If I Die in a Combat Zone (9 page)

Eight
Alpha Company

      T
he first month with Alpha Company was a peculiar time. It was mostly a vacation. We wandered up and down the beaches outside Chu Lai, pulling security patrols and a very few night ambushes. It was an infantryman’s dream. There were no VC, no mines, sunny days, warm seas to swim in, daily resupplies of milk and beer. We were a traveling circus. A caravan of local children and women followed us from one stretch of sand to the next, peddling Coke and dirty pictures, cleaning our weapons for a can of C rations. During the days we played football. Two or three lovers lounged under their ponchos with Vietnamese girls. They flirted, and there were some jealousies and hurt feelings. When we moved to a new position, our column stretched out for a quarter-mile, filled with soldiers and prostitutes and girls carrying bags of Coke and children carrying our packs and sometimes even our rifles. At dusk the children dug our foxholes. Each GI had his personal mascot, his valet. My own helper was a little guy called Champion. He was ten years old, perhaps even younger, but he knew how to disassemble and clean my rifle, and he knew how to give a back rub.

During the first month, I learned that FNG meant “fuckin new guy,” and that I would be one until the Combat Center’s next shipment arrived. I learned that GIs in the field can be as lazy and careless and stupid as GIs anywhere. They don’t wear helmets and armored vests unless an officer insists; they fall asleep on guard, and for the most part, no one really cares; they throw away or bury ammunition if it gets heavy and hot. I learned that REMF means “rear echelon motherfucker;” that a man is getting “Short” after his third or fourth month; that a hand grenade is really a “frag;” that one bullet is all it takes and that “you never hear the shot that gets you;” that no one in Alpha Company gave a damn about the causes or purposes of their war: It is about “dinks and slopes,” and the idea is simply to kill them or avoid them. Except that in Alpha you don’t kill a man, you “waste” him. You don’t get mangled by a mine, you get “fucked up.” You don’t call a man by his first name—he’s the Kid or the Water Buffalo, Buddy Wolf or Buddy Barker or Buddy Barney, or if the fellow is bland or disliked, he’s just Smith or Jones or Rodriguez. The NCOs who go through a crash two-month program to earn their stripes are called “Instant NCOs;” hence the platoon’s squad leaders were named Ready Whip, Nestle’s Quick, and Shake and Bake. And when two of them—Tom and Arnold—were killed two months later, the tragedy was somehow lessened and depersonalized by telling ourselves that ol’ Ready Whip and Quick got themselves wasted by the slopes. There was Cop—an Irish fellow who wanted to join the police force in Danbury, Connecticut—and Reno and the Wop and the College Joe. You can go through a year in Vietnam and live with a platoon of sixty or seventy people, some going and some coming, and you can leave without knowing more than a dozen complete names, not that it matters.

Mad Mark was the platoon leader, a first lieutenant and a Green Beret. It was hard to tell if the name or the reason for the name came first. The madness in Mad Mark, at any rate, was not a hysterical, crazy, into-the-brink, to-the-fore madness. Rather, he was insanely calm. He never showed fear. He was a professional soldier, an ideal leader of men in the field. It was that kind of madness, the perfect guardian for the Platonic Republic. His attitude and manner were those of a CIA operative. A lover of stealth. A pro, a hired hand. It was his manner, and he cultivated it. He walked with a lanky, easy, silent, fearless stride. He wore tiger fatigues, not for their camouflage but for their look. He carried a shotgun—a weapon I’d thought was outlawed in international war—and the shotgun itself was a measure of his professionalism, for to use it effectively requires an exact blend of courage and skill and self-confidence. The weapon is neither accurate nor lethal at much over fifty yards. So it shows the skill of the carrier, a man who must work his way close enough to the prey to make a shot, close enough to see the enemy’s eyes and the tone of his skin. To get that close requires courage and confidence. The shotgun is not an automatic weapon. You must hit once, on the first shot, and the hit must kill. Mad Mark once said that after the war and in the absence of other U.S. wars he might try the mercenary’s life in Africa.

He did not yearn for battle. But neither was he concerned about the prospect. Throughout the first month, vacationing on the safe beaches, he did precisely what the mission called for: A few patrols, a few ambushes, staying ready to react, watching for signs of a rocket attack on Chu Lai. But he did not take the mission to excess. Mad Mark was not a fanatic. He was not gung ho, not a man in search of a fight. It was more or less an Aristotelian ethic that Mad Mark practiced: Making war is a necessary and natural profession. It is natural, but it is only a profession, not a crusade: “Hunting is a part of that art; and hunting might be practiced—not only against wild animals, but also against human beings who are intended by nature to be ruled by others and refuse to obey that intention—because war of this order is naturally just.” And, like Aristotle, Mad Mark believed in and practiced the virtue of moderation; he did what was necessary in war, necessary for an officer and platoon leader in war; he did no more or less.

He lounged with us during the hot days, he led a few patrols and ambushes, he flirted with the girls in our caravan, and, with a concern for only the basics of discipline, he allowed us to enjoy the holiday. Lying in the shade with the children, we learned a little Vietnamese, and they learned words like “mother-fucker” and “gook” and “dink” and “tit.” Like going to school.

It was not a bad war until we sent a night patrol into a village called Tri Binh 4. Mad Mark led it, taking only his shotgun and five other men. They’d been gone for an hour. Then came a burst of fire and a radio call that they’d opened up on some VC smoking and talking by a well. In ten minutes they were out of the hamlet and back with the platoon.

The Kid was ecstatic. “Christ! They were right out there, right in the open, right in the middle of the ville, in a little clearing, just sitting on their asses! Shit, I almost shit! Ten of ’em, just sitting there. Jesus, we gave ’em hell. Damn, we gave it to ’em!” His face was on fire, his teeth were flashing, he was grinning himself out of his skin. He paced back and forth, wanting to burst.

“Jesus,” he said. “Show ’em the ear we got! Let’s see the ear!”

Someone turned on a flashlight.

Mad Mark sat cross-legged and unwrapped a bundle of cloth and dangled a hunk of brown, fresh human ear under the yellow beam of light. Someone giggled. The ear was clean of blood. It dripped with a little water, as if coming out of a bathtub. Part of the upper lobe was gone. A band of skin flopped away from the ear, at the place where the ear had been held to a man’s head. It looked alive. It looked like it would move in Mad Mark’s hands, as if it might make a squirm for freedom. It had the texture of a hunk of elastic.

“Christ, Mad Mark just went up and sliced it off the dead dink! No wonder he’s Mad Mark. Like he was cuttin’ sausages or something.”

“What you gonna do with it? Why don’t you
eat
it, Mad Mark?”

“Bullshit, who’s gonna eat a goddamn dink? I eat women, not dead dinks.”

Kid laughed. “We got some money off the gook, too. A whole shitload.”

One of the men pulled out a roll of greasy piasters. The members of the patrol split it up and pocketed it; then they passed the ear around for everyone to fondle.

Mad Mark called in gunships. For an hour the helicopters strafed and rocketed Tri Binh 4. The sky and the trees and the hillsides were lighted up by spotlights and tracers and fires. From our position we could smell smoke coming from the village. We heard cattle and chickens and dogs dying. At two in the morning we started to sleep, one man at a time. Tri Binh 4 turned curiously quiet. Smoke continued to billow over to our position all night, and when I awakened every hour, it was the first thing to sense and to remind me of the ear. In the morning another patrol was sent into the village. The dead VC soldier was still there, stretched out on his back with his eyes closed and his arms folded and his head cocked to one side so that you could not see where the ear was gone. Little fires burned in some of the huts. Dead animals lay about. There were no people. We searched Tri Binh 4, then burned most of it down.

Nine
Ambush

      T
onight,” Mad Mark said quietly, “we are sending out an ambush.”

It was near dusk, and the lieutenant had his map spread out in the dirt in front of a foxhole. His squad leaders were grouped in a circle around him, watching where he drew Xs, taking notes. Mad Mark pointed at a spot on the map, circled it, and said, “We’ll be bushing this trail junction. Headquarters has some pretty good intelligence that Charlie’s in the neighborhood. Maybe we’ll nail him this time.”

He drew two red lines on the map. “First Squad will set up along this paddy dike. Make sure the grenade launchers and machine guns aren’t bunched together. Okay, Second Squad lines up along this hedgerow. That way we form an L. We get Charlie coming either way. Third and Fourth Squads stay here tonight. I’ll lead the ambush myself.”

He asked if there were questions, but the squad leaders were all experienced, and no one said anything.

“Okay, good enough. We move out at midnight—maybe a little after. Make sure you bring enough Claymores. And for Christ’s sake, don’t forget the firing devices. Also, tell every man to carry a couple of grenades. No freeloading. Let’s get some kills.”

The night turned into the purest earthly black, no stars and no moon. We sat around our foxholes in small groups, some of us muttering that it was bad luck to send out ambushes on nights as dark as this one. Often we had simply faked the whole thing, calling in the ambush coordinates to headquarters and then forgetting it. But Mad Mark apparently wanted to give it a try this time, and there was nothing to do about it. At midnight the squad leaders began moving from foxhole to foxhole, rousing men out. We hung grenades from our belts. We threw our helmets into foxholes—they were a hindrance at night, distorting hearing, too heavy, and, if it came to a fire fight, they made it hard to shoot straight. Instead we put on bush hats or went bareheaded. Every third man picked up a Claymore mine. We wiped dirt off our rifles, took a drink of water, urinated in the weeds, then lay on our backs to wait.

“The wait,” Chip murmured. “I hate the wait, seeing it get dark, knowing I got to go out. Don’t want to get killed in the dark.”

When Mad Mark moved us out of the perimeter and into the darkness, the air was heavy. There were none of the sounds of nature. No birds, no wind, no rain, no grass rustling, no crickets. We moved through the quiet. Metal clanging, canteens bouncing, twigs splintering and hollering out our names, water sloshing, we stepped like giants through the night. Mad Mark stopped us. He spoke to two or three men at a time, and when it was my turn he whispered that we must hold the noise down, that he, at least, didn’t want to die that night. It did no good.

Mad Mark led us across a rice paddy and onto a narrow, winding dirt road. The road circled a village. A dog barked. Voices spoke urgently inside the huts, perhaps parents warning children to stay down, sensing the same certain danger which numbed all twenty of us, the intruders. We circled the village and left it. The dog’s barking lasted for twenty minutes, echoing out over the paddies and following us as we closed in on the trial junction.

One of the most persistent and appalling thoughts that lumbers through your mind as you walk through Vietnam at night is the fear of getting lost, of becoming detached from the others, of spending the night alone in that frightening and haunted countryside. It was dark. We walked in a single file, perhaps three yards apart. Mad Mark took us along a crazy, wavering course. We veered off the road, through clumps of trees, through tangles of bamboo and grass, zigzagging through graveyards of dead Vietnamese who lay there under conical mounds of dirt and clay. The man to the front and the man to the rear were the only holds on security and sanity. We followed the man in front like a blind man after his dog; we prayed that the man had not lost
his
way, that he hadn’t lost contact with the man to his front. We tensed our eyeballs, peered straight ahead. We hurt ourselves staring. We strained. We dared not look away for fear the man leading us might fade and turn into shadow. Sometimes, when the dark closed in, we reached out to him, touched his shirt.

The man to the front is civilization. He is the United States of America and every friend you have ever known; he is Erik and blond girls and a mother and a father. He is your life. And, for the man stumbling along behind you, you alone are his torch.

The pace was slow, and the march brought back thoughts of basic training. I thought of the song about the Viet Cong: “Vietnam, Vietnam, every night while you’re sleepin’ Charlie Cong comes a-creepin’ all around.” I thought of the
Legend of Sleepy Hollow
, of imminent violence and guileless, gentle Ichabod Crane. Which turn of the road, which threatening shadow of a tree held his nightmare in hiding? I remembered a dream
Y’d
had as a kid, a fourteen year old sleeping in southern Minnesota. It was the only dream I have ever remembered in detail. I was in prison. It was somewhere in a very black and evil land. The prison was a hole in a mountain. During the days, swarthy-faced, moustached captors worked us like slaves in coal mines. At night they locked us behind rocks. They had whips and guns, and they used them on us at pleasure. The mountain dungeon was musty. Suddenly we were free, escaping, scrambling out of the cave. Searchlights and sirens and machine-gun fire pierced the night, cutting us down. Men were bellowing. It rained. It was a medium drizzle bringing out a musty smell of sedge and salamanders. I raced through the night, my heart bloated and aching. I fell. Behind me there were torches blazing and the shouts of the swarthy-faced pursuers. I plunged into a forest. I ran and finally came out of the trees and made my way to the top of a mountain. I lay there. The torches and noise and gunfire were gone. I looked into the valley below me, and a carnival was there. A beautiful woman, covered with feathers and tan skin, was charming snakes. With her stick she prodded the creatures, making them dance and writhe and perform. I hollered down to her, “Which way to freedom? Which way home?” She was a mile away, but she lifted her stick and pointed the way down a road. I loved the woman, snakes and stick and tanned skin. I followed the road, the rain became heavier, I whistled and felt happy and in love. The rain stopped. The road opened to a clearing in a dark forest. The woman was there, beads of water scattered on her arms and thighs. Her arm was around a swarthy, moustached captor, and she was laughing and pointing her stick at me. The captor embraced her, and together they took me away. Back to prison. That was the dream. I was thinking of that dream as we walked along, finally coming on the trail junction.