Prairie Spy

by Linda, Alan

  I wasn’t totally sure he couldn’t kill us. I’d had my folks send me a ten-minute egg timer because you couldn’t trust the kid on top of the bunker to stay awake while you tried to catch some Z’s down below. Three GI’s, each two hours on, four hours off, 24 hour duty. These bunkers were spaced along the circular perimeter of the base, about a hundred meters apart. You looked out at the jungle over triple concertina wire, outside of which was elephant wire—razor tipped wire strung in diamond shapes on stakes, so Charles couldn’t run through it, or crawl under it. There were Claymore mines interspersed through the elephant wire.

  Nonetheless, a 19-year-old got his throat cut four bunkers north of us. How, no one said. You’d occasionally hear bad stuff that happened; you’d never hear why. Probably went to sleep. Once I got the timer, I’d pass out from exhaustion for ten minutes below, wake up, go up topside, wake up the kid, do it again. You spent a lot of time exhausted. It wasn’t only the lack of sleep. It was the constant anxiety, endless oppressive heat and humidity.

  We came around a curve and off to the left saw the South China Sea, blue and peaceful. All of a sudden, Tex, who is now driving, turns the truck to the left and we’re driving down a sand road headed for the ocean. “What the @#$% are you doing?” I asked him. Army talk. Jungle on the left, jungle on the right. Shit like this got stupid Americans killed.

  “Let’s just go down and look,” he said. You’re beginning to see what I mean about anxiety. We pull around some shrubbery growing up on sand pushed up by the ocean, and there’s a bunch of army jeeps and a couple of trucks and a bunch of GI’s down there, all kind of excited.

  It truly was quite a sight for a guy who grew up in Iowa. Out on the ocean, which had about a ten-foot swell going, you’d see small fishing junks with random-firing engines. They’d ride up high on a wave, bang smoke rings a couple of times, then drop down out of sight to reveal a huge U.S. battleship headed the opposite way, so big that it was unaffected by the waves. It rode level steady; the junk rose up and down. If I never see another juxtaposition of contrasting cultures so starkly illustrated, may I be struck blind. All the Vietnamese wanted to do was raise rice and go fish. Maybe all the U.S. was good at was what we were doing, screwing that up for them.

  About then, a small Vietnamese boat made its way close enough to shore that some of the soldiers could wade out to it. GI’s dragged one of our own out of the boat and brought him to shore, his head hanging. He was in cut-offs, and you could see his dog tags sparkling. The undertow took him out, and he drowned. They worked on him for a while, but it was no good.

  A day at the beach for a 19-year-old grunt, maybe. Thought he was safe from leeches and night ambushes and humping around in constant waiting for whatever was going to happen, and he gets dragged under and buys it in the China Sea. Xin loi. Sorry.

  I kicked Tex out of the driver’s seat, backed the truck the hell out of there, and got underway.

  We were both pretty quiet for a while. I’ve got 39 days to go. Each hour weighs a ton, each day is an eternity, and I can feel the weight of their yet-to-happen-ness dragging me under.

  It’s July, 1969. We’re headed south on Highway 1.

  §

  Highway 1, Number 8

  It wasn’t even midmorning, and Tex and I, on our way to Da Nang with a truck full of shot-up and otherwise FUBAR electronic equipment, had already come upon two soldiers who were going home early.

  Unfortunately, they were going home in a body bag. Even Tex, who at 19 had up to now shown absolutely no recognizance of his own possible death, seemed to now be newly aware of it. He was seriously examining his rifle over on the passenger side of the vehicle as we went south down Highway 1, traveling from Quang Tri Combat Base up north.

  He had been assigned to be my “shotgun,” the equivalent of the extra man who used to ride armed as a guard up on top of a stagecoach. I felt a little better that he no longer seemed to regard this as a family trip to Disneyland. I felt a bit more reassured about his attitude.

  Then he turned to me and said: “If we see a tiger, stop and let me get a shot off, will you?” Aw, shit. I wished once again that I and the 39 days I had left were back at the base, where I could hide my butt in a bunker, where neither Charley or some reckless 19-year-old with a gun could shoot it off.

  On our right, the occasional rice paddy showed up, but for the most part, the northern part of South Vietnam was hilly, and farming was hard. The next stop was Phu Bai, and if one were to examine a map, he would see Dong Ha up below the DMZ, then Quang Tri—our base--, next, Phu Bai, then Hue, then Da Nang.

  This end of Vietnam was mostly assigned to the Third Marines, with some support from the army’s long range recon soldiers. It was the poor end of South Vietnam, and one marine, upon first seeing Quang Tri Province, had supposedly said: “My gawd! We are fighting to make them take it back, right?”

  Anyway, things would calm down a little at the base, then these combat units would sally forth and stir stuff up; next thing you know, Charley is aggravated and raining rockets and mortars down on us.

  There were a lot of fire bases established out around Quang Tri, where the big artillery pieces could zero in and help support the ground pounders when they needed it.

  At night, up on the 100-foot-tall steel guard tower, you could look out at the night and see tracer rounds and illumination flares around those fire bases. If you looked north, you could see the flashes of 1000-pound bombs that B-52’s were dropping. Look south, you saw the same as they carpet bombed the Ashau valley. Some nights you could almost read by the light of the high altitude bombing.

  I yawned as we drove along. Last night had been a long one. We’d taken more than a dozen 122’s, with the result that our mess hall and some hooches had been leveled. Now we were short two cooks and the kitchen. We’d be eating C-rations for a while.

  It’s always hard to sleep after a Condition 1 attack. Just to make matters worse, I and the other dozen guys in my hooch were awakened in the early morning hours by the sound of gunfire inside the hooch. Boom! Boom! Boom! How many rounds were fired, I don’t know. Several. We were all asleep. It was loud, followed by a long, tense minute with everyone half awake, hollering and waving his rifle around.

  It turned out that Jersey, who I’d thought was another 19-year-old. He turned out to have lied about his age to get into the army. He was now barely 18. He’d had enough of the glory of war. Enough heat. Enough lost sleep. Enough lifers. Enough worry. This last rocket attack had pushed him over the edge. So he waited until we were asleep, got out his M-14 .308-caliber rifle, pointed it down at his foot, and tried to give himself a million-dollar wound, which is one that’ll get you back to The World. Instead of just one shot, the semiautomatic rifle, after the first round went through his foot, had recoiled, then settled back into his trigger finger. The rifle climbed on him and he’d managed to put at least three more rounds up his leg before dropping it.

  It was messy. We got a belt high on his leg to slow down the bleeding and shipped him off to the infirmary. He was going home for sure, but if that leg was going home with him, he would be one lucky guy. It was mangled indescribably. Nobody in and around us slept much more that night.

  Tex is aiming his rifle out the window, imagining no doubt a tiger in his sights. I hope he doesn’t drop it.

  These days and nights, this far from home, I spend a lot of time hoping.

  The long blacktop road up ahead seems endless in the wild shimmers it gives off in the subtropical heat. We’re headed south on Highway 1. It’s July, 1969.

  §

  Highway 1, Number 9

  The sun is reaching that point in the sky where Tex and I, as we’re headed down Highway 1 in Vietnam, are being broiled alive inside the olive-drab-colored cab of the army deuce-and-a-half truck that we are driving south. Maybe green is invisible in the jungle we’re driving through, but white
would have reflected a little of the heat, maybe.

  As I think back on it now, most of us were probably dehydrated almost continually. I looked at one of the canteens on the seat beside us, grabbed it and drank a little. It wasn’t so bad if you strained it through your teeth and didn’t mind the purification junk they dumped in it. I knew the guy who drove a tanker truck up every day to Dong Ha and piped our water out of the river. “Should be good,” he said to me, reasoning that that was as far north as the river went. Evidently his geography quit at the DMZ, because North Vietnam was up there, and China on top of that.

  The water tasted of everything bad you can think of, so we dumped everything into it we could think of, Kool-aid, orange juice concentrate—you name it. It was still bad. At least they didn’t purify it with iodine, which was what the grunts carried with them to treat the water they found. According to my brother, you could tell the FNG’s (foolish new guys) because their teeth were stained red from the purification tablets, which everyone else shunned. Their logic at not using it was solid. A good case of dysentery got you out of the jungle.

  Next stop, Phu Bai, where another maintenance battalion is located. I’ve had some minor communication with their electronics guys concerning the Starlite scopes I work on. I think the scopes are the reason I’m not a combat grunt. You need a Secret clearance to work on them, and I had one from civilian life. I also work on mine detectors, most of which work fine when I get them, but the marines get the heeby-jeebies after using them a while, and want a new one. The ones I don’t ever see to repair are blown to kingdom come with their operator, I expect.

  So I don’t blame them for their nervousness. One of the few times I’ve had to leave the combat base was to head up to Dong Ha with a couple of repaired ones and a couple of new ones to instruct the marines in their use.

  “Hey,” some two-bar said to me, “you’re just in time. Jump into that jeep over there, we’re headed out to Firebase Nancy.” He seemed to think about something for a while, then said: “We should have you back by nightfall, everything goes well.”

  When a marine says something like that, it would be like a normal person telling you to be sure your affairs are in order, your end is near.

  “But I don’t want to go to Firebase Nancy,” I felt like telling him. But I didn’t. Into the valley of death quietly, honor is everything, die on the battlefield, all that crap.

  Next thing you know, I’m point on what would barely pass for a deer trail back here in The World. I’ve got a metal detector in my hands and well-armed marines behind me. “Everything’s probably alright,” one of them said to me, adding that there was some activity out here last night and they wanted an expert opinion.

  As I waved the metal detector back and forth above the ground, I wanted to tell them that these things don’t pick up plastic explosives, but then I wanted to tell them I didn’t want to be there at all. It all seemed pretty much like I might as well save my breath. I had a lot of didn’t wants these days. So did they.

  They didn’t seem to be taking all this too seriously, but then, they were marines. Young. Crazy. Young. The young part explains a lot. The rest of it has to be the crazy. I walked around a curve in the trail and down into a dip and the metal detector in my hands went crazy. I froze. The detector showed stuff everywhere. “Get back!” I shouted. “There’re mines everywhere!” I stood there frozen, not sure what to do.

  I saw the half dozen marines smirking and enjoying themselves. The two-striper took out a knife and dug up three old canteens. “We just wanted to know if these things worked after you fixed them.”

  When I got my heart rhythm back to normal, I pulled the knobs off the detector I was using, put them in my pocket, and handed the detector to their operator. “Here. I’ll keep these knobs. You don’t want to get too confused.” Which gave them a chance to pick on him. He was an E-2 FNG; I was a Spec 5. Better him than me. All this is humorous in retrospect, but being an FNG and being handed a mine detector was pretty serious, especially when there had been three divisions of NVA in this area only months ago.

  The only good thing was I got some C-rats with beans and wieners. Beans and wieners were the good ones.

  That was last week.

  This is now. This is me and Tex. We’re headed down Highway 1. It’s July, 1969. I’ve got 39 days left. They felt like 39 years.

  §

  Highway 1, Number 10

  The long road to Hue from Quang Tri Combat Base in Vietnam back in 1969, when Tex and I headed there in a deuce-and-a-half truck, wasn’t measured purely in miles, or klicks, or minutes, or hours.

  Instead, as I look back on it now, it seems more to be arranged in scenes and events than in anything else. Obviously, I made it. So did Tex, although to be truthful I have made him several 19-year-olds all rolled up into one, the accumulation of all of their youthful inattentions and general carefree carelessnesses.

  Phu Bai Combat Base, which we stopped at to forage up some lunch, and because I had heard that they had air conditioned work trucks and I wanted to see if that was true, turned out to be a disaster. We got some water—which was way better than anything should ever be--but mostly we arrived in the middle of the military equivalent of a volcanic eruption. The entire maintenance battalion was under house arrest.

  See, that battalion at Phu Bai had been National Guard over here in the states, located in Boston, Ma., and had been sent intact to Vietnam as a complete unit. Back then, that wasn’t done much, and I think after this experiment turned bad, it wasn’t done again, not for a long time. My only contact with them so far had been by telephone, and the Boston accent of the guys to whom I spoke seemed to radiate intellect and education. And well it might have, for the average educational level of that unit was between a master’s degree and a doctorate, just a bunch of over-educated guys who hadn’t wanted to be drafted out of their teaching, medical, and legal careers, so they’d joined the Guard.

  Then things changed. Drastically, for them.

  The day we drove into their combat base, they had been in-country about six weeks, and they had taken all they could stand. This very morning, they had rebelled. They had had enough morning reveille, enough reconstituted dried eggs for breakfast, enough military chicken shit, illogical orders, enough heat, and enough rocket attacks,--well, anyway, at morning reveille, they proceeded to throw stones at the poor lifer sergeant who had been newly assigned to them. The First Sgt., hearing the ruckus, went out to restore order, and they stoned him also. Their—the rock throwers—thinking was pretty prevalent in Vietnam: Hell! We’re in Vietnam—what else can they do to us?

  As it turned out, the First Sergeant and the E-7 stayed drunk and hidden for the nearly three weeks that it took for the army to figure all this out and disband the entire unit, shipping it here and there around Vietnam in ones and twos. My maintenance battalion got one of them, and he found out what war really was. After he’d been exposed to some prolonged and truly terrifying rocket and mortar attacks, and twice after sappers got inside our perimeter and flung satchel charges here and there, he began organizing work slowdowns, which he intended to barter for… for what? Had he been realistic, he would have now realized that he and his unit had had it made in Phu Bai. Those bastards had actually had air conditioned work places. Up here on the DMZ we were a little closer to where the action was at that point in the war. Rockets didn’t come one at a time, once a week. There wasn’t any air conditioned work vans. Our drinking water was truly awful. He had to have realized he’d screwed up.

  Did he intend to barter our work for a better life? It was, after all, Vietnam; what better life was there? Less work? When the rockets blew up our sleeping quarters, wouldn’t we want to rebuild them rather than sleep in the rain? How about the marines, who needed the radios and searchlights and metal detectors and StarLite scopes we repaired? Should they not get done? And hell! Bottom line—we were not going hom
e, regardless of our behaviors.

  He however had his philosophy, and he turned into a major pain in the butt with all his bitching and complaining. We humored him, and ignored him, like the nurses humor the insane at the asylum. He was shortly reassigned, and I never heard of him again.

  All this stuff we found out from a soldier with whom we sat after we went through the chow line.

  In 1969, morale in Vietnam had hit a new low. Racial strife between the blacks and whites simmered, and had in fact broken out in our mess hall at Quang Tri with group brawls. Drug usage was epidemic. Charlie seemed to know that, after Tet, he was going to win, and he poured on the pressure. We seemed to know it, too, right from General Westmorland on down. Yet, no one was in a position to be the first one to say: “But, the Emperor has no clothes.” Instead, each of us—with the exception of the Bostonians—did the best he could do.

  It’s 1969, we’ve had a bite to eat, and Tex and I are back in the truck headed south down Highway 1, our canteens full of fresh National Guard water.

  It seems like this one-day trip will never end; that we’ll never get there.

  Thirty-nine days and counting.

  §

  Highway 1, Number 11

  You all have been tagging along on this trip in Vietnam, where Tex and I were stationed back in ’69, as we hauled a truck full of shot-up electronics down to Hue.

  Some of it was destined to go further, but I think Hue is far enough for now. There have been ten previous accounts of parts of this journey, and for you to have hung in there with me and Tex this far—well, I think Hue is far enough.