by Michael Herr
There wasn’t a day when someone didn’t ask me what I was doing there. Sometimes an especially smart grunt or another correspondent would even ask me what I was really doing there, as though I could say anything honest about it except “Blah blah blah cover the war” or “Blah blah blah write a book.” Maybe we accepted each other’s stories about why we were there at face value: the grunts who “had” to be there, the spooks and civilians whose corporate faith had led them there, the correspondents whose curiosity or ambition drew them over. But somewhere all the mythic tracks intersected, from the lowest John Wayne wetdream to the most aggravated soldier-poet fantasy, and where they did I believe that everyone knew everything about everyone else, every one of us there a true volunteer. Not that you didn’t hear some overripe bullshit about it: Hearts and Minds, Peoples of the Republic, tumbling dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching Doodah; you could also hear the other, some young soldier speaking in all bloody innocence, saying, “All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period.” Which wasn’t at all true of me. I was there to watch.
Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn’t frozen, you are.
Sometimes I didn’t know if an action took a second or an hour or if I dreamed it or what. In war more than in other life you don’t really know what you’re doing most of the time, you’re just behaving, and afterward you can make up any kind of bullshit you want to about it, say you felt good or bad, loved it or hated it, did this or that, the right thing or the wrong thing; still, what happened happened.
Coming back, telling stories, I’d say, “Oh man I was scared,” and, “Oh God I thought it was all over,” a long time before I knew how scared I was really supposed to be, or how clear and closed and beyond my control “all over” could become. I wasn’t dumb but I sure was raw, certain connections are hard to make when you come from a place where they go around with war in their heads all the time.
“If you get hit,” a medic told me, “we can chopper you back to base-camp hospital in like twenty minutes.”
“If you get hit real bad,” a corpsman said, “they’ll get your case to Japan in twelve hours.”
“If you get killed,” a spec 4 from Graves promised, “we’ll have you home in a week.”
TIME IS ON MY SIDE, already written there across the first helmet I ever wore there. And underneath it, in smaller lettering that read more like a whispered prayer than an assertion, No lie, GI. The rear-hatch gunner on a Chinook threw it to me that first morning at the Kontum airstrip, a few hours after the Dak To fighting had ended, screaming at me through the rotor wind, “You keep that, we got plenty, good luck!” and then flying off. I was so glad to have the equipment that I didn’t stop to think where it had to have come from. The sweatband inside was seasoned up black and greasy, it was more alive now than the man who’d worn it, when I got rid of it ten minutes later I didn’t just leave it on the ground, I snuck away from it furtive and ashamed, afraid that someone would see it and call after me, “Hey numbnuts, you forgot something.…”
That morning when I tried to go out they sent me down the line from a colonel to a major to a captain to a sergeant, who took one look, called me Freshmeat, and told me to go find some other outfit to get myself killed with. I didn’t know what was going on, I was so nervous I started to laugh. I told him that nothing was going to happen to me and he gave my shoulder a tender, menacing pat and said, “This ain’t the fucking movies over here, you know.” I laughed again and said that I knew, but he knew that I didn’t.
Day one, if anything could have penetrated that first innocence I might have taken the next plane out. Out absolutely. It was like a walk through a colony of stroke victims, a thousand men on a cold rainy airfield after too much of something I’d never really know, “a way you’ll never be,” dirt and blood and torn fatigues, eyes that poured out a steady charge of wasted horror. I’d just missed the biggest battle of the war so far, I was telling myself that I was sorry, but it was right there all around me and I didn’t even know it. I couldn’t look at anyone for more than a second, I didn’t want to be caught listening, some war correspondent, I didn’t know what to say or do, I didn’t like it already. When the rain stopped and the ponchos came off there was a smell that I thought was going to make me sick: rot, sump, tannery, open grave, dump-fire—awful, you’d walk into pockets of Old Spice that made it even worse. I wanted badly to find some place to sit alone and smoke a cigarette, to find a face that would cover my face the way my poncho covered my new fatigues. I’d worn them once before, yesterday morning in Saigon, bringing them out of the black market and back to the hotel, dressing up in front of the mirror, making faces and moves I’d never make again. And loving it. Now, nearby on the ground, there was a man sleeping with a poncho over his head and a radio in his arms, I heard Sam the Sham singing, “Lil’ Red Riding Hood, I don’t think little big girls should, Go walking in these spooky old woods alone.…”
I turned to walk some other way and there was a man standing in front of me. He didn’t exactly block me, but he didn’t move either. He tottered a little and blinked, he looked at me and through me, no one had ever looked at me like that before. I felt a cold fat drop of sweat start down the middle of my back like a spider, it seemed to take an hour to finish its run. The man lit a cigarette and then sort of slobbered it out, I couldn’t imagine what I was seeing. He tried again with a fresh cigarette. I gave him the light for that one, there was a flicker of focus, acknowledgment, but after a few puffs it went out too, and he let it drop to the ground. “I couldn’t spit for a week up there,” he said, “and now I can’t fucking stop.”
When the 173rd held services for their dead from Dak To the boots of the dead men were arranged in formation on the ground. It was an old paratrooper tradition, but knowing that didn’t reduce it or make it any less spooky, a company’s worth of jump boots standing empty in the dust taking benediction, while the real substance of the ceremony was being bagged and tagged and shipped back home through what they called the KIA Travel Bureau. A lot of the people there that day accepted the boots as solemn symbols and went into deep prayer. Others stood around watching with grudging respect, others photographed it and some just thought it was a lot of bitter bullshit. All they saw out there was one more set of spare parts, and they wouldn’t have looked around for holy ghosts if some of those boots filled up again and walked.
Dak To itself had only been the command point for a combat without focus that tore a thirty-mile arc over the hills running northeast to southwest of the small base and airfield there from early November through Thanksgiving 1967, fighting that grew in size and fame while it grew more vicious and out of control. In October the small Dak To Special Forces compound had taken some mortar and rocket fire, patrols went out, patrols collided, companies splintered the action and spread it across the hills in a sequence of small, isolated firefights that afterward were described as strategy; battalions were sucked into it, then divisions, then reinforced divisions. Anyway, we knew for sure that we had a reinforced division in it, the 4th plus, and we said that they had one in it too, although a lot of people believed that a couple of light flexible regiments could have done what the NVA did up and down those hills for three weeks, leaving us to claim that we’d driven him up 1338, up 943, up 875 and 876, while the opposing claims remained
mostly unspoken and probably unnecessary. And then instead of really ending, the battle vanished. The North Vietnamese collected up their gear and most of their dead and “disappeared” during the night, leaving a few bodies behind for our troops to kick and count.
“Just like goin’ in against the Japs,” one kid called it; the heaviest fighting in Vietnam since the la Drang Valley two years before, and one of the only times after la Drang when ground fire was so intense that the medevacs couldn’t land through it. Wounded backed up for hours and sometimes days, and a lot of men died who might have been saved. Resupply couldn’t make it in either, and the early worry about running out of ammunition grew into a panic and beyond, it became real. At the worst, a battalion of Airborne assaulting 875 got caught in an ambush sprung from behind, where no NVA had been reported, and its three companies were pinned and cut off in the raking fire of that trap for two days. Afterward, when a correspondent asked one of the survivors what had happened he was told, “What the fuck do you think happened? We got shot to pieces.” The correspondent started to write that down and the paratrooper said, “Make that ‘little pieces.’ We were still shaking the trees for dog tags when we pulled back out of there.”
Even after the North had gone away, logistics and transport remained a problem. A big battle had to be dismantled piece by piece and man by man. It was raining hard every day now, the small strip at Dak To became overloaded and unworkable, and a lot of troops were shuttled down to the larger strip at Kontum. Some even ended up as far out of their way as Pleiku, fifty miles to the south, for sorting and transport back to their units around II Corps. The living, the wounded and the dead flew together in crowded Chinooks, and it was nothing for guys to walk on top of the half-covered corpses packed in the aisles to get to a seat, or to make jokes among themselves about how funny they all looked, the dumb dead fuckers.
There were men sitting in loose groups all around the strip at Kontum, hundreds of them arranged by unit waiting to be picked up again and flown out. Except for a small sandbagged ops shack and a medical tent, there was no shelter anywhere from the rain. Some of the men had rigged up mostly useless tents with their ponchos, a lot lay out sleeping in the rain with helmets or packs for pillows, most just sat or stood around waiting. Their faces were hidden deep inside the cover of their poncho hoods, white eye movement and silence, walking among them made you feel like you were being watched from hundreds of isolated caves. Every twenty minutes or so a helicopter would land, men would come out or be carried out, others would get on and the chopper would rear up on the strip and fly away, some toward Pleiku and the hospital, others back to the Dak To area and the mop-up operations there. The rotors of the Chinooks cut twin spaces out of the rain, forcing the spray in slanting jets for fifty yards around. Just knowing what was in those choppers gave the spray a bad taste, strong and briny. You didn’t want to leave it on your face long enough to dry.
Back from the strip a fat, middle-aged man was screaming at some troops who were pissing on the ground. His poncho was pulled back away from the front of his helmet enough to show captain’s bars, but nobody even turned around to look at him. He groped under his poncho and came up with a .45, pointed it into the rain and fired off a shot that made an empty faraway pop, like it had gone off under wet sand. The men finished, buttoned up and walked away laughing, leaving the captain alone shouting orders to police up the filth; thousands of empty and half-eaten ration cans, soggy clots of Stars and Stripes, an M-16 that someone had just left lying there and, worse, evidence of a carelessness unimaginable to the captain, it stank even in the cold rain, but it would police itself in an hour or two if the rain kept up.
The ground action had been over for nearly twenty-four hours now, but it was still going on in compulsive replay among the men who’d been there:
“A dead buddy is some tough shit, but bringing your own ass out alive can sure help you to get over it.”
“We had this lieutenant, honest to Christ he was about the biggest dipshit fool of all time, all time. We called him Lieutenant Gladly ’cause he was always going like, ‘Men … Men, I won’t never ask you to do nothing I wouldn’t do myself gladly,’ what an asshole. We was on 1338 and he goes to me, ‘Take a little run up to the ridge and report to me,’ and I goes like, ‘Never happen, Sir.’ So he does, he goes up there himself and damned if the fucker didn’t get zapped. He said we was gonna have a real serious talk when he come back, too. Sorry ’bout that.”
“Kid here [not really here, “here” just a figure of speech] gets blown away ten feet in back of us. I swear to God, I thought I was looking at ten different guys when I turned around….”
“You guys are so full of shit it’s coming out of your fucking ears!” one man was saying, PRAY FOR WAR was written on the side of his helmet, and he was talking mostly to a man whose helmet name was SWINGING DICK. “You were pissing up everything but your fucking toenails, Scudo, don’t you tell me you weren’t scared man, don’t you fucking dare, ’cause I was right fucking there man, and I was scared shit! I was scared every fucking minute, and I’m no different from any body else!”
“Well big deal, candy ass,” Swinging Dick said. “You were scared.”
“Damn straight! Damn straight! You’re damn fucking straight I was scared! You’re about the dumbest motherfucker I ever met, Scudo, but you’re not that dumb. The Marines aren’t even that dumb man, I don’t care, all that bullshit they’ve got in the Marine Corps about how Marines aren’t ever afraid, oh wow, I’ll fucking bet…. I’ll bet the Marines are just as scared!”
He started to get up but his knees gave under him. He made a quick grasping spasm out of control, like a misfire in the nervous system, and when he fell back he brought a stack of M-16’s with him. They made a sharp clatter and everyone jerked and twitched out of the way, looking at each other as though they couldn’t remember for a minute whether they needed to find cover or not.
“Hey baby, hey, watch where you’re goin’ there” a paratrooper said, but he was laughing, they were all laughing, and Pray For War was laughing harder than any of them, so hard that it filled suddenly with air and cracked over into high giggles. When he lifted his face again it was all tracked with tears.
“You gonna stand there, asshole?” he said to Swinging Dick. “Or are you gonna help me up on my fucking feet?”
Swinging Dick reached down and grabbed his wrists, locking them and pulling him up slowly until their faces were a couple of inches apart. For a second it looked like they were going to kiss.
“Looking good,” Pray For War said. “Mmmm, Scudo, you are really looking good, man. It don’t look to me like you were scared at all up there. You only look like about ten thousand miles of bad road.”
What they say is totally true, it’s funny the things you remember. Like a black paratrooper with the 101st who glided by and said, “I been scaled man, I’m smooth now,” and went on, into my past and I hope his future, leaving me to wonder not what he meant (that was easy), but where he’d been to get his language. On a cold wet day in Hue our jeep turned into the soccer stadium where hundreds of North Vietnamese bodies had been collected, I saw them, but they don’t have the force in my memory that a dog and a duck have who died together in a small terrorist explosion in Saigon. Once I ran into a soldier standing by himself in the middle of a small jungle clearing where I’d wandered off to take a leak. We said hello, but he seemed very uptight about my being there. He told me that the guys were all sick of sitting around waiting and that he’d come out to see if he could draw a little fire. What a look we gave each other. I backed out of there fast, I didn’t want to bother him while he was working.
This is already a long time ago, I can remember the feelings but I can’t still have them. A common prayer for the overattached: You’ll let it go sooner or later, why not do it now? Memory print, voices and faces, stories like filament through a piece of time, so attached to the experience that nothing moved and nothin
g went away.
“First letter I got from my old man was all about how proud he was that I’m here and how we have this duty to, you know, I don’t fucking know, whatever … and it really made me feel great. Shit, my father hardly said good morning to me before. Well, I been here eight months now, and when I get home I’m gonna have all I can do to keep from killing that cocksucker.…”
Everywhere you went people said, “Well, I hope you get a story,” and everywhere you went you did.
“Oh, it ain’t so bad. My last tour was better though, not so much mickeymouse, Command gettin’ in your way so you can’t even do your job. Shit, last three patrols I was on we had fucking orders not to return fire going through the villages, that’s what a fucked-up war it’s gettin’ to be anymore. My last tour we’d go through and that was it, we’d rip out the hedges and burn the hootches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can’t shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?”
