by Doug Stanton
PART II
WANDERING
As we talked, I noticed a fellow mortarman sitting next to me. He held a handful of coral pebbles in his left hand. With his right hand he idly tossed them into the open skull of the Japanese machine gunner. Each time his pitch was true I heard a little splash of rainwater in the ghastly receptacle. My buddy tossed the coral chunks as casually as a boy casting pebbles into a puddle on some muddy road back home; there was nothing malicious in his action. The war had so brutalized us that it was beyond belief.
—E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
February 8, 1968
Hai Lang, Vietnam
Stan wakes at LZ Jane under a gray sky and in cold drizzle thinking about the girl with the peaches. She’s been dead for over a day. What’s painful is this: her death will last forever, and he knows he caused it. He knows there’s nothing he can do to change this. After leaving her, he and the rest of the platoon returned to LZ Jane to await the next orders. The others wake now, stretch, stir in wet poncho liners, the ground around them muddy and slick, pocked with rain pools.
Al Dove unfastens the back of a Claymore mine and pinches off a thumb-sized piece of the C-4 explosive inside, just a dab, places it on a rock, lights it with his Zippo, and places his metal cup filled with coffee over the quick flame. Nothing, in fact, burns quicker or hotter than C-4. The entire white dab is consumed in about thirty seconds and the water inside Al’s cup is boiling. He drinks down his coffee, watching Parker, who’s quiet, withdrawn. Al’s worried about Stan; they’re close, and he sees more and more strain in Stan’s face. Al relies on Stan for steadfastness, for his courage. Stan will not leave anyone in a fight. He will stand and slug it out until the lights dim. Al knows that; Jerry Austin knows that. They all know this about each other. They will fight to the death for each other, yet, of course, none of them wants to die.
It’s strange to be living in a world now where the very reason for your existence, the protection of your buddy, is in fact predicated on your commitment to die for that person. But still, Al’s worried. Stan looks exhausted, his eyes hooded by grief, by unspecified anger: anger at being in this position of fighting to live in the first place; anger at surviving, which means so much killing has been done in order to have survived thus far.
On a typical day, if you can call any of their days typical, they gulp down their coffee, slurp some beans and weenies from a cold C-rations can, repack their ammo belts with full magazines, grab more grenades from camp supply, and walk back out beyond the wire, looking for trouble. The days are a loop: patrol and carry out search-and-destroy missions, and ambush at night. The platoon’s job is supposed to be the eyes and ears of the battalion, to find the enemy, to probe, size up, and report to the battalion so that the line companies—the “line doggies,” the other grunt soldiers—can come in and fight.
But as February progresses, as the platoon maneuvers back and forth from LZ Jane to Hai Lang, the battlefield is around them every hour of every day. They don’t sleep. They don’t really eat. The filtered water they drink tastes like iodine, which tastes like blood.
Slowly, they are no longer part of this world. They start calling the world another place, as in: “Back in the world, my girl’s probably, she’s probably, well, who knows what she’s doing.” That’s what they think of the war: that it’s not happening in the world they know or once knew.
They don’t use first names. It’s Anderson. Or Bradshaw. Austin. Dove. Lane. Parker. Beke. Soals. Fowler. Pyle. Sudano.
Stan doesn’t want to get too close to anyone around him. The other boys feel the same way. Somebody asks, “Who got killed?” And somebody else gives the first name—and hearing the dead guy’s name makes the news more painful. They say, for instance, “Donald got it; he got killed.” And it’s different than if they had answered with just the last name. The first name makes it personal. It brings them closer to the person in question and if something should happen to them, it would become one more thing to forget.
Today they load into two-and-a-half-ton trucks and ride the two miles down Highway 1 into Hai Lang. They’re going to scout the positions of an outnumbering force of three hundred NVA and the VC soldiers who’ve taken control of part of the city. This new information will be used by 1st Battalion’s four rifle companies to plan an attack.
Stan and the crew bounce over the rough road, the diesel trucks spitting black smoke in their faces, making some of them light-headed—that, and the heat. Helicopters zip past, leading the way into Hai Lang and providing fire cover.
The trucks park a half mile outside Hai Lang, and the men start walking. The fighting in the village has been intense since the Tet kicked off. Other soldiers of the 101st Airborne have been here, too, fighting house to house.
Dead dogs lie alongside the road to Hai Lang. The village is in ruins, leveled by artillery fire.
They crest a hill and hear voices down in the wooded depression at its bottom. They creep forward and look down. Below them is an NVA platoon, about thirty or thirty-five soldiers kicked back alongside a river. The soldiers are eating and laughing, holding bowls of rice, chopsticks poised in midsentence as somebody tells a joke. Their khaki uniforms are dirty and bloodstained. These are not replacements to the area, Stan thinks. These guys have killed before. These are the guys who greased Charlie Company.
The platoon maneuvers into position, surrounding the NVA soldiers, then starts firing at them from their hilltop vantage. For the first few seconds, the NVA soldiers are surprised, and then they return fire. As they do, a UH-1D Huey arrives overhead and circles the entrapped NVA, the door gunner aiming his machine gun at them. Every man is killed. In the silence after the gunfire, Stan feels an immense sense of relief for having avenged Charlie Company’s slaughter. He looks at the dead men down the hill, tumbled about in awkward positions. But his relief is fleeting. He knows he will have to kill again.
• • •
Later in the day, they’re walking across a rice paddy and hear, Boom.
They have no idea what made this sound.
It’s an RPG, being fired at them by an unseen enemy soldier. The rocket whooshes past them. And then here comes another whoosh, with the explosion landing not far from where they’d just been walking in the rice paddy. They realize that somebody is zeroing in on them and start hotfooting it for the tree line. Toward safety.
Stan and Russo and the rest of them stop and look back to where they’d come from, and when they turn back to keep running, they find themselves face-to-face with an NVA soldier. He’s stepped out of the trees, either to meet them or by mistake. But either way, Stan can’t believe his eyes. Where’d this guy come from? Up out of the ground?
Stan’s walking point, so he’s the lead guy, and he knows there are others behind him. The NVA soldier is solo. Stan looks at the soldier, who’s maybe seven, eight feet away. It’s just crazy; he’s standing there with this huge, cat-eating-the-canary grin on his face, like, “I got you,” and he raises his AK and starts firing. It happens so fast that Stan doesn’t even have time to lift his M-16, and the guys behind can’t start firing either because Stan and Russo are in the way, or because they don’t know what’s going on, it’s happening so fast. The NVA guy empties what seems like his entire magazine, and Stan’s sure he’s going to die. When the guy finishes shooting, Stan sees smoke rising from the end of the barrel. Stan’s watching it, waiting for the image to fade as he waits to die. The NVA soldier is out of bullets and he’s staring at his weapon, like, “What the hell?” and then at Stan, as if trying to understand why he’s still standing. And now he has to reload, if he’s going to shoot some more. That’s when Stan lifts his M-16 and starts firing. The look on the guy’s face goes from “Got you” to “Whoops.” Stan kills the guy.
When the shooting stops, someone in the platoon pipes up, “Stan, you are so lucky. There’s no reason for you to still be alive. You must have a guardian angel watching over you.”
• • •
The next day, February 9, the weather is still gray and cold. Stan’s on a three-man patrol and he smells bacon and coffee. He turns off the path and follows his nose, parting his way through the undergrowth until he emerges on a clearing where cooks from the 1st Air Cavalry Division are just putting away the makings of a hot breakfast they’ve served to some of their famished troopers. The food’s all gone but Stan begs for something, and a sympathetic cook gives him three raw eggs. Cradling the eggs as carefully as possible, which makes it difficult to fire his rifle quickly if needed, he makes his way back to the rest of the platoon outside Hai Lang. The fighting around the village is still heavy. New airstrikes are landing close to the friendly troops, and Stan and the patrol are forced to pull back. He realizes he won’t be able to cook the eggs, so he cracks them open and eats them raw. At the same time, some of the guys in the platoon get deathly ill and come down with food poisoning. They had arrived at the 1st Cav’s cooking station before Stan and got to eat some of the cooked food. Dysentery and other maladies have plagued them throughout their time in-country, so this food poisoning seems like an insult to injury. Stan’s glad that he ended up eating the eggs raw. What seemed ill luck at first turns out to be good fortune. With some of the men puking and running off into the bushes with their pants around their knees, the platoon is ordered by Higher to set up a night ambush position near a railroad bridge outside Hai Lang. The severely ill hole up in a nearby French-built bunker and continue to be sick.
• • •
Dwight Lane is in the bunker and has food poisoning so badly that he’s doubled over constantly in pain, and each evacuation of his bowels literally blows through the fabric of his fatigues. Meanwhile, Stan, Al, Tony Beke, and David Watts set up the ambush on the bridge spanning the Song Vinh Dinh River while the others of Recon stand guard. Al isn’t sick because he didn’t have any of the hot chow; his mother had sent him a care package from home, filled with Hawaiian delicacies, candy, and one of his favorites, cuttlefish, which everyone else in the platoon finds gross. It smells like what it is: salted fish.
Stan and Al can hear the groaning of the men coming from the echo chamber of the bunker and hope that by nightfall, when the NVA are expected to cross the bridge, they’re able to lay quietly in their misery. Otherwise they’ll be discovered before the ambush can be enacted. A large force of NVA troops—maybe as big as a battalion, numbering approximately five hundred—is expected to be on the move in the night over the bridge, trying to make their way into Hue, where U.S. Marines are fighting NVA and VC soldiers in the city.
Just before night closes in, Stan and the others organize the ambush, setting trip flares just before the bridge and then on the bridge itself.
The trip flares work pretty much like their name implies. A wire or chord is attached to the end of the flare and then tied off to a distant object. When the wire or chord is pulled, or stepped through, it ignites the flares and burns brightly on the ground, leaving almost no time for anyone trapped in the glare to evade the inevitable follow-on gunfire.
Stan sets maybe six Claymores on the bridge. The bridge isn’t much to write home about. It’s constructed of two I-beams, and spread between them are boards and interlocking metal planking, the same kind used to make airplane runways in the country. When they step on the metal plate, it squeaks on the I-beams, and Al’s worried that the noise will give them away to any NVA soldiers lurking in the area. Stan unspools the wire leading to the Claymores, and they try to step quietly back across the bridge, which is hard in the dark. They make it all the way across and pick their way along the river back to their gun positions and wait.
They’re maybe fifty yards from the bridge. Al positions the M-60 machine gun with a clear line of sight; others in the platoon take up their places where they can have the most effective killing radius. Now they sit and wait. At about eight o’clock in the evening, some of them hear the first creak on the bridge, then silence, then another creak—another step—and the first trip flare goes off.
The bright light in the otherwise deep darkness is blinding. What’s revealed is a tableau of khaki-clad men frozen in confusion on the narrow bridge. Then they start to move, turning this way and that. Al watches as maybe two dozen men make a decision to proceed all the way across the bridge. The men in his position open up with the small arms fire, which creates even greater confusion among the NVA soldiers. Other trip flares go off as even more of their compatriots come in from behind them, and now the bridge is haloed in a globe of hissing light. The NVA stumble around, disoriented, trying to figure out which way to go. The scene is so sudden and dramatic that all Al Dove can do for about ten seconds is stare and take it in. He can’t bring himself to shoot because it seems too easy. He sits there and does nothing. Parker’s yelling at him while he’s emptying magazine after magazine into the disorganized NVA.
“Al,” he yells, “fire them up!”
Yet Al is quiet. This pause lasts for maybe only ten more seconds, but in the firefight, it seems an eternity. So often he’s pulled the trigger on the machine gun and killed lots of men, elevating the barrel to lob the shots and kill them that way. This time, Al is waiting for the NVA soldiers to dive to safety off the bridge. He’s waiting to find a way where he doesn’t have to kill them. When he comes to, he starts yelling at Parker to stop firing his M-16 and set off the Claymores.
But Stan can’t find the clacker handles that operate the Claymore mines. He’s pawing at the ground along the riverbank, looking for them.
The NVA soldiers turn around on the bridge, and start running back the way they’ve come. Al swears to himself, feeling even worse, because now the enemy is getting away from him, and the question he has to answer is whether he will shoot them in the back.
He can’t. He didn’t come to Vietnam to shoot anyone in the back; he just can’t. He’s under some belief that honor is at stake here—his own and even the honor of his enemy. But what is he supposed to do? He can’t let them get away—or can he? Yes, he can—he could if he wanted to—but there is the pull of the duty of the entire Recon troop to kill as many of the other guys so they can’t be killed by them. So to stop their stampede off the bridge, he starts firing ahead of the soldiers, ricocheting rounds off the concrete wall that faces the end of the bridge, and then he starts shooting at the bridge itself, hoping to turn them around. This way they’ll run back toward him, face-first, and in this way he can shoot them in the chest or the face instead of the back. Al can see his rounds spark on the bridge and on the concrete wall, and he waits for the NVA soldiers to start jumping into the river instead of running ahead, straight into his bullets. But they don’t. Not one jumps in the water, and he doesn’t know why. Instead they run straight into his fire. They run into it, and they tumble off the bridge with a splash illuminated in the faintest brush of light. Al is swearing even louder, asking himself why they are running into his fire, and he will live with this white light of the trip flares burning on the bridge for his whole life. He keeps shooting. They keep running into the fire and falling. He can’t imagine how many men he’s killed, but he guesses it’s a lot. Two dozen? He can’t wait for the morning to count the dead bodies and to give the number up to Higher; he looks forward to this with a sad mixture of pride and regret.
The next morning, some of the other guys want to dive for the dead and ask him to stay on the bank to provide cover in case the NVA stages a counterattack. Al is disappointed. A part of him wants to go down to the river and find the bodies himself. He’s killed them; it should be his job to do the cleanup.
In his place, Dennis Tinkle, Tim Anderson, and Sergeant Kinney go diving. And it’s a shocker to them all when they find just one body. After all the shooting and anguish, all the worry that he was killing them in cold blood by shooting them in the back, and now to find evidence of just one kill. It’s beyond disappointing and even insulting—that so much existential inner debate should result in no evidence that the killing ever occur
red. Al and the rest figure that the dead hit the rain-flooded river and floated downstream and were gone. Dennis Tinkle surfaces with the one body, holding it by the ankle, with the boot still attached to the foot, and he’s able to lift the body, or at least most of the leg, out of the water. They carry the guy up the bank and lean him against a tree and tie him up there. They call in to Higher and report that their body count has elicited exactly one confirmed NVA dead and he’s tied to a tree. You can’t miss him.
• • •
On about February 14, the heavy fighting around and near Hai Lang is nearly over. So many are dead now, Americans and South Vietnamese civilians, NVA and VC. Who knows who did what? A slaughter, everything is dead: body parts here, body parts there, trouble in the mind. After a while, it starts to pile up, add up, accrue. Stan is running out of room on that shelf in his brain where he puts all the sadness.
The men are haunted by things that will become ghosts but are not ghosts yet. They are images, moods, gestures that are moving from the physical world to the museum of memory. For Al Dove, the thing that will become a ghost is the sight of a man running away from him, as if the man is already knowingly running toward ghosthood, toward the future a few moments later in which he will cease to exist and become part of a past that almost no one will remember.
One of those people who will remember is Al Dove, who will commit this last moment of the man’s life to his museum of memory. The man’s shiny black shirt flapping, his black pants flapping.
The man who is about to become a ghost comes out of a hooch from which Recon had received sniper fire and starts walking away from Al, Stan, and Jerry. He may not even have seen the three paratroopers; he’s out for a walk, it looks like. Stan and Jerry see the man as someone who’s carrying a weapon; Al doesn’t see this weapon, he sees the man as unarmed but he suspects he’s an enemy fighter. Either way, as is the case with these memories in this museum, each man will remember in his own way, and differently. The man is striding along, like nobody’s business, on this wide thoroughfare shaded by trees. It’s pleasant outside, a nice day. But because Al’s all pumped up, and generally pissed because he’s seen so much dying, he yells at the carefree man to stop. Al feels that the man’s nonchalant nature is an affront while he, Al Dove, is forced to march and walk through this death day after day. Al yells again for the man to stop and when he doesn’t, Al fires a few rounds ahead of the guy, maybe by eight feet, and they kick up the dirt of the road. And the guy doesn’t turn around or look around. No; he starts running, and then he picks up speed. Al is now yelling, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Goddamnit, stop!” Al raises his rifle and fires a quick three rounds. The first two miss. Al, Jerry, and Stan are now pretty sure he’s VC: he’s male, he’s wearing local clothing, and he’s running. In the time it takes for the round to leave the barrel and travel the six hundred feet to the man, zeroing in on his back, getting closer, and, impact, entering the right shoulder and exiting out through the man’s heart, blowing pieces of his heart out his shirt front—in the time it takes for this to happen—Al knows that what he’s done is wrong. But there’s no calling the bullet back.