by Tim O'Brien
* * *
At Lexington that morning, eight colonists lay dead or dying. No one knows, or will ever know, who fired the first shot. What seems certain is that Major John Pitcairn called on the rebels to lay down their arms, that at least some of the militia began dispersing, that the British infantry continued to press forward, and that a single shot rang out. In quick succession, without orders, British troops fired two sharp volleys. One colonist was bayoneted to death. Others were killed or wounded as they sought cover. At that point, although Pitcairn signaled for a cease-fire, the dawn was full of gunfire. According to one eyewitness, the British regulars “were so wild they cou’d hear no orders.”
Altogether, it lasted only a few minutes, but a terrible inertia had taken hold. One volley led to the next. Ordinary field discipline collapsed. In various measures, the first bloodshed that day can be traced to the rawness of the troops, to the hodgepodge composition of their units, and to the unfamiliar leadership of Major Pitcairn. Ultimately, though, the causes were pedestrian. History is made not only by plan or policy, but also by fear and fatigue and adrenaline.
The fight at Lexington was lopsided. The colonists suffered a 23 percent casualty rate: eight dead, nine or ten wounded. Only a single British soldier had been injured.
When it was over, at roughly five-thirty in the morning, the British formed up and resumed their march toward the small town of Concord off to the west. An exuberant, almost heady confidence filled their ranks. They had received only the lightest resistance at Lexington, none of it lethal, and they had swiftly routed an assemblage of farmers and merchants. For weeks, they had openly ridiculed the rebels, using language of contempt. One British officer sneered at the colonists’ deficiencies of “patience, coolness, and bravery.” Another officer, commenting on an incident only a month earlier, had expressed amusement at the rebels’ lax discipline: “They got 2 pieces of Cannon to the Bridge and loaded ’em but nobody wou’d stay to fire them.”
For the moment, the redcoats’ scorn for the colonists seemed justified. There were hurrahs and thumping drums. There was singing.
But the 19,000-man Massachusetts militia was no pushover. Drilled and trained by competent officers, organized into 47 formal regiments, the colonial force far outnumbered the British troops stationed in Boston. In addition, the Provincial Congress had recently developed a new rapid-deployment system called “the minute men,” by which a full quarter of the militia had been assigned to units capable of responding “at a minute’s warning” to any emergency. The towns and villages of Massachusetts had been directed to provide each minuteman “with an effective fire arm, bayonet, pouch, knapsack, thirty rounds of cartridges and balls, and that they be disciplined three times a week, and oftener, as opportunity may offer.” Moreover, on the early morning of April 19, 1775, the rebels had the formidable advantages of nearby reinforcements, an intimate knowledge of the region’s roads and woods and fields, and a smoldering—now boiling—indignation at years of perceived British tyranny, corruption, and arrogance. Most powerfully, however, the colonists were now stirred by outrage at the one-sided casualty count in Lexington. Politics aside, men will kill for revenge.
For five more miles, the twenty-one companies of redcoats toiled through the early-morning hours, and it was close to eight in the morning when the column finally marched into Concord. The men had been roused from their Boston encampments eleven hours earlier. They had come twenty hard miles. Now, the most difficult moments of their lives lay ahead.
* * *
I remember crossing the Diem Diem River late in the night, turning north for a time, then back to the east. We did not know where we were, exactly, or the names of the villages we passed, or where the enemy might be, or which trails were mined and which were not, or how the night would end. The moon was still up there, still gauzy yellow, but now it seemed to cast no light at all, and for short bursts of time I lost touch with myself, as if another guy had suddenly occupied my boots, some dumb dipstick who let himself get drafted and ended up here in this tropical killer-dreamscape. I tried counting my steps. I tried pretending I was elsewhere.
A chunk of eternity swept by, then another chunk, and then I smelled salt. Somewhere ahead was the South China Sea—maybe a mile, maybe a step or two.
Not much later, in a silvery gray predawn light, we stopped along a paddy dike outside a hamlet that lay hidden behind trees and thick brush.
We waited for a time. Officers conferred. We waited a little longer, then two platoons circled around to the far side of the village, and a few minutes later, after another wait, the rest of us formed into a rank and moved across the paddy and into brush surrounding the village.
Off to my left, as we pushed forward, I heard a muted, almost gentle-sounding thud. There was an instant of silence. Automatic gunfire then picked me up, or seemed to pick me up, and threw me, or seemed to throw me, headfirst into the dark. I remember spinning sideways. I remember men yelling. A great noise exploded between my eyes, which was the sound of my own weapon, and then everything else became crawling and squealing and hoping to stay alive.
I’m not sure how long it lasted. Not long.
Later, we found two dead VC. One was a boy, maybe fifteen, but maybe not a VC, maybe just fifteen. The other’s age was impossible to guess.
We spent another half hour in the ville, searching for weapons, then we straggled off toward the next village of the day.
* * *
In Concord that morning, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith divided his expedition into three parts. Six companies were dispatched to seize the North Bridge outside town and then to proceed to a nearby farm where the provincials were suspected of storing military supplies. The second unit marched west to capture and hold another bridge. The bulk of Smith’s command remained in Concord itself, where troops began searching for hidden weapons, gunpowder, and other provisions.
It was just after nine in the morning.
North of town, on a ridge overlooking the Concord River, about 300 militiamen had already gathered under the command of Colonel James Barrett, a local farmer. Warned of the British approach, the colonists had already relocated most of their supplies, and now they stood glaring down at the detachment of six redcoat companies holding the bridge below. After a short while, three of those companies continued across the bridge and headed up a narrow road toward the Barrett farm. The remaining three British companies—between 90 and 100 men—took up positions on and around North Bridge. For the first time that day, raw numbers swung in favor of the colonists. Armed militiamen were still streaming in from Acton, Lincoln, Westford, Littleton, Groton, Stow, Chelmsford, Bedford, and Carlisle. The 300 angry colonists soon became 400, then closer to 500. For the British troops waiting below, there was the pinch of unpleasant arithmetic. Captain Walter Laurie, in command of the British detachment at North Bridge, estimated the total provincial force to be about 1,300—an exaggeration not unknown among officers in my own war. As the rebel force strengthened, Laurie rushed a request for reinforcements back to Colonel Smith in Concord. But requests are only requests: a rider had to be dispatched, Smith had to be located, the request had to be approved, orders had to be issued, reinforcing units had to be scrabbled together, officers had to arrange and straighten the ranks, and tired men had to move by foot from Concord to North Bridge.
Meanwhile, north of town, Captain Laurie’s 100 or so redcoats eyed a growing force of rebels only a few hundred yards away. Neither Laurie nor the militia commander, James Barrett, seemed willing to initiate hostilities, and except for an accident of history, things may well have ended there—a standoff. But around nine-thirty, rebel gun carriages and heavy cannon were discovered in Concord. Hastily, Smith’s redcoats put the carriages and other supplies to the torch, and plumes of black smoke were soon rising high over the town. Among the militiamen about a mile away, there were rumblings that Concord itself might be razed and burned. (In fact, British troops were trying to extinguish fires that had spread to the town’s me
etinghouse.) Colonel Barrett, a Concord native, met with his officers and instructed a regiment to advance down to the bridge. According to one colonist, “We were all ordered to load, and had strict orders not to fire till they fired first, but then to fire as fast as we could.”
Hostilities were now nearly inevitable. On both sides, retreat was out of the question.
Quickly, as the militia pressed forward, Captain Laurie brought his three redcoat companies to the Concord side of the bridge. He had little room to maneuver. A few planks were torn up; flanking units were sent out along the riverbank. “By this time,” Laurie wrote, “they were very close upon us.” With battle imminent, it is doubtful that the British responded with amused or disdainful comments about an enemy refusing to stand and fight. “They halted for a considerable time, looking at us,” Laurie wrote, “and then moved down upon me in a seeming regular manner.” Another British officer described the rebel force as “very military” in its bearing and comportment.
If discipline broke down at all, it was among Laurie’s own men.
Badly outnumbered, tense and weary, the British troops watched the colonists approach to within fifty yards. A moment passed, and then, almost at the same instant, several redcoats fired without orders. Two militiamen fell dead; two or three others were wounded. Slowly at first, then rapidly, the colonists returned fire at almost point-blank range.
Within seconds, more than a tenth of the British force at North Bridge went down under intense musketry. Half the officers were hit—four out of eight. Three privates lay dead or dying. Five others were wounded.
The much-celebrated professionalism of the British army evaporated. Orders went unheeded or unheard. Standard infantry tactics were abandoned.
According to Lieutenant William Sutherland, himself among the wounded, “Captain Laurie desired the men to form a line to the right and left of the bridge, and the soldiers to keep up their fire. I jumped over the hedge into a meadow just opposite to the enemy as they were advancing to the bridge and beg’d they [his own men] would follow me . . . which only 3 or 4 did.”
The redcoat resistance was feeble at best. Captain Laurie exhorted his troops to stay steady, but the men soon broke and ran “in spite of all that could be done to prevent them.”
It was the beginning of a bloody, headlong retreat that would last another twenty miles, another nine or ten excruciating hours.
* * *
For the British, their opponents were “demons,” or “devils,” or “savages.”
For us, in Vietnam, they were “dinks,” or “slopes,” or “gooks.”
Today, they are “ragheads,” or “camel jockeys,” or worse.
The enemy is never wholly human. Never civilized, never virtuous, never honorable or righteous.
The enemy is barbarous, and we are not.
The enemy is fanatical, and we are not.
The enemy is godless, and we are not.
“What do you get,” went the joke in Alpha Company, “if you breed VC with rats?”
Midget rats.
“Sneaky little critters,” a tired old master sergeant once said. He was going home; he’d had enough. “I mean, hell, they don’t even got the nuts to duke it out, they don’t never barely stand up. Like snakes or something. Slither around and stick their fangs up your ass and then slither away.”
Snakes. Rats. Devils. Demons.
The enemy isn’t human, and we are.
Easier to kill a rat than a man. And afterward, easier to sleep at night.
In Vietnam, much as the British had two hundred years earlier, we viewed the enemy with a bizarre mixture of contempt and awe. Ridicule suddenly became terror. A rat suddenly became a demon. Moreover, again like the British in 1775, we hailed our army as the most powerful and proficient on the planet. We were the inheritors of Patton and Eisenhower and MacArthur. No vitamin deficiencies. Good bones, good teeth, good all-American genes. And if genes didn’t do the trick, there was always the glorious fruit of American industry, the choppers and jets and napalm and five-hundred-pound bombs and scrambler radios and starlight scopes and endless crates of ammunition, C rations, and whatever else the doctor ordered.
The typical VC carried a rifle, two or three magazines of ammunition, maybe a pouch of rice.
We chuckled at this, and then later we didn’t.
Contempt and awe, ridicule and astonishment—these dizygotic twins have coexisted in armies down through the ages, and the same double-sided image of the enemy lived on in Alpha Company during the month of May 1969 as we made our way from one hostile village to the next along the South China Sea. Roy Arnold was shot dead. Chip Merricks and Tom Marcunas were killed by a rigged artillery round. Several others, whose names I didn’t know, were badly wounded by gunfire. A kid named Clauson, whose first name long ago escaped me, was wounded by a homemade VC grenade. There were others, too. It was a terrible time. In a way, all these years afterward, it’s as if none of it ever happened, but in another way, it’s still happening and will never stop. I remember the dust-off choppers settling down, and how we carried our casualties aboard and then stood back and watched the helicopters lift off and dip their noses and bank out over the South China Sea. In those moments I’d imagine grabbing a skid, hanging on tight, and taking a long, high ride out of the horror. Maybe others in Alpha Company found comfort in the same fantasy. I don’t know.
Either way, we saddled up and plodded on—more villages, more dead, more wounded. The sniper fire never seemed to stop. We took fire from tree lines, from bamboo hedges, from the banks of the Tra Bong River, from paddy dikes, from pitiful little hooches out on the Batangan Peninsula, and yet through all that, we had very little to shoot back at. The VC were ghosts. It was their land, and they knew it well, and they disappeared without ever appearing.
Partly we were terrified, but we were also full of tight, hot payback fury, especially as the dead and wounded were choppered away.
At one point in mid-May, diving into a ditch, I somehow lost my glasses, and instantly, as if a gas burner had been turned on, a searing rage bubbled up inside me—my goddamn glasses—and it was those lost glasses, or my own incompetence, not just the endless gunfire, that made me truly and dearly want to kill and keep killing. I remember crabbing around in the ditch, full of fury, yelling at God and the war because I couldn’t find my goddamned glasses.
In different ways, we all felt it. Sometimes there were jokes, which was one way of feeling it. Mostly, though, we felt it in less pleasant ways. Shooting dogs and water buffalo, for instance. Calling in the Cobras and jets and artillery, for instance, and watching things burn.
* * *
About noon on April 19, 1775, the British expedition began its long march back to Boston. With flankers off to each side of the road, the column retraced its route back toward Lexington, now shadowed by militia units along a ridge just to the north. A mile or so outside Concord, at a road junction called Merriam’s Corner, the militia took up positions behind stone walls and farm buildings, waiting for the British to cross a narrow bridge to their front. According to a militiaman, “As soon as the British had gained the main road and passed a small bridge near the corner, they faced about suddenly and fired a volley of musketry upon us. They overshot, and no one to my knowledge was injured by the fire. The fire was immediately returned by the Americans, and two British soldiers fell dead at a little distance from each other in the road near the brook.”
In total, eight redcoats lay dead or dying. Not a single colonist had been hurt.
Heartened by ineffective British fire, the militiamen ran ahead to establish new positions along the road to Lexington. At a place called Hardy’s Hill, five full companies of provincial soldiers opened up on the redcoat column, killing two, wounding several others, while at the same time, to the rear, snipers and small groups of colonists kept up a steady harassing fire.
The pressure of superior numbers had begun to tell. In the woods and fields, everywhere, fresh militiamen from
surrounding towns were arriving to swell the American forces. At a spot that would later be known as Bloody Angle, two hundred provincials triggered a savage ambush that killed eight British soldiers and wounded about twenty more. Confusion and terror filled the British ranks. They had been trained to maneuver in formal alignment, standing upright in tidy rows, and now they were both horrified and enraged at the colonists’ Indian-style tactics.
“They did not fight us like a regular army,” wrote an anonymous redcoat, “only like savages, behind trees and stone walls, and out of the woods and houses.”
The same soldier complained that the provincials were “as bad as the Indians for scalping and cutting the dead men’s ears and noses off.”
Reports—and rumors—of atrocity were not unfounded. Earlier in the day, at North Bridge, a young colonist had used his hatchet to finish off a wounded redcoat, badly maiming the man. Accounts of the incident, perhaps embellished a bit, had circulated among the British rank and file. “The rebels fought like the savages of the country,” wrote a British officer, “and treated some, that had the misfortune to fall, like savages, for they scalped and cut off their ears with the most unmanly barbarity. This has irritated the troops to a very high degree.”
It was more than irritation. It was revulsion.
Later in the day, as British casualties mounted, the “scalping” episode became a justification for revenge—what we called payback in Vietnam.
Stumbling along, carrying their wounded, terrified and half dizzy with fatigue, the once-elegant British column seemed to disintegrate under ceaseless rebel musketry. Two more regulars died in a field of boulders along the road. Minutes later, members of the Lexington militia triggered an ambush that killed four British soldiers and wounded several others—among them the expedition’s commanding officer, Colonel Francis Smith.