Goodbye to the Blind Slash Dead Kid's Hooch

From the helicopter at 1500 feet, the nightmare moonscape of Vietnam--a description that springs automatically into the mind of everyone who flies above this blasted, seared country--appears exotically beautiful and cool. Flying north, there are sharp green mountains on the left horizon and on the right bright-blue sea, as if a painter had smeared Caribbean colors upon the harsh coast of Greece. Beneath pass sections of totally desolate ground, first defoliated, then torn apart by gigantic Romes (tractors twice the size of tanks, named after their Georgia manufacturer), whose steel dozer blades churn through forests or jungle, leveling the land. Their unit motto: "We prevent forests." Throughout these dead wastes are strewn thousands of back-yard swimming pools--bomb craters and shell holes from previous actions, the rain water in them now multicolored from poisons thrown in by both sides to make it undrinkable. Through these nonplaces, this stubble where nothing lives, "we" and "they" sneak by night sowing booby traps.

Among the desolation, the mountains, the jungle and the sea, life goes on in checkerboards of rice paddies and bamboo groves, dotted with small villages and banana palms, all looking deceptively ordered and solid from high in the air. But as we start down, the pretty, abstract character of the ground changes: The bamboo groves jut thick, solid and tall, and dark tangles of forbidding mangrove swamp appear. By 200 feet, the Lima Zulu into which we are to Charlie Alpha (landing zone into which we are to make a combat assault--abstraction of an abstraction) has turned from a solid, green field into a watery mass of tall grass jumbled by dikes. Behind us the four gunships turn in, ready to work over the LZ with rockets and cannon. The heat blasts up. Water and rice ripple beneath the blades of the chopper. From the grass in the center of the landing zone rise up a boy and a girl herding ducks.

"Pop green!"

From the helicopter, now at about ten feet, we throw out a grenade of green smoke the size of a beer can.

"Green LZ. Green LZ." The assault commander flying the helicopter is on his radio telling the gun helicopters not to work over the landing zone. The two children have made up his mind to go in cold, to land his six helicopters without shooting up the zone. Had he "popped red," the gunships would have unleashed their rockets, the landing zone would have been safer for his men, the children dead.

The assault commander is 23. He has been wounded three times and is on his second tour in Vietnam. He never graduated from high school. "In my first tour," he reminisced later, "we shot everything up." He put in 12 months around Hué as a lieutenant, a chopper pilot, in 1967--1968. He is now in the tenth month of his second tour, which gives him far more combat time than practically any officer in World War Two or Korea. "They'd say, 'There's V. C. in that village.' And we'd go out and blast it. Looking back, I'm sure we made more V. C. than we killed. It's different now."

The chopper circles and lands on a patch of white, resort-bright sand near three thatched huts in a bamboo grove. Pack on my back, M-16 in my hand, I am out almost before the chopper hits; helicopters on the ground make prime targets. I run a few steps and drop to one knee to brace myself against the wind of the chopper's take-off. I rise with difficulty beneath my pack and turn to face the four visible soldiers of the 36 with whom I will spend the next three days and nights.

I was first shot at in France as a lieutenant platoon leader 26 years ago. Three weeks ago, now 46 years old, I was shot at again. I missed Korea, covering that war from the Pentagon. I say this neither to boast nor to excuse, but because if I am certain of any one fact about Vietnam, I know that the country in its ancient and shifting complexity is a magic mirror reflecting back to the viewer his own background and beliefs. In Vietnam, people standing and talking tête-à-tête on the same spot of turf often appear to see totally different worlds.

The soldiers before me are part of a company that lost 17 men last week, including their commander, in one hot half hour. Their basic mission is, of course, survival, like that of any combat soldier in any war. So is mine. Only mine is for merely 60 days. They are bound for 365. I look at the men to judge how professional they are; from their closed world--a combat unit is tighter than any Mafia society--they similarly eye me. I note that their weapons are clean, that they chat with one another (beware of the sullen unit with dirty weapons) and that their packs are too heavy; but only the most outstanding units insist on light packs. As they move out through the rice paddy, they keep properly distanced from one another.

"Don't walk too close to me, sir," says the radio operator as he passes, humped beneath his pack plus the radio, a total weight of around 80 pounds. The antennae swing behind and above him like a blind beetle's. "I'm target number one."

The line of men moves across the rice paddy, a formation familiar to us all through war pictures and television. What am I doing here? I ask myself, as the water begins to rise above my waist. (My notebook, like my food and extra socks, is in a waterproof pouch.) Answer: I am checking. Different generals, different colonels, different lieutenants, different sergeants, different privates all tell me different things. To check and recheck is the only way to elicit some truth from behind the magic mirror.

To get at that truth I have had to promise anonymity to those who gave it to me or, better, let me spend time where I could see it. I did this to protect them from their superiors, from Congress and even from irate readers. Everything in this article happened and has been checked. The quotations were all said. But to protect the sayers and doers, I have disguised the places and actions.

• • •

One of the most senior commanders in Vietnam is talking, gazing out the window of his air-conditioned office. For the most part, the brass live more austerely in this war than their counterparts did in World War Two and Korea. Many of them as platoon leaders and company commanders were horrified at the lavish living of their superiors back then and vowed to live relatively simply if they made it. Even at headquarters in Saigon, life is comfortable but far from plush--no linen tablecloths or martinis served from silver pitchers. Everyone wears the same green jungle fatigues, only in the rear lines they're better pressed.

The general's subject is the wind-down. "Basically, there are two forms of control over a military operation," he says, "the dollar and the mission. When you concentrate on the enemy, the mission, you see one set of problems. When you concentrate on the dollar, you face another set. We are going from thirty-two billion dollars [spent in Vietnam in fiscal 1970] to eleven billion this year. The President wants it. He's our boss. The able commander soon gets the word. We don't want people charging up the hill and getting their men killed. It's a question of morality. It's morally wrong at this time to shed American blood if the South Vietnamese can accomplish the same job by shedding theirs."

I ask him about the problems of discipline and morale during the winddown.

"As we shift our concern from the mission to dollars, we'll have an authority problem. We're aware of that. And it probably will get worse."

• • •

A fire base is a small beau geste, a circular area containing roughly an acre hacked out of the jungle and surrounded by a broad trench and barbed wire. Helicopters ferry in supplies and an American battalion makes the area its temporary home. At one such base, late at night, a lieutenant colonel pulls a white file card out of his pocket and in the dull light of the bunker hands it to me.

"These are what guide my life."

On a 3 x 5 card is typed the number of rifle bullets, Claymore Mines, 81mm mortar rounds, artillery shells--and on up the line--his battalion can fire each month. In World War Two and Korea, such restrictions were imposed from time to time; but the restrictions on this card are much tougher. When it comes to one particular type of ammunition, I note, a unit in World War Two often would have fired his monthly quota in less than a week.

The colonel carries on another card the number of hours each day he can fly the various helicopters assigned to him. This limitation, called the blade-hour limitation and used throughout Vietnam, is the most rigid cost-control tool of the war. This year, helicopters will fly roughly one sixth the hours they did last year.

"The rules have changed," says the colonel. "A fellow battalion commander of mine got relieved the other day. He was killing more gooks than anyone else in the division. But he also had the highest casualty and malaria rates."

In the blazing sun at another fire base, the alert young major leans against a sandbagged bunker and says to me, "We are getting everything we need."

Fifty yards away from the major, a lieutenant is talking to his men about the sandbags they have laboriously filled two weeks before to make their holes safer. "These sandbags cost forty-two cents apiece, men. We need 'em in the new base where we're going. Empty half of 'em and take 'em with ya."

Loud groans, raised fingers and unprintable replies.(continued on page 199)Kid's Hooch(continued from page 114)

In the back of a truck-maintenance shed in the black hours of a rainy night, a chaplain and two of his assistants are scarring new plywood with a blowtorch and then smearing it with black paint. They have gotten the new plywood from an engineer company. But there is a rule in Vietnam that there can be no new military construction except out of salvaged matériel. So the chaplain is making old boards out of new wood to build a chapel.

When the lieutenant colonels carry fire restrictions on cards, the grunts empty sandbags and the chaplains cheat the eye, all in the name of cost control, the word is out. U.S. participation in the war is not just winding down. It is flooding toward the close. Some 15,000 men a month leave Vietnam.

• • •

The company I am walking with now moves single file through tall grass and white sand, next through a section of palms and red mud. Peewees and other birds with a high warbling note chirp around us. From the undergrowth comes the chant of "Fuck you, fuck you" from small lizards, not unexpectedly called fuck-you lizards. The sun is brilliant, the sand white, the cactus burnished and bright, the palms and bamboo a rich green. We could be walking toward the beach on a tropic vacation or be in some maneuver area back in Louisiana. We stop in a graveyard flanked by high ferns and cultivated strands of manioc. The captain is not quite sure where he is. This area, a V. C. stronghold, has been fought over for 20 years and the maps show villages that are no longer there, while new roads and trails are unmarked on the maps. The distant hills are too far away for a compass sight. All rice paddies look the same. I suggest firing an artillery smoke round to get our position.

"We don't have the ammunition for that," the captain replies.

I have arrived at his company by what I hope has been a conscious process of selection. Commanders naturally steer me toward their good units. I wish to see all types, though when there's danger I don't wish to be with the fuck-ups. Through the selection of the units he reports on, an observer can mirror to the world any face of Vietnam he chooses. Back at the rear--the battalion fire base, called the front by many reporters--I ask questions. In the answers that follow, the more polite ones are from officers.

"You might try Alpha Company, but I'm not sure."

"You'll be safe with Charlie Company."

"No contact Charlie, man. They run when they see V. C."

"Baker's pretty steady."

"Delta's commander is coming along."

"They step on their dicks down in Delta."

"Alpha, they used to be cold steel. Now they're cold soup."

"Baker's got their shit together."

I am with Baker. Now, as we take a break on the sand beneath the banana palms, several men drift over to me.

"What are you doing here?" they ask.

"Covering the end of the war."

Laughter. "The end of the war. That's rich. You hear how we got blown away last week?"

"Yes."

"Tell it like it is. Tell 'em back in the world who's really fightin' this war. The age of the guys. How we get shit on."

• • •

The young general restlessly shifts his hands about the can of cola he holds. It's late at night again, but cold, wet and unpleasant. The general is a deeply troubled man. I had not known him before but have been passed on to him by the old-boy network along which I travel, a group of officers, some of whom I fought with in World War Two, others whom I met as bright juniors in the Pentagon or knew as cadets during my occasional lectures on "press power" at West Point.

Most of these men are bright and articulate, some with Rhodes scholarships, others with Ph.D.s or books behind them. Most are on their second or, occasionally, even their third tours in Vietnam. Many have grave doubts about the war. Some few are outright doves and have been since General Ridgway fought against coming to the aid of the French at Dien Bien Phu. Others are equally convinced that history will judge the Vietnam effort a necessary, if confused, exercise of our national power.

"You see what's happening, don't you?" says the general. "You don't need me to tell you. We are economizing on everything else to spend our psychic energy and blood.

"Two years ago, on my last tour, everywhere you moved you heard airplanes. Now the air has practically vanished from the sky, except for a few tactical emergencies, the criteria for which become increasingly more stringent. The artillery is no longer accurate or responsive. It's full of economic restrictions and there are also command restrictions because we're afraid we may kill someone by accident. But the restrictions themselves will kill people in an emergency. Armor has vanished from the roads. You'll fly over this whole AO [area of operations] and not see a single tank, except in the rear, and then they're dead-lined for lack of parts that aren't stocked for reasons of economy. The fire bases crumble and grow old, dangerous and unsanitary, and I can't move them or even repair them because of dollar restrictions. I haven't been able to build a new base since August fifth. Now the helicopter blade hours are being drastically cut again.

"The senior noncoms who gave a unit its tone are gone. We threw three Vietnam tours at them in a row; and they quite properly decided to quit and grab some of the richness of America for themselves. At the same time, the captains and the lieutenants lack experience. The battalion commander must spend a great deal of time and energy doing things that should have been done further down the chain of command. It was much easier to have a battalion when I had one.

"Lieutenant colonels also must expend themselves dealing with the ten percent, the hard core, the anti-authority people, both black and white. They must continually explain why, because men will not move from A to B merely on the basis of an order. That's all very well now, but in an emergency it may kill us. And it drains our good men.

"And who are the young men we are asking to go into action against such solid odds? You've met them. You know. They are the best we have. But they are not McNamara's sons, or Bundy's. I doubt they're yours. And they know they're at the end of the pipeline. That no one cares. They know."

They do.

• • •

Checking his map beneath the palm trees, the captain, relaxed and easy, says, "I want ten guys for patrol." He has no trouble getting a corporal and ten men. Among the volunteers, I note two who a while ago told me firmly they are "through with this whole fucking war and are never goin' to pull no fucking trigger again."

But the captain has taken the easy, unfair way. In an outstanding unit, the patrols rotate by squad, so the danger is spread evenly. As I spend time with a succession of Infantry platoons, I am conscious of a vast sieve sifting beneath the young men of our society. No one who objects violently will end up in the Infantry. From avoiding the draft to cultivating a noncombat specialty to merely dragging his feet, a man can assure himself of--at worst--a safe rear-area assignment. As a result, Infantry companies are peopled by a highly select group of men, though the selection is unconscious and bureaucratic. To take a line company and ask for volunteers from it further divides unfairly an already unfairly divided risk. Though when the going gets tough even the finest outfits call for "ten hard-charging dicks."

A new soldier, his first day in combat, approaches the captain and asks to volunteer. He is quite shy about it. Half eager to belong, half ashamed for volunteering.

"Corporal," calls the captain, "here's one more man."

The young man walks off to join the patrol. He is black. About ten percent of this unit and other front-line units, give or take a few points either way, are black. The reports that in this war blacks are dying out of all proportion to their numbers in our society are false. Judging from the number of black faces in the rear, it appears that they may be drafted out of proportion to their numbers, but in the dying units or the hospital wards containing wounded, the ratio of blacks to whites seems to be about the same as in the civilian population.

Notably absent are Ivy Leaguers and graduates of other prestigious non-Catholic universities. In two months with frontline units, I met only two Ivy Leaguers. If our future continues to resemble our past, and if being a veteran remains almost a must in politics, then a generation of Ivy Leaguers may have Jim Crowed themselves out of politics.

Also usually absent are the very poor, black faces and white faces alike being mostly those of the middle class of each race. The psychological and physical health of those raised in poverty does not adapt to the strains of combat. The Vietnamese war, which the radicals so violently protest, actually unites them and the poor in safety, while the best of the middle class gets blown away.

The patrol moves without packs, carrying only weapons and ammunition. The sun is blinding and hot. We traverse the edge of a rice paddy, trudge across a field of something I don't recognize, move through a bamboo grove with giant cactuses on both sides of the trail. I study the red-and-blue flowers entwined in the grass. The war becomes tiresome and unreal. We are walking well spread out, fearful of booby traps. From the fields beside the trail an occasional woman or child stares at us. This is hard-core V. C. country. They are probably either V. C. families or under Communist control. I am walking number six. First comes the point man, then the drag, a combination closer than any marriage. They are followed by the patrol leader, a corporal, peace symbol dangling from his neck; behind him the radio operator, M-16 beneath his arm, telephonelike receiver at his ear, wearing five strands of red and blue beads. Then a rangy, bearded guy in a stocking cap; then me; and behind me a short, smily kid with a grenade launcher. I wish I knew more about booby traps.

• • •

Several weeks later, I am at another fire base deep in the jungle, one that has twice been almost overrun: sappers breaking through, gun tubes destroyed, 40-plus enemy bodies found in the wire next morning. For miles around the base the tall teak trees stand defoliated, bare of green, like the burned areas in Western forests. But the leaves of these trees have been replaced by the hanging white blooms of parachute flares, thousands and thousands of flares fired during three years of anxiously watching the night around the base. On the dead branches, seemingly part of the parachute flowers, bulge the mud nests of ferocious hornets.

The battalion commander and I are talking; as usual it is late at night. The lieutenant colonel has his shirt off, revealing the ringworm splotches and mushroom-shaped splashes of jungle rot that stain his body like birth defects. Beneath this scabby mess are the deeper scars of Korea, his first war: a long incision down the back for radical débridement and nerve grafts, a large, jellyfish blob across his left shoulder to emplace the artificial socket. As he smears ointment on himself, I am acutely conscious of the missing finger on his left hand. He has nine more days left in Vietnam on this, his second tour. He is wasted, drained, almost somnambulant.

As he walks around the fire base "kicking ass," as he calls it (actually, binding men to him by some form of mystic Irish insight), he seems not to step very hard upon the earth. Perhaps after so much combat he does not really believe himself still here. He has not been fragged or even threatened with murder, as have a majority of the battalion commanders I talk to. Such threats were occasional in World War Two, now they are more common and hold more terror. The hooch--Vietnamese for hut--in which he lives has been tear-gassed twice.

"Mostly for laughs," he says. "It's different now. When you praise a man for being a good soldier, he looks at the ground and shuffles his feet. It's not much fun anymore." That phrase I had heard and would hear time after time, along with "No one cares anymore."

Still, the lieutenant colonel perked up, things had been worse perhaps in Korea. He took over a company there in the front lines, in contact with the enemy. Its captain had simply disappeared, walked toward the rear and not returned the night before. The first sergeant was drunk. There were no lieutenants. And when he inspected his perimeter that night he discovered only one of the nine squads on guard awake.

Later yet he shows me his real map, not the public one for visitors. Within his area of operation he has crosshatched several areas with grease pencil.

"I just don't send my men in there," he says. "It's too heavily booby-trapped. I bush [ambush] the trails coming out. If the dinks want to stay in those swamps and eat roots, let 'em. I'm not getting my men blown away going in after them."

• • •

As we walk on, my M-16 gets heavier and heavier at the end of my arm. The trail closes in and I switch the sight to close range with my thumb. I realize my vision is beginning to narrow, drawing back from the distant mountains and bright palms at the edge of the farther rice paddies to the little sector of ground beneath my feet and to my immediate front. We have fallen silent. I speculate on how many more days I have to go in Vietnam. Undoubtedly, other men about me are doing the same. With each man putting in 12 months in Vietnam--or as few as nine, recently, as the war winds down--everyone has an individual end to his private war. That is why the end of the war itself does not loom as importantly to Infantrymen as it does to rear-area soldiers and reporters.

The trail bends left and I lose sight of all but the stocking-capped man in front of me. Suddenly he stiffens, leans forward, M-16 coming up, the classic pose of the surprised. Almost at the same instant, the shooting starts. Instinctively I race forward to help in someone else's unreal war now suddenly become my own. Off to my left two figures rise and run toward a mangrove swamp. Expecting to find men in black shooting at me, I check Fire for an instant, seeing men in camouflage capes running. But their position and actions make them enemy. I squeeze off three shots. Around me other men are firing full-automatic bursts. It's hard to hit anything that way. The firing stops. I don't like the way the men bunch up as soon as the shooting is over. That kills you. The V. C., five of them, have gotten away, leaving blood trails.

I move up slowly, keeping my distance, two garbled lines of Yeats throbbing in my head:

This is no country for old men,

The young at one another's throats.

The men bring in two women prisoners who were eating with the five V. C. we surprised. I am still amazed at how easily we surprised them. Perhaps because we were moving during the heat of noon, when most American units rest. Ritual kills.

A soldier pulls the pin on a grenade and yells, "Fire in the hole." He brings back his hand to toss the grenade into a storage tunnel beneath a hooch. As his arm starts forward, a child crawls out.

"Goddamn it, you dumb kid, don't you come crawling out of holes that way," the soldier yells, furious with mixed tension and relief. The child, maybe four or five years old, looks at him uncomprehending.

Close.

But no closer than in other wars. All soldiers, myself included, have grenaded cellars of enemy houses. And the two women did not say a word as the grenade arm came back. Did they want the atrocity for propaganda more than they wanted the child for manhood?

"Check those other holes out," yells the corporal.

"We ought to go into the swamp and find 'em," yell several. One grunt explains: "We get a case of beer for every V. C." (Other units reward the capture of a prisoner with three-day passes or Bronze Stars.)

There is haphazard surging into and exploration of the borders of the mangrove swamp. To penetrate deeply after armed, wounded men is beyond the emotional and physical resources of the patrol. One of the surges produces an AK-47, a Chinese-made automatic rifle, a major find that can be taken home or sold as a souvenir; also several jungle pouches filled with documents and ammunition. The men again bunch together dangerously around the pouches. The captain and the lieutenant arrive to take over the operation and yell at the men to spread out.

"If I might suggest, sir," says the radio operator to the lieutenant, who has only two weeks of combat, "one or two fire teams to the east, sir. In case they make a break for the road."

In time-honored tradition, the old sergeant is breaking in the new lieutenant.

A shout from the swamp. One of the surges has produced a prisoner, shirtless, black pants, the lower part of his left leg shredded and mangled like a badly carved chicken's. The Kit Carson scout (a Vietnamese, usually a defector, assigned as a guide to a combat unit) begins to question the prisoner as he lies in agony on the ground. Doc, the medical sergeant, binds up the prisoner's leg, fixing a tourniquet, wrapping the white, sterile bandages around a bamboo splint furnished by another soldier.

The prisoner officially surrenders, or chou-hoys, by giving the location and number of his fellow V. C., their weapons and their unit. There are seven of them in the mangrove swamp. They have two machine guns, a grenade launcher and five rifles.

Such information entitles the prisoner to treatment as a defector. The doc--young, intense, a high school graduate from east Texas with a cross around his neck--wants to call in a helicopter to medevac the prisoner. He turns to the patrol's radio operator, who is standing in the circle around the prisoner, and asks him to call for a medevac dust-off.

"I ain't goin' to do it, Doc," says the radio operator.

"You gotta, man. He's chou-hoyed."

"I hope the son of a bitch bleeds to death."

"Let him die," says another soldier standing beside the radio operator. Other men nod, while others, including one of the officers, drift away to be out of the argument.

"He's chou-hoyed," pleads the doc, with an intensity close to tears.

The radio operator shakes his head.

The doc shuffles across the sand to the patrol leader.

"You got your job, Doc. I got mine. Mine's gettin' tracker dogs to find the bastards still in there." The corporal jerks his head toward the swamp. There is no hostility between the two, merely a pair of lawyers arguing a case.

The bandage around the Viet Cong's leg is turning red. He lies on the sand twisted in pain, still being questioned by the Kit Carson scout. Once outside Magdeburg I got into a bomb crater to get between two German POWs and the GIs who were about to shoot them because one of them was wearing U.S. Infantry boots. Other times I didn't do so much.

The young medic, bare-chested and demoralized, walks across the patch of sand to the captain's radio operator, standing in the shade of a banana palm.

That operator is smooth. "Doc, I got to keep my radio set up on higher. You know how it is with V. C. beaucoup close."

Mouth set, the doc walks back to the patrol radio operator.

"Gimme that microphone, I'll call in medevac myself."

The operator does not move. Doc reaches over the operator's shoulder, unhooks the microphone and puts it to his mouth.

"The radio's not set up on the right channel, Doc," says the operator.

"Set it up."

"Nope."

Five soldiers gather in a circle to watch. The two officers have disappeared.

Doc pulls the confidential code booklet containing the channel frequencies out of the radio operator's top left-hand jungle-fatigues pocket and slips the booklet from its waterproof plastic bag. He leafs through it to find the medical helicopter's frequency. He has to stand right up against the operator's chest to do this, because by order the booklet is chained to the operator's clothes. Before Doc's determination the operator relents.

"OK, Doc, it's on the right channel. The medevac call sign is dusky lobster."

Doc pushes the microphone button: "Dusky lobster, this is Husky 56." The medevac operation has commenced. In the end, the chopper bearing the dog tracking team arrives first and the prisoner is lifted out on that.

During the wait for the dogs to do their stuff (they fail), Doc comes over and sits down beside me. He wants to make certain I understand why the men behaved as they did.

"You know they got a lot of friends blown away last week. They're uptight about the V. C. You can't blame them."

"I don't. Two weeks from now, or in another hour, they may react differently. Besides, they rely on you being there."

He turns on me with almost saintlike intensity, the tropic sun glinting on his gold cross, his jungle hat with the sergeant's stripes on it pulled down against the glare.

"It's so unfair! It's so unfair! It's the hard chargers who are dying. The guys who've got it all together. It'll end up being the hard-assed guys who go into the swamp after them. The rest will hang back. And all those in the rear. And back in the world. It's the best are getting killed, sir. The best."

"I guess, Doc, if I learned any one thing from World War Two, I learned just that. There were always a few guys stuck their heads up first. Time after time, the same guys. And they got killed first. Welcome to the club."

He nods. "Why?" The question sinks into the Vietnamese sand. We sit there 25 years and two wars apart, bound by the same agony: that we are alive while better men are dead.

• • •

I have known the colonel a long time, since he was a captain, badly wounded in Korea, returned to staff duty in the Pentagon. He is a man torn. He is one of those who have been against this war since the beginning. He was relieved from one important assignment because of his opposition to the war. Now he is finally on the list to make general.

"There are actions you could call war crimes," he says, "actions you could legally classify as war crimes, going on every day in my area. Given the attitude of the country toward this war, the people who are over here, what the enemy does to us, what can I do? The division commander is a good man. I mean that. He is. He understands the problem. We run a school for selected new arrivals on how to regard the enemy and the civilian Vietnamese. But Christ, it don't amount to no more than pissin' on a forest fire. As soon as the men get into the old units they learn the old ways.

"I talk to all the officers that come into my brigade and tell 'em what I want. You know, you can't even give officers an order anymore, you have to explain. That's all right in its way; but it's sure wearin'. We got a team that investigates the hell out of any injury to any civilian Vietnamese. And all sorts of restrictions on the artillery and air so we won't kill Vietnamese by accident. And I make those restrictions stick. And the men hate me for it.

"We have to get clearance from the Vietnamese before we fire artillery. But you can't trust that. Some of the ARVN commanders get paid off by villages not to fire in their area or to fire on others. I don't know what to do."

We are walking toward the hospital, where the colonel is to give out Purple Hearts to three of his men. He looks at the hospital and pauses. "We had a lieutenant come to in the postoperative ward and saw a V. C. beside him, recovering on the next bed. He reached over and yanked all the tubes out of him. The doctors wanted to court-martial the lieutenant. I wanted to hang the doctors for being so stupid as to put the two of them together. Ain't doctors human?

"I hate giving out Purple Hearts. I hate it. It's meaningless. Meaningless. There's not one goddamn thing in my whole AO worth one rancid peanut to the United States. Not one rancid peanut. What we're doing is meaningless."

He turns away from me to face the jungle fringing the base beyond the booby-trapped barbed wire. The dirty tears groove down the red dust on his face.

"I'm going to get out, Hadley. It's no fun anymore. And no one cares."

Before our walk to the hospital I have been sitting with the colonel in his office. The problems on his desk resemble a metropolitan police blotter rather than those of a military command. He voices the universal complaint of all commanders: that they have to spend 60 percent of their time with the ten percent who won't fight, because the Army system of justice has broken down before the determined onslaught of militant blacks and whites. "And since the passage of the omnibus crime bill," he adds, "the military system of justice is less restricted than the civilian."

Two captains have been murdered by grenade attack as they slept in his area in the past two months. One murderer is still free, the other convicted. The captain's division is losing about ten M-16s a week, stolen by a criminal population that floats from base to base and probably sells the weapons to the V. C. One Service Club has been entirely taken over by black militants. "When you start losing more men from beatin' each other up than from enemy action, you're in trouble," the colonel said.

Last night, a few blocks from where we are talking, four blacks were fragged by someone while standing in their company area. I talk to one of the wounded and get nowhere. In this particular division, fraggings in the rear area have become so common that Purple Hearts are awarded to those wounded in such incidents.

"I hope we learn from this war," says the colonel as we leave the hospital, "like the Russians learned from the Finns. Because right now I do believe the Arabs could wipe our ass all over the desert."

• • •

Behind the paddy dike some more soldiers drift over to talk to Doc and me. They ask me about World War Two. This, too, always happens. They and I are experts in the same trade, but we practiced it on different planets. They are avid to learn the differences and similarities. How accurate were the mortars? What did I fear most? How were the lifers? The officers? Did we dig? Wear steel pots? How many killed each day? From this we drift naturally into my questions about Vietnam. How do they feel? Should we be here? What happens next?

From the edge of the mangrove swamp, a V. C. machine gun opens up on a group of men off to my right. It's ineffective, and we lie in safety behind our dike, smiling into the sun. There is a good deal of debate, more than I like, over what to do next. We decide to put artillery on the swamp. After another long wait, the first round arrives. It screeches in way short and slams into the ground among us, while we cower in the dirt.

"How much do you get paid for this, sir?" asks the soldier on top of me.

We shuffle back through the sand to get out from under our own artillery, more a group than a military unit. I have picked up enough clips of ammunition from the sand to refill my bandoleer, only half full when we started. The world, once beautiful, soft and vacation-like, now appears transformed. The cactus tears at my pants, the bird calls sound like enemy signals, the sand stirs up choking dust and the bamboo is ugly. I remark on the change to the captain.

He nods: "You mean all hostile. I know. This country hasn't looked any other way to me for a long time."

Someone has forgotten one of our radios. After a good bit of debate over whose fault this is, the lieutenant and one man run back toward the swamp to retrieve the radio. The artillery has not gotten the word and fires an eight-gun salvo. Fortunately, this time the rounds are off target to the far side and the two race back safely, though still minus the radio.

Another, longer wait behind another dike, while the artillery works over the swamp. It turns out that the captain spent his honeymoon on Martha's Vineyard, where I live. Such random contacts seem incredibly important at these moments, confirming the existence of "back in the world," a reality beyond this all-inclusive present.

The captain climbs to the top of the dike with his radio operator to place the artillery more on target.

"Captain, me beads, me beads, easy on me beads," pleads the radio operator as the mike cord gets tangled in his neck-ware.

The artillery fires some more. The group of men lying with me behind the dike remark on the high percentage of duds. About one round in three does not explode.

"We'll get them back as booby traps," remarks one soldier.

"Back in the world," asks another, "can you write it like it is?"

"Yes," I answer.

"About what's happening to us. That Kit Carson scout there." The men point toward the Vietnamese scout. "A little kid--can you imagine that?--put a hand grenade in one of our jeeps the other day. Blew away a guy bad. The Kit Carson saw the kid running and shot him. Now they want to investigate our Kit Carson. That's shit."

The others nod agreement.

"Nobody likes this war," says another man.

"Roger that," the rest reply.

"Thank you for walking with us, sir."

"Thank you for having me."

"You know what we say?" asks another soldier. "Calley dies for our sins, man."

This is months before the trial and verdict. Again the others nod and several repeat: "Calley dies for our sins."

The captain scrambles back down the dike and the men drift off. The captain is wondering whether he can get an air strike on the swamp.

"This is taking an awfully long time," he keeps repeating, "an awfully long time. The way to get them is to push into the swamp after them."

After the third time he says this, I belatedly get the message. He is alone and would like to lean on my gray hairs a little.

"Captain, in this war, at this time, you'd be crazy to push in there. Crawling through swamps man to man is playing Charlie's game."

"That's how I feel," he replies, relieved.

• • •

At a small rear base outside one of Vietnam's most beautiful cities, five lieutenant colonels and I are seated around an officers'-club table eating steak, drinking and listening to two of the group, both battalion commanders, argue.

"The action is down there at Ah Thin mountain," repeats the first lieutenant colonel. "That's where Charlie is. I want to take my battalion down there and clean them out."

"That's where the action most definitely is not." The second lieutenant colonel is getting hot. "The action is protecting the population. Let the dinks sit on Ah Thin mountain and get malaria."

"You protect the population by killing V. C."

"Agreed, buddy. But you don't kill V. C. by charging up their mountain. Not my outfit. That's what the enemy wants. You kill him by strengthening the forces of this country. And by bushing at night--selectively."

"No sir, you want to...."

A captain approaches our table and whispers in the ear of the colonel who won't charge up the mountain; he is also my host.

"Oh, shit," he says, "not again." He turns to me. "Another race riot in my area. You might as well see how we live. Come on."

He and the post commander and I walk rapidly out of the club and dogtrot through the blacked-out night toward the disturbance. It isn't much this time. Three black soldiers have been hassling a black first sergeant and a noisy crowd has gathered. The colonel breaks it up quickly. "What's going on, stud? ... Let's break it up, stud.... Get back to the barracks.... OK, OK, stud, this is Colonel X. That's enough. Now!"

The crowd dissolves. The first sergeant is shaking with rage. The colonel takes him aside and spends five minutes walking him up and down the road in the dark--sympathizing, reassuring, calming.

The senior noncommissioned officers--master sergeants, first sergeants and platoon sergeants--are mangled victims of America's rapid social change. They have come to the end of a long career and instead of rewards find threats. Their love affair with the Army has turned sour and their remarks about the military are more violently anti than those of any SDS member.

"I'm on my third tour in my third war," says one first sergeant, a scholarly Jewish man who was a platoon sergeant with the First Infantry in Aachen. "I'd been wounded twice before some of these sons of bitches calling me pig and motherfucker were born."

I am sitting in a senior N. C. O. club, a small board shack bare of decoration but containing a stove and an icebox. The windows, which can be quickly shuttered with thick wooden boards, are also covered by heavy screening to prevent grenades from being tossed inside by the men they lead.

"We come to this grubby place," says the battalion sergeant major, "and eat Spam and eggs, 'cause that's all we can get, and have a beer, so we won't have to eat with the filth they've got in the Army today."

"Ninety percent of the men are all right," says another, a big Irishman with arms the size of watermelons and the deceptive softness of a professional boxer about him. "It's just that they're too easy swayed by the hard-core ten percent."

The other N. C. O.s jump on him.

"Ninety percent all right, nuts!"

"Are you kiddin'?"

"Where have you been?"

"You sound like a general."

"Generals tell you today's generation is the best. That's bullshit."

"The officers lie to the public. They stand before a graph with all the arrows pointing up. They should deal with the scum we get."

These sergeants sitting here in the humid heat remind me of professional football players, both in their size and their outlook. They have the same self-assurance about everything but words. Their views are hard and passionately held but not particularly aggressive. A month ago, one of their number was blinded by a booby trap rigged in his own hooch by his own men. Another was beaten so badly he was shipped home. The sergeant major wears a pistol when he makes bed check.

"First they threaten you. Then they spit in your face. And the officers won't back you up."

"You can't court-martial a man anymore. Hell, a D. D. [dishonorable discharge] is a badge of honor to these kids."

"You can't even send the sons of bitches home."

"They'll throw a grenade under your hooch. Sure, it's only a dud or a tear-gas grenade. But you don't know that. You feel your stomach drop as it pops."

"Draft boards are giving us the dregs. What the home, the community and the church have failed to mold."

The home, the community, the church. What obsolete words are these? Who has them today? As often in Vietnam, I feel I am talking under water to men already dead.

"We're the professionals."

"The forgotten men."

These are words the lifers use about themselves all the time: "professional," their highest accolade, and "forgotten men." I suddenly remember Joe Wolff, a regular, and my platoon sergeant back in 1942, confiding to me just after I'd made lance corporal how the Army was going to hell with all the draftees in it; and how any dumb son of a bitch who kept his ass clean could now make sergeant.

But these men face problems Wolff and I would not have believed.

The sergeants invite me back to a party two nights later and I go. We sing the old songs I thought had been forgotten: You Are My Sunshine, Red River Valley, Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella, The Ballad of Lill ("Lill was a schoolteacher from way out West, / Who took up fucking 'cause she liked it best").

As we gel through singing God Bless America, someone tosses a grenade against the wall of the club. We hear the pop. It is a dud. They are right. Your stomach does drop.

• • •

The patrol halts deep in the jungle. I grab a tree root to keep from sliding farther down the muddy hill and sit panting. In the 35 hours I have been with this unit, no one has spoken above a whisper. The man in front of me, the only one I can see, holds up three fingers. I turn and hold up three fingers to the man behind. In response to some code I do not know, the unit silently rearranges itself, the machine gunner and his assistant slither forward past me, the grenade launcher climbs back up the trail toward the rear. The jungle is unbelievably thick, the basic plant being a squat, saw-toothed palm with narrow leaves. Old Vietnamese hands say the jungle is less passable now since defoliation. Destruction of the top cover has let more sunlight through to the plants below.

This is the most professional unit I will visit in Vietnam. The men's packs are checked for extra weight. No one carries soda pop off the landing zone, because the "pish" of a soda being opened makes too much noise at night. They do not inflate their air mattresses or cut branches to make poncho tents for the same reason. They never bunch. Their weapons and ammunition are spotless.

After a wait of about ten minutes, the man in front of me points at me and beckons. Using hand holds, I slide the last 30 yards down the hill toward the invisible green jungle river. At the edge of the river bed, suddenly feeling naked in a patch of sunlight, I fetch up against the captain. He is 24 years old, on his second tour. He has had 20 months of combat. His first tour he spent as an advisor to a South Vietnamese ranger company. During the first half of this tour he led long-range patrols into North Vietnam.

Pulling a leech off the back of my neck, he kneels down beside me and, pointing up the trail along the river-bank, explains in a slow whisper: "What I've found here is this trail made by between ten and twenty men. You can tell from the way the leaves look, it's between five and ten days old. We've been along it about a hundred yards and found a tin of sardines, a package of Kools and an almost empty bottle of Vitalis. Kools are the favorite cigarette of the NVA. Sardines are used by both the NVA and the ARVN. But this can had a little bit of oil left round the edge and the NVA usually leave a can really clean. Finally, there's the Vitalis. I've never known the NVA to carry that; but the ARVN use it all the time. We're right on the edge of an ARVN AO. What I judge we've got here is an old trail where a South Vietnamese patrol crossed into my area to work up the stream a ways. We'll go downstream."

Later we break for lunch. The radio operator, a rifleman and I cook our C rations over little bite-size pieces of C-4 explosive. The rifleman's C ration is ham and lima beans, a ration the Army stopped making in 1967. "Old stuff," he whispers. A monkey rustling in a tree gives us a case of the ass for a moment, then the jungle is quiet again, no one visible but ourselves and the outline of the man before and the man behind. In whispers still, we talk about the war, dope, the black-white problem.

"We don't have any problem here; it's back in the rear," says the radio operator. "We're all buddies here and we swear we'll never think those things about blacks again. But back in the world we start up the same things."

The rifleman shakes his head. "We'll remember something."

I remark that the unit is so professional they must have seen a lot of combat. Both men think about this. Then the radio operator, who has only five days to go and has seen a lot of combat, says no. The two men run through the company. Seventy percent have never heard a shot fired in anger.

"We're lucky to have this captain," whispers the rifleman. "He's cool to the max. We may get blown away; but we won't get blown away fucking up."

A few miles away, I visit another company. The officers and men had gotten drunk the night before and staged a fake mortar attack on themselves to see the helicopters shoot and maybe pick up a few Bronze Stars.

You can see any face of Vietnam you want.

• • •

After breaking up the mini-race riot and calming down the first sergeant, the lieutenant colonel, the one who won't charge up the mountain, takes me on a tour of his area of the base. Back of his headquarters company stands the long wooden shed of a latrine, brilliantly floodlit in the center of a floodlit field.

"That's one of my failures," says the colonel. "When I took over this outfit I found my headquarters company had gotten completely out of control. Completely. The officer I succeeded was a fine soldier, a brave man, but he'd spent all his time out in the field fighting his vehicles and he'd let his rear get away from him."

Black militants had segregated themselves onto one floor of one barracks and with their tight organization were charging whites and "Oreos"--black on the outside, white on the inside--a toll to go to the latrine without being beaten up. The colonel put MPs on the latrine. That didn't work. Finally he had to tear down the commandeered barracks, move the latrine into the center of the field and floodlight the whole place.

"In the maintenance barracks," the colonel continued, "the lights were on all night. The studs were jiving and smoking pot. By day no one did any work. So I said, this has got to stop. And set an eleven-P.M. lights-out curfew. Two nights later, the first sergeant came to me and said, 'The men won't go to bed.'

"I got the company commander and he and I and the first sergeant went into the barracks. I said, 'Studs, it's time for bed.' No one moved. We had to go down the line--the battalion commander, the company commander and the first sergeant--and order each man into bed personally under threat of court-martial. I tell you, it's no fun commanding anymore."

As the colonel moved to take control of his outfit, he and the other officers and noncoms began receiving death threats. The sergeant was blinded by a booby trap in his hooch. Another was severely wounded by a Claymore Mine exploding on him as he went out the door of his hut. Thanks to a tip in the nick of time, two booby traps were discovered in the gas tanks of helicopters, rigged to explode while the ships were in flight.

The Criminal Investigation Division came in and uncovered a ring of black revolutionaries who had infiltrated one of the major companies that supplies technical experts to help the Army with its maintenance problems. These men were sent home and seven of the more militant soldiers went to jail for persistently threatening officers. The colonel himself was fragged.

"I think it was more to scare me than anything else. I was coming up the walk toward my hooch late one night when the grenade was tossed from between the buildings. It hit the wall and exploded on the far side. If they'd really wanted to get me, they'd have waited till I was asleep and slipped it through my window."

Three weeks before I arrived, while the colonel was away, a group of 12 soldiers, white SDS members and blacks, from a neighboring battalion, marched on his command post with loaded M-16s to "stop the brothers from being killed." The officers and N. C. O.s inside the command post took up firing positions at the windows. The MPs were called out and surrounded the area.

"Thank God everyone kept their heads," the colonel says. "There was no shooting. The studs surrendered readily enough. Actually, all they wanted was to get out of going to the field themselves."

Taunting signs put up by the marchers remain here and there on the post. Going home, Courtesy of the SDS reads one.

• • •

On patrol again, with a different unit: A monsoon is forecast. A month ago, seven men were drowned in this area during a monsoon, and headquarters, firmly closing the door after the vanished horse, has ordered that we move to higher ground. The platoon grumbles as they strike their poncho tents. The company command group is moving with this platoon, the captain, his two radio operators, the artillery forward observer and his radio operator. The artillery lieutenant has a magnificent beard.

The platoon itself has a brand-new lieutenant, arrived yesterday. "You can tell the war is winding down," the captain laughs. "We finally got enough lieutenants."

We move out across a rice paddy. Once again I have the feeling I am outside the present and frozen in some ancient tapestry or marble frieze on an antique temple, celebrating a rite whose meaning is lost though the ritual continues. My pack, many pounds lighter than anyone else's, is for me staggeringly heavy; because of the monsoon threat, I am packing extra rations. The point man leading us across the paddy is a biker, as have been several other point men I have met. Since I ride a trail bike and my sons ride "big mothers"--and he himself a big mother with a suicide shift, back in the world--we have become good friends.

Other soldiers in the unit have told how great the biker is. "Man, he is one fantastic shot," said one. "A bird started up in front of him once, and he was all uptight and blasted it with his M-16. The feathers came down and hit him in the head. Mex said to him, 'What'd you do, Cowboy? Shoot an Indian?' "

Mex walks number two, drag. He is one of a family of 11, one of whose brothers died shooting up. "No one wants to be here. But to respect yourself, when you've got a job to do, man, give it your best." Back in the world, he plans to go to college and be a social worker. Behind his 11-Bravo designation, the Army occupational-specialty number for rifleman, he carries the 4-Yankee of a parachute pathfinder.

The 24 men are still burned up over yesterday's action. They were meant to get a helicopter-delivered hot lunch with cold sodas. But they were in a fire fight at the time and couldn't get to the landing zone and so missed the lunch. (Days later, I ask their battalion commander about this. It's true, he says sadly. Their fight lasted past their lunch-time and the helicopter had used up its blade hours and had to return to base.)

The company knows this area well. They have operated in it for several months and refer to its parts by nickname: "the birthday hooch area," where the captain celebrated his birthday; "the one-legged man's hooch"; "the Frenchman's hooch" (no Frenchman lives there, but it's larger than the rest); "the daffy duck's hooch"; and "the blind slash dead kid's hooch."

The blind/dead kid once lived peaceably in his particular small valley with his family. The V. C. tried to recruit his family, who refused. So the V. C. murdered them and burned out the eight-year-old's eyes. This made him the blind kid and his home the blind kid's hooch. The company tried to backhaul him by helicopter to a refugee center; but the kid refused so passionately they let him stay. He starved most of the time and the company gave him food when they came through his area. One time when no one was watching the kid picked up some C-4 explosive and ate that and died. In the company's mock Army nomenclature, his home then became the blind slash dead kid's hooch.

We are making for a hooch that stands up a little slope from the rice paddies behind a section of mixed bamboo and banana palms, with the jungle curving up the hills behind. It's high enough so there's no danger of floods.

"Does the hooch have a name?" I ask.

"No. It'll pick one up someday."

The column halts. Where the trail traverses a hedgerow between two paddies, the biker, walking point, has spotted a slope-stick booby trap. A cry of "Fire in the hole." Those in front fall flat. Those of us 100 yards to the rear squat down. The trap, made from a dud U.S. 105 round, explodes harmlessly.

We move on and arrive at the hooch where we will wait out the storm. Its three brick sides and 30-feet-long front wall have been blown out, but its brick-tile roof still stands--though full of holes--on the wooden frame. In the center of the building's single long earthen room is the bare frame of a battered double bed. At one end is a mound of earth over the storage cellar, at the other a cupboard and some cooking utensils. The place smells of dead fish.

"I'm going to have to sleep with my nose in my armpit," says the artillery lieutenant.

Machine guns are set up at both trail entrances and the men cut stakes and palm leaves in an attempt to make their poncho tents a bit more monsoonproof. I wish we had a mortar tube with us.

The platoon sergeant, who won a Silver Star as a helicopter door gunner on his first tour and volunteered for the Infantry on his second--he tried civilian life but found the phone company dull--is arguing with the captain.

"You got to send that son of a bitch to the rear."

"Use him as a body to haul stuff."

"He lies down.... He throws the stuff away."

"Catch him doing that, I'll have his ass in L. B. J. [Long Binh Jail]."

"He's pullin' us all down, Captain."

"I hate to see him get out of the field."

"We don't need the son of a bitch."

The sieve keeps sifting.

• • •

The Army maintains elaborate statistics on what is happening to its units, surveying 20 different indices each month to measure the morale of major commands. "Though after what McNamara did to us with statistics in Vietnam, we're a little careful," remarks one officer who deals with them. "For example, re-enlistment is often used by Infantrymen as a means of getting out of the field. So a high re-enlistment rate that used to indicate a good outfit may now indicate a poor one."

Nevertheless, when studied with care, the statistics reinforce the image one gets on the ground. As the war winds down, A. W. O. L.s, crimes and drug abuse are all rising rapidly, with by far the greatest rise in the rear. Article 15s (punishments by unit commanders) are up from 16 per 1000 men in fiscal 1970 to 20 per 1000 men this year. In fiscal 1970, 1589 Article 212s (less-than-honorable discharges) were given to rear-area soldiers, only 1080 to combat-area soldiers. Yet the combat-area soldiers outnumber rear-area soldiers three to one.

Fascinatingly enough, at the same time general courts-martial, which mete out the most serious punishments, are declining. This represents a profound change in the basic attitude of the Army in Vietnam toward its duty. "We used to feel that it was our responsibility to take the individual provided us by the draft and try and make a soldier out of him, return him to society a better man," said a general in Saigon who commanded troops on his first tour. "Now we 212 the bastard back into society the way we got him."

• • •

The monsoon has now been hammering down on us for a night and half a day. We are all cold and at least partially soaked. A patrol comes back to report that "hotel hooch," another of the company's private landmarks, has floated away.

"Don't let me go to sleep," the captain says and lies back on some boards we have placed across the double bed. He passes out almost immediately. His men let him sleep, moving the radios where they won't wake him. After a while he cries and shakes in the grip of nightmares.

"It's going to be a long fucking day," the bearded artillery lieutenant keeps repeating. He turns out to be a fantastic cook: Producing refried beans, enchiladas and hot sauce from his pack, he whips up a gourmet dinner out of long-range patrol and C rations cooked over burning explosive. "It's the baby fried bananas and green peppers give it the punch."

The captain wakes and later calls for another patrol. Again the same volunteers--the sergeant, the biker, the Mexican, a black, one other man and a machine-gun team.

"My hard core," the captain says proudly.

I nod sadly, glad that I don't have to slog through the hard rain to get shot at.

About an hour later we hear the sound of automatic-weapons fire in the distance. The patrol returns, bringing with them two women prisoners. They had surprised three NVA in front of a hooch and killed one. The women were with the men. The patrol has recognized one of the women.

"We picked her up before in our old AO, remember Captain? And the South Vietnamese let her go."

"By God, we did."

"She probably follows us around."

We are in the eye of the storm now and the rain has subsided to a drizzle. The patrol retires to their poncho tents or comes inside the hooch to get a little dry. The Kit Carson takes the two women off to the perimeter to question them. They are sullen and hostile. He gets nothing. A group of soldiers, not those who went on patrol, gather round the two women.

"You watch 'em or that young one will run away, just like the young one in Ah San."

"They think 'cause they're women we won't blow 'em away."

"I say kill 'em now."

"No. Let 'em live."

"We picked the young one up before. She give us beancoup trouble. Dink her."

"Man, you always was one hard-assed soldier."

"You're fucking soft."

"I say kill 'em. I'd kill 'em."

"I would, too."

"There's a time for killin' and a time for lettin' live."

"Shit."

"Point your gun at her and pull the trigger, then. Go ahead. Go ahead. You're so fucking hot. I ain't going to stop you."

The sergeant comes up. "Get the prisoners in the hole," he says, pointing to the cellar beneath the hooch. The debate stops.

The rain strikes from a new quarter. The afternoon drags on. The biker and I talk about drugs and Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. We are joined by the sergeant and five other soldiers, including one second-tour corporal: "Man, you don't know what it's like in my home." The talk follows its usual pattern: World War Two, Vietnam, why we are here. No one wants to be here, though some believe "We got to stop 'em here, or we'll be fightin' 'em at home." But the majority believe the war neither right nor necessary.

This belief, however, is not accompanied by the tendency often found in peace circles back in the world to glorify the enemy. Charlie is respected for his courage but despised for his cruelty. "These guys are worse than Hitler must have been; but we don't belong here" is a phrase I hear often. By their murder and torture of civilians and prisoners, the V. C. and NVA have helped keep up American morale.

• • •

Continuing to compress and restraighten his can of cola, the young general talks on.

"When Lyndon Johnson made the decision not to call up the Guard and the Reserves, a decision to fight this war on the cheap, he forced the Army to live out of its hide. So at one end of the scale you have officers on their third and occasionally their fourth tour. [I never found anyone on his fourth tour.] And on the other end you have platoon leaders and company commanders with practically no command experience.

"By Sixty-six-Sixty-seven, it was obvious to at least a few of us that neither we nor North Vietnam could 'win' this war. But by then, we were moving inevitably to the commitment of large units and the taking of hills, to the strategy of World War Two and Korea. While they, with equal inevitability, were moving toward Tet and the slaughter of their best people, because their strategy taught that all wars are colonial and similar. So we were both caught in rituals developed for other times and other moments of combat."

We gossip awhile about technicalities of military rituals and mutual friends who were or were not caught up in them. Then I ask, "What's going to happen next?"

"Things will get worse. The problem of motivation will grow as the level of combat winds down and the war, for us, drags closer to its close. North Vietnamese doctrine has always stressed that a real victory is a victory over the opponent's spirit. As our able officers go elsewhere, the senior noncoms leave, the men get more careless, morale sinks, ammunition, air and other assets become scarcer--and then the North Vietnamese may pick out six or seven companies and fall on them. Two thousand men vanish in one week. The few survivors are hounded down jungle trails and murdered. No known enemy dead. How does that grab you?"

"How does that grab you?" I ask the senior general back in Saigon.

"You can play some pretty horrifying scenarios if you want as the war winds down. But we must wind this war down rapidly; and to do that, we must face one or two disasters. We can't stop Vietnamization and pull back to the old ways just because we're afraid of the disasters."

• • •

The rain ends, but the heavy monsoon clouds persist. I inflate my air mattress and have time to sneak in a quick crap before the world around the hooch becomes totally dark just after six. The captain and I are lying head to toe on boards laid across the double-bed frame. The radio operator is keeping watch at my right shoulder with his replacements asleep behind him. At right angles to my head on the dirt floor, Doc lies asleep. Two scouts are huddled asleep next to him. The artillery lieutenant's jungle hammock swings from a rafter above the captain's head. Beyond him, his radio operator and two other soldiers lie asleep, their mattresses raised off the muddy floor on old doors and palm leaves. The pitched ponchos of the platoon rimming the hooch have disappeared in the dark.

The captain and I talk briefly about his future--he wants to be a doctor--then about his company, the war and the responsibilities of those who fight and those who criticize. He is particularly fond of angel-food cake; he shared the last piece his wife had sent him with me, in spite of my efforts to get him to eat it all. I promise I will mail him one as soon as I get back in the world.

I take off my wet boots, remove my wet socks and massage my feet to prevent jungle rot. I put on dry socks and tuck the wet ones against my stomach to dry during the night. I have a brief self-debate about whether to leave my boots on or off. They're wet and cold. There has been no enemy contact except for that of the patrols for two days. I saw other men remove their boots. I leave mine off. I would not have done so in World War Two. I reach down to put my flashlight in my helmet and discover that it is on the far side of the hooch. I start to swing up to get it, then realize that to do so, I will have to crawl under or over the captain, the doc, the artillery lieutenant and his radio operator. To hell with it: Few people in the platoon wear a helmet anyway. I wrap my poncho liner around myself, put my towel under my head and am immediately asleep.

A deep roar tears my dream apart. Where am I? The roar hits again. M-60 machine-gun fire, deep as a 50 but faster, an authoritative sound. I roll off the bed onto the floor, thinking: Christ, I'm going to get muddy. No trip flares have gone off. Haven't they been set properly? Has the enemy snuck inside us? Or is a trigger-happy new kid on the machine gun? I hear the bursts of two grenades, then the more open sound of a Claymore. A trip flare finally goes off. Still no sound of incoming.

The captain is crouching by a pillar of the ruined hooch, whispering into the dark.

A whisper comes back.

"What happened?" I ask, rising, not as muddy as I feared, into a crouch.

"A dink got through the trip wires to the edge of our position."

"New man or old on guard?"

"Old."

Then the report is probably true. We have been probed. Our position is accurately known. I sit on my bed knowing we should move, waiting for the captain to give the order but hoping he won't. We can never unstring our poncho tents. The night is wet. We will have to sit, silent and shivering, in some nearby field all night. And there is danger in that, too; no trip flares or Claymores out.

The captain gives no order. Perhaps it was just some lone V. C. or rice-carrying party that blundered into us. Exhausted, I sink back to sleep, without putting on my boots.

• • •

Straightening his cola can with a snap, the young general rises. "And even as we talk, some patrol isn't doing its job. Or, caught in ritual myself, or lacking helicopters and men, I've missed something. And the enemy is sneaking up on one of my fire bases or companies to overrun it and wipe it out."

There is a crack. He has pushed the can together so violently that he's cut himself on the torn edge. As he goes toward the bathroom in the rear of his hooch to wipe off the blood, I am conscious that for all his efforts to keep in top shape, he walks, when tired, with a marked limp.

• • •

Suddenly I am totally awake, sleep shattered by an explosion and the sound of rifle fire.

"Incoming!"

"Incoming!"

That cry hasn't changed.

I'm off my bed and in the mud behind the radio as the next explosion hits and I hear the steel spatter through the hooch above my head like heavy drops of rain. The radio operator has hit the dirt on top of me.

Two more explosions and again the soft spatter of steel. I cower in the mud, my hands over my head, my arms shaking. What am I doing here, what am I doing here? And without my boots on. Machine guns, rifles and the grenade launcher are firing.

"Medic! Medic!"

The doc crawls off. At my head a man collapses. Too big to be the doc.

"Captain, Captain, do you want gun-ships?"

"Negative gunships." His voice is calm. Good. "Where's the artillery?"

"I'm cranking it up." I can hear the artillery lieutenant whispering orders into his radio on the far side of the hooch.

I have my boots on and am crawling toward my helmet, having picked up a weapon from one of the wounded lying on the floor. I figure we will take another salvo of mortars, then grenades, then they will rush us. My watch says three-ten. Two hours to overrun us, an hour to get away in the dark. Plenty of time. I hunker down behind some bricks, putting two extra clips by my left hand.

"Medic, Medic, here's more wounded."

Flashlights are turned on to dress the wounded. I think, that's asking for it. Where's the artillery?

The captain's voice: "Squad leaders, check your squads. Everyone check his buddy, see if there's wounded we've missed."

The radio operator has reported the incoming and is ordering a medevac. Over the radio the rear voices sound too excited. Then the radio asks for the serial numbers of the wounded and their condition. Blessed Army paperwork.

"Where's the goddamn artillery?" asks the captain.

"We can't get clearance to fire."

"What?"

"The Vietnamese say there are friend-lies there."

We have just been hit from there. Here, on the other end, the clearance procedures seem killingly ridiculous.

"We're in contact. I want that fire ASAP."

Silence and the winking of flashlights, from the jungle the noise of insects sounding like high-speed gear wheels.

"Where's a flashlight? A flashlight? This guy's dying, I need a flashlight." The soldier's voice rises desperately.

All the flashlights are in use dressing other wounded. My flashlight is infinitely precious to me, they are unfindable in Vietnam; in this confusion, I will never get mine back; in the next instant, my flashlight may mean my life. I reach into my jungle fatigues' lower-left pocket.

"Here's one."

The flashlights keep bobbing in the dark. As yet no more incoming after the first deadly four rounds and we have not been rushed.

"Where's the artillery?" the captain asks again.

"They won't fire."

"Give me that radio." The captain takes the radio from the artillery lieutenant, who has been pleading into it for 20 minutes now.

"This is Socket Six. This is a combat emergency. I want those fires now. My initials are L. G."

In the dark, in a hostile jungle, his men dying around him, a cold, wet and tired 22-year-old is forced to accept the moral responsibility of which his superiors--from the President and Congress to his battalion commander--have, like Pontius Pilate, washed their hands.

In the distance the artillery fires. We cower in the mud again. How accurate will they be? The shells burst reasonably on target. But at least half of them are duds. In the dark the soldiers curse. Now the artillery also begins to fire flares, and by their flickering light as they drift down on their parachutes we can take stock. We have eight wounded, three seriously: one in the chest and legs, two in the head. One of these, the one who stumbled at my head in the dark, will die.

Over the radio a new problem erupts. The medevac helicopter refuses to land in the dark. Over and over we hear the pilot ask: "Is this mission really urgent? Can't the men last three more hours till light? Do you down there know the meaning of urgent?"

The captain feels his way over to the other radio, classifies the mission as urgent, again gives his initials. The scene keeps shifting and fading as the flares drift down beneath their top parachutes and burn out. In this light I make out the figure of the biker, the point man, going from wounded to wounded, lifting them with his strength. "You got a million-dollar wound there, man. You'll be back in the world in two days. You're going to be all right."

"You'll be all right." Once someone spoke those words from the dark to me. The face of war is everywhere the same. Burned-out houses, hostile lines of trees, deadly dark, men stretched out with others, coils of energy bent above them; and here and there bodies in the absurd, broken-marionette position of the dead.

A line of poetry Keith Douglas wrote after El Alamein throbs through me: "How can I live amongst this gentle obsolescent breed of heroes and not weep?" But who weeps for these men?

The scene shuts down dark.

"Captain," the artillery lieutenant pivots from his radio, "the 105s have run out of illume [flare shells]."

"Have the 155s fire them."

"They can't. It's too close in to us."

"Tell them it's a combat emergency and give them my initials."

"Roger that. It's lucky you're not signing checks."

We all laugh.

Laying the wounded on ponchos, we wind down the jungle trail and debouch like hornets from a narrow nest hole into the rice paddy, where the medevac chopper can land. The men wade across the paddy, fanning out in the water and along the dike, where they squat down like hard-shelled beetles. Above us the two gun helicopters guarding the Red Cross bird explode into a Fourth of July display, raking the jungle edges of our clearing with machine-gun fire, cannons and the double crack-bang of rockets. The whole show almost comes apart because we do not have the required red flare to mark our position. But the sergeant, a man for all seasons, has one he captured from the Communists two weeks ago and knows how to work. The flare goes up.

Out of the south, black and hanging backward in the air, red cross just visible on the bulge of its front, the medevac helicopter sneaks in, hugging the folds of the ground. The wind of its rotors blows a shower of wet mud over us. Carrying the wounded, the beetle shapes stagger toward the chopper through the mud. The gunships make another fiery pass at the jungle. Another hurricane of mud and the medevac helicopter has lifted off. Those of us who remain file back to the hooch, numb, to wait the two hours till dawn. As we walk back I see in the flare light the sergeant and the biker, carrying the machine gun, guarding our rear.

Sudden as death, light comes. We who are alive look at one another; inspect the mortar holes; make coffee; get the prisoners from the cellar.

"I had a squad of thirteen men yesterday. Now I got five." The squad leader stands dazed in the small clearing before the hooch. Blood on the floor, blood on my clothes, blood on the ammunition and the radios. The artillery lieutenant's hammock is full of holes, my own air mattress rent.

I am alive. At that moment Vietnam has no other truth for me. And I have only 60 days. These men, 365. I am alive.

The next day I am airlifted out, along with a soldier called Pete whose 365 days in Vietnam are up. As there are no higher headquarters officers around, the spot where the helicopter will land is named after Pete. LZ Pete written large with white aerosol shaving soap on the jungle path, a peace sign beneath.

A few weeks later I am at the christening of a jungle fire base called Fosberg, named for a sergeant who died close by. "This fire base will be a permanent memorial to him," says the colonel in charge. On whose map? For how long?

• • •

In Saigon the senior general paces back and forth. "Vietnam is a poison in our blood. It runs through our national life and infects us all. Those at home as well as those of us here. Will we learn from it? Will it have been worth it morally? That question has to be left to history."

As my home bird jets me toward back in the world, I have one overriding thought: I have been in hell and found most of the inhabitants there, contrary to popular belief, fine people. And this includes specifically the South Vietnamese, now in their 30th year of war. But all are trapped by a complexity too vast for them to understand, trapped in a ritual of boundless destruction. We and the enemy, partners together, dance, entombed by our opposing simplicities. So far, we are both unable to find the strength within ourselves to stop the music.

I keep remembering the words of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: "Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained.... Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding." There is no way out of the Vietnam tragedy without pain; and we are all part of the action. Those most intimately involved deserve our anger only occasionally, our tears almost always.