A Rumor of War (40 page)

Then it happened. The platoon exploded. It was a collective emotional detonation of men who had been pushed to the extremity of endurance. I lost control of them and even of myself. Desperate to get to the hill, we rampaged through the rest of the village, whooping like savages, torching thatch huts, tossing grenades into the cement houses we could not burn. In our frenzy, we crashed through the hedgerows without feeling the stabs of the thorns. We did not feel anything. We were past feeling anything for ourselves, let alone for others. We shut our ears to the cries and pleas of the villagers. One elderly man ran up to me, and, grabbing me by the front of my shirt, asked, “Tai Sao? Tai Sao?” Why? Why?

“Get out of my goddamned way,” I said, pulling his hands off. I took hold of his shirt and flung him down hard, feeling as if I were watching myself in a movie. The man lay where he fell, crying, “Tai Sao? Tai Sao?” I plunged on toward the foot of the hill, now only a short distance away.

Most of the platoon had no idea of what they were doing. One marine ran up to a hut, set it ablaze, ran on, turned around, dashed through the flames and rescued a civilian inside, then ran on to set fire to the next hut. We passed through the village like a wind; by the time we started up Hill 52, there was nothing left of Ha Na but a long swath of smoldering ashes, charred tree trunks, their leaves burned off, and heaps of shattered concrete. Of all the ugly sights I saw in Vietnam, that was one of the ugliest: the sudden disintegration of my platoon from a group of disciplined soldiers into an incendiary mob.

The platoon snapped out of its madness almost immediately. Our heads cleared as soon as we escaped from the village into the clear air at the top of the hill. Miller’s company, we learned, had overrun the enemy machine guns after the air strikes, but had lost a lot of men. C Company was ordered to remain on Hill 52 for the night. We started to dig in. The still-flaming rubble of Ha Na lay behind us. In the opposite direction, smoke was rising from the place where D Company had fought its battle and from the tree line the planes had bombed in the first hour of fighting.

It was quiet as we dug our foxholes, strangely quiet after five hours of combat. My platoon was a platoon again. The calm of the outer world was matched by the calm we felt inside ourselves, a calm as deep as our rage had been. There was a sweetness in that inner quietude, but the feeling would not have been possible if the village had not been destroyed. It was as though the burning of Ha Na had arisen out of some emotional necessity. It had been a catharsis, a purging of months of fear, frustration, and tension. We had relieved our own pain by inflicting it on others. But that sense of relief was inextricably mingled with guilt and shame. Being men again, we again felt human emotions. We were ashamed of what we had done and yet wondered if we had really done it. The change in us, from disciplined soldiers to unrestrained savages and back to soldiers, had been so swift and profound as to lend a dreamlike quality to the last part of the battle. Despite the evidence to the contrary, some of us had a difficult time believing that we were the ones who had caused all that destruction.

Captain Neal had no difficulty believing it. He was rightfully furious at me, and warned that I would be summarily relieved of command if anything like it happened again. I did not need the warning. I felt sick enough about it all, sick of war, sick of what the war was doing to us, sick of myself. Looking at the embers below, at the skeletons of the houses, a guilt weighed down on me as heavily as the heaviest pack I had ever carried. It was not only the senseless obliteration of Ha Na that disturbed me but the dark, destructive emotions I had felt throughout the battle, almost from the moment the enemy mortars started to fall: urges to destroy that seemed to rise from the fear of being destroyed myself. I had enjoyed the killing of the Viet Cong who had run out of the tree line. Strangest of all had been that sensation of watching myself in a movie. One part of me was doing something while the other part watched from a distance, shocked by the things it saw, yet powerless to stop them from happening.

I could analyze myself all I wanted, but the fact was we had needlessly destroyed the homes of perhaps two hundred people. All the analysis in the world would not make a new village rise from the ashes. It could not answer the question that kept repeating itself in my mind nor lighten the burden of my guilt. The usual arguments and rationalizations did not help, either. Yes, the village had obviously been under enemy control; it had been a VC supply dump as much as it had been a village. Yes, burning the cache was a legitimate act of war and the fire resulting from it had been accidental. Yes, the later deliberate destruction had been committed by men
in extremis;
war was a state of extremes, and men often did extreme things in it. But none of that conventional wisdom relieved my guilt or answered the question: “Tai Sao?” Why?

We passed a quiet night: it was noisier for D Company. Treating the many wounded, Miller’s corpsmen had run out of morphine, and helicopters were unavailable to evacuate the casualties. So, the dead and wounded lay out there all night, the dead bloating, the wounded moaning because there was no morphine.

The Viet Cong made a feeble attack against the battalion’s lines just before dawn, but were driven off with mortar fire. Later, helicopters flew in to evacuate the casualties and resupply us with rations and ammunition. Hovering over Hill 52 while the crew chiefs kicked the supplies out of the hatches, the aircraft drew a hail of automatic-weapons fire from the Viet Cong positions across the river. We answered with a few bursts from our machine guns, the short rounds geysering in the river that was bright gold in the early morning light.

The war went on.

Merry it was to laugh there—

Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.

For power was on us as we slashed bones bare

Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

—Wilfred Owen

“Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”

Filing up the trail that weaved through the stunted scrub jungle surrounding the outpost, the six men in the patrol walked on their bruised and rotted feet as if they were walking barefoot over broken glass. The patrol was waved in, and the marines climbed over the rusty perimeter wire one by one. The foothills where they had been all morning stretched behind them, toward the moss-green mountains wavering in the heat-shimmer.

The heat was suffocating, as it always was between monsoon storms. The air seemed about to explode. Sun-dazed, half the platoon were dozing beneath their hooches. Others cleaned their rifles, which would start to corrode in a few hours and have to be cleaned again. A few men squatted in a circle around a tin of cheese which had been brought to Charley Hill with the twice-weekly ration resupply. The cheese was a special treat: a change from the dreary diet of C rations, and it eased the diarrhea that gripped us. Squatting around the tin, the men ate with their fingers, grunting their approval.

“Hey, we got some cheese,” one of them said to Crowe’s patrol. “Good cheese. You guys want some cheese?”

Too tired to eat, the men in the patrol shook their heads and hobbled toward their foxholes. Their skin was pallid except for their faces and necks, their hands, and a V-shaped spot on their chests, which were tanned. One rifle-man’s bicep bore a tattoo: a skull and crossbones underscored by the words USMC—
Death before Dishonor
. I laughed to myself. With the way things had been going since Operation Long Lance, I was confident that the marine would not have to worry about facing the choice. Page and Navarro, killed a few days before, had faced no choice. The booby-trapped artillery shell had not given them any time to choose, or to take cover, or to do anything but die instantly. Both had had only four days left of their Vietnam tours, thus confirming the truth in the proverb, “You’re never a short-timer until you’re home.”

I was sitting on the roof of the outpost’s command bunker, sunning my legs. The corpsmen said that sun and air would help dry the running sores on feet and lower legs. The disease had been diagnosed as tropical impetigo. I had probably contracted it on our last patrol—three days in a monsoon rain that would have impressed Noah; three days of slogging through the slime of drowned swamps. The corpsmen had given me penicillin shots, but even antibiotics were not effective in that climate. Pus continued to ooze from the ulcers, so that whenever I took off my boots to change socks I had to hold my breath against the stench of my own rotting flesh. Well, I could have caught something a lot worse than a skin disease.

Holding a map in one hand, Crowe walked up to me to make his report. Crowe, called Pappy by the teen-age platoon because he had reached the advanced age of twenty-three—growing older than twenty-one was an achievement for most combat riflemen—had a face that made his nickname seem appropriate. The months of wincing at snipers’ bullets, the sleepless nights, and the constant strain of looking for trip wires had aged him. Behind his glasses, Crowe’s eyes were as dull as an old man’s.

He said his patrol had picked up some intelligence information. Spreading the map over the bunker’s sandbagged roof, he pointed to a village called “Giao-Tri (2).”

“You remember those three VCS we found in this ville two weeks ago, sir?”

I said that I did. He was referring to an earlier patrol and the three young men we had brought in for questioning. Since Giao-Tri was a village usually controlled by the Viet Cong, it was unusual to find young men there. The three youths, moreover, had been carrying papers that were obvious forgeries, and their ages had been falsified. McCloy, who by this time spoke fluent Vietnamese, and an ARVN militia sergeant gave them a perfunctory interrogation. They were released when the sergeant determined that their papers had been forged and their ages falsified so they could stay in school and out of the army. They were draft-dodgers, not Viet Cong.

“Well, sir,” Crowe went on, “it looks like two of ‘em are Charlies after all, the two older ones.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“The younger one told me, Le Dung I think his name is. We found him in the ville again and I started to question him. You know, a little English, a little Vietnamese, a little sign language. He said the other two was VC, sappers who was makin‘ mines and booby traps. I think he’s tellin’ the truth because one of the other two walked by when we was talkin‘ and the kid shut up. He looked scared as hell end shut up. So, when the other dude’s out of sight, I ask the kid, ”VC? Him VC?“ And the kid nods his head and says ’VC.” The third guy is standin‘ over by a house, buildin’ a gate or somethin‘. I pointed at the guy and said, “VC there?” The kid nods again and says that both the Charlies live in that house. Then I broke out my map and the kid said there were five Cong in Binh Thai, sappers too, and armed with automatic rifles. He drew me a picture of the weapons. Here.“ Crowe handed me a piece of paper with a crude drawing of a top-loading automatic rifle that resembled a British Bren. ”Then he says there’s a platoon—fifteen VC— in Hoi-Vuc and they’ve got a mortar and a machine gun.“

Angry, I swung off the bunker. “Crowe, why in hell didn’t you capture those two and bring ‘em in?”

“Well, I don’t know, sir. I mean, Mister McCloy cleared ‘em. He said they was okay before.”

“Goddamnit, we didn’t know this before. Crowe, this company’s lost thirty-five men in the last month. All of them to mines and booby traps, and you get a guy who shows you two sappers and you leave them there.”

“Sorry, sir. It’s just that they were cleared. Hell, we never know who’s the guerrilla and who ain’t around here.”

“No shit. Listen, the info’s good. You did all right. Shove off and take a break.”

“Yes, sir.”

I went down into the bunker, where Jones was cleaning his rifle. It was stifling inside, the air stale with the smells of sweat, rifle oil, and the canvas haversacks hanging from pegs driven into the mud walls. Cranking the handle of the field phone, I called company HQ with Crowe’s report, dreading the lecture I would get from Captain Neal.
Why didn’t he capture them? What’s the matter with that platoon of yours, lieutenant? Aren’t your people thinking
?

Having lost about thirty percent of his command in the past month alone, Neal had become almost intolerable. I assumed battalion was putting a great deal of pressure on him; since Operation Long Lance ended, the company had killed only three guerrillas and captured two more, while suffering six times as many casualties itself. C Company’s kill ratio was below standard. Bodies. Bodies. Bodies. Battalion wanted bodies. Neal wanted bodies. He lectured his officers on the importance of aggressiveness and made implied threats when he thought we lacked that attribute. “Your people aren’t being aggressive enough,” he told me when one of my squads failed to pursue two VC who had fired on them one night. I argued that the squad leader had done the sensible thing: with only eight men, at night, and a mile from friendly lines, he had no idea if those two guerrillas were alone or the point men for a whole battalion.

Had he pursued, his squad might have fallen into a trap. “Mister Caputo, when we make contact with the enemy, we maintain it, not break it,” said Neal. “You had best get those people of yours in shape.” Meekly, so meekly that I despised myself as much as I despised him, I said, “Yes, sir. I’ll get them in shape.” A few days later, Neal told me and the other officers that he was adopting a new policy: from now on, any marine in the company who killed a confirmed Viet Cong would be given an extra beer ration and the time to drink it. Because our men were so exhausted, we knew the promise of time off would be as great an inducement as the extra ration of beer. So we went along with the captain’s policy, without reflecting on its moral implications. That is the level to which we had sunk from the lofty idealism of a year before. We were going to kill people for a few cans of beer and the time to drink them.