My Detachment My Detachment

by Tracy Kidder

  The plan had another preliminary feature. We would distribute among our widely mistrusted allies, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, a set of fake plans describing a large amphibious assault on the coast south of the peninsula. Decoy operations would begin down there, backing up the ruse. Only the ARVN division’s commanding general would be told the real plan. The spies, presumably, would spread news of the fake plan, and the 48th Battalion might well take refuge in its stronghold, on the peninsula, just before the area was cordoned off.

  I remember seeing many smiles in the briefing room that morning. The plan sounded clever. This was a big deal, besides. One General Cooksey would be in charge of the Army troops. It would be important for him to know the locations of the radios of the 38th VC Battalion and especially of the 48th. There would be no other likely way to know if the ruse had worked and the operation’s main target was trapped. I would be the one who brought that information to the general.

  I remember standing in front of the map back at my detachment, briefing my men—Schulzie, whom I had begun to try to train as Rosenthal’s replacement, and Spikes, who had stood in for me at morning briefings during my R & R, and Pancho, who I knew would be interested. I said something like “We’ve got to be on our toes. This is a big deal.”

  They all seemed pleased. I think Pancho called it a “shaky plan,” and I think Spikes, too, gave it his highest praise and said, “Decent.”

  Soon our part of the operation had a name, Operation Russell Beach. The Marines’ portion was called Bold Mariner. (Marine commanders thought it wise to keep their men in practice for amphibious assaults, but it was hard to tell how coming in by sea would gain them an advantage, unless soggy boots are an advantage.) At morning briefings, the operation seemed to be unfolding nicely. But without any help from me. Back at my detachment, I stood at the big map and stared at the yellow dot with the red eye. The last fix, from several days before, had put the 48th a little south of the Batangan Peninsula. Now, evidently, their radio had gone silent. This wasn’t surprising. Probably the 48th had seen the beginnings of the phony amphibious assault south of the peninsula, and they were busy beating feet, as Pancho would say. Maybe they’d been fooled and were returning to Pinkville while our troops were advancing on them. Whatever advancing meant.

  It was getting hard even to fantasize about what was really going on. Memories of training camp marches—of suffocating heat, of grooves of pain that the protruding metal parts of a machine gun made in the shoulders after only half a mile or so, of chafing at the crotch, of squatting over a hole in the ground, of the nauseating taste of water in a plastic canteen heated by the sun—all of that seemed very long ago. The game we used to play in the lounge, Diplomacy, felt as real to me. Standing at my map, waiting for the encrypted radio to crackle or the Teletype to clatter and deliver up the latest fix on the 48th Battalion, I was relieved of every other reality. But where was the 48th?

  “Any news for us this morning, Lieutenant?” Colonel Chamberlain asked when I pulled the brown paper off the portable map in front of his chair at 6:00 A.M.

  “No, sir. I’m sorry, sir. Not yet.”

  And then, suddenly, I had nothing to report to him, no information at all about any North Vietnamese or Vietcong unit. I got the word by Teletype from company headquarters. As I’d learned back at Fort Devens, in one of those classrooms with a bank-vault door, every sophisticated army periodically changes all its call signs, all the symbols its units use to identify themselves over the air. The NVA and VC had just changed theirs. Almost certainly this had nothing to do with Operation Russell Beach/Bold Mariner. They had done this before. It was predictable. But why, I wondered, did they have to choose this moment?

  I drove to company headquarters in Chu Lai. I hardly knew the warrant officer who kept track of the enemy’s communications network, the man who would now reconstruct that network. He was an old-timer. The gray in his hair was reassuring. I sat down in front of his desk. It was situated outside the door to the room where the ditty-bops listened through headphones to the enemy communications traffic.

  So they’d changed everything around, and until he had the new network reconstructed, we wouldn’t know where the 48th was. Did I have that right?

  “That’s an affirm.”

  But when would he have it reconstructed?

  It was hard to say.

  Boy, the sooner the better. He knew about Russell Beach. The heat was on.

  He smiled.

  Would we have the location of the 48th before our soldiers moved into their cordon?

  His smile was friendly. He lifted his hands.

  After you spend some time inside a bureaucracy, you develop strategies that turn into reflexes. The most reliable is flattery. I don’t mean to say that this warrant officer, whose name I have forgotten, wasn’t going to do his job however I behaved. But I had to be sure he’d hurry.

  How in the name of this man’s Army could he reconstruct a commo net anyway? I wondered. It wasn’t as though I didn’t feel sincerely curious.

  He sat back in his swiveling desk chair. He lit up a cigar, and hands behind his head, he allowed that, sure, his own role was complicated, but it was possible for him to play it only because of the skills of our ditty-bops over there in the next room. See, he said, every commo operator who taps out messages in Morse code does so in a way that is at least slightly different from that of every other commo operator. Our ditty-bops knew the distinctive sound of every enemy commo op’s finger on the key, and the NVA and VC could change all their call signs and frequencies, but they couldn’t change their commo operators, not many of them anyway.

  When, scanning the airwaves, the ditty-bops who specialized in the 48th Battalion heard the telltale sound of its commo operator sending messages, and heard the new call sign attached to those messages, then it was a damn good bet that the 48th’s radio had been found again. The warrant officer would need more than one such rediscovery, and other kinds of evidence, before he could put the map of the network back together. Progress would be slow at first. Then it would accelerate.

  “Wow,” I said.

  He puffed on his cigar. This wasn’t uninteresting, he allowed, and it was important for sure, American lives being at stake. But for sheer complexity and the fun of the chase, it couldn’t compare to working on the interception of satellite communications. He was talking about a guy he’d once known at a listening post—was it in Turkey?—who could make a Russian satellite dump all its contents, when my mind began to wander. What would I tell Colonel Chamberlain? What would I tell General Cooksey? They’d be very disappointed.

  Down on the Batangan Peninsula, I heard, the real operation was about to commence. The briefings that came before mine had a snap to them, a quick cadence. The map with the operation outlined on it looked like a real battle map, a map in a book of military history, with big red arrows depicting Stonewall Jackson’s or Napoleon’s cleverness. This was the kind of event professional soldiers waited for, and it seems to me it was one time when I sensed that fellow feeling in the briefing room included me. Anyway, no one called me the spot man that day, and a major moved a little sideways on the bench to make room for me. He even nodded to me. I imagined he might be thinking, Good to have you aboard. But my briefing didn’t last long.

  “Any news today, Lieutenant?”

  “No, sir. Not yet.”

  In the afternoon I drove to Chu Lai again. I found the warrant officer bent over his desk, pencil in hand, papers scattered all around him. Moments after I arrived, the door to the big room full of ditty-bops opened, and a tall young soldier in an olive-drab T-shirt appeared. A pair of earphones hung around his neck. He glanced at me, wearing a sour look. Maybe he remembered that message I’d sent some weeks back. “He’s up,” he said to the warrant officer and walked back inside the room of the ditty-bops. The warrant officer came right out of his chair and followed the ditty-bop.

  “Do you think I’ll have something on the 48th today?” I aske
d.

  “Can’t talk now,” said the warrant officer.

  I was staring at the map in our operations hootch that evening, considering a visit to the lounge. The cordon was going to be put in place with or without information from me. Who cared? I might as well give up and have a beer. The phone in the front room rang. It was the warrant officer. He said I’d be receiving a Teletype any minute.

  “All right!” I said. “Outstanding!” I added. It wasn’t something I’d usually do, use lifers’ talk, but it sounded right.

  I called the brigade intelligence officer. Was General Cooksey still at the briefing room? Could he wait a few minutes for me? I hovered over the shoulder of the commo op. I watched the Teletype keys scratch out the usual heading. First, the secret code word, SORTIE; it had been changed, maybe because of Pancho and me. Next the routing instructions, which I read, thinking, Hurry up. Then came the unit designation. It was indeed the 48th. Then the radius of the fix. Five hundred meters, the very best. Finally, the coordinates. I reached over and tore the sheet off the Teletype. There wasn’t time to follow the new procedures and triple-wrap the piece of paper. I put in it my pocket and hustled out to the jeep. It was raining. I didn’t even bother to put on my poncho.

  Inside the briefing room, a small group of elderly men, elderly to me, stood at the map—the brigade S-2 and S-3, the new executive officer who had the necessary clearance, Colonel Chamberlain, General Cooksey. Perhaps it was the general’s name that made me imagine him in a Confederate uniform. He was tall, and he had nice manners.

  They all turned from the map when I came in the door. “Good evening, Lieutenant,” said the general.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  Colonel Chamberlain stood slightly off to one side. I felt a little pang, for feeling pleased that I was briefing a general instead of him.

  “If I may, sir.” I gestured toward the map.

  “Certainly.”

  It was around 6:00 P.M., 1800 hours. I glanced at the slip of paper, then quickly found the grid square on the map, then the exact spot within the square. Holding my finger on it—a spot right in the center of the Batangan Peninsula, a spot between the coast and the wall of soldiers even now moving into their cordon—I said, “Sir, at 1704 hours today, the 48th Main Force Battalion was located here.”

  The colonels and the general crowded in a little to look. Then the general turned to me with a big smile. He said, “We got ’em, Lieutenant!”

  “Yes, sir!” I felt my own smile rising, like a blush.

  ROUGHLY CONTEMPORANEOUS OFFICIAL MARINE DOCUMENTS SAY THAT Operation Bold Mariner/Russell Beach lasted from 13 January until 9 February 1969. They describe it as “the largest amphibious operation of the war.” And they uniformly describe a happy ending:

  The total success of the action ashore far exceeds the enemy battlefield casualties.… A hitherto enemy sanctuary was surrounded without warning, then systematically searched and cleared, thereby once again serving the enemy notice no area is secure from the mobile striking power of the forces of III MAF and the Seventh Fleet. As a result of Operation BOLD MARINER/RUSSELL BEACH, nearly 12,000 Vietnamese were returned to GVN influence, after more than two decades of VC control; 256 of them were identified as vci and taken into custody.

  I can imagine having been assigned to write that summary. The war was far from over then. There were careers to be made. I’d have written what my commanders wanted their commanders to read, and for self-respect I might have made these same small asides that I found in the once-secret documents: “In retrospect, while the opportunity to meet and destroy in battle a large enemy force did not materialize …” “The entire peninsula was found to be a labyrinth of cleverly concealed tunnels, caves, and trenches …” “It is quite possible sizable enemy forces used the existing tunnel network as an avenue to exfiltrate the area.” The New York Times reported on the operation, but not in any detail. It is hard to tell, from the several articles in the Times and from the official, once-secret documents, exactly how many people died. Perhaps only a dozen American soldiers, and God knows how many Vietnamese. In any case, from what I heard at the TOC, the operation sounded like a failure.

  Not surprisingly, once the cordon was established, I got no further fixes on the 48th Battalion’s radio, not for a long time. About a week after the cordon began to sweep across the peninsula toward the sea, I asked the S-3 if he thought the 48th had been destroyed. He seemed dubious. He said our soldiers had found one cave containing 150 head of cattle. He did not think that we had found every cave, or the majority of the 48th’s personnel and weapons.

  Something like twelve thousand of the people who had lived on the peninsula had left their homes and land for the American-run refugee camp outside the tightening cordon. I heard at morning briefings that there was an outbreak of dysentery among the refugees, and also that the VC mortared the camp from time to time. Eventually, the Vietnamese went home, back to the Batangan Peninsula. I’d never seen the place myself, but an officer I’d met at the TOC had told me that he’d often flown over it, and that it looked lovely from the air, full of streams, verdant with rice paddies and ordered hedgerows. Obviously, the place looked different after the operation, after the heavy shelling and the sorties of B-52s, called “mini arc lites.” I don’t know for sure exactly how different it looked, but a few years after the war ended I did get a description from the writer Tim O’Brien. He was stationed on the peninsula after Operation Russell Beach. When he told me this, I remarked that the area of his base camp was said to be beautiful. “Beautiful?” he exclaimed. “It was all red earth!”

  So that is what I imagine the refugees went home to once the operation ended. I have an article about their return, from the Pacific Stars and Stripes, quite descriptive in its way:

  BATANGAN PENINSULA, VIETNAM—The packs they carried were heavy, for they contained their life’s belongings.

  Yet the refugees—women, children and a scattering of men—seemed not to feel the weight as they walked ashore on the Batangan Peninsula, returning to the one-time Communist stronghold 15 miles southeast of Chu Lai.…

  Almost 12,000 refugees began a 20-day exodus last month from the Combined Holding and Interrogation Center near Quang Ngai City back to Batangan in a massive resettlement project coordinated by the Quang Ngai Province chief.…

  Getting ready for the villagers’ return required the clearing of four large village sites and construction of a 25-mile road system by elements of the Americal Div.’s B Co., 26th Eng. Bn.…

  To start the villagers anew, the South Vietnamese government provided each family with a “resettler’s kit” comprised of carpentry tools, tin roofs and one month’s supply of rice.…

  By the time resettler’s kits were being passed out, the excitement at headquarters was long past, and the old patterns of life had resumed, and on the map at my detachment, the dot like a red eye with a yellow rim was once again moving around the Batangan Peninsula.

  I SIT IN THE BRIEFING ROOM, WAITING MY TURN, MY MIND DRIFTING AWAY ON the droning voices. The captain from Artillery takes his place beside the map in front of Colonel Chamberlain, and, pointer stick in his right hand, glancing at a piece of paper in his left, he begins.

  “Sir, we fired thirty rounds of HE Quick here, results unknown. And, sir, twenty-five rounds of HE Quick here, results unknown. And, sir …” I notice a change in his voice, an increase in its cadence, as in one mouthful he says, “One hundred twenty-three rounds of willy peter here, results seventy-five VC KIA. And, moving along, sir, thirty rounds of—”

  “Wuh-wuh-wuh-wait a minute, Captain,” says Colonel Chamberlain. “Guh-guh-go back to that one.”

  The artillery captain stiffens. “Yes, sir.” He points again, again saying, “One hundred twenty-three rounds of willy peter here, sir. Results: seventy-five VC KIA.”

  Colonel Chamberlain rises from his chair. Bending over, he puts his finger on the spot on which all that white phosphorus rained down the night before. H
e studies it, then sits back and says to the artillery captain, “Tha-tha-that’s a village, Captain.”

  “Yes, sir!” The captain stands at attention now, the last hiding place available to a soldier. I sympathize.

  Colonel Chamberlain doesn’t raise his voice. He stares at the captain. “That isn’t a free-fire zone, Captain, is it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So wha-wha-what you mean is, two VC KIA and seh-seh-seventy-three women and children. Isn’t that right, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The colonel folds his hands in his lap. He stares at the captain. Then he says, very sternly for him, “Nuh-next time report it that way.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Over months of morning briefings, I must have heard of many villages being bombed, both accidentally and on purpose, but it had been easy not to realize this. The reports were clinical and bland, the pointer jabbing at a spot I couldn’t see on the map as the briefing officer read out the amount of ordnance expended. And no one in the audience had ever before made a translation. Looking back, I wonder if the colonel reported the embarrassing facts to his commanders at Division. I like to imagine that he did, and that this was the reason his own command ended after only four months. At the moment, I felt like applauding the colonel’s candor, and I felt like running away.

  The bombing of the village would have made a good subject for a letter to Sam or David, but I never mentioned it. “I was going to forget the war. I had made a separate peace,” says Lieutenant Frederic Henry, the hero of A Farewell to Arms. On a night soon after the briefing that I was going to forget, I sat in my hootch and wrote to David:

  The war proceeds. We’ve exported all those things you spoke about, plus a substantial amount of misery. The one thing that occurs to me is the justice of your remarks and speculation.