Susan seemed mildly amused. Mr. Tram was still thinking about rats. He said, “Our trenches were filled with rats. They ate…” He looked at Susan and didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew that it wasn’t C rations that the rats ate.
Mr. Tram said, “These rats carried disease… you understand, the… in French it is les puces.”
Susan said, “Fleas.”
“Yes, and these fleas carried the plague… the dark plague, when the skin becomes black… bubonic… many men died that way.”
We stood there under the gray, gloomy sky, with this constant wind sweeping down from the hills, and three of us retreated into our own thoughts. We could have stood there for a week playing Can You Top This, but what was the point?
Finally, Ted said, “Yeah, I remember now, a cargo plane came in one day carrying this stuff… gamma something.”
I said, “Gamma globulin.”
“Yeah. You remember that? They stuck this horse needle in your ass and squirted this shit into your butt. This stuff was on ice, and I swear it was thick as putty. I had a lump in my ass for a week, and we asked the medics what it was for, and they said, ‘measles.’ But afterward, we found out it was because of the plague. Jesus H. Christ, as if the incoming rounds wasn’t enough to worry about.”
Susan asked, “Did anyone get sick?”
Ted replied, “You think they’d tell us? You went to the field hospital with a fever, and sometimes you got sent back to duty with penicillin, and sometimes they took you out of here on the next thing flying out. Nobody used the word plague.”
I nodded, recalling the fear of bubonic plague, the evidence of which we’d seen among the dead and wounded North Vietnamese. We had gotten gamma globulin before the air assault, and our medics had been mostly up-front about this and told us to avoid flea bites from the rats, and, of course, direct rat bites. And while we were at it, quit smoking and try not to get hit by a bullet. Thanks, Doc.
The First Cavalry had named this operation Pegasus, after the mythological flying horse, but it could more aptly have been named the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death.
Mr. Tram continued, “So, this terrible siege went on for all of January, February, March, until April. We had perhaps twenty or twenty-five thousand men around this camp, and the American marines had… how many, Mr. Ted?”
“About five or six thousand.”
“Yes. And when we left here, they told us we had left ten thousand of our comrades behind, sick, wounded, and dead… and we had many more thousands with us who were sick and wounded… and many of them died afterward. I lost many friends here and some cousins and an uncle who was a colonel. And I know many Americans died also, so when I left here, I thought to myself, ‘What was the purpose of this?’”
Ted said, “Beats the hell out of me.”
Mr. Tram walked silently for a while, then stopped and pointed. “Do you see that trench out there? It is one of the surviving trenches that we dug. We began digging trenches toward this camp — just as my father and uncles had done at Dien Bien Phu. Each night we dug, and the trenches came closer and closer to your barbed wire. And when we were very close, we would come out of the trenches at night and attack a place where we thought the defenses were weak, and where we could penetrate into your camp… but we could not… and many men died out there, where the barbed wire once was.”
Ted picked up the story and said, “If we thought we saw movement out there, or if a flare tripped, our mortars would fire parachute flares above the area, and everything got lit up like day…” He looked down from the plateau where the wire had once been and said, “We’d see them coming at us, like hundreds of them, real quiet, not shooting, just coming at the wire, and they wouldn’t even take cover, they just kept running toward us, and we’d open up and they’d start dropping like tenpins. Christ, one night one of them blows a fucking bugle, and they all start running and screaming, and my asshole gets tight, and I’m shaking so fucking bad I can’t steady my rifle, and they start throwing those bangalore torpedoes into the outer wire, and the wire blows, and it’s breached, and they come in toward the second wire, and mortar rounds are falling all around my bunker, and I’m afraid to put my face to the firing slit because mortar and grenade shrapnel and tracer rounds are coming in through the slit, so I hold my M-16 up to the slit by its pistol grip, and I’m crouched below the slit, so I can’t see shit, but I’m emptying magazine after magazine downrange… and then I get hit in the hand by hot shrapnel, and I drop the rifle and see that it’s damaged, so what the hell am I thinking when I run out of the bunker and start chucking grenades down at the wire. Five frags and two white phosphorus, and everything down there is burning, including people, and these little… these guys are still fucking coming, and they’ve breached the second wire, and there’s nothing between me and them except the last wire because we’ve blown all our claymores now, and the machine gun got knocked out, and I’m looking around for a fucking rifle… then, all of a sudden, the bugle blows again, and they’re gone.”
Ted stared down the slope of the plateau and said, in a barely audible voice, “And they’re gone… except for a few dozen of them tangled in the wire, or moaning on the ground. So, we go down there and… well…” He looked at Mr. Tram, who looked away from Ted.
We walked around the perimeter of the big camp, and there wasn’t a scrap of anything left, except the ghostly trace of the long airstrip, where, as Mr. Tram said, nothing seemed to grow.
Mr. Tram said to me, “If you do not mind, could you tell me what was your experience here?”
We continued our walk, and I thought a minute and said, “Well, after we air-assaulted in, we made contact with the enemy… with the North Vietnamese army, but it was obvious they were retreating into Laos. We had light contact for the next week or so. I really can’t remember how long we stayed. We saw many hundreds of dead soldiers, many wounded, many graves… and the rats… and there was a terrible stench of death, and the land was devastated… and I had never seen anything like this… the aftermath of a great slaughter, and in some ways, it was more terrible than battle itself. I kept saying to myself, ‘I am walking through the Valley of Death, and God has abandoned this place.’”
We were back in the town square of Khe Sanh again. I gave Mr. Tram a ten and said to him, “Thank you. I’m sure this is difficult for you to relive this.”
He bowed and replied, “I can only do this with Americans who have been here. To the others, it is meaningless.”
Susan said, “Well, I wasn’t here, but you three guys made me feel like I was.”
Ted asked Susan, “Hey, do you think my wife should have come?”
Susan replied, “Yes. Come back with her tomorrow.”
Ted bit his lip and nodded. “She wanted to come… it was me who didn’t want her to.”
Susan said, “I understand.”
Susan said something in Vietnamese to Mr. Tram. He bowed and replied, we all shook hands, and Ted was off to his bus, and Mr. Tram to wherever.
We got back in the RAV, and I said to Mr. Loc, “Quang Tri.”
He pulled onto Highway 9, and we headed east, back toward the coast, to the place where I’d spent most of my time here, when they weren’t air-assaulting me into the middle of another nightmare.
Susan said, “That was incredible. What an experience.”
I didn’t reply.
She asked me, “How are you holding up?”
“Fine.”
“Paul… why do you think you survived this place?”