Thirty Days Has September Page 13

  The Gunny repeated what I told him word for word

  “Roger that, over,” came back, after only a few seconds. “The actual says nice work.”

  The Gunny went back to building his hooch and getting out of the rain.

  “Fessman, have Zero come over here,” I ordered.

  Seconds later the giant of a man appeared, the moonlight gleaming off his black skin. He wore only the green undershirt. I wondered if he was impervious to the awful onslaught of the nightly mosquito attacks.

  “Sir,” he said, squatting down, his comment sounding not like a question but more as a request for orders.

  “You backed me,” I said, looking into the black pools where his eyes were supposed to be. “I back you.”

  “Sir?” he asked, a tone of surprise in his voice.

  “You heard me,” I answered. “Dismissed.”

  The man scurried away, no doubt getting under his own poncho to get away from the cloying misty rain.

  “The best combat promotion I’ve ever made,” I whispered to myself, in some twisted attempt to find any humor within me. I wasn’t even sure I could make battle field promotions at all. I’d heard of such things but presumed them to be the province of generals or admirals, and not lowly make-believe lieutenants.

  “Fessman,” I whispered, knowing the Child-Marine would appear in seconds like some sort of magical ghost. And he did.

  “Sir?” he inquired, ready with the radio handset extended.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I need a rubber band, but a smaller one. Where do you get rubber bands out here, anyway?” I asked.

  “Rittenhouse, sir,” he replied. “Company Clerk. I’ll get one. What do you need it for, I mean, if I may ask, sir?”

  “Cover my flashlight lens so I can write something,” I said. “I can punch a hole in a piece of paper and see good enough. In fact, get Rittenhouse over here.”

  Rittenhouse did not come because the night exploded with incoming fire. Small arms tracers began to arc from the mountain down into the Company area, effectively making it a beaten zone. I cringed. The whole team cringed. Even digging in would have been of little help unless digging deep down below the heavy layer of jungle mud and tough interlacing roots. I could not call fire on the hill because our company was universally known to have taken it earlier in the day. There would be no suppressing artillery fire and air did not fly at night, unless it was to dump officers like me into hell.

  I crawled the few feet over to the Gunny’s hooch.

  “What’s our plan?” I asked, wondering if there was any plan at all, other than to exchange small arms fire with the NVA occupying the hill.

  “Nothing,” the Gunny said, sitting up calmly and eating from a C-Ration can. “We don’t return fire. They kinda know where we are but not really in detail, otherwise they wouldn’t be lighting up the areas we’re not at. All we can do is wait until morning. At least we know they’re on that hill in force. We’d have lost half the company trying to take it. Tonight we’ll lose some but nothing like that.”

  I heard the distinctive thwup of mortar rounds leaving their tubes. I went flat, face down into the mud at the Gunny’s feet.

  “Outgoing,” he said, lighting a cigarette and looking down at me.

  I knew he was trying not to laugh at my appearance. How I had gone from being the cutting edge of a wired-together, highly-trained Marine Officer to the piece of muddy flotsam laying at the Gunny’s feet was beyond understanding or accurate description. I plucked myself out of the mud.

  “The 81s stayed for the night,” the Gunny said, as the big mortar rounds impacted on the hill and things got quiet again.

  “Variable time fuses on those things. The shrap will keep their heads down for awhile, but they couldn’t haul too much ammo on their backs alone.”

  “So, we just wait?” I asked, feeling stupid.

  “Sometimes God means it that way,” the Gunny said, making me wonder if his being Spanish also meant he was Catholic, like me. “We do nothing but wait.”

  “And pray?” I asked, looking for a hint at his background.

  “Sure, if you feel lucky,” he said back, giving me nothing.

  “We wait for the Red Ball,” he went on, taking in a double lungful of smoke, and then blowing it out slowly.

  I noticed that the mist had relented. It was only oven hot, not wet oven hot. I wondered how I’d get my new layer of mud off. I didn’t want to use my precious half-canteen of drinking water. I lived for my coffee moments where I could read the cigarette box notes from home. The last one I’d read had promised a farm breakfast of fresh eggs and salted bacon slabs from a farm couple in Iowa. I’d saved that one in my wallet with the address. H54 Nodaway, Iowa was the address. The Mulberrys. I would go and visit them for breakfast I promised myself, if I ever got back.

  “What’s a red ball?” I asked, hoping I was not simply revealing more of my endless ignorance.

  “Sometimes the medevac chopper is so filled with wounded that the fuselage bleeds red,” the Gunny answered, no derisive inflection in his tone. “Called the Red Ball. If the chopper comes in and leaves under fire, it does it real fast. That’s called the Red Ball Express.”

  I thought about the lucky ones. Aboard the Red Ball Express. I then thought about how bizarre it was to think about being shot as being lucky. I crawled on all fours back to my hooch to wait out the night. To make it from one bout of incoming fire to another, with the 81s providing the only release from the noise and paralyzing fear. And the cries of the wounded. No wounded yet. No cries. I girded myself to wait. No heavy machine guns or mortars on the hill or they’d have opened up already. That kind of “good news” in combat was as bizarre to think about as hoping to get aboard the Red Ball Express.

  I did pray but I didn’t feel lucky. I prayed that Jurgens’ men would not be sent to kill me in the night, and if they were sent they’d be put off by the Gunny being nearby, or maybe not able to find me in the muck of the night.

  seventeen

  The Fifth Day

  No light meant it wasn’t yet morning. Not even moonlight under the broken bamboo and soggy brush that cascaded down and over almost everything under it. I lay there, disturbed by the fact that I’d lost the ability to determine if I was asleep or awake. Had I slept or been awake for the whole night? Humans had to sleep. I’d read somewhere that the world’s record for going without sleep was only four or five days — about the same time I’d been in country. I didn’t feel rested or experience any of the relief I would have felt if I’d actually slept. It seemed that the night had been filled with one volley of green tracers after another plunging down on our position from the side of the untaken hill, followed by mortar rounds sent back by Lima Company’s on-loan mortar team.

  For some reason the mosquitoes had let up. Had they taken in enough of the repellent to cause them to go soggy and inert? I wondered. I thought about the jungles of Vietnam — how they were nothing like I’d been led to expect from Tarzan and other Saturday morning shows from my youth. There was no “triple canopy” stuff, rising hundreds of feet into the air, with vines and liana strung everywhere. Tarzan would have had to walk like the rest of us in the lowlands of Vietnam, where lush green shoulder high brush and bamboo groves were interspersed with only an occasional large cypress, and there was plenty of mud everywhere. Reed clumps permeated every open area and allowed for hooches to be inhabitable with the monsoons approaching. The reeds could be easily cut and then laid under ponchos or the few air mattresses that weren’t filled with holes. I had no mattress since I’d never made it to supply.

  My letter home was ready to go although I wasn’t sure I should send it. My wife was back home in San Francisco, waiting. My parents were in Florida doing whatever they were doing, what with my dad being a warrant officer in the Coast Guard. My brother was an army officer tanker serving in the Big Red One down
South in a place called Bien Hoa. My letter detailed what was to be done when I didn’t come home. Ever. There was the government life insurance, the six month’s pay, a small private policy with a company called Mass Mutual, and the pay I was owed but hadn’t been paid out yet. My list to Mary was eleven items long. I couldn’t believe that everything I had ever had could be easily described in eleven entries, wherein about six of them were rather meaningless. What to do with my Ace Double Science Fiction collection of books seemed idiotic. Would my wife react badly or understand that she had to do certain stuff without me in order to take care of herself and the baby? Would the contents of the letter be too much for her emotionally?

  Dim first light allowed me to see the ground around me but not much farther. As the mist slowly lifted, I could make out where the incoming bouts of small arms fire had died out. The enemy entrenched on the sides of Hill 110 were probably wondering why no artillery had been dumped on them, I thought with a frown. The whole idea of making believe we’d taken a hill, lying to Command and then trying to survive nearby was so unlike any Marine operation that it was simply too much to take in. I wondered if I was a better more experienced officer whether I would have been able to actually command the unit and effectively take the required objective.

  I struggled up and got my stuff together to make coffee. The Gunny came over, Pilson crawling behind him. Fessman appeared at my shoulder with Zero and Stevens not far behind. Only Nguyen hung back, barely visible behind everyone, his gleaming black eyes meeting mine. It was like seeing a leopard in the bush and like a leopard he disappeared after only a few seconds.

  “Your nickname’s not Zero anymore,” I said to him, and the group in general. “It’s Zippo, like the lighter. Every time someone calls you Zero you correct him, and so will everyone else. Zero is a put down and you don’t have to take that here or anywhere.” I looked around but no one met my eyes except Fessman. He smiled. My first commands to the unit were about seemingly nonsense items, but where was I to start? I wasn’t even the real six actual.

  “How many?” I asked the Gunny, over the too-hot lip of my canteen holder, the liquid slightly burning my lips.

  “Six and three,” he answered, making his own fixings.

  Stevens, Zippo, and Fessman munched on crackers from the C-Rations issued the day before. I accepted a cracker. Fessman handed me a tin of Peanut Butter (fortified) from somewhere in Georgia. I wondered what “fortified” meant, but gouged some of the stuff onto my cracker without comment. I took a few seconds to eat the whole cracker down. The peanut butter was some of the best I’d ever had in my life, although I knew some of the flavor might be enhanced by where I was and what was happening. The stuff was called Cinderella. I also wondered about why it had any name at all once packaged inside one of the rather anonymous looking ration tins.

  “Six KIA and three wounded,” I noted, trying to get my tongue straight after clearing the peanut butter from my mouth. “All by small arm injuries I would presume. And why are there always more killed than injured. That doesn’t seem right.”

  “The way it is,” the Gunny replied, his tone revealing a little exasperation.

  “I’d like to see the bodies before they go on the chopper,” I responded.

  “Sealed up, tagged, and clipped,” the Gunny came right back. “Tomorrow, if we have any, maybe.”

  I stared at him until he focused his eyes on mine. I waited, neither of us taking in any of our cooling coffee. I didn’t know what I was after but I knew I could not go on as the fucking new guy who does nothing, yet doesn’t get sent out to be the point. The dead and wounded were my men, my responsibility, and there wasn’t much getting around that. Why there was any discussion about it at all surprised me. Not totally, because of the friendly fire casualties I knew we were enduring, but there was something more. I felt it.

  “Fine,” the Gunny said, putting his coffee down and reaching into one of his cargo pockets on the outside of his right leg. I thought he was going for a cigarette but he wasn’t. He pulled out a small rubber-banded white paper package and held it out toward me with is left hand. With his right he picked up his coffee. It was his turn to wait.

  I stared at the package. I’d gotten through the night frightened but not terrified. I’d gotten rid of the shakes. I wasn’t used to the dirt, grime and smell, but I had a feeling I was never going to get used to those. While I stared at the unwavering package held out before me, I vowed to never ever start another day, if I made it back to the real world, without taking a hot shower. The thought of such a shower made my mind waver a bit. Enough to make the Gunny comment.

  “Well?” he said. “You wanted this.” He shoved the package out a few more inches.

  I took it into my right hand. The package was about the size of a child’s fist. My peanut butter fingers, undercoated with layers of grimy bug juice and dirt, made smudges on the outside of the paper. I looked over at the Gunny, who seemed positively clean and crisp compared to the rest of us. I wondered how he did it but brought my mind back to the package without asking him anything.

  “What’s inside?” I asked, my eyes going back and forth between the Gunny’s and the package.

  He didn’t reply. I noticed that the tableau had become frozen. Nobody was moving, eating or even breathing around me. They were all waiting. I looked over the Gunny’s shoulder, past Pilson, his radioman. Nguyen’s eyes looked out from low down inside a nearby bamboo grove. His head slowly nodded. I looked back down at the package and then back, but the inscrutable Montagnard was gone.

  I slowly removed the two rubber bands, being careful not to break them. I set them gently down on my poncho cover. I unwrapped the paper. Nine morphine curettes fell into the palm of my right hand. I struggled a bit to hold them without dropping any. I looked closely. Each small lead curette was partially covered by a white label. Written in red on each were the words: “solution of morphine ½ grain .5cc”

  “Morphine,” I said, feeling rather stupid. “Morphine, like with the corpsman.” I’d never seen morphine in any container before. I was surprised that the most effective and wonderful painkiller on earth came in such small packages. Each curette was no bigger than my little finger. I worked to get the package back together while my mind went into overdrive. What did the morphine, intended to be carried and applied by the corpsmen alone, have to do with being now in my possession and somehow associated with the dead and wounded?

  I looked up when I was done, not sure whether I should hand the package back or hold on to it as I was seemingly intended to do. I noticed it was lighter around me. The resupply would be coming and it was an important one. The Gunny looked around at the Marines surrounding us. They all got up and left, as if he’d given them an order. But nobody had spoken. In seconds we were alone, only the faint chatter of birds starting their day sounding in the distance.

  “What’s the mystery?” I asked.

  The Gunny said nothing.

  “What is it, God damn it, Gunny?” my voice rising slightly.

  “When they’re hit bad enough and no medevac can come in because of the night or weather, then you have to do something,” he said, like saying the words was difficult for him.

  “Yes?” I replied, not getting what he might be talking about.

  “Company commander. It’s part of the CO’s job,” the Gunny went on. “It was my job. Now it’s yours. I don’t know what to say about it. You’ll know when it’s the right time.”

  “What?” I said, stated in more of a demanding tone than a question.

  “When they’re too badly wounded to make it through the night you punch in three curettes, unless the Marine is really big, then it may take four,” the Gunny said back, forcefully.

  I looked down at the package. I got it suddenly. My hand opened and the package fell down to the poncho cover, resting against the side of my old leather combat boot.

  “You’v
e got to be kidding me,” I finally said, in a whisper. “What in hell is this? Where is this? I’m supposed to what? Kill one of my men? Make the decision that he can’t make based on what? I’m the company commander, not God.”

  “I did it last night,” the Gunny replied, his voice so sad sounding I didn’t know what to say back.

  “Did it?” I uttered, not knowing why I said the words because I understood all too well what he’d done. “How did you know?” I asked, for no reason I could think of, my mind in complete turmoil. I couldn’t believe we were having the discussion at all. I’d shot the Corpsman. I’d called in artillery dangerously close. I’d even targeted First Platoon and thought about dropping a battery of six down upon them, but the thought of injecting of an overdose of morphine into the agonized body of a living Marine kid hit me hard.

  “Do the men know?” I asked.

  “Please,” the Gunny answered, his voice almost a snarl. “The corpsmen tell you when it’s okay to do it. The men know. You think they want to hear one of their friends scream, cry, and talk about his family while he’s dying through the night? You think they want him crying and attracting more fire that might kill them?”

  I looked around. There was no one, not even Nguyen nearly invisible in the brush. No wonder, I thought to myself. No wonder no one was around. Who wanted a part of this? Maybe they’d go home one day. Maybe I’d go home one day. How was I going to tell anyone about this? What kind of war story would this be, and how many of them would there be? I thought of my Uncle Jim in that attic and I pitied him. He’d probably never told a soul on earth about what he’d done. Only a teenage kid in an attic once. Was that going to be me someday? Telling some kid in an attic about killing my own men to stop their suffering, to keep them quiet, to make an absolutely unbelievable and hellishly unexplainable situation somehow limp along and work?

  “I don’t think I can do it,” I finally said, staring down at the deadly package.