There was no way to find any VC in the area. A shot would come from the woods, and you’d return fire, killing a lot of the vegetation without ever hitting the sniper. If you did hit him, you wouldn’t know about it.
The guy that got hit was a private. Everybody was standing around him congratulating him on his wound. He’d have a chance to get back to Chu Lai for a week or so, and it wasn’t a bad hit. It was funny. A guy could get hit, be inches from being killed or crippled for life, and make a joke of it. It was all part of Nam. Some parts you could laugh at, like getting hit in the ass. Other parts, like the kid blowing up, you tried to shut out of your mind.
Johnson came over to where I was trying to down some scrambled eggs before the flying bugs got them. What I would do is to wave my fork over the eggs until all the bugs flew away, then grab a forkful before they came back. Johnson sat down on the ground next to me and watched me for a while.
“The officers ain’t eating no powdered eggs,” Johnson said.
“What are they eating?”
“Dehydrated potatoes.”
“How come they get all the good stuff?”
“They having a big fight over at HQ hooch,” Johnson said.
“What about?”
“We suppose to go on a joint patrol with the ARVNs and the ARVN colonel wants us to get into position first. Cap’n Stewart wants the ARVNs to go in first.” “Stewart told you that?”
“Gearhart.” Johnson grunted the name.
“He say anything else about Dongan?”
“Nothing he can say,” Johnson said. “Dongan made them switches too fast. Soon’s he got here he looked around and did his thing. He might know how to keep himself together, but I don’t want him doing it by getting me killed.”
There was something about Johnson that was different than the rest of us. There was a knowing about him, as if he had been here before, as if dying and fighting was something he had been bom to. When he talked about Dongan, I listened.
“First thing he done was to sit down and have him a beer with Brunner, then he had him a beer with Walowick. He don’t like Lobel because he think Lobel’s a faggot. He even ask me if he was a faggot.” It made me feel good to hear Johnson say that. I didn’t think he would have said it when he first came into the army, or even when he first got into the squad. But we had all learned something about dying, and about trying to keep each other alive. It was good.
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say nothing,” Johnson said. “I don’t talk that shit. A man in Nam fighting by my side is a man fighting by my side. I don’t care what he doing in bed.”
We watched as the guy who had been hit in the rear end came out of the tent. He had a big smile on his face. His boots were unlaced and he was walking with a limp. The medic was just helping him into a jeep when he got hit a second time. It was another titi hit, on his hand, but this time somebody saw where the fire had come from.
A squad went out to look for the sniper. He probably could have stayed in his tree or his hole for the rest of the war without being caught, but he elected to fire on the squad. They pinned him down with automatic fire while the mortar squads set up. It must have cost ten thousand dollars to kill him.
“You hear what happened?” Peewee’s fatigues hung on him loosely. There were dark stains under the arms that were ringed with salt at the edges.
“What happened?” Johnson looked at Peewee.
“The little Viet colonel gave Stewart a direct order to take some damn hill. Stewart said he wasn’t going up first and the colonel called Division.”
“Now what going to happen?” Johnson asked.
“Now we going up the damn hill first,” Peewee said.
“What it is,” Lieutenant Gearhart was saying, “is a small hill overlooking a village called Phuoc Ha Two. There’s been activity on the hill, and they want it checked out. The thing is, this colonel is the same one who was leading some ARVN troops that got ambushed along Route 534. Got a whole battalion wasted.”
“Let’s just not go,” Peewee said.
“Division said we had to go, so we’re going,” Gearhart answered. “We’re going to call in artillery to soften up the area, then explore the slopes off the paddies. All we want to do is draw fire if there’s any unfriendlies there.”
Peewee wrote down the number of the highway that the ARVN colonel’s battalion had been ambushed on and said that he was going to send it to his barber, who took numbers back home, and have him play it for the whole month.
“I feel lucky,” he said.
It was the first time I had seen Peewee actually smile since I was back. It was funny that he should smile when we might be going into a firefight.
First we choppered into a hot LZ and the pilots jerked us out and took us out of there and into the valley itself, which didn’t seem hot. We were getting fire support from Tam Ky, and there was no response from the hill we were supposed to be moving onto. That didn’t mean a damn thing. I had heard stories about artillery fire taking off the entire top of a mountain and then having the Congs come out of the ground. Their bunkers were deeper than ours, a lot deeper.
The new LZ was a makeshift number. We were bunched up pretty good, and I was just praying that we hit the wood line before we got fire. The enemy was close enough for us to hear the sounds of their mortars firing. The rounds were going long but, more important, they weren’t detonating. You could hear them whistling overhead, but then there wouldn’t be an explosion. We figured it was either defective equipment or the Cong mortar squad didn’t know how to arm them. That wouldn’t last long.
A black lieutenant took Charlie Company to the right of the hill we were supposed to hit and Lieutenant Gearhart took us to the left. We started advancing in as wide a skirmish line as I had seen, but there was still no return fire.
Our squad was on the deep flank and I was far man.
We had to cross a paddy field to get to the wood line that led to the hill we were going to explore. This was why the ARVNs didn’t want to go first. The paddy area was at least the size of a football field and exposed.
I breathed a little easier when we reached the wood line. Lieutenant Gearhart picked the route with the most cover for us. We went through a heavy canopy area, and the branches scratched my face and ripped at my hands. I was jumping through bushes, hoping I didn’t hit any booby traps, avoiding anything that looked like it might be a step easier. I was struggling to keep up. The two weeks in the hospital had done a number on me. Just two lousy weeks. The M-16 felt like sixteen pounds instead of five.
Jamal carried the radio, and Gearhart was on it. He gave us the signal to stay put, and I got down behind a fallen tree.
Peewee crawled over to me.
“I got a coin back home,” he said. “You go in my room and look in the back of the closet on the floor. You find a sneaker there and in the sneaker there’s a sock with some stuff in it. Most of the stuff ain’t worth nothing, but that coin is real old.”
“Yeah?”
“If I don’t get out this shit you go get that coin,” Peewee said. “My moms might be a little uptight thinking you trying to rip her off or some shit. But if you got to buy it from her you do that. We get out this particular mess, and I’ll write her and tell her to save it for you.”
That’s all he said. Then he started crawling back to his position. It meant he had a bad feeling about this place.
We heard some light fire on the other side of the mountain. The sixty was stuttering. Once in a while I thought I heard the M-i6s, but I couldn’t be sure.
Some rounds of high explosives came in on top of the hill.
I tensed. I looked over to where Lobel was snuggling up to the base of a tree trunk. I gave him the thumbs-up sign and he returned it.
We waited. I checked my watch and it was 1000 hours. The barrage on the hill stopped. The sounds of a firefight on the other side of the hill picked up. Still, our squad waited. Gearhart was signaling. I looked over at h
im. He was pointing toward the trees. Okay, look out for snipers.
I tried to make myself smaller.
Don’t think, just be alert. Sergeant Simpson used to say it over and over again. But I was thinking.
Gearhart waved his arm in the air. Crap. We started getting up. I had to pee. I’d do it later. I must have had a pee ratio of three to one in Nam versus the amount of times I had peed in Harlem.
We had to move around the base of the hill to another area. Gearhart took us away from the wood line and back toward the paddies.
“What the fuck’s he doing?” Peewee asked.
“Trying to draw fire,” Walowick said.
We were showing ourselves, being targets. We moved along the edge of the paddy. The ground was muddy, oozing with water.
“Stay away from the dikes!” Sergeant Dongan called out.
“Keep your distances!”
I was wearing a flak jacket. Peewee had found two and had given me one. It weighed a ton. We kept moving. We kept slipping in the mud. Monaco had pushed forward faster than the rest of us. I think he wanted the point. He hit a dry spot and stopped. He held his rifle over his head and we all stopped. He knelt and then stepped off the dry spot into the paddy.
We all followed him into the paddy. When I passed the dry spot I saw how smooth it looked. Maybe it was too smooth. Maybe it was mined. That’s what Monaco must have thought.
I thought that if I got killed, I would want it to be over quick. I wanted to be hit and not even realize what was happening. I’d be gone, like Lieutenant Carroll. Over. Out. I don’t want to lay screaming. I don’t want to be carried in a medevac chopper while guys you could be home playing ball with were banging on your chest, trying to get your heart beating again.
Don’t think.
The rice paddy seemed forever. The water was up past my ankles, and the stink was something else.
“Johnson, hit that line of trees!” Dongan called out.
Johnson held the sixty at his waist. He leaned into it and fired. I saw that he had something on his left hand. It looked like one of those mittens you used to handle hot pots, only it was silver.
We kept moving. The rice paddy ended. We were crouched, moving forward toward the wood line again. We hadn’t drawn fire.
We moved up the hill. It was steep. We slid and fell. I fell, and let myself slide backward. I was afraid to catch on to anything. We fired a few shots, even though we didn’t see anything.
We went up thirty, forty meters. Nothing. Gearhart signaled us to stop.
We looked around and found cover.
Wait. It was 1130 hours.
We dug in. Charlie had taught us well. We rested. We sat. Gearhart was on the radio. I tried to read him from where I was. Next to Gearhart, lying exhausted on the ground, was Jamal.
Lobel was sitting against a tree. When I saw him I froze. His eyes were open but there was no expression in them.
“Lobel!” I called to him.
“Wha?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, I thought you were dead.”
He smiled. His face was caked with dirt, and the smile showed his teeth. The blank expression in his eyes never changed.
We waited until almost 1200 hours before Gearhart signaled for us to move out. We moved back down the hill. We backed down the best we could. We got to the bottom and then ran the distance back to the paddy. Then we started back through it. It began to rain lightly.
The trip back through the paddy went faster than it did the other way. We got away from the paddy and started moving toward the LZ. Stewart was already there when we got there. He was pissed.
He told Gearhart to “get over to the command post.” Gearhart glanced toward us and then left.
“What was that all about?” Lobel and Walowick came over to where the rest of the squad was already sitting.
“All I know is that Gearhart got the order to regroup here,” Jamal said.
“It’s my lunch time,” Peewee said. “So we had to break.”
“Check your weapon,” Dongan said to Johnson.
“It’s okay,” Johnson said, not moving.
“I said check your fucking weapon!”
Johnson looked up at Dongan and then started stripping the sixty.
“What makes you such a hotshot?” Monaco asked Dongan.
“When you were still pissing your pants I was kicking ass, kid,” Dongan said. “This ain’t no fucking war. These slants can’t fight. You go up against the Koreans, then you got your damn hands full.”
We listened to Sergeant Dongan talk about how hard things had been in the Korean war, and how tough the Koreans had been. I didn’t care. I hadn’t been in Korea, and I hadn’t been in any other wars. I was in Nam, here and now, and here is where my war was.
Gearhart came back. Brunner, kissing ass as usual, got up from a box he was sitting on so Gearhart could sit on it. Gearhart sat on it. I didn’t think Lieutenant Carroll would have done that.
“The Vietnamese officer, Colonel Hai, has changed his mind,” Gearhart said. “Now he wants his men to take the hill.”
“We was on the damn hill already,” Peewee said. “That’s why Stewart is pissed,” Gearhart said. “After we reached the hill without drawing fire, Hai thinks it’s safe. So he’ll send his men up, then he’ll write up his report and take credit for the body count.”
“What we do, stay here?”
“No, we follow them back up the hill,” Gearhart said.
The ARVNs had an ONTOS, an antitank weapon, that was supposed to lead the way. But there was no way the tracked vehicle was going to get through the mud. And if it did get to the base of the hill, there was no way it was going up the hill through the trees unless somebody chopped out a path for it. At least we didn’t have to do that.
The ARVNs got into a staging area and started moving out. We sat and watched as what looked like almost a full company of little soldiers moved out. They were bunched too tightly, and they were moving too quickly.
They left a small headquarters contingent behind as they moved out. Charlie Company moved out after the tail end of the ARVNs, which were mostly mortar teams. We followed Charlie Company.
It was 1320 hours.
The first fire came from the flank. Two squads of ARVNs moved out to suppress it.
“I don’t like it,” Dongan said. “That’s about where we were on the first trip. I bet you got the Second over there.”
He was talking about the Second North Vietnamese Regiment. I had heard about them. They had been operating in Quang Ngai and just southeast of Tam Ky, but the marines had beaten them pretty badly. If it was the Second Regulars, they would be more disciplined, and better armed than the VCs.
The flank fire seemed to move the whole battalion toward it and toward the paddies. I didn’t want to go through the paddies again.
“Incoming!” Monaco yelled and we hit the ground.
The mortar shells landed behind us. They were long again. Long but walking. They had spotters who saw where the shells were landing, and who were directing the fire. They kept shortening up the range to get closer and closer to us. And the shells were coming fast.
The noise was terrible. Every time a mortar went off, I jumped. I couldn’t help myself. The noise went into you. It touched parts of you that were small and frightened and wanting your mommy. Being away from the fighting had weakened my stamina. It did even more to my nerves. I was shaking. I had to force myself to keep my eyes open.
The South Vietnamese ahead of us had just cleared the paddies when the whole damned hill seemed to explode with gunfire.
I was thirty meters into the paddies. The shells exploding in the paddy sent water in huge cones into the air. The ARVNs on the far edge of the paddy, and those who were trapped in the open space between the paddy and the hill’s wood line were being cut down in waves. Some started to come back into the paddy. Others, in the paddy, were trying to get out to dash across the open spa
ce to the wood line.
“Get back! Get back!” Gearhart had turned around and crouched over, one hand holding his helmet.
We started moving back. The ARVNs around us didn’t seem to know what to do. I didn’t know what to do, either.
I slipped in the mud and went straight down. I tried to hold my piece out of the water, but I wasn’t sure if I did or not. Then there was fire from our rear. We were trapped in the paddy! I was on my knees, water up to my waist.
“Stay away from the dikes and work back toward the staging area!” Gearhart called out.
Suddenly there were jets in the skies above us. I watched one as it dove toward the hill, and pulled up just after releasing a bomb. I turned to see the napalm explode and then roll up the hill in a billowing cloud.
An ARVN soldier was struggling to keep moving. He had been hit and the water around him was red with blood. I put my arm under his and lifted him the best I could. Monaco grabbed him by the other side, and we dragged him along.
“Keep going! Keep going!” Lieutenant Gearhart’s voice.
We reached the wood line and laid the ARVN guy down. A medic came over, looked at him, and pulled him into a sheltered space.
“Hit that line!” It was Peewee’s voice. “Johnson, hit that line!”
I turned to see what he was pointing at. There was a row of bushes that almost completely hid the muzzle flashes coming from their midst. Johnson got down in a prone position and started stitching the bushes. We all went down and started firing.
There were Congs on the hill behind us, and Congs to our flanks. We kept moving toward the line of bushes, and I saw some of them moving out. Johnson cut them down as they ran.
There were stands of trees every hundred yards or so along the rice paddies leading to the hill. We hit the first stand and fought from tree to tree. I got behind a tree and took clips from my belt. They were wet, and I shook them and blew on them to get the water off.
There were hundreds of ARVNs still in the paddies. They were being cut up pretty bad. Many were wounded and screaming. Some of the ARVNs had just stopped where they were and were holding their hands to their heads. They had freaked out completely. Some guys from Charlie Company had tried to get out along the dikes and now lay dead on them. One kept waving his arm in the air. He was still alive.