A Rumor of War Read online

  There are other memories. Memories of Nick Pappas, a college football star who tripped a mine that put him in a wheelchair for nearly two years and ended his football-playing days for good; of the young officer in the tank battalion attached to our regiment, wounded in the leg and side by an AK-47, dying slowly of gangrene in a hospital in the Philippines, the doctors amputating the infected leg bit by bit until they reached the upper thigh and could amputate no more; of the rainy night I went to the hospital to identify three marines from my old platoon, Devlin, Lockhart, and Bryce.

  They had been blown up in a listening-post bunker forward of C Company’s lines. I recall that night clearly, more clearly than I care to. Kazmarack and I pulled up to the hospital, parking the jeep beside a tarpaulin that had been stretched over three tables. A light bulb hung over each of the tables. Outside, a power generator hummed steadily and the wet grass sparkled in the glare of the lights. Corporal Gunderson and another marine stood outside, their shoulders hunched against the rain. Gunderson, a squad leader in C Company, said he had found the bodies and had brought them to the hospital.

  Taking my notebook from its plastic wrapper, I ducked under the tarpaulin, which was attached to the tent like an awning. A Navy doctor wearing skintight latex gloves came from the tent, accompanied by a corpsman who held a clipboard. Other corpsmen emerged, carrying the bodies on stretchers, which they lifted onto the tables. Wet, muddy ponchos covered the bodies, except for their boots. There were three corpses, but I saw only five boots. Looking at me, the doctor asked who I was and what I was doing there. I explained that I had come to verify the identities of the dead men and to make a report on the extent of their injuries.

  “Okay, that’s about what I have to do. I understand this might have been an accident.”

  “We’re not sure, yet, sir,” Gunderson said, stepping inside. “The comm wire into their bunker was burned. Maybe lightning hit it and the current set off their grenades. They had about ten grenades in there. Maybe a VC threw a grenade inside, through the firing slit, and set the grenades off. He could have sneaked up easy in this rain.”

  Nodding, the doctor pulled the poncho off of Devlin’s body.

  “All right, can either of you tell me who this is?” he asked.

  “I think it’s Devlin,” I said, my jaw muscles tightening as I looked at the corpse. Peter Devlin. He’s a PFC. Was, I mean.”

  “I want to know who it is.”

  “It’s Devlin,” Gunderson said. “I found them.”

  Satisfied, the doctor began to make his examination. I guessed that he was making an autopsy. He kneaded Devlin’s flesh, turned the body onto its stomach, then onto its back again, and inserted his fingers into the holes the shrapnel had made. Turning to the corpsman, he described the nature of the wounds and gave the medical terms for the injured parts of the body. The corpsman made checkmarks on a form attached to his clipboard. I tried to write it all down, but I had a difficult time understanding some of the anatomical jargon and an even harder time watching the doctor probing into the holes with his gloved hands. Finally, I asked, “Doc, how can you do that?”

  “It’s my job. I’m a doctor. You get used to it, and if you can’t, you shouldn’t be a doctor. Anyhow, he doesn’t feel it.”

  Then he turned to the corpsman. “Penetrating fragment wound, puncture wound, right kidney.” The corpsman made another checkmark. I noticed then that the waistband of Devlin’s underwear was solid red, as red as if his shorts had been dipped in dye. Dye. Die. Death. Died a dyed death. I remembered the way he used to look, the way he looked when he had a face, and how he walked, and the sound of his voice. For some reason, I thought of the time Devlin had been run up for sleeping on post and I’d made a plea of leniency for him because he had always been a good marine. The captain let him off with a warning. Coming out of the captain’s tent, Devlin said to me, “Sir, I know this isn’t military, but I’d like to thank you for what you did for me.” And I, playing the role of the stiff-lipped, stern-eyed officer, replied, “You’re right, Devlin. It isn’t military, so don’t thank me.”

  Bryce was easily identified because there was hardly a mark on him from the waist up. From the waist down, he presented a challenge to the doctor’s professional abilities and to my ability to emulate the doctor’s air of scientific detachment. It was the nakedness of Bryce’s left calfbone that bothered me. Every strip of flesh and muscle had been torn away, so that the splintered bone looked like a broken ivory stick. The doctor said something like, “Traumatic amputation, left foot and compound fracturing, left tibia with massive tissue loss,” and the corpsman made more checkmarks.

  “We found his boot with the foot still in it,” Gunderson said. “But we left it there. We didn’t know what to do with it.”

  The doctor waved his hand to indicate that that was all right, he didn’t need Bryce’s foot. He continued his examination, and when he cut off Bryce’s underwear with a scissors, I turned away. I told myself that it had been quick, too quick for Bryce to have felt a thing; but I didn’t believe it. The pain of a dentist’s drill is quick, but you feel it. So what had that felt like? Could an incredible amount of pain be compressed into a single instant?

  Lockhart had been killed by the concussion, which relieved me. I could not bear any more mutilation. Lockhart looked as if he was asleep, except for his eye sockets, bruised and swollen to the size of golf balls. “They’re young men,” he had said of the VC we had killed three months before. “It’s always the young men who die.” Lockhart was nineteen.

  He was the last. Putting my notebook back in the wrapper, I got into the jeep. I felt peculiar, tense and dizzy, like a man walking a ledge on a high building. A drenched Kazmarack started the engine. Just then, another jeep pulled up.

  “Yo! P.J.!” McCloy called.

  “Murph. What’re you doing down here?”

  “Just making sure the bodies got here all right,” he said, walking over to me.

  I asked if he knew whether or not it had been an accident. I had to know so I could put the reports in the correct file. No, McCloy said, he didn’t know. Feeley would conduct an investigation tomorrow.

  “Well, it doesn’t make much goddamned difference, does it?” I asked rhetorically. “Christ, that’s the worst mess I’ve ever seen.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t so bad.”

  “Are you kidding? Did you see Bryce? They were blown off.”

  “Don’t exaggerate. They were just torn open.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, ‘torn open’ then. You don’t think that’s bad?”

  McCloy held me by both shoulders. In the glow of the light bulbs, I could see him smiling. “No, I don’t think it’s that bad. C’mon, get a hold of yourself.”

  That night, I was given command of a new platoon. They stood in formation in the rain, three ranks deep. I stood front and center, facing them. Devlin, Lockhart, and Bryce were in the first rank, Bryce standing on his one good leg, next to him the faceless Devlin, and then Lockhart with his bruised eye sockets bulging. Sullivan was there too, and Reasoner and all the others, all of them dead except me, the officer in charge of the dead. I was the only one alive and whole, and when I commanded, “Platoon, rye-eet FACE! Sliiiing HARMS! For-WARD HARCH!” they faced right, slung their rifles, and began to march. They marched along, my platoon of crippled corpses, hopping along on the stumps of their legs, swinging the stumps of their arms, keeping perfect time while I counted cadence. I was proud of them, disciplined soldiers to and beyond the end. They stayed in step even in death.

  I woke up soaked in sweat and afraid. I wasn’t sure if I had been dreaming. It had seemed so real. Even when I realized that it had only been a dream, the fear remained. It was the same fear I had felt after Sullivan’s death. A mortar tube fired in the distance. I started counting: “Thousand-one, thousand-two, thousand-three…” Usually, it took twenty seconds for a mortar shell to reach its target. “Thousand nineteen, thousand twenty, thousand twenty-one, thousand twen
ty-two…” Nothing happened. The shell exploded away off somewhere. It was one of our own mortars. Relieved, I smoked a cigarette, cupping it with my hands so the burning tip would not show through the cracks in the tent. Then, still afraid, I fell into an uneasy sleep.

  In the morning, the sun was hovering just over the line of palm beyond Highway One and the farmers were out working in the fields near the batteries across the dirt road. Waking with the sight of those marching corpses still in my mind like an after-image, I swung off my cot. I saw the new sun and the farmers plowing in the green paddies by the now silent guns, but nothing my eyes saw could blur that persistent vision of dead men marching. Shaving at the improvised washstand outside the tent, I saw their faces in the mirror that reflected my own face. I saw them when I put on my jacket, stiff and white with dried sweat, and when I urinated into one of the acrid-smelling piss-tubes, and when I walked to the mess for breakfast, hopping over the drainage ditch where the mud from the night’s rain was cracked and drying. All these familiar things—the tube with its stench, the feel of the salt-stiffened jacket against my back, the worn footpath leading over the ditch to the mess—told me I was back in the world of concrete realities, where dead men do not rise. So why was the picture of Bryce, Devlin, Lockhart, and the others still so clear, and why did the dream still seem so real, and why when there was no menace was I still afraid?

  I went through the chow line and sat down across from Mora and Harrisson. The yolks of the eggs in my tray looked like two yellow eyes set in a slimy white face. I mashed them with my fork and tried to eat. Mora and Harrisson were talking about a regimental operation that was coming up in a couple of days. It was to be a combined ARVN-Marine operation, aggressively code-named Operation Blast Out. I ate and listened to them and felt the mental bisection that comes from smoking the strong marijuana the bargirls in Vietnam call Buddha Grass. Half of me was in the mess, listening to two officers talking of practical military matters, of axes of advance and landing zones, and the other half was on the dream drill field where legless, armless, eyeless men marched to my commands. Hut-tup-threep-fo, your lef, if you’ve got a left. Then they vanished. Suddenly. I saw them and then I did not see them. In their place, I saw Mora and Harrisson prefigured in death. I saw their living faces across from me and, superimposed on those, a vision of their faces as they would look in death. It was a kind of double exposure. I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead.

  I did not go crazy, not in the clinical sense, but others did. The war was beginning to take a psychological toll. Malaria and gunshot and shrapnel wounds continued to account for most of our losses, but in the late summer the phrases acute anxiety reaction and acute depressive reaction started to appear on the sick-and-injured reports sent out each morning by the division hospital. To some degree, many of us began to suffer “anxiety” and “depressive” reactions. I noticed, in myself and in other men, a tendency to fall into black, gloomy moods and then to explode out of them in fits of bitterness and rage. It was partly caused by grief, grief over the deaths of friends. I thought about my friends a lot; too much. That was the trouble with the war then: the long lulls between actions gave us too much time to think. I would brood about Sullivan, Reasoner, and the others and feel an emptiness, a sense of futility. They seemed to have died for nothing; if not for nothing, then for nothing tangible. Those men might as well have died in automobile accidents. It made me feel guilty to think about them, guilty about my own comparatively safe life on the staff, guiltier still about being the one who had translated their deaths into numbers on a scoreboard. I had acquired a hatred for the scoreboard, for the very sight of it. It symbolized everything I despised about the staff, the obsession with statistics, the indifference toward the tragedy of death; and because I was on the staff, I despised myself. It did not matter that I was there by orders, that I had made several attempts to get transferred back to a line company. I despised myself every time I went up to the board and wrote in some new numbers. Maybe it was an extreme form of the cafard. One of its symptoms is a hatred for everything and everyone around you; now I hated myself as well, plunging into morbid depressions and thinking about committing suicide in some socially acceptable way—say, by throwing myself on an enemy hand grenade. At other times, I felt urges to kill someone else. When in those moods, the slightest irritation was likely to set me off. Once, I asked another lieutenant a question about a message that had come into the adjutant’s office. It was hot inside the tent, almost unbearable, and he was in no cheerful mood himself. “What’s troubling you?” he snapped. Leaping up, I smashed the message in his face and shouted, “This is what’s troubling me, you shithead!” The outburst relieved some sort of inner tension, and I calmed down as quickly as I had flared up.

  Some men lost their nerve. One marine took his rifle and walked off into the bush, telling his buddies that he could no longer stand waiting for an attack and was going after the VC by himself. A Navy corpsman in one of the battalions shot himself in the foot so he would not have to go on any more patrols. A company commander cracked up under a heavy mortar bombardment. In a panic, he ran away, abandoning his men and leaving his executive officer to take command.

  And combat madness could be murderous. As the legal officer, I reviewed summaries of the investigations and court-martials conducted in the regiment. That was how I learned of the case of two marines in 2d Battalion. For over four months, they had been out in the bush without relief and with no more than three or four hours’ sleep a night. They had seen their comrades killed and had themselves killed men. Surviving half a dozen operations and a number of combat patrols, all they had to look forward to was more of the same.

  In the dry season, even the nights in Vietnam are hot, seldom any cooler than eighty or eighty-five degrees; and it was hot on the night Harris woke up Olson and told him it was his turn to go on watch.

  “Screw you,” Olson said. “I ain’t going on post.”

  “Get up, Olson. You’re my relief. I gotta get a little sleep.”

  “Screw it and screw you, Harris. I gotta get a little sleep myself.”

  “Olson, I hate your guts. I oughtta kill you, you shitbird.”

  Olson stood up and leveled his rifle at Harris. “You ain’t got the balls to kill me.”

  “Olson, you shitbird, I gotta automatic rifle pointed at your fuckin’ head. All I gotta do is give a little trigger squeeze and I’ll blow your head off.”

  A few other marines, who were later witnesses at the court-martial, stood watching the confrontation. Perhaps they thought nothing would happen.

  “Like I said, Harris, you ain’t got the balls to do it.” And that was the last thing Olson ever said. Harris pumped five or six rounds into Olson’s skull at point-blank range.

  * * *

  Operation Blast Out began and ended in early August. Three thousand marines and ARVN soldiers, supported by tanks, artillery, planes, and the six-inch guns of a U.S. Navy cruiser, managed to kill two dozen Viet Cong in three days. Even those two dozen died hard. They holed up in a complex of caves and bunkers near the Song Yen River. In scenes reminiscent of the mopping-up operations against the Japanese, the marines and ARVN fought the enemy from cave to cave, bunker to bunker, blowing them out with grenades and satchel charges.

  A small number of enemy soldiers and one hundred and twenty VCS were captured and brought to HQ for interrogation. VCS stood for Viet Cong suspects, a term applied to almost every unarmed male Vietnamese found in enemy-controlled areas. Ninety percent of them turned out to be innocent civilians. The suspects and the Viet Cong prisoners were brought in by helicopter. Dressed in motley uniforms, the VC looked small and ragged compared to
the marine guards who herded them from the landing zone to a dusty field at the side of the road. The marines ordered them to squat, which they did with the quick compliance of men who know their lives are completely in the hands of other men who would just as soon shoot them. Blindfolded, with their hands tied behind them, the VC looked frightened. The marines were tired and edgy. As usual, it was extremely hot; the thermometer outside the operations tent registered one hundred and ten degrees, and there was no wind. The much larger group of suspects was kept at the landing zone, waiting for the VC to be questioned first.

  One by one, the enemy soldiers were led into a tent, where an American staff sergeant and two ARVN interpreters from an intelligence unit interrogated them. Outside, one of the Viet Cong, a boy of eighteen or so, started to cry when his older comrade was led away for questioning. I guess he thought the man was going to be shot. He called out the man’s name, and one of the guards bent down and pinched the boy’s lips together. “Now you shut up,” the marine said. “You keep your goddamned mouth shut.” He moved away, but the boy kept crying and calling out his friend’s name. “I said, keep your goddamned mouth shut!” The marine’s voice sounded brittle, and in the pressure-cooker heat, I could sense that something was going to happen if the prisoner did not quiet down. I got one of the interpreters to tell him there was nothing to fear, they were only going to be questioned. That was a half-truth: they were going to be questioned, but when that was done they would be turned over to the South Vietnamese Army, who would probably shoot them. The ARVN shot most of the prisoners we handed over to them.

  Inside the tent, the VC for whom the boy had been crying was proving stubborn. He refused to look at his interrogator, the American sergeant, or to answer any questions. All he said was, “Toi khoung hieu” (I don’t understand) or “Toi khoung biet” (I don’t know). He was wearing shorts, sandals, and a camouflage shirt, and looked about thirty years old. He sat with his legs drawn up, his eyes fixed on the ground. “What is your name?” “Toi khoung biet.” “How old are you?” “Toi khoung hieu.” “How … old … are … you?” “Toi khoung biet.” “What is your unit?” “Toi khoung hieu.”