by Bing West
“No. We weren’t sent down here to shoot colonels. Besides, you can’t blow a guy away just because he’s an asshole.”
“I’ll just hit him in the leg. Hell, with his helmet and flak vest all buttoned I couldn’t kill him if I wanted to.”
“No, man, I’m telling you no. We’ll wait him out. We’ll be here after he’s gone.”
McGowan’s strained relations with higher headquarters showed in other ways as well. The combined unit was accustomed to receiving only first-class volunteers as replacements for any casualties or for men who rotated home. Late one afternoon in mid-March a supply truck jounced down the narrow track to the fort. As it pulled into the courtyard, Corporal Ed Gallagher looked closely at five Marines sitting on their duffel bags in the open bed.
“These guys are going to stay with you,” the driver called out.
While the truck was slowly turning around, Gallagher ran to the tiny messhall.
“Sarge,” he burst in, “I know three of those guys. They were shitcanned from Charlie Company after the last op.”
“I know the other two from battalion headquarters,” Swinford added. “They’re supply pogues. They’ve never been outside of camp.”
McGowan walked outside. The others followed.
“You people hold it right there,” he said. “Don’t even bother getting off the truck, because you’re going right back wherever you came from.”
The radio yelps from battalion came in as soon as the truck had driven back. By then McGowan had down a pat story: there was not enough room for more Americans. District would not allow it, and the fort was a PF outpost. When queried, Captain Dang confirmed the story.
Had the replacements seemed halfway decent, McGowan would have accepted them, since messages were coming in at a furious rate warning of an attack upon the fort. Like White, however, McGowan refused to allow squads from the line units to enter the boundaries of Binh Nghia. Yet one night it happened.
A squad left Charlie Company to rendezvous with two amtracs which were to ferry them to an ambush site far upriver. Dusk had fallen by the time the ambushers reached the river, where they found no amtracs waiting. The corporal in charge radioed headquarters for instructions. For some reason never fathomed, a voice without a brain told him to set up an ambush for a few hours in the nearest hamlet rather than return to the company position.
The ambushers were then at the edge of the Binh Yen Noi hamlet complex, and the squad members argued with the corporal, telling him the men from Fort Page covered the Binh Yen Nois like a blanket and that it was suicide to obey. The corporal called headquarters back and said he was concerned about friendly patrols. Headquarters assumed the ambush team was across the river and gave the coordinates of the nearest known friendly ambush—on the other side of the river.
“See?” said the corporal. “It’s all clear in there. We can go in.”
He convinced nobody. The members of his team wanted no part of the trespass, headquarters or no headquarters. Finally, the corporal gave them a direct order.
“I’m not going to lose my stripes over this,” he said. “We’ve been told what to do, and we’re going in there. I’ll take point myself.”
And so he died. Among the houses beside a black section of the trail, two Marines and two PFs from Fort Page lay in wait. Their leader heard movement, saw a figure loom up in front of him on the trail and fired. The corporal from Charlie Company died instantly, and the curses in English from the other ambushers told the combined-unit Marine of his tragic mistake.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” he screamed. “It’s us from Page. Who are you?”
“Charlie Company.”
“Oh, God Almighty.”
He stood up, walked the few feet to the fallen corporal, looked down, and slowly sobbing, shot himself in the foot. It was reported that he was wounded in a fight with the Viet Cong, during which another Marine was killed, and so he was evacuated to the United States and would never again have to carry a rifle.
Shortly afterward the combined unit lost another American, when he tried to murder the villagers. Proficient at patrolling, a member of the unit from the beginning, hand-picked by Beebe for his expert weaponry, the man was hard on everybody—himself, the other Americans, the PFs and the villagers. He rarely smiled and seldom relaxed. He was most content when out on patrol and savored those special moments when he could demonstrate his remarkable accuracy with a LAW. Once in October he had consumed half a bottle of the local rice wine and had torn about the fort like some demon fiend. It had taken five Marines to subdue and tie him up, and the next day when he was sober, White told him he was through at the fort if he touched hard liquor again. White had warned McGowan about the man and his drunken rages.
Still, when it happened again, there were no warning signs. The man quietly left the fort one morning alone and was gone for several hours. In the afternoon he suddenly appeared, reeling through the gate, saying nothing, turning and stumbling toward the machine-gun bunker, manned only at night. The few PFs and Marines who had seen him enter the fort had smiled that tolerant, pitying smile reasonable people reserve for drunks and had gone about their business. Suddenly it hit them as they watched him grope his way behind the handles of the long, sinister, black 50-caliber machine gun: he was intent on murder. As he fumbled to cock the weapon, startled cries in English and Vietnamese filled the fort and floated out to the paddies.
“——’s on the gun! He’s drunk out of his mind! Get down! Get down!”
Scattered in the paddies were a dozen women and several buffalo boys, and the PFs were calling to them.
“Nam xuong! Nam xuong! Get down! Get down!”
The drunken soldier was set now, having leaned his body over the rear of the gun and swung the heavy barrel upward. It wavered around the fort and then slowly swung out toward the paddies, like a compass needle coming to rest. There came the solid, belting jackhammer sound of the weapon firing and the thick incendiary slugs, big as cigars, burned over the paddies. In red arcs the shells lazed out, almost casually reaching for the people who lay among the rice stalks, as if shells designed to stop planes and armor thought it humdrum to squash mere skin and bones.
Before Thanh could decide to use his unholstered pistol, while Colucci was agonizingly lifting his M-16, McGowan broke from the village hall. In a few strides he was across the tiny courtyard and up over the sandbag parapet, his fist hitting the drunk behind the ear, once, twice and a third time.
No one had been struck by the twenty or thirty wild shells which had been fired, and Trao called a quick meeting to instruct all in the fort to tell their families and neighbors that the shooting was the result of a runaway gun being test-fired. But, of course, the story did not hold up.
They kept the man under guard at the fort until the next day, when McGowan told him to pack his seabag. He was through. He was sent back to Charlie Company, where he was immediately made a squad leader because of his tactical knowledge and hard reputation.
Had the incident happened in June of 1966, it might have been brushed over, for the Marine was an able tactician. But nine months later the Americans at Fort Page were unwilling to excuse a man who tried to murder a villager. None of the Marines asked McGowan to reconsider. The man was finished. They no longer wanted him with them and the PFs in the village.
The Americans were beginning to feel at home in the village, with its guerrillas and PFs, fishermen and farmers, women and children. Many of the Marines let months go by without writing a letter or reading a newspaper. The radius of their world was two miles.
At least, that was how it was for most of them. Their corpsman was their most diligent letter writer, a fact attributed to his being married. The man had served in the unit for four months, performing his chores well and getting along without friction with both the villagers and the Marines. He was a Navy enlisted man, for all Marines must qualify as riflemen and rely upon the Navy for non-combatant support, such as chaplains, doctors and nurses. He liked the village.
But one afternoon McGowan entered the squad tent to find him alone at his cot in the corner, crying. McGowan backed out and told the other Marines and PFs to stay away for a while. Still, in such close quarters, a man cannot hide his distress for long and by evening all the Marines knew that his wife was living with a sailor and had written to ask for a divorce. Then, in confusion, she had written a second letter saying she did not want to leave him and what should she do?
The advice of young bachelors was predictably unsettling. Most blithely urged that he divorce her and celebrate his freedom by going to Taiwan or Hong Kong, where, if he worked at it, he could sleep with a dozen girls during a week’s pass, and return refreshed and content. This struck everyone but the corpsman as a splendid idea, and several offered to go with him. A few suggested they could write some friends in San Diego who owed them favors for help in past firefights. These returned veterans could work over the wife’s boyfriend. The corpsman perked up at that, but became glum again when McGowan suggested it would probably ensure a divorce.
Next, the corpsman sought the advice of Lieutenant Carlson, a district adviser. Carlson was a mustang, a first sergeant who had been commissioned to the officer ranks at the age of forty. Salty and understanding, he offered simple advice to the corpsman: go home, see his wife, talk to her and to his parents or a priest or someone with a level, older head, make a decision, stick to it and come back. The corpsman agreed.
The personnel department at headquarters did not. In comparison with the justifications for emergency leaves usually granted, such as the death of a parent or terminal illness at home, the love life of one corpsman seemed insignificant. His request refused, the man could not concentrate on his work. The PF corpsman, Bac Si Khoi, filled in, taking care of the Americans, the PFs and the villagers. Since he had saved Theilepape’s life, the Marines had complete trust in him.
McGowan told the corpsman to take a week off. He could go anywhere in the province he pleased. Military police treated Marines from combined units as they did Army Special Forces and Navy Seal commandos: with a mixture of respect and wariness. It was better to stay out of their way, and if they were drunk, just return them to their units. Arresting them did no corrective good; and there was always that awkward moment of seizure when they might choose not to be arrested.
The corpsman took the time off but didn’t leave the village. McGowan kept four quarts of whiskey under his cot so that anyone could take a drink, provided others knew. A private bottle or a pouch of pot spelled automatic expulsion from the CAP since slack reflexes on patrol could not be tolerated. Drinking steadily, the corpsman consumed all four quarts in six days. He rarely spoke, rarely ate, just sat on top of the trench line sipping at his bottle, broiling in the sun, and frequently vomiting into the stagnant moat.
McGowan knew something was coming, and when the man did flip out, he did so with flair, ensuring that even bored processing clerks would read his case twice. By the seventh day of his drunk he was dehydrated, beet-colored, scrub-bearded, stinking and red-eyed. He lolled around the fort until ten in the morning. By then the market was full, the PFs had gone home and most of the Marines were napping or sitting in some cool thatched house teasing the girls or whiling away the time somewhere with the PFs and the old men.
No one was watching the corpsman. He walked slowly out of the fort and took a side trail into a treeline. A few moments later he emerged onto the main trail, and ran full tilt into the marketplace, shrieking at the top of his lungs, stark-naked.
Three days later, on orders signed by a doctor who examined psychiatric cases, he flew to San Diego on emergency leave. He stayed married to the girl and returned to Vietnam one month later. There he had to join a rifle company. The bureaucracy was not about to send him back to Binh Nghia. Besides, Binh Nghia had been sent a new corpsman, named John Blunk.
Faced with the draft after scholastic difficulties in his junior year of college, Blunk had chosen to enlist in the Navy as a corpsman in order to further his premedical training. Bright and bouncy, he strode into Binh Nghia with the attitude of a young doctor hanging out his shingle for the first time. Like a conscientious doctor with a wealthy clientele, Blunk looked upon the chronic ailments of the Marines as trivial. Although he was assigned to the fort in order to be available for emergencies, Blunk decided his day-to-day patients should be the villagers.
In the past, CAP corpsmen had attended the villagers on a Band-Aid and penicillin level and had called helicopter medevacs for serious cases. With a higher level of skill and dedication, Blunk went beyond those rudiments. He spent long hours with Khoi, who also said he wanted to be a doctor, a claim some thought was influenced by his admiration for Blunk. From Khoi the corpsman learned of the sicknesses and hurts which went unreported, because it took the fear of death to drive a villager to the province hospital, what with the expense, the distance, the strangeness, the crowded sick and the harried doctors. Most of the villagers who fell ill preferred to stay at home and suffer steadily. So Blunk did not lack for real patients. He started with those he could treat with the tools and drugs the United States Navy provides each combat corpsman: Terramycin, malaria pills, aspirin, stitches and bandages. Both the local needs and his own skill exceeded those basics, and Blunk dipped into the medical slush fund Marine headquarters had set up for village care. There, too, he quickly exceeded his quota, since patients were starting to come from Binh Thuy Island and from the Phu Longs. Blunk told McGowan he had to have more and better supplies. He had pulled several teeth lately and infection was spreading in one farmer’s jaw. Some of his minor-surgery cases needed similar follow-up attention and he did not have the proper drugs. If he got a bad reputation, so would the combined unit.
McGowan got the message. He sought out Lieutenant Carlson, who could only suggest sending any relapse cases to the Vietnamese hospital. The medication Blunk wanted required forms in triplicate and a doctor’s signature.
“Oh hell,” McGowan said. “If I have to go through the paper mill, we’ll all be dead and buried before that stuff arrives.”
He knew of a faster way. The head corpsman for a nearby rifle company, a chief petty officer who had been in the Navy for twenty years, was notorious for his thirst. Under General Walt’s order, no bottles of hard liquor were officially sold anywhere in I Corps. The rifle companies received a weekly ration of beer, scarcely an acceptable substitute to the chief’s discriminating tongue. McGowan’s stockpile included a quart of Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch whisky. In return for the liquor, Blunk got his shopping list filled, including a credit voucher for drugs which needed refrigeration.
19
Although the Americans were gradually becoming involved in nonmilitary matters in the village, their primary effort and the focus of their attentions remained tactical. But after nine months of some of the hardest village fighting in Vietnam, Binh Nghia was still intact. There was never an air strike called in the war for that village. It was a battle fought with rifles and grenades at such close quarters that both sides used their senses of smell and hearing as much as their eyesight. The villagers did not stroll around at night, and in the firing at sounds, flashes and shadows, it was usually the participants on both sides, not the villagers, who died. There were exceptions, but they were exceptions.
March brought the warm sun back and, as the waters subsided and the muddy trails dried out, both the villagers and the Viet Cong moved about more frequently. One night McGowan was at point on an evening patrol moving slowly through the far reaches of Binh Yen Noi. It was a little after ten, a time when patrols rarely made contact, and the sergeant was not especially alert. But by habit he stopped every hundred yards or so to listen. It was during such a break that he heard someone moving rapidly toward him up the hard-packed trail. McGowan fired from the hip, spraying the trail from right to left.
A man went down groaning, then lay still. The patrol waited for two minutes before moving. They heard nothing further. Advancing cautiously, they swit
ched on a flashlight and in its beam picked up the face of the dead man, whom a PF identified as one of his neighbors. He was not carrying a weapon or anything else which associated him with the Viet Cong.
The next day the PFs found out the story. The man had been having an affair with his wife’s sister. Several evenings a week, on one pretext or another, he would visit her just before dark, then run back home shortly after curfew. Since he never was gone overnight, his wife suspected nothing. The evening of his death, he had stayed too long. The sister begged him to wait until dawn and give some excuse to his wife, but he said he could dash home safely and so not risk arousing suspicion. He was almost home when he was killed.
A few nights later another villager died as a result of poor judgment. On that night, a three-man patrol was prowling the outskirts of My Hué when the point man saw a group of men digging in the sand dunes. The patroller returned to the fort to gather a reaction squad, but when they arrived at the scene, the men were gone, having dug and camouflaged a trench line near the main trail for ambush purposes. The reaction force destroyed the trench line and the next night McGowan took a patrol back to the scene. He was at point nearing the edge of the hamlet when his head bumped a board. Without hesitation he dove flat, yelling “Grenade!” The other patrol members jumped off the trail and the booby trap exploded harmlessly.
Something about the setup bothered McGowan. Not quite sure what it was, he led another patrol the next night back to the same spot. As he moved through My Hué with his safety off, three rounds from a carbine cracked by his head. Their sound was still hanging in the air when he returned fire, hitting his assailant in the chest and killing him instantly.
The patrollers dragged the body from the bushes and turned on a flashlight. McGowan recognized the man immediately. Several times he had eaten at his house and once, on a week’s stakeout in the hamlet, he had slept there. The man had been friends with several of the PFs.
