Dispatches

by Michael Herr

  No, to find the really mindless optimism, the kind that rejected facts and killed grunts wholesale and drove you into mad, helpless rages, you had to travel outward from Khe Sanh. The morale of the men at Khe Sanh was good (they were surviving, most of them; they were hacking it), but that didn’t give any general the right to claim that they were anxious for a fight, eager for the attack to come. During a five-day trip across the DMZ at the end of February and the beginning of March, that seemed to be the only kind of talk that any of them was capable of. “Excellent,” “real fine,” “outstanding,” “first rate”: talk like that poured over you until it was all you could do to keep from seizing one graying crew-cut head or another and jamming it deep into the nearest tactical map.

  On that trip I traveled with Karsten Prager of Time. Prager was in his early thirties and had been covering the war on and off for over three years. He was a German who had come to the States to attend college, and had lost all traces of his original accent. What replaced it was a gruff, clipped, Brooklyn-docks way of speaking. I once asked him how it was that he had been speaking English for such a short time and yet lost his German accent. “Well,” he said, “I got dis tuhriffic eah fuh langwidjis.” He had tough, shrewd eyes that matched his voice and a disdain for Command bravado that could be unsettling in an interview.

  We flew the DMZ together from Quang Tri to Camp Carrol and the Rockpile, hitting each of the firebases that had been set up or converted to firing missions supporting Khe Sanh. We flew in beat-up Marine choppers, clumsy H-34’s (Screw metal fatigue, we decided; the 34 had a lot of heart), over the cold, shattered, mist-bound hills, the same hills that had received over 120,000,000 pounds of explosives from B-52 raids in the previous three weeks, terrain like moonscapes, cratered and pitted and full of skilled North Vietnamese gunners. From past experience and the estimates of our meteorologists, the monsoons should be ending now, blowing south, clearing the DMZ skies and leaving the hills warm, but it wasn’t happening, the monsoon held (“The weather?” some colonel would say. “The weather is increasingly advantageous!”), we were freezing, you could barely piss on those hilltop firebases, and the ceilings were uniformly low before noon and after three. On the last part of the trip, flying into Dong Ha, the aluminum rod that held the seats broke, spilling us to the floor and making the exact sound that a .50-caliber round will make when it strikes a chopper, giving us all a bad scare and then a good, good laugh. A couple of times the pilots thought they saw something moving on the hilltops and we went down, circling five or six times while we all groaned and giggled from fear and the cold. The crew chief was a young Marine who moved around the chopper without a safety line hooked to his flight suit, so comfortable with the rolling and shaking of the ship that you couldn’t even pause to admire his daredevil nerve; you cut straight through to his easy grace and control, marveling as he hunkered down by the open door to rig the broken seat up again with pliers and a length of wire. At 1,500 feet he stood there in the gale-sucking door (Did he ever think about stepping off? How often?), his hands resting naturally on his hips, as though he were just standing around on a street corner somewhere, waiting. He knew he was good, an artist, he knew we were digging it, but it wasn’t for us at all; it was his, private; he was the man who was never going to fall out of any damn helicopter.

  At Dong Ha, after days without a bath or a shave or a change of fatigues, we went to the headquarters of the 3rd Marine Division, where Prager requested an immediate interview with General Tompkins, the commander. The general’s aide was a brisk dude of a first lieutenant, scrubbed and shaved and polished to a dull glow, and he stared at us in disbelief. That initial distaste was mutual, and I didn’t think we’d ever get beyond it, but a moment later he led us reluctantly into the general’s office.

  General Tompkins was seated behind his desk dressed in an OD sweatshirt, and he gave us a smile that made us feel slightly lunatic, standing there in our stubble and dirt and wrecked fatigues. When the lieutenant left the room, it was as though a great door had been slammed against the chill, and the general asked us to be seated. In spite of his hard good health and his taut, weathered face, he reminded me of Everett Dirksen. It was something sly and amused in his smile, a lurking wit behind the eyes, a soft gravel in his voice, each sentence rounding out in a grand deliberateness. Behind him several flags hung in their standards, and across the length of one entire wall there was a remarkable relief map of the DMZ, with several small sectors covered over, obscured from the eyes of unauthorized personnel.

  We sat down, the general offered us cigarettes (by the pack) and Prager began the questioning. It was all stuff I’d heard before, a synthesis of everything Prager had gotten together during the past four days. I’d never seen any point in asking generals heavy questions about anything; they were officials too, and the answers were almost always what you expected them to be. I half listened, tuning in and out, and Prager began a long, involved question dealing with weather variants, air capability, elevation and range of our big guns, his big guns, problems of supply and reinforcement and (apologetically) disengagement and evacuation. The general touched his fingertips together as the question developed, smiled and nodded as it went into its third minute, he looked impressed by Prager’s grasp of the situation and, finally, when the question ended, he placed his hands on the desk. He was still smiling.

  “What?” he said.

  Prager and I looked at each other quickly.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, boys. I’m a little hard of hearing. I don’t always catch it all.”

  So Prager did it again, speaking unnaturally loud, and my mind went back to the map, into it really, so that the sound of outgoing artillery beyond the general’s windows and the smell of burning shit and wet canvas brought in on the cold air put my head back at Khe Sanh for a moment.

  I thought about the grunts who had sat in a circle one night with a guitar, singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Jack Laurence of CBS News had asked them if they knew what that song meant to so many people, and they said, Yes, yes, they knew. I thought about the graffiti that John Wheeler had discovered on a latrine wall there, “I think I’m falling in love with Jake,” and about the grunts who had gone running up the trenchline to find a stretcher for me to sleep on, about Mayhew’s space blanket, about the kid who had mailed a gook ear home to his girl and could not understand now why she had stopped writing to him. I thought of the thirteen Marine maneuver battalions deployed across the Z and of the brutality and sweetness they contained, all the ways they had of saying their thanks, even though they knew you were crazy for being there. I thought about the Marines at Khe Sanh on this night; it would be about the forty-fifth night of the shelling, the Flood had not lasted this long. Prager was still talking, the general was still nodding and touching his fingertips together and the question was almost finished. “General,” Prager said, “what I want to know is, what if he decides to attack at Khe Sanh and, at the same time, he attacks at every single base the Marines have set up to support Khe Sanh, all across the DMZ?”

  And I thought, Please, General, say “God forbid!” Let your hands fly up, let involuntary shudders rack your spare, tough frame. Remember Langvei. Remember Mayhew.

  The general smiled, the crack trapper anticipating something good, past all doubting. “That … is exactly … what we … want him to do,” he said.

  We thanked him for his time and cigarettes and went out to look for a place to sleep that night.

  On the afternoon of the day that we returned to Danang an important press conference was held at the Marine-operated, Marine-controlled press center, a small compound on the river where most correspondents based themselves whenever they covered I Corps. A brigadier general from III MAF, Marine Headquarters, was coming over to brief us on developments in the DMZ and Khe Sanh. The colonel in charge of “press operations” was visibly nervous, the dining room was being cleared for the meeting, microphones set up, chairs arrange
d, printed material put in order. These official briefings usually did the same thing to your perception of the war that flares did to your night vision, but this one was supposed to be special, and correspondents had come in from all over I Corps to be there. Among us was Peter Braestrup of the Washington Post, formerly of The New York Times. He had been covering the war for nearly three years. He had been a captain in the Marines in Korea; ex-Marines are like ex-Catholics or off-duty Feds, and Braestrup still made the Marines a special concern of his. He had grown increasingly bitter about the Marines’ failure to dig in at Khe Sanh, about their shocking lack of defenses against artillery. He sat quietly as the colonel introduced the general and the briefing began.

  The weather was excellent: “The sun is up over Khe Sanh by ten every morning.” (A collective groan running through the seated journalists.) “I’m glad to be able to tell you that Route Nine is now open and completely accessible.” (Would you drive Route 9 into Khe Sanh, General? You bet you wouldn’t.)

  “What about the Marines at Khe Sanh?” someone asked.

  “I’m glad we’ve come to that,” the general said. “I was at Khe Sanh for several hours this morning, and I want to tell you that those Marines there are clean!”

  There was a weird silence. We all knew we’d heard him, the man had said that the Marines at Khe Sanh were clean (“Clean? He said ‘clean,’ didn’t he?”), but not one of us could imagine what he’d meant.

  “Yes, they’re bathing or getting a good wash every other day. They’re shaving every day, every single day. Their mood is good, their spirits are fine, morale is excellent and there’s a twinkle in their eye!”

  Braestrup stood up.

  “General.”

  “Peter?”

  “General, what about the defenses at Khe Sanh? Now, you built this wonderful, air-conditioned officers’ club, and that’s a complete shambles. You built a beer hall there, and that’s been blown away.” He had begun calmly, but now he was having trouble keeping the anger out of his voice. “You’ve got a medical detachment there that’s a disgrace, set up right on the airstrip, exposed to hundreds of rounds every day, and no overhead cover. You’ve had men at the base since July, you’ve expected an attack at least since November, they’ve been shelling you heavily since January. General, why haven’t those Marines dug in?”

  The room was quiet. Braestrup had a fierce smile on his face as he sat down. When the question had begun, the colonel had jerked suddenly to one side of his chair, as though he’d been shot. Now, he was trying to get his face in front of the general’s so that he could give out the look that would say, “See, General? See the kind of peckerheads I have to work with every day?” Braestrup was looking directly at the general now, waiting for his answer—the question had not been rhetorical—and it was not long in coming.

  “Peter,” the general said, “I think you’re hitting a small nail with an awfully big hammer.”

  VI

  The door gunner was leaning out, looking down, and he started to laugh. He wrote out a note and handed it to me. It read, “We sure brang some pee down to bear on them hills.”

  The monsoons were breaking, a hard heat was coming back to I Corps and the ordeal at Khe Sanh was almost over. Flying across the westernmost stretches of the DMZ, you could read the history of that terrible winter just by looking at the hills.

  For most of the time that the North Vietnamese had controlled Route 9 and kept the Marines isolated at Khe Sanh, all that anyone could see of the hills had been what little the transient mists allowed, a desolated terrain, cold, hostile, all colors deadened by the rainless monsoon or secreted in the fog. Now they were full and voluptuous in the new spring light.

  Often you’d hear Marines talking about how beautiful those hills must have been, but that spring they were not beautiful. Once they had been the royal hunting grounds of the Annamese emperors. Tigers, deer and flying squirrels had lived in them. I used to imagine what a royal hunt must have been like, but I could only see it as an Oriental children’s story: a conjuring of the emperor and empress, princes and princelings, court favorites and emissaries, all caparisoned for the hunt; slender figures across a tapestry, a promise of bloodless kills, a serene frolic complete with horseback flirtations and death-smiling game. And even now you could hear Marines comparing these hills with the hills around their homes, talking about what a pleasure it would be to hunt in them for anything other than men.

  But mostly, I think, the Marines hated those hills; not from time to time, the way many of us hated them, but constantly, like a curse. Better to fight the war in the jungles or along the dry flats that lined the Cua Viet River than in those hills. I heard a grunt call them “angry” once, probably something he’d picked up from a movie or a television series, but from his point of view he was right, the word was a good one. So when we decimated them, broke them, burned parts of them so that nothing would ever live on them again, it must have given a lot of Marines a good feeling, an intimation of power. They had humped those hills until their legs were in an agony, they’d been ambushed in them and blown apart on their trails, trapped on their barren ridges, lain under fire clutching the foliage that grew on them, wept alone in fear and exhaustion and shame just knowing the kind of terror that night always brought to them, and now, in April, something like revenge had been achieved.

  We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh. The smaller foothills were often quite literally turned inside out, the steeper of them were made faceless and drawless, and the bigger hills were left with scars and craters of such proportions that an observer from some remote culture might see in them the obsessiveness and ritual regularity of religious symbols, the blackness at the deep center pouring out rays of bright, overturned earth all the way to the circumference; forms like Aztec sun figures, suggesting that their makers had been men who held Nature in an awesome reverence.

  Once on a Chinook run from Cam Lo to Dong Ha, I sat next to a Marine who took a Bible from his pack and began reading even before we took off. He had a small cross sketched in ballpoint on his flak jacket and another, even less obtrusive, on his helmet cover. He was an odd-looking guy for a combat Marine in Vietnam. For one thing, he was never going to tan, no matter how many months he spent in the sun. He would just go red and blotchy, even though his hair was dark. He was also very heavy, maybe twenty pounds overweight, although you could see from his boots and fatigues that he’d humped it a lot over here. He wasn’t a chaplain’s assistant or anything, just a grunt who happened to be fat, pale and religious. (You didn’t meet that many who were deeply religious, although you expected to, with so many kids from the South and the Midwest, from farms and small rural towns.) We strapped in and he started reading, getting very absorbed, and I leaned out the door and looked at the endless progression of giant pits which were splashed over the ground, at the acre-sized scars where napalm or chemical spray had eaten away the cover. (There was a special Air Force outfit that flew defoliation missions. They were called the Ranch Hands, and their motto was, “Only we can prevent forests.”) When I held out some cigarettes to offer him one, he looked up from the Bible and shook his head, getting off that quick, pointless laugh that told me for sure that he’d seen a lot of action. Maybe he had even been at Khe Sanh, or up on 861 with the 9th. I don’t think he realized that I wasn’t a Marine, I had on a Marine flak jacket which covered the correspondent’s identification tags sewn on my fatigues, but he saw the offer of a cigarette as a courtesy and he wanted to return it. He passed over the open Bible, almost giggling now, and pointed to a
passage. It was Psalms 91:5, and it said,

  Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.

  Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

  A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

  Okay, I thought, that’s good to know. I wrote the word “Beautiful!” out on a piece of paper and handed it back to him, and he jerked his thumb up, meaning that he thought so too. He went back to the book and I went back to the door, but I had a nasty impulse all the way into Dong Ha to run through Psalms and find a passage which I could offer him, the one that talked about those who were defiled with their own works and sent a-whoring with their own inventions.