Dispatches

by Michael Herr

  The relief of Khe Sanh began on April 1. It was code-named Operation Pegasus, and while it included over 10,000 Marines and three full battalions of ARVN, it took its name and its style from the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). A week earlier, 18,000 members of the Cav had left their base at Camp Evans, near Dong Ha, and moved to a point in a river valley eleven miles northeast of Khe Sanh, just beyond the range of the big guns that were dug into the Laotian mountains. The Cav had plenty of helicopters, choppers were what the Cav was all about; and Sky Cranes lifted in earth-moving equipment, Chinooks brought in the heavier artillery pieces, and within days there was a forward operational base that looked better than most permanent installations in I Corps, complete with a thousand-meter airstrip and deep, ventilated bunkers. They named it LZ Stud, and once it was finished Khe Sanh ceased to be the center of its own sector; it became just another objective.

  It was almost as though the war had ended. The day before Pegasus began, President Johnson had announced the suspension of airstrikes against the North and put a closing date on his own Administration. The Marines’ 11th Engineers had begun moving down Route 9, deactivating mines and repairing bridges, and they had met with no resistance. The shelling of Khe Sanh had become a matter of a few scattered rounds a day, and it had been more than two weeks now since General Westmoreland had revealed that, in his opinion, the attack on Khe Sanh would never come. The 304th NVA Division had left the area, and so had the 325C. Now, it seemed that all but a token force of NVA had vanished. And now, everywhere you went, you could see the most comforting military insignia in all of Vietnam, the yellow-and-black shoulder patch of the Cav. You were with the pro’s now, the elite. LZ’s and firebases were being established at a rate of three and four a day, and every hour brought them closer to Khe Sanh.

  Really, it was almost too good, and by the third day something odd attended Pegasus. As an operation, it revealed the tastes of the Cav’s commander, Major General John Tolson, a general of uncommon intelligence and subtlety. Its precision and speed were unbelievable, especially to anyone who had just spent the better part of three months with the Marines. Pegasus was almost elegant in its tactics and scope. Stendhal would have loved it (he would have called it “an affair of outposts”), but it soon came to look more like a spectacle than a military operation, a non-operation devised to non-relieve the non-siege of Khe Sanh. When I told General Tolson that I had no real grasp of what the Cav was doing, he laughed and told me that I was probably brighter about it than I knew. Pegasus was objectiveless, he said. Its purpose was to engage. But engage what?

  Perhaps, as we claimed, the B-52’s had driven them all away, broken the back of their will to attack. (We claimed 13,000 NVA dead from those raids.) Maybe they’d left the Khe Sanh area as early as January, leaving the Marines pinned down, and moved across I Corps in readiness for the Tet Offensive. Many people believed that a few battalions, clever enough and active enough, could have kept the Marines at Khe Sanh inside the wire and underground for all of those weeks. Maybe they’d come to see reasons why an attack would be impossible, and gone back into Laos. Or A Shau. Or Quang Tri. Or Hue. We didn’t know. They were somewhere, but they were not around Khe Sanh anymore.

  Incredible arms caches were being found, rockets still crated, launchers still wrapped in factory paper, AK-47’s still packed in Cosmoline, all indicating that battalion-strength units had left in a hurry. The Cav and the Marines above Route 9 were finding equipment suggesting that entire companies had fled. Packs were found on the ground in perfect company formations, and while they contained diaries and often poems written by the soldiers, there was almost no information about where they had gone or why. Considering the amount of weapons and supplies being found (a record for the entire war), there were surprisingly few prisoners, although one prisoner did tell his interrogators that 75 percent of his regiment had been killed by our B-25’s, nearly 1,500 men, and that the survivors were starving. He had been pulled out of a spider hole near Hill 881 North, and had seemed grateful for his capture. An American officer who was present at the interrogation actually said that the boy was hardly more than seventeen or eighteen, and that it was hideous that the North was feeding such young men into a war of aggression. Still, I don’t remember anyone, Marine or Cav, officer or enlisted, who was not moved by the sight of their prisoners, by the sudden awareness of what must have been suffered and endured that winter.

  For the first time in eleven weeks, Marines at Khe Sanh left their perimeter, walked two miles to Hill 471, and took it, after what amounted to the one serious battle of those weeks. (LZ’s, including Stud, were sporadically rocketed and mortared; the Cav lost some ships to NVA gunners; there were small often sharp firefights almost every day. One or two body bags waited for removal at most landing zones on most afternoons, but it was different, and that was the trouble. After the slaughter of the winter, you were afraid of this unaccustomed mercy, afraid of becoming lax or afraid of having the Joke played on you. It was one thing, if it had to happen, to have it happen in Hue or Khe Sanh, but something else to be one of the few. WHY ME? was a common piece of helmet graffiti.) You’d hear a trooper of the Cav say something like, “I hear the Marines stepped into the shit above Route Nine,” but what he really meant was, Of course the Marines stepped into the shit, what else would they be doing in this war? The Cav’s attitude acknowledged that they might die too, but never the way the Marines did. A story circulated around the Pegasus TAOR about a Marine who had been staked to a hillside by the NVA: Marine choppers refused to pick him up, so the Cav went down and got him. Whether it was true or not, it revealed the complexities of the Marine–Cav rivalry, and when the Cav sent an outfit to relieve the Marines on 471, it killed off one of the last surviving romances about war left over from the movies: there was no shouting, no hard kidding, no gleeful obscenities, or the old “Hey, where you from? Brooklyn!? No kiddin’! Me too!” The departing and arriving files passed one another without a single word being spoken.

  The death of Martin Luther King intruded on the war in a way that no other outside event had ever done. In the days that followed, there were a number of small, scattered riots, one or two stabbings, all of it denied officially. The Marine recreational facility in China Beach in Danang was put off-limits for a day, and at Stud we stood around the radio and listened to the sound of automatic-weapons fire being broadcast from a number of American cities. A southern colonel on the general’s staff told me that it was a shame, a damn shame, but I had to admit (didn’t I?) that he’d been a long time asking for it. A black staff sergeant in the Cav who had taken me over to his outfit for dinner the night before cut me dead on the day that we heard the news, but he came over to the press tent later that night and told me that it shouldn’t happen that way. I got a bottle of Scotch from my pack and we went outside and sat on the grass, watching the flares dropping over the hillside across the river. There were still some night mists. In the flarelight it looked like heavy snow, and the ravines looked like ski trails.

  He was from Alabama and he had all but decided on a career in the Army. Even before King’s murder he had seen what this might someday mean, but he’d always hoped to get around it somehow.

  “Now what I gonna do?” he said.

  “I’m a great one to ask.”

  “But dig it. Am I gonna take ’n’ turn them guns aroun’ on my own people? Shit!”

  That was it, there was hardly a black NCO anywhere who wasn’t having to deal with that. We sat in the dark, and he told me that when he’d walked by me that afternoon it had made him sick. He couldn’t help it.

  “Shit, I can’t do no twenny in this Army. They ain’ no way. All’s I hope is I can hang back when push comes t’ shove. An’ then I think, Well, fuck it, why should I? Man, home’s jus’ gonna be a hassle.”

  There was some firing on the hill, a dozen M-79 rounds and the dull bap-bap-bap of an AK-47, but that was over there, there was an entire American division betwee
n that and us. But the man was crying, trying to look away while I tried not to look.

  “It’s just a bad night for it,” I said. “What can I tell you?”

  He stood up, looked at the hill and then started to leave. “Oh, man,” he said. “This war gets old.”

  At Langvei we found the two-month-old corpse of an American stretched out on the back of a wrecked jeep. This was on the top of the small hill that opposed the hill containing the Special Forces bunkers taken by the NVA in February. They were still in there, 700 meters away. The corpse was the worst thing we’d ever seen, utterly blackened now, the skin on the face drawn back tightly like stretched leather, so that all of his teeth showed. We were outraged that he had not been buried or at least covered, and we moved away and set up positions around the hill. Then the ARVN moved out toward the bunkers and were turned back by machine-gun fire. We sat on the hill and watched while napalm was dropped against the bunkers, and then we set up a recoilless rifle and fired at the vents. I went back to Stud. The next day a company of the Cav tried it, moving in two files on high and low ground approaching the bunkers, but the terrain between the hills offered almost no cover, and they were turned back. That night they were rocketed heavily, but took no serious casualties. I came back on the third day with Rick Merron and John Lengle of the Associated Press. There had been heavy airstrikes against the bunkers that night, and now two tiny helicopters, Loaches, were hovering a few feet above the slits, pouring in fire.

  “Man, one Dink with a forty-five could put a hurtin’ on those Loaches they’d never come back from,” a young captain said. It was incredible, those little ships were the most beautiful things flying in Vietnam (you had to stop once in a while and admire the machinery), they just hung there above those bunkers like wasps outside a nest. “That’s sex,” the captain said. “That’s pure sex.”

  One of the Loaches rose suddenly and flew over the hill, crossed the river and darted into Laos. Then it circled quickly, dipped, flew directly over us and hung there. The pilot radioed the captain.

  “Sir, there’s a gook di-di-ing down the trail into Laos. Permission to kill him.”

  “Permission given.”

  “Thank you,” the pilot said, and the ship broke its suspended motion and sped toward the trail, clearing its guns.

  A rocket whistled by, missing the hill, and we ran for the bunkers. Two more came in, both missing, and then we moved out for the opposite hill one more time, watching the machine-gun slits for fluttering blips of light with one eye and checking the ground for booby traps with the other. But they had abandoned it during the night, and we took it without a shot, standing on top of the bunkers, looking down into Laos, past the remains of two bombed-out Russian tanks, feeling relieved, victorious and silly. When Merron and I flew back to Stud that afternoon, the two-month-old corpse rode with us. No one had covered him until ten minutes before the chopper had picked us up, and the body bag swarmed with flies until the motion of the rising chopper shook them off. We got out at Graves Registration with it, where one of the guys opened the bag and said, “Shit, this is a gook! What’d they bring him here for?”

  “Look, Jesus, he’s got on our uniform.”

  “I don’t give a fuck, that ain’t no American, that’s a fucking gook!”

  “Wait a minute,” the other one said. “Maybe it’s a spade.…”

  The chopper that brought us back to Khe Sanh had barely touched the strip, and we were running again. I must have seen the Marines playing softball there, lounging around, hanging up laundry, but I rejected it and ran anyway. It was the only way I knew to behave there. I knew where the trench was, and went for it.

  “Must be Airborne trainin’,” some grunt called, and I slowed down.

  “Ain’ no hurry-up no more,” a black Marine said. They all had their fatigue shirts off, there must have been hundreds of them, all around the field. It didn’t seem possible, but I knew it must be all right; I had noticed the weight of my flak jacket and pack as I’d run. Nearly 500 Vietnamese Rangers sat near the strip with all of their gear around them. One of them ran up to an American, probably an advisor, and embraced him tightly. They were being taken out that morning. Colonel Lownds’ replacement was due at the base any hour now, and some of the 26th had already been lifted out and moved to Hoi An, south of Danang. The new Charlie Med triage room had just been completed, deep underground and well lighted, but only a few men a day were being treated there. I went over to Hotel Company’s position, but they were gone; a company of the Cav was there instead. They had cleaned out the trench floor all along the perimeter there, and the old bunker smelled now as though it had been dug that morning. It was no wonder that the Marines called the Cav dudes and got uncomfortable whenever they were around. I was relieving myself on the ground by one of the dumps when a Marine sergeant came up to me.

  “You wanna please use the piss tube next time,” he said.

  It hadn’t even occurred to me; I couldn’t remember ever having seen a piss tube at Khe Sanh.

  “Has the Cav taken over most of the perimeter?” I asked.

  “Hmmmm.”

  “It must be a relief not to have to worry about that anymore.”

  “Shit, I’d feel a whole lot better if we had Marines here still. Damn Cav, all’s they do is sleep on watch.”

  “Have you seen that?”

  “No, but that’s what they do.”

  “You don’t like the Cav much?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  Far up the strip, 400 meters away, there was a man sitting on some ammo crates. He was by himself. It was the colonel. I hadn’t seen him in nearly six weeks, and he looked tired now. He had the same stare that the rest of the Marines here had, and the corners of his mustache had been rolled tortuously into two tight points that were caked with dried creamed coffee. Yes, he said, it sure would be good to get out of this place. He sat there looking at the hills, and I think that he was all but hypnotized by them now; they were not the same hills that had surrounded him for most of the past ten months. They had held such fearful mystery for so long that when they were suddenly found to be peaceful again, they were transformed as greatly as if a flood had swept over them.

  A token American force was kept at Khe Sanh for the next month, and the Marines went back to patrolling the hills, as they had done a year before. A great many people wanted to know how the Khe Sanh Combat Base could have been the Western Anchor of our Defense one month and a worthless piece of ground the next, and they were simply told that the situation had changed. A lot of people suspected that some kind of secret deal had been made with the North; activity along the DMZ all but stopped after Khe Sanh was abandoned. The Mission called it a victory, and General Westmoreland said that it had been “a Dien Bien Phu in reverse.” In early June engineers rolled up the airstrip and transported the salvaged tarmac back to Dong Ha. The bunkers were filled with high explosives and then blown up. The sandbagging and wire that remained were left to the jungle, which grew with a violence of energy now in the Highland summer, as though there was an impatience somewhere to conceal all traces of what had been left by the winter.

  Postscript: China Beach

  It was a great curving stretch of beachfront that faced the Bay of Danang. Even during the monsoons the afternoons were warm and clear, but now, in August, the dry, hot winds blew the sharp grit of the sand across the beach, into your eyes, hurling it stinging against your skin. Every Marine in I Corps got to spend a few days at China Beach at least once during their thirteen-month tours. It was a place where they could go swimming or surfing, get drunk, get stoned, get laid, get straight, groove in the scivvie houses, rent sailboats, or just sleep on the beach. Sometimes it was just an in-country R&R, a vacation, and sometimes it was a reward for outstanding service, exceptional bravery. Some Marines, the ones who were more than just good in a firefight, would get here as often as once a month because their company commanders did
not like having them around between operations. With their medals and commendations, they would get three days out, a reprieve that promised them hot food, hot showers, time to goof and miles of beach. Sometimes choppers from the Cav would fly low along the beach, buzzing the Marines, and once, when a beautiful girl in a bikini was sighted, one of them actually landed. But you saw very few women here, mostly just Marines, and on some days there were thousands of them. They would splash in the surf, giggling and shouting, riding beach disks along the shoreline, playing like kids. Sometimes they would just lie asleep, half in the water and half in the sand. This was not the war for such images, you knew better, but they were Marines, and there was something terrible about seeing them there, limp in the wash of the tide.

  Up from the beach there was a long, airless concrete building that served as a cafeteria. It had the best jukebox in Vietnam, and black Marines would spend more time there than on the beach, jiving around the room, carrying stacks of greasy hamburgers, dank french fries, giant paper cups full of malted milk, grape drink or (because it was so pretty, one of them told me) tomato juice. You’d sit at the tables there listening to the music, glad to be out of the sun, and every once in a while some grunts would recognize you from an operation and come over to talk. It was always nice to see them, but it always brought bad news, and sometimes the sight of what the war had done to them was awful. The two who came up to me now looked all right.

  “You’re a reporter, ain’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “We seen you one time at Khe Sanh.”

  They were from the 26th Marines, Hotel Company, and they told me all about what had happened to the outfit since April. They weren’t from the same platoon as Orrin and Day Tripper, but they knew that both of them had made it home. One of the guys who had run out to bring me a stretcher to sleep on was in a big hospital in Japan. I couldn’t remember the name of the one grunt I most wanted to hear about, I was probably afraid of what they’d say, but I described him. He was a little cat with blond hair, and he was trying to grow a mustache.