A Rumor of War

by Philip Caputo

  Like most Australians, they were champion drinkers. Two bottles of Johnnie Walker were eventually brought out from their private stock. In the spirit of Australian-American friendship, they poured us each a tumblerful of the clear, golden-white whiskey. Neat, of course. No water, no ice. Then they filled their glasses, emptying one bottle and part of the other. Then one of the Aussies, a lean, leathery warrant officer, did something I had never seen before and have never seen since: he took his glass, which held at least eight ounces, and drained it in one gulp.

  “Baawuagh! Bloody good stuff that,” he said, pouring himself another. Compared to his heroic swallow, I had taken a delicate sip. The Aussie whacked me on the back. “Look, mate, I thought you was a U.S. Marine. Thought you blokes was supposed to be tough. C’mon now, drink it down. We got lots more.”

  With a twenty-three-year-old’s ideas about manhood, and challenged to defend the reputation of the U.S. Marines, I chugged it all down. Within seconds, the room began spinning slowly, like a helicopter’s rotor blades when the engine has just started. “That’s the way,” the warrant officer said. He poured me a couple of ounces more. Someone said “Cheers” and I said “Cheers” and had another drink. The faces in the spinning room multiplied by two and my mouth felt the way it does after a dentist’s Novocain injection; the clipped, Australian voices seemed to be coming through a mile-long tube. “C’mon, mate, ’ave another. Drink it down now. ’Ey, that’s the stuff. Cheers. You’re bloody all right.”

  Feeling considerably less than bloody all right, I woke up in the chamber of one of the Chinese bargirls. I could not remember how I had gotten there. My uniform was strewn on the floor. Her ao-dais was folded neatly on a chair. Lying naked next to me, she said with a giggle that I was “buku drunk” and had fallen asleep. But was I okay now and did I want a number-one short-time?

  “Sure. How much?”

  “Four thousand P.”

  Except for the hard, commercial look in her eye, she was a beautiful girl, more full-figured than a Vietnamese, but with the same long, straight black hair. Without reflecting on the fact that four thousand piasters was worth more than thirty dollars, I said, “Sure. Why not? Four thou it is.” Fumbling in my wallet, I produced a stack of orange bills with tigers and dragons on them. She counted it out carefully, then rolled over on top of me and gave me a short-time that was number one but still not worth four thousand.

  When we were finished and dressed, she walked me back across the street to the Blue Dahlia. McCloy was still there, sitting with a girl on his lap. Incredibly, the Australians were working on another bottle of Scotch.

  “And how was Lang?” the warrant officer asked. It was the first time I had heard the girl’s name.

  “Lang was fine, but expensive.”

  “Yeah, they’re spoiled in this place.”

  There was a pounding on the door. “Shit,” the Aussie said, “it’s the fucking MPs. You two Yanks under the couch over there.” He shoved McCloy and me toward a sofa backed against one wall. Apparently, the bar was in a district off limits to Americans after a certain hour. We squeezed ourselves under the couch, and I recall seeing two pair of gleaming black boots with white laces not six inches from my face. The whiskey and the ludicrousness of the situation made me giddy. McCloy had to clamp a hand over my mouth to keep me from laughing. The MPs stomped around the room for a few minutes until they were satisfied that no Americans were there. The door slammed behind them.

  Their departure was a signal for ours. Thanking the Aussies for the whiskey and the hiding place, we shoved off and walked in the humid night to the Grand Hotel. Peterson and Loker were there, drinking rum on the veranda with a Norwegian merchant sailor. A glassy-eyed Peterson introduced us to the Norwegian, a big, blond man with red and blue veins in his face.

  “Phil and Murph, this sailor is one helluva good man,” the skipper said, thick-tongued. “He’s one helluva good man because he’s a Scandinavian and I’m a Scandinavian and proud of it. Scandinavians are the greatest people in the world.”

  Acknowledging the superlative qualities of Scandinavians, Murph and I sat down. The sailor offered to buy a round of rum. I accepted, having sweated out the whiskey on the walk to the hotel. Then I bought a round. Then the Norwegian bought another round. In a stupor, I was watching the lights of the fishing junks bobbing on the silky black ribbon of the Tourane River when four giant MPs swept onto the veranda and arrested all of us but the sailor. We had violated a curfew law, they said. Unmoved by our protests that we were field marines who did not know anything about curfew laws, the MPs hauled us off to the Danang brig.

  All I remember about our brief stay in that place is standing unsteadily in front of a full-length mirror above which a sign commanded: LOOK SHARP! CHECK YOUR CREASES, BOOTS, AND BRASS. I checked my creases—they had dissolved in the heat; my boots—they were filthy; my brass—it was tarnished.

  After some argument, the MPs were talked out of putting us behind bars. Lance Corporal Reed was somehow summoned to fetch us, and we were released. We climbed into the skipper’s jeep, picked up two truckloads of roaring, drunken marines, and rattled back to camp. Everyone was laughing and singing. Well, not everyone. Peterson had passed out.

  The Cinderella liberty exacted a retribution that was not the stuff of fairy tales. All the celebrants suffered from crippling hangovers the next day. Three days later, half of them discovered they had VD and filed down to the battalion aid station to bare their buttocks while a corpsman pumped them full of penicillin.

  * * *

  My memories of my last two weeks with the battalion are all of a piece. C Company went out on two or three more operations during that period. The always hot, sometimes dangerous days in the bush alternated with monotonous days of waiting in camp. A couple of brief, sordid liberties, much like the first, relieved the boredom.

  Once, I led a difficult platoon-sized patrol near Charlie Ridge. I like to think of it whenever I hear some general who spent his tour looking at maps and flitting around in helicopters claim that we could have won the war. First we had to hack our way through a patch of bamboo and elephant grass ten feet high, the worst, thickest patch of jungle we had encountered. Working in shifts, the point man and I chopped at the growth with a machete. When we had cut as much as we could, three or four marines would come up and flatten the wall of brush by hurling their bodies against it. That done, the rest of the platoon would move forward a few yards. Then the point man and I would start out again. All this in bake-oven heat. Coming out of the jungle, we entered a swamp, which we had to cross by hopping from one small island of solid ground to the next. Corporal Mixon lost his footing once, fell into a quicksand pool, and had sunk up to his chest before he was hauled out, covered with muck and leeches. The patrol route took us over the swamp, then up an eight-hundred-foot ridge. The only trail up the ridge was an overgrown game-track. It was easy at first, but then the slope became so steep we had to climb hand over hand, clutching at the bone-gray roots of mahogany trees, hand over hand a foot at a time, gasping and sweating in the moist air. Sometimes a man fell, toppling several of those behind him as he rolled downhill. Thorn bushes clawed us, cordlike “wait-a-minute” vines coiled around our arms, rifles, and canteen tops with a tenacity that seemed almost human. When we finally reached the crest, I checked my map and watch: in five hours, and without making a single enemy contact, we had covered a little over half a mile.

  Lemmon was wounded on an operation a few days later. The company was camped in a landing zone named LZ Oriole and Lemmon’s platoon had been sent out ahead to scout a hill that overlooked the LZ. Halfway up, the platoon got into a short, sharp fire-fight with a group of VC guarding a large base camp. One of the guerrillas, concealed behind a rock outcropping, tossed a grenade as Lemmon led a charge against the camp. The grenade struck him in the chest, bounced off, landed between his feet, then rolled into a hollow and exploded. Fragments struck Lemmon in the face, and the force of the blast almost bowled ove
r Sullivan, who was behind him, carrying a machine gun.

  The platoon rushed the camp. They found it empty of Viet Cong—the djinns had vanished again—but filled with enough uniforms, equipment, and new AK-47s to equip a full-strength company. The marines cheerfully destroyed the weapons and gear, fired the camp, then pulled back while our artillery pounded the hills behind them.

  Lemmon had escaped with minor scratches, Sullivan with only a peppered uniform. But the experience had made an impression on both men. Experiences like that usually do. Sullivan, who was now a sergeant and the father of a two-month-old boy, did not want any more close calls. “Man,” I heard him say as the platoon filed back into the LZ, “I felt that blast hit me like a hot wind. It plastered my uniform against my skin. No more of that shit for me. I’m a daddy now.”

  Lemmon did not say anything at first, just kept shaking his head. I can still see his angular face, as white as porcelain except for the bloody patches where the shrapnel had struck him. He was silent for several minutes, then it all came out of him in a rush.

  “Phil, I’m never going to forget that one. I saw that thing coming down at me. I could see the son of a bitch who threw it. I was going up after him with my carbine and then that thing came sailing over.” Dragging on his cigarette, he shook his head several times. All the while, his face did not lose that strange, sick whiteness. Smoke from the burning camp billowed through the trees on the hill up ahead. We could not see the camp, only the smoke and the occasional orange flashes of the flames. Rising from the hills beyond were the gray-black plumes of the shells that had covered Lemmon’s withdrawal. “I thought I was finished,” he continued. “It bounced right off my goddamned chest, and when I saw it down between my legs, all I could think of were my credentials. ‘It’s going to blow my balls off’—that’s all I could think of. Then the thing just rolled away and went off.”

  D Company, which was on our left flank during the operation, ran into some trouble later in the day. They were shelled with 60-millimeters in a place appropriately nicknamed Mortar Valley and about six men were seriously wounded. But they evened the score when they attacked another base camp and killed five VC, including a North Vietnamese political officer. Meanwhile, my platoon was sent off on an all-night ambush, an experience I recall for its sheer misery. No enemy soldiers entered the ambush, but thousands of insects did. We lay awake for eight hours, enduring the bites of mosquitoes and stinging fire ants.

  Worn-out and red-eyed, we returned to the battalion’s lines the next day and were greeted by a strange rumor: our role in the war was to end in September when the regiment would be rotated back to Okinawa. Some of us accepted the rumor as fact, under the illusion that we were hurting the VC badly. It was an illusion partly created by the ever-optimistic reports issued by higher headquarters or printed in the Stars and Stripes and partly by our own persistent belief that we would win quickly. Not as quickly as we had first hoped, but within, say, six months or a year.

  “I have a feeling the VC are getting demoralized,” I wrote in a confident letter to my parents. “They have taken to their camps in the hills because they’re afraid of us. Now, we’re chasing them into their mountain hideouts.”

  * * *

  At the end of May, I was ordered to report back to my parent unit, Regimental Headquarters Company. After attending a week-long course in Yokosuka, Japan, I would be assigned to the staff as assistant adjutant. An adjutant is an administrative officer. I hated the idea of leaving One-Three. It was a first-rate infantry battalion, with a unique spirit and personality. The staff, on the other hand, seemed to be nothing more than a military organization, a soulless, bloodless thing. Papers. Reports. Pins on a map. I made a few attempts to get the assignment changed; all were unsuccessful. So I packed my gear and complained bitterly. Lemmon, whose ideas about war had changed radically since his narrow scrape, could not understand my disappointment.

  “I don’t know what you’re bitchin’ about, P.J. I’d give anything for a week out of this hole. Yeah, a week in Yokosuka in a clean bed with one of them Japanese honey-wa’s.”

  Feeling desolate, I padlocked my seabag and then said good-bye to the platoon, to Morrisson the daredevil; to Sampson, who had been awarded a Bronze Star for rescuing Gonzalez and was then reduced to PFC for going AWOL in Danang; to Butler, who had livened the dull days in camp with his singing; to Mixon, Marshall, Skates, and Parker, and, of course, Sergeant Campbell. “Sorta hate to see you go, lieutenant.” he said. “Now old Wild Bill’s gonna be the platoon commander and the platoon sergeant and have to do all the work by himself.”

  Part Two

  The Officer in Charge of the Dead

  How many dead? As many as ever you wish.

  Don’t count ’em; they’re too many.

  Who’ll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?

  —Siegfried Sassoon

  “The Effect”

  Nine

  Your dextrous wit will haunt us long

  Wounding our grief with yesterday.

  Your laughter is a broken song;

  And death has found you, kind and gay.

  —Siegfried Sassoon

  “Elegy”

  I came back from Japan on June 15, and was picked up at the airfield by Lance Corporal Kazmarack, the adjutant’s driver. It was a damp, overcast day. An early-morning rain had turned the dust on the roads to mud. The tents at regimental and battalion headquarters—the two HQs occupied the same camp—looked strangely clean. Pools of water had collected on the tent tops, and marines were draining them off by pushing poles against the bulges they made in the canvas ceilings. The water made a pleasant sound as it slid off in silvery sheets and splashed on the ground. Kazmarack turned off the road, the jeep skidding in the mud, and drove through an opening in the barbed wire. Two marines sat in a sandbagged emplacement, their ponchos still slick and shining from the rain. I flinched when an eight-inch howitzer from the battery across the road fired a round. You have to hear an eight-incher to appreciate it. Smiling, Kazmarack said, “No sweat, sir, that’s outgoing.”

  “I know it’s outgoing,” I said, put out with myself for flinching and with the driver for noticing it. “It’s sure goddamned loud, though.”

  “Wait till tonight, lieutenant. Those mothers and the one-five-fives’ll be banging away all night. You’d think the Red Chinese Army was out there instead of a bunch of guerrillas.”

  He pulled up near the adjutant’s tent and climbed out to get my valpack from the back seat. “Well, here we are, sir. Home. Welcome back to dear old Dang-Dang by the sea. How was Japan compared to this?”

  I thought of the weekend I had spent in Tokyo after the course was finished. “Kazmarack, how do you suppose Japan was compared to this?”

  “Compared to this hole, I imagine Japan was number one, sir.”

  “There you are.”

  Actually, I did not feel that bad about coming back. I had been lonely the whole ten days in Japan, and now, sloshing in the mud of the camp, I knew why. My friends and my outfit were in Vietnam. I belonged there. The regiment, in fact, was home.

  I reported in to my new boss, Captain Anderson. He was sitting heavily on a canvas chair behind a desk made of scrap lumber, an old map board, and ammo boxes. Across from his stood another makeshift desk, mine. Several empty shell crates, with the words 155-mm How painted on them served as filing cabinets. The adjutant’s, or S-1, section occupied half the tent; the S-4 (logistics) section the other half.

  I handed my orders, all thirteen copies of them, to Anderson. He took them in a pudgy hand and signed the endorsement. Having served for over five months with the lean, hard-muscled Peterson, I was amazed at the size of the adjutant’s belly, bulging against his sweaty undershirt and hanging well over his belt. He had a large head. His face, with its weak chin, its small eyes closely set in folds of sunburned flesh, looked porcine.

  “Welcome aboard,” he grunted. “You can have the rest of the day off to get squared away. Report
in by oh-seven-thirty tomorrow.”

  Lieutenant Schwartz, whom I was replacing, showed me to the junior officers’ billets. Schwartz was as happy about my transfer to headquarters as I was unhappy about it; he was going to take command of a rifle company in 2d Battalion.

  He pointed to a cot over which a green mosquito net hung like a frayed cocoon. “That’s yours. You’ll like it here. It’s got all the disadvantages of a line company with none of the advantages.” I dropped my valpack on the wooden pallet that lay alongside the cot. The tent was filthy. It was pitched next to the road, and the dust raised by passing convoys and tanks rolled right into it. Dead bugs were strewn across the hard-packed, dirt floor. Outside, a trench offered shelter in case of a shelling, or a fighting position in the unlikely event of a ground attack. A foot of water lay in the trench.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, I rode up to Hill 268 to pick up some of the personal gear I had left behind.

  When you have lived in the intimate world of an infantry company, you come to know those who have shared that world with you as well as you know your own family. Walking into C Company’s bivouac, I sensed immediately that something had happened. No one said anything to me or looked at me in a strange way. Still, I could sense it, just as a man can walk into his house after being gone for a while, hear familiar words from familiar people, see the usual objects in their usual places, yet know instinctively that things are not the same as when he left.

  The camp did not look any different. The galley, the headquarters, officers’ and platoon sergeants’ tents were still pitched end to end on the narrow shelf on the reverse slope of the hill. Farther down was the broad red scar of the landing zone, and the enlisted tents below that. The defensive positions on the forward slope had not been changed. I saw the old, traversed trench line cutting across the hillside in a series of sharp angles; the foxholes with their weathered, sandbag parapets; sentries in flak jackets sitting in some of the foxholes; the dugout where I had slept many nights, and the heavy-timbered FO’s bunker, its radio antennae waving in the breeze like steel reeds.