AFTER TWELVE DAYS in Rach Kien, Ellsberg was due to head back to Saigon. He decided to go on one last march.
“Every patrol that’s come near that spot has drawn fire,” an officer told Ellsberg, pointing to a map. “There’s heavy cover there and all along the riverbank, but there must be VC there all the time. I’m sending a company there tonight. We’ll take them by surprise in the morning and clean it out.”
The men set out at two o’clock in the morning. Walking along the dikes with empty pockets and everything on their packs tightly strapped, they moved almost silently over the soft dirt. It was a warm, cloudless night with no wind, and the reflection of the full moon glowed on the still, black water of the rice paddies.
They marched all night. Reaching their objective just before dawn, the men lay in the muddy water behind a dike, watching the grove of trees in front of them. The enemy was there. When the sky began to lighten, Ellsberg looked to his left and watched a massive red sun rising, it seemed, straight out of the water.
As soon as Ellsberg’s platoon started moving forward, a burst of machine gunfire erupted from the tree line. The Americans fired back, heads low as they waded through thigh-high water toward the trees. By the time they reached the grove, the enemy was gone.
The men were ordered forward and were suddenly in thick jungle. They slashed with machetes at branches and vines to clear a path toward the river, sinking deeper and deeper into the swampy soil beneath them.
They stopped. For a moment, there was silence. Then voices. Voices speaking in hushed tones. Speaking in Vietnamese. They were across the river, no more than twenty yards away.
The platoon leader called in artillery, whispering the map coordinates over his radio. Moments later, a series of well-placed shells slammed into the trees across the river. Fragments of metal and clumps of leaves and torn branches rained into the water.
Exhausted, frustrated at again having no real chance to confront the enemy, the Americans marched into a nearby village. As they neared the first hut, Ellsberg watched some of the marines open fire. No one shot back.
They went inside. The hut was empty, but ashes in the fireplace were still warm. There was food on the table and a few handmade toys on the floor.
Ellsberg asked the platoon’s lieutenant why his men had fired at the hut.
“Reconnaissance by fire,” the man answered.
It was a way of determining if enemy fighters were hiding inside—a lot safer than walking into a potential ambush.
What if there’s a family inside? Ellsberg asked.
“Tough shit,” the lieutenant said. “They know we’re operating in the area, they can hear us, and they ought to be in their bunker. I’m not taking any unnecessary chances with my men.”
Most huts, Ellsberg saw, did have some kind of shelter—holes in the ground, or sandbags in the corner. But did that mean they were used by the Viet Cong? Or were the families just trying to survive the crossfire? There was no way for the Americans to know.
As they moved through the village, Ellsberg watched a young marine hold the flame of his cigarette lighter to the thatch roof of a hut. Black smoke and orange flames were already rising from two other huts.
“These are VC huts,” the lieutenant told Ellsberg. “Tonight they’ll have to hump it in the rain, same as us!”
Of course, the men knew this would have no impact on the war. But Ellsberg understood the angry impulse. “It was the first thing they had done in two weeks that had any visible effect at all,” he later explained. “It was the only sign they were able to leave that they had ever been there.”
Ellsberg headed back to Saigon later that day. The marines soon packed up and moved out of Rach Kien. The Viet Cong moved back in.
* * *
Ellsberg spent the first month of 1967 flat on his back in Bangkok.
January 1967. Daniel Ellsberg recuperating from illness in a Saigon hospital.
He’d gone to Thailand on leave, looking forward to lounging on a beach he and Patricia had enjoyed when she’d first come to visit. But a debilitating case of hepatitis spoiled the vacation. He figured he must have picked up the liver disease while wading through one of those rice paddies. After a month in Bangkok, he was just strong enough to fly to Saigon—where he spent another month in bed. Too weak to move around, he balanced a typewriter on his stomach and typed reports on what he’d learned in Vietnam.
And he had a lot of time to think.
There had been one other time in his life like this, when he’d been flat on his back for months. It was the summer of 1946. Ellsberg was fifteen. The family—Dan; his younger sister, Gloria; and their parents, Adele and Harry—were driving from Michigan to Colorado to attend a party at Adele’s brother’s place.
They had gotten a late start the first day, and by the time they reached the motel where they’d been planning to stay, the rooms they’d reserved were taken. Gloria and Adele slept in the car, while Dan and his father stretched out on the ground under a shared blanket. Ellsberg later remembered his father tossing and turning all night.
The next day, July 4, they drove all morning before stopping for a roadside picnic in Iowa. Gloria had sat up front that morning, so it was Dan’s turn next. But as they walked back to the car, Gloria raced ahead and jumped in the front passenger seat, calling out, “I’m going to sit here if it kills me!”
Dan had to cram himself, among the suitcases and blankets, into the seat behind his father. Adele sat behind Gloria.
They drove through endless cornfields. It was a hot day. Harry felt himself nodding off.
“I’ve got to stop and sleep,” he said.
Adele urged him to push on, or they wouldn’t make it to Denver in time for the party.
Shortly after one o’clock, Harry fell asleep. The car swerved off the road and slammed into the side of an overpass. The impact ripped off the right side of the car.
Dan opened his eyes thirty-six hours later.
He was in a bright white room. Everyone was wearing white. A doctor was bending over him.
“You were in an automobile accident,” the doctor said. “You are very lucky to be alive.”
“How is my mother?”
“She died instantly.”
Gloria was also dead. Dan’s father was not seriously hurt.
Ellsberg spent the next three months in a hospital bed, recovering from a severe concussion and a broken knee. He watched his father struggle with overwhelming guilt. He didn’t blame his father for the accident, not exactly. Instead, he grappled with an intensely painful realization—one that would have unsettling relevance to his bitter experience in Vietnam.
“I think it probably left an impression on me,” Ellsberg said of the accident, “that someone you loved or respected, like my father—an authority—could fall asleep at the wheel, and had to be watched. Not because they were bad, but because they were inattentive, perhaps, to the risks.”