1968 Page 12

  You know what the lumberjack stuff reminds me of, though? Pancakes. One of the first books I can remember Mom reading to me from was about lumberjacks and the big stacks of pancakes they ate. Then she taught me how to make pancakes on the griddle. I remember standing on the piano bench, turning them.

  I think about food alot for some reason.…

  Linda wrote me about Uncle Terry killing himself. That’s awful. But I guess he’s always been a little crazy, even before Aunt Phyllis left. The note he sent with the Christmas present knife was about how he’d left his own knife in a Korean “gook.” From what Dad said that couldn’t be true, he was never actually in the war zone. But he was crazy by the time he got out of the army anyhow. (That goes along with what people here say, though, and my own impressions, too. The guys back in the base camp are alot crazier than us out here.)

  Beverly’s writing me almost every day. I miss her so much.

  Love,

  John

  P.S. Supposed to be a big truce next week, for the Vietnamese Tet holiday. I’ll believe it when I see it.

  January 24th

  Dear Spider,

  I’m sorry it’s been so long since I last wrote you. Beginning of school and all. Every professor piles on the reading like you didn’t have any other courses.

  God, the world is going crazy! You don’t get any news, you say, so maybe you don’t know about the H-Bombs and the Pueblo.

  The H-Bombs were yesterday. A B-52 bomber crashed in the ocean off Greenland yesterday with four live H-Bombs aboard! What was it doing over Greenland anyhow?

  The Pueblo was this morning. That’s the name of a Navy ship, evidently a spy ship, that cruised into North Korean territory and the Communists seized it. The government says it was in neutral territory, and they want to send troops in to get it back. My friend Lee says it was a setup, an excuse to broaden the war. I usually think stuff like that is paranoid, but this time maybe it’s true.

  I wonder whether your mail gets opened, speaking of paranoid. In WWII they censored mail with a razor blade. If you don’t get this letter, write and tell me!

  Let’s see, what other subversive stuff in the paper. Lyndon Johnson is as good an art collector as he is a president. One of the paintings he brought to the White House has been hanging upside down all this time.

  I’m glad you’re not farther north. It looks like the Marines are in for a hard time up by the DMZ, in a place called Khe Sanh. They’re surrounded by 11,000 NVA soldiers. It’s just a few days till the New Years truce, but someone on TV said that the NVA would probably use that time to sneak more people and supplies in.

  I guess the only good news is that they orbited that lunar module, the thing that the astronauts are going to use to go back and forth between the moon and their capsule. That’s going to be exciting!

  I’d better get back to my exciting history. It’s so relevant.…

  Love,

  Beverly

  Tet 1968

  The 1968 Tet Offensive had a lot in common with Japan’s World War II surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Both attacks were expected by the Americans, sooner or later, but nevertheless caught the Americans unprepared; both were the most significant turning points of their wars. But Pearl Harbor was an unqualified success for the Japanese, which ultimately led to their defeat; Tet was a total disaster for the Vietnamese, which ultimately led to their victory.

  In both cases, this was because of changing civilian attitudes rather than strictly military factors. Pearl Harbor galvanized an America most of whom were already spoiling for a fight. Tet further demoralized an America that was getting ready to quit.

  You couldn’t ignore the pictures. Pearl Harbor’s mighty ships helplessly sinking in billows of smoke; the Army Air Corps destroyed on the tarmac while Jap Zeros buzzed at treetop level, strafing civilians and military alike. American MPs cowering inside Saigon’s American embassy, American boys dead at their feet; the televised offhand execution of a handcuffed prisoner—by our side! The realtime interviews with confused, dog-tired GIs. All the American blood, in living color.

  Tet became a symbol, in some quarters, for the hopelessness of continuing the war. But the NVA and Viet Cong had been soundly defeated in a desperate all-out attack, with thirty-three thousand dead before the campaign slowly fizzled out. The fifteen hundred American dead would have a greater political impact.

  Strategy

  “What you mean,” Batman said, “is that we get to spend this truce settin’ in some ambush out in the boonies.” Spider had the sinking feeling that he would be part of the “we.”

  Sarge had come over to collect three engineers. “No, not really, not all of us. We just quietly set up a position and if Charles breaks the truce, we send out two squads to watch over the trails headed here.” He sat down on the edge of the engineers’ bunker and opened a beer. “I volunteered for it, Home,” he said softly.

  Batman squinted at him. “No shit.”

  “Look around.” He gestured with the can. “This place ain’t got shit. We got no fifties, no recoilless, and you know we been watched from day one. Charlie wants to break the truce, he gonna hit here first, take out the one-five-fives. He gonna wipe our ass.”

  “Jus’ hold it,” Batman said. “Don’t Charlie have to come by your ambush on the way up? I mean, he wipe your ass first. Then he come up here and finish the job.”

  “You ain’t thinkin’ it through, bro’.” He took a drink and displayed about a hundred white teeth. “They ain’t gonna fuck with no little ambush. Gonna know where we are and avoid us!”

  Moses was sitting next to Spider. “Sounds screwy to me, Sarge. What you’re saying is you make a lot of noise setting up the ambush—”

  “A little more than usual, maybe.”

  “Okay. Why doesn’t he hit you then, though?”

  “We set it up early, before it gets dark. Charlie ain’t gonna fuck with us in the daytime.” He pointed at the ground. “Gonna hit here after midnight. Midnight tomorrow.”

  “During the truce?”

  “Fuckin’ A. Truce don’t mean shit to Charlie.”

  “I don’t know,” Batman said. “I guess one place just as bad as the other, Charlie decide to fight.”

  “Up here, they’d give you more air support,” Spider said. “Wouldn’t they? Protect the guns.”

  “Of course they would, my man,” Sarge said. “And more artillery support. But that’s what I’m sayin’. I don’t wanta be here when they need all that shit! Be in some little pissant ambush a couple miles away.”

  “But if they hit the ambush—”

  “They got no reason to, like I say.”

  “Ah, you fulla shit, Sarge,” Batman said good-naturedly. “I’ll go along with it, though.”

  “What, you fulla shit, too?”

  “Yeah. This place too quiet, been too quiet too long. ’Bout time it got hit.”

  “I’ll go along with you too,” Moses said. They all looked at Spider.

  He had a bad feeling about it. The eight layers of sandbags on top of that bunker felt like a secure investment. “Think I’ll wait till Killer gets back.” He was on a sump detail on the other side of the hill, digging a garbage pit. “Flip him for it.”

  Sarge looked at his watch. “Better go settle with him now. Wanta hump in about an hour.”

  Spider considered it for a second. “Aw hell. Count me in.” He figured he’d just lose the toss anyhow.

  Love letter

  Beverly and Lee came back from their volunteer work exhausted but happy. They’d been called in early that Sunday morning, the 28th of January, because of King’s “go-for-broke” speech in Atlanta. He said he intended for the April Drive for the Poor to “escalate nonviolence to the level of civil disobedience.” Poor people camping on the Mall, on the White House lawn unless Johnson kicked them off. The office wanted all hands on deck to deal with the press. Lee’s strong and undeniably Caucasian telephone voice was an asset with certain kinds of callers. />
  Her old roommate Sherry had come by earlier but couldn’t stay. She left behind a stack of mail, mostly junk but also a dirt-stained letter from Spider. The last one, from Pleiku, had been clean. “Well, he’s out in the boonies again,” she said. He’d known he would only be in base camp for a couple of days, though.

  They said hello to a foursome of people they vaguely knew, who were sitting on the couch smoking dope, and went into the kitchen for a snack. They were alone with a half-eaten pizza. Lee picked up a guitar and strummed quietly.

  She opened the letter and read some of it to Lee, interesting stuff about lumberjacking and the various kinds of ants and mantises he’d observed. She didn’t read him romantic or horny parts, by prior agreement.

  “He seems pretty up,” she said after the first page. “Maybe it’s time I told him about us. At least start hinting.”

  Lee munched on cold pizza. “I wouldn’t. By the time he gets the letter, who knows how he’ll feel?”

  She scanned the second page. “Oh shit.”

  “Oh?” He set the pizza down and wiped his fingers. “Bad news.”

  “He wants me to meet him for R&R. ‘Rest and Recreation,’ in Hawaii, this spring. For a week.”

  “Well, hell. What’s that, five hundred bucks?” He struggled with the cork in a wine bottle, but his fingers were too slippery. “You and I together couldn’t buy a ticket to Philadelphia.”

  “Shit. Oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “He wrote to dear old Dad. My father! He says he’d be glad to pay my way. A no-interest loan until he gets out.”

  “Oh, now, that’s cool. That really sucks.” He used a paper napkin for traction and the cork came out with a loud pop. He got up to rinse out a couple of glasses. “Forces the issue.”

  “He asked his own family, but they don’t have any money. He apologizes for not clearing it with me first. ‘But your Dad and I always got along so well.’ Jesus! I wonder what the old bastard told him.”

  “Probably nothing. What’s he gonna say? ‘Your girlfriend’s fucking a hippy and I think you ought to try to talk her out of it’?”

  She took the tumbler of wine he handed her. “I do have to write him. Write my father, too, about what a big help he is to our boys overseas.”

  They both watched silently as one of the dopers shuffled, lost in thought, through the kitchen and out the back door, which led to nothing but a fenced-in yard of junk. Probably wanted to take a leak in the rain. Organic.

  “Don’t be too quick to tell Spider everything. Blow his mind.”

  “So what should I tell him?” She set the glass down without tasting it. “Say I’m having an argument with Dad; you can’t borrow money from him? What should I tell him we’re arguing about?”

  “You could just tell him it sounds like a great idea.”

  “Go to Hawaii?”

  “Tell him that, yeah.”

  “Maybe I should just go and give him a good fucking,” she said, voice rising, as the doper returned through the door. He looked at them both and walked seriously back into the living room.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “Want? What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t own you.”

  “You mean you don’t love me.”

  “I mean it’s your body. You have to make your own decisions.”

  She stood up, gripping the edge of the table. “And what would you decide to do with your body, while I was away? Hmm?” He didn’t reply; didn’t change expression.

  “Jesus!” She yanked her coat off the back of the chair and rushed out of the kitchen, through the sweet smoke, out into the cold drizzle. She walked hatless the mile into town, at first crying and then just furious. She stopped at a drugstore for a box of stationery, and took it into the all-night doughnut shop.

  With every version of the letter, she bought a cup of coffee and a different kind of doughnut. Cream-filled, jelly-filled, glazed, dusted.

  Cream-filled: everything, the awful truth. The sex, the lies.

  Jelly-filled: Yes, I’ll come to Hawaii, I can’t wait to see you again.

  Glazed: I need time to think; things have become complicated.

  Dusted: Only if I can raise the money myself; I can’t take money from Dad; don’t ask me why.

  She had a mad impulse to put each letter in an envelope and mail one at random, and then open the others to see what her future would be. Instead, she got a glass of milk and a fried apple pie and wrote this one:

  Dear, dear Spider,

  Your letter about Hawaii comes at a difficult time for me, and for us. I’m not speaking to my father, because of an argument a few weeks ago, and he didn’t consult me about his offer.

  The argument was over a man I’m seeing, who Dad calls a “hippy.” I thought I was falling in love with him, but now I don’t know. I’m confused by everything.

  So I don’t know how I’ll feel when your R&R comes. I would love to see you then, but it might be just as a friend rather than your girlfriend.

  I would rather raise the money myself, too. I don’t want to cost you extra and I don’t want anything from my father.

  I’m sorry. I’ve been wanting to write you about this for awhile, but I guess it was just easier to lie a little bit and keep from hurting you, and me. But I don’t want you to build up hopes and then have a big disaster happen in Hawaii.

  Your very best friend,

  Beverly

  She read it over several times and then sealed it and stamped it. She hurried outside, suddenly afraid she was going to throw up, but getting out of the stuffy, smoky atmosphere into the clean cold settled her stomach.

  It settled her mind, too. She had thought hard about going back to the dorm. Instead, she would go back to Lee and have it out with him.

  So it was with mixed feelings—regret but determination—that she opened the mouth of the mailbox, set the letter inside, and let it slam shut. She had never written a letter before that she knew would actually change her life.

  It wouldn’t change Spider’s life, though. He would never see it.

  Miscalculations

  Spider’s rucksack was too heavy. Ten C-ration meals, five extra hand grenades and a smoke grenade, two extra sticks of C-4 besides the demo bag. Ten cans of beer and soda and three books. An extra gallon of water clipped to the packframe with a D-ring. Three M16 magazines, besides the two taped back-to-back that the rifle already carried, and three hundred more rounds in cardboard boxes. At least they were for Sarge’s M16, which presumably worked. He’d be leaving his own behind. Killer would DX it if they had to evacuate the hill.

  In which case, Spider would be stranded out in the boonies with Sarge and his gang, with no fire base to go back to. It was not something you wanted to dwell on.

  He sat in the heat smoking, making a list of all this extra stuff as part of a letter to Beverly. Hurry up and wait. Sarge had said they were leaving in an hour. That was three hours ago. The spaghetti he’d had for lunch grumbled in his stomach; made him queasy in the heat. He opened a warm Coke to quiet it down.

  Sarge came down the hill from the shade of the Command Group bunkers. “Fuckin’ shit,” he said, “go on back to your areas. They want us stayin’ here tonight, four-on-four-off. Hump out tomorrow.”

  “Think we’ll get hit tonight?” Spider said.

  “Guess that’s what they think. Ain’t nothin’ gonna happen.” He stretched and yawned. “Bet your ass they turn it into full alert, though. Gonna catch some Zs.”

  “Good idea.” Spider dragged his junk back up to the bunker and collapsed.

  On the other side of the world, Beverly’s morning paper was being delivered, with the secondary headline SAIGON TAKES ON HOLIDAY AIR AS TET ARRIVES.

  American intelligence was pretty sure something was about to happen, possibly right after Tet. Enemy troops were massing around the Marine base at Khe Sanh, and on the eve of the truce they struck hard at support bases that supplied Khe Sanh an
d served to protect it with artillery crossfire.

  Lyndon Johnson was worried—some say obsessed—by the potential similarity of Khe Sanh to Dien Bien Phu thirteen years before. At that time it was the French who had faced the Vietnamese across a conference table, both sides needing a decisive military victory for political leverage. The Communists laid siege to Dien Bien Phu and crushed the French, winning independence and undermining French influence all over the world. Could it happen again, with Americans across the conference table?

  Lyndon Johnson had been a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and had advised against helping the French save the beleaguered base. That was 1954. In 1968, he vowed that Khe Sanh was not going to be “no god-damned Dien Bien Phu,” and went so far as to secure a written guarantee from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the base would not be abandoned.

  On January 20th, one Lieutenant La Than Tonc defected from the enemy with detailed information about their plans for Khe Sanh. He said, accurately, that the attack was going to begin that night, and was going to build up to an all-out assault during Tet—turning the base into a second Dien Bien Phu, a final humiliating defeat for the Americans.

  The Americans responded by throwing everything they had at the enemy besiegers, committing two thousand fixed-wing aircraft and three thousand helicopters to the defense of the base. B-52s dropped seventy-five thousand tons of bombs, turning the surrounding territory into a lunar wasteland.

  But when Tet came around, the enemy ignored Khe Sanh. It had evidently been a feint intended to draw American forces away from the cities to the south. Instead, a combined force of one hundred thousand NVA and VC troops infiltrated over a hundred cities and towns, cleverly using the holiday confusion as a cover, and attacked more or less simultaneously. People in Saigon and Hue and Long Binh thought they were listening to fireworks. Then they saw the muzzle flashes.

  It was all very dramatic and bloody, and would ultimately lead to the curious combination of crippling military defeat and ambiguous political victory described earlier. American television would be full of compelling pictures of Saigon in flames, of panicked civilians fleeing Hue as determined Marines marched in. For stateside newswatchers, it was not evident that the regular war was still going on. But there were still small units out in the bush, waiting to engage other small units.