Dispatches (20 page)

But mostly, I think, the Marines hated those hills; not from time to time, the way many of us hated them, but constantly, like a curse. Better to fight the war in the jungles or along the dry flats that lined the Cua Viet River than in those hills. I heard a grunt call them “angry” once, probably something he’d picked up from a movie or a television series, but from his point of view he was right, the word was a good one. So when we decimated them, broke them, burned parts of them so that nothing would ever live on them again, it must have given a lot of Marines a good feeling, an intimation of power. They had humped those hills until their legs were in an agony, they’d been ambushed in them and blown apart on their trails, trapped on their barren ridges, lain under fire clutching the foliage that grew on them, wept alone in fear
and exhaustion and shame just knowing the kind of terror that night always brought to them, and now, in April, something like revenge had been achieved.

We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh. The smaller foothills were often quite literally turned inside out, the steeper of them were made faceless and drawless, and the bigger hills were left with scars and craters of such proportions that an observer from some remote culture might see in them the obsessiveness and ritual regularity of religious symbols, the blackness at the deep center pouring out rays of bright, overturned earth all the way to the circumference; forms like Aztec sun figures, suggesting that their makers had been men who held Nature in an awesome reverence.

Once on a Chinook run from Cam Lo to Dong Ha, I sat next to a Marine who took a Bible from his pack and began reading even before we took off. He had a small cross sketched in ballpoint on his flak jacket and another, even less obtrusive, on his helmet cover. He was an odd-looking guy for a combat Marine in Vietnam. For one thing, he was never going to tan, no matter how many months he spent in the sun. He would just go red and blotchy, even though his hair was dark. He was also very heavy, maybe twenty pounds overweight, although you could see from his boots and fatigues that he’d humped it a lot over here. He wasn’t a chaplain’s assistant or anything, just a grunt who happened to be
fat, pale and religious. (You didn’t meet that many who were deeply religious, although you expected to, with so many kids from the South and the Midwest, from farms and small rural towns.) We strapped in and he started reading, getting very absorbed, and I leaned out the door and looked at the endless progression of giant pits which were splashed over the ground, at the acre-sized scars where napalm or chemical spray had eaten away the cover. (There was a special Air Force outfit that flew defoliation missions. They were called the Ranch Hands, and their motto was, “Only we can prevent forests.”) When I held out some cigarettes to offer him one, he looked up from the Bible and shook his head, getting off that quick, pointless laugh that told me for sure that he’d seen a lot of action. Maybe he had even been at Khe Sanh, or up on 861 with the 9th. I don’t think he realized that I wasn’t a Marine, I had on a Marine flak jacket which covered the correspondent’s identification tags sewn on my fatigues, but he saw the offer of a cigarette as a courtesy and he wanted to return it. He passed over the open Bible, almost giggling now, and pointed to a passage. It was Psalms 91:5, and it said,

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day
.

Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday
.

A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee
.

Okay, I thought, that’s good to know. I wrote the word “Beautiful!” out on a piece of paper and handed it back to him, and he jerked his thumb up, meaning that he thought so too. He went back to the book and I went back to the door, but I had a nasty impulse all the way into Dong Ha to run through Psalms and find a passage which I could offer him,
the one that talked about those who were defiled with their own works and sent a-whoring with their own inventions.

The relief of Khe Sanh began on April 1. It was code-named Operation Pegasus, and while it included over 10,000 Marines and three full battalions of ARVN, it took its name and its style from the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). A week earlier, 18,000 members of the Cav had left their base at Camp Evans, near Dong Ha, and moved to a point in a river valley eleven miles northeast of Khe Sanh, just beyond the range of the big guns that were dug into the Laotian mountains. The Cav had plenty of helicopters, choppers were what the Cav was all about; and Sky Cranes lifted in earth-moving equipment, Chinooks brought in the heavier artillery pieces, and within days there was a forward operational base that looked better than most permanent installations in I Corps, complete with a thousand-meter airstrip and deep, ventilated bunkers. They named it LZ Stud, and once it was finished Khe Sanh ceased to be the center of its own sector; it became just another objective.

It was almost as though the war had ended. The day before Pegasus began, President Johnson had announced the suspension of airstrikes against the North and put a closing date on his own Administration. The Marines’ 11th Engineers had begun moving down Route 9, deactivating mines and repairing bridges, and they had met with no resistance. The shelling of Khe Sanh had become a matter of a few scattered rounds a day, and it had been more than two weeks now since General Westmoreland had revealed that, in his opinion, the attack on Khe Sanh would never come. The 304th NVA Division had left the area, and so had the 325C. Now, it seemed that all but a token force of NVA had vanished. And now, everywhere you went, you could see the most comforting
military insignia in all of Vietnam, the yellow-and-black shoulder patch of the Cav. You were with the pro’s now, the elite. LZ’s and firebases were being established at a rate of three and four a day, and every hour brought them closer to Khe Sanh.

Really, it was almost too good, and by the third day something odd attended Pegasus. As an operation, it revealed the tastes of the Cav’s commander, Major General John Tolson, a general of uncommon intelligence and subtlety. Its precision and speed were unbelievable, especially to anyone who had just spent the better part of three months with the Marines. Pegasus was almost elegant in its tactics and scope. Stendhal would have loved it (he would have called it “an affair of outposts”), but it soon came to look more like a spectacle than a military operation, a non-operation devised to non-relieve the non-siege of Khe Sanh. When I told General Tolson that I had no real grasp of what the Cav was doing, he laughed and told me that I was probably brighter about it than I knew. Pegasus was objectiveless, he said. Its purpose was to engage. But engage what?

Perhaps, as we claimed, the B-52’s had driven them all away, broken the back of their will to attack. (We claimed 13,000 NVA dead from those raids.) Maybe they’d left the Khe Sanh area as early as January, leaving the Marines pinned down, and moved across I Corps in readiness for the Tet Offensive. Many people believed that a few battalions, clever enough and active enough, could have kept the Marines at Khe Sanh inside the wire and underground for all of those weeks. Maybe they’d come to see reasons why an attack would be impossible, and gone back into Laos. Or A Shau. Or Quang Tri. Or Hue. We didn’t know. They were somewhere, but they were not around Khe Sanh anymore.

Incredible arms caches were being found, rockets still
crated, launchers still wrapped in factory paper, AK-47’s still packed in Cosmoline, all indicating that battalion-strength units had left in a hurry. The Cav and the Marines above Route 9 were finding equipment suggesting that entire companies had fled. Packs were found on the ground in perfect company formations, and while they contained diaries and often poems written by the soldiers, there was almost no information about where they had gone or why. Considering the amount of weapons and supplies being found (a record for the entire war), there were surprisingly few prisoners, although one prisoner did tell his interrogators that 75 percent of his regiment had been killed by our B-25’s, nearly 1,500 men, and that the survivors were starving. He had been pulled out of a spider hole near Hill 881 North, and had seemed grateful for his capture. An American officer who was present at the interrogation actually said that the boy was hardly more than seventeen or eighteen, and that it was hideous that the North was feeding such young men into a war of aggression. Still, I don’t remember anyone, Marine or Cav, officer or enlisted, who was not moved by the sight of their prisoners, by the sudden awareness of what must have been suffered and endured that winter.

For the first time in eleven weeks, Marines at Khe Sanh left their perimeter, walked two miles to Hill 471, and took it, after what amounted to the one serious battle of those weeks. (LZ’s, including Stud, were sporadically rocketed and mortared; the Cav lost some ships to NVA gunners; there were small often sharp firefights almost every day. One or two body bags waited for removal at most landing zones on most afternoons, but it was different, and that was the trouble. After the slaughter of the winter, you were afraid of this unaccustomed mercy, afraid of becoming lax or afraid of having the Joke played on you. It was one thing, if it had to
happen, to have it happen in Hue or Khe Sanh, but something else to be one of the few.
WHY ME
? was a common piece of helmet graffiti.) You’d hear a trooper of the Cav say something like, “I hear the Marines stepped into the shit above Route Nine,” but what he really meant was, Of
course
the Marines stepped into the shit, what
else
would they be doing in this war? The Cav’s attitude acknowledged that they might die too, but never the way the Marines did. A story circulated around the Pegasus TAOR about a Marine who had been staked to a hillside by the NVA: Marine choppers refused to pick him up, so the Cav went down and got him. Whether it was true or not, it revealed the complexities of the Marine–Cav rivalry, and when the Cav sent an outfit to relieve the Marines on 471, it killed off one of the last surviving romances about war left over from the movies: there was no shouting, no hard kidding, no gleeful obscenities, or the old “Hey, where you from? Brooklyn!? No kiddin’! Me too!” The departing and arriving files passed one another without a single word being spoken.

The death of Martin Luther King intruded on the war in a way that no other outside event had ever done. In the days that followed, there were a number of small, scattered riots, one or two stabbings, all of it denied officially. The Marine recreational facility in China Beach in Danang was put off-limits for a day, and at Stud we stood around the radio and listened to the sound of automatic-weapons fire being broadcast from a number of American cities. A southern colonel on the general’s staff told me that it was a shame, a damn shame, but I had to admit (didn’t I?) that he’d been a long time asking for it. A black staff sergeant in the Cav who had taken me over to his outfit for dinner the night before cut me dead on the day that we heard the news, but he came over to
the press tent later that night and told me that it shouldn’t happen that way. I got a bottle of Scotch from my pack and we went outside and sat on the grass, watching the flares dropping over the hillside across the river. There were still some night mists. In the flarelight it looked like heavy snow, and the ravines looked like ski trails.

He was from Alabama and he had all but decided on a career in the Army. Even before King’s murder he had seen what this might someday mean, but he’d always hoped to get around it somehow.

“Now what I gonna do?” he said.

“I’m a great one to ask.”

“But dig it. Am I gonna take ’n’ turn them guns aroun’ on my own people? Shit!”

That was it, there was hardly a black NCO anywhere who wasn’t having to deal with that. We sat in the dark, and he told me that when he’d walked by me that afternoon it had made him sick. He couldn’t help it.

“Shit, I can’t do no twenny in this Army. They ain’ no way. All’s I hope is I can hang back when push comes t’ shove. An’ then I think, Well, fuck it, why should I? Man, home’s jus’ gonna be a hassle.”

There was some firing on the hill, a dozen M-79 rounds and the dull bap-bap-bap of an AK-47, but that was over there, there was an entire American division between that and us. But the man was crying, trying to look away while I tried not to look.

“It’s just a bad night for it,” I said. “What can I tell you?”

He stood up, looked at the hill and then started to leave. “Oh, man,” he said. “This war gets old.”

At Langvei we found the two-month-old corpse of an American stretched out on the back of a wrecked jeep. This
was on the top of the small hill that opposed the hill containing the Special Forces bunkers taken by the NVA in February. They were still in there, 700 meters away. The corpse was the worst thing we’d ever seen, utterly blackened now, the skin on the face drawn back tightly like stretched leather, so that all of his teeth showed. We were outraged that he had not been buried or at least covered, and we moved away and set up positions around the hill. Then the ARVN moved out toward the bunkers and were turned back by machine-gun fire. We sat on the hill and watched while napalm was dropped against the bunkers, and then we set up a recoilless rifle and fired at the vents. I went back to Stud. The next day a company of the Cav tried it, moving in two files on high and low ground approaching the bunkers, but the terrain between the hills offered almost no cover, and they were turned back. That night they were rocketed heavily, but took no serious casualties. I came back on the third day with Rick Merron and John Lengle of the Associated Press. There had been heavy airstrikes against the bunkers that night, and now two tiny helicopters, Loaches, were hovering a few feet above the slits, pouring in fire.