Praying for Slack: A Marine Corps Tank Commander in Viet Nam

by Robert E. Peavey

  My demand was met with another round of laughter even louder than the first. I was on the outside of some inside joke, and I didn't like it one bit. My thoughts were on the grunt we-no, I-had just killed.

  That night, as we sat in our crew positions and ate some C's, I learned the rest of the story. When our machine gun began to fire, it was as big a surprise for the lone grunt as it was for me, probably bigger. He suddenly found himself in the middle of a dust cloud of bullets that hit all around, some even between his legs. His immediate reaction was to hit the deck, convinced that he was under fire from an enemy machine gun.

  It was at that moment that I had managed to cut the wire to stop the deranged machine gun; I was certain I had cut down the grunt as well. The rest of the battalion, seeing one of their men under fire, assumed our tank was returning fire at an unseen enemy machine gun. They opened fire blindly into the tree line. It was the typical response of a veteran grunt unit that suddenly came under fire-return fire, and in prodigious quantities.

  Embesi, who was aware that the grunts were looking back at him to get a sense of where the enemy was, yelled, "They're in the tree line!" It was then that I wasted the two HE rounds, which the grunts could follow with their own eyes.

  No one ever suspected that it was our wired contraption that started the whole thing. Our screw-up remained our secret thanks to Embesi's quick thinking.

  The lone grunt whose execution I was sure I had witnessed was the luckiest son-of-a-bitch on earth, having lived through a stream of bullets from what he thought was a North Vietnamese machine gun. He and all his buddies were grateful for the tank that took out the "enemy" machine gun! Suddenly the grunts thought we were great!

  WE WERE CLOSE TO PHu LOC 6 when we met up with our relief force, 3/27. Our appearance dispelled any hope they were going to have a cakewalk. The two units didn't say much as they passed one another. The blank, expressionless faces of the men of the 7th Marines told the story. They were faces of Marines who had been on the edge a little too long. There was no exchange or banter that usually went on between two units that pass one another. The relief troops didn't like what they saw.

  The grunts had been worn to the point of exhaustion; they needed to be refitted, regrouped, replenished, and rested. We had been in the field for twelve days without a break and were totally drained. Too many sleepless nights and the constant harassment by sniper and mortar fire had taken its toll. True to Marine tradition, we came out with all of our dead, wounded, and equipment.

  We were almost within sight of Phu Loc when suddenly, wham! My world was shattered by a violent explosion. The tank had taken a solid hit! A cloud of dust immediately replaced the air in the turret. My first thought was that it was an RPG but I didn't see the telltale flash inside the tank. Over the radio, Embesi immediately wanted to know how everyone was. The driver didn't answer right away. A few seconds later he said that he was fine, but he wanted to know, "What the hell was that, Sergeant Embesi?"

  Before Embesi could answer the driver, I reported that everything appeared okay in the fighting compartment, as the turret was called. I asked him the same question, "What the fuck was that?"

  "We hit a mine."

  So that's what it's like, I thought. I had always thought that the blast would be more severe.

  Embesi said, "Peavey, get up here and man the fifty." That told me that he was getting off the tank and I was to take his spot in the TC's position. I jumped at the chance to stick my head out into the cooler air.

  As I crawled up and into the TC's position, I could see Embesi was on his hands and knees, looking over the edge of the tank's fender as he inspected the suspension system. There was a corpsman next to the tank, working on a wounded grunt who had been hit by shrapnel from the mine.

  Embesi was smiling as he turned to Hearn and me. "We hit an antipersonnel mine. I think we're okay." He was still on the tank next to the driver's position when he told the driver to slowly pull ahead.

  "Okay, stop!" he yelled. He was inspecting the track without getting off the tank. He was not about to risk stepping on another one of Charlie's surprises.

  "We're okay!" he said, "All we did was flatten one set of roadwheels slightly. We didn't even break track!"

  The damage was light-unbelievably good news because it was too damned hot to have to replace track.

  It represented the pinnacle of our luck for the entire operation. When we thought about all the things we had gotten away with, we started laughing among ourselves. After all, there had been a number of things that could have been disastrous:

  The RPG that sailed in between the driver and me

  The RPG that should have killed Embesi

  The NVA on top of our tank

  The two A-4 "angels" that appeared out of nowhere

  My getting caught off the tank during a mortar attack

  The never before seen appearance of two Puffs

  Winning the coin toss as the weapons tank

  Not cutting the grunt in half

  Hitting a mine without breaking the track

  We were giddy and laughing over the intercom as we resumed the sweep with the grunts. The wounded grunt had been put up on the back of the tank.

  I was certain of one thing, however: If that was an antipersonnel mine, I did not want to hit an antitank mine.

  We had moved about one hundred meters; the fire base was within sight as we gloated over our phenomenal luck. We were like kids who had just found out they had a snow day and didn't have to go to school. The end was in sight and we were about to end this long exhausting operation.

  Embesi said, "I am glad as hell we didn't have to repair that track. That was really lucky!"

  And as he uttered that last word, it happened. The tank immediately pulled hard to the left. Embesi screamed over the radio louder than I had ever heard him before, "Stop! Driver! Stop, goddamn it!"

  The track had decided that it had been abused long enough and had finally just let go. It must have heard our gloating and decided that we had, in fact, been too lucky. Fortunately for us, the driver stopped the tank before the track ran off the tank.

  After a careful inspection, Embesi discovered that the track had separated at the spot where the mine had detonated beneath it. The mine had cracked some of the end connectors, which weren't visible when he had inspected it. It decided it had had enough after it made a few circuits around the drive sprocket.

  It took us forty-five minutes to replace the section of track, but there was nothing we could do about the flattened roadwheel. The grunts had to set up a perimeter around us; it was especially frustrating for them with their goal in sight. They were so close to getting out of the bush, and now the tanks held them up-again. Some of them blamed us for wounding one of theirs when we hit the mine. The alternative, I suppose, was to let them find the antipersonnel mines with their own feet. Sometimes there was just no winning with grunts. They suddenly forgot who supplied them with water, who covered and rescued their asses more than once. They acted as if we hadn't done a damned thing for them.

  We soon resumed the slow procession toward the little fire base. We no sooner got into the fire base and dismounted than someone broke out several cans of warm beer-from where I don't know. A few of us gathered around and someone got out a camera to record our Kodak moment.

  We were all talking as ifwe were on amphetamines or speed, unable to speak at a normal rate, each of us doing more telling than listening and all of us giggling with the sudden relief and an outpouring of our pent-up emotions. Then the shakes started; we tried to chase the moving beer cans with our mouths, our hands betraying our adrenaline rush. We were still alive; we had made it through a horrible twelve days.

  We spent the night at the fire base. The following morning the three tanks of our platoon formed up for a fast return trip to 1st Tank Battalion's CP. It would be roads all the way and for the first time in two weeks we would feel a breeze, albeit the artificial one we created. I was still forced to stay down
in the gunner's position, because we were still in Indian country. I so desperately wanted to feel the wind. Now I had nothing to do; I could only sit there and imagine what it looked like outside.

  We had been on the road for twenty minutes, still going flat out when I heard Hearn ask Embesi over the intercom, "Do you smell that?"

  "Yeah. Smells like someone's burning tires, don't it?"

  We never skipped a beat as we headed back to civilization, anxious to get off the tank and get a decent night's sleep. A voice I didn't recognize came over my comm helmet, "Bravo Two Four, you got a fire." It was one of the tanks behind us telling us we were on fire. Embesi and Hearn quickly looked over their shoulders toward the engine exhaust where one would expect a fire to show itself. There was no sign of anything unusual coming out of our exhaust. There was, however, black smoke trailing from the left side of the tank.

  "Driver, stop the tank."

  When we came to a stop, I began to smell the burning-rubber odor. Embesi and Hearn had exited the turret. I took advantage of the open TC position to stick my head out. The left side of our tank was billowing black smoke.

  "Holy shit!" I thought to myself. I couldn't imagine what was burning until I got a whiff.

  Embesi yelled up to me to hand down one of our five-gallon cans of water that was strapped to the turret. "What's burning?" I asked as I was undoing the can.

  "The damned roadwheel's on fire," he said. The egg-shaped roadwheel wasn't turning, and the friction of it rubbing against the track caused it to ignite.

  He took the almost empty water can from me, unscrewed the top, and threw water at the blazing roadwheel. There wasn't enough water to do the job; it continued to burn.

  "Everybody off the tank!" he ordered. "We're gonna have a pissing contest!"

  How comical it must have looked, four grown men, standing in a semicircle, pissing on their tank. The urine steamed back off the burning roadwheel, adding mightily to the already awful stench. Fortunately, the contents of our collected bladders were sufficient to extinguish the fire. We climbed back up on the tank and got ready to move out.

  "Damnedest thing I ever saw!" Embesi said just before he told the driver to kick it in the ass.

  And so that is how we ended Allen Brook-pissin' on Better Living Thru Canister!

  ALLEN BROOK CONTINUED FOR ANOTHER MONTH, but without us. According to Marine Corps lists, casualties for Allen Brook in May totaled 138 killed and 686 wounded. There were 283 nonbattle casualties, mostly heat-stroke victims. In many engagements, the number of heat casualties equaled or exceeded the number of Marines killed and wounded.

  There was a total of 1,017 confirmed North Vietnamese killed. We were not in the habit of inflating numbers to accommodate the unseen enemy wounded and dead dragged off the battlefield, so actual enemy KIAs would probably approach closer to two or three times the confirmed count.

  We got back to 1st Tank Battalion and found orders waiting for us as soon as we fixed the roadwheel and the machine gun solenoid. We would get two days' rest, then head back to our CP at the 2/27 fire base.

  Chapter 10

  Not So Tough

  ith our role in Allen Brook over and Better Living repaired, the next day we made our way back to our platoon CP at 2/27's fire base. Awaiting us were orders that would send our platoon quite hastily to Hoi An, a city twelve miles south of Da Nang. We had been assigned to support an American ally in a war the American public thought was all their own. There were several allies in Vietnam including Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and South Korea. The South Koreans had several major units in-country, and now we would work with the Korean Marine Corps, or KMC.

  We packed up all our gear and left the fire base, bound for Marble Mountain, headquarters for Bravo Company, 5th Tanks. The following morning brought us to Hoi An, the only time I saw tanks driving through the streets of a major Vietnamese city.

  Our orders told us to get there as soon as possible to relieve a platoon from 1st Tank Battalion. We didn't know they had already left Hoi An-rather suspiciously. When one unit relieved another, that wasn't the way a change of command usually took place. We couldn't exchange information to find out the lay of the land and, more important, what it was like working with the Korean Marines. We never suspected the reason they had departed so quickly was that 1st Tank Battalion HQ didn't want them talking with us. Consequently, there was no one to warn us of what we were driving into.

  Overnight, with no help, Embesi and our new lieutenant had to learn to deal with the Korean command structure-a task made all the more difficult by the differences in language, customs, and food, not to mention the Koreans' operating procedures.

  When we pulled into our platoon CP we thought we had died and gone to heaven. It was like the set of South Pacific, complete with a white beach and hardback hooches that were constantly bathed with cool breezes-as close to a Far East vacation as we could get. At first, we were certain that this was one of Embesi's practical jokes, so nobody dismounted the tanks. We just sat there, waiting to be directed to the shit hole we were really supposed to occupy. Then we saw the LT and Embesi hauling their personal gear into one of the hooches.

  Could this be the real thing?

  We accepted our fate. As we unpacked we began to hear stories from a nearby US. Marine amtrac unit, also attached to the Koreans. This was our first inkling that the previous tank unit had had some kind of friction with the Koreans. Also, we heard tell of a tank that was lost while supporting the Korean infantry. But the craziest rumor-that we would be turning our tanks over to the Koreans-came from the Koreans themselves.

  Axiom Number Six: The stranger a rumor is, the more likely it's true.

  That idea sounded so totally weird that it just might be on the level. Naturally assuming the worst, we figured that we'd be assigned to the grunts ... but in which Marine Corps, American or Korean?

  SO HERE WE WERE, a rogue platoon, out of the mainstream and living on our own. Embesi had his own truck, driver, cook, and corpsman. Our tanks were immediately assigned to various KMC units. Embesi and the lieutenant would monitor the tanks by radio-a very similar arrangement to the one we had had with 2/27, when our tanks were spread around to support different units and bridges.

  I was reassigned as the gunner on Kimbrew's tank. We were ten miles away from the rest of the platoon, stuck in a small Korean Marine combat base in the middle of Dodge City, an area, as bad as they came, full of mines and booby traps. The Koreans referred to the outpost as the Mud Flats. That name didn't do it justice, because it was now July, the height of the dry season. Surrounding the compound was a sea of dry, redcracked earth that could have been on Mars. Not only was the terrain bizarre, but we were also surrounded by aliens who spoke no English.

  The Mud Flats was a nameless spot on the map at which a road and a railroad line intersected. Neither of them was recognizable to the naked eye. The rail line was a slight berm whose rails and ties had been stripped years earlier. The road, unless someone pointed it out to you, looked more like an abandoned, overgrown path. A look at the map showed that it was clearly an extension of the same railroad line we had fought for during Allen Brook. In fact, we were only three klicks (3,000 meters) north of the river and its eight spans of steel bridges leading to Goi Noi Island. It was hard to imagine that the long mound, one foot high and ten feet wide that ran through our compound, was the same rail line. The road, impossible to see, showed up on our maps as Highway 4. "Highway" was a gross misnomer; it hadn't seen traffic since the French left, more than a decade before.

  Our tank sat parallel to the railroad berm that ran through the Korean position. The previous Marine tank crew had dug a bunker into the side of the berm and covered it with sandbags. It became our daytime sleeping area, and the only place we could get out of the sweltering July sun, which boosted the mercury to a constant 120 degrees every day.

  The mud all around us, dry as concrete, amplified the heat beyond measure. The thick air made our least exertion a Hercul
ean effort. I swore that once I got back to The World, I would-to paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara-never, ever go hungry again ... for air-conditioning.

  I WAS REALLY PISSED THAT Embesi had assigned me out to this godforsaken spot. To make matters worse, the more I got to know Kimbrew, my new tank commander, the more I was convinced he wasn't playing with a full deck. He was a nice guy, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I increasingly distrusted his ability as a TC. During one of our conversations he said he would never use the .50-caliber machine gun on Charlie because it was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. The .50 was considered inhumane against soft targets and thus to be used only against vehicles and aircraft. Although Kimbrew was correct, a lot of Marines died on Allen Brook assaulting.51-caliber Chicom machine guns. I felt my chances of survival were severely limited with this tank commander and I wanted off this tank in the worst way.

  Many years later I asked Embesi, "Why did you assign me to Kimbrew's tank?" He laughed. "I had to have at least one man on each tank I could count on if the TC got hit. Somebody I knew that could at least tie his own bootlaces. That's why I had Gibson on his tank during Allen Brook."

  The Mud Flats compound's most prominent features were the square green bunkers the Koreans had built. None of us had ever seen sandbagged fortifications to rival these. They spent so much time filling sandbags and meticulously shaping and placing each bag that their bunkers appeared to be constructed of green bricks.

  Several days after our arrival, we noticed that not one Korean had yet set foot outside the wire. Were they too occupied filling sandbags to send out patrols? Their perimeter looked like the Maginot Line, yet it never seemed to be strong enough. The Koreans kept at it continually, always digging, filling, and tying. Each and every bag was shaped, set in place, and tamped square. If an enlisted man can recognize anything, it's busy work, and that combat base had to be the greatest monument to busy work ever created.

  One single trench, lined with sandbags, traversed the entire perimeter. The ring was broken only at the compound's two entrances, two hundred feet apart and directly opposite the other. A tank was positioned by each entrance; we would know if anyone came or went. But I had doubts about the soundness of the base's design. If attacking troops could breach the defensive line, couldn't the enemy run around the entire perimeter through the uninterrupted trench line?