When Cigarettes Saved Lives

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t smoke. I grew up in a time when kids who smoked were considered juvenile delinquents, children with whom “good children” (like me) didn’t associate. I pestered my parents until they quit smoking. A relationship fell apart because she smoked and I tried to get her to quit. (She did try, but then, looking for a replacement for the hand-mouth motion associated with smoking, decided to have coffee, instead. She complained of hyperventilating by 11am. This may give some insight into the relationship as a whole.)

(I should point out that I have no use for the current social battle against tobacco use. No, I don’t want people smoking in my air-space, but I’d rather give a smoker the opportunity to be courteous and give myself the option to be gracious, than have some law forcing the issue.)

Anyway, the headline there is not Orwellian newspeak, like many other attempts at justifying the unjustifiable. But a few years ago, I wrote about a Vietnam veteran and his face-to-face encounter with “Charlie Cong” – an enemy soldier – just after the rest of his unit had been wiped out in an ambush. After staring at each other for what seemed like ages, the VC soldier held up two fingers to his mouth. Rudy – the American – realized he was asking for a cigarette. Rudy had some, so they sat together, had a smoke, and communicated as best they could with sign language. The VC soldier showed Rudy photos of his family. They went separate ways, and when Rudy got back to camp, he told his CO he couldn’t kill North Vietnamese anymore.

So I got thinking the other day: what if Rudy and “Charlie” didn’t smoke? What shared social experience would they have had, that would have led to that turning point in their lives? A drink? I doubt either would have had a hip flask or a canteen of water, and would they have shared? What if one was a mean drunk? How about marijuana – the smokable weed that’s apparently exempt from the social convention against smoking? Again, I doubt they would have had any handy.

Also, consider the circumstances: Rudy had just seen his entire unit wiped out. Who knows how many VC were killed in that exchange, but “Charlie” was all alone when it was over, just like Rudy. Smoking would have calmed their nerves, and smoking together broke through the barrier that war imposes, turning the Invading Imperialist American and the Ruthless Jungle Guerrilla into two men, sitting together, chatting.

Rudy was medical’d out within a week after telling his CO that he couldn’t kill “those people”. “Charlie” disappeared into the jungle – who knows what happened to him? Maybe he was killed the next day; maybe he, too, realized he couldn’t kill people and got out of the war and back to his family. We probably couldn’t count the number of people whose lives were saved, because Rudy had a couple of cigarettes that day.