Guns Up!

by Johnnie Clark

  “Could that have killed me?”

  “It took us an hour to find out what killed my last A-gunner. A tiny sliver of shrapnel went under the back of his helmet and into his brain. It was in his hair, so we couldn’t even find any blood, but it killed him.”

  “Will they medevac me?”

  “No way. Not for those two little holes. Go see the doc. Tell him to put something on it before it gets infected.”

  I did what Red told me to do. The doc, our corpsman, tweezered out two splinters of shrapnel while I looked through my little wounded Bible. On the inside cover someone had written a long passage in red ink. It was Chan’s handwriting; I didn’t know anyone else who could print that small. I wondered when he had written it. I started reading it, and each line made me feel a little better.

  Romans 8:35–39

  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

  Just as it is written, “FOR THY SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG; WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED.”

  But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.

  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

  Romans 8:28

  And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

  “Are you okay?” the doc asked. He looked up and seemed to be studying my face.

  “Yeah. I’m fine.” His concern surprised me. “I’m just reading something really neat out of the Bible. You should hear this.”

  “No thanks,” he said with the slur of a spoiled snob. He was a Navy man from Massachusetts, and was generally disliked for his attitude of resentful superiority, but for some uncharacteristic reason I didn’t get mad at him. I found myself wondering what his parents were like. The doc threw on some red stuff that burned and a couple of Band-Aids. I gave him a thanks that I didn’t mean and headed back to the gun position.

  A chopper picked up Blaine twenty minutes later. The moment it lifted off, Swift Eagle shouted, “Saddle up!” A collage of thoughts rambled through my mind as the hump through the bush started again. I was a Spartan on my way to Thermopylae. We looked like Spartans. Red looked like one. Everyone looked meaner than me. Their eyes were serious, almost menacing. They all had mustaches. I had peach fuzz.

  I started scuffing my boots as we walked along. One of the best ways to recognize the grunt Marines was their boots.

  The terrain turned hard and hilly with little vegetation. At 1900 hours the seventeen-man column stopped. We dropped to one knee and waited to be placed in ambush position. Corporal Swift Eagle swept through the column, taking three men at a time and quickly placing them in position for the night. When he finished we had a textbook L-shaped ambush.

  It was that eerie time of the day. The lighting was just right for your eyes to play tricks on you. A pinkish yellow twilight filtered across the brown and green earth, casting odd shadows that made me nervous.

  Tactically we were on our own except for possible artillery support from Phu Bai about five miles north. There was supposed to be an enemy battalion out here roaming around. The logic of sending seventeen Marines to make contact with an NVA battalion had escaped me, but I was only a private first class. I was contemplating the prospects of finding an NVA battalion when Red woke me up with a stiff elbow to the shoulder.

  “Do you see movement?”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Straight ahead. Keep looking straight ahead.”

  I strained to see what he was now aiming at. Then I saw movement. Shadowy figures, silhouetted by evaporating sunlight, looked to be moving thirty meters away. I felt myself trying to crouch lower as I took aim. I covered my mouth and whispered in the direction of the Marines on our left.

  “Gooks!”

  I started linking up ammo for the gun. Suddenly green tracers shot across our position from the left flank. Then another burst of fire came at us from straight ahead. Seven khaki-clad NVA appeared from the shadows in front of us. They were led by an officer who suddenly ran toward us firing a pistol. The others carried AKs. They looked surprised, maybe as surprised as we were. A couple turned and ran from us, but the others followed their leader. Red opened up first, making us the only real target they had. The officer was lifted off his feet and blown backward with the first twenty rounds. The gun stopped firing. I started firing my M16, but the targets disappeared. All firing ceased. I knew Red was hit. My face was wet with blood, and it wasn’t mine. He was slumped forward onto the gun.

  I rolled him off the gun. Two dime-sized holes sunk into one cheek. His eyes were open—lifeless and blue. I could hear myself calling for a corpsman. My voice sounded dreamlike. For an instant I thought I was dreaming: I’d wake up and find none of this had really happened. Swift Eagle flattened out beside me. He looked at the back of Red’s head with no expression. Doc slid in beside us, breathing hard.

  “He’s dead, Doc,” Swift Eagle said.

  “Red?”

  “Yeah. Put his poncho over him. I’ll get an A-gunner for the boot.”

  “He only had a month to go, Chief.” Doc’s voice sounded far away.

  The night crept by sleeplessly, congested with weird, fully awake dreams of home, friends, and the Marine Corps. I felt numb. It started drizzling. The sound always reminded me of French fries in a pan.

  By first light it was still raining. The air smelled fresh and crisp. It was a stateside rain, not the normal pounding rain of the monsoon that sounds more like a war than the war itself. Raindrops formed tiny puddles on Red’s poncho. His huge Viking boots stuck out of the poncho like out of a blanket that’s too small. I was thankful for the rain. It kept away the ants and flies and hid my tears. How could he be dead? Men like that couldn’t just die. He told me if you got past the first two months you’d make it. I wanted to pray; I needed it now, but I just didn’t know God well enough to do it right, I thought. Chan always told me you had to talk to him regularly if you wanted to get to know him. I missed Chan. I felt more alone than I could remember ever feeling. The others weren’t crying. Maybe they didn’t know yet. I remembered the gunny’s warning about being eighteen. I looked around again and the lieutenant was walking my way. His young Annapolis face couldn’t hide the loss. No tears, but he was frowning. He pulled back the poncho, grimaced, and covered him again.

  “You’re the gunner now, Marine. Keep it clean. Every man here depends on it. Red said you’d do all right. Don’t let him down.” His words sounded rehearsed.

  “I won’t.”

  “Look, John, I don’t know what to say. I thought the world of that big redhead. You’ve been dropped into a real tough spot. I’m here to help in any way I can. If you have questions, I want you to come to me. If I don’t know the answers, we’ll go to the chief or gunny or whatever it takes. Do you pray?” he asked bluntly.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, surprised at the question.

  “Start praying, John. He’ll get us through this mess.” He gave me a pat on the helmet.

  “Yes, sir.” I immediately felt much closer to Lieutenant Campbell than I ever had before.

  “I’ll try to get you an A-gunner with a machine-gun MOS as soon as I can. I’m supposed to get the next one that shows up.”

  “Lieutenant!” Sam was calling from twenty meters in front of us. “We got one confirmed. I’m claiming the pistol.”

  “Hey, stow-it-below-Marine!” Striker yelled. “The gun got him. It belongs to Red.”

  “Red’s dead,” he said.

  Sam pulled out his K-bar. It looked sharper than any knife I’d ever seen. He ripped the dead man’s shirt open and began carving “A 1/5” across his chest. I co
uld hear Sudsy sputtering out coordinates over the radio. It lent a perfect background to Sam’s bizarre ritual. Sam pulled an ace of spades card out of the black band that he wore around his helmet. He took a small metal clip off one of his bandoliers of M79 rounds and tacked the ace of spades into the forehead of the dead officer.

  “Johnnie.” I pulled my eyes off Sam to see who was calling me. It was Sudsy. “Here.” He threw me Red’s NVA pack. “Take this, too.” He tossed me Red’s .45-caliber pistol and holster. “You’re the gunner now, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sam the Blooper Man gave the forehead of the dead NVA officer one last tap and walked over to Red’s body. The muffled popping of helicopter rotors signaled the approach of the medevac chopper. Sam pulled the poncho away from the face of the corpse.

  “Not too bad. He can still have an open casket—just plug up these two holes and put something on the back of his head.”

  Swift Eagle walked forward, took the poncho from Sam’s hands, and covered the corpse.

  “Okay. Sam, you and Striker load him on the chopper.”

  Sudsy tossed out a green smoke grenade to mark the landing zone. When the chopper landed, a chunky little man with glasses jumped out as Sam and Striker loaded Red for the last chopper ride.

  The chunky guy said something to the lieutenant. Then the two of them came over to me.

  “John, this is PFC Doyle. He’s boot. He’s 0331, so he’ll be your assistant gunner. Teach him what he has to know as fast as you can.” The lieutenant turned and walked away before I could speak. I knew my mouth was hanging open as I stared at PFC Doyle in disbelief. “Teach him what he has to know” kept echoing through my stunned brain. I didn’t know any more than he did, I thought. My God, if ever there was the blind leading the blind!

  “Hi!” Doyle stuck out his hand. I shook it, and a nervous but friendly smile pushed up his fat cheeks. He sure didn’t look much like a Marine. I’d never seen anyone come out of boot camp with that much baby fat. Had to be a Hollywood Marine, I thought.

  “Your MOS is 0331?” I asked.

  “Yep, that’s me.” He pushed his glasses back on his pug nose and they promptly slid back down. I tried to remember some of the things Red told me to do.

  “Well, the most important thing you have to remember is this: When you hear ‘Guns up!’ make sure you’re on my tail no matter what.”

  “Okay.” He hesitated. “What happened to that guy they put on the chopper?” he blurted quickly, his eyes open wide with curiosity.

  “I’ll tell you later. Take those dog tags off and put ’em in your boot laces. You know how to feed the gun and clear a jam, right?”

  “Yep. Can do.”

  “Don’t forget the Halazone in your water and the malaria pills. And don’t forget salt tabs. Got it?”

  “Yeah. I’m scared.” Doyle looked at me like I was supposed to tell him what came next.

  “I know. Don’t worry about it. Just make sure you react the way an A-gunner should. You’ll get killed a lot quicker by panicking. Where are you from?”

  “Denver, Colorado. See?” He pointed to his camouflage helmet cover where he had printed COORS in large black letters. I knew it. Camp Pendleton.

  “Saddle up!” Swift Eagle shouted.

  “Well, here we go, Doyle.”

  The umbilical cord got severed in a harsh, uncaring way as far as I was concerned. Just yesterday morning I felt close to God. My life was probably saved by my Bible, and I knew in my heart that only fools believed in luck and accidents. Now I was marching into the bush feeling betrayed, bitter, and all alone. Chan had left me. Now Red. The big red Viking was gone. I tried praying for help but couldn’t.

  Four hours later we plodded up a rocky gray bump in the green terrain and set up a loose perimeter. Word came around to chow down. I felt too low to eat but decided to try. I missed Chan more than ever. He could always tell me where to read in the Bible, that one specific place that would answer my problem, whatever it might be. I needed that a lot more than I needed this disgusting can of congealed ham and lima beans I was gagging down. Doyle gulped down the last bite of his second can of C-rations.

  “Doyle, do you know the Bible?” I asked.

  “Just a little. Why?” He pulled another can out of his pack.

  “The body they were putting on the chopper was my friend.” Suddenly a lump the size of an egg developed in my throat. I turned away to keep Doyle from seeing his leader cry like a baby.

  “Yeah. I sort of figured that out. He had ‘Guns up!’ printed on his helmet just like you do.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and looked at the grayish haze clinging to the steep mountains to the west.

  “Sometimes I feel like God’s dumpin’ on me,” I mumbled.

  “Well,” Doyle said. “I don’t know the Scriptures very well, but I have an uncle who’s a minister. He once told me this parable that Jesus said, I think. I don’t know exactly how it goes …”

  “Saddle up!” Swift Eagle shouted. The men started putting their packs on.

  “Finish your story,” I said. “But make sure you bury that C-ration can. The gooks use ’em for booby traps.”

  “This parable was about a potter who made pots for different purposes. Well, the potter is God, of course. This one pot is a spittoon or something, and he doesn’t think it’s fair because this other pot is holding the king’s gold, or something. Now, I probably got the story all screwed up, but the gist of it is, what right does the pot have to cry about being a spittoon to the potter? The potter can do anything he wants to. It’s his clay. Then he told me that some people blame God for every bad thing that happens, and when good things happen, they call it luck.”

  I thought about Doyle’s rendition of Jesus’ parable for the next hour as we inched closer to the threatening mountains. It didn’t sound very scriptural, but it made sense.

  I felt closer to my chunky A-gunner, but still strangely alone. I remembered the writing in the front of my Bible. I put the stock of the machine gun on my left shoulder and held one bipod leg with my left hand so I was free to pull the Bible out of my shirt pocket with my right. I read it over and over as we humped along. Soon I started feeling pretty good again, or at least I stopped feeling so sorry for myself.

  Dusk came upon us before I was ready. The gloaming hour turned the hot blue-white sky into striking shades of red, pink, and blue. The danger that nightfall brought usually overshadowed the glorious sunsets, but it was impossible not to notice.

  We stopped along a small trail. The lieutenant moved from man to man among the kneeling column, pointing to positions for the night ambush. By the time he reached us, Corporal Swift Eagle loomed beside him.

  “Lieutenant,” Swift Eagle said quietly.

  “Yeah, Chief.” They both knelt down on one knee to talk.

  “It might be a good idea to set in here until it gets black and then move about twenty-five meters.”

  “Why, did you see anything?”

  “No, sir.”

  The careless splash of a shot of tobacco signaled the presence of the gunny. He knelt down beside the lieutenant.

  “The chief thinks we should set in and then move again. What do you think?”

  The gunny shot another stream of tobacco juice to the ground. “It’s the chief’s fourth tour. He’s got time in grade over both of us.” The gunny drew his syllables out like a Southern farmer.

  “They’ve probably been watching us all day.” The lieutenant seemed to be talking to himself. “And we have made contact already. You might be right, Chief. Better to be safe. We’ll set in here until I give the word in about twenty minutes, then we’ll move twenty-five meters east. Does that sound right to you?”

  “Sounds good to me, sir,” Gunny replied.

  “Yes, sir,” Swift Eagle said.

  I liked knowing what was going on for a change. I’d listen to that big Indian anytime he chose to speak.

  Ten minutes later the sunset color s
how disappeared. Our position, now engulfed by darkness, felt dangerous. A sense of urgency swept over me. Then we moved, rather clumsily at first. The clinking of a mess kit carried through the still, humid night. Someone to my right stumbled over a rock with all the delicacy of a drunken bull. The hollow clump of a helmet striking the rock-hard earth identified another Marine Corps klutz. Doyle’s breathing got louder with each noise until at last we reached the new position on slightly lower ground, where our only cover was a gradation of small natural trenches, the kind caused by rainwater runoff. Yesterday’s mortar attack had made me thankful for any indentation in the earth I could find.

  By 2200 hours most of the perimeter was asleep and it was my turn to turn in. My eyelids felt like they were being weighed down by sandbags. I tapped Doyle on the shoulder. He didn’t budge. I tapped him again.

  “Your watch,” I whispered and pointed at my wrist. He sat up, looking groggy. I shook him again. He nodded and motioned me to stop with his hand. I went down and seemed to just keep going and going, all the way home, but not to Saint Petersburg. To South Charleston. Dad was there, alive, and he wasn’t blind. He kept calling for me to hurry up, but the faster I ran the farther away he was, until I stopped. I was in front of the old log cabin out in Lincoln County. It was snowing, and the mountains up and down the holler turned gray and bleak. I ran into the cabin for warmth. Shafts of blue light streaked from the cracks in the walls, crisscrossing the hard dirt floor. A potbelly stove blazed with heat in the center of the room, but the room was still freezing. Someone was crying. They kept saying the same thing over and over, sobbing with each word. “The baby’s freezing! Junior, he’s freezing!” It was Mom. She was frantically gluing newspapers over the cracks between the logs, but the more she put up, the colder it got, and I shivered and kept shivering until I shook violently.…

  “Wake up! John! Wake up, man!” Doyle was shaking me in near panic and whispering into my ear. “I hear something,” he whispered and pointed to our front.