A Rumor of War Read online

  We were lectured on the codes marines are expected to live by: they never leave their casualties on the battlefield, never retreat, and never surrender so long as they have the means to resist. “And the only time a marine doesn’t have the means to resist,” one instructor told us, “is when he’s dead.” There were classes on Marine Corps history, or, I should say, mythology. We learned of Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon storming the fort of the Barbary corsairs at Tripoli, of Captain Travis seizing the fortress of Chapultepec—“the halls of Montezuma”—during the Mexican War, of the 5th and 6th Regiments’ bayonet charge at Belleau Wood, of Chesty Puller whipping the rebels in Nicaragua and the Japanese on Guadalcanal.

  Around seven hundred and fifty men began the advanced course; only five hundred finished. The graduation ceremony took place on a scalding August afternoon in 1963. We stood at attention on the liquefying asphalt of the parade field on which we had spent countless hours drilling.

  A squad of field grade officers began taking their places in the reviewing stand, campaign ribbons adding a splash of color to their khaki shirts. The sun glinted off their brass rank insignia and the polished instruments of the band. There was a small crowd of civilians, mostly parents who had come to watch their sons take part in this martial rite of passage. Awards were presented, the usual messages of congratulation read, and someone made a brief duty-honor-country valedictory speech. We stood patiently, sweat trickling from our noses and onto our ties, the heat wilting the creases in our shirts.

  Finally, the order to pass in review rippled down the line. We marched past the stand, snapping our heads at the command “Eyes right” while the gold and scarlet guidons fluttered in the breeze and drums rolled and the band played the Marine Corps Hymn. It was glorious and grand, like an old-fashioned Fourth of July. Bugles, drums, and flags. Marching across the field in battalion mass, with that stirring, soaring hymn blaring in our ears, we felt invincible, boys of twenty-one and twenty-two, all cheerfully unaware that some of us would not grow much older.

  * * *

  I was commissioned on February 2, 1964, and returned to Quantico in May for Officers’ Basic School, where new second lieutenants served a six-month apprenticeship before being sent to their first commands. I was assigned to Company H, Basic Class 2-64.

  Basic School was fairly pleasant compared to OCS. No more harassment from profane, sadistic drill sergeants. Now they had to call us “sir,” although, with the previous summer’s experience fresh in our minds, the sight of some old salt with three stripes and a rocker on his sleeves still caused a Pavlovian reaction of terror.

  Living conditions were regal. We were housed in two-man rooms in a BOQ that was indistinguishable from a modern dormitory. Large, airy lecture rooms and a gymnasium (named in honor of an alumnus who had been killed in Korea) completed the collegelike atmosphere.

  Basic School was a school in fact as well as in name, a halfway house between the campus and the real Marine Corps. Its purpose was to turn us into professional officers. Because of the Corps doctrine that every marine is a rifleman, the course emphasized infantry fundamentals—weapons-training and small-unit tactics. It was dry, technical stuff, taught in the how-to-do-it fashion of a trade school: how to take a hill by frontal assault or envelopment; how to defend it once you have taken it; how to deliver searching and traversing fire with an M-60 machine gun.

  For me, the classroom work was mind-numbing. I wanted the romance of war, bayonet charges, and desperate battles against impossible odds. I wanted the sort of thing I had seen in Guadalcanal Diary and Retreat, Hell! and a score of other movies. Instead of the romance, I got the methodology of war, Clausewitz and his nine principles, lines and arrows on a map, abstract jargon, and a number of bewildering acronyms and abbreviations. To be in battle was to be “in a combat situation”; a helicopter assault was a “vertical envelopment”; an M-14 rifle a “hand-held, gas-operated, magazine-fed, semiautomatic shoulder weapon.” I had read somewhere that Stendhal learned his simple, lucid style by studying Napoleon’s battle orders. Literature should be grateful that Stendhal didn’t live in the present; the battle orders we studied were written in language that made the Rosetta Stone look like a Dick-and-Jane reader.

  “Enemy sit. Aggressor forces in div strength holding MLR Hill 820 complex gc AT 940713-951716 w/fwd elements est. bn strength junction at gc AT 948715 (See Annex A, COMPHIBPAC intell. summary period ending 25 June) … Mission: BLT 1/7 seize, hold and defend obj. A gc 948715 … Execution: BLT 1/7 land LZ X-RAY AT 946710 at H-Hour 310600 … A co. GSF estab. LZ security LZ X-RAY H minus 10 … B co. advance axis BLUE H plus 5 estab. blocking pos. vic gs AT 948710 … A, C, D cos. maneuver element commence advance axis BROWN H plus 10 … Bn tacnet freq 52.9 … shackle code HAZTRCEGBD … div. tacair dir. air spt callsign PLAYBOY … Mark friendly pos w/air panels or green smoke. Mark tgt. w/WP.”

  I was not the only one to find this eye-glazing. During one particularly dull lecture, a classmate named Butterfield leaned over to me. “You know,” he whispered, “the trouble with war is that there isn’t any background music.”

  Our Hollywood fantasies were given some outlet in the field exercises that took up about half the training schedule. These were supposed to simulate battlefield conditions, teach us to apply classroom lessons, and develop “the spirit of aggressiveness.” The Corps prized élan in its troops. The offensive was the only tactic worthy of the name. We were taught the rudiments of defensive warfare, while retrograde movements were hardly mentioned, and only then in tones of contempt. The Army retreated, the Marines did not, although they had—at Chosin Reservoir in Korea. The essence of the offensive was the frontal assault: “Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle.” This was the supreme moment of infantry combat; no tricky flanking or encircling movements, just a line of determined men firing short bursts from the hip as they advanced on the enemy at a stately walk.

  It was easy to do in the bloodless make-believe of field problems, in which every operation went according to plan and the only danger was the remote one of falling and breaking an ankle. We took these stage-managed exercises seriously, thinking they resembled actual combat. We couldn’t know then that they bore about as much similarity to the real thing as shadowboxing does to street-fighting. Diligently we composed our five-paragraph attack orders. We huddled in pine-scented thickets, soberly playing the roles assigned to us—student platoon leader, student squad leader—and with our maps spread flat, planned the destruction of our fictitious enemy, the aggressor forces. We fought them throughout the spring and summer, enveloped them, went at them with squad rushes, and made frontal assaults against the sun-browned hills they defended, yelling battle cries as we charged through storms of blank cartridge fire.

  * * *

  At the time, counterinsurgency was fashionable in military circles: it had become obvious that the next war, if there was to be one, would be fought in Indochina (that August, when the Tonkin Gulf resolution was passed, we were midway through the Basic course); and combating insurgencies gave the services a special mission in the age of the New Frontier. The Peace Corps could go off to build dams in India or schools in Bolivia, but it was up to the War Corps to do the man’s work of battling Communist guerrillas, the new barbarians who menaced the far-flung interests of the new Rome. Finally, counterinsurgency was still surrounded by the Kennedy mystique, even though the young president had been dead for nearly a year. But the glamorous prince of Camelot had given the new doctrine his imprimatur by sending the first Special Forces detachments to Vietnam, glamorous figures themselves in their green berets and paratrooper boots.

  The fascination was strongest among the junior officers, who were drawn by the apparent romance of fighting guerrilla bands in far-off places. Beyond that, a feeling of inadequacy came over us whenever we compared the colorful chests of combat veterans to our own, naked except for marksmanship badges. We wanted to dress up that blank khaki with Bronze and Silver Stars, and Vietnam appeared to be the most
likely place where we could win them.

  The senior first lieutenant who tutored us in counterguerrilla operations had served there for thirty days as a “military observer,” which did not exactly qualify him as an expert. He had been wounded, however, and although it had happened under less than heroic circumstances—he was hit in the buttocks while squatting over a latrine—the Purple Heart pinned above his left pocket gave him an air of authority.

  Anyway, he sounded authoritative as he revealed to us the mysteries of counterrevolution. His lectures were full of enough jargon to dispel the illusion that guerrilla-fighting was something like Indian-fighting, a rough, seat-of-the-pants form of warfare. On the contrary, it appeared to be a highly specialized art; complex tactics with esoteric names were required to outwit the wily insurgents. We were taught how to batter them into submission with the Hammer and Anvil Movement, to make them dance to their deaths in a Minuet Ambush, to trap them in a Constricting Cordon, and to repulse their attacks with the Triangular Defense.

  These strange maneuvers we practiced in the steamy bottomlands that were as close an approximation of Asian jungles as Virginia could offer. Many months later, I would remember, as a grown man remembers the games played in boyhood, how we ran around in those woods, ambushing each other and raiding imaginary guerrilla camps. In our enthusiasm, we tried to make these playact exercises as realistic as possible, even in such minor details as our dress. I have kept a photograph taken of another lieutenant and me just before we set out on a “reconnaissance mission.” It shows us wearing what we conceived of as authentic jungle-fighter uniforms: camouflage shirts, camouflage berets fashioned from helmet covers, camouflage paint smeared on our faces. I guess we were little more than overgrown kids playing soldier, but, judging from our grim expressions, we must have thought it serious business.

  A few of my classmates became counterinsurgency cultists, immersing themselves in almost all of the literature published on the subject. They made a curious sight, those crew-cut, American-looking officers studying the gospels of Mao Tse-tung as devoutly as the Chairman’s disciples in Peking and Hanoi. They were obeying the old injunction “Know your enemy.” Most of those studious officers were regulars with career ambitions, and they boned up on that exotic strategy for the same reason medical students read articles on the latest trends in surgery: they thought it would make them better at their profession if and when the time came to practice it in earnest. As for me, I had no desire to be a general. Vietnam mostly interested me as a place where I might find a bit of dangerous adventure, not as a testing ground for new military theories or for my own professional talents, which were modest at best.

  * * *

  Whenever I think back to those days at Basic School, the recollection that first comes to mind is always the same: A double file of green-clad men, bent beneath their packs, are tramping down a dirt road. A remorseless sun is beating down. Raised by our boots, a cloud of red dust powders the trees alongside the road, making them look sickly and ashen. The dust clings to our uniforms, runs in muddy streaks down our sweating faces. There is the rattle of rifle slings and bayonet scabbards, the clattering of mess kits bouncing in our haversacks. Our heads ache from the weight of steel helmets, and the cry “Close it up, keep your interval, close it up” is echoing up and down the long column.

  I do not know which was worse, the monotony or the effort—the monotony of putting one foot in front of the other hour after hour or the effort of keeping five paces distance from the man in front “so’s one round don’t get you all.” Even among the most disciplined troops, a route-column has an “accordion effect.” It stretches and contracts because of differences in stride. At first, the company moves at an easy pace; then it stops suddenly. We bunch up, bump into each other and wait, leaning far forward to ease the ache in our backs. The column begins to move again, in the jerky fashion of a train pulling out of a siding. Gaps open in the files. We run to close them up, that maddening cry in our ears. “Close it up, damnit, people, keep it closed up.” At last, a five-minute break is called. Shedding our packs, we drift off the road and slide down an embankment to lie exhausted on the cool grass. There is just enough time for a few swallows from our canteens, a few drags on a cigarette, before the dread command comes down the line. “H Company, saddle up! Off your ass and on your feet. Saddle up, move out!” We pick ourselves up, slowly, unwillingly, like convicts in a workgang, and are at it once more. One foot in front of the other. Pick ’em up and put ’em down. Sometimes I could not remember ever having done anything else. My college years receded, and it seemed as if I had spent almost all my life humping a too heavy pack beneath too hot a sun down a road that was too long. The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.

  But there were moments of exhilaration that compensated for the hours of marching on blistered feet. I remember one evening when we were trudging over a hilly firebreak toward a bivouac site. Coming to the top of one rise, I looked ahead at the lead platoon laboring up yet another. They were strung out along the trail like two lengths of chain, one behind the lanky figure of Major Seymour, the company CO, the other behind the bobbing, scarlet pennant carried by the guidon-bearer. When the latter reached the crest of the next hill, the flag caught a breeze, momentarily revealing a gold H, then furled again and gradually sank out of sight as he went down the slope. The column followed, shambling through a faint pall of dust that moved with it, uniforms mottled with black patches of sweat, webbed cartridge belts faded to a dull yellow from constant scrubbing, haversacks framed by blanket rolls, the stocks of slung rifles showing as brown daubs on the backs of the marines’ olive-drab utilities.

  Right of the firebreak, the woods stretched unbroken to the horizon, where the sun hovered over a serrated line of trees: a giant orange balloon floating above a green sea. The air was growing cool and smelled of pine, with the drowsy stillness of a summer evening in the South. I clambered down into the saddle between the two hills, climbed again, went down again, and was gratified to see nothing but level ground ahead. About a quarter of a mile away, the trail joined the hard-surface road that led to the bivouac. It was a welcome sight, that patch of asphalt showing through the trees. Now that it knew it was on the last leg, the company began to march faster, almost jauntily. A few marines near the point started singing the verse to a marching song and the rest of the column answered with the chorus.

  I gotta gal that lives on a hill …

  Oh, Little Liza, Little Liza Ja-ane.

  She won’t do it but her sister will …

  Little Liza Jane.

  Whoa-oh-oh-oh Little Liza, Little Liza Jane

  Oh, Little Liza, Little Liza Jane.

  I gotta gal in Lackawanna …

  Oh, Little Liza, Little Liza Jane.

  She knows how but she don’t wanna …

  Little Liza Jane.

  Whoa-oh-oh-oh Little Liza, Little Liza Jane

  Oh, Little Liza, Little Liza Jane.

  The song was like a cry of defiance. They had just humped through thirty miles of wilderness in intense heat with forty pounds on their backs, and they were coming in singing. Nothing could subdue them. Hearing that full-throated Whoa-oh-oh-oh Little Liza, Little Liza Jane roaring through the woods, I felt proud of that spirited company and happy that I was one of them.

  * * *

  Autumn brought a week in Norfolk for amphibious warfare school: seasick days on the choppy Atlantic, drunken nights on South Granby Street. Then a return to Quantico for training in house-to-house fighting and night attacks, mock battles fought in the wan and fitful glow of illumination flares. Week by week, month by month, we learned our violent craft, each lesson a step in our evolution from civilians to professional soldiers. The change would not be complete until after we had served in Vietnam, for there are facts about war which cannot be taught in training, no matter how realistic and strenuous it is. But Quantico carried the process about as far as possible off the battlefield.

  Lik
e all evolutions, ours was accompanied by mutations. The Marine Corps had made highly efficient fighting men of us, and we had begun to look it. Gone were the shaggy, somewhat overweight children who had stumbled off the buses at OCS a long time before. They had been replaced by streamlined marines, whose hardened limbs were adapted for walking great distances or for thrusting a bayonet into a man’s ribs with ease.

  But the most significant changes were not the physical ones. We had become self-confident and proud, some to the point of arrogance. We had acquired the military virtues of courage, loyalty, and esprit de corps, though at the price of a diminished capacity for compassion. There were other alterations. In my own case, it was the way I looked at the world around me. A year earlier, I would have seen the rolling Virginia countryside through the eyes of an English-major who enjoyed reading the Romantic poets. Now I had the clearer, more pragmatic vision of an infantry officer. Landscape was no longer scenery to me, it was terrain, and I judged it for tactical rather than aesthetic value. Having been drilled constantly to look for cover and concealment, I could see dips and folds in a stretch of ground that would have appeared utterly flat to a civilian. If I saw a hill—“high ground”—I automatically began planning how to attack or defend it, my eyes searching for avenues of approach and fields of fire. A woodland meadow held no picturesque beauty for me. Instead, it presented a potential menace. If I came upon one, my first instincts were to figure out how to get a platoon safely across the exposed ground and how best to deploy the men: in a wedge, a combat-V, or line of skirmishers, two squads up and one back.

  * * *

  Not all the training dealt in lethal practicalities. In those pre-Vietnam days, the course proceeded leisurely, with plenty of time devoted to the ceremonial side of military life. We learned to put on reviews, the proper way to flourish a sword, how to behave at social functions; in brief, all that spit-and-polish nonsense which is totally divorced from the messy realities of twentieth-century warfare.