A Rumor of War (9 page)

Charley Company had been assigned the southern sector of the perimeter, its lines anchored on the left on an asphalt road that led into Danang city, and tied in on the right with A Company. The MLR, or main line of resistance, was opposite the dirt road to our front. It consisted of a chain link fence, a zigzag trench line connecting a series of stone watchtowers—relics from French colonial times—a double-apron barbed wire fence, a minefield, and a triple row of concertina wire. The MLR was manned by an ARVN regional force (militia) battalion, which we would formally relieve in two or three days. Until then, One-Three would serve as a secondary line of defense. Peterson told us that the swath of rice paddies and villages stretching southward had been a Communist stronghold for years and was considered the most likely avenue of approach for a Viet Cong attack. In simple terms, if they hit, they would hit C Company first.

Spurred by that warning, the men worked hard all afternoon, digging foxholes, filling and piling up sandbags, tamping them down with the flat side of entrenching tools. Officers trooped along the line, assigning and changing positions. I was careful to do everything by the book, setting up interlocking fields of fire, emplacing machine guns to cover the platoon frontage—in brief, all that I had learned at Quantico in Rifle Company Defensive Tactics. I was now plying my trade in earnest, but I had a difficult time convincing myself that that was the case. So far, the operation had the playact quality of an exercise. Back on Okinawa, the skipper’s briefing about offensives and counteroffensives had created in my mind somber images of shell-cratered fields and devastated towns. But Vietnam, from what I could see of it, did not look like a war-torn country (a scenic defect American firepower would eventually correct). The “Communist stronghold” in front of us reminded me of a tropical park. Groves of bamboo and coconut palm rose out of rice paddies like islands from a jade-colored sea. Carrying poles slung across their shoulders, peasant women in conical hats jogged down a paddy dike past a small boy riding a water buffalo. A group of young girls glided by, provocative creatures in their silk trousers and filmy aodais. They smiled politely when a machine-gunner named Bunch waved at them from his foxhole. “Hey, naisson, number one. Joto itchiban.” Williams, his squad leader, reminded him that he was no longer on Okinawa. Meanwhile, I scanned the countryside with my binoculars, looking for the red hordes, but the only signs of war were our own Phantoms, roaring northward with their bomb racks full.

The Beau Geste watchtowers on the MLR contributed to the atmosphere of make-believe. If this was a real war zone, what were those anachronisms doing here? Their only conceivable use would be as registration points for VC mortar batteries. Their occupants were another source of bewilderment. The relaxed behavior of the RFs—Ruff-Puffs they were called—indicated one of three possibilities: no one had warned them that an enemy attack was imminent; they had been told, but were such experienced veterans that mere warnings did not alarm them; or they were the worst soldiers in the world. I was not yet familiar with ARVN fighting abilities, but I inclined to the last possibility. Whatever, they milled around, some without helmets or weapons, and stared curiously at our feverish activity. About half a dozen were asleep under a thatch lean-to; others lounged barefoot near one of the whitewashed towers. A few of the bolder ones slipped through a hole in the chain link and walked along our line, begging cigarettes. “GI, you gimme one cig’rette you.” They demanded Salems, but all we could offer were C-ration Luckies so stale that they were said to be of Korean War vintage. These satisfied the RFs, however. Encouraged by their comrades’ success, a second mooching expedition set out, but was driven off on Peterson’s orders. He passed the word to avoid fraternizing with our allies. According to the intelligence officer, the Ruff-Puffs were politically as well as militarily suspect; their ranks were believed to be riddled with Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers, which amounted to the same thing. Needless to say, we found this intelligence hard to comprehend. That a battalion full of VC in ARVN uniforms could be defending an American airbase against the VC was still beyond our understanding.

At dusk, having neither heard a shot nor fired one in anger, we secured work on our excavations and rigged shelters for the night. This done, the company had its first meal since the previous day’s breakfast on Okinawa. That was already beginning to seem like a long time ago. The marines squatted to open the olive-drab ration cans with the openers attached to their dogtags. Small, blue cooking fires sprang up in front of the hooches, the acrid smell of heat tablets drifting across the bivouac. There was the usual bitching and horse trading that attends a meal of Cees. “Aw, shee-hit, I got ham and limas… hey, tradeja ham and limas for a canna peaches…”

“Yeah, okay I’ll take ‘em…”

“You
like
ham and limas, man, you gotta be a fuckin‘ idiot…”

“All right, then keep ‘em, maggot…”

“Hey, man, I was only shitinyuh, c’mon, gimme them peaches…”

“No way, not just for ham and limas. Price has gone up, my man. Ham and limas
and
your date-nut roll for the peaches.”

They were all filthy after a day of muddy digging, and bleary-eyed after nearly two days without sleep. I think they also felt a little let down. The haste with which they had been sent to Vietnam caused them to assume that the situation was desperate. The wagon train was surrounded and the cavalry had to come to the rescue. They had whipped themselves into such a fever of anticipation that reality proved to be an anticlimax. Rather than desperate, the situation appeared to be totally calm. Yes, the wagons were here, in the form of supersonic warplanes, but the Indians were not. Looking at the lackadaisical ARVNs and tranquil rice paddies, we wondered, Well, where is this war we’ve heard so much about? where are these fabled guerrillas, the Viet Cong? There was one moment of excitement, when something exploded in a paddy field about a hundred yards away. A plume of yellow-brown smoke rose through the trees. A few men reached for their weapons, but relaxed when they learned what had happened: a dog had wandered into a minefield and blown itself to bits.

Night came on quickly. In a matter of minutes, dusk turned into the dark of a moonless midnight. Watches were set: a twenty-five-percent alert for the first four hours, fifty percent after that. Helmets and flak jackets on (we had all managed to “lose” the clumsy armored shorts), the company filed off to the line. Around nine or ten, when snipers opened up on our positions, we learned that the Vietnam War was primarily a nocturnal event. The sniping was neither heavy nor accurate, just a few rounds fired every half hour or so, but it caused a good deal of nervousness because no one could tell where it came from. The bullets seemed to whiz in out of nowhere. The landscape, so bucolic in daylight, gradually assumed a sinister aspect. To our inexperienced eyes, bushes began to look like men. Still, there was no return fire on our part: the battalion had been placed under strict rules of engagement to avoid hitting civilians accidentally. Chambers had to be clear, no firing could be done except on orders of a staff NCO or an officer.

Our toughest battle that night was waged against Vietnam’s insect life. Mosquito netting and repellents proved ineffective against the horde of flying, creeping, crawling, buzzing, biting things that descended on us. From every hooch came the sound of slaps and cries of “goddamn little bastards, get outta here.” By midnight, my face and hands were masses of welts.

To escape this torture, I made frequent checks of the platoon lines. It was either on this night or the next, or perhaps the one after that—those first nights in Vietnam all blend into one—that I came close to being shot by one of my own men. As I approached his foxhole, he stopped me with a bookishly formal challenge.

“Halt, who goes there?”

“Charley Two Actual” (my code name).

“Two Actual, advance to be recognized.”

I took two steps forward.

“Halt. Who is the President of the United States?”

“Lyndon B. Johnson.”

“Who is the Secretary of Defense?”

“Robert S. McNamara.”

Thinking my responses clearly identified me as an American, I started to walk forward. Another
halt
, followed by the sound of a bolt slamming home and the unpleasant sight of a rifle being leveled at me from ten yards’ range brought me up short.

“Two Actual, who is the Undersecretary of Defense?”

“For Chrissake, how the hell do I know.”

“Two Actual recognized,” said the marine, lowering his weapon. It was Guiliumet. Jumping into his foxhole, I learned the reason for his excessive vigilance. He and the rifleman with him, Paulson, had almost been hit. A shredded sandbag was pointed out to me. “He put it right between us, lieutenant,” Paulson said. “Jesus, if I’da been a couple inches the other way, I’da been deep-sixed sure as shit.” I flipped off some old-salt comment about a miss being as good as a mile, but made sure to stay away from the wounded sandbag. Looking into the gloom beyond the wire, I saw nothing dangerous, only the empty paddies, gray now instead of green, the inky patches that marked a village or thicket, the scalloped tops of distant tree lines blacker than the black sky. All the same, the sniper had to be out there somewhere—with my head in his sights, for all I knew. Before my imagination got the best of me, I climbed out and continued on my rounds, feeling queasy the whole time. Phantoms, I thought, we’re fighting phantoms.

Later, a brisk fire-fight broke out about a thousand yards forward of the perimeter. Grenades and mortars thumped. Small arms crackled like burning timber, and a couple of tracers streaked in silent, scarlet lines above the trees. Artillery boomed in another, more distant battle. All these sounds, the mysterious and fascinating sounds of contact, seemed to answer our earlier questions: the war and the Viet Cong were here all right, waiting for us.

>

   I’d read of our heroes, and wanted the same,

   To play my own part in the patriot game.

   —Irish ballad

They waited a long time. The battalion did not see any action until April 22, when B Company was sent to reinforce a reconnaissance patrol that had fallen into an ambush a few miles west of Hill 327. In the meantime, we fought the climate, the snipers, and monotony, of which the climate was the worst.

The days were all alike. The sun rose about six, changing color as it climbed, from red to gold to white. The mists on the rice fields evaporated and the dawn breeze died away. By noon, nothing moved beneath the bright sky. Peasants left the fields for the shade of their villages; water buffalo lay motionless in the wallows, with only their heads and broad, curving horns showing above the mud; the trees stood as still as plants in a greenhouse. A wind fanned out of the mountains in the midafternoon, a hot wind that lifted the dust from the roads and the parched paddy fields lying cracked in the sun, where the rice had been harvested. Whenever the wind was up, we could not look anywhere without seeing dust—dust blowing in clouds, palls of dust, dust devils that whirled into tents, the canvas walls billowing like sails, pulling the guy lines taut, then collapsing suddenly when the funnel passed through. This was no fine dust, but thick stuff that clung to everything it touched, to flesh and rifles and the leaves on the trees. It covered the greasy mess gear in the galley, so that we had to eat dust as well as breathe it. And drink it, too, for it sifted into Lister bags and jerry cans, giving the water the taste of warm mud.

In the late afternoon, the mountains brought a premature twilight to the coastal plain, but this early dusk was the worst time. The wind dropped and the air was made stifling as the earth released the heat it had absorbed all day. We drank from our canteens until our bellies bulged, and tried to move as little as possible. Sweat ran down our sides and faces. The dust clinging to our skin thickened into a gummy film. Temperatures were irrelevant—the climate in Indochina does not lend itself to conventional standards of measurement. The mercury level might be 98 degrees one day, 110 the next, 105 the day after that; but these numbers can no more express the intensity of that heat than the reading on a barometer can express the destructive power of a typhoon. The only valid measurement was what the heat could do to a man, and what it could do to him was simple enough: it could kill him, bake his brains, or wring the sweat out of him until he dropped from exhaustion. The pilots and mechanics on the base could escape to their cool barracks or air-conditioned clubs, but on the perimeter there was nothing you could do about the heat except endure it. Relief came only at night, and night always brought swarms of malarial mosquitoes and the
crack-crack-crack
of the snipers’ rifles.

Boredom was another problem, as it always is in stationary warfare. The battalion relieved the ARVNs, who, less than enthusiastic about being “free to fight” in the counter-offensive, took their time moving out. We would have happily taken their place. Instead of the adventure we had hoped it would be, defending the airfield turned out to be a deadening routine. We stood watch at night, stand-to after sunset, stand-down at first light. By day we repaired the rusted wire, dug fighting holes, filled sandbags. Our positions were shifted frequently, first to the right, then to the left, then right again, according to the ever changing defensive schemes drawn up by the brigade staff. This was not war; it was forced labor. Once, the word was passed to emplace crew-served weapons in bunkers strong enough to withstand direct hits from 120-mm mortars, then the heaviest artillery in the Viet Cong arsenal. The machine-gun squads, displaying a creative flair, erected elaborate works in a style that might be called Sandbag Modern. These architectural projects had no sooner been completed than they were ordered dismantled. The brigade CG, General Karsch, felt that bunkers destroyed a marine’s “offensive spirit,” which prompted Sullivan to remark that after weeks of working in the hot sun without a bath, his men were about as offensive as they could get.