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[Untitled, Vietnam]: photo by Clare Love (clare_love42), c.1968; posted 13 September 2008
Of mechanized arms and the man: from an interview with Larry Heinemann, author of Close Quarters (1977):
Q: What did you want to say [in Close Quarters]?
Heinemann: I always tried to talk about the war in terms of the work. It seemed like a good place to start. What struck me about Moby Dick was that Melville talked about what the work was so that you get an honest to God appreciation. There is a reason why the passing of that work is not mourned. Rowing after whales. You’re engaged in slaughterhouse work and you’re up to your eyeballs in blood. I started writing Close Quarters in 1968. I’ll hang the story on the work, the same as Melville. It struck me that folks back here not only did not know what it was like to be in an Army barracks, but also knew nothing about the war as work. In every sort of work there is a literal physical satisfaction that comes over you when a job’s well done, a personal pride. But if you’re an infantryman, your job is to kill people. “Close and engage” the lifers call it. I’ve heard historians refer to it as “state sanctioned murder.” But it’s still murder. And how can you possibly have any good feeling about that? The aftermath of a firefight is all exhaustion, and downrange it’s all meat. In half an afternoon you are standing in a smell like no other in the world. The stink of body count corpses.
I was in mechanized infantry, a sort of junior armored cavalry. We had APCs, armored personnel carriers. Tracks. What exactly was the work? Well, there’s a .50 caliber machine gun that weighs about a hundred pounds and throws a slug about the size of your thumb and can blow your head off at a mile. Joseph Heller’s Snowden in Catch-22 was a fifty gunner. That’s what they used to shoot down Messerschmidts. A very serious weapon. I had never seen an APC before, but learned quickly because I was the driver. I was in a recon platoon, so we had four guys on each track. If you fuck up, three guys hump. You hump, but they hump, too. On the back were two M-60 machine guns. Basically, you’re driving around in a 13-ton bunker. We had Chevy 283 V-8s with a four-barrel carburetor and a blower about the size of a room fan and a 90-gallon gasoline tank. So, you’re always messing with machinery.
So I told stories about night ambushes, search and destroy missions, and firefights large and small. What you do with body count. Smoking grass, drinking ourselves stupid. I never heard the word marijuana until I went to Vietnam, and we smoked it all the time. Stories about how the war worked, the same as you would go at any strange “process.” It’s the same in Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk. He talks about what a helicopter is, for what, the first 60 or 70 pages? And if there’s one symbol of Vietnam it’s the Huey chopper. Mason called it “hauling ass and trash.” We just hauled ass.
Q: I remember a famous photograph of a truck pulling VC bodies behind it.
Heinemann: I don’t need to see the picture. We did that a time or two. You get in a firefight and afterwards go out and do what we referred to as a dismount, just like the cavalry. Searching the bodies and making the count. You tie the heels together with commo wire, which is like extension cord, and drag them out to the road and leave them. There were some outfits that left playing cards but we never bothered with that. The strong inference was, “Fuck with us and this will happen to you.” Sometimes we had to drag the bodies a good long way. That’s what got to me about reading The Iliad. Achilles ties Hector’s corpse to a pair of horses. He gives them a whack on the ass and Hector’s body get dragged round and round the city until there was nothing left but what was tied at the ankles. How’s that for “fuck you?”
We had maybe ten thousand rounds of ammunition, which will last you all day. Crates of hand grenades. M-79 grenade launchers with both high explosive rounds and canister rounds, which were 40-millimeter casings with double ought buck shot. The barrel was eight or nine inches long so you’re walking around with a serious sawed-off shotgun. The M-16s back in those days were junk. I took an M-16 on my first ambush and fired three rounds and it jammed. Fuck this. So after that I took the M-60, the pig, we called it. You really did carry it like Sylvester Stallone (laughs). You tied a long strap to the barrel and the butt plate and slung it over your shoulder, and you’ve got Pancho Villa style bandoleers of ammunition. I had a 12-gauge shotgun for a while, and then an AK-47, which has be the best in the world.
You couldn’t keep an M-16 clean enough. If I ever run into the motherfucker that sent that rifle overseas, I’m going to make short work of him. The other motherfucker I want to talk to is the asshole who sent gasoline-powered APCs. Just behind the driver is a 90-gallon gasoline tank. An engineer told me one gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 19 pounds of TNT and 19 pounds can blow the back of this house off.
Q: How effective was the armor?
Heinemann: It’s inch and a quarter aluminum alloy. Small arms fire will ricochet. My track was all nicked up. By the way, it’s the same armor that they make the Bradley Fighting Vehicle the Army uses nowadays. And they’re both deathtraps. A rocket propelled grenade will go through inch and half aluminum alloy armor plate like spit through a screen. You hit the gas tank, the track goes up like the head of a match, mushroom cloud and all. Happened more than once. The drivers had their bodies separated from their heads. Many drivers got killed or burned to death. I ever run into the fucking genius who sent gas-powered to Vietnam, he and I are going to have a serious discussion. I would gladly do time in prison for the chance of showing Mr. Genius what I think of his scheme.
Q: Diesel wouldn’t do the same thing?
Heinemann: Diesel will burn but it takes more to get it going. The only trick we had was to keep the tank full. That was the myth anyway. The RPG round has a magnesium core which burns of itself because it carries its own oxygen. So if you get whacked with an RPG, the shrapnel will burn right through you. Lots of casualties from that.
Q: It sounds like complicated machinery didn’t work very well. What did work?
Heinemann: We used our bayonets to clean our nails and open our mail. Shotguns never failed. The M-79s were much coveted. The .45 pistols weren’t much good beyond 25 or 30 feet but looked stylish. A lot of guys had personal weapons. A good friend of mine’s father gave him a hand-made Bowie knife. We drove our tracks hard, but they were beaters to start with.
Larry Heinemann in conversation with Kurt Jacobsen, from Logos 2.1, Winter 2003
5th of the 60th [M113 acav APC 5/60th Mechanized Infantry "Bandido Charlie"]. Not sure who the driver was. South of Tan An: photo by Moosejaw2, n.d., posted 27 November 2012
M113 acav 11 ACR "Blackhorse". The 11th Armored Cavalry troops move into position through heavy jungle grass in Vietnam, July 1967 (Al Chang Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 16 April 2007
Road to My Tho. Along the road between Dong Tam, "home" to the 9th Infantry Division, and the city of My Tho in Dinh Tuong Province in Vietnam's Mekong delta in 1968. I shot this with an old Practiflex 35mm camera while riding in a 1 1/4 ton truck up this road: photo by Lance Nix (Lance and Cromwell), November 1968
M113 acav ""E" troop 11 ACR "Blackhorse". Track "C-20". Vietnam, September 1968 (Don McPhail Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 8 June 2012
M113 acav ""C" troop 11 ACR "Blackhorse". Unknown fire support base in Vietnam (James J. Trier Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 27 April 2012
M113 acav "B" troop 17th Cavalry, 82nd Airborne Division "All American". Track "B-34". Somewhere in Vietnam, author unknown: image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 8 June 2012
M113 acav "K" troop 11 ACR "Blackhorse". Vietnam '66-67 (Henry David McInnis Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 7 September 2012
M113 acav "K" troop 11 ACR "Blackhorse". Vietnam '66-67 (Henry David McInnis Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 7 September 2012
M113 acav "A" troop 3/5th Cavalry "Black Knights" 9th Infantry Division "Old Reliables". Near Quang Tri on the DMZ border -- patrol along the 17th Parallel. Vietnam, 1971 (Bruno Barbey Colection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 24 August 2012
M113 acav "A" troop 3/4th Cavalry 25th Infantry Division "Tropic Lightning". Unknown fire support base -- Cu Chi? Vietnam '66-'67 (Phil Hogue Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 1 October 2012
M113 acav 11 ACR "Blackhorse". U.S. soldiers of an armored unit dig in as they advance into Cambodia, about 10 miles north of Katum base in South Vietnam, in May 1970 (Henri Huet Collection): photo 1 May 1970; image by Jerzy Krzeminski
M113 APC "B" Company 1/5th Infantry "Bobcats" 25th Infantry Division "Tropic Lightning". Vietnam '70-'71 (Mike Smith Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 1 October 2012
M132 zippo track 919th Engineer Company "Red Devils" 11 ACR "Blackhorse". Vietnam '69-'70 (R.C. Perea Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 14 August 2012
[Untitled, Vietnam]: photo by Bandido Charlie 36, n.d., posted 27 November 2012
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Two Charlie Company tracks leaving Tay Ninh base camp after a three day standdown: photo by Mario Tarin (mariotarin63), c. 1969-1970, posted 1 January 2008
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Two Charlie Company tracks leaving Tay Ninh base camp after a three day standdown: photo by Mario Tarin (mariotarin63), c. 1969-1970, posted 1 January 2008
APC with .50 cal. going through Bien Hoa, 1967: photo by William Harrell (7th Surgical Hospital), 1967
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A Duster with twin 40 mm guns passing by between the battalion aid station and the ammo dump, Tan Tru, Long An, Vietnam: photo by Dennis 2nd/60th/9th, 1968; posted 3 August 2009
M113 acav 11 ACR "Blackhorse". Probably 919th Engineer Company "Red Devils". Vietnam ['69-'70] (Chester Brozozowski Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 21 June 2012
5th of the 60th Mechanized Infantry, 9th Division. Traveling through Tan An on the way to the air strip: photo by Moosejaw2, n.d., posted 20 December 2012
M-113 "D" Company 16th Armor 173rd ABN. Vietnam (Jacob Thomas Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 4 August 2013
M113 acav "E" troop 1/1st cavalry 23rd Infantry Division "America!" Somewhere in Vietnam (Thomas Dovine Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 24 August 2013
M113 acav 1/61st Infantry Division "Red Diamond". Vietnam, June 1970 (Bud Wagner Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 16 September 2013
M113 acav 1/61st Infantry Division "Red Diamond". Vietnam, June 1970 (Bud Wagner Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 16 September 2013
M113 acav 1/61st Infantry Division "Red Diamond". Vietnam, June 1970 (Bud Wagner Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 16 September 2013
M106 mortar track1/61st Infantry Division "Red Diamond". Vietnam, June 1970 (Bud Wagner Collection): image by Jerzy Krzeminski, 16 September 2013
Alpha 4.2 Mounted [M106 mortar track]. I believe that's staff Sergeant Passmore's hind side: photo by David (dvdrhdgkns), c. 1969, posted 8 November 2009
111th ACR, Quan Loi, Vietnam '69-'70: photo by David McSpadden (DandS McSpadden), c. 1969-1970; posted 15 July 2009
111th ACR, Loc Ninh to Fishhook, Vietnam 1969-1970 [M577 command track]: photo by David McSpadden (DandS McSpadden), c. 1969-1970; posted 15 July 2009