Read Online They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss - Free Book Online Page B

another” every peasant had been contacted and “asked to perform duties for the V.C. against us.” His sardonic streak was growing darker. Vietnam, he mused, “would be an OK country except for the Vietnamese. Since they pledge no allegiance to the govt., they pick the winner, the V.C. by default, and give us a tough time. We had three women spies in here yesterday pacing off distances and spotting troop areas on the pretense they were looking for a job. It’s impossible to tell who is and is not a V.C. sympathizer. Right now we’re in the process of killing everyone one way or another. So that the insects can have the place to themselves.”
    Here was a common theme among the enlisted men, the notion that they were being used by both the Vietnamese and their own government. “I’ve seen what it’s like over here,” Mike Troyer told his family on a three-inch reel-to-reel recording that he sent home at the beginning of his tour. “Not that I feel like marchin’ in any protest march against Vietnam, but this war is worthless. These people over here are playin’ both ends against the middle. They got it made, man. If Charlie won’t give it to ’em, the Americans will. If the Americans won’t give it to ’em, Charlie will. The comparison is like a divorce. They both want custody of one child. One parent gives it to ’em if the other won’t. So they think, why the hell should I go with you?…I’ll tell the president himself, this damn war, it just ain’t worth it.”
    Natural beauty all around, yet the most descriptive word was shit . “Here it’s used for everything,” Lieutenant Welch explained in a letter home. “They call a Chinook helicopter a shit-hook. When the firefights first begin is when the shit starts and when things are really going hot and heavy, you’re in the shit. The code name for our officer that’s the preventive medicine officer (checks for flies, correct latrine maintenance, clean garbage etc.) is Shithouse 6. And if a guy gets drunk he is shitfaced.”
    Some things were shittier. The men heard stories about soldiers stepping on pungi sticks laced with human feces, and about puddle jumper bugs that bit out chunks of human flesh, and about the three-step viper, a snake that bites you and three steps later you’re dead. They had daily encounters with the water buffalo, an animal that snorted at the sight of Americans and seemed incontrovertibly on the side of the VC. There were mosquitoes everywhere, voracious red ants, yellow spiders as large as your fist, dogs and monkeys with rabies, and during the long summer nights, through twelve hours of heartless darkness, the soldiers could hear little lizards, in voices soft and clear and matter-of-fact, calling out to them over and over again, with a refrain that sounded like fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
     
    T HERE WERE ALWAYS fucking new guys to hear the lizards call out their names at Lai Khe. New soldiers arrived every day, and old soldiers left every day, their identities in large measure determined by their DEROS, which was both a noun and a verb: D ate E ligible for R eturn from O ver S eas. Every soldier knew his DEROS, and when he left he was derossed. The simultaneous arrival of so many 2/28 Black Lions from the troop ship that summer was unusual. By 1967 most soldiers were flown to Vietnam. They traveled together on chartered commercial jets with meal service and movies and stewardesses, diversions that could be pleasing but also discordant with what awaited them on the ground. The three weeks at sea might have seemed like an endless purgatory, but for those who arrived by plane, the transition from one world to another was swift and unsettling.
    Tom Hinger, a Black Lions medic from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the son of a steelworker, flew to Vietnam that July with two vastly contrasting images in his mind. The last thing he had seen on television while waiting to board a chartered 707 at Fort Ord, California, was the major