The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The men got up at five-thirty in the morning and were guided in the dark to a mess tent in a different part of the rubber grove, where they had a breakfast of grapefruit juice, hot cereal, scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee. At about six-thirty, the sky began to grow light, and they were led back to the airstrip. Strings of nine and ten helicopters with tapered bodies could be seen through the treetops, filing across the gray early-morning sky like little schools of minnows. In the distance, the slow beat of their engines sounded soft and almost peaceful, but when they rushed past overhead the noise was fearful and deafening. By seven o’clock, sixty helicopters were perched in formation on the airstrip, with seven men assembled in a silent group beside each one. When I arrived at the helicopter assigned to me—No. 47—three engineers and three infantrymen were already there, five of them standing or kneeling in the dust checking their weapons. One of them, a sergeant, was a small, wiry American Indian, who spoke in short, clipped syllables. The sixth man, a stocky infantryman with blond hair and a red face, who looked to be about twenty and was going into action for the first time, lay back against an earth embankment with his eyes closed, wearing an expression of boredom, as though he wanted to put these wasted minutes of waiting to some good use by catching up on his sleep. Two of the other six men in the team were also going into combat for the first time. The men did not speak to each other.

  At seven-fifteen, our group of seven climbed up into its helicopter, a UH-1 (called Huey), and the pilot, a man with a German accent, told us that four of us should sit on the seat and three on the floor in front, to balance the craft. He also warned us that the flight might be rough, since we would be flying in the turbulent wake of the helicopter in front of us. At seven-twenty, the engines of the sixty helicopters started simultaneously, with a thunderous roar and a storm of dust. After idling his engine for three minutes on the airstrip, our pilot raised his right hand in the air, forming a circle with the forefinger and thumb, to show that he hoped everything would proceed perfectly from then on. The helicopter rose slowly from the airstrip right after the helicopter in front of it had risen. The pilot’s gesture was the only indication that the seven men were on their way to something more than a nine-o’clock job. Rising, one after another, in two parallel lines of thirty, the fleet of sixty helicopters circled the base twice, gaining altitude and tightening their formation as they did so, until each machine was not more than twenty yards from the one immediately in front of it. Then the fleet, straightening out the two lines, headed south, toward Ben Suc.

  In Helicopter No. 47, one of the men shouted a joke, which only one other man could hear, and they both laughed. The soldier who had earlier been trying to catch a nap on the runway wanted to get a picture of the sixty helicopters with a Minolta camera he had hanging from a strap around his neck. He was sitting on the floor, facing backward, so he asked one of the men on the seat to try to get a couple of shots. “There are sixty choppers here,” he shouted, “and every one of them costs a quarter of a million bucks!” The Huey flies with its doors open, so the men who sat on the outside seats were perched right next to the drop. They held tightly to ceiling straps as the helicopter rolled and pitched through the sky like a ship plunging through a heavy sea. Wind from the rotors and from the forward motion blasted into the men’s faces, making them squint. At five minutes to eight, the two lines of the fleet suddenly dived, bobbing and swaying from the cruising altitude of twenty-five hundred feet down to treetop level, at a point about seven miles from Ben Suc but heading away from it, to confuse enemy observers on the ground. Once at an altitude of fifty or sixty feet, the fleet made a wide U turn and headed directly for Ben Suc at a hundred miles an hour, the helicopters’ tails raised slightly in forward flight. Below, the faces of scattered peasants were clearly visible as they looked up from their water buffalo at the sudden, earsplitting incursion of sixty helicopters charging low over their fields.

  All at once, Helicopter No. 47 landed, and from both sides of it the men jumped out on the run into a freshly turned vegetable plot in the village of Ben Suc—the first Vietnamese village that several of them had ever set foot in. The helicopter took off immediately, and another settled in its place. Keeping low, the men I was with ran single file out into the center of the little plot, and then, spotting a low wall of bushes on the side of the plot they had just left, ran back there for cover and filed along the edges of the bushes toward several soldiers who had landed a little while before them. For a minute, there was silence. Suddenly a single helicopter came clattering overhead at about a hundred and fifty feet, squawking Vietnamese from two stubby speakers that stuck out, winglike, from the thinnest part of the fuselage, near the tail. The message, which the American soldiers could not understand, went, “Attention, people of Ben Suc! You are surrounded by Republic of South Vietnam and Allied Forces. Do not run away or you will be shot as V.C. Stay in your homes and wait for further instructions.” The metallic voice, floating down over the fields, huts, and trees, was as calm as if it were announcing a flight departure at an air terminal. It was gone in ten seconds, and the soldiers again moved on in silence. Within two minutes, the young men from No. 47 reached a little dirt road marking the village perimeter, which they were to hold, but there were no people in sight except American soldiers. The young men lay down on the sides of embankments and in little hollows in the small area it had fallen to them to control. There was no sign of an enemy.

  For the next hour and a half, the six men from No. 47 were to be the masters of a small stretch of vegetable fields which was divided down the center by about fifty yards of narrow dirt road—almost a path—and bounded on the front and two sides (as they faced the road and, beyond it, the center of the village) by several small houses behind copses of low palm trees and hedges and in back by a small graveyard giving onto a larger cultivated field. The vegetable fields, most of them not more than fifty feet square and of irregular shape, were separated by neatly constructed grass-covered ridges, each with a path running along its top. The houses were small and trim, most of them with one side open to the weather but protected from the rain by the deep eaves of a thatch-grass roof. The houses were usually set apart by hedges and low trees, so that one house was only half visible from another and difficult to see from the road; they were not unlike a wealthy American suburb in the logic of their layout. An orderly small yard, containing low-walled coops for chickens and a shed with stalls for cows, adjoined each house. Here and there, between the fields and in the copses, stood the whitewashed waist-high columns and brick walls of Vietnamese tombs, which look like small models of the ruins of once-splendid palaces. It was a tidy, delicately wrought small-scale landscape with short views—not overcrowded but with every square foot of land carefully attended to.

  Four minutes after the landing, the heavy crackle of several automatic weapons firing issued from a point out of sight, perhaps five hundred yards away. The men, who had been sitting or kneeling, went down on their bellies, their eyes trained on the confusion of hedges, trees, and houses ahead. A report that Mike Company had made light contact came over their field radio. At about eight-ten, the shock of tremendous explosions shattered the air and rocked the ground. The men hit the dirt again. Artillery shells crashed somewhere in the woods, and rockets from helicopters thumped into the ground. When a jet came screaming low overhead, one of the men shouted, “They’re bringing in air strikes!” Heavy percussions shook the ground under the men, who were now lying flat, and shock waves beat against their faces. Helicopter patrols began to wheel low over the treetops outside the perimeter defended by the infantry, spraying the landscape with long bursts of machine-gun fire. After about five minutes, the explosions became less frequent, and the men from the helicopters, realizing that this was the planned bombing and shelling of the northern woods, picked themselves up, and two of them, joined by three soldiers from another helicopter, set about exploring their area.

  Three or four soldiers began to search the houses be
hind a nearby copse. Stepping through the doorway of one house with his rifle in firing position at his hip, a solidly built six-foot-two Negro private came upon a young woman standing with a baby in one arm and a little girl of three or four holding her other hand. The woman was barefoot and was dressed in a white shirt and rolled-up black trousers; a bandanna held her long hair in a coil at the back of her head. She and her children intently watched each of the soldier’s movements. In English, he asked, “Where’s your husband?” Without taking her eyes off the soldier, the woman said something in Vietnamese, in an explanatory tone. The soldier looked around the inside of the one-room house and, pointing to his rifle, asked, “You have same-same?” The woman shrugged and said something else in Vietnamese. The soldier shook his head and poked his hand into a basket of laundry on a table between him and the woman. She immediately took all the laundry out of the basket and shrugged again, with a hint of impatience, as though to say, “It’s just laundry!” The soldier nodded and looked around, appearing unsure of what to do next in this situation. Then, on a peg on one wall, he spotted a pair of men’s pants and a shirt hanging up to dry. “Where’s he?” he asked, pointing to the clothes. The woman spoke in Vietnamese. The soldier took the damp clothing down and, for some reason, carried it outside, where he laid it on the ground.

  The house was clean, light, and airy, with doors on two sides and the top half of one whole side opening out onto a grassy yard. On the table, a half-eaten bowl of rice stood next to the laundry basket. A tiny hammock, not more than three feet long, hung in one corner. At one side of the house, a small, separate wooden roof stood over a fireplace with cooking utensils hanging around it. On the window ledge was a row of barely sprouting plants, in little clods of earth wrapped in palm leaves. Inside the room, a kilnlike structure, its walls and top made of mud, logs, and large stones, stood over the family’s bedding. At the rear of the house, a square opening in the ground led to an underground bomb shelter large enough for several people to stand in. In the yard, a cow stood inside a third bomb shelter, made of tile walls about a foot thick.

  After a minute, the private came back in with a bared machete at his side and a field radio on his back. “Where’s your husband, huh?” he asked again. This time, the woman gave a long answer in a complaining tone, in which she pointed several times at the sky and several times at her children. The soldier looked at her blankly. “What do I do with her?” he called to some fellow-soldiers outside. There was no answer. Turning back to the young woman, who had not moved since his first entrance, he said, “O.K., lady, you stay here,” and left the house.

  Several other houses were searched, but no other Vietnamese were found, and for twenty minutes the men on that particular stretch of road encountered no one else, although they heard sporadic machine-gun fire down the road. The sky, which had been overcast, began to show streaks of blue, and a light wind stirred the trees. The bombing, the machine-gunning from helicopters, the shelling, and the rocket firing continued steadily. Suddenly a Vietnamese man on a bicycle appeared, pedalling rapidly along the road from the direction of the village. He was wearing the collarless, pajamalike black garment that is both the customary dress of the Vietnamese peasant and the uniform of the National Liberation Front, and although he was riding away from the center of the village—a move forbidden by the voices from the helicopters—he had, it appeared, already run a long gantlet of American soldiers without being stopped. But when he had ridden about twenty yards past the point where he first came in sight, there was a burst of machine-gun fire from a copse thirty yards in front of him, joined immediately by a burst from a vegetable field to one side, and he was hurled off his bicycle into a ditch a yard from the road. The bicycle crashed into a side embankment. The man with the Minolta camera, who had done the firing from the vegetable patch, stood up after about a minute and walked over to the ditch, followed by one of the engineers. The Vietnamese in the ditch appeared to be about twenty, and he lay on his side without moving, blood flowing from his face, which, with the eyes open, was half buried in the dirt at the bottom of the ditch. The engineer leaned down, felt the man’s wrist, and said, “He’s dead.” The two men—both companions of mine on No. 47—stood still for a while, with folded arms, and stared down at the dead man’s face, as though they were giving him a chance to say something. Then the engineer said, with a tone of finality, “That’s a V.C. for you. He’s a V.C., all right. That’s what they wear. He was leaving town. He had to have some reason.”

  The two men walked back to a ridge in the vegetable field and sat down on it, looking off into the distance in a puzzled way and no longer bothering to keep low. The man who had fired spoke suddenly, as though coming out of deep thought. “I saw this guy coming down the road on a bicycle,” he said. “And I thought, you know, Is this it? Do I shoot? Then some guy over there in the bushes opened up, so I cut loose.”

  The engineer raised his eyes in the manner of someone who has made a strange discovery and said, “I’m not worried. You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a dead guy, and I don’t feel bad. I just don’t, that’s all.” Then, with a hard edge of defiance in his voice, he added, “Actually, I’m glad. I’m glad we killed the little V.C.”

  Over near the copse, the man who had fired first, also a young soldier, had turned his back to the road. Clenching a cigar in his teeth, he stared with determination over his gun barrel across the wide field, where several water buffaloes were grazing but no human beings had yet been seen. Upon being asked what had happened, he said, “Yeah, he’s dead. Ah shot him. He was a goddam V.C.”…

  · · ·

  With the attack over, the tricky task of distinguishing V.C.s from the civilians moved from the battlefield into the interrogation room. First, under the direction of the Americans, ARVN soldiers segregated the villagers by age level, sex, and degree of suspiciousness. All males between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were slated to be evacuated to the Provincial Police Headquarters in the afternoon. From among them, all who were suspected of being Vietcong and a smaller group of “confirmed V.C.s” were singled out. Some of these men were bound and blindfolded, and sat cross-legged on the ground just a few yards from the large assemblage of women, children, and aged. They were men who had been caught hiding in their bomb shelters or had otherwise come under suspicion. One group, for example, was unusually well dressed and well groomed. Instead of bare feet and pajamalike garb, these men wore Japanese foam-rubber slippers and short-sleeved cotton shirts. Standing over them, his arms akimbo, an American officer remarked, “No question about these fellas. Anyone in this village with clothes like that is a V.C. They’re V.C.s, all right.” A group of about a dozen men categorized as defectors were singled out to be taken to the special Open Arms center near Phu Cuong.

  The Americans interrogated only the prisoners they themselves had taken, leaving the prisoners taken by the Vietnamese to the Vietnamese interrogators. The American interrogations were held in a large, debris-strewn room of the roofless schoolhouse. Four interrogating teams worked at the same time, each consisting of one American and an interpreter from the Vietnamese Army. The teams sat on low piles of bricks, and the suspects sat on the floor, or on one brick. These sessions did not uncover very much about the enemy or about the village of Ben Suc, but I felt that, as the only extensive spoken contact between Americans and the Ben Suc villagers throughout the Cedar Falls operation, they had a certain significance. Approximately forty people were questioned the first day.

  In one session, a stout American named Martinez questioned, in a straightforward, businesslike manner, a small, barefoot, gray-haired man with a neat little gray mustache, who wore a spotlessly clean, pure-white loose-fitting, collarless shirt and baggy black trousers. First, Martinez asked to see the old man’s identification card. By law, all South Vietnamese citizens are required to carry an identification card issued by the government and listing their name, date and place of birth, and occupation. (The Americans considered an
yone who lacked this card suspicious, and a man who last registered in another village would have to supply a reason.) This suspect produced an I.D. card that showed him to be sixty years old and born in a village across the river. A search of his pockets also revealed an empty tobacco pouch and a small amount of money.

  “Why did he come to Ben Suc?” Throughout the session, Martinez, who held a clipboard in one hand, spoke to the interpreter, who then spoke to the suspect, listened to his reply, and answered Martinez.

  “He says he came to join relatives.”

  “Has he ever seen any V.C.?”

  “Yes, sometimes he sees V.C.”

  “Where?”

  “Out walking in the fields two weeks ago, he says.”

  “Where were they going?”