by Max Hastings
The story got worse. When the Marines returned to base and their company commander ordered an investigation of this alleged ‘enemy contact’, an officer who went to the scene directed attempts to hide the truth. During this process a badly-wounded child was spotted, whom Potter clubbed to death with a rifle butt. The facts emerged only when the rape victim, who had been left for dead, was found alive by fellow-villagers and carried to the Marine base for treatment. She told her story, which a medical officer immediately reported. Potter served twelve years’ imprisonment for premeditated murder and rape. The officer responsible for the attempted cover-up was sentenced to be dismissed from the Corps, but this verdict was overturned on appeal. Only two other patrol members served significant prison sentences.
Reg Edwards later described with regret his involvement in casual village burnings and killings. Oddly enough, he was most affected by shooting a piglet: ‘You think it’s just gonna fall over and die. Well, no. His little guts be hangin’ out. He just be squiggling around and freakin’ you out. See, you got to shoot animals in the head. They don’t understand that they supposed to fall over and die.’ Bob Nelson was once ordered to fire an M-79 round into a bunker entrance. As the smoke cleared, another man peered in and shouted back, ‘There’s just a bitch and two kids,’ all dead. Nelson said with deep sadness later, ‘That’s one image that stayed with me, that I could have done without in my memory bank.’ Emmanuel Holloman from Baltimore was an interpreter who spent his first Vietnam tour distributing compensation among civilians: $10 or a thousand piasters for a destroyed house; $40 for a corpse, or maybe $60 on a good day. Holloman thought black Americans like himself got on better with local people than did whites, because they had a shared sense of victimhood.
Bob Nelson said: ‘Sometimes it was serious, then at times it was not serious, then it would turn serious again’ – almost always without notice. Mike Sutton was advancing through a delta hamlet one morning with an adviser team when suddenly a lone VC in black pyjamas appeared from behind a tree and shot Sutton’s comrade and friend, a young Texan named Dave Hargraves, in the back. Vietnamese soldiers blew away the killer before Sutton could raise his own rifle, but the shock and sorrow were all the greater because they had had no previous contact for days, and experienced no further action through those that followed.
3 TRAPS AND TRAIL DUST
There were booby traps, booby traps, booby traps – what the twenty-first century calls IEDs, improvised explosive devices – and how they hated them all! Most were manufactured from scavenged US ordnance: a 60mm mortar round removed a foot, while an 81mm bomb took off a leg and maybe some fingers and an elbow. A 105mm round would take both legs and often an arm. A 155mm round vaporised its immediate victim below the waist, and almost certainly killed anybody else within twenty yards. Mines were often planted in clusters, so that the first crippled a man, the next wrecked the corpsman who sought to tend him. Grunts engaged in macabre debates about which limb they would soonest lose: most claimed a preference for keeping knees and what was above them. In one two-month period a single Marine company lost fifty-seven legs to mines and booby traps – which, as an officer bleakly observed, amounted to almost a leg a day.
A man who glimpsed a tripwire ahead could throw a grenade towards the business end, in hopes of detonating its attached charge. Buried mines were always tough, however: even if an engineer stayed alive while digging down to the blasting cap and fuse, it was necessary to crimp both with precision, an inch from the bottom of the cap: carelessness was fatal. Everybody hated having to handle the three-prong primers on ‘Bouncing Betties’. Combat engineer Harold Bryan once worked for an hour on a man from the 1/9th Cavalry who was standing on such a mine, but had not – yet – detonated it. The prongs proved irremovably trapped in the cleats of one of his jungle boots: the slightest movement would be lethal. Bryan attached a rope to the man’s waist, got his team to take the strain from a safe distance of twenty yards, then together snatched and swung him balletically fifteen feet before the explosion came.
That mine-walker lost only the heel of his jungle boot, but few were so lucky, and after such a bang there was a yearning to identify gooks – signifying any accessible Vietnamese – upon whom to wreak vengeance. When a mine detonated in the midst of Bob Nelson’s squad, after the casualties were evacuated and the patrol moved on, ‘innocent people died’, in the Marine’s words. ‘We got aggressive.’ An ARVN general said: ‘The enemy does not confront you. But he harasses you every night to give the impression that all the people around are hostile. Everyone becomes your enemy. But in reality it is only the same five or six VC who come back every night. And they plant the punji pits, booby traps, land mines … The VC make you nervous to the point that you lose your patience and say, “I want to be finished with this.” And you have fallen into their trap. You kill the wrong people.’
Harold Hunt was one of five sons of a black car-worker who joined the army the day he left high school in 1961, and seldom afterwards regretted it: ‘Not many of the kids I knew ever went anywhere outside Detroit in the rest of their lives, and I went everywhere.’ He served a first Vietnam hitch as a helicopter door-gunner, before returning in December 1965 to lead a squad of the 2/27th Infantry. ‘It was ugly from the first day,’ he said. ‘We had to fight our way into Cu Chi, fight our way to secure almost every yard of ground that the 25th Division became responsible for.’ One morning in April 1966, Hunt was leading a patrol through high grass towards outpost Ann-Margret when he was slightly wounded by a burst of incoming fire. After the Americans threw themselves prone and starting shooting back, he found himself clutching wire – a tripwire. He was carrying a radio on his back, and exchanged hasty words with Willie Somers, their M-60 man: ‘This is either a dud or a pressure-release job – can you see it?’ Somers could indeed see, though not reach, an improvised enemy Claymore mine. The firing died down; the VC faded. Hunt carefully rolled over, putting his back to the presumed end of the wire, which he then released. The mine exploded, lacerating his right-side face, body, legs; only the radio saved his life, taking most of the shrapnel. He spent the ensuing half-year in an army hospital where they rebuilt his face, repaired his legs and subjected him to a long course of physiotherapy before he was pronounced fit for limited duties.
Vietnam started going equally badly for Bob Nelson on a patrol one June morning when a booby trap exploded beside him, scattering shrapnel which inflicted multiple abrasions that cost him a trip to field hospital and a week back at base. There followed a succession of firefights, big and small. His Vietnam finally ended on an October day when his scout team heard voices beyond a hedge and the squad leader shouted, ‘VC!’ He emptied his Thompson in their direction, and received in return a shower of grenades. One of these exploded beside Nelson, detonating a smoke canister on the front of his webbing. Struggling against the blinding, choking fumes he grabbed at the hot metal to throw it free, and found his hand stuck in agony. Screaming and cursing, he rolled around in the paddy even as a firefight continued around him. When the shooting finally died away, he was medevacked and sent home.
Who set all the booby traps? While American commanders enthused about ‘zapping Charlie Cong’, a communist officer wrote of visiting the delta ‘personally to direct the organization of an American-killing zone … Day by day the operations [in this] became richer, more creative and more enthusiastic.’ The writer insisted that it was often locals, not guerrillas, who laid the traps: ‘The people did not automatically decide to attack the Americans, nor did anyone push them into it. It was the things done by American troops that decided the people’s attitude. [At first] they handed out candy and cookies, distributed T-shirts to the children, repaired and outfitted schools, provided medical examinations and gave out free medicine. Only a short time later, however, these same American units shelled villages, destroyed people’s crops … shot and killed innocent civilians. Buses loaded with passengers flipped over into canals and streams after being forced off
the road by American trucks. Soldiers regularly threatened and beat up the weak and innocent. That is why peasants, on their own initiative, planted mines and booby traps. People’s war … developed on its own.’ There is some element of truth in this communist explanation, but VC units stimulated local IED industries by organising collections of unexploded bombs and shells for conversion into mines in little village factories: empty sardine tins were favoured receptacles, filled with explosive and fused.
US infantry captain Ted Fichtl said that as he gained combat experience, he learned to listen to his streetwise – or rather, paddywise – NCOs: ‘We could more easily live with green lieutenants than with green sergeants.’ He discovered the importance of making men dig in whenever and wherever they halted, and enforcing the discipline of sleep: ‘We were all thoroughly imbued with the macho spirit that we could do it and just catnap here and there. But we found that wasn’t the case – your logic gets muddled. Your ability to discern the reality of your circumstances just falls apart very rapidly.’
More important still, and often neglected, was making the big effort necessary not to surrender the hours of darkness to the enemy. Fichtl said: ‘There is a fundamental fear, I think, in American soldiers about operating at night … I was a victim of that myself. [But] if you don’t extend your eyes and ears by way of patrolling and outposting, you become very, very vulnerable.’ Capt. Dan Campbell, a West Pointer commanding an Airborne company, shared Fichtl’s view. He thought his unit did not do nearly enough night patrolling, partly because they were so tired by the time darkness fell. Contrarily, Campbell was astonished by the willingness – even enthusiasm – of some of his men to brave the terrors of exploring enemy tunnels.
A few revelled in the Vietnam experience. Lt. John Harrison’s Airborne company included a formidable sergeant named Manfred Fellman who as a boy in 1945 had won an Iron Cross as a member of the Wehrmacht defending Breslau. Fellman’s request to be allowed to wear his medal in Vietnam was vetoed by an officer who said, ‘Think how a survivor of Auschwitz would feel, if he saw it.’ ‘Fellman was something,’ said Harrison, who admired the German’s warrior gifts, ‘but he was always being busted for drinking problems.’ Helicopter pilot Capt. Frank Hickey said, ‘We enjoyed what we did … We always won … To me, we were always successful. We used to say to each other: “Go get Charlie!”’
Arkansas farm boy Carlos Norman Hathcock was a superb shot who claimed to have killed ninety-three communists. Much of the time he was a quiet, shy man, though prone to outbreaks of extreme violence, one of which almost caused him to be busted for getting into a fight with an officer and overstaying leave. In 1965 he won America’s most prestigious shooting prize, the Wimbledon Cup, a thousand-yard event, and in March the following year went to the war, first as a military policeman, then as a Marine sniper. ‘Vietnam was just right for me,’ he said later. He never willingly took time out or R&R. On discharge he found that he knew how to do nothing else. He re-enlisted and returned to the war, where one morning he was travelling in an amphtrac that ran over a mine. He suffered burns over 43 per cent of his body, and on returning from hospital to Quantico found himself unable to shoot straight any more. He continued to instruct other riflemen, but proved prone to heavy drinking and bouts of uncontrollable anger.
When Jonathan Polansky, a draftee assigned to the 101st Airborne, reached his new firebase as a skinny kid weighing 112 pounds he felt a sense of despair: ‘I was taken to the company commander, a big strong strapping guy with about eight days’ growth of beard and blond hair straight back. The platoon sergeant was this big black guy. I was awed by these men with the dirty clothes. I was in my brand-new little green fatigues and my boots were still shiny. I looked about twelve years old with my bald head and helmet that was too big. And they just kind of looked at me and laughed. My heart fell. I can’t ever remember feeling so intimidated, so weak, so ineffectual. Nobody wanted a “cherry”.’ After an interminable day climbing a mountain, Polansky went to see his captain and asked to be transferred out of the company, saying, ‘I can’t do it.’ The officer laughed and told him not to worry: he would make it. Next day the company climbed an even higher mountain: ‘At the end of the day I felt fantastic. I felt that I would survive. By the third day in-country, I knew I would make it. I didn’t know how, but I knew I would.’
Among some terrible deeds, virtuous ones deserve emphasis. Shirley Purcell was a veteran nurse summoned to active duty in 1966. Her brother, a Texas redneck, urged her not to go, but she was convinced of her duty, and struggled successfully to reduce her weight to meet service requirements. At Bien Hoa, between shifts she spent many hours working in the hospital of an orphanage, teaching Vietnamese nuns in the labour ward the importance of surgical gloves. She formed a deep attachment to a five-year-old girl she called ‘Scamp’, for whose sake Purcell later served a second tour in the country. She took a passionate pride in her work: ‘I really didn’t have a political commitment … [but] there were American troops there that needed help.’
She was thinking, for instance, of an infantryman who had triggered a Bouncing Betty: ‘This young man had literally been ripped in half – from his knees up and from just below his ribs down. It was like hamburger meat. All of the internal organs were just chopped up, but his legs were perfect laying on the litter, and his arms, hand, upper chest were perfect, and his mind was still very much alert. He was looking up at us. The sense that went over that entire unit, with that young man lying in the emergency room dying because there was absolutely nothing that we could do for him, was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It was total helplessness and hopelessness. The terror and frustration in the doctors’ eyes, because with all of this training that they had, and all the knowledge and all that we could give, we still couldn’t give this man a chance.’ Another soldier came in with half his head blown away: ‘He was about nineteen, it was an inoperable wound … I remember trying to wrap his head so that his brains would not be lying on the litter. He looked up at me and said, “Well, how does it look?” I had to tell him, “It doesn’t look good, but you won’t be alone.” That was really all we had to offer him – that he would not be alone.’ Shirley had been a teetotaller all her life, but in the officers’ club at Chu Lai she started on Screwdrivers, and who could blame her? Later, she could never bring herself to watch MASH on TV, because her memories imposed a veto upon laughter.
The two Australian battalions based in the south-eastern corner of Vietnam, above Vung Tau, at first found themselves struggling to fulfil their mission with relatively meagre manpower, and the usual vast tracts of wilderness to patrol and sweep. In their first weeks the enemy proved elusive, but a night mortar attack on their camp in mid-August 1966, which wounded twenty-four men, provoked the battalion commander to dispatch a force to scour the area. On the afternoon of 18 August, in vile weather a hundred Australians clashed with a powerful force of VC near the abandoned village of Long Tan, and found themselves fighting for their lives. Artillery hit the communists hard, but small-arms ammunition ran dangerously low. Two RAAF helicopters braved rain and low cloud to fly an emergency resupply, and just as the infantry began to fear being overrun, APCs reached them carrying .50-calibre machine-guns and a reinforcement company. The communists withdrew, leaving behind 245 dead. The Australians had lost eighteen killed. They prevailed, but knew that they had been on the brink of suffering a disaster, partly because their contingent lacked sufficient mass to handle a powerful enemy on territory the communists considered their own. During the months and years that followed the Australians and New Zealanders forged a reputation as formidable infantry soldiers.
Alongside search-and-destroy missions, there was an ever more relentless aerial assault on the wildernesses in which the communists sought refuge. Operation Trail Dust, defoliation of infiltration routes, began in 1961. In July 1965 the first vegetation-killers were unleashed in the heart of South Vietnam, where chemical clouds drifted onto orchards near Bien Hoa and Lai Thie
u, with disastrous consequences for crops of mango, custard apples, jackfruit, pineapple. Almost overnight, fruit fell; leaves turned brown on thousands of rubber trees. Local people were at first bewildered, unable to comprehend the cause of this apparent natural disaster. When the truth emerged, farmers were not much comforted by assurances that the consequences of Agent Orange would not linger for more than a year. A Southern colonel observed that the popular anger and distress caused by defoliation around inhabited areas ‘far eclipsed any military gain’. He acknowledged nonetheless that defoliants were effective in denying the enemy jungle communication routes, especially in the mangrove swamps along the Saigon River.
The programme peaked in 1968–69; in all, almost twenty million gallons of defoliants, over half of them dioxin-contaminated, were broadcast across Indochina. This remains one of the most vexed issues in posterity’s view of the war: it is impossible to avoid a sense of revulsion about systematic destruction of the natural environment, to serve tactical purposes. It is hard to doubt that some Vietnamese, and perhaps Americans too, suffered ill-effects from Agent Orange. It seems nonetheless prudent to be cautious about extreme twenty-first-century claims made by Hanoi, and by some American bodies, that hundreds of thousands of people of the war generation suffered lasting harm – birth defects, cancer and other hideous diseases. Hanoi’s official history of the war gives figures of two million civilians affected by Agent Orange. Yet for humans to suffer serious harm they would have needed to face heavy sustained exposure to dioxins, on a scale that relatively few did. A Southern veteran recently noted that he and his comrades constantly handled defoliants, broadcasting them from hand-pump sprayers, without ill-effects. He suggests that Vietnamese farmers’ notoriously reckless use of insecticides is as likely to have injured their health as did Agent Orange.
