A Rumor of War (34 page)

“Toi khoung hieu.”

“Cam anh ba. Di-di.” (Thank you, woman. Go now.)

She nodded and, with the others, shuffled into a hut.

I sat down next to Coffell and pulled a ration tin out of the baggy side-pocket in my uniform. Coffell asked if I had learned anything. No, I said, of course not.

“Pass the word to break for chow. We’ll move out in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, rising like an old man with arthritic joints. Coffell was twenty-four. “You know, I sure don’t like the idea of that long walk back.”

“Well, we could always stay out here.”

“I like that idea even less.”

The platoon ate cold C rations in the rain, then headed back toward friendly lines. Cutting cross-country to avoid retracing our steps over the trail, we slashed through elephant grass as sharp and thick as the spines on a hedgehog’s back. The weather turned strange. Spells of total calm and intense heat were broken by brief, heavy squalls that seemed to blow in out of nowhere. All the way back, we were alternately soaked, chilled, and scorched. At dusk, we reached the front line, or what, in that war, passed for a front line. Sergeant Pryor’s squad, left behind to guard the platoon’s section of the line, were blackening their faces with charcoal and shoe polish before they went out on ambush. Coffell’s and Aiker’s squads trudged off to their positions, with nothing before them but one more damp night of nervous waiting.

Waiting was about all we did for the next week. We were sniped at and rained on every night. The platoon’s new command post, an abandoned one-story barn whose stone walls had been chipped in some long-forgotten battle, acquired a few more scars. Meanwhile, C Company was alerted to be ready to be flown into an operation code-named Harvest Moon. It was a large operation for that stage of the war. Night after night, flickering artillery rumbled. We waited, numbed by the ceaseless rain and wind. It was always worse than combat itself, waiting to go into combat.

The action was taking place near Hoi-An, a small city south of Danang. One afternoon, we learned that the enemy unit involved in the battle was the 1st Regiment.

“Jesus Christ, that’s the outfit we wiped out at Chu Lai,” said Coursey, the 1st platoon leader. He had fought in the Battle of Chu Lai before being transferred to One-One.

“Guess you forgot to wipe out their recruiting department,” I said.

“Well, I hope we don’t go in. I don’t want any part of it. One of those is enough.”

“I’d like to get down there,” said Captain Neal. “You guys aren’t very adventurous.” Neal was writing the name of his hometown on a piece of stationery. He did that often, wrote the name of the Tennessee town over and over on bits of paper, on C-ration boxes and acetate map covers; wherever he could find something to write on, he wrote the name of his hometown.

Hudson, the artillery officer attached to C Company, rolled over and sat up on his cot. “Go right ahead, skipper. You go right ahead down there if you think it’s an adventure. This damned war doesn’t seem like an adventure to me.”

“I just don’t want any part of it,” Coursey repeated, his face rucked by months of exposure. “I had just about all the adventure I’ll ever want at Chu Lai. They’re all inconclusive, these goddamned operations. We wiped out that regiment at Chu Lai, now we’re fighting ‘em again and we’ll probably wipe ’em out again and then have to fight ‘em again in a few months. Bullshit.”

“Well, I’d still like to get down there.”

“So would I. I’m ready for the Cong. Me and my boys are ready to rumble with Charlie.” It was McKenna, show-ing off a jungle hammock he had acquired in a barter with the Special Forces detachment at Danang. He was wearing his helmet and flak jacket and had the rolled-up hammock strapped to his cartridge belt. “We’ll wipe their ass. Can you dig it? Old fuckin‘ Luke the Gook’s gonna die.” In a crouch, with his carbine at port, he crept up and down the aisle between the cots like a stalking hunter. “Can you dig it? With my brand-new, nylon, camouflaged super fuckin’ Special Forces jungle hammock, I’m ready for anything.”

“The only thing you’re ready for is the goddamned psycho ward,” said Hudson.

“Oh, man,
man
. I’m cool and outfitted for the boonies. With this jungle hammock and my platoon of badasses,
I am the greatest jungle-fighter in the world
. Look at me, look, I’m the world’s greatest jungle-fighter.” He crept around grinning maniacally.

“You’re the world’s greatest asshole, Mac,” Hudson said.

McKenna whirled and sprayed the artillery officer with imaginary bullets. “Ta-da. Ta-da. Tatatatata. You’re zapped, you cannon-cockin‘ Texas shitkicker, zapped by the world’s greatest jungle-fighter. I’m a killer, man, a fuckin’ killer.

“Can you dig it? I’m a killer and I’ve got a platoon full of the baddest badasses in the Nam. We’re bad, baaaad fuckin‘ killers.” He turned to Neal, who was writing the name of the town in the margins of the letter paper. He had filled up the rest of the sheet. “Look at me, skipper,” McKenna said, creeping and grinning. “I’m the world’s greatest jungle-fighter. You send us down there, me and my badasses. I’m invincible with my Special Forces hammock.”

Without looking up from his scribbling, Neal said, “Take that silly thing off, Mister McKenna.”

“But skipper, it’s my jungle-fighter’s hammock. It’s got everything, waterproofing, mosquito netting…”

“I said to take it off.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And when you’ve got that done, go over to the comm bunker and check on the landline communications to Charley Hill.”

Crestfallen, the world’s greatest jungle-fighter said, “Yes, sir.”

Operation Harvest Moon ended during the third week of December. Flights of helicopters, unrejoicing, came bringing in the sheaves to the division hospital. There were so many wounded, a corpsman told us, that the hospital would take only emergency cases. “They were putting the dead in cold-storage reefers,” he said, “but they ran out of room, so now they’re putting the bodies in ammo crates and stacking ‘em four-high in a squad tent.” Because the enemy had lost the equivalent of a battalion, all our generals agreed that the operation had been a great success.

My platoon received a Christmas present on the 23d: we were attached to Captain Miller’s D Company, which was going to conduct a three-day operation to clear the Viet Cong out of Hoi-Vuc. That village, which had been cleared many times before, was still in enemy hands. The plan of attack was as dangerous as it was simple. My platoon was to create a diversion to cover D Company’s movement on the village, which we would do by marching down the trail on the north bank of the river, drawing as much attention as possible. Meanwhile, D Company would advance on Hoi-Vuc from the south and hit the VC from the rear. The danger lay in the fact that my platoon would have to walk five miles down that elongated minefield called Purple Heart Trail. In all likelihood, we would hit at least one big mine or fall into an ambush, and because the platoon had been reduced to just slightly more than half its original strength, we could not afford to suffer even moderate casualties.

Nevertheless, we were all in a cheerful mood when we trudged off Charley Hill that morning. The weather had finally broken, and we welcomed the sun, whose heat we had cursed in the dry season. We also rejoiced in our temporary liberation from Captain Neal. Most of all, we were going to do something besides wait.

The platoon crossed the rice paddy south of the outpost, snaking along its dike in what looked like a tribal dance. The river lay just ahead, winding, yellow-brown, fringed by palm and bamboo jungle. We turned onto the trail, instinctively increasing our interval to ten paces. “Line of departure. Lock and load.” The squad leaders passed the word back. “Lock and load.” There was a ragged, metallic clicking as rifle bolts slammed shut. The marines walked slowly through the jungle’s silent green twilight, some limping from the boils that covered the soles of their feet. We forded the narrow stream marking the frontier of Indian country. Allen, Lonehill, and Crowe jogged out ahead of the column, Crowe’s head turning from side to side, its movements as mechanical as the sweeps of a radar antenna.

I tightened the shoulder straps of my pack, heavily loaded with signal flares, smoke grenades, dry socks, a poncho, and three days’ rations. An entrenching tool and machete were lashed to its sides. In my pockets, I carried a map, compass, hand grenades, more flares, halizone tablets, malaria pills, and a spare magazine for my carbine. A pistol, two clips of ammunition, knife, first-aid kit, and two full canteens hung from my belt. My steel helmet and flak jacket added twenty pounds to the load. The gear probably weighed over forty pounds altogether, but I felt a wonderful, soaring lightness in my limbs. I felt good all over, better than I had felt in months. Even Neal, who was not inclined to hand out compliments, had praised my gung-ho enthusiasm before the platoon left base camp. A sudden and mysterious recovery from the virus of fear had caused the change in mood. I didn’t know why. I only knew I had ceased to be afraid of dying. It was not a feeling of invincibility; indifference, rather. I had ceased to fear death because I had ceased to care about it. Certainly I had no illusions that my death, if it came, would be a sacrifice. It would merely be a death, and not a good one either. A good death involved a certain amount of choice, ritual, and style. There were no good deaths in the war.

But the manner of dying no longer mattered. I didn’t care how death came so long as it came quickly and painlessly. I would die as casually as a beetle is crushed under a boot heel, and perhaps it was the recognition of my insect-like pettiness that had made me stop caring. I was a beetle. We were all beetles, scratching for survival in the wilderness. Those who had lost the struggle had not changed anything by dying. The deaths of Levy, Simpson, Sullivan, and the others had not made any difference. Thousands of people died each week in the war, and the sum of all their deaths did not make any difference. The war went on without them, and as it went on without them, so would it go on without me. My death would not alter a thing. Walking down the trail, I could not remember having felt an emotion more sublime or liberating than that indifference toward my own death.

The platoon marched all morning and into the afternoon. Gently, almost imperceptibly, the trail climbed toward the high country. The Song Tuy Loan had become narrower. Twigs and debris sailed on its surging current. For a distance nearly as straight as a canal, the river curved sharply, eddying where it curved, then vanished into the scrub jungle ahead. A quarter-mile short of our objective, Hoi-Vuc, we turned onto a track that circled through dense jungle and rejoined the main trail where the river made a horseshoe-bend around the village. It took a long time to hack our way through the bush. Crowe and I took turns with the machete. Leeches dropped off the dripping leaves and fastened on our necks. We splashed across another stream. Underbrush had dammed it into a series of stagnant pools. But the jungle was not as dense on the other side, and we had easy walking through a deep-shaded bamboo forest. Strands of sunlight fell through the still, delicate leaves of the bamboo. Allen’s fire-team moved out well ahead of the column. They were probably the three best scouts in the business. Months in the bush had changed them from fairly ordinary young men into skilled manhunters; Allen, a gaunt midwesterner who smiled, when he smiled, with all the humor of a skull; Crowe, short and stocky, an expert with the sawed-off twelve-gauge he carried; Lonehill, a full-blooded Comanche from Oklahoma, a crack shot who stood six feet two and looked at you with a stare that made you choose your words carefully when you spoke to him. They padded soundlessly down the muddy track. We could hear only the slim, deadly kraits slithering in the brush, the bumping of distant shellfire and the querulous rushing of the river ahead.

The rifleman in front of me dropped suddenly to one knee, holding up his right hand to signal a halt. He pointed to his collar (platoon leader up) then joined the palm of his left hand to the fingertips of his right, forming a
T
(enemy ahead). I relayed the signals to the marine behind me and moved up the trail in a crouch. In the hush, my waterlogged boots seemed to make a great deal of noise. The woods ended in a small clearing. Coming out of the woods, I blinked in the hard, bright light of the clearing. Allen’s fire-team was across it, squatting in a thicket at the river’s edge. Crowe and Lonehill had their weapons aimed at something on the far side of the river, where the huts of the village showed as dun-colored patches through the trees and hedgerows. Allen was facing me, his face smudged by sweat-streaked camouflage paint and wreathed by the green sprigs stuck in the band of his mottled helmet-cover. He signaled me to get down and come forward. I did, crawling on my elbows and belly with the carbine cradled in my crooked arms. Crawling, I could see the river shining in the light of the late-afternoon sun, the hedgerows on the opposite bank, the gray walls and tile roof of a wrecked shrine several yards behind them, and, near the shrine, part of the figure of a man wearing a khaki uniform. Allen motioned for me to stop, and crawled out to meet me in the middle of the clearing. Crowe and Lonehill remained in the thicket. They crouched, as fixed as statues, Crowe with his shotgun poised, Lonehill sighting down the length of his automatic M-14.

“Lieutenant, there’s three of ‘em, three regulars standin’ by that pagoda,” Allen whispered hurriedly. “No more’n fifty yards away, standin‘ at sling arms. There’s maybe ten, fifteen more around the bend in the river. They’re takin’ baths or somethin‘. We could hear ’em talkin‘ and splashin’ around. If you can get the platoon up, we can waste all of ‘em. Fish in a barrel, sir.”

“All right. You people hold your fire unless they spot you. I’ll try to get the platoon on line, but it’s going to take a long time to move quietly in that bush back there. Just make sure you hold your fire unless they spot you.”

“Yes, sir.” He started back.

Still on my belly, I turned around as slowly as I could, afraid the Viet Cong could hear the beating of my heart.