September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Anyway, the Army is still using the metaphors from the War in Europe twenty years ago. Massive American strength will crush the enemy. They can’t figure out why Charlie keeps coming back.”

  I watch GIs walking down the street, arms around their pretty mistresses, kids who are still in their early teens. Maybe some of them think the girl is the love of their life and they will bring them home to America, like I thought I would bring Trudi home. Maybe it will even work out for them.

  I’m told that half the eighty-five thousand troops that the VC threw at us last week were killed. We lost only two thousand—two thousand brokenhearted parents and girlfriends and young wives.

  This afternoon I went to a Catholic center here where a swarm of young soldiers, mostly Catholic kids, were teaching young orphans, playing basketball with them, and going to Mass with them at the end of the day. I went to Mass too, oops, participated in the Eucharist and for a few moments felt united in God’s love with you guys back in St. Ursula. I hope God knows what He’s doing over here.

  Anyway, not all the kids are dope heads or rapists. All of them, however, are lonely.

  So am I.

  I can hardly wait to get home.

  Love to all.

  Khe Sanh

  Rosemarie, April Rosemary, Kevin, Jimmy, Seano, Moire—all my darlings.

  I really ought not to be here. I promised I would not come up here. However, I was told by my Marine friends that it was quite safe now, so I thought an overnight would be a good experience. Don’t worry about me because by the time you get this tape I’ll be out of here and almost on my way home.

  This base started as an advance point to monitor any movement by the ANV into South Vietnam. Apparently General Giap—the genius behind Tet, a Pyrrhic defeat if there ever was one—felt a little nervous about our presence so he sent some of his regulars in to drive us out. The Marines wouldn’t leave since they don’t leave, they simply redeploy to the rear, as they said up at the Chosin Reservoir, where Chris Kurtz was killed.

  So the twenty thousand troops settled down in the hills around the base and began lobbing mortar shells in at odd hours and especially when transport planes or choppers landed. Occasionally they would test the perimeter, looking for weak spots. Once or twice they actually attacked with major forces, as they had at the time of Tet. That was a mistake. For once they were playing the American game instead of vice versa.

  Then we responded to their mortars by sending jets to patrol the base twenty-four hours a day. Every time a mortar shell was fired, a jet dived at the source of the explosion and blasted it. They say up here that the rim of hills around us is the most bombed place in human history.

  I’m constantly caught between conflicting emotions. I hate the war. I think we should never have got into it. On the other hand the Communists are butchers. In Hue before they were finally driven out they tortured and murdered three thousand men, women, and children, most of them Catholics. The difference between the Nazis and them is hard to figure out. I don’t like our forces losing battles, but I don’t like them being in a war that they can’t possibly win.

  Anyway our big transport plane with a load of Marine reinforcements flew up from Tonsunhut Air Base yesterday. The country is breathtaking from air, unbelievably beautiful. Its people don’t deserve to be caught in a war that is foolish on both sides.

  We circle the base once before coming in. A bevy of jets circle with us. I’m too dumb to know that I’m flying into a combat situation. I look out the window and see the ring of hills and this sprawling American base with its tents and tanks and artillery and fences and trenches. Lots of good shots I tell myself as we slip down on the runway. Nice landing. We turn and begin to taxi off the runway.

  The dust puffs up next to us, harmless, if unexplained, little clouds.

  “Mortars!” shouts the Colonel who is in command of the detachment. “Prepare to take cover as soon as you disembark!”

  He doesn’t say where the cover is. I don’t see it anywhere.

  A jet curves lazily above us and then plummets toward the line of hills. Black clouds explode from the greenery. The plane turns around and sails through the smoke. Another explosion erupts and then a whole string of them. Three other planes follow the first jet. The whole ridge of hills is covered with smoke. There are no puffs of dust next to the plane.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  Rhetorical question.

  “Step lively, now!” the Colonel orders. “Ground personnel will direct you to cover.”

  We jump out of the plane—no jetways in Khe Sanh—and run toward a bunker. It’s too big a jump for Chucky, so I fall flat on my face. A black Marine with a big grin helps me up.

  “Be careful, sir,” he warns me. “This place could be a little dangerous.”

  Just a little.

  Behind the bunker a Captain looks at the faces of the reinforcements. Then he sees a redhead civilian who really doesn’t belong with the gyrenes.

  “Colonel O’Malley, sir? Captain Ramirez, Third Marines,” he salutes me, “welcome to Khe Sanh.”

  “Staff Sergeant, Captain, retired. First Constabulary Regiment.”

  The young man has no idea what the First Constabulary is, such is the short span of national memory. However, he is impressed and salutes me again.

  “Charlie arranged a little reception for you, sir.”

  “So I noticed … Is he always that obliging?”

  “Usually, sir. We welcome it. The reinforcements understand very quickly that we are at war up here.”

  I was shown my hooch, a wooden hut on legs to keep the crawling beasties away. In front of it was a foxhole in which I was expected to jump when someone shouted, “incoming” meaning that mortar shells were falling, or more likely had just fallen.

  “That doesn’t happen much anymore, sir,” the Captain assured me. Charlie knows that as soon as he fires a mortar, our air will be all over him.”

  I was not completely reassured.

  Later when I was eating dinner—K radons—with the one-star General who commanded the garrison I asked how long he expected the battle to continue.

  He was a man who, save for the lines round his eyes, might have been a First Lieutenant.

  “A month, sir. Maybe a little more. It may not have looked like it but we’re winning. They’re taking terrible casualties over there. They’re regular army and not used to such losses. If Giap was smart, he’d pull out now. He’s stubborn and not used to being outlasted. He’s fighting our kind of war without our kind of resources. One morning we’ll wake up and find that they have disappeared.”

  A roar, as of thunder right above our heads, detonated just outside the door of the CO’s command post.

  “Just our artillery, sir. We lay down intermittent barrages just to keep them on their toes. They’re afraid to bring up their big pieces because they know we’ll destroy them the day they appear. So they’re limited to mortar fire and that at considerable risk. If Giap is thinking Dien Bien Phu, he is forgetting that the French didn’t have much air and we have a hell of a lot of it.”

  “Are they likely to attack again?”

  “Never can tell,” he said lazily. “Probably. They don’t care much about casualties. We do. That makes it a little hard for us.”

  “You’re confident you’ll hold the base?” I asked.

  Just for a moment the General’s eyes looked tired.

  “Certainly, sir. We’re Marines. However, when General Giap finally withdraws his troops, he’ll quite correctly think he has won a major victory, no matter how heavy his losses. He has tricked the Americans the way he tricked the French, though with a different goal. He fooled the French by luring them into Dien Bien Phu and then defeating them. He tricked us by luring us out here to this useless place so that we would define it as another Dien Bien Phu. Here his goal is not to defeat us, but merely to hold us down so we cannot continue our attempts at winning over the people in the coastal lowlands. He’s a brilli
ant fellow, all right.”

  “I guess I don’t understand,” I admitted.

  “The Marines have a different image of the war than General Westmorland. He believes we should be out in the highlands searching and destroying the enemy resources. We believe that we should establish coastal lowland enclaves where we win the locals to our side by protecting them from Vietcong terrorism. Ninety percent of the people live in the lowlands. With all our resources up here on Route 9, our efforts in the enclaves are weakened. I’m afraid General Westmorland is doing exactly what Giap wants him to do. So are we, though we don’t want to …”

  With that unhappy thought preying on my mind, I wandered about the base, talking to the troops, taking pictures, and nervously glancing toward the hills. A Catholic chaplain joined me.

  “Anyone ever fire ordnance at you, sir?”

  “A couple of times,” I replied casually. “A couple of days ago in Saigon a kid fired an AK-47 in my direction and once in Bamberg an officer working in the black market tried to kill me with a .45. Both, as is patent, missed.”

  “That’s in Germany, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, First Constabulary Regiment, Father.”

  Meant nothing to him either. He was a short bald man, in good condition and of indeterminate age, probably the oldest man in Khe Sanh. He spoke East Coast, probably Long Island.

  “With a name like O’Malley, I would imagine you’re a Catholic, sir.”

  “Sir is for officers, Father. I’m Chuck, Chucky to my wife and sibs. And sure I’m a Catholic, brother a priest. Archdiocese of Chicago.”

  “I’m Tom Boyle … What brings you to Khe Sanh, Chuck?”

  “I’m a photographer, Father. Getting some pictures.”

  “You’re married?”

  “I was when I left. Five kids. I think they may disown me when I come back. Wife is Irish-American too, bossy like they all are!”

  We both laughed, as Irishmen must when they discuss the determination of their womenfolk.

  “What do you think of this war, Chuck?”

  “Folly. We may win all the battles. We will still lose the war. Shouldn’t be here in the first place.”

  “Everyone over here thinks that, except some of the high brass and the dodos at the Embassy. It’s not only folly, but sinful folly. It’s destroying the moral fiber of the young men who have to fight it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Up here, thank God, there are no bimbos and pimps. There’s still heroin.”

  “Heroin!”

  “It’s all over. Most of the men use it, some of the officers. They’re frying their brains because they’re bored!”

  “Wow!”

  “Some night the Vietminh will come down out of the hills, all the alarms will ring, all the lights will go on, and nothing will happen. Our men will be so high on heroin that they won’t fight back!”

  “Scary!”

  The good Father was exaggerating. I hoped.

  “The Marines don’t kill their officers. In the Army they do. They roll fragmentation grenades under the officers hooches. Call it fragging. Blacks especially.”

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes because they don’t want to go into combat with them. Sometimes because they just don’t like them. There’s a race war going on here in country. The Marines won’t tolerate it. The Army pretends it’s not there.”

  How many American families had received notice of the death of a son or a husband “in action” when in fact he had died at the hands of his own men?

  “These are kids,” Father Boyle went on, “young men at the beginning of their lives with all the juices in their bloodstreams that come with being male and young. They are lonely, bored most of the time, in terrible danger on occasion, commanded often by dumb and cowardly officers, fighting an enemy they rarely see. They risk disease and addiction because they don’t know what else to do. The war will haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

  So did all the wars we had fought, some of them dumb, some of them perhaps not so dumb.

  “I would think they also lose some of their respect for human life. The enemy they can’t see dies horribly, as are those men up in the hills. We’re happy to see them die.”

  “They’re the enemy, Chuck. You cheer when you know they’re dying.”

  Yeah.

  He explained to me the layout of the base. Barbed wire and mines created an outer perimeter. When someone tried to break through the wire, alarm bells went off, and floodlights illumined the location of the break. Then the machine-gun emplacements a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards farther in began to fire on the enemy who might have survived the minefields. The artillery several hundred yards farther back depressed the muzzles of their guns and fired into the area of the break. Infantry rushed to the bunkers around the machine guns to repel any attackers that managed to infiltrate.

  “Slaughter,” Father Boyle told me. “Human waves like in Korea. They just keep coming and we just keep killing them.”

  “Do we bury their bodies?”

  “No place to bury them and no time. They’ve still got mortars up in the hills. We douse them with gasoline and burn them.”

  The smell of burning bodies would remain with the young Marines for all of their lives.

  I ate supper with the CO and his staff. They talked about why the NVA was wasting so many of its regulars on a battle they could not win.

  I thought to myself that they might be wondering why we were wasting many of our young men on a war we could not win.

  After supper I wandered about taking pictures of the young gyrenes, weapons next to them, writing letters home. I realized that I should be talking to the folks back home So I’ve talked into the recorder. I’ll finish this tape before I leave in the morning.

  I love you all. Pray for me.

  Morning.

  The sleeping bag in my hooch was not quite as comfortable as the bed in the Grand Hotel-Saigon, to say nothing of my marriage bed back home. So far away from home, I thought as I fell asleep. Almost as though it were not there. I’d be in country only for a couple of weeks. Most of the men out here would be away for a year—if they were not killed. I found my rosary and prayed myself to sleep.

  It was not a quiet night—the thump of mortar rounds, the whine of a jet, the buzzing of mosquitoes and heaven knows what other beasties outside my net, an occasional angry burst of artillery kept me half-awake for several hours. Then I jolted up from deep sleep and very pleasant dreams about my wife.

  The demons were loose. Sirens were sounding, a PA system was intoning the words “condition red, condition red, enemy within the perimeter, enemy within the perimeter,” artillery was booming, men were shouting, troops were running by my hooch, jets were snarling overhead, searchlights were blinking on and off, machine guns were burping away—the first time I had heard an automatic weapon up close since my basic training at Fort Benning.

  I considered my options. My stomach was tight, my mouth dry. I wanted to go back to sleep. There was too much noise. I pulled on my shoes. I forgot to shake them to get rid of scorpions. Fortunately, there weren’t any. I remembered the watchtower near my hooch. Making sure that I had both the Leica and my rosary, I crept out of the hooch. Though it was still night, the lights outside illumined Khe Sanh like a ballpark at a night game. There weren’t any men around me. They must be out there somewhere manning the inner perimeter.

  I pondered the watchtower. It was maybe thirty feet above the ground. I don’t like heights. So I climbed it anyway, not looking down the ladder till I made it to the top. I looked down then and immediately regretted it.

  Clutching the rail for dear life I looked around at the battle scene, a nightmare worse than any night horror I’d ever experienced.

  The breach in the perimeter was on our side of the base. Antlike figures were rushing, dashing through the barbed wire, across the minefields, and into a solid wall of American ordnance. Human waves. Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg carried on at night u
nder highintensity light. Maybe the enemy was unprepared for the light. They had their own nightmares.

  Khe Sanh was like a movie set, background for an improbable drama of brave men dying. The battle seemed illusory, hallucinatory, a pinball machine game. Reluctantly I dug out my camera and the telephoto lens. However, I was too far away to get any shots. The surrealist spectacle did not admit of photography. I would have to be down with the machine-gun emplacements.

  That would not be a good idea.

  I’m sure, dear ones, that you are happy to hear that for once Chucky was prudent.

  The firefight might have lasted another half hour. Then the ants stopped coming through the outer perimeter and the automatic weapons grew silent. The jets continued to whine overhead and the artillery continued to pound the hills.

  Maybe the attack was over. However, no one on our side would take any chances. I lay down on the platform of the watchtower, just to rest my head, and despite the artillery fell asleep.

  I woke to the rising sun and the smell of death. I looked around and discovered I was on the watchtower. Not a wise decision. I should never have tried it. Would someone please send a fire engine. Pretty please.

  Since the Chicago Fire Department was halfway around the world, I realized that I would fry if I stayed on the tower as the sun rose in the sky. So with the bravery which has marked all my life I began to crawl down the ladder, step by trembling step. I resisted the impulse to cry for help, not because I was ashamed to but because no one would hear me.

  I jumped the last several steps and, naturally fell on my rear end. Chucky Ducky as hero.

  I staggered back toward my hooch, saw a puff of dust ahead of me and dove headfirst into an available foxhole. The soft barks of exploding mortar shells surrounded me. A furious jet whined over me, its guns clattering. Two rockets erupted from its wings. The mortar fell silent.

  “Missed!” I chortled.

  Gentle listeners, you will assume that Chucky Ducky had flipped out. I will not attempt to disabuse you of that conclusion.