by Doug Stanton
“You’ve got to fix these guys,” the major says.
“What do you mean, ‘Fix them’?”
“There’s going to be some other guys coming here, and if they see this?”
So Wongus, Stan, and others start running around the clearing trying to make all of the corpses look dead again. It’s not as easy as it might seem. They grab this one soldier, and he’s tightened up in rigor mortis, hardened into a sitting position with his AK-47 gripped in his hands. Stan tries to pry the rifle away, but he won’t be quit of it. Then he lays him on his back and tries to push him straight down to the ground, to, in essence, flatten him out, and that won’t work either. He stays on his back, frozen in a horizontal C shape.
“You know what?” Stan announces. “This ain’t going to work. We got to get rid of these guys.”
So they start dragging them off the trail, hiding them in bushes. The dead stare intently at plants and weeds just inches from their faces; some still don’t look dead at all but appear to be asleep. And that’s when the colonel’s helicopter lands. They’re only about half done with the job of hiding the dead.
Stan’s ashamed. He now feels that what they’ve done is not right, but he’s taken part in it, and there you have it. The colonel walks up to him, and Stan has a boot touching the chest of one of the dead men to hold him flat as the colonel talks.
The colonel tells him what a fine job they’ve done, killing so many of these bastards so thoroughly, and every time Stan lifts his boot, the dead guy starts to sit up, and Stan has to step back down and apply pressure as the colonel rattles on. The colonel doesn’t notice. After about fifteen minutes of chitchat, the colonel reboards the chopper and lifts off. The clearing falls quiet, and the men gather their things and start walking, just to get the hell out of there. Stan vows never to do anything like that to the dead again.
• • •
They move on. It’s a Thursday, March 14, and Stan and Al Dove are lying on the sunny banks of the Song Bo River, their pale feet trailing in the soft current flowing beneath them. Stan spies something across the river and sits up.
“Dove,” he whispers.
“What?”
“I said, quiet. Look. Over there.”
He nods his head upriver, trying to indicate with the degree of his head’s tilt how far upstream Al should be looking.
Al sits up slow and sees it too.
NVA soldiers are sitting on the riverbank opposite them, upstream by about fifty yards. Not too far. Strange that they haven’t spotted the Americans, but you never know in these things. It may be that the NVA don’t expect to see any Americans sunning themselves along this riverbank, just as Stan and Al didn’t expect to see them upstream either.
Stan and Al are looking at two NVA soldiers, whose weapons are on their laps and are also dangling their feet in the water.
Stan says, “Okay, now, Al, on three, I’m going to take the guy on the right, farthest upstream.”
“I got the one on the left.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
And Stan starts counting slowly and quietly, and on three, he and Al open fire. They shoot in two small bursts, and Stan watches one of the guys in his group fall over, the one he was shooting at, but the other one is unscathed, not shot at all, and Stan has a hard time believing that Al Dove has made such a bad shot.
At the same time, Al’s complaining, “What happened, Parker! I thought you were going to shoot!”
“I did shoot.”
“But what happened?”
“I don’t know. What happened to you?” Stan’s watching the one dead guy he shot lie there in the sun. A moment ago he was alive, of course, now he’s very, very quiet.
“Parker, I got only one of the guys.”
“Me, too.”
And Al points at the guy he shot, closer to them, along another part of the bank, and both Al and Stan realize that they’d been shooting at different groups of NVA soldiers, and each one of them had killed just one of them. All of the still-living soldiers start to run away; they go up and over the bank and disappear. Stan and Al realize that they’re probably in trouble because where there are two NVA groups, there is probably another larger group. The two of them think about what to do next.
The rest of the Recon Platoon is spread out about a quarter mile away. They are waiting for nightfall and the setup of another ambush. They’ve got about an hour left before it gets dark. They’ll eat in the light of the day, and then in the cover of darkness, they’ll move down the trail, or up the trail, and set up an ambush. But those guys are of no help now; they’re too far away to assist Al and Stan. They are on their own.
Upstream, nearly a hundred and twenty-five yards away, hangs a cable bridge, close to seventy-five feet in length. It’s made of two strands of cable strung across the river, each strand at waist height, and from it hang more wires and an uneven deck of crude wood planking; some of the boards are not even nailed down. Stan sees that about twenty armed NVA soldiers are running toward the bridge, headed at Al and Stan to attack them.
Stan gets up and starts running.
“What are you doing!” Al yells after him.
“We’ve got to stop these guys,” says Stan. He’s running and firing across the river at the NVA soldiers who are keeping pace with him. Stan’s trying to get to the bridgehead before they do because it will form a natural choke point and he can stand there and lay down suppressive fire and prevent them from crossing over and killing them both. Just as he reaches the end of the bridge on his side of the river, he looks down and sees a hole up ahead.
It’s only about two feet deep, and if you knew it was there, you could easily avoid it. Stan sees the hole has sharp spikes sticking straight up. Punji sticks, about eight of them standing up in the air, the bamboo wood dried and hard and hacked to a very sharp point by machetes back in some village sympathetic to or run by the Viet Cong.
At the last minute, just before Stan realizes he’s going to step into the punji pit and impale one of his feet right through the heavy sole of his combat boot, he dives forward and lays himself out in an effort to halt. He’s got both hands gripped on his M-16 before him like a stick, one hand on the barrel and one hand on the stock, and he drops it down over the punji hole so that the length of the rifle will stop his descent.
It only half works.
His right hand stays up with his weapon out of the hole, but his left hand keeps going down. His wrist first rests atop a bamboo point for the briefest of moments—which not even the quickest camera could catch—then the wrist keeps going. Stan keeps falling, following his left hand down into the two-foot-deep hole, and the bamboo spear enters his wrist and travels through skin and muscle tissue and tendon. The point reaches the other side of Stan’s wrist and presses against his skin, from the inside, and then pokes through and appears, covered in the thinnest veil of blood.
Stan stops.
Sucks in a breath.
He’s lying with his head in the hole, smelling the damp dirt, and behind him, across the river, he can hear the NVA soldiers headed his way. He’s trapped, pinned. Speared. Literally pinned to the bottom of the hole like an insect.
He looks at his wrist. The spike is attached to the ground at the bottom of the hole; it’s probably buried three or four feet deep to make it especially secure. Stan studies the spikes around the one that’s going through his wrist and sees they are smeared with excrement, likely human; a homemade bioweapon. Stan’s got about twenty seconds before the NVA soldiers head his way. With him stuck in the hole, they’ll shoot him dead for sure. He thinks that Al Dove will try to save him, and poor Al, outnumbered, will get killed too.
With his right hand, Stan maneuvers the M-16 around in the hole. It’s hard because he’s gripping the barrel with his right hand and he’s afraid that if he lets go, he’ll come tumbling down even farther onto more sharp spikes. His left hand is useless. He scooches his right hand back along the barrel until it’s on the receiver and then on
the trigger guard, and he inserts his finger onto the trigger. Pressing forward and readjusting his body, he carefully places the muzzle against the base of the sharp spike that’s sticking through his left wrist and presses on the trigger. The weapon fires and shoots the sharp spike in half. He’s suddenly free and deafened by the blast of the weapon. He pops up wild-eyed, the piece of spike still in his wrist, and looks around.
He scans the bridge and sees the NVA soldiers running across it. He’s still got the M-16 in his right hand and starts to fire. He’s got his left hand held out from his body with the six-inch length of stick poking through the wrist; it’s awkward and hurts, and he’s surprised it isn’t bleeding more.
The NVA soldiers start returning fire. He kills three of them and they fall onto the bridge. One tumbles off the few feet into the swift river. And then Al Dove arrives and starts shooting too. Trapped at the bridge entrance, the NVA soldiers retreat. Al and Stan slump down against a tree, breathing heavily, sweating, amazed they’ve gotten out of this jam. The afternoon is quiet, the river peaceful. They watch it slide past as a familiar soft whir rises downstream and a helicopter comes into view to pick them up.
• • •
The next day, March 15, Stan is back in the same hospital he entered earlier when he’d been blown up by the grenade. The nurse he’d fallen in love with at the time walks into his room, where he’s hooked up to IV lines feeding him antibiotics and fluids, and when she recognizes him, she does a double take and, Stan thinks, she’s about to walk back out of the room. He’s glad she gathers herself and tells him, gently, “I told you to take care of yourself.” She means it. His injury seems to upset her, though he imagines she doesn’t remember his name, except by looking at his medical chart. When she leaves after checking his bandage, the examining doctor tells Stan he’s impressed he had the presence of mind to shoot his way free. The six-inch-long stick, where it enters and exits his wrist, bears a collar of blood around the wood itself, but beyond this, the wound does not communicate the violent moment that created it. Surprisingly, Stan can still wiggle his fingers. The pain, though, is unrelenting.
On one end of the stick, where he’d placed the barrel of the M-16 and fired, the wood is frazzled, cracked. The doctor tells him he will have to pull the stick backward, with the point end leaving his body last. He injects Stan’s wrist with painkiller, and Stan watches as the doc grips the stick between thumb and forefinger and begins to pull, with the same speed and attention you lift a garden stake from firm ground. It slides out silently. Stan spends two weeks in the hospital pumped with antibiotics, flexing his hand, as the dime-sized hole heals, dimming later in life to a scar he’ll carry hidden under his watch’s wristband. In heavy rain or when summer turns to autumn, the wrist will ache and he will think again of the nurse, the punji stick, the girl who died because he gave her peaches.
When he’s able to write, he sits in the hospital bed and composes a letter.
“Dear Mo,” he begins, and he tries describing what he’s seen, but the more he writes, the more he’s certain he can never send this to Mo. He writes,
I am torn between letting you know what it is really like over here, and not saying anything at all.
I have been thinking more and more about you a lot here lately, even to the point of thinking about you when I should have my mind fixed on searching for the enemy.
I have desired to write to you this letter but realize at the same time that you are too beautiful, soft and too delicate to be tarnished with my fearful stories.
But I feel that if I do not inform you or someone of the misery around me, dealing with death on a daily and nightly basis, I may not live long enough to get the chance to write to you again to express just what it is like over here. . . .
I have been WIA twice already and Recon is suffering tremendous casualties and so the way things are going over here, with the constant endless fighting, I have more days of expecting to be killed than living to see another day.
I really want to live and get out of this awful dreadful place alive and in one piece and go home. . . . But one minute I hate this place, but the next minute I like it here. . . .
I know that Vietnam has changed me and I am not the same guy you knew before, but I know that down deep underneath all this ugliness, I believe that I am still normal and a good kind person at heart. And to help me keep my sanity, I need to write and say something.
He’s certain he can’t send her this letter. He starts over:
My Dearest Mo, You ask me in one of your letters what it was like over here. I mentioned a few things in one letter past but was reluctant to write and be too graphic and possibly upset you and have you stop writing me. I have a confession for you. I have not been completely truthful with you in prior letters with the total numbers of enemy (NVA/VC) being killed on behalf of myself and my buddies in Recon.
I purposely keep the numbers low because I figured that if I told you the truth in the numbers of enemy dead, you might think less of me for being somewhat proud of our job of killing bad guys. I want you to be proud of me and not ashamed or frightened of me. That is what we are called upon to do over here and I hope that you have not thought the less of me for doing so.
He continues:
Our living conditions are the worst I have ever experienced, seen, or heard of. They are absolutely primitive, archaic, deplorable, and totally unbelievable. I hope that you can comprehend what I am writing and really appreciate what I and the others here are being subjected to as we are exposed to such unimaginable conditions. We are living and acting like animals and each day life gets worse.
The insanity of this place is easy to absorb. The inhuman, dreadfully appalling misery here makes insane behavior seem sane and feel normal. As a paratrooper, I, as well as those around me, are trained to kill and have adapted to that characteristic habit very demonstratively. I hope that I get out of here alive and when I get back home that I will be able to conduct myself in a sensible, rational, respectable manner and act normal again especially if I am able to see you again. And be accepted as the person I was a lifetime ago when I left home, and not the person I have become in order to survive here. . . .
Because I and the others have attained the quick subliminal reaction to kill so easily, no doubt, a civilized person back home would view our reaction as a neurotic, habitual, irrational, illogical psychological disorder. . . .
But ironically, for some unexplainable reason, as bad as I hate it here, at the same time I like it here and I and some of us are talking about extending our combat tour or volunteering to come back once we get home. We feel like this is where we belong, even though we hate it here. . . .
I just want to get out of here alive and see you, if that is possible. And that when I finally get home, I can be accepted as a normal young man who consequently was required to grow from the adolescent boy I was when I got here, almost overnight, into the hard core young man of resolute convictions I had to become.
Just like the law of the Old West, there are only two types of people here in the Nam, “the quick and the dead.”
In the end, he decides he can’t send this letter to Mo either.
He scribbles out her name and writes across the top, “Dear Brothers . . .” and gets to the meat of his feelings:
It’s hard to find a beginning for this story in the fact that I can remember it in every detail at any given moment. We are lucky to live from one day to the next.
He writes in detail about the dead girl with the peaches, the rats, his screaming. He sends the letter to his younger brother Bruce, back in Gary, Indiana, who’s enjoying his junior year of high school.
On the day that Bruce comes home and opens the letter, he reads it and is filled with fear. That night, and for nights thereafter, he has trouble sleeping. He starts worrying about his two brothers fighting in a war he doesn’t know much about but which he sees nightly on the news. Whenever a news report comes on about the combat, Stan’s father stops whereve
r he is in the house, cocking his head to listen for one word, any word, about Stan and Dub. Thankfully, so far, that word has not come.
Bruce is confused by how Stan has closed his letter.
“Hug a girl for me,” Stan instructs Bruce, and he tells him to, of course, ask the girl’s permission, and to remember every sensation of this hug, and to write it all down and send a description of these sensations in a letter back to him.
He wants it all. “The smell of her hair,” he explains to Bruce. “Her softness. Even the color of her clothes.”
Stan is so far gone from the world back home he can no longer remember it. After two weeks, he’s shipped from the hospital back to the field. He can’t wait to be among the platoon again.
• • •
Specialist Charlie Pyle, from Colleyville, Texas, is killed on March 22 while Stan is in the hospital. He’s blond, handsome, and beloved by his platoon. His death, like the wounding of John Payne, who in January was accidentally shot by one of his own platoon-mates, is a blow to them all. Ever after, in the platoon, they will mark time by saying things like, “This happened after Charlie Pyle was killed.”
On the day that Pyle dies, the platoon gets a call from Higher that a blocking force is needed to protect Charlie and Delta Companies, which are slugging it out with a large NVA force. It’s midday; they’ll be exposed on open ground as they advance toward Charlie and Delta. Al Dove doesn’t like the situation at all. It feels to all of them that they’re about to walk into an ambush.
They’re accompanied by what are called PFs, or Popular Forces—militia-type Vietnam soldiers. Nearly every village they pass through, the PFs emerge with more stuff—booty, pots and pans and chickens, items they’ve lifted from the villagers as they make their way.
In order to move quickly, Al and the platoon are forced at times to walk along the dikes that line the rice paddies they pass, but that lifts their silhouettes above the horizon and makes them easy targets. When this seems too dangerous, as it does almost immediately, they wade directly through the paddy, in places sinking deep in muck. Progress is slow.