by Tim Curran
Jesus.
All those wasted afternoons spent watching John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima and Back to Bataan had not prepared me for this. I could feel the blood all over me, mixed with that raw, gut-awful stink of spilled bellies, spent ordinance, and voided bowels.
There was certainly no doubt by that point that we were smack dab in the middle of the North Vietnamese Army. I could hear squad leaders telling what remained of their squads that we were flanked on all sides by hundreds if not thousands of hardcore NVA. We had injured everywhere, men who wouldn’t live if they weren’t medevaced off that hill pretty damn soon. We had lost dozens. Dozens more were wounded seriously. They were laid out in a little clearing, some missing limbs and others with gaping, bleeding holes in them to which pressure bandages were pressed. It was a mess.
But there was no way any helicopters were going get to us.
The NVA would shoot them down.
Something had to happen.
And then it did.
As the NVA prepared for their next attack with a rallying, bloodthirsty cry, Sweet was on the radio calling in a fire mission. “…have made contact with a large number of November-Victor-Alpha! Repeat: We have made contact with a large number of November-Victor-Alpha! Requesting fire mission! Over!”
He was darting along the top of the hill, dragging the radioman behind him by the cord as gook snipers tried to get a bead on him. The other company commanders off to our left and right flanks were calling in fire support, too.
Within minutes, artillery shells from a Marine firebase were screaming over our heads and ripping up the real estate. There were huge, deafening explosions, one after the other as HE and WP rounds came screaming down on the NVA. The jungle came apart all around them, trees falling and undergrowth going up in balls of flame, high-explosive rounds tearing jagged craters in the earth. The gooks were screaming down there, shooting and running and dying. The shells landed in volleys, one after the other, some as close as the hollow below and the others peppering the jungle.
It went on for ten minutes like that.
All the while, the NVA commanders were trying to rally their forces, trying to get them to charge en masse up into our lines. The rational being that if they could get in close enough, we’d have to call off the artillery. The air was filled with smoke and gouts of earth belching skyward. I saw a dozen NVA charge from the burning jungle and then a HE round landed right on top of them. When the smoke cleared….they were just gone.
When it was over, that thick forest was laid flat into a tangle of deadfalls and shattered trees and smoldering foliage. You could see the gooks down there, dozens and dozens of them trying to fight their way out. And then two Cobra helicopter gunships came zipping over the treeline, firing their rockets into the retreating NVA and spraying down the survivors with minigun fire.
“Bring on them snakes!” someone shouted.
The Cobras made two or three more runs until nothing was moving down there and flew off.
And that was it. We’d broken their backs.
Sweet got us up and moving, carrying the wounded to the LZ for extraction. The choppers came and went, ferrying off the dead and wounded. The rest of us—as well as Charlie and Echo companies—maintained a defensive cordon, waiting for our turn which we knew would be hours. So we waited in the darkness and listened to the jungle and sweated, waiting, just waiting.
The platoon I was with was one of the last to get plucked out.
We made no further contact. What remained of the NVA force was off-licking its wounds, carting off its dead. About 2300 hours someone started shooting and, of course, before long everyone was at it until Sweet called for them to stop.
After a time he came back, shaking his head. “Goddamn kids,” he said. “Imagining shit.”
I could hear the choppers—our choppers—coming in now. “Thought they saw Charlie?” I said.
Sweet just laughed low in his throat. “No. Pointman said he saw someone out walking along our perimeter. Someone he claims was about seven, eight feet tall…”
5
It was all rolling around in the drum of my brain—death and dying and blood and ghost stories—swirling around in there in an ugly, simmering stew that carried a noisome mental odor of decomposition. I was thinking about what Quinn had told me and seeing the faces of those Viets at Bai Loc—the laughing old man with no eyes and that crazy woman pointing at me and ranting on about the Devil That Hunts Heads. I’d only been back from that party with the 4th a few days and I kept thinking about what Sweet had told me about the pointman shooting at something seven or eight feet tall.
It was bullshit, of course.
But I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was mentally and physically wrecked. Not enough sleep. Too many uppers and downers and booze and combat and Saigon bar-girls. It was all taking its toll on me. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the faces of dead nineteen-year olds like Toones. They all started to look alike. What sleep I did get was haunted by hulking things that hunted heads in the Highlands.
I should’ve just left, got out of that damn country, but I didn’t.
Something in me wouldn’t let me go.
The grunts were always amazed by me when I told them that I didn’t have to be in Vietnam, that I could hop a plane and go home anytime I wanted. When they found that out, they either liked me more or hated me more, telling me what a goddamn stupid motherfucker I was.
Most of the grunts seemed to accept me, though, if not actually like me. I’d been in the shit with them on numerous occasions and they appreciated that I fought alongside them, tended to the wounded, and the fact that I had good black market connections. Whenever I went out to see a unit, I brought a few bottles of Jack Daniels, fuck books, and cartons of cigarettes. Grass sometimes. Whatever I could lay my hands on. Sometimes I wondered if I had earned their friendship and respect or bought it. I worried that I was playing headgames with them. But ultimately, I knew, the only one I was playing headgames with was myself.
But sometimes you wondered.
Some of the grunts were so wired and angry and hateful. They looked on me as some sort of parasite, some scavenger living off the dead and dying, glorifying in tragedy. And maybe I was those things. I’m not sure. I’ll only say that I never took photos of dead grunts or dead gooks. I’d seen some correspondents get a hard-on when they learned a unit was coming in from the boonies with KIAs. They’d gather on the tarmac and, once the bodies were unloaded and lined up in rows, they’d dart amongst them, pulling back the tarps and taking snapshots of those ruined, young faces.
Once, a black cat with the 3rd Marines, a guy I’d drank and gotten stoned and laid with, came off a mission and I went to see him in his hootch. I found him on his knees, beating his cot with his fists. His name was Dudak. He was still wearing his fatigues and they were threadbare and stained with blood. Without even turning and looking at me, he started telling me his company had been out with elements of the 37th ARVN Rangers. Said they up were up near Pleiku scouting a mixed NVA/VC battalion and they’d found them, all right. The ARVNs led them into not one, but three separate ambushes. And at each one, they’d hung back like they knew it was coming. It wasn’t long before the Marines were certain the ARVNs were working with the North Viets.
But they’d paid them back.
When it came time for extraction, their commander—Captain Rivasmade the ARVNs form the rear-guard element. And when the choppers came, they were left out in the cold. Rivas had only called in enough birds for the Marines. Once the grunts were loaded up, the ARVNs came charging out of the jungle with the VC on their asses—apparently a VC unit that wasn’t in on the set-up. The Marines opened up on the ARVN and they got caught in-between the Marines and the VC and chopped up.
Last Dudak had seen of them, they were dying in great numbers.
“See that’s the shit we eat up there, sir. You dig, sir? Now you got your story, don’t you, sir? You can splash that on your front fucking page, sir�
�”
He was stressed and wiped-out, but I couldn’t let that stand. I should’ve walked away, but instead I just lost my cool and walked up to him, slapped him across the face. “I ain’t no sir,” I said. And then he was up and on me. He knocked me over flat and had his knife against my throat, his black face sweaty and greasy and stinking of jungle rot. I thought he would slit my throat, but he just started laughing instead. “Thaz cool, thaz cool,” he said. “You ain’t no sir and I ain’t no sir and they ain’t no sirs amongst us.”
A week later Dudak was KIA.
But that was Vietnam.
Incoming rounds and outgoing bodies.
6
During the war, some people came to the realization that the U.S. Army was disintegrating. Coming apart at the seams and unrolling like some worn blanket. They said it was the drugs and lack of support at home and the government’s willingness to wage a war, but to never declare it as such, always pulling back when the deathblow to the North Vietnamese could have been thrown.
I won’t argue with any of that.
The grunts I knew and bopped with were as good as any in any war. They fought hard and they fought bravely, but they didn’t do it for love or country or any of that flag-waving hypocrisy. They did it because they only had each other and their units meant the world to them, so they fought for each other and they fought for sheer survival. There were cowards over thereas in every war—sure, but legions of brave men.
The best units over there were probably the special operations forces, the Green Berets and SEALs, Marine Recons and Aussie SAS troops. Outfits like that waged guerrilla war against the guerrilla and they were damn good at it, too.
Some of those Berets were crazy and they had to be. To them the war was a drug, they mainlined it and sniffed it and smoked it and sucked it down like wine. They didn’t need drugs as such, no spiking or tripping, because they knew a real buzz, a real high when they saw one. That same all-consuming addiction man had carried with him from the caves.
One time I had come off a hard patrol and seen too many men bagged. This Green Beret laughed at me, told me I hadn’t seen shit, didn’t know shit, wouldn’t have known shit if I stepped my cherry feet into it. He stood there laughing, dressed in worn tiger-stripe jungle fatigues. His beret was tilted cockily on his head and he had a big Special Forces Randal knife in a breakaway sheath strapped to his chest. He kept calling me scribbler and I kept watching that knife, needing to get mouthy with him, but knowing if I did, with one quick motion—so quick I’d never see it coming—he’d have stuck that blade in me, slit me like a pig. Those guys were always sticking their knives in something or someone.
So I sat there, smoked a cigarette, and couldn’t hold it back any longer. I threw an annoying, clichéd journalist’s question at him (one I never used, but others did): “You really think you can win this war? That you can set these people free?”
It was designed to get under his skin, piss him off, but his skin was too thick. He just laughed, then told me that they had once raided a POW camp near Phu Bai…or what they thought was a POW camp. What it was was some kind of NVA circus full of women and children locked up in bamboo tiger cages. The Berets came in quietly, killed six guards. A seventh they took alive, but he had somehow hidden a razor on him and slit his own throat before they could stop him. So they never learned why the women and kids were in those cages. Later on they heard a rumor that the NVA had tigers and they would feed these people to them for amusement.
“When we opened those cages and got those people out…and shit, they were slat-thin, man, just skeletons…and started giving ‘em medicine and food, waiting for the choppers to pick ‘em up, we saw they had all lost their minds. All of ‘em had this blank, empty stare. Creepy. Whenever we’d leave ‘em alone, you know what they’d do? They’d crawl right back into those cages and stay there.” He shook his head, laughed grimly. “So you see, Scribbler, you can’t set people free that don’t want to be free in the first place.”
He was an asshole, but I never forgot what he said.
7
Maybe a week after the shitstorm with the 4th in the Plei Trap Valley, I was standing on the strip at Dac To when the Chinooks came in, carrying survivors of the 173rd Airborne and their operation at Hill 875. It had been a real mess up there and the 173rd had taken hundreds of casualties and a few more hundred were KIA. They had fought all through the night before taking 875. I watched the choppers come in and the dead being unloaded and the survivors—just as dead—walking up the tarmac with that glazed, after-battle look in their eyes.
Quinn had called me, told me he had run into a paratrooper with the 173rd that I ought to talk to. An NCO named Bridges. So there I waited and watched, keeping my distance because these guys looked rough, real rough like something big and hungry had chewed them up, swallowed them, and shit them out on the strip.
Other journalists were swarming around like bluebottle flies on a corpse, snapping pictures and asking questions and being met with dead silence. One bouncy, giddy broad from Life ran up to a soldier, a big white guy with scars on his face and a junkyard dog demeanor, started firing questions at him. He unzipped his fatigue pants and, to her amazement, proceeded to urinate on her dress.
Later, I was in the NCO club putting a shine on, when that same big grunt walked up to me. “You Mac?” he said and I told him I was. “Listen up, Bitch. I won’t repeat this. I was up near Khe Sanh with a recon patrol on the Xe Cong River, watching Charlie on the other shore. Laos. First thing we know, we’re taking fire from an NVA unit. Company-strength. Must’ve been some sapper targeting us, because mortar rounds were landing directly on our position. About half of us were KIA right there, the rest scattered into the jungle right into a fucking ambush. Next thing I know, I’m alone. So I E and E’d my ass out of there, just running and running, deciding if maybe I hid my shit deep enough in the bush, they’d leave me.”
“Did they?”
He nodded. “Damn straight. But by that time I was fucking lost. I’d wandered into this little hollow. The ground was all mucky and wet and the jungle was so thick you had to cut your way through. Soon enough, I wandered into a clearing. You know what I saw there?”
“What?” I lit a cigarette, wondering why Quinn had put this guy on my ass. “What did you see?”
“Heads.”
I looked at him and his hard gray eyes did not blink. “Heads?”
“You heard me. Fucking heads. Sure as shit. Hundreds of ‘em speared on these seven-foot bamboo stakes. I’m six-foot-six and they were up above me, so, yeah, seven feet, I’m saying. Some had been there a long time, weren’t nothing more than skulls. Others were fresher. Some real fresh. Viets, Americans. Lots of heads. A forest of them on stakes, far as I could see in any direction.”
I was just staring at him now.
“I heard something big, mister, something big coming through the jungle, something that smelled horrible. I ran and ran until maybe three, four hours later I bumped into a Marine unit. They got me out. But I’ll never forget all those heads. What they were like.”
I swallowed, something cold sluicing in my belly. “What were they like?”
“Fields of the dead.”
8
More horror stories.
You thought too much about them, they’d get under your skin, turn your mind soft. A few months before I’d been down in the Delta near Can Tho with the SEALs and their Vietnamese counterparts, the LDNN. We came through the marshes and paddies to this village that had been hit by the NVA. There was no one left alive. The hootches were all burning, the livestock had been slaughtered. Women had been impaled on stakes through the crotch, forced down on them so that the sharp end came out right through their mouths or throats. Their breasts had been slit off and nailed to trees. Men had been hanged by the neck, their genitals sliced off and shoved in their mouths. Children were beheaded, tied to trees and used for target practice. Babies chopped up like cold cuts and scattered over the groun
d. Girls had been raped with bamboo poles. Other villagers had been beaten into shapeless masses, bones sticking out of too many rents in their skins. We found fingers and hands and legs and heads and you name it. I had never dreamed there could be such atrocities in any war.
I got sick more than once.
Pointless? No, there had been a point to it. A real sick, twisted point. Amongst the dead we found American cigarette butts, wrappers from American candy bars, a tossed M-16 rifle, and a Marine K-Bar knife stuck in an old man’s throat. The point, then, was to make it look like Americans had done it. We cleaned up the area and buried the dead. A few days later—I learned—the SEALs caught up with North Viets who’d perpetrated that little party. Those they hadn’t killed outright they skinned with their diving knives.
That day in the village, though, the ground had been saturated with blood and it had soaked into the soles of my boots. For weeks afterward, whenever I walked in the wet or got caught in the rain, my boots would seep blood. I finally threw them out.
9
The chopper that dropped me at Khe Sanh Marine Base barely even touched down. I hit the ground running, stumbling, making for the trench, Marines huddled there cheering me on as the rotor wash lifted over and above me and I was the biggest object on the strip. The Marines were shouting, “Come on, baby! You can make it! Run! Run! Run yer ass off!” And then I dove into the trench next to them and they were laughing and I was breathing hard and wondering why the fuck I kept sticking my ass in the line of fire.
You see, at the Khe Sahn Combat Base—a mere eleven kilometers from Laos—the strip was the constant target of NVA mortars and rockets and big guns tucked away in the forested hills. The base was continually under siege, but the airstrip was the very worse place. Many Marines had died running to or from some transport and the strip itself was often littered with the wreckage of aircraft. It was so bad, so very dangerous flying in there that re-supply (whenever possible) was made by parachute drop from 1500 feet above. More than one Marine, at the end of his tour, had decided to re-up rather than take a chance out there, running for his plane or chopper.
