#warjournalism

The latest episode of The Oz Katerji Show is out now on YouTube, featuring legendary war photographer Paul Conroy discussing his life, his work, and how he survived the siege of Homs.

Read more:👇

They wind up discussing some of dos Capital’s old dispatches from war zones. I intertwine the complete dispatches into the overall dialogue of the book. Much of the book incorporates real news events, together with dialogue, names and a specific scenarios from my mind.

This below is what will be one of dos Capital’s first-person dispatches, written for some big to-be-determined US magazine of the era -- something like TIME or the New Yorker -- from the Battle of Ia Drang Valley in 1965, which was the first major battle between US forces and North Vietnamese regulars. And yes, this is the battle from the movie ‘We Were Soldiers’.

Again, the book, including the dispatches, are full of non-fiction places and dates, and this one in particular, is partially inspired by a UPI correspondent named Joe Galloway, but the dispatches are fiction with the characters I’ve created.

If you don’t like copious amounts of profanity, I suggest you get over it -- or not read past this period -> .

---

Nov. 17, 1965

By James dos Capital

PLEIKU, VIETNAM

As I landed in Saigon for the first time, I was set taut like a loaded catapult, looking to get out and find some good fighting to cover.

I phoned some US Army intelligence contacts at the US Embassy. Their consensus was that there would likely be heavy fighting soon in the Ia Drang Valley, not far from the city of Pleiku, the US air base there, and to its west, the Vietnam-Cambodian border.

"But I'd advise you to try something a little less sketchy on your first go in-country," one of them cautioned.

I told him I wanted to get in the thick of it, with some serious Viet Cong or NVA regulars, as soon as possible.

The next day, Nov. 13, I was on the first morning C-130 from Saigon to the US forward operating base just outside Pleiku. Once on the ground, I meandered around and talked to the right people and got the skinny on how to get a ride out of the base and to the frontline.

"You don't want to go out there," Sgt. Maxwell Jay, of Erie, New York, told me when I asked him how to get a ride on a chopper to the Ia Drang. "It's a meat-grinder. Every chopper that goes out is coming back loaded with dead and wounded."

That's the type of fighting I was looking for.

"Send me in."

He shook his head. He walked into a command tent. After five minutes, he came out and pointed to a row of Hueys. "You're on the next one out. When the chopper puts you down, ask for Staff Sgt. Berkowitz; he'll put you with a squad you can roll with."

I said thanks, grabbed my bag and started to the choppers.

"Hey!" he yelled. "I'm serious. You might not make it out of there. It's bad; the worst I've seen since I've been here."

I smiled and waved him off and walked to the landing pad and told a captain who was preparing to get in his chopper to deliver a load of rations, ammunition and medical supplies, that the sergeant had cleared me to tag along, if there was room. He looked back to the command tent. With crossed arms, Sgt. Jay shrugged. He looked back at me.

"You don't want to do this." I told him that I did. He paused again, then lost his care. "Fine. It's your body, not mine."

I climbed in and sat on a crate and wrapped my left hand around a steel handle and waited for the chopper to rise. It was a thirteen minute flight. As we got near the landing zone, the chopper and the ones around us dropped to the tops of the trees.

It was warm and humid and everything was green, except for the whites and blacks and tans of human skin.

The chopper came into a clearing that opened to ground that glimmered and sheened. We were was putting down in a rice paddy. One of the pilots turned slightly and yelled over his shoulder that I should get ready to jump out. "We're not landing! We're just going to hover, right off the ground!"

I leaned forward and inched to the edge and watched the mud get closer and closer.

"Now! Go!"

I hesitated and looked to the captain I first spoke to back at Pleiku.

"You're the dumb ass who wants to be here. Get the fuck out of my bird!" I could faintly hear him yell without turning around, keeping his focus on keeping the chopper steady. I pulled at the strap on my bag, stepped out and braced for the five-foot drop. My feet hit and I collapsed to my knees. Several soldiers moved forward and one helped me to my feet. I asked him to identify "Sgt. Berkowitz!?" He pointed into the Sun. "Tall, skinny guy!" he shouted over the chukkas of the chopper blades.

I moved my boots and noted that they were water-logged. I trudged thirty feet and waited for the sergeant to turn around. When he did, his eyes surveyed me and he sighed. He turned and yelled something that I couldn't hear. A soldier splashed through the paddy at speed.

"You're with Duncan! Good luck!"

The corporal looked at me and back to his sergeant. He could tell I was fresh; they both could. And I could tell that they'd both been in country for too long and that I was found to be quite the annoyance. But I also knew that however annoying I seemed, soldiers liked knowing that there was a reporter from a major magazine coming to tell their story to the people back home in the states.

The soldier leaned his head and his body moved toward the squad of soldiers he came from and my body followed. He stopped about 15 feet away from the group, turned to face me and he let out a sarcastic-yet-legitimate sigh.

"I don't know why they put you with me. I don't do nothing special. Only reason I'm a corporal is cause I've managed, well, I've just been lucky not to get killed from when I got here as a private, and after a while, they ran out of people to promote."

I shrugged with my hands and got on to asking him his name.

"Jack. Jack Duncan."

"Where you from, corporal?"

"Carthage, Mississippi. Small town. Next to the Pearl River. Kinda like this Drang River, except... not."

He asked who I was and I told him.

"We ain't in Mississippi no more. We're right in the thick of the shit here, son, and I hate to tell you this, but I'm guessing we're in for it on this jaunt."

I asked him how he knew.

"You get to feelin it after a while. You can smell it. You can sense it. I can't see a gook, but I can sense him. They're here. I feel it. They're watching us. Just waiting for us to walk into something. You come in one of these jungles for the first time and you don't know whether to piss your whole bladder or scream out your lungs from excitement. Your eyes are about to pop out of they sockets, your nostrils are flarin and you're smellin the humidity, you're smellin the leaves, you're hearing pops and cracks, and the pitch-black mud sucks at your boots -- fffssttt, slllkkkp, fffssttt -- and you're trying to process it all while a hundred other guys in your company, who you don't even know yet, cause you just got your unlucky bastard ass airdropped in here, are walkin in with you, and you're askin stupid fuckin questions to guys who've been out here too long, and you're just some grunt who'll probably be dead in a few minutes, and if not, then a few days, so it's just a waste of time for them to answer your questions, but they do it anyway, usually, cause most of them got at least an ounce of hope left that they'll get out, and if the answer to one of your stupid fuckin questions keeps you alive, and keeps them alive, then they figure it's worth it to waste their breath. I know, I've been the dumb ass grunt and now I'm one of the guys who has to deal with these new boys when they come in asking dumb ass questions."

He looked around and pointed at some of the men gathered in a rice paddy.

"He'll be dead by the end of this mission. And him. And him. And him. And him," he said with his arm and pointer finger moving around aimlessly, "and, say, those four guys over by that berm, too, and those twenty guys over there by the drainage ditch will be wounded -- in the head, in the legs, in the body, in the arms, and few of these guys we'll just never see again. Their bodies will just disappear. Look, I've got to where I can pretty much deal with guys dying in front of me, but when one of these boys just woosh, click, boom, vanishes from existence, except for maybe a severed leg, it fucks your mind. One minute you're talkin with em, and another, the human you knew is gone, and you have an impulse to scramble and search for them, cause everythin you know tells you that people don't just disappear like that, but, woo, holy shit, son, they do. They sure the fuck do. Gone."

He lit a cigarette and drew in deep and blew. He offered it to me and started again.

"And the people back home, they got no idea what any of that means. I sure as hell didn't. They'll never have any idea. You can tell ya readers that they could go to the most dangerous place they can think of there in the US, somewhere in LA, or maybe in the Bronx, and go out there at night, with a sign on they chest that says I'm Here To Kill All Y'all, and just walk slowly through there, and they can feel what that's like, and how insane that is, and then know that that doesn't even come close to feelin what it's like to be out here. I been here and I been back and walked around New York while I was there, and you got people runnin around doing crazy shit, and you got some serial killer mother fuckers going around killin people. Add all that into the situation, and that'd be peaceful to me. Tom, Burt and Jimmy over on fourth street would have shit running down they legs, with tears, curled up in balls, and I'd just be smoking a joint, giving out hugs. It'd be a celebration. Peace in the city. I wish I was back there now. Take my ass back to Detroit or Brooklyn or Chicago. I don't care where. Hell, I'd settle for Fresno! I'd walk around in a god damn tutu with pink leggins and beg people to try something stupid. But naw, I'm tiptoein the fuck around here, just waitin for a mine one-ah these gooks set to blow my fuckin feet off, while watchin and smellin and feelin and hopin my front and my six and my one, two, four, eight, ten and any other fuckin number in hopes that if I can't see it, I can hear it and pull a Muhammad Ali in time to not have a bullet tear a nice souvenir in my flesh, and if I'm even more lucky, fast enough to avoid my entire body becomin a souvenir for my momma and daddy worried the fuck about me back home."

He spit and it settled onto the brackish water with tiny ripples. He looked at me briefly, then turned, walked to another soldier, said something and pointed to a tree line. The message was relayed quietly through his squad. He walked back, looked at me and back out to somewhere.

I asked him what he missed about home. A smile cracked his face and he chuckled.

"I miss my wife. Oh, to be in a bed with that woman right now. Hell, I'd take her right here in this paddy, with all y'all watching, for all I care."

I asked him if he wanted me to print that.

"I don't care. I'm not making it out of here alive, anyway."

It caught me off guard, and he could tell, but he continued.

"And my kids. I got a boy and a girl, 2 and 6 months. Jimmy was a little over 1 when I left and I ain't even met Sarah yet."

He pulled pictures out of his wallet and showed me.

"So, anyway, I got something to live for, but some of these boys, they already gone, nothin left to worry about, to want, to care for. They snapped; just zombies now. It's terrible to say this, but I'd wish they'd just get shot or have a leg blown off, so they have an acceptable reason for us to put their ass on a chopper and send em home, cause they're goin to get us all killed while we're tryin to protect them while they sit and stare off in the distance and don't cover nobody or warn no body, cause they're just gone. It's not they're fault. It's what this place does to some of these boys. But they ain't helping nobody being out here just taking up space."

The war journalist Ernie Pyle called it "the accumulated blur" -- the debilitating numbness that many soldiers develop, mental and physical, from the crush of the physiological effect from constant pressure and stress, not just to perform, but to simply survive and keep their buddies alive.

Hands suddenly shot up in succession from across the paddy and everyone took a knee. Guns came up and pointed in all directions.

"You ready to die?" he laughed.

I turned to look at him and said nothing. He was smiling.

"Well, if I don't see you after this…"

He didn't finish his sentence. Gunfire erupted and I hit the ground. Face, hands and body met standing water and wet mud. He splashed down next to me.

"Bet you're regrettin gettin on that Huey now, huh, boy!?" he yelled at me over the sound of bullets whizzing over our heads and other soldiers yelling, trying to communicate in the chaos.

I was.

He flipped over on his back and started dictating back to his squad.

"Stay the fuck down! If you stand up, they'll blow your brains out."

He was still dragging his cigarette. He looked at his watch.

"Shit. Two hours till dusk."

I asked him what we should do.

"I'm not sure yet. Gimme a minute or two."

I was frozen solid in 3-inch water. As much of my head was hard-pressed into the mud as I could force it. The water lapped up and back against the left side of my lips as I stared at the soldier who was dragging and puffing. I leaned my head back and around and saw several men stand and run and dive and shoot in variable across the paddy.

"Webster, what the fuck did I tell you!? Stay your backwoods ass down until I tell you otherwise."

I tucked my chin to my chest, squinted and made out a wide-eyed red head staring toward the corporal.

"That's one of the dumb asses I was talking about. First instinct is to get up and run. That's what they want you to do. That's too easy."

He pushed himself up slightly on his right elbow and looked across my body.

"Roll into that ditch."

I flipped to my right and eyed the ditch and looked back to him uncertainly.

"It's flooded."

"I know. Get your ass in."

He shimmied over and pushed me toward it. He leaned back and yelled to the squad.

"Alright, men, we're going to float our asses out of this death trap and get to that tree line! Stay on the ground and crawl to that ditch, 100 feet that way! Alright! Move!"