Thirty Days Has September

by James Strauss

  “You stay,” a voice yelled into my deafened right ear. “You stay until I come back for you. You’re the company commander, you don’t get to run away.”

  I knew it was the Gunny’s voice but it took me seconds after his leaving for my mind to work well enough to figure it out. The firing continued but more in the distance. Apparently we weren’t surrounded. It hadn’t occurred to me in my full panic mode to consider that I might be trying to run through my unit’s own machine gun fire at the perimeter or why there wouldn’t be enemy attackers where I was trying to go.

  I waited. I breathed slowly, feeling the mud and muck begin to congeal around me. I was half buried in the stuff but I didn’t move. I had nothing. I had no courage, no honor, no nothing. All I had was the Gunny and he’d said wait. I counted breaths. Sixteen to a minute I’d heard somewhere. I did sixteen one thousand times. I was just over three thousand sixteen breath bits when the shooting stopped. Things went quiet, except for some mute screaming in the far distance. I started counting from the beginning but didn’t get far. A big hand reached down, grabbed my arm, and eased me gently upward and out of the grip of the mud. The Gunny let go. I sat there, the first light of dawn just barely beginning to make itself felt.

  The Gunny smoked a cigarette, squatting like a gook not very far away.

  “Your first contact,” he said, between slow puffs.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, shakily, trying to pry loose some of the mud clots that had dried to my clothing.

  “This is my third war” the Gunny said, facing toward where the sun would eventually come up. “It’s the worst one of all.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to really be anywhere anymore.

  “You think you’re a coward,” the Gunny said with a faint smile on his features, barely visible in the low light. “You think you ran under fire. You think that proves something because of what you’ve been taught. Well, there’s no teaching for this shit. If you tell people later on what it was like they’ll think you’re nothing but a liar.”

  I listened intently, trying to grasp what the man was saying, but not quite getting it.

  “You’re just a kid. You ran because you’re an intelligent kid. I was there behind you because I’ve been in three wars. I knew you’d run. The good ones always run if they have a brain. But you won’t have to run again. Next contact you’ll stay but you won’t be able to say or do anything. Maybe after your fifth contact, or so, you’ll be able to talk. Nobody will listen to you. It’ll take a few more before that happens, and then you’ll be okay. I mean if we get that far. The last part I can’t help you with. If you stay here too long and go through too much of this, then you’ll get to look forward to the contacts. You won’t come back from that and I can’t help you with it if it happens. Let’s go. Everyone knows you’re here, what happened, and nobody gives a shit. We’d all run if there was somewhere to run to.”

  The Gunny slowly got up and stretched, field stripping his cigarette and fluttering away its small remaining bits. He walked back into the bush we’d come out of.

  When I got back to our small command box area my stuff was all packed up and waiting. Fessman, Stevens, and Nguyen made believe I’d never been gone. There was no time to say anything because the sound of a helicopter approaching began to dominate the whole area. The resupply was coming in. I knew from the deep dissonant roar that it was one of the big dual rotor jobs that could haul a lot of stuff. I heard a second machine in the distance.

  “The Huey’s resupply, if you want to mail your letter home, sir,” Fessman said through cupped hands. “The big one’s for medevac. We lost a few more than usual. The Gunny’s bagging them up and filing the tags.”

  I looked around but saw no special activity anywhere. In the jungle all sorts of stuff went on only a few feet away that you might never know was happening unless you stepped right into it. The jungle seemed to have a life all of its own. I looked back at my small team and then made my way to the open area near the paddy dikes where I’d spent the night. I headed for the resupply chopper and got my letter off to my wife, or at least placed into the hands of a crewman who looked like he was from a war movie. He stood next to the chopper with his legs spread, the finest new jungle utilities on, and wearing some kind of cowboy cavalry hat folded up on one side in the Australian style. In his hands he balanced a Thompson submachine gun. He looked so wildly out of place in his Hollywood outfit and back home cleanliness I would have laughed at any other time in my life. He took my letter with a grim expression, playing his role to the hilt. I walked away, back toward my team.

  As I walked I looked down and saw the imprint my body had left in the mud the night before. I smiled to myself with a twisted bitterness.

  seven

  The Third Day

  Ham and lima beans. Nobody wanted them so I took all four boxes. It was preferable to the sliced “spam” I’d had before. The boxes had already been picked through for sugar and fake cream packets. I got a carton of cigarettes. Lucky Strike. I sat back against a big bamboo tree, waiting for Gunny’s order to move out. I opened the Lucky Strikes and found the hand-written note I’d been told would be there. What you are doing means so much to my husband and I. He fought in the big war. Here’s our address. Come visit when you get back and we’ll make our best stew. It was signed William and Maude Collins, with an address somewhere in Iowa. I wondered if Vietnam would end up being a “little war” later on. I’d have fought in a little war. Not a real one. Certainly not a big one. I folded the piece of notepaper from home and put it in my wallet.

  “Don’t do that, sir,” Fessman whispered in my left ear.

  “What?” I replied, surprised.

  “Don’t save the note,” Fessman said, actually holding out his hand. “We’re here for a long time. There’s going to be a lot of notes. We don’t save ’em. It’s bad luck. We burn ’em at night, after we read them.”

  I got my wallet out and gave him the note. The plaintive quality of the way he asked compelled me. He cared about me and my survival. I felt it emanate viscerally from him. Fessman put the note in his pocket, for burning later that night I presumed.

  At the chopper I’d also gotten more insect repellent (type II), a brownish-green can of Mennen foot powder, one tooth brush, one tube of Pepsodent, a box of .45 Colt bullets (ball), and a cardboard container without markings about half the size of a shoe box. I put everything except the cardboard box into my pack, wondering why I needed fifty bullets for an automatic I wasn’t likely to ever use, what with all the automatic rifles surrounding me. I opened the container and then quickly closed it. It was a box of lead tubes with plastic tip covers. There must have been forty or more of them inside. It was morphine. Ten milligram morphine tubes. The corpsman problem came rushing back at me. What was I going to do? Nobody had said anything once the issue was dumped in my lap. What had the corpsman done the night before with all our “friendly” dead and wounded? I didn’t know. Maybe nothing would come of it at all, I thought. The order to move out came down the line. Nobody issued any order that I heard. Everyone just somehow knew and started the process of getting up and going. Fessman and I returned to the other two on my team.

  “The leeches, sir,” Fessman said, handing me a burning cigarette.

  “What leeches?” I replied, looking at the extended cigarette but not taking it.

  “From lying in the mud out there last night,” he said. “On your neck.”

  I hurriedly put my hand up to my neck, and then stopped. I felt some rounded growths. Four or five of them. I pulled my hand down. I almost threw up.

  “Get them off,” I ordered, my voice hoarse.

  Fessman approached until he was inches away, bent over and began applying the burning tip of the cigarette to the backs of the leeches. One fell off, and then another. I looked down. Black finger-long things
lay squirming on the ground in front of me. I shivered openly. Fessman puffed on the cigarette a few times, and then went back to work. After several minutes he was done.

  “When we get set in tonight check the other parts of your body. The heat from the cigarette will make any you have drop off without you having to tear their teeth out. Gasoline works too but they only have that in the rear area and we aren’t going there. Still, you’ll have scars. Little white round ones.”

  Stevens began packing up my stuff. I tossed in what I’d gotten from resupply along with the boxes of C-Rations. I held the morphine in my right hand. I had to give it to somebody, but I wasn’t sure who. The Gunny would know.

  Fessman’s Prick 25 radio squawked. He turned away to speak into the small handset. “It’s for the six actual,” he said, holding out the handset. I just looked back at him.

  “That’s you, sir,” he replied.

  I took the handset and pushed the button down.

  “Six actual here, over,” I said, loudly.

  Fessman made his hand go up and down. I got his message to lower my voice.

  “Casualty report,” a tinny voice said.

  I shrugged my shoulders. I had no idea how many we’d lost, in reality. I hadn’t seen the bags shipped out or the wounded medevaced. “What do I tell them?” I asked Fessman in a whisper, holding my hand over the microphone part of the handset.

  “Make it up,” Fessman replied, also in a whisper. “We do it all the time. It’s for Battalion daily reports. They don’t mean anything. They don’t care. They don’t check with anybody.”

  “We can’t just flat out lie to Battalion, for Christ’s sake,” I hissed back.

  “They’re back there and we’re out here,” Stevens piped in from behind me. “Fuck ’em.”

  I looked over my shoulder at him. Nguyen stood next to him, grinning, like he knew what we were talking about. I sighed, loudly. “Eight KIA and four MIA, friendlies,” I reported into the handset. “Twenty-seven KIA NVA, no wounded, over.”

  “Roger,” the handset said and then went dead.

  I looked down at the ground where the eight squirming leeches were in their last throes. I felt my neck. Blood came back, all over my hand. I looked up at Fessman in surprise. He held out an old t-shirt. I staunched the blood with one hand and, with Stevens help, got into my pack.

  Stevens taped his little transistor radio to his shoulder. Brother John announced the first song of the day. “If you hear this song, then you’re okay. You’ll get back, and there she’ll be…” The song “Angel of the Morning” began to play. There’ll be no strings to bind your hands, not if my love can’t bind your heart… We walked back out onto the muddy drying surface of the paddy dikes, all silent and listening.

  The song had been the one my wife used to laugh at, and I used to sing, while she waited to deliver our first child back home. In those very last days before I left. A chill went through me in spite of the morning heat. I wasn’t going home. I knew I wasn’t going home ever again. Wherever I’d landed and however it happened that I’d come there, I’d come to a place that wasn’t survivable. I couldn’t describe it in my mind in words, but the feeling ran up and down my spine like a brilliant Tesla coil of blazing fire. A coldness radiated out from the fire and ate itself into my body and mind.

  The move would be a brutal one, even though the sun came out and a slight breeze blew the cloying misty rain away. The mountains lay ahead of us, with Hill 110 at the top. The company’s direction eased toward the west and ever so slowly we left the paddies behind, along with most of the mosquitoes. The brush began to grow thicker and thicker. Plenty of paths penetrated the bracken, bringing about more risk from booby traps. The most common trap, according to Stevens, was a simple “soup grenade.” The M26 fragmentation grenade carried by all Marines fit perfectly into a Campbell’s soup can with the top cut off. After inserting the grenade into the can, the pin would be pulled. The can would be tied to a tree several feet off the ground with a string or wire running from the top of the grenade to some other tree or bush. Anyone passing on the path would push against the string and the grenade would be pulled from the can. Five seconds later a medevac chopper would have to be called in. If the grenade was American, then a body bag would likely be taken out. If it was Chinese, then injuries might be treated for transport.

  The tough part of the hike was enduring the low-level hill climbs leading up the mountain to Hill 110. Training in Virginia, we carried packs weighing twenty-five pounds, one canteen of water, a weapon, and some ammunition. In Vietnam, the packs weighed seventy pounds and were filled with a lot of ammo, food, and as much other junk as could be accommodated for long stays in the field without full relief. We needed four canteens of water, sometimes six. In Virginia, the paths were all hard ground and rock. In Vietnam, even the mountains were made of mud.

  I noticed a lot of nasty looks sent my way by Marines I didn’t know. Just looks. Nobody outside of the Gunny and my team spoke to me. The Gunny made his way to near the rear of the moving unit by mid-afternoon. We stopped under the trees of the single canopy jungle. The heat-relieving trees were a godsend, as around noon the sun had cooked all metal surfaces to near boiling temperatures.

  “I gave a bogus report to battalion,” I started out, once I’d dropped my pack and we were crouched to enjoy our explosive-fueled coffee.

  “Yeah, I heard,” he replied with one of his smiling non-smiles. “The right thing to do. You’re learning.”

  “Really?” I asked. “I presume that most in the company know about last night and aren’t too happy. From the looks I’m getting, I mean.”

  “Oh, they know everything,” the Gunny replied, laboriously rolling one of his battered looking little cigarettes. “But it’s not what you think. They’re mad because they know you can call artillery in and you didn’t. Some good guys bought the farm last night. Everything’s a trade-off.”

  “Trade-off for what?” I asked, wondering how I could possibly misinterpret everything every time.

  “I left you in the mud so you might live long enough to become a real company commander,” the Gunny said.

  “Some guys died just for that?” I replied, shocked and hurt a bit.

  “Yeah, that was the trade-off and, oh, don’t get all teary-eyed,” the Gunny said, blowing out a huge lungful of bluish smoke. “I’m in a bad spot here. The worst of my life, and that’s saying something. I gotta get out of leading this show and you’ve gotta get into running it.”

  “Is Hill 110 defended?” I asked, changing the awful subject.

  “Probably,” the Gunny replied. “We’ll see, and then decide what we’re going to do.”

  “Does that decision involve me,” I asked, dreading what he might say in response.

  “I’m here to advise you and I hope to keep you alive doing it,” the Gunny said, putting out his cigarette by field stripping it while it was still burning. “Anytime you feel you can handle this then just say so and you’ve got it. You can read a map and god knows you can call artillery. What you’re going to do with the doc might determine a lot about the rest of it though.”

  “No,” I replied, instantly, without having to think for one second. “You’re doing fine. Just tell me what to do.”

  “Hill 110, you got it,” the Gunny pointed at me with one index finger when he said the words, like the last three were some lyrical mantra. “The doc is an issue you’ve got to take care of yourself, though. Tonight, when we go down, would be good.”

  I pulled the cardboard box filled with morphine syrettes from my left thigh pocket and held it out.

  “Thought you’d know what to do with these,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’ll dole them out a bit more carefully,” the Gunny said. “These are supposed to go directly to the docs, not us. Somebody back there’s paying attention.”

  “You know where we are, exactly?
” he asked, holding the morphine box like it contained something much more delicate.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Nine one nine six seven seven two two one,” I read off from memory. “Actually that’s a position about a hundred meters off our right flank just up ahead.”

  “You remember that, just like that, without the map or compass?” he asked.

  “Don’t need a compass,” I replied. “Hill 110 is due west at 4800 mils. North is sixteen hundred mils that way,” I pointed with my right index finger. “Then I just memorized the defensive fires I set up.”

  “Ah, what’s a mil?” the Gunny asked.

  “Sixty-four hundred in a circle,” I described. “Taken from the two radians, as a multiple of pie and then converted to thousands and rounded from 6283 to 6400. Sixty-four hundred mils in a circle. Lot more accurate than degrees.”

  “Right,” the Gunny said, and then quickly departed back toward the point of the company’s advance.

  “Where is he?” I yelled at his back.

  “On the point with the FNGs that just came in,” he tossed over his shoulder before disappearing into the jungle.

  “How could he not have known all that mil stuff, anyway?” Stevens asked.

  I turned to look at him in question before he and Fessman burst out laughing.

  The afternoon was a brutal slog ever upward, until going downward every once in a while into a pit of water and more rotten red mud. Even though Hill 110 was only five hundred meters high the hills between Gulf Company and that objective were many and steeply sloped. At the bottom of one of those hills an explosion echoed back to my ears from the point.