Word of Honor

by Nelson DeMille

  Behind first squad was team B, one of the two M-60 machine-gun teams, consisting of a gunner, assistant gunner, and an ammo bearer.

  Third rifle squad followed: three men, led by Pfc Larry Cane. Bringing up the rear was machine-gun team A and the squad leader of the two teams, Paul Sadowski, a twenty-year-old who had been a sergeant for five days.

  Even as the platoon contracted, Tyson kept his machine-gun squad up to strength by assigning riflemen to the two teams. Conventional wisdom had it that the life expectancy of machine gunners in battle was shorter than that of officers and radio operators. And Tyson believed it. At Phu Lai, every one of the original fourth squad was killed or wounded. Men were understandably reluctant to be assigned to the machine-gun squad but were perversely proud when they were; only the best, the brightest, and the strongest men could be trusted with this grueling and crucial job. The guns had to be manned and fed, and when a gunner was hit, someone else took his place, just as someone always picked up the fallen colors in the old cavalry regiments.

  Personnel management, Tyson thought. Just like they taught us in Personnel Management 401 at Auburn. Though it was a little more complex here.

  Tyson watched the last man come out of the copse of willows, Pfc Hernando Beltran, a hefty Cuban-American and the sole survivor of second squad. Beltran claimed he was now the second-squad leader and refused to be assigned to either of the remaining rifle squads or the machine-gun squad. Tyson could see his point and allowed Beltran to command his phantom squad, always in the rear guard.

  Beltran carried a Browning automatic shotgun and slung an M-79 grenade launcher over his shoulder. He wore a Colt revolver, and judging from its ebony handles and chrome finish, Tyson doubted that it was standard Army issue. Probably West Miami standard, however. Also smuggled in from the States was Beltran’s machete, made of gleaming surgical steel and with an ivory handle. Beltran said it had belonged to his late father, who had owned a sugar plantation in pre-Castro Cuba. Beltran also claimed that Nuestra Señora del Cobre had appeared to him one night in boot camp and instructed him to kill one hundred communists to avenge his family’s misfortunes. Tyson was somewhat skeptical of this but saw no good reason to disabuse Pfc Beltran of this useful notion.

  Tyson’s platoon command group, usually five men, consisted of himself, Brandt, and Kelly. His second radio operator, Johanson, had been killed at Phu Lai, and the platoon sergeant, Fairchild, was in Japan by now, contemplating the flat bed sheets where his legs should have been. Losing Fairchild, Tyson thought, had been particularly unfortunate. Fairchild had been the only regular Army man among them. At thirty-eight years of age, he had been a stabilizing influence, a father figure to the teenaged platoon. This war, Tyson thought, had become a children’s war. And children, as any schoolmaster would tell you, were capable of astonishing acts of brutality if left unsupervised.

  Tyson moved to the edge of the dike and watched the procession of men coming toward him. As each man passed by, Tyson laid a hand on him and said something. “How’s the jungle rot today, Walker?” “Stand a little closer to the razor next time, Scorello.” “How short, Peterson? Eighteen days? Hang in there. I’ll get you out of the field in a day or two.”

  Brandt handed out malaria pills, and Tyson watched as each man dutifully placed his pill in his mouth. A few paces away, about half of them spit their pills out. In a choice between malaria and what had come to look like certain death or injury in combat, malaria seemed to be the preferred choice of half.

  Tyson looked into each man’s eyes as he passed and saw that too many of them had developed the Thousand-Yard Stare.

  But perhaps today or tomorrow would be the day Alpha Company rotated to the rear; rest, recreation, refitting, and replacements. Not to mention a little debauchery, if the Quang Tri brothels had survived the enemy “cleansing” program. Tyson turned to his radio operator. “Well, Kelly?”

  Kelly nodded in understanding. He said softly to Tyson, “I give them one or two more days, if things go right—no more mine fields, no snipers, no booby traps, and damn sure no more Phu Lais. A break in this shit weather would help.”

  Tyson lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the gray, rain-sodden air. Kelly, like most radio operators, was a notch above the average grunt. Officers picked their RTOs for their ability to think fast and talk quickly on the radio. RTOs observed their officers at close quarters, and ostensibly some leadership ability rubbed off. In fact, Tyson thought Kelly to be officer material.

  Inevitably, Kelly had become almost a friend, though the Army frowned on officers fraternizing with enlisted men. This quaint custom extended into combat, and due to the fact that Alpha Company had only two officers left of the six authorized—Browder and himself—Tyson’s circle of potential friends was limited to Browder. It was, Tyson reflected, lonely at the top.

  Kelly added, “I don’t think anyone is real anxious to reach Hue.”

  Tyson considered a moment, then said, “There are a lot of Marines there waiting for the cavalry to arrive.”

  Kelly shrugged. “This bunch won’t do them a lot of good.” Kelly added, “Besides, the Marines got themselves into that shit, they can get themselves out.”

  Tyson threw down his soggy cigarette and glanced at Kelly, wondering how much more Kelly knew of the men’s state of mind than he did. “Orders is orders.”

  Kelly snapped, “Come on, Lieutenant.” Kelly hesitated, then said softly, “I don’t trust them anymore.”

  “Who? The brass?”

  Kelly snorted. “I haven’t trusted those assholes since I set foot in this country. No, I mean them.” He cocked his head toward the straggling platoon.

  Tyson nodded. He had stopped trusting them a week before, when Fairchild stepped on a land mine. The thought occurred to Tyson, as it had undoubtedly occurred to his men, that Lieutenant Tyson was the last vestige of military authority in the platoon; that if he were removed from the picture, things might, in some dimly perceived way, get better.

  But there was, he hoped, a lot of emotional territory between wishing for the elimination of an officer and actually eliminating him. For the most part he was trusted and respected. Even the Phu Lai debacle hadn’t hurt his standing with the platoon; he’d gotten them into the mess, but he’d also gotten them out.

  Kelly, who seemed to be reading his mind, observed, “You’re the only one in this platoon who knows how to read a map or call in artillery.”

  Tyson didn’t reply.

  “If you weren’t here, the colonel would have to let us join up with the company. Or better yet, with Browder as the only officer left, he’d order us all to stand down.”

  “They’d send some rear echelon lieutenant out to take over.”

  “He wouldn’t last long.”

  Tyson nodded to himself. No, he would not last long. Tyson watched the last man, Beltran, move past him. At ten-meter intervals, the line of troops stretched nearly a quarter kilometer along the muddy, rain-splashed dike. Tyson scratched at a leech bite on his forearm and contemplated the watery blood running over his pallid skin. “Damn it.”

  Brandt looked at the arm. “Still got teeth in there, Lieutenant. It’s getting infected.”

  Tyson squeezed the raised red circle and felt the sharp microscopic teeth in his flesh. The leech had joined him sometime in the night, and by the time he’d awoken, it had engorged itself into a gray, pulsating tumescence the size of a fountain pen. Leeches injected an anticoagulant into the blood, and Tyson knew it would be hours before the holes clotted.

  The leech, he thought, was probably the sole remaining object of disgust among the hardened veterans who had grown accustomed to the repulsive flora and fauna of Southeast Asia, who picked lice out of one another’s hair, and who found poisonous snakes in their sleeping bags on cold nights. The blood-sucking leech was metaphor; it was Vietnam sucking them dry.

  Brandt splashed iodine on the bite. “I’ll give you a needle later so you can dig the teeth out. You shouldn’t h
ave squashed him. Heat their ass with a cigarette. They’ll back off.”

  “I know that.” But Tyson had smashed the obscene thing with his fist and had no regrets about it. He said, “Let’s go.” Tyson, Brandt, and Kelly moved quickly up the column to take their positions in the middle of the formation. Tyson turned to Brandt, who walked bent under the weight of his medical bag, the rain dripping from his camouflage net. Tyson asked, “Did anyone come to you this morning?”

  Brandt raised his head, and Tyson was struck by the color of his flesh. Tyson had seen unhealthy skin that was chalky, mottled, yellow, grayish. But Brandt’s face was actually deep gray, the color of clay. Tyson suspected that the man had been eating some sort of nitrate substance—probably the propellant envelopes from a mortar round—to feign illness but had overdone it. Bastard. “Any sick call, Brandt?”

  Brandt replied tonelessly, “Only Scorello. Said his nerves were shot.”

  Tyson replied, “I told you to send those to me.”

  Brandt shrugged.

  Tyson regarded his medic as they walked. Brandt, the only other college graduate in the platoon, had been a premed student at Bucknell. Having failed to get quickly accepted into a medical school, Brandt belatedly declared himself a conscientious objector and was drafted directly into the Medical Corps. Tyson said to him, “Next time you eat an explosive, Doc, do me a favor and swallow a lit match.”

  “What are you talking about?” Brandt turned his head away as he walked.

  Tyson recalled that Brandt had been in country about seven months. Many COs began by refusing to carry a weapon, but within a month accepted a pistol for self-defense. Sometime later, depending on the depth of their belief and how frequently they brushed shoulders with death, they graduated to an M-16 automatic rifle. Some began requisitioning hand grenades and other nonpacifist ordnance. Brandt, on the other hand, had come to the field fully armed. Tyson made no moral judgment on that account. But, he had come to judge Brandt in other ways, and Spec/4 Steven Brandt was found wanting. Tyson asked, “No one had any physical complaints?”

  Brandt shook his head.

  Tyson reflected on this. There certainly wasn’t a man in the platoon who was physically well. He didn’t have to be a medic to hear the hacking coughs or see the effects of dysentery, fever, and vomiting. Blood and water blisters oozed into rotting boots, and there was barely a man who walked right. Yet no one had tried to go on sick call for at least a week. There was some message there, and Tyson thought it was this: The survivors of First Platoon, Alpha Company, were beyond pain, and that frightened him.

  Tyson, Brandt, and Kelly reached a point in mid-column and fell into file. Kelly remarked to Brandt, “Someday, Doc, when you’re sitting in your consulting office listening to some fat executive complain about his hemorrhoids, remember that you did something good here. Don’t bug out on this platoon, Doc, or you’ll never have that memory.”

  Brandt’s eyes met Kelly’s. Brandt said, “Fuck off.”

  Tyson opened a cellophane packet of stateside Nabisco cream-filled sugar wafers that his sister had sent him and passed it to Kelly, then to Brandt. Tyson took one himself and put it in his mouth, letting it dissolve slowly like a Communion wafer, his mouth salivating in response to the aromatic essence of vanilla and the richness of the cream and sugar. Bless you, Laurie, he thought. Bless you for the sugar wafers. When I get home I’m going to buy you ten boxes of sugar wafers.

  They trekked on slowly through the dead and quiet countryside. After an hour, Tyson pulled his plastic-coated map from his pouch pocket and opened it. He studied the map as he walked, glancing at the terrain features around him. He reckoned he was about equidistant between Highway One to the northwest and the Perfume River to the south. Hue was about three kilometers to the east, off the map. In fact, whenever the rain lightened and the wind blew from the South China Sea, he could hear the far-off rumble of war.

  Intellectually, Tyson was fascinated by the chaos. He understood that he was a direct participant in an historic event. The national life of twenty million people had almost ceased to exist. The country’s social fabric and institutions were in shreds, and its army was near collapse. Hunger and disease stalked the cities and villages. From his small perspective, and from radio and written briefings, Tyson knew that the situation was serious. And if Alpha Company was a microcosm of the American fighting formations in the field, then the Green Machine was barely holding together.

  Kelly’s radio crackled, and the voice of the point squad leader, Moody, came over the speaker. “Hey, there’s a bunch of gooks, about two o’clock, two hundred meters.”

  Kelly handed Tyson the radiophone. Tyson looked out across the rain-splattered rice fields. He spoke into the phone. “Roger. See them. Hold it up. I’ll take a look. Cover me.”

  The platoon came to a gradual halt, and the men knelt in the mud of the wide dike, facing alternately left and right for security. The two machine guns were set up facing the group of unknown Vietnamese who stood on a small bare knoll.

  Tyson motioned to two riflemen, Farley and Simcox. “Let’s take a walk.”

  Tyson, Kelly, and the two men moved farther up the main dike, then turned right, onto a smaller dike, and headed out across the exposed paddies. Tyson drew a pair of field glasses from a plastic case and adjusted the focus. The people appeared to be civilians. “ICs or good actors.”

  Simcox remarked, “Yeah, I haven’t seen a real innocent civilian since I left San Francisco.”

  They turned again onto a still smaller dike that was knee-deep in water, and sloshed forward, toward the Vietnamese. Tyson could see that the people were standing on a burial mound. In fact, they appeared to be burying bodies. He counted ten Vietnamese standing on the mound: five old men, one young boy, and four females, consisting of two women and two teenage girls. Typical of what was left in the villages. They appeared to be peasants, all dressed in black pajamas and conical straw hats. Normally, there would be some mixture of Western clothing, but since Tet, the peasantry had reverted to traditional garb, undoubtedly, Tyson thought, to curry favor with the ascendant power. If the communist offensive failed, the peasants would be back in jeans and Hawaiian shirts. Being a peasant was tough.

  A few of the Vietnamese glanced at the approaching Americans, but otherwise they went about their unhappy business. Kelly remarked, “I can smell the stiffs from here.”

  Tyson came within twenty meters of the earth mound that rose from the gray water. He called out, “Dung cu don!” The Vietnamese stopped moving and faced him. They seemed to know the drill because they separated so he could see them all and kept their hands to their front. The boy and a young woman dropped their shovels.

  Tyson, with Kelly beside him, walked out of the water onto the mound. Farley and Simcox covered. Tyson stood directly in front of the group; then looked down at the bodies. He counted eight of them, wrapped in good, white cotton bed sheets, which made him think the bodies had come from Hue. One of the shrouded corpses was a small child. Tyson surveyed the burial detail and met their eyes, one at a time. He said, “ID—cho toi xem gian can cuoc. ID.”

  The six males and four females produced plastic ID cards from their pajamas. Tyson inspected them perfunctorily, then following protocol, addressed the oldest male, a bald, age-spotted man with a wispy, gray beard. “Ong lam gi o day?”

  The old man looked at the young boy, who replied in English, “We bury mama-san, papa-san. VC kill beaucoup—VC very bad, VC number fucking ten—”

  “Okay, cut the bullshit.” Tyson looked at the freshly opened holes and counted six finished graves and two more started. The Vietnamese had a strong prohibition against mass graves, and the holes must have taken hours to dig with the two shovels. Each body, he knew, had been wrapped first in black cloth, then in white. Grains of rice had been placed in the mouth. In the end, he thought, even a dying civilization tries to inter its dead properly.

  Tyson could not imagine anything more depressing than this gray ta
bleau of frightened villagers burying their families in the cold winter rain. He spoke again to the old man. “Ong o dau den?”

  Again, the boy answered. “We from An Ninh Ha. Beaucoup VC come. Kill papa-san, mama-san, baby-san—”

  “Okay, ace, cool it.” Tyson looked at his map and located An Ninh Ha. “Which way is your village? Con bao xa nua den lang?”

  The boy pointed to a mist-shrouded tree line in the far distance. Tyson estimated it at about a kilometer. He took a bearing with his compass, then looked at his map again and said to Kelly, “According to the map, there’s a hospital there.”

  Kelly glanced at Tyson’s map. “Don’t count on it.”

  Tyson looked again at the white bed sheets and turned to the boy. “Nha Thuong—hôpital?”

  The boy nodded vigorously. “Beaucoup VC in Nha Thuong.”

  Tyson’s eyes met Kelly’s, and Kelly observed, “Good place to avoid.”

  Tyson replied, “The mission, Kelly. The mission of the infantry is to—”

  “Make contact with and destroy the enemy. Fuck it, Lieutenant.” Kelly cocked his head toward the two riflemen at the edge of the mound and said quietly, “No one has to know about the beaucoup fucking VC. No one gives a shit.”

  Tyson spoke to the boy again. “VC in Nha Thuong? Bac si in Nha Thuong?”

  The boy nodded again. “Français. Français. Catholique. Catholique.”

  Tyson looked again at Kelly.

  Kelly’s expression conveyed that he could not have cared less if the pope were in the hospital. He suddenly turned and knelt beside one of the bodies. Blood had seeped through the white sheet, and Kelly stared at the red, rain-soaked blotch. “Stinks.” He grasped the shoulder of the corpse and shook the body. “Big sucker.” Kelly drew his Marine K-bar knife, and made a slice through the white sheet from forehead to chest. The Vietnamese began wailing. Kelly ripped open the double shroud and exposed the blue-white features of a young man, the slice from Kelly’s knife bisecting his bloodless face. Kelly ripped further and exposed the khaki tunic of a North Vietnamese soldier.