Dispatches (25 page)

When he’d first arrived in Vietnam in the summer of 1965, he had been considered news himself, and a lot of stories were written about his early trips into combat. Most of them managed to include all the clichés, all of them called him “swashbuckling.” There were still a lot of easy things to say about him, and a lot of people around who were more
than willing to say them, but after you knew him all of that talk just depressed you. There were a number of serious (heavy) journalists who could not afford to admit that anyone who looked as good as Flynn looked could possibly have anything more going for him. They chose not to take him as seriously as they took themselves (which was fine with Sean), and they accused him of coming to Vietnam to play, as though the war was like Africa had been for him, or the South of France or one of the places he’d gone to make those movies that people were always judging him by. But there were a lot of people in Vietnam who were playing, more than the heavies cared to admit, and Flynn’s playing was done only on the most earnest levels. He wasn’t much different from the rest; he was deeply fascinated by war, by
this
war, but he admitted it, knew where he stood in it, and he behaved as though it was nothing to be ashamed of. It gave him a vision of Vietnam that was profound, black and definitive, a knowledge of its wildness that very few of his detractors would have understood. All of this was very obvious in his face, particularly the wildness, but those people only saw it as handsome, making you realize that, as a group, newspapermen were not necessarily any more observant or imaginative than accountants. Flynn moved on and found his friends among those who never asked him to explain himself, among the GI’s and the Apaches of the press corps, and he established his own celebrity there. (There would be occasional intrusions: embarrassingly deferential information officers, or a run-in with Colonel George Patton, Jr., who put him through one of those my-father-knew-your-father trials.) The grunts were always glad to see him. They’d call him “Seen,” a lot of them, and tell him that they’d caught one of his flicks on R&R in Singapore or Taiwan, something that only a grunt could bring up and get away with, since all of that was finished for Flynn, the dues-paying and the accommodations,
and he didn’t like to talk about it. Sometime during his years in Vietnam, he realized that there really were people whom he cared for and could trust, it must have been a gift he’d never expected to have, and it made him someone who his father, on the best day he ever had, could have envied.

It was still a little too soon for the Marines to just sit down and start talking, they would have to probe a little more first, and we were getting bored. By the time they had finished cutting the lz there was no cover left from the sun, and we were all anxious for the scouting platoon to reach the top so that we could get together with Dana Stone, put a little pressure on for a helicopter and get out. The trip back to the press center in Danang could take two hours or two days, depending on what was flying, but it was certain to go faster with Stone along because he had friends at every airfield and chopper pad in I Corps. Danang was Soul City for many of us, it had showers and drinks, flash-frozen air-freighted steaks, air-conditioned rooms and China Beach and, for Stone, a real home—a wife, a dog, a small house full of familiar possessions. Mutter’s Ridge had sickening heat, a rapidly vanishing water supply and boredom, so there really wasn’t any choice. Judging by the weathered, blackened bits of ammunition casing (theirs and ours) that littered the ground around us, the ridge also had a history, and Dana had told us something about it.

Stone was a lapsed logger from Vermont (he always spoke about going back to that, especially after a bad day in the field, screw all this bullshit), twenty-five years old with sixty-year-old eyes set in deep behind wire-rimmed glasses, their shrewdness and experience almost lost in the lean anglings of his face. We knew for certain that he would be walking well ahead of the rest of the platoon on the trail, standard Dana and a break for the Marines, since he was easily the best-equipped
man in the party for spotting booby traps or ambushes. But that had nothing to do with his being on point. Dana was the man in motion, he just couldn’t slow himself down; he was the smallest man on the trail, but his engines would drive him up it as though the incline ran the other way. GI’s who had forgotten his name would describe him for you as “that wiry little red-headed cat,
crazy
motherfucker, funny as a bastard,” and Stone
was
funny, making you pay for every laugh he gave you. Hard mischief was his specialty—a thumb stuck abruptly into your egg yolk at breakfast or your brandy at dinner, rocks lobbed onto the metal roof of your room at the press center, flaming trails of lighter fluid rampaging across the floor toward you, a can of ham and limas substituted for peaches in syrup when you were practically dying of thirst—all Dana’s way of saying hello, doing you good by doing you in. He’d wake you at dawn, shaking you violently and saying, “Listen, I need your glasses for just a minute, it’s really important,” splitting with them for an hour. He also took beautiful pictures (he called them “snaps” in accordance with the wire-service ethic which said you must never reveal your pride in good work) and in almost three years as a combat photographer he’d spent more time on operations than anyone else I knew, getting his cameras literally blown off his back more than once but keeping otherwise unhurt. By now, there was nothing that could happen around him in the field that he hadn’t seen before, and if his joking was belligerent and even ghastly, you knew at least where it came from, saw the health that it carried. And that morning, waiting by the base-camp airstrip for the assault to begin, he started to tell us about the other time he’d been up on Mutter’s Ridge, in the days before it even had a name. It had been, in fact, two years ago
to the day
, he’d said, on that
exact same ridge
. He’d gone up there with the 9th that time, and they’d
really stepped in deep shit.
(It was true, we all knew it was true, he was doing it to us again, and a smile showed for just an instant on his face.) They had been pinned down on the ridge all night long without support or re-supply or medevac, and the
casualties
had been
unbelievable
, running somewhere around 70 percent. Flynn laughed and said, “Dana, you bastard,” but Stone would have gone on like that in his flat Vermont voice, telling it to those of us about to go up there as though it were nothing more than the history of a racehorse, except that he looked up and saw that we weren’t alone; a few of the guys from Kilo Company had come over to ask questions about our cameras or something, and they’d heard some of it. Stone turned a deep red, as he always did when he realized that he’d gone a little too far. “Aw, that was just a bunch of shit, I never even been
near
that ridge,” he said, and he pointed to me. “I was just trying to get him uptight because this is his last operation, and he’s already fucked up about it.” He laughed, but he was looking at the ground.

Now, while we waited for him, a Marine came up to Lengle and me and asked if we’d like to look at some pictures he’d taken. Marines felt comfortable around Lengle, who looked like a college basketball star, six-seven and very young (actually, he was thirty), a Nevadan who’d parlayed a nice-kid image into a valuable professional asset. The pictures were in a little imitation-leather folder, and you could tell by the way the Marine stood over us, grinning in anticipation as we flipped over each plastic page, that it was among his favorite things. (He’d also taken some “number-one souvenirs,” he said, leaving the details to our imaginations.) There were hundreds of these albums in Vietnam, thousands, and they all seemed to contain the same pictures: the obligatory Zippo-lighter shot (“All right, let’s burn these hootches and move out”); the severed-head shot, the head often resting on the chest of the dead man or being held up
by a smiling Marine, or a lot of heads, arranged in a row, with a burning cigarette in each of the mouths, the eyes open (“Like they’re
lookin’
at you, man, it’s scary”); the VC suspect being dragged over the dust by a half-track or being hung by his heels in some jungle clearing; the very young dead with AK-47’s still in their hands (“How old would you say that kid was?” the grunts would ask. “Twelve, thirteen? You just can’t tell with gooks”); a picture of a Marine holding an ear or maybe two ears or, as in the case of a guy I knew near Pleiku, a whole necklace made of ears, “love beads” as its owner called them; and the one we were looking at now, the dead Viet Cong girl with her pajamas stripped off and her legs raised stiffly in the air.

“No more boom-boom for that mamma-san,” the Marine said, that same, tired remark you heard every time the dead turned out to be women. It was so routine that I don’t think he even realized that he’d said it.

“You posed that one,” Lengle said.

“Not me,” the Marine said, laughing.

“Now come on, you rascal. You mean you found her just like that?”

“Well, some other guy fixed her that way, and it was funny, ’cause that guy got zapped later on the same day. But look, look at that bitch there, cut right in half!”

“Oh, that’s a honey,” John said, “really terrific.”

“I was thinkin’ about sending some in to the
Stars and Stripes
. You think the
Stripes
would run ’em?”

“Well …” We were laughing now, what could you do? Half the combat troops in Vietnam had these things in their packs, snapshots were the least of what they took after a fight, at least pictures didn’t rot. I’d talked to a Marine who’d taken a lot of pictures after an operation on the Cua Viet River, and later, when he was getting short and nervous about things, he’d brought them to the chaplain. But the
chaplain had only told him that it was forgivable and put the pictures in his drawer and kept them.

A couple of Marines were talking to Flynn and Wheeler about their cameras, the best place to buy this lens, the right speed to use for that shot, I couldn’t follow any of it. The grunts were hip enough to the media to take photographers more seriously than reporters, and I’d met officers who refused to believe that I was really a correspondent because I never carried cameras. (During a recent operation, this had almost gotten me bumped from the Command chopper because the colonel, for reasons of his own, was partial to photographers. On that one, a company of his battalion had made contact with a company of Viet Cong and forced them out on a promontory, holding them there between their fire and the sea for the gunships to kill. This particular colonel loved to order the chopper in very low so that he could fire his .45 into the Cong, and he’d always wanted pictures of it. He was doubly disappointed that day; I’d not only turned up without a camera, but by the time we got there all the VC were dead, about 150 of them littered across the beach and bobbing in and out with the waves. But he fired off a few clips anyway, just to keep his piece working.)

Marines were all around us now, about fifteen of them, and one, a short, heavy kid with a flat, dark face and the bearing of an overdeveloped troll, came up and looked hard at us.

“You guys’re reporters, huh? Boy, you really get it all fucked up,” he said. “My old man sends me stuff from the papers, and he thinks you’re all full of shit.”

A couple of Marines booed him, most of them laughed. Lengle laughed too. “Well, podner, what can I tell you? I mean, we try, we really take a shot at it.”

“Then why can’t you guys just tell it right?”

“Fuckin’ Krynski,” someone said, hitting the kid hard on the back of the head. According to his helmet, it was the Avenger himself, and he’d come to work for us now, just in time. He looked like a freshman in divinity school—clear blue eyes, smooth snub nose, cornsilk hair and a look of such trust and innocence that you hoped there would always be someone around to take care of him. He seemed terribly embarrassed about what had just been said to us.

“Don’t you listen to that asshole,” he said. “God
damn
, Krynski, you don’t know any fuckin’ thing about it. These guys are number-one dudes, and that’s no shit.”

“Thank you, friend,” Lengle said.

“I didn’t mean nothin’,” Krynski said. “Don’t go gettin’ your balls in an uproar.”

But the Avenger wasn’t letting it go. “Man, these guys take plenty of chances, they eat C’s just like us, and sleep in the mud, and all that good shit. They don’t have to stand around here and listen to you bitch. They don’t even have to be here at all!”

“Now what’s
that
supposed to mean?” Krynski said, looking really puzzled. “You mean you guys
volunteer
to come over here?”

“Well, dumb shit, what’d you think?” the Avenger said. “You think they’re just some dumb grunt like you?”

“Oh man, you
got
to be kidding me. You guys
asked
to come here?”

“Sure.”

“How long do you have to stay?” he asked.

“As long as we want.”

“Wish
I
could stay as long as
I
want,” the Marine called Love Child said.
“I’d
been home las’ March.”

“When did you get here?” I asked.

“Las’ March.”

The lieutenant who had been supervising the blasting looked down from the lz and yelled for someone named Collins.

“Yes Sir?” the Avenger said.

“Collins, get your bod up here.”

“Yes Sir.”

There was some movement on the lz now, the platoon had reached the clearing. Stone came out first, backing out very fast with his camera up, referring quickly to the ground just behind him between shots. Four Marines came out next, carrying a fifth on an improvised litter. They brought him to the center of the clearing and set him down carefully on the grass. We thought at first that he was dead, taken off by a booby trap on the trail, but his color was much too awful for that. Even the dead held some horrible light that seemed to recede, vanishing through one layer of skin at a time and taking a long time to go completely, but this kid had no color about him anywhere. It was incredible that anything so motionless and white could still be alive.