Drafted

by Andrew Atherton

  What the hell? We looked at each other. This was all wrong. And coming from an inexperienced newbie—a chaplain’s assistant/warehouse bureaucrat no less—who didn’t ask questions to find out what he didn’t know.

  “Where’s Captain Kirby?” somebody yelled.

  Tibbot squinted at us. “Captain Kirby put me in charge. He and Lieutenant Ashley have commo training and Major Roberts asked them to work with the commo crew on the down phone lines to the perimeter bunkers.”

  “First Sergeant Tibbot?”

  “Yes … ah, Specialist Pochanski.”

  “Why are the reinforcements going out in trucks?”

  Tibbot put his hands on his hips and replied from the corner of his mouth, “It’s the fastest way to get there, partner.”

  Gerhardt, one of our general maintenance mechanics—a man of thuggish character and appearance—called out from behind Tibbot, “Who decided we’d go out in trucks rather than run out there?”

  Tibbot stepped off his ammo box and disappeared from view, except for those of us near the front. He turned and faced the men behind him. “I did.”

  “First Sergeant Tibbot,” Berry-Ain’t-Cherry said, his brown eyes flicking among the men affirming our common concern. Tibbot turned and clearly recognized him with a big smile as our fun-loving, second-shift cook. But Berry looked at Tibbot without smiling. “Sappers hit trucks one, two, three, RPG, just like that.” Berry snapped his brown fingers three times. Several men nodded. Everyone liked Berry and knew him to be wise to the issues.

  “Our first responsibility,” Tibbot replied, the pitch of his voice going still higher, “is to reinforce the perimeter as fast as we can, and that’s what we’re going to do!”

  “But if sappers are in the area,” Berry said, “we won’t be reinforcin’ nothin’ if we get our motherfuckin’ asses blown off in a fuckin’ truck.”

  “Major Roberts personally told me he wants reinforcements moved out there as fast as possible,” Tibbot said, his lips tight, “so we’re going out in trucks!”

  Everybody groaned and shifted around.

  Bruno Dretchler, our other Headquarters Company cook, called out from behind me, “Roberts say to go out in trucks?”

  Tibbot glared at us and said nothing.

  It occurred to me that Tibbot didn’t understand the tactical advantage of our improvised SOP for ground assaults. I raised my hand and called out, “First Sergeant Tibbot?”

  The man in front of me stepped aside and Tibbot gave me a smile of recognition. “Yes, Specialist Atherton.” Tibbot thought he was better acquainted with me than with the other men. When he first arrived in the battalion, I was ordered by Adjutant Harris to walk Tibbot over to Headquarters Company and introduce him to the company commander and the office staff.

  Trying to sound reasonable and even friendly, I said, “If our reinforcement teams have perimeter bunkers assigned to them, they can run the quarter mile from their hooches directly to the perimeter. That’s actually faster than loading up on trucks and driving out there. The password identifies us to the guards as reinforcements, and our run sweeps the area for sappers. Like Faulkenberry said, we don’t use trucks.”

  Tibbot’s gaze drifted unfocused for a moment. Then he looked at me as though I were far away. “This is a different kind of situation,” he said. He wiped his forehead with the tips of his fingers and shook the perspiration to the ground. “Communications with three bunkers are down, and we’ve been ordered to move out as fast as possible.”

  “First Sergeant Tibbot,” I said, “this is unnecessarily dangerous. Please do not order us out in trucks to a ground assault. That bunches us into ideal targets. We’ll be ducks in a shooting gallery if sappers get past the perimeter in our area.”

  Tibbot’s face reddened. “Specialist Atherton, I’m in charge here, and you’ll do as I say.”

  I had not intended my answer to be heard, but I said out loud what I was thinking: “Well, I’m not getting on a fucking truck.”

  Tibbot’s response was immediate. “You’ll get on that truck, soldier, if I order you on that truck!” Tibbot’s hand moved to his holstered .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol.

  My reaction was instant, without thought or premeditation. I locked and loaded my M16 and flipped the safety to automatic. I held the rifle at my waist and aimed it at Tibbot’s feet. My finger was on the trigger ready to walk the firing rifle up the asshole’s body. The other men backed away on either side of us.

  Tibbot moved his hand slowly from his .45 and pointed his finger at me. “Atherton,” his voice cracking, “I’m charging you with insubordination and threatening a superior.”

  From a great distance, and in slow motion, I saw myself raise the muzzle of my M16 in the air, flip the safety back on, release and drop the magazine, and eject the chambered round. Everybody seemed to calm down except for me.

  I’m ready to die if I have to, but not for this stupid fuck.

  Tibbot took a deep breath and rubbed his hands together. His eyes darted from man to man.

  Corrigan, a friend of mine from Personnel, came up beside me and put his hand on my arm. I jumped. “You okay?” he whispered. I glared at him and started trembling.

  “All right,” Tibbot said in a hollow voice. “I need eight volunteers to carry M60s and eight volunteers to carry their ammo.” He paused, noting the raised hands. “Okay, good. You volunteers pick up your equipment at the armory as soon as we’re done. Any questions?” Nobody said anything. Everybody looked at the ground or glanced at each other from the corners of their eyes. “Okay, you’re dismissed. And Atherton! You report to my office in the morning.”

  As we walked back to our hooches, Corrigan, his face dotted with red acne, told me I shouldn’t worry. A couple other guys heard Corrigan and agreed. Tibbot was an asshole. Nobody would testify against me. I said “Thanks,” but I knew too many men had seen the confrontation. With sufficient threat, at least a few of the men would testify. I would be charged, court-martialed, and sentenced to the LBJ at Long Binh for the duration of the war.

  Later that evening, sitting on my cot around nine o’clock, I wrote a letter to a friend back home. I detached the two grenades from the clips on my flack jacket and rolled them back and forth on my cot while I described in the letter my fascination with the fearsome power in these objects the size of baseballs. After finishing the letter with a little bragging about my standoff with Tibbot—“I almost pulled the trigger”—I decided to get a few hours sleep. The attack, if there was one, probably wouldn’t occur until the middle of the night.

  I arranged my helmet, my flack jacket, and my M16 on the floor beside my cot. My bandoleers and grenades I positioned on the floor near my feet. Then I lay on my back, my hands behind my head, and reflected on what had happened between Tibbot and me.

  I had become a different person than I was before being drafted. Back then, I had no idea I could be a killer. Yet now I had no doubt that, in the emotion of the moment, I would have wasted Tibbot if he had tried to draw his weapon. I would have regretted it, but not because of the presumed immorality of killing a fellow American soldier. I would have regretted it because I would have forfeited my freedom and maybe my life. Tibbot had made himself a needless danger to me and to the other men in my unit. Killing him would have been morally questionable, but no more so than killing VC. Many VC were fighting to avenge the families and villages we destroyed with our indiscriminate bombing and free-fire-zone killing. And other VC were fighting for national unity and freedom from decades, even lifetimes, of foreign occupation. Tibbot was an asshole who was endangering his own men. Killing him would therefore be as defensible as killing any other threat to the lives of American soldiers.

  Even if the only motive of the VC and NVA was to enforce communism on South Vietnam, we’d still be engaged in a monumental compromise with evil. We’re doing the devil’s work at the same time we’re fighting him, and here’s why.

  Nobody I know, here in the Army or at home in t
he States, gives a damn about the Vietnamese people. We traveled halfway around the world to kill citizens and destroy property of another country so we can be safe from the threat of communism. This war is about us, not about them. Thus it follows, by the logic of self-preservation at any cost, if Tibbot is a danger to me and my military unit, particularly if that danger is due to his arrogance and stupidity, I or any other man can justifiably blow him away.

  The question now was what should I do if Tibbot ordered me on one of those trucks? And if he didn’t order me onto a truck, he’d order me into an underground bunker with the second wave reinforcements—a less dangerous idea, but almost as stupid as his truck idea. His order for the second wave reinforcements to wait in an underground bunker was consistent with Army SOP, but it wasn’t the way we, in this company and battalion, did it because we had a safer, more effective procedure.

  When preparing for a ground assault, a number of men from every company are assigned as additional guards to the perimeter bunkers while others remain behind in their company areas. Those who stay behind position themselves behind waist-high walls of sandbags we all have around our hooches. That puts them at greater individual risk from rockets and mortars—even friendly crossfire—but the risks are worth it. That way, the company area is guarded and the men aren’t clumped together in underground bunkers in locations known by every Vietnamese day worker employed in the vicinity, which means the VC also know where the underground bunkers are. So if we follow regular Army SOP, any VC sapper who encounters no resistance will immediately know we’re in the company’s underground bunker. He’ll know where it is and he’ll shoot the bunker lookout and lob a grenade or satchel charge down the bunker steps. One sapper could kill or injure forty or more men that way.

  With Tibbot in charge, maybe the best thing for me to do, if the attack came, was to run straight to the perimeter line and avoid Tibbot entirely. In all the confusion, he’d think I’d gone out on one of the trucks.

  One thing was certain. In the morning, I’d either be a casualty or I’d be court-martialed. Probably both. What the hell, why not kick off my boots and enjoy these last few hours?

  So I took off my boots, laid back, and fell into a deep sleep.

  ****

  I awoke with a jolt. The hooch was dark. My heart was pounding. I looked at my watch. It was 1:20 in the morning.

  At that precise moment concussive air pressure from an explosion hit my ears like nails rammed in my eardrums. I found myself on the floor with my arms over my head. I had no idea how I got there. A mortar round had exploded near the hooch.

  Everything was still pitch dark. My ears were ringing from the explosion. But I could faintly hear, at a great distance on the other side of the ringing, men yelling and cursing, pulling on gear, and stumbling for the door. Then the Full Alert siren started wailing.

  On my knees, beside my cot, I fumbled in the dark for my boots. They weren’t there. I felt under the cot. I swept the floor with my arms. I found one boot near my foot locker at the end of my cot, and the other boot near the hooch wall at the head of my cot.

  I pulled on my boots and laced them in the dark. Kneeling, I found my flack jacket and bandoleers and put them on. Again I swept the floor with my arms, searching desperately for the grenades. My fingertips hit a smooth, round, metal object and sent it skittering across the concrete floor. I crawled under the cot, raising it with my head and shoulders, and found the grenades. I threw the cot off me and, sitting on the floor, I tried to hook the grenades to my flack jacket clips, but my hands were shaking and I couldn’t work the clips. In frustration, I stuffed them in the lower leg pockets of my fatigues.

  Another explosion slammed at the hooch. It sounded metallic. Must have hit a tin roof.

  I stood up, bent over, and stepped backward while brushing the floor with my fingers for my rifle, and fell over my cot. As I got up, I found the rifle. The clip was in and the safety was on. I bumped my helmet with my boot. I kicked the stupid thing toward the wall.

  Then, in dim light now filtering through the window screens from overhead flares, I ran down the aisle in the middle of the hooch. Halfway to the door I stepped on a bottle, turned my ankle, and fell in front of Ken Latimer running behind me.

  Latimer, tall, thin, and usually stoned, pitched over me and yelled, “Whoa, what the hell?” We scattered fans and toiletries in all directions, and knocked over somebody’s reel-to-reel tape deck that was sitting on his foot locker.

  “You okay?” I yelled.

  “God, you’re worse than the VC.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.” We were the last ones in the hooch. He pulled me up and we ran out the door. My ankle hurt like hell.

  Outside, the world looked like an old-time tintype photograph. Everything was either opaque black or glowing silver in the light of magnesium flares floating in the sky on little white parachutes.

  Another explosion shook the ground.

  I ran with Latimer between the hooches on a silver-colored dirt road. As I ran, the grenades in my leg pockets bounced against my shins like wrecking balls.

  “Go on,” I yelled to Latimer, “I’ll catch up.”

  I stopped, laid my M16 across the toes of my boots, fished the grenades from my lower pants pockets, and snapped them onto my jacket clips. I picked up my M16 and started running—hobbling—again.

  Setting aside my resolve to run to the perimeter line, I hobbled toward the Headquarters Company formation yard. Two trucks were moving out to the perimeter. Men in trucks. Were they nuts?

  “All right,” Tibbot yelled, “the rest of you, down—”

  An explosion slapped at us. I fell to the ground and stayed there to survey the situation. I didn’t see where the mortar shell hit or any damage it caused. Must have landed behind nearby hooches or the motor pool buildings.

  Tibbot jumped up before I did and yelled, “Is that you, Atherton?”

  I stood up and limped toward Tibbot.

  “Where’s your helmet?” Tibbot yelled.

  “Couldn’t find it in the dark.”

  “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “Sprained my ankle.”

  “Then get in the bunker with the second wave reinforcements.”

  “Sergeant Tibbot, we’d be better off—”

  A mortar round exploded over in Delta Company. We hit the ground anyway. Shrapnel can travel a long way.

  Tibbot was on his feet within seconds yelling at men running past us toward the perimeter. I jumped to my feet, uncertain what to do. I looked around.

  The blackest shadows I’d ever seen were spreading on the ground from buildings and trees like flowing puddles of India ink. When new flares popped overhead, the shadows disappeared and new shadows started pooling out again as the new flares floated closer to the ground.

  Silver-colored soldiers—glowing, dream-like figures—ran across the formation yard. The only colors in the landscape were red and green tracers streaking high overhead among the flares. I could hear M16 fire, chattering M60 machine guns, and exploding claymores out on the perimeter line. Cobra mini-guns started roaring like locomotives—6,000 rounds a minute—their tracers weaving sensuous red ribbons I could see above the trees.

  The NVA ground assault had begun under the arching mortar rounds.

  Then I realized Tibbot was yelling and waving his arms at me. “Don’t you hear me?” He jabbed his finger toward the tunnel entrance across the formation yard. “Get your ass in that bunker ASAP!”

  A mortar round exploded in Charlie Company. The NVA were zigzagging the rounds back and forth across the battalion. The rounds were coming our way again.

  Ignoring the pain in my ankle, I ran for the bunker. Tibbot followed.

  We climbed down the bunker steps. The mortar explosions became distant thunder.

  The tunnel was about fifty feet long and lined with hardwood beams. Three low-watt light bulbs, spaced evenly along the upper edge of one wall, provided barely enough ligh
t. Men sat opposite each other on thick wooden benches that extended out from the walls. A space of two feet separated opposing knees, a space filled at floor level with boots and legs extended across the aisle. The air was stuffy—dusty, earthy—smelling of sweat and oiled metal.

  I squeezed past a dozen men to an empty spot on the right-hand bench. I sat down and rubbed my swelling ankle through the tight upper canvas of my boot.

  Entering the bunker had been a big mistake. Helmets, flack jackets, bandoleers, M16s, M60 machine guns, and ammo chains bulked up the men sitting on either side of me. We were crowded together like cattle waiting for slaughter. If a grenade or satchel charge were thrown down either exit, I would not be able to get out of the tunnel fast enough to escape harm. I was trapped in the middle.

  Lookouts at the tunnel exits periodically yelled down descriptions of what they saw up on ground level. The first team of two lookouts were assigned by Tibbot and were to alternate with other men every twenty minutes. Everyone wanted to be near an exit. Everyone but Tibbot knew we were in a death trap.

  Tibbot removed his helmet and picked up the field phone next to the steps and listened for sit-reps from the command bunker.

  Dretchler, several men down from me on my right, stood up—bending so he didn’t hit his head—and yelled, “First Sergeant Tibbot. One grenade or satchel charge from one single sapper and we’re all dead meat. We need to get out of here.”

  A thought surfaced in my mind and I quickly looked up and down the two rows of men for our other cook, Berry-Ain’t-Cherry. I didn’t see him. Fuck. Berry was on a truck. This was particularly disturbing to me because Berry, like a few other NCOs, often joined the reserve guards during an unexpected attack on the perimeter even though his rank exempted him from such duty.

  Suddenly I had a premonition. It was eerie. Frightening. I could feel the future and it wasn’t good. I couldn’t get my breath. I started to panic.

  I pulled myself together. He’s okay. I’m okay.