The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  Similar battles were occurring elsewhere that night all over the country and would continue for nearly a month afterwards. It appeared General Giap thought he might win the war with a single major sustained offensive. No retreat. Keep pushing. Keep attacking until final victory.

  Pete doubted Commander Minh was in charge of tonight’s clusterfuck at the hotel, although elements of the 514th were undoubtedly involved. Minh would never have sacrificed his soldiers so foolishly. Corpses were stacking up below the hotel like cordwood. In spite of the matter of Mhai, in spite of, indeed, because of the fall of Junk Base 35, Pete felt a grudging liking and respect for the Vietnamese guerilla commander with the honest hawk-like eyes. At the same time, he realized Mhai might never be free of the warlord until he was dead.

  He fought with renewed savagery, eating up drum-belts of ammo though his Stoner.

  Dawn arrived with a sun as red as the blood that flowed in the streets. A lull in the fighting allowed the contenders to catch their collective breath for the next round. Night shadows gradually melted to expose the full extent of the night’s carnage. Bodies were strewn in the streets like empty bags of old clothing. Clumps of them were piled up at the hotel doors where grenades had got them.

  Pete yawned. He had been without sleep for over twenty-four hours. He lounged in a lawn chair and idly counted dead gooks to keep himself awake. He dozed off and stopped counting at twenty-six.

  In return, the defenders suffered only two casualties. A hunk of flying brick hit one of the Nguoi Nhai on the forehead. He fought on, even though his swollen forehead beetled out over his brow and he could hardly see. The second was Commander Rock, who took a ricochet slug through the meaty part of his thigh. It was a clean through-and-through hole and had struck nothing vital. He bound the wound with a battle dressing and grinned as he displayed it. He could have been Rock Hudson playing Rock Taylor in a war movie.

  “I’ll get a Purple Heart,” he said proudly. “I’m submitting a recommendation that everybody get a Distinguished Service Cross.”

  He paused and looked at Pete. “Sailors don’t often see this kind of action,” he added. “Not unless you’re a SEAL. And everybody knows SEALs are crazy.”

  Enemy troops pulled back into the city away from the hotel to regroup. Pete decided his men needed more food and ammo and organized a foray to run over to the ARVN compound six blocks away to get another truckload. Naturally, Piss Hole insisted on going if Pete went. Dih-Dah also volunteered. Ensign Cochran looked anxious.

  “I’m too old and tough to be shot now,” Pete reassured him.

  The detailed cleared away the stack of furniture barricading the bullet-riddled back door and ripped off the boards that kept the door nailed closed. Pete cautiously looked outside. Nothing. The gooks must be sleeping. Piss Hole dragged inside a dead NVA soldier blocking the doorway, whipped out his knife, sliced off both ears and stuffed them into his pocket. Pete shook his head in mild reproval. Piss Hole shrugged and grinned.

  Pete led the way darting across the street without drawing fire. They had returned the other trucks to the ARVN camp before the battle began and would have to walk. With Pete still on point, the patrol wended its way along side streets and alleys. They avoided one outpost manned by four NVA in khaki and pith helmets before reaching the ARVN gates without being seen, There had been almost no fighting at the walls. A buck sergeant left in charge of the GI platoon said both his platoon leader and his platoon sergeant had been killed in initial skirmishes and that they had suffered heavy casualties before withdrawing into the compound. He was a muscular New Yorker who hung around while Pete and his Frogs loaded a truck.

  “It sounded like you guys had a helluva tussle over there last night,” he commented.

  “Yep,” Pete said.

  “I don’t think Marvin the ARVN here could have held this post if you guys hadn’t kept the bad guys occupied. What’s you got over there—a company of infantry?”

  Pete grinned tightly. “Better than that—three U.S. sailors and eight Vietnamese Frogmen.”

  The SEAL drove the six-by truck with Piss Hole riding shotgun. Dih-Dah crawled under the tarped back with a tripoded M60 machine gun. ARVN sentries swung open the heavy gate for them. Pete floor boarded the truck, kicking up dust. He raced along deserted streets littered with burned cars and wreckage. They took ineffective sniper fire once. Dih-Dah answered with the machine gun.

  Pete thought about stopping off at the Catholic mission to check on Mhai and Bailey but decided that might be pushing Father Pierre’s amnesty protection too far. Instead, he took another side street on an impulse and braked in front of a comparatively large house known to him and a few other unconventional operatives in the AO as a CIA safe house.

  “Let’s see what these cocksuckers are hoarding,” he said to Piss Hole.

  The doors were locked and everything seemed to be in good order. Nobody was in sight. He forced open the front door. Nothing inside seemed to have been disturbed. That probably meant the CIA knew about the TET offensive beforehand and cut a chogie, leaving all the other Americans to fend for themselves. You could never trust anybody from the government, any government.

  The house was well stocked. Booze, sardines, chocolate, bread, canned milk. Even a propane-powered frig full of steaks, crab legs, bologna and other goodies. Pete took out a cold beer and glared balefully at it; his party beer had gone stale during the night. What a way to fight a fucking war. Suddenly grinning, he wrapped his arms and legs around the reefer and exclaimed, “Mine! “

  They cheerfully loaded the frig into the back of the truck and sacked up as much food as they could carry. With beer in hand, Pete ramrodded the six-by back to the hotel, receiving only light enemy fire as they neared the back door. A human chain quickly unloaded the goodies while Commander Rock and a couple of Viets fired cover from the roof. Everyone marveled at the food and beer. Even Ensign Cochran laughed uproariously when the chattering Frogs unloaded the reefer.

  “Don’t stop here with it,” Pete ordered. “You want it to get shot? Take it to my room and set it up. I want cold beer and steaks the rest of the day.”

  Thus resupplied, the defenders settled in comfortable for a siege. In the absence of Pol Pots, the regular cook, Dih-Dah took over. He built a fire in a metal trashcan and grilled steaks. C. C. Cochran wondered aloud what the enemy made of the aroma of cooking meat wafting through the streets to their hidden noses.

  During the hour or so after sunrise, the attackers threw everything they had at the hotel. The defenders, with their resupply of ordnance, threw it right back while sipping ice cold beer and snacking on steak and bologna sandwiches. Piss Hole would gobble down an entire can of sardines, toss the tin over the side, lick his fingers and then rattle a belt of ammo through his M60 before looking around for more sardines.

  “Wonder what the poor people are doing today?” Commander Rock wryly commented.

  Long before noon, the fighting tapered off completely. Dih-Dah picked up a message over his radio that a battalion of U.S. 9th Infantry was on its way to relieve the besieged city. Unable to resist, Pete climbed atop the roof’s brick parapet and cupped his hands around his mouth.

  “Minh? Minh?” he shouted, taunting. Junk Base 35 had been avenged. “If you’re out there, this is Ohmja Nguoi Nhai. Thanks for the fight. Do it again sometime?”

  From here, he could see the mission’s holy spire rising out of a jumble of tin roofs. Unreasonably, he experienced a moment of panic in the thought that Mhai had pulled out of Dong Tam with Minh.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  My Third Herd Platoon was still at PPB Cougar the night TET began and Pete had his fight at the hotel in Dong Tam. The Christmas ambush on Widow Maker Lane had left me another five men short and left the outfit “lower than whale shit,” as Daniels the machine gunner put it. Colonel Hackman and Captain Bruton the Crouton ordered replacements trucked out. FNGS, fucking new guys, so scared they reminded me of grade-schoolers walking through a graveyard
on Halloween night. Naturally, they had already heard all the horror stories about the ambush. Bugs Wortham buddied up with them, since he was still pretty much cherry himself, but the “old timers,” meaning anyone who had been in-country at least three months, derived perverse pleasure in tormenting them with war stories.

  “Fu-uck,” sneered Mad Dog Carter, scowling at the fresh meat as they huddled wide-eyed inside our giant mud crayfish berm. “You little pissants really think you can take the place of real Hard Core boonirats like Donatelli and Sgt. Richardson?”

  Pineapple the Hawaiian was the worst offender. He mesmerized and terrorized them with exaggerated accounts of Mangrum getting his head blown off on the LZ and of Fortes getting his mangled leg caught underneath the overturned Jeep during the Widow Maker Lane bushwhacking, trapping him in the open under heavy enemy fire. Only a finger-thick flap of skin and flesh kept him attached to his leg and therefore trapped. In raw desperation he ripped out his K-Bar knife and cut himself free of it.

  “Like an animal chews off its own foot to get out of a trap,” Mad Dog leered.

  To Daniels the seer, the platoon’s recent ill fortune seemed an omen of even more bad luck ahead. “I can smell it comin,” he predicted. “I feel locusts and drought and plague.”

  Sgt. Holtzauer wanted none of that. “Keep it the fuck to yourself, Daniels.”

  Daniels spat and turned loose his voodoo eye. “I can smell it,” he insisted.

  During the early hours of 30 January, division radio net suddenly placed all field units on full alert, At Cougar, we learned details of the cease-fire offensive from listening to Armed Forces Radio Network on our transistor radios. Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin or the Beatles would be interrupted by an announcer gravely broadcasting how VC were busting out of the woodwork all over South Vietnam.

  “I told you,” Daniels chortled. “I told you!”

  TET seemed to drive Colonel Hackman into a frenzy of action. He was determined not to let the enemy take over his AO. He set 4th Battalion to leapfrogging like crazed toads, hopping and jumping here and there and everywhere, trying to fix the bad guys and fuck ’em over. Drive them to bay and make them fight since it seemed that was what they wanted to do.

  At dawn, Third Platoon received radio orders to abandon Cougar and return to FSB Savage. The Hard Core was being tasked with relieving the town of Dong Tam. Third humped four klicks across swamp and through jungle to reach Highway 4, where APCs, armored personnel carriers, were supposed to meet us. Instead, we had to hoof it six more klicks to reach the FSB. Transportation couldn’t get through to pick us up. Some ratty old Viet bus loaded with pigs, chickens and people hit a road mine that lifted it into the air and blasted people, fowl and animal parts everywhere. The crater left in the road was big enough to dump in an APC and still have room for its troops.

  “Gooks’ll do any goddamned thing to fuck up our day, including getting themselves blowed to hell,” Mad Dog complained.

  Third Platoon reached Savage in time to be airlifted to the outskirts of Dong Tam as part of a mass battalion-sized airmada. The city seemed quiet. Bravo Company with my Third on point worked its way down the narrow streets. They were deserted. Here and there were left smoldering debris and a few burning homes. Haunting silence retreated ahead of us. The enemy had already pulled out in defeat. Bodies deposited in the wreckage around the hotel and on the avenues surrounding were already beginning to putrefy and stink beneath the tropical sun. Charlie had pulled out awfully fast to have left his casualties behind.

  My platoon drew the shit detail of tossing the corpses into the backs of trucks, stacking them in like soiled rolls of carpet, and hauling them out to a mass grave dug by army engineers. The stiffs were covered with lime to hurry up decomposition before they were covered.

  The hotel defenders had already departed. The building was gouged and riddled with bullets and rockets. It seemed Third Herd was always going around cleaning up after the navy from Shit City. We had choppered out to Junk Base 35 after it went down. Now here we were again in Dong Tam. Fucking SEALS. Daniels craned his neck to eye the roof from which, we heard, three American sailors and a handful of Viets had held off a horde of VC and NVA.

  “They must be some bad mo’fuckers,” he decided, awed.

  Still, while the enemy might be venturing out of his holes to do battle elsewhere, he continued his elusive cat-and-mouse tactics as far as Bravo Company and my Third Herd were concerned. Hit us, run, hit us again. We could never seem to pin the sonsofbitches down.

  Bravo Company received a three-day mission into the boonies. A hammer-and-anvil seek and-destroy operation, part of the Colonel’s plan to rid AO Kudzu of bad guys. Second Platoon and my Third Platoon would sweep wide in opposite directions to, theoretically, drive the enemy into a trap laid by First and Fourth. We were issued extra ammo and lightweight, freeze-dried LRRP rations instead of C’s and told we were entering a free fire zone. Villagers had been warned to clear out. Anything that moved out there was subject to being shot.

  “No grabassin and fuckin off,” Sgt. Holtzauer warned. “Keep on your toes or our asses are grass and Charlie’s the lawn mower. If we’re lucky we’ll get in a few licks to pay back the slopes for Mangrum and the others.”

  “I got this feelin...” Daniels offered.

  “Keep it to yourself.”

  Mad Dog cast a look at the cherry-boys and asked, “Who’s it gonna be this time, nigger boy? Which one’a them is gonna get it?”

  Nothing moved out there for us to shoot at. By noon of the second day the troops started to bitch. Even Bugs Wortham and the other FNGs were concluding war was more about tedium and exhaustion, leeches and bugs and snakes, heat and sore feet than it was about honor in combat.

  “This fuckin country is the garbage dump of civilization,” Mad Dog grumbled. “Everything that is nasty and fucked up anywhere else in the world is shipped to Vietnam.”

  “The asshole of the world,” Wallace clarified.

  “The outhouse of Asia,” Buck Sgt. Tolliver added.

  “Shoot me,” Pineapple pleaded. “Put me out of my misery.”

  “Can the horse shit, people,” I scolded. “You want to tell every dink within ten klicks that we’re out here?”

  “You mean they don’t know?” Daniels said with mock surprise around a chew of Red Man.

  “It don’t mean nothin,” Mad Dog said. “Fu-uck.”

  Pineapple on point spotted movement ahead and stopped the column. The signal flowed back. Enemy sighted. Even though our tongues were slapping our ankles, the prospect of action shot fresh adrenaline into weary bodies. I scouted forward to take a gander. Pineapple crouched in deep shadows where jungle opened into a clearing converted to a rice paddy. A grass hooch sat in the woodline on the other side, about a football field’s length away.

  A small man in front of the hooch was scooping rice or something from a large clay bowl into a grain sack. If the U.S. Army moved on beans, the Vietnamese army moved on rice. I glassed him through my binocs. His face leaped out at me. A thin teenager’s face, the expression revealing his thorough absorption in the task at hand. His rifle leaned against the wall of the hut nearby.

  I sent for Mad Dog, the best marksman in the platoon. “Waste the gook,” I ordered.

  Dog looked and nodded. He assumed a prone position, using a downed log as a weapon rest.

  “I been wantin to look one of these motherfuckers in the eyes,” he said.

  The Dog shot him. There was the sharp crack of the shot, followed once more by the normal quiet of the jungle. The gook dropped. Nothing else stirred.

  Flies were already crawling on the dead man’s glazed eyes when we reached him. The platoon stared. The presence of death made men quiet, at least for a time. Mad Dog looked long, but without emotion. It was the first man he had killed. Daniels aimed and splatted tobacco juice on the corpse’s face.

  “Ain’t you got no fuckin respect?” Pineapple said, grinning.

  “Fu-uck.” Mad Dog
walked off.

  My new radioman, Bubba Lawmaster, who had moved up from Second Squad to take Donatelli’s place, coaxed a sitrep, a situation report, into our PRC-25 radio, giving our body count and the fact that we had uncovered an enemy cache of rice.

  “Give the hooch the Zippo,” I said.

  Someone lighted a chunk of C-4 plastic explosives and tossed it blazing onto the grass roof. Flames immediately enveloped the dry structure. The platoon stared, mesmerized. It was the first time we had torched one of the little houses. I felt vaguely criminal and at the same time strangely satisfied. I looked around, feeling guilty.

  An odd, almost scary transformation was taking place on the faces of the Hard Core Recondos staring either into the heat of the fired hooch or at the dead man as he settled back into the earth underneath the tropical sun. Something seemed to change in the platoon after that. It was like Third Herd developed a renewed urge to go on the prowl. The dangerous green caterpillar formed and crawled across the land, seeking someone else to kill, something else to burn. Ready to release blood for God, country and the boys who had gone before.

  We came upon other huts, abandoned now in advance, of our sweep. Tendrils of black smoke rose above the jungle in our wake. I thought of Sherman’s scorched-earth march across Georgia.

  “We need to burn this stinkin country back for three generations,” suggested First Squad leader, Sgt. Shirkey.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “TET was a very unsettling time in Vietnam,” concluded Father Pierre as we finished breakfast. He had told me what he knew—and, still, it was not enough. The priest rose from table laboriously with the aid of his dragon cane and we moved to the garden where the SEAL and his Viet lover had spent so much of their brief romance together. Primed by my return to Asian, my imagination conjured up images of Pete bent over his canvas while lovely Mhai posed by the water fountain or the bougainvillea. I imagined the two of them walking hand-in-hand, sworn enemies who had fallen in unlikely love with each other. I could almost see that haunting smile of hers so familiar to me from the framed picture Pete kept on his wall. Sometimes I felt I had actually known her.