A Rumor of War

by Philip Caputo

  I walked past the galley. Some marines were cleaning their rifles under the tarp that extended from the galley like an awning. There were the familiar smells of oil and solvent, and the metallic sound made by the cleaning rods and bore brushes as they were drawn through the barrels of the rifles. A transistor radio was playing the country-music program broadcast every afternoon by the Armed Forces station in Saigon. Some men from my old platoon saw me. They waved and asked what it was like “in the rear.” I said I didn’t know, I had just reported in.

  I went up to get my gear, increasingly haunted by the feeling that things were not the same. There was something peculiar about the men; they seemed a little cool and distant, and I wondered if it was because they now regarded me as an outsider. In the NCOs’ tent, Campbell and Greene, Lemmon’s platoon sergeant, were playing cribbage, as they did whenever the company was in camp. Lemmon, Tester, and McCloy were in the officers’ tent next door. Tester was saying something about his gear, by which he meant the Teac tape recorder he had bought in Hong Kong before the battalion was sent to Vietnam. He had had to leave it in storage on Okinawa, and he was worried about it. “I just hope those clowns don’t wreck my gear,” he said to Lemmon as I walked in. Glen, his hawklike face still showing the marks of the grenade shrapnel, did not say anything. McCloy was reading a World War II saga titled Panzer Leader. “That gear would cost me twelve hundred bucks in the States. I picked it up for six … hey, P.J.’s back,” Tester said, interrupting himself. “Caputo, shove off. This is a line company. It’s off limits to rear-echelon pogues.”

  “Bruce, I feel lousy enough about being there. Don’t make it worse.”

  “Uh-oh, Caputo’s pissed. Caputo’s going to beat the shit out of me.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you feel lousy about,” Lemmon said. “You ought to be happy you’re at regiment.” He did not look at me. Sitting on an empty crate, a bush hat pulled low over his forehead, he was dealing cards to himself and an imaginary opponent. “Fact is, I don’t know why you were in such a hurry to get back to the Nam. Hell, Walsh over in Alpha Company and Mike Repp in Delta went to Okinawa last month for flight physicals and I don’t think they’re back yet. You should have stretched it out.”

  “I saw Walsh and Repp,” I said. “Anyway, I stretched it out as long as I could.”

  “Ah, Phil, you’re still a boot brown-bar. Suppose you stayed a few extra days. What could they do to you? Make you a grunt and send you to Vietnam?”

  Lemmon’s Texas accent was naturally harsh, but there was a new edge in his voice, a bitterness that had not been there before. And like the enlisted men I had seen earlier, he had a vaguely distant air.

  “Well, I want to know about Japan,” said Tester, who seemed more or less his old self. “What I want to know is, did you get your socks blown off? Did one of those honey-wa’s blow your socks off? That’s what I want to know.”

  So I told him about the weekend in Tokyo and the half-Russian, half-Japanese girl who stayed with me in the Palace Hotel. Her name was Ayako, she was a bargirl in Yokosuka, and just before we got on the train for Tokyo, she turned to me and said, “Philsan, I will spend two days with you and you will not have to pay me. I will love you for two days and then I will not love you.”

  “Jesus, you got it for nothing?” Tester asked. “Why did you come back?”

  Lemmon shook his head as he dealt the cards. “Gol-lee, if I had that going, I’d still be there. Like I said, what could they do to me? Make me a grunt and send me to Vietnam?”

  “For openers, Glen, they could throw you in the brig,” I said.

  “Shit, the brig’s better’n this. You can’t get killed in the brig.”

  “Well, I don’t plan on getting killed. There’s not much chance of getting killed at regiment anyway.”

  “You don’t know about Sullivan?”

  “No.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Sullivan flashed in my mind. Tall, skinny, looking even younger than his twenty-two years, he was handing me a cigar. I was up in one of the old French blockhouses, looking out at the rice paddies through my binoculars. Sullivan, reaching up as far as he could, was handing a cigar to me. He was smiling, the smile cracking the dust that caked his face. “Hey, lieutenant,” he was saying, “just got a letter from my old lady in Pennsylvania. It’s a boy.” That had been in March or early April, when the battalion was still on the airfield perimeter; and picturing Sullivan as he was then, I felt something draw tight inside myself, tighter and tighter until I thought it would snap.

  “How?” I asked.

  “A sniper got him. This guy wasn’t just some Cong popping off with a carbine. He could shoot. We were set in south of the Song Tuy Loan, near the Song Yen River. It was hotter’n a bitch, and Sully volunteered to fill canteens. He’d just got down to the river when the sniper cranked off a round. We figure he was using one of those Russian rifles with a scope, because he got Sullivan with one shot. Went in one side and came out the other. Plowed one helluva hole right through him. He was probably dead before he hit the deck.”

  I asked when it had happened and felt like a deserter when Lemmon said, “A few days after you left.” Not that my presence would have made any difference; I just felt I should have been with them.

  “Three companies were out on a battalion-sized operation,” Glen went on. “And you’re lucky you missed that one because it really got screwed up. Ingram got it, too, you know.”

  “KIA?”

  “No, but he got hit pretty bad. A round caught him in the back and chipped his spine, I think. Last we heard, a meningitis infection set in and he’s in a wheelchair. I think he’s in a hospital in Tennessee somewhere, near his hometown. He might not ever walk again.”

  And then I saw an image of Ingram, big, barrel-chested, striding out of the galley on the morning of the company’s first operation, striding powerfully and singing in his rich baritone, and that emotional wire inside me tightened again and broke. I felt it break just as surely as you can feel a bone or a tendon break; and afterward, there was only a cold, empty, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Ingram crippled and Sullivan dead. Dead. Death. Death. I had heard that word so many times, but I had never known its meaning.

  “The thing was,” Lemmon was saying, “Ingram asked for it. That goddamned Ingram … you know how he was. Thought he was too big or tough to get hurt. Right after Sullivan got hit, somebody spotted the sniper in a tree line near a ville, Duyen Son. It was a ways off, so we fired a three-point-five at him. A willy-peter round, and that’s when it got all fucked up.

  “A couple of gunships saw the WP and I guess they figured we were marking the target for an air strike. They started strafing the ville and putting rockets into it. One of my squads heard women and kids yelling and crying in there, and we moved out to get those people out of there. We ran right into an ambush. Got hit from three sides. Ingram was walking around like he’s on the drill field. I told him to get his ass down. He says, ‘I’m a Marine NCO, sir, and I ain’t gonna go low-crawlin’ on my belly.’ How do you like that bullshit, Phil? So he got it in the back, and then my radioman gets his arm shot to shit. Anyhow, we got into the ville to rescue those civilians, but we couldn’t get the Hueys to cease firing. They started strafing and rocketing us. That was something else, getting hit with your own planes.…”

  Evacuating the casualties had been another nightmare, Lemmon said. The landing zone was under enemy machine-gun fire, and the medevac helicopters were unable to land. Then Gallardo, a corporal in 1st platoon, ran into the LZ and guided the choppers in with hand signals. His canteens were shot off his hip, bullets were whacking at his feet, but he stayed out there until the birds were down and the casualties loaded on board.

  “Sullivan’s body was laying out there all the time. The skipper couldn’t look at him and the others. Like I said, that was a bad hole in Sully, in the side of his chest. That round made pulp out of his insides, and Peterson was really shook about it. He just
turned around and walked away so he didn’t have to look at him.”

  “Well, that’s the way he is,” I said. “He really loves this company.”

  “Yeah,” Lemmon said, “a little too much I think.”

  We talked about other things. Then I picked up my gear and left. Outside, I ran into Colby.

  “Hey, Lieutenant Caputo,” he said. “Seeing how the other half lives?”

  “You guys won’t lay off that, will you? I didn’t ask for the staff.”

  “I know, sir. Guess you’ve heard about Sergeant Sullivan by now.”

  “Just now. Mister Lemmon just told me.”

  “Well, sir, it was bound to happen. I’m just sorry it had to happen to Sully.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that and everything. You told me once that you were going to make everybody look at the first man who got KIA. Did you do that, Sergeant Colby?”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  Kazmarack drove me back to regimental HQ, down the winding dirt road. The troops were lining up for the evening meal. I was not at all hungry, but went to the officers’ mess anyway. There was nothing else to do. The mess was luxurious compared to what I was used to. Two squad tents were joined together and stretched over a frame of two-by-fours. There were screens to keep dust and insects out of the staff officers’ food, and a plywood floor, and three tables arranged in a U. Tacked to one of the two-by-fours was the regimental crest, a black shield with a red and gold 3 superimposed on a bayonet, and a banner that proclaimed THIRD MARINES. FORTES FORTUNA ADJUVAT. In contrast to the fairly democratic atmosphere in a rifle company mess, the one at regiment was rigidly hierarchical. Seating at the U-shaped table went according to rank. The regimental CO, Colonel Wheeler, and the executive officer sat at the head. Next came the majors, then the captains, then the lieutenants, with the ends reserved for second lieutenants. There were only two of us on the staff, and, as the other one was off somewhere, I ate alone.

  That suited my mood. I did not feel like talking to anyone. Sullivan was much on my mind, Hugh John Sullivan, dead at the age of twenty-two and before he had had the chance to see his son. Colby had been right; it was bound to happen. But I wondered why it had to happen to a decent young man who always had a joke to tell, and not to some cynical old veteran. I wondered why it had to happen to a husband and father, and why it had to happen in the way it did. Like many inexperienced soldiers, I suffered from the illusion that there were good ways to die in war. I thought grandly in terms of noble sacrifices, of soldiers offering up their bodies for a cause or to save a comrade’s life. But there had been nothing sacrificial or ceremonial about Sullivan’s death. He had been sniped while filling canteens in a muddy jungle river.

  I saw him as Lemmon had described him, lying on his back with the big, bloody hole in his side. I imagined that his face must have looked like the faces of the dead Viet Cong I had seen the month before: mouth opened, lips pursed in a skull-like grin, eyes staring blankly. It was painful to picture Sullivan like that; I had grown so used to seeing his living face. That is when I felt for the first time, sitting in the mess over a greasy tray of greasy food, the slimy, hollow-cold fear that is the fear of death; the image of Sullivan’s dead face had suddenly changed into an image of my own. That could be me someday, I thought. I might look like that. If it happened to him, there’s no reason it can’t happen to me. I did not think it necessarily would happen, but I realized it could. Except in an abstract sense, the chance of being killed had never occurred to me before. As a young, healthy American raised and educated in peacetime, or what passes for peacetime in this century, I had been incapable of imagining myself sick or old, let alone dead. Oh, I had thought about death, but only as an event that would happen far in the future, so far that I had been unable to consider it as a real possibility. Well, it had suddenly become a possibility, and a proximate one for all I knew. That was the thing: I could not possibly know or suspect when it would come. There was only a slight chance of being killed in a headquarters unit, but Sullivan probably had not felt any intimations of mortality when he walked down to that river, a string of canteens jangling in his hand. Then the sniper centered the cross hairs on his telescopic sight, and all that Sullivan had ever been or would ever be, all of his thoughts, memories, and dreams were annihilated in an instant.

  I came to understand why Lemmon and the others had seemed so distant. It had nothing to do with my no longer belonging to the battalion. It was, rather, the detachment of men who find themselves living in the presence of death. They had lost their first man in battle, and, with him, the youthful confidence in their own immortality. Reality had caught up with them, with all of us. As Bradley put it later that evening: “I guess the splendid little war is over.”

  Some combat veterans may think I am making too much of a single casualty. Later, I was to see fairly active fighting, and I know that experiencing heavy or constant losses tends to diminish the significance of one individual’s death. But at the time we lost Sullivan, casualties were still light; it was the “expeditionary” period of the war, a period that lasted roughly from March to September 1965. The loss of even one man was an extraordinary event. Perhaps, too, we were less emotionally prepared for death and wounds than those who came later; the men who fought in Vietnam at this time had joined the service in peacetime, before the toll built up to a daily announcement. A small statistic illustrates what I mean: One-Three’s total losses between March and August of 1965 amounted to about one hundred and ten killed and wounded, or ten percent. During one battle in April 1966, a single company from that same battalion lost one hundred and eight men in only one hour. But most important, in this early period the men in One-Three were very close to one another. They had been together for years and assumed they would remain together until the end of their enlistments. Sergeant Sullivan’s death shattered that assumption. It upset the sense of unity and stability that had pervaded life in the battalion. One-Three was a corps in the old sense of the word, a body, and Sullivan’s death represented the amputation of a small part of it. The corps would go on living and functioning without him, but it was aware of having lost something irreplaceable. Later in the war, that sort of feeling became rarer in infantry battalions. Men were killed, evacuated with wounds, or rotated home at a constant rate, then replaced by other men who were killed, evacuated, or rotated in their turn. By that time, a loss only meant a gap in the line that needed filling.

  Ten

  “He’d never seen so many dead before.”

  The lilting words danced up and down his brain,

  While corpses jumped and capered in the rain.

  No, no; he wouldn’t count them anymore …

  —Siegfried Sassoon

  “The Effect”

  True to Kazmarack’s prediction, my first night at headquarters was noisy. The big guns across the road fired H-and-I missions until dawn. H-and-I stood for “harassment and interdiction,” a type of artillery fire directed at road junctions, hilltops, anywhere the enemy was likely to be. It was supposed to fray the Viet Congs’ nerves and keep them off balance. I don’t know if the artillery achieved its purpose, but by morning my nerves were plenty frayed. I had been jolted awake a dozen times by the roaring howitzers. Well, the artillery was on our side, when the shells didn’t fall short.

  Frazzled, I spent the next day breaking in as assistant adjutant. Schwartz and I plowed through what seemed a truckload of paperwork. Documents had to be inventoried and audited, messages, directives, and regimental orders filed. Looking at all the red tape, I decided that the life of a staff officer was going to be even worse than I had feared. Later, Schwartz briefed me on my extra assignments—additional duties, as they were called. Junior staff officers were given a number of them because nobody else would do them. We were therefore known as SLJOs: shitty little jobs officers. Schwartz listed mine. In addition to assistant adjutant, I was to be: Regimental Casualty Reporting Officer, Regimental Secret and Confidential Documents Officer, Regi
mental Legal Officer, Regimental Mess Officer.

  On paper, it looked like a heavy work load. In fact, Schwartz said, it would not amount to more than three or four hours a day. Then why was I there? Couldn’t one of the clerks handle it all? No, because regulations called for an officer to handle these duties. All right, why couldn’t Captain Anderson handle them? He was an officer. Yes, he was, but that’s what the assistant adjutant was there for—so the captain didn’t have to handle it.

  Schwartz left for 2d Battalion a few days later, and I took over. He had been right about not having more than three or four hours’ work a day. Sometimes there was less than that. I spent my ample leisure time looking for things to do or reading the cheap paperbacks donated by the Red Cross—Fighting Red Devils, “the true-life story of Britain’s guts and glory paratroopers in World War Two,” or just sitting at my desk, sweaty and thoroughly bored.

  At night, the junior officers took turns standing watch in the operations tent. The more junior you were, the later the watch. Generally I drew 2400 to 0200 (midnight to two A.M.) or 0200 to 0400. That did not amount to much work, either. All we did was monitor the radios, call the operations officer, Major Conlin, when something unusual happened, and log the situation reports in the unit diary. The sitreps came in about once an hour: disembodied voices crackled over the radio or the EE-8 field phones, and spoke in the Captain Midnight code-word gibberish that passes for language in the military. “Crowd Three this is Burke Three. Burke Alpha Six reports Alpha Two Scorpion in position at grid coordinates Alpha Tango Hotel Hotel Echo Yankee Yankee Lima. All units report Alpha Sierra Sierra Romeo Sierra.” All secure, situation remains the same.

  * * *

  As fighting increased, the additional duty of casualty reporting officer kept me busiest. It was also a job that gave me a lot of bad dreams, though it had the beneficial effect of cauterizing whatever silly, abstract, romantic ideas I still had about war.