“Where you reckon they’ll send us on R&R?” he wondered, anticipating our reward for capturing the gook prisoners.
“Maybe this is R&R,” I said and pretended to read from a travel brochure. “‘Enjoy an adventure-filled getaway in the alluring green wonderland in the north of beautiful South Vietnam. Where you awake each morning to life’s harmony and the sound of artillery, to the hearty call of the red-plumed gook calling to you from the rain forest.’”
Kilgore chuckled, and Tony said, “Maras, you’re full of shit, you know that?”
“Affirmative.”
That was when Gunny came by with the word that we would be attacking 881N. Kilgore’s cheeks and eyes suddenly seemed to sink into his skull, age lines dug furrows from the corners of his mouth. He became an old man right there before us.
Tony attempted to lighten him up with his Buddy Hackett routine. “Good morning, Vietnam, and all you little rug rats out there. It’s a lovely day here in Shitsville.”
It didn’t work. Kilgore slumped off with his Starlite scope and his thermite grenade.
I sighed deeply, shook my head, and looked at Tony. His round face had turned serious. He nodded. We were Marines. If the hill was our duty, then we would do our duty.
Now was no time to think of Jaggers or Lieutenant Sauer. I had to prepare myself by thinking of better days. I imagined Linda and Mom at home doing little domestic things that normal people did. Anything to keep my mind occupied and off the terrors on the mountain ahead of us.
Back in high school, Linda and I and some of our teen friends sometimes partied on the sandy beaches at nearby Keystone Lake. Somebody would arrange for beer and we would guzzle suds, watch the red sun sink peacefully into the lake, split off into couples after dark to make out around the campfire, or take romantic walks along the shoreline in the moonlight.
I remember the last time we all got together at the lake. It was the night following graduation. I hadn’t attended grad ceremonies because that day I went to enlist in the Marine Corps. Linda tried to talk me out of it. We walked together along the dark beach and I saw tears glistening in her eyes. She kissed me and withdrew.
“Bobby, you don’t have to go.”
“I do have to go,” I insisted. “Linda, we got all summer to be together before I leave for boot camp.”
“Why do you have to go, Bobby?”
I couldn’t answer that question. Even now, or perhaps especially now, I still couldn’t answer it. It was merely something I felt I had to do. War was intruding into our lives, even then, turning the beginning of our last summer together sour-sweet.
“War is so horrible,” she said, her voice choked. “What if you’re killed, Bobby? I don’t know what I’d do if you never came back.”
I remembered now her face lifted to me with the moon shining on her tears.
I wasn’t going to die. I was coming back. I promised her. John Wayne always came back, right?
One day at Camp Schwab on Okinawa we were rope-bridging a creek when a squadron of Huey helicopters flew over. Sergeant Hard said they were Army Special Forces guys helping film a movie about the war in Vietnam. He said from what he had heard and seen of the production, it appeared very real to actual conditions. Except, and it was a very big exception, actors always came back because nobody ever got maimed or killed in the making of a film. The real thing, like in these hills, was brutal and bloody and if it didn’t kill you, it killed someone you knew, and it killed something inside you.
Prep fire against 881N began with sudden alarming impact. The first barrages of 105s and 155s moaned and wailed across the sky over our heads like the revenant returning to claim lost souls. After that, the drum and howl of the Wicked Witch of the North blowing her top and spouting fire and brimstone dominated sight, hearing, and nerve endings.
Why, I demanded of myself, since no one else listened, did we keep bombing the tops when the gooks were probably waiting down below on the slopes? On second thought, if we didn’t bomb the crests, then the NVA would be dug in up there waiting. Strategy and tactics were a bunch more complicated than they appeared on the surface. That was why generals and colonels and not privates ran the show.
Squad leaders and right guides, more commonly referred to as platoon sergeants, hustled between last-minute meetings with officers and keeping the rest of us informed. Lieutenant McFarlane’s 1st Squad leader, PFC Taylor, looked stressed out.
“We move out in twenty minutes,” he said. “Maras, you and Leyba are with me in Lieutenant Mac’s Third Herd. Roger that?”
With the thunder of prep fire in the background, troops hurried to gear up for combat—buckling on web gear and helmets; honing edges on knives; filling grenade and ammo pouches; checking field dressings, just in case; writing last letters home; topping off canteens, and not from the dead gook crater either. Resupply had finally delivered.
Bolts ratcheted as men primed and dry-fired their rifles as a test. Teams swabbed out their 60mm mortar tubes. Anticipating casualties, Golf corpsmen stuffed their aid bags with pressure bandages, blood expander, bags of IV fluids, drugs and needles and tourniquets. Magilla came around to guys who smoked and collected cellophane wrappers from their cigarette packs to use in the emergency treatment of sucking chest wounds.
Beneath the surface of all this ran an undertone of apprehension as men fretted about. Would the M-16s jam just when we needed them most?
In addition to my Pig and Tony’s M-16, he and I split the weight of a 3.5 rocket launcher and rounds between us. I carried the two parts of the launcher strapped to my back while Tony took the hard plastic backboard containing the rockets. I stuck my lunch of chicken noodle soup deep inside my pack where, hopefully, it would be safer than last time when a bullet found it.
“Maras,” Tony observed as we team-worked getting things together, “you and I are starting to act like an old married couple.”
“If that’s a proposal, I’m already married. Besides, I wouldn’t marry you anyhow. You is so ugly.”
“You is so ugly too.”
Best I understood it, the battle plan called for the refurbished and personnel-strengthened companies of Echo and Foxtrot to attack the hill from the south while Golf maneuvered to approach the northeastern slope. Hotel Company, not fully recovered from the fiasco in the draw that thinned out its ranks, stood in reserve on 861.
Golf Marines huddled in our holes—packed, strapped, and ready to go. Things got very quiet. No more banter, very little talking as we stared into the abyss and waited for cover fire to lift and orders to come down.
Gunny Janzen loped down the lines. “Saddle up, Marines! Drop your cocks and grab your socks. We’re moving out.”
Chapter Thirty
Move! Move!
Captain James Sheehan continued to control the battalion’s assault in the field while Colonel Pappy Delong commanded from his post at the Khe Sanh airfield. Not that Pappy would not have preferred to personally lead his men from the front, but a commander needed to remove himself from the minute-by-minute bedlam in order to maintain a view of the strategic “Big Picture.” An officer under fire might make tactical decisions, but it required a certain detachment to make strategic ones. Captain Sheehan oversaw tactics primarily by radio commo with his junior leaders in Golf and with company commanders in Echo and Foxtrot, who remained subordinate to him during the operations against 881N.
At least that was the way I understood it as Golf organized into a skirmish line, just like in training, and we advanced on the hill through grasses that made the turtles thing again with our helmets. Brush and grass grew so thick and high in places that Marines lost sight of those on our flanks. I understood the “fog of war” concept, how it was confusing to keep track of what was going on when bombs started falling to fuck up the best laid plans of mice and men.
Sometimes I couldn’t even see Tony ten feet over. My heart
pounded in my ears, my mouth felt so dry I couldn’t swallow. I felt compelled to look into that awful abyss from which no man returned. This too was part of the fog of war—and it wasn’t pretty like the pink-tinted fog that snagged in the valley between the two hills. Nothing, nothing, was pretty about war.
Dead silence persisted as the terrain steepened. My labored breathing sounded like The Little Engine That Could panting up a mountain pass. Canteens of water sweated out through every pore. I stumbled over vines and stumps and rocks, barking my shins on fallen logs out of which rats and snakes and other little creatures scurried. I pulled myself up precipitous inclines with one hand while keeping the other near the trigger of the Pig slung from a strap over my shoulder, muzzle pointing forward, ready for action.
Tony labored along with me, appearing in and out of sight in the undergrowth. We tried to maintain visual contact with each other and with squad leader PFC Taylor in the event Lieutenant Mac required our services with the M-60. I heard Tony grunting, the clatter of his gear, the little under-the-breath curse when he tripped over some log and disturbed its occupants.
I suppressed a nervous laugh when he tumbled head first into a gully camouflaged with undergrowth. He came crawling back out with his helmet askew on his head, dragging his M-16 by its carrying strap, red dirt smeared on his chin and nose, glowering back over his shoulder with wide eyes for snakes. He hated snakes more than he had learned to hate gooks.
The anticipation of combat, the minutes leading up to the first shot or mortar going off, was always worse than the actual fighting. You lost all sense of self once the action started, became immersed in the machinery of it like you were a piston in a big engine operating by design. It was all instinct and training. No man was an island; we were a single organism, a machine fueled by blood and adrenaline.
Only afterwards were you human again, did you become aware of the cries of the wounded, the metallic stench of spilled blood, the sight of mangled bodies. Being human again wasn’t always pleasant. Your bones began to rattle. Some guys vomited. Others wept with relief that it was over and they had made it through.
But we did our job, no matter. Our job was to kill people, break things, and blow shit up. We were Marines. We were good at it.
Up we climbed through the grass and trees, our nerves honed and aware of the snap of every twig, the whisper-rattle of wind through leaves, the mote-filled rays of yellow-bile sunlight sifting down through the forest canopy, the call of some distant bird, maybe a troop of monkeys getting the hell out of Dodge.
Where are they? Where the hell are the little bastards?
I could almost smell them. Feel hostile eyes watching. Their fingers on triggers posed to fire. Feel that first slug as it thudded into my chest and penetrated straight through into guts and lungs and heart. Hear my last wheeze of breath as I flopped onto the ground like a dying fish.
Damn! Next thing I knew Kilgore and I would be forming a Premonition of Death cult.
A kind of hump on the side of the hill ahead past a long narrow clearing sprinkled with sunlight caught my attention. I thought I saw movement.
Whump! Whump! The familiar sound of mortar rounds leaving their tubes.
The fight was on.
Chapter Thirty-One
Timber-r-r-r!
Mortar explosions walked big-footed and ear-piercing through grass, trees, and undergrowth. Shrapnel, rocks, wood chips buzzed through the air, producing debris cuts and wounds on every Marine within range, some minor, others disabling. I automatically hit the ground when the first round went off. Snakes and rats, get out of the way! I could have dug to the center of the earth. No wonder monkeys were getting out of Dodge. This wasn’t their fight and they wanted no part of it.
All along the skirmish line platoon leaders and sergeants bounced back to their feet after obeying their first instincts to go to cover.
“Move! Move! Keep going! Don’t stop!” they yelled, their voices sounding as though they came from the depths of some cave because their ears were ringing from explosions.
Stop and you were dead. Close on the enemy, get at his throat, and the mortaring had to halt. Infantry always trained for this kind of scenario—and the drills worked. I sprang to my feet, calling out for Tony.
“Okay! Okay! Let’s go!” he responded immediately.
Golf’s skirmish line assaulted an invisible enemy through fire and smoke generated by exploding mortar shells. A single spontaneous, blood-thirsty roar erupted like a tsunami from the throats of Marines, louder and more chilling than the accompanying thunder of rifles and machine guns. A WWI bayonet charge out of the trenches, only without bayonets.
Yelling and screaming hysterically along with the rest of the company, surrendering to the passion and the fury of the mob, Tony and I together as always charging up the hill, burning rounds, shooting from the hip like John Wayne. No thinking now, just action. No attempt to pick out the source of hostile fire. Blasting away at anything that might conceal a gook. Thickets, clumps of grass. It didn’t matter.
Enemy spider holes and machine gun bunkers were so well camouflaged that fire seemed to come right out of the ground. So I shot at the ground, at the occasional blaze-winking of a muzzle flash. Not seeing the enemy exactly. Anything that moved was fair game, even leaves trembling in the breezes.
Small-arms fire rippled like electrical surges back and forth along our skirmish line. Heavier here at one moment, rolling on the next to the other end of the line, then back again as the fast-moving firefight scrambled uphill into the enemy’s teeth. It was what Marines called a target-rich environment.
The enemy had laid their defenses in layers, each echelon pulling back into the next to avoid being overrun. I began to glimpse shadows flitting through the trees as the nearest positions broke and withdrew before our onslaught. At least when we closed in on them, their mortars had to stop.
A bush moved in my peripheral vision. I swiveled the Pig’s snout and cut down on it. I yelped with satisfaction, maybe even glee, when dying shrieks of pain erupted from it. I pumped another burst into the target for good measure. The screaming stopped.
Got the bastard!
As my section of skirmishers stampeded across a narrow clearing, a Marine to my left jerked up in mid-stride as though having collided with an invisible wall. He staggered back a step or two, blood pumping from his ruptured neck like red water from a garden hose. He went down hard out of sight in the grass.
I took one more look at him and kept going, my mind focused only on survival and what lay ahead, and on killing as many of the bastards as I could. Not giving a second thought about who the stricken Marine might be. He had to be one of my buddies in Taylor’s 1st Squad, maybe even Taylor.
No time to consider it now. I yelped louder and louder, part rage, part fear, part . . . nihilism. If it were the end of the world, take as many with you as you could.
It proved impossible in this kind of terrain for the skirmish line to maintain form. It bent and shaped itself to the landscape, parts of it ranging ahead while other sections lagged. Tony and I came across a wounded Marine named Johnson who was bellowing like a beef next in line at a slaughter house. He had dragged himself behind a rock where blood sluiced from a severed artery in his leg with the sound of water gushing from a faucet. Tony and I dropped beside him.
“It’s all right, brother, all right, all right. . . .” I muttered in a litany, willing it to be so as I jerked off his web belt and used it as a tourniquet to staunch the flow of blood.
The blood felt hot and sticky on my hands, the odor rich and nauseating. Tony rolled over on his back.
“Corpsman up!” he shouted.
Magilla seemed to appear out of nowhere to take over. God bless Navy corpsmen. They rushed into brimstone where even angels feared to tread.
“God protect the both of you,” Magilla called out as Tony and I rejoined the herd.<
br />
Lance Corporal Ted West and his AG with their stubby 60mm mortar tube had passed us on the run while we were busy with Johnson. West, a member of my Weapons Platoon, was built close to the ground. His short legs pumped as the two Marines disappeared into the bush uphill.
Tony and I came upon them in an abandoned gook fighting hole where they were pumping out mortar rockets so fast the tube glowed red-hot. We tucked into the hole unannounced while West’s AG, up on his knees, pissed on the tube to cool it down. No sense in wasting good canteen water. Urine sizzled on the hot metal and issued a rank cloud of ammonia.
“Man! You guys piss in your own living room?” Tony exclaimed. Buddy Hackett was how he coped with stress.
The grunt glanced at him and kept pissing. But in spurts. It was tough to keep a steady stream going when you were scared half to death.
Platoon leaders and sergeants kept at us. Tall, lanky Lieutenant Mac scurried past the mortar pit. “Marines! Keep moving! Run down the bastards!”
“Nice talking to you,” Tony quipped as we leapt from West’s hole and back into the melee.
“I really wanted to stay in that hole,” Tony later confessed.
Dueling tracers of red and green snapped across the battlefield. The air was so full of steel it felt like you were breathing it. I dropped to one knee and turned the Pig loose on a grove of suspicious thorn trees, chewing them into kindling with a cone of red. Nothing ran out. There were no screams of pain. Shit! I thought sure gooks would be hiding in there.
Tony fed me another belt of 7.62 and we continued our crazy uphill sprint. A bullet plucked Tony’s canteen off his web gear. Something whacked me on the back with such force that it drove me to my hands and knees. I felt the warmth of blood.
Blood in the Hills Page 18
