Sergeant Dickinson Read online

  As soon as Breckinridge released the transmit button on the mike we began receiving calls from Plei Djereng, Plei Mrong, Plateau Gi, Dak To. I recognized Woods’ voice from Duc Co, and Roy’s from Pleiku, and I caught Dak Pek’s call sign. They said they would jump in troops as soon as they could get air support. Breckinridge kept his back to us but we could see his shoulders hunching in spasm. He said into the mike, “Thank you, men,” you could hear the warble in his voice. Still with his back to us he set the mike on the radio casing. “What wonderful men,” he said. “What beautiful men.”

  The Times correspondent was very apologetic. He said that Pleiku had told him that the battle here was over. I explained to him about the two wire service correspondents and what they had done and he could see for himself the wounded that needed to be evacuated. The Times correspondent was finishing his first year in Viet Nam and he would be here for two more, it was hard on him and on his wife and children. We grew to like him very much, and respected him almost as much as the correspondent from Paris Match who had temporarily given up journalism and was working full time as a medic.

  Later that day and the next, correspondents and television crews came in in multitudes. One of the first in was present when the kitchen door was shot off its hinges by machine-gun fire. He could not get over it, watching the door fall away from the wall, hearing the thack! sound each bullet made when it struck wood. His eyes kept returning to the door even the following day and he told other correspondents about seeing it shot away from the wall and they were impressed. They talked about one of their own, a famous wire service photographer who was not here, and told within our hearing about how many wars the famous photographer had been to. They were trying to convince us and themselves of their courage. We knew they were liabilities.

  When on the night of the eighth day the camp had fallen completely into chaos with reinforcing unit commanders unable or unwilling to control their troops, and the troops numbering one thousand now in a camp constructed for three companies, we began to think about breaking out. Some of us wanted to leave the correspondents and the clerics but Breckinridge said no, all Americans would go together, and then we began to think about how it would be trying to protect the deadweight in a breakout that looked hopeless anyway and some of us were angry and talked about the correspondents and the clergy getting us killed for a few pictures and a few prayers, and Breckinridge was angry and said that Americans would go together, all of us, so we resigned ourselves to die for nothing. Some of us put a single bullet in our shirt pockets, death was better than capture, we had seen or heard of what was done to American prisoners. I visualized Barnes again as we had found him, his body stacked on top of itself, in parts, crowned by the head, the sex organs stuffed into the mouth. I was afraid of being captured while unconscious and unable to kill myself; I tried to stay out of doors so that I would not be hit on the head or pinned by falling beams. But it never came to a breakout, and the bunkers didn’t collapse.

  The North Vietnamese were dug in on the slope beginning just beyond the northern edge of the camp and inclining for five hundred meters. After seven days of napalm and concussion bombing there was little left of the vegetation that had concealed their spider holes. At the base of the slope was an NVA machine gun firing at the Rangers and Americans assaulting unseeing past it; this explained how so many Americans had been shot from behind, we had thought the Rangers were shooting us in the back. Two of us went out to the perimeter and picked off the machine gunner and his assistant. When the fighting on the north side of the camp was over, and before the battles to the south and west had begun, we walked out to the dead spider hole.

  They were kids. In one’s pack was a diary. We gave it to one of the interpreters to translate. The diarist had spent four months walking from North Viet Nam to the southern highlands. He had had dysentery and fever. This had been his first combat although he had survived two bombing raids on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Before leaving the North he had returned to his village near Dien Bien Phu and had married. He had competed against another young man for the girl who became his wife; the other had not been conscripted. He had not received a letter from his wife since he entered Laos, he did not believe that she was receiving his mail either. He wrote that even if his wife bore a love-child he would want to return to her and raise the child as his own.

  We sat in the sun; I took off my shirt. After a while Robbie opened his mouth as though to speak. A word was there but it didn’t come out.

  I had written the propaganda. I had promised them food and water. I had promised them safe conduct into the camp. I had said that they would be treated as prisoners of war. I had gotten the Ranger commander’s word that my promises would be honored. Three NVA stood up, as the leaflet had instructed, with their hands over their heads. The Rangers shot them.

  “He says they weren’t prisoners. He says they may have surrendered, but his men did not take them prisoner,” Breckinridge said.

  “They were prisoners.”

  Breckinridge called Pleiku. He talked to the Deputy Commander; he asked that his counterpart be relieved for having sanctioned the killing of North Vietnamese prisoners.

  The Deputy Commander was reluctant but said that he would report the incident to the Vietnamese command in Pleiku.

  “Is there anything more you can tell me now?” the Deputy Commander asked.

  “No. I’ll have to have it encoded.”

  “Keep me informed. How are things otherwise? Did you get the President’s message?”

  “It’s on top of the radio,” I said. The message said: “We are gravely concerned about your situation. The President.”

  “The President of the United States?” Breckinridge said into the mike.

  The Deputy Commander laughed. “That’s the one.”

  “What’s his interest in this?”

  There was no response from the other end.

  “He’s concerned,” Breckinridge said. He pressed the transmit button. “Yes. Fine. I’ll tell the press we got a message from the President. Out.”

  Several Americans came down the stairs into the bunker, taking cover from the shelling. A correspondent wanted to come in. “No reporters!” Breckinridge shouted. Then at the others: “What are you men doing in here! Get outside and inspire the troops!”

  They went up the stairs and the white sunlight came past them through the open door, fixing the red dust in the air in frozen whorls.

  “We ought to just shoot the bastard,” Breckinridge said. He went outside.

  I lay down and put my arm over my eyes. I had been up all night talking with the experts from Psyops. They had insisted that I write the leaflet; I was familiar with the situation, they said. I couldn’t sleep. I went outside to help inspire the Vietnamese.

  We watched an Air Force jet go in. “There goes another two million dollars,” someone said. “Not to mention a pilot.”

  The Group commander called from Pleiku. “What the hell are you doing out there? Have you got ambush patrols out?”

  “No sir…”

  “God damn it, the first thing I would do if I was in your place would be to get some goddamn ambush patrols out.”

  “I tried, sir, but we keep losing men, Americans, they hit us just as soon as we get outside the wire. Stone is dead, and Sergeant Major Victoria…,” Breckinridge said.

  “All right, all right. I’m coming in on the next lift.”

  When the Group commander came in he insisted on meeting with all the Americans in the mess hall. He noted the door lying off to the side and made a joke about it. There was a lull in the shooting then and everybody was walking around upright, it was very relaxed. When we were inside the mess hall the NVA machine guns started up again, and they started dropping mortar rounds in on us. We threw over the benches and tables and made ourselves as small as we could behind them. The Group commander was left standing with the master sergeant whose job it was to light his cigars. The master sergeant opened the door of the refrigerat
or and the Group commander stuck his head inside. It was very funny; we laughed, and nobody was hurt. The Group commander stopped talking about ambush patrols after that.

  The correspondent wanted me to say yes, I was fighting for Democracy.

  “Other things are more important,” I said instead.

  “What things?”

  He put the microphone up to my mouth. Frenzy surrounded his eyes, made them unnaturally round and buggy.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I raised my can of fruit cocktail. “Food.”

  “Food? Oh, you mean about Southeast Asia being the rice bowl of the world, and like that?”

  “Like that.” I turned away from him. He asked the man beside me, “How does it feel to be eating C-rations on a Tuesday afternoon?”

  “Better than eating them on a Saturday,” the man said, and laughed contemptuously.

  The woman lay on her back in a cave dug into the side of a trench. As I passed she opened her legs. I went on to wake up a man who was sleeping. When I saw her again, a Ranger was on top of her.

  I followed the shadow-sweep of the dying flare through the trench. Impatient of it, I stepped into the light and continued my round. A rock glanced off my shoulder; it had come from outside the perimeter. The Vietnamese standing beside me pointed to the bush beyond the wire; he was smiling either from amusement or bewilderment. I completed my tour of the camp and returned to the same spot. A second rock hit me. I pretended not to notice; I was hit again. “Why doesn’t he shoot?” The Vietnamese shrugged and laughed. It was a question without an answer.

  A bullet, barely warm, fell on my shoulder. The other Americans were unbelieving. “It must have been fired from two miles away,” one said. I put it in my pocket beside the suicide round.

  The rat crouched on a sandbag at the entrance to the command bunker, its legs tucked under it, staring at me. I swung my rifle like a baseball bat. The butt hit it with a soft phump and it flew off the sandbag, landing on its side, its legs still tucked in. “It must have been dead before you hit it,” said an American. There was no blood on it. “The concussion must have got it. Or it died of fright.”

  They were in the wire, or where the wire used to be before the bombing, and we called in a strike on top of them and got down behind the wall of the inner perimeter. I heard a sound like zzzzz and looked over the wall. A shard of bomb frag was burning its way through the wall’s dirt pack; I saw it and couldn’t move, I was fascinated. It stopped at a stick of wood before it got to me.

  Three walls and the ceiling of the latrine were shot away. I dropped my pants and sat down over one of the holes and began to read Studs Lonigan. Occasionally I heard a spang! or a thack! when a bullet struck metal or wood. When I was finished I bent over to retrieve my pants; I waggled my ass at the perimeter.

  They had smeared other men’s blood on themselves and tied phony bandages on their arms and legs. We threw them out of the helicopter as fast as they climbed in. The pilot was shouting, trying to lift off. We jumped; the helicopter lifted and swung to the side, scraping off against the ground the Vietnamese clinging to its struts. Not more than a couple of them got out of the camp that way.

  Red dust kicked up to my left. I continued eating. I knew he would bracket me with his next round. It struck to my right. I slid a few feet down the slope of the bunker and to the left. The third round was dead center on my first position. I waited, giving the sniper time to adjust his scope, then I moved again, forward and to the right. The fourth round was high and well to the left. I moved to my left. The fifth round struck to my right, still high. I stood up and walked back to my original position and sat down. The sixth round hit where the first had. I didn’t move. The seventh hit wood on the command bunker. The eighth and ninth followed it. The tenth went to my right, the eleventh below my feet. I finished my peaches, tossed the can aside, and stuck the spoon in my shirt pocket. Rounds were going everywhere. I ran back inside the fence of the inner perimeter. The eyes and mouths of the other Americans made perfect Os. They made me laugh.

  On the ninth night I rolled up in a poncho against the wall of the inner perimeter. I lay on my back and tried to focus on the stars behind the light of the flares. I woke up at noon to quiet voices and a dessicating sun; I had slept for twelve hours. Faces were grinning at each other. The battle noises had stopped. The North Vietnamese had gone; the First Cav was chasing them into the Ia Drang.

  CHAPTER 2

  The brown grass flattens in whorls. The red dust is sucked up into the cabin so that even before we have settled it coats the clay caked into my skin, my nose and ears. We touch ground, rock, settle, the blades continue to whirl. I jump out, grasping my rifle. The door gunner hands down my rucksack. The wop-wop-wop of the rotors smoothes to a high whine; I run back out of the way and the helicopter lifts sideways and up.

  It is hot. The sweat runs into my beard, muddying my face and neck. The sky is whiter than it is gray or blue. Where the sun is behind the clouds I can’t stand to look for the glare. I walk from the helipad across the road to the gate. The Nung on guard duty salutes. The camp is red and the color of baked adobe. There is grass which is just beginning to sere. There are the fatigue-green and camouflage stripe-and-mottle of men going into and out of billets, Supply, Air Operations, the latrine. Vaguely, I begin to feel that I have made a mistake.

  At Supply is a man whose name I can’t remember. He says, “Welcome back.”

  I don’t remember his name. He is a captain. “I need a room.”

  He takes a key down from a board with nails in it and numbers painted on it. “You can have your old room back.” He looks at me as though studying me, then hands over the key.

  The Enlisted Men’s billets is the next building down from the massive concrete communications complex they call a bunker. Inside the entrance I stop to allow my vision to adjust to the dark. Here the air is almost cool. A Vietnamese woman comes out of a room carrying fatigue uniforms. She sees me and stops but says nothing; nor does her face. She scurries on to the far end of the corridor. The laundry room is there.

  I have forgotten my room number and it is not written on the key. A tall American comes by. I ask him which room is Dickinson’s.

  “Dixie?”

  “Yes.”

  “I heard you were dead.”

  “Not this time.”

  He looks at me like the captain did at Supply. Finally he points to a door. “This one is yours.” He walks on toward the white sunlight beyond the door at the end of the corridor.

  This room is mine. I have been here before. I am home here. Suddenly I am very tired. My legs are sore. The muscles between my ribs ache. I hang my rifle by its sling on a nail in the wall, toss my rucksack in a corner, my pistol belt and canteens after it. I let myself down on my bunk and begin to unlace my boots. They have not been off in nine days.

  A Vietnamese girl comes into my room and stares at me. Like the American I didn’t recognize, like the captain at Supply. She smiles, tentatively at first, then without reserve. She says something that I do not understand. “Không biêt,” I tell her. But now she is crying. I stand up and put my arms around her. Others come in, they are crying too. Then they are laughing and chirping like small birds; they are making fun of me. One points to my armpit, then pinches her nostrils with her thumb and forefinger. The others respond with hilarity, and I laugh, too. There is something between us, something from before I went away, but I don’t remember what it is. And now there is something new between us, a distance, a numbness, which they do not perceive, and which I am only beginning to. I shoo them out of my room and sit down again to pull off my boots. I am still in my socks when one of the maids comes back, she is crying again, and presses my hand with both of hers. She drops it quickly and runs out. Oh God, I think. I, too, am beginning to cry. But I swallow hard and the threat dissipates.

  I undress, wrap a towel around my waist, and start to the latrine. To achieve the latrine I must cross an open flat of about fifty meters; I do this
quickly, without running.

  The water pounds my back, hot, hotter still, then cold, then hot again, until I doze on my feet. How odd to be alive: This thought enters my head. It shocks me awake. I feel fear, but fear without relish. I think again with intent: How strange to be alive. As though to rehearse the line.

  I dry myself, sling the towel over my shoulder, shave, brush my teeth, tongue, palate. A girl comes in, sets a pail under the tap in a utility sink. She smiles and puts her thumb in the air. I wonder who she belongs to, she is too pretty to be free. I wrap myself in the towel and start back to my room. My reflection in the mirror as I turn reveals that my back is covered with yellow-green pustules. I reach over my shoulder and rub my finger across one. It is hard and does not hurt; I continue on to my billet. The oldest of the maids, the one in charge of the others, I remember, is waiting for me. She offers one of the girls to me, I will not have to pay, she says. The one I recognize as the one called the Cambodian is standing behind her. I ask the old woman if she is talking about the Cambodian. No, another one, Mama-san answers. She looks around but the girl she wants to give me is not in sight. I thank her but tell her I want to sleep. “Slip?” “Da phái. Slip.” I bring my palms together and place my cheek against them. Mama-san giggles.