A Rumor of War Read online

  Pryor’s squad climbed the embankment, the men slipping on the muddy trail, slipping and falling into each other until they were bunched in a knot. The rest of the platoon waded through the rice paddy behind us, holding their rifles in the air. A snake made a series of S’s in the black water as it slithered between two men in the column. On dry ground again, Pryor’s marines picked up their interval and hiked up the ridgeline that rose above the embankment. The Cordillera loomed in the distance, high and indomitable. The last two squads started to struggle up the bank, bunching up as one man after another slipped and slid into the man behind him.

  Standing by the dead tree, I helped pull a few marines up the trail. “Pass it back not to bunch up,” I said. To my left, a stream whispered through a brushy ravine. “Don’t bunch up,” a marine said. “Pass it back.” On the other side of the paddy, the rear of the column was filing past a hut at the edge of the hamlet. Smoke started to roll from the hut and a woman ran out yelling.

  “Bittner,” I called to the platoon sergeant, who was bringing up the rear, “what the hell’s going on?”

  “Can’t hear you, sir.”

  “The hut. Who the hell set fire to the hut?”

  “Somebody said you passed the word to burn the hut, sir.”

  “What?”

  “The word came back to burn the hut, sir.”

  “Jesus Christ. I said, ‘Don’t bunch up.’ DON’T BUNCH UP. Put that fire out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I stood by the leafless tree, watching the marines douse the fire with helmets full of water. Fortunately, the thatch had been wet to begin with and did not burn quickly. Turning to walk back toward the point squad, I saw Allen stumbling on the trail.

  “Allen, how’re you doing?” I asked, extending my arm. Taking hold of it, he hauled himself over the lip of the embankment.

  “Hackin’ it, lieutenant. I’m hackin’ it okay,” Allen said, walking beside me. Ahead, I could see Pryor’s squad trudging up the ridge and the point man briefly silhouetted on the ridgeline before he went down the other side. “But this here cease-fire’s come along at the right time,” Allen was saying. “Could use a little slack. This here cease-fire’s the first slack…”

  There was a roaring and a hot, hard slap of wind and a needle pricking my thigh and something clubbed me in the small of the back. I fell face down into the mud, my ears ringing. Lying on my belly, I heard an automatic carbine rattle for a few seconds, then someone calling “Corpsman! Corpsman!” Because of the ringing in my ears, the shots and voice sounded far away. “Corpsman! Corpsman!” Someone else yelled “Incoming!” I got to my hands and knees, wondering what fool had yelled “incoming.” That had not been a shell, but a mine, a big mine. Who the hell had yelled “incoming”? You did, you idiot. It was your voice. Why did you say that? The fence. The barbed wire fence was the last thing you saw as you fell. You had fallen toward the fence, and it was like that time when you were six and walking in the woods with your friend Stanley. Stanley was nine, and he had been frightening you with stories about bears in the woods. Then you had heard a roaring, growling sound in the distance and, thinking it was a bear, you had run to the highway, tried to climb the barbed wire fence at the roadside, and caught your trousers on the barbs. Hanging there, you had cried, “Stanley, it’s a bear! A bear, Stanley!” And Stan had come up laughing because the growling noise you had heard was a roadgrader coming up the highway. It had not been a bear, but a machine. And this roaring had not been a shell, but a mine.

  I stood, trying to clear my head. I was a little wobbly, but unmarked except for a sliver of shrapnel stuck in one of my trouser legs. I pulled it out. It was still hot, but it had not even broken my skin. Allen was next to me on all fours, mumbling, “What happened? I don’t believe it. My God, oh my God.” Some thirty to forty feet behind us, there was a patch of scorched, cratered earth, a drifting pall of smoke, and the dead tree, its trunk charred and cracked. Sergeant Wehr was lying near the crater. He rose to his feet, then fell when one leg collapsed beneath him. Wehr stood up again and the leg crumpled again, and, squatting on his good leg, holding the wounded one straight out in front of him, he spun around like a man doing a cossack dance, then fell onto his back, waving one arm back and forth across his chest. “Boom. Boom,” he said, the arm flopping back and forth. “Mah fust patrol, an’ boom.”

  Allen got to his feet, his eyes glassy and a dazed grin on his face. He staggered toward me. “What happened, sir?” he asked, toppling against me and sliding down my chest, his hands clutching at my shirt. Before I could get a grip on him, he fell again to all fours, then collapsed onto his stomach. “My God what happened?” he said. “I don’t believe it. My head hurts.” Then I saw the blood oozing from the wound in the back of his head and neck. “Dear God my head hurts. Oh it hurts. I don’t believe it.”

  Still slightly stunned, I had only a vague idea of what had happened. A mine, yes. It must have been an ambush-detonated mine. All of Pryor’s squad had passed by that spot before the mine exploded. I had been standing on that very spot, near the tree, not ten seconds before the blast. If it had been a booby trap or a pressure mine, it would have gone off then. And then the carbine fire. Yes, an electrically detonated mine set off from ambush, a routine occurrence for the rear-echelon boys who looked at the “overall picture,” a personal cataclysm for those who experienced it.

  Kneeling beside Allen, I reached behind for my first-aid kit and went numb when I felt the big, shredded hole in the back of my flak jacket. I pulled out a couple of pieces of shrapnel. They were cylindrical and about the size of double-0 buckshot. A Claymore, probably homemade, judging from the black smoke. They had used black powder. The rotten-egg stink of it was in the air. Well, that shrapnel would have done a fine job on my spine if it had not been for the flak jacket. My spine. Oh God—if I had remained on that spot another ten seconds, they would have been picking pieces of me out of the trees. Chance. Pure chance. Allen, right beside me, had been wounded in the head. I had not been hurt. Chance. The one true god of modern war is blind chance.

  Taking out a compress, I tried to staunch Allen’s bleeding. “My God, it hurts,” he said. “My head hurts.”

  “Listen, Allen. You’ll be okay. I don’t think it broke any bones. You’ll be all right.” My hands reeked from his blood. “You’re going to get plenty of slack now. Lotsa slack in division med. We’ll have you evacked in no time.”

  “My God it hurts. I don’t believe it. It hurts.”

  “I know, Bill. It hurts. It’s good that you can feel it,” I said, remembering the sharp sting of that tiny sliver in my thigh. And it had done nothing more than raise a bump the size of a beesting. Oh yes, I’ll bet your wounds hurt, Lance Corporal Bill Allen.

  My head had cleared, and the ringing in my ears quieted to a faint buzz. I told Pryor and Aiker to form their squads into a perimeter around the paddy field. Casualty parties started to carry the wounded out of the paddy and up to the level stretch of ground between the embankment and the base of the ridgeline. It was a small space, but it would have to do as a landing zone.

  A rifleman and I picked up Sergeant Wehr, each of us taking one of the big man’s arms. “Boom. Boom,” he said, hobbling with his arms around our necks. “Mah fust patrol, lieutenant, an’ boom, ah got hit. Gawd-damn.” A corpsman cut Wehr’s trouser leg open with a knife and started to dress his wounds. There was a lot of blood. Two marines dragged Sanchez up from the paddy. His face had been so peppered with shrapnel that I hardly recognized him. Except for his eyes. The fragments had somehow missed his eyes. He was unconscious and his eyes were half closed; two white slits in a mass of raspberry red. Sanchez looked as if he had been clawed by some invisible beast. The marines fanned him with their hands.

  “He keeps going out, sir,” said one of the riflemen. “If he don’t get evacked pretty quick, we’re afraid he’ll go out for good.”

  “Okay, okay, as soon as we get the others up.”

  “Rod
ella, sir. Get Rodella up. Think he’s got a sucking chest wound.”

  I slid down the embankment and splashed over to where the corpsman, Doc Kaiser, was working to save Corporal Rodella. There were gauze and compresses all over his chest and abdomen. One dressing, covering the hole the shrapnel had torn in one of his lungs, was soaked in blood. With each breath he took, pink bubbles of blood formed and burst around the hole. He made a wheezing sound. I tried talking to him, but he could not say anything because his windpipe would fill with blood. Rodella, who had been twice wounded before, was now in danger of drowning in his own blood. It was his eyes that troubled me most. They were the hurt, dumb eyes of a child who has been severely beaten and does not know why. It was his eyes and his silence and the foamy blood and the gurgling, wheezing sound in his chest that aroused in me a sorrow so deep and a rage so strong that I could not distinguish the one emotion from the other.

  I helped the corpsman carry Rodella to the landing zone. His comrades were around him, but he was alone. We could see the look of separation in his eyes. He was alone in the world of the badly wounded, isolated by a pain none could share with him and by the terror of the darkness that was threatening to envelop him.

  Then we got the last one, Corporal Greeley, a machine-gunner whose left arm was hanging by a few strands of muscle; all the rest was a scarlet mush. Greeley was conscious and angry. “Fuck it,” he said over and over. “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck the cease-fire. Ain’t no fuckin’ cease-fire, but they can’t kill me. Ain’t no fuckin’ booby trap gonna kill me.” Carrying him, I felt my own anger, a very cold, very deep anger that had no specific object. It was just an icy, abiding fury; a hatred for everything in existence except those men. Yes, except those men of mine, any one of whom was better than all the men who had sent them to war.

  I radioed for a medevac. The usual complications followed. How many wounded were there? Nine; four walking wounded, five needing evacuation. Nine? Nine casualties from a single mine? What kind of mine was it? Electrically detonated, black-powder, a homemade Claymore probably. But what happened? Goddamnit, I’ll tell you later. Get me a medevac. I’ve got at least one, maybe two who’ll be DOW if we don’t get them out of here. How big was the mine? Four to five pounds of explosive, plenty of shrapnel. It was placed on an embankment and the platoon was down in a rice paddy below it. Most of the shrapnel went over their heads. Otherwise, I’d have several KIAs. Okay? Now get me those birds. “Boom. Boom,” said Sergeant Wehr. “Mah fust patrol an’ boom, ah get hit.” Charley Two, I need the first letter of the last names and the serial numbers of the WIAs needing evac. Now? Yes, now. Rodella and Sanchez had lapsed into unconsciousness. The corpsmen and some marines were fanning them. Doc Kaiser looked at me pleadingly.

  “Hang loose, doc,” I said. “The birds’ll be here, but the assholes in the puzzle-palace have to do their paperwork first. Bittner! Sergeant Bittner, get me the dog tags of the evacs, and hustle.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bittner, who was one of the walking wounded. A green battle dressing was wrapped around his forehead. One of the walking wounded. We were all walking wounded.

  Bittner gave me the dog tags. I tore off the green masking tape that kept the tags from rattling and gave Captain Neal the required information. Then the radio broke down. Jones changed batteries and started giving long test-counts: “Ten-niner-eight-seven…” I heard Neal’s voice again. Did I have any serious casualties? For Christ’s sake, yes, why do you think I’m asking for a medevac?

  “Charley Two,” said Neal, “you must have not been supervising your men properly. They must have been awfully bunched up to take nine casualties from one mine.”

  “Charley Six,” I said, my voice cracking with rage. “You get me those birds now. If one of these kids dies because of this petty bullshit I’m going to raise somekinda hell. I want those birds.”

  There was a long pause. At last the word came: “Birds on the way.”

  The helicopters swooped in out of the somber sky, landing in the green smoke billowing from the smoke grenade I had thrown to mark the LZ. The crew chiefs pushed stretchers out of the hatches. We laid the casualties on the stretchers and lifted them into the Hueys, the rain falling on us all the time. The aircraft took off, and watching the wounded soaring out of that miserable patch of jungle, we almost envied them.

  Just before the platoon resumed its march, someone found a length of electrical detonating cord lying in the grass near the village. The village would have been as likely an ambush site as any: the VC only had to press the detonator and then blend in with the civilians, if indeed there were any true civilians in the village. Or they could have hidden in one of the tunnels under the houses. All right, I thought, tit for tat. No cease-fire for us, none for you, either. I ordered both rocket launcher teams to fire white-phosphorus shells into the hamlet. They fired four altogether. The shells, flashing orange, burst into pure white clouds, the chunks of flaming phosphorus arcing over the trees. About half the village went up in flames. I could hear people yelling, and I saw several figures running through the white smoke. I did not feel a sense of vengeance, any more than I felt remorse or regret. I did not even feel angry. Listening to the shouts and watching the people running out of their burning homes, I did not feel anything at all.

  Seventeen

  … for, as I am a soldier …

  I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur

  Till in her ashes she lie buried.

  The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,

  And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,

  In liberty of bloody hand shall range

  With conscience wide as hell …

  —Shakespeare

  Henry V

  Eleven days after the patrol, while Greeley, Rodella, and Sanchez lay recovering in the hospital—Greeley and Rodella waiting to be evacuated out of Vietnam, Sanchez to be returned to duty, as Wehr and Allen had been earlier, Wehr still limping when they discharged him with a slap on the back and a cheery bid to “go back out there and get ’em, tiger”—the battalion clustered nervously, waiting to be flown into an operation against a North Vietnamese regiment.

  In the assembly area at C Company’s base camp, men were sitting on their packs or standing in small, restless groups. A one-oh-five from the battery nearby fired a round, and the shell flew out with a diminishing hiss to burst against a far-off hill. Otherwise, it was quiet. Voices murmured in the black of the moonless night and cigarettes glowed, furtively inhaled behind cupped hands. McCloy and I, leaning against a jeep, could not see individual marines, only the dark mass of men and the round silhouettes of their helmets. On the road behind us, a convoy stood idle. Parked close together, with only their square outlines visible in the darkness, the big six-bys looked like a line of freight cars. Sometimes a flare went up in the distance, and we would see a few faces, drawn and worn with waiting, bulging packs with blanket rolls strapped to them, the olive-drab cabs of the trucks, the barrels of the howitzers pointing skyward, a rifle propped against a pack, its polished stock shining until the flare went out and plunged everything back into darkness.

  This night, January 5, was our third night of waiting for Operation Long Lance to get under way. The battalion was to make a night helicopter assault at a point about twenty-five miles southwest of Danang. This was the Vu Gia Valley, named after the river that flowed through it. An NVA regiment, supported by a local battalion of Viet Cong, was supposed to be using it as a base for operations against Danang. At a briefing, the company officers had been told the attack would be the second night helicopter assault in history. Perhaps that was intended to inspire us, but the reason the assault had to be made at night was anything but inspirational: the North Vietnamese regiment reportedly had a battery of 37-mm anti-aircraft cannon—the same guns they were using against our jet fighter-bombers in the North. In daylight, helicopters would be defenseless against them. As one of my riflemen put it, “If they’ve got those thirty-sevens, we might just go dow
n like ducks on opening day.”

  Preparations for Long Lance had been thorough, since a night assault is an extremely tricky maneuver. But we were going into an area where no American or South Vietnamese units had been before, and, as usual, intelligence could not say definitely how many enemy units were in the valley. Intelligence was not even sure if any were there at all. The NVA regiment might be there; then again, it might not. It might have flak guns, then again, it might not. That was one of the things that made the war such a nerve-jangling experience: the constant and total uncertainty. Whether we were going out on a squad patrol or into a battalion-sized attack, we never knew what we were going to run into. We were always tense with the feeling that anything could happen at any moment.

  The officers had celebrated New Year’s Day by attending a series of briefings. We spent the next two days briefing and rehearsing our men, checking and rechecking their equipment, then briefing and rehearsing them again, until every private knew exactly what he was supposed to do. Like the other two companies that were to make the attack, C Company was substantially understrength; but by making riflemen out of our clerks and cooks, by placing our light-duty cases back on full duty, and by refusing to allow anyone with anything less than terminal cancer from going on the sick list, we were able to muster about one hundred and forty effectives. That was a respectable number, though still seventy men short of a marine rifle company’s usual combat strength.

  The assault had been scheduled for the night of January 3. The men were up for it, on a keen edge. The last days of December had been grueling for Charley Company, a succession of patrols down Purple Heart Trail, with more casualties from mines and booby traps. We were making history: the first American soldiers to fight an enemy whose principal weapons were the mine and the booby trap. That kind of warfare has its own peculiar terrors. It turns an infantryman’s world upside down. The foot soldier has a special feeling for the ground. He walks on it, fights on it, sleeps and eats on it; the ground shelters him under fire; he digs his home in it. But mines and booby traps transform that friendly, familiar earth into a thing of menace, a thing to be feared as much as machine guns or mortar shells. The infantryman knows that any moment the ground he is walking on can erupt and kill him; kill him if he’s lucky. If he’s unlucky, he will be turned into a blind, deaf, emasculated, legless shell. It was not warfare. It was murder. We could not fight back against the Viet Cong mines or take cover from them or anticipate when they would go off. Walking down the trails, waiting for those things to explode, we had begun to feel more like victims than soldiers. So we were ready for a battle, a traditional, set-piece battle against regular soldiers like ourselves.