The Vietnam Reader (23 page)

“Two, this is Six. Read you loud and clear. Six Actual says to advise your actual that Alpha Company taking some mortar fire.”

“Roger, Six. If no further traffic, this is Two out.”

“Six out.”

“Did you hear that, sir?” Jones said. I said that I had.

The wind was blowing hard, and the rain came sweeping horizontally across the paddies to strike the hooch like buckshot. I listened for the mortars, but could not hear anything over the wind, the rain, and the dry-rattling branches of the bamboo trees around us. The last of my platoon were filing through the gray dusk toward their positions. Heavy-legged, they walked along the line—which was not a line, but a string of isolated positions dug wherever there was solid ground—and dropped off by twos into the foxholes. The coils of concertina wire in front of the positions writhed in the wind.

I had the first radio watch. Jones and the others lay down to sleep, curling up into the fetal position. Looking out, I tried to familiarize myself with the landscape. Second platoon’s part of the line followed the course of the road, skirted a hamlet that was guarded by some Popular Forces—village militia—and ended at the river. Altogether, we held a frontage of seven hundred yards, normally the frontage for a company, and there were dangerously wide gaps between positions. One such position, called the “schoolhouse” because of the cement-walled school that stood there, was separated from the next, a knoll near the river, by about two hundred yards of flooded rice paddy. The two positions were like islands in an archipelago. Out front were more paddies, a stream with jungle-covered banks, then the gray-green foothills. Charley Hill stood there, a muddy, red little knob that stuck out of the surrounding hills like an inflamed sore. In the dimming light, I could just see the olive-drab patches of the hooches and the small figures of our men. There was nothing in front of the outpost but more hills, then the mountains, rising into the clouds. Compared to
that place, the front line was the center of civilization. Charley Hill was at the ragged edge of the earth.

It was soon dark. I still could not hear anything but the wind and crackling branches, and now I could see nothing except varying shades of black. The village was a pitch-colored pool in the gray-black paddies. Beyond the inky line of the jungle bordering the stream, the Cordillera was so black that it looked like a vast hole in the sky. Even after my eyes adjusted, I could not see the slightest variation in color. It was absolutely black. It was a void, and, staring at it, I felt that I was looking into the sun’s opposite, the source and center of all the darkness in the world.

The wind kept blowing, relentless and numbing. Soaked through, I started to shiver. It was difficult to hold the hand-set steady, and I stammered when I called in the hourly situation report. I could not remember having been so cold. A flare went up, revealing the silhouettes of palm trees tossing in the wind and sheets of rain falling from scudding clouds. A strong gust knifed into the foxhole, tugged at the hooch, and tore one side of it from its moorings. Rubbery and wet, the poncho slapped against my face, and Brewer said “Goddamn” as the rain sluiced into the now exposed hole. Then a stream of water guttered down from the hilltop and seeped through cracks in the sandbags, almost flooding us out. The poncho was still flapping like a sail loosed from its sheets. “Goddamn motherfuckin’ Nam.”

“Jones, Brewer, get that thing pegged down,” I said, bailing again with my helmet. The rain fell into my collar and poured down the sleeves of my jacket as if they were drainpipes.

“Yes, sir,” said Jones. He and Brewer climbed out, got hold of the poncho and pegged it down, pounding the metal stakes with the butt ends of their bayonets. The corpsman and I bailed, and the work warmed us a little. There was still an inch of water in the foxhole when we settled down again. I turned the radio over to Jones. It was his watch. Lying on my side, knees drawn up, I tried to sleep, but the puddles and chilling wind made it impossible.

Around midnight, automatic-rifle fire spattered into one of the positions near the hamlet. The squad leader called me on the field phone
and said that twenty rounds had been fired into his right flank, but without causing any casualties. There was another burst.

“He’s at it again, Two Actual,” said the voice on the phone. “I think he’s in the tree line along that stream.”

“Roger. Give him a couple of M-79s. I’ll be right down.”

Taking a rifleman along for security, I went down the road and through the village. Two M-79 grenades exploded in the tree line. The mud on the road was ankle deep. We could not see anything except a lamp burning in one of the huts. Staying close to the culvert at the roadside in case we had to take cover quickly, we reached the position that had taken the fire. There were a couple of bullet holes in the marines’ hooch. It began to rain harder, although that did not seem possible. Huddling down next to the riflemen, I tried to see something in the black tree line a hundred yards across the rice paddies. The paddies had been turned into a miniature lake, and wind-driven waves lapped the dike in front of us. Then a white-orange light winked in the gloom. Bullets streamed past us with that vicious, sucking sound, and I went down on my belly in the mud.

“See you now, you cocksucker,” one of the riflemen said, pumping rapid fire at the sniper’s muzzle-flash. Three or four more grenades, flashing brightly, crashed into the trees.

“That should give him something to think about, if it didn’t blow his shit away,” said the rifleman who had done the firing.

We waited for perhaps half an hour. When nothing more happened, my guard and I headed back toward the CP. The wind had let up finally, and in the quiet air mosquitoes hummed. Two mortar shells hit far behind us, where the road climbed and curved around a bend in the river. They exploded near D Company’s lines, bursting in showers of lovely red sparks. In the opposite direction, One-Three, newly returned to Vietnam with all unseasoned troops, was having a fire-fight with figments of its imagination. We passed the hut where the lamp was burning. “Hey, GI,” someone whispered. “GI, you come.” A middle-aged farmer stood in the doorway, waving us inside. The marine brought his rifle up, just in case, and we went into the hut. It reeked of garlic, woodsmoke, and rotten fish-sauce, but it was dry and we were grateful for even a few moments out of the rain. I lit a
cigarette, grateful for that, too. I drew the smoke deep into my lungs, feeling it calm my nerves.

The farmer had meanwhile taken some photographs out of an oilskin packet. They were photos of Vietnamese whores and American soldiers making love in various positions. The farmer hissed and chuckled as he showed us each a picture. “Good, huh?” he said. “Number one, no? Want buy? You buy. Number one.”

“Jesus Christ, you old pervert, no,” I said. “Khoung. No buy.”

“No buy?” the farmer asked in the surprised tone of all salesmen when met by a customer’s refusal.

“Khoung. Chao Ong.”

“Chao Ong, dai-uy.” (Good night, captain.)

“No dai-uy. Trung-uy.” (Lieutenant.)

“Ah. Ah. Trung-uy. Hokay. Chao trung-uy.”

“How do you like that shit, lieutenant,” said the rifleman when we were outside. “We’re supposed to be fighting for these people. We’re getting soaked and our asses shot at and he’s in there whacking off at dirty pictures.”

“Life is full of injustices.”

“If you’re a grunt, that’s no lie, sir.”

We slept fitfully for the rest of the night and woke up to a drizzling dawn. Dazed, the platoon hiked back to base camp, leaving one squad behind to guard the line. The rice paddies were underwater and filled with snakes. We could see the wakes they made as they slithered just beneath the surface. One fireteam, marooned on an island of high ground, had to borrow sampans from the villagers to get back to the road. Like prisoners in a labor gang, the marines marched toward camp joylessly and without expectation that the new day would bring anything different or better. Shivering myself warm, I felt more tired than I had ever felt before. I was worn out after only one night on the line, and I wondered how the platoon felt, after months on the line. I found out soon enough: they felt nothing, except occasional stabs of fear.

It went like that for the rest of the month. It was a time of little action and endless misery. I was given command of 1st platoon for a week,
while its officer was absent. Our sole casualty that week was the squad leader who ended up hospitalized with a centipede bite. The real fighting had shifted to the Ia Drang Valley in the Central Highlands, where the Seventh Cavalry, of Little Bighorn fame, was fighting the North Vietnamese in what was then the biggest battle of the war. But it was quiet at Danang. Almost every hour of every night, the radio operators chanted, “All secure. Situation remains the same.” I took out two or three patrols, but there was no contact except for the usual snipers. All secure. Situation remains the same. The company lost two machine-gunners to a mine. All secure. Situation remains the same. We trudged up to the line and back again, patrolled the booby-trapped trails, dug foxholes and redug them when they were collapsed by the rain. It rained all the time. We slept, when we slept, in the mud. We shivered through our nervous night watches, calling in reports every hour: All secure. Situation remains the same. A sentry from B Company was killed one morning by infiltrators. And still it rained. The Viet Cong lobbed a few shells at us, but they fell short, exploding in the paddies a long way from our wire, gray smoke blossoming, water and clods of mud geysering. Charley Six observed six enemy mortar rounds six-oh millimeters two hundred meters from this position. No casualties. All secure. Situation remains the same.

At the end of the month, the Viet Cong staged a small attack on the village. The rain that night was falling lightly. It leaked from the swollen sky like pus from a festering wound. The second squad leader, Sergeant Coffell, who had been transferred to One-One from another battalion, and I were on watch in a murky foxhole, talking to each other to keep awake. We talked about home, women, and our fears. A heavy mist lay in the jungle along the stream in front of us. The trees appeared to be standing in a bank of deep snow. Coffell was whispering to me about his dread of Bouncing Betties: mines that sprang out of the ground and exploded at waist level. He was going to take a patrol out in the morning and said he hoped they did not trip any Bouncing Betties. His last company commander had been hit by one.

“It tore one of his legs off at the thigh, sir. His femur artery was cut and the blood was pouring out of it like out of a hose. We couldn’t stop it. We didn’t know what the hell to do, so we just started packing
mud into it, from out of the rice paddy. We kept slapping mud into the stump, but it didn’t do any good. No, sir, those Bouncing Betties, goddamn, I hate those things.”

An automatic rifle thumped in the village behind us. One of the Popular Force militiamen fired a burst from his carbine.

“Goddamn PFs shooting at shadows again,” Coffell said.

“Shadows don’t carry automatic rifles. That sounded like an AK to me.”

Then came a crackling as of a dry brush pile set alight. Hand grenades exploded and tracers were glowing redly above our heads. A couple of rounds whacked into the sandbags of a nearby position, narrowly missing a machine-gunner. Crouching low, I picked up the field phone and called Dodge, the platoon sergeant. He was with another squad at the schoolhouse position, on the opposite side of the village. I asked if he could see where the fire was coming from.

“No, sir. We’re pinned down here. Can’t even lift our heads. We got automatic-weapons fire hitting the schoolhouse. It’s coming from near the ville, but I can’t say exactly.”

“Then Charlie’s behind us. Anyone hit?”

“No, sir, but old watash almost got it between the running lights. Four, five rounds hit the wall next to me. Got sprayed with a lot of plaster …”

The line went dead as two more grenades burst.

“Dodge, are you reading me?” I asked, clicking the receiver button several times. There was no answer. The grenades had cut the landline; so now I had one squad pinned down and no communications with them.

Rolling over the parapet of the foxhole, I crawled up the road embankment to see if I could spot the enemy’s muzzle-flashes. I could. The Viet Cong were in the village, shooting in every direction. A line of red light appeared above the road. It was moving rapidly toward me, and one of the tracers cracked past my ear, close enough for me to feel the shock wave. With the sick feeling that comes when you are receiving fire from your rear, I rolled back down the embankment.

“Coffell, they’re behind us. Face your people about. Face ’em
toward the road and tell ’em to drop anything that moves on that road.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sliding on my belly toward the radio, I heard my heart drumming against the wet earth. “Charley Six, this is Charley Two Actual,” I said, trying to reach Neal. “Do you read me?” I was answered by static. “Six, this is Two requesting illumination on concentration one. Are you reading me, Six?” The static hissed in the receiver. A rifleman was lying next to me, his M-14 pointed at the road. He had turned his head to face me. I could not tell who he was. In the darkness, I could only see his hollow, haggard eyes staring from beneath his helmet’s brim. “Six, this is Two. If you are receiving me, I have Victor Charlies in the ville behind me. One squad pinned down by automatic-weapons fire and landlines cut by grenades. Request illumination on concentration one.” Mockingly, the static hissed. I hit the radio with my fist. Discards from World War II, the PRC-10s could always be relied on to break down in a crisis.

After trying for nearly fifteen minutes, I got through to company HQ. Neal said he knew nothing about a fire-fight.

“It’s going on right behind me. Or was. It’s just about over now.”

“I don’t hear anything,” he said.

“Six, that’s because it’s almost over. They were really going at it before. Can you give me some illumination on concentration one? Maybe we can spot the VC pulling out.”