Prairie Spy

by Linda, Alan

  Anyway, it was dark the night before, and Tex had his head lathered up with shampoo pretty fair when a 122-mm ChiCom rocket hit maybe forty yards away, blasting the corrugated tin with gravel that hit like steel ball bearings. In a panic, Tex and I headed for the exit. We both hit the door at the same time, which bounced him—blind with hair shampoo in his eyes-- sideways just enough to stick one of his long legs in a 55-gallon garbage can just outside the shower door. Sirens were howling. The quad-fifties that were parked on our bunker line that week began barking. Men shouted. Flares went up. A Claymore mine down the perimeter went off. All hell was breaking loose, and me and Tex were racing for the protection of a culvert covered in sand bags, him with a barrel on one leg.

  And damned if he wasn’t winning. A big strong kid, Tex. I figured if the war boiled down to a wrestling match, and Tex went first, we had a chance.

  We pulled around one of the sharp curves and saw up ahead four Aussies, whom we could identify by their folded up bush hats. The Australians had a small part of the nightmare that was Vietnam, for political reasons—any reasons—that were beyond me. A small utility vehicle kind of like a four-wheeler with a flat platform on it was tipped over beside the highway, next to a small crater in the shoulder. The men were sharing in the placing of a body bag on a helicopter that was sitting there cranking, ready to take off.

  I pulled to a stop. The deuce-and-a-half quit. I cranked the electric starter and prayed. It started again, and backfired. The slick had taken off, and when the pilot heard what sounded like gunfire, he momentarily swiveled his door gunner our way, and then they flew off, leaving us alone once again.

  We were ten thousand miles from home. I wondered briefly what everyone back in the world was doing. It was July, so dad had the first crop of hay up, and the corn cultivated twice. Mom’s flowers would be in full wondrous color, and she’d be watering the garden.

  Tex was hanging out the truck window, waving merrily at the helicopter as it flew off and left us.

  I remember feeling really alone as I let out the clutch.

  We’re headed down Highway 1 in Vietnam. It’s 1969.

  §

  Highway 1, Number 4

  It was July of 1969, maybe not the hottest month in Vietnam, at least, not hot enough to keep me and Tex in our army truck off Highway 1, which wound its blacktopped serpentine way down the coast, making one mile south for just about every one mile winding sideways through light-to-heavy jungle and the occasional rice paddy.

  When it got real hot, the tar road got too soft for truck traffic. They had road restrictions for heat like Minnesota has for frost in the spring. When that happened, the Vietnamese walked somewhere else--they sure didn’t walk the shoulders, though, because Charlie planted an assortment of antipersonnel mines in the soft earth there: toe poppers—which clicked when you stepped on them and exploded when you lifted your foot; bouncing bettys—which jumped up into the air and went off somewhere around your gut; and anything else that would explode.

  “Whatever you do,” my First Sergeant said, “stay on the road.” So we were staying on the road, Tex and I, headed south with a deuce-and-a-half truck full of shot up communications equipment.

  The truck was running pretty good, after a spell of jerking and dying, although 25 mph was pretty well as fast as it wanted to go. So 25 mph was what we were going when we rounded a curve and found an APC (armored personnel carrier) blocking further progress. A flak-vested GI standing there pointed off to our left at a road that disappeared into the jungle.

  “Tex,” I said to the guy riding with me as shotgun, him armed with an M-14 and 36 round of ammo, “ask that guy what’s up.” I pulled up. Tex hung out the window, whooped, slapped the door beneath him and said: “Hey man, how’re they hanging?” Tex thought this war was better’n a boy scout jamboree. He failed to comprehend my more serious approach to all this fun.

  It turned out that the grunts were sweeping through, hence anything that moved was a fair target, and were sending traffic toward the coast along roads that wound through a couple of villages. He showed us on a map where he wanted us to go; said: “We just run a dozer over into the back of that hamlet, so you can make it, and you can pick up the main detour other side of it.”

  Perhaps I was just too apprehensive. I shifted down and turned into a trail torn into the jungle. The truck stumbled and missed and started losing power again. Branches grabbed at us.

  This truck was probably the same deuce-and-a-half Tex and I’d used to haul a load of garbage out to the landfill a month ago, which the lifers had crazily positioned a mile outside Quang Tri Combat Base. “You can either take that garbage run, or burn shit,” said the platoon sergeant, as he was handing out duties. Whoa. No contest. All outhouses on all combat bases sat over 55-gallon barrels. Every day, some lucky guys got to go around, drag those barrels out, stir in fifteen-twenty gallons of diesel fuel, and set them on fire. You had to keep stirring, make sure it was all burned up. Vietnam didn’t smell all that good a lot of the time. Neither did the guys doing the burning. We took the garbage run.

  So, a month ago, out through the main gate me and Tex went, a truck with no tailgate piled high with all kinds of cans and assorted crap. We made it through Quang Tri village okay, found and turned into the land fill clearing in the jungle, and looked the situation over. I worried about an ambush. Tex didn’t worry. He was 19. He was gawking around, soaking in the scene, having a good time.

  “Listen, Tex,” I said, “it’s down hill to the pile there. I’m going to turn around, back up real fast, hit the brakes, slide the load out, and we’ll get the hell back inside the base, never have to leave the truck, okay?” We’d be safest that way, I thought.

  Tex was bouncing around as I picked up speed backwards down that grade, which was maybe just a little steeper than I’d reckoned on. I was bouncing around. Cans were flying over the hood. Maybe I wouldn’t even have any load left by the time I slammed on the brakes.

  I slammed down on the brake pedal, the pedal went stiff for a second, and then went all the way to the floor. Brakes were gone. We’re careening around inside the cab, gathering velocity backwards. I yelled to Tex: “SOON AS WE HIT HEAD FOR THE JUNGLE!!!” We hit the giant pile of garbage at the bottom of the hill, came to a sudden halt. Tex was out his door and gone in a flash. I couldn’t get my door open. I slammed it into whatever was holding it five or six panicky times, and then Tex was there laughing.

  I settled down, got my panic under some control, looked out the door. There was a marijuana plant ten feet tall with a trunk like a small tree that kept me from opening my door. It was everywhere over there, and very potent. It kept me in the truck. It kept us soldiers from lots of things, it seems to me now: homesickness, helplessness, the high price of war.

  We’re on the road south. It’s Vietnam, 1969.

  §

  Highway 1, Number 5

  Tex and I are headed south from Quang Tri Combat Base, which is way up on the DMZ in South Vietnam. We’re headed for Da Nang with a truck full of shot-up electronics equipment.

  It’s July, not the hottest season in Vietnam, probably only low 90’s, relative humidity hovering somewhere around soup.

  .We had just turned off Highway 1 onto a detour road bulldozed through forest. The growth is impressively heavy, and we drive slowly through it with branches and bushes grabbing at the truck, I’m forebodingly aware of how vulnerable we are, and of how far from The World we are. “Back in The World,” that’s how we talked about home.

  But, after all, from the army’s point of view, we are merely one truck and two soldiers, the loss of which won’t even raise a blip on anyone’s screen. I’m aware of that, too.

  Tex isn’t. He’s leaning out the window grabbing at branches, and though I warn him, it isn’t until he has torn his hand open and is bleeding all over everything that he begins to get it. What got him w
as “wait-a-minute” vines, because once you’re in them, you have to literally unhook whatever is hooked, skin or clothes. The thorns have hooks on the ends, like sharp darning needles.

  Tex is holding his hand outside the truck, dripping blood, when we come out into a small clearing with a few hooches centered around a small gazebo-like Buddhist temple. The hooches have tin roofs, and I think I recognize my roof from back at the base. It left in a China Sea hurricane that reached inland to us and removed nearly all our roofs last month in a three-day and two-night blow with winds that never dropped under 70 mph, and, as I found out many years later, 55 inches of rain during that week.

  I’m only going about ten mph when a small short-haired dog runs out of nowhere in front of me and I feel the thump of my left front tire running over something. An old man sitting cross legged in front of the candles and china figurines before the little temple gets to his feet and slowly comes over just as I stop and get out of the truck.

  It was a strange scene: Tex was holding his right hand out to keep the flow of blood away from himself; the Buddhist monk, both of his hands out of sight in his robe; the dog just behind the tire; and me. It was an unreal scene.

  I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my old worn wallet, and offered him some American money and a handful of MPC. MPC, military police currency, was monopoly money invented by the U.S. government to control black market and drug trade. It was actually about the size of monopoly money, no less, printed on paper that didn’t last too long, which didn’t matter because, without warning, we would be notified to exchange our old MPC bills for new, different colored and styled stuff. Anyone who had a whole gob of it had to account for where it came from. And of course no Vietnamese native could exchange any. So they liked dollars.

  The monk held both hands up in denial, turned his head and said something to one of the hooches, out of which came an old mama-san, her teeth blackened from chewing the betel leaf, her head in a conical straw hat, who picked up the dog and promptly sat down and began to butcher it for the stew pot.

  The monk said something else, and a young daughter-san came out with a couple of GI bandage packs, which I tied on Tex’s hand. The monk then turned to me—me with my wallet still in my hand—and held out his hand for my wallet.

  I looked at him. I looked at my wallet. Thought to myself: “huh.” I slowly handed over my wallet, which he gave to the young black-pajama clad girl who disappeared with it. Then he ushered us over to the third hooch and sat us down, whereupon we were fed some fish and something like potato with very dirty salt. As we were eating—Tex, oblivious to everything, since he was always starving-- the young girl came over and held a wallet out to me, which I took and examined.

  I looked over at the half-butchered dog just to make sure that they hadn’t turned that one into this dog hair wallet in my hands. I looked inside. Everything was there. The old monk made a gesture that this was much better. He pointed to it and said: “Numbah 10, GI,” and smiled proudly. Ten is very good. A ten in France for a grade is like a four-point-oh here. The Vietnamese picked that up from the French.

  I had that billfold several years. When it got damp with body sweat, it smelled like wet dog, but with the grain of the hair grabbing backwards at your pocket it was almost impossible for it to slip out.

  I bowed to the old monk and grabbed Tex before he ate these folks out of house and home.

  We got back on the road again. It’s Vietnam, 1969.

  “Hey,” Tex said, as he turned to me, “do you smell dog?”

  §

  Highway 1, Number 6

  Before I get any older, I’m reliving this trip down Highway 1, in the month of July, 1969. I decided to do it before it’s all screwy, instead of just parts of it.

  We’re driving a deuce-and-a-half truck full of classified secret but shot up electronics equipment, and so far, it isn’t even noon, we haven’t even gone 10 kilometers of the 90 or so from our home base of Quang Tri, and we’ve had a couple of mini adventures.

  As we roll along through the “mountainous” (north) end of South Vietnam--flat rain forest broken by abrupt large hills--there is no doubt we’re not in the U.S. Over on the right, as we roll along, we see intermittent rice paddies, and small hamlets of a dozen or so hooches. On the left, we pass an old man driving two water buffaloes around in a circle on a small platform, knocking rice out of its hull.

  Seeing the more agricultural side of Vietnam somehow reassures me that life goes on. The Viet Cong are pounding us regularly now at our base, rockets and mortars which come in a random sort of steady fashion. Sometimes two or three nights will go by and dusk will come quite peacefully. Then all hell will break loose two or three nights in a row. We’re continually reminded at daybreak of our puny mortality when we look at the splintered wood and torn corrugated tin that used to be our buildings. We’re putting in long grueling evening hours cleaning up the debris, trying at the same time to keep up with the daily workload.

  I’m favoring the right side of my right arm and leg a little from three nights ago, when an explosion knocked me out of my canvas cot. It wasn’t the explosion itself, it was when I woke up outside on the gravel path leading to the sandbagged culvert where we take cover (hide) during these attacks. The waking up part was alright; unfortunately, I was lying on my right side, running full speed. Instinct got me out the door while still asleep; lack of sight and balance let me fall. I tore up the skin on my arm and leg pretty good, and now, after finding fly eggs in the ragged meat of my forearm, I have to pay better attention to it; otherwise, there’ll be maggots in it. Which, maybe, isn’t all bad, the natives say. I’m just not sure I’m up to it, hygiene wise.

  Someone had duct taped two fragmentation grenades together and pitched them up onto the new major’s hooch roof, which was right across the footpath from my bed. The grenades, instead of falling down between his sandbag wall and hooch wall, rolled off the roof and up against my sandbag wall. Frags are pretty impressive, blast wise.

  The new major thought so, too, because he had me and a GI named King spend a day and a half welding steel PSP up inside his sleeping area. PSP—portable steel platform—is a sheet of very heavy metal used to make a landing strip on ground like Vietnam’s, ground which is too soft to land on directly. The perforated steel sheets link together, and it’s heavier than heck, which the major knew, apparently. King and I sweat like pigs putting that stuff up, and we thought—hoped--maybe the major might expire of heat stroke in the night, trying to sleep in there. That first night after we finished, someone snuck up on his roof and painted a bullseye over his bed. I’ve still got a picture of it somewhere.

  The new major came in about three weeks ago, and next thing you know, on top of getting the crap blown out of us, we’re shining jungle boots and standing formation in direct sight of the perimeter, and of the jungle not far outside that. Stupid. One rocket, sixty men gone. Some GI decided this extra grief wasn’t necessary, tried to frag the major, and nearly got me.

  I took another tack, wrote a fairly detailed accounting of all this, and, before mailing it to my U.S. Senator, stopped and showed it to the C.O. I told him what I was doing, and gave him a copy. He didn’t say much. A month later, he called me in and showed me a pile of paper on his desk about six inches thick. The top one was a letter of inquiry from General Westmorland himself. “You’ve caused me an unbelievable amount of paper work here, Specialist,” he said to me. But he said he appreciated me warning him that it was coming. Toward the end of my hitch, he tried his best to get me home for grandpa’s funeral. He was tough, but fair. He never minded a fair fight, he told me, one that was face to face.

  Me neither. Unfortunately, one thing you could say about Vietnam was, it wasn’t a fair fight.

  We’re on the road, headed south. It’s hot, and sticky, but we’re headed for the Pass of the Ocean Clouds, north of Da Nang. It’s Vietnam, and it�
��s 1969.

  §

  Highway 1, Number 7

  “Let me drive, will you?” Tex asked me as we rolled south on Highway 1 in South Vietnam. It was 1969, and the Tet offensive the year before that had nearly destroyed the town of Quang Tri was barely a bad memory, and, since GI’s were rotated through annually, no one was around Quang Tri Combat Base--our base--who had been through it.

  Right there, in hindsight, you have one of the biggest reasons Vietnam was such a FUBAR operation. (Fouled up beyond all recognition.) GI’s stayed a year; officers six months. Nothing that was learned was passed on; each new generation of officer or enlisted man made the same mistakes, based on the same mistaken impressions and information—impressions and observations which logically enough came from people who also were new.

  Tex and I had left the base earlier in the day with a truck full of blown up and broken electronics gear, which we were to deliver to Da Nang. Why, I didn’t know. It was junk, full of bullet holes, water, dirt, and crud. CRUD: corrosion, rust, unidentified debris. A lot of the tags on the stuff in the truck behind us was marked with those initials.

  “How come you want to drive?” I asked Tex, a big 19-year-old kid who seemed to regard all this as a day trip to a state park. Like all the new 19-year-olds, even the old ones, he was bulletproof. I had turned 25 in ‘Nam. I spent the first rocket attack trembling in a dark sandbagged culvert while my heart attempted to pound its way out of my chest. It all seemed pretty clear. That giant whose exploding footsteps walked your way in the dark didn’t care where he stepped. It was your turn, then it was your turn. Bad luck, sorry.

  It turned out that Tex wanted to say he’d driven down Highway 1 while he was in country, and, since at any speed over 25 this deuce-and-a-half shook you like a dog shakes a rat, I didn’t figure he could kill us. I pulled over and we traded places, while a couple of peasants in black silk pajamas in a rice paddy next to us ignored us.