The next morning we left our position and drove down to C-4. There, my crew would pick up a new TC and turn around and go right back to Oceanview.
It would be the last time I would ever see them. On their part, the goodbyes were genuine, but all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there.
The next part of my trip was by truck down to Cua Viet. Never had a ride down that familiar beach taken as long as it did that morning. Mysteriously, the shore had tripled in length and was strewn with dozens of unseen mines, each one with my name engraved on it. I was hunkered down in the back of the truck, never more grateful to be inside my two-part flak jacket, M14 at the ready, and pistol holstered under my left armpit. My eyes, just above the truck's sidewalls, scanned the sand dunes, looking for an NVA I just knew was out there-and who didn't want to let me go home.
I made it to Cua Viet and, eventually, to Dong Ha.
Next morning, after a sleepless night back at the company CP, I reported to the airstrip to wait for the first C-130 destined for Quang Tri. I knew that I was still facing the most dangerous part of the trip, for if my journey was going to get interrupted anywhere, it would be at the Dong Ha airstrip. Often, when a plane landed, NVA artillery opened up and tried to catch it on the ground, where it was most vulnerable. So at Dong Ha, planes never "stopped" in the traditional sense of the word. They just kept taxiing while their crews pushed out pallets of supplies. To catch a plane at Dong Ha, you chased after it and literally caught the plane as the last pallet rolled off.
We were told, to my surprise, that our plane had to take on some cargo and would actually stop for a few seconds. Ten of us were waiting for that same flight, half heading home and the rest going on R&R. We were all waiting in a slit trench running parallel to the runway. I was surrounded by nine very anxious men as the Marine C-130 began its steep approach to the runway.
A gunnery sergeant who ran the strip came over and said, "If you guys want to get out of here, ya gonna have to help with loadin' some cargo. We can't sit around here waitin' for Charlie to shell us."
"Shit, Gunny, we don't mind. This is our bird out of here!"
With half of us going home and the others leaving for R&R, what did we care? We were only too happy to lend a hand, because none of us wanted to be caught on the ground by Charlie's artillery. I had almost forgotten the first day I had landed at Dong Ha, six months earlierbut I was in for a quick refresher.
The C-130 touched down, immediately roared its engines in reverse to bring it to a stop at the end of the runway, and turned toward us. We were brought around the edge of the slit trench and told to kneel down behind a sandbag wall. The plane raced back up the runway, which was more like a straight dirt road. Billowing clouds of brown dust followed the plane as it taxied toward us at an alarming speed.
We were led around the revetment in a half-crouched run to muscle whatever cargo had to accompany us on the flight. Turning the corner, we ran right into two rows of ... body bags!
We all came to an abrupt halt. "Oh, fuck!" I said.
"No fuckin' way, man!" said another guy. "I'm outta here!"
In unison, several men yelled to the gunny, "You motherfucker!"
"Let's go!" he yelled back. "Two men to a bag! Ya ain't leavin' till they're all on!"
To load all twelve bags, we had to make several trips in and out of the aircraft. With the first five, we paired ourselves and tried to carry them at a run onto the plane. It was difficult, because one man had to run backward while carrying that weight up the ramp. As we hurried back and forth, we were all grumbling and bitching-"I don't believe this shit!" and "I'm too short for this!"-and cursing out the cargo master. We hated anyone with a cushy job who hadn't seen combat, especially any asshole who took advantage of us, like this one. Making us, the ones who did the fighting, load the dead was the final outrage.
The plane sat there too long. We had just gone back for the third haul when the first shell landed at the far end of the runway.
"Oh, shit!" I said, as my partner and I struggled with another bag.
"Charlie, you motherfucker," he said. "You're gonna make sure we don't leave this place, aren't you?"
From the front of the plane, the pilots screamed at us to get on. Already the crew chief was raising the ramp. Quickly we lugged the last bag up the ramp and set it in the middle of the floor along with the others. Out of breath, we sat on one of the two benches running along the airplane's bulkhead.
Swiftly the plane taxied to the end of the runway, all of us praying that we would make it through the shelling. The plane turned. Its engines went to full power.
Crack! Crack! Two more rounds landed, one hundred meters off to the side of the runway. The plane rolled forward, engines going full bore. Inside, we hung on to keep from sliding backward.
Come on, I thought. Come on, you can make it! Others verbalized the same thing. We were going to will this goddamned plane off the ground.
Faster and faster we rolled down the dirt runway. Finally, we left the ground in a steep climb. To keep the cargo from sliding to the rear of the plane, everybody had to lean forward and grab a bag. Finally airborne, the ten of us sat back, glad that we didn't have to cling to the bags any longer. We all sighed in relief, but it was restrained. There wasn't the normal joy that ten guys leaving The Nam would display, not with the bags at our feet.
Nobody looked down, ignoring the silent cargo we had just loaded into this flying hearse. Each guy just stared at the man sitting across from him.
We each kept to ourselves, willing the plane to keep on flying. Our minds kept running through all the things that could easily still go wrong-and make us join up with those twelve who lay at our feet. We were the lucky ones, and we knew it. None of us talked. We wouldn't insult those less fortunate who traveled with us, also going home.
The flight to Quang Tri took only ten minutes. No sooner were we up and we were landing again. Independently of one another, without uttering a word, all ten of us had arrived with the same game plan. They had gotten us to do their dirty work once, but there was no way they were going to get us again. At the first moment a survivable escape offered itself, each of us planned to exit that plane.
On the ground, as our taxi speed began to slow, the crew chief began to lower the ramp. Before the C-130 stopped, even before the ramp was all the way down, we scampered through the opening and leaped to the ground.
A few guys tripped, but they rolled and jumped up again. We all broke into a run, leaving behind a dumbfounded crew chief who screamed for us to stop and help with the cargo.
Pretending not to hear his shouting over the propeller noise, we ignored him and kept running, not making eye contact with anyone on the ground. We weren't getting suckered into doing their dirty work again. Let those wing-wipers get a taste of the war.
I grabbed the first truck I could get to 3rd Tank Battalion CP. Once there, I hated having to turn in my .45, but I had been careful to hide my M14 outside the battalion office. For the first and only time, I met the battalion CO. He presented me with a certificate and thanked me for my ser-vice with his battalion.
I stayed there one night, then trucked back to the airfield for an uneventful flight to Da Nang. On the tarmac they directed me to an area that did nothing except handle the rotation of troops.
I was assigned to a hooch, where I grabbed a vacant cot and was instructed to hang loose while waiting for our "back to The World" flight information. Only then did it really hit me: I was immersed in a bunch of guys who were going home, delirious with knowing that they had survived the ordeal.
They were the most upbeat group I had ever been around. None of us imagined this would be the last time ever we could all share our experiences with men who understood, who knew the rush of still being alive. It was the last time we would have to wake up in this god-awful country. No more standing watch or burning shitters. We were outta here!
That evening, we tried to sleep but were like kids on Christmas Eve. We knew dawn would
come faster if we slept, but we were all too pumped up. The jokes, particularly those about how short we were, lasted all through the night. We talked about our girls back home and what kind of cars we were going to buy. I had wedding plans in the making; I was due to get married on March 29-only nine days away. I still had to spend four or five days on Okinawa before we caught our plane for California, so my bride-to-be was getting a little nervous that I wouldn't make it in time.
At 10:30 p.m. we all jumped at the familiar ga-womp of an incoming rocket. All through the hootch went the cry of "Incoming!" We piled out of the building and into a slit trench nearby.
Out loud, each of us was saying the same thing: "I'm too short for this shit!" One guy, in a trance, had squatted down against the sandbag wall. Another was weeping that he'd never make it home. The entire trench turned on him and told him to shut up, which he did-but he continued to whimper.
It was impossible to tell where Charlie's rockets landed, but they were somewhere in the distance, maybe at the other end of the airbase. A likely target was the hundreds of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft that packed the airfield. With so much hardware parked all over, it would be hard to miss. And every combat veteran in our trench knew that rockets sometimes preceded a ground attack. Not one of us had a weapon. Probably for the first time in thirteen months, everyone was totally defenseless-except me. I still had my M14 with four full magazines, each holding twenty rounds.
All of us watched the night sky, looking for the dreaded red star cluster that signaled an enemy ground attack. I positioned myself at one end of the slit trench, waiting for anyone or anything that came our way.
So far, the rockets were impacting a long way off. Men were speculating that it would affect tomorrow's flight.
Someone said loudly, "Charlie, you can't even let me get out of here without more shit, can you?" That drew a big laugh, because we were all thinking the same thing. All were praying, Please, just let me get out of here!
If I report the phrase, "I'm too short for this shit," just one more time here, that night I must have heard it five thousand times. It was a mantra that we uttered over and over again.
The rockets subsided after about ten minutes and an all-clear sounded, and we went back inside our hooches. After that, no way was anyone getting any sleep!
Late the next morning, an Air Force bus took us out to the tarmac, where we stood in a loose formation next to a Continental Airlines DC-8, waiting for it to unload its cargo-a fresh batch of FNGs. It was a changing of the guard. They had all just enjoyed twelve hours of airborne airconditioning, so when each new guy reached the doorway to exit the plane, he usually took a step back, as if he'd been hit in the face with the blast of a Pittsburgh coke furnace.
One by one, they staggered down the stairs and past a gauntlet of mangy veterans, calling out to them, "Hey, you think this is hot?
You ain't seen shit yet!"They were taunted with questions like, "Hey, FNG! Don't you wish you was us? We're so short we could use a blade of grass for a hammock!" And reminders like, "Look at the bright side; you've only got three hundred and ninety-four and a wake-up!" And horrible threats like, "They got a plastic bag with your name on it!"
It was then that I realized just how fortunate I had been twelve months earlier to arrive by sea. I had never had to face a chanting group of happy short-timers, nor the sudden plunge into this hellhole's heat. I never had to face a crowd of men my own age wearing tattered uniforms, whose eyes looked ten years older than they had looked only a year before.
We climbed the stairs to the DC-8, thanking God we were not one of those men, who each had a whole year in front of him. There was a lot of joking, singing, and grab-assing as the first in our group entered the plane. Something has to go wrong, I thought. This plane just has to have some mechanical problem-something bad has to happen!
No sooner did the first guy disappear into the plane's door, than he bounded back out. "Round eyes!" he yelled down to the rest of us. "We got us some round-eyed ladies on this here plane!"
From below him, the assembled horny souls let out a collective scream of catcalls. We couldn't believe it-female stewardesses ... American female stewardesses ... in dresses!
We taxied out. Our freedom bird started down the runway. Inside, there was an absolute hush. No one uttered a word-yet silently, to ourselves, each of us said the same thing: Don't fuck with me now, Charlie. Just let me get out of here!
We held onto our armrests for dear life. The guy next to me had his fingers crossed on both hands. Some had their eyes shut, others just glanced from one face to another, seeking reassurance that we were going to make it.
Gaining speed, the airplane made a slow turn and began to climbout of the Stone Age. The higher we got, the safer we each began to feel. But nobody uttered a peep.
Finally the captain came over the intercom: "Guys, we have just left the airspace of the Republic of Vietnam!"
Cheers, whistles, yells, and foot stomping engulfed the cabin. Hats were thrown in the air. We had made it! Never have I had such an exhilarating feeling. The uproar lasted for five straight minutes, unabated.
When it finally died down, one of the stews announced that there could be no playing of radios or cassette players. They could affect the plane's navigation equipment, she explained.
A few seconds later, her announcement was followed by a voice I could only assume was the captain's: "Hey, guys, don't worry about it! We don't know how to navigate anyway!"
With that, the entire cabin broke into hysterics.
"Ma'am, could you get me a pillow, please?"
After that first guy, everyone wanted a pillow or a blanket, just to watch the stews lean forward and reach up into the overhead bins, their skirts raising up a little. With every request, the whistling started anew.
I felt sorry for the girls, but they were very gracious about the whole thing. After all, their passengers had just been through hell. They even looked as if they enjoyed it just a bit.
AND SO ENDED MY THIRTEEN-MONTH TOUR. Waiting for me was my future bride and the chance to go to college. I was twenty-two, going on forty.
We were all returning heroes-or so we thought. We never imagined what awaited us when we landed in the States. I had no anger at the moment. That would come later, not to be overcome until I wrote this book.
I was alive. I sat next to the window and gazed out among the clouds, a million thoughts running through my mind. I pulled out a pack of Camels, flicked the wheel on my Zippo, and lifted the flame to my cigarette.
Engraved on my lighter were the words from that sign outside ConThien:
For those who must fight for it, life has a certain flavor the protected will never know.
Yes it does, 1 thought.
Yes, it does.
Praying for Slack: A Marine Corps Tank Commander in Viet Nam Page 30