A Rumor of War

by Philip Caputo

  “Hey, we got some cheese,” one of them said to Crowe’s patrol. “Good cheese. You guys want some cheese?”

  Too tired to eat, the men in the patrol shook their heads and hobbled toward their foxholes. Their skin was pallid except for their faces and necks, their hands, and a V-shaped spot on their chests, which were tanned. One rifleman’s bicep bore a tattoo: a skull and crossbones underscored by the words USMC—Death before Dishonor. I laughed to myself. With the way things had been going since Operation Long Lance, I was confident that the marine would not have to worry about facing the choice. Page and Navarro, killed a few days before, had faced no choice. The booby-trapped artillery shell had not given them any time to choose, or to take cover, or to do anything but die instantly. Both had had only four days left of their Vietnam tours, thus confirming the truth in the proverb, “You’re never a short-timer until you’re home.”

  I was sitting on the roof of the outpost’s command bunker, sunning my legs. The corpsmen said that sun and air would help dry the running sores on feet and lower legs. The disease had been diagnosed as tropical impetigo. I had probably contracted it on our last patrol—three days in a monsoon rain that would have impressed Noah; three days of slogging through the slime of drowned swamps. The corpsmen had given me penicillin shots, but even antibiotics were not effective in that climate. Pus continued to ooze from the ulcers, so that whenever I took off my boots to change socks I had to hold my breath against the stench of my own rotting flesh. Well, I could have caught something a lot worse than a skin disease.

  Holding a map in one hand, Crowe walked up to me to make his report. Crowe, called Pappy by the teen-age platoon because he had reached the advanced age of twenty-three—growing older than twenty-one was an achievement for most combat riflemen—had a face that made his nickname seem appropriate. The months of wincing at snipers’ bullets, the sleepless nights, and the constant strain of looking for trip wires had aged him. Behind his glasses, Crowe’s eyes were as dull as an old man’s.

  He said his patrol had picked up some intelligence information. Spreading the map over the bunker’s sandbagged roof, he pointed to a village called “Giao-Tri (2).”

  “You remember those three VCS we found in this ville two weeks ago, sir?”

  I said that I did. He was referring to an earlier patrol and the three young men we had brought in for questioning. Since Giao-Tri was a village usually controlled by the Viet Cong, it was unusual to find young men there. The three youths, moreover, had been carrying papers that were obvious forgeries, and their ages had been falsified. McCloy, who by this time spoke fluent Vietnamese, and an ARVN militia sergeant gave them a perfunctory interrogation. They were released when the sergeant determined that their papers had been forged and their ages falsified so they could stay in school and out of the army. They were draft-dodgers, not Viet Cong.

  “Well, sir,” Crowe went on, “it looks like two of ’em are Charlies after all, the two older ones.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “The younger one told me, Le Dung I think his name is. We found him in the ville again and I started to question him. You know, a little English, a little Vietnamese, a little sign language. He said the other two was VC, sappers who was makin’ mines and booby traps. I think he’s tellin’ the truth because one of the other two walked by when we was talkin’ and the kid shut up. He looked scared as hell and shut up. So, when the other dude’s out of sight, I ask the kid, ‘VC? Him VC?’ And the kid nods his head and says ‘VC.’ The third guy is standin’ over by a house, buildin’ a gate or somethin’. I pointed at the guy and said, ‘VC there?’ The kid nods again and says that both the Charlies live in that house. Then I broke out my map and the kid said there were five Cong in Binh Thai, sappers too, and armed with automatic rifles. He drew me a picture of the weapons. Here.” Crowe handed me a piece of paper with a crude drawing of a top-loading automatic rifle that resembled a British Bren. “Then he says there’s a platoon—fifteen VC—in Hoi-Vuc and they’ve got a mortar and a machine gun.”

  Angry, I swung off the bunker. “Crowe, why in hell didn’t you capture those two and bring ’em in?”

  “Well, I don’t know, sir. I mean, Mister McCloy cleared ’em. He said they was okay before.”

  “Goddamnit, we didn’t know this before. Crowe, this company’s lost thirty-five men in the last month. All of them to mines and booby traps, and you get a guy who shows you two sappers and you leave them there.”

  “Sorry, sir. It’s just that they were cleared. Hell, we never know who’s the guerrilla and who ain’t around here.”

  “No shit. Listen, the info’s good. You did all right. Shove off and take a break.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I went down into the bunker, where Jones was cleaning his rifle. It was stifling inside, the air stale with the smells of sweat, rifle oil, and the canvas haversacks hanging from pegs driven into the mud walls. Cranking the handle of the field phone, I called company HQ with Crowe’s report, dreading the lecture I would get from Captain Neal. Why didn’t he capture them? What’s the matter with that platoon of yours, lieutenant? Aren’t your people thinking?

  Having lost about thirty percent of his command in the past month alone, Neal had become almost intolerable. I assumed battalion was putting a great deal of pressure on him; since Operation Long Lance ended, the company had killed only three guerrillas and captured two more, while suffering six times as many casualties itself. C Company’s kill ratio was below standard. Bodies. Bodies. Bodies. Battalion wanted bodies. Neal wanted bodies. He lectured his officers on the importance of aggressiveness and made implied threats when he thought we lacked that attribute. “Your people aren’t being aggressive enough,” he told me when one of my squads failed to pursue two VC who had fired on them one night. I argued that the squad leader had done the sensible thing: with only eight men, at night, and a mile from friendly lines, he had no idea if those two guerrillas were alone or the point men for a whole battalion. Had he pursued, his squad might have fallen into a trap. “Mister Caputo, when we make contact with the enemy, we maintain it, not break it,” said Neal. “You had best get those people of yours in shape.” Meekly, so meekly that I despised myself as much as I despised him, I said, “Yes, sir. I’ll get them in shape.” A few days later, Neal told me and the other officers that he was adopting a new policy: from now on, any marine in the company who killed a confirmed Viet Cong would be given an extra beer ration and the time to drink it. Because our men were so exhausted, we knew the promise of time off would be as great an inducement as the extra ration of beer. So we went along with the captain’s policy, without reflecting on its moral implications. That is the level to which we had sunk from the lofty idealism of a year before. We were going to kill people for a few cans of beer and the time to drink them.

  McCloy answered the phone. Neal was busy elsewhere, so I was spared another chewing out. I read Crowe’s report to McCloy, who of course asked, “Why didn’t they bring them in?” I explained. Murph said he would pass the information on to battalion S-2. Yes, I thought, putting the receiver back in its canvas-covered case, and they’ll pass it on to regimental S-2, who’ll pass it on to division G-2, who’ll bury it in a file cabinet, and the sappers will go on blowing up Charley Company. An immense weariness came over me. I was fed up with it, with the futile patrols and inconclusive operations, with the mines and the mud and the diseases. Only a month remained to my Vietnam tour, and my one hope was to leave on my own feet and not on a stretcher or in a box. Only a month. What was a month? In Vietnam, a month was an eternity. Page and Navarro had had only four days left. I was much haunted by their deaths.

  Jones, leaning against a wall of the bunker, was still cleaning his rifle. There was a sheen of sweat on his face. His cleaning rod, drawn back and forth through the rifle bore, made a monotonous, scraping sound. I lay down on the poncho that was spread across the floor. Sleep. I had to get some sleep. Taking one of the haversacks off its
peg, I propped it against my helmet to make a pillow and rolled onto my side, grimacing when my trousers, which had been glued to the pussy sores, pulled loose and tore away bits of flesh. To sleep, to sleep, perchance not to dream. I had again begun to have some very bad dreams.

  * * *

  The month that followed the attack in the Vu Gia valley had itself been a bad dream. I can recall only snatches of that time; fragmentary scenes flicker on my mental screen like excerpts from a film: There is a shot of the company marching near a tree line that was napalmed during the assault. Through my field glasses, I see pigs rooting around forms which resemble black logs, but which are charred corpses. Click. The next scene. A crazy, running fire-fight on the last day of the operation, the Viet Cong dashing down one side of a wide river, firing as they run, my platoon running down a dike on the other side, firing back. Bullets dance in the rice paddy between the river and the dike, then spurt toward Jones and me. As the rounds strike at our feet the two of us dive over backward into a heap of buffalo dung from which we leap up laughing insanely, the offal dripping from our faces. Then the company’s mortar crew is dropping sixties on the enemy and my platoon pours rifle fire into the pall of shell smoke. An artillery observer, flying over in a spotter plane, calls on the radio to say that he sees seven enemy bodies lying on a trail near the river bank.

  Click. The next scenes take place at the company’s operation area near Danang. They are all of a piece, shots of patrols coming back diminished by two or three or half a dozen men. The soundtrack is monotonous: the thud of exploding mines, the quick rattle of small-arms fire, the thrashing of marines pursuing enemy ambush parties, almost never finding them, men crying “Corpsman!” and the wap-wap-wap noise of the medevac helicopters. Click. There is one piece of time-lapse footage, but instead of showing flowers blooming, it shows our company slowly dissolving. With each frame, the ranks get shorter and shorter, and the faces of the men are the faces of men who feel doomed, who are just waiting their turn to be blown up by a mine. Click. A shot of my platoon on a night patrol, slogging through a blackness so deep that each man must hold onto the handle of the entrenching tool on the back of the man in front of him. A driving rain whips us as we stumble blindly through the dark. Holding onto an E-tool handle with one hand, I am holding a compass in the other. I cannot see the marine who is an arm’s length in front of me, only the pale, luminous dial of the compass. Click. There is a scene of PFC Arnett, who has been hit by a mine. He is lying on his back in the rain, wrapped in scarlet ribbons of his own blood. He looks up at me with the dreamy, far-off expression of a saint in a Renaissance painting and says, “This is my third Purple Heart and they ain’t gettin’ no more chances. I’m goin’ home.”

  Other episodes reflect what the war has done to us. A corporal is chasing a wounded Viet Cong after a fire-fight. He follows the man’s blood trail until he finds him crawling toward the entrance to a tunnel. The enemy soldier turns his face toward his pursuer, perhaps to surrender, perhaps to beg for mercy. The corporal walks up to him and casually shoots him in the head. Click. Sergeant Horne is standing in front of me with a nervous smile on his face. He says, “Sir, Mister McKenna’s gone crazy.” I ask how he has arrived at this diagnosis. “We were set in in a daylight ambush near Hoi-Vuc,” Horne says. “An old woman came by and spotted us, so we held her so she wouldn’t warn the VC that we were around. She was chewing betel-nut and just by accident spit some of it in Mister McKenna’s face. The next thing I knew, he took out his pistol and shot her in the chest. Then he told one of the corpsmen to patch her up, like he didn’t realize that he’d killed her.” There is a quick-cut to the officer’s tent that night. In the soft light of a kerosene lamp, McKenna and I are talking about the murder. He says, “Phil, the gun just went off by itself. You know, it really bothers me.” I reply that it should. “No, that isn’t what I mean,” McKenna says. “I mean the thing that bothers me about killing her is that it doesn’t bother me.”

  * * *

  I slept briefly and fitfully in the bunker and woke up agitated. Psychologically, I had never felt worse. I had been awake for no more than a few seconds when I was seized by the same feeling that had gripped me after my nightmare about the mutilated men in my old platoon: a feeling of being afraid when there was no reason to be. And this unreasoning fear quickly produced the sensation I had often had in action: of watching myself in a movie. Although I have had a decade to think about it, I am still unable to explain why I woke up in that condition. I had not dreamed. It was a quiet day, one of those days when it was difficult to believe a war was on. Yet, my sensations were those of a man actually under fire. Perhaps I was suffering a delayed reaction to some previous experience. Perhaps it was simply battle fatigue. I had been in Vietnam for nearly a year, and was probably more worn-out than I realized at the time. Months of accumulated pressures might have chosen just that moment to burst, suddenly and for no apparent reason. Whatever the cause, I was outwardly normal, if a little edgier than usual; but inside, I was full of turbulent emotions and disordered thoughts, and I could not shake that weird sensation of being split in two.

  Thinking fresh air might help, I climbed out of the musty bunker. I only felt worse, irritated by the pain that came each time my trousers tore loose from the ulcers. The sores itched unbearably, but I couldn’t scratch them because scratching would spread the disease. The late-afternoon air was oppressive. Heat came up from the baked earth and pressed down from the sky. Clouds were beginning to build in gray towers over the mountains, threatening more rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. When would it stop raining? From the heads rose the stench of feces, the soupy deposits of our diseased bowels. My need for physical activity overcame my discomfort and I set out to walk the perimeter. Around and around I walked, sometimes chatting with the men, sometimes sitting and staring into the distance. A few yards outside the perimeter, the walls of a half-ruined building shone bright white in the san’s glare. It made me squint to look at them, but I did anyway. I looked at them for a long time. I don’t know why. I just remember staring at them, feeling the heat grow more oppressive as the clouds piled up and advanced across the sky. The building had been a temple of some kind, but it was now little more than a pile of stones. Vines were growing over the stones and over the jagged, bullet-scarred walls, which turned from white to hot-pink as the sun dropped into the clouds. Behind the building lay the scrub jungle that covered the slopes of the hill. It smelled of decaying wood and leaves, and the low trees encircled the outpost like the disorderly ranks of a besieging army. Staring at the jungle and at the ruined temple, hatred welled up in me; a hatred for this green, moldy, alien world in which we fought and died.

  My thoughts and feelings over the next few hours are irretrievably jumbled now, but at some point in the early evening, I was seized by an irresistible compulsion to do something. “Something’s got to be done” was about the clearest thought that passed through my brain. I was fixated on the company’s intolerable predicament. We could now muster only half of our original strength, and half of our effectives had been wounded at least once. If we suffered as many casualties in the next month as we had in the one past, we would be down to fifty or sixty men, little more than a reinforced platoon. It was madness for us to go on walking down those trails and tripping booby traps without any chance to retaliate. Retaliate. The word rang in my head. I will retaliate. It was then that my chaotic thoughts began to focus on the two men whom Le Dung, Crowe’s informant, had identified as Viet Cong. My mind did more than focus on them; it fixed on them like a heat-seeking missile fixing on the tailpipe of a jet. They became an obsession. I would get them. I would get them before they got any more of us; before they got me. I’m going to get those bastards, I said to myself, suddenly feeling giddy.

  “I’m going to get those bastards,” I said aloud, rushing down into the bunker. Jones looked at me quizzically. “The VC, Jones, I’m going to get them.” I was laughing. From my map case, I took out an overlay of the patrol ro
ute which 2d squad was to follow that night. It took them to a trail junction just outside the village of Giao-Tri. It was perfect. If the two VC walked out of the village, they would fall into the ambush. I almost laughed out loud at the idea of their deaths. If the VC did not leave the village, then the squad would infiltrate into it, Crowe guiding them to the house Le Dung had pointed out, and capture them—“snatch,” in the argot. Yes, that’s what I would do. A snatch patrol. The squad would capture the two VC and bring them to the outpost. I would interrogate them, beat the hell out of them if I had to, learn the locations of other enemy cells and units, then kill or capture those. I would get all of them. But suppose the two guerrillas resisted? The patrol would kill them, then. Kill VC. That’s what we were supposed to do. Bodies. Neal wanted bodies. Well, I would give him bodies, and then my platoon would be rewarded instead of reproved. I did not have the authority to send the squad into the village. The patrol order called only for an ambush at the trail junction. But who was the real authority out on that isolated outpost? I was. I would take matters into my own hands. Out there, I could do what I damned well pleased. And I would. The idea of taking independent action made me giddier still. I went out to brief the patrol.

  In the twilight, Allen, Crowe, Lonehill, and two other riflemen huddled around me. Wearing bush hats, their hands and faces blackened with shoe polish, they looked appropriately ferocious. I told them what they were to do, but, in my addled state of mind, I was almost incoherent at times. I laughed frequently and made several bloodthirsty jokes that probably left them with the impression I wouldn’t mind if they summarily executed both Viet Cong. All the time, I had that feeling of watching myself in a film. I could hear myself laughing, but it did not sound like my laugh.