Thirty Days Has September Page 4

  “Nope. He used it on himself. He’s an addict, apparently. So what do we do? Can’t send him back because they don’t take people back. Somebody else would have to come out. That’s not happening. Meanwhile, the men have their buddies dying in pain before dawn, waiting for a medevac through the night while they listen to the screams of their friends.”

  “What’s my call?” I replied, trying to wrap my damaged mind around the problem.

  “Can’t keep him here, can’t send him away,” the Gunny said. “Gotta have morphine to survive. They can’t take him out because the other corpsmen won’t help them when they’re wounded if they do.”

  “Dilemma,” I stated the obvious.

  “Yep,” the Gunny replied, “most of this is all of that.”

  “Where is he?” I asked, finishing my coffee, hoping for a second cup without having to ask.

  “I sent him out with the point,” the Gunny said. “The river’s not far ahead. We’ll set up a perimeter for the night once we get down there. He knows he’s fucked but I don’t know what to do about it.”

  I presumed the point was a lead scout of some kind. In training we’d moved in unit formation of platoons, squads and fire teams. There had been no point. But then, there’d been no booby traps set into the beautiful pine-studded hills of Virginia, either.

  “What am I supposed to do, I mean, as company commander, and all?” I said, hesitantly, accepting another cup of the instant coffee with silent thanks.

  “Whatever you do is going to be wrong to somebody here. That’s the way it works,” the Gunny replied.

  “Better you than me, kind of a thing?” I asked, fear returning to my belly to overcome my good sense of keeping silent so as not to show ignorance or to upset.

  “If you like,” he said, finishing his coffee. “Let me know what’s what there. I’ll get the unit ready to set in.”

  “We can’t exactly set in where we’ve been before,” I could not stop myself from adding. “It’s against all tactical reason.”

  “You see any place else?” he replied, replacing his canteen on his belt and walking away.

  Darkness descended and with it came my fear. When would we be hit, and where, and why didn’t anyone around me have an air of expectation or immediacy? Fessman, Stevens, Nguyen, and I moved from the long paddy dike into a bamboo wooded area plush with reeds. The ground seemed solid. Marines spread out around us. I headed toward a small rise near the center of the area.

  “Not there, sir,” Fessman pointed out in a hushed voice. “They’ll register that point for mortar fire, if they haven’t already. Go beyond it. It’ll be wetter but we’re wet anyway.

  I did what Fessman suggested, pulling my heavy pack off and laying it down atop some sort of leafy mass of ferns. I unstrapped my poncho cover and spread it next to the pack. Finally, I sat down, exhausted. Nguyen knelt on the edge of the cover and carefully slid a plastic canteen to me. He motioned with his chin for me take it.

  “You’re tired from lack of water,” Stevens said. “Drink the whole thing. We’ll have plenty of water in the morning.”

  I drank the warm water tasting of iodine. I didn’t care about the temperature or the taste though. I listened to Brother John from Nha Trang, wondering about the total stupidity of playing tinny music out into the coming night, as if to send a sound beacon out to anyone around. Was there a curfew for playing the music or did it stop when Armed Forces Radio ceased transmission? I wanted to yell “Shut the fuck up” at the top of my voice, but didn’t yield to the temptation.

  I could call artillery, read a map, and apparently little else to try to prove my worth in a Marine Company gone nuts. The Gunny hadn’t even bothered to fill me in on why we ensconced where we were or why we’d been ordered to move there. I pulled out my map and used a grease pencil to write grid coordinates running all around the current position. I waved Fessman over to me and called the battery to register our position at the Fire Direction Center. If I had to call for fire at night, then it would save time not to have to input our own position. I looked down at the map and the ten words and numbers I’d written down around a black point. The information seemed to fly up at me physically. It was inside me. Somehow I memorized the data, the map contours and direction. Surprised, I shut my eyes and it was still all there like it was imprinted on the back of my eyelids.

  “Where the hell is the latrine?” I asked, not having eliminated anything from my body all day long.

  “E-tool,” Steven’s said. “Nobody digs a trench on these stops. Just go down by the river and dig a hole. Make sure you’re inside the perimeter.”

  “What’s the password?” I asked, unstrapping my E-tool from the back of my pack. “Just in case.”

  Fessman and Stevens went silent and then stared at me together. Stevens spoke to Nguyen in Vietnamese. The Kit Carson Scout smiled. I looked back at all three of them in the dying light.

  “Ah, there’s no passwords out here,” Stevens said. “Nobody out there speaks American and nobody not American comes through the perimeter in the dark.”

  Marine training in a lush pine forest set among the rolling hills of Virginia was fast dying inside me. I found a marginally private spot among the bamboo groves to do my business. There was no way I was going down to the river and encounter the perimeter, although the idea of all that potential drinking water crossed my mind. That I could be thirsty in a constantly misting land where the humidity was about the same as pure liquid didn’t cross my mind as an analytical problem. It simply was.

  My small core group of men had found an area to assemble shelter-halves in a clump, little runnels dug around each one to allow the ever present water to flow anywhere else. I crouched down and set my back under the cover, then fumbled through my pack for writing materials I’d carefully stored in a plastic bag. I wrote my first letter home from in country. I didn’t have to lick the envelope to seal it. The weather of Vietnam did that for me.

  I waited for the Gunny, my only contact with the Marines around me except for the scout group and radio operator assigned to me. I wasn’t a company commander or even a platoon commander. I had no command at all. I was a fucking new guy, a FNG.

  six

  The Second Night : Second Part

  The radio music transmissions were supposed to stop at night but it was not full dark when my small team of scouts and radio operator went to work setting up shelter halves around them. I was afraid of the radio transmissions giving our position away. I smelled heavy cigarette smoke wafting in the slow-moving air around me. The air felt like cobwebs passing over my face, as it was so full of heated moisture. I folded my Iwo Jima flag-raising envelope in half and stuck it into my right front thigh pocket. No matter what happened in the night I was determined to make sure that I sent the letter off aboard the resupply chopper supposedly coming in the following morning.

  Stevens had a small transistor radio playing the Armed Forces Radio Station. “Ninety-Nine Point Nine FM,” the announcer said in a tinny voice, followed by one of Brother John’s short baritone comments: “Here’s Chicken Man.” There was a pause in the transmission. I wanted so badly to order Stevens to turn the damned radio off but I was afraid to order anyone to do anything. And I was afraid of the feeling it gave me to be afraid of doing that.

  “Chicken man?” I asked, quietly, instead.

  “You’ll love this, sir,” Fessman said, finally easing the big rectangle of the combat radio from his back.

  A hideous laugh came from Stevens’ little radio, and then another announcer, obviously pre-recorded, said: “Chicken Man. Benton Harbor, salesman by day, and the world’s greatest crime fighter by night, makes his appearance.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Chicken Man? The announcer went on to describe how Benton had decided to be a crime fighter and gone to a costume store for a disguise. The store only had a rabbit, a teddy bear and a chicken c
ostume available. Benton tried the rabbit suit on and went outside the store, only to be encountered by a passing citizen. The man kissed him, telling him he was a cute rabbit. Benton went back into the store, took off the rabbit outfit, passed over the teddy bear, and decided on the chicken suit. Chicken Man was born.

  I looked at Stevens and Fessman. It was obvious they loved the story and the weirdly and totally out of place character. I presumed the story was funny but somewhere in the last two days and one night I’d lost my sense of humor. I reflected briefly, while Chicken Man fought crime over the radio, about how a person could possibly lose a sense of humor while knowing he’d lost it.

  The mosquitoes were back. Armed Forces Radio finally shut down for the night, thankfully. I dug my mosquito repellent out of a pack pocket and slathered it on my arms. Stevens passed me a full pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes, but I shook my head.

  “No, for the mosquitoes,” Stevens said, holding the pack out. “You can’t put that shit on your face or it’ll sting your eyes real bad. Light a cigarette and let if burn under your chin. Does the trick. They send us plenty of cigarettes every morning so you’ll never run out. At least a box each.”

  “Who sends them?” I asked, taking the cigarette pack while Fessman rummaged in his own pack for a lighter.

  “Gift packs from home,” Stevens replied. “They come with notes inside them from people back home. You never know the people sending them and the notes can say anything. We read them every night we get a chance. Really neat stuff some of the people back home put down.”

  “Matches don’t work in this place,” Fessman said, holding out a chrome-plated Zippo lighter.

  “Thank you,” I said, looking the Lance Corporal in the eyes to communicate my sincerity.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” he answered. “We get a ton of them left over from the dead guys every day.”

  I stared at the Zippo. Somebody had carved “M.C.” carefully into its lower body. I wondered if it was initials or the abbreviation for Marine Corps. “We can’t take stuff from the dead,” I said, still holding the lighter gently in one hand. “Their stuff has to be bagged tagged and returned home with them,” I finished.

  “Nah, not here,” Stevens said. “Not now. Never seen it. The only stuff that goes home is what you take if you live and what you keep from the body of anyone you kill.”

  I opened the pack of Camels while I thought. The pack squished in my fingers from the oil content used as the base in the repellent. Would I ever be clean again, I wondered, as I pulled a white tube out, fumbled with it until I got one end in my mouth and the Zippo flipped open. I flicked the small wheel down with my thumb and the lighter flared.

  “If you kill somebody you get their stuff?” I asked, lighting the cigarette carefully before pulling it out to hold it under my chin.

  “Spoils of war, they call it,” Stevens said, lighting a cigarette of his own.

  “Wallets, pictures, notes, insignia, belts, knives, and even guns, as long as they’re not full auto, get sent with re-supply. They send the stuff to Division where it’s stored until we go home, and then they ship it.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Why had I heard nothing of the spoils of war? The whole thing sounded like it was a description of what might have happened in war situations hundreds or even thousands of years ago, not the late sixties in the Marine Corps. I had no reason to disbelieve the boys in front of me. They were a mess I realized. Dirty to the bone, nervous as displaced spiders in little ways and looking to be saved. I could see it beyond the surface deadness in their eyes. Could I save them? Would I be the one? Would I get them out of hell? I had just turned twenty-three. Their looks were like knives going straight into what was left of my heart. I’d been there two days, one night and now moving into a second night and already I knew. I couldn’t save them. I very probably couldn’t save myself.

  The Gunny appeared out of nowhere. He knelt on the edge of my poncho, which served as the floor of my half-tent. He took out a canteen and handed it to me.

  “Drink that down. Last water until dawn. Pull out your map.”

  I opened my left thigh pocket and took out my one to twenty-five thousand grid-photo map. The area it covered was about twenty kilometers by twenty. An Hoa, the fire base for artillery and landing strip for small air support was in the lower left hand corner of the paper. I spread the map out as best I could without dropping the cigarette or losing the lighter. The rubberized surface of the poncho cover felt wet but then everything felt wet.

  The Gunny knelt and examined the map.

  “Night defensive fires?” he asked, noting the grease pencil numbers all around our current position. I hadn’t registered our exact location with an artillery round but I was pretty certain. The Gunny took out a small pencil flashlight.

  “Here,” he said, pointing at the map. “Hill one ten, on this side of the slope heading west into the A Shau Valley. We head on over there tomorrow. Seems like some Army insertion went wrong.” He clicked the light off and pulled some stuff from his pack. He lit a fire after plopping some C-Ration cans nearby. “Dinner. Eat if you can. We’ll be moving long and hard tomorrow after resupply and medevac.”

  “Medevac?” I asked, my mind going back to the corpsman problem I’d been given earlier to somehow deal with.

  “Yeah, they’ll know we’re moving out in the morning so they’ll hit us tonight. Again. I’ll be back.”

  I moved over to the small fire. I noticed that there were fires all around me and hushed conversations going on but nobody approached. I’d met none of the Marines, had no opportunity to identify or see the non-commissioned officers leading our five platoons and I hadn’t been consulted about the coming move on the following day. I presumed that Gulf Company would be assaulting Hill 110, but there’d been no operational planning meeting I’d had any part of.

  “When did he get the orders?” I asked Fessman. “Don’t we get the command net stuff all the time on your radio?”

  “Nah, I don’t turn the radio on unless we need to call somebody, sir,” he answered, puffing on his own cigarette. “The Gunny has his own radioman. He talks to command as the six.”

  For the first time I was more angry than I was afraid. In training I’d only had three hours of schooling on how to use the Prick 25 radio but none at all on how to access different commands or even what the language was. I knew the “six actual” of the unit was the commanding officer in person. The “six” referred to someone acting as the commanding officer or for him.

  “Turn it on,” I ordered. “I want it on all the time. Scroll between the command net and artillery all the time I want to know what’s going on and what the Gunny’s talking to command about.”

  “He may not like that,” Stevens said.

  Fessman handed me a tiny little folding can opener. I opened it and began working slowly around the edges of a can the Gunny had left behind. I had to eat but I wasn’t hungry. I needed sleep but I wasn’t tired. The Gunny’s words “so they’ll hit us tonight” reverberated through my brain. It would be my first contact if it happened. I didn’t count the horrid weirdness of the night before. That had simply been a confused mess of nightmare oddity. The day’s hike had been strange, with little regard for security. We’d taken the high ground all the way without regard to a surrounding enemy. The radios had played and all the Marines had been talking to one another, like we were in training. The night was filled with small fires and hung over with a pall of cigarette smoke to fight off the mosquitoes. There was no hiding the two hundred and seventeen Marines plopped down atop the only high ground around with machine gun snouts sticking out of the brush everywhere.

  Hit? Of course we’d be hit, I thought darkly, leaning back into my half a tent, mist starting to fall on the shiny edge of my poncho cover. I ate ham slices that tasted like dull, old spam. I drank down the liquid after, as I had the water in the Gunny’s c
anteen. Water was everywhere but in short supply for drinking.

  I didn’t sleep. I laid down, my face only inches from the shelter half canvas, listening intently for the enemy through the slight rustle made by water drops running down the outside when enough mist had been collected together to drive them.

  We got hit at 2:07 a.m. exactly, according to my combat watch. It started with light machine gun fire going outward from our perimeter I guessed. The sound of the M60s was distinctive, a smooth sort of cracking sound, the bullets going out distinctively from the guns, not like in training. There they’d seemed jarring and staccato in their desire to get out of the barrel in a mass and move downrange. The firing spread all around me, going out into the night. I hugged the poncho cover, rolling onto my face. I had my .45 Colt strapped to my waist but it seemed idiotic to take it out. There were real guns going off all around me.

  I didn’t look at my watch again. The fire escalated and got much louder. I knew we were taking fire inside the perimeter because tracer bullets began curving over my shelter half. Far enough away to make me shiver but not make me quiver in terror. That started with the explosions. The north side of the perimeter erupted in a series of large explosions.

  “Fucking Chi-Com grenades,” Fessman shouted, from somewhere nearby. A bigger gun than all the rest opened up and I became terrified. The bigger gun was even slower in delivering its automatic fire but the size of its tracers made them look like express flaming beer barrels going over. It was enemy fire and had to be the 12.6 mm heavy machine gun the enemy used instead of our own Browning .50 caliber. We didn’t have a Browning in the company. They were too big and heavy for a ground unit to carry.

  What broke me was when the beer barrel trajectories dropped until they were coming in only a few feet over my head. I went blind with their glare and the sound was causing me to lose my hearing when I ran. I’d looked up and out through the bracken to see where the tracers were starting from and it was close. It seemed that they were inside the perimeter. And it was enough. It was too much. I moved rapidly, running fast and staying low. I ran directly toward the paddy dike we’d come in on. And I didn’t make it. Just before breaking free of the heavy growth a huge force closed around me and drove me into the mud. When I hit the weight just increased until I was almost submerged in the squishy mess of the paddy dike wall.