The Vietnam Reader (63 page)

1967. On a U.S. firebase, empty boots at a memorial service stand in for the dead.

The memoir, like the oral history, claims to take readers past the lies and obfuscations of the media and the official story of the war and give them the real truth from someone who’s been there. The drawbacks of this method are the same as the oral history, maybe to an even greater degree, since there’s no supposedly objective intermediary figure like an overall editor or compiler. The reader is asked to buy the author’s subjective version of events and has little or nothing with which to compare it.

This was especially true early on, when Ronald J. Glasser, M.D.’s
365 Days
(1971) appeared. Glasser served as an Army doctor in-country, so it’s intriguing that in the section here he’s chosen to write in the third person about a patrol he doesn’t seem to have been on. While the book was marketed as nonfiction, Glasser employs a novelistic technique, a blunt realism mixing clichés with sharply observed details, many rarely seen at the time. A powerful indictment of the war, 365
Days
was well reviewed and continues to be reprinted today.

Army lieutenant Frederick Downs’s
The Killing Zone
(1978) belongs to the first wave, yet unlike much of that work, lays out the contradictions of the American experience without drawing any conclusions. His book details his tour leading an infantry platoon and relies on a simple straight-ahead realism, marking off the days. The section here features the interrogation of a prisoner, a common occurrence in the literature.

Chickenhawk
(1983), by helicopter pilot Robert Mason, belongs to the second wave, yet dwells on atrocities like an antiwar tract from the early seventies—a rarity both for that time period and this genre. Note Mason’s ironic use of quotations at the beginning of the chapter. Again, the mode is realism and the author ticks off the months of his tour.
Chickenhawk
was extremely well received, and Mason later wrote a sequel,
Chickenhawk: Back in the World,
in which he relates his difficulties after coming home.

The Only War We Had
(1987) is former Army lieutenant (and later captain) Michael Lee Lanning’s first of his four Vietnam books. Based on Lanning’s journals, like
The Killing Zone
it follows his outfit from day to day in a flat, realistic style. Lanning’s publisher, Ivy Books (a division of Ballantine, itself a division of the giant Random House), has released a whole shelf-ful of this kind of combat memoir, which critics have christened the “tactical duty narrative.” In these cheap mass-market paperbacks, combat veterans from specialized units such as SEALs, Marine snipers, or LRRPs let the reader in on the secrets of their professions. These titles sell well at both large chain bookstores (where they make up the majority of Vietnam titles) and, strangely, at airports. Lanning’s, like the rest, is somewhat heroic and technically oriented compared to the other memoirs in this section, and shies away from political or moral questions of character, concentrating instead, like an adventure film, on exciting exterior action.

Implicitly or explicitly, each of these works takes a moral stance with respect to the war, seeing it as justified or not. Likewise, each paints the American military and the individual soldier in a certain light, as well as their relationship to the Vietnamese. As in the fiction and films, atrocities and war crimes crop up often, serving as a test case or metaphor for either the war as a whole or this particular soldier’s involvement in it.

365 Days
R
ONALD
J. G
LASSER
, M.D.
1971

SEARCH AND DESTROY

It was 115 degrees in the sun, and what little shade there was offered no relief. A dull, suffocating dryness hung over the paddies, making it almost impossible to breathe. By seven-thirty, the troopers were already covered with a thin, dusty layer of salt. Instead of swallowing their salt pills, they walked along chewing them two or three at a time. A few visibly hunched their shoulders against the heat, but there was nothing to be done about it so they kept walking, trying as well as they could to shelter the metal parts of their weapons from the sun. The sweet smell of marijuana drifted along with them. A little before noon, the point man, plodding along a dusty rise, sweating under his flack vest, stepped on a pressure-detonated 105-mm shell, and for ten meters all around the road lifted itself into the air, shearing off his legs as it blew up around him. The rest of the patrol threw themselves on the ground.

That evening, the company was mortared—two rounds that sent the already exhausted troopers scurrying for shelter. After the attack, those who had been resting found it impossible to get back to sleep. The heat that the sun poured into the Delta during the day continued to hang over them, covering them like a blanket; despite the darkness, it was still over 90 degrees. The troopers lay on the ground, smoking grass or just looking vacantly up at the empty sky. It was the fifth night that week they were hit.

Before breakfast, a patrol was sent out to sweep the area around the nearby village. The troopers got up while it was still dark, put on their webbing and flack vests, and without saying a word, went out. All they found were the usual, uncooperative villagers. The patrol, against orders, went into the village, searched a few huts, kicked in a door, and left.

Later that morning, the company began sweeping again. They moved out on line, humping through the gathering heat, chewing salt pills as they had the day before, looking out over the same shimmering landscape. A little after ten o clock, they began moving through a hedgegrove. A trooper tripped a wire and detonated a claymore set up to blow behind him. It took down three others, killing two right off and leaving the third to die later. The survivors rested around the bodies till the Dust Offs came in and took out the casualties, then started up again.

Before noon, the platoon strung out along a dike had entered a tangled area of burned-over second growth. It wasn’t so big that they couldn’t have gone around, but the Old Man wanted to kill some gooks, so he sent them through it just in case. Disgusted, they moved into it, and for over two hours pushed their way through the steaming shadowy tangle. The thick overhead filtered out almost all the sunlight, making it difficult to see, while the matting of vines and bushes held onto the heat, magnifying it until the troopers felt they were moving through a breathless oven. The sweat poured off them as they moved cautiously through the suffocating half light. At places the growth was so thick that to get through they had to sling their weapons and pull the vines apart with their bare hands.

“Careful, there … hold it, man … don’t move.”

The vines and thorns caught onto their fatigues and equipment, and they had to stop to tear themselves loose.

“Watch it, Smithy … hold up, Hank; there, by your foot …”

“Fuck … I’m caught.”

“Watch your step, man …”

Scratched and bleeding, they pushed on through the tangle. “Larry, don’t move your arm. Don’t move. I think I see a wire.”

“It’s OK, Frey. It’s just a vine.”

Suddenly, out on their right someone screamed.

“Don’t move!” Crayson yelled. “Just don’t move. I’m coming.”

“Jesus Christ, I’m on one.”

Pulling up short, the others froze.

Crayson and the other corporal stepped carefully through the bushes toward the trooper.

“Don’t lift your foot. Freeze, man, just don’t lift it.”

“EOD, EOD, forward! EOD forward!”

“That fucken bastard, that fucken bastard,” the trooper kept repeating, almost hysterically, “that fucken bastard,” as the EOD bent down to look at the mine.

“What is it? Jesus!” he said, rigid with fear.

“It’s OK,” the EOD said, straightening up, wiping the sweat from his eyes. “It’s pressure-release. Don’t worry, it’s not a bouncing betty. Just don’t move.”

“M-60 carriers, forward! Ammo carriers, forward!”

The EOD slipped off his rucksack, and laying down his weapon got down on his hands and knees, as the troopers came up with the boxes of M-60 ammunition.

“OK, now, just don’t move,” he said. “I’m gonna stack these ammunition cans on the detonator plate. When I tell you, move your foot a bit, but don’t lift it up. OK?” The EOD carefully wiped off the steel plate and placed one forty-pound can on the right side of the plate next to the trooper’s foot and another on the left side of the plate.

“OK, man,” the EOD said, looking up. “It’s OK. Just step off.”

Three-quarters of the way through the tangle, a trooper brushed against a two-inch vine, and a grenade slung at chest height went off, shattering the right side of his head and body. The medic, working down in the dim light, managed to stop the major bleeders, but could do nothing about the shattered arm and the partially destroyed skull. Nearby troopers took hold of the unconscious soldier and half carrying, half dragging him, pulled him the rest of the way through the tangle.

The platoon finally came out onto a small dirt road. Shielding their eyes from the sudden glare of sunlight, they dropped their rucksacks
and sat down along the slight rise bordering the road, licking the salt off their lips as they waited for the chopper to come in and take out the body.

They were sitting there strung out along the road, when they spotted a small figure putt-putting toward them. They watched disinterestedly while the figure moved toward them, its progress marked by little puffs of grayish smoke, and became an old man driving a scooter. When the scooter was less than fifty meters away from them, the old man began to slow down.

The point, a blank-faced kid, picked up his weapon and got slowly to his feet. Holding up his hand, he walked wearily into the center of the road and stopped there, waiting. The old man slowed to a stop and stared at the trooper, waiting impatiently for him to move. He had a small steel container strapped to the back of his Honda. The point leveled his weapon at the little man’s stomach, and, walking around him, motioned for him to open the container. The old man hesitated. The trooper calmly clicked his M-16 to automatic. Holding it with one hand, he carefully opened the container.

“Hey,” he said, lowering his weapon. “The dink’s got cokes.”

The rest of the platoon got to their feet. The point was reaching into the container when the old man grabbed his wrist. Startled, the trooper jumped back.

“Hey!” He pulled his hand away. “What the fuck?”

“Fifty cent,” the old man demanded, waving five fingers in the trooper’s face. “Fifty cent!”

There was a moment of stunned silence.

“The little fucker steals ’em from us and then wants us to pay,” someone said angrily. The point reached in again, only to have the old man slap his hand away.

“Watch it, dink,” he said angrily. The Vietnamese, furious, reached for the container top and slammed it shut. From the side of the road there was the metallic click of a round being chambered. The old man turned on his scooter and kicked at the starter.

“Hold it,” the corporal said, moving into the road. Others followed him and gathered around in angry, sullen silence. The Vietnamese, head down, ignoring them all, kicked again at his starter.

“I want a coke,” one of the troopers said, and swinging his rifle, he knocked the top off the steel container. The Vietnamese spun around and spat at him. The trooper took a small step backward, brought the weapon smoothly up into the crook of his arm and emptied the magazine into him, cutting him off his scooter, then calmly reached into his webbing, took out another clip, and pushed it into his gun. When the chopper came they were standing there drinking the cokes. They sent their own dead home and left the old man sprawled in the middle of the road.

That night, a little after midnight, just as they were getting to sleep, the company was rocketed again. The first 122-mm rocket hit near their flank. The jarring whoosh of its explosion rolled over the camp, and a moment later someone was screaming for a medic.

In the morning, the patrol sweeping the area in front of the village found the partially destroyed cross pieces of a rocket launcher. When they brought it back, the CO examined it and asked permission to hit the village. It was denied. That afternoon, two platoons of the company were ordered out of the area to take part in a combined sweep of a nearby VC stronghold. Brigade sent them some slicks and they were CA’d in.

What was supposed to be a VC stronghold turned out to be an NVA regiment. The slicks on line brought the platoons in downwind of a little group of paddies. Even as the choppers drifted into a hover, they came under fire. While the door gunners swept the tree lines, loaches and cobras swung in and out over the LZ, shooting at anything that looked good.

The troopers, huddled in the doorways of their slicks, were being shot down before they had a chance to jump. The air crackled with passing rounds. One of the slicks was still thirty feet off the ground when a gunship, keeping pace with them, shuddered, wavered a bit, then dropped fifteen feet and exploded, sending great pieces of metal hurtling in all directions. The 1st Platoon’s six slicks brought them in closer to the tree line than the other units. Hovering three feet off the ground, the troopers jumped out into the swirling dust while the door gunners shot up the tree lines. Three troopers got hit right off, tumbling over even before they’d got their balance. Those running could
hear the sledge hammer sounds of the RPD’s slamming into the choppers behind them.

The second platoon was landing off to their right, the chopper’s blades flattening down the bushes, while the troopers leaped out. A gunship came in low, right over the slicks, its gunner planted solidly in the door, feet braced against the struts, firing his 60 directly into the tree line. The pilot kept the chopper moving parallel to the troopers rushing the line, while the door gunner, pressing down on the trigger, kept his quad 60’s cracking out in one long continuous roar. A slick exploded as it pulled out.