by John Lawton
‘Notley sat at the center of it all, like he was out of it, but like he was the hub at the same time. Notley and that old woman with the calabash. Stillness in the eye of the hurricane. Till Al Braga realized she was there and blew the top of her head off, that is.
‘I don’t know how long the firing lasted. You could tell me it was ten minutes or an hour, and the only reason I’d say it was less than an hour was I don’t think our ammo would have lasted that long. But go quiet it did. It dropped on us like a blanket. Silence. Not a bird, not a squealing pig—after all we’d killed the pigs too.
‘Then the air began to fill—it filled with the sound of Gurvitz crying and it filled with the smell of blood and open guts—a stinking gory, shitty smell that gradually overtook the stink of cordite.
‘Then—the men came running, up from the fields downriver. Little wiry, peasant guys in wooden hats, clutching nothing more lethal than hoes. Feaver grabbed Gurvitz by the arm, slung a couple of bandoliers over his shoulder and said, “You load”—dragged the kid out toward the men and opened up with his shotgun and his M79. At close range, a sawed-off shotgun is a messy weapon. But that’s nothing compared to a grenade launcher. Shotgun can pulp a man’s face and chest. Grenade just dissolves him into a bloody mist. Maybe twenty or thirty men came running. Feaver stood his ground, like some old gunfighter in a Western—like The Magnificent Seven—took ’em one at a time, blasting away with first one gun and then the other, one hand then the other. Gurvitz crouched behind him loading each gun as he threw it down. He didn’t miss once. One guy got within three feet of him. Feaver cut him in two with a machete.
‘The only living thing left was a big, old water buffalo, standing a ways off, up to its knees in water, not seeming to mind the noise. Feaver loaded one last grenade, took aim. It looked like an impossible shot. Just too damn far for such an erratic weapon. We watched the critter explode like a bag of water a couple of high school kids had dropped off the roof.
‘It was over, there was nothing to kill anymore. Feaver had us drag all the bodies to the irrigation ditch and pile ’em up. I counted as the Nine did it. He saw me counting and asked me how many. I told him. Give or take half a dozen I made it one hundred and thirty-four. One hundred and thirty-four. Everyone that lived in Village 77.’
Mouse stopped. He’d talked so long I felt it was akin to the silence after the gunfire he’d described. It came down and left a void. The unholy joy of dope had evaporated like morning mist. I was back with blood and vomit. I felt like I’d been cased in glass, a brittle, transparent skin between me and Mouse and everything he’d said. The night was pitch dark now. The table lamp cut an arc across the room, I could see my own hands, splayed across the photo album, Mouse’s huge hands resting on his legs. I could scarcely see Mouse at all.
‘Mouse?’
‘Sure.’
‘Mouse. What were you doing all this time?’
‘Following orders. What did Feaver tell me? Keep clicking. So I clicked. I got it all on film.’
‘But . . . but . . .’
‘Why didn’t I try to stop it? Is that what you tryin’ to say, Johnnie? Why not? Because Feaver would have killed me. He’d made it perfectly clear he’d kill Gurvitz. Believe me he’d of done it if Gurvitz hadn’t backed down. And the way the Nine opened up on those gooks I had little doubt any one of them would have killed me if I got in the way. Only one not blasting away for Stanley Mishkoff was Notley, but he didn’t get in their way either. It was all for Stanley. Nothing I could have said would have made a nickel’s worth of difference.’
‘Mouse . . . it was . . . it was a massacre,’ I bleated.
‘Sure it was. A massacre. A gookshoot. Happens all the time.’
‘You can’t mean that?’
‘Johnnie. I never saw another killing on that scale, but if you’re there—and like I said an hour or two back “you had to be there”—you hear stories like this all the time.’
‘Innocent people cut down without a second thought?’
‘Yes. What the hell else is a free fire zone? Oh, you never heard of that? Means what it says. Brass draw a circle round a district, and say any Vietnamese found inside is presumed to be VC and killed if encountered. Even without that they’re fair game. I was being flown back to Da Nang one time in a gunship. We fly low over a garbage dump, and there are twenty or so gooks scrabbling over it looking for the good stuff Uncle Sam throws away. So the guy in charge tells the pilot to come round again. He drops a load of C-rations and candy bars, so the gooks all converge on ’em, we hover while they do and he drops a white phosphorous shell and cooks the lot of ’em. He and the pilot laugh all the way back to base. That’s what it’s like. Things like that happen all the time. And not just to the gooks. There was one guy at Mighty Joe Young got paranoid about getting some peace and privacy, so he rigged claymore mines all around his dugout. Took out half his own platoon when they got drunk and decided to roust him.’
I realized I’d bumbled into the source of an urban myth—a much told tale, the mad grunt with the claymores.
I said, ‘But this is different.’
‘So you keep saying. You gonna tell me why?’
‘Because it got you discharged from the army and pensioned off. That’s why.’
Mouse sighed. ‘Let me finish. There was more. There was more. We got ourselves together. Nobody was cheering. Braga and Puckett were grinning, Gurvitz looked to be in shock, the rest were silent. Nobody’s got nothin’ to say. Then Feaver says, “Torch it.”
Hollis says, “It’ll be visible for miles around.”
“Right,” says Feaver. So we torch the place and move out, back the way we came. First break we take for food Lieutenant Gurvitz sits down, puts his .45 in his mouth and pulls the trigger. We didn’t even bury the kid, just took his dogtags, kicked earth over him and moved on.
‘Walter Hollis was walking behind me, telling me again that “this guy is gonna get us all killed”. VC stepped out of the trees, put a gun to his neck and damn near blew his head off. I couldn’t turn quick enough. I got off one shot and missed. Marty Fawcett dropped him. Then all hell breaks loose and we hit the floor as the bullets start flying. We return fire and start crawling out of there. Feaver tells Braga to blast ’em as soon as we’re clear and he cuts up the jungle with a burst of fire. I don’t know if he got any of them. We got sniped at every so often the rest of the day, and all the next, but they didn’t score. We’d return fire and the sniping would stop for an hour or two, but it seemed pretty clear to me they were dogging us.
‘When we came to the first village again, the one made out of crates, Feaver led us in, marked a couple of mines on the way and took us right into the ville. It was empty. Fire still glowing, food in the pot, but empty. They’d heard, and they’d run. It was close to dark. All the rules say you don’t overnight in a ville, too easy a target, but Feaver says, “Demolish this place, fill the crates with dirt and dig in.”
Marty says, “Supposing they have mortars?”
Feaver says, “If they had mortars they’d have used them. They wouldn’t be trying to pick us off one by one. We’re the ones with the mortar.”
‘And he tells Gus to get his mortar set up and ready.
‘By the time we were in position we looked like a wagon train circled and waiting on the Injuns to attack. Attack they did. Feaver says to ignore rifle fire, and wait for movement. They couldn’t scratch us with AK47s. Just gave away their own positions. Reckon there must have been more ’n fifty of ’em. Feaver has Gus lob a mortar shell at the flashes, and that does the trick. They come at us like Englishmen going over the top. Feaver launches flares, lights up the clearing like daylight, yells “Fire” and we cut ’em down. Then a second wave comes at us, and in among them, dodging bullets like a linebacker, is this little guy with a really weird looking jacket. Takes me a second or two to re
alize what it is. He’s wearing a chestful of explosives—the guy is a human bomb. All the other guys are dying just as his cover. He means to leap the Hershey Bar stockade and blow himself up and us with him. And nobody can hit him. Braga is changing belts. Marty keeps missing him. I have Stanley’s M16 and the damn thing jams on me. But—shit—I’m deadeye dick, aren’t I? I taught these guys to shoot. I stand up. Pray to God nothing hits me. Take my .45 in both hands, draw a bead on the little fucker and squeeze. Blast lifted me right off my feet. Knocked me cold for a minute. By the time I come to, Gus Gore is checking me for wounds and saying, “It’s all over, you got him.” I sit up, look out as the last flare dies off, and there in front of our stockade is a crater, ten feet across and two deep and no sign of the little fucker.
Feaver claps me on the shoulder and says to me, “Nice shooting, weegeeman. That bastard would have done for us for sure. Welcome to ’Nam.”
‘Welcome to ’Nam. I’d finally killed somebody. Ten years in the US Army and I’d finally killed somebody. Welcome to ’Nam.
‘We lit out at first light. I remember picking my way through the bodies, the bits of Cong scattered around from the night before. Like wading into the dead. Later that day we’re back in thick jungle. Foster is walking point, Connor has the compass and is a few steps behind. Good point man needs second sight, intuition like a dog. We put the company clowns on it. Second sight didn’t get a look in. You know what a Bouncing Betty is? It’s a small mine with three prongs, you have only to brush one as you pass it. But there’s two charges inside it, and detonation isn’t instant. Damn thing leaps out of the ground on the first charge, makes a sound like a popgun going off. Shoots up to about waist height. By now, if you’re the poor motherfucker that’s tripped it, you’re a step or so ahead, and the guy behind you becomes a target as well. Foster tripped one. When the second charge went off it blew him in two and put a hole in Connor’s belly the size of a football. One piece passed right through him traveling so fast it shimmied up the side of my forearm . . .’
Mouse shoved his right arm into the light. There was a shiny scar with puckered edges, about ten inches long. A shallow, gouging wound, as though some thoughtless child had scraped a quarter along the side of a shiny new automobile.
‘I figure you won’t want to see the Purple Heart, but I got one. So did Notley. Same chunk of metal finally spent itself in his helmet. When I wheeled round with my arm burning there he was with a wash of blood flowing down over his face. Everybody else had hit the floor. But there were no more bangs, no bullets. I didn’t turn round. I’d seen what had happened. I didn’t need to look again. Nine was Six. We didn’t even kick earth over them this time. We collected up the bits, wrapped ’em in ponchos and left ’em. Gus Gore bandaged us up, Feaver got us together and said chances were Charlie had mined the trail in several places, so we were going off-trail. So we did. Took us about five days out I reckon, took us eight to get back. Slashin’ and cuttin’ and crawlin’ our way back to Mighty Joe Young. Braga just threw the M60 away when he used up his last belt, Gus dumped the mortar, and Feaver said nothing. So we got back. No machine gun, no mortar, no radio, out of C-Rations, all but out of ammunition, fifty percent casualties.
‘We were coming up the slope to our perimeter, sunset on the thirteenth day, guards had sounded the alert, there were guns trained on us—waiting for us to ID ourselves. Feaver sends Marty up the slope, then he walks next to me a while. I’m dog tired. Man, I’m tireder than I’ve ever been my whole life, and he kinda makes out he’s giving me a hand, then he slips his knife under my camera strap and the 35mm drops into his hand like an apple from the tree.
‘I just looked at him.
He says, “I have more use for this than you do. And I’ll take the other films. I know you shot more than one.”
‘I had my 35mm tins in a cartridge belt, like ammo. I unhooked it and let him have it. He says, “Believe me, Sergeant Mouse, you’ve done the right thing, and if you got the right shots you did a good job.”
‘I said nothing. I just let him walk on past me right into the compound. I had the Rolleiflex slung at the back. Maybe he didn’t notice it. Maybe he didn’t realize that kinda square leather box held a camera. Those old two lens reflexes look nothing like modern cameras. I’d used it. I had a roll of twenty-four in it and I’d shot ’em all off at Village 77. He thinks he got it all. He hasn’t. I got twenty-four color shots of what happened there. Now—turn to the back of the book. There’s a small folder, like an envelope, tucked into the sleeve.’
I looked but once and I never looked again. Even when those photographs became public property I never looked again. There is a myth—and I do not mean by that that it is a lie—that the Vietnam war was the first television war, and took place in the living rooms of America night after night. The truth in that is that it was night after night—but it wasn’t live, it was often days old and as such controlled and mediated. The first war that wasn’t was the Gulf War, happened here and now, in your face. What I saw on Rose’s black and white portable TV in the comfort of our downtown Manhattan apartment in the late 1960s could be bloody, but nothing in the nightly news could prepare me for the color carnage in Mouse’s twenty-four shots of Village 77. The euphemisms suddenly took on a literal quality—blown away, wasted. People literally being blown away by our fire power. We huffed and we puffed and we blew their house in.
In a curious way the bloodiest shots, the action shots—Foster and Connor mowing down a dozen women in a crossfire, a tide of blood lapping at their feet—Al Braga, hatless and locked in a permanent and silent cry of triumph, mouth wide, eyes wide, arms wide, holding up the severed head of an old man—the ditch full of children riddled with bullets—the moment the water buffalo exploded—made less impact than the more passive, the recorded moments Mouse had snatched between the action. Notley, still sitting crosslegged, expressionless, bits of someone’s brain spattered in his hair like death’s own confetti—a woman putting her body between her unseen assailant and her children, a photo that left me trying to count the seconds till she died—Walter Hollis looking sideways at the camera, his pistol hanging loose at his side, his face far from expressionless, the eyes telling you he is in hell . . . and the old woman with the calabash just staring back at the camera.
I flipped over the last photograph. Mouse had scrawled the date and place on the back. ‘Village 77. March 31st, 1968.’
A lot happened that day.
‘I don’t know what happened next. I slept the whole night and most of the next day. Then a second lieutenant I’d never seen before wakes me up and says, “Get your shit together, you’re outa here.” I didn’t get to shit or shave even. Next thing I know there’s this big Chinook on the edge of the base whirling away. Two sergeants scream at me that I’m the last and throw me and my kit into the ’copter, and there inside are the six survivors of the Nine, all lookin’ as rough as me and askin’, “Whasshappenin’, Sarge?” Like I should know.
‘At Da Nang we finally get to clean up and the next morning we parade in front of a half-colonel who says something like, “You’ve done sterling service, men.” Yeah—I’m sure that was it. Sterling service. “And your government is happy to inform you all of your discharge from the United States Armed Forces at the end of your tour of duty. Your tour ends, 1300 hours today.” He looks at his watch, like every one of those guys hasn’t already worked out that it is exactly five hours and forty minutes away. They’re looking at one another in pure disbelief. Then he says, “Sergeant Kylie, PFC Chapin? There’ll be purple hearts for the both of you. Men, my congratulations.” Then we all salute like puppets jerking our arms up and down. A corporal come round, hands each of us written orders. Four of the six are flying out today—all on different flights. Me, Notley and Pete Chambers are flying down the coast to Saigon, to wait for a flight the next day or the day after.
‘So, the guys get shitfaced over lunch—
ripped between the happiness of knowing they come through alive and the knowledge of what they had to do to come through alive. Nobody mentions what happened over the last couple of weeks. But I can almost smell it. That mildewed, rotting cotton smell that hung over everything in ’Nam. I could swear I smelled it, wafting our way every so often, blown in with a joke or a beer. The taste of jungle in a Da Nang bar, the lick of death that’d never leave us.
‘That afternoon, the three of us say goodbye to the other four and I haven’t seen any of them since. I heard from Marty once, but he didn’t tell me he was ill. And Gus writes to me. I figure Puckett and Braga went back to their own briarpatches—they were the kind that weren’t happy anywhere else. The rest of us get into Saigon in time to have an evening out. But we all have different ideas of what that should be. All I want is a bar and a whiskey while I wait for some little guy in a photoshop to develop my roll for me. I have to know what I’ve got. If I don’t know I don’t think I’ll ever relax again. Notley goes in search of a hooker and a pipe of opium. Pete Chambers wants to do what he always did if there was light enough. Read and write. When he wasn’t writing letters he was reading. Read that Madame Bovary by the beam of his flashlight completely encased in his poncho while we were out there. Now he has this thing, The Quiet American by some English guy called Greene. All he wants is a good café, a cup of coffee and to read. We all arrange to meet up with him at ten. At twenty of ten some kid rides a bike packed with plastic explosive into the café and blows up himself and half the people in there. By the time I get there, the medics have Pete’s body under a sheet and Notley is standing there quiet, with tears rolling down his face, clutching the bloody, ripped up book Pete had been reading.