Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  “I’m hit!”

  Ever-faithful Tony skidded to the rescue, plopping down next to me. He quickly made his assessment. “Calm down, Maras. Look at me. You’re not hit. It’s your chicken noodle soup again.”

  “What?” That really pissed me off. “The sonsofbitches shot my chicken noodles? This is the second time the bastards did this. May they all rot in Hell.”

  Further up the incline we encountered actual human beings wearing pith helmets and tennis shoes. Tony and I dived for cover in a washout when a group of them opened fire on us from a short distance ahead and to one side. The firing stopped as soon as we were out of their sight.

  They were still out there though, playing the old wait-for-the-squirrel trick. A squirrel when surprised dived into his hole. Wait a few minutes quietly, however, and, curious, he stuck his head out to take a look. That was when you bagged him.

  We were hiding there trying to figure out how to handle the obstacle and warn other Marines in the area when a Mule armed with a 106mm recoilless rifle came charging up our washout where it extended in a downhill drainage. A “Mule” was like a flat-bedded go-cart with a cannon attached.

  The operator driving the four-wheeler slid to a halt in the ditch, slinging mud, dirt, and leaves. He grinned with jaunty excitement as he flung himself onto the ground and crawled up to the berm-like lip of the washout where Tony and I sought cover. All he needed was a scarf around his neck to become the land-borne equivalent of the Red Baron, the famous WWII air ace. His little craft sat idling contentedly.

  “Where are they?” he demanded.

  I pointed in a direction. “About six of them, I think.”

  He pulled himself up to get a look. The NVA were well-disciplined soldiers who opened up only when they had clear targets. I pointed to a clump of bushes and trees, careful not to show myself and become the squirrel. Leaves shuddered as an enemy infantryman apparently peeped out at us peeping out at him.

  “I see ’em,” the Mule jockey announced triumphantly. He seemed to be calculating range and direction before he slipped back down to his carriage. “Keep down,” he cautioned. “There’s gonna be blood and shit in the air.”

  He made adjustments on his recoilless. He looked up toward Tony and me and gave thumbs up. The guy was one cool dude.

  He gunned the buggy out of the low onto higher ground for a quick shot. He knew what he was doing and was good at it. The gooks weren’t expecting this. He beat them to the draw. The cannon burped, its first shell followed almost immediately by a second. The powerful 106 rounds detonated spot on-target in the midst of the enemy, culminating their sorry lives in an iridescent vapor that slung chunks of flesh, cloth, leather, and weapons all over the landscape. A pith helmet leaped twenty feet into the air. A bloody tennis shoe ended up stuck on a high tree limb.

  We waited another minute or two. When nothing moved in the trees, no sound, we assumed the standoff had ended successfully for our side.

  “You call, we haul,” the Mule driver remarked cheerfully as he raced on down the skirmish line like the Lone Ranger.

  “He could have at least left us a silver bullet,” Tony grumbled.

  The advance continued. More NVA engaged Tony and me up the incline where they had gone to ground next to an isolated forest giant that stood twenty feet tall with a trunk about three feet in diameter. Fortunately, Tony and I were moving fast, ducking and dodging, so that when the gooks opened up their aim was off. All they got were leaves and twigs that rained down on our helmets.

  We fared more accurately with our return fire. My machine gun scored two of them who in their eagerness to bring us down had left the protection of the tree and jumped into the open. Tony’s M-16 engulfed a third. So far his Mattie Mattel was working perfectly. I finished off the trio in case they weren’t already dead. Tracers singed into their bodies and jerked them around like puppets controlled by a spastic hand. Hot tracers oozed tendrils of smoke from the holes they punched into flesh.

  The confrontation turned into a standoff. The remaining two gooks proved smarter, or at least more cunning. They kept low behind the tree, popping up like gophers to rip off at us. Tony and I behind some rocks dueled back. Where was the Lone Ranger when you needed him?

  I looked around for other Marines nearby that might offer a hand in eliminating the threat. Sounded like they were all busy with their own problems. Continuous gunfire raged from either side as well as forward and behind. Seemed to me like our skirmish line had disintegrated into a clusterfuck. FUBAR—Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Squads and groups and even individual Marines fought it out with counterparts all over our sector of the slope, while further away and around the hill more gunfire marked Echo’s and Foxtrot’s progress.

  In this kind of environment, you dealt with any challenge yourself. I nudged Tony and pointed to a huge tree limb left broken and barely hanging eight or ten feet above our two opponents. Probably the result of a previous shelling of the area. The limb itself was about the size of a normal tree and likely weighed several hundred pounds. It was a long shot, but if I could dump it on these two guys, it would be like dropping a load of concrete blocks on a pair of rats. I explained to Tony what I intended.

  “Go for it,” he encouraged, eager to see what happened.

  AK-47s rattled on full auto, the spray of bullets zapping the air above our heads. I waited until the gooks ducked back behind their tree where they were directly underneath the broken limb. I remained low to the ground out of their sight and let loose a long Pig burst at the strip of bark and wood that held the limb attached to the tree.

  “Timber-r-r-r!” Tony cheered as the heavy limb crashed down on the two enemy infantry, eliciting from them amped-up banshee screams.

  I sprayed the trapped gooks as we ran past, putting them out of their misery. I paused in astonishment. I had witnessed demonstrations in which 7.62 bullets from an M-60 machine gun ripped hog carcasses to shreds. I finally understood why our machine guns—even the heavy 50-cals—weren’t tearing NVA soldiers apart when we unleashed on them. They wrapped their arms and legs with wire to hold flesh and bone together so they could continue to fight should they only be wounded and not killed. You had to respect these guys. They were hard core.

  “Damn!” Tony exclaimed respectfully.

  What a gory mess. I looked at my hands. They were trembling. It was not a good thing to stop and actually look at what you had accomplished in battle.

  “Anyhow,” Tony said as we turned away, “I’ll bet we’re the only Marines ever wasted gooks by dropping a tree on them.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Dig In, Marines

  What began as a full-fledged assault against a determined enemy gradually slacked off, breaking out again only in isolated pockets of resistance. It appeared the NVA could be withdrawing their delaying forces down here below and reintegrating them into their main force up on the hill.

  From the sounds of it, Echo and Foxtrot were experiencing a similar lull in fighting. Only a spattering of small arms continued from their sector, diminishing into stray rifle shots, perhaps from jittery Marines popping at shadows or breeze-riffled leaves.

  Still, no one thought the fight was finished.

  Captain Sheehan utilized the breather to consult with Colonel Pappy at Khe Sanh and reconsolidate his companies for the final push. Our casualties appeared relatively light—relative in the sense that your chances of getting struck by lightning were remote, unless you were the one who took a bolt down your skivvies. At which point it became irrelevant how many casualties accompanied you in the body bags.

  Captain Sheehan came to me and pointed to the top of the hill, which was concealed from view by what remained of forest after the beating it had taken from artillery, mortars, and air raids. He wanted to pop smoke on the summit as a guide to the objective.

  “Maras,” he asked, “you think you can put a W
illie Pete on it?”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper.”

  A WP (white phosphorus) burned brightly upon exploding and emitted a thick plume of smoke.

  I broke out the 3.5 rocket launcher I had humped since morning, assembled the two sections, and loaded a round from Tony’s pack board. I was about to fire it up when one of the platoon sergeants stopped me.

  He was one of the kiss-ass sort. Troops mocked him behind his back for always trying to make points with the brass. Troops called him “Georgie Porgy.” He was the type who, in high school, was the nerd in the front row who washed the teacher’s blackboard and whose hand always grabbed for attention. “Me, me, teacher! Choose me!” Even in combat, he kept his hand in the air and his lips puckered.

  He snatched the launcher from my hands with a smirk that seemed to say “don’t send a private to do a sergeant’s job.”

  Captain Sheehan shrugged.

  Georgie made a production of prolonging the moment for whatever limited attention it attracted. He took careful aim and let fly. Tony rolled his eyes and pressed out a Buddy Hackett expression.

  The rocket whooshed and trailed flame as it looped high above treetops and dived back down toward the point of 881N. The Captain’s command element waited expectantly for the round to impact and send up its tell-tale plume of smoke. I couldn’t resist calling it first.

  “Dead miss.”

  The sergeant glowered.

  “Give it back to Maras,” Captain Sheehan instructed.

  My round hit the target square. Smoke snaked into the air.

  “That’s how you do it, Sergeant,” Tony taunted.

  Judging from Georgie Porgy’s scowl, I suspected he looked forward to Tony’s and my being the next casualties.

  Curiously enough, gooks on top made no effort to extinguish the Willie Pete, even though they had to know we were using it as a guide.

  The hill grew steeper, more treacherous. Marines on line labored sweating and tense to make the final climb. All resistance seemed to have melted away. I couldn’t help thinking this was just too damned easy.

  How many Marines had died and NVA been slain in our savage dispute over the Wicked Twin Sisters? It made no sense that the North Vietnamese would give up so easily at the end. I still felt gooks, smelled them, knew they were up there waiting for us to trip their kill zone.

  Foot by foot, yard by yard, the advance continued until Golf’s skirmish line linked up with Echo’s and Foxtrot’s toward the peak. Tension continued to mount. Marines scrambled through tangled brush and over downed trees on our final few hundred meters either to the finish line—or to more chaos and destruction.

  Why weren’t the gooks mortaring us? Why no ambushes or snipers? I began to think, or hope, this might end as the taking of 881S had ended: with the enemy having abandoned it.

  As a machine gun team, Tony and I were among the lead elements of Lieutenant Mac’s Third Herd to venture cautiously out of the bush onto the hill’s denuded crown. Platoon members hesitated and looked about, puzzled, not yet willing to accept that this might be over, that we had pulled ourselves to the top of the hill and it belonged to us at last without further resistance. There was no spiking the ball at the goal line, no little dance of triumph and “Team! Team!” No real sense of victory. It was all so anticlimactic. The gooks had simply pulled out. It was not a Mt. Suribachi moment.

  Relative peace seemed a threatening stranger after so many days without it. Standing there suddenly in the open, crouched and my finger on the trigger, all I heard were the burr of insects and the calls of distant birds. As elsewhere, death and scorched human flesh hovered over the hilltop like a noxious cloud. Big green shit flies swarmed seeking lunch and biting the hell out of our exposed faces and hands.

  Artillery and aerial assaults had obviously taken a terrible toll on the NVA. One-thousand-pound bombs had pummeled the crown into a dump site of splintered trees, destroyed defensive positions, craters, pulverized earth and rock, out of which threaded wisps of smoke and crackling tongues of flame. Shreds of clothing and bits and pieces of flesh were strewn about a wasteland that resembled a scene from some apocalyptic end-of-the-world flick.

  Commanders quickly began organizing the companies into a defense. Tony and I were digging ourselves a gun position out of an NVA caved-in fighting hole when Tony uncovered a severed hand buried in the rubble. He picked it up and handed it to me for a look-see. Young men immersed in death and violence soon became conditioned to it. Tony reformed the stiffened hand into a one-finger salute and hailed Gene Kilgore, who labored nearby on his own position.

  “Hey, Kilgore!” Tony thrust the hand aloft. “Gooks sent you a message.”

  Kilgore shook his head in pretended disgust. “You are some sick assholes, you know that?”

  He had defied his nightmare premonitions once again and made it unscathed through another day with his Starlight scope.

  As we decompressed, we began to take stock. While Tony, Kilgore, and most of us survived, we had suffered losses. Some were friends, some were not. All were brothers.

  The most unusual losses involved Jim Hill’s Bowie knife. The kid to whom Magilla handed the blade after Hill bought the farm had himself gone down. The knife passed to the next man, who subsequently fell. After that, Magilla or one of the others threw the knife into the bush, figuring it to be a bad omen.

  Robert J. Todd out of Foxtrot Company was another freakish incident. Tony and I didn’t see exactly what happened, but a sergeant eyewitness told us about it a few days after we conquered 881N.

  Medevac choppers jinked in to evacuate our dead and wounded. Todd had taken a fatal bullet during the assault. His poncho-wrapped body was brought up and loaded aboard a hovering Huey. Although the NVA might have fled the hill, they were still in the area and full of venom. Apparently, they were moving back in to surround us. Shelling medevac birds was their way of letting us know the struggle wasn’t over yet.

  Mortar shells rained down fire and smoke on the Huey. Crewmembers piled in on top of the casualties, the pilot pulled collective, and the bird bounced into the air in a steep yaw with its blades clawing for altitude. It gained air as it soared in a steep bank out over the valley. Witnesses on the ground watched in disbelief when an object tumbled out the aircraft’s open door.

  “Somebody fell out!”

  During the Huey’s emergency getaway, crew had not had time to secure bodies on the helicopter’s blood-slippery deck. Todd’s body slid out the open door and plummeted to earth, crashing into thick canopy somewhere north of the Twin Witches. Every patrol from then on was instructed to be on the lookout for it. His body was never recovered.

  After that and the renewed mortaring, frantic activity on 881N prepared for possible counterattacks. The NVA might have retreated, but they weren’t beaten. They would want their hills back. Whether or not they could re-take them had to be seen. But most certainly they would try.

  Captain Sheehan had earlier passed on to Tony, Kilgore, and me what the three prisoners Tony and I took from the ground revealed. Under interrogation, they said they were soldiers attached to the 325th NVA Division. They had traveled south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in March in a vanguard of infantry massing against the Khe Sanh Combat Base. Uncle Ho was as determined as LBJ not to lose the fight. The POWs stated that many more communist troops were on their way—and, boy, were they pissed off.

  Gunny Janzen looked worn out with his cheeks stuck to his teeth and his eyes like hollows in his skull.

  “Well,” he said after a deep breath, “we’ve taken the three hills. The question now is whether we can keep them. This fight’s not over. Dig in, Marines, and stay alert if you want to live.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Knock That Shit Off!

  I shook my canteen, hearing only a weak slosh of water. There was little chance of replenishing it until tomorrow when a resupply ch
opper might make it in. Nonetheless, I removed the crevette I used as a sweat rag around my neck, wet one corner, and with it reamed out my nostrils in an attempt to scrub out the sickening odor of death. I thought I might never rid myself of it.

  Each guy had his own way of coping with war. In between events, some behaved like zombies, staring off into space to blank from their minds scenes of gore and brutality they may have witnessed, not wanting to recall dead and maimed friends and perhaps the extent to which their own humanity may have been tested and found wanting.

  Others went dark, confronting violence and brutality with that barbarism I suspected may lurk in the hidden corners of the human soul waiting to be unleashed. One Marine notched off a dead gook’s ear and stuck it in his pocket as a souvenir. One day he would be hanging around the pool hall showing off the dried and shriveled piece of flesh: “Yep, cut it off a dead gook myself.” Another with a little Kodak camera had his buddy take a picture of him pissing on an enemy corpse.

  Maybe they were just trying to prove they were tough, hiding their own fears and uncertainties. Maybe. I was no psychologist, just an amateur observer of human nature—and witnessing it at its worst. And, sometimes, to be fair, at its best.

  The majority of us learned to compartmentalize for the sake of sanity. Doing what had to be done, which meant killing or mauling with bullets, clubs, knives, grenades, bare knuckles, teeth, or nails—whatever. As long as the gook was the one who ended up dead. Afterwards, we had to shut off that dark chamber and move to the light where we might still have a chance at “normality.” It was in this recompression chamber that Tony’s Buddy Hackett reemerged with “Good morning, Vietnam!” Or Wally Jacubowski demonstrated with his spastic chicken dance an enemy soldier getting chewed on by machine gun bullets.

  Many of us, after all, were still teenagers barely out of high school and, in spite of Marine Corps training, largely unprepared for a real world that included war. Not so long ago we were attending house parties, camping out on the beach, teasing and pulling pranks on each other, going on dates. None of us wanted to lose that part of ourselves. We desperately attempted to hold onto it in spite of the grimness of the environment into which we had been thrust. In the process, we were discovering our capability for consuming both brotherhood and intense brutishness.