In Pharaoh's Army

I
WOULD LIKE
to give special thanks again, and again, to my wife, Catherine, and to my editor, Gary Fisketjon, for their patient and thoughtful readings of this book. My gratitude as well to Amanda Urban, Geoffrey Wolff, and Michael Herr. Their help and friendship made all the difference.

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

—FORD MADOX FORD
,
The Good Soldier

S
OME PEASANTS WERE
blocking the road up ahead. I honked the horn but they chose not to hear. They were standing around under their pointed hats, watching a man and a woman yell at each other. When I got closer I saw two bicycles tangled up, a busted wicker basket, and vegetables all over the road. It looked like an accident.

Sergeant Benet reached over in front of me and sounded the horn again. It made a sheepish bleat, ridiculous coming from this armor-plated truck with its camouflage paint. The peasants turned their heads but they still didn’t get out of the way. I was bearing down on them. Sergeant Benet slid low in the seat so nobody could get a look at him, which was prudent on his part, since he was probably the biggest man in this part of the province and certainly the only black man.

I kept honking the horn as I came on. The peasants held their ground longer than I thought they would, almost long enough to make me lose my nerve, then they jumped out of the way. I could hear them shouting and then I couldn’t hear anything but the clang and
grind of metal as the wheels of the truck passed over the bicycles. Awful sound. When I looked in the rear-view most of the peasants were staring after the truck while a few others inspected the wreckage in the road.

Sergeant Benet sat up again. He said, without reproach, “That’s a shame, sir. That’s just a real shame.”

I didn’t say anything. What could I say? I hadn’t done it for fun. Seven months back, at the beginning of my tour, when I was still calling them people instead of peasants, I wouldn’t have run over their bikes. I would have slowed down or even stopped until they decided to move their argument to the side of the road, if it was a real argument and not a setup. But I didn’t stop anymore. Neither did Sergeant Benet. Nobody did, as these peasants—these people—should have known.

We passed through a string of hamlets without further interruption. I drove fast to get an edge on the snipers, but snipers weren’t the problem on this road. Mines were the problem. If I ran over a touch-fused 105 shell it wouldn’t make any difference how fast I was going. I’d seen a two-and-a-half-ton truck blown right off the road by one of those, just a few vehicles ahead of me in a convoy coming back from Saigon. The truck jumped like a bucking horse and landed on its side in the ditch. The rest of us stopped and hit the dirt, waiting for an ambush that never came. When we finally got up and looked in the truck there was nobody there, nothing you could think of as a person. The two Vietnamese soldiers inside had been turned to chowder by the blast coming up through the floor of the cab. After that I always packed sandbags under my seat and on the floorboards of anything I drove. I
suspected that even the scant comfort I took from these doleful measures was illusory, but illusions kept me going and I declined to pursue any line of thought that might put them in danger.

We were all living on fantasies. There was some variation among them, but every one of us believed, instinctively if not consciously, that he could help his chances by observing certain rites and protocols. Some of these were obvious. You kept your weapon clean. You paid attention. You didn’t take risks unless you had to. But that got you only so far. Despite the promise implicit in our training—
If you do everything right, you’ll make it home
—you couldn’t help but notice that the good troops were getting killed right along with the slackers and shitbirds. It was clear that survival wasn’t only a function of Zero Defects and Combat Readiness. There had to be something else to it, something unreachable by practical means.

Why one man died and another lived was, in the end, a mystery, and we who lived paid court to that mystery in every way we could think of. I carried a heavy gold pocket watch given to me by my fiancée. It had belonged to her grandfather, and to her father. She’d had it engraved with a verse from Kahlil Gibran’s
The Prophet
. It went with me everywhere, rain or shine. That it continued to tick I regarded as an affirmation somehow linked to my own continuance, and when it got stolen toward the end of my tour I suffered through several days of stupefying fatalism.

The ordinary human sensation of occupying a safe place in a coherent scheme allowed me to perform, to help myself as much as I could. But at times I was seized and shaken by the certainty that nothing I did
meant anything, and all around me I sensed currents of hatred and malign intent. When I felt it coming on I gave a sudden wrenching shudder as if I’d bitten into something sour, and forced my thoughts elsewhere. To consider the reality of my situation only made it worse.

Not that my situation was all that bad, compared to what it might have been. I was stationed in the Delta at a time when things were much quieter there than up north. Up north they were fighting big North Vietnamese Army units. Tens of thousands of men had died for places that didn’t even have names, just elevation numbers or terms of utility—Firebase Zulu, Landing Zone Oscar—and which were usually evacuated a few days after the battle, when the cameras had gone back to Saigon. The NVA were very hard cases. They didn’t hit and run like the Vietcong; they hit and kept hitting. I kept hearing things: that they had not only mortars but heavy artillery, lugged down mountain trails piece by piece as in the days of Dienbienphu; that before battle they got stoned on some kind of special communist reefer that made them suicidally brave; that their tunnels were like cities and ran right under our bases; that they had tanks and helicopters; that American deserters were fighting on their side.

These were only a few of the rumors. I doubted them, but of course some question always remained, and every so often one would prove to be true. Their tunnels did run under our bases. And later, at Lang Vei, they did use tanks against us. The idea of those people coming at us with even a fraction of the hardware we
routinely turned on them seemed outrageous, an atrocity.

The Delta was different. Here the enemy were local guerrillas organized in tight, village-based cadres. Occasionally they combined for an attack on one of our compounds or to ambush a convoy of trucks or boats, or even a large unit isolated in the field and grown sloppy from long periods without contact, but most of the time they worked in small teams and stayed out of sight. They blew us up with homemade mines fashioned from dud howitzer shells, or real American mines bought from our South Vietnamese allies. They dropped mortars on us at night—never very many; just enough, with luck, to kill a man or two, or inflict some wounds, or at least scare us half to death. Then they hightailed it home before our fire-direction people could vector in on them, slipped into bed, and, as I imagined, laughed themselves to sleep. They booby-trapped our trucks and jeeps. They booby-trapped the trails they knew we’d take, because we always took the same trails, the ones that looked easy and kept us dry. They sniped at us. And every so often, when they felt called on to prove that they were sincere guerrillas and not just farmers acting tough, they crowded a road with animals or children and shot the sentimentalists who stopped.

We did not die by the hundreds in pitched battles. We died a man at a time, at a pace almost casual. You could sometimes begin to feel safe, and then you caught yourself and looked around, and you saw that of the people you’d known at the beginning of your tour a number were dead or in hospitals. And you did some nervous arithmetic. In my case the odds were not an
actuary’s dream, but they could have been worse. A lot worse, in fact. Terrible, in fact.

Back in the States I’d belonged to the Special Forces, first as an enlisted man and then as an officer. As part of my training I’d spent a year studying Vietnamese and learned to speak the language like a seven-year-old child with a freakish military vocabulary. This facility of mine, recorded in my file, caught the eye of a personnel officer during my first couple of hours in Vietnam, as I was passing through the reception center at Bien Hoa. He told me that a Vietnamese artillery battalion outside My Tho was in need of an adviser with a command of the language. Later on, when a replacement was available, I could request a transfer back into the Special Forces. He apologized for the assignment. He figured I’d been itching for some action, more than I was likely to get in the Delta, and was sorry to disappoint me.

I saw it as a reprieve. Several men I’d gone through training with had been killed or wounded in recent months, overrun in their isolated outposts, swallowed up while on patrol, betrayed by the mercenary troops they led. My best friend in the army, Hugh Pierce, had been killed a few months before I shipped out, and this gave me a shock I’ve never really gotten over. In those days I was scared stiff. The feeling was hardly unique over there, but I did have good reason for it: I was completely incompetent to lead a Special Forces team. This was adamant fact, not failure of nerve. My failure of nerve took another form. I wanted out, but I lacked the courage to confess my incompetence as the price of getting out. I was ready to be killed, even, perhaps, get others killed, to avoid that humiliation.