by Tobias Wolff
When the pianist played “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” one of the women whooped. “Listen to him! You’re in the wrong state, mister.” She finally let on they were from Arizona.
Stu leaned over to me. “We’re gonna split. You coming?”
I looked across the piano at the snooty blonde. She was staring into her drink.
“You go on,” I said. “Catch you in the morning.”
Mr. Hoffman gave my shoulder a squeeze, and they were gone.
The Arizonans had the pianist play “Hello, Dolly,” and made the rest of us join in. One of the men draped his arm around the blonde and swayed back and forth with her. She didn’t pull away but she didn’t sing, either. She smiled in a tight-lipped way like someone with bad teeth.
We sang a few show tunes, then the Wild Bunch rolled up their sleeves: “Don’t Fence Me In,” “Cool Water,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” It was their party now. They kept our glasses full and made sure we were loud enough. The blonde left. She didn’t say good-bye to anyone, just got up and left. I wanted to sneak out after her but I couldn’t find the right moment. We drank to the approaching nuptials of the pilot and his girlfriend. We drank to the piano player. We drank to the Cactus State, and to the States United. We sang some patriotic songs and everybody got choked up.
Then the pilot told the Arizonans I was shipping out the next morning. One of the women took this as an occasion to shed tears. Her husband patted her on the back a few times, then he and his friend took seats beside me and settled down to the business of giving me advice.
Jovial men get serious with a vengeance. It lurks there always behind their crinkled eyes, the eagerness to show you that even if they do know how to have a good time they can by God get down to cases too. These weren’t the worst of the breed. They professed no gospel, no dietary plan, no road to riches. But all the same I could see how happy they were to close the party down, to pull long faces and speak of arms and war.
Both were vets and had plenty to say, though I couldn’t follow much of it. “This country can mobilize!” one of them kept shouting. Finally the wives took pity on me and made them stop. Then we were all out on the street in glistening fog, shaking hands and embracing, promising to meet again, next year in Phoenix. The men guided me into a cab. As the driver counted the money they’d given him, one of them leaned inside and regarded me solemnly. “Son,” he said. I could see he wanted to say something, something momentous. I bent toward him. He said, “Keep your head down, son.”
I LAY awake in my room until the orderly called me. It was still dark when we boarded the buses. A sergeant got on and read our names out. Stu didn’t answer. Neither did two other men. When the sergeant came to the end of his list he called their names again, then asked if anyone knew why they weren’t present. Silence. He made a notation on his clipboard and got off the bus.
They kept the inside lights off on the way to the airport. Cigarettes burned in the gloom. Hardly anyone spoke, and then just a few words, quietly. There was no grab-ass, no swagger. Later, on the plane, we’d find our tongues and talk ourselves into a grotesquely festive state, but at this moment we were numbed by the grip of the current that was carrying us away. I was, anyway. Until now nothing had seemed irrevocable. I had persisted in the unconscious faith that no matter what I did, no matter how many steps I took, I would be excused from taking this last step. Something would happen—I didn’t know what. The VC would surrender. My orders would get changed. The President would decide to pull out. Something. Up to now men had been going over in one long unbroken line, but I hadn’t been one of them. My position in the line guaranteed that something would happen to make it stop. I hadn’t really thought these things but I must have felt them, because I was in shock to find myself on the bus that morning, and I don’t believe it was just my imagination that the others were in shock too.
We weren’t meant to be here, every one of us knew that, but here we were.
An odd question came to me, one I’ve never forgotten. What would this bus look like if you could see us all exactly as we would be a year from now?
Nothing could stop it. Except … what? A breakdown? We’d just have to get on another bus. My pals from the Haight—the Hug Patrol in a human chain across the road? Nah, bunch of softies, they’d never get up this early. Hijackers. A gang of hijackers in front of a barricade, wielding shotguns and pitchforks and clubs, shining bright lights into the driver’s eyes. The driver stops. The hijackers pound on the door until he opens it. They come up the steps and down the aisle, flashing their beams from face to face until they find the ones they’re after. They call our names, and then we know who it is behind the blinding lights. It’s our fathers. Our fathers, come to take us home.
Crazy.
But not as crazy as what they actually did, which was let us go.
Part Two
The Lesson
THEY HAD BEEN coming into My Tho for weeks. The Vietnamese army didn’t know, the American advisers didn’t know. The town was full of them and nobody said a word. I couldn’t forget that afterward—not a word of warning from anyone. For weeks they were all around us, on the streets, in the restaurants, gathering for the great slaughter and tasting the pleasures of the town until it began.
Certain scenes acquire piquancy in afterthought. Just before Tet a carnival established itself in a park along the river. Sergeant Benet and I stopped there one night and wandered among the games, the puppet shows, the jugglers and fire eaters. There was a dinky shooting gallery with a couple of antique .22s, and I lingered to try my hand. A stoop-shouldered man, tall for a Vietnamese, took the place to my right. A pair of younger fellows stood behind him and cheered him on. He shot well. So did I. We didn’t acknowledge that we were competing, but we were, definitely. Then I missed some and quit for fear I’d miss more. “Good shooting,” I said to him. He inclined his head and smiled. It might have been an innocent smile, but I think of it now as a complicated, terrible smile.
By pure dumb luck I was in my bunk at the battalion when the killing started. If I’d been in town or on the road, end of story. The first American they killed was a young guy from headquarters who was driving home from a bar after midnight. He probably felt safe because of the annual holiday cease-fire. They caught him on the road and shot him. Instead of leaving his body, they lugged it around for the entire time they held My Tho. Maybe they thought he’d prove valuable in some future exchange of the dead, or maybe they just couldn’t bring themselves to part with such a trophy. He was very big. In the end they did get some use out of him, as a kind of portable bulwark to hide behind and shoot from. When his body was found afterward, Doc Macleod told me, “he was so full of holes you could have played him like a fucking ocarina.”
They were happy to kill any Americans who fell into their hands but they were more efficient at killing Vietnamese. They’d come prepared with lists of local politicians, teachers, civil servants, anyone named by their agents as insufficiently friendly to the cause. Early that morning, when they could count on the people’s enemies being asleep in their beds, execution squads went from door to door, rounding them up. Meanwhile their political cadres took control of the streets and their sappers began to attack police stations and military barracks. All this we found out later. When the assault, the so-called Tet Offensive, first began we didn’t know what was going on.
The firing woke us up. It was about three-thirty, four in the morning, January 31, 1968, which I think of now as a kind of birthday; the first day in the rest of my life, for sure. Sergeant Benet and I hustled outside and saw flares going up all over the town. Soldiers from the battalion were running past us, carbines in hand, heading for the perimeter. I said I didn’t like this. I could hear myself say it: “I don’t like this.”
We got dressed and walked over to Major Chau’s headquarters. His staff officers were carrying out tables and chairs, map cases, radios. One of them told the major we were there. He came to the door and said, “Later. You come back
later.” When I asked him for a situation report, he said, “Later. Now is too busy, yes,” and went back inside.
Sergeant Benet and I spent the morning cleaning our weapons and listening to the radio. In this way we learned that My Tho was in enemy hands and most of our division under attack. We also found out that the same thing was happening everywhere else. All the towns of the Delta—My Tho, Ben Tre, Soc Trang, Can Tho, Ca Mau, Vinh Long, all of them—were full of VC. Every town and city in the country was under siege. Every airfield had been hit. Every road cut. They were in the streets of Saigon, in the American embassy. All in one night. The whole country.
I could barely take in what I was hearing. To make sense of it was especially hard because nothing could be put to use, or translated into hope. Even the official optimism of the Armed Forces Radio announcers couldn’t patch over the magnitude of the facts they were reporting, and when we tuned in the regular military frequencies we heard nothing but shock and frenzied pleas for support. Nobody was getting any support because the supporting units needed support themselves. That meant we couldn’t get relief from anyone, which was sorry news for us. The battalion was undermanned to begin with, and a lot of our troops had gone home for Tet. We would have to defend this ridiculously exposed piece of land with a skeleton crew and without a prayer of help from the air or the ground. We were completely on our own.
Sergeant Benet and I listened to the radio and said little. He was lying on the couch, gazing up at the ceiling, which was a kindness. I didn’t want him to see how I was taking this because I didn’t really know how I was taking it. I felt as if I were looking on from a great distance. As the morning passed I got hungry and made a sandwich, still listening. I became aware of my hands and what they were doing. How strange it is to spread mayonnaise. It can be the strangest thing you’ve ever done. I ate a few bites and had to stop, my mouth was so dry.
Major Chau sent for us. He was in the bunker where he’d set up his command post. “This is too bad,” he said. “You can get air support, yes?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Yes! Come. Look.” He showed me the map, tapping with his pointer, trying to make me see the difficulty of our position. When he finally understood that I couldn’t call down jets if we were attacked, he made a hissing noise and bared his teeth. He laid the pointer on the map and fumbled out a Marlboro but couldn’t fit it into the holder he used. He looked down at the cigarette and the holder, then turned and walked outside. A few minutes later he came back and acted as if nothing had happened. Sergeant Benet and I leaned over the map with him and his staff officers, trying to imagine a plan of some kind, but none of us had anything much to say.
I felt hollow, loopy. I was dull and slow-tongued, the others as well. What we did was stand around and wait for something to happen.
All this time we could hear the sound of the shooting in My Tho.
A SHELL EXPLODED somewhere outside. We hit the deck, our mouths twisted in dire grins. Two more went off almost together. They weren’t very close, but I felt the shock in my chest. We waited for the next one. Then we stood up again, very, very slowly. I was wide-awake.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON a soldier came to the door of the bunker and said there was an airplane above us. It turned out to be a spotter plane, a small single-engine craft like a Piper Cub. The pilot was circling the battalion and wagging his wings as if he wanted something. Sergeant Benet flipped through the radio until he found his frequency.
The pilot was in a state of some impatience. He’d been flying past, he said, and seen a large body of men moving up behind one of the tree lines that faced our perimeter, about three football fields away. He wasn’t sure how many, could be a hundred, hundred fifty of them. We couldn’t see anybody but he gave us their position and kept circling above to direct fire.
Everyone went to work. Major Chau was a good artilleryman. He’d long ago had his fire-direction people work out the range on that spot and on every other likely avenue of attack, and they fed the settings to the men waiting in the gun pits. The gun crews fired three salvos in rapid succession. I watched the shells bursting in the trees and thought, Yes! Yes! We caught them all bunched up together. The pilot had a high, thin voice that cracked with excitement as he told us how we were killing them—“knocking them down,” as he put it. We adjusted and fired for effect, round after round after round, mud geysering up, trees toppling and exploding into flame. When the VC broke and ran the pilot followed them, calling down more fire, yipping like a cowboy every time we knocked more of them down. The tree line was long and dense. We could hear our shells exploding in the paddies behind it but never saw any of the men we were killing until the end, when a few of them hooked left and made a run for the My Tho road. They crossed our line of vision for a few moments then, five or six distant figures in black loping in a half crouch across the tops of the dikes. The sight of them astonished me. I went absolutely blank. The perimeter guards let off a clatter of shots but didn’t hit anyone. They made the road and vanished over the embankment.
The pilot let them go. He had us concentrate our fire on the larger group we couldn’t see until they were down or dispersed into cover. Then he gave us the all clear and climbed away. When Sergeant Benet thanked him he didn’t answer, just wagged his wings.
We let the guns cool. Then—flushed, giddy, ears ringing, teeth clenched in weird elation—we commenced firing again. We were thin on the ground but we had a mountain of ammunition. All that afternoon we fired, and on into the night. I say we. In truth I did very little. My advice was not in demand. An American who couldn’t get choppers or jets had no vote. When I got tired of hanging around the command bunker I checked the perimeter posts and helped Sergeant Benet hump ammo and clear the pits of shell casings. Sergeant Benet worked himself into a lather. Stripped to the waist, skin gleaming, shouting encouragement to the gunners, he loomed like Vulcan in the sulfurous smoke and din. As darkness came on, the tips of the barrels glowed like embers.
We blew up the road leading from My Tho so they couldn’t attack us with the trucks and armored personnel carriers they’d seized. We blew up the surrounding tree lines to deny them cover and the dikes so they couldn’t use them as trails. We blew up the landings along the river. Wherever they might move or hide in the countryside around us we dropped high explosives. Then we turned our attention to the town.
THE PROCESS BY WHICH we helped lay waste to My Tho seemed not of our making and at all times necessary and right. As the battalions in town came under more and more pressure, we began to drop shells on the buildings around them. We bombarded the old square surrounding General Ngoc’s headquarters, where he and the province chief were holed up with their staff officers. There were pockets of terrified government officialdom and soldiery huddled throughout the town, and every time one of them got through to us on the radio we put our fire right where he wanted it, no questions asked. We knocked down bridges and sank boats. We leveled shops and bars along the river. We pulverized hotels and houses, floor by floor, street by street, block by block. I saw the map, I knew where the shells were going, but I didn’t think of our targets as homes where exhausted and frightened people were praying for their lives. When you’re afraid you will kill anything that might kill you. Now that the enemy had the town, the town was the enemy.
And I wasn’t too sure about our friends. I worried that Major Chau and his officers might run out on us if we got attacked, maybe even cut a deal and hand us over. These men had never given me any reason for such a thought, as I well knew, but that didn’t stop me from thinking it.
For the next couple of days we plastered the town. Then the jets showed up. Their run into My Tho took them right over our compound, sometimes low enough that we could see the rivets on their skin. Such American machines, so boss-looking, so technical, so loud. Phantoms. When they slowed overhead to lock into formation the roar of their engines made speech impossible. Down here I was in a deranged and malignant land, but when I raised my eyes to
those planes I could see home. They dove screaming on the town, then pulled out and banked around and did it again. Their bombs sent tremors pulsing up through our legs. When they used up all their bombs they flew off to get more. Flames gleamed on the underside of the pall of smoke that overhung My Tho, and the smell of putrefaction soured the breeze, and still we served the guns, dropping rings of ruination around every frightened man with a radio transmitter.
None of this gave me pause. Only when we finally took the town back, when the last sniper had been blasted off his rooftop, did I see what we had done, we and the VC together. The place was a wreck, still smoldering two weeks later, still reeking sweetly of corpses. The corpses were everywhere, lying in the streets, floating in the reservoir, buried and half buried in collapsed buildings, grinning, blackened, fat with gas, limbs missing or oddly bent, some headless, some burned almost to the bone, the smell so thick and foul we had to wear surgical masks scented with cologne, aftershave, deodorant, whatever we had, simply to move through town. Hundreds of corpses and the count kept rising. Gangs of diggers sifted through the rubble, looking for survivors. They found some, but mostly they found more corpses. These they rolled up in tatami mats and left by the roadside for pickup. One day I passed a line of them that went on for almost a block, all children, their bare feet protruding from the ends of the mats. My driver told me that we’d bombed a school building where they had been herded together to learn revolutionary history and songs.
I didn’t believe it. It sounded like one of those stories that always make the rounds afterward. But it could have been true.
Now that the danger was past I could permit myself certain feelings about what we had done, but I knew even then that they would vanish at the next sign of danger. How about the VC? I used to wonder. Were they sorry? Did they love their perfect future so much that they could without shame feed children to it, children and families and towns—their own towns? They must have, because they kept doing it. And in the end they got their future. The more of their country they fed to it, the closer it came.