Bloods

by Wallace Terry

  If you heard something, you were to yell “Score event.” The guy would call it back to you, and you’d know the noise you heard came from a friendly.

  We got to the top floor, and it seemed like there were a zillion offices. You could hide anywhere. This was going to be shaky. Checking all of those offices one at a time. All the closets. Behind every desk.

  You talk about doing some tall praying. You didn’t know what to look for. All you knew was that in this building there are some people bent on eliminating the breath in your body. And they know they got nowhere to go.

  We would open the doors very carefully. One guy would go right, one would go left, and the last to come in would come up the middle. That would work fine as long as there were no desks right there at the door. Each room was different. And we didn’t have time to get a floor plan to know how the rooms were set up.

  The top floor was very hair-shaking. It took us about a half-hour to clear it. I kept hoping that the other guys would run into those dudes.

  So we take the elevator down to the next floor. When we went into the second room, I moved left, the other brother was on the right, and poor Brute came down the middle. Then we heard some scuffling over in the back corner. Everybody got quiet. Real quiet.

  I threw a grenade over in the corner. And then we just started shooting in that area.

  When we got through shooting, there was no more noise. So now the question becomes, Who’s going to go over there and see what we have shot? Brute decides to be the hero.

  He went from behind one desk to another until he found this one guy. He was wasted. He had been hiding more or less. He had an AK-47 with one banana clip. If he gets off a burst for five seconds, he’s out of ammo. He had on black pajamas and those rubber-tire sandals. He looked to be maybe in his middle twenties.

  Now it’s for real. Until you come face to face with the VC, it doesn’t seem so real. This is real. And who knows when you open this next door, there may be five or six guys there waiting. Or somebody not dumb like this one guy fumbling around behind a desk.

  As we cleared the rest of the floor and the next floor, we heard gunshots from the other team. By the time we got down to the lobby, the five they killed were all stretched out in a row, lined up like ducks. We didn’t bring our guy down. Left him up there for the medic folks. We shoot ’em, you drag ’em.

  So we got six VC out of the Chancery. They never saw any classified material. They were just lookin’ for a place to hide.

  They had told Ambassador Bunker to stay away until the fighting was over. The rankingest guy that I saw there was a three-button Army general, Frederick Weyand, commander of the United States forces in the area, and this guy, Barry Zorthian, who spoke for the Embassy.

  It would have been impossible to totally prevent what happened to the Embassy. But we did a lot of dumb-shit things over there. The wall around the Embassy was a barrier to honest folks. Just like a lock on your front door. But if a burglar wants to break in, he will. So who was watching the wall where the VC blew the hole. We needed more Marines than two on guard. And better equipped. This was a war zone.

  And the VC would watch you all the time. They knew your pattern. And we would, most of us, do the same thing at the same time every day.

  In Tuy Hoa they would set the claymore mines out in the daytime. The VC would be watching in the bush. They know exactly where they are so they can sneak up at night and turn them around against you. We would broadcast over an open airway. The Vietnamese would learn some English. So we’re telling them when we were coming and what time and how many of us are coming. They’d sit back and wait. We would even bomb the same area the same time day in and day out. So the enemy would sit in their caves till the bombing is over. Then they would come back out and have a picnic. We won’t be back until tomorrow. Same time. Creatures of habit.

  I got so I enjoyed the city of Saigon. The real difficulties came mostly after curfew, when the Vietnamese police, the MPs, and our group were the only ones allowed on the city streets.

  The guys in our outfit went to a club on Tu Do Street—“the street of flowers.” We called it our club. Being favorite customers, we were accustomed to getting more than normal favors from the proprietor, which meant girls.

  Not too far from the main gate of Tan Son Nhut was Soul Alley, where you could find Cambodian girls in bars who could readily pass for black females. And in the Soul Kitchen, which was run by this brother in the Air Force, you could buy soul food that tasted like back home. Chitlins, ham hocks, cornbread—the works.

  If you could drive around Saigon in the daytime, you could drive in any city in the world. Saigon prepared me for driving in West Germany. Saigon had no speed limit.

  The big thing during rush hour was to burn rubber from traffic light to traffic light. Especially guys who were driving jeeps and cars that had some pickup. What really aggravated you was waiting at this red light when, invariably, a Vietnamese guy would pull in front of you on a pedal bicycle, loaded with bricks.

  One day, coming from the Embassy, I was drag racing this Vietnamese up the strip to the Saigon River. I was in a jeep. He was on this Honda. From red light to red light, he would win one, I would win the other.

  When we got to the last traffic light before the bridge, I knew the one who got there first wouldn’t have to give up the lane closest to the center. The four lanes would become two after the light.

  When the light turned green, he zoomed off in the lane that would merge with mine. There was no blockade. The road just quit. At the bridge. He had to turn into my lane or go into the river. And that river was so thick with pollution it looked like syrup.

  I don’t think he realized what was happening until too late. The last I saw of that young fellow and his Honda, they were both airborne. And he was screaming “Ahhhhhh.”

  A lot of Army MPs who would go around checking on their people would go through a narrow alley or street and never come out. There’s no way to turn around. And it’s very easy to drop a grenade in the back seat of an open jeep. And that’s how the MPs usually drove. Which I thought was ludicrous.

  One time I was out checking cars in my closed jeep, and I had a grenade thrown at me. It bounced off the side. It was a dud.

  Another time I was following an MP jeep, and for some reason, I stopped to talk to another guy who was on the road. The MP jeep went on. About three or four minutes later, we heard this tremendous explosion. Naturally, we responded. When we were about to run into this alley, this guy said, “Don’t go up there. Let’s get out and go on foot.” We found the jeep blown up by a grenade or several grenades. The two Army guys, obviously dead.

  Snipers were the biggest danger in the city, however. Especially at night. And sometimes a guy would ride up on a Honda next to a GI on a cycle or in a pedicab and just shot him right there on the spot. You learned to duck at any sound, watch the movement of anyone.

  It got to the point where we were told to always be armed, even in daytime. And if a Vietnamese, be it man, woman, or child, refused to di di mau or tried to get away, the authorization was to go ’head and shoot ’em. We were told not to hesitate.

  One guy in our contingency was traveling in the Cholon district. A girl on a Honda bike stopped beside him. He told her three times, “Di di mau.” She didn’t. Maybe it was difficult for her to get away through the traffic. Maybe she didn’t understand the Vietnamese he was speaking. Well, he shot her. The white mice showed up, and just took the body away. She was not armed. There was no report. It was just one of those things.

  During the spring and summer of ’68, the Viet Cong were just shelling Saigon indiscriminately. I remember one night I was in bed and all of a sudden this tremendous explosion went off. My whole life passed before my eyes. I grabbed a helmet, flak vest, and my weapon. I went up to the roof, and this three-story building that stood next door was nothing but total rubble. There were several Vietnamese casualties, and one baby fatality.

  One of our guys ran
out the front of our villa and was shot in the leg by someone. Then the Army MPs showed up. This second lieutenant jumped out of his jeep and left it unattended with a M-60 machine gun and all the ammunition in the world on it. So he yells, “Go get my jeep. Go get my jeep.” By that time, some Vietnamese or Viet Cong is standing by the jeep, just about ready to take off with it. They fired a couple of shots and he disappeared into the woodwork. Now everything is really tense.

  Then this dumb-ass second lieutenant felt that the area wasn’t lit up enough. He fires off a hand flare that sounds like an incoming round. Everybody just dives into the street or tries to grab something to pull over them. The second lieutenant is standing there looking dumb.

  Needless to say, we wanted to kick the second lieutenant in the rear.

  Then everything calmed down, and we took care of the wounded.

  When I heard that Martin Luther King was assassinated, my first inclination was to run out and punch the first white guy I saw. I was very hurt. All I wanted to do was to go home. I even wrote Lyndon Johnson a letter. I said that I didn’t understand how I could be trying to protect foreigners in their country with the possibility of losing my life wherein in my own country people who are my hero, like Martin Luther King, can’t even walk the streets in a safe manner. I didn’t get an answer from the President, but I got an answer from the White House. It was a wonderful letter, wonderful in terms of the way it looked. It wanted to assure me that the President was doing everything in his power to bring about racial equality, especially in the armed forces. A typical bureaucratic answer.

  A few days after the assassination, some of the white guys got a little sick and tired of seeing Dr. King’s picture on the TV screen. Like a memorial. It really got to one guy. He said, “I wish they’d take that nigger’s picture off.” He was a fool to begin with, because there were three black guys sitting in the living room when he said it. And we commenced to give him a lesson in when to use that word and when you should not use that word. A physical lesson.

  With the world focused on the King assassination and the riots that followed in the United States, the North Vietnamese, being politically astute, schooled the Viet Cong to go on a campaign of psychological warfare against the American forces.

  At the time, more blacks were dying in combat than whites, proportionately, mainly because more blacks were in combat-oriented units, proportionately, than whites. To play on the sympathy of the black soldier, the Viet Cong would shoot at a white guy, then let the black guy behind him go through, then shoot at the next white guy.

  It didn’t take long for that kind of word to get out. And the reaction in some companies was to arrange your personnel where you had an all-black or nearly all-black unit to send out.

  Over the next months some of us in the contingency were sent on secret operations in the Delta similar to the Phoenix Program. We would get the word that certain people were no longer necessary or needed to be removed. Our group never got a high-ranking VC. It was always a local person in the village who was coerced by the VC into being a leader, to get the community to rise up in arms against the allied forces. ARVN troops engaged in everything we did, but when it came to the interrogation or the torture, we were specifically instructed not to do that. The ARVN troops did that.

  I remember this one ARVN sergeant took one of these old guys into this hut and strung him up from his ankles. The guy wouldn’t talk. So the sergeant built a fire underneath him. When his hair caught on fire, he started talking. Then they stopped the fire.

  When we passed through those villages, we really had to watch out for the kids. They would pick up arms and shoot at you. And we had to fire right back.

  When we were going out from an operation not very far from Vung Tau, we went through a hamlet we were told was friendly. Quite naturally, you see the women and the children. Never see the men. The men are out conducting the war.

  We had hooked up with some Army guys, so it was about a company of us. As soon as we got about a half mile out down the road, we got hit from the rear. Automatic gunfire. It’s the women and the children. They just opened up. And a couple of our guys got wasted.

  The captain who was in charge of this so-called expeditionary group just took one squad back to the village. And they just melted the whole village. If women and children got in the way, then they got in the way.

  In another village we sent an advance party to recon the place. It was fairly empty. But when we got there, this kid come running out of a hut. Looked to be about fourteen or fifteen years old. He was told to halt. And he didn’t. He ran into another hut, and gunfire started coming from the hut. So two GIs took defensive measures. Dropped to the ground and fired into the hut. We went inside. And here’s the kid with the gun. Dead. And then mama san comes out of the other hut boohooing and all.

  I’m willing to bet that a lot of those grenades that were thrown in the back of Army jeeps were done by kids. The very kids the GIs befriended with candy or whatever.

  When it was time for me to leave, my staff had a dinner in my honor at one of the restaurants. My secretary, my interpreter, and the clerk were there. And the Vietnamese who helped with the training. And they put me at the head of the table.

  On the menu was pigeon soup. And each bowl had a pigeon head in it with the eye open and the beak. I ate the soup. I didn’t eat the pigeon head.

  And as custom goes, I had to toast each person at the table with what was like rice whiskey syrup. I made it to nine of the twenty sitting there. That was Saturday. I didn’t gain full control of my senses until Tuesday.

  And just before I left, one of our maids tried to sell me her baby boy for about the equivalent of $200. She wanted me to bring him back to the United States and raise him.

  She had difficulty with English so I couldn’t philosophize with her. I just told her that in American society we just don’t buy children like that.

  When the North Vietnamese started taking over South Vietnam in 1974 without too many shots being fired, I felt let down. But I never had any faith in the ARVN. As long as they knew that the American platoon was 2 feet behind them, they would fight like cats and dogs. But if they knew that they didn’t have American support real close—like right behind them—they would not fight.

  When I watched on TV the cowardly, shameful way we left Saigon and left the Embassy, I felt hurt. I felt betrayed. I didn’t feel very proud to be an American.

  We destroyed what we couldn’t carry with us. We ducked our tails and ran.

  Why wait ten years and thousands upon thousands of lives later to just turn it over to the Communists? We could have done that at the very beginning.

  Late that year I got accepted to officers’ candidate school, after failing six times. General David Jones, whom I worked for in race relations in West Germany when he commanded the Air Force in Europe, wrote a beautiful letter to make that appointment happen.

  I’ve made captain and will retire at that rank. And I still sing when I can. Swing stuff. I don’t do much disco. You could call it a cross between Lou Rawls and Johnny Mathis. When I was stationed in Nevada, I worked as a replacement in the lounges at the Sahara, the Dunes, the Landmark. That was great. That’s the top of the line.

  When I think back, there were a lot of things we did in that special contingency unit in Vietnam that we didn’t get credit for. We couldn’t talk about it. Or put in for commendations. In fact, we were even under oath not to talk about what we did for five years.

  But we really wanted some kind of commendation for what we did at the Embassy during Tet. Some of the Marines and Army guys got medals. But that was out of the question for us. You weren’t supposed to report our activities. They were secret.

  All we got was the Vietnam campaign medal. Everybody got that. If you flew into the country and stayed overnight during the war, you were eligible for that.

  So at the famous battle of the American Embassy, officially, we were not there.

  Specialist 4

&nbs
p; Robert L. Mountain

  Millen, Georgia

  Mortarman

  25th Infantry Division

  U.S. Army

  Cu Chi and Dau Tieng

  June 1968–December 1968

  “Burns! Burns!”

  I’m calling out to tell him that I’m hit.

  “Burns, I’m hit. Oh, God. I’m hit.”

  But Burns, he’s getting into the bunker.

  Burns and I built this bunker together. Burns and I were good friends. He was a brother from Texas. He’d been through Tet and in the field a lot. He was gonna go home in like two months, so they had taken him out of the field and put him in supply. Apparently he had been a good troop.

  On this particular night, Sergeant O’Hanlon said to us, “Sleep inside of your bunkers, because of the incoming mortars.”

  Prior to that we hadn’t had a hell of a lot of incoming. And it’s hot as heck over there, so nobody likes to sleep in those bunkers. We slept just lying right outside the bunker. Burns was lying next to me. We were maybe 10 feet from the bunker.

  I guess it was three in the morning, December 23. The round came in, messed me up, and Burns didn’t get a scratch.

  I looked. My right hand was stinging. This piece of white bone was sticking up where my little finger was. There is just a splinter where my ring finger is.

  I heard some rounds going off again. I think they were outgoing. I could see Burns crawling to go into the bunker.

  I tried to sit up, and all I could see was just blood, blood everywhere. I looked at my right leg, and it was just blood. I turned on my stomach to push to go into the bunker. When I pushed with my left foot, that’s when all hell broke loose. Oh, it was just a tremendous amount of pain. But I managed somehow to crawl on over to the bunker.

  The firing didn’t last long, and immediately the guys came over.

  People were hollering, “Medic. Medic. Medic.”