One of several tricks to expedite its removal involved elevating the gun instead of jacking the chain hoist. I hooked up the hoist and began elevating the gun, which meant that the breech, inside the tank, was going down. As it did, it slowly pulled the block out of the breech. I had elevated the gun almost to maximum when I heard a soft muffled pop.
What the hell was that? Immediately I stopped and lowered the gun to investigate when a strong smell hit my nose. I thought it was some kind of solvent, but then a small amber river began to meander along the turret's floor. I recognized the smell of Scotch!
I was already guilty of violating the rules. To elevate the main gun, I had used the TC's override handle, which engaged powerful hydraulic pumps. Officially, the book stated that any movement of the turret or gun in a confined area must be done by hand, in order to avoid damage to the turret's hydraulic motor should the gun abruptly bump into an obstacle. But because turning the turret or elevating the main gun manually was very time-consuming, many of us paid little attention to the rule. We just made sure that our platoon sergeant or platoon leader wasn't around when we did it.
I followed the little river of liquid to its source and found a Scotchsoaked canvas AWOL bag that had been stuffed way under the main gun. To see whose bottle I had just broken, I looked for some name or identifying mark on the bag. When I turned it over, the name hit me with the force of a prizefighter's blow: SSGT ROBERT EMBESI.
All I could say was, "Oh, shit!"
Suddenly queasy, I broke out in a sweat. Please, God, anybody but Embesi! I'd rather have been stripped of my rank-rather have eaten that broken bottle-than tell Embesi I broke it. Where could I hide until we got to Da Nang? Getting rid of the bag was impossible-the smell permeated the entire tank. And the Navy had very strict rules; having alcohol aboard ship was a court-martial offense.
What was I going to do? Could I run fast enough and long enough to outrun him? Suddenly the Thomaston had shrunk to the size of a small dinghy, and swimming suddenly seemed like a very serious option.
Embesi wasn't around, which may well have saved my face from being permanently rearranged. My two fellow crewmen, working on the tank's exterior, followed their noses and peered down into the turret from the two hatches above me.
"What the hell's that smell?" they asked with Cheshire Cat-like grins, assuming that I-sitting on the turret floor, about to be nauseous-had been holding out on them. But when I explained what had just happened, they both looked at each other, then back at me, their eyes big as saucers.
"You broke Embesi's bottle?" they asked in unison. "Embesi's bottle?"
"Oh shit, man!" said one. "You're dead!"
"No shit!" I replied. "Tell me something I don't know!"
Some people just love to see others squirm in a difficult situation. "Are you a strong swimmer?" the other guy asked with a half-giggle.
"I don't suppose either of you has a bottle, do you?" I pleaded.
"On a Navy ship?" they both said, feigning shock that I would even dream of their breaking such a rule.
Now I dreaded having to tell Embesi what I'd done. The last thing I wanted to do was disappoint him, because he had been very good to me. I was only a twenty-year-old "snuffy" still wet behind the ears, less than two years out of boot camp, with no combat experience.
I cleaned up the mess and gave serious thought as to how I should approach Embesi about his secret bottle. I dismissed the thought of playing dumb-the inside of that turret reeked of Scotch and there was no way to get rid of the smell. But while cleaning up, I came up with a great idea. When I explained what had happened, I'd use the word "we," thereby deflecting some of the wrath that I knew was sure to follow.
I walked through the bowels of the ship, scared to death and rehearsing my lines, while trying to find his quarters. Eventually I found the staff sergeant's quarters and approached Embesi. He was in the midst of a Pinochle game with three other staff sergeants.
Gathering up my courage, I asked, "Can I talk with you a minute? We have a little problem on the tank."
He had just called trump after winning the bid. "What is it?" he wanted to know.
"I can't say right here."
Unintentionally, with his fellow staff sergeants sitting right there, he made it even more difficult. "Whatever you got to tell me can be said here. What's the problem?"
"We were cleaning the breechblock," I began, "when we raised the gun to..."
"Don't you even fuckin' tell me!" he shouted.
"It was a mistake. We didn't see..." Again I had no chance to finish, but I thought the we part was working well.
"That was a thirty-dollar bottle of Glenlevit! What fuckin' idiot raised the gun using power? Didn't anybody bother looking underneath the fuckin' gun?"
Out of first-person plurals, I looked down at the deck. "Sergeant Embesi, it was me."
The small room broke into catcalls. Half of them began needling Embesi about having a bottle of booze on board a Navy ship and not sharing it with his fellow staff sergeants. The others asked me, "Do you know how short your life expectancy just became?" and "Did you pass your drown-proofing test?"-a type of training all Marines go through in case we're stranded in the ocean for any period of time.
"You dumb son-of-a-bitch!" Embesi yelled. "I was saving that bottle for ... get the fuck out of my sight!"
He didn't have to ask me twice. I went back to the tank to hide out and count my blessings-and my teeth. I felt unbelievably lucky I hadn't been given a personal one-on-one karate demonstration.
The next morning, Embesi climbed in the tank's turret. I heard him inhale deeply, and he looked at me like someone who had just lost his best friend. "God," he said, "I love that smell!"
To his credit, he never mentioned the incident again.
Until I put this story down on paper, I didn't realize that the bottle of Scotch-broken or not-was a court-martial offense for its owner, not me. I could have just as easily said, "Sergeant Embesi, why'd you hide that contraband under the gun of my tank? Don't you realize you could go to the brig for that?" But I was far too young and naive.
That night, I wrote my mother a letter, pleading with her to break all U. S. postal laws and send me a replacement bottle. Of course, my letter wouldn't get mailed until we had landed in Vietnam, and her bottle could never reach me fast enough.
BY THIS TIME, our voyage was beginning to get old. The squids had enjoyed messing with us, playing one long mind-fucking game after another, until we found their weak spot. We disliked C rations, but they loved them. Because each of our tanks carried several cases of twelve meals each, we soon realized we had some major negotiating power.
Embesi's experience-nine years in tanks and a previous tour in Vietnam-proved invaluable. One tip he shared with us was how handy thick nylon rope could be. It was very strong, far more flexible, much lighter and easier to work with than our issue tow cables, which were stiff, unwieldy, and hard to get on and off a tank. "Try to borrow, swap, or steal some from the Navy," he told us. That became my job.
Of the very little I had learned about the Navy, I knew that if you wanted to procure anything aboard ship, you sought out a boatswain's mate. With that in mind and a case of C rations under my arm, I sought out a petty officer first class-in the Navy, a rank equivalent to that of a staff sergeant like Embesi. "I'm looking for rope," I told the squid. "And for the right kind I'm willing to trade a case of C rats."
To my surprise, that got his immediate attention. "How much do you need?" he asked. "What diameter?"
"Fifty feet of three-inch rope should do the trick."
He looked at me like I was a complete idiot. "Why do you need such thick rope?"
I explained how we would use it in the field, instead of our stiff heavy tow cables.
"You sure that's what you want?"
"Yes," I replied, naive enough to think I was dealing with an honest seaman-sort of like assuming I'd found an honest lawyer.
"Where do you want it?" he asked.
"Ya know, ya can't leave it sitting out, or we'll both get in trouble." He added that the thickest rope available on ship was only two inches in diameter.
"No problem." I said. Doubled up, the thinner-diameter rope would still be much easier to use than our heavy cables. "Just make it a hundred feet then. I'll leave the tank's hatch unlocked, so you can drop it inside the turret."
He confirmed my order. "Ya want two-inch rope, right? Ya know, it ain't gonna fit inside."
One hundred feet of rope would fit inside a tank's turret with room to spare. His last statement should have set off a warning bell in my head, but I was too caught up in making the deal.
Before I could say anything, he nodded. "I'll just put it on the back of the tank and throw your tarp over it."
"Okay," I replied. "No problem."
He smiled. "I'll arrange for the delivery tonight. But I'll take the C rats now." I handed him the case, proud of the good deal I'd just negotiated.
Next morning, we were eating breakfast in the ship's mess when Embesi walked over to me. "What's that pile of crap on the back of the tank?" he asked.
Knowing how much he wanted the rope, I told him what a great job I'd done and all the details of the trade.
He just started to laugh. "Go down to the well deck and check out the tank."
I finished eating and went below, squeezing my way between the rows of tanks until I got to ours. When I climbed up on its back, I was confronted by our tarp hiding a truly voluminous mass. Hell, I could supply all of Bravo Company with all the rope I had here. That Navy guy had really outdone himself!
I pulled back the tarp, and my jaw dropped. Lying there before me-knee-high, nearly four feet in diameter-was a gigantic coil of the thickest, heaviest steel cable I'd ever seen. It weighed at least a thousand pounds!
I stood there, stunned. What the fuck was going on here? I proceeded to scour the ship, looking to track down the dumb squid who didn't know nylon rope from steel cable. When our eyes finally met, he smiled-as if he'd been expecting me!
"Why the hell'd you leave me all that goddamn cable, instead of the rope I asked for?" I demanded. "I couldn't even budge that pile of shit!"
"No," he replied, "I don't suppose you could. I had to use the ship's crane to get it up there."
I was really pissed. "Look, I asked you for one hundred feet of twoinch-diameter rope. What do you call that pile of steel cable on the back of my tank?"
"I call it rope, son," he said in a condescending tone. "Maybe what you really wanted was line."
That was my first lesson in seamanship: What we Marines called rope, the Navy called line; and what we called cable, they called rope!
He had kept his end of the bargain and was sticking by it, knowing I didn't have much choice. "Of course," he volunteered, "if you want me to replace it with line, it'll cost ya' another case of C rats."
I certainly couldn't leave a half-ton of cable sitting on the back of my tank, so-shrewdly-I negotiated for him to remove the rope and replace it with the line I wanted.
He just smiled. "Been nice doin' business with ya, son, but I'll take the C rats now."
After being taken like that, I really hated the Navy. My revenge would come later, but right then, I couldn't imagine how.
As OUR DAYS AT SEA became longer and longer, the ship seemed to get smaller and smaller. Several of us were so bored we broke into one of the frozen-food lockers. Over the ship's intercom, our angry captain demanded that the guilty parties come forward. Of course, we didn't. But at least he got a lesson in the kind of tools that tankers carried with them-a Marine bolt cutter goes through a Navy padlock with no trouble at all.
We ate our fill of ice cream that night. But try as we might, we couldn't empty three five-gallon containers. After a couple of hours, we had to dispose of the evidence before we had a mess on our hands. At 2 a.m., three faint splashes could barely be heard on the port side of the Thomaston as we shared our leftover dessert with the fish.
Well into our second week, we sighted our first landmass, Guam. I was surprised at the island's size and its degree of civilization. Except for the tropical palms and the jungle we passed on the way into the harbor, it could easily have passed for a base back in the States, with its streets of houses with cars, telephone poles, and streetlights.
The six-hour layover gave us all a chance to get off the Thomaston. It was easy to spot landlubbers who had just spent twelve days on the high seas. We were the ones experiencing the strange symptoms of what the squids called sea legs, weaving from side to side as if the island itself was rolling-or so it felt.
Refueling went way too fast, and we were ordered back aboard.
We spent our days down in the well deck going over our chariots, cleaning, inspecting, and returning every part that was humanly reachable.
A tank's most vulnerable component was its very heart: six very large 24-volt batteries, accessible through a hinged door on the turret floor. Only two batteries could be reached at any one time, and you had to rotate the turret to get to the next pair under the floor. Their contacts and connector cables required frequent cleaning, especially in the salty air. For a rookie tanker, the job could be hazardous. By definition, a tank's 24-volt battery discharged a mere twenty-four volts, but it also delivered the enormous amperage needed to turn over the M48's twelve-cylinder diesel engine.
And so, when working around these large batteries, great caution was necessary. First you removed your watch and any rings-especially rings!-because any metal tool making contact between a battery post and any part of the turret caused an immediate arc.
If a wrench ever slipped out of someone's hands, bouncing against a terminal and the turret floor at the same time, the resulting crack! of amperage and shower of sparks could make the calmest man jump. There wasn't a tanker alive who hadn't experienced this at least six times in his career.
Sometimes, the wrench didn't simply bounce away; it actually welded itself to the points of contact. When that happened, you had to act fast and break the contact-with the blow from a hammer or a swift kick from a boot. If you didn't react quickly enough, the wrench would quickly glow red-hot and make the battery explode. I had never seen this recipe for disaster until one morning, down in the Thomaston's well deck, when one of us got a shocking initiation to one of the many differences between tanks and amtracs.
Getting at the batteries was always a tight fit, and the rolling of the ship didn't make the job any easier. Along with many of the other tank crews, I was sitting on top of the turret, cleaning the copper fittings that screwed each leg together to create the long aerials we used. I happened to be looking in the right direction when, suddenly, a blue-white flash, as if someone was using an arc welder, lit up the well deck. It was immediately followed by a loud CRACK! Every veteran tanker recognized the sound.
A banshee-like scream immediately followed. A solitary ring of blue smoke rose from the turret where the arc of light appeared.
None of us moved. We knew what had happened and we just smiled at the tank silently, looking for the rookie who had made the mistake. Five seconds later, up out of the turret came the head of Corporal Washington, an ex-amtracker. Smoke seeped from his hair like steam rising off asphalt after a summer rain. His eyes were as wide as I'd ever seen on a man. Looking around, he realized that twenty pairs of eyes were centered on him. His expression changed to that of a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Smoke was still coming off his head when he uttered what became the immortal words of the cruise: "Them bat-trees is sure much bigger then them amtrac bat-trees!"
Washington's larger-than-life grin brought the house down. The entire well deck broke out in a roar of laughter followed by a few catcalls. "Hey, Sparky! Workin' on them batteries, are ya?" Then, with an embarrassed grin, even Corporal Washington started laughing.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN the Marines and our Navy hosts became strained. One afternoon we ran into a major storm that pushed the tenuous Navy-Marine relationship to the breaking
point. As the seas grew increasingly rough, we quit work and went back to our berthing areas. Scores of queasy men showed signs of seasickness. Then the PA system barked, "All Marines go below and dog down your tanks."
On a rolling ship, a loose fifty-two-ton object becomes a serious threat. Fearing that the tanks might shift around in the well deck, the Navy wanted us to add additional chains, the better to secure them. We put on our foul-weather gear and reported onto the main deck, into the teeth of a driving rain. The Thomaston seemed to be rocking more than you would expect for a ship of her size. Later I learned that an LSD has a flat bottom, denying her the ability to right herself as she took on ocean swells, thus accentuating the ship's movement.
All the tank crews were bent over the rail, staring down into the ship's cavernous middle. Not one of us moved. Fifty feet below, our tanks swayed with each swell, straining against the chains. Suddenly-as if one had fired a main gun-a chain exploded and went flying across the well deck.
We all looked at each other, waiting for somebody to make the first move to go below. No one was that stupid.
A minute later, another chain below us let go. "All Marine personnel, go below," the PA system repeated the same announcement, "and dog down your tanks immediately!"
Another chain flew across the well deck. Twenty tank crews looked down into the mayhem, then back at each other. No one budged.
Our commanding officer, Captain Morris, came out among us. "What's the problem?" he wanted to know. "Why aren't you going down as ordered?" Then he saw why. "Stay put," he told us and strutted off toward the ship's bridge.
Five minutes later, we saw dozens of the ship's crew running through the well deck, dragging heavy chains behind them.
Later, we learned that our CO and the ship's captain hadn't seen eyeto-eye about whose responsibility it was to secure the tanks. The Navy captain-equivalent in rank to a Marine colonel-demanded that the Marines go below to tend to the tanks because his ship was in danger. The Marine CO countered that he wasn't sending any of his men down there, that the Navy was responsible for chaining down its cargo. Fortunately, no sailor was injured down there that stormy afternoon-if the Navy didn't hate us before, they sure did now.
Praying for Slack: A Marine Corps Tank Commander in Viet Nam Page 4
