The Vietnam Reader (32 page)

And I was thinking, Oh man, so this is a rice paddy, yes, wow! when I suddenly heard an electric guitar shooting right up in my ear and a mean, rapturous black voice singing, coaxing, “Now c’mon, baby, stop actin’ so crazy,” and when I got it all together I turned to see a grinning black corporal hunched over a cassette recorder. “Might’s well,” he said. “We ain’ goin’ nowhere till them gunships come.”

That’s the story of the first time I ever heard Jimi Hendrix, but in a war where a lot of people talked about Aretha’s “Satisfaction” the way other people spoke of Brahms’ Fourth, it was more than a story; it was Credentials. “Say, that Jimi Hendrix is my main man,” someone would say. “He has definitely got his shit together!” Hendrix had once been in the 101st Airborne, and the Airborne in Vietnam was full of wiggy-brilliant spades like him, really mean and really good, guys who always took care of you when things got bad. That music meant a lot to them. I never once heard it played over the Armed Forces Radio Network.

I met this kid from Miles City, Montana, who read the
Stars and Stripes
every day, checking the casualty lists to see if by some chance anybody from his town had been killed. He didn’t even know if there was anyone else from Miles City in Vietnam, but he checked anyway because he knew for sure that if there
was
someone else and they got killed, he would be all right. “I mean, can you just see
two
guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam?” he said.

The sergeant had lain out near the clearing for almost two hours with a wounded medic. He had called over and over for a medevac, but none had come. Finally, a chopper from another outfit, a LOH, appeared, and he was able to reach it by radio. The pilot told him that he’d have to wait for one of his own ships, they weren’t coming down, and the sergeant told the pilot that if he did not land for them he was going to open fire from the ground and fucking well
bring
him down. So they were picked up that way, but there were repercussions.

The commander’s code name was Mal Hombre, and he reached the sergeant later that afternoon from a place with the call signal Violent Meals.

“God
damn
it, Sergeant,” he said through the static, “I thought you were a professional soldier.”

“I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, I was gonna lose my man.”

“This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant?”

“Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper ‘dirty laundry’?”

“At ease, Sergeant,” Mal Hombre said, and radio contact was broken.

There was a spec 4 in the Special Forces at Can Tho, a shy Indian boy from Chinle, Arizona, with large, wet eyes the color of ripe olives and a quiet way of speaking, a really nice way of putting things, kind to everyone without ever being stupid or soft about it. On the night the compound and the airstrip were hit, he came and asked me if there was a chaplain anywhere around. He wasn’t very religious, he said, but he was worried about tonight. He’d just volunteered for a “suicide squad,” two jeeps that were going to drive across the airstrip with mortars and a recoilless rifle. It looked bad, I had to admit it; there were so few of us in the compound that they’d had to put me on the reaction force. It might be bad. He just had a feeling about it, he’d seen what always happened to guys whenever they got that feeling, at least he
thought
it was that feeling, a bad one, the worst he’d ever had.

I told him that the only chaplains I could think of would be in the town, and we both knew that the town was cut off.

“Oh,” he said. “Look, then. If I get it tonight …”

“It’ll be okay.”

“Listen, though. If it happens … I think it’s going to … will you make sure the colonel tells my folks I was looking for a chaplain anyway?”

I promised, and the jeeps loaded and drove off. I heard later that there had been a brief firefight, but that no one had been hurt. They didn’t have to use the recoilless. They all drove back into the compound two hours later. The next morning at breakfast he sat at another table, saying a lot of loud, brutal things about the gooks, and he
wouldn’t look at me. But at noon he came over and squeezed my arm and smiled, his eyes fixed somewhere just to the right of my own.

For two days now, ever since the Tet Offensive had begun, they had been coming by the hundreds to the province hospital at Can Tho. They were usually either very young or very old or women, and their wounds were often horrible. The more lightly wounded were being treated quickly in the hospital yard, and the more serious cases were simply placed in one of the corridors to die. There were just too many of them to treat, the doctors had worked without a break, and now, on the second afternoon, the Viet Cong began shelling the hospital.

One of the Vietnamese nurses handed me a cold can of beer and asked me to take it down the hall where one of the Army surgeons was operating. The door of the room was ajar, and I walked right in. I probably should have looked first. A little girl was lying on the table, looking with wide dry eyes at the wall. Her left leg was gone, and a sharp piece of bone about six inches long extended from the exposed stump. The leg itself was on the floor, half wrapped in a piece of paper. The doctor was a major, and he’d been working alone. He could not have looked worse if he’d lain all night in a trough of blood. His hands were so slippery that I had to hold the can to his mouth for him and tip it up as his head went back. I couldn’t look at the girl.

“Is it all right?” he said quietly.

“It’s okay now. I expect I’ll be sick as hell later on.”

He placed his hand on the girl’s forehead and said, “Hello, little darling.” He thanked me for bringing the beer. He probably thought that he was smiling, but nothing changed anywhere in his face. He’d been working this way for nearly twenty hours.

The Intel report lay closed on the green field table, and someone had scrawled, “What does it all mean?” across the cover sheet. There wasn’t much doubt about who had done that; the S-2 was a known ironist. There were so many like him, really young captains and majors who had the wit to cut back their despair, a wedge to set against the bitterness. What got to them sooner or later was an inability to reconcile their love of service with their contempt for the war, and
a lot of them finally had to resign their commissions, leave the profession.

We were sitting in the tent waiting for the rain to stop, the major, five grunts and myself. The rains were constant now, ending what had been a dry monsoon season, and you could look through the tent flap and think about the Marines up there patrolling the hills. Someone came in to report that one of the patrols had discovered a small arms cache.

“An arms cache!” the major said. “What happened was, one of the grunts was out there running around, and he tripped and fell down. That’s about the only way we ever find any of this shit.”

He was twenty-nine, young in rank, and this was his second tour. The time before, he had been a captain commanding a regular Marine company. He knew all about grunts and patrols, arms caches and the value of most Intelligence.

It was cold, even in the tent, and the enlisted Marines seemed uncomfortable about lying around with a stranger, a correspondent there. The major was a cool head, they knew that; there wasn’t going to be any kind of hassle until the rain stopped. They talked quietly among themselves at the far end of the tent, away from the light of the lantern. Reports kept coming in: reports from the Vietnamese, from recon, from Division, situation reports, casualty reports, three casualty reports in twenty minutes. The major looked them all over.

“Did you know that a dead Marine costs eighteen thousand dollars?” he said. The grunts all turned around and looked at us. They knew how the major had meant that because they knew the major. They were just seeing about me.

The rain stopped, and they left. Outside, the air was still cool, but heavy, too, as though a terrible heat was coming on. The major and I stood by the tent and watched while an F-4 flew nose-down, released its load against the base of a hill, leveled and flew upward again.

“I’ve been having this dream,” the major said. “I’ve had it two times now. I’m in a big examination room back at Quantico. They’re handing out questionnaires for an aptitude test. I take one and look at it, and the first question says, ‘How many kinds of animals can you kill with your hands?’”

We could see rain falling in a sheet about a kilometer away. Judging by the wind, the major gave it three minutes before it reached us.

“After the first tour, I’d have the goddamndest nightmares. You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying
, me
dying … I thought they were the worst,” he said. “But I sort of miss them now.”

Going After Cacciato
T
IM
O’B
RIEN
1978

GOING AFTER CACCIATO

It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker. Billy Boy had died of fright, scared to death on the field of battle, and Frenchie Tucker had been shot through the nose. Bernie Lynn and Lieutenant Sidney Martin had died in tunnels. Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Buff was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead. The rain fed fungus that grew in the men’s boots and socks, and their socks rotted, and their feet turned white and soft so that the skin could be scraped off with a fingernail, and Stink Harris woke up screaming one night with a leech on his tongue. When it was not raining, a low mist moved across the paddies, blending the elements into a single gray element, and the war was cold and pasty and rotten. Lieutenant Corson, who came to replace Lieutenant Sidney Martin, contracted the dysentery. The tripflares were useless. The ammunition corroded and the foxholes filled with mud and water during the nights, and in the mornings there was always the next village and the war was always the same. The monsoons were part of the war. In early September Vaught caught an infection. He’d been showing Oscar Johnson the sharp edge on his bayonet, drawing it swiftly along his forearm to peel off a layer of mushy skin. “Like a Gillette Blue Blade,” Vaught had said proudly. There was no blood, but in two days the bacteria soaked in and the arm turned yellow, so they bundled him up and called in a dustoff,
and Vaught left the war. He never came back. Later they had a letter from him that described Japan as smoky and full of slopes, but in the enclosed snapshot Vaught looked happy enough, posing with two sightly nurses, a wine bottle rising from between his thighs. It was a shock to learn he’d lost the arm. Soon afterward Ben Nystrom shot himself through the foot, but he did not die, and he wrote no letters. These were all things to joke about. The rain, too. And the cold. Oscar Johnson said it made him think of Detroit in the month of May. “Lootin’ weather,” he liked to say. “The dark an’ gloom, just right for rape an’ lootin’.” Then someone would say that Oscar had a swell imagination for a darkie.

That was one of the jokes. There was a joke about Oscar. There were many jokes about Billy Boy Watkins, the way he’d collapsed of fright on the field of battle. Another joke was about the lieutenant’s dysentery, and another was about Paul Berlin’s purple biles. There were jokes about the postcard pictures of Christ that Jim Pederson used to carry, and Stink’s ringworm, and the way Buff’s helmet filled with life after death. Some of the jokes were about Cacciato. Dumb as a bullet, Stink said. Dumb as a month-old oyster fart, said Harold Murphy.

In October, near the end of the month, Cacciato left the war.

“He’s gone away,” said Doc Peret. “Split, departed.”

THE OBSERVATION POST

Cacciato’s round face became the moon. The valleys and ridges and fast-flowing plains dissolved, and now the moon was just the moon.

Paul Berlin sat up. A fine idea. He stretched, stood up, leaned against the wall of sandbags, touched his weapon, then gazed out at the strip of beach that wound along the curving Batangan. Things were dark. Behind him, the South China Sea sobbed in against the tower’s thick piles; before him, inland, was the face of Quang Ngai.

Yes, he thought, a fine idea. Cacciato leading them west through peaceful country, deep country perfumed by lilacs and burning hemp, a boy coaxing them step by step through rich and fertile country toward Paris.

It was a splendid idea.

Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth living for still longer, stood high in the tower by the sea, the night soft all around him, and wondered, not for the first time, about the immense powers of his own imagination. A truly awesome notion. Not a dream, an idea. An idea to develop, to tinker with and build and sustain, to draw out as an artist draws out his visions.

It was not a dream. Nothing mystical or crazy, just an idea. Just a possibility. Feet turning hard like stone, legs stiffening, six and seven and eight thousand miles through unfolding country toward Paris. A truly splendid idea.

He checked his watch. It was not quite midnight.

For a time he stood quietly at the tower’s north wall, looking out to where the beach jagged sharply into the sea to form a natural barrier against storms. The night was quiet. On the sand below, coils of barbed wire circled the observation tower in a perimeter that separated it from the rest of the war. The tripflares were out. Things were in their place. Beside him, Harold Murphy’s machine gun was fully loaded and ready, and a dozen signal flares were lined up on the wall, and the radio was working, and the beach was mined, and the tower itself was high and strong and fortified. The sea guarded his rear. The moon gave light. It would be all right, he told himself. He was safe.

He lit a cigarette and moved to the west wall.

Doc and Eddie and Oscar and the others slept peacefully. And the night was peaceful. Time to think. Time to consider the possibilities.