Men Facing Death

BATTLES IN THE MONSOON by S.LA. Marshall. 408 pages. Morrow. $6.95.

Viet Nam is no war for the classic military historian. It offers no vast clash of arms; no divisions sweep and pivot to the grand strategy of latter-day Clausewitzes. Instead there are quick, dirty fire fights--usually on no more than platoon or company scale--set in copses of bamboo and thorn vine so thick that men kill at a range of 10 ft. without having once seen each other. It is a war of leg-shearing booby traps and dung-smeared punji stakes, of professional skill and personal courage. It is also a war that is tailor-made for a writer like S.L.A. Marshall, who can reconstruct a small-unit action so that it takes on the intimate immediacy of a leech beneath a platoon sergeant's collar.

Product of a three-month Viet Nam tour in the summer of 1966, this book follows elements of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and the 101st Airborne Division through the string of Central Highlands skirmishes, ambushes, successes and failures that were known as Operations Crazy Horse, Austin 6, and Hawthorne II. Marshall, at 66 a retired brigadier who once was the youngest American company commander in World War I, viewed most of the terrain and some of the fighting himself, meticulously interviewed survivors and strategists to produce his staccato narrative.

Ominous Evidence. Crazy Horse began quite by accident when a patrol of Montagnard mercenaries, led by a U.S. Special Forces sergeant, "zapped" a North Vietnamese platoon in the mountain massif to the rear of the Air Cav's An Khe headquarters. In a tin box on one of the Communist bodies was a Chinese mortar sight, on others a compass, quadrant and binoculars: ominous evidence that the North Vietnamese might be preparing to clobber An Khe with mortar fire in preparation for an assault. Into the mountains swept chopper loads of Air Cavalrymen to "spoil" the Red attack before it could be mounted.

Though the Air Cav ultimately drove an entire North Vietnamese regiment off the hills, it paid a bloody price. On one landing zone--"a burned-off, trampled and rubble-strewn glacis about double the size of a basketball court" --an Air Cav platoon led by Sergeant Robert L. Kirby, a slight, solemn, 29-year-old Los Angeles Negro, was ambushed by a full company of North Vietnamese. With the platoon was Look Editor Sam Castan, 32, working on a story about "the thoughts of men facing death." Kirby managed a quick radio call for help before taking four shell fragments in the head that somehow failed to kill him or even knock him out. Most of the platoon, though, was wiped out in the first assault. Kirby and a few survivors, including Castan, fought their way out of the encirclement behind a barrage of hand grenades. All of them were wounded at least twice. Castan, belatedly armed with Kirby's .357 Magnum pistol, disappeared into the man-high elephant grass and was gunned down. His film of the doomed platoon was found days later on a dead Red. Kirby, who was carrying only a flare pistol, escaped by blasting a skirmisher between the eyes with his last flare. One of his buddies survived by playing dead. It was not surprising that the deception fooled the enemy troops: a Red bullet had torn through his left ear and out his nose.

Deeper Meaning. Marshall's other accounts are equally graphic: the "perfect ambush" of a Communist column by American Claymore mines, which so shredded the enemy that a full body count could only be made by tallying weapons; the "long patrol" of Sergeant Robert Grimes Jr., another brave Negro, who took his men deep into Red territory--each armed with 800 rounds of ammo and plenty of Tabasco sauce (a favorite condiment for cold C rations); a "checkerboard" search through thick jungle by the 101st Airborne, which finally pinned down and slaughtered 400 North Vietnamese in log bunkers.

"How many other bodies were entombed under the shattered walls and roofs of the hilltop bunker line is beyond saying," writes Marshall. "The victors had no wish to delve and dig for the sake of such meaningless statistics. The war in Viet Nam is so little understood by their countrymen that the relative death rate of the two sides is given wholly disproportionate emphasis." After reading this book, those statistics take on a much deeper meaning.

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