A Rumor of War (30 page)

So much was lost with you, so much talent and intelligence and decency. You were the first from our class of 1964 to die. There were others, but you were the first and more: you embodied the best that was in us. You were a part of us, and a part of us died with you, the small part that was still young, that had not yet grown cynical, grown bitter and old with death. Your courage was an example to us, and whatever the rights or wrongs of the war, nothing can diminish the Tightness of what you tried to do. Yours was the greater love. You died for the man you tried to save, and you died
pro patria
. It was not altogether sweet and fitting, your death, but I’m sure you died believing it was
pro patria
. You were faithful. Your country is not. As I write this, eleven years after your death, the country for which you died wishes to forget the war in which you died.

Its very name is a curse. There are no monuments to its heroes, no statues in small-town squares and city parks, no plaques, nor public wreaths, nor memorials. For plaques and wreaths and memorials are reminders, and they would make it harder for your country to sink into the amnesia for which it longs. It wishes to forget and it has forgotten. But there are a few of us who do remember because of the small things that made us love you—your gestures, the words you spoke, and the way you looked. We loved you for what you were and what you stood for.

Colonel Nickerson said he was having trouble sleeping at night. It was the end of September, and the cause of the colonel’s insomnia were the casualties a company from One-One had suffered during a week-long operation. Out of about one hundred and seventy men, they had lost nearly forty, almost all of them to booby traps and ambush-detonated mines. It would have been a tolerable price if the operation had accomplished something; it had not. The Viet Cong were still there.

I was chalking up the statistical results when Nickerson told me about his problem.

“We’re talking too many casualties, lieutenant. I can’t sleep half the time, thinking about those kids.”

Colonels usually did not make such confessions to lieutenants, so I didn’t know what to tell him. Perhaps he had begun to wonder if we were just wasting lives in Vietnam and wanted someone to tell him otherwise. Perhaps he wanted me to say, “You rest easy, colonel. Those men died in a good cause.” Well, he would have to turn to someone else for that. I had far too many doubts myself.

But the moody colonel was a completely different man two days later, when a thirty-five-man patrol from A Company was ambushed. It was a typical ambush: the VC set off a Claymore-type mine, sprayed the patrol with automatic-weapons fire, then faded back into the landscape.

The action lasted no more than thirty seconds, but fifteen of those thirty-five marines were killed or wounded. Toting up the Scoreboard once again, I mentioned to the new executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Mackle, that if One-One continued taking such casualties, it would cease to exist in about four months. Nickerson walked in just then. He was splattered with mud and had an unlit cigar jammed in his mouth.

“Now whaddya mean by that, lieutenant?” he asked, and I could tell by his tone that the compassionate officer had given way to the tough, hell-for-leather commander.

“One-One’s attrition rate, sir,” I said. “If it keeps up, they’ll have one-hundred-percent casualties by February.”

“Why, I was just over at the hospital,” the colonel said. “I saw those kids from that patrol. They’re still fulla fight, lieutenant.”

“I wasn’t slandering their courage, sir. I meant they’re taking too many casualties.”

“Hell, there was this one kid, this Martinez kid. Know what he wants to do?”

“No, sir.”

“He wants to get back out there. Get back out there at those goddamned VC. Here, I pulled this out of him.” He waved a piece of shrapnel under my nose, like a second administering smelling salts to a groggy boxer.

“Hell, fifteen casualties ain’t nothin‘,” Nickerson said, walking over to the wall map and tracing the patrol route with a stubby finger. “There’s three thousand men in this regiment.”

“Right you are, sir, but fifteen casualties is a lot for one platoon.”

“Is it? When I landed at Guadalcanal, ninety percent of my platoon was wiped out in an hour. There were only five or six of us left, but we kept fighting.”

“I’m sure you did, sir. My point was…”

“We kept fighting, goddamnit!” the colonel yelled, and then treated me to a long account of the battle of Guadalcanal, as it was experienced by then-Second Lieutenant Nickerson. When he paused for a breath, I said that I had to get back to work.

“Well, go ahead then. Get the hell out of here.”

In such condition there is… no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

—Hobbes

Leviathan

In late October an enemy battalion attacked one of our helicopter bases, inflicted fifty casualties on the company guarding it, and destroyed or damaged over forty aircraft. Two nights later, another Viet Cong battalion overran an outpost manned by eighty marines from A Company, killing twenty-two and wounding fifty more. The usual ambushes and booby traps claimed daily victims, and the medevac helicopters flew back and forth across the low, dripping skies.

The regiment’s mood began to match the weather. We were a long way from the despair that afflicted American soldiers in the closing years of the war, but we had also traveled some emotional distance from the cheery confidence of eight months before. The mood was sardonic, fatalistic, and melancholy. I could hear it in our black jokes: “Hey, Bill, you’re going on patrol today. If you get your legs blown off can I have your boots?” I could hear it in the songs we sang. Some were versions of maudlin coun-try-and-western tunes like “Detroit City,” the refrain of which expressed every rifleman’s hope:

I wanna go home, I wanna go home,

O I wanna go home
.

Other songs were full of gallows humor. One, “A Belly-full of War,” was a marching song composed by an officer in A Company.

Oh they taught me how to kill,

Then they stuck me on this hill,

I don’t like it anymore.

For all the monsoon rains

Have scrambled up my brains,

I’ve had a belly-full of war.

Oh the sun is much too hot,

And I’ve caught jungle rot,

I don’t like it anymore.

I’m tired and terrified,

I just want to stay alive,

I’ve had a belly-full of war.

So you can march upon Hanoi,

Just forget this little boy,

I don’t like it anymore.

For as I lie here with a pout,

My intestines hanging out,

I’ve had a belly-full of war.

There was another side to the war, about which no songs were sung, no jokes made. The fighting had not only become more intense, but more vicious. Both we and the Viet Cong began to make a habit of atrocities. One of 1st Battalion’s radio operators was captured by an enemy patrol, tied up, beaten with clubs, then executed. His body was found floating in the Song Tuy Loan three days after his capture, with the ropes still around his hands and feet and a bullet hole in the back of his head. Four other marines from another regiment were captured and later discovered in a common grave, also tied up and with their skulls blasted open by an executioner’s bullets. Led by a classmate from Quantico, a black officer named Adam Simpson, a twenty-eight-man patrol was ambushed by two hundred VC and almost annihilated. Only two marines, both seriously wounded, lived through it. There might have been more survivors had the Viet Cong not made a systematic massacre of the wounded. After springing the ambush, they went down the line of fallen marines, pumping bullets into any body that showed signs of life, including the body of my classmate. The two men who survived did so by crawling under the bodies of their dead comrades and feigning death.

We paid the enemy back, sometimes with interest. It was common knowledge that quite a few captured VC never made it to prison camps; they were reported as “shot and killed while attempting to escape.” Some line companies did not even bother taking prisoners; they simply killed every VC they saw, and a number of Vietnamese who were only suspects. The latter were usually counted as enemy dead, under the unwritten rule “If he’s dead and Vietnamese, he’s VC.”

Everything rotted and corroded quickly over there: bodies, boot leather, canvas, metal, morals. Scorched by the sun, wracked by the wind and rain of the monsoon, fighting in alien swamps and jungles, our humanity rubbed off of us as the protective bluing rubbed off the barrels of our rifles. We were fighting in the crudest kind of conflict, a people’s war. It was no orderly campaign, as in Europe, but a war for survival waged in a wilderness without rules or laws; a war in which each soldier fought for his own life and the lives of the men beside him, not caring who he killed in that personal cause or how many or in what manner and feeling only contempt for those who sought to impose on his savage struggle the mincing distinctions of civilized warfare—that code of battlefield ethics that attempted to humanize an essentially inhuman war. According to those “rules of engagement,” it was morally right to shoot an unarmed Vietnamese who was running, but wrong to shoot one who was standing or walking; it was wrong to shoot an enemy prisoner at close range, but right for a sniper at long range to kill an enemy soldier who was no more able than a prisoner to defend himself; it was wrong for infantrymen to destroy a village with white-phosphorus grenades, but right for a fighter pilot to drop napalm on it. Ethics seemed to be a matter of distance and technology. You could never go wrong if you killed people at long range with sophisticated weapons. And then there was that inspiring order issued by General Greene: kill VC. In the patriotic fervor of the Kennedy years, we had asked, “What can we do for our country?” and our country answered, “Kill VC.” That was the strategy, the best our best military minds could come up with: organized butchery. But organized or not, butchery was butchery, so who was to speak of rules and ethics in a war that had none?

In the middle of November, at my own request, I was transferred to a line company in 1st Battalion. My convictions about the war had eroded almost to nothing; I had no illusions, but I had volunteered for a line company anyway. There were a number of reasons, of which the paramount was boredom. There was nothing for me to do but count casualties. I felt useless and a little guilty about living in relative safety while other men risked their lives. I cannot deny that the front still held a fascination for me. The rights or wrongs of the war aside, there was a magnetism about combat. You seemed to live more intensely under fire. Every sense was sharper, the mind worked clearer and faster. Perhaps it was the tension of opposites that made it so, an attraction balanced by revulsion, hope that warred with dread. You found yourself on a precarious emotional edge, experiencing a headiness that no drink or drug could match.

The fear of madness was another motive. The hallucination I had had that day in the mess, of seeing Mora and Harrisson prefigured in death, had become a constant, waking nightmare. I had begun to see almost everyone as they would look in death, including myself. Shaving in the mirror in the morning, I could see myself dead, and there were moments when I not only saw my own corpse, but other people looking at it. I saw life going on without me. The sensation of not being anymore came over me at night, just before falling asleep. Sometimes it made me laugh inside; I could not take myself seriously when I could already see my own death; nor, seeing their deaths as well, could I take others seriously. We were all the victims of a great practical joke played on us by God or Nature. Maybe that was why corpses always grinned. They saw the joke at the last moment. Sometimes it made me laugh, but most of the time it was not at all humorous, and I was sure that another few months of identifying bodies would land me in a psychiatric ward. On staff, there was too much time to brood over those corpses; there would be very little time to think in a line company. That is the secret to emotional survival in war, not thinking.

Finally, there was hatred, a hatred buried so deep that I could not then admit its existence. I can now, though it is still painful. I burned with a hatred for the Viet Cong and with an emotion that dwells in most of us, one closer to the surface than we care to admit: a desire for retribution. I did not hate the enemy for their politics, but for murdering Simpson, for executing that boy whose body had been found in the river, for blasting the life out of Walt Levy. Revenge was one of the reasons I volunteered for a line company. I wanted a chance to kill somebody.

Jim Cooney, my old roommate on Okinawa, was brought up from 3d Battalion to replace me. And it was with a sense of achievement that I gave him casualty files several times thicker than the ones that had been given to me in June.

Kazmarack drove me out to One-One’s headquarters. Sergeant Hamilton saw me off. I would miss him, for his humor had helped me maintain at least an outward semblance of sanity during the previous five months: Hamilton, who suffered constantly from gastroenteritis, running into the colonel’s head, then telling the officer who chewed him out, “For Christ’s sake, sir, I’ve got Ho Chi Minh’s revenge. What do you expect me to do, dump a load in my pants just because my turds don’t have colonel’s eagles on them? Shit and death are no respecters of rank, sir.”