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After ‘Full Metal Jacket’, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford

I wanted to see exotic Vietnam, Bangkok, the jewel of Southeast Asia. I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture and… kill f**k them.

I’m no Vietnam veteran;
I’m fat and old;
a hopeless wimp;
bossed around at work
and by my wife;
a kind, but cowed and cowardly
Colonel Blimp.

O-three-hundred, Infantry. You made it.

So getting on this aeroplane to Thailand
is hard for me.
it feels as though I am
in the marines,
posted from Parris Island
to Đa Nang,
in the shit,
in Vietnam.

Delta Six, immediate assistance required on the f**king double...

Because this place
(I’m talking Nana Plaza)
looks like Huế City,
a bombed-out shell,
full of gooks and corpses…
another Gaza,
another Somme,
another place made hell.

When we're in Huế ... when we're in Huế City... it's like a war. There's the enemy…

The fair enemy –
but who are those I saw?
(Can their bones live?)
They’re the same burned out wrecks as
I’ve seen before,
the fallout from America’s other war:
(or Dream?)
the war between the sexes.

Suckee, f**kee, smoke cigarette in the pussy, she give you everything you want. Long time.

My heart is pounding,
I break out in sweat,
wrestling her,
then over and again
penetrate her with my bayonet.
She writhes in ecstasy (or is it pain?)

Am I bad? Am I a life-taker? Am I a heart-breaker?

But in the end it’s stalemate
so I pay, and write her off
(the Poetry’s in the Pity),
and she retreats to fight another day,
another sniper back in Huế City.

Well, at least she died f**ked for a good cause.
What cause was that?

Her cause:
I made her wealthy in a night,
helped her to share the First World’s Capitalism.
And my cause, too:
because now I’m not so broken and uptight,
and can stand tall, a man again.
And every man’s cause:
fighting Communism Feminism.

Chaplain Charlie will tell you about how the free world will conquer Communism with the aid of God and a few marines!

I’m coming home,
I’ve survived Vietnam –
(well, Vietnam for me,
so don’t you dare to knock it).
You’ll see how changed I am
if you look carefully –
you’ll see I’ve got the stare…

the thousand-yard stare. A marine gets it after he's been in the shit for too long. It's like ... it's like you've really seen beyond. I got it. All field marines got it. And you'll have it too.


© Bangkok Byron, 2008. All rights reserved by the author.