My Detachment My Detachment

by Tracy Kidder

  So they were doing this not for personal gain but for communal motives. I didn’t know what regulations, if any, we were breaking, but if we were and I had to answer for it, I could say it was a project to improve morale. “Okay, one more time.” I spent a nervous night, chain-smoking behind the screen walls of my hootch, watching for MPs, who didn’t come, though for all I knew some might have been there as paying customers.

  The next day Pancho and a couple of others took the truck to the Chu Lai PX and returned with a new TV and a full-size refrigerator, and enough beer to fill it up. And a day or two after that, Pancho went off again, and didn’t return until long after dark. In the morning there was a pile of new lumber stacked in the drinking hootch, which turned into a bar and chairs. Everyone pitched in, sawing and hammering. Meanwhile, the sandbags on the roof above us, on all the roofs of our hootches, had rotted and were slowly leaking. So were the sandbags in our two bunkers, built to protect us from shelling. I’d asked Spikes to make up a roster for filling new sandbags, but the work hadn’t progressed very far. It stopped altogether for work on the lounge.

  The war seemed more than ever like an abstraction. I had to drive fairly often to the TOC, the tactical operations center, a building made of sandbags, half underground, to deliver information to the brigade’s S-2 and to the S-3, a lieutenant colonel whom I liked. Sometimes I’d find him sitting with his feet up on his desk, making predictions about shellings. According to his theory, a full moon meant a quiet night for LZ Bayonet, and a moonless sky meant we might get attacked, by sappers or mortars or rockets. “Look out for incoming,” he’d say, with a smile. So far, though, I’d heard only prodigious amounts of outgoing. Then one afternoon I heard him tell some other officers, “Tonight we will get hit. There’s no moon tonight, and yesterday was conversion day.”

  The day before, simultaneously throughout Vietnam, all American-backed military payment certificates had been replaced, without warning. You weren’t supposed to pay Vietnamese in military payment certificates, but most wouldn’t accept anything else. So the Vietnamese people who had financial dealings in and around the base camp, and the people with whom they in turn exchanged money, all had found themselves yesterday holding worthless bills. The S-3’s prediction made sense. Then again, his record hadn’t been very good so far.

  I didn’t pass on the warning to my men. I’d forgotten about it, but around midnight, I woke up under my mosquito net thinking I was home and there was a thunderstorm, and I should close the windows.

  “Lieutenant! We’re getting hit!” yelled a voice through my screen wall. “We are getting hit!”

  I hurried out, strapping on my .45 as I ran up the hill toward the nearest bunker, and scrambled beneath its sandbagged roof. There wasn’t room to stand. It had an earthy smell. Was everyone inside? Was everyone all right? In the low doorway, I saw a flash of light. A loud crack followed. You could hear sand trickling onto our guns and helmets, trickling down from the rotting sandbags. Then the base camp erupted, the soldiers who protected the perimeter, who protected us, returning fire at the dark. There were shouts. Machine guns rattled. Flares were popping. The light from the flares entered the doorway. I looked around. All my men were grinning. So was I.

  “That was a big fucker.”

  “Bet your ass.”

  “Lucked outta that one.”

  “No shit, GI.”

  “They like to ruined our whole evening.”

  After things quieted down, we came outside. We stood together. One of the men turned on his flashlight. Another started chuckling. “Lieutenant, look at yourself.”

  I had dressed my upper half for battle, with steel pot and flak jacket and .45, but in my haste had neglected the rest.

  “You can’t fight this war in your underpants, Lieutenant,” said one of the men.

  I laughed.

  “Heh heh.” That was Pancho, of course, laughing as he did when the world became interesting to him. “You’re shaky, Lieutenant. Heh heh. Lieutenant Colonel Shaky.”

  I knew to a certainty then that, as far as Pancho was concerned, I had been accepted.

  SECRET CODE WORD

  I STOOD WITH ONE OF THE NEWER GUYS, SCHULZIE, IN THE DUSTY, denuded field in front of operations, where we sometimes played basketball and touch football, and I pointed at the sky. Way up there, three jets, in formation like a trio of geese and minuscule at that distance, were flying right over us, heading inland. A few hours before, the S-3 had said that the brigade had access just now to the services of B-52 bombers. The planes would have flown here all the way from Okinawa, loaded with five-hundred-pound bombs. From what the S-3 had said, I thought they might be heading for locations I’d delivered to the colonel that morning.

  “Those are B-fifty-twos,” I said to Schulzie.

  He was impressed. “Here come the judge. Huh, Lieutenant?” he said.

  I smiled. I may have said “Fuckin’ A” in agreement, while telling myself that I was actually disgusted by that sight of enormous military force. These days I often felt as if I were lying to all sides of myself.

  About fifteen minutes later, I could have sworn I felt the ground tremble. I’d never seen the terrain out to our west, except on the map, where it was mostly whorls of densely packed contour lines, covered all over with green. But I had a picture in my mind, of bombs crashing through thick-leaved canopies, of enormous root-balls flying into the air, of giant trees splintering, while, a mountain away, a small man in a dark green uniform, a radio strapped on his back, ran on—more swiftly now, hearing the thunder behind him—along a forest path.

  What I thought I knew for certain about the lands outside the base camp was that people with radios moved across them, and that some of those radios belonged to people we Americans were here to kill—to various infantry units, the most important of which was the 3d North Vietnamese Division, whose headquarters and regiments periodically sent messages to each other via encrypted Morse code. Quite often I also knew where those various enemy radios were situated.

  At my higher headquarters in Chu Lai, there was a room in which enlisted men, known as “ditty-bops,” sat in front of typewriters with headphones on their ears, monitoring the frequencies used by the enemy units in the Americal Division’s area of operations. The ditty-bops transcribed the messages they overheard and sent them on to NSA in Virginia—to DIRNSA, short for Director NSA. If NSA ever broke the ciphers, I never knew about it. That would have been a secret too secret for me to know. The ditty-bops couldn’t read the messages, but ASA soldiers had long since assembled a chart of the enemy communications networks, so the ditty-bops knew who was sending messages to whom when they heard the call signs of the enemy units.

  Say a ditty-bop in Chu Lai heard through his headphones the commo op of the 3d Regiment of the 3d NVA Division, spelling out the 3d Regiment’s call sign. The ditty-bop would at once alert another soldier, who would relay the information by secure radio to an airborne ditty-bop, aloft in an Air Force or Navy plane, a propeller-driven plane equipped with direction-finding equipment. The technicians in the plane would tune in to the signal, and the pilot would fly toward it and, in the best case, circle around it so as to catch the signal from three different directions, triangulating the location of the 3d Regiment’s radio. Eventually, that location would be sent to my detachment, a packet of two letters followed by six numbers. By now I could see one of those and place it in the brigade’s AO without even looking at a map.

  Locations came in throughout the day, but mostly in the afternoon. I’d ferry them to the brigade’s S-2 and S-3, and at night I’d often sit with Rosenthal in the operations hootch, in front of our big map of southern I Corps. It occupied an entire freestanding wall. On the acetate that covered it, Rosenthal and I kept a record in multicolored grease pencil of the past month’s movements of all the enemy radios of all the enemy units in southern I Corps. I can see us now, on a sultry night under bare lightbulbs, Rosenthal with his shirt off, smoking his pipe, I think, poi
nting at our map and saying, “And by the same token, Lieutenant, those movements could suggest a new offensive.” And I in a white T-shirt, smoking a cigarette, saying, “I see what you mean, Mike. I think you may have something there.”

  When I was a boy, my father taught me to read nautical charts. In time, he had let me do the navigating on his catboat. I’d loved maps ever since. I liked to dream on them, making trips and adventures. And most of all I liked to use them, especially at night under the wavering glow of the cabin’s kerosene lamps, when the art of transferring their symbols to the visible world of lighthouses, red-flashing bell buoys, and faintly blinking channel markers was most challenging. But to represent something is to command power over it. Maps are the tools of many ambitious people, of policy makers, commanders of armies, and youths who like to play at being one of those. And the problem is that maps are easily confused with the world.

  When I’d left the United States, some people in the antiwar movement were still saying this was a war waged only between a corrupt South Vietnamese regime and valiant local insurgents. But on the part of our map that covered the brigade’s AO, most of what you saw were large North Vietnamese units, and just a couple of Vietcong companies. And here was the kicker, as Rosenthal had explained: All of those units, including the two little VC companies, communicated directly with a giant corps headquarters across the border in Cambodia, which we called “MR-5,” and MR-5, in turn, communicated directly with Hanoi. More than mere geography separated me from my principled antiwar friends back home. Especially from people like that guy in Cambridge who had refused to shake hands with me on account of my haircut. Arrogant bastard. He should be against this war, of course, but I’d bet he didn’t know why.

  For me, and I think for Rosenthal, tracking the enemy radios on our enormous map was easily the most interesting part of our lives right then. We’d talk about the locations of those radios as if gossiping about old mutual acquaintances. Their movements weren’t always predictable. One night I woke up to Rosenthal’s voice calling through my screen wall, “Lieutenant, something just came in you better look at. Third NVA.” By the time I got up to operations, he had it marked on the map. The radio of the 3d NVA Regiment. Two days ago it had been situated many kilometers to the west of Chu Lai. Now, on the map, it sat right near the edge of the giant Americal Division base camp. I looked at the Teletype message. I plotted the location myself. Not that Rosenthal ever made a mistake. “Jesus,” I said. I turned to Rosenthal and saw that both of us were trying not to smile.

  We assumed that by this point in the war the enemy knew what we were up to. We imagined that their commo ops would send their messages from some empty field or hilltop, then pack up in a hurry and start running. But there was a limit to how far they could stray from their headquarters. So the location of a radio was still useful information.

  The locations weren’t all equal. If the direction-finding plane managed to triangulate a radio, the location was said to be “a fix,” and fixes varied from “within five hundred meters,” which were the best and most reliable, to “within three thousand meters.” Many times subsequent five-hundred-meter fixes would show three-thousand-meter fixes to have been wrong by far more than that. And a signal caught from only two directions, “a cut,” wasn’t to be trusted at all.

  This alarming new location for the 3d Regiment was a three-thousand-meter fix. It had been recorded near dusk yesterday. It was two o’clock in the morning now. No telling why the fix had taken so long to get to us.

  For a couple of weeks Rosenthal had been speculating about the start of a new enemy offensive, like the famous Tet Offensive of the previous February. It was a prediction based on a pattern of radio activity and movement that he thought he’d discerned. We weren’t trained or equipped to make that kind of analysis, and God knows we weren’t authorized to confuse the colonel by sharing ideas like that. (That was the CIA’s job, I’d decided mordantly, after one of the biweekly high-level crypto briefings that the colonel got from Division, where I’d heard a CIA strategic analysis that was based largely on a cut.) But there was no question about one thing. I had to wake up Colonel Mahoney. Protecting the Americal Division’s base camp was his brigade’s principal responsibility. For all we knew, the 3d Regiment might at that moment be about to attack Chu Lai. I called headquarters. The colonel’s aide told me to come to the house trailer in fifteen minutes.

  As we got the portable map ready, Rosenthal reminded me of the pattern we thought we’d seen, the suggestions of a new offensive. “Do you think you should tell the colonel?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Yeah, we should! Why don’t you come with me?”

  He drove the jeep. I carried the map. I knocked on the door of the house trailer. Colonel Mahoney answered. His face looked a little puffy, but he was fully dressed, in pressed, tailored fatigues.

  “Sir, we just got this fix for the Third NVA Regiment.” I handed him the map and pointed at the location.

  He sat down on the edge of his bed, the map balanced on his knees. He stared at it, and then he yelled, “Goddammit!” He looked up at me. “When was this from?”

  “Seventeen hundred hours, sir. But it just came in.”

  He was staring hard at the map again. “Goddammit!” He slammed a fist on his mattress. “Goddammit!” He grabbed his field telephone and told his S-3, who had already been awakened, “Get over here, Nat.”

  Then silence inside the house trailer, the colonel staring at the map.

  I cleared my throat. “Sir, while we’re waiting, Specialist Rosenthal here has been noticing something I think you’d find interesting, sir, while we’re waiting.”

  He looked up at me, dark eyebrows lowered. “I’m not waiting, Lieutenant. I’m thinking.”

  There were times in the Army when the position of military attention—stiff spine, lifted chin, wide, front-facing eyes, wooden arms—seemed like the most natural of postures. “Yes, sir!”

  “Is it important? Or just a goddamn detail?”

  “Just a detail, sir.”

  He had gone back to staring at the map, muttering imprecations. Then the S-3 arrived, and the colonel’s bedroom filled with infantry talk, names of battalions, mobile resources, punctuated now and then by oaths from the colonel. I see him, sitting there slamming his fist down on the edge of his bed, saying in a voice nearly anguished, “But the First of the Fifth is at least ten clicks away!” We stood there, forgotten, Rosenthal and I. Finally, the colonel turned to us. “Thank you, Lieutenant. You, too, Specialist.”

  So we never did get to tell Colonel Mahoney our theory about a new offensive. Which was just as well. A few afternoons later we received a new location for the 3d NVA Regiment, a five-hundred-meter fix, which put the regiment’s radio miles away to the west of Chu Lai, where it represented no threat to the big base camp, just to the infantry platoons out there. But when I delivered this news at the morning briefing, Colonel Mahoney didn’t even mention the false alarm. Not long afterward I was able to return the favor.

  I hadn’t paid much attention to my detachment’s other mission, which was called comsec. We were supposed to monitor the brigade’s radio and landline transmissions, looking for violations of communications security. Three men usually did that job, among them Pancho, who was the boss. Now and then I’d see him or one of the others sitting in operations at the comsec desk with headphones on and typing. More often, their desk was empty. But so far they seemed to be producing enough paper to satisfy our headquarters in Chu Lai. I saw no point in asking Pancho to do more. Actually, I hoped he wouldn’t. A lot of people in this base camp could make our lives miserable if we caught them making comsec violations and reported them.

  But Pancho liked the job well enough, the sneakiness of it. For him, I thought, this was a form of pheebing around, and he could be assiduous. There was always the chance he’d get lucky and eavesdrop on something juicy, some officer boasting about his conquest of an Army nurse or Red Cross donut dolly. Comsec guys
liked to talk about those kinds of scores. And in retrospect, it seems inevitable that one day I’d walk into operations and find Pancho with the headphones on, typing furiously. He looked up at me and smiled craftily, then went back to work. A little later, while I was working on the map, he came around the corner and handed me a sheaf of paper. “You gotta see this shit, Lieutenant. It’s your brother Colonel Mahoney.”

  The colonel, anyone could tell, was enthusiastic about his work. That day, from his helicopter, he’d gotten carried away and forgotten protocol. Not once but repeatedly, he’d radioed orders down to various of his units on the ground, saying over the air, “This is Colonel Mahoney.”

  There they were, recorded in black and white, gross comsec violations. Pancho planned to send the transcripts to Chu Lai. I imagined them ending up on the desk of the commanding general, I imagined the commanding general putting in a call to Colonel Mahoney, and in the aftermath, I imagined the end of our immunity from local inspections, from standing shifts all night in the bunkers on the landing zone’s perimeter. It must have been class prejudice making Pancho stupid. He must have found the chance to mess with a full-bull colonel irresistible.

  I said, “Don’t even think about it!” I seem to recall that the other comsec guys got a little indignant in the lounge that night. “This is a war, Lieutenant.” “We got a job to do, Lieutenant.” Mostly, I think, they wanted to feel their job was important. I don’t remember Pancho ever talking about the war, or his job, as if he believed in either one or, for that matter, disbelieved, but he wanted those transcripts sent back to headquarters. I compromised. I said I’d talk to the colonel personally the next morning.