Nine
Tonight,” Mad Mark said quietly, “we are sending out an ambush.”
It was near dusk, and the lieutenant had his map spread out in the dirt in front of a foxhole. His squad leaders were grouped in a circle around him, watching where he drew Xs, taking notes. Mad Mark pointed at a spot on the map, circled it, and said, “We’ll be bushing this trail junction. Headquarters has some pretty good intelligence that Charlie’s in the neighborhood. Maybe we’ll nail him this time.”
He drew two red lines on the map. “First Squad will set up along this paddy dike. Make sure the grenade launchers and machine guns aren’t bunched together. Okay, Second Squad lines up along this hedgerow. That way we form an L. We get Charlie coming either way. Third and Fourth Squads stay here tonight. I’ll lead the ambush myself.”
He asked if there were questions, but the squad leaders were all experienced, and no one said anything.
“Okay, good enough. We move out at midnight—maybe a little after. Make sure you bring enough Claymores. And for Christ’s sake, don’t forget the firing devices. Also, tell every man to carry a couple of grenades. No freeloading. Let’s get some kills.”
The night turned into the purest earthly black, no stars and no moon. We sat around our foxholes in small groups, some of us muttering that it was bad luck to send out ambushes on nights as dark as this one. Often we had simply faked the whole thing, calling in the ambush coordinates to headquarters and then forgetting it. But Mad Mark apparently wanted to give it a try this time, and there was nothing to do about it. At midnight the squad leaders began moving from foxhole to foxhole, rousing men out. We hung grenades from our belts. We threw our helmets into foxholes—they were a hindrance at night, distorting hearing, too heavy, and, if it came to a fire fight, they made it hard to shoot straight. Instead we put on bush hats or went bareheaded. Every third man picked up a Claymore mine. We wiped dirt off our rifles, took a drink of water, urinated in the weeds, then lay on our backs to wait.
“The wait,” Chip murmured. “I hate the wait, seeing it get dark, knowing I got to go out. Don’t want to get killed in the dark.”
When Mad Mark moved us out of the perimeter and into the darkness, the air was heavy. There were none of the sounds of nature. No birds, no wind, no rain, no grass rustling, no crickets. We moved through the quiet. Metal clanging, canteens bouncing, twigs splintering and hollering out our names, water sloshing, we stepped like giants through the night. Mad Mark stopped us. He spoke to two or three men at a time, and when it was my turn he whispered that we must hold the noise down, that he, at least, didn’t want to die that night. It did no good.
Mad Mark led us across a rice paddy and onto a narrow, winding dirt road. The road circled a village. A dog barked. Voices spoke urgently inside the huts, perhaps parents warning children to stay down, sensing the same certain danger which numbed all twenty of us, the intruders. We circled the village and left it. The dog’s barking lasted for twenty minutes, echoing out over the paddies and following us as we closed in on the trial junction.
One of the most persistent and appalling thoughts that lumbers through your mind as you walk through Vietnam at night is the fear of getting lost, of becoming detached from the others, of spending the night alone in that frightening and haunted countryside. It was dark. We walked in a single file, perhaps three yards apart. Mad Mark took us along a crazy, wavering course. We veered off the road, through clumps of trees, through tangles of bamboo and grass, zigzagging through graveyards of dead Vietnamese who lay there under conical mounds of dirt and clay. The man to the front and the man to the rear were the only holds on security and sanity. We followed the man in front like a blind man after his dog; we prayed that the man had not lost his way, that he hadn’t lost contact with the man to his front. We tensed our eyeballs, peered straight ahead. We hurt ourselves staring. We strained. We dared not look away for fear the man leading us might fade and turn into shadow. Sometimes, when the dark closed in, we reached out to him, touched his shirt.
The man to the front is civilization. He is the United States of America and every friend you have ever known; he is Erik and blond girls and a mother and a father. He is your life. And, for the man stumbling along behind you, you alone are his torch.
The pace was slow, and the march brought back thoughts of basic training. I thought of the song about the Viet Cong: “Vietnam, Vietnam, every night while you’re sleepin’ Charlie Cong comes a-creepin’ all around.” I thought of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, of imminent violence and guileless, gentle Ichabod Crane. Which turn of the road, which threatening shadow of a tree held his nightmare in hiding? I remembered a dream Y’d had as a kid, a fourteen year old sleeping in southern Minnesota. It was the only dream I have ever remembered in detail. I was in prison. It was somewhere in a very black and evil land. The prison was a hole in a mountain. During the days, swarthy-faced, moustached captors worked us like slaves in coal mines. At night they locked us behind rocks. They had whips and guns, and they used them on us at pleasure. The mountain dungeon was musty. Suddenly we were free, escaping, scrambling out of the cave. Searchlights and sirens and machine-gun fire pierced the night, cutting us down. Men were bellowing. It rained. It was a medium drizzle bringing out a musty smell of sedge and salamanders. I raced through the night, my heart bloated and aching. I fell. Behind me there were torches blazing and the shouts of the swarthy-faced pursuers. I plunged into a forest. I ran and finally came out of the trees and made my way to the top of a mountain. I lay there. The torches and noise and gunfire were gone. I looked into the valley below me, and a carnival was there. A beautiful woman, covered with feathers and tan skin, was charming snakes. With her stick she prodded the creatures, making them dance and writhe and perform. I hollered down to her, “Which way to freedom? Which way home?” She was a mile away, but she lifted her stick and pointed the way down a road. I loved the woman, snakes and stick and tanned skin. I followed the road, the rain became heavier, I whistled and felt happy and in love. The rain stopped. The road opened to a clearing in a dark forest. The woman was there, beads of water scattered on her arms and thighs. Her arm was around a swarthy, moustached captor, and she was laughing and pointing her stick at me. The captor embraced her, and together they took me away. Back to prison. That was the dream. I was thinking of that dream as we walked along, finally coming on the trail junction.
Mad Mark dispersed us along the two trails, setting us up in the L-shaped formation he’d mapped out back at camp.
He gave me a Claymore and pointed at a spot along the east-west trail. I felt brave and silly walking out onto the dark road. The deadly device worked just as it had during training. I inserted the blasting cap in a hole on top of the mine. I opened up the mine’s little metal legs and plugged them into the dirt, aiming the concave face out toward the middle of the junction. I crept back to the hedgerow, unwinding the wire behind me; I plugged the wire into its firing device, put the thing on safety, and waited. It would be Ichabod’s revenge.
We were paired into ten teams of two men each. One man in each team would sleep while the other watched the road: an hour on and an hour off until daybreak.
My partner was a kid we called Reno. His real name was Jim or something. He probably chose Reno as a nickname over such others as Ringo, the Sunset Kid, and Flash. He was a squad leader, and I didn’t care for him. He liked his job too well.
He gave me his watch, and he rolled onto his back. He pulled his hat down and was asleep. He slept quietly. At least that was in his favor.
Watching the road was not an easy thing. The hedgerow was thick. I tried it on my knees, but that didn’t give enough elevation. I tried standing, but there is a certain horrible sensation that comes from standing on your feet on an ambush. Finally I stooped and squatted down. It hurt the thighs, but the road was visible, and it would be tough to fall asleep that way.
I took hold of the Claymore’s firing device, testing its feel. It fit my hand well. I flicked the safety back and forth to be sure it wouldn’t jam. I was jittery. What to do? I toyed with my M-16, patting the magazine, rubbing the trigger. Would the weapon work when the moment came? I pictured myself desperately yanking at that trigger, over and over, bawling, screaming, but the gun wouldn’t fire.
Other thoughts. Memories, fantasies. I imagined that the twenty of us had suddenly become the objects of this night’s hunt, that we were fooling ourselves to think that we remained the hunters. There we lay, twenty lonely GIs without foxholes or barbed wire or a perimeter for protection. Ten of us were sleeping. The others gazed stupidly in one direction, out at the trail junction, as if the war gods had it arranged that the Viet Cong should trot down before our gunsights like drugged turkeys. I remembered an old Daffy Duck movie cartoon. A well-equipped hunter—red cap, ten-gauge shotgun, sacked lunch—lies in wait behind an elaborate blind, chortling at the cleverness of his concealment. And all the while Ol’ Daffy is prancing up from behind the doomed fellow, sledgehammer and sticks of red dynamite at the ready. A whole theater full of preadolescent sadists ripped into laughter when Daffy sent the hunter to Never-Never Land, abroad a gratifying shock wave. I led the laughter. I’d always favored the quarry over the hunter. It seemed only fair.
I glanced backward. Only trees and shadows.
I woke Reno, gave him the wristwatch, and curled up around my rifle.
It was cold. The ground was wet.
Reno slapped a mosquito and sat cross-legged, staring dead into a clump of bushes. He was a veteran, I thought. He knew what he was doing. Immediately, incredibly, I fell into a peaceful, heavy sleep.
Reno awakened me. My fatigues were drenched, a soggy web. It was drizzling and it was cold. I asked Reno for the wristwatch. It was three-ten. Reno had cheated by a few minutes. My sleep should have ended at three-twenty, but he was a squad leader, and there wasn’t anything to say about it. He grinned. “Don’t get too wet, New Guy,” he said, not bothering to whisper. “You catch pneumonia, we’ll have to ship you to the rear. I bet you’d hate that.” He lit a cigarette, cupping it in his palm. That was stupid and against the rules, but I couldn’t decide if it was more cowardly to tell him to put it out or to keep quiet and hope he’d die of lung cancer. The rain finally extinguished the cigarette, and Reno rolled around on the ground until he was asleep.
I passed the hour counting up the number of days I had left in Vietnam. I figured it out by months, weeks, and hours. I thought about a girl. It was hopeless, of course, but I tried to visualize her face. Only words would come in my mind. One word was “smile,” and I tacked on the adjective “intriguing” to make it more personal. I thought of the word “hair” and modified it with the words “thick” and “sandy,” not sure if they were accurate anymore, and then a whole string of words popped in—“mysterious,” “Magdalen,” “eternal” as a modifier. I tried fitting the words together into a picture, and I tried closing my eyes, first taking a long look down the road. I tried forcing out the memory of the girl, tried placing her in situations, tried reciting the Auden poem in a very brave whisper. For all this, I could not see her. When I muttered the word “hair,” I could see her hair plainly enough. When I said “eyes,” I would be looking smack into a set of smiling blue irises, and they were hers, no doubt. But if I uttered the word “face” or tried to squeeze out a picture of the girl herself, all there was to see was the word “face” or the word “eye,” printed out before me. It was like asking a computer to see for me. And I was learning that no weight of letters and remembering and wishing and hoping is the same as a touch on temporary, mortgaged lands.
I spent some time thinking about the things I would do after Vietnam—after the first sergeants and rifles were out of my life. I made a long list. I would write about the army. Expose the brutality and injustice and stupidity and arrogance of wars and men who fight in them. Get even with some people. Mark out the evil in my drill sergeants so vividly that they would go to hell lamenting the day they tangled with Private O’Brien. I would expose the carelessness with which people like Reno played with my life. I would crusade against this war, and if, when I was released, I would find other wars, I would work to discover whether they were just and necessary, and if I found they were not, I would have another crusade. I wondered how writers such as Hemingway and Pyle could write so accurately and movingly about war without also writing about the Tightness of their wars. I remembered one of Hemingway’s stories. It was about a battle in World War I, about the hideous deaths of tides of human beings, swarming into the fight, engaging under the sun, and ebbing away again into two piles, friend and foe. I wondered why he did not care to talk about the thoughts those men must have had. Certainly those suffering and scared human beings must have wondered if their cause was worthy. The men in war novels and stories and reportage seem to come off the typewriter as men resigned to bullets and brawn. Hemingway’s soldiers especially. They are cynics. Not quite nihilists, of course, for that would doom them in the reader’s eye. But what about the people who are persuaded that their battle is not only futile but also dead wrong? What about the conscripted Nazi?
I made plans to travel. I thought of buying or renting a secondhand boat and with six or seven friends sailing the seas from Australia to Lisbon, then to the Cote d’Azur, Sicily, and to an island called Paros in the Aegean. Perhaps I might rent a cottage in Austria, perhaps near a town called Freistadt just across the Czechoslovakian border. Freistadt would be the ideal place. The mountains were formidable, the air was clean, the town had a dry moat around it, the beer was the best in the world, the girls were not communists, and they had blue eyes and blond hair and big bosoms. There would be skiing in the winter and hiking and swimming in the summer. I would sleep alone when I wanted to, not in a barracks and not along a trail junction with nineteen GIs.
The thought of Freistadt, Austria, turned me to thinking about Prague, Czechoslovakia, where I’d spent a summer trying to study. I remembered an evening in July of 1967. I’d been drinking beer with a young Czech student, an economics specialist. Walking back from the hostinec, the fellow pointed out a poster that covered three square feet on a cement wall. The poster depicted three terrified Vietnamese girls. They were running from the bombs of an American B-52 bomber. In the background, a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun was blasting the planes with red fire. A clenched fist in the foreground.
The Czech asked what I thought of it. I told him I was ambivalent. I didn’t know. Perhaps the bombs were falling for good reason.
He smiled. “I have an invitation to extend, a proposition for you. If you find it distasteful, just say so, but as an interested bystander I hope you’ll accept. You see, my roommate is from North Vietnam. He studies economics here at the university. I wonder if you’d like to talk with him tonight.” He chuckled. “Perhaps you two can negotiate a settlement, who knows.”
It was a three-hour conversation. With my Czech friend helping with the translation, we carried on in French, Czech, German, and English. The fellow was cordial, a short and reserved man who told me his name was Li and offered me a seat on his bed. I asked if he thought Americans were evil, and he thought a while before he said no. He asked me the same question and I said no, quickly. I asked if the North Vietnamese were not the aggressors in the war. He laughed and stated that of course the opposite was the case. They were defending Vietnam from American aggression. I asked if the North Vietnamese were not sending troops to the South in order to establish a communist regime in Saigon, and he laughed again, nervously, and informed me that to speak of a divided Vietnam was historically and politically incorrect. I asked Li if he believed that President Johnson was an evil man, another Hitler. Personally, he said, he didn’t believe so. Johnson was misguided and wrong. But he added that most North Vietnamese were not so lenient.
“What else can they think when they see your airplanes killing people? They put the blame on the man who orders the flights.”
We talked about democracy, and totalitarianism, and the fellow argued that the government in Hanoi could be considered a wartime democracy. Stability, he said, was essential. We argued some about that, and my Czech friend joined in, taking my side.
When I left him, Li shook my hand and told me he was a lieutenant in the North Vietnamese Army. He hoped we would not meet again. That was in 1967.
I roused Reno out for the final watch. It was four-thirty and the sky was lighting up and the worst was over. Reno lay on his back. His eyes were barely slit, and there was no way to be sure he was awake. I nudged him again, and he told me to relax and go to sleep. I put the Claymore firing device beside him, brushed his foot a little as I lay down, and closed my eyes. I was nearly asleep when I remembered the wrist-watch. I sat up and handed it out toward him. He was wheezing, sound asleep. I kicked him, and he sat up, lit a cigarette, took the wristwatch, and sat there in a daze, rocking on his haunches and staring at his clump of bushes.
An hour later, when Mad Mark hollered at us to saddle up and move out, Reno was on his stomach and wheezing. He was a seasoned American soldier, a combat veteran, a squad leader.
Not every ambush was so uneventful. Sometimes we found Charlie, sometimes it was the other way.
In the month of May, we broke camp at three in the morning, Captain Johansen leading three platoons on a ghostly, moonlit march to a village in the vicinity of the My Lais. Johansen deployed the platoons in a broad circle around the village, forming a loose cordon. The idea was to gun down the Viet Cong as they left the ville before daybreak—intelligence had it that some sort of VC meeting was in progress. If no one exited by daybreak, the Third Platoon would sweep the village, driving the enemy into the rest of us.
Alpha Company pulled it off like professionals.
We were quiet, the cordon was drawn quickly, securely. I carried Captain Johansen’s radio, and along with him, an artillery forward observer, and three other RTOs, we grouped along a paddy dike outside the village. Captain Johansen directed things by radio.
In less than an hour the Second Platoon opened up on four VC leaving by a north-south trail. Seconds later, more gunfire. Third Platoon was engaged.
Second Platoon called in again, confirming a kill. The stars were out. The Southern Cross was up there, smiling down on Alpha Company.
The artillery officer got busy, calling back to the rear, preparing the big guns for a turkey shoot, rapidly readingoff grid coordinates, excited that we’d finally found the enemy.
Johansen was happy. He’d lost many men to the Forty-eighth Viet Cong Battalion. He was getting his revenge.
Rodriguez, one of the RTOs, suddenly uttered something in Spanish, changed it to English, and pointed out to our front. Three silhouettes were tiptoeing out of the hamlet. They were twenty yards away, crouched over, their shoulders hunched forward.
It was the first and only time I would ever see the living enemy, the men intent on killing me. Johansen whispered, “Aim low—when you miss, it’s because you’re shooting over the target.”
We stood straight up, in a row, as if it were a contest.
I confronted the profile of a human being through my sight. It did not occur to me that a man would die when I pulled the trigger of that rifle.
I neither hated the man nor wanted him dead, but I feared him.
Johansen fired. I fired.
The figures disappeared in the flash of my muzzle. Johansen hollered at us to put our M-16s on automatic, and we sent hundreds of bullets out across the paddy. Someone threw a grenade out at them.
With daybreak, Captain Johansen and the artillery lieutenant walked over and found a man with a bullet hole in his head. There were no weapons. The dead man carried a pouch of papers, some rice, tobacco, canned fish, and he wore a blue-green uniform. That, at least, was Johansen’s report. I would not look. I wondered what the other two men, the lucky two, had done after our volley. I wondered if they’d stopped to help the dead man, if they had been angry at his death, or only frightened that they might die. I wondered if the dead man were a relative of the others and, if so, what it must have been to leave him lying in the rice. I hoped the dead man was not named Li.
Later, Johansen and the lieutenant talked about the mechanics of the ambush. They agreed it had been perfectly executed. They were mildly upset that with such large and well-defined targets we had not done better than one in three. No matter. The platoons had registered other kills. They were talking these matters over, the officers pleased with their success and the rest of us relieved it was over, when my friend Chip and a squad leader named Tom were blown to pieces as they swept the village with the Third Platoon.
That was Alpha Company’s most successful ambush.