Last Man Out
Page 19
“Who’s on duty?” he asked quietly and slowly.
I got to my feet and turned toward the clock on the wall. It was 1520. Theoretically, I had been on duty for twenty minutes.
Dunn and Crash both said, “He is,” and pointed at me.
The colonel took a step in and put his map case on one of the tables below the radios. He continued to look at me very seriously.
Dunn and Crash said, “Excuse us,” and walked out. Standing behind the colonel, Dunn had an exaggerated smile on his face, his eyes wide and twinkling, as he closed the door to the van.
Inside, the air conditioner and the lights came on. I stood at attention. There were only two people in the whole world—me and the colonel.
“What’s happening?” he asked, seeking a briefing on the movement of the various units in the battalion. His battalion.
The clipboard was beside him on the table. Sweating, I figured if I could get to the clipboard and read the messages maybe I could get through this.
I got the clipboard, walked to the map, and read the last entry on the clipboard about an enemy sighting. It wasn’t plotted on the map. I read the next entry. It wasn’t plotted either. Nothing on the clipboard had been plotted since 1400. And it was past 1520.
The colonel cleared his throat, and there was a pause—like those last few seconds before an incoming rocket explodes. Then he began talking to me in a low, even voice, his eyes hard.
When he finished, I wanted just to be by myself, to walk alone down a quiet country road.
He said he would be back in fifteen minutes and he wanted a complete briefing. He opened the door and left.
Dunn and Fred Astaire Crash Burke were standing in the distance. They waved and did a soft-shoe to the right. It wasn’t funny.
The colonel had received orders from General DePuy, the division commander, to bring in the battalion and prepare the men for a heliborne move to the Michelin rubber plantation, near the Cambodian border. We would support the brigade’s attack on a suspected VC command center. Thankfully, for the rest of the afternoon and evening I was busy calling in the companies and coordinating how they would tie in around the battalion CP.
A lone helicopter brought in replacements the next morning. Jumping off the helicopter in their new uniforms, some held their rifles by the handles and bent over more than necessary to get away from the blades. When the chopper lifted off, I noticed a black man who had gotten off on the other side. Standing erect, taller than the rest, he started walking toward us behind the other replacements who were jogging our way.
Duckett.
Smiling, I stood up and met him halfway. We hugged. I asked how he was doing and pointed at his bad ear. He said, “Say what?”
“How’s the ear?” I asked. “How you doing?”
“Say what?” he said again, then he smiled. “It’s okay.”
I told him that it was good having him back, and we went to find the colonel. Although I was still in trouble from the previous day and the colonel ignored me, he smiled broadly at Duckett and welcomed him back. Haldane told Joe that he would like to put him in a staff job, but we were low on platoon leaders. We were losing one a month. Only two officers, Woolley and Trost, were left in Alpha Company. Arthur had been wounded and evacuated to the States. Duckett said he wanted to work with Woolley again, wanted his own platoon back.
As we walked away I told Duckett not to be surprised if he didn’t see too many of the old guys around.
The next day the entire battalion was heli-lifted in one flight of helicopters. Dunn and I were on the last chopper. All of our trucks, including the van, had already moved out for the battalion rear camp. I looked down at that very good hole under the old tree as we gained altitude and headed west, leaving the Fred Astaire stage behind.
Our battalion landed at an old airstrip near the Michelin plantation. We established a battalion CP just inside a forest of rubber trees near the airstrip. The four companies in the battalion, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta, were deployed to secure individual TAORs.
Alpha Company broke down into small units. My old platoon, on a patrol the third night of the operation, walked into a North Vietnamese position and Ayers and Castro were killed.
Bratcher led the party that brought their bodies back to the battalion CP. Covered by ponchos, they lay at the edge of the CP in the shade by the runway for a long time. Sticking out from the ponchos, tags on their boots identified them and their unit.
I tried to go about my work that morning, but, from deep inside, thoughts of the two soldiers kept interrupting. A picture of Ayers would come to mind, and I would remember that he was an eighteen-year-old boy from the midwest. Strong as an ox, he stayed on point until he dropped. Never complained. Bad teeth. No one wrote to him much. Quiet most of the time. No rough edges. Responded to praise. Did everything asked of him. Dead now—over there under the trees.
I would shake my head and try to focus on the staff work. Then I would see Castro, laughing, getting to the train at the last moment and once aboard, stomping his feet in a circle like he was doing a Mexican hat dance. He was in his late thirties, twice the age of some of the other men. He made good hot stew out of C rations. Friendly, humble. A sergeant E-5 from the old Army. Over there under a poncho, with his boots sticking out, tagged with his name and his unit. Dead.
Suddenly I had trouble breathing. I took a deep breath every few minutes, and I finally had to get away from my work. I walked across the airstrip and sat down. Looking back at the CP, I tried to think about nothing. Don’t moralize, I said to myself, my lips moving. Nothing to do, nothing to say. Just sit here quietly, everything will be okay.
Then clearly, in my mind’s eye, I saw Ayers and Castro moving quietly through the jungle that night. The sudden, deadly firefight. I saw Ayers fall. His finger still on the trigger of his M-16, he fell backward without expression, his M-16 firing into the night. Then Castro, moving forward, caught in a deadly hail of fire with bullets, one after the other, going through his chest, getting knocked around by the impact, coming to rest finally on top of Ayers. The sound of battle fading as they died.
I could no longer keep from looking at the two lumps lying under the ponchos, and I stared, transfixed, running the imagined nighttime engagement over and over again in my mind. Finally I focused on the peacefulness that was surely on their faces. I remembered McCoy saying on the boat over that we either live, get wounded, or die. No matter the way, it’s no problem. If we die, maybe others have a problem with that, but, for us, we’re dead and at peace. It isn’t bad. It’s simply the way things worked out.
Sadly, I constructed a compartment for Ayers and Castro in the back of my mind and I put their memories in a basket there.
A medevac helicopter came in sometime later that morning and took away their bodies. Emotionally paralyzed, I watched from a distance.
I would never be the same again.
Occasionally their memories would escape their compartment and leap out at me in my mind, along with others, but I would put them away and go on. In time, with practice, I kept them securely in their baskets in the back compartment, under control.
Several days later, Bravo Company engaged an enemy unit. The battle raged throughout most of the morning in an area that the VC had not previously controlled. It was possible that a new North Vietnamese outfit had moved in, which would affect the security of Saigon. Because the enemy troops were staying and fighting, Haldane guessed that they were not guerrillas but were, in fact, from a mainline North Vietnamese unit. We could hear the firing from the CP.
At midday, a Bravo Company platoon leader reported that he had a prisoner. Haldane told the Bravo Company commander to bring the prisoner out. We searched on a map for a clearing near the company’s location where we could get in a helicopter, and I notified the air controller in the area that we would soon have a priority requirement for a slick and a gunship or two. The company commander came back on the radio and said it was useless, the man was sh
ot up too badly. He wouldn’t live another ten minutes.
We could not find a clearing large enough to get in a helicopter close to the fighting, so Haldane told the commander to start moving overland toward our location. If the prisoner died en route, then it was too bad, but he wanted to talk to the man if possible.
Less than an hour later, a group carrying several stretchers broke through the tree line across the airstrip. I called for Colonel Haldane, the medics, the battalion intelligence officer, and the Vietnamese interpreter, “Jose,” assigned to our unit. Dunn walked up and I asked him to call in a dust-off for the Company B soldiers who were wounded. He picked up a radio and jogged onto the airfield toward the group coming our way. A couple of medics slung bags over their shoulders and joined him.
Dunn pulled on the PRC-25 radio and talked into the handset. Looking up, he yelled at me to get some purple smoke for the medevac.
By then the colonel was at the CP. He picked up a smoke canister and headed toward Dunn and the medics. When they reached the group in the middle of the airfield, the medics began frantically working on the men on the stretchers. Finally two men picked up one stretcher and started walking toward the aid tent beside the CP. Haldane fell into step beside them. I told Crash to look after the radios, and I followed the interpreter and the colonel inside the small tent. The soldiers had just lifted the Vietnamese prisoner onto the operating table. They moved away and began unwrapping their ponchos from the two bamboo poles used to make a stretcher.
The Vietnamese prisoner had one arm blown off above the elbow. His right leg was cantilevered at a crazy angle, and his left leg was torn open at the thigh, with a jagged piece of bone sticking out. His olive-green uniform was matted with blood, dirt, and slime, and the jacket had several bullet holes in it. Half of his face had been blown away. Some of his teeth and lower jawbone were exposed. Most of his left cheekbone was missing, and his left eye was dangling by a few strands of muscle and tissue.
But he was breathing—deep heavy breaths. His good eye was moving and making contact with us as we looked down at him.
Haldane told the interpreter to ask the man what unit he was from. Jose leaned close to the man’s ear and said a long sentence in Vietnamese. The prisoner’s one dancing eye continued to scan us. Jose raised his voice and repeated the sentence. The prisoner turned his head and looked at Jose. As the prisoner tried to talk, he spit blood on Jose and on Haldane’s hand, but he managed to say something in Vietnamese. Jose leaned forward quickly as he listened. He said something in Vietnamese. The prisoner responded with a few fractured words.
“What did he say? What did he say?” Haldane asked. “What’s his unit?”
The man on the table continued to mumble.
“Don’t know,” Jose said, shaking his head. “He calls his mother, father. He says Vietnamese names.”
“Ask him, please, what is his unit?” Haldane, a good and moral man, was having trouble keeping his focus on the job at hand without lapsing into pity for that mangled boy, still alive, calling out the names of loved ones.
Jose repeated his question, but the prisoner was losing ground. His eye stopped roaming and he looked straight up at the top of the tent. I noticed that blood had stopped seeping from the wound on his leg. His breathing became weaker.
One of the medics came in hurriedly and broke through the crowd of men around the table. He looked at us with some disgust because no one appeared to be helping the man. The medic had been opening a bandage package as he moved, but when he looked down at the mess lying on the table, his hands dropped to his sides. He said, “Ah, shit.”
Dunn, apparently finished with medevacking the wounded soldiers from Bravo Company, came in and stood beside me. Two more medics walked in.
The man on the table was barely breathing. Then he gathered some energy from somewhere and started to babble. He blinked his good eye. His raised his arm slightly. Jose repeated his sentence. A medic reached down and put the man’s whole arm on his stomach and wiped his forehead. His breathing became slower again, irregular.
One of the medics said, “The man is dead, he just doesn’t know it yet. His whole body’s in shock. He can’t think. He doesn’t know who he is.”
I remembered when Goss died. It wasn’t sudden. Most of him was dead while his heart was still beating.
But this boy—any one of his wounds should have killed him. Tough son of a bitch, I thought, but give it up. Go on. Give it up. You’re blown apart. You’ll never be whole again. There is no hope.
Most of the men around the table began to slip away. Dunn and I remained at the end of the table. Bob’s platoon had suffered as many casualties as had mine. He had held some of his men as they died. We hated the VC for causing so much pain, for killing so many good men. This one, in fact, might have killed Castro and Ayers, and here he lay. The enemy. Castro and Ayers had been avenged. This enemy was dying in front of us.
But I kept saying to myself, give up, please give up. You must hurt. Die and it will all end. You’ll be okay. Your mother will be sad and those other people you called out to. Your father, if he knew, would be proud. You are so strong. You must have stayed to fight when the others pulled back, and now you still won’t give up. Give up and there’s peace.
Bob and I were alone in the room with the man when he stopped breathing.
You were a good soldier, I thought. You did your duty. How noble to have lived and died doing something as well as you did. You should have been in my platoon. You have my respect. You, Castro, Ayers. I shall always remember your sacrifices, one against the other.
Then we heard a loud gasp. The prisoner suddenly bent forward at the waist and sat up straight, reaching out his arm toward us. He looked at us with his good eye, his other eye bobbling around like a bloody ball on a string. His mouth was open. He was gargling, and blood splattered over us, but his eye remained focused on us, on both of us at once. Then, Mother of Jesus, one leg moved off the operating table. He garbled again, louder. His weight followed the leg that was draped over the side of the table. His whole arm moved across the front of us when he turned—as though he wanted to get off the table.
His body twisted around and he fell to the floor. There, thankfully, he died.
Dunn and I had jumped back to the far side of the tent. We were holding each other’s arms, our eyes and mouths wide open. Maybe we yelled. One of the medics came running in and around the table to the man on the floor. Bob and I walked out.
“Goddammit, that was a tough son of a bitch,” I said.
“I think I poop-pooped in my pants,” Bob said.
Two days later we received word that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of MACV, would visit our unit for an awards ceremony. To Haldane’s credit, he didn’t break a sweat over receiving the highest-ranking American general in Vietnam. Instructions about security, timing, and ceremony arrangements came in gradually. Throughout the day before Westmoreland’s arrival, Haldane said that we were not going to stop the war or fall down dead because one man was coming for a thirty-minute visit. He was upset, however, when he received word that Westmoreland would be handing out Silver Stars.
“Well, just who do we give them to? Sorta getting the horse in front of the cart, isn’t it?” he asked no one in particular when he received the message. “I don’t remember recommending anyone for Silver Stars.”
Major Allee thought that perhaps Westmoreland was upgrading the level of decorations for combat bravery. He remembered that we had about eight recommendations in the works for lesser medals and suggested that we line up the people who had been recommended for awards and think of the general’s visit as a dry-run ceremony.
Westmoreland’s party arrived exactly on time, as if the U.S. Army and the whole Vietnam War were running on his schedule. We saw the covey of helicopters coming in long before they landed. Gunships making passes along the tree lines looked like advance bodyguards, eventually landing at both ends of the runway. Westmoreland’s command helicopter ar
rived near our CP right on the smoke that Crash threw. Photographers jumped off a following helicopter and focused their cameras on the general as he stepped to the ground. They swarmed around him like gnats and took pictures of his every move.
The general had a regal manner. With silver-gray hair and a square jaw, he stood taller than those around him. I noticed that he had his arm in a sling. Assuming that he had been wounded, I asked one of his aides about it but his answer made no sense. The aide wasn’t very friendly, in fact. I had shaken his hand when we first met. He had small, dainty hands and manicured fingernails.
The visit turned out to be pure public relations for General Westmoreland. We were props. He trooped the line and, smiling warmly, presented medals to the assembled men. And then he was gone, back on his clean helicopter, with the escort gunships lifting off first. The newsmen hurried to get on a trailing slick.
Panton went along the line of men as the helicopters lifted off and took back the medals, an awards ceremony in reverse.
Within hours, Crash learned that Westmoreland had fallen on his elbow while playing tennis in Saigon and had suffered a sprain.
I told Dunn and Crash later, “I’m a little sick of this war. There isn’t much to make me proud. Platoon leader, at least I had the men and it was us against them. Being a staff officer—I don’t know—Ayers and Castro dying. This is one useless fucking war. Westmoreland handing out medals. Show time. We got all this stuff, helicopters, medals, hot meals. What’s Charlie got? He ain’t got shit. Death’s a blessing. What’s the use of it all? Nothing, one big fucking waste.” I was not making sense, nor was I trying to. I was just mouthing thoughts coming into my head. My voice trailed off.
“What exactly are you talking about, Parker?” said Dunn, never a sentimentalist. “There ain’t no great truth here. This ain’t the first war man’s ever fought. This is all you have to remember: ‘Ours is not to question why, ours is to do and die.’ It’s just w-a-r, as simple as a three-letter word. Some people die, some people live. That’s it. Some people win and some people lose. Winners are right and losers are wrong. It’s no more difficult than that, so don’t agonize over it.”