One Very Hot Day

by David Halberstam

  There was little they could teach him about the war, little they could teach him about frustration, or about how men react in combat and how they look when they die. When they did have valid points on things that could be changed, even under Captain Dang, he accepted these in somewhat bad grace, so that he knew (there was after all a playback among the Vietnamese about what the Americans felt) that he was regarded by the Americans as an arrogant little bastard but a good officer, “the prince” in fact had once been his code name. Of all the Americans he was quite sure that Anderson was the best officer he had seen: brave, intelligent, handling himself well with the Vietnamese soldiers, speaking the language better than any American he had ever seen; similarly he was sure that Beaupre was the worst, sloppy, careless, indifferent to the troops, contemptuous of the Vietnamese, and worse, he was sure he sensed Beaupre's fear.

  They stayed in the village for fifteen minutes. While they were there, the American radio came on and said that Beaupre was wanted. The Captain went over to Anderson's radio.

  “How's it there, old buddy,” the CP said.

  “It's quiet here,” Beaupre said, “except for the noise we're making.”

  “Quiet on the eastern front too,” said the CP, laughing at his own joke.

  “Any prisoners there?” Beaupre said.

  “No,” said the CP, “you got any?”

  “Just Anderson and me,” he said.

  “Pretty good,” the CP said.

  “I'll talk to you later. You be careful, hear. The Colonel says the time to worry is when it's quietest.”

  “Thank the Colonel for me,” Beaupre said.

  They got ready to leave the village; soon, Beaupre thought, I can have some water.

  Anderson got up ahead of him, walking up and down the troop file, checking the troops out.

  He heard a cluster of Vietnamese troops giggling, and he looked over in time to hear one say, or he thought he heard one say, the American is looking to see if we have taken any chickens. He heard them giggling. They were right, of course; it was exactly what he did.

  “No,” he said, “I was checking to see if you had taken any of the women with you, or if any of you had stayed behind to protect the village.”

  As they moved out of the village Anderson could feel the difference in their pace; he sensed the letdown, if anything, they were going slower than usual. He decided to prod them and push them a little harder.

  He worked his way to the front of the column: faster, he told the Viets, faster now, the faster we go, the quicker we get to the rice. They laughed and he asked one of them if he would share some rice with a poor American; they laughed again and for a moment he liked the country and the assignment again. When he had first arrived, he had tried hard to talk to the troops; encouraged at first by their easy humor and their easy response to his kidding, he had tried even harder and had asked more serious questions only to see them somehow float away and become uneasy, their eyes gaze off; when they answered, there was a quality of apology as if somehow they felt they were disappointing him by telling how poor and simple their lives really were. Why would anyone want to know these things: they were born, they grew up, they went into the army, they died; they apologized for the telling, and turned away, embarrassed to be taking his time even to repeat what was so obvious, to give foolish answers to foolish questions. He had also sensed that if the conversations were too long, Thuong would be uneasy. So Anderson had continued to get on well with the troops, but it had been a limited affair, built on his promises to swap their rice for his Coca-Cola (sometimes they insisted that he eat their rice, which he did, reluctantly, since it was dotted with black spots which he could never identify and made him constantly uneasy but which he bravely swallowed; he had little confidence in their field hygiene).

  Move on, he was saying now, you people are as slow as American troops, move on, move on. How are we going to march to Hanoi if you walk like that. How am I going to meet any Tonkinese girls if we go this slow. Come on, there won't be any hotel rooms left in Hanoi and the Rangers will beat us there. You don't want the Rangers to get to the women before you do. Move it on.

  They delighted in this and he was relatively sure they were laughing at what he said and not at his language construction: he had checked these phrases out very carefully with the full-time Vietnamese interpreters at the Seminary so that there wouldn't be any grammatical problems.

  “Move it on,” he said, “speed it up, or we'll never get back to My Tho, and you'll have to go three days on that rice. You move it on, now, or I'll never get back to America and never see my wife, and she'll have to marry some general.”

  He had wanted to make some remarks about their own women, suggesting that civilians and garrison soldiers would be in their beds unless they hauled ass, but he was not sure that a Westerner should say something like that to a Vietnamese, perhaps it would be considered racial or insulting, coming from a foreigner, and so it was only his own bed which was threatened; he had tried the other line on the interpreters at the Seminary and they had laughed, and said, oh, yes, that was fine and funny and the troops would like that (the interpreters looked down on the troops and thought they would enjoy any joke which mocked them) but he had decided against it. So now he pushed and prodded and talked about their rice and not their women.

  He kept pushing until he came to the point where he found Beaupre. They walked side by side for a while.

  “Anderson,” said Beaupre, “you think we're going to see any lovin' Vietcongs today?”

  “Your friend Captain Dang told me we were going to kill beaucoup of them,” said Anderson. “I believe your counterpart. What he says, we do.”

  “My friend, the warrior, Captain Dang,” Beaupre said.

  “You wouldn't want me to doubt your counterpart.”

  “The goddamn Communists are too smart to go out today. They'll wait till it's cooler. Yes sir, they'll sit today and drink their rice wine, with their lady Communists, and they'll take it easy. They got the radio network which is reporting how many clicks we walk, and how much we're sweating, and they get the news and they laugh, and the lady Congs pour them another rice wine, and if there's no more in the bottle, they send the lady Congs out to the PX for more and they laugh a little more at us, and they wait till it's cooler and then they knock off a VC piece. You think I'm kidding, but you ever seen a Vietcong sweat?”

  Anderson, appreciative of this Beaupre, laughed; the man was a study in torture, his uniform black, the sweat rolling down his face, but at least he was joking.

  “You know why we're here, don't you?”

  “To kill beaucoup Congs, like all good American warriors.”

  “No, no, that's the cover. We'll kill those VC, mind you, but the real reason is to visit his kinfolks here. You see the wife of Captain Dang is from here, originally, and they would put up a plaque to her saying how she married the Captain, except the Vietcong would pull it down. But Madame Dang's kinfolk is everywhere here, and you see his wife is married to the province chief's sister, whose nephew married the cousin of the district chief right here in this very district, this very district, mind you, where the uncle of that cousin was once the head of the village, the village in this district, only Captain Dang has forgot which village it is, so we are visiting all three villages and maybe more, and hoping to find the right one, and the right village chief, it's a homecoming.”

  Beaupre seemed to want to continue; and Anderson thought, he is talking out his thirst; he must be nervous, perhaps his thirst is nervous. But out of the corner of his eye, he saw Thuong moving up and he was sensitive about Americans talking too much to Americans; he knew that Beaupre had made his distaste for the Vietnamese clear to Thuong, and he did not want to be identified with the Captain.

  Anderson was a chosen young man: a West Point graduate, but not too high in his class so that he would spend the rest of his career frightening superior officers, rather a well-trained young professional, with the right attitudes, and tas
tes, and a carefully muffled ambition. He had completed the Ranger and Airborne training, had been with the best line units in West Germany, married a German wife, volunteered for Vietnam and had learned Vietnamese. He had come with high expectations to Vietnam, and had been disappointed since arrival: disappointed with the war, the Vietnamese themselves, with the Colonel, and disappointed with Beaupre.

  He had not taken Beaupre seriously at the very beginning: they had met the first day at the Seminary, Beaupre back from an operation drenched with sweat, undressing and holding up each garment so his bunkmates could see how it had been soaked through (T-shirt, skivvies, socks, everything), a scene which had shocked Anderson — it had seemed, at the least, unmilitary, unofficer. They had gone out on the first operation together, and Anderson, who had volunteered for Vietnam, assumed that everyone else did too; he had asked Beaupre why he had come to Vietnam, and Beaupre had thought for a minute and then said with great honesty, “To get away from my wife,” and from then on they had never really communicated well. Now, sometimes Anderson felt that if perhaps he had paid more attention to Beaupre, shown him more respect, asked him more questions at the very beginning, they might have become better friends. But he had instinctively shied away from Beaupre and his table, with the sense of a young man who is going places and does not want to be with men who are not going along, whom he knows will not be promoted, will never, he was sure, make major, who sit each day and complain about the country and the war; they were not his people and he was not going to share their defeat. Later, when it became clear that they were going to spend most of their time together in Vietnam (“You have been given the assignment,” Beaupre said, “that countless young girls in Seoul, Saigon, Paris, and many other places where we have fought and died, are seeking, the right to spend the night in the open skies with me”), it was too late to reverse the snub which had come at the very beginning when, instead of eating at Beaupre's regular table at the mess hall, which was if nothing else, a combat table — Beaupre, Raulston, and others like that — a sour combat table, he had chosen to eat with younger officers, all of them rather like him, “the caydets,” Raulston called them; Raulston made a point of saying that he was not, as he put it, an Annapolis man. Later when Anderson realized that his assignment made him more nearly a member of the Beaupre-Raulston table (the other young officers were in signals and administration and jobs like that, not combat men), it was too late; if he had shunned them because he distrusted their lack of ambition, they in turn distrusted him for his youth, his ambition, and the fact that he did not complain about the country, the army, the war, and the food. (Raulston was bitter over the food. He claimed that Vietnamese shrimp were the best in the world, but the mess hall would not serve them because they were unsanitary; “everything in this whole goddamn country is unsanitary, but the shrimps are the only unsanitary thing that taste any goddamn good. I say we give up chipped beef because it is a known, proven, researched medical fact that chipped beef is unhealthy and unsanitary in a hot climate, and that we keep the shrimp instead; if I get hepatitis, I goddamn well want shrimp hepatitis and not S.O.S. hepatitis.”) But Anderson tried to bridge the gap and from time to time would talk to Beaupre about the country, about the differences between Vietnamese from the southern and Vietnamese from the central region, and the Captain would say: all island people are like that; Anderson would say: what island? and Beaupre would say: this island, of course; and Anderson would be troubled and bothered by the conversation, not knowing whether Beaupre was serious or kidding, and finally letting it go, but a week later he had quietly started the conversation on the subject of islands and island people, and finally had become more specific, and Beaupre had said: “What island, I've never been on any island; what the hell are you talking about, is that what they teach you at West Point?” It became a pattern: if the Lieutenant claimed that the Vietnamese were brave, Beaupre might discuss their cowardice, telling tale after tale of how they fled from battle; if Anderson insinuated (after all, he was too good an officer to do more than that) that the Vietnamese were not quite so brave as he had expected, Beaupre might answer with a long and detailed account of Vietnamese heroism, once telling how he, Beaupre, had been carried off the battlefield by Viets (a story spiked by Raulston when questioned by an uneasy Anderson: “it'd take fifteen goddamn Viets to carry that lardass off, and besides if it was that bad, he wouldn't wait, he'd get his tail off quicker than they could unless the VC had already amputated his legs for him. Besides which, he ain't shy about being a hero and he ain't told anyone here”).

  Anderson shuttled back and forth in the line now. They moved so slowly, always so slowly. He wanted to yell at them, to push them, to pick them up and carry them. Instead he coaxed them and teased them; he knew it was an impossible task but he continued, not so much any more to change them, he knew it couldn't be done, not today anyway, but because he had learned early in his tour that unless he did this and burned up his own energy, their slow pace with their short legs and what were for him mincing little steps would exhaust him, the act of holding back more exhausting than the act of letting go; the talking and the shuttling were an outlet for his own energy. He wanted to yell at them, to pick them up, to court martial them, anything, but he said instead, “Move it on, if you go that slowly, I'll never get back to America, I'll never see my wife again, I'll spend the rest of my life in My Tho, and I'll have to join the Vietnamese Army, and I'll have to marry a Vietnamese girl. Move it on, help me out.” It became like a song.

  This was one reason why he liked the helicopter assaults: there was in that instant of debarking, the roar of the engine, the fear of getting hit in the head by the whirling rotor blades, and getting hit by the VC, a drive that carried you further; he sensed that the Vietnamese were aware of it, that when he had heliborne units, they went a little harder and a little faster; he thought they really loved the helicopters, it was as if that made them like American soldiers, lofted around in and out of the sky by American pilots it became, he thought, a booster shot of pride as if they themselves finally believed they were real soldiers.

  He was still annoyed about not getting the helicopter assault; so much of the country and the war had disappointed him, so many other aspects of the country had let him down, that this had become increasingly important; it was the part of the war which pleased him the most and the part which had become the most valuable. In six months when he went home, he wanted to be a specialist in heliborne assault so that he could be a member of the brand new Airmobile Division, an entire division with nothing but helicopters (which was training, according to Beaupre, to come right the hell back to Vietnam); it would be tough to be a member of that division, but if he made enough heliborne assaults, he was sure it would show in his record; it would salvage Vietnam for him.

  Vietnam had begun well for him. He had wanted to come to the country, had volunteered for it, had wanted to do it properly so that he had even given up the chance to come in one of the first batches and had stayed behind for language training. When he finally arrived, he was ready to fall in love with the country and the people: indeed, even as they had flown over the rice fields on the way in, he had been awed by how green the color of the country was, and, deeply moved, he had thought: this country is in Technicolor. He had never forgotten how green it looked and that sense of life which it had seemed to reflect, it was a giant garden. At the airport he had been pleased by the little girls, so slim and polite, in their native dresses, so oriental. He had been delighted when he spoke to them and they spoke right back, the people, he thought, are not too shy. The first night he had left the other Americans at the hotel barracks in Saigon, broiling thick American steaks on top of the hotel on American charcoal and drinking American beer; Saigon soldiers, he had thought, and had gone off to a Chinese restaurant alone. On the way back he had taken a cyclo deliberately instead of a pedicab or the prehistoric bus which the Americans were supposed to use and which was recommended for officers (with its grill wire over t
he windows to stop terrorist grenades; terrorists, it was said, preferred officers); he had been excited as the cyclo rushed through the zoo of Saigon traffic, inches away from collision after collision with bikes laden with fruit, men with crated live ducks, children, even goats, he thought. It was night, and with the air cooler there seemed to be more excitement, more energy, and he wanted to yell out, mix his sweat with their sweat, his joy with their joy (he assumed it was joy); finally it took control of him and he did yell, a long, happy whoop, scaring the cyclo driver who stopped the cyclo and waited to be chewed out for a wrong turn; but no attack was forthcoming, it was, the driver decided, just one more drunk American. The next time Anderson let go with a whoop, the driver whooped too, and soon they were playing a game: Anderson whooping, then the driver whooping; the driver whooping, and then Anderson returning the whoop; Anderson finally giving him the largest tip in his history.

  The second day in Saigon had not been so pleasant. He had started off intending to make a complete sight-seeing tour of the city and had even given the cab driver a list of the places he wanted to see, carefully marked out in Vietnamese. The cab driver had looked at them, had smiled at him, and had begun to drive; they were in the cab about two minutes when the driver had turned around, smiled rather broadly, and said, “Jiggedy jigg jigg.” Anderson had not understood and had looked puzzled and had answered in Vietnamese; the cab driver turned again, more insistent this time, a touch of a leer, and said, “Jiggedy jigg, jigg.” Anderson did not understand the words — after all, he thought the cab driver was speaking Vietnamese, and the cab driver thought he was speaking English — but Anderson understood the leer, leers after all are not just oriental, they are international; but by the time he understood it, the driver was more insistent: “Jiggedy jigg, jigg, numbar wan gull,” with three gold teeth, Anderson would remember those gold teeth a long time. Finally, in desperation, Anderson stopped the cab, threw one hundred piastres at the driver, and walked back to the BOQ, disliking Saigon all the way.