A Rumor of War Page 12
Paulson and I scramble up a knoll and find an L-shaped bunker dug into its side. Approaching carefully, I stand next to the entrance and toss a grenade inside. A shudder passes through the ground when the grenade explodes with compacted force. After the smoke has cleared, Paulson and I crawl inside and find a reed mat which has been shredded by the blast. But the sniper, if he was ever here in the first place, is long gone. Then we trudge back to the road, feeling blown out by the wasted effort, like a boxer who has swung hard and missed.
An hour goes by. Parties of marines are staggering along, carrying heat casualties who lie in stretchers we have made by cutting poles with machetes and then doubling ponchos over the poles. My platoon is ordered to relieve the 1st at point. Moving up, we pass Lemmon’s men; they are sprawled in a culvert in the shade of some trees. One marine, slumped at the shoulders, his arms hanging between his knees, sits on a log in the classic pose of the worn soldier. Hollow-eyed, he stares at a point in space. Sweat-smeared dust coats his face. His helmet lies at his feet. His rifle, resting on its butt plate, is propped at an angle against one of his legs. I look at him and know that he is feeling what I am feeling: a tiredness greater than mere fatigue, deeper than bone-deep, one that reaches down into a part of myself I cannot name.
Another hour passes, and we can see the convoy that will take us back to the base camp on Hill 268. The trucks are lined up near the junction of this road and the one that leads through the Dai-La Pass. Slim and straight, an old French watchtower stands in the pass, a ruined monument to a ruined empire. The convoy is about five hundred yards ahead, the olive-drab vehicles miragelike in the heat waves rippling up from the road. Though the sight of it lifts our spirits, our bodies are too jaded to move any faster.
A machine-gunner named Powell begins to stumble and pirouette, like a man mimicking a drunk. Another marine offers to carry the heavy weapon, but Powell shoves him aside and says proudly, “I can hack it. I can hump my own gun.” The M-60 clatters to the ground. Powell staggers forward, then falls facedown into the dust. Rolling him over, we see that his skin is hot, dry, and fish-belly white. Heatstroke. We wet his lips and pour what is left of our water over his head. Two marines lift the unconscious Powell and, holding him in a fireman’s carry, hurry him to the trucks. He is put in the cab, to keep him out of the sun, but this turns out to be a mistake: the stifling air inside makes his condition worse. He wakes up in a maniacal rage and tries to strangle the driver. It takes three of us to pry his fingers loose from the man’s throat. His lips curled back on his teeth, kicking and growling like a captured animal, Powell is dragged into the bed of the truck and strapped to a stretcher with web belts. There are no helicopters available for an evacuation.
The convoy moves slowly. All the while, Powell alternates between unconsciousness and frenzy, and once he manages to snap the belts loose. When we reach the 105-mm battery position, Lieutenant Miller and I put him in Miller’s jeep and rush him to the hospital. He is raging again, and the Navy doctor refuses to treat him.
“This isn’t a medical problem,” he says.
“What the fuck do you think it is, doc,” says Miller, “a disciplinary problem?”
“There’s nothing I can do for him.”
“You goddamned well better do something,” I say, putting my hand on the grip of my pistol. It is a silly thing to do, typical of my hot temper and proclivity for melodrama. But it works. The doctor orders Powell to be taken into one of the tents. Half an hour later, the doctor comes out and says, apologetically, that Powell will have to be evacuated to the States.
“I can’t figure out why he’s even alive. He’s got a body temperature of a hundred and nine degrees.”
I ask what that means.
The doctor replies that, in effect, the blood in Powell’s head is bubbling like water in a boiling kettle. “If he lives, he’ll probably suffer permanent brain damage.”
Riding back to the company area in Miller’s jeep, I think, We’ve lost a man, not to the enemy, but to the sun. It is as if the sun and the land itself were in league with the Viet Cong, wearing us down, driving us mad, killing us.
* * *
The company is going out again to the area around Hoi-Vuc, a village that is becoming synonymous in our minds with the war. It is under VC control, day as well as night, and we are almost certain to run into something there. This is the scheme: A Company will make a helicopter assault near the village, in a field that has been given the unwarlike code name of LZ Duck. C Company will move by truck to a jump-off point near the Song Tuy Loan River. From there we will proceed on foot for three or four miles, guiding on the river, and set up a blocking position. It’s the same old hammer and anvil plan, but we have learned that, in the bush, nothing ever happens according to plan. Things just happen, randomly, like automobile accidents.
We ride past battalion and regimental HQ. Clerks and typists stand at the roadside, turning their heads to shield their eyes from the dust thrown up by the trucks. They cheer and watch us with the envy rear-echelon troops often feel for infantrymen. As is frequently the case before an operation, we are filled with a “happy warrior” spirit and tend to dramatize ourselves. With our helmets cocked to one side and cigarettes hanging out of our mouths, we pose as hard-bitten veterans for the headquarters marines. We are starring in our very own war movie, and the howitzer battery nearby provides some noisy background music.
The convoy slows to a crawl as it passes through Dogpatch. The filth and poverty of this village are medieval. Green pools of sewage lie in the culverts, the smell mingling with the stench of animal dung and nuoc-maum, a sauce made from rotten fish. Lean dogs snarl and snap at each other in the dirt streets. Water buffalo bellow from muddy pens shaded by banana trees whose leaves are white with dust. Most of the huts are made of thatch, but the American presence has added a new construction material: several houses are built entirely of flattened beer cans; red and white Budweiser, gold Miller, cream and brown Schlitz, blue and gold Hamm’s from the land of sky-blue waters.
Crowds of children and teen-age boys run alongside the convoy. Many of the children have distended bellies and ulcerous skin, decades of wisdom in their eyes and four-letter words on their lips. They run alongside, begging, selling. “GI gimme one cig’rette you.” A cigarette is flipped into the crowd and the boy who catches it is immediately tackled by his friends. He disappears beneath a pile of tiny arms and legs, clutching, kicking, clawing for the cigarette. “Hey gimme candy you.” A C-ration tin is thrown down. “Hey booshit. Fuck you GI this no candy. Numbah ten.” The kid’s friends laugh as he throws the can against the side of a truck. “Gimme cig’rette gimme candy you buy one Coka. One Coka twenny P you buy.” Some marines drop piaster notes and coins into the sea of hands holding up bottles of Coca-Cola; but they do not accept the sodas. In this Alice in Wonderland war, Coke is a weapon. The VC sometimes poison it or put ground glass in it and give it to the children to sell to Americans. Or so we’ve been told. “Twenny P GI I say you twenny P. This no twenny P Fuck you cheap Charlie.” The teen-agers are less mercenary. Like adolescent boys everywhere, they are fascinated by soldiers and armies. One of them shouts, “Mahreene numbah one. Kill buku VC.” A marine who is not much older than the boy makes a pistol with his thumb and forefinger. “You VC,” he says. “Bang. Bang.” The boy grins and mimics a soldier firing a rifle from the hip. “Hokay, hokay. Kill buku VC.”
The older people of the village remain aloof. The men smoke gnarled cheroots and stare at us without seeming to notice us. The women stand in the doorways, nursing infants, spitting red streams of betel-nut juice into the dust. We are not a novelty to them. They have seen foreign soldiers before. The whores are the only adults who pay any attention to us. Dogpatch has acquired several whorehouses since the brigade landed. Boom-boom houses, they are called in the local slang. The girls are pathetic to look at, dressed in Western-style pants and so heavily made up that they look like caricatures of what they are. They make obscene g
estures and signal prices with their hands, like traders on the floor of a commodities market.
It is midafternoon. The company is strung out along the trail on the north bank of the river. There is no front in this war, but we are aware that we have crossed an undefined line between the secure zone and what the troops call “Indian country.” The hamlets here are empty except for the very old and the very young. Pangee traps yawn at the side of the trail, and there is that tense, oppressive stillness. We are about halfway to the blocking position when the point platoon, Tester’s, is ambushed. The VC open from a trench line across the river. The automatic fire sounds like paper ripping; bullets scythe the leaves above our heads, and someone up front yells “Ambush left!” There is another ripping sound as 3d platoon returns fire. The exchange quickly falls off to a few desultory shots, then just as quickly swells again. Things pop and crack in the air. The call “Second platoon up! Second up!” comes down the column. Bent double, I run up the trail and almost bowl over a marine who is aiming his rifle from behind a tree. He is aiming at a patch of clothing that flashes briefly in the green tangle on the opposite bank. He pulls the trigger, cries “Goddamnit!” when nothing happens. His rifle has jammed or in his excitement he has failed to chamber a round. “Goddamnit,” he says to no one in particular. “I had him in my sights.”
At the same time, part of 3d platoon is stumbling down the steep bank; the rest are splashing across the river, yelling and shooting, charging wildly toward a hamlet on the other side. Sniper fire crackles, and a marine who is struggling to cut through the web of brush on the riverbank spins and goes down. Another rifleman calls for a corpsman. The action lasts two or three minutes at most, yet I have seen and heard everything with an unusual clarity, which seems to have something to do with the fact that I might have been shot at any moment.
Peterson orders my platoon and Lemmon’s to form a perimeter around the paddies on this side of the Tuy Loan. Meanwhile, 3d platoon pursues the VC, but they have again evaporated. Someone says there are blood trails leading off into the jungle. I want to believe this. I want to believe these wraiths are really men who bleed.
Our single casualty, Lance Corporal Stone, has been hit superficially in the hand. The force of the AK round impresses him, however. “It just grazed me,” he says to the corpsman bandaging his wound, “but that thing turned me right around.” Tester’s men make a sudden rush on the hamlet. A phosphorus grenade bursts in a cloud of thick, white smoke, and a hut begins to burn. Another goes up. In minutes, the entire hamlet is in flames, the thatch and bamboo crackling like small-arms fire. The marines are letting out high-pitched yells, like the old rebel yell, and throwing grenades and firing rifles into bomb shelters and dugouts. Women are screaming, children crying. Panic-stricken, the villagers run out of the flame and smoke as if from a natural disaster. The livestock goes mad, and the squawking of chickens, the squeal of pigs, and the bawling of water buffalo are added to the screams and yells and the loud popping of the flaming huts.
“They’ve gone nuts, skipper,” Tester says. “They’re shooting the whole place up. Christ, they’re killing the animals.”
He and Peterson try to stop the destruction, but it is no use: 3d platoon seems to have gone crazy. They destroy with uncontrolled fury. At last it is over. The hamlet which is marked on our maps as Giao-Tri (3) no longer exists. All that remains are piles of smoldering ash and a few charred poles still standing. By some miracle, none of the people have been hurt. I hear women wailing, and I see one through the smoke that is drifting across the river. She is on her knees, bowing up and down and keening in the ashes of what was once her home. I harden my heart against her cries. You let the VC use your village for an ambush site, I think, and now you’re paying the price. It is then I realize that the destruction of Giao-Tri was more than an act of madness committed in the heat of battle. It was an act of retribution as well. These villagers aided the VC, and we taught them a lesson. We are learning to hate.
Seven
And you’ve lost your youth and come to manhood, all in a few hours.… Oh, that’s painful. That is indeed.
—Howard Fast
April Morning
Our next operation took place in a desolate area southwest of Danang. It was true Indian country, a region of fallow fields, sun-seared hills, and abandoned villages lying near a pale-green height called Charlie Ridge. The operation, which lasted four days, was yet another attempt to trap the Viet Cong between two rifle companies, ours and Captain Miller’s A Company. This time we partially succeeded, though it was more by accident than design.
We spent the first day blundering around in the bush and skirmishing with the usual snipers. Once, while taking a break, we were hit with automatic-weapons fire. Although it almost killed Peterson and the colonel, who had come in by helicopter to pass some word or other, the only real damage it did was to our peace of mind. On the morning of the second day, intelligence having received a report of enemy movement south of us, C Company was lifted out to make a helicopter assault near a hill marked on the map as Hill 270.
The flight was a short one and took us over a part of the Annamese range. The manuals we had used in guerrilla-warfare courses cheerfully stated that the modern, civilized soldier should not be afraid of the jungle: “the jungle can be your friend as well as your enemy.” Looking at the green immensity below, I could only conclude that those manuals had been written by men whose idea of a jungle was the Everglades National Park. There was nothing friendly about the Vietnamese bush; it was one of the last of the dark regions on earth, and only the very brave or the very dull—the two often went together—could look at it without feeling fear.
We had been airborne less than ten minutes when the H-34s started down toward the landing zone, a field bounded on the north by tangled woods and a stream whose still, brown waters, flecked with white, reminded me of dirty milk. To the south, a low ridge separated the LZ from a swamp, beyond which rose the dusky slopes of Hill 270. Circling down, the helicopters began to draw ground fire; the rounds made a noise like corn popping as they whipped past the aircraft. The fire was not heavy, but it produced in us the sensation of helplessly waiting for a bullet to pierce the fuselage and plow through a foot or groin. Trapped, we were little more than pieces of human cargo, with no means of defending ourselves and nowhere to take cover. The door gunner, sitting on a folded flak jacket, was tensed behind his machine gun; but he could not return fire without the risk of hitting another aircraft. Hearing that pop-pop-pop outside, I could only think of what a pilot had once told me: “If a chopper gets hit in the right place, it has the flying characteristics of a falling safe.” Nevertheless, the experience—our first of a hot LZ—was not entirely unpleasant. There was a strange exhilaration in our helplessness. Carried willy-nilly down toward the landing zone, with the wind slapping against our faces and the trees rushing in a green blur beneath us, we felt a visceral thrill. It was like the feeling of being on a roller coaster or in a canoe careening down a wild rapids; the feeling, half fear and half excitement, that comes when you are in the grip of uncontrollable forces.
Suddenly we were on the ground. I leaped out of the door and was grateful when my boots touched the soft, damp earth. I was back where an infantryman belonged, on his feet and in the mud. Bent at the waist, we dashed toward the woods at the northern edge of the clearing. Opposite, Lemmon’s men were assembling in a swale of elephant grass at the base of the low ridge. The grass rippled in the wind churned up by the helicopters’ rotor blades. The VC were still taking potshots at the landing zone; we heard the rounds smacking overhead and the distinctive crack of Russian SKS carbines. The two sounds occurred almost simultaneously, so it was impossible to tell where the snipers were. But now that we were back in the foot soldier’s natural element, the firing did not seem half so frightening. It was just the usual, sporadic harassing fire, and we had learned by this time that it was not serious sniping, rather a VC tactic intended to fray our nerves. We ignored it.
The last wave came in, dropped Tester’s platoon, and flew off. There was a brief crackling as the VC turned their rifles on the aircraft, but none of the H-34s was hit. Watching them climb until they were just specks in the sky, some of us felt a momentary but deep longing to go with them back to the small comforts and relative safety of what was called, for lack of a better term, the rear. It was the same feeling we had experienced on the first operation, a sense of being marooned on a hostile shore from which there was no certainty of return. Drawn up in mass formation back at base camp, C Company had looked formidable—two hundred heavily armed marines. But there in the LZ, surrounded by those high, jungled hills, it seemed such a small force.
Forming a column, my platoon started toward its first objective, a knoll on the far side of the milky-brown stream. It was an objective only in the geographical sense of the word; it had no military significance. In the vacuum of that jungle, we could have gone in as many directions as there are points on a compass, and any one direction was as likely to lead us to the VC, or away from them, as any other. The guerrillas were everywhere, which is another way of saying they were nowhere. The knoll merely gave us a point of reference. It was a place to go, and getting there provided us with the illusion we were accomplishing something.
The platoon stumbled through patches of ankle-high creepers, then filed down a trail into the yellow-green scrub that bordered the clearing. The sniper fire continued to pop behind us. Two shots, half a minute of silence, another shot, fifteen seconds of silence, two more shots. The woods became dense, muffling sound until we could no longer hear the small arms. A solid wall of vegetation hemmed both sides of the trail, the trees so still they did not look real. A marine slipped in the mud, his rifle and equipment clattering as he fell. The column started to bunch up and the NCOs passed the word to “keep it spread out, people, five paces between each man.” It was a phenomenon I had seen before: in the jungle, men tended to draw together, seeking the reassurance that comes from being physically close to one another, even though that increased the risk of the proverbial one round killing several men at once. I think this bunching happened because even the illusion of being alone in that haunted, dangerous wilderness was unbearable. We were supposed to know better, but officers were as prey to this fear as the men. On a previous patrol, I had lost sight of the marine in front of me; he had slipped around a sharp bend in the trail. Although I knew he was only a short distance ahead, I felt lost, almost terrified, and ran around the bend until I again saw the comforting sight of his back.