The Vietnam Reader (20 page)

Snake noticed Bagger, and called to him. “Bagger.”

Bagger stuffed the shorts into his flak-jacket pocket. “Oh, I’ll bet old papasan was humping a B-forty last night. Ain’t that right, Mamasan.”

“Bagger. Give ’em back.”

Bagger finally acknowledged Snake. “I’m gonna wear ’em, man, instead of tiger shorts.”

“It’s against the rules. You know that. Give ’em back.”

“So what do you care? Huh? You talking like a goddamn lifer, Snake. What’s the rules to a pair of shorts?”

Cannonball called from the top of a nearby family bunker, where he was standing security. “Man, you know Snake, he goan’ be a lifer. I been telling you that.”

“Ah, screw you, Cannonball.” Snake walked up to Bagger. “I ain’t gonna get in trouble because of any damn shorts.” He looked around for Hodges. “I ain’t having any new Lieutenant or somebody run me in because you want a pair of shorts. Now give ’em back to the lady. Hurry up.”

Bagger fished them out of his pocket. “Oh. Now she’s a
lady,
too. Cannonball’s right. My man Snake is gonna be a lifer.”

One hootch over, Cat Man and Phony were patiently standing in front of an old man who was gesturing wildly in the air. They both grinned, shaking their heads in perfect time with the gestures. Hodges walked over to them, curious at the mimic pantomime of it, as if all elements were prerehearsed.

“What the hell …?”

Phony eyed Hodges pleasantly. “Hey, Lieutenant. You can shoot some art’y, you know? Not bad. Oh.
Him?
He lost his
can cuoc.”
Phony noted that the phrase did not register with Hodges. “His I.D. card.” He put his arm around the old man’s shoulders. “It’s a lifer game. Find a dude without his
can cuoc
and he’s s’posed to be VC or something, ’cause he ain’t registered with the gov’mint.”

Snake had joined the group. He addressed Hodges. “So every time we find a dude without one, we’re s’posed to run him in. But it’s like everything out here, Lieutenant. Nothing’s what it’s s’posed to be. All the VC have
can cuocs.
Half the villagers don’t, cause when you lose it, you have to pay a goddamn fortune to get a new one. So
can cuocs
don’t mean nothing, really. It’s just a game.” He grinned, poking the old man playfully in the chest. “But every villager has the same story. We ask where it is and they point up to the sky and tell us how the bombs blew it up, so we’ll feel sorry for ’em and think it’s our own fault. That right, Papasan?”

The old man smiled earnestly, his electric, beady eyes communicating as he ran frail hands through the air, simulating an air strike, then brought them together in front of himself and threw them up and apart, indicating the exploding bomb.

“And anyway,” Phony shrugged absently, “they’re all VC. Every ville out here is VC. Them
can cuocs
don’t mean a goddamn thing.”

Cat Man agreed. He nodded shyly, his delicate features intense, and addressed Hodges with carefully chosen words. “Wait till you sweep into a ville and it’s flying a VC flag for you, Lieutenant. Papasan grins ’cause he thinks we’re gonna stick him. If we were just moving through, he wouldn’t even wave.”

They found no bodies in the ville. There were numerous blood trails, a blend of blood that joined in a drag line toward the western
mountains, a half-dozen dropped grenades, and one abandoned AK-47 rifle, lost in the dark as the enemy retreated.

Hodges was slightly disappointed. No victories without tangible monuments. He was also amazed at the lack of damage to the village. Two burnt hootches, several dozen new pockmarks in the dried earth, and one bleeding mamasan. All those mortar rounds, he marveled. And even the rooster came away unscathed.

The company perimeter was more than a mile away. Speedy and Burgie pulled a bamboo pole off one rended hootch, found a parachute that had once floated down above a huge Basketball flare, and fashioned a hammocklike carrying device for the whimpering mamasan. The patrol then straggled back across the sunbaked valley, walking in the sanctum of the treelines because it was daylight and there would be snipers, then finally cut across the wide, parched paddy that led to the southern tip of Phu Phong (4). Hodges radioed ahead, and a small patrol met them at the base of the hill, near one of the wells. The company corpsman, one of the Vietnamese Kit Carson Scouts, and a fire team for security awaited them in the scrubby shade of the well.

They filed up to the well, the patrol finished. Some walked immediately to it and doused themselves, cooling off from the hump. Others dropped into the shade, greeting the fire team, which was from the other squad in their platoon. Still others moved up to the perimeter without pausing, anxious to eat.

A dozen Marines ambled down from the perimeter when the patrol returned, curious about the previous night’s happenings, calling and jibing friends from the returning patrol.

They gathered around the moaning mamasan. The corpsman took her pajama top and ripped it at the shoulder, then wrapped her wound with a battle dressing. She winced mightily, still whimpering.

The Kit Carson Scout sauntered slowly over and peered down unemotionally at the woman. Snake put his hand on the man’s shoulder, pointing to the mamasan. “Dan. Ask her why she wasn’t in the bunker. Why she in fucking hootch when Marines
bac bac
VC.”

Dan nodded solemnly, thinking for a moment, then asked her a question in Vietnamese that came out as a song. Mamasan whimpered,
responding in a weakened rapid fire, a long, gesturing explanation. Dan pondered the answer, still emotionless, then sent her into tears with a short retort.

Snake leaned in front of Dan, smiling amusedly to him. “What did she say, Dan?”

Dan still stared down at her. His expression had not changed. “She say, Marines, VC
bac-bac boo coo
long time, she in bunker, gotta take shit. She say, wait all night, go outside to take shit, got
boo coo
bombs. Go back fucking hootch, Marine come, shoot her.”

The crowd nodded, muttering judiciously. Mamasan still whimpered. Snake nudged Dan. “So, what did you say?”

Dan shrugged absently. “I say, now on, shit in bunker.”

The crowd applauded in appreciation of Dan’s wisdom. Dan smiled back impishly, acknowledging the praise. Then he coolly, persistently questioned the weary mamasan, prodding her, trying to discover information about the North Vietnamese unit that had been in her village the night before.

Goodrich watched Dan and the others and, attempting to understand and rationalize their callousness, discovered a basic truth about himself. Even as he searched for some humorous remark that would write off the incident, he knew that he could not accept it. He could understand, condone the massive use of force, but the terrors of its particularizations horrified him. A hundred NVA deaths tallied in a newspaper column would draw an absent nod, but one stinking, suffering old wretched woman who bled from his own bullet, who would be flown by helicopter to an air-conditioned hospital and saved, turned his stomach.

Whoo boy, he fretted, walking by himself up the hill. Only 387 more days of this. Time sure flies when you’re having fun.

The mail had arrived on the resupply helicopter and there was a letter from Mark. Goodrich dropped his gear next to his poncho hootch and lit a cigarette, reading it.

You wouldn’t believe the faces of my friends when I told them my old college roomy was a Marine! I think they believe I’m an FBI plant! It is kind of funny, you know—me
here
and you there. I see pictures of the patrols burning down homes, things like that and I just can’t picture you there. But if anything I feel a little good, if you insist on making an ass out of yourself. It injects the tiniest bit of credibility to the holocaust. I mean, I sure can’t see
you
burning people, or standing by while someone else does. Pot, maybe, but definitely not
people.

The letter was the touch that bottomed out Goodrich’s depression. He turned to Ottenburger, who was napping under his poncho hootch. “Hey, Burgie. Where do I turn in my letter of resignation?”

“Say what, Senator?”

Goodrich attempted a smile. “Where do I quit, man?”

Ottenburger snorted. “Talk to Bagger. He knows all about it. He quits at least once a day.”

Speedy overheard them and called almost derisively, fed up with Goodrich. “Tonight, Senator, I’ll give you a grenade. You pull your own pin. No sweat. One hand up in the air,
boom,
bye-bye Senator.”

Goodrich grinned miserably. “Tempting. Tempting. But it might hurt.”

A Rumor of War
P
HILIP
C
APUTO
1977

PROLOGUE

In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars.…

—Shakespeare,
Henry IV, Part I

This book does not pretend to be history. It has nothing to do with politics, power, strategy, influence, national interests, or foreign policy; nor is it an indictment of the great men who led us into Indochina and whose mistakes were paid for with the blood of some quite ordinary men. In a general sense, it is simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them. More strictly, it is a soldier’s account of our longest conflict, the only one we have ever lost, as well as the record of a long and sometimes painful personal experience.

On March 8, 1965, as a young infantry officer, I landed at Danang with a battalion of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the first U.S. combat unit sent to Indochina. I returned in April 1975 as a newspaper correspondent and covered the Communist offensive that ended with the fall of Saigon. Having been among the first Americans to fight in Vietnam, I was also among the last to be evacuated, only a few hours before the North Vietnamese Army entered the capital.

Although most of this book deals with the experiences of the marines I served with in 1965 and 1966, I have included an epilogue
briefly describing the American exodus. Only ten years separated the two events, yet the humiliation of our exit from Vietnam, compared to the high confidence with which we had entered, made it seem as if a century lay between them.

For Americans who did not come of age in the early sixties, it may be hard to grasp what those years were like—the pride and overpowering self-assurance that prevailed. Most of the thirty-five hundred men in our brigade, born during or immediately after World War II, were shaped by that era, the age of Kennedy’s Camelot. We went overseas full of illusions, for which the intoxicating atmosphere of those years was as much to blame as our youth.

War is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it, but we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy’s challenge to “ask what you can do for your country” and by the missionary idealism he had awakened in us. America seemed omnipotent then: the country could still claim it had never lost a war, and we believed we were ordained to play cop to the Communists’ robber and spread our own political faith around the world. Like the French soldiers of the late eighteenth century, we saw ourselves as the champions of “a cause that was destined to triumph.” So, when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.

The discovery that the men we had scorned as peasant guerrillas were, in fact, a lethal, determined enemy and the casualty lists that lengthened each week with nothing to show for the blood being spilled broke our early confidence. By autumn, what had begun as an adventurous expedition had turned into an exhausting, indecisive war of attrition in which we fought for no cause other than our own survival.

Writing about this kind of warfare is not a simple task. Repeatedly, I have found myself wishing that I had been the veteran of a conventional war, with dramatic campaigns and historic battles for subject matter instead of a monotonous succession of ambushes and fire-fights. But there were no Normandies and Gettysburgs for us, no epic
clashes that decided the fates of armies or nations. The war was mostly a matter of enduring weeks of expectant waiting and, at random intervals, of conducting vicious manhunts through jungles and swamps where snipers harassed us constantly and booby traps cut us down one by one.

The tedium was occasionally relieved by a large-scale search-and-destroy operation, but the exhilaration of riding the lead helicopter into a landing zone was usually followed by more of the same hot walking, with the mud sucking at our boots and the sun thudding against our helmets while an invisible enemy shot at us from distant tree lines. The rare instances when the VC chose to fight a set-piece battle provided the only excitement; not ordinary excitement, but the manic ecstasy of contact. Weeks of bottled-up tensions would be released in a few minutes of orgiastic violence, men screaming and shouting obscenities above the explosions of grenades and the rapid, rippling bursts of automatic rifles.

Beyond adding a few more corpses to the weekly body count, none of these encounters achieved anything; none will ever appear in military histories or be studied by cadets at West Point. Still, they changed us and taught us, the men who fought in them; in those obscure skirmishes we learned the old lessons about fear, cowardice, courage, suffering, cruelty, and comradeship. Most of all, we learned about death at an age when it is common to think of oneself as immortal. Everyone loses that illusion eventually, but in civilian life it is lost in installments over the years. We lost it all at once and, in the span of months, passed from boyhood through manhood to a premature middle age. The knowledge of death, of the implacable limits placed on a man’s existence, severed us from our youth as irrevocably as a surgeon’s scissors had once severed us from the womb. And yet, few of us were past twenty-five. We left Vietnam peculiar creatures, with young shoulders that bore rather old heads.