The next day, a resupply helicopter put down inside our perimeter. I gave the unloading crew the signal, and the whole squad raced for the doorway, all trying to climb inside the aircraft at once. They were uncomplaining as I began drilling them all over again, and finally, they got it.
It was a hot afternoon in May. We were on patrol wading through the saw grass, sweating and slapping at insects, when the puttering of an L-19 “Bird Dog” observation plane sounded overhead. The pilot radioed that he had special-delivery airmail for me, which soon came swaying to earth at the end of a big yellow handkerchief. I ran to the drop zone and found a box full of Reese’s peanut butter cups. At the bottom of the box was an envelope marked “Baby Letter.” I tore it open, and a photograph fell out. A puffy red face peered out at me with all the wonder of someone who has spent one day on earth. Who did he look like? What did he look like? I could not tell much, but he was real, and he was mine. Welcome, Michael Powell. The Vietnamese crowded around, clucking and smiling. I let them see the photo. Then it went into my breast pocket and stayed there.
Later that May, I had another brief respite from combat. I was called back to Hue, where the advisory group to the ist ARVN Division was headquartered. I was to meet with an Infantry Branch assignments officer, since, assuming I came through the A Shau Valley in one piece, the Army had to assign me somewhere else after my tour. I helicoptered in directly from the field, and as we approached the ancient Vietnamese capital I was struck by the beauty of the city, with its shimmering Perfume River, the landmark Citadel, and the charming French colonial aura. Once on the ground, I experienced what every combat veteran feels when he is suddenly yanked to the rear—the unnatural cleanliness, the illusion of order, the abnormally normal sounds, the incongruity between where I was compared to where I had been. I had my M-2 slung over my shoulder and a hand grenade and knife dangling from my belt, and my boots still carried the mud of the A Shau Valley. I had not bathed for a month, except for a quick splash in a stream. My underwear was a shade of yellow-gray and almost eaten through by sweat. I headed first for the officers’ mess for an American meal. There the neatly dressed staff types looked at me as if to say, what do you think you’re doing here? And I returned a look that said, I know why I’m here. But maybe you’ve forgotten. I waded into a steak and french fries, drank a milk shake, and again felt sick. I left the mess hall feeling lethargic, queasy, longing for my rice balls.
I checked in with a Lieutenant Colonel Spears, the assignments officer, at division headquarters. By now I had been in the Army almost five years. I had about seven more months to pull in Vietnam. I was eager to know what the infantry had in mind next. In those days, the Army had an ingenious system for ranking officers in merit order. The key was a number arrived at by assigning points to factors in our efficiency reports. The colonel thumbed through my personnel file, looked up, and said, “Infantry Officers Advanced Course, Fort Benning, Powell.”
I was surprised. “I’m barely out of the basic course,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” he answered. He had that magic number in front of him, which he was not about to divulge. But he did say, “Don’t be surprised if you get an early promotion to major.”
I had been a captain for only seven months, and this guy was already talking about an oak leaf. In spite of the cannonball rolling around in my stomach, I walked out of that office on air. All the hardship and horror of the past months and the months to come seemed somehow more bearable.
Back in the A Shau Valley, my notebook entries resumed their monotony:
16 May, Thurs. Contact 0810. 3 WIA by VC grenade. 2 houses destroyed, 3 hec manioc, 1 hec rice, by hand.
17 May, Fri. 1st Co. contact 1615 1 KIA.
The entry for May 18 is significant. “Contact 0805. 1 VC KIA….” We had been patrolling a gorge fed by a rushing stream that covered up our noise. For once, our point squad spotted the VC before they spotted us. For once, we did the ambushing. We nailed them. A hail of fire dropped several VC, and the rest fled. We approached gingerly. One man lay motionless on the ground, the first dead Viet Cong that I could definitely confirm we had killed. He lay on his back, gazing up at us with sightless eyes. The man was slightly built, had coarse, nut-brown features, and wore the flimsy black short-legged outfit we called pajamas. My gaze fixed on his feet. He was wearing sandals cut from an old tire, a strip of the sidewall serving as the thong. This was our fearsome unseen enemy. I felt nothing, certainly not sympathy. I had seen too much death and suffering on our side to care anything about what happened on theirs. We took the wounded VCs prisoner and left.
The first confirmed kill produced a boost in morale among the ARVN. The numbers game, later termed the “body count,” had not yet come into use. But the Vietnamese had already figured out what the Americans wanted to hear. They were forever “proving” kills to me by a patch of blood leading from an abandoned weapon or other circumstantial evidence. Not good enough, I told them. I became the referee in a grisly game, and a VC KIA required a VC body. No body, no credit.
Soon after the first sure kill, a Vietnamese lieutenant came to me excitedly reporting another sure KIA. “Show me,” I said. “Too far, too dangerous,” he replied. I repeated the rule. He shook his finger as if to say, I’ll show you. Half an hour later, he returned and handed me a handkerchief. I opened it and gaped at a pair of freshly cut ears.
That night around the campfire, I summoned the company commanders and senior noncoms. The rules needed refinement. A kill meant a whole body, not component parts. No ears. And no more mutilation of the enemy.
July 23. Six months in the boonies and, at last, the battalion was getting a break. We had orders to leave the Be Luong base camp and proceed east out of the A Shau Valley to a Special Forces camp for a rest. We resumed the trail and were marching late one morning along a creek bed. The sun was shining directly over us, and I had moved up toward the head of the column. Suddenly my right leg went out from under me and I felt a sharp sting. I yanked my foot out of a small hole about a foot deep. I had stepped into a punji trap, and the spike had pierced through my boot into my foot. I cursed my stupidity and continued limping toward the camp, still a couple of hours away. If anything, I felt more embarrassment than pain and did not want to let the Vietnamese know what had happened.
I had not gone for twenty minutes, however, when the pain became excruciating. I found a branch to use as a crutch and kept moving. I staggered the last mile, barely making it. In the camp, the American medic did not bother trying to unlace my boot but cut it off. He took one look at the wound and called for a helicopter. The spike had passed from the sole clear through the top of my instep. My foot was hugely swollen and had turned purple as the poison from the dung spread. He bandaged the wound, and I was soon airborne, headed for Hue.
On my arrival, an L-19 Bird Dog pilot, Jack Dunlap, took charge of me. I had never laid eyes on the man, though Dunlap immediately treated me like an old friend. He was the one, he told me, who had delivered the baby letter. Dunlap made sure that I got to a dispensary set up in the bachelor officers’ quarters, where a doctor cleaned the wound by a memorable procedure. He shoved a treated fabric called iodoform gauze into the bottom of the wound, pulled it through the top, and ran it back and forth through my foot like a shoeshine rag. I was sure I was going to faint with the pain, as I squeezed Dunlap’s hand. Afterward the doctor pumped me full of antibiotics and put me in a room in the BOQ.
I recovered quickly, but my days as a field advisor were over. I had too few months left to rejoin the battalion. In the seven months I served, I was the unit’s thirty-fourth casualty—seven killed and twenty-seven wounded. It would be dishonest to say I hated to leave combat. Hardship and death are easily abandoned companions. But by the time I was injured, I had become the battalion commander in all but name. I had taken the same risks, slept on the same ground, and eaten from the same pots as these men and had spilled my blood with them. Challenges shared on Georgia cliffsides had bond
ed me to my own kind. Shared death, terror, and small triumphs in the A Shau Valley linked me just as closely to men with whom I could barely converse. I left my comrades of the 2d Battalion with more than a tinge of regret.
I tried to stop the Army from pushing the buttons that automatically advise the next of kin when a soldier is killed or wounded. I had stepped on a sharp stick, not a land mine, and I did not want my family unnecessarily alarmed. But the wheels of bureaucracy grind relentlessly. Notification that I had suffered a minor wound went by telegram to both Alma, who took it calmly, and Pop, who was sure the Army was holding back the worst. Matters were not helped by a practice of the South Vietnamese ruling family. Madame Nhu, sister-in-law of the bachelor President Diem—she was the wife of his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who was head of the secret police—acted as South Vietnam’s “first lady.” Whenever a GI was killed or wounded, Madame Nhu sent a letter to the man’s family. Her message had a curious tone. It seemed to say, sorry, but you should know the sacrifices our people are making. American GIs referred to Madame Nhu as the Dragon Lady, a title richly deserved.
Since I was out of action, I was reassigned to ist ARVN Division headquarters as an assistant advisor on the operations staff. One day in the officers’ mess, I heard a familiar booming voice. I turned to see George Price, now promoted to a key job, G-3 (operations and planning) advisor to the ist ARVN Division and my new boss. I felt reassured working with George. He still talked nonstop, but I listened closely, since what he said usually made sense.
And much of what I observed at headquarters badly needed explaining. When I left the A Shau Valley, I shifted from a worm’s-eye to a bird’s-eye view of the war, and the new vantage point was not comforting. One of my assignments was to feed data to a division intelligence officer who was trying to predict when mortar attacks were most likely to occur. He worked behind a green door marked “No Entry” doing something called “regression analysis.” My data got through the door, but not me. I was not cleared to enter. One day, the officer finally emerged. There were, he reported, periods when we could predict increased levels of mortar fire with considerable certainty. When was that? By the dark of the moon. Well, knock me over with a rice ball. Weeks of statistical analysis had taught this guy what any ARVN private could have told him in five seconds. It is more dangerous out there when it is dark.
The infantryman in the boondocks, slogging back and forth over the same terrain, ambushed daily, taking casualties from an enemy who melts away, wonders, understandably, what good he is accomplishing. He seeks comfort in assuming that while he might not know, up there somewhere, wiser heads have the answer. My service on the headquarters staff exploded that assumption. We were the most sophisticated nation on earth. We were putting our superior technology in the service of the ARVN. Deep thinkers, like my intelligence officer behind the green door, were producing printouts, filling spreadsheets, crunching numbers, and coming out with blinding flashes of the obvious, while an enemy in black pajamas and Firestone flip-flops could put an officer out of the war with a piece of bamboo dipped in manure.
In the jungle we carried only what proved useful or life-saving. Yet at Hue, every helicopter crew chief sported a big knife with a carved handle and a gleaming blade, ideal for reflecting the sun and giving away one’s position. Eighteen-year-old truck drivers hauling trash to the division dump wore tooled shoulder holsters custom-made by leatherworkers in Hue, who must have been getting rich on this sucker trade. I saw guys carrying six-guns into mess halls with the bullets arrayed, cowboy-style, on the back of their belts. How did they expect to load in a sudden firelight? That didn’t matter. The ammo looked sharper in the back. It was STRAC all over again.
This kind of behavior was just silly. What seriously disturbed me was my first exposure to the upper ranks of the Vietnamese military command. Most officers and noncoms in my battalion had been dedicated, able professionals. The foot soldiers were brave and uncomplaining. But incompetence, corruption, and flashy uniforms seemed to increase in direct ratio to rank. One such rising rocket was Nguyen Cao Ky, on his way to becoming chief of the South Vietnamese air force at age thirty-two. The flamboyant Ky, with his pencil mustache and dark sunglasses, his pearl-handled, chrome-plated revolver, his scarf trailing from his black flying suit, fought the war with equal panache in the air and in Saigon nightclubs. Were these the people, I wondered, for whom ARVN grunts were dying in the A Shau Valley?
I must admit that having paid my combat dues, I found service in the rear pleasant. As a wounded combat veteran, I enjoyed a certain status. And Hue, with its delicate beauty, good restaurants, and diversions for the troops, was no hardship post. Even a trip to the barbershop was a treat. The barber not only trimmed my hair but massaged the tension from my scalp, neck, and shoulders with skilled hands. I started to regain some of the weight sweated off in the A Shau Valley by retooling my digestive tract for steaks and Ba Muoi Ba, “Number 33,” a popular Vietnamese beer. And I tried to keep the weight down by playing softball.
Soon after I joined the headquarters staff, I flew to Hong Kong for rest and recreation. For some GIs, R and R in this indulgent city meant wall-to-wall sex. For others, Hong Kong meant a shopping spree. I picked up the mandatory custom-made shoes ($10 a pair) and tailored suits ($30) and the lowest-priced stereo in the world. I bought Alma Mikimoto pearls, a silk dress, and a bolt of silk cloth. Within four days I was broke and back in Hue.
There I received another of the offbeat assignments that had marked my career. As an additional duty, I was assigned as commander of the Hue Citadel airfield, which handled C-7 Caribou transports, L-19S, and other small aircraft. One cocky pilot clearly resented that a nonaviator was running his airfield. He challenged me one day to go up for a spin in his Bird Dog. My ego was on the line, so I accepted. It immediately became clear that this hotshot was trying to dump me or my stomach out of the L-19 as he performed barrel rolls, vertical dives, and other nauseating aerial capers. I thought that I was going to die, but refused to out of sheer spite. Finally, as he leveled off, I looked down and was shocked to see an unfamiliar landmark, a railroad track running on top of an embankment. I did not remember any such feature in our area.
“You know where we are?” I shouted.
“A little north of Quang Tri,” my pilot announced confidently.
“You damn fool,” I hollered through the howling wind, “turn this thing south and get us out of here. We’re over North Vietnam!”
It turned out I was right. After dealing with intelligence wizards and puffed-up pilots, I began developing another rule: don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.
On November 1, I was back in Saigon, my tour over. I had to be processed out and would soon be headed home. South Vietnam, at the time, was in turmoil. President Diem, a Catholic, was trying to suppress Buddhist ceremonies and Buddhist demonstrations against his regime. A stark photograph had shocked the world: a Buddhist priest sitting cross-legged in a Saigon intersection had poured gasoline over himself, lit a match, and burned to death without moving a muscle, to protest the Diem regime. In August, while I was still in Hue, the city had been placed under martial law, and American forces were confined to quarters. About a week later, President Diem had put the whole country under martial law.
As I rode out to Tan Son Nhut Airport this day to ship my gear home, something more serious was evidently under way. The Presidential Palace was shot up, and the streets were empty, except for troops in personnel carriers. I had arrived in Saigon in the middle of a coup. A cabal of South Vietnamese generals had just overthrown the government and had executed President Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, the secret police chief. At age twenty-six, I had no penetrating political insights into what was happening. I thought like a soldier who knew his perimeter, and not much more. To me, the coup was just another baffling fac
et of this strange land.
In spite of the most recent upheaval, I was being sent home a month early, because we were supposedly doing so well in Vietnam. The number of American advisors had actually dropped slightly from a high of 16,600 to 16,300. The McNamara-era analytic measurements that were to dominate American thinking about Vietnam were just coming into vogue. We rated a hamlet as “secure” when it had a certain number of feet of fence around it, a militia to guard it, and a village chief who had not been killed by the Viet Cong in the last three weeks. While I was in the Be Luong base camp, Secretary McNamara had made a visit to South Vietnam. “… every quantitative measurement,” he concluded after forty-eight hours there, “shows that we are winning the war.” Measure it and it has meaning. Measure it and it is real. Yet, nothing I had witnessed in the A Shau Valley indicated we were beating the Viet Cong. Beating them? Most of the time we could not even find them. McNamara’s slide-rule commandos had devised precise indices to measure the unmeasurable.
The Army’s attitude seemed to be, don’t question those who know better, including these slide-rule prodigies. If it ain’t working, pretend it is, and maybe it will fix itself. The flabby thinking that I had first witnessed in West Germany had been shipped to Vietnam. This conspiracy of illusion would reach full flower in the years ahead, as we added to the secure-hamlet nonsense, the search-and-sweep nonsense, the body-count nonsense, all of which we knew was nonsense, even as we did it.
My American Journey Page 13