Dispatches

by Michael Herr

  By the time Davies’ friends showed up, we were already stoned. We could hear them below, laughing and rapping with Mama, and then they came up the stairs, three spades and two white guys.

  “It sure do smell peculiar up here,” one of them said.

  “Hi, you freaky li’l fuckers.”

  “This grass is Number Ten,” Davies said. “Every time I smoke this grass over here it gives me a bad trip.”

  “Ain’ nuthin’ th’ matter with that grass,” someone said. “It ain’t the grass.”

  “Where’s Hoa?”

  “Yeah, Davies, where’s your ole lady at?”

  “She’s out hustling Saigon tea, and I’m fucking sick of it.” He tried to look really angry, but he only looked unhappy.

  One of them handed off a joint and stretched out. “Hairy day today,” he said.

  “Where’d you fly?”

  “Bu Dop.”

  “Bu Dop!” one of the spades said, and he started to move toward the joint, jiving and working his shoulders, bopping his head. “Bu Dop, budop, bu dop dop dop!”

  “Funky funky Bu Dop.”

  “Hey, man, can you OD on grass?”

  “I dunno, baby. Maybe we could get jobs at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds smokin’ dope for Uncle Sugar.”

  “Wow, I’m stoned. Hey, Davies, you stoned?”

  “Yeah,” Davies said.

  It started to rain again, so hard that you couldn’t hear drops, only the full force of the water pouring down on the metal roof. We smoked a little more, and then the others started to leave. Davies looked like he was sleeping with his eyes open.

  “That goddamn pig,” he said. “Fuckin’ whore. Man, I’m paying out all this bread for the house and those people downstairs. I don’t even know who they are, for Christ’s sake. I’m really … I’m getting sick of it.”

  “You’re pretty short now,” someone said. “Why don’t you cut out?”

  “You mean just split?”

  “Why not?”

  Davies was quiet for a long time.

  “Yeah,” he finally said. “This is bad. This is really bad. I think I’m going to get out of here.”

  A bird colonel, commanding a brigade of the 4th Infantry Division: “I’ll bet you always wondered why we call ’em Dinks up in this part of the country. I thought of it myself. I’ll tell you, I never did like hearing them called Charlie. See, I had an uncle named Charlie, and I liked him too. No, Charlie was just too damn good for the little bastards. So I just thought, What are they really like? and I came up with rinky-dink. Suits ’em just perfect, Rinky-Dink. ’Cept that was too long, so we cut it down some. And that’s why we call ’em Dinks.”

  One morning before dawn, Ed Fouhy, a former Saigon bureau chief for CBS, went out to 8th Aerial Port at Tan Son Nhut to catch the early military flight to Danang. They boarded as the sun came up, and Fouhy strapped in next to a kid in rumpled fatigues, one of those soldiers you see whose weariness has gone far beyond physical exhaustion, into that state where no amount of sleep will ever give him the kind of rest he needs. Every torpid movement they make tells you that they are tired, that they’ll stay tired until their tours are up and the big bird flies them back to the World. Their eyes are dim with it, their faces almost puffy, and when they smile you have to accept it as a token.

  There was a standard question you could use to open a conversation with troops, and Fouhy tried it. “How long you been in-country?” he asked.

  The kid half lifted his head; that question could not be serious. The weight was really on him, and the words came slowly.

  “All fuckin’ day,” he said.

  “You guys ought do a story on me suntahm,” the kid said. He was a helicopter gunner, six-three with an enormous head that sat in bad proportion to the rest of his body and a line of picket teeth that were always on show in a wet, uneven smile. Every few seconds he would have to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, and when he talked to you his face was always an inch from yours, so that I had to take my glasses off to keep them dry. He was from Kilgore, Texas, and he was on his seventeenth consecutive month in-country.

  “Why should we do a story about you?”

  “ ’Cause I’m so fuckin’ good,” he said, “ ’n’ that ain’ no shit, neither. Got me one hunnert ’n’ fifty-se’en gooks kilt. ’N’ fifty caribou.” He grinned and stanched the saliva for a second. “Them’re all certified,” he added.

  The chopper touched down at Ba Xoi and we got off, not unhappy about leaving him. “Lis’n,” he said, laughing, “you git up onna ridgeline, see y’ keep yer head down. Y’heah?”

  “Say, how’d you get to be a co-respondent an’ come ovah to this raggedy-ass motherfucker?”

  He was a really big spade, rough-looking even when he smiled, and he wore a gold nose-bead fastened through his left nostril. I told him that the nose-bead blew my mind, and he said that was all right, it blew everybody’s mind. We were sitting by the chopper pad of an lz above Kontum. He was trying to get to Dak To, I was heading for Pleiku, and we both wanted to get out of there before nightfall. We took turns running out to the pad to check the choppers that kept coming in and taking off, neither of us was having any luck, and after we’d talked for an hour he laid a joint on me and we smoked.

  “I been here mor’n eight months now,” he said. “I bet I been in mor’n twenny firefights. An’ I ain’ hardly fired back once.”

  “How come?”

  “Shee-it, I go firin’ back, I might kill one a th’ Brothers, you dig it?”

  I nodded, no Viet Cong ever called me honky, and he told me that in his company alone there were more than a dozen Black Panthers and that he was one of them. I didn’t say anything, and then he said that he wasn’t just a Panther; he was an agent for the Panthers, sent over here to recruit. I asked him what kind of luck he’d been having, and he said fine, real fine. There was a fierce wind blowing across the lz, and the joint didn’t last very long.

  “Hey, baby,” he said, “that was just some shit I tol’ you. Shit, I ain’ no Panther. I was just fuckin’ with you, see what you’d say.”

  “But the Panthers have guys over here. I’ve met some.”

  “Tha’ could be,” he said, and he laughed.

  A Huey came in, and he jogged out to see where it was headed. It was going to Dak To, and he came back to get his gear. “Later, baby,” he said. “An’ luck.” He jumped into the chopper, and as it rose from the strip he leaned out and laughed, bringing his arm up and bending it back toward him, palm out and the fist clenched tightly in the Sign.

  One day I went out with the ARVN on an operation in the rice paddies above Vinh Long, forty terrified Vietnamese troops and five Americans, all packed into three Hueys that dropped us up to our hips in paddy muck. I had never been in a rice paddy before. We spread out and moved toward the marshy swale that led to the jungle. We were still twenty feet from the first cover, a low paddy wall, when we took fire from the treeline. It was probably the working half of a crossfire that had somehow gone wrong. It caught one of the ARVN in the head, and he dropped back into the water and disappeared. We made it to the wall with two casualties. There was no way of stopping their fire, no room to send in a flanking party, so gunships were called and we crouched behind the wall and waited. There was a lot of fire coming from the trees, but we were all right as long as we kept down. And I was thinking, Oh man, so this is a rice paddy, yes, wow! when I suddenly heard an electric guitar shooting right up in my ear and a mean, rapturous black voice singing, coaxing, “Now c’mon baby, stop actin’ so crazy,” and when I got it all together I turned to see a grinning black corporal hunched over a cassette recorder. “Might’s well,” he said. “We ain’ goin’ nowhere till them gunships come.”

  That’s the story of the first time I ever heard Jimi Hendrix, but in a war where a lot of people talked about Aretha’s “Satisfaction” the way other people speak of
Brahms’ Fourth, it was more than a story; it was Credentials. “Say, that Jimi Hendrix is my main man,” someone would say. “He has definitely got his shit together!” Hendrix had once been in the 101st Airborne, and the Airborne in Vietnam was full of wiggy-brilliant spades like him, really mean and really good, guys who always took care of you when things got bad. That music meant a lot to them. I never once heard it played over the Armed Forces Radio Network.

  I met this kid from Miles City, Montana, who read the Stars and Stripes every day, checking the casualty lists to see if by some chance anybody from his town had been killed. He didn’t even know if there was anyone else from Miles City in Vietnam, but he checked anyway because he knew for sure that if there was someone else and they got killed, he would be all right. “I mean, can you just see two guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam?” he said.

  The sergeant had lain out near the clearing for almost two hours with a wounded medic. He had called over and over for a medevac, but none had come. Finally, a chopper from another outfit, a LOH, appeared, and he was able to reach it by radio. The pilot told him that he’d have to wait for one of his own ships, they weren’t coming down, and the sergeant told the pilot that if he did not land for them he was going to open fire from the ground and fucking well bring him down. So they were picked up that way, but there were repercussions.

  The commander’s code name was Mal Hombre, and he reached the sergeant later that afternoon from a place with the call signal Violent Meals.

  “God damn it, Sergeant,” he said through the static, “I thought you were a professional soldier.”

  “I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, I was gonna lose my man.”

  “This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant?”

  “Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper ‘dirty laundry’?”

  “At ease, Sergeant,” Mal Hombre said, and radio contact was broken.

  There was a spec 4 in the Special Forces at Can Tho, a shy Indian boy from Chinle, Arizona, with large, wet eyes the color of ripe olives and a quiet way of speaking, a really nice way of putting things, kind to everyone without ever being stupid or soft about it. On the night that the compound and the airstrip were hit, he came and asked me if there was a chaplain anywhere around. He wasn’t very religious, he said, but he was worried about tonight. He’d just volunteered for a “suicide squad,” two jeeps that were going to drive across the airstrip with mortars and a recoilless rifle. It looked bad, I had to admit it; there were so few of us in the compound that they’d had to put me on the reaction force. It might be bad. He just had a feeling about it, he’d seen what always happened to guys whenever they got that feeling, at least he thought it was that feeling, a bad one, the worst he’d ever had.

  I told him that the only chaplains I could think of would be in the town, and we both knew that the town was cut off.

  “Oh,” he said. “Look, then. If I get it tonight …”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “Listen, though. If it happens … I think it’s going to … will you make sure the colonel tells my folks I was looking for a chaplain anyway?”

  I promised, and the jeeps loaded and drove off. I heard later that there had been a brief firefight, but that no one had been hurt. They didn’t have to use the recoilless. They all drove back into the compound two hours later. The next morning at breakfast he sat at another table, saying a lot of loud, brutal things about the gooks, and he wouldn’t look at me. But at noon he came over and squeezed my arm and smiled, his eyes fixed somewhere just to the right of my own.

  For two days now, ever since the Tet Offensive had begun, they had been coming by the hundreds to the province hospital at Can Tho. They were usually either very young or very old or women, and their wounds were often horrible. The more lightly wounded were being treated quickly in the hospital yard, and the more serious cases were simply placed in one of the corridors to die. There were just too many of them to treat, the doctors had worked without a break, and now, on the second afternoon, the Viet Cong began shelling the hospital.

  One of the Vietnamese nurses handed me a cold can of beer and asked me to take it down the hall where one of the Army surgeons was operating. The door of the room was ajar, and I walked right in. I probably should have looked first. A little girl was lying on the table, looking with wide dry eyes at the wall. Her left leg was gone, and a sharp piece of bone about six inches long extended from the exposed stump. The leg itself was on the floor, half wrapped in a piece of paper. The doctor was a major, and he’d been working alone. He could not have looked worse if he’d lain all night in a trough of blood. His hands were so slippery that I had to hold the can to his mouth for him and tip it up as his head went back. I couldn’t look at the girl.

  “Is it all right?” he said quietly.

  “It’s okay now. I expect I’ll be sick as hell later on.”

  He placed his hand on the girl’s forehead and said, “Hello, little darling.” He thanked me for bringing the beer. He probably thought that he was smiling, but nothing changed anywhere in his face. He’d been working this way for nearly twenty hours.

  The Intel report lay closed on the green field table, and someone had scrawled “What does it all mean?” across the cover sheet. There wasn’t much doubt about who had done that; the S-2 was a known ironist. There were so many like him, really young captains and majors who had the wit to cut back their despair, a wedge to set against the bitterness. What got to them sooner or later was an inability to reconcile their love of service with their contempt for the war, and a lot of them finally had to resign their commissions, leave the profession.

  We were sitting in the tent waiting for the rain to stop, the major, five grunts and myself. The rains were constant now, ending what had been a dry monsoon season, and you could look through the tent flap and think about the Marines up there patrolling the hills. Someone came in to report that one of the patrols had discovered a small arms cache.

  “An arms cache!” the major said. “What happened was, one of the grunts was out there running around, and he tripped and fell down. That’s about the only way we ever find any of this shit.”

  He was twenty-nine, young in rank, and this was his second tour. The time before, he had been a captain commanding a regular Marine company. He knew all about grunts and patrols, arms caches and the value of most Intelligence.

  It was cold, even in the tent, and the enlisted Marines seemed uncomfortable about lying around with a stranger, a correspondent there. The major was a cool head, they knew that; there wasn’t going to be any kind of hassle until the rain stopped. They talked quietly among themselves at the far end of the tent, away from the light of the lantern. Reports kept coming in: reports from the Vietnamese, from recon, from Division, situation reports, casualty reports, three casualty reports in twenty minutes. The major looked them all over.

  “Did you know that a dead Marine costs eighteen thousand dollars?” he said. The grunts all turned around and looked at us. They knew how the major had meant that because they knew the major. They were just seeing about me.

  The rain stopped, and they left. Outside, the air was still cool, but heavy, too, as though a terrible heat was coming on. The major and I stood by the tent and watched while an F-4 flew nose-down, released its load against the base of a hill, leveled and flew upward again.

  “I’ve been having this dream,” the major said. “I’ve had it two times now. I’m in a big examination room back at Quantico. They’re handing out questionnaires for an aptitude test. I take one and look at it, and the first question says, ‘How many kinds of animals can you kill with your hands?’ ”

  We could see rain falling in a sheet about a kilometer away. Judging by the wind, the major gave it three minutes before it reached us.

  “After the first tour, I’d have the goddamndest nightmares. You know, the work
s. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying, me dying … I thought they were the worst,” he said. “But I sort of miss them now.”

  Colleagues

  I

  There’s a candle end burning in a corner of the bunker, held to the top of a steel helmet by melted wax, the light guttering over a battered typewriter, and the Old Guy is getting one off: “Tat-tat-tat, tatta-tatta-tat like your kid or your brother or your sweetheart maybe never wanted much for himself never asked for anything except for what he knew to be his some men have a name for it and they call it Courage when the great guns are still at last across Europe what will it matter maybe after all that this one boy from Cleveland Ohio won’t be coming back-a-tat-tat.” You can hear shell fire landing just outside, a little gravel falls into the typewriter, but the candle burns on, throwing its faint light over the bowed head and the few remaining wisps of white hair. Two men, the Colonel and the Kid, stand by the door watching. “Why, Sir?” the Kid asks. “What makes him do it? He could be sitting safe in London right now.” “I don’t know, son,” the Colonel says. “Maybe he figures he’s got a job to do, too. Maybe it’s because he’s somebody who really cares….”

  I never knew a member of the Vietnam press corps who was insensible to what happened when the words “war” and “correspondent” got joined. The glamour of it was possibly empty and lunatic, but there were times when it was all you had, a benign infection that ravaged all but your worst fears and deepest depressions. Admitting, for argument’s sake, that we were all a little crazy to have gone there in the first place, there were those whose madness it was not to know always which war they were actually in, fantasizing privately about other, older wars, Wars I and II, air wars and desert wars and island wars, obscure colonial actions against countries whose names have since changed many times, punitive wars and holy wars and wars in places where the climate was so cool that you could wear a trench coat and look good; in other words, wars which sounded old and corny to those of us for whom the war in Vietnam was more than enough. There were correspondents all around who could break you up with their bad style and self-consciousness, but those aberrations were hardly ever beyond your understanding. Over there, all styles grew in their way out of the same haunted, haunting romance. Those Crazy Guys Who Cover The War.