We Get Our Man...boy...kid...whatever
You have to realize that I was a true and total REMF. I was frightened a few times by mortars, once by rockets. Aside from that, Vietnam was, for me (and I do apologize—I think I must—for this), fairly pleasant. I was able to speak the language well enough, thanks to the Defense Language Institute (East Coast) to actually converse with some folks who lived there. I could definitely read it well enough to sit down in an outdoor café and peruse the local newspaper while small children pointed at me in something akin to wonder that I could actually read their language.
What I am getting at is that Dak To, though I was in country, was totally alien to me. I was much closer to the war than I had any desire to be. The men I saw there had actually been fighting, had been in danger of dying, had killed other people...well, some of them.
The only way to get into the small town of Dak To was to hitch a ride on a laundry convoy (I don’t recall seeing any hootch girls at the base camp). The laundries of Vietnam were among the major places where soldiers could lease female companionship for a short-time. I wasn’t about to 1) lease female companionship at a laundry or 2) hitch a ride on a convoy through the hills of Dak To. Remember: Bao was out there reporting on convoys leaving the small base camp. Did I say “base camp”? There wasn’t even a PX!!!!
That first night, both Jim and I managed somehow to find our way through the dark to our two-man foxhole when mortars started falling in. Foxhole? Back on Engineer Hill, the 555th had used bobcats and other earth-moving equipment to dig out what seemed like palatial bunkers compared to this! The other thing we noticed was that the area around the camp there was not nearly as well fortified as had been the Hill. So, for this particular REMF, Dak To was a scary place. The mess tent the next morning was . . .a tent. Everyone lined up, got their breakfasts, and moved out quickly. I was told that mess tents are popular mortar targets at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Jim and I went back to our own tent and listened to the radio. Why? A convoy had just left and, sure enough: “hai xe dip,…” Bao was reporting in the clear on jeeps and other vehicles from the convoy. We knew Bao had to be nearby because the convoy had just left the gate as he started reporting. But he could have been anywhere in immediate area, somewhere on one of the hills surrounding the camp.
We did what we could to locate him. I was for a while, each morning we were there, something of a human locating device. . .triangular antenna in my hand, circling, searching for the signal in the few minutes Bao was up and reporting. We were able to get a straight line and Bao sat somewhere on that line. The line, though, circled the entire globe!!! We could narrow it down to points on the line within view of the front gates of the camp: Maybe a ten klick line leading up to hills on either side of the area. And we could assume he was on one of the two closest hills on that line. Why? He wouldn’t be at ground level for the camp because he couldn’t see well enough and he would have been in danger of being seen by almost anyone in the area. “Hey, Lieutenant, what’s that funny looking Gook with the antenna doing over there? See!” And then ZAP!!!!!!!! No more Bao. So, he had to be up in the tree line on one of the two hills: better spying area and better cover for him.
So, we located him--close enough for government work. One morning in the war, we let the camp’s C.O. know that Bao was up and broadcasting. He almost always came up at around 0800 hours. We stood in front of our tent, earphones on our heads, listening. It was like surround sound: Jets on the line extending to our rear dropping napalm; same thing in front, and then heard same sounds on the radio. And then? We saw Napalm: beautiful in its brilliant luminescence as it exploded into the air, licked up the surrounding vegetation, its tongues radiating outward. Smoke. Red-orange to black on the hills. And then a quick strafing run in front of us and behind us. A hissing sound on the radio. Silence.
This is part of why I wrote this villanelle, years later, some weeks after my first visit to our wall. The formality of the structure of the poem gave some distance from the event:
Not All the Names Are There
I said I would not write about the Wall,
two wings of black marble with 58,000 names.
I know not all the names are there, not all.
They say the Wall brings healing, peace,
understanding. They never mention rage.
I knew I should not write about the Wall.
A boy named Bao lay dying on a hill,
his body burned with napalm, his death my call.
I know not all the names are there, I cannot
see his name and face behind the marble sheen
neither on the west nor on the east, no trace.
No one carved his name upon the Wall.
No one ever mentions tears can fall and rage
Can dominate those wings of black, etched names.
I said I would not write about the Wall,
not all the name can fit there, hardly all.
Not one of my better poems: another reason I should not have written about the Wall. But Bao deserves some respect, some lasting memory. I cannot imagine the courage it took to sit out there on the side of a hill looking down at thousands of enemy troops and reporting on their movements. Our LRRPs did some similar things and I have a great deal of respect for them. But I can't recall hearing of anyone going out alone, getting close to a large concentration of troops and reporting back.
Bao's death was just one small incident in the deadly hills around Dak To that late November. But it remains the only death I actually heard happening on the radio during the war and the only death of an enemy soldier I was so closely involved in.
We left Dak To three days later. Two weeks later, some other VC cannonfodder was making similar reports on the camp. We kill someone, some thousands, and we count them, and then others are back. It's like the film version of Hamburger Hill: w e kill enough of them that they leave, we leave or continue what we were doing, they come back. Over and over and over again. We spent young people like some cheap currency and we say wonderful things about them, but in a situation like Vietnam the currency of life became seriously deflated.
(One last blog post about Dak To and then back to the security of Engineer Hill.)
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