Joe Klein - Payback: Five Marines After Vietnam

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PRAISE FOR PAYBACK

Extraordinarily perceptive... a remarkably sensitive story of a generation.

Stanley Karnow, The New York Times Book Review

Klein rescues the grunt from anecdote and restores his dignity.... Payback is, simply, one of the best accounts of how men respond to combat written about Vietnam or any other war.... Kleins reporting is remarkable.... He brings each man to life, takes us into the battlefields between men and women, lets us see as we so rarely do the agonies and hard-won victories of growing up in working-class America.... He has overcome the many barriers that divided us, and has healed some of the wounds of the war.

William Broyles, Esquire

The most eloquent work of nonfiction to emerge from Vietnam since Michael Herrs Dispatches ... Mr. Klein has a brisk, instinctive talent for illuminating American lives.... We come to know the five Marines as intimately as characters in a novel.... Indeed, Payback has that rare quality in a bookthe visceral feel of real life, pinned down and clarified through words.

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Some of the most vivid, harrowing, and emotionally honest writing to come out of Vietnam.

The Washington Post Book World

Its perhaps good to be reminded just how compassionate the most informed journalism can be.... Some of Kleins most interesting reporting concerns the effect on the wives of their husbands experiences; he shows how supportive some of them could be.... Kleins book eloquently demonstrates that what brings these men back into the world is their own efforts: their understanding and their care for one another, their interest in something outside themselves, their brave determination.

Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

Its a grim picture, painted in compelling strokes. Klein gets it alltheir troubles with women, with employers, with the worldand the book must be a sober look in the mirror for the survivors. For the reader, its near-hypnotic.

New York Daily News

A rich and important book that explains a great deal about a lot of people... Payback is the story of Joe Kleins search for the survivors of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, vintage 1967. It is a special book because it focuses in depth on the experience of five men... who were temporarily thrown together in an unpopular war.

Chicago Sun-Times

[ Payback ] captures the sort of fine and private detail one ordinarily finds only in fiction.

People

ALSO BY JOE KLEIN

Nonfiction

Charlie Mike: A True Story of Heroes Who Brought Their Mission Home

Woody Guthrie: A Life

The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton

Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think Youre Stupid

Fiction

Primary Colors

The Running Mate

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Copyright 1984 by Joe Klein

Originally published in 1984 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

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First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition October 2015

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Cover design by Christopher Brian King

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Klein, Joe, date.

Payback / Joe Klein.

pages cm

1. Vietnam War, 19611975VeteransUnited StatesBiography. 2. United States. Marine Corps. Marine Division, 3rd. Regiment, 3rd. Battalion, 1st. Charlie Company. Platoon, 2ndBiography. 3. Cooper, Gary W., 19461981Friends and associatesBiography. 4. Vietnam War, 19611975VeteransSocial conditions. 5. Man-woman relationshipsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 6. Vietnam War, 19611975VeteransMental healthUnited States. 7. Vietnam War, 19611975VeteransSubstance use. 8. United StatesSocial life and customs20th century. 9. Vietnam War, 19611975Regimental histories. I. Title.

DS559.73.U6K57 2015

959.704'345092273dc23

2015031100

ISBN 978-1-4516-8362-2

ISBN 978-1-4516-8363-9 (ebook)

Authors Note: The principal characters in this book agreed to the use of their real names. Some of the other names have been changed.

For my parents

Payback is a motherfucker.

A MARINE CORPS PROVERB, POPULAR DURING THE VIETNAM ERA

In late January 1981, at the peak of the short-lived national euphoria over the return of the American hostages from Iran, I noticed a brief wire service story in one of the New York tabloids about a Vietnam veteran who had been killed by the police in Hammond, Indiana. The headline was something like: Viet Vet Goes Berserk over Hostage Welcome.

His name was Gary Cooper and his story was, in its way, as classically American as his name. It was true that hed been angered by the tumultuous welcome the former hostages received; there had been no parades or visits to the White House when he returned from Vietnam. But it wasnt merely anger over the hostages that pushed Gary Cooper to the brink; indeed, that was only a small part of it. He was far more troubled by his inability to find a job since being laid off by the Pullman Standard Company nine months earlier. On January 20, the safe return of the hostages and Ronald Reagans inauguration shared the front page of the Hammond Times with a story of more immediate interest: Pullman was permanently closing its freight car division, and Coopers slim hope that he would be called back to work vanished. A week later, he learned that a job hed hoped to get at Calumet Industries also had eluded him. Two days after that, he was dead. He was thirty-four years old. He had been born in Tennessee, but his family moved North in the great migration of poor Southern whites to the factories of the Midwest during World War II, a migration that now seemed to be reversing itself as steel mills and auto plants along the shores of the Great Lakes closed their gates and the children of the original migrants drifted back to the sun belt. Gary Coopers tragedy seemed a reflection of several troubling problemsthe rising anger of Vietnam veterans, the legacy of the war itself, the dislocations caused by the shriveling of basic industries in the Midwestand I decided to write a magazine article about his life and death.