Shadow Divers (9 page)

Chatterton studied the wounded. Mostly he watched their eyes as doctors explained about wheelchairs and breathing tubes, and their eyes always seemed to stare straight ahead, as if the men were looking through the doctor. To Chatterton, these soldiers were not “Charge of the Light Brigade” types. They looked stunned, afraid, lonely. But they also looked like they knew something Chatterton did not know.

As months passed and busloads of neurosurgical patients poured through the 249th, Chatterton’s questions grew more urgent. He devoured newspapers, read books, and sought out conversations, but those sources only told him about politics; they couldn’t explain how the world could have come to this. He got the feeling again, the same one he’d had on the beach as a boy, that he would have to go see for himself.

Chatterton began telling friends that he might request a transfer to Vietnam. Their response was immediate and unanimous: “Are you fucking crazy?” He tested the idea on his superiors. They pleaded with him to reconsider and explained that neurosurgical ward duty was among a soldier’s highest callings. He told them that this was not about patriotism or anything noble like that—he just needed to understand. Even the wounded pleaded with Chatterton. “Don’t go, man—it’s a big mistake,” they said. A paralyzed soldier told him, “Stay here, do your time, and go home. I’m wasted, but you’re still good and you gotta stay good.” But Chatterton requested the transfer. In June 1970, he was on an airplane to Chu Lai in South Vietnam.

Chatterton was assigned to the 4th Battalion 31st Infantry of the Americal Division. When he landed, he was told to report to the battalion aid station on a firebase near the Laotian border, a place called LZ West. He reached the firebase late that morning.

Around noon, a telephone rang on the base. A man answered, said nothing for a moment, then mumbled, “Shit” into the receiver. Soon everyone on the base began scrambling. An administrative officer called to Chatterton, “Get your gear! A medic in the field just got killed getting off a helicopter. You’re taking his place.” Chatterton wasn’t sure if he heard the guy correctly. He was replacing a dead medic? On a helicopter? In the field? Then the same man began to sob and his eyes went wild, a look Chatterton had seen on those suffering nervous breakdowns in the Japanese hospital.

Chatterton stood in place as men grabbed weapons and gear and zigzagged around him. He did not know where to go or what to do. A minute later, a smallish man with scruffy brown hair grabbed his arm and told him, “Listen, I’m a medic, too. I’ll get you ready to go out there.” The medic looked old, at least twenty-four. He introduced himself as “Mouse.”

“Follow me,” Mouse said.

Mouse led Chatterton to a bunker on the firebase. It would be a few hours before the helicopter arrived to take Chatterton into the jungle. Until then, Mouse said he would show Chatterton the ropes. “If you want, man, we can talk while we work,” he said.

In the bunker, Mouse stuffed Chatterton’s aid bag with the field medic’s tools—malaria pills, tetracycline, morphine, IV, tape, scissors, field dressings—and explained the jungle way to use them all, unhappy methods more sudden than Chatterton had learned in the hospital. In between, he spoke to Chatterton of Vietnam.

“I hate the war,” Mouse said. “But I’m here. I do everything I can for the men. I’m here to be a good medic. The war is irrelevant to me. Over here, being a good medic is my life.”

Mouse labeled the malaria and dysentery pills, pulled buckles around Chatterton’s gear, and told him to carry a small aid bag in addition to the larger one thought sufficient by average medics. On patrol, he told Chatterton, a great medic separates his trauma supplies from the allergy and stomach-cramp shit—you don’t lug antihistamines to treat a bullet wound to the head.

“These guys are your responsibility,” Mouse continued. “For me, I have to do right by my men. That’s the only thing that matters—the men. They’re the only thing.”

Chatterton asked Mouse about the .45-caliber pistol he kept on his hip—didn’t field medics arm themselves better than that?

“A lot of medics carry a rifle or machine gun,” Mouse said. “The only reason I carry a weapon at all is to protect a guy who’s down. I’m not willing to let the enemy finish a guy I’m treating just because I’m unarmed. But I won’t carry an offensive weapon. I’m no warrior. I leave the heavy stuff behind. It’s symbolic in a way. It reminds me why I’m here.”

For the next two hours, Chatterton lost himself in Mouse’s philosophy. Mouse had ideas about courage and dedication and conviction that Chatterton had known were true but could never enunciate. For those two hours, Chatterton forgot that his life would be on the line that day.

A helicopter arrived. Someone shouted, “Let’s go!” Mouse helped stuff hand grenades and a poncho into Chatterton’s pack, then quizzed him a final time on which pill treated which ailment. Chatterton grabbed his helmet. He strapped a .45-caliber pistol to his hip.

“One more thing,” Mouse said. “A lot of the stuff you do out there, you’re going to have to live with all the way down the line. You’ll have to make decisions out there. When that happens, you have to ask yourself, ‘Where do I want to be in ten years, twenty years? How will I want to feel about this decision when I’m an old man?’ That’s the question for making important decisions.”

Chatterton nodded and shook Mouse’s hand. Mouse would remain at the base. Chatterton wondered if he would see this man again. He could only think to say, “Thanks a lot, Mouse. Good-bye.” Then he climbed into the chopper and sat on a case of C rations—no seats, no seat belts—and the machine lifted away, disappearing above the trees and into the sun on its way to the real Vietnam.

The helicopter released Chatterton and several boxes of supplies in the jungle, then disappeared back into the sky. For what seemed an eternity, there was no one else there. Finally, Chatterton heard rustling behind a patch of trees. He turned toward the sound to see a dozen men emerging from the jungle, Western men with filthy faces, long hair, and scraggly beards. To Chatterton, it appeared as if a California motorcycle gang had materialized in Vietnam. The men walked toward him dressed in torn olive T-shirts and shredded pants. None wore a helmet or flak jacket or other military garb. As they came nearer, it seemed to Chatterton that each soldier carried the same expression, the look of a man who could no longer be surprised.

The soldiers broke open the supply boxes and began to outfit themselves. None said a word to Chatterton, including another medic assigned to the company command post. Every so often, one of them would glance up at Chatterton with a tired disgust that was an unmistakable subtitle in Vietnam:
You don’t know shit. You won’t be around long. If we need help, you probably won’t deliver.
As the men finished packing, one of them grunted to Chatterton, “Let’s go.” The men made up a small platoon. They were on the move to a new location. While in transit, they were to hunt and kill North Vietnamese as necessary. The group walked into the jungle. Chatterton walked with them in the single-file line.

The men crossed rice paddies, swatted bird-sized insects, slogged through alligator-infested rivers, stepped over a machine-gunned buffalo. An hour into the jungle, shots rang out. The platoon hit the ground. Chatterton was the last man down. Bullets polka-dotted the dirt around them. Chatterton believed his heart was going to explode. When the shooting stopped, he looked around. The expressions on the faces around him had remained exactly as they were when he’d first seen them. Minutes later the men resumed walking. Chatterton pulled himself together and joined them. When his breath returned and his brain began working again, he thought to himself, “These guys are crazed killers. Nobody is talking to me. Where the hell am I? What have I done?”

The platoon spent the evening under a sweltering moon. While the others slept, Chatterton lay awake. At dawn, he saw a tiger disappear into the jungle. The next day, as the temperature broke one hundred degrees, the platoon arrived on the outskirts of an abandoned village. Reports indicated enemy soldiers in the vicinity. Other than Chatterton, the men in the platoon were heavily armed and primed for such a confrontation, none more so than John “Ace” Lacko, a twenty-eight-year-old New Jersey paperhanger whom Chatterton had pegged as the platoon’s top dog. Lacko, six foot two and 220 pounds, was completing his third tour, an old-timer by Vietnam standards. He carried an M-60 machine gun with seven hundred rounds crisscrossed on assault straps slung over his chest—the era’s definition of locked and loaded. Lacko had earned the nickname “Ace” for the black playing card he was said to leave on the chests of the enemies he had killed.

The platoon walked single file as they began the patrol. Before long, they came to a dried-up rice paddy that looked to provide easy passage through the otherwise hilly terrain. They entered the open area, scanning the hillside for the enemy. About fifty yards into the clearing, Lacko stepped up onto a rock to get a better view of the surroundings. Shots rang out from a hillside forward left. Five rounds, two of them armor-piercing, tore through Lacko’s left hip and traveled clear through to his right hip. Stunned, he placed his gear on the ground and lay down, partially camouflaging himself in the two-foot grass. Blood began flowing from his wounds. The rest of the platoon turned back and took cover behind a ten-foot pile of dirt and rocks back near the opening to the field. Someone yelled, “Ace is hit! Medic! Medic!” Chatterton and the other medic crawled forward. They could see Lacko’s outline in the grass about fifty yards away. He was in the open, a clear target. The enemy would not finish him; they were likely waiting for a medic to run out, giving them two kills for the price of one.

The platoon’s other medic, Chatterton’s superior, hugged close to the protective cover made by the wall of dirt.

“Fuck it, I’m not going out there,” he told Chatterton.

The platoon could only glare at the man. As for Chatterton, they expected him to do even less. No greenhorn on his second day in Vietnam was going to run onto a shooting range.

“I’ll get him,” Chatterton said.

The platoon went silent. No one was more surprised than Chatterton. He began to remove his gear, all except for the small aid bag Mouse had packed for him.

“Christ, the kid’s gonna go,” someone said.

The platoon began to take position to provide cover fire. With each moment, Chatterton’s vision narrowed and the jungle sounds compressed, until the only impressions in his world were his own heaving breaths and pounding heart. Chatterton had contemplated moments like this at the hospital in Japan. He believed that if he was ever faced with such a decision, he could call upon the lessons of his grandfather. Now, as he readied himself to make the naked run to Lacko, he thought to himself, “I’m going to find out what I am.”

Chatterton sprinted into the open. A barrage of gunfire rang from the hillside far left. Bullets sprayed dirt around Chatterton, but he kept running. Halfway to his man, he could see Lacko lying in the grass. He ran faster. The ground in front of him staccatoed with gunfire. Behind him, he could hear his platoon returning fire so thick that the sky itself began to explode. Chatterton expected to be killed, he kept waiting to fall, but a blur of a feeling kept him from turning back, and that feeling was that he did not want to go through life knowing that he had given up. A second later he slid into the grass next to Lacko.

“I was laying there and the numbness and shock were setting in,” Lacko recalls today. “And I see this new guy, here comes this new guy, and he’s coming with everything he’s got. I didn’t know him at all, didn’t even know his name. But he put himself right in the line of fire. The guy was risking his life.”

Chatterton took cover in the grass beside Lacko. Bullets tore up the ground around them. Chatterton reached into his supply bag for scissors, slit Lacko’s pants top to bottom, and looked for arterial damage. There was none. Lacko could be moved immediately. Now Chatterton had to get him back to the protection of the dirt wall, a distance of fifty yards that seemed to stretch across all Vietnam.

Chatterton considered throwing Lacko over his shoulders, but the wounded soldier outweighed him by fifty pounds. Chatterton sat on the ground behind Lacko and took his arms. More shots hit the dirt where they lay. Chatterton began pushing his legs backward in order to drag Lacko backward a body length at a time, all the while waiting for a bullet to strike him. Two minutes later they were halfway to the dirt wall; by now the platoon had pinpointed the source of the enemy fire and was beating back the attack on Chatterton and Lacko. Soon the men were ten feet from the wall, then five feet, then behind it. Soldiers rushed to them. Moments later, two American Cobra attack helicopters swooped in and unleashed hellfire on the enemy hillside. A Huey medevac chopper followed the Cobras in and airlifted Lacko, now in shock, to the hospital.

As the Huey disappeared, Chatterton collapsed to the ground. He was dehydrated and exhausted. He scarcely knew where he was. But he could see that something had changed in the men. They spoke to him. They rubbed his shoulders. They smiled at him. They called him “Doc.”

As the platoon moved through the jungle, some of the soldiers might have wondered about the shelf life of Chatterton’s courage. American medics in Vietnam walked in uniquely dangerous boots when they accompanied a squad on combat patrol. Because their job was to aid wounded soldiers, medics often found themselves running directly to where the action was hottest—around land mines, in the line of sniper fire, and over booby traps. But the medic faced an even more insidious risk: the enemy often wanted him dead more than anyone. Killing a squad’s medic meant that the soldiers would be on their own when wounded, a devastating blow to a squad’s morale.

In the days following Lacko’s shooting, Chatterton volunteered for every patrol available to the platoon. The men chuckled and clapped him on the back and explained that a medic who walked every patrol would be pulling an impossible and deadly load. Something was rumbling inside Chatterton. He had been excellent on his first patrol, and the feeling of success was overwhelming to him. He could not imagine turning away from the first thing in his life at which he had been special, the thing at which he might be great.