by Doug Stanton
8M:
CA, cold LZ, south of An Loe Bridge, but firefight followed shortly after touchdown.
9M:
CA, cold LZ, to foothills at base of mountains with night ambush, contact with NVA patrol and firefight.
9M:
Extraction back to LZ Sally.
9M:
CA, cold LZ, night ambush along Song Bo River and contact with oversize NVA platoon, close-quarter firefight. Next five days Recon continued movement south along Song Bo River toward foothills to base of mountains. Daily contact with nightly ambush with NVA/VC firefight.
13M:
Extraction back to LZ Sally from foothills at base of mountains.
14M:
CA, with Company C, with afternoon firefight with large NVA force for control of footbridge over river tributary from known NVA sanctuary.
18M:
CA, cold LZ, to foothills at base of mountains with night ambush with contact and firefight.
19M:
CA, cold LZ seven miles back to the north. Contact made and firefight with NVA.
25M:
Extraction back to LZ Sally.
27M:
CA, very hot LZ alongside Perfume River, six miles north of Hue, OH-6A helicopter shot down. Companies A and D made combat assault with Recon. U.S. Navy Riverine patrol craft also supported two-day battle.
29M:
CA, extremely hot LZ, Recon committed to new battle along with Company B. Followed with close-quarter fighting for the next three days.
5A:
Extraction back to LZ Sally and moved by truck to An Loe Bridge over Song Bo River.
16A:
CA, light contact on LZ.
17A:
CA, night combat assault, extremely hot LZ along with Companies A, C, and D for three-day battle.
20A:
CA, light contact on LZ. Link up with Company C on the ground with Company B, also committed to same all-day battle that quickly erupted.
22A:
Extraction, vicinity of An Loe Bridge, which quickly became a combat assault as cold LZ erupted into firefight.
24A:
CA, hot LZ, same NVA/VC contested area as earlier.
29A:
CA, semi-hot LZ with firefight south of An Loe Bridge over Song Bo River. Nus, a ad minciuntur? Cimo vel ipid ullendelique por abo. Qui ditiis sam,
When he learns that Americans back home believe they are losing the war, Michael Bradshaw, like others in the platoon, is incredulous. They’re decimating the VC and NVA. Before the offensive, the VC had often vanished after short, intense firefights. Now they’ve been taking a stand to slug it out, and consequently are suffering large casualties.
Some forty thousand NVA and VC—compared to some four thousand U.S. forces—are now dead. That’s a lot of dead Communists.
Yet old Johnson himself is on TV, looking as if he’s wound tighter than a two-dollar watch, and acting as grim as a high school biology student during rat dissection week—there he is staring into the camera, giving up, quitting, kaput. He no longer wants to be president.
When the boys hear this, the news is hard to digest. Have they been winning? they wonder. Have they?
The president seems to be saying that no matter how many boys he pours into this war, the boys won’t win.
Is this true?
The president seems to be saying that the killing will continue and continue.
During the coming weeks, the platoon will wonder if he’s right.
• • •
On April 20, the platoon is along the Song Bo River, about four and a half miles northeast of LZ Sally, keeping to the left flank of Charlie Company as they, with Bravo Company, sweep through a close-by hamlet. It’s a pincer maneuver converging on the village, ostensibly trapping enemy fighters inside.
Jerry Austin is walking point, quietly, heel-toe, heel-toe, alongside Paul Sudano. Darryl Lintner’s right behind them. Lintner has just joined the platoon, one of the replacements for the wounded and the dead. He’s new; he’s a cherry. A firefight virgin. The enemy fires from some trees, and Darryl Lintner drops immediately.
Austin runs for a little mound, not enough to conceal him, but he dives for it anyway, and Michael Bradshaw and John Arnold come running and dive behind the too-small mound and hunker closer to the ground. Austin hears Lintner yelling, “Medic!” a cry in the noon sun, and then it’s quiet and then again: “Medic! Medic! Medic!” And Austin and a few of the others try to get up to run to Darryl, and that sweet kid yells, “Get down, get down!” as more fire comes from the tree line. And then Darryl is quiet and they hear no more from him because he’s dead.
• • •
When the firing stops, Austin and Arnold creep out and drag Lintner back and he’s white as a bleach bottle. His skin has already turned that plastic color, his face shiny and smooth and very white.
Dammit, that’s the hell of it all, they all agree, he was such a super guy, the kind you’d want your sister to marry. His wife sent him sweet-smelling letters with money inside—money!—and Paul Sudano kidded him, “Lintner, where are you gonna spend all that money way out here?” and they’d stare out at the sun’s silver glare on the trees—hot, silent emptiness—and Darryl blushed. Darryl, such a sweet kid! The hell of it is, Darryl is killed before he’s been in-country long enough to be an old warrior, to make this business of killing a way of life. Hyperalertness hadn’t set in; he was still Darryl Lintner from Perryville, Missouri. What killed him was that he hadn’t done enough killing first, to know enough how to stay alive.
When Stan hears about Darryl’s death, he goes nuts. He loses his mind. His reaction is way out of proportion to the degree to which he knows Lintner. He feels that he and Darryl might have gotten to know each other had they met back in the world. He’d said to Lintner shortly after his arrival, “Stick with me, kid,” even though they were the same age. “I’ll take care of you.” Kind of nonchalant. Yet he’d meant it. That’s about it, though: “Stick with me, kid. I’ll take care of you.” Sounding like an old man. When he first met Lintner, he did one thing that he didn’t usually do: he learned Lintner’s first name, and he called him by that. He wishes now he’d never learned his first name. Darryl.
He’s about a quarter mile away in the same firefight when he hears the gunfire. When he makes his way over to the position where Lintner has been killed and Tom Soals tells him what’s happened, Stan wants to walk into the village and kill every living being who has a weapon in his hand.
He starts running toward the village where the shooting has been coming from, ready to fight. Friendly and enemy fire fills the air. Someone tackles him and says, “Stan, no, there’s arty coming in; it’s about to get bombed.” But Stan doesn’t care. He gets up and starts running toward the village just as the first rockets land and blow up the village, and Stan cartwheels hard onto the ground. In the pause, he steels himself and starts running again, and he is knocked down when the next salvo lands. He gets up again and keeps trying to reach the village. He wants to run in there so badly and kill the village itself, but each time he’s thrown back by the artillery barrage. He never makes it to the village, and finally someone tackles him again and says, “Stan, you can’t.” He thinks, The hell I can’t; they killed him, and thinks, I’m ready to die. But his punishment is to keep living. He tries to forget Darryl’s name. He tries to unlearn it. He can’t, of course. He promises himself he will never learn another person’s first name in the platoon.
• • •
There’s a bad firefight on the morning of April 29, the gunfire cracking the hot dawn. Stan is walking down the trail in a sleepless trance, ahead of Francis Wongus.
Wongus yells to Stan to slow down. “Get back here! Hurry up!” Wongus wants them to walk together for security.
In a hurry, Stan rounds a corner and, just twenty feet away, sees an NVA soldier standing there, staring up at the sky, and he’s whistling a song, which sounds like all songs even though technicall
y it’s Vietnamese whistling. When he turns at Stan’s approach, Stan lifts the M-16 and fires the soldier up, BRRRPPP, and drops him. Stan jams in a fresh mag and moves forward in a crouch. But when he gets to where the soldier was, he can’t find him. He’s gone.
Where’d he go?
Stan sees the AK at his feet; there’s blood on it, and there’s the guy’s rucksack. Wongus walks up and looks around and says that he’s going back up the trail to tell Higher that they’ve engaged an enemy and are going after him. He tells Stan to stay right there and don’t go looking for this guy alone.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Stan answers, but ignores his warning. He wants to get even for Lintner, Kass, Pyle, and all the others.
He walks into the bushes with his M-16 aimed ahead, his bayonet leading the way.
Stan follows the blood spatter into the thicket, tracking the guy. He can make out a path in the leaves where it seems the man dragged himself forward, looking for a place to hide.
The undergrowth is so thick Stan has to get down on his hands and knees and crawl along the guy’s blood trail. There are so many branches grabbing at him, and the passage is so narrow that he lays his rucksack and M-16 aside, removes the bayonet from the rifle and keeps moving, parting the vegetation with the bayonet’s sharp tip. He crawls into a clearing in the jungle no bigger than a big living room rug, only this space is filled with bloody leaves. Stan’s thinking, If I were this guy, this is where I’d be hiding. He looks around the clearing but can’t see him. He’s just about ready to stand up when he does one last scan and stops. He sees a set of eyes, just eyes, glaring at him, and he freezes. He immediately realizes the soldier’s body is covered with leaves—he’s pulled the leaves up over himself; if he had covered his eyes, Stan never would have spotted him. As it is, there are eyes peering through the loose scrim of leaves, unblinking, and aimed right at Stan, about six feet away. He springs out of the brush wall like a tiger and in midair reaches out with both hands and grabs Stan. He realizes the NVA soldier must not be that badly wounded, given his strength as he tightens his hands around Stan’s neck. Stan doesn’t even have time to raise his bayonet and stab him. They hit the ground and roll.
Stan keeps reaching up and stabbing but hits nothing but air. Then the NVA soldier has a knife out, and he’s trying to stab Stan. This doesn’t look good. Stan notices he doesn’t have his bayonet anymore. Where’d that go? He reaches for the guy’s hand, trying to wrestle the blade away, and as he does this, Stan remembers a move from his high school wrestling matches. He gets on top of the NVA and they roll again. Now the NVA soldier is sitting atop Stan and starts whacking at him with the blade as Stan rolls his head back and forth, trying to get out of the way. He’s getting cut on the arms and the chin, and then Stan does another reversal and ends up sitting atop the guy again. The guy reaches up with just one hand and clasps Stan’s throat and starts squeezing. With the other hand, he’s batting away Stan’s stabs with the bayonet. The guy’s really squeezing, and Stan’s vision starts to narrow; he’s getting tunnel vision from the lack of oxygen. He’s being choked to death. Stan sees small stars circling the rims of his eyes. He has to change the game quickly and decisively. Stan reaches up with his left hand and slowly pushes the guy’s free hand out of the way, and when there’s an opening, he stabs at the man’s neck. He thrusts three times and on maybe the second thrust, warm blood spurts up on Stan, all over his face and chest. He can taste it, and in his oxygen-deprived state, he’s not quite sure what’s going on. He keeps stabbing.
Finally he sees the world coming back, the aperture opening up, his peripheral vision returns, and even though the guy is dead, or certainly dying, his death grip hasn’t loosened. Stan has to reach up and pry the man’s fingers from around his neck. He throws the hand aside, the arm flops away, and Stan rolls off and lies on the ground gasping. He still feels close to passing out as Wongus crawls up. Stan tries talking, but he doesn’t have any voice; it’s been squeezed out of him. He’s covered in blood. Coming into the clearing with Wongus is Brian Riley. They look at Stan and are pretty sure that he’s been badly wounded. But because there’s so much blood, they can’t see any wounds. Wongus and Riley grab Stan by the feet and drag him backward and then help him up. They retrace his steps by following the blood trail and find Stan’s M-16 and his ruck, and they each take an arm and shuffle back to the trail. Only ten minutes have passed since Stan shot the NVA soldier and stabbed him in the jungle. If other NVA have been nearby, surely they’ll be coming close to check out the source of the firing.
The three men rejoin a group from the platoon. When they wipe some of the blood away, they discover that Stan hasn’t been stabbed deeply but he’s been cut up pretty bad and needs treatment and stitches to prevent infection. A Huey is called in and Stan is loaded aboard. As they take off, he looks down and sees the green ground passing beneath him and the guys looking up at him, and they are gone. That’s the last he will see of many of them. That’s the last day he will serve as a member of Echo Company, Recon Platoon.
• • •
In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong fighters, the poor farmers, the teachers by day who pick up a gun at night to fight as guerrillas, the indigenous people who have never wanted anything in their country except independence from the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, and now the Americans—these people have suffered enormous losses. The Tet has made them fight in the open alongside regular NVA forces, in cities and villages and in fighting that resembles set-piece battles. Accustomed to fighting and fading away to the jungles to live and fight again, they have died in huge numbers. Vietnam will never recover from these losses, and for the remainder of the war, the next seven years, the government of North Vietnam, aided by organized cadres of thousands of women, will send troops down into the South, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, to supplant the lost VC fighters.
• • •
After getting out of the hospital on May 20, 1968, after his third wounding, Stan faces the prospect of leaving Vietnam. When you get wounded three times, this means you have three Purple Hearts. And when you have three Purple Hearts, you’re through. You’ve done your time for Uncle Sam in Vietnam.
To avoid a mandatory exit of Vietnam, Stan refuses to accept his third Purple Heart. This has the effect, from an administrative perspective, of making it appear as if the third wounding has never happened. He’ll be able to serve the remaining seven months of a twelve-month combat tour in the 101st Airborne Division. But in another part of the division.
A day after leaving the hospital, May 21, still limping and in pain with healing stab wounds across his back and arms, he’s reassigned to the 1/327th, 1st Brigade, at Camp Gia Lee, several miles from the 101st Airborne’s large headquarters at Camp Eagle. He’ll serve as a photographer in the Army’s Press Information Office—a desk job, essentially, but he’ll take it. Four months earlier, he’d passed through Camp Eagle when he was new to the country and when Eagle had been called LZ El Paso. He’s returning to the beginning of his journey, bearing this time the haunted look of the war-weary, “the thousand-yard stare.”
Two months spent sitting at a desk takes its toll. Stan realizes he hasn’t been shot at in six weeks and he’s stir-crazy. He asks to join a line unit as a combat photographer and reunites with Dwight Lane and David Watts in their platoon, part of 1st Battalion, 327th Airborne Infantry. He relishes this reunion with his buddies but realizes his attraction to combat and its adrenaline infusions is an addiction. He increasingly fears being asked to leave the war. On December 17, Stan’s twelve-month tour of duty in Vietnam ends and he has to return to the States. He’ll serve the remaining seven and a half months of his three-year enlistment assigned to the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, North Carolina—predictable garrison life, filled with administrative tasks. He dreads the prospect of boredom.
In the meantime, he’s returning to Gary, Indiana, for Christmas on a thirty-day leave and reuniting with his father and two younger brothers, George a
nd Bruce, along with his older brother, Dub, also home from Vietnam.
Stan fears his homecoming. The truth is, he can barely remember what it feels like to live indoors or eat warm food.
He’s worried if he’ll adjust to civilian life. As he boards the military transport in Bien Hoa, he’s scared. Fourteen hours later, he lands at Travis Air Force Base; transfers by bus to the Army air terminal in Oakland, California, forty-seven miles to the southwest; and boards still another bus to cross the bridge over San Francisco Bay to the city itself, home to war protests that had been a counter-soundtrack to the gunfire and screams that had filled every corner of his year in Vietnam.
Each transfer and bus ride is another wicket, another cycling back into civilian life, the days behind him slamming shut. By the time he enters the bright, fluorescent concourse of the San Francisco airport, he’s on edge, walking as alertly as if he’s moving down a wooded trail. It’s only 9:00 a.m., but it feels like midnight in his head. He feels as if he’s been awake for years.
Other soldiers back in Vietnam had warned him about San Francisco—about how, when you land there, you had to remove your uniform to avoid being hassled. But Stan stays in his Class A dress uniform. He orders a Coke at a restaurant counter, thinking, What have I been through?
He catches sight of a television in an airport lounge and is reminded of how little he knows about what’s gone on in America in his absence. Robert F. Kennedy has been killed; there have been riots in Chicago outside a hotel at the Democratic National Convention. There’s been a protest march with several hundred thousand people at the Pentagon. Stan feels a million miles away from these events, which is strange, he reflects, because he—or his experience—is at the center of the national debate. Should we be in Vietnam, and what are we doing there? “Doing there?” What does that question even mean? We’re trying to stay alive, that’s for sure; that’s one thing we’re doing there. He can tell everybody a bit about that. Should we be there? He doesn’t know the answer. But here’s the thing: he wanted to be there. He wants to be there right now.