Blood: Kentucky Morning

Bodies on the battlefield at Antietam

33

The combat man isn’t the same clean-cut lad because you don’t fight a kraut by Marquis of Queensberry rules. You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself.

 Bill Mauldin, Up Front

You know how the boys used to sit all along Brighton front in their blues, an’ jump every time the coal was bein’ delivered to the hotels behind them?

Rudyard Kipling, A Friend of the Family

1974

Death and blood are always there. They are, after all, the purpose of the infantry. That is why we move to and fro upon the earth and up and down in it. To kill. To be killed. To bleed. To die.

Not that I meditated at any length on these ideas. But they struck me at odd times and I sometimes reacted inappropriately.

I went to my war twice. When I returned after the last time I was still a captain. I did not object, because captain was the best rank of all for an infantry officer and it let me stay in the best job of all for an infantry officer, the commander of a rifle company. In this time we were in training. We slipped through the woods and were alert, but not as alert as we would be if our lives were at stake. The alertness was driven as much by the games-like atmosphere as anything else. Some of the sounds were the same — the hissing of the radios, the distant thumping of helicopters, the curses when someone tripped and fell. On the other hand, there was a distance, and not-realness to this game, as if it didn’t matter.

I studied the map. I knew that if I could get my men to a specific location before the Blue Force (my men were the Red Force, the “opposing force,” the enemy), if I positioned my men correctly, if they dug in and performed all the tasks of defense correctly, that the Blue Force would lose. At least that’s the way it was supposed to be. Unless the Blue Force had more people, or they managed to get around a flank, or if they were actually somewhere else. A lot of “ifs.”

This time we did all the right things. We were at the right place. We set up on a very pretty horseshoe-shaped hill with an open field at the bottom of it. My men were there early and we quietly planned our defense and dug in. Listening posts were set up out to our front. We linked up with other infantry companies to our left and right. Through the night we watched and waited and were very silent, very professional.

Not long after dawn the Blue Force battalion came into the field below us. They were in an appropriate formation and they moved reasonably well. They just didn’t know they were moving into a trap. With a few clicks on my radio and a few whispered code words I unleashed my artificial Armageddon. The sounds, although impressive, were not quite right. Belts of blank ammo ran through the machine guns. Blank rifle cartridges banged and flashed in the morning light. A few crashes of artillery simulators and fake hand grenades were heard. Colored clouds from smoke grenades rose up into the air and flowed down the hillside. My heart beat increased. I thrilled to the sounds and sight of destruction.

Then there were whistles and men with white arm bands and soft caps strolled through the smoke waving their arms. These men were not camouflaged and did not carry weapons. They were the umpires, the referees of the game. They called for the commanders of the opposing units.

I came up out of my command post, signaling with my hands for my men to stay hidden. My two radio operators, my RTOs, followed me as always, like remoras constantly circling close to their shark. An umpire who’d been with me in my command post came along, looking clean and unconcerned. We walked down the hill. 

My company was quickly judged to have “won.” The Blue battalion was told to withdraw and casualties were assessed. The operation would restart in a couple of hours. I turned and went back up the hill, calling in a situation report as I went. My platoon leaders and their sergeants were waiting for me.

“We won,” I told them. “Decisively. They’re assessed thirty percent casualties and have been told to move back 3 klicks to refit.” The lieutenants grinned and left to inform their men. Their sergeants just nodded and followed them.

The news rippled along the line from foxhole to foxhole. 

“Teach them assholes to take on the Cold Steel Cobras.” 

Calls flowed down the slope toward the Blue Force soldiers. 

“Come back another day, pussies!” 

“Call yourselves soldiers? We saw your butts coming a mile away.” 

And more friendly curses and belligerent shouts.

Behind me I heard the sound of a jeep bringing up supplies. In the distance I could hear the thumping of a helicopter, probably one of the bosses circling around. Below me, down in the bowl into which they’d come, the Blue battalion was gathering itself. Some of the men stood up and drank from their canteens. A medic was working on the leg of one of them, probably a twisted ankle. Their battalion commander was arguing with the umpires about something. A slight breeze blew the smell of smoke up the hill.

And then it was as if a cloud had passed in front of the sun. The golden grass below me seemed to fade and flicker. The image shifted to one that looked like a civil war photograph. The color leached out of the ground and every shadow was a pool of blood, every manshape was dead or dying. The bodies were everywhere, bodies and pieces of bodies and metallic debris. A grimacing head lay at the foot of the slope. Churned dirt and shattered tree stumps marked the impact of artillery shells. The faint sounds I heard were the calls of the wounded. Thin wisps of smoke rose everywhere across the valley floor and what movement I saw was like the movement of crippled insects lurching away from the light into the far darkness. The thrilling, atavistic surge, my soaring sense of triumph abruptly spiraled downward. Victory spilled out of me like vomit splashed to the ground.

I heard my troops begin one of their marching songs, a song filled with jokes and obscene affirmations of their prowess as soldiers and men. It was a song I’d heard and smiled at a dozen times, but now it infuriated me, filled me with an unresolved, unreasoning rage. From deep in my belly came the voice I used on parade grounds, the voice that could echo across a hundred yards and still a thousand marching soldiers.

“At ease!” I barked. 

The command blew across the hill and the hill was still. 

More quietly, almost to myself, I muttered, “Every one of those sonsabitches is dead. It is not their fault, God damn them!” 

I could say no more.

My cluster of RTOs and the artillery forward observer, my personal little command group, drifted away from me. In the valley below an umpire wearing a soft cap and white arm band looked up at me. All of the Blue Force had heard my order and they, too, were silent. An empty circle was around me, a bubble that no one would breach, no one could understand. I turned to look down the hill again and took my helmet off. 

Behind me I heard one of my RTOs mutter, “What the fuck got into him?” 

“Beats the shit outa me. But I’m not gonna ask.”

My First Sergeant strode through the cluster of men and into the silence. He walked swiftly up to me and stopped directly in front of me in a rigid posture of attention. His dark, almost black eyes stared out from under his helmet. He looked directly into my eyes. I’m sure he saw the rapid breathing, the color of my face, maybe a muscle jumping on the side of my jaw. When he spoke he was very formal and it reminded me that he, the First Sergeant, was also an infantryman, that he had been an infantryman for a very long time. He was in full field gear that hung from his shoulders and around his waist as if he’d been wearing it all his life.

“Sir,” the First Sergeant said in a still, quiet voice pitched so low that only I could hear him, “Battalion has ordered us to ‘go admin’ and redeploy. They’ve designated a PZ about a klick from here.” 

He held up a plastic-covered map and showed me where he’d drawn a circle on it. “With the Captain’s permission, I think it would be good training for the junior NCOs to take charge and run the extraction and insertion.”

My heart was still racing. I was barely seeing the First Sergeant. What I was seeing was the dead, the hundreds of dead. I blinked and gave a short nod. 

The First Sergeant spun around and pointed at one of the RTOs. His voice lashed out at him. “Soldier, the Captain wants all the platoon sergeants and the lieutenants here. On me. Right now!”

“Yes, First Sergeant,” the RTO answered and he began talking into the handset of his radio.

In a moment helmeted heads were bobbing along the crest of the hill. The First Sergeant walked about ten meters away from me. The sergeants and lieutenants formed a small circle around him. He showed them the map.

“Put your next senior NCO in charge of your platoons and tell me who it’s going to be. We’re moving out. March order third platoon, second platoon, first platoon. Third platoon, you secure the PZ. We’ve got three flights of six coming in forty-five minutes. Set it up. The Captain has put me and the junior NCOs in charge of the operation. Platoon sergeants, the Captain wants you to get down there and tell those dumb assholes how they got all their men killed. Lieutenants, sirs, I suggest you do the same.” 

He turned to the forward observer. “You. The Captain would like you to go with the lieutenants and help them explain to the Blue Force just how fucked up they were.”

He turned back to the sergeants. “Just make sure that they know it was the Cold Steel Cobras that whipped that entire battalion’s ass. And that we could do it again. Any time. Any place. But that they made it easy for us today. Any questions?”

There were none. The platoon sergeants murmured into their radios as they went down the slope and other helmeted heads came bobbing over the hill towards the First Sergeant. The First Sergeant pointed at one of the RTOs. 

“There’s a thermos with coffee in it in my jeep. Get the Captain a cup.” 

The soldier scurried off.

Down the slope I saw the Blue battalion commander still arguing with the umpires. Their words didn’t carry up the hill, but the lieutenant colonel was waving his arms at them. The Blue battalion’s command sergeant major was back near that commander’s little cluster of radio men. One of my platoon sergeants went up to the sergeant major. I saw them standing side by side while my platoon sergeant spoke rapidly and pointed me out on the hillside. The sergeant major nodded once and then walked over to his battalion commander and took him off to one side.

I was handed a canteen cup filled with coffee. The hot metal burned my lips as I took a sip, but it didn’t matter. I was still staring at the field below me, at the dead men now walking and talking. I should not be proud of this, but I was.

“Nice day,” my First Sergeant said as he came up and stood alongside me and offered me a cigarette.

I looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. “Good to see you, Top. You came up with supplies?”

“Yes, sir,” he said as he lit a cigarette of his own. “Looks like we figured this one out right. Men did a good job.”

“Yeah, we did.” I gestured down the hill to where the defeated unit was moving out and the landscape was turning back to normal. “They didn’t. We woulda slaughtered them. Just goddamned wiped them out. No goddamned excuse for that.”

“No, sir. I take it the Captain’s pissed off because the Blue force is no good, sir?”

My mood shifted as suddenly as it had come on me, as if the cloud blocking the sun had drifted on through the sky. I came back to the game. I smiled. “That’s right, Top, I’m pissed at them, not us. We did fine.”

The First Sergeant field-stripped his cigarette and put the filter in his pocket. “Company’s ready to move. Let’s walk with ’em, sir. The platoon sergeants will make sure the lieutenants find us.” The First Sergeant had nothing but contempt for lieutenants. In fact, he talked to them only when he absolutely had to.

“Right, Top. Let’s go. Thanks for setting it up.” 

I field-stripped my cigarette and we walked off together towards the Third Platoon. The First Sergeant shouted, “Move out!” and the platoons shook themselves into formation. The RTOs were circling within calling distance of me. I threw the dregs of the coffee out of my cup and tossed the cup back to the RTO. 

It was not yet noon on this fine Kentucky morning and I noticed an immense dogwood tree in full bloom. Spring was close at hand.

“We really did kick their ass, didn’t we, Top?”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is one hell of a company, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. Proud to be in it.”

“So am I, Top, so am I.”

It was a good day. The men began to sing again and I saw out the corner of my eye the gesture from the First Sergeant that signaled that it was OK. 

And so the soldiers moved through the Kentucky morning, blood on their hands, a song on their lips, proud, happy, moving to and fro upon the earth and satisfied with doing just that and only that.

Blood: Medal

32

Thou shalt not kill.

Exodus 20:13

This commandment forbids murder, not the forms of killing authorized for Israel, e.g., war or capital punishment.

Note to Exodus 20:13

The New Oxford Annotated Bible

Thou shalt do no murder. Lord have mercy upon us. and incline our hearts to keep this law.

The Book of Common Prayer

There had to be something somewhere in all of them, in all of us, that loved it. Some dark, aggressive, masochistic side of us, racial perhaps, that makes us want to spray our blood in the air, throw our blood away, for some damned misbegotten ideal or other. Whether the ideal is morally right or wrong makes no difference so long as the desire to fight for it remains in us. Fanatics willing to die for ideals. It was territory, back when we were animals. Now that we have evolved into higher beings and learned to talk, territoriality has moved up a step higher with us, and become ideals. We like it. Cynical as it sounds, one is about led to believe that only the defeated and the dead really hate war. And of course, as we all know, they do not count.

James Jones, WWII

I still have a box that used to rest on the bureau in my grandparents’ bedroom. It has a leather-like covering that is now a deep mahogany color and has the logo of a tobacco company on it. In my grandparents’ time it had treasures in it — cufflinks, an Illinois pocket watch, a church collection envelope with petunia seeds in it, and a medal for service on the local draft board during World War II. The box sat on the top of the bureau alongside photographs of my grandparents’ four children, two young men and two young women. One of the women was the my mother and one of the men was the father of my cousins. The other two I never knew. The woman wore a high-necked dress and had dark eyes and hair done into a tight bun — Ruth, dead from TB sometime in the 30’s. The other was a man in uniform whose death will be forever a mystery since all who might know the truth are now also dead and at the time no one spoke of him — Floyd. He was only a photo and a name on a tombstone.

In the cedar-smelling closet there was no uniform for my grandfather to wear his medal on. I wondered, then, why the medal was in the box and what it meant.

Part of what it meant was connected to the courthouse square. No respectable county seat is without monuments on its courthouse square. They memorialize at least the Civil War, World War One (called the Great War on many of the monuments), World War Two, and other conflicts great and small. Crawford County, Arkansas is no different.

Most of those squares also have a bench or two where people can sit and feed pigeons and squirrels, which was what I often did with my grandfather and at least once, I seem to remember, with my Aunt Edyce, widow of the man in the uniform on the bureau. In my memory she was a woman who was oddly sexless, a woman who sat on the fringes of family gatherings.

Sometimes I ran my fingers across the raised letters on the bronze plaques or the letters carved into marble and granite, the names, the names. It did not occur to me to ask why these names? Why this specific name? Nor was I the only one who did not, does not ask.

I now know that in my grandfather’s time, in the 40’s, a roll was made of every male child in the county, not unlike the call for enumeration by Caesar Augustus commemorated each Christmas. All the sons of Crawford County were listed and classified. Their names were put forward to a selection committee that had been chosen from among the elders of the community. Eventually and at last all those selected went out of the county. For some of those men all that now remained was a name on a monument. They passed forever even from the memory of the community, as have the names of their elders who sat on the board and were given their medals at the end of their service.

Blood: Above the Wagon Wheel

Huey and Farmer, Jerry Barnes, 1969
Used with permission of the artist

30

The Delta is silent below Saigon. Where the land falls away to sea level, the waters of the Mekong fan out, pulse like plasma through the dark silt and infuse it with the slow, rich life of rice, sugar cane, and bananas. The Delta nourishes the country and is silent, complete within itself. On its rivers and along the grey strips of road, cargoes of rice move east to Saigon, west to Cambodia and to the North, as they did in the days of Indochina.

Frances FitzGerald, The Long Fear

1972

From the air the Delta was a pale shade of green that time of year. The particular spot I was over was called, by Americans, the Wagon Wheel and wasn’t very far from My Xuyen. At the Wagon Wheel several canals met and from a helicopter it looked like a hub with thick spokes radiating outward. Looking down I wondered just how and why the configuration came to be. I had seen canals being dug and had an understanding of the human effort involved. I thought this must go back to French times before World War II. Where else in this country’s past had people been able to organize themselves for something like this kind of effort? And why this hub and spoke arrangement?

I couldn’t ask the question of the men I rode with. True, I spoke more Vietnamese than most on the advisory team, which was why I was the only American on this helicopter. But I didn’t know enough to ask them why the wagon wheel was there.

The Vietnamese infantrymen were down there on the ground. Small figures walked along the paddy dikes that ran like lacework between the spokes. It was another day of endless searching. I sat near the open door of the VNAF Huey with two PRC-25 radios near my feet and a map in my lap. In the helicopter with me were other Vietnamese, mostly officers, and more radios and maps. Somewhere up in the air and far away were U.S. Navy jets. Nearby in the sky with us was a U.S. Air Force FAC, Forward Air Controller, in a high-winged, propeller-driven aircraft with rockets hung under his wings.

It would be nice to think that the FAC’s presence — and the fighter-bombers soon to come on station — was all part of a carefully thought-out plan, an acute analysis of Mission, Enemy, Terrain, and Troops available. I’d like to think that my job was to sit here on high and conduct a small, carefully composed concerto of death, or at least be the percussionist, the guy who stood in the back of the orchestra, eyes glancing at the score from time to time, waiting, waiting, then almost casually unleashing a burst of thunder.

But I knew better.

I had personally delivered the bag of VC and NVA flags (sewn up by the mother of one of the hooch maids) and sworn their provenance as having been captured at the end of a desperate fire fight. This was over shots of Jack Daniels while sitting at the FAC squadron’s table in the Ton Son Nhut Officers Club. I had also delivered the books with our radio frequencies and codes so that we’d be able to talk to each other. I had bartered for a promise.

“Sure,” one of the FACs said, “we ever have anything extra, anything we can’t use, we’ll give you a call and come down and put it anywhere you want.”

So on this day I had a FAC up in the air with me. He’d refueled in Can Tho and had given us an hour’s warning that something might be available. Navy aircraft were coming on station with ordinance they had not used on their primary mission to the west. They would stay nearby for as long as they could before flying back to their home on the sea. The FAC passed on to me the ordinance — the types of bombs — available and the station time — the time that they would become available and when they would be leaving. I passed the information on to my counterpart, a Vietnamese Major, Thieu-ta, now sitting beside me. We’d spun up the chopper and flew to circle over an operation that was already in progress. Now we were above the wagon wheel waiting for the jets.

I checked with the province headquarters on the other radio to make sure the Americans there were listening. Our helicopter and the FAC kept on circling. The troops on the ground kept on making their way across the paddies and dikes below them.

The Thieu-ta listened to his radio and drew a circle on his map. He tugged on my sleeve and held the map in front of me, pointing at a blue-green hatched area on the map. Then he pointed out the door at a smudge of green alongside one of the canals that radiated from the hub. I had been down there. I knew what it was. It was a swamp full of dark green plants and snakes and spiders.

I picked a spot in the middle of the green and made a quick computation of the grid coordinates. Just before calling the FAC I shouted my last question to the Thieu-ta — had the Province Chief approved? “Ya-phai! Yes!” the Thieu-ta shouted back. I nodded, encoded the numbers, and called the coordinates to the FAC. Then we circled away to be out of the path of bombs falling from aircraft. We would never see either the bombs or the bombers. The FAC buzzed down low and marked the point with a white phosphorous rocket. A thin trail of white smoke fell up out of the green. I confirmed that the smoke marked the right spot. Moments later great black gouts of mud and water began to erupt into the air. They formed odd bulbous patterns in the green, like bubbles boiling up in a sauce, as if the Delta’s surface was a thick green stew left too long on the stove.

It was someone’s unlucky day. From the edge of the deep green a sampan came sputtering out. One man was standing up in the narrow boat holding the tiller of the outboard engine with its long propeller shaft thrashing the muddy water behind him. The FAC was excited. He was screaming for permission to follow up. The Thieu-ta, excited himself, was calling for more bombs. In the flat voice I adopted in crisis, I laconically passed the request to the FAC. Everyone was very happy.

More bombs came. One splashed into the canal in front of the sampan, another behind. The prow pitched up over the wave and the man could be seen struggling for control. The Thieu-ta shouted in Vietnamese for me to stop the bombing. He was pointing to the troops on the ground who were running down the bank of the canal and firing their rifles. I passed the cease fire order to the FAC and both our helicopter and the FAC’s plane dropped down low, so low that we could see the moment the man pitched forward into the bottom of his boat. One of the soldiers on the canal bank dropped his gear, jumped into the canal, and swam out to retrieve their prize.

I switched to another frequency, one for only myself and the FAC. “Why don’t you and the Navy take a KIA for that? Looks good to me.” I heard a click-click of acknowledgement before I switched back to the open frequency and called a report back to the province. The FAC came up on that frequency and reported that the “fast movers,” the fighter-bombers, were outbound. He thanked me for the action. Said it was the most fun he’d had in a long time. We agreed that the FAC would buy a round of drinks the next time I was in Saigon.

Up in the cockpit of the helicopter the alarms that had been sounding for several minutes finally got my attention. I saw red lights flashing on the instrument panel, but didn’t know what they meant. I replayed in my mind the gallows humor of the team house about the risks of flying with the Vietnamese. It wasn’t the pilots. They were generally thought to be almost as good as the teenage American warrant officers. It was the maintenance and the maintenance crews who sometimes left off vital parts or tightened the wrong bolt, or left out the odd cotter key.

“Chung-ta phai di. We must go back now,” the Thieu-ta shouted. The pilots took us up to gain enough altitude for a possible fluttering autorotation, that peculiar death spiral unique to helicopters that could sometimes be walked away from. I spent the flight back in indecision regarding my seat belt. Should I keep it buckled? Or would I be better off if I were thrown from the crash?

The district town of My Xuyen came into sight and the big white H of the helipad was a beautiful sight. The pilot banged the Huey down on its struts and immediately began shutting down the engines. Everyone else just climbed off like it was an ordinary ride. I gathered up my radios and my rifle and strolled to the edge of the pad where Chen, my bodyguard/driver, and Kiem, my interpreter, were waiting. I gave the radios to Chen who held them while I made one last check with the FAC and then turned that radio off. I used the other radio to report my location to the province CP and gave the mike to Chen, who knew my call sign and would bring the radio to me if I were called.

All of us, the Thieu-ta, a Dai-uy, Kiem and Chen had a mildly celebratory meal in the shade of the marketplace. We commandeered two tables. Kiem and Chen began walking through the stalls and coming back with sellers of fish, shrimp, and crabs, each of them with a basket full of their wares. The Thieu-ta made the decisions and I dealt out stacks of Vietnamese currency, dong. In a few minutes bottles of Ba Muoi Ba beer, filthy glasses with chunks of probably contaminated ice in them, bowls of rice, and platters of cooked shrimp and crab were on the table. I picked a pair of chopsticks of equal length from the container and competed with them all for the shrimp and morsels of crab, pausing from time to time to shovel some rice into my mouth or to take a swig of ice-cooled beer.

When the meal was finished the sun was past noon. The Thieu-ta and the Dai-uy went back to the district headquarters, probably for their mid-day naps. I decided to wait for the ground unit that had been sweeping the wagon wheel to return. I planned to have a chat with their commander and then head back to Soc Trang to make a full report on the day’s operation.

This was in the days when American presence was slowly being pulled out of the Delta. The problem, as I saw it then, was not in the Vietnamese soldiers or even the young officers. Even this Thieu-ta was reasonably competent and did not lack courage. The problem was very simple — there was no way to “win” unless you killed them all, every VC and NVA soldier — to the last man. And neither the South Vietnamese nor the Americans had the heart for that. It wasn’t a war, not even a battle. There was no place to stand, no place from which victory could be proclaimed.

My Xuyen was at the junction of a couple of large canals that connected to the Bassac, a lower branch of the Mekong. Narrow sampans made their way along the canals carrying rice and other goods. Roads paralleled the canals. At key points the canals were crossed by bridges or ferries. The market was near the largest of the canals and I walked along the banks with my little team. I was an infantryman without my fellow soldiers. I was alone, but I was not fearful. A child came up to me and brushed his small hand along my bare forearm. The boy wanted to feel the hair. A woman scolded the child and the boy ran to the shelter of her shadow. At a corner an old woman tossed peanuts into a metal pan atop a charcoal brazier. I watched as she shook them back and forth. I bought all of them and shared them with my team as we walked along.

Behind us I heard the sound of trucks pulling into the square in front of the marketplace. I turned around and walked back to them. I reached the square just as they were pulling the corpse off the back of one of the trucks. They laid the body out on the steps to the market. I saw the District Chief, a Lieutenant Colonel, Trung-ta, walking across the square followed by his small entourage, the Thieu-ta and the Dai-uy. I met them at the steps and we discussed the operation over the dead body. The dead young man wore only loose black cotton trousers. His hair was still damp with streaks of mud in it. His bare chest was hairless and marked only with a small, round, blue blemish, the bullet’s hole. He was still and composed, like an old cat in a pool of sunlight.

The District Chief was smiling and pleased with himself, as if this one dead body was his own kill, as if he were a hunter returned from the mountains above Dalat with a tiger instead of a sad dead boy who may not have even been a soldier but a poor unfortunate who picked the wrong day and time to check out his father’s fish traps.

The Trung-ta began a long oration directed at my interpreter. The gist of it was that he was sure that this person was from the local area. He would leave the body here in the market square until someone claimed him. Then they would know who he was. The District Chief was pleased with this playing off cultural values — the desire for a proper burial — against his own need for military intelligence.

The District Chief gave a small speech to the townspeople who were nearby and waited for a few minutes, rapping his swagger stick against his thigh. No one came forward. He strode off with his retinue, back to his headquarters. A soldier squatting near the body brushed away a fly that had landed on the dead boy’s cheek.

I waited, sitting in my jeep, for the length of a couple of cigarettes. I talked for a while to the Dai-uy who had led the ground operation. Then I drove across the bridge and onto the highway that would take me back to Soc Trang and my team house.