Hamburger Hill

Almost forty-years ago, at the age of twenty-four, I went to the Philippines to act in the movie Hamburger Hill, one of a trilogy of Vietnam movies, that came out between 1986-1987 which included Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. During filming I wrote a novel/chronicle/prose-poem/military log. I never published it or even showed it to anyone, and just have recently dug it back out. This is the first few pages.

I lost my mezuzah right off the bat! Ten minutes in the barracks and it's gone. Maybe this is Hashem spiting me for not having a Bar Mitzvah.

I have left behind my wife and friends and am sitting in the barracks, sad and mezuzahless, among fourteen methodists, but only in the acting sense. Thirty-six hours ago, I left L.A.; still life of man saying goodbye to wife, then thirty-six hours of terminal terminals on the way to Manila. Vietnam books are being pored through, and push-ups done on picnic tables make it quite clear that young men can be convinced to kill...Or act like they will.

It is September 17, 1986. I am here at the Subic Bay Naval and Marine base to be basically trained for a film about Vietnam called Hamburger Hill. The ride here from Manila International Airport was astounding. Rice paddies with billboards, Pepsi-drinking oxen pulling their plows straight toward the fifteenth century. Women and babies everywhere, folks living in treeless treehouses, working the land under raw silk skies. A corrugated tin roof heaven on earth. Men like me came here (to Southeast Asia) to hunt people like them twenty years ago, and they hunted back. I'm happy to fake it.

The flight wasn't bad. Leg room, scrambled eggs, forty winks and a fourteen-hour card game with what will turn out to be the boys. Actors flying to location. We win, yay for us. Actually, they all seem like very nice guys and so do I.

The Filipinos are not wealthy people and I already find myself party to a nice little piece of exploitation, having some brown-skinned man in shower shoes make my bed every day for three dollars a week. Cliff, our military chaperone and general man about the base asked me if I would like to take advantage of a native, and before I could flip to “morals” in my mental rolodex the deal was cut. A small crack about imperialism dribbled out of my mouth, loud enough to knit Cliff's eyebrows but not loud enough to land me in the stockade.

It's raining and looks like it always has been and always will be, and we are definitely "in country." My first impressions could be good, but I lost my mezuzah right off the bat.

                           *

I spoke eloquently to my wife before departure. Celebrating my anticipated adventure and assuring her of my profound uncompromising love. She came running down the 1940s black and white railroad platform of my mind, waving the handkerchief she would cry in after. I love you, I love you, see you in four months. I leave her behind and our theater company with it. I was to direct our first production, or “observe” it in our parlance (we don’t just have a theater company but an original technique called “jamming”) but then the show biz gods smiled or frowned upon me depending on how you look at it, and off I was whisked to the Philippines. I think they smiled but we will have to wait and see.

The color of the sky on the drive to LAX sticks in my mind. The minor chords of dusk. Pink as a color of foreboding. The feeling of large events awaiting and things were never the same again.

                       *

Lightning strikes in the form of a baseball mitt. A fellow bearded thespian pulled out a Louisville slugger outfield model and warmed my heart with a combination ball toss/get to know each other laugh-fest/Jewish soulmate jamboree (I brought my mitt along just in case someone brought theirs and someone did). This guy is very funny. His name is Steven Weber and not only did we connect on the most basic have a catch and a cackle level but it turns out he is super tight with the great Jon Chartier, my hero and dear friend from North Country School, the Adirondack, milk the cows before breakfast boarding school I was sent to when I was twelve. Weber knows Chartier! And not just Chartier, but Preston Maybank, another close boarding school comrade. They all went to SUNY Purchase together, so he also caught them in a school setting, just a little further down the line.

This all happened in front of the barracks by the beach of a dirty diesel sea, the heat and humidity unrelenting even with a slight ocean breeze. And just in case we forgot we are on a military base in a third world country, an enormous man with a shaved head and southern accent is talking prostitutes and German Shepherds and the diabolical glories of formaldehyde beer. If that don’t make you want to join the navy, what will?

                            *

We got this guy in charge of us (us actors trying to be soldiers). His name is Al Neale. Command Sergeant Major Al Neale 101^st Airborne Division based out of Fort Campbell Kentucky. Al is the real deal, and by real deal I mean he was at the actual battle, up and down the hill six times, shot twice and kept on going.  If you have doubts about his authenticity, just shake his hand and look in his eye and those doubts will be gone. Al hails from Tennessee. He is very unassuming and commands great respect with no effort. He talks with the terrifying simplicity of a man who has seen the shit and not just any shit but the exact shit we are trying to re-create.

We also met his commanding officer at the battle. The man who flew above it all in a helicopter and ordered nineteen-year-old boys up and down that hill until there weren’t many left (then abandoned the hill, hours after it was captured, the entire endeavor an exercise in senseless slaughter). He terrified us with a murder in the name of God and country pep-talk, and you can all be proud to be part of the 101^st Screaming Eagles.

                       *

Lunch today was a real trip. We ate and will be eating all our meals at the enlisted men’s club here at Subic Bay. I waited an hour for a mauve tuna sandwich served on poundcake though they were calling it bread. It was brought to me by a middle-aged Filipina woman who has spent her life bringing soldiers chow. We sat there fourteen strong at a long conference table with silverware. My new friend Don Cheadle (a very nice and beautiful young cat who sat next to me on the plane) said he could feel me having deep internal revelations. Truth is I was I was just kind of jet-lagged, but if that gives me a philosopher’s gravitas, so be it.

After lunch we played basketball in the mud bowl monsoon outside (at some point it rains here every day). The elements did not allow our abilities to shine, but we shared common athletic ground and got a little closer.

It’s almost lights out as they say in the service. I’ll talk to the prop guy about my mezuzah, and have a feeling it will all work out. I’m not sure why I have attached such importance to that little trinket/detail, but I was always fascinated by them. I grew up in a red-diaper, religion is the opiate of the people household and never got anywhere near a mezuzah, so, kids who wore them were exotic to me. I’ve decided that Private Martin Beinstock (my character) is one of those kids.

As I scribble away the boys are playing poker and it already feels like we’ve been together a month. I have had nice moments of contact with at least half of them, and if nobody acts the flick will be great. I miss Laura (my wife) but this is some serious all-male action. Boys in the barracks, jets overhead, seven card stud, and fourteen excitable young dudes getting paid to play soldier. I am happy with the whole situation and except for the sky club Mexican dinner special, which was cooked in a muffler and backfired onto my plate, things are groovy, everyone quoting the Honeymooners and discussing their favorite New York street people. The journey of a four-month war movie begins with a single day.

                           *

Day two and the pussy talk is rampant. Major mood swings. Breakfast was a dangerous affair. Pound cake toast, tasteless mud-pie hash browns, aluminum orange juice and vile eggs benedict, the hollandaise sauce more like a mystery placenta, all of this eaten as Nightmare on Elm Street Part Two spewed video carnage from a wall-mounted TV. Total time ninety minutes, and now onto letter mailing, haircuts, and more.

                           *

We just got kitted out as the English would say. First-off we got our boots. Black leather and green nylon. Combat boots in the most literal sense and major stomp-wear (as opposed to Corporal stomp-wear). Then we got our fatigues (we’re in the army now), and then our flat-top haircuts and a shave for rabbi Tommy and I look like a baby or so they tell me.

It was a real event as we all watched each other get shorn. Not only did we change in appearance and show each other our ears (ears have such personality when freed from the cloak of hair) but we turned from the people we were when we got here to the people we are in the movie. It was as if who we really are both disappeared and emerged in a purer form-- Unhidden, vulnerable, the hair of who we used to be in piles on the floor. All of us just face and nape and neck.

                           *

The south Pacific breeze blows, as serious war planes do “touch and go” exercises on the Subic Bay runway, which is about six hundred yards from the barracks. “Touch and go” is landing but not stopping, and instead, lifting off again. Maybe this is training for landing on aircraft carriers or maybe this is just for shits and giggles, but it literally never stops. We are separated from the runway by the lagoon of a bay that leads to the South China Sea. The bay is chock full of primer-coat gray war ships, floating dinosaurs that make up a large chunk of the Seventh Fleet and keep the world safe for democracy (yes, we will Ronald Reagan, yes, we will). The jets are loud in that break the sound barrier way and the whole thing is pretty military and insane, but I guess that’s the point.

The boys are starting to adapt into roles and the barracks are quickly becoming home. Vietnam books, walkmans, porno mags, poker and all that good American shit. Fourteen strong we stand in our fatigues and no William Morris agents within earshot. I’m not sure how we look, but we got a shot.

And this paragraph is from further along in the book, when I go and buy a hardcover journal to write in.

I am now writing in a new book, which I have just purchased at the “Goodwill” bookstore for 89 pesos. It is 500 8X16 inch pages bound in a hard navy-blue cover with red corners, and has the word “Journal” printed on it in black. It is a magical sea log that will turn words into pieces of eight into rubies into spices. For the logging of miles on the Pony Express, stagecoach paragraphs that will just make it St. Louis. It is for weigh-ins at gold strikes, a ledger for the barter of deer skins for whiskey. You’ll find it dusty in the basement or stacked in a backroom full of love letters from Buffalo Bill to your grandma. From Amos and Andy to Mahatma Gandhi. From the Cherokee Nation to Union Station. A Santa Fe railroad, Cam Ranh Bay motherload. A cardiac almanac. For the halls of justice or jail when they bust us. A lifetime sentence, no repentance, diary of a three-sewer home run. A tears and teeth speedball of fun. It is all these things, this new book of mine.

The cast of Hamburger Hill