“You’re fair game if you’re walking around inside the perimeter at night,” Gunny Janzen warned. “Not just from gook mortars. Everybody’s jittery and you may end up with perforations in your skivvies.”
Nobody wore skivvies in the field, they gave us diaper rash, but he had made his point.
After H&I did its stuff, one of the C-47s we referred to collectively as “Puff the Magic Dragon” flew over to drop flares that, like little suns, lit up the terrain around us in an eerie, flickering approximation of daylight. Any NVA foolish enough to be exposed in the kitchen when the lights went on felt the Dragon’s fiery breath. While only every fifth round from its 20mm cannon was a red tracer, the accumulative effect resembled the fiery tail of a dragon lashing back and forth. The sound it made was like the biggest ratchet in the world. Awesome sights and sounds for a good ol’ boy from Oklahoma to witness.
I stood hip-shod at daybreak in our hole keeping a wary eye out for monsters over the Pig’s heavy barrel when Gunny Janzen approached in that little sand crab run intended to keep a low profile against possible snipers in the green below. We called it the “861 Shuffle.” Tony rested in the hole at my feet; he had stood our last 50-50 watch and felt groggy. Red dirt had already managed to grime into his utilities, and into mine. I needed a shave and a good hot bath.
“Warning order,” Gunny said. “We’re moving out in three-zero mikes.”
Janzen looked as though he hadn’t slept much either. At thirty-six years old, he was in fit shape, lean and mean with a square unshaved jaw underneath his helmet.
I blurted out the first thought that came to mind. “You mean—out there?” Then felt foolish as hell for saying it.
“What do you think we’re doing out here, Maras? Kicking gook butt or pulling R&R?”
“If that’s a choice, Gunny, . . .” Tony ventured.
The gunny sergeant rolled his eyes and pointed toward a green ridge-line below. It appeared to connect 861 and 881N. Thick fog covered it this early in the morning. That ridge, Gunny outlined in a hurried, condensed version of an OpPlan, was our intermediate objective on the way to a low hill mass farther on toward 881N, our ultimate target. From what I gathered, if we secured these three hills—861 and 881 North and South—we checkmated the NVA bastards right in their tennis shoes. Ho-Ho-Ho Ho Chi Minh!
“Muster with Lieutenant Mac’s Third Herd,” Gunny said, “and follow the boots in front of you. Mac will let you know if we need the M-60 up.”
Gunny vaulted out of our hole and skittered on down the perimeter. Platoon leaders would provide briefings once we assembled to move out. I continued to study the ridgeline Gunny pointed out. Elements of the 9th that had replaced what remained of Bravo 1/9 when it pulled back had dug in on the ridgeline to hold it. Last night right after dark, they must have spotted movement between them and 881S and called in arty. Four or five 175mm rounds from one of the batteries at Leatherneck Square had scattered the gooks.
Maybe, if we were fortunate, today would be just another walk in the sun. We would walk over there, walk up 881N and 881S in a day or so, find nobody home, and that would be the end of it. The brass that played with our colored pins on maps would move BLT 2/3 back to our three boats to cruise around some more where we had hot chow and showers. There was a chance we might even venture south to Australia. That was the way to fight a war in comfort.
Although getting an outfit the size of a battalion ready to move out appeared to be little more than an organized clusterfuck, Captain Sheehan had it ready to go in surprisingly short order. Stay-behind elements that were left on 861 to hold and defend it watched as 2/3 Battalion along with supplemental companies from 3/3 and 3/9 dropped off the side of the hill.
Captain Ray Madonna’s Hotel Company took point with Golf trailing in support. Golf had a fairly easy march compared to Hotel’s breaking brush out front and tramping a three-foot-wide trail for us to follow that wended through chin-deep elephant grass and around clumps of trees and stands of bamboo that towered above our heads. My job was a simple one: follow the boots of the Marine ahead of me, like Gunny said, although in tall grass I switched from boots to helmets that resembled turtles swimming in a sea of grass. Within minutes of starting the hump to the ridge I was dripping with sweat that stung my eyes and soaked my utilities.
The long green caterpillar traversed the grass valley and pushed on toward the ridgeline with 881N and 881S rising ahead and 861 crouched to the rear. I noticed from below that the crowns of all three hills were denuded and stood out red-brown from having been shredded and ploughed up by artillery and air power.
Everything remained still as we left the grass and began climbing the ridge through heavy shrubbery and jungle, the only sounds being the clank of equipment, the grunting of straining men, and the swish of foliage swept aside.
“It’s like in the movies,” Tony pointed out. “You know the savages are waiting—but . . .”
“But it’s quiet, too quiet,” I finished for him.
The ridge leveled into a wide spot on top where elements of the 9th had set up to secure the high ground and establish a CP and jumping-off site for assaults on the two hills ahead and to our flanks. Bomb craters pock-marked the clearing while surrounding trees stood scorched and splintered from prior artillery assaults to drive NVA back and off the ridge.
A finger of the ridge plunged into a narrow draw that broke the ridge into two bones before it funneled uphill again to high ground on the other side. Captain Madonna’s Hotel Company descended on point into the grassy draw while Captain Sheehan set his other companies in overwatch positions until Hotel’s Marines were safely across.
Lieutenant Mac placed Tony, the Pig, and me on the lip of the ridge in an old shell crater to provide cover fire for Hotel were it needed. From our high vantage point we watched the drama play out like in a Roman coliseum as Hotel’s column in staggered formation proceeded cautiously toward the opposite slope and the head of the draw. I noticed that the flexible whip antenna of the PRC-25 carried by Captain Madonna’s RTO (radio-telephone operator) stuck up above the grass as a dead giveaway to the presence of a commanding officer. No wonder there were never enough officers to go around. First and second lieutenants kept getting knocked off faster than they could be turned out from “shake and bake” officer candidate schools. Attrition rates for junior officers in-country compared with the life spans of turkeys on Thanksgiving.
I nudged Tony and pointed. Sergeant Crawford spearheaded one of the point elements for the company. He crouched in the low-ready position while maneuvering through weeds, as alert and watchful as a pointer sniffing out quail or pheasant. Sticking close behind him came the civilian whose name was Bob Handy, a lean, rawhide-looking man we first thought to be a reporter but who turned out to be a CIA operative. He also wore jungle utilities and carried an M-16.
“You boys will do all right in a fight when it comes to that,” Big Ed assured Tony and me. “Remember your training and don’t do anything stupid.”
Tony gave one of his best Buddy Hackett impressions. “Does enlisting in the Marine Corps qualify as stupid?”
Crawford’s group of Marines approached the slope near the head of the draw, unaware that NVA had dug out a bunker complex on the forward slope ahead in the trees and were waiting to spring the trap. When hell suddenly erupted, I almost jumped out of my skin. The din was deafening and loud enough to awake the dead in Hong Kong—heavy 50-cal machine gun thump-thump-thumping, automatic weapons stuttering, mortars whumping, RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) whooshing from hidden sites on the slope and exploding in quick lethal flashes among Hotel’s Marines. The effect was like a high-powered race car shooting off a starting line and going from zero to one hundred in a second and a half to crash into stadium spectators. My first terrified thought was that Ed and his “boys” had been trapped in the kill zone. I recoiled from the sudden violence, stupefied by it.
The gooks had not gone home after all.
Chapter Nine
Kill Zone
“Motherfucker! There’s about a million gooks down there!” Tony yelped.
Growing up in Oklahoma, kids sometimes amused ourselves by poking sticks into red ant hills and watching the critters scurry madly about seeking an enemy to attack. That was how the draw below the ridgeline appeared now—an agitated red ant hill but with Marines instead of ants tearing about searching for cover or somebody to kill. Those of us not in the fight and realistically unable to join it without charging into the kill zone ourselves watched helplessly as the fight below played out in real unreal time. The action was only a few hundred meters away. It was almost like viewing a John Wayne war movie from the front row.
We watched, stunned, as our fellow Marines dropped in the tall grass, not knowing whether they were hit or not, whether they might be dead. Grenades and rockets exploded among them while AK fire and an NVA machine gun raked through their ranks in a murderous crossfire. Screaming and shouting merged with the rise-and-ebb thunder of explosions and rifle and automatic weapons fire.
Our guys had been so close to the gooks before the enemy triggered the ambush that they could have kicked them in the balls, smelled their bad breath. The NVA were cunning that way. They had learned to get in tight during an attack in order to nullify our artillery, mortar, and cover fire. We dared not respond effectively without taking a chance of killing our own men.
Gunny Janzen appeared out of nowhere as he always seemed to do. He dived into our crater with Tony and me. He pointed to where the gooks were dug in among the brush on the far slope, from which the heaviest fire originated. I had seen some of our guys take to the ground and disappear into the grass not fifty meters in front of the enemy parapets.
“Maras, lay down cover on top of that slope,” Gunny ordered. “Keep ’em high and be careful of our guys.”
“Roger that, Gunny.”
Until now, I had not experienced combat other than being mortared and that other time during Operation Beacon Star when the sniper with the 50-cal winged a shot at us, neither of which counted as real combat. After landing at Red Beach, the battalion had spent the following few days camped out nights in the cemetery or wandering around in the boondocks searching villages for contraband and looking for VC. When Sergeant Crawford and his boys stirred up enemy at the Catholic Church and it appeared a real fight might be brewing, our colored pins got abruptly moved to Khe Sanh. So far, I had only fired the Pig at range targets, never at live human beings.
As Gunny moved on to synchronize Golf’s other machine gun crews, I took a deep breath and sighted down the barrel of the M-60. I saw nothing but thick brush and the indistinct flickering of muzzles in the foliage above and forward of our Marines. I squeezed the trigger and opened up the Pig for its first taste of combat, and for Tony’s and mine as well. Not seeing anything definite to shoot at. Just shooting, feeling the satisfying recoil of the stock against my shoulder, the gun vibrating on its bipod and going Da Da Da. . . . Da Da Da. . . .
I fired in short bursts rather than lay on the trigger and risk overheating the barrel, pounding red tracers across the draw above the heads of Hotel’s Marines and into the opposing slope. An M-60 could sure chew the hell out of things. Tony fed me a fresh belt of 7.62 and I gave the gooks another taste of Pork.
“Yeah! Yeah! Hell, yeah!” Tony cheered.
I caught a glimpse of Big Ed Crawford and Bob Handy the CIA spook scooting low through elephant grass on the western edge of the draw, dodging brush clumps as they maneuvered toward the Viet 50-cal machine gun thumping death into the trapped Marines. They and a few others were so near the gun that I dared not lower my aim to the NVA gun nest for fear of hitting them. I always figured Ed had gonads the size of basketballs; now I knew he did.
“Move to the left to flank the gun!” Big Ed yelled at Handy.
The NVA gunners hadn’t yet spotted the two men closing on them. To Crawford’s rear, Hotel Company’s executive officer, whose name really was Hackett, sprang up from the grass the better to be heard above the bedlam.
“Pull back! Pull back!”
The 50-cal caught him full frontal bore, almost ripping him in half and slamming what was left of him back to the ground.
Captain Madonna took up the chorus from another part of the field. “Fall back!”
Crawford shouted counter instructions to keep his men from returning through the kill zone. “Shift left!” he called out.
A pair of well-camouflaged spider holes not twenty feet directly ahead of Big Ed and his sidekick suddenly flipped open their lids. An NVA soldier armed with an AK-47 automatic rifle popped up out of each one. Crawford barely broke stride in his headlong dash. Before either enemy could pull a trigger, he and Handy responded with bursts of 5.56 from their M-16s that slashed into the enemy soldiers’ heads and upper bodies. A pith helmet spun high into the air and sailed off above the grass. The other soldier, confined in his hole, danced a restricted version of the spastic chicken, spraying blood in a pink cloud. He died with one lifeless hand sticking up wedged between the lid of his spider trap and its rim.
Spotting a discarded 3.5 rocket launcher, Crawford scooped it up, only to discover that a bullet had disabled it. And apparently its bearer as well, for the weapon was smeared with blood. He cast it aside regretfully; it would have been the perfect cure to the 50-cal still eating away at Hotel’s Marines.
With Handy beside him and slightly behind, Crawford led their running, dodging advance up the slope toward the deadly machine gun that was doing so much damage. By now, they had attracted the attention of other enemy. AK-47s opened up on them.
Bullets slammed into Big Ed, blasting his leg out from underneath him and hurling his mangled rifle and other pieces of equipment into the brush and weeds. Tony and I, pausing to reload the Pig, saw him collapse out of sight like a dead man.
“Ohmigod, Tony! They’ve just killed Sergeant Crawford!”
Tony wailed back, “My God, if they can kill him—we’re all gonna die!”
Such an overwhelming amount of fire. When the guy in Okinawa bashed his head into the shower wall to keep from returning to Vietnam, I remembered thinking, How bad can Vietnam be? I experienced a sudden sick feeling that I was finding out—and that things were going to get a whole lot worse.
Incredibly, Crawford was still alive in the grass and moving around. He crawled over to Handy and covered the spook protectively with his own body while the thumping of the gook’s heavy machine gun continued to echo across the draw.
“Ed, if I don’t make it back,” Handy requested, “will you tell my wife what happened?”
The two men made a pact under fire. Big Ed would notify Handy’s wife if the agent was killed, Handy would notify Ed’s wife if Ed took one. Handy produced a ballpoint pen with which each of them scrawled his address and phone number on the back of the other’s utility jacket.
“But we’re not finished yet,” Crawford vowed with the determination that had seen him through two previous wars.
“Ed, you’re bleeding. We need to get you out of here.”
“Not yet. Patch me up.”
A bullet had perforated his upper thigh but appeared to have missed the artery. Handy hurriedly bound the bloody wound with a field dressing while elsewhere Captain Madonna’s voice rose above the fray, still calling for the company to pull back. Big Ed realized that to retreat under this much fire would move his boys back through the kill zone and subject the company to even more casualties. The 50-cal had to be knocked out.
“Let’s go!” he urged his stalwart partner.
The big sergeant relieved a fallen Marine of his M-16 as the two men wriggled forward on their bellies. The next time I spotted Sergeant Crawford, he and Handy were on their feet in thick brush at the edge of the draw. His tattered utilities looked black with blood from his uppe
r thigh to his knee. He limped badly as he and Handy closed in on the machine gun, whose operators still hadn’t seen them.
A khaki-clad figure flushed out of the bushes directly ahead. Crawford attempted to bring him down, but his commandeered Mattie Mattel jammed. He tossed it aside in disgust and drew his E-tool. An entrenching tool—a mini-shovel—was better than no weapon at all.
Crawford wasn’t the only Marine on the battlefield suffering malfunction problems with the new M-16A1. Elsewhere, Corporal Gerald Pett’s rifle jammed after he fired only eight or ten rounds. He rolled over in the grass and rammed a cleaning rod down the barrel, thinking a faulty round may have plugged it. The barrel was clear. No jammed bullet—just another unexplained malfunction.
He crawled around unarmed until he came upon a dead Marine, whose weapon he appropriated. It also jammed after a half-dozen rounds. He dropped his head on his arms and cried out, “Damn! We’re all going to die down here!”
Crawford, armed only with his E-tool, was determined to let nothing stop him from silencing the NVA machine gun. Handy covered him with his still-functioning M-16, popping rounds at suspected enemy positions as the two men continued on their mission.
An NVA helmet appeared from a gopher hole not ten feet away. Crawford charged without breaking stride, swinging his E-tool. The Viet ducked and Big Ed missed his forward swing—but he caught his target on the back stroke. The sharp edge of the shovel in the hands of a strong warrior like Crawford exploded the man’s skull in a mist of blood, brains, and bone fragments.
With that, the two Americans managed to eliminate the machine gun crew’s flank security, which left the gun unprotected and vulnerable. The fight continued with bullets snapping and whining, green and red tracers interlocking like supersonic dueling fireflies on speed, the enemy 50-cal pumping heavy slugs into its trapped victims. Wounded Marines cried out, “Corpsman! Corpsman up!”
Blood in the Hills Page 6