1968 Read online

  The rear peep-sight kept filling up with crud.

  The sling was useless.

  When you tried to sneak through the jungle, the hollow stock made loud clacks and scrapes against the brush. The sling swivels (unless you’d taped them or taken them off) made jolly little squeaking, snickering sounds.

  It was very disconcerting to American soldiers when, after a battle, they would collect enemy ordnance and find that the primitive superstitious devils had been returning fire enthusiastically with weapons that were dirty, rusty, and held together with wire and friction tape. Whereas GIs often had to scrunch down behind a tree in the middle of a battle, and take their beautiful weapon apart and try to figure out why it had stopped working.

  A graffito often found scratched on the stocks of M16s was MADE BY MATTELL, IT’S SWELL.

  Hygiene

  Scratched on the stock of Spider’s M16 was the disconcerting legend THIS MACHINE DOESN’T WORK. The supply sergeant who had issued him the weapon said not to worry about it.

  Spider cleaned his hands with a little bit of the gas, then worked over the external metal parts of the gun with a piece of toilet paper moistened with gas.

  “Good morning, Mr. Spider.” Wilkes, buck sergeant, Spider’s squad leader.

  “Pull up a chair.” Spider worked the little toggle free and the gun swung open. He dropped the slide, bolt, and trigger assembly into the helmet to soak.

  “Know you’re not supposed to use gasoline.” Wilkes sat down across from him. “Fire hazard.”

  “That a fact.” Spider threaded a patch of cotton the size of his thumbnail through the eye of a cleaning rod. He soaked the patch with gas and ran it through the barrel.

  “Yep. If you try to shoot the gun when it’s full of gasoline vapor, it’ll blow up in your face.”

  Spider showed him what was written on his stock.

  “Guess you’re safe.” Wilkes broke open his rife. “Can I bum some?”

  “Go ahead.” Spider ran the cleaning rod through again, this time with a few drops of LSU light grease. He took the soaking parts out of the gasoline and lined them up on a strip of clean toilet paper on his knee, then offered the helmet to Wilkes. “Save me some for my ammo.”

  He didn’t want to go through the hassle of taking apart the bolt and trigger assembly. They looked clean enough, so he just wiped them off and gave them a thin coat of LSU. “True we’re goin’ out today?”

  “Shit, I hope not. I had early guard last night. Didn’t get two hours’ sleep.” The fire base had gone on “100% alert” after the abortive sabotage: everybody up and standing guard in bunkers around the perimeter, until dawn. If you were already up, you had to stay up.

  Spider started to put the thing back together, which always took as long as all the rest of the cleaning operation. It was like assembling one of those carved-wood Chinese puzzles.

  He got it back together, carefully propped it against his rucksack, out of the dust, and then stepped away from the gas to light up a cigarette.

  “It won’t be so bad, though, if we do go out. Right?”

  “Depends.” Wilkes was ostentatiously taking apart his bolt assembly “All we ever do is walk, practically. Walk all day, dig a hole at night. Fill up the hole in the morning and start walkin’ again.” He made a face, concentrating so as not to lose the little spring when it popped out. “Some guys like it better. You know that. No dust, no officers to speak of.”

  “No dinks.”

  “Not in over a month. And the last one wasn’t even a fire-fight, just a little argument. One casualty.”

  “Yeah, I heard—”

  “Poor ol’ Smiley. Got it right here.” He indicated a point midway between his own sternum and navel. “Haven’t heard anything since we put him on the medevac, guess he’s dead.” He got the spring out, without its flying into the dust. “Ah. Son of a bitch owed me almost a hundred bucks.”

  “You and everybody else.”

  Wilkes laughed. “We oughta get together and hit up his ol’ lady for it. Hire a bill collector or somethin’, shit, he was such a hard ass.…” The trigger assembly came apart more easily. He swished the components around in the gasoline.

  “I like fire base better. Like right here, three hots a day, beer, sleep on a cot—”

  “You’ve got a cot?”

  “Hell, yes. Don’t seem so safe since last night, though, shit. Fuckin’ gooks just walked in, all it takes is one asshole asleep at the switch.”

  “They find out who?”

  “Nah. Prob’ly Bravo, if they went out the same way they came in.” He dipped a toothbrush into the gasoline and worked over the outside, all around the receiver. “Trouble with a fire base is that you’re a bigger target. Liable to get a whole fuckin’ regiment attack at once. Human wave, man, bad shit.”

  “Like a banzai—”

  “I guess. Never been in one myself, but God … bloodbath, that’s all. They just keep comin’. Happened down Plei Djarang, was it? Couple of months ago, two and a half.” He shook his head and started fishing pieces out of Spider’s helmet.

  “Heard about it. Said we had a lot of work at Graves.”

  The enemies

  Spider soon learned that the GI had four enemies in Vietnam. They had four distinct ways of killing him.

  The NVA were green-uniformed North Vietnamese Regular Army troops. They were the GIs’ counterparts, a mixture of career soldiers and draftees. They moved in relatively large units through the jungle and engaged the Americans with “conventional” weapons: rifles, grenades, machine guns, artillery, and sometimes even tanks. They occasionally employed small airplanes for reconnaissance, but didn’t have jet fighters in the south.

  Most GIs had some sympathy for the NVA. From policing up bodies after a battle, or taking an occasional prisoner, a composite picture emerged of the NVA private as young, scared, ill-equipped, and undersupplied. A sixteen-year-old drafted out of high school would walk a thousand miles and go into battle with a taped-together rifle older than his father, a cloth sack with a couple of dozen loose cartridges, and a plastic bag of rice and dried fish heads. He could kill you with one of those two dozen bullets, but it would take a lot of bad luck on your part.

  There were two varieties of Viet Cong. The ones you encountered in the boonies were guerrilla fighters who set ambushes, littered the landscape with boobytraps, harassed you with hit-and-run mortar and rocket engagements, and sometimes came charging out of the night bent on suicidal mayhem. They tortured prisoners and mutilated the dead. If a village tried to resist them, the village chiefs would be found castrated and/or disemboweled and/or beheaded. The GIs saw them as dangerous maniacs, and so did some of the Vietnamese.

  The other VC were civilians, women and children and old men, who would walk up to you smiling with a basket of soft drinks or a sexual proposition or a hand out, begging. Inside the basket or under the clothing would be a hand grenade or satchel charge or just a loaded pistol. When the smoke cleared and the bodies were tallied, the GIs would shake their heads in wonder. How could they hate us so much? How could they value their own lives so little? And the lesson constantly fed back was this: Every slope is an enemy; they don’t care whether they live or die; they don’t see you as a human being at all. Never turn your back on one.

  The fourth enemy was the army, the lunatics that had sent you to Vietnam in the first place, the ones that ordered you out of the relative safety of base camp or bunker to go produce a body count. This implacable enemy was personified by officers and noncoms, who sometimes perished from a perceived lack of empathy with those beneath them. Vietnam was not the first American war where a significant number of officers were killed by their own men, but it was the only war that produced a verb describing the action: to “frag,” because the preferred weapon for assassination was the fragmentation grenade, ubiquitous and impossible to trace.

  Love letter

  January 3, 1968

  Dear Spider,

  Happy birthd
ay to me! There’s not much happening here. I hope you can say the same!

  We’re just hanging around, waiting for the new semester to start. Still just working afternoons. We went down to the Roma for pizza last night, and I got served without using my ID. They’ve got a really awful band. So we went down to the Zebra and watched Tommy Cole and the Belvederes, we went there with the St. Andrews crowd before you got drafted, remember? They’re funny. “Passengers will please refrain from using toilets while the train is in the station Darling I love you.” We sang it all the way home. Guy asked for my ID but didn’t really look at it, good thing.

  There’s not much on the TV about Vietnam, so I guess things are pretty quiet. Hang in there.

  Love,

  Beverly

  Excrement

  When he was working at Graves Registration, Spider was twice punished by being assigned the shit-burning detail. This was the lowest-caste job in the army, and Spider pretended outrage and disgust when it fell to him. Actually, he rather enjoyed it.

  The latrines at his base camp were four-holer outhouses. Instead of emptying into a pit, though, the droppings dropped into old fuel containers, fifty-five-gallon drums, with their top thirds cut off. Every couple of days they would fill up, and whichever enlisted man was in least favor would be assigned shit-burning detail.

  You were given a pair of gloves reserved for the purpose. You locked the latrine and propped up the swinging door at the rear that allowed access to the fifty-five-gallon drums. The smell was Olympian in the tropical heat. You dragged the heavy drums to the side of the road and sat upwind, if there was wind, which was rare.

  In a few minutes or hours, a fuel truck would come by, and top off the drums with diesel. You would float a gasoline-soaked crumpled piece of paper on top of the noisome mess and light it, and with luck, that would coax the diluted diesel fuel alight, and soon you would have four festive bonfires pouring forth choking black smoke with an aroma that is difficult to describe. They would burn for a couple of hours; your job was to watch them.

  As unpleasant as the detail sounds, it did give you lots of time to read. And it wasn’t unreasonable for Spider to enjoy it, at least on those days when his normal employment would have entailed the manipulation of decomposed bodies and fractions of bodies.

  While he was hauling the barrels of shit, Spider would sing, at the top of his lungs, “Passengers will please refrain/ from using toilets while the train/is in the station Darling I love you,” to the tune of “Funiculi, Funicula.”

  Life is but a dream

  It’s a place that Spider visits almost every night. It is very cold and smells bad, bad like a butcher shop with roadkill inside. Grace notes of Lysol and body wastes. The lights are bright and blue. There are three barber chairs and in one of them a naked man sits dead and white, his hide sewn together in big clumsy stitches that close his half-emptied body. One eye is a fish eye and one eye is gone.

  The skinny black man who is Spider’s guide stops at the corpse and shakes its hand. “Good evening, Major.” He giggles and moves the hand down, forcing against rigor mortis, so it modestly covers shrunken genitals. “An officer and a gentleman.”

  Six dark green body bags are lined up next to a white porcelain-clad table with blood gutters. “Every day is just like Christmas,” the black man says. “Give me a hand here.”

  Spider helps him wrestle a heavy, lumpy body bag up onto the table. The black man undoes the clamp and cable that holds the bag closed, and starts to skin the plastic back. A head rolls out and falls on the floor with a wet smack.

  “Ah, shit.” He picks up the head by the hair and sets it on the table facing Spider. A man or beast has flayed the skin off the face; it looks like a grinning anatomy illustration crusted with clotted blood. The eye sockets are dark holes. A shiny black millipede scurries out of one of them. Spider screams and wakes up.

  SECOND WEEK

  Moving out

  “Everybody humps three meals and at least two gallons of water.” Wilkes had popped four boxes of Cs with the flash suppressor of his M16. “They got some pogeybait and weeds down at the LZ; get your ammo there too. Everybody humps four hundred rounds and three grenades.”

  “Heavy shit,” Killer said. Wilkes shrugged.

  “Goin’ out on slicks?” Spaz asked. The LZ was the helicopter pad, landing zone; slicks were the standard UH-1 utility helicopters, also called Hueys. (They were originally HU-ls, for “Helicopter, Utility.” The army changed its nomenclature but the old name stuck.)

  “Not this time. Humpin’. Meet back here when you got your shit together, ten minutes. I’ll go get some plastic and stuff.”

  The squad headed down toward the LZ, the more experienced ones moving faster than the new guys. Candy and cigarettes were in limited supply; if you wanted your favorite brand you had to be there first. They came in boxes called SP packs, which also had a few cigars and packs of pipe tobacco and things like razor blades and shaving soap.

  There were never enough Winstons and Marlboros and always two cartons of Salems that nobody wanted. Spider liked nonfilters, Luckies or Camels or in a pinch Pall Malls, so he didn’t have much competition.

  They also had “fours and fives” at the LZ; four beers and five sodas apiece. There was some on-the-spot horsetrading; Spider, like most of the guys, would rather have had warm Coke than warm beer. Killer took his four Buds in exchange for a Coke and an orange soda.

  Their rucksacks about fifteen pounds heavier, they returned to the engineer bunker. Wilkes passed out C-4 plastic explosive, two 1-kilogram blocks per man, and three bricks of TNT apiece. Moses got the demo bag, a canvas sack with fuses, an extra load of detonation cord, and blasting caps, which you didn’t want to treat too roughly. Everyone else carried a tool—shovel, axe, or pick mattock—for making bunkers each night, one for each two or three men.

  Everyone carried an M16, including Doc, who swore he would never use it. Wilkes also carried a .45 automatic, carefully wrapped in plastic to save him the labor of cleaning it, or firing it, for that matter. Killer had managed to score a civilian .44 Magnum revolver with a shoulder holster, although he only had six rounds for it.

  “So how long we gonna be out?” Killer asked.

  “Two days, anyhow,” Wilkes said. “’Course, last time they said that it was, what, two weeks.”

  “More like three,” Spaz said. “Fuckin’ uniform was rotting off my back.”

  “Jus’ that powerful BO,” Doc drawled.

  Two whistle blasts echoed from the other side of the camp. “No rest for the weary,” Wilkes said. “Saddle up.”

  Search and destroy

  The infantry company to which Spider’s engineering squad was attached was about to embark upon a “search-and-destroy” mission, a term both inaccurate and unfortunate. It was unfortunate because it sounded brutal, vaguely un-American, and did not help the image of the war at home. It was inaccurate because the company did not so much search for the enemy as expose itself to them. It was sort of like trolling. When they made contact with the enemy they would take cover and shoot back, and call in artillery and air support, a deadly rain of high explosives and white phosphorus and napalm, which could come in minutes or hours or not at all. Usually it was minutes, and the enemy knew this, so most contacts were brief and furious.

  The company would walk through the jungle in three lines, roughly parallel, making as little noise as possible, which was usually quite a lot. If they were lucky, they wouldn’t make contact with the enemy, and in late afternoon would settle down and dig in for the night.

  The two outside lines were infantry platoons, carrying along with their M16s an assortment of M79 grenade launchers, M60 machine guns, and two “light” 60-millimeter mortars, which actually weighed almost fifty pounds each, with baseplates. Two people carried LAWs, M72 Light Antitank Weapons. (There weren’t any tanks here in the mountains, but they were handy against bunkers, or just to point and shoot at wherever the bullets were coming from.) Th
e infantrymen also had a wide assortment of nonstandard weapons, such as captured Chinese AK-47s, civilian pistols like Killer’s, and old-fashioned Thompson submachine guns and grease guns, both of which fired the fat slow .45 ACP slug, much better suited for jungle warfare than the M16’s light 5.56-millimeter round (see “The Black Death [2]”).

  Spider’s engineers were in the middle line, the “command group.” Protected by the two flanking platoons, this group also contained the captain who was in charge of the operation, the top sergeant who actually knew what was going on, the FAO (forward artillery observer), the RTO radioman, a squad of riflemen, and the head medic. Sometimes, not this time, there were temporary people like observing officers and official photographers.

  The command group carried weapons but would not normally fire them, since they would be shooting through their own lines. If the company made contact with the enemy, the captain and sergeant would figure out what to do and pass orders to the platoon sergeants, who might obey them. With the help of the FAO and radioman, they would attempt to call in artillery or air strikes onto the enemy’s position. The engineers, protected by the squad of riflemen, would go back down the trail and try to find a place to make an LZ, blasting away a circle of trees with C-4 and TNT, so that helicopters could land to evacuate the wounded and resupply the company. It was not as dangerous a job as the infantrymen’s, but it sometimes had its moments.

  Happy trails

  The company formed three ragged lines in the dust, smoking and trading comments with the artillery crews. The top sergeant stomped through, yelling “Spread ’em out, spread ’em out, you know the drill,” in a hoarse but penetrating voice. The soldiers picked up their gear and shuffled around until no one was closer than six to nine feet from anyone else, so that not too many people could be wiped out by a single grenade or mortar round.