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  Hagel waited some more. When the clangs and swishing and odors got really close, he squinted through the lower leaves. Was that a shadow on the trail? Charlie?

  The sergeant slowly, very slowly, rolled over and up, facing his three belly-down mates. He tapped each in turn, fingers on a boot, firm but silent. As he did so, he placed a hand over each man’s mouth—gently, a gesture, not a threat. No need to get the guys all cranky. Hagel made his intentions clear. Don’t talk.

  Out on the trail, half-heard whispers carried through the still air.39 The metallic tone rang softly, rhythmic, deliberate, possibly a stripped tire going around. Steady shuffling noises grew louder. Someone out there—some VC—just barely coughed.

  Hagel touched each of his men. Then the sergeant slid slowly to his belly, M16 in hand. The riflemen figured it out. They, too, flattened onto their stomachs. Chuck slowly, very slowly, crawled away from the trail. Like a human snake, left hand extended to graze the foot of the man in front, the quartet wriggled through the brush. They carried their rifles resting on their right hands, muzzles up out of the dirt. They left the Claymores behind, clackers, wires, and all the rest.40

  Hagel made a quick but conscious decision to abandon the PRC-25 radio. He just couldn’t figure out how to heft it back onto his back, or drag it like a boat anchor, without rustling so much foliage that they’d hear it all the way up in Hanoi. The choice greatly aided the foursome’s concealment.41 But it also ensured mission failure—no artillery, helicopters, or air support. And no medevac, reinforcements, or transmissions to get back through the U.S. barbed wire without getting blown into the next province. Military schools often feature classroom debates on life and death decisions. That night, Chuck Hagel made one.

  Once they slithered for over an hour, a hundred yards or more by Hagel’s guess, the team stopped in a thicket. The four men sat up back to back, rifles facing out. Nobody slept, or even thought about sleeping. The Americans waited for the sun. Once it became light, Charlie would be long gone. More importantly, in daytime the U.S. guys manning the firebase berm asked questions before opening fire. Chuck Hagel just had to hope the radio watch at Binh Phuoc didn’t do something dumb, like send out a reaction force or vector helicopters overhead. People sniffers didn’t discriminate all that well between U.S. and VC bodies.

  The sun came up not long after six-thirty. Charlie’s march column seemed long gone, its noises disappearing more than an hour before the first graying of dawn. Hagel and his wrung-out, stiff soldiers stood up and stretched. Taking point, he led them back to the ambush site. The sergeant checked the map coordinates carefully. He saw the impressions made by his team, and the markings on the trail that many people and something on tires had passed. But no radio, no Claymores—all had been taken. Hagel’s knee trembled uncontrollably as he looked at the spot. As he put it: “Everything was gone.”42

  When the tired quartet came into the U.S. base that morning, the officers asked questions. Weak NCOs at times “sandbagged” patrols, going out a few hundred yards and sacking out while pretending to be in the assigned ambush site. Chuck Hagel, though, wasn’t that kind of sergeant. He’d made his decision and that was that. And to their credit, the 2-47th chain of command deferred to the tactical leader. The senior people were disappointed. But they didn’t second-guess, at least in Hagel’s presence. The intel guys at battalion tried to determine which VC outfit Hagel’s men encountered. Naturally, they had no idea.43

  The experienced NCOs and officers, the ones who had been out and about with Charlie enough times to matter, knew the deal. Any night ambush had three possible outcomes. If the pinball machine lit and rang, the VC died by the gross and the Americans walked home in triumph. That hardly ever happened, but when it did, it made all the dry holes seem worthwhile. Second, nothing happened and everybody came home tired—the usual result. Third, something very bad occurred.44 Hagel and his men achieved a version of number two. Not the best, they thought, but not the worst.

  The worst came not long afterward. Up at division, Ewell and his brain trust tweaked the knobs and directed larger ambush elements. The general thought it encouraged his infantrymen to stand their ground and take more risk.45 On the night of October 3–4 outside Binh Phuoc, a reinforced Company B rifle squad, eleven strong, moved out to a night ambush position. They followed a good route and got into their site without any trouble. The first few radio checks came in loud and clear: one push.

  Then nothing.46

  All that long night at Binh Phuoc, nobody on duty heard any distant gunfire. Maybe the radio failed. The heat and humidity chewed through batteries, and it had been especially warm and muggy. Perhaps the squad ran into a larger VC force, took a page from Chuck Hagel’s experience, and just laid low. The company commander worried. Well he should. At sunrise, Company B sent out a mounted reaction force, two platoons and the company headquarters. Chuck and Tom Hagel rolled out with this force. The M113s roared to the vicinity of the ambush location.

  On the side of a rice paddy off Route 4, three bedraggled figures appeared. PFC Eddie Bivens and PFC John Hodges stood together, both hit, but upright, helping each other. Near them, Sergeant Charles N. Peace, the squad leader, leaned into a tree. He’d also been wounded. With his good arm he waved a strobe light, the perfect means to attract a medevac chopper in darkness. But it was broad daylight. Peace’s eyes had that thousand-yard stare.47 Not good at all.

  Mr. Charles made a house call on the U.S. ambush. Eight men lay scattered in the trees, shot to death: PFC Robert J. Bergeron, PFC George M. Clayton Jr., PFC Daniel J. Czajak, PFC Donald R. Gise, PFC Gary G. La Chapelle, Corporal Charles N. Schall, PFC John P. Stepp, and Specialist 4 Danny Williams. In all of that bloody year of 1968, Company B, 2-47th Infantry never suffered a worse blow.48 All the company could do was to pick up the pieces.

  The company and battalion officers and senior NCOs tried to put together what transpired. They never could. Possibly the men conked out, run ragged by too many daily iterations of jitterbug and checkerboard and too many nightly ambushes. Or it could be they ran the patrol to standard, and Mr. Charles got lucky. Peace, Bivens, and Hodges offered nothing. What could they say? For the rest of their lives, they’d see those final muzzle flashes. And they’d wonder why they lived, and eight died.

  The Hagel brothers had rolled the same dice day after day and night after night. After five Purple Hearts between them, they knew that war, like football, was a game of inches. God or fate or a cosmic random number generator—it mattered not. You could do everything right and lean forward at the wrong instant, or peek around a blind corner, or zig when you should have zagged, and then: “The Secretary of the Army regrets to inform you…”49 That same awful October 4, Chuck Hagel marked his twenty-second birthday. He didn’t feel much like celebrating.

  THE REST OF October didn’t go much better for 2-47th Infantry. Both Hagels stayed out in the field, doing their bit to generate Ewell’s constant pressure. The smart guys at DISCOM and Lieutenant Colonel Scovel came up with a brainstorm that placed six ambush patrols out in contested ground every night. By the end of October, the battalion’s exertions ran off most VC mortar and rocket crews, sparing the Dong Tam Base Camp, and thus accomplishing one important goal of Operation Kudzu. Division accounting teams recorded 120 VC killed and 26 captured, but only eighteen individual weapons taken (a disturbing discrepancy shrugged aside), plus twenty-six “structures” destroyed. To do all this cost 2-47th Infantry another seven American lives on top of the eight from October 4 and another soldier lost back in August, a total of sixteen killed in action. The battalion sustained 255 wounded.50 Once more, 2-47th Infantry basically traded its entire field strength to hold Charlie at bay for a couple months. In some MACV circles, that evidently counted as a win.

  And speaking of winning, the 1968 presidential campaign limped to its finish line. George Wallace faded into the background, irate to the end. In a salute to his wartime B-29 service, on October 3, Wallace tagged General Curtis LeMay as
his number two. It turned out to be a disaster. As a political candidate, LeMay came across as a bellicose crackpot, opining that “there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons.”51 Hiroshima or Hanoi—for the old air force general, a target was a target and a weapon was a weapon. Bombs away. That kind of loose talk might go over fine in an air force bomber crew’s ready room. But it scared the hell out of middle-class families in America. LeMay managed the seemingly impossible feat of making George Wallace sound reasonable by comparison. But not reasonable enough.

  In the end, Wallace carried five southern states and almost 10 million votes, about 13.5 percent. Most observers thought he damaged the already staggering Humphrey. Even with that, and allowing for the mess in Chicago, Nixon barely edged HHH. The Republican prevailed by a half million, although that narrow popular vote translated to a decent 301 electoral votes.52 Thus Dick Nixon would have his chance to ride the tiger.

  First Sergeant Martin Garcia duly delivered a case of Budweiser beer to Sergeant Chuck Hagel. By election day, November 5, Chuck had been given a cushy job in the base camp, running the small enlisted men’s club. He didn’t go to the field anymore. That violated both the letter and the spirit of Julian J. Ewell’s draconic dictates to put every rifleman in the bush. But Garcia just did it.53 He thought it was right. And in the infantry, the word of the first sergeant is final.

  Chuck had a month to go. Tom had three. Even though he arrived only six weeks behind his brother, the younger Hagel had to extend two weeks to be sure he could get out as soon as he made it home. The army let draftees leave the service if they had 150 days or less left in service. When Chuck departed on December 4, he’d make it just under that five-month wire. But Tom needed an extra two weeks in Vietnam to be sure.54 It seemed crazy. Yet in the words of the troops in country: there it is.

  Chuck considered extending to stay with Tom. But his brother refused to permit it. He stood up to his fellow sergeant in no uncertain terms. “No,” Tom said. “That’s the wrong thing to do. Our mother is expecting you home. You need to do that. I’ll be fine.”55 So Chuck left on schedule.

  But Tom Hagel would not be fine.

  CHAPTER 10

  Children of Nyx

  And Night [Nyx] bore hateful Doom and black Fate and Death and Sleep and the brood of Dreams.

  HESIOD, Theogony1

  They thought they were doing a favor for Tom Hagel. With three Purple Hearts and his older brother on the way home, the battalion sergeant major and the first sergeants assigned Tom to run the little post exchange (PX) at Binh Phuoc.2 Somebody had to do it. It promised an end to day patrols and night ambushes. Now and then, in emergencies or near emergencies, Tom had to report to the berm line and take charge of a bunker. But chasing Charlie fell to others, the newer troops. Mrs. Hagel’s second son would most likely make it back to Nebraska in one piece.

  In taking Tom Hagel away from line infantry duties, the 2-47th leadership gave credence to a set of dismal facts about combat riflemen. Extensive studies in World War II charted a trajectory: becoming “battlewise,” “maximum efficiency,” “overconfidence/hyper-reactivity,” “emotional exhaustion,” and then a “vegetative stage.” Timing varied by individual. People with preexisting problems might go immediately to the wrong end of the scale. Those better educated, physically stronger, and well grounded in their families endured longer—those old army preferences at work once more. Unit teamwork and especially good officers and NCOs also helped keep things together. Most infantrymen made it under fire from 200 to 240 days (six and two-thirds to eight months) before cracking. As one study summarized, at the eight-month mark: “Practically all men in rifle battalions who are not otherwise disabled ultimately become psychiatric casualties.”3 The pace varied. The eventual progression did not.

  As veterans of World War II and Korea, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps generals in Vietnam well understood this grim sequence. Yet for reasons attributable only to the same kind of unhealthy institutional inertia seen in the trenches of the Great War, the senior commanders adopted personnel policies tailor-made to accelerate combat soldier and unit disintegration. Individual replacements created steady coming and going, and that atop the steady drain of casualties. Scheduled swap-outs of key officers, typically in as little as six months, really spun the cycle. Twelve-month (army) and thirteen-month (Marine Corps) assignments applied to riflemen and rear-area clerks alike—very fair, but guaranteed to outrun that historic six- to eight-month breaking point. Well, the old guys told each other, that limit didn’t really apply. Vietnam wasn’t thought to be much of a war, not like Bastogne or Iwo Jima.4 From a hovering helicopter or a quiet office, it may have been so. Neither Chuck nor Tom Hagel saw things that way.

  Objective post-war assessments explained why the generals pictured a rather low-intensity conflict (except high points such as Tet or Mini-Tet) and the junior soldiers believed they had been run ragged. Like any smart guerrilla, Charlie refused combat except in those rare situations where VC victory looked likely. That caused the Americans, determined to make contact, to increase patrols and ambushes, to substitute volume of activity in hopes of forcing engagements. Ewell’s 9th Infantry Division epitomized this mentality. Yet even under the scourge of a most unyielding commanding general, urging day and night constant pressure, the division never compelled the VC to fight in more than 9 percent of all their many operations.5 For the riflemen out beating the bush, and the aviators loitering above, those numbers offered no comfort. Any trip outside the wire could devolve into “the big one.” And each one chipped away at a soldier’s finite reservoir of battle resilience.

  Sergeant Chuck Hagel explained how it added up. “I don’t know how many firefights I was in,” he said. “I don’t know how much combat—I mean, the actual day-to-day people shooting at you and you shoot at them.” In the long, monotonous stretches in between, patrol followed patrol, day after day and night after night, all wrapped in stifling heat and dripping humidity, and all affected by chronic lack of sleep. “Maybe you go for a week and not have anything,” Hagel said. “Maybe you go for two weeks and just not have anything.” But you never knew when it would go upside down. It could happen any day, any time. “The intensity of that pressure,” Hagel summarized, “does make an individual break.6

  Chuck Hagel never reached his breaking point. Tom Hagel didn’t either. But when 2-47th shifted Tom to look after the PX hut, they inadvertently did the Nebraskan a disservice. He still endured just enough risk, from mortar rounds and odd angry shots, to keep him anxious, and yet not enough to keep him busy. In war, idle minds wander, and perceptive ones, more so. In that last month of 1968, Armed Forces Radio in Saigon took a lot of requests for the late great Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.”7 Tom Hagel could relate to lyrics about hanging around, watching the sun go up and down, wasting time. He faced two months with the exact twosome he most hoped to avoid: the war he loathed… and himself.

  THE MORE TOM or any Vietnam combat veteran thought about it, the more obvious it became. The problem with the U.S. campaign in Vietnam went beyond strategy, the objection of learned war college faculties. It eclipsed morality, the favored talking point of passionate anti-war agitators. And it certainly had very little do with the news media, or long hair, or hippies, or drugs, or the Age of Aquarius. Those ideas found audiences because they implied that the war’s conundrum could be solved. Americans love to fix things.

  Vietnam defied vaunted Yankee ingenuity. In essence, America endeavored to use the wrong tool, the conventional U.S. Armed Forces, for the wrong job, counterinsurgency. A force manned, organized, equipped, and trained to close with and defeat the German Wehrmacht, or perhaps the Soviet army, found itself scrabbling through pigpens trying to figure out which guy in black pajamas to kill. The inability to do so ensured that no matter how many Charlie Cong died, too many local villagers went with them, and the rest became refugees disillusioned with the weak Saigon regime and its U.S. allies. It
all resembled exterminating termites by running a family out of their house, shooting at the bugs (and laggard children) with a machine gun, then setting fire to the edifice to finish the job. As a U.S. officer said of the Mekong Delta city of Ben Tre during Tet: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”8 There it is.

  Just as form follows function, so the GI slang of the era very much reflected this ugly truth at the core of America’s ill-fated venture in Vietnam. 9 The military lexicon of any epoch brims with acronyms, abbreviations, nicknames, and euphemisms. It has ever been so. You can find the like chiseled onto Roman monuments. Learning the appropriate martial lingo, understanding it, and employing it correctly differentiates civilians from soldiers, outsiders from insiders, and those with questions from those with answers, or at least better questions.

  In Vietnam, the ground combat troops called themselves “grunts.” That terse animalistic term came from the guttural sound that welled up from an overloaded soldier laboring through a morass of vines and branches. Slip in the mud. Knock a knee. Bang a sweat-stained head under a cloth-covered steel pot helmet as it slow-cooked the brain underneath. Shift the rucksack straps digging into shoulders. Heft up that long, black M60 machine gun. Look right, then left, then ahead. Keep going. Discipline and exhaustion strangled speech. Men moving through the bathwater-warm air and dank undergrowth strode step by step, swaying, stumbling, their passage marked by the chopping of the machete, the swishing of leaves—and grunts. They became what they did.

  “REMFs,” rear-echelon motherfuckers, comprised the majority of MACV’s hundreds of thousands, safe in base camps. Where REMFs started depended on where you served. Nobody assigned to 2-47th Infantry, even the clerks puttering around Binh Phuoc, considered themselves REMFs. But in the rifle squads, sometimes guys joked about the bastards back at platoon headquarters. In essence, a REMF could be anybody routinely safer than you. To grunts, gradations of REMF-dom didn’t mean much. You either went outside the wire all the time or you didn’t. You were either a grunt or you weren’t.