A Rumor of War Read online

  Exasperated and sweating heavily, the American leaned forward and shouted in English, “Look at me, you son of a bitch. I said you look at me when I talk to you. I want to see your eyes when I’m talking to you.”

  The prisoner, small but muscular and with the face of a veteran soldier, did not look up.

  With one hand, the sergeant grabbed the man’s face, pressing his thumb into one of the prisoner’s cheeks, his fingers into the other, squeezing them together. He turned the man’s head sharply from side to side. “You’re real hardcore, huh? Now you look at me when I talk to you. Anh hieu? You understand me now?”

  “Toi khoung hieu,” the VC said through clenched teeth.

  The American turned to one of the interpreters. “Tell him to look at me when I talk to him.”

  The interpreter translated. The sergeant let go of the prisoner’s face. The man’s head dropped into the position it had been in before, chin tucked in, eyes looking at the ground between his legs.

  “Tell him to look at me, goddamnit!”

  Grabbing the prisoner’s hair, the ARVN soldier jerked the man’s head up and pulled it so far back that I could see his neck muscles straining. The interpreter slapped him twice, not with his full hand, but with the backs of his fingers, flicking his fingernails across the prisoner’s face. It was a quick, subtle motion, like brushing a fly away, but I could hear the sharp crack the fingernails made against the man’s skin.

  “Ask him if he understands now,” the American said. “He looks at me when I talk to him and he answers my questions.”

  The ARVN spoke rapidly in Vietnamese, pulling the prisoner’s head back until the latter was looking straight up at the ceiling of the tent. The VC said something. The interpreter released him, and his head fell forward; but now he was looking at the sergeant.

  “I think he understands now, trung-si,” the ARVN soldier said.

  Outside, the suspects were being marched down the road toward the field where the last of the VC, squatting in the heat, waited to be questioned. Blindfolded, they marched in single file, each holding onto the shoulders of the man in front of him. Suspects! Looking at them, I wondered what they had done to arouse suspicion; they were all ragged, underfed men, and not one of them was under forty. I stood outside the tent and watched them marching through the dust raised by their bare or sandaled feet. I was to wait until all had been questioned and count the number, if any, who were confirmed as Viet Cong. Then I would add that number to the VC-POW column on the scoreboard. They came down the road with the light, rhythmic shuffle the peasant girls used when walking with carrying-poles across their shoulders. Marine guards moved along the flanks of the column, yelling orders none of the Vietnamese understood. It was midafternoon, and I could see in the paddy fields beyond camp other, luckier farmers filing down the dikes toward their shaded villages. On the road, an old man, last in the file, was having trouble keeping up. He fell behind, groped for the man in front of him, found him, then fell behind again, groping. “Lai-dai, lai-dai. Maulen,” one of the guards said. (Get over here, quickly.) The old man pulled his blindfold down and, seeing where he was, caught up with the column, replaced the blindfold, and put his hands back on the other man’s shoulders. He wheezed when the guard clubbed him in the back with the flat end of a rifle butt. “You keep that blindfold on,” the guard said, tying it tighter. “You keep this on. Keep on. Understand?” In April, the Vietnamese officer whom Peterson had stopped from striking a villager had said we would one day learn how things were done in Vietnam. A lot had happened to us since April, and we were learning. Some of our friends had been killed, others maimed. We had survived, but in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty. His life, his sight, or limbs are not the only things he stands to lose.

  The column was halted and the suspects made to lie on their stomachs in the field. The guards bound their hands. They lay there, as limp and passive as sleeping children, while the guards tied them up or rolled them over to search for documents. The documents, placed in small piles, were later examined by one of the ARVN interpreters, who asked each of the Vietnamese a few questions. If everything was in order, the man was officially declared a civilian and released; if not, he was taken into the tent for interrogation by the sergeant and his persuasive assistants. The ARVN noticed that one of the suspects had loosened his bonds and pointed it out to a marine guard, who went over and kicked the prone man in the ribs. Jamming a knee into the man’s back, he said, “Okay, let’s see you get out of this one.” The man’s feet were pulled up and tied to his hands, so that he lay on his belly with his body bent like a bow.

  Nearby, a very old man—he must have been in his eighties—searched through one of the piles for his papers. He looked worried. Valid identification could mean the difference between freedom and a POW camp, even between life and death. In that sense, the documents were the most precious thing the old man owned. By some oversight, the guards had failed to tie him up; or perhaps they had thought him too old and frail to run away. They had also put a sheer, cheesecloth blindfold on him, which he did not have to remove to look through the papers. He continued to rummage through the pile, his dry, wrinkled hands fluttering nervously as he picked up each piece of paper and held it close to his eyes. Finally he found them, clucking happily to himself as he stuffed them in his shirt pocket. Having that sheer blindfold put on him was probably the best thing that had happened to him all day. It might have been the best thing that had ever happened to him. He was lucky. He had found his papers without arousing the anger or suspicion of the guards. The ARVN soldier would now come up to him, look at his identification, ask him a few questions, and, seeing that he was a very old, harmless man, let him return to his village. For the time being, that old man had been spared becoming another casualty of the war.

  Part Three

  In Death’s Grey Land

  Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,

  Drawing no dividends from time’s tomorrows.

  —Siegfried Sassoon

  “Dreamers”

  Thirteen

  They come like sacrifices in their trim,

  And to the fire-eyed maid of smoky war

  All hot and bleeding will we offer them …

  —Shakespeare

  Henry IV, Part I

  The monsoons began in mid-September. At first, the rains fell only at night and in the early morning, heavy rains blown by winds that came off the sea and out of the mountains north of Danang. At dawn, the wind dropped to a light, steady breeze, the rain to a drizzle. Out on the line, riflemen in flooded foxholes woke to a landscape that looked like a photographic negative, all grays, whites, and blacks. The peaks of the Annamese Mountains were hidden by clouds, the rice paddies and valleys by a mist called the crachin, and the slopes showing between the clouds and the layers of mist were as dark as cinder. The weather cleared by midmorning; the fog lifted, and we could see the rim of the mountains again. The air became still and oppressive, the paddies steaming in the sun. It stayed like that until the late afternoon, when clouds started to build once more over the mountains, and the wind rose, rattling the tin cans strung on the perimeter wire. There was an occasional peal of thunder, a flat rolling roar indistinguishable from the sound of artillery. In the evening, the rains began again.

  Regimental headquarters was moved forward that month, to a patch of muddy flats near the Dai-La Pass. A battery of 155s was emplaced nearby, so we continued to be serenaded by gunfire. There were more guns now, and tanks and tent camps, more barbed wire spreading steel thorns through the late-summer rice. Also, more casualties, three to four times as many. The splendid little war, which had long since ceased to be splendid, was now growing up to be a big war.

  There were two hills in front of HqCo’s new position, with the Dai-La Pass between them. The old French watchtower stood in the pass, overlooking the sodden foothills where the rifle companies were setting up a new main line of resistance. Almost every day, tru
ck convoys carrying wire, sandbags, and ammunition struggled up the mired road that led through the pass and out to the MLR. There was an atmosphere of urgency. The Viet Cong were expected to launch a monsoon offensive, an annual rite in Vietnam, and the new line was supposed to stop them from overrunning the airfield. So, the regiment spent most of that month digging, and filling sandbags and laying wire. At HQ, we started constructing a big command bunker in response to reports that the VC were acquiring quantities of heavy mortars and long-range rockets. While an engineer outfit worked on the bunker, the junior officers in HqCo were detailed to less impressive excavations, swinging picks and entrenching tools alongside the enlisted men. Colonel Nickerson, the regiment’s new CO, had so ordered, less in the interests of fostering a spirit of democracy than as a way of getting the job done quickly. But the atmosphere of urgency could be found only up front, among the infantry battalions. The regimental staff remained its old, relaxed self.

  Digging was hard work in the rain and in mud that turned to clay a few inches below the surface, but we found it a welcome change from the routine of shuffling papers. We were hard at it on the day the colonel ordered us to drop what we were doing and get to work on a priority project: his horseshoe pit. Lieutenant Nargi, Major Burin’s assistant, had been put in charge of the project two weeks earlier. Now the colonel, his large head thrust forward, shoulders hunched, walked over to us and asked why no work had been done on the pit. Nargi’s shrug suggested there was a war on.

  “I’ve been hounding you to get it done, Nargi, and you haven’t done a damned thing,” said Nickerson. “I want that thing built, and now.”

  “Now, sir?” asked Nargi, looking up from the foxhole he had half dug.

  “Now, lieutenant. I said now. You and some of these other people get to work on it now. I want to be pitching horseshoes tomorrow. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The colonel turned around and walked off, broad-backed, thick-necked, a too small helmet on his head. When he was a safe distance away, Nargi threw his entrenching tool down.

  “So help me Christ,” he raged, almost in tears. “I can’t wait till I’m out of this fucked-up outfit. I can’t take any more of this petty bullshit. Between that S.O.B. and Burin, I’m going rock-happy. So help me Christ, I’m going to slug one of them and wind up in the brig.”

  With that out of his system, Nargi got to work. The following evening, the colonel was happily pitching horseshoes. There weren’t any horses in Vietnam, so I don’t know where he found the horseshoes.

  Nickerson had taken command of the regiment in late August, when Colonel Wheeler was sent back to the States because of illness. In contrast to the aloof, aristocratic Wheeler, Nickerson was a loud, profane rakehell who enjoyed mixing with the junior officers and enlisted men. He was also subject to quick, violent changes of mood. In his good moments, he was a warm, affectionate man and an energetic combat officer who worked hard at his trade. In his bad moments, he seemed to take a perverse delight in being unreasonable and often confused the petty with the important. Early on, Nickerson let it be known that he had come to Vietnam to fight a war, and he shook the staff section-heads out of their complacency by demanding a full day’s work. “We ain’t gonna win this war sitting on our asses in these damned enclaves,” he roared on his first day with the regiment. “I’m moving this whole shebang out of here, south of that damned river.” He meant he was going to move the regiment to the Viet Cong stronghold south of Danang, and someone had to remind him that our sister regiment, the 9th Marines, was already operating there. He could be forgiven that oversight. He had just arrived.

  But despite the colonel’s announced intent to make the staff sweat for its pay, it soon fell back into old habits. And Nickerson himself began to display strange quirks.

  One evening around eight o’clock, he walked into the mess and found several officers drinking beer.

  “What in the hell’s going on here?” he asked.

  “Nothing, sir,” said a captain.

  “What do you mean nothing? You’re drinking. I said there would be no drinking in the mess after nineteen-thirty. It’s twenty-hundred hours, gents.”

  “Sir,” the captain reminded Nickerson, “you passed the word that there would be no hard liquor after nineteen-thirty but that we could drink beer until twenty-one-thirty. We secured the hard liquor at nineteen-thirty. We’re drinking beer, sir.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Begging the colonel’s pardon, but you did, sir. You said we could drink beer until twenty-one-thirty.”

  “I never said that,” the colonel shouted. “No, no, I never said that. Now get your asses out of here and get to work. We’re in a war zone and you should all be working. And just for being a wiseass, captain, there’ll be no beer, no liquor, no nothing served in this mess after eighteen-thirty.”

  War zone not withstanding, the headquarters company football pool was one of the colonel’s passions. The 1965 season had begun. The colonel wanted a football pool and he got it. Tim Schwartz was put in charge. I was the alternate and ran the pool in Schwartz’s absence.

  One drenched night, I spent several hours shivering on the perimeter with my ten-man guard detail. A stand-to had just been ordered after a sentry in HqCo was killed by a grenade, his own. (The sentry had seen, or thought he had seen, infiltrators moving toward our wire. He tried to throw a grenade at them, but his hand slipped off the spoon. The grenade went off and blew the sentry in half.) After stand-down, I sloshed back to the adjutant’s tent, made out a casualty report on the sentry, then went into the colonel’s tent to adjust the scoreboard. There I found a furious Nickerson. I was in charge of the pool that week, why had I failed to put out the results? I said that I hadn’t had the time.

  The colonel banged his fist on his desk. “Well, you get on it, Mister Caputo! You get on it first thing in the morning. I want to know who won the pool this week first thing in the morning.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, too wet and tired to be anything but docile.

  * * *

  My old battalion, One-Three, had shipped out for Camp Pendleton, where they were to be reorganized. The battalion was to return to Vietnam in November, but with none of the men who had made the March landing. Its original members were to be discharged or transferred to other units. I was sorry to see them go, but they were not sorry to be leaving. They had lost some of their friends and most of their old convictions about the reasons for the war. Oh, if, someone had asked them, “Do you think you did the right thing?” they would have answered yes. But if you pointed to the casualty list and asked them why their friends had died, they would not have replied with some abstract speech about preserving democracy and stopping Communism. Their answer would have been simple and concrete: “Well, Jack was killed by a sniper and a mortar got Bill and Jim stepped on a mine.” Captain Peterson summed up Charley Company’s collective feelings one night shortly before the battalion shipped out. “Phil,” he said to me over a beer in the HqCo mess, “we’ve been shot at and missed and shit on and hit, and now we’re getting out of this hole.”

  One-Three was relieved by 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, which had been detached from its parent regiment on the West Coast and placed under our operational control. After a twenty-two-day voyage from San Diego to Danang, the new men clattered off the troopship full of restless energy. Compared to the marines in One-Three, they looked splendid, ruddy-faced and full of the raw good health that comes from getting plenty of outdoor exercise, eight hours’ sleep a night, and three hot meals a day. Their rifles were as bright as their faces, their uniforms starched and creased, and they were absolutely gung-ho. Of course they were gung-ho. No dysentery cramped their bowels, no fears shrunk their hearts, no ghosts of dead comrades haunted their memories. Now that they were in Vietnam, the war was as good as won. They were going to do it all by themselves, the 1st Battalion of the 1st Regiment of the 1st Marine Division, the division that had whipped the North Koreans at Inc
hon and bloodied the Chinese at Chosin and kicked the Japs off Guadalcanal. Now the inheritors of that victorious tradition were in a new war—not much of a war, “but the only one we’ve got”—and they were going to win it, the first of the first and best of the best. The months of blank-cartridge scrimmaging were behind them; they were going to play in the Big Game. During the long trip across the Pacific, they had heard about the 7th Marines’ feat at the Battle of Chu Lai, the first American engagement in Vietnam that could be called a battle. In three days of fighting in mid-August, the 7th had destroyed the Viet Cong’s elite 1st Main Force Regiment. The men of the Marines’ 1st Regiment were confident that they could do as well, if not better. Such confidence came not only from their ignorance, but also from their numbers. Theirs was a “fat” battalion, meaning a unit at or over its authorized strength. One-One had eleven hundred men when it came ashore.

  It was a big, fine-looking battalion, and when I saw them I felt as an old man does when he sees someone who reminds him of his youth. I thought of the way we had been six months before. I was both charmed and saddened by their innocent enthusiasm, charmed because I wished I could be that way again, saddened because they didn’t really know what they were getting into. I did. I was the regiment’s resident statistician. I knew I would be writing a lot of their names on my mimeographed forms, because I knew they were marching into a different war than the one we had fought between March and August. It was not really a guerrilla war any longer. Our patrols were still encountering guerrillas, but we were fighting more and more actions against main-force regulars and, in some instances, against North Vietnamese Army units. I didn’t know if the enemy had started his rainy-season offensive. I only knew that our battalions were holding frontages which should have been held by regiments, that the weather often grounded our planes and helicopters, that it was difficult to move supply convoys, tanks, and big guns down the muddy roads, that the enemy was fighting harder, and we were losing more men. The expedition had become a war of attrition, a drawn-out struggle in the mud and rain.