by Jack McLean
Were we the paper tiger?
Would the United States government and Robert McNamara give us up as well?
It was beginning to feel that way to the boys of Charlie Company.
On Tuesday, February 7, Peter Arnett, a reporter for the Associated Press, went to view the ruins of the embattled South Vietnamese city Ben Tre. In his dispatch, he quoted a U.S. Army officer as saying, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
To many, the quote became symbolic of the looming American failure in Vietnam.
Days after the beginning of the Tet Offensive, I accompanied a sergeant on a trip down to Cam Lo to get a situation report on some recent activity. Two squads from Delta Company had been sent down from the Washout the previous afternoon to bolster security following the NVA ambush of an army convoy.
We had stood lines in Cam Lo for several days shortly after my arrival, so I was familiar with the layout. Nothing, however, could prepare me for what I saw on this sunny February morning. Coming into the tiny village, we spotted six U.S. Army trucks on the side of the road, still smoking from the rockets that had leveled them the previous afternoon. Their frames were twisted. Several were on their sides. Blackened bodies lay in the cabs, burnt into the seats, all but irremovable.
We paused for a brief moment, and then moved on. There was nothing there for us to see and nothing there for us to do. As we drove around the corner, another horrific sight came into view. There before us was a pile of dozens upon dozens of dead bodies stacked as high as they could be thrown.
Gooks?
Yes, thank God.
The marines from the two squads of Delta Company that had come down from the Washout the day before to provide security were now methodically grabbing body after body off the barbed wire that encircled the small perimeter that they had established. The only sound was that of our idling motor. The only smell was the omnipresent stench of cordite—the detritus of modern battle. The bodies had been dead for only hours. It was a remarkably surreal scene—indescribable and instantly etched into my permanent memory.
Years later, I was sure that it had been only a dream.
The previous evening, those two squads from Delta Company had held off a vastly superior force of NVA that had targeted the previously defenseless Cam Lo village as part of the Tet Offensive. In one night, these thirty-five boys confirmed one hundred sixty NVA dead (with dozens of others certainly carried away). Enemy body counts in Vietnam were routinely inflated by the higher-ups. In this case, however, you could walk over and count them one by one. Thirty-five other NVA were captured, along with several enemy trucks and a flag signed by all of the troops that was to have been raised over the village after their anticipated victory. Delta Company had one marine die. Nearby, the army had lost several more in the passing convoy that had been ambushed in the beginning of the attack.
The entire scene was so far beyond anything that my sane mind could comprehend that, after a time, I forgot the incident but for recurring nightmares that continued for decades. Like many grunts, I had dozens of such memories that hung between the real and the surreal. They became part of our DNA. Therapy could bring some out over time. Most, however, were destined to remain right there, deep inside, as surely as if they inhabited a bone. They would not depart my body before I did.
A Delta Company marine, Corporal Larry Leonard Maxam, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valor that night. It was awarded posthumously. The citation reads as follows:
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving as a fire team leader with Company D. The Cam Lo District Headquarters came under extremely heavy rocket, artillery, mortar, and recoilless rifle fire from a numerically superior enemy force, destroying a portion of the defensive perimeter. Cpl. Maxam, observing the enemy massing for an assault into the compound across the remaining defensive wire, instructed his assistant fire team leader to take charge of the fire team, and unhesitatingly proceeded to the weakened section of the perimeter. Completely exposed to the concentrated enemy fire, he sustained multiple fragmentation wounds from exploding grenades as he ran to an abandoned machine gun position. Reaching the emplacement, he grasped the machine gun and commenced to deliver effective fire on the advancing enemy. As the enemy directed maximum firepower against the determined marine, Cpl. Maxam’s position received a direct hit from a rocket propelled grenade, knocking him backwards and inflicting severe fragmentation wounds to his face and right eye. Although momentarily stunned and in intense pain, Cpl. Maxam courageously resumed his firing position and subsequently was struck again by small-arms fire. With resolute determination, he gallantly continued to deliver intense machine gun fire, causing the enemy to retreat through the defensive wire to positions of cover. In a desperate attempt to silence his weapon, the North Vietnamese threw hand grenades and directed recoilless rifle fire against him, inflicting two additional wounds. Too weak to reload his machine gun, Cpl. Maxam fell to a prone position and valiantly continued to deliver effective fire with his rifle. After one and a half hours, during which he was hit repeatedly by fragments from exploding grenades and concentrated small-arms fire, he succumbed to his wounds, having successfully defended nearly half of the perimeter single-handedly. Cpl. Maxam’s aggressive fighting spirit, inspiring valor, and selfless devotion to duty reflected great credit upon himself and the Marine Corps and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.
Corporal Maxam was just one of us. He had been a corporal, a fire team leader, a veteran of December 6, 1967. Until the day before, he too had been at the Washout, digging pissers, burning shitters, filling sandbags, and going on endless perimeter patrols. He was now the recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, as surely as if he’d been Audie Murphy himself.
Corporal Maxam could have been any one of us. This realization, and the horror of what our Delta marines had endured, snapped many of us in Charlie Company back to the reality that, although times were slack, the war was all around us, and in a matter of minutes we could again be in the very thick of it.
18
ON FEBRUARY 18, 1968, THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT of State announced the highest U.S. casualty toll of the Vietnam War. The previous week they had counted 543 Americans killed in action and 2,547 wounded.
Early March brought changes back home that could barely have been predicted even two months earlier. On March 12, liberal Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, running on an antiwar platform, came within two hundred thirty votes of defeating President Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic party primary election, the traditional beginning of the presidential campaign season. McCarthy’s campaign was buoyed by more than two thousand full-time student volunteers who cut their hair, cleaned up their dress, and convinced the conservative voters of the state that a new day was indeed dawning.
Four days later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, responding to the abrupt change in the national mood, ended months of speculation by announcing that he too would enter the race to defeat President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president.
The primary plank in his platform was opposition to the war in Vietnam.
As winter changed into early spring, the days became hotter and the ground grew progressively drier and harder. What was left of the jungle had been severely defoliated by the relentless aerial spraying of Agent Orange over the past month.
We continued to feel ourselves becoming soft—losing our edge. We hadn’t had any real sustained contact with the enemy since December 6, 1967. Half of Charlie Company had rotated back to the States by this time, and the rest of us were starting to get short in tenure and overly cautious.
When we returned to camp late one afternoon and dropped the deadweight of our gear from our exhausted bodies, we were greeted with the news that the commander in chief—the top person in our chain of command—was not running for another term
.
The president of the United States, the near immortal Lyndon Baines Johnson, had become the latest victim of the war in Vietnam.
I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year.
With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the Presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
But let men everywhere know, however, that a strong, a confident, and a vigilant America stands ready tonight to seek an honorable peace—and stands ready tonight to defend an honored cause—whatever the price, whatever the burden, whatever the sacrifice that duty may require.
The war had claimed its ultimate victim—the president of the United States.
The country was undergoing enormous change.
Nothing had a greater impact on this change than the now totally out of control American adventure in Vietnam.
What the hell were we doing there?
Early on the morning of April 5, 1968, as we dragged our filthy, smelly, exhausted bodies inside the perimeter through the south wire, fresh from an all-night ambush emplacement to the west, we were greeted with the most awful of the escalating bad news from home. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., while spending a day working at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis to plan a Poor People’s March on Washington, D.C., had been killed with a single shot from a .30–06 caliber rifle. Despite pleas for calm and a powerful extemporaneous eulogy from Senator Robert F. Kennedy, rioting had broken out in cities throughout the United States, rioting that had killed dozens of people and caused untold millions in property damage.
That morning, I became aware of a thin line that began to divide the black marines from the rest of us—nothing that ever manifested itself in combat, but a “something” that began to appear in a thousand little ways in our day-to-day lives.
19
APRIL 15.
The day that Andover seniors stood glued to their mailboxes to await decisions from the Ivy League schools.
Actual dates were of little consequence in Vietnam, so the date passed without notice, as did April 16. There were shitters to stir, sandbags to fill, and lines to man. I had no sense of time other than the gentle warming of spring. A supply chopper came in around noon on April 17 and off-loaded two large red nylon bags of mail, twelve cases of C rations, and several cases of ammo. I was eating lunch in the gun pit next to my bunker. Dan Burton brought over a handful of letters. Dan had a mad love back in San Diego and was usually among the first in the squad to pick up our mail from the command post. My mind was on R & R, which was two days off. I was hoping that my parents had sent a money order to help defray expenses.
I read the letters one by one—savoring each for minutes before turning to the next. I always got a lot of mail, and this day was no exception. The money orders arrived, as did a long letter from my father. Other letters came from friends and family filled with news and good wishes. The morale boost was incalculable. Near the bottom of the pile was a fat letter from Harvard University. It had been two years since I’d thought of the fat-thin differential, so I tore it open with no expectation about what might be inside, still smiling from the previous letters from home.
I pulled out a wad of folded paper. In the middle was a document with the Harvard University seal on top.
I had been accepted.
I had no idea what to do or say, so I said nothing for several minutes other than the repeated whisper of “Holy shit.”
“Dan. Hey, Dan. You’re not going to believe this shit.” Dan Burton was engrossed in a letter from his girlfriend, but looked up briefly to acknowledge me.
“Waddayagot, brother?”
“Dan,” I began softly, still unsure of the news myself. “Dan, I got into Harvard.”
Dan got it.
His unconditional grin said it all.
He was as happy as he could be for me and was unabashed about showing it. First he gave me a hug, then swung me around, and then he commenced to share the news with all within earshot. To most of my comrades, he might well have been speaking Greek—such was their grasp of the concept of attending Harvard. Finally, Lieutenant Ladd, my former platoon commander, came by, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “You know, McLean, it’s not every day that a fuck-ass enlisted marine gets into Harvard.”
He was right, of course, but I wasn’t just an enlisted marine. … I was me, which … to me … made it even more unlikely. It took days to wipe the smile off my face. In Andover it was expected. Here, it was unheard of.
R & R was the most anticipated week of every marine’s Vietnam experience. Those returning from their five days often remarked, not entirely in jest, that they would extend their stay in Vietnam for a year just to get another R & R. For teenage boys who had been in the shit for eight months and, for the most part, never slept with a girl, it was an exquisite experience beyond all imagination.
When one boy went on R & R, it was as though his whole squad went. Weeks before departure, every move and moment would be plotted. Most of the senior guys in my squad had chosen Singapore out of the eight or nine possible destinations. To leverage their considerable experience, I chose Singapore as well.
On April 19, I left the Washout on the morning supply chopper to begin a journey that would take me through Dong Ha to Da Nang for my flight to Singapore.
Arriving in Da Nang later that afternoon, I was overwhelmed by the changes that had occurred in the six months since my arrival in country. They were massive. The war was huge, and Da Nang was at the center of the buildup. Where tent cities had once sprawled, there were now wooden barracks. The dusty roads were paved. The PX could rival any stateside department store. I wandered around for hours feeling like a small-town midwestern boy seeing New York City for the first time. I could not have felt more distantly removed from the dusty little Washout.
We deplaned in Singapore the next day, two hundred uniformed boys representing all service branches, and were politely directed into an anteroom in which we were briefed about our five-day stay.
It’s hard to imagine a more wonderful period than those first few hours of R & R.
The speaker was an army sergeant who somehow had swung the job of jobs.
“Gentlemen, there are buses waiting outside that door to take you to your designated R & R hotel. By agreement with the government of Singapore, you must remove your uniforms as soon as you arrive at the hotel.”
This announcement was greeted by spontaneous applause, whistles, whoops, and laughter.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he interrupted. “I know you’re all eager to get moving, so let me go over just a few announcements. The faster I finish, the faster I get you onto those buses.”
Complete, utter bated-breath silence.
“The uniforms come off and the civvies go on. Each hotel has a shop in the lobby where you can buy the basics to get you started. The uniforms stay off until you get back on those buses at the end of the week. Is that clear? Please understand, you can be court-martialed if you’re caught wearing a uniform.”
This news was greeted by another spontaneous outburst.
“We want you all to have a good time this week. That’s why you are here. Rest, relax, and enjoy all that Singapore has to offer.”
More cheers, more whoops.
“Should anything come up which might require our assistance, please let us know. We’re here to serve you. The office number is on the material you’ve been given.”
“How ’bout bail bonds, Sarge?” The question was blurted out from the corner of the room.
“Let’s just say that this is the
last time I want to see any of you until you leave. That’s it. Any real questions?”
There were several other questions, but mostly everybody knew the drill. After all, each boy had been planning his trip for months, deciding which city to visit, which hotel to stay at, and, in some cases, which specific companion to keep. Late nights during watch, we’d talk endlessly about where to go, what to do, what the air smells like. The stories were told over and over—tales to stifle the boredom of standing in a trench at three A.M.
There was no sadder scene in the field than the first sight of a boy returning from R & R. Soon, though, the stories would begin to pour forth and we would all revel in the wonders of Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Manila, Hawaii (mostly married boys), and Singapore—cities in countries that only months before had not even been in the vocabulary of most of us. Several weeks after a boy’s return, the fervor would wane as the combat routine ground on and more recent R & R returnees assumed center stage with fresher material. By the third week back, however, squad mates would commence the ticking of a different R & R countdown clock.
“Last, but far from least, please be advised that the girls are required by law to keep their shot cards up to date. Be sure you check, gentlemen. The mama-san will help you make sure. It will save you a lot of suffering after you get back in country.”
Venereal disease.
The clap, as it was called, gestated about thirty days after contact. It normally arrived in the form of an involuntary drip and painful urination. Those with symptoms would march up to see the corpsman and get a penicillin shot—some quietly, sheepishly feeling that God had given them their just reward for the first intimate encounter with a woman of their young lives.