A Rumor of War Page 10

  “Roger, Charley Six, I read back for copy. Charley Two to remain in position until One and Three move out, then follow in trace. Roger, Six. This is Two out.” Then, turning to me: “Sir, the Six says…”

  “I heard what the Six said, Widener. Every VC inside of ten miles must have heard it. Keep your fucking voice down, will you.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t be sorry, just be quiet.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The company started to file down the river trail. One by one they vanished into the undergrowth; it was as if they were being swallowed whole. Then my platoon peeled off of the perimeter and formed the rear guard. We marched for an hour through the gallery jungle that grew alongside the river, and in the mottled light and dense, damp air, it was like walking underwater. The trail was narrow and muddy—even in the dry season nothing ever dried in the bush, it only became less wet. A maze of bamboo and elephant grass twice the height of a man grew on one side of the trail, and on the other side there was the sluggish river, and, west of the river, the mountains. The saw-edged grass slashed our skin, sweat made the scratches sting, and the heat pounded against our helmets and wrung the sweat out of us as we might wring water from a sponge. There were moments when I could not think of it as heat—that is, as a condition of weather; rather, it seemed to be a thing malevolent and alive. We kept walking, slowly, with the high green wall of the mountains looming above us.

  The patrol that morning had the nightmare quality which characterized most small-unit operations in the war. The trail looped and twisted and led nowhere. The company seemed to be marching into a vacuum, haunted by a presence intangible yet real, a sense of being surrounded by something we could not see. It was the inability to see that vexed us most. In that lies the jungle’s power to cause fear: it blinds. It arouses the same instinct that makes us apprehensive of places like attics and dark alleys.

  Men with active imaginations were most prey to these fears. A man needs many things in war, but a strong imagination is not one of them. In Vietnam, the best soldiers were usually unimaginative men who did not feel afraid until there was obvious reason. But the rest of us suffered from a constant expectancy, feeling that something was about to happen, waiting for it to happen, wishing it would happen just so the tension would be relieved.

  Something finally did happen that morning, and when it did I damned near jumped out of my skin. It wasn’t much—a burst of heavy rifle-fire from the head of the column, the noise magnified by the dense woods. The men dropped immediately and faced the flanks. The shooting lasted no more than a few seconds, and then I heard my heart drumming against my chest. Widener took a call on the radio, a summons from Peterson. I ran forward at a crouch, weaving around prone marines. It felt good to be moving. I found Peterson standing in, of all things, a corn field. The thick bush ended and there was this corn field, a piece of the Midwest in an Asian jungle. A line of riflemen was moving cautiously through the rows of dead stalks. The field ended in a swath of elephant grass, the same color as the corn stalks, and beyond the grass rose a low, wooded ridge. Hill 107 stood about a thousand yards away, to our left rear.

  From the ridge, a sniper had opened up on the point. Although the sniper broke contact with the first burst of return fire, Peterson suspected an ambush. An enemy mortar crew atop Hill 107 and a few automatic-riflemen on the ridge could damage the company badly as it moved through the broad corn field. Therefore, we would cross it one platoon at a time, each covering the other, while the skipper called an air strike on the hill.

  Lemmon’s men moved out first. A machine-gunner sprayed the jungle on the far side of the field. This was called “reconnaissance by fire,” a fancy term for what amounted to shooting at bushes to see if they shot back. Two Skyhawks came in low, strafing with rockets. Tester’s platoon jogged across the clearing, followed by mine. Earth and smoke erupted through the trees on the hill. The racket was comforting. It broke the unreal stillness and somehow assuaged our fear of the presence that seemed to lurk in every thicket. That may have been the real reason for the air strike and the blind firing into the underbrush: they made noise, and noise made us feel less afraid. It was as though rockets and machine guns were merely the technological equivalents of the gourds and rattles natives use to chase away evil spirits.

  The excitement over, the column trudged down the ever winding trail. Walk for ten minutes. Stop for five while the point checks out a suspicious-looking area. Drop down and watch the flanks. Get up and walk some more. Stop again. Now what? What the hell is going on up there at the point? Drop down, face outboard, and watch the flanks. Get up, walk again. Stumble down into a gully, up the other side, slipping in the mud. Don’t bunch up, the squad and fire-team leaders caution. C’mon people, don’t bunch up. Keep your interval. Hold it up. Get down, watch the flanks. Move out. Walk stop walk and the sun is growing hotter by the minute. Take a swig from your canteen. Just a swig. Water discipline. Oh, goddamn that was good. How about one more? All right, but that’s all. Ohhhhh, that was better than the first one. The hell with it. You’ve got two canteens and you’ll drink the poison in that river if you have to. Tilting your head back, you suck at the canteen like a baby at a tit. You don’t spit the water out, the way you’ve been taught to. No, you just gulp it down until you feel your gut distending. Slip the empty canteen back into its cover and five minutes later you are as parched as you were before.

  It took us all morning to cover the three miles between the landing zone and the village. Four hours to walk three miles, and the company had not once run into significant enemy resistance. It was the land that resisted us, the land, the jungle, and the sun.

  Hoi-Vuc stood on the south bank of the Tuy Loan, near a horseshoe bend in the river. A score of thatch huts and a ruined pagoda that bore the marks of past fire-fights. Peterson ordered a cordon and search: 1st and 3d platoons would encircle the village first, then 2d would poke around in the huts. By this time I was sweating so heavily I could hardly see. I seemed to be looking at the world through a translucent curtain. Half blind, I stumbled off the trail, felt the ground give way and suddenly found myself two feet shorter. I had fallen into a pangee trap. Fortunately, it was an old one. The stakes were loose and rotten and I suffered nothing more than the mocking grin of the marine who helped pull me out.

  Pushing its way through a baking stand of elephant grass, the platoon forded the river, shallow now in the dry season. A water buffalo lazing in the wallow downstream raised his broad-horned head as we splashed across. The trail on the opposite bank was wide and wound through a tunnel of arched bamboo. On both sides of the track were fire trenches, spider holes for snipers, pangee traps, and rows of crisscrossed stakes, emplaced at angles, like the chevaux-de-frise used in our own Civil War.

  The platoon moved cautiously into the village. Shaded by coconut palms, the huts were arranged around an open area where a crone with a face as brown and fissured as a walnut squatted beside a small fire. A pile of long, wooden stakes lay next to her. She was holding one over the fire, apparently to harden its point. There was hardly anyone else around—just a few more old women, their teeth stained reddish-black from chewing betel nut, and a couple of idle old men in white cotton shirts and conical straw hats. An emaciated dog rolled in the dust.

  We broke up into teams and started the search, which amounted to a disorganized rummaging through the villagers’ belongings. Maybe it was the effect of my grammar-school civics lessons, but I felt uneasy doing this, like a burglar or one of those bullying Redcoats who used to barge into American homes during our Revolution. But I was not completely convinced these thatch and bamboo shacks were homes; a home had brick or frame walls, windows, a lawn, a TV antenna on the roof. Most of the huts were empty, but in one we found a young woman nursing an infant whose head was covered with running sores. She was sitting on a bed of woven straw, and she looked at us with eyes that reflected neither fear nor hatred, nor any emotion at all. It was dim and close inside. T
he air smelled of wood-smoke. The earthen floor was as hard and smooth as concrete. Widener and I began sifting through bundles of clothes. Two other marines rolled aside a large, rice-filled urn to see if it concealed a tunnel entrance, while a third poked his bayonet through the walls. We had been told that the VC sometimes hid clips of small-arms ammunition in the walls. The girl just sat and stared and nursed the baby. The absolute indifference in her eyes began to irritate me. Was she going to sit there like a statue while we turned her house upside down? I expected her to show anger or terror. I wanted her to, because her passivity seemed to be a denial of our existence, as if we were nothing more to her than a passing wind that had temporarily knocked a few things out of place. I smiled stupidly and made a great show of tidying up the mess before we left. See, lady, we’re not like the French. We’re all-American good-guy GI Joes. You should learn to like us. We’re Yanks, and Yanks like to be liked. We’ll tear this place apart if we have to, but we’ll put everything back in its place. See, that’s what I’m doing now. But if she appreciated my chivalry, she did not show that, either.

  The search turned up nothing significant. Peterson passed the word to break for lunch and be ready to move in half an hour. Gratefully, the marines shed their packs and flopped down in the shade of the trees. A few energetic types collected empty canteens. Campbell, Widener, and I rested inside one of the huts. It must have belonged to a local fat cat because it had a cement floor. I lay with my head against my haversack and drank the juice from a can of peaches. That was about all I could eat. Christ, I had never felt so exhausted, and yet I had walked only three miles, less than one-tenth the distances I had marched at Quantico. It must have been the heat, the incredible Southeast Asian heat. Looking through the door at the white glare outside, I wondered how this sun could be the same one now shining gently in the cool midwestern spring back home.

  “Sure takes the starch out of a man, don’t it?” Campbell said, as if he had read my thoughts. “Know what I could use right now? A cold bottle of San Miguel. Used to drink that when I was on barracks duty in the Philippines. Had me a little house on Subic Bay, maid and everything. Little Filipino girl. I’d come back from duty, sit back on the couch, and that little Filipino’d crack me a bottle of San Miguel. Ice-cold, lieutenant.”

  “Jesus Christ, knock it off.”

  “Ice-cold, lieutenant. Ice-cold bottle of San Miguel’d go down real good about now.”

  Unable to stand any more of this torture, I walked down to the river, dipped my helmet into the current, and poured the water over my throbbing head. On the way back, I saw an example of the paradoxical kindness-and-cruelty that made Vietnam such a peculiar war. One of our corpsmen was treating the infant with the skin ulcers, daubing salve on the sores while other marines entertained the baby to keep it from crying. At the same time, and only a few yards away, our interpreter, a Vietnamese marine lieutenant, roughly interrogated the woman who had been tending the fire. The lieutenant was yelling at her and waving a pistol in front of her ravaged face. I could not understand a word, but I did not have to be a linguist to guess that he was threatening to blow her head off. This went on for several minutes. Then his voice rose to an hysterical pitch, and holding the forty-five by the barrel, he raised his arms as if to pistol-whip her. I think he would have, but Peterson stepped in and stopped him.

  “She is VC, Dai-uy,” the lieutenant protested, explaining that the stakes which she had been hardening in the fire were antihelicopter devices; the VC placed them in fields which might be used as landing zones. Peterson said, all right, the stakes would be destroyed; but he was not going to preside over the torture of an old woman, Viet Cong or not. Looking surprised and disappointed, the lieutenant stalked off, warning us that we would learn how things were done around here. The old woman shuffled away, a sack of bones covered by a thin layer of shriveled flesh. The Enemy.

  The company moved out half an hour later. We had just begun to cross the dusty, furrowed field outside the village when the snipers opened up. Bullets cracked loudly overhead, or went past our ears with a sucking sound, as when you draw in a breath through clenched teeth. The sniping seemed to be coming from the area we had passed through earlier, but all I could see there were trees. Two or three marines, taking cover behind the crumbled, overgrown walls of a wrecked shrine, fired blindly into the jungle. The VC replied with a few more rounds, the marines answered with another burst, and that ended the quarrel. The company formed into a column and started down the river trail, shambling listlessly in the white, liquid light of a tropic afternoon. Sweat blackened our uniforms, our backs ached from the weight of rifles and packs.

  The plan called for us to patrol a short distance along the south bank, then to ford the river and sweep a hilly area on the north side before linking up with D Company. That would complete the operation—if this aimless thrashing around could be called an operation. My platoon had the point. We had gone about two hundred yards when our invisible friends opened up again, this time with a brief but heavy burst of automatic fire. The bullets smacked into the trees, shredding leaves, snapping twigs. The lead squad, Sergeant Gordon’s, jumped into a nearby trench and loosed a long, stuttering volley into the underbrush on the far side of the river. One marine quickly emptied his magazine, inserted another and banged away again. A round whipped past me, with a loudness disproportionate to its size. I leaped into the trench beside Lance Corporal Bunch, not altogether sure what I was supposed to do. So, as was my habit, I yelled. When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. “Slow fire!” I shouted into Bunch’s ear. “Slow fire! What the hell are you shooting at?”

  “Right there, sir. They’re right in there,” he said, squeezing off another five-rounds-rapid. I looked over his shoulder, but there was only the placid river and the wall of jungle beyond. It was as if the trees were shooting at us. I wasn’t frightened, just confused. Or maybe I was confused because I was frightened. Then I heard Campbell’s voice booming above and behind us. “Cease fire, you silly shits! Cease fire!” Several enemy bullets walked up the trail behind him, splattering dust, the last round striking less than an inch from his heel. He kept walking, as casually as a coach at the rifle range. “Cease fire, Second. Can’t see what the hell you’re shooting at. Let’s have a little goddamned fire discipline.”

  The gunfire spluttered to a stop. I climbed out of the trench, feeling a little embarrassed.

  “Didn’t know you was in there,” Campbell said. I wasn’t sure if this was meant as a statement or a reproach. “Those troopers haven’t got any fire discipline, lieutenant. Bunch of cotton-pickin’ girls.”

  “Yeah, listen, that was nice going. They almost shot your ass off.”

  Campbell sneered as only he could. “Now, don’t go making me out no goddamned hero. I didn’t hit the deck because I wrenched my back getting out of the chopper. Got a bad back. I’m an old man, you know.”

  Well, I thought, you’re some old man.

  Peterson came up on the radio. He wanted to know what we were doing, restaging World War II? I felt that old dread of criticism rising up in me, but the skipper let me off with a mild reprimand.

  “Just don’t go shooting up all your ammo at a couple of snipers,” he said. “Okay, let’s move it out.”

  Fifteen minutes later, while crossing an expanse of rice paddies, the platoon was again pinned down by a small group of guerrillas. There could not have been more than three of them, two with carbines and one with an automatic rifle, probably an AK-47. They were on our side of the river this time, in a tree line that was almost out of effective small-arms range. The carbines started it off. There was a double cracking: the sound of the bullet followed by the report of the carbine. The effect was that of a man rapidly and rhythmically clapping his hands. Then the AK put a few rounds across our front and the platoon went down as if they had hit a trip wire. I then saw something rare for that stage of the war: I saw a VC. He was the one with the automatic. Actually, I saw a twitch
ing beige cloud at the edge of the trees; it was the dust kicked up by the recoil of his rifle. I might have seen the guerrilla himself, but I could not be sure. He was too far away to hit any of us, except by accident, but I thought we might get him with an M-60. I ran over and got one of the machine guns into action. As its tracers streamed in long, red arcs toward the woods, a few riflemen from 3d platoon set up a line behind a paddy dike and began firing in the direction of the tracers. My platoon, however, just lay flat, in a state of bewildered paralysis.

  I figured this presented an opportunity to redeem my earlier foul-up with Hollywood heroics. Standing up in front of a stunted tree—it was the only tree in the paddy and a stupid place to expose myself—I crooked my arm and pumped it up and down. This was the hand-and-arm signal to move out on the double. Pumping away, I hollered, “C’mon, Second, move your asses. You gonna let a couple of snipers pin a whole platoon down? Move your asses out.” Something slapped into the branches not six inches above my head; a fillip from Charlie. A severed twig fell against my helmet and shredded leaves fluttered past my face. Belatedly, I hit the deck. Well, there was nothing random about that. That one had been addressed to me; and so, for the first time in my life, I had the experience of being shot at by someone who was trying to kill me specifically. It was not horrifying or terrifying or any of the things it is supposed to be. Rather, it was perplexing. My first reaction, rooted in the illusion that anyone trying to kill me must have a personal motive, was: “Why does he want to kill me? What did I ever do to him?” A moment later, I realized there was nothing personal about it. All he saw was a man in the wrong uniform. He was trying to kill me and he would try again because that was his job.

  Peterson again came up on the radio, and this time he was mad. I knew by the tone of controlled exasperation in his voice. Peterson, who I thought was one of the best company commanders anybody could have served under, hardly ever raised his voice. He calmly asked what the hell I was doing waving my arms around under fire. I explained that I was using a hand-and-arm signal they had taught us at Quantico.