If I Die in a Combat Zone (11 page)

Later, Johansen and the lieutenant talked about the mechanics of the ambush. They agreed it had been perfectly executed. They were mildly upset that with such large and well-defined targets we had not done better than one in three. No matter. The platoons had registered other kills. They were talking these matters over, the officers pleased with their success and the rest of us relieved it was over, when my friend Chip and a squad leader named Tom were blown to pieces as they swept the village with the Third Platoon.

That was Alpha Company’s most successful ambush.

Ten
The Man at the Well

      H
e was just an old man, an old Vietnamese farmer. His hair was white, and he was somewhere over seventy years, stooped and hunched from work in the paddies, his spine bent into a permanent, calcified arc. He was blind. His eyes were huge and empty, glistening like aluminum under the sun, cauterized and burnt out. But the old man got around.

In March we came to his well. He stood and smiled while we used the water. He laughed when we laughed. To be ingratiating he said, “Good water for good GIs.” Whenever there was occasion, he repeated the phrase.

Some children came to the well, and one of them, a little girl with black hair and hoops of steel through her ears, took the old fellow’s hand, helping him about. The kids giggled at our naked bodies. A boy took a soldier’s rifle from out of the mud and wiped it and stacked it against a tree, and the old man smiled.

Alpha Company decided to spend the day in the old man’s village. We lounged inside his hut, and when resupply choppers brought down cold beer and food, we ate and wasted away the day. The kids administered professional back rubs, chopping and stretching and pushing our blood. They eyed our C rations, and the old blind man helped when he could.

When the wind stopped and the flies became bothersome, we went to the well again. We showered, and the old fellow helped, dipping into the well and yanking up buckets of water and sloshing it over our heads and backs and bellies. The kids watched him wash us. The day was as hot and peaceful as a day can be.

The blind old farmer was showering one of the men. A blustery and stupid soldier, blond hair and big belly, picked up a carton of milk and from fifteen feet away hurled it, for no reason, aiming at the old man and striking him flush in the face. The carton burst. Milk sprayed into the old man’s cataracts. He hunched forward, rocking precariously and searching for balance. He dropped his bucket. His hands went to his eyes then dropped loosely to his thighs. His blind gaze fixed straight ahead, at the stupid soldier’s feet. His tongue moved a little, trying to get at the cut and tasting the blood and milk. No one moved to help. The kids were quiet. The old man’s eyes did a funny trick, almost rolling out of his head, out of sight. He was motionless, and finally he smiled. He picked up the bucket and with the ruins of goodness spread over him, perfect gore, he dunked into the well and came up with water, and he began showering the next soldier.

Eleven
Assault

      O
n the twelfth day of April, Erik wrote me, and on the sixteenth day I sat on a rucksack and opened his letter. He was at Long Binh, working as a transportation clerk. I was on a hill. It was a hill in the middle of the bomb-grayed Batangan Peninsula, at a place we called Landing Zone Minuteman.

April 16 was hot, just as every day in April had been hot. First, in the April mornings, came the signs of the day. An absolutely cloudless sky crept out of the dark over the sea. The early mornings were clear, like a kind of distorted glass. A person could see impossible things. But the sun mounted, and the sky focused it on LZ Minuteman. By ten o’clock each morning, the rifles and uncovered canteens and ammo were untouchable. We let the stuff lay.

Sometimes, before the tepid swamp of air moved into its killer phase, Captain Johansen would move us off LZ Minuteman and we would sweat out the April morning on the march. We would search a hamlet carelessly, hurrying to get out of the sun. We would taunt some Vietnamese, applaud an occasional well or creek, find nothing, and finally retire to the top of our hill for the worst of each day.

We ignored the Viet Cong. We fought over piles of dead wood. We hacked poles out of the stuff, rammed them into the ground, and spread our ponchos over the poles, forming little roofs. Then we lay like prisoners in the resulting four square feet of shade.

The sun owned the afternoon. It broiled Alpha Company, that dusty red hill the skillet. We came to accept the sun as our most persistent and cunning enemy. All the training and discipline and soldierly skill in the world vanished during those April afternoons. We slept under our shelters, off guard, and no one cared. We waited for resupply. Occasionally a patrol would go down the hill to search out water. I sat with the radio, prodding and sometimes begging the rear to speed things up. Alpha was a fat company. We took our oranges and sacks of cold Coke for granted, like haircuts and bullets. There could be no war without them.

During those April afternoons Captain Johansen or the artillery officer would call for the chess set, and we passed time watching my white, clean army succumb. We wrote letters. We slept. I tried poetry and short stories. Other times we talked, and I tried to pry Johansen into conversation about the war. But he was an officer, and he was practical, and he would only talk tactics or history, and if I asked his opinion about the politics or morality of it all, he was ready with a joke or a shrug, sending the conversations into limbo or to more certain ground. Johansen was the best man around, and during the April afternoons it was sad he wore his bars.

The rest of the men talked about their girls, about R & R and where they would go and how much they would drink and where the girls performed the best tricks. I was a believer during those talks. The vets told it in a real, firsthand way that made you hunger for Thailand and Manila. When they said to watch for the ones with razor blades in their vaginas—communist agents—I believed, imagining the skill and commitment of those women.

We lay under our shelters and talked about rumors. On the sixteenth of April the rumor was that Alpha Company would be leaving soon. We would be CA’d into Pinkville. Men uttered the rumor carefully, trying to phrase it in more dramatic ways than it had come to them. But the words were drama enough. We feared Pinkville. We feared the Combat Assault. Johansen gave no hints, so we waited for resupply and hoped it wasn’t so.

At three in the afternoon my radio buzzed and word came that resupply was inbound. Johansen had us spread out security for the chopper. When the pile of sacks and jugs and boxes was tossed off the bird, he hollered for everyone to stop clustering around the stuff. It was the big moment of April 16, and we were nothing but the children and hot civilians of the war, naked and thirsty and without pride. The stuff was dispersed. By three-thirty we had returned to our shelters, swearing that if the sun was our worst enemy, then the Coca-Cola Company certainly snuggled in as our best friend.

Next in order was the mail. And Erik:

Unclothed, poetry is much like newspaper writing, an event of the mind, the advent of an idea—bam!—you record it like a spring flood or the latest quintuplets. Which, after a sorely strained metaphor, brings me to the subject of the poems you sent me. If Frost was correct when he said a poem must be like a cake of ice on a stove, riding on its own melting, then the
Dharma
poem rides well indeed. I especially like the lines “truly/brutally/we are the mercenaries of a green and wet forest;” also, the juxtaposition of the last line to the whole of the poem is so effortless, so ephemeral, like the last ice crystal made liquid, that I can’t help but regret its melting: “Moksa, which is freedom.”

In the rather limited reading I’ve done lately, I’ve discovered the poet Robinson Jeffers. His writing is harsh yet beautiful, and it makes me think of April, and April turns me to
The Waste Land
, and for a reason I do fully understand, the first lines of
The Waste Land
turn my thoughts not to England, but rather to you, here, in Vietnam. Take care. For it is not a fantasy:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

April went on without lilacs. Without rain. When the choppers came in, they scooped dunes of red dust off LZ Minuteman, stirring the soil in their rotor blades, spewing clouds of rust color for a hundred yards. We learned to hide when the choppers made their drops. We stuffed our clean paper and clothes and apples into plastic bags. Minuteman was like the planet Mars. The place was desolate, hostile, utterly and vastly boring.

The days in April multiplied like twins, sextuplets, each identical. We played during the days. Volleyball. Gin. Tag. Poker or chess. Mad Mark had fun with his riot gas grenades, tossing them into a bunker and watching the artillery officer scramble out in tears. Captain Johansen and the battalion commander, Colonel Daud, flew overhead in a helicopter, dumping gas grenades onto the LZ. It was a training exercise. The idea was to test our reaction time, to make sure our gas masks were functioning. Mostly, though, it was to pass away the month of April.

At night we were supposed to send out ambushes, orders of Colonel Daud. Sometimes we did, other times, we did not. If the officers decided that the men were too tired or too restless for a night’s ambush, they would prepare a set of grid coordinates and call them into battalion headquarters. It would be a false report, a fake. The artilleryman would radio phony information to the big guns in the rear. The 105s or 155s would blast out their expensive rounds of marking explosives, and the lieutenant would call back his bogus adjustments, chewing out someone in the rear for poor marksmanship. During the night’s radio watch, we would call our nonexistent ambush, asking for a nonexistent situation report. We’d pause a moment, change our voice by a decibel, and answer our own call: “Sit Rep is negative. Out.” We did this once an hour for the entire night, covering the possibility that higher headquarters might be monitoring the net. Foolproof. The enlisted men, all of us, were grateful to Alpha’s officers. And the officers justified it, muttering that Colonel Daud was a greenhorn, too damn gung-ho. Phony ambushes were good for morale, best game we played on LZ Minuteman.

The rumors persisted. Near the end of the month they picked up steam; they became specific. Alpha Company would be CA’d into the My Lai area. A long operation. The helicopters would carry us to Pinkville before the end of the month. But the rumors had no source. To ask for a source was folly, for you would eventually be referred to the sun or to the rice or to a man who would have to ask someone else. Johansen only shrugged.

Four days before the end of the month, we were pulled off LZ Minuteman. We were given three days of rest in Chu Lai, a sprawling and safe military base along the South China Sea. Drinking, whistling, and gaping at the women in the floor shows, we killed the days and nights. On the final day of rest, Colonel Daud confirmed it. He played a strong but loving father. He drew Alpha Company into a semicircle and told everyone to be at ease.

“You’re going after the VC Forty-eighth Battalion,” he said. He was a black man, a stout and proper soldier. He didn’t smile, but we were supposed to like him for that. “The Forty-eighth Battalion is a helluva fighting unit. They’re tough. Some of you have tangled with them before. They’re smart. That’s what makes them tough. They’ll hit you when you’re sleeping. You look down to tie your boot laces, and they’ll hit you. You fall asleep on guard—they’ll massacre you. You walk along the trails, where they plant the mines because Americans are lazy and don’t like to walk in the rice paddies, and they’ll blow you all back to the world. Dead.”

Colonel Daud seemed to think we were a bunch of morons. He thought he was teaching us, helping us to live. And he was sending us out there anyway.

“Okay. So you gotta be smart, too. You gotta be smarter. You’re American soldiers. You’re stronger than the dink. You’re bigger. You’re faster. You’re better educated. You’re better supplied, better trained, better supported. All you need is brains. Common sense will do it. If you’re sleepy on guard, wake up a buddy, have him take over. Be alert while you’re on the march. Watch the bushes. Keep an eye out for freshly turned earth. If something seems out of place, stay clear of it and tell your buddy to stay clear. Okay? Pinkville is a bad place, I know that. But if you’re dumb, you’ll die in New York City.”

Daud flew away in his helicopter. “Christ, what a pompous asshole.” It was an officer. “Sends us to Pinkville and says we’ll be okay if we’re smart. New York, my ass.”

I wrote a letter to Erik. Then there was a floor show. A Korean stripper started in her black evening gown and silver jewelry. She did it to Paul Simon and Arthur Garfunkel’s music.
Homeward bound, I wish I was, homeward bound
. She had big breasts, big for a gook everyone said, damn sure. Pinkville. Christ, of all the places in the world, it would be Pinkville. The mines. Sullen, twisted dinks.

The Korean stripped suddenly, poked a tan and prime-lean thigh through a slit in the black gown. She was the prettiest woman in the Orient. Her beastly, unnaturally large breasts quivered like Jell-O.

The men cheered when the gown slid by wonderful accident from her shoulders.

It seemed to embarrass her, and she rolled her back, turning slightly away from Alpha Company and flexing her shoulderblades.