The Vietnam Reader (31 page)

A twenty-four-year-old Special Forces captain was telling me about it. “I went out and killed one VC and liberated a prisoner. Next day the major called me in and told me that I’d killed fourteen VC and liberated six prisoners. You want to see the medal?”

There was a little air-conditioned restaurant on the corner of Le Loi and Tu Do, across from the Continental Hotel and the old opera house which now served as the Vietnamese Lower House. Some of us
called it the Graham Greene Milk Bar (a scene in
The Quiet American
had taken place there), but its name was Givrai. Every morning they baked their own baguettes and croissants, and the coffee wasn’t too bad. Sometimes, I’d meet there with a friend of mine for breakfast.

He was a Belgian, a tall, slow-moving man of thirty who’d been born in the Congo. He professed to know and love war, and he affected the mercenary sensibility. He’d been photographing the Vietnam thing for seven or eight years now, and once in a while he’d go over to Laos and run around the jungles there with the government, searching for the dreaded Pathet Lao, which he pronounced “Paddy Lao.” Other people’s stories of Laos always made it sound like a lotus land where no one wanted to hurt anyone, but he said that whenever he went on ops there he always kept a grenade taped to his belly because he was a Catholic and knew what the Paddy Lao would do to him if he were captured. But he was a little crazy that way, and tended to dramatize his war stories.

He always wore dark glasses, probably even during operations. His pictures sold to the wire services, and I saw a few of them in the American news magazines. He was very kind in a gruff, offhanded sort of way, kindness embarrassed him, and he was so graceless among people, so eager to shock, that he couldn’t understand why so many of us liked him. Irony was the effect he worked for in conversation, that and a sense of how exquisite the war could be when all of its machinery was running right. He was explaining the finish of an operation he’d just been on in War Zone C, above Cu Chi.

“There were a lot of dead VC,” he said. “Dozens and dozens of them! A lot of them were from that same village that has been giving you so much trouble lately. VC from top to bottom—Michael, in that village the fucking
ducks
are VC. So the American commander had twenty or thirty of the dead flown up in a sling load and dropped into the village. I should say it was a drop of at least two hundred feet, all those dead Viet Congs, right in the middle of the village.”

He smiled (I couldn’t see his eyes).

“Ah, Psywar!” he said, kissing off the tips of his fingers.

• • •

Bob Stokes of
Newsweek
told me this: In the big Marine hospital in Danang they have what is called the “White Lie Ward,” where they bring some of the worst cases, the ones who can be saved but who will never be the same again. A young Marine was carried in, still unconscious and full of morphine, and his legs were gone. As he was being carried into the ward, he came out of it briefly and saw a Catholic chaplain standing over him.

“Father,” he said, “am I all right?”

The chaplain didn’t know what to say. “You’ll have to talk about that with the doctors, son.”

“Father, are my legs okay?”

“Yes,” the chaplain said. “Sure.”

By the next afternoon the shock had worn off and the boy knew all about it. He was lying on his cot when the chaplain came by. “Father,” the Marine said, “I’d like to ask you for something.”

“What, son?”

“I’d like to have that cross.” And he pointed to the tiny silver insignia on the chaplain’s lapel.

“Of course,” the chaplain said. “But why?”

“Well, it was the first thing I saw when I came to yesterday, and I’d like to have it.”

The chaplain removed the cross and handed it to him. The Marine held it tightly in his fist and looked at the chaplain.

“You lied to me, Father,” he said. “You cocksucker. You lied to me.”

His name was Davies, and he was a gunner with a helicopter group based at Tan Son Nhut airport. On paper, by the regulations, he was billetted in one of the big “hotel” BEQ’s in Cholon, but he only kept his things there. He actually lived in a small two-story Vietnamese house deeper inside of Cholon, as far from the papers and the regulations as he could get. Every morning he took an Army bus with wire-grille windows out to the base and flew missions, mostly around War Zone C, along the Cambodian border, and most nights he returned to the house in Cholon where he lived with his “wife” (whom he’d found in one of the bars) and some other Vietnamese who were said
to be the girl’s family. Her mamma-san and her brother were always there, living on the first floor, and there were others who came and went. He seldom saw the brother, but every few days he would find a pile of labels and brand names torn from cardboard cartons, American products that the brother wanted from the PX.

The first time I saw him he was sitting alone at a table on the Continental terrace, drinking a beer. He had a full, drooping mustache and sharp, sad eyes, and he was wearing a denim workshirt and wheat jeans. He also carried a Leica and a copy of
Ramparts,
and I just assumed at first that he was a correspondent. I didn’t know then that you could buy
Ramparts
at the PX, and after I’d borrowed and returned it we began to talk. It was the issue that featured left-wing Catholics like Jesus Christ and Fulton Sheen on the cover.
“Catholique?”
one of the bar girls said later that night.
“Moi aussi”
and she kept the magazine. That was when we were walking around Cholon in the rain trying to find Hoa, his wife. Mamma-san had told us that she’d gone to the movies with some girlfriends, but Davies knew what she was doing.

“I hate that shit,” he said. “It’s so uncool.”

“Well, don’t put up with it.”

“Yeah.”

Davies’ house was down a long, narrow alley that became nothing more than a warren at the end, smelling of camphor smoke and fish, crowded but clean. He would not speak to Mamma-san, and we walked straight up to the second floor. It was one long room that had a sleeping area screened off in an arrangement of filmy curtains. At the top of the stairs there was a large poster of Lenny Bruce, and beneath it, in a shrine effect, was a low table with a Buddha and lighted incense on it.

“Lenny,” Davies said.

Most of one wall was covered with a collage that Davies had done with the help of some friends. It included glimpses of burning monks, stacked Viet Cong dead, wounded Marines screaming and weeping, Cardinal Spellman waving from a chopper, Ronald Reagan, his face halved and separated by a stalk of cannabis; pictures of John Lennon peering through wire-rimmed glasses, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix,
Dylan, Eldridge Cleaver, Rap Brown; coffins draped with American flags whose stars were replaced by swastikas and dollar signs; odd parts clipped from
Playboy
pictures, newspaper headlines (
FARMERS BUTCHER HOGS TO
PROTEST PORK PRICE DIP
), photo captions
(President Jokes with Newsmen),
beautiful girls holding flowers, showers of peace symbols; Ky standing at attention and saluting, a small mushroom cloud forming where his genitalia should have been; a map of the western United States with the shape of Vietnam reversed and fitted over California and one large, long figure that began at the bottom with shiny leather boots and rouged knees and ascended in a microskirt, bare breasts, graceful shoulders and a long neck, topped by the burned, blackened face of a dead Vietnamese woman.

By the time Davies’ friends showed up, we were already stoned. We could hear them below, laughing and rapping with Mama, and then they came up the stairs, three spades and two white guys.

“It sure do smell
peculiar
up here,” one of them said.

“Hi, you freaky li’l fuckers.”

“This grass is Number Ten,” Davies said. “Every time I smoke this grass over here it gives me a bad trip.”

“Ain’ nuthin’ th’matter with that grass,” someone said. “It ain’t the grass.”

“Where’s Hoa?”

“Yeah, Davies, where’s your ole lady at?”

“She’s out hustling Saigon tea, and I’m fucking sick of it.” He tried to look really angry, but he only looked unhappy.

One of them handed off a joint and stretched out. “Hairy day today,” he said.

“Where’d you fly?”

“Bu Dop.”

“Bu Dop!” one of the spades said, and he started to move toward the joint, jiving and working his shoulders, bopping his head. “Bu Dop, budop, bu dop dop
dop!”

“Funky funky Bu Dop.”

“Hey, man, can you OD on grass?”

“I dunno, baby. Maybe we could get jobs at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds smokin’ dope for Uncle Sugar.”

“Wow, I’m stoned. Hey, Davies, you stoned?”

“Yeah,” Davies said.

It started to rain again, so hard that you couldn’t hear drops, only the full force of the water pouring down on the metal roof. We smoked a little more, and then the others started to leave. Davies looked like he was sleeping with his eyes open.

“That goddamn pig,” he said. “Fuckin’ whore. Man, I’m paying out all this bread for the house and those people downstairs. I don’t even know who they are, for Christ’s sake. I’m really … I’m getting sick of it.”

“You’re pretty short now,” someone said. “Why don’t you cut out?”

“You mean just split?”

“Why not?”

Davies was quiet for a long time.

“Yeah,” he finally said. “This is bad. This is really bad. I think I’m going to get out of here.”

A bird colonel, commanding a brigade of the 4th Infantry Division: “I’ll bet you always wondered why we call ’em Dinks up in this part of the country. I thought of it myself. I’ll tell you, I never
did
like hearing them called Charlie. See, I had an uncle named Charlie, and I liked him too. No, Charlie was just too damn good for the little bastards. So I just thought, What are they
really
like? and I came up with rinky-dink. Suits ’em just perfect, Rinky-Dink. ’Cept that was too long, so we cut it down some. And that’s why we call ’em Dinks.”

One morning before dawn, Ed Fouhy, a former Saigon bureau chief for CBS, went out to 8th Aerial Port at Tan Son Nhut to catch the early military flight to Danang. They boarded as the sun came up, and Fouhy strapped in next to a kid in rumpled fatigues, one of those soldiers you see whose weariness has gone far beyond physical exhaustion, into that state where no amount of sleep will ever give him the kind of rest he needs. Every torpid movement they make tells you that they are tired, that they’ll stay tired until their tours are up and the big bird flies them back to the World. Their eyes are dim with it, their
faces almost puffy, and when they smile you have to accept it as a token.

There was a standard question you could use to open a conversation with troops, and Fouhy tried it. “How long you been in-country?” he asked.

The kid half lifted his head; that question could
not
be serious. The weight was really on him, and the words came slowly.

“All     fuckin’     day,” he said.

“You guys ought to do a story on me suntahm,” the kid said. He was a helicopter gunner, six-three with an enormous head that sat in bad proportion to the rest of his body and a line of picket teeth that were always on show in a wet, uneven smile. Every few seconds he would have to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, and when he talked to you his face was always an inch from yours, so that I had to take my glasses off to keep them dry. He was from Kilgore, Texas, and he was on his seventeenth consecutive month in-country. “Why should we do a story about you?”

“ ’Cause I’m so fuckin’ good,” he said, “ ’n’ that ain’ no shit, neither. Got me one hunnert ’n’ fifty-se’en gooks kilt. ’N’ fifty caribou.” He grinned and stanched the saliva for a second. “Them’re all certified,” he added.

The chopper touched down at Ba Xoi and we got off, not unhappy about leaving him. “Lis’n,” he said, laughing, “you git up onna ridge-line, see y’ keep yer head down. Y’heah?”

“Say, how’d you get to be a co-respondent an’ come ovah to this raggedy-ass motherfucker?”

He was a really big spade, rough-looking even when he smiled, and he wore a gold nose-bead fastened through his left nostril. I told him the nose-bead blew my mind, and he said that was all right, it blew everybody’s mind. We were sitting by the chopper pad of an lz above Kontum. He was trying to get to Dak To, I was headed for Pleiku, and we both wanted to get out of there before nightfall. We took turns running out to the pad to check the choppers that kept coming in and
taking off, neither of us was having any luck, and after we’d talked for half an hour he laid a joint on me and we smoked.

“I been here mor’n eight months now,” he said. “I bet I been in mor’n twenny firefights. An’ I ain’ hardly fired back once.”

“How come?”

“Shee-it, I go firin’ back, I might kill one a th’ Brothers, you dig it?”

I nodded, no Viet Cong ever called
me
honky, and he told me that in his company alone there were more than a dozen Black Panthers and that he was one of them. I didn’t say anything, and then he said that he wasn’t just a Panther; he was an agent for the Panthers, sent over here to recruit. I asked him what kind of luck he’d been having, and he said fine, real fine. There was a fierce wind blowing across the lz, and the joint didn’t last very long.

“Hey, baby,” he said, “that was just some shit I tol’ you. Shit, I ain’ no Panther. I was just fuckin’ with you, see what you’d say.”

“But the Panthers have guys over here. I’ve met some.”

“Tha’ could be,” he said, and he laughed.

A Huey came in, and he jogged out to see where it was headed. It was going to Dak To, and he came back to get his gear. “Later, baby,” he said. “An’ luck.” He jumped into the chopper, and as it rose from the strip he leaned out and laughed, bringing his arm up and bending it back toward him, palm out and the fist clenched tightly in the Sign.

One day I went out with the ARVN on an operation in the rice paddies above Vinh Long, forty terrified Vietnamese troops and five Americans, all packed into three Hueys that dropped us up to our hips in paddy muck. I had never been in a rice paddy before. We spread out and moved toward the marshy swale that led to the jungle. We were still twenty feet from the first cover, a low paddy wall, when we took fire from the treeline. It was probably the working half of a crossfire that had somehow gone wrong. It caught one of the ARVN in the head, and he dropped back into the water and disappeared. We made it to the wall with two casualties. There was no way of stopping their fire, no room to send in a flanking party, so gunships were called and we crouched behind the wall and waited. There was a lot of fire coming from the trees, but we were all right as long as we kept down.