America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (45 page)

In the black night we moved quietly on the river, showing no lights, watching the soft glowing radar screen for anything moving. Sometimes we stopped our engines and listened for the sound of a putt-putt or the dip of oars. But there was nothing, or if there was, we didn't know it, just the quiet and the unshiny blackness of the hooded shores and faint stars reflected in the steel gray river. Now and then small islands of lily pads floated by detached from someplace far upriver. Any place on that dark tangle can belch fire and it often does from bunkers hidden in the undergrowth. But this night—quiet—quiet.

I've only been in country a few weeks but everywhere I've gone there has been the intimacy of the war. I went in with the lead ship of an assault team of the First Cav. In the north I've seen the volcano of a B-52 strike from a chopper five or six kilometers away. And I've been with the Marines in their forward positions, burning up in helmet and steel vest and glad to be so burning. The heavy drum of artillery and the lazy floating flares and the quick tearing of rockets have become almost commonplace. Perhaps that is why the dark quiet of the night river with faint stars and squinty yellow hut lights made such a deep impression on me.

When our time was up our two-boat river patrol went back to base to report no action, no activity—but it didn't last. I'll have to tell you about that when I can write again.

 

Yours,

John

Saturday, January 21, 1967
Can Tho

 

Dear Alicia:

 

I WROTE TO YOU about the quiet patrol on the river, the silent shores and the stars doubly twinkly because of the damp atmosphere. We came into dock a little before nine o'clock. Part of Operation Game Warden is based on Can Tho, the largest city in the Delta region. There are a few small restaurants in Can Tho where Viet people, always with their children, go to eat and talk in their language, which sounds like singing. The lights are not bright in such places. Because of power shortage most of them are lighted with flickering lamps.

At about ten o'clock in the evening two strolling young men paused in front of a crowded restaurant and suddenly threw two grenades in at the wide-open door. One was a dud. The other exploded and tore up the people and their children. There were no soldiers in the restaurant either American or Vietnamese. There was no possible military advantage to be gained. An American captain ran in and carried out a little girl of seven. He was weeping when he got her to the hospital and she was dead. Ambulances carried the broken bodies to the long building, once a French hospital and now ours. Then the amputations and the probing for pieces of jagged metal began and the smell of ether filled the building. Some of the tattered people were dead on arrival and some died soon after but those who survived were treated and splinted and bandaged. They lay on the wooden beds with a glazed questioning in their eyes. Plasma needles were taped to the backs of their hands, if they had hands, to their ankles if they had none. The children who had been playing about on the floor of the restaurant were the worst hit by the low-exploding grenade. The doctors and nurses of the brutal, aggressive, imperialist American force worked most of the night on the products of this noble defense of the homeland.

Meanwhile the grenade throwers had been caught and they proudly admitted the act, in fact boasted of it.

I find I have no access to the thinking of the wanton terrorist. Why do they destroy their own people, their own poor people whose freedom is their verbal concern? That hospital with all its useless pain is like a cloud of sorrow. Can anyone believe that the VC, who can do this kind of thing to their own people, would be concerned for their welfare if they had complete control? I find I can't. We and our allies too often kill and injure innocent people in carrying out a military operation. The VC invariably wash themselves with innocents. They set up a machine gun in the doorway of a peasant's house and herd the children close around it knowing our reluctance to return fire at the cost of people. They build their bunkers in thickly populated areas for the same reason. And people do get hurt. I've seen the care we take to avoid it, and instant care when it cannot be helped.

One wing of the old French hospital at Can Tho is for VC casualties. The doors and windows are barred, of course, but inside the treatment is the same we give our own. But in the eyes of the injured prisoners I saw another atrocity, the long conditioning of these minds to expect only torture and death from us and their uneasy suspicion when it did not come. These minds are crippled by the same plan which plants the satchel charge in a market or throws a grenade into a crowded theater.

I must believe that the plodding protest marchers who spend their days across from the UN and around the White House hate war. I think I have more reason than most of them to hate it. But would they enlist for medical service? They could be trained quickly and would not be required to kill anyone. If they love people so much, why are they not willing to help to save them? Their country is woefully short of medical help. Couldn't some of the energy that goes into carrying placards be diverted to emptying bedpans or cleaning infected wounds? This would be a real protest against war. They would have to be told of course that their VC heroes do not respect peaceful intentions. They bomb hospitals and set mines for ambulances. It might be dangerous to see this method of protest and besides, if they left the country, their relief checks might stop. But in return they might gain a little pride in themselves as being for something instead of only against.

The question comes from home so often—when will it be over? I can only guess, Alicia, but at least I am guessing on a base of observation from one end of this country to the other. I guess that a cease-fire is not too far in the future because we and our allies can meet and defeat any military foe that will face us. But a cease-fire is only the beginning. During the Christmas truce, which amounts to a cease-fire, there were over a hundred violations of the truce and not one by us. But that is not the finality of this war. The trained, professional hard-core VCs in their cells of three infest the country. They must be rooted out one by one until the villages and hamlets are able to defend themselves. And that may take a generation. But anyone who doubts that it can be done should look at South Korea. In one generation that is a changed people, proud, efficient and self-reliant. Their troops here in Vietnam are as fine as any in the world. And what happened to them can happen here—and must. If we are too quick to pull out or too stupid to understand the price, we may win the battle and lose the war.

 

Yours,

John

Saturday, February 25, 1967
Saigon

 

Dear Alicia:

 

IT IS TIME for us to continue our journey on to Thailand. We made the reservations to Bangkok and said goodbye to many friends. I know that I have not written to you about everything I have seen. That would take a lifetime. But I have been six weeks here, about five of them in the field, and perhaps my years tell on me a little. I have often wished that if a war is necessary, it might be fought by men of my age rather than by boys with their whole lives ahead of them. The difficulty is that we wouldn't do it very well. Our bones would creak and our eyes might not have the clear sharpness required. Let's face it, Alicia, I get tireder quicker than the kids do and I don't recover as fast.

It was my last night and I had reserved it for a final mission. Do you remember or did I even mention Puff, the Magic Dragon? From the ground I had seen it in action in the night but I had never flown in it. It was not given its name by us but by the VC who have experienced it. Puff is a kind of a crazy conception. It is a C-47—that old Douglas two-motor ship that has been the workhorse of the world since early on in World War II.

The one I was to fly in was celebrating its twenty-fourth birthday and that's an old airplane. I don't know who designed Puff but whoever did had imagination. It is armed with three six-barreled Gatling guns. Their noses stick out of two side windows and the open door. And these three guns can spray out 2,800 rounds a minute—that's right, 2,800. In one quarter-turn, these guns fine-tooth an area bigger than a football field and so completely that not even a tuft of crabgrass would remain alive. The guns are fixed. The pilot fires them by rolling up on his side. There are cross hairs on his side glass. When the cross hairs are on the target, he presses a button and a waterfall of fire pours on the target, a Niagara of steel.

These ships, some of them, are in the air in every area at night and all night. If a call for help comes, they can be there in a very short time. They carry quantities of the parachute flares we see in the sky every night, flares so bright that they put an area of midday on a part of the night-bound earth. And these flares are not mechanically released. They are manhandled out the open door by the flare crew. I know the technique but I have never flown a night mission with Puff. I had reserved it for my last night in South Vietnam. We were to fly at dark and hoped to be back by midnight.

My lady-wife Elaine, who has taken everything in her proud stride to my admiration, did not want to sit alone in the Caravelle Hotel waiting for me, so Johnny Floyd, Regular Army, third hitch, recently wounded but recuperating, asked her to have dinner with him in a small restaurant near the hotel to wait out my return.

I went by chopper to the field where the Puffs live, met the pilot and his crew and had supper with them. Our mission was not general call. A crossroad area had been observed to be used after dark recently by Charley, who was rushing supplies from one place to another for reasons best known to Charley. We were to be directed by one of the little Forward Air Control planes I spoke of in an earlier letter.

Because it was hot and no wind in prospect, I wore only light slacks and a cotton shirt. We flew at dusk and very soon I found myself freezing. Puff is not a quiet ship, her door is open, her gun ports open, her engines loud and everything on her rattles. I did not wear a headset because I wanted to move about, so one of the flare crew, a big man, had to offer me an extra flight suit and he said it in pantomime. I accepted with chattering teeth and struggled into it and zipped it up. Then they fitted me with a parachute harness and showed me where my pack was in case of need. But even I knew that flying at low altitude, if the need should arise, there wouldn't be much time to get out even if I were young and clever.

Forward of the guns and aft by the open door were the racks where the flares stood, three feet high, four inches in diameter. I think they weigh about forty pounds. Wrestling two or three hundred of them out of the door would be a good night's work. The ship was dark, except for its recognition lights and a dim red light over the navigator's table.

They gave me ear plugs. I had heard that the sound of these guns is unique, so I put the rubber stoppers in my ears but they were irritating so I pulled them out again and only hoped to get my mouth open when we fired.

There was a line of afterglow in the western sky, only it was not west the way Puff flies. Sometimes it was overhead, sometimes straight down. Without an instrument you couldn't tell up from down but my feet were held to the steel floor by this centrifuge of the turning, twisting ship. Then the order came and a flare was thrown out and another and another. They whirled down and the brilliant lights came on. We upsided and looked down on the ghost-lighted earth. Far below, us almost skimming the earth, I could see the shape of the tiny skimming FAC plane inspecting the target and reporting to our pilot. We dropped three more flares, whirled and dropped three more. The road and the crossroads were very clearly defined on the ground and then there was a curious unearthly undulating mass like an amoeba under a microscope, a pseudo-pod changing its shape and size as it moved. Now Puff went up on its side. I did know enough to get my mouth open. The sound of those guns is like nothing I have heard. It is like a coffee grinder as big as Mt. Everest compounded with a dentist's drill. A growl but one that rocks your body and flaps your eardrums like wind-whipped flags. And out through the door I could see a stream, a wide river of fire that seemed to curve and wave toward the earth.

We flared and fired again and once again. Out on the edges of darkness there were the little winking lights that were ground fire aimed at us.

During the last five weeks, I guess I have been in areas and under conditions of danger. I've had a good normal fear that makes one keep his head down and take cover when it offers, the tenseness and crystal awareness danger brings. I guess it is fear all right but it brings compensations. But now, on the last night, with the mission completed and only the winking ground fire and that receding behind us, I was afraid. More than that—I was scared. I could see the stray and accidental shot hit a flare and the whole ship go up in a huge Roman candle of incandescent searing light. I thought how silly it would be on my last night. I think it was the first time I had thought of myself, me, as being in danger. And then curious memories came to me like movie shorts. I had a drink with Ernie Pyle in San Francisco. Ernie ordinarily dressed like a tossed salad but now he was wearing a new Eisenhower jacket. I said, “Just because you're going to the Pacific do you have to be a fashion plate?”

Ernie said, “It's new. I shouldn't have bought it. I'm not going to need it.” And his first time on the line he got a bullet between the eyes.

And Capa leaving Paris for the war in East Asia. We made a date for dinner in Paris a week away. And Capa said, “I hate to go on this one. If I didn't need the money, I wouldn't go. I've had it. I tell you this is the last time.” And it was.