Free Dispatches by Michael Herr Page B

them really were. The rest were already there, Saigon duty; coming through a year of that withoutbecoming totally blown out indicated as much heart as you’d need to take a machine-gun position with your hands, you sure couldn’t take one with your mouth. We’d watched a movie ( Nevada Smith , Steve McQueen working through a hard-revenge scenario, riding away at the end burned clean but somehow empty and old too, like he’d lost his margin for regeneration through violence); now there was a live act, Tito and His Playgirls, “Up up and awayeeyay in my beaudifoo balloooon,” one of those Filipino combos that even the USO wouldn’t touch, hollow beat, morbid rock and roll like steamed grease in the muggy air.
    Roof of the Rex, ground zero, men who looked like they’d been suckled by wolves, they could die right there and their jaws would work for another half-hour. This is where they asked you, “Are you a Dove or a Hawk?” and “Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?” Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena , I’d think, but I wouldn’t say it, especially not here where they knew that I knew that they really weren’t fighting anybody anywhere anyway, it made them pretty touchy. That night I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, “Colonel, you’re insane”? It was like turning up in the middle of some black looneytune where the Duck had all the lines. I only jumped in once, spontaneous as shock, during Tet when I heard a doctor bragging that he’d refused to allow wounded Vietnamese into his ward. “But Jesus Christ,” I said, “didn’t you take the Hippocratic Oath?” but he was ready for me. “Yeah,” he said, “I took it in America.” Doomsday celebs, technomaniac projectionists; chemicals, gases, lasers, sonic-electric ballbreakers that were still on the boards; and for back-up, deep in all their hearts, there were always theNukes, they loved to remind you that we had some, “right here in-country.” Once I met a colonel who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death.
    “Come on,” the captain said, “we’ll take you out to play Cowboys and Indians.” We walked out from Song Be in a long line, maybe a hundred men; rifles, heavy automatics, mortars, portable one-shot rocket-launchers, radios, medics; breaking into some kind of sweep formation, five files with small teams of specialists in each file. A gunship flew close hover-cover until we came to some low hills, then, two more ships came along and peppered the hills until we’d passed safely through them. It was a beautiful operation. We played all morning until someone on the point got something—a “scout,” they thought, and then they didn’t know. They couldn’t even tell for sure whether he was from a friendly tribe or not, no markings on his arrows because his quiver was empty, like his pockets and his hands. The captain thought about it during the walk back, but when we got to camp he put it in his report, “One VC killed”; good for the unit, he said, not bad for the captain either.
    Search and Destroy, more a gestalt than a tactic, brought up alive and steaming from the Command psyche. Not just a walk and a firefight, in action it should have been named the other way around, pick through the pieces and see if you could work together a count, the sponsor wasn’t buying any dead civilians. The VC had an ostensibly similar tactic called Find and Kill. Either way, it was us looking for him looking for us looking for him, war on a Cracker Jack box, repeated to diminishing returns.
    A lot of people used to say that it got fucked up when theymade it as easy for us to shoot as not to shoot. In I and II