Thirty Days Has September Page 3

  “Eleven,” I concluded, more to myself than to him. “And how many Marines do we have?”

  “Reinforced company. Two hundred and twenty-two, including you and the dead and wounded last night.”

  “Eleven out of two-twenty-two,” I said. “So, we’re losing about five percent a day,” I went on. We have twenty days left, if my calculations are accurate.”

  “Twenty days for what?” Fessman asked.

  “Before we’re wounded or dead,” I answered, my voice without emotion.

  “I’ve been here for almost two months,” Stevens said. “I’m still here,” he went on with some enthusiasm. “So what does that mean?”

  “Not good,” the Gunny said. “You guys scram. I want to talk to the actual.”

  Fessman, Stevens, and Nguyen moved quickly out of the crater, leaving their stuff behind.

  “Don’t tell them shit like that,” the Gunny said, staring into my eyes. “They’re fucked up enough. None of us are going home. Not in one piece, anyway, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Those guys, and the others, killed the last two sets of officers,” I hissed back at him. “What am I supposed to do? Let them kill me too?”

  “It wasn’t them,” The Gunny said wearily, sitting close to me and pulling up his knees. He took out a cigarette. “Funny, we get more cigarettes than we can ever smoke. I wonder if that’s because they know back home none of us is going to die of lung cancer.”

  He offered me one. I shook my head in reply. I’d tried cigarettes in high school. They’d made me sick every time. I was in enough trouble without getting sick to my stomach.

  “We’ve got a race war going on in this unit, but you’ll find that out real soon for yourself,” the Gunny said, spitting out a bit of tobacco. “The only way out of here is in a bag or on a medevac. You figured that out. You can do whatever you want for as long as you have left. We’re moving out in about an hour.”

  “Moving out to where?” I asked, surprised. We’d just been under fire. I couldn’t imagine going anywhere until a secure passage could be figured out or arranged.

  “We move by day and then get hit every night,” the gunny said, pulling out a photo grid map layered over in plastic tape. “They don’t shoot at us in daytime because hell from the air would drop down on them. It’s the way of it out here. We’re on what’s called Go Noi Island, although it’s not. We’re trapped by three surrounding swollen rivers about to get more swollen with the monsoons coming. We move inland under our supporting fires, mostly artillery, and retreat toward the ocean under their supporting fires. We’ve got to get seventeen clicks up the Song Bong River, across from Duc Duc, before dark.”

  “Who’s laid out supporting fires?” I asked, looking down at his nearly unintelligible map, half covered with black magic marker.

  “Outside of me, and now you, nobody has or reads a map, much less can call artillery,” he said. “Accurate artillery fire might just save your life, although I doubt it.”

  My stomach would not uncurl. I wasn’t sure I could even stand up when the time came. I looked at his map, my own still tucked into my pack. I knew he was right.

  Calling artillery was an arcane science passed down by the French from before World War II. A fire direction center in the rear, all the way back at An Hoa, processed calls for fire and then sent the data to the guns so the battery could fire accurately. The language required to be used on the artillery net was as complex as it was inflexible. Call in, using that radio, without the language and knowledge and you wouldn’t get anything in return no matter how dire your situation or how badly you needed support. You didn’t pick up artillery ability in the field or on the job. You either went to Fort Sill and were trained for six tough weeks or you could forget about artillery support.

  “They can’t call artillery?” I asked, my voice very soft, almost asking the question to myself. “You can’t call it either, can you Gunny?” I asked, looking the man straight in the eyes for the first time.

  “In a pinch,” the Gunny said, his own tone softening for the first time since I’d been dropped in. He looked away.

  “Call Fessman and those other guys back,” I said, giving my first order. “Do I call Nguyen a gook too?”

  The Gunny got up, climbed to the top edge of the mud pit and gestured before sliding back down. “Nguyen’s a scout. He’s on our side. Only the NVA are called gooks. Some of the men call all Vietnamese gooks but it’s not a good idea. Nguyen’s invaluable when we’re in contact, which is pretty much every night.”

  I noticed my hearing improving. The distant ringing was going away. It was a tiny thing but that little fact made me feel a bit better. I grabbed my pack and took out a small stack of folded maps and my compass. I realized I’d need a supply of the plastic tape. Everything around me was wet all the time. I also needed a rubberized flashlight instead of the pitifully cheap metal thing I’d been issued. I found the one-to-twenty-five-thousand quarter map I needed. I realized a second problem about why the unit lacked artillery support, other than the battery I was supposed to be assigned to might have heard about Gulf Company and not wanted to provide any fire. Two-Eleven was the unit, Second Battalion of the Eleventh Field Artillery Regiment. The maps had very few contour intervals on them. There was almost no rising and falling topography high or low enough to merit a twenty-five-meter difference in elevation. I oriented the map north and south. I’d worry about true north, the math calculation closing the difference between grid north (where the map pointed north) and magnetic north (where my compass pointed). The difference was important for accurate fire but not for what I was going to do.

  The Gunny was about to put away his map when I stopped him. “Where do you think we are, precisely,” I asked,

  Fessman, Stevens, and Nguyen assumed their former positions nearby.

  “Where do you think we are?” the Gunny replied, surprisingly.

  I looked up from the map toward where he sat concentrating over his own. And then it hit me. He didn’t know exactly where we were, not for incoming artillery fire purposes, anyway. I let him out.

  “We’re right here,” I reached over and dotted a point on his map above the Song Bong River.

  “Yes, I thought so,” the Gunny replied, quickly packing his own map away.

  I took one more compass reading, re-oriented the map slightly and took bearings on two distant peaks to make certain.

  “Give me the arty net, Corporal,” I ordered, holding out my hand for the mic.

  Fessman handed the instrument over, and then fiddled for a few seconds with the thick radio he’d brought down from his back. The flat bladed antenna was folded back on itself to stick up only four or five feet.

  I keyed the mic when Fessman nodded.

  “Fire mission, over,” I said, pushing the transmit button down with my index finger.

  “Fire mission, over,” came right back through the little speaker. The words were loud enough for everyone in the crater to hear.

  “What are you doing?” the Gunny asked.

  I looked at the man coldly, while I held the mic and waited.

  “Sir,” he finally said. I ignored him.

  “Ipana 44565, Wrigley 61238,” I instructed, reading the magic marker numbers I’d written to mark out position on the map. The fire direction center (FDC) would not process a fire order without knowing the caller’s position for fear of hitting that position. I knew that someone was putting a pin up on a wall map while I waited.

  “Ipana 44145, Wrigley 34745,” I intoned, still looking at my map.

  “Sir?” the Gunny questioned, deep concern beginning to register in his tone.

  “One round, whiskey papa, fifty meters, over,” I ordered, before handing the mic back to Fessman.

  I looked at the Gunny. I’d lied to the fire direction center. I’d stated our coded position on the
map incorrectly. I’d placed Gulf Company almost a thousand meters from where it really was. The second set of coordinates were our own.

  “Shot, over,” came through Fessman’s open mic.

  I nodded at Fessman, wondering if he had any experience with artillery at all.

  He did. “Shot, out,” he said into the mic.

  “Oh shit,” the Gunny wrenched out before going face down in the mud.

  “Splash, over,” came through the radio. Fessman didn’t respond to that because there was no reason. The splash indication was a calculation by the FDC that your fire mission round or rounds were five seconds from impact or detonation.

  A huge Fourth of July explosion took place far above all of our heads.

  I smiled, I’d gotten the map reading and calculations right.

  The forty-six-pound artillery round of white phosphorus had exploded precisely fifty meters over our heads and the phosphorus rained down like a giant fireworks fountain display. The tails of the phosphorus trailed down almost to the ground before going out.

  “Holy shit,” the Gunny got out, crawling up to his knees. “What in hell did you do that for?”

  I didn’t reply. I was most pleased. The fifty meters had apparently been sufficient enough to allow all the phosphorus to burn up before impacting down on the Marines of Gulf Company. I smiled openly, not at my success or the fact that I had graphically demonstrated that the unit now not only had artillery support, but someone who could call it accurately on command. I smiled because I didn’t give a damn if the Marines below, including myself, were hit or not.

  I grabbed my map and began to plot night defensive grid coordinates for our day travel. Those coordinates would prove invaluable if we were hit along the way because they acted as registration points. There would be no need to do any plotting at all if we were close to one of them. I’d be able to call a round to the pre-designated point and then adjust fire accordingly.

  I got packed up then and got ready to move.

  “If we reach the river can we bathe?” I asked the Gunny.

  The man just stared back at me, his expression almost inscrutable except for a very faint look of worry and fear in his eyes.

  “Yes sir,” Fessman said with open enthusiasm. “The Bong is mostly runoff but it’s a lot better than trying to clean up in the rain. We better get to the units and introduce you.”

  “Oh, I think they all got introduced just now,” Stevens said, saying something in Vietnamese to Nguyen that made them both laugh.

  The move was unremarkable. The reinforced part of Gulf Company was a machine gun platoon added for security, or whatever. Sixteen M60 machine guns, each manned by four Marines. The gunner did the shooting while the others packed ammo, carried the gun and its parts, and then set it up when it was ready.

  Seventeen clicks equal seventeen thousand meters. The clicks were derived by someone with one of those little map distance measuring devices found in training. The machines clicked at the equivalent of a thousand meters on the map. Ten miles, or so, was the distance of the hike. Everything was wet so the company moved mostly atop paddy dike walls. It was lousy cover. In fact, it was no cover at all but the rice paddies were filled with human excrement as fertilizer and nobody wanted to have anything to do with that. It was a long hard hike. I hadn’t been in the unit to be there for the last resupply. I had no water in my two canteens, no C-rations, outside of the single box that had been in my pack. I refused to ask for anything from anyone there, however. In a very short period of time I’d found out something about war.

  I was at war with everyone and everything from my own men, my commanding officers, the environment, the insect life, the weather, and, finally, the enemy.

  five

  The Second Night

  Night didn’t come easily in the ’Nam. The day had been a blessing compared to my first night. Moving seventeen clicks through muddy rice paddies wearing a fifty-pound pack was its own form of misery, but the brutality of Marine training had kicked in and setting one foot in front of the other had become a tweaking exercise of endurance. And I had endurance. What I didn’t have any longer was a useless flak jacket or utility coat, and wearing only a Vietnam-issue green t-shirt allowed the shoulder straps of my pack to chaff, cut, and hurt like hell. Being the supposed leader of whatever this Marine Company had morphed into, I knew instinctively that there could be no show of weakness. I hunched and staggered my way through without comment and without water.

  We were in the flatlands. From the ocean far away in the unseeable distance to the mountains inland, the land supported subsistence farmers trying to grow rice. Rice and small fish, with inedible fish sauce called nuoc mam (“nook mom”), were what indigenous locals ate all of their lives, along with noodles. My concern, with nightfall coming and the inevitability of attack facing us again, was where to set in. The soggy land prevented digging foxholes. The few spotted areas among the paddies of low-hanging jungle seemed to be all that was left. My training told me that those would not work simply because they were the only places to spend the night. The enemy would know that. They would be registered (previously measured for range and declination) for mortar fire, if not heavier stuff.

  The unit stopped just before sunset. I’d ended up near the rear for unexplainable reasons. I’d talked to no one during the arduous hike, proceeded by my scouts and followed by Fessman, who somehow managed a full pack and the Prick 25 radio. The Gunny made his way back from the long line of Marines strung along the straight raised berm of the paddy dike. The dikes themselves were all wide enough for two people to pass one another side by side, but that was about it. The slightest misstep and a bath in the awful smelling paddy water would result.

  The day itself was okay — dryer with no mist or rain. Although it was at least ninety-eight degrees, that was survivable and there weren’t any cloying mosquitoes. Except for a gentle moderating wind, all was quiet except for the radios. Many of the Marines carried small battery-powered radios. The armed forces network put out constant music moderated by a disc jockey I’d never heard of, Brother John. After one day in the bush, I felt I knew him well. Deep voiced, probably black with a slight southern twang, Brother John’s signature comment, made between every rock n’ roll or country & western song was “This is Brother John, coming to you from Nha Trang in the ’Nam.” I didn’t know where Nha Trang was but I presumed it was close by. The fact that playing radios in a combat arena might alert any nearby enemy to one’s exact location seemed to not matter in this utterly strange war.

  Everyone scrunched down on the dike into squatting positions, similar to the ones the local population used to relax. I found it weird to see the Marines all acting like natives while it was obvious they hated the gooks. I squatted. It hurt my knees but I saw the immediate value. The only alternative was to unfold my poncho cover and spread it across the dike or sit with my butt in the mud. Neither of those options worked. I squatted and endured more pain. The Marine Corps was all about pain and the handling of pain. Pain was good. Pain was alive. Pain kept you going.

  “Coffee?” the Gunny offered.

  I nodded, craving any liquid at all to quench my deep thirst. I laboriously unloaded one of my canteens from its cover and placed the holder atop the mud.

  The Gunny half filled my holder with water. “Drink it,” he whispered. “They won’t notice.”

  I drank the water as slowly as I could, looking around at the Marines, none of whom would look back at me, except my scouts and Fessman.

  The Gunny broke out a chunk of white material. “Comp B,” he said with a smile. “Burns hotter than the idiot tabs.”

  Composition B was the intense plastic high explosive invented after the Korean War. It was extremely stable and could only be exploded using a detonator. I’d never seen it openly burned before and leaned back a bit. The Gunny grinned, pouring water into his own canteen holder.

&n
bsp; “Great stuff,” he said. “Won’t explode. If it did we’d never know. Twenty-six thousand feet per second. Powerful shit to toss down gook tunnels. A lot better than sending Marines down there. But don’t let the guys eat it. It’s like LSD, except they usually die from the trip, not that most of them care.”

  I said nothing. I wasn’t surprised that the explosive was something more and less than I’d learned in training. There was nothing in the ’Nam that wasn’t a surprise. Nothing. But I knew if I could simply keep my mouth shut, I wouldn’t reveal my ignorance. The Gunny poured coffee into my holder. I was still thirsty. I drank the hot liquid greedily, not caring if it burned a bit. Pain was good.

  “They got the message,” the Gunny said, looking at me over the top of his canteen holder. “The arty thing. I suppose you learned about the willy peter all burning up before it hits the ground in Fort Sill.”

  I remained silent. The “willy peter,” or white phosphorus, doesn’t always burn up when the shell is exploded that close to the ground. Maybe at a hundred meters. I’d seen it used at Sill, but only in demonstrations. I hadn’t cared about it all burning up or not before it came to earth when I called the mission.

  “The medevac picked up our casualties but they only dropped more bags,” the Gunny said, “Tomorrow’s drop will include water, food, and morphine. We need the morphine bad. I hadn’t missed the muffled screaming of the night before. It had just added to the symphonic cacophony of horror.

  “Why more morphine?” I asked. “Don’t the corpsmen have it already?”

  The Gunny remained silent for a minute, sipping his coffee.

  “You’re the company commander,” he finally said. “How’s this for it being your call? We have three corpsmen. Saunders, Johnson, and Murphy. We get morphine once a week. Saunders and Murphy are out because Johnson used all his in the first couple of days.”

  “He saw more action?” I asked, since the Gunny didn’t go on.