If I Die in a Combat Zone (12 page)

She was in time with the music. She unwrapped herself. She took up a baton, and she prodded herself with it.

The band played Beatles music,
Hey, Jude, don’t be afraid. Take a sad song and make it better. Remember
. The girl finished stripping and sang the words.
And anytime you feel the pain, Hey Jude, refrain, don’t carry the world upon your shoulder
.

Everyone sang, slowly and with an ache, getting drunk, and the Korean beat time against her brown leg.

On April 29 we were on the helipad before dawn. With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head. The helmet seems heavy and awkward. It is painful, in a slow and torturous way, to stumble to the pad under a sixty-pound rucksack, not easy to tote a rifle.

We lay in private groups on the tarred parking lot of an airfield. The black soldiers joked and were too loud for the early morning. They had their own piece of the helipad, and only officers would interrupt them. Out over the sea the sun began to light the day. Captain Johansen talked with his lieutenants; then he lay on his back. We smoked and thought about the Korean stripper and about hometowns. I made a communications check with battalion headquarters, wiped off my M-16, and put oil on the working parts. Some of the men complained about having to carry extra M-60 ammunition. The squad leaders were harsh, trying to be leaders in the morning. We exchanged cans of C rations, turkey loaf for pork slices, applesauce for peaches. All the noise ruined the early morning, the time when pure silence is only right, the time that is for thought alone.

With the first sunlight, Colonel Daud flew over. He radioed down. The first formation of choppers had an ETA of 0605 hours; they would arrive in four minutes. The landing zone in Pinkville seemed quiet, he said. Fourteen miles to the south, the villagers of My Khe were sleeping.

Then the helicopters came in. They carried the day’s hard light with them. It was already hot. Third Platoon and the command unit waddled to the birds and climbed in. We knelt or sat with our legs dangling over the open lips of the choppers. We shouted, trying to cheer up our friends. The helicopters roared, rose very slowly, dipped their noses forward, and climbed.

It was a short, hopelessly short ride. Chu Lai and the jets and PXs and clubs and libraries and USO and friendly beaches were down there; then came the guard towers and fences; and then came the countryside. Clusters of hamlets, paddies, hedgegrows, tunnel openings. Riding along, we watched for movement along the trails. It was too early.

You begin to sweat. Even with the rotor blades whipping cold air around like an air-conditioner, you sweat.

You light a cigarette, trying to think of something to say. A good joke would help, something funny. Laughing makes you believe you are resigned if not brave.

You stare at the faces. The Vietnamese scout, a kid who looked younger than my fourteen-year-old brother, was scared. Some of the other men seemed unconcerned. I felt tired, thinking I should be in bed, wondering if I were ill.

Johansen pointed down. It was an expanse of rice paddy, bordered on one side by a ridge of forest and on the other side by one of the village of My Khe. “That’s the place,” he said. “When we begin the descent, grab my shoulder harness and hold on. If I’m hit, I don’t want to fall out of this chopper.”

We started to go down. The worst part of the Combat. Assault, the thing you think about on the way down, is how perfectly exposed you are. Nowhere to hide. A fragile machine. No foxholes, no rocks, no gullies. The CA is the army’s most potent offensive tactic of the war, a cousin to Hitler’s blitzkrieg. The words are “agile,” “hostile,” and “mobile.” One moment the world is serene, in another moment the war is there. It is like the cloudburst, like lightning, like the dropping of the bomb on a sleeping Hiroshima, like the Nazis’ rush through Belgium and Poland and France.

You sit in your helicopter, watching the earth come spinning up at you. You jam your magazine into the rifle.

We came in at tree level, and the helicopter’s machine guns opened up on the forested ridge, spraying down protective fire.

I held on to Johansen’s shoulder straps. We waited for the crack of enemy fire, trying to hear above the sound of the bird and our own fire. The helicopter nestled into its landing area, hovering and trembling over the paddy, and we piled out like frantic rats. We scrambled for paddy dikes and depressions and rocks.

Bates lay beside me. “Jesus,” he whispered, “I got a fire burning in my gut, I’m so scared. A big fire right in my gut.”

There was no incoming fire, a cold LZ. Johansen waited until the helicopters were in the sky again. Running and waving, he got us to our feet, and we raced to search out the village. Someone spotted Vietnamese running from the village on the northern edge. We chased them. We felt confident and happy to be alive, and we felt brave. Simply surviving the assault was blessing enough, something of a mandate for aggressiveness, and we charged like storm troopers through My Khe.

It ended with two dead enemy soldiers and one dead American, a fellow I clobbered in Ping-Pong back in Chu Lai.

More Combat Assaults came in the next days. We learned to hate Colonel Daud and his force of helicopters. When he was killed by sappers in a midnight raid, we heard the news over the radio. A lieutenant led us in song, a catchy, happy, celebrating song: Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead. We sang in good harmony. It sounded like a choir.

Twelve
Mori

      S
he had been shot once. The bullet tore through her green uniform and into her buttock and out through her groin. She lay on her side, sprawled against a paddy dike. She never opened her eyes.

She moaned a little, not much, but she screamed when the medic touched at her wound. Blood gushed out of the holes, front and back.

Her face lay in dirt. Flies were all over her. There was no shade. It was mid-afternoon of a hot day. The medic said he did not dare squirt morphine into her, it would kill her before the wound did. He tried to patch the holes, but she squirmed and twisted, rocked and swayed, never opening her eyes. She flickered in and out of consciousness.

“She’s a pretty woman, pretty for a gook. You don’t see many pretty gooks, that’s damn sure.”

“Yes. Trouble is, she’s shot dead through the wrong place.” A dozen GIs hovered over her.

“Look at that blood come, Jesus. Like a fuckin’ waterfall, like fuckin’ Niagara Falls. She’s gonna die quick. Can’t mend up them bullet holes, no way.”

“Fuckin’-aye. She’s wasted.”

“I wish I could help her.” The man who shot her knelt down. “Didn’t know she was a woman, she just looked like any dink. God, she must hurt. Get the damn flies off her, give her some peace.”

She stretched her arms out above her head. She spread her fingers wide and put her hands into the dirt and squeezed in a sort of rhythm. Her forehead was wrinkled in a dozen long, flushed creases; her eyes were closed.

The man who shot her peered into her face. He asked if she couldn’t be given shade.

“She’s going to die,” one soldier said.

“But can’t we give her some shade?” He swatted at a cloud of flies over her head.

“Can’t carry her, she won’t let us. She’s NVA, green uniform and everything. Hell, she’s probably an NVA nurse, she probably
knows
she’s just going to die. Look at her squeeze her hands. Trying to hurry and press all the blood out of herself.”

We called for a dustoff helicopter and the company spread out in a wide perimeter around the shot woman. It was a long wait, partly because she was going to die, helicopter or no helicopter, and partly because she was with the enemy.

Her hair was lustrous black. The man who shot her stroked her hair. Two other soldiers and a medic stood beside her, fanning her and waving at the flies. Her uniform was crusted an almost black color from her blood, and the wound hadn’t clotted much. The man who shot her held his canteen to her lips and she drank some Kool-Aid.

Then she twisted her head from side to side. She pulled her legs up to her chest and rocked, her whole body swaying. The man who shot her poured a trickle of water onto her forehead.

Soon she stopped swaying. She lay still and seemed either dead or unconscious. The medic felt her pulse and shrugged and said she was still going, just barely. She moaned now and then, almost talking in her sleep, but she was not being shrill or hysterical. The medic said she was not feeling any more pain.

“Damn, she is pretty. It’s a crime. We could have shot an ugly old man instead.”

When the helicopter came, she was still. Some soldiers lifted her onto a poncho and took her to the chopper. She lay curled up on the floor of the helicopter, then the bird roared and went into the air. Soon the pilot radioed down and asked what we were doing, making him risk his neck for sake of a dead woman.

Thirteen
My Lai in May

      T
he villages of My Lai are scattered like wild seed in and around Pinkville, a flat stretch of sandy red clay along the northern coast of South Vietnam. “Pinkville” is a silly, county-fairish misnomer for such a sullen piece of the world. From the infantryman’s perspective, zigzagging through one of the most heavily mined areas in the war zone, there is little pink or rosy about Pinkville: mud huts more often deserted than not, bombed-out pagodas, the patently hostile faces of Pinkville’s inhabitants, acre after acre of slush, paddy after paddy, a dirty maze of elaborate tunnels and bomb shelters and graves.

The place gets its name from the fact that military maps color it a shimmering shade of elephant pink, signifying what the map legends call a “built-up area.” Perhaps it once was. Perhaps Pinkville once upon a time was a thriving part of Quang Ngai province. It is no longer.

Pinkville and the villages called My Lai were well known to Alpha Company. Even before the headlines and before the names Calley and Medina took their place in history, Pinkville was a feared and special place on the earth. In January, a month or so before I arrived in Vietnam, less than a year after the slaughter in My Lai 4, Alpha Company took part in massive Operation Russell Beach, joining forces with other army elements, boatloads of marines, the navy and air force. Subject of the intricately planned and much-touted campaign was Pinkville and the Batangan Peninsula. Both had long served as Charlie’s answer to the American R & R center—friendly natives, home-cooked rice, and nearly total sanctuary from American foot soldiers. Despite publicity and War College strategy, the operation did not produce the anticipated results, and this unit learned some hard lessons about Pinkville. There was no reliable criterion by which to distinguish a pretty Vietnamese girl from a deadly enemy; often they were one and the same person. The unit triggered one mine after another during Operation Russell Beach. Frustration and anger built with each explosion and betrayal, one Oriental face began to look like any other, hostile and black, and Alpha Company was boiling with hate when it was pulled out of Pinkville.

In May we were ordered back. Inserted by chopper in the villages of My Khe, a few thousand meters south of the My Lais, we hit immediate contact. The Viet Cong were there, waiting in ambush across the paddy. The people of My Khe 3 were silent; they let us walk into the ambush, not a word of warning.

The day was quiet and hot, and I was thinking about Coke and rest. Then the bushes just erupted. I was carrying the radio for the company commander, and I remember getting separated from him, thinking I had to get up there. But I couldn’t. I lay there. I screamed, buried my head.

A hand grenade came out of the bushes, skidded across my helmet, a red sardine can with explosives inside. I remember my glimpse of the thing, fizzling there beside me. I remember rolling to my left; remember waiting for the loudest noise of my life. It was just a pop, but I remember thinking that must be how it sounds to a dead man. Nothing hurt much. Clauson, a big fellow, took the force of the grenade. I lay there and watched him trot a few steps, screaming; then he lay on his back and screamed. I couldn’t move. I kept hollering, begging for an end to it. The battalion commander was on the radio, asking where my captain was, wanting to talk to him, wanting me to pop smoke to mark our position, wanting me to call the other platoons. Bullets were coming from the bushes. Clauson was gone, I don’t know where or how, and when I put my head up to look for him, I couldn’t see anyone. Everything was noise, and it lasted on and on. It was over, I knew, when Mad Mark came out of the bushes, carrying a tall, skinny guy named Arnold over his shoulder. He swiveled Arnold into a helicopter, and we went north, into the My Lais.

Along the way we encountered the citizens of Pinkville; they were the nonparticipants in war. Children under ten years, women, old folks who planted their eyes into the dirt and were silent. “Where are the VC?” Captain Johansen would ask, nicely enough. “Where are all the men? Where is Poppa-san?” No answers, not from the villagers. Not until we ducked poppa’s bullet or stepped on his land mine.

Alpha Company was fatigued and angry leaving My Lai 5. Another futile search of a nearly deserted village, another fat zero turned up through interrogation. Moving north to cross the Diem Diem River, the company took continuous sniper fire, and it intensified into a sharp thunder when we reached the river and a bridge, seventy-five meters long and perfectly exposed, the only way across. One man at a time, churning as fast as the rucksacks and radios and machine guns allowed, the unit crossed the Song Diem Diem, the rest of the troops spraying out protective fire, waiting their own turn, and we were scared. It was a race. A lieutenant was the starter, crouched at the clay runway leading into the paddy, hollering “Go” for each of us, then letting loose a burst of fire to cover the guy. The captain, first man to win his race, was at the finish line. He gave the V sign to each man across. It may have signaled victory or valor. It did not mean peace. The men were angry. No enemy soldiers to shoot back at, only hedgerows and bushes and clumps of dead trees.