The Vietnam Reader (66 page)

Sure enough! It was the same picture of that Vietcong squad.

I held the black and white photo and looked at the dink lying dead on the ground before me, his body twisted in the grotesque frozen dance of death. Yes, there he was in the photo, smiling with his comrades as they all held their weapons in preparation for being immortalized by the photographer.

Well, you poor motherfucker. I hope your folks have a copy of this picture because you belong to the jungle now,
I thought to myself. We passed on into the jungle growth to complete our sweep.

We had reached a little clear area surrounded by a hedgerow-like bush common in that part of Vietnam. Those damn bushes grew everywhere and anywhere. The dinks used them as fences. They were thick and bushy with a little red flower growing from every major leaf, it seemed like. The only way through one of these bushes was where the farmers had made a path over many years.

This little area was a good place to take a break. The agent and Fouel were standing next to me when Fouel let out a yell and jumped into a large growth of tangled bushes next to the trail. We wondered what the hell was going on in that thicket. Fouel was yelling like a madman. All of a sudden he popped out of the growth, prodding another guerrilla.

We were surprised as hell. How did Fouel know he was there? Some of my men grabbed the dink and tied him up. I looked at Fouel just as he let out another yell and jumped back into the brush. More yelling and talking produced another soldier. This one was different. Fouel explained this was an NVA soldier. We looked on in astonishment.

“Shit, sir, this ain’t nothing but a fucking kid.”

The NVA soldier was a boy about fourteen years old. The only thing he had left was his green NVA soldier’s jungle fatigues. His baggy jungle shirt hung on him a few sizes too big. With his young face and baggy clothes, he certainly didn’t look dangerous.

I forgot him as I called my radioman over to call Captain Sells.

I looked around the little grass-covered clearing. The men were spread out in little groups, smoking C ration cigarettes or eating a can of C rations. It had been a good operation so far and we were ready to go back to the bridge. Just a little longer.

Smack! A rifle butt streaked by my side into the side of the young NVA soldier who had sidled up to me. Fouel had hit him with his rifle butt and was on top of him swinging his fists. My men and I pulled Fouel off.

“What did you hit that kid for?”

Fouel looked at the agent as someone translated what we had said. Fouel looked at me and for an answer reached down and ripped the kid’s jungle fatigue shirt back. Strapped to his stomach were two American hand grenades.

“Jesus! Didn’t anybody search him?” I exclaimed.

We thought Fouel had searched him and he figured we were going to do it. It hadn’t been done.

Fouel explained that the NVA soldier waited until he figured out who the leader was and that he was going to blow both himself and the leader up. The dink had seen me talking on the radio and was preparing to take me with him.

I looked at the young soldier lying on the ground. He was looking back at me just as intently.

My life on this sweet earth had been within a few seconds of its end. Everything had seemed so peaceful, the sweep was almost over, I was enjoying a smoke and congratulating myself on a good operation—and this dink kid had almost zapped me. Never again would I trust any dinks.

The squad coming up the other side of the hill called me on the radio to say they had found a big tunnel. Leaving our three prisoners with one squad, we went over the crest of the hill to see the other squad below us in a large grassy area on the hill.

Partially covered over with grass was a huge well-like hole, at least five feet in diameter and fifteen feet deep. The hole went straight down. The walls were perfectly smooth and at the bottom we could see the holes of five or six tunnels. Where we were standing was not
an entrance. There was no way in or out. This hole was an air hole for the tunnel systems which honeycombed the little hill.

None of us was going to lower himself to the bottom to explore the tunnels, so I called Delta Six to report the find. We were not too concerned since Vietnam must have had a million miles of tunnels under everything. I had only been in-country a short time and already tunnels were a feature of the landscape.

We completed the sweep and prepared to go back to the bridges. We wanted to get out of this miserable rain.

The agent informed me that Fouel had convinced the young boy to lead us to a hidden weapon. It would be a good way to end our operation.

Fouel and the kid took out ahead of us, heading for the village next to the bridge. We hurried to catch up as I was anxious to see where a weapon was hidden around there, we had conducted so many patrols without turning up anything.

The kid led Fouel across the road. I told Schaldenbrand to take most of the men with him back to the road while I took a squad with me.

The kid twisted through the farmers in their fields, crossed the stream, and pointed to a pile of wood that we had passed many times in our patrols.

“That’s one of the few woodpiles we never pulled apart,” Mann said to me.

“Yeah, we had better be careful of booby traps.”

Fouel did the work for us, throwing the wood out from the pile as he dug down. With a yell of discovery, he pulled out a rifle wrapped tightly in plastic and tied with cord. The rifle was unwrapped, revealing a delapidated M-l carbine and magazines with ammo.

We trudged back to the bridge through the rain with our find, proud of the success of the patrol.

Chickenhawk
R
OBERT
M
ASON
1983

TELL ME YOU’RE AFRAID

I am sure we are going to win.

—Nguyen Cao Ky, in
U.S. News & World Report,
August 1, 1966

A Communist military takeover in South Vietnam is no longer just improbable … it is impossible.

—Lyndon Johnson, August 14, 1966 (after conferring with General Westmoreland at the LBJ Ranch)

July-August 1966

Sleep no longer gave me peace. I had escaped Vietnam with an R&R to Hong Kong, but I had not escaped my memories.

Twenty-one men lay trussed in a row, ropes at their ankles, hands bound under their backs—North Vietnamese prisoners. A sergeant stood at the first prisoner’s feet, his face twisted with anger. The North Vietnamese prisoner stared back, unblinking. The sergeant pointed a .45 at the man. He kicked the prisoner’s feet suddenly. The shock of the impact jostled the prisoner inches across the earth. The sergeant fired the .45 into the prisoner’s face. The prisoner’s head bounced off the ground like a ball slapped from above, then flopped back into the gore that had been his brains. The sergeant turned to the next prisoner in the line.

“He tried to get away,” said a voice at my side.

“He can’t get away; he’s tied!”

“He moved. He was trying to get away.”

The next prisoner said a few hurried words in Vietnamese as the sergeant stood over him. When the sergeant kicked his feet, the prisoner closed his eyes. A bullet shook his head.

“It’s murder!” I hissed to the man at my side.

“They cut off Sergeant Rocci’s cock and stuck it in his mouth. And five of his men,” said the voice. “After they spent the night slowly shoving knives into their guts. If you had been here to hear the screams.… They screamed all night. This morning they were all dead, all gagged with their cocks. This isn’t murder; it’s justice.”

Another head bounced off the ground. The shock wave hit my body.

“They sent us to pick up twenty-one
prisoners”
I pleaded.

“You’ll get ’em; you’ll get ’em. They’ll just be dead, is all.”

The sergeant moved down the line stopping prisoners who tried to escape. The line of men grew longer than it had been, and the sergeant grew distant. His face glowed red and the heads bounced. And then he looked up at me.

Forgotten events dogged my sleep.

A wounded VC lay on a stretcher, one end rested on my ship’s deck, the other end held by a medic.

“I don’t think he appreciates this. I think he’d rather die,” said the medic.

The VC stared at me. His black eyes accused me. He lay in a black pajama top—the bottoms were gone. He had a swollen, stinking thigh wound from days before. He’d been hiding in the jungle.

“He’s going to lose that leg,” said the medic.

The man stared at me. The stretcher grated against the deck as the medic shoved. The crew chief reached across from the other side and pulled. They slid the stretcher up against the cockpit seats. While they shoved and jostled the stretcher, he kept his eyes on mine.

“That fucker either has the clap or he’s turned on by us.” The crew chief grinned. He pointed to the man’s groin. What looked like semen dripped from his penis and glistened on his thigh. I looked away,
feeling his hate. I felt his exposure. I looked back to his eyes and they stared, black and hot. The scene stopped. I thought I was waking up. But then it was the human shield I’d seen during LZ Dog.

The eyes blinked and wrinkles formed at their edges. The old woman with black teeth said something to me, then screamed. There was no sound. Her wrinkled hand held a child’s smooth arm. The child hung lifeless and dragged the old woman down. She moved slowly, like she was falling through water. The crowd around her gasped silently and flinched and fell. The machine gun stuttered from a distant place. The woman fell slowly to the ground, bounced, dying and dead. The old woman had been saying something. When I saw her lips moving, I knew that she had been saying, “It’s okay …”

The scene changed again. I sat in my Huey waiting for the grunts to finish inspecting a napalmed village.

“It’s okay.” A man looked in my cockpit window.

“She’s dead!”

“They’re all dead. It’s okay.”

The crowd was gone. I sat in my cockpit while the man talked to me from outside. The place had been a village. The wet ground smoked. Scorched poles and mud-daubed walls and thatch smoldered. Charred people lay twenty feet away. The smell of burnt hair and smoldering charcoal sank into my lungs and brain.

Why was there barbed wire in the village? Was it a pen? A defense perimeter? I couldn’t see the scene beyond where the child stuck to the wire.

“This is wrong,” I said to the man.

“It’s okay. It’s the way it is. They had their warning. Everybody else left the village. They’re VC.”

“She’s VC?”

The man looked down. “No. She’s unfortunate.”

She was burned to the barbed wire. The wire was growing from the charred flesh of her tiny chest. She was bent over the wire, a toddler who had run away from the hell from the sky. The lower half of her two-year-old body was pink from intense heat; her tiny vulva looked almost alive.

“This is not war. It’s—”

“It’s okay. There’s always going to be some innocent victims.”

The man talked on, but his voice became silent. The little girl’s stark body, half charred death, half pink life, leaned against the wire, almost free. Suddenly I heard ringing.

I awoke hearing my voice echoing off the far wall. The phone was ringing on the night table.

“Hel-” I gulped. “Hello?”

“Your call to the United States will be coming through in fifteen minutes,” said the voice.

The call! Of course. The call to Patience. “Thank you.”

“We wanted to make sure you would be here for the call, Mr. Mason.”

“Yes. Yes, thank you. I’m here.”

The phone clicked off and I held the buzzing receiver in my hand for a minute before setting it back on its cradle. I shivered as an air-conditioned breeze chilled me. The sheets were wet and twisted.

I lit a cigarette with shaking hands and sat up to wait for the call. I was having these dreams almost every night. I began to feel better. I was awake, after all, away from the dreams.

After four miserable nights, I decided to cut my leave short and return to Vietnam. The leave had been a disaster. Gary had come to Hong Kong with me, but he left the second day for Taipei. I had bragged about the women there too convincingly, and the call girls in Hong Kong were too experienced, too professional, and too expensive. Resler packed up and left. I was going to follow, but when I tried to get a ticket to Taipei, I was refused because I was a serviceman on leave to Hong Kong, and that’s where I’d have to stay. I don’t know how Gary slipped through the red tape, but I was alone.

I had not the slightest desire to hire a call girl; I really just wanted to talk.

“I love you. Over,” I said.

“I love you too. Are you okay? Over,” said Patience. Her voice struggled weakly through the hiss and whistles of the radiophone connection.

“I’m fine. They say I won’t have to fly any more combat assaults when I get back. Over.”

“No?”

“That’s what—”

“The party has not said ‘over,’ sir.”

“Oh,” said Patience. “Over.”

“That’s what the doc said when I left. He said that the Prospectors were going to put their last-month short-timers on ass-and-trash missions. Over.”

“Oh, I hope they keep their word. Over.”

“They will. These guys are not the Cav. Over.”

I listened to the howl and echoes of interfering electronics, sorting out the words. Patience, my son, Jack, and my family had become phantoms. They were dreams, too. When we finally stopped talking, when her voice melted into the static, the tenuous link to my home fantasies broke. “Over,” I said.

And there I sat, on the edge of the bed, just like every other dream.

It was very similar to my hometown, Delray Beach. There was a beach; it ran north and south. There were palm trees, sandy roads, salt smells, girls playing in bikinis, and quietly rolling surf. It was late afternoon, almost dusk, and the sun glinted off parts of the heavy wire screen that surrounded the terrace. My table stood near the front of the terrace, allowing me the best view.