A Rumor of War (21 page)

Worn-out and red-eyed, we returned to the battalion’s lines the next day and were greeted by a strange rumor: our role in the war was to end in September when the regiment would be rotated back to Okinawa. Some of us accepted the rumor as fact, under the illusion that we were hurting the VC badly. It was an illusion partly created by the ever-optimistic reports issued by higher headquarters or printed in the
Stars and Stripes
and partly by our own persistent belief that we would win quickly. Not as quickly as we had first hoped, but within, say, six months or a year.

“I have a feeling the VC are getting demoralized,” I wrote in a confident letter to my parents. “They have taken to their camps in the hills because they’re afraid of us. Now, we’re chasing them into their mountain hideouts.”

At the end of May, I was ordered to report back to my parent unit, Regimental Headquarters Company. After attending a week-long course in Yokosuka, Japan, I would be assigned to the staff as assistant adjutant. An adjutant is an administrative officer. I hated the idea of leaving One-Three. It was a first-rate infantry battalion, with a unique spirit and personality. The staff, on the other hand, seemed to be nothing more than a military organization, a soulless, bloodless thing. Papers. Reports. Pins on a map. I made a few attempts to get the assignment changed; all were unsuccessful. So I packed my gear and complained bitterly. Lemmon, whose ideas about war had changed radically since his narrow scrape, could not understand my disappointment.

“I don’t know what you’re bitchin‘ about, P.J. I’d give anything for a week out of this hole. Yeah, a week in Yokosuka in a clean bed with one of them Japanese honey-wa’s.”

Feeling desolate, I padlocked my seabag and then said good-bye to the platoon, to Morrisson the daredevil; to Sampson, who had been awarded a Bronze Star for rescuing Gonzalez and was then reduced to PFC for going AWOL in Danang; to Butler, who had livened the dull days in camp with his singing; to Mixon, Marshall, Skates, and Parker, and, of course, Sergeant Campbell. “Sorta hate to see you go, lieutenant.” he said. “Now old Wild Bill’s gonna be the platoon commander and the platoon sergeant and have to do all the work by himself.”

How many dead? As many as ever you wish.

Don’t count ‘em; they’re too many.

Who’ll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?

—
Siegfried Sassoon

“The Effect”

Your dextrous wit will haunt us long

Wounding our grief with yesterday.

Your laughter is a broken song;

And death has found you, kind and gay.

—Siegfried Sassoon

“Elegy”

I came back from Japan on June 15, and was picked up at the airfield by Lance Corporal Kazmarack, the adjutant’s driver. It was a damp, overcast day. An early-morning rain had turned the dust on the roads to mud. The tents at regimental and battalion headquarters—the two HQs occupied the same camp—looked strangely clean. Pools of water had collected on the tent tops, and marines were draining them off by pushing poles against the bulges they made in the canvas ceilings. The water made a pleasant sound as it slid off in silvery sheets and splashed on the ground. Kazmarack turned off the road, the jeep skidding in the mud, and drove through an opening in the barbed wire. Two marines sat in a sandbagged emplacement, their ponchos still slick and shining from the rain. I flinched when an eight-inch howitzer from the battery across the road fired a round. You have to hear an eight-incher to appreciate it. Smiling, Kazmarack said, “No sweat, sir, that’s outgoing.”

“I know it’s outgoing,” I said, put out with myself for flinching and with the driver for noticing it. “It’s sure goddamned loud, though.”

“Wait till tonight, lieutenant. Those mothers and the one-five-fives’ll be banging away all night. You’d think the Red Chinese Army was out there instead of a bunch of guerrillas.”

He pulled up near the adjutant’s tent and climbed out to get my valpack from the back seat. “Well, here we are, sir. Home. Welcome back to dear old Dang-Dang by the sea. How was Japan compared to this?”

I thought of the weekend I had spent in Tokyo after the course was finished. “Kazmarack, how do you suppose Japan was compared to this?”

“Compared to this hole, I imagine Japan was number one, sir.”

“There you are.”

Actually, I did not feel that bad about coming back. I had been lonely the whole ten days in Japan, and now, sloshing in the mud of the camp, I knew why. My friends and my outfit were in Vietnam. I belonged there. The regiment, in fact, was home.

I reported in to my new boss, Captain Anderson. He was sitting heavily on a canvas chair behind a desk made of scrap lumber, an old map board, and ammo boxes. Across from his stood another makeshift desk, mine. Several empty shell crates, with the words
155-mm How
painted on them served as filing cabinets. The adjutant’s, or S-l, section occupied half the tent; the S-4 (logistics) section the other half.

I handed my orders, all thirteen copies of them, to Anderson. He took them in a pudgy hand and signed the endorsement. Having served for over five months with the lean, hard-muscled Peterson, I was amazed at the size of the adjutant’s belly, bulging against his sweaty undershirt and hanging well over his belt. He had a large head. His face, with its weak chin, its small eyes closely set in folds of sunburned flesh, looked porcine.

“Welcome aboard,” he grunted. “You can have the rest of the day off to get squared away. Report in by oh-seven-thirty tomorrow.”

Lieutenant Schwartz, whom I was replacing, showed me to the junior officers’ billets. Schwartz was as happy about my transfer to headquarters as I was unhappy about it; he was going to take command of a rifle company in 2d Battalion.

He pointed to a cot over which a green mosquito net hung like a frayed cocoon. “That’s yours. You’ll like it here. It’s got all the disadvantages of a line company with none of the advantages.” I dropped my valpack on the wooden pallet that lay alongside the cot. The tent was filthy. It was pitched next to the road, and the dust raised by passing convoys and tanks rolled right into it. Dead bugs were strewn across the hard-packed, dirt floor. Outside, a trench offered shelter in case of a shelling, or a fighting position in the unlikely event of a ground attack. A foot of water lay in the trench.

In the afternoon, I rode up to Hill 268 to pick up some of the personal gear I had left behind.

When you have lived in the intimate world of an infantry company, you come to know those who have shared that world with you as well as you know your own family. Walking into C Company’s bivouac, I sensed immediately that something had happened. No one said anything to me or looked at me in a strange way. Still, I could sense it, just as a man can walk into his house after being gone for a while, hear familiar words from familiar people, see the usual objects in their usual places, yet know instinctively that things are not the same as when he left.

The camp did not look any different. The galley, the headquarters, officers’ and platoon sergeants’ tents were still pitched end to end on the narrow shelf on the reverse slope of the hill. Farther down was the broad red scar of the landing zone, and the enlisted tents below that. The defensive positions on the forward slope had not been changed. I saw the old, traversed trench line cutting across the hillside in a series of sharp angles; the foxholes with their weathered, sandbag parapets; sentries in flak jackets sitting in some of the foxholes; the dugout where I had slept many nights, and the heavy-timbered FO’s bunker, its radio antennae waving in the breeze like steel reeds.

I walked past the galley. Some marines were cleaning their rifles under the tarp that extended from the galley like an awning. There were the familiar smells of oil and solvent, and the metallic sound made by the cleaning rods and bore brushes as they were drawn through the barrels of the rifles. A transistor radio was playing the country-music program broadcast every afternoon by the Armed Forces station in Saigon. Some men from my old platoon saw me. They waved and asked what it was like “in the rear.” I said I didn’t know, I had just reported in.

I went up to get my gear, increasingly haunted by the feeling that things were not the same. There was something peculiar about the men; they seemed a little cool and distant, and I wondered if it was because they now regarded me as an outsider. In the NCOs’ tent, Campbell and Greene, Lemmon’s platoon sergeant, were playing cribbage, as they did whenever the company was in camp. Lemmon, Tester, and McCloy were in the officers’ tent next door. Tester was saying something about his gear, by which he meant the Teac tape recorder he had bought in Hong Kong before the battalion was sent to Vietnam. He had had to leave it in storage on Okinawa, and he was worried about it. “I just hope those clowns don’t wreck my gear,” he said to Lemmon as I walked in. Glen, his hawklike face still showing the marks of the grenade shrapnel, did not say anything. McCloy was reading a World War II saga titled
Panzer Leader
. “That gear would cost me twelve hundred bucks in the States. I picked it up for six… hey, P.J.‘s back,” Tester said, interrupting himself. “Caputo, shove off. This is a line company. It’s off limits to rear-echelon pogues.”

“Bruce, I feel lousy enough about being there. Don’t make it worse.”

“Uh-oh, Caputo’s pissed. Caputo’s going to beat the shit out of me.”

“Well, I don’t know what you feel lousy about,” Lemmon said. “You ought to be happy you’re at regiment.” He did not look at me. Sitting on an empty crate, a bush hat pulled low over his forehead, he was dealing cards to himself and an imaginary opponent. “Fact is, I don’t know why you were in such a hurry to get back to the Nam. Hell, Walsh over in Alpha Company and Mike Repp in Delta went to Okinawa last month for flight physicals and I don’t think they’re back yet. You should have stretched it out.”

“I saw Walsh and Repp,” I said. “Anyway, I stretched it out as long as I could.”

“Ah, Phil, you’re still a boot brown-bar. Suppose you stayed a few extra days. What could they do to you? Make you a grunt and send you to Vietnam?”

Lemmon’s Texas accent was naturally harsh, but there was a new edge in his voice, a bitterness that had not been there before. And like the enlisted men I had seen earlier, he had a vaguely distant air.

“Well, I want to know about Japan,” said Tester, who seemed more or less his old self. “What I want to know is, did you get your socks blown off? Did one of those honey-wa’s blow your socks off? That’s what I want to know.”

So I told him about the weekend in Tokyo and the half-Russian, half-Japanese girl who stayed with me in the Palace Hotel. Her name was Ayako, she was a bargirl in Yokosuka, and just before we got on the train for Tokyo, she turned to me and said, “Philsan, I will spend two days with you and you will not have to pay me. I will love you for two days and then I will not love you.”

“Jesus, you got it for nothing?” Tester asked. “Why
did
you come back?”

Lemmon shook his head as he dealt the cards. “Gol-lee, if I had that going, I’d still be there. Like I said, what could they do to me? Make me a grunt and send me to Vietnam?”

“For openers, Glen, they could throw you in the brig,” I said.

“Shit, the brig’s better’n this. You can’t get killed in the brig.”

“Well, I don’t plan on getting killed. There’s not much chance of getting killed at regiment anyway.”

“You don’t know about Sullivan?”

“No.”

“He’s dead.”

Sullivan flashed in my mind. Tall, skinny, looking even younger than his twenty-two years, he was handing me a cigar. I was up in one of the old French blockhouses, looking out at the rice paddies through my binoculars. Sullivan, reaching up as far as he could, was handing a cigar to me. He was smiling, the smile cracking the dust that caked his face. “Hey, lieutenant,” he was saying, “just got a letter from my old lady in Pennsylvania. It’s a boy.” That had been in March or early April, when the battalion was still on the airfield perimeter; and picturing Sullivan as he was then, I felt something draw tight inside myself, tighter and tighter until I thought it would snap.

“How?” I asked.

“A sniper got him. This guy wasn’t just some Cong popping off with a carbine. He could shoot. We were set in south of the Song Tuy Loan, near the Song Yen River. It was hotter’n a bitch, and Sully volunteered to fill canteens. He’d just got down to the river when the sniper cranked off a round. We figure he was using one of those Russian rifles with a scope, because he got Sullivan with one shot. Went in one side and came out the other. Plowed one helluva hole right through him. He was probably dead before he hit the deck.”

I asked when it had happened and felt like a deserter when Lemmon said, “A few days after you left.” Not that my presence would have made any difference; I just felt I should have been with them.

“Three companies were out on a battalion-sized operation,” Glen went on. “And you’re lucky you missed that one because it really got screwed up. Ingram got it, too, you know.”

“KIA?”

“No, but he got hit pretty bad. A round caught him in the back and chipped his spine, I think. Last we heard, a meningitis infection set in and he’s in a wheelchair. I think he’s in a hospital in Tennessee somewhere, near his hometown. He might not ever walk again.”

And then I saw an image of Ingram, big, barrel-chested, striding out of the galley on the morning of the company’s first operation, striding powerfully and singing in his rich baritone, and that emotional wire inside me tightened again and broke. I felt it break just as surely as you can feel a bone or a tendon break; and afterward, there was only a cold, empty, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Ingram crippled and Sullivan dead. Dead. Death.
Death
. I had heard that word so many times, but I had never known its meaning.