Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  “Our youth, our young people, are trying to tell us something.” That was the chatter, the rallying cry for protesters and peaceniks. Hell, the majority of grunts in these Vietnam hills were youth. The “baby killer” branch. No one was listening to what we thought or felt, especially not the press that came out to watch and film us dying. I kept thinking we served as mere props for agitators back home, proof of war crimes and imperialism and all that.

  The “counterculture,” the “hep generation” and their protests were in this year of 1967 while many of us were in Vietnam. We fought for our lives while “flower children” with their two-finger peace signs—I had a finger for them—responded to Harvard professor and LSD champion Timothy Leary in a “youth revolution” to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Hallucinogenic drugs and free love, flower power, and peace. Long hair, beads, psychedelic love vans, idleness, pot, and dirty bare feet. Draft card burners and draft dodgers, hippies and pampered Columbia students.

  They rejected all the values I had been brought up on. Time-honored values like honesty and decency, patriotism and love of country, courage and freedom. None of what was happening outside made sense viewed from a muddy red dirt hole on a remote hilltop in Vietnam surrounded by a vicious enemy that wanted to kill us, cut off our heads, stuff our dicks in our dead mouths, and conquer the world for communism. No matter what, I refused to believe efforts to stop communism and free people from its oppressive clutches were unjust.

  Politics presented the fourth factor. Politicians were beginning to respond to and cave in to the other three factors. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had been a staunch advocate of the war after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, gradually became disillusioned until by the time of Khe Sanh he was recommending the United States cut back its efforts against the communist encroachment into South Vietnam and pursue diplomatic measures.

  For all his determination to triumph at Khe Sanh, President Johnson nonetheless extended diplomatic feelers to Ho Chi Minh. Secretary of State Dean Rusk revealed that North Vietnam had so far turned down at least twenty-eight US proposals for peace talks, a stand bolstered no doubt by Moscow and Peking stepping in to ship war supplies and matériel to Hanoi, making the war a proxy war for the forces of communism. Commies thought they were going to win. They did not negotiate. Communism was “the wave of the future.” Ask any peacenik.

  Former Eisenhower vice president Richard Nixon warned, “This apparent division at home is prolonging the war.” At the same time he considered campaigning for the presidency on a platform of ending the war and “bringing our boys home.”

  General Westmoreland seemed to be the only one who had not lost his resolve. On 28 April 1967 with the Hill Fights still raging, he addressed Congress to declare that the United States would “prevail in Vietnam over the communist aggressors with the resolve, confidence, patience, determination, and support of the American people.”

  He suggested protest marchers and antiwar activity gave “the enemy hope that he can win politically that which he cannot accomplish militarily.”

  His remarks incited further protests from the usual cast of characters.

  I wasn’t old enough to vote, but I was old enough to go to war. What I had experienced of war in less than a month in-country had made me yearn for peace. I ached to go home and see my Mom and Dad, sister and brother, and be with Linda. Go out to Mickey D’s for a hamburger, attend a movie, take a walk without fear of a mortar shell landing on my head, run with my old high school buds, engage in all those normal activities of young people who, unlike me now, thought they would live forever.

  But at the same time I was a by-God Marine on a tough but noble calling. It was a dirty job, taking these hills, but somebody had to do it. Marines did not run away from hardship and danger with our tails tucked between our legs. Semper Fi, damnit! Semper Fi!

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Fall of 881S

  “How many days since we left the graveyard?” Tony asked, referring to the Buddhist cemetery where we bivouacked after going ashore at Red Beach. It was the place, as Tony liked to say, where Dracula dwelled.

  I gave it some thought. “Say, uh, about three years, minus a day or so?”

  At least it felt that long.

  We seemed to live in a nightmare that went on and on with no distinction between yesterday and tomorrow, between Monday and Sunday.

  “But it’s still 1967, right?”

  I shrugged. “I guess it is if we’re moving out soon. We have our warning order.”

  Together we glanced upward at the Evil Twin, 881N. Tony shuddered. I felt the same chill run up my spine.

  Back at the Pentagon, or IV Corps headquarters, or wherever such decisions were made, higher-higher must have been frustrated at how slowly our colored pins crept about on the Khe Sanh map. This was becoming more like the static trench warfare of World War I in France. Doughboys holding down their section of a trench, peering out over No Man’s Land and wondering what horror came next. Not like World War II when colored pins made great leaps all over the globe. From North Africa to Italy, Britain to France, China to the Philippines, island to island in the Pacific—I could almost see ol’ Texas hick LBJ getting up each morning in the White House, yawning, farting, scratching himself, twisting his beagle’s ears, and taking a look at his Vietnam map and swearing when he saw the pins hadn’t moved overnight.

  Down at a grunt’s pay grade, of course, we weren’t privy to the president’s “Big Picture.” I ribbed Tony that, since he was my assistant gunner, I was his superior while he was the man at the very bottom of the pecking order. There was him, then me, then on up in the ascending chain of command through squad, platoon, company, battalion, regiment, division, troop command, Marine Corps Command, General Westmoreland, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Department, Commander-in-Chief President Johnson—and then God.

  I wondered if God had a map of the universe with colored pins on it.

  Out here in the bush and the hills, things were a lot more immediate and personal than they were for the at-home brass moving pins on a map in the White House Situation Room for the president. Our tiny slice of the “Big Picture” played out in real life. Such was the battlefield concentrated as it was around the three hills—861, 881N, 881S—that whenever something happened over there on one hill or ridge, we over here became spectators. Not that we actually witnessed the details of individual maneuvering in the bush between Marines and enemy, although we occasionally glimpsed a group of unidentifiable stick figures darting to and fro. None of the blood and gore, just the fear and dread that we might be next. The illusion that we were sent over here like cavalry to the rescue to kick ass and go home had quickly faded.

  We knew something big was up when our neighboring Twin, 881S, erupted like a volcano as Tony and I were taking our “Good morning, Vietnam!” piss. It seemed every howitzer at Khe Sanh, backed up by even bigger guns from Leatherneck Square, opened up at the same time to hurl steel across the sky. I almost jumped out of my skin. Damn! Why hadn’t somebody warned us?

  Tony, who wasn’t through with business, wet all over himself in his haste to get back to our rat hole.

  Exploding shells blotted out the morning patina of sky with colors even more vivid. Black smoke boiled into the sky. The bombardment continued for a full fifteen minutes before it lifted and a flight of jets reported overhead to carry out a second phase. The high-pitched screaming thunder of diving fighter-bombers culminated in a deep series of Boom! Boom! Boom! as 250- and 500-pound bombs went off. Napalm seared 881S with flames that appeared as a distant forest fire.

  Crispy critters in the making.

  I remembered as a kid being taken to a Fourth of July celebration that featured a flyover in formation by the US Air Force. The thunder of the jets and the glinting of their wings in the sunshine sent thrills through my bones, rattling them. I experienced that same sensation now, onl
y magnified by this delivery of all the power in the universe. My bones weren’t rattling; they seemed shattered into corn meal.

  Only a few days before, Mike and Kilo Companies of 3/9 had been beaten off 881S while suffering significant casualties. Apparently, they and whichever other units were over there with them were going to take another shot at it, leaving 881N as an encore performance for the 2/3. Right now, Echo, Foxtrot, and Golf 2/3 weren’t directly involved, but we nonetheless took sympathetic comfort with 3/9 in the bombardment. Each NVA destroyed by artillery and bombs meant one less enemy soldier for Marines to fight and kill going back up that damnable hill.

  Not that the prep would kill all of them, even if the NVA were up there at Ground Zero, which I had begun to doubt. I kept hearing Sergeant Crawford’s forewarning when the companies of BLT 2/3 landed on the airstrip of Khe Sanh that fateful whatever-day-it-was. Hill 861 absorbed this same beating while we Newbies watched, awe-stricken. Somebody remarked how there wouldn’t be any gooks left. “That’s what we thought at Iwo Jima,” Big Ed had said.

  A door seemed to slam when the flyboys packed their ditty bags and went home, followed by a deathly silence over the hills, ridges, and valleys. We field Marines of 2/3 waited expectantly on our toehold knobs below 881N while whatever elements of 3rd Battalion of the 9th led by Mike and Kilo jumped off in another attempt to wrest 881S from the enemy.

  I felt guilty for even entertaining the thought—but, nonetheless, I had to admit some comfort in knowing that as long as the gooks were busy on 881S they would have no time or inclination to fuck with us. That meant a free day in the sun.

  For some reason, I reflected back on the three gooks who surrendered to Tony and me when they emerged hands in the air from out of their destroyed bunker. They had dirt underneath their fingernails from clawing air holes through which to breathe. For all the NVA’s fearsome reputation, these guys, incredibly filthy and reeking of body odor and decaying flesh, were frightened and homesick and, like us, would much rather have been home sipping brew and chasing women.

  My guys over at 881S, my Marines, were preparing to go into battle against our prisoners’ comrades. They would kill and be killed—I would kill and perhaps be killed when the time came—but somehow after seeing and recognizing the common humanity the prisoners and I shared I no longer felt the same fear and hatred toward them.

  This one Vietnamese after he and his buddies surrendered squatted on the ground while Tony kept them covered with his M-16 and we waited for Captain Sheehan to come. He met my eyes with gratitude revealed in them.

  “Thank you,” he said in broken English. “Thank you . . . for not shoot. I remember . . . always.”

  I had nothing against these guys as individuals; they had nothing against me personally. All of them couldn’t be savages who cut off heads and dicks. We were here to fight for the rights of the South Vietnamese to live free of communism. Uncle Ho sent his soldiers to force communism upon them. That was the black and white of it, but war wasn’t always all black and white. As individuals, had we the choice, both sides would pull up and go home to our families.

  “Maras, you can’t change things,” Tony advised. “You just live with it.”

  Nothing seemed to happen over at 881S for several hours after the Marine battle companies formed and started their approach through the jungle. With mounting tension, our eyes locked on the other hill; we below 881N waited for something to happen that might indicate how we in turn would fare when orders came for us to attack and take our objective.

  “What are they doing over there?” Tony worried impatiently.

  “Our time will come,” I replied.

  “You know how to lift a guy’s mood, you know that, Maras?”

  “Tell it to the chaplain.”

  “Can’t. He went home. Too much sinning going on. Maras, if you hadn’t been such a Boy Scout, we could have taken our Purple Hearts and been home too.”

  Distant explosions ended the conversation and jerked our attention back to 881S. Neither of us felt like talking after that. We simply waited quietly. It was a stupid conversation anyhow, fueled by anxiety and the need for human contact and companionship.

  Mike Company’s lead platoons reached the lower western edge of the hill and started up. The hill steepened and was covered with tall grass and thick brush. Fires crackled here and there from the recent prep. Large areas of the forest had been scorched black down to the ground.

  The rest of the assault force maneuvered into position on Mike’s flank. The sudden chatter of rifle and machine gun exchanges initiated the fight. Hostile mortar rounds fell on attacking Marines. Snipers in trees and gooks in camouflaged spider holes and bushes unleashed hell. NVA infantry attempted to break through in an effort to trap Americans in a killing box.

  From our distant observation it was difficult to tell which side was winning and which losing. We saw little other than grenade and mortar smoke puffing up in the brush. Sounds of the battle provided only marginal information—the distinctive deep-throated banging of enemy AK-47s, the tinny Mattie Mattel rattle of M-16s, the ripped-cloth bursts of machine guns, both theirs and ours, opposing tracers in streams and waves, the low-decibel crashing of mortar rounds.

  Huey UH-1E gunships joined the fight, streaking in like bumblebees to sting enemy positions with rocket and machine gun fire. Artillery from both sides hung fire as the two sides mingled in the forest and grasses to claw at each other’s throats.

  It went on and on like that—but then the fighting dwindled off. None of us could believe it. It appeared the NVA had made a wise choice and relinquished the field of battle. At least temporarily. No last-ditch stand at the Alamo for this crowd. It was like Sun Tzu in The Art of War recommended: Run today in order to fight tomorrow.

  Word from our CP and commo shed soon circulated that, after only ninety minutes, 3/9 had reached the crest of 881S. Goal and touchdown! I felt vindicated in my cautious prediction that the NVA would not stand and fight at the top.

  Days of bombardment had left the hill denuded. Virtually no tree stood intact. What remained was a shattered moonscape of craters, splintered timber scorched by napalm, torn earth, grass burned down to black stubble. Not a single live NVA soldier was found when Marines burst free of the lower forest onto the peak. Gooks seemed to have deserted their tunnels, trenches, and bunkers and mysteriously vanished. Like ghosts blending into the ether.

  A familiar overpowering stench poisoned the air and made conquerors retch onto the ruined earth. The gook dead were not there. Left behind instead were the remains of Marines missing from previous encounters. They had apparently been dragged to the top of the hill and put on display as a message to the rest of us. One sergeant was left spread-eagled on a dirt bunker roof with his penis chopped off and stuffed in his mouth. Others were horribly mangled and then charred by explosives and napalm our prep fires had dumped on the hill. Pieces of them had to be scooped onto ponchos with E-tools to be ready for evacuation.

  I was wrong about these people being human, wrong! They were savages, animals that deserved annihilating.

  The 3/9 had seized their hill first ahead of us, but at a cost attested to by body bags that subsequently lined the strip of airfield below at the Khe Sanh Combat Base. Marines of 3/9 walked up 881S and took it. Now it was our turn against 881N. Did I dare assume the NVA would likewise abandon it at the end—or would they make their stand on 881N and demand the extraction of even more Marine blood?

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Show Time

  Sergeant Crawford was from Pennsylvania. When he and I met during Vietnam up-training at Camp Schwab on Okinawa, I asked him if he had heard of Sally Star. Aunt Sally, my Mom’s sister, was locally famous in Philadelphia for her TV show for kids.

  “Oh, my God, yes!” he said. “My kids love her and want to be on her show.”

  I wrote my aunt and asked her to give Ed’s wi
fe a call. She invited Ed’s children on her show and that sealed the friendship between Sergeant Crawford and me. Both of us would like to have seen the program. We decided to get together after Vietnam for a replay of it when we returned home. There was never any discussion of if we returned home.

  I had made inquiries as to Big Ed’s condition after his wounding in the draw. The only thing I learned for sure was that he was expected to live. What did that mean? I heard of guys “expected to live” who went home without their legs or an arm. Or with brain injuries that left them forever lost in Vietnam.

  Since this morning when a new warning order jolted us awake—Get Ready!—I couldn’t seem to shake from my mind thoughts of the mutilation of Lieutenant Sauer or of Jaggers. The lieutenant’s body all carved up, his severed head on the ground at his feet, the face ghastly blackened with an expression of terror frozen on it. Imagine going to meet your Maker with your penis stuffed in your mouth! And Jaggers. Oh, God! I picked up his brain and cradled it in my hands like you might a puppy or a kitten.

  I also thought of Gene Kilgore and his persistent premonition that he was going to be killed. His face when I last saw him this morning said today might be his last day. It was gray and drawn as though he peered at something scary deep inside his soul.

  He had been all right yesterday when the gooks were too busy with the 3/9 on Hill 881S to fuck with us. Our holes were dry and we even got some sleep in shifts. Then came a last warning order. Yesterday, 881S fell. Today was the day of our Big Game when 2/3 broke for the goal and took our hill.

  Kilgore was visiting my position when Gunny Janzen strode by passing the word. Prep fire against 881N had not yet started. It was easy to forget a war was going on as the sun prepared to break above the misty green peaks in that by-now familiar ritual of deceptive tranquility. The thick blankets of fog that lay in the valley between the Twin Sisters appeared soft and pastel-tinted, like a baby’s blanket. Kilgore was his old self, smoking and grinning.