by Chris Lynch
It was almost like a holiday, the days we spent at Da Nang. We didn’t have anything specific to do, but we got to dwell among the “official” operatives going about the business of war, more or less in plain sight.
But now we’re in the sky, with Da Nang and all that far behind us, and a certain border just ahead of us.
“Good-bye, gentlemen,” the chopper pilot calls out to us.
“What?” Lopez asks urgently, nervously. “What? Are we bailing out or something? What’s wrong?”
He is looking at Col. Macias, who is sitting at the rear of the helicopter with a serene expression, bordering on a smirk.
“Hey,” the copilot calls, getting Lopez’s attention, along with everybody else’s. He’s pointing out his window, toward the ground beneath us. “That, right there, is where South Vietnam just became someplace else. Someplace Laos-y. Good-bye means you no longer exist. And neither do we, for that matter. So we hope to see you on the other side, someplace else, anyplace else. Until then, good luck!”
“Thanks,” Lopez says. “And good luck to you.”
“Thanks. We sure do need it, picking up and dropping off the likes of you cowboys.”
We all laugh, partly because any laugh we can steal at this point is a valuable thing. There’s otherwise a good deal of tension rippling through the team, not least because we don’t feel like quite as much of a team as we once did. We lost two of our CIDG guys on our last operation—and we’re heading right back to the spot where we lost them. Three more were taken out during previous operations, and unlike with regular Army units, there’s no set system for rotating guys in and out. Therefore our team is steadily depleting. The Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army appear to have the ability to grow back whatever they lose, the way reptiles regrow their tails. We’re both jealous and furious about it—because everybody knows that the source of their replenishing numbers is the very Ho Chi Minh Trail that we are supposed to be cutting off, but are failing to do so.
The American assault helicopters are known as Guns, and the largely unarmed ones that deliver supplies, men, and bodies to and from hotspots are called Slicks. We’ve grown to love the Slick pilots who insert us into these situations and then extract us again when we get into trouble. They’re among the bravest and most dedicated people I have ever met. And it is generally agreed that their jobs are among the most dangerous in this whole circus, tougher than what the gunship pilots have to do, by far.
But sometimes when they have put us on the ground and then go to lift off again, I am so envious that I want to jump up, grab the choppers by the skids, and smash them back to earth. That cannot be right.
What’s wrong with me? What has happened to me?
“Oh, oh, oh,” the copilot says, gesturing again, out his window to the ground below. There, the magnificent lush countryside has opened up, just a little, to expose a mini-convoy trudging along a short stretch of mucky road.
Two elephants pull modest trailers of something that doesn’t look like militarily important anything—though it probably is.
“See that,” the copilot says, like a mildly interested tour guide. “You know how you can tell those are enemy elephants and not friendly ones?”
My mind shoots instantly to my elephant friend, Dave.
“Elephants from the North have this accumulation of different-colored muds, with a certain chemical—”
Crrraaaackk!
In a flash Lopez has his rifle out and has shot the first of the two elephants. I’m in the seat behind the copilot, looking down through the open side of the chopper. Lopez is, was, on the other side, but has now lurched over, across from me.
Almost as quickly as his shot is off, I have brought up my rifle and brought it down again, right across the side of Lopez’s neck. I have smashed him to the deck of the chopper and I have him pinned there, choking, while I watch through the open side of the helicopter as that poor, magnificent, noble beast comes to the realization that he’s been shot. He staggers sideways, almost off the trail. He slides down the soggy slope. He tromps, clambers, thumps his way back up to where he was. Then, with blood streaming down his neck, he resumes his steady pace out of the clearing and out of our sight.
The copilot is laughing. Lopez is swinging and kicking back to his feet. I suddenly realize that there’s an arm around my neck, and Col. Macias has me in a choke hold from behind my seat.
“Enough,” he says.
When he relinquishes his grip and things seem to have calmed, I look around.
Henry, Cabot, and Lodge just look out the windows on the other side of the helicopter, grim and silent. Garvine, sitting in the rear next to Macias, gives me a small shrug.
I expect to see Lopez staring away from me when he scrambles back to his seat. But he’s staring right at me.
“What?” I say.
“We’re here to kill, Bug. Don’t forget that.”
“We’re not here to kill innocents,” I say.
“We’re here to kill everything,” he says coldly.
* * *
It feels strange when we’re dropped back into the very same tiny landing zone where they picked us up last time, like some nightmare déjà vu.
“Good luck!” the copilot shouts as he practically shoves us off of his chopper before lifting off again.
It takes less time for us to get to our observation perch than it did last time, since we’re going downhill rather than up. Also we aren’t doing it in a hailstorm of every type of artillery flying in both directions.
In fact, the jungle is almost serene.
We work our way down, in the silence we’ve practiced so diligently to hone, until we find ourselves on the ridge. Our ridge. This quiet spot amidst the foliage was the flash point of so much mayhem before.
We even settle into basically our same notches, lining up our same sightings.
And sure enough, within minutes we find that the reports are accurate. All our good work is being reversed. The road is being rebuilt. Quickly, and expertly, it is being rebuilt.
And the antiaircraft artillery is being rehabilitated.
“Remarkable,” Col. Macias says, with more than a little admiration.
There will be no extended photography session today. I know my assignment, which is to record what’s happening and then to stop it from happening.
Lopez manages—as Lopez often does—to sum it all up crisply. He even endorses a popular pesticide while he’s at it.
“We’re switching from recon to d-CON today, comrades,” he says. “Time to kill the rats.”
“Uh-oh, boys,” Garvine says as he peers intently through his spyglasses.
“What?” I say. I gather my equipment to try and catch a glimpse of what he’s seeing. I affix my telephoto and get a focus on the industrious work being done on the trail, and the crew doing it. “No big deal. We know what to do. We’ll blast ’em away, the same way we blasted ’em away before.”
“Okay,” Garvine says in a voice that does not mean okay at all. “Though I don’t know about you, but I’ve personally never blasted away a whole crew of ladies before.”
“What?” Col. Macias says, and practically snaps Garvine’s neck with the force of snatching the binoculars off of him.
While the colonel verifies for himself that the work crew is all female, I do my version of the same thing. I lock my viewfinder onto one after another after another of these solemn, determined women, shoveling and raking, filling and smoothing over every crater we’d so carefully blown into the terrain only a few days ago.
Quite a few of the antiaircraft guns that were central to the whole episode have already been extracted from their holes. They’ve been arranged right into their own little on-site nests, rather than hauled any farther up the trail. I guess the Vietcong decided after the last raid that this is as good a place as any to make a stand and welcome our superior airpower into something more like a fair fight.
I can’t stop focusing on each woman, with their shov
els and rakes, their overloaded bikes saddled with bags of gravel. The looks of quiet determination that grace their faces as they focus on the job before them.
“Put … that … camera … down … now,” Col. Macias growls in my ear.
I have never defied this man. As far as I know, no still-living person ever has. And I’m not doing so now.
At least I don’t think I am. But I can hear the autowinder whirring away for several more seconds before I feel the heavy thump of the side of Col. Macias’s fist pounding my camera into the ground in front of me.
“You’re acting like somebody who wants to lose his job, Manion,” he says.
“No, sir, I do not want to lose my job,” I say. I join the rest of the team in drawing and aiming my rifle.
At the work crew. Of women.
They’re a great crew, in fact. Just as they get a stretch of gravel and turf so smooth you could lay a putting green on it, another truckload of material backs up and dumps its load. It takes off again while the ladies throw themselves furiously and without hesitation into the task of grooming another stretch of perfectly navigable road.
“All right, men,” Macias says. “Here’s how it goes. We wait for this stretch to finish. Then, when the truck with the next load rounds that bend, Cabot, you are to take the truck out with the grenades. That’s your job and you keep at it until it’s done. When you’ve accomplished that, you turn your attention to helping Henry wipe out those antiaircraft guns. This time we leave nothing useful behind. Turn it all to rubble. Lodge, you just keep feeding the grenades into the launchers. The rest of us—Lopez, Garvine, Manion, and myself—we focus on the personnel. Understand? We do not stop firing as long as there is one enemy standing. Is that clear?”
There are murmurs up and down the line. They could mean anything, but everyone understands that the murmurs are interpreted as acknowledgment, agreement, complicity.
“Are they even armed, though?” I say, fearing this conversation as much as anything else I’ve faced in battle. “They’re just road crew, after all.”
I feel the heat of Macias’s stare as I continue to focus on the enemy below. I will not look toward him.
Garvine laughs. “You mean roadkill.”
I hear a chuckle or two from somebody or other, but it’s so awkward and foreign-sounding it could just as well be coming from some freaky Laotian bird or monkey. Or nightmare birdmonkey beast that would round out this horror show perfectly.
It’s just nerves. Nerves and nervous laughter, in lieu of anything else sane to do in this insane situation. Nobody is happy with this.
I can still feel the stare.
I hear the first low rumbles of the gravel truck.
Everybody is locked in place, locked on targets, locked into doing what must be done, when it must be done, because we understand why we are here.
“Ha,” Garvine echoes himself, because there is not a single okay thought rippling through the brains of any of us now. It’s all tension and jitters. Echoes and impulses. “Ha, roadkil—”
A crack. A crack, a shot. A crack shot bangs through the air between the women down there and the men up here. It incinerates every gulp of oxygen between there and here, and between here and anyplace I have ever been, and anything I have ever known.
I feel Col. Macias’s attention rip away from me and I finally look toward him and then beyond him to the neat baby’s eyehole in Garvine’s forehead. I stare numbly, just like everybody else, for the several seconds it takes the colonel to flail and slap Garvine’s face, hissing like a furious lizard. Then Col. Macias abruptly quits trying to patch that hole with his bare, strong, useless hands. He practically spikes Garvine’s face into the ground before screaming, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
And fire we do.
Fire isn’t even the word. We have to convert the word hellfire into a verb, to properly represent what is happening now.
Every member of the team is screaming as he fires. The rocket-propelled grenade action off to my far left is almost certainly leaving me deaf in that ear. Henry is reloading the rockets of death, keeping both Cabot and Lodge armed up to the microsecond. They repay the effort by blasting that supply truck backward and sideways and up and down, until there’s nothing left to indicate there was ever a truck that turned that corner, and certainly no truck crew to wish they never had.
Then our Meo grenade team comrades turn their furious power on the sequence of deadly antiaircraft nests, and the fireworks show is heavy enough to scorch our eyebrows even from this distance. Each small nest dug subtly into the trailside contains a stack of rockets. When nailed by one of our RPGs, they set off a chain of cave-canister implosions. For a moment it feels like we must have lit up half the explosives in Southeast Asia in just our modest search-and-destroy outing on this nowhere strip of Ho Chi’s Highway.
But none of that really even matters. It matters, of course, in the big picture. After all, it’s this very destruction we were dispatched to achieve. The very type of operation for which we are skulking around in places we’re not supposed to be skulking. It is, in fact, the way we minimize the killings of American Boys by North Vietnamese Boys. By North Vietnamese people. By cutting off the supply of materials and … personnel … who travel down this very trail for that purpose.
So, that matters.
But right now, there are other matters.
We cannot stop shooting. I cannot stop shooting. At all the people I had just been shooting in a very different way. I was photographing people who were carrying out their duties, doing the stuff of war, the stuff that comes with the territory of waging war and making it possible for others to wage war. We break things in war and somebody has to fix those things before we break them again. And so on and so on.
But they were doing the other stuff of war. Rather than … trying to kill me.
Then that all changed.
I am focusing like never before. I am focusing my aim and my M16 on one and then two specific women who were a few minutes ago raking gravel in a way that was almost hypnotic, almost peaceful. I am focusing well enough that I have hit them both several times and they are on the ground and they are trying to crawl to safety in two different directions. I don’t know if one direction is smart and the other one is stupid, or if it matters at all. It turns out it doesn’t, because I am shooting and shooting and hitting both of them, and I can even see bits of them, of their black cotton clothing and then their blood and then whatever else is coming out of them and off of them because I am doing my job unbelievably well. I have never focused like this, not with the camera, that’s for sure, and probably not with any other means of focus, either. Nobody anywhere has ever focused harder than this before. And I am not missing, ever, at all; not a single round is wasted. And I sense from everything around me that all the guys are bearing down and not wasting bullets. It is impossible to do this thing we are doing right now. Impossible to do it any better than we are doing it.
From the muzzle flashes and the shots coming our way, there’s no chance there were more than maybe two shooters on their team. Very good shooters, though. And then even those muzzle flashes are dead.
I hear Col. Macias calling on the radio for an extraction.
We’re scrambling up the hillside once again, just like the last time we were here. It’s different, though, in that it’s less frantic. There’s no air assault on the position below us. There is no response fire threatening us from behind. We left no lives to threaten our lives.
Garvine needs helping to the helicopter, like he did last time. But it’s more than just help this time. And this time there’s no hope.
* * *
There is no such thing as silence on an airborne chopper. But, as we head back to base, pilot and copilot up front, our team seated and Garvine stretched out on the deck amidst us all, I experience a brand-new kind of silence.
Outside of recon, there has not been a minute—not one single waking moment in all the time I’ve been in my country’s serv
ice—when nobody made a sound. It’s almost as if it’s an unspoken command at the center of this cyclone of loudly spoken commands that the boys gotta be barking. They gotta be blowing: blowing steam, blowing smoke, blowing raspberries, and above all blowharding. The alternative is listening to our own silences. Or worse, somebody else listening to them.
That moment has now come, and the silences that whoosh and thump around the inside of this chopper are well overpowering the howl of the engines and the fwopping of the blades.
Because of the dead guy on the floor among us. Because of what happened to him. And because of what we did in response.
You would think, or at least I would, that a bunch of guys with the same sort of backgrounds and experiences, the same exact training, the same sense of mission and willingness to leap into the most dangerous situations imaginable and execute the meanest, dirtiest deeds possible, would have a lot of the same thoughts.
Especially at a time like this. After a time like that.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Now, I don’t know for sure what anybody else is thinking. How could I, since I have no idea what I’m thinking myself? But I have an idea. And it’s an ugly idea.
When we reach camp and the fly-boys have the skids on the ground and the engine cut, it’s not as if the silence gets any quieter. Col. Macias hops off the chopper and, using hand gestures alone, directs the two medics who are there to greet us. They follow his orders, as if there was anything else they were going to do with the stretcher they were carrying.
I don’t move. Can’t. At least not right away.
I watch as the medics carrying Garvine follow Macias down the hill from the helipad, and as Henry, Cabot, and Lodge follow behind them.
Lopez has taken several strides in the same direction and then realizes I’m not with them. He turns on his heel and comes back to where I am, still sitting in my seat.
“You waiting for some prince to come along and see if you fit the glass slipper?” he says, with a seriousness much more deadly than his words.
“Is there something wrong with you, Gust?” I ask, with a seriousness that’s more than a match for his.