Thirty Days Has September Read online

  The Gunny came across the mud mess between our hooches. Reverting to ape-hood, I smelled him before I could really see him. I hated the smelling. Soon I would be swinging from the low-hanging branches nearby.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he began, squatting down and lighting a block of explosives with his Zippo.

  I waited, but he said nothing more. Finally, I squatted down, tossing a packet of the Coca Cola coffee to him. I’d dug through the pack and found my small supply.

  “Thank you,” The Gunny said formally, as if we were in some mess hall back in America.

  When I couldn’t wait any longer to for him to tell me about this new problem, I spoke up. “Fessman heard that the Army on our flank is sending somebody over to see us at first light.”

  “That’s great news,” the Gunny replied, his tone suddenly one of excitement. The first excitement I’d heard in his voice since I’d jumped from the chopper a week before. “They’ll bring hot food. They always bring hot food. The men will go nuts. The Screaming Eagles. Great name for an outfit, isn’t it, even if it’s Army? Do you think eagles really scream in the wild?”

  I sat on the edge of my poncho cover, a bit befuddled. The Gunny’s enthusiasm seemed so out of place. We had to cross almost a quarter mile of flat muddy open area where the enemy had to be encamped on the other side after dawn. We had no water to speak of, unless somebody had worked to haul it up, and our artillery was all but useless as an effective accurate means of fire support. We were about to get shot to pieces, and the Gunny was excited about maybe getting a hot meal. I decided to shut up and wait, sloshing what water I had left around in my canteen cover over the Gunny’s fire.

  I thought about crossing the flat open area, wondering about the chances of the letter in my pocket ever making it home? In Basic School, one of the best training officers had said, “Take care of the big things and the little things will go to shit.” I didn’t really understand what he’d meant at the time, and I wasn’t entirely sure now, but the letter in my pocket was a big thing. The little things would have to dribble on down or take care of themselves, unless the choppers didn’t show up.

  “We got a blooper problem,” the Gunny finally said, sipping his steamy brew. How he drank it so boiling hot I had no idea but, it impressed me.

  “Blooper?” I asked, knowing I should know but obviously didn’t.

  “M79 thing,” he said.

  The M79 was a grenade launcher. A 40-millimeter, shotgun-like weapon, that shoots spin-armed “balls” or small grenades. The weapons were issued one to a squad, which meant that the company had a bunch of them. I hadn’t noticed any Marines carrying them. In the Basic School they’d shown us the weapon and then demonstrated it but, since we were officers, we didn’t get to fire it because, well, we were officers. Some Marines thought the weapon was terrific and others found it an underpowered, slow-reloading and heavy piece of crap. It was hard to justify a grenade thrower used in a jungle where bamboo and other heavy growth were seldom more than a few yards away, and the “blooper” round, named that because of it’s strange blooping sound when it launched, didn’t arm itself until it was thirty meters from the end of the tube.

  “We out of blooper ammo?” I asked, trying to prompt the Gunny to explain his situation.

  “Nah, one of the guys from Fourth Platoon fired some rounds last night and a Marine from First Platoon got hit.”

  I wanted to scream “No shit!” in the darkness around me. Bloopers did not have tracers that I knew of, so there was no way to know where rounds fired came from, or went. The race war inside the regular war went on, no matter what plans I implemented to stop it.

  “Wounded or dead?” I asked, sipping my own tepid coffee.

  “Sort of wounded,” the Gunny replied. I couldn’t see his shoulders actually move but I would have bet that he had shrugged when he said the words.

  “Sort of ?” I asked, in surprise. “How in hell does someone get sort of wounded out here?

  “Well, it seems that the round went through the air, probably armed itself, and when it came down it hit this guy’s soft tissue just above his collar bone, and then entered the area around his lung or somehow got down into his abdomen. That’s where the round is now. Inside him. The Marine seems fine though, except for some bleeding and breathing shit, but he’s got that live round in there.”

  “I’d say he meets whatever standard we have for being wounded.”

  “That’s funny, right?” the Gunny replied.

  “I don’t see the problem,” I said, ignoring his comment. “Medevac him and let the aid station work it out. Since they were shooting at each other inside the perimeter, it’s likely the damned thing never got far enough to arm, anyway.”

  “The problem is that medevac won’t come if he has this live round in him. If it goes off in the chopper, then everyone aboard’s dead.”

  “Screw it,” I said. “Don’t tell ’em. This is a game of risk. Lousy risk. They signed on just like we did.”

  “Pilson told them when he called for the chopper,” the Gunny murmured softly so Fessman, sitting by like a bird of prey, didn’t hear. “Even the resupply won’t come,” he finished, his voice trailing off. He took another swig of his coffee.

  So here it is again, I thought. The company commander, but not the company commander. I get the ability to make the wrong decision handed to me, and if I’m wrong, I’m “that crazy fucker,” but if I’m right, then somebody else gets the credit. I only get to make decisions that have no solutions. We had to have medevac and resupply. What was the alternative? None. We needed water, ammo, food, and more. Even the gunships would provide invaluable help by strafing the tree line before we crossed, unless they didn’t come because the other choppers wouldn’t. I clutched the morphine package in my other thigh pocket, massaging it gently. Was I supposed to kill the Marine with morphine to save the unit? Leave him behind? Take a K-Bar and cut the big round out of him? What?

  “It gets worse,” the Gunny went on. “Jurgens wants to take his platoon and carry the man all the way back to the aid station. If he does that, then we won’t have our best platoon at point to get us across that open area or available to us as we cross down into the A Shau.”

  I just sat there thinking about the problem and drinking my coffee. I wondered if the Basic School ever offered to teach young officers how to handle problems like this, instead of how to cross a radioactive bridge or raging river with no bridge. Once, in a college poker game I’d been forced to play in, that I didn’t want to play in because I had so little money, I’d bought the same kind of cards used to play. I made up a ‘cold deck’ by stacking the cards, kept the deck under my right thigh and then substituted that deck with the one I’d just shuffled, dealt and won the hand and was able to quit. The situation I faced was much the same, with no acceptable solution that had odds either way too high to gamble. How could I cheat my way through?

  I knew when to expect first light because Brother John, three hundred miles away down in Na Trang, told me with his first daily broadcast: “This is brother John, coming at you with Otis Redding from Na Trang.” The song began to play. Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun, I’ll be sittin’ when the evenin’ comes, watching the ships roll in and then I watch ’em roll away again…

  What I would give, if I had anything to give, to be sitting on the dock of any bay anywhere in the world and watch ships roll in. It would have been more appropriate if John had started the day out with a “Chickenman” episode.

  “They’re here, sir,” Fessman said.

  “They radio in?” I asked, presuming he was talking about the Army visit.

  “No, sir, listen.”

  I picked up the sound of laughing and talking around me. An uncommon sound. A group of men came out of the waning darkness and jungle bracken, the mud-sucking sounds of their boots preceding them.

  “Six actual?” the l
eading man asked, holding out one hand.

  I looked at the Gunny. He shrugged but said nothing.

  I climbed to my feet and faced the man. I noticed that he was clean, wearing a set of the new jungle utilities I’d only heard about, along with the duty flak jacket none of our Marines wore. A small group of men behind him brought forth a few big green canisters, which they plopped down in the mud next to where the Gunny squatted.

  “Hot spaghetti and ice cream,” the man said, still holding out his right hand. “We gave out the rest back there to your men.”

  I shook with my own repellent and Agent Orange smeared hand, feeling like an alley vagrant in comparison to the picture perfect officer in front of me. He wore double black bars on his helmet and on each shoulder of his green flack jacket.

  “Captain Dennis Morgan, at your service,” he smiled. “West Point, Class of ’66. How can I help you guys? It’s always good to have you Marines taking care of the flank. Where are the other officers?”

  I sat back down on the edge of my poncho cover and motioned for the captain to do the same, wondering if he would because of his pristine condition.

  The captain sat immediately, to my surprise. The Gunny and the rest of my scout team went at the canisters without comment, the captain’s men standing back to get out of the way.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, automatically.

  “Sir? What’s your rank?”

  “Second lieutenant, sir,” I replied, looking away.

  “Stop calling me sir. We’re out in the field. I’m commanding Echo Company, 101st. What happened to the other officers?”

  I thought about his comment and his question. Maybe it was okay for my Marines not to call me sir. We were in the field. The other officers didn’t matter, so I set that part of his question aside without answering. Maybe the captain could help with something other than food.

  “I heard that your choppers are piloted by young warrant officers,” I said.

  “Crazy fuckers, every one,” the captain said, with a laugh like he was proud of their insanity. I noticed his gold Academy ring, worn where other men wore wedding rings. “Ring knockers” the rest of us non-academy officers had called them in Basic School. “Why do you ask?”

  “We’re headed into the A Shau and we gotta get across the clearing, sir. Our air won’t come in. I’m at the end of range from the An Hoa battery for supporting fire. The Cobras won’t be here to strafe the tree line if the Hueys don’t come in.”

  The captain lost his smile and stared at me. I wondered what he saw. I knew what he saw. A ragamuffin officer covered in stinking oils and probably smelling like a cape buffalo straight from a wallow, and a second lieutenant to boot. The captain looked away without replying.

  “Why no air support?” he asked.

  I told him the blooper story.

  “Larsen, get over here,” he yelled to the side when I finished. “Give me that,” he ordered, holding his hand out. Larsen, coming in out of the dark, proved to be the radio operator. He gave the captain his handset.

  “When do you want them to come?” he asked.

  “They’re coming?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Are you kidding me?” the captain exclaimed. “To be a part of a story like the blooper thing? This is Stars and Stripes kind of shit. You want a Cobra dustoff and supplies, too? What do you need on the resupply ship?”

  I sat stunned. This was the Army? The Army that was supposed to hate the Marine Corps? Was nothing in the world the way I thought?

  “Water, food, and some 60 millimeters ammo for the crossing would be good, maybe in an hour?” the Gunny piped in, talking between big bites of spaghetti he’d loaded into his cleaned out canteen holder.

  “What’s a grid number where you want them down,” the captain said, dangling the mic from his hand and flipping it around like it was a ball at the end of a piece of string.

  “They’ll take the Marine with the round in him?” I asked, just to make sure he’d fully understood what I’d told him.

  “Hell, if he was going to blow up he’d have blown up already. That’s American ordinance he has inside him, not that Chinese shit.”

  I gave him a grid number from memory, as I’d laid out fire for our attack across the open area earlier in the night.

  “Okay,” the captain said, waiting to hear back from whoever he called for air support. “I’ll give your radioman the frequency for the Americal Division. They’ve got some of those M102 lightweight 105s on top of Cunningham peak a few miles down the A Shau. Dropped ’em in by helicopter a few months back. I’m sure they’ll be happy to fire for you guys. Gotta air drop ammo though, so you might have to use them sparingly.”

  I sat in front of the man in wonder. A real company commander. Fessman’s radio began to squeak out another song that seemed so appropriate for the coming of the light and maybe the possibility of living through the day.

  “Fighting soldiers from the sky, fearless men who jump and die. Men who mean just what they say, the brave men of the Green Beret.”

  The 101st weren’t Green Berets but they sure seemed like it.

  twenty-nine

  The Seventh Day : Second Part

  You want wet or lurps,” Captain Morgan said, holding the radio handset to his right ear.

  “What are lurps?” I asked, vaguely having heard the word but not understanding what it meant.

  “Long range patrol rations,” he responded. “They’re dried. Light-weight. Just put water in, heat, and there you go.”

  “Okay, lurps then,” I said, wondering about what the “u” might stand for but not enough to ask.

  I watched him call it in. It would be good to lessen the load in all of our packs if the mountain we were climbing was any indication of how tough it would be to scale the cliffs of the coming A Shau Valley.

  “Water,” the Gunny whispered to me. “A gallon weighs eight pounds.”

  We’d been hauling almost all of our own water between air drops. I hadn’t thought about that. Were C-Rations heavier than lurps, after adding water? I was willing to bet that the whole thing was a wash, just like everything else I’d so far discovered in Vietnam. For every First Platoon there was a Fourth Platoon.

  “You have any racial problems in your company?” I asked the captain, my own problems on my mind. And then, suddenly, even before he answered, I knew I’d made a mistake asking.

  I felt both the Gunny and Fessman shrink back from where we stood. The light was good enough to see the captain’s full face and read his expression. Or the lack of it. His facial features instantly changed from the smiling Army ambassador of good will into one of the Washington Monument stone things.

  “Okay then, lieutenant, your medevac, resupply, and dust-off will roll in fifty minutes,” he said, hesitating, making a show of looking at his watch. “Just give the hot chow container vats to the Huey crew. Good luck.”

  He smiled again, but not like the smiles he’d graced us with before. He held out his hand, again, a strange gesture because we should have been saluting for any kind of greeting. He was a captain and I was a second lieutenant.

  I shook his dry, crisply powerful hand with my small, oily one, and like wisps in the night, he and his radioman were gone, slipping away into the still dark jungle. I squatted back down, reached over and loaded some of the spaghetti into my unwashed canteen holder.

  “Try this,” Fessman said. Grabbing some metal implement, he scooped into the other container and dumped a big white glob onto the top of my spaghetti.

  I stared down. Ice cream. Fessman had dumped a load of ice cream on the still warm spaghetti and it was melting away. I exhaled deeply, took my dirty metal spoon, cleaned by rubbing it with my oily hand, and dug in. After a few seconds I could only smile and dig ever deeper into the red, white, and whatever mess he’d piled into my holder.

  �
��Told you,” Fessman laughed.

  It felt like home. Hot spaghetti and ice cold vanilla ice cream. Mixing it didn’t matter. It wasn’t canned ham and lima beans put together in rusting old tin cans during the Korean war. I regretted asking the question about the racial thing. I could have talked to the captain all day long about so many things but I’d driven him away.

  “Where do you get those big black rank markers the captain wore?” I asked the Gunny, between massive mouthfuls of the food.

  “I’ll take care of that,” the Gunny said, between spoonfuls from his own canteen holder. “Sugar Daddy said his platoon won’t cross the open area, that there’s no reason to go into the A Shau. He says we can just wait here, like we did below Hill 110.”

  I stopped eating. My shoulders slumped a little. I chewed on what I had in my mouth, my mind racing. I was still a Marine. We were all still Marines, animal and jungle Marines, but Marines nevertheless. As long as I breathed, I knew in my heart that I would never go around a Hill 110 again. Not in the jungle, Vietnam, any war, or even back home.

  The Gunny stared at me over his food, his spoon paused in mid-air. I could not hear Fessman breathing near my right ear, or the soft gentle sounds the other scout team members usually made nearby. I said nothing. I looked intently into the Gunny’s eyes, not really waiting so much as not having any reply to make.

  “Yeah, I kinda thought so,” the Gunny finally said. “Me neither.”

  He went back to eating while I tried to figure out what his laconic phrases really meant. The sounds and Fessman’s nervous breathing came back.

  “Fessman,” I began, but he’d already held it out right in front of my face. “Americal?” I asked.