13

Krystal Burgers
and the Truck

ON THE FIRST week of the push inside the Citadel, photographer John Olson was with Charlie Company in the thick of the fighting. Officially he was shooting for Stars and Stripes, but he carried four other cameras to take pictures he hoped to sell elsewhere.

One of the frames he shot that week was a common sight in those days of terrible street fighting, a Patton tank carrying wounded marines. The picture would become emblematic of the Battle of Hue, one of the most famous photographs from the Vietnam War, and one of the great shots in the annals of combat photography (see page 472).

With an artist’s eye for composition, Olson captured seven marines in a tableau worthy of Rembrandt. The palette is dark, muddy greens and blues and browns in a grayish light, with shocking splashes of blood. Under their helmets, the eyes of the men who face the camera are wide and anxious. They are looking past the photographer fearfully. One man has his entire face wrapped in a thick bandage and his arm in a sling. Behind him sits a marine whose face isn’t visible but whose bare leg out of torn trousers is smeared with blood. At the center of the shot, in the foreground, the most striking figure is supine and has been shot through the center of his chest. He is pale, limp, and half naked. His shirt has been stripped away and his wound roughly bandaged with a compress and a tan wrap tied around his neck and torso. He is speckled with blood. A worried marine leans over him, one hand draped protectively over his body, the other resting on his bare shoulder. In the left edge of the frame sits another man in a green poncho with an anxious look on his dirty, unshaven face. He is holding upside down a bottle that is feeding clear liquid into a tube that curls down to the limp man’s left arm. The limp figure’s head is the closest thing to the viewer in the frame. We see him upside down, his eyes closed beneath dark eyebrows, his head resting on a wooden door that had been used as a makeshift stretcher. He has a full head of wet black hair and a lean, handsome face with a long aquiline nose and a faint, youthful attempt at a mustache. He looks dead, or nearly so.

The photograph would appear on March 8 in Life magazine, part of a six-page color display of powerful images from Hue.88 It included shots of Sergeant Thoms, clearly identifiable in his torn trousers, assaulting the ruins of the Dong Ba Tower with his squad, and three compelling shots of a terrified wounded marine crawling toward safety, being pulled in with one hand tightly gripping the barrel of a proffered M16.

But it was Olson’s amazing shot of the marines on the tank that got the biggest play. It was splashed over two full inside pages. The remarkable pictures came with no story line or detailed captions. The scenes were not described; the marines were not identified. In the brief text that ran alongside, the magazine noted that the Hue battle “demonstrated the sickening irony into which the war has fallen—the destruction of the very things that the U.S. is there to save.”

As stunning as they were, the photographs did not make the cover of Life that week. A crying black child was on the cover, part of a special report called “The Cycle of Despair: The Negro and the City.” Olson’s images were sandwiched between ads for color TVs, Volvos, Best Western Motels, and “The amazing FOTRON color camera,” and pictures of movie stars (Richard Burton), politicians (George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller in a golf cart), Joe DiMaggio, the vice president and newly named batting instructor of the Oakland Athletics, and dazzling showgirls from the Folies Bergère. The placement of Olson’s pictures suggests a nation at war but preoccupied with other things—there’s a two-page spread some pages later on the film version of the soft-porn satire Candy. More words were given to a profile of the actor George C. Scott, speaking of his “courage” as a performer.

The pale figure shot through the chest on top of that tank was Alvin Bert Grantham. He was from Mobile, Alabama, and he was eighteen years old. A year earlier he and his friend Freddie Thrift had joined the marines. They had been working as bricklayers. Both had dropped out of high school, and when the draft board came calling they decided to join the marines because the marines were reputed to be the best fighters, and if they were going to go to Vietnam anyway, they might as well go with the best. They knew nothing about the country or the war, except that the Communists were trying to take over and had to be stopped. They were led to believe, Grantham and Thrift, that they could stay together if they enlisted together, which sounded good. That way in battle they could look out for each other. Neither this nor the war turned out the way they’d imagined.

They were separated before they even got to boot camp. Thrift was pulled off the bus at a rest stop along the way because his sister had been in a bad car wreck. He was sent home and wound up finishing at Parris Island two weeks behind Grantham. In Vietnam, Thrift went to the Third Marine Regiment farther north. Grantham went to the Fifth in Hue and joined an M60 machine-gun squad.

Grantham found the marines he was with to be cruel. After a while he understood why they were that way, but it never stopped bothering him. It did not take some horrible atrocity to make him feel this way. It was little things. Things he saw nearly every day. The way the grunts hated the Vietnamese, whom they called gooks. They also hated having to be there. They called Vietnam the Asshole. “We just need to kill everything we see and then go home” is how it was explained to him. The normal rules of human feeling and behavior seemed to have been suspended. Grantham watched one member of his squad repeatedly bat an elderly Vietnamese man on the head with the steel handle of his knife. The beating was prolonged and deliberate. The old man was crying. Blood was pouring down his face, and he was pleading, but the marine wasn’t happy with his answers so he kept rapping him hard on the same spot on the top of his head. Grantham hated to watch it. He had never seen anyone treated that way before and it didn’t seem right, but he didn’t dare speak up. The three rules that mattered were these: You followed the leader, you did whatever he told you to do whether you liked it or not, and, most important—an admonition enunciated repeatedly—“Don’t fuck up.”

In Hue, where they were never sure whether a Vietnamese was an enemy or a civilian, the default decision, particularly with men, was enemy. This was a life-and-death matter. The gooks were hated and they were killed. The marines were all scared and angry. The more they were shot at, the more their friends were killed or wounded, the angrier they got.

Grantham’s unit was nearly always directly across the street from the enemy, and each morning rang with action. They were repeatedly ordered to send squads across the street, and every time the men were mowed down. Then they’d spend excruciating minutes, sometimes hours, trying to drag the downed men back. Grantham watched as a sergeant walked out alongside a tank to try to retrieve one man. When they got close, he took off his helmet and leaned down to place his ear on the man’s chest, to see if his heart was still beating, and he was shot through the head—the bullet entered by his left ear, just below the temple, and it exited through his right jaw. Almost a half century later Grantham could still hear the sound the bullet made as it passed through the sergeant’s head, the pop! it made as it hit bone. The sergeant, improbably, was still alive. He fell over and rolled around and the men behind him, Grantham included, shouted for him to crawl back. He made it to a ditch in front of the house where the rest of his squad was hiding, and a corpsman went to work on him there.

This went on for days. Grantham would later be unsure how many days, but it seemed like forever because it seemed like a death sentence. The moist air was thick with smoke and the smell of diesel fuel and rotting flesh. It was awful, and you did not get used to it. Every time they moved they were shot at. It seemed there were no safe places anywhere.

On the day he was wounded, all four of the other members of his machine-gun squad were hit by shrapnel. He was the only one unhurt. He had dragged them, one by one, to cover. When he returned for the last one, a bleeding and incapacitated man he knew only as “Snow,” he refused to let Grantham pull him from the room.

“Take the gun first,” he said.

Grantham could not carry both him and the gun.

“I ain’t got time to come back,” Grantham said.

“Take the gun first,” said Snow. “You can’t let them get the gun.”

So Grantham did as he was told. He carried the gun out and then went back for Snow, whom he picked up and carried out to the others. Then someone down the street started yelling that they needed the gun. Grantham picked it up and ran with it toward the house on the corner, which was set back farther from the street than the others. He stopped behind the last house before that one, looked to his left, and saw an enemy soldier pointing a rifle at him. Grantham ducked through a back door just as rounds hit it behind him. He set up the gun in a rear window and started blasting toward the shooter.

Another marine ran into the house, screaming for him to stop firing.

“There’s marines in that house!” he said.

“Well, there might be, but there’s gooks all over the outside of it!”

More enemy soldiers came running across the street toward the corner house and Grantham started shooting at them. He ducked back out of the window just as return fire came through, waited for a few moments, and then peeked out again. That’s when the rifle round hit him square in the chest.

It felt like being hit by a bus. It knocked him backward off his feet and he landed on his back. He still had the machine gun in his hand when he hit the floor. He threw it off to the side and yelled, “I’m hit!”

Then he felt it, like a hot poker had been stuck through his chest, just to the right of center. It felt like it was still there. It burned badly all the way through him. He started to have trouble breathing. Someone, the marine who had been in the room with him, leaned over him and started to work on him. His shirt was torn off and he could see blood spurt out of the hole when he exhaled and suck back into him when he tried to inhale. The marine took the cellophane off a cigarette pack and stuffed it over the wound, poking it in to line the edges of the bullet hole. Then he placed a compress over it and bound it to him tightly with a bandage wrapped around his chest and neck.

Now he could breathe better, but the wound still burned terribly. Several of his ribs were shattered. Grantham was turned on his right side so that his good lung wouldn’t fill up with blood. The marine kept slapping him, trying to keep him awake, trying to make him talk. Grantham felt an overpowering need to go to sleep. When a corpsman came, he fumbled with Grantham’s arm and started an IV. There was a discussion about morphine.

“We can’t give him too much,” the corpsman said. “I don’t want him to pass out.”

He was placed on the wooden door and four marines carried him from the house. He felt that he was going to roll off, that they were going to drop him, but they didn’t. They lifted him up to the tank. When it started to move, the pain was excruciating. He thought he would die from the pain.

He drifted into and out of consciousness. They stopped at one aid station, which couldn’t take more wounded—it was overwhelmed—so they had to drive farther, toward another. Every shudder and bounce stabbed him with blinding pain. At the second station he was lifted from the tank and zipped into a body bag.

He was still semiconscious. He could hear people yelling, screaming in pain, but there was not enough help for everyone. He heard someone say, “Wait, this one’s not dead yet.” Grantham felt sorry for that person, whoever he was, only to realize that the corpsman must have been talking about him, because the body bag came unzipped.

Then he was sure he was dying . . . not dead yet. He was not going to make it back alive. He would never see his family again. A whirl of sad thoughts went through his head, the people and things he would miss, his parents, his friend Freddie, a girl he liked . . . and then he remembered the truck.

He had fallen ill when he was five years old. He had a rare enzyme disease, porphyria, which had affected his kidneys. He was frightened of the hospital where his parents took him to stay, and he was confined to his bed, so one day his father had brought him the truck. It was a miniature tow truck made of metal, with real rubber tires. It had a hook on the back. You could change the tires and lower and raise the hook. The doors would open and close. He loved that truck. It gave him something to play with in bed in the hospital and it had come home with him when he was released. The memory of that truck cheered him a little. He missed that truck.

And then he remembered Krystal burgers. He and Freddie, after they’d worked a long morning laying bricks, would drive together to the restaurant Krystal, where they sold small square hamburgers for ten cents each—you could eat one in two bites. They would order a dozen each, two large fries each, two big Cokes each, and two pieces of pie each.

“Who’s going to eat all this food?” the counter girl asked.

“We are,” he said.

They took the food out to the car and sat there and feasted until it was time to go back to work. Grantham remembered those burgers as, perhaps, the happiest moment of his life. They tasted that good.

His reverie ended abruptly. He was taken to an operating room—he wasn’t sure anymore where he was or how much time had elapsed—but it was a huge room with lots of lights. There were many people in the room and a lot of noises, shouting. Some were screaming. He was stripped naked and turned over on his side. A nurse jabbed him with a needle. The doctor lifted one of his arms up over his head and started cutting. He was still conscious and the blade stung like hell.

When he next opened his eyes he was on a hospital ship. He was in a tiny room with a number of other beds. The man in the bed next to him was screaming. This is what woke him. The screaming man had just awakened to discover that he had lost both of his legs. Grantham went immediately back to sleep. The next time he woke up, he was being loaded onto a plane, a C-130, and he was told that he was being taken to the 106th Army General Hospital in Yokohama, Japan.

He would learn more about his wound later. The rifle round had left a small hole in his chest and a larger one under his right shoulder blade. It had shattered his ribs and passed through his lung, but it had not ruptured any major blood vessels. At first they didn’t stitch up the hole in his chest. The wound was allowed to dry up and heal from the inside out. He had an incision that went from his right nipple all the way around to the exit wound in his back. There were tubes in his torso and his arm and up his penis.

By the end of March he was able to get up and walk around. He learned that he had contracted malaria in Vietnam, and while he was recovering in Japan he came down with typhoid fever. He dropped fifty pounds, down to 119. They told him he could not be flown back to the States until his fever subsided, so he started taking the thermometer out of his mouth when it reached 98 degrees. They flew him to Pensacola, where, when they learned he still had typhoid, he was placed in quarantine.

He was there when his sister’s former husband, who had also served in the marines, visited him and showed him the picture in Life. He had been at a barbershop, flipping pages in the magazine, when he’d seen it.

Grantham stayed sick for a year. He had lost so much weight and his body was so depleted that he kept getting sick. Doctors discovered that he had an amoeba in his liver—a leftover from dysentery in Vietnam—that had formed an abscess. He did not feel normal again until April 1969.

He got married when he left the marines in 1970, went to work for Scott Paper Company in Mobile, and fathered three children. Twelve years later he got a job with a company that built circuit boards for computers. In time he was the head of manufacturing. He divorced and remarried, and adopted his second wife’s youngest son, who grew up and joined the marines, serving two tours in Iraq.

As with most of those who fought in Hue, the slightest glimpse of a photo or scrap of video shot there in February 1968 is enough to bring back the awful smell; the shattering noise; the days of gray, cold rain, of smoke and cordite; the days of fright and feral anger and pain. Something about the grayness of that month is the battle’s spooky signature, as if Hue for nearly a month had literally fallen into the shadow of death.

Grantham never talked about Vietnam. At first it was a difficult subject. The war was ever more unpopular in the years that followed, until it ended, from America’s perspective, not just badly but disgracefully. It was the war we lost. There was no shortage of people to blame. The war divided two generations and, nearly a half century later, still shapes our politics and foreign policy to an unhealthy degree. Grantham didn’t want to talk about it at first, and in time not talking about it became a habit. He got on with his life. He reset his moral compass. He hid his scars. The Olson picture became famous, but the marine at its center did not. He is like a model who sat for an artist who produced a painting that resonated in the world for larger reasons, for reasons that had nothing to do with him. In that sense, and in that sense alone, the picture is not about him, and yet, because it is a photograph, because it was real, it will always be very intimately, very painfully about him. But no one outside his immediate family and friends ever recognized that the stricken marine with the hole in his chest on that tank in Life magazine was Alvin Bert Grantham, and that he, unlike so many other of his fellow marines and soldiers, lived to tell the tale.