A Rumor of War Read online

  “Beautiful! Beautiful!” I said excitedly. “They were right on ’em.”

  The napalm rolled and boiled up out of the trees, dirty smoke cresting the ball of flame. The enemy mortar fire stopped. Just then, three Viet Cong broke out of the tree line. They ran one behind another down a dike, making for the cover of another tree line nearby. “Get ’em! Get those people. Kill ’em!” I yelled at my machine-gunners, firing my carbine at the running, dark-uniformed figures two hundred yards away. The gunners opened up, walking their fire toward the VC. The bullets made a line of spurts in the rice paddy, then were splattering all around the first enemy soldier, who fell to his knees. Letting out a war whoop, I swung my carbine toward the second man just as a stream of machine-gun tracers slammed into him. I saw him crumple as the first Viet Cong, still on his knees, toppled stiffly over the dike, behind which the third man had taken cover. We could see only the top of his back as he crawled behind the dike. What happened next happened very quickly, but in memory I see it happening with an agonizing slowness. It is a ballet of death between a lone, naked man and a remorseless machine. We are ranging in on the enemy soldier, but cease firing when one of the Skyhawks comes in to strafe the tree line. The nose of the plane is pointing down at a slight angle and there is an orange twinkling as it fires its mini-gun, an aerial cannon that fires explosive 20-mm bullets so rapidly that it sounds like a buzz saw. The rounds, smashing into the tree line and the rice paddy at the incredible rate of one hundred per second, raise a translucent curtain of smoke and spraying water. Through this curtain, we see the Viet Cong behind the dike sitting up with his arms outstretched, in the pose of a man beseeching God. He seems to be pleading for mercy from the screaming mass of technology that is flying no more than one hundred feet above him. But the plane swoops down on him, fires its cannon once more, and blasts him to shreds. As the plane climbs away, I look at the dead men through my binoculars. All that remains of the third Viet Cong are a few scattered piles of bloody rags.

  * * *

  After the fight in the landing zone, C and D Companies started to advance through the valley, driving on the blocking position B Company had set up several miles away. We slogged across the paddies beneath an unforgiving sun. There was no enemy resistance, but that did not last for long. In the midafternoon, Charley Company was ordered to search Ha Na, one of the large villages that fronted the Vu Gia River. It proved a hellish task because the village was crisscrossed by thorny hedgerows as cruel and unyielding as barbed wire fences. We had to hack through them with machetes or blow holes in them with grenades, and when we couldn’t cut or blast our way through, we would circle around them, only to run into more. The result was the division of the company into small groups of confused men who bumped into each other, cursing each other as they cursed the thorns that slashed their skin and tore their uniforms.

  Sergeant Pryor’s squad uncovered a large cache of rice, medical supplies, and uniforms. It was stored in a poorly camouflaged pit, the rice in tins, the medical supplies in metal chests, the uniforms tied in bundles. Altogether, the food and equipment amounted to a ton. Calling Neal on the radio, I asked if we could get a helicopter to haul it out. No, he said, there wasn’t time for that. The operation was running behind schedule. The company had to be at its first objective, Hill 52, by such and such a time. Get moving.

  “Get moving,” I said to Pryor, “we can’t get a chopper.”

  The sergeant, his trousers in tatters, turned to me with rage on his sunburned face. “You mean leave this stuff? No way I’m going to leave this stuff for Charlie, sir. What the fuck’d they make us search this ville for?”

  “All right. Destroy it in place and then get your people moving.” I handed him two white-phosphorus grenades.

  He threw them into the cache, which began to burn. So did a nearby house, as the chunks of bursting phosphorus landed on its thatch roof. Flames engulfed the house in a matter of seconds, and the sparks from the blaze flew into a neighboring hut, setting it afire. Four women ran out, screaming. Above their cries. I heard the team of engineers attached to the company yelling “Fire in the hole!” They had found a complex of concrete bunkers at the edge of the village and were about to blow it with TNT charges. Terrified, the women threw themselves on the ground and covered their ears as the charges went off. They screamed again when a second charge shook the ground and brought a cascade of dirt and powdered concrete down on their heads.

  Sniper fire started to lash at us from the cane fields flanking the village, the crack of bullets almost indistinguishable from the sound made by the bursting bamboo frames of the burning huts. Six or seven houses were blazing now, and flames were licking at the tops of the trees. Coursey’s and McKenna’s platoons pushed ahead. Mine went on with the search. A corporal, his face blackened with soot, came up to me. He was holding a Vietnamese man at gunpoint.

  “We found this son of a bitch trying to get away,” the corporal said. “What should we do with him?”

  The man, who looked to be about forty, was dressed in a khaki shirt and dark trousers. “Teach school. No VC,” he said.

  “I’ll bet you do. Tie him up and bring him to the skipper,” I said to the corporal. I did not like the look in the marine’s eyes and added: “Alive. You get him to the skipper alive.”

  “Yes, sir,” the corporal said. He pulled the man’s shirt down and tied his hands with the sleeves. The schoolteacher, who turned out to be the political officer for the local Viet Cong battalion, was built like a flyweight wrestler.

  “No VC. Teach school,” he repeated as the marine led him away, both of them choking in the smoke.

  The heat inside the village was terrific, a blast-furnace heat that seared our lungs. Pryor shoved two hysterical young women toward me.

  “Lieutenant, let’s take these two in. I felt their hands. They’re soft. Not a callus on ’em. They sure as hell aren’t peasant girls.”

  Before I could answer, the engineers again yelled “Fire in the hole!” We ducked down. There was another jarring blast. The girls fell, screaming and rolling in the dust. Pryor pulled them up, grabbing one in each hand, and shook them roughly. “Stop that,” he said. “Stop that goddamned screaming.” Then to me: “What should we do with ’em, lieutenant?”

  “Let them go, for Chrissake.”

  “But sir…”

  “I said to let them go, sergeant.”

  He pushed the two girls away. “Yes, sir,” he sneered. “Yes, sir.” I could feel myself losing control of him and the platoon. The marines were still overwrought from the earlier fighting, and with the heat, the hedgerows, the sniping, the wailing villagers, and the noise of the spreading fire they were on the verge of losing what little emotional balance they had left.

  Machine-gun and rifle fire broke out up front. Bullets were smacking into the trees around us. I learned from Neal that Coursey’s platoon had opened up on a squad of Viet Cong attempting to cross the river in a boat, and enemy riflemen on the opposite side of the river, covering their comrades in the boat, had opened up on the platoon.

  Several minutes later, a fighter-bomber came in to strafe the Viet Cong positions on the far side of the Vu Gia. It dove down firing rockets and cannon. Maddened by the noise, several water buffalo broke out of their pen, stampeding through the village, red-eyed and bellowing, hooking with their curved horns. One of the infuriated beasts gored a marine in Coursey’s platoon and was then cut down with an automatic rifle.

  Half of Ha Na was in flames by this time, the flames leaping from house to house, the fire creating its own wind. Gagging, I ran through the smoke trying to reorganize the platoon. The hedgerows and the blaze had broken it up into bands of two or three men each. “Get your people together and move on Hill 52,” I said whenever I found an NCO. “Get your people together.” The marines stumbled half blind through the black clouds, trying to get away from the fire. Sergeants and corporals bawled “Get on line! Tie in on your right and left. Where’s Smith’s fire-team? Ti
e in on your right. Guide is right. Where’s Baum? Baum! Where the fuck are you?” Sniper bullets whined in from the cane field.

  Then D Company, three hundred yards away on our left flank, met heavy resistance. We could hear it above the sniping and the exploding bamboo, a sound like that of a huge piece of canvas being torn in half. Heavy mortars started crashing somewhere in front of us. Neal called me on the radio: Miller’s company had run into a nest of enemy machine guns and had lost thirteen men. They were now pinned down and shelling the Viet Cong positions with four-deuces. C Company had to get to Hill 52 quickly. Get your people moving. Yes, sir. Right away, sir. “SECOND PLATOON ON LINE! MOVE!” After shouting ourselves hoarse and filling our lungs with smoke, the NCOs and I managed to form something that resembled a line. It was still a mess. Some of McKenna’s men were mixed in with mine, mine with his. The platoon drove toward the hill, pressed by the fire roaring behind them, pressed by the NCOs’ constant cries of “stay on line, tie in your right, guide is right.” The village was a long one, sprawling beside the riverbank for a quarter of a mile. There seemed to be a hedgerow every ten yards, or a pangee trap or a ditch with crisscrossed bamboo stakes in it. There was another tearing-canvas noise in the fields beyond the canebrake. Neal again called me on the radio: D Company had advanced on the machine guns behind the mortar barrage, but the four-deuces had had no effect on the heavily reinforced VC bunkers. Miller had lost seventeen men in the assault and fallen back to call in air strikes. My platoon was not moving fast enough. We were not keeping abreast of Coursey’s men.

  I handed the receiver back to Jones. Yelling at the men and kicking them, I pushed them forward. Jets came in to bomb and strafe the enemy machine-gun bunkers. The planes shrieked directly over our heads, deafening us. The two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs made the ground tremble, and the trees and houses shimmied in front of our eyes. More planes came over, strafing with their cannon, the cannon making that buzz-saw sound. Then the first flight, circling around, flew over again and dropped more bombs. Huge columns of brown smoke jetted upward, but the VC machine guns kept hammering. “Move it out, people,” the squad leaders yelled, trying to make themselves heard above the noise. “Guide is right. Don’t bunch up in the center.” Behind us was the advancing wall of flame from the burning village. We smashed through another hedgerow, flushed a Viet Cong from a concrete building, captured him, and then blew up the building with a satchel charge. Lunging through the sulfur-stinking smoke of the blast, dust and bits of cement raining down on them, the marines leaped into a traversed trench line. I tried to reform them there, but it was enfiladed by a sniper in the cane field. Crack-crack-crack. The rounds narrowly missed us, and we clambered out of the trench to pour rifle fire into the field. A Viet Cong came running out of the yellow-green cane. At a range of nearly four hundred yards, Lonehill put a bullet at the man’s feet, adjusted the elevation knob of his rifle, and coolly fired again, the enemy soldier falling hard. The planes came in for another bombing run. There was a great roar, and the forms of the men in front of me blurred for an instant, as if a filmy, wavering curtain had dropped between us. While the planes bombed, we clawed our way through hedgerows and smoke toward the hill whose serene, pale-green crest we could see rising from the trees ahead. We had advanced a few hundred yards, but the hill did not look any closer. The noise of the battle was constant and maddening, as maddening as the barbed hedges and the heat of the fire raging just behind us.

  Then it happened. The platoon exploded. It was a collective emotional detonation of men who had been pushed to the extremity of endurance. I lost control of them and even of myself. Desperate to get to the hill, we rampaged through the rest of the village, whooping like savages, torching thatch huts, tossing grenades into the cement houses we could not burn. In our frenzy, we crashed through the hedgerows without feeling the stabs of the thorns. We did not feel anything. We were past feeling anything for ourselves, let alone for others. We shut our ears to the cries and pleas of the villagers. One elderly man ran up to me, and, grabbing me by the front of my shirt, asked, “Tai Sao? Tai Sao?” Why? Why?

  “Get out of my goddamned way,” I said, pulling his hands off. I took hold of his shirt and flung him down hard, feeling as if I were watching myself in a movie. The man lay where he fell, crying, “Tai Sao? Tai Sao?” I plunged on toward the foot of the hill, now only a short distance away.

  Most of the platoon had no idea of what they were doing. One marine ran up to a hut, set it ablaze, ran on, turned around, dashed through the flames and rescued a civilian inside, then ran on to set fire to the next hut. We passed through the village like a wind; by the time we started up Hill 52, there was nothing left of Ha Na but a long swath of smoldering ashes, charred tree trunks, their leaves burned off, and heaps of shattered concrete. Of all the ugly sights I saw in Vietnam, that was one of the ugliest: the sudden disintegration of my platoon from a group of disciplined soldiers into an incendiary mob.

  The platoon snapped out of its madness almost immediately. Our heads cleared as soon as we escaped from the village into the clear air at the top of the hill. Miller’s company, we learned, had overrun the enemy machine guns after the air strikes, but had lost a lot of men. C Company was ordered to remain on Hill 52 for the night. We started to dig in. The still-flaming rubble of Ha Na lay behind us. In the opposite direction, smoke was rising from the place where D Company had fought its battle and from the tree line the planes had bombed in the first hour of fighting.

  It was quiet as we dug our foxholes, strangely quiet after five hours of combat. My platoon was a platoon again. The calm of the outer world was matched by the calm we felt inside ourselves, a calm as deep as our rage had been. There was a sweetness in that inner quietude, but the feeling would not have been possible if the village had not been destroyed. It was as though the burning of Ha Na had arisen out of some emotional necessity. It had been a catharsis, a purging of months of fear, frustration, and tension. We had relieved our own pain by inflicting it on others. But that sense of relief was inextricably mingled with guilt and shame. Being men again, we again felt human emotions. We were ashamed of what we had done and yet wondered if we had really done it. The change in us, from disciplined soldiers to unrestrained savages and back to soldiers, had been so swift and profound as to lend a dreamlike quality to the last part of the battle. Despite the evidence to the contrary, some of us had a difficult time believing that we were the ones who had caused all that destruction.

  Captain Neal had no difficulty believing it. He was rightfully furious at me, and warned that I would be summarily relieved of command if anything like it happened again. I did not need the warning. I felt sick enough about it all, sick of war, sick of what the war was doing to us, sick of myself. Looking at the embers below, at the skeletons of the houses, a guilt weighed down on me as heavily as the heaviest pack I had ever carried. It was not only the senseless obliteration of Ha Na that disturbed me, but the dark, destructive emotions I had felt throughout the battle, almost from the moment the enemy mortars started to fall: urges to destroy that seemed to rise from the fear of being destroyed myself. I had enjoyed the killing of the Viet Cong who had run out of the tree line. Strangest of all had been that sensation of watching myself in a movie. One part of me was doing something while the other part watched from a distance, shocked by the things it saw, yet powerless to stop them from happening.

  I could analyze myself all I wanted, but the fact was we had needlessly destroyed the homes of perhaps two hundred people. All the analysis in the world would not make a new village rise from the ashes. It could not answer the question that kept repeating itself in my mind nor lighten the burden of my guilt. The usual arguments and rationalizations did not help, either. Yes, the village had obviously been under enemy control; it had been a VC supply dump as much as it had been a village. Yes, burning the cache was a legitimate act of war and the fire resulting from it had been accidental. Yes, the later deliberate destruction had been committed by m
en in extremis; war was a state of extremes, and men often did extreme things in it. But none of that conventional wisdom relieved my guilt or answered the question: “Tai Sao?” Why?

  We passed a quiet night: it was noisier for D Company. Treating the many wounded, Miller’s corpsmen had run out of morphine, and helicopters were unavailable to evacuate the casualties. So, the dead and wounded lay out there all night, the dead bloating, the wounded moaning because there was no morphine.

  The Viet Cong made a feeble attack against the battalion’s lines just before dawn, but were driven off with mortar fire. Later, helicopters flew in to evacuate the casualties and resupply us with rations and ammunition. Hovering over Hill 52 while the crew chiefs kicked the supplies out of the hatches, the aircraft drew a hail of automatic-weapons fire from the Viet Cong positions across the river. We answered with a few bursts from our machine guns, the short rounds geysering in the river that was bright gold in the early morning light.

  The war went on.

  Eighteen

  Merry it was to laugh there—

  Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.

  For power was on us as we slashed bones bare

  Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

  —Wilfred Owen

  “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”

  Filing up the trail that weaved through the stunted scrub jungle surrounding the outpost, the six men in the patrol walked on their bruised and rotted feet as if they were walking barefoot over broken glass. The patrol was waved in, and the marines climbed over the rusty perimeter wire one by one. The foothills where they had been all morning stretched behind them, toward the moss-green mountains wavering in the heat-shimmer.

  The heat was suffocating, as it always was between monsoon storms. The air seemed about to explode. Sun-dazed, half the platoon were dozing beneath their hooches. Others cleaned their rifles, which would start to corrode in a few hours and have to be cleaned again. A few men squatted in a circle around a tin of cheese which had been brought to Charley Hill with the twice-weekly ration resupply. The cheese was a special treat: a change from the dreary diet of C rations, and it eased the diarrhea that gripped us. Squatting around the tin, the men ate with their fingers, grunting their approval.