Dispatches (15 page)

During the early morning of February 7 something so horrible happened in the Khe Sanh sector that even those of us who were in Hue when we heard news of it had to relinquish our own fear and despair for a moment to acknowledge the horror and pay some tribute to it. It was as though the very worst dream any of us had ever had about the war had come true; it anticipated nightmares so vile that they could take you off shuddering in your sleep. No one who heard it was able to smile that bitter, secret survivor’s smile that was the
reflex to almost all news of disaster. It was too awful even for that.

Five kilometers southwest of the Khe Sanh Combat Base, sitting above the river which forms the border with Laos, there was a Special Forces A Camp. It was called Langvei, taking its name from the small Montagnard village nearby which had been mistakenly bombed a year before by the Air Force. The camp was larger than most Special Forces camps, and much better built. It was set on twin hills about 700 meters apart, and the vital bunkers holding most of the troops were on the hill nearest the river. It was manned by twenty-four Americans and over 400 Vietnamese troops. Its bunkers were deep, solid, with three feet of reinforced concrete overhead, seemingly impregnable. And sometime after midnight, the North Vietnamese came and took it. They took it with a style that had been seen only once before, in the Ia Drang, attacking with weapons and tactics which no one imagined they had. Nine light tanks, Soviet T-34’s and 76’s, were deployed east and west, closing on the camp so suddenly that the first sound of them was mistaken by the Americans for a malfunction of the camp generator. Satchel charges, bangalore torpedoes, tear gas and—ineffable horror—napalm were all hurled into the machine-gun slits and air vents of the bunkers. It took very little time. An American colonel who had come on an inspection visit to Langvei was seen charging the tanks with nothing but hand grenades before he was cut down. (He survived. The word “miracle” doesn’t even apply.) Somewhere between ten and fifteen Americans were killed, and as many as 300 of the indigenous troops. The survivors traveled all night, most of them on foot through NVA positions (some were picked up later by choppers), arriving at Khe Sanh after dawn, and it was said that some of them had become insane. At the same time that Langvei was being overrun, Khe Sanh received the most
brutal artillery barrage of the war: 1,500 rounds that night, six rounds a minute for more minutes than anyone could bear to count.

The Marines at Khe Sanh saw the Langvei survivors come in. They saw them and heard about them up in their Special Forces compound, holding off all visitors at rifle point, saw their faces and their unfocused stares, and they talked quietly among themselves about it. Jesus, they had tanks. Tanks!… After Langvei, how could you look out of your perimeter at night without hearing the treads coming? How could you patrol in the dark without remembering every story you ever heard about ghostly enemy helicopters flying the fringes of the Z? About the trails cut in the floor of the A Shau Valley, big enough to hold trucks? About the complete fanaticism of attackers who were doped to the eyeballs (sure they smoke dope, it gets them crazy), who ran pushing civilian shields forward, who chained themselves to their machine guns and died right there rather than fail, who had No Regard For Human Life?

Officially, the Marines admitted no relevance between the Langvei attack and Khe Sanh. Confidentially, they said something awful about Langvei having been bait—bait which the poor, desperate bastards took, exactly as we hoped they would. But everyone knew better, much better, and the majors and colonels who had to tell reporters about it were met with embarrassed silence. One hated to bring it up, one never really did, but there was a question that had everything in the world to do with Khe Sanh after Langvei fell. I wanted to ask it so badly that my hesitance made me mad for months. Colonel (I wanted to ask), this is purely hypothetical, I hope you understand. But what if all of those gooks that you think are out there are
really
out there? And what if they attack before the monsoons blow south, some mist-clogged night when our planes just cannot get up there?
What if they really want Khe Sanh, want it so badly that they are willing to maneuver over the triple lines of barbed wire, the German razor wire too; over barricades formed by their own dead (a tactic, Colonel, favored by your gook in Korea), coming in waves,
human
waves, and in such numbers that the barrels of our .50-calibers overheat and melt and all the M-16’s are jammed, until all of the death in all of the Claymore mines on our defenses has been spent and absorbed? What if they are still coming, moving toward the center of a base so smashed by their artillery that those pissy little trenches and bunkers that
your
Marines half got up are useless, coming as the first MIG’s and IL-28’s ever seen in this war bomb out the TOC and the strip, the med tent and the control tower (People’s Army my ass, right, Colonel?), coming at you 20,000 to 40,000 strong? And what if they pass over every barricade we can put in their way … and kill every living thing, defending or retreating … and take Khe Sanh?

Some strange things would happen. One morning, at the height of the monsoons, the sun came up brightly at dawn and shone all day. The early-morning skies were a clean, brilliant blue, the only time before April that anyone saw that at Khe Sanh, and instead of waking and coming out shivering from their bunkers, the grunts stripped down to boots, pants and flak jackets; biceps, triceps and tattoos all out for breakfast. Probably because the NVA knew that American surveillance and bombers would be working overtime on a morning like this, there was almost no shelling, and we all knew we could count on it. For those few hours Khe Sanh had the atmosphere of reprieve. I remember passing a chaplain named Stubbe on the road and seeing his incredible pleasure at the miracle of this morning. The hills did not
seem like the same hills that had given off so much fear the night before and all of the days and nights before that. In the early-morning light they looked sharp and tranquil, as though you could take some apples and a book and go up there for an afternoon.

I was walking around by myself in the 1st Battalion area. It was before eight in the morning, and as I walked I could hear someone walking behind me, singing. At first I couldn’t hear what it was, only that it was a single short phrase being sung over and over at short intervals, and that every time someone else would laugh and tell the singer to shut up. I slowed down and let them catch up.

“ ‘I’d rather be an Oscar Mayer weiner,’ ” the voice sang. It sounded very plaintive and lonely.

Of course I turned around. There were two of them, one a big Negro with a full mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth, a mean, signifying mustache that would have worked if only there had been the smallest trace of meanness anywhere on his face. He was at least six-three and quarterback thick. He was carrying an AK-47. The other Marine was white, and if I’d seen him first from the back I would have said that he was eleven years old. The Marines must have a height requirement; whatever it is, I don’t see how he made it. Age is one thing, but how do you lie about your height? He’d been doing the singing, and he was laughing now because he’d made me turn around. His name was Mayhew, it was written out in enormous red letters across the front of his helmet: MAYHEW—
You’d better believe it!
I’d been walking with my flak jacket open, a stupid thing to do even on this morning, and they could see the stitched tag above my left breast pocket with the name of my magazine written on it.

“Correspondent?” the Negro said.

Mayhew just laughed. “ ‘I’d-a rather be—a Oscar Mayer
 … weenieeee,’ ” he sang. “You can write that, man, tell ’em all I said so.”

“Don’t pay no attention to him,” the Negro said. “That’s Mayhew. He’s a crazy fucker, ain’t you, Mayhew?”

“I sure hope so,” Mayhew said. “ ‘I’d rather be a Oscar Mayer weiner.…’ ”

He was young, nineteen, he later told me, and he was trying to grow a mustache. His only luck with it so far was a few sparse, transparent blond clumps set at odd intervals across his upper lip, and you couldn’t see that unless the light was right. The Negro was called Day Tripper. It was on his helmet, along with
DETROIT CITY
. And on the back, where most guys just listed the months of their tours, he had carefully drawn a full calendar where each day served was marked off with a neat X. They were both from Hotel Company of the 2nd Battalion, which was dug in along the northern perimeter, but they were taking advantage of the day to visit a friend of theirs, a mortar man with 1/26.

“The lieutenant ever hear ’bout this, he know what to do,” Day Tripper said.

“Fuck the lieutenant,” Mayhew said. “You remember from before he ain’t wrapped too tight.”

“Well, he wrapped tight enough to tear
you
a new asshole.”

“Now what’s he gonna do to me? Send me to Vietnam?”

We walked past the battalion CP, piled five feet high with sandbags, and then we reached a giant ring of sandbagging, the mortar pit, and climbed down. In the center was a large four-oh-deuce mortar piece, and the inside of the pit was stacked completely around with ammunition, piled from the ground to just below the sandbags. A Marine was stretched out in the dust with a war comic spread over his face.

“Hey, where’s Evans?” Mayhew said. “You know a guy named Evans?”

The Marine took the comic off of his face and looked up. He’d been asleep.

“Shit,” he said. “I thought you was the Old Man for a second. Beg your pardon.”

“We’re looking for this guy Evans,” Mayhew said. “You know him?”

“I—uh—no, I don’t guess so. I’m pretty new.”

He looked it. He was the kind of kid that would go into the high-school gym alone and shoot baskets for the half-hour before the basketball team took it over for practice, not good enough yet for the team but determined.

“The rest of the crew’ll be down here right away. You can wait if you want.” He looked at all the rounds. “It’s probably not too cool,” he said, smiling. “But you can if you want.”

Mayhew unbuttoned one of the pockets in the leg of his fatigues and took out a can of crackers and Cheddar-cheese spread. He took the P-38 opener from a band around his helmet and sat down.

“Might as well eat some shit while we wait. You get hungry, it ain’t so bad. I’d give my left ball for a can of fruit now.”

I always scrounged fruit from rear areas to bring forward, and I had some in my pack. “What kind do you like?” I asked.

“Any kind’s good,” he said. “Fruit cocktail’s really good.”

“No, man,” Day Tripper said. “Peaches, baby, peaches. All that syrup. Now that’s some good shit.”

“There you go, Mayhew,” I said, tossing him a fruit cocktail. I gave a can of peaches to Day Tripper and kept a can for myself.

We talked while we ate. Mayhew told me about his father, who “got greased in Korea,” and about his mother, who worked in a department store in Kansas City. Then he started to tell about Day Tripper, who got his name because
he was afraid of the night—not the dark, but the night—and who didn’t mind who knew it. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do during daylight, but if there was any way at all to fix it he liked to be deep in his bunker by nightfall. He was always volunteering for the more dangerous daylight patrols, just to make sure he got in by dusk. (This was before daylight patrols, in fact almost all patrols around Khe Sanh, were discontinued.) There were a lot of white guys, especially junior officers trying to be cool, who were always coming on to Day Tripper about his hometown, calling it Dodge City or Motown and laughing. (“Why they think somethin’s special about Detroit?” he said. “Ain’t nothin’ special, ain’t nothin’ so funny, neither.”) He was a big bad spade gone wrong somehow, and no matter how mean he tried to look something constantly gentle showed. He told me he knew guys from Detroit who were taking mortars back, breaking them down so that each one could get a piece into his duffel and then reassembling them when they got together back on the block. “You see that four-oh-deuce?” he said. “Now, that’ll take out a police station for you. I don’t need all that hassle. But maybe nex’ year I gonna need it.”

Like every American in Vietnam, he had his obsession with Time. (No one ever talked about When-this-lousy-war-is-over. Only “How much time you got?”) The degree of Day Tripper’s obsession, compared with most of the others, could be seen in the calendar on his helmet. No metaphysician ever studied Time the way he did, its components and implications, its per-second per seconds, its shadings and movement. The Space-Time continuum, Time-as-Matter, Augustinian Time: all of that would have been a piece of cake to Day Tripper, whose brain cells were arranged like jewels in the finest chronometer. He had assumed that correspondents in Vietnam
had
to be there. When he learned that
I had asked to come here he almost let the peaches drop to the ground.

“Lemmee … lemmee jus’ hang on that a minute,” he said. “You mean you don’
have
to be here? An’ you’re
here?”

I nodded.

“Well, they gotta be payin’ you some tough bread.”

“You’d get depressed if I told you.”

He shook his head.

“I mean, they ain’
got
the bread that’d get me here if I didn’ have t’ be here.”

“Horse crap,” Mayhew said. “Day Tripper loves it. He’s short now, but he’s comin’ back, ain’t you, Day Tripper?”

“Shit, my momma’ll come over here and pull a tour before I fuckin’ come back.”

Four more Marines dropped into the pit.

“Where’s Evans?” Mayhew demanded. “Any of you guys know Evans?”

One of the mortar men came over.

“Evans is over in Danang,” he said. “He caught a little shit the other night.”

“That right?” Mayhew said. “Evans get wounded?”

“He hurt bad?” Day Tripper asked.

“Not bad enough,” the mortar man said, laughing. “He’ll be back in ten days. Just some stuff in the legs.”

“He’s real lucky,” another one said. “Same round got him killed a guy.”