Sergeant Dickinson

dream.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

By the sixth day the worst part was the bodies. They reeked, some were five or six days dead, and the troops who remained, Montagnards, Vietnamese, and Americans, did not like being reminded how negligent was Death. Each day we took more dead and at first we put them out of the way, in the ammunition bunkers, American dead in a different bunker from Montagnard and Vietnamese, to aid in keeping an accurate tally of each. But then the bunkers filled, and the helicopter pilots refused to come in to take out the bodies, one of their number lay burnt and smoking still, upside down, just south of the camp. After the bunkers filled we left the dead in the sun in rows of ten near where the dispensary had stood, and because we were soon out of rubberized bags we wrapped them in ponchos, and after the ponchos were gone we used strips of cotton parachute. The sun dried up everything, men and earth, everything but the dead, whose gases and fluids ate away the body bags and ponchos and the cotton parachute so that when the helicopters came in again the bags split when we lifted them to carry to the choppers and we were sick at the stench.

The helicopters came in again on the seventh day at dusk, sliding in out of the sun, dipping and swinging like puppets on invisible wires, trying to evade the machine gun fire, and then dropped swiftly, suddenly, the last hundred feet, and stopped, hovering, ten feet from the ground, and then set down easily, tenderly, shining silver-gray in the sun. At first they took only the wounded but by the following day the stench was overwhelming and the Montagnards avoided those areas of the camp where the wind blew most freely, the wind contained the malevolent spirits of their unburied kinsmen, and we became afraid that the North Vietnamese would penetrate the areas that the Montagnards had left unprotected, so that finally we began evacuating the dead and cared for the wounded as best we could.

On the fourth day we were reinforced by thirteen Americans and a battalion of Arvin Rangers. Three American correspondents were with them, one dying, he had been shot in the eye in an ambush on the road. We were all relieved when he had lost strength enough to stop moaning. On the first day a Montagnard was shot through the skull. His eyes were pulled to one side and he urinated continually, and when the wind blew across the hole in his skull his arm jerked and he beat his thigh with his fist in a motion like masturbation. We placed the correspondent next to him on the floor of the command bunker, neither knew anything about anything. The Americans were commanded by a Major Breckinridge, he called everyone except his officers stud and his men were devoted to him. Breckinridge took command of the camp and everybody’s morale went up, everyone felt like fighting again where before we had begun to lose purpose. We lost more men and we killed more but there began to be sense to it.

One Montagnard was dead and stuffed into a rubberized bag. He had been dead for five days and his wife all that time had squatted beside him, as though keeping a vigil. She had accepted only water from the other women on the first day, before the water ran out, so that until we put the body on the helicopter she had had no more water and no food at all. When we carried the body to the helicopter the woman followed us silently but when we heaved it up on top of the others stacked inside the cabin she screamed and tried to pull it out. She became hysterical when the helicopter lifted off, screaming and beating her thighs with her fists until the other women went to her. War is hell, as General Grant once said, somebody said. Somebody else said, I think it was Sherman who said that.

There had been a village beside the Special Forces camp. When the listening posts were overrun the villagers moved into the camp and dug caves for themselves in the walls of the communications trenches. Inside the camp we knew the fighting at the listening posts was over when the automatic weapons fire stopped and we could hear single, intermittent rounds fired as the wounded were finished off. After the Rangers came to rescue the camp it became common to see Vietnamese Rangers and Montagnard women coupling in the trenches at night while the Montagnard Strike Force and the old men from the village made silent talk among themselves.

On the night of the seventh day we were reinforced by an Arvin mechanized infantry battalion. They assaulted south of the camp, then withdrew and quit for the night, leaving their wounded lying in the brush and the red laterite dust. In the morning the APCs went out to retrieve those of their wounded who had survived the night, the dead were left to erode in the wind with the land. In one of the APCs was a dead crewman. He had been shot through the head, his brain and skull stuck in bits to the interior walls, the Vietnamese crew would not touch him. After we pulled him out the crew used oily rags to pick and rub the pieces of him off the walls. In another APC was a black man. I thought, What’s he doing here? this isn’t his war. On his left shoulder was the shield and horse’s head patch of the First Cav, he was a forward observer. He had a belly wound, his groans came from down deep, he already looked small and flat like the dead look. We folded his arms across his belly and started to carry him out. When the stretcher was halfway out his right arm slid off his belly and lodged against the side of the APC. Somebody said, Get his arm. Then the black man raised his arm himself and placed it across his belly. Get him to the medics! somebody yelled, and we rushed him to the makeshift dispensary. For two hours, until he died, we deceived ourselves that he would live. When he raised his arm he became one of us.

On the way in to the camp the mech battalion was ambushed, losing eleven vehicles and one hundred twenty men on the highway from Pleiku. In the camp we gave their American advisors onion soup and coffee and told them we wanted them to assault south of the camp not tomorrow but tonight. They did not want to leave the command bunker. They were cold, it was night, they did not know the terrain, their troops were tired, they were afraid. We watched them eat and make excuses. Then Breckinridge told us to lock and load.

You’re kidding, a major said. Breckinridge said they had ten seconds to finish their soup and rejoin their troops. He began to count.

You can’t be serious, said another major. When Breckinridge said six the first major said, Come on, men, let’s go. One of the captains threw his coffee on the floor.

They made a halfhearted assault and withdrew. They left their wounded lying in the brush. They came into the camp, having threatened to fire on us with their tank guns unless we opened the gate.

When the American advisors had left the command bunker after the countdown, I asked Robbie if he would have fired had Breckinridge ordered us to. I don’t know, Robbie said. Would you have? But I didn’t know either.

I kept passing Dale’s body. His feet and his legs up to the knees were all that showed under the poncho, but he lay in a puddle of his own fluids and I was always careful not to step in it. I walked in an arc around it whenever I passed, I did not want my boot prints in Dale’s body fluids.

Finally I had to sleep, the Benzedrine wasn’t working any longer. I went into the radio bunker and lay on the floor and closed my eyes and listened to the planes bombing and strafing. But then I opened my eyes and I saw that my feet were together at the same angle that Dale’s formed and I couldn’t sleep. Later that night or the next, I lay on the floor again but the rats were coming out from underground trying to escape the concussion from the bombing and first one and then another skittered over my face. I took my sleeping bag cover into the command bunker and put it on the table that they used for surgery. I slept there until the next wave of wounded came in.

On the seventh or eighth day a priest came in by helicopter to say a mass and take confessions. He was a fat, florid man, quite jovial, and he had used a scented aftershave that morning. He laughed a great deal and praised those who attended the mass. Just before boarding the helicopter to leave he said something cheery about no atheists in foxholes. Then he climbed up into the helicopter and it took off. When the siege was almost over a plethora of priests and ministers came in on the helicopters that were taking out the dead. There were almost as many clerics as there were correspondents; they sat around nattering at each other, the clerics and the correspondents, vultures at a feast.

The first correspondents came in on the day after the night we lost the listening posts. There were two wire-service correspondents and a photographer from Paris Match, they had been told at Pleiku that the battle was over and in fact had been only a minor probing action. They came in on the second of two helicopters, the first carried a medic coming in to relieve Breslin, who had been shot in the right shoulder and had lost the use of two fingers. The first helicopter was setting down when it took machine-gun fire, catching the medic in the heart. The helicopter carrying the correspondents settled, dumped them out, and spun away after the first one, the machinegun following its rise. It had lifted about a hundred feet when it turned belly up and exploded; it came down in a rush of yellow, red, and black.

In the morning the wire-service reporters were gone. The photographer from Match discovered it first; he was in a panic. The Montagnards told us that the correspondents had taken the place of wounded on a helicopter going back to Pleiku. We were all very angry and swore we would shoot the two if they showed up again. The photographer stayed with us the entire battle; when he ran out of film he helped with the wounded. No other correspondents came in until the fifth day when instead of the medic we had been expecting the Times man stepped out of a helicopter. Who the hell are you? Breckinridge exploded. I need you like I need the clap! The Times man was tall and yellow-haired, and had the beginning of a paunch. He was very apologetic; he hadn’t known, he said, they had told him at Pleiku… He offered to get on the next helicopter out. Those helicopters are for the wounded! Breckinridge raged. Nobody gets on one unless he’s wounded or dead! He called Pleiku on the radio. He said that they were cowards for not coming in to fight with us. He said that the Rangers were worthless and their commander had as much value as a case of the clap. Breckinridge was a large man with a voice like a rasp, he accused the entire Corps area of cowardice for not parachuting in to help us. He was crying; Captain Stone who had been his closest friend had bled