A Rumor of War (31 page)

Battalion HQ, awash in mud, was a cluster of tents and bunkers near the French fort. There I followed the usual Stations of the Cross: to the adjutant’s tent to have my orders endorsed, to the battalion aid station to drop off my health records, back to the adjutant’s to have the transfer entered in my service record book, then to a meeting with the CO, a rangy lieutenant colonel named Hatch. He told me I was to be given a platoon in C Company, Walt Levy’s old company. Captain Neal was the skipper and McCloy, who had extended his tour, was the executive officer. When the chat with the colonel was over, I went back to the adjutant’s to wait for Charley Company’s driver to pick me up. It was raining hard. It had been raining day and night for two weeks.

The driver, PFC Washington, pulled up in a mud-slathered jeep. Like all company drivers, Washington was eager, cheerful, and helpful. Drivers who were eager, cheerful, and helpful got to remain drivers, while lazy, dour, unhelpful drivers were given rifles and sent back to the line. We drove down the road that cut through the Dai-La Pass, the rain lashing our faces because there was no windshield. The road, which had been churned into a river of mud, meandered through villages stinking of buffalo dung and nuoc-mam. Flooded rice paddies and rows of banana trees whose broad leaves bowed in the rain lined the road. Putting the gears in low, Washington gunned the jeep up a gentle hill, the wheels spinning, the jeep fishtailing as it went over the top of the rise. From there, I could see a T-junction about half a mile ahead, a clump of dark trees shading a hamlet, then the rice paddies and foothills, which rose in tiers toward the black mountains. The plumes of mist rising through the jungle canopy made the mountains look menacing and mysterious. We went down the hill, and the road became like reddish-brown pudding two feet deep. Several farmers stood by a village well, washing their legs and feet. Far away, a machine gun was firing in measured bursts.

Washington turned onto a side road just short of the T-junction, passing a cement house whose walls were pocked with bullet and shrapnel holes. A section of 81-mm mortars, emplaced in a field near the house, was shelling a hill in the distance. The shells made gray puffs on the crest of the hill, which was also gray, as gray as slag in the rain. Running along the edge of an overgrown ravine, the side road led into a stretch of low, worn-looking hills. C Company’s base camp lay just ahead. The tents were pitched randomly beside a one-oh-five battery, whose candy-stripe aiming stakes looked strangely festive against the background of tents, guns, mud, and rain-swept hills. A squad of marines slogged up the track that led from the base camp to the front line. They walked slowly and in single file, heads down, long, hooded ponchos billowing in the wind. The stocks of their rifles, slung muzzle-down against the rain, bulged under the backs of the ponchos; hooded and bowed, the marines resembled a column of hunchbacked, penitent monks.

Captain Neal was sitting behind his desk in the headquarters tent. A wirily built man with bleak eyes and taut, thin lips, he resembled one of those stern schoolmasters seen in sketches of old New England classrooms. I handed him my orders. He looked up from his paperwork and all I could see in his eyes was their color, pale blue.

“Lieutenant Caputa, been expecting you,” he said.

“Caputo, sir.”

“Welcome aboard.” He attempted to smile, and failed.

“I’m giving you second platoon, Mister Caputa. They’ve been without an officer since Mister Levy was killed.”

“I was at Quantico with Mister Levy, skipper.”

“Third and weapons platoon don’t have officers, either.”

He stood up, unfolded a map, and briefed me on the situation. The battalion, the whole division in fact, was now on the defensive. Our job was to prevent another VC attack on the airfield by holding the main line of resistance. No offensive operations of any kind were being conducted, except squad- and platoon-sized patrols, and even those were not to venture farther than two thousand yards from the MLR.

The company’s frontage extended from the T-Junction south along the road to the Song Tuy Loan River, a distance of nearly a mile; that is, three times the distance a full-strength company could defend adequately, and this company was considerably understrength. The gaps in the line were covered by artillery barrages. The company followed a set routine: two platoons, less the squads on ambush patrol, manned the MLR at night. A third platoon held Charley Hill, a combat outpost about seven hundred yards forward. In the morning, a twenty-five-percent alert was maintained on the line, while the rest of the men hiked the half-mile back to base camp to eat a hot meal, clean their rifles, and rest. In the afternoon, they relieved the morning watch, worked on their positions, or went out on daylight patrols. In the evening, the routine began again.

Mines and booby traps accounted for almost all of the company’s casualties. There was some sniping and, rarely, a mortar shelling. I was to keep a sharp lookout for immersion foot in my platoon. The men were constantly wet. They were also tired, and sometimes hungry because they subsisted almost exclusively on cold C rations.
But I was not to give them any slack
. Give ‘em slack and they’d start thinking about home, and the worst thing an infantryman could do was think. Did I understand all that? Yes. Did I have any questions? No.

“Good. You’re going up to the line tonight, so draw your gear now, Mister Caputa.”

“Caputo, sir. As in
toe
.”

“Whatever. You’ll be going up tonight.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, thinking that he was absolutely the most humorless man I had ever met.

Evening vespers began about seven o’clock, when the howitzers and mortars started firing their routine harassment missions. With my new platoon, I sloshed up to the line. The shells ripped the air over our heads and the rain, slanting before a high monsoon wind, pelted our faces. The platoon moved up the track at the steady, plodding pace that is one of the signs of veteran infantry. And they were veterans if they were anything. Looking at them, it was hard to believe that most of them were only nineteen or twenty. For their faces were not those of children, and their eyes had the cold, dull expression of men who are chained to an existence of ruthless practicalities. They struggled each day to keep dry, to keep their skin from boiling up with jungle rot, and to stay alive. In the sodden world they inhabited, the mere act of walking, an act almost as unconscious as breathing, could bring death. The trails they had to patrol were sown with mines. One misstep, and you were blasted to bits or crippled for life. One misstep or a lax moment when your eyes wandered and failed to notice the thin strand of wire stretched across the trail.

We reached the road that marked the front line. I crawled into the platoon command post—a foxhole ringed with sandbags and covered by a leaky poncho. Jones, the radioman, Brewer, the platoon runner, and a corpsman crawled in with me. The CP was on a grassy hillock just behind the road. A pool of cold water lay at the bottom of the foxhole. We bailed it out with our helmets and, spreading a poncho over the mud, sat down to smoke a last cigarette before darkness fell. Jones slipped the heavy, ancient PRC-10 radio from his back, propping it against one side of the hole.

“Charley Six, this is Charley Two. Radio check,” he said into the handset. “How do you read me, Six?”

“Two, this is Six. Read you loud and clear. Six Actual says to advise your actual that Alpha Company taking some mortar fire.”

“Roger, Six. If no further traffic, this is Two out.”

“Six out.”

“Did you hear that, sir?” Jones said.

I said that I had.

The wind was blowing hard, and the rain came sweeping horizontally across the paddies to strike the hooch like buckshot. I listened for the mortars, but could not hear anything over the wind, the rain, and the dry-rattling branches of the bamboo trees around us. The last of my platoon were filing through the gray dusk toward their positions. Heavy-legged, they walked along the line—which was not a line, but a string of isolated positions dug wherever there was solid ground—and dropped off by twos into the foxholes. The coils of concertina wire in front of the positions writhed in the wind.

I had the first radio watch. Jones and the others lay down to sleep, curling up into the fetal position. Looking out, I tried to familiarize myself with the landscape. Second platoon’s part of the line followed the course of the road, skirted a hamlet that was guarded by some Popular Forces —village militia—and ended at the river. Altogether, we held a frontage of seven hundred yards, normally the frontage for a company, and there were dangerously wide gaps between positions. One such position, called the “school-house” because of the cement-walled school that stood there, was separated from the next, a knoll near the river, by about two hundred yards of flooded rice paddy. The two positions were like islands in an archipelago. Out front were more paddies, a stream with jungle-covered banks, then the gray-green foothills. Charley Hill stood there, a muddy, red little knob that stuck out of the surrounding hills like an inflamed sore. In the dimming light, I could just see the olive-drab patches of the hooches and the small figures of our men. There was nothing in front of the outpost but more hills, then the mountains, rising into the clouds. Compared to that place, the front line was the center of civilization. Charley Hill was at the ragged edge of the earth.

It was soon dark. I still could not hear anything but the wind and crackling branches, and now I could see nothing except varying shades of black. The village was a pitch-colored pool in the gray-black paddies. Beyond the inky line of the jungle bordering the stream, the Cordillera was so black that it looked like a vast hole in the sky. Even after my eyes adjusted, I could not see the slightest variation in color. It was absolutely black. It was a void, and, staring at it, I felt that I was looking into the sun’s opposite, the source and center of all the darkness in the world.

The wind kept blowing, relentless and numbing. Soaked through, I started to shiver. It was difficult to hold the handset steady, and I stammered when I called in the hourly situation report. I could not remember having been so cold. A flare went up, revealing the silhouettes of palm trees tossing in the wind and sheets of rain falling from scudding clouds. A strong gust knifed into the foxhole, tugged at the hooch, and tore one side of it from its moorings. Rubbery and wet, the poncho slapped against my face, and Brewer said “Goddamn” as the rain sluiced into the now exposed hole. Then a stream of water guttered down from the hilltop and seeped through cracks in the sandbags, almost flooding us out. The poncho was still flapping like a sail loosed from its sheets. “Goddamn motherfuckin‘ Nam.”

“Jones, Brewer, get that thing pegged down,” I said, bailing again with my helmet. The rain fell into my collar and poured out the sleeves of my jacket as if they were drainpipes.

“Yes, sir,” said Jones. He and Brewer climbed out, got hold of the poncho and pegged it down, pounding the metal stakes with the butt ends of their bayonets. The corpsman and I bailed, and the work warmed us a little. There was still an inch of water in the foxhole when we settled down again. I turned the radio over to Jones. It was his watch. Lying on my side, knees drawn up, I tried to sleep, but the puddles and chilling wind made it impossible.

Around midnight, automatic-rifle fire spattered into one of the positions near the hamlet. The squad leader called me on the field phone and said that twenty rounds had been fired into his right flank, but without causing any casualties. There was another burst.

“He’s at it again, Two Actual,” said the voice on the phone. “I think he’s in the tree line along that stream.”

“Roger. Give him a couple of M-79s. I’ll be right down.”

Taking a rifleman along for security, I went down the road and through the village. Two M-79 grenades exploded in the tree line. The mud on the road was ankle deep. We could not see anything except a lamp burning in one of the huts. Staying close to the culvert at the roadside in case we had to take cover quickly, we reached the position that had taken the fire. There were a couple of bullet holes in the marines’ hooch. It began to rain harder, although that did not seem possible. Huddling down next to the riflemen, I tried to see something in the black tree line a hundred yards across the rice paddies. The paddies had been turned into a miniature lake, and wind-driven waves lapped the dike in front of us. Then a white-orange light winked in the gloom. Bullets streamed past us with that vicious, sucking sound, and I went down on my belly in the mud.

“See you now, you cocksucker,” one of the riflemen said, pumping rapid fire at the sniper’s muzzle-flash. Three or four more grenades, flashing brightly, crashed into the trees.

“That should give him something to think about, if it didn’t blow his shit away,” said the rifleman who had done the firing.

We waited for perhaps half an hour. When nothing more happened, my guard and I headed back toward the CP. The wind had let up finally, and in the quiet air mosquitoes hummed. Two mortar shells hit far behind us, where the road climbed and curved around a bend in the river. They exploded near D Company’s lines, bursting in showers of lovely red sparks. In the opposite direction, One-Three, newly returned to Vietnam with all unseasoned troops, was having a fire-fight with figments of its imagination. We passed the hut where the lamp was burning. “Hey, GI,” someone whispered. “GI, you come.” A middle-aged farmer stood in the doorway, waving us inside. The marine brought his rifle up, just in case, and we went into the hut. It reeked of garlic, woodsmoke, and rotten fish-sauce, but it was dry and we were grateful for even a few moments out of the rain. I lit a cigarette, grateful for that, too. I drew the smoke deep into my lungs, feeling it calm my nerves.

The farmer had meanwhile taken some photographs out of an oilskin packet. They were photos of Vietnamese whores and American soldiers making love in various positions. The farmer hissed and chuckled as he showed us each a picture. “Good, huh?” he said. “Number one, no? Want buy? You buy. Number one.”