Army Blue

by Lucian K. Truscott

  The Colonel laughed so hard he almost choked. Sergeant Major Theodore Bennett was an old Cavalry troop, the kind of man he had grown up around as a kid. In fact, he felt like a kid sometimes around the old soldier. More wisdom had passed through the Sergeant Major’s ears than would ever be produced by the cabal of Saigon bureaucrats who thought they were running the war.

  The Colonel turned arbitrarily to one of the pages in his hand and began reading aloud:

  “ ‘Subject: Nightly anti-mortar ambush patrols. Distribution: one each battalion command. One: Each battalion-sized base camp will send out six, parentheses figure 6 close parentheses, squad-size ambush patrols each night in order to depress enemy mortar pressure on night defensive perimeters. Ambush patrols will patrol and establish ambushes at a radius of three hundred meters from battalion perimeter, considered effective range of enemy sixty-millimeter mortars. Patrols will begin thirty minutes before dusk and will end at first light. Reports on effectiveness of night defensive perimeter anti-mortar patrols will be made on a daily basis with body-count supplied by each command. Failure to institute adequate anti-ambush patrols will result in disciplinary action by next highest command. Signed: William P. Richter, Brigadier General, Corps G-3.’ ”

  Sergeant Major Bennett spat in the dirt outside the tent fly.

  “Shit,” he intoned under his breath.

  “Do you believe that, Top? Every Battalion in this division has been wasting time and energy and lives on those goddamned ambush patrols every goddamned night, and we’re getting mortared more today than we were when we got here two months ago.”

  “Yes, sir. Sarenmajor Cunningham done tol’ me the same thing when I seen him at division yesterday for that damn command sarenmajor briefing. Waste a’ fuckin’ time, damn patrols and briefings, both.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you there, Top,” said the Colonel, lighting a cigarette and passing it to his stocky Sergeant Major. “I’ll see if we can’t do something about this policy.”

  Chuckling over the corps directive on ambush patrols that afternoon had proved a turning point in the Colonel’s career that he couldn’t have foreseen at the time. He had kept meticulously accurate figures on mortar attacks suffered by his Battalion ever since it had arrived in Vietnam. He plotted the mortar attacks on a graph against strength of ambush patrols and proved that there was no link whatsoever between ambush patrols and the incidence or aggressiveness of nighttime mortar attacks.

  He filed a memo on the subject appending his graphed statistics with the brigade commander, addressing it to the corps G-3, General Richter. A week later he made his first official trip to Saigon, to the mahogany-paneled office of Brigadier General Richter.

  Richter ignored the Colonel’s statistics and memo. Without letting the Colonel get in a word edgewise, he ordered the Colonel to destroy both his data and all copies of his memo and commanded him not to discuss the subject with any contemporaries, inferiors or superiors. The G-3 raged and screamed at the Colonel at the top of his lungs. He sent the Colonel back down to the Delta with orders to shut up and forget that he had ever filed a memo on ambush patrols.

  The Colonel stayed quiet for a few weeks, sending out patrols and counting bodies. American bodies. The patrols, as he had predicted, did nothing but suffer casualties. Mortar attacks went unabated.

  At the end of the fourth week, the Colonel generated another memo on his ambush patrols, this one plotting American casualties against mortar attacks on two graphs. One showed casualties suffered when no ambush patrols were dispatched. The number of casualties was zero, and its graph was flat. The other showed casualties suffered when ambush patrols went out every night. The number of casualties went up in direct proportion to the number of patrols dispatched.

  The message of the memo and graphic analysis was simple: Enemy mortar attacks produced zero casualties. American anti-mortar ambush patrols produced casualties in direct proportion to the number of patrols that were demanded.

  The Colonel never heard anything about his second memo, and assumed that it had traced a trajectory through the bureaucracy similar to that of all bad news: a steep slide straight into the circular file.

  The Colonel made a final trip to Saigon at the end of his tour with the Battalion. He was ordered up to corps headquarters the day before his flight departed from Tan Son Nhut. The purpose of his visit became clear when he saw who was waiting for him at Headquarters.

  Brigadier General Richter.

  The G-3 called the Colonel into the mahogany-paneled, airconditioned office and read him his officer efficiency report out loud. Somehow Brigadier General Richter had gotten his hands on the Colonel’s OER, and he had changed the score in every category to a substandard rating. He finished reading the OER to the Colonel, then he just stood there behind his desk, grinning from ear to ear, as if to say, You thought you’d have the last word on those ambush patrols, but now you know. I had the last word, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  The Colonel stared at the grinning apparition for a moment, then saluted and turned an about-face and walked out of the G-3’s office.

  It wasn’t the last he heard about his OER, a black mark on his record that followed him to this day. Once or twice the Colonel wished that he had simply ignored the memo and faked his ambush patrol reports, the way he knew all the rest of the battalion commanders were doing. If he’d just knuckled under and played the damn game, if he’d just kept his own memos and statistics and graphs to himself . . .

  Nah. I did the right thing by the troops, and I did the right thing by the system. What does it matter in the end, anyway? What’s more important? A high OER or one eighteen-year-old GI taking a bullet that he shouldn’t have taken?

  The OER followed him around, but Brigadier General Richter didn’t.

  He read in the pages of The Army Times one day that Brigadier General Richter had been killed in Vietnam while on an inspection tour of base camps in the Delta.

  He was mortally wounded in a night mortar attack on a battalion defensive perimeter. Six ambush patrols had protected the perimeter from mortars that night.

  The taxi rattled to a stop under the canopy of the Hotel Caravelle, and the Colonel handed the driver a couple of dollars.

  “Dallah number one. Piaster number ten,” the driver said, grinning, shifting the fencepost cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.

  The Colonel pulled his duffel behind him and walked through the hotel doors into the lobby. Ceiling fans turned lazily overhead, stirring the moist air. A young woman signed him in, taking no notice of the fact that he omitted any mention of his rank or indeed of the fact that he was an Army officer. A stooped little porter showed him to a balconied room on the back side of the hotel. The porter threw open the louvered doors to the balcony. The Colonel stepped outside. He was high enough to see over the rooftops along Tu Do Street to the Saigon River, brown and littered with junks and sampans and house barges, flowing toward the sea.

  He turned to tip the porter, but the porter had slipped silently away, closing the door behind him. The Colonel opened the door and looked up and down the hall. He’d spent only an instant on the balcony, and the stooped little man was gone.

  He was back in Vietnam, all right. There was no doubt in his mind about that.

  The Colonel sat down on the edge of the swaybacked double bed in the middle of the room and picked up the phone.

  “Give me the NCO Club at Cam Rahn Bay,” said the Colonel.

  “That is a military call, sir,” said the voice of the telephone operator.

  “Then get me a military line,” said the Colonel.

  He waited for several moments while the phone clicked and screeched and clacked and crackled.

  Finally he could hear a dim, hollow ringing, like an alarm clock going off at the end of a long, empty hall.

  Somebody picked up.

  “Cam Rahn NCO Club,” said a man’s voice.

  “I’d like to speak to Sergeant Major
Theodore Bennett,” the Colonel said authoritatively, hoping the voice on the phone wouldn’t ask him to identify himself. The Colonel was going out of his way not to advertise his presence in Vietnam. So far he’d been successful. He held his breath.

  “Wait one,” said the voice.

  The phone crackled and popped a few times. The Vietnamese phone system, through which he knew the call had been routed, was the technological equivalent of two juice cans and a piece of Mom’s kitchen string. He hoped the line would remain open long enough . . .

  “Sarenmajor Bennett, sir,” said a voice. It was Top’s.

  “Sarenmajor,” the Colonel said slowly, making sure he could be understood, “this is an old friend from down south.”

  “Come again, sir?” said Sergeant Major Bennett.

  “Top, it’s me,” said the Colonel.

  “Sir? Colonel, sir, that you?”

  “Yep, it’s me, Top.”

  “Sir, whatchew doin’ back over here? I thought maybe you’d . . . you know, sir . . .”

  “Retired.”

  “Yes, sir. Where ya at, sir?”

  “Saigon. Don’t use my name, Top. You hear me? Don’t say my name.”

  “Yes, sir. Trouble, sir?”

  “You’ve got it, Top. I need to see you. Soon.”

  “Name place and time, sir. I’ll git myself there soon’s I can.”

  “Where was that spot you were always talking about, Top? The restaurant you went to all the time when you were on your damn resupply missions.”

  “Madam Ky’s.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Down along the river, sir. In Saigon. It ain’t hard to find. Any bike-taxi take ya there, sir. Madam Ky’s place is a wee hole-in-the-wall down where the Ben Nghe Canal meets the Saigon River. Right there by the bridge, sir. It ain’t much, but she got herself a new sign a coupla months ago.”

  “I can find it, I’m sure.”

  “What’s up, sir?”

  “Can’t talk right now, Top. When can we meet?”

  “I’ll catch a hop first thing in the mornin’, sir. Be there by noon fer sure.”

  “Bring your kit with you, Top.”

  “Y’mean my stuff, sir?”

  “That’s what I mean, Top.”

  “Pas de problème, sir,” said the Sergeant Major, giving the French phrase a Kentucky kick in the ass.

  “Sir?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This don’t have nothin’ to do with—”

  “It’s private, Sarenmajor. Don’t talk to anyone about me. You hear?”

  “Yes, sir. Gotchew.”

  “I’ll see you at Madam Ky’s, twelve hundred tomorrow, Top.”

  “That ya will, sir,” said the Sergeant Major.

  “Take care not to . . .”

  “Righto, sir. Don’tchew go worryin’ yourself none. O1’ Top’s on top a’ things. You kin count on it.”

  Outside the louvered doors, across the rooftop, the sun had gone down and the lights of Saigon had begun to twinkle in the wet heat.

  The Colonel cradled the phone and fell back on the bed. He was so close he could taste it . . . the Delta only a few miles away down the road . . . the smell of the dust . . . the sound of the big guns on the edge of town . . . the heat of the sun . . . the icy stillness of the night . . .

  9

  * * *

  * * *

  Cathy Joice heard scratching coming from her balcony. It was eight o’clock, and the sun had just gone down. She walked over to the middle doors leading out on the balcony and peeked between the louvers. Below her room at the Continental Hotel, the yellow lights of Saigon sparkled in a soft rain.

  There it was again, louder, only a foot or so away!

  It wouldn’t surprise her if it was a thief. A week after she had arrived in Saigon, she walked into her room one night and interrupted a burglary in progress. She slammed the door and ran downstairs, yelling for the police. Five minutes later, accompanied by hotel security officers—two off-duty “white mice,” South Vietnamese Military Police—she unlocked the room to find the burglar gone and her balcony doors ajar.

  If they came in this way once, they could try it again. Saigon burglars weren’t notable for their criminal genius, but they did show a certain daring as they went about their business.

  She turned and looked around the room for something big and heavy. Not a few of the correspondents staying at the Continental had firearms stashed in their rooms, though most avoided carrying them while on assignment. She had done her best to ignore the handgun issue. Now she wished she had sprung for the twenty-five dollars or so it would have taken to pick up a black-market pistol.

  She tiptoed over to the standing lamp in the corner. It was a thick-stemmed behemoth with a circular cast-iron base. She unplugged the lamp and quickly unscrewed its shade. Grabbing the lamp in both hands like a baseball bat, she tiptoed back to the balcony doors. With her left foot she kicked open the louvered doors. She stepped onto the balcony swinging. Something fluttered overhead brushing her hair. She dropped the lamp at her feet and looked up.

  A dozen bats were hanging upside down from the door frame above her, apparently escaping the rain.

  She collapsed in a chair, gasping for breath.

  In Saigon, nothing was as it seemed. Every day when she woke up she repeated the maxim to herself, and every day she proceeded to forget it.

  In Vietnam, your eyes played tricks on you . . .

  Your ears heard things that were not there . . .

  Your memory slipped out of gear like a car’s transmission gone lame with age . . .

  Your skin crawled with insects and fungus and scales and maladies for which there were no cures . . .

  Your feet stank . . .

  Your hair stuck . . .

  Your makeup melted . . .

  Your eyes stung . . .

  Your lips cracked . . .

  Your nails split . . .

  Your button threads rotted . . .

  Your zippers rusted . . .

  Your sweat poured . . .

  Your lonely dreams swam thickly with creatures carved cruelly from the deepest darkest reaches within you . . .

  There were times when Cathy Joice wondered what the hell she was doing in a hotel room in Saigon getting ready to go out there and strip the mysteries from a world that didn’t particularly relish the idea of being shown naked by a girl. This was one of those times.

  She hit the arms of the captain’s chair on the balcony and hit them again.

  Bats!

  If you tried to write home about what had just happened, nobody would believe you. They’d dismiss such a letter as the ravings of a malaria-induced fever and send you a get-well card, that’s what they would do.

  No one would believe Saigon the way it truly was. That was one reason news pieces sent back to the States featured correspondents standing in the sun clad in their best foreign-correspondent gear—khaki bush jackets with epaulets and bellows pockets and floppy hats and dark glasses dangling from a breast pocket—staring emotionless into the unblinking eye of the camera reading scripts that carried piles of facts to the viewer like buckets of water to a house fire. Few of the television correspondents working in Vietnam could be said to have an ounce of faith left in anything at all, but what little faith still burned beneath their hairy chests was invested in the notion that exposed film coupled loosely to found facts represented a form of truth that was at least palatable and maybe even powerful.

  Which was the problem, of course. There wasn’t a man in that gang of self-important talking heads in khaki bush jackets who could get beyond the daily grind of stating the obvious with brow furrowed as seriously as possible in vocal tones as close to those of Edward R. Murrow as they dared. They could gather facts and stack them like slices of cheese and salami on a poor-boy sandwich, but they couldn’t tell a story to save themselves.

  Cathy Joice wanted to tell stories about America’s war in Vietnam. This was her source of
trouble, as well as her greatest strength. She knew that at least some of the stuff she filed would never be aired and was destined for film cans in the basement library. But she filed her stories anyway and hoped for the best and kept looking for more stories to tell.

  Now she had one by the throat and she wasn’t about to let go. The grandson of a four-star general, indicted for desertion in the face of the enemy? Are you kidding? It was bound to be a story that spoke reams about the Army, the war, the military leadership in Saigon and Washington . . .

  There wasn’t a single element of the American dilemma in Vietnam that the story of Lieutenant Matthew Nelson Blue IV wouldn’t touch. Of that much she was certain.

  Now all she had to do was get the story and tell it.

  Danny said they had the lid down on this one tight, and she didn’t doubt him. It was going to take more than a little digging to get at the heart of the story. Hell, just getting in to see this Lieutenant Blue would tax her abilities to the limit. Cathy Joice was going to have to turn the crank on her little box of tricks, and she knew it.

  She got up from the chair on the balcony and went back inside, closing the louvered doors behind her. The wind was coming up, and rain had begun pitter-pattering on the balcony. It was time to get ready to go out there and fool them yet one more time.

  She sat down at her dressing table and contemplated the girl in the mirror. Maybe if I lift my hair like this and roll it and tuck it with some bobby pins . . .

  She began the process of becoming—ta-ta!—Cathy Joice! And as her fingers flew across the dressing table’s potions and lotions and tubes and jars, her mind drifted off to a time long ago when she had first discovered that when she wanted to, she could fool them and fool them good . . .

  She was sixteen, all legs and arms and neck and teeth, and her family was spending Christmas day with her grandparents on her mother’s side. They were Phelans and they owned banks and horses in the United States and England and France and they had a sixty-room house in New Hampshire that sat on a piece of property groomed so meticulously for the gentlemanly sports of hunting and jumping and polo that the U.S. Equestrian Olympic Team considered itself privileged to train there once every four years.