The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  The enemy captured a wireman from Bravo Company one night. They skinned him alive, leaving only his face, sliced off his penis, then soaked him in salt water. Bravo, which had gone into perimeter three klicks away, listened to him screaming all night long. The VC used amplifiers to make sure the Americans heard.

  VC were equally brutal to their own people who refused to cooperate with the NLF. A village chief was totally reduced in spirit after VC delivered his son to him in an earthenware jar.

  He looked like a pot of stewed tomatoes, among which floated fragments of bone, wads of hair and lumps of flesh.

  GIs, of course, committed their own atrocities. It was that kind of war. They sometimes shot down civilians for fun or target practice. Bored soldiers went “squirrel hunting” in civilian areas. Helicopter gunships were occasionally hired out for human turkey shoots,

  “Fu-uck!” Mad Dog Carter would say. The way he said it, the word was two syllables. Fu-uck. His represented the general attitude. “The only way to end this fuckin war is to put all these dinks in boats, take ’em out to sea, shoot ’em all, then sink the boats.”

  My Third Herd Platoon was tasked to pull duty at PPB Cougar through Christmas 1967. Although rumors of a “big offensive” had circulated among GIs for weeks, there was little indication that it would actually happen. Mangrum had already had his head blown off and we had eagle-flighted into the burned-out junk force base on the My Tho River and saw the damage Charlie could do when he put his mind to it. Third Platoon was happy to get out of the field for a while. Duty at Cougar was almost downtime, a welcome respite from jitterbugging all over the AO trying to add a decent body count to Colonel Hackman’s dic board.

  Aside from routine security patrols, the platoon played cards, wrote letters, passed around crotch novels, and bullshitted. Nights, we rotated guard duty and listened to transistor radios, since we had no light by which to do anything else. Sitting in the dark at rifle slits listening to Nancy Sinatra, Dean Martin and the Beatles over Armed Forces Radio Network. Every so often someone popped a hand-held parachute flare to illuminate the rice field so we could see if Charlie was sneaking up on us.

  Daniels the seer still predicted a dire future for the platoon, but everyone else thought we had it “dicked.” Like Bill Mauldin’s cartoon characters Willie and Joe used to say in World War II, it was a good war as long as nothing was happening in your sector. It was an especially good war for Third considering that elsewhere in the AO the enemy was putting the 4/39th’s feet to the fire.

  We learned from eavesdropping on the battalion radio net that Alpha Company located a VC tunnel complex and triggered an ambush which left one GI dead and three wounded, that Head & Head MPs at Dong Tam nabbed a female at the army garbage dump salvaging discarded U. S. Army Field Manuals on booby traps and small unit combat tactics; that the VC attacked a scout dog team, killing the dog and wounding the handler; that patrol boats crossing the Kinh Xang Canal took thirty rounds of AK fire; that an ARVN company found graves containing the remains of five tortured GIs.

  We felt lucky indeed to be out of it, at least for a little while. Only the beginning monsoons dampened our spirits. Billowing clouds rushed angrily in from the South China Sea and dark grayness covered the land. One violent downpour followed another, with brief intermissions of sun and steam. Driving sheets of rain pounded the poor land until every canal, stream and river swelled and overflowed. Men and machines broke down. Only boats continued to operate in some areas of the Mekong Delta.

  Rain fell almost steadily for three days. PPB Cougar flooded and resembled more than ever a giant crayfish berm. We had to add an extra layer of sandbags to the walkways to keep above the water line. Cougar became a bog, along with platoon morale. Men objected to pulling night watch or running security patrols.

  “Mother Kaz, there ain’t no dinks out there. They’re smarter than we are. 0l’ Charlie is shacked up someplace warm and dry with a good piece of ass.”

  Sgt. Holtzauer was always alert for infractions of protocol. He warned me not to let the men become too familiar. A distance had to be maintained between officers and enlisted.

  “That’s Lieutenant Kaz to you, stink breath,” he scolded. “Now get off your own good piece of ass and do what the LT. tells you, or I’m gonna kick it so hard you’ll have to take off your shirt to shit.”

  “It’s raining,” the acute weather observer predicted.

  Sgt. Holtzauer glared at him, sticking out his jaw. “What gives you your first clue, Dick Tracy?”

  “It’s cold,” Bugs Wortham put in, whining as usual. “I never thought it was cold in Vietnam.”

  Daniels sat in a corner of the command bunker cleaning his M60, his feet propped up on sandbags to keep them out of the water.

  “You ain’t done nothin but bitch since you got here, Wortham,” he said mildly, taking a swipe at an imagined rust spot on the breach of his gun. Rain gnawed hard at the hooch’s tin roof “You a cherry-boy, man, an you don’t know nothin. You listen to me an thank your white man God you in here an not out there. “

  He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the pool underneath where he sat, for emphasis. He closed one eye, which made the other one bug out more. Mad Dog Carter called it his “voodoo eye” look.

  “Things,” he predicted ominously, “is gonna happen when we go back out there.”

  “Listen to the nigger, cherry-boy,” Mad Dog said. “The nigger knows things. He saw it that Mangrum was goin to buy the farm—and Mangrum bought it in a big way. You should have seen that poor motherfucker’s head fly off.”

  He hesitated, scratched the side of his nose and grinned at Wortham. “Maybe you the next one, cherry-boy. Look at him, Daniels. Look him deep in the eyes. Pull some of your voodoo juju shit on him. Is he the next one?”

  The bunker grew quiet. Nothing but the drumming of rain on tin. Eyes turned toward Daniels and Bugs. Bugs looked about to cry. He was trembling. Daniels seemed to enjoy the attention. He let the suspense hang.

  Donatelli finally broke the quiet by slipping the headset off his ears from where he huddled over his radio in a comer. He looked over to the terrified FNG and laughed. “What you lookin so scared about, Bugs? Is he next, Daniels?”

  The machine gunner went back to cleaning his weapon, “I don’t do that no mo, wop,” he said. “I don’t predict nothin no mo.”

  Rain or not, confirmation that Bob Hope was going to give a Christmas R&R show at Dong Tam jerked morale back up. Exact dates weren’t provided, to prevent Charlie from sabotaging it, but it would be sometime during the week before Christmas. Captain Bruton the Crouton sent word that I could start dispatching R&R parties a squad at a time in to Dong Tam for showers, cold beer and movies. By the luck of the draw, one of them would get to see Bob Hope and the nubile young actresses he always brought with him on tour.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Crouton, which was how I thought of Captain Bruton, sent a quarter-ton Jeep and trailer out from FSB Savage to transport the R&R squads to Dong Tam. The squad leaders, Sgts. Richardson, Wallace, Roberts and Tolliver, played draw poker to determine the order. Wallace’s squad went first for two days, followed by Tolliver’s. Sgt. Holtzauer went in with Tolliver. I waited to accompany the last squad, Roberts’. Either Holtzauer or I had to be at Cougar with the platoon at all times.

  Tolliver’s squad returned in the afternoon of their second day laden with supplies and goodies. They were in a jubilant mood in spite of having to ride back in a rain that had finally lightened up to a steady drizzle, broken by occasional sunshine. Laughing and talking like schoolboys, which many of them had been less than a year before, they unassed at the dead-end, where the Jeep and trailer would wait to take Richardson’s squad back in.

  Sgt. Holtzauer noticed immediately that things were different. Normally, naked children with smudges and grins on their round, squint-eyed little faces ran out of the four hooches with their aunts, mothers and older sisters to souvenir us, sell Cokes and beg for chop-
chop. This afternoon, however, the hooches appeared deserted. Eerie silence hung over the road. Holtzauer, a broad-shouldered, imposing man with an even more-imposing handlebar mustache, got off the Jeep and stood in the road, looking around. His eyes narrowed.

  “Fourth Squad, cut the grabass, girls,” he growled. “Lock and load—and keep your intervals on the trail.”

  Daniels had also noticed. He slung his heavy M60 over one shoulder, muzzle forward, and cranked the charging handle. It made a sound extraordinarily disturbing in the light sound-masking rain. Bugs Wortham started trembling, He seemed to wish he could crawl under a leaf or down an ant hole.

  “Fu-uck!” Mad Dog said.

  The Jeep driver and his assistant were also suddenly nervous. They clicked off the safeties on their Ml 6 s.

  “Haul ass in there and get that other squad back mosh-skosh,” the driver said. “We’ll give you ten minutes and then we’re outa here.”

  The short patrol through the jungle and across the rice field proved uneventful. Even Holtzauer thought he might have overreacted. The kids at the hooches were simply staying inside out of the rain.

  Donatelli stood atop the mud berm watching for the squad’s return when it broke out of the jungle into the open field. He sounded the alert. Sgt. Richardson’s squad had been ready to go since early morning, the boonirats looking forward to their deserved break. Little Arles Gray grabbed his rifle and shouldered his empty ruck in which he intended to bring back more goodies for the platoon’s Christmas party. Norman jumped on the wall and waved for Tolliver to hurry.

  “Did you see Bob Hope?” he hallooed, cupping palms around his mouth to form a megaphone.

  “Fu-uck no-o-o-o-o!” Mad Dog shouted back through the rain.

  Norman relayed the good news down to the rest of the squad waiting at the gate. “We still got a chance.”

  The squads exchanged places. Richardson’s men left in a holiday spirit.

  “Keep alert,” Sgt. Holtzauer warned.

  “Walk, goddamnit, walk,” I added forcefully. “Don’t hitch a ride on the Jeep until you’re out on the main road. Is that clear? Donatelli, I want you to maintain radio contact with us here until you reach Dong Tam.”

  “Yes, Mother.” He grinned, in a good mood.

  Holtzauer glared his disapproval. He and I stood on the mud wall and watched while everyone else went excitedly through the good stuff Tolliver’s bunch brought back from base camp. The departing squad filed out the walls and through the wire, waded the rice paddy and soon disappeared into the jungle. The sky hung wet, low and gray. Bubba Lawmaster, the relief RTO, radio-checked Donatelli twice before the squad reached the waiting Jeep and trailer.

  The men were wet and cold and eager to reach Dong Tam. The Jeep driver objected to creeping back down the road while the squad walked. Richardson ignored my orders. All seven soldiers piled onto the Jeep and trailer. Besides, everybody knew Charlie worked mostly at night.

  Ten minutes after Richardson departed Cougar, blasts of man-made thunder reverberated from the direction of what Third Herd would forever afterwards know as Widow Maker Lane. VC in ambush had opened up with rockets and machine gun fire. Lawmaster gripped his radio mike with white-knuckled hands as the first message blasted through to us. Bugs Wortham started weeping and shaking in terror.

  “Help! Help! We’ve been hit! I don’t know how many men are hit.. Bodies all over the place...”

  “That could’a been us! God, God, that could’a been us!” Bugs Wortham shrieked.

  Donatelli died. So did Sgt. Richardson and the two Jeep drivers. Fortes had his leg blown off, Norman a bullet hole through his lungs, and Arles Gray lapsed into a catatonic trance from the gore and the shock of it all. He eventually ended up in a mental ward back in Virginia.

  Third Herd raged for enemy blood in retaliation. We raided every hooch in the vicinity, bursting in, fingers on hair triggers. Old men and women and children cowered in corners while boonirats ripped apart sleeping mats and dumped baskets of rice in the mud, searching for weapons or signs of VC presence. I had to yell and shout threats to keep my GIs from torching every little grass shack they came across.

  “They all knew an ambush was comin down,” Mad Dog Carter bellowed menacingly. “Not one’a these little cocksuckers warned us.”

  It wasn’t until several weeks later, just before the TET cease-fire that we learned how the ambush had come off. Captain Bruton passed down the story. One of the VC who ambushed the squad had approached FSB Savage in the middle of the day and called out “Chieu hoi! “ A mortar man said they were busy and for him to come back tomorrow.

  When he returned the next day, he brought with him a Chicom rifle, two U.S. claymores, five Russian grenades, and his SKS rifle, just to prove he was serious. He received payment for the weapons and immunity from prosecution. On top of that, he fingered eight local VC—a village chief and his wife, a local tax collector, a cook for the VC and four other members of the VC infrastructure. He said the Viet Cong were discussing ways and means of violating the upcoming TET truce to launch surprise attacks all over Vietnam. Captain Bruton said MAAG in Saigon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon didn’t believe him. The enemy hadn’t the capability for that kind of large-scale operation.

  What was of most interest to Third Platoon was our ambush. The information used to trigger it, the hoi chanh said, came from the girls in the four hooches at the end of Widow Maker Lane who laughed and sold Cokes to us. The ambushers were from the 514th VC Battalion out of Vam Tho, the same bunch that blew off Mangrum’s head and also overran Junk Base 35.

  “They really fucked up our chances of seeing Bob Hope,” Mad Dog grumbled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  For the folks back home, TV sanitized the war and made it palatable over their dinner tables, like a grim blessing. No such sanitization occurred for those of us who were actually there. It was stark reality and it robbed us of certain elements of our own humanity. Even after all these years, the memories alone were enough to bring on sweating and shakes.

  Van looked at me curiously when I got back in his red taxi, but said nothing for several minutes, until we were well gone of Widow Maker Lane. He had driven other American vets to old battle sites and was familiar with the reactions. I told him I wanted to see the 9th Infantry’s base camp at Dong Tam.

  He waited in the taxi for me while I walked slowly through the ruins. Little remained of it—only concrete foundations; some moldy, collapsed bunkers occupied by bamboo rats; fighting trenches smoothed out, overgrown and shallowed by time; rusted pieces of concertina wire. An archaeological site for future diggers into the past. Vietnamese scavengers had long ago carried off the lumber and anything else worthwhile.

  Colonel Bob Hackman, our old “Hardcore” Battalion CO, was dead now of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He shot himself in 1975 after helicopters evacuated the American embassy in Saigon and the North Vietnamese Army rolled into the city. He left a note saying it was a goddamn disgrace that the United States of America had lost a war to a bunch of pissant commies in Asia and a hairy, dope-smoking bunch of war-protesting Jane Fonda commies in the U.S. What was America coming to? Next thing we knew, we’d have a draft dodger in the White House.

  I paused standing in the weeds, jungle growth and sunshine at the foundation of what had been 4th Battalion headquarters. I looked down at my bare, bony old legs sticking out of baggy shorts. The last time I was here I wore jungle fatigues. My legs then, although crusted with jungle rot and sores caused by leeches and mosquito bites, were young and strong.

  I started to turn away. Let the past stay buried, at least the parts of it I couldn’t yet face. Then I hesitated, frozen in spot. Colonel Hackman’s steel-gray eyes once more pierced me from cross his battered desk. He was a wiry man, shorter than I, with a face like a well-used hatchet blade.

  “Lt, Kazmarek,” he rumbled, “I’d have your ass court-martialled except for two circumstances. First, you’ve been a reasonably good pl
atoon leader. Second, if I court-martialled you it would open up a goddamned Pandora’s box for the hippies and fucking anti-war protestors back home to use against my U. S. Army. So what I’m going to do is put my ass on the line for you and your platoon.

  “Your men will be separated and shipped stateside to either be discharged or scattered in different outfits all over the U.S. If ever you or one of them breathes a single word of any of this to another living human being, we’re all going to end up doing some real hard time in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. Is that clear? Each of you—and you most of all, Lt. Kazmarek—is going to have to live with what happened out there. There will be nothing about this in your personnel file, Lieutenant, but it’ll always be on your conscience that you fucked up and lost control.”

  He was right. I struggled every day of my life to keep it suppressed. I even stayed in the army to retire, trying to make amends through service, but you could never truly make amends for something like that. I never spoke of it again. My Elizabeth died not knowing my terrible secret, only that I carried one that haunted my nights and sometimes attacked me to leave long fits of depression.

  I would go to the grave with my conscience, as Pete had undoubtedly gone to the grave with his.

  I glanced guiltily toward the waiting taxi, suddenly fearful Van might read my thoughts over distance and time. He stood in the sunshine, leaning on the red hood of his cab, smoking a cigarette and gazing off in the direction of what had once been the location of the U.S. Navy base camp at the river harbor. Nothing remained of Lump Adkins’ and Pete Brauer’s Shit City. Little grass or tin hooches were built there now. It was vegetable patches, chicken runs, pigpens and banana groves.