A Rumor of War Read online

  The next few hours were given to the usual preparations, with everyone very cheerful—except the platoon sergeants. When I walked into their tent to pass some last-minute instructions to Campbell, I found them in what struck me as a solemn mood. Campbell seemed especially grim, not at all like himself, and in the weak light of a kerosene lamp, shadows deepening the lines in his face, he looked much older than his thirty-six years. He was writing a letter to his wife and three sons. It was odd how I had never been able to think of him as a husband and father, or as anything other than a sergeant. Now, I made some remark about their morose mood.

  “We’re not morose,” Colby said. “It’s just that this company acts like we’re going on a boy-scout hike. We were just talking and we think that if somebody gets killed tomorrow, he oughtta be laid out and the company marched past to look at the body. Then we’ll see if anybody’s still got something to laugh about.”

  I said that that sounded pretty morbid.

  “These helicopter assaults can get pretty morbid, lieutenant.” Colby then launched into a description of some bloody operation he had gone on while serving as an adviser with the ARVN Rangers. “We’d move left and the mortar’d move left. We moved right and the mortars moved right. Stayed with us all the way up that valley. That was down at Tam-Ky, where I got hit, lieutenant. We just got our asses waxed and that’s what might happen tomorrow if it’s a hot LZ.”

  I made a graceful retreat, sensing I had touched an exposed nerve in these veterans. But I could no more understand what it was than I could the mood they were in. Full of illusions, I did not realize they had none.

  Five

  You wanted combat for what? I don’t know really why. Or really know why. Who wants true combat? But here it is …

  —Ernest Hemingway

  Across the River and into the Trees

  Widener awoke me in the early morning. Reaching through my mosquito net and shaking me by the shoulders, he said, “It’s oh-four-hundred, lieutenant. Time to get outta the rack.” Widener, a southern Indianan who had taken Chris-well’s place as platoon radio operator, had the shrill, twanging voice of a country-music disc jockey. It was an extremely disagreeable voice at that hour. “Oh-four-hundred, sir. Rack-out time.”

  “I’m awake, Widener. You can shove off.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I swung off my cot. The hard-packed earthen floor of the tent felt cool underfoot. My mouth had a metallic taste from having smoked too much and slept too little the night before. I had, in fact, just managed to doze off when Widener came in. And yet I was not at all tired. There had been times in civilian life when I had slept ten hours and felt less alert than I did on that early April morning in Vietnam. Miller, the forward observer attached to C Company, lay snoring on the cot next to mine. Only the outline of his bulky figure was visible through the mosquito netting that shrouded him. The others were awake: Peterson lacing up his boots, McCloy shaving by flashlight at the makeshift washstand outside, Lemmon wiping the dampness from his carbine, Tester doing the same to his rare and precious SK-50, a submachine gun he had acquired because his pistol seemed an inadequate means of self-defense. I fumbled in the darkness for my boots and jacket, locating both by their smell, the moldy stink of dried sweat and embedded filth. The whole tent smelled that way, like a locker room that has never been aired out. We dressed without talking; the only sounds were the far-off bumping of artillery and the clanging of mess kits as the company filed toward the galley for breakfast. Then a battery of eight-inch howitzers opened up from its position across the road from battalion HQ. The noise made my heart contract. The big guns had been brought up a few days earlier, but I could not get used to their monstrous roar, nor to the sound, a demented whooping, made by the retaining bands that spun off the huge shells that rushed overhead.

  “Big Ivan,” said Miller, awakened by the firing. Ivan was the battery’s radio code-name. “That’s what they’ll prep the LZ with. They’re probably registering now. Yeah, I’ll bet Ivan puts the fear of God into Charlie.”

  “I don’t know about Charlie,” I said, “but it sure puts the fear of God into me.”

  “Hey,” someone said, “P.J.’s getting nervous in the service.”

  McCloy, who was primping himself outside, recited some Kipling: “‘I’m old and I’m nervous and cast from the service’…”

  I bristled at the ribbing because it came too close to the truth. I was nervous. Afraid that I might make some stupid mistake when the platoon hit the LZ, I had lain awake all night trying to conceive of every contingency and then rehearsing what I would do in each case. Over and over again until, exhausted by the mental effort, I had entertained myself with fantasies of personal heroics. I had even imagined how the accounts of my bravery would sound in the local newspapers: “A Chicago-area marine has been awarded the Silver Star in Vietnam, it was announced today. Philip Caputo, of suburban Westchester, was cited for his courageous actions while serving as a platoon leader with the 3d Marine Regiment near Danang. The 23-year-old officer single-handedly knocked out a Viet Cong machine-gun nest.…” With my brain alternating between feverish dreams of glory and the coldly practical problems involved in securing a landing zone, my feelings had become confused. I hoped we would meet resistance so I could fulfill those dreams, or at least learn how I would behave under fire. At the same time, worried that I might behave badly, I hoped nothing would happen. I wanted action and I did not want it. The result of these conflicting desires was what I felt now, a tense emotional balance which the blasts of the howitzers threatened to upset.

  In this state, McCloy’s poetry recital irritated me more than it should have. I made some testy comment about the stupidity of shaving before an operation; every nick and scratch would sting like hell in the heat. Murph said something about it being proper and gallant for an officer to go into combat clean-shaven, adding that “the French paratroopers shaved before they jumped into Dien Bien Phu.”

  “Yeah,” Lemmon said, “it sure did them a lot of fucking good.”

  The eight-inchers started firing another mission as we walked down to the galley, the guns visible, then invisible in the fitful muzzle-flashes. The valley toward the west was a pool of blackness lit only by the red-bursting shells. Toward the east, the China Sea could not be distinguished from the sky, so that the lamps of the fishing junks looked like low-hanging stars and the strip of white coastal sand like the edge of the world. Up ahead, the company was filing past the mess line, the faces of the men dimly seen in the yellow light cast by the lantern burning in the galley. Mess men in greasy dungarees indifferently slopped breakfast onto the trays, and one marine expressed amazement when he saw what it was. “Steak and eggs? I gotta be seeing things. Steak and goddamned eggs?”

  “You ain’t seeing things,” a cook said. “Fattening you up for the slaughter, jarhead. Steak and eggs’ll look terrific when your guts are hanging out.”

  In the fly tent grandly billed as the Officers’ and Staff-NCOs’ Mess we ate hurriedly amid the pleasant and strangely domestic smell of brewing coffee. The platoon sergeants had recovered from their funk and were cheerful in the resigned way of men who know they have no control over what is going to happen to them. They complained only about the lack of bread and jam. What was the good of luxury like steak and eggs without bread and jam? First Sergeant Wagoner told them not to expect too much, and Campbell said, “Top, you’re full of sour owlshit,” and everyone laughed a little too hard.

  It grew light, not the way it does in temperate climates, with darkness receding slowly before the advancing gray of dawn, but all at once. Breakfast was over, our first decent meal in seven weeks. Walking back to the officers’ tent to pick up my gear, I caught the odors of water, wet earth, and woodsmoke on the early-morning breeze. This was the only bearable time of day in Vietnam. I delighted in the coolness while dreading the heat that was promised in the red, rising sun.

  We formed into helicopter teams of eight men each and assembled at
a wide, level place in the saddle between our hill—we now thought of it as ours—and Hill 327. C Company presented a picture that could have been a symbol of the war: lines of men in rifle-green and camouflage helmets, standing or kneeling on one knee, waiting for the helicopters that would take them into combat. Far below and across the road from the dust-powdered headquarters tents, the eight-inch battery began pounding the landing zone. It was a sight that would move me always, even after I became disillusioned with the war: the sight of heavy guns in action. They were self-propelled howitzers, awesome-looking things as big as tanks. Tongues of flame flicked from the long, black barrels. The shells went hissing overhead and on over the valley, dim in the shadow of the mountains. The Cordillera looked especially beautiful at that hour, and, in the clear air, close enough to touch. It was golden-green high up, where the new sun touched it, greenish-black lower down, and the line between light and shadow was as sharp as if it had been painted on. Looking in the opposite direction, we could see the helicopters taking off from the airfield. Climbing into the clean sky, they flew above the coastal paddy lands and resembled a string of ungainly, migrating birds. Now the sound of the bombardment reached us. The explosions of the first shells echoed and reechoed through the mountains; just as their reverberating roar began to fade, there was another burst and another series of echoes, and still another, until all we heard was a rumbling, solemn and unbroken. The guns were firing airbursts. Gray puffs of smoke blossomed above Hill 107, which bulked from the embrowned elephant grass like the back of a sleeping dinosaur. Behind it rose Nui Ba-Na, on whose eastern face the shadow line receded as the sun climbed. Mists had begun to curl up through the jungle that covered the mountain’s slopes, and they mingled with the smoke to form a cloud that was shaken and thickened by each new bursting shell. The scene charmed me: the dim valley, the hill and the gray puffs blossoming above it, and, towering above it all, that great mountain with its mysterious name.

  The helicopters came in when the bombardment lifted. They landed three at a time in the small zone, each chopper creating a miniature hurricane. The crew chief on the lead aircraft waved my team forward. Bent double beneath the whirling rotor blades, we ran through the wind-lashed dust and were hauled aboard. The noise was terrific. The squat, blunt-nosed H-34 shuddered and rattled violently. We had to shout to make ourselves heard. The crew chief, sitting on a folded flak jacket behind his machine gun, motioned to us to strap ourselves into the webbed seats. The engine pitch increased. The helicopter seemed to bear down for a moment, like a high-jumper crouching to spring, then lunged upward. My guts tightened in the abrupt ascent. We went into a banking climb. I saw the rest of the company far below, growing rapidly smaller.

  We flew westward, following the course of the Song Tuy Loan. Rice paddies stretched north and south of it, a green and brown mosaic slashed by the mustard-colored ribbon that was the river. Widener and the six riflemen in my team sat stiffly, their weapons propped upright between their knees. Dust clung to their faces like red talcum powder. The crew chief, leaning on the butt of the M-60, was trying to light a cigarette in the wind that blew through the open hatch. It was the first cool, steady wind I had felt since coming to Vietnam and it was wonderful. God, it was going to be hot in the bush. If only it would not be so hot, just this one day. Looking out the hatch, I saw the other helicopters flying alongside in staggered formation. Dark-green against the blue sky, they rose and fell on the wind currents, like ships riding a gentle swell at sea.

  After I came home from the war, I was often asked how it felt, going into combat for the first time. I never answered truthfully, afraid that people would think of me as some sort of war-lover. The truth is, I felt happy. The nervousness had left me the moment I got into the helicopter, and I felt happier than I ever had. I don’t know why. I had an uncle who had told me what the fighting had been like on Iwo Jima, an older cousin who had fought with Patton in France and who could hardly talk about the things he had seen. I had read all the serious books to come out of the World Wars, and Wilfred Owen’s poetry about the Western Front. And yet, I had learned nothing. “All the poet can do today is warn,” Owen wrote. Colby and the other platoon sergeants were certainly not poets, but that is what they had been trying to do the night before—warn me, warn all of us. They had already been where we were going, to that frontier between life and death, but none of us wanted to listen to them. So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

  The country changed. The Tuy Loan narrowed until it was only a thread bordered by galleries of bamboo jungle. The paddy lands gave way to creased and yellow foothills that looked like the hills on a terrain model or a relief map. I checked to make sure the smoke grenades were securely fastened to my cartridge belt, and for what must have been the tenth time, went over the plan for securing the LZ: the nose of the helicopters will be 12 o’clock; 1st squad will set in from 12 to 4; 2d squad from 4 to 8; 3d squad from 8 to 12; red smoke, hot LZ; green smoke, cold LZ. While I was doing this, the formation changed course. We were flying parallel to the mountains; the Cordillera spread out before us, and it was the most forbidding thing I had ever seen. An unbroken mass of green stretched westward, one ridgeline and mountain range after another, some more than a mile high and covered with forests that looked solid enough to walk on. It had no end. It just went on to the horizon. I could see neither villages, nor fields, roads, or anything but endless rain forests the color of old moss. There it was, the Annamese Cordillera, hostile and utterly alien. The Vietnamese themselves regarded it with dread. “Out there” they called that humid wilderness where the Bengal tiger stalked and the cobra coiled beneath its rock and the Viet Cong lurked in ambush. Looking down, I wondered for a moment if the operation was somebody’s idea of a joke. Our mission was to find an enemy battalion. A battalion—a few hundred men. The whole North Vietnamese Army could have concealed itself in that jungle-sea, and we were going to look for a battalion. Crush it in a hammer and anvil movement. We were going to find a battalion and destroy it. Search and destroy. I half expected those great mountains to shake with contemptuous laughter at our pretense.

  We crossed the line of departure, a military term for the imaginary line beyond which a unit is committed to an attack. I signaled the squad to lock and load. Rifle bolts were pulled back, rounds chambered, chin straps unbuckled. The helicopters went down in a steep, spiraling descent. The trees below seemed nearly a hundred feet high, and for a long way up their trunks were as gray and bare as bones. The landing zone was just ahead, coming up fast, a circle of brightness in the gloom of the jungle. Flowing through the middle of the clearing, the brown Tuy Loan glinted dully in the sunlight, like a belt of tarnished brass. Now the chopper was skimming over the tops of the trees and the crew chief pumping machine-gun bursts into the undergrowth at the edge of the clearing. The belt of cartridges twitched as it uncoiled from the ammo box. The pilot “flared” the helicopter; that is, he committed it to a landing. The rotors made a wap-wap-wap noise, the aircraft settled against the earth, and we were out and running in a skirmish line through the wind-flattened grass.

  The other two squads came in, and I was relieved to see them fanning across the clearing without confusion. The lack of enemy fire was another relief. This, I had decided, was the last place I wanted to get into a fire-fight. Happiness is a cold landing zone. Within a few moments, we had cleared the LZ and set up a perimeter in the bordering woods. It was like walking from brilliant sunshine into a darkened room. Through the dense canopy overhead the light fell in splintered shafts, bathing everything below in a greenish twilight. No wind blew. The air was heavy and wet, and the jungle smelled like a damp cellar. We could hear things slithering and rustling in the underbrush. We could hear them, but not see them. It was difficult to see much of anything through the vines and trees, tangled together in a silent, savage struggle for light and air. A war o
f plant life.

  I tossed a grenade. The thick green smoke billowed from the canister and the remainder of the company landed. When the helicopters flew off, a feeling of abandonment came over us. Charley Company was now cut off from the outside world. We had crossed a line of departure all right, a line of departure between the known and the unknown. The helicopters had made it seem familiar. Being Americans, we were comfortable with machines, but with the aircraft gone we were struck by the utter strangeness of this rank and rotted wilderness. Nothing moved in the paralyzed air, and the only sounds were the gurgling of the river and the rustling of those invisible things in the underbrush. It was not at all a tranquil silence. I thought of that old line from the westerns: “It’s too quiet.” Well, it was too quiet. There was a tension in the calm, a feeling of something about to happen. Walking around the perimeter to make sure no one had gotten lost, I crashed through a thicket of elephant grass and heard a taut voice cry out, “Who’s there? Who’s that?”

  “It’s the lieutenant.”

  The voice belonged to Lance Corporal Skates, ordinarily not the jumpy type. I found him a few yards ahead, with his rifle still aimed in my direction. “Okay, it’s you, sir. You sure scared the hell out of me, lieutenant.”

  Lemmon’s and Tester’s platoons were forming up at the far end of the clearing. Company HQ, marked by a small forest of radio antennae, was in the middle of the column. My own radio crackled just then, and the silence was shattered by Widener’s disc-jockey voice.