by Michael Herr
Five to seven were bleary low hours in Saigon, the city’s energy ebbing at dusk, until it got dark and movement was replaced with apprehension. Saigon at night was still Vietnam at night, night was the war’s truest medium; night was when it got really interesting in the villages, the TV crews couldn’t film at night, the Phoenix was a night bird, it flew in and out of Saigon all the time.
Maybe you had to be pathological to find glamour in Saigon, maybe you just had to settle for very little, but Saigon had it for me, and danger activated it. The days of big, persistent terror in Saigon were over, but everyone felt that they could come back again any time, heavy like 1963–5, when they hit the old Brinks BOQ on Christmas Eve, when they blew up the My Canh floating restaurant, waited for it to be rebuilt and moved to another spot on the river, and then blew it up again, when they bombed the first U.S. embassy and changed the war forever from the intimate inside out. There were four known VC sapper battalions in the Saigon–Cholon area, dread sappers, guerrilla superstars, they didn’t even have to do anything to put the fear out. Empty ambulances sat parked at all hours in front of the new embassy. Guards ran mirrors and “devices” under all vehicles entering all installations, BOQ’s were fronted with sandbags, checkpoints and wire, high-gauge grilles filled our windows, but they still got through once in a while, random terror but real, even the supposedly terror-free safe spots worked out between the Corsican mob and the VC offered plenty of anxiety. Saigon just before Tet; guess, guess again.
Those nights there was a serious tiger lady going around on a Honda shooting American officers on the street with a .45. I think she’d killed over a dozen in three months; the Saigon papers described her as “beautiful,” but I don’t know how anybody knew that. The commander of one of the Saigon MP battalions said he thought it was a man dressed in an ao dai because a .45 was “an awful lot of gun for a itty bitty Vietnamese woman.”
Saigon, the center, where every action in the bushes hundreds of miles away fed back into town on a karmic wire strung so tight that if you touched it in the early morning it would sing all day and all night. Nothing so horrible ever happened upcountry that it was beyond language fix and press relations, a squeeze fit into the computers would make the heaviest numbers jump up and dance. You’d either meet an optimism that no violence could unconvince or a cynicism that would eat itself empty every day and then turn, hungry and malignant, on whatever it could for a bite, friendly or hostile, it didn’t matter. Those men called dead Vietnamese “believers,” a lost American platoon was “a black eye,” they talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigor.
It seemed the least of the war’s contradictions that to lose your worst sense of American shame you had to leave the Dial Soapers in Saigon and a hundred headquarters who spoke goodworks and killed nobody themselves, and go out to the grungy men in the jungle who talked bloody murder and killed people all the time. It was true that the grunts stripped belts and packs and weapons from their enemies; Saigon wasn’t a flat market, these goods filtered down and in with the other spoils: Rolexes, cameras, snakeskin shoes from Taiwan, air-brush portraits of nude Vietnamese women with breasts like varnished beach balls, huge wooden carvings that they set on their desks to give you the finger when you walked into their offices. In Saigon it never mattered what they told you, even less when they actually seemed to believe it. Maps, charts, figures, projections, fly fantasies, names of places, of operations, of commanders, of weapons; memories, guesses, second guesses, experiences (new, old, real, imagined, stolen); histories, attitudes—you could let it go, let it all go. If you wanted some war news in Saigon you had to hear it in stories brought from the field by friends, see it in the lost watchful eyes of the Saigonese, or do it like Trashman, reading the cracks in the sidewalk.
Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower, the poison history, fucked in its root no matter how far back you wanted to run your trace. Saigon was the only place left with a continuity that someone as far outside as I was could recognize. Hue and Danang were like remote closed societies, mute and intractable. Villages, even large ones, were fragile, a village could disappear in an afternoon, and the countryside was either blasted over cold and dead or already back in Charles’ hands. Saigon remained, the repository and the arena, it breathed history, expelled it like toxin, Shit Piss and Corruption. Paved swamp, hot mushy winds that never cleaned anything away, heavy thermal seal over diesel fuel, mildew, garbage, excrement, atmosphere. A five-block walk in that could take it out of you, you’d get back to the hotel with your head feeling like one of those chocolate apples, tap it sharply in the right spot and it falls apart in sections. Saigon, November 1967: “The animals are sick with love.” Not much chance anymore for history to go on unselfconsciously.
You’d stand nailed there in your tracks sometimes, no bearings and none in sight, thinking, Where the fuck am I?, fallen into some unnatural East-West interface, a California corridor cut and bought and burned deep into Asia, and once we’d done it we couldn’t remember what for. It was axiomatic that it was about ideological space, we were there to bring them the choice, bringing it to them like Sherman bringing the Jubilee through Georgia, clean through it, wall to wall with pacified indigenous and scorched earth. (In the Vietnamese sawmills they had to change the blades every five minutes, some of our lumber had gotten into some of theirs.) There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.
The Mission and the motion: military arms and civilian arms, more combatant between themselves than together against the Cong. Gun arms, knife arms, pencil arms, head-and-stomach arms, hearts-and-minds arms, flying arms, creeping-peeping arms, information arms as tricky as the arms of Plastic Man. At the bottom was the shitface grunt, at the top a Command trinity: a blue-eyed, hero-faced general, a geriatrics-emergency ambassador and a hale, heartless CIA performer. (Robert “Blowtorch” Komer, chief of COORDS, spook anagram for Other War, pacification, another word for war. If William Blake had “reported” to him that he’d seen angels in the trees, Komer would have tried to talk him out of it. Failing there, he’d have ordered defoliation.) All through the middle were the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese, not always exactly innocent bystanders, probably no accident that we’d found each other. If milk snakes could kill, you might compare the Mission and its arms to a big intertwined ball of baby milk snakes. Mostly they were that innocent, and about that conscious. And a lot, one way or the other, had some satisfaction. They believed that God was going to thank them for it.
Innocent; for the noncombatants stationed in Saigon or one of the giant bases, the war wasn’t much more real than if they’d been getting it on TV back at Leonard Wood or Andrews. There was the common failure of feeling and imagination compounded by punishing boredom, an alienation beyond tolerance and a terrible, ongoing anxiety that it might one day, any day, come closer than it had so far. And operating inside of that fear was the half-hidden, half-vaunted jealousy of every grunt who ever went out there and killed himself a gook, furtive vicarious bloodthirsting behind 10,000 desks, a fantasy life rich with lurid war-comics adventure, a smudge of closet throatsticker on every morning report, requisition slip, pay voucher, medical profile, information handout and sermon in the entire system.
Prayers in the Delta, prayers in the Highlands, prayers in the Marine bunkers of the “frontier” facing the DMZ, and for every prayer there was a counter-prayer—it was hard to see who had the edge. In Dalat the emperor’s mother sprinkled rice in her hair so the birds could fly around her and feed while she said her morning prayers. In wood-paneled, air-conditioned chapels in Saigon, MACV padres would fire one up to sweet muscular Jesus, blessing ammo dumps and 105’s and officers’ clubs. The best-armed patrols in history went out after services to feed smoke to people
whose priests could let themselves burn down to consecrated ash on street corners. Deep in the alleys you could hear small Buddhist chimes ringing for peace, hoa bien; smell incense in the middle of the thickest Asian street funk; see groups of ARVN with their families waiting for transport huddled around a burning prayer strip. Sermonettes came over Armed Forces radio every couple of hours, once I heard a chaplain from the 9th Division starting up, “Oh Gawd, help us learn to live with Thee in a more dynamic way in these perilous times, that we may better serve Thee in the struggle against Thine enemies.…” Holy war, long-nose jihad like a face-off between one god who would hold the coonskin to the wall while we nailed it up, and another whose detachment would see the blood run out of ten generations, if that was how long it took for the wheel to go around.
And around. While the last falling-off contacts were still going on and the last casualties being dusted off, Command added Dak To to our victory list, a reflexive move supported by the Saigon press corps but never once or for a minute by reporters who’d seen it going on from meters or even inches away, and this latest media defection added more bitterness to an already rotten mix, leaving the commanding general of the 4th to wonder out loud and in my hearing whether we were or weren’t all Americans in this thing together. I said I thought we were. For sure we were.
“… Wow I love it in the movies when they say like, ‘Okay Jim, where do you want it?’ ”
“Right! Right! Yeah, beautiful, I don’t want it at all! Haw, shit … where do you fucking want it?”
Mythopathic moment; Fort Apache, where Henry Fonda as the new colonel says to John Wayne, the old hand, “We saw some Apache as we neared the Fort,” and John Wayne says, “If you saw them, sir, they weren’t Apache.” But this colonel is obsessed, brave like a maniac, not very bright, a West Point aristo wounded in his career and his pride, posted out to some Arizona shithole with only marginal consolation: he’s a professional and this is a war, the only war we’ve got. So he gives the John Wayne information a pass and he and half his command get wiped out. More a war movie than a Western, Nam paradigm, Vietnam, not a movie, no jive cartoon either where the characters get smacked around and electrocuted and dropped from heights, flattened out and frizzed black and broken like a dish, then up again and whole and back in the game, “Nobody dies,” as someone said in another war movie.
In the first week of December 1967 I turned on the radio and heard this over AFVN: “The Pentagon announced today that, compared to Korea, the Vietnam War will be an economy war, provided that it does not exceed the Korean War in length, which means that it will have to end sometime in 1968.”
By the time that Westmoreland came home that fall to cheerlead and request-beg another quarter of a million men, with his light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel collateral, there were people leaning so far out to hear good news that a lot of them slipped over the edge and said that they could see it too. (Outside of Tay Ninh City a man whose work kept him “up to fucking here” in tunnels, lobbing grenades into them, shooting his gun into them, popping CS smoke into them, crawling down into them himself to bring the bad guys out dead or alive, he almost smiled when he heard that one and said, “What does that asshole know about tunnels?”)
A few months earlier there had been an attempt Higher to crank up the Home For Christmas rumor, but it wouldn’t take, the troop consensus was too strong, it went, “Never happen.” If a commander told you he thought he had it pretty well under control it was like talking to a pessimist. Most would say that they either had it wrapped up or wound down; “He’s all pissed out, Charlie’s all pissed out, booger’s shot his whole wad,” one of them promised me, while in Saigon it would be restructured for briefings, “He no longer maintains in our view capability to mount, execute or sustain a serious offensive action,” and a reporter behind me, from The New York Times no less, laughed and said, “Mount this, Colonel.” But in the boonies, where they were deprived of all information except what they’d gathered for themselves on either side of the treeline, they’d look around like someone was watching and say, “I dunno, Charlie’s up to something. Slick, slick, that fucker’s so slick. Watch!”
The summer before, thousands of Marines had gone humping across northern I Corps in multi-division sweeps, “Taking the D out of DMZ,” but the North never really broke out into the open for it, hard to believe that anyone ever thought that they would. Mostly it was an invasion of a thousand operation-miles of high summer dry season stroke weather, six-canteen patrols that came back either contact-less or chewed over by ambushes and quick, deft mortar-rocket attacks, some from other Marine outfits. By September they were “containing” at Con Thien, sitting there while the NVA killed them with artillery. In II Corps a month of random contact near the Laotian border had sharpened into the big war around Dak To. III Corps, outside of Saigon, was most confusing of all, the VC were running what was described in a month-end, sit/rep handout as “a series of half-hearted, unambitious ground attacks” from Tay Ninh through Loc Ninh to Bu Dop, border skirmishes that some reporters saw as purposely limited rather than half-hearted, patterned and extremely well coordinated, like someone was making practice runs for a major offensive. IV Corps was what it had always been, obscure isolated Delta war, authentic guerrilla action where betrayal was as much an increment as bullets. People close to Special Forces had heard upsetting stories about the A Camps down there, falling apart from inside, mercenary mutinies and triple cross, until only a few were still effective.
That fall, all that the Mission talked about was control: arms control, information control, resources control, psycho-political control, population control, control of the almost supernatural inflation, control of terrain through the Strategy of the Periphery. But when the talk had passed, the only thing left standing up that looked true was your sense of how out of control things really were. Year after year, season after season, wet and dry, using up options faster than rounds on a machine-gun belt, we called it right and righteous, viable and even almost won, and it still only went on the way it went on. When all the projections of intent and strategy twist and turn back on you, tracking team blood, “sorry” just won’t cover it. There’s nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.
You couldn’t find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began going off? Mission intellectuals like 1954 as the reference date; if you saw as far back as War II and the Japanese occupation you were practically a historical visionary. “Realists” said that it began for us in 1961, and the common run of Mission flack insisted on 1965, post-Tonkin Resolution, as though all the killing that had gone before wasn’t really war. Anyway, you couldn’t use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter; might just as well lay it on the proto-Gringos who found the New England woods too raw and empty for their peace and filled them up with their own imported devils. Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle’s body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Bien Phu. But the first happened in a novel, and while the second happened on the ground it happened to the French, and Washington gave it no more substance than if Graham Greene had made it up too. Straight history, auto-revised history, history without handles, for all the books and articles and white papers, all the talk and the miles of film, something wasn’t answered, it wasn’t even asked. We were backgrounded, deep, but when the background started sliding forward not a single life was saved by the information. The thing had transmitted too much energy, it heated up too hot, hiding low under the fact-figure crossfire there was a secret history, and not a lot of people felt like running in there to bring it out.
One day in 1963 Henry Cabot Lodge was walking around the Saigon Zoo with some reporters, and a tiger pissed on him through the bars of its cage. Lodge made a joke, something like, “He who
wears the pee of the tiger is assured of success in the coming year.” Maybe nothing’s so unfunny as an omen read wrong.
Some people think 1963’s a long time ago; when a dead American in the jungle was an event, a grim thrilling novelty. It was spookwar then, adventure; not exactly soldiers, not even advisors yet, but Irregulars, working in remote places under little direct authority, acting out their fantasies with more freedom than most men ever know. Years later, leftovers from that time would describe it, they’d bring in names like Gordon, Burton and Lawrence, elevated crazies of older adventures who’d burst from their tents and bungalows to rub up hard against the natives, hot on the sex-and-death trail, “lost to headquarters.” There had been Ivy League spooks who’d gone bumbling and mucking around in jeeps and beat-up Citroëns, Swedish K’s across their knees, literally picnicking along the Cambodian border, buying Chinese-made shirts and sandals and umbrellas. There’d been ethnologue spooks who loved with their brains and forced that passion on the locals, whom they’d imitate, squatting in black pajamas, jabbering in Vietnamese. There had been one man who “owned” Long An Province, a Duke of Nha Trang, hundreds of others whose authority was absolute in hamlets or hamlet complexes where they ran their ops until the wind changed and their ops got run back on them. There were spook deities, like Lou Conein, “Black Luigi,” who (they said) ran it down the middle with the VC, the GVN, the Mission and the Corsican Maf; and Edward Landsdale himself, still there in ’67, his villa a Saigon landmark where he poured tea and whiskey for second-generation spooks who adored him, even now that his batteries were dead. There were executive spooks who’d turn up at airstrips and jungle clearings sweating like a wheel of cheese in their white suits and neckties; bureau spooks who sat on dead asses in Dalat and Qui Nhon, or out jerking off in some New Life Village; Air America spooks who could take guns or junk or any kind of death at all and make it fly; Special Forces spooks running around in a fury of skill to ice Victor Charlie.
