A Rumor of War

by Philip Caputo

  But Long Lance was postponed on the 3d because the crachin had socked in the landing zone. The next day, we were again trucked to the airfield, made to wait by the helicopters all night, and then driven back to base camp to wait some more. Now, on the 5th, we were still waiting for the weather to clear. We were exhausted with waiting. Our edge had begun to dull. We had begun to think. It was becoming more and more difficult to maintain that suspension of imagination which makes waiting for an attack emotionally bearable.

  For a few, one way out was to feign illness. They were uniformly unsuccessful. One marine broke down, and it was not a pleasant thing to see. A veteran of the Battle of Chu Lai and of countless patrol actions since, he let out a cry, collapsed, and rolled in the mud, sobbing that he could stand no more. The rest of the company stood rigidly at attention, many near the breaking point themselves. Then Sergeant Horne bulled up to the marine, kicked him in the ribs, and pulled him to his feet. “You yellow son of a bitch,” Horne bellowed. “You worthless yellow scumbag, you’ll stand it, you hear me?” Horne’s face was scarlet and fierce beneath its flaring moustache. He shook the marine violently. “You’re a fucking coward, but you’re going and you’ll take it. You’ll take it as long as I do.” Holding the man by the front of the shirt, he shook him like a rag doll. “YOU HEAR THAT, YOU FUCKING COWARD? YOU’LL TAKE IT AS LONG AS I DO.” And none of us did a thing to stop Horne because we felt the same terror. And we knew that that kind of fear was a contagion and the marine a carrier. So, shake the hell out of him, Sergeant Horne. Beat him, kick him, beat that virus out of him before it spreads.

  The medicine worked. The marine recovered, his fear of battle overcome by a greater fear of the big, bull-chested Horne.

  We heard Gunnery Sergeant Strong’s voice: “Charley Company, fall in. Saddle up and get on the trucks. Let’s go, hustle it up.”

  “Yeah, right, gunny,” someone said. “Hurry up and wait.”

  “Knock off the chatter, girls, and get your asses on the trucks.”

  The dark mass of men moved with a creaking of canvas web gear and a rattling of rifle slings, flowing toward the convoy, their boots sloshing in the mud. The truck engines coughed to life, then swelled to a steady roar. McCloy put his arm around me as I shouldered my pack.

  “Well, I think we’ll be going in this time, P.J. ‘Once more dear friends, into the breach!’”

  I laughed. It seemed nothing could dampen McCloy’s romantic spirit. The slender, straw-blond Kentuckian had a mechanism in his head, a shock-proof prism that turned the starkest realities of the war into the colorful stuff of romance. He never saw mangled, festering corpses, only heroes bravely fallen in battle. And now that we were going into a potentially disastrous attack, he saw himself as Prince Hal, going once more into the breach.

  The convoy started to bump down the road, the wheels of the trucks spinning as they sought a purchase in the soft mud. We rode without lights, except when the drivers flashed the headlamps to avoid collisions. The six-bys plowed slowly through the muck, the drivers running through the gears and the noise of the engines rising from a deep roar to a high whine, then falling back to a roar, then up to a whine again. We passed through a village whose groves of sheltering trees made a vaultlike blackness over the road. The drivers turned their lights on and off, on and off. In the flickering beams we could see the misty rain that chilled us. Men’s faces, rifles, and the glistening leaves of the trees at the roadside appeared for an instant, then vanished. In the shadows, where we could not see them, water buffalo bawled at the machines. The convoy turned onto the road that curved around Hill 327 and ran toward the airfield. On the higher ground, the road was drier, and the trucks picked up speed. A shell flashed on the horizon. A few seconds later, we heard the long, mournful echo of the explosion. Coming around a sharp bend, the drivers again flicked their lights, and I saw the men in the truck ahead. The marines sat braced against the wooden guardrails. A few were sleeping, their limp bodies jostled by the rocking motion of the truck. A machine-gunner slouched behind his M-60 on the bed of the truck, the gun resting on its bipods and the belt of cartridges gleaming like a row of long, sharp teeth. Allen was sitting by the tailgate, a rifle held vertically between his knees. His face looked determined, angry and sad at the same time. It was the expression of a veteran, a man going to the place where he has been too many times before. Then the lights went off and I could see only outlines and the slim profiles of rifle barrels. They were just a mass of faceless men again.

  Charley Company reached the airfield sometime in the very early morning. D Company and the battalion headquarters group arrived as we were dismounting from the trucks. There was a mystery and drama about it: the rumbling trucks, voices commanding “Fall in,” tailgates banging open, and large numbers of men, half-visible as they formed ranks. The helicopters squatted on the tarmac, their outstretched, drooping rotor blades resembling the wings of gliding hawks.

  C Company fell in, stood at attention for a few minutes, then was put at rest. We waited, were called to attention again, and told to form helicopter teams. The company shifted from its regular formation into eight-man teams with the precision of a school band performing a movement at halftime. We waited again; then the teams were marched to the helicopter loading points, marched back to the assembly area, then back to the loading points again. It was the same routine we had gone through on the previous two nights. Neal ordered the company to lie down and rest in formation. Chilled by the rain, we rolled up in our ponchos and slept, or tried to. Looking at the helicopters, my imagination started to work. I saw black flak clouds in the sky, falling, flaming helicopters, bodies tumbling out of them into space. Well, you could not escape fear before an action. All you could do was to control it and keep your head clear. So, I thought about my platoon’s mission, which was to secure the high ground at the southern edge of the landing zone and hold it until the rest of the battalion was in. Forcing myself to think of nothing but that, I felt calmer inside and fell asleep.

  Dawn broke, the light of the rising sun seeping through the gray clouds like blood through a dirty battle dressing. Wet and bone-tired, we waited all morning. The weather began to clear. It grew very hot, but the sun was a balm to joints and muscles stiffened by the monsoon damp. Shortly after noon, the decision came down: we were to risk a daylight assault. The helicopter engines revved to a steady, pulsating roar, and with mixed feelings of relief and dread, we climbed on board.

  The aircraft covered the twenty-five miles in a quarter of an hour. The valley lay below, a band of bright green rice paddies lying between two gloomy mountain ranges. I could see the Vu Gia River, light-brown in the sun, the ribbon of jungle growing along its banks, the roofs of villages showing through the jungle, a red road running past the villages, a couple of creased, barren hills in the surrounding rice fields, and the rib of muddy high ground, like a miniature ridgeline, which my platoon was to hold. The helicopters started to make a tight circling descent, and the mountains on the south side of the valley came into view, then the mountains on the north, flashing in the square frame of the open hatch like photographs on a screen. The force of the turn pressed us against the webbed jump seats. The flight leveled off. I searched the sky for the dark puffs of flak but saw none. There was a squeezing in my guts as the aircraft, dropping rapidly, went in for an assault landing. Coffell cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, “Line of departure, lock and load.” The marines loaded their rifles, but we could not hear the bolts locking over the engine noise and the buffeting wind. We had once again crossed that line between a world of relative stability and one that was wholly unstable; the world where anything could happen at any moment.

  Sitting near the hatch and looking down at the uprushing green, I heard the muffled popping of small-arms fire and saw a puff of smoke expanding at one end of the landing zone. Another puff appeared at the opposite end. From our altitude, the mortar shells looked like gray, blossoming flowers. The helicopter went on down, the
small arms cracking and popping. There was no more mortar fire, but that was small comfort: the first two shells were probably registration rounds. The Viet Cong would wait until we were all in. The rifle fire continued, sounding like the old Rice Krispies commercials. Snap. Crackle. Pop. The aircraft was in level flight now, racing about a hundred feet over the ground. Some distance away, I saw two or three Viet Cong in black uniforms running for the cover of a tree line. Unbuckling their chin straps, the marines knelt in a row behind me. Tight-lipped, they waited for the lurch of the flare-up and the instant when they would lunge out of the hatch.

  A helicopter assault on a hot landing zone creates emotional pressures far more intense than a conventional ground assault. It is the enclosed space, the noise, the speed, and, above all, the sense of total helplessness. There is a certain excitement to it the first time, but after that it is one of the more unpleasant experiences offered by modern war. On the ground, an infantryman has some control over his destiny, or at least the illusion of it. In a helicopter under fire, he hasn’t even the illusion. Confronted by the indifferent forces of gravity, ballistics, and machinery, he is himself pulled in several directions at once by a range of extreme, conflicting emotions. Claustrophobia plagues him in the small space: the sense of being trapped and powerless in a machine is unbearable, and yet he has to bear it. Bearing it, he begins to feel a blind fury toward the forces that have made him powerless, but he has to control his fury until he is out of the helicopter and on the ground again. He yearns to be on the ground, but the desire is countered by the danger he knows is there. Yet, he is also attracted by the danger, for he knows he can overcome his fear only by facing it. His blind rage then begins to focus on the men who are the source of the danger—and of his fear. It concentrates inside him, and through some chemistry is transformed into a fierce resolve to fight until the danger ceases to exist. But this resolve, which is sometimes called courage, cannot be separated from the fear that has aroused it. Its very measure is the measure of that fear. It is, in fact, a powerful urge not to be afraid anymore, to rid himself of fear by eliminating the source of it. This inner, emotional war produces a tension almost sexual in its intensity. It is too painful to endure for long. All a soldier can think about is the moment when he can escape his impotent confinement and release this tension. All other considerations, the rights and wrongs of what he is doing, the chances for victory or defeat in the battle, the battle’s purpose or lack of it, become so absurd as to be less than irrelevant. Nothing matters except the final, critical instant when he leaps out into the violent catharsis he both seeks and dreads.

  * * *

  The platoon, or most of it, lay against the slope of the crescent-shaped ridge, firing into the tree line from which the Viet Cong were shooting at the helicopters landing the rest of the battalion. The tree line was about two hundred yards in front of us, across some rice paddies, the landing zone an equal distance behind. I could not remember how we had gotten to where we were, only jumping out of the helicopter into muddy water up to our waists, stumbling, heavy-legged and clumsy, with bullets lashing the air over our heads; then we had scrambled up the slippery ridge, wet and cold from the waist down, hot and sweating from the waist up. A few of my men had become disoriented in the confusion of the landing. I could see them, bunched up as they awkwardly staggered down a dike at the edge of an irrigation canal. I yelled at them to spread out, but they could not hear me. Two mortar shells gestured in the field in front of us. Two more went off behind, bursting with that ugly, crumping sound. I climbed off the high ground and ran down the dike toward the stragglers. “Spread it out, people,” I yelled. “Goddamnit, spread it out. C’mon, this way. Move move move!” I grabbed one bewildered rifleman by the collar and shoved him off the dike into the paddy. “This way, I said. C’mon, move. We’ve got incoming.” Staggering like drunks, they followed me to the ridge. We climbed its reverse slope hand over hand, slipping in the sticky, drying mud. A dozen shells, crashing against the forward slope, sent up a spray of mud and singing steel splinters. We hit the deck hard. Smoke from the mortar shells rolled over the ridge, the air stinking of high-explosive. Several more rounds struck behind us. Jones, lying beside me, said, “They’ve got us bracketed, sir. We might just die on this fuckin’ tit of a hill.”

  But we did not die, because the enemy did not have us bracketed. Instead, he walked the shells into the landing zone. The scene there was almost a battle portrait. The last helicopters were taking off, climbing nose down, banking sharply as they climbed, with the dark-green mountains in the background. Marines were fanning out across the rice paddies, some in extended skirmish lines, some in serried, staggered ranks, the mortar shells bursting among them. An enemy automatic rifle tack-tacked from a row of grassy mounds west of the landing zone. The bullets spurted in the light-green paddies, and one of our white-phosphorus shells flashed near a clump of palms atop one of the mounds, the orange-white streamers arcing over the graceful trees. A line of riflemen were breasting a flooded field, weapons held over their heads; they had just begun to climb onto a dike when they vanished in a cloud of shell smoke. One of the marines flew into the air, dropping sideways as he fell, the tiny stick that was his rifle sailing off in the opposite direction.

  A heavy shell banged into the paddies between my platoon and the tree line. Behind us, a knot of marines were running in the crouched position men adopt under fire. Several were carrying radios, and the tall, waving antennae made an obvious target. As loudly as I could, I yelled at them to spread it out. They kept moving in a closely packed crowd, and one of my marines said, “That’s battalion headquarters. Fuckin’ pogues don’t know enough to stay out of the rain.” I hollered at them again, but they could not hear or simply ignored me. I was about to yell a third time, when they were all engulfed in smoke and clouds of pulverized earth, the shells going crump-crump-crump and bodies falling or flying out of the smoke. Faint with distance, the cry “Corpsman! corpsman!” drifted across the field. It was battalion headquarters, and it had almost been wiped out. The operations chief, a master sergeant with three wars behind him, lay in the muck with one of his legs blown off. The operations officer had been hit in the groin. The artillery officer had been badly wounded in the face and head. Altogether, HQ lost eight officers and a number of enlisted men. Only Colonel Hatch escaped serious injury. And the mortars kept coming in and the small arms crackling.

  We heard a hollow cough, then another. Several seconds later, two 60-millimeters exploded nearby. “I heard ’em that time,” a corporal said. “I heard ’em.”

  “Are they in the tree line? It sounded like the tree line to me.”

  “Good a place as any to put mortars, lieutenant, but I dunno.”

  I was drenched with sweat and my mouth felt as if it were full of steel wool. Battalion HQ had been nearly wiped out. D Company was suffering casualties, and ours was pinned down. My platoon was supposed to hold the ridge until ordered to do otherwise, but I felt compelled to take some sort of action. I called Neal on the radio and asked if the 4.2-inch mortar battery supporting the battalion could shell the tree line. I wasn’t sure if the enemy mortars were in there—the Viet Cong were maintaining their usual invisibility—but the four-deuces would at least suppress the VC rifle fire. Neal replied that our mortars were unable to fire, and, because we were far out of range of the artillery at Danang, he had decided to call in an air strike.

  The planes came in several minutes later. Three Sky-hawks, flying low, streaked over us. “Bound Charley Two,” the flight leader said over the radio, “this is Playboy. Mark your positions with air panels, target with willy-peter.” We set out the orange, iridescent panels and fired a white-phosphorus round into the tree line. The first of the squat, dull-gray planes banked around and knifed toward that column of white smoke, Viet Cong machine-gunners firing at it wildly. Two bombs tumbled end over end from its wings. The first was a dud, but the second exploded with a blast that made the earth lurch beneath us. The platoon
cheered, but the enemy mortars continued to fall in the landing zone. The second Skyhawk made a pass, dropping two more bombs into the pillar of black smoke rising from where the first had struck. One of the two-hundred-and-fifty-pounders fell on the village behind the tree line. There was a tremendous eruption of smoke, dirt, roof tiles, chunks of concrete, burning thatch, and tree branches. “Playboy, Playboy,” I said, “this is Bound Charley Two. You were over on that last one. Put it in the tree line.”

  “Roger,” the pilot answered, and I felt a giddy sense of power. I was controlling those machines.

  The third plane came in, skimming the treetops, engine screeching. Two napalm canisters spun down from the Skyhawk’s bomb rack into the tree line, and the plane pulled into a barrel-rolling climb as the red-orange napalm bloomed like an enormous poppy.