Dispatches (19 page)

His professed ignorance of Dien Bien Phu drove correspondents crazy, but it was a dodge. Lownds knew very well about Dien Bien Phu and what had happened there, knew more about it than most of the interviewers. When I first met him, I brought a two-week-old message to Khe Sanh from his son-in-law, a Marine captain whom I’d met in Hue. He had been badly wounded in the fighting along the canals southwest of the Citadel, and the message amounted to little more than personal regards. Being a colonel commanding a regiment, Lownds of course had all the current information on the captain’s condition, but he seemed glad for the chance to talk to someone who’d been there, who had seen him. He was
proud of his son-in-law and very touched by the remembrance. He was also growing tired of reporters and of the criticism which most of the questions addressed to him implied, and I couldn’t help but feel a sympathy for him. There were policies and attitudes at Khe Sanh that were getting grunts killed, but I doubted that they were the colonel’s. He was really sort of a grunt himself, he had been there for a long time now, and it was beginning to tell on his face. The stories published about him never bothered to mention his personal courage or the extreme and special caution with which he risked the lives of his men.

No, to find the really mindless optimism, the kind that rejected facts and killed grunts wholesale and drove you into mad, helpless rages, you had to travel outward from Khe Sanh. The morale of the men at Khe Sanh was good (they were surviving, most of them; they were hacking it), but that didn’t give any general the right to claim that they were anxious for a fight, eager for the attack to come. During a five-day trip across the DMZ at the end of February and the beginning of March, that seemed to be the only kind of talk that any of them was capable of. “Excellent,” “real fine,” “outstanding,” “first rate”: talk like that poured over you until it was all you could do to keep from seizing one graying crew-cut head or another and jamming it deep into the nearest tactical map.

On that trip I traveled with Karsten Prager of
Time
. Prager was in his early thirties and had been covering the war on and off for over three years. He was a German who had come to the States to attend college, and had lost all traces of his original accent. What replaced it was a gruff, clipped, Brooklyn-docks way of speaking. I once asked him how it was that he had been speaking English for such a short time and yet lost his German accent. “Well,” he said, “I
got dis tuhriffic eah fuh langwidjis.” He had tough, shrewd eyes that matched his voice and a disdain for Command bravado that could be unsettling in an interview.

We flew the DMZ together from Quang Tri to Camp Carrol and the Rockpile, hitting each of the firebases that had been set up or converted to firing missions supporting Khe Sanh. We flew in beat-up Marine choppers, clumsy H-34’s (Screw metal fatigue, we decided; the 34 had a lot of heart), over the cold, shattered, mist-bound hills, the same hills that had received over 120,000,000 pounds of explosives from B-52 raids in the previous three weeks, terrain like moonscapes, cratered and pitted and full of skilled North Vietnamese gunners. From past experience and the estimates of our meteorologists, the monsoons should be ending now, blowing south, clearing the DMZ skies and leaving the hills warm, but it wasn’t happening, the monsoon held (“The weather?” some colonel would say. “The weather is increasingly advantageous!”), we were freezing, you could barely piss on those hilltop firebases, and the ceilings were uniformly low before noon and after three. On the last part of the trip, flying into Dong Ha, the aluminum rod that held the seats broke, spilling us to the floor and making the exact sound that a .50-caliber round will make when it strikes a chopper, giving us all a bad scare and then a good, good laugh. A couple of times the pilots thought they saw something moving on the hilltops and we went down, circling five or six times while we all groaned and giggled from fear and the cold. The crew chief was a young Marine who moved around the chopper without a safety line hooked to his flight suit, so comfortable with the rolling and shaking of the ship that you couldn’t even pause to admire his daredevil nerve; you cut straight through to his easy grace and control, marveling as he hunkered down by the open door to rig the broken seat up again with pliers and a length of wire. At 1,500 feet he stood
there in the gale-sucking door (Did he ever think about stepping off? How often?), his hands resting naturally on his hips, as though he were just standing around on a street corner somewhere, waiting. He knew he was good, an artist, he knew we were digging it, but it wasn’t for us at all; it was his, private; he was the man who was never going to fall out of any damn helicopter.

At Dong Ha, after days without a bath or a shave or a change of fatigues, we went to the headquarters of the 3rd Marine Division, where Prager requested an immediate interview with General Tompkins, the commander. The general’s aide was a brisk dude of a first lieutenant, scrubbed and shaved and polished to a dull glow, and he stared at us in disbelief. That initial distaste was mutual, and I didn’t think we’d ever get beyond it, but a moment later he led us reluctantly into the general’s office.

General Tompkins was seated behind his desk dressed in an OD sweatshirt, and he gave us a smile that made us feel slightly lunatic, standing there in our stubble and dirt and wrecked fatigues. When the lieutenant left the room, it was as though a great door had been slammed against the chill, and the general asked us to be seated. In spite of his hard good health and his taut, weathered face, he reminded me of Everett Dirksen. It was something sly and amused in his smile, a lurking wit behind the eyes, a soft gravel in his voice, each sentence rounding out in a grand deliberateness. Behind him several flags hung in their standards, and across the length of one entire wall there was a remarkable relief map of the DMZ, with several small sectors covered over, obscured from the eyes of unauthorized personnel.

We sat down, the general offered us cigarettes (by the pack) and Prager began the questioning. It was all stuff I’d heard before, a synthesis of everything Prager had gotten together during the past four days. I’d never seen any point
in asking generals heavy questions about anything; they were officials too, and the answers were almost always what you expected them to be. I half listened, tuning in and out, and Prager began a long, involved question dealing with weather variants, air capability, elevation and range of our big guns, his big guns, problems of supply and reinforcement and (apologetically) disengagement and evacuation. The general touched his fingertips together as the question developed, smiled and nodded as it went into its third minute, he looked impressed by Prager’s grasp of the situation and, finally, when the question ended, he placed his hands on the desk. He was still smiling.

“What?” he said.

Prager and I looked at each other quickly.

“You’ll have to excuse me, boys. I’m a little hard of hearing. I don’t always catch it all.”

So Prager did it again, speaking unnaturally loud, and my mind went back to the map, into it really, so that the sound of outgoing artillery beyond the general’s windows and the smell of burning shit and wet canvas brought in on the cold air put my head back at Khe Sanh for a moment.

I thought about the grunts who had sat in a circle one night with a guitar, singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Jack Laurence of CBS News had asked them if they knew what that song meant to so many people, and they said, Yes, yes, they knew. I thought about the graffiti that John Wheeler had discovered on a latrine wall there, “I think I’m falling in love with Jake,” and about the grunts who had gone running up the trenchline to find a stretcher for me to sleep on, about Mayhew’s space blanket, about the kid who had mailed a gook ear home to his girl and could not understand now why she had stopped writing to him. I thought of the thirteen Marine maneuver battalions deployed across the Z and of the brutality and sweetness they contained, all the
ways they had of saying their thanks, even though they knew you were crazy for being there. I thought about the Marines at Khe Sanh on this night; it would be about the forty-fifth night of the shelling, the Flood had not lasted this long. Prager was still talking, the general was still nodding and touching his fingertips together and the question was almost finished. “General,” Prager said, “what I want to know is,
what if
he decides to attack at Khe Sanh and, at the same time, he attacks at every single base the Marines have set up to support Khe Sanh, all across the DMZ?”

And I thought, Please, General, say “God forbid!” Let your hands fly up, let involuntary shudders rack your spare, tough frame. Remember Langvei. Remember Mayhew.

The general smiled, the crack trapper anticipating something good, past all doubting.
“That
 … is
exactly
 … what we … 
want
him to do,” he said.

We thanked him for his time and cigarettes and went out to look for a place to sleep that night.

On the afternoon of the day that we returned to Danang an important press conference was held at the Marine-operated, Marine-controlled press center, a small compound on the river where most correspondents based themselves whenever they covered I Corps. A brigadier general from III MAF, Marine Headquarters, was coming over to brief us on developments in the DMZ and Khe Sanh. The colonel in charge of “press operations” was visibly nervous, the dining room was being cleared for the meeting, microphones set up, chairs arranged, printed material put in order. These official briefings usually did the same thing to your perception of the war that flares did to your night vision, but this one was supposed to be special, and correspondents had come in from all over I Corps to be there. Among us was Peter Braestrup of the
Washington Post
, formerly of
The New York Times
. He had been covering the war for nearly three years. He had been a captain in the Marines in Korea; ex-Marines are like ex-Catholics or off-duty Feds, and Braestrup still made the Marines a special concern of his. He had grown increasingly bitter about the Marines’ failure to dig in at Khe Sanh, about their shocking lack of defenses against artillery. He sat quietly as the colonel introduced the general and the briefing began.

The weather was excellent: “The sun is up over Khe Sanh by ten every morning.” (A collective groan running through the seated journalists.) “I’m glad to be able to tell you that Route Nine is now open and completely accessible.” (Would you drive Route 9 into Khe Sanh, General? You bet you wouldn’t.)

“What about the Marines at Khe Sanh?” someone asked.

“I’m glad we’ve come to that,” the general said. “I was at Khe Sanh for several hours this morning, and I want to tell you that those Marines there are
clean!”

There was a weird silence. We all knew we’d heard him, the man had said that the Marines at Khe Sanh were clean (“Clean? He said ‘clean,’ didn’t he?”), but not one of us could imagine what he’d meant.

“Yes, they’re bathing or getting a good wash every other day. They’re shaving every day, every single day. Their mood is good, their spirits are fine, morale is excellent and there’s a twinkle in their eye!”

Braestrup stood up.

“General.”

“Peter?”

“General, what about the defenses at Khe Sanh? Now, you built this wonderful, air-conditioned officers’ club, and that’s a complete shambles. You built a beer hall there, and
that’s
been blown away.” He had begun calmly, but now he was having trouble keeping the anger out of his voice. “You’ve got a medical detachment there that’s a disgrace, set up right on the airstrip, exposed to hundreds of rounds every day, and
no
overhead cover. You’ve had men at the base since July, you’ve expected an attack at least since November, they’ve been shelling you heavily since January. General, why haven’t those Marines
dug in?”

The room was quiet. Braestrup had a fierce smile on his face as he sat down. When the question had begun, the colonel had jerked suddenly to one side of his chair, as though he’d been shot. Now, he was trying to get his face in front of the general’s so that he could give out the look that would say, “See, General? See the kind of peckerheads I have to work with every day?” Braestrup was looking directly at the general now, waiting for his answer—the question had not been rhetorical—and it was not long in coming.

“Peter,” the general said, “I think you’re hitting a small nail with an awfully big hammer.”

VI

The door gunner was leaning out, looking down, and he started to laugh. He wrote out a note and handed it to me. It read, “We sure brang some pee down to bear on them hills.”

The monsoons were breaking, a hard heat was coming back to I Corps and the ordeal at Khe Sanh was almost over. Flying across the westernmost stretches of the DMZ, you could read the history of that terrible winter just by looking at the hills.

For most of the time that the North Vietnamese had controlled Route 9 and kept the Marines isolated at Khe Sanh,
all that anyone could see of the hills had been what little the transient mists allowed, a desolated terrain, cold, hostile, all colors deadened by the rainless monsoon or secreted in the fog. Now they were full and voluptuous in the new spring light.

Often you’d hear Marines talking about how beautiful those hills must have been, but that spring they were not beautiful. Once they had been the royal hunting grounds of the Annamese emperors. Tigers, deer and flying squirrels had lived in them. I used to imagine what a royal hunt must have been like, but I could only see it as an Oriental children’s story: a conjuring of the emperor and empress, princes and princelings, court favorites and emissaries, all caparisoned for the hunt; slender figures across a tapestry, a promise of bloodless kills, a serene frolic complete with horseback flirtations and death-smiling game. And even now you could hear Marines comparing these hills with the hills around their homes, talking about what a pleasure it would be to hunt in them for anything other than men.