I said to Susan, “This was once a small city, now it’s a big village. Back to basics through airpower.”
“Incredible,” she said.
I asked Susan, “What did he say to you?”
“About what? Oh, he’s going to park and leave the vehicle, so he wanted me to take my stuff.”
I nodded.
A few kids saw us, and soon there was a mob of them following us. A few adults watched us curiously from their gardens.
We continued on the village paths, and Susan was looking around. She said, “I’ve never really been in a rural village.”
I replied, “I’ve been in hundreds of them. They all look the same. Except some held Viet Cong and some didn’t.” I looked around. “See that haystack? Once we found a whole room hidden in a big haystack. Chuck was gone, but he’d left some equipment. So we Zippo’ed the haystack, then got carried away and burned some nearby hootches — that’s what we called the peasant houses.” It was all coming back to me, and I continued, “Then there’d be these little holes hidden in the gardens, big enough for one tiny VC to stand in — we called them spider holes, and they were hard to find, unless Chuck decided to pop out and open up with his AK-47. Plus, every hootch had an earth bunker in the garden, where the family would go if the shit hit the fan. But each bunker could also hold some VC, and you didn’t want to go in there and check it out because if you did, you’d never come out again, so you shouted for everyone to come out with their hands up, and usually you’d get a few co-deps who Mama-san wanted to hide from the GIs in case we had things on our minds beside finding Mr. Charles. So, after everyone was supposed to be out, you chucked a tear gas grenade in, and now and then Mr. Charles would come running out with his AK-47 blazing, and you’d waste him, then move on.”
I was amazed that this was all coming back to me so vividly, and I went on, “Buried in the thatch roofs you’d find rifles, ammunition, plastic explosives, and all that good stuff, and you’d arrest the family and turn them over to the National Police and burn their house, though nine times out of ten the poor bastards who were hiding VC or weapons were doing it under threat. One time — and I guess this was funny — we pulled on a water well rope and sure enough, whatever was down there was too heavy to be a water bucket, and so about three guys pull Charles up, his black pajamas dripping wet, his feet in this wooden bucket, and before he got to ground level, he threw his AK-47 rifle up so we wouldn’t blow him away. So, up he comes, looking almost sheepish — like, you found me — and we laughed our asses off, then someone punched him in the face, and he fell down into the well, and we let him tread water for fifteen minutes before we lowered the bucket down and fished him up. Then the same guy who punched him in the face gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, then burned the house where the well was, and we tied Chuck up and put him on a chopper back to a POW camp, and the beat goes on. Day by day by day, village by village by village, until we were sick to death of searching these miserable villages and searching the people and trashing their hootches looking for weapons and wondering when Charlie was going to pop up out of nowhere and blow your head off. And other days, we’d help deliver a baby, medevac some sick kid back to an aid station, put first aid ointment on some old guy’s festering sore, and hand out candy. Acts of human kindness, alternating with acts of extreme cruelty, usually on the same day, and often in the same village. You just never knew how a hundred armed boys were going to act at any given moment. I guess a lot of it depended on how many casualties we’d taken the day before, or if we found anything in the village, or maybe how hot and thirsty we were, or if the officers and sergeants were minding the boys closely, or if they didn’t give a shit that day because they’d gotten a bad letter from home, or they’d gotten chewed out on the radio by a superior officer, or if they themselves were starting to go around the bend. As the war went on, the young lieutenants got younger, and the sergeants had been PFCs just a month before… and the normal constraints of more mature people… you know, like Lord of the Flies… kids can get crazy… and if somebody kills one of the gang, they want blood in return… and so the village sweeps got… they got out of hand, and it wasn’t war anymore, it was kids on the prowl with short fuses, who were just as likely to throw a fragmentation grenade into a family bunker as a tear gas grenade, or just as likely to give Papa-san a box of cookies from home as to crush a lit cigarette in his face if they found a spider hole in his garden.”
Susan walked silently beside me, and I wondered if I should be telling her any of this. I also wondered if I should be telling me any of this. Back in the States, you could forget it, or sanitize it in your mind, or put it all down to false memory syndrome, the result of watching too many ’Nam flicks. But here… here is where it happened, and there was no way to spin it.
We kept walking through the village, the kids following, but not begging or being annoying, like they were in Saigon. These were rural kids, who didn’t see many Lien Xo, and so maybe they were shy; but maybe they had an ancestral memory of big Americans who had walked through their fathers’ and grandfathers’ villages, and they kept their distance.
I said to Susan, “Imagine being a villager — you don’t sleep at night, and you don’t smile during the day. You and everyone around you are on the brink of madness and despair, and you’re totally at the mercy of two armed enemies who say they want to win your hearts and minds, but who may one day rape you and slit your throat. And that was life in the villages of this tortured country. By the time it was all over, the peasants didn’t care who won. The devil himself with his legions from hell could have won, and that would be wonderful because the war had stopped.”
Susan stayed quiet for a while, then said, “I would have joined the guerrillas and gone into the hills to fight. I’d rather die fighting.”
I forced a smile and said, “You’re a fighter.” I added, “In fact, most of the young men and women chose one side or the other and did just that. But some stayed in the villages to plant and harvest, and to take care of aging parents and younger siblings and hope for the best. In any case, if you ever get to a rural village again, when you see people of that age, you’ll understand what they went through.”
She nodded.
As if on cue, an old man stood on the side of the path, and he bowed to us. Susan spoke to him, and he smiled at her Vietnamese. They talked for a few minutes, and Susan said to me, “The Citadel is just up this path. He says he’s a longtime resident of Quang Tri, and if you are a returning soldier, you must be surprised at what you see.”
“I am. Tell him I was with the First Cavalry, and my brigade headquarters was in the old French fort.”
She told him, and he replied at some length. She said to me, “In 1972, the Communists and the Army of the Republic… the ARVN… fought back and forth for the city, and it changed hands many times, and lay in ruins, then the ARVN withdrew toward Hue, and the American bombers came and destroyed all that was left of the city, and killed many Communist soldiers who were in the Citadel and the French fort, and the American base camp outside the city. There is nothing left.”
I nodded.
He said something else, and Susan said to me, “He says other Americans from the cavalry have returned, and they are always sad and surprised that nothing is left of their presence here. He also met a Frenchman once who came to see the fort where he was stationed, and the Frenchman was convinced he was in the wrong place and spent all day looking for his fort, and the… watchtowers, I think he means.”