Sand in the Wind (60 page)

Lieutenant Forest sat heating some Curations when Nash gruffly ordered him to follow them. They approached a corpsman who was helping a man remove his blood-soaked sock. Each time the sock was touched, the man would cry out. Finally, the corpsman had to cut it with a razor blade. But part of the sock still remained stuck to his instep. The corpsman slowly pulled it away as the man squirmed in pain. Before discarding it, he held the piece of sock up to Nash. There was a patch of flesh over an inch in diameter still sticking to it. The corpsman then washed the man’s instep, exposing a mass of bloody tissue.

Nash was barely able to control his anger until he could get Trippitt and Forest far enough away from their men to berate them. He knew that conditions like this were inevitable; but he was also aware that Trippitt hadn’t done anything to try and prevent them, and that they could have been put off a while longer. Now it was probably too late to keep the rest of the company from ending up in the same condition as the man he had just seen. Making no effort to hide his anger, Nash ordered Trippitt to see that his men dried their feet and kept them dry for at least an hour before moving out each morning.

When the men of Hotel Company awoke the next day, no one was surprised to see that it was raining. Kramer immediately passed word for his men to take off their boots. All their gear was either soaked or very damp, so they still had no way of drying their feet. Kramer decided the only thing to do was to have them build fires. But there was no dry wood around. It was Sugar Bear who got the idea to use the wooden floors of the abandoned bunkers. Though this wood was damp, they were finally able to start a fire with it. From this main fire, the men took burning pieces of wood and started smaller fires within the dryer hootches. Six to eight men would gather in these hootches and take turns drying their feet.

Trippitt had three patrols planned for the day. Nash told him to eliminate one and shorten the other two. The entire company remained within the perimeter until eleven o’clock when the medivac chopper came for the six men with the worst cases of immersion foot. As soon as it took off, the patrols left camp. Anyone with a bad case of immersion foot was left behind. Since most of these men were members of First Platoon, the remaining men in it were divided up and sent out with Fourth and Second Platoons.

An hour after leaving the perimeter, Fourth Platoon got pinned down by some heavy sniper fire. Judging by the fire power they were receiving, Lieutenant Howell estimated that it was at least a squad firing at them. He immediately called in some helicopter gun ships. It took three of them over an hour to silence the snipers.

Howell swept his platoon towards the heavy brush from which the fire had originated. He did so expecting the usual results — none at all. Tt made little difference whether the Americans who searched for them believed the Viet Cong had escaped unharmed or had somehow managed to carry off their dead and wounded. All that was usually left for the Marines to see was their own casualties. To Howell’s surprise, this incident ended differently. They discovered the bodies of two NVA soldiers, but some of the more experienced men were sorry they had. Fourth Platoon carried the reasons for this discomfort back to the perimeter with them.

When Nash saw what they had found, he immediately called for a meeting with Trippitt and his platoon commanders. They arrived to find Nash in front of his hootch with two NVA pith helmets in his hand. He stared hostilely at the men before him for a few seconds, then began speaking in a disgruntled and angry tone. “Fourth Platoon found something you should all be interested in.” Nash held out the helmets. One of them had some writing on it that numerous bullet holes would have made illegible if similar writing had not been clearly printed on the other helmet. “Hotel 2/5” was written in large, black letters on the front of it. “I’m not sure about the reason for this, but I’ve got a pretty good idea. I’m warning all of you: You’re responsible for the actions of your men. It’s beyond me to figure out why someone would think of a dead body as a toy. Once you’ve killed a man, that’s damn well enough. I want you to make it clear to your men that anyone caught fucking with a dead body will be court-martialed. You’d think what happened to Charlie 1/9 would be warning enough, but I guess it isn’t. A few years in the brig might not teach anything either, but you can bet your ass I’ll do my best to send someone there if I get the chance. That’s it!”

It was obvious to Kramer what Nash had warned them about, but he was puzzled by the reference to Charlie 1/9. As soon as he reached their position, Kramer asked Tony 5, “Does Charlie 1/9 mean anything to you?” Tony laughed derisively before answering, “Those jerks could get ambushed in South Philly.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You never heard about the ghost platoon?” Kramer shook his head. “I ain’t sure how it started, but it was probably Charlie 1/9’s fault. Some guys — I’ve seen a few of them — get a kick out of fucking with dead Gooks — carving the name of their company across their chests, shaving their heads, cutting their ears off — real fun stuff like that. Well the Gooks don’t like you fucking with their dead, so they decided to teach Charlie 1/9 a lesson. Wherever Charlie 1/9 went, a platoon of Gooks used to follow them. Every chance they got, they’d hit ’em somehow — ambushes, mortars, rockets. It got so bad, the guys in Charlie 1/9 used to think they were haunted. Sometimes they’d knock off a few Gooks in the ghost platoon, but they still got the worst of it. They knew it wasn’t any accident because some of the dead Gooks had Charlie 1/9 carved on their rifle stocks. I don’t know whether they wised up and quit fucking with the dead bodies, but the ghost platoon sure as hell didn’t. More than one guy from Charlie 1/9 got found by his buddies with his balls cut off and his cock in his mouth. You find your best friend like that, and you do some heavy thinking. The Gooks kept ’em thinking. Last I heard, they sent 1/9 back to Da Nang to guard some PX or something.”

As Kramer listened to Tony 5, he purposely kept his face expressionless. This wasn’t because he was surprised or worried, but rather because the story amused him. In a macabre way, it seemed to exemplify so many other things he had witnessed, to testify to the cheapness of human life and make a sham of actions and ideas that ‘hypocritically’ placed value upon it. His mind flashed back to those intense moments when he and his men had recklessly advanced in the face of fire, and his senses partially relived the shrill intoxication of that advance, that zenith of sensation when the value of life became submerged and lost in the feverish excitement of the moment. Since then he had often tried to dissect those few minutes — not because he found them disturbing, but because they puzzled him, and hidden within them he sensed there was a reality on the verge of exploding before him as testament to and justification of the ‘truths’ he refused to ignore. A hatred rose within him, not for what he viewed as his own pathetic existence, but for the ‘hypocritical’ faces in his past who had tried to place a value upon their own meaningless lives by torturing him into the belief that life itself was something sacred and to be prized, that his blindness to the beauty it contained would someday fade and leave him also possessed with this vision that somehow, for some perverted reason, had eluded him. He suddenly ‘realized’ that those faces that clogged his past, in their own tortured striving, had deceived themselves with the very poison they had offered him, and with this realization his outrage waned to amusement. He looked on them as creatures more pathetic than himself, fools not even satisfied with the ‘lie’ that life was something to be endured. Kramer took sadistic pleasure in the wish that they could somehow be with him, here in this pitiable country where war had obliterated all facades of false meaning, where it was not enough to rob a man of something as meaningless as his own life, where even the violence of this act was incapable of drawing from the man that killed all the lie-produced venom which made the act possible, here, where there was even a need to disfigure and mutilate the hollow, already decaying corpse that had once enclosed that life.

Childs sat by himself, violently cutting shavings from a stick with his bayonet. It had been almost an hour since Kramer — ‘the worthless prick’ — told him to go to the battalion CP and talk to the sergeant major. Two Purple Hearts weren’t enough. They wanted him to grovel and beg his way to the rear. Childs promised himself that if he ever got the chance, he’d make the company master sergeant pay. He pictured him sitting in his office in An Hoa, evading Forsythe’s question as to why he was still in the bush, not even bothering to lie that he would try to get him a job in the rear. No, Childs knew they wanted him to beg, and even then they would do everything they could to keep him in the bush. He flung away the remainder of the stick and sheathed his bayonet, but still hesitated before getting to his feet. As he walked towards the battalion CP, he thought of the things he would like to say to the sergeant major, to all of them.

The first few men Childs asked said the sergeant major hadn’t even been there, but finally someone told him that he’d been choppered back to An Hoa. At first Childs was relieved, knowing that now he wouldn’t have to beg. But then it began to seem like a plot, of everyone and everything, against him. He stopped walking, as if doing so itself was an act of defiance, knowing that if he stood there a week no one would even bother to ask him why. His outrage increased. If the master sergeant had been standing in front of him, Childs would have been able, driven to kill him.

Childs remained standing in the same place, paralyzed by the impotency of his rage. He heard a voice say, “I see them now.” Major Lucas had said this to the battalion artillery spotter. They were sitting together, a few yards away, while Lucas squinted through a pair of binoculars. “They might be children,” he added before handing the binoculars to the spotter.

After a long look, the spotter said, “I think they
are
children.”

“Can’t be sure,” Lucas replied reflectively.

“You want to go ahead?”

“Might as well.”

The spotter yelled a set of coordinates to a mortar position thirty yards away, then called for some rounds of white phosphorous. Childs stood motionless, glaring at the backs of the two men as if he were looking at germs through a microscope. After the mortar rounds were fired, the artillery spotter casually called out an adjustment and yelled for two more. Childs raised his rifle, knowing he wouldn’t use it, and sighted in on the back of Major Lucas’s neck. He pressed hard enough to remove the play from the trigger, but no harder. While Lucas and the spotter speculated about how successful the rounds had been, Childs lowered the rifle and walked back towards his foxhole.

Dusk fell upon a cloudless sky. For the first time in weeks, the men were allowed to fall asleep without the discomfort of wet clothing, and most of them were tired enough to take quick advantage of this. Their comfort was short lived. Two hours before dawn, the rain started again, it fell harder than at any previous time during the operation, flooding the ground beneath their hootches and turning it to mud. Sleep became impossible. One by one, the men sat up and wrapped their soaked poncho liners around themselves. In this manner, they sat shivering in the mud until the sun rose slowly above the mountains, its light and heat all but dissipated by a barrier of rain.

Colonel Nash would have slept little regardless of the rain. The incident of the NVA helmets emphasized something he was already aware of — the lack of control he held over the men in his battalion. He knew the gulf between himself and them was caused by the absence of responsible leadership beneath him. Again the paradox had proved itself: war demands superior leadership; war dilutes leadership. The battalion was already five officers short, and it would be absurd to remove any of the remaining officers. This would merely place the lives of his men in the hands of less experienced and probably even less competent officers. It was not the fear of losing lives that bothered him. The possibility of such losses had to be accepted along with the responsibility for them. It was needless loss of life that worried him. He wondered how many men would die because they were in no condition to fight, or because a ‘fatalistic’ enemy had been goaded by atrocities upon their dead to sacrifice even more of their lives to take those of his own men.

All logic and all of his training told Nash that it was just a matter of time before the enemy would succumb. Yet his experiences and intuition overruled this conclusion. The Americans had been constantly able to raise the price of a Viet Cong victory without being able to put it out of reach. He knew the possible reasons — the presence of a foreign race upon their land, a normal standard of living little removed from that demanded by war, the belief in their cause, the patience inherent in their culture — and yet none of these reasons nor all of them together seemed to explain the amount of suffering they chose to endure, it wasn’t the question of defeating the Viet Cong that bothered Nash. It was the realization that all the destruction he had witnessed was endured by a population so indifferent to the struggle before them that if not for the suffering they would refuse to recognize it.

What little of the idealist that had ever been in him had gradually succumbed to his experiences in the military, but never before Vietnam had Nash considered himself a fatalist. His first few months in-country left him convinced that he was witnessing the destruction of a people and a cause so stubborn as to deserve, by their very obstinance, to survive. Now this destruction seemed no longer imminent, and was replaced by the destruction, not of his country, but of the myth that gave it life and in which he had once believed.

The heavy rain prevented the men from building fires to dry their feet. They sat huddled in their hootches until an hour after dawn when word was passed for them to form up for a company-size patrol. Because they were to return before dusk, they left their packs behind. Those men with the worst cases of immersion foot remained in camp to guard the CP.