Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  Bored during the day and nervous at night made sleep hard to come by. We fashioned beds out of scraps of whatever we could find—mortar ammo boxes, C-rat cartons, ponchos, or we dozed on and off crumpled in the dark bottoms of our pits. Waiting. The enemy made it less than easy to grab a Z or two.

  We heard ghosts out there in the dark prowling and scurrying about like rodents or cockroaches. Felt their eyes watching, could almost see them in the bush below the ridge with their fingers on triggers. Frequent thick fog contributed to our trench anxieties. Random sniper fire from the distant jungle further added to the war of nerves, while enemy sappers under cover of fog and darkness moved to within forty yards of our perimeter. Out of the liquid dark emerged sounds of their activity—the slap of a rifle sling against the wooden stock of an AK-47, the high-pitched singsong tones of voices chattering in Vietnamese. Even laughter.

  What kind of demons were we up against?

  Marines yelled taunts and insults. “You yellow little cocksuckers! Come out and play if you got the balls!”

  Here and there around the perimeter a Marine with frayed nerves fired off a burst from his M-16, his tantrum sometimes culminating with “Sonofabitch!” when his rifle jammed.

  Hell of a way to fight a war. Guys who seemed to know said our weapons were manufactured by the cheapest bidders supported by political lobbyists in Washington. It was bullshit that they malfunctioned because of our own improper cleaning. The damned things were defective, and they were getting Marines killed. Sergeant Crawford once told us he never knew of an M-1 Garand or M-14 jamming in combat.

  In between being mortared and pulling daily platoon-sized recon forays into the bush, guys managed to get together to kill time by chatting about girls, cars, and more girls, as young men will. We tried to avoid talking about returning home, as it gave us an empty, lonesome feeling to acknowledge how many Marines in these hills had been KIA and would never go home again—and that some of the rest of us likely shared the same fate. Down to a man, we all envied Jaggers.

  Jaggers had a month left of his enlistment when BLT 2/3 hit Red Beach. Colonel Delong left him aboard ship to work Supply, since he was a short-timer.

  “Lucky bastard,” everyone agreed. “He don’t know how lucky he is.”

  I had grown up listening to the tough Marines of my father’s era, reading about them, and watching WWII movies. I wondered if that generation might have been tougher than we. Sergeant Crawford, who was about the age of my father, seemed to prove it. Word came back that his wounds were healing and he would soon return to action. The man was tough, tough.

  “Maras,” Crawford assured me once, “if Marines took a beach, they didn’t give it up.”

  I tried to imagine what it must have been like. Later, I read about it in a book called Two Fronts, One War:

  Iwo Jima was to be a 24-hour operation at most. The Navy had been working over the island for weeks, and were still at it. Battlewagons were spitting chunks of fire as transports pulled to anchor a mile or so offshore. Troops lined the rails of transports and watched the rest of the day and night as Navy guns and airplanes hammered the tiny piece of terra firma and smoke and fire roiled from it.

  A cold drizzle fell. Just enough to keep Marines wet and miserable. Mount Suribachi, the 550-foot black cone on the island’s southern tip, dominated the beach. It seemed to be waiting in ambush. Surely, nothing on this little hunk of rock and volcanic sand could withstand the beating it had taken.

  Then why was it going to take three full Marine divisions—the 3rd, 4th, and 5th—to run the Japs off it?

  “Now hear this, now hear this!” blared transport PA systems. “Chaplains will offer a moment of prayer before you board your landing craft. . . .” That was when you knew things were serious.

  How was that so much different than now?

  The 3rd Marine Regiment, my 3rd Marines, carried the battle flag from Iwo Jima and into Vietnam as part of our honor guard colors. Would it carry the battle flag of the Hill Fights forward for a new generation of warriors to wonder about? It seemed every generation had its war.

  Tony shook his head. He suggested there might not be another generation after Vietnam if the world continued on the road to hell and the Soviet Union and the United States started lobbing nukes at each other.

  Screw it. Speculation like that was above my pay grade. The 3rd Marines hadn’t given up Iwo Jima. Neither would the 3rd today give up 861 and its sisters, 881N and 881S, once we took them.

  We weren’t always aware of it, but back in “the World” or “the Land of the Big PX,” which in Marine idiom meant the United States, Khe Sanh made Walter Cronkite’s Evening News and the nation’s front pages every day. It had become a political bone for dope-smoking hippies and their “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” From what we understood, President Lyndon Johnson was determined to make the Combat Base the turning point of the war, vowing, “We shall not, under any circumstances, let Khe Sanh fall.”

  As the situation began playing out, we Marines were to find ourselves trapped between the rock and a hard place, between Ho Chi Minh’s hammer and LBJ’s anvil. Uncle Ho was hell bent on another Dien Bien Phu; President Johnson was just as hell bent on winning here in I Corps no matter the price Marines had to pay.

  It became more difficult each day for Tony and me to maintain real enthusiasm for our daybreak ritual of pissing on Vietnam.

  “Good morning, Vietnam!” Tony muttered as he stood urinating on a dirt pile.

  I echoed the greeting.

  There was fog this morning down lower. Tony squinted into it. Everything was quiet, so far. His round face went nostalgic. I thought he was thinking about his fiancée, Peggy.

  Instead, he said, “Maras, remember the pie?”

  We both chuckled.

  “How could I forget it? You and Lappeguard ate it.”

  It was my turn to squint into the fog and remember Linda.

  After boot camp and ITR, Tony, Don Lappeguard, and I went on to BITS at Pendleton for machine gun school. I brought Linda out so we could be together. We had been married no more than three or four months; the Marine Corps had kept us separated since our wedding during boot camp leave.

  I rented a cheap little motel room on the beach at St. Ona Fre, just outside Pendleton’s main gate. Sea lions bellied right up on the sand and barked to be fed. Linda was delighted; she laughed and laughed. Being from Oklahoma, neither she nor I had been this close to these beautiful sleek creatures with their big eyes and comical expressions.

  One night, Linda baked a cherry pie and we invited Tony and Don out for a home-cooked meal. Linda had left the pie out to cool on the table. My buddies’ eyes immediately fixated on it.

  “Take it and eat it,” Linda offered. “That’s what it’s for.”

  “Really?”

  The Marines pounced on the cherry pie like two chickens on grasshoppers. They ate the whole thing while Linda and I watched and laughed.

  “It was a good time,” Tony reminisced as we buttoned our flies and headed back to our hole. It was no good thing to expose yourself long enough to present some sniper the chance to draw a bead on you.

  Not long after the cherry pie, Lappeguard was assigned to the 1st Marine Division and we never saw him again. Linda returned to Tulsa to stay with my mom and dad. Tony and I went to the 3rd Marines and shipped out for Okinawa and Vietnam.

  Chapter Twelve

  Dear John

  Troops in the hills as well as down in the valley at the Khe Sanh Combat Base were almost entirely dependent upon air resupply. Enemy mortar teams had cut Route 9 between the air base and Cam Lo to prevent overland reinforcement. The arrival of a helicopter was always a welcome event. It approached by surprise, screaming in low and hot before the enemy could zero in on it. It had about thirty seconds to set down on our makeshift LZ, offload, take on medevac cases, if
any, and get the hell out before enemy mortar rounds caught it like a sitting duck. Most of the time it hovered a foot or so off the ground while crews kicked out food, water, and ammo, and then it sprang back into the air. What really pissed us off was when the bad guys got lucky and blew up our resupply before we had a chance to get it off the LZ and safely into a hole. We were always short of everything. Troops groused that “nothing is too good for the troops, and nothing is what we get.”

  Choppers were a great morale booster when they brought in mail from home. An hour or so before dark one afternoon, a UH-1 “Huey” darted down out of the sky and kicked out a bag of mail. As it took off again, nose down and full bore for speed, I noticed huge boom box speakers attached to either skid strut. It must have been shanghaied into double duty; normally, a psyops (psychological operations) platform remained high and safely in the air over a battle zone to drop leaflets and broadcast enticements for the enemy to give up communism and join the South. The psyops people didn’t like to get down and dirty with the hoi polloi on the ground.

  PFC Gene Kilgore was Golf Company’s duty “mail man” for the day. He scooted through Golf’s positions delivering it. He had several letters for me from Linda and Mom. Since night was coming and Viet soldiers were on the move for their nightly hoedown, I stuffed the letters into my pack to wait for daylight to read and reply to them. Last time I wrote home, a warrior ant somehow got into the envelope and chewed up most of the contents before it reached Tulsa.

  Tony slipped his letter into a cargo pocket. “It’s from Peggy,” he said.

  “Am I invited to the wedding?”

  “If Linda brings a cherry pie.”

  Kilgore waved an envelope addressed to him. “There was this blonde at the San Diego USO with bazoombas way out to here. . . .”

  Tony laughed. “Way out to where? She a cow or something?”

  Kilgore feigned offense. “She sent me a picture. I was going to show it to you poor homesick suckers, but I won’t now.”

  Kilgore was from Texas, short and stocky, a solid Marine. You could trust him with everything except your wife or girlfriend. He insisted no photo be taken of him smiling or laughing while in uniform. A Marine had to look professional. He was the A-gunner for Pelky’s M-60 gun team and carried an M-16 with a see-in-the-dark Starlite Scope attached to it. The Scope was a classified item valued at about $3,000, or about two years’ pay for a private. Its assignment to Kilgore attested to the trust officers and sergeants invested in him.

  He also carried a thermite grenade with instructions to destroy the Starlite if he had to in order to prevent the NVA capturing it.

  “How will you know when to burn it?” other Marines asked him.

  “I’ll know,” he said with typical confidence.

  Our mail/psyops Huey remained in the AO. I looked up when I heard it throbbing overhead. It circled wide and high up where sunshine still shone as its crew kicked out bundles of leaflets that drifted down onto enemyville like a big snowstorm. Each missile offered its bearer the opportunity to Chieu Hoi and change sides by simply presenting it to the nearest American or South Vietnamese. VC sometimes accepted the offer, but rarely a hardcore NVA.

  The Huey’s boom boxes began blasting music from the darkening sky to attract attention to the falling leaflets. Playing tonight and tonight only: the rock group The Animals and their hit song “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place.” The incongruity struck a reaction from 2/3 on the ridge. Laughter broke out in infectious waves. Tony, Kilgore, and I laughed until tears came to our eyes. The NVA must have thought the Americans had all gone absolutely bugfuck.

  Leaflets and music, however, appeared to have no effect on the NVA. During the day, enemy soldiers in groups numbering up to one hundred men in each were spotted on the move humping heavy packs and garbed out in their greenish-tan uniforms, sneakers, and pith helmets. More mortar and sniper fire than usual raked our ridgeline.

  As night drew near, the enemy moved in close, flitting in rushes to evade the eerie green pulsating half-light of flares dropped from Puff or from artillery at Khe Sanh. The NVA were not yet serious about attacking us. They were merely probing, testing our weaknesses, attempting to pick off an LP/OP. But an attack was coming sooner or later. It was coming as predictably as hangover followed a drunk.

  Marines responded with grenades and rifle fire. An occasional scream from a wounded enemy shattered the darkness. With excellent bedside manners, Marines shouted back, “Die, you cocksucker! Die!”

  Action dwindled off into welcome silence as the eastern sky dawned out and the outline of the surrounding hills emerged out of darkness. Marines hunkered in our holes. Tony shook himself out of his turn at a catnap. He peered drowsily about, sniffing the air.

  “Something stinks,” he noticed.

  “When was the last time you took a bath?”

  “I smell your stinking ass, Maras, not mine. Have you ordered breakfast? I’ll have an omelet with hash browns, toast, butter, and strawberry jam. Make sure the coffee is hot.”

  I rummaged through my pack and produced a pair of OD cans. “Ham and eggs,” I offered, “or fruit cocktail?”

  I tossed him the ham and eggs. He shook his canteen. “Half-empty,” he said.

  “I prefer to see it as half-full,” I corrected. “Gunny said to ration water in case the choppers can’t make it in today.”

  “Crimney, it’s gonna be hot. Maybe we can lick dew before it dries up.”

  Private Hernandez from one hole over heard the discussion. “I got something you can lick, Leyba.”

  “Marines are crude bastards, Maras. You notice that?”

  Hernandez chuckled. “We can’t all be refined gentlemen like you, home boy.”

  Before Tony opened his can of breakfast, he and I enjoyed our ritual morning piss on Vietnam.

  “Good morning, Vietnam!”

  Tony opened his letter from Peggy while we ate. I saw his face darken as the sky lightened. He slammed his half-eaten can of ham and eggs against the trench wall, splattering it. His chin dropped to his chest. He looked defeated and somehow diminished as his thick body collapsed in on itself.

  “Fuck! Fuck!”

  “Tony?”

  “The bitch!” he sobbed. “The two-timing, low-down, cheap bitch.”

  No need to ask. A Dear John. It happened all the time. Guys went off to war and the girls we left behind tumbled into the sheets with draft dodgers.

  “Tony. . . . Tony, I’m sorry, man.”

  “Screw her.”

  He had had her name tattooed on his arm during boot camp Leave—a red heart with “Peggy” superimposed on it. He drew in a deep painful breath and lifted his head, sniffing.

  “The world really does stink, you know that, Maras?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ambush

  The NVA avoided sustained direct contact following Hotel Company’s brawl with them in the draw where Sergeant Crawford got hit. I shook my head in disbelief at word that Big Ed was eager to get back in the fight with his “boys.” Wounded in Korea, now wounded in Vietnam—and he was coming back for more. Seemed to me he might be pushing his Guardian Angel’s protection a bit too far. Even a cat only had nine lives.

  “I get out of here alive,” Tony fussed, “I’m going home and never coming out of my house again.”

  The sun glared at us. Sweating, we both removed our utility jackets down to green T-shirts. Tony rested his chin on his shoulder to peer unhappily at the Peggy’s Heart tattoo on his upper arm. I saw how he was struggling to overcome his Dear John letter.

  “Maras, loan me your banana knife.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m gonna skin off the bitch’s name.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Fuck it. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get it shot off.”

  Truth be admitted, Viets weren’t the
only ones avoiding direct contact. The two sides were like boxers in the first round of a championship fight. Jabbing, feinting, probing, feeling each other out for the later rounds when the match got serious. Stood to reason that while we Marines conserved our resources and built up resolve, sending out frequent patrols to see if we could figure out what the enemy was up to, the enemy was doing pretty much the same thing. Rumors spread that, in spite of losses the NVA suffered during our near-constant bombardment of their hilltop redoubts, the North Vietnamese still had an entire division prepared to wipe us out in the hills and then move on Khe Sanh.

  Likely the NVA generals had big battle maps of their own with colored pins to move around. I wondered if Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar had colored pins.

  In spite of the heat, or perhaps because of it, mist lay thick by the creek between the two Wicked Sisters, which is what I took to calling 881N and 881S. It clung to forest giants like fiber caught in a cotton mill’s teeth. While our big guns and air power may have denuded the hills, forest and grasses grew virulent and concealing down below. I compared our bombardment of the Wicked Sisters to going to a Marine barber and requesting he take a little off the top—and he chopped you off down to your ears.

  “You all right, Tony?” I asked.

  He still seemed in shock from his Dear John. Couldn’t broads at least wait until we got out of combat before putting the screw to us?

  “Piss on her,” Tony said.

  It was Lieutenant McFarlane’s turn to run a daylight recon patrol down into the creek valley. Gunny Janzen came by.

  “Maras, you and Leyba saddle up. You’re going out with Lieutenant Mac. Meet up over at the Company CP.”

  Since Weapons Platoon was a company asset, weapons men could be assigned piecemeal anywhere within Golf Company. My pucker factor shot through the roof, providing we had had a roof for it to shoot through. Tony’s expression remained unchanging and morose as we stripped down our packs to essentials, like water and ammo. At least he continued to function.