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The Weight of the Matter

By Ray Kemble

Author's note: Fire Support Base Monterey Jack is a fictitious name. After the passage of almost 60 years, the author is unable to remember the base's actual name.

Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.―Joseph Heller, Catch-22

I've never been a fan of war stories. Most seem boring, many are exaggerated, and some just aren't true. Only a few ever feel real to me. After I left the Army and moved to a mountain town in Colorado for grad school, I soon found myself surrounded by such stories. When people found out I was a Vietnam vet, another grad student who was also a Vietnam vet insisted I go with him to the local VFW meeting. I eventually went, but I sat there uncomfortable, listening to the kinds of war stories I never liked.

It's been more than 50 years since I left the Army, moved to Colorado, and went to that VFW meeting. Looking back, I realize I was impatient with the older veterans' stories because my own memories of Vietnam were still fresh. Their stories from long ago didn't match mine, which were still clear in my mind just months after coming home.

I ended up in the Army not out of patriotism, family tradition, or because I was drafted. I ended up there by accident. In the summer of 1962, with the Vietnam War already underway and college ahead of me, enrolling in my college's ROTC program would let me finish my studies without interruption and, at the same time, keep me out of Vietnam. I did the math: 1962 plus 4 years meant 1966, and I thought the Vietnam War would be over by then. After graduation, I would owe the Army two years of service, but as an officer. It was a trade-off I was willing to make. So, I signed up for ROTC.

Looking back, I would come to regret that decision. In 1966, after finishing my undergraduate studies and earning my B.A., the Vietnam War was still going on. As graduation approached, I learned that my ROTC performance had earned me a regular commission instead of a reserve one, which meant I had to serve an extra year. I felt honored and accepted the regular commission. I was lucky, though, because the Army sent me to South Korea for a year. When that tour ended, I returned to serve my second year at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, as the commanding officer of a basic training company. By then, I knew I didn't want a long-term Army career, so I wrote to the Pentagon asking for an early release from my three-year commitment. Instead, they sent me orders for Vietnam and promised I would be discharged soon after I got back.

I arrived in Vietnam in December 1968. Before I left the United States, I trained at Fort Sill to be a field artillery officer. When I got to Tan Son Nhut, I was assigned to the 2/33rd Artillery in the 1st Infantry Division. Our headquarters was at the old Michelin plantation in Lai Khe, on Highway 12, about halfway between Saigon and the Cambodian border.

I felt pretty secure in my job as a lieutenant and soon-to-be captain of field artillery. My Battalion, the 2/33rd, was stationed well inside the heavily wired and guarded perimeter of the 1st Division's large base at Lai Khe. The 1st Division's base was considered a comparatively safe place, spoken of as being inside the wire. Aside from the occasional need to take cover during rare enemy mortar attacks, I saw my year in Lai Khe as a time when I was safely out of danger.

During the second half of my year in Vietnam, I was made the CO of the 2/33rd's HQ battery. In this new role, I was nominally responsible for the Battalion's forward observers––nominally, because I maintained their personnel files; but functionally, my FOs spent their days with the Division's infantry companies situated at an assortment of fire support bases outside the wire.

Occasionally, I'd visit my FO's. I recall one time in particular when I called the Lai Khe tower and asked if there was room on a helicopter departing that day to make a resupply run to the Division's fire support bases. I was told I could have a seat on a helicopter heading out later that morning. Our first stop would be the Division's most distant base, FSB Monterey Jack, a half-hour's flight away.

As we neared Monterey Jack, the helicopter pilot received an urgent call. An infantry patrol a few miles beyond Monterey Jack had been heading back to base when it was ambushed. Several soldiers were badly wounded—four from small arms fire and one from an old WWII stick grenade. We were ordered to change course and help evacuate them back to Lai Khe.

Though we were only a few miles from the ambush site when we got the call, two other helicopters had already reached the area. They were loading the more seriously wounded. As our helicopter set down, an Infantry sergeant stood akimbo in the wind-whipped grass and hollered at us to help with the less seriously wounded. He also asked if we could clear the field of any discarded weaponry and other odds and ends. We clambered out of our helicopter and helped the injured to board. We then hastily began collecting the many scattered items. Without intending to, we formed a haphazard line from where men were finding items back to our waiting helicopter.

I started getting all sorts of things handed to me: web gear, a flak vest, an empty ammo canister, some clothes, and a clipboard with a map covered in plastic. Soon, I got into a rhythm—receive, secure, pass, receive, secure, pass—when an item with a different "feel" was handed to me: An arm. Torn from some infantryman's shoulder. One of the crewmen had found it lying in the grass and, maybe thinking about what it meant, wrapped it loosely in a piece of clear plastic. I stopped before passing the arm, because it had weight, its own unique weight. The realization froze me …

"Dammit, sir," the crewman next to me snapped, " Come on, ferchrisake, sir, pass me what you got. We all want to get the fuck outta here!"

I don't know how to finish my only war story. It's not about bravery. What happened at Monterey Jack almost 60 years ago has stayed with me. I held a severed arm for less than half a minute, but the memory has lasted my whole life. What lingers is not just that it was an arm, but the heavy, terrible weight of it. Even now, I still feel that weight in my mind.

So I'll end here: it happened, and I still carry it. I remember Joseph Heller's World War II novel, Catch-22, especially the last chapter when the dying airman Snowden, moaning "I'm cold, I'm cold!" finally shares the intuitive secret that had the reader wondering since the novel's first chapter: Man is matter.

Ever since Monterey Jack, whenever I pick up something like a book or a loaf of bread, the memory returns. My hands remember the heavy weight of a human arm, a feeling nothing else can match. For 57 years, that sensation has stayed with me, the sense of holding something that was so recently part of someone else.

Snowden was right. We are made of matter. The real lesson is that when we forget how physically fragile we all are, we are capable of terrible things. But that's a story for another day.

Ray Kemble, a native New Yorker, was a captain with the 2nd Battalion, 33rd Field Artillery, 1st Infantry Division, 1969-70. He currently lives in Denver.