Going After Cacciato

by Tim O'Brien

  He had his hair cut again. He drank Coke, watched the ocean, saw movies at night, learned the smells. The sand smelled of sour milk. The air, so clean near the water, smelled of mildew. He was scared, yes, and confused and lost, and he had no sense of what was expected of him or of what to expect from himself. He was aware of his body. Listening to the instructors talk about the war, he sometimes found himself gazing at his own wrists or legs. He tried not to think. He stayed apart from the other new guys. He ignored their jokes and chatter. He made no friends and learned no names. At night, the big hootch swelling with their sleeping, he closed his eyes and pretended it was a war. He felt drugged. He plodded through the sand, listened while the NCOs talked about the AO: “Real bad shit,” said the youngest of them, a sallow kid without color in his eyes. “Real tough shit, real bad. I remember this guy Uhlander. Not such a bad dick, but he made the mistake of thinking it wasn’t so bad. It’s bad. You know what bad is? Bad is evil. Bad is what happened to Uhlander. I don’t wanna scare the bejesus out of you—that’s not what I want—but, shit, you guys are gonna die.”

  On the seventh day, June 9, the new men were assigned to their terminal units.

  The Americal Division, Paul Berlin learned for the first time, was organized into three infantry brigades, the 11th, 196th, and 198th. The brigades, in turn, were broken down into infantry battalions, the battalions into companies, the companies into platoons, the platoons into squads.

  Supporting the brigades was an immense divisional complex spread out along the sands of Chu Lai. Three artillery elements under a single command, two hospitals, six air units, logistical and transportation and communication battalions, legal services, a PX, a stockade, a USO, a mini golf course, a swimming beach with trained lifeguards, administration offices under the Adjutant General, twelve Red Cross Donut Dollies, a central mail detachment, Seabees, four Military Police units, a press information service, computer specialists, civil relations specialists, psychological warfare specialists, Graves Registration, dog teams, civilian construction and maintenance contractors, a Stars and Stripes detachment, intelligence and tactical planning units, chapels and chaplains and assistant chaplains, cooks and clerks and translators and scouts and orderlies, an Inspector General’s office, awards and decorations specialists, dentists, cartographers, statistical analysts, oceanographers, PO officers, photographers and janitors and demographers.

  The ratio of support to combat personnel was twelve to one.

  Paul Berlin counted it as bad luck, a statistically improbable outcome, to be assigned to the 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade.

  His sense of place had never been keen. In Indian Guides, with his father, he’d gone to Wisconsin to camp and be pals forever. Big Bear and Little Bear. He remembered it. Yellow and green headbands, orange feathers. Powwows at the campfire. Big Fox telling stories out of the Guide Story Book. Big Fox, a gray-haired father from Oshebo, Illinois, owner of a paper mill. He remembered all of it. Canoe races the second day, Big Bear paddling hard but Little Bear having troubles. Poor, poor Little Bear. Better luck in the gunnysack race, Big Bear and Little Bear hopping together under the great Wisconsin sky, but poor Little Bear, stumbling. Pals anyhow. Not a problem. Shake hands the secret Guide way. Pals forever. Then the third day, into the woods, father first and son second, Little Bear tracking Big Bear, who leaves tracks and paw prints. Yes, he remembered it—Little Bear getting lost. Following Big Bear’s tracks down to a winding creek, crossing the creek, checking the opposite bank according to the Guide Survival Guide, finding nothing; so deeper into the woods—Big Bear!—and deeper, then turning back to the creek, but now no creek. Nothing in the Guide Survival Guide about panic. Lost, bawling in the big Wisconsin woods. He remembered it clearly. Little Elk finding him, flashlights converging, Little Bear bawling under a giant spruce. So the fourth day, getting sick, and Big Bear and Little Bear breaking camp early. Decamping. Hamburgers and root beer on the long drive home, baseball talk, white man talk, and he remembered it, the sickness going away. Pals forever.

  A truck took him up Highway One, then inland to LZ Gator, where he joined the 5th Battalion of the 46th Infantry of the 198th Infantry Brigade. There, in a white hootch surrounded by barbed wire and bunkers, a captain jotted his name and number into a leather-bound log. An E-8 took him aside.

  “You look strack,” the E-8 whispered. “How’d you go for a rear job? I can fix it for you … get you a job painting fences. Sound good?”

  Paul Berlin smiled.

  “You go for that? Nice comfy painting job? No paddy humpin’, no dinks?”

  Paul Berlin smiled. The E-8 smiled back.

  “Sound good, trooper? You get off on the sound of them bells?”

  Paul Berlin smiled. He knew what the man wanted. So, only faintly, he nodded.

  “Well, then,” the E-8 whispered, “I fear you come to the wrong … fuckin … place.”

  Walking down the hill toward Alpha Company, he passed a wooden latrine built over two sunken barrels. The first truly familiar smell of the war. He stopped, dropped his duffel, went in, closed the door, unbuttoned his trousers, and sat down.

  And for a long time he sat there. At home, comfortable, even at peace. Flies played against the screened windows. Outside, far up the hill, stood a tall tower, and, behind it, the sandbagged tactical operations center. Down the hill ran a gravel road along which the various company areas sprawled, six in all—Headquarters, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Echo. The 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry. Farther down the hill was the wired perimeter, bunkers, a steel-mesh gate draped with a hand-printed sign reading THE PROFESSIONALS. Beyond the gate was flat paddy. Beyond the paddies were mountains.

  Yes, at peace, warm and wet inside, and he watched the flies and the clean sky and a black man raking trash and two officers moving slowly up the road.

  At peace, he read what was written on the shitter’s walls. So short, it was written, I just fell through the fucking hole. Below that, Better off where you at. Others, he read—On Gator, the wind don’t blow, it sucks, and in a different hand, So does PFC Prawn, when he gets the urge. Another, Where am I? And beneath it, If you don’t know, better climb out before I drown your ass. Names, dates, residue. Hapstein’s queer … No, man, Hapstein’s just good fun … I’m so short, I’m gone—this is my answering service … Cacciato … Brilliant, ain’t he?

  Paul Berlin took out a pencil.

  Very carefully, he wrote: I’m so short, I can’t see the forest for the trees.

  When PFC Paul Berlin joined the First Platoon of Alpha Company on June 11, 1968, he found three squads manned by twelve, ten, and eight soldiers.

  The squads were led by two PFCs and a buck sergeant, Oscar Johnson.

  There were no fireteams, no SOPs for tactical maneuvers or covering fire. There was no FO. There was no platoon sergeant. Doc Peret was the only medic, and his training was at best eccentric.

  The platoon leader, Lieutenant Sidney Martin, was almost as new to the war as Paul Berlin. His intelligence and training were clearly above average, but his wisdom was in doubt from the very beginning. He died in Lake Country—World’s Greatest Lake Country, Doc Peret kept calling it—and after him came a much older lieutenant, Corson, who though only average in intelligence and training and wisdom, was a platoon leader the men could finally love. He took no chances, he wasted no lives. The war, for which he was much too old, scared him.

  They were organized around personalities, specialties of knowledge, and tradition. They were also organized around superstition.

  It was not rank so much as superstition, for example, that made Oscar Johnson leader of the Third Squad. He was a sergeant, true. But he held that rank because he’d survived nearly nine months in the bush. Nine was a lucky number. And the coincidence of it, Paul Berlin learned, was the peculiar fact that Oscar Johnson knew very little about surviving. They were organized around luck.

  Stink Harris walked point because he prided himself on his scouti
ng abilities. Eddie Lazzutti carried the radio because he prided himself on his voice. They were organized around pride.

  They were organized also around principles of trust. Ben Nystrom, who later left the war and wrote no letters, carried the radio until he could not be trusted with it, at which point Eddie was given the trust. Jim Pederson, in many ways the most trusted of all, was given the responsibility for triggering ambushes, and so the ambush formations were always organized around Jim Pederson.

  Disobedience was sometimes organized and sometimes not.

  When First Lieutenant Sidney Martin persisted in making them search tunnels before blowing them, and after Frenchie Tucker and Bernie Lynn died in tunnels, the disobedience became fully organized.

  They were often organized around Standard Operating Procedures. The SOPs were of two sorts, formal and informal.

  Formally, it was SOP to search tunnels before blowing them. Informally, it was SOP to blow the tunnels and move on, without a search, without risking life. Lieutenant Sidney Martin, who was trained at the Point, violated the informal SOPs, and the men hated him.

  The routinization of the war, which helped make it tolerable, included even trivial things—what to talk about and when, the times to rest and the times to march and the times to keep the guard, when to tell jokes and when not to, the order of the march, when to send out ambushes and when to fake them. These issues were not debatable. They were governed by the informal SOPs, and these SOPs were more important than the Code of Conduct.

  “How many days you been at the war?” asked Alpha’s mail clerk, and Paul Berlin answered that he’d been at the war seven days now.

  The clerk laughed. “Wrong,” he said. “Tomorrow, man, that’s your first day at the war.”

  And in the morning PFC Paul Berlin boarded a resupply chopper that took him fast over charred pocked mangled country, hopeless country, green skies and speed and tangled grasslands and paddies and places he might die, a million possibilities. He couldn’t watch. He watched his hands. He made fists of them, opening and closing the fists. His hands, he thought, not quite believing. His hands.

  Very quickly, the helicopter banked and turned and went down.

  “How long you been at the war?” asked the first man he saw, a wiry soldier with ringworm in his hair.

  PFC Paul Berlin smiled. “This is it,” he said. “My first day.”

  Five

  The Observation Post

  Spec Four Paul Berlin tilted his wristwatch to catch moonlight. Twelve-twenty now—the incredible slowness with which time passed. Incredible, too, the tricks his fear did with time.

  He wound the watch as tight as it would go. Facing east, out to sea, he counted to sixty very slowly, breathing with each count, and when he was done he looked at the watch again. Still twelve-twenty. He held it to his ear. The ticking was loud, brittle-sounding. The second hand made its infinite sweep.

  Maybe it was the time of night that created the distortions. Middle-hour guard, it was a bad time. First-hour guard was better; the safest time, and surest, and once it ended you could sleep the night through. Or last-hour guard. Last guard was all right, too, because there was the expectation of dawn coming upon the sea, and you could watch the water turn to color as if paint had been poured into it at the horizon, and the pretty colors helped sustain pretty thoughts.

  Sure, it was the hour. Things shimmered silver in the moonlight, the sea and the coils of wire below the tower, the sand winding along the beach. The night was moving now. He tried not to look at it, but it was true—the night moved in waves, fluttering. The grasses inland moved, and the far trees. Middle-hour guard, it was a bad time for keeping watch.

  Kneeling, he lit a cigarette, cupping it in his hand to hide the glow, then he stood and leaned against the sandbagged wall and looked down on the sea. The sea helped. It protected the back and gave a sense of distance from the war, a warm washing feeling, and a feeling of connection to distant lands. His mind worked that way. Sometimes, during the hot afternoons beneath the tower, he would look out to sea and imagine using it as a means of escape—stocking Oscar’s raft with plenty of rations and foul-weather gear and drinking water, then shoving out through the first heavy breakers, then hoisting up a poncho as a sail, then lying back and letting the winds and currents carry him away—to Samoa, maybe, or to some hidden isle in the South Pacific, or to Hawaii, or maybe all the way home. Pretending. It wasn’t dreaming, it wasn’t craziness. Just a way of passing time, which seemed never to pass.

  He could make out the dim outline of Oscar’s raft bobbing at anchor in the moonlight. They used it mostly for swimming. Sometimes, when boredom got the best of them, they would take it out to deeper water and fish off it, spend the whole day out there, separating themselves from the daily routine.

  He watched the sea and the bobbing raft for a long time. Then he checked the watch again. Twelve-twenty-two.

  He tried to remember tricks for making time move.

  Counting, that was one trick. Count the remaining days. Break the days into hours, and count the hours, then break the hours into minutes and count them one by one, and the minutes into seconds.

  He began to figure it. Arrived June 3. And now it was … What was it? November 20, or 25. Somewhere in there. It was hard to fix exactly. But it was November, he was sure of that. Late November. Not like the old-time Novembers along the Des Moines River, no lingering foliage. No sense of change or transition. Here there was no autumn. No leaves to turn with the turning of seasons, no seasons, no crispness in the air, no Thanksgiving and no football, nothing to gauge passage by. Inland, in the dark beyond the beach, there were a few scrawny trees, but these were mostly pines, and the pines did not change whatever the season.

  November-the-what?

  Oscar’s birthday had been in July. In August, Billy Boy Watkins had died of fright—no, June. That was in June. June, the first day at the war. Then, in July, they’d celebrated Oscar’s birthday with plenty of gunfire and flares, and they’d marched through the sullen villages along the Song Tra Bong, the awful quiet everywhere, and then, in August, Rudy Chassler had finally broken the quiet. That had been August. Then—then September. Keeping track wasn’t easy. The order of things—chronologies—that was the hard part. Long stretches of silence, dullness, long nights and endless days on the march, and sometimes the truly bad times: Pederson, Buff, Frenchie Tucker, Bernie Lynn. But what was the order? How did the pieces fit, and into which months? And what was it now—November-the-what?

  He extinguished the cigarette against his thumbnail and flipped it down to the beach.

  Stepping over the sleeping men, he moved to the tower’s west wall and faced inland.

  He tried to concentrate on the future. What to do when the war was over. That was one happy thought. Yes—when the war ended he would … he would go home to Fort Dodge. He would. He would go home on a train, slowly, looking out at the country as it passed, recognizing things, seeing how the country flattened and turned to corn, the silos painted white, and he would pay attention to the details. At the depot, when the train stopped, he would brush off his uniform and be certain all the medals were in place, and he would step off boldly, boldly, and he would shake his father’s hand and look him in the eye. “I did okay,” he would say. “I won some medals.” And his father would nod. And later, the next day perhaps, they would go out to where his father was building houses in the development west of town, and they’d walk through the unfinished rooms and his father would explain what would be where, how the wiring was arranged, the difficulties with subcontractors and plumbers, but how the houses would be strong and lasting, how it took good materials and good craftsmanship and care to build houses that would be strong and lasting.

  The night was moving. He concentrated hard, squinting, trying to stop the fluttering …

  He would go to Europe. That’s what he would do. Spend some time in Fort Dodge then take off for a tour of Europe. He would learn French. Learn French, then take off
for Paris, and when he got there he would drink red wine in Cacciato’s honor. Visit all the museums and monuments, learn the history, sit in the cafés along the river and smile at the pretty girls. Take a flat in Montmartre. Rise early and walk to the open market for breakfast. He would eat very slowly, crossing his legs and maybe reading a paper, letting things pass by, then maybe he’d walk about the city and learn the names of places, not as a tourist but as a man who comes to learn and understand. He would study details. He would look for the things Cacciato would have looked for. It could be done. That was the crazy thing about it—for all the difficulties, for all the hard times and stupidity and errors, for all that, it could truly be done.

  Six

  Detours on the Road to Paris

  So without Harold Murphy and his big gun they continued along the trail west, twice finding the ash of Cacciato’s breakfast fires, once a neat pile of discarded ammunition. They found a broken penknife and tripflares and grenades, but they did not find Cacciato.

  “War’s over,” Doc Peret took to chanting. “Peace and domestic tranquillity, a humble line from Marsilius. Translated it means this: Back on the block.”

  The jungle ended.

  Descending, flattening as it dropped, the land opened to expose patches of sky. The rain forest turned scraggly. There were antelopes and deer. The trees thinned out to make meadows, and the meadows grew wider and fuller, and soon the meadows became open plains. At the crest of a small hill they stopped to look down on savanna that stretched to the horizon. They were quiet. Taking turns, they used the lieutenant’s binoculars.

  “Peace,” Doc murmured. “World unto end, amen.”

  It was graceful, expansive country. To the north, barely visible even with the field glasses, a river ran down from the hills and wound off into a flat meadow filled with wild flowers. There were gazelles in the meadow. The sky was full of birds.