Dispatches (16 page)

“Yeah,” someone said. “Greene got killed.” He wasn’t talking to us, but to the crew, who knew it already. “Remember Greene?” Everyone nodded.

“Wow, Greene,” he said. “Greene was all fixed to get out. He’s jerkin’ off thirty times a day, that fuckin’ guy, and they’s all set to give him a medical. And out.”

“That’s no shit,” the other one said. “Thirty times a day. Disgusting, man. That sombitch had come all over his pants, that fuckin’ Greene. He was waitin’ outside to see the major about gettin’ sent home, an’ the major comes out to find him an’ he’s just sittin’ there jerkin’ off. Then he gets blown away the night before.”

“Well,” Day Tripper said quietly to Mayhew, “see what happens if you jerk off?”

A Chinook, forty feet long with rotors front and back, set down on the airstrip by Charlie Med, looking like a great, gross beast getting a body purchase on some mud, blowing bitter gusts of dust, pebbles and debris for a hundred yards around. Everywhere within that circle of wind men turned and crouched, covering their necks against the full violence of it. The wind from those blades could come up strong enough to blow you over, to tear papers from your hands, to lift tarmac sections weighing a hundred pounds in the air. But it was mostly the sharp fragments, the stinging dirt, the muddy, pissed-in water, and you acquired a second sense of when it would reach you, learned to give it only your back and your helmet. The Chinook had flown in with its rear hatch down and a gunner with a .50-caliber machine gun stretched out flat on his stomach peering over the edge of the hatch. Neither he nor the door gunners would relax their weapons until the chopper touched the strip. Then they let go, the barrels of the big guns dropping down like dead weights in their mounts. A bunch of Marines appeared on the edge of the strip and ran to the chopper, through the ring of harsh, filthy wind, toward the calm at the center. Three mortar rounds came in at three-second intervals, all landing in a cluster 200 meters down the strip. No one around the chopper stopped. The noise from the Chinook drowned out
the noise of the rounds, but we could see the balls of white smoke blowing out away from the strip in the wind, and the men were still running for the chopper. Four full litters were carried at a run from the rear of the Chinook to the med tent. Some walking wounded came out and headed for the tent, some walking slowly, unaided, others moving uncertainly, one being supported by two Marines. The empty litters were returned and loaded with four poncho-covered figures, which were set down near some sandbagging in front of the tent. Then the Chinook reared up abruptly, dipped horribly, regained its flight and headed north and west, toward the covering hills.

“One-nine,” Mayhew said. “I’ll bet anything.”

Four kilometers northwest of Khe Sanh was Hill 861, the hardest-hit of all the sector outposts after Langvei, and it seemed logical to everyone that the 1st Battalion of the 9th Marine Regiment should have been chosen to defend it. Some even believed that if anyone but 1/9 had been put there, 861 would never have been hit. Of all the hard-luck outfits in Vietnam, this was said to be the most doomed, doomed in its Search-and-Destroy days before Khe Sanh, known for a history of ambush and confusion and for a casualty rate which was the highest of any outfit in the entire war. That was the kind of reputation that takes hold most deeply among the men of the outfit itself, and when you were with them you got a sense of dread that came out of something more terrible than just a collective loss of luck. All the odds seemed somehow sharply reduced, estimates of your own survival were revised horribly downward. One afternoon with 1/9 on 861 was enough to bend your nerves for days, because it took only a few minutes up there to see the very worst of it: the stumbles, the simple motions of a walk suddenly racked by spasms, mouths sand-dry seconds after drinking, the dreamy smiles of total abdication. Hill 861 was
the home of the thousand-yard stare, and I prayed hard for a chopper to come and get me away from there, to fly me over the ground fire and land me in the middle of a mortar barrage on the Khe Sanh pad—whatever! Anything was better than this.

On a night shortly after the Langvei attack an entire platoon of 1/9 was ambushed during a patrol and wiped out. Hill 861 had been hit repeatedly, once for three days straight during a perimeter probe that turned into a siege that really
was
a siege. For reasons that no one is certain of, Marine helicopters refused to fly missions up there, and 1/9 was cut off from support, re-supply or medical evacuation. It was bad, and they had to get through it any way they could, alone. (The stories from that time became part of the worst Marine legends; the story of one Marine putting a wounded buddy away with a pistol shot because medical help was impossible, or the story of what they did to the NVA prisoner taken beyond the wire—stories like that. Some of them may even have been true.) The old hostility of the grunt toward Marine Air became total on 861: when the worst of it was over and the first Ch-34 finally showed over the hilltop, the door gunner was hit by enemy ground fire and fell out of the chopper. It was a drop of over 200 feet, and there were Marines on the ground who cheered when he hit.

Mayhew, Day Tripper and I were walking near the triage tent of Charlie Med. In spite of all the shrapnel that had fallen into that tent, no way had been found to protect it. The sandbagging around it was hardly more than five feet high, and the top was entirely exposed. It was one reason why grunts feared even the mildest of the Going Home wounds. Someone ran out of the tent and took photographs of the four dead Marines. The wind from the Chinook had blown the ponchos from two of them, and one had no face left at all. A Catholic chaplain on a bicycle rode up to the
entrance of the tent and walked inside. A Marine came out and stood by the flap for a moment, an unlighted cigarette hanging from his mouth. He had neither a flak jacket nor a helmet. He let the cigarette drop from his lips, walked a few steps to the sandbags and sat down with his legs drawn up and his head hanging down between his knees. He threw one limp arm over his head and began stroking the back of his neck, shaking his head from side to side violently, as though in agony. He wasn’t wounded.

We were here because I had to pass this way to reach my bunker, where I had to pick up some things to take over to Hotel Company for the night. Day Tripper wasn’t liking the route. He looked at the bodies and then at me. It was that look which said, “See? You see what it does?” I had seen that look so many times during the past months that I must have had it too now, and neither of us said anything. Mayhew wasn’t letting himself look at anything. It was as though he were walking by himself now, and he was singing in an odd, quiet voice. “ ‘When you get to San Francisco,’ ” he sang, “ ‘be sure and wear some flowers in your hair.’ ”

We passed the control tower, that target that was its own aiming stake, so prominent and vulnerable that climbing up there was worse than having to run in front of a machine gun. Two of them had already been hit, and the sandbags running up the sides didn’t seem to make any difference. We went by the grimy admin buildings and bunkers, a bunch of deserted “hardbacks” with crushed metal roofs, the TOC, the command latrine and a post-office bunker. There was the now roofless beer hall and the collapsed, abandoned officers’ club. The Seabee bunker was just a little farther along the road.

It was not like the other bunkers. It was the deepest, safest, cleanest place in Khe Sanh, with six feet of timbers, steel and sandbags overhead, and inside it was brightly lit.
The grunts called it the Alamo Hilton and thought it was candy-assed, while almost every correspondent who came to Khe Sanh tried to get a bed there. A bottle of whiskey or a case of beer would be enough to get you in for a few nights, and once you became a friend of the house, gifts like that were simply a token and very deeply appreciated. The Marines had set up a press “facility” very, very near the strip, and it was so bad that a lot of reporters thought there was a conscious conspiracy working to get some of us killed off. It was nothing more than a narrow, flimsily covered, rat-infested hole, and one day when it was empty an incoming 152 shell sewed part of it up.

I went down into the Seabee bunker, picked up a bottle of Scotch and a field jacket, and told one of the Seabees to give my rack to anyone who needed it that night.

“You ain’t mad at us or anything?” he said.

“Nothing like that. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” he said as I left. “If you think so.”

As the three of us walked toward the 2/26 positions, two batteries of Marine artillery started firing 105’s and 155’s from the other side of the base. Every time a round was fired I’d flinch a little, and Mayhew would laugh.

“Them’re outgoing,” he said.

Day Tripper heard the deep sliding whistle of the other shells first.
“That
ain’ no outgoin’,” he said, and we ran for a short trench a few yards away.

“That ain’t outgoing,” Mayhew said.

“Now what I jus’ say?” Day Tripper yelled, and we reached the trench as a shell landed somewhere between the 37th ARVN Rangers compound and the ammo dump. A lot of them were coming in, some mortars too, but we didn’t count them.

“Sure was some nice mornin’,” Day Tripper said. “Oh, man, why they can’ jus’ leave us alone one time?”

“ ’Cause they ain’t gettin’ paid to leave us alone,” Mayhew said, laughing. “ ’Sides, they do it ’cause they know how it fucks you all up.”

“Tell me
you
ain’ scared shit!”

“You’ll never see
me
scared, motherfucker.”

“Oh no. Three nights ago you was callin’ out for your
momma
while them fuckers was hittin’ our wire.”

“Boo-sheeit! I ain’t never gettin’ hit in Vietnam.”

“Oh no? Okay, mothafucker, why not?”

“ ’Cause,” Mayhew said, “it don’t exist.” It was an old joke, but this time he wasn’t laughing.

By now, the trenchline circled the camp almost completely. Most of the northern perimeter was held down by the 2nd Battalion of the 26th Marine Regiment, and Hotel Company was along this sector. In its westernmost part it was opposed by North Vietnamese trenches that ended just 300 meters away. Farther to the east it sat above a narrow river, and beyond that was Hill 950, three kilometers to the north, which was held by the NVA and whose highest ridge ran exactly parallel to the Khe Sanh airstrip. The bunkers and connecting trenchworks sat on a rise that ran up from the riverbank, and the hills began a couple of hundred meters from the far side of the river. Two hundred meters away, facing the Marine trenches, there was an NVA sniper with a .50-caliber machine gun who shot at the Marines from a tiny spider hole. During the day he fired at anything that rose above the sandbags, and at night he fired at any lights he could see. You could see him clearly from the trench, and if you were looking through the scope of a Marine sniper’s rifle you could even see his face. The Marines fired on his position with mortars and recoilless rifles, and he would drop into his hole and wait. Gunships fired rockets at him, and when they
were through he would come up again and fire. Finally, napalm was called in, and for ten minutes the air above the spider hole was black and orange from the strike, while the ground around it was galvanized clean of every living thing. When all of it cleared, the sniper popped up and fired off a single round, and the Marines in the trenches cheered. They called him Luke the Gook, and after that no one wanted anything to happen to him.

Mayhew had a friend named Orrin from somewhere in Tennessee, from the mountains there where his family owned three small trucks and did a short-haul business. On the morning that Mayhew and Day Tripper had gone over to 1/26 to find Evans, Orrin received a letter from his wife. It told him straight off that her pregnancy was not seven months along, as he had believed, but only five. It made all the difference in the world to Orrin. She had felt so awful all the time (she wrote) that she went to see the minister, and the minister had finally convinced her that the Truth was God’s one sure key to a beautiful conscience. She would not tell him who the father was (and Honey, don’t you never, never try and make me tell), except to mention that it was someone Orrin knew well.

When we got back to the company, Orrin was sitting on top of the sandbags above the trench, alone and exposed, looking out toward the hills and Luke the Gook. He had a beefy, sulky kid’s face, a perpetual mean squint and a pouting mouth that would break into a dull smile and then a dry, soundless laugh. It was the face of someone who would hunt the winter out and then let the meat go to rot, a mean Southland aberration of a face. He just sat there, working the bolt of a freshly cleaned .45. No one in the trench would go near him or say anything to him, except to yell out, “Come on down, Orrin. You’ll get greased for sure, motherfucker.” Finally,
the gunnery sergeant came along and said, “If you don’t get your ass down off that berm I’ll shoot you myself.”

“Listen,” Mayhew said. “Maybe you better go and see the chaplain.”

“Real good,” Orrin said. “What’s that cocksucker gone do for me?”

“Maybe you could get an emergency leave.”

“No,” someone said. “There’s gotta be a death in the family before you’ll get out like that.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Orrin said. “There’s gone be a death in my family. Just soon’s I git home.” And then he laughed.

It was a terrible laugh, very quiet and intense, and it was the thing that made everyone who heard it believe Orrin. After that, he was the crazy fucking grunt who was going to get through the war so he could go home and kill his old lady. It made him someone special in the company. It made a lot of guys think that he was lucky now, that nothing could happen to him, and they stayed as close to him as they could. I even felt some of it, enough to be glad that we would be in the same bunker that night. It made sense. I believed it too, and I would have been really surprised if I had heard later that anything had happened to him. But that was the kind of thing you seldom heard after you left an outfit, the kind of thing you avoided hearing if you could. Maybe he was killed or maybe he changed his mind, but I doubt it. When I remembered Orrin, all I could think of was that there was going to be a shooting in Tennessee.