“Jackson! Where do you think you are, Marine! This ain’t no riot in Watts!”
“Spoils of war, Lieutenant.” Jackson’s big smile was catching. Just looking at him made me grin too.
“The guy who owned the store was dead anyway, Lieutenant. Would you mind keeping this stuff for me till we go back to Phu Bai so I can mail it home?” The lieutenant looked horrified.
“And look at this!” Jackson lifted his chin, revealing a vicious-looking green rubber snake with bloody teeth that clamped onto Jackson’s shirt like a clothespin.
“Drop that garbage and saddle up. We’re moving out in ten minutes.”
“What?” the Indian corporal asked.
“That’s right, Chief.”
“Why?”
“To preserve the honor of the South Vietnamese we’re pulling out so they can mop up. Saddle up! We got choppers on the way.”
An hour later I jumped off a troop helicopter in Phu Bai. The base looked strangely different this time, no longer dangerous and foreign, but actually safe.
Early the next morning the whole company was bouncing down Highway 1 away from Hue City. We reached the first bridge in twenty-five minutes. The convoy stopped. The first platoon was shouted out of the last two trucks in the column.
The rest of the convoy started up again. A mile down the road we came to a stop at a large old steel bridge that was painted black. It looked like an old suspension bridge for trains, but it was strictly for road traffic. It stretched across a wide jungle river that was reddish black from decaying leaves that swirled near its surface and lay in piles on its bed. Rolls of barbed wire encircled the bridge, and thick, five-foot-high sandbag bunkers guarded each end. Another sandbag bunker sat on a huge cement piling that supported the center of the bridge.
The big Indian corporal jumped out of our truck and started shouting, “Truoi Bridge! Second Platoon, get out! Move it! Move it! Hurry up, you’re makin’ a great target!” We lined up in formation in front of a rusting old tank with a French emblem on the turret. Twenty yards to the right of the tank stood a three-story sandbag bunker with the barrel of a .30-caliber machine gun sticking out near the top.
Just to the left of the bridge and behind the three-story bunker sat five small white cement-block buildings with tin roofs. Directly in front of us on the other side of the road was a long cement-block building riddled with bullet holes. Vietnamese children ran around it, screaming like normal kids in a playground. Thirty meters to the right of that building was a huge camouflaged parachute spread fully open and tied to three trees. Under the parachute, sheltered from the murderous sun, sat twelve Marines. Some were playing cards; others were sleeping.
“Who are they?” I asked Red.
“That’s a Civil Action Patrol unit. CAP, they’re called. They work with the villagers. They try to keep ’em on our side, protect their rice, and give ’em medical aid.”
On the south end of the bridge was a long village that paralleled the river for as far as I could see. ARVNs (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) walked in and out of the white block buildings. Most of them didn’t carry weapons. The lieutenant stood at the door of the smallest block building talking to an ARVN major. The major first pointed to the largest of the buildings, then pointed at us. They exchanged salutes, and the lieutenant strode over to us.
“Listen up!”
Chan and I were the only two who did. The rest of the platoon kept chattering. Then the big Indian said the same thing, only different: “Shut up!” The chatter stopped. “Okay, Lieutenant.”
“We’re spending the night in the ARVN compound.” He pointed to the nearest and largest of the tin-roofed buildings. “The ARVNs are standing lines tonight so we can get some sleep. If we’re lucky, we will probably be here for a couple of weeks. Go ahead and stow your gear.” He turned to the Indian corporal. “Swift Eagle, I want a guard on the gear so our ARVNs don’t pick something up by mistake.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dismissed!”
The building didn’t impress me much, but the rest of the men acted like it was the Hilton. Chan and I dumped our gear and quickly strolled toward the village to avoid getting picked for guard duty.
As we reached the south end of the bridge, a Vietnamese boy ran up to us with two eight-ounce Cokes in each hand.
“I sell Coke. One dollar MPC.”
“No thanks,” Chan said.
“What you need, Marine?” The boy looked at me. “You need boom-boom. I can get.”
“Chan, what’s boom-boom mean?”
“I assume it’s a reference to a prostitute.”
The kid looked at Chan.
“Why you look like Marine? You same-same me.”
Chan’s face tightened. He clenched his fists, and for an instant I thought he was going to belt the kid. I grabbed his arm and patted him on the shoulder.
“Hey! What’s wrong?”
Chan ignored me and glared at the kid like he still wanted to smack him.
“I’m not same-same Vietnamese.” Chan shook my hand loose and grabbed the kid by the throat. “I’m American. Chinese-American. Not Vietnamese.” When Chan let go, the kid ran back a few feet and turned back to us.
“You dink-ki-dow, Marine!” he sneered as he made circles with his index finger around his right ear, then ran away.
“The kid thinks you’re nuts,” I said.
“He’s probably right,” Chan mumbled angrily.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” He looked me in the eyes. “It just hit me the wrong way. Sometimes I get fed up with explaining my nationality. I’m a good eight inches taller than your average Vietnamese, and they still assume that I’m one of them. You know that corporal that you think so highly of?” he said sarcastically.
“Corporal James? The stocky little jerk that acts like a general?”
“Yes. Him. He told me he didn’t trust Kit Carson Scouts, and for me to watch it.”
“You’re kidding! What did you say?”
“I told him I didn’t particularly trust Vietnamese scouts either, or corporals who weren’t aware of new replacements. That seemed to stump him. He walked off with this ignorant look on his face.”
I was caught off guard by Chan’s reaction. Usually he drove me crazy with his forgiving Christian attitude. He’d practically become my conscience. He didn’t wag fingers at me or anything like that, but if I ever made the mistake of arguing with him over something being right or wrong, sin or not sin, he would just open up his little Bible and shoot my view full of more holes than Swiss cheese. He sure wasn’t anyone’s angel. Sometimes he sounded arrogant, but that was usually because he knew what he was talking about. Overall he was disgustingly honest and disgustingly fair, and I was quite sure that I could depend upon him right to the end. I didn’t say anything. I knew he would feel badly about the kid soon enough. He finally shook his head and smiled. “That was pretty stupid, wasn’t it?” I nodded yes. “I’ll have to make it up to the kid when I see him. You ready to go see downtown Truoi?”
“Let’s go,” I said.
As we started through the village I noticed that every hootch had its own bunker. Actually they weren’t bunkers so much as small underground caves. Red had told us the people slept in these things, but I’d thought he was exaggerating. He hadn’t been. It was a village of human groundhogs. They only came up in the daylight. We peeked into one hole to see how it was furnished. Two pieces of rotting plywood lined the floor. Two filthy old Army blankets and a dozen spiders. One had a body as big as a fifty-cent piece.
The primitive existence of these people fascinated me. Civilization drove right by on Highway 1, but twenty feet away women squatted together beating their clothes on rocks. The villagers looked and sounded unhealthy. Everyone coughed and hacked as if they all had TB. We decided to keep curiosity from getting the better of us. We turned back.
The night started quietly. Having off from work was a big deal, because most of the me
n hadn’t slept a full eight hours straight in over two months. We cleaned our weapons, then Sam pulled out a deck of cards and started saying “Back-alley, bro. Back-alley,” grinning with a mouth full of rotten teeth.
So far it looked like Sam would receive the platoon’s vote for strangest person in the Fifth Marines. His sense of humor was as strange as the rest of his personality, and although I didn’t particularly like him, I didn’t particularly dislike him either. He seemed to have an almost unnatural love for his little blooper gun, officially known as an M79 grenade launcher. The blooper looked like a sawed-off shotgun with an extra-fat barrel. It even broke in half like a shotgun, but it fired midget artillery rounds—or so I called them—that exploded on contact. It made a bloop sound when fired. Red told me Sam could hit anything with it.
“Keep your eyes on your own cards, Sam,” Sudsy said as he leaned back on his PRC-25 radio. Sudsy, our freckle-faced radioman, reminded me of Beaver Cleaver. He usually stayed with the CP (Command Post), with the doc and lieutenant and gunny. He had a flare for talking on the radio.
“You treat that radio like a woman, Suds,” Rodgers said with a nervous laugh. Rodgers was the kind of Marine that girls would call cute. Sort of a pug-nose kind of cute. Red told me that Rodgers used to be a good Marine, but he’d heard that Rodgers was spooked now. He’d caught some shrapnel in Hue and just wasn’t the same guy anymore.
I watched the card game for a while and listened to loud-mouthed Sam complaining about his luck. The men looked tired but relaxed. I couldn’t have been less relaxed on a bed of nails. The place smelled like fish. In fact, the whole country reeked of fish.
My pack made a rocky pillow. I dumped out a couple of cans of C-rations, fluffed it up, and tried again. By the time the red, pink, and pastel flow of sunset had passed over our one-room, earth-floor Hilton, leaving us engulfed in darkness, most of the men were asleep.
The darkness was shattered by three violent explosions, one right after the other. Bullets of fluorescent red light rifled through cracks in the boarded-up windows. I was instantly awake. I scrambled for my rifle and got to my feet waiting for instructions. Another series of explosions shook the building. The door was yanked open, bringing in more red light filtering through clouds of dust. Confusion filled the room. Someone screamed, “Mortars!” Two men ran out the open door. The slow, fluctuating rhythm of an older machine gun opened up with a long burst. Shouting Vietnamese ran by the door. A loud voice screamed, “Guns up!” I thought I saw Red dart through the door and into the eerie red light. I followed him into a world of chaos.
Vietnamese were running in all directions. Panic had overwhelmed the compound. An ARVN ran into me, entangling the barrel of his rifle in my machine-gun ammo belts. As we struggled to free ourselves, our faces came together for one terrifying moment. He stared into my eyes and screamed, “VC!” He pulled his rifle away and sprinted in the opposite direction from the bridge. My instincts said to follow him, but just then another flare popped open above the bridge and I saw Red running into the back door of a cement machine-gun bunker twenty meters in front of me.
Behind me, on top of the three-story sandbag bunker, an old .30-caliber machine gun was going crazy, raking every inch of the surrounding barbed wire. Another machine gun opened up from the sandbag bunker on the cement piling under the center of the bridge.
ARVNs manning positions on the south side of the bridge stopped firing and ran wildly to the other side, dropping their weapons as they went. The only ARVN returning fire was the gunner on the three-story bunker. The rest were in retreat. A blast of M60 fire from the cement bunker blew one off the bridge.
I ran to the door of the bunker and screamed in at Red, “You’re shooting ARVNs!”
“Shut up and feed the gun!”
I dropped my M16 and linked up a belt of ammo as fast as my shaking hands would function. Two more red flares popped open over the bridge, revealing shadowy figures crawling through the wire directly to our front on the opposite side of the road. I could see more shadows turning into people on the south end of the bridge. Red started firing twenty-round bursts southward. I tried to fire at the men coming through the wire to our front, but my weapon wouldn’t work.
A ripping explosion behind us caused Red to cease firing. Another explosion to our right popped my right ear. My ears started ringing. My head felt like the inside of a bass drum. I felt warm blood trickle out of my ear and down my neck.
“Red!” I screamed. Red couldn’t hear me through the constant blasts around us. The bunker filled with dust and smoke.
“Red!” I screamed again and shook his arm. “My rifle won’t work!”
“Take the safety off, boot!”
I felt for the safety. It was on. God, what an idiot. Now the M60 on the cement piling opened up on the south end of the bridge. Hundreds of muzzle flashes erupted from the blackness. I put my rifle on full automatic and started firing.
“No, you idiot!” screamed Red. “Semi-automatic only. You’ll run out of ammo! Link up more ammo! Quick!”
Red started firing again as I linked up another belt of ammo. A series of explosions started pounding the north side of the bridge. Then explosions walked down the road in ten-yard intervals, slowly zeroing in on the three-story bunker. Red screamed, “Mortars!” and started firing at the south end of the bridge. Shrapnel slapped against the side of our bunker, then the red light died. Red stopped firing.
Enemy muzzle flashes illuminated the darkness like hundreds of deadly lightning bugs. Suddenly the explosions stopped. Then the night was silent. A green flare popped open above the bridge and swung down slowly under its tiny parachute. Five men sprinted onto the bridge from the south end. I couldn’t see any weapons. Another flare burst more light on the battle. Now I could see that each had satchel charges taped to his chest and back.
“Sappers!” Red screamed, and opened up on the five men now weaving toward the center of the bridge. The M60 on the cement piling and the .30 caliber opened up on the sappers at the same time Red did.
Orange tracers ricocheted in a thousand directions as bullets bounced around the five sappers, yet they kept coming. Then three dropped at the same time. One of them struggled back to his feet. His legs were cut from under him again. He began crawling toward the center of the bridge. The remaining two staggered like drunks, jerked spasmodically as the machine guns found their mark, then finally collapsed.
Suddenly our position came under murderous small-arms fire from directly across the road. Pieces of cement and dirt stung my face as bullets chipped away at our bunker. Whining lead tore through the gun slit. It looked like the flashes of another hundred rifles were firing straight at us.
Red ducked, bumping helmets with me. My stomach pressed against my spine. I mumbled a quick prayer. Lead smacked against the outside wall of the bunker. Bullets flattening with solid thuds ripped away precious inches of all that was keeping us alive. Then the firing stopped.
We peeked through the gun slits in time to see another group of five sappers jog onto the south end of the bridge.
I started firing, this time single-shot. I hit one; I knew I hit him, but he kept coming.
“I hit that sucker!”
“Go for the legs!” screamed Red as he opened up again. “They’re doped up. You gotta knock ’em off their feet!”
Now the flashes across the road to our front were firing at the maniac manning the .30 caliber at the top of the three-story sandbag bunker. He must have two thousand rounds linked up to that thing, I thought. I haven’t heard him stop yet.
I linked up another belt of ammo as Red blew one of the sappers off his feet. The M60 on the cement piling had a bad angle for hitting the sappers. That was supposed to be the job of the south-end gun bunker that the ARVNs had abandoned.
Bright white flares began popping open from above, lighting the battle like twenty little suns. When I realized where they were coming from, I cried out, “A plane, Red! Air support!”
The sa
ppers on the bridge were being yanked and twirled like puppets with each direct hit. The lead man spun like a top, his arms flailing the air above his head, but still he came forward.
A giant sparkler moving in a small circle sizzled at us from the blackness of the jungle across the road. Red stopped firing and shoved me down, landing on top of me. Our bunker shuddered under the numbing explosion. Dirt, rocks, and dust poured through the firing slits. We lifted our heads in time to see another rocket sizzling toward the three-story sandbag bunker.
“They’re inside the wire!” Red pointed as he yelled over the clamor of the screaming NVAs. Silhouettes moved across the road to our right. “Shoot anything that moves!”
I knew the positions to our right were being overrun; self-torturing thoughts of hand-to-hand combat darted through my mind. I’d rather get shot than bayoneted, I thought. God, I hate knives!
A fleeing Vietnamese ran by our door. Red turned and fired a burst through the opening, dropping two ARVNs five feet from the bunker. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I stared at the dead ARVNs for a couple of seconds until Red started firing again. I watched the tracers of the M60 ripping into the sappers on the bridge. Only three still stood. Others tried to crawl forward.
At the center of the bridge, just over the piling where the M60 gun team was still firing, the three sappers put their arms around a steel support. Five seconds later a violent explosion lifted the huge steel superstructure into the air. It surged ten feet above the cement piling, twisted slightly, and crashed back down on the gun team.
For twenty seconds the firing ceased, as if the climactic destruction had ended the battle. Then an American began screaming in pain from the bridge. Until that moment I hadn’t been sure it was a Marine gun team out there. “Chan!”
Red slapped me across the face. “It’s not Chan! It’s a CAP unit. They work with the ARVNs.”
Guns Up! Page 3
