A Rumor of War (11 page)

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 Quan-tico 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.

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.

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 Chriswell’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.