Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  “Maras?” Tony’s voice quivered.

  I drew in a deep breath. Damn! I was about to do the dumbest thing I had ever done in my entire life. I tore the casualty tag off my jacket and handed it to Magilla.

  “Take it. I’ve got my gun. I can still shoot. I’m going back. See you later, Tony.”

  Tony couldn’t believe it. “What? Maras, you stupid bastard.”

  I headed down the ridge to where Golf was digging in again for another night and another try at the hill tomorrow. Not looking back, the Pig slung forward for possible action. Above the ominous rumble of thunder, I overheard Tony saying to Magilla, “He’ll never make it without me. I have to go with him.”

  We returned to the fight together, walking side by side, our utilities stained with our blood and the blood of others, not talking as the gathering storm lashed at our faces, gale winds shrieked in the trees, and thunder sounded like the bombardment of enemy hills.

  We heard later that Vlasek died before the chopper reached the Princeton’s sick bay.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Green Parrot

  “We could have caught that chopper out of here.” Tony was limping, I was cradling my arm. But we made our way through the building storm to link up with the battalion. “Both of us—stupid!”

  I couldn’t dispute Tony. I wanted to get out of here as badly as he did. But what brand of men would we have been to desert our brothers-in-arms when they needed every shooter they could get for what lay ahead? I was beginning to understand why Sergeant Crawford kept returning to the battlefield.

  I had seen how they were, Sergeant Crawford of Korea and the World War II vets of my pop’s generation. They didn’t talk much about combat itself, the dying and killing, when they got together at reunions. That wasn’t what they missed, wasn’t what they lost when their wars ended and they went home. They missed that special bond forged among them in the crucible of war, a brotherhood attachment that they clung to and would continue to do so for the rest of their lives. You couldn’t explain that kind of connection to someone who had never experienced it.

  Johnson, Huckaba, and some of the other able-bodied who had helped wounded to the medevac pickup LZ hadn’t expected Tony and me to return with them. They left the LZ and went on ahead to where the battalion’s two remaining companies were digging back in at our old position on the flat ridgetop below 861. It was there that Tony received his Dear John from Peggy and he and I found the dead gook.

  A light rain continued, soaking our utilities and bandages and causing our wounds to sting. Wind picked up, whipping foliage into a frenzy. Heavier monsoon rains were on the way. Presently, with temperatures still high, we sweltered in the steaming heat. That was bound to change after nightfall when the mercury plummeted. Why couldn’t they give a war in a more pleasant climate?

  Exhausted from our wounds and the exertion of toting casualties off the battlefield, Tony and I collapsed in a thicket where we wouldn’t easily be spotted. We sprawled out on the grass and lost ourselves for a few moments gazing up through jungle canopy at black boiling patches of storm scuttling overhead. Terrific bolts of lightning that sounded like exploding mortar rounds jolted us back to reality.

  Tony exhaled wearily. “Maras,” he confessed, “I couldn’t have left either—not unless they carried me out.”

  “I know, brother.”

  Above us, a large green parrot flew toward the recent battlefield. It struck me as somehow out of place, this beautiful, iridescent bird in its otherwise idyllic and familiar setting, and what was it doing? Flying toward war.

  “Don’t go that way!” I warned, but only under my breath in case some gook might be lurking about.

  Tony’s eyes followed the parrot’s progress on its path to 881N. “Stupid bird.”

  The clouds coalesced into a full tropical storm. Water washed off the cartoon tiger on my helmet like a waterfall in front of my eyes and poured down the back of my neck. Hail pounded the helmet, sounding the way it did falling on the tin roof of a barn. Gale-force winds slashed through the forest with the roar of ocean waves. Jagged lightning bolts bayonetted trees, lighting up the terrain and cracking like artillery.

  Garvin and Hughes out on OP/LP seemed surprised to see us. “We heard you two bought the farm.”

  “Price was too high,” I replied.

  Lightning struck nearby, making nerve endings tingle. “God’s pissed off at us,” Garvin decided.

  “Can you blame Him?” Tony grumped. “I’m pissed off at us.”

  Gunny Janzen was even more astonished at our return. He was up pacing with concern over Captain Sheehan’s delay in returning from the battlefield with his CP element. Lieutenant Brian Jackson was assigned to the CP as FO—Forward Observer—whose duty it was to direct artillery fire onto targets. Everyone accused him of calling friendly fire in on top of us, which wasn’t the truth but which nonetheless damaged his reputation because every Marine knew the most dangerous man in the world was a second lieutenant with a map and a radio. Gunny thought Sheehan might be late due to Jackson’s having turned up missing during the artillery exchange and presumed to be dead or injured.

  “Welcome home,” was all Gunny said to Tony and me when he saw us, after shaking his head in disbelief.

  Hell, Tony and I found it hard to believe ourselves.

  He seeded us and the Pig into the perimeter to cover a likely enemy avenue of approach. By now we were both soaked and shivering. Our hole was the same one we had occupied previously; but the old homestead needed some improvements. It hadn’t been raining before.

  “Maras, you put up a poncho over the hole and I’ll dig a rain trough around it to divert some of the flood,” Tony suggested.

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” Gunny warned as he hurried off.

  “Reckon the gooks’ll be out in this weather fucking with us?” Tony wondered.

  “Would you be?”

  Using the razor-sharp banana knife, I cut some bamboo stakes with which to tack down the four corners of a poncho over our hole, leaving a machine gun port open downrange. Tony couldn’t dig fast enough or deep enough with his E-tool to redirect the flow of water and it continued to rush into our hole. Wind popped and snapped the poncho roof and kept jerking up stakes.

  While we struggled with our abode, other Marines around the perimeter were likewise digging in and trying to erect shelter from a cold, dark, miserable night. The only thing that could make it worse was for the gooks to come out and start fucking with us. Maybe lightning would strike them.

  Finally, I managed to stake down my poncho and Tony accomplished all he could with his E-tool. I slid underneath the low canvas roof and splashed into freezing rainwater already up to boot-lace level. We bailed frantically with our helmets but made little headway as rain continued to drum down in monsoon sheets and wash over the top of our pit in waves.

  I gave up. “You going to bed first, or shall I?”

  “You’re bullshitting me, right?”

  Bullshit and black humor were what kept us sane.

  Dennis Johnson dropped by begging for cigarettes. “No food, no cigarettes, no water—”

  “No water?” Tony splashed a hand in the overflowing drainage ditch he dug around our hole.

  Johnson scoffed. “You ain’t gonna drink that stuff, are you? Gooks have been shitting in it. You could catch something and die. Now, about that cigarette? Me and Huckaba tried to split our last one, but the rain melted it.”

  I didn’t smoke and had already traded off my little C-rat packs for choice C-rats. Tony used his last butt when we took our break up the ridge where we saw the parrot.

  Disappointed, Johnson peered out into the darkness from beneath our poncho roof, reluctant to venture out again into the weather.

  “You know,” he mused, sounding sad and, I thought, lonely, “I think God must be crying. He’s as sick of
this as the rest of us.”

  It came as no surprise to me by now that servicemen at war turned to thoughts of God to help them reason through chaos, madness, and so much death. Few are not in some way or in some degree touched by the supernatural as they struggle for understanding, comfort, and protection.

  I had not considered myself particularly religious while growing up. I rarely attended church. Sunday school had been hit and miss. But not a day passed under fire but thoughts of God and life and death and eternity intruded. What did it all mean?

  Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Marines in Vietnam had a phrase used to dismiss confronting difficult and hard-to-understand concepts. “It don’t mean nothing,” we said.

  It don’t mean nothing.

  If that were true, then why were we here? Why were we killing and dying—and for what?

  It don’t mean nothing.

  Soon, water in our hole rose above our knees, forcing us to stand up rather than sit down where cold, muddy water could lap at our chests. We stood and waited for daylight, or for the crazy gooks. Whichever came first. I had never been so miserable in my life.

  Gunnery Sergeant Janzen waited until Captain Sheehan and his CP, along with Lieutenant Jackson, who had been found, returned safely before he wrapped himself in a poncho and crawled into a shell crater. In spite of freezing rain, hail, and wind, he lapsed into the deep sleep of the chronically exhausted. Water had risen to his shoulders when he awoke at dawn.

  “If the gooks had got me,” he told everyone, “I’d have at least been put out of my misery.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Watch Continued Running

  “Vietnam! I’ve had about all this shit I can enjoy!” came a challenge from within the perimeter.

  Gray dawn found the storm moved out of the AO. Its soaked and wretched victims were cranky and tense. Distant thunder rumbled from the departing storm.

  “Fuck you back very much!”

  Gunny Janzen interceded. “Knock off the bullshit.”

  Everything looked slow and desultory in the morning gray. Even Doc Magilla seemed uncharacteristically depressed as he made his rounds. The only words he uttered while he changed dressings on my elbow and Tony’s thigh were, “Heath gave you two birds a chance to get out of here and you blew it.”

  “Where is Heath?”

  Magilla took a deep breath and blew it out again, puffing out his cheeks. He looked old and tired.

  “We went back out there while the fight was still going on to get more wounded. He’s still out there. Lloyd didn’t make it back.”

  What could you say? It occurred to me that I knew very little about Lloyd Heath. Not where he came from, his family, nothing. Just enough to say, “Hey, Doc. How’s it hanging?” Although we considered him and the other Navy corpsmen as much Marines as any of us, they played by different rules. Their mission was not to kill people, break things, and take ground. Theirs was to save Marine lives. Any way they could. Heath tried to save Tony and me by tagging us for medevac with what turned out to be minor wounds.

  Doc Magilla issued us tubes of antibiotic ointment. “See you don’t get infections,” he said before moving on.

  I stopped him. “Magilla?”

  “Maras?”

  No words came. We just looked at each other. He understood. How could you ever properly thank these guys? He nodded and moved on.

  Marines were so miserable from last night we were in no mood to take shit from anybody today. A bunch of pissed-off Marines waiting to be turned loose bore ill for the enemy.

  On the other hand, the gooks were probably just as pissed off as we were. What was that verse from the Bible? Something about rain falling equally on the righteous and the unrighteous.

  I knew we had to go back out there, back into the abyss. Our colored pins were no doubt being moved even now. To avoid another Dien Bien Phu, we were saddled with the task of running the NVA out of these hills and occupying them ourselves. That meant casualties. Casualties had to be expected and accepted. You looked into the abyss, I remembered reading somewhere, and the abyss looked back at you.

  Doc Heath was missing and, I feared, another of us who may have fallen into the abyss.

  We received warning orders. The best I understood about the “Big Picture” was that we were attacking two objectives simultaneously this morning. Golf would take on the same knob from yesterday and the day before. Echo would move off to our left flank to seize and hold another small hilltop on another ridge across the valley from us. Once secured, the two knobs could be launch pad for assaults against 881N proper.

  Further delay, went the reasoning, allowed the NVA to reinforce their positions and thus more difficult to dislodge. We had hurt them and seized the initiative. The enemy knew we were coming back, they knew where we were coming from, and they should know who they were dealing with. Marines could not be stopped for long.

  Again, arty and air prepped the two objectives. We were becoming so accustomed to the routine that even fire and thunder delivered by bombs and shells gave the gray morning a distant lazy look. Smoke hung in the now-still air like a dirty cloud.

  Finally, Captain Sheehan issued orders: “Saddle up! Move ’em out!”

  Lieutenant Mac’s Third Herd Platoon took point for Golf Company, with Ramirez our “faithful Indian scout” in the lead and PFC Taylor’s squad, including Tony and me, backing him. One of our tasks, should we have the opportunity, was to recover our dead who had been left on the field yesterday. Except for Doc Heath, the missing were all Lieutenant Mac’s people. He insisted his platoon be the one to make the recovery.

  Out into the forest we went, down once more into Crawford’s Draw, up the opposite slope and across that same cursed clearing below the rise of the knob where we had been ambushed less than twenty-four hours ago. Sounded like a SciFi thriller: The Rise of the Knob.

  Prep of the knobs lifted as we approached. Apparently, somebody decided not to do any more “enemy close” scenarios that subjected us to the possibility of friendly fire. The fight started once the arty stopped. Today became a replay, a continuation of what had gone before.

  In a bush fight, each man felt almost isolated within his individual war. You saw only what happened immediately around you. Everything else was mostly sound—cries and shouts, screams when somebody got hit. Crack! Crack! of rifle shots. Ripped-cloth Tat Tat Tat! of machine guns. Sudden Whump! of a grenade, RPG, or mortar round landing, its signature of smoke rising out of the weeds and underbrush. It was, in a practical sense, like the blind fighting the blind.

  A battlefield was so damned noisy. Plus: “I’m hit! I’m hit!”

  “Relax, man. They’re just dirt clods.”

  “Doc up!” A cry out of the bedlam that made me feel sick, knowing a Marine had taken one.

  The crack and pressure of slugs passing near my head almost took my breath. Damn! That was close!

  Panting like a marathon runner, sweating like a pig. No offense to the Pig.

  A bullet whacked my pack, knocking me to my knees and exploding my last can of chicken noodle soup. Now, that pissed me off.

  “I’m okay, okay,” I assured Tony, regaining my feet and continuing on the wild advance toward the knob, firing the Pig from my hip John Wayne style, lighting up groups of bushes while Tony sprayed any likely enemy hidey hole with his M-16.

  I wondered if John Wayne had ever been in actual combat. Sacrilege! Bite my tongue!

  Over on one flank, Corporal Richard Schmitz came upon what he took to be an abandoned bunker until he spotted movement. Thinking a wounded gook might be inside and perhaps anticipating capturing a prisoner to win Pappy Delong’s promised R&R, he rolled into the end of the trench that made up part of the bunker.

  I overheard him shout, “Drop your weapon! Drop it! Come on out! Chieu Hoi! Chieu Hoi!”

  Captain Sheehan also hea
rd and knew what Schmitz was up to. He yelled at Schmitz, “No! Get back!”

  These guys we fought weren’t VC guerrilla types. They were hard core down to the bone and would sooner cut out your throat than fuck with Chieu Hoi.

  “Let’s go!” I called out to Tony. We raced through the weeds to contribute our machine gun to Schmitz’s dispute. To hell with John Wayne, this was what Sergeant Crawford would have done.

  The gook bunker consisted of a trench about chin deep, eight feet long and two feet wide with a cave-like bunker carved into one wall. Schmitz was hugging the wall next to the cave entrance and shouting out for its occupants to surrender. The barrel of an AK-47 thrust from out of the hole and blasted into the Marine’s chest, splattering blood and flesh.

  Schmitz’s combat buddy, a private named Coleman, saw Schmitz disappearing into the bunker’s tiny mouth, being dragged inside like the earth was eating him. The gooks probably intended to use him as a shield or a hostage.

  Enraged beyond rational thought, Coleman leapt into the trench and grabbed his friend’s boot in a deadly game of tug-of-war.

  The dark mouth of the hole lit up with another burst of AK fire as gooks inside shot across Schmitz’s body, striking Coleman in the legs. The heavy slugs slammed him back against the wall and to one side where the bunker occupants would have to show themselves in order to finish him off.

  Although bleeding profusely and in severe agony, Coleman wasn’t about to give up on his buddy. He grabbed a boot and returned to the task of trying to pull Schmitz free.

  Sergeant Santos, who reached the scene seconds before Tony and I appeared, threw himself on the ground at the lip of the trench above the bunker. He was a tough lifer Marine on his second combat tour in Vietnam. He stretched over into the trench, grabbed Coleman by his battle harness and manually yanked him up and out of danger, depositing him in the grass.

  “They got Dickie in there!” Coleman cried. “Corpsman up!”