Up Country (55 page)

We continued our walk.

Ted stopped near the edge of the plateau and said, “I remember that my bunker was on this side, the south side, about the middle of the perimeter here, and we could see down to Highway 9.”

Mr. Tram said, “Yes? My regiment was also to the south, on the other side of the highway, so perhaps we exchanged some bullets.”

“Hey, I’m sure we did, pal.” Ted asked me, “Where were you, Paul?”

I looked out over the valley to the hills in the far distance and said, “Also here on the south side. We air-assaulted into those hills, near where we drove in from A Shau. They told us we were going in behind the enemy—behind Mr. Tram here—but there were plenty of North Vietnamese troops where we landed.”

Mr. Tram nodded thoughtfully and said, “Yes, I recall quite clearly the afternoon when the helicopter cavalry arrived.” He added, “They bombed us for days before the helicopter assault began and dropped much napalm, and when the helicopters arrived with the air soldiers, we were very frightened.”

I said, “
You
were frightened? I was scared shitless. Biet?”

Mr. Tram nodded and kept nodding, and I saw he was far away, thinking of the day the helicopters came.

Ted said, “I remember when the Cav arrived, and we said, ‘Shit, now they’re going to run Charlie off, and the fun is over.’ ”

There seemed to be two different versions of this battle: The First Cavalry looked at this as saving the besieged marines; the marines looked at it as the cavalry spoiling their fun. I said to Ted, “I wouldn’t have minded staying home.”

He laughed.

Mr. Tram came back from wherever he’d gone and asked Ted, “Did you have rats?”

“Did we have rats? Christ, we had trench rats so big we thought they were deer. And those were
hungry
rats. You had to sleep with your boots on or you’d get your toe bit off. I kid you not. These fuckers were mean and ballsy. We had special buckshot rounds for the .45 automatics, and we’d do rat hunts once a day. One time, two rats picked up a case of C rations and carried it into a hole, then one comes back out and tries to swap a pack of C ration cigarettes for a can opener.” He laughed. “That’s balls.”

Susan seemed mildly amused. Mr. Tram was still thinking about rats.
He said, “Our trenches were filled with rats. They ate . . .” He looked at Susan and didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew that it wasn’t C rations that the rats ate.

Mr. Tram said, “These rats carried disease . . . you understand, the . . . in French it is les puces.”

Susan said, “Fleas.”

“Yes, and these fleas carried the plague . . . the dark plague, when the skin becomes black . . . bubonic . . . many men died that way.”

We stood there under the gray, gloomy sky, with this constant wind sweeping down from the hills, and three of us retreated into our own thoughts. We could have stood there for a week playing Can You Top This, but what was the point?

Finally, Ted said, “Yeah, I remember now, a cargo plane came in one day carrying this stuff . . . gamma something.”

I said, “Gamma globulin.”

“Yeah. You remember that? They stuck this horse needle in your ass and squirted this shit into your butt. This stuff was on ice, and I swear it was thick as putty. I had a lump in my ass for a week, and we asked the medics what it was for, and they said, ‘measles.’ But afterward, we found out it was because of the plague. Jesus H. Christ, as if the incoming rounds wasn’t enough to worry about.”

Susan asked, “Did anyone get sick?”

Ted replied, “You think they’d tell us? You went to the field hospital with a fever, and sometimes you got sent back to duty with penicillin, and sometimes they took you out of here on the next thing flying out. Nobody used the word plague.”

I nodded, recalling the fear of bubonic plague, the evidence of which we’d seen among the dead and wounded North Vietnamese. We had gotten gamma globulin before the air assault, and our medics had been mostly up-front about this and told us to avoid flea bites from the rats, and, of course, direct rat bites. And while we were at it, quit smoking and try not to get hit by a bullet. Thanks, Doc.

The First Cavalry had named this operation Pegasus, after the mythological flying horse, but it could more aptly have been named the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death.

Mr. Tram continued, “So, this terrible siege went on for all of January,
February, March, until April. We had perhaps twenty or twenty-five thousand men around this camp, and the American marines had . . . how many, Mr. Ted?”

“About five or six thousand.”

“Yes. And when we left here, they told us we had left ten thousand of our comrades behind, sick, wounded, and dead . . . and we had many more thousands with us who were sick and wounded . . . and many of them died afterward. I lost many friends here and some cousins and an uncle who was a colonel. And I know many Americans died also, so when I left here, I thought to myself, ‘What was the purpose of this?’”

Ted said, “Beats the hell out of me.”

Mr. Tram walked silently for a while, then stopped and pointed. “Do you see that trench out there? It is one of the surviving trenches that we dug. We began digging trenches toward this camp—just as my father and uncles had done at Dien Bien Phu. Each night we dug, and the trenches came closer and closer to your barbed wire. And when we were very close, we would come out of the trenches at night and attack a place where we thought the defenses were weak, and where we could penetrate into your camp . . . but we could not . . . and many men died out there, where the barbed wire once was.”

Ted picked up the story and said, “If we thought we saw movement out there, or if a flare tripped, our mortars would fire parachute flares above the area, and everything got lit up like day . . .” He looked down from the plateau where the wire had once been and said, “We’d see them coming at us, like hundreds of them, real quiet, not shooting, just coming at the wire, and they wouldn’t even take cover, they just kept running toward us, and we’d open up and they’d start dropping like tenpins. Christ, one night one of them blows a fucking bugle, and they all start running and screaming, and my asshole gets tight, and I’m shaking so fucking bad I can’t steady my rifle, and they start throwing those bangalore torpedoes into the outer wire, and the wire blows, and it’s breached, and they come in toward the second wire, and mortar rounds are falling all around my bunker, and I’m afraid to put my face to the firing slit because mortar and grenade shrapnel and tracer rounds are coming in through the slit, so I hold my M-16 up to the slit by its pistol grip, and I’m crouched below the slit, so I can’t see shit, but I’m emptying magazine after magazine downrange . . . and then I get hit in the hand by hot shrapnel, and I drop the rifle and see that it’s damaged, so
what the hell am I thinking when I run out of the bunker and start chucking grenades down at the wire. Five frags and two white phosphorus, and everything down there is burning, including people, and these little . . . these guys are still fucking coming, and they’ve breached the second wire, and there’s nothing between me and them except the last wire because we’ve blown all our claymores now, and the machine gun got knocked out, and I’m looking around for a fucking rifle . . . then, all of a sudden, the bugle blows again, and they’re gone.”

Ted stared down the slope of the plateau and said, in a barely audible voice, “And they’re gone . . . except for a few dozen of them tangled in the wire, or moaning on the ground. So, we go down there and . . . well . . .” He looked at Mr. Tram, who looked away from Ted.

We walked around the perimeter of the big camp, and there wasn’t a scrap of anything left, except the ghostly trace of the long airstrip, where, as Mr. Tram said, nothing seemed to grow.

Mr. Tram said to me, “If you do not mind, could you tell me what was your experience here?”

We continued our walk, and I thought a minute and said, “Well, after we air-assaulted in, we made contact with the enemy . . . with the North Vietnamese army, but it was obvious they were retreating into Laos. We had light contact for the next week or so. I really can’t remember how long we stayed. We saw many hundreds of dead soldiers, many wounded, many graves . . . and the rats . . . and there was a terrible stench of death, and the land was devastated . . . and I had never seen anything like this . . . the aftermath of a great slaughter, and in some ways, it was more terrible than battle itself. I kept saying to myself, ‘I am walking through the Valley of Death, and God has abandoned this place.’”

W
e were back in the town square of Khe Sanh again. I gave Mr. Tram a ten and said to him, “Thank you. I’m sure this is difficult for you to relive this.”

He bowed and replied, “I can only do this with Americans who have been here. To the others, it is meaningless.”

Susan said, “Well, I wasn’t here, but you three guys made me feel like I was.”

Ted asked Susan, “Hey, do you think my wife should have come?”

Susan replied, “Yes. Come back with her tomorrow.”

Ted bit his lip and nodded. “She wanted to come . . . it was me who didn’t want her to.”

Susan said, “I understand.”

Susan said something in Vietnamese to Mr. Tram. He bowed and replied, we all shook hands, and Ted was off to his bus, and Mr. Tram to wherever.

We got back in the RAV, and I said to Mr. Loc, “Quang Tri.”

He pulled onto Highway 9, and we headed east, back toward the coast, to the place where I’d spent most of my time here, when they weren’t air-assaulting me into the middle of another nightmare.

Susan said, “That was incredible. What an experience.”

I didn’t reply.

She asked me, “How are you holding up?”

“Fine.”

“Paul . . . why do you think you survived this place?”

“Beats me.”

“I mean, half the men who were with Mr. Tram died, and he survived. Ted Buckley survived, you survived. Do you think it was fate? Or skill? Or luck? What?”

“I really don’t know. The dead, if they could speak, would tell you why they died, but the living have no answers.”

She took my hand, and we rode in silence down Highway 9 through the peaceful valley of Khe Sanh, which means the Green Valley, and which must have seemed like a cruel joke to the twenty thousand North Vietnamese who came here and watched the valley turn red with their blood and the bomb-blasted earth, gray with ash, and black with rotting corpses.

And the South Vietnamese, who were fighting for their land, must have wondered if inviting the Americans to help them was a blessing or a curse because no one can level the terrain like Americans, and the destruction must have been beyond anything the South Vietnamese could comprehend.

And for the six thousand American marines surrounded and besieged at Khe Sanh combat base, so far from home, they must have wondered how they wound up in the epicenter of hell on earth.

And Khe Sanh, the Green Valley, had passed into military legend for the marines, right up there with the Halls of Montezuma, the Shores of
Tripoli, Okinawa and Iwo Jima, and all the other blood-soaked battlefields around the world.

And for the First Air Cavalry Division, casualties were mercifully light, victory was claimed, we put another battle streamer on our regimental flags, received a commendation from the president, and flew into the A Shau Valley, where fate awaited us in yet another dark and misty place.

I looked at the countryside as we passed through the valley, and I saw it was green again, and life had returned, coffee and vegetables grew over the bones, and the human race marched on toward something hopefully better.

Yet, standing there on that plateau, I knew that I, and Ted, and Mr. Tram could hear the whispers of ghosts on the wind, and the distant sound of that bugle that split the quiet night and roused the beast in each man’s heart.

W
e continued east on Highway 9. In the hills, I could see acres of fire and smoke, like the war had returned, but then I remembered that some of the Montagnards practiced slash-and-burn agriculture.

The mouth of the valley widened and the hills on both sides retreated into the distance. The landscape became less verdant the farther east we traveled.

Around us were flat, open stretches of scrub brush and some hardscrabble farms. I recalled seeing this from the air as the armada of helicopters, in nice neat formations, carried us to the hilltop landing zones of Khe Sanh.

I said to Susan, “The DMZ is about five kilometers north of here. This entire strip of land south of the DMZ, from the coast to the Laotian border, was the marine area of operations. The marines set up a series of firebases from Cua Viet on the coast to Khe Sanh in the east. This whole stretch of land was fought over for a decade, and the marines said that DMZ meant Dead Marine Zone.”

Susan asked, “Did it always look this bleak?”

I replied, “I don’t know. This might be the result of defoliation, napalm, and high explosives.” I added, “The motto of the defoliation people was, ‘Only We Can Prevent Forests.’” I had thought that was funny once, but it didn’t seem funny anymore.

We came to the former marine base called the Rockpile, a towering, seven-hundred-foot-high rock formation, which we could see to our left as the road swung east again.

We continued on, and I saw a sign near a dirt road to the right that said
Camp Carroll
. A mini-bus was coming toward Highway 9 from the dirt road, and on the side of the bus it said
DMZ Tours
.

I remarked, “DMZ World.” I said to Susan, “When I was back here for Part Two in 1972, Camp Carroll had been turned over to the South Vietnamese army as we were trying to turn the whole war over to the South Viets. During the Easter Offensive of ’72, the South Viet commander of Camp Carroll surrendered to the North Viets without a shot fired. We heard about this down in Saigon, and we couldn’t believe it at first. The whole garrison just laid down their arms.”

It was then, I recalled, that I knew that as soon as the last American soldier left, the South Vietnamese would lose the war, and all the American blood that had been spilled here was wasted.

We continued on and passed through the town of Cam Lo, which would never be a picture on a postcard. There were a number of DMZ Tour buses parked on the street near a café, and I said to Susan, “Just north of here is Con Thien firebase, which as you know means the Hill of Angels, and where a high school buddy of mine was killed.”

We left Cam Lo, passed the turnoff for Con Thien, and continued east.

The landscape hadn’t improved much, and the sky was even grayer as we came toward the coast.

There were a few buildings on both sides of the road now, and there was even a decent-looking four-story stucco hotel with a big banner sign that said
DMZ Visitor Welcome Here—Rooftop Restaurant Sees DMZ
. I said to Mr. Loc, “Dung lai.”

He glanced back at me and pulled over.

Susan and I got out and walked back to the hotel, named the Dong Truong Son. The lobby was small but new, and we took the one elevator up to the rooftop restaurant.

It was well past lunchtime, and not yet the cocktail hour, so no one was there, except a young man who had to be the waiter because he was sleeping in a chair.

Susan and I took a table by the low wall of the covered restaurant where we had a panoramic view to the north.

I knew this place; I’d seen it from the ground and from the air, I’d seen it on maps, and I still saw it in my mind. I said to Susan, “That’s the Cua Viet River, which runs out to the South China Sea over there. To the east is Con Thien on the Cam Lo River, and all along the Cam Lo were smaller
fire support bases, starting with Alpha One to the east, Alpha Two, Three, and Four.” I pointed and said, “Beyond the Cam Lo River, you can see the Ben Hai River, which runs right through the center of the old DMZ at the 17th Parallel, which was the border that partitioned North and South Vietnam. I’ll be going that way tomorrow.”

She didn’t reply.

Susan and I looked out over the still devastated landscape, and from up here, I could see the telltale ponds, some of them running in a straight line, evenly spaced, so there was no mistaking that they were created by a bomb pattern.

She said, “It’s bleak. So much different than around Saigon and Nha Trang.”

“I had the same feeling when I came from Bong Son in January ’68. We came into the winter monsoon, then the Tet Offensive, then Khe Sanh, and the A Shau. Rain, fog, mist, mud, gray skies, scorched earth, and too many corpses. I remember thinking that my father may have had it easier fighting the Germans in France in the summer of ’44, although I never said that to him.”

“Your father was in World War II?”

“He was an infantryman, just like me. The Brenners pride themselves on never having had an officer in the family, or anyone with a safe military job. We’re just South Boston cannon fodder for the wars. I lost an uncle in Korea.”

Susan said, “My father was an air force officer in Korea. A flight surgeon.” She added, “As I said in Saigon, I think you’d like each other.”

“Fathers have a tough time liking guys who are having sex with their daughters.”

“I’ve never had sex. I’m still a virgin. Ask my father.”

I smiled. “Well, then there’s the age difference.”

“Paul, I’m past thirty—my parents wouldn’t mind if you were a Civil War veteran. They’re desperate.” She added, “So am I, or I wouldn’t bother with you.”

The waiter had woken up. He saw us and ambled over. We ordered two coffees.

Susan said to me, “How does it feel sitting in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the DMZ?”

“I’m not sure. I feel sort of . . . disconnected, like I know I’m here,
though it’s hard to think of this as a tourist attraction.” I paused. “But I’m glad it is. None of this should be trivialized, but maybe it’s inevitable that it will be. On the plus side, maybe the tourists can learn something, and maybe the vets can come to terms with a lot of things, and the Vietnamese can meet a lot of Americans and make a few bucks while they’re at it.”

She nodded. “I’m glad I came here.”

The coffee came, Susan lit up, and we looked out over the silent battlefields below.

I said to Susan, “Okay, here’s the brochure copy—DMZ Tours: A pleasant morning in the minefields where you can gather shrapnel and participate in a sandbag-filling contest, followed by a picnic lunch in the ruins of Con Thien firebase, after which we look for unmarked graves along Highway One, and we end our day at the Dong Ha Soccer Stadium, where we’ll see a re-creation of the surrender of Camp Carroll, performed by the original cast. Picnic lunch included.”

She looked at me awhile and decided not to respond.

Somewhere around her second coffee and third cigarette, she said to me, “As if this isn’t stressful enough for you—this return to your old battlefields—you’re probably worried about the trip up country and what you have to do there, and the people in Washington are giving you a hard time, and this Colonel Mang is shadowing you—”

“Don’t forget you.”

“I was getting to that. So, on top of all this, along comes this pushy bitch—”

“Who’s that?”

“This very forward, very brazen broad, who decides to pursue you—”

“Seduce.”

“Whatever. And you’ve got a million things on your mind, and your heart is back in the States, and your soul is on temporary loan to the dead.”

I didn’t reply.

She said, “And yet, Paul, I think it worked. Between us.”

I nodded.

She said, “But I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t go up country with you.”

“I never asked you to.”

“Maybe I’d be more of a burden than a help.”

“I think you should go on to Hanoi, and I’ll meet you there.”

“No, I think I should go back to Saigon.”

This sort of surprised me, and I said, “Why?”

“I think you have to finish your job here, then go to Honolulu . . . see how that works out, then . . . give me a call.”

“From Honolulu?”

“No, Paul, from Virginia.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“Then we can both see how we feel.”

“You mean, we have to be in different hemispheres to see how we feel?”

Susan seemed a little impatient with me for some reason and said, “I’m giving you an out. Are you dense?”

“Oh. Where’s the out? I missed the exit ramp.”

“You’re a complete idiot. I’m trying to be sensitive to your situation, and I’m willing to give up the man I love—”

“You already did that. You sent him a fax.”

She stood, “Let’s go.”

I gave the waiter a few bucks, and we rode down the elevator. I said, “I’m sorry. It’s been a stressful day. I make jokes when I’m stressed, and when I sense danger—old combat habit. Don’t mean shit, as we used to say about things that meant a great deal. Xin loi. Sorry about that.” And so forth. By the time we got to the lobby, Susan was holding my hand and telling me she understood, which was more than I could say for myself. I mean, sometimes I’m full of shit, but Susan’s self-sacrificing performance was a whole barn-yardful of it. I know an out when I see one, and that wasn’t it. For better or worse, we were going to complete this tour of duty together.