Dispatches

by Michael Herr

  Now, while we waited for him, a Marine came up to Lengle and me and asked if we’d like to look at some pictures he’d taken. Marines felt comfortable around Lengle, who looked like a college basketball star, six-seven and very young (actually, he was thirty), a Nevadan who’d parlayed a nice-kid image into a valuable professional asset. The pictures were in a little imitation-leather folder, and you could tell by the way the Marine stood over us, grinning in anticipation as we flipped over each plastic page, that it was among his favorite things. (He’d also taken some “number-one souvenirs,” he said, leaving the details to our imaginations.) There were hundreds of these albums in Vietnam, thousands, and they all seemed to contain the same pictures: the obligatory Zippo-lighter shot (“All right, let’s burn these hootches and move out”); the severed-head shot, the head often resting on the chest of the dead man or being held up by a smiling Marine, or a lot of heads, arranged in a row, with a burning cigarette in each of the mouths, the eyes open (“Like they’re lookin’ at you, man, it’s scary”); the VC suspect being dragged over the dust by a half-track or being hung by his heels in some jungle clearing; the very young dead with AK-47’s still in their hands (“How old would you say that kid was?” the grunts would ask. “Twelve, thirteen? You just can’t tell with gooks”); a picture of a Marine holding an ear or maybe two ears or, as in the case of a guy I knew near Pleiku, a whole necklace made of ears, “love beads” as its owner called them; and the one we were looking at now, the dead Viet Cong girl with her pajamas stripped off and her legs raised stiffly in the air.

  “No more boom-boom for that mamma-san,” the Marine said, that same, tired remark you heard every time the dead turned out to be women. It was so routine that I don’t think he even realized that he’d said it.

  “You posed that one,” Lengle said.

  “Not me,” the Marine said, laughing.

  “Now come on, you rascal. You mean you found her just like that?”

  “Well, some other guy fixed her that way, and it was funny, ’cause that guy got zapped later on the same day. But look, look at that bitch there, cut right in half!”

  “Oh, that’s a honey,” John said, “really terrific.”

  “I was thinkin’ about sending some in to the Stars and Stripes. You think the Stripes would run ’em?”

  “Well …” We were laughing now, what could you do? Half the combat troops in Vietnam had these things in their packs, snapshots were the least of what they took after a fight, at least pictures didn’t rot. I’d talked to a Marine who’d taken a lot of pictures after an operation on the Cua Viet River, and later, when he was getting short and nervous about things, he’d brought them to the chaplain. But the chaplain had only told him that it was forgivable and put the pictures in his drawer and kept them.

  A couple of Marines were talking to Flynn and Wheeler about their cameras, the best place to buy this lens, the right speed to use for that shot, I couldn’t follow any of it. The grunts were hip enough to the media to take photographers more seriously than reporters, and I’d met officers who refused to believe that I was really a correspondent because I never carried cameras. (During a recent operation, this had almost gotten me bumped from the Command chopper because the colonel, for reasons of his own, was partial to photographers. On that one, a company of his battalion had made contact with a company of Viet Cong and forced them out on a promontory, holding them there between their fire and the sea for the gunships to kill. This particular colonel loved to order the chopper in very low so that he could fire his .45 into the Cong, and he’d always wanted pictures of it. He was doubly disappointed that day; I’d not only turned up without a camera, but by the time we got there all the VC were dead, about 150 of them littered across the beach and bobbing in and out with the waves. But he fired off a few clips anyway, just to keep his piece working.)

  Marines were all around us now, about fifteen of them, and one, a short, heavy kid with a flat, dark face and the bearing of an overdeveloped troll, came up and looked hard at us.

  “You guys’re reporters, huh? Boy, you really get it all fucked up,” he said. “My old man sends me stuff from the papers, and he thinks you’re all full of shit.”

  A couple of Marines booed him, most of them laughed. Lengle laughed too. “Well, podner, what can I tell you? I mean, we try, we really take a shot at it.”

  “Then why can’t you guys just tell it right?”

  “Fuckin’ Krynski,” someone said, hitting the kid hard on the back of the head. According to his helmet, it was the Avenger himself, and he’d come to work for us now, just in time. He looked like a freshman in divinity school—clear blue eyes, smooth snub nose, cornsilk hair and a look of such trust and innocence that you hoped there would always be someone around to take care of him. He seemed terribly embarrassed about what had just been said to us.

  “Don’t you listen to that asshole,” he said. “God damn, Krynski, you don’t know any fuckin’ thing about it. These guys are number-one dudes, and that’s no shit.”

  “Thank you, friend,” Lengle said.

  “I didn’t mean nothin’,” Krynski said. “Don’t go gettin’ your balls in an uproar.”

  But the Avenger wasn’t letting it go. “Man, these guys take plenty of chances, they eat C’s just like us, and sleep in the mud, and all that good shit. They don’t have to stand around here and listen to you bitch. They don’t even have to be here at all!”

  “Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Krynski said, looking really puzzled. “You mean you guys volunteer to come over here?”

  “Well, dumb shit, what’d you think?” the Avenger said. “You think they’re just some dumb grunt like you?”

  “Oh man, you got to be kidding me. You guys asked to come here?”

  “Sure.”

  “How long do you have to stay?” he asked.

  “As long as we want.”

  “Wish I could stay as long as I want,” the Marine called Love Child said. “I’d been home las’ March.”

  “When did you get here?” I asked.

  “Las’ March.”

  The lieutenant who had been supervising the blasting looked down from the lz and yelled for someone named Collins.

  “Yes Sir?” the Avenger said.

  “Collins, get your bod up here.”

  “Yes Sir.”

  There was some movement on the lz now, the platoon had reached the clearing. Stone came out first, backing out very fast with his camera up, referring quickly to the ground just behind him between shots. Four Marines came out next, carrying a fifth on an improvised litter. They brought him to the center of the clearing and set him down carefully on the grass. We thought at first that he was dead, taken off by a booby trap on the trail, but his color was much too awful for that. Even the dead held some horrible light that seemed to recede, vanishing through one layer of skin at a time and taking a long time to go completely, but this kid had no color about him anywhere. It was incredible that anything so motionless and white could still be alive.

  “Collins,” the lieutenant said, “you go find the Old Man. Tell him we’ve got a real serious heat casualty here. Remember, tell him serious.”

  “Yes Sir,” the Avenger said, starting at a slow run along the ridge toward the CP.

  Dana took a few more pictures and then sat down to change film. His fatigues were completely darkened with sweat, but except for that he showed no signs of exertion. The rest of the column was coming off of the trail now, dropping in the clearing like sniper victims, the packs going first, staggering a few feet and falling. A few were smiling up at the sun like happy dreamers, more went face down and stopped moving except for some twitching in their legs, and the radio man made it all the way across the clearing to the commo section, where he eased the equipment from his back slowly, set his helmet very carefully on the ground for a pillow after picking his spot, and immediately fell asleep.

  S
tone ran over and photographed him. “You guys know something?” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s hotter than a bastard.”

  “Thanks.”

  We could see the colonel approaching, a short, balding man with flinty eyes and a brief black mustache. He was trussed up tightly in his flak jacket, and as he came toward us small groups of Marines broke and ran to get their flak jackets on too, before the colonel could have the chance to tell them about it. The colonel leaned over and looked hard at the unconscious Marine, who was lying now in the shade of a poncho being held over him by two corpsmen, while a third brushed his chest and face with water from a canteen.

  Well hell, the colonel was saying, there’s nothing the matter with that man, feed some salt into him, get him up, get him walking, this is the Marines, not the goddamned Girl Scouts, there won’t be any damned chopper coming in here today. (The four of us must have looked a little stricken at this, and Dana took our picture. We were really pulling for the kid; if he stayed, we stayed, and that meant all night.) The corpsmen were trying to tell the colonel that this was no ordinary case of heat exhaustion, excusing themselves but staying firm about it, refusing to let the colonel return to the CP. (The four of us smiled and Dana took a picture. “Go away, Stone,” Flynn said. “Hold it just like that,” Stone said, running in for a closeup so that his lens was an inch away from Flynn’s nose. “One more.”) The Marine looked awful lying there, trying to work his lips a little, and the colonel glared down at the fragile, still form as though it was blackmailing him. When the Marine refused to move anything except his lips for fifteen minutes, the colonel began to relent. He asked the corpsmen if they’d ever heard of a man dying from something like this.

  “Oh, yes Sir. Oh, wow, I mean he really needs more attention than what we can give him here.”

  “Mmmmmm …” the colonel said. Then he authorized the chopper request and strode with what I’m sure he considered great determination back to his CP.

  “I think it would have made him feel better if he could have shot the kid,” Flynn said.

  “Or one of us,” I said.

  “You’re just lucky he didn’t get you last night,” Flynn said. The evening before, when Flynn and I had arrived together at the base camp, the colonel had taken us into the Command bunker to show us some maps and explain the operation, and a captain had given us some coffee in Styrofoam cups. I’d carried mine outside and finished it while we talked to the colonel, who was being very hale and friendly in a way I’d seen before and didn’t really trust. I was looking around for some place to toss the empty cup, and the colonel noticed it.

  “Give it here,” he offered.

  “Oh, that’s okay, Colonel, thanks.”

  “No, come on, I’ll take it.”

  “No, really, I’ll just find a—”

  “Give it to me!” he said, and I did, but Flynn and I were afraid to look at each other until he’d returned underground, and then we broke up, exchanging the worst colonel stories we knew. I told him about the colonel who had threatened to court-martial a spec 4 for refusing to cut the heart out of a dead Viet Cong and feed it to a dog, and Flynn told me about a colonel in the Americal Division (which Flynn always said was sponsored by General Foods) who believed that every man under his command needed combat experience; he made the cooks and the clerks and the supply men and the drivers all take M-16’s and go out on night patrol, and one time all of his cooks got wiped out in an ambush.

  We could hear the sound of our Chinook coming in now, and we were checking to see if we had all of our gear, when I took a sudden terrible flash, some total dread, and I looked at everyone and everything in sight to see if there was some real source. Stone had been telling the truth about this being my last operation, I was as strung out as anybody on a last operation, there was nothing between here and Saigon that didn’t scare me now, but this was different, it was something else.

  “Fuckin’ heat …,” someone said. “I … oh, man, I just … can’t … fuckin’ … make it!”

  It was a Marine, and as soon as I saw him I realized that I’d seen him before, a minute or so ago, standing on the edge of the clearing staring at us as we got ourselves ready to leave. He’d been with a lot of other Marines there, but I’d seen him much more distinctly than the others without realizing or admitting it. The others had been looking at us too, with amusement or curiosity or envy (we were splitting, casualties and correspondents this way out, we were going to Danang), they were all more or less friendly, but this one was different, I’d seen it, known it and passed it over, but not really. He was walking by us now, and I saw that he had a deep, running blister that seemed to have opened and eaten away much of his lower lip. That wasn’t the thing that had made him stand out before, though. If I’d noticed it at all, it might have made him seem a little more wretched than the others, but nothing more. He stopped for a second and looked at us, and he smiled some terrifying, evil smile, his look turned now to the purest hatred.

  “You fucking guys,” he said. “You guys are crazy!”

  There was the most awful urgency to the way he said it. He was still glaring, I expected him to raise a finger and touch each of us with destruction and decay, and I realized that after all this time, the war still offered at least one thing that I had to turn my eyes from. I had seen it before and hoped never to see it again, I had misunderstood it and been hurt by it, I thought I had finally worked it out for good and I was looking at it now, knowing what it meant and feeling as helpless under it this last time as I had the first.

  All right, yes, it had been a groove being a war correspondent, hanging out with the grunts and getting close to the war, touching it, losing yourself in it and trying yourself against it. I had always wanted that, never mind why, it had just been a thing of mine, the way this movie is a thing of mine, and I’d done it; I was in many ways brother to these poor, tired grunts, I knew what they knew now, I’d done it and it was really something. Everywhere I’d gone, there had always been Marines or soldiers who would tell me what the Avenger had told Krynski, You’re all right, man, you guys are cool, you got balls. They didn’t always know what to think about you or what to say to you, they’d sometimes call you “Sir” until you had to beg them to stop, they’d sense the insanity of your position as terrified volunteer-reporter and it would seize them with the giggles and even respect. If they dug you, they always saw that you knew that, and when you choppered out they’d say goodbye, wish you luck. They’d even thank you, some of them, and what could you say to that?

  And always, they would ask you with an emotion whose intensity would shock you to please tell it, because they really did have the feeling that it wasn’t being told for them, that they were going through all of this and that somehow no one back in the World knew about it. They may have been a bunch of dumb, brutal killer kids (a lot of correspondents privately felt that), but they were smart enough to know that much. There was a Marine in Hue who had come after me as I walked toward the truck that would take me to the airstrip, he’d been locked in that horror for nearly two weeks while I’d shuttled in and out for two or three days at a time. We knew each other by now, and when he caught up with me he grabbed my sleeve so violently that I thought he was going to accuse me or, worse, try to stop me from going. His face was all but blank with exhaustion, but he had enough feeling left to say, “Okay, man, you go on, you go on out of here you cocksucker, but I mean it, you tell it! You tell it, man. If you don’t tell it …”

  What a time they were having there, it had all broken down, one battalion had taken 60 percent casualties, all the original NCO’s were gone, the grunts were telling their officers to go die, to go fuck themselves, to go find some other fools to run up those streets awhile, it was no place where I’d have to tell anyone not to call me “Sir.” They understood that, they understood a lot more than I did, but nobody hated me there, not even when I was leaving. Three days lat
er I came back and the fighting had dropped off, the casualties were down to nothing and the same Marine flashed me a victory sign that had nothing to do with the Marine Corps or the fading battle or the American flag that had gone up on the Citadel’s south wall the day before, he slapped me on the back and poured me a drink from a bottle he’d found in one of the hootches somewhere. Even the ones who preferred not to be in your company, who despised what your work required or felt that you took your living from their deaths, who believed that all of us were traitors and liars and the creepiest kinds of parasites, even they would cut back at the last and make their one concession to what there was in us that we ourselves loved most: “I got to give it to you, you guys got balls.” Maybe they meant just that and nothing more, we had our resources and we made enough out of that to keep us going, turning the most grudging admissions into decorations for valor, making it all all right again.

  But there was often that bad, bad moment to recall, the look that made you look away, and in its hateful way it was the purest single thing I’d ever known. There was no wonder left in it anywhere, no amusement, it came out of nothing so messy as morality or prejudice, it had no motive, no conscious source. You would feel it coming out to you from under a poncho hood or see it in a wounded soldier staring up at you from a chopper floor, from men who were very scared or who had just lost a friend, from some suffering apparition of a grunt whose lip had been torn open by the sun, who just couldn’t make it in that heat.