Pollution of the pond made resupply more critical than ever and made us almost entirely dependent on helicopters as a lifeline. Chopper pilots had big balls. Hell, their balls had balls. CH-46 Sea Knight medevacs and smaller Sikorsky UH-34s varied their routes to stay unpredictable and avoid enemy antiaircraft fire from guns studded on valley walls along Route 9 that led into the Khe Sanh area. They chopped about and snaked into our stronghold from various approaches to fool the gooks. But there were only so many ways in. Each arriving flight became a magnet for NVA guns. Aircraft arrived with windows shot out, bullet holes punched in cowlings, hydraulic fluid leaking.
Those nervy flight crews won our undying admiration and gratitude. We might go hungry and thirsty, but we knew they’d deliver as soon as they could make it through. You had to believe that if you were wounded, somebody would come get you and fly you to an aid station where you had a chance. Medevacs were our angels out of the sky who made valiant efforts to reach our hills through hell and brimstone and sometimes through zero-degree visibility because of fog and rain and darkness.
A chopper had about thirty seconds to get in, offload supplies and mail, pick up casualties and perhaps outgoing mail, and get back out again before enemy mortar rounds began falling. Coming in one morning with fresh water and supplies, a chopper suddenly appeared running hot with tracers cutting the air all around as it air-skidded onto a tiny makeshift LZ on a 45-degree slope near the pond. While its wheels hovered a few feet off the ground, it dropped the ramp to allow crew to dump off cargo and rush any wounded or dead aboard.
“Incoming! Get the hell out!”
“Go! Go!”
I ran out, jumped on the outside step to the cockpit and handed the pilot a note home I had scribbled on a B-3 unit lid.
“Will you mail this for me?”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll get it out.”
My note read: Mom. Linda. Whatever you hear about what’s happening, I want you to know I’m still alive.
Little things matter under difficult circumstances. The successful arrival of a resupply mission was always cause for a celebration. Gunny tapped me, Tony, Kilgore, and Bill Rainey to meet the next Sea Knight as it galloped in and pulled up hard on one of our crude landing zones. We always had two or three designated LZs so the enemy wouldn’t know which one was in play and pre-target it.
The big green bird settled in with a blast of downdraft so loud it demolished rational thought. A tall kid with big ears caught my attention among the helicopter crew kicking out C-rat boxes, jerry cans of water, and cans of ammo and grenades. I did a double take as I recognized Jaggers, the short-timer Colonel Delong left behind on the ship to work Supply. He had survived the deadly ambush that sent 2/3 back to Okinawa to refit and pick up replacements. Pappy didn’t think it fitting to send him back into combat after that since he had only weeks remaining on his tour. But here he was, right in the thick of it with only days left in the ’Nam before he shipped back home.
Spotting us, he stood straight inside the body of the chopper and began waving and shouting above the rotor roar: “Hey, guys! It’s me. Jaggers.”
He jumped out onto the ground to hug his old buddies.
“Vietnam can kiss my ass in two more days!” he shouted through all the noise and bustle. “Two days and I’m outta here. I seen Sergeant Crawford on the ship. I understand you guys have really had it bad. I see every fucking day somebody is dying. I heard Doc Heath got it, and Jim Hill, and—”
“Yeah, but we’re killing their asses too,” Tony shouted back.
The helicopter crew, in a hurry to get back in the air, shoved supplies out on the ground. Tony, Kilgore, Rainey, and I tossed the boxes and cans into a nearby shell crater to get them out of the line of mortar fire.
“Incoming!”
“Oh, shit!”
Boom! Boom! Boom! Three shells landed in quick succession, bracketing us. One long, one short, and . . .
Jaggers dived for cover among the offloaded cargo we had transferred into the crater. That was where the third round landed. Hardly enough of him remained to identify. The in-and-out pressure of the explosion popped his face like a balloon. The chopper leapt into the air and left the remains of our old comrade with us. The next medevac would have to take him out.
Afterward, I retrieved Jaggers’s brain from the rubble when we policed up his parts. Unabashed tears streamed down my face. Vietnam had popped the ass of another Marine and sent him on his final journey home just two days before he was scheduled to DEROS out.
Following that kind of blow, the men of Golf needed a pick-me-up. But even that came with a certain cruel irony.
Most of the offloaded cargo made it through the explosion relatively intact, although scattered all over the landscape. From among the debris we recovered a large care package sent by some stateside civilian organization to share a little home cheer with the troops. It was addressed generically to U.S. Marine Corps, Vietnam, but had somehow found its way to us. Care packages normally contained cookies and cakes and candies and other goodies, along with personal care items like shaving cream, soap, and paperback books.
Gunny delayed opening it until the next morning to allow our grief over Jaggers to subside. An outfit in combat had to hold tough and move on quickly. Otherwise, it fell apart.
Gunny performed the unwrapping honors with agents from each platoon present and anticipating the grand unveiling of our windfall. Cookies and cakes and candy all around. Tony and I represented Weapons Platoon.
Gunny Janzen ripped apart the big cardboard box, it having hardly been damaged at all by the mortar explosion. He flipped open the top and froze. Everyone stared in stunned disbelief. The box contained dog biscuits. Along with a note from antiwar protestors in Oceanside, California: You guys are animals, you might as well eat like animals.
A disappointed Marine expressed the resentment that all of us felt: “Piss on ’em. And fuck California.”
Tony and I tried some of the biscuits. We figured they’d clean our teeth. Not bad—and they in fact did clean our teeth.
“They won’t hurt you,” Magilla said. “They’re probably good for you, but they might make you start barking.”
We shared them with the rest of our fellow animals.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The FNG
Before the old combat vet Sergeant Crawford was hit and medevac’d out, he left us with a dire warning about what to expect fighting in these hills. The Hill Fights, he predicted, would rank alongside epic Korean and World War II battles like Pork Chop Hill and Tarawa. The war in Vietnam, he explained, had been waged in some form or another since World War II, but had heated up out of the Cold War following the 9th Marines’ landing at Da Nang. Marines were the first combat troops to arrive; we would probably be the last to leave.
“We may be fighting in this shit hole ten years from now,” he said. “We can take these hills, but we won’t hold them.”
“Then why are we fighting for them?” I asked.
“Because that’s what we do.”
That was what real men of his generation did—and, to a lesser extent, perhaps, of my generation. Especially if you were from Oklahoma or Texas or some other rural state and not from San Francisco or Berkeley where long-haired, dope-smoking hippies whimpered and whined and sent dog biscuits in care packages to the battle front. We heeded the call of our country when it needed us. Uncle Sam Wants You, and all that. Just like our fathers and grandfathers had done.
Before shipping off to Marine Corps training and then Vietnam, I had rarely traveled out of Oklahoma. Some folks said Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and surrounding states had barely escaped from the nineteenth century. We were protected from the outside world in many ways, isolated in the center of a nation where people only went if they had a real good reason to go. Like a death in some remote branch of the family or something. Growing up
, I knew farm people who didn’t have electricity or know how to use a telephone.
Living in Tulsa made me a city kid, but in many ways Tulsans were as provincial as our country bumpkin cousins. I barely knew anything about Vietnam before I enlisted. Certainly I couldn’t have found it on a map. My first vague awareness of its existence and America’s involvement with it occurred with the Gulf of Tonkin incident. I was a sophomore in high school, too busy with school and parties and girls to pay much attention. After all, Oklahoma was a long way from Vietnam.
President Johnson said dirty Red Communist North Vietnamese attacked one of our destroyers in international waters. The “little yellow bastards” would have to pay for it. The by-God Marines would make them pay.
I graduated from high school at eighteen years old and enlisted in the Marine Corps on a deferred program that allowed me to hang around Tulsa for the rest of the summer with Linda and our school chums before reporting for duty. I knew I was headed for the ’Nam when I enlisted. The recruiter told me so.
Linda protested. “Bobby! Don’t do it!”
I brushed her off, but then came home on boot camp leave and married her. I figured she could use my $10,000 federal life insurance payout, even though I felt confident that guys like me never got killed. We came home decorated heroes. Like Audie Murphy, Lee Marvin, and Ed Crawford.
Now, in the hills, I no longer felt that certain about anything. Guys like me did get killed. War was nothing like what I expected from watching John Wayne movies. It was filthy and brutal and nasty and you watched your buddies die in random, equal-opportunity combat. No stirring background martial music playing, no electrifying oration about God and dying for Mom’s apple pie.
Perhaps my making judgment on the conduct of the war was a bit like a house mouse appraising the human occupants whose scraps he lived off. Nonetheless, it appeared to me from my nineteen-year-old private’s perspective that the NVA’s General Giap held the master plan for winning the war while we merely reacted. We were lured into Giap’s and Uncle Ho’s stronghold to die for a worthless piece of real estate that hardly anybody wanted. Into the same hills where the French had met their Dien Bien Phu.
Maybe what it all boiled down to was that LBJ had thrown us into the fire and now he didn’t know how to pull our chops out and save face at the same time. But what the hell? I was nothing but a common jarhead grunt, part of a colored pin on a battle map, a pawn on the Big Chess Board at the Pentagon and White House.
I cleaned and oiled the Pig to keep my mind occupied. It seemed that waiting to fight, rather than combat itself, might be the toughest part of war. The sun beat down on our hole and was so bright I squinted whenever I looked out into enemy country. Tony stripped off his utility jacket, revealing the “Peggy” tattoo on his upper arm. It caught his eye and brought back memories. I saw it in the way his face collapsed in on him and made him look much older than a kid just beginning his adult life.
He squatted in the dirt on the floor of our “penthouse,” his head turned, chin resting on his shoulder, eyes fixated on the tattoo.
So this, I pondered, this affable Buddy-Hackett-character-turned-warrior was the “baby killer” we kept hearing about from antiwar protestors back home who mocked us, chanted their senseless ditties, and sent us dog food. Isolated as we were in Vietnam, we still picked up some news from letters, hometown newspapers in the mail, and rumors. None of it made sense. It was like the nation was going hog crazy, what with black people rioting in the cities, students occupying college administration offices, and leftwing radicals bombing police stations and staging at airports to spit on returning soldiers and Marines, sailors, and airmen.
“Ho, Ho, Ho!” they chanted. “Ho Chi Minh’s going to win. How many babies have you killed today?”
Sonsofbitches! What did they know shit about anything?
We were dying over here while these spoiled brats remained oblivious to everything except toking a joint and dissing “the Man.” Let them get shot at, see their friends die. See what they thought then. Would they still run off to Canada and hide?
“Faster than ever,” Tony predicted.
I couldn’t seem to shake the sight of the monster mask Vlasek’s face became before Tony and I put him on the medevac to die on the way to Charlie Med. I kept seeing what was left of Jaggers’s face with his brain knocked out of his skull, leaving one eye and almost nothing else. Grisly images that threatened to haunt me from now on.
I was beginning to understand about previous combat vets who sometimes, right in the middle of a sentence, suddenly went slack. One second they were with you—and then suddenly they were just gone. Reliving some horror, recalling old buddies who never made it back.
Frank Sousley, a fun-loving Kentucky hillbilly boy, was the same age as I was now when he died on Iwo Jima. He was one of those depicted in the famous “Raising of the Flag” Iwo Jima memorial. When the War Department sent out the telegram to tell his mother that he was dead, it went to the General Store in the little crossroads of Hilltop. A barefoot boy ran the telegram to his mama’s farm. Neighbors living a quarter-mile away heard her screaming all night.
In my mind, I saw Jaggers’s mama screaming. And Heath’s . . . and Jim Hill’s . . . and Vlasek’s . . . and Boda’s . . . and Carter’s . . . and Schmitz’s . . . and Roldan’s . . . and . . .
“When it’s your time,” Tony moped, “God’s finger comes down out of the sky and squashes you like a bug.”
Choppers, when they got through, brought infusions of replacements for our decimated ranks. One of the fresh-faced Newbies whom Gunny assigned to a neighboring position in the perimeter dropped over for a visit. I didn’t bother asking his name. He was a down-home, aww-shucks kind of FNG who, like the new kid in a preppie high school, just wanted to fit in with the cool crowd and be accepted. Difference was you could take a new kid in school under your wing, become friends, and not worry about his getting knocked off tomorrow or the next.
This Cherry hunkered down with us. Tony ignored him. I continued cleaning the Pig. I didn’t intend to be mean, to be cruel. It was just that we had lost friends KIA out here in these hills and weren’t eager to make new ones to lose.
“Whaddya want?” I finally asked.
“N-nothing. I mean—”
We were of approximately the same age, but I felt years older than the fresh-faced FNG I had been not so many days ago when BLT-2/3 landed at Red Beach. Older, wiser, more wary while growing a crust around my soul to protect it.
“I don’t want nothing,” the Cherry repeated, ready to flee.
“Look, you’re new so you don’t know yet,” I counseled. “This is how it is: Do your job and don’t expect to make friends. We’re your brothers, but we don’t want to be your friends. Believe me, kid, it hurts too much. Do you understand?”
I felt like a bully for telling him the truth.
The poor little fucker looked scared to death and about to cry. He nodded once, quickly, and scrambled away.
“Do you think you might have been too hard-ass on him?” Tony said.
What did I know? I was a lowly grunt in a mouse’s hole. For days now—or had it been weeks, years?—we had fought to wrest these hills from the NVA—and the NVA refused to let go. It was like Tony contemplating his “Peggy” tattoo. Torturing himself. Likewise refusing to let go.
He put his jacket back on to hide the tattoo. “Piss on her,” he said.
He looked at me. “Maras, don’t you dare get yourself wasted.”
We stood side by side in our hole and gazed out over the enemy’s kingdom of monsters, death, and destruction.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The POWs
Obnoxious odors corrupted the air on our hill knob. They clung to our utilities and spoke of dead gooks in the clutter left behind after prep fire demolished the enemy’s bunkers and fighting holes. It occurred to me, more house m
ouse philosophy, that while we continued to bombard the tops of 881N and 881S, there was nobody up there. Like with this knob, the gooks pulled out of the kitchen when it got too hot.
Then they returned to harass, ambush, mortar, and fuck with us, knocking us off a few at a time. A war of . . . What was the word? Attrition. That was their strategy. To take these hills was only bait to lure us out here in their neighborhood where we were vulnerable. All the fighting for the Wicked Sisters was not going to be on top of the hills. It was taking place down here on the ridges and lesser hills and in the jungled valleys.
I bounced my theory off Tony and PFC Taylor. Tony shrugged.
“What difference does it make whether we die down here or up there?” Taylor challenged.
“And a good Vietnam morning to you too, Sunshine. I think I’ll go take a piss on that note.”
“Piss on her,” Tony suggested, subconsciously indicating the “Peggy” tattoo he now kept concealed beneath his jacket.
I retreated into the perimeter where little mounds of dirt marked where guys dug little holes for their shit and covered them back up. I took a leak on the ground, not bothering to dig a cat hole. Dead gook smell masked any odors of urine. Besides, how much longer were we going to be here anyhow? It wasn’t like we were homesteading waiting for spring to put in a crop.
None of us, not even officers and sergeants, showed any inclination to search for dead NVA and bury them proper. If by proper we meant dumping corpses in an unused trench assholes to belly buttons and pushing earth over them. We could live with them on the knob as long as they were dead.
Another boring, uneventful day passed. Uneventful described a day when we took only a few mortar and sniper rounds. Darkness slowly crept in, bringing with it the greater terror of the night when Charlie went a’sneakin’ and a’peekin’. Parents back home told their kids, “Kids, there’s nothing out there in the dark to hurt you.”
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