by Michael Herr
Some journalists talked about no-story operations, but I never went on one. Even when an operation never got off the ground, there was always the strip. Those were the same journalists who would ask us what the fuck we ever found to talk to grunts about, who said they never heard a grunt talk about anything except cars, football and chone. But they all had a story, and in the war they were driven to tell it.
“We was getting killed and the Dinks was panicking, and when the choppers come in to get us out, there wasn’t enough room for everybody. The Dinks was screaming and carrying on, grabbing hold of the treads and grabbing hold of our legs till we couldn’t get the choppers up. So we just said smack it, let these people get their own fucking choppers, and we started shooting them. And even then they kept on coming, oh man it was wild. I mean they could sure as shit believe that Charlie was shooting them, but they couldn’t believe that we was doing it too.…”
That was a story from the A Shau Valley years before my time there, an old story with the hair still growing on it. Sometimes the stories were so fresh that the teller was in shock, sometimes they were long and complex, sometimes the whole thing was contained in a few words on a helmet or a wall, and sometimes they were hardly stories at all but sounds and gestures packed with so much urgency that they became more dramatic than a novel, men talking in short violent bursts as though they were afraid they might not get to finish, or saying it almost out of a dream, innocent, offhand and mighty direct, “Oh you know, it was just a firefight, we killed some of them and they killed some of us.” A lot of what you heard, you heard all the time, men on tape, deceitful and counterarticulate, and some of it was low enough, guys whose range seemed to stop at “Git some, git some, harharhar!” But once in a while you’d hear something fresh, and a couple of times you’d even hear something high, like the corpsman at Khe Sanh who said, “If it ain’t the fucking incoming it’s the fucking outgoing. Only difference is who gets the fucking grease, and that ain’t no fucking difference at all.”
The mix was so amazing; incipient saints and realized homicidals, unconscious lyric poets and mean dumb motherfuckers with their brains all down in their necks; and even though by the time I left I knew where all the stories came from and where they were going, I was never bored, never even unsurprised. Obviously, what they really wanted to tell you was how tired they were and how sick of it, how moved they’d been and how afraid. But maybe that was me, by then my posture was shot: “reporter.” (“Must be pretty hard to stay detached,” a man on the plane to San Francisco said, and I said, “Impossible.”) After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and the images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories, you’d hear them out of a remote but accessible space where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information. However many times it happened, whether I’d known them or not, no matter what I’d felt about them or the way they’d died, their story was always there and it was always the same: it went, “Put yourself in my place.”
One afternoon I mistook a bloody nose for a headwound, and I didn’t have to wonder anymore how I’d behave if I ever got hit. We were walking out on a sweep north of Tay Ninh City, toward the Cambodian border, and a mortar round came in about thirty yards away. I had no sense of those distances then, even after six or seven weeks in Vietnam I still thought of that kind of information as a journalists’ detail that could be picked up later, not something a survivor might have to know. When we fell down on the ground the kid in front of me put his boot into my face. I didn’t feel the boot, it got lost in the tremendous concussion I made hitting the ground, but I felt a sharp pain in a line over my eyes. The kid turned around and started going into something insane right away, “Aw I’m sorry, shit I’m sorry, oh no man I’m sorry.” Some hot stinking metal had been put into my mouth, I thought I tasted brains there sizzling on the end of my tongue, and the kid was fumbling for his canteen and looking really scared, pale, near tears, his voice shaking, “Shit I’m just a fucking oaf, I’m a fucking clod, you’re okay, you’re really okay,” and somewhere in there I got the feeling that it was him, somehow he’d just killed me. I don’t think I said anything, but I made a sound that I can remember now, a shrill blubbering pitched to carry more terror than I’d ever known existed, like the sounds they’ve recorded off of plants being burned, like an old woman going under for the last time. My hands went flying everywhere all over my head, I had to find it and touch it. There seemed to be no blood coming from the top, none from the forehead, none running out of my eyes, my eyes! In a moment of half-relief the pain became specific, I thought that just my nose had been blown off, or in, or apart, and the kid was still going into it for himself, “Oh man, I’m really fucking sorry.”
Twenty yards in front of us men were running around totally out of their minds. One man was dead (they told me later it was only because he’d been walking forward with his flak jacket open, another real detail to get down and never fuck with again), one was on his hands and knees vomiting some evil pink substance, and one, quite near us, was propped up against a tree facing away from the direction of the round, making himself look at the incredible thing that had just happened to his leg, screwed around about once at some point below his knee like a goofy scarecrow leg. He looked away and then back again, looking at it for a few seconds longer each time, then he settled in for about a minute, shaking his head and smiling, until his face became serious and he passed out.
By then I’d found my nose and realized what had happened, all that had happened, not even broken, my glasses weren’t even broken. I took the kid’s canteen and soaked my sweat scarf, washing the blood off where it had caked on my lip and chin. He had stopped apologizing, and there was no pity in his face anymore. When I handed his canteen back to him, he was laughing at me.
I never told that story to anyone, and I never went back to that outfit again either.
III
In Saigon I always went to sleep stoned so I almost always lost my dreams, probably just as well, sock in deep and dim under that information and get whatever rest you could, wake up tapped of all images but the ones remembered from the day or the week before, with only the taste of a bad dream in your mouth like you’d been chewing on a roll of dirty old pennies in your sleep. I’d watched grunts asleep putting out the REM’s like a firefight in the dark, I’m sure it was the same with me. They’d say (I’d ask) that they didn’t remember their dreams either when they were in the zone, but on R&R or in the hospital their dreaming would be constant, open, violent and clear, like a man in the Pleiku hospital on the night I was there. It was three in the morning, scary and upsetting like hearing a language for the first time and somehow understanding every word, the voice loud and small at the same time, insistent, calling, “Who? Who? Who’s in the next room?” There was a single shaded light over the desk at the end of the ward where I sat with the orderly. I could only see the first few beds, it felt like there were a thousand of them running out into the darkness, but actually there were only twenty in each row. After the man had repeated it a few times there was a change like the break in a fever, he sounded like a pleading little boy. I could see cigarettes being lighted at the far end of the ward, mumbles and groans, wounded men returning to consciousness, pain, but the man who’d been dreaming slept through it.… As for my own dreams, the ones I lost there would make it through later, I should have known, some things will just naturally follow until they take. The night would come when they’d be vivid and unremitting, that night the beginning of a long string, I’d remember then and wake up half believing that I’d never really been in any of those places.
Saigon cafarde, a bitch, nothing for it but some smoke and a little lie-down, waking in the late afternoon on damp pillows, feeling the emptiness of the bed behind you as you walked to the windows looking down at Tu Do. Or just lying there tracking the rotations of the ceiling fan, reaching for the fat roach that sat on my Zippo in a yellow disk of grass
tar. There were mornings when I’d do it before my feet even hit the floor. Dear Mom, stoned again.
In the Highlands, where the Montagnards would trade you a pound of legendary grass for a carton of Salems, I got stoned with some infantry from the 4th. One of them had worked for months on his pipe, beautifully carved and painted with flowers and peace symbols. There was a reedy little man in the circle who grinned all the time but hardly spoke. He pulled a thick plastic bag out of his pack and handed it over to me. It was full of what looked like large pieces of dried fruit. I was stoned and hungry, I almost put my hand in there, but it had a bad weight to it. The other men were giving each other looks, some amused, some embarrassed and even angry. Someone had told me once, there were a lot more ears than heads in Vietnam; just information. When I handed it back he was still grinning, but he looked sadder than a monkey.
In Saigon and Danang we’d get stoned together and keep the common pool stocked and tended. It was bottomless and alive with Lurps, seals, recondos, Green-Beret bushmasters, redundant mutilators, heavy rapers, eye-shooters, widow-makers, nametakers, classic essential American types; point men, isolatos and outriders like they were programmed in their genes to do it, the first taste made them crazy for it, just like they knew it would. You thought you were separate and protected, you could travel the war for a hundred years, a swim in that pool could still be worth a piece of your balance.
We’d all heard about the man in the Highlands who was “building his own gook,” parts were the least of his troubles. In Chu Lai some Marines pointed a man out to me and swore to God they’d seen him bayonet a wounded NVA and then lick the bayonet clean. There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, “How can you shoot women and children?” and he’d answered, “It’s easy, you just don’t lead ’em so much.” Well, they said you needed a sense of humor, there you go, even the VC had one. Once after an ambush that killed a lot of Americans, they covered the field with copies of a photograph that showed one more young, dead American, with the punch line mimeographed on the back, “Your X-rays have just come back from the lab and we think we know what your problem is.”
“I was sitting in a Chinook and this guy across from me had his sixteen loaded and it was pointing like ha-ha at my heart. I made signs for him to kind of put it up and he started laughing. He said something to the guys next to him and they started laughing too….”
“He probably said, ‘Asshole here wants me to put my gun up,’ ” Dana said.
“Yeah, well, you know … sometimes I think one of them’s going to just do it, clear his weapon like bbbdddrrrpp, ya ha! I got a reporter!”
“There’s a colonel in the Seventh Marines who said he’d give a three-day pass to any one of his men who killed a correspondent for him,” Flynn said. “A week if they get Dana.”
“Well that’s just bullshit” Dana said. “They fucking think I’m God.”
“Yeah, it’s true,” Sean said. “It’s true, you little fucker, you’re just like they are.”
Dana Stone had just come down from Danang for more equipment, he’d fed all his cameras to the war again, they were either in the shop or totaled. Flynn had come back the night before from six weeks with the Special Forces in III Corps, he hadn’t said a word about what had gone on up there. “Spaced”: he was sitting on the floor by the air-conditioner with his back against the wall trying to watch the sweat running down from his hairline.
We were all in a room at the Continental Hotel that belonged to Keith Kay, the CBS cameraman. It was early May and there was a lot of heavy combat all around the city, a big offensive, friends came in from there and went out again all week long. Across the way, on the latticed porches of the Continental annex, we could see the Indians shuffle back and forth in their underwear, bushed from another hard day of buying and selling money. (Their mosque, near L’Amiral Restaurant, was called the Bank of India. When the Saigon police, the White Mice, raided it they found two million in cold green.) There were trucks and jeeps and a thousand bikes moving in the street, and a little girl with a withered leg darting back and forth on wooden crutches faster than a dragonfly to sell her cigarettes. She had a face like a child dakini, so beautiful that people who needed to keep their edge blunt could hardly bear to look at her. Her competition were street boys, “Changee money,” “Boom-boom picture,” “Dinkydao cigarette,” hustle and connection ran like a current down Tu Do, from the cathedral to the river. Rounding Le Loi there was a large group of correspondents coming back from the briefing, standard diurnal informational freak-o-rama, Five O’Clock Follies, Jive at Five, war stories; at the corner they broke formation and went to their offices to file, we watched them, the wasted clocking the wasted.
A new correspondent came into the room to say hello, just arrived from New York, and he started asking Dana a lot of questions right away, sort of bullshit questions about the killing radius of various mortars and the penetration capability of rockets, the ranges of AK’s and 16’s, what shells did when they hit treetops, paddy and hard ground. He was in his late thirties and he was dressed in one of those jungle-hell leisure suits that the tailors on Tu Do were getting rich cranking out, with enough flaps and slots and cargo pockets to carry supply for a squad. Dana would answer one question and the man would ask two more, but that made sense since the man had never been out and Dana hardly ever came in. Oral transmission, those who knew and those who didn’t, new people were always coming in with their own basic load of questions, energetic and hungry; someone had done it for you, it was a kind of blessing if you were in a position to answer some questions, if only to say that the questions couldn’t be answered. This man’s questions were something else, they seemed to be taking on hysteria as they went along.
“Is it exhilarating? Boy, I’ll bet it’s exhilarating.”
“Aw you wouldn’t believe it,” Dana said.
Tim Page came in. He’d been out at the Y Bridge all day taking pictures of the fighting there and he’d gotten some CS in his eyes. He was rubbing them and weeping and bitching.
“Oh you’re English,” the new man said. “I was just there. What’s CS?”
“It’s a gas gas gas,” Page said. “Gaaaaaa. Arrrrgggh!” and he did a soft version of raking his nails down his face, he used his fingertips but it left red marks anyway. “Blind Lemon Page,” Flynn said, and laughed while Page took the record that was playing on the turntable off without asking anybody and put on Jimi Hendrix: long tense organic guitar line that made him shiver like frantic electric ecstasy was shooting up from the carpet through his spine straight to the old pleasure center in his cream-cheese brain, shaking his head so that his hair waved all around him, Have You Ever Been Experienced?
“What does it look like when a man gets hit in the balls?” the new man said, as though that was the question he’d really meant to ask all along, and it came as close as you could get to a breach of taste in that room; palpable embarrassment all around, Flynn moved his eyes like he was following a butterfly up out of sight, Page got sniffy and offended, but he was amused, too. Dana just sat there putting out the still rays, taking snaps with his eyes. “Oh I dunno,” he said. “It all just goes sort of gooey.”
We all started to laugh, everyone except Dana, because he’d seen that, he was just telling the man. I didn’t hear what the man started to ask next, but Dana stopped him and said, “Only thing I can tell you that might actually do you some good is to go back up to your room and practice hitting the floor for a while.”
Beautiful for once and only once, just past dawn flying toward the center of the city in a Loach, view from a bubble floating at 800 feet. In that space, at that hour, you could see what people had seen forty years before, Paris of the East, Pearl of the Orient, long open avenues lined and bowered over by trees running into spacious parks, precisioned scale, all under the soft shell from a million breakfast fires, camphor smoke rising and diffusing, covering Saigon and the shining veins of the river with a
warmth like the return of better times. Just a projection, that was the thing about choppers, you had to come down sometime, down to the moment, the street, if you found a pearl down there you got to keep it.
By 7:30 it was beyond berserk with bikes, the air was like L.A. on short plumbing, the subtle city war inside the war had renewed itself for another day, relatively light on actual violence but intense with bad feeling: despair, impacted rage, impotent gnawing resentment; thousands of Vietnamese in the service of a pyramid that wouldn’t stand for five years, plugging the feed tube into their own hearts, grasping and gorging; young Americans in from the boonies on TDY, charged with hatred and grounded in fear of the Vietnamese; thousands of Americans sitting in their offices crying in bored chorus, “You can’t get these people to do a fucking thing, you can’t get these people to do a fucking thing.” And all the others, theirs and ours, who just didn’t want to play, it sickened them. That December the GVN Department of Labor had announced that the refugee problem had been solved, that “all refugees [had] been assimilated into the economy,” but mostly they seemed to have assimilated themselves into the city’s roughest corners, alleyways, mud slides, under parked cars. Cardboard boxes that had carried air-conditioners and refrigerators housed up to ten children, most Americans and plenty of Vietnamese would cross the street to avoid trash heaps that fed whole families. And this was still months before Tet, “refugees up the gazops,” a flood. I’d heard that the GVN Department of Labor had nine American advisors for every Vietnamese.
In Broddards and La Pagode and the pizzeria around the corner, the Cowboys and Vietnamese “students” would hang out all day, screaming obscure arguments at each other, cadging off Americans, stealing tips from the tables, reading Pléiade editions of Proust, Malraux, Camus. One of them talked to me a few times but we couldn’t really communicate, all I understood was his obsessive comparison between Rome and Washington, and that he seemed to believe that Poe had been a French writer. In the late afternoon the Cowboys would leave the cafés and milk bars and ride down hard on Lam Son Square to pick the Allies. They could snap a Rolex off your wrist like a hawk hitting a field mouse; wallets, pens, cameras, eyeglasses, anything; if the war had gone on any longer they’d have found a way to whip the boots off your feet. They’d hardly leave their saddles and they never looked back. There was a soldier down from the 1st Division who was taking snapshots of his friends with some bar girls in front of the Vietnamese National Assembly. He’d gotten his shot focused and centered but before he pushed the button his camera was a block away, leaving him in the bike’s backwash with a fresh pink welt on his throat where the cord had been torn and helpless amazement on his face, “Well I’ll be dipped in shit!”; as a little boy raced across the square, zipped a piece of cardboard up the soldier’s shirtfront and took off around the corner with his Paper Mate. The White Mice stood around giggling, but there were a lot of us watching from the Continental terrace, a kind of gasp went up from the tables, and later when he came up for a beer he said, “I’m goin’ back to the war, man, this fucking Saigon is too much for me.” There was a large group of civilian engineers there, the same men you’d see in the restaurants throwing food at each other, and one of them, a fat old boy, said, “You ever catch one of them li’l nigs just pinch ’em. Pinch ’em hard. Boy, they hate that.”
