Grace: Homecoming

40

Si monumentum requiris circumspice

(If you wish to see his monument, look about you) 

It signifies that those who desire to behold a proper memorial to Kurban Sahib must look out at the house. And, Sahib, the house is not there, nor the well, nor the big tank which they call damns, nor the little fruit-trees, nor the cattle. There is nothing at all, Sahib, except the two trees withered by the fire. The rest is like the desert here — or my hand — or my heart. Empty, Sahib — all empty!

Rudyard Kipling, A Sahib’s War

1973

At the end of my second tour I left Sóc Trăng and traveled to the out-processing center outside Saigon. On the morning of January 31, 1973 I was lying on a steel-framed cot under an olive green mosquito net. There were a couple hundred other men like me staying in one-story buildings inside the fenced compound. Giving up on trying to sleep, I grabbed my shaving kit, slipped on my flip-flops and walked to the latrine to shave and shower and get dressed for my trip back to The World.

Through sheer happenstance, or a very odd kharma, my DEROS — date of reassignment from overseas, 365 days from the moment I’d been ordered to be in country — was also the official date of the cease fire agreed to by the United States, the Republic of South Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. I felt oddly detached from this coincidence of history, except that it did have some small effect on me: As I’d left my team I had had no one to whom I could transfer my duties. I was just leaving, in fact, I was one of the last to leave.

Back from the latrine, I stuffed my shaving kit into the top of my duffle bag that was filled with bits and pieces of the preceding year. On the floor beside my bunk were the shoes that only a few days earlier had been covered with mildew. Now they had a high polish thanks to one of the Vietnamese hooch maids back in Sóc Trăng that would soon be out of a job. A cotton khaki uniform was hanging from the mosquito bar, freshly laundered and stiffly starched. Light glinted from the Combat Infantryman’s Badge and polished jump wings pinned to the shirt. All around me men like myself were finishing their packing or sitting on their cots, stunned to numbness by the reality that they were going home, back to The World. They did not reflect on why they were going home.

I felt uneasy about what I would not be putting on that morning, by what I was not wearing. I would feel that uneasiness for weeks, months. There was no .45 and knife to strap to my belt. The .45 had been turned in and the knife was deep inside the duffel bag. I’d thrown away most of my jungle fatigues and all except one pair of my jungle boots. Most of the green underwear was also gone. 

I put on a clean white t-shirt and white boxer shorts, put on my new sunglasses and strolled outdoors still wearing my shower shoes to smoke a cigarette. It felt odd to stand in the sun without either a helmet or my jungle hat on my head. The heat beat down on packed earth, but I didn’t notice it. My hands were free. I had no M-16 to carry or hang from my shoulder. My ears — trained to filter messages from the whispering hiss of radios, alert to the metallic click of a rifle bolt, the snap of a branch breaking, the slithering snick of a booby trap, the distant whop whop whop of helicopters — could make no sense of the normality of flight announcements, rock and roll radio, howling jet engines.

I went back inside and put on my uniform. It would be very rumpled before this day was done. In a pile on my cot was a pile of crumpled paper money, Military Payment Certificates, fake dollars in lurid colors, and Vietnamese đong. They had no meaning for me. They were currencies for an economy that no longer existed, except in my mind.

As an infantryman, in this place I could not stand. Whatever small victories I and the men I’d worked with had won; whatever small hamlet I had once walked through like a king, safe and secure; whatever we had earned was now spent and was as worthless as these torn and frayed scraps of paper. I had filled up my foxhole and moved on. And now I was without even my team. These men around me, even though they were in the same uniform, were not my brothers. They were just waiting for the ride home.

The loudspeaker announced my flight. I hoisted my duffel bag and left.

Victory in battle ultimately comes down to a small group of men, usually an infantry squad, possessing a place on the earth. What is extraordinary is how men responsible for the conduct of war, who once may have known this truth, seem to lose sight of it. At the end of December 1944, little squads of men owned the dirt in the Ardennes. When the truce was declared in Korea, each point in the irregular line across the peninsula was owned by infantry squads. After its great sweep across southern Iraq in 1991, the tanks of VII Corps idled their engines. The Bradley fighting vehicles drew up alongside, dropped their ramps, and infantry squads rushed out. Those men stood on the ground not far from the banks of the Euphrates and declared by their presence that they owned the land. In every case they knew, or would come to know, that they would eventually leave. But they could all, each of them, remember that moment and know that they had done their jobs, accomplished the mission. Almost twenty years later it would happen again.

Hours and hours and hours later I stepped out of the hatch of the chartered jet airliner and was stunned by the bright California sunlight. Near the bottom of the metal stairs was a cluster of television cameras recording this first flight of soldiers coming home after the cease fire. My ears cleared from the depressurization and the reporters’ shouted questions seemed to bounce off the concrete and slap me in the face. Behind the chain link fence at the terminal were men and women, boys and girls, waving signs scrawled with obscenities and symbols. I stumbled slightly on the last step down to the concrete and it disoriented me. My head went skyward and I momentarily felt as if I had just hit the ground and was looking for fellow paratroopers. I felt a shivering fear that I must have jumped out all alone. I was on the ground and I could not see my squad, my platoon, or my company. My men were not gathering about me. We were not coming together on the ground to protect each other. I turned and turned and looked for them, but they were not there. 

I pushed past the reporters and went into the terminal where I found my duffel bag and got a shuttle to San Francisco International. As I had been advised, the first thing I did at the airport was find a men’s room and change out of my uniform into civilian clothes. 

I have never quite forgiven them, my country, even elements of my Army, for that day. I wondered later when I finally visited the memorial if anyone understood that it was, at least for me, anger and resentment that motivated me to donate my money and effort to its creation. I wanted the memorial to tell those television crews and demonstrators, and those bastards who’d called my wife in the middle of the night while I was gone, and the sonofabitch who’d bragged to her about how much money he was making on the war as she flew to meet me in Hawaii in the middle of one of my tours, to go to Hell — we will remember our comrades.

At that moment, however, it was more important that I was going home. I flew to my family and took them with me back to the infantry.

Grace: Filled With Grace

Vendor, Dalat, Vietnam, Photo Courtesy of The Cape Club

39

Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end. Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Saviors of God

1972

They sent me up out of the Delta to Đà Lạt. Maybe they thought I needed a break. Maybe it had something to do with my time in country. Or maybe I was just on some roster kept somewhere and my name came up. I packed my AWOL bag with an extra uniform, clean socks and underwear, spare ammunition, and went where I was told to go. This was not an operation, so under the loose jungle fatigue shirt I wore only my .45 and a knife. Instead of a helmet I wore a floppy jungle hat with the three lotus-blossom symbol of my rank. 

I was driven to Cần Thơ where I caught a ride on an Air America C-47. I strapped in and they took off. The Delta began to flow below me, the flatness marked by irregular stream beds and the ruler-straight canals. The long flight took me over the rubber plantations of III Corps and up into the soft-looking mountains surrounding Đà Lạt.

The airstrip was set on a small plateau. As we turned on the final approach I saw the orderly rows of crops, very different from the rice paddies I was used to. Ambitious Vietnamese truck farmers were raising produce for the Americans scattered up and down the country. But on the drive in there were the same black-eyed water buffalo and their child herdsmen.

I was driven through the town where the streets were filled with a frantic clutter of bicycles and cyclos, past fragrant marketplaces and up to an old resort hotel. When I stepped out it was as if I had fallen into a Somerset Maugham story. A porter grabbed my bag and led me up a wide set of stairs and into a high-ceilinged lobby. Broad-bladed fans hanging far overhead slowly turned. I walked on wide planks of polished wood through a room defined by upholstered furnishings, oriental carpets, brass ash trays and potted palms. Small men in starched white coats scurried about. A distinguished-looking Vietnamese man dressed in black noted my reservation and room assignment. He gave the porter an old fashioned key attached to a wooden fob that reminded me of the tops I used to spin on my grandfather’s driveway.

A stately four-poster bed dominated my room, the diaphanous mosquito netting rippled from the air blown by a ceiling fan and swayed in the breeze that came through a tall open window. The view from that window was of a green lawn and the peculiar spindly trees left behind when the jungle was cleared. In the near distance were green rumpled hills. 

My dinner was sautéed trout, new potatoes, and fresh green beans, with ripe strawberries and cream for dessert. On the veranda after dinner I felt out of place in my loose green fatigues smoking unfiltered Luckies. I thought I should be in a white linen suit and smoking a thin black cheroot or perhaps an Algerian briar pipe filled with a blend of cured Virginia tobaccos flavored with latakia and perique. The conversation should have been of the fate of Empires, the British or the French or, for the older Southeast Asia hands, the Dutch. Or of rubber production and markets, of shopping trips to Paris, of tigers bagged or Eurasian women available to share one’s room. Instead, even though the coffee was strong and French, the conversation was about Provinces and Corps, VC infrastructure and HES reports, of time in-country and DEROS, of the status of peace talks and the Vietnamese response, of the prospects for promotion and the possible location of the next war, the next place for us.

As I watched, the sky shifted abruptly from a cloud-streaked blue to purple, then black. In the very far distance a flare blossomed and drifted down over the forest. It reminded me of where I was, the time I was in, as I sipped my coffee and smoked my cigarettes.

The conference was just for one day. So I only had two evenings on the cool veranda before I stuffed my underwear and spare ammunition back into my bag and was driven back to the airstrip. This time my ride to the south was in an old C-123, the two-engined predecessor to the C-130. I got on board by walking up the ramp that dropped down at the back and took a seat along the side. Pallets were strapped down the length of the cargo bay, a shipment to the Americans at Cần Thơ and elsewhere in the Delta.

The engines were running. Over them I heard the high-pitched whine of the electric motor for the ramp. The ramp rose up and shut out the sky until with the final thump I was enclosed in a noisy darkness broken only by the light from the scattered port holes. 

My nostrils flared and filled with the scents flowing from the lashed-down pallets. They were loaded with the produce from the fields nearby. In the coolness and darkness around me were lettuce, strawberries, cucumbers, cantaloupes, and watermelons. I breathed in deeply, again and again and again, not even noticing that we had left the ground.

Grace: Crow's Foot

Photo courtesy of  South East Asia - Hidden Riches of a Colonial Past

37

We master archers say: with the upper end of the bow the archer pierces the sky, on the lower end, as though attached by a thread, hangs the earth. If the shot is loosed with a jerk there is danger of the thread snapping. For purposeful and violent people the rift becomes final, and they are left in the awful center between heaven and earth.

Eugene Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

1969

The Crow’s Foot was southeast of Pleiku. It was called the Crow’s Foot because on a map three blue lines representing streams in three valleys merged into a single blue stream, all of them running to the south. That is, on a map it looked like the footprint of a bird. It was just the local American name for the area, and not the only place like it in the country. Even the name was used elsewhere, so that when I told my stories in later days I had to say, “This Crow’s Foot was southeast of Pleiku,” and my listeners would get a rough idea of where it was.

The operation was sort of an experiment. Regular U.S. Forces were given a sector. Regular Vietnamese forces had a sector. And on one flank the local militia units, Regional Forces/Popular Forces or “Ruff-Puffs”, were cobbled together into a battalion and given a sector. At the level of the colonels and the generals it had all the common elements of any decent-size operation: estimates of who and where the enemy might be; lists of units participating; assignments of sectors and objectives drawn on maps; timetables and routes of movement; bound booklets of radio frequency assignments and call signs; and all the rest. At every level and within each level this was expressed in the same five paragraph format, even when it was in different languages. The higher the level, the more pieces of the plan that were put in writing, typed on paper or mimeograph stencils, and drawn on semi-transparent sheets of paper. At the lowest level it was a group of soldiers standing around a sergeant who drew the plan in the dirt and told each man where he was to go and what was expected of him.

The plan was much, much more than just the infantrymen who were out on the points of the arrows spread across the maps. First, and most important, were the schemes for the entire array of indirect fire weapons. Those plans began with the infantry units’ own mortars that we carried with us and would set up and move and set up again as we made our way into the Crow’s Foot. Positioned behind all the infantry units at distances appropriate to their caliber and range were the artillery pieces. These were towed or driven into position. They would be “surveyed in” so that they knew exactly where they were on the ground and in relationship to each other. And, more importantly, where they were in relationship to us infantrymen. The artillerymen would unload some of their ammunition and sort it by type and then, sweating in the heat, drinking water from their canteens and Lister bags, wait. Near them were the mathematicians and geometers, the men who plotted on maps and computed from tables the angle and direction of fire and amounts of propellant needed to launch an explosive shell that would land at the right time and place.

Back near the main road was a small group of M-48 tanks. Almost never in all the years we were in Vietnam was there a time when the terrain, the roads, and the enemy location were right for the use of these monsters, these war chariots, but maybe this time. So the tankers tested their radios and their engines, their main guns and their machine guns, and waited.

Flying orbits overhead were FAC’s in their quiet little airplanes. They were looking down at the ground and talking to Air Force command posts and aircraft waiting on airstrips much further back. They were working together to make educated guesses about what kinds of weapons might be the most useful.

Whistling very high in the sky, and very far away, en route from an island in the Pacific Ocean was a flight of B-52 bombers scheduled to deliver an ARCLIGHT into the center of a rectangle drawn near the Crow’s Foot. That was to be the overture, so to speak, of the concerto. Cynics, that is to say the infantrymen in the process of getting off of helicopters or jumping down from the backs of trucks and some of the more jaded staff officers still back in Pleiku, would make the allegation that the Air Force must have been the low bidder on an Army contract to dig a bunch of swimming pools out in the middle of nowhere.

Also in the sky were command and control helicopters. These were filled with radios and the superior officers of the men on the ground. Their place in the sky gave them something of a God’s eye view of the operation. Best case, they had the ability to shift artillery fires and air strikes to exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Worst case, they had a deceptive illusion of control, of being in absolute charge of the men on the ground.

Even further back, near the base camps of the units involved and not very far from the Air Force units, were caches of ammunition, water, fuel, and food for the men in the field. Their orders gave them timetables of when they would move what supplies to which places. In the nearby tented hospitals ward space was cleared out, supplies of blood and bandages checked, procedures and routines checked.

On the ground, on the far right flank of all the thousands of men was one binh-si, one little man about 5’2” tall and weighing maybe 110 pounds. He was walking down a footpath that ran southeast along the edge of orderly rows of tea bushes. To his left and continuing along in a wide, kilometers-long arc were dozens of men just like him, the point men of their respective platoons and companies. He didn’t know about them, nor did he much care. He was focused on what was directly in front of him. His only concern was making it through the day, sorting out the light and the shadows, the natural from the unnatural, the friendly from the hostile.

Behind him was his squad. Behind his squad was his platoon. Behind his platoon was his company commander and with the commander were the only Americans on this flank of the operation — they were my sergeant and me. Each company had three platoons and they were advanced with two platoons forward and one back. That meant that leading the other forward platoon somewhere off to binh-si's left, probably out in the middle of the tea plantation, was another binh-si like him, just as scared, just as hopeful that there was nothing in front of him.

The battalion had three companies and it was advancing with two companies forward and one in reserve. Each company had a pair of Americans who walked near the Vietnamese company commander. At battalion level was another American team, this one with a larger group of four men.

The complexity was extraordinary. Every leader had at least one radio, most had two or three. The Americans could talk to each other. The Vietnamese could talk to each other. The Americans could talk to the Vietnamese. The commanders flying in their helicopters could talk to their units on the ground and the ones back at the base. The artillery and the mortar units could be reached and the Air Force could be called.

In the middle of the morning a grumbling sound came out of the east and the earth began to tremble. The ARCLIGHT had arrived. Thousands of pounds of steel and explosive were falling from aircraft so high they could not be seen. Somewhere to the east the bombs were crashing into the ground, flashing into life, and stirring the earth.

As I said, I was with the company on the far right flank with the binh-si out on point in front of me. The only other American with me was a staff sergeant with a couple of months in country. Our job was to help the captain, the đại-úy in command, bring in fire support and give him advice on how to use his company in battle. It struck me that it was as if we were on a hunt like those once staged for noblemen in Europe. The ARCLIGHT was like the beaters who swarmed through the woods and flushed game to run in panic towards the hunters. The only problem was that in this case the game was armed. Also, there was a good chance, a very good chance, that the ARCLIGHT had hit nothing at all. In any case, any NVA or VC unit in that general direction knew for sure that something was coming. They would be ready.

What was most memorable about the day was the heat, the steam room oppressiveness of the air. The straps of my rucksack began to chafe almost as soon as I put it on. Itching flared in my crotch within minutes. I wrapped an olive drab bandanna around my neck to soak up some of the sweat and before the day was done I would ring it out a dozen times.

Soon we were past the tea plantation and moving into the hills. We walked through a mixed kind of cover. In some places the grass reached up past our knees and the few trees that stood had black burn marks on their trunks. That meant that at some point the Montagnards had cleared the area with fire and had perhaps grown manioc and other food. Now the grass was back and soon the jungle would return.

We went under the canopy and the air was even more still. When we waded through a stream that hadn’t been on our maps I rinsed out the bandanna and tied it back around my neck. For a moment it felt so cool that a shiver ran down my spine. We broke out of the jungle at the base of a hill that was oddly clear of trees and brush. The point man, the binh-si, was well ahead of us, about halfway up the hill, his squad spread out behind him. The point man stopped, seeing something not quite right in front of him. Then he fell. He was so far away that it seemed to take minutes for the sound of the rifle shot to reach the command group. And then that was mixed with the small clatter of noise coming down the hill and up the hill.

The ruff-puffs went to ground. That was the wrong thing to do, but ill-trained soldiers will not do what seems so insanely counter-intuitive as run up a hill into fire. Nothing I could do, nothing my sergeant could do, would get them up and moving forward. After a few moments cajoling the đại-úy, I got on my radio and began bringing in artillery on the hillside.

I ended up behind a tree trunk checking coordinates on my map and watching the gray puffs of the incoming artillery march up the hill. As always I was struck by how benign it looked from a distance. Even the sound was a soft crump, crump, crump. But I knew it was only because I wasn’t near.

“You must go now,” I told the đại-úy after the last rounds had landed. Suddenly, for no reason I could see or understand, the ruff-puffs shook themselves into a decent unit. Small groups rushed forward, covered by their mates and machine guns. Bit by bit they worked their way up the hill.

I scrambled up the hill with my sergeant trying to listen to my radio, keep my rifle ready, and watch everything all the way up. We rushed from one small fold in the ground to another, keeping watch over each other, but there was nothing coming our way. I saw a still Vietnamese in an odd green uniform sprawled in the bottom of a shallow hole, but that was all I saw of the enemy.

We reached the top of the hill and flopped on the ground. Below us was an abandoned Montagnard village. Of the buildings only the structural posts of the long houses remained. Grass was already growing into the edges of the fire pits. On the far side of the village I could see the first of the streams of the Crow’s Foot running between steep banks. Except for the dead soldier I’d passed on the way up, there was no sign of an enemy. The soldiers were scattered about and seemed confused and disorganized.

“We’ve got to get this sorted out,” I told my sergeant. “You take the platoon over there. I’ll try to get the đại-úy on track.”

I spoke with the đại-úy and listened to him shout his orders to his lieutenants. In ten minutes or so the men were set into a perimeter and linked up with the company on our left. A medevac came in for the point man’s body and took the sniper’s body with it. I put together a report and called it in. From my team leader I got a summary of the rest of the action so far. Across the front it was much like their encounter — a few snipers, but no real concentration of force.

We stayed in a hasty defense long enough to open a couple of cans of C-rations, but what I wanted more than anything else was water. I drained one canteen and started on a second. From the radio chatter I could tell that some of the artillery was displacing so that they would stay in range. I heard, then saw, one of the FAC birds fly over. The troops began to move out, cautiously wading through the stream and up the mottled hillside beyond. They generally followed the edges of the fields that had once been cleared, not quite in the open, but not in the jungle either. Drops of sweat ran off my forehead and into my eyes, blurring my vision and stinging. When I crossed the stream I stopped for a minute, filled my canteen, dropped in a couple of iodine tablets, and shook it a few times before putting it back in its carrier.

By mid-afternoon we were on the top of the second of the ridges that defined the Crow’s Foot and looking down into a part of the box that had been struck by the ARCLIGHT. In the last hundred meters the smell of the wood smoke told us we were near. From the ridge it was a landscape of potholes and shattered trees marked by wisps of black and gray smoke. I was pleased that, according to the plan, it would not be my company sweeping through. Instead, we would turn to the south and establish a position at the place where the map showed the three streams meeting.

As I moved I could sense the units in the operation condensing together. They were gathering as they approached their objectives. My company followed the middle stream bed. The reserve company was swinging out to my right and the other company was coming up on my left. As the afternoon waned we found our objective, an odd little hillock overlooking the confluence of the streams. The company spread out on the forward slope and began to dig in. The chatter among the soldiers began to increase in volume. I went off to find the company on my right and found them close to where they were supposed to be. Talking with their American advisors we adjusted the two foxholes that were on their respective flanks and gave quick lessons on emplacing Claymore mines to the squad leaders.

As far as I could tell, if there had ever been anyone there, they were gone. If that sniper we’d encountered in the early morning had been part of a larger unit, that larger unit had long since abandoned him.

I took my helmet off and wiped the soaked sweatband with my bandanna. “What do you think?” I asked my sergeant when he came up.

“Not bad.” He pointed to a location down the slope to his right. “That’s about the only place they can get close. If we get an outpost out there we’ll have some warning.”

It wasn’t going to get any better. This was going to be our place for the night. There was plenty of daylight for the company to work on their holes, clear their fields of fire, plot mortar and artillery fires, plant more Claymores, and plan their night patrols. Nearly smokeless cooking fires were lit and the smell of rice boiling drifted over the positions. I and my sergeant ate cold C-rations and settled in for the night. We then endured the black hours of mosquitoes humming. We scratched the salt residue on our skin. Our hearts raced at sudden clanks and clicks out beyond the perimeter. We heard soft pops and saw brilliant white lights in the distance. At odd moments we heard the sound of water moving through the stream below us.

More cooking fires were lit as soon as the morning light filtered down through the mist. Two cigarettes, a malaria pill, and a cup of coffee made from water boiled over a chunk of C-4 explosive opened the day. Then I got a call telling me the units were staying in place, at least for a while. I was told to report to the battalion command post for a meeting. The message ended with a cryptic line: “Bring soap.”

I gave đại-úy a little pep talk about staying alert and went with my sergeant back down the path we’d walked the day before.

We found the CP on the back side of the ridge. The Battalion Advisor, a Major from our province team, looked as scruffy as all the rest of us. He waited for the rest of the teams to show up.

“We’ve got too many advisors out here,” he said, “but I was overruled on that at the beginning. We need to give them a chance to run their own units for a while. They’ve changed the plan anyhow. The ruffs-puffs are going to stay in place for the rest of the morning and then we’re all pulling out.”

He drew some arrows on his map and showed us. “The rest of the task force is going to continue to swing around to the south and will simply sweep past where we are at about the same time that we pull out.”

He looked at his sergeant with a grin. “In the meantime, the we’ve got something to show you guys.”

He led us up into the valley and then along the side of the stream. A squad of Vietnamese was off to our flank as security. The path took a sharp turn and then the jungle opened out and revealed a glade, a glen, a copse, or whatever word rightly describes something out of a Tarzan movie. A gentle, graceful waterfall spilled from a ledge about 15 feet high into a still pool beneath the jungle’s trees and vines. The banks of the pool were lined with feathery ferns, pale green moss, and small blossoming plants. The Vietnamese soldiers kept on going up the path until they were above the waterfall. I saw them settle on rocks and light cigarettes, American cigarettes, and turn to watch the jungle upstream.

I crouched beside the pool and drew water into my hands. It felt cool and it was very clear, if tea-colored.

“Take turns,” the Major said. He indicated his sergeant. “We’ll take the first watch.”

With a few mumbled, appreciative obscenities the rest of us dropped our gear, stripped to our skins, grabbed our soap, and waded out into the pool.

My first step was tentative and I realized that for a very long time, since the morning of the day before, my senses had been cranked up to an extra level of alertness. They had been tuned for specific kinds of sights and smells and sounds, tuned to wrongness. I’d walked through an Edenesque countryside, but all that I saw, all that I looked for, was something out of place, something not quite right. I had not listened for the gurgle of water or the call of a songbird. I had listened for the sound of metal on metal or the crack of a branch. The smells that mattered were raw tobacco, sweat, and human shit, not the perfume of flowers or the dampness of watered earth.

Now I watched the sunlight dance on the splashing water, felt the coolness sluice over my bare skin, smelled the pungent soap I lathered on. I got my turn to stand in the waterfall to rinse off and I just stood there, eyes closed, feeling the water drum on the top of my head, hearing the childish laughter of my fellow soldiers. When I stepped out from under the waterfall and opened my eyes the first thing I saw was a huge iridescent dragonfly hovering and flitting and then dashing away.

Later in the morning, back with my ruff-puffs, feeling clean and refreshed, I walked the perimeter with my sergeant. It was a sound defense. They owned this small piece of ground. I used my rudimentary Vietnamese to congratulate the đại-úy and his soldiers because they had done a good thing. They had done what infantrymen do. They had staked this claim and would defend it, or, as it turned out, simply move on to another place. Did it make any difference in the long run? Probably not. Nevertheless, at that moment, at that time and place, things were exactly as they should be.

Blood: From the Sky

The Night Café, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

35

...the officers were playing billiards in the mud-walled club-house when orders came to them that they were to go on parade at once for a night-drill.

Rudyard Kipling, The Lost Legion 

Who are these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?

Woody Guthrie, Deportees

1972

The road from Mỹ Xuyên to Lịch Hội Thượng on the South China Sea paralleled a wide canal that eventually emptied into a slackwater inlet that barely deserved to be called a bay. The hamlet there was a shallow-water seaport with a few fishing sampans tied up at ramshackle docks. Not many Americans ever visited this hamlet even though there was a lovely Catholic church set in a bamboo grove nearby with a Vietnamese priest who spoke very good French and kept a large garden enclosed by the bamboo and banana trees.

At the intersection of the canal road and the road that led to the church was a little shop. It could perhaps be called a tea shop, or a cigarette shop, or maybe just the corner store. The building was a shabby mixture of tin, woven bamboo, and thatch. The roof projected enough forward to provide a small rectangle of shade and shelter from the rain over the beaten earth in the front. Under the shelter an old woman sautéed plantains for passersby and for folks such as myself and my little team. I was making my rounds in that peculiar window of time in Vietnam where the war, for Americans, was at an end and the Delta was relatively peaceful. We stood in the shade and watched the bananas sizzle in the black pan. My interpreter and I chatted with the Deputy District Chief, a civilian, in a bizarre mixture of French, English, Cambodian, and Vietnamese. We spoke of Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism, and other Existentialists.

This sort of thing happened in the Delta because it was not really a good place for war. This man, the Deputy District Chief, was of mixed blood, Cambodian and Chinese. He was a French-trained bureaucrat who could remember the Japanese occupation of the area during World War Two. He fondly recalled his one visit to Paris and his teacher of calligraphy in Chợ Lớn. We sat at a rickety table and drank tea and ate fried plantains.

My interpreter, Kiêm, was also a man out of time and place. He was Vietnamese by ethnicity but he and all his kin had lived for generations in Phnom Penh until they were driven out in the early 70’s. They fled downriver to end up in Ba Xuyen Province. (He would, much later, after re-education, flee again and traverse Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand before finally coming to live in Arlington, Virginia.)

We spoke of Albert Camus and the final irony of his death, as a passenger, on a highway in France. 

The Deputy District Chief led us into the gloom of the store/cafe/tea shop and from there into a back room where he swept his arm out like a headwaiter showing us to the finest table in the house. He grinned and the gold in his teeth flashed in the dim light. There stood a billiard table.

For a moment two images competed in my mind. The first was of a faintly-remembered painting of a green billiard table in a pool of Van Gogh’s inimitable yellow light. The second was in black and white, a recollection of a movie and of a man sweeping the cover off a billiard table to Paul Newman’s astonishment.

But here in Vietnam? In the Delta? In Lịch Hội Thượng? A billiard table? A Catholic church down the road? A Khmer Buddhist temple visible in the distance? 

The cues were warped and only thin shreds of leather remained on the tips. The heavy, ivory-appearing balls had chips gouged out of their surfaces. I rolled a creamy yellow ball across the table. It lurched over the seams where pieces of the slate bed had become misaligned. The ball eventually fell against the dead rubber and torn felt of the rails. I looked at the Deputy District Chief and we both slowly shook our heads in respect to an irretrievable past.

I went back to my jeep. We all shook hands and bowed to each other. The hiss of the radio hung from the back of the seat intruded as my driver fiddled with the squelch. We drove away leaving the French-trained, Cambodian-Chinese, official of a Vietnamese equivalent of an American county standing in front of the billiard parlor. I checked my weapons, chambering rounds into my M-16 and into my .45. I used the radio to tell the Province Headquarters where I was and when I expected to return. We drove along the canal, the flat, felt-like Delta on both sides of us.

We crossed the ferry at Mỹ Xuyên and went on towards Sóc Trăng. I dropped my interpreter off at the entrance to the refugee village where he lived with his father, wife, and daughter in a hut made of woven bamboo. The road led past the airport on its way into the city and as we came near we saw a black cloud beginning to boil up out of the rice paddies between us and the airport.

Death came to the Delta that afternoon when a C-130 transport plane fell out of the sky in sunlight so bright that, after the plane exploded, the flames could barely be seen. The plane gouged a wide furrow in the paddy and spilled out its fuel. The black pillar of smoke arose softly and quietly. My driver and I saw the cloud and at almost the same time the radio began to chatter. Jeeps and trucks were coming out of the city. My jeep was coming into the city. We gathered on the side of the road.

Soon we were struggling thigh deep in the rice paddy mud. Americans from the Province Team and Vietnamese soldiers from the airport converged and got as close to the heat as we could. But then we had to wait, holding our hands in front of our faces, circling around the pyre, dodging the pools of flame that spread across the top of the water with the leaking fuel.

Eventually the flames slackened and we could approach. We heard the clicking cooling of the aluminum. The stench reached into us. On that day death was in my hands and death became simply work. It became the gathering of charred remnants of human beings into heavy rubber bags and zipping the bags up.

One pair I will remember forever, because they were a pair. The inferno fused their bodies together. I and my team mates could not bring ourselves to tear them apart. We placed both of them into one bag and made an annotation on the tag attached. 

Every one of us working in that mess of mud and blackened aluminum and broken rice stalks found his own way through the afternoon. Some were angry. They tore pieces off the plane with their hands and wrestled bodies out to have them flop and almost disappear under the water into the mud before someone else would grip a hand or toe or shoulder. Others wore gloves, the thick leather kind used for stringing barbed wire, as if that layer of leather would keep death and pollution away. Some were excruciatingly gentle, so gentle that they would stay inside the fuselage for ten or twenty minutes just to loosen a melted seat belt and gently, so gently, try to separate a form from the charred frame of a seat. One of us thought to relieve his own anxiety through a blackly humorous comment and was angrily rebuked, although several days later, over a bottle of sour mash whiskey, the same comment brought unrelenting, tear-evoking laughter. We worked in pairs or threes, sharing the burden, solving the small puzzles of where one body stopped and another started, lifting the corpses together, taking turns on the really difficult tasks.

Hours and hours it seemed that we bagged blackened bodies and dragged them to the edge of the paddy. Chopper after chopper lifted off. Truck after truck drove away. Someone arrived with a manifest and the body count didn’t match the list. Cables from armored personnel carriers were attached to odd pieces of the aircraft that stuck out from the wreckage and the plane was ripped apart. We spent the twilight looking for the last body, but we never found it.

We returned to our compound and drank a lot that night. We all showered again and again until the hot water was gone and then we took more showers. We put our uniforms into plastic bags and threw the bags away. But we couldn’t escape the smell.

Those were not infantrymen’s deaths. Falling out of the sky? How could that be a way for a soldier to die? Helpless, belted into a machine. It could not be right. We, we infantrymen, like to think we have a choice. Is this just the arrogance of youth, that we will choose the time and manner of our dying? Or is it any soldier’s necessary illusion?

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.

Blood: Killer

It Was Dark and Wet, Tom Dunn, Bougainville, 1942

28

Varieties of religious experience; good news and bad news; a lot of men found their compassion in the war, some found it and couldn’t live with it, war-washed shutdown of feeling, like who gives a fuck. People retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair, some saw the action and declared for it, only heavy killing could make them feel so alive. And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years. Every time there was combat you had a license to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

1969

The most dangerous man I ever encountered was an Australian. We never would have met, probably, except that we were fellow passengers on a flight through several province capitals, beginning at Nha Trang, dropping south to Phan Rang, then to Dalat, Ban Me Thuot and finally to Pleiku. It was an overly circuitous route for me since it was an easy direct hop from Nha Trang to Pleiku. I would not have taken it if it had been my choice, but I had been tagged with a courier task while at IFFORCEV headquarters. I carried thick sealed envelopes in a canvas bag at my feet on the deck of the Air America C-47 and got a receipt in exchange for an envelope at each stop we made.

Dangerous was the first adjective that came to mind when the Australian took the seat next to me in the nylon webbing that lined the side of the fuselage. The man dropped a well-worn kit bag on the deck and leaned a Belgian FN rifle against the bag. His floppy hat was down over his forehead shading watery blue eyes. He was a thin man. His tiger-striped jungle fatigues draped down from the points of his shoulders. He was also a still man. He glanced at me as he dropped his kit, mumbled a “g-day”, and settled into his seat seeming to notice everything and nothing.

He was quiet on the first leg, until we flew over the tracings of irrigation canals and squared dikes that marked the remnants of the Champa kingdom. “Know anything about those chaps?” he asked as we were both looking down at the ground.

“Only what I’ve read. Remnants of the old Champa kingdom who were defeated by the Vietnamese when they pushed down from the north a couple of centuries ago.”

“Smart buggers,” he allowed, “but no match for the Vietnamese. Something like you chaps, I reckon.” He said the last with what he probably thought was a friendly smile, a thin quivering of the corners of this mouth.

“Those chaps (he meant the North Vietnamese), aren’t any more comfortable in the jungle than you are. Ya got to make them fear the jungle, fear the night.”

He meant doing what he had been taught to do and had done as a young soldier in Malaya. The same skills he was now teaching to the Special Forces and their Montagnard allies in the highlands. 

On the leg from Phan Rang to Dalat, I, who’d read my Mao, Che, Ho, Giap, Sir Robert Thompson, and Magsaysay, pointed out that the Emergency had been different. They had had the advantage of exploiting ethnic differences. In Malaya it was much easier to separate the “fish” from the “sea.” The insurgency could be confined to a mainly Chinese sub-group. The Malay Peninsula was easier to isolate from sources of arms shipments. Vietnam, on the other hand, was inevitably part of the larger Cold War where Chinese and Soviet factors were much more important.

The Australian would have none of that, or so it seemed — in those still blue eyes it was hard to read anything like anger. He had no sense of politics, only war, his kind of war. He rapped the wooden stock of his rifle and then gave a contemptuous look at the plastic of my M-16.

“That’s not a real rifle,” he said. “Ya can’t trust it. Wouldn’t have one. My chaps,” meaning his Montagnards, “have some of your old M-14s and it’s a better rifle.”

He was quiet for a long time as the plane droned over the textured mountains. “Ghurkas, that’s what you need here.” 

Ghurkas had been his mentors in Malaya, and they seemed to be the only soldiers he really respected. They hadn’t understood the jungle either, not when they first came down out of their mountains. But they understood soldiering and stealth and terrorizing their enemies. Put Ghurkas on patrol in a region and pretty damn quick you didn’t have any living opponents.

It was the cold stillness that marked the man, not the words. There was no real emotion in his voice. Nor was there any connection between him and the people he talked about. He was telling  stories he’d told before. He didn’t expect anyone to care or even understand. He was isolated and self-contained. A pure assassin. It was easy to imagine him on the edge of some jungle trail west of Ban Me Thuot, his hat down over his eyes, his rifle in his arms, just waiting for a target. He was a hunter, a killer. He was no longer part of an army.

That man had long since separated himself from any purpose larger than his own narrow satisfaction in killing, if it can even be said that he was moved by anything like an emotion. Even on the airplane in his washed-out tiger-striped fatigues he seemed to fade into the background. On the ground he would drift like morning fog through the elephant grass and bamboo groves, like smoke from a Montagnard cooking fire, like one of those spirits they propitiate with bowls of rice wine set into bamboo tripods erected on the edge of their villages.

That kind of man was not created by a training program. He was born to it. What shaping had occurred was done by forces outside the drills and rituals of ordinary soldiering. He did not seem to be a man who could be comfortable in a city. He did not even seem to be a man who could be comfortable in a foxhole with other soldiers. He was a ghost, a ghost that one could only hope was on our side, because people like him did not seem to be bound by ordinary rules.

I shivered as the aircraft flew high over the plateau. The distance between me and the man beside me was uncrossable, and neither had an interest in crossing it. I would like to have his respect, his acknowledgement that we were fellow soldiers, but I knew that was impossible. And when I thought about it later I knew that I would never want to walk the path that had made that man whatever he was.

The Australian left the plane at Ban Me Thuot. A battered jeep driven by a Montagnard in loose fitting jungle fatigues and a bush hat was waiting.

Blood: Point

Sketch of a Soldier, Theodore E. Drendel, 1967

25

   But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard, it took me a year to understand it:
   “Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.”
   I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story; when I asked him what had happened he just looked like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he’d waste time telling stories to anyone dumb as I was.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

1968

Point was a fearsome place to be. Even with all the estimates, the planning, the aerial reconnaissance, the careful crafting of orders and map overlays, it all eventually came down to a young man, by himself, out in front of everybody else.

Kilometers to the rear, in a well-lit command post with the smells of coffee and cigarettes, the hiss of radios and the chugging of a generator, the point was only the tip of an arrowhead drawn in grease pencil on clear plastic on top of a map. To see the point man required the imagination to look down through the markings, the plastic, the contour lines, down to the real point, the young man who walked so softly, carefully through the shifting light.

On some terrain he touches gently with his heel and rolls his foot forward, increasing the weight slowly, listening to himself. On other ground he uses a slight shuffle, weight balanced. Always he is trying to become as weightless and without substance as a shadow. He wants to blend and be part of his place, but he must move within and in spite of the danger and fear.

Infantry careers are not made of being point men. Point was simply the shared experience of the survivors and the competent. A soldier might take some pride in being good enough to be chosen to be point. And they all — once there — if they were not yet insane — wondered ruefully if they were not too good for their own health.

Competence, or at least confidence, got a man put on point. If he were good and his luck held out — he needed both — he would someday become the man who put someone else on point. He might become the man who gave out the order of march and said, “Jones on point.” Jones then would groan with mock fear, pride, and bravado, and feel real fear. Jones would check his compass and take the lead. He was on point.

From there, as always, it depended on the mission, the enemy, and the terrain. Consider a Russian Spetznatz point man traversing a rugged, treeless, arid valley on the edge of the Hindu Kush, or, fifteen years later, a U.S. Special Forces soldier in the same place. The landscape was far and khaki. It was not for agoraphobics. Their eyes were on the long view, the glint of sunlight off binoculars, the sudden shifting of a falcon’s flight over a ridge line, the unnatural shape on the edge of a distant rock.

In Vietnam in the highlands it was close and green and full of sounds. It was not for the claustrophobic. A tendril of vine was like a trip-wire and, after constant touching and tripping, natural reflexes were damped by the never-ending apprehension. The one sure constant was the fear of the sound of metal on metal. Nowhere in the world of an infantryman is that a safe sound. The point man’s own metal objects were wrapped and muffled to keep him safe. As were those of his squad mates.

The point man is extruded from the collective like one of those creatures under a microscope in biology lab. He is encapsulated within his own self and is linked back to his brothers by the barest filament, the thinnest of strands. He is isolated. His job is to lead them all from here to there. His job is to be on point, to be the first man, the lone man, the tip of the bayonet.

He probably won’t trip an ambush, or step on a mine, or trip and stumble and give them all away. He might have known, in his rational mind, that probabilities don’t change, that the odds of throwing a seven on the next roll of the dice are exactly the same odds they were on the last roll of the dice. But he doesn’t believe it. He believes that every time he rolls the dice the odds a seven will come up increases. He believes that if his point was five, on a good day he can roll a three and a two the very next roll, every time. He knows that you can fill an inside straight with the last card in the deck. He believes this. He also knows that snake eyes can come up again and again and again. He believes that if he is lucky, he will live and that if he is unlucky, he will die.

Point men are rotated fairly often.

Blood: Into the Rocket Belt

Spooky aka Puff (AC47) working out of Pleiku, Vietnam in 1969

23

Interestingly, from the start of the war, incessant talking and shouting characterized most German small-unit offensive actions. Erroneously interpreted by Allied soldiers as a sign of poor discipline, it was later ascertained that such chatter was, in fact, a most effective means of dispelling individual loneliness and heightening group cohesion. 

John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry

1968

On my first tour in Vietnam I lived in reasonable comfort as part of an advisory team in the city of Pleiku. Along with our other jobs, a duty roster assigned two-man teams as advisors to the local militia units, known as Regional Force/Popular Forces, shortened to the acronym RF/PF, and then, inevitably, turned into slang — “Ruff-Puffs.” The Ruff-Puffs were not regular army in either training or equipment and were used only locally, such as operations into the “rocket belt.” The rocket belt was a rough perimeter around the city from which, if they could get inside it, the VC or NVA could launch 122 mm rockets. An operation into the rocket belt was intended to prevent them from firing them from firing rockets into the city or the nearby bases.

For my first real combat operation I found myself packing gear into a rucksack and shaking hands with a staff sergeant about my own age but with a very different look on his face, SSG Jarvis. Not much later we got out of a jeep on the edge of Pleiku and joined up with a small crowd of ill-uniformed Vietnamese. This was a Ruff-Puff company and we were going on an overnight operation into the rocket belt. Almost before I’d made sure of our location on my map we were moving, strung out in a line and walking through an odd landscape of tall, thin trees and open spaces interrupted by clumps of bamboo. It was late in the day and the idea was to move to a location, set up a hasty defense, and run a few patrols.

I was not there as a leader. My job was to coordinate American fire support. So the really important tasks were to make sure that the radio was working, that I knew all the frequencies for units in the area, that I understood how to use the codes, and, most important of all, that I knew where the hell we were on the ground. It helped enormously that I knew exactly where I was when we started on our stroll. All I had to do was keep track of our path, be sure I knew where we were when we set up our final position, and where the patrols were planned for that night. Deciding where the patrols were going was not my job. That was the job of a Vietnamese captain, the dai-uy who commanded the Ruff-Puff company.

The operation was not what I expected, what I trained for, what my life as an infantryman at Ft. Benning, in Germany, and at Ft. Bragg had been. Instead of a practiced formation, the Ruff-Puffs moved in a straggling line, all chattering and joking. They looked like children with their oversize, antique American weapons — M-1s, Browning Automatic Rifles, and Thompson sub-machine guns. They were little spindly moving mushrooms in outsized American helmets. They smoked cigarettes as they walked along and the cooking pots tied to their packs clanked to the rhythm of their steps. I glanced at my sergeant who had not done anything more than introduce himself. He just shrugged, lit his own Marlboro and swung his CAR-15 into a more comfortable position. I followed and ran a radio check every fifteen minutes or so.

As we approached our final position the noise of the Ruff-Puff’s movement was increasing. By this time several live chickens had been acquired while passing through a hamlet along the way and were tied by their feet to the packs of the soldiers. I was surrounded by little people I did not understand. Their voices sang up and down and seemed incongruously cheerful. From time to time the dai-uy would talk into his radio, then shout something to his troops. The strung out line of soldiers would then shift its direction.

Eventually, about an hour before sunset, we stopped and the soldiers drifted into a loose circle around us. I noticed SSG Jarvis talking to our interpreter and handing him one of his C-ration cans. The sergeant came back and said, “Let’s dig in, sir. The Vietnamese’d do it for us, but maybe it will do some good to set an example for that dai-uy with the long fingernails over there.”

We opened our entrenching tools and dug a shallow fighting position, only about two feet deep. The soil beneath the leaves was full of fine roots that were easily sliced by the shovel. Not easy digging, but not too bad. The spoil was a deep brick red that we covered with leaves.

Just before dark the interpreter came back carrying a pot of rice with a few small fish on the top.

“Get your canteen cup out, Captain,” Jarvis said.

I did and he filled it with rice and added a couple of the fish.

“ARVN C-rats,” he said. “Sardines. Think they get it from the Koreans. They’re pretty good. Want some nuoc mam?” He offered a bottle of pungent fish sauce. ARVN would be the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the regular soldiers of the South Vietnamese army.

“Sure,” I said.

I poured some over the fish and rice and crinkled my nose at the smell. Jarvis pulled chopsticks out of a pocket of his shirt and began to eat. I used a plastic spoon from my C-ration box. We ate sitting on our helmets. All around us small fires were going and groups of Vietnamese were squatting around them waiting for rice to be ready. The next morning I would accidentally kick a small mound of feathers and watch them drift across the trail as we headed back to our pick-up point.

The interpreter sat near us, eating his share of the rice and sardines. Jarvis and he talked in an odd mixture of pidgin English and Vietnamese. Jarvis took a second canteen cup of rice from the pot and offered more to me, but I didn’t want any. I got a can of fruit from my pack and ate that. Then a can of crackers and a can of peanut butter. The sergeant wiped his chopsticks off on his pants leg and put them back into his pocket. Then he cleaned his cup with a mix of water and dirt. He picked up his entrenching tool and his rifle.

“C’mon, sir. Let’s go take a shit before these guys get settled in.”

I followed him to a place close to the perimeter where we dug a small hole.

“You first, sir. I’ll stand watch.”

I did my business and then picked up my rifle and looked out into the brush for God knows what while the sergeant did his. I crushed my C-ration cans by stomping on them and tossed them into the hole before I covered it back up.

“Gotta be regular in the field,” Jarvis told me. “Take a piss whenever you can. An’ don’t never put nothin’ off if you don’t have to.”

Back at our foxhole we went over the fire plan. I wanted to be sure Jarvis approved, although all I got was a few grunts and nods. We agreed on a watch plan, two hour shifts, but both of us awake between 2300 and 0100, the usual time for rocket attacks. In the swift darkness fires still flared and the bobbing ends of cigarettes could be seen. Wood smoke and the smell of boiled chicken drifted past us. Then there was the clatter of a group getting ready for a short patrol. Eventually only the hiss of the radio was in the night.

SSG Jarvis rolled himself into his poncho and poncho liner and went to sleep sitting up, his hands on his rifle. He came instantly awake when I touched his arm to wake him for his shift.

For me it was as if an alarm clock had gone off when my eyes snapped open at exactly 2300. I glanced at my watch glowing in the moonlight to confirm. I smelled tobacco smoke in the faint breeze. I shifted in the hole and sensed the sergeant beside me.

“Wish I could smoke,” I said.

“Aw, go ahead, sir. Just light up under your poncho and keep it cupped down below the edge of the hole. And duck down when you take a drag. There’s little guys all around us. They’ll get shot first anyhow.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, but I really did want a cigarette. So I got under my poncho, feeling like a child hiding under his blanket reading a comic book by flashlight. I held the Zippo with both hands as I opened it so that it would not be able to click, and I closed one eye before I spun the wheel so that I would not lose night vision in that eye. I came out from under the poncho with my lungs full of smoke and night blind in the other eye.

“Just about rocket time,” the sergeant said.

He was right. A moment later a light streaked across the sky, like a shooting star on a warm summer night, like a fire arrow in an old western. Then another and another and another. I damn near shouted as a cold flare of fear went through me.

I felt an intense isolation, as if I were the only man in the world. The calm voice of Jarvis talking into the radio steadied me.

“I can’t even give you a decent guess about the distance, but I put the launch point on an azimuth of 330° from my position...roger...out.” He snapped his compass closed. He looked at me. “They’ve got another bearing from another bunch of Ruff-Puffs. So they can triangulate. We’ll hear some outgoing 175 in a few minutes. Hope to hell we’re not on their GT line.”

The GT line was the gun-target line, the thin path on the earth between an artillery piece and its target. 175 mm’s were famous for their short (and long) rounds. Something to do with the length of the barrel, the flexing of the steel as it warmed up from being fired, and, sometimes, sheer negligence because the crews were Americans and the troops under the GT line were not — except for me and SSG Jarvis.

Soon we heard the whiffling sound of outgoing artillery. We could not observe the impact of the rounds. Jarvis was back on the radio. “No...not observed...roger...out.”

He turned to the me. “They’re putting a Spooky up.”

Spooky was an old airplane, a C-47, with a modern weapon,  7.62 mm “mini-guns” mounted in the door.

The Vietnamese dai-uy slid into our hole and was almost gutted by the nasty-looking, serrated Randall that appeared in Jarvis’ hand. The dai-uy had his map with him and a flashlight with a red lens on it. We two captains studied the positions to confirm where they could and could not fire. Vietnamese and American artillery was firing. Spooky was coming in. We needed to be sure. I called in the information to the American side of the Province command post. The dai-uy did the same to the Vietnamese side. Everyone was talking to everyone else. I knew the voices on the radio. I felt less alone. And yet in the darkness all around me, in the moving, helmeted shadows, who was my friend?

The radio crackled. Jarvis gestured toward the sky. “Spooky’s coming on station,” he said. We looked up and saw the lights of the airplane begin to circle, roughly over the area where the rockets had been launched from.

A mini-gun was a six-barreled contraption that seemed to defy the ordinary laws of mechanics and physics. It looked, at first, very much like the old, hand cranked Gatling gun. It had an electric motor that drove the six barrels in a whirring circle. In the space of a minute, a complexly-curved mechanism fed thousands of 7.62 mm cartridges into the barrels and a cascading shower of bullets spewed out. Even with a standard mixture of one tracer to five plain rounds, what was seen from the ground was a great shining stream of fire falling from the night, like God was taking a piss. The weapon fired so fast that the sounds of the rounds firing canceled each other out and what was heard was a deep buzzing sound, like a muffled chain saw or the ripping of a giant zipper. “Rrrrrrrrruuup! Rrrrrrrrruuup!”

And then the dai-uy was screaming for it to stop, to cease fire, to turn off the mini-gun in Spooky. He was screaming that the rustling swarm of bullets falling from the sky was landing on his outposts.

I called it in, but it was five long minutes before the aircraft turned slowly away, far too late for the poor souls in the outpost.

What was strange to me the next morning, as we walked out with two limp bodies strung beneath bamboo poles, as if they were game bagged on a Central Highlands safari, what was strange was how little anyone seemed to care.

Jarvis, who’d waited till dawn to light his cigarette, shrugged it off. He seemed mildly surprised that I would even bring it up. It was as if he expected the Air Force would fuck it up — especially if there weren’t any real Americans on the ground. “We ain’t Americans no more. Not when we’re out with the little guys.”

Jarvis’ breakfast had been more rice and nuoc mam. I was beginning to understand that he, with his worn rucksack and array of carefully fastened accessories — knife, grenades, strobe light, and all the rest — was within himself, had gone somewhere beyond the ordinary comradeship of the infantry. Two or three back-to-back tours will do that.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow him.

Blood: The Eternal

Killed in Action, Burrell Moody, 1967

22

And ye shall hear of wars
and rumors of wars.

Matthew 24:6

1967

Soldiers don’t think about eternity. The eternal is mentioned from time to time, such as in the memorial services they attend or at funerals when they provide the escort and firing squad. But they don’t feel that the preacher is talking to them.

Soldiers live within the moment. The future is a list of things they have to do, steps they need to take, tasks that need to be accomplished. But the actual goal is always a bit hazy and they know that when they’ve finished the list there will be more tasks. Even the strategists never look beyond victory; instead they develop lists of what has to be done to achieve victory. They determine what actions have to be taken against which aspect of the enemy force they are opposing: bomb here, march there. They make lists of what forces they need, supplies to accumulate, intelligence required, ammunition to be delivered. The future is simply the time at which all those things will have been done.

In this sense soldiers create their own future, but it makes bringing the eternal into the light, and what little comfort can be drawn from contemplating the eternal, somewhat awkward. They are inept in the face of death. They, we, never expect, really expect, the consequences of being in a killing profession.

I was in Germany, far away from Vietnam. I was the Staff Duty Officer, the SDO, for the 1st Battalion, 39th Infantry — Paddy’s Gang, Anything, Anytime, Anywhere, Bar None — which was headquartered in Worms, a city most famous for Liebfraumilch wine and as the place where Martin Luther first confronted his Catholic Church. Every battalion in Germany, Alaska, Italy, Japan, Korea, the United States — that is, the entire Army — had a man like me sitting in a room with a couple of radios and a telephone. With me were two other men, a duty NCO and a runner. As with most things military the task had both ritual and purpose. In the room were large 3-ring binders with instructions for almost any contingency. In a locked safe in the room was a set of code books with decoding instructions for the “big one,” since in those days even an infantry battalion had its own nuclear weapons and planned diligently for the day when the Russian hordes would come pouring through the Fulda Gap.

The duty officer’s usual tasks were mundane in the extreme. I walked through the kaserne (the barracks area) and spoke with the Charge of Quarters of each company. At 0030 hours I stopped by the NCO club to supervise closing out of the cash registers. Twice during the night I checked guard posts outside the kaserne. My runner drove the jeep and my job was to make sure the guards were awake and doing their jobs.

It was simply an accident of German geography and U.S. troop stationing policy that the call came to the 1st of the 39th’s duty room telephone at just after 0600. A Staff Sergeant named Atkins had a wife who was German and who was from Worms. She had come home to stay with her parents while her husband did his tour in Vietnam. The 1st of the 39th was the only combat unit garrisoned in Worms.

Six in the morning in Germany was midnight in DC and noon in Vietnam. When the phone rang the Duty NCO had just finished playing reveille over the battalion’s public address system. He logged the time of the call as he picked up the phone and chanted the greeting used by anyone in the battalion who answered an office telephone, “Headquarters, First Battalion, Thirty-ninth Infantry, Triple A-Bar None! Staff Duty NCO speaking, sir. This line is not secure.”

I was drinking a cup of coffee as I listened to the duty NCO answer the call. My eyes were clear if my mind a bit fuzzy. I had just visited the latrine down the hall where I had shaved, brushed my teeth, broken starch on a fresh set of fatigues, and laced up my spit-shined Corcoran boots. I was ready to be relieved of my duty and go home to my quarters and hug my wife and sleep out the rest of the morning.

The SDNCO was listening and making notes on the log sheet. Then he flipped open one of the 3-ring binders. I came fully awake.

An alert?

Every month or so we had a practice “go to war” drill. Officers from the 8th Division headquarters would show up and stand around with clipboards and stopwatches. They watched the battalion assemble, pack up our tracks and start our engines, issue weapons and ammunition — and waited for us to screw up.

I stood behind the sergeant and saw the page he turned to, Casualty Notification, and felt my heart sink. There were hundreds of “additional duties” specified for officers in a line unit. Some were handed out on a semi-rational basis based on an individual officer’s rank, or skill, or special competence. Others were assigned almost randomly, most often simply exchanged between officers leaving and officers arriving. Others were assigned on a “tag, you’re it!” or “hey, you!” principle. That is, if you happened to pick up the phone or be standing in the sight of the CO — if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time —then it was your job. I was standing there. I would be the Casualty Notification Officer.

I scanned down the page my sergeant was looking at and saw the list of tasks, questions, procedures. He was writing out the details on a message pad.

Step One: Verify.

Almost too easy. “She’s a friend of my wife, sir,” the duty NCO told me. “This address sounds right to me.”

Step Two: Call chaplain to accompany.

Which one? Probably Catholic. Didn’t really matter. Call the battalion chaplain, interrupt his breakfast, and let him decide.

Step Three: Wait for official message before delivering notification.

And so on through a list of procedures that ultimately referred to a regulation and another book of procedures that would guide the Survivor’s Assistance Officer.

None of which let me off the hook.

Light was filling the parade ground of the kaserne. A thin fog from the Rhine obscured the units that were falling in for morning formation. My relief would be here in a few minutes and I would no longer be the SDO. That burden would be lifted. I could go home, but only to change into my Class A uniform.

This I did and I then walked back through the German morning in the green woolen coat (blouse) and trousers wearing my polished low-quarter shoes. The sunlight glinted from the jump wings on my chest and the eagle on my hat.

Back at the battalion headquarters the battalion chaplain was waiting alongside our colonel’s sedan. I was given an envelope that had been couriered from Division headquarters that had the official message from the Secretary of the Army in it and the unofficial story I would be allowed to tell. We drove along cobblestone streets through the city.

“Have you done this before?” I asked the chaplain.

The chaplain nodded. “First time in Germany, though. I hope her English is OK.”

“Should we have brought an interpreter?”

“Too late now. But they were married for quite a while. I’m hoping we don’t have a problem. And I’ve called the local parish and let them know.”

The sedan stopped outside a neat, sturdy house near the edge of the city. We got out. I knocked and the dark wooden door swung inward. A young woman stood there. She had her blonde hair in a bun and was wiping her hands on a dishtowel. I saw her eyes go wide at the uniforms. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. She knew.

I am forever grateful to the chaplain. Quick as an infantryman he stepped toward the woman and took her into his arms before she collapsed. His rush took them into the small, perfectly kept living room. I followed, but I left the door open behind me. The chaplain helped the woman to a couch and sat beside her with an arm around her shoulders, murmuring to her. I stood there with the envelope in one hand and my hat with its shining eagle in the other. I listened to her take her breath in and in and in and in, as if she were sucking all the air in the world into her body.

I could not tell you how long I stood there before the small whimpering cry began. Her long mewling sigh like a bereft kitten brought her mother into the room. That woman, her square face lined like someone who worked outdoors, glanced at the green uniforms and looked out the door where she saw the official sedan at the curb. She looked then at her daughter and I would remember that look as being very hard, as if she wanted to say, “I told you so.” But her face then softened. She sat beside her daughter and pulled one of her hands into her lap and began to pat it and stroke it. The daughter turned from the Chaplain’s embrace and curled within her mother’s arms. They sat there, together, for what seemed like a very long time. The Chaplain was very still.

I knew I should read her the letter from the Secretary of the Army, but the moment would not come. I heard a sharp rap on the door behind me and turned to see a priest standing there, accusatory in his black suit and white collar. He acknowledged the crosses on the chaplain’s uniform with a sharp jerk upwards of his eyebrows. The chaplain got up and joined the priest at the door. They spoke in low voices, in English, for a few minutes. Then the chaplain gestured to me. I joined them outside the door, in the open air, in the sunlight.

“You will tell me, please, of the circumstances,” the priest said.

I told the story — a patrol, an ambush, an evacuation, a death — and gave the priest the envelope. I also told him the next few steps in the process: where the body was, where it would be, decisions that needed to be made by the new widow. The priest looked at the chaplain for confirmation. The chaplain nodded.

“Good. I will now take care of things. We will be having more information soon?”

“Yes.” My sentences took on the quick cadences of the German priest. “By this afternoon. An officer will be appointed to help Mrs. Atkins. My task was only to notify her.”

The priest nodded and abruptly turned and went into the house.

“We’re done,” the chaplain said.

On our way back the chaplain told me that the mother was a war widow, too. “It seems that we have brought another war here. I think that upset the priest more than the dying.”