“Yeah, guess so. Just wish the fucking Marines would finish up in Hue so we could put this whole Tet thing behind us. Tired of reading about it. Mean, the fucking papers, Stars and Stripes and those coming through the mail, ain’t printing a fucking thing ‘bout Byson’s great victory—it’s all gloom and doom.”
“Yeah, Top, but…”
“And now,” he continued angrily, ignoring me, “when we should be going for Uncle Ho’s jugular, I read that our senators, Morse and Fulbright at their helm, are ‘probing’ the goddamn Maddox incident! Well, shit! What the hell’s that got to do with where we are today? I mean, goddamn, sir, these are the people who sent us over here, and now that we’re finally kicking the shit out of Charlie—and dying in the process—they’re probing the fucking Maddox!”
I nodded but said nothing. He really didn’t expect me to. Besides, he was right.
“Why don’t they probe the fucking Maine?” he said, now really steamed.
“I mean, there’s probably a hell of a lot fewer Spanish War veterans to piss off, and them that are still around sure as hell ain’t gonna be fighting in Cuba while their senators are conducting their probe. Fuck it!”
“Take it easy, Top. You worry too much about the small shit. We can kick Charlie’s ass with or without the support of Senators Morse and Fulbright, or any of the rest of those Washington wimps.”
But I was dead wrong about that.
“And I hope you’re right, sir. I just got a gut feeling, you know, reading the papers and so forth, that this whole thing’s turning sour. And if it does, it’s gonna be a dirty rotten shame, and somebody ought to pay for it. By God, we’ve paid!”
After a short lull, he said, “Well, anyway, right or wrong, good or bad, for better or worse, looks like Tet’s pretty much history now—I mean except for Hue. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it’s written up. Right, Six?”
“Guess so, Top.”
Later, lying wrapped in my poncho liner, mindlessly listening to the faint sounds of the rock band, I found myself mulling over Sergeant Sullivan’s comments. What did he mean by “turning sour”? Why worry about a bunch of mindless politicians? Shit, we’ve turned the corner; Charlie has finally come out to play and is sorely sorry for having done so! We’re tearing him apart!
After pondering these tactical realities, I dismissed my first sergeant’s concerns as but another example of his tendency to overreact to misinterpret the facts. I was remiss in doing so. The Bull was far more politically astute than his commander. A short time later, while lying in a hospital bed in Silver Springs, Maryland, I would find myself utterly bewildered by what my country had done to its soldiers, its allies, and itself in the afternath of the 1968 Tet offensive. Indeed, I remain just as bewildered now, over twenty years later.
21. Camp Evans, I Corps
“Damn, it’s cold!” Dubray said as we disembarked our C-130s on the southern end of Quang Trio’s airstrip.
“Monsoon, Willie,” Sergeant Sullivan said. “I Corps’s in the middle of the winter monsoon now.”
It was cold, at least compared to the blistering heat we were accustomed to on Bong Son’s plain. Although it wasn’t really raining, the darkened gray overcast sky emitted a steady drizzle, the kind that in time penetrates every fiber of your clothing, chilling you to the bone.
And the weather’s gloom was only heightened upon our learning that, due to a mix-up in flight scheduling, the trucks that were to take us to Evans had not yet arrived.
“Yo, sir,” Lieutenant O’Brien yelled, running toward me as I stood talking to Lieutenant Norwalk and the first sergeant, the three of us discussing what to do next. “The air-transport officer says we ought to dig in right here on the southern end of the runway. Says the North Vietnamese have the northern end ranged all the way from the fucking DMZ!”
“Okay, fellows, you heard the man,” I said. “Let’s get ’em into a hasty perimeter. Looks sandy, easy digging, so may as well play the game and scratch out prone shelters just in case we do receive incoming.”
I wondered if the enemy really did have the strip ranged all the way from the DMZ, or if some disgruntled and bored Air Force captain might have just seized the moment to vent his frustrations on our newly assigned second lieutenant. How far are we from the Z? I asked myself. Eighteen, twenty miles? Shit, guess it’s possible, but don’t think we have red leg that’ll reach that far. Not unless it’s mounted atop a battleship.
So we sat in the wet sand beside Quang Trios airstrip, ponchos about our shoulders, warming our coffee on heat tabs and complaining about the weather and battalion’s failure to have transportation awaiting us upon deplaning. And we wondered what the future might hold for US.
It held very little that was good.
By midafternoon we were defending a portion of Camp Evans’ northern perimeter, which, as it turned out, was one of the safer places to be at Evans. When darkness settled over the camp, most of the company had already showered, and some of us had even managed to get a haircut.
In the days that followed, as the constant soaking drizzle continued, interrupted only by brief rain showers, we spent most of our time filling sandbags and reinforcing our bunkers. We approached this task with a bit more enthusiasm than we had on the bridge, since Evans, unlike Bong Son’s bridge, was vulnerable to rocket attack. Of course, these duties did not preclude the men of Charlie Company from doing some of those things they had been unable to do in the boonies: things such as visit the PX, mail packages home, take a steam bath, drink something a little more potent than 3.2 beer, and perhaps take in an open-air movie while sitting on an empty ammo crate, in the mud, in the rain.
Had the sun been shining, Camp Evans would still have been a pretty depressing piece of real estate. An Khe, though we rarely saw it, had a sense of order and tidiness about it. Its hardened streets and wooden troop billets provided a semblance of semipermanence. Most of the camp’s division staff had been housed in prim, neatly aligned mobile homes, while the division commander and his major subordinates occupied splendid brick cottages atop a small hill adjacent to an elaborate underground TOC. It was a “1965” camp constructed for the long haul in a war that had not yet gone haywire. At An Khe, one rarely heard a round fired in anger.
Camp Evans, in contrast, had a distinct sense of disorder and untidiness about it. It was for the most part a hodgepodge of tents, bunkers, trenches, wire barriers, and sandbags, set atop a lowlying hill on the western side of Highway One south of Quang Tri and north of Hue.
Supplies were stacked or thrown helter skelter, either by design or as a result of the most recent rocket attack. Everyone slept underground or in a posture that permitted them to go underground at a moment’s notice, because at Evans hearing rounds fired in anger was the norm.
“Incoming!” someone screamed shortly after nightfall on our second day in I Corps.
Whish! Whish!
We dove into our trenches and then, looking up, gazed at the rockets’ orange trails as they sped across the darkened overcast sky before falling within the camp’s perimeter. Transfixed, we watched the second or third round land squarely on a supply-laden truck; silhouetted against the rocket’s fiery explosion we saw boxes, debris, and what appeared to be a man blown high in the air.
“Mama, sweet Mama,” Dubray moaned, “Binh Dinh weren’t never like this!”
“Battalion wants an azimuth, sir!” Blair yelled from across the trench.
“Wants to know if we can give ’em an azimuth for counterfire!”
“Roger!” I shouted back and quickly pulled out my compass, only to see that our new forward observer, Lieutenant Moseley, was already tracking the incoming rockets.