If I Die in a Combat Zone

by Tim O'Brien

  The rest of the men talked about their girls, about R & R and where they would go and how much they would drink and where the girls performed the best tricks. I was a believer during those talks. The vets told it in a real, firsthand way that made you hunger for Thailand and Manila. When they said to watch for the ones with razor blades in their vaginas—communist agents—I believed, imagining the skill and commitment of those women.

  We lay under our shelters and talked about rumors. On the sixteenth of April the rumor was that Alpha Company would be leaving soon. We would be CA’d into Pinkville. Men uttered the rumor carefully, trying to phrase it in more dramatic ways than it had come to them. But the words were drama enough. We feared Pinkville. We feared the Combat Assault. Johansen gave no hints, so we waited for resupply and hoped it wasn’t so.

  At three in the afternoon my radio buzzed and word came that resupply was inbound. Johansen had us spread out security for the chopper. When the pile of sacks and jugs and boxes was tossed off the bird, he hollered for everyone to stop clustering around the stuff. It was the big moment of April 16, and we were nothing but the children and hot civilians of the war, naked and thirsty and without pride. The stuff was dispersed. By three-thirty we had returned to our shelters, swearing that if the sun was our worst enemy, then the Coca-Cola Company certainly snuggled in as our best friend.

  Next in order was the mail. And Erik:

  Unclothed, poetry is much like newspaper writing, an event of the mind, the advent of an idea—bam!—you record it like a spring flood or the latest quintuplets. Which, after a sorely strained metaphor, brings me to the subject of the poems you sent me. If Frost was correct when he said a poem must be like a cake of ice on a stove, riding on its own melting, then the Dharma poem rides well indeed. I especially like the lines “truly/brutally/we are the mercenaries of a green and wet forest;” also, the juxtaposition of the last line to the whole of the poem is so effortless, so ephemeral, like the last ice crystal made liquid, that I can’t help but regret its melting: “Moksa, which is freedom.”

  In the rather limited reading I’ve done lately, I’ve discovered the poet Robinson Jeffers. His writing is harsh yet beautiful, and it makes me think of April, and April turns me to The Waste Land, and for a reason I do fully understand, the first lines of The Waste Land turn my thoughts not to England, but rather to you, here, in Vietnam. Take care. For it is not a fantasy:

  April is the cruelest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  April went on without lilacs. Without rain. When the choppers came in, they scooped dunes of red dust off LZ Minuteman, stirring the soil in their rotor blades, spewing clouds of rust color for a hundred yards. We learned to hide when the choppers made their drops. We stuffed our clean paper and clothes and apples into plastic bags. Minuteman was like the planet Mars. The place was desolate, hostile, utterly and vastly boring.

  The days in April multiplied like twins, sextuplets, each identical. We played during the days. Volleyball. Gin. Tag. Poker or chess. Mad Mark had fun with his riot gas grenades, tossing them into a bunker and watching the artillery officer scramble out in tears. Captain Johansen and the battalion commander, Colonel Daud, flew overhead in a helicopter, dumping gas grenades onto the LZ. It was a training exercise. The idea was to test our reaction time, to make sure our gas masks were functioning. Mostly, though, it was to pass away the month of April.

  At night we were supposed to send out ambushes, orders of Colonel Daud. Sometimes we did, other times, we did not. If the officers decided that the men were too tired or too restless for a night’s ambush, they would prepare a set of grid coordinates and call them into battalion headquarters. It would be a false report, a fake. The artilleryman would radio phony information to the big guns in the rear. The 105s or 155s would blast out their expensive rounds of marking explosives, and the lieutenant would call back his bogus adjustments, chewing out someone in the rear for poor marksmanship. During the night’s radio watch, we would call our nonexistent ambush, asking for a nonexistent situation report. We’d pause a moment, change our voice by a decibel, and answer our own call: “Sit Rep is negative. Out.” We did this once an hour for the entire night, covering the possibility that higher headquarters might be monitoring the net. Foolproof. The enlisted men, all of us, were grateful to Alpha’s officers. And the officers justified it, muttering that Colonel Daud was a greenhorn, too damn gung-ho. Phony ambushes were good for morale, best game we played on LZ Minuteman.

  The rumors persisted. Near the end of the month they picked up steam; they became specific. Alpha Company would be CA’d into the My Lai area. A long operation. The helicopters would carry us to Pinkville before the end of the month. But the rumors had no source. To ask for a source was folly, for you would eventually be referred to the sun or to the rice or to a man who would have to ask someone else. Johansen only shrugged.

  Four days before the end of the month, we were pulled off LZ Minuteman. We were given three days of rest in Chu Lai, a sprawling and safe military base along the South China Sea. Drinking, whistling, and gaping at the women in the floor shows, we killed the days and nights. On the final day of rest, Colonel Daud confirmed it. He played a strong but loving father. He drew Alpha Company into a semicircle and told everyone to be at ease.

  “You’re going after the VC Forty-eighth Battalion,” he said. He was a black man, a stout and proper soldier. He didn’t smile, but we were supposed to like him for that. “The Forty-eighth Battalion is a helluva fighting unit. They’re tough. Some of you have tangled with them before. They’re smart. That’s what makes them tough. They’ll hit you when you’re sleeping. You look down to tie your boot laces, and they’ll hit you. You fall asleep on guard—they’ll massacre you. You walk along the trails, where they plant the mines because Americans are lazy and don’t like to walk in the rice paddies, and they’ll blow you all back to the world. Dead.”

  Colonel Daud seemed to think we were a bunch of morons. He thought he was teaching us, helping us to live. And he was sending us out there anyway.

  “Okay. So you gotta be smart, too. You gotta be smarter. You’re American soldiers. You’re stronger than the dink. You’re bigger. You’re faster. You’re better educated. You’re better supplied, better trained, better supported. All you need is brains. Common sense will do it. If you’re sleepy on guard, wake up a buddy, have him take over. Be alert while you’re on the march. Watch the bushes. Keep an eye out for freshly turned earth. If something seems out of place, stay clear of it and tell your buddy to stay clear. Okay? Pinkville is a bad place, I know that. But if you’re dumb, you’ll die in New York City.”

  Daud flew away in his helicopter. “Christ, what a pompous asshole.” It was an officer. “Sends us to Pinkville and says we’ll be okay if we’re smart. New York, my ass.”

  I wrote a letter to Erik. Then there was a floor show. A Korean stripper started in her black evening gown and silver jewelry. She did it to Paul Simon and Arthur Garfunkel’s music. Homeward bound, I wish I was, homeward bound. She had big breasts, big for a gook everyone said, damn sure. Pinkville. Christ, of all the places in the world, it would be Pinkville. The mines. Sullen, twisted dinks.

  The Korean stripped suddenly, poked a tan and prime-lean thigh through a slit in the black gown. She was the prettiest woman in the Orient. Her beastly, unnaturally large breasts quivered like Jell-O.

  The men cheered when the gown slid by wonderful accident from her shoulders.

  It seemed to embarrass her, and she rolled her back, turning slightly away from Alpha Company and flexing her shoulderblades.

  She was in time with the music. She unwrapped herself. She took up a baton, and she prodded herself with it.

  The band played Beatles music, Hey, Jude, don’t be afraid. Take a sad song and make it better. Remember. The girl finished stripping and sang the words. And anytime you feel the pain
, Hey Jude, refrain, don’t carry the world upon your shoulder.

  Everyone sang, slowly and with an ache, getting drunk, and the Korean beat time against her brown leg.

  On April 29 we were on the helipad before dawn. With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head. The helmet seems heavy and awkward. It is painful, in a slow and torturous way, to stumble to the pad under a sixty-pound rucksack, not easy to tote a rifle.

  We lay in private groups on the tarred parking lot of an airfield. The black soldiers joked and were too loud for the early morning. They had their own piece of the helipad, and only officers would interrupt them. Out over the sea the sun began to light the day. Captain Johansen talked with his lieutenants; then he lay on his back. We smoked and thought about the Korean stripper and about hometowns. I made a communications check with battalion headquarters, wiped off my M-16, and put oil on the working parts. Some of the men complained about having to carry extra M-60 ammunition. The squad leaders were harsh, trying to be leaders in the morning. We exchanged cans of C rations, turkey loaf for pork slices, applesauce for peaches. All the noise ruined the early morning, the time when pure silence is only right, the time that is for thought alone.

  With the first sunlight, Colonel Daud flew over. He radioed down. The first formation of choppers had an ETA of 0605 hours; they would arrive in four minutes. The landing zone in Pinkville seemed quiet, he said. Fourteen miles to the south, the villagers of My Khe were sleeping.

  Then the helicopters came in. They carried the day’s hard light with them. It was already hot. Third Platoon and the command unit waddled to the birds and climbed in. We knelt or sat with our legs dangling over the open lips of the choppers. We shouted, trying to cheer up our friends. The helicopters roared, rose very slowly, dipped their noses forward, and climbed.

  It was a short, hopelessly short ride. Chu Lai and the jets and PXs and clubs and libraries and USO and friendly beaches were down there; then came the guard towers and fences; and then came the countryside. Clusters of hamlets, paddies, hedgegrows, tunnel openings. Riding along, we watched for movement along the trails. It was too early.

  You begin to sweat. Even with the rotor blades whipping cold air around like an air-conditioner, you sweat.

  You light a cigarette, trying to think of something to say. A good joke would help, something funny. Laughing makes you believe you are resigned if not brave.

  You stare at the faces. The Vietnamese scout, a kid who looked younger than my fourteen-year-old brother, was scared. Some of the other men seemed unconcerned. I felt tired, thinking I should be in bed, wondering if I were ill.

  Johansen pointed down. It was an expanse of rice paddy, bordered on one side by a ridge of forest and on the other side by one of the village of My Khe. “That’s the place,” he said. “When we begin the descent, grab my shoulder harness and hold on. If I’m hit, I don’t want to fall out of this chopper.”

  We started to go down. The worst part of the Combat. Assault, the thing you think about on the way down, is how perfectly exposed you are. Nowhere to hide. A fragile machine. No foxholes, no rocks, no gullies. The CA is the army’s most potent offensive tactic of the war, a cousin to Hitler’s blitzkrieg. The words are “agile,” “hostile,” and “mobile.” One moment the world is serene, in another moment the war is there. It is like the cloudburst, like lightning, like the dropping of the bomb on a sleeping Hiroshima, like the Nazis’ rush through Belgium and Poland and France.

  You sit in your helicopter, watching the earth come spinning up at you. You jam your magazine into the rifle.

  We came in at tree level, and the helicopter’s machine guns opened up on the forested ridge, spraying down protective fire.

  I held on to Johansen’s shoulder straps. We waited for the crack of enemy fire, trying to hear above the sound of the bird and our own fire. The helicopter nestled into its landing area, hovering and trembling over the paddy, and we piled out like frantic rats. We scrambled for paddy dikes and depressions and rocks.

  Bates lay beside me. “Jesus,” he whispered, “I got a fire burning in my gut, I’m so scared. A big fire right in my gut.”

  There was no incoming fire, a cold LZ. Johansen waited until the helicopters were in the sky again. Running and waving, he got us to our feet, and we raced to search out the village. Someone spotted Vietnamese running from the village on the northern edge. We chased them. We felt confident and happy to be alive, and we felt brave. Simply surviving the assault was blessing enough, something of a mandate for aggressiveness, and we charged like storm troopers through My Khe.

  It ended with two dead enemy soldiers and one dead American, a fellow I clobbered in Ping-Pong back in Chu Lai.

  More Combat Assaults came in the next days. We learned to hate Colonel Daud and his force of helicopters. When he was killed by sappers in a midnight raid, we heard the news over the radio. A lieutenant led us in song, a catchy, happy, celebrating song: Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead. We sang in good harmony. It sounded like a choir.

  Twelve

  Mori

  She had been shot once. The bullet tore through her green uniform and into her buttock and out through her groin. She lay on her side, sprawled against a paddy dike. She never opened her eyes.

  She moaned a little, not much, but she screamed when the medic touched at her wound. Blood gushed out of the holes, front and back.

  Her face lay in dirt. Flies were all over her. There was no shade. It was mid-afternoon of a hot day. The medic said he did not dare squirt morphine into her, it would kill her before the wound did. He tried to patch the holes, but she squirmed and twisted, rocked and swayed, never opening her eyes. She flickered in and out of consciousness.

  “She’s a pretty woman, pretty for a gook. You don’t see many pretty gooks, that’s damn sure.”

  “Yes. Trouble is, she’s shot dead through the wrong place.” A dozen GIs hovered over her.

  “Look at that blood come, Jesus. Like a fuckin’ waterfall, like fuckin’ Niagara Falls. She’s gonna die quick. Can’t mend up them bullet holes, no way.”

  “Fuckin’-aye. She’s wasted.”

  “I wish I could help her.” The man who shot her knelt down. “Didn’t know she was a woman, she just looked like any dink. God, she must hurt. Get the damn flies off her, give her some peace.”

  She stretched her arms out above her head. She spread her fingers wide and put her hands into the dirt and squeezed in a sort of rhythm. Her forehead was wrinkled in a dozen long, flushed creases; her eyes were closed.

  The man who shot her peered into her face. He asked if she couldn’t be given shade.

  “She’s going to die,” one soldier said.

  “But can’t we give her some shade?” He swatted at a cloud of flies over her head.

  “Can’t carry her, she won’t let us. She’s NVA, green uniform and everything. Hell, she’s probably an NVA nurse, she probably knows she’s just going to die. Look at her squeeze her hands. Trying to hurry and press all the blood out of herself.”

  We called for a dustoff helicopter and the company spread out in a wide perimeter around the shot woman. It was a long wait, partly because she was going to die, helicopter or no helicopter, and partly because she was with the enemy.

  Her hair was lustrous black. The man who shot her stroked her hair. Two other soldiers and a medic stood beside her, fanning her and waving at the flies. Her uniform was crusted an almost black color from her blood, and the wound hadn’t clotted much. The man who shot her held his canteen to her lips and she drank some Kool-Aid.

  Then she twisted her head from side to side. She pulled her legs up to her chest and rocked, her whole body swaying. The man who shot her poured a trickle of water onto her forehead.

  Soon she stopped swaying. She lay still and seemed either dead or unconscious. The medic felt her pulse and shrugged and said she was still going, just barely. She moaned now and then, almost talking in her sleep, but she was not being shrill
or hysterical. The medic said she was not feeling any more pain.

  “Damn, she is pretty. It’s a crime. We could have shot an ugly old man instead.”

  When the helicopter came, she was still. Some soldiers lifted her onto a poncho and took her to the chopper. She lay curled up on the floor of the helicopter, then the bird roared and went into the air. Soon the pilot radioed down and asked what we were doing, making him risk his neck for sake of a dead woman.

  Thirteen

  My Lai in May

  The villages of My Lai are scattered like wild seed in and around Pinkville, a flat stretch of sandy red clay along the northern coast of South Vietnam. “Pinkville” is a silly, county-fairish misnomer for such a sullen piece of the world. From the infantryman’s perspective, zigzagging through one of the most heavily mined areas in the war zone, there is little pink or rosy about Pinkville: mud huts more often deserted than not, bombed-out pagodas, the patently hostile faces of Pinkville’s inhabitants, acre after acre of slush, paddy after paddy, a dirty maze of elaborate tunnels and bomb shelters and graves.

  The place gets its name from the fact that military maps color it a shimmering shade of elephant pink, signifying what the map legends call a “built-up area.” Perhaps it once was. Perhaps Pinkville once upon a time was a thriving part of Quang Ngai province. It is no longer.

  Pinkville and the villages called My Lai were well known to Alpha Company. Even before the headlines and before the names Calley and Medina took their place in history, Pinkville was a feared and special place on the earth. In January, a month or so before I arrived in Vietnam, less than a year after the slaughter in My Lai 4, Alpha Company took part in massive Operation Russell Beach, joining forces with other army elements, boatloads of marines, the navy and air force. Subject of the intricately planned and much-touted campaign was Pinkville and the Batangan Peninsula. Both had long served as Charlie’s answer to the American R & R center—friendly natives, home-cooked rice, and nearly total sanctuary from American foot soldiers. Despite publicity and War College strategy, the operation did not produce the anticipated results, and this unit learned some hard lessons about Pinkville. There was no reliable criterion by which to distinguish a pretty Vietnamese girl from a deadly enemy; often they were one and the same person. The unit triggered one mine after another during Operation Russell Beach. Frustration and anger built with each explosion and betrayal, one Oriental face began to look like any other, hostile and black, and Alpha Company was boiling with hate when it was pulled out of Pinkville.