A Rumor of War (19 page)

In the early evening, the company reached the dirt road that ran past the “French fort,” a stone and concrete ruin overlooking the rice paddies west of Hill 327. According to legend, its French-Moroccan garrison had been wiped out by the Viet Minh in the early fifties. None of us reflected on their fate or saw a warning in the fort’s bullet-chipped walls.

Slumped by the roadside in the waning light, we waited for the convoy that would bring us back to base camp. A file of peasant girls came down the road, carrying-poles balanced on their shoulders. Swinging their arms vigorously, the baskets at the ends of the poles swinging in rhythm with their arms, they hurried to reach their village before curfew. The “rules of engagement” specified that Vietnamese caught outside after dark were to be considered VC and either shot or captured. The trucks rolled up shortly afterward. The marines mounted up, happy to be riding instead of walking, and yet conscious that the trucks made them more vulnerable to an ambush or being blown up by a mine. Their sense of relief was almost palpable when the convoy cleared the Dai-La Pass. They were out of Indian country, out of immediate danger, released from the tensions that had cramped them for four days.

I was riding with Corporal Mixon’s squad and a machine-gun team, about fifteen men altogether. The U.S. Army calls the infantry the Queen of Battles, but these worn riflemen looked anything but regal. From the knees down, their legs were caked with dried mud; their old-style leather boots —the new canvas jungle boots had not yet been issued— were rotting on their feet; their web gear, like their uniforms, was faded and frayed.

Packed as tightly as commuters on a bus, bumping against each other as the trucks bounced down the rutted road, we passed battalion headquarters. To men grown used to the bush, it looked incredibly domestic. Laundry hung on lines strung between tents, and smoke curled cheerfully from the stovepipe in the roof of the mess shack. Some tankmen in the armor company attached to the battalion were sitting idly atop one of their thirty-ton monsters. A group of marines with towels wrapped around their waists padded on rubber sandals toward the field showers. And in the foxholes behind the barbed wire along the perimeter, other marines lounged at ease, waiting for night.

The convoy turned onto the new road the engineers had built to connect headquarters with the rifle company camps on Hills 327 and 268. The road, climbing a succession of sharp curves, was thick red dust in the rainless heat of the dry season. We went up slowly, with a gradual, shallow drop on one side and a steep rise on the other. Choked by the dust and eager to get back to camp, we marked our progress by watching the trucks at the head of the column. They vanished around a hairpin turn, reappeared higher up, running straight across the face of the hill, vanished around the next curve, then reappeared again, higher still. The drop-off grew deeper, its slope sheering to a brush-matted draw a long way down. The steep rise on the opposite side of the road began to level off and we caught sight of the grassy spurs and rock outcroppings near the crest. Looking below, I could see the tail of the column and the dust trail behind it, describing a series of S’s down the hillside. The headquarters tents, the tanks, guns, and men in the field at the bottom of the hill looked like pieces in a boy’s scale-model army.

The convoy came to an abrupt halt in the bulldozed field that served as the company assembly area.

“Off the trucks and fall in!” Gunnery Sergeant Marquand’s voice boomed across the field. “You’ll turn in your pyrotechnics”—signal flares and illumination grenades— “to your platoon guides. Fall in, people. Quicker we get this done, quicker you’ll get to crap out.”

Tailgates clanged loudly as the marines dismounted and formed up, without any fuss and without their usual boisterousness. They were not dispirited; sober, rather.

The platoon sergeants barked the ritualistic commands— “Dress right dress, ready front, at ease!” Looking at the company, at their old-young faces and cracked and muddy boots, I sensed that another change had come over them since March. A close outfit from the start, C Company had become even more tightly knit in Vietnam, and in a different way. Their old fellowship had an adolescent quality to it; it was like the cliquishness of a football team or a fraternity. The emotion in them that evening was of a sterner kind; for Vietnam had fused new and harder strands to the bonds that had united them before the Danang landing, strands woven by the experience of being under fire together and the guilt of shedding first blood together, by dangers and hardships shared. At the same time, I knew I had become less naïve in the way I looked at the men in the battalion. I now knew my early impressions had been based not on reality but on a boyhood diet of war movies and blood-and-guts novels. I had seen them as contemporary versions of Willie and Joe, tough guys who at heart were decent and good. I now realized that some of them were not so decent or good. Many had petty jealousies, hatreds and prejudices.

And an arrogance tempered their ingrained American idealism (“one marine’s worth ten of these VC”).

It wasn’t that I had become critical of them; not the most exemplary character, I was in no position to criticize. Rather, I had come to recognize them as fairly ordinary men who sometimes performed extraordinary acts in the stress of combat, acts of bravery as well as cruelty.

Sergeant Colby had a somewhat different view. One night I told him I could not understand what had been going on in Hanson’s mind. “When I was in Korea,” Colby said, “I saw men sight their rifles in by shooting at Korean farmers. Before you leave here, sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.” But I refused to believe him. I only knew I had acquired a great deal of affection for those young marines, simply because we had been through a few things together. They were the men with whom I had shared the heat and dust, the tense, watchful nights, the risks of patrolling some desolate jungle trail. There were more admirable men in the world, more principled men, and men with finer sensibilities, but they slept in peaceful beds.

Liberty!

The officers and platoon sergeants were in the headquarters tent for the captain’s daily briefing, and First Sergeant Wagoner had just uttered the magic word.

Did you say liberty, Top?

Snorting and adjusting his glasses, Wagoner said yes, ten percent of the battalion would be allowed Cinderella liberty (ending at midnight) in Danang.

“But nobody can go ashore except on the regularly scheduled liberty-bus run,” he added.

“Okay,” someone asked, “when is the regularly scheduled bus run?”

With a straight face, Wagoner replied, “As far as I know, there isn’t any.”

Tester, short, tow-headed, ever cheerful, the company’s litterateur—he had brought a small library to Vietnam— leaned back laughing on his campstool. “And I thought
Catch-22
was fiction.”

“What’s Catch Twenty-two?” the Top asked.

“It’s a satire about army bureaucracy,” I explained.

Wagoner looked puzzled. “Army? What’s that got to do with us? We’re in the Marine Corps, not the Army.”

Despite the lack of a regularly scheduled bus run, liberty call was sounded that afternoon. And about twenty-five enlisted men from C Company were trucked into Danang. McCloy, Peterson, Sergeant Loker, and I drove in the captain’s jeep, charged with the task of making sure the troops stayed out of serious trouble.

We left camp looking crisp in our tropical khakis, but were sweating and dust-powdered by the time we entered the city. Although it looked good to eyes that had been staring at nothing but rice paddies and jungle, Danang was no Hong Kong. It might have possessed an exotic charm before the war; vestiges of those days remained in the quiet districts where whitewashed houses stood in the shade of palm and tamarind trees. But for the most part, Danang had become a garrison town, teeming with refugees from the countryside, armed soldiers in battle dress, whores, pimps, camp followers, and black marketeers.

Thatch huts clustered in dense squalor on the outskirts and merged into warrens of shacks with rusting, sheet-metal roofs. Big-bellied children squalled in the mud alleys between the shanties, the alleys reeking like cesspools. Doc Lap Street, one of the main avenues, was the preserve of the more fortunate. Middle-level army officers, civil servants, and merchants lived there in stucco cottages surrounded by stucco walls covered with bougainvillaea. Flame trees with bright-red blossoms shaded the street. Doc Lap led us into the city’s center, a chaotic place full of flyblown restaurants, brothels, and shops whose metal shutters were rolled down while the owners rested in the flattening, afternoon heat. In a vegetable market nearby, peasant women jostled each other at the stalls, bargaining in rapid, singsong voices.

Lance Corporal Reed, Peterson’s driver, piloted the jeep through the squadrons of pedicabs that jammed the street. He stopped in front of a row of bars with names like the Velvet Swing and the Blue Dahlia. The trucks behind us bumped to a halt. Released from almost six weeks of constant combat operations, the marines leaped to the ground and whooped into the bars. Their exotic names notwithstanding, the bars were ordinary inside: a Formica-topped bar, a stereo set pilfered from an American PX playing songs about Georgia and Tennessee, a row of booths where dark-haired girls cooed to boys a long way from Georgia and Tennessee, “GI,
buy
me one drink.”

“Yeah, sure. One drink. What’s your name?”

“My name Co-Phoung. Come from Say-gone. You buy me one drink now.”

“I said all right. If I buy you one drink, then we go to your place.”

“For sure. You me we go my house. Number-one short-time. But first you must to buy me one drink.”

Outside, cycle-drivers pimped on the street corners, eyes darting lizardlike from beneath their cork sun helmets as they surveyed the khaki crowds passing by. “Hey, you GI,” they hissed, straddling their three-wheeled cycles, “you ride my cyclo to good place. Very cheap. Good place. No VD. No VC.” Old women with faces like dried dates squatted on the sidewalks, peddling black-market cigarettes or currency or trinkets or cheaply made jackets with the words
Danang
—
I’ve Served My Time in Hell
sewn on the backs.

Once in a while, a man missing an arm or a leg or an eye, some forgotten victim of some forgotten battle, would hobble up holding out a faded fatigue cap. There wasn’t any Veterans Administration in Vietnam, and its legions of maimed soldiers, like Falstaffs peppered survivors, were left “for the town’s end, to beg during life.”

Walking down a street with McCloy and Loker, I gave a few piasters to one of the beggars. He no sooner said “Cam Ong” (thank you) than a mob of small boys with very old eyes accosted us.

“You gimme money you.”

“No money. Go on, di-di.”

“Gimme cig’rette. One cig’rette one Salem you gimme.” They mimicked the motions of a man smoking a cigarette.

“Di-di, you little bastards,” Loker snarled. “Di-di mau.” (Get out of here and quickly.)

But they stayed with us, chorusing “Cheap Charlie, num-bah-ten cheap Charlie.” All the time it was steaming hot and the air smelled of the fish piled up and rotting on the quay by the Tourane River.

We sought refuge in Simone’s, a bar named after its owner, a French-Cambodian-Thai adventuress who had been born in Bangkok and whose ambition was to marry an American and get to the States. Five or six marines from my platoon were in the place, well on their way to becoming drunk and broke. Loker immediately started talking to Simone. He was much taken by her, although he had no intention of taking her to the States. She knew it and so talked to him noncommittally. McCloy introduced me to two girls from Simone’s stable. They had the incredible names of Yum-Yum and Yip-Yap and were plump, pleasant, and reasonable. But I was shy about whoring in front of my men.

Two of the marines, Marshall and Morrisson, wanted to know if I would have a drink with them and the others. I agreed; for some time, I wanted to break down the barriers between officer and enlisted, to drink with the troops and get to know them as they were among themselves.

The experiment in military democracy did not work out. We all had too much to drink and talked a lot of nonsense. Morrisson kept throwing one of his beefy, hairy arms around my neck and slurring, “Lieutenant, me and you could win this war together. Just the two of us.” Then he asked if I would talk to Peterson about a brilliant battle plan he and his buddies had worked out.

“We were talking and figured we could whip Charlie’s ass if we made a night parachute jump over the Laotian border and then worked our way back to Danang on foot. See, sir, the Cong could never catch us if it was only four or five of us. We’d just move through the boonies creepin‘ and crawlin’ and ambushin‘ Cong along the way. We’d raise all kindsa hell. We’d waste the shit out of ’em. You just gotta talk to the skipper about it.”

“Old Moe could do it,” said one of the other marines. “He’s a shitbird in garrison, but a real evil dude in the boondocks.”

“Morrisson,” I said, “that’s just about the craziest idea I’ve ever heard.”

“That’s because I’m a crazy motherfucker, lieutenant. I’m a badass. You know that and I know that. Man, I been busted so many times I couldn’t make lance corporal if I stayed in the Crotch for thirty years.”

Another marine, reeling on his feet, raised his beer glass. “Tell him, Moe. Tell him. Eat the apple and fuck the Corps.”

“Stow it, scumbag,” Morrisson said. “Like I was saying, sir. I am a crazy badass, but it’s crazy badasses that win wars.”

But I had heard all I wanted to hear about Private Morrisson’s military theories, and I turned to Marshall, who had been quietly standing by. The talk that followed was hardly better. Marshall’s favorite subject was cars. It may have been his only subject. I was almost totally ignorant about cars and listened stupefied as the others nodded knowingly while Marshall rambled on about torques, revs, gear ratios, mills, bores and strokes, overhead cams and rockers and tachs, and how it was really cool to rap your lakers in the parking lot of an A&W root beer stand.