Sergeant Dickinson (2 page)

On the way in to the camp the mech battalion was ambushed, losing eleven vehicles and one hundred twenty men on the highway from Pleiku. In the camp we gave their American advisors onion soup and coffee and told them we wanted them to assault south of the camp not tomorrow but
tonight. They did not want to leave the command bunker. They were cold, it was night, they did not know the terrain, their troops were tired, they were afraid. We watched them eat and make excuses. Then Breckinridge told us to lock and load.

“You're kidding,” a major said. Breckinridge said they had ten seconds to finish their soup and rejoin their troops. He began to count.

“You can't be serious,” said another major. When Breckinridge said “six” the first major said, “Come on, men, let's go.” One of the captains threw his coffee on the floor.

They made a halfhearted assault and withdrew. They left their wounded lying in the brush. They came into the camp, having threatened to fire on us with their tank guns unless we opened the gate.

When the American advisors had left the command bunker after the countdown, I asked Robbie if he would have fired had Breckinridge ordered us to. “I don't know,” Robbie said. “Would you have?” But I didn't know either.

I kept passing Dale's body. His feet and his legs up to the knees were all that showed under the poncho, but he lay in a puddle of his own fluids and I was always careful not to step in it. I walked in an arc around it whenever I passed, I did not want my boot prints in Dale's body fluids.

Finally I had to sleep, the Benzedrine wasn't working any longer. I went into the radio bunker and lay on the floor and closed my eyes and listened to the planes bombing and strafing. But then I opened my eyes and I saw that my feet were together at the same angle that Dale's formed and I couldn't
sleep. Later that night or the next, I lay on the floor again but the rats were coming out from underground trying to escape the concussion from the bombing and first one and then another skittered over my face. I took my sleeping bag cover into the command bunker and put it on the table that they used for surgery. I slept there until the next wave of wounded came in.

On the seventh or eighth day a priest came in by helicopter to say a mass and take confessions. He was a fat, florid man, quite jovial, and he had used a scented aftershave that morning. He laughed a great deal and praised those who attended the mass. Just before boarding the helicopter to leave he said something cheery about no atheists in foxholes. Then he climbed up into the helicopter and it took off. When the siege was almost over a plethora of priests and ministers came in on the helicopters that were taking out the dead. There were almost as many clerics as there were correspondents; they sat around nattering at each other, the clerics and the correspondents, vultures at a feast.

The first correspondents came in on the day after the night we lost the listening posts. There were two wire-service correspondents and a photographer from
Paris Match
, they had been told at Pleiku that the battle was over and in fact had been only a minor probing action. They came in on the second of two helicopters, the first carried a medic coming in to relieve Breslin, who had been shot in the right shoulder and had lost the use of two fingers. The first helicopter was setting down when it took machine-gun fire, catching the medic in the heart. The helicopter carrying the correspondents
settled, dumped them out, and spun away after the first one, the machinegun following its rise. It had lifted about a hundred feet when it turned belly up and exploded; it came down in a rush of yellow, red, and black.

In the morning the wire-service reporters were gone. The photographer from
Match
discovered it first; he was in a panic. The Montagnards told us that the correspondents had taken the place of wounded on a helicopter going back to Pleiku. We were all very angry and swore we would shoot the two if they showed up again. The photographer stayed with us the entire battle; when he ran out of film he helped with the wounded. No other correspondents came in until the fifth day when instead of the medic we had been expecting the
Times
man stepped out of a helicopter. “Who the hell are you?” Breckinridge exploded. “I need you like I need the clap!” The
Times
man was tall and yellow-haired, and had the beginning of a paunch. He was very apologetic; he hadn't known, he said, they had told him at Pleiku… He offered to get on the next helicopter out. “Those helicopters are for the wounded!” Breckinridge raged. “Nobody gets on one unless he's wounded or dead!” He called Pleiku on the radio. He said that they were cowards for not coming in to fight with us. He said that the Rangers were worthless and their commander had as much value as a case of the clap. Breckinridge was a large man with a voice like a rasp, he accused the entire Corps area of cowardice for not parachuting in to help us. He was crying; Captain Stone who had been his closest friend had bled to death, Sergeant Major Victoria, who had been in Laos with Breckinridge and Stone, was in
the command bunker screaming at the medics who were trying to put him under, “I have a wife! I have two children!” while the surgeon chanted “You're not going to die, you're not going to die, you're not going to die…” and waited for him to sleep so he could begin work on the shattered arm.

As soon as Breckinridge released the transmit button on the mike we began receiving calls from Plei Djereng, Plei Mrong, Plateau Gi, Dak To. I recognized Woods' voice from Duc Co, and Roy's from Pleiku, and I caught Dak Pek's call sign. They said they would jump in troops as soon as they could get air support. Breckinridge kept his back to us but we could see his shoulders hunching in spasm. He said into the mike, “Thank you, men,” you could hear the warble in his voice. Still with his back to us he set the mike on the radio casing. “What wonderful men,” he said. “What beautiful men.”

The
Times
correspondent was very apologetic. He said that Pleiku had told him that the battle here was over. I explained to him about the two wire service correspondents and what they had done and he could see for himself the wounded that needed to be evacuated. The
Times
correspondent was finishing his first year in Viet Nam and he would be here for two more, it was hard on him and on his wife and children. We grew to like him very much, and respected him almost as much as the correspondent from
Paris Match
who had temporarily given up journalism and was working full time as a medic.

Later that day and the next, correspondents and television crews came in in multitudes. One of the first in was
present when the kitchen door was shot off its hinges by machine-gun fire. He could not get over it, watching the door fall away from the wall, hearing the
thack!
sound each bullet made when it struck wood. His eyes kept returning to the door even the following day and he told other correspondents about seeing it shot away from the wall and they were impressed. They talked about one of their own, a famous wire service photographer who was not here, and told within our hearing about how many wars the famous photographer had been to. They were trying to convince us and themselves of their courage. We knew they were liabilities.

When on the night of the eighth day the camp had fallen completely into chaos with reinforcing unit commanders unable or unwilling to control their troops, and the troops numbering one thousand now in a camp constructed for three companies, we began to think about breaking out. Some of us wanted to leave the correspondents and the clerics but Breckinridge said no, all Americans would go together, and then we began to think about how it would be trying to protect the deadweight in a breakout that looked hopeless anyway and some of us were angry and talked about the correspondents and the clergy getting us killed for a few pictures and a few prayers, and Breckinridge was angry and said that Americans would go together, all of us, so we resigned ourselves to die for nothing. Some of us put a single bullet in our shirt pockets, death was better than capture, we had seen or heard of what was done to American prisoners. I visualized Barnes again as we had found him, his body stacked on top of itself, in parts, crowned by the head, the sex organs
stuffed into the mouth. I was afraid of being captured while unconscious and unable to kill myself; I tried to stay out of doors so that I would not be hit on the head or pinned by falling beams. But it never came to a breakout, and the bunkers didn't collapse.

The North Vietnamese were dug in on the slope beginning just beyond the northern edge of the camp and inclining for five hundred meters. After seven days of napalm and concussion bombing there was little left of the vegetation that had concealed their spider holes. At the base of the slope was an NVA machine gun firing at the Rangers and Americans assaulting unseeing past it; this explained how so many Americans had been shot from behind, we had thought the Rangers were shooting us in the back. Two of us went out to the perimeter and picked off the machine gunner and his assistant. When the fighting on the north side of the camp was over, and before the battles to the south and west had begun, we walked out to the dead spider hole.

They were kids. In one's pack was a diary. We gave it to one of the interpreters to translate. The diarist had spent four months walking from North Viet Nam to the southern highlands. He had had dysentery and fever. This had been his first combat although he had survived two bombing raids on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Before leaving the North he had returned to his village near Dien Bien Phu and had married. He had competed against another young man for the girl who became his wife; the other had not been conscripted. He had not received a letter from his wife since he entered Laos, he did not believe that she was receiving his mail either. He
wrote that even if his wife bore a love-child he would want to return to her and raise the child as his own.

We sat in the sun; I took off my shirt. After a while Robbie opened his mouth as though to speak. A word was there but it didn't come out.

I had written the propaganda. I had promised them food and water. I had promised them safe conduct into the camp. I had said that they would be treated as prisoners of war. I had gotten the Ranger commander's word that my promises would be honored. Three NVA stood up, as the leaflet had instructed, with their hands over their heads. The Rangers shot them.

“He says they weren't prisoners. He says they may have surrendered, but his men did not take them prisoner,” Breckinridge said.

“They were prisoners.”

Breckinridge called Pleiku. He talked to the Deputy Commander; he asked that his counterpart be relieved for having sanctioned the killing of North Vietnamese prisoners.

The Deputy Commander was reluctant but said that he would report the incident to the Vietnamese command in Pleiku.

“Is there anything more you can tell me now?” the Deputy Commander asked.

“No. I'll have to have it encoded.”

“Keep me informed. How are things otherwise? Did you get the President's message?”

“It's on top of the radio,” I said. The message said: “We are gravely concerned about your situation. The President.”

“The President of the United States?” Breckinridge said into the mike.

The Deputy Commander laughed. “That's the one.”

“What's his interest in this?”

There was no response from the other end.

“He's concerned,” Breckinridge said. He pressed the transmit button. “Yes. Fine. I'll tell the press we got a message from the President. Out.”

Several Americans came down the stairs into the bunker, taking cover from the shelling. A correspondent wanted to come in. “No reporters!” Breckinridge shouted. Then at the others: “What are you men doing in here! Get outside and inspire the troops!”

They went up the stairs and the white sunlight came past them through the open door, fixing the red dust in the air in frozen whorls.

“We ought to just shoot the bastard,” Breckinridge said. He went outside.

I lay down and put my arm over my eyes. I had been up all night talking with the experts from Psyops. They had insisted that I write the leaflet; I was familiar with the situation, they said. I couldn't sleep. I went outside to help inspire the Vietnamese.

We watched an Air Force jet go in. “There goes another two million dollars,” someone said. “Not to mention a pilot.”

The Group commander called from Pleiku. “What the hell are you doing out there? Have you got ambush patrols out?”

“No sir…”

“God damn it, the first thing I would do if I was in your place would be to get some goddamn ambush patrols out.”

“I tried, sir, but we keep losing men, Americans, they hit us just as soon as we get outside the wire. Stone is dead, and Sergeant Major Victoria…,” Breckinridge said.

“All right, all right. I'm coming in on the next lift.”

When the Group commander came in he insisted on meeting with all the Americans in the mess hall. He noted the door lying off to the side and made a joke about it. There was a lull in the shooting then and everybody was walking around upright, it was very relaxed. When we were inside the mess hall the NVA machine guns started up again, and they started dropping mortar rounds in on us. We threw over the benches and tables and made ourselves as small as we could behind them. The Group commander was left standing with the master sergeant whose job it was to light his cigars. The master sergeant opened the door of the refrigerator and the Group commander stuck his head inside. It was very funny; we laughed, and nobody was hurt. The Group commander stopped talking about ambush patrols after that.

The correspondent wanted me to say yes, I was fighting for Democracy.

“Other things are more important,” I said instead.

“What things?”

He put the microphone up to my mouth. Frenzy surrounded his eyes, made them unnaturally round and buggy.