Saigon (78 page)

Captain Gary Sherman sat up in his dank, musty bunker at Firebase Birmingham and rubbed his eyes. Outside, twilight was falling over the flat coastal plains of Quang Ngai, three hundred miles north of Saigon. He had slept for half an hour hut was still gray—faced with fatigue; only three hours earlier he had led his under strength Bravo Company back to base from its third abortive “search-and-destroy” sweep of the week through the poor hamlets that lay scattered across the low-lying marshes of the province within sight of the sea. the mission had been routine; they had been out for two nights without once making contact with the Viet Cong, but mines and booby traps had again whittle away another half-dozen of his men. 

By the end of the operation, the fatigued survivors were watching the wounded being hauled out by medivac helicopters with envious expressions in their eyes, and he knew that some of the frightened young draftees he was trying so painstakingly to mold into an efficient fighting force would have gladly swapped places with them. Two had suffered minor shrapnel wounds, another had lost a foot, and a third had all the fingers blown off his left hand. Three of them, however, had been killed outright, and as always happened with mines, the bodies of the victims had been horribly mutilated, and their departure by helicopter wrapped in their own rain ponchos had left the other men dull- eyed and silent with shock. 

It was the third time in a week that Bravo Company had been caught in a minefield, and in all some thirty men had been lost; seven had been killed and many of the others had suffered severed limbs and mutilations that would leave them crippled and disfigured for life. The casualty rate was higher than normal because the winding paths through the hamlets of the region, like those all over rural South Vietnam, had been sown and re-sown with mines more intensively than ever before in the wake of the Tet Offensive that had proved so costly for the Communist forces. Although pictures of the street fighting in the major cities had shocked America deeply, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese losses by the time they retreated had mounted to thirty thousand dead and wounded against American and South Vietnamese losses of about ten thousand. As a result, as soon as the offensive ended, the severely weakened Communist battalions had reverted to their familiar guerrilla strategy once more, dodging and feinting in the jungles and mountains and rarely engaging their enemy openly. 

Anxious to press home their advantage, the United States military commanders in South Vietnam were gushing their own troops hard in pursuit, and for this reason Gary’s repeated requests to have his demoralized company stood down from active duty had been refused. General Westmoreland, the American commander in South Vietnam, had asked for a massive new commitment of troops from the United States to help holster this new drive, but the Tet Offensive had greatly strengthened antiwar sentiment in America, and President Johnson had turned down his request; as a consequence no replacements were arriving for the casualties in Bravo Company either, and for a minute or two after waking Gary lay motionless on the inflated mattress covering his wooden plank bed, reflecting wearily on his predicament. He could see no end to the terrible attrition of the men under his command, arid he couldn’t think how he was going to lift the morale of the Bravo troops for yet another operation. He had barely been able to believe his ears when, after their return that afternoon, the colonel commanding the four— company Task Force Birmingham had announced that Bravo was being assigned a blocking role in a dawn assault by the entire force on the village of Quang To. High grade intelligence indicated the presence in the village of a large contingent of the Viet Cong’s 42nd Light Force Battalion, the crew-cut colonel had announced with a smug grin. “The SOBs are hiding out in those bricked-up houses and the tunnels underneath,” he had told his officers. “I guess all our guys need a boost we’ve had too many frustrating weeks of noncontact. So you can go tell ‘em tomorrow we’re gonna give ‘em a real chance to zap Victor Charlie’s ass!” 

Looking at his watch, Gary saw there was still a half an hour to go before briefing time, and he dragged himself reluctantly to his feet and began to wash. As he splashed water on his sleepy face from a hand bowl, the sudden sound of hysterical giggling reached his ears from outside and he stopped and looked out through the doorway. Two of the draftees in his company, both steelworkers from Indiana, were staggering back to their billets from the direction of the base “boom—boom shop,” a collection of’ tumbledown shacks just off Highway One where peasant girls sold their favors under the beady-eyed gaze of an aged mamasan; they were passing a marijuana joint hack and forth between them as they swayed along and one of them, a heavily built youth with fair hair, was tipping a can of American beer to his bps between giggles. Watching them go, Gary remembered that the last time he’d seen them in the field they had been helping lift one of the shattered bodies into a helicopter; they hadn’t changed their clothes, and he could see that blood smears from some of the wounded had merged into the filth of their mud—spattered combat fatigues. 

“Go get a fresh issue of clothing, you men,” called Gary sharply. “I want everybody shaped up for my briefing in art hour’s time.” 

The soldiers stopped giggling long enough to turn and raise their hands in a sloppy salute, but a he went back into the bunker, he heard their shrill laughter Start up again and they continued noisily on their way back to their billets. He stood thinking absently about the two stoned soldiers for a moment, then to take his mind off the briefing for the next day’s operation, he pulled out an airmail pad and sat down to write a letter to his father. 

“Dear Dad,” he began, 

Don’t mistake my lateness in replying to your letter from London as evidence of anything at all except that I’m usually too damned busy and too tired these days to get around to letter-writing. During the four months since the Tet panic died down, life here has been one long hectic round of “search-and-destroy” missions in which we do a hell of a lot of searching and very little destroying. In return of course we get a steady debilitating toll of casualties from traps and mines. That may sound to you like “the mixture as before,” but believe me, it’s stronger medicine now than ever and just as unpleasant to swallow. Your letter arrived a week ago and I’m snatching a few minutes between sorties to scribble a line in reply because I wanted to tell you how delighted I was when I read those first few lines about Mark getting out of his hellhole in Hanoi soon. 

Like you, don’t give a damn either which peace group goes to bring him home as long as he gets Out okay after all he’s been through. I’m sure the personal letter you wrote to Ho Chi Minh helped a hell of a lot although I wish you’d told me about it before — it might have helped me to behave more sensibly those last couple of times we met. Your other major revelation that you’d quietly married Miss Boyce-Lewis and decided to set up home in England also helped make me feel a little more ashamed of myself than I already did — which is saying something. Outside the Continental that night when I saw you together I was somewhat less than gracious and my conscience bothered me a hell of a lot afterwards. It’s a load off my mind to let you know that and I offer a clumsy apology along with my really heartfelt congratulations to you both . 

Gary stopped writing and listened when a long burst of what sounded like distant machine-gun fire broke the silence; but it went on and grew rapidly louder and he recognized then the rapid thump of helicopter engines. One of the other three Birmingham companies was obviously returning from an operation, and he listened absently until all the choppers had landed. 

“I was going to say I hope your shoulder’s mended,” he continued when the last helicopter engine had cut. 

But I guess it must be okay if you felt well enough to “walk up the aisle” at Caxton Hall. If you’re embarking on a critique of our Vietnam policy in book form, as you say in your letter, you must be in fairly good shape, I guess — so I’ll wish you luck with that too. A book of that kind from someone as knowledgeable as you on the subject must be assured of considerable sales no doubt the libraries at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon will be ordering advance copies to see what you say about their masters. As for myself, I feel I could contribute a few lines of “critique” myself right now about the situation here. (This will obviously have to be mailed clandestinely through civilian channels to reach you intact now that I’ve gotten onto this subject.) We’ve just done three missions in a week, and we’re going out again at the crack of dawn tomorrow. We’re badly under strength and morale among the remaining men is very low. Whether we’ll have any more luck this time is open to serious doubt and I’m afraid I’m feeling pretty down in the mouth about it all. I find myself torn now between a strong desire to resign my commission and get the hell out, and a sense of duty that tells me that I ought to stay and do what I can to curb some of the worst things going on here. For instance, there’s a rule that any Vietnamese who doesn’t stop and identify himself in a village should be shot. Many run away out of sheer terror and then it’s a question of “shoot first and ask questions afterwards.” This, as you can imagine, leads to a lot of indiscriminate killing. Also you never know when you go into a village whether you’re going to find just women and children, a few hidden snipers or a whole goddamned battalion of VC. So we’ve taken to laying down a heavy barrage of rocket and artillery fire every time just its case. It’s madness, really. Civilian casualties on a big scale are unavoidable and “winning the hearts and minds of the people,” as we’re supposed to be doing, is impossible under these circumstances 

Gary stopped writing and glanced at his watch again; only five minutes remained before the briefing began, and he reluctantly shuffled the pages of the letter together. “I’ve got to dash now to yet another ‘war council,’ “ he added hurriedly at the foot of the page on which he’d just been writing. “So I’ll just add for now those immortal words beloved by magazine serial writers, ‘to be continued.’ 

Without looking over what he’d written, he folded the pages together and slipped them into one of his breast pockets. 

When he stepped out of the bunker, the darkness outside was moist and warm against his face and because of the heat he walked slowly towards base headquarters where the officers of the four companies were beginning to assemble. To take his mind off the dismal prospect of the briefing, he let his thoughts stray back to his father’s letter and he found himself wondering as he walked how his brother Mark would cope with the problems of readjustment to freedom after his terrible imprisonment. He tried to imagine too what kind of life his father was leading with his new English wife, and it occurred to him suddenly that the lives of his brother, his father and himself had all been marked deeply by Vietnam. As he mused on this, the image of the game animals shot in the jungles of Cochin-China and Annam by his grandfather an(l his dead uncle forty years before flashed unbidden into his mind; he remembered how his father had tried to explain his aversion to the tableau during their unhappy meeting in the museum and the halting words he’d used then came back to him. “...Too often, Gary, we get carried away with the idea of wanting to win at all costs. . . We’re all of us likely, God knows, to fall prey to the worst sides of our natures 

For some reason the memory brought hack the vague sense of foreboding he’d felt earlier on learning that he would have to go out again so soon with his exhausted draftees, and the feeling grew rapidly as he approached the briefing room. By the time he reported to Birmingham’s colonel his mood had become deeply pessimistic. 

As the American briefing got under way, fifteen miles to the north in the village of Quang To, two hundred guerrillas of the 42nd Light Force Battalion of the Liberation Army were settling clown for the night in thatched “hootches” that all had concealed entrances leading into the network of subterranean passages beneath the village. The tunnels, which were two or three kilometers long, led to outlets on the seashore, and the guerrillas had many times rehearsed rapid withdrawal through them to test the speed and thoroughness with which they could vacate the village. On these occasions wives and families invariably stayed behind, and as the senior commissar of the battalion went from hut to hut that night giving whispered orders to the fighting men to retreat to the beach, he also warned their families to remain where they were on pain of punishment; they were told that spies at Firebase Birmingham had learned that an American raid was expected at dawn and they were instructed not to cooperate with the imperialist troops in any way. Then their meal was finished the Viet Cong guerrillas took leave of their families without fuss and slipped down into the tunnels. By midnight only women, children and old men beyond military age remained in Quang To. 

Next morning Gary flew in the lead helicopter when Task Force Birmingham took off at first light. Looking back, he could see the rest of the first wave of the force strung out behind, a dozen wasp-like silhouettes seesawing in Indian file against the orange flare of the rising sun. Ahead of them he could see brilliant flashes and smoke bursts spreading all across the half-dozen hamlets of the target village, and Cobra gunships were plunging and rearing through the smoke, pouring rocket and machine- gun fire into the thatched huts. Although there was no sign of firing from the ground, the door gunners of all the troop- carrying helicopters opened up with their M-6os too, as they neared the selected landing zone in a paddy field two hundred yards to the south of Hamlet One. The two soldiers Gary had reprimanded the night before were flying with him in his lead helicopter alongside other members of their platoon; all of them were strained and tense, and they clutched their M-16s tightly in front of them, peering through the open door searching for signs of the 42nd Light Force which by reputation was a crack Viet Cong unit that hit hard and ruthlessly when it chose to engage.