A Rumor of War (20 page)

When he had finished his automotive soliloquy, he asked what kind of car I drove, his eyes bright with anticipation: an officer would own at least a Jaguar XKE. Sadly I confessed I did not own a car. I had never owned one.

Marshall appeared to feel genuinely sorry for me. “No shit, lieutenant?”

“No shit. But I always wanted a ‘fifty-seven Chevy.”

“Yeah—I mean, yes, sir. Well, let me tell you about ‘fifty-seven Chevies…”

And on he went. Baffled and ultimately bored by his jargon, pestered at intervals by Morrisson, who still wanted me to consider his mad scheme, I decided there was a good reason for barriers between officers and enlisted men. I managed to extricate myself from the group and left the bar with McCloy.

Murph, who had also done a tour in Vietnam as an observer, was bent on introducing me to the mysteries of Danang. We started by having dinner at a restaurant with the CO of the ARVN battalion McCloy had served with, the 11th Rangers. The meal was unmemorable except for the chayo—rice paper stuffed with vegetables—and the sharp nuoc-maum sauce. Happily, the nuoc-maum tasted better than it smelled. After washing the meal down with iced tea, we left to satisfy other physical needs.

Striding confidently through a maze of narrow, sinister-looking streets, McCloy led me to a two-story house with flaking yellow walls and green shutters. “This is it,” he said, climbing the stairs. The inside of the brothel was a scene from a Fellini film: a large, stifling room with a dirt-encrusted floor; half-naked whores lounging on straw beds and languidly waving wicker fans at the clouds of flies that buzzed around their heads. In one corner, a bony creature of indeterminable age lay on her back, staring at the ceiling with opium-glazed eyes. McCloy’s confidence began to crumble.

“It wasn’t like this last year,” he said in his soft Kentucky drawl. “Maybe I’ve got the wrong place.”

One of the women got up and shuffled toward us. Her mouth was a smear of lipstick, and red circles were painted on her sallow cheeks. “Boom-boom, GI?” purred the clown-like thing, pointing at a staircase. “Fuck-suck?”

“Khoung, khoung,” I said, backing away from her. “No, no.” I turned to McCloy. “Murph, I don’t care if this is the
right
place. Let’s get the hell out. We’ll get a dose just breathing in here.”

Just then, three marines from Charley Company came down the stairs laughing and tucking their shirts into their trousers. They stopped cold when they saw us. McCloy’s fair complexion turned red, and I felt a flush of embarrassment creeping up my own face. Officers are not supposed to be saints, but they are expected to be discreet. That is to say, they are not supposed to be seen whoring or getting drunk. We had just been seen. I had no idea of what to say, but Murph solved the problem with his usual aplomb. Looking at the marines sternly, he said, “Lieutenant Caputo and I are checking to make sure you men are taking care of yourselves. We hope you’ve taken precautions.”

“If you mean did we use rubbers, yes, sir, we did,” said one of the men, a black lance corporal.

“Very good. We don’t want you men coming down with VD. Well, carry on.”

“Oh, we’ll carry on, sir.”

Without a further word, McCloy made a crisp turn and walked out the door.

“Neatly done,” I said.

“P.J., I didn’t go to the Naval Academy for nothing.”

We then went to the Blue Dahlia, a dimly lit place with a lush garden outside and a bevy of lush, Chinese bargirls inside. It was a hangout for the Australian advisers stationed at Danang. Three of them were with the 11 th Rangers, and I had to endure listening to them and McCloy reminisce about jungle skirmishes in the “old days.”

Like most Australians, they were champion drinkers. Two bottles of Johnnie Walker were eventually brought out from their private stock. In the spirit of Australian-American friendship, they poured us each a tumblerful of the clear, golden-white whiskey. Neat, of course. No water, no ice. Then they filled their glasses, emptying one bottle and part of the other. Then one of the Aussies, a lean, leathery warrant officer, did something I had never seen before and have never seen since: he took his glass, which held at least eight ounces, and drained it in one gulp.

“Baawuagh! Bloody good stuff that,” he said, pouring himself another. Compared to his heroic swallow, I had taken a delicate sip. The Aussie whacked me on the back. “Look, mate, I thought you was a U.S. Marine. Thought you blokes was supposed to be tough. C’mon now, drink it down. We got lots more.”

With a twenty-three-year-old’s ideas about manhood, and challenged to defend the reputation of the U.S. Marines, I chugged it all down. Within seconds, the room began spinning slowly, like a helicopter’s rotor blades when the engine has just started. “That’s the way,” the warrant officer said. He poured me a couple of ounces more. Someone said “Cheers” and I said “Cheers” and had another drink. The faces in the spinning room multiplied by two and my mouth felt the way it does after a dentist’s Novocain injection; the clipped, Australian voices seemed to be coming through a mile-long tube. “C’mon, mate, ‘ave another. Drink it down now. ’Ey, that’s the stuff. Cheers. You’re bloody all right.”

Feeling considerably less than bloody all right, I woke up in the chamber of one of the Chinese bargirls. I could not remember how I had gotten there. My uniform was strewn on the floor. Her ao-dais was folded neatly on a chair. Lying naked next to me, she said with a giggle that I was “buku drunk” and had fallen asleep. But was I okay now and did I want a number-one short-time?

“Sure. How much?”

“Four thousand P.”

Except for the hard, commercial look in her eye, she was a beautiful girl, more full-figured than a Vietnamese, but with the same long, straight black hair. Without reflecting on the fact that four thousand piasters was worth more than thirty dollars, I said, “Sure. Why not? Four thou it is.” Fumbling in my wallet, I produced a stack of orange bills with tigers and dragons on them. She counted it out carefully, then rolled over on top of me and gave me a short-time that was number one but still not worth four thousand.

When we were finished and dressed, she walked me back across the street to the Blue Dahlia. McCloy was still there, sitting with a girl on his lap. Incredibly, the Australians were working on another bottle of Scotch.

“And how was Lang?” the warrant officer asked. It was the first time I had heard the girl’s name.

“Lang was fine, but expensive.”

“Yeah, they’re spoiled in this place.”

There was a pounding on the door. “Shit,” the Aussie said, “it’s the fucking MPs. You two Yanks under the couch over there.” He shoved McCloy and me toward a sofa backed against one wall. Apparently, the bar was in a district off limits to Americans after a certain hour. We squeezed ourselves under the couch, and I recall seeing two pair of gleaming black boots with white laces not six inches from my face. The whiskey and the ludicrousness of the situation made me giddy. McCloy had to clamp a hand over my mouth to keep me from laughing. The MPs stomped around the room for a few minutes until they were satisfied that no Americans were there. The door slammed behind them.

Their departure was a signal for ours. Thanking the Aussies for the whiskey and the hiding place, we shoved off and walked in the humid night to the Grand Hotel. Peterson and Loker were there, drinking rum on the veranda with a Norwegian merchant sailor. A glassy-eyed Peterson introduced us to the Norwegian, a big, blond man with red and blue veins in his face.

“Phil and Murph, this sailor is one helluva good man,” the skipper said, thick-tongued. “He’s one helluva good man because he’s a Scandinavian and
I’m a
Scandinavian and proud of it. Scandinavians are the greatest people in the world.”

Acknowledging the superlative qualities of Scandinavians, Murph and I sat down. The sailor offered to buy a round of rum. I accepted, having sweated out the whiskey on the walk to the hotel. Then I bought a round. Then the Norwegian bought another round. In a stupor, I was watching the lights of the fishing junks bobbing on the silky black ribbon of the Tourane River when four giant MPs swept onto the veranda and arrested all of us but the sailor. We had violated a curfew law, they said. Unmoved by our protests that we were field marines who did not know anything about curfew laws, the MPs hauled us off to the Danang brig.

All I remember about our brief stay in that place is standing unsteadily in front of a full-length mirror above which a sign commanded: LOOK SHARP! CHECK YOUR CREASES, BOOTS, AND BRASS. I checked my creases—they had dissolved in the heat; my boots—they were filthy; my brass—it was tarnished.

After some argument, the MPs were talked out of putting us behind bars. Lance Corporal Reed was somehow summoned to fetch us, and we were released. We climbed into the skipper’s jeep, picked up two truckloads of roaring, drunken marines, and rattled back to camp. Everyone was laughing and singing. Well, not everyone. Peterson had passed out.

The Cinderella liberty exacted a retribution that was not the stuff of fairy tales. All the celebrants suffered from crippling hangovers the next day. Three days later, half of them discovered they had VD and filed down to the battalion aid station to bare their buttocks while a corpsman pumped them full of penicillin.

My memories of my last two weeks with the battalion are all of a piece. C Company went out on two or three more operations during that period. The always hot, sometimes dangerous days in the bush alternated with monotonous days of waiting in camp. A couple of brief, sordid liberties, much like the first, relieved the boredom.

Once, I led a difficult platoon-sized patrol near Charlie Ridge. I like to think of it whenever I hear some general who spent his tour looking at maps and flitting around in helicopters claim that we could have won the war. First we had to hack our way through a patch of bamboo and elephant grass ten feet high, the worst, thickest patch of jungle we had encountered. Working in shifts, the point man and I chopped at the growth with a machete. When we had cut as much as we could, three or four marines would come up and flatten the wall of brush by hurling their bodies against it. That done, the rest of the platoon would move forward a few yards. Then the point man and I would start out again. All this in bake-oven heat. Coming out of the jungle, we entered a swamp, which we had to cross by hopping from one small island of solid ground to the next. Corporal Mixon lost his footing once, fell into a quicksand pool, and had sunk up to his chest before he was hauled out, covered with muck and leeches. The patrol route took us over the swamp, then up an eight-hundred-foot ridge. The only trail up the ridge was an overgrown game-track. It was easy at first, but then the slope became so steep we had to climb hand over hand, clutching at the bone-gray roots of mahogany trees, hand over hand a foot at a time, gasping and sweating in the moist air. Sometimes a man fell, toppling several of those behind him as he rolled downhill. Thorn bushes clawed us, cordlike “wait-a-minute” vines coiled around our arms, rifles, and canteen tops with a tenacity that seemed almost human. When we finally reached the crest, I checked my map and watch: in five hours, and without making a single enemy contact, we had covered a little over half a mile.

Lemmon was wounded on an operation a few days later. The company was camped in a landing zone named LZ Oriole and Lemmon’s platoon had been sent out ahead to scout a hill that overlooked the LZ. Halfway up, the platoon got into a short, sharp fire-fight with a group of VC guarding a large base camp. One of the guerrillas, concealed behind a rock outcropping, tossed a grenade as Lemmon led a charge against the camp. The grenade struck him in the chest, bounced off, landed between his feet, then rolled into a hollow and exploded. Fragments struck Lemmon in the face, and the force of the blast almost bowled over Sullivan, who was behind him, carrying a machine gun.

The platoon rushed the camp. They found it empty of Viet Cong—the djinns had vanished again—but filled with enough uniforms, equipment, and new AK-47s to equip a full-strength company. The marines cheerfully destroyed the weapons and gear, fired the camp, then pulled back while our artillery pounded the hills behind them.

Lemmon had escaped with minor scratches, Sullivan with only a peppered uniform. But the experience had made an impression on both men. Experiences like that usually do. Sullivan, who was now a sergeant and the father of a two-month-old boy, did not want any more close calls. “Man,” I heard him say as the platoon filed back into the LZ, “I felt that blast hit me like a hot wind. It plastered my uniform against my skin. No more of that shit for me. I’m a daddy now.”

Lemmon did not say anything at first, just kept shaking his head. I can still see his angular face, as white as porcelain except for the bloody patches where the shrapnel had struck him. He was silent for several minutes, then it all came out of him in a rush.

“Phil, I’m never going to forget that one. I saw that thing coming down at me. I could see the son of a bitch who threw it. I was going up after him with my carbine and then that thing came sailing over.” Dragging on his cigarette, he shook his head several times. All the while, his face did not lose that strange, sick whiteness. Smoke from the burning camp billowed through the trees on the hill up ahead. We could not see the camp, only the smoke and the occasional orange flashes of the flames. Rising from the hills beyond were the gray-black plumes of the shells that had covered Lemmon’s withdrawal. “I thought I was finished,” he continued. “It bounced right off my goddamned chest, and when I saw it down between my legs, all I could think of were my credentials. ‘It’s going to blow my balls off’ —that’s all I could think of. Then the thing just rolled away and went off.”

D Company, which was on our left flank during the operation, ran into some trouble later in the day. They were shelled with 60-millimeters in a place appropriately nicknamed Mortar Valley and about six men were seriously wounded. But they evened the score when they attacked another base camp and killed five VC, including a North Vietnamese political officer. Meanwhile, my platoon was sent off on an all-night ambush, an experience I recall for its sheer misery. No enemy soldiers entered the ambush, but thousands of insects did. We lay awake for eight hours, enduring the bites of mosquitoes and stinging fire ants.