Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 15)

Preliminary Report: Dak To and Hill 875

Hill 875 and the small base camp at Dak To have always nestled somewhere in the back of my mind. That area was under constant attack, small skirmishes mostly, the whole time our ship pushed through the waters of the Pacific to get us to DaNang and then to Chu Lai. I was blissfully unaware of a place even called Dak To that whole time. But when I got to Pleiku and the 330^th with Allen and Jim and Will, awareness of that small, I want to say cursed, but no, not really. That small place ringed by mountains and triple cover became almost my whole concern.

People died there almost every day for months. That’s not an exaggeration.

Americans died. South Koreans died. ARVN (men of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam) died and PAVN soldiers and South Vietnamese civilians…so many people…died. Some fought heroically and died. Some died for no real reason and with no heroic struggle except they were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some people perform heroically in war and live or die. Others just die...or live without displaying heroism. One of the great sins we perpetrate on truly heroic soldiers is to declare all soldiers heroic. If people become heroes just for putting on a uniform, then heroism is bought too cheaply.

I am reminded of a short Thomas Hardy poem, one of the poems I had memorized and quoted on dark nights when I was on perimeter guard:

Hap

IF but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan....
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

I looked at Dak To and Hill 875 from a distance greater than that of the B-52 pilots and navigators and bombardiers who participated in Rolling Thunder, flew over Kontum Province, and dropped tons of bombs on the surrounding hills, as dispassionately (and I wonder if, and don't truly believe that, a lack of passion could really have been possible) as the jet jockeys who napalmed and strafed the “enemy.”

I listened to parts of it on the radio as PAVN forces broke security and spoke in the clear, read bloody messages captured from dead and wounded PAVN soldiers. And it was all academic. I did not smell the napalm. I did not see the dead and wounded from either side. I did not see bomb craters, hear children crying. I listened, instead, to the living young men on both sides, listened to the American English and the North and South Vietnamese radio signals. It was, yes, very exciting to listen in on what was happening and then to read letters and messages from the enemy, almost like watching Spielberg's Pacific. My first little book was called From the Periphery and, in truth, I was always on the periphery…at least until Jim and I went to Dak To and that was a few weeks after most of the action was over.

Back at Pleiku, though, as the October fighting came to a close, we read messages about ambushes of convoys and not messages about intense fighting and maneuvering. We heard observers count the numbers and types of vehicles leaving the Dak To base camp or 4^th Division HQ, or whatever. What happened after the big Battle of Dak To was dull, commonplace to those of us who were a hundred klicks away or so. People were still dying, just in smaller numbers.

War really isn’t very funny though funny things do happen. I mean schools get bombed, pagodas destroyed, women are sometimes raped, and everywhere, we see the results: children crying in the streets of Pleiku, Dak To, Kontum dirty, hungry. Our own troops (and this is a small, good thing the military did) tried to help them, to feed them, to give them much needed medical and dental care. . . care they might not have needed had we not been there.

I’ll talk later about Dak To and what happened when Jim and I finally got there. But even before we boarded our HUEY and flew, feet dangling over the edge of the chopper, to that small camp, Dak To had loomed large in our every day work experience. This was just one place in Vietnam, just one battle and series of skirmishes. I recommend reading Michael Herr’s Dispatches for what I consider to be the best account of that battle and then read the U.S. Army’s military history of the battle at most good government documents libraries. Both accounts are classic. What I have to say about it is only after most of the dying had already happened and, though I was there, remains distant from the pathos that was our war in Vietnam.

I wrote this little sonnet once after my wife asked me about the war, Dak To and napalm:

A Sonnet for Napalm

"Tell me something," she says. "Do any flowers look
just like that, those blossoms of black, orange, red?"
She points at the screen, napalm flowering in the dawn.
"Some strange beauty from far enough not to feel
or smell, riots of deep embers glowing like fierce clouds?"
He nods, cannot find the words, remembers that
one time. That moment on the mountain he looked down
into a too green valley, B-52s so high he could not see

the spot in the sky where bombs dropped, some odd
whistling noise, some in-rushing of air, down and down
until in one moment, one space of time, dark green
turned to some color it had never meant to be and the smell
of the morning changed to nothing anyone could love,
a smell of heat and decay and green things turning gray.