Thirty Days Has September Read online

  “Booby trap,” Stevens whispered.

  The immediate relief I felt about the possibility that my problem would be taken care of if the doc had set off the booby trap made me feel slightly guilty. I’d heard nothing more about the racial problem the Gunny had mentioned earlier. In fact, I hadn’t seen anyone of color since I’d arrived in the unit. Where were they and what was the problem, I wondered.

  Gunfire came back from the front of the column. Instantly I recognized incoming small arms fire. Not sixteens, AKs, or the heavy stuff. Something else…

  “Arty up,” came shouting back to where I was, yelled from man to man.

  “Do you suppose that’s my new title?” I said to Fessman.

  “I’m right behind you,” he said, knowing no other answer was necessary.

  We hunched over, running up through the path and past a dozen Marines down in the bracken-filled mud. It didn’t take long to reach the Gunny. He knelt near two men who lay on their backs. Several other Marines worked over and on them. Everyone stayed as low as possible. There was no more incoming fire.

  “Hill 110’s hot,” the Gunny said. “Last year two Marine units lost their asses on that hill and it’s not going to be us this year. Up and to the left a few hundred yards there’s some kind of base of fire or nest of VC. That’s old U.S. surplus crap shooting at us. We give it out to the RVNs, and it comes right back to us.”

  “Artillery?” I asked, laying as flat in the mud as I could get without exposing my neck to the horrid leeches.

  “That rise just ahead on the left… that’s where we’re taking some fire from,” the Gunny said as he raised one arm and pointed through the jungle toward some invisible position.

  I knew the position from the map, relieved to have contour intervals again. My defensive fires had been easily selected. It wasn’t likely that enemy forces would choose dips or valleys to observe or fire from. A small hillock, maybe sixty meters high, lay just ahead. A ring of three contour intervals ran around it on the map in my head. A registration point. I smiled my new humorless smile and motioned to Fessman for the handset. He looked at me and clicked the frequency knob around before handing me the set.

  After calling for a mission and inputting the coded data, I gave the final order. “Battery of six, H.E., fire for effect.”

  “Battery of six?” Fessman said, as the radio squawked out “Shot, over.”

  “Shot out,” Fessman said in return, looking at me with a vague frown.

  “Splash, over,” the machine reported over its small speaker.

  “Get as low as you can,” I ordered, before following my own advice.

  The rounds came in, the first six of them spaced in a circle about a hundred yards in diameter, depending on how the battery was set up in An Hoa.

  The forty-six pound rounds, with super quick fuses that blew on contact, exploded with a ground-shaking jungle-swaying intensity. Six more rounds came in six seconds later, exactly as before. And then six more. The rounds kept coming until thirty-six had been expended. Twisted pieces of jungle matter flew over our position and lay hanging everywhere. The air compressed causing a light weather misting just in our part of the jungle. The huge explosions seemed to reverberate long after they had stopped.

  “What the fuck was that?” the Gunny yelled too loudly. “You’re not supposed to call that shit closer than two hundred meters.”

  Everyone’s hearing had been adjusted, including my own. I scuttled through light bracken moving like a sand crab, more sideways than straight ahead. I reached the Gunny who had his back to me, bending over working on someone.

  “The doc?” I asked, hopefully.

  “Still with us right here, working on this guy with me.”

  I looked around the Gunny’s body. A corpsman just finished a bandage wrap on the wounded Marine in front of his knees.

  “That him?” I asked, thinking it was one of the dumbest questions I’d ever asked. But I had to know.

  “Yeah, it’s him,” the Gunny said. The Corpsman made believe neither of us were right there with him.

  “Where are the other corpsmen?” I asked, seeing no one else. The other wounded Marine needed no help. Part of his head was missing.

  “Be here in seconds,” the Gunny answered. “Why?” he said, his voice still too loud to be normal.

  I reached down, pulled out my .45 and pointed it at the Corpsman. “Get up and turn sideways,” I said.

  “Huh?” he murmured, finally looking directly at me.

  “What the fuck?” the Gunny exclaimed, half turning to face me.

  “I said get up,” I said flatly to the Corpsman, thumbing off the safety of the Colt with a loud click, even to our damaged ears.

  The man stood up slowly.

  “Sideways,” I said, motioning with my automatic.

  He slowly turned, a questioning look on his face.

  I squeezed the trigger of my Colt slowly and carefully, my aim certain. The gun went off with a bang louder than the artillery shells. The bullet took the Corpsman through the side of his buttocks, and probably out the other side, too, but I didn’t see that damage as he was thrown sideways and down. He screamed at the top of his lungs.

  “What the fuck have you done?” the Gunny said, his tone one of shock.

  My ears rang from the close muzzle blast of the .45. I re-holstered the Colt while the Corpsman continued to roll back and forth on the ground and scream. The other two corpsmen came running up.

  “Who’s hit?” one of them asked.

  I pointed at the Corpsman. Both men went to work on their fallen associate.

  “Medevac him,” I ordered them both.

  The Gunny stared at me as I rose to a standing position I moved back past Fessman, and then crawled forward to the edge of the bracken. The little hill wasn’t a hill anymore. The thirty-six rounds had turned it into a ten-foot high plateau of vegetable salad and muck.

  “Did you shoot somebody?” Fessman said, close enough to my damaged left ear so I could hear him.

  “He got hit,” I murmured.

  The night was coming and the hill we were supposed to take the next day was occupied. Would we get hit again when it was full dark?

  Would I run again?

  I didn’t know the answer to either question, but I knew I wasn’t going to spend another night in the mud with the leeches.

  eight

  The Third Day : Second Part

  I made my way back to the Gunny. The Corpsman lay still, breathing shallowly with a poncho cover wrapped around him. The poncho covers served as our blankets, since they easily separated from the rubber liner. The air mattresses most everyone had, like mine, were filled with holes. They served as immediate ground cover for the hooches thrown up inside the perimeter every night.

  “Morphine?” I asked the Gunny.

  He briefly turned to stare at me, as he readied the other wounded Marine for storage until the morning’s medevac. The wounded FNG to be stored for care by the two remaining corpsmen and the other body bag moved to a nearby clearing to wait. The morphine-addicted Corpsman finally was receiving morphine for the purpose it was intended instead of for escape, I thought, although he was in fact escaping. The corpsmen worked, ignoring my presence. I wondered if there’d be another corpsman on the morning chopper to replace the one we’d lost.

  I retreated back toward the area not far from where I’d called in the artillery. There had been no more incoming small arms fire. My mind replayed the cracks the weapons made when they’d gone off outside the perimeter. The Gunny was accurate. Not sixteens or AKs. Different. Like the choppers were different. You didn’t have to see the chopper to know what it was. Even the Huey Cobra attack helicopters sounded distinctly different from the supply ones.

  Stevens and Nguyen had set up the hooches, mine too. I couldn’t remember dropping my pack. In o
fficer candidate school and then the basic school I’d never worked in the field with enlisted men. The work, and obvious care for me the small team exhibited, kept me in a state of disconcerted surprise.

  I pulled out a box of “Ham and Mothers,” as Fessman called the particular B-2 Meal. “Combat, Individual” was printed on the box. I checked inside and found a pack of sugar and one of cream. I’d thought the boxes had all been gone through, but maybe I was wrong. And then I thought of what might have been done to the food, given that the company had such little regard for officers and absolutely no fear of killing them. I shrugged, reading the little cream container. There was nothing to read out in combat conditions. I was so used to reading. In spite of having no time to do anything but be afraid, fight the awful conditions, and try to survive, I missed reading. The package said that the four grams of powdered cream inside was made by Sanna Dairies in Madison, Wisconsin. For some reason I felt like visiting the company if I ever got back to the world.

  “Why do they take the sugar and cream out of the C-Rations?” I asked Stevens, sitting nearby under his own lean-to. “Cut drugs, or something?” I went on, after he didn’t reply.

  “Hot chocolate,” Fessman said.

  “What?” I asked, not believing his answer.

  “B-3 units,” Fessman replied. “The B-3 units have cocoa powder packets instead of the John Wayne crackers you have in the mother box. The cocoa powder tastes a lot better with extra sugar and cream.”

  “I suppose you got a B-3,” I said, tearing open a brown envelope of crackers. The John Wayne crackers, no doubt, but I wasn’t going to ask.

  “No, sir,” Fessman responded, holding up two small discs. “I’m a B-1 man, myself. Pure chocolate. No powder.”

  I’d never seen C-Rations before, or “Charlie Rats,” as Fessman called them. That the codes on the boxes meant something made sense. That there was no training about the subject made no sense at all.

  It was closing on full dark. I was eating the ham and limas without shaking, having been supplied a small hand-formed pyramid of the explosives for heating. So far so good. Suddenly I realized I had better use the bathroom, or what passed for one in the field. I put my cans back in my B-2 box, set it aside and grabbed my E-tool, the little folding shovel that was irreplaceable.

  “Be careful out there,” Stevens whispered to me, as I got ready to go. “Don’t go far and stay low. No booby traps in here or we’d have set ’em off already, but there’s other stuff.”

  Other stuff. I was learning about other stuff. During my entire time on the planet I’d never been to a place where I was so disliked so quickly without almost anyone knowing me, or even having met me.

  I moved very slowly away from the small fires of my team. I realized immediately that I’d also forgotten to bring the cigarettes and the bad smelling lotion. The mosquitoes were back in full force. I stopped no more than thirty feet deep into the nearby bracken, got down on my knees and quickly dug a calf-deep hole. I set the shovel down, being sure to be as quiet as possible, and then did what I had come there to do. The little pack of toilet paper in the B-1 accessory pack did the job. I covered the mess carefully, and then stopped. The overwhelming aroma of marijuana wafted through the chest-high ferns. A small group of Marines moved in and began setting up not ten feet from my position. For some reason I froze in place, dropping to the prone position near my covered hole.

  The Marines started a single large fire, apparently also fueled by the plastic explosives, and then sat around it, working through their own C-Ration boxes.

  “What do you think, Jurgens?” one of the Marines said. “This new clown we got.”

  I held my breath, wondering if they could possibly be talking about me.

  “More of the same. Another ring-knocker, most likely,” a deeper voice answered.

  My mind whirled. Ring-knocker was a derogatory word used to describe a West Point or Naval Academy graduate. I knew it was a phrase also used to describe officers in general. They had to be talking about me.

  “So what do we do?” another Marine asked. “Is he going to side with us or them? And does it matter. We’re doing fine on our own.”

  “Yeah, we’re doing just great,” the deeper voice responded. “Four KIA yesterday alone, not counting the doc, who that asshole took out.”

  “He needed to go,” the one they called Jurgens said, forcefully. “He stole the fucking morphine.”

  Who were “they,” I wondered. The enemy? North Vietnamese Army? The VC? I couldn’t figure it out.

  “We ain’t goin’ home, Sarge,” the first Marine said.

  “Let’s just fucking take him out like the rest,” another Marine said, his voice low and deep. “Why risk anything? What are they going to do, send some more? We’ll take them out too.”

  “This one’s no dummy,” Jurgens said. “He can read a map and call artillery pretty damned good, and something had to be done with doc. That was pretty slick.”

  “We can use the ambush trick. Like with Weathers in First Platoon. We’ll just set up an ambush for tomorrow night after we deal with 110. Just like before. We’ll give him the wrong location. The Gunny can send him out to check on us and when he walks by we’ll let him have it. Hell, remember Weathers? I called him on the net and told him we had activity in our kill zone and he said to open fire.”

  It seemed that they all laughed together from my perspective a few feet away. I pushed myself down into the wet ferns. They’d just admitted killing an officer, or making him kill himself. If I was discovered I knew I would be dead on the spot.

  “The Gunny was pissed about that,” Jurgens said, when the laughing died down. “We can’t afford to piss off the Gunny. He’s all we’ve got. Do what you gotta do but leave the Gunny out of it. He’s kind of soft on the asshole anyway.

  “Screw it,” the deep voiced Marine said. “That clown is nutty as a fruit cake. He called in that phosphorus round right over our heads. If it’d gone off a little lower, we’d all burned to death. And that little artillery display before, to kill a VC sniper? That was way too close and I think he did it on purpose. He’s nuts.”

  “No Gunny,” Jurgens said, flatly. “You can pull the ambush trick tomorrow night but no Gunny.”

  “What about the radio jockey and Stevens?” deep voice asked.

  “Whoever shows up,” Jurgens replied. “Fortunes of war. Maybe he’ll bring Sugar Daddy along and we can finally finish off that son-of-a-bitch too.”

  I had to get out of there but I couldn’t move. If I moved, the battle-tested Marines nearby, only a few feet from me, would be alerted and then they wouldn’t wait for an ambush. I had my .45 but they all had automatic weapons. I felt in my lower back pocket. I’d taken one of the brand new M33 grenades, just to check it out, when I was at the morning chopper. I pulled it out very gently. It was smaller than an orange and perfectly round. The safety pressure lever stuck out and down from the side, almost as big as the device. I thought about pulling the pin and tossing it in among the Marines nearby but I knew I couldn’t do it. Maybe they weren’t all in on it. Maybe they were kidding and wouldn’t go through with it. But I had to get away and I was frightened down to my boots again. My whole body was tensed up. I had the grenade in my right hand but wasn’t sure I could control myself to pull the damned pin.

  I eased the grenade under me. I’d trained only part of one day with the older M26 model. When the lever, or spoon as it was called, was released, it made a loud mechanical noise when the striker hit to start the fuse. They would know my location instantly when I let the pressure off the spoon, so I did it while I had the grenade under my stomach in the mud. There was almost no sound, my body muffling almost all of the grenade’s action.

  I rolled over and threw the grenade as far over the group as I could, my whole torso whipping up and then back down. I prayed there was no Marine doing what I was doing in the brush
on the far side.

  “What the fuck?” came from one of the men just before the five second fuse burned through and the grenade went off.

  I vaulted up and ran.

  “Grenade!” a Marine screamed, but I was moving low and fast back toward my team’s position. I’d thrown the grenade pretty far, and the M33 seemed like it wasn’t too big for a grenade, anyway.

  When I was within a few meters of my hooch I slowed down, took a few breaths and moved in.

  “Incoming?” Stevens asked.

  “Didn’t sound like it,” I responded, as matter-of-factly as I could.

  “Maybe a triple play attempt,” Fessman added, “since it sounded like it was one of ours. I’d say M33, not 26. Too sharp. That was Comp B.”

  I was amazed that a seventeen-year-old kid could observe such a thing with great accuracy.

  “What’s a triple play?” I asked.

  “You get three purple hearts awarded here and you get to spend the rest of your tour in Okinawa,” Fessman said. “They throw grenades nearby after digging in, usually when there’s incoming later in the night. They hold their hands up to get hit by fragments. Three and you’re out. Triple play.”

  I listened to the hubbub in the distance but nobody came in our direction except the Gunny. Moments after I returned he appeared, moving easily and quietly to sit on the edge of my poncho.

  “Grenade,” he said. “Likely friendly. Don’t know. We’ll get hit later, of course, but we’re in a pretty good position. One KIA and two wounded before the sun goes down though. Not a good omen. The Corpsman’s going to live. Thought you might want to know.”

  “Thank you, Gunny,” I responded.

  “You did want to know,” he came back.

  “Of course,” I replied, wondering where he was going.

  He got to his feet. “I’ll be just a few meters over there all night. Tomorrow, before we engage with whatever we have to engage with, I want you to meet somebody. The other problem we got, like the doc, the knuckle-knockers. I’ll arrange it.”