Bolger Daniel P. - Our year of war: two brothers, Vietnam, and a nation divided

A year ago, none of us could see victory. There wasnt a prayer. Now we can see it clearly like light at the end of a tunnel.

GENERAL HENRI EUGNE NAVARRE

September 28, 1953

T om Hagel hated walking point. He disliked going first, breaking bush, knocking aside wet branches, stepping over fallen logs, slipping around leaning, mossy tree trunks, and all the while watching, listening, feeling, smelling, even tasting, seeking an enemy who knew exactly how to blend into the rotting woodwork. The Vietnamese jungle was greener than green, a riotous, enveloping ocean of foliage, the ground layer thick and tangled from the brown loam floor to a swaying mat of vegetation twice as high as Toms angular, spare six-foot frame. It made for tough slogging. And that was before somebody took a shot at you.

Toms head turned like a gun turret, slow and steady, listening and looking. He reached out, the long fingers on his left hand weaving through leaves and stems, just enough to push aside the abundant greenery. His right hand gripped the trigger region of his black M rifle. Eyes, ears, nose, and fingertips sought anything that did not belong there. An oddly broken branch. A Kalashnikov automatic rifle clicking from safe to fire. The sharp tang of human urine. A gleaming trip wire stretched like a garrote. Hagel had to stay alert for all of those telltale signs and dozens more. He had to do it despite the oppressive heat, the cloying humidity, and the pervading gloom. Not much sunshine filtered down through the soaring, thick tree canopy high above. In the fetid, tangled morass that choked the bottom of this rain forest, it was always dusk. Out there in the dim unending sea of vegetation, beyond sensing, lurked dangers past counting. Tom Hagel knew it only too well. There be monsters.

Yes, Tom Hagel hated walking point. But he was good at it. Nohe was great at it. He kept his rifle company alive. He made sure they won their fights, because those sharp clashes usually started with him. Woe to the thing that did not belong. With one squeeze of his M s trigger, Hagel would level it: rock and roll, full auto, punching out an entire magazine of twenty hot bullets as fast you could snap your fingers. And that would usually do it. The old sergeants, the ones who carried out this brutal business and lived to tell of it, said that he who shot first and in force gained the edge in a murderous jungle ambush. Tom Hagel was all about that edge.

Yet Tom Hagel hated doing it. He detested the war with all his heart. It wasnt just the dull ache of all combat soldiers in all wars, heartily sick of losing their friends, shaken by taking lives of strangers better left alone, and bone-tired from endless draining hours of hunting and being hunted. Tom Hagels disgust went beyond that. He considered the Vietnam War an abomination, an awful deviant strain far removed from Americas best instincts, a pointless bloody scrum on behalf of an utterly corrupt local ally. It was wrong, he said later, with characteristic bluntness. Still Tom Hagel walked point, and did it well.

He did it not for the flag, nor for the cause, such as it was, but for the other American soldiers who counted on him. It fell to this nineteen-year-old to balance the urgent pressure from his captain to move steadily onward and his own hard-earned wisdom to take care with each step. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. That paradoxical phrase made no sense except to a battle-wary rifleman. Tom Hagel was one. The lives he saved would include his own, as well as those of his mates.