A Rumor of War Read online

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  Twenty or thirty of us were standing on the tarmac when the C-130 taxied to a stop. Our three days of freedom were over. An old gunnery sergeant stood next to me, entertaining the crowd with jokes. He knew more jokes than a stage comedian, and he told them one after another. He had fought on Iwo Jima and in Korea and had been in Vietnam for seven months. He was a veteran, and with his brown, lined face, he looked it. His rapid-fire jokes kept us laughing, kept us from thinking about where we were going. Perhaps he was trying to keep himself from thinking. But the jokes and laughter stopped when the hatch of the C-130 opened and they brought the bodies off. The corpses were in green rubber body-bags. We knew what they were by the humps the boots made in the bags—and why was that always such a painful sight, the sight of a dead man’s boots?

  The mood changed. No one spoke. Silently we watched the crewmen carry the dead down the ramp and into an ambulance parked near the aircraft. And I felt it come back again, that old, familiar, cold, cramping fear. The humorous gunnery sergeant, veteran of three wars, shook his head. “Goddamn this war,” he said. “Goddamn this war.”

  Fifteen

  … We are but warriors for the working day.

  Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirched

  With rainy marching in the painful field.

  —Shakespeare

  Henry V

  Poised like high-wire artists, we crossed the narrow bamboo bridge that spanned the stream. The monsoons had turned the stream into a river, and the deep, brown water rushed swiftly beneath us. From their foxholes on Charley Hill a short distance ahead, 3d platoon mocked our balancing act. “Don’t fall in and get your feet wet, dears.”

  “Up yours, shit-for-brains,” one of my marines called back.

  A drizzling rain fell. The platoon filed across the rice paddy on the other side of the stream, slipping on the muddy dike, then climbed the hill. At the top, they waited for Jones and me to pick up a spare radio. They sat down to rest and smoke a last cigarette before the patrol got under way. Dull green, broken by islands of palm trees, the foothills stretched away from the outpost toward the mountains. We could not see the mountains; they were hidden behind a solid, lead-colored wall of clouds. Third platoon had been on Charley Hill a long time, a little too long. Ragged and filthy, they stared at us with fatigued eyes and made a few more tired jokes.

  “Watch those nasty booby traps out there,” one said. “We don’t want you to get killed, Allen.”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna get killed,” said Lance Corporal Allen, a fire-team leader in my platoon.

  “If you do get killed, can I have your boots? We’re about the same size.”

  “You’ll get my boots in your balls. Listen, you sit tight here, asshole. We’ll drive a whole friggin’ regiment into you.”

  “Friggin’? Friggin’. Wooah, they’re gonna drive a friggin’ regiment into us. Allen, you are a baaaaad motherfucker.”

  “Don’t you know it, asshole. It’s your mother.”

  “Then I’m your son, and if you get dinged, I’ll be an orphan. So let me have your boots, Daddy.”

  “Like I said, in the balls. In the balls.”

  I went into the dugout to pick up the radio. It was almost as muddy inside as out. Water seeped through the bunker’s clay walls and dripped from the rotted canvas curtain hanging over the doorway. I checked the radio.

  “It works, believe it or not,” said McKenna, the 3d platoon leader. He had joined C Company recently, a dark-haired, jive-talking Bronx Irishman who was known as Black Mac and who conceived of the war as a street gang-fight on a grand scale.

  The radio did work. That was unusual. Little Jones—for some reason, all radio operators are small men—hoisted the PRC-10 onto his back. I lit a cigarette, reluctant to leave the dugout and spend all day out in the rain. I could hear it pattering against the bunker’s sandbagged roof. I did not want the rain and the long hours of walking and the waiting for a booby trap to blast someone into fragments. Two weeks had passed since Saigon, but I was as tired now as I had been before the R-and-R. No, more tired. It was as if I had had no rest at all, as if no amount of rest could overcome my fatigue. The same was true of the others. The company had run nearly two hundred patrols in the month I had been with it, and then there had been all those nights on the line. The men were in a permanent state of exhaustion. They were in a shaft, plunging daily from one level of fatigue to the next, and the squad leaders kept pleading for a break. “They’re tired, lieutenant. They’re so tired that half of ’em are half asleep on patrol. They’ve got to get some slack.” But there was no slack. There was no rotating back to the rear, as in previous wars, because there was no rear to rotate to.

  Jones adjusted the radio’s pack straps and walked out.

  “Did your boys pass Captain Bligh’s rifle inspection the other day?” McKenna asked.

  “Yeah, we passed. A rifle inspection! The son of a bitch must think we’re in garrison.”

  “You should’ve seen the shit he pulled out here. He came out and the first thing he does is line everyone up in platoon formation. That was cool. One fuckin’ mortar round would’ve wasted everybody. Then he finds a rifleman with a dusty chamber, reams him out and reams the whole platoon out. He went on down and found another rifleman with a speck of rust on his magazine, and he took the magazine and threw it in the mud. Just like that. The platoon was ready to kill him. After he left, Sergeant Horne told everybody to get back to work, and we almost had a mutiny. This one kid tells Horne to get laid, so Horne decks him. I mean, you just don’t tell that big son of a bitch to get laid. The kid got his rifle then and told Horne he was going to kill him. The kid probably wanted to kill Neal, but Horne’d do. Horne tells him, ‘Go ahead, it’ll only get you a rope or life,’ and then grabs the weapon away before the kid can fire it. The kid just broke down. ‘I can’t take it no more,’ he said. That’s all he kept saying, ‘I can’t take it no more and all this petty harassment on the front lines.’ You know, I think the skipper’s nuts. Somebody’s going to put a bullet in the back of his head one of these days.”

  “Well, whoever does, I hope they give him the Congressional Medal of Honor. Jesus, Mac, the war’s bad enough without having to put up with that goddamned tyrant.”

  “We’re in the Corps, P.J. The Crotch. Semper fi and fuck your buddy.”

  “El Crotcho endalay. I’m going and get this little walk over with.”

  I crushed my cigarette and went out to where the platoon waited, patiently enduring their misery.

  “Saddle up, Second,” said Sergeant Bittner, the new platoon sergeant. Dodge, suffering from old leg injuries, had been transferred to battalion HQ. “Saddle up, Second. Movin’ out.”

  The platoon rose as one, like a congregation at a Mass.

  “Point fire-team out twenty-five meters. Smoking lamp is out. No talking or smoking once we’re off this hill. Pick up your interval and maintain it. Ten paces between each man. Stagger the column.”

  The commands were not really necessary. They were just part of the ritual. The platoon knew what to do, having done it often enough.

  We slid over the edge. That was what it was like every time we moved off the outpost and into the enemy-controlled country beyond, like sliding over an edge.

  The platoon followed the traces of an old road for a short distance, stumbled down into a watery ravine, toiled up a hill, went down into another ravine, then up another hill. The words to a half-remembered nursery rhyme went through my head: “Oh, the grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men; he marched them up the hill, then marched them down again.” We wound through the foothills for an hour, fighting off the wet caresses of the high elephant grass. Scaling a low, razor-backed ridge, the column started down toward the paddy lands that bordered the river, moving across the paddies with veteran skill. The point fire-team crossed first, covered by the rest of the patrol and a machine-gun team. When the point reached the tree line on the far side, the main body we
nt across, the machine-gun team still covering; then they crossed. Our tactical maneuvering did not even draw a glance from the farmer who was working in one of the fields. He rode over the mud on a sledlike plow, whipping the steaming flanks of his water buffalo with a long, bamboo rod. We went across, cursing the ankle-deep ooze that hobbled us. It was as black as tar and almost as thick. The rain never stopped.

  After three hours of walking, the platoon reached the river trail. It was the same one I had patrolled with One-Three months before, but it had a new name: Purple Heart Trail. The Tuy Loan River was in full flood. Racing between its crumbling clay banks, it eddied around the deep pools and made riffles over the sunken bushes that had been on dry ground before the monsoon. Pangee traps and spider holes began to appear alongside the trail. We did not see anyone in the villages or in the fields, some of which were pocked with shell craters. There was no sound but the infrequent cries of birds and the hissing of rain through the trees. At point, Lance Corporal Crowe walked delicately—like a man walking through a minefield. And that’s what the trail was, a long, narrow minefield. The blackened stump of a tree testified to that; a booby trap had exploded there two days before, seriously wounding two marines from another platoon. Purple Heart Trail usually lived up to its name. Crowe’s head was turning from side to side, his eyes flicking from side to side, lizardlike, looking for the shining thinness of a trip wire, for the length of electric detonating cord snaking off into the underbrush. Behind him, Allen and PFC Lonehill searched the trees for snipers. I followed them, with Jones behind me and then the rest of the patrol. We walked with muscles tensed and senses awakened, walked on feet sore from constant dampness. Ahead, there was a clearing, and, on its far side, the village we were to search. Crowe, Allen, and Lonehill started out into the clearing, quickening their pace as they moved across the exposed ground. Jones and I came next. The bullet sounded like a bullwhip cracking. It struck a branch just overhead. Jones and I slid over the edge of the riverbank, Jones bending the radio antenna down to conceal it from the sniper.

  “Allen. Sniper, right flank. Probably in the tree line. Can you reach him with the M-79?”

  “Think so, lieutenant,” said Allen, who was crouched with the other two marines behind a hump in the ground.

  The grenade launcher popped once, twice, three times. The sniper fired again. Low, the bullet sang through the grass and sent chunks of mud flying as it struck the trail. The first 40-millimeter burst, and I yelled, “Second, double-time across the clearing, on the double!” Lonehill sprayed the tree line with his automatic rifle. The sniper, panicked by the return fire, loosed five or six wildly aimed rounds. The platoon came running up the trail, helmets and equipment clattering, as the last two grenades went off.

  Safely across the clearing, we approached the village. Crowe checked its bamboo gate for booby traps. The gate was clear. Coffell’s squad cordoned off the village while Corporal Aiker’s squad searched it. The search turned up the usual stuff: a small food cache, a couple of tunnels, and a few clips of small-arms ammunition, so old they might have been there since the French Indochina War.

  There were only four people in the village, two old women, a girl, and a small boy.

  “Chao-Ba,” I said to one of the women.

  She smiled, baring her red teeth. “Chao-anh.”

  “Manh gioi khoung?”

  “Toi manh.” (I am well.)

  “Ba gap Viet Cong khoung?” (Woman, have you seen the Viet Cong?)

  Fumbling beneath her blouse, revealing for a moment a pair of sagging, desiccated breasts, she handed me her identification card. It was the regulation, plastic-laminated I.D. card issued by the government. If it had not been issued by the government, it had been issued by the VC, who often forged I.D. cards.

  “Woman, this tells me nothing. I ask you, have you seen the Viet Cong?”

  “Khoung.” (No.)

  I gestured toward the clearing and, not knowing the Vietnamese word for sniper, said in English, “VC. VC. Ten minutes ago. Bang. Bang.”

  “Toi khoung hieu.” (I don’t understand.)

  I mimicked the motions of a man firing a rifle, then pointed at myself. “VC. Bang. Bang. At me. Toi. Ten minutes ago.”

  “Ah, toi hieu.”

  “Where are the Viet Cong?”

  “Toi khoung biet.” (I don’t know.)

  I had been through the same routine a dozen times in a dozen other villages, and it was beginning to exasperate me—that mulish peasant stubbornness.

  “Woman, you know.” I showed her a clip of .30-caliber ammunition. “You know. VC here. How many?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mot? Hai? Lam?” (One? Two? Five?)

  “I know nothing about the Viet Cong.”

  I had my first violence fantasy then, a hint that I was breaking down under the strains and frustrations peculiar to that war. In my mind, the red liquid in the woman’s mouth was blood, not betel-nut juice. In my mind, I had slapped her across the mouth with the back of my hand, and blood was pouring out from between her lips as she told me all I wanted to know. I had beaten the truth out of her. With one slap of my hand, I had ended her litany of “no” and “I don’t know.” There was no one out there to stop me from actually doing it, no one and nothing except that inner system of moral checks called conscience. That was still operating, so I did not touch the old woman. I merely asked, again, “Where are the Viet Cong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  My right arm tensed. “You old bitch, tell me where they are,” I said in English.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Ba gap Viet Cong khoung?”

  “No. I know nothing about the Viet Cong. There are many VC in the mountains.”

  “I know, buku VC in the mountains. How many here?”

  “No VC are here.”

  “VC here,” I said, holding up the ammo clip.

  “No VC here.”

  “Yeah, right, you old bitch, and we’ll probably walk out of here and get sniped again.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s because I’m speaking English. You don’t understand a goddamned thing, do you?”

  “Toi khoung hieu.”

  “Cam anh ba. Di-di.” (Thank you, woman. Go now.)

  She nodded and, with the others, shuffled into a hut.

  I sat down next to Coffell and pulled a ration tin out of the baggy side-pocket in my uniform. Coffell asked if I had learned anything. No, I said, of course not.

  “Pass the word to break for chow. We’ll move out in fifteen minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, rising like an old man with arthritic joints. Coffell was twenty-four. “You know, I sure don’t like the idea of that long walk back.”

  “Well, we could always stay out here.”

  “I like that idea even less.”

  The platoon ate cold C rations in the rain, then headed back toward friendly lines. Cutting cross-country to avoid retracing our steps over the trail, we slashed through elephant grass as sharp and thick as the spines on a hedgehog’s back. The weather turned strange. Spells of total calm and intense heat were broken by brief, heavy squalls that seemed to blow in out of nowhere. All the way back, we were alternately soaked, chilled, and scorched. At dusk, we reached the front line, or what, in that war, passed for a front line. Sergeant Pryor’s squad, left behind to guard the platoon’s section of the line, were blackening their faces with charcoal and shoe polish before they went out on ambush. Coffell’s and Aiker’s squads trudged off to their positions, with nothing before them but one more damp night of nervous waiting.

  Waiting was about all we did for the next week. We were sniped at and rained on every night. The platoon’s new command post, an abandoned one-story barn whose stone walls had been chipped in some long-forgotten battle, acquired a few more scars. Meanwhile, C Company was alerted to be ready to be flown into an operation code-named Harvest Moon. It was a large operation for that stage of the war. Ni
ght after night, flickering artillery rumbled. We waited, numbed by the ceaseless rain and wind. It was always worse than combat itself, waiting to go into combat.

  The action was taking place near Hoi-An, a small city south of Danang. One afternoon, we learned that the enemy unit involved in the battle was the 1st Regiment.

  “Jesus Christ, that’s the outfit we wiped out at Chu Lai,” said Coursey, the 1st platoon leader. He had fought in the Battle of Chu Lai before being transferred to One-One.

  “Guess you forgot to wipe out their recruiting department,” I said.

  “Well, I hope we don’t go in. I don’t want any part of it. One of those is enough.”

  “I’d like to get down there,” said Captain Neal. “You guys aren’t very adventurous.” Neal was writing the name of his hometown on a piece of stationery. He did that often, wrote the name of the Tennessee town over and over on bits of paper, on C-ration boxes and acetate map covers; wherever he could find something to write on, he wrote the name of his hometown.

  Hudson, the artillery officer attached to C Company, rolled over and sat up on his cot. “Go right ahead, skipper. You go right ahead down there if you think it’s an adventure. This damned war doesn’t seem like an adventure to me.”

  “I just don’t want any part of it,” Coursey repeated, his face rucked by months of exposure. “I had just about all the adventure I’ll ever want at Chu Lai. They’re all inconclusive, these goddamned operations. We wiped out that regiment at Chu Lai, now we’re fighting ’em again and we’ll probably wipe ’em out again and then have to fight ’em again in a few months. Bullshit.”

  “Well, I’d still like to get down there.”

  “So would I. I’m ready for the Cong. Me and my boys are ready to rumble with Charlie.” It was McKenna, showing off a jungle hammock he had acquired in a barter with the Special Forces detachment at Danang. He was wearing his helmet and flak jacket and had the rolled-up hammock strapped to his cartridge belt. “We’ll wipe their ass. Can you dig it? Old fuckin’ Luke the Gook’s gonna die.” In a crouch, with his carbine at port, he crept up and down the aisle between the cots like a stalking hunter. “Can you dig it? With my brand-new, nylon, camouflaged super fuckin’ Special Forces jungle hammock, I’m ready for anything.”