Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man’s work.
DYLAN THOMAS, “ON NO WORK OF WORDS”
CHAPTER 21
DECEMBER 1967
from: Capt. M. F. O’Reilly
H Co., 2nd Bn., 29th Marines, 6th Mar Div FMF
c/o FPO San Francisco, Calif. 96602
Fri 15 Dec 1967
Khe Sanh, RVN
My Dearest Lizzie,
Well, here I am, recovered from my so-called wounds and back safe and sound in the world’s best-armed mountain vacation spot. Much safer than the Da Nang hospital, which is besieged by mad generals jabbing medals into people’s chests and hurrying back to the base for happy hour.
In my absence, the company somehow acquired a parrot. Hotel Henry—Hank, for short. He is in the Second Platoon, rank as yet undetermined. He doesn’t speak much English yet, except for a few typical Marine obscenities, but is fluent in French and Vietnamese. He is quite fussy, won’t touch birdseed, or anything of a typical bird nature. Having been raised on John Wayne crackers (C-rations), he won’t eat anything else. If he’s starving and there are no John Waynes available, he’ll eat a Saltine or two. He also smokes—Salems only—and I believe they have stunted his growth.
Meanwhile, the rats are teaching their next generation to run up and down inside the tin inner roof of my bunker. The rats over here are a constant threat to anything smaller than an elephant. After seeing them, I figured out why there are no cats around. The rats eat them. The Third Platoon positions have one slightly smaller than a St. Bernard. They’ve caught him four times in a regular rat trap, but he just pulls his head out and leaves. The First Platoon has given up trying to catch theirs. They’ve named them instead.
Other than that, you wouldn’t know there’s a war on. The reason Khe Sanh isn’t on the map is that nobody knows where it is except a few Bru tribesmen, and they can’t read. Also, nobody except a few idiot Marines even cares where it is. It has little strategic value, is actually a liability, and is a complete and total loss aesthetically. Outside of that, it’s a pretty nice place.
The weather continues steady—it rains daily. Chances of a white Christmas extremely poor. No new developments otherwise. The bad guys have clearly decided this place isn’t worth bothering with, an opinion in which I concur. I think we ought to let them have it. They would go crazy figuring out what to do with it, and how to keep the rain from washing it away.
I love you, my darling Liz. With all my heart. Thanks for the pictures of the kids, and especially for the picture featuring your shoulders, which I have been savoring on a constant basis. I would marry you again in a second, just for those all-universe shoulders of yours. Please don’t waste any more time fretting about my continued well-being. This place is safer than Nebraska, in many ways. And not half as exciting. Plus, my men are more determined than ever to keep me alive, as there is a great loss of face involved in a company losing its CO. I’ll do my unheroic stint here and be home in no time, in one slightly scuffed-up piece. I’ll be where I belong, in your arms, happy and grateful for our beautiful life. I love you.
your loving,
Mike
LIZ DIDN’T TRUST the letters anymore. Mike’s blithe reports of a war safer than Nebraska had already continued to arrive for a week and a half after he’d been blown up once. If it was all so goddamned safe, why did he have to keep telling her how safe it was? She knew her man. She’d seen him break an ankle once playing touch football, about six months after they were married. He’d jumped right up and tried to walk it off, assuring her it was just a little sprain. She would probably have believed him, at that point in their relationship, if she hadn’t seen the bone sticking through the skin.
And now the bone was sticking through the skin of their life, and she was still supposed to pretend it was just a little sprain. It would have been so much better—not easier, but better, truer—if he had just been honest with her. She could handle living with the possibility of his death, minute by minute; she was handling it. She could handle the goddamn empty bed. What she missed was the reality of her husband, the depth of shared life that had disappeared from his letters lately. One of the strengths of their marriage had always been their mutual realism, their capacity to talk things through, to acknowledge the obstacles, problems, and even absurdities in any situation and find a way through together. She missed the late-night conversations at the kitchen table, fretting frankly about money or the kids’ latest phases; she missed lying in bed with Mike’s arms around her, talking about the latest difficulties with her mother or his father or what an ass his new CO was. She missed the man who could look at her when the car’s tire went flat on an empty highway in the rain at two in the morning and raise one eyebrow so eloquently that it made the whole thing a shared adventure, the man who could get back in the car soaked to the skin and turn the key and have the ignition click once and die, and say, “Do we still have that blanket in the trunk?” She could share anything with Mike, she would, she had, willingly and happily. Except the lie that everything was fine.
These letters were unreal now, was the thing, cheerful little tours de force from a stranger caught up in a role. The war had gotten to him, somehow. He didn’t trust her with the reality of his life. She’d turned into the little woman in his mind; she’d turned, Liz thought, into his mother. That hurt. But there was a Mike in her heart, a Mike she remembered perfectly, a partner, comrade, lover, and friend; and she would let nothing in the world take that real man from her, not the Marine Corps, not the war, not history, not even his own maddening need to protect her from the truth. He would make it home to her or he would not, and that was in God’s hands. But she would not forget who she was waiting for.
IT WAS ONE of those years when Christmas felt like heaving a dead weight. While the other houses in the neighborhood sparkled with strings of lights, and reindeer and manger scenes blossomed in every yard, the O’Reilly home remained dim. The kids kept bringing home charming little craft items from school; Kathie dropped increasingly pointed hints, and the Christmas cards piled up on the mantel over the cold fireplace, but Liz couldn’t make herself go out to the garage and find the box of ornaments and seasonal paraphernalia and just get down to work. It didn’t feel like a holiday, and it certainly didn’t feel like the advent of our dear Savior; it just felt like another cold month with her husband away at war. She was amazed at how cheerful the rest of the world was, celebrating the ordeal of a pregnant woman forced to travel in the dead of winter by a governmental directive, unable to find decent shelter on a frozen December night. How did all these people manage to feel so festive on cue? Didn’t they have lives?
She finally bought a tree on the Wednesday before Christmas, but the thing was too big to get off the station wagon by herself, and she let it sit on top of the car for three days before she finally mustered the boys and they all dragged it inside and wrestled it into position in the living room. Kathie had already given up on her, rummaged through the garage, and found the Christmas box herself by then, and Liz let her older daughter take charge of the decoration. She sat on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate while the children hung the ornaments and strung the lights and draped the tree with so much tinsel that it looked like the aftermath of an ice storm. Kathie had the kids all singing carols, and Liz sang along as best she could and tried not to cry.
After the children were in bed, Liz went back to the couch and plopped down on it. She could feel the baby fidgeting, as if it had picked up on its siblings’ excitement. She was exhausted, though she hadn’t really done a thing. She reached over to turn off the lamp and sat for a time in the quiet colored glow of the tree’s lights. No angels, she thought; no Magi, not a shepherd to be seen. She felt fat, sad, and lonely, but she couldn’t stop humming “Away in a Manger.”
TWO DAYS BEFORE Christmas, someone at Battalion Headquarters decided that Hill 851 needed someone on
it, and Hotel Company was dispatched to occupy it the next day. The mountain was about three kilometers due west of the combat base, a crooked peak jutting out of the jungle like a shark’s fin, and was more or less useless, on the whole; but it had an unobstructed line of sight to the main Khe Sanh runway and had been popular recently with NVA mortar and rocket teams.
It was almost noon before the fog burned off enough for the company to chopper in on eight CH-46 transport helicopters. Mike had everyone locked and loaded, but the landing zone wasn’t hot, which came as a relief. No one wanted to die on Christmas Eve.
They strung a ring of concertina wire and secured a perimeter, set up some Claymore mine booby traps and noisemakers on the fringes, then started to dig in. There were a number of old foxholes and bunkers and scatterings of typical combat troop trash; Marines had already died once for this hilltop, the previous May. The trees were so full of shrapnel from that battle that the Marines’ chain saws had all broken on them within half an hour of starting to try to cut them down. They would have to live with the jungle a bit too close for comfort for a while.
Mike got a shovel and started working with everyone else, digging a command bunker. It wasn’t raining, which was a glorious break, and the air was crisp and pleasantly cool. The sun came out for about fifteen minutes, midafternoon, and the sea of jungle below them turned into a kingdom of jewel green, an exquisite wonderland, surreally beautiful.
By early evening, everyone’s holes were deep enough for Mike to give the order to stand down for the night. The Christmas cease-fire was set to begin at 1800 hours, and at 5:57 some joker on the next hill over shot a 120mm rocket at them. Everyone heard the whoosh, and the entire population of the hilltop disappeared instantly into their freshly excavated holes. The rocket went high, but it enraged the company, and there was a mad moment as everyone in Hotel Company shot everything they had at the neighboring hill.
Mike let the firing go on for precisely two and a half minutes and called for a stop as the second hand on his brand-new watch from the Da Nang PX went straight up at six o’clock. They all waited tensely; the sudden silence seemed to have a weight of its own. Mike had the fire control center of Charlie Battery 1/13 on the radio, and if there had been one more shot fired from the other hill, if someone had even lit a cigarette over there, then fuck the cease-fire, he would have called in every howitzer available and told anyone who cared that his watch was slow. But apparently the rocket had been a whim, and there was no more hostile fire.
The Welcome Wagon, Mike thought. Just a little note to say we’re glad to have you in the neighborhood. He would have preferred a fruit basket.
As the quiet lengthened and firmed up, someone in the Second Platoon perimeter began to sing “Silent Night” in a high, sweet tenor. Other voices joined in, and soon the whole company was singing. To Mike’s astonishment, these bad-ass Marines even knew the second verse. His arms prickled into gooseflesh.
To the west, the sun was going down behind the massive sawtooth of Co Roc Mountain in Laos; to the east, a full moon floated over the Khe Sanh plateau. The Marines at the main base would have hot meals tonight, actual turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and real vegetables, but Hotel Company would have to make their Christmas feast of C-rations. Mike had saved up two cans of his favorite, Meal, Combat, Individual, Beef, Spiced With Sauce, Cookies, Cocoa, White Bread, Canned. Add a little carefully hoarded Tabasco, and it was almost edible. Liz had sent a special Christmas care package that included an entire case of Kathie’s Girl Scout cookies, and Mike set one box aside for himself and had Ike Tibbetts distribute the rest to the troops.
Liz had also sent a plastic baby bottle filled with Jack Daniel’s. God, he loved that woman. Mike ate his tinned beef and sopped the sauce out of the can with the bread, then sat on the edge of his foxhole and sipped the bourbon gratefully. The moon was so bright in the cloudless sky that you could make out individual trees on the company’s perimeter, and the spikes of the mountains cast deep shadows in the valleys, where the NVA were no doubt using the cease-fire to move everything they could into better position. Across the dark gulf of jungle to the east, dozens of campfires burned openly at the combat base, an unprecedented sight. To the north, beyond the Rao Quang River, something was going on around Hill 950; he could see the green and red arcs of tracer bullets and the occasional flash of a grenade or mortar explosion. So much for the cease-fire and goodwill to men. It looked like a probing attack—not big, but nasty enough.
Sleep in heavenly peace, indeed, Mike thought. It was a very strange feeling. They were singing around the campfires in Khe Sanh, and he was sitting here eating Girl Scout cookies and sipping Tennessee bourbon, but men were dying in plain sight on Hill 950. Merry Christmas to all, and good fucking night.
GERMAINE LIFTED the Host for the consecration and felt the tug of the old bayonet wound in his shoulder, skewing the elevation slightly to the left like a kind of gravity. St. Jude’s was packed, as always, for the midnight mass on Christmas Eve, but for a moment he felt perfectly alone in the church. Emptied, stripped, finished. And grateful, to be spent, to be done. All the roads of his life led uphill to this, to the place of the skull and the place of the birth, to the eternally repeated last meal of a man born in a manger to die on a cross. This was the moment it was made new, if there was such a moment anymore. If there ever had been, if there ever would be. Not omens and magic, not angels singing and gifts from alien kings. Just this bit of bread, dry as cardboard, and the silence that lifted it into holiness, or made it nothing. This is my body, which will be given up for you. Take, eat; do this in remembrance of me. This, just this, and a sip of blood red wine to wash it down. He wondered what Elizabeth O’Reilly was doing tonight.
CHAPTER 22
JANUARY 1968
LIZ HAD BARELY gotten the tree up in time for Christmas, and now she couldn’t get it down. It stood in the living room, dropping needles day by day. The children had long since stopped commenting on its protracted presence and were treating the thing as furniture.
Liz knew she should take the tree down, just put the ornaments away and drag the thing out to the curb. But somehow she couldn’t find the energy. She took to sitting in the living room at night, after the kids were in bed, with no lights burning but the tree’s strings of red and green, nursing half a glass of red wine and considering the impossibility of normality.
She often caught herself addressing Mike, in her mind. You could have come home, sweetheart. Much of her inner life now was an ongoing letter, one long unanswered conversation with her husband. You were wounded badly enough to come home with honor, duty done, and you refused the gift. I hope one day you can tell me what it was, beyond honor and duty, that kept you there to fight your goddamned war some more.
The baby would stir and thrust, then settle, and Liz would feel the weight of its presence, the neglected miracle growing in her, day by day. There was a sweetness in the mystery of that movement, the haunting flavor of an irreducible truth. Some things didn’t have to make sense, she thought. Maybe even most things, in the end. Like her husband, turned toward battle like a plant toward the sun. Like this life inside her, stretching its limbs, blind and insistent. And this tree, this relic, this ghost of a gutted celebration, casting its web of shadows in the quiet like a sentinel guarding an abandoned outpost in a war long since lost. It was what it was, when you got right down to it. And tomorrow was another day.
ON SATURDAY, the thirteenth of January, an unprecedented series of supply planes began landing at the Khe Sanh combat base. Hotel Company watched from their hilltop, fascinated, and then awed, by the C-130s, C-123s, and cargo choppers landing one after another on the plateau below. The sleepy Khe Sanh airstrip suddenly looked like O’Hare on a busy day.
“What the hell is going on?” Ike Tibbetts growled.
“Damned if I know,” Mike said. “Looks like somebody in Da Nang decided we don’t have enough toilet paper.”
“I hope they’re bringing
beer,” Stinson said. “All that cargo space, there must be some beer in there somewhere.”
“Ain’t no beer gonna get to this fucking hilltop, no way,” Tibbetts told him. “Those fuckers at the base will drink it all themselves. We’ll be lucky to get bullets.”
“We’re going to need bullets more than beer for a while, it looks like,” Mike said. “Ike, tell the guys to start digging their holes deeper.”
from: Capt. M. F. O’Reilly
H Co., 2nd Bn., 29th Marines, 6th Mar Div FMF
c/o FPO San Francisco, Calif. 96602
Thur 18 Jan 1968
Hill 851, circa Khe Sanh, RVN
My Dearest Lizzie,
I’m sitting here eating a meatball sandwich, getting crumbs all over my flak jacket, in my brand-new, two-room, subterranean dwelling. Located on a choice hilltop site with a view of such scenic splendors as Hill 1015, the KSCB runway and ammo dump, and Laos, the bunker has all the comforts of home, except electricity and running water. The only real drawbacks are the lousy climate and noisy neighbors. However, be it ever so humble, etc. Let’s face it, you can’t beat the price.
Things hereabouts appear to be taking a slight turn toward the semiserious, finally. The latest scuttlebutt from various recon sources and intelligence wonks has “masses” of NVA crossing the DMZ. (A “mass” is defined as three or more hordes.) They have even identified some of the horde-sized units. (A horde consists of five unruly mobs.) In many instances, these are broken into the smallest unit of intelligence terminology, “beaucoup VC.” Translated into English, this becomes “many, many,” or “a whole bunch,” if one is talking to a senior staff officer. (A “bunch,” of course, is a subunit of a “mob” the normal mob consisting of several bunches, according to its mission.)
I see that the fog has rolled in to our little aerie, yet again, and my fingers are getting numb. Back to the stove. At least it’s warm, like you. But not as shapely, and the conversation tends to drag. I miss you, my precious wife.
Lizzie's War Page 23