Guns Up!

by Johnnie Clark

  “Woooooo-we!” the pilot shouted. “Thank you, Uncle Sam, for this steel plate I got my butt on!”

  A moment later we were out of range. The door gunner slid back toward Chan and me. “Are you okay?” His bushy mustache made him look like a walrus.

  “Yes, but your aircraft has a new hole in it,” Chan said.

  “That’s par for the course. We picked up a medevac in Dodge City about a month ago and got hit thirty-seven times in an old bucket just like this one. We still made it home.”

  “No one got hit?” I asked.

  “Yeah, the copilot, but he lived.”

  “We’ve spent time in Dodge City, only in the mud. We’re gunners. Wouldn’t want to change places, would ya?”

  I knew the answer, but I wanted to see if these fly-boys had proper respect for the grunts.

  “Ain’t no way, dude! I’ve been down there once too often already.”

  “You were a grunt?” Chan asked.

  “For one week. With the Ninth.”

  “How’d you get out of the bush? I heard you have to have three Purple Hearts to transfer from gunner to chopper gunner,” I said.

  “Yeah. That’s what I heard too, but I had a good buddy who was an office pogue in the rear, and he wrote me up a duty change.”

  “Are you feedin’ me some bull?” I said.

  “Nope. It’s the truth.” He held up his right hand as if he were swearing in.

  Chan and I looked at each other in disgust.

  “Can your friend do it again?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Rotated home.”

  “Is there actually a movie theater in Da Nang?” Chan asked.

  “Sure is. On Freedom Hill. Got cold beer, too.”

  “I bet you guys get beer every night, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Yep. We even have our own little refrigerator.”

  “It feels like we’re going down. Are we at Da Nang already?” I asked.

  “No. We’re picking up some KIAs on Hill 188. See it?” He pointed at a muddy hilltop surrounded by barbed wire. It stuck out like a brown-cratered thumb in a sea of green.

  The chopper settled into the muck of the mountain with a squish instead of the customary bounce. Four solemn-looking, helmetless Marines hustled toward us from a nearby sandbag bunker. They were shirtless and splattered from head to toe with dried mud. They carried a dead Marine wrapped in a poncho liner. Ten yards from us they sank into green muck up to their knees. When they reached the open hatch, they heaved the corpse in. It landed at my feet. The expressionless face just stared. Chan and the door gunner dragged the stiff, heavy corpse away from the hatch. Two more shirtless Marines came toward us carrying another dead man wrapped in a poncho spotted with dried blood. They heaved the corpse in and stood staring with the same blank faces. Then huge tears started streaming uncontrollably down the cheeks of one of the young men. I’d never seen anyone cry such huge tears without a sound or the slightest change of expression.

  The chopper lifted off grudgingly from the sucking mud. Not a word was uttered by anyone. Wind swirling through the open hatch lifted the poncho nearest me, revealing a blond-haired, handsome boy.

  “Look at his face, Chan.”

  “Yes. He was a good-looking guy.” Chan leaned back with a sigh. “I wish we’d try to win this war.”

  “I wonder why we don’t. I mean the real reason.”

  “We’ll probably never know.”

  “Did you hear what old MacArthur said?” I asked.

  “When?”

  “My mom wrote in her last letter that he was appalled at what the government was doing to the American fighting man. He said he could take the First Marine Division, sweep to Hanoi, and end the war in three weeks.”

  “You know he’s right.” Chan sighed. “And I know and the gooks know, but I’m beginning to think we’ll never do it.”

  “My leg is starting to hurt pretty bad.”

  “Mine too. The morphine is wearing off.”

  “I’m a PFC, and I could have told the morons that after one month,” I said.

  “Told them what?”

  “That we could end the war in three weeks if we went to Hanoi.”

  “If we don’t do something offensive, we’re going to look just like the chicken French.”

  “How long has it been since you two slept in a bed?” the door gunner shouted from his position near the open hatch.

  “I don’t even remember!” I answered.

  “I do!” Chan said. “At least seven months!”

  “Well, get ready for a real bed!”

  “Welcome to Da Nang!” the pilot shouted from the cockpit.

  We came down on a portable landing pad about fifty yards from a group of gray Quonset huts. NAS was painted in large red letters on the roof and side of the nearest building. I could see people running from hut to hut. Others ran toward us carrying stretchers. Another medevac chopper lifted off to our left. It wasn’t one hundred feet off the ground before another landed in its place. A drab green truck pulled up beside us. Two corpsmen jumped out, opened the back doors of the truck, then rushed over to us.

  “Give us the stiffs!” a tall young corpsman shouted at the door gunner.

  Two other corpsmen ran up to the open hatch. “Wounded first! Who’s hit the worst?”

  “After you,” Chan said with a motion of his hand.

  “Where am I going?” I asked as I struggled onto a stretcher.

  “Your friendly Naval Aid Station,” a corpsman answered.

  A minute later they dumped me onto an operating table and rushed off again. Chan was close behind. Two corpsmen laid him on a table beside me. He looked like he had just gotten off a roller coaster the hard way. Fifteen tables lined the wall to my front with muddy Marines, all of them bleeding. Tubes ran in and out of each man. Plastic bags of blood and glucose and God knows what else drained over each bed.

  Doctors shouted for instruments while others shouted for thread or bandages. The large room was a pandemonium of noise. No one seemed to be in charge. Bright lights glared off white walls. Even the doctors were dressed in blood-spattered white, with only their eyes showing. Medical personnel rushed about, colliding and shoving each other out of the way.

  The pain was getting worse. A whiff of ether smacked my nostrils. Normally, the smell of hospitals made me sick, but it had been so long since I smelled anything but the stench of the jungle and unwashed bodies that I found the antiseptic aroma strangely comforting.

  I felt like a caveman. The electric lights fascinated me. The air felt abnormally cool. Maybe the loss of blood, I thought. Air conditioning! “Chan! It’s air conditioning!”

  “Where are you hit, Marine?”

  I looked to my left to see the harried face of a young corpsman.

  “My legs.”

  He reached for a large pair of scissors and started cutting up one leg of my trousers to the hip. A grenade fell out of one of the huge trouser pockets and bounced between the corpsman’s feet. He turned pale. Then he lost control.

  “You jarheaded moron! What are you doing with a grenade in here!”

  His panicky scream startled everyone around us into silence. He was still too stiff with panic to pick up the grenade from between his feet.

  “Haven’t you heard, Squid?” I said with as threatening a tone as I could muster. “There’s a war going on out there, and frags are tools of my trade.” The frightened corpsman squatted slowly, delicately picked up the grenade with a forefinger and thumb, and ran out of the room holding it at arm’s length.

  The wounded around me were getting quite a chuckle, especially Chan, and I must say I was feeling rather pleased with myself until a doctor appeared from nowhere and shoved a pill in my mouth.

  “This is Darvon, Marine. It will help relieve the pain a little. I can’t give you anything else for now. We’re out of nearly everything. We have to save what’s left for the more seriously wounded.”

  He turned to the frightene
d corpsman, who had by now reluctantly disposed of my grenade.

  “Cut his boots off and dig the shrapnel out.”

  The most serious wound was just under my left knee. The doctor was pointing to that spot when he said the word “dig.”

  A moment later three very large characters, all dressed in white, waltzed up to my table and proceeded to hold me down by my hands and feet. Things were beginning to look very grim again. I wanted to resist being held down, but six months of C-rations and humping fifteen to twenty miles a day had turned me into a walking skeleton. I was too weak to put up a struggle.

  It felt like he was digging for clams. I screamed until someone gave me a towel to bite. He finally ceased the torture, stepped back from the table, and made the most ludicrous statement a man in his position could possibly make.

  “Well.” He paused, looking into the now gaping hole in my left leg, scratching his head like Stan Laurel, and sounding like a female impersonator. “I guess it’s too deep to dig out.”

  My head dropped back to the table. I kept waiting to hear the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. The pain felt worse now than when I got hit. It convinced me that these fools were using me for on-the-job training.

  The brunt of the Tet Offensive was over, but the combat was still heavier than at any other time in the history of the war. That fact became more alarming to me after they sewed me up, cleaned me, and wheeled me into a long Quonset hut filled to the limit with wounded Marines.

  I fought back a loud sigh at the touch of clean white sheets. It felt so clean, cleaner than anything I could remember. I drifted into a deep sleep.

  “How are you feeling, Marine?”

  The soft voice sounded too pleasant to be anything but a dream.

  “Wake up. Time for medicine.”

  I opened my eyes slowly for fear of chasing away my sensuous illusion. Huge round blue eyes seemed to be staring back at me through a thick fog. What was that smell? Lilac, I thought. Benita George used to wear lilac, or was that Jody Abbott? Oh, what a body. Benita was blond. I blinked my eyes. Either some of the fog had cleared or I had perfected dreaming. Bleached-blond hair surrounding large white teeth. I blinked again. Huge, healthy, positively American breasts. Couldn’t be.

  I slowly raised my right hand toward the lovely vision. I gave one breast two light pats. Hm. Firm dream, I thought. She smiled.

  “I think you’ll live, Marine.” She reached for a tray beside the bed and hoisted out of it a bayonet, disguised as a needle. “Roll over.”

  I felt like a beached whale. I quickly nodded off and into a world full of large, friendly blondes.

  “PFC Clark?”

  That is not a dream, that is a nightmare, I thought. I opened my eyes. A stern-faced major in dress greens looked down at me.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I am presenting you with the Purple Heart medal on behalf of the United States Marine Corps.” A young Red Cross girl handed him a purple box, then focused in on me with a camera. He opened the box and showed me the medal. “Would you like me to pin it on?” he asked.

  I looked down to discover I was wearing blue pajamas. “No, I’ll just lay the box by me.”

  “As you wish. This young lady is here to take a picture if you want. We suggest that you have the photo taken to send to your folks back home and let them know you’re okay. Marines will come to their door with a telegram informing your next of kin that you have been wounded in hostile action in Quang Ngai Province.” He turned and practically marched to the next bed.

  “Smile,” she said, and I didn’t. “That will be one dollar.” She tore the Polaroid picture from the camera and handed it to me like a traffic cop.

  “But I don’t have any money. We don’t get paid in the bush. I don’t even know where my wallet is.”

  “Your belongings are in the medical bag hanging on the side of your bed. You will receive a one-hundred-dollar Military Payment Certificate today. I’ll come back later for the dollar.”

  She never got her dollar, and I never got my hundred. Twenty-four hours later I was flying south toward an Air Force hospital in Cam Rahn Bay aboard a C-130. Vietnam looked so pretty from the air, a giant green quilt with each square piece a different shade of green. I envied pilots.

  The giant snub-nosed plane bulged with wounded Marines. I couldn’t see Chan, but I figured he’d be aboard. I dozed off again and didn’t wake until we bounced down at Cam Rahn airstrip. The engines whined to a stop. As we were unloaded from the plane, I noticed a strange silence. No artillery! We had landed so far away from the war there wasn’t even the sound of artillery.

  The Air Force hospital at Cam Rahn looked more like a cheap housing district in the U.S. But the Waldorf wouldn’t have looked any better to me. Paved roads led us to the hospital, and I thought I actually saw streetlights. Sidewalks and well-kept hedges linked all the little one-story buildings together. Army and Air Force people walked about, carrying soft drinks instead of M16s and towels instead of packs. Everyone looked clean.

  They wheeled me into a hospital ward. The wonders continued to unfold. Cold air-conditioned air slapped me in the face. Television sets mounted above some of the beds just about took my breath away. Telephones rang, and women nurses strolled in and out of the building. “I don’t believe this!”

  “Can you believe this?” a familiar voice said.

  I looked right. Chan lay in the bed next to me.

  “Chan! I’ve been wondering where you were.”

  Before he could answer another voice interrupted.

  “Just like downtown, ain’t it, dude?”

  The voice was slow, deep, and monotonous, with a faintly nasal intonation. The face looked like a New York Italian’s. Definitely a New York something.

  “It’s unreal!” I said. “I can’t even hear artillery.”

  “You guys are Marines, no doubt. Da Nang must be overflowing again.”

  “Yeah, it is. Are you a Marine?”

  “No way, man. I just broke my arm playing volleyball down at the beach. I’m Air Force.”

  “Volleyball?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Beach?” Chan echoed my disbelief.

  “Sure,” he said. “What do they do to you clowns anyway? Where have you been, another planet?”

  “Yeah. It’s called the bush.” I rolled toward Chan, hoping to end the conversation.

  “Hey listen, man. I wanna quiz ya about the war when I get back from the latrine, okay?”

  I ignored him. “How you feeling, Chan?”

  “A lot better now that she’s here.”

  His eyes led me to a beautiful red-headed Red Cross girl doing her best to maneuver a cart full of books and magazines through the swinging doors of our ward. She pushed the cart to the foot of my bed and stopped.

  “Hi, fellas.” She smiled. “See anything you’d like?”

  My heartbeat picked up a couple of extra thumps. All we could do was stare. I felt like a country boy visiting the big city. Before either of us gained our composure, she dropped a pencil. The pencil bounced between our beds. She seemed to pay no attention to the pencil; she grabbed two magazines, walked between our beds, and handed one to each of us. She then turned around and bent over from the waist to retrieve the pencil.

  Though normally Chan’s manner conformed to an accepted standard of propriety and good taste exceeding that of most Marines, with the combination of combat fatigue, pain, short dress, long legs, exquisite rear end, and generous view, the strain was too much. He succumbed and leaned so far out of his bed that his head banged into mine, which coincidentally had drifted into approximately the same area. Naturally, she turned around in time to see us gawking.

  Chan winced slightly, closed his eyes, and grimaced as if in great pain. I had never seen him more embarrassed. I decided to come to our weak but nonetheless hopeless defense.

  “We’ve been in the bush a long time, ma’am, and you’re our first mini-skirt.”

  “I would like to apolo
gize …” Chan began.

  “You haven’t seen a mini-skirt before?” she asked unbelievingly.

  “They were coming in just as we were going out,” Chan said.

  Chan spoke the painful truth, undoubtedly the single most atrocious crime against good timing I had personally committed.

  “You have to be Marines.” Her smile let us know she understood.

  “Are you wounded badly?”

  “No, just shrapnel,” Chan answered.

  “Speak for yourself,” I said. “Mine hurts!”

  “I suppose you’ve been on R&R by now?”

  “No,” we said in unison.

  She looked pleased with our answer. She looked around secretively before continuing.

  “If you two want more than a look, it’ll cost you fifty each. Make up your minds. I’ll be back later.”

  With that she pushed her little cart away, leaving me thoroughly jolted.

  “That’s a shame,” Chan said quietly, as much to himself as to me.

  “What is?”

  “That a beautiful young lady, who very likely began her adventure as a Red Cross girl in Vietnam with humanitarian and patriotic ideals, has become no more than a prostitute.” He looked at me seriously. “I think we should pray for her.” He stared at me, then broke into a smile. “You look like I just stole your candy.”

  He was right, that’s the way I felt.

  “Look, Chan”—I suddenly felt angry with him, but I wasn’t sure why—”I don’t want to pray.” I stopped myself from going on with some angry comment on how I just wanted to lust in peace.

  “Sorry,” he said. He knew how I was feeling.

  I was almost happy to see two solemn-looking characters dressed in white appear at the foot of my bed with a wheelchair. A half-dozen examinations later, a bespectacled physician informed me that I had managed to catch four or possibly five strange little jungle diseases ranging from a touch of malaria to worms.

  “According to your records, you’ve lost forty-two pounds.”

  That hurt. I hated losing weight. I hadn’t realized how skinny I’d become. One of the strange ironies of war was how all the trivial concerns, like worrying about my physique, had not entered my mind once in seven months. In a bizarre kind of way it felt good to forget all the trifles.