by Tim O'Brien
He gave me his watch, and he rolled onto his back. He pulled his hat down and was asleep. He slept quietly. At least that was in his favor.
Watching the road was not an easy thing. The hedgerow was thick. I tried it on my knees, but that didn’t give enough elevation. I tried standing, but there is a certain horrible sensation that comes from standing on your feet on an ambush. Finally I stooped and squatted down. It hurt the thighs, but the road was visible, and it would be tough to fall asleep that way.
I took hold of the Claymore’s firing device, testing its feel. It fit my hand well. I flicked the safety back and forth to be sure it wouldn’t jam. I was jittery. What to do? I toyed with my M-16, patting the magazine, rubbing the trigger. Would the weapon work when the moment came? I pictured myself desperately yanking at that trigger, over and over, bawling, screaming, but the gun wouldn’t fire.
Other thoughts. Memories, fantasies. I imagined that the twenty of us had suddenly become the objects of this night’s hunt, that we were fooling ourselves to think that we remained the hunters. There we lay, twenty lonely GIs without foxholes or barbed wire or a perimeter for protection. Ten of us were sleeping. The others gazed stupidly in one direction, out at the trail junction, as if the war gods had it arranged that the Viet Cong should trot down before our gunsights like drugged turkeys. I remembered an old Daffy Duck movie cartoon. A well-equipped hunter—red cap, ten-gauge shotgun, sacked lunch—lies in wait behind an elaborate blind, chortling at the cleverness of his concealment. And all the while Ol’ Daffy is prancing up from behind the doomed fellow, sledgehammer and sticks of red dynamite at the ready. A whole theater full of preadolescent sadists ripped into laughter when Daffy sent the hunter to Never-Never Land, abroad a gratifying shock wave. I led the laughter. I’d always favored the quarry over the hunter. It seemed only fair.
I glanced backward. Only trees and shadows.
I woke Reno, gave him the wristwatch, and curled up around my rifle.
It was cold. The ground was wet.
Reno slapped a mosquito and sat cross-legged, staring dead into a clump of bushes. He was a veteran, I thought. He knew what he was doing. Immediately, incredibly, I fell into a peaceful, heavy sleep.
Reno awakened me. My fatigues were drenched, a soggy web. It was drizzling and it was cold. I asked Reno for the wristwatch. It was three-ten. Reno had cheated by a few minutes. My sleep should have ended at three-twenty, but he was a squad leader, and there wasn’t anything to say about it. He grinned. “Don’t get too wet, New Guy,” he said, not bothering to whisper. “You catch pneumonia, we’ll have to ship you to the rear. I bet you’d hate that.” He lit a cigarette, cupping it in his palm. That was stupid and against the rules, but I couldn’t decide if it was more cowardly to tell him to put it out or to keep quiet and hope he’d die of lung cancer. The rain finally extinguished the cigarette, and Reno rolled around on the ground until he was asleep.
I passed the hour counting up the number of days I had left in Vietnam. I figured it out by months, weeks, and hours. I thought about a girl. It was hopeless, of course, but I tried to visualize her face. Only words would come in my mind. One word was “smile,” and I tacked on the adjective “intriguing” to make it more personal. I thought of the word “hair” and modified it with the words “thick” and “sandy,” not sure if they were accurate anymore, and then a whole string of words popped in—“mysterious,” “Magdalen,” “eternal” as a modifier. I tried fitting the words together into a picture, and I tried closing my eyes, first taking a long look down the road. I tried forcing out the memory of the girl, tried placing her in situations, tried reciting the Auden poem in a very brave whisper. For all this, I could not see her. When I muttered the word “hair,” I could see her hair plainly enough. When I said “eyes,” I would be looking smack into a set of smiling blue irises, and they were hers, no doubt. But if I uttered the word “face” or tried to squeeze out a picture of the girl herself, all there was to see was the word “face” or the word “eye,” printed out before me. It was like asking a computer to see for me. And I was learning that no weight of letters and remembering and wishing and hoping is the same as a touch on temporary, mortgaged lands.
I spent some time thinking about the things I would do after Vietnam—after the first sergeants and rifles were out of my life. I made a long list. I would write about the army. Expose the brutality and injustice and stupidity and arrogance of wars and men who fight in them. Get even with some people. Mark out the evil in my drill sergeants so vividly that they would go to hell lamenting the day they tangled with Private O’Brien. I would expose the carelessness with which people like Reno played with my life. I would crusade against this war, and if, when I was released, I would find other wars, I would work to discover whether they were just and necessary, and if I found they were not, I would have another crusade. I wondered how writers such as Hemingway and Pyle could write so accurately and movingly about war without also writing about the Tightness of their wars. I remembered one of Hemingway’s stories. It was about a battle in World War I, about the hideous deaths of tides of human beings, swarming into the fight, engaging under the sun, and ebbing away again into two piles, friend and foe. I wondered why he did not care to talk about the thoughts those men must have had. Certainly those suffering and scared human beings must have wondered if their cause was worthy. The men in war novels and stories and reportage seem to come off the typewriter as men resigned to bullets and brawn. Hemingway’s soldiers especially. They are cynics. Not quite nihilists, of course, for that would doom them in the reader’s eye. But what about the people who are persuaded that their battle is not only futile but also dead wrong? What about the conscripted Nazi?
I made plans to travel. I thought of buying or renting a secondhand boat and with six or seven friends sailing the seas from Australia to Lisbon, then to the Cote d’Azur, Sicily, and to an island called Paros in the Aegean. Perhaps I might rent a cottage in Austria, perhaps near a town called Freistadt just across the Czechoslovakian border. Freistadt would be the ideal place. The mountains were formidable, the air was clean, the town had a dry moat around it, the beer was the best in the world, the girls were not communists, and they had blue eyes and blond hair and big bosoms. There would be skiing in the winter and hiking and swimming in the summer. I would sleep alone when I wanted to, not in a barracks and not along a trail junction with nineteen GIs.
The thought of Freistadt, Austria, turned me to thinking about Prague, Czechoslovakia, where I’d spent a summer trying to study. I remembered an evening in July of 1967. I’d been drinking beer with a young Czech student, an economics specialist. Walking back from the hostinec, the fellow pointed out a poster that covered three square feet on a cement wall. The poster depicted three terrified Vietnamese girls. They were running from the bombs of an American B-52 bomber. In the background, a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun was blasting the planes with red fire. A clenched fist in the foreground.
The Czech asked what I thought of it. I told him I was ambivalent. I didn’t know. Perhaps the bombs were falling for good reason.
He smiled. “I have an invitation to extend, a proposition for you. If you find it distasteful, just say so, but as an interested bystander I hope you’ll accept. You see, my roommate is from North Vietnam. He studies economics here at the university. I wonder if you’d like to talk with him tonight.” He chuckled. “Perhaps you two can negotiate a settlement, who knows.”
It was a three-hour conversation. With my Czech friend helping with the translation, we carried on in French, Czech, German, and English. The fellow was cordial, a short and reserved man who told me his name was Li and offered me a seat on his bed. I asked if he thought Americans were evil, and he thought a while before he said no. He asked me the same question and I said no, quickly. I asked if the North Vietnamese were not the aggressors in the war. He laughed and stated that of course the opposite was the case. They were defending Vietnam from American aggression. I asked if t
he North Vietnamese were not sending troops to the South in order to establish a communist regime in Saigon, and he laughed again, nervously, and informed me that to speak of a divided Vietnam was historically and politically incorrect. I asked Li if he believed that President Johnson was an evil man, another Hitler. Personally, he said, he didn’t believe so. Johnson was misguided and wrong. But he added that most North Vietnamese were not so lenient.
“What else can they think when they see your airplanes killing people? They put the blame on the man who orders the flights.”
We talked about democracy, and totalitarianism, and the fellow argued that the government in Hanoi could be considered a wartime democracy. Stability, he said, was essential. We argued some about that, and my Czech friend joined in, taking my side.
When I left him, Li shook my hand and told me he was a lieutenant in the North Vietnamese Army. He hoped we would not meet again. That was in 1967.
I roused Reno out for the final watch. It was four-thirty and the sky was lighting up and the worst was over. Reno lay on his back. His eyes were barely slit, and there was no way to be sure he was awake. I nudged him again, and he told me to relax and go to sleep. I put the Claymore firing device beside him, brushed his foot a little as I lay down, and closed my eyes. I was nearly asleep when I remembered the wrist-watch. I sat up and handed it out toward him. He was wheezing, sound asleep. I kicked him, and he sat up, lit a cigarette, took the wristwatch, and sat there in a daze, rocking on his haunches and staring at his clump of bushes.
An hour later, when Mad Mark hollered at us to saddle up and move out, Reno was on his stomach and wheezing. He was a seasoned American soldier, a combat veteran, a squad leader.
Not every ambush was so uneventful. Sometimes we found Charlie, sometimes it was the other way.
In the month of May, we broke camp at three in the morning, Captain Johansen leading three platoons on a ghostly, moonlit march to a village in the vicinity of the My Lais. Johansen deployed the platoons in a broad circle around the village, forming a loose cordon. The idea was to gun down the Viet Cong as they left the ville before daybreak—intelligence had it that some sort of VC meeting was in progress. If no one exited by daybreak, the Third Platoon would sweep the village, driving the enemy into the rest of us.
Alpha Company pulled it off like professionals.
We were quiet, the cordon was drawn quickly, securely. I carried Captain Johansen’s radio, and along with him, an artillery forward observer, and three other RTOs, we grouped along a paddy dike outside the village. Captain Johansen directed things by radio.
In less than an hour the Second Platoon opened up on four VC leaving by a north-south trail. Seconds later, more gunfire. Third Platoon was engaged.
Second Platoon called in again, confirming a kill. The stars were out. The Southern Cross was up there, smiling down on Alpha Company.
The artillery officer got busy, calling back to the rear, preparing the big guns for a turkey shoot, rapidly readingoff grid coordinates, excited that we’d finally found the enemy.
Johansen was happy. He’d lost many men to the Forty-eighth Viet Cong Battalion. He was getting his revenge.
Rodriguez, one of the RTOs, suddenly uttered something in Spanish, changed it to English, and pointed out to our front. Three silhouettes were tiptoeing out of the hamlet. They were twenty yards away, crouched over, their shoulders hunched forward.
It was the first and only time I would ever see the living enemy, the men intent on killing me. Johansen whispered, “Aim low—when you miss, it’s because you’re shooting over the target.”
We stood straight up, in a row, as if it were a contest.
I confronted the profile of a human being through my sight. It did not occur to me that a man would die when I pulled the trigger of that rifle.
I neither hated the man nor wanted him dead, but I feared him.
Johansen fired. I fired.
The figures disappeared in the flash of my muzzle. Johansen hollered at us to put our M-16s on automatic, and we sent hundreds of bullets out across the paddy. Someone threw a grenade out at them.
With daybreak, Captain Johansen and the artillery lieutenant walked over and found a man with a bullet hole in his head. There were no weapons. The dead man carried a pouch of papers, some rice, tobacco, canned fish, and he wore a blue-green uniform. That, at least, was Johansen’s report. I would not look. I wondered what the other two men, the lucky two, had done after our volley. I wondered if they’d stopped to help the dead man, if they had been angry at his death, or only frightened that they might die. I wondered if the dead man were a relative of the others and, if so, what it must have been to leave him lying in the rice. I hoped the dead man was not named Li.
Later, Johansen and the lieutenant talked about the mechanics of the ambush. They agreed it had been perfectly executed. They were mildly upset that with such large and well-defined targets we had not done better than one in three. No matter. The platoons had registered other kills. They were talking these matters over, the officers pleased with their success and the rest of us relieved it was over, when my friend Chip and a squad leader named Tom were blown to pieces as they swept the village with the Third Platoon.
That was Alpha Company’s most successful ambush.
Ten
The Man at the Well
He was just an old man, an old Vietnamese farmer. His hair was white, and he was somewhere over seventy years, stooped and hunched from work in the paddies, his spine bent into a permanent, calcified arc. He was blind. His eyes were huge and empty, glistening like aluminum under the sun, cauterized and burnt out. But the old man got around.
In March we came to his well. He stood and smiled while we used the water. He laughed when we laughed. To be ingratiating he said, “Good water for good GIs.” Whenever there was occasion, he repeated the phrase.
Some children came to the well, and one of them, a little girl with black hair and hoops of steel through her ears, took the old fellow’s hand, helping him about. The kids giggled at our naked bodies. A boy took a soldier’s rifle from out of the mud and wiped it and stacked it against a tree, and the old man smiled.
Alpha Company decided to spend the day in the old man’s village. We lounged inside his hut, and when resupply choppers brought down cold beer and food, we ate and wasted away the day. The kids administered professional back rubs, chopping and stretching and pushing our blood. They eyed our C rations, and the old blind man helped when he could.
When the wind stopped and the flies became bothersome, we went to the well again. We showered, and the old fellow helped, dipping into the well and yanking up buckets of water and sloshing it over our heads and backs and bellies. The kids watched him wash us. The day was as hot and peaceful as a day can be.
The blind old farmer was showering one of the men. A blustery and stupid soldier, blond hair and big belly, picked up a carton of milk and from fifteen feet away hurled it, for no reason, aiming at the old man and striking him flush in the face. The carton burst. Milk sprayed into the old man’s cataracts. He hunched forward, rocking precariously and searching for balance. He dropped his bucket. His hands went to his eyes then dropped loosely to his thighs. His blind gaze fixed straight ahead, at the stupid soldier’s feet. His tongue moved a little, trying to get at the cut and tasting the blood and milk. No one moved to help. The kids were quiet. The old man’s eyes did a funny trick, almost rolling out of his head, out of sight. He was motionless, and finally he smiled. He picked up the bucket and with the ruins of goodness spread over him, perfect gore, he dunked into the well and came up with water, and he began showering the next soldier.
Eleven
Assault
On the twelfth day of April, Erik wrote me, and on the sixteenth day I sat on a rucksack and opened his letter. He was at Long Binh, working as a transportation clerk. I was on a hill. It was a hill in the middle of the bomb-grayed Batangan Peninsula, at a place we called Landing Zone Minuteman.
&n
bsp; April 16 was hot, just as every day in April had been hot. First, in the April mornings, came the signs of the day. An absolutely cloudless sky crept out of the dark over the sea. The early mornings were clear, like a kind of distorted glass. A person could see impossible things. But the sun mounted, and the sky focused it on LZ Minuteman. By ten o’clock each morning, the rifles and uncovered canteens and ammo were untouchable. We let the stuff lay.
Sometimes, before the tepid swamp of air moved into its killer phase, Captain Johansen would move us off LZ Minuteman and we would sweat out the April morning on the march. We would search a hamlet carelessly, hurrying to get out of the sun. We would taunt some Vietnamese, applaud an occasional well or creek, find nothing, and finally retire to the top of our hill for the worst of each day.
We ignored the Viet Cong. We fought over piles of dead wood. We hacked poles out of the stuff, rammed them into the ground, and spread our ponchos over the poles, forming little roofs. Then we lay like prisoners in the resulting four square feet of shade.
The sun owned the afternoon. It broiled Alpha Company, that dusty red hill the skillet. We came to accept the sun as our most persistent and cunning enemy. All the training and discipline and soldierly skill in the world vanished during those April afternoons. We slept under our shelters, off guard, and no one cared. We waited for resupply. Occasionally a patrol would go down the hill to search out water. I sat with the radio, prodding and sometimes begging the rear to speed things up. Alpha was a fat company. We took our oranges and sacks of cold Coke for granted, like haircuts and bullets. There could be no war without them.
During those April afternoons Captain Johansen or the artillery officer would call for the chess set, and we passed time watching my white, clean army succumb. We wrote letters. We slept. I tried poetry and short stories. Other times we talked, and I tried to pry Johansen into conversation about the war. But he was an officer, and he was practical, and he would only talk tactics or history, and if I asked his opinion about the politics or morality of it all, he was ready with a joke or a shrug, sending the conversations into limbo or to more certain ground. Johansen was the best man around, and during the April afternoons it was sad he wore his bars.