Guns Up!

by Johnnie Clark

  “Yeah!” I answered. “I didn’t know you could see artillery rounds.”

  “I didn’t either. But it’s logical, presuming your position in proximity—”

  “The people who see ’em probably don’t get to tell anybody,” I interrupted.

  “Precisely.”

  I heard the closing whistle of another artillery round. I held on to my helmet and started praying. A shuddering explosion ripped into the earth thirty meters away. Then another. A rock the size of a bowling ball crashed into the ground beside me with a back-breaking thud. I prayed faster. The explosions stopped.

  “You stupid son of a—! You’re shelling Alpha Company!” Lieutenant Campbell’s curse could have been heard in Phu Bai without the aid of Sudsy’s radio.

  It was over. Someone cursed the Marine Corps. Someone else cursed Vietnam. Shots echoed through the steaming heat. I saw flashes on the crest of a barren hill one hundred meters to the left.

  “Guns up! Guns up! Guns up!”

  I grabbed the gun and ran zigzagging toward the voice as little clouds of dust spit out of the ground around me. Then I heard the gun. “That’s an M60!” I dove to the ground, flipped the bipod legs down, and took aim at a wavering stream of orange tracers floating my way. Chan slammed to the earth beside me, knocking a solid grunt of air out of him. I opened up. Chan linked up a belt of ammo like a pro, holding it out of the dirt with his left hand and firing his M16 with his right. The enemy tracers stopped. I kept firing in twenty-round bursts.

  “We got ’em ducking!” Chan shouted as he linked up another belt.

  “Get ’em, Johnnie!” someone screamed nearby, then yelped like a cowboy. “Blow ’em off that hill!”

  “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire! It’s B Company! They’re Marines!” Sudsy screamed. I released my sweaty grip on the gun, and my insides churned in panic.

  “Did I kill any Marines?” I shouted as I jumped to my feet and ran at Sudsy. He kept talking into the radio. “Are they hit?” I grabbed him by the shoulder. “What’s going on, Sudsy?”

  “They thought we were gooks!” He turned from me and spoke into the field phone again. “No, that is negative. No one was hit in Alpha Company.” He looked back at me, pulling the phone away from his mouth. “They thought we were gooks! They called in arty and opened up!”

  “That’s brilliant! Just brilliant!”

  “Saddle up!” Lieutenant Campbell shouted, his grimacing face red with anger. He jerked the field phone out of Sudsy’s hands, turned Sudsy around with a push, and pulled the antenna on the PRC-25, strapped to Sudsy’s back, all the way out. “Alpha one, Alpha one, this is Alpha two … over!”

  We started off again. This time back toward the mountains. I was beginning to feel like a dusty green yoyo. If we crossed that river one more time, I would know for sure that everyone had lost their minds. Dusk, the time of the day I was learning to hate, crept up on us before we reached the river. The column stopped. The silhouette of Jackson turned its head and covered its mouth.

  “Psst. We’re setting up a perimeter.”

  Before I turned to give the word to Chan, an automatic burst of AK fire sent us diving for the ground. Fiery green tracers sputtered out of the darkness ahead. I started to move into position to return fire. Bullets pounded the earth around me. I froze stiff waiting for the pain. Hot whining lead sucked the air near my right ear, and dirt stung my face. It sounded like hundreds of bullets whistling and flattening into the earth around me. I covered my helmet with my hands and waited for the bullet that would scream through my skull. I didn’t want to die like this. At least I wanted to be shooting back. I looked up from the dirt. A tracer round hit close to my face. The sizzling phosphorescent tip broke from the lead and fried into my flesh. It felt like someone had put a cigarette out on my cheek. I started to move again. Chan grabbed my pack and shoved me down. Then silence. It was over. A painful moan came from the front of the column.

  “Corpsman!”

  “Corpsman up! We got wounded up here!”

  “Okay, let’s get in a perimeter!” I looked up to see who was barking orders. Swift Eagle stood over me.

  “Chief, who got hit?”

  “Thomas.”

  “Who?”

  “The point man.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “Don’t know. Sam said two in the belly.”

  “He’s the only one hit out of all that?”

  “Looks that way. I want the gun facing the direction they fired from. I think we walked into the flank squad of a large unit.”

  Somewhere to my right I could hear Sudsy calling for a medevac chopper. Twenty minutes later helicopter rotors whirred overhead. The gunny popped a green flare, lighting up a landing zone for the chopper.

  “We should just carry a portable neon sign to mark our exact location,” Chan murmured.

  He had a point, but Thomas was a dead man if we didn’t get him to a hospital unit. His chances didn’t sound good even with a medevac. I didn’t know him very well. Chan thought he was married. The moment the chopper touched ground three men gently lifted the wounded Marine in. Gunny stomped out the flare. My night vision was gone. I was totally dependent upon my hearing. I didn’t like it.

  A few minutes later someone on my left whispered, “Saddle up.” I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “We’ll be stumbling around like blind men out there.”

  “Let’s write LBJ,” Chan said.

  “Okay by me.”

  The perimeter turned into a column, and we plodded into the blackness ahead. Mosquitoes were tearing me up. I wanted to splash some bug juice on but didn’t dare put the gun on my shoulder. I was scared, and I wanted to be able to pull that trigger fast. Somehow, Jackson, the new point man, stumbled onto a trail. We followed it up a large rocky hill, down the other side, and halfway up another that was overgrown with scrubby bushes. At that point, it leveled off and skirted around the hill. We followed it for fifty meters and stopped.

  “Set up a perimeter on the side of the hill,” whispered a voice. I was too tired to care. No one had had any real sleep in days. I was exhausted.

  Swift Eagle grabbed my arm. “Put the gun down there.” He pointed to a large bush ten meters on the downhill side of the trail. “We’re ambushing this trail, but the flank is all yours.”

  Chan and I set the gun up behind the large bush facing downhill. Within ten minutes we were sound asleep. I knew it was wrong, and so did Chan, but staying awake felt impossible. The moment I leaned back against the hillside, a heavy dreamless sleep fell over me like a powerful drug.

  “All right, listen up!” It was Corporal Swift Eagle. “The Lieutenant’s ticked off today. People fell asleep on line last night.”

  “Did you fall asleep, too, Chief?” I asked naively. His piercing black eyes were harsher than the answer I didn’t get. He turned and started to walk back up the hill then stopped and turned back to us.

  “Prepare to saddle up.”

  Chan slapped me on the helmet.

  “You’re insinuating the Warrior could fall asleep on line.”

  “Saddle up! We’re moving out right now!”

  “Somebody sounds overly anxious this morning,” mused Chan.

  Two hours later that statement haunted us. We force-marched farther and faster than we ever had before. I felt a sense of urgency in our pace. We finally reached an area with a flat terrain and small patches of trees that looked like undernourished pines. There I saw the first signs of civilization I’d seen in seventeen days: four grass huts huddled together. Two hundred meters beyond the huts we passed what appeared to be a Buddhist shrine, then we reached a rarely used dirt road that seemed to snake off to nowhere.

  Chan tapped me from behind. “Did you hear that?”

  “Yeah! Now I do. What is it?”

  “Sounds like a tank.”

  Around the first bend in the dusty road, parked behind and under a clump of trees, sat two huge American tanks. One already had its engi
ne rumbling.

  “Now that’s the life,” Chan said enviously. “Why didn’t we get into tanks?”

  “The tour guide said we’d see the country better on foot.”

  “These guys go out once every six months whether they have to or not.”

  “Hurry up! Saddle up!” Lieutenant Campbell shouted. “Get aboard!”

  “No thanks,” Striker said louder than he meant to.

  “Move it, Marine!”

  Sam the Blooper Man pulled me up and onto the nearest steel monster. I pulled Chan up. A moment later the ride began. It was exhilarating. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been on a tank. Two hundred meters down the road two more of the big machines pulled out in front of us, kicking up thick clouds of dust that turned us all beige.

  “Wow, man!” Sam hit me with a sharp elbow. “This looks big. You might get your first confirmed today.”

  CONFIRMED

  “Do you grunts have any idea just how bad you smell?” the baby-faced tanker shouted over the rumbling diesel. “How long have you been in the bush?”

  “Seventeen days!” I shouted back.

  “It becomes less repugnant after a couple of weeks!” Chan added.

  The tanker looked at Chan questioningly. “They told me you guys stay in the bush two months at a shot.”

  “So they say,” I replied.

  “Made any contact?”

  “We made contact every single day.”

  The young tanker turned completely around inside the turret hatch, banging his elbow on his .50-caliber machine gun. He winced, then cursed.

  “I must bang myself on this thing ten times a day.” He rubbed his elbow. “Did you say you made contact for seventeen days straight?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Wow! I haven’t seen a Charlie yet.”

  I suddenly felt rather salty. Downright pleased with myself. Another cloud of dust from the two tanks ahead settled on us like a brown fog. It stuck to our sweaty faces and turned instantly into mud. I felt like I was in World War II, racing toward Rommel over the desert for a tank battle.

  “Chan, do you still have your little camera?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let’s take a picture of the tank behind us.”

  “Oh, brother. Look, Baby-san, is it a permanent ingredient of your basic nature to become excited about everything?”

  “Just take the picture, will ya? And I want a copy when we get home.”

  Chan snapped the picture just as our tank pulled off the road and slammed on the brakes. The gunny jumped off first, shouting as he landed, “Get off! Move it! Move it!”

  I jumped down and stumbled into a column already forming.

  Freckle-faced Sudsy trotted up to us. “Lieutenant wants to know if you’d mind switching to an M16 for this sweep? We got a gunner with no gun in Third Platoon, and they’re setting up a blocking action for the sweep.”

  “He actually asked me?”

  “Yeah.” Sudsy blew a small bubble from what had to be an ancient piece of bubble gum. “He said you gunners are a strange breed, once you get used to a gun.”

  “Well, I sure ain’t that used to it yet.”

  “Ol’ Red sure was,” Sudsy said. “The guy you’re giving it to is up front.” He turned and started back toward the front of the column with Chan and me following.

  “What did you mean, Red sure was?” I shouted over the rumbling of diesel engines.

  “The lieutenant tried to get the gun away from Red once when we were up at Hai Van Pass and ol’ Red wouldn’t let him have it.”

  Lieutenant Campbell looked happy to see us. He was talking to the gunner from Third Platoon.

  “Thanks, John. We’ll get your gun back to you right after this sweep. This M16 is going to be a lot easier to carry across that field.” He handed me the plastic M16 as I gave the M60 to the Third Platoon gunner. I felt like I was abandoning an old, trusted friend. The little M16 rifle felt like a toy. The lieutenant held Chan’s rifle while he removed four hundred rounds from around his neck.

  “Is this a major operation, Lieutenant?” Chan asked.

  “A spotter plane saw a lot of fresh dirt out there. It looks like they may be doing some digging.” He looked at me and smiled. “I bet it feels good to get rid of that gun, doesn’t it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What?”

  “I’m better with the gun than the M16.”

  “He’s telling the truth, Lieutenant,” Chan added. “Don’t ask me why. Our instructor at Lejeune said he was a natural gunner.”

  “I’ll get it back to you as soon as this sweep is over.” His face looked happily puzzled. He patted me on the back and turned to look for Sudsy.

  A few minutes later the sweep started across a treeless field. The huge steel monsters led the way, churning deep paths into the moist earth for fifty meters. Having tanks in front of us was a new phenomenon. Hiding behind a thirty-ton caterpillar with cannon gave me a new sense of confidence.

  That confidence was short-lived. We reached a ledge with a twenty-five-foot drop that no tank could possibly negotiate. The tanks lined up along the ledge overlooking a relatively flat, unwooded area. Small ridges of earth covered with brush dotted the terrain like some gigantic gopher had pushed up long mounds of dirt.

  We climbed down the embankment, fanned out on line, and proceeded cautiously across the field. Suddenly my foot sank into an ankle-deep hole and I fell forward. I caught myself with my rifle. I realized immediately what I’d done. The barrel of my rifle, the notoriously jam-mable M16, was rammed full of mud.

  I wanted to tell someone, but we were past the point of talking. Visions of meeting the enemy, pulling the trigger, and nothing happening flashed through my head. Then an even worse vision of the barrel blowing up in my face flashed across my mind.

  One hundred meters across the field I smelled a faint whiff of smoke. I wasn’t sure if anyone else smelled it or not. Chan, looking straight ahead, moved slowly fifteen feet to my right. I looked quickly to my left. Jackson had come to a stop. He was looking down into a large hole in the ground. Ten feet in front of us was the first of the long mounds of dirt, six feet tall and about thirty feet long.

  I didn’t like the embankment in front of me. I looked at it, then at Jackson, and then back at the embankment.

  “Ohhh, gooks!”

  Jackson turned away from the hole and jumped backwards. Three shots followed in quick succession. I dropped to one knee. Green plastic flew from the hole, followed by a small cloud of smoke. Three men jumped out of the hole carrying rifles. I opened fire as they scrambled over the embankment. My rifle worked! The last one staggered at the top of the embankment then fell forward to the other side. We ran forward, taking cover against the embankment.

  I pulled a grenade off my cartridge belt, pulled the pin, and tossed it over the embankment. A moment later Chan did the same. We leaned against the dirt, bracing for the explosions. I put in a new clip of ammo. Suddenly I realized that they could be doing the same thing. My grenade exploded, then Chan’s. I ran around to the end of the mound and fired the entire clip full automatic into the prone bodies of two of the NVA and dove back behind the mound.

  I yanked the empty clip out and jammed another full one into the M16. Adrenaline shot through my system. My hands were shaking. I gasped for air like a panting dog. I pulled another grenade off my flak jacket, straightened the pin, pulled, and threw it over the mound. Gunpowder smoke filled the air. My second grenade exploded. I darted around the end of the mound again, unleashed an eighteen-round burst, firing from the hip, and jumped back behind the mound.

  Marines were screaming something twenty yards to my left. I pulled out the empty clip and reloaded. My fear had been replaced by the sheer thrill that comes with a life-and-death situation. The thought of getting shot when I stepped around the mound had not even occurred to me until Swift Eagle slid in beside me breathing hard and looking mad.

  “Don’t fire that wa
y again! Some of your rounds almost hit the First Platoon. They’re flanking the gooks. Are you trying to get yourself killed, boot?”

  “I don’t know what happened, Chief. I just really got into it.”

  “You keep playing John Wayne and you’re not going to make it out of here.”

  “Cease fire! We’re movin’ in!” Lieutenant Campbell ran over to Swift Eagle and me. “Okay, Chief, let’s see what we bagged.” Swift Eagle turned and shouted, “Give us cover! We’re going in for a count!”

  We ran around the mound and spread out. I could see one body but not the other two. I wondered if they got away—but how could anyone survive all those grenades?

  “Here’s one, Lieutenant!” Swift Eagle shouted and pointed at a body I didn’t see.

  We moved forward cautiously.

  “Are you sure there were just three?” Lieutenant Campbell asked.

  “That’s all I saw, Lieutenant,” I said, not daring to move my eyes from straight ahead.

  “Where’s the third?” I looked to my right. Swift Eagle stood over a khaki-clad corpse. “This one’s been shot. He’s yours, John.” The Indian’s expression didn’t change. Business as usual. “Looks like a kid.”

  I walked over to the chief and stared down at the dead man. He was face up. His single-shot Russian SKS rifle lay beside him. It was a grotesque scene. Singularly odd. The skull was split in half, like a watermelon. The morbidly yellow face lay fully intact but separate from the rest of the skull and looking up with a ludicrous expression of almost childish shock. I felt riveted to the ground. I wanted to pull my eyes away but couldn’t. I could hear voices drifting in and out around me. The gray brains of the dead man slid lazily onto the ground, carried by a tiny river of dark-red blood. My mouth tasted like bitter cotton. Sweat streamed out of every pore on my body.

  “Quit admiring your work and see if he’s got any papers on him.” I didn’t recognize the voice, but it struck a nerve. I turned around slowly. By the time I faced the voice, tears were trying to force their way out of my eyes. I dropped the M16 and started toward a short, stocky corporal with a thick brown mustache. Someone grabbed me in a bear hug.