Going After Cacciato (6 page)

It was there by the sea.

A staging area, he decided. A place to get acquainted. Rows of tin huts stood neatly in the sand, connected by metal walkways, surrounded on three sides by wire, guarded at the rear by the sea.

A Vietnamese barber cut his hair.

A bored master sergeant delivered a re-up speech.

A staff sergeant led him to a giant field tent for chow, then another staff sergeant led him to a hootch containing eighty bunks and eighty lockers. The bunks and lockers were numbered.

“Don’t leave here,” said the staff sergeant, “unless it’s to use the piss-tube.”

Paul Berlin nodded, fearful to ask what a piss-tube was.

   In the morning the fifty new men were marched to a wooden set of bleachers facing the sea. A small, sad-faced corporal in a black cadre helmet waited until they settled down, looking at the recruits as if searching for a lost friend in a crowd. Then the corporal sat down in the sand. He turned away and gazed out to sea. He did not speak. Time passed slowly, ten minutes, twenty, but still the sad-faced corporal did not turn or nod or speak. He simply gazed out at the blue sea. Everything was clean. The sea was clean, and the sand and the wind.

They sat in the bleachers for a full hour.

Then at last the corporal sighed and stood up. He checked his wristwatch. Again he searched the rows of new faces.

“All right,” he said softly. “That completes your first lecture on how to survive this shit. I hope you paid attention.”

   During the days they simulated search-and-destroy missions in a friendly little village just outside the Combat Center. The villagers played along. Always smiling, always indulgent, they let themselves be captured and frisked and interrogated.

PFC Paul Berlin, who wanted to live, took the exercise seriously.

“You VC?” he demanded of a little girl with braids. “You dirty VC?”

The girl smiled. “Shit, man,” she said gently. “You shittin’ me?”

   They pitched practice grenades made of green fiberglass. They were instructed in compass reading, survival methods, bivouac SOPs, the operation and maintenance of the standard weapons.
Sitting in the bleachers by the sea, they were lectured on the known varieties of enemy land mines and booby traps. Then, one by one, they took turns making their way through a make-believe minefield.

“Boomo!” an NCO shouted at any misstep.

It was a peculiar drill. There were no physical objects to avoid, no obstacles on the obstacle course, no wires or prongs or covered pits to detect and then evade. Too lazy to rig up the training ordnance each morning, the supervising NCO simply hollered
Boomo
when the urge struck him.

Paul Berlin, feeling hurt at being told he was a dead man, complained that it was unfair.

“Boomo,” the NCO repeated.

But Paul Berlin stood firm. “Look,” he said. “Nothing. Just the sand. There’s nothing there at all.”

The NGO, a huge black man, stared hard at the beach. Then at Paul Berlin. He smiled. “Course not, you dumb twerp. You just fucking
exploded
it.”

   Paul Berlin was not a twerp. So it constantly amazed him, and left him feeling much abused, to hear such nonsense—twerp, creepo, butter-brain. It wasn’t right. He was a straightforward, honest, decent sort of guy. He was not dumb. He was not small or weak or ugly. True, the war scared him silly, but this was something he hoped to bring under control.

Late on the third night he wrote to his father, explaining that he’d arrived safely at a large base called Chu Lai, and that he was taking now-or-never training in a place called the Combat Center. If there was time, he wrote, it would be good to get a letter telling something about how things went on the home front—a nice, unfrightened-sounding phrase, he thought. He also asked his father to look up Chu Lai in a world atlas. “Right now,” he wrote, “I’m a little lost.”

It lasted six days, which he marked off at sunset on a pocket calendar. Not short, he thought, but getting shorter.

He had his hair cut again. He drank Coke, watched the ocean, saw movies at night, learned the smells. The sand smelled of sour milk. The air, so clean near the water, smelled of mildew. He was scared, yes, and confused and lost, and he had no sense of what was expected of him or of what to expect from himself. He was aware of his body. Listening to the instructors talk about the war, he sometimes found himself gazing at his own wrists or legs. He tried not to think. He stayed apart from the other new guys. He ignored their jokes and chatter. He made no friends and learned no names. At night, the big hootch swelling with their sleeping, he closed his eyes and pretended it was a war. He felt drugged. He plodded through the sand, listened while the NCOs talked about the AO: “Real bad shit,” said the youngest of them, a sallow kid without color in his eyes. “Real tough shit, real bad. I remember this guy Uhlander. Not such a bad dick, but he made the mistake of thinking it wasn’t so bad. It’s bad. You know what bad is? Bad is evil. Bad is what happened to Uhlander. I don’t wanna scare the bejesus out of you—that’s not what I want—but, shit, you guys are gonna
die.
”

   On the seventh day, June 9, the new men were assigned to their terminal units.

The Americal Division, Paul Berlin learned for the first time, was organized into three infantry brigades, the 11th, 196th, and 198th. The brigades, in turn, were broken down into infantry battalions, the battalions into companies, the companies into platoons, the platoons into squads.

Supporting the brigades was an immense divisional complex spread out along the sands of Chu Lai. Three artillery elements under a single command, two hospitals, six air units, logistical and transportation and communication battalions, legal services, a PX, a stockade, a USO, a mini golf course, a swimming beach with trained lifeguards, administration offices under the Adjutant
General, twelve Red Cross Donut Dollies, a central mail detachment, Seabees, four Military Police units, a press information service, computer specialists, civil relations specialists, psychological warfare specialists, Graves Registration, dog teams, civilian construction and maintenance contractors, a
Stars and Stripes
detachment, intelligence and tactical planning units, chapels and chaplains and assistant chaplains, cooks and clerks and translators and scouts and orderlies, an Inspector General’s office, awards and decorations specialists, dentists, cartographers, statistical analysts, oceanographers, PO officers, photographers and janitors and demographers.

The ratio of support to combat personnel was twelve to one.

Paul Berlin counted it as bad luck, a statistically improbable outcome, to be assigned to the 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade.

   His sense of place had never been keen. In Indian Guides, with his father, he’d gone to Wisconsin to camp and be pals forever. Big Bear and Little Bear. He remembered it. Yellow and green headbands, orange feathers. Powwows at the campfire. Big Fox telling stories out of the
Guide Story Book
. Big Fox, a gray-haired father from Oshebo, Illinois, owner of a paper mill. He remembered all of it. Canoe races the second day, Big Bear paddling hard but Little Bear having troubles. Poor, poor Little Bear. Better luck in the gunnysack race, Big Bear and Little Bear hopping together under the great Wisconsin sky, but poor Little Bear, stumbling. Pals anyhow. Not a problem. Shake hands the secret Guide way. Pals forever. Then the third day, into the woods, father first and son second, Little Bear tracking Big Bear, who leaves tracks and paw prints. Yes, he remembered it—Little Bear getting lost. Following Big Bear’s tracks down to a winding creek, crossing the creek, checking the opposite bank according to the
Guide Survival Guide
, finding nothing; so deeper into the woods—Big Bear!—and deeper, then turning back to the creek, but now no creek. Nothing in the
Guide Survival Guide
about panic. Lost, bawling in the big Wisconsin woods.
He remembered it clearly. Little Elk finding him, flashlights converging, Little Bear bawling under a giant spruce. So the fourth day, getting sick, and Big Bear and Little Bear breaking camp early. Decamping. Hamburgers and root beer on the long drive home, baseball talk, white man talk, and he remembered it, the sickness going away. Pals forever.

   A truck took him up Highway One, then inland to LZ Gator, where he joined the 5th Battalion of the 46th Infantry of the 198th Infantry Brigade. There, in a white hootch surrounded by barbed wire and bunkers, a captain jotted his name and number into a leather-bound log. An E-8 took him aside.

“You look strack,” the E-8 whispered. “How’d you go for a rear job? I can fix it for you … get you a job painting fences. Sound good?”

Paul Berlin smiled.

“You go for that? Nice comfy painting job? No paddy humpin’, no dinks?”

Paul Berlin smiled. The E-8 smiled back.

“Sound good, trooper? You get off on the sound of them bells?”

Paul Berlin smiled. He knew what the man wanted. So, only faintly, he nodded.

“Well, then,” the E-8 whispered, “I fear you come to the wrong … fuckin … place.”

   Walking down the hill toward Alpha Company, he passed a wooden latrine built over two sunken barrels. The first truly familiar smell of the war. He stopped, dropped his duffel, went in, closed the door, unbuttoned his trousers, and sat down.

And for a long time he sat there. At home, comfortable, even at peace. Flies played against the screened windows. Outside, far up the hill, stood a tall tower, and, behind it, the sandbagged tactical operations center. Down the hill ran a gravel road along which the
various company areas sprawled, six in all—Headquarters, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Echo. The 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry. Farther down the hill was the wired perimeter, bunkers, a steel-mesh gate draped with a hand-printed sign reading THE PROFESSIONALS. Beyond the gate was flat paddy. Beyond the paddies were mountains.

Yes, at peace, warm and wet inside, and he watched the flies and the clean sky and a black man raking trash and two officers moving slowly up the road.

At peace, he read what was written on the shitter’s walls.
So short
, it was written,
I just fell through the fucking hole
. Below that,
Better off where you at
. Others, he read—On
Gator, the wind don’t blow, it sucks
, and in a different hand,
So does PFC Prawn, when he gets the urge
. Another,
Where am I?
And beneath it,
If you don’t know, better climb out before I drown your ass
. Names, dates, residue.
Hapstein’s queer … No, man, Hapstein’s just good fun … I’m so short, I’m gone—this is my answering service … Cacciato … Brilliant, ain’t he?

Paul Berlin took out a pencil.

Very carefully, he wrote:
I’m so short, I can’t see the forest for the trees
.

   When PFC Paul Berlin joined the First Platoon of Alpha Company on June 11, 1968, he found three squads manned by twelve, ten, and eight soldiers.

The squads were led by two PFCs and a buck sergeant, Oscar Johnson.

There were no fireteams, no SOPs for tactical maneuvers or covering fire. There was no FO. There was no platoon sergeant. Doc Peret was the only medic, and his training was at best eccentric.

The platoon leader, Lieutenant Sidney Martin, was almost as new to the war as Paul Berlin. His intelligence and training were clearly above average, but his wisdom was in doubt from the very beginning. He died in Lake Country—World’s Greatest Lake
Country, Doc Peret kept calling it—and after him came a much older lieutenant, Corson, who though only average in intelligence and training and wisdom, was a platoon leader the men could finally love. He took no chances, he wasted no lives. The war, for which he was much too old, scared him.

   They were organized around personalities, specialties of knowledge, and tradition. They were also organized around superstition.

It was not rank so much as superstition, for example, that made Oscar Johnson leader of the Third Squad. He was a sergeant, true. But he held that rank because he’d survived nearly nine months in the bush. Nine was a lucky number. And the coincidence of it, Paul Berlin learned, was the peculiar fact that Oscar Johnson knew very little about surviving. They were organized around luck.

Stink Harris walked point because he prided himself on his scouting abilities. Eddie Lazzutti carried the radio because he prided himself on his voice. They were organized around pride.

They were organized also around principles of trust. Ben Nystrom, who later left the war and wrote no letters, carried the radio until he could not be trusted with it, at which point Eddie was given the trust. Jim Pederson, in many ways the most trusted of all, was given the responsibility for triggering ambushes, and so the ambush formations were always organized around Jim Pederson.

Disobedience was sometimes organized and sometimes not.

When First Lieutenant Sidney Martin persisted in making them search tunnels before blowing them, and after Frenchie Tucker and Bernie Lynn died in tunnels, the disobedience became fully organized.