If I Die in a Combat Zone

by Tim O'Brien

Captain Smith ambled over and sat down on the dike. “Got me a little scratch from that mine. Here, take a look. Got myself a Purple Heart.” He showed me a hole in his shirt. It looked like a moth had done it, that small. “My first big operation, and I get a Purple Heart. Gonna be a long year, Timmy. But wow, I’ve lost a lot of men today.”

  Two Vietnamese scouts had been killed by the mine. When the dust-off choppers came in, we loaded up the dead scouts and eight wounded GIs. In half an hour Alpha had lost seventeen men.

  After the helicopters had gone, Captain Smith and the track commander argued again. We sat on the paddy dikes, the enemy presumably still around, while the two officers debated issues of honor and competence. Smith said the track commander should have informed him that they had a policy of backing up when taking incoming fire. “Damn it, I’m going to suffer for this,” Smith said. “What’s my commander to think? He’s gonna see a damn casualty list a mile long, and it’s only my first operation. My career is in real jeopardy now.” And the track commander swore and said Smith should have known the rudiments of track warfare. He muttered something about ROTC.

  Then they argued about what to do next. Orders from battalion headquarters were clear: We were supposed to sweep through the hamlet to a helicopter pickup zone a few miles away. Finally the two officers decided to forget the sweep. The tracks turned around. We would make a wide skirt around the village, let the Viet Cong have the place.

  We climbed aboard the tracks, keeping our gear on, and the column moved ten yards and stopped. The track commander radioed Captain Smith and said the infantry would have to get off and walk, taking the lead.

  “You want us to walk, huh?” Smith shook his head. “Now, why the hell do you want us to walk three miles?”

  “Mines,” the track commander said. “This place is loaded with them. You’ll have to put a man up front with the mine detector and have all the troops walk ahead of us to look for the damn things.”

  “My God, man, you want me to use my men to find mines for you? You mean that?”

  “That’s affirmative,” the track commander radioed back. “The mines are pretty thick. We’ve got a mine detector, may as well use it.”

  “Mine detector, hell. That thing won’t find a mine in a million years. Might as well tell my troops to roll along in front of your tracks to clear the way.”

  “Look, be reasonable. What’s going to happen if one of my tracks hit a booby-trapped 105? It’ll blow us all to hell.”

  “Reasonable. You tell me to be reasonable? You’re trying to tell me to use my men as mine detectors? What about the Bouncing Betties, damn it? One of my men hits a Betty and he’s dead. Christ, those things don’t even scratch a track.”

  Smith called his platoon leaders over, explained the problem, and tried to talk them into going along with the track commander. The platoon leaders laughed and said they wouldn’t do it. Smith said he knew it was a crazy order, but what could he do? The platoon leaders walked away, ignoring him, but Smith told everyone to jump off the tracks. We lined up, ready to walk. When the platoon leaders sulked and delayed, Smith waddled over to the command track and continued the argument. In ten minutes he waded back and told us to get aboard. The track commander was tired of arguing, it was late in the day, and everyone was in a hurry to eat hot chow. We turned our backs on the village and rode away.

  After this disaster, Captain Smith tried to regain his leadership, but the lieutenants gracefully avoided him. He was openly ridiculed by the men. There was half-serious talk about his being a marked man. The black soldiers hated him, claiming it was only a matter of time before someone chucked a grenade into his foxhole, and we were all careful not to sleep near Captain Smith.

  His sense of direction was absurdly bad. We were late arriving at objectives. He was never certain where he was or where to go next. Calling for artillery rounds to mark the company’s position, he would sometimes motion at a piece of the sky, predicting the round would burst there; then the explosion would come directly in back of him. He would chuckle and holler at his platoon leaders for getting him lost.

  In mid-July we were CA’d into a burning village. Jets were dropping tons of napalm. There was a company of GIs on the opposite side, engaged with the enemy in loud, desperate-sounding battle, and we could hear their calls for dust-offs over the radio as we went down.

  We landed and spread out and moved in on the ville. The First Platoon was hit immediately. A grenade knocked off a lieutenant’s left testicle. The gunfire was close and loud. Smith hollered at the Third Platoon, and they ran up and lay down and returned fire into a hedgerow. The fire fight lasted five minutes. Then the First Platoon radio operator called. His friend was shot, he said. His platoon leader was mangled.

  We called the battalion commander, a tough colonel circling around in his helicopter directing things. We asked him to come down to evacuate the wounded. The colonel asked if we had a secure landing zone, asked where the enemy was, asked if the dust-offs were urgent, and then said we should call into headquarters for a regular medivac chopper.

  The First Platoon radio man broke in. “We’ve got two men badly hurt. Need an urgent—repeat, urgent—dust-off. One of the men will die. There’s no time.”

  “Roger,” the colonel said. His helicopter buzzed the treetops, scouting the battlefield. He flew for another five minutes, then called again and told us to call for a dust-off through the normal channels. “Damn it, I haven’t got time to do everything. Got to direct this operation.”

  We acknowledged, but the First Platoon man broke in and said his friend had a sucking chest wound and would die without quick help.

  “Soldier, stay off this net. You relay your damn requests through your CO. Stay out of this.”

  “Roger that, sir.” The First Platoon man paused, then came on the radio one more time and said his CO was unconscious and bleeding.

  The jets pounded the village. With each pass, smoke ballooned into the air; then another jet whined over our heads, over the village, into the smoke; then more smoke shot up. We shouted over the noise, firing into the enemy’s hedgerow, waiting for the dust-off.

  When the jets went home and the smoke was gone, the battalion commander came down and picked up the wounded officer and a dead man with a sucking chest wound.

  Later, we entered the village. There were two dead VC. An old lady wandered about, smiling, and that was all. We took papers off the VC, and the woman went away.

  The men made a perimeter around the village. Since everyone knew we would be mortared, we dug our foxholes deep. And we set up listening posts inside the village itself. The place was full of tunnels and bomb shelters, and the napalm might have missed something.

  In the night, the mortar barrage fell on us. Two men were wounded.

  We slept some more.

  Then Captain Smith and three others opened fire inside the perimeter. The thing they shot lay there all night, and in the morning we kicked a dead pig.

  The next day we blew up tunnels and bomb shelters. A piece of clay came down and hit a man, slicing off his nose, and he drowned to death in his own blood. He had been eating ham and eggs out of a can.

  That afternoon we continued through the countryside. We stopped and rested on a hill. Thinking about security, Captain Smith sent a patrol down to circle the hill—six men. There was an explosion a while later, and I called out to them, asking if everything were all right. They didn’t answer, so we waited. Captain Smith said it was just a stray artillery round. We ate supper. Then a member of the patrol stumbled through the bushes, bleeding, sobbing. The patrol had hit a big mine. The rest were still down there. The medics sweated and tried, but two of the men were dead, and one lost his leg, and the others couldn’t move. The battalion commander flew down and picked them up. He got a Distinguished Flying Cross for that, an important medal for colonels.

  Near the end of July, Alpha Company was choppered to the top of a mountain. There was a monastery there, but intelligence told Captain
Smith to look for a fight.

  We landed next to a statute of the Buddha, and a monk strolled out to meet us. He brought watermelon and other fruit. So we went inside the gates and walked down neatly swept paths, through gardens and past small statues.

  The monk held his head high on a neck he did not use. To look left or right, he pivoted his body at the trunk. He had a round, bald skull with brown skin stretched over it like cowhide tanning in the sun—skin pulled tight over the cranium and over a thin, pointed nose.

  He pointed out his gardens with watermelons and things that looked like cucumbers. The paths were red-colored; the buildings were white and scrubbed. He showed us a brood of children, half of them orphans, he said, and the rest just abandoned. He pointed at his bald head and chuckled.

  The place was as far from the war as you can get in Vietnam: south of Chu Lai, north of the Batangan, east of Highway One, west of the sea. It was on the side of a ridge line that sprouted palms and pine and, in his gardens, watermelon and fruit.

  He showed us where to dig foxholes in his yard. With grace, he accepted C rations and allowed the medics to look after the children. Night came, and the monk went into a white building, burned incense, and went to sleep.

  I kept guard, slept, took the guard again when it began to rain. I opened C rations in the darkness and listened to the radio. Someone called and reported movement on one of the mountain slopes. Out that way, GIs threw grenades at the breeze. They blew a Claymore mine, settling the matter for the moment. The Claymore gave an echo. Its steel pellets, seven hundred of them, went through the bushes, across the courtyard, where they blew bits of white stone from the Buddha’s belly. He protested no more than the monk when we went away in the morning.

  During the first days of August, Captain Smith was relieved of his command of Alpha Company.

  Eighteen

  The Lagoon

  Where a reef of scarlet coral touches against the Batangan Peninsula there is a lagoon rimmed by stretches of sand for a mile and more.

  Beyond the saltwater and beyond the sand there are growths of tropical fir and coconut trees, living sparsely off soil made more of clams and chloride than nitrogen. Farther inland come layers of sedge, paddies brewing rice and mosquitoes, swamps, clusters of jungle, verdant places where every sort of thing grows and decays.

  First, though, is the lagoon, and it was there that Alpha Company made its camp. We came to protect the place. We came to provide security for the small village that took its food and living out of the lagoon. On a knob of land overlooking the village, we erected sunshades, dug foxholes, rolled out canisters of concertina wire, and made friendships with the villagers. The children brought us crayfish, and we gave out C ration candy bars, a formality at first, but later the exchanges seemed something more than barter. We swam in the lagoon and did some fishing. We skipped rocks across calm waters. Sometimes we walked about the beaches without our rifles.

  The lagoon must always have been a good place. Plenty of fish from the sea, cool winds for land that is always hot. Protection from the reef, in the old days, centuries ago, the lagoon must have been a port for travel and adventure. Who knows, perhaps the place once boasted its own lagoon monster, a sea serpent with green scales and bulging eyes and an appetite for careless fishermen and little boys.

  It sets a fellow to thinking. Back when kings were kings and tyrants were called tyrants, the lagoon must have had a proud populace.

  On the red reef they would have built large fires at night to keep it clear of shipwrecks. The people would have been naked on the hot days. They would have had white pagodas for Buddha, they would have burned sticks of incense in his honor. For the boys, adulthood would have meant bringing in fish from the sea.

  The place would have been tranquil, even with a lagoon monster lurking about.

  But all that is conjecture, and it is better to describe the lagoon as Alpha Company found it.

  On each black midnight a hundred fishermen take a hundred bark skiffs down to the lagoon. They sail a half-mile into the lagoon, each boat lighted by a single lantern, a hundred white lights bobbing among the waves. It looks like Minneapolis when you come in at 15,000 feet on the midnight 707 from Seattle. The fishermen fish until morning. Then they bring in eel, octopus, squid, red snappers, crayfish, and seaweed.

  Old men arise just at daybreak and go down to the water to greet the fishermen.

  The old men wade out and help push the boats to the sand; then the fishermen sleep, and the old men lay out the catch to dry and smoke in the sun.

  In an hour the women come out, the old men go to sit in the shade, the children do some sweeping.

  It is not a village Gauguin would have painted; it is not a romantic place. The village starts where the coral meets land, and it extends for two hundred meters along the beach. It is a war village, a refugee camp.

  It is made of army tin. The huts are long, metal barracks, one contiguous to the next, identical in squalor, crammed full of families, surrounded by rows of the new kind of army concertina wire, the sort with tiny razor blades replacing barbs. Two thousand people live there.

  Beyond the wire are mines. The curved stretch of sand holds Bouncing Betties. The ground is loose, and the Betties pop into the air, explode, and spray sand and clams and flesh out for twenty yards. The beach is littered with Bouncing Betties. And where there are no Betties there are booby-trapped grenades, some set out by the enemy, others scattered by the Popular Forces to defend the village.

  Where the fir and coconut trees grow, the ground is firmer. There, along with Betties, are M-14 toe poppers, booby-trapped artillery rounds, and other gadgets. The lagoon is not the place you would have found if you’d explored the place with Magellan or Captain Cook or whoever sailed here in other centuries.

  Still, when it is midnight and the fishermen are out on the water, the lagoon is calm, and it’s as good a place to be as any. And when a full moon is out, it is the best place to be. Village guards beat out “all is well” on hollowed hunks of wood. The breeze blows in, you can see the moon shining a beacon across the water, tracing a path out to the boats. On those nights you can think about how the lagoon once was. You may have met a lover there.

  It was hot. I was sleeping when the boats came in, but when Bates and I went down to the water we saw the catch was tremendous. Thousands of baby shrimp lay drying on the beach. Two children were pulling seaweed out of the nets. Silently, the old men were brushing black, smelly pitch onto the skiffs, preparing them for another night on the lagoon. A jumble of women were leveling sand for a village square. Already they had raised a flagpole, and on top of it was a yellow flag crossed by horizontal red stripes, the South Vietnamese flag, looking grotesque, out of place.

  In the middle of the morning the women were well into their work and the fishermen at the third level of sleep. I was at the radios. We were called by one of our patrols along the beach: “It’s a mine. We’ll need a chopper out here, urgent. Guy’s whole leg is gone, have to make it fast. Got our position?”

  I made the old frantic call to headquarters, curious about who I was trying to save, names and faces flicking past, a list of wanted posters. “Bandit 99, this is Zulu 10. Request urgent dust-off. U.S. soldier, mine, he’s hurt bad. Grid 789765.”

  “Seventy-two, this is 10. Need to know extent of injuries. Any hostile fire. You got a secure landing zone? Got smoke?”

  A new lieutenant was out with the patrol, and he was cool. “Well, I don’t know, the guy’s hurt real bad, it’s his whole leg, he’s just lying there. We’ll make some kind of litter, just get that bird out here. No enemy fire, no problem. LZ secure, we’re standing by with smoke.”

  The dust-off was completed in eighteen minutes, but it wasn’t fast enough. The soldier had stepped on a rigged mortar round, and there wasn’t a chance.

  He was a quiet, intelligent Texan, an NCO named Martin, but when the chopper lifted him off the beach and over the old lagoon, he died.

  The next
day, July 7, Bates and I cooked crayfish at dusk. Resupply had brought us canned margarine and lemons, and it turned out to be a real feast. In the morning we called in another dust-off. A GI named Peterson had gone fishing with hand grenades, and one of them blew his belly away. Six of the men carried him out of the lagoon. They had him in a poncho. The plastic was filled with sea-water and Peterson’s stomach.

  At Landing Zone Minuteman, an American firebase half a mile from the lagoon, mortarmen perform a nightly ritual, week after week. Acting as the village’s line of light-artillery protection, they calibrate their weapons, determine grid coordinates for defensive firing, and, finally, they register the guns for accuracy by firing upon uninhabited target areas around the lagoon. If the lagoon is attacked, they’re able to fire immediately.

  One night they made a mistake. A buck sergeant determined the gun elevation and deflection and called the numbers to his RTO, who passed the information on to a gun crew. The firing data recorded in the gun pits were not the data recorded in the bunker. At 10:20 P.M. the guns fired, the same old ritual, and at 10:21 the rounds were falling on the lagoon’s little village.

  Thirty-three villagers were wounded. Thirteen were killed: Bi Thi Cu, 2 years old; Dao Van Cu, Bi’s brother, 4; Le Xi, 2; Dao Thi Thuong, 9; Pham Thi Ku, 4; Pham Khanh, 15; Le Chuc, 8; Le Thi Tarn, 10—the children.

  Dust-off helicopters shuttled to the lagoon all night, working in the rain, ferrying the casualties to hospitals and morgues. GIs scrambled through the rain and tin rubble for survivors. Military inspectors were there within an hour, taking notes and looking grim.

  A month later, when the reports were finalized and guilt apportioned, solatium payments were made to the families of those killed and maimed—twenty dollars for each wounded villager; thirty-three dollars and ninety cents for each death. Certain blood for uncertain reasons. No lagoon monster ever terrorized like this.

  Nineteen