So we’re hunkered down on the edge of the hill, me with an M16 — which feels even more like a toy than it did before I took over the sixty — and some grenades. The sun was out and I was pretty much boiling inside my flak jacket and helmet. Not that taking them off was an option. Then I heard that familiar little sound we call the “Laos Pop.”
“Time to go, sir,” I said.
He was in the middle of calling in an air strike, so he just nodded, holding up one finger for me to wait a minute.
Like we had a minute? I was already counting the seconds off in my head, and we didn’t have enough time to get to the nearest trench or hole. So I tackled him at the waist — Flaherty blitzes! He sacks the quarterback! The Bengals win! — and slammed him into the ground. Then, dumb guy who follows orders like I am, I made sure that he was completely covered by my body.
It felt like someone hit me across the back with a baseball bat, and then stuck a hot knife in my thigh. I guess the concussion waves were pretty intense, because I blacked out for a minute. I was confused for a few seconds when I opened my eyes, but then I listened to make sure the barrage was over. The Tac Air guy is much smaller than I am, so I hauled him to his feet, and yanked him over to the nearest trench.
He was a little dazed, too, but otherwise fine.
“Thanks, kid,” he said. “You okay?”
I thought I was fine, except that my back ached and I could feel some burning on my leg. Doc Jarvis came running over and found a big chunk of shrapnel stuck in the back of my flak jacket and a smaller piece in my thigh. There were some slivers of shrapnel in both of my legs, but they didn’t hurt much. I was ready just to slap a bandage on and leave it at that, but Doc didn’t like it when he heard I’d passed out.
So — with me swearing the whole time — I ended up on a resupply chopper on my way to Charlie Med.
When we landed, the main base was getting hit hard. Which made me really mad, since I would have been safer back up on the hill. But I knew enough to run for the nearest trench and get down. No wonder they call choppers and cargo planes “Mortar Magnets.” I landed on top of some guys who were on their way out of Khe Sanh — either on stretchers, or heading back to the World because their tours were up. We all did some snarling at each other, but then they were tearing across the airstrip to try and jump onto the chopper before it took off. Maybe half of them made it. The others either turned back — or got hit with flying shrapnel. Like Bebop says, this place just isn’t healthy.
Getting over to Charlie Med involved another gauntlet of running and diving into trenches, or behind piles of sandbags. The base was really getting slammed. They’d been taking heavy fire all day, so Charlie Med was really crowded inside. When they finally got to me, a corpsman read the medical tag Doc Jarvis had filled out and attached to the zipper on my flak jacket. Then he called over a doctor, who did some quick neurological tests to make sure I didn’t have a concussion. I already knew I didn’t, since I’ve had my bell rung harder than that during football games.
Then, they pulled the shrapnel out of my thigh, and disinfected and bandaged the wound. The doctor moved on to someone else, while the corpsman used tweezers to pick out all of the metal splinters he could find. Can’t say I was really thrilled about lying there with my pants around my ankles — but the place was filled with guys a lot worse off than me, so I kept my mouth shut.
Once they’d cleaned me up, I was certified to return to duty — but that doesn’t mean I could get a ride back. So, just like that time Bebop and I came down here, I was going to be stuck spending the night.
The back of my flak jacket had been pretty badly shredded, so I helped myself to a better one from the huge pile lying outside Charlie Med and left mine behind. Part of me wondered who had worn it before me, and why he didn’t need it anymore — but I decided not to focus on that aspect of it. I was still here, I was mostly in one piece, and I needed a flak jacket to stay that way. Plain and simple.
The base looked completely different from the way it had a couple of months ago. Most of the above-ground buildings were gone, and there were lots of trenches. There was junk all over the place, too — broken ammo crates, leaking sandbags, empty artillery round cannisters, discarded gear, that kind of stuff. Bunkers were dug much deeper than they had been, and even the smallest ones had overhead cover about six feet deep. Immediately, that made me wonder how come no one ever sent us supplies to use for decent bunkers — but, screw it. No matter what anyone else thought, we were doing just fine up on 881S.
Some recoilless rifle guys let me crash on the floor of their bunker for the night. I was so hungry that I didn’t even argue when they offered me a can of ham and lima beans.
Okay, I did argue — for self-respect — but I kept it short.
Artillery shells and rockets pounded the base just about nonstop, but I’ve learned to sleep through anything — even B-52 air strikes. So, even though some of the rounds seemed to be landing nearby, I wasn’t going to sweat it. Either they landed on us, or not. I was too tired to worry about it.
“Man, look at him,” I heard someone saying, just as I was falling asleep, using part of an ammo crate for a pillow.
“Hill guys are nuts,” someone else said.
And proud of it.
March 24, 1968
Took me almost all day to get a ride back, and I only managed it because I stayed in the trenches right by the airstrip. I knew — unfortunately — that a medevac would probably be heading out to 881S sooner or later, and I was planning to be on it.
There wasn’t much around to scrounge, but I did manage to fill my cargo pockets with a bunch of apples I found. They seemed to be pretty fresh, and it was better than nothing.
When I found my way onto a medevac, the crew chief thought I was insane for going back voluntarily. When a few .51-caliber rounds ripped through the side of the chopper, I thought he was insane for doing this every day. Halfway back, I got scared, wondering who had gotten hurt. What if it was Bebop? Or the Professor? Or — we were already hovering over the LZ, and I leaped out, trying to land on my good leg.
The two WIAs were both from Hotel Company. One of the guys was still walking, but he had bandages wrapped around his head and right eye. The other guy had a sucking chest wound, which meant that he was an emergency. If he got to Charlie Med fast enough, though, he would probably be okay. I helped get the stretcher aboard, then ran for the trench. Doc Jarvis — who had been at the other end of the stretcher — jumped in right after me.
“Any concussion?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said.
“Did you let them take a look at your bad ear?” he asked.
I was so used to not being able to hear right out of it, that I hadn’t even thought to mention it at Charlie Med. “Nope,” I said.
Doc Jarvis shook his head. “You’re a putz, Mighty Mouse.”
“Yep,” I said.
When I got back to my position, I found Bebop lying in our bunny hole, playing his mouthpiece and singing “The Khe Sanh Blues.” That’s a song he made up weeks ago, complete with a little mouthpiece solo in the middle. The big finish goes: “If I gotta choose, I’ll take them Khe Sanh Blues.” Although I like the “It’s all over the news, that we’ve got the Khe Sanh Blues” part the best.
Pretty catchy tune, actually. I sing it sometimes, too.
He saw me, and a smile spread across his face. “Maria!” he said. “You’re back from the Abbey!”
“I’m not supposed to run away from my problems anymore,” I said. “I’m supposed to face them.”
Bebop cracked up. “You’re a fool, you know that, Patrick?”
“Yeah,” I said, and gave him an apple. “I’ve heard.”
March 29, 1968
Typical resupply snafu today. The choppers dropped a couple of pallets on No Man’s Land, like usual. We left t
hem there until after dark, because we assumed it was just ammo and C rations, and cans of water.
Come to find out, they’d dropped us a whole load of ice cream in individual Dixie Cups — and it had completely melted. Didn’t stop us from eating it, of course. We’re all sick as dogs now — it’s been too long since we’ve had normal food like that, so it was way too rich — but it was worth it.
Every bite.
April 1, 1968
Operation Pegasus officially began today. Marine combat engineers are going to work to reopen Route 9, all the way out to the coast, and then the Army — 1st Air Cav, I think — is going to come and “relieve” us. Oh, yeah, we’ll be real relieved when we see a bunch of doggies show up. But I just want to break out of here, and go out to 881N and get some payback. All those mortars and rockets? All the guys we’ve lost? We owe it to them to go out and get rid of every last NVA soldier out there.
Rotgut wants to use the M60, and have me go back to a regular rifle. Says he has more time in-country, and he’s trained for it, so I should give it up already. But I’ve gotten to like having that much firepower, so I just said, nope. He offered to fight me for it, but I said, nope. I figure if I’ve been doing all the work cleaning and oiling it all these months, I’ve earned the right to keep it.
Told him he could be my assistant, if he wanted. Somewhere in among all the swearing, I think he said no. Stomped off down the trench, then came stomping back.
“You know, you fire it pretty good,” he said. “For a dumb, grungy mick.”
“When there is a wrong to right, Mighty Mouse will join the fight,” I said, checking the inside of the barrel to make sure that it was absolutely, completely, perfectly clean.
Rotgut just shook his head and stomped off again.
“If we start patrolling again, I’ll let you carry the tripod and ammo!” I yelled after him.
He called me about ten more names I’d never want my mother to hear, and then disappeared into his bunny hole.
I think the guy’s warming up to me. I really do.
April 3, 1968
Audrey wrote back to me! Two pages, both sides!
Not that I got excited about it, or happy, or read it six times in a row. Nothing like that at all.
She wrote that she was really glad to hear from me, and had been wondering how I was doing. She was actually going to call me when she was home for Christmas break — she’s a freshman at Smith College — but then, she heard from someone that I was already over here. She sounds like she’s really worried that I’m at Khe Sanh, because she’s read so much about it lately, and she told me to be careful at least once on every page. She also wanted to know if I’d mind if she kept writing to me.
Mind?
She really likes college, but hasn’t decided what she wants to major in. Literature, she thinks. The other girls are really smart (okay, her exact words were “most of the women here are extremely intelligent”), but she’s worried that she doesn’t quite fit in, because she doesn’t have fifteen cashmere sweaters or a stack of charge cards, and she didn’t spend the summer after graduation in Europe, visiting art museums.
No, she spent the summer working at the Pig & Whistle Diner. Before I went to boot camp, I would go by there — well, kind of a lot. I always told her it was because they made such good chicken croquettes.
Which they actually do.
The rest of the letter was filled with news about people we both knew from the neighborhood, and from high school. The only time she mentioned Keith was to say that he was off at the University of Pennsylvania, but she hadn’t heard from him recently.
All right!
Finally, at the very end, she wrote that she wished I had told her I thought she was cool.
Damn. I wish I had, too. More than ever.
Later —
Tonight was one of our C ration stew nights. When we were only being issued one meal a day and had to conserve every bite, we never bothered doing anything fancy. A little Tabasco sauce, some salt, and that was about it. Most of the time, we didn’t even take the time to heat them up — we were just too hungry. But now that supplies aren’t as scarce, we’re being a little more creative.
The Professor and Pugsley have the biggest bunny hole, so usually, the squad hangs out in that area of the trench. I’m starting to get used to most of the new guys, and we’re even finding nicknames for them. Snuffy, this doughy kid out of West Virginia. Rat-Boy, who holds the company record for the number of rats killed in one night — twenty-six. And he even got three of them with a slingshot. Motormouth, a real yappy kid from Watts in Los Angeles, who — big surprise — never seems to stop talking. Twenty-four hours a day. I don’t think he sleeps. But he’s so friendly that you have to like the kid. Logan, who we might start calling “Grunt,” because that’s all he ever does — even when you ask him a direct question. And Bosco, who got his name from a brand of chocolate syrup, because his parents are always sending him bottles of it from home.
We used two different helmets to make our stews. One was a few cans of boned chicken and sliced pork, combined with water, cream substitutes, and about ten cans of cheese spread. When we heated it up, the cheese and cream substitute melted into a lumpy sort of sauce. And Tabasco sauce, of course. We go through a lot of Tabasco sauce. Steak sauce, too. If we can get it.
Pugsley worked as a short-order cook back in the World, so on C rat stew nights, we let him take charge. And Pugsley loves being in charge. He loves it so much that I’m really glad the Professor is our squad leader, instead of him. Pugsley might get a little too carried away. I like him, but he’s really gung-ho.
Our other stew was mostly beef. Beef with spiced sauce, beef and potatoes, meatballs and beans. Throw enough cans in, and you can feed a lot of guys. The potatoes always taste sort of raw, so we call the beef and potatoes C rations “beef and rocks.” Motormouth’s mother had sent him a jar of pickled onions in his last package, so we added those, too. Pugsley broke off pieces of canned white bread and rolled them into little balls, which he put on top of the beef stew. Claimed that they were now dumplings.
I don’t know if any of that sounds good, but it tasted just fine to me. Then again, all food tastes fine to me, so what do I know?
One thing you have to like about new guys — lots of them have brand-new radios they bought at the PX, and they stock up on fresh batteries, too. All we have to do is wrap some comm wire around the antennas, string it up to improve the reception, and then we have tunes. Bebop keeps saying, grim as hell, that there isn’t even one damn jazz fan anywhere in Vietnam. No one ever disagrees with him.
Our two main choices on the radio are AFVN and Hanoi Hannah. Hanoi Hannah is sort of like Tokyo Rose in World War II. The enemy recruits women — there must be more than one, although she always sounds the same — who have these really sexy voices. They come on, and give us all this propaganda about how the “American GIs should throw down their weapons” and that kind of thing. In the gospel according to Hannah, we’re evil imperialists who will soon be vanquished by our brave and completely superior enemy. She goes on and on like that. She likes to mention actual unit names and locations — which can be creepy. She’s even talked about our hill before, and how little time we have to live before we are crushed by her brothers in arms. Right after that, she played the song “Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide.” We thought it was really funny.
But once she stops talking, she plays great music. Lots of rock and roll. Much better than AFVN, where they mostly play pop songs, and have commercials about how important it is for us to clean our weapons and wear our helmets. Support the chieu hoi program. Protect ourselves from VD. And no matter how bad things are out in the bush, they always report that “American casualties were light.” I’d like to see them come up here, and say that.
Tonight, Hannah was on a roll, and we were singing along to mo
st of the songs. “Wild Thing.” “Woolly Bully.” “Dirty Water.” That one’s all about Boston! “Twentieth Century Fox.” Since there’s not exactly anything secret about our being here on the hill, the skipper is usually pretty good about letting us crank the volume up before it gets dark, and we have to go out on LPs and start guarding the lines.
Just after the sun went down, she put on my favorite song. Everyone’s favorite song.
You really haven’t lived until you’ve seen a hundred Marines singing “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place” along with the Animals, and playing air guitar with their M16s.
On days like today, Vietnam doesn’t seem so bad.
April 5, 1968
We never hear anything about what’s going on back in the World, except in letters that are days, and usually weeks, old. But today, we found out from AFVN that Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The shooter was a white man.
As soon as we heard the news, Bebop went off by himself. I wasn’t sure I should go after him, but after a while, I did.
He was lying in our bunny hole with his fists clenched. When he saw me, he scowled.
“Don’t even think of telling me you’re sorry a proud black man got killed,” he said.
I had been planning to say something exactly like that, so I just nodded. It would have made things worse if I’d walked away, so I sat down in the trench with my back against one dirt wall and propped my boots up on the other side.
Into No Man's Land Page 11
