And Night [Nyx] bore hateful Doom and black Fate and Death and Sleep and the brood of Dreams.
HESIOD, Theogony1
They thought they were doing a favor for Tom Hagel. With three Purple Hearts and his older brother on the way home, the battalion sergeant major and the first sergeants assigned Tom to run the little post exchange (PX) at Binh Phuoc.2 Somebody had to do it. It promised an end to day patrols and night ambushes. Now and then, in emergencies or near emergencies, Tom had to report to the berm line and take charge of a bunker. But chasing Charlie fell to others, the newer troops. Mrs. Hagel’s second son would most likely make it back to Nebraska in one piece.
In taking Tom Hagel away from line infantry duties, the 2-47th leadership gave credence to a set of dismal facts about combat riflemen. Extensive studies in World War II charted a trajectory: becoming “battlewise,” “maximum efficiency,” “overconfidence/hyper-reactivity,” “emotional exhaustion,” and then a “vegetative stage.” Timing varied by individual. People with preexisting problems might go immediately to the wrong end of the scale. Those better educated, physically stronger, and well grounded in their families endured longer—those old army preferences at work once more. Unit teamwork and especially good officers and NCOs also helped keep things together. Most infantrymen made it under fire from 200 to 240 days (six and two-thirds to eight months) before cracking. As one study summarized, at the eight-month mark: “Practically all men in rifle battalions who are not otherwise disabled ultimately become psychiatric casualties.”3 The pace varied. The eventual progression did not.
As veterans of World War II and Korea, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps generals in Vietnam well understood this grim sequence. Yet for reasons attributable only to the same kind of unhealthy institutional inertia seen in the trenches of the Great War, the senior commanders adopted personnel policies tailor-made to accelerate combat soldier and unit disintegration. Individual replacements created steady coming and going, and that atop the steady drain of casualties. Scheduled swap-outs of key officers, typically in as little as six months, really spun the cycle. Twelve-month (army) and thirteen-month (Marine Corps) assignments applied to riflemen and rear-area clerks alike—very fair, but guaranteed to outrun that historic six- to eight-month breaking point. Well, the old guys told each other, that limit didn’t really apply. Vietnam wasn’t thought to be much of a war, not like Bastogne or Iwo Jima.4 From a hovering helicopter or a quiet office, it may have been so. Neither Chuck nor Tom Hagel saw things that way.
Objective post-war assessments explained why the generals pictured a rather low-intensity conflict (except high points such as Tet or Mini-Tet) and the junior soldiers believed they had been run ragged. Like any smart guerrilla, Charlie refused combat except in those rare situations where VC victory looked likely. That caused the Americans, determined to make contact, to increase patrols and ambushes, to substitute volume of activity in hopes of forcing engagements. Ewell’s 9th Infantry Division epitomized this mentality. Yet even under the scourge of a most unyielding commanding general, urging day and night constant pressure, the division never compelled the VC to fight in more than 9 percent of all their many operations.5 For the riflemen out beating the bush, and the aviators loitering above, those numbers offered no comfort. Any trip outside the wire could devolve into “the big one.” And each one chipped away at a soldier’s finite reservoir of battle resilience.
Sergeant Chuck Hagel explained how it added up. “I don’t know how many firefights I was in,” he said. “I don’t know how much combat—I mean, the actual day-to-day people shooting at you and you shoot at them.” In the long, monotonous stretches in between, patrol followed patrol, day after day and night after night, all wrapped in stifling heat and dripping humidity, and all affected by chronic lack of sleep. “Maybe you go for a week and not have anything,” Hagel said. “Maybe you go for two weeks and just not have anything.” But you never knew when it would go upside down. It could happen any day, any time. “The intensity of that pressure,” Hagel summarized, “does make an individual break.6
Chuck Hagel never reached his breaking point. Tom Hagel didn’t either. But when 2-47th shifted Tom to look after the PX hut, they inadvertently did the Nebraskan a disservice. He still endured just enough risk, from mortar rounds and odd angry shots, to keep him anxious, and yet not enough to keep him busy. In war, idle minds wander, and perceptive ones, more so. In that last month of 1968, Armed Forces Radio in Saigon took a lot of requests for the late great Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.”7 Tom Hagel could relate to lyrics about hanging around, watching the sun go up and down, wasting time. He faced two months with the exact twosome he most hoped to avoid: the war he loathed… and himself.
THE MORE TOM or any Vietnam combat veteran thought about it, the more obvious it became. The problem with the U.S. campaign in Vietnam went beyond strategy, the objection of learned war college faculties. It eclipsed morality, the favored talking point of passionate anti-war agitators. And it certainly had very little do with the news media, or long hair, or hippies, or drugs, or the Age of Aquarius. Those ideas found audiences because they implied that the war’s conundrum could be solved. Americans love to fix things.
Vietnam defied vaunted Yankee ingenuity. In essence, America endeavored to use the wrong tool, the conventional U.S. Armed Forces, for the wrong job, counterinsurgency. A force manned, organized, equipped, and trained to close with and defeat the German Wehrmacht, or perhaps the Soviet army, found itself scrabbling through pigpens trying to figure out which guy in black pajamas to kill. The inability to do so ensured that no matter how many Charlie Cong died, too many local villagers went with them, and the rest became refugees disillusioned with the weak Saigon regime and its U.S. allies. It all resembled exterminating termites by running a family out of their house, shooting at the bugs (and laggard children) with a machine gun, then setting fire to the edifice to finish the job. As a U.S. officer said of the Mekong Delta city of Ben Tre during Tet: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”8 There it is.
Just as form follows function, so the GI slang of the era very much reflected this ugly truth at the core of America’s ill-fated venture in Vietnam. 9 The military lexicon of any epoch brims with acronyms, abbreviations, nicknames, and euphemisms. It has ever been so. You can find the like chiseled onto Roman monuments. Learning the appropriate martial lingo, understanding it, and employing it correctly differentiates civilians from soldiers, outsiders from insiders, and those with questions from those with answers, or at least better questions.
In Vietnam, the ground combat troops called themselves “grunts.” That terse animalistic term came from the guttural sound that welled up from an overloaded soldier laboring through a morass of vines and branches. Slip in the mud. Knock a knee. Bang a sweat-stained head under a cloth-covered steel pot helmet as it slow-cooked the brain underneath. Shift the rucksack straps digging into shoulders. Heft up that long, black M60 machine gun. Look right, then left, then ahead. Keep going. Discipline and exhaustion strangled speech. Men moving through the bathwater-warm air and dank undergrowth strode step by step, swaying, stumbling, their passage marked by the chopping of the machete, the swishing of leaves—and grunts. They became what they did.
“REMFs,” rear-echelon motherfuckers, comprised the majority of MACV’s hundreds of thousands, safe in base camps. Where REMFs started depended on where you served. Nobody assigned to 2-47th Infantry, even the clerks puttering around Binh Phuoc, considered themselves REMFs. But in the rifle squads, sometimes guys joked about the bastards back at platoon headquarters. In essence, a REMF could be anybody routinely safer than you. To grunts, gradations of REMF-dom didn’t mean much. You either went outside the wire all the time or you didn’t. You were either a grunt or you weren’t.
Lieutenants and captains and lifer NCOs certainly qualified if they went out on missions day after day. Men like Robert Keats, Jim Craig, Skip Johnson, William Smith, and Doc Rogers might be regular army types. Still, they certainly lived and fought, and sometimes died, as grunts. The battalion and brigade commanders, not to mention the various generals, did not count. Flying overhead in a helicopter or popping out as a guest patroller impressed none of those sweating and bleeding on the ground. Soldiers credited “Gunfighter” Emerson as crazy-tough, swooping down in his chopper to chase VC, and sometimes loping along on foot in the dirt, out with rifle platoons. The grunts saw old Ewell mix it up, too, now and again. But those two were the exception. Most senior officers sent out grunts. They didn’t lead them. As a rule, the top guys lived up in the ether, orbiting in their C&C birds, out of sight, out of mind. “You just didn’t ever see those people,” recalled Chuck Hagel. “They didn’t make much of an impact or difference.”10 The braver and smarter higher commanders earned some credibility. But not enough.
Grunts “humped.” Humping bore two connotations. The obvious one referred to camels, beasts of burden. A rifleman lugging eighty pounds of ammunition, water, and gear through the hot, humid Mekong Delta certainly sympathized with the erstwhile ships of the desert.11 The less obvious idea, a bit crude, tied to sex, not in the sense of anything pleasurable, but in the way it drained you, took it all out of you, left you limp and gasping. Given the utter absence of satisfaction in laboring cross-country under a bulging rucksack, perhaps humping might have been better rendered as dry-humping. But nothing stayed dry for long in Vietnam.
Moist and warm as an overgrown greenhouse, the “boonies” hosted the grunts. Boonies derived from boondocks, the hinterlands, the countryside, the pastiche of jungles, hamlets, and Mekong tributaries that characterized the Delta. In Tet and Mini-Tet, 2-47th fought in and around Saigon. The marines up north, reinforced by army battalions, did likewise in Hue city. But those were unusual occurrences. Most of the grunt war happened in the great outdoors. Riflemen also called it the bush or the field. Or Indian country.12 They called it that, too. By whatever name, although green and savagely beautiful, it was anything but inviting or pleasant. The bad guys saw to that.
The opposition went by “Charlie,” of course. To be precise, that referred to the true guerrillas, the VC, Victor Charlie in the military phonetic alphabet. The NVA regulars never rated their own nickname. When especially able, Charlie earned promotion to Mr. Charles or even, in exceptional cases, Sir Charles. Sergeant Tom Hagel, for all his doubts about the war, judged the VC cause “absolutely evil.”13 The opposition brutalized the Vietnamese villagers in the most personal ways, opting for retail hut by hut murder by AK-47 bullet and knife edge as compared to wholesale U.S. attempts to blow away entire square acres with artillery shells and high-explosive bombs. In the end, though, Charlie’s harsh methods suited the war he fought.
Runty, slight, and often young, Charlie displayed endless ingenuity, courage, and endurance. He could also be obstinate, suicidal, and predictable. But for sure, Charlie fought, and fought hard. While U.S. body counts tended to be inflated, undoubtedly the enemy suffered high casualties. Somehow, though, enough of them always seemed to slip away and the hostile battalions reappeared as consistently as weeds on the lawn. The communists fought so hard that, despite their many reasons to think otherwise, the U.S. riflemen respected their foe. Tom Hagel certainly did, referring to his opponents as “incredible soldiers.” Senior officers discouraged such “Charlie worship.”14 But the grunts believed.
As guerrillas, Charlie swam in the sea of the local people. The fighting fish impressed U.S. infantrymen. The sea—the Vietnamese population—did not. Although neither Chuck nor Tom Hagel resorted to the common terminology, they certainly heard it constantly. Americans called the Vietnamese “gooks,” “slopes,” and “dinks” as a matter of course.15 Even in the much more tin-eared American society of 1968, one in which the most offensive racial monikers could be heard daily on radio, television, and in street conversation, calling a human a gook, slope, or dink consigned the already put-upon citizenry of South Vietnam into a subdungeon all their own.
The cultural contempt extended into the pidgin dialect used by U.S. soldiers in their interactions with the Vietnamese. The residents of the south ranked so lowly that the men from across the Pacific did not often deign to address the locals in their own vernacular, a delicate tonal language that remained almost wholly unintelligible to pretty much all Americans. Instead, impatient grunts employed an amalgam of words borrowed from previous wars and other countries, plus a very few choice snatches of Vietnamese. From the French era came beaucoup (many) and fini (the end); most rural Vietnamese understood neither. Out of occupied Japan Americans appropriated “hootch” (from uchi, house), “papa-san,” “mama-san,” and “baby-san,” all nonsense even in the Tokyo ginza, let alone in the hamlets of Long An Province. The Korean War contributed the callous epithet gook (literally people, but most often applied to an individual), which meant nothing to the populace of the Mekong Delta.16 The usual remedy to U.S. linguistic incoherence involved yelling louder, gesticulating forcefully, and waving firearms around. It all got responses. But most replies made as little sense as the gibberish shouted by frustrated American troops.
As for Vietnamese phrases, the real business terms were few. Di di mau (move out). Dung lai (halt). As a villager, get those wrong and it might earn a burst of M16 rounds. Whatever happened, good, bad, or indifferent, the Americans shrugged and offered the all-purpose conversation closer: xin loi (sorry about that). That one came not from the traditions of the region, but from the U.S. television spy comedy Get Smart.17 When a zany character caught his nose in a fast-closing elevator door or the unwieldy cone of silence clunked on unwitting heads, “sorry about that” made it all better. Raised on television, sardonic American grunts favored the phrase, courteously translated into Vietnamese. Shoot the family hog? Burn the hut? Kill the daughter? Xin loi, mama-san. They were only dinks.
Sweeping racist generalizations also included ARVN and the national police, the White Mice. Those often inept organizations lived down to their reputations. All the committed, brave Vietnamese appeared to have signed up for the VC. Our side got the leftovers. Tom Hagel contemptuously recalled moving out on dangerous M113 roadrunner missions and passing ARVN soldiers “swinging in their hammocks” on the roadside, taking their ease. It might be their country, but a great number seemed ready to sit this one out. 18 After all, they had the best army in the world—the Americans—fighting on their behalf. From their South Vietnamese allies, grunts expected very little.
With regard to the village inhabitants, the Americans thought even less. Dirt poor and alien to the grunts, the average Vietnamese hardly ranked as humans. Some actively supported the Viet Cong. Others strongly opposed the communists. Most seemed to blow with the wind, “GI Number One” by day, “GI Number Ten” by night. The locals sold everything: smokes, soft drinks, beer, black-market post exchange goods, marijuana, hard drugs, their daughters, you name it. And the prices stayed low, low, low. The grunts figured that being so desperately indigent, the Vietnamese would do anything for money, to include selling out a neighbor. And the locals just didn’t appear to care about much of anything, even each other. Life seemed cheap. Even well-educated senior U.S. officers sometimes echoed such stereotypical sentiments.19 They were, of course, horribly wrong. But the language and cultural barriers, combined with the incredibly tortuous need to figure out which guy sowed rice and which one buried land mines—and which Vietnamese planted both—well, it demanded the patience of Job. American grunts just didn’t have it.
And impatience, rashness, anger—those impulses led directly to the short, blunt, single-syllable words, the ugly ones. Bust caps. Fuck ’em up. Light ’em up. Nape and snake. Rock and roll. Zap. Waste.20 “Kill” and “dead” and “body” were three other four-letter words, but grunts tended to use them only in reference to Charlie or other Vietnamese. The telling term, le mot juste (with a nod to the French who’d gone before), had to be “waste.” It served as a verb. It worked as a noun. It summarized the whole damn war.
DURING THE DAY, Tom Hagel found things to do. As those who placed him there expected, the lanky sergeant determined to operate the best possible small PX in Vietnam. The big bases, like Dong Tam, overflowed with creature comforts: a swimming pool, clubs (officer, NCO, junior enlisted), USO shows, intramural sports leagues, and even a Red Cross club-mobile, staffed by young female American civilian volunteers.21 Dong Tam hosted a large PX full of televisions, radios, and other consumer goodies. The quality beer like Ballantine, Budweiser, Michelob, and Miller High Life remained cold and ready in bulk at Dong Tam.
Binh Phuoc had almost none of this beyond tiny club huts and Hagel’s miniscule PX. Out at the 2-47th firebase, the suds stayed warm and inferior: Carling’s Black Label, Falstaff, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Schlitz, and even Vietnamese 33 brand. In later wars, American soldiers didn’t drink alcohol.22 In Vietnam, they did.
Officially, each man received an okay to drink two beers a day. Unofficially, the cans accumulated while troops carried out missions. Some units drank in the field—tracks with coolers were not an uncommon sight, and one wiseass battalion commander even told Ewell that his M113’s basic load included six cases of beer. Old campaigner Ewell, product of a much more rough-hewn army than today’s more tightly wound bunch, laughed it off. The general had been known to quaff a few cold ones when mingling with his men, Chuck Hagel among them.23 Sergeant Tom Hagel inherited the responsibility of feeding this habit. He decided to improve the stockage.
That necessitated a shopping expedition. Hagel approached the major and master sergeant at battalion S-3, the operations section, the 2-47th planners and command post team. Drawing on his reservoir of good will as a veteran NCO with three Purple Hearts and a valor award, Hagel asked to borrow the major’s jeep and trailer. The dutiful PX supervisor intended to make a trip to Dong Tam. He knew “contacts” there. He’d bring back the good stuff. The major agreed immediately. He liked decent brews, too.24
So on a clear December morning—the dry season had returned—Hagel set off as part of a supply convoy en route to Dong Tam Base Camp. He drew on all his M113 mission experience as he planned and executed the movement. Hagel drove northwest on Route 207 into the overcrowded town of Tan An. Had he turned north, he’d run into the same Vam Co Dong River where Lieutenant Colonel Van Deusen’s helicopter crashed on July 3. Bad vibes for sure—and no Budweiser waited up that way. Instead, Hagel motored south on Route 4, entering Dinh Tuong Province. After creeping through the refugee-swollen city of My Tho (about 63,000 people), Hagel turned his jeep onto Route 25 and proceeded west to Dong Tam Base Camp. The twenty-two-mile trip took a few hours, with most of the delays brought on by dodging bicycles, pull carts, and scooters in Tan An and My Tho.25
Bustling Dong Tam Base Camp brimmed with some 10,000 U.S. troops. The major combat forces included the 2nd Brigade (the riverine outfit) and some of their partners in the U.S. Navy task force. The majority of Dong Tam housed the 9th Infantry Division headquarters, the DISCOM logistics battalions, the 9th Aviation Battalion, and various smaller support and service units.26 The place looked like Fort Bliss, only with more tents, corrugated metal roofing, and plywood huts. The riverine guys and aviators certainly sallied forth to fight. The rest? Not so much.
A wily peasant in the imperial capital, Tom Hagel found his way to the right provisioning centers. He backed up his jeep and trailer. Over the next few hours, he loaded up “cases of beer, cigarettes, toothpaste, you know, the essentials.” Being Tom Hagel, he thought it ironic that 2-47th depended on him to get their beer, and yet by law, he couldn’t pop a cold one back in the United States. Tom had just passed his twentieth birthday in November. Well, he gave himself a dispensation. If he could zap Charlie for America, he could certainly see fit to knock back a few.27 Or more than a few, he figured. He owed it to himself.
It took until late afternoon for Hagel and the rest of the convoy to finish their business, such as it was, at Dong Tam. They rolled out not long after three o’clock, heading back to Binh Phuoc. Every uniformed American in country knew the deal. Get to a safe space by nightfall, just before seven. In this potentially terminal version of musical chairs, if the tune ended and the trucks were still out, well… between the ill will of Charlie and the various 9th Infantry Division night hunters in the sky and ambushes on the ground, nothing pleasant would result.28 Sergeant Hagel had no intention of testing that folk wisdom.
About 4 p.m., north of My Tho on Route 4, barely across the Long An provincial boundary, that friction so common in battle showed up right on schedule. Civilian traffic disappeared, which always raised antenna among veteran grunts like Hagel. The locals always seemed to know where not to be. Near the highway, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry, on loan from the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, had been chasing VC rocket teams.29 Evidently one of Charlie’s elements elected to do something about it. Some kind of desultory firefight developed. The distant smoke puffs of unseen shell bursts crumped among the trees a mile or so out from the road, well across a flat expanse of open rice paddies. Not his issue, and far away, Sergeant Hagel thought. He kept right on going.
As Hagel’s jeep and a 2-47th Infantry 2.5-ton (universally nicknamed “deuce-and-a-half”) cargo truck rumbled north, a VC mortarman overshot his target. An 82mm projectile popped in a hot gray spray right at the roadside. The chance impact riddled Hagel’s trailer. Both tires went flat. Holes appeared in the metal sides. Beer began spraying out in random golden streamers. Unwilling to wait around for more 82mm encouragement, Hagel gunned it. The cargo truck’s driver did, too.
A few miles north, though, Hagel had to stop. The trailer’s wheels, reduced to shaky, creaky rims, sparked on the pavement.30 They’d outrun Charlie’s mortar range. But the trailer was finished.
Hagel went to work. Working with the men from the deuce-and-a-half, Hagel chucked out the leaking cans. Lady Bird Johnson might be keeping America beautiful on the far side of the Pacific. In Long An, Hagel and the other soldiers dumped their damaged goods. Wet cardboard, torn-up cans, busted wooden pallet slats went into the roadside ditch. The locals would eventually pick through the detritus. Charlie might, too. But with the trailer pretty well chewed into junk, there wasn’t much of an alternative. Hagel crammed the intact cases atop the rest of the boxes and crates in the already laden jeep. Then he and the other troops wrestled the trashed trailer up into the deuce-and-a-half’s cargo bed.31 Fortunately, the 2-47th men in a large truck had already delivered their load at Dong Tam. Well, now they had something to carry back.
The jeep and the bigger truck got through the gate into Binh Phuoc about dusk. Hagel expected a less than welcome reception from the S-3 major and master sergeant. “Oh God, I’m in trouble now,” he thought. The major raised some hell, and at least one staff officer mentioned court-martial charges. But in the end, with Hagel weeks from going home—and those three Purple Hearts—nothing came of it. When one of the higher-ups mentioned that Tom Hagel sure went the extra mile to take care of his fellow grunts, the sergeant nodded. “Nobody else would.”32
STAYING BUSY IN the sunshine, even in such dubious exploits, checked off the days on the calendar. But nights proved to be a different matter. Battery B, 2nd Battalion, 4th Field Artillery pounded away the dark hours, its six 105mm howitzers engaging “harassment and interdiction” targets all over Long An. Together, the half dozen cannons fired an average of 150 rounds a night, and more on many occasions. The nearby 2-47th Infantry heavy mortar platoon pumped out big illumination rounds. The golden glow lit up the dark spots across the fence line. “Plenty of juice up there,” Tom recalled.33 The sound and light show went on all night, every night.
Under the thunder of the outgoing shells, 2-47th soldiers guarded Binh Phuoc’s roughly rectangular defensive wall. At each corner, a squat tower featured a .50-caliber machine gun. Fired from a dozen feet above ground, the big rounds were effective to about a mile, but could keep right on zipping out to four miles.34 On the wide packed-dirt wall, the berm, a succession of sandbagged bunkers also included M60 machine guns. In between, other bunkers allowed riflemen to shelter under cover and shoot back. At night, 2-47th manned the four corners and some of the berm line. Until the alarm sounded, and then all on the firebase took their posts, most of the bunkers stood empty. Well, not totally empty—on more than one occasion, both Chuck and Tom met the bunkers’ full-time inhabitants, feisty rats the size of raccoons.35
Inside the berm, the Americans crowded together in some seventy- three temporary buildings. In one of the few open stretches, artillery and U.S. heavy mortar crews set up in sandbagged firing spots at the south end of the base. At the northeast end, a bare field—mud in the wet times, dust in the dry—served as the motor pool, with the battalion’s M113s aligned in company ranks, fueled, armed, and set to roll out the gate. The battalion command post was in the northwest, just across from where the tracks parked. Between those two key areas stood the main gate and a “battalion street” that ran all the way to the big guns in the South. On either side of the dirt main artery, a tight clutch of metal-roofed barracks alternated with a mess hall, company orderly rooms, an aid station, and Tom Hagel’s little PX. 36 If you lived inside the dirt wall, you lived in very close quarters.
Beyond the berm, cleared flat ground, much of it flooded former rice paddies, spread all around. About ten yards out, the 2-47th had emplaced and staked down the first of three rows of razor-rimmed, head-high concertina wire. Another such ring ran ten more yards out. And the third one stood ten yards beyond that. Dozens of Claymore mines dotted the open space between the concertina rolls. Any attackers, even skilled NVA sappers, had a rough time ahead of them if they tried to penetrate Binh Phuoc.37
Charlie, being Charlie, avoided such strength. An infantry assault would be suicidal, unless for some reason 2-47th disarmed themselves. The Black Panther battalion leadership knew way better than that. No matter what else went on, the lieutenant colonel always kept enough defenders around to protect Binh Phuoc. Charlie made a few feints, but never mounted a serious attack. But as Chuck Hagel mentioned, at Binh Phuoc: “A regular evening was to get rocketed, mortared.”38 Both brothers had been out of the congested firebase most nights. Now Tom was on the inside, at the receiving end. What if things really got out of control? If you thought about it too much, it reminded you of Bernard Fall’s disturbing history of Dien Bien Phu, Hell in a Very Small Place.
Usually, the VC favored 82mm mortars. As Binh Phuoc had been there for years, and many Vietnamese had gone in and out of the camp for official and unofficial reasons, the VC benefited from a very good lay-down of key facilities. Skilled hostile gunners knew how to “walk ’em across the compound,” Tom remembered. Unwilling to share the bunkers with the active colony of rats, Tom and the other base types sat atop the berm. When they saw flashes in the distant darkness, they knew those were Charlie’s mortar projectiles leaving the tubes. The grunts then had thirty seconds to slide into the bunkers, rats or not.39 During Tom’s two months there, the VC mortar gunners never killed anyone. But it wasn’t from lack of trying.
Before and after the 82mm rounds each night, Tom drank. He tried every type of beer, the good ones and the bad ones. From some Australians, he learned to squeeze a lime into his brew. That added a new taste. Still, after a while, the sergeant didn’t much care, as long as the cans had alcohol.
He also smoked marijuana. Vietnam’s tropical climate produced quality dope, and a lot of it. The lifer NCOs did not approve, but Tom didn’t ask for their okay. He toked up out of their sight. They didn’t ask. He didn’t tell. Tom Hagel had never smoked grass on operations, nor permitted it. As he noted later, “peer pressure” kept men straight in the bush. But as the PX guy, well, dope was like the beer. He owed it to himself.
One dull day in late December, with his neat PX hut all in order, and having watched enough of the time slip away à la Otis Redding, Tom decided to adjust his nightly routine. The bored sergeant got tired of playing games with the rats and Cong mortars. He chose to build his own bunker. Hagel went to the artillery cannoneers and asked for dozens of their old wooden ammunition boxes, each about the size of two window planting containers side by side. He spent the rest of the day, and a good part of the next, filling the boxes with ruddy dirt. When he’d completed a little hideaway, he nestled a green army cot inside and rigged up a mosquito net. There he planned to stay each night until he left Vietnam.40
Had the VC stuck to the customary mortar and rocket barrages, with rounds landing here and there but mostly nowhere important, Tom might have enjoyed his new rat-free digs. But a few nights later, Charlie made one of his rare ground efforts. They staged in the little village—really just a row of huts—to the north. A few furtive guerrillas, erstwhile sappers, actually messed around at the outer ring of concertina wire. If they ever got through the wire…
Confronted with this kind of probe, the American defenders opened up with the entire repertoire. Tracers from machine guns lanced into the nondescript shanties. The battalion heavy mortars coughed up one brilliant illumination round after another. Those drifting parachute flares lit up the darkness.41 With a potential infantry breach under way, the 2-47th Infantry command post duty officer summoned all hands. Along with the other base people, Tom Hagel reported to the berm with his M16 in hand. Was this the long-feared big one?
An hour or so of shooting and shouting ensued. Green tracers crossed the berm line, reflecting continued interest from the VC. The Americans returned a hundred, maybe even a thousand, for every bullet received. Men in the towers reported shadows flitting in the ville. Helicopters came on station overhead, but the aviators radioed that they didn’t really see much. The howitzer battery couldn’t engage, as the enemy had gotten too close. But if Charlie got over the wall and came running into the base, the artillerymen prepared to level their tubes, set fuze zero, and shoot straight into the enemy infantry. The big 105mm shells would blow right at the muzzle, gouts of white-hot shrapnel, six giant shotguns scything ’em down.42 It never got that bad. Having stirred up enough trouble, way more than he bargained for, Charlie backed away.
When he returned to his home-made bunker, Tom found that a sharp-edged shell fragment—theirs, ours, who knew—had pierced right through the wood and dirt. Had his head been on the cot, it would have gone through him, too. Tom looked at the holes. Then he just laid down and crashed into a black, boozy sleep. “In the shape I was in, I didn’t care.”43 For the first time in his life, he felt he was definitely his father’s son.
FOR MOST OF WORLD WAR II, the fliers of the 42nd Bombardment Squadron never really saw what happened after they dropped their deadly bombs. Sergeant Charles Hagel saw the dead and wounded Americans who came back in shattered airplanes. And he watched comrades spiral downward in smoking hulks with wings gone. Sometimes parachutes blossomed. Often they did not. In that last horrible summer over the home islands of Japan, Hagel and his buddies flew low enough to see and smell the residue of their handiwork. He never forgot any of it. It came home with him. And although his 1962 death certificate read heart attack, what he witnessed in combat, and what he could not put aside, probably did much to put him in an early grave.
Now his son Tom faced the same, in the quiet hours of darkness gifted to him by distracted superiors at Binh Phuoc. The best thing in war is to stay busy as hell. The old sweats—Curtis LeMay, Julian Ewell, Martin Garcia, Creighton Abrams, William Joyce—certainly agreed heartily. Most of them remained on the go long after their war years ended, hyperactive, doing this and doing that, anything to run out each day to exhaustion. The key was not to remember the faces, ours or theirs. Keep it vague, generic, and impersonal.
Yet Tom saw the faces, a parade of them, night after night. The alcohol and dope made them go away for a few hours. But nothing ingested erased the vivid memories. “Half the time you didn’t see anything,” he said. Even in nightmares, old Mr. Charles hardly ever showed his hand. “Until you’d find the bodies.”44 And all too many wore civilian clothes. How many carried weapons? And if they didn’t, were they VC? Concerned citizens? The wrong guys in the wrong place? What about the women? The children?
Up at 9th Infantry Division, Major General Julian J. Ewell dealt with the same issue. He saw those killed not as subhuman gooks, or dinks, or slopes to be slaughtered at will. Nor did he visualize them as individual NVA soldiers, sons and husbands with homes and families near Vinh or outside Haiphong, fellow military men separated only by team colors. No, Ewell slept soundly because he’d reduced the division’s foes to numbers. When the jitterbug juked by day or the choppers hunted by night, the statistics piled up. At almost the same time twenty-year-old Sergeant Tom Hagel wondered what the hell he’d done to himself and to others, Ewell added up and sifted the numbers. He found comfort there. Tom Hagel did not.
In the six months after Mini-Tet in May, the 9th Infantry Division claimed to have killed 5,574 NVA/VC and captured 677. Sweeps recovered 1,291 individual enemy firearms and 273 crew-served weapons. Very impressive—until you realized, as Ewell and his staff did, that even this result still left 44,777 hostile troops in the field: twenty-one battalions and ninety-seven separate companies. By the MACV estimate, built around metrics furnished by the 9th Infantry Division, three-quarters of the countryside in Ewell’s area of operations remained under Hanoi’s effective control.45 Ewell only saw the count of enemies killed in action. We wiped them out. For Ewell, that defined success.
To ring up these “achievements,” the Mekong Delta home had been well and truly smashed up, the family members run off, cowed, or accidentally finished off—and the termites remained in the rubble, numerous as ever. Moreover, three-quarters of those slain were unarmed.46 That’s why Tom Hagel and plenty of others at the user end would spend the rest of their lives seeing faces they didn’t ever want to see.
Some tried to jog the hard-bitten general from his complacency. Staff officers raised the gap between assessed enemy dead and number of weapons captured. Ewell and his brigade commanders waved it off. The VC did great work pulling out their dead and their arms. (Yet, if so, why were so many corpses left behind to be tallied? Or were those figures just nighttime “guesstimates”?) The heavy use of air strikes and artillery incinerated the enemy AKs and RPDs. And that marshy, flooded Delta no doubt swallowed abandoned armaments by the dozen.47 You could talk yourself into it.
Ewell believed that he did the best he could with the blunt instruments at hand: rifle squads, helicopters, howitzer batteries, and jet fighter-bombers, all manned and run by an ever-shifting team of individuals rotating in and out every twelve months. He assessed his battalion and brigade commanders as about 25 percent effective and the rest merely good for following orders, if that. The general knew he lacked quality, veteran NCOs. He thought a lot of the troops and the front-line officers, the real grunts, but he knew they could only do so much, shackled as they were by rampant inexperience, not to mention wildly inapplicable conventional army doctrine and training.48 His division’s uniquely lethal arcade laydown every night—sniff ’em and stiff ’em—anticipated the twenty-first-century sensor-to-shooter battlefield of all-seeing 24/7 overhead surveillance and roving armed drones.49 Had he been able to do so, Ewell would have leaned even more heavily on things, not humans. But the technology didn’t yet exist.
Because Ewell was doing surgery with a chainsaw, chips flew. He just could not discriminate. “You know at night we had a curfew,” he said later, “and anybody that was out there was fair game. So you’d have five VC and twenty peasants carrying mortar ammunition. You’d knock off five or six.” Ewell continued: “It’s true that probably two were VC and four were peasants but they weren’t supposed to be out there. So that’s tough luck.”50 It sure was.
Thus anyone out at night became VC. In the sunshine, anyone who looked up when a helicopter flew over also might count as VC. Those who did not look up—well they were probably VC, too. If they ran away from helicopters or ground patrols, they must be VC. And if they gave you a defiant look, well, you know that deal. Plus, the Cong all wore black pajamas. So anyone dressed like that must be enemy.51 All VC were Vietnamese, and all Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta might well be VC. Or sympathizers. Hell, three-quarters of the villages had thrown in with Hanoi. The bottom line seemingly followed naturally. Dead equaled VC.
Now MACV didn’t just declare open season. Far from it. Many officers, including other generals, roundly criticized Ewell’s heavy-handed approach, especially after LBJ moved toward peace talks, Abrams took command, and domestic support for the war cratered. The old paratrooper dismissed these complaints as a preference for “toe-dancing,” “fan dancing,” and “Maypole celebrations” over finding and killing Cong.52 Yet he had to follow orders. Despite some fairly lurid allegations, then and later, the 9th Infantry Division did not defoliate, burn, and slaughter their way across the entire Mekong Delta. Ewell stretched the U.S. tactics as far as he could. He took a very hard line, putting paid to many opposing forces and not a few unfortunate civilians caught in the backblast. But this wasn’t World War II. And the Mekong Delta wasn’t Dresden or Nagasaki.
As 2-47th Infantry learned during Mini-Tet, use of heavy firepower took time-consuming approval. Chuck Hagel correctly observed that the United States “went well beyond” the customary laws of land warfare in not torching villages, slaughtering cattle, and wiping out villagers, even as those locales hosted (willingly or unwillingly) scores of enemy troops. Nobody in 2-47th Infantry perpetrated a My Lai massacre, the horrendous crime committed up north in the Americal Division on March 16, 1968. Chuck Hagel acknowledged “mistakes” and even “atrocities,” but also noted that American restraint “cost us lives.”53
That said, something jagged and hurtful was keeping Tom Hagel up at night. He tried. But he couldn’t exorcise these unquiet ghosts.
THE UNIFORMED ENEMIES bothered him less. He understood those guys, even the nameless AK-47 shooter he encountered close up on July 3 at the riverbank. They were soldiers like him. They took their chances. The man he shot face to face returned now and then to pay his respects. In certain dark hours, Tom Hagel again saw that stunned visage, neat bullet hole drilled in the forehead.54 But it didn’t eat at Hagel.
The bodies of the NVA and VC also didn’t linger long in Hagel’s nightmares. He’d found them gnarled and rigid, cut down by machine gun bullets, cooked by napalm, cut up by shell fragments, laid low by helicopter rocketry. Charlie lacked airpower and heavy weaponry—he wouldn’t trundle out that stuff until 1972, as the Americans folded their tents. But as with the individual Tom had killed, the hostile fighters seemed like equals, even the women found with gear. Too bad the bad guys had to ply their trade with hand weapons. If they chose to go at it, they, too, understood the risks.
“But there were all the others,” Tom said. “Women and children,” he went on, “and they didn’t have guns—because we saw them after.”55 The supporting fires, artillery and air, blotted out big areas. But sometimes the deaths came more directly. He thought about the pregnant woman killed on July 3 by the jumpy lieutenant in that sad riverside ville. Tom Hagel couldn’t just write off these people as collateral damage or rounding errors or by-catch from America’s relentless culling of the Mekong Delta Viet Cong. He personally didn’t do any of it. But he didn’t stop it, either.
Another scene, a bad one, flashed up now and then. On a night mission near a village, Tom’s platoon took a lot of fire. An NCO, reeling with liquor, swung up into an M113 commander’s cupola. The unsteady sergeant settled behind the .50-caliber machine and ran through a few belts, pouring tracer slugs into the Vietnamese hovels. One was an orphanage. The crazed sergeant finally ceased fire. Did he wipe out any children? Nobody knew. “None of us went in to check,” Tom remembered. Chuck had been there, too.56 The older Hagel blamed the drunken NCO. Tom blamed himself.
There was more. On New Year’s Eve at Binh Phuoc, a good many Americans partook of Tom Hagel’s stacked cases of PX beer. The recent VC mortar attack and lunge at the outer wire had encouraged the 2-47th leadership to clear out those hootches on the northwest corner. The Vietnamese rumor mill buzzed that before the action, Charlie evicted families and used the shacks to get close. In the next few days, 2-47th officers expected to arrange to remove the nearby structures. On December 31, as part of celebratory fun, well-lubricated grunts decided to get a head start.
Well after dark, unprovoked by any hostile gesture, the boisterous team up in the corner tower near the ville opened up with the big .50-caliber heavy machine gun. They’d loaded up a long belt of armor- piercing incendiary, a sort of supertracer that set aflame what it struck. After pouring in a few belts of those deadly 12.7mm rounds, the troops had a few low-ceilinged shacks burning merrily. If there were any noncombatants in there, nobody much cared. Instead, guys took turns cranking off more rounds.57
Tom Hagel never doubted that the Vietnamese buildings needed to go. The U.S. firebase couldn’t be secured if enemy sappers enjoyed a concealed route right to the barbed wire near the main gate. “You don’t have any options,” he admitted much later.58 But that night, all he saw were civilian homes blazing and fellow soldiers spraying slugs into the bonfire—and laughing like demons. Xin loi, mama-san.
It was past time to go home.
THEY CALLED IT the “Freedom Bird” and of all the welcome things that dropped out of the sky in Vietnam, the grunts wanted this one most of all. As they waited to board the contracted airliner, outbound soldiers at Tan Son Nhut looked across the steamy parking apron. An uncertain group of fresh troops stood there, uncomfortable in their clean uniforms. Many departing soldiers razzed the newly arrived privates. “You’ll be sorry.” “Charlie’s gonna love you.” “They’re going to cut your ears off.” Other comments were unprintable.59 The same thing happened every day, inbound meeting outbound, the doomed passing the saved.
Tom Hagel chose not to say anything. He sympathized with the rookies. Had it only been a year and two weeks? It seemed like a lifetime. For twenty-eight men of Company B, 2-47th Infantry, it had been.60 Tom’s rifle company took more casualties, killed and wounded, than any other in the battalion. Three of those wounded were him. Two were Chuck. And to what end? Xin loi, grunt.
Tom went home the way he came over, with a hundred-odd uniformed strangers, guys whose departure date matched his. The troops shuffled into assigned seats, no thought given to former divisions or the like, the military’s bureaucratic widget and screw drill maintained right to the end. When the jet took off, those aboard cheered and clapped. Then most just zoned out. The lucky ones drifted off to sleep. Most of them didn’t have bad memories. Or at least they didn’t think they did.
Once he arrived at Travis Air Force Base, California, the U.S. Army owned Sergeant Hagel for three more days. Out-processing at the Oakland Army Terminal emphasized form over substance.61 An anonymous major welcomed all of them back to America. A sergeant major got up and growled at them, reminding the soldiers to shut up, follow the out-processing checklist, and move with a purpose from station to station. The senior NCO made sure to mention that the Uniform Code of Military Justice still applied. In plain English, screw up, face a court-martial. The smarter draftees, like Tom Hagel, would be out of the army when this final purgatory passed. A good number hadn’t watched their timeline to be sure to get down to the magic 150 days. Others had enlisted voluntarily for more than the two-year conscription period. All of those soldiers received orders for stateside posts.
Once more, as he’d done so many times since that first long day at Fort Bliss, Tom Hagel made the rounds. Dutiful finance clerks settled up back pay. A doctor went over Tom’s medical records, gave him a most cursory medical examination, and pronounced all well. A chaplain talked to him. A psychological interviewer—not a doctor, just some guy—questioned Tom, too.62 Apparently, Tom gave the right answers. The fellow initialed Tom Hagel’s checklist. Not crazy. He now had the paperwork to prove it.
At the final stop on the line, a careful personnel specialist typed up Department of Defense Form 214, the military version of that infamous permanent record you’d always heard about in grade school. But a DD 214 was quite real. If you ever hoped to merit anything from the Veterans Administration, you needed that key document.63 To get it right, the typist checked each line of Tom’s records, verifying his rank, his training, his assignments, his combat awards, and his campaign ribbons. The three Purple Hearts got attention. Well they should.
And then it ended. For the last time, Sergeant Thomas Leo Hagel walked out of a U.S. Army headquarters. He had a wallet full of money, a government-paid ticket back to Nebraska, and a long way to go. No hippies spit on him. And nobody turned out for a dress parade, either. He left the army as he entered it. Alone.
On the way out, Tom heard a voice. He never saw the person who spoke. “Thank you for your service, young man,” someone said. “Now go have a good life.”64