The Tet Offensive

[a_kleber]

Tobias Wolff в своем автобиографическом романе "In Pharao's Army" описывает, как началось и закончилось знаменитое Тетское Наступление - это когда северовьетнамские коммунисты вошли во все города Вьетнама, методически перерезали (расстреляли) по заранее приготовленным спискам огромное количество "врагов народа", а также массово аттаковали все враждебные фортпосты. Очень личное описание "изнутри" (он был военным советником при южновьетнамском батальоне, дислоцированном рядом с провинциальным городом Май То). И выводы очень четкие. Но Тобиас вообще как снайпер пишет - специализуется на меткости наблюдений и почти достоевских саморазоблачениях. Не поленилась оцифровать всю главу целиком:

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THE LESSON

They had been coming into My Tho for weeks. The Vietnamese army didn't know, the American advisers didn't know. The town was full of them and nobody said a word. I couldn't forget that afterward - not a word of warning from anyone. For weeks they were all around us, on the streets, in the restaurants, gathering for the great slaughter and tasting the pleasures of the town until it began.

Certain scenes acquire piquancy in afterthought. Just before Tet a carnival established itself in a park along the river. Sergeant Benet and I stopped there one night and wandered among the games, the puppet shows, the jugglers and fire eaters. There was a dinky shooting gallery with a couple of antique .22s, and I lingered to try my hand. A stoop-shouldered man, tall for a Vietnamese, took the place to my right. A pair of younger fellows stood behind him and cheered him on. He shot well. So did I. We didn't acknowledge that we were competing, but we were, definitely. Then I missed some and quit for fear I'd miss more. "Good shooting," I said to him. He inclined his head and smiled. It might have been an innocent smile, but I think of it now as a complicated, terrible smile.

By pure dumb luck I was in my bunk at the battalion when the killing started. If I'd been in town or on the road, end of story. The first American they killed was a young guy from headquarters who was driving home from a bar after midnight. He probably felt safe because of the annual holiday cease-fire. They caught him on the road and shot him. Instead of leaving his body, they lugged it around for the entire time they held My Tho. Maybe they thought he'd prove valuable in some future exchange of the dead, or maybe they just couldn't bring themselves to part with such a trophy. He was very big. In the end they did get some use out of him, as a kind of portable bulwark to hide behind and shoot from. When his body was found afterward, Doc Macleod told me, "he was so full of holes you could have played him like a fucking ocarina."

They were happy to kill any Americans who fell into their hands but they were more efficient at killing Vietnamese. They'd come prepared with lists of local politicians, teachers, civil servants, anyone named by their agents as insufficiently friendly to the cause. Early that morning, when they could count on the people's enemies being asleep in their beds, execution squads went from door to door, rounding them up. Meanwhile their political cadres took control of the streets and their sappers began to attack police stations and military barracks. All this we found out later. When the assault, the so-called Tet Offensive, first began we didn't know what was going on.

The firing woke us up. It was about three-thirty, four in the morning, January 31, 1968, which I think of now as a kind of birthday; the first day in the rest of my life, for sure. Sergeant Benet and I hustled outside and saw flares going up all over the town. Soldiers from the battalion were running past us, carbines in hand, heading for the perimeter. I said I didn't like this. I could hear myself say it: "I don't like this."

We got dressed and walked over to Major Chan's headquarters. His staff officers were carrying out tables and chairs, map cases, radios. One of them told the major we were there. He came to the door and said, "Later. You come back later." When I asked him for a situation report, he said, "Later. Now is too busy, yes," and went back inside.

Sergeant Benet and I spent the morning cleaning our weapons and listening to the radio. In this way we learned that My Tho was in enemy hands and most of our division under attack. We also found out that the same thing was happening everywhere else. All the towns of the Delta—My Tho, Ben Tre, Soc Trang, Can Tho, Ca Mau, Vinh Long, all of them— were full of VC. Every town and city in the country was under siege. Every airfield had been hit. Every road cut. They were in the streets of Saigon, in the American embassy. All in one night. The whole country.

I could barely take in what I was hearing. To make sense of it was especially hard because nothing could be put to use, or translated into hope. Even the official optimism of the Armed Forces Radio announcers couldn't patch over the magnitude of the facts they were reporting, and when we tuned in the regular military frequencies we heard nothing but shock and frenzied pleas for support. Nobody was getting any support because the supporting units needed support themselves. That meant we couldn't get relief from anyone, which was sorry news for us. The battalion was undermanned to begin with, and a lot of our troops had gone home for Tet. We would have to defend this ridiculously exposed piece of land with a skeleton crew and without a prayer of help from the air or the ground. We were completely on our own.

Sergeant Benet and I listened to the radio and said little. He was lying on the couch, gazing up at the ceiling, which was a kindness. I didn't want him to sec how I was taking this because I didn't really know how I was taking it. I felt as if I were looking on from a great distance. As the morning passed I got hungry and made a sandwich, still listening. I became aware of my hands and what they were doing. How strange it is to spread mayonnaise. It can be the strangest thing you've ever done. I ate a few bites and had to stop, my mouth was so dry.

Major Chau sent for us. He was in the bunker where he'd set up his command post. "This is too bad," he said. "You can get air support, yes?"

"No. Nothing."

"Yes! Come. Look." He showed me the map, tapping with his pointer, trying to make me see the difficulty of our position. When he finally understood that I couldn't call down jets if we were attacked, he made a hissing noise and bared his teeth. He laid the pointer on the map and fumbled out a Marlboro but couldn't fit it into the holder he used. He looked down at the cigarette and the holder, then turned and walked outside. A few minutes later he came back and acted as if nothing had happened. Sergeant Benet and I leaned over the map with him and his staff officers, trying to imagine a plan of some kind, but none of us had anything much to say.

I felt hollow, loopy. I was dull and slow-tongued, the others as well. What we did was stand around and wait for something to happen.

All this time we could hear the sound of the shooting in My Tho.

A shell exploded somewhere outside. We hit the deck, our mouths twisted in dire grins. Two more went off almost together. They weren't very close, but I felt the shock in my chest. We waited for the next one. Then we stood up again, very, very slowly. I was wide-awake ...

The process by which we helped lay waste to My Tho seemed not of our making and at all times necessary and right. As the battalions in town came under more and more pressure, we began to drop shells on the buildings around them. We bombarded the old square surrounding General Ngoc's headquarters, where he and the province chief were holed up with their staff officers. There were pockets of terrified government officialdom and soldiery huddled throughout the town, and every time one of them got through to us on the radio we put our fire right where he wanted it, no questions asked. We knocked down bridges and sank boats. We leveled shops and bars along the river. We pulverized hotels and houses, floor by floor, street by street, block by block. I saw the map, I knew where the shells were going, but I didn't think of our targets as homes where exhausted and frightened people were praying for their lives. When You're afraid you will kill anything that might kill you. Now that the enemy had the town, the town was the enemy ...

For the next couple of days we plastered the town. Then the jets showed up. Their run into My Tho took them right over our compound, sometimes low enough that we could see the rivets on their skin. Such American machines, so boss-looking, so technical, so loud. Phantoms. When they slowed overhead to lock into formation the roar of their engines made speech impossible. Down here I was in a deranged and malignant land, but when I raised my eyes to those planes I could sec home. They dove screaming on the town, then pulled out and banked around and did it again. Their bombs sent tremors pulsing up through our legs. When they used up all their bombs they Hew off to get more. Flames gleamed on the underside of the pall of smoke that overhung My Tho, and the smell of putrefaction soured the breeze, and still we served the guns, dropping rings of ruination around every frightened man with a radio transmitter.

None of this gave me pause. Only when we finally took the town back, when the last sniper had been blasted off his rooftop, did I see what we had done, we and the VC together. The place was a wreck, still smoldering two weeks later, still reeking sweetly of corpses. The corpses were everywhere, lying in the streets, floating in the reservoir, buried and half buried in collapsed buildings, grinning, blackened, fat with gas, limbs missing or oddly bent, some headless, some burned almost to the hone, the smell so thick and foul we had to wear surgical masks scented with cologne, aftershave, deodorant, whatever we had, simply to move through town. Hundreds of corpses and the count kept rising. Gangs of diggers sifted through the rubble, looking for survivors. They found some, but mostly they found more corpses. These they rolled up in tatami mats and left by the roadside for pickup. One day I passed a line of them that went on for almost a block, all children, their bare feet protruding from the ends of the mats. My driver told me that we'd bombed a school building where they had been herded together to learn revolutionary history and songs.

I didn't believe it. It sounded like one of those stories that always make the rounds afterward. But it could have been true.

Now that the danger was past I could permit myself certain feelings about what we had done, but I knew even then that they would vanish at the next sign of danger. How about the VC? I used to wonder. Were they sorry? Did they love their perfect future so much that they could without shame feed children to it, children and families and towns—their own towns? They must have, because they kept doing it. And in the end they got their future. The more of their country they fed to it, the closer it came.

As a military project the Tet tailed; as a lesson it succeeded. The VC came into My Tho and all the other towns knowing what would happen. They knew that once they were among the people we would abandon our pretence of distinguishing between them. We would kill them all to get at one. In this way they taught the people that we did not love them and would not protect them; that for all our talk of partnership and brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them, and that we would kill every last one of them to save our own skins. To believe otherwise was self-deception. They taught that lesson to the people, and also to us. At least they taught it to me.

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