The funny thing about the hospital was that working the X-ray, you find people that had bullet wounds. As far as I was concerned, anybody got those kind of injuries was there in the fighting. And it seemed like 99.8 percent of the time it was from weapons that was American. Like from M-16s. Finally, they told us that we were actually treating the enemy. But they were coming in dressed like civilians. We had some of them chained to beds. You knew they were enemies. And the CIA and the Army intelligence would come to the hospital and take them away. Some were killed. The lucky ones got to POW camps. We just didn’t see people with pneumonia, bed colds, or some kind of disease. I thought it was a facade. We were really wastin’ our time.
One night the Viet Cong or the NVA must have had someone in the hospital they really wanted out, ’cause they went through the hospital. There were some policemen at the hospital. They got shot really fast. We went over there, and as they were leaving, they fired some mortars on the hospital. And there were people there that were blown apart.
I remember this Vietnamese. He was one of the people who worked at the hospital. He was lying there, you know, moanin’. I reached down to pick him up, and as I picked up his back, I discovered all of his back was blown out. I had actually put my hands on his lungs. I went over and put him in a stretcher. And I just felt—I just felt—I put my hands on his lungs. And he died.
Somebody came up with the idea one time that it might be a good idea to have a medical person around to make sure that people were not physically injured by the interrogations. Or you could treat them right then if something happened so they could still be interrogated. I don’t know whose idea that was, but that didn’t last long.
So I went over one time for this. They had this young Vietnamese female, and they had her standing on a little tiny stool with three legs on it, like a milk stool. They had taken all her clothes off. She had her hands tied behind her. And there was this ROK Marine doin’ the interrogating. There was an American civilian. And a Vietnamese individual.
The Korean didn’t never hit her. But she got really upset and spit on him.
So what he did was he took a flare and he pushed it up in her body between her legs. Phosphorous flare. He stuck it up in her vagina, enough for it to stay there.
And he lit the flare. It burned her legs. Then she just fell off the stool and flopped around. She moved around. And he just let the flare burn. It burned the inside of her body.
She flopped around.
They just let her burn up like that.
I said, “Hey! This is ridicu— You shouldn’t do that.”
I walked over to her, and they grabbed me and pulled me out of the room.
I was not allowed to stop it.
She was screamin’. You hear her outside the room. The scream.
When she quit screamin’—when she quit screamin’, I knew she was dead.
After that point, I was not privileged to any of that kind of goin’s on.
And who was I to report it to? What would’ve they done? I mean you—you know they’re there to kill people anyway. I mean, so what’s another person killed?
One evening I was sittin’ there on the bunker watching the war. Watching the bombs goin’ up. And I heard the voice of God, the Holy Spirit, speak through me.
I hadn’t been drinkin’ or nothing like that.
It was something that I could not really define, because I’d not heard it before. But I knew that it was God. Because it was not a audible thing. Not nothin’ that I heard with my ears. It felt like from the depths within me, within my soul. It felt like something that just caused my entire body to tremor.
All It said was that you are to teach My people.
I said no, no, no, I can’t believe this. And I went in the bar. And I sit down. And I start havin’ a few drinks. ’Cause I don’t believe it.
About a week later, I was down at China Beach. There were some Marines out there havin’ a cookout. The German females were there from the German medical team. They were out there splashing around. Just havin’ a good time. But I didn’t want to swim. I didn’t want anything to drink. I remember I didn’t want anything to eat. I felt uneasy. I wasn’t afraid or frightened or nothin’ like that. Just uneasy.
So I started walking up towards the jungle at the edge of the beach. There was a Catholic nun from the orphanage not very far away. There were kids yellin’. You heard some of the birds. And the wind was blowin’. And you heard the weeds were rattlin’, the foliage, everything.
And I was walking up there and was just lookin’, everything stopped. The bushes quit rattlin’. The birds got quiet. The kids. Everything got still. There was not a sound. Nothing moved.
And I heard It again. It said, “You must.”
And I said, “Well, Lord, when I get out of the Navy, I’ll do what You want me to do.” That’s what I said.
Then came the twenty-seventh of August ’67. ’Round about two o’clock in the morning, we were attacked. I woke up, and there were people runnin’ all over the place. A sapper squad. They were plantin’ charges all over. Make you think you got a lot of incoming mortar.
They were actually in the building that I lived in. And I am hearing all this stuff. Most of the time I wore sandals. I didn’t wear combat boots. And when you walk across the floor with a boot on, it doesn’t make the same noise when you wear sandals. I just had on a pair of swimming trunks. Being so thin, I probably looked just like one of them to them, runnin’ in the night.
I went right past them with the M-4, came out the building, around the corner, and into the bunker.
A white guy I worked with named Peter Gillis was sittin’ on top of the bunker. I guess the bunker was maybe 6 feet high.
Gillis said, “You better not go in there.”
I said, “Why not?”
“Well, they’ll know you’re in there, and they’ll shoot you in there. Come on up here.”
So I got on top of the bunker with him.
Another party of them, maybe 15 or 20, were attacking the ARVN company to our right. They repaired vehicles over there. Armored personnel carriers. And the only thing separating us from the ARVNs was a little chicken-wire fence. The people the VC were attackin’ were yelling and screaming over there. Then a bunch of ’em put a Bangalore torpedo down to tear up the wire. And here’s another explosion.
So now there’s a really big group of people right inside our compound. Folks right in front of where we had the bar.
Gillis said, “We need to fire on them.”
I said, “I don’t think we ought to, ’cause we don’t know whether they’re friendlies or not. You can’t go around killing the friendly people, ’cause you get in trouble.”
All the Vietnamese looked alike to me. I couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys. Especially at night.
Well, Gillis had a BAR. So I said, “You fire down in front of the bunker. I’ll cover you.”
He fired about three rounds down in front of the bunker, and they just opened up on it. They just riddled it with bullets. But they shot inside the bunker. We were sittin’ on top of it. And the sandbags just beginnin’ to fall away.
Gillis yelled, “They’re the enemy. They’re the enemy.”
I didn’t know what to do, because I never been involved in a fire fight before.
I just opened up on a pack of ’em with this M-4 grease gun that shot not only through them but through the building and through the slot machines. Iron slot machines. It just tore them all to pieces. It just blows a hole through you that just can’t be imagined.
By now, planes swoop over in the area, ’cause the whole area was under attack. And they dropped in the flares that illuminated the area. Shadows would move across, and I would shoot whatever moved. I shot shadows moving. We had ducks and chickens and dogs. And they were all just shot up. Everything that moved, I engaged in fire.
We had two boxes of grenades. We threw them all out. Just pull the pins, throw the hand grenades. It’s like in a mad pa
nic. Throw ’em and throw ’em and throw ’em.
I think I was just makin’ it on an animal instinct of survival.
But then I prayed.
I said, “Lord, I know that there’s nowhere for me to go. There’s nowhere I can run to. There’s nowhere I can hide. I have not been such a bad person. I’ve been good. I always said my Grace and everything. I just got one request that I wanna make to You. That is that when I get shot that I will die instantly. That I won’t suffer, and that they won’t capture me. I just want to die right away. I don’t want to be painin’ and yellin’ and screamin’ and hollerin’. I just want to die right away. And I think that You ought to be able to honor my request.”
A moment later, this guy in the command bunker to my right yelled out, “What’s going on?”
We did not respond, since we were under direct attack. We knew they would call in artillery on the position. And we, still bein’ alive, did not want him to call in anything near out position. The enemy was on top of us. Callin’ in artillery when you being overrun was the dumbest thing you could ever think about.
By now, Gillis was hit. He had one bullet in him.
Then some of the enemy came around our rear in a armored personnel carrier. Gillis shot the carrier to death with the BAR. He stopped it. I don’t know how he managed to do that, but, you know, the Lord was with us.
I continued to deliver so much fire in the area in front that they could not go back the way they came. They were forced to go in another direction. There was a fence next to the hospital, but they couldn’t get through that. Then they climbed up on top of our building to get to the .30-caliber machine gun. They killed one of the Marines and wounded the other. But the sergeant who slept in that little shed got up on the building and engaged them before they could get to the machine gun.
Then they came around the corner again. This time they unloaded this B-40 rocket directly into the bunker. I was facing them. Gillis was covering my back.
We were lifted straight up into the air. The blast blew out his eardrums. They tell me I must’ve had my mouth open, because all the fillings were blown out of my teeth.
When I fell, I landed on my side and I dropped the weapon. It got so much sand in it that it jammed. I got the sand out. I just took the clip and shook it and shook it. And I started firing. And firing. And firing.
While I was still on the ground, this individual came by. He said, “It’s me. It’s me.”
It was Kelly. The chief hospital corpsman. Short, fat guy. The typical hospital corps chief.
I said, “What are you doing out there?”
I almost had shot him.
I said, “Get out of there. Get out of there.”
There were people lying there moanin’, cryin’, yellin’, screamin’. They would scamper around tryin’ to find somewhere to hide.
Gillis said, “We ought to do something about them. We’re hospital corpsmen.”
And I did. I shot ’em. I shot in the direction of the cries and moanin’ till I didn’t hear ’em anymore.
It just seemed like the thing to do. I didn’t want to hear it. That noise. That whining. That groanin’. That moanin’. And I was afraid to go down to administer first aid to someone I shot. They might shoot me even if I’m trying to help them.
I did not stop shooting until daybreak. About five-thirty in the morning.
The Viet Cong had went in and freed all the prisoners in the prison behind us.
The repair company had been destroyed.
We had got no assistance from the police station across the street from us.
Then this CIA civilian guy came down. He said he heard we were gonna be attacked, but he didn’t tell us because he didn’t believe it would happen.
He started walkin’ through the area with Kelly. There were a couple of people badly wounded but still alive. He just killed them. Put a Swedish machine gun to their head.
When the sun came up, they found this one VC in a wood pile. He couldn’t get out, and he was afraid to leave. He was taken and interrogated. That’s all I know happened to him.
Besides the Marine, one of the corpsmen was dead.
We had to get our wounded out on this deuce and a half that had all the tires shot out. It was a mess. But it would run.
They said I killed 47 of them. I don’t really believe it. They always exaggerated the body count. The whole thing in Vietnam was how many people you kill. I saw about 25 bodies in front of my position.
At the time, I thought that I should have at least gotten the Silver Star. But they gave me a Bronze Star. For holding them off even when we were being overrun and for keeping on fighting after the bunker was blown up. Especially me being a sailor. And a hospital corpsman at that.
Everybody said they couldn’t believe what I did. I guess because I was black. When you’re white and you think that no good can come out of black people, when you think that black men are cowards who run scared, yellin’ “Massa save me,” then I guess they would be amazed.
The morning after the fight I became acutely aware of the fact that I should stay alive for something. I said, “Wow. Boy. I never thought I’d live through that.” Then I thought to myself, If I lived through that, what am I s’posed to do now?
Because of the fight, they moved us to live down at this Army compound. In the evenings I ran the bar there, but I was still the medical supply adviser at the hospital.
There were a couple of people that I did socialize with. They were much older than me. I was twenty-five. There was Andy Garrett. And these two Army brothers. Irvin Nixon from New Jersey. And this other guy from Louisiana, who was called Fully Love.
Andy Garrett, Irvin Nixon, and Fully Love were gamblers. They loved to gamble.
We wouldn’t have nothin’ else to do. So we gambled and we drank and then, when we were shot at, we shot back. And that was it. Until it came time to go home.
We played Monopoly with real money. We’d make up a bank, maybe $500, $600. We get up sometimes to $1,000. And we’d play all day, all night, whenever, until someone took all the money.
Garrett was a compulsive gambler. He would bet on raindrops on a windowpane. That was one of his favorites. When it would be raining, Garrett would stand in front of the window to see the raindrops. Then he would say, “I got fifty dollars that say that this raindrop here will beat any raindrop that you can select.” Somebody say, “I’ll take this one.” Somebody say, “I want ten dollars on this one.” Then the raindrops would come down. And when they get down to the bottom, Garrett say, “Okay. You guys pay me.” I mean he was lucky.
Nixon was a real good poker player. Fully Love was a crap shooter. He was so good with the dice that most people would make him blow the dice out of his mouth. Garrett was a very good poker player. Not a great poker player, but very good. He thought he was a great crap shooter. Fully Love never played poker. Garrett and Nixon would play the poker, and they would run the game on people. Nixon and Fully Love would run the craps. And they all played together like that. No other way. And they took everybody else’s money.
On Saturdays, we’d go to Danang. We’d catch the Black Cat, which was the Army helicopter squadron. Then they’d go in and wipe out Camp Tien Sha, the Navy base. They’d take all the money that was there, and I got 10 percent.
I was the bag man. They allowed me to carry the money because of my temperament. After having been in that fire fight when we were overrun, I would rather shoot than hold a conversation. I think maybe I kind of went off a little bit.
I was playing poker one evening with four other people. And I thought they were cheating. We were all drinking. And I just pulled out a .38. There was a guy right in front of me. I said, “You ought to be ashamed.” And I just fired. He moved out of the way. If he hadn’t, I would’ve killed him.
After a while, nobody really wanted to play with me. They said, “You carry the money.”
One time I was outside drinkin’ beer. These two guys came up and told me to give th
em the suitcase the money was in. I told them, “Okay. You can have it.”
I gave them the suitcase.
Then I just reached in my coat and said, “Now you can take it wherever you want to, after I shoot you.”
They put the suitcase down and ran down the road.
Actually I made more than Garrett and the others did. Even though 10 percent wasn’t much. I kept it. And I’d lend it to them. If I lent them $100, they had to give me $200. They knew that they had to pay me, because if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be nothin’ for their demise to come during that period of my life.
When we had five days left in Vietnam, we flew into Danang to wait for the flight to Saigon going back to America.
Garrett and Fully Love got into an argument. Garrett always said that he could beat him anytime, but they never gambled against each other. Garrett and Fully Love decided that they gonna have the crap shoot of the century. So they get this room in the Danang Hotel.
Garrett went over to Camp Tien Sha to get all the money he had coming in from dispersing.
Whenever one of them went to the bathroom, they paid somebody to watch the other roll.
Garrett lost his money. So I lent him $500. He lost that. He had two SLR cameras. He had a Colt Cobra. He had two cashmere coats. He had special shoes he had made. He had an enormous amount of suits. Him and Fully Love happened to be the same size. And Fully Love took all of that, too. He even took the diamond ring Garrett had on his hand. Everything Garrett owned. Clothes, cameras, $3,000, and the ring.
Garrett was really hurt.
His pride—everything he had—was lost.
Bloods Page 9
