A Rumor of War (10 page)

Karsch and Colonel Bain came out to the perimeter fairly often, and it was interesting to see the contrast in these two officers. The colonel looked, and was, every inch a field marine, a brusque, hulking man with a face that managed to be ugly and attractive at the same time. His nose, banged-up, and too big, the seamed flesh and hard, worn eyes told more about where he had been than the words in his service record book and the ribbons on his chest. It was an ugly face, but it had the dignity that is conferred upon those who have suffered the bodily and emotional aches of war. The colonel had paid his dues under fire, and so belonged to that ancient brotherhood to which no amount of money, social pedigrees, or political connections can gain a man admittance.

The tall but paunchy brigadier was another matter. He affected dash by wearing a green ascot with his starched battle jacket. His boots and the stars on his collar gleamed, and a kite-tail of staff officers trailed behind him when he toured the perimeter. The general made some attempts at talking man-to-man to us during his outings, but he could never quite bring it off. Once, he came to my platoon command post while I was shaving out of my helmet. As I started to wipe the lather off my face, the elegant figure, all starch and sharp creases, waved his hand deferentially. “No need for that, lieutenant,” he said. “Keeping clean in the field. I like to see that. Carry on.” I carried on, struck by the insincere friendliness in his voice, like the voice of a campaigning politician.

The overture of the counteroffensive began as March ended. I use the term
counteroffensive
loosely; the racket we heard each night seemed to be a series of disconnected firefights rather than an organized battle. Machine guns would fire in short, measured bursts, the bursts growing ever longer until there was only one long continuous rattling that fell suddenly silent; and then the timed bursts would begin again. Once in a while, a mortar round went off with a quick, dull
ca-rump
, a sound which could not be heard without thinking of torn flesh and crushed bones. Heavy artillery drummed all night at irregular intervals, the pale light of the exploding shells flickering above the rims of the distant hills. The fighting sometimes came close to the airfield, but never close enough to touch us, except for the usual sniping; and it was strange to sit safely in our foxholes while other men were killing and dying less than a mile away.

To keep the troops from becoming complacent, the company gunnery sergeant, a broad-chested cheerful man named Marquand, would send them to their positions with prophecies of impending attacks. “They’re gonna hit us tonight. I gar-untee you. We’re gonna get hit.” But nothing happened. Our role in the alleged counteroffensive was limited to making detailed reports of whatever firing we heard forward of our respective platoon sectors. I am not sure who did what with that information, but I think it helped the battalion intelligence officer plot what is known in the jargon as a “sitmap”—a map showing the dispositions of friendly and enemy forces. He showed it to me one day. The MLR was a green line drawn in grease pencil. Beyond it, a swarm of rectangles symbolizing VC battalions and independent companies described a semicircle around the airfield, with the heaviest concentrations to the south and west. A sobering and bewildering sight: the Communists had the equivalent of a division out there, but we had yet to see one enemy soldier. Looking at the map, then out at the paddies, then back at the map, I felt the same queasiness as on that earlier night in Guiliumet’s foxhole. It had been a phantom sniper then. Now it was a whole division of phantoms.

Gonzalez was wounded late in the month, our first casualty. He had been leading a wiring detail and strayed into a minefield which the RFs were supposed to have cleared before we relieved them. Either they had made a bad job of it or the VC said to be in their ranks had deliberately left a few mines in place. They were small antipersonnel mines, designed to cripple rather than kill, and the one Gonzalez stepped on did what it was supposed to do. He was blasted into the air, and his left foot turned into a mass of bruised and bloody meat inside the tatters of his boot. He might have bled to death out there, but Lance Corporal Sampson, crawling on his belly and probing for mines with a bayonet, cleared a path through the field, slung the wounded man over his shoulders, and carried him to safety. Sampson was recommended for a Bronze Star. We did not see Gonzalez again. He was evacuated to the States and the last we heard of him, he was recovering in the Oakland Naval Hospital. His foot had been amputated.

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 natural 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.