Ted informed Mr. Tram, "We have the same thing in the States. New York, New Jersey, New London, New whatever. Same thing."
"Yes? Very interesting," said Mr. Tram, who hadn"t gotten paid yet. Mr. Tram continued, "You see those many ponds in the area? These are not ponds, but bomb craters. There were once thousands of them, but most have been filled in with earth. The remaining ones are used to raise ducks or to water the animals."
I remembered this landscape when I flew in, and from the air all you could see was the dead brown defoliation, the gray ash, mile after mile of North Vietnamese trenches, and crater after crater, like the surface of the moon.
I imagined Captain Tram and his comrades sitting in their bunkers or slit trenches at night, smoking and talking, hoping for a quiet evening. Meanwhile, six miles overhead, too high to be seen or heard, a flight of huge, eight-engine B-52 bombers all released their thousand-pound bombs simultaneously. The bombs did not whistle or shriek on the way down- the shrieking came from the people on the ground as the hundreds of bombs. .h.i.t without warning.
Arc Light Strikes, they were called, and they transformed the earth below into a here-and-now h.e.l.l, as though the nether regions had surfaced to engulf the world. And there wasn"t a bunker built or a tunnel deep enough to withstand a delay-timed fuse, which let the thousand-pound bomb burrow into the earth before exploding. And if the bomb didn"t actually hit you and vaporize you, the concussion turned your brain to Jell-O, or ruptured your internal organs, burst your eardrums, and threw you into the air like another clod of dirt. Or sometimes you got buried alive when your tunnel, trench, or bunker collapsed.
We"d found hundreds of North Vietnamese here, lying down, staring up at the sky, blood running from their ears, nose, mouth, or wandering around like zombies. They weren"t worth taking as prisoners, they were beyond medical help, and we didn"t know if we should shoot them or not waste the time.
I glanced at Mr. Tram, and knew he"d seen this, from his perspective, and I wondered if he thought about it much, or if it was always there.
We traveled about two kilometers on Highway 9, then Mr. Loc turned left at a sign that said, in English, Khe Sanh Combat Base Khe Sanh Combat Base.
We drove up a dirt road that climbed to the plateau. A bus was coming down, and a line of backpackers was climbing up. Within a few minutes, we were in a parking field where about six buses sat, along with a few private cars and motor scooters. Mr. Loc stopped, and we all got out.
The plateau on which the combat base once sat was nothing more than an expanse of windswept gra.s.sy field. The misty green hills towered over the plateau, and I could imagine the North Vietnamese artillery, rockets, and mortars up there, firing down onto the open plateau. What military genius picked this place to defend? Probably the same idiot who set up the base at A Luoi, and since both places had once been French strongholds, I thought also of Dien Bien Phu, which was geographically similar. I said to Ted, "They taught us to take the high ground and hold it. I think they forgot Lesson Number One."
Ted agreed and said, "Jesus, we were sitting ducks here." He looked around at the hills. "The f.u.c.king gooks would fire, then quick-move the artillery into a cave. We"d return counter"artillery fire from here, and the air force would hit the hills with high explosives and napalm. This game went on for a hundred f.u.c.king days, and this camp was h.e.l.l on earth, buddy. You went out to take a p.i.s.s, and you got your weenie blown off. We lived like f.u.c.king animals in the trenches and bunkers, and the f.u.c.king rats were everywhere, and I swear to G.o.d it rained every day, and the f.u.c.king red mud was so thick it pulled your boots off. In fact, we had a guy stuck up to his knees in the mud, and a Jeep tried to pull him out, and got sucked in up to the windshield, then a deuce-and-a-half truck tried to pull the guy and the Jeep out, and got buried up to the roof, and then two bulldozers came and they both got buried, then we called in a sky crane chopper with cables, and the chopper got sucked right in and disappeared. You know how we got everybody out?"
I smiled and asked, "No, how?"
"The mess sergeant yelled "Hot chow!""
We both laughed. Truly, the marines were full of s.h.i.t.
Mr. Tram and Ms. Susan smiled politely. Mr. Loc, who ostensibly didn"t speak English and had no sense of humor anyway, stood stone-faced.
Mr. Tram said, "Here we are on the combat base. As you can see, there is nothing left here, except the outline of the runway over there, where nothing seems to grow."
We all looked at the runway in the distance. Susan and Ted snapped a few pictures of the barren landscape and of us.
Ted said, "I was here in June when the bulldozers buried the whole f.u.c.king base. We didn"t leave s.h.i.t for Charlie."
Mr. Tram, who had once been Charlie, agreed and said, "When the Americans abandoned the base in June, they did not want to leave anything which could be used in a propaganda film, and so now we see nothing. But you see the holes in the earth where the metal scavengers have mined everything that was buried. They have found even trucks that had been destroyed by artillery and buried." He added, "There is talk of reconstructing some parts of this combat base because when the tourists come, they see nothing."
I said to Ted, "Hey, I got a job for you."
He laughed. "Yeah. No f.u.c.king way I"m filling one more f.u.c.king sandbag on this f.u.c.king hill."
Mr. Tram smiled and said, "Many American marines have been helpful in providing information to the local authorities about this base, and now we have maps and drawings of how it may have looked."
Ted said, "It looked like a s.h.i.thole. Red mud and sandbags. No gra.s.s when I was here."
Mr. Tram went on a bit about reconstructing h.e.l.l for the tourists. I looked around and saw that there were maybe fifty people wandering around, trying to figure out what all the fuss was about. I guess you had to have been here.
We walked around awhile, and Mr. Loc stayed with the vehicle. Mr. Tram pointed to the west and said, "You can see the hills there of Laos, twenty-five kilometers. Near that border is the American Special Forces camp of Lang Vei, which my regiment captured in the early days of the siege." He paused, then said, "They were very brave men, but there were too few of them."
I said, "Their Montagnard fighters were also very brave."
Mr. Tram did not reply.
We continued walking across the plateau, and I spotted two middle-aged American men together, who were having a very emotional moment while their wives stood off to the side and looked away.
Ted noticed them, too, and stared at them awhile, then went over and spoke to them. Big Ted didn"t look like the huggy, kissy type, but within a minute, the two guys and Ted were embracing.
A few minutes later, Ted returned, cleared his throat, and said, "They were artillery guys. Both got hurt when the ammo dump exploded in January, and they got medevaced out." He added, "They missed most of the fun."
No one commented on this, though Mr. Tram must have remembered when the main ammo dump got hit by a North Vietnamese artillery round. Guys I knew who had been patrolling in the hills near Quang Tri City said they could see and hear it thirty kilometers away. It must have been a big morale booster for the North Viets, and a bad omen for the besieged marines.
We continued our walk.
Ted stopped near the edge of the plateau and said, "I remember that my bunker was on this side, the south side, about the middle of the perimeter here, and we could see down to Highway 9."
Mr. Tram said, "Yes? My regiment was also to the south, on the other side of the highway, so perhaps we exchanged some bullets."
"Hey, I"m sure we did, pal." Ted asked me, "Where were you, Paul?"
I looked out over the valley to the hills in the far distance and said, "Also here on the south side. We air-a.s.saulted into those hills, near where we drove in from A Shau. They told us we were going in behind the enemy-behind Mr. Tram here-but there were plenty of North Vietnamese troops where we landed."
Mr. Tram nodded thoughtfully and said, "Yes, I recall quite clearly the afternoon when the helicopter cavalry arrived." He added, "They bombed us for days before the helicopter a.s.sault began and dropped much napalm, and when the helicopters arrived with the air soldiers, we were very frightened."
I said, "You were frightened? I was scared s.h.i.tless. Biet?" were frightened? I was scared s.h.i.tless. Biet?"
Mr. Tram nodded and kept nodding, and I saw he was far away, thinking of the day the helicopters came.
Ted said, "I remember when the Cav arrived, and we said, "s.h.i.t, now they"re going to run Charlie off, and the fun is over.""
There seemed to be two different versions of this battle: The First Cavalry looked at this as saving the besieged marines; the marines looked at it as the cavalry spoiling their fun. I said to Ted, "I wouldn"t have minded staying home."
He laughed.
Mr. Tram came back from wherever he"d gone and asked Ted, "Did you have rats?"
"Did we have rats? Christ, we had trench rats so big we thought they were deer. And those were hungry hungry rats. You had to sleep with your boots on or you"d get your toe bit off. I kid you not. These f.u.c.kers were mean and b.a.l.l.sy. We had special buckshot rounds for the.45 automatics, and we"d do rat hunts once a day. One time, two rats picked up a case of C rations and carried it into a hole, then one comes back out and tries to swap a pack of C ration cigarettes for a can opener." He laughed. "That"s b.a.l.l.s." rats. You had to sleep with your boots on or you"d get your toe bit off. I kid you not. These f.u.c.kers were mean and b.a.l.l.sy. We had special buckshot rounds for the.45 automatics, and we"d do rat hunts once a day. One time, two rats picked up a case of C rations and carried it into a hole, then one comes back out and tries to swap a pack of C ration cigarettes for a can opener." He laughed. "That"s b.a.l.l.s."
Susan seemed mildly amused. Mr. Tram was still thinking about rats. He said, "Our trenches were filled with rats. They ate..." He looked at Susan and didn"t finish the sentence, but I knew that it wasn"t C rations that the rats ate.
Mr. Tram said, "These rats carried disease... you understand, the... in French it is les puces."
Susan said, "Fleas."
"Yes, and these fleas carried the plague... the dark plague, when the skin becomes black... bubonic... many men died that way."
We stood there under the gray, gloomy sky, with this constant wind sweeping down from the hills, and three of us retreated into our own thoughts. We could have stood there for a week playing Can You Top This, but what was the point?
Finally, Ted said, "Yeah, I remember now, a cargo plane came in one day carrying this stuff... gamma something."
I said, "Gamma globulin."
"Yeah. You remember that? They stuck this horse needle in your a.s.s and squirted this s.h.i.t into your b.u.t.t. This stuff was on ice, and I swear it was thick as putty. I had a lump in my a.s.s for a week, and we asked the medics what it was for, and they said, "measles." But afterward, we found out it was because of the plague. Jesus H. Christ, as if the incoming rounds wasn"t enough to worry about."
Susan asked, "Did anyone get sick?"
Ted replied, "You think they"d tell us? You went to the field hospital with a fever, and sometimes you got sent back to duty with penicillin, and sometimes they took you out of here on the next thing flying out. n.o.body used the word plague."
I nodded, recalling the fear of bubonic plague, the evidence of which we"d seen among the dead and wounded North Vietnamese. We had gotten gamma globulin before the air a.s.sault, and our medics had been mostly up-front about this and told us to avoid flea bites from the rats, and, of course, direct rat bites. And while we were at it, quit smoking and try not to get hit by a bullet. Thanks, Doc.
The First Cavalry had named this operation Pegasus, after the mythological flying horse, but it could more aptly have been named the Four Hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse-War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death.
Mr. Tram continued, "So, this terrible siege went on for all of January, February, March, until April. We had perhaps twenty or twenty-five thousand men around this camp, and the American marines had... how many, Mr. Ted?"
"About five or six thousand."
"Yes. And when we left here, they told us we had left ten thousand of our comrades behind, sick, wounded, and dead... and we had many more thousands with us who were sick and wounded... and many of them died afterward. I lost many friends here and some cousins and an uncle who was a colonel. And I know many Americans died also, so when I left here, I thought to myself, "What was the purpose of this?""
Ted said, "Beats the h.e.l.l out of me."
Mr. Tram walked silently for a while, then stopped and pointed. "Do you see that trench out there? It is one of the surviving trenches that we dug. We began digging trenches toward this camp-just as my father and uncles had done at Dien Bien Phu. Each night we dug, and the trenches came closer and closer to your barbed wire. And when we were very close, we would come out of the trenches at night and attack a place where we thought the defenses were weak, and where we could penetrate into your camp... but we could not... and many men died out there, where the barbed wire once was."
Ted picked up the story and said, "If we thought we saw movement out there, or if a flare tripped, our mortars would fire parachute flares above the area, and everything got lit up like day..." He looked down from the plateau where the wire had once been and said, "We"d see them coming at us, like hundreds of them, real quiet, not shooting, just coming at the wire, and they wouldn"t even take cover, they just kept running toward us, and we"d open up and they"d start dropping like tenpins. Christ, one night one of them blows a f.u.c.king bugle, and they all start running and screaming, and my a.s.shole gets tight, and I"m shaking so f.u.c.king bad I can"t steady my rifle, and they start throwing those bangalore torpedoes into the outer wire, and the wire blows, and it"s breached, and they come in toward the second wire, and mortar rounds are falling all around my bunker, and I"m afraid to put my face to the firing slit because mortar and grenade shrapnel and tracer rounds are coming in through the slit, so I hold my M-16 up to the slit by its pistol grip, and I"m crouched below the slit, so I can"t see s.h.i.t, but I"m emptying magazine after magazine downrange... and then I get hit in the hand by hot shrapnel, and I drop the rifle and see that it"s damaged, so what the h.e.l.l am I thinking when I run out of the bunker and start chucking grenades down at the wire. Five frags and two white phosphorus, and everything down there is burning, including people, and these little... these guys are still f.u.c.king coming, and they"ve breached the second wire, and there"s nothing between me and them except the last wire because we"ve blown all our claymores now, and the machine gun got knocked out, and I"m looking around for a f.u.c.king rifle... then, all of a sudden, the bugle blows again, and they"re gone."
Ted stared down the slope of the plateau and said, in a barely audible voice, "And they"re gone... except for a few dozen of them tangled in the wire, or moaning on the ground. So, we go down there and... well..." He looked at Mr. Tram, who looked away from Ted.
We walked around the perimeter of the big camp, and there wasn"t a sc.r.a.p of anything left, except the ghostly trace of the long airstrip, where, as Mr. Tram said, nothing seemed to grow.
Mr. Tram said to me, "If you do not mind, could you tell me what was your experience here?"
We continued our walk, and I thought a minute and said, "Well, after we air-a.s.saulted in, we made contact with the enemy... with the North Vietnamese army, but it was obvious they were retreating into Laos. We had light contact for the next week or so. I really can"t remember how long we stayed. We saw many hundreds of dead soldiers, many wounded, many graves... and the rats... and there was a terrible stench of death, and the land was devastated... and I had never seen anything like this... the aftermath of a great slaughter, and in some ways, it was more terrible than battle itself. I kept saying to myself, "I am walking through the Valley of Death, and G.o.d has abandoned this place.""
We were back in the town square of Khe Sanh again. I gave Mr. Tram a ten and said to him, "Thank you. I"m sure this is difficult for you to relive this."
He bowed and replied, "I can only do this with Americans who have been here. To the others, it is meaningless."
Susan said, "Well, I wasn"t here, but you three guys made me feel like I was."
Ted asked Susan, "Hey, do you think my wife should have come?"
Susan replied, "Yes. Come back with her tomorrow."
Ted bit his lip and nodded. "She wanted to come... it was me who didn"t want her to."
Susan said, "I understand."
Susan said something in Vietnamese to Mr. Tram. He bowed and replied, we all shook hands, and Ted was off to his bus, and Mr. Tram to wherever.
We got back in the RAV, and I said to Mr. Loc, "Quang Tri."
He pulled onto Highway 9, and we headed east, back toward the coast, to the place where I"d spent most of my time here, when they weren"t air-a.s.saulting me into the middle of another nightmare.
Susan said, "That was incredible. What an experience."
I didn"t reply.
She asked me, "How are you holding up?"
"Fine."
"Paul... why do you think you survived this place?"
"Beats me."
"I mean, half the men who were with Mr. Tram died, and he survived. Ted Buckley survived, you survived. Do you think it was fate? Or skill? Or luck? What?"
"I really don"t know. The dead, if they could speak, would tell you why they died, but the living have no answers."
She took my hand, and we rode in silence down Highway 9 through the peaceful valley of Khe Sanh, which means the Green Valley, and which must have seemed like a cruel joke to the twenty thousand North Vietnamese who came here and watched the valley turn red with their blood and the bomb-blasted earth, gray with ash, and black with rotting corpses.
And the South Vietnamese, who were fighting for their land, must have wondered if inviting the Americans to help them was a blessing or a curse because no one can level the terrain like Americans, and the destruction must have been beyond anything the South Vietnamese could comprehend.
And for the six thousand American marines surrounded and besieged at Khe Sanh combat base, so far from home, they must have wondered how they wound up in the epicenter of h.e.l.l on earth.
And Khe Sanh, the Green Valley, had pa.s.sed into military legend for the marines, right up there with the Halls of Montezuma, the Sh.o.r.es of Tripoli, Okinawa and Iwo Jima, and all the other blood-soaked battlefields around the world.
And for the First Air Cavalry Division, casualties were mercifully light, victory was claimed, we put another battle streamer on our regimental flags, received a commendation from the president, and flew into the A Shau Valley, where fate awaited us in yet another dark and misty place.
I looked at the countryside as we pa.s.sed through the valley, and I saw it was green again, and life had returned, coffee and vegetables grew over the bones, and the human race marched on toward something hopefully better.
Yet, standing there on that plateau, I knew that I, and Ted, and Mr. Tram could hear the whispers of ghosts on the wind, and the distant sound of that bugle that split the quiet night and roused the beast in each man"s heart.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE.
We continued east on Highway 9. In the hills, I could see acres of fire and smoke, like the war had returned, but then I remembered that some of the Montagnards practiced slash-and-burn agriculture.
The mouth of the valley widened and the hills on both sides retreated into the distance. The landscape became less verdant the farther east we traveled.
Around us were flat, open stretches of scrub brush and some hardscrabble farms. I recalled seeing this from the air as the armada of helicopters, in nice neat formations, carried us to the hilltop landing zones of Khe Sanh.
I said to Susan, "The DMZ is about five kilometers north of here. This entire strip of land south of the DMZ, from the coast to the Laotian border, was the marine area of operations. The marines set up a series of firebases from Cua Viet on the coast to Khe Sanh in the east. This whole stretch of land was fought over for a decade, and the marines said that DMZ meant Dead Marine Zone."
Susan asked, "Did it always look this bleak?"