A Rumor of War

by Philip Caputo

  “Did you call Conlin?” I asked through the door, talking to my relief. “Charlie’s hitting the airfield.”

  “No shit. Conlin and the Old Man are on their way.”

  A recoilless rifle fired with a quick, double crack—the gun cracking first, the shell a moment afterward. A huge ball of flame rose over the trees like a mock sunrise. There was the hollow thud of exploding fuel tanks—the recoilless had hit one of the aircraft. The ball of flame boiled up, orange-crested and so brilliantly white at the center that I could clearly see the faces of the marines who were running toward the trenches on our perimeter.

  I went back into the tent, feeling that I ought to be doing something but not sure what it was. Major Conlin and his assistants, Harrisson and Captain Johnson, came in wearing helmets and flak jackets. They were soon joined by the intelligence officer and his number two, Lieutenant Mora. Then Colonel Wheeler arrived, stoop-shouldered, quiet, smoking his pipe. We were all crowded in there, along with a number of radio operators and message clerks. A single shell could have wiped out half the regimental staff, and I’m sure there were some line officers who hoped one would.

  The battle around the airfield had begun in earnest. The VC mortars made a steady thudding, the Marine mortars firing in return and the fuel tanks bursting. Machine guns tacked. Another bright flash was followed by a loud noise that was not a mortar shell: one of our own bombs going off or maybe an enemy satchel charge blowing up one of the aircraft. There was some confusion inside the operations tent. Radios crackled, field phones buzzed, staff officers ran from one bank of phones to another. Someone was talking to One-Nine, trying to learn where the attack was coming from and how many VC were in the assault. The colonel sat staring at the big operations map, as if, by staring at it, he could force it to reveal what was happening.

  “Look, we’re tripping over each other in here,” Captain Johnson said. “Anybody who doesn’t have to be in here, get your helmets and flak jackets on and take up your positions on the perimeter.”

  I started to go out. A big, bull-chested man with a deeply lined face came through the door, his heavy shoulders rolling as he walked. Seeing the two stars on his cap, I stupidly saluted and said, “Good morning, sir.” Major General Lew Walt did not acknowledge the formality, making his way up to the operations map. Walt had recently taken command of the III MAF, Third Marine Amphibious Force, the headquarters for all Marine units in Vietnam. He looked angry, and he had every reason to be: the very attack the Marines were supposed to have prevented was happening.

  I was in awe of Walt. I still had a strong tendency to hero-worship, and he was an authentic hero; he had won three Navy Crosses, one for single-handedly pulling an artillery piece uphill under heavy Japanese fire during a battle in the South Pacific. Beyond that, he was one of those rare general officers who believed it was his job to lead his army from up front, and not from a cushy command post so far removed from the action that it was almost desertion. He had established his forward headquarters in an amphibious tractor—a type of armored personnel carrier—parked just behind the howitzer batteries next to the regimental CP. Walt was leading his men from the cannon’s mouth, where generals had positioned themselves in the days when they were fighting-men like Lee, and not business managers like Westmoreland.

  It was my impression that Walt also was one of the few high-ranking officers who took the Viet Cong seriously in those confident, complacent days. And in moving his HQ so far forward and exposing himself to dangers he could have honorably avoided, he was trying to set an example of personal leadership for subordinate commanders and their staffs. It was an example few of them seemed to follow, then or later. I do know Walt was disturbed by some things he found when he took command in May. Outdoor movies were being shown at night at regimental HQ; Walt put a stop to that. Ten or twenty percent of the men in the rifle battalions were often on liberty, wandering around drunk in Danang; Walt put the city off limits. The main line of resistance around the Danang enclave showed as a solid line of men and bayonets on the staff officers’ maps; Walt went out to look for himself—something few staff officers ever did—and discovered that the line was not a line, but a string of disconnected bivouacs surrounded by flimsy wire that could not have resisted a determined assault by an enemy platoon. He ordered the construction of a proper MLR, with strongpoints, forward outposts, and preregistered artillery concentrations.

  But he was not able to overcome the inertia and complacency, and now the attack was progressing with destructive efficiency.

  Outside, it was almost as bright as day from the flares hanging over the airfield and the fires of the burning planes. Tracer bullets scratched scarlet lines across the sky. A star cluster rocketed up, reaching higher than the white, wavering flares, then burst in a shower of sparks. It was a red star cluster, a signal that the enemy had penetrated the airfield perimeter. The one-oh-fives behind the CP had opened the counterbattery barrage. A couple of bullets hissed overhead, but I couldn’t tell if we were being sniped at or if they were just stray rounds from the airfield battle.

  Putting on my helmet and flak jacket, I went over to the tent where the secret-and-confidential documents were stored in a safe. The S-and-C files contained the regiment’s message codes and operation plans, as well as a couple of small cryptography machines used to unscramble the codes. As the S-and-C officer, I was responsible for the security of all that James Bond stuff, and my standing orders were to burn it with thermite grenades if the camp was attacked and overrun. Sergeant Hamilton, the chief clerk, was outside the tent in his battle gear. With him was a lance corporal, a new arrival who looked tense and confused.

  “Lieutenant, are the yellow hordes approaching?” Sergeant Hamilton asked. “Everything’s all set. I’ve got the grenades out, and there’s nothing I’d like better than to burn all this crap.”

  “The yellow hordes are through the airfield’s wire. It doesn’t look like they’re going to hit us, but if they do, I don’t want you burning this stuff unless you’ve got Charlies coming right at you.”

  “Sir, if I’ve got Charlies coming right at me, I’m going to throw these grenades at ’em. Then I’ll throw the files on top of ’em and let ’em all burn together.” A flurry of tracers went over us, and we heard the slow, throaty thumping of a heavy machine gun. Hamilton laughed. “What was that you said about them not hitting us, sir?”

  “That was probably one of our own fifties. Okay, you heard what I said.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s a great show Mr. Charles is putting on, but someone should tell him he’s three days short of the Fourth.” He laughed again. The joke seemed funnier than it was.

  With nothing more to do, I went to my position on the perimeter. Each of the junior officers in HqCo was responsible for a section of the CP perimeter. I was in charge of a corporal and ten men, the closest thing I had to a command.

  While we waited in our foxholes, a convoy carrying a rifle company rolled past, headed toward the base. Tardily, the counterattack was getting under way. The trucks were moving fast, throwing up clouds of dust that shimmered in the orange twilight cast by the flames licking at the sky over the airfield. The convoy sped recklessly down the road, the packed marines yelling, cheering, and holding their rifles in the air. “Goddamned grunts are all crazy,” said a headquarters clerk next to me. The one-oh-five battery stepped up its fire, the guns and the gun crews silhouetted against the intermittent muzzle-flashes. The last two six-bys in the convoy went past. Each was towing an artillery piece, and I felt a flicker of excitement when I saw the howitzers, bouncing on their carriages behind the speeding trucks. A column of white flame from burning magnesium fountained up over the airfield just as the one-oh-five shells began bursting in the rice paddies south of the base.

  We stayed on the perimeter until first light. Plumes of black smoke roiled the early-morning sky, but the battle was over. Later in the day, Kazmarack and I drove past the airfield. We were on our way into Danang with reports for I
Corps headquarters. I expected to find the base a shambles, but it was very large and most of it had escaped serious damage. Still, the attack had had more than a minor effect. Two big transports lay at the south end of the field, both totally destroyed, bits of their wings and engines scattered about. Two fighter planes nearby looked like broken toys, and a third was just a pile of ashes and twisted metal. A truck was towing another damaged plane off to the side of the runway. Stopping to look at the wreckage, we saw the holes the VC sapper teams had blown or cut in the chain link fence along the perimeter road. They had come through the sector my platoon had manned back in March and April, when we thought we were going to win the war in a few months and then march home to ticker-tape parades.

  Twelve

  The greatest tragedy is war, but so long as there is mankind, there will be war.

  —Jomini

  The Art of War

  There was no heavy fighting around Danang for the rest of that summer. During the daytime, there did not seem to be any war at all. The rice paddies lay quietly in the sun. They were beautiful at that time of year, a bright green dappled with the darker green of the palm groves shading the villages. The peasants in the villages in the secure areas went on living lives whose ancient rhythms had hardly been disturbed by the war. In the early mornings, small boys led the water buffalo from their pens to the river wallows and farmers came out to till the fields. They plodded for hours behind wooden, ox-drawn plows, tilling the sunbaked hardness out of the earth. In the afternoons, when it became too hot to work, they quit the fields and returned to the cool dimness of their thatch huts. It was like a ritual: when the heat got too intense, they unhitched their plows and filed down the dikes toward the villages, their conical hats yellow against the green of the paddies. A wind usually sprang up in the afternoon, and in it the long shoots of maturing rice made a luxuriant rippling. It was a pleasant sight, that expanse of jade-colored rice stretching out as far as the foothills and the mountains blue in the distance. At dusk, the buffalo were driven back to the pens. With the small boys walking beside them and whacking their haunches with bamboo sticks, they came down the dusty roads, their horned heads swaying and their flanks caked with the mud of the wallows.

  The war started at night. The eight-inch and one-fifty-five-millimeter guns commenced their regular shellings, and the VC began their sniping and mortaring. Our patrols slipped down darkened trails to set ambushes or to be ambushed themselves. On the perimeters, sentries listened and looked into a blackness lighted now and then by dull flares. They waited, alternately bored and nervous, for the infiltrators who sometimes probed our lines to lob grenades over the wire or spray a position with carbine fire. They came in twos and threes, and that is how they died and how our own men died—in twos and threes. We fought no great battles. There was no massive hemorrhaging, just a slow, steady trickle of blood drawn in a series of ambushes and fire-fights. Although there was more action than in the spring, contacts with the enemy were still rare. Almost every hour of every night the same reports came in over the radios in the operations tent. They came in from outposts and patrols, and we could hear them whenever we stood watch, twenty different voices saying the same thing, like a choir reciting a chant: “Contact negative. All secure. Situation remains the same.” When contacts did occur, they were violent, but nothing ever really changed. The regiment sat in the same positions it had occupied since April, and the details of the surrounding landscape became so familiar that it seemed we had been there all our lives. Men were killed and wounded, and our patrols kept going out to fight in the same places they had fought the week before and the week before that. The situation remained the same. Only the numbers on the colonel’s scoreboard changed.

  The numbers were not all that changed. I was twenty-four when the summer began; by the time it ended, I was much older than I am now. Chronologically, my age had advanced three months, emotionally about three decades. I was somewhere in my middle fifties, that depressing period when a man’s friends begin dying off and each death reminds him of the nearness of his own.

  Our men did not die in great numbers. And because they died as individuals, I remember them as individuals and not as statistics. I remember Corporal Brian Gauthier, who, as one cynical old campaigner put it, “won himself two Navy Crosses: the blue and gold one they pin on you and the white, wooden one they put over you.” Gauthier, a twenty-one-year-old squad leader in A Company, was mortally wounded in an ambush on July 11. They gave him the medal because he continued to lead his men under heavy enemy fire until, to quote from the citation, “he succumbed to his wounds.” Later, the regimental HQ camp was named for him. That was nice of them, but they did not give any medals to, nor name anything for, the grenadier who died in the same ambush. He did not have the chance to do anything heroic because the mine he stepped on caused the sympathetic detonation of his 40-mm grenades, killing him instantly. “Sympathetic detonation” was the phrase I used in the casualty report. It was another one of those dry, inaccurate military euphemisms. It meant that the explosion of the mine had caused his grenades to go off at the same time, and I could see nothing sympathetic about that.

  I remember Frank Reasoner, who also died a hero’s death, and Bill Parsons, who did not. I saw Reasoner in the operations tent the day after Gauthier was killed. I had just finished filling out reports for seven marines who had been killed or wounded by mortar fire that morning. Reasoner was sitting in the tent smoking his battered, bent pipe and looking at the map. A short, stocky man, Reasoner was twenty-nine—old for a first lieutenant—an ex–enlisted man who had worked his way up through the ranks, a husband and a father. I liked him and his air of quiet maturity. We split a beer and talked about the patrol he was taking out in the afternoon. His company was going into the paddy lands below Charlie Ridge, flat, dangerous country with a lot of tree lines and hedgerows. Reasoner finished his beer and left. A few hours later, a helicopter brought him back in; a machine gun had stitched him across the belly, and the young corporal who had pulled Reasoner’s body out of the line of fire said, “He should be covered up. Will somebody get a blanket? My skipper’s dead.” Out on the patrol, his company had run into a couple of enemy machine-gun nests. He had charged one of the guns single-handedly, knocking it out of action. Then, having fired his carbine at the second gun, he had run to pick up one of his wounded and was killed. They gave Frank Reasoner the Congressional Medal of Honor, named a camp and a ship after him, and sent the medal and a letter of condolence to his widow.

  Parsons, a lieutenant in E Company, 2d Battalion, was killed two nights later by one of our own 4.2-inch mortar shells. It fell on his platoon while he was briefing them in a “rear area” base camp. The marines had been crowded close together, and since a four-deuce is a fairly large shell, there were a number of casualties. At HQ, we had problems making out accurate casualty reports; no one knew exactly who had been killed and who had been wounded. Captain Anderson said I would again have to go to the division hospital to straighten things out. I begged off, saying that I had seen enough dead bodies to know that I did not want to see any more. Anderson said he would go. When he got back, he looked a little strange and said nothing except to read aloud the notes he had made at the hospital. He had made good, thorough notes: Parson’s legs had been scythed off at the hip, two more men had been killed, eight others seriously wounded. I filled out the forms while he read, then filed them in the nonhostile casualties folder. Then Anderson flipped his notebook on his desk and said, “It looked like a butcher shop in there.”

  I also remember the night nearly two weeks later when a squad of VC sappers got through the wire of an engineer battalion’s camp near the CP. A lot of flares and grenades were going off and bullets were splattering the dust around the junior officers’ tent. I tore through my mosquito net, grabbed my carbine, tripped, fell against the corner of my footlocker, and knocked myself out. I lay unconscious for a few moments. Coming to, I crawled into a trench where Mora, the assistant i
ntelligence officer, stood wearing nothing but a pistol belt. Bart Francis, another lieutenant on the staff, looked at him and said, “Really, Roland, that’s hardly proper.” A little giddy from the knock on the head, I laughed hysterically. An exalted Schwartz—the Prussian in Schwartz came out in combat—was meanwhile yelling orders to groups of confused enlisted men. Well, the more power to him if he could tell what was going on. I couldn’t, though it was a moonlit night made brighter by the flares. Small-arms fire had broken out along our perimeter; apparently another sapper squad was trying to breach the CP’s wire. The VC were shooting at the marines, the marines at the VC or at other marines or at nothing at all. In the blanched light we saw a rifleman about twenty or thirty yards away from our trench. Crouched low, he ran into the cross fire and went down, falling as if he had slipped on a patch of ice. His legs flew out and he landed heavily on his back and lay still. When the firing died down, another officer and I climbed out of the trench and, calling for a corpsman, ran over to the marine. He did not need a corpsman. His eyes were wide but not seeing, and one of his legs, half severed at the thigh, was bent under him in what looked like a contortionist’s trick.