Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  The relentless thunder of exploding bombs echoed off the green hills and howled down valleys and canyons. An occasional opening in the forest canopy revealed thick black and gray smoke percolating off the top of 861. As we approached, drawing near, I began to worry that the bombing might continue and we would march right into it. Gooks must really be dug in up there to survive all this and still offer to fight.

  I overheard Tony breathing heavily on my heels. I glanced back. His round face was as red as a boil about to burst in the heat.

  “Tony?”

  “This sucks,” he panted.

  No worries as long as a Marine was bitching; it was when he stopped bitching that you knew his ass was dragging.

  During a short rest break I had him remove his helmet while I poured water from my canteen over his head to cool him down. He shook his head like a dog emerging from a stream. Big, redheaded Navy Third Class Petty Officer Vernon Wike, otherwise known as “Magilla Gorilla,” came along with his aid bag checking on the men. He was one of three Navy medical corpsmen assigned to Golf Company. The Marine Corps had no medical personnel of its own.

  “Try not to waste your water,” he cautioned. “There won’t be any on the hill.”

  So this, I reflected, was what combat was like—jungle, sweat, heat exhaustion, humping impossible loads, gooks somewhere out there ready to pound us. . . . Nothing like what I expected. Hell, there wasn’t even martial music and drums playing in the background.

  “I’m good to go,” Tony insisted, struggling to his feet as the battalion moved out again. “Say, Maras,” he puzzled, “what do you suppose would happen if somebody gave a war and nobody showed up?”

  It was something to ponder. Peace would break out?

  Shortly, we encountered remnants of Bravo 1/9 straggling down the hill through and past us. They resembled zombies, all hollow-eyed, dirty, ragged, bloody, and silent with that characteristic after-battle thousand-yard stare that looked right through you and made you shiver. Men wrapped in bloody bandages served as crutches for those with mangled limbs. Those more able-bodied bore the weight of the dead and seriously wounded in ponchos. Blood leaking from makeshift litters left scarlet lines on the trail. These were the survivors and casualties of what had once been a proud company of Marines the size of Golf. I turned around in the trail, reeling under the full impact of reality setting in, and stared in horror at the backs of these beaten Marines disappearing downhill into the green morass on their retreat to the airfield. The Walking Dead, I thought, were aptly named.

  The hammering of Hill 861 lifted as BLT 2/3 ascended, replaced by a sudden void of silence. We grew more cautious and alert for signs of enemy presence. Expecting combat, perhaps even anticipating it, we entered the lower bombing zone, a wasted moonscape of craters, splintered trees, burned grass, and bomb-ploughed earth. The only sounds were those of Marines breathing nervously, the crackling of fires still burning, flame-gutted trees toppling to earth. . . . The air tasted scorched and bitter in my throat. Tendrils of smoke seemed to curl up out of the earth itself. Blistering heat blew into my face and made my eyes water and my nostrils burn. A sudden feeling overcame me that this was what it would be like in a world devastated by nuclear war where no life remained.

  Point platoon reached the crest by 1600, still a few hours before dark, and gazed down from the heights onto a vista of green, rolling terrain with 881N and 881S rising higher a short distance ahead on either flank. To our relief, at least to my relief, the NVA had withdrawn, taking their dead and wounded with them. Apparently, they hauled ass down the back slope either as soon as our bombardment began or while 2/3 was laboring up the hill to confront them. They left, however, ample evidence of their presence, and an ample presence it must have been—over three hundred interlocking bunkers, trenches, and mutually supporting fighting holes and spider traps. Some of the positions had been destroyed by pre-attack bombing and artillery, but many others were so well constructed in layers of logs and dirt that only a direct hit would have damaged them.

  Bravo 1/9 Marines must have blundered into this hive where they fought savagely enough to run NVA soldiers off the hilltop. Battered and bleeding, they nonetheless occupied the hill themselves and held it against repeated enemy counterattacks while they waited for help to come. Much weakened and facing destruction if they remained, they finally began withdrawing this morning while BLT 2/3 was being jerked away from Beacon Star and dumped onto Khe Sanh. I wondered if maybe the wily North Vietnamese, having reappropriated the hill, might not have vacated the premises again before our artillery and planes began pyrotechnics. Had we perhaps been striking empty positions while the hordes reassembled and reinforced below and waited for their next victims to wander into the trap?

  As the battalion repossessed the neighborhood and began setting up a defensive perimeter, word came down through the chain of command to be on the lookout for the bodies of four Marines that the 9th had been forced to leave behind.

  “I guess they couldn’t get everybody out when they broke contact,” Lieutenant Mac said.

  He and Gunny Janzen established Tony and me and the Pig in one of the NVA fighting holes that offered a field of fire downslope across one of the draws and ridgelines that separated 861 from 881S.

  “Get set in, Marines,” the Lieutenant hurried us along. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  The connotation of that phrase—It’ll be dark soon—was enough to pucker assholes all over the hill’s mangled knob.

  “Damn, Maras,” Tony complained. “Couldn’t you have picked a better penthouse? This one stinks like gooks.”

  I had never smelled a decomposing corpse before, but the stench in our hole was more than merely poor human hygiene. “I think somebody’s real dead, real close,” I decided.

  The sun hung low, shooting its final rays over the tops of 881S. I didn’t relish the prospect of spending my first night in the field with odor that foul. Tony kept watch while I wriggled from cover to take a look around. Sure enough, about ten feet away I spotted legs and fire-scorched boots protruding from a partially collapsed bunker. This was one of our guys; gooks wore tennis shoes.

  “Holy shit!”

  Tony scurried over. “What? What?”

  We immediately summoned Lieutenant Mac and Gunny Janzen, who brought in Captain James Sheehan, who, in addition to commanding Golf Company, had been assigned as acting 2/3 commander in the field while Colonel Delong established an overall CP at the airfield. Everyone stared in horror at the mangled body, including Lieutenant Mac, even though he had seen men killed in battle before. “Big green shit flies,” as we called them, swarmed the charred body. Enough remained of it for us to realize the Marine had been decapitated and his testicles stuffed into the throat of his separated head. The eyes were open and blackened by soot. His tongue lolled past his testicles and out of what was left of his lower face after rats and birds and the sun had gnawed on him. Lieutenant bars pounded into the chest helped Graves Registration identify the body as that of Lieutenant Philip H. Sauer of Alpha Company, 3rd Antitank Battalion, 9th Marines.

  We subsequently learned Lieutenant Sauer, commander of a pair of ONTOS, had been a member of a thirty-man recon force climbing 861 ahead of the main body of Marines. An ONTOS was a medium-sized track and armored vehicle equipped with a 106mm recoilless rifle. Sauer split from the main patrol with three other men to scout out a good observation point on the hill and find a route to bring his vehicles to the top. None of the four returned. It appeared Sauer and the three Marines with him had inadvertently interrupted what may have been an overwhelming surprise attack on the Khe Sanh Combat Base. What followed was a brutal two-day fight on 861 that all but decimated Bravo 1/9.

  Report of the discovery of the corpse and its condition spread rapidly across the hilltop. Attitudes hardened immediately, especially among the FNGs who had linked up with the battalion in Okinawa. The new grimness was almost palpab
le, a sudden thirst for blood revenge. This was no longer high adventure. This was reality. War!

  “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.”

  Resolve spread that the 2/3 would take no prisoners. Not after this.

  “We’ll shoot you ourselves if you let one of the motherfuckers live,” became the general consensus. “These bastards are not human. They’re savages and they don’t deserve to live.”

  I found a Vietnamese banana knife dropped near Sauer’s corpse. I assumed it had been used to carve up the lieutenant and the bodies of the other three missing Marines, which were located nearby the next day in a similar condition. I stuck the knife on the outside of my pack where I could get to it and glared with a new fierceness down the hill in the direction the NVA had gone. I was a Marine trained on how to kill; after this, I wanted to kill.

  The falling night wasn’t nearly as bleak and scary as the darkness growing inside my soul.

  Chapter Seven

  Good Morning, Vietnam

  A Sea Knight helicopter dropped in at dusk to pick up Lieutenant Philip Sauer’s recovered body. As it lifted off again and banked sharp to get out of Dodge, some gook down the hill where the foliage started took a rifle shot at it. I detected the muzzle flash and felt tempted to unlimber the Pig and chew down the jungle on his ass. Except a machine gunner was not authorized to answer stray or probing fire without orders. It wasn’t smart to let the enemy know where machine guns were located. Best to reserve them as a deadly surprise for when and if the enemy decided on a mass attack.

  One of the mortar guys popped a 60mm round at the shooter. A puff of smoke drifted up out of the trees, after which everything went quiet again to meet the night.

  “Maybe he’s the only one left,” Tony hoped. “Maybe the rest of ’em are back in Laos by now chugging brews and chasing mamasan.”

  My thoughts were elsewhere. I watched the chopper sail up and out and away over the purple-darkening hills and valleys. Back in the “Real World,” there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth as a government sedan pulled up in front of a house in Omaha or Abilene or whatever town or city Sauer was from to deliver the sad news to parents and wife that their warrior had gone on to Valhalla.

  Although no gook cadavers remained on the hill—the NVA must have carried them off when they departed—the stench of death poisoned the air we breathed. That was because bombardment of the peak had scattered parts all over—fingers and scalps, feet and hands, ears and chunks of flesh. . . . And blood. Blood blown in a splatter all over the hilltop to decay in the hot sun. The Vietnamese must have endured hell on this miserable hill. They deserved it, as far as I was concerned, after what they put Lieutenant Sauer and his team through.

  When the breezes lay with nightfall, I heard Marines gagging, retching, and complaining.

  “Damn! They stink!”

  “You brush your teeth today, Morrison?”

  “It’s your ass you’re smelling underneath your nose.”

  “Knock it off,” NCOs snapped. “This ain’t no church picnic, ladies. Get set for the night before you have gooks in your skivvies.”

  “Hell, Corporal, we don’t wear no skivvies.”

  “If we get gooks, make sure they’re females.”

  Banter like that, I recognized from my own reaction, provided a means of working off tension.

  Night first arrived in the lowlands below the hills, slithering in like bruised reptiles before gradually creeping up the slopes. When I was a kid, Dad said there was nothing to fear about the night because there was nothing in the dark that wasn’t there in the light. Dad was wrong. There were things out there in the dark to be afraid of. Most of the greenhorn Marines were like me, so scared we couldn’t even spit. I doubt anyone on the hill slept that first night, even those who were on the sleeping side of 50-50 alert. Nail my eyelids shut and the nails would have popped right out.

  We hunkered together for comfort in our holes like frightened rats, gripping weapons with white-knuckled fists, mostly listening for rustling sounds coming out of the night, imagining hordes of little yellow men in pith helmets massing out there for a Japanese-like banzai charge. In the darkness there was nothing to see except black unless you shifted your eyes upward to the stars.

  If I were God, I thought, I probably would never have made people. Humans were such a contentious lot. I mean, cutting off people’s heads and stuffing their dicks in their mouths. A lion or a bear might kill a deer, but neither would cut off the deer’s penis or head to torture it or amuse himself. As God, I might have created platypuses and octopuses and giraffes, but never people. I wouldn’t have made ticks and chiggers, mosquitoes and snakes either.

  Tony thought God must have a dark sense of humor.

  “Like a big Buddy Hackett up in the sky?” I said.

  “Maras, anybody ever tell you you’re strange?”

  We stood elbow to elbow in our hole peering into the darkness, whispering so as not to attract attention from our NCOs or from any gooks lurking about.

  “Look, so God makes people,” Tony explained. “He makes ’em all different colors and where they speak different languages. Then he mixes ’em all together to see what happens.”

  “You say I’m the strange one? Tony, you’re the strange one.”

  I thought God must be more like John Wayne. Tough and reliable and knowing just what to do to take care of things. What was significant about our whispered conversation was that it centered on the subject of God. God and creation and all they implied about life and death and eternity. When the men from Oklahoma returned from World War II, they brought back a saying: There are no atheists in foxholes. I was beginning to understand. I looked up into the night sky infinitely spangled with stars and planets, all serene and beautiful and so far away from the killing in Vietnam and its stench of death and dying.

  About that time an enemy mortar round exploded inside the perimeter with a terrific doomsday crack and a blinding white ball of light. It had to be the Second Coming. And just when we thought the NVA didn’t want any more fire from the sky and had packed up their shit and gone home.

  Tony and I ended up piled on top of each other at the bottom of our hole. We remained like that, breathing hard as though from exertion, until it became apparent that the explosion was just a single harassing round to let us know the NVA were still out there and watching.

  “Get off me, Tony,” I said finally. “I didn’t know you cared.”

  I clambered back to my machine gun. Tony kind of sniggered to cover his jitters. “Well. . . . Well, fuck!” he said.

  The night passed long and dark. Except for every now and then a mortar shell arriving C.O.D. Probably from a stay-behind unit covering the withdrawal of the Main Force NVA and attempting to discourage pursuit. This was no Dien Bien Phu. Maybe the fight was already over, and we won. Without either Tony or me having busted a single cap.

  We were still wide awake when dawn lightened the eastern sky over Khe Sanh and the night gradually turned to gray. The sun broke slowly over the misty green peaks of South Vietnam’s most distant corner to reveal a scene of deceptive tranquility. Fine ephemeral mist lay down in the valleys between 861 and the other two hills of the triangle. The soft early light elicited a sigh from Tony.

  “I gotta piss like a race horse,” he said.

  I broke open C-rats of fruit cocktail and pound cake for breakfast, emptied the contents into our canteen cups, and passed Tony one of the empty cans. I kept the other. We unbuttoned, filled our cans, and tossed urine out of our new home. It couldn’t smell any worse than all the rotting gook parts scattered about.

  “Good morning, Vietnam!” Tony cheered as he poured urine from the can. From then on it became part of our morning ritual: Wish Vietnam good morning while we pissed on her.

  I wondered as I ate what Linda might be having for breakfast. She was staying with Mom and Dad
and my little sister while I was gone. What with the time difference on the other side of the world, instead of breakfast she was probably sitting down at the dinner table with the rest of the family. Maybe I’d be joining them soon. The NVA might have messed up Bravo 1/9, but it seemed that when the Marines got serious and brought in the cavalry the gooks took off. If this was the best they could do, the war would be over by Christmas.

  Chapter Eight

  A Walk in the Sun

  Out there be monsters. Nights on 861 Tony and I huddled in our miserable hole, and we half-expected dragons and fanged, two-headed demons to materialize out of the night to do to us what they had done to Lieutenant Sauer. Gooks were still out there, and they were out there in force. That seemed to be the general consensus of Colonel Pappy Delong and the I Corps leadership dug in at the airfield and trying to figure out what the NVA would do next. Uncle Ho and General Giap hadn’t come this far to create a second spring offensive Dien Bien Phu just to pack up and go home at the first setback.

  Every night, our artillery dueled with their artillery and mortars, mostly harassment and interdiction (H&I) fire. If anybody saw movement out there, if anybody suspected it, big guns from Khe Sanh and even bigger 175s from Leatherneck Square opened up to hurl a few rounds whose mighty explosions seemed to reveal the fiery soul of the universe.

  The NVA responded in kind, H&I-ing us back. Officers cautioned troops not to get out of our holes after nightfall. If you needed to take a leak or a dump, figure something out.