THE HELICOPTER SET DOWN IN RACH KIEN. The village’s dirt streets were lined with huts. In the center of town were a few plaster buildings with corrugated tin roofs.
Ellsberg jumped out, carrying a pack with extra clothes and a sleeping bag, and was met by the colonel in charge of the American battalion at Rach Kien. They walked through town together, meeting other officers, shouting to be heard over the roar of the helicopters bringing in artillery and ammunition. The Viet Cong had been living in the village, the colonel told Ellsberg. They’d scattered when the Americas arrived. Now the Americans were setting up a makeshift headquarters in the same buildings recently used by the Viet Cong.
“You’ll be mortared tonight,” an officer who knew the area well told Ellsberg. “Remember, they’ve been living a long time right where you’re standing.”
“Are you kidding?” another officer asked. “This is a reinforced American battalion, with artillery and air support. There won’t be a VC for ten miles around tonight.”
Ellsberg was given a canvas cot next to the colonel’s in one of the plaster buildings. After supper he strung up a mosquito net around his cot and fell asleep in his clothes.
A few hours later, he was jolted awake by the sound of exploding shells.
“WHOOMP!” is how he described the noise. “WHOOMP! WHOOMP!”
He sat up in the dark and saw the colonel pulling on his boots. He did the same.
They ran into the street, shoelaces dangling, as shells fell all over town and machine gunfire flew in from the darkness. As they ducked into the crowded command post, Ellsberg noticed a look of terror on the young private standing guard outside. It was his first day in Vietnam.
Just as they shut the door, a shell hit right outside. The building shook and maps fell from the walls and half-full coffee cups spun through the air. The hanging lantern that lit the room rocked and spun, projecting shadows of falling men onto the walls.
“Everyone scrambled for his helmet,” Ellsberg remembered. “I was suddenly sorry I hadn’t had one of my own.”
The soldier outside was hit by the blast. He died in a helicopter on the way to the nearest hospital.
The shelling stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Ellsberg went back to his cot and fell asleep, and it was not until the next morning that he noticed an unexploded .60 mm shell sticking into the floor a few feet from his bed. He figured it must have landed just seconds after he’d run out. Ellsberg took out his camera to document his brush with death. He was snapping pictures as a demolition team came in to defuse the bomb.
“For Christ’s sake,” one of them barked at Ellsberg, “that round is live!”
* * *
A few days later, an American platoon sloshed through a paddy of waist-high rice plants, scanning in all directions for enemy fighters. With his camera and a borrowed submachine gun over his shoulder, Ellsberg walked with them.
He was pretty sure he remembered reading some rule against civilians bearing weapons in war zones. As an employee of the American embassy in Saigon, he was positive he was not supposed to fire at anyone.
A few shots whistled in from a line of trees at the edge of the field. The Americans grabbed their M-16s and started moving toward the tree line, blasting as they went. Ellsberg lifted his camera and photographed the scene.
When they reached the cover of the trees, the enemy was gone. A furious sergeant charged toward Ellsberg.
“Are you a reporter?” the sergeant demanded.
“I’m from the embassy,” Ellsberg said.
“Were you taking personal photographs in a firefight?”
“No. I’m here observing for the deputy ambassador, and I’m taking pictures for him.”
Disgusted, the sergeant turned and walked away. A civilian observer was a dangerous liability for the platoon—they’d have to watch out for him when they should be focused only on the mission.
As a former marine, Ellsberg understood. “After that,” he later said, “when people around me were firing, I was too.”
He had plenty of opportunities. Walking patrols for a week, Ellsberg lived the life of an infantryman in Vietnam. Lugging packs weighing more than fifty pounds, the young men slogged across muddy rice fields and cut through dense forests. Their heads baked in their helmets as temperatures soared over one hundred degrees. Clouds of mosquitoes were a constant torment, and during brief breaks they had to pull off their boots and soaking socks to pick leeches off their feet.
Photograph taken by Daniel Ellsberg of his unit on combat patrol, 1967
The long marches were grueling, miserable, boring—and, without warning, deadly. Any step could trigger a hidden mine. Gunfire could erupt from behind any clump off trees. When it did, the men got low and returned fire. They called in air strikes at what they guessed were the enemy positions. They called in helicopters to evacuate the wounded. Then they moved forward again. They never saw who was firing at them. Other than Americans, the only dead body Ellsberg saw was that of a teenage girl killed by a stray American shell.
“That didn’t improve morale,” he recalled.
The pattern continued, day after day. They would chase the Viet Cong from an area one day, and then take fire from the Viet Cong in the same exact area the next day. Ellsberg saw anger and frustration on the faces of the men.
“It was hard to believe we were accomplishing anything at all,” he said.
* * *
In a rice paddy on the first day of 1967, Ellsberg finally saw the enemy.
The platoon was conducting another search-and-destroy mission. Ellsberg and three other soldiers were walking point, about fifty yards out in front of the other men. Their job was to locate the Viet Cong by drawing their fire. The water in the paddy was up to their knees. The plants came to their chests and swayed in the breeze. As they stepped out of the paddy, they heard shots coming from behind.
Lifting his weapon, Ellsberg spun and saw a very young soldier, maybe fifteen, wearing nothing but black shorts. He was crouched in the rice plants, blasting a Russian-made AK-47 at the American platoon. At least two more Viet Cong fighters were with him. Ellsberg saw their black hair and heard their guns. They were firing from the exact spot Ellsberg had just walked past—they must have been lying still in the water, he realized. They’d let the men walking point go past, and then, when they were between the point men and the rest of the platoon, opened fire. Ellsberg and the three soldiers with him couldn’t fire at the Viet Cong without the risk of hitting their own men.
As usual, the firefight was brief. Ellsberg saw the teenage gunman crouch lower and disappear. Then, silence.
The patrol resumed. The men walking point crossed a dirt path and splashed into another paddy. The rest of the platoon followed fifty yards behind. Ellsberg could see no more than a few feet in any direction through the tall plants. He had the disturbing realization that each time he put down his boot he might literally step on an enemy soldier.
Again, they were fired at from behind. Ellsberg saw a flash of black clothing, then nothing.
Again, they resumed the march.
* * *
Later in the day the men rested on a dirt levee between rice fields. They saw a few men setting up a machine gun on a tripod among trees on the far side of the paddy.
The platoon leader picked up the radio and called headquarters.
“Who are the friendlies ahead of us?” he asked.
He listened to the answer and grunted, “Hunh.”
“What do they say?” one of the men asked.
“There are no friendlies ahead of us,” the platoon leader reported. He put on his helmet.
Ellsberg asked, “What are you going to do?”
“I guess we’re going to find out who they are.”
Moments later, Ellsberg and a few soldiers were crawling on knees and elbows through shallow water, holding their guns above their heads. From behind, men from the platoon opened fire on the enemy machine gun. The machine gun fired back.
Ellsberg in combat in Vietnam, 1967
“You didn’t need to be told to keep your ass down,” Ellsberg noted.
They got within about fifteen yards of the gun. “I took two grenades off my belt,” Ellsberg recalled, “pulled the pin on one, and, lying on my side, tossed it with a straight arm at the machine gun. I pulled the pin on the other one and threw it too. Both went off, and the machine gun stopped firing.”
Then he and the other Americans jumped out of the mud and charged toward the trees. They heard twigs snapping, footsteps on brush, and then nothing. The gun and tripod were gone. Any dead or wounded had been carried away.
“Very good soldiers,” Ellsberg thought.
The Americans continued into the next rice paddy and were fired at from a different patch of trees. Several men were hit. A helicopter carried them off. The platoon continued toward the spot they’d taken fire from, and found only spent cartridges, blood on the dirt. So they moved on, and were soon fired at from a new location.
“This happened three or four times,” Ellsberg later said, “taking fire and zigzagging toward it every half hour or so.” There were two groups of Viet Cong fighters out there. One fired at the Americans while the other retreated to a new position and waited. “They were playing with us,” Ellsberg realized, “a kind of leapfrog.”
As the sky grew dark, the exhausted Americans sat on the ground gulping water from canteens and licking melted chocolate bars from the wrappers. Ellsberg remembered the stories he’d read in school of the American Revolution, of young British soldiers in heavy packs and red uniforms marching around the New England woods, taking fire from the cover of trees and stone walls, chasing a highly motivated enemy that moved faster and knew the local geography better.
He turned to the young radio operator resting beside him. “Sergeant, do you ever feel like the Redcoats?”
The man said, “I’ve been thinking that all day.”