A Rumor of War (23 page)

The shattering or fragmenting effect of high explosive occasionally caused semantic difficulties in reporting injuries of men who had undergone extreme mutilation. It was a rare phenomenon, but some marines had been so badly mangled there seemed to be no words to describe what had happened to them. Sometime that year, Lieutenant Colonel Meyers, one of the regiment’s battalion commanders, stepped on a booby-trapped 155-mm shell. They did not find enough of him to fill a willy-peter bag, a waterproof sack a little larger than a shopping bag. In effect, Colonel Meyers had been disintegrated, but the official report read something like “traumatic amputation, both feet; traumatic amputation, both legs and arms; multiple lacerations to abdomen; through-and-through fragment wounds, head and chest.” Then came the notation “killed in action.”

The battalion adjutants phoned in reports of their units’ casualties, and I relayed them to the division combat casualty reporting center. That done, I filed copies of the reports in their respective folders, one labeled CASUALTIES: HOSTILE ACTION and the other CASUALTIES: NON HOSTILE. I believe the two were kept separate because men killed or wounded by enemy fire were automatically awarded Purple Hearts, while those hit by friendly fire were not. That was the only real difference. A man killed by friendly fire (another misleading term, because fire is never friendly if it hits you) was just as dead as one killed by the enemy. And there was often an accidental quality even about battle casualties. Stepping on a mine or stumbling over the trip wire of a booby trap is a mishap, really, not unlike walking in front of a car while crossing a busy street.

Once the reports were filed, I brought Colonel Wheeler’s Scoreboard up to date. Covered with acetate and divided into vertical and horizontal columns, the board hung behind the executive officer’s desk, in the wood-framed tent where he and the colonel made their headquarters. The vertical columns were headed, from left to right, KIA, WIA, DOW (died of wounds), NONHOST, VC-KIA, VC-WIA, and VC-POW. The horizontal columns were labeled with the numerical designations of the units belonging to, or attached to, the regiment: 1/3 for 1st Battalion, 3d Marines, 2/3 for 2d Battalion, and so forth. In the first four vertical columns were written the number of casualties a particular unit had suffered, in the last three the number it had inflicted on the enemy. After an action, I went into the colonel’s quarters, erased the old figures and wrote in the new with a grease pencil. The colonel, an easygoing man in most instances, was adamant about maintaining an accurate Scoreboard: high-ranking visitors from Danang and Saigon often dropped in unannounced to see how the regiment was performing. And the measures of a unit’s performance in Vietnam were not the distances it had advanced or the number of victories it had won, but the number of enemy soldiers it had killed (the body count) and the proportion between that number and the number of its own dead (the kill ratio). The Scoreboard thus allowed the colonel to keep track of the battalions and companies under his command and, quickly and crisply, to rattle off impressive figures to visiting dignitaries. My unsung task in that statistical war was to do the arithmetic. If I had been an agent of death as a platoon leader, as a staff officer I was death’s bookkeeper.

Sometimes I had to verify the body counts. Field commanders occasionally gave in to the temptation to exaggerate the number of Viet Cong their units had killed. So the bodies were brought to headquarters whenever possible, and I counted them to make sure there were as many as had been reported. That was always pleasant because the corpses had begun to decompose by the time they reached headquarters. Decomposition sets in quickly in that climate. Most pleasant of all was the job of identifying our own dead. The battalion adjutants usually did that, but whenever there was confusion about the names of the dead or when the descriptions of their wounds were incorrectly reported to regiment, I had to do it. The dead were kept in a fly tent adjacent to the division hospital. They were laid out on canvas stretchers, covered with ponchos or with rubber body-bags, yellow casualty tags tied to their boots—or to their shirts, if their legs had been blown off. One of the simplest ways to identify a dead man was to match his face against his photograph in a service record book. Some of them did not have faces, in which case we used dental records, since teeth are almost as reliable a means of identification as fingerprints. The latter were used only when the casualty had been decapitated or his jaw shattered to bits.

The interesting thing was how the dead looked so much alike. Black men, white men, yellow men, they all looked remarkably the same. Their skin had a tallowlike texture, making them appear like wax dummies of themselves; the pupils of their eyes were a washed-out gray, and their mouths were opened wide, as if death had caught them in the middle of a scream.

They smelled the same, too. The stench of death is unique, probably the most offensive on earth, and once you have smelled it, you can never again believe with conviction that man is the highest being in earthly creation. The corpses I have had to smell as a soldier and war correspondent smelled much worse than all the fish, birds, and deer I have scaled, skinned, or gutted as a sportsman. Because the odor of death is so strong, you can never get used to it, as you can get used to the sight of death. And the odor is always the same. It might vary in intensity, depending on the state of decomposition, but if two people have been dead for the same length of time and under the same conditions, there will be no difference in the way they smell. I first made that observation in Vietnam in 1965, when I noticed that the stench of a dead American made me just as sick as that of a dead Vietnamese. Since then, I have made it again and again in other wars in other places, on the Golan Heights and in the Sinai Desert, in Cyprus and Lebanon, and, coming full circle back to Vietnam, in the streets of Xuan Loc, a city much fought over during the North Vietnamese offensive in 1975. All those dead people, Americans, North and South Vietnamese, Arabs and Israelis, Turks and Greeks, Moslems and Christians, men, women, and children, officer and enlisted, smelled equally bad.

My first day on the job as a casualty reporting officer was June 21, 1965. Early that morning, a patrol from 2d Battalion fought a small action with the VC near Iron Bridge Ridge. Around noon, my field phone buzzed; it was the 2d Battalion’s adjutant reporting four friendly casualties, one dead, three wounded. I put some hostile-action forms on my desk and said, “Okay, go ahead.” One by one, beginning with the KIA, he gave me their names and service numbers and the descriptions of their wounds. There was a lot of static on the line, and he had to spell the names phonetically: “Atherton. Alpha Tango Hotel Echo Romeo Tango Oscar November. First name John. Middle initial double-u, as in Whiskey… gunshot wound upper body… killed in action while on patrol vicinity of Danang…” His voice had the rote, practiced sound of a radio announcer reading the stock market results.

I wrote quickly. It was extremely hot in the tent. Sweat dribbled off the tip of my nose and onto the forms, smudging the print. The forms stuck like flypaper to the forearm of my writing hand. One of the reports became badly smeared, and I asked the adjutant to read the information back to me. He was halfway through when the switchboard operator broke in. “Crowd One Alpha”—that was my new code-name—“this is Crowd Operator breaking… breaking… breaking.” That meant he was going to cut me off to clear the line. “Crowd Operator, this is One Alpha working working,” I said, meaning I had not yet completed my call. “One Alpha this is Crowd Operator. Cannot hear you. Breaking.” There was a click. “You dumb son of a bitch,” I yelled into the dead phone. Sweating heavily, I cranked the handle of the EE-8. After ten or fifteen minutes, the operator answered and reconnected me to 2d Battalion. Their adjutant came back on the line and picked up where he had left off. “… Multiple fragment wounds, lower half of both legs. WIA, evacuated…”

When the reports were called into division and filed, I went over to operations to find out how many enemy casualties there had been. Webb Harrisson, one of the assistant operations officers, leafed through a small pile of messages. “Here it is,” he said. “Four Charlies, all KIA.” I walked into the colonel’s tent and made the proper changes on the Scoreboard with my grease pencil. The Ex-O, Lieutenant Colonel Brooks, looked at the figures. He was a bald, stocky man whom the troops had nicknamed Elmer Fudd because he resembled the comic-book character.

“Keeping the old board up to date, are you, lieutenant?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said, thinking, What the hell does it look like I’m doing?

“How recent are those figures?”

“As of this morning, sir.”

“Very good. Colonel Wheeler is giving a briefing for General Thompson this afternoon and he’ll want the latest casualty statistics.

“Yes, sir. Who is General Thompson?”

“He’s from MACV.” Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Westmoreland’s headquarters.

Sometime later, a jeep drove into headquarters carrying the dead Viet Cong and two civilians who had been injured in the fire-fight. The civilians, both women, rode in the back of the jeep. One was old and frail-looking, and had minor scratches on her arms. The other, in her early or mid-thirties, lay on her stomach in the back seat. Pieces of shrapnel had lodged in her buttocks. The bodies were on a trailer hitched to the jeep.

The driver parked behind the adjutant’s tent and unhitched the trailer. It tipped forward, the hitch clanging against the ground and the bodies tumbling over on top of each other. A half-severed arm, with a piece of bone protruding whitely through the flesh, flopped over the side of the trailer, then flopped back in again. Stretcher-bearers came up and carried the young woman to the regimental aid station. The old woman shuffled along behind, spitting blackish-red betel-nut juice into the dust.

I checked to make sure there were four bodies. There appeared to be. It was difficult to tell. Tossed around in the trailer, they had become entangled, one barely distinguishable from another. Three of them were entangled, anyway. The fourth did not have arms below the elbow, and his legs had been shot or blown off completely. The others had been mangled in other places. One had been hit in the head, his brains and the white cartilage that had moored them to his skull spilling onto the bottom of the trailer. Another, hit in the midsection, had been turned inside out, the slick, blue and greenish brown mass of his intestines bulging out of him. There was a deep, dark red pool of blood at the low end of the trailer. I turned away from the sight and told the driver to get the bodies out of there.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, starting up his jeep. “I was told to leave the bodies here. I’ve got to get back to the motor pool.”

“Who the hell told you to leave the bodies here?”

The driver shrugged. “Some officer told me, lieutenant. I’ve got to get back to the motor pool.”

“All right, shove off.”

The marine drove away. I went into the tent and told Kazmarack to take the corpses to the cemetery where the enemy dead were buried. Kazmarack called it the body dump, and it was more that than a proper cemetery.

Captain Anderson said, “Leave the bodies here, Mister Caputo.”

“Sir, they’re going to smell pretty bad in another few hours.”

“The colonel wants the bodies here.”

“What the hell for?”

“He wants the clerks around here to look at them. There isn’t much action around here, so I guess he wants them to get used to the sight of blood.”

“You’re kidding, captain.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, I don’t think much of that idea. Christ, let’s just bury the poor bastards.”

“Lieutenant, I think what you think doesn’t make much difference. The Old Man wants these people to get used to the sight of blood, and that’s what they’re going to do.”

“Well, there’s plenty of blood in there, but I’m not sure they’re going to get used to it. Plenty of other stuff, too, guts and brains.”

“I’ll tell you when to get rid of the bodies.”

“Yes, sir.”

So the corpses were left lying in the sun. As the colonel had ordered, the headquarters troops were marched past the trailer to look at the dead Viet Cong. They filed by like visitors passing before an exhibit in a museum. The sun burned down, and the bodies began to smell in the heat. The odor, at first faint because the VC had been dead only a short time, was like cooking gas escaping from an oven burner. One by one, the marines walked up to the trailer, looked into it, made some desperate jokes when they saw what was inside or said nothing at all, then walked back to their desks and typewriters. The sun burned hotter in the empty sky; the smell grew stronger. It blew into the adjutant’s tent on a puff of breeze, the cooking-gas odor and a stench that reminded me of hydrogen sulfide used in high-school chemistry classes. Well, that was all the corpses were, masses of chemicals and decaying matter. Looking outside, I was pleased to see that the show was almost over; the marines at the end of the line were filing past the trailer. Because of the smell, they kept their distance. The smell was not unbearable; several hours would pass before it got that bad. It was, however, strong enough to prevent these men at the end of the line from lingering, as those at the front of the line had done, thus depriving them of the chance to look at the corpses long enough to become accustomed to the sight of blood. They just gave the bodies a brief glance, then moved quickly from the trailer and the growing stench.

The procession ended. Kazmarack and another clerk, Corporal Stasek, hitched up the trailer and drove off toward Danang. Anderson left for a staff conference that had been called in preparation for General Thompson’s visit. Ten minutes later, he came lumbering back into the tent, his red, jowly face pouring sweat.

“Mister Caputo, we’ve got to get those bodies back here.”

I looked at him incredulously.

“The Old Man wants the bodies back here so he can show them to the general when he briefs him,” Anderson said.

“Stasek and Kazmarack are gone, sir. They’re probably in Danang by now.”