A Rumor of War (26 page)

The greatest tragedy is war, but so long as there is mankind, there will be war.

—Jomini

The Art of War

There was no heavy fighting around Danang for the rest of that summer. During the daytime, there did not seem to be any war at all. The rice paddies lay quietly in the sun. They were beautiful at that time of year, a bright green dappled with the darker green of the palm groves shading the villages. The peasants in the villages in the secure areas went on living lives whose ancient rhythms had hardly been disturbed by the war. In the early mornings, small boys led the water buffalo from their pens to the river wallows and farmers came out to till the fields. They plodded for hours behind wooden, ox-drawn plows, tilling the sunbaked hardness out of the earth. In the afternoons, when it became too hot to work, they quit the fields and returned to the cool dimness of their thatch huts. It was like a ritual: when the heat got too intense, they unhitched their plows and filed down the dikes toward the villages, their conical hats yellow against the green of the paddies. A wind usually sprang up in the afternoon, and in it the long shoots of maturing rice made a luxuriant rippling. It was a pleasant sight, that expanse of jade-colored rice stretching out as far as the foothills and the mountains blue in the distance. At dusk, the buffalo were driven back to the pens. With the small boys walking beside them and whacking their haunches with bamboo sticks, they came down the dusty roads, their horned heads swaying and their flanks caked with the mud of the wallows.

The war started at night. The eight-inch and one-fifty-five-millimeter guns commenced their regular shellings, and the VC began their sniping and mortaring. Our patrols slipped down darkened trails to set ambushes or to be ambushed themselves. On the perimeters, sentries listened and looked into a blackness lighted now and then by dull flares. They waited, alternately bored and nervous, for the infiltrators who sometimes probed our lines to lob grenades over the wire or spray a position with carbine fire. They came in twos and threes, and that is how they died and how our own men died—in twos and threes. We fought no great battles. There was no massive hemorrhaging, just a slow, steady trickle of blood drawn in a series of ambushes and fire-fights. Although there was more action than in the spring, contacts with the enemy were still rare. Almost every hour of every night the same reports came in over the radios in the operations tent. They came in from outposts and patrols, and we could hear them whenever we stood watch, twenty different voices saying the same thing, like a choir reciting a chant: “Contact negative. All secure. Situation remains the same.” When contacts did occur, they were violent, but nothing ever really changed. The regiment sat in the same positions it had occupied since April, and the details of the surrounding landscape became so familiar that it seemed we had been there all our lives. Men were killed and wounded, and our patrols kept going out to fight in the same places they had fought the week before and the week before that. The situation remained the same. Only the numbers on the colonel’s Scoreboard changed.

The numbers were not all that changed. I was twenty-four when the summer began; by the time it ended, I was much older than I am now. Chronologically, my age had advanced three months, emotionally about three decades. I was somewhere in my middle fifties, that depressing period when a man’s friends begin dying off and each death reminds him of the nearness of his own.

Our men did not die in great numbers. And because they died as individuals, I remember them as individuals and not as statistics. I remember Corporal Brian Gauthier, who, as one cynical old campaigner put it, “won himself two Navy Crosses: the blue and gold one they pin on you and the white, wooden one they put over you.” Gauthier, a twenty-one-year-old squad leader in A Company, was mortally wounded in an ambush on July 11. They gave him the medal because he continued to lead his men under heavy enemy fire until, to quote from the citation, “he succumbed to his wounds.” Later, the regimental HQ camp was named for him. That was nice of them, but they did not give any medals to, nor name anything for, the grenadier who died in the same ambush. He did not have the chance to do anything heroic because the mine he stepped on caused the sympathetic detonation of his 40-mm grenades, killing him instantly. “Sympathetic detonation” was the phrase I used in the casualty report. It was another one of those dry, inaccurate military euphemisms. It meant that the explosion of the mine had caused his grenades to go off at the same time, and I could see nothing sympathetic about that.

I remember Frank Reasoner, who also died a hero’s death, and Bill Parsons, who did not. I saw Reasoner in the operations tent the day after Gauthier was killed. I had just finished filling out reports for seven marines who had been killed or wounded by mortar fire that morning. Reasoner was sitting in the tent smoking his battered, bent pipe and looking at the map. A short, stocky man, Reasoner was twenty-nine—old for a first lieutenant—an ex-enlisted man who had worked his way up through the ranks, a husband and a father. I liked him and his air of quiet maturity. We split a beer and talked about the patrol he was taking out in the afternoon. His company was going into the paddy lands below Charlie Ridge, flat, dangerous country with a lot of tree lines and hedgerows. Reasoner finished his beer and left. A few hours later, a helicopter brought him back in; a machine gun had stitched him across the belly, and the young corporal who had pulled Reasoner’s body out of the line of fire said, “He should be covered up. Will somebody get a blanket? My skipper’s dead.” Out on the patrol, his company had run into a couple of enemy machine-gun nests. He had charged one of the guns single-handedly, knocking it out of action. Then, having fired his carbine at the second gun, he had run to pick up one of his wounded and was killed. They gave Frank Reasoner the Congressional Medal of Honor, named a camp
and
a ship after him, and sent the medal and a letter of condolence to his widow.

Parsons, a lieutenant in E Company, 2d Battalion, was killed two nights later by one of our own 4.2-inch mortar shells. It fell on his platoon while he was briefing them in a “rear area” base camp. The marines had been crowded close together, and since a four-deuce is a fairly large shell, there were a number of casualties. At HQ, we had problems making out accurate casualty reports; no one knew exactly who had been killed and who had been wounded. Captain Anderson said I would again have to go to the division hospital to straighten things out. I begged off, saying that I had seen enough dead bodies to know that I did not want to see any more. Anderson said he would go. When he got back, he looked a little strange and said nothing except to read aloud the notes he had made at the hospital. He had made good, thorough notes: Parson’s legs had been scythed off at the hip, two more men had been killed, eight others seriously wounded, I filled out the forms while he read, then filed them in the nonhostile casualties folder. Then Anderson flipped his notebook on his desk and said, “It looked like a butcher shop in there.”

I also remember the night nearly two weeks later when a squad of VC sappers got through the wire of an engineer battalion’s camp near the CP. A lot of flares and grenades were going off and bullets were splattering the dust around the junior officers’ tent. I tore through my mosquito net, grabbed my carbine, tripped, fell against the corner of my footlocker, and knocked myself out. I lay unconscious for a few moments. Coming to, I crawled into a trench where Mora, the assistant intelligence officer, stood wearing nothing but a pistol belt. Bart Francis, another lieutenant on the staff, looked at him and said, “Really, Roland, that’s hardly proper.” A little giddy from the knock on the head, I laughed hysterically. An exalted Schwartz—the Prussian in Schwartz came out in combat—was meanwhile yelling orders to groups of confused enlisted men. Well, the more power to him if he could tell what was going on. I couldn’t, though it was a moonlit night made brighter by the flares. Small-arms fire had broken out along our perimeter; apparently another sapper squad was trying to breach the CP’s wire. The VC were shooting at the marines, the marines at the VC or at other marines or at nothing at all. In the blanched light we saw a rifleman about twenty or thirty yards away from our trench. Crouched low, he ran into the cross fire and went down, falling as if he had slipped on a patch of ice. His legs flew out and he landed heavily on his back and lay still. When the firing died down, another officer and I climbed out of the trench and, calling for a corpsman, ran over to the marine. He did not need a corpsman. His eyes were wide but not seeing, and one of his legs, half severed at the thigh, was bent under him in what looked like a contortionist’s trick.

There are other memories. Memories of Nick Pappas, a college football star who tripped a mine that put him in a wheelchair for nearly two years and ended his football-playing days for good; of the young officer in the tank battalion attached to our regiment, wounded in the leg and side by an AK-47, dying slowly of gangrene in a hospital in the Philippines, the doctors amputating the infected leg bit by bit until they reached the upper thigh and could amputate no more; of the rainy night I went to the hospital to identify three marines from my old platoon, Devlin, Lockhart, and Bryce.

They had been blown up in a listening-post bunker forward of C Company’s lines. I recall that night clearly, more clearly than I care to. Kazmarack and I pulled up to the hospital, parking the jeep beside a tarpaulin that had been stretched over three tables. A light bulb hung over each of the tables. Outside, a power generator hummed steadily and the wet grass sparkled in the glare of the lights. Corporal Gunderson and another marine stood outside, their shoulders hunched against the rain. Gunderson, a squad leader in C Company, said he had found the bodies and had brought them to the hospital.

Taking my notebook from its plastic wrapper, I ducked under the tarpaulin, which was attached to the tent like an awning. A Navy doctor wearing skintight latex gloves came from the tent, accompanied by a corpsman who held a clipboard. Other corpsmen emerged, carrying the bodies on stretchers, which they lifted onto the tables. Wet, muddy ponchos covered the bodies, except for their boots. There were three corpses, but I saw only five boots. Looking at me, the doctor asked who I was and what I was doing there. I explained that I had come to verify the identities of the dead men and to make a report on the extent of their injuries.

“Okay, that’s about what I have to do. I understand this might have been an accident.”

“We’re not sure, yet, sir,” Gunderson said, stepping inside. “The comm wire into their bunker was burned. Maybe lightning hit it and the current set off their grenades. They had about ten grenades in there. Maybe a VC threw a grenade inside, through the firing slit, and set the grenades off. He could have sneaked up easy in this rain.”

Nodding, the doctor pulled the poncho off of Devlin’s body.

“All right, can either of you tell me who this is?” he asked.

“I think it’s Devlin,” I said, my jaw muscles tightening as I looked at the corpse. Peter Devlin. He’s a PFC. Was, I mean.“

“I want to know who it is.”

“It’s Devlin,” Gunderson said. “I found them.”

Satisfied, the doctor began to make his examination. I guessed that he was making an autopsy. He kneaded Devlin’s flesh, turned the body onto its stomach, then onto its back again, and inserted his fingers into the holes the shrapnel had made. Turning to the corpsman, he described the nature of the wounds and gave the medical terms for the injured parts of the body. The corpsman made checkmarks on a form attached to his clipboard. I tried to write it all down, but I had a difficult time understanding some of the anatomical jargon and an even harder time watching the doctor probing into the holes with his gloved hands. Finally, I asked, “Doc, how can you do that?”

“It’s my job. I’m a doctor. You get used to it, and if you can’t, you shouldn’t be a doctor. Anyhow, he doesn’t feel it.”

Then he turned to the corpsman. “Penetrating fragment wound, puncture wound, right kidney.” The corpsman made another checkmark. I noticed then that the waistband of Devlin’s underwear was solid red, as red as if his shorts had been dipped in dye. Dye. Die. Death. Died a dyed death. I remembered the way he used to look, the way he looked when he had a face, and how he walked, and the sound of his voice. For some reason, I thought of the time Devlin had been run up for sleeping on post and I’d made a plea of leniency for him because he had always been a good marine. The captain let him off with a warning. Coming out of the captain’s tent, Devlin said to me, “Sir, I know this isn’t military, but I’d like to thank you for what you did for me.” And I, playing the role of the stiff-lipped, stern-eyed officer, replied, “You’re right, Devlin. It isn’t military, so don’t thank me.”

Bryce was easily identified because there was hardly a mark on him from the waist up. From the waist down, he presented a challenge to the doctor’s professional abilities and to my ability to emulate the doctor’s air of scientific detachment. It was the nakedness of Bryce’s left calfbone that bothered me. Every strip of flesh and muscle had been torn away, so that the splintered bone looked like a broken ivory stick. The doctor said something like, “Traumatic amputation, left foot and compound fracturing, left tibia with massive tissue loss,” and the corpsman made more checkmarks.

“We found his boot with the foot still in it,” Gunderson said. “But we left it there. We didn’t know what to do with it.”

The doctor waved his hand to indicate that that was all right, he didn’t need Bryce’s foot. He continued his examination, and when he cut off Bryce’s underwear with a scissors, I turned away. I told myself that it had been quick, too quick for Bryce to have felt a thing; but I didn’t believe it. The pain of a dentist’s drill is quick, but you feel it. So what had that felt like? Could an incredible amount of pain be compressed into a single instant?