A Rumor of War Read online

  He was deeply missed, not because he possessed qualities that made him special, but simply because he had been one of us. Peterson, concerned about the company’s low spirits, told the platoon commanders to have a talk with their men. We were to remind them that this was a war zone and that they would have to get used to casualties, because Gonzalez, though the first, would surely not be the last. The thought of giving such a lecture made me feel like a fraud—I didn’t know anything about combat soldiering—but I gave it anyway. The platoon assembled at my command post, as my hooch was grandiosely called, at dusk. Huddled around me like a football team around a quarterback, helmets held under their arms, faces so caked with dust that their eyes seemed to be peering from beneath red masks, they listened patiently to a boot second lieutenant telling them about the hard facts of war. I called for questions when I was finished. There was only one: “José gonna be okay, lieutenant?” I said that he would be, except for the amputation. A few men nodded. They had heard the only thing that was truly important to them and could not have cared less about anything else I had to say. Their friend was going to be all right. I dismissed them then and, watching them file off in twos and threes, I was again impressed by the uncommon affection these common men had for each other.

  And there were more casualties. Three-Nine suffered most of them. Only a few were caused by enemy action, the rest by sunstroke and accidents—those mishaps that are an inevitable part of war. Nervous sentries shot other marines by mistake. Accidental discharges accounted for several dead and wounded. Once, a prop-driven Skyraider that had been crippled by anti-aircraft fire made a crash landing on the airstrip. The pilot had jettisoned all of his ordnance except a two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder, which for some reason remained in the bomb rack. A big exception. It exploded, disintegrating him and his plane and injuring several airmen nearby. That other inevitability, disease, also affected us, though not too seriously. Diarrhea and dysentery were the most prevalent. Malaria made its appearance, but the bitter-tasting pills we took kept it under control; they also gave a yellowish cast to everyone’s skin. I heard that two marines in the brigade died of blackwater fever. A more common affliction, one which I caught that spring, was called FUO—fever unknown origin. It was characterized by a slight fever, a sore and swollen throat, and a generally worn-out feeling which the heat made all the worse.

  These maladies were mainly due to our living conditions. We used to read with amazement the stories about the luxuries lavished on the United States Army. The Ice-Cream Soldiers, we called them, for the marines in I Corps lived hard, the way infantrymen always have. Dust, filth, and mosquitoes filled our hooches at night. Our one cooked meal seemed always to be rice and beans. C rations constituted the other two meals, and there came the moment when I could not look at those tin cans without gagging. Except for the peaches and pears. Peaches and pears were about all we could eat in that climate. We had no field showers at first; there was seldom enough water for drinking, let alone bathing, and much of that was the green-as-pea-soup stuff we drew from village wells. It was purified with halizone tablets, which made it taste like iodine. Even with the tablets, the water loosened everyone’s bowels, and if there is any one odor I will always associate with Vietnam, it is the stench of feces and lime in a latrine. Toilet paper was in short supply, except for the small tissues in the ration boxes, and what with waste-matter caking to anal hairs and no baths and constant sweating and uniforms stiff and white with dried sweat, it got so that we could not stand our own smell.

  All that aside, it was not an unpleasant time for us, this time of phony war. The miseries of the monsoon were months away, as was the war of attrition, with its murderous game of King of the Hill. We were near enough to danger to maintain the illusion that we really were in danger, and so to style ourselves combat infantrymen. Our self-image was bolstered by the airmen stationed at the base. An unwarlike bunch of mechanics and technicians, they had lived for weeks with nothing between them and the VC but that thin, unreliable line of ARVN militia. Now, with a Marine brigade guarding them, they could crawl into their bunks at night without fear of having their throats slit while they slept. “Man, I can’t tell you how glad we are to see you guys here” was a constant refrain. Their clubs were thrown open to us, and we were always assured at least one round of free beers. We were heroes in their eyes, a role we played to the hilt with much talk about ducking bullets out on the perimeter, which they thought of as the edge of the world.

  Some risk was involved in the small-unit security patrols we ran through the villages beyond the MLR, but these never amounted to more than healthy outdoor exercise. For diversion, we had occasional liberties in Danang, where we did the usual whoring and drinking. Once we had fulfilled our soldierly duties along those lines, we went to the Grand Hotel Tourane, a whitewashed, charmingly seedy colonial establishment, and ate a decent meal. Then, feeling sated and wonderfully clean in tropical khakis, we moved to the veranda to drink cold beer beneath slowly twirling fans and watch sampans gliding down the Tourane River, rust-red in the sunset.

  It was a peculiar period in Vietnam, with something of the romantic flavor of Kipling’s colonial wars. Even the name of our outfit was romantic: Expeditionary Brigade. We liked that. And because it was the only American brigade in-country at the time, we had a feeling of being special, a feeling of “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Lieutenant Bradley, the battalion motor transport officer, perfectly expressed the atmosphere of those weeks. He called it the “splendid little war.”

  It was not so splendid for the Vietnamese, of course, and in early April we got a hint of the nature of the contest that was being waged in the bush. Two Australian commandos, advisers to an ARVN Ranger Group, walked into Charley Company’s area. They were tough-looking characters, with hatchet-hard faces, and were accompanied by an even tougher-looking Ranger, whose eyes had the burned-out expression of a man no longer troubled by the things he has seen and done. The Aussies looked up Sergeant Loker, Tester’s platoon sergeant, who had once served as an adviser with them. There was a noisy reunion. A few of us, curious about these strangers, gathered nearby to listen. The Australians were describing a fire-fight they had been in that morning. The details of this clash have vanished from my memory, but I recall the shorter of the two saying that their patrol had taken a “souvenir” off the body of a dead VC. He pulled something from his pocket and, grinning, held it up in the way a fisherman posing for a photograph holds up a prize trout. It was an educational, if not an edifying, sight. Nothing could have been better calculated to give an idea of the kind of war Vietnam was and the kind of things men are capable of in war if they stay in it long enough. I will not disguise my emotions. I was shocked by what I saw, partly because I had not expected to see such a thing and partly because the man holding it was a mirror image of myself—a member of the English-speaking world. Actually, I should refer to “it” in the plural, because there were two of them, strung on a wire: two brown and bloodstained human ears.

  * * *

  Later in April, we relieved Three-Nine on Hill 327, which was not a single hill but a range of heights that formed a natural wall between Danang and the VC-controlled valley to the west. Happy Valley it was called, for nothing happy ever happened there.

  D Company held 327 itself, on the left flank; Hill 268, in the center, was occupied by our company; on the right flank, A Company defended the Dai-La Pass, north of which rose another hill, 368. It was held by 2d Battalion, which, along with regimental HqCo, had landed a few days earlier. Battalion HQ and B Company, in reserve, pitched camp at the base of the high ground, in a field near a squalid village nicknamed Dogpatch. A battery of 105s was emplaced immediately behind them, the howitzers enclosed by circular, sandbagged walls and the barrels elevated so the shells would clear the hills.

  The company’s new home had much to recommend it. The steep, grassy slopes of Hill 268 were almost unassailable by a large force. Its former tenants had improved its natur
al defensive features with sandbagged trenches, machine-gun emplacements, and a fortresslike forward observer’s bunker. Three-Nine apparently had not thought much about the admonition to preserve offensive spirit. Better still, the heat was less intense up there. And there was no dust, nor any snipers, except for Sixteen-Hundred Charlie, a punctual guerrilla who cranked off a few rounds at four o’clock almost every afternoon. We grew rather fond of him, mainly because he never hit anything. But most impressive was the view, especially when you looked westward. Happy Valley was as beautiful as it was dangerous, a quilt of emerald rice paddies and dusty fields broken by the vagrant lines of paddy dikes and palm groves where the villages were. The Song Tuy Loan flowed through the valley, but we could not see it because of the bamboo clustered thickly along its banks; only an occasional patch of brown water showed through the arched branches of the trees. Far off, duncolored foothills climbed toward the high Cordillera, whose peaks had names like Ba-Na, Dong Den, and Tung Heo. The mountains were always changing but never changing. Their forms shifted in the shimmering heat waves and their colors varied with the light, from pale green, when they caught the rising sun, to an ever darkening green that became blue on the very clear days after a rain had washed the dust from the air. I had never seen such country, so lush and enchanting in the daytime that it reminded me of Shangri-La, that fictional land of eternal youth. But night always brought the sound of artillery, a practical reminder that this was Vietnam, where youth was merely expendable.

  Ten days passed, ten days of total idleness. The novelty of our surroundings wore off and the battalion began to suffer from a spiritual disease called la cafard by the French soldiers when they were in Indochina. Its symptoms were occasional fits of depression combined with an inconquerable fatigue that made the simplest tasks, like shaving or cleaning a rifle, seem enormous. Its causes were obscure, but they had something to do with the unremitting heat, the lack of action, and the long days of staring at that alien landscape; a lovely landscape, yes, but after a while all that jungle green became as monotonous as the beige of the desert or the white of the Arctic.

  We waited and waited for an attack that never came. Finally, in the latter half of the month, someone decided that since the Viet Cong would not come to us, we would go to them. The strategy of static defense was scrapped. The brigade received orders to commence long-range patrols and small-scale search-and-destroy operations beyond the perimeter. “Small-scale” meant up to battalion size. The new strategy went under the rubric of “aggressive defense,” but it meant that we were going to share in the fighting. The war would no longer be only “their war,” meaning the Vietnamese, but ours as well; a jointly owned enterprise.

  This proved to be an effective cure for la cafard. The old excitement, dulled by seven weeks of drudgery, pulsed through the battalion again. Since the landing, we had acquired the conviction that we could win this brushfire war, and win it quickly, if we were only turned loose to fight. By “we,” I do not mean the United States, but our brigade alone; and by “quickly,” I mean very quickly. “I think we’ll have this cleaned up in a few months,” a staff major told me at the time. Such assurance did not seem outlandish then, nor was it confined to those of us in Vietnam. An old high-school friend, also in the Marine Corps, was aboard ship in the mid-Atlantic when he learned of the Danang landing. As soon as he got back to the United States, he rushed to Washington and requested immediate assignment to “ground forces, Western Pacific.”

  “I was worried that the war would be over before I got there,” he told me years later. (He got his wish; he was sent to Vietnam twice and was twice wounded, first by a mortar, then by a rocket that left him blind in one eye.)

  I guess we believed in our own publicity—Asian guerrillas did not stand a chance against U.S. Marines—as we believed in all the myths created by that most articulate and elegant mythmaker, John Kennedy. If he was the King of Camelot, then we were his knights and Vietnam our crusade. There was nothing we could not do because we were Americans, and for the same reason, whatever we did was right.

  The new phase opened with B Company’s skirmish on April 22. As far as I know, it was the first engagement fought by an American unit in Vietnam. Like so many of the thousands of fire-fights that were to follow, it began with an ambush and ended inconclusively. An eighty-man company from the 3d Reconnaissance Battalion had set out that morning on a patrol through Happy Valley. Third Recon was a band of self-styled swashbucklers whose crest was a skull and crossbones and whose motto proclaimed them to be CELER, SILENS ET MORTALIS—swift, silent and deadly. Slow, noisy and harmless would have been more like it, because about all they ever did was get themselves surrounded or ambushed, or both, and then call for someone to rescue them.

  And that is what happened on the 22d. A company of VC, numbering around one hundred and twenty men, opened up on the patrol near the hamlet of Binh Thai. The patrol charged the enemy positions, but the lightly armed reconnaissance troops failed to dislodge the guerrillas, who pinned them down with automatic-weapons fire. A team of ARVN scouts attached to the marines detached themselves and fled in panic. The patrol leader meanwhile radioed an urgent request for reinforcements. After a long delay, while the request went up and down the chain of command, Bravo Company was ordered to saddle up in full combat gear. Led by its delighted captain, the riflemen assembled at the battalion helipad to await the arrival of their helicopters, symbol of the military’s New Mobility. The H-34s got there, but not in time to prevent another delay, which, through no fault of the H-34s, rendered the New Mobility meaningless. A regimental staff officer, noticing that the marines were not wearing flak jackets, ordered them back to their tents. At this, Colonel Bain flew into a rage, commenting acidly about “chicken-shit staff officers who care more about uniform regulations than about helping marines in trouble.” To show his contempt for these meddlers, he hopped in his jeep and drove to the valley by way of a dirt road. Where the road ended, he continued on foot to the battlefield, through two miles of hostile bush with only a frightened driver and the sergeant major for security. This daring act earned him the admiration of the troops and the enmity of the brigade and regimental staffs.

  We in C Company were unaware of the confusion. From our eight-hundred-foot citadel, we could see only the drama of the operation. It was as though we were in an open-air theater, watching a war movie. The marines running at a crouch into the helicopters; the helicopters taking off one by one as they were loaded, each rising in a floating, nose-down climb out of the dust cloud raised by the rotor blades; the deafening roar of the engines diminishing as the aircraft soared to an assembly point directly overhead, hovering, while up ahead Huey gunships strafed the landing zone, skimming low and looking small against the background of the mountains, the bursts from their rapid-fire cannon muted by distance to a whirring noise; then the long, sliding descent of the assault helicopters, which grew larger, then smaller before they vanished beneath the low ridge beyond which lay the landing zone; the white-phosphorus smoke billowing through the trees where Bravo Company made contact, and the taut voice that came crackling over a field radio: “Burke Bravo has four VC KIA, say again four Victor Charlie KIA.” There was a fascination in all this. More than anything, I wanted to be out there with them. Contact: that event for which so many of us lusted. And I knew then that something in me was drawn to war. It might have been an unholy attraction, but it was there and it could not be denied.

  Off and on, the fire-fight lasted until dusk, but B Company never came up against the main body of VC. The guerrillas had used the delays to break contact with the recon patrol and then fade back into the bush, their withdrawal covered by a few snipers and a small rear guard. Six of these were killed and four captured in a hamlet that was burned down with white-phosphorus grenades. Our casualties were insignificant: a few men were wounded by grenade shrapnel, but only one, from the reconnaissance patrol, seriously enough to be hospitalized. Still, Bravo Company felt they had undergone their
baptism of fire, that soldier’s sacrament, and came back in a cocky mood.

  Late the following day, Peterson called the officers and platoon sergeants into briefing. B Company’s little scrap had inspired the staff to try something more ambitious: a two-company search-and-destroy operation. The enemy unit to be sought and, if found, destroyed, was the 807th Battalion. It was thought to be operating in the foothills around Hoi-Vuc, a village on the far side of the valley. Delta Company was to establish a blocking position near the scene of the previous day’s action while Charley Company made a helicopter assault a few miles farther west. The landing zone would be a clearing sandwiched between Hills 107 and 1098, the latter a great, green pyramid known to the Vietnamese by the more poetic name of Nui Ba-Na. From there C would move southeast, following the course of the Song Tuy Loan River, pass through the village of Hoi-Vuc, then link up with D. I recognized the maneuver from my Quantico schooldays: a hammer and anvil movement. C Company was the hammer, and the Viet Cong were expected to flee before its advance like crazed rats, only to be crushed against D Company, the anvil. That is how the plan looked on the captain’s map, where the tangled jungle was merely a smear of green ink and all the hills were flat.

  Peterson concluded by reading instructions from brigade concerning rules of engagement. The day before, a rifleman in B Company had shot a farmer, apparently mistaking him for a VC. To avoid similar incidents in the future, brigade again ordered that chambers be kept clear except when contact was imminent, and in guerrilla-controlled areas, no fire be directed at unarmed Vietnamese unless they were running. A running Vietnamese was a fair target. This left us bewildered and uneasy. No one was eager to shoot civilians. Why should the act of running identify someone as a Communist? What if we shot a Vietnamese who turned out to have a legitimate reason for running? Would that be a justifiable act of war or grounds for court-martial? The skipper finally said, “Look, I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but I talked to battalion and they said that as far as they’re concerned, if he’s dead and Vietnamese, he’s VC.” And on that note, we left to brief the squad leaders.