7

Andy and Mimi

LIEUTENANT ANDREW WESTIN knew he was headed for trouble when he and everyone else, in Charlie Company were issued flak jackets.

“There’s only one place in Vietnam where people wear these things all the time,” Westin wrote to his wife, Mimi. “That’s the DMZ! I pray we don’t go there, but it sure looks like we will. Have you read about the trouble the Marines have had up there?83 I guess they want us to help out. I am scared now.”

Westin wrote Mimi almost every day. He was one of the thousands of men caught up in Westy’s grand Checkers strategy, a major reshuffling of forces throughout I Corps. In his letter home in October, Frank Doezema had mentioned “a brigade of the 1st AirCav.” This was Westin’s, the Third Brigade of the army’s First Cavalry Division,84 which given the vagaries of army nomenclature was known as the Seventh Cavalry. He was in its Fifth Battalion. The Seventh was a storied unit that had seen service in every American war that century. It had last been flagged in South Korea before being deployed to Vietnam. Its officers wore yellow scarves and black Stetson hats. On their left sleeves they wore a distinctive yellow patch: a shield with a diagonal black stripe and the silhouette of a horse head in the upper right corner. The horses were history; the AirCav now rode to battle on helicopters, usually Hueys,85 which could carry a full squad; or on the newer, giant twin-engine Chinooks,86 which could haul more than fifty troopers at a time. They were a key part of Westy’s strategy. In a war with few clear front lines, and where the enemy was apt to pop up unexpectedly, the AirCav offered unmatched speed and flexibility.

Westin’s Charlie Company, manned increasingly by draftees, had been at work in An Khe in the Central Highlands, doing the kind of patrol work called for in the CORDS program, which was described by reporter Denby Fawcett as “mean-spirited village sweeps.”87 She had gone to see for herself. A fearless young photographer and reporter who worked for the Honolulu Advertiser, Fawcett was petite and fit, with dark red hair that she wore in pigtails, certainly a welcome sight to homesick troops in the field. She had tagged along with one of Westin’s heroes, a rifle platoon lieutenant named Winfield Beck, on a patrol in 1967. The Americans arrived to find, as usual, a community filled with children, women, and the elderly. No young men.

“You never find a military age male in the village,” Westin wrote. “They’re either VC or trying to stay out of the South Vietnamese army.”

On Fawcett’s patrol, the villagers were not helpful. Beck’s men set fire to their hay supplies—a perfect place to hide men and arms—and roughly questioned the inhabitants through their Vietnamese interpreter.

“Two Vietnamese boys they were questioning said they were just farmers,” Fawcett wrote. “No, they were not Viet Cong. No, the boys told the interpreter, they had never seen any Viet Cong in the village. Yes, they hated the Viet Cong.”

One woman with children was threatened with decapitation if she failed to reveal the whereabouts of her husband. She furiously stared down her inquisitor, calling his bluff.88

Westin had joined the Seventh in late summer 1967, and so far his war was going well. The worst part was being away from Mimi—Miriam, née Peters, a fun-loving, petite blond woman he had married eleven months before shipping out. Westin was a cheerful, fair-haired, ­guitar-playing, wholesome Methodist from Benton Harbor, Michigan, son of a county judge. He had graduated from Adrian College, a small church-run school just outside Ann Arbor. With grades too low for grad school, even if he had wanted to go, and the draft looming, he decided not to wait. The army offered him a better chance to steer his own path, or so it said, and he set out to steer clear of Vietnam. He graduated from officer candidate school in 1966, a second lieutenant. He immediately married Mimi and they honeymooned as they drove to Aberdeen, Maryland, where he had been assigned to command a group of ordnance school candidates. Westin thought he’d done it, found himself a nice stateside berth where he could serve out his obligation living with Mimi.

That blissful sojourn—and blissful it was, because Andy was crazy about Mimi, and they both were crazy about sex—had lasted less than a year. The army abruptly ordered him to Vietnam. He was twenty-six, just weeks shy of his first wedding anniversary. The letter that arrived at his comfortable Maryland desk began: “Congratulations.”

He went for two weeks of jungle training in Panama, where he began his habit of correspondence. Mimi went home to Ypsilanti to live unhappily with her folks. He sent her a turtle and she named it Andy. His letters captured the carnal withdrawal of youth plucked from the pleasures of newly married life. They were full of childlike professions of love—“I love you oodles and goodles and noodles!”—and nagging laments of bridled lust. He warned her that his anniversary letter “might be slightly pornographic, but I’ll try to keep it nice.” By the end of his first month in Vietnam he was so horny he drew a stick figure of himself at the bottom of one letter with great antlers sprouting from his head. A few weeks later he drew the same thing, only now the antlers filled the whole page, and his body became a tinier stick figure, forlornly labeled: “Me.”

On the long flight to Cam Ranh Bay, the mood on his plane full of soldiers was somber. When they finally reached Vietnam, out the window he saw beaches and, to the west, row upon row of deep green hills shrouded in mist and low-hanging clouds. His one-year turn for war had arrived.

“I really got a funny feeling as the wheels came down,” he wrote. “You could have heard a pin drop.”

After a few boring days at Cam Ranh Bay, he flew to join his new unit. He was given headphones for the approach into Pleiku, and he heard the pilot ask the tower operator: “Hey, you got anything going on down there? Any incoming?”

“No,” responded the tower. “Just outgoing.”

Westin’s heart sank. He thought, Oh man, this is real.

But after an initial adjustment, the war had turned out not to be as bad as he’d feared. He explained to Mimi that his battalion consisted of four rifle companies—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta. Within each company there were three rifle platoons and one mortar platoon. The mortar platoon for Charlie would be his. A command! He had received a promotion to first lieutenant on his arrival. He was issued a weapon, the AR-15, which was mostly carried by officers. While Westin at first thought it might be better to just carry an M16 and “look like any other private” in the field, status won out. Gone was his ceremonial yellow bandanna. Westin now wore around his neck a mud-brown sling he’d cadged from a medic; he used it to wipe the sweat and grime from his face and to shield his eyes and nose when choppers kicked up storms of dust. He had led his mortar platoon on air assaults, arriving after defoliants and artillery had done their work. It was a rush, riding in the open window of a chopper with a cool breeze blowing over him, descending with all that unholy firepower aimed outward. He wrote, “They’re a lot of fun.”

Patrols were another story. It was hot and humid by day and cold at night. They walked for hours across rice paddies and through palm groves and in grass over their heads. Tension gave way to monotony. On one of their early walks they found a skull. His men propped it on a stick, put an NVA cap on its head, and stuck a cigarette in its teeth. It was macabre, but also reassuring. Soldiers feel better patrolling areas that are deadlier for the enemy than for themselves. Any sighting of suspected VC provoked gales of ineffectual gunfire and offered momentary relief. It didn’t feel as if much was being accomplished. On a typical day, the entire division of over ten thousand men, in its wide-ranging sweeps, would report having killed two or three VC; they were now Charlie. Westin drily noted that at that pace they would wipe out an entire enemy battalion in about a year. In his first firefight he felt weirdly out of place, chucking hand grenades over a big rock and feeling like a character in a war movie. He thought, What the hell am I doing here? “I really didn’t think about the fact that I was trying to kill another human being until it was over and the VC had headed for the hills,” he wrote Mimi. “Honey, it didn’t bother me. The fact that it didn’t bother me bothers me, not the fact that I shot at him.” It became more real when he lost one of his men. His letter to Mimi did not sugarcoat it: “He had the top of his head blown off.”

They were in the An Lao Valley when, in one of those bizarre ­twentieth-century moments, the actor Charlton Heston appeared. The platoon was at a muddy encampment when up came one of the world’s most famous tanned faces. Heston, in clean combat fatigues and white cap, and with a dazzling smile, shook hands all around, offered words of encouragement and appreciation, and signed a postcard-size publicity shot of himself for Mimi.

The day after this encounter, Westin was transferred to a staff job at battalion headquarters. He began working long days in an underground bunker lined with maps coated with acetate, sitting in a cheap folding chair, directing the constant flow of supplies and ammunition. After a few manly protests about preferring to be out in the bush with his men, he was actively scheming to avoid being sent back. He found he preferred the rigors of his desk job, he wrote, to “being shot at.” He’d had enough of a taste of combat to satisfy any itch about proving himself, and he had no intention of making a career in the army anyway, he explained to Mimi. So it mattered little to him to score “command time,” which was vital for promotion, and he was annoyed that the rules demanded it.

“No way in hell will I stay in the army,” he wrote. “I have no desire to ever again get into a situation where I can get shot at. I don’t like it. I want out.”

The day they handed out the flak vests, he realized with chagrin that ahead he had more chances of being shot at. He was in the field again weeks later, but not near the DMZ, as he had feared. The battalion was instead sent to the Que San Valley, southwest of Da Nang. Mimi received one rain-smeared letter, wherein Westin described fog and “sheets of rain,” and explained again why he did not wish to stay in the army when his tour was over. He wrote that he liked “some comforts.” In Vietnam he had “ZERO comforts.” He was soaked to the bone, cold at night, and broiling during the day. He was still drawing pictures of himself with antlers.

In one letter, Westin described the vocabulary of his new world. An “LZ” was a landing zone for choppers, and it became a firebase when artillery was placed around it. New LZs were being established in the field all the time. Andy named one LZ Mimi.

On October 10, he had reason to feel lucky about having lost his desk job. A small VC raiding party emerged from a tunnel in the middle of their base camp—this was the initial story—and killed everyone except two men at the battalion command post before they, too, were killed.89 The man who replaced him had died behind the same desk, sitting in the same folding chair where Westin had sat for two weeks. He became a rifle platoon leader shortly after that when one of the other lieutenants was wounded and evacuated. His platoon used a lot of ammo, despite rarely seeing the enemy.

“This having a rifle platoon is a lot different from the mortar platoon,” he wrote. “Instead of supporting the troops with the mortar, I’m now the guy who requests the mortar to help me.”

He wrote to complain of boredom when he and his men were ordered to stay at an LZ for a few days. They bathed in a nearby river, the first bath he had taken in weeks. He scrubbed himself with soap and rinsed over and over, removing layers of grime, and wrote Mimi that when he finished he was surprised to find that his tan was not as dark as he had thought.

A new company commander took over in late October, Captain Mike Davison.

“He’s an airborne ranger, West Point type,” Westin wrote. This was not a good thing. He explained to Mimi: “The West Point type in the company is a real yo-yo. He doesn’t know his head from a hole in the ground. I don’t like him.” Davison, however, “seems to be pretty good. I hope he isn’t gung ho. That would mean a lot of walking. He seems to have a good head.”

By now the war inhabited him. He wore it, smelled it, and lived it day and night. It was caked in his ears and nose and he could taste it. The fear of being under fire never went away, even when he slept. What shut-eye he got, curled on his leaky air mattress in a shallow hole, was more like a pause between wakefulness and sleep. But the routine grew on him. There was comradeship, and laughs, and a sense of shared effort. The smallest pleasure, like a mouthful of canned fruit or the chance to bathe in an ice-cold river, was a luxury, something to be savored.

After a month of nearly steady patrolling, Westin wrote, “My guys got a gook yesterday. The first one since I’ve had the platoon. Great. I took a picture of it. I mailed a roll of film yesterday.” Against all expectation, he felt he had become a warrior. In December, the annual rains started to fall, and became a more insistent enemy than Charlie. When water pooled around his air mattress, however, he finally found and patched two small leaks that had bedeviled him for months. He noted one day with some pleasure that his platoon shot two female VC. “Only one died,” he wrote. When his platoon was hit by a mortar barrage, he wrote, “I’ve never felt so helpless in my life.” A few days later he got to take another bath in an ice-cold river, and loved it.

Then came R&R in Da Nang, the biggest base he’d ever seen.

“There [sic] guys don’t even realize there’s a war going on!” he wrote. A Las Vegas showgirl with impressive curves and minimal apparel stopped by to pose for packs of horny soldiers with cameras. There would be hell to pay with Mimi for those photos.

Westin celebrated the New Year by shooting off some hand flares. Orders were “no fireworks,” but you couldn’t expect several hundred thousand men in a war zone, armed to the teeth with explosive devices, to follow an order like that. From Westin’s hilltop perch, he and his men watched a vast panorama of red and green tracers and the impossibly bright bluish glow of illumination flares that descended slowly from small parachutes, turning night into day. “It was wild,” he wrote. “Any place where there were GIs, the place went off.”

To round out his education, Lieutenant Westin was sent to work with a small group of ARVN scouts. Westin posed for a heroic portrait with four of them. When one, a former Charlie who had converted, was getting married, the men in his unit took up a collection to give the new couple a set of dishes from the PX in Da Nang. Westin wrote Mimi: “He and his new wife will probably be the envy of all the local gooks.” Weeks into 1968, his tour rounded the corner into its second half. Days seemed endless. Patrols. More patrols. Sore feet. Rain. Occasional firefights. Horniness.

“We haven’t seen any action lately,” he wrote Mimi. “We did trap an NVA in a bunker and we told him to give up. He said he’d fight to the death. He did.” The rain now came so hard it collapsed hootches. He wrote, “When I get home there’s no way I will ever get wet (with my clothes on) again.”

On January 22 his division moved north. He wrote to Mimi: “Get out your map and find Hue. It’s about halfway between the DMZ and Da Nang. We’ll be working in that area.”

It was a big move. He explained to Mimi that for once the entire division would be together instead of being spread out. He was confident this was a good thing. They would all be safer.