He and Tyler had finished morning sick call. Tyler was sitting at the microscope examining a mole he’d removed from a soldier’s neck that morning. Perched on the stool, his legs drawn up, he looked like a frog with glasses.
“It’s only an eighth of an inch thick,” David said from across the room.
“A sixteenth,” Tyler corrected without taking his eyes away from the scope. “But from the comment, I can see you do not understand the advantage of being a patient in a small socialized practice. I can say without the slightest hesitation that this mole is not malignant, because,” he went on as he continued his examination, “I have personally examined every individual cell.” He switched off the light and looked up, triumphant, when the screen door jerked open.
Sergeant Bradford stuck his head into the room. “Gunship with wounded, five minutes out.”
Tyler didn’t move, the proud look on his face fading. “Well, Doctor,” he said softly, “enter the real world.”
David grabbed his hat off the desk. “Plunkett’s triage today, isn’t he?”
“David,” Tyler warned, “when they have to bring ’em down here, it’s usually too late.”
Plunkett was at the helipad. Brown, the air evac lieutenant, and two corpsmen were there, too. David walked over to Plunkett. “How many coming in?” The heat rose in layers off the pad.
“Don’t know yet. Communications got kind of garbled.”
The usual approach to the helipad was from the north, away from the buildings, then directly in over the wire.
“There it is.” Plunkett pointed into the sun. David, turning, shielded his eyes and saw a small speck skimming along the ground about two miles out.
“Pretty low, isn’t it?”
The chopper, its metal skin flickering in the morning sun, continued toward them. As he watched, David heard the whine of its turbines, a high-pitched whistle distorted into a kind of shriek by the thin, dry air of the flats. The chopper started to drift left. “Jesus,” Plunkett mumbled. The engine sputtered and then the turbines began to whine again. The chopper gained some height but continued to veer out over the paddies, away from the base. As they watched, a tiny thread of smoke uncurled from its tail. The distance between the gunship and the 40th continued to widen.
“Why doesn’t he put it down?” David asked.
“Too low and too fast,” Plunkett said.
The engine noise suddenly increased in pitch. There was a frantic, metallic quality to the sound. The chopper, moving parallel to the perimeter, continued to rise. There was a moment when it seemed suspended, neither rising nor falling, simply holding its own; and then the next moment it twisted on itself and went into the ground. The main section plowed its way across the earth, while pieces of the tail and rotor flew into the air. There was a flash, transparent in the drenching sunlight, and then, as the corpsmen started to run, great curls of thick, black smoke rose up off the flats.
David started to follow, but Plunkett stopped him. “Take it easy,” he said. “There’s not going to be much left. Engine housings are mounted on top of choppers. When they hit the ground like that, the hot oil splashes out of the cam shaft down into the cabin. If anyone’s alive before they crash, they burn to death.”
Plunkett was right. It took over an hour for what was left of the main section to cool enough so they could get inside the cabin. David and the corpsmen spent that time going over the crash site, picking up the bodies that had been thrown free. Plunkett, working near the area where the chopper had first hit, called David over. He pointed to a leg lying under a section of the tail rotor. There was a tourniquet still twisted about the thigh. “Whoever they were carrying were pretty shot up. I guess the pilot figured he had to get ’em down quick.”
Thorpe sent out more troopers, and by noon all the bodies, even those in what was left of the main section, had been collected. David and Plunkett walked back to the dispensary together.
“What do you think happened?” David asked.
“Hard to know,” Plunkett answered. “Could have taken a round out at the landing area where they picked up the troopers, loosened or smashed something that came apart out here on the flats. It was a gunship, so either a med evac couldn’t get into the landing zone or wasn’t available. Gunships’ll go into a hot LZ to get out the wounded if they have to and the pilots are willing to take the chance. The trouble is that choppers are complicated machines. Doesn’t take much to bring one down. Hit a rotor hub, cut a hydraulic or fuel line and that’s it … they’re gone.”
“Went down fast, didn’t it?”
Plunkett nodded. “It always happens fast,” he said. “I never told you, but I was a general medical officer with a maneuver battalion of the 25th for a couple of weeks before I got assigned here. Boy, was I glad to get out. We went out with the patrols. There were days when it was like this all the time—med evacs getting hit all over the place, gunships going down. Out of nowhere a grenade goes off, blowing away someone’s leg; someone else steps off a path and a claymore levels the whole patrol. I’ll tell you,” Plunkett said, “this whole damn place can turn into one big surprise. I don’t know. Maybe wars were always like this, but I don’t think so.”
David glanced back over his shoulder. The corpsmen were still picking through the wreckage.
David had taken to walking around the base after dinner, a sort of constitutional where, in the coolness of the evening, he would survey, with a proprietary air that seemed to grow daily, what had become his world. It was a time of relaxation. The day’s work was done, and for the first time in years, with no articles to write or charts to review, there was nothing left to do. David usually walked first to the gate, where he’d watch the sun retreat behind the western horizon. The night of the accident, he left the mess hall and went directly to the helipad.
The sun was almost gone. The mountains, impossible to see in the bright daylight, grew close, a tiny cardboard silhouette rising off the plateau.
David sat down. The ground was like a warm blanket. He pulled his knees up and folded his arms around them. Thorpe had ordered the wreckage picked up and carried to one of the supply buildings. In the fading light, David could no longer pick out the spot where the chopper had hit the ground or where it had finally come to rest. By evening, all that remained of the crash was some scorched earth and a few furrows gouged out of the ground. Soon no one would be able to tell that anything had happened. Tom was right; one or two rainy seasons and there would be no trace of the 40th either. Yet it was not the crash that had drawn David back to the helipad, or the loss of life. He knew about death, or thought he did. He’d been dealing with it since medical school. What troubled him, what had forced him out to the pad, was not the deaths but the dying.
Another twenty seconds and they’d have made it. A quarter-mile at most; no more. It didn’t seem right, to have come so close and not make it. David wondered what those on board must have thought, seeing the 40th right there in front of them, knowing they’d never get there. There had to have been a moment when at least the pilot must have known. And David had watched it all happen. He was not used to that. He had always been able to help before. Dying was something that you struggled against, that you didn’t let happen. There had always been so much to do: cutdowns, blood transfusions, central venous catheters, plasma, antibiotics, respirators, cardiac massage. But there had been no way to do anything today except watch. It occurred to him that he had never seen an accident before, not one as it happened; but what astonished him even more was the realization that for all the people standing there and waiting, those men in the chopper were as alone as if they had been on the moon.
Nights in Nam come quickly. Within minutes, the sun and the mountains had all vanished, and as the sky faded to a steel gray, David found himself enveloped in the gathering darkness. He was about to get up when he heard someone coming up behind him. Whoever it was was either clumsy or was making sure he’d be heard.
“This was the last place I figu
red I’d find anyone.” It was Tyler.
“It’s cooler away from the buildings.”
“It’s never cool; only less hot. Sergeant Bradford says you take a walk every night. Making it a tradition?”
“For the last month anyway.”
Tyler, grunting, sat down next to him. All David could see was the faint round glow of his glasses. “Anything you do over here for more than a week becomes a tradition. Does get dark out here, doesn’t it?” he said dryly.
“It got dark in Saigon, too, didn’t it?”
“The lights get in the way there. There’s a lot of neon. Look,” Tyler said softly, “I came out here to let you know that this wasn’t a good day for anyone.”
“I’m all right,” David said.
“Yeah, but you didn’t look so good this afternoon or at dinner.”
“It’ll pass.”
“It doesn’t pass,” Tyler corrected. “People just get quieter. You still getting along with Griffen?”
“Huh?”
“Things still okay with him?” Tyler asked.
“Getting better.”
All that separated the helipad from the rest of the plateau was the wispy luminescence of the razor wire.
“You listening to him?”
“He doesn’t talk all that much.”
“You should ask, then. He ever tell you why they put the 40th out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“No.” David heard Tyler shift to make himself more comfortable.
“And Cramer hasn’t either … right?”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“They put it here because this plateau is one of the main infiltration routes from the north into the south. We’re sitting at the end of the line that runs from Hanoi to Saigon and points south and east. Last stop on the train. It’s not only the main infiltration route, it’s the classic one. A hundred different armies have walked across this plateau. The Mongols and Chinese used it for centuries, and everyone else since. In the fifties, when the Vietminh were fighting the French, the trail was enlarged, and the North Vietnamese have been improving it every year. It’s called the Ho Chi Minh Trail after that illustrious leader of the north, but it’s not a single trail; it’s hundreds of miles—maybe thousands—of intertwining paths and roads and mountain passes that crisscross Laos and Cambodia.”
Tyler spoke with an easy confidence that David had never noticed before. In the dark, a stranger would have thought he was a bigger man. “There are lots of exits. The one that comes out here directly ahead of us is the furthest south.” Tyler hesitated. “It was the reason Morril didn’t think we should be doing med caps out there. Whatever else he was,” Tyler said, “our Captain Morril was no fool. He knew what he was doing out here. He was down in the Delta, out in the boonies for a while. By the time they transferred him up here he was a real savvy guy. It didn’t take him two weeks to figure out the VC wouldn’t let us have this plateau and the hills around it to ourselves for very long.”
David didn’t know what to make of Tyler’s comments, particularly about the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the flats being an infiltration route. Maybe Tom and Cramer had figured he already knew, or that someone else had told him. But if Tyler was right … “Morril did the med caps, though, didn’t he?” David asked.
“He had to; he lost the draw.”
“You mean you all drew for it?” David was amazed.
“America’s a democracy,” Tyler said. “Besides,” he went on, “Colonel Cramer knew he couldn’t order anyone to do it, not after the fighting that had been going on around here before the plateau was declared a secure zone.”
“Couldn’t order anyone, or couldn’t order Morril?”
“Well done,” Tyler said. “Our colonel likes things to be orderly. A surgeon who jumps out of airplanes and can live on candy bars and chunks of hardtack wasn’t exactly his cup of tea.”
In the few minutes they had been talking, the moon had risen, flooding the plateau with a soft, silvered light. It was as if they were sitting at the edge of a great, motionless ocean.
“And Morril lost?”
“He lost,” Tyler answered matter-of-factly.
David waited a few seconds. “Did he carry a weapon?”
Tyler laughed. “Captain Morril carry a weapon! He went out like Attila the Hun. The world’s most heavily armed battalion surgeon. But to tell you the truth,” Tyler added, a note of respect in his voice, “he wasn’t afraid. He honestly believed in our being here. Morril might be willing to trust nature, but only because he took her on her own terms. People, though, had to be shown the foolishness of their ways, kept in place or they’d go on to ruin everything, that kind of thing.”
David, lost in his own thoughts, was barely listening. “And no one cared that Morril went out armed?” he asked finally.
“David”—Tyler sounded almost apologetic—“there’s no one checking on anyone out here. No one’s watching. All anyone cares about is that you visit the number of villages that someone at MACV assigned to II Corps, that II Corps assigned to whoever runs this zone, who assigned it to Thorpe, who assigned it to Cramer, who assigned it to whoever is supposed to go out to the villages. Believe me, David, if this war is anything, it’s a war of numbers. That’s all people care about. Numbers of VC wounded, numbers of NVA killed, tons of bombs dropped, total of fighter bomber runs per day, kilos of rice captured, villages pacified, pills handed out. If you put down that you visited twelve villages instead of four, everyone would be three times as happy.” Tyler hesitated. “No matter what Cramer says about Saigon, I learned a lot there. You’d be surprised,” Tyler said, “what generals and colonels say when they’re standing there naked bent over in front of you with a roaring case of pruritis ani, or jock itch.”
Despite himself, David smiled. The thought of Tyler perched on a stool telling some naked general to bend over was something he’d like to see.
“There’s no consensus on this war, David. As far as I can tell,” Tyler said, “no one in the military knows what they’re doing. Everyone from the top down is confused about what the objectives are; and if you don’t have firm objectives, there’s no way of knowing how well we’re doing or even where we’re going. So it’s all numbers. At least you can talk about them whether you know what they mean or not. As far as I can see, the politicians are as much to blame as the generals. Elected officials,” Tyler said, stressing the word elected, “don’t like to decide on objectives; it’s too easy to end up wrong. So they’ve turned the war over to their systems analysts and political scientists.”
“Systems analysts?” David asked.
“Yeah, they’re all over Saigon, hundreds of them. The new elite talking about cost analysis, counterinsurgency, interdiction methods, computer analysis, the light at the end of the tunnel, electronic borders. The politicians love to listen to them because no one knows what it all means; and the military has caved in to all the jargon because they don’t have anything that sounds as good, or what they have is too hard-nosed to be acceptable. It’s the political technicians who are running the show. A two-star told me that the head of the joint chiefs of staff doesn’t even meet with the President on a regular basis. A full-bird colonel complained that in the six months he was at the Pentagon in planning and development, none of the generals in his department visited the White House or was asked to come over. All they ever got were memos from the Department of Defense that they were to increase the bombing ten percent, organize another air mobile division, or get ready to supply and equip another hundred thousand regular ground troops. It’s all means and no ends. This colonel told me that all the Defense Department ever talks about is punishing the North Vietnamese. All those analyst guys think we have to do is hurt them a little and they’ll cave in.”
Tyler paused as if to give David a chance to absorb what he’d said. “Vietnam is nothing but a kind of actuarial game to these guys, and there’s a whole group of new career officers who are learning the jargon and going along with
them, telling them and the bosses—the President and Congress—what they want to hear. All an army can do—any army—is defeat an enemy army in the field, blockade a coast, and cut lines of communication and supply, and that’s it. The First Air Cav can’t build a country, but no one wants to hear that. Believe me. There aren’t any leaders anymore,” Tyler said, “only managers. Hell, the strategic headquarters for this war isn’t even here in Vietnam. It’s five thousand miles away in Honolulu. Take my word for it; there are still some field grade officers convinced we should be in enclaves along the coast. They want the ARVNs to do the fighting and the pacification and restrict U.S. involvement to taking on the NVA and keeping reinforcements from getting through into the south. There are a few general officers, too, who don’t think that Vietnam counts or ever counted for anything. It’s just something between the last great war with the Germans and the next big one with the Russians; a great chance, though,” Tyler added with his old sarcasm, “to give officers combat experience for the real war that’s coming. The truth, David—the Army didn’t want this one. The Air Force was already saving the country with its hydrogen bombs and the Navy with its atomic subs, so when the political experts offered them this opportunity to show that wars of liberation could not succeed, they couldn’t afford to say no. If they had, those bright young analysts would have chewed ’em up and spit out the pieces. The Army said yes without knowing what they were getting into. Before I left Saigon, there was information of a rather substantial increase of infiltration of North Vietnamese troops. A few of the generals in Hawaii are convinced it’s only to keep units in the south up to strength, but those at MACV thought that the communists were gearing up for a large-scale conventional offensive.” As Tyler continued to talk, David found himself listening. “Since we were finally going to get our chance to kill them all, they wanted the first team to be in the game. So two months ago the ARVN units were pulled out of the front lines and sent back into secure areas, and U.S. units were given the job of going after the communists. I don’t agree,” Tyler said, speaking with a confidence David hadn’t heard before. “The ARVNs have been getting after the VC real good; so the communists, to keep things going, are sending down more regular units, but it’s only because they have to. They don’t want to take us on, or the ARVNs. I think they’re just changing strategies, that’s all. All they want to do is keep the pressure on, and the VC aren’t doing it anymore.
Another War, Another Peace Page 5
