Heart of a Soldier

基本介紹

• 中文名稱：Heart of a Soldier
• 裝幀：Paperback
• 定價：USD 22.95
• 作者：James B. Stewart,James Stewart
• 出版社：Simon & Schuster
• 出版日期：2003-5-6
• ISBN：9780743244596

媒體推薦

The Baltimore Sun Humming with tension, foreign adventure, and the clash of arms, Heart of a Soldier has all the ingredients of an Indiana Jones movie. -- Review

作者簡介

James B. Stewart is the author of the bestselling Blind Eye, Blood Sport, and the blockbuster Den of Thieves. Former Page One editor of The Wall Street Journal, Stewart won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his reporting on the stock market crash and insider trading. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and SmartMoney. He lives in New York.

目錄

Contents

Prologue Peachey and Dravot Winds of War Heart of a Lion American Dream Hard Corps In the Valley of Death Charge of the Light Brigade Home front Not to Reason Why Towers in the Sky The Target Soul Mates We Were Soldiers A Day to Be Proud The Courage to Heal Epilogue: You'll Remember Me by Susan Rescorla

Notes and Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

文摘

Chapter 7: Charge of the Light Brigade

A letter Dan Hill had sent to Larry Hess was returned to Hill the same week at Fort Campbell. Stamped on the unopened letter was "Search," meaning that the addressee couldn't be found. Hill knew that meant only one thing: Hess was dead.

After Rescorla, there was no man Hill had felt closer to than Hess. He had given Larry the copy of "If" that Rescorla had given to him. Now he was haunted by the notion that the heroism celebrated by Kipling and extolled by Hill had led Hess to his death. Hill knew Hess had just turned twenty. He thought of Hess's jazz guitar music that no one would hear again, and he wept. Late that night, Hill got a bottle of Jack Daniel's bourbon, and he started drinking. He kept going until he had downed the entire bottle. He donned his camouflage fatigues, rifle, and pistol, painted his face with camouflage grease, and began rampaging through the house.

Hill awakened his wife, Pat, who found him fully armed with bloodshot eyes, looking crazed. She'd never seen him in such a state. "Leave me alone!" he yelled. He looked as if he were about to use his gun on himself. Frightened, she was about to call the military police. But then Hill passed out.

The next morning, he had a ferocious hangover and his memory was blank. "What happened?" he asked his wife.

"You nearly killed yourself," she said.

Soon after, Hill saw press reports about a major battle in the Ia Drang valley and saw that Rescorla's battalion was involved. On ABC News, General Westmoreland said, "I'd characterize this entire campaign as being the most successful of this conflict thus far. I feel that success is really unprecedented." But Hill was troubled by reports that there might have been more than three hundred American casualties.

Hill wrote Rescorla immediately, asking what had happened and if he knew anything about Larry Hess. From An Khe, Rescorla reported that the battles of X-ray and Albany were "the goddamnedest thing I've ever been part of in my life." Nothing he experienced in Cyprus or Africa had prepared him for warfare on this scale, with so many casualties. "Now I know why the guys in World War One and Two came back shell-shocked," he wrote. "I've never seen such carnage in my life." And he told Hill what he knew about Hess: that he'd been killed at Albany, charging valiantly into enemy fire, wounded three times before he fell.

Unlike his hangover, Hill couldn't so easily shake off his grief. He began badgering the assignment officer at the Pentagon, asking for immediate assignment to Vietnam. He wanted to avenge Hess's death.

*

Hill landed in Saigon on January 19, 1966. From the air the landscape was beautiful: verdant, lush, with rice paddies and irrigation ditches forming a patchwork quilt stretching to the distant mountains. After landing, Hill reported to Camp Alpha, the American base outside the city hastily built to accommodate the huge infusion of troops. Hill found it fly infested, filthy, the latrines overflowing. He left almost immediately to explore Saigon.

It wasn't the gracious former colonial capital he had expected, though he could see that it had once been beautiful, with grand boulevards and palm-lined streets. But now it was noisy, dirty, and crowded, overflowing with refugees camping in the streets, fleeing the fighting in the countryside and drawn by the American dollar. After fighting off scores of pimps and ragged children begging for candy and cigarettes, Hill checked into the Saigon Hotel and had a shower. Still wet, he wiped the soap from his eyes and saw that a young woman had come into his room. She was naked. Hill said there must be some mistake and insisted that she dress and leave. He resumed his shower "in a rather disturbed state of mind," as he later wrote in his diary.

Four days later, Hill reported to the American base at Tuy Hoa, located about an hour's helicopter ride south of An Khe. It was even closer to the coast than An Khe, and Hill briefly enjoyed swimming in the South China Sea off of the beautiful white sand beaches adjacent to the base. But he was quickly thrown into action. Like Rescorla's platoon at An Khe, Hill's unit was so well disciplined and effective that it drew the heaviest assignments and was often the first to land in a hostile area. By now, "search and destroy" was standard operating procedure, and day after day, Hill and his men were sent by helicopter into unfamiliar landscapes, told to pursue and kill the enemy, then return for a short rest before being sent out again.

Hill kept a diary of those early months in Vietnam. Inside the front cover he wrote: "This book is dedicated to 2nd Lieutenant Larry Hess, who had all those soldierly traits and qualities, that great generals strive to achieve, and who demonstrated every one of them, right up to the day he valiantly gave his life for his country, leading his troops at An Khe, Republic of Vietnam."

In many entries Hill recorded the peculiar mix of excitement and dread that characterized their missions: "How men can thrill at the knowledge that soon they may be in pitched battle, struggling to stay alive or to kill their opponents, I don't know. But it was there. It came and went, now jubilation, now fear, now thrill, now anxiety. Maybe here is the very cause of war: the human lust for adventure, the slight touch of insanity within the normally sound mind that challenges one to risk death in a mortal contest with another man or nation."

It didn't take long for Hill to realize that Vietnam was a new kind of warfare, where the tactics he had learned in postwar Europe and the code of honor that went with them seemed irrelevant. The enemy was indistinguishable from the population they were meant to save; civilians one day were Viet Cong the next; areas supposedly "pacified" reverted to enemy control the instant the Americans and their rifles, grenades, and mortars left. On one mission, Hill's platoon was ordered to assault a village in which eighteen North Vietnamese regulars were reported to have taken refuge. Hill ordered his machine gunners to open up on the village, then he and his troops warily advanced to the first buildings, expecting the enemy soldiers to open fire on them at any moment.

Instead, "out of the houses came a bunch of women and children of all ages," Hill wrote. "There were a few old men, one so sick he couldn't move and had to be carried by two of the younger women. I held my breath and my heart stopped. I was sorry now I had the troops go in firing and feared that I had been responsible for many, many women and children being killed or injured. When we finished searching the village we found only a cow had been hit. I was weak with relief." On another mission he wasn't so lucky. As he and his men searched a village, a figure dressed in the black pajamalike garments of the Viet Cong had run into his path, carrying what looked like a rifle. Hill had shot instinctively. When he reached the body, it turned out to be a woman carrying a broom.

"Why do women and children have to get involved?" Hill wrote in his diary. "Soldiers have asked themselves this for centuries. This is the reason soldiers hate war more than anyone else. They see the torn and twisted bodies, smell the death, and rip themselves apart inside for the rounds they fire that kill the innocent, and the ones they don't fire that are the cause of some enemy soldier living to kill a friend."

On one mission, Hill's platoon was ordered into a valley to pursue a Viet Cong battalion that had reportedly taken refuge there. After jumping from the helicopters, they found themselves in "boggy muck" three to four feet deep, "covered in green slime" and infested with leeches. They immediately came under heavy enemy fire from higher positions and called for artillery support. Two volleys struck the enemy positions. Then, "my stomach knotted with the grip of stark naked fear," Hill wrote. An artillery barrage fell short, onto their positions. The explosion threw Hill into the air. When he landed intact, he dug himself into the muck as more rounds landed and shrapnel flew overhead.

"Get that artillery off my ass!" Hill yelled into his radio.

Then American planes arrived, dropping napalm and white phosphorus on the enemy positions, and the hillside erupted in flame. Hill's men began to cheer.

When the smoke cleared, they advanced into the devastated area, which contained a labyrinth of tunnels and caves that had been occupied by enemy troops. But now they were gone. Despite the intense bombardment, Hill was astounded that the caves were intact and there were no enemy bodies. The enemy "may well have suffered not a single casualty, which I now began to suspect," Hill wrote. He radioed for permission to pursue the fleeing troops but was told instead to withdraw. "We have another mission," a senior officer said. They marched back to the landing zone, and the helicopters returned to take them back to camp.

Filthy, hot, covered in sweat, and exhausted, Hill and his men returned to find a television film crew had arrived. The officer motioned Hill aside, out of earshot of the film crew and his men. "What's the big mission?" Hill asked.

"Now look," the officer replied. "You're not going to like this. You're going to take that hill again. They sent out this TV crew to get some film of an attack. I want you to take that hill the same way you did before."

Hill was speechless. He couldn't be serious.

"You understand?" the officer asked.

"No, no. I don't understand," Hill replied. "I took it once. We got away clean. Right now, Charlie is crawling back out of those holes and he's going to zap somebody on this go-around."

"That's enough, Hill," he said sharply.

Hill took a large swig out of the canteen of Jack Daniel's bourbon he always carried. Then he walked over and offered some to his men. "You gents better have a drink," he said.

The canteen was passed around, and no one said anything. Finally one spoke up. "Well, sir, how do the sons of bitches want us to take it for the camera?" he asked.

"How did you know?" Hill asked, incredulous.

"Sir, I...