What it is Like to Go to War (20 page)

The other company commander lost his nerve and stopped. It happens, even in the Marine Corps. Our company made the assault alone.

The next day we took a second hill just to our west but couldn’t hold both for lack of Marines. We regrouped on the first hill and were assaulted that night by NVA sappers and ground troops. Another friend who’d gone with me through PLC
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was in the company that stopped. He took his platoon, on his own authority, and worked his way up to join us. He reached us when we were much in need defending the hill against counterattacks. The greater part of our ammunition had been spent in the assault and we were now two full nights without sleep. I remember him and his platoon sergeant making the rounds of the holes under fire just after they’d arrived, eager to make amends for not joining the assault, eager to prove themselves always faithful—which they did.

Instead of going with them to help familiarize them with the perimeter, I just watched, telling myself that I’d already risked my neck enough. I’m still ashamed of it.

In the midst of all this chaos and carnage, cowardice and honor, I won my first medal, a Bronze Star. It was during the initial assault. The platoon commander who replaced me when I was moved up to XO was green. He had been in only one real fight, not counting the hot landing. I couldn’t stand to have my old platoon make the assault without me. My actual post, as number two, was with the command group on a small knoll just down the ridgeline from the hill we were assaulting. My job was to help the skipper direct the artillery and the supporting fire from the weapons platoon and be there to take over if he got killed or wounded. I couldn’t stand it. I told the skipper I was joining the assault and didn’t wait to hear an answer.

The small knoll and the larger hill where the NVA were dug in were connected by a blasted barren neck, the top of the ridge. I ran alone down this neck between the command post and the assaulting Marines. The assault group was already at the FLD
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draped across the ridgeline, one end of the string hanging down the south slope and the other end hanging down the north slope. I knew that one very critical tactical task would be to keep the assault together, as the tendency is for the squads to slide down their respective sides of the ridge, opening a gap in the assault and weakening the force to be applied against the NVA bunkers. In any assault the defenders are usually considered to have at least a three-to-one advantage, mainly because they are dug in and have prepared defensive fires on all the easy ways up.
Up
is the other operative word. Assaulting a hill slows and exhausts the attackers enormously, making them very vulnerable to fire.
To succeed, an assault depends on all-out fury focused at the smallest possible point.

Artillery shells were piling into the hill above us. Pieces of nearly spent shrapnel were falling beside me as I ran toward the FLD. While I was running toward my old platoon and the coming assault, I felt an overwhelming sense of excitement, almost joy. I was rejoining
my
unit. I was nearly crazy with adrenaline. The screaming and earth-shattering artillery rounds filled the air around me with vibrant shaking noise that I felt pounding right up through the soles of my jungle boots and smashing into my face and ears from the shivering air. I’ve jumped out of airplanes, climbed up cliff sides, raced cars, done drugs. I’ve never found anything comparable. Combat is the crack cocaine of all excitement highs—with crack cocaine costs.

The artillery stopped, smoke grenades were popped, and we stood up and walked up the hill in an eerie silence, waiting for the first bullets. Then, all across our front, unseen machine guns and small arms opened up. Bullets cracked past our ears, kicked dirt, and killed. We surged forward. Everything was blood in the throat, shouting, running, furious thinking, noise, and chaos.

I kept screaming at the troops to try to keep the gap from opening. They responded admirably. We hit the slope of the hill as one. Then began the extremely hard job of climbing it under fire. The new platoon commander immediately had his hands full trying to force through, or around, a concentration of bunkers and holes on our right flank, about midway up the hillside. I went tearing around a small bump of dirt to the left of where the ridgeline joined the steeper hill, working my way sideways on the hillside, trying to link two squads that had drifted apart while at the same time spreading people to our left trying to keep them from bunching
up.
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There I saw Utter, a tall awkward kid of eighteen, leaning with his back against the steep hill, frantically trying to clear his M-16. I remember his Adam’s apple pumping up and down. He was near panic.

I threw myself against the hillside, so steep here that both of us were actually standing, leaning our backs against it, looking out over the valley below us. Bullets, exceeding the sound barrier, made loud sonic snaps over our heads, but we were safe in this little cup that protected us. Utter’s magazine hadn’t been properly seated, causing the bolt to hang up on its forward edge, a common problem with the M-16. I cleared it for him, fired a short burst, and handed the rifle back to him. I asked him where his squad leader was. He didn’t know exactly. Over there someplace.

I looked up over the lip of the cup and could see that the brush had been carefully cleared away from the ground up to about knee level. By this time I’d been around long enough to know this meant a machine-gun emplacement. They’d shoot the legs first. When the attacker fell, the bullets would finish him off as the body fell through the kill zone.

I grabbed Utter by the shirt and forced his head above the lip to show him the trap, shouting at him not to go up that way, to try to find some way around. He stared at the cut brush. I yanked him down and then told him to stay put. I’d find his squad leader and we’d get a team together and get the gun by flanking it from the left side. Don’t go up there. He nodded, still dazed with fear. I made him shoot a couple of rounds. He nodded; he was all right.
I took off to organize an attack on the machine gun. As I left the protection of the cup I saw Utter take off, straight up the hill. I’ll never know why. Perhaps he too wanted to be a hero. Maybe he just wanted to show me he was a good Marine.

My former platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Bell, came running around from the opposite side. His radioman, Lance Corporal Putnam, piled into the hillside right after him. Bell, a terrific platoon sergeant, was doing the same thing I was, trying to get the two squads back together, but from the other direction. So the gap was getting closed.

I shouted at him, “Utter’s just gone up the hill toward that machine gun. Where in hell’s Second Squad?”

He just pointed over his shoulder and leaned his back against the side of the hill, his chest heaving. I saw movement in the brush and heard the sound of an M-16, so knew that Bell and the second squad leader had closed the gap.

Then we all heard the enemy machine gun open up. You can definitely tell this machine gun by its heavy popping sound, methodical and hammerlike, unlike the heavy slapping sound of the AK-47 or the tense, high-pitched scream of our own M-16s.

I heard Utter cry out, “I’m hit.”

The machine gun kept firing.

I looked at Bell and he looked at me. He shook his head, lips pressed tight. I finally said, “I don’t have anything else to do. I’ll go get him.”

Bell looked directly at me and said, “Don’t go up there, Lieutenant.”

I was split three ways. I’d known Utter for months. He was my guy, even though I’d just been replaced. He was hit. I simply wanted to get him before he bled to death. Another part of me
was screaming to listen to Bell and stay safe. Then there was the third part. I wanted a medal.

I’d always wanted a medal, ever since I looked at my father’s medals from World War II, ever since I’d seen Audie Murphy in
To Hell and Back
, ever since I was never chosen first when we chose up sides. All that. It wasn’t enough to do heroic things. I had to be recognized for it. That meant putting the ribbon on my chest so that when I went home other Marines would know not only that I’d been there but that I’d done something extraordinary. I would be extra ordinary. I’d be special among a special group.

I have heard Napoleon quoted to the effect that an army runs on its stomach and ribbons. This man understood the desire to feel special and how it motivates. This man, who could have been the savior of the French revolution and all its ideals, as much revered as George Washington, also blew it by making himself emperor. He too wanted to be special.

When I first got back from Vietnam I hadn’t yet received any medals except my two Purple Hearts and Combat Action Ribbon,
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paperwork being paperwork. I felt proud. They showed that I’d been there, that I was one of the group. But while I was at the Pentagon the paperwork started catching up with me and it seemed as if every few weeks I was in front of some general getting another medal. It became a sort of office joke. And I, Mr. Hotshot, got more and more special.

Wanting to be a society-certified hero is a specialness issue. I see people killing themselves at work and at home to pay for
mortgages that are too much for them, or taking vacations they can’t afford in the right spots, all to be special. Wanting a medal in war is just killing yourself at a faster pace, for all the same wrong reasons.

With every ribbon that I added to my chest I could be more special than someone who didn’t have it. Even better, I quickly learned that most people who outranked me, who couldn’t top my rows of ribbons, didn’t feel right chewing me out for minor infractions.
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I pushed this to the limit. I read the regulations on hair. I grew mine to the absolute limit allowed, getting it cut weekly to keep it there on the margin of acceptability. I found out mustaches were permitted. I grew a scraggly little thing that made me look like a corn-fed Ho Chi Minh.

It all came to an abrupt halt when a major from another department with whom I occasionally had to work asked me into his office. He had nowhere near my rows of medals, but he had been in Vietnam. I remember him sitting on his desk, looking out of the window while I stood there, quite at ease. Then he turned to me and said, “Marlantes, I don’t give a fuck how many medals you’ve got on your chest. You look like shit. You’re a fucking disgrace to your uniform and it’s a uniform I’m proud of. Now get out of here and clean up your goddamned act.”

I can’t remember the man’s name. If I could, I’d thank him personally. He called my shit.

I walked away feeling terrible. Too many of my friends had died wearing a Marine uniform. I cleaned up my act. It also started me thinking about why I was behaving so badly.

We all want to be special, to stand out; there’s nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we’re unique to start with. But we then go through some sort of boot camp from the age of zero to about eighteen where we learn everything we can about how not to be unique. This spawns an unconscious desire to prove yourself special, but now it’s special in the eyes of your peers and it comes out in the form of being better than or having power over someone else. In the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect. This is pretty nice. It’s also a psychological trap that can stop one’s growth and allow one to get away with just plain bad behavior.

To a large extent my behavior could be explained as a result of experiencing the dreadful time of return that so many Vietnam veterans experienced. I desperately wanted to be accepted by my other peer group, college-age kids in civilian society. So to prove my loyalty to the college kid crowd and try to gain their respect and admiration by being the “war-protesting rebel Marine” I started to put down military values such as pride in one’s uniform. Some protest.

Looking even deeper, I realize now that I also had very mixed feelings about some of the medals on my chest. I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all. I was having a very hard time carrying those medals and didn’t have the insight or maturity to know what to do with my combination of guilt and pride. So I attacked my image. Some solution.

The truth is there were important aspects about the medals that weren’t in the write-ups. That day on the assault I felt like someone in a movie. I remember thinking, “This is like a
movie. I’m the hero, and the dumb kid has just gotten in trouble with the enemy machine gun, and now the hero will go rescue him.” The movies are America’s mythological matrix. I also remember thinking, “This is your chance. You throw this one away and you’ll never get your medal.”

I turned to Bell and made a wise-guy sort of joke out of it. I was aware that I was talking as if I were reading a script. I had become a character, come out of myself somehow. “Is it worth a medal if I go get him? You write me up for one?” I laughed to make sure he knew I was joking.

“Don’t go. You’ll get killed,” was all he said. Bell, around age twenty-seven, with a couple of kids at home, was far more mature than me.

“He’s going to die if someone doesn’t go get him,” I said. I actually think I was bargaining with Bell. I’ll go get him
if
I can get a medal.

If Bell hadn’t said what he did say I’d probably still have gone because I’d already been taken over by this inner (or maybe outer) force. But he said, “I’ll write you up, but you’ll be fucking dead.”

That was all the hero needed. You see, heroes don’t die. They’re immortal. They return from the land of the dead and bring back the boon.

The land of the dead was that thin zone of cleared brush, just over a foot high, through which the bullets were tearing with a methodical deadly intensity. The boon to bring back was Utter. I was going. There was no stopping me.

I told Bell to pass the word for Doc Southern and seated a fresh magazine in my rifle. “I’ll be firing as I go up. You and Putnam try and keep the gunners’ heads down.”