Another War, Another Peace

by Ronald J. Glasser

  Through the haze, David could see the shadowy outlines of choppers settling onto the ground while troopers, like apparitions, jumped from the open doorways and, hunched over, scurried out from under the rotor blades. Those at the edge of the pad, emerging from the dust, began to gather in small groups. Even as other choppers moved in over them, some started assembling their gear.

  Within minutes all the choppers were on the pad, and when the last engine shut down, the dust quickly settled. As the sun broke through, drenching the pad in light, David was amazed to see eight neat rows of aircraft.

  The order that had materialized so suddenly out of what had seemed only moments before to be utter chaos was stunning. David looked with equal astonishment at the apron, deserted a moment before, that now held at least two hundred fully armed soldiers.

  The last troopers off each chopper had carried boxes of ammunition that they stacked alongside the landing area. A few of their comrades joined them, opening boxes and pulling out grenades and clips of ammunition that they tossed to the others.

  They were all young. None of the troopers or even the chopper pilots looked older than eighteen or nineteen. Most, too, appeared gaunt. David had never seen a group of American kids who looked so lean. They had none of the robustness that you could see in the kids hanging out around any high school or drive-in movie. Many must have been twenty to thirty pounds underweight, but it didn’t seem to affect them. Indeed, they reminded David more of a group of grim stevedores than adolescents, men whose lifetime of hard work had led to a kind of fitness that had nothing to do with health. Over a third of the troopers were black. The mahogany sheen to their skins reminded David of pictures he had seen of warriors on the African plains.

  There was little conversation among the troops, and less joking. Some wore bracelets, but they were not very garish; only a few, unlike the pictures on television, wore beads. There were no slogans painted on flak jackets or helmets, and none wore a beard or had shaved his head. As David watched, some of the troopers moved to the shade of the nearby buildings, where they sat on the ground organizing their gear, cleaning their weapons, unconcerned about blocking paths or doorways. The majority, though, ignoring the heat, stayed out on the apron.

  There was not the slightest sense of urgency to what they did, but neither was there any wasted energy. The troops stayed in small groups, as if even inside the 40th they were wary of making too tempting a target.

  On the ground, a few feet from David, three troopers sitting cross-legged pumped round after round into the chambers of their sawed-off shotguns. The shotguns were wicked-looking weapons that he thought had been banned at the Geneva Convention. While he watched the troopers, the sweet smell of marijuana drifted across the helipad. Everyone had to have smelled it, but no one, neither the officers nor the NCOs who had come off the choppers nor those out at the landing area from the 40th, paid any attention.

  While David watched, grenades were clipped onto web gear, ammunition was stuffed into pockets or taped to stocks of weapons, M-16s were stripped and cleaned, and all with a casualness that rendered it particularly sinister. Directly across the pad, a freckle-faced kid pulled an M-14 out of a leather case and carefully attached a telescopic sight to the rifle. A trooper next to him reached into the kid’s pack and pulled out a gleaming copper-jacketed bullet. Squinting, he turned it slowly in the sun and then handed it to the redhead, who chambered the round. The trooper checked five other rounds the same way. On his face was the matter-of-fact look of the journeyman.

  No one paid any attention to David; even the troopers near him acted as if he weren’t there. Except for the few officers, the assault company ignored everyone from the 40th. The troopers might look up when someone from the 40th walked past, but then they would go right back to whatever they were doing.

  As the troopers finished organizing their gear, they relaxed. Some lit cigarettes or joints while others rested against their packs, helmets over their faces to shield themselves from the sun. Most sat where they were and smoked or talked among themselves.

  It could have been a pastoral scene, almost summery, with heat, the soft murmur of conversation, the scattered groups of young men resting; but it wasn’t. There was nothing tranquil here. It was more than the gunships and the weapons. The sun was shining and it was a languid day, but no one was at ease. It was calm, but it was a frightening calm. There was no swagger here, no arrogance, but there was a terrible tension in the air as if some kind of deadly machinery was in place there in front of him, wired and ready to go, so that all that was needed to bring it roaring to life was the turn of a key. David had never seen anything like this. He had to remind himself that these were American kids, not professional soldiers or mercenaries, but he wasn’t sure he succeeded.

  Turning to go back up the walk to the dispensary, he saw Tom standing at the corner of the communications building, quietly watching the troops. He didn’t see David until he was walking up the path to the building. They both stood and looked at the troopers.

  “Not a very talkative lot,” David said.

  “Well,” Tom answered, “they ain’t got no friends here. Besides,” he added in a more sympathetic tone, “they’ve been out a long time. You get to look like that after a couple of weeks.”

  “I thought combat units go out for a few days and then get choppered back for a few days’ rest.”

  “Nah, not these guys,” Tom answered briskly. “You know,” he went on thoughtfully, “I think I recognize some of them. We had a couple of combined maneuvers with the 25th.”

  “Why so surprised?”

  “Surprised?” Tom answered softly. “Yeah, guess I am. Those maneuvers were over five months ago.” He hesitated. “I’d have thought they’d all be dead by now. Well, I got some things to do … See you in the morning.”

  David watched him walk off. As he turned for one last look, David realized that the troopers reminded him of Tom on their first day out.

  The assault company left an hour later. David stepped out of the dispensary as the first choppers passed overhead. A few moments later, he heard the rattling of machine-gun fire as the door gunners, out beyond the perimeter of the base, cleared their weapons.

  No one mentioned the 25th; over two hundred armed soldiers had come and gone without anyone saying a word.

  After lunch, David stopped Thorpe and asked him if he knew where the troops were going.

  “There’s been enemy movements in the central highlands. Probably NVA; a company, maybe a regiment, no bigger. The troops here this morning were part of a combined operation to sweep the area … routine stuff.”

  David decided not to ask Thorpe about the gunship that had crashed the day before.

  Chapter 13

  DAVID DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING about the assault group until he and Tom were well away from the 40th. He’d expected Tom to bring it up, but Tom, like Thorpe and the others, acted as if the choppers had never been there.

  “You mentioned something about those troopers having been out for weeks,” David said.

  “Yeah, maybe even a couple of months.”

  “But there are half a million soldiers over here, right?”

  “Something like that,” Tom answered.

  “That’s a lot of soldiers.”

  “Oh,” Tom said, seeing what David was getting at. “Well, most of them half-million are in support or supply. Clerk-typists, supply sergeants, telephone operators, computer programmers. Hell, look at the 40th. A hundred and twenty guys and no one’s fightin’. Then again, maybe it’s best they don’t.”

  “So what you’re saying …”

  “Only a couple divisions do any real fightin’; the 1st Air Cav, the 9th, parts of the 25th and Americal, the Hundred and First—that’s about it, and they’re all understrengthed … maybe forty, fifty thousand troops and that’s about it. If you let those units rest, there ain’t all that much left to do the fighting.”

  “You mean fifty thousand out of half a million do the
fighting for all of Nam?”

  “Yeah, ain’t the half-million you thought, is it?”

  “Are they enough?”

  “Yeah, if all they got to do is kill gooks, but I don’t think they’re gonna be able to kill enough of ’em. There always seems to be more.”

  While they’d been talking, the road had taken them into a series of parallel valleys. They were moving up a shallow grade when Tom suddenly took his foot off the gas and let the jeep roll for a few yards until it came to a stop itself.

  “Jesus,” David mumbled. There was no road anymore. There was no anything. The valleys in front of them had been sheared clean of vegetation. There was not a tree or bush left standing. For as far as they could see there was nothing but craters, thousands of great, circular holes. Where one crater ended, the next began, and it went on for miles.

  Tom, folding his arms across the top of the steering wheel, rested his chin on his forearms. “You can feel the ground shake ten, fifteen kilometers away when the bombs hit. MACV calls it rollin’ thunder. It’s scary to walk and have the ground rumblin’ under your feet and not hear a thing. It ain’t the detonations that do the real killin’. They make the holes. It’s the concussion that flattens everything.”

  “Anything ever grow back?”

  “Fish. In the monsoons those craters fill with water. Some of those are thirty, forty feet deep. They must have been movin’ a lot of supplies down through here. Looks like the B-52s hit these valleys two, maybe three times.”

  David was awed by the dimension of the destruction. The very structure of the earth itself had been altered; yet for all the devastation, the craters followed the contours of the valleys, giving the destruction a kind of logic. While the valleys had been destroyed, virtually nothing outside their rims had been touched. The ridge lines and upper slopes had all been spared. The geometric precision of the devastation was as ominous as the destruction itself.

  “All this was since the last rain then,” David said.

  “Yeah, sometime in the last four months.” Tom put the jeep back into gear. “Don’t worry. They don’t have the B-52s we do.”

  They had to take the jeep back to the main road to detour around the valleys. By noon they were less than a quarter of the way to their first village, and David told Tom to stop.

  “We’re not going to get there much before three.” He handed Tom the map. “There’s another village that should be on the other side of that ridge line. We’d probably do just as well to go there. We have the kind of practice that can go virtually anywhere.”

  “Would seem that way,” Tom said.

  They turned off at the next dirt road. Neither said a word for over fifteen minutes, though David noticed Tom glancing over at him several times.

  “Tell me,” Tom said, “you drafted?” The question was so unexpected and so obviously genuine that David had to laugh.

  “No,” David answered. “I had something better—a deferment plan. A real triple treat. Keep you out of Nam, fulfill your military obligation, and practice internal medicine in one of the first-class military hospitals.” Tom waited. “Then they changed the rules. It was Nam or an extra year in the Army.”

  “And you took Nam?” Tom, surprised, tried to make it a statement but didn’t quite succeed.

  “Well, an extra year was a little too much time to give up,” David answered, feeling obliged to say something.

  “Hell,” Tom said thoughtfully, “a year over here can be a long time, too.”

  It took another hour to reach the village. After they’d set up and the least reluctant of the villagers had been examined and given their pills, David noticed a woman at the back of the line holding a child, four or five years old, who was too heavy for her, forcing her to shift the child from arm to arm. But she didn’t move forward. She continually let others in front of her so that after half an hour she hadn’t gotten one step closer to the jeep.

  Finally, with the line thinning, she started to move forward, and David saw that one of the child’s legs was almost twice the size of the other. At first he’d thought it was a congenital defect of some sort or a tumor, but as the woman moved closer, he saw the whole leg was swollen and covered with some kind of salve.

  As the woman stepped up to the jeep, David motioned her forward. Instead of coming any closer, she held out her hand.

  “No, no, please,” David said in Vietnamese, motioning her on toward the hood of the jeep. The woman didn’t move. David pointed to the child and motioned again.

  “Doc.” Tom was half a dozen feet away, examining a man’s hand. “All she wants is the pills.”

  “The leg’s infected. Look at it. It’s one big abscess.”

  Tom motioned the man whose hand he was examining to move on. “She knows,” Tom said. “All she wants is the antibiotics. There’s some staphcillin up near the windshield.”

  “Come here,” David said to the woman. The villagers walking away from the jeep stopped.

  Tom straightened. “She won’t show him to you,” he said. “Besides, them pills’ll help.”

  “That’s an abscess. It’s got to be drained. The toes are already gangrenous. There’s so much pressure built up in that leg that the blood supply to the feet has been cut off. There’s not enough blood flow to get any antibiotics into that leg.” David started to walk toward the woman. She took a step backward.

  “They got their own ways,” Tom said.

  “Their own ways, huh. You mean that salve. It’s not doing anything for the infection or the blood supply. If the pressure isn’t relieved, he’s not only going to lose his toes, he’s going to lose the whole leg. We’ve got to take him back.”

  The woman, not moving, continued to stare at David with unblinking hostility.

  “We can’t,” Tom said.

  “What do you mean we can’t?”

  “They won’t treat Vietnamese nationals in Army medical facilities. Major Thorpe wouldn’t let her in. It’s the way it is, and besides, she won’t go.”

  “What do you mean she won’t go? She knows her child’s in trouble or else she wouldn’t be here.”

  “Believe me, all she came for was the pills.”

  David moved around the front of the jeep. The woman took another step backward.

  “She’s burned,” Tom said and nodded toward the woman’s legs. “Four months ago, maybe longer.”

  David stopped and looked at her legs for the first time.

  “Luckier than most,” Tom said, walking up to the jeep. “Napalm usually binds ’em up so bad they can’t move.” He picked up two of the bottles. The woman’s eyes moved from Tom to David and then back to Tom. Suspicious, she took a half-step back toward the jeep.

  “Don’t give her those pills,” David said. She stopped again, her eyes on David.

  Tom picked up two more bottles. “She won’t let us take the kid. If anyone around here don’t like us, she don’t,” he said under his breath while he smiled at the woman. She took another step toward the jeep.

  David, confused, didn’t want to stay where he was, but he knew that if he moved she’d leave.

  The woman stepped cautiously up to the side of the jeep. Shifting the child to her other arm, she reached across the hood.

  “Those pills aren’t going …”

  But as David spoke, Tom took a short step back. It was barely noticeable, but the small movement forced the woman to reach out a little further, putting her off balance. As she hung there, Tom dropped the bottles he was holding onto the hood and grabbed her wrist. There was a flash, and the next instant a geyser of blood and pus spurted into the air. The smell of a rotten orchard engulfed them.

  As quickly as Tom had plunged in the knife, he pulled it out. The child, his eyes wide, made no sound as more pus and blood ran from the wound. It had happened so quickly that neither David nor the woman had had time to move. Tom let go of her wrist, bent down, picked up the two bottles he had dropped, and handed them to her with two more. The Vietnamese who h
ad stopped to watch continued on back to the village.

  The woman, her eyes narrowed, glared for a long moment at Tom and then, pus running down her skirt, tucked the pills into her apron. Cradling the child in both arms, she followed the others. For a moment, David was too stunned to speak. Tom wiped the blood off the blade and put the knife back into his belt.

  “You just might have killed him,” David said once he realized what had happened.

  Tom looked up and gave the retreating woman a quick, indifferent glance.

  “She’s got the antibiotics. Besides, she looks like she knows what she’s doing.”

  “What are you talking about? You’ve turned that leg into an open wound.”

  “The abscess’s draining.”

  “Draining! You don’t drain abscesses by sticking them with a hunting knife.”

  “They ain’t my rules,” Tom answered. “They wouldn’t have let us take her or the kid inside the 40th. They wouldn’t have let you take ’em in if they were dying.”

  David was outraged by what Tom had done. There wasn’t an intern or a medical student who’d have dared do anything close to what Griffen had done. He’d been right about him from the beginning. You can’t teach a high school dropout something as intricate as medicine. David looked back at the village. The mother and child had disappeared into one of the huts. Eight or ten hours wouldn’t make much difference, not unless the knife had nicked an artery or vein.

  “Come on,” David said angrily. “Let’s clean up and get the hell out of here.”

  Tom seemed about to say something but, shrugging, changed his mind.

  Neither spoke as they packed up. David grew angrier and more annoyed by the minute. He had let it get away from him this time, but it wouldn’t happen again.