Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  They desperately wanted to go back. They tried a half dozen times. They drew maps. But they could never find it; they never knew where they had been. The boys hitchhiked a lot after that. But they never found a place that great again.

  John entered Garden City High School in 1965, the year the first marines landed at Da Nang. He had grown into some of his tallness and, with his short blond hair and squaring jaw, looked every week more man than kid. He made friends easily, especially among guys who appreciated his wild side, a side that could hitchhike fifty miles or rebuild a motorcycle’s suicide shifter.

  John’s academic averageness continued in high school. But as sophomore year unfolded, he began to get a handle on impressions that had been just vague companions since grade school. Garden City was isolated, he thought, enveloped by a protective bubble that shielded residents from all that was going on in the rest of the world. People’s concerns seemed small—they worried about who owned the best vacation house or whether Dad would pop for the Auxiliary Air Spring Kit for their new Mustang. Neighbors claimed to favor civil rights and even went out of their way to invoke the positives of having a “black boy” in the high school, but there were no minorities or working-class folks living in Garden City.

  As John became an upperclassman, he continued his love affair with the beach. Still, he never dreamed of becoming a world-class fisherman or a champion surfer or the next Jacques Cousteau. Aside from his grandfather, he had no heroes. He didn’t even have a nickname, a fact that he believed kind of summed it up about him in high school. But he always thought big about the ocean. Every time he looked at the Atlantic he marveled at the vastness of the world that must lie beyond Garden City.

  In 1968, John’s junior year, reports poured in about unthinkable war casualties all around Vietnam. Everyone had an opinion, and John listened to all of them. But the more John absorbed these viewpoints, the more he suspected that these people didn’t really know. It was not that he doubted their conviction; in fact, he admired their passion and felt invigorated by the era. But he asked himself about the lives of the people behind the opinions, and the more he asked, the more he became convinced that few of them had ever gone out and looked for themselves.

  By this time, John’s parents had divorced and his father had moved to California. One evening, John’s father called home and asked his son about his future. John knew what his dad wanted to hear—that he would apply to Yale and then pursue a field worthy of the mind. Instead, John found strange words pouring out of his mouth. He told his father that he intended to explore the world, not as a tourist or an intellectual, but in search of answers. He told his father he didn’t know where he was going, just that he had to go, that he had to see for himself.

  “The hell you are!” his father exploded. Jack had started his own business and had just invented the circuitry for the Bar-O-Matic, the device that allows bartenders to pour several sodas from a single hose. He was riding high. He had money. John would come work for him.

  “That’s your plan. That’s not my plan,” John said.

  “If you don’t do it, John, you will end up a common laborer.”

  John hung up the phone.

  Early in 1969, during John’s final semester of high school, a girl attended one of his classes wearing a black armband. B-52 bombers had conducted recent heavy raids against targets near the Cambodian border. American protesters were demanding that the United States leave Vietnam. The girl made strong statements that day; she believed in her antiwar message. John pictured himself as a soldier risking his life in combat and wondered whether he would appreciate this girl and her armband and her fist, but he could not decide; he did not have enough information. And this was John’s central problem in life, right there in the classroom, right next to the girl with the armband and students chanting, “Right on!” He didn’t have answers. He had never gone and seen for himself.

  John hit on an idea: the military could take him into the world; by joining the military he could see for himself. He asked himself if he could kill a person or fight for a cause he might come to despise. Again, he had no good answer. Then he had an epiphany: he could volunteer as a medic. No matter how ugly things got, as a medic he could help people instead of killing people. He could stay positive and still have a first-person experience with the most important questions in the world.

  He first considered the navy, his grandfather’s branch. But the navy made provisions for the grandchildren of heroes, and John wanted no special treatment. Other branches would not guarantee a specialty. Only the army promised to make a volunteer a medic in return for a four-year commitment. John enlisted.

  In January 1970, the army assigned Private Chatterton to the neurosurgical ward of the 249th General Hospital in Asaka, Japan. He was eighteen. The ward existed for a single purpose: to treat the horrors of war. Every day, wounded American soldiers arrived in waves as if coming over a hill, some missing the backs of their skulls, others with torn spines, still others delirious or screaming for Mother or with sideways faces. Chatterton bathed patients, applied their dressings, turned them in bed as they tried to recover from damage done by ingeniously cruel weapons. Many of the patients were Chatterton’s age. Sometimes a soldier would look at him before surgery and say, “I’m paralyzed, man.” On the ward, Chatterton might let his mind wander for a moment and try to fathom life for a man suddenly without his body at eighteen.

  If a soldier had it good in 1970, that soldier was Chatterton. He rode trains and drank beer and dined often in Asaka’s sukiyaki houses. He liked his work—it was emotional and important. He was seeing the world. He was out of harm’s way. But as he watched the parade of ruined lives delivered to the neuro ward, he began to ask questions that would not go away: What caused people to do this to one another? How is this happening to these guys? What is going on over that hill?

  Chatterton studied the wounded. Mostly he watched their eyes as doctors explained about wheelchairs and breathing tubes, and their eyes always seemed to stare straight ahead, as if the men were looking through the doctor. To Chatterton, these soldiers were not “Charge of the Light Brigade” types. They looked stunned, afraid, lonely. But they also looked like they knew something Chatterton did not know.

  As months passed and busloads of neurosurgical patients poured through the 249th, Chatterton’s questions grew more urgent. He devoured newspapers, read books, and sought out conversations, but those sources only told him about politics; they couldn’t explain how the world could have come to this. He got the feeling again, the same one he’d had on the beach as a boy, that he would have to go see for himself.

  Chatterton began telling friends that he might request a transfer to Vietnam. Their response was immediate and unanimous: “Are you fucking crazy?” He tested the idea on his superiors. They pleaded with him to reconsider and explained that neurosurgical ward duty was among a soldier’s highest callings. He told them that this was not about patriotism or anything noble like that—he just needed to understand. Even the wounded pleaded with Chatterton. “Don’t go, man—it’s a big mistake,” they said. A paralyzed soldier told him, “Stay here, do your time, and go home. I’m wasted, but you’re still good and you gotta stay good.” But Chatterton requested the transfer. In June 1970, he was on an airplane to Chu Lai in South Vietnam.

  Chatterton was assigned to the 4th Battalion 31st Infantry of the Americal Division. When he landed, he was told to report to the battalion aid station on a firebase near the Laotian border, a place called LZ West. He reached the firebase late that morning.

  Around noon, a telephone rang on the base. A man answered, said nothing for a moment, then mumbled, “Shit” into the receiver. Soon everyone on the base began scrambling. An administrative officer called to Chatterton, “Get your gear! A medic in the field just got killed getting off a helicopter. You’re taking his place.” Chatterton wasn’t sure if he heard the guy correctly. He was replacing a dead medic? On a helicopter? In the field? Then the same man be
gan to sob and his eyes went wild, a look Chatterton had seen on those suffering nervous breakdowns in the Japanese hospital.

  Chatterton stood in place as men grabbed weapons and gear and zigzagged around him. He did not know where to go or what to do. A minute later, a smallish man with scruffy brown hair grabbed his arm and told him, “Listen, I’m a medic, too. I’ll get you ready to go out there.” The medic looked old, at least twenty-four. He introduced himself as “Mouse.”

  “Follow me,” Mouse said.

  Mouse led Chatterton to a bunker on the firebase. It would be a few hours before the helicopter arrived to take Chatterton into the jungle. Until then, Mouse said he would show Chatterton the ropes. “If you want, man, we can talk while we work,” he said.

  In the bunker, Mouse stuffed Chatterton’s aid bag with the field medic’s tools—malaria pills, tetracycline, morphine, IV, tape, scissors, field dressings—and explained the jungle way to use them all, unhappy methods more sudden than Chatterton had learned in the hospital. In between, he spoke to Chatterton of Vietnam.

  “I hate the war,” Mouse said. “But I’m here. I do everything I can for the men. I’m here to be a good medic. The war is irrelevant to me. Over here, being a good medic is my life.”

  Mouse labeled the malaria and dysentery pills, pulled buckles around Chatterton’s gear, and told him to carry a small aid bag in addition to the larger one thought sufficient by average medics. On patrol, he told Chatterton, a great medic separates his trauma supplies from the allergy and stomach-cramp shit—you don’t lug antihistamines to treat a bullet wound to the head.

  “These guys are your responsibility,” Mouse continued. “For me, I have to do right by my men. That’s the only thing that matters—the men. They’re the only thing.”

  Chatterton asked Mouse about the .45-caliber pistol he kept on his hip—didn’t field medics arm themselves better than that?

  “A lot of medics carry a rifle or machine gun,” Mouse said. “The only reason I carry a weapon at all is to protect a guy who’s down. I’m not willing to let the enemy finish a guy I’m treating just because I’m unarmed. But I won’t carry an offensive weapon. I’m no warrior. I leave the heavy stuff behind. It’s symbolic in a way. It reminds me why I’m here.”

  For the next two hours, Chatterton lost himself in Mouse’s philosophy. Mouse had ideas about courage and dedication and conviction that Chatterton had known were true but could never enunciate. For those two hours, Chatterton forgot that his life would be on the line that day.

  A helicopter arrived. Someone shouted, “Let’s go!” Mouse helped stuff hand grenades and a poncho into Chatterton’s pack, then quizzed him a final time on which pill treated which ailment. Chatterton grabbed his helmet. He strapped a .45-caliber pistol to his hip.

  “One more thing,” Mouse said. “A lot of the stuff you do out there, you’re going to have to live with all the way down the line. You’ll have to make decisions out there. When that happens, you have to ask yourself, ‘Where do I want to be in ten years, twenty years? How will I want to feel about this decision when I’m an old man?’ That’s the question for making important decisions.”

  Chatterton nodded and shook Mouse’s hand. Mouse would remain at the base. Chatterton wondered if he would see this man again. He could only think to say, “Thanks a lot, Mouse. Good-bye.” Then he climbed into the chopper and sat on a case of C rations—no seats, no seat belts—and the machine lifted away, disappearing above the trees and into the sun on its way to the real Vietnam.

  The helicopter released Chatterton and several boxes of supplies in the jungle, then disappeared back into the sky. For what seemed an eternity, there was no one else there. Finally, Chatterton heard rustling behind a patch of trees. He turned toward the sound to see a dozen men emerging from the jungle, Western men with filthy faces, long hair, and scraggly beards. To Chatterton, it appeared as if a California motorcycle gang had materialized in Vietnam. The men walked toward him dressed in torn olive T-shirts and shredded pants. None wore a helmet or flak jacket or other military garb. As they came nearer, it seemed to Chatterton that each soldier carried the same expression, the look of a man who could no longer be surprised.

  The soldiers broke open the supply boxes and began to outfit themselves. None said a word to Chatterton, including another medic assigned to the company command post. Every so often, one of them would glance up at Chatterton with a tired disgust that was an unmistakable subtitle in Vietnam: You don’t know shit. You won’t be around long. If we need help, you probably won’t deliver. As the men finished packing, one of them grunted to Chatterton, “Let’s go.” The men made up a small platoon. They were on the move to a new location. While in transit, they were to hunt and kill North Vietnamese as necessary. The group walked into the jungle. Chatterton walked with them in the single-file line.

  The men crossed rice paddies, swatted bird-sized insects, slogged through alligator-infested rivers, stepped over a machine-gunned buffalo. An hour into the jungle, shots rang out. The platoon hit the ground. Chatterton was the last man down. Bullets polka-dotted the dirt around them. Chatterton believed his heart was going to explode. When the shooting stopped, he looked around. The expressions on the faces around him had remained exactly as they were when he’d first seen them. Minutes later the men resumed walking. Chatterton pulled himself together and joined them. When his breath returned and his brain began working again, he thought to himself, “These guys are crazed killers. Nobody is talking to me. Where the hell am I? What have I done?”

  The platoon spent the evening under a sweltering moon. While the others slept, Chatterton lay awake. At dawn, he saw a tiger disappear into the jungle. The next day, as the temperature broke one hundred degrees, the platoon arrived on the outskirts of an abandoned village. Reports indicated enemy soldiers in the vicinity. Other than Chatterton, the men in the platoon were heavily armed and primed for such a confrontation, none more so than John “Ace” Lacko, a twenty-eight-year-old New Jersey paperhanger whom Chatterton had pegged as the platoon’s top dog. Lacko, six foot two and 220 pounds, was completing his third tour, an old-timer by Vietnam standards. He carried an M-60 machine gun with seven hundred rounds crisscrossed on assault straps slung over his chest—the era’s definition of locked and loaded. Lacko had earned the nickname “Ace” for the black playing card he was said to leave on the chests of the enemies he had killed.

  The platoon walked single file as they began the patrol. Before long, they came to a dried-up rice paddy that looked to provide easy passage through the otherwise hilly terrain. They entered the open area, scanning the hillside for the enemy. About fifty yards into the clearing, Lacko stepped up onto a rock to get a better view of the surroundings. Shots rang out from a hillside forward left. Five rounds, two of them armor-piercing, tore through Lacko’s left hip and traveled clear through to his right hip. Stunned, he placed his gear on the ground and lay down, partially camouflaging himself in the two-foot grass. Blood began flowing from his wounds. The rest of the platoon turned back and took cover behind a ten-foot pile of dirt and rocks back near the opening to the field. Someone yelled, “Ace is hit! Medic! Medic!” Chatterton and the other medic crawled forward. They could see Lacko’s outline in the grass about fifty yards away. He was in the open, a clear target. The enemy would not finish him; they were likely waiting for a medic to run out, giving them two kills for the price of one.

  The platoon’s other medic, Chatterton’s superior, hugged close to the protective cover made by the wall of dirt.

  “Fuck it, I’m not going out there,” he told Chatterton.

  The platoon could only glare at the man. As for Chatterton, they expected him to do even less. No greenhorn on his second day in Vietnam was going to run onto a shooting range.

  “I’ll get him,” Chatterton said.

  The platoon went silent. No one was more surprised than Chatterton. He began to remove his gear, all except for the small aid bag Mouse had packed for him.


  “Christ, the kid’s gonna go,” someone said.

  The platoon began to take position to provide cover fire. With each moment, Chatterton’s vision narrowed and the jungle sounds compressed, until the only impressions in his world were his own heaving breaths and pounding heart. Chatterton had contemplated moments like this at the hospital in Japan. He believed that if he was ever faced with such a decision, he could call upon the lessons of his grandfather. Now, as he readied himself to make the naked run to Lacko, he thought to himself, “I’m going to find out what I am.”

  Chatterton sprinted into the open. A barrage of gunfire rang from the hillside far left. Bullets sprayed dirt around Chatterton, but he kept running. Halfway to his man, he could see Lacko lying in the grass. He ran faster. The ground in front of him staccatoed with gunfire. Behind him, he could hear his platoon returning fire so thick that the sky itself began to explode. Chatterton expected to be killed, he kept waiting to fall, but a blur of a feeling kept him from turning back, and that feeling was that he did not want to go through life knowing that he had given up. A second later he slid into the grass next to Lacko.

  “I was laying there and the numbness and shock were setting in,” Lacko recalls today. “And I see this new guy, here comes this new guy, and he’s coming with everything he’s got. I didn’t know him at all, didn’t even know his name. But he put himself right in the line of fire. The guy was risking his life.”

  Chatterton took cover in the grass beside Lacko. Bullets tore up the ground around them. Chatterton reached into his supply bag for scissors, slit Lacko’s pants top to bottom, and looked for arterial damage. There was none. Lacko could be moved immediately. Now Chatterton had to get him back to the protection of the dirt wall, a distance of fifty yards that seemed to stretch across all Vietnam.