by John Lawton
Of course. I thought everybody had.
‘It’s anonymous . . . nobody’s layin’ claim to it, but after we flattened Ben Tre into matchsticks someone on our side says, “We had to destroy the town in order to save it.” That goes for Hué too. Could be before this war’s over that’ll be the key phrase for the whole of Vietnam. Had to destroy it to save it.’
Mouse took a toke and passed the joint back to me, momentarily lost in his narrative.
‘But—like I was sayin’, the Nine came through all that. The Army really worked those kids. By the middle of March they looked and sounded like veterans. I’d been out with each squad once, easy missions in each case, and I’d been back and forth to Da Nang, often for no better reason than a colonel wanted a mess photo of the senior staff all together or a picture to send home to the wife and kids. One idiot even had me flown across a battleline with flak bursting all around the chopper just to photograph some damn Vietnamese pig he’d adopted as a mascot. Another wanted a picture of his dog. God knows ’Nam has enough dogs and pigs to go round. There were times I thought we’d invented napalm just as a glaze for roast pork. But the Nine, they patrolled hard, almost non-stop, met Charlie head on more’n half a dozen times. They say it’s a war in which you cannot see your enemy. I met guys served whole tours in ’Nam and never set eyes on Charlie. They did. They’d seen action. Watched guys shot up and blown apart. Tried to stop open arteries with pressure bandages. Gathered up dead grunts and loaded the bits into body bags. They were no longer FNG . . . Fucking New Guys—the guys who came after the guys who came after them, they were the FNG now. I finally figured out what it was about them . . . it was childhood’s end. I’d known them as boys. I suppose this is where I have to say they were now men—but what the fuck does that mean? What’s “a man”? Someone who’s finally worked out he’s mortal just like everybody else? That’s manhood? Having to see someone else blown apart just so you can realize it could happen to you? Horsepucky. If that’s the definition, then the point of war is to wise up the unimaginative. I heard idiots tell me crap like “war makes men”—all war does is make dead boys. Best I can say about the Nine is they’d seen enough to take off the shine and maybe not yet enough to get bitter or numb about it. Maybe wised up to war, but not broken by it. You could see that in the eyes of the short-timers. Guys who knew exactly how many days they had left to serve and were counting down to it. They’d been to the limit. They’d been broken—shot up, patched up and sent back to the line, and they’d watched their buddies die week after week and they’d killed Cong and they’d got past the point where they cared one way or the other about killing Cong. The Nine had just tasted it. Three months in the field. No one hurt, no one really sure if in all the rounds he’d fired he’d ever hit Charlie. But . . . they were still alive—not one of ’em had gotten a scratch yet. Every now and then they’d get back to base, find a chance to meet up, take the rise out of Stanley, listen to Bob’s string of gags and get shitfaced.
‘It was then the Colonel showed up. The day after I got back from Hué. Now, Johnnie, you flip that book open again about the halfway point.’
Mouse leaned over to me, put his hand flat on the page when I hit the right one.
‘Yeah, that’s the feller. Jack Feaver. Colonel. United States Special Forces.’
It was a small color snap, another square contact print, not big enough for detail and slightly out of focus. A big, strutting kind of white man, almost as big as Mouse himself, leaner, sleeker, loaded down with weapons, a green blur at the top of his head.
‘A Green Beret?’
‘That ain’t no cabbage leaf on his head. Yeah. That’s him. John Wayne for real. He turned up around the third week of March. Alpha and Charlie were both back at Mighty Joe Young. He flew in looking like a one-man arsenal. Y’see that thing looks like a sawed-off shotgun in his hand? It’s a grenade launcher, an M79. You see that thing in the holster on his belt? That is a sawed-off shotgun. I knew the first time I saw him what it meant. Man who carries a sawed-off means to kill, means to kill not like raining down shells or napalm, or loosing off every round in an M16 at shadows, but up close, to kill a man when you can see his face. Shotgun ain’t much use over fifty feet away anyways, so a man with a sawed-off means to kill you when he’s looking you right in the eye. I had him tagged for a crazy from the start. He shows up with written authorization to recruit for a ten-man patrol to go a week out towards the border. Volunteers only, and he’s askin’ for ’em. None of the short-sticks would go. Any man who’s counting down to the end of his time means to live through it. The new guys just looked baffled. They didn’t know what to volunteer meant. They’d always followed orders, and here was this guy not giving orders. Maybe it was only guys like the Nine who would ever volunteer. Guys with one foot in the swamp. Just wised-up enough, just green enough. Marty upped and spoke. I’m with you, he said, and then the others were bound to follow. The comedians, Notley, Puckett. Where Marty led they followed. I was standing by Walter Hollis, Platoon Sergeant. He just grit his teeth and muttered “Shit” and got in line. That left the lieutenant in a fix. Second Lieutenant Norman Gurvitz. He could hardly stand by and let his men go without him. He followed Hollis no more happy about it than Hollis was. “I need ten men,” Feaver says and Marty asks for the other four to be brought over from Charlie Company. Feaver’s back in less than thirty minutes with them all in tow. Al Braga, Pete Chambers, Gus Gore, and little Stanley. And the other eight are happy as hogs in a peach orchard, ’cause they all got Stanley back. Whatever they were now they were still young enough, superstitious enough to believe in things like the power of having your own mascot. Stanley loved every minute of it. When else does a short, fat, Jewish kid get to be the center of attention? They wore that kid like a cap badge.’
As if on cue, I could not but think of Mel Kissing, of Jerry Rubin, of Abbie Hoffman—all the short, Jewish guys I’d known, desperate to be the center of attention.
‘Next morning they were setting off at first light. I showed up, toting my cameras, just the .45 on my belt for defense. Braga had an M60 machine gun across his shoulders, Stanley was RTO, Radio Telephone Operator, with the radio strapped to his back, Gus Gore had a lightweight mortar and it looked to me as though everyone was carrying double ammo, maybe five, six hundred rounds apiece. I didn’t say nothing. Feaver just looks at me and says, “Those stripes won’t count for nothing here. I got all the sergeants I need.”
“Fine by me,” I says. “I’ll just be one of the men.”
“Why the hell not?” he says. “I said I wanted ten, didn’t I? Nine greenhorns and a weegeeman. Why the hell not? Just keep that shutter clicking.”
‘I was the one who lacked imagination, I was the greenest horn of them all. Walter Hollis was an old buddy. We’d done boot camp together back in the fifties. He was in the Army same reason I was—unless you could sing do-wop, the only chance for a black man to get out and get up. But he said to me first day out, “Why d’you do this, man? I got no choice. These boys is my boys, but you? Why, man?” I had no real answer to give him. There was no necessity for me to be there. I could be back in Da Nang snapping hookers and pot-bellied pigs. It was tougher than anything I’d done on patrol. Made route marches in Georgia seem like picnics. By the end of that day you could of dragged me to a hammock and sewn me up, I felt as though every vine and every thorn in the whole of Vietnam had tried to choke me or slash me. I had blisters the size of half dollars and skeeter bites like teenage zits. Feaver says to me, how do I like life as a foot soldier? I told him I’d been there before, just not lately. Got a smile out of him, so I cut in quick and said, “What exactly are we after, sir?”
“After? We have a mission, weegeeman. We have a mission.”
‘And that told me diddley squat.
‘I was doing what the Nine had done for the best part of three months, slogging through swamp and jungle loaded down with seve
nty pounds of gear—two cameras, twenty rolls of film, trenching tool, poncho, ammunition, flares, tin hat, knife, malaria pills, iodine tablets, C rations, clean socks . . . you can get to love clean socks. You know what the American infantryman is? A factory workshop on legs, a human Swiss Army knife with a blade for everything, a mobile unit that works till exhausted and beyond.
‘Jungle got so thick by the next afternoon you could hardly tell it was day. Sun just didn’t make it down to the bottom. It was like hacking through jello—jello, slime, green slime that grew. We seemed to cover a matter of only a few hundred yards in an hour. Must’ve been more but it sure felt that way.
‘We dug in—not literally, couldn’t dig a hole in the jungle floor for roots, made skeeter tents out of our ponchos—we looked like an Indian camp of midget teepees—posted guards, cooked up C-rations—and then they all did their own thing. Did things just like they’d do at home in the privacy of their own rooms. Braga took out his collection of fuck shots, women doing it with God knows who in God knows what position, and I’ll swear that punk beat his meat. Marty flossed—didn’t matter where we were, what we’d eaten, Marty would floss. Chambers wrote letters to his girlfriend, Stanley to his mother, Connor told dirty jokes half the night, and Notley—man he was weird—Notley did his latest thing, he’d sit in the lotus position and meditate. He was in the middle of the goddam jungle doing a hippie number on a hard-case like Feaver. Feaver just ignored him.
Stanley says, “Do I get on the radio and report our position, sir?”
Feaver says, “What is our position, Private?”
Stanley says, “I don’t know.”
“Then you can’t report it, can you? Just maintain radio silence.”
‘On the third day we came out into elephant grass—that’s kinda like razor blades on stalks high as your head. And where the grass ended we found ourselves looking down on a village—a dozen hooches, no more than that, a flat-bottomed little valley, a stream no more than six feet wide and long narrow rice paddies either side of it. It was bizarre. They’d built their hooches out of garbage—crates, boxes, cans, all the stuff that gets thrown away on an American base. Through binoculars I could even read the labels on the side—Budweiser, Brillo, Coke, Campbell’s, Heinz, Pepsi, Marlboro, Reese’s, Camel, Hershey. Reading the side of one of those hooches was like watching the ads between two bits of Bonanza on the TV. I hadn’t a clue where we were, Feaver did all the navigating himself. We were in the middle of nowhere, and it looked like an outtake of back home. America in a straw hat, America toting a rice bowl.
I heard the lieutenant say, “Do we go in, sir?”
Feaver said no, we go round it.
“But they might be VC, sir.”
“Might? They sure as hell are.”
‘He wasn’t a great one for explaining. Frustrated the hell out of Lieutenant Gurvitz. A couple of days later, we’re taking a break, he comes up to Feaver, I’m a few yards off, rubbing my feet, Hollis is next to me, cleaning the condensation out of his rifle, and he says, “Sir. I’ve been following the map with my compass.” And he unfolds the map between us, so Hollis can see as well. “Here is where I think we are, and here is where we encountered Charlie the last two times out. It seems to me that we’re swinging south, almost as though we were coming up behind them.’
“You could be right,” says Feaver.
‘But Gurvitz ain’t through. He points to a river, for all I knew one we’d waded across, I’d lost track of them, three or four, I wasn’t sure, and he says, “If we’re here, on the west bank of this river, and this is where we are, isn’t it, sir?”
“So?” says Feaver.
“Then I’m afraid we’ll have to go back, sir. We’re in Laos. We’re not in Vietnam anymore, not these last five miles. We’re in Laos.”
‘Feaver laughed out loud at this.
“You don’t say,” he says. “And what do you think the Laotians will do about us?”
“Well, sir. Technically it is an act of war, an invasion.”
“Then let ’em fight back. What’re they gonna do? Nuke Washington? Lieutenant, it’s just a line on a fucking map, probably not even an accurate line. Do you think Charlie bothers about lines on maps, do you think the Ho Chi Minh trail carefully toes a line down the Vietnamese side of the border? Haven’t you learnt yet? It’s all Vietnam—don’t matter what they call it. It’s all Charlie. We’re just taking the war to them, ’stead of waiting for it to come to us. Why do you think we bomb Laos every day?”
“We bomb Laos?”
“We bomb Laos every goddam day.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Gimme a break, Mr Gurvitz.”
‘Gurvitz had nothing more to say. I looked at the map. It seemed to me we were skirting a big hill numbered Hill 77. The village we’d passed wasn’t even marked on the map.
‘Next day it was uphill and downhill. Foothills below Hill 77, which we kept to our right. My feet were hardening off. I wasn’t finding it so bad. We had another river to wade, wider than most, thirty or forty feet. Made us vulnerable, strung out like that with no cover. Sniper on the far side got off a couple of rounds. We all turned on his fire flash, pumped a hundred rounds and a couple of grenades into the trees and he went silent. When we looked back Stanley Mishkoff was lying on his back under the water. The obvious target, the guy with the wavy aerial over his head. Foster pulled him up, but there was a hole clean through his helmet and clean through his head. The Nine had lost their first man. Lost their mascot. Two or three guys ran up the other bank. Found Charlie, looked to be a kid of fifteen or so, wounded, badly shot up and not like to live, dragged him to the edge. They kicked him and they stomped on him and they cursed him. Then Al Braga racks up the M60 and cuts the kid into pieces with it. Till Feaver stops him.
“You’re wasting ammunition. You’ll need it, when your chance comes.”
“Motherfucker killed Sputnik!” Braga screams at him.
“You’ll get your chance,” says Feaver. Then he looks at all of us. “You’ll all get your chance,” he says, “every last one of you.” And Walter Hollis just whispers, “Oh shit” so only I can hear him. “This fucker’s gonna get us all killed.”
‘We lost a couple of hours burying Stanley. Usually you call in a chopper to take out the dead, but Stanley had fallen on the RT and smashed it, so we dug a hole, Hollis said a few words and then we were on our way again. Nine were eight, but they weren’t the same. They were blooded now.
‘It was next morning, midday sun not quite on high, when we came to the next village. Gurvitz got out his map again, tells Feaver this one is marked but not named.
“Call it what you like,” says Feaver. “We’re gonna put it on the only map that matters.”
‘I watched Gurvitz scribble in “Village 77.” Just had time to stuff it in his pouch before Feaver says, “Fan out, we’re going in. Everybody watch for trip-wires.”
‘It was bigger than the last, maybe thirty hooches in all. Packed in tight to a broad clearing, wide paddies all around it, water buffalo grazing or whatever it is water buffalo do in water. Pigs and chickens and kids roaming around in the dirt.
‘There was an old woman. Could’ve been eighty or more. Hard to tell with Vietnamese women. They start out looking so good and then age so fast. I say eighty. God knows she could have been fifty. She watched us all come into the ville, like men stepping on broken glass. Lightfoot and silent. She had this big calabash type thing over an open fire. She was stirring it with a wooden spoon three feet long. She looked up and she just watched. She said nothing and her expression didn’t change. Wasn’t blank nor indifferent, or stuff like that. Seemed to me like nothing could surprise her, as though she saw us as some sort of inevitability.
‘I took her photograph. First of many. Full on staring at me without a flicker.
‘We turned out the hooches. Mostly women, some old men, lotsa kids. Not a man under sixty among them. We searched the place, looking for weapons, hidey holes, bunkers, ammo dumps—all the usual evidence of VC being there. We found nothing. If the VC had been there it was a while back, they’d left no trace. If it was a VC village—and there was a theory most of us held to that everyone was VC—then they’d covered it well. To me they were just peasants.
‘Gurvitz reports to Feaver, “Nothing, sir. They’re clean.”
“Clean,” Feaver says. “How can they be clean? Where do you think the guy who shot Sputnik came from?”
“Sir, there’s no evidence they’re VC.”
‘But the Lieutenant is trying to fold the flood, ’cause mostly the Nine are all fired up about Stanley. Whatever happens now they want to get even. They’ll do whatever Feaver tells them. And Feaver tells them.
“If it walks kill it. If it crawls kill it. If it grows kill it.”
‘Braga opens up on half a dozen women straightaway. Blasts them to bits.
‘Gurvitz yells for him to stop, tries to argue one more time, but by now Feaver has a pistol to his head, tells him to shut up or he’ll blow his brains out. And then he moves out the men at the top of his voice.
“KILL THEM ALL!”
‘And they did, they wasted everyone, old men, women, kids. They lobbed grenades into hooches, they gunned them down when they ran, they blew them away as they pleaded for mercy. I watched a woman wrap her baby in her arms and try to shield it. Puckett shot the kid at point blank range. Blew the kid out of her arms. She was spattered in the blood and guts of her baby, then Puckett shot her too. Connor and Foster rounded ’em up like cattle, maybe fifty in a crowd, herded them into an irrigation ditch and shot ’em like they was popping at fish in a barrel.
‘Hollis froze. Gurvitz wandered around weeping. Then Hollis unfroze, started firing off single rounds, while everybody else was set to rock ’n’ roll. Picking off the men, as though this somehow was more acceptable to him, as though Walter couldn’t bring himself to shoot a woman, but couldn’t bring himself to disobey an order either. But Notley—Notley just laid down his rifle, sat cross-legged and let it all happen around him. Feaver seemed like ten men, a killing machine, a man gone berserk, yet still he didn’t let Gurvitz out of his sight. Seemed to regard him as the one threat to him. He ignored Notley. It was as though he couldn’t even see him.