A Rumor Of War

by Philip Caputo

“There’s nothing I can do for him.” “You goddamned well better do something,” I say, putting my hand on the grip of my pistol. It is a silly thing to do, typical of my hot temper and proclivity for melodrama. But it works. The doctor orders Powell to be taken into one of the tents. Half an hour later, the doctor comes out and says, apologetically, that Powell will have to be evacuated to the States. “I can’t figure out why he’s even alive. He’s got a body temperature of a hundred and nine degrees.” I ask what that means. The doctor replies that, in effect, the blood in Powell’s head is bubbling like water in a boiling kettle. “If he lives, he’ll probably suffer permanent brain damage.” Riding back to the company area in Miller’s jeep, I think, We’ve lost a man, not to the enemy, but to the sun. It is as if the sun and the land itself were in league with the Viet Cong, wearing us down, driving us mad, killing us.

Tester’s men make a sudden rush on the hamlet. A phosphorus grenade bursts in a cloud of thick, white smoke, and a hut begins to burn. Another goes up. In minutes, the entire hamlet is in flames, the thatch and bamboo crackling like small-arms fire. The marines are letting out high-pitched yells, like the old rebel yell, and throwing grenades and firing rifles into bomb shelters and dugouts. Women are screaming, children crying. Panic-stricken, the villagers run out of the flame and smoke as if from a natural disaster. The livestock goes mad, and the squawking of chickens, the squeal of pigs, and the bawling of water buffalo are added to the screams and yells and the loud popping of the flaming huts. “They’ve gone nuts, skipper,” Tester says. “They’re shooting the whole place up. Christ, they’re killing the animals.” He and Peterson try to stop the destruction, but it is no use: 3d platoon seems to have gone crazy. They destroy with uncontrolled fury. At last it is over. The hamlet which is marked on our maps as Giao-Tri (3) no longer exists. All that remains are piles of smoldering ash and a few charred poles still standing. By some miracle, none of the people have been hurt.

The door gunner, sitting on a folded flak jacket, was tensed behind his machine gun; but he could not return fire without the risk of hitting another aircraft. Hearing that pop-pop-pop outside, I could only think of what a pilot had once told me: “If a chopper gets hit in the right place, it has the flying characteristics of a falling safe.”

Forming a column, my platoon started toward its first objective, a knoll on the far side of the milky-brown stream. It was an objective only in the geographical sense of the word; it had no military significance. In the vacuum of that jungle, we could have gone in as many directions as there are points on a compass, and any one direction was as likely to lead us to the VC, or away from them, as any other. The guerrillas were everywhere, which is another way of saying they were nowhere. The knoll merely gave us a point of reference. It was a place to go, and getting there provided us with the illusion we were accomplishing something.

C Company was ordered to move down into the swamp. We were to clean out any remaining pockets of resistance and look for enemy corpses, the number of which would be the measure of our victory. According to the tactics manuals, this phase of the action was the “pursuit.” The word suggests an exhilarating chase, but in this case it meant a vicious, mudbound manhunt. The swamp, a great pool of rust-red mire about twice the size of a football field, was broken by islands of thorn bushes and razor-sharp grass that slashed the skin and tore our uniforms. The mud was waist-deep in places. It tugged at our boots, almost pulling them off when we lifted our feet to walk; and with each step the rotten-egg stench of escaping marsh gas rose into our nostrils. All of us were soon covered with leeches, black things as big as a man’s thumb.

The sight of mutilation did more than cause me physical revulsion; it burst the religious myths of my Catholic childhood. I could not look at those men and still believe their souls had “passed on” to another existence, or that they had had souls in the first place. I could not believe those bloody messes would be capable of a resurrection on the Last Day. They did, in fact, seem “more” dead. Massacred or annihilated might better describe what had happened to them. Whatever, they were gone for good, body, mind, and spirit.

Outside, cyclo-drivers pimped on the street corners, eyes darting lizardlike from beneath their cork sun helmets as they surveyed the khaki crowds passing by. “Hey, you GI,” they hissed, straddling their three-wheeled cycles, “you ride my cyclo to good place. Very cheap. Good place. No VD. No VC.”

Like many inexperienced soldiers, I suffered from the illusion that there were good ways to die in war. I thought grandly in terms of noble sacrifices, of soldiers offering up their bodies for a cause or to save a comrade’s life. But there had been nothing sacrificial or ceremonial about Sullivan’s death. He had been sniped while filling canteens in a muddy jungle river.

I came to understand why Lemmon and the others had seemed so distant. It had nothing to do with my no longer belonging to the battalion. It was, rather, the detachment of men who find themselves living in the presence of death. They had lost their first man in battle, and, with him, the youthful confidence in their own immortality. Reality had caught up with them, with all of us. As Bradley put it later that evening: “I guess the splendid little war is over.” Some combat veterans may think I am making too much of a single casualty. Later, I was to see fairly active fighting, and I know that experiencing heavy or constant losses tends to diminish the significance of one individual’s death. But at the time we lost Sullivan, casualties were still light; it was the “expeditionary” period of the war, a period that lasted roughly from March to September 1965. The loss of even one man was an extraordinary event. Perhaps, too, we were less emotionally prepared for death and wounds than those who came later; the men who fought in Vietnam at this time had joined the service in peacetime, before the toll built up to a daily announcement.

The big guns across the road fired H-and-I missions until dawn. H-and-I stood for “harassment and interdiction,” a type of artillery fire directed at road junctions, hilltops, anywhere the enemy was likely to be. It was supposed to fray the Viet Congs’ nerves and keep them off balance. I don’t know if the artillery achieved its purpose, but by morning my nerves were plenty frayed. I had been jolted awake a dozen times by the roaring howitzers.

Schwartz briefed me on my extra assignments—additional duties, as they were called. Junior staff officers were given a number of them because nobody else would do them. We were therefore known as SLJOs: shitty little jobs officers.

Schwartz left for 2d Battalion a few days later, and I took over. He had been right about not having more than three or four hours’ work a day. Sometimes there was less than that. I spent my ample leisure time looking for things to do or reading the cheap paperbacks donated by the Red Cross—Fighting Red Devils, “the true-life story of Britain’s guts and glory paratroopers in World War Two,” or just sitting at my desk, sweaty and thoroughly bored.

As fighting increased, the additional duty of casualty reporting officer kept me busiest. It was also a job that gave me a lot of bad dreams, though it had the beneficial effect of cauterizing whatever silly, abstract, romantic ideas I still had about war.

The mines were similar to our Claymore, packed with hundreds of steel pellets and a few pounds of an explosive called C-4. If I recall correctly, the gas-expansion rate of C-4 is 26,000 feet per second. That terrific force, and the hundreds of steel pellets propelled by it, made the explosion of a command-detonated mine equivalent to the simultaneous firing of seventy twelve-gauge shotguns loaded with double-0 buckshot.

I filed copies of the reports in their respective folders, one labeled CASUALTIES: HOSTILE ACTION and the other CASUALTIES: NON HOSTILE. I believe the two were kept separate because men killed or wounded by enemy fire were automatically awarded Purple Hearts, while those hit by friendly fire were not. That was the only real difference. A man killed by friendly fire (another misleading term, because fire is never friendly if it hits you) was just as dead as one killed by the enemy. And there was often an accidental quality even about battle casualties. Stepping on a mine or stumbling over the trip wire of a booby trap is a mishap, really, not unlike walking in front of a car while crossing a busy street.

high-ranking visitors from Danang and Saigon often dropped in unannounced to see how the regiment was performing. And the measures of a unit’s performance in Vietnam were not the distances it had advanced or the number of victories it had won, but the number of enemy soldiers it had killed (the body count) and the proportion between that number and the number of its own dead (the kill ratio).

If I had been an agent of death as a platoon leader, as a staff officer I was death’s bookkeeper.

“Maybe you could explain what we’re doing over here. You’ve been a platoon commander. When we got here, we were just supposed to defend the airfield for a while and then go back to Okinawa. Now we’re in the war to stay and nobody has been able to explain to me what we’re doing. I’m no tactician, but the way it looks to me, we send men out on an operation, they kill a few VC, or the VC kill them, and then we pull out and the VC come right back in. So we’re back where we started. That’s the way it looks to me. I think these boys are getting killed for nothing.”

“What I mean is that twelve KIAs in two months isn’t bad.” Ryerson’s face reddened and his voice got strident. “That’s twelve wrecked homes. Twelve wrecked homes, lieutenant.” He pointed a finger at me. “Twelve KIA is pretty bad for the families of those dead marines.”

I cooled off, apologized to Ryerson, and finished eating. Leaving the mess, I went back to my desk. It was difficult to work. The tent was stifling, and I felt confused. The chaplain’s morally superior attitude had rankled me, but his sermon had managed to plant doubt in my mind, doubt about the war. Much of what he had said made sense: our tactical operations did seem futile and directed toward no apparent end.

the staffs went on, sticking to routines, which was just another way of doing nothing. They dealt with the enemy threat by ignoring it, and on July 1, the Viet Cong attacked the airfield.

Although there was more action than in the spring, contacts with the enemy were still rare. Almost every hour of every night the same reports came in over the radios in the operations tent. They came in from outposts and patrols, and we could hear them whenever we stood watch, twenty different voices saying the same thing, like a choir reciting a chant: “Contact negative. All secure. Situation remains the same.” When contacts did occur, they were violent, but nothing ever really changed. The regiment sat in the same positions it had occupied since April, and the details of the surrounding landscape became so familiar that it seemed we had been there all our lives. Men were killed and wounded, and our patrols kept going out to fight in the same places they had fought the week before and the week before that. The situation remained the same.

They had lost some of their friends and most of their old convictions about the reasons for the war. Oh, if, someone had asked them, “Do you think you did the right thing?” they would have answered yes. But if you pointed to the casualty list and asked them why their friends had died, they would not have replied with some abstract speech about preserving democracy and stopping Communism. Their answer would have been simple and concrete: “Well, Jack was killed by a sniper and a mortar got Bill and Jim stepped on a mine.” Captain Peterson summed up Charley Company’s collective feelings one night shortly before the battalion shipped out. “Phil,” he said to me over a beer in the HqCo mess, “we’ve been shot at and missed and shit on and hit, and now we’re getting out of this hole.”

What would it be like when they answered the bell and saw a man in uniform standing in the doorway? Would they know instinctively why he had come? What would he say? How do you tell parents that all the years they had spent raising and educating their son were for nothing? Wasted. In that war, soldier’s slang for death was “wasted.” So-and-so was wasted. It was a good word.

I had always liked Levy and sometimes envied him. He was quietly deliberate, while I was hot-tempered and impulsive. I had a degree from a parochial commuter-college; he had gone to Columbia. His family was well-off; mine had just recently struggled out of the working class. He had had all the advantages, but he had enlisted when he could have easily done something else. I guess he had that, too: a high sense of duty. My own motives for joining the marines had been mostly personal, but Levy seemed to have no personal ambition. He was a patriot—the best sort, the kind who do not walk around with American flags in their lapels. He had volunteered because it had seemed the right thing to do, and he had done it quietly, easily, and naturally. He had one other attribute rare in this indulgent age: an inflexible fidelity to standards.

In such condition there is … no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. —Hobbes LEVIATHAN

“A Belly-full of War,” was a marching song composed by an officer in A Company. Oh they taught me how to kill, Then they stuck me on this hill, I don’t like it anymore. For all the monsoon rains Have scrambled up my brains, I’ve had a belly-full of war. Oh the sun is much too hot, And I’ve caught jungle rot, I don’t like it anymore. I’m tired and terrified, I just want to stay alive, I’ve had a belly-full of war. So you can march upon Hanoi, Just forget this little boy, I don’t like it anymore. For as I lie here with a pout, My intestines hanging out, I’ve had a belly-full of war.

It was common knowledge that quite a few captured VC never made it to prison camps; they were reported as “shot and killed while attempting to escape.” Some line companies did not even bother taking prisoners; they simply killed every VC they saw, and a number of Vietnamese who were only suspects. The latter were usually counted as enemy dead, under the unwritten rule “If he’s dead and Vietnamese, he’s VC.”

According to those “rules of engagement,” it was morally right to shoot an unarmed Vietnamese who was running, but wrong to shoot one who was standing or walking; it was wrong to shoot an enemy prisoner at close range, but right for a sniper at long range to kill an enemy soldier who was no more able than a prisoner to defend himself; it was wrong for infantrymen to destroy a village with white-phosphorus grenades, but right for a fighter pilot to drop napalm on it. Ethics seemed to be a matter of distance and technology. You could never go wrong if you killed people at long range with sophisticated weapons. And then there was that inspiring order issued by General Greene: kill VC. In the patriotic fervor of the Kennedy years, we had asked, “What can we do for our country?” and our country answered, “Kill VC.” That was the strategy, the best our best military minds could come up with: organized butchery. But organized or not, butchery was butchery, so who was to speak of rules and ethics in a war that had none?

On staff, there was too much time to brood over those corpses; there would be very little time to think in a line company. That is the secret to emotional survival in war, not thinking.

“Six, this is Two. If you are receiving me, I have Victor Charlies in the ville behind me. One squad pinned down by automatic-weapons fire and landlines cut by grenades. Request illumination on concentration one.” Mockingly, the static hissed. I hit the radio with my fist. Discards from World War II, the PRC-10s could always be relied on to break down in a crisis. After trying for nearly fifteen minutes, I got through to company HQ. Neal said he knew nothing about a fire-fight.

Would I like to go to Saigon for three days’ R-and-R? Yes,

I found escape from the war the next morning. It was in a quiet quarter of the city, where tall trees shaded the streets and I could walk for a long way without seeing soldiers, whores, or bars; just quiet, shady streets and whitewashed villas with red tile roofs. There was a sidewalk café on one of the side streets. I went inside for breakfast. The café was cool and fresh-smelling in the early morning, and the only other customers were two lovely Vietnamese girls wearing orange ao-dais. The waiter handed me a menu. A menu. I had a choice of what to eat, something I had not had in months. I ordered juice, café au lait, and hot croissants with jam and butter.

On my second day in Saigon, I met an Indian silk-merchant in one of the city’s noisy, enclosed market places, and he asked how I liked Saigon. I said that I liked it very much. It was a beautiful city, a magnificent city when you compared it to the mess in the countryside.

I had had two nights of solid sleep, a bath, an excellent dinner, and I felt normal—I mean, I did not feel afraid. For the first time in a very long time, I did not feel afraid.

That was the real crime a deserter committed: he ran out on his friends. And perhaps that was why, in spite of everything, we fought as hard as we did. We had no other choice. Desertion was unthinkable. Each of us fought for himself and for the men beside him. The only way out of Vietnam, besides death or wounds, was to fight your way out. We fought to live. But it was pleasant to toy with the idea of desertion, to pretend I had a choice.

The marines walked slowly through the jungle’s silent green twilight, some limping from the boils that covered the soles of their feet.

I tightened the shoulder straps of my pack, heavily loaded with signal flares, smoke grenades, dry socks, a poncho, and three days’ rations. An entrenching tool and machete were lashed to its sides. In my pockets, I carried a map, compass, hand grenades, more flares, halizone tablets, malaria pills, and a spare magazine for my carbine. A pistol, two clips of ammunition, knife, first-aid kit, and two full canteens hung from my belt. My steel helmet and flak jacket added twenty pounds to the load. The gear probably weighed over forty pounds altogether,

my gung-ho enthusiasm before the platoon left base camp. A sudden and mysterious recovery from the virus of fear had caused the change in mood. I didn’t know why. I only knew I had ceased to be afraid of dying. It was not a feeling of invincibility; indifference, rather. I had ceased to fear death because I had ceased to care about it. Certainly I had no illusions that my death, if it came, would be a sacrifice. It would merely be a death, and not a good one either. A good death involved a certain amount of choice, ritual, and style. There were no good deaths in the war.

I would die as casually as a beetle is crushed under a boot heel, and perhaps it was the recognition of my insect-like pettiness that had made me stop caring. I was a beetle. We were all beetles, scratching for survival in the wilderness. Those who had lost the struggle had not changed anything by dying. The deaths of Levy, Simpson, Sullivan, and the others had not made any difference. Thousands of people died each week in the war, and the sum of all their deaths did not make any difference. The war went on without them, and as it went on without them, so would it go on without me. My death would not alter a thing. Walking down the trail, I could not remember having felt an emotion more sublime or liberating than that indifference toward my own death.

The whole plan of attack flashed through my mind in a matter of seconds. At the same time, my body was tensing itself to spring. Quite separate from my thoughts or will, it was concentrating itself to make a rush for the tree line. And that intense concentration of physical energy was born of fear. I could not remain in the hollow for longer than a few more seconds. After that, the Viet Cong would range in on me, a stationery target in an exposed position. I had to move, to face and overcome the danger. I understood then why a cornered animal is so dangerous; he is terrified and every instinct in him focuses on a single end: destroying the thing that frightens him.

the thrill of having seen the platoon perform perfectly under heavy fire and under my command. I had never experienced anything like it before. When the line wheeled and charged across the clearing, the enemy bullets whining past them, wheeled and charged almost with drill-field precision, an ache as profound as the ache of orgasm passed through me. And perhaps that is why some officers make careers of the infantry, why they endure the petty regulations, the discomforts and degradations, the dull years of peacetime duty in dreary posts: just to experience a single moment when a group of soldiers under your command and in the extreme stress of combat do exactly what you want them to do, as if they are extensions of yourself.

when a sniper opened up from a tree line beyond the village, I did something slightly mad. Ordering the platoon to train their rifles on the tree line, I walked up and down the clearing, trying to draw the sniper’s fire. “When he opens up, every man put five rounds rapid into the tree line,” I said, walking back and forth and feeling as invulnerable as an Indian wearing his ghost shirt. Nothing happened. I stopped walking and, facing the tree line, waved my arms. “C’mon, Charlie, hit me, you son of a bitch,” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “HO CHI MINH SUCKS. FUCK COMMUNISM. HIT ME, CHARLIE.” Some of the marines started laughing, and when I heard one of them mutter, “That stocky little fucker’s crazy,” I started laughing too. I was crazy. I was soaring high, very high in a delirium of violence. “C’mon and hit me, Charlie,” I yelled again, firing a burst into the tree line with my carbine. “YOU SON OF A BITCH, TRY AND HIT ME. FUCK UNCLE HO. HANOI BY CHRISTMAS.” I was John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima. I was Aldo Ray in Battle Cry. No, I was a young, somewhat immature officer flying on an overdose of adrenalin because I had just won a close-quarters fight without suffering a single casualty.

Then the shelling stopped, and my spirit, reluctantly leaving the peace of its elevated plane, slipped back into my body. I was whole again. I was a whole man. The Jesuits at college had stressed that: the purpose of a Jesuit education is to create a whole man. And I was a whole man again in my foxhole; a whole in a hole. I crawled out to the edge of the perimeter and called to Smith’s fire-team. “Yes, sir,” Smith said in a whisper. “You guys all right?” “Outside of being cold, wet, miserable, hungry, and scared shitless, we’re just fine, sir.” “No casualties?” “No, sir. Because I’m black, the shells couldn’t see me.” I laughed to myself, thinking, They’re all right, the best you could ask for. They’ve been through a fire-fight and a shelling and they’re making jokes about it. The platoon survived the shelling.

We ate lunch. Our rations were the same as the Viet Cong’s: cooked rice rolled into a ball and stuffed with raisins. The riceballs were easier to carry than the heavy C-ration tins and alleviated the diarrhea from which we all suffered. Eating the rice on that desolate hill, it occurred to me that we were becoming more and more like our enemy. We ate what they ate. We could now move through the jungle as stealthily as they. We endured common miseries. In fact, we had more in common with the Viet Cong than we did with that army of clerks and staff officers in the rear.

Operation Long Lance to get under way. The battalion was to make a night helicopter assault at a point about twenty-five miles southwest of Danang. This was the Vu Gia Valley, named after the river that flowed through it. An NVA regiment, supported by a local battalion of Viet Cong, was supposed to be using it as a base for operations against Danang. At a briefing, the company officers had been told the attack would be the second night helicopter assault in history. Perhaps that was intended to inspire us, but the reason the assault had to be made at night was anything but inspirational: the North Vietnamese regiment reportedly had a battery of 37-mm anti-aircraft cannon—the same guns they were using against our jet fighter-bombers in the North. In daylight, helicopters would be defenseless against them. As one of my riflemen put it, “If they’ve got those thirty-sevens, we might just go down like ducks on opening day.”

The officers had celebrated New Year’s Day by attending a series of briefings. We spent the next two days briefing and rehearsing our men, checking and rechecking their equipment, then briefing and rehearsing them again, until every private knew exactly what he was supposed to do. Like the other two companies that were to make the attack, C Company was substantially understrength; but by making riflemen out of our clerks and cooks, by placing our light-duty cases back on full duty, and by refusing to allow anyone with anything less than terminal cancer from going on the sick list, we were able to muster about one hundred and forty effectives. That was a respectable number, though still seventy men short of a marine rifle company’s usual combat strength.

We could not fight back against the Viet Cong mines or take cover from them or anticipate when they would go off. Walking down the trails, waiting for those things to explode, we had begun to feel more like victims than soldiers.

Wet and bone-tired, we waited all morning. The weather began to clear. It grew very hot, but the sun was a balm to joints and muscles stiffened by the monsoon damp. Shortly after noon, the decision came down: we were to risk a daylight assault.

This was supposed to be a nighttime assault, the second nighttime helicopter raid ever.

the aircraft, dropping rapidly, went in for an assault landing. Coffell cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, “Line of departure, lock and load.” The marines loaded their rifles, but we could not hear the bolts locking over the engine noise and the buffeting wind. We had once again crossed that line between a world of relative stability and one that was wholly unstable; the world where anything could happen at any moment.