Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  Tony carried a nostalgic expression on his face while he watched the sun edge down in the west. We were taking a short break from renovating our new “penthouse suite with a view.”

  “Guess what I’m thinking about,” he piped up.

  “Pussy?”

  “Piss on her.” He flipped me the middle-finger bird.

  “I’m thinking about ice cream,” he went on. “Me and my buds hanging out in air conditioning at the malt shop whistling at girls as they go by and having a banana split with cherries and pecans on top. What do you miss about home, Maras?”

  I thought about it. “Linda,” I said. “I miss Linda, Mom, my old friends. I miss the lake on lazy Sunday afternoons. You know, Tony, sometimes I miss being just a kid again.”

  We lapsed into that lonely silence of reminiscence.

  “I wonder if it’s true what they say,” I mused finally. “That you can never go home again.”

  “This is getting too deep, Maras. Who do you think you are? Plato or something?”

  I shrugged and dismissed the sudden uncomfortable image of Linda having a good time with some draft dodger. I mean, it happened to guys over here. Look at Tony’s Peggy as an example.

  Not Linda though. She was probably at home getting ready to go to bed at Mom’s, completely clueless as to what was going on over here. So there I was on the other side of the globe, barely surviving, while people in America were sleeping in real beds, not being shot at, and getting up to go to work at their nine-to-five jobs, oblivious to people dying in a war in a part of the world nobody wanted.

  Shit happens.

  Captain Sheehan was good about keeping the troops informed, at least commensurate to what we had to know at our pay grade. Leaders like him, Lieutenant McFarlane, and most of the others were why Marines were considered the bad asses of the US military. Wind us up, point us in a direction, and somebody was going to get a butt kicking. He passed down the word through our junior leaders that Colonel Delong and the command element at Khe Sanh believed the enemy would not so easily relinquish the area and that we should be prepared to defend.

  “He also says to tell every Marine he did a good job today. He’s proud of us.”

  Pappy was proud of us! We all walked a little taller with our chests stuck out.

  By sunset, 2/3 Battalion was well-mounted on the crest of 881N and set up for the night. Troops exhausted from the day’s fighting sought sleep on a 50-50 alert basis. Tony volunteered to stand first watch at nightfall while I took my poncho and racked out on the ground nearby in a cool breeze. I closed my eyes and immediately sank into a deep fatigued sleep.

  I should have known the gooks wouldn’t leave us alone.

  “Incoming!”

  A hell of a way to be jolted awake. I lunged for the hole and dived headfirst in on top of Tony.

  OP/LPs concealed down in the timberline to keep watch thought the mortar barrage signaled a pending ground attack. They raced up the hill shouting at the tops of their lungs so Marines in the perimeter wouldn’t shoot them by mistake.

  “LPs! LPs! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! We’re coming through!”

  Red-flashing mortar shells stomped the hilltop hard, contributing to the wreckage and overall denuding and ploughing up of the real estate. Sectors manned by Echo and Foxtrot on the south side of the crest took the brunt of the pounding. Gunnery sergeants counted ninety-two mortar rounds dropping from the sky in the span of several minutes.

  Convinced we were under attack, Marines opened fire downhill into the darkness, adding to the noise and confusion. Shooting back served to relieve tension, even when targets were indistinguishable from the night. I burned through a belt of 7.62, streaming cones of red tracers downrange while Tony’s M-16 malfunctioned. He crouched at the bottom of the hole and frantically worked with his K-bar knife to extract a fractured hull from the weapon’s chamber.

  I offered him my .45 pistol. “Take it. But first feed the Pig!”

  While Tony pulled a fresh belt of ammo from its can, I peered downhill and noticed to my astonishment that we were receiving no return fire. No enemy muzzle flashes winking like angry fireflies in the dark. No bugles blaring or banshees screaming.

  “Tony! Tony, there’s nobody out there.”

  “Huh?”

  I couldn’t believe it myself.

  We peeped out of our hole like a pair of perverts hid out in a ladies’ room. It soon became apparent to everyone that we weren’t facing a ground assault, although mortar rounds continued to thud the top of the hill, coming in so fast on top of Echo and Foxtrot that even the gutsy corpsmen dared not leave their hiding places to answer cries for help.

  Officers and sergeants began shouting, “Hold your fire! Cease fire, damn it! There’s nobody out there!”

  Somebody was out there somewhere. God wasn’t the one slinging lightning bolts at us for our sins.

  Incoming gradually subsided and then ceased altogether, replaced by the even more nerve-shattering wailing and screaming of the wounded south of us on the hill. Foxtrot lost one KIA and a half-dozen wounded, several of whom weren’t going to make it without immediate care back at Charlie Med. Corpsmen patched them up and moved them back to an evac area to wait for choppers to come in for a perilous night extraction.

  Battered Marines emerged from our defensive posture and glared challenges deep into the dark—but nothing moved out there. Nonetheless, none of us found any rest for the remainder of the night. We kept expecting an attack. We hunkered wide-eyed and waited. Some of us prayed. Some of us simply stared.

  Tony broke a long quiet spell after a Sea Knight dropped in, loaded up the wounded and the dead man, and took off again without a single shot having sought it out. Really weird. He watched the shadow of the big helicopter against the stars as it climbed out and poured on the coal back toward Khe Sanh.

  “Maras?”

  “Leyba.”

  “You know I love you like a brother, right?”

  “You ain’t gonna get all mushy?”

  “We’ve saved each other’s ass at least a dozen times since this shit started—but I want you to take this with all due respect: I’m hoping that if one of these rounds hits this hole it gets you and not me.”

  That triggered a relief valve. We sniggered and snorted at the bottom of our black hole like a pair of lunatics escaped from an insane asylum. Which seemed appropriate enough. After all, these hills were in fact a kind of loony bin populated by the mad and deranged.

  A familiar voice boomed out of the darkness. “Knock that shit off!”

  Chapter Thirty–Four

  Purple Haze

  Tony rubbed his eyes. We climbed from our cramped den for our morning ablutions and a “Good morning, Vietnam!” salute. Other than the mortar attack that killed one of Foxtrot’s men, our first night in possession of 881N passed without our having been otherwise hit. Another long and terrible night and we survived. At least most of us had.

  Mankind, I pondered, had been terrified of the night since people first huddled in caves surrounded by bears, saber-toothed tigers, and other fearsome creatures. Since then, man himself had assumed the mantle of the most dangerous being on earth. You had more reason to be afraid of man lurking in the darkness than of beasts or demons.

  Accepted scripture dictated that the NVA rarely launched full-scale ground attacks in the light of day. They, like thieves and assassins, preferred to work in the shadows. When necessary, they defended, ambushed, patrolled, snuck around, employed mortars and artillery in daylight, but for their major efforts they preferred a dark, cloudy night when, Zen-like, they became one with the universe.

  Enemy soldiers started to come out in the quiet that followed the setting of the Vietnam sun. We heard them rustling about in the jungle outside our perimeter. Cloud cover over the stars and the absence of a moon assisted them in sneaking to within a co
uple of hundred meters of our lines, close enough that we could have had conversation with them. Jittery OP/LPs opened fire at sounds until Captain Sheehan ordered them back inside battalion defenses. Leaving them out there amidst blatant enemy activity amounted to signing their death warrants.

  From the dark came the high-pitched tones of their voices, along with strange noises that sounded like a cross between the cackling of geese and the quacking of ducks. They seemed to be chatting and laughing nonchalantly, as though sharing a secret they intended to spring on us in the very near future as a dirty trick. Gunny Janzen said it was all part of a plan to psyche us out. If it was, it was working.

  Marines taunted back in a vicious exchange of insults.

  “You filthy scum!”

  “You die, Marines!”

  “Come on in, motherfuckers. Have we got something for you!”

  “Marines, dinky-dow mamas!”

  “Fire up their asses!”

  “Damnit!” sergeants chimed in. “Knock that shit off.”

  “They started it, sergeant.”

  We held fire and took the verbal assault, waiting for orders or for an actual attack. We had become hardened and disciplined troops in the days after Red Beach. Since that first day when as a cherry I scrawled my inspiration on the cardboard C-ration box top at the airfield, I had come to realize I possessed no special insight, none, into what it meant to fight for life. The words must have been a whim, a fresh flight of fancy. Or perhaps, once in a while, some of us caught an omniscient glimpse into an alternate reality or truth.

  There had been days and nights since we entered these hills that I expected never to see another morning. It wasn’t only Kilgore and me either. The Marine collective mood had seemed to sour as our casualties mounted. Outfits left behind to guard Khe Sanh, the 1/26th or whatever, must have been continually stunned as bodies of Marines accumulated each day at the airfield, laid out neatly in body bags waiting for their last flight home.

  You had to hand it to the enemy for having guts and for being as tenacious as ticks, leeches, or mosquitoes. But what, I wondered, did Uncle Ho hope to achieve now by hanging around in these hills? It should be clear to him by this time that he couldn’t drive Americans out of I-Corps, the DMZ region, or Khe Sanh. He had missed his chance to create another Dien Bien Phu. If anything, we had reversed Dien Bien Phu on him.

  Puff the Magic Dragon appeared overhead to drop flares and light up the terrain around the hill in eerie, flickering, greenish light. Fiery breath from the Dragon’s mini-guns blistered the cockroaches and sent them scattering.

  All right! Fuck you bastards!

  The psyops boys in their invisible Huey arrived next to drop Chieu Hoi leaflets. Their loudspeakers blared from out of the night sky. Jimi Hendrix.

  Oooo . . .

  Help me . . .

  Ahh, yea-yeah, purple haze.

  Oh, no, oh

  Oh, help me.

  Tell me, tell me, purple haze.

  I can’t go on like this. . . .

  Daylight came after the terrible nights. I watched a beautiful sun turn from pale pink to orange—beautiful because I was alive to see it. Funny, I thought, how the sun just kept rising and setting around the globe, unaffected by what we little ant-like creatures did to each other below. In a world away from these hills people were going about their normal affairs—having sit-down breakfast or lunch or dinner at a table, making love in bed, playing pick-up basketball at the park, indulging in quarrels, having family gatherings, working through a crisis, making plans for vacation or a weekend fishing trip, getting married, dying in bed of old age, giving birth, going to school, attending PTA meetings. . . .

  How they took it all for granted while out here, in these bloody hills, men died and were being maimed, events that allowed you to take nothing for granted. Especially not life and the privilege of viewing another sunrise.

  I took pride in preparing breakfast under less than ideal conditions. I arranged a small circle of stones on the ground near enough to our hole that I could tend it. In its center I ignited a heat tab and placed my canteen cup on the stones above the tiny blue flame. Tony contributed some of his last water to mine and I boiled water for coffee. We pooled our rations: I had one C-rat broadly defined as ham and eggs and one of fruit cocktail; Tony had a can of white cake and a John Wayne chocolate bar.

  Tony lent his endorsement to my efforts. “Not bad. My compliments to the chef.”

  “Chef says you can wash dishes.”

  “You’re getting fucking weird, you know that, Maras?”

  “I thought you promised God to stop swearing.”

  “It takes time.”

  Little exchanges of domesticity, much of it obscene and bordering on the absurd, helped in escaping the stress of combat, made us feel almost “normal” under decidedly un-normal circumstances. It was this ability to find and hang onto an anchor that was part of a warrior breed’s gestalt.

  The reality of war often cut discussions short, whether philosophical or not. The distinct Kerplunk! Kerplunk! of enemy mortar rounds leaving tubes compelled us to duck and cover.

  Incoming!

  “Not again!” Tony raged.

  About two dozen mortar rounds walked across the hill, then stopped, leaving smoke hazing the air and swirling around our necks. I listened for any cries of distress that might indicate wounded Marines, hearing nothing except the quiet that followed and the hollow-like vibrations of bruised eardrums. The dead never cried out, but I decided if any of us had been killed in one of the other companies, I didn’t want to hear about it. Just shut it out for the moment. If Golf Company was okay, I was okay. The death of any Marine was personal, but it was especially personal if the dead guy was one of our own.

  I thought of Kilgore and his premonitions. I called out to him in the aftermath. He and Rainey and a couple of other guys manned a machine gun post nearby.

  “What do you want, Maras?”

  “Just checking to see if you’re all right.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “You didn’t notice? They were shelling us.”

  His dreams had him dying in an ambush, not from mortar fire.

  Another voice broke in from down the perimeter. “Kilgore, still got your Starlite?”

  Ribbing him about his duty to destroy the scope were we overrun had become a company pastime.

  “Fuck you very much, pig breath,” he retorted.

  Kilgore never so much as sounded like he was smiling as long as he was on duty and in uniform. I had snapshotted the only known photo of him actually wearing a grin, although he claimed it wasn’t so. He said he had gas.

  We barely had time to catch our breath before a lookout on the northwestern sector of the hill sounded an urgent warning: “The gooks are charging up the hill!”

  What? Didn’t these cocksuckers know it was broad daylight? Did they not read their own tactical manuals?

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Kilgore’s Starlite

  Commie bugles initiated the rare daylight mass attack. High, strident notes that chilled spines, loosened bowels, and made some men doubt their courage. One night on Okinawa while Golf’s new replacement trainees were gathered in the barracks scuttlebutting, somebody got Sergeant Crawford talking about Korea and how it had been when the Chicoms massed and charged with bugles tooting. We Newbies gathered around enthralled and curious. We didn’t know enough at the time to be afraid. But what I saw on the vet’s face, how his eyes narrowed and turned grim, how his jaw set, and sweat formed on his upper lip. . . .

  “If there is a Hell,” he said, “that’s how it will be—demons and devils, the scourge of the underworld charging bellowing and tooting carrying red hot pitchforks with flames shooting from them. Boys, that’s Hell on earth.”

  Echo Company on its hill knob had repelled a mass NV
A attack that night previously while Golf across the lowlands that separated our two companies watched and listened with our mouths dry and hands shaking. Now—in broad daylight, no less—the rest of us were experiencing the bugle. I wasn’t sure if it might not be better in the night not seeing the human infantry waves bursting from tree lines all around 881N and scrambling up the denuded slopes at us, firing their Kalashnikovs and light machine guns in throbbing claps of thunder, smoke, and fire that awoke the tormented gods of war. The Devil, that crazy sonofabitch, must have been clapping his hands in glee, whipping his barbed tail back and forth, and egging his advocates to scream and roar in his tribute. These guys seemed dead set on annihilating every last Marine on the hill—and there was enough of them to do it too. We were outnumbered at least four to one.

  Colonel Pappy was right. These guys wanted their hill back. An image of Lieutenant Sauer’s mutilated corpse flashed across the front of my mind.

  King of the Mountain. Played with deadly overtones. I felt and heard the pressure and snap of lead and steel in a lethal hailstorm that buffeted the hill, geysering dirt, ricochets shrieking into the morning sky. Enemy soldiers howling like banshees loomed larger and larger as they closed in on us, firing from the hip and chugging grenades.

  There was no time for fear, for rational thought even. A Marine reacted according to training. I laid on the trigger of my M-60. Piggy, don’t fail me now! Sweeping my fire back and forth across the rushing masses in their pith helmets and tennis shoes. I wanted my bullets to explode the little bastards into mist and separate body components and leave nothing except unrecognizable chunks of human flesh. I couldn’t help noting, even during the heat of chaos, that those I and others hit remained largely intact because of wire wrapped around their extremities. Blood, however, couldn’t be wrapped. It misted and turned the air pink as bodies stacked up. Jaggers and Sauer and all the other Marines hammered by these devils deserved avenging.