The End Of The Tunnel
By
Bradly Dalton
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Bradly Dalton
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One
Private First Class Robert Stans watched out the jetliner window as he finished last call. The plane had just broken out of a heavy overcast and the earth appeared unexpectedly close in the bright afternoon sunlight. The pilot had announced their arrival over Vietnam several minutes before but this was the first that Stans had seen of it. Beneath the clouds, the air was clear enough to see every detail of the countryside for miles. They were flying over a large flooded plain and a great murky river. The land was sectioned off into rectangular plots surrounding clusters of houses and bordered by a jungle.
Since they were scheduled to land in Saigon, Stans guessed the river to be the Mekong. It was the only river in Vietnam he knew and he remembered that Saigon was close to it.
The airliner entered another bank of clouds and the river disappeared. By the time they broke through the overcast, the river had been left behind for a gently sloping landscape of scrub brush and stunted trees. A fire had blackened everything in the recent past and gullies had laid bare the roots of the dead and dying trees. The only sign of human habitation was a narrow road and the empty foundations of several houses.
Two air force fighters were barely visible in the distance, their dark green camouflage patterns silhouetted against the reddish-brown earth. Together they turned into a wide arc and began to circle some particularly heavy brush. The lead jet leveled off at the height of the treetops and then abruptly pulled up as a napalm bomb engulfed everything behind it. The flames lasted only a few seconds and then died as an oily black column of smoke spiraled upwards and then flattened out at the top like a miniature atomic cloud. The second plane followed the first, with red tracers streaming from its fuselage and disappearing into the smoke.
Inside the airliner there was not the slightest sound of anything that was happening outside. Another napalm bomb exploded into mute violence and more tracers ricocheted silently off into the distance. All that could be heard aboard the jetliner was the sounds of the soldiers’ intent upon enjoying the last few minutes of the flight. Stewardesses hurried primly down the aisles picking up the tiny bottles of airline liquor and the last of the dinner trays, while their passengers engaged in loud conversations over card games. A few of the others sat quietly listening to stereo headsets, eyes shut and heads moving unconsciously back and forth to the rhythm of the music.
The fighters were still making passes over the smoldering ground as they disappeared from Stans’ view. He felt strangely ill at ease but was at a loss to explain why. There was something surrealistic about the whole scene. The double paned window could just as easily have been a television screen with a broken volume adjustment or the airliner a flying movie theatre. The trimly dressed stewardesses with their manufactured faces and cotton candy hair looked more like mannequins than real people. They were within sight of the war and yet could not have been more removed from it. Stans looked forward to the day when he would be something more than just an observer of the war. He wanted to be a part of all the sweat and danger that the war had to offer. He wanted to do his part.
The airliner came in for a jarring landing and taxied to a stop. As if on command, everyone stood up as soon as the seat belt light went off and impatiently crowded into the narrow aisles. The stewardesses positioned themselves at the exits, smiling and wishing everyone an overly intonated, but otherwise expressionless, “Good Luck!” as they stepped off the plane. The soldiers responded to the feminine sendoff by throwing back their shoulders, inflating their chests and flashing their best hard-ass smiles. It was interesting to watch the reactions of the men as they walked by the stewardesses. Some smiled in an overly confident manner and winked, while others smiled stoically as if they were walking willingly into the flaming gates of hell itself. It made no difference whether they had been assigned to a job as a postal clerk or an infantryman, for the moment at least their roles were the same.
Stans sat in his seat until the aisle had cleared. He avoided looking directly at the stewardess’ as he made his way down the aisle and stepped quietly through the door.
Stepping off from the air-conditioned jetliner into the tropical afternoon heat was like stepping into a blast furnace. He had never felt the sun's rays so directly. Nearby, another airliner taxied into take-off position with a deafening scream of turbines. The shock of the heat and the noise jolted his senses from a state of refrigerated dormancy. Waves of hot air rising from the concrete distorted the end of the runway and made him feel slightly dizzy. He collected his thoughts and looked around the airbase as he stepped from the stairs. There was a bustle of activity from the back of the plane as a Vietnamese work crew was unloading baggage. They were the first Vietnamese that Stans had ever seen. They were taller and darker than he had imagined them to be and curiously foreign looking. They were dressed for the heat in sleeveless shirts and shorts. Sweat glistened off their bodies as they pushed duffel bags off from a conveyer and onto a truck.
For Stans, the very air seemed electric with anticipation. Even the sky looked somewhat different that it had the day before on another continent. He felt his heart step up its rhythm in his chest and the blood began to flow back through his cramped legs. The airport looked much like the one they had taken off from in Hawaii. Planes might be dropping bombs and people might be dying a short distance away but here there was just the hustle of a busy airport. He felt no particular sense of fear or dread. He had just spent four months learning that he was part of the best equipped and best trained army in the world and more than a match for any rag-tag group of Viet Cong farmers. The next twelve months stretched out before him as a limitless expanse of possibilities. The uncertainty was stimulating and he was confident of his ability to master any situation that fate might have in store for him. There was adventure and excitement in the unfamiliar faces around him and he liked the sensation of it all.
Two sergeants walked in front of him engaged in loud conversation. Stans followed at a respectful distance but stayed close enough to hear what they were saying.
“Now you see this!” Said the first sergeant with obvious disgust, as he made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “This is what I was talking about! You’d think the Army would know better than to let gooks work inside an airbase like this, let alone give them free run of the place. I heard this country had security problems and it ain’t hard to see why!”
The second sergeant didn’t disagree with this principle but saw the problem from a different angle.
“True.” He agreed. “But I sure as hell wouldn’t want to spend the next year unloading planes – especially in this heat!”
“Let the conscientious objectors do it then,” said the first sergeant. “It’d even be better to have them around than the gooks! One of these days half the planes on this base will go up in smoke and everyone will just stand around with their fingers up their asses wondering what happened!”
“You know you hear a lot of talk in the states about the problems over here, about not being able to tell villagers from the V.C. and all that bullshit. But the real problem here ain’t so much that you can’t tell the good gooks from the bad gooks, or the Northern gooks from the Southern gooks. That’s the story the brass likes to tell everyone back in the world, but it’s not true. The real problem here is that every gook in this goddamned country is just as happy to see you get your brains blown out as the next, some would rather keep you live long enough to rob you first. That’s the only difference I’ve ever been able to see. If they’re smilin’ you know they’re getting ready to rob you and if they’re not smilin’ you know they’re getting ready to kill you.”
The second sergeant shook his head in disbelief while the other sergeant continued in the same critical tone.
“Yes sir! These gooks are funny people. You’d think they’d cooperate with us just a little anyway. After all, this is their fuckin’ country and all. But they don’t. Act just like they’re doing us a favor by letting us come over here and fight their battles for them. You know they even charge the Army a landing fee for every one of our planes that land here! Damnedest situation I ever heard of! This is my second tour and if it wasn’t for the extra money and the chance of an extra rocker before I retire, I’d never have come back.”
By this time they had caught up with the rest of the group who were assembling under a sunroof beside the runway. A balding Sergeant First Class stood on a bench in front of them, holding a clipboard and scowling. A cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth as he spoke, slurring his speech as though he were doing a very poor James Cagney imitation. First he directed the officers and senior non-coms to a nearby building and then checked the names of the enlisted men from the flight list.
“When you hear your names I want you to sound off like you’ve got a pair’!” The sergeant bellowed. “I’m only going to go through this one time and if I can’t hear you answer I’ll mark you A.W.O.L!”
He began reading the list of names. “Adams – Atkins – Adkinson – Bryant – Christenson …” He continued down the list without waiting for a reply. To contribute to the confusion, a plane on a nearby runway readied its engines for take-off and nearly drowned out his voice altogether. In a few minutes the sergeant seemed to finish and looked up at the bewildered group of men as though anticipating some response. Receiving none, he stepped smartly down from the bench, pivoted expertly on his heel and walked away.
Stans sat down in the shade with the others and waited. Half an hour passed and they grew restless. Someone spotted an Enlisted Men’s Club so they left their bags beside the runway and went in for a drink. Once inside, everyone relaxed and talked freely. Being in uniform always provided a topic for conversation. Units and destinations were points of reference when they had nothing else in common. The nametags on their uniforms were all the introduction that was ever needed, first names were seldom used.
Stans ordered a glass of beer from the bar and sat down at a table with half a dozen others whom he recognized from the flight. A jukebox blared the latest rock-and-roll hit at a volume that distorted the sound.
“What the hell we suppose to be waiting for anyway?” Someone asked impatiently.
“Our discharge dates,” another soldier by the name of ‘Reichert’ answered in a completely serious voice.
“Just like in training,” someone else added. “Hurry up and wait.”
“But wait for what?” The impatient soldier asked. “Shouldn’t someone find out how long we’re going to be here? It’d be just like the Army to forget all about us.”
“So let them forget,” Reichert advised. “You got something better to do for the next two hundred and fifty days?”
“Here – here!” Said a big man named Lewis at the end of the table as he raised his glass. “If the Army’s lost me, then they can damn well find me, but I ain’t volunteering no help!”
“Yea!” Agreed another. “I volunteered to be a fireman once in basic and I found myself stoking furnaces for the next eight weeks while everyone else slept!”
They laughed and drank for several hours as the sun burned its way through the sky and planes landed and departed in apparently endless fashion. Presently a bus appeared and stopped at the edge of the runway beside the stacks of baggage. A few minutes later a second bus arrived and stopped beside the first. The men slowly began to make their way out of the club and collect their bags. Stans left half a beer on the table and followed indifferently. He was not used to drinking and the beer was making him groggy. He had no idea where the buses were going but for the moment he didn’t care. The windows of the bus were covered with heavy wire to keep grenades and satchel charges from being thrown inside but all Stans could think about was how embarrassing it would be to retch on the floor. He sat in a seat close to the door and looked intently out the window so that he would not have to speak to anyone.
The bus sat for an excruciatingly long twenty minutes in the broiling sun before the driver returned from the club and they finally got under way. They left the airbase by way of a rusty barbwire gate manned by the military police. The road outside was a newly constructed four-lane highway that might have resembled an American expressway had it not been for the traffic of three wheeled Japanese Lambrettas, motorcycles and canvas covered trucks. But the pavement soon ended and the highway narrowed to a single lane, dirt road hardly wide enough for two vehicles to pass. The traffic moved too slow to suit the bus driver so he leaned on the horn, demanding the right of way legally due to all military vehicles. The motorcycles and Lambrettas gave way begrudgingly, often waiting until a collision seemed unavoidable before swerving out of the way at the last possible instant.
Further along, the roadside became for closely settled with houses and shops. The bus slowed down as they approached a market area thronged with people and vehicles of every possible size and description. A tank sat in the middle of the crowd with children climbing up the sides and a Vietnamese soldier sitting on the turret shaking his fist at them least they come any closer. It was an old world war two model tank, very lightly armored with a small caliber main gun. Old men with long sparse whiskers squatted in the dust beside their baskets of fish while women seemed to monopolize the vegetable trade. Children appeared from every house and hedgerow. They were for the most part barefoot and dressed only in dark colored shorts. Alerted by the sound of the bus’s horn they eagerly ran toward the road. Some held out their hands and shouted for candy while others demanded cigarettes. The braver boys ran out and slapped the bus to get the rider’s attention while others shouted encouragement from the roadside.
“Candy G.I.! You give me candy, G.I.! G.I. cigarette! Cigarette G.I.!” they shouted with their hands held out in an entreating manner. Their straight black hair fell wildly into their faces as they ran after the bus.
Their efforts were all in vain however, as the screen on the windows prevented anything from going out as well as from coming in. The bus driver accelerated as they left the market, swerving dangerously close to a woman as he tried to avoid hitting an ox cart. The woman’s scream punctuated the blare of the horn and the din of yelling children. The bus clattered on, leaving behind only a cloud of dust and the driver’s curses.
Beyond the market place was an attractive, sedate village with neatly tiled roofs and carefully trimmed gardens. Chickens scratched around in the dirt and pigs foraged about in the bushes. But the village was small and the bus passed through it quickly. The road became even narrower and the bus driver was forced to slow down enough to give a group of ox carts time to move out of the way.
There was something timeless about the ancient two wheeled carts and the old men in them. Even the humped back cows seemed as old and used as the land itself. There were hollow depressions behind their rib cages and the vertebrae of their backs seemed ready to poke through their hide. The old men looked like time itself. It was not hard to imagine their grandfathers and their grandfather’s grandfathers wearing the same straw hats and riding the same wooden wheeled carts. They moved slowly off the road at the insistence of the bus’s horn, but otherwise, gave no indication of having heard or seen anything. There was no expression on their faces, no emotion discernable in their unchanging features. One could easily have expected them to be outraged or at least mildly annoyed. But whatever they felt, the old men chose not to reveal to strangers. Some of them spoke lowly to quiet their animals while others looked off into the distance but nowhere did an eye turn toward the American bus. For the old men it was as if there was no bus and no foreign soldiers. It was a passing illusion and nothing more. They had been interrupted in the past by the French, and then the Japanese, and then French again; and now by other Vietnamese and Americans. The bus would soon pass and they would continue on as they had always done in the past.
The village was small and they soon reached its limits. It ended abruptly rather than gradually. The houses were spaced evenly right to the edge of town and then they just left off altogether. Surrounding the village were neatly worked fields, laid out in perfect rectangles and separated by earthen birms, but not a single house outside the village.
In another two miles the fields were left behind, the road was deserted and brush grew thickly up to the edge of the road. The whole area looked as if it had once been cut and burned with a profusion of new growth coming up in tangles around the blackened stumps.
Presently, they came to another clearing that looked like a slum in the middle of nowhere. On each side of the road were rows of ramshackle houses built one against the other so that they shared two walls. A deep drainage ditch had been gouged out beside the road and branches had been thrown over it to serve as walkways to the houses. Bulldozers had leveled every tree and blade of grass for several hundred yards around the houses. All that was left was the red clay burnt and hard in the sun. The houses were constructed out of scrap lumber from ammunition and artillery cases. The boards were too short to offer any structural support so the houses leaned at strange angles. Bamboo poles propped up the walls in places where they threatened to fall over. Rags hung in the doorways and window frames to keep out the dust. Instead of paint or stucco the houses were covered with a collage of military abbreviations, identification codes and shipping marks. Like absurd billboards, they seemed to advertise the paraphernalia of war, ‘HE105, 90MM CANISTER, HE150 ARTILLERY, 79 MM GREN’ and printed everywhere, the words, ‘PROPERTY OF THE U.S. ARMY.’ Children peered quietly out from around the window frames and rag curtains but stood perfectly still, as though the slightest movement would attract some hostile action. Unlike their high-spirited counterparts in the neighboring village they did not run after the bus or demand candy and cigarettes. Instead they just stood and stared, their dark eyes wide and unblinking.
The desperation of the isolated little group of refugees permeated the atmosphere of the bus. The conversation died down, the horn fell silent for the first time since they had left the airbase, the driver stopped swearing. There was no other traffic here. Even the air seemed heavy and unmoving. There was a depth of despair here that Stans was unprepared for. He had seen the standard training films and had read some news accounts of Vietnam, but pictures and metaphors paled beside the harshness of the actual situation. In the Army films it was only the Communist villages that were dysfunctional. Stans averted his eyes from the window and looked around the bus. His previous nausea had left him feeling somewhat lightheaded but otherwise all right. It was not until now that he really took notice of the person sitting in the seat next to him. He recognized him from the Enlisted Men’s Club. It was the soldier named Reichert who had made the humorous comments. His appearance was so disheveled that Stans wondered how he had gotten by the inspections in San Francisco. His uniform looked as though he had slept in it. Contrary to regulations there was no nametag over his shirt pocket, nor brass on his collar. If he was at all aware of military dress codes it was not discernable from his appearance. His hair was long beyond the prescribed maximum and hung in dark waves over his forehead. He was not unusually good looking but had a strong, quick looking face that might be described as handsome in a rough way. At first glance he seemed outgoing and self-assured to the point of arrogance. The corners of his mouth were upturned in a slight smile as though he was enjoying some private joke. But if his lips smiled, his eyes did not. They were dark and serious and seemed to reveal a more thoughtful side of his personality.
Stans, by contrast, was slightly taller than Reichert and was built much lighter. He was very thin for a soldier, and wore a neatly pressed dress uniform that was several sizes too large and fit him like a tent. His appearance was in strict conformity with regulations; his hair was no longer than the prescribed maximum of two inches and his brass was brightly polished. He looked younger than his nineteen years, with rather credulous features and light blue eyes. His mannerisms and speech however were more deliberate and thoughtful than his youthful appearance indicated would indicate.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” Stans asked. His voice had a decidedly Midwestern drawl and was deeper than one might have expected from someone so slight.
“The airbase was Bien Hoa and this must be some kind of resettlement camp from the looks of it,” Reichert answered.
“I thought we landed in Saigon?” Stans said.
“No. We’re just to the north of Saigon,” said Reichert. “That’s a real city; this is just a refugee center. All part of Sam’s new pacification program. They move the people away from the trouble spots in the country to areas where they can be watched.”
“Seems to be working real well too,” he added sarcastically. " The kids are even too disoriented to beg cigarettes.”
“What do they want cigarettes for anyway?” Stans asked.
“Smoke them or sell them,” Reichert answered. “A carton of cigarettes goes for twenty dollars here on the Black Market and a pack of menthols is more stable than the Piaster.”
“Is this your second tour?” Stans asked, wondering why he did not have more rank.
“Not likely!” Reichert snorted disdainfully. “I was here for four months and then went stateside on an emergency leave. Right now I’m just hitching a ride to the Replacement Center and from there I’ll line up a chopper headed for my base. What about you? Where you assigned?”
“I don’t know,” Stans, said, “My orders just direct me to a Replacement Battalion.”
“That’s typical,” Reichert told him, “They’re afraid that if you find out you’re going to a field unit you’ll desert before you get there. But sometimes you can figure out your Division from the Post Office number on your orders. Each Division has its own number. If you’ve got a copy I might be able to recognize it.”
Stans opened his flight bag and produced a manila folder with his name on it. He leafed through the folder until he found a copy of his orders.
“The number should be on the first line,” Reichert said as he looked at the paper. “There – nine, six, three, four, five. That’s First Division, but I don’t recognize anything else. What’s your M.O.S.?”
“Radio Operator,” said Stans.
“Sounds like a slot for a headquarters outfit somewhere. There’s the Hundred and Thirty Second Signal Battalion at Dion, that would be the most likely place,” Reichert guessed. “From what I’ve heard radio men have a higher casualty rate from hemorrhoids than bullets. You’ll probably spend your entire tour sitting in a commo shack relaying calls to the Colonel’s wife back in the states.”
“Sounds like my kind of work,” Stans said with a laugh. “Except for the hemorrhoids. Are they ever fatal?”
“Only if people try to get too friendly,” Reichert replied in his dry sardonic manner. “But don’t worry, whenever that happens, the army sends the body home with a Purple Heart for action above and beyond the call of duty.”
It was not until then that it occurred to Stans that Reichert might have had too much to drink. There was something unusual about his smile and his manner was overly confident. Stans laughed uncomfortably and changed the subject.
“What’s it like over here?” He asked, knowing as he did that the question was unanswerable. “Is it anything like you read about or see in the news?”
Reichert was silent for a moment as though he had not heard the question or did not think it deserved a reply. When he did finally answer, his voice was more serious than it had been, as if he had just remembered where he was at.
“In a way it’s like the news reports show it,” he said slowly. “It has to be I guess. Pictures don’t lie or at least that’s what most people believe. Yet in a way the news films are probably the subtlest lies of all in that they’re so hopelessly incomplete. Sometimes I try to imagine a news crew staging a battle just to get some more news. They don’t I suppose but what I’ve seen on the Five o’clock news is about as realistic as a stage set.”
“What do you mean?” Stans asked, totally confused at this point.
“What I mean is the news media gives me a case of the ass,” Reichert continued in no unmistakable terms. “They wouldn’t dare print the real war over here and yet they seem to think of themselves as some holy purveyors of truth. They come over here like they’re on some kind of holiday and send back their stories all neatly cleaned, packaged and sterilized to be read over toast and coffee for the morning edition. They write a lot of statistics, make a lot of cautious predictions and throw in a few interviews with some bullshit general tells everyone how well the war is going. Same with the news films, what they film actually happens but there’s more to this war than they’d ever film.”
He paused for a minute and lit a cigarette before he said anything more.
“Let me give you an example. Just before I went on leave, one of the tank gunners in my unit came up missing. He just disappeared one night while we were back at base camp without a clue. The last anyone saw of him he was stumbling around drunk on Japanese whiskey, then – puff! Vanished without a trace! Our entire platoon searched a whole day for him and didn’t turn up a thing. We checked the chopper pad to make sure he hadn’t flown out and we even contacted the M.P.’s at the other bases to keep an eye out for him. Still nothing. Then a couple days later one of the local Vietnamese reported a body in one of their wells that was beginning to muck up the water. We pulled it up with grappling hooks, but by then it had started to decompose. It was our missing gunner all right, but it would have been impossible to identify him if it hadn’t been for his dog tags. Evidently he’d decided to go into the village for some after hours whoring, stopped to get a drink of water and fell over the side of the well.”
“Just once I’d like to see something like that spread across the cover of ‘Life’ magazine with the caption: ‘Drunken G.I. drowns in well.’ Maybe even a few pictures of his rancid body or a copy of an army letter saying; Dear Mr. And Mrs. Doe, we regret to inform you that your son was killed by enemy action on the night of…
“No one would ever print anything like that but it would be better if they did. If the Army tired to censor news releases the media would scream like hell, but they censor themselves just as effectively and think they’re being objective. Sometimes it seems the people only have the right to know what the government and the press decide is in their best interests to know.”
There was something very charismatic about Reichert as he spoke, a certain conviction and intensity of expression that conveyed his feelings as thoroughly as his words. But if Stans was impressed with what he had to say it was not evident.
“Ah, come on!” Stans said in an exasperated tone. “You just can’t tell some mother that her son got drunk and fell down a well! People don’t want to know things like that and you can’t blame the media for it.”
“Why can’t I?” Reichert said with a sardonic smile. He was not going to compromise. “It’s about time people stopped thinking about this war as a ‘G’ rated news clip. I don’t really care if people want to know that Johnnie got drunk and fell down a well or that Richard caught some case of incurable clap and lost his equipment. When the papers broke a story about M-16s being sold on the Saigon Black Market they didn’t worry about whether the Army wanted to read about it! So some people would rather not know what goes on over here, so what? How many things can we afford to ignore just because some people don’t want to know? If the press wants to write about this war let them write about all of it. Either the truth is redeeming or it’s not.”
Stans was becoming exasperated with Reichert’s opinions.
“How is it going to help matters to tell people things that only cause more suffering?” Stans countered. “Isn’t it enough that a man or woman lost their son without having to know the details of his death? Maybe someone gets drunk for the first time in his life and gets killed because of it; it’s just a freak accident, not a representative act. Why should that overshadow everything he did when he wasn’t drunk?”
Reichert dismissed everything Stans had said with a casual shrug of his shoulders. “If it’s not representative people are going to know, and if it is, they’re not going to be surprised. The truth might not be the kindest thing to lay on someone but in the long run it would prevent more suffering than it would cause. Maybe the next generation won’t grow up feeling obligated to be heroes just like daddy. Then too, if the asshole at the bottom of the well knew his family was going to find out the details of his death he might have been a bit more careful about how he died. Or, if the people back home were told about all the shit that goes on over here, it might never have happened anyway.”
Reichert had evidently given the matter some thought. He spoke quickly and did not grope for words or hesitate.
“As I see it,” he continued, “the Army’s dealing with an unpopular war and to keep it from getting any more unpopular, they’re got to suppress controversy. They’re not really interested in any humanitarian concerns and they’re not trying to spare anyone’s feelings. They just don’t want their private little war getting too much bad publicity. What better way to do that than to convince the press to be humanitarian and patriotic all at the same time by not publishing anything that’s contrary to the war effort. There’s no need for government censorship if the press will censor itself. Every now and then they add an occasional touch of reality by printing a good scandal, but criticizing the Black Market is different than criticizing the war. The press doesn’t criticize the war.”
He finished his cigarette and ground it out on the back of the seat in front of them.
“My drill sergeant once told me, 'Don’t knock the war, it’s the only one we’ve got!' The hell of it was, the son of a bitch wasn’t joking. He’d been in Vietnam for two years and would have stayed longer if the Army hadn’t made him come home. War and killing were his whole life and he was good at it. If Vietnam hadn’t come along he’d be looking for another war someplace else. Without a war he’d just stagnate behind a desk somewhere.”
“From what McNamara says it will all be over in another year anyway.” Stans offered confidently. “I read an article on it just the other day. The North Vietnamese Army has been practically wiped out. They’ve lost their best soldiers and they can’t replace their equipment. It’s really just a matter of how long they can hold out before the end.”
Reichert was not impressed.
“McNamara said the same thing last year,” he said, “and somebody else said it the year before that. Somehow the North Vietnamese are always on their last leg and somehow the fighting is always escalating. The Defense Department has been wiping out the North Vietnamese Army every year since I can remember. It’s becoming an annual tradition.”
He laughed at his own joke, knowing that it goaded Stans, but not caring.
“So the government has been lying to us all along?” Stans asked sarcastically.
“Sure,” Reichert agreed. “And I suspect they’ll keep right on lying just as long as people keep believing them.”
“Maybe,” Stans conceded, “but the Defense Department couldn’t be any further off than Hanoi. The North Vietnamese don’t admit to having any troops in the south at all. I’ve been reading about the way they get the locals to support them. They move into an area, kill all the leaders as examples and then tax everyone a percentage of their rice crop. Have you ever read any of Tom Dooley’s books?”
“No.” Reichert answered. “I’ve heard of him, but I’ve never read any of his books.”
He did not sound interested, but Stans proceeded to tell him anyway.
“Dooley knew the communists real well because he used to work in North Vietnam and Laos setting up medical clinics and training medics to run them. In one of his books he described how the communists ruined one of his clinics and massacred all of his staff. They called his medics ‘traitors’ for cooperating with a westerner and lined them up in front of the whole village and cut the tendons in the backs of their legs. When they got tired of watching them crawl in the dirt, they cut off their heads with machetes and stuck them up on poles to rot in the sun. That was a warning to Dooley and any other Laotian who might think of helping them.”
“The communists are trying to take over all of Southeast Asia just the way they took over North Vietnam. They’re afraid that the people might become healthy or literate and not so easily intimidated or brainwashed. They ruined every clinic Dooley set up on the pretext that he worked with the C.I.A.. That’s the kind of people we’re fighting over here. They have no respect for human life at all.”
If Reichert had doubts about the war, Stans did not. He had made up his mind that the war was justified and was not going to be easily dissuaded. Reichert however was unconvinced.
“Yea,” he said. “I don’t doubt it. Sticking heads on poles seems to be an old Vietnamese custom. The Special Forces group at Quan Loi does the same thing. But just because I think I’ve been had doesn’t mean that I think the other side is any better. Hell, I don’t have much respect for either side over here. I’ve seen too many bodies of mutilated G.I.’s to think the V.C. are worth a damn. They’re not nice people and I’m not inviting any to my going away party, but then I’m not inviting McNamara either.”
There did not seem to be much left to say. Neither was going to convince the other of anything.
“If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, why did you bother to come back?” Stans asked. “I hear Canada’s nice this time of year.”
There was no anger in his voice nor anything personal in his comment. He believed in the war but carried no grudge against those who did not. Since coercion didn’t make inspired soldiers he felt that those who didn’t want to be there could just do everyone a favor by opting out.
“I suppose I supported it once,” Reichert said slowly. “Or at least I didn’t not support it. But the time to go to Canada was before I was drafted. I’d be a deserter now and that’s a federal offense. I’d never be able to come back.
“Before I was drafted I tried registering as a conscientious objector but since I didn’t belong to a church my draft board laughed in my face. Then after I was drafted there was a chance I’d stay stateside. After I got my orders for Vietnam, I met this guy who spend his year working in the Saigon Post Office. He lived in a hotel and shacked up with a Chinese girl the whole time. I figured I was bound to get lucky someday but when I got here and found out where I was assigned it was too late.”
“I even thought about becoming a priest, but they told me I had to be Catholic.” Reichert was incapable of being serious for any length of time. His smile returned as he began to make up a story. “Hell, by the time it would have taken me to convert, my tour would have been over!”
“I even heard about an Army directive that prohibits two members of the same immediate family from being in a war zone at the same time. I tried to talk my sister into volunteering for the W.A.Cs. Told her what a great life the army was and how exciting Vietnam was. It was all worked out but then the enlistment sergeant found out she was only thirteen.” His voice dropped in exaggerated disappointment.
“Why didn’t you just get a college deferment?” Stans asked.
“I had one for three years.” Reichert said. “Then my board changed the rules because there were too many deferments.”
“Why not just win the Medal of Honor then?” Stans joked. “They’d have to fly you back to Washington for the presentation and you could hijack the plan to Cuba!”
“No,” Reichert replied as though he were serious, “I already thought of that but you usually have to be either dead or severely mangled to be eligible.”
“It looks like I’ll just have to ride this year out. I figure if a person is careful and doesn’t make stupid mistakes, his chances of coming through in one piece are pretty good. You’d be surprised at the number of people who die stupidly. Like the tank gunner I was telling you about, but I left out the best part. Evidently headquarters thought it would look bad to report what really happened so they wrote up the report as a death due to hostile action. Then to keep anyone from questioning the casualty report, they included a citation for heroic action!”
Reichert laughed buoyantly, the irony appealing to his sense of the absurd. Stans smiled but said nothing, wondering how much of what he had just heard was bullshit.
Reichert sat spread out on his half of the seat in as leisurely a manner as the bus allowed. His knees were braced stiffly against the back of the next seat while he slouched down to rest his head on his own seat. There was something disarming about his casual manner and his critical nature. His impertinence seemed to be balanced with a good sense of humor and a quick wit. Even though he and Stans had just met, he spoke without the usual guarded stiffness that strangers use until they size each other up. There was a detached cordiality about him that Stans liked in spite of the fact that they agreed on very little.
The bus had left the dirt road and was turning into a dismal looking army base surrounded by concertina wire and concrete bankers. Unpainted buildings seemed everywhere to be awash in a sea of mud.
Reichert produced a flask from his flight back and unscrewed the top. “Just time for one last drink,” he said as he put the flask to his mouth and took a long drink, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and offered it to Stans.
“No thanks,” Stans declined without having to ask what it contained. “I really don’t care for whiskey.”
“Three months in the field and you’ll change your mind,” Reichert said as he returned the flask to his bad. “In three months time you’ll be paying seven dollars a bottle for the local buffalo piss and be glad to get it. Nothing like a stiff drink to help pass the time,” he laughed. “War just wouldn’t be any fun otherwise.”
The bus stopped and Reichert stood up to leave.
“I’ll be finding someplace to spend the night,” he said to Stans, “these replacement areas are pits, try to get assigned out as soon as you can. And, remember not to sign your real name when you draw a blanket tonight – they make the duty roster from that list.”
Grinning broadly, he waved the back of his hand in a friendly salute and shouldered his way toward the door.
Two
The work routine of the Long Bien Replacement Battalion was endless and repetitive. There were bunkers to be built and rebuilt, guards to be posted, barbed wire to be strung, garbage to be dumped and consignments of every item imaginable to be loaded and unloaded at the trucking company next door. New recruits were a good source of labor so when the battalion wanted something done they just held some soldiers over until it was finished.
To escape the work details, the holdovers used every ingenuity, diversion and trick at their disposal. In its purest form, this was more than mere malingering, it was also a highly involved game of wits between the opposing ranks of non-coms and enlisted men. The most successful gold bricks took great pride in their tactics and were held in high esteem by the rest of the men. If at all possible those who were most successful made friends with a clerk in the orderly room, as this was the nerve center of the battalion. There they could find out exactly which N.C.O. was in charge of extra duty for the day, which formations he picked his men from, when and where he ate his meals, and how to avoid him wherever he was most likely to turn up. The men at Long Bien seldom had time to develop all the subtleties of this art but they did remarkably well on such short notice. The more adept were able to exercise their wits again at combating the boredom of a day with nothing to do.
If assignment orders were given out at all they were given out during morning formation. Orders meant a permanent assignment and an escape from the ever-forming work details. The problem however was to be available to collect one’ orders and still miss the work details. This was a very formidable problem. If a set of orders came down with a name on them, and that person was not there to claim them he was then listed A.W.O.L. and there was hell to pay. On the other hand, if one went to morning formation and did not get their orders, the chances of being assigned to some garbage detail were almost a certainty. Sometimes it was possible to find out whose orders had arrived from the night orderly and the guesswork could be eliminated. The only other alternative was a riskier procedure of hiding in nearby barracks during formation and then sneaking into the back ranks when one’s name was called.
If work detail was avoided at morning formation, the rest of the day was clear, providing one did not stay in the area. The best routine was to keep moving. As long as one kept moving no one ever asked questions. Meals could be had at the trucking company as they were used to unfamiliar drivers showing up at all hours of the day and never questioned anyone unless they were wearing clean fatigues.
Stans stayed at the replacement battalion a week and was then assigned to First Division Headquarters at Dion. From here he would be assigned to a specific unit. The routine at Dion consisted of stacks of paperwork and endless lines. There was equipment to sign for, insurance forms, next-of-kin forms, payroll forms and medical and dental forms. All to be filled out in triplicate.
There were orientation sessions on everything from religious services, dental hygiene, venereal disease and Vietnamese culture. Most of it was a repeat of the basic training don’t mess with the locals, brush-your-teeth, and go-to chapel routine.
The only thing new was a session on Vietnamese culture. The Sergeant in charge of this class began by explaining that he was only teaching this class while he was assigned to the rear recovering from a bullet wound. The Army seemed to have deduced that since a Vietnamese had shot him, he therefore, must know something about them. His arm was in a sling and he looked very much like a combat soldier. He started out answering questions about his arm, his unit, what he thought about M-16 rifles and even where he went on R&R. When he finally got around to talking about Vietnamese culture there was not much time remaining.
“The Vietnamese don’t really have anything that can properly be called culture anyway.” He explained, “Sure they have traditions and customs and things like that, but nothing really civilized. Most of these villages don’t even have electricity. Of course, they think of themselves as belonging to a very fine culture and since they’re our allies it isn’t our place to tell them anything different.”
“You probably won’t have much to do with them anyway,” he continued, “but if you do it’s expected that you show them a normal amount of courtesy. Don’t go propositioning the schoolgirls and the women. Some of them really get upset about stuff like that.”
The last few minutes of the session was devoted to the Vietnamese language, which the Sergeant also had a working knowledge of. He started with some simple but useful phrases that everyone repeated three times and then promptly forgot. ‘Di Di’ was Vietnamese for ‘get out of here’, ‘Dav Hang Va Chet’ was ‘surrender or die’, ‘Dinh Chien’ was ‘halt’ and ‘Ban Toy Ien’ meant ‘put your hands in the air’. At the end of his second week at Dion, Stans and six others were called out of formation and handed a set of orders assigning them to a cavalry troop at the base troop of Phu Loi. A truck was already waiting to take them there and they quickly loaded their bags and climbed in the back. They proceeded to the Enlisted Men’s Club where the driver had left the ‘shotgun’ and then to the main gate where they were to join a convoy. They were late and the convoy had already left. The M.P. at the gate was hesitant about letting the truck travel by itself.
“This is a damned milk run!” The driver said confidently. “Nobody ever gets ambushed on this road, and besides, I’ll catch up with the convoy before it gets halfway to Phu Loi.”
The M.P. was unconvinced “You know there’s a directive out about traveling any road in this entire section alone!” He said sharply to the driver, “I don’t mind if you want to get your own ass blown away, but I’m responsible for you if you leave here alone.”
“Look,” the driver pleaded, “If I don’t get this truck back this afternoon it’s my ass. If anyone says anything, I’ll tell them I went out the South gate. How about it? I’ve really got to get back today.”
The M.P. thought for a minute, swore angrily and waved the truck through. “Next time it’ll be your ass!” He shouted to the driver. “Make the damned convoy or don’t go at all!”
Stans listened uncomfortably from the back of the truck. Of the nine people on the truck, only the driver and guard were armed, no one else would be issued a rifle until they arrived at their unit. The idea of traveling alone unarmed and in a strange country was not to his liking.
The driver proceeded at a reckless pace, bouncing everyone in the back around so much that they had to hang onto the sides to keep from being thrown out. Finally, when someone pounced on the cab window and shook their fist at him, the driver slowed down.
The houses along this road were poorer and more widely scattered than Stans had seen before. Most were built of dried mud with straw roofs and only a few had windows or tiled roofs. Children ran out to beg food and cigarettes as seemed to be their habit everywhere. A group of half a dozen waited ahead beside a cluster of houses.
“Chop-chop! G.I. Chop-chop!” They shouted making eating gestures with one hand while extending the other in an entreating manner. The guard leaned out the window waving a pistol and yelling for them to get off the road. They paid him absolutely no mind. One of the new arrivals threw two candy bars over their heads. This succeeded in distracting a few, but the others only pushed in with renewed effort.
“Cigarette G.I.! You give me cigarette!” They wailed in their most pathetic voices. They made smoking gestures by waving two fingers back and forth to their mouths just to make sure they were understood. Someone threw a half pack of cigarettes over the side of the truck and a mad scramble ensued through which a whole cigarette could scarcely have emerged intact. Then, as the truck began to pick up speed, a curious thing happened. As if they had all rehearsed it beforehand the little group of beggars assembled in the middle of the road holding up their middle fingers in an obscene farewell.
“Fuck you G.I. sons-of-bitches! Fuck you! Fuck you!” They shouted and pumped their hands in the air amid great gales of laughter.
The reaction from the men on the truck was a mixture of surprise and disbelief. Somehow, obscenities’ coming from such small children was so absurd it was funny. It had never occurred to Stans that his first contact with the locals would involve being told to ‘get fucked’ by ten year olds. One of the other new arrivals took an orange from his bag and, standing with great difficulty in the bouncing truck, delivered a blazing overhand into the group of kids. The orange struck one of the older boys directly in the forehead. He staggered, started to fall, and then seemed to regain his balance just as he was pushed over in a wild scramble for the orange. Everyone on the truck laughed and relaxed for the first time since leaving the base camp. It had all been a much needed relief and took their minds off traveling alone.
From a distance Phu Loi looked like a large brown chancre on a flat green plain. The surrounding area was immense lowland that had once been used for growing rice. Thick earthen birms still divided the dried up fields in places where they had not been flattened by bulldozers. Surrounding the base was a defense perimeter of concrete bunkers and rolls of coiled barb wire fully ten feet high. Inside the outer perimeter was a second circle of barbed wire staked ankle high – this would be rigged with mines and trip flares. Barrels of napalm lay half buried behind embankments in front of concrete bunkers. In the center of this elaborate defense sat a disfiguring array of Quonset huts, tents, barracks and bunkers reinforced with rows of sand bags.
The truck entered the base and stopped in front of an unpainted building with a bright red sign nailed over the doorway that announced: ‘Home of the 3rd Squadron, 5th Cavalry’ A buck sergeant emerged impatiently from the building, directing menacing glances at the driver who pretended to be watching something in the other direction.
“You can throw your shit off here!” The buck sergeant shouted to Stans and the other new arrivals. “You’re home!”
Without saying a word, Stans and the other men picked up their bags and dropped them over the side of the truck.
“Stow your gear in the first barracks until you’re assigned to a platoon.” The buck sergeant continued. “Chow is at seventeen hundred hours, stand-to at six hundred hours in front of the barracks. Give me the white copy of your orders and you’re dismissed until tomorrow morning.”
The men shouldered their bags and walked to the designated barracks. Inside were a couple of dozen bed frames and a half dozen wall lockers. A blond haired soldier lay sleeping on the only bed with a mattress, his head propped up on the end, which had been folded back. The door slammed and he stirred. The new arrivals dropped their bags on the floor and looked the place over.
“Where can we get some mattresses for these beds?” One of them asked the blond soldier.
“Supply’s closed,” he answered, “take some from Delta Troop, fifth barracks down. They’re all in the field anyway and besides, they stole them from Alpha Troop.”
Some of the new arrivals sat down on the bedsprings and lit up cigarettes, while others disappeared in the direction of the Delta Troop barracks. Stans took a bunk at the far end of the barracks, opposite the blond haired soldier. There was a sandbag bunker just outside the door, at that end of the barracks; he would be closest to it.
“Did they tell you where the club was at?” The blond haired soldier asked Stans.
“No,” he answered, “I wasn’t even sure there’d be one here.”
“They never tell you the important things,” the blond haired soldier said. “I’m going over for a drink before chow, come along and I’ll show you where it’s at. Don’t worry about the mattresses; Delta Troop won’t be back for another two weeks.
Stans nodded his head is agreement and they set off across the camp. The blond haired soldier’s name was ‘Smith’ and he worked in supply. At first impression he seemed friendly enough and had a swaggering, overly confident walk, and a hurried manner of speech. Physically, he was less than imposing. Although strongly built, he was shorter than average in height with sharp, hawkish facial features.
The Enlisted Men’s Club was unexpectedly plush. A horseshoe shaped bar of polished mahogany dominated the wall opposite the entrance. Leather stools surrounded the bar and there were tables and booths along the walls. Behind the bar where Stans and Smith sat was an impressive stock of liquor at least fifty different kinds along with several blenders, a stainless steel sink and an ice machine. The club was empty except for themselves, a bartender and three other soldiers sitting at a corner table at the opposite end of the building.
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