Blood in the Hills

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Blood in the Hills Page 24

by Charles W. Sasser


  I spotted the green parrot flying over the hill. Probably a sibling or cousin, rogue daddy or slut mama, but no matter. I always thought of him as the same one, an old buddy with freedom under his wings and no worries. In a stream of idle whimsy, I saw him as a bird on a recon to report the state of the jungle to his fellow critters—tigers and elephants and deer and monkeys—few of whom I had observed so far. Couldn’t say I blamed the elephants for packing their trunks and leading the other animals in evac’ing the AO. Had I my druthers, I would druther have packed my own ditty bag and departed with them.

  Tony reminded me that we had had our druthers after being struck by mortar fragments.

  “But no-o-o-o,” he dramatized. “Maras had to be the hero. I don’t feel like a hero. I feel like a fool standing in shit up to my neck, holding my nose, and pretending I’m in a Hilton Hotel swimming pool.”

  “You didn’t have to stay. You could have left without me.”

  “And leave you out here alone with these poor gooks! How fair would that have been to them? Perish the thought.”

  He sighed, making a production of it. “It wouldn’t have been right,” he said.

  Along with a rifle and name-stenciled skivvies, the USMC issued every recruit a sense of duty, responsibility, and, yes, guilt. One for all, all for one. The sort of mindset that prompted a Marine to forsake self interest in favor of doing what was expected in regard to buddies and the By-God Crotch. Living that maxim caused Marines to die for it and contribute a heavy body count.

  The term body count had become common usage in Vietnam as a standard for gauging the progress of the war. After contact, higher-higher demanded an After Action on how many of them we killed. That was one of a leader’s responsibilities. Let’s see, this guy is blown in two parts. Does that count as one body or two bodies?

  The news media took these gory stats and broadcast them around the world for entertainment and edification: Today, in a major action near Da Nang in the Republic of Vietnam, the U.S. destroyed 308 Viet Cong soldiers while losing only 26 American lives. Followed by an ad for Things go better with Coca-Cola, or I’d walk a mile for a Camel.

  The NVA didn’t have to keep their own body counts. Newspapers and TV in the West supplied them with a running tally of American losses, along with live coverage of the latest peacenik marches, draft-card burnings, antiwar demonstrations, and assorted hippie be-ins and stink-ins. Uncle Ho didn’t have to have his Dien Bien Phu at Khe Sanh in order to win the war. I could almost see the old fucker wringing his hands in delight in anticipation of the United States winning every battle over here while losing the war back home.

  I resented the term body count when applied to us. Doc Heath and the others were not body counts; they had been live human beings with names and ambitions and people at home who loved them. To refer to them collectively as body counts diminished their ever having been, reduced them to statistics and forgotten names hardly anyone would remember in a few years.

  I wondered how long Linda would remember me if I never made it back.

  How about Khe Sanh? Who would remember it and the Hill Fights after those of us who fought here were gone? I kept imagining LBJ in the Oval Office in his boxer shorts jumping up and down with joy and sending Uncle Ho nasty greeting cards over a victory he won a half-world away, a vindication of leadership policies that a generation from now everyone would have forgotten.

  It wasn’t as though Khe Sanh was D-Day or Anzio or Hiroshima or Pearl Harbor. Or even Pork Chop Hill, the Frozen Chosin, or Inchon . . . Belleau Wood and the trenches of World War I France . . . Teddy Roosevelt and San Juan Hill . . . The Battle of Bunker Hill . . . Gettysburg or Shiloh in the Civil War.

  Khe Sanh?

  “Papa, what’s a Khe Sanh?” my little grandchild might ask one day, if I lived that long.

  A tour of duty in Vietnam was one year. I had about eleven months to go. At the rate of the body count in the Hill Fights, the odds were stacked against me.

  Christ, I was growing melancholy at the advanced age of nineteen.

  Tony and I cornered Gunny Janzen. “When do we get our five-day R&R for capturing the POWs?” we asked.

  “Way I heard it, they came up and begged you to capture them.” He was poking at us. His sense of humor was returning now that things had slowed down. “Don’t worry about it, boys. If the Marine Corps wants you to have R&R, you’ll get it issued.”

  “We thought you were the Marine Corps.” Poking him back.

  “My daddy wore OD skivvies with a globe and anchor tattooed on his chest. My mama was a Tijuana whore. Does that sound like I’m the Marine Corps?”

  I admitted it did. Gunny chuckled. “You’ll get your R&R,” he promised. “When we get to Hanoi.”

  The enemy was still out there—still being monsters in the dark—but they seemed to be fewer and with less bite. You could powder the hell out of Fido for fleas, but some always remained hiding in the hair. I supposed Uncle Ho left a few unlucky bastards behind to harass us and gather intel for when he might decide to try another Dien Bien Phu operation.

  Rumors persisted that there were NVA base training camps hidden out in the jungles where the gooks bided their time and built up forces. We didn’t want to make contact. Neither, apparently, did the gooks. What we heard was that they had written off the hills for now and were considering circumventing them in order to attack the Khe Sanh airfield directly and in overwhelming force.

  Our daily patrols became little more than long marches in the sun. Rather pleasant strolls, actually. Once, we surprised an elephant basking in the sunshine by a watering hole, a highlight talked about within the perimeters of the two 881s. We had heard gooks used elephants as beasts of burden, like Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes, but no one that I knew of had actually witnessed it.

  Our patrols were reduced from platoon-sized elements to squads, there being no real need for larger forces. A squad could sneak and peek more on the quiet, without as much chance of being discovered.

  Lieutenant McFarlane assigned PFC Taylor to lead his 1st Squad on patrol west in the direction of Laos to cop a look for possible enemy infiltration routes. Taylor chose Tony and me for heavy weapons, along with Ramirez as his point man. A patrol didn’t have to worry about blundering into an ambush with Ramirez out front as its eyes, ears, and nose. He could smell gooks a mile upwind or a half-mile downwind.

  First Squad reached our objective checkpoint and turned back. We had encountered nothing remotely suspicious—no tennis shoe prints, latrine cat holes, no sounds except those made by critters. Places in the forest were scorched and dug up from H&I artillery and air delivery, but it was easy to see why an entire NVA regiment could turn into ghosts and vanish into such rough terrain.

  Not expecting contact, Taylor gave Ramirez a break and put him to the rear of the column on Tailend Charlie. Tony and I with the Pig remained near the front. The patrol took up an animal trail as it pushed through thick undergrowth that hazed the sun into twilight. Above our heads, a noisy troop of monkeys with black beards peppered us with handfuls of their own excrement to dramatize their displeasure at our trespassing.

  “The gooks ambush us, monkeys ambush us,” Tony muttered. “What comes next?”

  “Invasion of the Cat People?”

  We threaded in and out of jungle, crossed a dry creek bed and an open ravine where the sun beat down hard, then along a ridgeline.

  Suddenly, Ramirez flashed up an alert from the rear. Enemy near! He had done it again. The entire patrol went to ground, eyes flashing anxiously in all directions, weapons ready. Ramirez crawled up the line to point out a small group of NVA well concealed below the ridge in a creek bed.

  Carefully parting a few leaves allowed me to peep through and find them. Two or three men sprawled out on flat rocks sleeping with their weapons lying on the ground alongside. Another pair huddled together chatting. A third man yawned a
nd scratched himself. His buddy laughed quietly. They all seemed unaware of our presence, having obviously failed to place out a sentry during their rest break. Looked like gooks were getting lax in also thinking the fight had ended.

  Were these careless little bastards going to be surprised! Smoking and joking like that in the sun as if they were all alone out here in the wilderness. Allowing us to walk right up on them.

  Our patrol was already on line. Taylor pointed with a pistol hand and let down his thumb like a hammer. We understood. When he gave the signal, the line exploded with rifle and machine gun fire. Lead and steel chewed through the somnolent Vietnamese. Those lying on the rocks died in their sleep. A couple of others, wounded in the initial shooting, jumped up to flee. They didn’t get far.

  Shouting and cursing, the patrol took revenge for all the atrocities and pain the NVA had inflicted upon us. On-line, we charged right over the gooks, shooting at anything that moved. The Pig and I were right in the lead, John Wayne-ing it, letting the Pig loose. Da-Da-Da-Da. . . . Splattering human parts and fluids all over the creek bed, turning the trickle of water in the stream red.

  The surprised gooks ended up a bloody mess of tennis shoes, blood, and entrails by the time we ceased fire and they woke up in the arms of the Great Buddha. It was one easy body count. Because none of our guys suffered so much as a scratch, the victory produced an entirely different reaction than in the encounter when Foxtrot lost so many of its Marines. We held off celebrating, however, until the patrol returned safely to 881N. Then we let it all out.

  “Did you see Carter’s face when that dude’s head exploded?”

  “Man, that was some awesome shit! I reckon them gooks never knew what hit ’em.”

  “A dead gook is a good gook.”

  “That one kid we caught sleeping. Did you see him? He wasn’t even twelve years old.”

  “It ain’t no big thing. Give a kid an AK and as far as I’m thinking he could be forty years old.”

  “Hey, Carlisle! You missed the chance to collect some ear trophies.”

  “You’re a sick motherfucker, know that, Jonesy?”

  “Maybe we’re all sick.”

  And maybe we were. A side effect of war.

  Chapter Forty-One

  The Silver Dragon

  We heard the NVA drafted women into their army. Not like Catherine, the French journalist who came out to shoot pictures. They actually sent their females into combat. I hadn’t personally run across any that I knew of, hadn’t seen any among the gooks we killed. I doubted it was true. I thought about Linda and my mom. Come on! Why would any sane people send girls and women out here? It was Moshe Dayan the Israeli general with the black eye patch, whom I had gotten a look at that morning on the hill, who said something like, “Any nation that would send its daughters, mothers, and wives into combat is a nation not worth preserving.” At least I thought he was the one who said it. Even if he didn’t, he should have.

  So, if the gooks really were running women out to fight, it proved how uncivilized communism really was.

  But, then, on a patrol with Taylor’s 1st Squad into the bush, I finally saw one of the fabled woman warriors with my own eyes. It was just like the other time when our faithful Indian scout spotted gooks taking a nap by the creek and we wasted them before they knew what was going on.

  Ramirez on point did it again. This time there were four young men and a woman wearing NVA uniforms lollygagging in a patch of bamboo. The woman wore her pith helmet, the men had thrown theirs aside to cluster around the female and vie for attention. Their weapons lay on the grass.

  While we watched, still surprised at seeing a woman out here, she giggled and playfully slapped one of the men on the shoulder. The men laughed and moved closer, like elementary school boys on the playground around a pretty classmate with a package of cookies. Clearly, they had their feeble minds on pussy and not on business. Another reason why you shouldn’t send women into combat. Hard dicks and a pretty face were about to get the flock butchered.

  PFC Taylor pointed to several 1st Squad men, designating them to trigger the ambush on his signal. I nodded when he looked at me. The Pig always got first call in such situations.

  My finger tightened on the trigger. Tony sprawled belly-down next to me with his M-16. From the corner of my eye, I saw Taylor gesture with his pistol-hand. I squeezed and felt the quick jolting recoil of the machine gun stock against my shoulder as I whipped tracers into the four surprised targets. The tinny rattling of Mattie Mattels provided accompanying drama as everyone else opened up. Savage yells burst out above the cacophony.

  It wasn’t a battle; it was a massacre over in seconds. Not a pretty aftermath. Blood and gore splattered for yards about. Brains and bone and hair dripping from bamboo. Unlike other enemy soldiers we had encountered in actual campaign engagements, these had not wrapped their limbs in wire to keep from being blown apart. Bullets from my machine gun ripped open the woman’s chest and tore out her lungs and heart. She died instantly, lying face up with her arms flung wide and her mouth and eyes open in astonishment. Only one of the four men survived. He lay curled up in a fetal position, emitting painful half-conscious groans, his eyes squeezed tightly shut as if to block out the world. If he didn’t see it, it didn’t really happen.

  This time the aftermath was different, what with the woman involved. At least it was for me as I looked down on the dead woman and realized bullets from the Pig had slain her. The interaction we had witnessed among the gooks before the shooting started was as ancient and as human as mankind—guys preening and showing off for a female. The Vietnamese weren’t specters and monsters after all; they were as human as we were. With all man’s common natural desires, foibles, ambitions, weaknesses, and strengths. Kids became young men and women, grew middle-aged, then became old and died. The natural cycle of life.

  Except these never had the chance to grow old through the cycle.

  Best not to dwell on killing and death. But in not thinking about it, in experiencing it daily and dismissing it from our minds, did that not turn us hard and calloused? The violence and cruelty of war—was it not transforming us into monsters, both us and them? Monsters fighting monsters.

  In order for war to work, you had to turn off your humanity. And pray to God you could reacquire it afterwards.

  Tony, Taylor, and I searched the bodies for documents of intel value. The woman was an officer, according to her uniform markings. A tee-wee, a lieutenant. She carried a medical bag, indicating she was probably a doctor or nurse. So what the hell was she doing out here with these guys, other than getting herself killed?

  She had carried a light carbine and a field pouch containing papers now strewn about by the force of our attack. As I collected them, I overheard Tony exclaim, “Damn! Would you look at that ring!”

  The woman wore on her wedding finger a beautiful silver dragon ring with glowing ruby eyes. Her wrist was shattered and her hand all but severed from her arm, remaining attached only by a shred of sinew. I commandeered a communist hammer and sickle helmet band from one of her comrades as a trophy while Tony worked at removing the dragon ring from the woman’s swollen finger. I slung my M-60 and the dead Dragon Lady’s field packet of papers over my shoulders.

  “Hurry, Tony. We gotta go.”

  “This damned ring won’t come off.”

  I heard Taylor saying, “Somebody take care of the wounded gook.”

  The guy continued his pitiful wailing. I thought Taylor meant for us to administer medical aid. I was bent over one of the corpses relieving it of a map I’d overlooked initially when a single rifle shot startled me. I refused to look. I didn’t want to know which Marine put the gook out of his misery. Nothing, I was discovering, could be as heartless as a teenage Marine cast into a wartime environment.

  I wondered, though, afterwards, if the guy died with his eyes still closed.

 
Taylor prepared the patrol to move out. It was never tactically prudent to remain long at an ambush site.

  “Maras, give me your knife,” Tony called out.

  I tossed my banana knife at Tony’s knees where he knelt over the nurse’s corpse. I presumed he intended to hack off her finger to get the ring.

  “Get it and let’s get out of here,” I urged.

  Taylor was getting impatient. “What’s the holdup, Maras?”

  “Go on. We’ll catch up. Only be a sec.”

  The green caterpillar the patrol resembled got its legs underneath and headed out. I started to fall in, calling back over my shoulder, “Tony, what’s keeping you?”

  “I’m right behind you.”

  I stopped to wait for him at the edge of the bamboo and away from the carnage. It was already starting to smell. Tailend Charlie disappeared ahead of me in the jungle. I heard Tony panting as he charged up the trail with his M-16 slung and something clutched in one hand. He collapsed at my feet to catch his breath, his face red and his breathing rapid and hoarse like that of a thief flushed from a house he had just robbed.

  “Come on, Tony! On your feet!”

  “A minute. I got . . . have a minute,” he gasped.

  Up ahead, I heard the rattle of Taylor’s halting the squad to wait for us. I reached down a hand to Tony. Then jumped back in sudden revulsion when I noticed he had three hands.

  “Fuck, Tony. What do you think you’re doing?”

 

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