The evening before the battalion loaded up a month ago and set sail from Okinawa, the battalion commander, Colonel Earl Delong, assembled everyone in the base theater at Camp Schwab for a pep talk. “Pappy” Delong was an old salt. At least he was old compared to most of his Marines. He had been well seasoned in the Marine Corps.
“Remember your training,” he advised. “That’s critical. Everybody in this battalion is a good shot, so make your bullets count. We have the experience in this outfit. Some of your NCOs fought in World War II or Korea. Listen to them. They’ll guide you through. Most of all except for mission and duty, look out for one another. That’s the Marine Corps way. Make your battalion proud!”
Semper Fi!
Tony and I were privates, down near the bottom of the military pecking order. We had been together looking out for each other from boot camp on through ITR and BITS (Battalion Infantry Training School) where we drilled on unit crew-served weapons, everything from the M-60 machine gun and 3.5 rocket launcher to flamethrowers, 60mm mortars and the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR). If a Marine company had the weapon, Tony and I could fire it. I suspected we were about to have an opportunity to prove our mettle.
“Maras?” Tony whispered next to me as the AMTRACs charged toward Vietnam. “Are you nervous, man?”
We knew each other too well to lie. But bluster and braggadocio in the face of pending danger was not the same as a lie. “I ain’t paid to be nervous, Tony. It’s out of my pay grade.”
Tony sighed. “I think my pay grade stops at cleaning the pissers in the head.”
He reminded me of the actor-comedian Buddy Hackett, but now a very anxious Buddy Hackett with cramps as we drew near Red Beach. He wasn’t fat like Buddy. No combat Marine was fat. But he was a solid block of a guy with dark bristle on top of a round head covered by his helmet.
The closer we drew to shore, the quieter we became. Marines gave our weapons a last check, tightened our helmet straps, tapped each other on the shoulder or helmet for good luck. I gripped the machine gun tightly between my knees and waited, expecting at any moment a bombardment from shore, like at Iwo Jima. That was the way it happened in John Wayne movies.
Quiet like this couldn’t be good; it was giving me time to think. I glanced at Tony. His head was lowered and I figured he must be thinking of Peggy. Or praying, like the good Catholic boy he was. I thought of Linda, my high school sweetheart. I married her on boot camp leave. A lot of boots before shipping out to Vietnam got married when they went home. Marriage formed a bond, an assurance of an anchor to bring us back, someone waiting for us.
“Maras?” Tony lifted his head. “Maras, if I don’t make it, will you . . .?” He took a deep breath. “Will you tell Peggy what happened?”
I tried to josh him out of it. Buddies did that for buddies. A mood was something you didn’t want to carry into combat. “Come on, Tony, don’t get your skivvies in a knot. We’re both coming back, okay? Peggy is counting on you to fart for her.”
“You’re cold, Maras. Cold.” But he half-grinned, sheepishly.
I chuckled, feeling the release of tension. Most of the time, you could count on Tony for a funny story or comment. One of his funniest was when his girlfriend Peggy had her heart set on becoming high school prom queen. She was afraid her chief rival, one of the most popular and self-centered girls in the senior class, would move in over her. Tony couldn’t let that happen.
At the school dance where the voting and selection occurred, Tony whisked Peggy’s competitor onto the dance floor to whirl with Elvis. In the middle of a light-footed but complicated series of rock ’n’ roll steps, Tony passed wind in a gale that reverberated throughout the gym and rattled colored lanterns hanging from the ceiling. The dance went embarrassingly silent.
Pretending alarm and disgust, Tony grabbed his partner and shook her. “You pig!” he scolded. “Farting like that and you wanna be Prom Queen?!”
Peggy won the crown.
“Coldest thing I’ve ever done to anybody,” Tony confessed to me as we heard breakers crashing against Vietnamese sand, his good Catholic boy persona crushed. “But I couldn’t let my girlfriend lose.”
I slapped his helmet. We both laughed and relaxed.
Lieutenant Mac’s standing up in the AMTRAC immediately got our attention. “One minute!” he announced.
That brought back the tension.
Half of BLT 2/3 consisted of raw greenhorns like Tony and me. The “old” 2nd Battalion had got fucked up bad in a deadly ambush northwest of Da Nang that left the outfit’s command sergeant major dead along with a bunch of other NCOs, men, and most of the brass. The battalion returned—what was left of it—from Vietnam to Okinawa to refit and seed in replacements. Golf Company, into which fate inserted Tony and me, had lost 26 dead and 46 wounded out of a company of 110 men.
A Marine lance corporal who had survived the ambush balked at the prospect of having to go back to Vietnam. He had barely made it back the first time. Returning to give the gooks another shot at him was beyond his ability to cope. When the battalion was preparing to load onto the boats, the disturbed Marine took off for the showers and repeatedly bashed his head against a tile wall until he cracked open his skull. Medics carried him out on a stretcher. He giggled hysterically through the blood and gore on his face.
“Don’t go back there!” he ranted. “Don’t go! You’re all dead if you do! God, don’t go!”
Chapter Two
The Graveyard
The battalion was ramped up, every grunt’s senses hyper-aware. “Red Beach” in gyrene lingo was a generic term indicating a possible hot landing with enemy opposition. The 9th Marine Regiment had done the first Vietnam Red Beach when it stormed ashore at Da Nang two years ago in March 1965 to kick this ragtag war into high gear. In all the old World War II movies, like Sands of Iwo Jima and The Fighting Seabees, a dramatic score with crescendos of drums and bugles accompanied landings. There was nothing like that now as our AMTRACs charged toward the sand. Just the rattle of weapons, some muted cursing, a few muttered prayers, nervous knees knocking together.
PFC Gene Kilgore occupied a space in the track on the other side of Tony. He slapped the black plastic stock of his new Mattie Mattel M-16 rifle. “This piece of shit had better work,” he muttered.
Up until Okinawa, we had trained with trusty M-14s that replaced WWII-era M-1s. They were heavy-caliber, heavy-weight semi-automatic rifles, and they were dependable. On Okinawa, however, officers collected our M-14s and issued black metal-and-plastic M-16s that resembled children’s toy guns. They were touted as lightweight weapons capable of fully automatic fire fed by 20- or 30-round magazines. Whereas the -14 fired enemy-stopping 7.62mm rounds, the new -16 loaded 5.56mm, a slight advance over the .222 rifles Sunday shooters used back home for plinking rabbits or squirrels. In selecting it as Vietnam’s rifle, the Pentagon apparently preferred its higher bullet velocity and magazine capacity.
It had problems from the beginning. On the range at Camp Schwab, M-16s jammed every few rounds when the battalion took them out for a test run. Bang! Bang! Jam. Bang! Jam. Bang! Jam. Marines exchanged startled looks.
“They’re sending us to war with these pieces of shit.”
“So, I see this gook coming right at me,” Tony hypothesized. “I got him dead in my sights. Sight picture, sight picture. . . . Squeeze the trigger. Oh, fuck!”
“I’ll shoot him,” I offered. The reliable ol’ Pig, the M-60 machine gun, always functioned.
Same thing happened with the Mattie Mattels when we test-fired them off the Ogden’s fantail on the sea cruise to Vietnam. Seldom could you burn through a magazine without their malfunctioning. Failures were initially chalked up to our not cleaning the weapons properly. That didn’t fly. Even though we were issued only enough cleaning equipment and rods for every fourth or fifth man, a finicky New York Fifth Avenue socialite could have sipped coffee from
the barrels. Marines always kept our weapons that clean.
The unreliable status of the M-16 added to the tension as the amphib tractors rolled up on tan-white sand backed by lush tropical vegetation and low jungle hills in the distance. The AMTRACs dropped their “drawers” and excreted the battalion onto Vietnam soil. For perhaps the majority of Marines in 2/3, due to the previous ambush casualties, this was our first time on hostile shores.
We charged off the armored boats like 1,300 John Wayne impersonators prepared to combat evil and save the world. It was 22 April 1967 and Operation Beacon Star, later called Operation Bo Diddley, was under way. Our debut turned out to be rather anticlimactic and inglorious. Nobody shot at us. Nobody said a cross or unkind word. Fact was, nobody said anything to us because nobody was there. Just a gull that flushed and winged off down the beach screeching his indignation.
Marines had arrived ready to do battle with the hordes—and it was like we were on a day’s outing at Miami or Waikiki Beach. Confused, even a bit disappointed, we looked at each other, looked up and down the deserted beach. Somebody laughed out of nervous relief. It proved contagious and more sniggers rippled through the invaders.
A private named Burnham figured it out. “Gooks heard the mighty 2/3 was coming and they split. They’re probably back in Hanoi by now.”
Tony Leyba threw back his head and called out at the top of his lungs, “Good morning, Vietnam!”
Platoon leaders and sergeants snapped us back into line. Golf Company’s Gunny Sergeant Janzen, thirty-six years old and still feisty and hard-core, roared, “Cut the grabass. You guys are sounding like a gaggle of geese. Shape up or my boot will be up your asses and you’ll have more to worry about than gooks.”
The way I understood our mission at my lowly pay grade was that Viet Cong guerrillas supported by Hanoi and the NVA had established a presence in the ratty little villages in the Phu Bai area of I Corps. Communists moved into a village, generally the more remote ones, and took it over through a combination of stick and carrot. Go along with the program and the village elders were rewarded by not being assassinated; resist and they found themselves hung in the village square as a warning to potential opposition. Communists had been using this tried and true method since Vladimir Lenin—and along the way had slaughtered several million recalcitrants. Building communism was a brutal and bloody business.
BLT 2/3’s role in Operation Beacon Star was to create a presence by patrolling VC-infested villages to search for and seize arms, combat rations, and other war matériel and, finally, to root out VC and kill them.
The battalion quickly formed for a road march in force along a cart trail that threaded up and off Red Beach. Echo Company took point, followed by Hotel and Foxtrot. Golf brought up the rear. Grass hooches with either tin or palm leaf roofs caught the notice of naïve young Marines who soon came to realize that much of the Third World existed in squalor and poverty. Naked, dirty-faced kids played in the mud along with chickens, ducks, pigs, water buffalo, and, presumably, various parasites. Snaggle-toothed mamasans with babies on their hips and baskets balanced on their heads stared as the battalion tramped by. From the rice fields, papasans in black “pajamas” paused in the tepid water with their trouser cuffs rolled up to the knees and straw cone hats pulled low to shade their eyes from sunlight.
Kids stood by the side of the trail hawking cans of warm Coca-Cola. “Joe? Joe, you buy Coca?”
“They had Cokes ready for us,” Tony observed. “How did they know we were coming? I thought we were a secret operation.”
“Nothing’s secret in this country,” said Gunny Janzen, who happened to be passing by checking on his men.
Shortly, we approached a Buddhist cemetery that looked to be about a thousand years old. Ancient trees shrouded in gray moss stood sentinel over little cupolas, shrines, and tombstones crusted in lichen. A lizard watched us from the top of the stone wall that surrounded the graveyard.
I expected the battalion to march on by. To my surprise, Echo and the Command Element turned in through the cemetery gate and proceeded to set up a battalion Command Post under a clump of gloomy trees from which to oversee and control the Area of Operations (AO). Darkness crept through the grave markers as the battalion established a perimeter and put out Observation/Listening (OP/LP) Posts.
I surmised the site had been selected because of the protection afforded by the high rock wall. Still, it had to be the spookiest place in Vietnam, an assumption that proved premature the longer I remained in-country. There were a lot of spooky places in Vietnam.
Things got even spookier as the sky turned purple and full night slithered in. Tony figured Dracula with slanted Asian eyes would probably rise out of the grave next to which he and I set up our 50-50 watch—one of us sleeping and the other keeping an eye peeled for the enemy, ghosts, or Dracula, whichever arrived first.
Foxfire glowed from a decaying pile of fallen trees nearby. Tony kept a wary eye on it.
“It’s like eyes shining in the dark,” he ventured. “I have a feeling Vietnam is glaring at us, telling us it doesn’t want us here.”
Chapter Three
Khe Sanh
At first I was embarrassed busting into the little Vietnamese villages ransacking through people’s belongings without so much as a by your leave. Poor gooks in their grass hooches seemed so ignorant they probably didn’t even realize the world was round or that the sun didn’t rise out of the ocean as it seemed to. You could smell a village from a mile downwind.
The kids were cute little critters, the younger ones naked, the older standing aside in their faded black cotton pants as they silently watched big, round-eyed foreigners wearing helmets and armed with exotic weapons invade and go from hut to hut, poking knives into barrels of grain, up-ending baskets, nosing around and taking no guff from the elders.
Women in their woven-grass cone hats and baggy black pajamas were tiny things, and cute too. At least some of them were attractive when they were young. They aged fast working the rice paddies, became mamasans with their faces wrinkled and crusted in the hot tropical sun like cardboard left out in the weather. The withered crones they became glared silent resentment as we barged into their homes.
The men with their wispy little beards all looked like Ho Chi Minh. I could have sworn one of them was Uncle Ho. He stepped aside and watched with a pained expression on his face as Bill Rainey, Tony, and I barged into his hooch and tossed it for contraband. A fat, crudely rolled cigarette burned down to his fingers; he grimaced and dropped it at his feet on the dirt floor. Instead of stomping it out, he squatted and carefully salvaged what few grains of tobacco remained.
I stood over him. Poor bastard. I handed him a pack of cigarettes. Lucky Strikes. Little packs of six came with our C-rations. I didn’t smoke, so I mostly traded mine for C-rat fruit cocktails or white cake. I figured I always got the better of the deal.
Uncle Ho seemed so grateful for a few butts that Rainey forked over a C-rat chocolate bar to a passing maiden to see just how grateful she might be. She snatched it out of his hand and kept going without looking at him.
“Damn!” he huffed. “The bitch probably doesn’t even speak English.”
It occurred to me that all these poor dirt farmers wanted out of life was to be left alone to grow their rice, bed their women on their woven sleeping mats, raise their children, and watch the sun rise and set. Instead, the commies came through promising a “workers’ paradise,” and anyone who refused it was shot and hung in the center of the village as a warning.
Then here we came chasing the commies, tossing people’s houses, ogling their women, and further disrupting their lives. Poor fuckers were losers no matter what.
“Third Herd’s” platoon leader, Lieutenant McFarlane, had fought in Korea and didn’t trust any gooks. He warned we shouldn’t turn our backs on them. Even the sweetest-looking little granny or a four-year-old kid might dr
op a hot Chicom grenade down our skivvies.
“Search and destroy” in Operation Beacon Star, at least for BLT 2/3, seemed to be mostly “search” with the companies sent out separately. After a hard day’s work in the sun, we returned to the cemetery to set out OP/LPs and wait for the hordes to attack. Tony hunkered next to our tomb and shivered, still half-convinced that Dracula roamed the graves at night and would suck our blood.
“You won’t doze off or nothing when you’re on watch, right, Maras?”
“We could build you a crucifix or find some garlic to ward him off,” I teased.
Nights after-action, such as it was, our squad and platoon leaders briefed us about hard-core VC and perhaps even NVA in the area. Already beginning to feel like old salts, our reaction was Bring ’em on! We were fresh, young, loaded with all this battle equipment, and raring to go. As Kilgore put it, “All dressed up and nobody to take us to the party.”
Golf Company was on a trudge between villages, all strung out up and down a muddy road, when a sniper with a grudge and an old 50-caliber rifle took a pot shot at the lead elements, which included Tony and me. The machine gun always traveled near the front of a column. That 50-cal boomed like a cannon from out of a clump of mangrove on the other side of a rice paddy. I hit the dirt. I would have crawled under it if possible. This was my first experience getting shot at—or at least it felt like I had been shot at.
“I can’t get any lower, me buttons are in the way,” I quipped to ease the tension. That was the tagline from a cartoon in Bill Mauldin’s classic World War II book Up Front, which seemed apropos for the occasion.
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