Category: RVN

I woke with cotton socks I quit wearing six or seven months before having taken up residence in my mouth.  Some of the socks were unwashed.  I reached for a smoke and sloshed the beaker that held the last of the Jack Daniels from the night before – just to check for bugs.  I hate waking up at Division rear confining me with barbed wire around a throng of Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers (REMFs), Remington Raiders, Office Pogues.  But I wanted my pay and I had to check in on the First to make my amount in cash known.  Bad habits, even overseas, even in a combat zone, even if I, too, am a REMFing Remington Raider and something of an Office Pogue as well.  Twenty-some days a month I get usually a full night’s uninterrupted sleep – except for a voluntary radio watch or the very occasional night ambush or listening post.  Relaxing and safe.  Not like Hill 327, First Marine Division (-) (Reinforced).  I never had been inside The Sandbaggers enlisted men’s club, even the restricted NCO (non-commissioned officers) side: too dangerous. Guns. Knives, grenades. More pot than Haight Street.  More booze than The French Quarter. Just. Too. Damn Dangerous.

Got paid the day before, December Fourth.  Went to downtown DaNang at the formerly Marine-run Press Center on the DaNang River for a spaghetti supper with Mateus Rose and real French bread dripping butter and garlic. Got massively drunk. More massively high with some civilian journalists I had taken “To See The Elephant” ages earlier in this interminable existence in The Green Suck. The officers were not allowed in the Enlisted Club side of the press center and we slime were similarly barred from the ossifers’ side.  The working press, as a rule ate and drank with us when they could get an invite.  Friday had been a party of sorts, with an Oklahoma congressman and several members of the press, including Jay Sharbutt and John Sullivan who were there to celebrate the “not guilty” verdict of a Marine being court-martialed for murder for killing NVA who had been identified as those men toting the machine gun the day before back in prehistory – or the past Spring I seem to recall.  So the whiskey, wine and suds flowed.  There were stops to add fog to the low-lying clouds covering the DaNang River.  I briefly considered walking out the gate to go spread pollen along the sidestreets, but with only two months or so to go before I had to make up my mind about extending for six more months, I was lying to myself successfully about “being careful.”

That go shot to shit the next morning, December Sixth.

I walked through the monsoon mists up the slope to just below the division headquarters bunker to the Public Affairs “shop,” which the Summer before I had christened with a bucket of white paint meant for the walls. Said it was a spill.  But I did not have to paint any more and retired then to the radio-guy’s bunker to catch some sleep.  This day was different.  Captain J. P. (for) Novak (committee) was less than pleased.  The month before some of us who worked with the grunts had just a little too much salt in our sails and he was determined not to let the attitude continue to corrode his command.  I grinned as I entered, tossled Private Ernie Gomer Pyle’s indeterminate orange-yellow-brown coat and bent down to see if he had peed under The Skipper’s desk again, as promised by co-conspirator Bob Davis, king slacker of us all. Gunny George Selby was on the phone so I just waved and assumed my position along the back walk of the Quonset hut which bounded public affairs from The Real World.  Feet up on the length-of-hallway running repository of typewriters, I cracked open a beer and began mentally reviewing the process called Surviving December.  This was my first December in DeNahmb.  Full-on monsoon.  Strange rumors of troop movement down from the mountains.  And then there was the dream.  No. The Dream!

Sometime Oh Dark Thirty I awoke, screaming “Incoming!” and rose from my perch alongside the dust-now-mud orange clay of hill 24 alongside the route from LZ Baldy to Que Son City en route to Fire Support Base Ross at the southern end of the Marine’s tactical area of responsibility.  I knew by the sound they were mortars and I who had made a mad passion of NOT digging in in the bush since I arrived and I had but moments to get underground if I wanted to live.  Shit.  I had given up wearing the red-n-black-n-yellow meso-American headband woven through the shotgunshell loops in my bushhat. I had switched from pink to green the sweat towel that rested between my flak jacket and my too-damn-heavy always pack perched atop a row of canteens on the aluminum alloy packframe.  I saw the hole and dove…and woke up between two footlockers back in Divvy Rear to the roaring delight of all the other bushrat writers and the REMFs who filed and typed and brushed black their boots and wrote fleet hometown news reports about johnnyrottencrotch’s latest promotion.  I coulda swore it was mortars!  Damn.  Well, that was entertaining.  Ain’t had a nightmare like that in years.  Well, never, in fact.  Smelled real.  Tasted the cordite.  Heard the yell.  Shit.

Gunny Selby called me over to his station, just outside Captain Novak’s office.  After I had gotten the other Gunnery Sergeant drunk in October at An Hoa I had figured Selby was no fan of mine, since that other lifer soon picked up a jeep and at gunpoint forced a couple of rear-area press pogues to drive out to Go Noi Island – miles south on National Highway 1 and infested with a reported NVA battalion.  He got shipped back to Okinawa – had been sober for years I later was told. No one had warned me not to show him my stash and share.  Oh, well. What they gonna do? Cut my hair off and send me to VeetNahmb?

“Richards,” Selby intoned with that thin-lipped sick smile of the professional warrior-watcher.  “Stars & Stripes Pacific wants you.” He handed me the phone that connected The War to Okinawa.  The voice on the other end asked if it were true that I had the only underwater Nikinos II camera left in either the photo or press sections of the First Marine Division.  It was my personal property, I intruded, not mentioning I bought it from Captain J.P. (For) Novak last September for sixty bucks.  Yup, I guess that’s true since photo got told to ship out all but the Nikons back to The States since we were about to be pulled out.

Well, we heard you loaned that camera out to JAG for photos of an atrocity scene just when the monsoons began, they edged around the main point.  I assented.  It had helped acquit a Marine falsely accused – not by Vietnamese but by self-serving Pogues trying to make a perfectly acceptable war into The Drill Field at Eighth And Eye back in D.C.

Well, began the voice, warming to the task. You are about the only one left who walks with the grunts these days.  Even ahead of point sometimes.  We want you to go out and do a photo-essay with copy about Marines who walk point for a double-truck in Stars-And-Stripes.  Well, why not.  I know just where to go, I reasoned.  Relatively safe. Say the Thu Bon River at the Highway 1 bridge.  Even though it’s no longer the Seventh Marines of the Summer and earlier, I know the people and the places and it’s still pretty much run through the ringer and quietly drying on the line.

OK, I finally replied.  Gotta go back out anyway.  Hear they’re kicking me out of The Arizona and I would welcome a return to The Que Sons.  Sure, let me get my shit together and work up a plan.  Shouldn’t take more than a week or 10 days, okay?  It was and they hung up.

And I soon was hanging on for drear life.  Not a single bird was flying that afternoon or the Seventh.  I had gone through Typhoon Kate back in either late October or early November and saw the twenty-mile-long, eight-mile-wide lake instead of a verdant green flanked by two lazy shallow rivers that is known to cartographers as The An Hoa rivers basin.  From Charley Ridge to the North and The Que Son Mountains to the South it was water to chest-height at minimum with small peaks poking their snouts above the deluge.  Good times.  One of the two Navy Corpsmen arguing which had the higher temperature and thus had to accompany the truly sick Marine from that dank and dripping bunker over near Elephant Valley and I jumped aboard the CH-46 twin-rotor almost pregnant banana-shaped combat assault/resupply/medevac helicopter and it raced through the driving, blinding rain and windgusts nose down, rotors almost beating loud enough to hear over the roar of the massive typhoon en route to the Air Force’s 95th Med Evac (Mobile Air Surgical Evacuation Hospital) instead of the Marines’ Charley Med just South and East of Division Rear. Only months later in the surgery ward of Jacksonville Naval Hospital Ward 8 (surgery) did I reflect on that little bit of brutal serendipity.

Now, December Eight.  Still I had no way to get to a safe place.  The only “bird” leaving Camp Reasoner, the division Recon Battalion landing zone just below Hill 327, was heading to LZ Baldy.  So far maybe so good. It was high noon and armpit dark.  When I arrived and squish-trekked to the 5th Marines Regimental Command Post to inquire about transport and where it was going.  Nothing.  Except one jeep was scheduled to leave at 1400 ( 2 p.m.) for Hill 24 and The Football Field.  That was the road going West from Baldy, not the road going East and then North to the Song Thu Bon and where I weaned in Vietnam last February.  So much for safe.

The jeep deposited me at Hill 24, and scooted off. I never had been to the place.  But back in ancient history, March or April,  Leo Dromgoole, Don Darby and Bob Davis spent time working that end of the Alpha Company (1st Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment) Combined Unit Pacification Program (CUPP) in which a reinforced squad of Marines and a navy corpsman joined up with a platoon of regional and popular forces local guard type retreads, refits and rejects who could and did with USMC stiffening and teaching turn away much of the local theft by NVA of their young men and women by impressment gangs and even more immediately threatening steal their seasonal store of eating – and later for replanting – rice and what few animals such as chickens, pigs and dogs they kept for sale, for sometimes fat to add to their mostly vegetarian diet and last of all for impromptu toilet paper.  It was a dog’s lot to lap squishy butts and then when plump if too many were around to join the cookpot.  this hill looked like the dog did not make its rounds.  An ugly pimple of blood orange clay scraped from a verdant bank of vine with tufts of grass mostly cut down to provide fields of fire from within the triple rows of concertina barbed wire embedded with German razor wire in a tanglefoot pattern.  I once watched a Chieu Hoi – turncoat NVA – strip to a loincloth and carrying a made-up satchel charge explosive simulating  eight of more pounds of plastique Compound-4, wriggle and worm through forty feet of the stuff in less than a minute. He practiced a lot. The demonstration was convincing.  I never went to sleep standing watch either in a bunker, a hasty ambush or in a light – but separate by 10 feet or more – circle of sleeping Marines in a hastily set up night pos (position).  But this place reeked of “Come Here And Kill Me.” The Football Field itself neither looked like nor assumed the dimensions of an American football field.  Its name came from the continual contests staged there since apocrypha  had it time immemorial two – or more – sides of any dispute let blood upon its green field.  Here the simple Vietnamese farmers fought and bled and won over Chinese invaders a thousand years before; here, too, Japanese invaders met their matches after and before it was the turn of France’s Legion of Strangers; and like Hill 65 on the other side of The Que Sons, Vietnamese introduced themselves to their southern cousins and their Yankee friends.  It was a place to fear.  We twenty-somethings would find to fight men who had fought here for twenty consecutive years and more.  The Football Field gives shudders and cold bumps still.

I shucked my pack – two ponchos, two liners, ten one-quart canteens and two three-quart plastic inside a green nylon case blivets, and removed two of the three bandoliers of almost fully-loaded M-16 ammunition magazines.  One bandolier served as a semi-belt about my waist and my flak jacket held five more mags.  The twenty-seventh magazine was inserted – but not loaded its first round not in-chamber but awaiting the distinctive pull and release charging handle.  I carried no grenades.  The bottom of my pack was ome to two more un-magazine M-16 .226 caliber ammunition.  Usually I carried both my Canon and the Nikonos II underwater camera: today I had just the Nikonos.  The month before when I got a surprise Carrier On-board Delivery flight (COD) out to the USS Oriskany aircraft carrier at Yankee Station Up North about parallel with Hanoi and Haiphong,  the photo shop aboard pulled about an ounce and one-half of Vietnam out of my Canon FTb with its trusty fifty-five millimeter F1:1.2 ultra fast low-light capable lens. So it resided at home, back in the squalor of the enlisted pukes quarters at Division Rear. Once in late Summer I weight my self fully loaded at it totaled two-hundred sixty-five pounds.  Then I stripped to just cammies and boots and I weight something like one-hundred thirty-eight.  I got there last February at one-hundred eighty-six.  What a spa!  Schedule a tropical war in triple-canopy mountainous clime and hey presto! instant weight loss machine!  Wearing only my rifle and my Randall bowie knife I approached a lieutenant and a staff sergeant with some crusty navy corpsman in tow at the top of the pimple, just outside a low dug-in and surrounded by layers of sandbags command bunker.

Hill 24 was what was then called a Permanent Platoon Patrol Base.  Militarily acronymed as PPPB, or in short PB.  A headquarters team of Marines, about ten in all and a couple of squads of South Vietnamese Regional Forces – about thirty – ringed the hilltop and served as headquarters and first reaction force for several if not more individual reinforced squads of Marines and platoons of regional/popular force indigenous troops.  A Marine rifle squad in those days was supposed to total three four-man fire teams plus a squad leader, a radio man (optional) and an M-79 (grenade launcher) usually second-in-command for a total of fourteen and with radio a half-thirty.  Reinforced with a corpsman, at least one M-60 machine gun team – usually such a CUPP squad had scrounged at least one more – and the heavy firepower of assorted rocket launchers and other toys of the trade were augmented by the sixty millimeter mortar usually carried and operated by the South Vietnamese, most of whom worked their fields by day and came to join up with the Marines by night.  Often select Ruff-Puffs as they were called came out by day to join the usually twice and sometimes thrice-daily combat patrols, a show-of-force public relations activity mostly though dead seriously earnest for almost all who attended such soirees.

I new not a single person there.  This was Golf Company, Second Battalion, Fifth Marines.  I knew the company well. And they knew me.  With a different platoon during the past summer I was focus of a real nasty foodfight between the bigwigs at Headquarters, United States Marine Corps and The Press.

 

I lost about a third of the December 10 additions or perhaps a bit more by an errant typing finger and have somehow found a saved version that will allow me to do more (one hopes) with finding the elements leading up to the attack by the Sapper Assault Company of the Sapper Battalion of the 98th C Division, North Vietnamese Army at Hill 24 (The Football Field) just West of Landing Zone Baldy and East of Que Son City.  I have work in the woods tomorrow and the rest of the afternoon squandering what lucre remains. I have been luckier.  I shall try to improve on today sometime early next week.

 

 

 

…More to come later…got some new chores.