Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  That night found us supporting a Popular Reconnaissance Unit. The PRUs, as we called them, were made up largely of VC defectors who were paid by the kill or by the number of weapons captured. In the unit that we worked with that night, the commander told me that five of his men had been decorated for bravery by Ho Chi Minh himself, prior to their defection. Now their job was shooting their former comrades.

  The fact that men could so easily be brought to shift their allegiances in their own country prompted even deeper doubts about the eventual success of our policy. As long as there were jets and napalm and vast resources of ammunition and guns and hospital supplies, of course it must have been inviting to fight on the government’s side. But when these were exhausted, which they had to be someday, then what? Would they shift back to the other side if they began to believe that the guerrillas were gaining? I wondered, while we helped this former VC to land in supposed enemy territory, where he and his comrades would hunt for the present VC.

  For an hour or so, we sat in the night not far from where the PRUs had been dropped off by two PBRs. We had shut down our engines and were nestled into the shore on the bank opposite the landing point. Only our generator’s clatter broke the silence. Two men kept an intense lookout on the shore side to see that no one crept up on us. The rest of us sat silently with M-16s close by, waiting either to be attacked or to hear from the PRUs.

  Suddenly, a red flare shot into the sky from their position, calling for emergency extraction. The two PBRs sprang to life and started up a small estuary leading to the PRUs. The PBR skipper was on the radio to headquarters, yelling, “Emergency extraction requested—moving in now—emergency extraction requested—moving to coordinates.”

  We started the engine and pulled off the bank as fast as possible. We’d never worked with PBRs and knew only what we had read in the operation order given to us that morning, when we had assumed the patrol area. I carefully headed up the estuary in the wake of the PBRs. Swifts, designed for the ocean, with a three-and-a-half-foot draft, risked running aground, whereas the PBRs could float in inches of water. It was so dark we couldn’t see where they were. Wasser started yelling, “Over there, skipper, over there,” and he pointed to an even smaller stream that disappeared around a corner. We could hear the noise of the PBRs once we slowed down.

  “Hey, skipper—I saw someone move in that hut over there,” Gardner yelled down from the guntub.

  “Where?” I asked, and then I looked out the other door to see that we were only ten feet from the bank and that ten yards in from the bank was a long thatch hut with a light on in it. At the same moment, shots came from the vicinity of the PBRs. There were a few bursts of M-16 and then the .50 calibers started firing in earnest. Some of the tracers flew over our heads.

  I started up the small stream. Fish stakes spanned it from one side to the other. For a moment, I hesitated and then said, “The hell with it.” We smashed right through the wooden poles. They broke on contact with the bow. We still couldn’t see the PBRs. The shooting was sporadic by this time. The stream had narrowed so that we barely had room to turn around. I was wondering if we should continue when the decision was made for me. We began to feel ground beneath us. A few more shots were fired. I ran outside the pilothouse and took the controls at the outdoor aft helm, where it was easier to see. Slamming the gears first into reverse and then spinning the boat on its axis by working the engines against each other—one full reverse, the other full forward, with the wheel fully turned—we avoided the mud bank. I turned the boat around, hoping the PBRs wouldn’t come screaming around the corner and crash into us, creating a gallery of sitting ducks for whatever had prompted the shooting originally. We moved into the larger estuary, where we waited for the PBRs. I was momentarily frustrated the Swifts couldn’t operate in shallower water. Wasser said, “Shit, I was hoping we could’ve gotten up there and seen something.”

  Eventually, after long moments of uncertainty while waiting in the dark as we drifted near the bank of the river, the PBRs appeared from the small stream where we had nudged the mud. They were moving very slowly with a sampan in tow, confident the shooting was over for the evening. Hatch nursed the Swift alongside the PBR. I jumped aboard to talk with the chief petty officer in charge.

  “What happened?” I asked. He told me that the PRUs were patrolling through the area when they came on a hut with two people in it—a man and a woman. They went in, found the woman writing a letter to her VC boyfriend, so they took them into custody. As they were coming back, they spotted a sampan with four people in it. “They took ’em under fire and that’s it.”

  “Were the people killed?” I ventured timidly.

  “Hell yes. PRUs don’t miss when they shoot.”

  “But the people in the sampan didn’t fire or anything?”

  The chief just talked on. “It was a free-fire zone. They shouldn’t have been there. Besides, one of the PRUs says they had guns, but the sampan tipped over and the guns were lost in the water.”

  I looked at the face of the woman who was squatting in the rear of the PBR. She was defiant. She was very calmly watching the movements of the men who had just blasted four of her countrymen to bits. She glared at me. I wondered where her boyfriend was fighting us.

  I could see the terror, perhaps hatred, in her eyes. I wanted to tell her that things would work out, but I wasn’t confident they would. I knew I did not like the feeling of making someone look at us that way.

  While we exited back into the Soi Rap River, the PRUs moved excitedly among themselves, talking about the action that had taken place. One mocked and mimicked the expression and position one of the dead had assumed at the instant he was blown away. They laughed. I was taken aback, but maybe it was just their way of relieving tension. Bottom line—the four dead were just four more casualties of war. Statistics. The body count was now higher.

  • • •

  I WAS SUPPOSED to be on a quick reconnaissance flight to view some of our patrol area from a helicopter, but it was diverted into a medevac. We arrived at a skeleton base at the foot of the Long Tau River where a tiny Vietnamese soldier was ushered into the seat next to me. He had been hit in the face. His entire head was swathed in gauze. By the time the helo arrived, the gauze was a saturated dark red. I didn’t learn anything about what had happened—how he got hit. He kept feeling the bandage with his hands and lolling his head around uncontrollably. Occasionally, his head would drop for an instant against my shoulder. I was nauseated. His agony was affecting all my senses. His blood rubbed off onto my uniform.

  We diverted to the base, where we helped the soldier into a waiting ambulance. Then we were off again, over the delta area I had seen so often on Huntley-Brinkley reports, over the Rung Sat Special Zone, over miles of mud and canals that wove forever through the RSSZ. The trip was peaceful. Only the vibration of the helicopter up and down with the singular whoop-whoop of a Huey engine and the brown mud below reminded us that we were in fact riding over the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam. We inspected the bunkers from the air, then returned to base.

  In the afternoon, a helicopter cover team arrived to give us support, and I took PCF-44 to the Soi Rap and entered the river, which earlier that day had looked so peaceful from the air. The tactical operations center had read its tide table incorrectly. There were ten foot tides in this area, and at low tide, we could barely see over the high banks on both sides, which created the effect of being in a small canyon. It was impossible to see bunkers from where we were. I kept thinking how incredibly easy it would have been for the VC to shoot down on us and tear the boat to shreds. Only the helicopters gave us some sense of security. Since we couldn’t see the bunkers, one of the helos spotted for us. We fired a few mortar rounds with the hope that one or two might land on a target.

  Midway through the firing, one of the helos developed mechanical problems, so both left us and returned to base. We retraced our earlier steps with no air cover and luckily exited without a shot being fired. The
Viet Cong had missed a prime opportunity to decimate a lone exposed Swift boat.

  • • •

  LATER IN THE afternoon, in the same river, we received a call asking us to move some Vietnamese troops from the base at Nha Be to a small village near the end of the Soi Rap River. Among the soldiers was a U.S. Marine captain who was acting as advisor to the Vietnamese. His name was Tim—I don’t remember his last name, but he was reaching the end of his tour in Vietnam and the end of his rope as well.

  “What’s it been like?” I asked.

  “Kinda varied,” he said. “There’s no way to sum it up really.”

  I asked him how he would describe the war generally. I was fishing with the hope that I would learn something about the war I hadn’t seen.

  “I dunno,” he said. “It’s been pretty bad. . . . We had a job to do. We did it as best as possible, I guess.”

  He really didn’t want to talk, at least not to a stranger. He stood in the pilothouse thinking, looking down with deep furrows in his brow, squinting against the sun. Then he came out of his thoughts and said, “I can’t really say it was worthwhile. I mean, I can’t see what we’ve gotten done. We’ve torn up a lot of villages . . . killed a lot of people that probably shouldn’t have been killed. We’ve lost a lot of good men too. I dunno. It’s hard to say. I sure as hell know that we can’t ever win over here . . . nothing to win anyway. You run through a fucking village cleaning out the VC and then you come back a few weeks later and they’re all in the same place again. You walk over booby traps—booby trap after fucking booby trap—and there’s nothing you can do about them. Just keep going and hit some more. I dunno. I’ll be glad to get out of here and forget.”

  “Were you always down in this area?” I asked.

  “No. I was up around Da Nang for a while. Then they shifted me down here to take on this advisory bit. Man, that was a scene up there. We used to sit around on some mountaintop waiting for weather to lift with battalions of North Vietnamese regulars closing in on us. That was hairy. You felt alone out there. Just sitting on a hill waiting for the gooks to sneak up and shoot your head off. That was a hell of a setup. But we got out of it. Lucky, I guess.”

  “What do you do down here?”

  “I’ve been helping these guys”—he pointed to the Vietnamese sitting around the boat—“to set up a perimeter defense for their village. But it’s harder than hell because no one wants to sit out on the perimeter and man a gun. They all insist on coming into the village at night because they feel safe. . . .”

  We deposited the Marine and his entourage at the village. I didn’t envy him having to stay there overnight, but it was clear he’d been through a lot worse.

  During the night, we found that it was almost impossible to patrol effectively. If we tried to shine a light on the banks of the rivers to detect camouflaged sampans waiting to cross, we were providing them with an ideal target.

  Despite their dangers, the rivers were an unending source of pleasure. They were a way of life for the Vietnamese. By patrolling them each day, we were given an opportunity to share that life in a unique manner. The rivers were the interstate highways of the delta. Junks were their trucks. Some junks were so large and so laden with goods of one sort or another that there was no way to move the goods and inspect thoroughly. It was all very well to have the special routine for searching a junk we had learned at San Diego, but in the rivers of South Vietnam, it just didn’t work.

  The junks were overflowing with grandmothers, grandfathers, children, animals, bicycles. It would have taken half the day to inspect the identification papers of the people alone. We learned to simply scan the passengers and interrogate any males who appeared of fighting age.

  We would ask the peasants for their papers, and they would dutifully hand them over. Wasser and I would pretend that we were reading them carefully for errors and for legitimacy. My Vietnamese was not sufficient to make much out of their answers. I learned to interpret their body language, including hand motions, and long speeches of protest. Wasser was capable of gleaning a lot more. With much pronounced head nodding, muttering something here and there to show approval or disapproval, we would feign full comprehension.

  We examined their papers to see whether they had done their military service, whether they had a fishing permit or whether they carried the identification papers authorized by the government. If not, we would detain them as VC or as deserters for interrogation by intelligence.

  One day we came across a large, very suspicious-looking junk. It was loaded down from gunwale to bilge keel with sand. Wasser climbed on board and started to dig away at the sand, hoping to find a hidden shipment of AK-47s. After an hour’s digging, and aided by the friendly men aboard the junk, we gave up. While we’d been digging on this one junk, twenty-five or thirty others passed us. The percentages were hardly in our favor.

  To try to cover as many junks as possible, we would anchor in the middle of the river and hail everyone over as they passed. If a sampan tried to slip by pretending not to notice us, we would fire an M-16 across the bow and it would immediately veer toward us. One couldn’t help but think about what it would be like to be cruising down a Los Angeles freeway or the Connecticut Turnpike and have a Mexican or a Canadian who was helping the U.S. government search automobiles fire a shot across the front of your car to make you stop.

  There were times when we had as many as twenty junks and sampans alongside. It would have been easy for the VC to get us if they had wanted to—just float down on a barge and, when we were tied up with a mass of sampans, jump us in our confusion.

  Wasser, Hatch and Gardner took the most pleasure out of boarding and searching. They would swarm over the chickens and the market produce, sticking their hands incredulously into everything. The Vietnamese would laugh at them as they stumbled over the passengers or possessions. We’d laugh back. Sometimes the girls would flirt with the crew. In the end, it was impossible to tell whether we’d searched them or they us. I remember once a chicken bit Wasser, and he was so surprised that he fell backward and landed prone in the vegetable produce. In one day, we might inspect hundreds of junks and sampans, visually and by hand, and in the few weeks we weren’t carrying out Sealords raids, we only once found a piece of contraband—a stolen U.S. Navy anchor that had somehow found its way onto one of the barges.

  The Army periodically gave us a blacklist of Vietnamese to watch out for: If we came across someone whose name matched that on the list, we were to bring them into the headquarters for interrogation. Unfortunately, the names on the lists that they gave us invariably didn’t have the accent marks on the right letters or they had no accent marks at all. One name could be confused with one hundred people. Nevertheless, they expected us to bring in the blacklist people we found.

  One day on the Soi Rap River we found a young man we thought was on the blacklist. We couldn’t take him off the ferry because he was the only helmsman and pilot. Wasser was convinced the man was on the blacklist. From the top of the ferry, Wasser yelled down, “Mr. K., we’ve got to take this guy in. I know he’s on the list and he’s mighty crooked looking.” So we took the entire ferry into custody, and with Wasser remaining on board to guard the helmsman while he steered, we stuck the nose of the Swift right on the ferry’s stern and herded everyone up to the base at Nha Be.

  From our position in the rear of the ferry, we were able to look directly into the kitchen. We watched, fascinated, while a little, old Vietnamese lady prepared food. She in turn watched us and, to our surprise, handed bowls of rice to us from the window. The sight of this comic parade from the banks of the river had to be hilarious—Wasser standing with his rifle behind the helmsman, a crowd of passengers staring at him, and a Swift boat passing food back and forth through the rear window, almost pushing the ferry toward its rendezvous with the interrogators at Nha Be, where we found that the accentless list was responsible for one more case of mistaken identity. The ferry was allowed to go on its way.

 
On another occasion, one of the junks approaching us to be searched came alongside too fast and started a panic among those already tied up. People started running around untying lines and shouting, and the result was a crash that put about three people in the water with chickens all over the place and little kids laughing and old men swearing at each other. I think it was the only time I saw them get honestly upset over anything.

  Funnier than the way in which we conducted our job of boarding and searching was the manner in which the Vietnamese patrolled. Several of our new Swift boats had been turned over to them in Cat Lo, but I rarely saw them go out on patrol. They spent most of the time painting the boats and getting them ready for something. They were very good at waving as we passed them going to or returning from a river. Generally, however, they were anchored and everyone aboard was asleep. When this was the case, we would occasionally go by them at full speed, passing about a foot or two away. With delight, we would watch as our wake washed into them, waking up the crew. One of them always poked his head out of the hatch to see what was happening and then, kerplunk, he disappeared from view. When they weren’t asleep they were usually fishing. Although we joked about our allies’ work ethic, it was an ominous contrast to those who were running up and down patrolling their rivers.

  The situation came to a crescendo in An Thoi, where the Vietnamese Swifts were finally persuaded to make a river incursion. Each Swift carried an American advisor. The Swifts were ambushed. One of the advisors was blown overboard. The boats refused to stop in or near the ambush to look for the advisor. Instead, they retreated completely out of the river before even considering a search. Once out of the river, they decided that they didn’t want to go back and look for the man because they didn’t want to be ambushed again. They refused even though the advisor might be alive in the water somewhere.

  When notification was received at the An Thoi base, several American crews were detailed to leave and initiate a search at an ungodly hour of the morning. The advisor was never found, although a piece of his skull was picked up off the deck of the Vietnamese Swift. It was some time before anyone wanted to work with the Vietnamese again.