One Very Hot Day

by David Halberstam

  He had no trouble with the first of the three canals (as he passed over it he looked at the intricate network and thought what an ideal place for an ambush, a unit would be completely pinned down and would never be able to move across without exposing itself, soldier by soldier, dead soldier by dead soldier). But he was tired and on the second bridge he had made the terrible mistake of looking down and then thinking about the possibility of falling; he had looked at the water, dirty, murky, tepid, vile, how many people had pissed in it that day, and for a moment he had hesitated and almost slipped.

  The third canal had been a little wider and he had been nervous by the time he started; on the bridge the Viets were going too slowly and had jammed up, and he had been forced to stop and wait and he had looked at the bridge, thin and slippery from the muck on their boots. He had stopped and thought for too long a moment, and when he finally started again, he did what he had almost willed himself, he started to fall, and he slipped off the bridge and into the water, slowly, so that by the time he hit, with his shoulder, he had one arm out to break the water, and another holding his weapon above his head. He went completely under, the water was warm and filthy, and though he tried to close his mouth, it was too late, and some of the water got in. He came up spitting and coughing and cursing the goddamn canals, and the goddamn bridges and the goddamn country (he rarely cursed himself) and the water. He was angry and soaked with the warm filth of the water; despite the heat, it was not even refreshing; he was angry and humiliated. He looked back to where the Viets were still standing on the bridge, but they were completely silent. He angrily pushed his way out of the water, climbed out of the canal, and began to march again, when he realized he had lost his pistol (not his really, Raulston's, they had swapped because Raulston had admired a Luger he kept; when Raulston had given him the Colt, there were only two bullets in the chamber; he had demanded four more, but Raulston said you only needed two, one for Charley and then one for yourself). So he walked back into the filthy water, hating it, he had never been in water so warm, and squatted down and started to grope for the pistol; he would not, he vowed, put his head under that water again. He could feel nothing but the muck on the bottom, when a Viet jumped off the bridge and looked at him for a sign of what was missing. Beaupre signaled a pistol, and the Viet stuck his head under water like a diver, and a moment later proudly came up with the pistol. Beaupre, more humiliated than ever, thanked the Viet clumsily, realizing he did not know the Vietnamese word for thank you. He started to reach in his pocket for some piastres, and then decided that would be the worst thing to do. He smiled at the soldier, and it was returned. He felt old and foolish. He walked on but in his walk there was less swagger. He let the sun steam the warm water out of his uniform. He was probably lucky, he admitted to himself, that he had missed the pistol so quickly; it would be difficult to describe to Raulston the loss of a pistol, and those two bullets. He never carried more.

  He took his canteen and wasted precious water cleansing his mouth out; he was not even sure any more whether his mouth tasted foul; the important thing was that he thought it did. He spat the water out; his canteen was already dangerously low, perhaps, from the feel and the angle of tilt, one third filled. He wished now that he carried two canteens of water. It was a logical enough idea; the troops in the South Pacific had done it during World War II, though they never knew when they would be resupplied; but at the Seminary no one else did it, and so his false pride had hurt him once again. It would be a simple thing to do.

  He made Anderson get the CP on the radio. Everything was just fine, the CP said, just clockwork, running off nice and smooth. No buggering it up (when he said this, somehow Beaupre sensed that he was saying there would be no buggering up unless Dang and Beaupre buggered it up).

  “What about Raulston?” he asked.

  “Some old women got pissed off at the friendlies for the usual and then attacked some of the troops, and so Raulston decided he would play the big-nose judge and make peace, and he like to have lost both eyes from those women. Said he'd never seen women so mad, made his own wife look like a lady. He got pissed off himself and had three of them taken in. Says he's never been so scared in his life, kept shouting: ‘I am your friend, I am your friend, I am good American,’ and they kept coming. He left a message for you. Want it?”

  Beaupre said yes.

  “Raulston says it's pretty damn hot over in his part of the country and wants to know how things are with you. Says he made an arrangement with the Colonel to fly home in the choppers if there's an extra lift, and you can walk. Says you'll understand, the both of you bein' buddies and all.”

  “Tell him,” Beaupre said, “that's fine, and for him to fly over us on the way back, so we can just signal them friendly like, just like buddies.”

  “Colonel asked about you, too,” the CP said. “Wanted to know how you were holding out, and if everything was okay. I told him you were just fine, and plenty smartass, same as ever, but he seemed a little worried and he wants you to pass the word if the heat gets too much.”

  “Tell him no sweat. Heat's okay,” Beaupre said, but later he wondered if he had said the right thing; whether it wouldn't be better to go in if there were a medevac chopper; and finally whether Anderson had said anything to the Colonel.

  They walked along, and Beaupre watched the troops with a certain grudging awe; they were not bothered by the heat. It had taken no toll. Instead there was still a quality of an outing, he thought. The troops had their food with them and some of them were already nibbling from the hunks of cold rice glued into a lump. Others were gnawing on sugarcane stalks. Several times that day he had been offered sugarcane by the troops, but though he enjoyed sucking on the cane, it had become part of his own mythology that somehow sugarcane made him thirstier, like drinks of Coca-Cola; it was somehow too sweet.

  After the first hour of the operation, if there were no contact the troops always relaxed; the rattling and babbling seemed to go up, the pace was slower, the background noise of giggling seemed to increase. Sometimes he was inclined to compare them with American troops and to be shocked by their lackadaisical and relaxed attitude in the face of combat situation; sometimes it seemed to him combat interrupted them only as rainstorms. They walked and joked, there would be a brief ambush, a few men killed, the ambush would end, and within minutes they would be walking again, laughing and talking again, imperturbable even with death; whatever their faults, and American troops had many, they would not be so casual with death. Then he would wonder about American troops if they had been going over the same ground in the same war for five years or more, and he was not so sure the Vietnamese were very different. Even with himself, there had been change: when he had first arrived, he had brought with him a sense of total tension and tautness fashioned out of World War II and Korea; he still remained, he thought, professional, but it was a more relaxed, more acclimated professionalism; he bent with the wind here, he did not go at 100 per cent capacity in a war which was fought at 5 per cent capacity; it was all very well to think as they suggested, no, demanded, at the indoctrination briefings — Vietcong to pop out from every single bush or jump up from every canal, or hide in every single hut (“Victor Charley is always where you don't think he is. Victor Charley is always outthinking you. You are sleeping and Victor Charley is thinking, planning, cleaning his weapon,” they had said at that last briefing) — but if you thought like that, you would soon be exhausted. There were simply too many bushes, canals, huts in the country to fear and too few VC to hide there; one would have to be a raving maniac if he spent his first three operations chasing VC everywhere; by the fourth he would be in a state of physical and mental exhaustion and, of course, Charley would step out and zap him. It was a lousy goddamn war. So he went at his own pace, with his own sloppiness; if you were to be ready in this war, you had to roll with it and feel its pace. The Lieutenant, Anderson, was different: Anderson was young and ambitious and hungry and there was no quality of relaxation to him.
Each ambush was an enemy and a duty; each VC was a step toward promotion; each successful operation was a victory for his country, duty and honor and country and the Point. He had seen the Lieutenant before, often in Korea. In Korea it was almost as if they had been mass-produced: young, strong, absolutely fearless, they came there as if off a production line at home; they led, often a little too bravely, and they died; they went back almost as quickly; they died well, their troops mourned them (he never heard the troops in Korea who bitched frequently about everything else complain about these young officers; it was not just the West Pointers, it was all of them as if the ROTC men, in order to prove they were as good as the others, were trying to outPoint the Pointers). And so believing everything they were taught, they came a little too quickly, and died a little too quickly and were replaced a little too quickly by someone just like them, eager to take their place. He sometimes wanted to reach out and tell them that they had been badly briefed, that none of it was true, that it was the cautious ones who would live and survive, and make it home and give the briefings, and it is the cautious ones who get ahead. But those who survived would have to learn for themselves, or not learn for themselves. They would not, he knew, believe it from him: lessons on advancement in the Army were not something old captains were authorized to give; they would take those lessons only from someone who had gotten ahead.

  For the first time that day Beaupre considered that it might be a reflection on him that he had not gotten the helicopter assignment. That was, after all, the elite assignment and demanded the best unit, the best coordination, the best American-Vietnamese relations, the best officers, the real tigers. He was not, after all, an American tiger (and when the Colonel teased him about Dang, was he not also teasing Beaupre about being Beaupre, saying in effect that Beaupre and Dang deserved each other, were well mated, that he had decided not to waste a good adviser on Dang).

  Once he had been a tiger, a good killer, with a taut, if somewhat unwieldy, body; but he was overweight now and even when his uniforms were fresh, he managed to look just a little bit sloppy and wrinkled. Not all of this was his fault: he was too old and too fat for this war, and he had not wanted it, not sought it. He had been sitting in the United States completing faithfully, if listlessly, the final years of his twenty, filling in at those places where the United States Army had long ago, for reasons no one any longer remembered, assumed responsibilities but where it was not deemed wise to waste chosen young officers — one of his last posts had been as teacher at prep school ROTC courses. These were not posts he would have wanted; but for four more years the United States Government was permitted to be wiser than he, they owned that much of him. The ROTC assignment had not been unpleasant or taxing and indeed the principal difficulty had been in watching his language among the students. There had been one reprimand and two near reprimands, but not much was made of these lapses, since it was assumed by his superiors that this type of failing was organic within the Army; all the Beaupres before him (and all the Beaupres after him) had drawn roughly the same number of reprimands, it was a truism of the Army that anyone so ungraceful in career as to be assigned to that position would have a serious language problem. He had not minded the position; he had long since written off advancement, promotion and similar miracles, and he had been content to check on close order drill (generally performed with more enthusiasm at these schools than by real recruits in the Army) and daydream away on the possibility of affairs with the wives of some of the instructors, for there were favors hinted and certainly promised; but it had struck him that it was not a fair match, an irate husband with tenure at some little school would somehow frighten the Army, and it would be Beaupre who would be dispensed with. Besides, the women on the average weren't worth the risk. He had been performing his official functions and not performing the unofficial ones when Vietnam erupted again and when counter-guerrilla became the fashion. By chance someone, perhaps an IBM machine, turned up the fact that earlier in his career, he had been a line crosser in Korea (an IBM machine certainly would be ruthlessly oblivious to the added weight and age and fear he had acquired in the intervening time). He had worked for a time filtering back and forth across lines, working on prisoner-snatching, a job assigned to him because when the call went out for volunteers his battalion commander had not liked him, had viewed him as expendable, and had volunteered him.

  In 1961 they had called him and told him rather pointedly that he was an expert in guerrilla war; he had protested, he knew nothing about guerrilla warfare, for a limited time he had done a very limited type of operation, and he had been luckier than most, he had survived. They had told him that his modesty was becoming but that what he had done qualified him as a guerrilla fighter, he had been behind enemy lines and the fact that he was still alive testified to the expert quality of his work. Many good and glowing things, they discovered now, had been said about him at the time, about his toughness, his ability to smell out traps (“sometimes I think Beaupre has a Korean nose,” they read from an old report); they told him of his valor and cunning; they seemed embarrassed about the ROTC business, it was a mistake, a big Army, Beaupre would understand, and thank Heaven, they said, it was now being rectified. He had protested — though naively pleased about the report from Korea, which was true — but he had pointed out that he was nine years younger then, with less weight and more wind and motivation, besides he was already involved in the ROTC program. They needed him, they said, and ROTC didn't, they made that clear; indeed, it would be good for the ROTC program, they added, to be able to say that Captain Beaupre had been pulled out in mid-term because he was needed in Vietnam, it would give the ROTC program more style, he could serve it better in Vietnam, than he could there, it would be like lighting a candle for ROTC. He protested again but because they made it an order, and because he was bored with his wife, with his life, he accepted.

  At the very first he had been asked to give a course at Fort Bragg on special warfare and infiltration. He had walked in the first day to lecture all the lean young men, and he had looked something like a gentle porcupine, roly-poly, and not one bit the infiltrator. He had sensed their amusement (all the other instructors were young embryonic Marlboro men); and so the next day he had come to class wearing all his ribbons and their amusement had ended, but perhaps he could mark it as the time when his own had begun. For he had never felt at ease: their questions were always too eager for his answers; they were sharp and alert, his answers were vague and uncertain; they saw his ribbons, the CIB twice, the Silver Star, and they expected first modesty and then bravery, bravery told modestly, modesty exhibited bravely, and they were rewarded with uncertainty. He could sense, almost feel, their disappointment; he found himself talking about how cold it was and pissing on his carbine, and they wanted to hear about how he had killed with a knife; but he had never killed with a knife, in fact, never killed with the carbine on these missions. His great miracle, his great act as an infiltrator, was staying alive and most of that was beating the cold. The IBM machine must have sensed this because, instead of being assigned to a Special Forces twelve-man unit and the special guerrilla war and infiltration duties, Green Berets, he had been converted to an average American Adviser (would they tell that to the ROTC students, he had thought, that he had failed to get a Green Beret and that he was just another adviser, would the light that he had lit flicker ever so slightly?), sent mercifully to the flat country instead of the mountains. The thought of climbing mountains at his age and slipping into Laos (he had never wanted to visit Laos, anyway) terrified him, and if he was thankful for anything in his life, it was that at least he was in the Delta.

  He thought of a day this hot in the mountains and the fear came back to him. It made walking in the Delta a little easier.

  Anderson came alongside him, and Beaupre questioned him about the Colonel, did he think the Colonel seemed a little nervous today.

  Anderson said no, he hadn't talked with the Colonel, but the messages had been the same: were t
he troops bunched up? Had Beaupre and Anderson said anything about their bunching up? Was the heat affecting the troops? What was the reaction in the villages? Any good signs, any bad signs, any signs at all? Was Dang any better? Any worse? Were the troops alert? What did the crops look like? Did they need anything? The messages were the same as ever; he was on their ass no more, no less, than usual.