A Rumor of War (16 page)

At the same time, part of 3d platoon is stumbling down the steep bank; the rest are splashing across the river, yelling and shooting, charging wildly toward a hamlet on the other side. Sniper fire crackles, and a marine who is struggling to cut through the web of brush on the riverbank spins and goes down. Another rifleman calls for a corps-man. The action lasts two or three minutes at most, yet I have seen and heard everything with an unusual clarity, which seems to have something to do with the fact that I might have been shot at any moment.

Peterson orders my platoon and Lemmon’s to form a perimeter around the paddies on this side of the Tuy Loan. Meanwhile, 3d platoon pursues the VC, but they have again evaporated. Someone says there are blood trails leading off into the jungle. I want to believe this. I want to believe these wraiths are really men who bleed.

Our single casualty, Lance Corporal Stone, has been hit superficially in the hand. The force of the AK round impresses him, however. “It just grazed me,” he says to the corpsman bandaging his wound, “but that thing turned me right around.” Tester’s men make a sudden rush on the hamlet. A phosphorus grenade bursts in a cloud of thick, white smoke, and a hut begins to burn. Another goes up. In minutes, the entire hamlet is in flames, the thatch and bamboo crackling like small-arms fire. The marines are letting out high-pitched yells, like the old rebel yell, and throwing grenades and firing rifles into bomb shelters and dugouts. Women are screaming, children crying. Panic-stricken, the villagers run out of the flame and smoke as if from a natural disaster. The livestock goes mad, and the squawking of chickens, the squeal of pigs, and the bawling of water buffalo are added to the screams and yells and the loud popping of the flaming huts.

“They’ve gone nuts, skipper,” Tester says. “They’re shooting the whole place up. Christ, they’re killing the animals.”

He and Peterson try to stop the destruction, but it is no use: 3d platoon seems to have gone crazy. They destroy with uncontrolled fury. At last it is over. The hamlet which is marked on our maps as Giao-Tri (3) no longer exists. All that remains are piles of smoldering ash and a few charred poles still standing. By some miracle, none of the people have been hurt. I hear women wailing, and I see one through the smoke that is drifting across the river. She is on her knees, bowing up and down and keening in the ashes of what was once her home. I harden my heart against her cries. You let the VC use your village for an ambush site, I think, and now you’re paying the price. It is then I realize that the destruction of Giao-Tri was more than an act of madness committed in the heat of battle. It was an act of retribution as well. These villagers aided the VC, and we taught them a lesson. We are learning to hate.

And you’ve lost your youth and come to manhood, all in a few hours… Oh, that’s painful. That is indeed.

—Howard Fast

April Morning

Our next operation took place in a desolate area southwest of Danang. It was true Indian country, a region of fallow fields, sun-seared hills, and abandoned villages lying near a pale-green height called Charlie Ridge. The operation, which lasted four days, was yet another attempt to trap the Viet Cong between two rifle companies, ours and Captain Miller’s A Company. This time we partially succeeded, though it was more by accident than design.

We spent the first day blundering around in the bush and skirmishing with the usual snipers. Once, while taking a break, we were hit with automatic-weapons fire. Although it almost killed Peterson and the colonel, who had come in by helicopter to pass some word or other, the only real damage it did was to our peace of mind. On the morning of the second day, intelligence having received a report of enemy movement south of us, C Company was lifted out to make a helicopter assault near a hill marked on the map as Hill 270.

The flight was a short one and took us over a part of the Annamese range. The manuals we had used in guerrilla-warfare courses cheerfully stated that the modern, civilized soldier should not be afraid of the jungle: “the jungle can be your friend as well as your enemy.” Looking at the green immensity below, I could only conclude that those manuals had been written by men whose idea of a jungle was the Everglades National Park. There was nothing friendly about the Vietnamese bush; it was one of the last of the dark regions on earth, and only the very brave or the very dull—the two often went together—could look at it without feeling fear.

We had been airborne less than ten minutes when the H-34s started down toward the landing zone, a field bounded on the north by tangled woods and a stream whose still, brown waters, flecked with white, reminded me of dirty milk. To the south, a low ridge separated the LZ from a swamp, beyond which rose the dusky slopes of Hill 270. Circling down, the helicopters began to draw ground fire; the rounds made a noise like corn popping as they whipped past the aircraft. The fire was not heavy, but it produced in us the sensation of helplessly waiting for a bullet to pierce the fuselage and plow through a foot or groin. Trapped, we were little more than pieces of human cargo, with no means of defending ourselves and nowhere to take cover. The door gunner, sitting on a folded flak jacket, was tensed behind his machine gun; but he could not return fire without the risk of hitting another aircraft. Hearing that
pop-pop-pop
outside, I could only think of what a pilot had once told me: “If a chopper gets hit in the right place, it has the flying characteristics of a falling safe.” Nevertheless, the experience—our first of a hot LZ—was not entirely unpleasant. There was a strange exhilaration in our helplessness. Carried willy-nilly down toward the landing zone, with the wind slapping against our faces and the trees rushing in a green blur beneath us, we felt a visceral thrill. It was like the feeling of being on a roller coaster or in a canoe careening down a wild rapids; the feeling, half fear and half excitement, that comes when you are in the grip of uncontrollable forces.

Suddenly we were on the ground. I leaped out of the door and was grateful when my boots touched the soft, damp earth. I was back where an infantryman belonged, on his feet and in the mud. Bent at the waist, we dashed toward the woods at the northern edge of the clearing. Opposite, Lemmon’s men were assembling in a swale of elephant grass at the base of the low ridge. The grass rippled in the wind churned up by the helicopters’ rotor blades. The VC were still taking potshots at the landing zone; we heard the rounds smacking overhead and the distinctive crack of Russian SKS carbines. The two sounds occurred almost simultaneously, so it was impossible to tell where the snipers were. But now that we were back in the foot soldier’s natural element, the firing did not seem half so frightening. It was just the usual, sporadic harassing fire, and we had learned by this time that it was not serious sniping, rather a VC tactic intended to fray our nerves. We ignored it.

The last wave came in, dropped Tester’s platoon, and flew off. There was a brief crackling as the VC turned their rifles on the aircraft, but none of the H-34s was hit. Watching them climb until they were just specks in the sky, some of us felt a momentary but deep longing to go with them back to the small comforts and relative safety of what was called, for lack of a better term, the rear. It was the same feeling we had experienced on the first operation, a sense of being marooned on a hostile shore from which there was no certainty of return. Drawn up in mass formation back at base camp, C Company had looked formidable—two hundred heavily armed marines. But there in the LZ, surrounded by those high, jungled hills, it seemed such a small force.

Forming a column, my platoon started toward its first objective, a knoll on the far side of the milky-brown stream. It was an objective only in the geographical sense of the word; it had no military significance. In the vacuum of that jungle, we could have gone in as many directions as there are points on a compass, and any one direction was as likely to lead us to the VC, or away from them, as any other. The guerrillas were everywhere, which is another way of saying they were nowhere. The knoll merely gave us a point of reference. It was a place to go, and getting there provided us with the illusion we were accomplishing something.

The platoon stumbled through patches of ankle-high creepers, then filed down a trail into the yellow-green scrub that bordered the clearing. The sniper fire continued to pop behind us. Two shots, half a minute of silence, another shot, fifteen seconds of silence, two more shots. The woods became dense, muffling sound until we could no longer hear the small arms. A solid wall of vegetation hemmed both sides of the trail, the trees so still they did not look real. A marine slipped in the mud, his rifle and equipment clattering as he fell. The column started to bunch up and the NCOs passed the word to “keep it spread out, people, five paces between each man.” It was a phenomenon I had seen before: in the jungle, men tended to draw together, seeking the reassurance that comes from being physically close to one another, even though that increased the risk of the proverbial one round killing several men at once. I think this bunching happened because even the illusion of being alone in that haunted, dangerous wilderness was unbearable. We were supposed to know better, but officers were as prey to this fear as the men. On a previous patrol, I had lost sight of the marine in front of me; he had slipped around a sharp bend in the trail. Although I knew he was only a short distance ahead, I felt lost, almost terrified, and ran around the bend until I again saw the comforting sight of his back.

And so, stretching and contracting, the column trudged at an exasperatingly slow pace. Finally we came to the stream. Holding his rifle above his head, the point man began to wade in the chest-deep water, which was stagnant and dark in the shade of the overhanging trees. I recoiled from the idea of stepping into it, though I was teased by memories of the Michigan trout stream I had fished on summer vacations. I remembered the narrow stretches where it flowed so fast that it had worn the rocks on the bottom to the smoothness of polished marble and how my teeth ached when I drank its cold water. Lost in this reverie, I only half heard the call coming up from the rear of the column. “Hold it up, Second. Tell the lieutenant to hold it up.”

“What the hell for?” I called back.

“Hold it up, lieutenant.”

Sweat spilled into my eyes, and I felt irritation rising. “Goddamnit, I said what the hell for?”

A drenched red-faced marine came jogging up the trail. It was one of the company clerks who doubled as runners on operations.

“Mister Caputo, the captain says for you to get your platoon back to the LZ on the double,” he said, breathing hard. “There’s some VC up on the ridge and we’re going to assault.”

Instantly, irritation turned into elation. An assault!

“How many?”

“Sir, that’s all the skipper told me, that you should double-time back to the LZ. But I think there’s maybe a platoon of them up there. One of the pilots spotted them.”

Facing about so that the rear squad was now the point, the platoon headed back at a run. Helmets bouncing against our heads, canteens against our hips, rifle slings and bandoliers jiggling, we sounded like a platoon of junkmen. We had covered half the distance, a hundred yards perhaps, when I heard an erratic volleying and the sounds that signaled solid contact: the stuttering of machine guns and the bursts of M-79 grenades, a 40-mm grenade fired from a riflelike launcher. Breaking out of the jungle, we ran into the clearing and a brisk fire-fight. Bullets plucked at the air and, though they were flying at a safe distance overhead, we instinctively fanned out and went forward with our shoulders hunched, as if we were walking against a strong wind. Dogtrotting across the field, stumbling on the low creepers, we found it difficult to tell what was going on. Sixty or seventy yards ahead, Lemmon’s men were moving up the ridge; small groups advanced in rushes while others fired up at the crest. Dust spots appeared where bullets pecked the earth, and then a whorl of gray smoke rose from behind the ridgeline, followed immediately by the flat explosion of an M-79. The runner led me to Peterson, who was standing with studied calm next to his radio operator. The skipper told me to put my platoon in defilade beside a hill that stood at a right angle to the ridge.

This we did. Tester’s platoon was in front of mine, strung out in a long file against the hillside. Hot and winded, we squatted to wait while 1st platoon made a frontal assault, that quintessential Marine maneuver. It was nothing like those choreographed attacks we had practiced at Quantico or on Okinawa. The marines were more or less on line, bunched into knots in some places, spread apart in others. Some men were falling behind, some pushing out ahead and firing from the hip. A few seemed to be scrambling hand over hand where the slope was very steep. My imagination persuaded me that I saw the Viet Cong on the ridgeline. If I did, I did not see them for long. Several greenclad figures suddenly appeared on the crest. Then I heard a rhythmic popping that recalled the sound of a rifle range. The company radioman said that the VC had been driven off and were now fleeing across the swamp. Lemmon wanted to hit them with mortars before they gained the cover of the jungle on Hill 270.

Sergeant Johnson’s 60-mm mortar crew ran out into the middle of the LZ, and, quickly setting up the tube, put three rounds in the air. “Right five-zero!” someone called out. Johnson, a Korean War veteran with a face as seamed as a well-worked mine shaft, relayed the correction to the crew and three more shells hissed over the ridge to burst with a succession of dull
crumps
in the swamp beyond.

Peterson ordered Tester’s platoon and mine to start moving up; we were to sweep around the guerrillas’ flank, then move into the marsh and mop up. We would be covered by an artillery barrage, which he would call in on Hill 270 in case another VC force was dug in there. While Johnson’s mortars continued to fire, we started up the hill, Tester’s platoon in the lead. It was slow, hot going through waist-high stands of elephant grass. An occasional ricochet sang past us, but the action had slackened to desultory exchanges between Lemmon’s machine-gunners and some snipers up on 270. Then our ears caught a faint, vibrating hiss, which in seconds became a sound like canvas tearing, followed by the most godawful noise I had ever heard, a screech such as a millsaw makes when it strikes a knot. It was the artillery, 155-millimeters, and because the target was close, we felt as well as heard the shell-bursts. The ground quivered, the shock wave slapped like a gust of wind, smoke and clods of earth boiled up from the swamp and 270’s forward slope. At that range, there was a good chance of a round falling short—that is, falling on us—and we crouched as low as dignity would allow. Listening to the 155s rending the air with howls and roars, I could only wonder what it was like to be under the bombardment, to be one of those Viet Cong, naked against the blast and splintering steel of one-hundred-pound shells. And for a moment, I pitied them. I doubt that I have any more compassion than the next man, but in those days, I tended to look upon war as an outdoor sport, and the shelling seemed, well, unfair. The runner had said there was perhaps a platoon of guerrillas on the ridge, meaning twenty or twenty-five men at most. We were two hundred and, to add to our numerical superiority, we were dumping a ton of high-explosive on them. But this was early in the war; later, I would be able to see enemy soldiers incinerated by napalm and feel quite happy about it.