Close Quarters by Larry Heinemann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Damn Fine Killers

It’s easy to get lost in Heinemann’s detailed descriptions of equipment, road maps, and soldierly recreations like dope, beer, and sex with the local prostitutes. Initially he provides explanations about the military terms, acronyms and patois that his protagonist Dozier/Deadeye/Flip deciphers as a raw replacement learning the trade. But gradually the explanations disappear as Dozier is absorbed into the culture of the American War in VietNam.

This attenuation of explanation is part of Heinemann’s technique. The narrative moves from description to confession. The transformation begins slowly. Dosier is a member of a group of modern dragoons, mounted soldiers who can dismount and fight as infantry. He drives an Armored Personnel Carrier, a vehicle only nominally designed for human transportation and certainly not for creaturely comfort. The driver suffers the worst in his cramped space as he steers the rattling hulk by pulling on brake handles. The blisters, cuts, and pain start in his finger tips and progressively moves throughout his entire body.

And with the physical changes produced by the job, the spiritual changes occur apace. The mixture of an alien culture, constant threat, drugs, the sudden death of comrades, and the procedural insanity of military life, re-shapes Dosier’s psyche. He documents the increments of what is essentially his re-programming in increasingly long paragraphs of existential vomit. As his body becomes accustomed to the vehicle, his soul becomes oriented to the job, which is simply survival.

The turning point is subtly signalled when Dosier takes leave of his homeward bound mentor, Cross. Cross gives Dosier his unofficial, unauthorised pump shotgun in exchange for Dosier’s standard M16. The shotgun is a far more primitive weapon than the automatic rifle. And that’s the point. Dosier has lost the habits of civilised life. He has become a journeyman of war. The shotgun doesn’t kill as effectively as an M16 but it maims in a much more satisfying way. It’s victim suffers a great deal more before it dies. Receipt of the gun is a sign of his descent into savagery.

Dosier has learned how to hate. He hates the enemy of course. But he also hates the country of VietNam and all of its people, even the children. They’re all gooks, potential killers. He hates the housecats, the admin soldiers who never go outside the wire, have a cushy life, and make his a misery. He hates lifers, that os, career enlisted men as well as officers. He hates his black colleagues because the other white boys do. He hates the Army as an institution for putting him in a situation he can’t comprehend. By extension he hates the government that initiated the violent mess and the country that tolerates its continuation. Hate is his fuel. He runs on it. It keeps him alive. It helps to dim the horror of the “collage of death poses” after a big shoot out.

There is a cost however - Dosier has also learned to hate himself. He is largely unaware of his hate and the ghastliness of the dreams and fantasies it generates. He only sees it clearly in his comrades. Hatred is banal, squalid, and ugly, as well as casually violent. It constitutes a sort of self-immolation. This is what it takes to make what the general calls “damn fine killers.”

Then the killers go home.

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