Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  Newbies were on the low end of receiving information, the last ones to know what was going on. That kept us focused on training without distractions. The USMC goal was to get us through it and put us aboard ships for the ’Nam. They were exciting times, those few weeks ago before the reality of war set in. Every swinging dick in the By-God Crotch was 0300-designated infantry. From the lowest slick sleeve right up to the commandant. That meant everybody was, first, a warrior, not a manager. We were proud of that. The Crotch always led the way.

  Every single day we had jungle patrols, camouflage and concealment, hand and arm signals, call for artillery, react to ambushes, setting up ambushes, offensive and defensive operations, rope training, first aid, exiting helicopters. . . . Instructors wrung us out from dawn to dusk in jungle and hills like those in Vietnam. Even a “combat village” had been erected to add verisimilitude to training. Local Okinawans, who were Asians of similar stock to Vietnamese, populated the village so we would know what to look for and how to react during “search and destroy” missions once we were in-country.

  One day, to teach us a lesson, the village turned against us. It was full of “Viet Cong,” as the home-grown commies were called in South Vietnam. They ambushed our patrol and wiped us all out. Sergeant Baker, our principle instructor, was really pissed off at our carelessness. He ran amok jabbing each of us with his stick and chanting with each jab, “You’re dead!”

  “You’re dead!”

  “You’re dead!”

  “Damnit, you’re all dead!”

  Not many kind words escaped the stone lips of Sergeant Baker, more commonly referred to as “Sergeant Hard.” Like Big Ed, he was a tough Korean War vet. Been there, done that.

  “You pussy-faced cockroaches,” he roared. “What, you wanna get your asses shot off, girls? This ain’t no prep school. If you pukes wanna live, you do what I tell you, when I tell you. Now get down, get down and give me pushups.”

  “How many, Sergeant Hard?”

  “Do ’em until I get tired.”

  Tony and I got volunteered to help him string a rope training bridge across a little creek. Damn! What rotten luck. Tony said he was as jittery about it as a dog shitting razor blades. I couldn’t top that description, but I knew what he meant.

  To our astonishment, once there were just the three of us, we discovered Sergeant Hard was human after all, with a sense of humor. He had two sides to his personality—the professional Sergeant Hard and the secret Everyman who surfaced for special occasions when he let down a bit.

  We were laughing and joking and Tony was channeling his Buddy Hackett when our troops showed up to train on the bridge. It was like Everyman slipped into Superman’s phone booth and came out Sergeant Hard.

  “You bunch of pussies! You mama’s boys are gonna come home in body bags.”

  Camp Schwab wasn’t a boot camp. We had free days now and then to soak up some rays on the beach or sip suds at the bars in Honoko where the bar maids weren’t too particular at carding us and the Shore Patrol left us alone, seeing as how we were bound for Vietnam, as long as we didn’t break things, start fights, and fuck with the locals.

  One Sunday, Tony and I dived for octopi off the coast to sell to natives for beer money. We got badly sunburned, a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. A Marine’s body was property of the United States; you did not abuse US property.

  That was one of the first times Magilla Gorilla, the Navy corpsman, saved our asses. He had to pour water on our t-shirts to get them off without taking hide and all.

  “I’ll fix you up,” he said. “Don’t say anything to anybody about it.”

  Through all the fun, however, ran a threat. While the survivors of the ambush that all but decimated 2/3 participated in the up-training to integrate Cherries into the battalion, it was like they went through the motions without actually being there. They had seen their buddies mangled and dead, and now they would be returning to Vietnam with fresh meat. You looked into their faces, into their hardened eyes, and you realized all the training we endured had a real-life, practical application that could well mean life or death.

  Now, in the Hill Fights, I had already experienced too much of death. Marines, some of them friends, so full of life before, suddenly empty and gray. I kept thinking: That could be me. That could be Tony.

  Tony and I were best buds, closer than brothers, together since the first day of boot camp. We looked out for each other. What happened if Tony bought the farm? If so, why him and not me? I thought if he got it, maybe I should get it too. Maybe get it in his place. That was fair.

  What about our other friends lost in these hills? How fair was that? Jaggers, Robert J. Todd, Hill with his bad luck Bowie knife, Boda, Carter, Schmitz, Corpsman Heath . . . all dead.

  All dead, and many others as well.

  Tony and me. We had to make it back to The World, to the Land of the Big PX, more so for our families than for ourselves. Sometimes, I imagined Linda and Mom, my Dad and my brother and sister all weeping together around a flag-draped coffin.

  Crouched in my hole I smelled the thick nauseating air filled with the stench of decaying human flesh. I tasted sweat on my upper lip. Felt it dribbling from my arm pits. My elbow ached from the shrapnel wound. I heard a spatter of rifle fire down in the valley between 881N and 881S. I looked up and saw my friend the green parrot sail overhead. Higher up, white frigate birds glided south. Tony passed gas. Loudly. I sniggered.

  I wondered if in another two hundred years from now, future Marines might not be dug in among these same hills fighting for their lives. Mankind seemed to keep repeating the same mistakes century after century.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Sleep Like the Dead

  Pappy Delong disabused us of the notion—call it the hope—that the fight was over once we conquered the hills. We held them, but the NVA were a long way from gone. Our next task, we were informed, was to disinfect the valleys and draws of the perverted little bastards and chase them back into Laos and North Vietnam where they belonged. Pappy wanted to keep them off-balance to prevent their regrouping against our hills.

  He briefed the battalion’s company commanders on his strategy. They were required to send out daily patrols by platoon to maintain a constant presence. S-3 Ops would provide each company its patrol responsibilities, daily routes, and checkpoint grid coordinates.

  “We want to let the NVA know we’re out here and we’re going to kill them whenever and wherever we find them,” he said.

  My thoughts were that whoever represented Uncle Ho and General Giap in the NVA 325th gave the same instructions to his officers in sneakers. What it boiled down to was that the two sides killed each other whenever and wherever we met. Sounded to me like a recipe for disaster, a plan for knocking each other back to the Stone Age. At that rate, these hill fights would never be over until the last two men met like David and Goliath for the championship.

  Each morning at first light, patrol duty platoons jocked up and prepared to set out. Golf Company’s AO lay to the west and northwest off 881N. We humped out to whatever checkpoints were assigned us over steep, rugged terrain and back again, returning to the perimeter at dusk dragging our asses. Much of the time we had to go out again the next morning, which left precious little time for chow, cleaning gear, and other housekeeping before nightfall when we went to ground against possible enemy attacks.

  Add to this innervating schedule the misery of OP/LP and perimeter watches, the sun simmering against us in the jungle by day, and long, restless nights without a breeze. The troops were beat down to nubbins and praying for relief.

  So let me get this straight: Our orders were to kill them, their orders were to kill us. So why all the blocking and feinting, like washed-up prize fighters reluctant to mix it up and get a bloody nose? Whenever we spotted the enemy on patrol, it was generally from a distance—gooks flitting through
trees or disappearing over the next ridgeline. We discovered plenty of sign they were still out here. Trails, discarded or lost equipment, blood stains, camp fires, latrine slit trenches. . . . But the enemy was obviously avoiding contact. Which was okay by us regular grunts. I liked the NVA’s new approach to the war: Live and let live.

  Captain Sheehan and Lieutenant Mac thought Uncle Ho was biding his time and building up troops and resources in preparation for another major offensive. If so, sooner or later, we were bound to find ourselves butting heads in another desperate fight for control of the hills and in defense of the Khe Sanh Combat Base.

  When not on patrol, we labored to build up defenses, just in case our officers were correct in assuming the present quiet was merely a lull before the storm struck again. Choppers ferried in C-4 explosives, wire, antipersonnel Claymore mines, and anything else we might utilize to construct a barrier between ourselves and the barbarians at the gate. Labor parties knocked down thickets and towering stands of elephant grass below the crest to enlarge our fields of fire. We laid out concertina wire and tanglefoot spiked with C-4 and grenades.

  It seemed improbable that the commie NVA would even attempt to break through all this, especially in the dark. Even if by chance they made it through these first defenses, what awaited them were Claymore mines either command detonated or connected to trip wires. A Claymore was a nasty piece of work constructed of C-4 molded in a shape that sprayed fans of ball bearings to chop down anything within its radius.

  I chose to believe we were impervious to attack, but nothing was a sure thing when it came to committed commies fanatical enough to sacrifice themselves for “the cause.”

  Nights, the enemy sent out teams to mortar us. Half-heartedly though, as if simply letting us know they were watching. Our arty at the airfield responded with heavy H&I to let the NVA know we were watching back. Random explosions targeting valleys, draws, and ridges where NVA might try to congregate, where they had in fact congregated before, kept our nerves on edge. But not nearly so much as when NVA mortar rounds dropped in uninvited among us, although not doing much damage except to our psyche and nerves. We went through most days pissed off and aching for a big set battle or something, anything, to put an end to this shit.

  Yesterday, Tony and I had gone out on patrol with Lieutenant Mac’s 3rd Platoon to search for a gook mortar site that kept harassing us at night. When we arrived at the suspected location, on the back side of a wooded ridge not far from the knob where Echo had fought that terrible dark battle, nothing remained except a couple of expended shell casings, an indention in the earth from the mortar base plate, and, nearby, a steaming fresh pile of feces.

  We scoured around, but the Viets were still avoiding and evading. We had to pick up the pace to get back inside our perimeter before nightfall. You didn’t want to be out here in the dark unprotected and vulnerable when Count Drac and the boys came out to play.

  Safe inside our perimeter—or at least as safe as we might expect under present conditions—Tony yawned mightily the next morning and stretched out cramps and muscle kinks from yesterday’s patrol hump. His leg still bothered him sometimes. The sun gradually rayed out to touch finger tips to the tops of the three hilltops that encompassed our entire world. We had become like rodents living in holes, who darted out to snatch crumbs while avoiding traps and predators.

  Tony let out gas, loud and long, but the pervasive smell was of bodies and napalm.

  Sometimes I was afraid the odor had ingrained itself into the pores of my nostrils so that I would smell it for the rest of my life. I had slept hard last night after our return, curled up in my poncho on the ground outside the hole during my 50 of our 50-50 alert. Slept like the dead. That was an old term people back home used without even thinking about it.

  I hated that phrase now, vowed never to use it again, not even to think it. The dead weren’t sleeping; they were dead. Speaking of which, I had no firm idea about how many Marines we might have lost so far in these hills. Word circulated that US Marines had killed 3,491 NVA in I-Corps up to last month while losing only 541 of our own. I supposed that was meant to be a morale booster to demonstrate how the body count showed we were winning.

  So how many had we lost since the Hill Fights started?

  Nobody was talking about it. Maybe the brass didn’t want to scare the hell out of us. I spoke to a medevac chopper crew chief while I was helping load a mortar casualty aboard. He told me that during evacs at the worst part of the struggles for 881N and 881S he had used buckets of water back at the airfield to wash blood from the deck of his helicopter.

  “That’s exactly the kind of information I need,” I responded wryly.

  “You get used to it,” he said matter-of-factly. But I noticed the strain and uneasiness in his eyes.

  Killing and dying were part of war. You had to accept it or you went crazy. But you never got used to it.

  “So,” I mentioned to Tony, “we kill about three thousand gooks while at the same time they kill five hundred Marines. That’s what, a ratio of about six-to-one? How long does it take us to wipe out all of ’em?”

  “We won’t,” Tony pointed out. “There’s a lot more of them than of us.”

  Heavy dew had settled on my poncho overnight after the patrol. I channeled the moisture into a low pocket and sucked it dry. Food and water remained a rationed commodity even though resupply choppers were coming in fairly regularly now, in spite of their still being targeted by antiaircraft emplacements along their routes. I looked back on the big monsoon rain and the bomb crater filled with water and dead gooks with a certain sentimentality. It was, after all, real water.

  Gunny promised a resupply today. If an army traveled on its stomach, this army hadn’t the stomach to go much farther. Except, we weren’t army. We were Marines. Marines kept going while the army pussied out and took the day off.

  “What’s for chow this morning?” Tony asked. “We got enough water for coffee?”

  I shook my canteen.

  “That’s it?”

  I pointed downhill. “Unless you want to go back to the river or suck some water out of bamboo.”

  “I got something you can suck on.”

  We managed to score up breakfast and coffee with PFC Taylor’s contribution and a little bartering with a C-rat pack of Lucky Strikes. Ham and lima beans.

  “We’re on the roster for another patrol,” Taylor said, getting up and rubbing his belly. “See you in about fifteen mikes.”

  Tony had used his M-16 during the night for a “sound shot.” When he broke out his cleaning kit, I wondered how many of our guys had died because of Mattie Mattell and some bigwig motherfuckers and politicians back in the Home of the Big PX getting rich off our blood by manufacturing cheap rifles they had to know were faulty.

  Last night in the middle of my turn at sleeping, I startled awake to the strange quacking sound of NVA laughter downhill at the edge of the forest. Tony was tired and had had about all this happy horse shit he could stand.

  “The bastards! The dirty little bastards!” he hissed. “Them motherfuckers are laughing at us, Maras.”

  “Piss on them.”

  The sound of gook laughter was what triggered his “sound shot” reaction. The muzzle of his M-16 flashed fire as he unleashed a burst into the distant dark outline of trees. The laughter stopped.

  “Piss on them,” he said. “And piss on her.”

  Always Peggy.

  “Knock that shit off!” a sergeant shouted.

  Due to the frequent usage of the phrase, I wondered why it hadn’t been incorporated into The Marine Corps Training Manual.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Mushy Dianne

  It appeared the mission of the B-52 bombers that chased the skies from Khe Sanh and the hills north to Ho Chi Minh Land and west to Laos was to pound North Vietnamese troops into the ground and annihilate eve
n the memory of them. If not for their Arc Light bombings, so called because of the awesome display of power when their ordnance exploded on target, the NVA may well have been able to amass enough troops to drive through all the way to Da Nang. Everyone took note when a formation of the big swept-wing birds flew high above heading north or west, their silver wings glinting back light from the universe.

  It was like the sun itself exploded when they let loose, a tremendous burst of blinding light that pulsated against the horizon. At first, all was deathly quiet while the light expanded. Sound and shock waves followed, rumbling and echoing through the hills so that you felt it in the soles of your feet and in the soles of your soul. Trees shuddered. Birds, rock apes, and krait snakes fled.

  Witnessing it, even from afar, must have been a bit like at White Sands that day in 1945 when the first atomic bomb exploded and Dr. Robert Oppenheimer uttered his famous phrase: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” B-52s terrified the Vietnamese and caused them tremendous suffering. I was terrified, just watching it. But fuck ’em.

  Kill ’em all, like some guys scrawled on their helmet covers, and let God sort ’em out.

  CIA spooks, State Department “fact finders,” congressional investigators, and Pentagon military brass trailed by reporters were constantly choppering in to take a quick look around, ask some questions, then shag ass back out before nightfall. No one wanted to be caught in these hills after dark. The rotating presence of so many dignitaries demonstrated the investment President LBJ and Washington placed in Khe Sanh.

  Tony cynically diagnosed politics as the problem. “This would all end,” he predicted, “if the fucking politicians would stop yapping, pick up their toys and go home. They strut around like banty roosters crowing and scratching in the dirt—but we’re the fighting gamecocks who die, not them.”