Dispatches (29 page)

We shared a great many things: field gear, grass, whiskey, girls (that Men Without Women trip got old all the time), sources, information, hunches, tips, prestige (during my first days there bureau chiefs from
Life
and CBS took me around to introduce everyone they could think of, and somebody did as much for other new arrivals), we even shared each other’s
luck when our own seemed gone. I was no more superstitious than anyone else in Vietnam, I was very superstitious, and there were always a few who seemed so irrefutably charmed that nothing could make me picture them lying dead there; having someone like that with you on an operation could become more important than any actual considerations about what might be waiting on the ground for you. I doubt whether anything else could be as parasitic as that, or as intimate.

And by some equation that was so wonderful that I’ve never stopped to work it out, the best and the bravest correspondents were also usually the most compassionate, the ones who were most in touch with what they were doing. Greenway was like that, and so were Jack Laurence and Keith Kay, who worked together as a reporter-camera team for CBS for nearly two years. And there was Larry Burrows, who had been photographing the war for
Life
since 1962, a tall, deliberate Englishman of about forty with one of the most admirable reputations of all the Vietnam correspondents. We were together on one of the lz’s that had been built for the operation that was supposedly relieving Khe Sanh, and Burrows had run down to take pictures of a Chinook that was coming in to land. The wind was strong enough to send tarmac strips flying fifty feet across the lz and he ran through it to work, photographing the crew, getting the soldiers coming down the incline to board the chopper, getting the kids throwing off the mailbags and cartons of rations and ammunition, getting the three wounded being lifted carefully on board, turning again to get the six dead in their closed body bags, then the rise of the chopper (the wind now was strong enough to tear papers out of your hand), photographing the grass blown flat all around him and the flying debris, taking one picture each of the chopper rearing, settling and departing. When it was gone he looked at me, and he seemed
to be in the most open distress. “Sometimes one feels like such a bastard,” he said.

And that was one more thing we shared. We had no secrets about it or the ways it could make you feel. We all talked about it at times, some talked about it too much, a few never seemed to talk about anything else. That was a drag, but it was all in the house; you only minded it when it came from outside. All kinds of thieves and killers managed to feel sanctimonious around us; battalion commanders, civilian businessmen, even the grunts, until they realized how few of us were making any real money in it. There’s no way around it, if you photographed a dead Marine with a poncho over his face and got something for it, you were
some
kind of parasite. But what were you if you pulled the poncho back first to make a better shot, and did that in front of his friends? Some other kind of parasite, I suppose. Then what were you if you stood there watching it, making a note to remember it later in case you might want to use it? Those combinations were infinite, you worked them out, and they involved only a small part of what we were thought to be. We were called thrill freaks, death-wishers, wound-seekers, war-lovers, hero-worshipers, closet queens, dope addicts, low-grade alcoholics, ghouls, communists, seditionists, more nasty things than I can remember. There were people in the military who never forgave General Westmoreland for not imposing restrictions against us when he’d had the chance in the early days. There were officers and a lot of seemingly naïve troops who believed that if it were not for us, there would be no war now, and I was never able to argue with any of them on that point. A lot of the grunts had some of that sly, small-town suspicion of the press, but at least nobody under the rank of captain ever asked me whose side I was on, told me to get with the program, jump on the team, come in for the Big Win. Sometimes they were just stupid, sometimes it came
about because they had such love for their men, but sooner or later all of us heard one version or another of “My Marines are winning this war, and you people are losing it for us in your papers,” often spoken in an almost friendly way, but with the teeth shut tight behind the smiles. It was creepy, being despised in such casual, offhanded ways. And there were plenty of people who believed, finally, that we were nothing more than glorified war profiteers. And perhaps we were, those of us who didn’t get killed or wounded or otherwise fucked up.

Just in the regular course of things, a lot of correspondents took close calls. Getting scratched was one thing, it didn’t mean that you’d come as close as you could have, it could have been closer without your even knowing it, like an early-morning walk I took once from the hilltop position of a Special Forces camp where I’d spent the night, down to the teamhouse at the foot of the hill, where I was going to have some coffee. I walked off the main trail onto a smaller trail and followed it until I saw the house and a group of eight giggling, wide-eyed Vietnamese mercenaries, Mikes, pointing at me and talking very excitedly. They all grabbed for me at once when I reached the bottom, and as it was explained to me a moment later, I’d just come down a trail which the Special Forces had rigged out with more than twenty booby traps, any one of which could have taken me off. (Any One Of Which ran through my head for days afterward.) If you went out often, just as surely as you’d eventually find yourself in a position where survival etiquette insisted that you take a weapon (“You know how this thang works ’n’ airthang?” a young sergeant had to ask me once, and I’d had to nod as he threw it to me and said, “Then git some!”, the American banzai), it was unavoidable that you’d find yourself
almost getting killed. You expected something like that to happen, but not exactly that, not until events made things obvious for you. A close call was like a loss of noncombatant status: you weren’t especially proud of it, you merely reported it to a friend and then stopped talking about it, knowing in the first place that the story would go around from there, and that there wasn’t really anything to be said about it anyway. But that didn’t stop you from thinking about it a lot, doing a lot of hideous projecting from it, forming a system of pocket metaphysics around it, getting it down to where you found yourself thinking about which
kind
of thing was closer: that walk down the hill, the plane you missed by minutes which blew apart on the Khe Sanh airstrip an hour later and fifty miles away, or the sniper round that kissed the back of your flak jacket as you grunted and heaved yourself over a low garden wall in Hue. And then your
Dawn Patrol
fantasy would turn very ugly, events again and again not quite what you had expected, and you’d realize that nothing ever came closer to death than the death of a good friend.

In the first week of May 1968, the Viet Cong staged a brief, vicious offensive against Saigon, taking and holding small positions on the fringes of Cholon and defending parts of the outlying areas that could be retaken only from the Y Bridge, from the racetrack grounds, from Plantation Road and the large French graveyard that ran for several hundred yards into a grove and a complex of Viet Cong bunkers. The offensive’s value as pure revolutionary terror aside (those results were always incalculable, our good gear notwithstanding), it was more or less what MACV said it was, costly to the VC and largely a failure. It cost the Friendlies too (between Saigon and the A Shau, it was the week that saw more Americans killed than any other in the war), a lot more damage was done to the city’s outskirts, more homes were bombed out. The papers called it either the May Offensive,
she Mini-Offensive (you know I’m not making that up), or the Second Wave; it was the long-awaited Battle of Algiers-in-Saigon that had been manically predicted by the Americans for practically every weekend since the Tet Offensive had ended. In its early hours, five correspondents took a jeep into Cholon, past the first files of refugees (many of whom warned them to turn back), and into a Viet Cong ambush. One of them escaped (according to his own story) by playing dead and then running like an animal into the crowds of Cholon. He said that they had all yelled, “Bao Chi!” a number of times, but that they had been machine-gunned anyway.

It was more like death by misadventure than anything else, as if that mattered, and of the four dead correspondents, only one had been a stranger. Two of the others were good acquaintances, and the fourth was a friend. His name was John Cantwell, an Australian who worked for
Time
, and he had been one of the first friends I’d made in Vietnam. He was a kind, congenial mock-goat whose talk was usually about the most complex, unimaginable lecheries, architectural constructions of monumental erotic fantasies. He had a Chinese wife and two children in Hong Kong (he spoke fluent Chinese, he’d take it through the Cholon bars for us sometimes), and he was one of the few I knew who really hated Vietnam and the war, every bit of it. He was staying only long enough to earn the money to settle some debts, and then he was going to leave for good. He was a good, gentle, hilarious man, and to this day I can’t help thinking that he wasn’t
supposed
to get killed in Vietnam, getting killed in a war was not John’s scene, he’d made no room for that the way some others had. A lot of people I had liked a lot, GI’s and even some correspondents, had already died, but when Cantwell got murdered it did more than sadden and shock me. Because he was a friend, his death changed all the odds.

In that one brief period of less than two weeks it became a war of our convenience, a horrible convenience, but ours. We could jump into jeeps and minimokes at nine or ten and drive a few kilometers to where the fighting was, run around in it for a few hours and come back early. We’d sit on the Continental terrace and wave each other in, get stoned early and stay up late, since there was no question of 5:30 wakeups. We’d been scattered all over Vietnam for months now, friends running into friends now and again, and this put everyone together. There was no other time when that was needed so badly. A day after John and the others died, a strange, death-charged kid named Charlie Eggleston, a UPI photographer, got killed at the Cemetery, reportedly while returning fire at a Viet Cong position. (He willed everything he had to Vietnamese charities.) A Japanese photographer was killed later that same day, a Brazilian lost a leg the day after that and somewhere in there another correspondent was killed; by then everyone had stopped counting and worked at keeping it away. Again in the Cemetery, a bullet tore through Co Rentmeister’s hand and lodged under the eye of another photographer, Art Greenspahn. A Frenchman named Christien Simon-Pietrie (known as “Frenchy” to his movie-warped friends) was hit above the eye by some shrapnel from the same round which crippled General Loan; not a serious wound but one more out of too many, more than correspondents had ever received at one time. By the fifth day, eight had died and more than a dozen others had been wounded. We were driving toward the racetrack when an MP stepped in front of our car to ask for identification.

“Listen,” he said, “I saw those four other guys and I never want to see any more like that. You know those guys? Then what the fuck do you want to go in there for? Don’t you people ever learn? I mean, I
saw
those guys, believe me, it ain’t worth it.”

He was firm about not letting us through, but we insisted and he finally gave up.

“Well, I can’t really stop you. You
know
I can’t stop you. But if I could, I would. You wouldn’t be driving up to no shit like those four guys.”

In the early evenings we’d do exactly what correspondents did in those terrible stories that would circulate in 1964 and 1965, we’d stand on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel having drinks and watch the airstrikes across the river, so close that a good telephoto lens would pick up the markings on the planes. There were dozens of us up there, like aristocrats viewing Borodino from the heights, at least as detached about it as that even though many of us had been caught under those things from time to time. There’d be a lot of women up there, a few of them correspondents (like Cathy Leroy, the French photographer, and Jurati Kazikas, a correspondent of great, fashion-model beauty), most of them the wives and girls of reporters. Some people had tried hard to believe that Saigon was just another city they’d come to live in; they’d formed civilized social routines, tested restaurants, made and kept appointments, given parties, had love affairs. Many had even brought their wives with them, and more often than not it worked out badly. Very few of the women really liked Saigon, and the rest became like most Western women in Asia: bored, distracted, frightened, unhappy and, if left there too long, fiercely frantic. And now, for the second time in three months, Saigon had become unsafe. Rockets were dropping a block from the best hotels, the White Mice (the Saigon police) were having brief, hysterical firefights with shadows, you could hear it going on as you dropped off to sleep; it was no longer simply a stinking, corrupt, exhausting foreign city.

At night, the rooms of the Continental would fill with correspondents drifting in and out for a drink or a smoke
before bed, some talk and some music, the Rolling Stones singing, “It’s so very lonely, You’re two thousand light years from home,” or “Please come see me in your Citadel,” that word putting a chill in the room. Whenever one of us came back from an R&R we’d bring records, sounds were as precious as water: Hendrix, the Airplane, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, all the things that hadn’t even started when we’d left the States. Wilson Pickett, Junior Walker,
John Wesley Harding
, one recording worn thin and replaced within a month, the Grateful Dead (the name was enough), the Doors, with their distant, icy sound. It seemed like such wintry music; you could rest your forehead against the window where the air-conditioner had cooled the glass, close your eyes and feel the heat pressing against you from outside. Flares dropped over possible targets three blocks away, and all night long, armed jeeps and massive convoys moved down Tu Do Street toward the river.