A Rumor of War (15 page)
Marshall comes up to me and tells me what happened. He had been off watch, lying in his hooch, when he heard movement a short distance away. There was a challenge from a sentry, followed by a few shots. Scrambling out of his hooch, Marshall saw a VC running past, toward the command post; but the infiltrator vanished into the darkness before anyone could get a clear shot at him.
After passing the word that there is to be a one-hundred-percent alert for the next hour, I walk back to the CP and take over radio watch from Widener. I am still not sure if the figure I saw and heard was a Viet Cong, an animal of some kind, or a chimera. The fear is real enough, though. We pass an uneventful but nervous night, and I feel like rejoicing when the sky begins to lighten and I call in the last situation report. “Charley Six, this is Charley Two. All secure, situation remains the same.”
Corporal Parker and I are in the division field hospital, visiting PFC Esposito, a grenadier in one of my squads. Esposito is seriously ill and is going to be evacuated to the States. A stocky, dark-skinned boy, he talks about going home after four years in the Marines. He has mixed feelings about it. It will be good to go home, he says, but he regrets having to leave the battalion and Parker, who has been his buddy since boot camp. Esposito appears to be heavily drugged. He lies on his canvas cot, eyes glassy, voice thick. Parker punches him softly in the shoulder and says, “You’ll be okay. Hey, we’ve been together a long time, huh?”
“Yeah, a long time,” Esposito says in a voice that sounds like a record playing at too slow a speed.
“Remember that Cuban missile thing back in ‘sixty-two? Man, that seems like a long time ago.” Turning to me, Parker says, “We’re tight, lieutenant. Me and Esposito are real tight.”
There are several wounded men in the tent, three marines and half a dozen South Vietnamese. The empty cots are spotted with dried bloodstains. Two of the three marines have been slightly wounded and are relaxing as if on a holiday. The third has a serious head injury. He is heavily bandaged. An intravenous tube is inserted in one of his forearms, a plasma tube in the other, and the tubes hang down from bottles suspended on a metal rack. Another tube is attached to his penis. Various fluids—urine, glucose, blood plasma—course steadily through the plastic tubes. The marine is a big, athletically built man, so tall that his feet hang over the edge of the cot. He lies still, and I can tell he is alive only by the rising and falling of his chest and the low, guttural sounds he makes every few minutes.
A corpsman puts a thermometer in his mouth, checks his blood pressure, then goes to look after the ARVN soldier who lies on the bed next to Esposito. It is a regular hospital bed, elevated so that the soldier is almost sitting straight up. Bandages and plaster casts cover every part of his body except one arm, the lower half of his face, and the top of his head. A shock of thick, black hair droops over the battle dressing wrapped around his forehead and eyes. A number of instruments are attached to the soldier’s body: tubes, rubber hoses, clamps, pressure gauges. Wrapped in white, with all those devices on him, he reminds me of one of those hideous experiments in a horror movie.
Parker and Esposito continue reminiscing about their long friendship. Parker’s eyes are damp, his voice cracking with emotion, and I feel embarrassed, as if I am listening in on the conversation of two lovers who are about to be separated. I turn to talk to the corpsman, asking him what happened to the South Vietnamese soldier. The corpsman tells me that he has been wounded in the left arm, both legs, the stomach and head and is expected to die in a day or two. The marine is less fortunate.
“He’ll probably go through the rest of his life about the way he is now, a vegetable,” the corpsman says.
A few moments later, almost as if he were trying to disprove this prognosis, the marine begins to thrash around and make a strange noise, a sort of gurgling snarl. Then I hear a sound like that of a crisp celery stalk being bitten in half. In his spasm, the marine has clamped his jaws on the thermometer. He is trying to swallow it. “Son of a bitch,” the corpsman says, running over and pulling the crushed instrument out of the marine’s mouth. The big man convulses violently, the bottles sway on the rack while the corpsman removes a Syrette from his kit. He daubs alcohol on the marine’s muscular arm and injects the sedative.
“Easy, easy,” he says, holding the man down. “Easy, easy. We’re going to have to give you a rectal thermometer from now on. Give it to you in the ass before you kill yourself.”
The sedative begins to take effect. The marine’s spasms subside, the snarling falls off to a succession of moans, and finally he is quiet.
We are lying in a ditch while an AK-47 rivets little pieces of copper-jacketed death into the road in front of us. When the firing stops, we run across and return fire from behind an embankment on the other side. We shoot without aiming into a field of elephant grass and up at some low, rounded hills nearby. A few of us clamber over the embankment, form a skirmish line and move through the field toward the hills. A rifleman cranks off a couple of rounds at something he has seen or heard, or something he thinks he has seen or heard. It is dead-still and broiling in the grass, hot enough to make it difficult to breathe.
Paulson and I scramble up a knoll and find an L-shaped bunker dug into its side. Approaching carefully, I stand next to the entrance and toss a grenade inside. A shudder passes through the ground when the grenade explodes with compacted force. After the smoke has cleared, Paulson and I crawl inside and find a reed mat which has been shredded by the blast. But the sniper, if he was ever here in the first place, is long gone. Then we trudge back to the road, feeling blown out by the wasted effort, like a boxer who has swung hard and missed.
An hour goes by. Parties of marines are staggering along, carrying heat casualties who lie in stretchers we have made by cutting poles with machetes and then doubling ponchos over the poles. My platoon is ordered to relieve the 1st at point. Moving up, we pass Lemmon’s men; they are sprawled in a culvert in the shade of some trees. One marine, slumped at the shoulders, his arms hanging between his knees, sits on a log in the classic pose of the worn soldier. Hollow-eyed, he stares at a point in space. Sweat-smeared dust coats his face. His helmet lies at his feet. His rifle, resting on its butt plate, is propped at an angle against one of his legs. I look at him and know that he is feeling what I am feeling: a tiredness greater than mere fatigue, deeper than bone-deep, one that reaches down into a part of myself I cannot name.
Another hour passes, and we can see the convoy that will take us back to the base camp on Hill 268. The trucks are lined up near the junction of this road and the one that leads through the Dai-La Pass. Slim and straight, an old French watchtower stands in the pass, a ruined monument to a ruined empire. The convoy is about five hundred yards ahead, the olive-drab vehicles miragelike in the heat waves rippling up from the road. Though the sight of it lifts our spirits, our bodies are too jaded to move any faster.
A machine-gunner named Powell begins to stumble and pirouette, like a man mimicking a drunk. Another marine offers to carry the heavy weapon, but Powell shoves him aside and says proudly, “I can hack it. I can hump my own gun.” The M-60 clatters to the ground. Powell staggers forward, then falls facedown into the dust. Rolling him over, we see that his skin is hot, dry, and fish-belly white. Heatstroke. We wet his lips and pour what is left of our water over his head. Two marines lift the unconscious Powell and, holding him in a fireman’s carry, hurry him to the trucks. He is put in the cab, to keep him out of the sun, but this turns out to be a mistake: the stifling air inside makes his condition worse. He wakes up in a maniacal rage and tries to strangle the driver. It takes three of us to pry his fingers loose from the man’s throat. His lips curled back on his teeth, kicking and growling like a captured animal, Powell is dragged into the bed of the truck and strapped to a stretcher with web belts. There are no helicopters available for an evacuation.
The convoy moves slowly. All the while, Powell alternates between unconsciousness and frenzy, and once he manages to snap the belts loose. When we reach the 105-mm battery position, Lieutenant Miller and I put him in Miller’s jeep and rush him to the hospital. He is raging again, and the Navy doctor refuses to treat him.
“This isn’t a medical problem,” he says.
“What the fuck do you think it is, doc,” says Miller, “a disciplinary problem?”
“There’s nothing I can do for him.”
“You goddamned well better do something,” I say, putting my hand on the grip of my pistol. It is a silly thing to do, typical of my hot temper and proclivity for melodrama. But it works. The doctor orders Powell to be taken into one of the tents. Half an hour later, the doctor comes out and says, apologetically, that Powell will have to be evacuated to the States.
“I can’t figure out why he’s even alive. He’s got a body temperature of a hundred and nine degrees.”
I ask what that means.
The doctor replies that, in effect, the blood in Powell’s head is bubbling like water in a boiling kettle. “If he lives, he’ll probably suffer permanent brain damage.”
Riding back to the company area in Miller’s jeep, I think, We’ve lost a man, not to the enemy, but to the sun. It is as if the sun and the land itself were in league with the Viet Cong, wearing us down, driving us mad, killing us.
The company is going out again to the area around Hoi-Vuc, a village that is becoming synonymous in our minds with the war. It is under VC control, day as well as night, and we are almost certain to run into something there. This is the scheme: A Company will make a helicopter assault near the village, in a field that has been given the unwarlike code name of LZ Duck. C Company will move by truck to a jump-off point near the Song Tuy Loan River. From there we will proceed on foot for three or four miles, guiding on the river, and set up a blocking position. It’s the same old hammer and anvil plan, but we have learned that, in the bush, nothing ever happens according to plan. Things just happen, randomly, like automobile accidents.
We ride past battalion and regimental HQ. Clerks and typists stand at the roadside, turning their heads to shield their eyes from the dust thrown up by the trucks. They cheer and watch us with the envy rear-echelon-troops often feel for infantrymen. As is frequently the case before an operation, we are filled with a “happy warrior” spirit and tend to dramatize ourselves. With our helmets cocked to one side and cigarettes hanging out of our mouths, we pose as hard-bitten veterans for the headquarters marines. We are starring in our very own war movie, and the howitzer battery nearby provides some noisy background music.
The convoy slows to a crawl as it passes through Dogpatch. The filth and poverty of this village are medieval. Green pools of sewage lie in the culverts, the smell mingling with the stench of animal dung and nuoc-maum, a sauce made from rotten fish. Lean dogs snarl and snap at each other in the dirt streets. Water buffalo bellow from muddy pens shaded by banana trees whose leaves are white with dust. Most of the huts are made of thatch, but the American presence has added a new construction material: several houses are built entirely of flattened beer cans; red and white Budweiser, gold Miller, cream and brown Schlitz, blue and gold Hamm’s from the land of sky-blue waters.
Crowds of children and teen-age boys run alongside the convoy. Many of the children have distended bellies and ulcerous skin, decades of wisdom in their eyes and four-letter words on their lips. They run alongside, begging, selling. “GI gimme one cig’rette you.” A cigarette is flipped into the crowd and the boy who catches it is immediately tackled by his friends. He disappears beneath a pile of tiny arms and legs, clutching, kicking, clawing for the cigarette. “Hey gimme candy you.” A C-ration tin is thrown down. “Hey booshit. Fuck you GI this no candy. Numbah ten.” The kid’s friends laugh as he throws the can against the side of a truck. “Gimme cig’rette gimme candy you buy one Coka. One Coka twenny P you buy.” Some marines drop piaster notes and coins into the sea of hands holding up bottles of Coca-Cola; but they do not accept the sodas. In this Alice in Wonderland war, Coke is a weapon. The VC sometimes poison it or put ground glass in it and give it to the children to sell to Americans. Or so we’ve been told. “Twenny P GI I say you twenny P. This no twenny P Fuck you cheap Charlie.” The teen-agers are less mercenary. Like adolescent boys everywhere, they are fascinated by soldiers and armies. One of them shouts, “Mah-reene numbah one. Kill buku VC.” A marine who is not much older than the boy makes a pistol with his thumb and forefinger. “You VC,” he says. “Bang. Bang.” The boy grins and mimics a soldier firing a rifle from the hip. “Hokay, hokay. Kill buku VC.”
The older people of the village remain aloof. The men smoke gnarled cheroots and stare at us without seeming to notice us. The women stand in the doorways, nursing infants, spitting red streams of betel-nut juice into the dust. We are not a novelty to them. They have seen foreign soldiers before. The whores are the only adults who pay any attention to us. Dogpatch has acquired several whorehouses since the brigade landed. Boom-boom houses, they are called in the local slang. The girls are pathetic to look at, dressed in Western-style pants and so heavily made up that they look like caricatures of what they are. They make obscene gestures and signal prices with their hands, like traders on the floor of a commodities market.
It is midafternoon. The company is strung out along the trail on the north bank of the river. There is no front in this war, but we are aware that we have crossed an undefined line between the secure zone and what the troops call “Indian country.” The hamlets here are empty except for the very old and the very young. Pangee traps yawn at the side of the trail, and there is that tense, oppressive stillness. We are about halfway to the blocking position when the point platoon, Tester’s, is ambushed. The VC open from a trench line across the river. The automatic fire sounds like paper ripping; bullets scythe the leaves above our heads, and someone up front yells “Ambush left!” There is another ripping sound as 3d platoon returns fire. The exchange quickly falls off to a few desultory shots, then just as quickly swells again. Things pop and crack in the air. The call “Second platoon up! Second up!” comes down the column. Bent double, I run up the trail and almost bowl over a marine who is aiming his rifle from behind a tree. He is aiming at a patch of clothing that flashes briefly in the green tangle on the opposite bank. He pulls the trigger, cries “Goddamnit!” when nothing happens. His rifle has jammed or in his excitement he has failed to chamber a round. “Goddamnit,” he says to no one in particular. “I had him in my sights.”
