We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (8 page)

Every mile we drove south now brought us closer to the part of South Vietnam we knew best; the part where we soldiered in dozens of combat operations that reached from the South China Sea into the mountains of the Central Highlands. Soon we would reach villages and towns and the coastal plains with their rich, green rice paddies that we had known well. Places where we saw friends killed and wounded in a war that this land and these people absorbed and where they have now moved on as though all that never happened.

Our hosts were amused when we referred to the conflict as the Vietnam War. In their history books this small ten-year slice of time is called the American War. “Our people have fought many wars in the last thousand years. They are all Vietnam wars, so we must call them by different names to be more specific,” one of the translators said.

Besides, he added, Vietnam today is a country, not a war. Before we finished this journey we would come to accept the truth in that statement.

In our stops for fuel or a bit of lunch over the next week of a road trip that would take us all the way south to Ho Chi Minh City, a.k.a. Saigon, we would get acquainted with Vietnam the country as well as Vietnam the war, trying to square our old memories with the reality of today, something the Vietnamese themselves seem to have done without regret.

Nearly two decades had passed since the last Americans were pulled off a rooftop by Marine helicopters in Saigon and South Vietnam fell to the Communists. The changes were evident and astonishing to those of us who had last seen these towns and villages in 1966. Over 65 percent of the people living here today had been born since the war ended, and the hordes of smiling, excited Vietnamese children who surrounded us to practice their English—a required course even in the smallest village schools—were testimony to the truth of the statistic. The end of war had clearly set off a baby boom of monumental proportions among these industrious, hardworking people.

The war so disrupted village life and rural rhythms that for most of that decade the United States shipped in millions of tons of rice to help feed the population. Today Vietnam is again one of the largest exporters of rice in the world. That population boom meant that the small, dirty towns and villages we remembered from combat operations long ago had grown like wildfire and now were large, dirty towns and villages bursting at the seams with people hustling to make a living. There were new schools for all those children, electric service in the unlikeliest of places, and a new form of entertainment that had spread across the land: billiard parlors. I’m talking
pool
here. Maybe only one table in a small thatch-or tin-roofed open-air pavilion with two shooters and a crowd of onlookers offering advice, but along Highway 1 most wide spots in the road had their pool hall.

Where the passion for pool came from was a mystery to us. None of us remembered any pool tables in the clubs and recreation centers for American troops during the war, so clearly it was not an American legacy. Joe mused that during his years living in just-developing Asian countries like Indonesia where television had not yet arrived, the people were starved for any recreation at all. In Jakarta in the late 1960s promoters filled a soccer stadium with a huge crowd of ticket buyers to watch a local “strongman” do battle with a toothless and obviously drugged old African lion. Even when the strongman, the Great Lahardo, slapped the lion across the nose with a slab of raw meat, he couldn’t get a reaction. The crowd was so incensed that it took platoons of soldiers to get the Great Lahardo out of the stadium alive. Some Vietnamese entrepreneur had seized on a similar hunger for amusement and somewhere to go in these little villages and introduced the locals to the game of pool.

The smells of this tropical country—simultaneously exotic, mysterious, and at times gross beyond description—are rooted in the memory of every American who ever did a tour here. All of them were still there to refresh that memory, from the smoke of charcoal cooking fires to unutterably foul gutters to ducks, pigs, and water buffalo living in backyards and along back alleys. Ah, yes, and there it is: the eye-watering, nose-twitching smell of nuoc mam, the fermented fish sauce so vital to any Vietnamese meal. Nuoc mam is prepared by filling small kegs with layers of whole fish separated by layers of salt. The kegs are left out in the sun for several months. The resulting juice is drained off the bottom. A little dab will do you.

As we made our way south we were surprised at just how little remained as evidence of the fact that over those ten years 3 million Americans served in the Indochina theater and billions of dollars were spent building bases and headquarters and housing and recreation facilities for those who came, did their twelve-month tour, and went home. Now they are gone. Far more remained to remind one of the French occupation of Vietnam and their last war with the Viet Minh rebels who rose against them in 1945 and, in 1954, defeated them. At the ends of bridges spanning the multitude of rivers and streams bisecting the highway small octagonal two-or three-man concrete Beau Geste forts with empty firing slits still stand silent guard with neither friend nor foe in sight. I suppose the old forts were built too well to easily tear down, and there’s no market for concrete rubble.

But only the sharpest eyes could pick out the fragments of an American presence: a piece of perforated steel plate (PSP) among the bamboo and wire making up a farmer’s fence around a cow or pig pen. Here a clattering, smoking truck whose chassis and engine once belonged to a U.S. Army deuce-and-a-half truck. There, in a small rural tea shop, a bulletin board whose notices were pinned up with individual flechettes, the modern-day equivalent of history’s grape shot or canister rounds, small razor-sharp darts that once filled artillery shells fired by American artillery at enemy attacking at close range.

How could so many of us have fought here for so long and left so little behind in token of our passing except the Vietnamese military cemeteries that dot the countryside, north and south, each of them walled, neatly kept, and marked with an obelisk? Even as our own special teams scour the mountains and jungles of Vietnam for some 1,200-plus still-missing American servicemen, so, too, does the Vietnamese government search for the remains of over 300,000 of their own missing soldiers. Those they have found rest in the new cemeteries.

Even the huge piles of war junk we left behind—blown-up trucks and tanks, crashed aircraft, twisted steel runway plates—long ago disappeared into the holds of ships that carried it all away to Japanese steel smelters to be melted down and, doubtless, turned into Toyotas and Nissans for the American market. Or perhaps it has come back to Vietnam in the form of those noisy, smoky motorcycles that now clog the roads and streets. It is hard to believe that the American presence in Vietnam, which gave rise to huge bases that sprawled over thousands of acres, has simply been erased. We even built half a dozen creamery operations that produced white and chocolate milk and ice cream for the troops, and they too have vanished. Perhaps all of it was simply built on too large a scale and too flimsily, unlike those French forts, for the Vietnamese to consider worth keeping. All of it may be physically gone, but it is harder to erase from the memories of those who passed through.

Bruce Crandall says of this part of our journey: “I was amazed as we traveled south to see what an effort had been made to completely eliminate any sign of American wartime presence. It seemed unbelievable that they would not have used the buildings and infrastructure left by the U.S. forces. From Danang onward, I saw nothing American.” Crandall added that we saw no sign of the Vietnamese having put to good use any of the equipment we had left behind—“no dozers, graders, cranes, trucks or other engineering equipment. I was told that all of this equipment was shipped out of the country to help pay some of Vietnam’s war debt.”

Nearing the end of this day’s long trip, as we were passing through the Bong Son Plain—the scene of several major battles fought by my Cavalry brigade between January and May 1966—we stopped near the site of a temporary headquarters of my old brigade. It had been located near the end of a small dirt airstrip constructed by my Engineer troops. We had cleared this area of a tenacious enemy in some very costly battles during Operation Masher–White Wing. The enemy had been embedded here, as in Quang Ngai, for a long time among a people who believed in their cause. Afterward, when we handed over control to the South Vietnamese army troops, they flooded into the region with long-absent landlords and tax collectors trailing behind them trying to swiftly squeeze as much rent money and rice as possible out of the tenant farmers. Within a week of our departure the South Vietnamese troops and their locustlike camp followers were gone, too, and the enemy had returned and was back in control. It was here that I first realized the futility of this war. I climbed to the high ground and looked down on that overgrown and abandoned landing strip, which had been paved by some succeeding American commander. Again, nothing was left but the painful memories of brave men fighting and dying in a struggle for what?

After dark we pulled into Qui Nhon, the old port city where we first disembarked from the troopship in 1965, and checked in to a run-down hotel whose dark, dingy rooms offered plenty of mosquitoes and electricity that came and went according to some unknown and erratic schedule.

In the morning our little convoy took Route 19 toward the Central Highlands, and it was quickly apparent that the Vietnamese government had grasped both the strategic and economic value of that road. It had been turned into a four-lane superhighway minus the potholes and the chaotic traffic of Highway 1. We stopped at the top of the An Khe Pass, once garrisoned by 1st Cavalry Division units guarding against enemy attempts to cut off that chokepoint between the port below and the division base farther inland.

As we gazed across the rugged mountain slopes below, Bruce Crandall idly asked: “Didn’t we lose a C-123 down there?” Larry Gwin, standing next to him, broke down sobbing. In an instant he was carried back to one of the worst days of his life, a day populated by the ghosts of war. That transport plane was carrying the mortar platoon of Gwin’s outfit, A Company 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry, from the base camp at An Khe to the Bong Son Plain for a new combat operation, Masher–White Wing, early in 1966, when it crashed near this pass with all aboard lost. That platoon was the only one from Gwin’s company that had survived the fierce battle at LZ Albany in the Ia Drang with few casualties. It was then Lieutenant Gwin, executive officer of A Company, who was dispatched to this lovely, rugged mountain pass to attempt to identify the charred bodies of his friends, men he had trained with and fought beside. Now Bruce and Joe shielded their friend from the ABC crew’s cameras and did their best to comfort him. It was neither the first nor the last time those of us on this journey would be ambushed by our memories.

After this trip Gwin would complete a book about his own memories of Vietnam,
Baptism
, which tells how his A Company 2/7 Cavalry dwindled to only 15 of 110 original members of the outfit in just twelve months of combat. As this book was going to press in early 2008 Gwin had just completed writing a new post-Vietnam memoir:
The Imploding Man: Back Home from Vietnam
.

Our next stop was at An Khe, where we hoped to walk the ground of the division base camp we had hacked out of the jungle and scrub brush by hand with machetes immediately upon our arrival in Vietnam. That base was our home for a year, a huge sprawling collection of wood-floored tents sandbagged against enemy mortars for living quarters, rudimentary buildings that served as headquarters, even cruder buildings thrown up by each battalion as enlisted and officers clubs.

Standing at the entrance to the base area was a small Vietnamese army post with a scattering of stucco buildings and a gate with a surprised and nervous Vietnamese soldier carrying an AK-47 rifle. General An, wearing his uniform and badges of high rank, approached the sentry and told him we wanted to pass through and walk the old base. An told us this was now the headquarters of a reserve division of the army. The soldier told him he could not permit us to pass. Eventually he summoned an officer, a captain, who said there was no problem with us going around the new headquarters and onto the ground where our old base had stood, but he could not allow foreigners to enter through the post. General An’s three stars seemed to carry less weight the farther we traveled from Hanoi—a phenomenon we would become better acquainted with in the days to come.

The buses could go no farther on the pitted and potholed dirt track, so we hiked around the army headquarters, crawled through a barbed-wire fence, and walked out onto the plain and hills where once a mighty American division had roosted with its 435 helicopters and 15,000 soldiers. All of that was gone and what remained was farmland—rice paddies carved out of land cleared with American sweat and muscle, and on the edges where the land was poorer were hardscrabble patches of manioc and yam.

Sergeant Major Plumley and I walked to the spot where our battalion headquarters once stood. Again, no more than memories of nights spent writing letters to the families of soldiers who had died in battle and of days spent saying farewell to small groups of other, more fortunate soldiers who had survived a terrible ordeal and now were going home. This had been our home base during our year in Vietnam. Upon arrival a party had climbed Hong Kong Mountain, which loomed over the base, and there cleared a space, collected rocks, and painted them to form a large yellow 1st Cavalry Division patch with its emblematic black horse head. It was gone now, whether dismantled by some later American division or by the Vietnamese or by the mountain’s relentlessly encroaching jungle I could not say.

I thought of how we spent the days here. I liked to rise early, in the coolness before dawn, and jog with some of my officers around the entire five-mile perimeter of the base, on a ring road of hard-packed red dirt just inside the tangles of barbed wire and machine-gun bunkers that guarded against an unseen enemy. It was quiet then, before the Army woke up, the silence only occasionally broken by the bark of an artillery tube firing a 105mm round. They called it H and I fire—harassment and interdiction—shooting blindly into the distant jungle in hopes that it might blow up some hapless Viet Cong loping down an unseen trail. I don’t think it worked very well, but we Americans had plenty of ammunition to waste. We learned to sleep through the steady booms of that friendly outgoing artillery addressed “To Whom It May Concern.”