by Tracy Kidder
“Yeah, we should have.”
But Schulzie was still employing the same girl. I sat beside him in the bar and listened as he and another young soldier complained about the time these women spent curling their hair. We went out together in a taxi. Schulzie’s girl came along. I thought she was going to show us the town, but it turned out to be a shopping trip, Schulzie sitting in the backseat with his arm around her, making sour faces whenever she ordered the driver to make another stop. Schulzie shaking his head, saying to me, “Women, you know?” He wasn’t alone in any of this. Maybe the name of our hotel had something to do with it. All around Serene House I saw soldiers walking hand in hand with their prostitutes, pecking them on the cheeks, retiring after the local floor show around 10:00 P.M., playing out what seemed like parodies of American conjugal life. And I discovered, if you went out into the hallways after ten or so, you’d usually run into a girl who had found a way to take a break from her employer. Black-haired young women in miniskirts, interchangeable to me by this time. “You want a short-timer?” they’d ask.
“How much?”
I contented myself with short-timers for the rest of our vacation. It’s hard to break out of the kind of bitter mood that keeps looking for reasons to justify its existence. In time you may really believe that the worst you can imagine about everything human must be true, simply because it is the worst. At any rate, I’d found a way to make sure I wouldn’t be disappointed. Schulzie seemed cheerful on the trip back from Singapore. I actually felt glad to return to our compound, metal roofs dotted with rotting sandbags, Simon and Garfunkel playing on the commo op’s tape deck, a basin of cold water right around dawn on the stoop of the operations hootch, the confusion I felt when I saw my face in my pocket-size mirror. Voices called out, “One hundred ninety-nine days to DEROS.” “Seventy-three and counting. Eat your heart out, new guys.” The ultimate in destinations was, in Spikes’s phrase, “the land of the big PX and the all-night generator.” Pancho called it “Fort Home.” There was still a place where life was perfect.
OPERATIONS
I WAS WORKING ON ANOTHER SHORT STORY—ABOUT A SOFT-SPOKEN soldier, not exactly like me, I thought, but like the person I was coming to resemble, who, in an indefinite place a lot like Vietnam, befriends a semiretarded Army cook and meets a tragic end through kindness. I had worked on it all morning in my hootch. When I came up to operations, I found a couple of new fixes for North Vietnamese units, close to each other and not very far from one of our battalion base camps to the west. The fixes were several hours old.
When I pulled up in the jeep outside the TOC, that big igloo of sandbags, Colonel Mahoney was on his way out the door, walking rather slowly for him. I showed him the new locations. He stared at the map. Then he looked up at me, and I thought that I saw sadness in his face. “I wish I’d had these earlier,” he said. There had been a firefight an hour or so ago, right near those locations, he explained. If he’d known the enemy units were there in force, he’d have sent in air strikes and reinforcements. He said he’d lost a couple of men. There was no rancor in his voice. He wondered why the locations had come to us so late.
“I don’t know, sir. But I’ll find out,” I said.
I went back and spent half an hour in the lounge, drinking beer and telling Spikes what had happened, saying I should have brought those fixes to the colonel sooner. I wondered if I was to blame for the deaths of those GIs. I went to operations and wondered to the commo op, a boy named Rose. He looked at the messages that contained the fixes. “Hey, Lieutenant, look when these came in.” It was true that they’d arrived at my detachment about half an hour before I’d taken them to Colonel Mahoney, but Rose pointed out to me, those new locations had languished in Chu Lai for about three hours before the commo ops back there had sent them out to us. Rose was a chatty young man, too eager to please. As it happened, he had spent time as a commo op in Chu Lai, and I think the other commo ops back there had picked on him. At the moment, though, it didn’t occur to me that he might be harboring a grudge.
There was often a moment, a beer or two short of drunkenness, when I could hear my voice grow loud and brassy, and I liked the sound. Then, in my mind, partial beliefs tended to become whole. Generally, these resembled the beliefs of whoever was around. I drank another beer. Then I drafted a message to the operations officer, denouncing the commo ops in Chu Lai. Because of them, American soldiers had died today, I wrote.
I showed it to Rose. “Think I should send this?”
“Yeah!”
Only minutes later, the operations officer called me on the landline phone. I had no right to send a message like that, he said. Then my company commander called. “I can’t believe a person with your education would send that message. I think if you were here right now in Chu Lai, some of these men would shoot you.” This was very strong language, a taboo broken, for a commander to talk about fragging that way.
I apologized to the captain, and to the commo ops in Chu Lai in another message. “Shot in the head,” I said in the doorway of my hootch when I turned in that night, but the words didn’t help much. Why did I have to overreact? Why couldn’t I just do my job and not worry about what other people did? Why did I have to dabble in causes I didn’t really care about?
Strangely enough, my outburst improved our operation. The commo ops in Chu Lai weren’t lazy, and weren’t to blame for the delay. There was simply too much traffic passing through their Teletypes. Within days, the operations officer initiated new procedures for getting fixes to me, so that most would come not through the Chu Lai comm center but by secure radio from the direction-finding plane itself. Now locations would get to the colonel sooner. Enemy soldiers, presumably, would have less time to get away.
I HAD TURNED TWENTY-THREE IN NOVEMBER AND NOW WORE ON MY COLLAR the first lieutenant’s black bar—black in a combat zone, silver elsewhere. Promotion to first lieutenant came automatically after a year of active duty, unless you did something very wrong, lost a secret code word message, for instance. But my promotion had come through right on time. Soon afterward I’d been ordered to report to Colonel Riddle in Nha Trang.
He handed me a couple of official letters from across his desk. One was signed by Colonel Mahoney: “As I leave this command I would like to extend this letter of commendation for a most outstanding performance of duty.” It went on in that vein for a few paragraphs and closed, “A copy of this letter will be placed in both your branch and permanent 201 files.” This, I understood, would help if I decided to make the Army my career.
The other letter was signed by Colonel Riddle. It read in part, “Your dedication and enthusiasm in providing the best possible special intelligence support to the 198th Light Infantry Brigade reflect most creditably upon your unit, the Radio Research community as a whole, and most importantly, upon yourself. I am sure I can count on you for continued high standards of performance, and shall be looking to you as an example of other personnel of this command.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Then he handed me the letter of reprimand. I felt his eyes on me and composed a sorrowful expression, playing my part and believing in it for a moment, as I read of my “gross carelessness” and “the violation of trust” I had committed, endangering the lives of American soldiers by allowing the loss of a classified message. I looked up, my eyes, I remember clearly, actually stinging, and saw that he was smiling. Was it the smile itself that was sickening or the reassurance that it offered? I was quite recovered. He reached for the paper, I handed it to him, he held it aloft in front of me and, still smiling, tore it in half.
“Thank you, sir.”
He dismissed me, saying, “Don’t let me down now, boy.”
Just making sure I realized I was in his debt. “No, sir.”
I had lingered in the briefing room on Colonel Mahoney’s last morning, standing nearby as he thanked his senior staff. He praised each for his “loyalty,” using the word in the personal sense. I didn’t know anything but r
umors about the lives of full-bull colonels, but I imagined the years it took to arrive at the rank, years of holding your tongue and smiling at people you despised, years that could be ruined by one or two commanders who disliked you or by a wife who drank too much. There would be years of preparation—weeklong maneuvers and mock battles; classes on the doctrines of Metternich, the tactics of Patton, at the Army War College. You’d dream of the day when you would command your own brigade in an actual war. But your chance in Vietnam was brief, because so many other full-bull colonels were waiting for their turns.
No wonder Colonel Mahoney got a little overwrought now and then. He wasn’t the sort of man who invited pity, but I remembered feeling sorry for him once. He had been briefing the Americal Division’s commanding general here in this room, and he’d gotten carried away and tapped the general on the knee with his branding iron, and I’d noticed the general stiffen slightly and shift his burly torso.
“Sir,” I had said, stepping forward. “I just want to say goodbye.”
“Oh, yes. Lieutenant Kidder. You did well, too.”
“Thank you, sir.” Perhaps he had sensed my sincerity, though at the time I didn’t think he could possibly remember the reason for it.
I was grateful to the small, natty colonel, but he’d never been a rival to my other older friends, Sam and David. He had too many traits I thought I recognized in myself. Besides, I disapproved of colonels.
The new brigade commander was named Colonel Chamberlain. I sized him up from the back of the briefing room. He was tall, which might be an improvement. He also seemed comparatively relaxed in the commander’s chair. And instead of a swagger stick, he had a stutter. Colonel Mahoney used to get my attention, but by the time this new colonel finished stammering and framed a sentence, he also had my sympathy. It would be hard to get through basic training with a speech impediment, I thought, remembering six-foot-six-inch Sergeant Fisher and the other drill sergeants I had known. When my turn came to brief him and I introduced myself, the new colonel gave me a small, friendly smile, tinged with amusement, perhaps.
“I think we’re going to like this colonel,” I told Spikes back at the detachment. “We should invite him over for cocktails some afternoon.” Spikes liked the idea. He and I cleaned up the lounge, and the colonel actually accepted. He didn’t stay long, but he stood at our homemade bar in that hootch and had a glass of bourbon and water with me. At one point I said to him, “I know a lot of officers don’t trust enlisted men, but these guys are great.”
He lowered his head and looked at me from the upper quadrant of his eyes, as if looking over the rims of glasses, in the way Robert Fitzgerald had looked at me when I’d aroused his skepticism. “Yea-yea-yea-yes, but your men aren’t like most infantrymen.”
I had considered discussing my moral objections to the Vietnam War with him until he said that.
Some nights later it happened again, the commo op on duty calling through my screen walls after midnight that a new fix had come in. The new system with the direction-finding plane was not infallible. Some fixes still arrived many hours late. This time I went alone to the colonel’s house trailer. One of the first things Colonel Chamberlain had done was to get his quarters out of the bunkered pit in the ground. Maybe he just didn’t like the feeling of sleeping half underground. But I thought he wanted to make himself as vulnerable to incoming as the other soldiers on LZ Bayonet. He was sitting on his bed in the house trailer, just as Colonel Mahoney had some months before. The new colonel rubbed the crew-cut top of his head with the knuckles of one hand, rubbed vigorously. Then he smiled. “Guh-guh-good morning, Lieutenant.”
“Good morning, sir. Sir, this just came in.” I handed him the map. On it was a dot perilously close to our base camp. It was that troublesome 3d NVA Regiment again.
He studied the map for a time. Then he looked at me again. “Well, Lieutenant, wha-wha-what would you do?”
A colonel of infantry asking a young intelligence officer what he would do? It was unheard of. For a moment I was tempted to make something up, and then I knew I shouldn’t. It’s always possible to borrow from the character of someone you’ve decided to admire.
He was still looking at me, eyebrows slightly lifted.
“I don’t know, sir.” I wet my lips. “I’m not a tactician.”
A smile crinkled up the weathered skin around his eyes. “Nuh-nuh-neither am I!”
That location was just another false alarm. On the big map in the operations hootch, the war seemed to have reached stasis. I still wrote letters home in which I said that the North Vietnamese might be planning new offensives, but I saw no evidence of that. On occasion I heard of incidents that might have qualified as battles, or massacres. The night, for instance, when an NVA battalion tried to assault Tam Ky City and were slaughtered while attempting to cross the coastal plain by that “they-kill-vc” armored cavalry regiment. (Several hundred corpses dotted the ground, I heard from an MI lieutenant who had flown over the battlefield. I remember corpses being dumped at the helicopter pad in the base camp like sacks of grain from a chopper, to be searched and identified, I assumed.) But most of what I heard about were skirmishes, and most of those, it seemed, went badly for our side.
One time I went into the TOC to bring the S-3 another of those “on the move” documents—triple-wrapped so it couldn’t blow away—and found Colonel Chamberlain inside talking on the radio. To a company commander, I gathered, who was caught in an ambush somewhere out in those hills to the west.
“Mu-mu-move!” the colonel was saying into the microphone in his hand.
The radio crackled. The infantry captain’s voice came into the room, along with sounds that took me back to basic training and the live-fire exercise when we had to crawl under barbed wire while a machine gun, fixed in place, fired real bullets over our heads, a sound nowhere near as loud as something designed to kill you ought to make. The embattled captain’s voice had a timbre I admired, one I didn’t think I could reproduce in his position. He didn’t sound entirely calm, but he wasn’t screaming. He said, over the crackling radio, “It’s like pulling teeth, trying to move.”
Colonel Chamberlain keyed his mike. “Stu-stop pulling teeth, and move!”
I began to feel as if I were a bystander at a traffic accident, all too fascinated. I left soon afterward, before hearing how the fight ended. I heard fragmentary accounts of other horrors like that one at almost every morning’s briefing, reports of American platoons and rifle companies walking into ambushes, and of American soldiers losing limbs to booby traps, often on the Batangan Peninsula, just north of the towns of My Lai, an area known collectively as Pinkville both because it was depicted in pink on the map and because it was what was known as a “VC stronghold.” The massacre of civilians at My Lai had already occurred, but the bodies were still buried and its public revelation was still the better part of a year away. To me, Pinkville wasn’t yet a place where Vietnamese women were raped and babies shot. It was just another battleground where American combat soldiers got maimed. A notorious place around brigade headquarters.
On our map in the operations hootch, the Batangan Peninsula was a little cape jutting into the South China Sea. A yellow dot with a red center, like a cartoon eye—Rosenthal, I think, had invented all such symbols—moved around it. Sometimes a brown dot with a red center lingered near the yellow one. The brown dot depicted the 38th Main Force Vietcong Battalion, but it usually drifted south of our AO, and it wasn’t often on the air. The yellow one with the red center stood for the 48th Main Force Vietcong Battalion, and it was much more active, presumably more important. We got fixes on its radio maybe two days out of seven. Once in a great while it traveled a few kilometers south of Pinkville, but mainly it stayed on the peninsula, tracing patterns on my map which suggested that it ruled the place. I thought perhaps the NVA colonels had their own words of praise for it; maybe at their briefings they would say, “That Forty-eighth Battalion, they kill Americans.”
EARLY
IN THE NEW YEAR, UNFAMILIAR FACES APPEARED AT THE MORNING briefing, faces rising out of tailored fatigues. They brought my colonel news of a large new operation, planned in Da Nang at the office of the commanding general of the 3d Marine Amphibious Force. I found a document containing the contents of that briefing many years later, in the archives of the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, a once-secret document that the archivist declassified on the spot—another piece of paper that had floated away, now in an old metal filing cabinet in the basement of an Army building. It came in capital letters and numbered paragraphs. The document began, as follows:
1. (S) THE ACCELERATED PACIFICATION CAMPAIGN IS MOVING AHEAD WELL.…
2. (S) THE TOP PRIORITY TARGET AREA IN THE BATANGAN REGION REFERRED TO AS PINK VILLE IS STILL COMPLETELY UNDER VC/NVA CONTROL.… THE TOTAL ESTIMATED POPULATION THERE IS 27,470. ESTIMATED ENEMY FORCES INCLUDE TWO VC/NVA BATTALIONS, TWO TO FOUR VC/NVA COMPANIES AND A HUNDRED OR MORE LOCAL GUERRILLAS. WE HOLD BLACKLISTS CONTAINING NAMES OF 208 VCI. VC/NVA FORCES IN REGION HAVE CAPABILITY TO MOUNT BATTALION SIZE COORDINATED ATTACKS ANYWHERE IN THE TARGET REGION. SMALL UNIT HARASSING ATTACKS ARE OCCURRING ON A WEEKLY BASIS.…
The plan was to deal with those battalions and companies and Vietcong Irregulars once and for all. A huge force would be assembled, U.S. Marines and infantry from the Americal Division, and also South Vietnamese troops, nearly eleven thousand men in all. They would cordon off the entire enemy stronghold. They’d make an armed wall of troops eleven miles long, over hills and flooded rice paddies, all the way across the throat of the peninsula. Navy Swift Boats would patrol the coast.
Once the cordon was in place, helicopters would circle over the impounded area, dropping leaflets and announcing over loudspeakers that everyone had better leave. As they passed through checkpoints, the refugees would all be scrutinized, some interrogated and detained, the rest given shelter at a camp, set up, as I recall, by our State Department. Then we’d bomb and shell the vacated landscape, and when the dust had settled, the allied troops would sweep across the peninsula, rounding up what was left of the 48th and perhaps the 38th and their auxiliaries.
