The Odyssey of Echo Company

by Doug Stanton

  • • •

  Two days after Stan returns to the platoon, they fight their way into a village and start to burn down a thatched hooch.

  It’s raining like hell; it’ll be hard to burn anything. But nonetheless somebody says something like, “Burn it all down.” But they can’t get any of the hooches lit. The thatch is wet and doesn’t ignite. Stan’s thinking he’s not comfortable with this anyway, so he and some of the crew are relieved. Then one of the men finds a stack of wide, deep baskets, and somebody lights these on fire, and then more baskets are discovered. A lot of them turn out to be stored with rice. In all, they guess they’d discovered about fifteen hundred pounds of food, enough, they believe, to feed a group of guerrilla fighters. Pretty soon somebody says, “Let’s burn the rice too,” and they start lighting the baskets and the rice and then throwing handfuls of rice in the growing fire. Stan protests, along with some other guys, saying, “This is somebody’s food,” and someone else says, “It’s probably VC or NVA food,” and Stan reasons, “Well, we don’t know that; we can’t know that.” The platoon has been turning discovered food and supplies into headquarters, radioing whenever they find something. Stan had no idea what anyone did with the rice after that. But this burning just seems wrong. It seems random, like they’re playing God. He’s pondering this when the rice starts popping in the fire.

  Pop! Pop!

  At first, a few of the guys jump, thinking this is gunfire, and then they start hollering and dancing around the fire. While this is going on, an old man comes out of the smoldering hooch and looks at all of them, trembling.

  Stan can see that the old man is terrified they’re going to shoot him. After all, they’re burning his rice. And he starts pointing at the ground and Stan realizes he’s pointing at the rice. The old man lowers himself to his hands and knees and starts picking up grains of rice and putting them into a pouch he’s made of his shirt by pulling it out from his body and holding it open. He goes from rice grain to rice grain, one at a time, tweezering the individual grains between his blunt thumb and finger and wiping them against his shirt front, holding them up and looking at them, and dropping them into his makeshift pouch. He’s talking to himself and crying.

  All Stan can think of is his mother, and how, if she saw him, John Stanley Parker, right now, she’d probably tan his hide, give him a whipping, and he’d be glad for it. He thinks back to his own family, back to the day of his grandfather during the Civil War, how Sherman came through and killed his family’s sheep and burned the land, and Stan wonders, Who am I? Am I like that? No, I am not like that.

  He gets down on his hands and knees and starts crawling alongside the old man and he starts picking up grains of rice too.

  Somebody says, “What are you doing, man, come on!” and they throw more rice on the fire, and Stan yells, “Knock it off!” and a few of the guys say, “Why are you helping the gooks?” All Stan can say is, “You know what . . . ? You know what . . . ?” He’s at a loss. And finally he says, “Enough is enough.” He can’t take the killing anymore. But he’ll keep killing, if needed; he knows that. He thinks how bored he’s grown amid so much adrenaline, so bored that a few days earlier he watched a few of the other guys throwing a knife at a dead guy they found on a trail. Stan told them to stop throwing the knife. They grunt and complain and kick over the rest of the rice baskets and walk away. The old man is so grateful to him that he calls out his entire family, who materialize from the woods, and Stan shakes their hands one by one. He can tell they’re so happy that he didn’t kill the old man, and he can tell that the old man is so happy too. He reaches up and gives Stan a big hug. Stan has tears in his eyes when he turns and walks away. These are people, he thinks.

  This is one of the worst things you can do, he thinks, burning an old man’s food.

  • • •

  On March 2, the platoon relocates southeast some twenty miles from LZ Jane to a larger base at LZ Sally, about eight miles northwest of Hue. Days earlier, U.S. Marines had recaptured Hue from NVA and Viet Cong soldiers. From LZ Sally, the platoon will shuttle by chopper across wider swaths of territory, engaging enemy fighters in the area. The platoon will perform at least fourteen combat assaults, their sense of time and place bending even more, the hours broken into abrupt departures, violent arrivals, ambushes during which your heart beats so fast it seems the enemy might sense its rhythm on the night air.

  On March 9, Stan, Wongus, Kinney, Dove, and Kleckler set up an ambush on an itty-bitty rise overlooking a trail, back in the trees, hidden in the green shade of the falling daylight. They arrange trip flares and Claymores while Al Dove sets up the M-60 on the rise. They settle back and wait for the kill.

  “You know what?” says Stan to Wongus.

  “No, what?”

  “I’m dog-ass tired. Let’s convince these ARVN rangers to watch guard duty all night,” meaning soldiers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

  The rangers are solid soldiers, but Stan and Wongus aren’t going to completely trust their lives to them. Yet they have to sleep. They are so worn out they can’t stay awake.

  Wongus is not sure. He says, “If you think you can pull it off,” meaning if he thinks he can get them to agree.

  “Well, let me try.”

  Stan walks up to the two ARVNs, looks at his watch, points, and says, “You guard now to 3:00 a.m.”

  And right away the ARVN soldier says, “Oh, not me,” which Stan ignores, and says to the other one, “And you take the guard duty from 3:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.”

  “No can do,” says the soldier. “No can do.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” says Stan. “We’re going to rest. We’re tired. You know, this is your country. You got to take some of the—”

  “Oh, no no!” the soldiers protest. They stop talking. They hear a sound on the trail.

  Movement.

  “Son of a bitch,” Stan says. He knows they won’t be sleeping now. They won’t be living and breathing maybe in five more minutes. Hard to tell.

  And then he has second thoughts, wishful thinking brought on by the fact that more than anything else on earth, he needs sleep. So he wonders if the sound is made by a water buffalo, the poor beast being forced to trundle down this dark midnight trail by the NVA, to clear it of the trip flares he and the others just placed there.

  “Here comes the buffalo,” Stan says. “Get ready”—and to himself, thinking, Don’t worry; it’s just buffalo. There ain’t no firefight here.

  The ARVN are really protesting. They seem to know something Stan doesn’t, which is what a buffalo sounds like coming down a trail, as opposed to what a human sounds like.

  “VC!” they’re saying.

  “VC, come on, really?”

  Stan starts to reason that there’s no way that a VC soldier, or soldiers, would be making this much noise, crunch, shuffle, crunk, snap, coming through the vegetation. Stan thinks it’s just the ARVN soldiers’ way of getting out of guard duty by implying that there’s something really dangerous happening right now.

  One of the trip flares pops.

  It’s not but fifteen feet away, and standing in the glare is an NVA soldier caught looking suddenly up and to the right, directly at Stan and the group. He’s got his AK strapped over his shoulder, not at the ready at all.

  In the light, Stan and Al and Wongus, and the rest, including the ARVNs, squint and make out another soldier, standing behind this first one, and then another one standing behind him. Another beyond that. Stan thinks, Holy cow, there must be fifty of these guys. He realizes they’re outnumbered, and that’s something you don’t want to be in an ambush. If you can’t have surprise when you’re outnumbered, you don’t want to pull the trigger; let ’em pass. Fight another day.

  Stan and the rest are lit up too by the trip flare, an illuminated target, and the shooting starts from behind him. It’s the two ARVN soldiers, they’re the first to react; they apparently do care that this is their country. They drop the solo NVA soldier where he
stands, and he falls away, out of the light of the flare.

  In the excitement, somebody yells, “The Claymores, blow the Claymores,” but Stan’s about a hundred feet from the Claymore clacker handles. Wongus yells, “Dammit, Parker. Get the Claymores,” and Stan says, “Wongus, you know where they’re at too!”

  “Yeah, but you set them out!”

  Wongus and Stan see tracers streaking in from their rear, passing through the large group of NVA soldiers in front of them. It’s Dove, dear Dove, shooting his M-60 machine gun. Stan thinks it’s now or never. He dives into brush alongside the trail and starts crawling. He crawls to the place where he thinks he left the clacker handles. He jumps up, and standing on the trail are two more NVA soldiers, and they too look at him surprised. In war, why is the look just before death one of surprise when it should be expected? Stan raises and fires. He shoots them dead.

  Stan ducks back into the brush, thinking, I guess I got out a little early. He moves up the trail and jumps out again, this time surprising two more NVA soldiers. He shoots and kills these guys. He can hear movement and NVA voices in every direction. He’s scared. He walks into an NVA soldier, and before the guy shoots, Stan stabs him in the chest with his bayonet. Another dozen soldiers appear and Stan shoots four or five of them. The rest are startled and Stan keeps shooting. The remaining few scatter into the darkness.

  As he keeps moving toward the clacker handles, more NVA swarm in. He fires his M-16 and keeps moving. After ten to fifteen seconds, he crawls up to the clacker handles, grabs them, and jumps into a hole to get out of the way of the coming blast. He squeezes the handles and the mines go off, sending ball bearings everywhere. Two men jump into the hole with him.

  Stan can’t really make out who these people are. “Who are you?” he asks, squinting, realizing they’re two NVA soldiers. They must’ve jumped into the hole to avoid the blast. There’s a parachute flare dropping down in the sky over them, illuminating their faces. Stan shoots one of them, and the other scrambles up over the lip of the trench, rolls out, and runs away in a crouch. Stan bears down with his M-16, trying to get a bead, and he’s about to fire when he senses that the shape has reversed direction and is headed back toward him. What now?

  He’s ready to shoot when a body, the object that had seemed to reverse direction, flies into the hole.

  It’s Wongus. Stan breathes a sigh of relief. He’d almost shot Wongus, but he doesn’t tell him this. Oh my god, he thinks, I was this close. Wongus says, “Who the hell just ran by me?”

  Stan puts it together and tells him “That was an NVA soldier.”

  “What’s he doing over here?”

  Stan nods at the dead soldier slumped in the hole and says, “That’s his buddy.”

  And that’s when Russo crawls up to the hole and slips in. Stan says, “Jesus, Russo, don’t scare us like that!” Russo’s got the radio on his back. The radio’s heavy, about the size of a small aquarium, and called a Prick 25 radio, nicknamed for its real name, which is PRC-25. Russo holds up the handset and starts talking into it, real quiet, “Battalion, come in.”

  He’s talking quietly because he and Stan and Wongus realize that it’s gotten very quiet on the trail. Not a sound is coming from the dark around them, except for the moaning of the dying who’ve been shot in this ambush over the past few minutes. It’s a terrible sound.

  Stan thinks something’s going to go down; he just doesn’t know what yet. Russo’s on the radio with Sergeant Kinney, who’s a hundred feet up the trail, and Russo hands Stan the radio and says, “For you.”

  Kinney says, “Parker, battalion wants to know who you ambushed. They want some evidence. Who are they?”

  And Stan says, “NVA. Who do you think it is?”

  “Do you know who they are?”

  Stan can’t believe that Kinney’s asking him such a dumb question. He must be getting pressure by Higher to get intel on enemy troop movement.

  “Oh, hang on,” he tells Kinney. “I’m going to ask them.” He says very quietly to the dark, “Hey, who are you guys?”

  Back into the radio, he says, “Come on, man.”

  “They want to see if you got anything,” meaning Higher wants to know if there’s any intel on these dead soldiers.

  He adds, “Go out and look at a couple of them.”

  Wongus and Stan worry, of course, that some of these guys might still be alive. They won’t know until they’re out there, when it’s too late.

  Off in the distance, maybe a quarter mile away, Stan can hear gunfire every once in a while—the fighting’s still going on somewhere close—but around him, all the NVA are dead. He convinces himself of this.

  More parachute flares go off overhead, drifting to earth, swinging their weird silver light over everything. Kinney says, “And we got some incoming too,” meaning incoming artillery, or, in the vernacular, “arty.”

  Stan tells Russo to holler out if he gets word on the radio that arty’s coming in. “We don’t want to get out there and get hit.”

  He and Wongus set out crawling through the bush. Wongus has his .45 out, leading it ahead of them as they crawl. They’re both nervous. It’s dark ahead on the path, especially this close to the ground.

  He stops. “Parker, what weapon you got?”

  “I got my M-16.”

  “That’s too big. It’ll make too much noise.”

  “How’s this?” Stan pulls out his Ka-Bar knife, and Wongus nods. He sets the M-16 aside and keeps the knife at the ready in his hand. They start crawling again.

  They haven’t gone far when they come to the first pile of shapes on the ground. And in a blast of sudden light—parachute flares again, burning above them and dropping—everything around them is revealed. It’s like somebody has suddenly turned on a light in a room filled with dead people. Wongus freezes. They’re surrounded by bodies. Wongus sees that he’s nearly crawled onto a dead guy, his face just inches away from the dead man’s.

  Wongus whispers, looking around, “So how do we know these guys are really dead?”

  “We don’t,” says Stan, ignoring Wongus’s fear. It seems to Stan that every one of these soldiers around them is dead.

  They stand up a bit but keep stooped in a crouch.

  “Here,” Stan says, “grab this fella’s ankle.”

  And he and Wongus grab a soldier by the ankles and pull, and he’s so light they nearly fall over. They regain their balance and start pulling in tandem, walking backward as they do. Russo, fifty feet behind them, starts hollering that the artillery is on its way.

  The shells drop close, not real close, but enough to make the ground rumble around them. He and Wongus start running to get out of the open.

  They run so fast that they run right past Russo and keep going up the trail. They’re disoriented. They stop and Wongus looks around, and says, “Russo, where are you?”

  “Hey, you guys, I’m back here!”

  Stan and Wongus walk back down the trail, dragging the dead soldier by the ankle. When they show up, Russo says, “You guys ran right past me.” The soldier is small, and Stan and Wongus are standing there still holding him by the legs. Stan feels stupid. What are they supposed to do with the guy? He’s wearing a small leather case on a strap over his shoulder, and they open it; there’s nothing inside. None of the intelligence that Kinney earlier told them that command wanted.

  What they’ve got here is a dead guy they don’t know and will never know; he’s nothing to them now. Minutes ago, he meant everything.

  • • •

  At daybreak, though, the numbers are staggering. They’ve killed forty-eight enemy soldiers. That’s a lot. The dead are lying in piles where they were standing when the trip flares went off and exposed their presence and the machine-gun fire poured on top of them.

  As they collect the corpses into one place and count them, they start arranging them in various poses, carrying and dragging the bodies around the clearing, propping them up under the trees with cigarettes in their mo
uths, some with their legs crossed and looking off in the distance. Others look like they’ve fallen asleep on the leafy ground. Some of the soldiers don’t even look dead except for a few small bloody holes, which Stan has to look for. The platoon has spent so much time and energy and pure focus trying to kill the enemy, and now it seems important to reanimate them, bring them back to life. They are experiencing a collective breakdown, an inside-out-turning of their world.

  In an hour, as they leave this place of carnage, Stan—all of them—will look back over their shoulders as they step among the blood and bone and realize how strange, how otherworldly their actions have been. They’ve snapped.

  News of this large ambush is all over the radio net; it’s being viewed as quite a show. A chopper lands in the clearing, and aboard is a major who’s come for a look-see at the body count before the colonel tours this battlefield.

  The major rolls out of the Huey in his clean uniform and strides across the makeshift LZ. The men, filthy, sweating, look up from their handiwork of arranging the dead. The major whips around the clearing, seeing the dead enemy soldiers propped up in the grass, against the trees, out in the open, many of them with their rifles, their AKs, pointing off in random directions. But some of them are pointing at the major. And some of them look alive. He thinks he’s just walked into an ambush, that Stan and the guys have been used as bait. He turns to head back to the chopper.

  “They’re dead,” someone calls after him.

  “Dead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What are they doing”—he points around the clearing—“like that?”

  He’s truly confused. And it dawns on him. “You can’t do that!”

  “Why?”

  “That’s, that’s—what do they call it? Defamation of . . . no . . .”

  “Desecration of a corpse,” somebody pipes up.

  “That’s right, desecration.”

  Desecration? thinks Stan.

  “You guys could be in trouble over this.”

  “No one ever told us this,” says Stan. He hadn’t thought of this action as being anything but . . . something to do. These guys were dead, weren’t they? What are the rules when the rule is to kill every man you see who is trying to kill you?