Susan stayed silent awhile, looked around, then said, “I can understand why you wouldn’t want to come back here.”
“Yeah . . . but . . . it’s better than reliving it in bad dreams . . . like the guy at the Cu Chi tunnels . . . you go back, look it in the eye, and see that it’s not what it used to be. Then, the new memory replaces the old one . . . that’s the theory. But meanwhile . . . the place bums me out.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“No.”
The road headed toward the resurrected village of A Luoi, which I could see in the distance. Around us, where there had once been elephant grass, bamboo, and brush, fields had been cleared for vegetable farming.
I said, “So, now it’s April 1968, and the American army wants the valley back. So we air-assault into here, and I’m sitting in a Huey with six other infantry guys, not happy about any of this, when all of a sudden flak starts to burst around the chopper. We’d never been shot at with Triple A—anti-aircraft artillery—and this was absolutely terrifying . . . these big black air bursts, like in a World War II flick, are filling the sky, and huge chunks of shrapnel are whizzing through the air around us. The chopper in front of me got hit in the tail rotor and the whole aircraft spun around, throwing infantry guys out the door, then the chopper fell like a rock and exploded on the ground. Then another chopper gets hit, and by now our pilot is in a rapid vertical descent, trying to get below the flak. So there’re two choppers down that I could see, each carrying seven infantry and four crew, so that’s twenty-two killed before we even hit the ground. We lost ten more choppers on the initial air assault. Meanwhile, we’re drawing machine gun fire from all these hills around the valley as we’re descending, and our chopper takes a round right through the plexiglass windshield, but we’re okay, and the pilot gets us about ten feet off the ground, we jump, and he gets the hell out of there.”
“Good lord. You must have been—”
“Scared shitless. So, now we’re on the ground, and it’s what’s called a hot landing zone, meaning, we’re drawing fire. The bad guys are in the hills all around us, and they’re lobbing in mortar rounds, rockets, and machine gun fire. We’re landing thousands of men by helicopter into this killing zone, and we start to spread out to engage the enemy in the hills. Meanwhile, the air force is dropping napalm and cluster bombs on the hills, and the army Cobra gunships are firing rockets and Gatling guns to try to suppress the enemy fire. It was a total fucking mess, sort of like the Normandy Beach landings, but by air instead of boat. By the end of the day, the situation was under control, we’d secured the A Luoi airstrip, and we were fanning out into the hills, searching for Chuck.”
I looked in the rearview mirror and said to Mr. Loc, “We beat the pants off the People’s Liberation Army that day, Mr. Loc.”
He didn’t reply.
“Paul. Don’t.”
“Fuck him. His mommie was a Commie.”
“Paul.”
I got myself calmed down a bit and saw that we were entering A Luoi, a muddy village of wooden structures. There was one stucco building with a flag that was obviously the government building. The only vehicles I could see were scooters, a farm truck, and two yellow police jeeps. There were electric wires overhead, so the place had electricity, which was an improvement over the last time I’d been here.
Mr. Loc stopped in the village square. There were no parking meters.
Susan and I got out, and I looked around, trying to orient myself. The hills hadn’t changed, but the valley floor had.
I said, “So, this is the shithole we fought for in three weeks of bloody combat.”
I said to Mr. Loc, in English, “We’re going to take a walk. You can report to your bosses.” I jerked my thumb toward the government building.
Susan and I walked through the small square and down a narrow path that ended in a field west of the village. Running through the farm fields was the old airstrip, a mile-long stretch of PSP—perforated steel planking—overgrown now with weeds, but still usable.
I said to Susan, “Here’s the airstrip, and at the far north end of it over there was the ruins of the Special Forces camp that the First Cav used as the command post when we landed. The engineers threw up sandbag bunkers all around the strip, and within two days, we had barbed wire and claymore mines encircling the whole runway. My company spent three days in the hills pushing the bad guys farther back, away from the airstrip. Then, we got a two-day break by manning the bunkers. My bunker was about over there, at the foot of that hill.”
I looked out over the farmland to where the hills rose, about five hundred meters away. I said to Susan, “One day, we’re sitting on top of the bunker, six guys playing poker, and Charlie starts dropping mortar rounds in from those hills farther back. And here’s what’s totally nuts—we barely looked up at the impacting rounds because we’re old pros by now, and we knew Chuck was trying to hit the command bunkers over there or the ammo dumps or the airstrip itself. So we kept on playing cards. And then—here’s the funny thing—some Commie son of a bitch up there in the hills—obviously the mortar spotter with field glasses—must have noticed us and got pissed off that we weren’t paying any attention to his mortar fire. So, he gets personal and starts directing the mortar fire toward our miserable little bunker. The rounds started walking in on us, and we realized they were getting too close when dirt and stones started falling on us. Well, I’m sitting there with three aces and about thirty bucks in the pot, and everyone drops their cards, grabs a handful of money, and jumps off the roof of the bunker and dives inside. I jumped in just as a mortar round exploded outside and shook the bunker. I’d kept my cards, and I’m showing these idiots my three aces as the bunker is starting to come apart, and we’re arguing if I won, or if it should be called a misdeal. We laughed about that for weeks afterward.”
Susan said, “I guess you had to be there.”
“I was.”
I walked on a path between two cultivated fields, and Susan followed. The path ended in a treeline, and we went through the trees to where the small river flowed. It was a shallow, rocky river, and I recalled crossing it at a rock ford somewhere upstream. I went down to the river’s edge and stood on a flat rock. Susan stood beside me.
“One day, we crossed this river a little upstream, over there. We had only about a hundred men in the company that used to number about a hundred and sixty. We’d lost a lot of people during the Tet Offensive in January and February, then at Khe Sanh in early April. So, now it’s around April 30, and we’ve already lost a few guys here in the A Shau, and the meat grinder needs fresh meat, but no replacements are arriving, and we’re also getting low on C rations and purified water . . .”
I looked at the water and said, “This is a clean mountain river, so we took a chance and filled our canteens here and drank directly out of the river.”
I walked along the rocky bank until I reached the natural rock ford I remembered. Susan followed, and we stepped into the river on the first rock. The water came up to our ankles, and it was as cold as I remembered it. We crossed the river and scrambled up the opposite bank.
I said, “So we crossed here, and what do we see? About ten dead enemy soldiers lying on the riverbank here, some of them half in the water. They were decomposing into the river, all green and bloated, and one guy’s jaw was just hanging by a piece of muscle and it was resting on his shoulder, with a full set of teeth . . . it was very weird.” I added, “Everyone emptied their canteens. One guy vomited.” I knelt down and scooped some water in my hands and stared at it, but didn’t drink.
Susan was quiet.
I stood and turned away from the river. I could see where the trail began through the thick vegetation, and I climbed the bank onto the trail.
Susan followed, but said, “Paul, this is the kind of place where there could still be land mines.”
“I don’t think so. This is probably a well-used ford, and this trail is also well traveled. But we’ll be careful.” I start
ed up the trail and Susan followed. “We’ll do a leech check later.”
She didn’t reply.
“So, we’re moving up this trail, and something moves in the bush. But it’s not Chuck, it’s a deer. I’m near the front of the lead platoon, and like idiots, we all fire at the deer. We miss, and we start chasing it through this bush while the rest of the platoon is jogging up the trail to keep up with us.”
I kept moving up the trail that rose into the thick woods and up into the foothills.
“The company commander, Captain Ross, was back by the river with the other two platoons, and he thought we were in contact, but my platoon leader radioed that we were chasing a deer. This got us a chewing out from the captain, who was now leading the rest of the company to our rescue.” I laughed. “I mean, totally nuts.”
I kept moving up the rising trail. The rain forest was very thick here, and I kept thinking I felt land leeches falling on my neck.
Susan said, “Where are we going?”
“There’s something up here I want to see. I can’t believe I found this place.”
We passed by a few bomb craters that were now choked with trees and bush, but which had been fresh earth back then.
Finally, we got to a clearing that I remembered, and which was still pocked with bomb craters. Across the open clearing was a wall of rain forest, and about a hundred meters beyond the forest rose a tier of steep hills. This was the place. I walked toward the forest.
I stood at the wall of vegetation and said to Susan, “So, about twenty of us are chasing this deer and blasting away, and the deer runs right into this treeline, which then had an opening that we thought was another trail. We follow, and all of a sudden, we break into the open, but it’s not a natural jungle clearing because we see a lot of cut tree stumps, and we realize it’s an enemy base camp, hidden in the jungle, and also hidden from the air with the high triple-canopy vegetation overhead to form this huge sort of sky dome. Sunlight is filtering into these acres of open space, and it’s totally surreal. Huts, trucks, hammocks, open air kitchens, a field hospital, a damaged tank, and lots of anti-aircraft weapons, just sitting there.”
I tried to find a break in the vegetation, but couldn’t. I said to Susan, “It’s in there.” I pushed through the thick growth and got tangled in a wait-a-minute vine, which I cut with my Swiss army knife.
“Paul, this is not a well-traveled path. You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“You go back.”
“No, you come back. That’s enough.”
“Just stay there, and I’ll call for you.” I pushed farther into the bush, knowing that this place could be littered with cluster bombs that had a habit of exploding when disturbed. But I needed to see this old base camp.
Finally, the bush thinned out, and I stood at the edge of what had once been a huge enemy base camp under the triple-canopy jungle. There was so little sunlight in here that the vegetation wasn’t very thick or tall, and I could see all the way to the rising hills about a hundred meters away.
Susan came up behind me and asked, “Is this it?”
“Yes. This was the North Vietnamese base camp. Look over there. You see those bamboo huts? This whole place was filled with huts, ammunition, trucks, weapons . . .”
I stepped farther into the old camp and looked up at the jungle canopy. “They’d actually hoisted camouflage nets up there. Very clever people.”
Susan didn’t reply.
“So, we charge in here after this deer, about twenty of us, and we stop dead in our tracks. The funny thing is that we’re chasing dinner, but the North Viets must have thought we were attacking with hundreds of troops because they’d all di di mau’ed. Gone. Someone noticed that a cooking fire was still smoking.”
I moved a few more meters into the camp and said, “We’re moving very cautiously now, tree by tree, stump by stump. We’d just scored a big hit by finding this camp, and my platoon leader, Lieutenant Merrit, radios the company commander with the good news, not mentioning the deer this time. But as it turned out, Charlie hadn’t really left, and they were hiding around the perimeter of this camp, mostly on those steep hills over there. But we’re not totally stupid either, so we get down behind the tree trunks and the stumps, and do what’s called recon by fire, which is basically shooting the place up to see if we can draw any fire in return before we get too deep into this compound. Sure enough, one of the bad guys loses his nerve or got overanxious, and fires back before the whole platoon is in the killing zone. All of a sudden, we’re in this huge firefight, and we’re firing grenades and rockets into these drums of gasoline, which are blowing up, and ammo dumps are blowing up, and by now, the rest of the company is right behind us.”
I walked farther into this overgrown camp and looked around. It was obvious that metal scavengers had been here because there wasn’t a shard of steel left anywhere—no blown-up gas drums, no wrecked trucks, and not even a scrap of shrapnel on the ground.
Susan came up beside me and stared at these open acres beneath the jungle canopy. “This is incredible . . . I mean, there must be places like this all over Vietnam.”
“There are. They managed to hide a half million men and women at any given time in jungle camps like this, in the Cu Chi tunnels and other tunnels, in villages along the coast, in the swamps of the Mekong Delta . . . they’d come out to fight when and where they wanted, on their terms . . . but this time, we trapped them in this valley, and they had to stand and fight on our terms . . .”
I moved farther into the deserted, spooky camp. “Unfortunately, it turned out that we’d tangled with a much bigger force than ours, so we broke contact and got the hell out of there. We moved back toward the river, but they kept trying to get around us to cut us off, and we kept blasting our way out. We called in helicopter gunships and artillery, which is the only thing that saved us from being surrounded and annihilated that day. It was a real mess, but the worst was yet to come. Our battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, had been wounded in the air assault, and his replacement, a major, really wanted to be a lieutenant colonel, so for two days, he ordered us to counterattack, supported by artillery and gunships. But we were still outnumbered, and by Day Three, we’d lost a third of the company, killed and wounded, but we retook the camp, or so we thought. All of a sudden, we hear something strange over there at the far end of the camp, and out of that jungle comes two tanks, and they weren’t ours because we had no tanks in the valley. None of us had ever run into an enemy tank, and we’re . . . frozen. The tanks had twin 57 millimeter rapid-fire cannon mounted on turrets, and they open up. One guy gets hit square in the chest with a cannon shell, and he disintegrates. Two guys get hit by flying shrapnel, and everyone is diving for cover or running, but you can’t outrun a tank. Then, one guy takes his M-72 anti-tank rocket—this little thing in a cardboard tube—stands, adjusts his aiming device very coolly as these tanks are coming at us, and he fires. The rocket hits the turret of the lead tank, and the gunner is blown out of the turret. Another guy fires a rocket and knocks out the other tank’s tread. The enemy tankers get out and start running, and we mow them down. Now we have two tank kills, and the captain radios this to battalion headquarters, and we’re heroes. So, do we get relieved and go back to A Luoi? No, the new battalion commander is trying to get a reputation or something, and he orders us to push on. That’s not what we had in mind, but the guy is slick, and he tells us on the radio that according to intelligence reports, there may be American POWs kept in bamboo cages farther into the hills. So this motivates us, and off we go.”
I walked toward where I thought we’d hit the tanks, and Susan followed. “We climbed this steep hill over here and pursued what was left of the enemy, and kept a lookout for those POW cages.” I took a breath and continued. “By Day Six, we’d had about a dozen fights with the North Viets as they withdrew. We actually did find some bamboo cages, but they were empty. By now, we were completely exhausted, overcome with the worst kind of combat fatigue wher
e you can’t sleep at night, you can’t eat, and you have to remind yourself to drink water. We’re barely speaking to one another because there’s nothing to say. Every day more people are getting killed or wounded, and the group becomes smaller, until platoons and squads no longer exist, and we’re just a horde of armed men without any real leadership or command structure . . . all the officers are dead or wounded, except the company commander, Captain Ross, a twenty-five-year-old who’s the old man of the company by now, and all the sergeants are dead or wounded . . . the medics are all wounded, and so are the radio operators and the machine gunners, so we’re trying to remember what we learned in basic training about radios, the M-60 machine gun, and first aid . . . and we keep pushing on . . .”
I stared at the hills in the distance.
Susan said in a soft voice, “Paul, we can go back now.”
“Yeah . . . well, we should have asked to be relieved or reinforced, and maybe the company commander did, though I don’t remember . . . but this running battle had taken on a life of its own, and I think it had a lot to do with killing more of the people who’d killed and wounded so many of us . . . it was like a fight to the finish, and as frightened and fatigued as we were, all we wanted to do was kill more of them. In fact, something very strange had happened to us.”
I stood. “It went on for a total of seven days, and by the seventh day, you couldn’t guess that we were nice American kids from a nice, clean country. I mean, we literally had blood on our hands, on our ripped fatigues, we had seven-day beards, and hollow bloodshot eyes, and filth on our bodies, and we weren’t thinking about shaves and showers, or food or bandages . . . we were thinking about killing another gook.”
We both stood there and finally Susan said, “I understand why you wouldn’t want to talk about this.”
I looked at her and said, “I’ve told this story a few times. This is not the story I don’t like to talk about.”
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