A Rumor of War (29 page)

One-Three was relieved by 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, phich had been detached from its parent regiment on the West Coast and placed under our operational control. After a twenty-two-day voyage from San Diego to Danang, the new men clattered off the troopship full of restless energy. Compared to the marines in One-Three, they looked splendid, ruddy-faced and full of the raw good health that comes from getting plenty of outdoor exercise, eight hours’ sleep a night, and three hot meals a day. Their rifles were as bright as their faces, their uniforms starched and creased, and they were absolutely gung-ho. Of course they were gung-ho. No dysentery cramped their bowels, no fears shrunk their hearts, no ghosts of dead comrades haunted their memories. Now that they were in Vietnam, the war was as good as won. They were going to do it all by themselves, the 1st Battalion of the 1st Regiment of the 1st Marine Division, the division that had whipped the North Koreans at Inchon and bloodied the Chinese at Chosin and kicked the Japs off Guadalcanal. Now the inheritors of that victorious tradition were in a new war—not much of a war, “but the only one we’ve got”—and they were going to win it, the first of the first and best of the best. The months of blank-cartridge scrimmaging were behind them; they were going to play in the Big Game. During the long trip across the Pacific, they had heard about the 7th Marines’ feat at the Battle of Chu Lai, the first American engagement in Vietnam that could be called a battle. In three days of fighting in mid-August, the 7th had destroyed the Viet Cong’s elite 1st Main Force Regiment. The men of the Marines’ 1st Regiment were confident that they could do as well, if not better. Such confidence came not only from their ignorance, but also from their numbers. Theirs was a “fat” battalion, meaning a unit at or over its authorized strength. One-One had eleven hundred men when it came ashore.

It was a big, fine-looking battalion, and when I saw them I felt as an old man does when he sees someone who reminds him of his youth. I thought of the way we had been six months before. I was both charmed and saddened by their innocent enthusiasm, charmed because I wished I could be that way again, saddened because they didn’t really know what they were getting into. I did. I was the regiment’s resident statistician. I knew I would be writing a lot of their names on my mimeographed forms, because I knew they were marching into a different war than the one we had fought between March and August. It was not really a guerrilla war any longer. Our patrols were still encountering guerrillas, but we were-fighting more and more actions against main-force regulars and, in some instances, against North Vietnamese Army units. I didn’t know if the enemy had started his rainy-season offensive. I only knew that our battalions were holding frontages which should have been held by regiments, that the weather often grounded our planes and helicopters, that it was difficult to move supply convoys, tanks, and big guns down the muddy roads, that the enemy was fighting harder, and we were losing more men. The expedition had become a war of attrition, a drawn-out struggle in the mud and rain.

The proud, confident 1st Battalion of the 1st Marines stepped into it in September, and stayed in it until March when the monsoon campaign ended. Then they were moved up to Hue and from Hue to the Demilitarized Zone, to fight harder battles against the North Vietnamese. By that time, they were no longer a fat battalion, but a rather lean one, and their cockiness had diminished in proportion to their losses. In the six-month campaign, the battalion’s total casualties would reach four hundred and seventy-five killed and wounded. More than half of those were patched up and sent out to fight again, some to be wounded again. A little less than two hundred were permanent losses—dead, invalided out, or wounded and hospitalized for long periods.

That worked out to eight men a week, an attrition rate almost equal to that suffered by many British battalions—ten a week—on the Western Front in 1915 and early 1916.

It had become a different war. The casualty rate had increased enough to make death and maiming seem commonplace. In its first two months, between mid-September and mid-November, the battalion took two hundred and forty-nine casualties. Attrition. The attrition the enemy inflicted on us and that which we inflicted on ourselves. The Huey gunship that flew in to give fire support to a company pinned down in ambush and ended up giving fire support to the VC by strafing the marines. The troop-carrying helicopter that went down in a monsoon storm. The armored personnel carrier that was backing away from a mortar barrage and crushed a marine lying in the road. Altogether, I wrote an average of seventy-five or eighty reports a week. It became part of my daily routine, as monotonous as the steadily falling rain; and soon those names meant no more to me than the names in a phone book.

Except one. On September 18, I was at my desk in the adjutant’s tent. It was a hot afternoon, and I was dripping sweat over the usual paperwork. The EE-8 buzzed. I picked it up. On the other end was Lieutenant Jones, the 1st Battalion adjutant. He did not announce himself as such, but spoke in our boy-scout secret code: “Crowd One? This is Bound One. Is your One Alpha there?”

“This is One Alpha.”

“One Alpha, Bound Charley Two’s had two storm ones and three storm twos. Can you copy?” In English, that meant 2d platoon, C Company had suffered two killed and three wounded.

“Wait one,” I said. I got up and pulled some casualty report forms from the ammo-box file cabinet. Sitting down again, I said, “Okay, go ahead.”

“I’ll give you the storm ones first.”

“Roger. Go ahead.”

The first KIA was a corpsman. He had suffered a GSW, through and through, head.

“Okay, that’s the first one,” Jones said when he had finished with the corpsman. “Second one’s last name is Levy. Lima-Echo…”

“Is his first name Walter?”

“Lima-Echo-Victor-Yankee. Levy.”

“Bound One, is his first name Walter?” I asked, scrawling L-e-v-y beside the line headed NAME. My hand was shaking slightly and my voice sounded strange.

“One Alpha, wait one, will you? That’s a roge. First name is Walter. Middle name Neville. November Echo Victor…”

“I can spell it.”

“Okay. Rank: first lieutenant. Serial number…” Some static interrupted. “Organization: you’ve got that. Nature of injuries: multiple fragment wounds…”

“Aw, goddamnit,” I said, forgetting the rules about using profanity in field communications. Writing down what Jones had just told me, I saw Levy’s darkly handsome face and slow, easy grin. Everyone who knew him remarked on his smile, warm, attractive, all straight white teeth; but there was something vaguely enigmatic about it, as if he were smiling at some secret joke. “Goddamnit. Goddamn all of it.”

“Did you know this guy?” Jones asked.

“We went through Quantico together. Yeah, we were pretty tight. I didn’t even know he was in your outfit.”

“Uh-huh. Well, let’s get this done. Age: twenty-three. Circumstances: while on patrol vicinity of Danang.”

“Bound One, let’s drop all this roger wilco crap. Just tell me how it happened.”

He told me as much as he knew. A patrol from the 9th Marines had fallen into an ambush and radioed for reinforcements. Levy’s platoon was sent, but was itself ambushed before it could get to them. Levy was hit by mine shrapnel and knocked down, another marine by rifle fire. The corps-man, while treating the man with the bullet wound, was sniped. Not knowing the corpsman was dead, Levy forced himself up and half crawled, half walked to him. As he tried to pull him out of the line of fire, Levy himself was sniped.

“You’re sure it’s him?” I asked.

“Sure we’re sure.”

“All right. You might as well go ahead.”

Jones went on: Levy’s religion, the beneficiaries
of
his serviceman’s life insurance policy, the address of his next of kin. That would be his parents in New York City. What would it be like when they answered the bell and saw a man in uniform standing in the doorway? Would they know instinctively why he had come? What would he say? How do you tell parents that all the years they had spent raising and educating their son were for nothing? Wasted. In that war, soldier’s slang for death was “wasted.” So-and-so was wasted. It was a good word.

We finished the reports. I filed them, then transmuted Levy, the corpsman, and the other casualties into numbers. The random arithmetic of war. I had been in Vietnam seven months and had not been scratched. Levy had lasted two weeks. Coming from the colonel’s tent, I saw the swollen, slate-gray clouds building up over the mountains. An image of Levy smiling was in my mind. He was standing with his back against a wall, his hands in his pockets. There was a jukebox next to him. Where had that been? In Georgetown, in Mac’s Pipe and Drum, a bar we went to on weekend liberties, to drink and look at girls and pretend we were still civilians. Five or six of us were there that night. We had picked up some girls, government secretaries—all the girls in Washington seemed to be government secretaries. We danced with them on the small dance floor by the front window. It must have been late autumn, because the window in my memory had steam on it. Levy had not danced. Tall and slim, he was leaning casually against the wall and smiling as we walked back to the table with the girls. There were half-empty pitchers of beer on the table and glasses with foam clinging to their sides. We sat down and filled the glasses, all of us laughing, probably at something Jack Bissell said. Was Bissell there that night? He must have been, because we were all laughing very hard and Bissell was always funny. Still standing, Levy took out his pipe, lit it, and bent down to say something to me. In my memory, I could see his lips moving, but I could not hear him. I could not remember what he said. That was in Georgetown, a long time ago, before Vietnam. I had begun to notice that in myself: I was having a hard time remembering anything that had happened before Vietnam.

I had always liked Levy and sometimes envied him. He was quietly deliberate, while I was hot-tempered and impulsive. I had a degree from a parochial commuter-college; he had gone to Columbia. His family was well-off; mine had just recently struggled out of the working class. He had had all the advantages, but he had enlisted when he could have easily done something else. I guess he had that, too: a high sense of duty. My own motives for joining the marines had been mostly personal, but Levy seemed to have no personal ambition. He was a patriot—the best sort, the kind who do not walk around with American flags in their lapels. He had volunteered because it had seemed the right thing to do, and he had done it quietly, easily, and naturally. He had one other attribute rare in this indulgent age: an inflexible fidelity to standards. At Quantico, he and I once shared a misadventure. Like me, he had not been an expert map reader. During a difficult land navigation problem, the two of us, following different compass azimuths, ended up lost in the same swamp. It was full of brambles and deep bogs, an evil-looking place where cottonmouths coiled on the branches of the stunted trees. I had been slogging through it for more than an hour, panic rising in me as I plunged out of one thicket and into another. The swamp seemed endless, and there were only a few hours of daylight left. Hacking at the brambles with my bayonet, I heard someone thrashing and cursing a few yards ahead.

Levy’s face appeared through the undergrowth, thorns hanging from his helmet. He stopped yelling and cursing as soon as he saw me. I was relieved to see someone else, but Levy, who had a reputation for being unflappable, seemed embarrassed that he had been caught in a fit of temper. We decided to stick together until we had worked our way out of the swamp. There was a stream at the edge of it, and beyond the stream, a range of pine-wooded hills. We broke out our maps and tried to figure out where we were. It seemed hopeless. I forded the stream to look for a compass marker that might be tacked to one of the pine trees on the far side. Finding none, I said that I was going to cut across the hills until I came to a road. It meant failing the problem, but that was better than spending the night in those black woods. Levy, however, was not ready to quit. He said he was going to plot a course back to his last compass marker and try to figure out where he had made his mistake. I tried to talk him out of it. To do that, he would have had to retrace his steps through the swamp, which was bad enough in daylight; it would be worse if he got caught in it at night. But he was firm. He was going to do the thing the right way, or at least give it a try. I said, all right, go ahead. He had more grit than I. He went back in. I forded the stream and, after running into another stray, found my way to a road. I also failed the problem.

So did Levy. Darkness eventually forced him to dead-reckon his way out, as I had done. The next week, he was back in the woods with the rest of us failures, taking the course over. But I had to admire his determination to do the thing as it was supposed to be done. It was typical of him. I think it was that fidelity to standards that killed him. Badly wounded in the legs, he did not have to endanger himself by trying to rescue the corpsman. He could have stayed under cover without any loss of honor, but they had drilled into our heads that a marine never left his wounded exposed to enemy fire. We never left our wounded on the battlefield. We brought them off, out of danger and into safety, even if we had to risk our own lives to do it. That was one of the standards we were expected to uphold. I knew I could not have done what Levy had done. Pulling himself up on his wounded legs, he had tried to save the corpsman, not knowing that the man was beyond saving. And he had probably done it as he had everything else—naturally, and because he thought it was the right thing to do.

I still could not remember what he had said to me that night in Georgetown. It could not have been important, yet I wanted to remember. I want to remember now, to remember what you said, you, Walter Neville Levy, whose ghost haunts me still. No, it could not have been anything important or profound, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you were alive then, alive and speaking. And if I could remember what you said, I could make you speak again on this page and perhaps make you seem as alive to others as you still seem to me.