Dispatches (21 page)

“Man, one Dink with a forty-five could put a hurtin’ on those Loaches they’d never come back from,” a young captain said. It was incredible, those little ships were the most beautiful things flying in Vietnam (you had to stop once in a while and admire the machinery), they just hung there above those bunkers like wasps outside a nest. “That’s sex,” the captain said. “That’s pure sex.”

One of the Loaches rose suddenly and flew over the hill, crossed the river and darted into Laos. Then it circled quickly, dipped, flew directly over us and hung there. The pilot radioed the captain.

“Sir, there’s a gook di-di-ing down the trail into Laos. Permission to kill him.”

“Permission given.”

“Thank you,” the pilot said, and the ship broke its suspended motion and sped toward the trail, clearing its guns.

A rocket whistled by, missing the hill, and we ran for the bunkers. Two more came in, both missing, and then we moved out for the opposite hill one more time, watching the machine-gun slits for fluttering blips of light with one eye and checking the ground for booby traps with the other. But they had abandoned it during the night, and we took it without a shot, standing on top of the bunkers, looking down into Laos, past the remains of two bombed-out Russian tanks, feeling relieved, victorious and silly. When Merron and I flew back to Stud that afternoon, the two-month-old corpse rode with us. No one had covered him until ten minutes before the chopper had picked us up, and the body bag swarmed with flies until the motion of the rising chopper shook them off. We got out at Graves Registration with it, where one of the guys opened the bag and said, “Shit, this is a
gook!
What’d they bring him
here
for?”

“Look, Jesus, he’s got on our uniform.”

“I don’t give a fuck, that ain’t no American, that’s a fucking
gook!”

“Wait a minute,” the other one said. “Maybe it’s a spade.…”

The chopper that brought us back to Khe Sanh had barely touched the strip, and we were running again. I must have seen the Marines playing softball there, lounging around, hanging up laundry, but I rejected it and ran anyway. It was the only way I knew to behave there. I knew where the trench was, and went for it.

“Must be Airborne trainin’,” some grunt called, and I slowed down.

“Ain’ no hurry-up no more,” a black Marine said. They all had their fatigue shirts off, there must have been hundreds of them, all around the field. It didn’t seem possible, but I knew it must be all right; I had noticed the weight of my flak jacket and pack as I’d run. Nearly 500 Vietnamese Rangers sat near the strip with all of their gear around them. One of them ran up to an American, probably an advisor, and embraced him tightly. They were being taken out that morning. Colonel Lownds’ replacement was due at the base any hour now, and some of the 26th had already been lifted out and moved to Hoi An, south of Danang. The new Charlie Med triage room had just been completed, deep underground and well lighted, but only a few men a day were being treated there. I went over to Hotel Company’s position, but they were gone; a company of the Cav was there instead. They had cleaned out the trench floor all along the perimeter there, and the old bunker smelled now as though it had been dug that morning. It was no wonder that the Marines called the Cav dudes and got uncomfortable whenever they were around. I was relieving myself on the ground by one of the dumps when a Marine sergeant came up to me.

“You wanna please use the piss tube next time,” he said.

It hadn’t even occurred to me; I couldn’t remember ever having seen a piss tube at Khe Sanh.

“Has the Cav taken over most of the perimeter?” I asked.

“Hmmmm.”

“It must be a relief not to have to worry about that anymore.”

“Shit, I’d feel a whole lot better if we had
Marines
here still. Damn Cav, all’s they do is sleep on watch.”

“Have you seen that?”

“No, but that’s what they do.”

“You don’t like the Cav much?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

Far up the strip, 400 meters away, there was a man sitting on some ammo crates. He was by himself. It was the colonel. I hadn’t seen him in nearly six weeks, and he looked tired now. He had the same stare that the rest of the Marines here had, and the corners of his mustache had been rolled tortuously into two tight points that were caked with dried creamed coffee. Yes, he said, it sure would be good to get out of this place. He sat there looking at the hills, and I think that he was all but hypnotized by them now; they were not the same hills that had surrounded him for most of the past ten months. They had held such fearful mystery for so long that when they were suddenly found to be peaceful again, they were transformed as greatly as if a flood had swept over them.

A token American force was kept at Khe Sanh for the next month, and the Marines went back to patrolling the hills, as they had done a year before. A great many people wanted to know how the Khe Sanh Combat Base could have been the Western Anchor of our Defense one month and a worthless piece of ground the next, and they were simply told that the situation had changed. A lot of people suspected that some kind of secret deal had been made with the North; activity along the DMZ all but stopped after Khe Sanh was abandoned. The Mission called it a victory, and General Westmoreland said that it had been “a Dien Bien Phu in reverse.” In early June engineers rolled up the airstrip and transported the salvaged tarmac back to Dong Ha. The bunkers were filled with high explosives and then blown up. The sandbagging and wire that remained were left to the jungle, which grew with a violence of energy now in the Highland summer, as though there was an impatience somewhere to conceal all traces of what had been left by the winter.

Postscript: China Beach

It was a great curving stretch of beachfront that faced the Bay of Danang. Even during the monsoons the afternoons were warm and clear, but now, in August, the dry, hot winds blew the sharp grit of the sand across the beach, into your eyes, hurling it stinging against your skin. Every Marine in I Corps got to spend a few days at China Beach at least once during their thirteen-month tours. It was a place where they could go swimming or surfing, get drunk, get stoned, get laid, get straight, groove in the scivvie houses, rent sailboats, or just sleep on the beach. Sometimes it was just an in-country R&R, a vacation, and sometimes it was a reward for outstanding service, exceptional bravery. Some Marines, the ones who were more than just good in a firefight, would get here as often as once a month because their company commanders did not like having them around between operations. With their medals and commendations, they would get three days out, a reprieve that promised them hot food, hot showers, time to goof and miles of beach. Sometimes choppers from the Cav would fly low along the beach, buzzing the Marines, and once, when a beautiful girl in a bikini was sighted, one of them actually landed. But you saw very few women here, mostly just Marines, and on some days there were thousands of them. They would splash in the surf, giggling and shouting, riding beach disks along the shoreline, playing like kids. Sometimes they would just lie asleep, half in the water and half in the sand. This was not the war for such images, you knew better, but they were Marines, and there was something terrible about seeing them there, limp in the wash of the tide.

Up from the beach there was a long, airless concrete building
that served as a cafeteria. It had the best jukebox in Vietnam, and black Marines would spend more time there than on the beach, jiving around the room, carrying stacks of greasy hamburgers, dank french fries, giant paper cups full of malted milk, grape drink or (because it was so pretty, one of them told me) tomato juice. You’d sit at the tables there listening to the music, glad to be out of the sun, and every once in a while some grunts would recognize you from an operation and come over to talk. It was always nice to see them, but it always brought bad news, and sometimes the sight of what the war had done to them was awful. The two who came up to me now looked all right.

“You’re a reporter, ain’t you?”

I nodded.

“We seen you one time at Khe Sanh.”

They were from the 26th Marines, Hotel Company, and they told me all about what had happened to the outfit since April. They weren’t from the same platoon as Orrin and Day Tripper, but they knew that both of them had made it home. One of the guys who had run out to bring me a stretcher to sleep on was in a big hospital in Japan. I couldn’t remember the name of the one grunt I most wanted to hear about, I was probably afraid of what they’d say, but I described him. He was a little cat with blond hair, and he was trying to grow a mustache.

“Oh, you mean Stoner.”

“No, it wasn’t that. He was always hanging out with Day Tripper. The guy I mean extended back in March, A crazy, funny little guy.”

They looked at each other, and I was sorry I’d asked.

“I know the guy you mean,” one of them said. “He was always running around singing real crazy shit? Yeah, I know. He got killed. What was that little fucker’s name?”

“I don’t know which one,” the other Marine said.

“Shit, yes, he got greased out on that
brilliant
fuckin’ operation down from Hoi An. ’Member, in May?”

“Oh yeah. Him.”

“Took a fuckin’ RPG round right in the chest. God
damn
, I’ll think of his name.”

But I already remembered it now, and I sat there playing with a bottle of suntan lotion.

“It was Montefiori,” one of them said.

“No, but it started with an M,” the other one said.

“Winters!”

“No, dumb shit, now does Winters start with an M?”

“That kid Morrisey.”

“You’re just fuckin’ with me now. Morrisey got sent home last week.…”

They went on like that, they really couldn’t remember it. It was just a matter of pride or politeness for them to come up with the name of a dead buddy, they were going to try, but when they thought I wasn’t watching, they looked at each other and smiled.

Illumination Rounds

We were all strapped into the seats of the Chinook, fifty of us, and something, someone was hitting it from the outside with an enormous hammer. How do they do that? I thought, we’re a thousand feet in the air! But it had to be that, over and over, shaking the helicopter, making it dip and turn in a horrible out-of-control motion that took me in the stomach. I had to laugh, it was so exciting, it was the thing I had wanted, almost what I had wanted except for that wrenching, resonant metal-echo; I could hear it even above the noise of the rotor blades. And they were going to fix that, I knew they would make it stop. They had to, it was going to make me sick.

They were all replacements going in to mop up after the big battles on Hills 875 and 876, the battles that had already taken on the name of one great battle, the battle of Dak To. And I was new, brand new, three days in-country, embarrassed about my boots because they were so new. And across from me, ten feet away, a boy tried to jump out of the straps and then jerked forward and hung there, his rifle barrel caught in the red plastic webbing of the seat back. As the chopper rose again and turned, his weight went back hard against the webbing and a dark spot the size of a baby’s hand showed in the center of his fatigue jacket. And it grew—I knew what it was, but not really—it got up to his armpits
and then started down his sleeves and up over his shoulders at the same time. It went all across his waist and down his legs, covering the canvas on his boots until they were dark like everything else he wore, and it was running in slow, heavy drops off of his fingertips. I thought I could hear the drops hitting the metal strip on the chopper floor. Hey!… Oh, but this isn’t anything at all, it’s not real, it’s just some
thing
they’re going through that isn’t real. One of the door gunners was heaped up on the floor like a cloth dummy. His hand had the bloody raw look of a pound of liver fresh from the butcher paper. We touched down on the same lz we had just left a few minutes before, but I didn’t know it until one of the guys shook my shoulder, and then I couldn’t stand up. All I could feel of my legs was their shaking, and the guy thought I’d been hit and helped me up. The chopper had taken eight hits, there was shattered plastic all over the floor, a dying pilot up front, and the boy was hanging forward in the straps again, he was dead, but not (I knew) really dead.

It took me a month to lose that feeling of being a spectator to something that was part game, part show. That first afternoon, before I’d boarded the Chinook, a black sergeant had tried to keep me from going. He told me I was too new to go near the kind of shit they were throwing around up in those hills. (“You a reporter?” he’d asked, and I’d said, “No, a writer,” dumbass and pompous, and he’d laughed and said, “Careful. You can’t use no eraser up where you wanna go.”) He’d pointed to the bodies of all the dead Americans lined in two long rows near the chopper pad, so many that they could not even cover all of them decently. But they were not real then, and taught me nothing. The Chinook had come in, blowing my helmet off, and I grabbed it up and joined the replacements waiting to board. “Okay, man,” the sergeant said. “You gotta go, you gotta go. All’s I can say is, I hope you get a clean wound.”

———

The battle for Hill 875 was over, and some survivors were being brought in by Chinook to the landing strip at Dak To. The 173rd Airborne had taken over 400 casualties, nearly 200 killed, all on the previous afternoon and in the fighting that had gone on all through the night. It was very cold and wet up there, and some girls from the Red Cross had been sent up from Pleiku to comfort the survivors. As the troops filed out of the helicopters, the girls waved and smiled at them from behind their serving tables. “Hi, soldier! What’s your name?” “Where you from, soldier?” “I’ll bet some hot coffee would hit the spot about now.”

And the men from the 173rd just kept walking without answering, staring straight ahead, their eyes rimmed with red from fatigue, their faces pinched and aged with all that had happened during the night. One of them dropped out of line and said something to a loud, fat girl who wore a Peanuts sweatshirt under her fatigue blouse and she started to cry. The rest just walked past the girls and the large, olive-drab coffee urns. They had no idea of where they were.