What kind of control must communism have over the minds of its subjects that they would charge mindlessly to their own destruction?
It was horrendous, gruesome, frightening, and exhilarating all at the same time. I read once how it was good that war should be so terrible lest man come to enjoy it.
Enemy soldiers dropped at close range, some the victims of our fusillades of defensive fire, others to seek cover from which to lob grenades at us. Little Chicom hand bombs with wooden handles sailed through the air. Most landed short and exploded harmlessly in blinding sun-flashes of white fire. Throwing uphill was not an easy matter.
The evening before, sergeants and platoon leaders, anticipating a possible attack, had distributed cases of M-26 frag grenades to the line. Grenades were superior defensive weapons at close range, better than machine guns at clogging up a mass infantry attack before its components grappled with you in your hole. Marines got busy all around the perimeter hurling frags back at the gooks. Chain bursts of explosions sounding like the fiercest of thunderstorms cast a barrier of fire and steel against the enemy’s assault.
Our downhill tosses were a lot easier and more accurate than the NVA’s chunking uphill. That day’s exchange with the enemy would go down in Golf Company legend as the “Big Grenade Battle.” Every Marine on the hill, including company commanders, hurled grenades. In all the excitement, Marines yelled, whooped, and shouted insults at the Vietnamese.
Gooks were almost close enough to smell their breath. Tony and I emptied a whole case of grenades. Barely had one landed than I put another in the air, Tony right beside me in the bright sunlight doing the same.
“Piss on ’em! Piss on ’em!” Tony chanted, until I wondered if he might not be doing battle with his own army of Peggy clones.
“Fuck ’em! Fuck ’em!” Corporal Ted West over to our left flank bellowed each time he tossed a grenade.
I suspected my throwing arm would get as sore as my wounded elbow as we kept at it for what seemed like hours, piling up bloody clumps of enemy soldiers in final repose. Those merely wounded or in the agony of their death throes squirmed like beds of screaming earth worms. Marines put them out of their misery with bursts of fire. The Hill Fights had become so brutal that no quarter was asked or expected. The only way to win in this kind of fight was to become as nasty as the enemy—which posed the risk of your waking up one morning to find yourself even nastier than the enemy.
The fierce human tsunami finally broke. As it disintegrated, a company jokester high on adrenaline couldn’t resist screwing with Gene Kilgore and his Starlite. It was an amazing thing that in the middle of gore and turmoil a Marine retained the sheer chutzpah to pull a boyish stunt on another.
“We’re being flanked!” the jokester shouted. “They’re overrunning us!”
Like the good Marine he was, Kilgore immediately stripped the scope form his rifle, flung it to the ground, and dropped his thermite on it. Nothing remained of it afterwards except a melted hunk of unidentifiable metal. Nobody ever learned who the culprit jokester was, but Golf Company enjoyed a collective chuckle at Kilgore’s embarrassed expense.
Gunny Janzen chewed Kilgore a new one at falling for the prank. He shook his head, turned his back, and walked away before Kilgore could see his barely-suppressed amusement.
Peace settled on the hill. The sun rose higher in the sky as though it had witnessed nothing extraordinary in its long dominion over the affairs of men. Miraculously, no Marine had been killed. Only a few suffered relatively minor wounds. That was in stark contrast to the corpses of dead NVA that littered the killing ground. The tropical climate began to rot them almost immediately. Scavengers attracted to the slaughter sailed in circles above while swarms of big green shit flies magically appeared, buzzing with anticipation.
“Clean this mess up and bury the stiffs in a trench before they stink up the whole neighborhood,” Gunny instructed.
Whereupon I commented to Tony, “This neighborhood already stinks.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Few, the Proud . . .
Sitting atop 881N waiting for God only knew what, just waiting, I had time to think, to chew on the past and try to digest events that at the time seemed inconsequential, with no future value to the rest of my life. Suddenly, I became inflicted with a bad case of homesickness and realized what real impact some stages of life exerted on subsequent stages. You made your choices and you enjoyed their benefits or suffered their consequences. For me, enlisting in the Marine Corps was one of those life-changing—and perhaps life-ending—choices.
I remembered when my cousin Jack Earl Woods came home wearing his Marine dress blues and how that inspired me to enlist. How naïve and Okie-innocent I must have been when, enamored by the uniform and the prospect of heroic adventure, I strolled into the USMC recruiting office in Tulsa and declared my intent to become a By-God U.S. Marine.
“Congratulations, boy,” the recruiting sergeant said. “You’ve chosen the toughest and the best. So if you think you got what it takes, you’ve come to the right place. But if you got a yellow streak or you’re a mama’s boy, don’t waste my time. Best you know it now and swish over to the Navy or Air Force.”
“I got what it takes,” I avowed with all the bluster and confidence of an eighteen-year-old in the fly-over middle of the country who had not yet graduated from high school.
General Chesty Puller, the most-decorated Marine in US history, had what it took. Why not me?
My brother George was four years older than me. “Bobby, are you out of your ever-loving mind?” he scolded when he learned I was enlisting.
Little sister Tammy was eight and still wide-eyed and innocent. “I don’t want you to go ’way,” she protested. “Will you come home again?”
“You know I will.”
Mom tried to be reasonable. “Do you know what you’re getting into, honey? There’s a war on. They’ll send you if you’re in the Marines. You could join the Air Force.”
Dad? Dad was Dad. He took everything in stride.
And Linda? A fun girl always up for a beach party, a hike in the woods, a horseback ride, or a fishing trip. Loyal, too. She was no Peggy. I would never get a Dear John from her.
Linda cried. But it didn’t matter. My mind was made up.
Marine Corps training was designed to take raw material like me and, through a process involving torture, indoctrination, and tradition, mold it into an efficient machine whose primary function was to break things, blow up shit, and kill people. Tough drill instructors burned Semper Fidelis into our receptive young skulls. Always Faithful. In honor, courage, and commitment. You never shirked your duty, and you never left a buddy behind.
Marines were America’s elite expeditionary force, the nation’s point of the spear when military force had to be applied. No better symbol existed for the Marines than the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor for the purpose we served. We wore the emblem proudly. The Eagle with its wings spread represented the nation we honorably defended. The Globe signified our worldwide presence. The Anchor pointed back to our naval heritage and the Marine Corps’ ability to access any coastline anywhere in the world.
How proud, how honored, I felt to come home to Tulsa on boot camp leave in my dress blues to marry Linda and show off in front of my neighborhood chums and former classmates.
“Did you hear? Bob Maras joined the Marines. You ought to see him in his uniform.”
The history of the Marine Corps stretched back a long ways. Perhaps the earliest predecessors of marines were the Vikings. Other than that, the evolution of seagoing infantry began with the European Naval Wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1731, the British government raised ten Royal Marine regiments for naval campaigns against the Spanish colonies in the West Indies and on the north coast of South America. The American colonies contributed one regiment for the campaign, with which George Washington’
s half-brother Captain Lawrence Washington served.
Marines from the American colonies also pulled duty on British ship detachments in the French and Indian War of 1756–1763. A dozen years later, the Battles of Lexington and Concord severed ties with King George and sparked the American Revolutionary War.
The Second Continental Congress issued a letter dated 10 November 1775 recommending the commissioning of Marines to conduct ship-to-ship fighting, provide fleet shipboard security, enforce naval discipline, and assist beachhead landings against enemy nations. That letter resulted in the birth of the Continental Marines and set the date celebrated by the Marine Corps as its birthday.
A piece of tradition that sounds just raunchy enough to be true holds that newly commissioned Captains Samuel Nicholas and Robert Mullan recruited the first Marines by holding muster at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia and luring prospective candidates into service with mugs of beer and promises of adventure on the high seas.
Captain Nicholas led the first amphibious beach landing in American history when he and 220 Marines stormed ashore on the British-held island of New Providence in the Bahamas and conquered Nassau.
The US Marine Corps was here to stay as the fledgling nation’s first truly elite military force. During the First Barbary War (1800–1805) against the Barbary Pirates of North Africa, eight US Marines landed at the head of thirty Arab and European mercenaries in an attempt to capture Tripoli and free the crew of the pirate-seized USS Philadelphia. Tripoli became immortalized in the Marine Corps Hymn.
The deposed pasha was so impressed by the American Marines that he presented his Mameluke sword to their commander, First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, beginning a tradition of swords worn formally by US Marine officers.
Marines have fought in every American war since then. During the Mexican-American War (1847–1848), Marines conducted their first major expeditionary venture with the famous assault on Chapultepec Palace to capture Mexico City. The event added “From the Halls of Montezuma” to the Marine Corps Hymn.
The US Civil War (1861–1865) found Marines fighting in a minor role on both the Union and Confederate sides. In one notable event in 1859, a prelude to the war itself, Lieutenant Israel Greene led a hastily gathered eighty-six-man detachment in storming abolitionist John Brown’s fortifications at a Union armory he and his men took over at Harper’s Ferry. The Marines captured Brown and killed some of his followers.
From 1898 to 1914, Marines continued to demonstrate their readiness for deployment by being utilized throughout the Caribbean and Latin America in various capacities. They assaulted beachheads in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico during the 1898 Spanish-American War.
Marines were therefore battle-tested when World War I erupted in 1916 and ready to serve a central role. The action that assured their reputation into modern history took place in June 1918 at the Battle of Belleau Wood.
Ordered to withdraw from taking on the Germans, Captain Lloyd Williams rallied his outnumbered troops with, “Retreat? Hell, we just got here.”
Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, ultimately a recipient of two Medals of Honor, led the way into battle, bellowing, “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”
German troops fled, relinquishing the area to the fierce US Marines, whom they nicknamed “Devil Dogs.” In honor of the American Marines, the French government re-named Belleau Wood Bois de la Brigade de Marine. Wood of the Marine Brigade.
In the meantime, Vladimir Lenin ushered in his socialist revolution in Russia that led to the eventual rise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). During this “workers revolution,” Marines landed at Vladivostok to protect American citizens caught up in the violence.
In between World War I and World War II, the USMC developed a specific mission to distinguish it from the army—that of a fast-reacting light infantry that could be shipped rapidly to far off locations via the Navy to land on enemy-held beaches. Success depended on waves of high-speed assault craft landing under the cover of naval gunfire and air power.
In 1941, as World War II began, American and British ship architects developed and constructed hundreds of LSTs (landing ship, tank) capable of steaming across open waters hauling infantry, tanks, and supplies to combat-offload directly onto hostile beaches. Joe Rosenthal’s famous Raising the Flag photo of five Marines and one Navy corpsman hoisting the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima symbolized “island hopping” Marine campaigns against Japanese in the Pacific.
Although Marines fought primarily in the Pacific theater against the Japanese, they were used on a more limited scale in other regions of the war. A Marine brigade occupied Iceland during the early stages. Other Marines served as advisors and trainers during British and American amphibious operations in Africa and Europe. Some were sharpshooters to detonate floating mines and clear the way for the landings at Normandy on D-Day. At least fifty Marines became intelligence agents and saboteurs for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor of the CIA, Army Special Forces, and Navy SEALs.
After the armistice, Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson believed there would be no future major wars and argued that the United States no longer required a Marine Corps, that America’s monopoly of the atomic bomb was adequate defense.
He went even further and confronted Admiral Richard L. Connolly. “Admiral,” he said, “there is no reason for having a Navy and a Marine Corps. General Bradley told me amphibious operations are a thing of the past. We’ll never have any more amphibious operations. That does away with the Marine Corps. And the Air Force can do anything the Navy can do, so that does away with the Navy.”
He was not just wrong, he was dead wrong.
In 1950, North Korean communist troops rampaged across the border into South Korea. The 1st Provisional Marine Brigade held the line at the Battle of Pusan. General Douglas MacArthur ordered a Marine amphibious landing at Inchon that collapsed NK lines and drove the North Koreans back north to the Yalu River.
Hordes of Red Chinese entered the fight on the side of North Korea. They surprised, surrounded, and overwhelmed the over-extended and outnumbered Americans. The U.S. 8th Army retreated in disarray. The 1st Marine Division inflicted heavy losses on the enemy during its own withdrawal to the coast in what became known as the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. It was during this fight that Big Ed Crawford was wounded for the first time.
Marines continued their battle of attrition against the NKs along the 38th parallel until the 1953 armistice. On the night of 26 July 1953, Buck Sergeant Crawford and his platoon were holding a hilltop overlooking the 38th parallel. Expecting a ground attack during the night that he knew the Marines could not hold off, Crawford assembled the members of his platoon.
“Write a letter home like it may be your last letter,” he instructed.
He gathered the letters, secured them in an ammo can, and gave the can to one of the tank commanders. “What you have in this ammo box is more important than anything,” he emphasized. “You have to get it out.”
Crawford’s outfit waited anxiously for an attack that never came. Shortly after midnight and the beginning of 27 July, word came through that an armistice had been signed. The war was over.
Between 1953 and 1965, Marines were dispatched to a number of regional crises: the 3/3 Marines evacuated Americans from Alexandria, Egypt, during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis; in 1958, Operation Blue Bat sent them to brewing trouble in Lebanon; five thousand Marines landed in Thailand in 1962 to support that nation’s struggle against communists; and in March 1965, the Walking Dead landed at Da Nang.
Way I figured it, US Marines had been fighting around the world for nearly two hundred years. That was hard to contemplate. And now here I was in that long continuum of Marine history dug in on a hilltop in northern South Vietnam waiting for the commies to strike again.
“Wonder whatever happened to the troop who bashed his head against
the shower tile?” Tony mused.
I shrugged. “Probably brain damage. He’s sitting in some corner drooling and sucking his thumb.”
“I suppose it might be better than being dead.”
Okinawa when we were still young and foolhardy seemed like a lifetime ago, although only a few weeks had passed since we left the island. For some of us, like Hill and Jaggers and Doc Heath and the others, it had been a lifetime ago. Life had changed dramatically in a very short time for those of us who survived this far. Life indeed had a special flavor when you fought for it, when life hung by a thread subject to fate, chance, and whim, when tomorrow, or even the next hour, might be your last. I felt about a hundred years old, and tired, disgusted, and homesick.
I even harbored nostalgia for Camp Schwab. We had fun there, like at a Boy Scout jamboree. Even the name—Camp Schwab—conjured up thoughts of mystery and adventure.
Schwab was the name of a US Marine flamethrower who received the Medal of Honor during World War II. He had been a Tulsa boy. Wouldn’t it be something if I went back to Tulsa with an MOH? Closest I was likely to ever actually come though was as a witness to Sergeant Crawford’s feats. Word had it that he was up for the award for bravery during the NVA attack against Hotel Company in the draw.
Tony and I had been among about two thousand fresh trainees flown into Kadena, Okinawa, and loaded onto cattle cars for the short ride to camp where we were to be conditioned and prepared for combat in Vietnam. Most of us had been in training now for some six months and were eager to get it all over with and ship out to the real war. We were United States Marines. Hell, yes! The baddest motherfuckers on the planet. Go over, kick ass, end the war, come back home heroes.
Blood in the Hills Page 21
