by Doug Stanton
A few months earlier, Westmoreland, whom Time magazine had named its 1965 “Man of the Year,” had assured the public that America was winning in Vietnam. Stan guesses that by the end of his yearlong tour, he and his platoon-mates will prove Westmoreland correct.
The newly arrived soldiers celebrate their first night in-country by filling sandbags and fall asleep on cement floors under canvas roofs stretched over makeshift wooden walls. Stan drifts off thinking of home, of nights back home when he pulled into the Blue Top Drive-In with Tom Gervais, without much of a care in the world. He wonders about Gervais’s warning: Stay away, Boots. Why would he write such a thing? He thinks of his mother and wishes he could speak to her, ask her if she is proud of him yet. He wonders when he’ll discover just what Gervais meant.
• • •
The next morning, December 14, Echo Company is transported northwest, through Saigon, to a place called Cu Chi, located in a thirty-square-kilometer region of expansive enemy fortifications that U.S. commanders call the Iron Triangle.
Since the end of World War II, the Cu Chi area has been a haven for guerrilla fighters. Recon’s job, Stan learns, will be to hunt and engage these fighters.
When he looks around Cu Chi, he sees acres of forest braided with creeks, a shaded, pleasant place. A year earlier, the U.S. Army’s 25th Division set up their base, completely unaware of the danger living below them, literally under their feet.
They had located atop a nerve center of the North Vietnamese Army and its guerrilla cadre, the Viet Cong. Miles of tunnels snake underground all the way to the city limits of Saigon. As the war has grown in intensity, the guerrillas have built hospitals and kitchens underground and devised an ingenious system that pipes the cooking smoke aboveground. The hidden piping might extend fifty feet on a horizontal plane and finally emerge on the forest floor, with the chimney opening screened by woven leaves. To anyone passing by, the emerging mist looks not like smoke but resembles a marvel of morning sunlight. The tunnels’ interior doors lead farther down into protected dwelling spaces. Some of the tunnels lead to a river, where, by a clever feat of engineering, a soldier can enter and exit the complex through an underwater opening. The tunnels are part of a large underground city with infirmaries, dormitories, and armories.
Dotted around the Cu Chi area are dozens of “spider holes,” fighting positions dug by the Viet Cong close to the myriad tunnel entrances. A fighter can hide in a spider hole and wait in ambush, fire off a few rounds, and slip undetected through the tunnel’s camouflaged entrance.
You could crawl through these tunnels—measuring maybe three feet high and two feet wide—and eventually pop out of a trapdoor in sight of a busy street in Saigon, pull yourself up through the hole, replace the camouflaged lid capped with leaves and twigs, tamp it back in place, brush off your clothes, and walk into town into the flow of traffic and become one of millions of South Vietnamese living in Saigon. That, in fact, is precisely how the North Vietnamese Army has been moving into position to attack the Americans in a planned early-winter operation, scheduled for the Tet New Year.
Chiefly, the NVA are using the six-hundred-mile-long Ho Chi Minh Trail that snakes through Laos and Cambodia; once they get close to the cities in South Vietnam, they hide in places like the tunnels at Cu Chi, which had been built under the command of Ho Chi Minh in the late 1940s. This means that by the time Stan Parker and the Recon Platoon arrive, the Viet Cong know these Cu Chi woods as intimately as Tom Sawyer knew the caves of Hannibal, Missouri.
• • •
By December 15, Stan and his fellow soldiers settle into new quarters, struggling to acclimate to the tropical climate. They have been warned about the dangers of sun exposure and instructed to acclimate by getting a “suntan” (read, “sunburn”). After a week of filling sandbags, Stan longs to go on a patrol. He expresses some of his frustration of garrison life in letters to his high school girlfriend, Maureen.
“I have a few extra minutes,” he writes, “so I thought I would drop you a few lines. A lot has happened since I wrote to you last”:
Around the end of the month, we’re going to join up with the 101st’s 1st Brigade and with 3rd Brigade and the whole 101st Airborne Division is going up on the Cambodian border and kick some ass. We’re going to end this war.
General Westmoreland himself said, “Give me the 101st Airborne Division and I’ll give you Vietnam.” Besides, this is an election year and something has to change about this war.
Have a real good tan now, real nice weather for getting a tan over here, but sure as hell gets cold over here at night. Oh shit does it get cold, oh shit does it get hot. . . .
I never did tell you thank you for going out with me when I was home. . . .
Well, I’ve got to go now and do what I was sent here to do (get a good suntan). . . . Tell your mom hi for me, love you, Stan.
Finally, after two weeks, they start patrolling and scouting for VC fighters. Stan is surprised by the dryness of the vegetation; he had expected to be in thick, wet jungle. The dust he kicks is red, like paprika, and tastes oily. He passes straw and bamboo huts and smells what he guesses is fish cooking. He soon comes to learn that the smell is nuoc mam, a fish oil, and an essential flavoring in food. The patrols are an assault on his senses, while his heart hammers in his chest.
They patrol a place they call Hobo Woods and through a French-owned rubber plantation called Filhol. They walk in single file, as trained, separated by about fifteen feet; this way, if they are attacked, they’re not bunched in groups and are slightly less vulnerable to mass casualty. The lead soldier is the point man and the guy behind him is called the slack position (as in, he’s “walking slack”). The slack guy’s job is to keep an eye out for anything the point man might have missed—literally, take up the slack. Most days, a Huey will land and pick them up from their patrol, before dark, and take them back to Cu Chi. One night, Viet Cong soldiers probe the camp’s perimeter and in the thirty-minute fight that ensues, thirty Viet Cong soldiers are killed and two taken as prisoners.
Through all of this, Stan still hasn’t fired his weapon. “We were itching for something to happen,” he writes to his father.
In the minds of the men of the platoon, the Viet Cong and NVA are wily, elusive opponents, quick as wraiths. They view them as able adversaries, but feel they are cowards because they’ve heard they rarely stand their ground in a fight. Almost as soon as battle begins, they melt back into earth and trees.
They’ve also heard that the VC and NVA are masters of devising ways to maim, having perfected all manner of booby traps, often made of sharpened bamboo stakes called punji sticks, smeared with human excrement, mounted on swinging boards, and triggered by an unsuspecting footfall on a trip wire. The stakes can come swooping down from a tree branch or fly up from the ground, impaling the soldier in his path.
There are trapdoor booby traps that, when you step on them, flip up and drop you down into a grave-like hole lined with punji sticks. There are spiked booby traps strung in trees designed to drop down and target a man’s genitals and puncture arteries. The uses of sharpened bamboo go on and on, the ingenious answer of a poor people to a richer country’s superior technology and firepower.
“Come on, do something!” Stan writes to his father. “Shoot at us!”
Little does Stan know that beneath them, enemy soldiers are gathering and waiting to do just that.
• • •
On Christmas Eve, Stan receives an early present. He’s on patrol when he gets word that he is urgently needed at platoon headquarters. He finds First Sergeant Koontz, who looks as if he’s going to chew him out.
“Parker, I don’t know who you think you are,” Koontz begins, “but you must think you’re special.”
He points at a Huey landing nearby. “But let me tell you, you’re not special.” And then he smiles, as if to say, I’m kidding, and steps aside, revealing Stan’s brother Dub on short-leave from the 1st Brigade, 101st combat operations near
Phan Rang, where he is fighting in the highlands. Stan is overjoyed as he realizes he’ll be spending Christmas with Dub.
They grab each other and hug, and Stan introduces him to the other guys in the platoon. He’s seen Dub only twice since the summer of his high school graduation—when he’d joined up for the Army and when they were both on emergency leave for their mother’s death and funeral.
Someone in the platoon has gone into the brush and cut something down that kind of looks like a Christmas tree. They decorate the scraggly twigs with hand grenades and machine-gun ammunition and different arm patches guys have taken off their uniforms for the occasion. Stan thinks it looks pretty cool. For Christmas dinner, the cooks serve turkey, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes.
On Christmas Day, Colonel John H. Cushman, commander of the 2nd Brigade, which has control of Stan’s 1st Battalion Recon Platoon, visits the bunker line and inspects its readiness to repel enemy attack. The word is that the enemy is going to try something soon. Stan certainly hopes so.
Something called the Tet holiday truce is in effect. In October, while Stan and the rest of Recon were training at Fort Campbell, the North Vietnamese government had announced hostilities would pause at the end of January, so that the Vietnamese, North and South, could return to their villages and cities. During the Tet truce, they would eat and drink and pay homage to ancestors, as part of the liturgy of the country’s Confucian, Buddhist, and animist theology.
That night Stan has perimeter guard duty. He is standing in the bunker with Al Dove, Brian Riley, and Dub. As Stan looks out of the bunker slit, he sees phantom shapes hovering in the dark night, like cutouts from black cloth. It dawns on him: it’s happening! And then the firing starts.
Stan and the guys alongside him start shooting back, and the noise and the sight of the tracers is spectacular. Beside him, Al Dove racks the big M-60 machine gun, swinging the barrel around in the direction of the firing, the darkness pricked by the enemy’s muzzle flashes. The shooting, to Stan’s ears, is Duh duh duh. This first exchange of enemy fire for the platoon lasts just three minutes. After about half an hour, the firing begins again and continues intermittently for several hours. The night turns into dawn, December 27, and it’s Stan’s birthday. He is twenty years old.
He does feel different, but not because he is officially a year older. He’d felt a special bond with Al in the bunker, as Al banged away with the machine gun and he with his M-16. He and Al are growing tight. Al, he thinks, is a magician with the .60.
Dub, Stan’s brother, tells him that in Vietnam you learn to mark time, and cherish life, by your brushes with death. Stan thinks of this realization as a kind of birthday present.
The excitement of the firefight is followed on December 28 by the much-anticipated appearance of Raquel Welch in camp, alongside Bob Hope, as part of Hope’s USO tour. Her presence is felt among the men as a kind of hormonal tremor. The year before, 1966, Welch starred in two movies, appearing in an animal-hide bikini in One Million Years B.C., whose promotional poster showed her in wide-legged stance, arms out at her sides, as if prepared to leap from the poster itself. The other movie, Fantastic Voyage, was about a submarine filled with intrepid scientists who are shrunk and inserted into a scientist’s bloodstream in order to repair his health. When these movies came out, Raquel Welch was perhaps the world’s number one sex symbol, and her appearance at the Cu Chi base camp seems as otherworldly and improbable as a story line from one of her movies. The guys dream of getting laid by Raquel Welch.
Before the show, Colonel Cushman comes around again to inspect the battalion’s line of defense, which faces outward in a 360-degree perimeter. He is not happy that his troops will be sitting around staring at Raquel Welch while the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong prowl around them.
When she walks onstage wearing a white miniskirt and a blue blouse drawn tight across her bosom, the men go nuts.
Stan is sitting too far back to see much of Raquel and he must peer at her through his binoculars. He and Jerry Austin go one step further: they start taking pictures of her by placing their binoculars to the lens of their cameras, so that Welch’s fulsome image is magnified in both their amazed eyeballs and on the Kodachrome film inside the camera. They click away as she high-steps across the stage. All the while, Bob Hope prances and vamps as he did in the old Bing Crosby Road Show pictures, his trousers slipping down and his shirt hiked up to expose a pale belly.
After the show, Stan and a group of the platoon make their way to the stage. When Stan’s turn comes, Raquel Welch turns her wattage in his direction and asks in the sweetest voice Stan has ever heard, “Would you boys like a picture?” And Stan stammers, “Uh, yeah.” Before he can say more, she hands him a black-and-white eight-by-ten of herself. He is about to ask her to sign it when a military policeman sees the Screaming Eagles patch on his uniform and tells him to move along. He learns that this VIP area belongs to the boys of Tropic Lightning, the 25th Infantry Division, and Airborne soldiers are not welcome. Stan is too happy gazing at the photo to be annoyed. He walks away gingerly holding it before him.
When he gets to his hooch, he rolls it up, sticks it inside a cardboard tube, and ships it home. He will later get a letter from his dad, kidding him, “What’s this picture all about? I thought you were there fighting a war, son . . . Love, Dad.”
• • •
On December 30, Stan goes on a patrol that teaches him a painful lesson about how the war is to be fought. He and Guido Russo walk up to a thatched hooch and stand looking at it, their rifles pointing at the front door. Suddenly, out steps a Vietnamese man dressed in loose black pants and shirt with an American-made M-1 carbine, which is odd. Most VC and NVA soldiers carry AK-47s. He is standing just ten feet away.
The Vietnamese guy is shocked, points his rifle at Stan and Russo, who stand frozen, their guns pointed at him.
“Who is he?” Russo says out of the side of his mouth.
“I don’t know,” replies Stan. “He’s carrying an M-1 carbine. Could be a good guy. But he’s dressed in black pajamas. Could be a bad guy. Not sure.”
“What do we do?” asks Russo. The soldier is definitely Vietnamese, but Stan and Russo have never seen an enemy soldier up close and never actually shot anyone. And Stan doesn’t know how, exactly, you decide to shoot someone as you stand staring them right in the eyes.
Then another man, similarly dressed, steps from the building, looks up in surprise, and he too raises his rifle and points it at the two Americans.
“Do we shoot?” whispers Stan.
The first enemy soldier starts inching sideways along the building, and then, when he gets to the corner, he gives a little bow to Stan and Russo and suddenly vanishes around it. Immediately, another surprised Vietnamese soldier walks out of the house, only he is dressed in a khaki uniform with an AK-47. He joins the second one, who by now is inching along the wall, until he too gives a bow at the corner and disappears. In total, five North Vietnamese soldiers exit the building and flee, all without a shot being fired. Stan and Russo look at each other shaking their heads, and breathe a sigh of relief. They have miraculously escaped death.
A few moments later, First Sergeant Koontz, who has witnessed part of the standoff from a distance, rushes up to them. Without warning, he punches Stan, knocking him off his feet.
“What are you doing!” he bellows. “Don’t you know who these guys were?”
“Well, we couldn’t tell at first—”
“Didn’t you see the red star on his helmet? He was NVA, the enemy. Your job is to kill bad guys! Do you understand?”
“Well, yes, but . . .” Stan says.
Koontz interrupts. “Do you understand? You kill bad guys, period!”
“I understand,” says Stan, rubbing his jaw. “I understand. Kill or be killed. I understand.”
Koontz tells the platoon: “There are two types of people in Vietnam. The quick and the dead.” He asks them, “Which are you going to be?”
Ever
y day after that, Stan reminds himself what his job is: Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy.
Kill them.
• • •
That night, Stan goes on ambush with Al Dove and Francis Wongus.
Wongus takes the rear position, and Stan the twelve o’clock, facing down the trail. Al Dove is next to him with the M-60 machine gun. Stan sets up some Claymore mines, each about the size and thickness of a paperback book and slightly concave. He runs the wires with the clacker handles back to their ambush position, tucking the wires along the way under leaf matter. He sets the clackers up on a little berm. They look like those exercise handles you buy off late-night TV, meant to strengthen the hand.
Each Claymore, named by its inventor, Scotsman Norman MacLeod, has on its front the odd but necessary wording: “Front Toward Enemy.” It’s packed with C-4 explosive and 700 steel balls that spray out in a killing pattern highly effective at fifty-five yards but still lethal at a hundred yards. When the clackers are squeezed, they send an electric charge down the wire and explode the mine.
Next to the clackers Stan also sets two grenades with the pins straightened for easier pulling. The only thing to do now is to sit and wait for the enemy to walk by.
Soon they hear footsteps in the night, the rustle of plants underfoot. Stan, Al, and Wongus open fire and see out in the darkness the flashes of the enemy’s gun. Soon the unseen enemy begin dropping mortars around them, and it’s terrifying to lie in the dark as the sky explodes. When the explosions stop, Stan is exhilarated and scared, all at once.
The next morning, he is sure there will be a lot of dead VC strewn about them, but when they check, they find only thick blood trails on the grass and jungle floor. The living have dragged the dead and dying away. He follows the tracks and soon they simply disappear. As a boy, living along the edge of Lake Michigan, he and his brothers had followed trails in the beach sand and imagined that they belonged to German soldiers; these tracks in Vietnam end in human-sized blossoms of blood, glistening under a tropic sun. How far has he traveled, he wonders, from that time when he played war as a boy? He also knows that part of him is still that boy along the lake. He can feel the change. He knows they killed some of the soldiers in the ambush, and this makes him feel good. Nor is he filled with reflection about what it means to end someone’s life. He’s happy that he is still alive. He’s happy that he’s no longer a combat virgin—or “cherry.”