They had never been to Vietnam.
In the dusk just before the sun disappeared for the night, hopefully not forever, Tony and I in position with the Pig stared into the gathering gloom, prepared to loose the M-60 on tonight’s probers and no-gooders.
Movement, although slight, attracted my attention. A shifting of shadows about thirty meters out front and outside the perimeter, from a mound of broken earth that remained from a collapsed gook bunker. I nudged Tony with my elbow and nodded at it. He nodded back that he saw it.
While we watched, mesmerized, rubble gave way and an open hand slowly emerged, as though of a ghoul rising from a grave. Definitely a Twilight Zone moment. Everything except the eerie background score.
Spooked, Tony and I fixated on the hand as it seemed to sniff its surroundings, twisting in various directions like a submarine periscope. Instinctively, as though fearing it really could see us, we ducked down so that only our startled eyes showed between the top of our hole and our helmets.
A second hand appeared, mate to the first. My trigger finger found the Pig’s sweet spot, but I held fire. Instead, fascinated, we watched as slowly, very slowly, the hands lengthened into arms, followed by a thatch of black hair and dark, frightened eyes staring directly at me.
“Chieu Hoi?” the head pleaded. Chieu Hoi stood for “open arms,” which was how we were supposed to greet defectors.
“I think he wants to give up,” Tony whispered.
Conflicting thoughts raced through my head: Jaggers’s brain, Lieutenant Sauer after gooks carved him up with the banana knife. . . . Communist fanatics who gave no quarter but now, like with this guy, apparently expected quarter. Tony sensed my mood. He touched my arm. It was quivering with tension.
“Five days R&R,” Tony reminded me softly.
I held fire as the guy cautiously clambered from his den, hands high above his head, still looking directly at me, into my eyes. Creating a jolt of one human being recognizing another.
“Chieu Hoi?”
To our surprise, two more gooks followed the first out of the ground, their hands likewise reaching for the night’s first stars. They must have been buried all this time inside what was left of their bunker. Maybe even watching us through air holes they had scrabbled out, waiting for their comrades to return, overrun the knob, and rescue them. Hunger and thirst must be finally driving them out.
Making up my mind—after all, I couldn’t just murder them, no matter what they might have done—I motioned for them to approach. I kept the Pig ready for action in case this was some kind of evil gook trick.
These were the first live NVA I had encountered up this close. Gray-green uniforms bagged on their slight frames. They were bare-headed, slack-faced from fright, with nervous eyes and trembling lips. What astonished me was the realization that these guys were actual human beings rather than apparitions in the night, evil reincarnate, zombies capable of atrocities so horrible as to defy imagination.
They appeared so weak from malnourishment that their feet shuffled through the red dirt like those of very old men. One appeared injured. He cradled an arm caked in dried blood against his chest. He stumbled and almost fell. His comrades caught him.
“Chieu Hoi? Please?”
“They don’t look like much, do they?” Tony whispered.
What sprung to mind was the thought that they weren’t so very different from us. They were very young. Back somewhere they had mamas and daddies and perhaps wives and children. They worked their rice fields or whatever, trudged home at dusk to eat their meager meals in grass hooches, bedded down with their women, laughed with their children. They probably didn’t want to be out here anymore than we did.
Communism. That was the demon that drove them, lashing them with a promised utopia if they went out and killed capitalists. Not for God, since commies didn’t believe in God, but for Uncle Ho and Karl Marx. Utopia? Right! They continued to live in grass huts and eat fish heads and rice while they waited for a promised paradise that never came.
“I feel sorry for the little bastards,” I admitted when some of the other guys came over to take a look for themselves and Captain Sheehan and Lieutenant Mac took the prisoners off our hands.
“Maras, Leyba. You guys did good.”
“The Colonel promised five days in-country R&R for prisoners,” I noted. “There’s three of them. One is mine, one is Tony’s, and the third belongs to Private First Class Taylor. Now where’s our R&R, sir?”
“You’ll get it,” Captain Sheehan assured us. “But nobody leaves until these hills are secure.”
“Or until we’re all dead,” Taylor responded with sarcastic false cheer.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Pencil Dicks
Echo Company, over on its own little hill across the valley, grew uneasy about its isolated circumstances. During the major NVA attack on its people, gooks had run wild inside the perimeter, killing twenty-six Marines. Although reinforced by Foxtrot, the Marine leadership on the hill was concerned about another enemy buildup and a second attack. Sergeant James Marden was dispatched with a patrol to sweep the northeastern slope of 881N to determine the presence and strength of enemy in the area.
Due to the distinct possibility of enemy contact, Echo’s command issued an unusual order, directing Marden to recon the hill by fire rather than by foot, which might trigger a deadly ambush. Marines almost never used such an incautious tactic. But the sergeant shrugged his objections aside and placed his patrol on line to ascend the slope.
Whenever the patrol approached any unusual feature, such as a clearing with thick undergrowth on the other side, Marden gave the order to fire at will. Rifles crackled and spat flames as the line marched against any suspicious terrain feature.
Shortly after these maneuvers commenced, every single M-16 in the patrol malfunctioned at almost the same time. It could have been a disaster of unprecedented proportion had the NVA known what was going on and had been listening when our radio traffic went ape shit. Guys were justifiably pissed off.
“They send us out here with these pieces of shit when they know they’re junk! Why don’t they just issue us clubs and bows and arrows and get it over with?”
Marden requested machine guns, mortars, and M-79 grenade launchers prep his front to cover his men while they cleared their weapons. It was a jumpy bunch of Marines who continued the patrol, especially when they came upon enemy sign. NVA bunkers and spider holes festooned the vicinity while wooden firing platforms for mortar tubes dotted the reverse side of a nearby ridge. Clearly NVA were still in the area, watching us and preparing for the next confrontation.
Miraculously, Marden and his men made it back safely to Echo’s lines with coordinates of their discoveries. Artillery raked the area to destroy enemy construction.
On Golf’s hill, I patted the stock of my trusty M-60 when news of the mass M-16 jam dribbled out onto the line. “I think I’ll call her Ol’ Faithful from now on,” I decided.
“Her and faithful never go in the same sentence,” Tony said. Buddy Hackett had never been moody like this before the Dear John letter.
That same afternoon, an escort from Colonel Delong brought out a CBS-TV News crew by helicopter to film the war. I wasn’t impressed. Both were pencil dicks, one tall and wasted, the other a shorter version. A jittery duo with their pressed-together lips and nervous eyes that bounced around in their heads like balls in a pinball machine. A Marine dropped a piece of rusted tin he was using to floor the bottom of his hole against standing in the mud. Both “combat correspondents” flung themselves to the ground where they lay shivering and shaking like a pair of Chicken Littles waiting for the sky to fall on them.
Gunny Janzen watched them. “Disgusting,” he scoffed. “Damned disgusting.”
The French journalist Catherine had had more balls than the both of these clowns put together. Maybe CBS-TV ought to send th
eir crews to her in Paris for training.
Officers and NCOs passed among the troops ahead of interviews by the Pencil Dicks. “Don’t say a word to the press about our M-16s, not a word. That’s an order.”
Tony opined the order sounded like a political CYA, Cover-Your-Ass. Maybe from McNamara’s Defense Department, or even the White House. Everyone knew you couldn’t trust politicians. They’d feed Marines to Ho Chi Minh if necessary to cover their own dirty butts.
I overheard the Pencil Dicks debating whether they ought to chance a visit to Echo Company while they were already here out in the field. I could tell both wanted to be back at Khe Sanh before darkness fell. They must have known the NVA didn’t much care for fighting in the sunshine. We had taught them the inherent risk of fucking with Americans when our formidable artillery and aircraft could be marshalled.
“Is it safe?” the Pencil Dicks asked Gunny Janzen.
“Gentlemen, you’re in a war zone. People shoot each other in war zones.”
The Pencil Dicks were nothing like Catherine. They opted to expose some footage of us in our holes and then go back.
“What we should have done,” I said, “is tell them how fucked-up our M-16s are—and then send ’em out on a patrol.”
A warning order came down from those on high who pushed around our colored pins. Companies of BLT-2/3 should prepare to assault 881N upon receipt of further instructions. It was about time. That set off a flurry of activity as men cleaned weapons, gathered ammo, sharpened knives, prepared their rucks, and wrote last letters home. I scribbled a note to Linda to let her know what was happening, but asked her not to worry Mom and Dad with the details. Tony took out a note pad and looked at it for a long time before he folded it again and stuck it back in his pocket. Gunny came around gathering mail to send out on the next chopper.
“Maras?” Tony said. “Whatever happens, promise you won’t leave me out there?”
“Fuckin’ A. We’re buddies. But what’s with you, man? You’re sounding like Kilgore. You having premonitions too? I know you’re not having bad dreams because we’re not getting any sleep.”
“Don’t run it in the ground, Maras. I’m just saying, don’t leave me.”
“You on your period or something?”
“Why shouldn’t I be? I think my leg might be infected. What about your arm?”
I flexed my elbow for him. It still twinged a little from where the shrapnel cut me. Otherwise, good to go.
“Better talk to Magilla,” I advised, “and get some more pills and salve for your leg.”
“That’s not it, Maras. I think I want to go home.”
I nodded in understanding. “We’ll all go home when this is over,” I said. “Twenty years from now, we’ll be like the old World War II vets sitting around the VFW sucking suds and telling each other war stories about the Hill Fights.”
“You know something, Maras? When I get home, I want to get dementia or Alzheimer’s or whatever it’s called and forget all about this shit.”
I admitted he had a point.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
America’s Living Rooms
“We are not, repeat NOT, going to be defeated at Khe Sanh,” General William Westmoreland, overall commander of troops in Vietnam, was soon to declare as the base itself came under siege. “I will tolerate no talking or even thinking to the contrary.”
I was no military strategic expert. Hell, I was just a nineteen-year-old kid fresh out of high school and thrust into events that would impact American society for years to come. But I had a brain and I had a personal stake out here in the hills that almost none of our critics back on the home front could claim. There was one damned big difference between getting shot at and watching your buddies die and marching your fat ass through the streets carrying antiwar signs and spitting on our guys in uniform when we came home. One thing I swore: when I got off that Freedom Bird in the U.S. of A., the first sonofabitch who spat on me or called me a “baby killer” was going to get knuckles in his chops and have trouble spitting on the next GI.
Like most Marines, I took Semper Fidelis to heart. Always faithful to God, country, Mom’s apple pie, and each other. Still, General West-moreland or not, the little house mouse I channeled refused to stay quiet. It appeared to me that events in both Vietnam and the United States were conspiring against the general. And against us.
The way I saw it, four critical factors were arrayed against us, the first one right here in Vietnam.
Marines landed at Da Nang two years and one month ago full of piss and vinegar. We stormed ashore confident of kicking communist butt in a few short months and then going back home to ticker-tape parades and flags waving. Marines secured the Da Nang sector, followed by the first big American drive in August 1965 that crippled a Viet Cong regiment.
Two months later, a US Army division crushed three NVA regiments in the densely jungled Ia Drang Valley near Pleiku and prevented communists from sweeping out of the Central Highlands down to the populated coasts. This action, which cost the North Vietnamese two thousand casualties against American losses of three hundred, demonstrated the effectiveness of using helicopters in mobile warfare. Air Cavalry.
Things started getting bogged down fairly quickly after that. Vietnam was an entirely new kind of war for US troops, posing a challenge unlike any America had faced before. Fighting on their ground always gave the enemy an advantage. They got to call the shots.
There was also the matter of the enemy being communists with the communist disdain for human life. After all, Comrade Stalin deliberately starved to death over ten million of his own Soviet citizens during the Great Famine in the 1930s just to make a point and bring the peasant kulaks to heel. Commies seemed always willing to sacrifice two thousand troops in order to kill three hundred Americans, as at Ia Drang.
Realizing they would surely lose if they fought on American terms, the North Vietnamese chose to create their own conditions. While Americans possessed superior firepower and mobility, the Vietnamese were light and nimble. Fighting them was like a heavyweight boxer in a ring with a quick lightweight who ran circles around the big guy while bleeding him to death with a million cuts. The System Analysis Office at McNamara’s Defense Department revealed how communist forces controlled the pace of action, as well as the size and intensity of combat engagements.
U.S. forces entering a remote area were anything but secretive about it, our insertions advertised by massive helicopter movements and artillery and aircraft prep fires that provided the enemy plenty of time to plan and react. Ready to move at a moment’s notice, the enemy evaluated the situation and decided to fight only if they fancied their chances. Otherwise, as fast and flitting as shadows or ghosts, they split into smaller units to regroup later at a more opportune time.
The VC and NVA, as we discovered in the Hill Fights, initiated more than 90 percent of all firefights. Even when we went looking for the NVA, it was they who invariably found us. Rarely were they ever taken by surprise.
The classic NVA pattern of battle waited until one of our platoons or companies pushed out from its FOB—Forward Operating Base. Somewhere out there in gook land the unit walked into a carefully prepared ambush, as Hotel Company had done in the draw. The first sign of the enemy came from a hail of machine gun, rifle, mortar, and artillery fire.
Captain Sheehan called it “damned frustrating.” So why did we keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different results?
The second factor that lined up against the war and, by extension, against those of us fighting it was the national media in America. Vietnam was becoming the most-reported conflict in the history of warfare. Reporters were already on the beach popping camera flashbulbs and shouting questions when the 9th Marines sloshed ashore at Da Nang. Since then, hundreds of news people from nations around the globe were swarming to this little shit hole of a country, most of them cri
tical of our involvement. Talking TV heads and pundits of every stripe, print or otherwise, were starting to chatter about “winning all the battles but losing the war.”
Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America,” brought TV images of blood, gore, and brutality to America’s living rooms every evening. Mothers recognized sons being slaughtered a world away. People in the United States, from President Johnson on down, seemed obsessed with Khe Sanh and were helping turn it into one of the most headlined and controversial battles of the war, what with every commentator with a mike comparing it to Dien Bien Phu. Letters we received from home—when the mail got through—dripped with anxiety. Are you okay? We’re praying for you. Oh, God! Let it end!
We responded in a general way to ease their worries, like when I replied to Mom and Linda: I’m still alive and fine. I hadn’t told them about my having been wounded.
Nothing beat this kind of mass exposure to turn the stomach and change hearts and minds.
The third factor involved the youth, not only in the United States but also in Europe, and the growing number of antiwar organizations. Out in these bloody hills without TV and Walter Cronkite, we still received news about the home front via mail and newspapers from our families and friends. I suppose people thought we wanted to know what was happening—but hearing about it while we were being shot at only served to increase our angst. It seemed the nation and the world was unraveling around our ears and abandoning us. The dog biscuit care package said everything about what they thought of us.
While the 9th Marines were getting mauled on Hill 861 before BLT 2/3 arrived for the fight, a group of US Quakers sailed a yacht into Haiphong Harbor loaded with thousands of dollars’ worth of medical aid for North Vietnam. Marines of Echo Company on their hill below 881N were fighting for their lives at the same time British philosopher Bertrand Russell conducted a mock war crimes tribunal in Stockholm to condemn the United States for atrocities its troops were allegedly committing in Vietnam. In New York and San Francisco, antiwar protests drew as many as two hundred thousand marchers.
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