A Rumor of War Read online

  The briefing started. Stasek and Kazmarack returned about a quarter of an hour later, both looking overwrought.

  “Lieutenant, sir,” Stasek said, “what the hell’s going on? We had those VC buried…”

  I told them what was going on and asked where the bodies were.

  “Outside, sir.” Stasek started to laugh in the slightly hysterical way a man does when what he really wants to do is scream. “Christ, we had to pull them out of where we buried them. One of the VC’s guts spilled out of him. Then I pulled at another one and his leg started to come off. They were just coming apart.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said. “Sorry about all this. Just stand by for now, but you’ll have to bring the bodies when the briefing’s over.”

  “Yes, sir. If that general’s going to look at those bodies, we’d better hose the trailer down.”

  “Okay, hose it down then,” I said, walking out of the tent with him and Kazmarack. The trailer was parked in the same place as before.

  The briefing was going on next door. I could not hear every word, just disjointed phrases: “and we’re planning further operations in the Le-My area … that’s here, general…” Through the screening, I saw Thompson sitting, legs crossed. He nodded while the briefing officer talked and waved a pointer at the big wall map in the colonel’s tent. Wheeler was standing by his desk, a collection of captured enemy weapons hanging on a partition that divided his half of the tent from Brooks’s. “One of our patrols engaged a VC force in that vicinity this morning, sir … activity has increased…” Twenty yards away, Kazmarack and another marine had connected a hose to a water carrier and were filling the trailer. The general, uncrossing his legs, said something I couldn’t quite hear. “Yes, sir,” replied the briefing officer. With the trailer filled, Kazmarack and the other marine disconnected the hose. They lifted the hitch from the ground, pushed the trailer back a couple of feet, pulled it forward, pushed it back, pulled it forward again, sluicing it out. There was a murmuring inside the colonel’s tent. “I think I can answer that one for you, sir,” someone said. Outside, Corporal Stasek said, “Okay, Kaz, tip it back a little.” Kazmarack and the marine who was helping him tipped the trailer backward. They held it like that, each with both arms under the hitch, their arms straining from the weight, while Stasek squatted, reached underneath the trailer, and unscrewed the plug in the bottom. He pulled his hand back quickly when the water poured out in a heavy, red stream speckled with bits of white stuff. “Jesus Christ,” Stasek said, “look at it all.”

  When the briefing ended, General Thompson, Colonel Wheeler, and the other officers came out of the tent. I saluted smartly as they walked past me toward my freshly washed corpses. I thought of them as mine; they were the dead and I was the officer in charge of the dead. A rivulet of blood-colored water flowed from under the trailer and soaked into the dust. The brass stepped over it carefully, to avoid ruining the shine on their boots. Someone pointed out the bodies and told the general that they were the VC who had been killed in the morning. He glanced at them, said something to the colonel, then continued on to the LZ, where his helicopter waited.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon puttering over some meaningless paperwork. When I walked into the mess for the evening meal, Chaplain Ryerson and the medical officer, Milsovic, stopped eating and looked at me. Putting my tray on the plywood table, I sat down. The chaplain, who was as thin and cheerless as the doctor was heavyset and jolly, slid along the bench to sit across from me.

  “The doctor tells me we lost another marine today,” he said, leaning forward slightly. He sounded accusatory, as if in recording it, I had been responsible for the boy’s death.

  “Yes, sir. We did.”

  “I just hope these boys are dying for a good reason, lieutenant. What do you think?”

  “All due respect, chaplain, but we’re not supposed to talk shop in the mess. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about casualties. I’ve had enough of that today.”

  “Shop or no shop, I just hope these boys aren’t getting killed because some officer wants a promotion.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “What do you mean, you wouldn’t know about that? You saw that show that was put on for the general today, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. But right now, I’d like to finish chow. Maybe you ought to talk to the Old Man about it. What do you expect me to do?”

  “Maybe you could explain what we’re doing over here. You’ve been a platoon commander. When we got here, we were just supposed to defend the airfield for a while and then go back to Okinawa. Now we’re in the war to stay and nobody has been able to explain to me what we’re doing. I’m no tactician, but the way it looks to me, we send men out on an operation, they kill a few VC, or the VC kill them, and then we pull out and the VC come right back in. So we’re back where we started. That’s the way it looks to me. I think these boys are getting killed for nothing.”

  I held up my hands. “Chaplain, what do you want me to say? Maybe you’re right. I don’t know, I’m just a second lieutenant. Anyway, it’s not that bad a war. We’ve taken only eighty-four casualties since the end of April, and only twelve of those have been KIA. Hell, in World War Two an outfit like this would take eighty-four casualties in five minutes.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? This isn’t World War Two.”

  “What I mean is that twelve KIAs in two months isn’t bad.”

  Ryerson’s face reddened and his voice got strident. “That’s twelve wrecked homes. Twelve wrecked homes, lieutenant.” He pointed a finger at me. “Twelve KIA is pretty bad for the families of those dead marines.” I didn’t say anything. My food was getting cold in the tray. A few senior officers had turned around, to see what the chaplain’s outburst was all about.

  “The doctor here and I think in terms of human suffering, not statistics,” Ryerson said, pressing his point. “That’s something you infantry types seem to forget.”

  I thought of Sergeant Sullivan then and remembered how deeply his death had affected the “infantry types” in C Company.

  “Well, good for you and the doctor,” I said. “You’re real humanitarians. Do you think I liked doing what I did today? Do you think I get a big fucking kick out of it, sky pilot?”

  “Now, hold on, mister…”

  “Hey, Phil,” Milsovic said. “Watch that dago temper of yours. The chaplain didn’t mean anything personal.”

  I cooled off, apologized to Ryerson, and finished eating.

  Leaving the mess, I went back to my desk. It was difficult to work. The tent was stifling, and I felt confused. The chaplain’s morally superior attitude had rankled me, but his sermon had managed to plant doubt in my mind, doubt about the war. Much of what he had said made sense: our tactical operations did seem futile and directed toward no apparent end. There were other doubts, aroused by the events of that day, which had made a mockery of all the Catholic theology the Dominican and Jesuit priests had preached to me in high school and college. Man’s body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit; man is created in the image and likeness of God; have respect for the dead. Well, the four temples in that trailer had undergone considerable demolition, and it was hard to believe a Holy Spirit had ever resided in them. As for their being the image and likeness of the Deity, they were more the image and likeness of the crushed dogs seen lying at the sides of highways. And we had not showed them much respect, though they were the dead. I still believed in the cause for which we were supposed to be fighting, but what kind of men were we, and what kind of army was it that made exhibitions of the human beings it had butchered?

  Twelve wrecked homes. The chaplain’s words echoed. That’s twelve wrecked homes. The doctor and I think in terms of human suffering, not statistics. I thought about Sullivan again. He was one of the statistics, just like the four enemy soldiers killed that morning. The only difference was that they were in different columns on the colonel’s scoreboard. Twelve wrecked homes. I thought about Sull
ivan’s young widow in Pennsylvania, and a chill passed through me. Maybe her husband had died for nothing, maybe for something. Either way, it could not make much difference to her now.

  I put in a few more hours at my desk, had a beer, and went to bed early. I had the late duty-watch and knew I wouldn’t get much sleep after twelve o’clock. The big guns boomed all night.

  Eleven

  If I were fierce and bald and short of breath,

  I’d live with scarlet majors at the Base,

  And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

  —Siegfried Sassoon

  “Base Details”

  Lying on my cot, I heard the crackling of rifle fire, the drumming of rain against the taut canvas above my head, and a voice calling, “Stand-to. Up out of the rack, hundred-percent alert.” It was very early morning, I was only half awake, and the rifle fire, the voice, and the sound of the rain seemed to come from far off. Then one of the eight-inch howitzers let go. I sat suddenly upright and knew I wasn’t dreaming. The small-arms fire was loud and fairly close. Webb Harrisson—it was his voice I had heard—stood at one end of the tent, unhooking the flaps.

  “Hey-ey, P.J., you’re finally awake. I think we’ve got visitors again tonight.”

  Parting the flap, he went outside. I grabbed my carbine from my footlocker and followed him. Jamming a banana clip into the carbine’s magazine well, pulling the bolt back to chamber a round, I ran clumsily in the mud toward the perimeter. I could not see Harrisson. The rain felt cold on my bare back. Off to the left, around 1st Battalion’s section of the line, muzzle-flashes winked in the darkness. Tracers from a machine gun streaked in swift succession across the flat rice paddies beyond the wire.

  Slipping in mud that had been powdery dust before the rain, I fell and rolled into a foxhole just as a flare popped. The water in the foxhole was knee-deep and cold and silty-feeling inside my boots. Another flare went up, and another. They hung briefly in the black sky, then started to drift downward on their small parachutes, swinging back and forth, making a strange, squeaking noise as they swung in the wind. I could see the rain slanting across the wavering orange circles of the flares, the outlines of the tents, two helmeted marines in a foxhole to the left front of mine, and, across the road, the thick, wet-shining barrels of the eight-inchers. The guns kept firing at their distant targets, as if they were indifferent to the petty skirmishing only a hundred yards away.

  I guessed it was another probe. The night before—the night of June 22—the VC had tried to infiltrate through headquarters company lines. Now they appeared to be looking for weak spots in One-Three’s perimeter. That was only a guess—I had no idea of what was actually going on. The flares hit the ground, sputtered for a few seconds, and went out. The regimental sergeant major sloshed past me dressed only in a pair of green undershorts and carrying a Thompson submachine gun in one hand. I called him over. Big and bulky, he jumped into the foxhole with a splash.

  “Jee-suz fucking Chee-rist,” he bellowed, not caring who heard him. “You didn’t tell me this was a goddamned swimming pool, lieutenant.”

  “Never mind that. What the hell’s going on?”

  “How the hell should I know? Probably a couple of scared kids shooting at bushes.”

  A spent tracer floated overhead, glowing like a spark from a campfire. There were more flares. We stared out at the landscape they dimly lighted but saw nothing that vaguely resembled a Viet Cong.

  “It’s just what I figured,” said the RSM. “Nothing out there but bushes, fucking bushes. And here I am, up to my ass in mud. It ain’t dignified.”

  The firing had stopped. We waited, shivering and wet, for another hour before the stand-to was secured.

  The sergeant major had been wrong about marines shooting at bushes. Shortly after reveille, two dead VC were carried into the CP. They were trussed to bamboo poles, like bagged game, and their black hair hung down in long, blood-matted shocks. They were wearing dark-blue uniforms, indicating they had been main-force regulars. Still trussed hand and foot to the poles, the bodies were tossed into a truck and carted off. I went into the colonel’s tent and added two to the number in the VC-KIA column on the scoreboard.

  The next seven nights were much the same. There were probes of the headquarters perimeter or of the battalions’ positions, a couple of random mortar attacks on isolated outposts, a few attempted infiltrations of the airfield defenses, now manned by 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. With all the alarms, we got very little sleep.

  Sometime that week, Harrisson told me that the two VC killed on the 23d had been part of a five- or six-man enemy patrol. Apparently, they had been making a reconnaissance of 1st Battalion’s lines and had made the mistake of getting too close; a machine-gunner had killed them at point-blank range. That was all well and good, Harrisson said, good for the machine-gunner’s cool-headedness and marksmanship, but the increase in VC activity indicated that reports of an impending enemy attack on the airfield were more than rumor. At the same time, he said, the VC were massing forces in Quang Ngai province, south of Danang, with the apparent objective of seizing the provincial capital. And finally, two North Vietnamese Army divisions were now operating in the South, one in the Central Highlands and the other somewhere in I Corps.

  “I’m telling you, Charlie’s going to try something soon.” Harrisson looked at our sprawling tent camp, everything aboveground, uncamouflaged, laid out in tidy rows, and nothing between it and the VC but a roll of rusting concertina wire. Harrisson laughed. “Jesus, Phil, even the French dug in.”

  A few days later, two VC were captured while scouting a part of the regiment’s positions in broad daylight. The next day, a patrol from the reconnaissance battalion sighted a battery of enemy 82-mm mortars being moved toward the airfield. The patrol, too far from the VC to attack, requested artillery fire but were turned down because another marine patrol was lost in the same area, and no one wanted to risk hitting friendly troops. The reconnaissance patrol leader reported the map coordinates of the mortars and suggested they were being moved into position to shell the airfield. The report was duly noted and buried in a file cabinet. On the 28th, an ARVN district headquarters near us was shelled, and the VC dropped mortars on an isolated section of One-Three’s lines, killing and wounding several marines.

  You did not have to be Clausewitz to conclude that all those incidents added up to something: the enemy was planning an attack on the airfield, the defense of which was still our primary mission. But the regimental staff was not about to be panicked into hasty action. We did not spend that week feverishly analyzing the pattern of VC activity or drawing up plans for counterattacks and improving existing defenses or doing any of the things a military staff is supposed to do. No, level-headed professionals that we were, we did what staff officers usually do: nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. We played volleyball in our off-hours, and, because there wasn’t enough work to keep even half the staff’s twenty-odd officers busy, most of our hours were off-hours. We also read a lot—I finished The Adventures of Augie March that week—or pursued individual hobbies. Major Burin, the communications officer, practiced calling square-dance tunes, accompanied by the screeching fiddle music he played on his portable tape recorder. He could be heard all over camp, singing in his Kansas twang: “Allemande left with the old left hand … swing your partners, do-si-do, gents to the center form a Texas star.” The civil affairs officer, Tim Schwartz (not the Schwartz I had replaced), discovered a new way of writing poetry: he made lists of the most esoteric words he could find in the dictionary, then strung them together in the order in which he had found them. He was quite proud of his incomprehensible verses and asked if I knew where he might publish them. I suggested the Kenyon Review.

  When they did any work, the staff sections concentrated on daily minutiae and routine reports. The S-1 section filed its usual strength and casualty reports. S-2—intelligence—made reports on the enemy’s order of battle and wrote accounts of recent enemy actions. The
latter were of some historical but of little intelligence value, because S-2’s main function was not to chronicle what the VC had already done but to forecast what they were likely to do. The operations section, S-3, went on logging situation reports in the unit diary, drawing up plans for operations that almost invariably sent battalions into areas where the enemy was not and compiling the number of patrols the line companies conducted each day. S-4 kept up our inventories of rations and ammunition.

  The division general staff sent several messages alerting us to critical matters:

  1) Marines who had nonregulation cloth name tags sewn above the left pockets of their shirts were to remove them. Henceforth, names would be stamped on in half-inch (½) block letters.

  2) The practice of stripping to the waist while on working parties, patrols, etc. would no longer be tolerated by the commanding general. When outside, all personnel were to wear their shirts and/or undershirts.

  3) The circulation of the Marine Corps Gazette was dropping. Officers who had not already done so were requested to subscribe.

  And so the staffs went on, sticking to routines, which was just another way of doing nothing. They dealt with the enemy threat by ignoring it, and on July 1, the Viet Cong attacked the airfield.

  It was around two o’clock in the morning, and I was just coming off duty-watch in the operations tent when the first shells hit. As a precaution against floods, the tent had been elevated on a platform of plywood and two-by-fours. A set of wooden steps led from the door to the ground. When I was about halfway down the steps, I saw a bright flash above the trees across Highway One and then heard the distinctive crump of a bursting mortar. The trees marked the outer edges of the airbase, which was about five hundred yards from the regimental CP. The airstrip itself, where the shell had struck, was at least another thousand yards away; so I felt no sense of immediate danger, only curiosity. Climbing back up the steps, I looked across the field beyond the CP, toward the dark, broken line of trees, and caught several more flashes. The explosions of the 82-millimeters came a few seconds later, the shells bursting rapidly one after another, like a string of firecrackers, only much louder, and the sky, which had been black above the tree line, was now a pale, flickering red. Inside the CP, marines were rolling out of their cots and grabbing their weapons.