Dispatches (18 page)

The Coleman lantern had been down to its minimum light for an hour, and now it was off for good. A lieutenant came in and flashed a sharp light around quickly, looking for someone who was supposed to be up on the wire. Then the canvas flap dropped shut, closing out the flarelight from the middle ground between their trenches and ours, and there were only cigarette ends and the light from Mayhew’s radio.

“Let’s talk about tracers,” the announcer was saying. “Sure, they’re fun to shoot. They light up the sky! But did you know that tracers leave
deposits
on your barrel? Deposits that often lead to
malfunctions
and even
jamming
 …”

“Hey Mayhew, turn that fuckin’ thing off.”

“Right after Sports,” Mayhew said. He was naked now, sitting up in his bed and hunched over the radio as though the light and the voice were a miracle for him. He was cleaning his face with some Wash ’n Dri’s.

“It’s been proven!” someone said. “You take and put a Chevvy in a Ford and a Ford in a Chewy and they
both
go faster. It’s been proven!”

We were all ready for sleep. Mayhew was the only one with his boots off. Two Marines that I hadn’t even met before nightfall had gone out on the scrounge and come back with a new stretcher for me to sleep on, giving it to me without looking at me, as if to say, Shit, it ain’t anything, we
like
walking around above ground. They were always doing things like that for you, the way Mayhew had tried to give me his mattress, the way grunts in Hue one day had tried to give me their helmets and flak jackets because I had turned
up without my own. If you tore your fatigues on the wire or trying to crawl for cover, you’d have new or at least fresh ones within minutes and never know where they came from. They always took care of you.

“… so next time,” the announcer said, “
think
about it. It
might
just save your life.” Another voice came on: “All right, then, moving right along here with our fabulous Sounds of the Sixties, AFVN, Armed Forces Radio Network, Vietnam, and for all you guys in the First of the Forty-fourth, and especially for the Soul Brother in the Orderly Room, here’s Otis Redding—the
immortal
Otis Redding, singing ‘Dock of the Bay.’ ”

“All right, my man,” Day Tripper said.

“Listen,” one of the Marines said. “When you think of all the guys in this fucked-up war, them casualties don’t mean nothing.
Nothing!
Shit, your chances are better here than on the L.A. Freeway.”

“Cold comfort,” I muttered to myself.

Mayhew jumped up. “Hey, man, you cold? Whyn’t you say so before? Here, my old lady sent me this. I ain’t hardly used it.” I didn’t have a chance to say a word, he threw over a silvery square that fell against my hands like a sheet of India paper. It was a space blanket.

“Your ol’ lady!” Day Tripper said.

“Yeah, my mother.”

“Mayhew’s momma,” Day Tripper said. “What else your momma send you, Hand Job?”

“Well, she sent me them Christmas cookies that you scarfed up before I hardly got the fuckin’ paper off.”

Day Tripper laughed and lit another cigarette.

“Man,” Mayhew said, “I’m so horny …” We waited for the rest of it, but there wasn’t any.

“Hey, Mayhew,” someone called, “you ever been laid? Your first don’t count.”

“Oh, yeah,” Day Tripper said. “Mayhew got himself a little number down at China Beach, little chickie workin’ the scivvie houses there, she jus’
love
Mayhew. Don’t she?”

“That’s a Rog,” Mayhew said. He was grinning like an old illustration of Puck. “She loves it.”

“Bullshit,” Orrin said. “Ain’t a Slope bitch in this whole fucked-up country that loves it.”

“Okay, Jim,” Mayhew said, and Day Tripper started to giggle.

The radio delivered a dramatized warning against losing pay vouchers and currency-exchange slips, and then the disc jockey came on again. “This one’s a request for Hard-Core Paul and the Fire Team, and for our groovy CO, Fred the Head.…”

“Hey, Mayhew, turn that up. Turn it on up.”

“Hey, cocksuck, you just tol’ me to turn it off.”

“Come on, man, that’s an outtasight song.”

Mayhew turned it up. It still wasn’t very loud, but it filled the bunker. It was a song that had been on the radio a lot that winter.

There’s something happening here
,

What it is ain’t exactly clear
.

There’s a man with a gun over there
,

Tellin’ me I’ve got to beware
.

I think it’s time we stopped, children
,

What’s that sound?

Everybody look what’s goin’ down
.…

“Know what I heard over at the captain’s hootch?” Mayhew said. “Some kid tol’ me the Cav’s comin’ in here.”

“Right,” someone said. “They’re coming tomorrow.”

“What
time
tomorrow?”

“All right,” Mayhew said. “Don’t believe me. This kid was
a clerk. He’s over to the TOC yesterday and he heard ’em talking.”

“What’s the Cav gonna do here? Make this a fuckin’ parking lot for helicopters?”

The Marines did not like the Cav, the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), they liked them even less than they liked the rest of the Army, and at the same time members of the Cav were beginning to feel as though their sole mission in Vietnam was to bail out Marines in trouble. They had come to help the Marines a dozen times in the past six months, and the last time, during the battle of Hue, they had taken almost as many casualties as the Marines had. There had been rumors about a relief operation for Khe Sanh since February, and by now they were being taken about as seriously as the rumors of attack which would attach themselves to particular dates thought to be significant to the North Vietnamese. (March 13, the anniversary of the initial Dien Bien Phu attacks, was the only one of those dates which anyone believed in. No one wanted to be anywhere near Khe Sanh on that day, and, as far as I know, the only correspondent who stayed through it was John Wheeler of the Associated Press.) If the rumors involved attack, everyone chose to ignore them. If they involved relief, no matter how farfetched they seemed, the Marines would embrace them privately while laughing them away publicly.

“Man, ain’ no Cav goin’ anywhere
near
this motherfucker.”

“Okay, I don’ give a shit,” Mayhew said. “I’m just tellin’ you what this kid tol’ me.”

“Thanks, Mayhew. Now shut the fuck up and let’s get some fuckin’ sleep.”

That’s what we did. Sometimes, sleeping at Khe Sanh was like sleeping after a few pipes of opium, a floating and a drifting
in which your mind still worked, so that you could ask yourself whether you were sleeping even while you slept, acknowledging every noise above ground, every explosion and every running tremor in the earth, cataloging the specifics of each without ever waking. Marines would sleep with their eyes open, with their knees raised and rigid, often standing up on the doze as though touched by a spell. You took no pleasure from sleep there, no real rest. It was a commodity, it kept you from falling apart, the way cold, fat-caked C rations kept you from starving. That night, probably sleeping, I heard the sound of automatic-weapons fire outside. I had no real sense of waking, only of suddenly seeing three cigarettes glowing in the dark without any memory of their having been lighted.

“Probe,” Mayhew said. He was leaning over me, completely dressed again, his face almost touching mine, and for a second I had the idea that he might have run over to cover me from any possible incoming. (It would not have been the first time that a grunt had done that.) Everyone was awake, all of our poncho liners were thrown back, I reached for my glasses and helmet and realized that I’d already put them on. Day Tripper was looking at us. Mayhew was grinning.

“Listen to that fucker, listen to that, that fucker’s gonna burn out the barrel for sure.”

It was an M-60 machine gun and it was not firing in bursts, but in a mad, sustained manner. The gunner must have seen something; maybe he was firing cover for a Marine patrol trying to get back in through the wire, maybe it was a three- or four-man probe that had been caught in the flarelight, something standing or moving, an infiltrator or a rat, but it sounded like the gunner was holding off a division. I couldn’t tell whether there was answering fire or not, and then, abruptly, the firing stopped.

“Let’s go see,” Mayhew said, grabbing his rifle.

“Don’ you go messin’ with that out there,” Day Tripper said. “They need us, they be sendin’ for us. Fuckin’ Mayhew.”

“Man, it’s all over. Listen. Come on,” he said to me. “See if we can get you a story.”

“Give me a second.” I put on my flak jacket and we left the bunker, Day Tripper shaking his head at us, saying, “Fuckin’ Mayhew.…”

Before, the fire had sounded as though it were coming from directly above the bunker, but the Marines on watch there said that it had been from a position forty meters farther down the trenchline. We walked that way in the dark, figures appearing and disappearing in the mist around us, odd, floating presences; it seemed like a long walk and then Mayhew bumped helmets with someone.

“You wanna watch where the fuck you’re goin’,” he said.

“That’s ‘You want to watch where the fuck you’re going,
Sir.’ ”
It was a lieutenant, and he was laughing.

“Sorry, Sir.”

“Mayhew?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“What the fuck are you doing over here?”

“We heard some shit.”

“Who’s that man? Where’s his rifle?”

“He’s a reporter, Sir.”

“Oh … Hello.”

“Hello,” I said.

“Well,” the lieutenant said, “you missed the good part. You should have been here five minutes ago. We caught three of them out there by the first wire.”

“What were they trying to do?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Maybe cut the wires. Maybe lay in a mine, steal some of our Claymores, throw grenades, harass us some, don’t know. Won’t know, now.”

We heard then what sounded at first like a little girl crying, a subdued, delicate wailing, and as we listened it became louder and more intense, taking on pain as it grew until it was a full, piercing shriek. The three of us turned to each other, we could almost feel each other shivering. It was terrible, absorbing every other sound coming from the darkness. Whoever it was, he was past caring about anything except the thing he was screaming about. There was a dull pop in the air above us, and an illumination round fell drowsily over the wire.

“Slope,” Mayhew said. “See him there, see there, on the wire there?”

I couldn’t see anything out there, there was no movement, and the screaming had stopped. As the flare dimmed, the sobbing started up and built quickly until it was a scream again.

A Marine brushed past us. He had a mustache and a piece of camouflaged parachute silk fastened bandana-style around his throat, and on his hip he wore a holster which held an M-79 grenade-launcher. For a second I thought I’d hallucinated him. I hadn’t heard him approaching, and I tried now to see where he might have come from, but I couldn’t. The M-79 had been cut down and fitted with a special stock. It was obviously a well-loved object; you could see the kind of work that had gone into it by the amount of light caught from the flares that glistened on the stock. The Marine looked serious, dead-eyed serious, and his right hand hung above the holster, waiting. The screaming had stopped again.

“Wait,” he said. “I’ll fix that fucker.”

His hand was resting now on the handle of the weapon. The sobbing began again, and the screaming; we had the pattern now, the North Vietnamese was screaming the same thing over and over, and we didn’t need a translator to tell us what it was.

“Put that fucker away,” the Marine said, as though to himself. He drew the weapon, opened the breach and dropped in a round that looked like a great swollen bullet, listening very carefully all the while to the shrieking. He placed the M-79 over his left forearm and aimed for a second before firing. There was an enormous flash on the wire 200 meters away, a spray of orange sparks, and then everything was still except for the roll of some bombs exploding kilometers away and the sound of the M-79 being opened, closed again and returned to the holster. Nothing changed on the Marine’s face, nothing, and he moved back into the darkness.

“Get some,” Mayhew said quietly. “Man, did you
see
that?”

And I said, Yes (lying), it was something, really something.

The lieutenant said he hoped that I was getting some real good stories here. He told me to take her easy and disappeared. Mayhew looked out at the wire again, but the silence of the ground in front of us was really talking to him now. His fingers were limp, touching his face, and he looked like a kid at a scary movie. I poked his arm and we went back to the bunker for some more of that sleep.

V

On the higher levels of Command, the Khe’ Sanh situation was being regarded with great optimism, the kind that had seen us through Tet, smiling in the shambles. This often led to misunderstandings between the press and ranking Marine officers, particularly when it caused heavy casualties to be announced as light, routs and ambushes to be described as temporary tactical ploys, and filthy weather to be characterized as good and even excellent. It is hard to be there in the
coastal warmth of Danang and be told by some Marine PIO that the DMZ, from which you have just that day returned, is enjoying the same warmth, especially when a hot shower and a change of clothes have failed to remove the damp chill of three days from your buttocks. You don’t have to be a seasoned tactician to realize that your ass is cold.

Interviews with the commander of the 26th Marine Regiment, Colonel David Lownds, seemed to reveal a man who was utterly insensible to the gravity of his position, but Lownds was a deceptively complicated man with a gift (as one of his staff officers put it) for “jerking off the press.” He could appear as a meek, low-keyed, distracted and even stupid man (some reporters referred to him privately as “The Lion of Khe Sanh”), as though he had been carefully picked for just these qualities by a cynical Command as a front for its decisions. When confronted with the possible odds against a successful defense of Khe Sanh, he would say things like “I do not plan on reinforcements” or “I’m not worried. I’ve got Marines.” He was a small man with vague, watery eyes, slightly reminiscent of a rodent in a fable, with one striking feature: a full, scrupulously attended regimental mustache.