Thirty Days Has September Read online

  “Fire mission, over,” I said, knowing Russ would be all over my call. I thought for the three seconds it took for him to come back.

  “Contact fire. Repeat last zone then repeat right three hundred, up three hundred, left six hundred, down three, and give me H.E. super quick with confirm reception, over,” I finished.

  And then I waited. I ordered a lot of ordinance covering a lot of real estate. Were others commandeering the fire? Was I ordering too much for supply to handle? Did I need to intersperse fuses? While I waited the incoming mortar rounds impacted in and around the LZ behind us. Every explosion made all of us wince, although none were close to our position. I wondered if the Gunny had made it out, or the men hauling bodies and after the supplies. I hadn’t even gotten resupplied with water or food, much less anything else. I thought about the water and food and then felt bad because I cared more about losing those than losing the Marines, and I knew it.

  “Shot, over,” came through the tiny speaker on the Prick 25 in Russ’s voice. So much for confirmation, I thought. I’d laid out fire all around the mountain, figuring that the cover of the wooded region just distant from our position would be the likely launch point rather than the flatland more visible from the air. I had two more areas to take out if the mortars fired again, but I would wait.

  “Splash, over,” came in just when the mortars stopped exploding.

  The sound of the express train rounds came first and then the real explosions began. They seemed to go on forever, but in the distance, like the artillery in some war movie. Unlike in a movie, where the sound of the rounds was instant with the appearance of a blast, in real life when you called artillery the sounds came back so late that the whole battle scene became eerie and off-worldly. If I’d been positioned to adjust fire at the perimeter, I’d have experienced that but I wasn’t on the line and wasn’t going near there either.

  The artillery fire stopped and everything grew quiet. We all sat unmoving. First the mortar round sounds coming in one side and then the artillery from the other was mind-numbing. There would be no ground attack. The NVA did not attack in daylight unless it was a sniper delay team or sappers laying booby traps along any suspected avenues of travel.

  The Gunny appeared out of the jungle, with Pilson, his radioman, right on his shoulder. The Gunny stooped to drop a five-gallon plastic bottle of water while Pilson unloaded two armfuls of C-Ration boxes. Stevens and Zippo moved in to get everything while the Gunny and I squatted to make coffee. Nguyen remained hidden, but there somewhere, I was certain.

  “Good morning,” the Gunny said, with one of his super-rare smiles.

  “Thanks,” I replied. “For the warning back there.”

  “Chopper made it out, but they blew the hell out of six casualties,” he said, taking out his fixings.

  “Six?” I replied, in shock. “We lost six in the attack?”

  “Nah, they blew the hell out of the body bags,” he replied. “The three wounded made it out on the chopper though.”

  “Six?” I said, still shocked. “We lost six last night, then?” All I could really think about was the three I’d been responsible for.

  “Machine guns are a bitch on the ground, and then there’s the other troubles,” the Gunny replied.

  I thought about the “other troubles” and then the landing zone being ripped up by mortars. I thought about Macho Man. Maybe he wasn’t fighting on the ground in combat but he sure had to be taking some fire in that Huey coming in and out of hot landing zones. Maybe his gunfighter rig, however affected, wasn’t so out of place after all. Was it easier to stay in the shit or be able to fly out every day but then have to fly back the next, day in and day out.

  “Binoculars?” the Gunny said, waving one hand toward the case I still carried in my hand.

  “Artillery,” I answered, not knowing what he was getting at.

  “We’re always too close,” he said. “Where you gonna look with them?”

  “A Shau,” I replied.

  “Maybe so, but up there we’re out of range for calling fire.”

  “Beyond maximum effective range,” I said. “Not beyond maximum range.”

  “What’s the difference?” he asked.

  “About five miles with the 105s,” I replied. “The Fire Direction Center doesn’t want to fire beyond 18,000 yards but I can get them to fire out to 23,000 in a pinch and from what I hear we’re always going to be in a pinch up there.”

  “Artillery’s never fired over the lip up there before,” the Gunny concluded, taking a sip of his hot coffee.

  I looked through the wavering heat waves the burning composition created, with no smoke. The Gunny wavered a bit in front of me.

  “We’ve never had you before to call fire, right?” he said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “What time do we cross the line of departure?” I asked back. Ignoring the question, I thought about how I would get over to the southern perimeter to begin calling the fire mission I’d designed earlier to clear our path of booby traps.

  “You’ll have plenty of time,” the Gunny said knowingly, smiling his strange smile again. “Last night they got a pallet of Tiger Piss in here somehow. Most of the guys got shit-faced. Strong beer. They’re all moving pretty slow for a bit.”

  “Just great,” I responded, with my voice gaining strength as I talked. “You let them drink? Out here? In this shit? With everything on the line every minute of every day?”

  “Let them?” the Gunny shot back. “Hell, I drank with them.”

  “At least you’re here and not hung over,” I said, exasperated and relieved at the same time.

  “That’s because I didn’t stop,” the Gunny said, drinking more coffee.

  “You didn’t stop?” I said, my tone one of apprehensive surprise.

  “Nah, I’m shit-faced right now. Still.”

  I put one hand on my forehead, set my old binoculars down and tried to phrase some question to the Gunny that made sense.

  “So how are you going to lead this company up that path to the A Shau today, if your drunk as a skunk?”

  “I’m not,” the Gunny smiled his drunk smile. “You are. You’re the company commander.”

  That he’d said those words in front of other Marines was important to me. He’d not go so far as to call me sir, and I didn’t miss that, either. He’d been absolutely correct when he said that I was completely incapable of being the commanding officer only days earlier, and I felt he was still correct about that. But with everything else I was coming to understand about the situation, nothing followed any preset plan and day to day, hour to hour and even minute to minute survival was everything. Somehow I was supposed to get everyone to do what I wanted them to do, and absolutely no one wanted to do it. What now, lieutenant, indeed?

  “Tell me something,” I said, wondering if he’d tell me the truth since he was drunk. “Do we ever really kill any of the enemy, or is that all about as real as the hill we didn’t take?”

  twenty-five

  The Sixth Day : Third Part

  My scout team took apart my hooch and packed me out while I went forward to the perimeter to lay in the defensive fire up and down the area of our travel. By the time I laid down on a poncho cover provided by one of the Marines on the line, the sun was fast rising over the jungle.

  “Do your thing, Junior,” the Marine said. I saw Fessman wince and frown at the man, but I did not react at all.

  I laid down and brought the binoculars from their case. The path leading up into the A Shau Valley was thousands of meters long and, the start of it hidden in the jungle brush and low-lying trees. The cleft between the peaks leading up to the ridge that stood up over the valley could be viewed for almost half its distance. I focused in and studied the terrain. Even though the glasses didn’t give me much more to work with in terms of adjusting fire, having them made me feel
better. With range always the hardest thing, by far, to attempt to gauge, not having to adjust the glasses on a single point made things easier. In single target firing, over and under fire had to be used to “home in” on the target. Creeping up on the target shot by shot had been the norm in early artillery, but range had proven so difficult to judge that the French were the first to dump the creeping system, followed by everyone else prior to WWII. Shooting over and under the target and then splitting the distance was faster and used fewer rounds.

  I called Russ and revealed my plan in detail, hoping that the battery would have plenty of concrete-piercing and high explosive shells on hand. I asked for a lot of artillery support that wouldn’t be going elsewhere, but I needed it badly for my own survival. The Marine’s comment, even though he used my disparaging nickname, had been revealing. I seemed to have developed a reputation for my ability to call in artillery for anything necessary to protect the unit. That in doing so I, first and foremost, managed to protect myself in several different ways, didn’t appear to matter much, if at all.

  “Got it all dialed in?” a voice from behind my back said. I didn’t have to turn to recognize the Gunny.

  “Roger that,” I replied, having received an assent from the battery that it could and would do the job.

  Russ had wanted to know what was going on but I didn’t have any way to explain things to him because of the open nature of the radio system. Any Prick 25 radio could receive the transmissions. We didn’t have encryption, although that had been discussed for years by the Defense Department.

  Having the enemy hear anything didn’t frighten me nearly as much as what higher ups might think about what I might say.

  “When?” I asked, wondering just how drunk the Gunny was.

  “Probably kick off in an hour or so,” he replied.

  “Guantanamera” began to play over Fessman’s little radio. The words weren’t what I remember from the Seekers song, since they were in Spanish.

  “That’s a cool song,” Fessman said, “but what does it mean?”

  “Cuban,” the Gunny responded, before I could say anything. “It’s a song about the Cuban revolution.”

  If memory served me from a college discussion, the lyrics told of a lost or unreturned love from a peasant girl, but I said nothing. I’d never been sure about the lyrics, anyway, even though I loved the song.

  “I’m going to walk a running series of zone fires up the path all the way to the top just before we start, and then as we move up,” I said, pulling my glasses down and turning to face the Gunny. “What about flank security?”

  “That’s a laugh,” the Gunny replied, laughing out loud. “Hill 110 is on our left flank full of the NVA we didn’t clear out or kill, and the other hill is unknown. What do you recommend?”

  “How about sending First Platoon out on patrol along the flank of Hill 110 and then Fourth Platoon up the other hill?”

  The Gunny laughed some more, my attempt at humor weak, but my meaning reaching him in spite of his inebriated state.

  “Variable Time,” I said, swinging my glasses back up to examine the hillsides bordering the path. “The 155s can reach out this far and if we keep the V.T. stuff up a bit on both sides, we can rain down shrapnel kind of at will. We can’t neutralize booby traps that don’t operate off of detonation, so we have to watch out for them. Other than that, the biggest fear ought to be the big bore machine gun. If they get that set up on the left flank, then they could play hell back and forth across our strung out line.”

  I leaned down to check my map, noting that I didn’t have a map for the A Shau Valley or even the ridge area where we were supposed to end up.

  “How long will it take the company to hump the distance?” I asked the Gunny.

  “About four hours, give or take,” he said.

  I grimaced. Even being inexperienced I knew that the trip would probably take much more time, particularly since it was likely we’d be hit in some fashion and have to set in along the trail. Medevac among the bigger thicker forest was out of the question, which meant any wounded or dead had to be hauled along. To be caught trying to move the last few thousand meters in the dark was too horrid to even consider.

  “I’ll need to be up near the point to call fire,” I said, although deep down I didn’t want to be anywhere near the point.

  “Not likely,” the Gunny said, to my great relief. “You bring up the rear with the feckless Fourth. I’ll be up there. It’s my place. If we need you, we’ll call you.”

  Stevens, Zippo, and Nguyen joined us, all three wearing heavy combat packs with Zippo dragging mine along in one hand without it touching the mud.

  “I’ll hump it up the path, sir,” he said, setting the pack next to me in case I wanted anything from it, although he didn’t comment on that.

  “Nobody wants to go up there,” the Gunny said.

  I put down my binoculars, turned and went to work lighting a chunk of the explosives in the mud.

  “The A Shau is that bad,” I replied, wondering what he was getting at. “I’ve heard stories.”

  “It’s a shit hole, one big, long, and beautiful shit hole,” the Gunny said, “but that’s not the problem.”

  I tore open a great envelope of coffee and poured the small amount into my canteen cover. Somewhere in my pack I had sugar and cream packages but I didn’t know where. Nguyen slipped to my side and stuck two packages of each into one gaping empty pocket sticking out from my chest. The pockets were only usable if you didn’t wear the flak jacket that wasn’t a flak jacket. The jacket didn’t stop high velocity bullets or even hand grenade or rocket fragments. I’d never been issued one since I’d come to the field direct and I wasn’t going to try to find one. It was simply too hot and the loads we packed, too heavy.

  “Artillery,” I said, after a few minutes, reaching for my hot coffee. I’d put my packets in with the coffee powder so I wouldn’t have to stir. The Marines around me had K-Bar knives, giant Bowie knives, but I hadn’t been issued one of those either.

  The Gunny nodded, looking away, his squat so deep and native that he would have looked Vietnamese if he weren’t so big.

  “Me?” I said, finally connecting the little dots he’d laid out in front of me.

  I would have smiled a real smile if I could have. The Marines in the company were afraid of me. It was the first good news I’d heard since the battery had gone along with all my zone fire orders. Admittedly, not too many forward observers called for concrete piercing fuses. They’d have a lot of those laying around, but still.

  “I can’t call in any fire missions on the company location just now,” I said. “The battery knows where we are and they won’t shoot.”

  “God damn it, it’s talk like that they’re afraid of…that I’m afraid of,” the Gunny replied, his tone a plaintive one.

  “Oh?” I answered, surprised. “They didn’t want to take Hill 110, either.”

  “And they didn’t,” the Gunny shot right back.

  “Anybody mention anything to them about our flanking companies and the rest of the battalion, not to mention Regiment and Division?” I asked, my voice low but my tone scathing. “They just think we’re going to be left on our own to do what we want and move where we want out here?”

  I held out my hand behind me and Fessman filled it with the radio handset. I looked first at it and then at the Gunny.

  “Fire mission, over,” I said into the handset, to begin the series of zone fires that would guide the company up the path and into the dreaded A Shau Valley.

  Pilson handed the Gunny the command net handset, but I couldn’t hear what he said. The company left as one, with Marines filing by headed toward the break between the two hills. I watched the move begin, wondering how it all seemed to happen automatically without the substitute platoon commanders yelling orders like would have been heard in training.
r />   The rounds began impacting up and down the sides of the hills in another awesome display of distant firepower. I could not see the impacts but could certainly hear and feel the ground waves from their explosions. My plan was nothing new. I’d read of that in the German SS book, just like the tracers. The Germans had been nearly as good at possessing outstanding artillery guns as they were using them. Nobody on earth in the modern era, however, could match the power and precision of American artillery, and the American stuff had one other advantage: the supply of shells seemed endless.

  I waited for most of the Marines to pass us by, the Gunny departing with Pilson, not saying a word when he left. They fell in easily with the Fourth Platoon, all black except for the few replacements I’d attached to it. I didn’t see them and wondered if Sugar Daddy had used the same solution to his additive problem that Jurgens had. Sugar Daddy appeared near the rear of his platoon, slowly walking by but not stopping as he passed.

  “You keep that shit away from us,” he said, pointing at Fessman for some reason, like the artillery came out of Fessman’s radio.

  My scout team picked up the rear. In training the rear guard was important to a unit moving in combat, but not in Vietnam. For some reason the Vietnamese almost never attacked from the rear, probably because all movements of American troops, barring special ambushes or recon patrols, took place in the daytime.

  The artillery barrage continued up in the valley, splintering the wooded forest on both sides of the path and turning it into timber charnel houses. Craters from the concrete-piercing pocketed the area. Cordite, the smell of exploded munitions, clung to everything and a very thin layer of smoke floated up from the bottom of one hole and over to fill another. With the sounds of artillery becoming more distant, I moved around the blasted tree stumps, careful not to touch them, the shattered wood edges looking razor sharp.

  The sound of the heavy machine gun firing came at nearly the same time as the call “Arty up!” echoed from Marine to Marine down the line.