by Michael Herr
Officially, the Marines admitted no relevance between the Langvei attack and Khe Sanh. Confidentially, they said something awful about Langvei having been bait—bait which the poor, desperate bastards took, exactly as we hoped they would. But everyone knew better, much better, and the majors and colonels who had to tell reporters about it were met with embarrassed silence. One hated to bring it up, one never really did, but there was a question that had everything in the world to do with Khe Sanh after Langvei fell. I wanted to ask it so badly that my hesitance made me mad for months. Colonel (I wanted to ask), this is purely hypothetical, I hope you understand. But what if all of those gooks that you think are out there are really out there? And what if they attack before the monsoons blow south, some mist-clogged night when our planes just cannot get up there? What if they really want Khe Sanh, want it so badly that they are willing to maneuver over the triple lines of barbed wire, the German razor wire too; over barricades formed by their own dead (a tactic, Colonel, favored by your gook in Korea), coming in waves, human waves, and in such numbers that the barrels of our .50-calibers overheat and melt and all the M-16’s are jammed, until all of the death in all of the Claymore mines on our defenses has been spent and absorbed? What if they are still coming, moving toward the center of a base so smashed by their artillery that those pissy little trenches and bunkers that your Marines half got up are useless, coming as the first MIG’s and IL-28’s ever seen in this war bomb out the TOC and the strip, the med tent and the control tower (People’s Army my ass, right, Colonel?), coming at you 20,000 to 40,000 strong? And what if they pass over every barricade we can put in their way … and kill every living thing, defending or retreating … and take Khe Sanh?
Some strange things would happen. One morning, at the height of the monsoons, the sun came up brightly at dawn and shone all day. The early-morning skies were a clean, brilliant blue, the only time before April that anyone saw that at Khe Sanh, and instead of waking and coming out shivering from their bunkers, the grunts stripped down to boots, pants and flak jackets; biceps, triceps and tattoos all out for breakfast. Probably because the NVA knew that American surveillance and bombers would be working overtime on a morning like this, there was almost no shelling, and we all knew we could count on it. For those few hours Khe Sanh had the atmosphere of reprieve. I remember passing a chaplain named Stubbe on the road and seeing his incredible pleasure at the miracle of this morning. The hills did not seem like the same hills that had given off so much fear the night before and all of the days and nights before that. In the early-morning light they looked sharp and tranquil, as though you could take some apples and a book and go up there for an afternoon.
I was walking around by myself in the 1st Battalion area. It was before eight in the morning, and as I walked I could hear someone walking behind me, singing. At first I couldn’t hear what it was, only that it was a single short phrase being sung over and over at short intervals, and that every time someone else would laugh and tell the singer to shut up. I slowed down and let them catch up.
“ ‘I’d rather be an Oscar Mayer weiner,’ ” the voice sang. It sounded very plaintive and lonely.
Of course I turned around. There were two of them, one a big Negro with a full mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth, a mean, signifying mustache that would have worked if only there had been the smallest trace of meanness anywhere on his face. He was at least six-three and quarterback thick. He was carrying an AK-47. The other Marine was white, and if I’d seen him first from the back I would have said that he was eleven years old. The Marines must have a height requirement; whatever it is, I don’t see how he made it. Age is one thing, but how do you lie about your height? He’d been doing the singing, and he was laughing now because he’d made me turn around. His name was Mayhew, it was written out in enormous red letters across the front of his helmet: MAYHEW—You’d better believe it! I’d been walking with my flak jacket open, a stupid thing to do even on this morning, and they could see the stitched tag above my left breast pocket with the name of my magazine written on it.
“Correspondent?” the Negro said.
Mayhew just laughed. “ ‘I’d-a rather be—a Oscar Mayer … weenieeee,’ ” he sang. “You can write that, man, tell ’em all I said so.”
“Don’t pay no attention to him,” the Negro said. “That’s Mayhew. He’s a crazy fucker, ain’t you, Mayhew?”
“I sure hope so,” Mayhew said. “ ‘I’d rather be a Oscar Mayer weiner.…’ ”
He was young, nineteen, he later told me, and he was trying to grow a mustache. His only luck with it so far was a few sparse, transparent blond clumps set at odd intervals across his upper lip, and you couldn’t see that unless the light was right. The Negro was called Day Tripper. It was on his helmet, along with DETROIT CITY. And on the back, where most guys just listed the months of their tours, he had carefully drawn a full calendar where each day served was marked off with a neat X. They were both from Hotel Company of the 2nd Battalion, which was dug in along the northern perimeter, but they were taking advantage of the day to visit a friend of theirs, a mortar man with 1/26.
“The lieutenant ever hear ’bout this, he know what to do,” Day Tripper said.
“Fuck the lieutenant,” Mayhew said. “You remember from before he ain’t wrapped too tight.”
“Well, he wrapped tight enough to tear you a new asshole.”
“Now what’s he gonna do to me? Send me to Vietnam?”
We walked past the battalion CP, piled five feet high with sandbags, and then we reached a giant ring of sandbagging, the mortar pit, and climbed down. In the center was a large four-oh-deuce mortar piece, and the inside of the pit was stacked completely around with ammunition, piled from the ground to just below the sandbags. A Marine was stretched out in the dust with a war comic spread over his face.
“Hey, where’s Evans?” Mayhew said. “You know a guy named Evans?”
The Marine took the comic off of his face and looked up. He’d been asleep.
“Shit,” he said. “I thought you was the Old Man for a second. Beg your pardon.”
“We’re looking for this guy Evans,” Mayhew said. “You know him?”
“I—uh—no, I don’t guess so. I’m pretty new.”
He looked it. He was the kind of kid that would go into the high-school gym alone and shoot baskets for the half-hour before the basketball team took it over for practice, not good enough yet for the team but determined.
“The rest of the crew’ll be down here right away. You can wait if you want.” He looked at all the rounds. “It’s probably not too cool,” he said, smiling. “But you can if you want.”
Mayhew unbuttoned one of the pockets in the leg of his fatigues and took out a can of crackers and Cheddar-cheese spread. He took the P-38 opener from a band around his helmet and sat down.
“Might as well eat some shit while we wait. You get hungry, it ain’t so bad. I’d give my left ball for a can of fruit now.”
I always scrounged fruit from rear areas to bring forward, and I had some in my pack. “What kind do you like?” I asked.
“Any kind’s good,” he said. “Fruit cocktail’s really good.”
“No, man,” Day Tripper said. “Peaches, baby, peaches. All that syrup. Now that’s some good shit.”
“There you go, Mayhew,” I said, tossing him a fruit cocktail. I gave a can of peaches to Day Tripper and kept a can for myself.
We talked while we ate. Mayhew told me about his father, who “got greased in Korea,” and about his mother, who worked in a department store in Kansas City. Then he started to tell about Day Tripper, who got his name because he was afraid of the night—not the dark, but the night—and who didn’t mind who knew it. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do during daylight, but if there was any way at all to fix it he liked to be deep in his bunker by nightfall. He was always volunteering for the more dangerous daylight patrols, just to make
sure he got in by dusk. (This was before daylight patrols, in fact almost all patrols around Khe Sanh, were discontinued.) There were a lot of white guys, especially junior officers trying to be cool, who were always coming on to Day Tripper about his hometown, calling it Dodge City or Motown and laughing. (“Why they think somethin’s special about Detroit?” he said. “Ain’t nothin’ special, ain’t nothin’ so funny, neither.”) He was a big bad spade gone wrong somehow, and no matter how mean he tried to look something constantly gentle showed. He told me he knew guys from Detroit who were taking mortars back, breaking them down so that each one could get a piece into his duffel and then reassembling them when they got together back on the block. “You see that four-oh-deuce?” he said. “Now, that’ll take out a police station for you. I don’t need all that hassle. But maybe nex’ year I gonna need it.”
Like every American in Vietnam, he had his obsession with Time. (No one ever talked about When-this-lousy-war-is-over. Only “How much time you got?”) The degree of Day Tripper’s obsession, compared with most of the others, could be seen in the calendar on his helmet. No metaphysician ever studied Time the way he did, its components and implications, its per-second per seconds, its shadings and movement. The Space-Time continuum, Time-as-Matter, Augustinian Time: all of that would have been a piece of cake to Day Tripper, whose brain cells were arranged like jewels in the finest chronometer. He had assumed that correspondents in Vietnam had to be there. When he learned that I had asked to come here he almost let the peaches drop to the ground.
“Lemmee … lemmee jus’ hang on that a minute,” he said. “You mean you don’ have to be here? An’ you’re here?”
I nodded.
“Well, they gotta be payin’ you some tough bread.”
“You’d get depressed if I told you.”
He shook his head.
“I mean, they ain’ got the bread that’d get me here if I didn’ have t’ be here.”
“Horse crap,” Mayhew said. “Day Tripper loves it. He’s short now, but he’s comin’ back, ain’t you, Day Tripper?”
“Shit, my momma’ll come over here and pull a tour before I fuckin’ come back.”
Four more Marines dropped into the pit.
“Where’s Evans?” Mayhew demanded. “Any of you guys know Evans?”
One of the mortar men came over.
“Evans is over in Danang,” he said. “He caught a little shit the other night.”
“That right?” Mayhew said. “Evans get wounded?”
“He hurt bad?” Day Tripper asked.
“Not bad enough,” the mortar man said, laughing. “He’ll be back in ten days. Just some stuff in the legs.”
“He’s real lucky,” another one said. “Same round got him killed a guy.”
“Yeah,” someone said. “Greene got killed.” He wasn’t talking to us, but to the crew, who knew it already. “Remember Greene?” Everyone nodded.
“Wow, Greene,” he said. “Greene was all fixed to get out. He’s jerkin’ off thirty times a day, that fuckin’ guy, and they’s all set to give him a medical. And out.”
“That’s no shit,” the other one said. “Thirty times a day. Disgusting, man. That sombitch had come all over his pants, that fuckin’ Greene. He was waitin’ outside to see the major about gettin’ sent home, an’ the major comes out to find him an’ he’s just sittin’ there jerkin’ off. Then he gets blown away the night before.”
“Well,” Day Tripper said quietly to Mayhew, “see what happens if you jerk off?”
A Chinook, forty feet long with rotors front and back, set down on the airstrip by Charlie Med, looking like a great, gross beast getting a body purchase on some mud, blowing bitter gusts of dust, pebbles and debris for a hundred yards around. Everywhere within that circle of wind men turned and crouched, covering their necks against the full violence of it. The wind from those blades could come up strong enough to blow you over, to tear papers from your hands, to lift tarmac sections weighing a hundred pounds in the air. But it was mostly the sharp fragments, the stinging dirt, the muddy, pissed-in water, and you acquired a second sense of when it would reach you, learned to give it only your back and your helmet. The Chinook had flown in with its rear hatch down and a gunner with a .50-caliber machine gun stretched out flat on his stomach peering over the edge of the hatch. Neither he nor the door gunners would relax their weapons until the chopper touched the strip. Then they let go, the barrels of the big guns dropping down like dead weights in their mounts. A bunch of Marines appeared on the edge of the strip and ran to the chopper, through the ring of harsh, filthy wind, toward the calm at the center. Three mortar rounds came in at three-second intervals, all landing in a cluster 200 meters down the strip. No one around the chopper stopped. The noise from the Chinook drowned out the noise of the rounds, but we could see the balls of white smoke blowing out away from the strip in the wind, and the men were still running for the chopper. Four full litters were carried at a run from the rear of the Chinook to the med tent. Some walking wounded came out and headed for the tent, some walking slowly, unaided, others moving uncertainly, one being supported by two Marines. The empty litters were returned and loaded with four poncho-covered figures, which were set down near some sandbagging in front of the tent. Then the Chinook reared up abruptly, dipped horribly, regained its flight and headed north and west, toward the covering hills.
“One-nine,” Mayhew said. “I’ll bet anything.”
Four kilometers northwest of Khe Sanh was Hill 861, the hardest-hit of all the sector outposts after Langvei, and it seemed logical to everyone that the 1st Battalion of the 9th Marine Regiment should have been chosen to defend it. Some even believed that if anyone but 1/9 had been put there, 861 would never have been hit. Of all the hard-luck outfits in Vietnam, this was said to be the most doomed, doomed in its Search-and-Destroy days before Khe Sanh, known for a history of ambush and confusion and for a casualty rate which was the highest of any outfit in the entire war. That was the kind of reputation that takes hold most deeply among the men of the outfit itself, and when you were with them you got a sense of dread that came out of something more terrible than just a collective loss of luck. All the odds seemed somehow sharply reduced, estimates of your own survival were revised horribly downward. One afternoon with 1/9 on 861 was enough to bend your nerves for days, because it took only a few minutes up there to see the very worst of it: the stumbles, the simple motions of a walk suddenly racked by spasms, mouths sand-dry seconds after drinking, the dreamy smiles of total abdication. Hill 861 was the home of the thousand-yard stare, and I prayed hard for a chopper to come and get me away from there, to fly me over the ground fire and land me in the middle of a mortar barrage on the Khe Sanh pad—whatever! Anything was better than this.
On a night shortly after the Langvei attack an entire platoon of 1/9 was ambushed during a patrol and wiped out. Hill 861 had been hit repeatedly, once for three days straight during a perimeter probe that turned into a siege that really was a siege. For reasons that no one is certain of, Marine helicopters refused to fly missions up there, and 1/9 was cut off from support, re-supply or medical evacuation. It was bad, and they had to get through it any way they could, alone. (The stories from that time became part of the worst Marine legends; the story of one Marine putting a wounded buddy away with a pistol shot because medical help was impossible, or the story of what they did to the NVA prisoner taken beyond the wire—stories like that. Some of them may even have been true.) The old hostility of the grunt toward Marine Air became total on 861: when the worst of it was over and the first Ch-34 finally showed over the hilltop, the door gunner was hit by enemy ground fire and fell out of the chopper. It was a drop of over 200 feet, and there were Marines on the ground who cheered when he hit.
Mayhew, Day Tripper and I were walking near the triage tent of Charlie Med. In spite of all the shrapnel that had fallen into that tent, no way had been found to protect it. The sandb
agging around it was hardly more than five feet high, and the top was entirely exposed. It was one reason why grunts feared even the mildest of the Going Home wounds. Someone ran out of the tent and took photographs of the four dead Marines. The wind from the Chinook had blown the ponchos from two of them, and one had no face left at all. A Catholic chaplain on a bicycle rode up to the entrance of the tent and walked inside. A Marine came out and stood by the flap for a moment, an unlighted cigarette hanging from his mouth. He had neither a flak jacket nor a helmet. He let the cigarette drop from his lips, walked a few steps to the sandbags and sat down with his legs drawn up and his head hanging down between his knees. He threw one limp arm over his head and began stroking the back of his neck, shaking his head from side to side violently, as though in agony. He wasn’t wounded.
We were here because I had to pass this way to reach my bunker, where I had to pick up some things to take over to Hotel Company for the night. Day Tripper wasn’t liking the route. He looked at the bodies and then at me. It was that look which said, “See? You see what it does?” I had seen that look so many times during the past months that I must have had it too now, and neither of us said anything. Mayhew wasn’t letting himself look at anything. It was as though he were walking by himself now, and he was singing in an odd, quiet voice. “ ‘When you get to San Francisco,’ ” he sang, “ ‘be sure and wear some flowers in your hair.’ ”
We passed the control tower, that target that was its own aiming stake, so prominent and vulnerable that climbing up there was worse than having to run in front of a machine gun. Two of them had already been hit, and the sandbags running up the sides didn’t seem to make any difference. We went by the grimy admin buildings and bunkers, a bunch of deserted “hardbacks” with crushed metal roofs, the TOC, the command latrine and a post-office bunker. There was the now roofless beer hall and the collapsed, abandoned officers’ club. The Seabee bunker was just a little farther along the road.
