THO AN (EXCERPT)

Tho An 

     The door gunner nodded at what he'd heard through his earphones, leaned back from peering over his weapon at the jungle below, and looked around at us. Helmeted heads turned to him. He made a quick down/up motion with his right hand. We jacked the bolts of our weapons  -most of us carried M14 rifles; Lt. O’Neill carried a .45 caliber “grease gun”(

) - to chamber a round. We checked our safeties. Engine and rotor noise made it too loud to talk, but talk was unnecessary. Glances ricocheted from face to face with the spark of here we go. The men from "F" Company looked longer at Lieutenant O'Neill, Chituras and me than at one another. They already knew who they were, had been in enough combat together to know who'd do what when the shit hit the fan. The three  of us were Marines from the air wing who'd come along as Tactical Air Control Party. Unknowns. I met their searching eyes with as much steadiness as I could muster. 

     The chopper dropped; waist high grass welled up under us and was flattened by rotor wash. The door gunner became a demon bent on clearing his aircraft so it could get back in the air: "Out!out!OUT!" We jumped out the door, bent low, ran to the edge of the clearing. No firing yet.                                         

     "F" Company, Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, had orders to approach the village of Tho An, about seven and a half miles southwest of Chu Lai, and, if fired upon from the direction of the village, to level it. Any villagers who wanted to leave could do so. They would be rounded up and taken by helicopter, with what possessions they could carry, to a refugee camp.      

     We fanned out, got on line with the grunt platoons leading and our headquarters group a few yards behind them, and advanced on Tho An, still walking in waist-high grass. Bayonets sniked onto bayonet lugs along the line. Lieutenant O'Neill nodded toward Chituras and me; my bayonet was already out of the scabbard and I was working its ring over the flash suppressor of my M14 when I heard Captain Love (no shit, that was his name), the "F" Company commander who was a few steps in front of me, say "That's it, that's what I like to see, gimme some steel on the end of it."

     Someone did fire on "F" Company from the village, and we began the work of leveling it. First, the firing from the village was answered by the sharp cracks of the company's rifles; machine guns were set up and added their staccato voices. Then we pulled back and sat and felt the earth tremble under the artillery barrage, and heard those peculiarly sharp explosions made by the splintering steel casings of artillery rounds. 

     Next came the F4 Phantoms, sharks of the air, the sinister, howling jets with their grotesquely turned-down black snouts (grotesque, yet beautiful to every infantryman on our side), their wide, low-slung, swept-back wings and high triangular tails: the 250-pound bombs were dropped with a straight approach and a quick, turning pull-out, the bombs falling like a handful of pickles and going off in quick succession. The napalm runs were long, graceful arcs. As each jet began to climb away from the bottom of its arc, it would loose one long silver obelisk to tumble end-over-end, flashing in the sun, until it hit behind the trees and sent a cloud of red-orange flames laced with black smoke into the feathered border between green palm-fronds and blue sky.

     Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began. Others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the Phantoms finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.               

     Attached to “F” Company, 2^nd Battalion, 7^th Marines, I was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements or attempts to flee. 

     They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot Company's combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C4 from the blast. A Sergeant cursed the engineers for using too much explosive, not because it was terrifying the Vietnamese, but because they might injure some of us. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.

     I'd imagined battle, but I'd never imagined this. The children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers' arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. 

     One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, yet feared my rifle and bayonet more. They wailed in awful concert with their children. The older women joined.

     But the old man: he didn't wail, cower, try to flee the explosions or shrink back from my bayonet. He just stared at me, afraid but with that resigned, calculated, limited fearfulness of one who is going to die before too long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I had ever seen on a human face.

     Something happened, as I looked down my rifle and bayonet at the old man and women and children I was holding captive, which would determine the course of the rest of my life. I looked at those people, then looked around me. I saw, in the bright noon light, a veil dropping. It fell between me and everything I could see in the village. It moved top to bottom, sky to earth. The veil seemed transparent, leaving the artillery-blasted fronds of the palm trees, their napalm-charred trunks, the flaming thatch and skeletal bamboo frameworks of the huts, the urgent movements of the Marines of "F" Company, the terrified people at my feet, all looking exactly as they had a moment before. Yet they also looked completely different. I can't explain that, except to say that suddenly, and ever after, I saw the world through different eyes.