by Doug Stanton
• • •
Something fateful happens on January 15, 1968, after a month at Cu Chi. Stan thinks that perhaps this fateful thing is not fateful at all, but only random, the result of inexperience among the platoon. After all, how can a thing be fated and random at the same time? The platoon is restless because it’s wondering how it will act when it meets its first large firefight. Every day in Cu Chi, the momentous event seems around the corner. Yet the fight has not yet arrived.
It’s about 2:20 p.m., and what happens involves Sergeant Larry Kass, who isn’t popular with some men in the platoon, and Specialist John Payne from Illinois. Once, during a training exercise in the States, Kass had charged a position and accidentally knocked a fellow soldier unconscious with the butt of his rifle. In response, realizing he’d screwed up, he went running off into the woods. Al Dove, who has had lifelong problems with braggarts on account of his difficult father back in Hawaii, thinks Kass is egotistical, always declaring himself to be a tough soldier. When Al Dove met him the first time, he punched Kass in the nose. They avoided each other after that. Stan Parker finds Kass to be a bully. He’ll say to Kass, “Why can’t you not be a jerk?” And Kass will answer, “Because I outrank you.” That is true, but barely. They’re both enlisted, but Kass does outrank him. Stan is a PFC/E-3 and Kass is presently a Sgt./E-5. Stan tells him, “If you think that’s going to stop me from fighting you, you are sadly mistaken.”
What happened next tells itself a couple of different ways, depending on with whom you speak. Jerry Austin hears that John Payne is asleep, leaning against a tree, with his hand on the trigger of an M-79 grenade launcher. It looks like a shotgun, with a wide-mouth barrel that shoots a three-inch, 40mm grenade—lobs it, really—much farther than anyone can throw such a thing, which is the whole point of the weapon.
Kass walks over and kicks Payne with his boot, trying to wake him, frogging around, the way Kass will do. Oh, fercrissakes, thinks Al Dove, and then Payne, startled, sits up, depresses the trigger, and the launcher fires.
The wide-mouthed barrel of the weapon is aimed straight up at his face. The grenade races from the barrel (its terminal velocity is two hundred fifty feet per second) and travels the several feet to Payne’s chin, and smashes his lower jaw, removing his teeth and lips and rendering him unconscious. Somebody immediately calls for a medevac. Within minutes, they hear a Huey coming in for a landing. Payne lays motionless and silent on the ground, bleeding from the place that had been his jaw, while Kass runs off again, as if to escape his stupidity, where he might get shot (and mercifully so, think some of the guys) by a VC. They can hear Kass out in the boonies muttering to himself, half-yelling, half-crying, as if to say “Oh, what have I done!”
Later, Al Dove remembers it differently. He and Stan and Guido Russo are sitting together, laughing and joking, when this noise happens. They’re about seventy-five feet away, far enough to be aware of Kass and Payne moving around in a general way, but not close enough to pay attention to details—except Al, who for some reason is watching. He sees Kass walk over to Payne, pick up the grenade launcher like he doesn’t care about much and isn’t paying attention to anything, and in this mood, he does not see that the launcher is loaded, points it at Payne, and fires. Al swears to this day that he watched this happen. Either way, Payne is nearly dead, shot right in the face. And in the end the details don’t matter, do they? This story, like all of these stories, is about, what? Forgiveness? Making peace?
When the shooting happens, Al Dove and Stan and another soldier have just cranked open several cans of C-rations, ham and lima beans, and are eating over the tops of their knees, Al sitting behind them a little ways, up a slight incline, with the machine gun lying on the ground beside him, quiet as a dog.
Then they hear this noise. Stan thinks the sound is the whoosh of an incoming mortar round, and he ducks down, ready for the explosion. Then he hears hollering and screaming coming from the direction of Kass and Payne. Stan thinks that perhaps a sniper round has come in and found its mark. But he doesn’t know who has been shot or how badly. Sergeant Westerman comes running up. He has not seen the incident happen either, but he’s heard the sound of a gunshot, or something like it, and he tells Stan and the other soldier to run over to those trees yonder, about seventy-five yards away, and see what the hell is there, if anything. If anyone has taken a shot at them, it would have come from that vantage point. Stan and the soldier take off running.
Just then the situation gets more complicated: a helicopter appears overhead, making passes, surveilling the ground from the air. And then somebody on the ground near the tree line starts shooting at the helicopter, though Stan can’t tell where this fire is coming from. But the helo scoots this way and that, evading the firing, and then it tips and starts firing back at the sound, the bullets ripping through the trees around them. Stan and the soldier stop moving, for fear they’ll be misidentified as the enemy firing on the helicopter. Because they’ve been forced to stop, this allows them to look around, and that’s when they see the old man standing out in the middle of the rice paddy.
He has something in his hand. A rifle? At first, the soldier with Stan thinks this is a rifle, and he’s ready to drop the old man right then. Stan thinks differently: No, this can’t be the work of this old man. For one, it would have been a helluva shot. And when he gets closer, about thirty yards away, Stan is quite certain that what the man is holding is not a rifle but a farmer’s hoe. The old man isn’t moving, frozen in place beside the rice paddy, still as an egret. Stan’s platoon-mate is still convinced the old man somehow has a weapon on him. He insists, “He’s holding a rifle.”
“No, he’s not.”
“I’m going to shoot him.”
“Don’t you dare shoot this guy.”
“We don’t know if he’s VC or NVA.”
“That’s right. We don’t know anything,” says Stan. “If he makes a move, I’ll be the first to kill him. But until then, do not shoot him. If you do, I’ll shoot you. Do you hear me?”
They look back and see another helicopter land and somebody is loaded aboard and it lifts off and Stan and the soldier walk back to the spot where all the commotion has been. The ground is strewn with tangled, bloody bandages.
Stan still doesn’t know what has happened, so he asks Westerman, who tells him that Payne had been shot by one of their own. Kass. Stan asks where Kass is now, and Westerman says he got in the chopper with Payne. The poor bastard, he felt so terrible. He says Kass just stared and stared at Payne as the helo lifted off for the hospital at Cu Chi. Stan feels this thing overcome him, a sickly feeling, maybe it’s anger, or fear, or dread, but his reaction, upon hearing this news, is to throw up.
He walks into the bush and bends over with his hands on his knees and keeps throwing up. He decides that it’s anger that’s making him sick. Stan has never lost anyone under these kinds of violent circumstances. This is something he realizes he must learn in this new life. He looks for a place inside himself to hide the pain and reaches up and places the feeling on a shelf in his brain, next to the sad feelings he has for his mother, now that she is dead. He remembers the way she whispered in his ear calling him “Troop” one last time as she lay dying. Lord, he misses her.
Some of the guys in the platoon are plenty mad at Kass for what he’s done. Stan is beyond getting mad. What he realizes he feels instead is . . . peace. Maybe forgiveness. At least, call it understanding. He doesn’t think that Kass shot Payne on purpose. He doesn’t think Kass has committed this terrible deed because he can’t help being a jerk. The shooting is something that happened. It’s something that happened. Who knows why? Who was watching when Kass walked over with the M-79 and fired at Payne? Who? Stan doesn’t know. His whole life he’s been sure someone has been watching over him—first his parents, then his friends, then God. He still doesn’t doubt any of this is true. Not yet.
When Kass returns from the hospital, he seems devastated. He comes back to the platoon a differe
nt man, as if coming back from a journey. He won’t give orders, doesn’t boss people around. He used to give the impression that he’d punch someone if they didn’t obey him. Now when he speaks to Stan, he won’t look him in the eye. Stan thinks it’s sad, how Kass’s been wrecked. And when Kass is killed about a month later in a firefight, shot three times in the chest, some of the guys in the platoon will have no remorse over his death, still blaming him for Payne’s disfigurement. But what, Stan wonders, could Kass have done differently, except to have decided not to walk up to John Payne and not pick up the grenade launcher, or reach over with his combat boot and nudge Payne? Somehow, and by someone, the launcher is fired, and from it, the rest of Kass’s life and Payne’s life follows behind. When Kass returns to the platoon from the hospital, Stan imagines that Kass must feel he’ll live forever with this regret, when in fact he’ll live with it for just another month. When he’s shot and they pick him up from the battlefield, he’s still alive—he’ll die in a matter of minutes—and in these precious minutes he’s still somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, the kid you see waving as he gets in his car at high school’s end, driving away to the rest of his life, and you don’t remember him again until his name appears in the news: KIA Larry Kass. When Stan learns that Kass has died on the medevac, he’s sad and reaches inside and puts this feeling too up on that shelf in his brain. He feels this death diminishes him, diminishes them all.
A few days pass, and Stan and Al Dove and Brian Riley and Dwight Lane feel that they should go and see Payne. His time in the Nam is done, they know that. It has ended before it began, really, before they’ve even begun to fight. Stan knows that visiting Payne is a way of making peace with the incident, the terrible pop and very short whoosh of the grenade as it leaves the launcher and heads for his chin.
They catch a chopper ride to the hospital and walk up and down the halls for ten minutes looking for Payne. They can’t find him. Stan walks into one room where a couple of guys are camped out in beds, sorry-looking young men all banged up from the war, and he looks right at one of them, and it’s John Payne. He doesn’t even recognize him and walks out of the room.
He gets halfway down the hall when he thinks, Wait a minute. That was a Screaming Eagle patch on the foot of that guy’s bed, and turns and walks into the room, and there’s Payne looking at him with baleful eyes, which are about all Stan can see because his face is so swollen and bandaged. He just stares and thinks, Oh, Payne, and he sits on the bed while every inch of his body says, Run, leave. There’s a small chalkboard hanging from the edge of the bed and it’s covered with white chalk smears and Stan guesses that he’s not been the first to visit Payne. Stan picks it up and starts writing, How are you feeling? And he turns it for Payne to see and Payne just looks at him, nineteen years old, and he says nothing, nothing, with his pale eyes.
Payne takes the board from him. Stan thinks how perfect his hands look, in comparison to his ruined face, his hands clean and unscarred, and Payne takes the chalk and writes in cursive, “Parker, I understand that you almost shot the wrong guy.” Stan doesn’t know what he means at first, and then he figures that Payne must’ve gotten word somehow that another soldier was hopping mad and had wanted to kill the old man with the hoe. Payne goes on with his chalk, writing, “I’m glad you didn’t shoot him. I’m glad you let him live.”
This makes Stan feel good because after the shooting, some of the guys yelled at Stan for not wasting the old man.
Payne has tubes running down his nose because his mouth opening is ruined and Stan can see the tube into his arm through which he’s being fed. After a short while they feel they’ve run out of things to say, and Stan erases what he’s written on the board and he too leaves a white chalk smear on the black slate and sets the board swinging from the edge of the bed and says good-bye to Payne and gets up and walks out of the room. He never sees him again. He tries calling him once when he gets out of the Army, using the number he’s had, but the recording of the operator’s voice tells him the number is disconnected. Stan hangs up the phone and walks away, goes back to work, or back into whatever part of his life he is living.
As far as he knows, Payne does get out of the hospital and away from the war, the pain of his wound being the price he pays for that journey back. Stan hopes that he finds happiness and that, somehow, his face has come back, almost like a near-dead plant, or a field of clover, the way the field can grow back overnight, especially after a rain, as if by magic. But Stan knows he’s only dreaming and that dreaming in this new life will kill a man.
They count the days until they can get out of Cu Chi.
They count the days until they can get into the war and leave behind this chickenshit, the shooting of John Payne.
• • •
At 7:15 in the morning, January 22, 1968, they load up on twenty-two Hueys and head out for a place called Black Virgin Mountain.
This is it: the big move, the big battle.
The five companies of the 1st Battalion, 501st Airborne Infantry Regiment—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Echo—lift off, the helicopters’ windscreens flashing in the sun. The Hueys fly at a thousand feet over rice paddies and hamlets. Soon, up ahead, Stan sees the mountain itself looming, a nearly perfect cone rising from the plain floor. They are going to assault the mountain.
Stan has never before felt such anticipation, such worry, such excitement.
They have flown for about thirty minutes when, suddenly, without any explanation, the long line of Hueys begins a slow arc to the right, as if rounding a bend on the air, and soon the lead Huey is heading past Stan, flying in the opposite direction, all of them headed back to where they’d come from.
Stan does not know where they are going. It isn’t evident at first that the mission is off; maybe plans have changed and they are going to assault from another position. But soon the airfield at Cu Chi comes into view and the Hueys are touching down. Immediately Stan and the rest of the soldiers are loaded, one company after another, onto a waiting C-130. They won’t be assaulting Black Virgin Mountain.
It’s increasingly evident to the platoon that there will be no rhythm to their movement or their days, no sense of forward progression.
• • •
They fly north to an airfield four hundred miles away, in the northernmost province in South Vietnam, near a town called Phu Bai, about eight miles southeast of Hue. It takes the U.S. Army twenty-one flights, or sorties, to transfer all of the men and cargo of the 1st and 2nd Battalions, 501st Airborne Infantry Regiment, from Cu Chi to this new northern base. (The 2nd Battalion, 502nd Airborne Infantry Regiment, will follow within a few days.)
Once at Phu Bai, Stan and the platoon load onto two-and-a-half-ton trucks and are driven about four miles west of Phu Bai to a place called Landing Zone El Paso.
The soldiers in Recon are told to cover their Screaming Eagle shoulder patches, clue enough that their presence is supposed to be a secret from the enemy. Stan figures they are probably being watched from some far-off vantage point, likely having spotted the trucks’ black clouds of diesel smoke.
So much for secrecy, he thinks.
They roll into LZ El Paso, a bustling new “city” of about five hundred soldiers whose job it is to defend this most northern sector of U.S. interest in Vietnam, called I Corps (pronounced “Eye-Core”). El Paso has previously been called LZ Tombstone, for the Vietnamese graveyard at its entrance, which consists of a large aboveground mound with a cement front and doorways leading to mausoleum-like structures. It’s a dusty, treeless place, loomed over by the distant eight-thousand-foot peaks of the Day Truong Song mountain range.
The provincial capital of this area, Quang Tri Province, is the city of Quang Tri itself, located sixteen miles south of the demilitarized zone. The DMZ runs along a river, the Ben Hai, for about fifteen miles, east to west, across a thin waist in the country’s topography. The DMZ, which extends about two and a half miles on either side of the river and which also follows the 17th par
allel, was established in 1954 when Vietnam was partitioned in the aftermath of the French withdrawal after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu. It is, in essence, the last line of defense, the demarcation between the Communist North and the U.S.-controlled South.
There have been reports that the NVA are going to attack the South, and this means they are going to come pouring across the DMZ. Since November 1967, the North Vietnamese Army has been increasing its presence in Quang Tri Province, and General Westmoreland had been alerted that the enemy might attack this area in northern I Corps.
On January 30, six days after arriving at LZ El Paso, Echo company loads into trucks again. This time, they are headed to an ill-equipped and poorly fortified outpost—LZ Jane—where they will make a stand against the supposed coming attack. They arrive in a cold rain at a forlorn hilltop bulldozed out of dirt and scrub, bounded by dark skies and encircled by tree lines several hundred yards down rocky, root-entangled slopes. The LZ is about the size of a football field and overlooks hill upon green rolling hill. It has been named, as is tradition, after somebody’s girlfriend. It sits about twenty-five miles south of the DMZ, and five miles southeast of Quang Tri City, a thirty-minute, double-time march for the boys or a two-minute helicopter ride, low and fast over the treetops. To the southeast, about fifteen miles away, is Hue, the longtime cultural capital of the province. To get any heavy machinery and resupply, such as tanks and artillery pieces, to Quang Tri and Hue, the enemy would have to use Highways 9 and 1. The 101st Airborne’s job is to stand in the middle and prevent this movement to these strategic centers.