by Doug Stanton
The next morning, they get up and start walking back into the village, but now it’s quiet. The wailing has stopped.
In Hai Lang, Stan and the Recon Platoon are battling the 5th Battalion of the 812th NVA Regiment, tough bastards. Stan crouches in the street, watching a column of the 101st Airborne’s Alpha Company 1/501 advance up the street. At the same time, he sees a squad or two of NVA soldiers, at least several dozen, sneaking up on Alpha Company by using a building and some abandoned vehicles as cover. He can see the whole thing happening from where he’s crouched. Alpha Company is about to be ambushed.
He pulls his M-16 up to his shoulder, takes aim, and fires off two shots—about seventy-five yards away, kind of Hail Mary shots at that.
His aim is good: his shots are headed straight for the RPG gunner in the group of enemy soldiers. Both shots strike the leader and topple him over backward. As he falls back, the RPG tube swings over his shoulder, pointing directly at the line of men behind him. Evidently, in the contraction of death, his finger tightens on the trigger and fires the rocket, which flies out of the launcher and starts tearing through his men, who drop like bowling pins. It travels about thirty feet and explodes. The devastation is nearly total. Stan has taken out a large portion of the assaulting force with two lucky shots. He’s thrilled.
• • •
Four days after the start of the Tet fighting, February 4, big U.S. guns, firing from a nearby firebase, shoot six hundred high-explosive rounds into Hai Lang for several hours. Stan can feel some of the explosions in his boots, as the sonic rumbles dissipate in the rest of his body. Echo Company’s sister company, Bravo Company, has moved into Hai Lang to engage the NVA, and they are under attack. Stan can hear the gunfire and mortars, and as the battle heats up, Bravo Company has to withdraw because the artillery fire is dropping too close to their own positions. In midafternoon, after several hours of this fighting, Charlie Company comes under attack too. The U.S. casualties are enormous: forty-two wounded and six killed, including the company commander and two platoon leaders. For the fourth day in a row, Stan doesn’t know if he’ll still be alive at sundown.
The platoon is falling now into a rhythm as a unit: walk and patrol during the day and set up ambush at night. Stan begins to feel they exist in a place between waking and sleep, between hyperalertness and somnolence. The street fighting is relentless. Stan is carrying a canvas pouch over his shoulder, hanging by a strap and made to carry Claymore land mines. The pouch, however, is filled with cans of C-ration peaches he’s collected along the way. The cans fit nicely in the hand, are made of heavy tin, painted Army green. They say “Peaches” on the side, in black letters.
Stan now finds the peaches to be a delicacy, a rare thing in an ugly place. He likes carrying the peaches in the pouch and feeling them thump against his chest as he patrols. They reassure him that there is still something beautiful in the world.
• • •
They’re about a half mile from the village of Hai Lang. Stan is walking point, and Francis Wongus is taking the slack. Wongus’s job is to keep an eye on things and spot anything Stan might miss. Stan is moving down the trail, heel-toe, heel-toe, with Wongus about twenty feet behind him, and suddenly an NVA soldier jumps out from a tree, levels his AK at Stan, and fires a quick four-round burst. Stan falls. Wongus wheels around and shoots the NVA soldier. No telling what the soldier was thinking, unless he didn’t anticipate Wongus would be walking in the slack position. Francis nearly cuts the guy in half, and he’s lying facedown on the ground. Stan’s lying on the ground too. He does some self-examination with his hand and fears he’s been hit in the spine. He can’t move; his legs are numb. He fears not that he may be dying but that he might not walk again.
Bullets pass all around him and overhead. The woods are filled with the hollow banging sound of gunfire. But for this minute, within this chaos, he’s worried he’s a cripple, worried, maybe, that his peter won’t work anymore, that he’ll be dead sexually, and he wonders whether this will have any effect on his ability to fight or defend himself during the rest of his life.
Stan reaches around and touches the wet spot on his back, where he thinks he stops feeling anything from there on down. He rubs his fingers together and brings them up to look: on his fingers is white cream.
Oh, God, he thinks, that’s my bone marrow.
He stares at the white marrow and smells his fingers. The fragrance is odd and he realizes that for his entire life he had no idea that bone marrow had any smell at all.
He hears somebody crawling up to him. Here comes Troy Fulton, a medic, to save the day. Stan couldn’t be happier to see him. There’s a photo Stan will look at years from this moment, a picture he will keep in a shoe box in a closet in his otherwise quiet house in Colorado; it’s of Troy, in grainy black-and-white, bending down to tie his boot, a white cigarette clenched in his jaw, unlit, while he squints in concentration over the laces. He will think, God bless, Troy Fulton, and wonder, Whatever happened to him?
Troy says, “Parker, you all right?”
“I’m hit.”
“Where?”
“I think my back’s broken.”
“Can you feel anything?”
“No.” And Stan can’t. He’s numb from the waist down, as if the lower half of his body went to sleep on him. Tingling.
“Let me see,” says Fulton, ducking down as more gunfire whizzes overhead. Fulton’s touching the wet spot on the back of Stan’s fatigue shirt. He has to root around to find the spot and then he pauses as if to say, “Wait a minute,” and he starts to rummage through Stan’s pack itself.
“That’s my bone marrow,” Stan says. “Can you feel it?”
“You mean this?” asks Fulton, pulling out a can of Barbasol shaving cream.
It’s got two bullet holes in it. Fulton shows him the smear of shaving cream in his own hand. Stan’s confused at first, then relieved and smiles.
“You haven’t been shot,” says Troy. “You’re fine.”
“Really?”
“You’re damn lucky to be alive.”
“But what about my legs, the numbness?”
“They’ll come back. Don’t worry. The nerve’s been bruised.”
Stan has no idea if nerves can be bruised, and if they can be bruised, if they’ll come back. But he trusts Troy Fulton. Even though he’s only a few years older than Stan, he seems so much wiser. Stan figures it’s due to all the death Troy had seen in Ia Drang. His sole job is to save people, to treat their broken bodies.
Fulton’s starting to edge away from Stan to help someone else. “You lay still. Don’t shoot back or you’ll make yourself a target, and they’ll kill you this time,” he says. “I’m going to check on you in a little while.” He explains he can’t call in a medevac right now—too much enemy fire.
Fulton reaches out and squeezes Stan’s arm and smiles a big, hundred-watt smile and says, “And when I come back, I’ll be sure to bring a big ol’ razor so you can finish the shave.”
• • •
Each day more bombs fall on the village. More wailing commences each nightfall. Each aria of pain, pure, as if an angel is singing with its throat cut, rises and finishes with a crystalline flourish. One night, Troy Fulton creeps up in the dark of an ambush and whispers to Stan that the NVA had come through the neighborhood and killed even more people, including the local South Vietnamese suspected of collaborating with the Americans. The women of the neighborhood had been spared, though. These were the people who were wailing.
• • •
The schoolhouse yard, where they’ve dug a fighting position and that they have begun to inhabit regularly each night, seems an odd place to make a killing ground. Yet here they are, digging in again with the job of watching the main highway in front of them. They are to kill any VC or NVA they see. Stan is coming to the conclusion that his real and even bigger job is simply to stay alive.
He and the others have passed a line: they’ve stopped fighting for any idea
s and they’re certainly not fighting for the Vietnamese. Stan is amazed and angry about the way some of his South Vietnamese soldiers will not stand with him and the other paratroopers and slug it out in a firefight. But he admires their cooking. They catch freshwater shrimp no bigger than a June bug, string them on a skewer, and roast them over a fire—delicious. But beyond this, beyond an admiration for the way the South Vietnamese Army may occasionally stand and deliver with a rifle, Stan feels almost nothing for his Vietnamese countrymen. He does feel immense remorse for the U.S. troopers killed in the battles he’s fought in, but no remorse for the dead NVA and VC scattered about the village of Hai Lang.
• • •
He’s fighting in a room overlooking a street in Hai Lang. The street is filled with gunfire. The room, a second-floor bedroom, is filled with smoke and American soldiers who are sticking their M-16s out the windows and shooting at the NVA soldiers down below in the rubble-strewn street, who are firing back up at them. The back wall of the bedroom is popping as the rounds from the street hit it. He looks out of his left eye, at the barrels sticking out of the window next to him, and realizes these are AK-47 barrels, which means that the people next door are North Vietnamese or VC fighters. Holy mackerel, he realizes; they are fighting next door to each other. He does some quick thinking, pulls out a Claymore, and sets it against the wall with the blast radius directed into the adjoining room. He steps out into the hallway and squeezes the clacker handles, setting off the mine. He steps back into the room in time to see the stunned fighters next door stumbling around, covered in dust; a few of them are lying dead on the floor. Stan steps up into the gap in the wall and takes aim and guns down the remaining soldiers. It’s like shooting men in a barrel. The stunned enemy soldiers don’t put up any resistance, and it’s in this kind of moment that he realizes that war is really about elimination—eliminating, erasing, wasting, greasing, making nonexistent. You kill the other guy, until there are more of you than there are of them.
Many mornings, Stan wakes up feeling old. He doesn’t feel twenty. He feels like he’s fallen into another story about another life he’d never imagined he’d be living, here in Vietnam, living “like an animal,” living to kill. He feels there’s no story except the one each of the platoon members tell themselves, by each act of staying alive, which means often committing another act of killing more enemy. Each man taps into the story, it hangs down out of the sky in gray shreds, as if torn from the sky.
Stay alive. Walk home. Crawl home. Get home. Journey.
Kill.
• • •
Stan and another soldier are walking down a trail and Stan finds a foot. As a matter of course these days, he finds body parts lying to the left and to the right wherever he goes. It seems fitting that he keeps finding feet because so much of his life is about movement now. It’s as if the universe is strewing feet in his path to guide him onward.
This foot is lying a distance from the guy it once belonged to and is still strapped inside its sandal. The sandaled foot looks like one of those fake feet/ankle displays that merchants use in department stores and dress with men’s dress socks, so you can see what the sock will look like when you slip it on. Sticking out of the top of the foot, cleanly detached from the leg at the middle of the shin bone by an explosion, are the tendons.
The tendons are sticking up like little stiff wires. Stan, half out of his mind, looks at them. He pulls at one of them, and the toes start moving. Then he picks at them and watches as each toe, one by one and then in concert, rises and drops, like fleshy piano keys, or, more accurately, like the hammers of a piano. Stan does this with real fascination. There’s a purity to this strange activity, watching the silent tapping of the toes on the air close around his face as he holds the foot and ligaments and understands, as if for the first time, what? That the body is a machine, that it’s built of parts, that it can be destroyed.
Finally, still fiddling with the foot, Stan takes the bayonet attached to the barrel of his M-16 and stabs it down into the meat at the top of the foot, so that now, at the end of his bayonet, is a man’s foot, looking quite normal, clean. When he holds his rifle up, pointing at the air, the foot is heavy and threatens to tip the rifle one way and another. He holds the rifle at his side, by the stock, and lets the foot rest on the ground, where it leaves a print, and then he takes a step forward and the rifle swings forward like a leg itself and the foot on the end of the bayonet swings forward and lights on the ground and leaves another print. Stan steps forward and, swing, the foot comes forward and lands. Slowly, and then quickly, Stan is mesmerized by this pattern evolving alongside him, as if he’s being accompanied by a one-legged man. He knows what he’s doing is highly irregular, but it’s hypnotic. About five or ten minutes later, the radio cracks to life and Russo answers it and gives the handset to Stan. “It’s for you.” It’s Sergeant Kinney, located behind them on the trail, asking, “Parker, which way did you go?” Stan tells him, and Kinney says, “Okay, you see that one-legged guy hobble by?”
Stan is surprised that his prank has been noticed, but he thinks, What the hell? and says, “Yeah, I saw him,” and then he says, “We’re following him.”
“Did you find him?”
“No.”
“Find out where he goes, okay?”
So Stan keeps walking with the one-legged man at his side, and pretty soon the radio cracks again, “We see where you’re at, but this one-legged guy—he’s still going. You have him?”
Stan says, “I have no idea where he’s at.”
“Well, we’d like to find him. He’s wounded.”
Not long after, Stan is overtaken by Kinney and the platoon officer, and they see what he’s been doing with the foot, see it on the end of his bayonet.
Stan says, “I didn’t do it intentionally. It was just something to do.” But even as he says this, he knows it’s not true; he did do this intentionally. It was something to do to keep from going crazy. The things that happen now seem to happen all at once, and the anticipation of them happening is so monumental that in the back of your mind, the fears curl and uncurl, glowing wires. Fear of explosion, fear of death by gunshot, death by bayonet, by grenade, snake bite, madness. Fear of being forgotten, by whom? By home, your sweetheart, your family. Fear of remembering, of what? Everything. The fear that you will remember everything.
• • •
They’re walking and looking for the remnants of Charlie Company. About thirty of their soldiers are missing. Stan doesn’t know them personally, of course, but they are part of the 1st Battalion, to which Echo Company belongs. He wants revenge. All of Recon wants revenge.
As they come into a clearing, the sun appears. Light slants down from the green canopy and joins the brown forest floor. Where the beam hits the ground, it spreads out in a pool of light, and arrayed around this pool of light are the thirty bodies of Charlie Company.
They’re all in uniform, staring up at the sky. Their faces have been shot in half. Or, rather, someone has placed a rifle’s muzzle and methodically pulled the trigger until half of the face of each man had turned to hamburger. The bodies have been arranged in neat rows, their hands either at their sides or folded on their chests.
Birds call in the canopy overhead; there’s the sound of dripping, the pwop-pwop of water in the trees. He can’t see the dripping, only hears it. Stan thinks of this as the jungle’s voice, and it has been talking to him, saying, You are not a man. You are an animal.
He kneels at the bodies and looks close. He turns his head this way and that, marveling at how from one angle, the young men look fine, and then by leaning the other way, they look otherworldly, bloody, their flesh whorled in red patterns. Stan stands up and starts vomiting.
One of the guys in the company says they must’ve arranged the platoon after they’d been killed in the firefight and then set about ruining the faces. Stan thinks they’d been executed and then shot—the wounded and the already dying who may or may not have surrendered. He c
an see bullet wounds in the skulls that had not been part of the unmasking of the flesh from the faces. He starts walking around the clearing and piecing together what he thinks happened.
There are a few soldiers who had not been lined up in rows. Stan finds one still sitting upright, his right leg bent backward, his left leg thrust forward, his rifle across his lap. He’s leaning back like a man in the middle of a stretching exercise; he still has an IV bag, empty now, clutched in his hand. From the bag runs the tube, and this had been attached by needle into another soldier’s arm. The medic had been trying to give his fellow soldier fluids and had been firing his M-16 at the same time. Stan can see the brass casings sprinkled around him.
Stan marvels at the ingenious nature of it, this trick of the eye that is not a trick at all, that had been created for them and that the enemy knew they would walk upon in this jungle clearing. Stan is filled first with awe at the sight, then more nausea, then rage.
They start on a steady march for the next ridgeline. As they turn a corner, Stan sees several NVA soldiers running down the trail. He fires but with no effect. Up ahead, he sees rucksacks that the fleeing soldiers have left behind. The platoon searches them for intelligence but finds nothing of value. As they are doing this, five NVA soldiers step onto the trail and fail to see Stan, Wongus, Dove, and Beke. Without a shot being fired, all five enemy soldiers are captured and turned over to the South Vietnamese, who will interrogate them.
Whether or not the five captured soldiers know anything of value, Stan knows he’ll never really find out. He wonders how you can measure value in a war like this. Their orders are to kill as many enemy soldiers as they can find. Back in D.C., men like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara have devised a strategy, and convinced President Johnson of its validity, that the North Vietnamese Army, led by the president of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, can be shot and bombed into submission. On the other hand, Ho Chi Minh himself has said that for each man the Americans kill, his country will replace that man with another soldier. Stan is pretty sure there is a never-ending supply of people to shoot.