A Rumor of War Read online

  A small group of marines gathered and stared at the letters and photographs. I don’t know what they felt, but I was filled with conflicting emotions. What we had found gave to the enemy the humanity I wished to deny him. It was comforting to realize that the Viet Cong were flesh and blood instead of the mysterious wraiths I had thought them to be; but this same realization aroused an abiding sense of remorse. These were men we had helped to kill, men whose deaths would afflict other people with irrevocable loss. None of the others said anything, but later, back at base camp, PFC Lockhart expressed what may have been a collective emotion. “They’re young men,” he told me. “They’re just like us, lieutenant. It’s always the young men who die.”

  We lingered for several minutes, trying to make some sense out of it. The company had only done what it was expected to do and what it had been trained to do: it had killed the enemy. Everything we had learned in the Marine Corps told us to feel pride in that. Most of us did, but we could not understand why feelings of pity and guilt alloyed our pride. The answer was simple, though not apparent to us at the time: for all its intensity, our Marine training had not completely erased the years we had spent at home, at school, in church, learning that human life was precious and the taking of it wrong. The drill fields and our first two months in Vietnam had dulled, but not deadened, our sensibilities. We retained a capacity for remorse and had not yet reached the stage of moral and emotional numbness.

  Or so it was for the majority of the men. There were exceptions. At least one marine in the company had already passed beyond callousness into savagery. We had just started back down the ravine, after setting fire to the camp, when we bumped into a patrol led by Sergeant Loker. They were dead beat and looked as if they had been caught in a cloudburst. Stopping to rest, Loker squatted and lit a cigarette.

  “Did you burn that place back there, sir?”

  I said that I had.

  “We passed by it earlier, but I left it alone. You remember how pissed the skipper was when we burned that ville. He said he didn’t want any more villes burned down.”

  “That’s a base camp, Sergeant Loker, not a village.”

  Shrugging, he said, “Okay, lieutenant. You’re the boss.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, looked away from me for a moment, then turned to face me again. Sweat was dripping off his trim, black moustache.

  “You hear about Hanson, sir?”

  “No. What about him?” Hanson was a rifleman in 1st platoon.

  “I caught the little sonuvabitch cutting the ears off one of those dead VC. He had a K-bar and was trying to slice the guy’s ears off. The little jerk. Lordy, I took him up by the stackin’ swivel and told him I’d run his ass up if I ever caught him doing that again.”

  An image of Hanson flashed in my mind: a quiet boy of about nineteen, tall and thin, with dark blond hair, he was so American-looking he could have posed for a Norman Rockwell in the old Saturday Evening Post. I tried to imagine him performing the act Loker had just described, but couldn’t.

  “Does Mister Lemmon know about it?”

  “Yes, sir. I don’t figure anything’ll happen to the kid this time. I didn’t give him a chance to finish the job. But how do you figure a little jerk like that?”

  I did not say anything, although I wanted to remind Loker about his two Australian friends. Perhaps Hanson had been among those who saw the Aussies proudly displaying their trophy, and perhaps his young, half-educated mind had formed the idea that that sort of thing was all right. Still, there had to be something fundamentally wrong with a man who could muster the cold-blooded nerve to mutilate a corpse with a knife. Marsden’s act was at least comprehensible, but Hanson’s was beyond understanding. I did not want to hear anything more about it. My quota of emotional shocks had been filled for that day.

  * * *

  Slogging back into the swamp, we saw the enemy dead lying in a neat rank, as if for an inspection. A photographer—I think he was with the Stars and Stripes—was taking pictures of them from various angles. Amazingly, there were only four of them. Four. We had fought for an hour and a half, expended hundreds of rounds of small-arms ammunition, twenty mortar shells, and a full concentration of 155s to kill four men. I remarked on this to someone in company headquarters, who said, “There were a lot of pieces and blood trails around, so we estimate eight VC KIA.” When I asked how that figure had been arrived at, the marine replied, “Oh, I guess somebody just counted up the arms and legs and divided by four.”

  I handed the documents to Peterson and gave him a report of our excursion to the Viet Cong base camp. He seemed pleased, which, of course, pleased me. The platoon was then ordered to outpost a hill at the western edge of the marsh. We were to keep a lookout for A Company, which was supposed to link up with us later in the day. They had captured five prisoners in a skirmish near Hoi-Vuc.

  The platoon was exhausted by the time it had hacked its way to the top of the three-hundred-foot hill. A perimeter was formed, after which the marines collapsed, resting their heads against their helmets and packs. I then performed that time-honored platoon commander’s duty, a foot inspection. The men removed their mud-caked boots and peeled off their drenched socks. From the knees down, their legs were covered with leeches and their skin was shriveled and white, like the skin of old men.

  As I moved from one man to the next, I became aware of a subtle difference among them, and I might not have noticed it if I had not known them so intimately. They had taken part in their first action, though a minor one that had lasted only ninety minutes. But their company had killed during those ninety minutes; they had seen violent death for the first time and something of the cruelty combat arouses in men. Before the fire-fight, those marines fit both definitions of the word infantry, which means either a “body of soldiers equipped for service on foot” or “infants, boys, youths collectively.” The difference was that the second definition could no longer be applied to them. Having received that primary sacrament of war, baptism of fire, their boyhoods were behind them. Neither they nor I thought of it in those terms at the time. We didn’t say to ourselves, We’ve been under fire, we’ve shed blood, now we’re men. We were simply aware, in a way we could not express, that something significant had happened to us. Moving around the perimeter, I caught snatches of conversation as the men talked about the experience; some were trying to master their emotions by talking them out; others masked their feelings under a surface toughness. “D’ ja see that Charlie Marsden greased?” “Yeah, blew his friggin’ brains out. Dude in first platoon told me you could see the back of his teeth through the hole in his head.” “Yeah, forty-five at close range’ll fuck up your health record every time.” “They found an I.D. on one of the Charlies says he was only fifteen. Fifteen, man. A goddamn kid.” “Fifteen, shee-hit. Listen, all these gooks look younger’n they are. It was probably a phony I.D.” “Well, they wasn’t much older than any of us. I don’t know, but I felt kinda sorry for ’em. No shit.” “No shit? You think they would’ve cried their eyes out if it was the other way around? No way. Fuck it. They woulda zapped us, so we zapped them. Sorry about that.”

  Most of the men were too worn out to talk for long. Eventually a sullen silence fell over them. The reaction was setting in, a general feeling of disappointment and depression. The fire-fight, our first experience of combat, had not turned out the way we had imagined it would. Used to the orderly sham battles of field exercises, the real thing proved to be more chaotic and much less heroic than we had anticipated. Perhaps it had been heroic for Lemmon’s platoon, but for the rest of us, it amounted to a degrading manhunt; pulling bodies out of the mud had left us feeling ashamed of ourselves, more like ghouls than soldiers.

  And the mutilation caused by modern weapons came as a shock. We were accustomed to seeing the human body intact; to us, a corpse was an elderly uncle lying in a coffin, his face powdered and his tie in place. Death admits to no degrees: the elderly uncle who dies decently in bed is no less dead than the enemy so
ldier whose head has been blown apart by a forty-five-caliber bullet. Nevertheless, we were sickened by the torn flesh, the viscera and splattered brains. The horror lay in the recognition that the body, which is supposed to be the earthly home of an immortal soul, which people spend so much time feeding, conditioning, and beautifying, is in fact only a fragile case stuffed full of disgusting matter. Even the brain, the wondrous, complex organ that generates the power of thought and speech, is nothing more than a lump of slick, gray tissue. The sight of mutilation did more than cause me physical revulsion; it burst the religious myths of my Catholic childhood. I could not look at those men and still believe their souls had “passed on” to another existence, or that they had had souls in the first place. I could not believe those bloody messes would be capable of a resurrection on the Last Day. They did, in fact, seem “more” dead. Massacred or annihilated might better describe what had happened to them. Whatever, they were gone for good, body, mind, and spirit. They had seen their last day, and not much of it, either. They died well before noon.

  * * *

  Finding no signs of immersion foot (a skin disease similar to trench foot) among the men, I returned to the platoon CP to have a look at myself. Campbell and Widener were there, resting under a poncho they had stretched between two trees. It was noon, without a breath of wind, and the sky seemed like a blazing aluminum lid clamped over the world. But the sun felt good against my bare feet.

  Campbell talked to himself as he burned a leech off one of his legs. “There you go,” he said, touching the black, swollen thing with the tip of a lighted cigarette. “A little hot-foot for you.” The leech curled up and dropped off. “There, got the little fucker. Got any on you, lieutenant?”

  “Haven’t checked yet,” I said.

  “Well, you just let your old platoon sergeant look for you. Got to drop your drawers, sir.”

  I took my trousers down, and, feeling a little ridiculous, stood while Campbell examined. Only one leech was on me, and I watched with pleasure as it recoiled under the heat of the cigarette.

  “That’s it, lieutenant. Guess leeches don’t like your blood type. There was more’n one on old watashiwa.”

  The Japanese word, which means “yours truly,” reminded me of the battalion’s peacetime days on Okinawa. That seemed a very long time ago.

  Standing on the brow of the hill, I was able to see the battalion’s positions on Hills 268 and 327. They were a good eight or nine miles off, but the clear air and some accident in the contours of the land made them appear only a short walk away. The tops of both hills, scoured of underbrush to clear fields-of-fire, rose red and bare from the surrounding green. The tents showed as black dots and the trenchworks as a dark, irregular line running across the red earth. That distant, dusty camp represented civilization to me. Showers. A cot to sleep on. Hot chow.

  Instead, I sat down to the usual C rations. It was difficult to eat because of the heat, because I was sick of Cees, and because I kept remembering that boy that White and I had found: the still-staring eyes, like those of a dead fish, the grinning, half-opened mouth.

  We were idle for the rest of the day. Occasionally I swept my field glasses over the valley to the west, looking for a sign of A Company. It was hopeless. Nothing could be seen through the green opacity of the jungle except a cluster of huge, oblong boulders standing on a hillside like enormous tombstones. In the end, A Company never made the linkup, having been forced to turn back by impenetrable forests. The jungle had won another round.

  Toward evening, a helicopter landed on the island of solid ground where the four bodies lay. They had stiffened into odd positions and were beginning to smell. Together with the captured documents and equipment, the corpses were loaded onto the aircraft. It took off, its slow, vertical ascent reminding me of a balloon rising on an updraft. I assumed it was taking the bodies to the Danang cemetery, where the enemy dead were said to be buried in mass graves.

  Peterson called me on the radio and ordered the platoon to move back to the landing zone; the company would set up its night defensive position there. Hitching their packs and slinging rifles, the marines stumbled down the hill, plodded across the marsh once again, and filed up the ridge where the VC had broken before 1st platoon’s assault. Except for some spent cartridge casings, there was nothing to show that a fight had taken place. The swamp where men had died was empty. Its red mud had seeped into the shell craters, filling them, and the smoke from the burning camp had cleared away. Tired, sweating, mud-spattered, the platoon climbed over the ridge at a processional pace. Frogs, crickets, and birds started singing their evening chorus. Artillery began its nightly refrain, guns thudding in the distance, shells whispering through the air, then exploding with an echoing boom that sounded like the beat of muffled drums.

  While 1st platoon set up an ambush nearby, 2d and 3d formed a perimeter around the landing zone. Watches were set, listening posts sent out, radios calibrated to the night frequency, foxholes dug: the usual routine. When those things were done, the marines settled back to smoke a last cigarette before darkness fell. A few took advantage of the remaining daylight to clean their rifles. There was a burst of laughter at some joke or other. Finally, the sun dropped below the notched rim of the mountains, the Asian mountains that had stood since the beginning of time and probably would still be standing at the end of it.

  Eight

  I have made fellowships—

  Untold of happy lovers in old song.

  For love is not the binding of fair lips …

  But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong …

  —Wilfred Owen

  “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”

  The company passed an uneasy night. A thick fog rolled in around two in the morning, the hour when the VC usually attacked. Sentries saw all sorts of imaginary terrors in the swirling whiteness; one marine, mistaking a bush for a man, fired several shots that kept everyone’s nerves on edge for an hour afterward. Blinded by the mists, we had to rely on our hearing, though that sense was often deceived by small animals thrashing loudly in the dry grass surrounding the landing zone.

  Once, we heard drums beating in the distance. It might have been the VC, but it was probably Montagnard tribesmen signaling each other. Regardless, it was a chilling sound that seemed the essence of all that was frightening and mysterious about the jungle. Sometime later, a marksman in Lemmon’s ambush fired at a guerrilla he had spotted through a starlight scope, a device used for night sniping. He thought the VC had been hit, but wasn’t sure. In the fog and blackness, listening to the strange night noises, none of us was very sure about anything. It seemed dawn would never come.

  When it did, we felt enormously relieved. “I’m sure glad that’s over,” Sergeant Gordon said as he came down from a brush-covered knoll where he had been on listening post. “It was like being inside a safe in there. Couldn’t see a thing, and every time I tried to get a little sleep, something’d start crashing around and we’d think it was a goddamned infiltrator. We were scared shitless half the time.”

  For A and C Companies, the last two days of the operation were the same as the first: hours of monotonous walking punctuated by brief duels with unseen snipers. Two marines were wounded, neither seriously. Several men fell victim to our other enemy, the sun.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, we passed through Giao-Tri, the hamlet 3d platoon had destroyed earlier. A few villagers were still there, searching for their belongings among the mounds of ashes and charred skeletons of their homes. One old man shuffled along, carrying a partially burned pot. He and the others—there were about six altogether—stopped to look at us as we marched by. I can still see them, dressed in ragged cotton clothes, standing against a background of rubble and blackened trees, watching us with a passivity that was not submission. A sense of guilt and compassion came over me at first. Burning their hamlet had been a demonstration of the worst in us, and I would have been grateful for a chance to show the best that was in us. Ins
tinctively, I wanted to do something for them because of what we had done to them. We could not have done much except, perhaps, give them our food and cigarettes. I would have gladly done that, emptied my pockets and pack, and ordered my platoon to empty theirs, but the villagers’ stony coolness inhibited me. They did not seem to want us to do anything. They just stood there, silent and still, showing neither grief nor anger nor fear. Their flat, steady gazes had the same indifference I had seen in the eyes of the woman whose house I had searched in Hoi-Vuc. It was as if they regarded the obliteration of their village as a natural disaster and, accepting it as part of their lot, felt no more toward us than they might feel toward a flood. Such passivity struck me as inhuman. It might have been a stoical mask, concealing deep feelings of sorrow or rage; but if that was the case, their ability to control their emotions was just as inhuman. In this way, my pity for them rapidly turned into contempt. They did not behave the way I expected them to behave; that is, the way Americans would under similar circumstances. Americans would have done something: glared angrily, shaken their fists, wept, run away, demanded compensation. These villagers did nothing, and I despised them for it. Their apparent indifference toward what had happened made me indifferent. Why feel compassion for people who seem to feel nothing for themselves? For I had no conception of the ordeal that constituted their daily existence. Confronted by disease, bad harvests, and above all by the random violence of endless war, they had acquired a capacity to accept what we would have found unacceptable, to suffer what we would have considered insufferable. Their survival demanded this of them. Like the great Annamese Mountains, they endured.