skin no matter what you did. That’s the way it felt to the men in our unit. So we’d mop ourselves off with a rag and swat mosquitoes and tiny little flies that would bite a hole in your flesh—playing cards, listening to the radio, or telling every story we could think of just to pass the time.

Our war, the one we fought through one hundred and sixty-six days in the Mekong swamp country, was mostly one of boredom, misery and heat, punctuated by short intervals of controlled terror when the enemy appeared. Most of the time we were kept waiting, and half expecting to get killed at the wrong moment—like sitting in the can while drunk, or playing cards with a bunch of guys in some village. Death seemed around us all of the time, though we could never quite get used to the idea, and you never really knew where the enemy was.

There wasn’t much along the river where our station was located. About six miles east across the rice paddies, the village of Duc Than offered a chance for basic entertainment, rice wine, cards and conversation. A few years back, the Bin Xuyen and the Cao Dai, the local warlord factions, had been subdued somewhat by the ARVN, only problem was that nobody told the people in that area. Our mission was to recon the movement of the Viet Cong along the river and in and out of the swamp region below Saigon; to repair occasional damages due to river flooding; and to pacify the civilian population through distribution of food, medicine and other supplies.

At our location, the rattle of gunfire was sporadic and seldom intense. But we knew VC moved up and down the river at all hours of the night. If you saw the choppers come up the river then you strapped your pistol on and kept alert for any sign of VC on the water.

But in the daytime you almost never saw anything. Sometimes you’d see farmers, women, kids and ox carts moving on the country highways. And over at Duc Than people got friendly. We’d pass out supplies and candy to the kids, and teenage girls would come around—but mostly it was quiet. They had a little village priest who they called Bien Thic, always dressed in dark robes, wearing sandals made of straw. He would look us over—smiling in a strange sort of way, though never bothering to speak to any of us except to say “thank you.” I guess that was the only American language that he knew.

When things started to happen, you knew VC were moving in the area. Like one night they shot up the whole region all night. The hamlets to the south of us were overrun. Plenty of people got killed. We heard they hit Saigon pretty hard, and later we saw groups of bodies floating in the river.

But most of the time, if you heard anything in the daytime it was just some kids laughing or a baby crying somewhere. Most often one or two elderly grandpa types would come out to the station with Bien Thic to get medicines and other items. Apart from an occasional word of French, you never understood much of anything these people ever said. Of course, most of us knew little if any French.

I liked Bien Thic pretty much, and sometimes tried to talk with him, but never got anywhere except to hear his friendly, “thank you.” Only one time I remember he stopped to look at me for what seemed an uncomfortably long moment, just staring with a smile that faded from his lips, though he bowed his head toward me and seemed to blink his eyes, as if to express a kind of sad approval—mixed with weary condescension, saying some prayer in his language.

Later, I found out that for people at Duc Than, this man had all the powers of a magician, and could heal the sick, make women have healthy babies, and even conjure up the spirits of the dead, or any number of strange and unexpected occurrences.

The lieutenant in our outfit, Lt. Serge Harris, from Norcross, Wyoming, was always telling us to work with the native peoples. Pray for them; give them food and other supplies; help them in any way we could and talk to them about freedom and democracy. Serge was a kind of overgrown boy scout just out of high school—and scared really bad all the time. The older men in our unit laughed behind his back and said all the villagers were VC.

Me, I didn’t know what to believe—until that summer I saw the Captain, an experience that changed my life.

I guess I was somewhat like Lt. Serge. Waiting out the war, trying to do good deeds on behalf of America, and sometimes even praying for these people I could never understand.

And then one night I pulled guard duty for the morning watch because three other men reported sick. A lot goes through your mind from midnight until six when you’re down along the river with a war going on. Every sound is more intense, and I was half expecting any minute a boatload of VC to come up shooting.

That night—I guess maybe I was scared pale but somehow half asleep, and could have been shot full of holes anyway.

Then suddenly, it was like someone struck a match, and I realized there was this boat there on the water—a damned big one, unlike the smaller rotor powered craft that we were using. This one had a long gray wooden hull and a short thud against the pier made me jump.

This boat, you see, was vintage World War II. So, I had a strange feeling, like I was on a movie set or maybe in a dream. And where the hell did that thing come from?

It was hot, I was scared and sweating and starting to think this could be my last moment on earth. Then I noticed this man standing on the deck looking down at me. Though everything was dark, his face was all lit up, like somebody struck a match, a point of illumination—I can’t explain what it was.

At that moment, I knew it was the Captain—my Captain. And a strange feeling of total calm and relaxation came over me.

I say he was my Captain now because what I saw there on the dock that night really opened my eyes.

“How ya’ doin’ sailor?” he asked, in a friendly way.

“All quiet, sir,” I replied.

“Everything secure at Mekong 3?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

It was a funny sort of question, I thought. And his voice was in a Boston accent that sounded familiar. Later, of course, I realized it was the same voice heard by millions of people all around the world.

Then, he spoke in a tone of warning.

“They’re comin’ through here, sailor. You better be ready. And don’t go down to Duc Than unless you want to die. The VC there are just waiting for you…”

The light, whatever it was, at that moment went out, and he kind of half leaned over, took a deep breath, almost whispering in words that were barely audible—so I still wonder exactly what he said to me.

It was something like this—

“Sailor, I have seen ten thousand wars. This one is not your war.”

At that moment, the engine on the boat powered up and slid forward. The Captain was gone, but I could see written on the hull somehow plain as day, reflected in the moonlight off the water, PT 109—printed in large white crisp letters that disappeared as the boat moved forward into the shadows.

Of course for me, that night made all the difference. I guess you’d say I’d seen a ghost. For a while I thought maybe it was just some trick, maybe the delirium of war, the stuff you hear them talking about—the men on the front who collapse into silence or shout insanities.

And later I thought, though it seemed crazy, maybe Bien Thic had something to do with it. Like somehow he had tricked me with his conjuring and the rest of his strange religion. But if this was a trick, it made me live when others died—and somehow too, it had opened my eyes.

Well, believe it if you want, but a few nights after that the VC did come through. They tried to overrun our base, shot us up pretty bad, mostly with mortars and small caliber weapons. And when things cooled off a group of about twelve men from our unit went down to Duc Than, but some of them did not come back alive.

Later of course, I went out across the rice paddies to look for Bien Thic, but I could never find him or any of the other people I had seen there, except for one or two kids. It was like a different village in a different world. And after the VC went through, one of our units hit Duc Than pretty hard. There was not much of it left that wasn’t destroyed.

I never saw Bien Thic again, but I never forgot that night on the Mekong River. For many years I told no one about it, and only wrestled with it in my mind, asking myself what was it, was it a trick? Was it a dream? Had I been delirious, or crazy? What was it that night on the river? But in spite of all my doubts, I always felt grateful for what I had experienced; for in my heart I knew that in the midst of war’s hell it was the gift of life that somehow had been given to me.