Guns Up!

by Johnnie Clark

  At first I thought he was just jumpy. I stared into the darkness until the sleep began to clear from my eyes and brain. Twenty meters to our front, silhouetted against a purple and black sky, the helmeted head of an NVA soldier moved slowly toward our old position.

  “I see one!”

  A large hand seized my shoulder. My heart stopped cold. “Don’t open fire till I do.” It was the chief, of course; no one else could be that quiet. He slipped to the next position without a sound.

  The wait was on. A few moments later, rustling weeds to our left warned of more men crawling in the direction of our old position. No one opened up. Doyle pointed to silhouettes of at least three men straight ahead. Still no one fired. My hands started shaking. Doyle was trying to turn his teeth into powder. I put my hand over his mouth to quiet him.

  “Link up some ammo. Be quiet.” I whispered so low I wasn’t sure he heard me. He rolled quietly from his stomach onto his side and began linking up a belt.

  A single burst of AK47 fire shattered the silence. An instant later a host of chattering AKs joined in. Muzzle flashes erupted from three sides of our old position as at least twenty AKs sent a murderous barrage of fire into it. Bullets ricocheted off hard ground, whining through the air in every direction.

  Still no Marine fired. Flashes two hundred meters away marked the beginning of a mortar barrage that lasted five minutes. Our old position had already been plotted. The mortars were probably supposed to hit us first, followed by a ground assault, but in the confusion the NVA didn’t realize they were the only ones firing.

  The mortar rounds swept through like a giant scythe. Two machine guns crisscrossed fire, sending green tracers ricocheting in all directions. I was dumbfounded. They were having a war all by themselves, and we had box seats. The flashes of exploding mortars provided a terrifying strobe-light effect.

  Still the word to return fire did not come. At 2235 the mortars ceased fire. Screaming NVA stormed the abandoned position, firing as they ran. Their own deafening firepower was so constant they still did not realize that no one was firing back, and the friendly thunder of big 155s at Phu Bai gave a hollow background echo that went unnoticed by the attacking NVA. Suddenly I realized why we weren’t firing. We wanted them where they were.

  Still, I wanted to open up. I wanted to for Red. The baneful whistle of friendly artillery rounds grew sharper and sharper until I cringed, feeling that final hiss as much as hearing it. Flashes of white light followed by ripping explosions, dirt, rocks, and screams mixed in a chaotic montage of war. Rocks pelted us like hail. Somewhere from behind me Sudsy was shouting, “Fire for effect! Right on, Bro! Fire for effect! You got it, Momma! You got it!” The barrage felt like it went on for an hour, but it was probably closer to ten minutes. Then it ended as quickly as it began. One final bright flash, an explosion of rocks and dirt, quiet.

  “Is it over?” Doyle’s whispered voice sounded like a scared child.

  “I think so.”

  “Jesus! My first firefight and we never fired a shot.”

  A heavy, sulphurous cloud settled over the scene like a fog. I couldn’t imagine anyone living through that destruction, but a forlorn moan told me someone had. The remainder of the night passed without incident.

  The first shafts of light replaced my sense of apprehension with a morbid curiosity. All around our perimeter men stretched their necks to see what could be seen. It was the same feeling I got in funeral homes. Part of me wanted to look in the casket, and part of me felt repulsed at the thought.

  The hard ground looked churned, as if a giant had gotten angry and stabbed the earth. Rocks the size of baseballs were strewn everywhere. The perimeter was stirring behind me. A cough, the klick of a safety, a canteen being downed. The sun wasn’t fully up, and it was already stinking hot.

  “We’re going out for a body count! Spread out! On line!” I turned to see who was shouting this insanity. The lieutenant stood with one hand pointing to where he wanted the line to start. No way, I thought. He had to be kidding. I looked at Doyle and laughed.

  “Next he’ll want us to fix bayonets.”

  “Fix bayonets!”

  Doyle forced a nervous laugh. I wanted to tell him not to worry, but I was worried. I had a bloody machine gun. What was I supposed to do in a bayonet fight?

  I looked back toward the center of the perimeter. Lieutenant Campbell stood next to Sudsy, the gunny, and Doc. They always looked less tired than the rest of us. They sat in the center of the perimeter, the CP (command post). Four people in one position equaled twice as much sleep as I was getting.

  Lieutenant Campbell looked downright excited. It wasn’t any secret, even to boots, that killing more gooks than the other platoons could mean a promotion. The Corps called it “Shoot of the Month.”

  The M60 machine gun was a superior weapon. It could be fired from a tripod, which was too heavy and which no Marine Corps gunners ever carried into the bush, or the bipod, two attached legs that swung from under the barrel, or it could be fired from the hip. The recoil from firing would actually help hold the weight of the barrel up and the gun on target. I could put out 550 rounds per minute with a maximum range of 3,750 meters. I was sold on the gun. But in spite of all this, going into hand-to-hand combat with a 23.16-pound machine gun, plus ammunition, was like fencing with handcuffs and snowshoes. I was petrified.

  “Move out on line!” The lieutenant pointed his rifle at the craters. We moved slowly. “Shoot anything that moves!”

  Somewhere a bird started chirping. With each step the gun got lighter, until it felt as light as a pretzel. The bird stopped chirping. I strained to see the first bodies. Something moved in the weeds. Suddenly I was firing a twenty-round burst into brush straight ahead. I stopped. Everyone had dropped to one knee, ready to fire at anything. There was a long, silent pause.

  “Move out!”

  We moved forward again, this time even more cautiously.

  “What shootin’!”

  I looked at Doyle in disbelief. How could he talk at a time like this?

  “Look!” he said. He pointed his rifle at the front half of a now deceased large gray snake.

  “What’d he hit?” yelled the lieutenant.

  “He blew a snake in half,” replied Doyle in a rather astonished tone.

  “Move out!” Lieutenant Campbell said.

  The search ended with only three bodies found. Shredded web gear covered with blood lay strewn about, indicating more kills than three, but as usual the NVA had done an incredible job of removing their dead. Sam found a spare leg. He thought it was funny. He took the bloody stump and shoved it into the crotch of one of the stiffs. He laughed at the three-legged corpse until tears filled his eyes.

  “Moronic Marines,” the doc mumbled. He sure had a sarcastic way of saying things, I thought. It was only a matter of time before somebody planted a fist in his mouth if he kept it up.

  I looked at Sam. He was still laughing. I wondered what he was like before the war. Had he ever felt sympathy? Maybe this was just his way of coping.

  We spent the rest of the day on a hill two thousand meters north of the bodies. The break from the daily march felt great. The last hours of the day looked like a 3-D movie. The sky billowed in pink and red and violet. The kind of day that made me feel infinitesimal. It looked like a Cecil B. De Mille backdrop.

  An hour before darkness we split into two squads of eight men each and headed back toward the corpses. Because the NVA had a habit of returning for their dead, we decided to develop a habit of waiting for their return. Doyle and I were put with the chief, four riflemen, and Sam the Blooper Man. Our squad went east, and the other squad went west. We circled around the rocky terrain and ended up twenty meters east of the NVA corpses. I wasn’t sure where the lieutenant’s squad was.

  The hour felt ominous—that hour when it isn’t day or night but some gray, primitive zone between the two. My nose caught the whiff of something foul. I wondered if the bodies were rotting already.
I started to ask Doyle if he could smell it, but then something moved near one of the artillery craters.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “No. Where?” He sat up.

  “Something moved from that bush to that bush.” I pointed where I saw movement. My heart started pounding like a jackhammer. Doyle took aim in the direction I pointed.

  Before either of us saw another movement, the unmistakable bloop of Sam’s M79 grenade launcher sucked away the silence. A bright flash followed by a crisp, small explosion blinded me momentarily. Then silence.

  The night ended quietly. At first light I called to Sam.

  “Sam, I’m comin’ over.”

  “I’m over here.” He gave a wave from behind a small clump of earth. I walked over to Sam’s position and found him putting a notch on the stock of his M79. He looked up with his pitted face gleaming in pride, smiling through rotted teeth.

  “I got another one, John.” He pointed at a body fifteen meters to our front.

  “I saw movement over there just before you fired.”

  “Go check him out. Got him right between the eyes.”

  I walked out to look at the body. Doyle stood over the already sun-dried corpse. Immense red ants bored into the large hole between the dead man’s eyes, foraging for food.

  “What a shot!” Doyle mumbled. “But I thought the M79 would do more damage than that.”

  “So did I.”

  “Did you see this one over here?” Doyle pointed to one of the three corpses from the night before. He had swollen up like a balloon. The buttons on his khaki shirt had popped off.

  “Don’t go too close. Red told me they’ll blow up sometimes and send the guy’s insides all over.”

  “Who put the ace of spades card on that one?” Doyle pointed to the corpse with three legs.

  “Sam the Blooper Man.”

  “What a character!” Doyle said as he removed his thick-lensed glasses and proceeded to clean them on his shirt.

  “He sure is.”

  “He told me not one machine gunner has rotated out so far.” He carefully adjusted his glasses over one ear at a time and looked in my eyes for the truth.

  “What?” I stalled.

  “He said since he’s been here not one gunner has done his thirteen months and rotated home. Is it true?”

  “I guess so. They told me the same thing.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “I try not to think about it, but sometimes it sneaks up on me.”

  “How can you not think about it?” snapped Doyle.

  “Not all those gunners are dead. Most were probably just wounded. To tell you the truth, that’s what scares me more than dying. I don’t want to go home without any legs. I’d just as soon die. That’s enough of this crap. If God wants you, you’re goin’ one way or another.”

  “I guess that’s true, but being a gunner seems to be a surefire way of rushing the process.”

  “Getting a little wound might not be so bad. I think that a lot. I mean, I don’t want to get hurt or anything, but I have a chick at home named Nancy. I got a couple of ’em, but she’s my favorite, a raving knockout. Trouble is she gets chased by half of Saint Pete. I daydream of her reading about me in the newspaper and getting all upset, but with my luck my little wound would be a fifty-cal. round upside the head.”

  “Yeah, I think about that stuff too. I always think about getting off the plane and getting the hero treatment. My old high school band playing the Marine Corps Hymn—you know, the whole bit.”

  “With women waiting, lots of ’em!” I added.

  “You can’t have a decent hero welcome without women.” He laughed. I laughed too. “John.” He paused. “Think we’ll make it? I mean, you know, being gunners and everything.”

  I was stumped. I didn’t want to freak Doyle out, and I wasn’t real sure I wanted to admit the obvious. We both had a whole tour in front of us, and we were going to have to finish that tour as gunners. Our chances didn’t look real good. I shook my head to stop thinking and grabbed my pack.

  “Let’s have a cup of coffee before you get me all depressed. I’d rather talk about women. I heard they’re wearing mini-skirts that would make a grown man cry!”

  After some coffee and a can of horrible C-ration eggs we started toward the mountains again. We marched all day, spotting nothing but scenery. The terrain grew harder and greener, rising and falling erratically as we inched closer to the foothills of the ominous mountains. We kept moving as the sun dipped behind the dominating peaks. Gigantic bomb craters scarred the landscape. The earth looked gray and dead. Some of the craters were thirty feet across and fifteen feet deep.

  Doyle tapped me on the shoulder. “What makes a hole like these?”

  “Had to be B-52 strikes,” I whispered.

  We stumbled along a rocky trail as the deepening night replaced any vision left over from the dusk. Doyle and I were in the center of the sixteen-man column, the position from which we could respond to a “Guns up!” call from either end. It was on nights like this that I relished the best part of being a gunner. I never walked point, and I never walked tail.

  Without warning, successive cracks of AK47 fire reverberated from the front of the column. Quickly the firing increased until it sounded like we’d made contact with a battalion. Everyone instinctively hit the ground. Doyle had a grasp on my foot. He repeated, “Oh God, oh God,” in a panic. Bullets ricocheted all around, whining as they went overhead, and thudding into the earth nearby.

  “Guns up! Guns up! Guns up!” The call sounded more urgent as each man picked it up and passed it back. I was already moving, crouching, stumbling, and running into the darkness ahead.

  I felt an arm under my foot, then a curse. I started up a small knoll. Now I could see muzzle flashes.

  “Get down!”

  “Lay down some fire!” It sounded like the lieutenant’s voice.

  I fell to the ground just on the other side of the small knoll and started firing at the flashes directly ahead. Immediately, more flashes opened up from our left. I carried a fifty-round belt in the gun at all times. The ammo was gone quickly. I turned and screamed for more. No one was there.

  “Doyle! I need ammo!”

  Enemy fire increased on our left flank. I tore a 100-round belt from around my shoulders and loaded the gun. An enemy machine gun opened up on the left flank and a bit below us. Our high ground was saving us. I started firing at the enemy gun, hitting low at first, then walking my tracers up to the target. The green tracers of the enemy gun arced high into the dark sky, then ceased.

  “You got him!” someone shouted.

  Bullets thudded and flattened all around me. I crawled back over the knoll for cover, and then a sudden, unaccountable silence cloaked the battlefield. I wasn’t sure which was worse. At least when they were shooting I knew where they were.

  We backed up twenty meters, moving like blind men to our new position. There we sat in a perimeter and waited nervously for the safety of sunlight. I passed the word around the perimeter for Doyle. He finally showed up, mumbling something about falling into a hole. I decided to wait until morning to talk about his disappearance. Part of me wanted to punch his lights out, but I knew I should give him a chance to explain. I wanted him to know that men had been shot for less in Vietnam. Morning finally arrived.

  I woke him up with a solid thump to his helmeted head.

  “You better have a good reason you fat little—”

  “I fell into a crater! One of those B-52 craters! It knocked my glasses off! By the time I found ’em, we stopped firing!” I pondered his excuse, trying to see a lie in his face.

  “Honest!” he said, holding up his right hand as if he was swearing in.

  “I want to believe you, Doyle. I almost got killed last night because I didn’t have an A-gunner. Life and death are about a hair apart in this armpit of the world. You have to be dependable.”

  “I am. I swear! I fell in a hole!”
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br />   I paused, staring at his dirty, chubby face.

  “Okay. I’ll drop it.” I wanted to believe Doyle. I liked him. He was a little scared of being a gunner, but he was quick to laugh and as jolly as a man could be over here.

  We searched for bodies but came up empty. I felt an odd sense of disappointment. Although I may have killed someone, only confirmed counted, and I had no confirmed kills. I wanted one badly. It didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t even go hunting when I could have back home because I didn’t like shooting animals. Yet here I was itching to blow some North Vietnamese into pieces.

  Sam found traces of blood, and Swift Eagle found a Chinese Communist grenade. ChiComs looked like the old potato masher. Chief said they were more concussion than shrapnel.

  The sun seemed to wrap itself in last night’s clouds; the rain was near. The lieutenant and the gunny pinpointed a pimple on the grid map for a resupply LZ. Three hours closer to the mountains, the tiring march ended on a small rocky hill. We set up a quick perimeter. Sudsy spit out the coordinates into his radio.

  I carved out a small niche in the ground and chowed down. Soon the backfiring echo of a Huey gunship penetrated the hot, still air. It banked sharply, circled our position, then made a larger circle, trying to draw enemy fire. A CH-46 helicopter floated in after the Huey finished checking out the LZ.

  “Stand by for cover fire!” Swift Eagle screamed across the top of the hill. Four men unloaded supplies, and the chopper lifted off without drawing fire.

  I tried to keep my attention on the surrounding hills, but it wasn’t easy. I had a feeling that mail came with that chopper, and I wanted to hear from home so bad I was ready to ask the chief about smoke signals.

  “Your manners are sadly deficient, as always,” said a voice from behind me. “Well, aren’t you going to invite me into your home?”

  I turned, already recognizing the voice. “Chan!” I jumped to my feet and we traded bear hugs. “God, it’s good to see you!”

  “I presumed it would be. I find I’m curiously pleased by your presence also, but I’d rather be back at China Beach.”