Dispatches

by Michael Herr

  It was at this point that I began to recognize almost every casualty, remember conversations we’d had days or even hours earlier, and that’s when I left, riding a medevac with a lieutenant who was covered with blood-soaked bandages. He’d been hit in both legs, both arms, the chest and head, his ears and eyes were full of caked blood, and he asked a photographer in the chopper to get a picture of him like this to send to his wife.

  But by then the battle for Hue was almost over. The Cav was working the northwest corner of the Citadel, and elements of the 101st had come in through what had formerly been an NVA re-supply route. (In five days these outfits lost as many men as the Marines had in three weeks.) Vietnamese Marines and some of the 1st ARVN Division had been moving the remaining NVA down toward the wall. The NVA flag that had flown for so long over the south wall had been cut down, and in its place an American flag had been put up. Two days later the Hoc Bao, Vietnamese Rangers, stormed through the walls of the Imperial Palace, but there were no NVA left inside. Except for a few bodies in the moat, most of their dead had been buried. When they’d first come into Hue the NVA had sat at banquets given for them by the people. Before they left, they’d skimmed all the edible vegetation from the surface of the moat. Seventy percent of Vietnam’s one lovely city was destroyed, and if the landscape seemed desolate, imagine how the figures in that landscape looked.

  There were two official ceremonies marking the expulsion of the NVA, both flag-raisings. On the south bank of the Perfume River, 200 refugees from one of the camps were recruited to stand, sullen and silent in the rain, and watch the GVN flag being run up. But the rope snapped, and the crowd, thinking the VC had shot it down, broke up in panic. (There was no rain in the stories that the Saigon papers ran, no trouble with the rope, and the cheering crowd numbered thousands.) As for the other ceremony, the Citadel was thought by most people to be insecure, and when the flag finally went up there was no one to watch it except for a handful of Vietnamese troops.

  Major Trong bounced around in the seat of his jeep as it drove us over the debris scattered across the streets of Hue. His face seemed completely expressionless as we passed the crowds of Vietnamese stumbling over the fallen beams and powdered brick of their homes, but his eyes were covered by dark glasses and it was impossible to know what he was feeling. He didn’t look like a victor, he was so small and limp in his seat I was afraid he was going to fly out of the jeep. His driver was a sergeant named Dang, one of the biggest Vietnamese I’d ever seen, and his English was better than the major’s. The jeep would stall on rubble heaps from time to time, and Dang would turn to us and smile an apology. We were on our way to the Imperial Palace.

  A month earlier the Palace grounds had been covered with dozens of dead NVA and the burned-over leavings of three weeks’ siege and defense. There had been some reluctance about bombing the Palace, but a lot of the bombing nearby had done heavy damage, and there had been some shelling, too. The large bronze urns were dented beyond restoring, and the rain poured through a hole in the roof of the throne room, soaking the two small thrones where the old Annamese royalty had sat. In the great hall (great once you’d scaled it to the Vietnamese) the red lacquer work on the upper walls was badly chipped, and a heavy dust covered everything. The crown of the main gate had collapsed, and in the garden the broken branches of the old cay-dai trees lay like the forms of giant insects seared in a fire, wispy, delicate, dead. It was rumored during those days that the Palace was being held by a unit of student volunteers who had taken the invasion of Hue as a sign and had rushed to join the North Vietnamese. (Another rumor of those days, the one about some 5,000 “shallow graves” outside the city, containing the bodies from NVA executions, had just now been shown to be true.)

  But once the walls had been taken and the grounds entered, there was no one left inside except for the dead. They bobbed in the moat and littered all the approaches. The Marines moved in then, and empty ration cans and muddied sheets from the Stars and Stripes were added to the litter. A fat Marine had been photographed pissing into the lockedopen mouth of a decomposing North Vietnamese soldier.

  “No good,” Major Trong said. “No good. Fight here very hard, very bad.”

  I’d been talking to Sergeant Dang about the Palace and about the line of emperors. When we stalled one last time at the foot of a moat bridge, I’d been asking him the name of the last emperor to occupy the throne. He smiled and shrugged, not so much as if he didn’t know, more like it didn’t matter.

  “Major Trong is emperor now,” he said, and gunned the jeep into the Palace grounds.

  Khe Sanh

  I

  During the bad maximum incoming days of the late winter of 1968 there was a young Marine at Khe Sanh whose Vietnam tour had run out. Nearly five of his thirteen months in-country had been spent there at the Khe Sanh Combat Base with the 26th Marines, who had been slowly building to full and then reinforced regimental strength since the previous spring. He could remember a time, not long before, when the 26th considered themselves lucky to be there, when the guys talked of it as though it were a reward for whatever their particular outfits had been through. As far as this Marine was concerned, the reward was for an ambush that fall on the Cam Lo-Con Thien road, when his unit had taken 40 percent casualties, when he himself had taken shrapnel in the chest and arms. (Oh, he’d tell you, but he had seen some shit in this war.) That was when Con Thien was the name everyone knew, long before Khe Sanh had taken on the proportions of a siege camp and lodged itself as an obsession in the heart of the Command, long before a single round had ever fallen inside the perimeter to take off his friends and make his sleep something indistinguishable from waking. He remembered when there was time to play in the streams below the plateau of the base, when all anybody ever talked about were the six shades of green that touched the surrounding hills, when he and his friends had lived like human beings, above ground, in the light, instead of like animals who were so spaced out that they began taking pills called Diarrhea-Aid to keep their walks to exposed latrines at a minimum. And on this last morning of his tour, he might have told you that he’d been through it all and hacked it pretty well.

  He was a tall blond from Michigan, probably about twenty, although it was never easy to guess the ages of Marines at Khe Sanh since nothing like youth ever lasted in their faces for very long. It was the eyes: because they were always either strained or blazed-out or simply blank, they never had anything to do with what the rest of the face was doing, and it gave everyone the look of extreme fatigue or even a glancing madness. (And age. If you take one of those platoon photographs from the Civil War and cover everything but the eyes, there is no difference between a man of fifty and a boy of thirteen.) This Marine, for example, was always smiling. It was the kind of smile that verged on the high giggles, but his eyes showed neither amusement nor embarrassment nor nervousness. It was a little insane, but it was mostly esoteric in the way that so many Marines under twenty-five became esoterics after a few months in I Corps. On that young, nondescript face the smile seemed to come out of some old knowledge, and it said, “I’ll tell you why I’m smiling, but it will make you crazy.”

  He had tattooed the name MARLENE on his upper arm, and up on his helmet there was the name JUDY, and he said, “Yeah, well, Judy knows all about Marlene. That’s cool, there’s no sweat there.” On the back of his flak jacket he had once written, Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I shall fear no Evil, because I’m the meanest motherfucker in the Valley, but he had tried later, without much success, to scrub it off because, he explained, every damn dude in the DMZ had that written on their flak jackets. And he’d smile.

  He was smiling on this last morning of his tour. His gear was straight, his papers in order, his duffel packed, and he was going through all of the last-minute business of going home, the back-slapping and goosing; the joshing with the Old Man (“Come on, you know you’re gonna miss this place.” “Yes sir. Oh wow!”); the exc
hanging of addresses; the odd, fragmented reminiscences blurted out of awkward silences. He had a few joints left, wrapped up in a plastic bag (he hadn’t smoked them, because, like most Marines at Khe Sanh, he’d expected a ground attack, and he didn’t want to be stoned when it came), and he gave these to his best friend, or, rather, his best surviving friend. His oldest friend had been blown away in January, on the same day that the ammo dump had been hit. He had always wondered whether Gunny, the company gunnery sergeant, had known about all the smoking. After three wars Gunny probably didn’t care much; besides, they all knew that Gunny was into some pretty cool shit himself. When he dropped by the bunker they said goodbye, and then there wasn’t anything to do with the morning but to run in and out of the bunker for a look at the sky, coming back in every time to say that it really ought to clear enough by ten for the planes to get in. By noon, when the goodbyes and take-cares and get-a-little-for-me’s had gone on for too long by hours, the sun started to show through the mist. He picked up his duffel and a small AWOL bag and started for the airstrip and the small, deep slit trench on the edge of the strip.

  Khe Sanh was a very bad place then, but the airstrip there was the worst place in the world. It was what Khe Sanh had instead of a V-ring, the exact, predictable object of the mortars and rockets hidden in the surrounding hills, the sure target of the big Russian and Chinese guns lodged in the side of CoRoc Ridge, eleven kilometers away across the Laotian border. There was nothing random about the shelling there, and no one wanted anything to do with it. If the wind was right, you could hear the NVA .50-calibers starting far up the valley whenever a plane made its approach to the strip, and the first incoming artillery would precede the landings by seconds. If you were waiting there to be taken out, there was nothing you could do but curl up in the trench and try to make yourself small, and if you were coming in on the plane, there was nothing you could do, nothing at all.

  There was always the debris of one kind of aircraft or another piled up on or near the strip, and sometimes the damage would cause the strip to be closed off for hours while the Seabees or the 11th Engineers did the clearing. It was so bad, so predictably bad, that the Air Force stopped flying in their star transport, the C-130, and kept to the smaller, more maneuverable C-123. Whenever possible, loads were parachuted in on pallet drops from 1,500 feet, pretty blue-and-yellow chutes, a show, dropping down around the perimeter. But obviously, passengers had to be flown in or picked up on the ground. These were mostly replacements, guys going to or returning from R&R’s, specialists of one kind or another, infrequent brass (most staff from Division and higher made their own travel arrangements for Khe Sanh) and a lot of correspondents. While a planeload of passengers tensed and sweated and made the run for the trench over and over in their heads, waiting for the cargo hatch to drop, ten to fifty Marines and correspondents huddled down in the trench, worked their lips futilely to ease the dryness, and then, at the exact same instant, they would all race, collide, stampede, exchanging places. If the barrage was a particularly heavy one, the faces would all distort in the most simple kind of panic, the eyes going wider than the eyes of horses caught in a fire. What you saw was a translucent blur, sensible only at the immediate center, like a swirly-chic photograph of Carnival, and you’d glimpse a face, a shell fragment cased in white sparks, a piece of gear somehow suspended in air, a drift of smoke, and you’d move around the flight crews working the heavy cargo strapping, over scout dogs, over the casually arranged body bags that always lay not far from the strip, covered with flies. And men would still be struggling on or off as the aircraft turned slowly to begin the taxi before the most accelerated take-off the machine had it in it to make. If you were on board, that first movement was an ecstasy. You’d all sit there with empty, exhausted grins, covered with the impossible red dust that laterite breaks down to, dust like scales, feeling the delicious afterchill of the fear, that one quick convulsion of safety. There was no feeling in the world as good as being airborne out of Khe Sanh.

  On this last morning, the young Marine caught a ride from his company position that dropped him off fifty meters from the strip. As he moved on foot he heard the distant sound of the C-123 coming in, and that was all he heard. There was hardly more than a hundred-foot ceiling, scary, bearing down on him. Except for the approaching engines, everything was still. If there had been something more, just one incoming round, he might have been all right, but in that silence the sound of his own feet moving over the dirt was terrifying to him. He later said that this was what made him stop. He dropped his duffel and looked around. He watched the plane, his plane, as it touched down, and then he ran leaping over some discarded sandbags by the road. He lay out flat and listened as the plane switched loads and took off, listened until there was nothing left to listen to. Not a single round had come in.

  Back at the bunker there was some surprise at his return, but no one said anything. Anyone can miss a plane. Gunny slapped him on the back and wished him a better trip the next time out. That afternoon he rode in a jeep that took him all the way to Charlie Med, the medical detachment for Khe Sanh that had been set up insanely close to the strip, but he never got himself past the sandbagging outside of the triage room.

  “Oh no, you raggedy-assed bastard,” Gunny said when he got back to the outfit. But he looked at him for a long while this time.

  “Well,” the kid said. “Well.…”

  The next morning two of his friends went with him to the edge of the strip and saw him into the trench. (“Goodbye,” Gunny said. “And that’s an order.”) They came back to say that he’d gotten out for sure this time. An hour later he came up the road again, smiling. He was still there the first time I left Khe Sanh, and while he probably made it out eventually, you can’t be sure.

  Such odd things happen when tours are almost over. It’s the Short-Timer Syndrome. In the heads of the men who are really in the war for a year, all tours end early. No one expects much from a man when he is down to one or two weeks. He becomes a luck freak, an evil-omen collector, a diviner of every bad sign. If he has the imagination, or the experience of war, he will precognize his own death a thousand times a day, but he will always have enough left to do the one big thing, to Get Out.

  Something more was working on the young Marine, and Gunny knew what it was. In this war they called it “acute environmental reaction,” but Vietnam has spawned a jargon of such delicate locutions that it’s often impossible to know even remotely the thing being described. Most Americans would rather be told that their son is undergoing acute environmental reaction than to hear that he is suffering from shell shock, because they could no more cope with the fact of shell shock than they could with the reality of what had happened to this boy during his five months at Khe Sanh.

  Say that his legs just weren’t working. It was clearly a medical matter, and the sergeant was going to have to see that something was done about it. But when I left, the kid was still there, sitting relaxed on his duffel and smiling, saying, “Man, when I get home, I’ll have it knocked.”

  II

  The terrain above II Corps, where it ran along the Laotian border and into the DMZ, was seldom referred to as the Highlands by Americans. It had been a matter of military expediency to impose a new set of references over Vietnam’s older, truer being, an imposition that began most simply with the division of one country into two and continued—it had its logic—with the further division of South Vietnam into four clearly defined tactical corps. It had been one of the exigencies of the war, and if it effectively obliterated even some of the most obvious geographical distinctions, it made for clear communication, at least among members of the Mission and the many components of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, the fabulous MACV. In point of geographical fact, for example, the delta of Vietnam comprehends the Plain of Reeds and frames the Saigon River, but on all the charts and deep in all the sharp heads, it ended at the map line dividing III and IV Corps. Referentially, the Highlands were
confined to II Corps, ending abruptly at the line which got drawn just below the coastal city of Chu Lai; everything between that and the DMZ was just I Corps. All in-country briefings, at whatever level, came to sound like a Naming of the Parts, and the language was used as a cosmetic, but one that diminished beauty. Since most of the journalism from the war was framed in that language or proceeded from the view of the war which those terms implied, it would be as impossible to know what Vietnam looked like from reading most newspaper stories as it would be to know how it smelled. Those Highlands didn’t simply vanish at the corps border, but went all the way up into a section of North Vietnam that Navy fliers called the Armpit, running in a chain with the wonderful name of the Annamese Cordillera that spanned more than 1,700 miles from the Armpit to a point just below Pleiku, cutting through much of the North, through the DMZ, through the valley fastness (theirs) of the A Shau, and through the piedmont that was once the Marine Combat Base of Khe Sanh. And since the country it traversed was very special, with its special evocations, my insistence on placing Khe Sanh there is much more than some recondite footnote to a history of that sad place and the particular ways in which so many Americans suffered their part of the war there.