LBJ's Hired Gun

by John J. Gebhart

  The house took another couple of hits. I saw a muzzle flash and returned the fire. Luckily, the gas system on this M-14 was clean. The rifle shot, but not like the semi-auto it was supposed to be. Believe me, for every hit on the wall, I returned a shot. Seabee Builtright didn’t even wake up. I figured there were two VC at best, with no balls to attack, so I kept my cool and shot only when they shot at me. I moved around to different windows, to make it look like both of us were up. I played this game of cat and mouse for what seemed like forever, but it was probably no more than an hour. Finally it started raining, and except for the noise of the rain everything got quiet again.

  At dawn, Sleeping Beauty awoke, took a piss out the window, and wondered why the floor was covered with empty 7.62 brass shells. I slowly went outside and the whole village was walking around like nothing had happened. I looked at the white walls and counted twenty or so bullet holes. My Seabee partner was amazed and we decided to get our asses back to our side of the river.

  We once again gave a sampan boat owner two dollars, and he quickly paddled us over to the Seabee base. I had a terrible hangover and was worn-out from staying up all night, but otherwise I thanked God for sparing me and this crazy Seabee. I went to chow and then to work, and didn’t tell anyone about this unauthorized island trip for a very long time.

  THE GREAT POPCORN TRAGEDY

  One night as I was walking out of the S-3 Operations Office, I was grabbed and pushed against the wall, and a 9mm Browning hi-power pistol was stuck in my left ear. Major Moose was playing games and had had too many beers. I acted scared and said, “Either let me go or shoot me.” The Major was wound up and said he wanted popcorn. I said, “Major, it’s 11:00 at night. Where in the hell am I going to get you popcorn?” He then asked, “Can you run faster than a 9mm hollow point?” He then ordered me to drive his jeep up the hill to where he lived. He was pretty boozed up, so I figured I’d drive him home and he’d pass out on his Hollywood bed and that would be that.

  When I got him home, he got his second wind. He said, “I have to have popcorn or I won’t be able to sleep.” Sure! He had a sleep disorder from popcorn deprivation. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll get your popcorn. Put your pistol back in its shoulder holster and be good. I’ll be back in a half hour.” I drove the jeep over to the Seabee outpost. Their club was closed and the guy that ran it was counting money and locking up. I told him the Major was going to shoot me if 1 didn’t get him some fresh popcorn. The Seabee said, “Fuck the Major.” I told him I’d owe him a favor, whatever he wanted. He knew about some deals I had made with Seabee Builtright and that I had a lot of pull with the gunbird crowd.

  Finally he handed me a shot of Jack Daniels and a cold beer. He loaded up the popcorn machine and we made a load of popcorn. We bullshitted, downed shots, drank a few more beers, and ate half of the fresh popcorn. I still had a huge plastic bag full, complete with butter on it. I sealed the bag to keep in the freshness and shook the Seabee’s hand. “God bless you and I owe you!”

  When I got back to the Major’s house, he was almost asleep. Once again I got the 9mm Browning put against my ear. The Major said I was an English-speaking VC, so we had to play question and answer games. I picked the Civil War this time and got four answers right. The Major decided I was not a VC and wanted to know where his “fucking popcorn” was.

  I gave him the huge bag of popcorn, complete with paper napkins to wipe his face. He started eating it like there was no tomorrow. I then said, “Major I am tired of being Lance Corporal. Would you put in a good word for me to get promoted?” He said I was lucky he didn’t shoot me. I saluted him and left. He was still drinking beer and eating his popcorn like a little kid. I figured he did a lot for our outfit, so he deserved to get drunk once in a while and make a fool of himself.

  The Major ate all the popcorn and passed out. His left his hand lying over the edge of his bed, and a large rat bit the tips off his fingers. He was so drunk it took a while for him to wake up and by the time he did, he was in severe pain.

  At 7:00 AM he drove himself to sickbay, where they treated and bandaged his fingertips. Then he was told he would have to get seven needles in his stomach to ward off rabies. The Major was not very happy with this deal. At 8:30 AM he stopped his jeep as I was returning from the mess hall. “Why the fuck did you get me popcorn, Gebhart?” he asked. I said, “You literally put a gun to my head and were going to shoot me if I didn’t get it for you. We now owe the Seabees a favor.”

  The Colonel instructed me to personally drive Major Moose everyday to sickbay at 1:30 PM and go into the room with him while he got the needle in his stomach. The Colonel said, “This mission seems easy, but Major Moose is afraid of needles, and you may have to hold him down, or at least hold his hand. I said, “Don’t you think an officer would be more suitable for this assignment?” The Colonel replied, “The Major would be too embarrassed to let a fellow officer see that he is afraid of a simple needle.”

  So at 1:30 PM on day one, I grabbed the Major, who first tried to hide in the shithouse, drove him up to sickbay, went into the doctor’s office, and helped him get ready. The Major was instructed to take off his shirt and lie on the operating table. I helped him up onto the table and took off his shirt and undershirt. He lay back and started to shake. The doctor came in with a huge needle with a point that looked about 12-inches long. It even gave me the creeps. The Major almost shit himself just at the sight of it. It took three Corpsmen and me to hold him down while he got this mile-long needle in his stomach. It lasted about a minute, but seemed like an hour. The Major was soaking wet from sweat, had the shakes, and was in a very foul mood. We toweled him dry and the doctor put a large bandage on his needle hole. I helped him with his T-shirt and utility jacket, and he limped out to the jeep. On the way to the ready room, the Major said, “Thank you. And if you tell anyone about this needle, you’re a dead man.”

  It took him seven times, but he finally loosened up and wasn’t that scared at the end. He never went nuts with rabies and I kept my mouth shut about the incident. Finally, the Major said, “Don’t do anything I order you to do when I am drunk!” So now I had to give him a field sobriety check in order to see if his order was real or humbug. It sure was fun watching him get his needles, and feeling happy I was not the one the rat got!

  SHITHOUSE JACKSON

  PFC Jackson was a tall skinny black guy who was a lot of fun and was always late for everything. Vietnam was a vacation for him. He often said more people got shot in his neighborhood in Detroit than in ’Nam. I filled a lot of sandbags with him and listened to his stories about where he lived. He had a million relatives who were forever sending him food—snacks, sweet potato pies and the like. He did not hoard his goodies but shared them with his fellow Marines.

  One day he received a large jar of pickled pigs’ feet. When he opened the jar, the smell almost killed the rest of us, but he pigged down the pigs’ feet like there was no tomorrow. We went to chow and he took a nap. We all returned from chow and went to the outside theater to watch old episodes of Combat and Batman, which is what the Marines Special Service showed when they ran out of regular movies.

  PFC Jackson started farting and we all had to move our lawn chairs. I mean it smelled like ten dead cats. Finally we asked him to move his chair farther away. We had all settled in and were enjoying Combat when the zips started a mortar attack, walking the mortars from our minefield into the flight deck, near where we were sitting. I grabbed my beer and jumped into a large triple-sandbag-walled bunker that we had recently constructed for the helicopter-line personnel. It was about 30 feet long and 10 feet wide with steps. It had taken a million sandbags and a whole week to build this monster, and this was its first test.

  But where was PFC Jackson? By the time we realized he was in the outhouse, it was clear that the mortars were coming his way. We yelled out for him to run for the bunker. He was taking his good old time. We yelled that two more mortar shots and the shithouse would get hit and we would ha
ve to send his body COD to his mother.

  Jackson came running out with his pants still down and he tripped over his big feet. At that very moment, a mortar round hit the side of the shithouse, sending wood, tin roofing, screening, and honey buckets filled with shit up in the air. Jackson got hit in his ass with splinters. He would have been killed if he hadn’t tripped over his own feet. We ran out to grab him and he was bleeding, covered with shit and toilet paper. He thought he was dying and asked for a Southern Baptist minister. We were all laughing as we dragged his tall, smelly, shit-covered body across the sand into our new super bunker. I told him a Roman Catholic chaplain was all I could find, was that okay? We gave him a cold can of Miller and told him goodbye. The mortar attacks stopped—once again two Huey gunbirds aloft pinpointed the VC mortar crew and blew them away.

  We called for Corpsmen and they refused to take PFC Jackson to the hospital until he took off all his foul-smelling clothes. I handed him a clean towel and off he went, stark naked on a stretcher with a towel covering his bloody ass and holding a can of Miller. We always laughed whenever this story was told and we changed PFC Jackson’s name to Shithouse Jackson. He was overjoyed when he received his Purple Heart.

  HOW SERGEANT RECKLESS LOST HIS CRACKERS

  One rainy monsoon night I had the pleasure of Sergeant Reckless’s company in my bunker. He was in charge of the Reaction Platoon, and rather than stay in the command tent with Lieutenant Boring and listen to his football stories, he decided to stay in my S-3 super bunker. I had known him when he was an E-4 Corporal. We both got the clap from the same Da Nang whore, both got the double-headed needle up the ass, and had fallen down drunk together once or twice. You could say he was my buddy, or, as I told the Captain later, he was a “military acquaintance.”

  It was a pitch-black night raining cats and dogs, and we were wet and hungry. Sergeant Reckless wanted peanut butter and crackers, so I traded my C-ration peanut butter for his hot Spam sandwich, which I had really started to like, especially on newly baked bread. Sergeant Reckless put peanut butter on all his crackers and lined them up one after another on a clean sandbag. When he was ready to eat them, a rat the size of a house cat jumped on the sandbag and beat him to it. Immediately Sergeant Reckless pulled out his .45-automatic, chambered a live round and readied to shoot the rat dead. I had to inform him that if he shot his trusty pistol, the whole line of bunkers would open fire, and we would have flares and a mad minute of firing. Since there would be no dead VCs, he would automatically be busted to the rank of Corporal. “Please, don’t shoot the rat,” I said. “Fuck you, pussy,” he relied. “That rat is history!” He shot it at four and a half feet away, and the rat’s guts blew up all over one of my Spam sandwiches, which totally pissed me off. I also got one of the rat’s hind legs attached to my poncho. I called him a moron and the whole line of bunkers opened fire into the darkness complete with 81mm star flares.

  It was like daylight for five seconds. The Marines wasted a couple thousand rounds of ammo and the phone rang in our bunker. It was a real pissed off Lieutenant Boring wanting to know what was going on. In five minutes he was running toward our bunker to inspect the source of the first round. Lieutenant Boring asked me what had happened. I said I didn’t know because I was outside taking a piss. He looked at the blood and guts from the dead rat and asked me why a dead rodent leg was on my poncho. I looked him straight in his Main Line football-hero face and said I had no idea. Later the next day, Sergeant Reckless received office hours and was reduced in rank to Corporal. Can’t say I didn’t tell him that Lieutenant Boring would break his balls without a dead zip to back up his story. He was up the creek without a paddle.

  I later wrote home to my father to buy me a Wham-O slingshot so I could kill rats quietly. Corporal Reckless even learned how to hit an empty beer can at 20 feet with it. Every time I told the story, the whole outfit split their guts laughing. Lieutenant Boring believed he acted by the book and we all thought he was an idiot ex-football player who never left the end zone of Villfanova University.

  LST 912

  When the monsoon season comes the war slows down. There is not much flying because of fog and rain and very poor visibility. I wasn’t a gunner forever; flight skins lasted for only one month. We got an extra $55 flight pay on top of our regular pay and combat pay. The officer and crew chief flew all the time, but the gunners were volunteers. This is how Corporal Cross got so many air medals. He was out fighting just about every day.

  On New Year’s Eve I got stuck with guard duty. I was ordered to guard a bunker on the beach side of the base. Since we had no beach, I was guarding the cliff and boulders by the sea. It was raining cats and dogs and I was with PFC Nervous. I told him the zips never attacked our base from the South China Sea side. Once in awhile a sampan would come in too close, 600 yards or so, and the guards would shoot M-60 machine gun fire near it to warn it to move away. Thus I was stuck in a boring bunker by the sea in pouring rain, with an idiot who was afraid he was going to be killed any minute by a sneaky ninja-dressed VC.

  The Navy anchored LST 912 directly in front of our bunker, and dropped anchor in about 50 feet of water. Since it was rough and the weather was terrible, they double anchored the ship. I watched LST 912 with my trusty, 7x35 binoculars and it looked about 600 or 700 yards out. I could see its running lights and portholes. I even saw a few sailors moving around in foul weather gear. The more I watched the ship, the closer it looked in my field glasses. Finally I could see a mole on the neck of a sailor. The huge waves were pushing the LST into our rocky shoreline. The anchors were not holding, but the sailors seem to be unaware that it was moving toward the shore.

  At 1:00 AM, I called Lieutenant Miller at the Command Post and told him the LST was dragging its anchors and moving toward the shore. He said he was the owner of a 27-foot sailboat from Boston, Massachusetts, and from the Command Post the ship looked okay. At 1:30 I called him back and he was quite annoyed that a Lance Corporal nobody would be able to determine a ship’s movement. He said I was nuts and not to bother him again. He then added that if the Marine Corps wanted a Lance Corporal to think, they would have issued him a brain. I then told him I didn’t own a 27-foot sailboat, but I had read Chapman’s Seamanship Book cover to cover and this LST was getting ready to land on Chu Lai rocks. If a low ranking Lance Corporal could see this, maybe a high ranking Lieutenant better get in his jeep and come over and take a look himself.

  By 2:00 AM the Lieutenant still had not driven over because he didn’t want to get wet. By this time, the fog had rolled in and we could barely see the crew walking about topside. At 2:10 AM I called our ready room and got the duty Lieutenant on the horn. He said he would enter my comments on the official log, but he wasn’t going to alert the Commanding Officer, who was drinking with the ship’s Captain and other officers celebrating New Year’s Eve. He appreciated me warning him, but told me not to worry. The Navy knew what it was doing, and LSTs were flat-bottomed vessels that could run in very shallow water, even 10 feet or less.

  At 3:00 PM, we saw the few remaining crewmembers through the fog running around in a panic. At 3:05 AM, LST 912 finally landed in the worst place on our rocky shoreline—not on sand but on a coral reef. The ship called for its Captain and soon the whole base was down there with floodlights surveying the damage. The Captain was drunk and swearing. No one mentioned that I had called in three or four times to no avail.

  The next day, the Navy sent two sea-going tugboats down to pull it off the rocks. They spent all day but the ship would not budge. Then they got the bright idea to get rid of extra weight. They started throwing everything not screwed down overboard—20mm ammo, chairs, tables, all the cargo they could. Meanwhile, the waves were beating the ship farther up on the rocks.

  The Navy then decided to fill the ship with white foam. They started pumping foam into it, and the whole inside turned into a giant white foam monster. That didn’t work. They then sent down Navy guys to paint the number LST 912 off the ship, as
if it never existed. The Captain was relieved of his command and court-martialed. Lieutenant Miller was severely criticized for not reporting Lance Corporal Gebhart’s warning. The Colonel came over and told me not to get pissed; I had done all that I could do to save the ship. Lieutenant Miller was pissed that a Lance Corporal had upstaged him, and that the Colonel told him, “Next time, listen to your men.”

  The Navy wrote LST 912 off and later sent welders to cut the ship into sections that they unsuccessfully tried to tow away. When I left, the ship was still on the rocks, in three large pieces at the mercy of the sea. The Marines looted it, stripping it bare of anything we needed or thought we could use. It was a sad sight, like something out of a World War II Jap movie. This tragedy could have been prevented if only a rich Boston Lieutenant had gotten off his ass, put on his rain gear, driven over to our bunker, and looked at how close the ship was to our shoreline. The Marines are set up in such a way that enlisted people are looked upon as stupid idiots, unable to think, reason or figure out anything higher than shooting an M-14 and getting killed. Lieutenant Miller will never forget how the Colonel blasted him about my warning! It was another Navy screw-up where they tried to save some worthless rich kid’s ass, only to have it all come back to haunt them later.