America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (44 page)

This story is told in one of those nameless hospitals which must be kept safe from bombs. Hope and company had worked and gradually they got the leaden eyes to sparkling, had planted and nurtured and coaxed laughter to life. A gunner, who had a stomach wound, was gasping softly with laughter. A railroad casualty slapped the cast on his left hand with his right hand by way of applause. And once the laughter was alive, the men laughed before the punch line and it had to be repeated so they could laugh again.

Finally it came time for Frances Langford to sing. The men asked for “As Time Goes By.” She stood up beside the little GI piano and started to sing. Her voice is a little hoarse and strained. She has been working too hard and too long. She got through eight bars and was into the bridge, when a boy with a head wound began to cry. She stopped, and then went on, but her voice wouldn't work anymore, and she finished the song whispering and then she walked out, so no one could see her, and broke down. The ward was quiet and no one applauded. And then Hope walked into the aisle between the beds and he said seriously, “Fellows, the folks at home are having a terrible time about eggs. They can't get any powdered eggs at all. They've got to use the old-fashioned kind that you break open.”

There's a man for you—there is really a man.

Saturday, January 14, 1967
Saigon

 

Dear Alicia:

 

THIS WAR in Vietnam is very confusing not only to old war watchers but to people at home who read and try to understand. It is mainly difficult because of our preconceptions accumulated over several thousand years. This war is not like any we have ever been involved in. I'll try to tell you some of the points of difference as I have observed them.

It was easy to report wars of movement, places taken and held or lost, lines established and clear, troops confronting each other in force and fighting until one side or the other lost. Big battles are conceivable, can be reported like a bullfight. You could see if only on a map all previous wars—on one side of a line our friends, on the other our enemies. Vietnam is not like that at all and I wonder whether it can be described. Maybe the inability to communicate its quality is the reason for the discontent and frustration of the press corps here. Many of the fine reporters here understand this war, but their readers don't and often their editors demand the kind of war they are used to and comfortable with.

Maybe I can't tell you what it is like, Alicia, but I'm going to try so you can feel it. It's a feeling war with no fronts and no rear. It is everywhere like a thin ever-present gas. I am writing this in a comfortable hotel room in Saigon, which was once a beautiful city and now has a worn and sagging look like a worn-out suit that once was well tailored. And the war is here—in the street below, on the roofs, always present.

When I leave my wife here and go out to the hard-bitten sandbag redoubts in the countryside, she is in as much danger as I am and perhaps in more because I am armed with alertness while she, walking in a civilized street to post a letter, may run into a murderous exchange of fire.

At night when we have drinks and dinner on the roof we can see the flares and hear the thunder of artillery all night long, and very often the quick-sharp rattle of automatic small arms fire. Both she and I know the sound of mortar fire and we are conditioned, if it comes close, to roll off the beds pulling the mattresses over us with one motion to veer off fragments and flying glass. This city is heavily fortified, but the bridge you cross to go to a small restaurant may be blown up before you return. The smiling man in the street selling colored etchings from a bulging briefcase may have a gummy lump of high explosive under the pictures—and he may not. There is the problem—he may be simply a smiling man selling pictures. That is the feeling all over the city. Any person, any place may suddenly erupt into violence and destruction. You have it with you every minute. You avoid clots of people in the streets and are prepared almost automatically to fall to the sidewalk or the street and to be perfectly still. Bob Capa's first instruction to me years ago was “Don't move. If they haven't hit you they haven't seen you.” No better advice was ever given.

I realize that this account makes it seem that we are surrounded by thousands of enemies, and that is just not true. The armed forces radio and television station was riddled with about two hundred rounds from automatic rifles, by just two men. The airport, the largest in the world and surely the most guarded, was penetrated recently by fifteen heavily armed teenage boys, and they would have done great damage if the guard dogs had not smelled them out. You see, it isn't that the enemies are many but that you don't know which ones they are. And three with modern weapons can do the destruction of a hundred. One man, sauntering slowly past with a basket of fruit on his head, can slaughter half the peasants in a village market with one grenade and he does not hesitate to do it. In many areas, we completely control the place by day, but no one moves about by night. Then the secured road is mined. Then a dreadful claymore mine is aimed to be exploded by the first man who opens the village gate.

On Christmas Day Gen. Westmoreland took me with him to visit the farthest outposts. The 101st Airborne has not been to its base camp for nearly a year. The special forces, Green Berets, are dug in in redoubts far in the hills. They range the countryside day and night like casting setters and very gradually they clear out the snakes. We called on the special forces at Plei Mrong and Polei Klong, elements of the 25th Division and the Eighth Infantry at Pleiku, the airborne and three battalions of infantry at Kontum and the First Cavalry at An Khe. The general must have rabbit blood. I had to run to keep up with him. The finest Army we have ever had, he said, the best-trained, most experienced soldiers in our history and with morale that clanged through the valleys like a struck gong.

Does it make you feel hopeless that these wonderful troops plus the equally fine allied troops cannot bring this thing to a quick victory? I find I am very hopeful but not of a quick victory. It is a large subject and I'll try to tell you more about it in my next. There is far too much to try to get in one letter.

 

Yours,

John

Saturday, January 21, 1967
Can Tho

 

Dear Alicia:

 

BY CHOPPER to Delta region of Vietnam, a vast level plain much bigger than Kansas and just as flat. It is a watery plain through which the great Mekong River, split into a many sinuous silver snakes, winds in looping curves to the sea.

In this respect it is like the Nile delta, but only in this. From three thousand feet up in this enormous rice bowl of Asia stretches from horizon to horizon a checkerboard of irregular-shaped rice paddies, some rich green, some harvested and some flooded for planting, for the growing season is the whole year and if the 5,500,000 people who live here wished they could grow three crops a year. That they do not is because for a thousand years they have had it taken away from them.

The potential of the Delta is staggering. It is crossed and recrossed by thousands of waterways, some natural and some man-made but all of them navigable by some kind of craft. The main channels of the river take seagoing traffic far up into Cambodia, but even the smallest water paths swarm with traffic. The VC are everywhere for the very good reason that here is the richest source of rice and money in all of Vietnam. The Viet Cong tax collectors roam through the countryside almost at will.

I came down to the Delta to go with the patrol boats which inspect the river traffic for contraband arms supplies and VC personnel. It is a long and a frustrating job and the best it can hope for now is to inhibit and to make difficult the movement of supplies.

Two boats make up a patrol. When the leader intercepts and inspects, the second stands by covering against surprise attack. I went on River Patrol Boat 37 (PBR) to cover a ten-mile stretch of the Bassac River. These are thirty-one-foot craft with water propulsion. The hull is not armored but the steersman is protected by a steel box, and two plates aft give some protection against shore fire. She is armed with twin .50-cal. machine guns forward and a single .50 aft. She also carries an M-70 .30 machine gun with two M-16 automatic rifles and two M-79 rocket launchers. On the 37, the boat captain was Harold Chase, engineman first class of New Bedford, Mass., a quiet red-haired man with restless eyes. In addition to the gunners and crew, we had aboard a Vietnamese river policeman to do the interrogation and inspection. We put out shortly after noon under a flaring sun. The river banks are surprising. From the air the flat country seems to be nothing but endless rice paddies but now I could see that the waterways are edged with high and dense fringes of palm, of bananas and of all manner of fruit trees with little thatched houses nestled among them. The banks are pierced with many small canals and half-concealed entrances. A boat attempting to escape inspection, if it has time, can literally disappear into what appears to be solid riverside.

As our two-boat patrol moved downriver there was little river traffic under the noonday sun. The junks and sampans were tied up near to the bank in the shade of overhanging trees. In the middle of the river a black tube about six inches in diameter bobbed up and down in the water. Mines are not practical in the main river course because of the current but booby traps are often encountered.

Our boat circled the canister warily keeping well clear. Then, making sure of a clear field of fire, one of our gunners opened on it with his M-16 and sank it with his first burst. Whatever it was, it did not explode.

Now the river traffic began to move up and down river but staying close to the bank, and I saw everywhere an engine new to me. It is a one-cylinder Briggs gas engine of the kind and power we use on lawn mowers. Extending from its driveshaft is a piece of pipe about eight feet long housing a propeller shaft and ending with a small two-blade screw. The whole affair is socketed in a hole bored in the stern of the boat and it can be turned 360 degrees or lifted out of the water. At right angles to the boat it can push the thing sideways. When clogged with eel grass, it is simply raised out of the water to spin in the air. It is the simplest contraption I have ever seen and it pushes even fairly large riverboats along at surprising speed. It would be ideal for trolling in the weedy inland waters of Long Island. The cheap little air-cooled engine uses very little fuel. I'm going to make one for myself when I get home.

Now we begin the job of stopping and inspecting boats. The procedure is always the same—a shrill whistle and a waving hat and if the called boat does not turn outward at once, a few shots ahead of it. When the boat comes alongside, two rifleman stand ready. The Vietnamese river policeman scrambles aboard, collects identity cards and manifest papers, which he inspects closely. The cards with photographs and fingerprints are passed to our boat captain, who checks them against lists of violators or known VC. The piles of loose rice are probed for weapons, baskets and packages opened and unwrapped. And in the poorest raggedest boats strange things come to light—transistor radios, painted vases, sets of hinges, a china doll, bits of tin and metal. Our policeman must have a decent approach. When the boats first came alongside the people, the women and children were worried and apprehensive, and why not? The VC tell them that we enslave them and steal their children. But in a few moments, even while probing through their effects, our policeman had them laughing and relieved. I watched the faces closely. These are very poor people, their clothing ragged, their possessions pitifully few. Most of the shallow-draft boats are roofed with thatch or corrugated iron against rain and sun. Some were so poor and old and leaky that the women could not pause in bailing and others were beautifully trim and well built and one in particular I admired because its deck-house was completely shingled with flattened Hills Brothers Coffee cans, the printing and colors still bright. In the distance the thing seemed to be made of stained glass.

And I remember one poor boat that came alongside. A father with one eye, a wife tiny and shriveled and three little boys. I can't forget the pain of worry on the faces, the eyes haunted and the little boys' faces wounded with fear. They looked over the side into our boat, at the guns and the ammunition belts and all the gadgetry with which we surround ourselves. And nothing happened to the boys, no one pounced or shouted at them, and I saw the fear slide away and the eyes brighten with normal curiosity. And then one, the biggest, put out a timid hand and touched the fiberglass of our siding and then he looked up and laughed and his brothers laughed because he had touched a snake and had not been bitten. And his tiny mother laughed and the one-eyed father laughed. And maybe it's overhopeful but I like to think that a bit of carefully planted poison got flushed away in that laughter.

In all we stopped and inspected eighty boats of all sizes and with every kind of cargo, but mostly rice and fruits, stems of bananas, piles of mottled papayas and lots of produce I have not yet learned to identify. After inspections our policeman would report. “They say the VC are out collecting. They are moving the rice to save it.” Charley is pushing them harder than ever, taking more and more. The afternoon waned into evening and the tree-clustered banks were black and threw even blacker shadows on the water and from the little hidden houses—glimmers of yellow light like fireflies. The slow-moving boats pulled near to the shore to anchor for the night for with the darkness comes the curfew when a sampan can legally move. This is the time when the VC move on the waters, creeping stealthily across with their sacks of stolen rice and their wads of crumpled small bills collected by threat and terror.