A Rumor of War (25 page)

“I’m telling you, Charlie’s going to try something soon.” Harrisson looked at our sprawling tent camp, everything aboveground, uncamouflaged, laid out in tidy rows, and nothing between it and the VC but a roll of rusting concertina wire. Harrisson laughed. “Jesus, Phil, even the French dug in.”

A few days later, two VC were captured while scouting a part of the regiment’s positions in broad daylight. The next day, a patrol from the reconnaissance battalion sighted a battery of enemy 82-mm mortars being moved toward the airfield. The patrol, too far from the VC to attack, requested artillery fire but were turned down because another marine patrol was lost in the same area, and no one wanted to risk hitting friendly troops. The reconnaissance patrol leader reported the map coordinates of the mortars and suggested they were being moved into position to shell the airfield. The report was duly noted and buried in a file cabinet. On the 28th, an ARVN district headquarters near us was shelled, and the VC dropped mortars on an isolated section of One-Three’s lines, killing and wounding several marines. You did not have to be Clausewitz to conclude that all those incidents added up to something: the enemy
was
planning an attack on the airfield, the defense of which was still our primary mission. But the regimental staff was not about to be panicked into hasty action. We did not spend that week feverishly analyzing the pattern of VC activity or drawing up plans for counterattacks and improving existing defenses or doing any of the things a military staff is supposed to do. No, level-headed professionals that we were, we did what staff officers usually do: nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. We played volleyball in our off-hours, and, because there wasn’t enough work to keep even half the staff’s twenty-odd officers busy, most of our hours were off-hours. We also read a lot—I finished
The Adventures of Augie March
that week—or pursued individual hobbies. Major Burin, the communications officer, practiced calling square-dance tunes, accompanied by the screeching fiddle music he played on his portable tape recorder. He could be heard all over camp, singing in his Kansas twang: “Alle-mande left with the old left hand… swing your partners, do-si-do, gents to the center form a Texas star.” The civil affairs officer, Tim Schwartz (not the Schwartz I had replaced), discovered a new way of writing poetry: he made lists of the most esoteric words he could find in the dictionary, then strung them together in the order in which he had found them. He was quite proud of his incomprehensible verses and asked if I knew where he might publish them. I suggested the
Kenyan Review
.

When they did any work, the staff sections concentrated on daily minutiae and routine reports. The S-1 section filed its usual strength and casualty reports. S-2—intelligence— made reports on the enemy’s order of battle and wrote accounts of recent enemy actions. The latter were of some historical but of little intelligence value, because S-2’s main function was not to chronicle what the VC had already done but to forecast what they were likely to do. The operations section, S-3, went on logging situation reports in the unit diary, drawing up plans for operations that almost invariably sent battalions into areas where the enemy was not and compiling the number of patrols the line companies conducted each day. S-4 kept up our inventories of rations and ammunition.

The division general staff sent several messages alerting us to critical matters:

1) Marines who had nonregulation cloth name tags sewn above the left pockets of their shirts were to remove them. Henceforth, names would be stamped on in half-inch (
^l
/2
) block letters.

2) The practice of stripping to the waist while on working parties, patrols, etc. would no longer be tolerated by the commanding general. When outside, all personnel were to wear their shirts and/or undershirts.

3) The circulation of the
Marine Corps Gazette
was dropping. Officers who had not already done so were requested to subscribe.

And so the staffs went on, sticking to routines, which was just another way of doing nothing. They dealt with the enemy threat by ignoring it, and on July 1, the Viet Cong attacked the airfield.

It was around two o’clock in the morning, and I was just coming off duty-watch in the operations tent when the first shells hit. As a precaution against floods, the tent had been elevated on a platform of plywood and two-by-fours. A set of wooden steps led from the door to the ground. When I was about halfway down the steps, I saw a bright flash above the trees across Highway One and then heard the distinctive
crump
of a bursting mortar. The trees marked the outer edges of the airbase, which was about five hundred yards from the regimental CP. The airstrip itself, where the shell had struck, was at least another thousand yards away; so I felt no sense of immediate danger, only curiosity. Climbing back up the steps, I looked across the field beyond the CP, toward the dark, broken line of trees, and caught several more flashes. The explosions of the 82-millimeters came a few seconds later, the shells bursting rapidly one after another, like a string of firecrackers, only much louder, and the sky, which had been black above the tree line, was now a pale, flickering red. Inside the CP, marines were rolling out of their cots and grabbing their weapons.

“Did you call Conlin?” I asked through the door, talking to my relief. “Charlie’s hitting the airfield.”

“No shit. Conlin and the Old Man are on their way.”

A recoilless rifle fired with a quick, double crack—the gun cracking first, the shell a moment afterward. A huge ball of flame rose over the trees like a mock sunrise. There was the hollow thud of exploding fuel tanks—the recoilless had hit one of the aircraft. The ball of flame boiled up, orange-crested and so brilliantly white at the center that I could clearly see the faces of the marines who were running toward the trenches on our perimeter.

I went back into the tent, feeling that I ought to be doing something but not sure what it was. Major Conlin and his assistants, Harrisson and Captain Johnson, came in wearing helmets and flak jackets. They were soon joined by the intelligence officer and his number two, Lieutenant Mora. Then Colonel Wheeler arrived, stoop-shouldered, quiet, smoking his pipe. We were all crowded in there, along with a number of radio operators and message clerks. A single shell could have wiped out half the regimental staff, and I’m sure there were some line officers who hoped one would.

The battle around the airfield had begun in earnest. The VC mortars made a steady thudding, the Marine mortars firing in return and the fuel tanks bursting. Machine guns tacked. Another bright flash was followed by a loud noise that was not a mortar shell: one of our own bombs going off or maybe an enemy satchel charge blowing up one of the aircraft. There was some confusion inside the operations tent. Radios crackled, field phones buzzed, staff officers ran from one bank of phones to another. Someone was talking to One-Nine, trying to learn where the attack was coming from and how many VC were in the assault. The colonel sat staring at the big operations map, as if, by staring at it, he could force it to reveal what was happening.

“Look, we’re tripping over each other in here,” Captain Johnson said. “Anybody who doesn’t have to be in here, get your helmets and flak jackets on and take up your positions on the perimeter.”

I started to go out. A big, bull-chested man with a deeply lined face came through the door, his heavy shoulders rolling as he walked. Seeing the two stars on his cap, I stupidly saluted and said, “Good morning, sir.” Major General Lew Walt did not acknowledge the formality, making his way up to the operations map. Walt had recently taken command of the III MAF, Third Marine Amphibious Force, the headquarters for all Marine units in Vietnam. He looked angry, and he had every reason to be: the very attack the Marines were supposed to have prevented was happening.

I was in awe of Walt. I still had a strong tendency to hero-worship, and he was an authentic hero; he had won three Navy Crosses, one for single-handedly pulling an artillery piece uphill under heavy Japanese fire during a battle in the South Pacific. Beyond that, he was one of those rare general officers who believed it was his job to lead his army from up front, and not from a cushy command post so far removed from the action that it was almost desertion. He had established his forward headquarters in an amphibious tractor—a type of armored personnel carrier—parked just behind the howitzer batteries next to the regimental CP. Walt was leading his men from the cannon’s mouth, where generals had positioned themselves in the days when they were fighting-men like Lee, and not business managers like Westmoreland.

It was my impression that Walt also was one of the few high-ranking officers who took the Viet Cong seriously in those confident, complacent days. And in moving his HQ so far forward and exposing himself to dangers he could have honorably avoided, he was trying to set an example of personal leadership for subordinate commanders and their staffs. It was an example few of them seemed to follow, then or later. I do know Walt was disturbed by some things he found when he took command in May. Outdoor movies were being shown at night at regimental HQ; Walt put a stop to that. Ten or twenty percent of the men in the rifle battalions were often on liberty, wandering around drunk in Danang; Walt put the city off limits. The main line of resistance around the Danang enclave showed as a solid line of men and bayonets on the staff officers’ maps; Walt went out to look for himself—something few staff officers ever did—and discovered that the line was not a line, but a string of disconnected bivouacs surrounded by flimsy wire that could not have resisted a determined assault by an enemy platoon. He ordered the construction of a proper MLR, with strongpoints, forward outposts, and preregistered artillery concentrations.

But he was not able to overcome the inertia and complacency, and now the attack was progressing with destructive efficiency.

Outside, it was almost as bright as day from the flares hanging over the airfield and the fires of the burning planes. Tracer bullets scratched scarlet lines across the sky. A star cluster rocketed up, reaching higher than the white, wavering flares, then burst in a shower of sparks. It was a red star cluster, a signal that the enemy had penetrated the airfield perimeter. The one-oh-fives behind the CP had opened the counterbattery barrage. A couple of bullets hissed overhead, but I couldn’t tell if we were being sniped at or if they were just stray rounds from the airfield battle.

Putting on my helmet and flak jacket, I went over to the tent where the secret-and-confidential documents were stored in a safe. The S-and-C files contained the regiment’s message codes and operation plans, as well as a couple of small cryptography machines used to unscramble the codes. As the S-and-C officer,
I
was responsible for the security of all that James Bond stuff, and my standing orders were to burn it with thermite grenades if the camp was attacked and overrun. Sergeant Hamilton, the chief clerk, was outside the tent in his battle gear. With him was a lance corporal, a new arrival who looked tense and confused.

“Lieutenant, are the yellow hordes approaching?” Sergeant Hamilton asked. “Everything’s all set. I’ve got the grenades out, and there’s nothing I’d like better than to burn all this crap.”

“The yellow hordes are through the airfield’s wire. It doesn’t look like they’re going to hit us, but if they do, I don’t want you burning this stuff unless you’ve got Charlies coming right at you.”

“Sir, if I’ve got Charlies coming right at me, I’m going to throw these grenades at ‘em. Then I’ll throw the files on top of ’em and let ‘em all burn together.” A flurry of tracers went over us, and we heard the slow, throaty thumping of a heavy machine gun. Hamilton laughed. “What was that you said about them not hitting us, sir?”

“That was probably one of our own fifties. Okay, you heard what I said.”

“Yes, sir. That’s a great show Mr. Charles is putting on, but someone should tell him he’s three days short of the Fourth.” He laughed again. The joke seemed funnier than it was.

With nothing more to do, I went to my position on the perimeter. Each of the junior officers in HqCo was responsible for a section of the CP perimeter. I was in charge of a corporal and ten men, the closest thing I had to a command.

While we waited in our foxholes, a convoy carrying a rifle company rolled past, headed toward the base. Tardily, the counterattack was getting under way. The trucks were moving fast, throwing up clouds of dust that shimmered in the orange twilight cast by the flames licking at the sky over the airfield. The convoy sped recklessly down the road, the packed marines yelling, cheering, and holding their rifles in the air. “Goddamned grunts are all crazy,” said a headquarters clerk next to me. The one-oh-five battery stepped up its fire, the guns and the gun crews silhouetted against the intermittent muzzle-flashes. The last two six-bys in the convoy went past. Each was towing an artillery piece, and I felt a flicker of excitement when I saw the howitzers, bouncing on their carriages behind the speeding trucks. A column of white flame from burning magnesium fountained up over the airfield just as the one-oh-five shells began bursting in the rice paddies south of the base.

We stayed on the perimeter until first light. Plumes of black smoke roiled the early-morning sky, but the battle was over. Later in the day, Kazmarack and I drove past the airfield. We were on our way into Danang with reports for I Corps headquarters. I expected to find the base a shambles, but it was very large and most of it had escaped serious damage. Still, the attack had had more than a minor effect. Two big transports lay at the south end of the field, both totally destroyed, bits of their wings and engines scattered about. Two fighter planes nearby looked like broken toys, and a third was just a pile of ashes and twisted metal. A truck was towing another damaged plane off to the side of the runway. Stopping to look at the wreckage, we saw the holes the VC sapper teams had blown or cut in the chain link fence along the perimeter road. They had come through the sector my platoon had manned back in March and April, when we thought we were going to win the war in a few months and then march home to ticker-tape parades.