by Tim O'Brien
In May we were ordered back. Inserted by chopper in the villages of My Khe, a few thousand meters south of the My Lais, we hit immediate contact. The Viet Cong were there, waiting in ambush across the paddy. The people of My Khe 3 were silent; they let us walk into the ambush, not a word of warning.
The day was quiet and hot, and I was thinking about Coke and rest. Then the bushes just erupted. I was carrying the radio for the company commander, and I remember getting separated from him, thinking I had to get up there. But I couldn’t. I lay there. I screamed, buried my head.
A hand grenade came out of the bushes, skidded across my helmet, a red sardine can with explosives inside. I remember my glimpse of the thing, fizzling there beside me. I remember rolling to my left; remember waiting for the loudest noise of my life. It was just a pop, but I remember thinking that must be how it sounds to a dead man. Nothing hurt much. Clauson, a big fellow, took the force of the grenade. I lay there and watched him trot a few steps, screaming; then he lay on his back and screamed. I couldn’t move. I kept hollering, begging for an end to it. The battalion commander was on the radio, asking where my captain was, wanting to talk to him, wanting me to pop smoke to mark our position, wanting me to call the other platoons. Bullets were coming from the bushes. Clauson was gone, I don’t know where or how, and when I put my head up to look for him, I couldn’t see anyone. Everything was noise, and it lasted on and on. It was over, I knew, when Mad Mark came out of the bushes, carrying a tall, skinny guy named Arnold over his shoulder. He swiveled Arnold into a helicopter, and we went north, into the My Lais.
Along the way we encountered the citizens of Pinkville; they were the nonparticipants in war. Children under ten years, women, old folks who planted their eyes into the dirt and were silent. “Where are the VC?” Captain Johansen would ask, nicely enough. “Where are all the men? Where is Poppa-san?” No answers, not from the villagers. Not until we ducked poppa’s bullet or stepped on his land mine.
Alpha Company was fatigued and angry leaving My Lai 5. Another futile search of a nearly deserted village, another fat zero turned up through interrogation. Moving north to cross the Diem Diem River, the company took continuous sniper fire, and it intensified into a sharp thunder when we reached the river and a bridge, seventy-five meters long and perfectly exposed, the only way across. One man at a time, churning as fast as the rucksacks and radios and machine guns allowed, the unit crossed the Song Diem Diem, the rest of the troops spraying out protective fire, waiting their own turn, and we were scared. It was a race. A lieutenant was the starter, crouched at the clay runway leading into the paddy, hollering “Go” for each of us, then letting loose a burst of fire to cover the guy. The captain, first man to win his race, was at the finish line. He gave the V sign to each man across. It may have signaled victory or valor. It did not mean peace. The men were angry. No enemy soldiers to shoot back at, only hedgerows and bushes and clumps of dead trees.
We were mortared that night. We crawled about in gullies and along paddy dikes, trying to evade. We saw the red quick flashes of their mortar tubes, but no one dared fire back, for it would do nothing but give away more precisely our position. The captain had me call headquarters to get gunships, and in the middle of the communication the mortar rounds fell even closer, and Johansen muttered that they were bracketing us, walking their rounds in from two directions, and on our hands and knees, my antenna dragging along in the paddy, the night purely black, we crawled forward and backward and finally into a village of My Lai, where we spent that night. Platoons lay out in the water of the paddies. They were afraid to move.
In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good.
We walked to other villages, and the phantom Forty-eighth Viet Cong Battalion walked with us. When a booby-trapped artillery round blew two popular soldiers into a hedgerow, men put their fists into the faces of the nearest Vietnamese, two frightened women living in the guilty hamlet, and when the troops were through with them, they hacked off chunks of thick black hair. The men were crying, doing this. An officer used his pistol, hammering it against a prisoner’s skull.
Scraps of our friends were dropped in plastic body bags. Jet fighters were called in. The hamlet was leveled, and napalm was used. I heard screams in the burning black rubble. I heard the enemy’s AK-47 rifles crack out like impotent popguns against the jets. There were Viet Cong in that hamlet. And there were babies and children and people who just didn’t give a damn in there, too. But Chip and Tom were on the way to Graves Registration in Chu Lai; and they were dead, and it was hard to be filled with pity.
We continued the march. The days baked red clay into our hides. One afternoon in mid-May we set up a defensive perimeter atop a high and safely steep hill, and we rested, taking a resupply of hot food, mail, Coke, and beer. Below us farmers worked in their paddies. A lieutenant—the one who earned the nickname Mad Mark—perched on a rock, pushed his spectacles against his nose, peered through the sniper scope mounted on his new M-14 rifle, and squeezed off a bullet at one of the farmers. The fellow fell. Mad Mark was elated: a bull’s-eye at three hundred meters. When the lieutenant took a squad down to examine the results, he radioed back to me: “Wounded him in the leg. He’s carrying rice and some papers in a small satchel. Call higher headquarters ASAP. Tell ’em we got one Victor Charlie, male, military-aged. Engaged with small-arms fire while trying to evade. How’s your copy?”
I swallowed and said, “Good copy. Anything further?”
He paused. “Well, tell ’em the dink has a broken leg. Better get a dust-off out here. Save some chow for us.”
Coming off the hill next day, a kid named Slocum hit a mine, shredding a leg. “Champion 48, this is Echo 40. Request urgent dust-off. Grid 788934. Urgent. I say again …”
And again that night. Small arms and grenades, two men wounded. Another man, lucky that time around, dislocated a shoulder as he dived for cover.
Following day, the officers decided to move us to the ocean. We took sniper fire along the way. My pack fell apart, rubber bands holding the radio antenna snapped, and the six-foot antenna dragged in the dirt. Mad Mark told me to wake up and get my shit together. But it was beginning not to matter. We walked like madmen, canteens going dry, and nothing stopped us. Finally came the sand, pines, a stretch of miraculously white beach, a sheaf of blue and perfect water—the South China Sea to the east of the My Lais—and if we’d had a raft and courage, that ocean could have carried us a thousand miles and more toward home.
Instead, security was placed out in the pines, and we swam. We bellowed and grinned, weapons and ammo in the sand, not giving a damn. We slammed into the water. We punched at it and played in it, soaked our heads in it, slapped it to make cracking, smashing sounds, same as blasting a hand through glass.
Mail came. My girlfriend traveled in Europe, with her boyfriend. My mother and father were afraid for me, praying; my sister was in school, and my brother was playing basketball. The Viet Cong were nearby. They fired for ten seconds, and I got onto the radio, called for helicopters, popped smoke, and the medics carried three men to the choppers, and we went to another village.
Fourteen
Step Lightly
The Bouncing Betty is feared most. It is a common mine. It leaps out of its nest in the earth, and when it hits its apex, it explodes, reliable and deadly. If a fellow is lucky and if the mine is in an old emplacement, having been exposed to the rains, he may notice its three prongs jutting out of the clay. The prongs serve as the Bouncing Betty’s firing device. Step on them, and the unlucky soldier will hear a muffled explosion; that’s the initial charge sending the mine on its one-yard leap into the sky. The fellow takes another step and begins the next and his backside is bleeding and he’s dead. We call it “o
l’ step and a half.”
More destructive than the Bouncing Betty are the booby-trapped mortar and artillery rounds. They hang from trees. They nestle in shrubbery. They lie under the sand. They wait beneath the mud floors of huts. They haunted us. Chip, my black buddy from Orlando, strayed into a hedgerow and triggered a rigged 105 artillery round. He died in such a way that, for once, you could never know his color. He was wrapped in a plastic body bag, we popped smoke, and a helicopter took him away, my friend. And there was Shorty, a volatile fellow so convinced that the mines would take him that he spent a month AWOL. In July he came back to the field, joking but still unsure of it all. One day, when it was very hot, he sat on a booby-trapped 155 round.
When you are ordered to march through areas such as Pinkville—GI slang for Song My, parent village of My Lai—the Batangan Peninsula or the Athletic Field, appropriately named for its flat acreage of grass and rice paddy, when you step about these pieces of ground, you do some thinking. You hallucinate. You look ahead a few paces and wonder what your legs will resemble if there is more to the earth in that spot than silicates and nitrogen. Will the pain be unbearable? Will you scream or fall silent? Will you be afraid to look at your own body, afraid of the sight of your own red flesh and white bone? You wonder if the medic remembered his morphine. You wonder if your friends will weep.
It is not easy to fight this sort of fear, but you try. You decide to be ultracareful—the hard-nosed, realistic approach. You try to second-guess the mine. Should you put your foot to that flat rock or the clump of weed to its rear? Paddy dike or water? You wish you were Tarzan, able to swing with the vines. You try to trace the footprints of the man to your front. You give it up when he curses you for following too closely; better one man dead than two.
The moment-to-moment, step-by-step decision-making preys on your mind. The effect sometimes is paralysis. You are slow to rise from rest breaks. You walk like a wooden man, like a toy soldier out of Victor Herbert’s Babes in Toyland. Contrary to military and parental training, you walk with your eyes pinned to the dirt, spine arched, and you are shivering, shoulders hunched. If you are not overwhelmed by complete catatonia, you may react as Philip did on the day he was told to police up one of his friends, victim of an antipersonnel mine. Afterward, as dusk fell, Philip was swinging his entrenching tool like a madman, sweating and crying and hollering. He dug a foxhole four feet into the clay. He sat in it and sobbed. Everyone—all his friends and all the officers—was very quiet, and not a person said anything. No one comforted him until it was very dark. Then, to stop the noise, one man at a time would talk to him, each of us saying he understood and that tomorrow it would all be over. The captain said he would get Philip to the rear, find him a job driving a truck or painting fences.
Once in a great while we would talk seriously about the mines. “It’s more than the fear of death that chews on your mind,” one soldier, nineteen years old, eight months in the field, said. “It’s an absurd combination of certainty and uncertainty: the certainty that you’re walking in mine fields, walking past the things day after day; the uncertainty of your every movement, of which way to shift your weight, of where to sit down.
“There are so many ways the VC can do it. So many configurations, so many types of camouflage to hide them. I’m ready to go home.”
The kid is right:
The M-14 antipersonnel mine, nicknamed the “toe popper.” It will take a hunk out of your foot. Smitty lost a set of toes. Another man who is now just a blur of gray eyes and brown hair—he was with us for only a week—lost his left heel.
The booby-trapped grenade. Picture a bushy shrub along your path of march. Picture a tin can secured to the shrub, open and directed toward the trail. Inside the can is a hand grenade, safety pin removed, so that only the can’s metal circumference prevents the “spoon,” or firing handle, from jumping off the grenade and detonating it. Finally, a trip wire is attached to the grenade, extending across the pathway, perhaps six inches above the dirt. Hence, when your delicate size-eight foot caresses that wire, the grenade is yanked from its container, releasing the spoon and creating problems for you and your future.
The Soviet TMB and the Chinese antitank mines. Although designed to detonate under the pressure of heavy vehicles, the antitank mine is known to have shredded more than one soldier.
The directional-fragmentation mine. The concave-faced directional mine contains from 450 to 800 steel fragments embedded in a matrix and backed by an explosive charge—TNT or petnam. The mine is aimed at your anticipated route of march. Your counterpart in uniform, a gentle young man, crouches in the jungle, just off the trail. When you are in range, he squeezes his electronic firing device. The effects of the the mine are similar to those of a twelve-gauge shotgun fired at close range. United States Army training manuals describe this country’s equivalent device, the Claymore mine: “It will allow for wider distribution and use, particularly in large cities. It will effect considerable savings in materials and logistics.” In addition, they call the mine cold-blooded.
The corrosive-action-car-killer. The CACK is nothing more than a grenade, its safety pin extracted and spoon held in place by a rubber band. It is deposited in your gas tank. The corrosive action of the gasoline eats away the rubber band, releasing the spoon, blowing you up in a week or less. Although rarely encountered by the foot-borne infantryman, the device gives the rear-echelon mine finder (REMF) something to ponder as he delivers the general’s laundry.
In the three days I spent writing this, mines and men came together three more times. Seven more legs, one more arm.
The immediacy of the last explosion—three legs, ten minutes ago—made me ready to burn the midsection of this report, the flippant itemization of these killer devices. Hearing over the radio what I just did, only enough for a flashing memory of what it is all about, makes the Catch-22 jokes into a cemetery of half-truths. “Orphan 22, this is … this is Yankee 22 … mine, mine. Two guys … legs are off … I say again, legs off … request urgent dust-off grid 711888 … give me ETA … get that damn bird.” Tactical Operations Center: “You’re coming in distorted … Yankee 22? Say again … speak slowly … understand you need dust-off helicopter?” Pause. “This is Yankee 22 … for Chri … ake … need chopper … two men, legs are …”
But only to say another truth will I let the half-truths stand. The catalog of mines will be retained, because that is how we talked about them, with a funny laugh, flippantly, with a chuckle. It is funny. It’s absurd.
Patent absurdity. The troops are going home, and the war has not been won, even with a quarter of the United States Army fighting it. We slay one of them, hit a mine, kill another, hit another mine. It is funny. We walk through the mines, trying to catch the Viet Cong Forty-eighth Battalion like inexperienced hunters after a hummingbird. But Charlie finds us far more often than we find him. He is hidden among the mass of civilians, or in tunnels, or in jungles. So we walk to find him, stalking the mythical, phantomlike Forty-eighth Battalion from here to there to here to there. And each piece of ground left behind is his from the moment we are gone on our next hunt. It is not a war fought for territory, nor for pieces of land that will be won and held. It is not a war fought to win the hearts of the Vietnamese nationals, not in the wake of contempt drawn on our faces and on theirs, not in the wake of a burning village, a trampled rice paddy, a battered detainee. If land is not won and if hearts are at best left indifferent; if the only obvious criterion of military success is body count and if the enemy absorbs losses as he has, still able to lure us amid his crop of mines; if soldiers are being withdrawn, with more to go later and later and later; if legs make me more of a man, and they surely do, my soul and character and capacity to love notwithstanding; if any of this is truth, a soldier can only do his walking, laughing along the way and taking a funny, crooked step.
After the war, he can begin to be bitter. Those who point at and degrade his bitterness, those who declare that it’s all a part of wa
r and that this is a job which must be done—to those patriots I will recommend a postwar vacation to this land, where they can swim in the sea, lounge under a fine sun, stroll in the quaint countryside, wife and son in hand. Certainly, there will be a mine or two still in the earth. Alpha Company did not detonate all of them.
Fifteen
Centurion
Alpha Company was resting in a village, using water from a deep well, when one of the men found an NVA rifle. It was hidden under a shrub. “Jesus, looky-looky! A little toy!” The man danced up and down, delighted. It was an AK-47, beat-up looking. A single banana-shaped magazine of ammunition was wrapped in cloth beside the weapon. “And we thought this village was so nice and cozy! Ha, the sneaky bastards!”
Captain Johansen ordered us to search the rest of the village, and we searched until sundown, not finding a thing. The villagers watched sullenly. We tore up the floors of their huts and overturned huge jugs of rice and kicked straw out of pig styes. We poured sand into the well.
