I paused and looked around through the drumming gray curtain of rain. I stood in mud and heard only the rain, as the distant battle had gone quiet some time ago. Grass-thatched hooches along with only a smattering of little frame, tin or concrete block huts composed most of the settlement. I thought about pulling the troops into a tight defensive perimeter in the center of the village, but quickly dismissed that tactic as suicidal. House to house fighting, if it came to that, could be brutal. We would be surrounded and fighting in the blind without fortifications.
No, the canal offered our best chance of establishing a defense. Dig in with the canal to our backs and fight off anything that attempted to approach us through the village. Of course, the VC had mortars; we had heard them pounding our troops on our left flank and the Nguoi Nhai Frogmen on our right flank. The VC could stand off in the banana groves and hammer us at will into the soil.
What other option did we have?
As I hurried back through the town to my command post at the canal, a splatter of gunfire erupted ahead. I broke into a shambling run. Sgt. Tolliver’s squad spread out on the canal bank was in an uproar. Shouting and cursing, and a few men were letting go rounds into the banana trees. Bubba Lawmaster hunched over his radio in the downpour, still frantically working with it, realizing it was our lifeline and our ticket out of here if he could coax some life back into it.
I slid belly-down in the wet grass next to Tolliver. He had pulled up a thick wooden bench from somewhere to use as a breastwork. I peered around the end of the bench. Rain beat the water of the canal into a boiling frenzy. Thick slants of rain blurred out the banana trees.
“What is it? What is it?” I demanded.
“Eskridge saw ’em movin in the trees,” Sgt. Tolliver said, squinting into the downpour.
“Did you see anything?” The way the rain undulated through the palms and rattled at them, I thought I almost saw legions skulking toward us myself, preparing to attack. Imagination fueled by adrenaline could produce anything.
“No, sir. I ain’t seen shit yet,” Tolliver admitted. “But if Eskridge said—“
“Goddamnit, Tolliver. Control your fucking men or I’ll have your ass. Is that clear?”
“Fuck, sir. If they seen somethin, they seen somethin. Lt. Kaz, they’re out there. We can’t hold ’em off.”
Our voices rose until we were shouting at each other, almost irrationally.
“Get some fire control, Sergeant. Now!”
“We don’t have control, Mother Kaz. The gooks have control.”
“Then we’ll take it away from them. And don’t call me ‘Mother.”’
I rolled over. “Ceasefire!” I yelled. “Stop shooting! Conserve ammo!”
A final shot and then, once again, there was only the sound of the hard rain.
“Sgt. Tolliver, I’m counting on you. Keep your head and keep control.”
I needed a cigarette in the worst way.
“Sergeant, I’m pulling in the perimeter. I’m gonna thin out the ranks and send men back to you a fire team at a time. Establish defensive positions on the other side of the medic hooch and tie the end of one flank at the footbridge and the other—“ I pointed the opposite direction along the canal—“at that pile of rocks down there. Have the men dig in, and dig in deep.”
“Mortars?” Sgt. Tolliver said, the dread in his voice thinning it out like a stretched wire.
“Prepare them for anything. Listen to me, Cecil,” I said, using his given name to reinforce the bond that we were all in this together. “Cecil, we’ll get through this.”
“L. T., maybe we should listen to Mad Dog.”
News traveled fast, especially bad news.
“Lt. Kaz, all we’d have to do is put all them gook cunts and kids in front of us here on the canal bank and—”
“That’s not an option,” I said.
“But—”
“Sgt. Tolliver, I’m sending men back. Do your job.”
I scooted back away from the berm before I got to my feet, just in case there were enemy over there. I wasn’t about to pull some dumb Sgt. Holtzauer trick.
“Mother Kaz!”Tolliver called out in a voice almost mournful. “Your job is to keep us alive.”
I stopped at the aid station to check on Sgt. Holtzauer. Skinny Doc Steinmeyer knelt over him changing IV bags. Bugs’ body lay covered with a poncho in the shadows at the back of the hooch. To my unspoken inquiry about the platoon sergeant’s condition, the Doc shook his head.
“He’s holding on,” he said.
I contemplated having a quick cigarette in the dry, but more rifle fire interrupted the thought. I ducked through the door back into the rain and jogged for the south perimeter, from which direction the shots had come. The men were jumpy, tense, shooting at the undulating movement of the rain.
It was already starting, the conspiracy. Right underneath me. The men were about to mutiny. I thought I had control, but I had lost control to the irrational notion spreading through the ranks that the captured villagers represented our only key to survival. As I approached the pigpen, I was startled to find that the perimeter had already been thinned out. Mad Dog, Daniels, the guards and a dozen other boonirats were jumping on the prisoners like a pack of hungry dogs, driving the villagers out of the pigpen. Jabbing and punching them with rifles, kicking and cursing, running them through the driving rain so that they were slipping and falling in the mud. Little children wailing in the arms of their mothers, black hair streaming with the rain over their foreheads. Villagers scrambling toward the canal pursued by crazed GIs, like animals being run off a cliff. A mad house, an insane asylum let loose. Out of control... Out of control...
Stocky Sgt. Wallace stood to one side, neither participating in the melee nor doing anything to stop it. Always so reliable, and now he was doing nothing.
I ran toward the stampede, waving my arms and brandishing my rifle.
“Goddamnit! What do you think you’re doing? Halt! That’s an order, goddamnit!”
Somehow the sight of another mad GI leaping out of the rain like that screaming the top of his head off turned the leaders. The mob milled and became a roiling screeching mass of confused humanity. I spotted Pineapple viciously kicking a fallen old man. I grabbed the big Hawaiian and flung him away.
“Take them back to the pen!” I roared. “Put ’em back, is that clear? That’s a direct order. Sgt. Wallace, get these people back in that pen. Now.”
Wallace lowered his head—his helmet covered his face. He stood unmoving in the rain.
Mad Dog approached me from one side, Daniels and Morris from the other. The black machine gunner carried his M60 in the crook of one arm, casually but at the same time oddly threatening.
“Tell him, Daniels,” Morris shouted, spluttering in the downpour. “Daniels sees things, he feels things.”
“That’s right, Lieutenant,” Daniels said, closing one eye the way he did so that the other seemed to bug out even more. “This is the only way.”
“You’re fucking crazy!” I bellowed into his face.
The villagers froze into a kind of animated tableau, somehow sensing that their fate was in the process of being decided. Boonirats formed a steel ring around them. I sensed their GI hostility, their blind fear mixed with hope grasping at a straw.
“We’re not goin to be next, Lt. Kaz,” Mad Dog shouted. “Don’t you see that we’ve got a chance this way? Fu-uck. They ain’t about to come in after us if we got their women and kids in front of us.”
“We’re not doing it this way,” I protested. I felt the veins in my forehead bulging,
Sgt. Wallace stepped up. He refused to meet my eyes. “I tried to talk ’em out of it, sir. But look what happened when Rich and the other guys got it on Widow Maker. The villagers set ’em up for the ambush. Sir, these ain’t nothin but Viet Cong. We’re cut off. There ain’t no help comin. We have to take care of ourselves.”
My eyes traveled around the faces of the Dog and Daniels and Pineapple a
nd the others. Their expressions were icy, set. They looked Hardcore Recondo. They were not going to back down.
“You’re either with us, Lieutenant—or you’a agin us,” Daniels said, eye narrowing.
I backed away sharply and raised my rifle to cover him and the others.
“I’ll shoot the first man who—”
I got no further. Pineapple had managed to ease around behind me. The big man hit me hard and low in the back with all his two hundred pounds. I crumpled underneath him in the mud. Daniels rushed in and snatched the rifle out of my hands. Pineapple and Dog lifted me onto my feet. It was useless to keep struggling.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” Sgt. Wallace said. “They’re not going to be hurt. The VC won’t take chances. Don’t worry. It’ll work out.”
He nodded at Daniels. The roundup resumed. Wailing and screaming, the villagers were herded en masse to the footbridge where they were forced into a large huddle on the canal bank, within clear view of any VC hiding in the banana palms beyond. I followed along helplessly, covered by Sgt. Wallace’s M16.
Daniels paced back and forth on the high canal berm, deliberately exposing himself, marching a few yard one way, then turning and marching back, his head swiveling so that his voodoo eye always blazed at the enemy.
“Listen to me out there, you cocksuckers,” he bellowed. “An’ you better understand this nigger’s English. See this bunch’a shithead dinks? You are lookin at all you is gonna see’a they yellow ass if you don’t pull back an’—”
In war, neither side can claim monopoly on sound judgment or on folly. Maybe what happened next wouldn’t have happened at all if a VC sniper hiding in the bananas hadn’t also been a fucking bonehead who had to push the issue. One shot was all it took. It popped in the rain. When the bullet struck Daniels in the chest, it hit with the impact of whacking a side of butcher beef with a dull ax. The bullet splintered through his ribs, took out his heart and blew it in a red exploding mass out the fist-sized hole that appeared in the middle of his spine. A look of surprise froze on his face and stayed there because he was dead before his body plunged into the soaked grass.
That provided the spark. It detonated the powder keg that my men had become. They went berserk. They went on a rampage fueled by fear and rage and frustration, unrestrained by the moral vacuum that was Vietnam.
Mad Dog started it. Shrieking unintelligibly and indeed mad now in every sense at witnessing the death of his buddy, he snatched up Daniels’ machine gun, trained it on the cowering defenseless villagers, and lit them up. Flesh, blood, bone, hair and screams filled the rain-laden air, making it taste thick and somehow cannibalistic. Bullets scythed and plunged and ripped and tore and exploded human flesh.
It was blood lust, and blood lust is contagious within a pack, be they dogs, wolves, sharks or humans. Boonirats abandoned their posts and came running from everywhere in the village to get in on the action, taunting and challenging each other to join in. Shouting themselves hoarse, sounding more like predatory animals than civilized men, leaning forward into the recoil of their weapons, teeth bared, eyes narrowed through the swirl of gunsmoke and the pounding mist of the downpour, blood splashing onto their faces, turning pink and then being cleansed again by the rain as though it had never touched them.
Not all joined in, of course. But none of us did anything to stop them. God help me, I stood in the rain, frozen by inertia, and I watched. It was my body there, my eyes, my ears, my brain, but it couldn’t have been me. For those of us who participated that day by not participating, as well as for those who did the shooting, shame and horror over what we had all done, what we all contributed to, would dog us for the rest of our lives. Pete, God would never forgive me either.
None of us could possibly forget, not entirely, the grisly images the massacre seared into our consciences.
Women sprayed with furious fire... bones flying away from them chip by chip... torn bodies jumping spastically like damaged puppets as bullets slashed into their torsos...
A baby clutched in a mother’s arms... opened up like a melon, blown out of her arms, one of her arms blown away with it...
Naked toddler crying and crying, running in circles in the rain, bodies dropping all around him... Someone shot him too, blew him almost half in two...
Two-year-old little boy crawling out of the carnage, bawling like a lost calf... Pineapple pushing him back with his foot and shooting him in the face...
Morris ramming the muzzle of his Ml6 up a young girl’s vagina, as she lay already wounded and squeezing the trigger...
Old man tossed alive into a dug well... live grenade tossed in on top of him...
Villager trying to escape, fleeing along the canal bank screaming in terror and flapping her arms like she was attempting to fly... Boonirats laughing, cutting her down...
Blood mixed with the rain and oozed into the canal. The canal turned pink for a hundred yards downstream...
Doc Steinmeyer, who was very religious, remained out of sight in his aid station, praying. Sgt. Holtzauer crawled out the door, jarred partly from his drug-induced coma by the commotion. He squinted with rainwater streaming off his hair and down his face, still too sedated to realize what was happening. On hands and knees, he squinted, confused and disoriented.
I stood immobile, equally confused and disoriented, and I did nothing to stop it. I took the stain of the blood on my own soul. Their commander, I, was responsible for them and for their actions. The rain roared in my ears and drummed on my helmet, and the world turned red with blood...
God help me...
Not even the VC sniper in the palms attempted to stop it. If he did, the sound of his rifle shots were masked by the furor on the canal bank. Daniels was his only casualty.
Nor did the VC attack Vam Tho. Perhaps they never intended to. By the time they learned of the canal massacre, it was too late to retaliate. The sky lifted and choppers returned for us. No one asked at the time what happened there; no one wanted to know. It happened; that was enough. Third Platoon had taken two KIA and Sgt. Holtzauer was WIA. Vam Tho went down in 9th Division history as one of three battles fought that day in the vicinity. It went down as the only victory.
The massacre itself was officially covered up, as many other such deeds in the war were. Only Lt. William Calley, who lost control of his troops at My Lai, would ever serve prison time for the crime of butchering civilians. But there were other Vam Thos, other My Lais. It didn’t make it right, that there were others. It was just that they happened.
God help us all...
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
“You remember,” Commander Minh said with satisfaction, watching emotion at war in my features. “It is good that you will die remembering.”
I felt limp, exhausted, old and resigned to inevitable death. Maybe it was fitting that I not only die in Vam Tho where I had caused such misery but that I also die within sight of where my victims had fallen.
Minh slowly raised his pistol. I looked deep into the black abyss of eternity.
Scattered raindrops began falling as they had threatened since noon, huge and plopping in the dust and so cool they almost seemed to sizzle when they struck my skin. I wondered, incongruously, if it ever rained in hell. Surely it must rain in my hell, as it had rained that day when the canal turned pink.
The clouds suddenly opened behind Minh. A sheet of rain commenced in the banana trees and charged toward us in a liquid front, thundering and drumming in the palms, like a stampede of water buffalo or the charge of light infantry. Minh’s eyes shifted, distracted for a brief instant.
Van took his chance. He turned and bolted toward the footbridge.
Minh’s gun hand veered reflexively toward him.
I wasn’t as resigned to dying as I thought. Long-dormant survival instinct kicked in. Using what strength remained in my bare bony legs, I drove the upper portion of my body hard into the former Viet Cong commander. I caught him in the chest with my full weight and sent him sprawling b
ackward with me to the ground just as blurring sheets of water washed over us like being sprayed with a fire hose.
Minh scrambled one direction, clawing in instantaneous mud for the pistol he dropped. I lumbered to my feet and dashed across the parking lot for the nearest cover and concealment, the banana grove. Running desperately, I collided with a parked Vespa, knocking it off its stand but managing to stay on my feet. I spun away and reached the banana grove before Minh’s first barking gunshot snapped through fronds uncomfortably near my head.
Ducking the bullet, an instinctive but utterly wasted gesture, I felt mud snatch my feet away. I rolled and scrambled among the squat trees before Minh could get off a second shot. Nearly blinded by the driving rain, beaten and stung by it, I fled for my life on footing as slippery as used grease.
I ran until my old heart pounded like a worn piston about to break through the walls of its cylinder. I gasped for breath, sucking in as much water as air, and choked trying to stifle a cough. I was no longer accustomed to this kind of exercise. A lap or two around the mall in a semi power walk, maybe. But a hundred-yard dash through trees and mud and rain pursued by a crazy old VC trying to kill me...
Within seconds I lost all sense of direction in the roiling liquid that crashed and drummed deafeningly around me. I thought I was still running until I noticed with alarm that I was barely putting one foot in front of the other in a pitiful slow-motion approximation of running. I had to stop to catch my breath, even if I died.
I braced myself against a palm, bent over at the waist to cut the rain out of my face, and sucked air with a rasping, tortured sound that, but for the beating rain, could have been heard in Vam Tho.
After a few moments, I recovered sufficiently to lift my head. I had lost my hat. Water flowed out of thinning hair and over my eyes, so that I peered out as from behind a veil. There was nothing but trees in the gray gloom—except for my deep footprints filled with water. They might as well have been neon signs flashing on and off. This way! Here he is! Here he is!
The Return: A Novel of Vietnam Page 30
