Thirty Days Has September

by James Strauss

  After what seemed like hours the Gunny found me. How he knew how to get around in the mess of night combat, jungle and cloying mud was beyond me. I could read a map like there was no tomorrow but I had no idea where I really was in the company.

  “We’ve got to form a perimeter for the night,” the Gunny said in a low voice. “They’re done. Kilo ripped them a new asshole. They’ll be back, though, and they know right where we are. We can’t stay in a line with our tits and asses hanging out all over the place.”

  The Gunny was right. I couldn’t believe how slow my mind was working. The Gunny had told me on that first day, after the first night, that I’d be able to function, but nobody would listen to what I said. I now understood. I was caught seconds behind the real world cascading in front of me. I had to somehow catch up. Perimeter. Dig in. Night defensive fires. Ammo check. Commo check. I knew that without the Gunny I’d have laid there all night, waiting for the comfort of a coming dawn that had every chance of never coming.

  I got to my feet but stayed hunched over. I followed Stevens with Fessman just behind me, as usual. After twenty yards of bulling through heavy brush it became easier going. Stevens ran into the Gunny’s back and then I ran into Steven’s back. Fessman was quicker and stopped in time.

  “Here,” the Gunny said. “Just hunker down. We took some casualties and the docs are hauling one over. He’s hit bad. Take a look at him. I’m going to check the line.”

  The Gunny was gone for several minutes before a group of men came out of the brush nearby. I realized I had no protection at all except the .45 still gripped so tightly in my right hand that my whole arm ached.

  I forced my hand to relax a bit. My whole body seemed to sag with the arm as it relaxed. My holster, filled with dirt, would have to do. I plunged the Colt .45 into it, feeling the squish of it adjusting to whatever muck was pushed into the leather with it. If Jurgens or Sugar Daddy were coming in this night, then I was a dead man for sure, and my Colt .45 wasn’t going to change anything. I squatted down from fatigue, my body a mess of pain. My side hurt like hell where the Gunny had struck. My legs ached from the forced march and I could not get rid of the hand shake that had come back. At least it was night, I thought, and nobody can see the shaking. I massaged some nearby branches instead of my hurting thighs.

  Two corpsmen laid out a poncho. The poncho contained a Marine. One of the corpsmen knelt down on his knees beside me.

  “No chance, sir. Won’t be a medevac until dawn and this is a zero life situation.”

  I stared into the corpsman’s eyes but he said nothing further. After a few more seconds he got up to leave. “Might want these,” he said. “The kid got him, but then the grenade went off. Spoils of war, if you want to record them.”

  I accepted the bandana of goods, reminded of the woman’s face looking up at the chopper and the bloody mess of her stuff right afterward. I handed the goods to Fessman and approached the Marine. I knelt beside him on the poncho liner before realizing he wasn’t all there. Half his body was gone. He had no legs or anything legs might attach to. I looked up to try to catch the attention of the corpsmen but they were gone. The Marine had to be dead.

  “Who are you?” a raspy voice asked.

  I sucked in my breath. The words had come from the body.

  “Ah, I’m ah, Junior,” I blurted out, wanting to curse myself for saying the word.

  “The crazy man,” the voice said. I leaned down toward the Marine’s face to listen more closely, and not look at his lower body.

  “Can you fix me up, crazy man?” he said. “Can you put me back together like Humpty Dumpty?”

  I didn’t know what to say. “What’s your name?” I got out in desperation.

  “Alfonso, Lance Corporal,” he said. “But they call me Alfie.”

  A moaning sound came low from Alfie’s throat. I waited half a minute for him to say something more. “The pain,” he gasped out. “So bad.” Another long moan.

  I didn’t think about anything. All thoughts of waiting the night through with Alfie disappeared from my mind. I eased my right hand from the butt of the Colt down to the outer pocket of my right leg. As if on its own, my hand pulled the morphine packet out and joined my other hand in getting the syrettes unfolded and revealed. I was more watching myself work than thinking anything through.

  Alfie started to talk again, so I waited, kneeling and patient, my own pains forgotten as I listened to the story of the boy’s life. How his mother, father, and cocker spaniel dog were waiting for him to come home a war hero. He was from a farm in California. A wave of pain overwhelmed him for a few seconds before he went on. He played the piano and was so happy the wounds had not hurt his hands. I waited for the next excruciating wave of pain to come over him, while carefully removing four syrettes from the pack, feeling each one to get it right.

  When Alfie stopped moaning again I squeezed the first into the muscles under his right arm. And then I just kept going, the boy recovered again, and then continued his story about how hard it was to do farming chores and go to school at the same time. The fourth syrette was in and yet the boy talked on. I stopped listening to him, instead drawing myself closer until I was lying beside him and hugging him with my head buried in his neck.

  “Thanks, Junior,” he said, his voice very faint. After a few more breaths he went still.

  I backed away and sat with my butt flat in the mud, looking at what I could see of the boy’s unmoving body in the mud. I looked around but there was nobody there. For only the second time Fessman was gone too. I was alone. With the boy. I moved to wrap the remaining supply of morphine up and tuck it back into my special pocket. I wondered, if I got back to the Basic School, if I could tell them that a short course in teaching what I’d just experienced might be in order, but then I gave that thought up. I was never going back to the Basic School and I knew it.

  I rose to my feet and moved to the little open area where the Gunny had led us. My team sat in a circle, smoking cigarettes. Fessman handed one up to me and I took it.

  “Is he gone yet?” he asked.

  I slid down next to him, inhaling the cigarette without coughing for the first time. I handed it back to him. “Yeah,” I said.

  Fessman handed me the little bag of personal stuff taken from the NVA soldier he’d killed before the soldier killed him. I slowly unwrapped it, wondering what the enemy carried with them. I didn’t get far before a pair of glasses fell to the mud. I plucked them up and examined them. Pointed gold rims gleamed out.

  “Oh, Christ,” I said, feeling like I’d been hit in the chest, and then the head, with a brick.

  “What?” Fessman asked, with a tone of concern in his voice.

  I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell the truth and I couldn’t think of a lie. I’d killed Alfie when I’d failed to get the safety off my .45. The soldier had moved by and then tossed the grenade at the kid. Then I’d killed Alfie for a second time with the morphine. I looked around at my team in the dark, ignoring the mosquitoes that were biting me in the face and on the backs of my hands. I could feel nothing, and I could never tell a living soul about killing Alfie twice.

  thirty-nine

  The Ninth Day

  The rest of the night passed in mud, a penetrating mist returning to add some sort of cutting liquid thinner to the blood being sucked in by the feeding mosquitoes. As I lay in my semi-comatose state replacing real sleep, I couldn’t hear any more firing. There were no more explosions that I was aware of.

  I didn’t need an alarm clock because I was always conscious, but never truly conscious. I could move if I had to, or was called upon to move, but I chose not to. I counted for the dawn to come. One, one thousand, and on up to the hundreds, finally keeping track of thousands with the fingers of both hands. Seconds to live. Light was life, if only I could get there, or the world could get there around me and take me along with it. When
there was enough light to see my hands, I unwound them from their counting positions and stretched. There was enough light to stop the counting and push back the blackness of night and fear.

  I stood and looked around me, my boots sunk inches deep in the mud. I pulled one up a bit and it broke loose with a faint sucking sound. It wasn’t the kind of mud that stuck in inch deep patches to the soles, like mud back home would do. This mud was more like a wet putty that let my feet go after a delay, just so they’d know they were working through mud and not on solid ground.

  Nothing moved, but I couldn’t see very far. Slight movement could be seen if I held myself very still. The mist collected on the edges of the leaves and ferns around me. Slowly the mist came together on the surfaces to form drops. The drops ran to the centers of the vegetation and slipped off to fall to the mud. The surfaces of the plants and tree leaves lightly rebounded and slightly bobbed from losing the water’s weight, and there was my movement.

  The Gunny came for me before the dawn. My scout team rose up to form around me, as the Gunny and Pilson squished through the mud and then squatted down next to my wet poncho cover.

  “Cup of coffee?” the Gunny asked, not bothering to wait while he went through the process of making his own.

  I wondered why Pilson never prepared anything for himself. Fessman was a Mormon and didn’t drink coffee, Stevens didn’t like instant stuff, and Zippo was an unknown. What Nguyen drank in the morning was anybody’s guess. For all I knew the man was nuclear powered because I’d never seen him eat or drink anything. But I was only entering my ninth day. I lit my own explosives and waited with my canteen cup of water over the small but powerful little fire. I was proud of the fact that my hands were not shaking. It was light, and I could function in the light.

  “Seven,” the Gunny said, without adding more.

  “Kilo?” I asked, using the alpha-numeric letter for “K,” meaning “killed.”

  “Roger that,” the Gunny answered.

  “How?” I asked, befuddled. As far as I knew the company had fired into the bushes until it was nearly out of ammo. Then Kilo Company had fired into the other side of the bushes from across the saddle and inflicted more damage on the enemy thought to be there.

  “The one,” the Gunny said, stopping for a few seconds. “Then the other six who didn’t get down when Kilo opened up.”

  “Friendly fire?” I said, in shock. “All friendly fire?”

  “The six? Yeah, kinda think so, unless the gooks are using 16s.”

  “Kilo Company Commander wants to come over for a pow wow,” the Gunny said. “He sent over a runner. Be here at dawn. So will supply and medevac so it should be a regular cluster fuck.”

  “Their resupply, or our own?” I asked, concerned about getting all the way back to our own supplies we’d dumped to make the forced march down to save Kilo. Our ammo had to be very low and probably everything else, as well. Plus, we’d be crippled in not having packs to put things in from the resupply stockpile until we recovered our stuff.

  “They had five wounded, so the medevac’s all theirs. Our bags will go out on the slick.”

  “All that shit we went through, and they only took five wounded?” I said in near disgust. “We lost seven Marines!” Where my anger had come from, now directed at Kilo about not having as many dead as we had, I couldn’t figure out. But anger was the first emotion I’d been able to dredge up since landing in the shit.

  “Not the way to think, Junior,” the Gunny said. “Your action saved their ass, after your action put them in the shit in the first place. We never told them we were diverting from the plan so they walked right into what was waiting for us.”

  I knew the Gunny used the nickname to make a point. If I was going to act like a Junior he was going to call me that, or so I presumed. I also knew that he’d used the word ‘we’ in stating that Kilo had not been informed. Once again I was getting little credit and a good load of blame. I delayed a few seconds by drinking some of my scalding hot coffee.

  “When?” I asked, hoping the subject would change without my asking for the change.

  “There’s enough light for a body count so I imagine any time now,” the Gunny said, lighting a cigarette to go with his coffee. He looked over at the bush we’d fired into so enthusiastically the night before, or at least most of the company had fired into. He held out the cigarette.

  I looked at the narrow white cylinder. I didn’t smoke, or hadn’t until I’d come to the ’Nam. I knew though that the Gunny wasn’t holding out a cigarette. He was holding out a peace pipe. I took it, puffed, didn’t cough, and then returned it. I blew the smoke out slowly. It did nothing for me except make my throat a bit hoarse and my mouth taste even worse than it did. I grimaced slightly and then swallowed. My toothpaste was back up the mountain in my pack.

  The bushes were wedged aside by a Marine smoking his own cigarette, his 16 slung over one shoulder and an M79 over the other. Across his chest were two bandoliers filled with the big grenade-thrower rounds. The image in my mind, of another Tarzan book cover, was broken when another Marine stepped through the opening, followed by a few more men.

  The Gunny came to his feet quickly, leaving his canteen holder sitting next to his little fire on the mud.

  “Captain, this is the CO,” the Gunny said, waving one hand down to me in a strange form of introduction.

  The captain’s cleanliness was the first thing I took in. He wore the uniform utilities as they were meant to be worn, and one of the useless flak jackets on top of it. His helmet had the proper two bars on its cover.

  I sat on my helmet in the mud. I didn’t get to my feet because I didn’t know how to present myself after the surprise of being introduced so abruptly.

  The Captain squatted down next to me. “Mertz,” he said, “John, Captain, out of the Point. What’s your date of rank?”

  A “Pointer” from the academy. I’d only met two before, both back in Quantico. I looked for his West Point gold ring but didn’t see it. Maybe it was too valuable to wear in combat.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, hesitantly.

  “You don’t know your date of rank?” he asked, in obvious surprise. “When did you get promoted to Captain? We need to establish who’s senior to who. What’s your serial number, then?”

  I gave him my seven-digit number, a number no Marine ever forgets.

  “That’s too new,” the Captain replied, his forehead screwed up in thought. “That number wouldn’t have been issued until very recently.”

  “Yeah, about six months ago,” I replied, getting the idea where the conversation was going.

  The Captain stood up, almost coming to a position of attention. “Jesus H. Christ, you’re a second lieutenant,” he said, making the word “second” sound like an expletive.

  I would have smiled up at him if I smiled anymore. “Yes, I believe that’s right, unless they gave me a combat promotion I’m unaware of.”

  “Jesus H. Christ. You’re that second lieutenant, and there aren’t any other officers to call a meeting of the CP. You’re that company.”

  I got to my feet slowly, watching the Gunny back up a bit. I pulled my helmet out of the mud and brushed it off as best I could. Next to the West Point Captain I looked worse than a street bum staggering up after a night of drinking cheap rum. I put the filthy helmet on my filthy head.

  “Actually, they call me Junior,” I said, with a smile as wide as it was fake.

  “You call your commanding officer Junior?” the Captain said, turning his head to face the Gunny.

  “Ah, no, sir,” the Gunny gasped out, not expecting the question or the Captain’s fierce turn of direction. “I mean, yes, sir, or no, sir, or…” the Gunny got out before giving up and going silent.

  “What’s your MOS, Lieutenant?” the Captain asked, turning his attention back to me.

  “Oh-eigh
t-oh-two,” I replied, leaving off the sir. For some reason not calling him sir made me identify with my own company better.

  “We don’t have an Artillery Forward Observer,” he said, as if I should somehow volunteer for the vacant job.

  “I don’t have any platoon commanders,” I replied.

  “Not my problem,” Captain Mertz said, two more Marines coming out of the bush behind him. They both wore helmets with one black bar on them, but no nickname printed underneath their bars.

  I nodded at the two Lieutenants but they only stared back, making no move to join their CO or engage in the conversation.

  “You’re to take your company and proceed up the trail to the lip of the A Shau,” the captain ordered, as if reading from a written directive. “Once there, you are to hold and wait for further orders. I lost some good men because you failed to stay on this path so let’s not go there again.”

  “Seven,” I said, my voice going lower and quieter.

  “Seven what?” he replied, leaning in closer to hear me.

  “Seven dead this last night, this last action,” I said, my voice a whisper, the new found anger coming over me and combining with the dead flat analytical expectation of combat and death.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” the captain replied. “How in hell did you manage to lose seven men? I doubt we got that many of the enemy when our body count is done.”

  “We’re going to hike back up to the position we left to get down and break the back of that ambush that was waiting for you,” I said, my voice low and without any emotion. “Then we’re going to come back down here to lead you into the Valley of No Return. You send your body count back in to battalion with our compliments, and wait until we return.”

  I watched emotions scroll across the Captains face. I waited, my right hand falling to the butt of my .45, the Colt sending a shiver of support back up through my arm. I knew I could not click off the safety without anyone hearing, so I left it on, knowing my thumb was on it and ready, however. The Captain suddenly turned to confer with the two officers who’d appeared behind him earlier. They talked for several seconds.