Dispatches (26 page)

“Collins,” the lieutenant said, “you go find the Old Man. Tell him we’ve got a real serious heat casualty here. Remember, tell him serious.”

“Yes Sir,” the Avenger said, starting at a slow run along the ridge toward the CP.

Dana took a few more pictures and then sat down to change film. His fatigues were completely darkened with sweat, but except for that he showed no signs of exertion. The rest of the column was coming off of the trail now, dropping in the clearing like sniper victims, the packs going first, staggering a few feet and falling. A few were smiling up at the sun like happy dreamers, more went face down and stopped moving except for some twitching in their legs, and the radio man made it all the way across the clearing to the commo section, where he eased the equipment from his back
slowly, set his helmet very carefully on the ground for a pillow after picking his spot, and immediately fell asleep.

Stone ran over and photographed him. “You guys know something?” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s hotter than a bastard.”

“Thanks.”

We could see the colonel approaching, a short, balding man with flinty eyes and a brief black mustache. He was trussed up tightly in his flak jacket, and as he came toward us small groups of Marines broke and ran to get their flak jackets on too, before the colonel could have the chance to tell them about it. The colonel leaned over and looked hard at the unconscious Marine, who was lying now in the shade of a poncho being held over him by two corpsmen, while a third brushed his chest and face with water from a canteen.

Well hell, the colonel was saying, there’s nothing the matter with that man, feed some salt into him, get him up, get him walking, this is the Marines, not the goddamned Girl Scouts, there won’t be any damned chopper coming in
here
today. (The four of us must have looked a little stricken at this, and Dana took our picture. We were really pulling for the kid; if he stayed, we stayed, and that meant all night.) The corpsmen were trying to tell the colonel that this was no ordinary case of heat exhaustion, excusing themselves but staying firm about it, refusing to let the colonel return to the CP. (The four of us smiled and Dana took a picture. “Go away, Stone,” Flynn said. “Hold it just like that,” Stone said, running in for a closeup so that his lens was an inch away from Flynn’s nose. “One more.”) The Marine looked awful lying there, trying to work his lips a little, and the colonel glared down at the fragile, still form as though it was blackmailing him. When the Marine refused to move anything except his lips for fifteen minutes, the colonel began to relent.
He asked the corpsmen if they’d ever heard of a man dying from something like this.

“Oh, yes Sir. Oh, wow, I mean he really needs more attention than what we can give him here.”

“Mmmmmm …” the colonel said. Then he authorized the chopper request and strode with what I’m sure he considered great determination back to his CP.

“I think it would have made him feel better if he could have shot the kid,” Flynn said.

“Or one of us,” I said.

“You’re just lucky he didn’t get you last night,” Flynn said. The evening before, when Flynn and I had arrived together at the base camp, the colonel had taken us into the Command bunker to show us some maps and explain the operation, and a captain had given us some coffee in Styrofoam cups. I’d carried mine outside and finished it while we talked to the colonel, who was being very hale and friendly in a way I’d seen before and didn’t really trust. I was looking around for some place to toss the empty cup, and the colonel noticed it.

“Give it here,” he offered.

“Oh, that’s okay, Colonel, thanks.”

“No, come on, I’ll take it.”

“No, really, I’ll just find a—”

“Give it to me!”
he said, and I did, but Flynn and I were afraid to look at each other until he’d returned underground, and then we broke up, exchanging the worst colonel stories we knew. I told him about the colonel who had threatened to court-martial a spec 4 for refusing to cut the heart out of a dead Viet Cong and feed it to a dog, and Flynn told me about a colonel in the Americal Division (which Flynn always said was sponsored by General Foods) who believed that every man under his command needed combat experience;
he made the cooks and the clerks and the supply men and the drivers all take M-16’s and go out on night patrol, and one time all of his cooks got wiped out in an ambush.

We could hear the sound of our Chinook coming in now, and we were checking to see if we had all of our gear, when I took a sudden terrible flash, some total dread, and I looked at everyone and everything in sight to see if there was some real source. Stone had been telling the truth about this being my last operation, I was as strung out as anybody on a last operation, there was nothing between here and Saigon that didn’t scare me now, but this was different, it was something else.

“Fuckin’ heat …,” someone said. “I … oh, man, I just … can’t … fuckin’ … 
make it!”

It was a Marine, and as soon as I saw him I realized that I’d seen him before, a minute or so ago, standing on the edge of the clearing staring at us as we got ourselves ready to leave. He’d been with a lot of other Marines there, but I’d seen him much more distinctly than the others without realizing or admitting it. The others had been looking at us too, with amusement or curiosity or envy (we were splitting, casualties and correspondents this way out, we were going to Danang), they were all more or less friendly, but this one was different, I’d seen it, known it and passed it over, but not really. He was walking by us now, and I saw that he had a deep, running blister that seemed to have opened and eaten away much of his lower lip. That wasn’t the thing that had made him stand out before, though. If I’d noticed it at all, it might have made him seem a little more wretched than the others, but nothing more. He stopped for a second and looked at us, and he smiled some terrifying, evil smile, his look turned now to the purest hatred.

“You fucking guys,” he said. “You guys are
crazy!”

There was the most awful urgency to the way he said it. He was still glaring, I expected him to raise a finger and touch each of us with destruction and decay, and I realized that after all this time, the war still offered at least one thing that I had to turn my eyes from. I had seen it before and hoped never to see it again, I had misunderstood it and been hurt by it, I thought I had finally worked it out for good and I was looking at it now, knowing what it meant and feeling as helpless under it this last time as I had the first.

All right, yes, it had been a groove being a war correspondent, hanging out with the grunts and getting close to the war, touching it, losing yourself in it and trying yourself against it. I had always wanted that, never mind why, it had just been a thing of mine, the way this movie is a thing of mine, and I’d done it; I was in many ways brother to these poor, tired grunts, I knew what they knew now, I’d done it and it was really something. Everywhere I’d gone, there had always been Marines or soldiers who would tell me what the Avenger had told Krynski,
You’re all right, man, you guys are cool, you got balls
. They didn’t always know what to think about you or what to say to you, they’d sometimes call you “Sir” until you had to beg them to stop, they’d sense the insanity of your position as terrified volunteer-reporter and it would seize them with the giggles and even respect. If they dug you, they always saw that you knew that, and when you choppered out they’d say goodbye, wish you luck. They’d even thank you, some of them, and what could you say to that?

And always, they would ask you with an emotion whose intensity would shock you to please tell it, because they really did have the feeling that it wasn’t being told for them, that they were going through all of this and that somehow no one back in the World knew about it. They may have been a
bunch of dumb, brutal killer kids (a lot of correspondents privately felt that), but they were smart enough to know that much. There was a Marine in Hue who had come after me as I walked toward the truck that would take me to the airstrip, he’d been locked in that horror for nearly two weeks while I’d shuttled in and out for two or three days at a time. We knew each other by now, and when he caught up with me he grabbed my sleeve so violently that I thought he was going to accuse me or, worse, try to stop me from going. His face was all but blank with exhaustion, but he had enough feeling left to say, “Okay, man, you go on, you go on out of here you cocksucker, but I mean it, you tell it! You tell it, man. If you don’t tell it …”

What a time they were having there, it had all broken down, one battalion had taken 60 percent casualties, all the original NCO’s were gone, the grunts were telling their officers to go die, to go fuck themselves, to go find some other fools to run up those streets awhile, it was no place where I’d have to tell anyone not to call me “Sir.” They understood that, they understood a lot more than I did, but nobody hated me there, not even when I was leaving. Three days later I came back and the fighting had dropped off, the casualties were down to nothing and the same Marine flashed me a victory sign that had nothing to do with the Marine Corps or the fading battle or the American flag that had gone up on the Citadel’s south wall the day before, he slapped me on the back and poured me a drink from a bottle he’d found in one of the hootches somewhere. Even the ones who preferred not to be in your company, who despised what your work required or felt that you took your living from their deaths, who believed that all of us were traitors and liars and the creepiest kinds of parasites, even they would cut back at the last and make their one concession to what there was in
us that we ourselves loved most: “I got to give it to you, you guys got balls.” Maybe they meant just that and nothing more, we had our resources and we made enough out of that to keep us going, turning the most grudging admissions into decorations for valor, making it all all right again.

But there was often that bad, bad moment to recall, the look that made you look away, and in its hateful way it was the purest single thing I’d ever known. There was no wonder left in it anywhere, no amusement, it came out of nothing so messy as morality or prejudice, it had no motive, no conscious source. You would feel it coming out to you from under a poncho hood or see it in a wounded soldier staring up at you from a chopper floor, from men who were very scared or who had just lost a friend, from some suffering apparition of a grunt whose lip had been torn open by the sun, who just couldn’t make it in that heat.

At first, I got it all mixed up, I didn’t understand and I felt sorry for myself, misjudged. “Well fuck you too,” I’d think. “It could have been me just as easily, I take chances too, can’t you see that?” And then I realized that that was exactly what it was all about, it explained itself as easily as that, another of the war’s dark revelations. They weren’t judging me, they weren’t reproaching me, they didn’t even mind me, not in any personal way. They only hated me, hated me the way you’d hate any hopeless fool who would put himself through this thing when he had choices, any fool who had no more need of his life than to play with it in this way.

“You guys are
crazy!”
that Marine had said, and I know that when we flew off of Mutter’s Ridge that afternoon he stood there for a long time and watched us out of sight with the same native loathing he’d shown us before, turning finally to whoever was around, saying it maybe to himself, getting out what I’d actually heard said once when a jeepload of correspondents had just driven away, leaving me there
alone, one rifleman turning to another and giving us all his hard, cold wish:

“Those fucking guys,” he’d said. “I hope they die.”

II

Name me someone that’s not a parasite
,

And I’ll go out and say a prayer for him
.

—BOB
DYLAN
, “Visions of Johanna”

I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn’t done that to them. Most combat troops stopped thinking of the war as an adventure after their first few firefights, but there were always the ones who couldn’t let that go, these few who were up there doing numbers for the cameras. A lot of correspondents weren’t much better. We’d all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult. The first few times that I got fired at or saw combat deaths, nothing really happened, all the responses got locked in my head. It was the same familiar violence, only moved over to another medium; some kind of jungle play with giant helicopters and fantastic special effects, actors lying out there in canvas body bags waiting for the scene to end so they could get up again and walk
it off. But that was some scene (you found out), there was no cutting it.

A lot of things had to be unlearned before you could learn anything at all, and even after you knew better you couldn’t avoid the ways in which things got mixed, the war itself with those parts of the war that were just like the movies, just like
The Quiet American
or
Catch-22
(a Nam standard because it said that in a war everybody thinks that everybody else is crazy), just like all that combat footage from television (“We’re taking fire from the treeline!” “Where?” “There!”
“Where?”
“Over
there!”
“Over
WHERE
?” “Over
THERE
!!” Flynn heard that go on for fifteen minutes once; we made it an epiphany), your vision blurring, images jumping and falling as though they were being received by a dropped camera, hearing a hundred horrible sounds at once—screams, sobs, hysterical shouting, a throbbing inside your head that threatened to take over, quavering voices trying to get the orders out, the dulls and sharps of weapons going off (Lore; When they’re near they whistle, when they’re really near they crack), the thud of helicopter rotors, the tinny, clouded voice coming over the radio, “Uh, that’s a Rog, we mark your position, over.” And out. Far out.