Last Man Out (26 page)

Suddenly I had trouble breathing. I took a deep breath every few minutes, and I finally had to get away from my work. I
walked across the airstrip and sat down. Looking back at the CP, I tried to think about nothing. Don’t moralize, I said to myself, my lips moving. Nothing to do, nothing to say. Just sit here quietly, everything will be okay.

Then clearly, in my mind’s eye, I saw Ayers and Castro moving quietly through the jungle that night. The sudden, deadly firefight. I saw Ayers fall. His finger still on the trigger of his M-16, he fell backward without expression, his M-16 firing into the night. Then Castro, moving forward, caught in a deadly hail of fire with bullets, one after the other, going through his chest, getting knocked around by the impact, coming to rest finally on top of Ayers. The sound of battle fading as they died.

I could no longer keep from looking at the two lumps lying under the ponchos, and I stared, transfixed, running the imagined nighttime engagement over and over again in my mind. Finally I focused on the peacefulness that was surely on their faces. I remembered McCoy saying on the boat over that we either live, get wounded, or die. No matter the way, it’s no problem. If we die, maybe others have a problem with that, but, for us, we’re dead and at peace. It isn’t bad. It’s simply the way things worked out.

Sadly, I constructed a compartment for Ayers and Castro in the back of my mind and I put their memories in a basket there.

A medevac helicopter came in sometime later that morning and took away their bodies. Emotionally paralyzed, I watched from a distance.

I would never be the same again.

Occasionally their memories would escape their compartment and leap out at me in my mind, along with others, but I would put them away and go on. In time, with practice, I kept them securely in their baskets in the back compartment, under control.

Several days later, Bravo Company engaged an enemy unit. The battle raged throughout most of the morning in an area that the VC had not previously controlled. It was possible that a new North Vietnamese outfit had moved in, which would affect the security of Saigon. Because the enemy troops were staying and fighting, Haldane guessed that they were not guerrillas but were, in fact, from a mainline North Vietnamese unit. We could hear the firing from the CP.

At midday, a Bravo Company platoon leader reported that he had a prisoner. Haldane told the Bravo Company commander to bring the prisoner out. We searched on a map for a clearing near the company’s location where we could get in a helicopter, and I notified the air controller in the area that we would soon have a priority requirement for a slick and a gunship or two. The company commander came back on the radio and said it was useless, the man was shot up too badly. He wouldn’t live another ten minutes.

We could not find a clearing large enough to get in a helicopter close to the fighting, so Haldane told the commander to start moving overland toward our location. If the prisoner died en route, then it was too bad, but he wanted to talk to the man if possible.

Less than an hour later, a group carrying several stretchers broke through the tree line across the airstrip. I called for Colonel Haldane, the medics, the battalion intelligence officer, and the Vietnamese interpreter, “Jose,” assigned to our unit. Dunn walked up and I asked him to call in a dust-off for the Company B soldiers who were wounded. He picked up a radio and jogged onto the airfield toward the group coming our way. A couple of medics slung bags over their shoulders and joined him.

Dunn pulled on the PRC-25 radio and talked into the handset. Looking up, he yelled at me to get some purple smoke for the medevac.

By then the colonel was at the CP. He picked up a smoke canister and headed toward Dunn and the medics. When they reached the group in the middle of the airfield, the medics began frantically working on the men on the stretchers. Finally two men picked up one stretcher and started walking toward the aid tent beside the CP. Haldane fell into step beside them. I told Crash to look after the radios, and I followed the interpreter and the colonel inside the small tent. The soldiers had just lifted the Vietnamese prisoner onto the operating table. They moved away and began unwrapping their ponchos from the two bamboo poles used to make a stretcher.

The Vietnamese prisoner had one arm blown off above the elbow. His right leg was cantilevered at a crazy angle, and his left leg was torn open at the thigh, with a jagged piece of bone
sticking out. His olive-green uniform was matted with blood, dirt, and slime, and the jacket had several bullet holes in it. Half of his face had been blown away. Some of his teeth and lower jawbone were exposed. Most of his left cheekbone was missing, and his left eye was dangling by a few strands of muscle and tissue.

But he was breathing—deep heavy breaths. His good eye was moving and making contact with us as we looked down at him.

Haldane told the interpreter to ask the man what unit he was from. Jose leaned close to the man’s ear and said a long sentence in Vietnamese. The prisoner’s one dancing eye continued to scan us. Jose raised his voice and repeated the sentence. The prisoner turned his head and looked at Jose. As the prisoner tried to talk, he spit blood on Jose and on Haldane’s hand, but he managed to say something in Vietnamese. Jose leaned forward quickly as he listened. He said something in Vietnamese. The prisoner responded with a few fractured words.

“What did he say? What did he say?” Haldane asked. “What’s his unit?”

The man on the table continued to mumble.

“Don’t know,” Jose said, shaking his head. “He calls his mother, father. He says Vietnamese names.”

“Ask him, please, what is his unit?” Haldane, a good and moral man, was having trouble keeping his focus on the job at hand without lapsing into pity for that mangled boy, still alive, calling out the names of loved ones.

Jose repeated his question, but the prisoner was losing ground. His eye stopped roaming and he looked straight up at the top of the tent. I noticed that blood had stopped seeping from the wound on his leg. His breathing became weaker.

One of the medics came in hurriedly and broke through the crowd of men around the table. He looked at us with some disgust because no one appeared to be helping the man. The medic had been opening a bandage package as he moved, but when he looked down at the mess lying on the table, his hands dropped to his sides. He said, “Ah, shit.”

Dunn, apparently finished with medevacking the wounded soldiers from Bravo Company, came in and stood beside me. Two more medics walked in.

The man on the table was barely breathing. Then he gathered some energy from somewhere and started to babble. He blinked his good eye. His raised his arm slightly. Jose repeated his sentence. A medic reached down and put the man’s whole arm on his stomach and wiped his forehead. His breathing became slower again, irregular.

One of the medics said, “The man is dead, he just doesn’t know it yet. His whole body’s in shock. He can’t think. He doesn’t know who he is.”

I remembered when Goss died. It wasn’t sudden. Most of him was dead while his heart was still beating.

But this boy—any one of his wounds should have killed him. Tough son of a bitch, I thought, but give it up. Go on. Give it up. You’re blown apart. You’ll never be whole again. There is no hope.

Most of the men around the table began to slip away. Dunn and I remained at the end of the table. Bob’s platoon had suffered as many casualties as had mine. He had held some of his men as they died. We hated the VC for causing so much pain, for killing so many good men. This one, in fact, might have killed Castro and Ayers, and here he lay. The enemy. Castro and Ayers had been avenged. This enemy was dying in front of us.

But I kept saying to myself, give up, please give up. You must hurt. Die and it will all end. You’ll be okay. Your mother will be sad and those other people you called out to. Your father, if he knew, would be proud. You are so strong. You must have stayed to fight when the others pulled back, and now you still won’t give up. Give up and there’s peace.

Bob and I were alone in the room with the man when he stopped breathing.

You were a good soldier, I thought. You did your duty. How noble to have lived and died doing something as well as you did. You should have been in my platoon. You have my respect. You, Castro, Ayers. I shall always remember your sacrifices, one against the other.

Then we heard a loud gasp. The prisoner suddenly bent forward at the waist and sat up straight, reaching out his arm toward us. He looked at us with his good eye, his other eye bobbling around like a bloody ball on a string. His mouth was open. He
was gargling, and blood splattered over us, but his eye remained focused on us, on both of us at once. Then, Mother of Jesus, one leg moved off the operating table. He garbled again, louder. His weight followed the leg that was draped over the side of the table. His whole arm moved across the front of us when he turned—as though he wanted to get off the table.

His body twisted around and he fell to the floor. There, thankfully, he died.

Dunn and I had jumped back to the far side of the tent. We were holding each other’s arms, our eyes and mouths wide open. Maybe we yelled. One of the medics came running in and around the table to the man on the floor. Bob and I walked out.

“Goddammit, that was a tough son of a bitch,” I said.

“I think I poop-pooped in my pants,” Bob said.

Two days later we received word that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of MACV, would visit our unit for an awards ceremony. To Haldane’s credit, he didn’t break a sweat over receiving the highest-ranking American general in Vietnam. Instructions about security, timing, and ceremony arrangements came in gradually. Throughout the day before Westmoreland’s arrival, Haldane said that we were not going to stop the war or fall down dead because one man was coming for a thirty-minute visit. He was upset, however, when he received word that Westmoreland would be handing out Silver Stars.

“Well, just who do we give them to? Sorta getting the horse in front of the cart, isn’t it?” he asked no one in particular when he received the message. “I don’t remember recommending anyone for Silver Stars.”

Major Allee thought that perhaps Westmoreland was upgrading the level of decorations for combat bravery. He remembered that we had about eight recommendations in the works for lesser medals and suggested that we line up the people who had been recommended for awards and think of the general’s visit as a dry-run ceremony.

Westmoreland’s party arrived exactly on time, as if the U.S. Army and the whole Vietnam War were running on his schedule. We saw the covey of helicopters coming in long before they landed. Gunships making passes along the tree lines looked like
advance bodyguards, eventually landing at both ends of the runway. Westmoreland’s command helicopter arrived near our CP right on the smoke that Crash threw. Photographers jumped off a following helicopter and focused their cameras on the general as he stepped to the ground. They swarmed around him like gnats and took pictures of his every move.

The general had a regal manner. With silver-gray hair and a square jaw, he stood taller than those around him. I noticed that he had his arm in a sling. Assuming that he had been wounded, I asked one of his aides about it but his answer made no sense. The aide wasn’t very friendly, in fact. I had shaken his hand when we first met. He had small, dainty hands and manicured fingernails.

The visit turned out to be pure public relations for General Westmoreland. We were props. He trooped the line and, smiling warmly, presented medals to the assembled men. And then he was gone, back on his clean helicopter, with the escort gunships lifting off first. The newsmen hurried to get on a trailing slick.

Panton went along the line of men as the helicopters lifted off and took back the medals, an awards ceremony in reverse.

Within hours, Crash learned that Westmoreland had fallen on his elbow while playing tennis in Saigon and had suffered a sprain.

I told Dunn and Crash later, “I’m a little sick of this war. There isn’t much to make me proud. Platoon leader, at least I had the men and it was us against them. Being a staff officer—I don’t know—Ayers and Castro dying. This is one useless fucking war. Westmoreland handing out medals. Show time. We got all this stuff, helicopters, medals, hot meals. What’s Charlie got? He ain’t got shit. Death’s a blessing. What’s the use of it all? Nothing, one big fucking waste.” I was not making sense, nor was I trying to. I was just mouthing thoughts coming into my head. My voice trailed off.

“What exactly are you talking about, Parker?” said Dunn, never a sentimentalist. “There ain’t no great truth here. This ain’t the first war man’s ever fought. This is all you have to remember: ‘Ours is not to question why, ours is to do and die.’ It’s just w-a-r, as simple as a three-letter word. Some people die, some people live. That’s it. Some people win and some people lose. Winners
are right and losers are wrong. It’s no more difficult than that, so don’t agonize over it.”

“Screw you, Dunn.”

“If you ever did, you’d never go back to girls.” Dunn refused to be drawn into my despair. “Don’t go around moralizing, Parker. Forget about it. Kill them before they kill us, and fuck the reasons why. Win. Survive.”

  TWELVE