Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  We were skeptical. Taking one of these guys alive was like entering a tiger’s den to bring out the tiger. No one wanted to die attempting it.

  “So,” Rainey speculated sarcastically, “we walk up while they’re shooting at us and say, ‘Hey, Mr. Charles, want a cigarette?’ And he gives up?”

  It was a lot safer to kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.

  The big guns from Leatherneck Square supplemented by Army batteries from Camp Carroll and the Rockpile along Route 9, the 175s, pummeled the gooks with an impressive, earth-shattering wall of steel ahead of Golf and Echo as the two companies, separated by terrain, moved off our heretofore relatively safe ridge toward a new position on the multi-fingered ridgeline closer to the base of 881N. Fire and smoke boiled out of the trees in a constant booming rumble, the concussions from which rattled grass and tree branches along our passage. What I dreaded was when we would draw near our objective and its defenders. That’s when the bombardment would lift to prevent shelling us along with the enemy. That was when the NVA could let loose and make things interesting.

  “Poor bastards,” Tony commiserated, meaning the enemy. “You gotta feel sorry for them.”

  I scoffed. “After what we seen they did to Lieutenant Sauer?”

  Lieutenant Mac’s Third Herd led Golf’s advance across the wide draw toward the new ridge hill, Echo ranging somewhere on our right flank. As usual, Tony and I marched up front with PFC Taylor’s 1st Squad and the point element, Ramirez as usual breaking brush and keeping his eyes, ears, and nose trained for NVA. The guy was a wild animal at sniffing the breeze and detecting them, like he had a sixth sense. We called him our “faithful Indian scout.”

  I kept the Pig ready to grunt on a short strap over my shoulder. I figured before this day ended we were apt to need all the firepower we possessed.

  I checked on Tony. “You okay? Got your head on straight?”

  Today was not a day to be mooning over a lost love.

  “Piss on her,” Tony said, by which I took he was up and running.

  It was slow, cautious going across the draw and along the ridgeline toward the hill knob. So far, the NVA hadn’t contested our approach. Probably conserving their strength and busy ducking our prep fires. Both companies pulled up short of the objective and set up defenses in a wooded ravine to wait for the pounding of the Wicked Witch to lift so we could proceed.

  To our astonishment, a round-eyed female suddenly appeared out of nowhere with a Marine escort. Pretty and small-built, she wore safari clothing and a Marine helmet and carried a couple of cameras on straps around her neck. Someone explained she was a French photojournalist named Catherine from Paris here to cover the Hill Fights. The eye of every Marine in the vicinity locked and loaded.

  Captain Sheehan had objected when informed by radio that she was coming out. Combat was no place for a civilian, especially a woman. It was primitive and dangerous out here. Colonel Delong gave him no choice; she would accompany the battalion into battle.

  “I’ll provide an escort,” the colonel offered Catherine, “but I can’t spare anyone to bodyguard you.”

  Captain Sheehan told her the same thing when she arrived.

  “I can take care of myself, Captain,” she responded. “I don’t need my body guarded, except—” with a sense of humor, she added jokingly, “except perhaps from your Marines.”

  She proved a big hit, the highlight of the operation so far before the shooting began—an attractive female, French, no less, suddenly dropped into the midst of a bunch of young, virile Marines who immediately began posturing and looking brave for the pretty lady’s cameras. A thorough professional, she was nonetheless charming and knew how to work her way into heads and hearts. The problem with women in combat, as Captain Sheehan saw it, was the male protective instinct. She could get Marines killed in their trying to shield her from harm.

  One of the Marines was so awed by her presence that he forgot all about having ripped open the front of his trousers during movement. Since Marines seldom wore underwear in combat—they caused rash and jungle rot—his privates hung innocently exposed.

  “Chrissakes!” Gunny Janzen barked. “Turn around. She doesn’t want to see your family jewels.”

  “It’s okay, Gunny,” the quick-thinking Marine retorted. “I’m a married man.”

  Even Catherine laughed. Laughter in this setting sounded totally out of place. Like a fart in church. This girl had balls to come out here, though. We had to hand her that.

  Golf and Echo went on the move again once the artillery bombardment ceased, leaving the air saturated with smoke and smelling like a Fourth of July celebration. The silence that followed seemed more startling than the roaring explosions it replaced.

  Still separated from each other, the two companies moved in the sudden quiet, each headed for its own sector of the objective. Lieutenant Hesser’s 1st Platoon replaced Lieutenant Mac’s 3rd on point. Another machine gun team from Weapons moved up; I wasn’t disappointed at being cast further back in the procession. Again, like the giant green caterpillar, Golf climbed out of the ravine where we had temporarily sought refuge and struggled through thick foliage toward the ridge finger and its hill knob. Catherine roamed up and down the column, shooting up film.

  With fog drifting in ahead of approaching evening, Captain Sheehan ordered Hesser to go for the goal. At the same time, he radioed Echo’s Six to begin the attack from his kickoff point. Platoon Sergeant Santos led half of Golf’s 1st Platoon up the left flank while Lieutenant Hesser took the other half right. Golf’s other two platoons, the 2nd and 3rd, set up to cover Hesser and Santos. Catherine also stayed back.

  Tony and I, still with Lieutenant Mac’s Third Herd, dropped behind a felled tree to use for cover. We sprong-legged the M-60’s bipod over the top of the log with its muzzle trained uphill into the tangle of brush. Both of us were ramped up, every sense hyper alert, eyes searching for movement in the smoke and fog gathering on the side of the knob.

  Marines of 1st Platoon jackrabbited across the intervening gully and started up the enemy-held slope. It was slippery from fog and an earlier rain shower. Weapons clutched in one hand, they used their free hands to grab at bushes and small trees to keep from tumbling back down the incline. Men grasping for hand- and footholds grunted and cursed under their breath. Their equipment clattered. No need for noise discipline now. The enemy knew we were coming.

  And the enemy was ready. What sounded like dozens of buzz saws cutting through cordwood suddenly broke out from higher on the knoll, followed by chaos among the attackers. Marines went to ground all over the slope as bullets snapped, whined, and popped through their ranks.

  Echo Company on the hill’s farther flank found itself in a similar situation. Their stay-behind elements, as with Golf’s, laid down a blistering barrage of cover fire to take pressure off our men and pin down defending NVA forces. In all the excitement, I burned through a full belt of 7.62, sweeping the Pig back and forth and spraying rounds into an enemy whose presence was marked only by flickering muzzle flashes in shadowed timber. The Pig emitted a satisfying deafening growl as it ingested rounds and spat out the seed with deadly intent.

  “Feed me, Tony!” I yelled above the melee, indicating that the gun needed a fresh belt.

  Next to me behind the log, sprawled on his belly, Tony expertly primed the machine gun with new ammo. High on adrenaline, we functioned together from training and drill like a machine, all thought vanished except for a primitive reptilian core that demanded satiation in death. Kill! Kill!

  Tony slapped me on the shoulder. He pointed and added in a high, shrill rush of words, “Something moving in the bushes up near the top, to the left.”

  “I see it.”

  I burned up another belt in controlled three-round taps to let the gun cool down from overheating. I had gone through my first belt with a single trigger pull. Movement in the bus
hes ceased.

  “Did you get them, mon ami?” asked a voice, distinctively French and distinctively feminine.

  Catherine was suddenly there, next to me behind the log. She had one eye glued to her camera viewfinder and was busily snapping the shutter.

  “Lady, maybe you oughta move back,” Tony suggested as enemy fire honed in on us and began eating at our barrier, sending wood chips flying.

  “Good idea,” she decided, belly-crawling rapidly back the way she came.

  “Be a shame for a pretty girl like that to get all shot up,” I noted.

  Fog rapidly crept into the lowlands on little cat feet, as the poets like to say. Smoke from the previous bombardment and from flames in the foliage further decreased vision. Firing dwindled off from both sides, as if in acknowledgment of approaching nightfall and the terrors it contained.

  Captain Sheehan apparently hadn’t expected such stiff resistance. Anyhow, because of that resistance, it was too late to attempt further taking of the hill knob tonight. He ordered both companies under his command to break contact and withdraw to the ravine in our rear where we went to ground to wait for another attempt in the morning.

  The gooks seemed just as ready as we to call it a night. The battlefield fell eerily silent while night crept through the valley, leaving only the disfigured top of 881N glowing in weak, dying sunlight.

  It was going to be another long, tense night. After Gunny Janzen came around to emplace machine guns on likely avenues of enemy approach, I left Tony manning the Pig while I adjourned to some nearby trees to relieve myself, looking around first to make sure Catherine wasn’t nosing about with her camera. My taking a leak on the battlefield would look striking on the front page of the Tulsa Tribune.

  Enough daylight remained that I spotted the dead uniformed NVA soldier just before I urinated on him. He lay face up in the weeds, all blackened from the weather and beginning to shrivel and decay as though melting into the earth, teeth showing in a death rictus, eye sockets already cleaned out by warrior ants taking home the bacon.

  By now I was becoming accustomed to running into corpses. I moved to one side to finish my business, feeling nothing for the dead guy other than hoping he took others with him when he went to Hell. One thing though I couldn’t help considering: Is this what will happen to me? Is this what I’ll look like?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Wounded

  It was a restless night in the ravine. Golf and Echo companies had been lucky in today’s brief encounter. None of our people were killed and everybody walked back out of it with only a few suffering minor wounds that Magilla and the other Docs patched up without need of a medevac to send them to the rear.

  The crunch of twigs, a whisper of moving branches, the scurry of some small creature through the weeds put everybody’s nerves raw and rubbing against his backbone. Stationed at the buttress of a rain forest giant with Tony, I struggled to suppress panic alarm in the motor response areas of a very tired nervous system, to control a natural instinct to breathe too fast and too shallowly. Fear, I scolded myself, was a handy warning system, nothing more.

  Muscles ached, eyes stung, skin and clothing were caked with sweat and dirt. My ears rang from today’s explosions and I dared not trust my hearing as I strained to distinguish monsters in the night from the harmless sounds of nature. Imagination was a terrible thing to waste—and none of us was wasting it. A number of times, unable to sleep during our 50-50, either Tony or I heard the tiger-heavy noise of men stalking us through the forest. A pattern to their movements—Step, step, pause. . . . Step, step, pause.

  “Somebody’s out there,” Tony whispered, his breathing fast and sharp.

  “No, no. It’s your turn to sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

  “Sleep? You gotta be shitting me, Maras.”

  So, together we stared into the long night, eyes wide.

  Elsewhere, guys with less discipline and more imagination, unable to restrain their natural impulses for self-preservation, beguiled by threatening movement in the surrounding jungle, would toss grenades that split apart the night. Somebody else would blast off with an M-16. That brought platoon leaders up and shouting their fool heads off.

  “Cease fire, damnit! Cease fire!”

  How was a guy supposed to get any sleep with all this racket, providing, of course, he was inclined to sleep?

  “Maras, do you ever pray?”

  “Not much before,” I admitted. “Now I pray every day.”

  Like the old World War II guys said, there were no atheists in foxholes. “God,” I promised, “I’ll never take life for granted again—”

  If You’ll get me out of this. That last part went unsaid. I just thought it. You don’t bargain with God or fate.

  Exhausted, we finally catnapped on and off in turns. Tony opened one eye to greet the dawn.

  “Good morning, Vietnam!” he managed half-heartedly as he got up on his knees to piss in place against our tree.

  The sun broke over the misty green peaks of the Wicked Sisters of the North and South. Last night’s thick blanket of fog engulfed all but the tops of the hills whose foreheads stuck up above in soft early light that helped cover blemishes and damages inflicted by prep fire.

  Back home, on a morning like this, the most important decision I might have to make was what to have for breakfast. “Mom, let’s have eggs and bacon. No, make that oatmeal.”

  Linda and I hadn’t lived together but for our honeymoon and those few weeks we spent in the motel on the beach at Pendleton where I attended Basic Infantry Training and where she baked a cherry pie.

  Of course, at home, decisions weren’t about life and death. My next-door neighbor wasn’t apt to take a pot shot at me with his deer rifle, nor was the Neighborhood Watch Committee organizing to overrun the block and eat my brain.

  For those who fight for life, I had scribbled on the C-rat carton at Khe Sanh the day BLT 2/3 arrived in these hills, it has a special flavor the protected shall never know. That special flavor was becoming more difficult to define as the Hill Fights dragged on. It was becoming . . . bitter.

  Warplanes stacked up in air space over Khe Sanh as prepping fire against the hills resumed. Aerial bombing blasted the tops and sides of both 881S and 881N, shaking earth and sky and making trees rattle against each other like skeletons. Artillery followed as planes cleared the AO. The hills absorbed a total of 166 aircraft sorties dumping over a half-million pounds of ordnance and 1,500 artillery rounds.

  At 1015 hours, Captain Sheehan received orders from Colonel Pappy to commence the operation, our objective once again the hill knob on 881N’s northeastern slope. The 1st Platoon, Lieutenant Hesser’s, led off again. Tony and I tagged along as a machine gun team with PFC Taylor’s 1st Squad in Lieutenant Mac’s 3rd Platoon. Taylor still resented Corporal Dye’s failure to live long enough to take over his responsibilities.

  “He would have to go and get himself killed,” Taylor fussed.

  Golf Company moved easily but cautiously along the narrow ridge that led toward the hill knob. To the right the ground fell away into Crawford’s Draw, to the left it began to swell into 881N.

  Hand signals flashed. Damn, it was a scorcher of a day, geared down as we were with weapons, ammo, packs. I was soon sweating like a pig, no offense to the Pig. Tony trailed along, puffing from exertion and the weight of 3.5 rocket rounds he carried. Over to our left, I spotted Rainey and Kilgore with his Starlite-mounted M-16 sneaking along in a half-crouch, weapons ready, eyes big and glaring beneath their helmets. You bet they were scared. We were all scared. We were also Marines, and we would do our job.

  War in Vietnam was nothing like the world wars of I and II with their large-scale operations of thousands all hitting a beach at the same time, or taking a town or an island, or seizing a range of hills. Here, there was a feeling of isolation in relatively small units moving more or less se
parately. I knew that Echo was off to our flank, but I had no idea which flank nor what it was doing. Same thing with units at 881S. While BLT 2/3 was tasked with taking 881N, other outfits, probably elements of the Walking Dead and perhaps our Foxtrot 2/3, were assigned to 881S. Aside from when air and artillery worked over the hills, I experienced war as that portion of it that occurred immediately around me and my squad or platoon. In that aspect, battle for the individual Marine in Vietnam was very personal and confined.

  Tony was a bulkier man than my lean 150 pounds. He soon drained his canteen. I still had half of my water left. I offered it to him during a break. I was afraid he would become dehydrated again. He licked his dry lips and shook his head.

  “Damn, Tony. Take it. What, you think I got syphilis or something?”

  He swigged and handed the canteen back. “Better ration what’s left, Maras, or we’ll be sucking the dew off toads.”

  Golf entered an area of thick woods and dense brush. During the last break, Lieutenant Mac’s Third Herd Platoon had relieved Hesser up front of the company. Our point man, currently Lance Corporal James Boda, who was giving our faithful Indian scout a break, forged a path through the woods and soon came to the edge of a small clearing, on the other side of which rose the hill knob just below our taller objective. He halted and took a knee to scan for the enemy.

  “Maras, I got a bad feeling again,” Tony mentioned.

  “Probably indigestion from the spaghetti you copped off me.”

  Boda stepped into the clearing and rushed to the far side with 2nd Squad right behind. PFC Taylor’s 1st Squad emerged next with Lieutenant Mac and his RTO, Bill Vlasek, Tony, and me. We footed into the clearing like mice scampering across a barn floor, followed by 3rd Squad bringing up Tailend Charlie.