Another War, Another Peace
Page 6
“The point,” Tyler went on, “is that this hasn’t been a five-year war; it’s been a one-year war five times.” He hesitated. “Look, it’s all still just a bunch of ideas.” He sounded more cautious, as if he’d suddenly realized he might have been talking too much, or that David didn’t or couldn’t share his concerns. “I guess all I’m saying is to take care of yourself … because no one else will. Griffen knows; just listen to him. Well,” Tyler said briskly, “I’ve got to go.”
David was about to stand also when Tyler said, “No, stay. I do have one great physical attribute. I see excellently in the dark. Don’t laugh,” he cautioned. “Over here any attribute is a virtue … See you tomorrow.”
Tyler left, the sound of his footsteps fading in the darkness. David lay back and made himself comfortable, putting his hands behind his head. Tyler, of all people, to turn out to be a military strategist. David had the sense that if it had not been for the darkness, Tyler might not have had the courage to speak. But was he right? A few months in Saigon didn’t make you an expert in tactics, any more than a few weeks in the OR made you a surgeon. Still, right or wrong, Tyler obviously believed what he’d said. David sighed wearily. This wasn’t so easy. None of it was what he’d expected.
He stared up at the heavens. Amazing, but he could see the stars a billion miles away more clearly than he could see the edge of the helipad.
Chapter 11
“YOU SEEM PREOCCUPIED,” DAVID said.
“Preoccupied,” Tom was amused by the word. “No one ever called me that before.”
“Thoughtful, then.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Tom admitted.
As they left the base, Tom glanced over to their left, out to where the chopper had crashed.
“There’s something bothering you.”
Tom shrugged. He had been on patrol when the chopper had crashed and hadn’t gotten back to the 40th until much later.
“It’s the chopper, isn’t it?”
“It’s just that everyone thinks it got hit out at the LZ and went in out here.”
“That’s Thorpe’s official report,” David said. “But …”
“Well, there could be another explanation,” Tom said.
David waited.
“It could have gotten hit out here on the plateau.” David knew that he meant near the 40th. “I looked at the wreckage last night. Hard to tell a lot after they’ve burned up like that, but there was a groove along the outside housing of the main drive shaft and a big crack in the rotor hub. It couldn’t have held together very long.”
“So then it had to happen out here.”
Tom sighed. “The rotor was pretty messed up; a lot of it was missing. The groove could have been from a piece of the assembly as it came loose.”
“But that’s unlikely since it was on the outside,” David said.
“I couldn’t find a hole; just the groove.”
David was thinking. “But you didn’t have the whole housing. The piece with the hole in it could have come off while it was still flying … You think it happened around here, don’t you?”
“Can’t be sure; besides, taking potshots at a chopper for no reason is asking for trouble.”
“Thorpe told me the chopper came down from the highlands. Maybe the pilot saw something out there on the flats, troops maybe, and they shot at it.”
Tom looked over at him.
“You should have told me why they put the 40th where they did. It might have explained all the road watching and smooth spots stuff. Tyler gave me a geography lesson last night, including an introduction to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
“I would have told you if I’d seen anything.”
“Tyler doesn’t think we should be doing this. He thinks we should be more careful, I guess stay close to the 40th and tell everyone that we’d been to half a dozen villages that day.”
“Nah,” Tom said, taking David’s comments seriously. “Distances don’t make no difference over here. I knew a forward observer, got shot down twenty meters from the end of his own runway.”
David told Tom about the rest of Tyler’s comments.
“Captain Tyler say all that?” Tom said, both surprised and pleased.
“Is he right about no one knowing what we’re doing?”
Tom laughed. “Pretty close, but a little too”—he looked over at David—“pessimistic.”
“One for you,” David said.
Tom smiled, pleased with himself. “The point is, if we catch ’em, everything works.”
“What do you mean?”
“Doesn’t matter what you do. Search and destroy; large sweeps; ambushes. You got to find ’em first, and then they’ve got to stay put. If they do, we can’t lose. We almost always outmaneuver them. As far as I know, we haven’t lost any major firefights recently. We did at the beginning, before we knew what to do. Now, every minute we maintain contact with the gooks, the balance swings in our favor. We can concentrate our forces quicker than they can and bring in more and more firepower.”
“So we can’t lose.”
“Well, we can’t lose, but we might not win. See, unless the gooks are surrounded, they got to decide to stay and fight. If we catch ’em, then for the most part they got to stay put, but if we don’t—if we sort of stumble on ’em or it’s night or close to night—they can break off the contact and fade away.”
“Just a dumb Georgia redneck, huh,” David said, raising an eyebrow.
“Well,” Tom said, embarrassed, “it don’t take no genius to figure this stuff out.”
“And Tyler’s worries about us?”
“Mean that we should stay around the base?”
“I don’t know about Tyler’s military judgments, but I think he’s wrong there. We’re helping, or something close to helping … slim stuff in the great sweep of things, but …” David looked ahead across the miles of desert. “Never thought I’d say something like that, but I guess when you know you can’t do all that much, the little you do seems to be enough.”
“Yeah, we’re helpin’,” Tom admitted, “but that’s about it. Livin’ like these people do ain’t no real way to live anyway.”
“Maybe,” David said. “But if you have pneumonia and can’t breathe, you aren’t so concerned about how you live, just so you can breathe a bit better … basic medicine, huh,” David said, feeling a little foolish about defending what they were doing. “In fact,” he went on, “I doubt if you can get more basic.”
“Oh, I can understand the helpin’; it’s kinda nice to be able to do. I mean, it makes sense,” Tom said. “It’s the tryin’ to help when everyone else is moving ’em out of their villages or tryin’ to kill ’em that don’t make sense.”
“Want to stop?” David said it before he realized what he’d said.
Tom didn’t answer.
“I don’t either,” David said. “But you’re right. It doesn’t make sense, but when does anything in this Army make sense?”
Tom brightened. “Now there,” he said appreciatively, “you have something. I do believe you are coming around at last.”
Cramer announced a week after the gunship crashed that he’d be leaving within the month. “They’ll be sending out another surgeon,” he said as if to soften the news, “but he might not be here until after I’ve left. That means that the highest officer in the grade will be temporary hospital commander until his arrival. Of course,” Cramer added with some reluctance, “Captain Tyler is the highest ranking officer.”
“I’ll consider it,” Tyler said, “a stepping stone to the head of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.”
“Who we getting?” David asked, unexpectedly feeling ill at ease.
“Looks like it will be a full colonel,” Cramer said with pride.
“They upgrading the 40th?” Plunkett asked, concerned.
“No, no,” Cramer answered. “No plans for that.” Tyler glanced at David and went back to his pie.
David was staring at one of Plunke
tt’s journals when Tyler walked into the barracks. “You’re awfully quiet,” Tyler said after a while.
“Preoccupied,” David corrected. “No,” he went on, “just thinking about Cramer’s leaving. I guess I’ve gotten used to him.”
But it was a lie and David knew it. It was not that he was used to Cramer, or even that he liked him. It was that Cramer was leaving. He knew everyone eventually left, but for some reason it came as a shock to see him just take off, as if nothing at the 40th mattered anymore. If you cared about something, you stayed till it was done.
“Don’t despair,” Tyler said. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance that our next commander will be just as endearing.”
“Cramer’s not so bad.”
“Well,” Tyler said, “if it will make you feel any better, he’d be going sooner or later anyway,” and then, as if reading David’s mind, “No one stays to the end. Hell, no one quite knows where the end is.”
The next day it was not the war that found David but David who found the war.
They had been on nothing but dirt paths carved out of the sides of the hills for most of the morning. Tom, for the tenth time in half an hour, slowed the jeep for another hairpin turn. David, engrossed in the map, was trying to figure out how long it would be before they got to the next village. They had already visited one and the other was supposed to be close to it. But, as Tom pointed out, only if you were a bird.
The jeep made still another turn. The instant they started into it, David knew something was wrong. Glancing up as they came out of the turn, he froze. He was too stunned to speak or move. The road was filled with armed troops. For a moment, it was all a terrible blur, fragments—the weapons leveled at the jeep; the armored personnel carriers off on the shoulder of the road; the tank directly in front of them—and yet he realized the jeep was still moving. Just as David saw the small red and yellow flag of the South Vietnamese Army, Tom pressed the gas pedal to the floor and they were speeding down the center of the armed troopers scattered along the road. David, letting out a long sigh, took his first breath in what seemed like minutes but could only have been seconds.
“No dust to warn us,” Tom said in explanation. David tried to wet his lips, but his mouth was dry. For a few moments, he didn’t trust himself to speak. They were soon clear of the column.
“You know,” David said, “they are our allies.”
“Maybe,” Tom answered, “but I’d rather have the North Vietnamese. Besides,” he added moodily, “they don’t like us any more than we like them.”
It was the first hint of real hostility that David had ever seen from Tom. He looked back over his shoulder at the quickly receding column of troops.
“Well,” he said under his breath, “you may not like them, but I’m glad they’re on our side.” Tom grunted some kind of answer.
At dinner, David mentioned the South Vietnamese unit. He didn’t talk about himself, only of Tom’s reaction.
“They do all right when they’re properly led,” Thorpe said. “The ARVNs are taking most of the casualties in this war—three and four to every one of ours.”
“Well, properly led or not,” David said, “I’m glad they were the ones on that road.”
Thorpe, taking the comment as a sign of mutual agreement, gave him an encouraging nod.
Cramer made some asinine comment about everyone being in this thing together, while Tyler and the others kept quiet.
Thorpe joined David for his after-dinner walk. “In the end,” Thorpe said as they reached the gate, “this is going to have to be the ARVNs’ war, but right now we’ve got to help them out.”
Chapter 12
THE NEXT MORNING DAVID had the duty. There were the usual half-dozen skin rashes, so that by nine o’clock Plunkett was finishing with the forms while David cleaned up the instruments. David had kept to himself most of the morning. Nothing had happened the day before. He’d thought he’d be able to forget it, but he couldn’t. Coming out of that turn had been like falling off the edge of the earth. There was no retreat; no way of changing a thing or of starting over again. He knew he’d been afraid, but it was more than that. He’d felt helpless. There had been that terrible moment when he’d known as sure as he’d ever known anything that they had already gone too far. It didn’t matter that they were South Vietnamese soldiers. The point was that they could have been North Vietnamese or VC.
Something similar had occurred at the infiltration course during the last weeks of basic, but then David had dismissed his feelings as unimportant, certainly not worth pursuing at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure.
It was the first time the class had worn their fatigues, and there was a certain amount of joviality as the two-and-a-half-ton trucks pulled up to take them out to the infantry area. What little good cheer there was ended as they climbed down from the trucks. The cadre that greeted them, stone-faced and severe in their own creased fatigues and polished jump boots, were regular infantry, not the familiar, easygoing cadre of the student detachment. A number had ranger patches on their shoulders. More than one had the subdued cloth rankings on their uniforms, meaning they’d been in Nam.
A sergeant carrying a bullhorn had climbed a small ladder beside the barbed-wire entrance to the course. There was a platform on the other side of the fence with two 60-millimeter machine guns mounted on each end. David could still feel the tension.
The course was something everyone had to go through. It was routine. Yet David, like everyone else, unexpectedly found himself nervous.
The sergeant raised the microphone. “I am Master Sergeant Tate, the range master.” The sergeant’s voice rang out through the still air with a metallic clarity so unnatural that it riveted David to the ground where he stood. “The weapons we will be firing today are M-60 machine guns. They are fixed at a standard infiltration course height of three feet six inches. These weapons fire a nine-millimeter round that can penetrate two inches of steel and a foot and a half of concrete. This will be a live ammunition exercise. Out on the course, you are not to stand up. I repeat, once out on the course you are not to stand up. If at any time you find yourself in difficulty, you will remain where you are and convey that information to the soldier coming up behind you. Upon finishing the course, that soldier will report directly to me at this position. I am the only person on this range authorized to stop the firing. I and I alone am the only person authorized to clear the course.” The sergeant did not ask if there were any questions.
The noise of the two machine guns was deafening. No one could hear anyone else.
David started to crawl. The machine guns were firing in short, staccato bursts. Within seconds, he was sweating. He hadn’t crawled in years and it was harder than he’d thought. He’d started out too fast. The dust got into his mouth, choking him. After a minute or two, he had to stop. A charge in one of the sandbagged bunkers on the course went off. Startled, David threw himself flat. There was a moment of panic till he realized what had happened. He spit the dirt out of his mouth and, looking up, saw the bunker directly in front of him. The sharp smell of explosives filled the air. He’d been so intent on his crawling, he’d let himself come right up to the side of a bunker without knowing it. He wiped the sweat off his cheek and started to crawl again, this time more slowly, pacing himself, watching what was up ahead.
A quarter of the way down the course was the first of the barbed wire. David rolled over on his back and started to pull his way through. Halfway under, the air began to crack above him. As he cleared the last strand and turned back onto his stomach, the cracking returned. Another explosion went off, showering him with pebbles and dirt. As he started to crawl again, the snapping sound came back. This time he could feel a strange heaviness pass over him. Bullets! The thought astounded him. The machine guns fired another long burst. A split second later, the rounds passed overhead.
The sergeant’s warning came back to him. If he stood up he’d be killed. The idea was outrageous. Yet the bullets had swept in again.
Plunkett had finished with the forms and sat down at the desk to read the new issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine that had just come in the mail. David was thinking about asking Thorpe if the gunship might have been hit out on the flats when suddenly the metal roof of the dispensary began to vibrate.
“Choppers,” Plunkett said, closing the journal, “and a lot of ’em.”
They went out onto the porch together. The sky to the west was filled with helicopters.
“Big stuff,” Plunkett said. “Look.” He pointed to the right. A second line of choppers was coming in from the northeast. Half a dozen Cobra gunships moved beside the columns as if shepherding them along.
“I’m going down to the pad,” David said.
“I’ll sit this one out,” Plunkett said. “Seen one chopper, you’ve seen ’em all.”
By the time David reached the helipad, the sky was a mass of helicopters and gunships crisscrossing overhead. The noise was deafening. More choppers moved in, stacking up over the pad, hanging stationary, while those that had arrived first, engines screaming so loudly that the noise became painful, landed below them. The down drafts from the dozens of whirling rotors raised great swirls of dust that tore at the gunners and troopers braced in the open hatchways. The air grew so dense that it become difficult to breathe. A gunship suddenly materialized out of the haze, passing directly over him, the skids so close that he could see the welds on the steel tubing. More choppers arrived.