Our Year of War Page 27

  Charlie, being Charlie, avoided such strength. An infantry assault would be suicidal, unless for some reason 2-47th disarmed themselves. The Black Panther battalion leadership knew way better than that. No matter what else went on, the lieutenant colonel always kept enough defenders around to protect Binh Phuoc. Charlie made a few feints, but never mounted a serious attack. But as Chuck Hagel mentioned, at Binh Phuoc: “A regular evening was to get rocketed, mortared.”38 Both brothers had been out of the congested firebase most nights. Now Tom was on the inside, at the receiving end. What if things really got out of control? If you thought about it too much, it reminded you of Bernard Fall’s disturbing history of Dien Bien Phu, Hell in a Very Small Place.

  Usually, the VC favored 82mm mortars. As Binh Phuoc had been there for years, and many Vietnamese had gone in and out of the camp for official and unofficial reasons, the VC benefited from a very good lay-down of key facilities. Skilled hostile gunners knew how to “walk ’em across the compound,” Tom remembered. Unwilling to share the bunkers with the active colony of rats, Tom and the other base types sat atop the berm. When they saw flashes in the distant darkness, they knew those were Charlie’s mortar projectiles leaving the tubes. The grunts then had thirty seconds to slide into the bunkers, rats or not.39 During Tom’s two months there, the VC mortar gunners never killed anyone. But it wasn’t from lack of trying.

  Before and after the 82mm rounds each night, Tom drank. He tried every type of beer, the good ones and the bad ones. From some Australians, he learned to squeeze a lime into his brew. That added a new taste. Still, after a while, the sergeant didn’t much care, as long as the cans had alcohol.

  He also smoked marijuana. Vietnam’s tropical climate produced quality dope, and a lot of it. The lifer NCOs did not approve, but Tom didn’t ask for their okay. He toked up out of their sight. They didn’t ask. He didn’t tell. Tom Hagel had never smoked grass on operations, nor permitted it. As he noted later, “peer pressure” kept men straight in the bush. But as the PX guy, well, dope was like the beer. He owed it to himself.

  One dull day in late December, with his neat PX hut all in order, and having watched enough of the time slip away à la Otis Redding, Tom decided to adjust his nightly routine. The bored sergeant got tired of playing games with the rats and Cong mortars. He chose to build his own bunker. Hagel went to the artillery cannoneers and asked for dozens of their old wooden ammunition boxes, each about the size of two window planting containers side by side. He spent the rest of the day, and a good part of the next, filling the boxes with ruddy dirt. When he’d completed a little hideaway, he nestled a green army cot inside and rigged up a mosquito net. There he planned to stay each night until he left Vietnam.40

  Had the VC stuck to the customary mortar and rocket barrages, with rounds landing here and there but mostly nowhere important, Tom might have enjoyed his new rat-free digs. But a few nights later, Charlie made one of his rare ground efforts. They staged in the little village—really just a row of huts—to the north. A few furtive guerrillas, erstwhile sappers, actually messed around at the outer ring of concertina wire. If they ever got through the wire…

  Confronted with this kind of probe, the American defenders opened up with the entire repertoire. Tracers from machine guns lanced into the nondescript shanties. The battalion heavy mortars coughed up one brilliant illumination round after another. Those drifting parachute flares lit up the darkness.41 With a potential infantry breach under way, the 2-47th Infantry command post duty officer summoned all hands. Along with the other base people, Tom Hagel reported to the berm with his M16 in hand. Was this the long-feared big one?

  An hour or so of shooting and shouting ensued. Green tracers crossed the berm line, reflecting continued interest from the VC. The Americans returned a hundred, maybe even a thousand, for every bullet received. Men in the towers reported shadows flitting in the ville. Helicopters came on station overhead, but the aviators radioed that they didn’t really see much. The howitzer battery couldn’t engage, as the enemy had gotten too close. But if Charlie got over the wall and came running into the base, the artillerymen prepared to level their tubes, set fuze zero, and shoot straight into the enemy infantry. The big 105mm shells would blow right at the muzzle, gouts of white-hot shrapnel, six giant shotguns scything ’em down.42 It never got that bad. Having stirred up enough trouble, way more than he bargained for, Charlie backed away.

  When he returned to his home-made bunker, Tom found that a sharp-edged shell fragment—theirs, ours, who knew—had pierced right through the wood and dirt. Had his head been on the cot, it would have gone through him, too. Tom looked at the holes. Then he just laid down and crashed into a black, boozy sleep. “In the shape I was in, I didn’t care.”43 For the first time in his life, he felt he was definitely his father’s son.

  FOR MOST OF WORLD WAR II, the fliers of the 42nd Bombardment Squadron never really saw what happened after they dropped their deadly bombs. Sergeant Charles Hagel saw the dead and wounded Americans who came back in shattered airplanes. And he watched comrades spiral downward in smoking hulks with wings gone. Sometimes parachutes blossomed. Often they did not. In that last horrible summer over the home islands of Japan, Hagel and his buddies flew low enough to see and smell the residue of their handiwork. He never forgot any of it. It came home with him. And although his 1962 death certificate read heart attack, what he witnessed in combat, and what he could not put aside, probably did much to put him in an early grave.

  Now his son Tom faced the same, in the quiet hours of darkness gifted to him by distracted superiors at Binh Phuoc. The best thing in war is to stay busy as hell. The old sweats—Curtis LeMay, Julian Ewell, Martin Garcia, Creighton Abrams, William Joyce—certainly agreed heartily. Most of them remained on the go long after their war years ended, hyperactive, doing this and doing that, anything to run out each day to exhaustion. The key was not to remember the faces, ours or theirs. Keep it vague, generic, and impersonal.

  Yet Tom saw the faces, a parade of them, night after night. The alcohol and dope made them go away for a few hours. But nothing ingested erased the vivid memories. “Half the time you didn’t see anything,” he said. Even in nightmares, old Mr. Charles hardly ever showed his hand. “Until you’d find the bodies.”44 And all too many wore civilian clothes. How many carried weapons? And if they didn’t, were they VC? Concerned citizens? The wrong guys in the wrong place? What about the women? The children?

  Up at 9th Infantry Division, Major General Julian J. Ewell dealt with the same issue. He saw those killed not as subhuman gooks, or dinks, or slopes to be slaughtered at will. Nor did he visualize them as individual NVA soldiers, sons and husbands with homes and families near Vinh or outside Haiphong, fellow military men separated only by team colors. No, Ewell slept soundly because he’d reduced the division’s foes to numbers. When the jitterbug juked by day or the choppers hunted by night, the statistics piled up. At almost the same time twenty-year-old Sergeant Tom Hagel wondered what the hell he’d done to himself and to others, Ewell added up and sifted the numbers. He found comfort there. Tom Hagel did not.

  In the six months after Mini-Tet in May, the 9th Infantry Division claimed to have killed 5,574 NVA/VC and captured 677. Sweeps recovered 1,291 individual enemy firearms and 273 crew-served weapons. Very impressive—until you realized, as Ewell and his staff did, that even this result still left 44,777 hostile troops in the field: twenty-one battalions and ninety-seven separate companies. By the MACV estimate, built around metrics furnished by the 9th Infantry Division, three-quarters of the countryside in Ewell’s area of operations remained under Hanoi’s effective control.45 Ewell only saw the count of enemies killed in action. We wiped them out. For Ewell, that defined success.

  To ring up these “achievements,” the Mekong Delta home had been well and truly smashed up, the family members run off, cowed, or accidentally finished off—and the termites remained in the rubble, numerous as ever. Moreover, three-quarters of those slain were unarmed
.46 That’s why Tom Hagel and plenty of others at the user end would spend the rest of their lives seeing faces they didn’t ever want to see.

  Some tried to jog the hard-bitten general from his complacency. Staff officers raised the gap between assessed enemy dead and number of weapons captured. Ewell and his brigade commanders waved it off. The VC did great work pulling out their dead and their arms. (Yet, if so, why were so many corpses left behind to be tallied? Or were those figures just nighttime “guesstimates”?) The heavy use of air strikes and artillery incinerated the enemy AKs and RPDs. And that marshy, flooded Delta no doubt swallowed abandoned armaments by the dozen.47 You could talk yourself into it.

  Ewell believed that he did the best he could with the blunt instruments at hand: rifle squads, helicopters, howitzer batteries, and jet fighter-bombers, all manned and run by an ever-shifting team of individuals rotating in and out every twelve months. He assessed his battalion and brigade commanders as about 25 percent effective and the rest merely good for following orders, if that. The general knew he lacked quality, veteran NCOs. He thought a lot of the troops and the front-line officers, the real grunts, but he knew they could only do so much, shackled as they were by rampant inexperience, not to mention wildly inapplicable conventional army doctrine and training.48 His division’s uniquely lethal arcade laydown every night—sniff ’em and stiff ’em—anticipated the twenty-first-century sensor-to-shooter battlefield of all-seeing 24/7 overhead surveillance and roving armed drones.49 Had he been able to do so, Ewell would have leaned even more heavily on things, not humans. But the technology didn’t yet exist.

  Because Ewell was doing surgery with a chainsaw, chips flew. He just could not discriminate. “You know at night we had a curfew,” he said later, “and anybody that was out there was fair game. So you’d have five VC and twenty peasants carrying mortar ammunition. You’d knock off five or six.” Ewell continued: “It’s true that probably two were VC and four were peasants but they weren’t supposed to be out there. So that’s tough luck.”50 It sure was.

  Thus anyone out at night became VC. In the sunshine, anyone who looked up when a helicopter flew over also might count as VC. Those who did not look up—well they were probably VC, too. If they ran away from helicopters or ground patrols, they must be VC. And if they gave you a defiant look, well, you know that deal. Plus, the Cong all wore black pajamas. So anyone dressed like that must be enemy.51 All VC were Vietnamese, and all Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta might well be VC. Or sympathizers. Hell, three-quarters of the villages had thrown in with Hanoi. The bottom line seemingly followed naturally. Dead equaled VC.

  Now MACV didn’t just declare open season. Far from it. Many officers, including other generals, roundly criticized Ewell’s heavy-handed approach, especially after LBJ moved toward peace talks, Abrams took command, and domestic support for the war cratered. The old paratrooper dismissed these complaints as a preference for “toe-dancing,” “fan dancing,” and “Maypole celebrations” over finding and killing Cong.52 Yet he had to follow orders. Despite some fairly lurid allegations, then and later, the 9th Infantry Division did not defoliate, burn, and slaughter their way across the entire Mekong Delta. Ewell stretched the U.S. tactics as far as he could. He took a very hard line, putting paid to many opposing forces and not a few unfortunate civilians caught in the backblast. But this wasn’t World War II. And the Mekong Delta wasn’t Dresden or Nagasaki.

  As 2-47th Infantry learned during Mini-Tet, use of heavy firepower took time-consuming approval. Chuck Hagel correctly observed that the United States “went well beyond” the customary laws of land warfare in not torching villages, slaughtering cattle, and wiping out villagers, even as those locales hosted (willingly or unwillingly) scores of enemy troops. Nobody in 2-47th Infantry perpetrated a My Lai massacre, the horrendous crime committed up north in the Americal Division on March 16, 1968. Chuck Hagel acknowledged “mistakes” and even “atrocities,” but also noted that American restraint “cost us lives.”53

  That said, something jagged and hurtful was keeping Tom Hagel up at night. He tried. But he couldn’t exorcise these unquiet ghosts.

  THE UNIFORMED ENEMIES bothered him less. He understood those guys, even the nameless AK-47 shooter he encountered close up on July 3 at the riverbank. They were soldiers like him. They took their chances. The man he shot face to face returned now and then to pay his respects. In certain dark hours, Tom Hagel again saw that stunned visage, neat bullet hole drilled in the forehead.54 But it didn’t eat at Hagel.

  The bodies of the NVA and VC also didn’t linger long in Hagel’s nightmares. He’d found them gnarled and rigid, cut down by machine gun bullets, cooked by napalm, cut up by shell fragments, laid low by helicopter rocketry. Charlie lacked airpower and heavy weaponry—he wouldn’t trundle out that stuff until 1972, as the Americans folded their tents. But as with the individual Tom had killed, the hostile fighters seemed like equals, even the women found with gear. Too bad the bad guys had to ply their trade with hand weapons. If they chose to go at it, they, too, understood the risks.

  “But there were all the others,” Tom said. “Women and children,” he went on, “and they didn’t have guns—because we saw them after.”55 The supporting fires, artillery and air, blotted out big areas. But sometimes the deaths came more directly. He thought about the pregnant woman killed on July 3 by the jumpy lieutenant in that sad riverside ville. Tom Hagel couldn’t just write off these people as collateral damage or rounding errors or by-catch from America’s relentless culling of the Mekong Delta Viet Cong. He personally didn’t do any of it. But he didn’t stop it, either.

  Another scene, a bad one, flashed up now and then. On a night mission near a village, Tom’s platoon took a lot of fire. An NCO, reeling with liquor, swung up into an M113 commander’s cupola. The unsteady sergeant settled behind the .50-caliber machine and ran through a few belts, pouring tracer slugs into the Vietnamese hovels. One was an orphanage. The crazed sergeant finally ceased fire. Did he wipe out any children? Nobody knew. “None of us went in to check,” Tom remembered. Chuck had been there, too.56 The older Hagel blamed the drunken NCO. Tom blamed himself.

  There was more. On New Year’s Eve at Binh Phuoc, a good many Americans partook of Tom Hagel’s stacked cases of PX beer. The recent VC mortar attack and lunge at the outer wire had encouraged the 2-47th leadership to clear out those hootches on the northwest corner. The Vietnamese rumor mill buzzed that before the action, Charlie evicted families and used the shacks to get close. In the next few days, 2-47th officers expected to arrange to remove the nearby structures. On December 31, as part of celebratory fun, well-lubricated grunts decided to get a head start.

  Well after dark, unprovoked by any hostile gesture, the boisterous team up in the corner tower near the ville opened up with the big .50-caliber heavy machine gun. They’d loaded up a long belt of armor- piercing incendiary, a sort of supertracer that set aflame what it struck. After pouring in a few belts of those deadly 12.7mm rounds, the troops had a few low-ceilinged shacks burning merrily. If there were any noncombatants in there, nobody much cared. Instead, guys took turns cranking off more rounds.57

  Tom Hagel never doubted that the Vietnamese buildings needed to go. The U.S. firebase couldn’t be secured if enemy sappers enjoyed a concealed route right to the barbed wire near the main gate. “You don’t have any options,” he admitted much later.58 But that night, all he saw were civilian homes blazing and fellow soldiers spraying slugs into the bonfire—and laughing like demons. Xin loi, mama-san.

  It was past time to go home.

  THEY CALLED IT the “Freedom Bird” and of all the welcome things that dropped out of the sky in Vietnam, the grunts wanted this one most of all. As they waited to board the contracted airliner, outbound soldiers at Tan Son Nhut looked across the steamy parking apron. An uncertain group of fresh troops stood there, uncomfortable in their clean uniforms. Many departing soldiers razzed the newly arrived privates. “You’ll be sorry.” “Charlie’s gon
na love you.” “They’re going to cut your ears off.” Other comments were unprintable.59 The same thing happened every day, inbound meeting outbound, the doomed passing the saved.

  Tom Hagel chose not to say anything. He sympathized with the rookies. Had it only been a year and two weeks? It seemed like a lifetime. For twenty-eight men of Company B, 2-47th Infantry, it had been.60 Tom’s rifle company took more casualties, killed and wounded, than any other in the battalion. Three of those wounded were him. Two were Chuck. And to what end? Xin loi, grunt.

  Tom went home the way he came over, with a hundred-odd uniformed strangers, guys whose departure date matched his. The troops shuffled into assigned seats, no thought given to former divisions or the like, the military’s bureaucratic widget and screw drill maintained right to the end. When the jet took off, those aboard cheered and clapped. Then most just zoned out. The lucky ones drifted off to sleep. Most of them didn’t have bad memories. Or at least they didn’t think they did.

  Once he arrived at Travis Air Force Base, California, the U.S. Army owned Sergeant Hagel for three more days. Out-processing at the Oakland Army Terminal emphasized form over substance.61 An anonymous major welcomed all of them back to America. A sergeant major got up and growled at them, reminding the soldiers to shut up, follow the out-processing checklist, and move with a purpose from station to station. The senior NCO made sure to mention that the Uniform Code of Military Justice still applied. In plain English, screw up, face a court-martial. The smarter draftees, like Tom Hagel, would be out of the army when this final purgatory passed. A good number hadn’t watched their timeline to be sure to get down to the magic 150 days. Others had enlisted voluntarily for more than the two-year conscription period. All of those soldiers received orders for stateside posts.