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.
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 grassy 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 fucking 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 fucking days, and this camp was hell on earth, buddy. You went out to take a piss, and you got your weenie blown off. We lived like fucking animals in the trenches and bunkers, and the fucking rats were everywhere, and I swear to God it rained every day, and the fucking 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 shit.
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 fucking base. We didn’t leave shit 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 fucking way I’m filling one more fucking sandbag on this fucking 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 shithole. Red mud and sandbags. No grass when I was here.”
Mr. Tram went on a bit about reconstructing hell 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-assaulted 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 assault 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 shitless. 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, ‘Shit, 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 rats. You had to sleep with your boots on or you’d get your toe bit off. I kid you not. These fuckers were mean and ballsy. 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 balls.”