Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  The gooks were wily enough to stay hidden deep inside the bunker and out of sight to wait for another Marine to show himself. Like rabid rats in a tunnel, these guys weren’t going to be any Marine’s R&R ticket.

  I flopped down on my belly at the end of the trench where I might get an enfilade shot at the hole without exposing myself to those inside. I trained the Pig’s snout on the entrance but held fire for fear of hitting Schmitz. His body, now still and undisturbed, lay mostly inside the bunker with only his feet showing.

  Santos lay sprawled next to me. “Cover me!” he said.

  He snatched a rope off his gear and dropped into the trench where he quickly tossed a loop around Schmitz’s extended foot and attempted to pull him free. NVA inside the hole opened fire, muzzle flashes flickering to light up the entrance. None of the rounds struck Santos since he remained out of their sight against the trench wall, but he was so near the entrance that muzzle fire burned his face. Giving up on rescuing Schmitz in this manner, he sprang out of the trench and went to his knees on the thick earthen roof of the subterranean den. It was clear to him and to us that Schmitz was dead.

  “Gimme a grenade!” he demanded.

  I freed a frag from my belt pouch and tossed it to the sergeant. He slammed it over the side of the trench and into the den. He rolled and flattened himself on the ground.

  “Fire in the hole!”

  The grenade exploded with a muffled Karump! Flame shot from the bunker’s mouth. Santos reached out a hand for a second grenade. I pitched it to him. He transferred it to the bunker in the same motion.

  A fortunate call, that second grenade. Subsequently, while retrieving Schmitz’s body from the wreckage, we found the corpses of two NVA soldiers. One of them appeared to have sat on the first frag to save his buddy. Had Santos not sent in a second grenade to finish the job, the surviving gook would likely have added to his personal body count when the next Marine attempted to retrieve Corporal Schmitz.

  The difference between living and dying, as this incident proved, could be a matter of seconds, of good and bad decisions made instantaneously.

  “Okay,” Santos said to the men of his squad, “get Dickie out of there and bury the gooks with another grenade. May they rot in Hell.”

  It had become obvious by this time that we faced not a major resistance but instead a small stay-behind element whose job was to delay us until the main force withdrew further up 881N to reconsolidate and bring in replacements from Laos and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. One thing we acknowledged by now: These guys were not going away. They were not guerrillas employing hit-and-run tactics. They were professionals. I wondered if the NVA had Marines.

  Tony and I waited with Sergeant Santos’ men to cover them with the Pig while they attended to Schmitz and the bunker. Captain Sheehan ordered Golf to ascend the rest of the steep slope to the top of the knob, which it did without further resistance. In the meantime, Echo was well on its way to controlling the other knob. Surprisingly, no more firing came at us. Apparently, the bad guys were pulling back after having delayed us. Golf Company lost two Marines killed in the skirmish and nine wounded.

  We located our four dead left behind in yesterday’s action. They were all together in what appeared to be a last stand gone horribly wrong. Tony and I and some of Santos’s squad members came upon Lieutenant Mac, Captain Sheehan, Doc Magilla, and a couple of other Marines standing with their helmets off and their heads bowed in a field next to a grove of thorn trees. Lance Corporal Jim Boda, PFC Andy Carter, PFC Jim Hill, and Navy Corpsman Lloyd Heath lay in a cluster where they fell. I joined the living around the dead, all of us silent and grieving. My injured elbow suddenly began to ache, as though reminding me of how Doc Heath tried to save Tony and me from all this. In the end, he couldn’t save himself.

  I had chatted with Jim Hill only this morning. Now he too was dead.

  “Maras,” he had said to me, “what do you reckon it’ll be like when we get home again? I can hardly remember home. It’s like it was another life.”

  After a pause, he added, “If we get home again.”

  Hill would never go home.

  A cleaning rod stuck out the barrel of Carter’s weapon. It had obviously malfunctioned. Hill’s weapon also jammed. When he went down, he appeared to have been trying to force a stuck cartridge from the chamber of his M-16 with the Bowie knife he always carried. Lieutenant Mac picked up the knife and studied it a moment before he sighed and handed to Magilla. “Here, Doc. Remember this day.”

  Doc Wike looked at it, shook his head, and also sighed before he passed it on to one of the other grunts, a newbie who had arrived on Okinawa with Hill. “Jim would have wanted you to have it,” he said.

  The newbie nodded solemnly and accepted the big knife.

  Magilla stood over the KIAs for a long time. A big man just standing there with his head lowered, his shoulders shaking, lips moving in silent prayer. Tears streamed down his cheeks. The Doc took the deaths of his friends personally.

  “They didn’t stand a chance,” one of the Marines said bitterly. “Their M-16s malfunctioned.”

  “Fucking McNamara.” This from a PFC in Santos’s squad who had been at the trench where Schmitz died.

  Rumors had circulated freely since we were issued the weapons in Okinawa that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara held investments in Colt, the company that designed and manufactured defective M-16s. It was further rumored that he and other politicians were making a profit off the war and the blood of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines in Vietnam.

  “Fucking McNamara!”

  Surely there was enough evidence by this time to prove something was badly wrong with the design of the rifle.

  I knelt on both knees next to Heath’s body. I didn’t know him well, would never really know him now as other than the brave and compassionate man who ran to the sound of guns and attempted to save those harmed by them. His eyes were open and fixed staring up into the sky as into another world.

  It struck me odd that Heath was dead here, his spirit gone, but his watch continued to run. How long, I wondered, was eternity?

  Chapter Twenty

  The Pond

  Once atop the knob, we discovered dozens of well-constructed bunkers, fighting holes, and trenches arranged for interlocking fire. Looking back over what seemed an interminable distance to where the top of 861 stuck up at the other end of the ridgeline, I couldn’t help succumbing to a sudden feeling of isolation. It occurred to me that the NVA may have employed an ages-old strategy of “isolate and destroy.” Brilliant move to sucker us out here, cut us off from our control and supply anchor, and trap us against the base of 881N, which swelled up out of the jungle above our heads.

  We hadn’t driven these guys out. It’s a trap! It’s a trap! But nobody listened to a nineteen-year-old FNG private. These guys would be coming back in force to collect rent. I could almost feel them out there waiting for full dark.

  Our officers established a hasty night perimeter, taking advantage of the enemy’s abandoned bulwarks. As usual, a machine gun being a critical defensive weapon, Tony, the Pig, and I were assigned to cover a strategic point. On 50-50 alert with listening posts sent out in all directions, Marines settled down for another in a series of long, restless, scary nights. The fighting hole I shared with Tony was virtually a replica of every other hole we had occupied since that long first-day march from the Combat Base at Khe Sanh to 861. Mud at the bottom of it from last night’s rain sucked at our boots and reeked of an odor somewhere between spoiled food—gooks relished fish heads and rice and a sour fish sauce called nuc mam—and unwashed bodies. We were decidedly in a low-rent district.

  Across a wooded lowlands from our knob, Echo Company likewise dug in on their ridgeline hill following slight resistance. Both companies now prepared to kick off when ordered to assault and seize 881N. When a job just had to be done right, call the Marin
es.

  Golf’s knob was relatively flat on top, its timber shredded and splintered and strewn about. Edges sloped off on three sides and rose on the fourth into the mother hill. Near where Captain Sheehan set up his CP lay a large crater the size of a small pond. Judging from the green scum on the surface, it had been here for quite some time. Recent rains had filled it to the brim and attracted new swarms of mosquitoes.

  Only emergency medevac choppers braved NVA fire to get in to us; a pair of Sea Knights managed to drop down fast and hover at the top of the knob long enough to pick up the wounded and our dead, among them Heath, Hill, Carter, Schmitz, and Boda. Mortar rounds landed on the LZ moments after the choppers sprang back into the air and barreled balls-to-the-wall for the Princeton. Trying to bring in resupply choppers seemed too risky. As a result, most of us nursed the few drops of remaining water in our canteens and hoarded our last cans of Cs. It was so bad that heavy smokers were trying to barter off their last Camel for a John Wayne chocolate bar.

  The mosquito crater-pond provided the knob’s sole source of water. For all we knew, it bred all manner of bugs and microscopic critters to play havoc with our systems and give us the running shits, or worse. Still, it was better than licking dew off bamboo leaves and toads. Tony and I and a few other Marines were replenishing our canteens from the crater, ignoring the odor and the pond’s green-brown sickish tint, when Magilla came around passing out halcyon purification tablets.

  “No telling what’s in that stagnant water,” he cautioned. “It’s probably full of napalm, and no telling what else.”

  Gene Kilgore swished scum aside and dipped his canteen into the water. “Napalm kills stomach worms, doesn’t it?”

  Magilla shrugged and dropped a tablet into his own canteen before he filled it. What the hell? A Marine had to have water.

  Kilgore picked up his M-16 with attached Starlite scope and started back to where Captain Sheehan assigned him to night-scope the terrain.

  “Still got your thermite grenade?” Tony needled.

  Kilgore grunted and patted his harness pouch. He took seriously his responsibility to destroy the scope if we were ever overrun.

  Tony and I returned to our hole while darkness and fog crept eerily up out of the lowlands. My elbow ached from the shrapnel wound. I tried to ignore it. Tony rubbed his injured thigh. Neither of us wanted to be the first to collapse in the bottom mud to try to sleep while the other kept watch. It was difficult to decide which would be more miserable—sleeping in the mud or grabbing a few winks standing up.

  I shook my canteen to make sure the halcyon was well distributed. Squinting and mentally holding my nose against the smell, I unscrewed the top and took a deep swig. Immediately I gagged on something foreign that felt like a soft length of squirmy plastic that almost went down my throat. I retched water and a two-inch leech all over Tony.

  “You reckon there’s any protein value in a leech?” was all Tony said.

  I vowed not to drink from the pond again; I was lying to myself and knew it. Wait until the sun came out again and temperatures spiked at about one hundred.

  Night was a time of angst and reflection. The Marines of Golf felt stressed by the deaths of our buddies. I kept seeing Heath’s watch running, mocking, keeping time while time had ended for him. Tony and I opted to stand up again to sleep, leaning against the side of our rat hole in the enveloping night, each of us deep in individual thoughts and fears.

  “Maras, do you suppose you see it coming and know you’re about to die?” Tony asked in a subdued voice. “You think Lloyd knew he was going to die just before he died?”

  “I don’t know, Tony.”

  Echo Company, less than a couple klicks away across the lowlands from Golf’s position, came up on the commo net to report activity in its area—“sounds of heavy digging” out front of the lines. Every unit in the vicinity of the three hills went on full alert when Kilo 3/9, Mike 3/3, and now the recently added Foxtrot 2/3, all of which remained stalemated at the bottom of 881S, looked across from their angle and confirmed NVA swarming around the bottom of Echo’s knoll and farther up the ridgeline. They spotted enemy soldiers in groups of fifty or more humping large packs as they appeared and disappeared in and out of fogbanks. Kilgore with his Starlite further corroborated their sightings. It appeared Echo Marines might be in for a long night.

  Tension mounted. Something was about to snap.

  “Relieve each other and try to get some rest,” Gunny Janzen advised, passing along our lines. “This may be our last chance to sleep tonight.”

  I nodded at Tony. “Go ahead. You first.”

  He failed to sleep. So did I. Finally giving up on it, we hunkered gunner and assistant gunner wide-eyed next to each other staring into threatening darkness where Count Dracula and his minions lurked.

  “Quiet.”

  “Yeah. Too quiet.”

  About midnight I began nodding off in position over my machine gun. Sleeping with the Pig.

  “I’ll wake you when the pizza comes,” Tony remarked. “I ordered out. A supreme with anchovies.”

  “Anchovies give me indigestion.”

  “Especially if gooks deliver it,” Tony said.

  My eyes closed. I bumped my helmet off the Pig. Tony’s sharp cry of alarm snapped me awake. “Motherfucker!”

  In the distance, across the lowlands, a green star cluster flowered bright above Echo Company, followed by the eerie tooting of bugles, both common NVA signals launching a ground attack. Sergeant Crawford, while we were in-training at Okinawa, told stories about how the North Koreans used bugles during their mass human wave charges.

  “If that sound doesn’t pucker your asshole,” he said, “your pucker is worn out.”

  My pucker factor puckered up completely as Echo’s hill erupted in strings of bright explosions. Rifle and machine gun fire surrounded the knob and twinkled like hundreds of lightning bugs. The roar, crackling and rumble of the commencing fight carried across the intervening valley and slapped us upside the head. Captain Sheehan received a message from the battalion S-3 whom he had seeded in with Echo.

  “Golf Company could be next on the NVA hit list.”

  Platoon leaders and sergeants fast-legged along the perimeter to pass the word to every fighting position. “The gooks are hitting Echo. We’re back on full alert. We could be next.”

  USS Princeton (LPH), a member of a three-ship convoy that transported BLT 2/3 to action in Vietnam. United States Navy

  USS Ogden (LPD) underway for Vietnam as part of a three-ship convoy transporting BLT 2/3. This was the ship that Maras called home during the voyage. United States Navy

  Official USMC photo of Bob Maras.

  USMC

  Bob Maras packing gear for deployment from Okinawa to Vietnam in 1967. Courtesy of Tony Leyba

  Bob Maras (right) and Private Bill Rainey aboard the USS Ogden en route to Vietnam.

  Courtesy of Tony Leyba

  Bob Maras test fires a 3.5 rocket launcher aboard the USS Ogden prior to insertion into Vietnam combat. Courtesy of Tony Leyba

  Bob Maras aboard USS Ogden en route from Okinawa to Vietnam.

  Robert Maras Collection

  B-52 bombers with their “Arc Light” raids against North Vietnamese Army forces helped prevent another Dien Bien Phu at Khe Sanh. United States Defense Department

  Lieutenant Andrew “Mac” McFarlane, platoon leader of 3rd Platoon, Golf Company, who referred to himself as the “oldest second lieutenant” in the Marine Corps. USMC

  Golf Company Gunnery Sergeant William Janzen (center) with Golf Company commander Captain James Sheehan (right) aboard ship on their way to Vietnam. Robert Maras Collection

  Golf Company 2/3 Marines prepare to assault ridge knob below Hill 861. Bob Maras is on the right, as indicated by the arrow. Robert Maras Collection

&nb
sp; This dramatic photo shows Golf Company corpsman Vernon “Magilla Gorilla” Wike treating LCPL William Roldan while under fire. Roldan died shortly after this photo was taken.

  Courtesy of Catherine Leroy

  Tony Leyba (left), Maras’s AG on the machine gun and close buddy, with an unidentified member of Golf Company who had just been wounded. Robert Maras Collection

  Marines of Bravo Company 1/9 carry their dead down from Hill 861 after first contact with NVA that led to “the Hill Fights” at Khe Sanh. USMC

  Marine movement to contact during the Hill Fights. United States Defense Department

  A Marine “medevac” helicopter arrives to evacuate the wounded and dead during the Hill Fights. United States Defense Department

  Bob Maras with M-60 machine gun, “the Pig,” during the Hill Fights at Khe Sanh. Robert Maras Collection

  Bob Maras (left) and R. J. Todd, whose body remains missing in action. Courtesy of Tony Leyba

  Bob Maras (right) and Private Bill Rainey aboard CH-46 helicopter after being picked up after Red Beach. Robert Maras Collection

  BLT 2/3 in force on Red Beach in Vietnam.

  Robert Maras Collection

  Private Bill Rainey in a Vietnamese village after the Red Beach landing prior to BLT 2/3’s sudden withdrawal and insertion into Khe Sanh. Robert Maras Collection

  Bob Maras (left) and Gene Kilgore in the only known photo of Kilgore actually smiling while in uniform. He had a premonition that he would die in combat—which later came true.