Michael Herr spent six years trying unsuccessfully to get into the pages of Esquire when he approached Harold Hayes about being the magazine’s Vietnam correspondent in the spring of 1967. Though the anti-war movement had begun, Herr still needed to make a case for why Esquire should devote considerable space to the conflict. In a letter to Hayes, he wrote: “As an overwhelming, unavoidable fact of our time, it goes deeper than anything my generation has known, even deeper, I’m afraid, than Kennedy’s murder. No matter when it ends or how it ends, it will leave a mark on this country like the trail of slime that a sand slug leaves, a lasting taint.” Herr was in Vietnam during the TET Offensive and “Hell Sucks” was the first of several devastating pieces of reportage he wrote for the magazine, later collected in his seminal book, Dispatches. Herr later contributed to the writing of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.



-Alex Belth, Esquire Contributing Editor

There is a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon, and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'll lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. The map is a marvel, especially absorbing because it is not real. For one thing, it is very old. It was left here years ago by a previous tenant, probably a Frenchman since the map was made in Paris. The paper has buckled, and much of the color has gone out of it, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicts. Vietnam is divided into its older territories of Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, and to the west, past Laos and Cambodge, sits Siam, a kingdom. That's old, I told the General. That's a really old map.

The General is drawn to it too, and whenever he stops by for a drink he'll regard it silently, undoubtedly noting inaccuracies which the maps available to him have corrected. The waters that wash around my Indochine are a placid, Disney blue, unlike the intense, metallic blues of the General's maps. But all of that aside, we both agree to the obsolescence of my map, to the final unreality of it. We know that for years now, there has been no country here but the war. The landscape has been converted to terrain, the geography broken down into its more useful components; corps and zones, tactical areas of responsibility, vicinities of operation, outposts, positions, objectives, fields of fire. The weather of Vietnam has been translated into conditions, and it's gone very much the same way with the people, the population, many of whom can't realize that there is an alternative to war because war is all they have ever known. Bad luck for them, the General says. As well as he knows them (and he knows them well), he seldom talks about them except to praise "their complexity, their sophistication, their survivability." Endearing traits.

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Everyone is terribly sorry about what the war is doing to Vietnam and the Vietnamese, especially since the cities have been brought into it, although somehow most of the official expressions of grief have about them that taint of Presidential sorrow, turning a little grinny around the edges. The Tet Offensive changed everything here, made this an entirely different war, made it Something Else. ("Nonsense," a colonel told me. "We're just doing the same things in the cities that we've done in the boonies, why … for years!" He was not the same man who said, "We had to destroy Bentre in order to save it," but he might have been. He'd be hip to that.) Before Tet, there was some clean touch to jungle encounters, some virtue to their brevity, always the promise of quick release from whatever horror there was. The war went on in bursts, meeting engagements; and covering it—particularly in the Highlands and the Delta, II Corps and IV Corps—you were always a tourist, a tripper who could summon up helicopters like taxis. You would taxi in, the war would break over you suddenly and then go away, and you would taxi out. Enough chances were taken to leave you exhilarated, and, except for the hangovers that any cheap thrill will give you, it was pleasant enough. Now, it is awful, just plain awful, awful without relief. (A friend on The New York Times told me that he didn't mind his nightmares so much as his waking impulse to file on them.) It has finally become that kind of conventional war that the Command so longed for, and it is not going well. And for every month that it continues not going well, the scope of its destruction is enlarged. We are not really a particularly brutal people, certainly no more brutal now than we've been in other wars, acquiring it as the war goes on. But our machine is devastating. And versatile. It can do almost everything but stop.

And after all these years, we were caught in midwinter with the blunt truth that our achievement in Vietnam had been less than epic, a fact that touched everyone but the men who run the war. It became finally clear that General Westmoreland did not understand this war ("This is a different war than Americans have ever been asked to fight," he told the Examining Angels. "How is it different?" they asked. "Well, you know, it's just … different"), and he was asked to leave it. The immediate official response was manic; after years and years of posing along the rim, the Mission joined hands and leapt through the Looking Glass. It was as though Swift's vault had been plundered to meet the public doubt. They trotted out their kill ratios, their curious estimates of enemy morale (there wasn't any), their poor, salvaged shards of Pacification (that good American idea; it would have worked wonderfully in New Mexico), strange redemption profiles of the countryside's lost security. The same incantations, the heavies, moderates and lights of this statistic-obsessed war, were sung again, and optimism was spent at the same excessive rate which we had previously maintained in the expending of ordnance. This antic Thumbs-Upmanship was best pegged by a British correspondent who compared it all to the captain of the Titanic announcing, "There's nothing to be alarmed about, ladies and gentlemen. We're only stopping briefly to take on some ice." And I remembered an Indian lady I once knew who shipped a trunk to her family in Calcutta. She had lost the key but found another, the key to one of her closets, and she mailed that on after the trunk. She knew it wouldn't open the trunk, but she so wanted it to work that she sent it anyway. Strange story, but I expect it might touch our Ambassador, and possibly even our former Commanding General.

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When the battle for Hué was all over, they entered it into the records, gauged its terrible cost and battlegrammed it, so that it took on the dry, tactical stamp of the West Point Atlas of American Wars. When future observers come to it, it will seem that some order had been apparent during the twenty-seven days that it took to get the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces out of the Imperial City, and that will not be exactly the truth. Hué was not the bloodiest battle of the Vietnam war (unless you enter in the more than four thousand civilian dead and the tens of thousands who were wounded, not likely in any forthcoming revised-edition of the W.P.A.O.A.W.), but it was the hardest and the bitterest, and for those of us who were a part of it, even the coldest chronicles will be enough to recall the texture of its dread. If the war was changing, Hué was that turn of the screw which locked the new terms into place for good, taking you beyond that cutoff point where one war becomes just like all other wars. You would get twinges of this feeling any time that you were on the line, with the troops; but still, before Hué, you thought of yourself as a dove or a hawk, felt that our involvement was criminal or proper, obscene or clean. After Hué, all of your lines of reasoning turned into clumsy coils, and all of the talk got on your nerves. Hué finally gave you what you had expected, half yearned for, in the days of the war that ended with the Offensive. It got up memories, vicarious enough, stored from old copies ofLife magazine, old movie newsreels, Pathé sound tracks whose dirge-disaster music still echoed: the Italian Campaign, the fight for the Reservoir, gruesome camp, evocations of '44 and '50.

They all have that wild, haunted, going-West look that says it is perfectly correct to be here where the fighting is worst.

So we sat there, grinning at the bad weather and the discomfort, sharing the first fear, glad that we were not riding point or closing the rear because, man, the middle is good. They had been hitting our convoys regularly, and a lot of the trucks had been turned back. The houses that we were passing so slowly made the best kind of cover for snipers, and one B-40 rocket could have made casualties out of a whole truckload of us. All the Grunts were whistling and no two were whistling the same tune, and it sounded like a locker room just before a big game. A friend of mine, Sergeant Dale Dye, a Marine correspondent, sat with a tall yellow flower sticking out of his helmet cover, a really outstanding target, the kind of idiosyncracy the Marines will indulge in. His eyes rollicked, and below his big moustache his wicked, shy smile said, "Oh yes, Charlie's got his shit together here, this will be oh-so-bad, indubitably." It was the same smile I saw later when a sniper's bullet tore up the wall two inches above his head inside the Citadel. Odd cause for merriment in anyone but a Grunt.

There's something you see in the faces of Marines that you'll never see in the Army, some extra character etched in by the training and by more hard times than you'd believe, by constant intimidation, by the widespread conviction that you will get yours if you hang in there long enough. They're each of them like the hardest man on the block (You ain't been cut, you ain't my man) and they all have that wild, haunted, going-West look that says it is perfectly correct to be here where the fighting is worst, where you won't have half of what you'll need, where it is colder than the Nam ever gets. To pass the time, I started reading the stuff they'd written on their helmet covers and flak jackets. There were the names of campaigns and the names of their girls, nicknames (The Entertainer, The Avenger, Short Time Safety Moe), the slogans that touch on their lonely, severe fantasies (Born to Lose, Born to Raise Hell), and general graffiti (Hell Sucks, Time is On My Side, Yossarian Lives, Just You and Me God—Right?). There was nothing on the truck as good as the scrawl on the wall in Khesahn that said, "I Think I'm Falling In Love With Jake," but it passed the time.

And they are all giving you that mock-astonished look. "You mean you don't have to be here? And you're here?" But they are glad you're here, really very grateful. "Hey, Esquire! Hey, you want a story, man? Write this: I'm up there on 881, this was May, I'm up there walkin' the ridgeline an' this Zip jumps up smack into me, lays this AK-47 fuckin' rightinto me, only he's so surprised I got my whole clip off 'fore he knew how to thank me for it. Grease one." After twenty kilometers of this, in spite of the roiling dark sky ahead, we could see the smoke coming up from the far side of the river, from the Citadel of Hué.

The bridge was down that spanned the canal dividing the village of An Cu and the southern sector of Hué, blown the night before by the Vietcong, and the forward area beyond the opposite bank was not thought to be secure, so we bivouacked in the village for the night. It had been completely deserted, and we set ourselves up in empty hootches, laying our poncho liners out over the litter of shattered glass and brick. At dusk, while we were all stretched out along the canal bank eating dinner, two Marine gunships came down on us, strafing us, sending burning tracers up along the canal, and we ran for cover, more astonished than scared. "Way to go, mother-lover, way to pinpoint the motherin' enemy," one of the Grunts screamed, and he set up his M-60 machine gun in case they came back. "I don't guess we gotta take that shit." Patrols were sent out, guards posted, and we went to the hootches to sleep. For some reason, we were not even mortared that night.

The next morning we knew that the area must have been secured beyond a reasonable doubt, because the A.R.V.N, were there. Good little fighters, the A.R.V.N.; ask any U.S. adviser in the field. Most of them here were not even armed. They needed both hands free for their work that morning, which consisted of thoroughly combing every house and store in the village, turning out drawers, tipping over chests and urns, raiding chicken coops and liquor cabinets, kicking in all the glass cases they could find, and forcibly relieving refugees on the road of radios, wine, ducks, clothing, anything. What they couldn't carry, they wore. One soldier moved up the road in an old felt hat that fell down over his eyes and a blue gabardine overcoat at least eight sizes too large, so that it trailed around him in the mud as he walked. I thought he was going to ask me the way to Floogle Street, but he only smiled proudly at his good luck and ducked into one of the shops.

They all knew how bad it was, the novelty of fighting in the streets had become a nasty, spooky joke, and not many of them really believed they'd ever get out alive.

It was the same after we'd crossed the canal on a two-by-four and started walking in. We tried to flag down a lift, but the jeeps all seemed to be driven by A.R.V.N. officers out on organized looting parties. We walked along in the open toward the river, talking in an offhanded way about how superb the N.V.A. snipers were supposed to be, until we came across the very first of the hundreds of civilian dead that we were to see in the next weeks: a little girl who had been hit while riding her bicycle and an old man who lay arched over his straw hat. They'd been lying out like that for over a week, and for the first time I was grateful for the cold.

Along the Perfume River's south bank there is a long, graceful park that separates Hué's most pleasant avenue, Le Loi, from the riverfront. People will talk about how they'd sit out there in the sun and watch the sampans moving down the river, or watch the girls bicycling up Le Loi, past the villas of officials and the French-architected university buildings. Many of those villas had been destroyed and much of the university permanently damaged. In the middle of the street a couple of ambulances from the German Mission had been blown up, and the Cercle Sportif was covered with bullet holes and shrapnel. In the park itself, four fat green dead lay sprawled around a tall, ornate cage, inside of which sat a small, shivering monkey. One of the correspondents along stepped over the corpses to feed it some fruit. (Days later, I came back to the spot. The corpses were gone, but so was the monkey. There had been so many refugees and so little food then, and someone must have eaten him.) The Marines of 2/5 had secured almost all of the central south bank and were now fanning out to the west, fighting and clearing one of the major canals. We were waiting for some decision on whether or not U.S. Marines would be going into the Citadel itself, but no one had any doubts about what that decision would be. Didn't it always come to that with the Grunts? Didn't it, every goddam time? We sat there taking in the dread by watching the columns of smoke across the river, receiving occasional sniper rounds, infrequent bursts of .50 caliber, watching the Navy L.C.U.'s on the river getting shelled from the wall. One Marine next to me was saying that it was just a damned shame, all them poor people, all them nice-looking houses. He was looking at the black napalm blasts and the wreckage along the wall. "Looks like the Imperial City's had the schnitz," he said.

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It stayed cold for the next ten days, cold and dark, and that damp gloom was the background for the footage that we all took out of the Citadel. The little sunlight there was caught the heavy motes of dust that blew up from the wreckage of the East Wall, held it until everything you saw was filtered through it. And most of what you saw was taken in from unaccustomed angles, prone positions or quick looks from a crouch; lying flat out, hearing the hard dry rattle of shrapnel scudding against the debris around you, listening to the Marine next to you who didn't moan, "Oh my God, Oh Sweet Jesus, Oh Holy Mother save me," but who sobbed, instead, "Are you ready for this? I mean, are you ready for this?" Once, when the noise from a six-round mortar attack stopped, I heard some singing in back of me. There were three Grunts huddled together holding onto their helmets, looking more mischievous than scared. "We gotta get out of this place," they sang, "if it's the las' thing we ever do-woo." With all of that dust blowing around, the acrid smell of gunpowder would hang in the air for a long while after fire fights, and there was also some CS gas that we'd fired at the N.V.A. blowing back in over our positions. It was impossible to get off a clean breath with all of that going on, and of course there was that other smell too, that most special of all smells that came up from shallow graves and from shattered heaps of stone wherever an air strike had passed. It held to the lining of your nostrils and worked itself into the weave of your fatigues, and weeks later, miles away, you would wake up from a dream in the middle of the night and it would be there in the room with you. The N.V.A. had dug themselves so deeply into the wall that air strikes had to destroy it meter by meter, dropping napalm as close as three hundred meters from our positions. Up on the highest point of the wall, on what had once been a tower, I looked across the Citadel's moat and saw the N.V.A. moving quickly among the rubble of the opposing wall. We were close enough to be able to see their faces. A rifle went off a few feet to my right, and one of the figures across the moat started forward and then dropped. A Marine sniper leaned back from his cover and grinned at me.

By the end of that week, the wall had cost the Marines roughly one casualty for every meter taken, a quarter of them K.I.A. 1/5, which came to be known as the Citadel Battalion, had been through every tough battle the Marines had had in the past six months, and now some of its companies were down to below platoon strength. They all knew how bad it was, the novelty of fighting in the streets had become a nasty, spooky joke, and not many of them really believed they'd ever get out alive. Everyone wanted to get wounded.



There was a tough, quiet Negro who called himself Philly Dog. He'd been a gang lord in the streets of North Philadelphia, and in Hué he was the best man to be with, the only one who really understood how it was when you had no cover and no rear. He was better here than the hottest jungle fighter, better than those lean, mean Nam veterans with their proficiency badges for coaxing water out of palm roots, filleting snakes and reading moss. Philly Dog was the only scout you could feel right about in Hué.

"Just hold onto it, man," he'd say. "You doan go out there. That's Charlie." He pointed up the road.

We were in among the makings of a former villa, with only the rear wall still standing. I couldn't see anything up the road past one of our tanks, only a few houses, scattered trees and wires and a gigantic portion of collapsed wall.

"How do you know?" I asked.

"'Cause if I was Charlie, that'd be my spot." And he was right, almost every time.

At night, in the battalion C.P., the Major in command would sit reading his maps, staring vacantly at the trapezoid of the Citadel. It could have been a scene in a Norman farmhouse twenty-five years ago, with candles burning on the tables, bottles of red wine arranged along damaged shelves, the cold in the room, the high ceilings, the heavy ornate cross on the wall. The Major had not slept for five nights, and for the fifth night in a row he assured us that tomorrow would get it for sure, the final stretch of the wall would be taken, and he had all the Marines he needed to do it. And one of his aides, a tough mustang of a first lieutenant, would pitch a hard, ironic smile above the Major's stare, a smile that rejected good news and opted for doom, and it was like hearing him say, "The Major here is full of shit, and we both know it."

Larry Burrows Getty Images

We found a villa near the C.P. and set ourselves up in it for the night. We never stayed in the same area two nights in a row, since it never took the N.V.A. very long to get us zeroed in. In the living room of the villa there were photographs of a Vietnamese family that had been taken in the States; the father in a dark business suit standing somewhere in New York; Mom, Dad and the kids at Disneyland. The Grunts could never get over the fact that there were wealthy Vietnamese, and these pictures filled them with awe. Dale Dye was there (after the sniper had barely missed him, he had gotten rid of that flower), and some of the guys had found a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Usually they'd scarfe up the 7 Crown or the Calvert's and leave four-star cognacs sitting on the shelves, but the champagne intrigued them. Most of them had never tasted it. One tall kid was saying that where he came from, it only got poured at weddings. Dye popped the cork, and one of them went chasing after it, giggling at how gala this was getting to be. Dye passed the bottle to the tall boy, who put it to his lips as if it might go off before drinking it. "It tickles m' nose," he said, and Dye broke up, shaking his head. "It's a good champagne," he said. "Not a great champagne, but a good champagne."

We slept so soundly that night that a sixty-round mortar barrage a little before dawn failed to wake us.

After the Catholic chaplain was killed, the Protestant had to give communion. His name was Takesian, an Armenian from Boston, one of those hip, blunt clerics who loved to talk, as though talking itself contained ritual powers of redemption. He wasn't one of your grizzled battle chaplains, but he was very brave, and very much affected by the particular ugliness of the Hué fighting. It was not physical fear that put him off, but the mood of bitterness that no one seemed to be able to shake, and he would sit for long stretches by himself, staring at the wounded through his thick steel-rimmed glasses. He was using sliced C-ration white bread and canteen water to deliver the sacraments, and some of the Grunts were skeptical about receiving them from a Protestant. "Listen, you silly bastards," Takesian said. "You could all get your ass shot off any time now out there. Do you think God gives a damn how you've been blessed?"

The bodies were stacked together, and there was always a crowd of A.R.V.N. standing around staring, death-enthralled like all Vietnamese.

Sometimes one of the companies would find itself completely cut off, and it would take hours for the Marines to get their casualties out. I remember one Marine with a head wound who finally made it up to the Battalion C.P., only to find himself stuck in a stalled jeep. He finally jumped out of the jeep and started to push it, knowing it was the only way out of there. Most of the tanks and trucks which carried casualties had to move up a long, straight road with no cover and they began calling it Rocket Alley. Every tank the Marines had had been hit at least once there. An epiphany of Hué turned up in John Olson's great photograph in Life, the wounded from Delta Company piled hurriedly on the tank. Sometimes, on the way out to the Battalion Aid Station, the more seriously wounded would take on that bad color, the grey-blue fishbelly promise of death that would spread upwards from the chest and cover the face. There was one Marine who had been shot through the neck, and all the way out the corpsmen massaged his chest. By the time they reached the station, though, he was so bad that the doctor triaged him, passed him over to treat the ones that he knew could be saved, and when they put him into the green canvas body bag there was some chance that he was still clinically alive. The doctor had never been in a position before where he had had to choose like that—there were so many wounded—and he never got used to it. During the lulls, he'd step outside for some air, but it was no better out there. The bodies were stacked together, and there was always a crowd of A.R.V.N. standing around staring, death-enthralled like all Vietnamese. Since they did not know what else to do, and not knowing how it would look to the Marines, they would smile vacantly at the bodies there, and a couple of ugly incidents occurred. The Marines who had volunteered for the body details were overworked and became snappish, ripping packs off of corpses angrily, cutting gear away with bayonets, heaving bodies into the green bags. One of the dead Marines had become stiff and they had trouble getting him to fit. "Damn," one of them said, "didn't this mother have big feet on him?" And he finally forced the legs into the canvas. In the station, there was the youngest-looking Marine I'd ever seen, so young that his parents must have had to sign for him at enlistment. He'd been caught in the knee by a large piece of shrapnel, and he had no idea at all of what they would do with him now that he'd been wounded. He lay out on the stretcher while the doctor explained how he would be choppered back to the Phubai hospital and then put on a plane for Danang, and then flown back to the States for what would probably be the rest of his hitch. At first the boy was sure that the doctor was kidding him, then he started to believe a little of it, and when he knew that it was true, that he was actually getting out, he couldn't stop smiling, and enormous tears of happiness ran down into his ears.

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It was at this point that I began to recognize almost every casualty, remember conversations we'd had days and even hours earlier, and that's when I got out, riding a Medevac chopper with a lieutenant who was covered with blood-soaked bandages. He'd been hit in both legs, both arms, the chest and head, his ears were filled with caked blood, and he asked a photographer named Art Greenspon who was in the chopper if he'd get a picture of him like this so he could mail it to his wife.

But at this point, the battle for Hué was almost over. The Cav was working the northwest corner of the Citadel, and elements of the 101st had come in through what had formerly been an N.V.A. resupply route. Vietnamese Marines and some of the 1st A.R.V.N. Division, who had fought well from the beginning, had been moving the remaining N.V.A. down toward the wall. The N.V.A. flag that had flown for so long over the South Wall had been brought down, and in its place an American flag had been put up, a sight which must have thrilled those most xenophobic of all Vietnamese, the people of Hué. Two days later the Hoc Bao, Vietnamese Rangers for whom this privilege had been reserved, stormed through the walls of the Imperial Palace, but there were no enemy troops left inside. Except for a few corpses that bobbed sluggishly in the moat, most of the dead had been buried. Nearly seventy percent of Vietnam's one lovely city was destroyed, and if the landscape seemed desolate, imagine how the figures in that landscape looked.



There were two official ceremonies marking the expulsion of the N.V.A., both flag raisings. On the south bank of the Perfume River, two hundred refugees from one of the camps were recruited to stand in the rain and watch the G.V.N. flag being run up. But the rope snapped, and the crowd, thinking the V.C. had shot it down, broke up in panic. (There was no rain in the stories that the Saigon papers ran, there was no trouble with the rope, and the cheering crowd numbered thousands.) As for the other ceremony, the Citadel was still thought by most people to be insecure, and when the flag finally went up there was no one there to watch it except a handful of Vietnamese troops.

In the first weeks after the Tet Offensive began, the curfew began early in the afternoon, and was strictly enforced. By two-thirty each day Saigon had the look of the final reel of On the Beach, a desolate city whose long avenues held nothing but refuse, windblown papers, small, distinct piles of human excrement and the dead flowers and spent firecracker casings of the Lunar New Year. Alive, Saigon had been depressing enough, but once the Offensive began it became so stark that, in an odd way, it was invigorating. The trees along the main streets all looked like they'd been struck by lightning, and it became unusually, uncomfortably cold; one more piece of bad luck in a place where nothing was in its season. With so much filth growing in so many streets and alleys, an epidemic of plague was feared, and if there was ever a place that suggested plague, demanded it, it was Saigon in the Emergency. Large numbers of American civilians, the construction workers and engineers who were making it here like they'd never made it at home, began openly carrying weapons, 45's and grease guns and AK's, and no mob of Mississippi sheriff's boys ever promised more bad news. You'd see them at ten in the morning on the terrace of the Continental Hotel, waiting for the bar to open, unable to light their own cigarettes until it did. The crowds on Tu Do Street looked like Ensor processions, and there was a corruption in the air that had nothing to do with government officials on the take. After seven in the evening, when the curfew became total, nothing but police vehicles and M.P. jeeps moved in the streets, except for a few very young children who raced up and down over the rubbish, running newspaper kites up into the chilling wind. Shortly after dark, I could expect to see the headlights of the General's jeep coming up the street toward my apartment.

Larry Burrows Getty Images

The General is a great favorite of the press here. He is commonly thought to be candid, articulate and accessible, which is absolutely the highest compliment the press corps can pay to any member of the American Mission. He is less accessible now that the war has begun to go badly, but he still finds time most nights to drop around for a quick drink, before returning to his headquarters and, I imagine, a late night's work. I have never really understood our growing friendship, since there is not a single point touching the war that we agree on. It is thought by outsiders that the General and I spend our evenings playing chess, but in fact I never learned the game, and its abstractions make the General nervous. My colleagues think that he drinks with me instead of them because I am accredited to a monthly, but of course there's more to it than that. For one thing, the General never condescends to me, while I take a lot of trouble trying not to understand him too quickly. I suppose that we are both, in our own way, aesthetes. The General is an aesthete of insurgency and counterinsurgency, a choreographer of guerrilla activity, and he has been at it a long, long time. Some of the older hands here remember seeing him in Vietnam at the time of the Indochina War. He was a captain then, and he would turn up in odd, remote corners of the country dressed in black pajamas. He is supposed to have spoken fluent Vietnamese then, although he now flatly denies any familiarity with that language, which he will actually mimic quite cruelly, breaking into protracted fits of laughter. It's said that he took a break in service during the early Sixties, two years in which he all but completely disappeared. He has no command designation as such, but is connected vaguely with something called Special Operations, about which he refuses to speak.

One is immediately struck by the clean-lined ruggedness of his features, although the longer you observe him the more you notice something delicate there, some softness behind the eyes that is almost feminine. The eyes are ice-blue but not cold, and they suggest his most interesting trait, an originality of mind that one never associates with the Military, and which constantly catches you off balance. It's impossible to guess his age to a certainty (I'd never think of asking him), but he is probably around fifty.

"How's the war going, General?" I'll ask him.

"You're a correspondent, you tell me."

"Seriously."

"Oh, how does it ever go, Mike? Slowly. Damned slowly."

He accepts his drink, lights a Bastos and sinks into a chair.

"We're hurting him," he says. "We know we're hurting him. What we don't know is how much more of it he can take. We're killing him." He raises his glass. "To absent friends."

We talk about many things: Blake, Mexico, the Beethoven Quartets, Oriental women, the Saints, wines, the Elizabethans, classic automobiles and, obviously, Vietnam, which I don't really understand that well. Before the Offensive, we would argue about whether the American position here was morally defensible. I believed it was not, the General believed it was beside the point. In fact (we never said this, but somehow mutually acknowledged it) the subject bored us both. Now, since Tet, I've been more concerned with whether or not our position is even militarily defensible, and the General is optimistic there. Sometimes, he worries about me, about my safety and, even more, about my sanity. I have what he refers to as "this thing about death," an unhealthy fascination with so much of what I've had to see here. He respects it intellectually (one of our other constant topics is suicide) but finally he finds it morbid and unprofitable. Worst of all, he finds that I have a tendency, when discussing the dead, to not only dwell on them, but to personalize them as well. "That way lies you-know-what," he says, tapping his temple; but he lets me get it out, lets me talk about the victims, about the dead and the disposition of the dead.

I knew a G.I. in Bu Dop who could look at blown-up Vietnamese all day ... but the sight of one quite cleanly killed American made him vomit. The war was a very simple one for him.

The first dead I saw in Vietnam was a Cambodian Mercenary serving with the Special Forces in the Seven Mountains Region of the Delta. He had accidentally shot himself in the head while cleaning his .30-caliber rifle. Mercenaries live in a compound with their families, and this one had his parents, his grandparents and his wife with him at the time. The medics bandaged his entire head so that he looked like something you'd see in relief on an old temple wall, some dead prince, very dignified in repose. The women squatted over his body, and their moaning built up into a terrible wail, falling off and beginning again, hour after hour. Some blood and brine from the wound had seeped through the bandages and filled a small dent in the canvas, so that when they carried him from the stretcher some of it spilled over my boots. "Sorry," one of the medics said. "Got some on you." The next dead that I saw were in a mass of over one hundred, Vietcong who had tried to overrun the perimeter of an outpost of the 25th Infantry Division near Tayninh. They had been stopped by 105's firing fléchette canisters, thousands of steel shafts that cut them up in the most incredible way, leaving them almost unrecognizable as human beings, although you could see that some of them were very young and some were women. In Cantho, on the morning after the Offensive began, there were around forty V.C. piled up at the end of the airstrip, and one of them was a medic who had died huddled over his aid case. One of the Americans worked him loose with his feet, jammed a cigar into the clenched teeth and photographed it. Another American was screaming at a very young dead, almost sobbing, "There, you silly bastard, there! You got it now? You got it?" Americans often admonish the dead like that, particularly the young ones. The bodies were all loaded into the back of a truck, where they lay all day, growing stiff in the positions which they had taken in death. When the truck finally started, one of them fell off the back. He was so rigid that he landed exactly on both knees and one elbow (a perfect three-pointer, one of the guys called it) with no other part of him touching the ground, and he had to be lifted up into the truck like a heavy wrought-iron figure.

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Later that day, in the provincial hospital at Cantho, the friendly dead began accumulating in the corridors. The Vietcong shelled the hospital for over seven hours from Cantho University, which they had captured and held until it was finally bombed flat, and even if we had wanted to leave we couldn't have. They needed help desperately that day. Over four hundred civilian wounded were brought in, most of them children ("Who shot you, V.C. or U.S.?" the Psywar types kept asking), and we had to cleanse the wounds, cut away dead tissue, or just lean on them, hold them still while the surgeons worked. Outside of the operating rooms there were all of those who were beyond saving, already going grey before death. They just waited there, and you could see they knew. There was an odd piece of graffiti up on the wall of one of the hospital rooms, and I passed it a hundred times that day, always meaning to find out who had written it, and why. It said, "How do you feel about decay, Senator?" In spite of the mortars, a number of Vietnamese came into the hospital carrying wounded children, strangers whom they'd found lying out in the streets, and a number of others came in simply to help. At this point in the fighting the IV Corps Commander, General Maim, was absorbed in constructing a solid five-block perimeter around his house, a strange sort of defense plan considering that the most precious region of the country was at stake, and we were not permitted to drive our jeeps through this perimeter because they drew fire. We had to drive instead through sniper-infested sections of the city, frequently through ambushes along the road, and there were certainly a lot of dead to be seen there.

Of course it is much closer to you when the dead are Americans, and closer still when you've known them. I'm always being told about our comparatively heightened regard for human life, and a lot of us here think that it's exclusively American. I knew a G.I. in Bu Dop who could look at blown-up Vietnamese all day, V.C. or friendly, men, women and children, it didn't much matter. "Hell, they ain't people," he said. "Them're Slopes." But the sight of one quite cleanly killed American made him vomit. The war was a very simple one for him, and you can bet that he had a solution for ending it. But we did agree that it was a bad thing that Americans were getting killed. I'd spent enough hours flying out of combat LZ's in choppers shared with the dead. Often enough, they had no faces left at all, and some died with that wincing sucking-in of breath that shows the full pain of it, some with the dreamy smiles of the drowned, and one that I particularly remember with full staring eyes and a look of mighty outrage, like some Old Testament picture of wrath at the injustice of it. Some just get Blown Away, and sometimes, if they can't reassemble a more or less total corpse from the found parts, they will enter it as Missing. "Shitty way to buy the farm," one kid told me.

"Because, General, it's the only war we've got."

For me, though, the very worst dead was a Vietnamese who had been killed near a canal in southern Hué, on the road leading to the Hotel Company C.P. The very top of his head had been shaved off by a piece of debris, so that only the back of his scalp remained connected to the skull. It was like a lidded container whose contents had poured out onto the road to be washed away by the rains. Perhaps something had driven over it, or perhaps it had just collapsed during the ten days or more that it had lain there, but I couldn't get the image of it out of my mind. I spent that afternoon with the commander of Hotel, checking their defense perimeter. He was a great, decent Marine named Captain Christmas. This was not a wealthy section of Hué. The homes were modest, sometimes nothing more than elaborate hootches, but walking around Hotel's positions you could see that the entire section had been planned and landscaped, its arranged pathways decorated with statues, its gardens formally designed. Christmas was very moved by this, and his men had strict orders to respect the homes, the grounds and the people. But when it came to spending the night there, my nerves gave out. The Grunts probably assumed that I was afraid of a mortar attack, which was ridiculous since one could be and usually was mortared almost anywhere in Hué at any time. It was that dead out there with his hinged scalp. I knew that if I stayed here he would drift in over me that night, grinning and dripping, all rot and green-black bloat. After I'd decided to go, I knew that I'd have to pass him again on the way out, and when the time came I forgot my promise and looked back at him one more time....

The General holds up his hand. He's been leaning forward, listening like a crack therapist, and his eyes have gone narrow. He's been tuned into it, all right.

"Yes. Of course," he says. "It's terrible. I didn't really expect it to happen this way. If they'd listened to me then."

"Who? When?"

He shakes his head and a guarded smile comes over his face. Outside, there is a gecko chittering and screaming, and a cluster of magnesium flares are settling down over the perimeter beyond Tan Son Nhut. The General's driver, a giant Khmer called Lurch, is sleeping behind the wheel of the jeep down by the curb.

"Sometimes," the General says, "I think I'm the only man in the world who understands this thing."

"It must be very lonely for you."

"Mike, it comes with the job. But you. If you hate this all so much, why do you stay?"

He has me there. I wait a moment before answering. "Because, General, it's the only war we've got."