The Vietnam Reader (67 page)

Voices chattered quietly behind me. Vietnamese sounds lovely even if you can’t understand it.

It did feel like home.

Golden dolls, wearing bikinis so brief they were ribbons of modesty, strolled with pale GIs. As it got darker, the beach crowd broke up, drifting into the town.

“Manh gioi khoung?
How are you?” said the smiling waitress. I noticed her Vietnamese glance of nerves and felt comforted by familiar behavior. “What would you like?” she asked.

I would like to jump you like a rabbit
. “I’ll have another beer, please,” I said. The girl prompted immediate lust. Perhaps I could find solace in solace. My conscience immediately began to pummel
me with shots of raw guilt, delivered at high voltage. “Monster!” it railed. “Married. Short-timer. And not only that, but you’re just getting over the clap!” It was mercilessly rational. I succumbed to its barbs.

The waitress bowed and left to get the beer. I smiled as I watched my phantom flit naked from me to the girl, to hump her happily while she leaned over the bar.

She returned, beaming, friendlier, and served my beer. Her arm brushed mine and I felt warm electricity flicker between us. My mind savored salty-sweet smells and orgasmic contractions, hearing her voice as an echo “Would you like …”

Her voice was obliterated by the sudden ripping, zipping howl of a stylus skidding across a record. She dropped to the floor and rolled under a table.

At the sound of crashing chairs and breaking glassware, I turned and saw the Vietnamese taking cover. Five men crouched low behind the bar. I sat alone on the porch and took a sip of beer. The girl knocked over a chair as she crawled toward the back of the porch.

All because of a stylus skidding across a record? Damn, they were even jumpier than I was. I looked around the bar. Nothing was happening. There was no fight. People peered from behind the bar and tables, looking up front. It had just been the sound that spooked them. They had absolutely no confidence that their city was secure. They knew the facts. The VC were everywhere.

Cowards, I thought. Anger flushed through me. I felt betrayed, revolted. They’re really afraid.

For five minutes I had complete quiet as I watched the surf foam glow in the gathering dusk. At the end of that time, the bar, the customers, the porch, came back to life.

I paid my tab and walked to the room I had rented.

I sat against the wall on the bed, thinking about the panic at the bar. The old question “Why don’t the Vietnamese fight the VC like the VC fight the Vietnamese?” seemed very valid. Without the support of the people, we were going to lose. And if they didn’t care, why were we continuing to fight? Surely the people who were running this fiasco could see this, too. The signs were obvious. Plans leaked to the
VC, reluctant combatants, mutinies in the ARVN, political corruption, Vietnamese marines fighting Vietnamese marines at Da Nang, and the ubiquitous Vietnamese idea that Ho would eventually win.

I stabbed a cigarette into an ashtray. Without American financial support and military support, the South Vietnamese government would have failed long ago, as a natural result of its lack of popular support.

The whole problem settled on my shoulders. In a few hours, I was going to voluntarily go back into battle and risk my scrawny neck for people who didn’t care.

I stayed up and smoked cigarettes all night. I tried to sleep, only to jerk awake, sitting in bed, listening.

I was back at Dak To, home, the next day. Here, the war was simple. We did our job well, beat the VC almost every time, and kept them on the run. Here, I was a member of the honorable side. The reluctant, cowardly Vietnamese were not visible to remind me that they didn’t care. I could go on believing that simply by killing more and more Communists we would win. When I crawled into my cot my first night back, I fell instantly asleep.

The next day, Gary and I sat on the deck of our Huey waiting for the grunts to finish eating. Their platoon was one of several that were pushing toward the west, scouting for the VC. We joked in familiar surroundings.

“You shoulda come, you know,” said Gary.

“I tried, asshole. They wouldn’t let me. How did you get a ticket?”

“I just went to the ticket counter and bought it.”

“Well, you must have looked like a civilian, because they wouldn’t sell me anything.”

“It’s really a shame. You missed Grass Mountain.”

“What’s that?”

“Grass Mountain is packed with geisha houses. Wanna know what it’s like to go to a geisha house?”

“No.”

“They start off with a bath. Just you and two naked girls. They wash you first, then soak you, then massage you.”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“I heard you,” Gary said. “The two of them massage you so well you think you’re going to crack. Then, at the perfect moment, one of the girls sits on you and puts you out of your misery.”

I nodded my head with closed eyes, kicking myself for not getting laid when I had the chance.

“And that’s just the beginning.”

“Just the beginning?”

“That’s right. It takes hours to get out of this place. They give you more baths, and tea and food and massages, to keep you going, and then they pass you down the line to teams of two or three girls who work you over in different ways.” Gary’s face brightened at his memories.

“I never heard of Grass Mountain when I was there,” I lamented.

“Never heard of it? Where the hell were you?”

The next day I was flying with Sky King. In the middle of a laager, a grunt lieutenant came to our ship. “We just had a newsman wounded. Will you guys pick him up?”

“Sure,” I said.

“The squad leader with the guy said it was a sniper. They say they’ve got the place secured.”

“No problem. Where are they?”

The lieutenant showed me on his map. They were only a mile away. When I turned to get into the ship, Sky King and the crew chief were all ready to go. I strapped in as Sky King cranked up.

Sky King flew at fifty knots heading for the place.

“Over there,” I pointed to four or five soldiers standing around a prone man in a thicket of leafless trees. “You see them?”

“Got ’em.”

As we flew by, the men hit the dirt, leaving one man standing. He was aiming a movie camera at us.

“Great place for a landing,” said Sky King.

The base of the clearing was wide enough for our ship, but the scrawny branches twenty feet off the ground crowded over the circle, making it too tight to get in.

“Axle One-Six,” I radioed. “Can you move to a better clearing?” Sky King circled, looking for a way to get through the trees.

“Negative, Prospector. We’re still getting sniper fire, and this guy is wounded pretty bad.”

Sky King set up an approach and closed in. As he got to the tree-tops, it became obvious that he was going to hit branches with the main rotor, so he aborted.

When the squad saw us heading across the LZ, they radioed, “Can you make it, Prospector?”

Sky King shook his head. “I can’t get in there. You want to try it?”

I nodded and took the controls. While Sky King had approached, I thought I saw a way. “We’ll get in, Axle One-Six. Just hang on.”

The plan was simple. I would come in ninety degrees to Sky King’s last try and then turn sharp. I thought that in a bank the rotors could slip through the narrow slot that Sky King had shot for. I lined up on a tangent to the clearing and let down.

I hit the turn fast, banked hard over, and as we slipped toward the ground, I saw that I was going to hit some stuff anyway. The main rotor smashed some dead branches, sounding like machine-gun fire. I flared for the landing and we were down.

“Great. Now how are you going to get out?” said Sky King.

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know how I was going to get out. The grunts grabbed the wounded man. He was unconscious, his fatigue blouse sopping with his blood. At that point I noticed the cameraman standing back filming the whole thing. The grunts were prone beside him, laying out cover fire toward the jungle. When I saw him aim the camera toward the cockpit, I sat a little straighter, and thought cool thoughts, in case those, too, might somehow be recorded. The crew chief called that we were ready, and the cameraman jumped on board.

In fact, there was no acceptable way to get out. There was not enough room to accelerate and bank back out through the slot. Some of the high branches hung over our rotor disk. By the book, we were trapped.

But I had seen rotor blades stand up to incredible stress before, so I decided to take the brute-force option. I picked up to the hover,
turned the tail until it matched a slot in the overhanging branches, and then pulled the pitch. We climbed straight up twenty feet before the rotors smashed into cane-thick branches at nearly every point of their circle. It sounded like the rotors were being smashed to pieces. Seconds later we cleared the treetops and I nosed over, accelerating toward the airstrip five miles away.

“Someday you’re going to hit a branch that’s just a little too big,” Sky King said after a long quiet.

“What then?” I asked.

“Then your ship’s going to come apart, and you’re going to kill yourself and everybody around you.”

“Now
that’s
frightening,” I said. “I think maybe I oughta quit this job and go home.”

“This guy’s still alive, sir.” The crew chief’s voice buzzed in my headphones. “The cameraman says he’s the
president
of CBS News. Imagine that.”

“Ain’t that a kick,” Sky King said. “I guess he got bored with his nice safe desk job, the dumb shit.”

When we landed at the hospital tent at the 101st, the cameraman jumped out and filmed his boss being unloaded. He filmed Gary and me in the cockpit, then put the camera down and gave us a salute.

I nodded, brought the rotors up to operating, and leapt off the pad. As I flew back to retrieve the empty thermos containers we left with the grunts, I recalled the cameraman’s salute and felt slightly heroic.

When we shut down that night, Sky King showed me the creases and nicks in the rotors and scolded me. “Look at this. You’ve ruined them.”

“Naw. They’re fine. Just creased is all. No holes. Look at the bright side. The guy’s alive.”

“Yeah, but look at those rotors.”

During the second week of July, Operation Hawthorne began winding up. The patrols and reconnaissance companies were getting very little opposition in the battle zone. The NVA had slipped away.

“If they’re gone, and we killed two thousand of them, we won,” said Gary.

“What did we win? We don’t have any more real estate, no new villages are under American control, and it took everything we had to stop them,” I said.

“We won the battle. More of them got killed than us. It’s that simple.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that it takes so much equipment and men to beat the NVA? If we were equally equipped, we’d lose.”

“Yeah, but we aren’t equally equipped, and they lose. Besides that, I have a month to go and I don’t give a shit.”

“Unless they made you fly assaults during your last month.”

“If they do that, then I’ll give a shit.”

While the First Cav slipped unceremoniously back to An Khe, the 101st decided to end the operation with a parade. There would be no spectators except for the news reporters—unless you want to count the men in the parade as spectators, and of course they were.

Hundreds of bone-weary soldiers gathered at the artillery emplacements and began the five-mile march back to the airstrip. They marched, in parade step, along the dusty road. Insects buzzed in the saturated air. No virgins threw flowers. No old ladies cried. No strong men wept. They marched to their own muffled footsteps.

“I bet they’re pissed off,” said Gary, leaning against his door window, staring down at the column. “Especially when they look up and see all these empty helicopters flying around.”

We flew up and down the column in four V’s at 500 feet during the entire march. Supposedly we were generating excitement, or underscoring a memorable event. But according to a grunt, “We wanted to know why you fuckers wouldn’t come down and give us a fucking ride.”

When the head of the column finally reached the 101st section of the airstrip, the band played, the Hueys whooshed overhead, and the general beamed.

With all the troopers back in camp, noses were counted. Nearly twenty people were unaccounted for. It was presumed that these men were all dead. There would be a search operation to find their bodies in few days.

• • •

The next day, while the missing moldered, the 101st had a party for the survivors. Their camp was within walking distance, but our aviator egos demanded that we fly. After seeing too much death and injury, the survivors celebrated life. We had a boisterously good time to emphasize that we were still alive.

The Only War We Had
M
ICHAEL
L
EE
L
ANNING
1987

23 June 1969
Monday

Set up on side of a mountain tonight
SP4 Garcia and one of the ARVNs talked for an hour—1 in
Spanish, 1 in Vietnamese—Never could figure it out but they
seemed to be communicating
Am getting so I can work with the ARVNs

The ARVN seemed relaxed, appearing basically happy with their situation. There would be no end of the war for them after only a year. None of them seemed to be in a hurry, particularly to face the enemy. They liked our C-rations and filled their rucksacks.

We were now deep into the jungle. Brush and vines covered the ground and small trees reached to a height of about six feet. Another layer of trees grew to about twenty-five feet. Yet a final growth of large trees, reaching heights of about a hundred feet, towered above the lower two layers of vegetation. This triple canopy virtually blocked the sunlight.

No breeze penetrated the damp jungle. The dark floor was stifling hot, and the unrelenting smell of rotting vegetation filled the air.