Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  New US activity in the area attracted NVA like syrup attracted ants. BLT 2/3’s mission was to “search and destroy” the enemy.

  As the big Navy choppers skimmed in under a noon sun and put us out in the scrub at the north edge of Leatherneck Square and the southern boundary of the DMZ, I exited the bird running with Tony and the Pig. When I cleared the blades and caught my breath, I looked around in sudden dismay. North, the Ben Hai River threaded in gleaming silver through low jungle and scrub out of North Vietnam. But it was to the south and west that my eyes fastened. I stared. Out there somewhere, Hills 881N, 881S, and 861 loomed like a bad omen from the past. I had hoped never to see them again, never to have to even think about them and our days up there in the blood and filth.

  Tony glared in the same direction. “Fuck! Fuck! Double fuck!” he exploded.

  “You promised God to stop cursing,” I reminded him drearily, feeling like cursing myself.

  “When it comes to those damned hills, Maras, I’m sure God understands.”

  Pappy Delong’s battalion dug in and set up a fixed position out of which to conduct operations against NVA within the DMZ. The enemy was near, watching, waiting for an opportunity. If Kilgore hadn’t destroyed his Starlite, we could have watched them up on their side of the 17th marching around in strength and threat-posturing for our benefit. Some of our patrols ran right up to within seventy yards of them, less than the length of a football field, and made faces at them across the magic boundary line that separated us. Any closer, one step across the demarcation by either side, meant trouble.

  Quite clearly, the NVA were massing troops to strike at our hill forts again. Our job was to kill as many of them as we could before they made it across the DMZ into South Vietnam. No easy task. The terrain was furred with thick scrub and jungle that allowed an enemy to sneak in right among us before we detected them. The same as in the Hill Fights. It was one haunted-looking place out there.

  Same old familiar routine—digging holes, stretching defensive wire, setting out Claymores and alarm devices, putting out OP/LPs. Routine, however, soon began to unravel.

  On 22 May, the day after the battalion inserted, Sergeant Crawford appeared out of nowhere, stalking down the line in that old cocky walk of a man comfortable in his skin and in his element. A grin crossed his broad face when he spotted Tony and me. We jumped out of the ground to give him bear hugs. We hadn’t seen him since that day in the draw below 861 when the gooks shot him. He couldn’t wait for full recuperation to get back to his boys in Hotel Company.

  “Sorry I had to leave the way I did, boys. I kept hearing how things got real bad up there. While I was on the Princeton, I saw guys come in every day to the treatment ward.”

  Old home week didn’t last long. US Naval aircraft began bombing Central Hanoi for the first time, their target the largest electrical plant in North Vietnam. An SA2 SAM missile shot down a US Phantom on its way back. From the ground, Tony and I along with the rest of the battalion saw the plane explode in a ball of flame and black smoke. A groan issued from the startled Marines—but then our hopes rose when we spotted two parachutes blossom when the pilots ejected.

  We watched the parachutes settle to earth in low scrub brush. “Angel” helicopters picked up the pilots. On our hill, Colonel Delong’s RTO tuned in on the chopper frequency and reported that the pilots were okay. The camp exploded in cheering.

  On the night of 23 May, eleven hundred rounds of heavy artillery fired from north of the DMZ clobbered our positions. Tony and I whipped out our E-tools and, like a couple of terrified gophers, started digging our hole deeper. Afterwards, during the “all clear” when medevacs began whipping in, we learned that Sergeant Crawford had been wounded again and was on his way to the Princeton. No report on his condition.

  This land would never let go until it had destroyed every last Marine. I climbed from our hole, which was still a long way from bottomless, and through the haze and smoke of the recent enemy bombardment shook my fists angrily in the direction of the Wicked Sisters.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Anything for R&R

  Venturing outside the wire was always a risky affair. On the day after Sergeant Crawford got himself mortared and evacuated, Lieutenant McFarlane, who remained more or less in charge of Weapons Platoon, sent Tony and me outside the perimeter to plant a Claymore mine on a little rise covered with beetle nut bushes. The sun was shining and all the cockroaches should have scurried into hiding after a long night scuttering about in the kitchen and making Marines nervous. Seemed to me like Operation Hickory was about to become a replay of the Hill Fights—or a continuation of them.

  Usually, machine gun teams were exempt from mundane tasks like setting out mines and pulling OP/LP. However, to coin an old Marine phrase: Shit happens. After the battalion’s occupation of 881N and the losses Golf and the other companies suffered, plus being worn out from fighting and patrolling, every swinging dick on the hill was expected to pull dirty double duty. Tony and I had found ourselves out on OP/LP on one of the blackest nights in Black Night history. Just the two of us alone hunkered in a clump of bushes to listen for the enemy trying to sneak up on us. I had never spent a longer nor more nerve-wracking night.

  I had turned the Pig over to Gunny’s capable hands for safekeeping. That left the two of us armed with Tony’s M-16, which had that bad habit of jamming when you needed it, my .45 pistol, and our pockets full of grenades. We lay covering each other’s back while we peered warily out of the bushes, the grenades arranged between us with their pins straightened and ready for use. We weren’t supposed to engage the enemy, just run back with a warning. Still, it never hurt to be prepared.

  On 50-50, one of us could have slept, but neither of us did so. We lay wide-eyed all night, knowing, just knowing, gooks were trying to sneak up on us. I heard my heart beating, heard Tony’s heartbeat. I listened to grass growing, heard lizards and insects crawling and hopping. Tony claimed later he heard a mouse fart.

  Near daybreak, something out there in the pre-dawn moved across from our left to right. Stealthy footfalls. My heart pounded so loudly, like drumbeats, that I thought the enemy was bound to hear and charge. It was better that we seized the initiative than to become the enemy’s initiative. On cue, the two of us chugged grenades and lit up our front with bursts of exploding flame. We figured afterwards that we may have annihilated a bamboo rat, two toads, a krait snake, and a colony of warrior ants.

  Now away from those hills and up on the DMZ, hostile eyes must have been watching and waiting while my partner and I set the Claymore, camouflaged it, and hotfooted back to our hole and the Pig.

  Next morning, Tony reminded me that today was our one-year anniversary in the Marines Corps. Curiously enough, we had both enlisted, though separately, on the same date on the deferred enlistment plan. It was about to become the most memorable anniversary of my lifetime.

  As we took our ritual “Good morning, Vietnam!” piss, Tony looked at me and wryly suggested we break open the champagne and throw a party.

  “Good idea,” I agreed. “I’ll get the champagne, you bring the dancing girls.”

  Instead, we went out to the beetle nut bushes to recover our Claymore. Patrols would be taking off soon; no one wanted an accident because of a mine left active. I carried a .45 in my hand as the two of us, keeping low and using available cover, approached the bushes.

  The rifle shot from extremely close range, so near I suffered powder burns, slapped my left leg out from underneath me. I floundered to the ground, trying to hold everything together. Where in hell did that come from?

  A second deafening report immediately followed the first. This bullet caught Tony. Ironically, it ripped at an angle across his chest muscles and grazed a deep furrow through his upper arm, in the process blasting off most of his tattoo, taking out the heart and all but the last two letters of Peggy. That was one way to finalize a romantic bre
akup.

  He collapsed to the ground in a mist of his own blood. That was when I spotted our assailant. The sneaky little bastard was not four feet away. The camouflaged lid of a spider trap raised a little to allow the soldier inside to finish us off, revealing a netted pith helmet, a grim face, and dark eyes. The stubby barrel of his AK-47 pointed at where Tony lay writhing on the ground cursing up the proverbial blue streak in his pain and surprise.

  Another moment and he would be dead from a second bullet. The gook couldn’t miss at this range. But neither could I.

  I beat the gook to the trigger, firing the .45, firing it again and again while the gook’s head exploded in a blurb of blood and brain. The spider trap lid slammed shut on him, leaving one lifeless arm and his rifle protruding.

  I scrambled over to Tony, dragging my wounded leg. It felt numb and about the size of an Oklahoma outhouse. Terror that I might lose my buddy after we had survived so much together made me forget my own injury. Blood stained the ground all around him, the leaves of bushes overhead, and his entire body, like he had run through a slaughterhouse.

  “Tony! Don’t you dare die on me, you hear?”

  “Fuck off, Maras. Did you see that?” he cried indignantly. “That son-ofabitch shot me.”

  “He won’t shoot no other Marines. I blew his fucking head off.”

  I was so preoccupied with Tony’s condition that I wasn’t aware that we were still taking fire. Bullets whipped into the bushes around us.

  I pulled Tony to cover behind a low outcropping of rock. He was still blackguarding and cursing every gook since the beginning of time. I parted bushes and spotted at least a half-dozen NVA protecting the mortar. They were up on their knees and craning their necks, trying to get a better look at where Tony and I had fallen. One of them pointed toward us.

  Tony was hurting, and he was pissed. The gooks were out of range of my .45. Tony rolled over, pushed aside some intervening branches, and honed in on the enemy with his Mattie Mattel.

  “Another fine kettle of fish you got me into, Maras,” he muttered as he picked off at least three gooks one by one with his deadly accurate sight picture.

  “Damn! I never knew you could shoot like that!”

  “Why do you think they sent me with you, Maras?” he replied. “Hell, you can’t take care of yourself without me around to wipe your butt for you.”

  AK fire slacked off. Tony dropped his head onto his arms and let out a muffled cry of pain.

  “C’mon, man. We gotta get you out of here,” I said.

  “How bad they get you, Maras?”

  “I’m not going to be dancing anytime soon.”

  Crawling on our bellies, helping each other as always, we dragged back to the perimeter. The first Marine we came upon, a newbie named Paul, looked pale and frightened. This was his first action.

  “You guys hit?”

  What did he think? We were covered in blood and crusted in red dirt.

  “Go get a corpsman!”

  A replacement corpsman, Doc Miranda, came racing across the field with his aid bag and skidded down next to us. The perimeter held its fire with remarkable discipline. Besides, the NVA mortars and their defenders remained under cover over the rise and away from direct fire.

  Doc ripped open my jungle trousers. The bullet had entered my upper thigh, leaving the entire leg ugly with bruise and a tiny hole still leaking blood. I groaned in pain. Miranda pressure-wrapped the wound while others took care of Tony and carried him directly to the CP to await medevac.

  My biggest concern at the moment was not my leg. “My Johnson?” I demanded.

  “Don’t worry,” the Doc reassured me. “Your Johnson is still there. The bullet missed it. The ladies’ll still like you. I’m going to give you some morphine.”

  He broke out a vial. A fresh new shake-and-bake lieutenant appeared before he had a chance to administer it.

  “Do you know where they are?” he asked me. “Which direction?”

  I pointed.

  “Come on. Show me.”

  Couldn’t the guy see I was hurt? Fuck it! Dragging my leg, I crawled with him back out to where I killed the gook in the spider trap. A lot of blood pooled on the ground, gradually soaking in where Tony and I were shot.

  “The tube is there,” I told the lieutenant. “Just on the other side of that little knoll.”

  I groaned and rubbed my leg. The dressing had come undone and left the wound exposed.

  “What—?” the lieutenant began, before hesitating to notice my damaged leg.

  “I got shot,” I explained.

  “Holy—! Okay! Okay!”

  He radioed in coordinates on the bad guys, who were promptly smacked by our own mortar men. Then we crawled back to the perimeter as black and gray smoke marked the spot where the gooks had been.

  The medevac landed. Tony and I were carried out on stretchers. Gunny Janzen saw us off.

  “Some guys will do anything to get R&R,” he said.

  “You mean—?” I began.

  He grinned. “Consider this in-country R&R for the POWs you captured.”

  “F-U-C-K-E-D A-G-A-I-N,” Tony sang miserably to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song.

  In that inescapable body count procedure that determined who won and who lost during this eight-day phase of Operation Hickory, Marines killed 789 enemy soldiers and disrupted the North Vietnamese command structure. Allied losses—Marines and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)—were likewise heavy with 164 of us killed and over 1,000 wounded, including Tony and me.

  The helicopter crew chief offered us cigarettes when corpsmen loaded our stretchers aboard. I didn’t smoke, but I smoked it anyhow. As the blades whirred for takeoff, irrepressible Tony Leyba looked over at my stretcher from his.

  “Happy anniversary, Maras,” he cracked.

  We were both laughing our asses off as the chopper lifted off. Before the doors closed, I took what I hoped would be my last close-up look of Vietnam and Hills 861, 881N, and 881S, the Trio of Wicked Witches where so many of my fellow Marines died or were maimed for life in what was to go down as one of the fiercest campaigns of the Vietnam War.

  But it wasn’t over yet. Not Khe Sanh. And not for Tony and me. We both recuperated from our wounds and returned to 3/2 to complete our tours of duty. Tony suffered another non-life-threatening wound; I was wounded twice more, the last time in October 1967 along the DMZ.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The Siege

  The week Tony and I departed the DMZ, me with a bullet in my leg and Tony with his “Peggy” shot off, President Lyndon Johnson publicly went on TV urging Hanoi to join him in “leading our people out of this bloody impasse” by accepting a compromise peace. Uncle Ho essentially snubbed the proposal and released General Giap to continue his campaigning out of Laos and along the DMZ in South Vietnam’s northern provinces. He smelled victory. If not a military one, at least a political one.

  Khe Sanh remained in the public mind back home, almost an obsession, and in the chants and demonstrations of dope-smoking draft dodgers.

  “When I get home,” I promised myself all over again as Tony as I recuperated aboard the USS Princeton, “the first cocksucker spits on me is going to spit on the next Marine or GI with no teeth in his head.”

  BLT 2/3 had pulled out of the Khe Sanh hills on 12 May 1967 to operate farther east along the DMZ. Less than five months later, in October 1967, intel reports indicated large-scale NVA infiltrations into South Vietnam from Laos and North Vietnam. Hidden sensors sown by the US Air Force went into electronic ape shit over the movement of more than a thousand trucks in the Khe Sanh area. That figure jumped to over six thousand trucks in December. In early January, intel reported division-level NVA units taking up positions in that strip of hilly jungle between the DMZ and Route 9, the only road connecting the Combat Base to the c
oast.

  Undoubtedly, General Giap had Khe Sanh on his mind again. Dreams of another Dien Bien Phu died hard. By now, more than six thousand Marines of the 26th Division or under its operational control manned the Combat Base. They were well protected by batteries of 105mm and 155mm howitzers, plenty of heavy mortars, and by 175mm firebases at Camp Carroll and the Rockpile northeast of Khe Sanh in Leatherneck Square.

  By mid-January 1968, NVA gunners up in the winter-foggy hills began to lob the isolated artillery shell at the Combat Base. Marine howitzers dished back H&I, with little effect. Targets were difficult to identify. Dense fog and low clouds made it almost impossible for airborne observers to locate targets and adjust Marine cannon fire. Sending out teams of Forward Observers on foot would be sending them to their deaths.

  On the morning of 19 January, Base Commander Colonel David E. Lownds received disturbing reports from Captain Bill Dabney, commander of one of the companies holding the outlying hills. His India Company had bumped into a battalion of NVA while patrolling on Hill 881N and was presently engaged in a tough struggle.

  Lownds was convinced the long-expected North Vietnamese offensive had begun. He ordered the base on full alert, cancelling the evening’s main film, which was Elvis Presley starring in Paradise, Hawaiian Style.

  India Company prevailed up in the hills where 2/3 had fought previously. But Colonel Lownds was right about an NVA offensive. The following morning, 20 January, artillery shells and 122mm rockets rained down on Khe Sanh. One round struck the base ammo depot. Over fifteen hundred tons of ordnance went up in a giant phosphorus flare, bowling over helicopters parked on the airstrip, demolishing tents and buildings, igniting aviation gas and oil supplies, and cooking off intense fires.