Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  On foot, scent could kill almost as surely as noise. Both sides cherished their scouts, some of whom had supremely refined senses. An NVA soldier named Nga was dubbed ‘the German shepherd’ because, in a comrade’s words, ‘His nose is legendary. Whenever he says he can “smell” Americans, he always turns out to be right.’ Some US officers, especially those leading deep-penetration patrols, barred smoking, so that men instead chewed tobacco. Scout dogs could be an asset, but were vulnerable to dehydration: more than one handler wound up carrying his canine charge. Australian animal-lovers raised a storm in Canberra when Cassius, one of their contingent’s trackers, died of heat exhaustion even after being immersed in ice baths by US Army veterinarians. Landen Thorne’s Marines prompted Vietnamese Kit Carson scouts to kick his platoon’s hapless dogs, ‘so they knew the difference between the good guys and the bad ones’. And despite the animals’ training, sometimes they barked, betraying their owners.

  It is hard to exaggerate the strain of sweeps, in which days of mere discomfort, filth, exertion and apprehension could end in an auto pile-up with an enemy ambush. Capt. Julius Johnson said his biggest problem was ‘keeping my men sharp enough, after a week or two without contact, to maintain their reactions that allowed them to be fired on and get off that second shot’. They had their own droll variant on the 23rd Psalm: ‘Yea, though I walk through this valley of the shadow of darkness and death, I shall not fear for thou art with me … Thy arty and thy B-52s are on call to comfort me.’

  The chronic wet rusted grenade pins, cans, guns, electrical circuits. The best way to ward off insects was to soak clothing and boots in repellent, but often juice was short. They had no prophylactic for the leeches: men wore steel-spring blousing garters to hold trousers tight, but the crawling horrors got through anyway, their heads boring a quarter-inch into a man’s skin before the pain started. They could be removed with a burning cigarette only at the evening halt.

  Booby traps were most often spotted early in the day, when troops were fresh. Sgt. Mike Sutton was wading thigh-deep through a swamp when among a heap of cut bamboo he found himself hard up against a tripwire; he never forgot the seconds of cold sweat before he stepped back … and lived. The most dangerous time came at late afternoon, when men were filthy, hungry, riddled with bug bites, weary of climbing hills, negotiating swamps. That was when it was wise to exchange point men, to secure a renewal of vigilance. A frenzied shout of ‘HIT IT!’ signified, usually too late, that a man had heard the ‘pop!’ as a mine triggered, that the squad should dive for the deck. It was almost always the enemy who initiated contacts, with a burst of fire or a shower of ‘Chi-Coms’ – grenades – that killed one, two, three Americans before they could respond. Lt. Frank Boccia compared the sort of stuff that followed to ‘a slugging match in a tar pit while blindfolded’. A Marine wrote: ‘As tired and bored as you get fighting both fatigue and the heat, all it takes is a shout, or someone moving too fast, and suddenly you have never felt so alert, so alive. Your nose, ears, eyes, working all of a sudden better than ever before. It is a real rush.’

  The Americans had overwhelming firepower, yet this meant little to grunts confronting an almost invisible enemy in close country. David Rogers said: ‘We felt pretty evenly matched. B-52s will not solve your problem when you’re pinned down; I never felt we had immense superiority. Their RPG was better than our LAW. Their AK-47 was better than our M-16.’ At the heart of every squad was its ‘pig’ – the M-60 machine-gun, a superb weapon that delivered a terrific weight of fire, at the cost of being heavy to hump – thirty pounds including a belt – and heavier still to feed. Some men carried M-79 ‘Thumper’ grenade-launchers, which resembled sawn-off shotguns and fired 40mm shells. M-79s and 66mm LAW rockets gave handy immediate support. Rogers said that in a firefight ‘sometimes we’d fire a LAW just for the noise’ – the morale boost its heavy bang provided. CS gas grenades were also sometimes used to shift enemy from stubbornly-held positions, or to test for their presence in a discovered tunnel system.

  Soldiers were awed by their own air strikes and 105mm support: ‘Simply by speaking a few words into a two-way radio, I had performed magical feats of destruction,’ an officer marvelled. Gunners five or six miles away dropped a smoke round to mark their aiming point, then waited for the FO accompanying a platoon or company commander to adjust fire. Here was why soldiers forgave officers many failings, but never poor map-reading, which was how friendly fire got to kill them. FOs directed aircraft on a course across their front, because if they attacked from behind, short munitions would hit Americans. Walt Boomer: ‘We loved napalm. I don’t know how effective it was, but it surely helped your morale.’ A stupendous volume of air-dropped ordnance was wasted on untenanted wilderness. When Andy Finlayson led a patrol inserted in the jungle by helo to investigate the impact of a B-52 strike, they found the usual devastation, together with evidence that many men had recently crossed the target area. The only blood pools, however, appeared to be from an elephant or buffalo.

  In a firefight many grunts – if their rifles were working – could not resist shooting into the green like it was the Fourth of July, on full automatic ‘rock ’n’ roll’. FO Bill Hardwick wrote: ‘Poor fire discipline was endemic. At times it just felt good … to rip off a few rounds … the sign of an amateur. The enemy usually had excellent fire discipline.’ This was partly because the Vietcong carried relatively little ammunition, sometimes no more than two magazines, and this could give Americans or South Vietnamese the edge in a sustained exchange. Capt. Joe Tenney complained that many of his own company made no pretence of aiming: ‘In one case I saw an enemy soldier run through the killing zone of an ambush without ever being hit, though nine men were shooting at him.’

  As for incoming, Tim O’Brien wrote of ‘the stiff thump of the bullet, like a fist, the way it knocks the air out of you and makes you cough, how the sound of the gunshot arrived about ten years later, and the dizzy feeling, the smell of yourself, the things you think about and say and do right afterward, the way your eyes focus on a tiny white pebble or blade of grass and how you start thinking, Oh man, that’s the last thing I’ll ever see, that pebble, that blade of grass, which makes you want to cry.’

  The most contentious phrase in every infantryman’s lexicon is ‘pinned down’. It can mean that a squad, platoon, company is trapped in the face of such heavy enemy fire that it would be suicidal to advance. More often, it means that nobody that day is feeling heroic enough to try for a Medal of Honor; it seems smarter to stay prone and call in ‘arty’ or an air strike, which is why so much of Vietnam was a radio-operator’s war. Most firefights were brief: in one that lasted just thirty seconds, fifteen of thirty-five patrolling Marines were killed or wounded. Often a handful of VC used their weapons for a minute or two, then pulled out before artillery could work on them. Vince Felletter said, ‘They could break off a firefight much easier than we could.’

  It was tough for junior leaders to exercise control in thick bush, where hand signals could not be seen and shouts were inaudible above a cacophony of exploding grenades, automatic fire, screams of fear and pain. Some battalion commanders ran their units from overhead Hueys, a practice that seldom impressed their men. Capt. Ken Moorefield’s colonel and operations officer could be hovering at a thousand feet, the brigade commander at fifteen hundred, the divisional commander at twenty-five, ‘and I swear to God one day I was in a battle where the commander of all US forces was at thirty-five hundred feet … From the point of view of some infantryman who is down there sweating his ass off, facing hot lead at close quarters, it’s very difficult to respect or identify with his leadership sitting up in the clouds in starched fatigues.’

  Company commanders were sometimes maddened by senior officers trying to micromanage firefights. Vince Felletter said: ‘I got into a little bit of push and shove with my battalion commander when I told him to get the hell off the net till the contact was over. I lost my cool a little bit … and that caused some problem
s.’ It is striking how many novels and memoirs, Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn notable among them, display not merely a lack of respect for higher commanders, but active contempt and even hatred for them.

  Anything could happen during a contact: riflemen in Charlie Shyab’s platoon put a few rounds over the heads of skulkers hanging back, men ‘who just didn’t want to do it’. Every platoon had such people. Shyab found that he had replaced a medic who refused to go into the bush any more, and instead got a job at base. When the company met trouble on Chu Moor Mountain, survivors were shocked to discover that their sergeant, who had seemed a decent guy, ‘went into shock. He just wasn’t there for us’: the NCO vanished forever, carrying a wounded man to the rear.

  All grunts called their corpsman ‘doc’, knowing that if they were hit he was as near to a real doctor as they were going to get before providence decided whether they lived or died. On reconnaissance missions David Rogers carried his medical kit in a C4 explosives bag: salt tablets, dressings, morphia, two cans of albumen, an intravenous drip, smoke grenades to call in dust-offs. On normal field duty this was reinforced by an AK-47 magazine vest filled with morphine ampoules and other kit. He also carried scissors on a D-ring. He said: ‘Most wounds had a little hole going in and a big one coming out. I really didn’t know what to do with one guy, because I couldn’t find a clear wound: some shrapnel must have got into him. He was alive when we put him onto the helicopter, dead before he got to Cu Chi.’ Fred Hillyard, a twenty-six-year-old West Pointer, felt that too often attacks lost momentum because of the priority given to casualty evacuation, which vanished if a man was dead. He cited ‘the emotional attraction that one has to a casualty and how that changes once it’s a KIA. The light inside of a body is so important that once that light is extinguished, you have a totally different emotional attention … Then it’s a logistics burden.’ Jim Williams said that when men broke off an attack to hump a casualty, ‘part of that was just an excuse to get out of the fire, and it was killing us – literally – because once you lose fire superiority the enemy gains it and you’re pinned down’. He told his own company: ‘I don’t care if it’s your mother that goes down, you leave her lying there and you keep going.’

  A communist officer expressed scepticism about American soldiers for the usual reasons – ‘They carried too many luxuries, were too heavy, too slow. We could see them coming a long way off.’ Nonetheless, the NVA’s fieldcraft was not always superior: American ambushes could be alerted to an approaching enemy by the same sounds they themselves generated – metal on metal, a clanking canteen, careless chatter. Once during a firefight in which Americans became momentarily unnerved, their spirits rose when a man began taunting the communists. Andy Finlayson again: ‘Soon all of us were laughing and yelling at the enemy to come and get us … I am not sure whether it was the heavy volume of fire we poured in, or the laughing or the grenades, but whatever it was the enemy moved away.’

  After a killing fight, men tried to gather to say a brief prayer over fallen comrades, though that indulgence had to be abandoned where casualties mounted. The practice of mutilating enemy dead was widespread. An October 1967 episode brought shame on the media: a CBS cameraman handed a soldier a knife with which to sever the ear of a dead communist for the benefit of TV viewers. Both the cameraman and his reporter fled the country rather than testify at the soldier’s subsequent court-martial. It was well-known, however, that men took such souvenirs. One day Walt Boomer’s battalion medical officer led the captain aside and warned that his men were collecting ears. Boomer gathered the company around him that night, sat them down and said, ‘If you ever do this again I’ll kill you. What would your mothers say?’ He believed tough leadership was the only way to check excesses: ‘From cutting off ears you can spiral into terrible atrocities. My Lai happened because officers failed.’ Some men instead contented themselves with leaving an ace of spades on VC corpses.

  John McNamara wrote home that he was appalled by the amount of loose talk about the need to employ terrorist tactics against terrorists: ‘Just a few years ago it was confined to the fringe. If the actual [US military] establishment ever start going that way – good grief. Quite decent people become frustrated … Beware the wrath of the centurions.’ With the 1st Air Cav, Don Graham felt ‘really proud’ when he saw a colonel relieve in the field a company commander whose men had wantonly burned civilian homes.

  Even if religious faith was on short ration – less than one man in five attended regular services, and two-thirds never – most did plenty of praying. During September 1967’s Operation Swift, chaplain Vincent Capodanno comforted a casualty by saying, ‘Stay calm, Marine. Someone will be here to help soon. God is with us all here today.’ The man later testified that Capodanno’s presence had given him an extraordinary sense of peace. The chaplain was killed soon afterwards, awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor, and declared a ‘Servant of God’ by the Catholic Church. Capodanno’s mere presence at the sharp end won the respect of his flock, though this could be overdone. James May described his own unit’s man of God seeking to showcase his brotherhood with the soldiers by delivering obscene imprecations such as, ‘Please, God, let the bombs fall straight on the little yellow motherfuckers.’ Another chaplain was photographed carrying a rifle and grenades, while yet one more liked to take shifts as a helicopter door-gunner.

  A unit in the field usually halted at late afternoon, where possible on higher ground, commanding a view. Men finished the day coated with red dirt baked in sweat which it became ecstasy to scrub off with sand in river water, if there was any nearby. Walt Boomer made his men shave – ‘I wanted them to think with the cunning of animals, but I didn’t want them to become animals.’ Few officers dared to enforce such discipline, however, especially as the war grew older and sicker.

  Most evenings they had to dig, which everybody hated, though it often made the difference between living and dying. Good units sank two-man foxholes forty inches deep, cursing the rocks and roots they encountered below the thin surface layer of clay. When rain came, as it so often did, Biblical torrents collapsed fighting holes and makeshift poncho roofs, prompting an orgy of obscenities. After they had dug they cooked, usually on a stove improvised from a C-ration tin punched full of holes, fuelled with small pieces of C-4 explosive that hissed and flared to a white-hot flame. There was trading and bitching about who got to eat what: everybody liked canned fruit and pound cake, while nobody relished ham and lima beans except Walt Boomer. Most men preferred LRRP recon packs to C-rations, but the former were hard for infantry units to get their hands on. Some men made elaborate messes, for instance extracting the potatoes from a meat-’n’-potatoes can, mashing them with dried cream substitute, while cooking the meat and gravy in a canteen cup. They brewed instant coffee or cocoa, finished with crackers perhaps spread with melted cheese, shakes of tarragon leaves and onion chips.

  After two weeks out, everything tasted the same, and sometimes they thought themselves lucky to get fed at all: if the weather closed in, a ‘skate’ – air resupply day, with mail and maybe beer – was cancelled. Most units occasionally found themselves hungry, though never remotely as ravenous as their enemies. The worst peril was that of exhausting radio batteries, a special risk for deep-penetration patrols. If communications died, their air hose was severed to fire support, rescue, maybe even survival. Almost everybody smoked, and cigarettes came in C-ration sundry packs along with candy, razor blades, toothpaste and brushes, writing paper and pencils. Pills played a big role: they sucked salt tablets, purified water with Halizone that made it taste like iodine, and which still gave them the shits, for which they would take two Lomotil tablets, four times a day. They swallowed daily malaria tablets under a corpsman’s eye, because some men yearned for fever, to escape the bush. In 1967–68, while drug abuse increased, it was mostly confined to the rear: officers and NCOs still had sufficient clout to keep men clean in the field.

  In the evenings in their hammocks, or prone on flatte
ned C-ration cartons after a skate, some men took out battered paperbacks. Andy Finlayson read voraciously on OPs – observation patrols – far from any firebase. He soaked up history, political science, anthropology, Conrad, Hardy, Hemingway, Updike and the Japanese classic The Tale of Genji. Comics were more popular, however. Harold Bryan was sometimes reduced to reading the Bible his mother had sent him, ‘when I couldn’t find any Playboys’. Those who could not read, talked. David Rogers: ‘You’d think about home – “What are they doing now?” I had a friend, a sergeant, who liked to play word games. We’d been through a lot, and were very close.’ Sooner or later all talk got around to the universal obsession: DEROS – ‘Date Estimated Return from OverSeas’, which each man carried burnt into his heart, especially when he was getting ‘short’. The 101st Airborne’s signature ‘Boonierat song’ started: ‘I landed in this country/One year of life to give/My only friend a weapon/My only prayer to live.’ Some men carried in the field ‘short-timers’ sticks’ – elaborately carved walking canes; others confined themselves to calendars and folk art on which they marked off the days. Nonetheless, it was thought unlucky for a new man to ask old sweats how long they had been there, before they saw fit to tell him.