One Very Hot Day

by David Halberstam

  “Captain Beaupre,” the Colonel said, “suppose you walk in from the east. See if you can't restrain your tiger from joining battle too often with the enemy along the way.” The Colonel got more laughter on this because everyone enjoyed the fact that Beaupre who was sour and often bitter had been switched to Dang, who was considered the worst of the Vietnamese officers.

  Afterward, after the Colonel had strung out the drama as best he could and done a brief flash of an impersonation of Saigon, enough to amuse them but not quite enough to be improper (How's your war down there in the Delta, Harrison? just fine sir. That's good Harrison, keep up the good work), they broke up. Anderson had lingered for a moment and had said that it was too bad about all the walking they would have to do the next day. You silly son of a bitch, Beaupre thought, it is safer to walk than to fly, you are so damn young. “Big William has all the luck,” said Anderson. “Yes,” said Beaupre, “it will probably be hot tomorrow,” and thought, all the luck, lucky old black man.

  “Hey, Captain Beaupre,” the Colonel called.

  Beaupre went back into the room. The Colonel was alone there now.

  “I figure you to lose,” the Colonel eyed Beaupre closely, “eight pounds tomorrow. Maybe nine. No eight. Five to the heat, and three for Dang.”

  Beaupre started to leave. “You want to stay with him. You don't have to, you know,” the Colonel said. “It's an easy switch.”

  “I'll stay with him,” Beaupre said. He answered almost without thinking; he did not know he had given that answer. High among the list of things he wanted to do was to get away from Dang. But he was aware how much pleasure it would give Dang if Beaupre were transferred and another American were assigned to him.

  Beaupre left the briefing room and ambled back to the bar for his last drink. He was alone; Anderson had already gone to bed; before operations Anderson never had more than two cans of beer and always got plenty of sleep. Beaupre tore the chits out of his little book, paid for two brandies, and poured them himself. An officer was trustworthy, particularly when dealing with other officers' liquor. He cursed Vietnam and My Tho and the imposed celibacy on the uncelibate. The Seminary was fine for priests, they wanted it that way; if you want a seminary why not locate it at My Tho, no temptations here. The trouble was, it wasn't fine for grown men and particularly grown men who were going to risk their necks the next day. He remembered coming to My Tho the first day, trying to arrive in clean starched khakis, but waiting too long at Tan Son Nhut in the sun, and arriving inevitably wrinkled. He was greeted by a young and very handsome major.

  “Welcome to My Tho, Captain Booprat.”

  “Bopray. Thanks. Good to be here.”

  “Sorry. Welcome anyway. It's not bad duty here.”

  “Why, doesn't look so special. Just a first glance.”

  “It's near Saigon, that's why.”

  “What about the local action. Any local sin?”

  “None. They forgot to invent it.”

  “Local ladies?”

  “Off limits to me, off limits to you, off limits to all long noses. Colonel's orders. Feels strongly about it — says it's bad for relations with the friendlies. You got something you have to do, you do it in Saigon. Big City. Two million people. Lots of ladies. Less chance of screwing your counterpart's cousin. Colonel wouldn't like that. Like I say, welcome.”

  “Colonel tightass, huh?”

  “Nobody's tightass here, Captain, we all do what we have to do, and we don't always like it, which means that we do it a little better than we intended. Colonel's better than most. Doesn't have us whitewashing the coal bins if that's what you mean.”

  He took his second brandy and carefully considered whether he should shave now, before he went to bed, or try and cram it in the next morning, or finally whether he should skip it entirely. It was the kind of decision he took seriously because it was one of the few decisions which still had an element of privacy and personal control: if he shaved now, he would be, if not clean shaven, at least somewhat shaven; in the tropics his beard would grow quickly but it would be somewhat pardonable at the start of the operation. Tomorrow morning would be a better time to shave but he would be too rushed. If he didn't shave at all he would look sloppy when he greeted Dang in the morning and he would look even nastier as the day went on. He did not want to shave and yet he did not want to greet Dang looking grisly. He cursed the Army for winning all the small points, even here where you had a war and death and you were supposed to be free of chicken shit, you found that the chicken shit was a part of you, they no longer inflicted it on you, instead you inflicted it on yourself. He went back to his bunk and got his razor.

  It was midnight. He would have to be up at two-thirty. The advantage of the helicopter units, the one tempting part of the assignment, was that they had the luxury of sleeping until four, while the ground units had to get up earlier. Donovan, the intelligence man, was sure that the VC kept agents inside the Seminary simply to gauge what time they were getting up; if it were earlier than two-thirty, Donovan claimed the word would be sent to the furthermost reaches of the sector; it had made sense (someone asked Donovan who the agents were and he had said he didn't know; someone else had said if we don't know who, why don't we fire them all and then start with a fresh bunch. Donovan had said it didn't matter, the same ones would come back in the fresh bunch), and then someone, one of the new lieutenants, had suggested they fox the VC by getting up even earlier on the days of operations; the Colonel had said he wanted to think about that idea, and mercifully it had died.

  Beaupre if he were lucky might get two hours of sleep. He looked over and saw Anderson asleep, and then tried to fall asleep himself.

  chapter two

  Beaupre woke up slowly and reluctantly from a troubled sleep; for a moment he wished he had not even gone to bed. He was dehydrated from too much whiskey and brandy the night before. He was annoyed by the number of mosquitoes inside his netting and remembered that they had woken him up once, or perhaps even twice; you put the netting up and it kept out the air and let in the mosquitoes. They rested now in the top corners of the netting above him, but he could hear them. He looked at one, and reached over and grabbed it. He watched his own blood squirt out. The mosquitoes were big and drank a good deal, but they were also slow and easy to kill.

  He shuffled off to the giant communal bathroom (he had wondered before, not being a Catholic, if it hadn't been embarrassing for the young priests; he had always assumed that priests were shy people, how could they stand to start the day with so little privacy). He managed in spite of his own distaste to drink a glass of water; above the long line of sinks was a huge sign which said: “U. S. Army Medical Service Corps welcomes you to My Tho. You may drink the water here, courtesy of us.” The water tasted foul, thanks to the water purification man. The Army wanted to save his kidneys and his liver. He drank it anyway but his mouth cursed his kidneys.

  At breakfast he drank two glasses of tomato juice, covetously eyed a third, and at the last minute his discipline held him back. He wished he had waited and skipped the damn water and held out for the tomato juice.

  The eggs were cold and gummy and the coffee was the color of Scotch whiskey and tasted like the water purification man had washed in it. He tried to eat the eggs, and managed half his plate. He was still eating when the deputy division adviser came through, table by table, voice low, saying, “Five minutes more. Charley's waiting. Move it on, five minutes more, move it on and out. Hurry it up men. Charley won't wait. Hurry it up.” Just as he finished the eggs, Anderson came by and sat down with his coffee. As they were talking, Beaupre looked at the huge pitcher of tomato juice and then poured himself another glass, almost defiantly, in case Anderson said anything about the heat. It was the first victory of the day for his real enemy, the heat. His uniform, as he walked out of the mess hall, was already stained under the armpits. It would be a long day.

  At first he had despised the heat, but now he feared it; he envied the younger men wh
o seemed to sweat so little, and he envied the older ones like himself, who seemed to have come to a truce with the heat, who could bear the worst of a bad day, and then say yes, it had been hot, as if that were that. He had sensed when he first arrived that the heat was the enemy of all white men, but it was more an enemy of his, he had less resistance and resilience; the others he sensed somehow managed to bounce back. His first day in My Tho had been an Easter Sunday, and there had been a major operation. It had been 110 degrees that day (he remembered the temperature of that particular day which was unusual, for like the others in My Tho he soon came to accept the daily weather as hot, and the exact temperature was never known: simply it had been hot yesterday, it was hot today, would be hot tomorrow, no one cared, one simply accepted it). It had been dry and there had been a long walk. Four Americans had been carried in with heat exhaustion. He had suffered at the command post, more mentally than physically, his imagination turning Vietnam into 365 days of this; when they brought back the second American, a young lieutenant, he began to feel giddy and appeared ready to pass out; this amused the then chief adviser who suggested that he take the Lieutenant's unit; then as Beaupre was getting his gear together, the Colonel stopped him and told him to take it easy, that it was a bad day. Later he learned that the Vietnamese thought it was a bad day too, and in the late afternoon when he helped take a lister bag of water to the troops he had found the Viets sprawled out, unconscious as though they had been drugged. He had loaded six of them into the helicopter and carried them back. The touch of their almost lifeless bodies had made him feel better, but he had known, too, that there were two enemies in the war.

  He and Anderson walked out of the Seminary to a jeep which was waiting to take them to the Vietnamese base, on the other side of town. A young corporal, one of the communications people, Beaupre thought, drove them over there. They were in the jeep a minute when he turned to Anderson and said: “You know what day this is?” Anderson said he did not. “Twenty-one days,” answered the Corporal. “Three weeks is all. Exactly twenty-one days to go in this country. Then home, the land of the Big PX.” Anderson nodded. “You mind if I ask you something, Lieutenant? How many days you got left?”

  Anderson smiled, almost shyly, Beaupre thought. “One hundred and eighty-two.”

  “One hundred and eighty-two, boy, that's the best,” said the Corporal, “downhill now. One hundred and eighty-three behind you, that's the important part, and nothing but downhill. Man, I remember when I got that one hundred and eighty-third.” He turned to Beaupre and asked: “How many you got, Captain? You mind if I ask?”

  “I don't know,” Beaupre said.

  “Whadya mean, you don't know,” the soldier said. “Sure you know. Everybody knows. Even the Colonel knows. How many?”

  “One hundred and eleven,” Beaupre said.

  “You sure about that, Captain?” the soldier said. “You want to be sure on something like that. I figured it out. Five hundred and four hours. Thirty-two thousand two hundred and forty minutes. You want to be sure.” Beaupre said he was sure.

  The soldier asked Beaupre when he got there, and Beaupre told him. “No,” said the Corporal. “No sir, that ain't right. Can't be hundred and eleven. What day'd you come, sir?”

  Beaupre told him.

  “No sir,” the Corporal said, “you don't have that at all. You got fifty-nine, maybe sixty days, no more.”

  “Sixty,” said Beaupre.

  “You ought to keep track of that, Captain,” the boy said, “that's nothing to make mistakes with. They might leave you in this place a second time. You can't trust 'em. Got to do your own counting. They won't help you, not on something like that. Guess it's a good thing I happened to drive you this morning, otherwise you'd still be thinking you had more months. Sixty days,” he said, “that's one thousand, four hundred and forty.”

  “What?” Beaupre asked.

  “Hours,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Beaupre said.

  They drove in silence, the sky still dark, the jeep lights at half power, the air already a little heavy. Then Beaupre asked Anderson, “How many villages we got today?”

  “Three,” said Anderson, “Ap Vinh Long, Ap Thanh, and Ap Binh Duong.”

  “Ap what?” Beaupre said.

  Anderson repeated the names.

  “Haven't we been there before?” Beaupre said.

  “Which one?” Anderson asked.

  “All of them,” Beaupre said.

  “No,” Anderson said, “none of them. All new objectives.”

  Beaupre thought for a moment. “You know what the trouble with this country is, Anderson? Too many villages. To many goddamn villages, hundreds of them, thousands of them, all alike, and too many people in all of them. If there weren't so many so far apart, there wouldn't be any war, and there wouldn't be all this walking. Just take the people, and put them in one big city, get them out of the villages and there wouldn't be any war, and no walking. And then you get those U.S. Aid boys, you know the ones with the fifteen-thousand-dollar salaries and expenses, and get them to invent a big machine which will plant the rice, and piss on the rice and kick the water buffaloes in the ass, and then pick the rice, and send it up to the people in the one city to count and eat, and you wouldn't have a war, and no Americans. We'd give them these machines.”

  Anderson laughed.

  “Some country,” Beaupre said, “all these goddamn villages, all with the same name, apvinhthanhbinhdinhlongdong.”

  They drove through the city now, the early risers beginning to wake and go to work in the markets, the people whose world in every country was always different from Beaupre's; they were always going to sleep when he was beginning to drink; being around when they were starting their day usually made him uneasy, but not here, not in this country.

  “You know what that bastard Dang is going to say when he sees us this morning?” Beaupre asked.

  Anderson began to laugh.

  “He is going to say, 'ah good morning my friends the American warriors, ah good morning to you.'”

  Anderson laughed aloud now, knowing Beaupre was right.

  The jeep took them to a long line of trucks where the Vietnamese troops were waiting. The troops were already seated in the trucks, facing the wrong way so that they could not respond in case of an ambush. They met Dang, who smiled enthusiastically at them, patted Beaupre on the back and said, “My favorite American warriors. Ah good morning. Ah good morning to my friend Captain Beaupre and my young friend Lieutenant Anderson.”

  “Captain Dang, my favorite Vietnamese warrior,” Beaupre said, and he thought he heard Anderson stifle a laugh.

  “The Captain Beaupre is in a good humor today, and so is his friend Captain Dang. Today we chase the Communist Vietcong. I think we will do very well today and we will kill many Communist Vietcong.”

  Beaupre, diplomat, nodded and agreed and inquired Mrs. Dang and the little Dangs.

  “We'll kick the VCs' Communist asses, Captain Dang,” Anderson said.

  “Ah, the Americans,” said Dang, “an enthusiastic people. Warriors.”

  Beaupre stood idly talking to Dang, thought that Dang was his reward: he had won him as at a raffle after his second week in Vietnam when he still had a certain element of drive and ambition. He had been assigned temporarily to another battalion, warned that the battalion commander was weak, warned also to behave himself, to be tactful, to be diplomatic, never to force his ally to lose face; that had been his first lecture, and he had nodded almost rhythmically as it had been given, knowing the words before they were spoken, knowing that he could roll with it and bend with it, he was an old pro. Ten days later they were on an operation and forty minutes short of linking up with the other units, when there had been an ambush of the east force; the ambush had come at a time when Beaupre's unit happened to be taking a break, one of its many, they were after all spotted through the days like radio commercials. When he had heard of the ambush on the radio, he had noticed that the troops wer
e still resting; he waited a few moments then tried to get the officer to move the unit. The officer nodded, agreed, but there were no new orders; the scene was repeated once more, several minutes later, Beaupre's voice hearing an added urgency, those were, after all, buddies ahead (he still thought of them as buddies then); and there was more agreement and still no orders, and finally two minutes on the nose, he had clocked it with his United States Army watch, he had come back, angry now, this was after all one of the few things he found distasteful, leaving your own men open and under fire, shouting goddamn get them moving, move their asses, kick them, if you can't I will, move them, Christ, there're men dying now in these goddamn paddies, move them, your own people dying, what the hell kind of people are you? It had been an amazing scene which the Vietnamese troops had enjoyed immensely, smiling and laughing, and soon moving out smartly but to arrive too late; there had been a terrific stink afterward, and normally Beaupre would have been in trouble, perhaps his last march, but fortunately for him his predecessors had logged many long and similar complaints against the officer; the Colonel had made a stand and, small miracle, the Vietnamese backed down (the division commander had liked the commander of the ambushed battalion better than he had liked Beaupre's officer) and changed officers. The Americans were overwhelmed with excitement and pleasure, the new era, it was said, Beaupre was taken aside and told that it was a great victory but that he must not push it, he must above all things get on well with his new counterpart, he must get on, there could be no second switch, and no second incident, no more shouting about kicking asses, not even whispering about it (the Colonel had smiled when he came to this part). He must get along, he must bend, he must listen, advise and be polite; he had achieved a great victory and they were all proud of him, it was the Vietnamese who had been transferred, not Beaupre, but it could not be repeated; he had nodded through all this, surprised and a little proud of himself. Then he had drawn Dang as a successor. A week later he was asked about Dang, and he had said, and that was all he had said for a month, well he speaks better English than most; it was the first and last words of praise he had for Dang.