Dispatches (24 page)

“I’ve been having this dream,” the major said. “I’ve had it two times now. I’m in a big examination room back at Quantico. They’re handing out questionnaires for an aptitude test. I take one and look at it, and the first question says, ‘How many kinds of animals can you kill with your hands?’ ”

We could see rain falling in a sheet about a kilometer away. Judging by the wind, the major gave it three minutes before it reached us.

“After the first tour, I’d have the goddamndest nightmares. You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying,
me
dying … I thought they were the worst,” he said. “But I sort of miss them now.”

Colleagues

I

There’s a candle end burning in a corner of the bunker, held to the top of a steel helmet by melted wax, the light guttering over a battered typewriter, and the Old Guy is getting one off: “Tat-tat-tat, tatta-tatta-tat like your kid or your brother or your sweetheart maybe never wanted much for himself never asked for anything except for what he knew to be his some men have a name for it and they call it Courage when the great guns are still at last across Europe what will it matter maybe after all that this one boy from Cleveland Ohio won’t be coming back-a-tat-tat.” You can hear shell fire landing just outside, a little gravel falls into the typewriter, but the candle burns on, throwing its faint light over the bowed head and the few remaining wisps of white hair. Two men, the Colonel and the Kid, stand by the door watching. “Why, Sir?” the Kid asks. “What makes him do it? He could be sitting safe in London right now.” “I don’t know, son,” the Colonel says. “Maybe he figures he’s got a job to do, too. Maybe it’s because he’s somebody who really cares
…
.”

I never knew a member of the Vietnam press corps who was insensible to what happened when the words “war” and “correspondent” got joined. The glamour of it was possibly empty and lunatic, but there were times when it was all you had, a benign infection that ravaged all but your worst fears and deepest depressions. Admitting, for argument’s sake,
that we were all a little crazy to have gone there in the first place, there were those whose madness it was not to know always which war they were actually in, fantasizing privately about other, older wars, Wars I and II, air wars and desert wars and island wars, obscure colonial actions against countries whose names have since changed many times, punitive wars and holy wars and wars in places where the climate was so cool that you could wear a trench coat and look good; in other words, wars which sounded old and corny to those of us for whom the war in Vietnam was more than enough. There were correspondents all around who could break you up with their bad style and self-consciousness, but those aberrations were hardly ever beyond your understanding. Over there, all styles grew in their way out of the same haunted, haunting romance. Those Crazy Guys Who Cover The War.

In any other war, they would have made movies about us too,
Dateline: Hell!, Dispatch from Dong Ha
, maybe even
A Scrambler to the Front
, about Tim Page, Sean Flynn and Rick Merron, three young photographers who used to ride in and out of combat on Hondas. But Vietnam is awkward, everybody knows how awkward, and if people don’t even want to hear about it, you know they’re not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up. (
The Green Berets
doesn’t count. That wasn’t really about Vietnam, it was about Santa Monica.) So we have all been compelled to make our own movies, as many movies as there are correspondents, and this one is mine. (One day at the battalion aid station in Hue a Marine with minor shrapnel wounds in his legs was waiting to get on a helicopter, a long wait with all of the dead and badly wounded going out first, and a couple of sniper rounds snapped across the airstrip, forcing us to move behind some sandbagging. “I
hate
this movie,” he
said, and I thought, “Why not?”) My movie, my friends, my colleagues. But meet them in context:

There was a ridge called Mutter’s Ridge that ran the crest of one of those DMZ hills which the Americans usually named according to height in meters, Hill Three Hundred Whatever. The Marines had been up there since early morning, when Kilo Company and four correspondents were choppered into a sparse landing zone on the highest rise of the ridge. If this had been an Army operation, we would have been digging now, correspondents too, but the Marines didn’t do that, their training taught them more about fatal gesture than it did about survival. Everyone was saying that Charlie was probably just over there on the next hill scoping on us, but the grunts were keeping it all in the open, walking out along the ridge “coordinating,” setting up positions and cutting out a proper lz with battery-powered saws and chunks of explosive. Every few minutes one or another of them would shag down to the spot below the lz where the correspondents were sitting and warn us indifferently about the next blast, saying, “Uh, listen, there’s fire in the hole, so you guys wanna just turn your backs and sort of cover over your heads?” He’d hang in there for a moment to give us a good look, and then run back up to the lz site to tell the others about us.

“Hey, see them four guys there? Them’re reporters.”

“Bullshit, reporters.”

“Okay, motherfucker, go on down and see. Next time we blast.”

There were some Marines stretched out a few feet from us, passing around war comics and talking, calling each other Dude and Jive, Lifer and Shitkick and Motherfucker, touching this last with a special grace, as though it were the tenderest word in their language. A suave black grunt, identified
on his helmet cover as
LOVE CHILD
, was studying an exhausted copy of
Playboy
, pausing to say, “Oh … 
man!
She can sure come sit on my face
anytime
. Any … time … at … all.” But none of them were talking to us yet, they were sort of talking for us, trying to make us out, maintaining that odd delicacy of theirs that always broke down sooner or later. It was like a ritual, all the preliminary forms had to be observed and satisfied, and it wasn’t simply because they were shy. As far as any of them knew, we were crazy, maybe even dangerous. It made sense: They
had
to be here, they knew that. We did
not
have to be here, and they were sure enough of that too. (The part that they never realized until later was that our freedom of movement was a door that swung both ways; at that very moment, the four of us were giving each other that Nothing Happening look and talking about getting out.) A GI would walk clear across a firebase for a look at you if he’d never seen a correspondent before because it was like going to see the Geek, and worth the walk.

Besides, there were four of us sitting there in a loose professional knot, there was another one flying in the command helicopter trying to get a long view of the operation, and a sixth, AP photographer Dana Stone, was walking up the hill now with a platoon that had been chosen to scout the trail. It was one thing for a lone reporter to join an outfit before an operation because the outfit, if it was a company or larger, could absorb him and the curiosity that his presence always set working, and when the operation was over most of the troops would never even know that he’d been along. But when six correspondents turned up on the eve of an operation, especially when it fell during a long period of light contact, the effect was so complicated that the abiding ambivalence of all troops and commanders toward all reporters didn’t even begin to explain it. Everyone from the colonel to
the lowest-ranking grunt felt a new importance about what he was going into, and to all appearances, as far as they were in touch with it, they were glad to see you. But our presence was also unnerving, picking at layers of fear that they might never have known about otherwise. (“Why us? I mean,
six
of those bastards, where the hell are we
going?”
) When it came all the way down to this, even the poorest-connected freelancer had the power on him, a power which only the most pompous and unfeeling journalists ever really wanted, throwing weird career scares into the staff and laying a cutting edge against each Marine’s gut estimates of his own survival. Then, it didn’t matter that we were dressed exactly as they were and would be going exactly where they were going; we were as exotic and as fearsome as black magic, coming on with cameras and questions, and if we promised to take the anonymity off of what was about to happen, we were also there to watchdog the day. The very fact that we had chosen
them
seemed to promise the most awful kind of engagement, because they were all certain that war correspondents never wasted time. It was a joke we all dug.

It was August now, when the heat in I Corps forgave nothing. That year the northern monsoons had been almost dry (so many stories had run the phrase “grim reminders of a rainless monsoon” that it became a standard, always good for a laugh), and across the raw spaces between hills you could see only the faintest traces of green in the valleys and draws, the hills rising from pale brown to sunbleached yellow and gaping like dark, dried sores wherever the winter airstrikes had torn their sides out. Very little had happened in this sector since early spring, when an odd disengagement had been effected at Khe Sanh and when a multi-division operation into the A Shau Valley had ended abruptly after two weeks, like a speech cut at mid-sentence. The A Shau held the North’s great supply depot, they had tanks and
trucks and heavy anti-aircraft guns dug in there, and while the American Mission had made its reflexive claims of success for the operation, they were made for once without much enthusiasm, indicating that even the Command had to acknowledge the inviolability of that place. It was admitted at the time that a lot of our helicopters had been shot down, but this was spoken of as an expensive equipment loss, as though our choppers were crewless entities that held to the sky by themselves, spilling nothing more precious than fuel when they crashed.

Between then and now, nothing larger than company-size sweeps had worked the western Z, generally without contact. Like all of the war’s quieter passages, the spring-summer lull had left everyone badly strung out, and a lot of spooky stories began going around, like the ones about NVA helicopters (a Marine patrol supposedly saw one touch down on the abandoned Marine base at Khe Sanh and wait while a dozen men got out and walked around the perimeter, “like they was just checking things out”). It had been a mild season for Vietnam correspondents too (the lull aside, home offices were beginning to make it clear to their Saigon bureaus that the story was losing the old bite, what with Johnson’s abdication, the spring assassinations and the coming elections), and we were either talking about how the Vietnam thing was really finished or bitching about getting shot at only to wind up on page nine. It was a good time to cruise the country, a day here and a week there, just hanging out with troops; a good time to make leisurely investigations into the smaller, darker pockets of the war. Now word had come down that a large mass of NVA was moving across the DMZ, possibly building for a new offensive against Hue, and battalions of the 5th Marines were deploying in rough conjunction with battalions of the 9th to find and kill them. It
had the feel of what we always called a “good operation,” and the six of us had gone up for it.

But there was nothing here now, no dreaded Cong, no shelling, no pictures for the wires, no stories for the files, no sign that anyone had been on this scalding ridge for at least six months. (A few miles north and a little east, a company of the 9th was in the middle of an evil firefight that would last until nightfall, leaving eleven of them dead and nearly thirty wounded, but we knew nothing about that now. If we had, we might possibly have made an effort at getting to it, some of us at least, explaining it later in cold professional terms and leaving all the other reasons unspoken, understood between us. If a Marine had ever expressed a similar impulse, we would probably have called him psychotic.) The only violence on Mutter’s Ridge was in the heat and whatever associations with that terrible winter you could take from the view, from Cam Lo, Route 9 into Khe Sanh, the Rockpile. A few more Marines had joined the group around us, but they were being cool, pausing to read the tags sewn on our fatigue shirts as though to themselves, but out loud, just to show us that they knew we were here.

“Associated Press, yeah, and UPI, uh-huh, and
Esquire
, wow,
they
got a guy over here, what the fuck for, you tell ’em what we’re wearing? And—hey, man, what’s
that
supposed to be?” (Sean Flynn had only the words “Bao Chi” on his tags, Vietnamese for “journalist.”) “That’s pretty far out, what’s that, in case you’re captured or something?”

Actually, Bao Chi was all the affiliation that Flynn needed or wanted in Vietnam, but he didn’t go into that. Instead, he explained that when he had first begun taking pictures here in 1965, most operations had been conducted by the South Vietnamese, and reporters would identify themselves this way so that they would not be mistaken for American advisors
and shot by the ARVN during the routine hysteria of routine retreats.

“Boy, if that ain’t just like the Slopes,” one of the Marines said, walking away from us.

Flynn was cleaning his camera lens with a length of Australian sweat scarf that he always wore into the field, but the least movement sent up a fine-grained dust that seemed to hang there without resettling, giving the light a greasy quality and caking in the corners of your eyes. The Marines were looking hard at Flynn and you could see that he was blowing their minds, the way he blew minds all over Vietnam.

He was (indeed) the Son of Captain Blood, but that didn’t mean much to the grunts since most of them, the young ones, had barely even heard of Errol Flynn. It was just apparent to anyone who looked at him that he was what the Marines would call “a dude who definitely had his shit together.” All four of us on the ridge looked more or less as though we belonged there; the AP’s John Lengle had covered every major Marine operation of the past eighteen months, Nick Wheeler of UPI had been around for two years, I’d had the better part of a year in now, we were all nearly young enough to be mistaken for grunts ourselves, but Flynn was special. We all had our movie-fed war fantasies, the Marines too, and it could be totally disorienting to have this outrageously glamorous figure intrude on them, really unhinging, like looking up to see that you’ve been sharing a slit trench with John Wayne or William Bendix. But you got used to that part of Flynn quickly.