Where a reef of scarlet coral touches against the Batangan Peninsula there is a lagoon rimmed by stretches of sand for a mile and more.
Beyond the saltwater and beyond the sand there are growths of tropical fir and coconut trees, living sparsely off soil made more of clams and chloride than nitrogen. Farther inland come layers of sedge, paddies brewing rice and mosquitoes, swamps, clusters of jungle, verdant places where every sort of thing grows and decays.
First, though, is the lagoon, and it was there that Alpha Company made its camp. We came to protect the place. We came to provide security for the small village that took its food and living out of the lagoon. On a knob of land overlooking the village, we erected sunshades, dug foxholes, rolled out canisters of concertina wire, and made friendships with the villagers. The children brought us crayfish, and we gave out C ration candy bars, a formality at first, but later the exchanges seemed something more than barter. We swam in the lagoon and did some fishing. We skipped rocks across calm waters. Sometimes we walked about the beaches without our rifles.
The lagoon must always have been a good place. Plenty of fish from the sea, cool winds for land that is always hot. Protection from the reef, in the old days, centuries ago, the lagoon must have been a port for travel and adventure. Who knows, perhaps the place once boasted its own lagoon monster, a sea serpent with green scales and bulging eyes and an appetite for careless fishermen and little boys.
It sets a fellow to thinking. Back when kings were kings and tyrants were called tyrants, the lagoon must have had a proud populace.
On the red reef they would have built large fires at night to keep it clear of shipwrecks. The people would have been naked on the hot days. They would have had white pagodas for Buddha, they would have burned sticks of incense in his honor. For the boys, adulthood would have meant bringing in fish from the sea.
The place would have been tranquil, even with a lagoon monster lurking about.
But all that is conjecture, and it is better to describe the lagoon as Alpha Company found it.
On each black midnight a hundred fishermen take a hundred bark skiffs down to the lagoon. They sail a half-mile into the lagoon, each boat lighted by a single lantern, a hundred white lights bobbing among the waves. It looks like Minneapolis when you come in at 15,000 feet on the midnight 707 from Seattle. The fishermen fish until morning. Then they bring in eel, octopus, squid, red snappers, crayfish, and seaweed.
Old men arise just at daybreak and go down to the water to greet the fishermen.
The old men wade out and help push the boats to the sand; then the fishermen sleep, and the old men lay out the catch to dry and smoke in the sun.
In an hour the women come out, the old men go to sit in the shade, the children do some sweeping.
It is not a village Gauguin would have painted; it is not a romantic place. The village starts where the coral meets land, and it extends for two hundred meters along the beach. It is a war village, a refugee camp.
It is made of army tin. The huts are long, metal barracks, one contiguous to the next, identical in squalor, crammed full of families, surrounded by rows of the new kind of army concertina wire, the sort with tiny razor blades replacing barbs. Two thousand people live there.
Beyond the wire are mines. The curved stretch of sand holds Bouncing Betties. The ground is loose, and the Betties pop into the air, explode, and spray sand and clams and flesh out for twenty yards. The beach is littered with Bouncing Betties. And where there are no Betties there are booby-trapped grenades, some set out by the enemy, others scattered by the Popular Forces to defend the village.
Where the fir and coconut trees grow, the ground is firmer. There, along with Betties, are M-14 toe poppers, booby-trapped artillery rounds, and other gadgets. The lagoon is not the place you would have found if you’d explored the place with Magellan or Captain Cook or whoever sailed here in other centuries.
Still, when it is midnight and the fishermen are out on the water, the lagoon is calm, and it’s as good a place to be as any. And when a full moon is out, it is the best place to be. Village guards beat out “all is well” on hollowed hunks of wood. The breeze blows in, you can see the moon shining a beacon across the water, tracing a path out to the boats. On those nights you can think about how the lagoon once was. You may have met a lover there.
It was hot. I was sleeping when the boats came in, but when Bates and I went down to the water we saw the catch was tremendous. Thousands of baby shrimp lay drying on the beach. Two children were pulling seaweed out of the nets. Silently, the old men were brushing black, smelly pitch onto the skiffs, preparing them for another night on the lagoon. A jumble of women were leveling sand for a village square. Already they had raised a flagpole, and on top of it was a yellow flag crossed by horizontal red stripes, the South Vietnamese flag, looking grotesque, out of place.
In the middle of the morning the women were well into their work and the fishermen at the third level of sleep. I was at the radios. We were called by one of our patrols along the beach: “It’s a mine. We’ll need a chopper out here, urgent. Guy’s whole leg is gone, have to make it fast. Got our position?”
I made the old frantic call to headquarters, curious about who I was trying to save, names and faces flicking past, a list of wanted posters. “Bandit 99, this is Zulu 10. Request urgent dust-off. U.S. soldier, mine, he’s hurt bad. Grid 789765.”
“Seventy-two, this is 10. Need to know extent of injuries. Any hostile fire. You got a secure landing zone? Got smoke?”
A new lieutenant was out with the patrol, and he was cool. “Well, I don’t know, the guy’s hurt real bad, it’s his whole leg, he’s just lying there. We’ll make some kind of litter, just get that bird out here. No enemy fire, no problem. LZ secure, we’re standing by with smoke.”
The dust-off was completed in eighteen minutes, but it wasn’t fast enough. The soldier had stepped on a rigged mortar round, and there wasn’t a chance.
He was a quiet, intelligent Texan, an NCO named Martin, but when the chopper lifted him off the beach and over the old lagoon, he died.
The next day, July 7, Bates and I cooked crayfish at dusk. Resupply had brought us canned margarine and lemons, and it turned out to be a real feast. In the morning we called in another dust-off. A GI named Peterson had gone fishing with hand grenades, and one of them blew his belly away. Six of the men carried him out of the lagoon. They had him in a poncho. The plastic was filled with sea-water and Peterson’s stomach.
At Landing Zone Minuteman, an American firebase half a mile from the lagoon, mortarmen perform a nightly ritual, week after week. Acting as the village’s line of light-artillery protection, they calibrate their weapons, determine grid coordinates for defensive firing, and, finally, they register the guns for accuracy by firing upon uninhabited target areas around the lagoon. If the lagoon is attacked, they’re able to fire immediately.
One night they made a mistake. A buck sergeant determined the gun elevation and deflection and called the numbers to his RTO, who passed the information on to a gun crew. The firing data recorded in the gun pits were not the data recorded in the bunker. At 10:20 P.M. the guns fired, the same old ritual, and at 10:21 the rounds were falling on the lagoon’s little village.
Thirty-three villagers were wounded. Thirteen were killed: Bi Thi Cu, 2 years old; Dao Van Cu, Bi’s brother, 4; Le Xi, 2; Dao Thi Thuong, 9; Pham Thi Ku, 4; Pham Khanh, 15; Le Chuc, 8; Le Thi Tarn, 10—the children.
Dust-off helicopters shuttled to the lagoon all night, working in the rain, ferrying the casualties to hospitals and morgues. GIs scrambled through the rain and tin rubble for survivors. Military inspectors were there within an hour, taking notes and looking grim.
A month later, when the reports were finalized and guilt apportioned, solatium payments were made to the families of those killed and maimed—twenty dollars for each wounded villager; thirty-three dollars and ninety cents for each death. Certain blood for uncertain reasons. No lagoon monster ever terrorized like this.