Ghosts and Shadows

by Phil Ball

  The only time I did not dig a hole in the bush, or have one close by I could get to quickly, was that night on the firebase when I got my eardrums blown out sleeping under the muzzle end of an 8-incher. The ground here was as hard as a rock, but I still got out my E tool and managed to scratch out a place big enough to get mostly below ground. It wasn’t much, but it would do; it was certainly more than anyone else around me had that night.

  Holt took first watch, of course, and Sal and I sat up with him talking. When his shift was over he went to sleep. The moon was extra bright that night and we sat there looking down into the valley below, talking about home and the things we planned to do when we got there. Sal took a small photograph out of his shirt pocket and proudly showed me the new picture he recently received of his beautiful, blonde girlfriend. “We’re gonna get married, you know,” he said with a big, toothy smile. Sal talked about that girl all the time; he was obviously in love with her. As far as I was concerned, love was a distraction I didn’t need. Sal had been with the company since February 1968; because he had come up from Da Nang with the salty grunts, he too was considered a salt. He had done well, achieving the rank of Lance Corporal already, just recently promoted.

  The Lance Corporal called “Tex” was another salt who had come up from Da Nang. With almost as much time in-country as Chico (eight-and-a-half months), Tex had seen his share of combat action. Scheduled to go home in November, he seemed very content as a fire team leader with us. He came over from the dark brush to our right and said he didn’t have a watch. “Come over and wake me up after your shift is over, Butterball, me and Barney and Chick are on the other side a few meters,” he said, pointing toward his position.

  “No problem, Tex,” I said quietly, “but Sal is after me, and you guys are after him.”

  Then Sal piped up, “I’ll wake you up, don’t worry.” Then as an afterthought, he called Tex closer, “Hey Tex, come here man, have you seen this one yet?” he asked, holding the wallet-size photo in his outstretched fingers for Tex to admire.

  Holt rolled over to face us and whispered, “What the hell are you guys doin’ over there? You gonna keep me awake all night?”

  I guess we woke him or he hadn’t really been sleeping. Whatever the case, he lay next to us and participated in our conversation a while. The way the high-altitude fog was beginning to roll in heavily, it cast an eerie, graveyard effect on the valley in front of us. The moon still very bright, we could clearly see the trees and shadows seeming to move with the vapor.

  We talked about not having a defensive perimeter, and the in-line formation we were in. “The CO and them all up on top, I bet they got a little perimeter set-up around them,” said Bruce.

  “Butterball’s the only smart one down here,” said Sal. “He’s about the only one with anything that even looks like a hole.”

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  “If the shit hits the fan,” Holt said, “we can always climb in there with him, can’t we, Butterball?”

  I don’t know why the nickname Butterball stuck so well, but everyone was starting to call me that. I really didn’t mind it, but it didn’t fit very well. I was 5'9" and 135 pounds soaking wet—you could count every one of my ribs, for God’s sake. I wasn’t fat like a butterball, though probably I was a little greasy.

  We were all a little nervous about our position and the vicinity in general, though so far it was ghostly quiet and clear enough to see if anyone was perhaps trying to sneak up on us; but at 2230 all that began to change. Holt sat straight up when we heard artillery guns firing an extended mission to the south of us. At first I didn’t think anything strange about it; they were obviously our own guns, probably from the Rockpile or Camp Carroll. Holt’s experience and keen sense of direction told him something was not quite right, and it only took him a few seconds to figure out what it was.

  The guns (there were several) kept pounding out rounds one after the other. They sounded like our big 8-inchers, judging from the deep booming sound. Sal made a nervous comment: “I’d hate to be on the other end of that stuff; somebody’s sure in for it.”

  I don’t know if it was Holt’s sense of alarm that I picked up or if I actually sensed it myself, but something had me leaning in the direction of the little hole I had scratched out of the ground next to me. Like a sixth sense, I just knew something bad was about to happen. Perhaps it was the sound of the guns as they continued to fire; something made me think they were coming our way. Maybe the targets were out in front of us, maybe they were behind us. It was not unusual to call in artillery at night, to prep the area where we were to move the next day. Wherever the targets were, they were much too close for comfort.

  Then I heard that first, terrifying whistle of a large projectile screaming toward us. It was only a second before the rounds started hitting our hill and exploding, one after the other in the same rapid sequence as we had just heard them being fired. That first one hit the closest, but I had managed to roll over on my belly and into my little hole. It exploded with such force that I was picked up off the ground and had the wind knocked out of me. These rounds could not have been better aimed and more on target if our exact coordinates had been used, which they obviously were.

  The first several rounds exploded right on top of us in 3-Alpha. I heard everyone screaming and yelling; some were crying out for help. As the artillery continued to rain in, announcing its arrival with the telltale whistles, it began to walk up the hillside, away from our area.

  Everyone knew this was a friendly fire incident, and I heard repeated attempts calling for a check fire. Radiomen in the company CP group were yelling loud enough to hear them without the radio, calling every call sign and frequency there was to get the artillery to stop, but it just kept right on coming.

  It looked like they weren’t going to stop until we were all killed. Without getting out of my hole I started calling for Sal. When I had last seen him he was caught out in the open with no cover, and that first round exploded only a few meters from him. When I got no answer, I called for Holt. The artillery was near the top of the hill by this time. Holt answered right away, telling me he was okay and asking my condition as well. After what I estimated to be 100 rounds finally stopped, I cautiously crawled out of my hole and saw Sal. He was lying in the clearing next to me. His eyes and mouth were wide open, frozen in a horrific expression. He had a massive head wound that left his brain partially exposed. I saw another large hole in his neck. The life was completely drained out of him and his flesh was a bluish-white that almost glowed in the moonlight. He had been dead for only a few minutes. I swear I felt his spirit present, but it was fading quickly.

  I heard someone yelling at me to get on the horn. When I put the handset to my ear and turned up the volume I heard an angry voice ordering a count. The CP wanted to know if anyone was wounded or killed, and if everyone could be accounted for. I rogered that and said I’d get back to him ASAP, but first I had to see what the hell Barney was screaming his head off about. He was down the hill, behind the brush where Tex had reported from earlier. Barney wasn’t making any sense, mostly just cursing and crying. When I got a little closer, he said, “Tex. Oh goddamn Tex. Tex is dead! They got Tex.” On and on he went, babbling, cursing, and crying as if he was completely coming unglued. He kept yelling for help, angrily cursing the rest of us as if it was our fault that his friend was dead.

  I heard the booming voice of someone obviously in a position of authority yell down from up the hill: “Somebody shut that man up immediately.” Panicked behavior like Barney’s is very contagious; given the worst of conditions, he might influence others to break down. Holt stepped forward to take charge, and after several attempts to quiet the loud, irrational PFC and only making it worse, Holt smacked Barney across the face with his open hand. He hit him so hard that it knocked him down and Barney just sat there sobbing, mumbling about Tex.

  We carried Tex’s lifeless corpse up and laid him next to Sal. We made our count and discovered tha
t we were one man short. An FNG who had only been in the bush two weeks was missing. We searched high and low for him until eventually bits and pieces of human remains started showing up. We located where he was last seen lying down to go to sleep, and discovered a crater caused by one of the artillery rounds in that precise spot. We assumed the FNG had unfortunately taken a direct hit.

  After the count was completed, I learned that our three KIAs—Sal, Tex, and the new guy—were the only ones in the whole company. I don’t know how many were wounded, but I don’t think there were any serious enough to get medevaced. The reaction of our CO and the CP group as a whole, concerning the three KIAs due to friendly fire, astounded me and the other grunts in 3rd Platoon. We were basically told to forget about it; the attitude was almost one of indifference, it seemed. We were outraged and wanted someone to pay, whether it turned out to be the guns of the U.S. Army, ARVN, or our own Marine Corps. It didn’t matter—someone should have to take responsibility for the deaths of three Americans. We were more or less told not to make waves. There would be no investigation and no charges would be filed, like it or not.

  Our battalion was spread out over the immediate area, but for the most part we formed a long column consisting of our four companies. The 1st and 3rd Battalions were not far away, and the 9th Marines were off to our east a few clicks. Gold Company took the point position; with the Battalion CP group in tow, they all began moving out bright and early on July 18. They moved very quickly, pushed by the brass who were overly anxious to engage the enemy, in my opinion so they could get their Combat Action Ribbon and get back to their cozy offices in the rear. A lot of us grunts did not care for our superiors, who we thought were doing a poor job calling the shots. They weren’t all bad; there were some good ones, but the greedy, selfish officers who made our lives more miserable far outnumbered the good ones who were genuinely concerned with our well-being.

  Golf Company, the Battalion CP with engineers and four-deuce mortars, Echo and Hotel companies all moved out. Fox Company remained behind waiting for a chopper to come out and pick up our KIAs. At 0830, just as 1st and 2nd Platoons were preparing to move out so they wouldn’t lose visual contact with the end of the column, those 8-inchers to our south started booming away again. It sounded identical to the night before, when those guns nearly blasted us off the side of the mountain.

  “Oh no, not again,” someone said. This couldn’t be happening again already, but it was. The first couple of rounds sailed over our heads, exploding on the opposite side of the mountain, but then one round hit the top of the hill and several others hit on our side, near the top. Luckily, nobody was killed this time, but one man was wounded pretty badly.

  This operation was turning into a jinx. From the start it had been one mistake after another. It was terribly demoralizing to suffer all these losses already, and we hadn’t really even met the real enemy yet. For the most part the NVA were not defending these long-time positions. We had caught them off-guard and they were just trying to get away with their lives. I felt like the brass were only interested in throwing us grunts to the lions so they could get all the credit, and they didn’t really care how many of us were killed along the way. There was a lot of complaining coming from 3rd Platoon and the brass no doubt knew about it, but they just didn’t care.

  By the time the chopper arrived the medevac was complete. The rest of the battalion was so far ahead of us that we had lost radio contact with them. The Prick-25 (PRC-25) radios were usually good up to a range of a couple of miles, but when operating in mountainous terrain such as the DMZ, the radio signals were easily lost. We moved out at a quick pace, hoping to catch up with the tail end of the column, but the battalion was moving fast, too. A strange sort of phenomenon occurs when you get a long enough column of troops spread out at varying intervals. The men in the back can sometimes run all day long and still never catch up. That’s exactly what happened to us. The lead element had a good head start and they moved quickly. The 10-meter intervals we tried to keep between us became 20- and 30-meter intervals. Before long, we were running to catch them. In doing so we became careless; even though we were walking point there was still a danger of ambush.

  Approximately 0930 I heard a fire fight break out about 1,000 meters ahead. It was Golf Company at the front of the column, and they had walked right into an NVA bunker complex. We were so far behind that the shooting really didn’t bother us, yet we were ordered to pick up the pace and try to catch up.

  Golf Company had surprised a handful of NVA, who for the most part weren’t even infantry soldiers. They were rear-type personnel and several wounded troops who were unable to leave with the rest of them. None of them elected to defend the position in force. It was basically a no-choice affair.

  It was approximately 1200 by the time we arrived at the bunker site. The engineers had already destroyed the place and moved on. We saw a few dead men lying around and quite a bit of USMC gear. Turns out that Golf Company had been allowed to drop their backpacks in order to pursue the fleeing enemy with greater speed, while we were nominated to hump the heavy gear for them. This was unheard of, and after adamant protests and a lot of griping and moaning, we picked up the gear and moved on.

  It was getting to be more than 110 degrees in the shade and our water supply was dangerously low. We had been told that water from a river would be available, but it wasn’t, not today anyway. Heat stroke casualties started mounting, and as usual, they wound up at the back of the column, leaving us grunts in the rear to tend to them. There wasn’t much water to give them. About all we could do was carry their gear, and in some cases, carry them. I picked up the smallest pack I could find and heaved it over my shoulder, one foot in front of the other, and we moved on. This was one of those times when we wished we could go back to the beginning and start over.

  We had strict orders to make sure that not one piece of gear was left behind, but the commanding officer was not so adamant about the heat casualties. He was very pissed off that so many grunts were dropping out the second day of the operation. He refused to let any of them be medevaced. The Corpsmen complained that they would possibly die without medical treatment, but the hard-nose lieutenant colonel said, “Fuck ’em, if they can’t hack it, leave ’em behind.” Of course leaving a fellow Marine behind, no matter how pitiful he might be, was never an option. Doc certainly was not about to leave a sick man behind, and we would never let him stay behind without protection of one of our squads or more.

  At 1530 a Golf Company sniper was called forward to take out a gook at 500 meters. It was a suspected NVA FO with a pair of binoculars. The Marine sniper made a perfect shot, dropping the enemy FO where he stood.

  We moved for another 30 minutes or so and found a recently evacuated enemy base camp. The rice in the underground mess hall was still hot, the cook fires still smoldered. Golf Company moved out immediately in hot pursuit, while we came up and secured the area so the engineers could blow the place up. In one area there were 10 recently vacated bunkers with log-reinforced overheads, one mess hall, NVA 782 web gear, lots of small arms ammo, and the hot rice. Not far from that location we found 15 more bunkers, two mortar pits, and three heavy machine gun positions. One of the bunkers had been used to hold casualties perhaps from our artillery, which had partially destroyed a few of the bunkers. We found bloody bandages and lots of blood. The Marine Corps engineers blew it all up with C-4 plastic explosives and then we all moved out.

  The engineers were with us not only for blowing the numerous bunkers and base camps we expected to find, but also to clear several new landing zones to be used in a future operation scheduled for September. They humped their chainsaws and explosives like grunts, but they did not have to stand perimeter watch at night.

  We found a 20-bunker base camp on the 19th that was a well-constructed NVA paradise. Located on the side of a very steep slope overlooking an impressive valley, the camp was heavily reinforced and very well camouflaged. There was no way you could see this place fr
om the air. Perfectly angled steps were cut into the hillside, complete with hand rails and com wire for nighttime negotiation. There were a mess hall and an aid station (underground) as well as two 82-mm mortar pits. It was almost a shame to have to blow it up.

  I thought I had learned my lesson in Leatherneck Square regarding water discipline and such, but it was happening again. No one had any water and the temperature was getting above 110 degrees every day. Nighttime lows averaged 75 degrees, but often it hung around 80, making sleep miserable. On July 20, we humped hard all day long, with the understanding that we were to receive a major resupply that evening when we reached our objective. The very thought of getting water is what kept me going, but many Marines dropped like flies. Fox Company was once again bringing up the rear of the long, battalion-size column, and with that duty came all the shit details and responsibilities. We were carrying the gear of all the heat-related casualties, as well as some of the casualties themselves. We barely had enough strength to carry our own gear and some of our guys dropped out, too. By late afternoon, we had fallen so far behind that once again we lost radio contact with the CP group.

  In a grueling hump, it’s important to have partners in front and behind who know each other and can keep a consistent pace that is as comfortable as possible. Chico would have been the perfect partner for me to follow, but he wasn’t here now. Holt was in front of me, and we worked well together. Hillbilly and Mouse, with their M-60, were directly behind me and they were truly phenomenal, especially Hillbilly. He humped the gun himself most of the time, plus a load of ammo and grenades and personal gear, too.