by Robert Roth
“I’m from Birmingham. Where’d you get your degree?”
“Gainesville, University of Florida,” answered Kramer the way he always did when he thought the person he was talking to might otherwise say, “Oh, that’s in Miami, isn’t it?”
“That’s in Miami, isn’t it?” asked Forest.
“No, Gainesville.”
“That’s right, you said Gainesville, didn’t you?”
Kramer nodded. “What’d you get your degree in, Forest?”
“Phys. Ed.”
“Gonna teach Phys. Ed.?”
“No, I’m gonna make the Marine Corps my career. I just needed a degree to get my commission. It was real interesting though.”
“I imagine it was.” — ‘A lifer. I knew it.’
“Did you see that Gook that just walked by?”
“Yeah.”
“His name is Binh. He’s a Kit Carson Scout. You know what they are, don’t you — ” Kramer did, but Forest continued without waiting for a reply. “ — They’re former VC or NVA who were captured or chieu hoied. We use them a lot. I make it a point never to trust a Gook, but he seems to be all right — brought up around here, knows the whole area like the back of his hand.”
“Do you get many chieu hois?”
“Not around here. They usually fight to the death, but every once in a while we corner a few Gooks and they jump up yelling “chieu hoi” just to cheat my platoon out of some confirmed kills. The government gives the slant-eyed bastards a piece of land and more money than they’ve ever had in their lives.”
“How long have you been here, Forest?”
“Call me Maynard.”
Kramer waited a few seconds before asking again, “How long you been here, Maynard?”
Forest stopped in front of a plywood building. “Four months. This is our hootch.” He grabbed Kramer’s seabag. “I’ll take it inside, and you can go see Nash.”
“I’ve been looking at your record book, Kramer. The test scores in it indicate you’re quite a bit more intelligent than most of the infantry officers we get here. This could make things a lot easier for you. Chances are it’ll make them harder. Do you have any idea why you got infantry instead of finance . . . even though you have a degree in acounting?”
“I requested infantry, sir.”
The colonel waited for more of an explanation but, when he saw none coming, went on. “I had a feeling you did. . . . As I was saying, you’re going to see a lot of things done here you won’t like. You’re also going to see men get killed following orders you question. It’s important, in fact it’s your job, to see that there’s as little of this as possible. You notice I say possible, because in most cases you won’t be able to do a damn thing about it. This war’s been going on for a long time. There’s about as much chance of you changing the way it’s fought as there is of you winning it single-handed. Your job is to make decisions within the boundaries set by your superiors, and no more. Otherwise you’ll be risking your own neck and maybe the lives of your men. This war is just like any other — things are done in certain ways, not because they’re best, but because they’re judged best by those that make the decisions. Don’t try and change things that can’t be changed. You’ll only end up doing more harm than good. Any questions so far?”
“No sir.” While Nash spoke, Kramer concentrated more on him than on what he was saying. Kramer had expected a talk on how great the Corps was, what a good job it was doing, and how he was now a part of it and had a chance to add to its glory. He had also expected a lecture on the importance of the United States being in Vietnam. Kramer hadn’t expected what he was now hearing. So far, Nash had refused to make a fool of himself, refused to give Kramer anything to scoff at. Kramer’s chair seemed suddenly uncomfortable. Nash’s eyes upon him, he remained motionless.
“I guess now you’re mainly interested in what you’ll be doing the next few days. First you’ll stay here for five days of Induction School, then you’ll join one of our rifle companies as a platoon commander. Anything else you need to know, you’ll find out soon enough. I’m not going to waste your time. Any questions?”
“No sir.”
As Kramer left the colonel’s office, he wondered whether this had been the same speech all the boot lieutenants received. He doubted it. Kramer had been prepared to dislike Nash from the start, but so far he hadn’t been able to find a good enough reason.
He was still thinking about Nash when he reached the officers’ quarters — a rectangular, plywood building, fifty feet in length and a few feet off the ground. The interior was a single room, dark except where thin wedges of dust clouded light knifed in from the outside. At first the room seemed empty, but then Kramer noticed someone sleeping on a cot at the far end. Against the walls, a few stacks of modified ammo boxes served as shelves. In the center of the room stood a makeshift table made of some more ammo boxes with a poncho liner draped over them. A portable television and some magazines lay on top of it. Kramer fingered through the magazines while mumbling to himself, “Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Leatherneck, Playboy, Leatherneck, Time — how’d that get in there?”
Looking up, he noticed an M-16 lying on one of the cots. He walked over and picked it up, then sat down on the cot. Kramer pulled the bolt back and pushed his finger into the chamber. He examined his finger for carbon and nodded — ‘Clean. Rule Number One: your rifle is your best friend, keep it clean.’ He placed the rifle on his lap and leaned back against the wall.
‘No surprises so far. . . . The way I wanted it.’ And it was. He didn’t have to be in Vietnam. ‘Haven’t regretted it yet,’ he thought, but then remembered, ‘Maybe . . . just that one time’ — the time in the plane. He’d finished a month’s leave and was headed for Camp Pendleton on the way to Vietnam. The plane took off into a bank of clouds. He felt relieved, free of decisions. All he could see were clouds swirling by his window — then, suddenly, no clouds. He glanced down, unthinkingly, immediately sorry that he had. The coast of South Florida lay beneath him, and off it the reefs. A thin white band sparkled between them like a ribbon of glass particles — the beach. But it was the reefs he stared at — light patches beneath the crystal blue water — wondering how many of them he had dived on. He saw them as if from a boat, remembering how the color of the water changed from light green, to blue, and finally to the rich dark blue of the Gulf Stream. The water was as he had seen it rarely — level, barely undulating, the only mark upon it being the wake of his boat. Staring down, fifty feet below him, he could see the coral heads — various shades of brown spotted with purple, slowly wavering sea fans and orange patches of fire coral — everything as distinct and clear as if it lay at the bottom of a glass paperweight. Dolphins swam near the surface, their prismed sides mirroring the sun’s light back at him, changing it to flashes of blue and gold and green. The dark shapes of turtles and stingrays moved slowly along the bottom.
Only a glasslike surface separated him from this quieter, simpler, more beautiful world. He entered that world, floated slowly towards the bottom. The colors sharpened. A school of parrot fish swam by him unafraid — some of them royal blue, others mottled with patches of red and yellow and green. Closer to the rocks, a queen angelfish swam in small, unhurried circles. Thousands of colors changed and blended around him as if he were floating weightless within a barely moving kaleidoscope. Water was the silence that surrounded him. He’d escaped. Time itself seemed slowed, almost suspended. He saw it as within a dream — then and now.
‘Ended it,’ Kramer thought to himself, ‘ended it for good.’ Everything that had happened since he’d signed his enlistment papers made him surer. Never had he regretted what he was doing — except once, when he looked down and saw the reefs, knowing it was for the last time, forced to think, to remember. Now, once more, he remembered; but told himself, ‘Never have to see them again. . . . No more second thoughts.’
Kramer drew the rifle up to his chest and let the bolt fly home with a loud, metallic crack.
The cot across the room scraped the floor as the motionless figure bolted to a sitting position. Startled, Kramer also sat up. He had forgotten someone else was there. The figure turned its head, quickly scanning the room. At first its glance passed over Kramer, then slowly returned to him. It pivoted its body until its legs were over the edge of the cot and its feet fell to the floor. It nodded at him; then, in a sleepy voice, asked, “Who are you?”
He answered hesitantly, “Lieutenant Kramer. I’ve just been assigned here.”
The figure lowered its face into its hands and spoke with muffled words. “I’m Lieutenant Hyatt. Just finished my tour. Came out of the bush last week.” After a long pause, Hyatt continued. His voice seemed tired, but from something more than just being awakened. “Seemed like a long time while I was waiting for it to end, now it seems like I just got off the plane from Okinawa. . . . Probably be the same way for you.”
“I guess so.” Kramer waited for Hyatt to speak, but he just sat there with his head in his hands massaging his face. Kramer started to ask, “How was it?” but checked himself and asked instead, “Was it bad?”
“Some of it, some of it was real bad. The rest was all right. . . . Seems most of the time I remember the bad parts.” Hyatt dropped his hands from his face and slowly raised his head. The room was too dark for them to make out each other’s features, but their eyes stood out against their silhouettes, each pair focusing on the other. “I made a mistake once, about two months ago. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.”
Hyatt got up and walked to the door. He placed one hand against the jamb and leaned his weight upon it. Kramer studied his dark outline — a blot against the deep pink evening clouds. Hyatt turned his head halfway back towards Kramer, seemingly looking in both directions at the same time. “It was in those mountains.” He paused, as if wondering whether to continue.
Kramer sensed that he would, and asked himself uneasily, ‘What’s he want from me?’
“My platoon was up there alone. Just before sunset we got a few rounds of sniper fire from above us. Probably from about four hundred yards — too far away to be accurate, just harassment. I should have ignored it. But I wanted to take some sort of action instead of just sitting there. I called in mortars. The rounds fell two hundred yards above us. I adjusted the fire two hundred yards higher up, or at least I thought I did, so did my radioman. Mortars thought I said ‘Come down two hundred,’ all three of them said that’s what it sounded like. A round fell near one of my squads — I should have made sure they were more spread out. . . . Two men were killed instantly, we couldn’t even tell what parts belonged to who. Three more were wounded seriously, and two others slightly. The medivac chopper couldn’t get in because it got dark too fast. Another man died just before dawn. Maybe he was luckier than the two amputees that lived . . . one of them had his balls blown off.”
Kramer said to himself, ‘At least it was short.’ But suddenly Hyatt began speaking again. Kramer wanted to leave or say something to stop him, knowing that he couldn’t do either, asking himself, ‘Why the hell did he pick me?’
“I’ll never forget that night,” Hyatt continued, and it was his change of tone that most unnerved Kramer. He was no longer talking, or even speaking. It was as if he were reading lines, lines he had read a thousand times before, each word imperatively following from the one that preceded it. His emotions seemed to stem as much from the words themselves as from their meaning — as if their meaning were lost to him, and could only be found by repeating them again and again. “There wasn’t any moon; you couldn’t see a thing. You wanted to reach out and touch someone. Even if there was somebody right next to you, you were all alone. Two choppers circled right over us for an hour trying to find a place to land. The noise was scaring us shitless. . . . I guess everybody felt better when they gave up and left. I can’t ever remember a time as silent as when those choppers left. We knew those men had to be medivacked, but I know damn well we were all relieved.
“The silence didn’t last long though, maybe not more than a few seconds. One of the wounded moaned real loud — no words, just a moan. That fucking sound cut through me like a razor. Then I heard some garbled words from the same direction. All three of them started mumbling, crying, moaning — one or two of them begging to die. I said to myself — maybe out loud — ‘God, please, please let them die. Don’t torture them.’ They were filled with morphine, but it didn’t do any good. They went on all night.
“The Gooks must have heard them. I guess it gave ’em pleasure — God knows they’ve suffered enough — because they started yelling and laughing at us. I don’t think there was more than four of ’em, but they came in close, maybe twenty-five yards and from different sides. They were yelling and laughing like a bunch of jackals — never fired a shot. We could hear the brush move as they changed positions. It was the only time I’ve actually hated them. I’d lost men to them before, good men, but I never hated them.
“A few of my men lost their cool. What cool? Nobody had their cool that night. The idea that it was our own mortars that did the damage, that’s what made it worse. You don’t expect to lose men to your own mortars. Some of my men fired at the sounds, giving away their positions by the muzzle flashes, knowing they didn’t have a chance to hit anything. If there had been more than a few Gooks out there, we would have been in real trouble. . . . They didn’t leave till an hour before dawn. All night they kept it up, all fucking night.”
Hyatt paused, and when he began speaking again, it was in a calm, deliberate tone. “It seemed like the sun was never gonna come up. Even when it did, it came real slow. All we could see were shadows, then bushes, . . . trees, rocks, . . . each other’s silhouettes. Nobody even felt like chasing them. We were beaten. We didn’t want revenge, we just wanted to get out of there. When it got barely light enough, we started to clear an LZ for the chopper. Nobody gave any orders — not me, not my squad leaders. Everybody knew what to do. They all moved slowly, with their heads down. We couldn’t look at each other’s faces. Each one of us was alone, trying to figure things out . . . because if what happened that night was real, God, what the fuck could be unreal?
“Nobody looked up when we first heard the choppers. Then, very slowly as we directed it in, everyone’s eyes locked on the medivac chopper. The gun ships that came with it didn’t prep-fire the area. I think we were all glad of that. As the medivac landed, we stared at it as if it was some sort of useless miracle. The men carrying the wounded and dead didn’t run towards it. I never saw that before. Always, when a chopper landed, they ran to it. One of the crewmen motioned for them to hurry up, but they ignored him, walking real slow with the stretchers.
“After the medivac took off, I gave the order to move-out — back down to the lowlands and the rest of our company. It took us four hours to get there and my orders were the last words I heard. We marched slowly, and with our heads down — even the point man, and I didn’t tell him to do otherwise. When we got back, nobody from the other platoons came up to us, they knew better. Usually my men would break up into groups. Not this time. Everyone just went his own way.”
Hyatt took his arm from the door jamb, lowered one foot to the top step, hesitated, and then walked out the door without looking back.
Kramer’s eyes followed him. He was still staring out the door when Forest came through it shaking his head. Upon seeing Kramer, he mumbled, “That Hyatt’s a weird one. Can’t get as much as a nod out of him.” Kramer made no reply, still wondering why Hyatt had chosen to tell the story to him. “You wanna go to chow?”
Kramer looked up, for the first time seeming to notice Forest. “In a few minutes.” He slowly pulled out a cigarette and leaned back on the cot, feet still touching the floor.
2. Hill 65
The convoy left An Hoa for Da Nang at eight in the morning. An hour and a half later a jeep, a six-by carrying troops, and two more six-bys carrying supplies, separated from the main body of the convoy as it passed Hill 65. The four vehi
cles proceeded up a steep dirt road that ran the length of one side of the hill. Just before it reached the top, the road hair-pinned to the left and was bordered by a row of six 105-millimeter guns set under large sheets of camouflage netting. A cliff of sand rose fifteen feet above the opposite side of the road. The backs of five wood-and-screen barracks were visible atop it. The vehicles followed the curve to the left and passed in front of the barracks. Twenty yards farther down the road, a long line of Marines passed sandbags to the edge of a barbwire fence where other Marines were building bunkers and gun emplacements. At the crest of a sharp rise, two six-inch guns sat upon their tanklike vehicles. The crews of both guns lethargically uncrated huge shells and piled them in pyramids against a dirt embankment. The newly arrived vehicles proceeded another fifty yards before stopping at the center of the hill where wooden buildings clustered along both sides of the road.
As soon as the six-by stopped, the Marines in it jumped down and plodded off in various directions. A jeep sped by honking its horn at a lanky Marine with a bushy mustache. He waved to the driver and called out, “Delaney,” then turned around to the two men walking behind him. “That’s Delaney. He used to be in Third Platoon, but after his second Purple Heart he got pulled out of the bush and they made him a jeep driver. It’s a skating job. . . . We’ve got to go back to the hootches we passed on the way up here. I’ll show you the gunny’s hootch when we get there.”
The taller of the two men in back of him nodded, and the other said, “Corporal Harmon, I better get my knee checked. It’s killing me.”
Harmon turned around thinking, ‘Hope I don’t get this worthless motherfucker in my squad.’ “Listen Graham, the first thing you and Chalice got to do is check in with the company gunnery sergeant, then you can start worrying about your knee.”
When the three of them reached the hootches at the far end of the hill, Harmon pointed to the second one and told Chalice and Graham they would find the gunny inside. He then walked over to a powerfully built soldier sitting on the steps of the next hootch cleaning his rifle. “Sarge, did you miss me?”
