Dispatches

by Michael Herr

  It was not like the other bunkers. It was the deepest, safest, cleanest place in Khe Sanh, with six feet of timbers, steel and sandbags overhead, and inside it was brightly lit. The grunts called it the Alamo Hilton and thought it was candy-assed, while almost every correspondent who came to Khe Sanh tried to get a bed there. A bottle of whiskey or a case of beer would be enough to get you in for a few nights, and once you became a friend of the house, gifts like that were simply a token and very deeply appreciated. The Marines had set up a press “facility” very, very near the strip, and it was so bad that a lot of reporters thought there was a conscious conspiracy working to get some of us killed off. It was nothing more than a narrow, flimsily covered, rat-infested hole, and one day when it was empty an incoming 152 shell sewed part of it up.

  I went down into the Seabee bunker, picked up a bottle of Scotch and a field jacket, and told one of the Seabees to give my rack to anyone who needed it that night.

  “You ain’t mad at us or anything?” he said.

  “Nothing like that. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” he said as I left. “If you think so.”

  As the three of us walked toward the 2/26 positions, two batteries of Marine artillery started firing 105’s and 155’s from the other side of the base. Every time a round was fired I’d flinch a little, and Mayhew would laugh.

  “Them’re outgoing,” he said.

  Day Tripper heard the deep sliding whistle of the other shells first. “That ain’ no outgoin’,” he said, and we ran for a short trench a few yards away.

  “That ain’t outgoing,” Mayhew said.

  “Now what I jus’ say?” Day Tripper yelled, and we reached the trench as a shell landed somewhere between the 37th ARVN Rangers compound and the ammo dump. A lot of them were coming in, some mortars too, but we didn’t count them.

  “Sure was some nice mornin’,” Day Tripper said. “Oh, man, why they can’ jus’ leave us alone one time?”

  “ ’Cause they ain’t gettin’ paid to leave us alone,” Mayhew said, laughing. “ ’Sides, they do it ’cause they know how it fucks you all up.”

  “Tell me you ain’ scared shit!”

  “You’ll never see me scared, motherfucker.”

  “Oh no. Three nights ago you was callin’ out for your momma while them fuckers was hittin’ our wire.”

  “Boo-sheeit! I ain’t never gettin’ hit in Vietnam.”

  “Oh no? Okay, mothafucker, why not?”

  “ ’Cause,” Mayhew said, “it don’t exist.” It was an old joke, but this time he wasn’t laughing.

  By now, the trenchline circled the camp almost completely. Most of the northern perimeter was held down by the 2nd Battalion of the 26th Marine Regiment, and Hotel Company was along this sector. In its westernmost part it was opposed by North Vietnamese trenches that ended just 300 meters away. Farther to the east it sat above a narrow river, and beyond that was Hill 950, three kilometers to the north, which was held by the NVA and whose highest ridge ran exactly parallel to the Khe Sanh airstrip. The bunkers and connecting trenchworks sat on a rise that ran up from the riverbank, and the hills began a couple of hundred meters from the far side of the river. Two hundred meters away, facing the Marine trenches, there was an NVA sniper with a .50-caliber machine gun who shot at the Marines from a tiny spider hole. During the day he fired at anything that rose above the sandbags, and at night he fired at any lights he could see. You could see him clearly from the trench, and if you were looking through the scope of a Marine sniper’s rifle you could even see his face. The Marines fired on his position with mortars and recoilless rifles, and he would drop into his hole and wait. Gunships fired rockets at him, and when they were through he would come up again and fire. Finally, napalm was called in, and for ten minutes the air above the spider hole was black and orange from the strike, while the ground around it was galvanized clean of every living thing. When all of it cleared, the sniper popped up and fired off a single round, and the Marines in the trenches cheered. They called him Luke the Gook, and after that no one wanted anything to happen to him.

  Mayhew had a friend named Orrin from somewhere in Tennessee, from the mountains there where his family owned three small trucks and did a short-haul business. On the morning that Mayhew and Day Tripper had gone over to 1/26 to find Evans, Orrin received a letter from his wife. It told him straight off that her pregnancy was not seven months along, as he had believed, but only five. It made all the difference in the world to Orrin. She had felt so awful all the time (she wrote) that she went to see the minister, and the minister had finally convinced her that the Truth was God’s one sure key to a beautiful conscience. She would not tell him who the father was (and Honey, don’t you never, never try and make me tell), except to mention that it was someone Orrin knew well.

  When we got back to the company, Orrin was sitting on top of the sandbags above the trench, alone and exposed, looking out toward the hills and Luke the Gook. He had a beefy, sulky kid’s face, a perpetual mean squint and a pouting mouth that would break into a dull smile and then a dry, soundless laugh. It was the face of someone who would hunt the winter out and then let the meat go to rot, a mean Southland aberration of a face. He just sat there, working the bolt of a freshly cleaned .45. No one in the trench would go near him or say anything to him, except to yell out, “Come on down, Orrin. You’ll get greased for sure, motherfucker.” Finally, the gunnery sergeant came along and said, “If you don’t get your ass down off that berm I’ll shoot you myself.”

  “Listen,” Mayhew said. “Maybe you better go and see the chaplain.”

  “Real good,” Orrin said. “What’s that cocksucker gone do for me?”

  “Maybe you could get an emergency leave.”

  “No,” someone said. “There’s gotta be a death in the family before you’ll get out like that.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Orrin said. “There’s gone be a death in my family. Just soon’s I git home.” And then he laughed.

  It was a terrible laugh, very quiet and intense, and it was the thing that made everyone who heard it believe Orrin. After that, he was the crazy fucking grunt who was going to get through the war so he could go home and kill his old lady. It made him someone special in the company. It made a lot of guys think that he was lucky now, that nothing could happen to him, and they stayed as close to him as they could. I even felt some of it, enough to be glad that we would be in the same bunker that night. It made sense. I believed it too, and I would have been really surprised if I had heard later that anything had happened to him. But that was the kind of thing you seldom heard after you left an outfit, the kind of thing you avoided hearing if you could. Maybe he was killed or maybe he changed his mind, but I doubt it. When I remembered Orrin, all I could think of was that there was going to be a shooting in Tennessee.

  Once on a two-day pass to Danang, Mayhew had gone off limits and into the black market looking for grass and an air mattress. He never found the grass, and he had been scared to death when he finally bought the mattress. He told me that nothing that had ever happened at Khe Sanh had scared him the way he had been scared that day. I don’t know what he had been told the MP’s would do to him if they caught him in the market, but as he told the story it had been the best adventure he’d had since the day two years back when the game warden had used a helicopter to chase him and a friend out of the woods after deer season had closed. We were sitting in the mingy damp of the eight-man bunker where Mayhew and Day Tripper both slept. Mayhew had been trying to make me use his mattress for the night and I’d refused it. He said that if I didn’t sleep on it he was just going to take it and throw it outside into the trench and leave it there until morning. I told him that if I’d wanted an air mattress I could have picked one up anytime in Danang, and that the MP’s wouldn’t have even bothered me about it. I said I liked sleeping on the ground; it was good training. He said that that was all horsecrap (he was right), an
d he swore to God, the mattress would just lie out there all night with the rest of the rubbish that collects on trench floors. Then he got very mysterious and told me to think about it while he was gone. Day Tripper tried to find out where he was going, but Mayhew wouldn’t tell him.

  During those brief moments when the ground all around you was not rumbling, when there were no airstrikes on the hills, no incoming or outgoing or firing from the perimeter, you could sit inside and listen to the rats running across the bunker floor. A lot of them had been poisoned, shot, caught in traps or killed by the lucky toss of a combat boot, and they were here in the bunker too. There was the smell of urine, of old, old sweat, C-ration decay, moldy canvas and private crud, and that mixing up of other smells that were special to combat zones. A lot of us believed that exhaustion and fear could be smelled and that certain dreams gave off an odor. (We were regular Hemingway gypsies about some things. No matter how much wind a chopper would put out as it landed, you could always tell when there were body bags around an lz, and the tents where the Lurps lived smelled unlike any other tents anywhere in Vietnam.) This bunker was at least as bad as any I’d ever been in, and I gagged in there once, the first time. Because there was almost no light, you had to imagine most of what you smelled, and that became something like a pastime. I hadn’t realized how black Day Tripper was until we walked inside the bunker.

  “It definitely stinks somethin’ fierce in here,” he said. “I gotta be gettin’ me a mo’—uh—effective deodorant.”

  He paused.

  “Any kinda shit come up tonight, you jus’ keep with me. You be lucky Mayhew don’ think you a Zip an’ blast your fuckin’ head off. He’ll go pretty crazy sometimes.”

  “You think we’ll be hit?”

  He shrugged. “He might try an’ do a probe. He did that number ’gainst us three nights ago an’ kill one boy. Kill a Brother.

  “But this here’s a real good bunker. We took some shit right on top here. All kindsa dirt come down on top our heads, but we’se all right.”

  “Are guys sleeping in their flak jackets?”

  “Some do. I don’. Mayhew, crazy fucker, he sleep bare-ass. He so tough, man, li’l fucker, the hawk is out, an’ he’s in here bare-ass.”

  “What’s that? About the hawk?”

  “That means it’s a co-o-old Mother Fucker.”

  Mayhew had been gone for more than an hour now, and when Day Tripper and I stepped out on the ammo-crate planking that made the trench floor we saw him outside talking to some grunts. He started walking toward us, laughing, looking like a little boy dressed in a man’s combat gear, swimming in his flak jacket, and the grunts sang after him, “Mayhew’s a lifer.… ’Ray for him.”

  “Hey, Day Tripper!” he called. “Hey, you hear it, motherfucker?”

  “I hear what?”

  “I just went over and extended.”

  The smile vanished on Day Tripper’s face. He looked like he didn’t understand for a second, and then he looked angry, almost dangerous.

  “Say again?”

  “Yeah,” Mayhew said. “I just saw the Old Man about it.”

  “Uh-huh. How long you extend for?”

  “Just four months.”

  “Jus’ four months. Tha’s real fine, Jim.”

  “Hey, man …”

  “Don’ talk to me, Jim.”

  “Oh come on, Day Tripper, don’t be a hard-on. It gets me outta the Corps three months early.”

  “Whatever. Jim.”

  “Oh man, don’t call me that.” He looked at me. “Every time he gets pissed off he calls me that. Listen, motherfucker, I get outta the Marine Corps early. And I get a home leave. The Old Man says I can go next month.”

  “You can’t be talkin’ to me. I jus’ don’ hear nonna that. I don’ hear one word you sayin’, Jim.”

  “Aw …”

  “You jus’ another dumb grunt. What I gotta talk to you for? It’s like you never hear one word I say to you, ever. Not one word. An’ I know … oh man, I jus’ know you already sign that paper.”

  Mayhew didn’t say anything. It was hard to believe that the two were around the same age.

  “What I gonna do with you, poor fucker? Why … why you jus’ don’ go runnin’ out over th’ wire there? Let ’em gun you down an’ get it over with. Here, man, here’s a grenade. Why you jus’ don’ go up backa the shithouse an’ pull the pin an’ lie down on it?”

  “You’re fuckin’ unbelievable. Man, it’s just four months!”

  “Four months? Baby, four seconds in this whorehouse’ll get you greased. An’ after your poppa an’ all that. An’ you jus’ ain’ learned. You’re the sorriest, sorriest grunt mother I ever seen. No, man, but the sorriest! Fuckin’ Mayhew, man. I feel sorry for you.”

  “Day Tripper? Hey, it’ll be okay. Y’know?”

  “Sure, baby. Jus’ don’ talk to me right away. Clean your rifle. Write your momma. Do somethin. Talk to me later.”

  “We can smoke some bullshit.”

  “Okay, baby. Say later.” He walked back into the bunker and lay down. Mayhew took off his helmet and scratched out something written on the side. It had read 20 April and OUTTA SIGHT!

  Sometimes you’d step from the bunker, all sense of time passing having left you, and find it dark out. The far side of the hills around the bowl of the base was glimmering, but you could never see the source of the light, and it had the look of a city at night approached from a great distance. Flares were dropping everywhere around the fringes of the perimeter, laying a dead white light on the high ground rising from the piedmont. There would be dozens of them at once sometimes, trailing an intense smoke, dropping white-hot sparks, and it seemed as though anything caught in their range would be made still, like figures in a game of living statues. There would be the muted rush of illumination rounds, fired from 60-mm. mortars inside the wire, dropping magnesium-brilliant above the NVA trenches for a few seconds, outlining the gaunt, flat spread of the mahogany trees, giving the landscape a ghastly clarity and dying out. You could watch mortar bursts, orange and gray-smoking, over the tops of trees three and four kilometers away, and the heavier shelling from support bases farther east along the DMZ, from Camp Carrol and the Rockpile, directed against suspected troop movements or NVA rocket and mortar positions. Once in a while—I guess I saw it happen three or four times in all—there would be a secondary explosion, a direct hit on a supply of NVA ammunition. And at night it was beautiful. Even the incoming was beautiful at night, beautiful and deeply dreadful.

  I remembered the way a Phantom pilot had talked about how beautiful the surface-to-air missiles looked as they drifted up toward his plane to kill him, and remembered myself how lovely .50-caliber tracers could be, coming at you as you flew at night in a helicopter, how slow and graceful, arching up easily, a dream, so remote from anything that could harm you. It could make you feel a total serenity, an elevation that put you above death, but that never lasted very long. One hit anywhere in the chopper would bring you back, bitten lips, white knuckles and all, and then you knew where you were. It was different with the incoming at Khe Sanh. You didn’t get to watch the shells very often. You knew if you heard one, the first one, that you were safe, or at least saved. If you were still standing up and looking after that, you deserved anything that happened to you.

  Nights were when the air and artillery strikes were heaviest, because that was when we knew that the NVA was above ground and moving. At night you could lie out on some sandbags and watch the C-47’s mounted with Vulcans doing their work. The C-47 was a standard prop flareship, but many of them carried .20- and .762-mm. guns on their doors, Mike-Mikes that could fire out 300 rounds per second, Gatling style, “a round in every square inch of a football field in less than a minute,” as the handouts said. They used to call it Puff the Magic Dragon, but the Marines knew better: they named it Spooky. Every fifth round fired was a tracer, and when Spooky w
as working, everything stopped while that solid stream of violent red poured down out of the black sky. If you watched from a great distance, the stream would seem to dry up between bursts, vanishing slowly from air to ground like a comet tail, the sound of the guns disappearing too, a few seconds later. If you watched at a close range, you couldn’t believe that anyone would have the courage to deal with that night after night, week after week, and you cultivated a respect for the Viet Cong and NVA who had crouched under it every night now for months. It was awesome, worse than anything the Lord had ever put down on Egypt, and at night, you’d hear the Marines talking, watching it, yelling, “Get some!” until they grew quiet and someone would say, “Spooky understands.” The nights were very beautiful. Night was when you really had the least to fear and feared the most. You could go through some very bad numbers at night.

  Because, really, what a choice there was; what a prodigy of things to be afraid of! The moment that you understood this, really understood it, you lost your anxiety instantly. Anxiety was a luxury, a joke you had no room for once you knew the variety of deaths and mutilations the war offered. Some feared head wounds, some dreaded chest wounds or stomach wounds, everyone feared the wound of wounds, the Wound. Guys would pray and pray—Just you and me, God. Right?—offer anything, if only they could be spared that: Take my legs, take my hands, take my eyes, take my fucking life, You Bastard, but please, please, please, don’t take those. Whenever a shell landed in a group, everyone forgot about the next rounds and skipped back to rip their pants away, to check, laughing hysterically with relief even though their legs might be shattered, their kneecaps torn away, kept upright by their relief and shock, gratitude and adrenaline.