Sand in the Wind

by Robert Roth

  An hour after they had returned to the perimeter, Trippitt called together his platoon commanders. He explained to them that the next day they would make camp in a tree line adjoining the village where Second Platoon had found the booby trap. Around noon, three of the platoons, with Second Platoon at the point, would circle behind the ville and approach from its opposite side. The remaining platoon would stay set-in as a blocking force in case any Viet Cong were flushed from the village.

  The men were told the plan at dawn the next morning. Nobody was surprised, and they were all less than anxious to return. Chief was given the point. As soon as he was within three hundred yards of the ville, he began leading the column across the rice paddies instead of on top of the dikes. When he reached the high ground, he avoided anything resembling a path and pushed his way through the brush. The closer he approached to the village, the more often he had to jump over trails that angled across his path.

  Chief soon found himself at the edge of the clearing with the ville in front of him. Three trails adjoined the clearing within a few feet of where he stood. Realizing this was a bad place to enter the ville, he hesitated going forward and tried to decide what to do. Trippitt radioed ahead to ask what the hold up was. Chief eyed the ground in front of him. It seemed hard packed and undisturbed. He moved slowly forward while shifting his eyes cautiously between the ville and the ground. Suddenly, as he was looking towards the ville, the ground beneath his feet gave a fraction more than it should have. He stood motionless for a protracted instant, as if awaiting retribution for a fatal error. Nothing happened. “Stay back!” Redstone cautioned sharply.

  Appleton was right behind him. “Booby trap?”

  “I think so.”

  “A dud?”

  “Maybe it’s pressure-release,” Redstone answered, referring to the type of booby trap that is detonated after pressure is removed instead of when it is applied,.

  “Don’t move. I’ll get the lieutenant.”

  ‘That’s the last thing I’m gonna do,’ thought Redstone. ‘The very last thing.’

  Kramer approached and found Redstone in the exact same position as when he had first felt the earth give beneath his foot. “You sure it’s a booby trap?”

  ‘No. I’m just fucking around.’ — “I think so.”

  “Okay, don’t move.”

  ‘Sure am gettin’ some great advice.’

  Kramer turned to Ramirez. “Get some E-tools, fast.” Two shovels were quickly passed up the column. Ramirez and Appleton held them as they looked questioningly at Kramer. “Dig a trench just off the trail. Be careful.” Ramirez moved forward on his hands and knees. “That’s far enough. Start digging, carefully. Make it just deep enough for Chief to dive into.” Redstone also wanted to remind them to be careful, but he realized this was unnecessary. “Won’t do much good,” he commented somberly, doubting that the trench would do any good.

  “Won’t do any harm,” Kramer replied. “Did you hear a click?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean anything. . . . It might not be a booby trap.”

  “We can’t take that chance.”

  ‘I can’t,’ thought Redstone.

  In order to keep calm, Kramer began thinking out loud. “If it’s a dud, we’re safe.”

  ‘You’re safe,’ thought Redstone.

  “If it’s pressure-release, we’ve still got a chance. You’ll dive into the trench, right?”

  Redstone nodded while thinking he’d be “lucky” only to lose his legs. This thought seemed bad enough, but then a worse one came to him, and he asked Kramer, “What if it’s a Bouncing Betsy?”

  This frightened Kramer. He pictured a metal canister popping a few feet above the ground, hanging for a second, and then exploding in all directions. “Then we’re wasting our time,” he thought out loud. “Maybe we could do it some other way. . . . Do you want to try and put a board under your foot?”

  “Never be able to do it.”

  A few seconds later, Kramer got another idea. “Should we spread some flak jackets around your leg?”

  “Too risky. I might of missed the fuse. You might hit it.”

  Until now, Redstone’s muscles had remained in the same tensed condition as when he had first felt the earth give. Feeling the strain and afraid of getting a cramp, he carefully relaxed his muscles without moving his foot. Redstone immediately felt surer of himself. He was further relieved to see sweat dripping from Kramer’s face, knowing that his own face was dry. Still frightened, he felt Kramer was doing enough worrying for both of them, thus leaving his own mind free to react.

  In a few minutes Ramirez and Appleton finished digging and returned to their places in the column. Redstone eyed the trench nervously, planning exactly how he would dive into it. Kramer motioned back the men behind him. He asked Redstone if he was ready. Chief nodded while thinking, ‘If you’d get out of here, I’d get this over with.’ Kramer started to walk away, but Redstone called him back and explained that he wanted a small hole dug next to the sole of his back foot. As Kramer was doing this, Redstone said, “Make it gradual so I can put my foot in it without putting any more weight on my other foot.”

  Kramer finished digging and stood waiting for Redstone to put his foot into the hole. Instead of doing so, Redstone motioned Kramer back. Only after Kramer was fifteen yards behind him, did Chief ease his foot into the hole. Very gradually, he shifted more weight onto his back foot while trying to retain pressure on his front foot. He leaned slowly forward, and at the right instant, shot his body towards the trench. Even before he landed in the bottom of it, Redstone knew there hadn’t been a booby trap or else it was a dud. For a few seconds he lay motionless in the trench, relieved by the sound of his own heavy breathing. He got to his feet and spit some dirt from his mouth.

  Kramer walked forward and found Redstone standing near the spot where his foot had been. “No booby trap?”

  Redstone pointed to the spot. “It’s there all right.” As Kramer kneeled, he could see a pinlike detonating device. If the rest hadn’t been covered by dirt, he would have seen a circle of them less than an inch in diameter. They had been placed in the ground upright, and all that should have been necessary to set off the mine was for one of them to be bent more than thirty degrees from the vertical. Clearly this had happened. Chief pointed to the needle that lay almost flat. “A dud.”

  Kramer returned to his position in the column as Redstone again began to crawl forward. Appleton stood well back while he watched him. First Chief would run his hand over the ground while gently pressing to see if it would give. He had gone about ten yards when the weight of one of his knees depressed the ground. There was a pop. A canister burst up from the ground. The thought, ‘Maybe a dud’ — his only chance — shot through his mind the same moment the canister exploded beneath him.

  The instant before Appleton was knocked backwards by the concussion, he saw a mass of arms and legs fly up in front of him. Ramirez, who was in back of Appleton, caught some shrapnel in the leg. They scrambled to their feet and reached Redstone at the same time as Kramer and Stoker. All of them had to turn their heads away as soon as they saw what lay in front of them. Redstone’s calm face, his eyes wide open, stared up at the sky. Shreds of dripping flesh hung from his rib cage, then nothing. His legs, cut off at the waist, were lying at a right angle to his upper torso and facing down. Only a thin strip of flesh joined the two sections of his body; and below his rib cage lay a green and brown iridescent mass that had once been his stomach. Stoker stepped backwards and began to vomit. Kramer was only able to keep from doing so by turning his back to the corpse. He noticed Ramirez’s blood-soaked pants leg, and began to tell Stoker to take care of him before changing his mind and calling for another corpsman.

  There was nothing to do but to try and cover the body. They had left their packs at camp, and therefore their ponchos and poncho liners. The first hootch was only twenty yards away. Appleton started to walk towards it, but Kramer shouted, “Wait! There may be
some more booby traps.”

  “I ain't goin’ nowhere,” Appleton called back harshly. An old man was sitting on the floor of the hootch. Appleton screamed, “Lai dai!” the Vietnamese words for “come here.” The old man didn’t move. “Lai dai!” Appleton screamed again. Still the old man sat motionless. Appleton aimed his rifle and emptied a magazine above the old man’s head. “LAI DAI!”

  The old man rose to his feet with great effort, and tottered towards Appleton. The frightened look in his eyes clearly indicated that he thought he would be killed. When the trembling old man reached him, Appleton spun him around and shoved him towards the hootch. Appleton followed a few yards behind until they reached it. He grabbed a straw mat off the floor and began shoving the old man back towards Redstone’s corpse. By this time Trippitt had reached the front of the column. Appleton threw the old man to the ground at Trippitt’s feet.

  Now that he was standing above the corpse, Appleton hesitated. He couldn’t figure out what to do. His eyes avoiding as much of the sight as possible, he finally turned over Redstone’s legs and pushed them against his upper torso. He still could not look at the grotesquely shortened form, so he laid the straw mat on top of it. With great effort, and some help from Kramer and Ramirez, he rolled the mat around it.

  Trippitt yanked the old man violently to his feet, at the same time ordering his men to round up all the villagers and burn their hootches. They did so with vengeance. Old people and mothers were pulled from their hootches, children still clinging to them. The soldiers shoved and kicked them from hootch to hootch, at all times making sure the villagers walked in front of them as a shield against booby traps. Constant screams from the children and moaning cries from the elderly added to the madness. Grenades continued to explode as each bunker was fragged, every hootch burned, and the peasants were herded into the center of the ville. Those too elderly to walk were dragged by their arms or legs. As more and more peasants were shoved, kicked, and dragged to the center of the ville, the moaning and screaming increased. This seemed to further incense the soldiers. Those few villagers who had tried to bring some of their valuables — a battered pot, a bag of rice, a wooden bowl — had them grabbed away and flung to the ground.

  Soon the entire ville was in flames, and all of the inhabitants pressed into a frightened mass at its center. A few of the Marines spat on them as they walked by. The elderly sat cowering, glancing up at their tormentors, wondering if they would soon see their own deaths and those of their grandchildren who now pressed against their mothers, bewildered and crying, too frightened to ask “Why?” maybe sensing that even their elders wouldn’t be able to answer them. Only the younger mothers sat stoically, never having known anything but war and never having possessed illusions that life could be something more than what they were now enduring.

  Trippitt called in a medivac chopper for Redstone’s corpse and Ramirez. He also called for a helicopter to evacuate the villagers. Chalice was one of the men assigned to guard them until it came. The pathetic scene before him was enough to temporarily obscure the memory of Redstone’s death and their complicity in it. He knew they would be sent to Due Due, a resettlement camp — not a village but straight rows of tin-roofed hootches no more than four feet apart. His mind ignored the stench of it, and he kept telling himself that it was for the best, anything would be better than living in a free-fire zone. Chalice knew they feared much worse. When no one was standing near him, he told them not to worry, that they wouldn’t be harmed. His words had no effect on them. It was not only fear that they were suffering. They looked at those standing before them with guns, these men with the watery eyes; and they knew there was a difference between themselves and these men. Yet they were not sure what this difference was. They were cruel, yes; but still different. They could not know that it was impossible for these men to think of a thatch-covered shack as a home, to see any difference between one piece of high ground and another, to find meaning and importance in the simple graves of unknown ancestors and remembered parents, to look upon battered pots and straw mats as valuables, or to know they were unwanted and terrifying strangers.

  The medivac chopper arrived in a half hour, but the Marines had to wait another two hours before a helicopter came for the detainees. When the company headed back to camp, it wasn’t necessary for Trippitt to push his men. The fear of being caught in the open at night kept them at a fast pace. They reached camp just before dusk. Not enough time remained to heat C-rations, and it was another hour before they had finished digging their foxholes and were able to eat their food cold from the cans in the dark.

  Tired as they were, no one in Second Platoon found it easy to sleep that night. It was just as well. Shortly after one o’clock in the morning, they were awakened by a series of explosions inside their perimeter — too small to be mortars or rockets, they had to be blooker rounds. The men scrambled into their foxholes, now wishing they had dug them deeper. They had no idea where the rounds were coming from. All that was left for them to do was sit cringing beneath the lips of their foxholes.

  Forsythe and Chalice were in the same hole, both of them thinking that sooner or later one of the rounds would land in somebody’s foxhole, hoping it wouldn’t be theirs. They knew that their hole was deeper than most of those on the perimeter, and they were thankful. Chalice pressed his back against the wall of the foxhole. The smell of damp earth, once nothing more than a repugnant odor, a reminder of the filth he’d learned to accept and live in, was now something reassuring. Unconsciously, he rubbed his fingers into the dirt. The feel of it somewhat calmed him, promised protection. He could ask for no more, except maybe a deeper hole to burrow himself into.

  The intervals between explosions increased to twenty and thirty minutes. During the long waits for a new explosion, the newer men would continually tell themselves, ‘That might have been the last,’ but an additional explosion seemed always to prove them wrong. Those who had been through this before, though just as frightened, were outwardly calmer. They knew the “odds” were with them. There was also the strange, added comfort that the Phantom Blooker was no longer a stalking shadow, but rather a tangible force that had finally seen fit to declare itself. They knew that even when the barrage ended, it would only be for the night; and if they were “lucky,” they would witness this same scene many more times.

  Though he continued to react with the same flinching tenseness in his muscles, Chalice almost grew accustomed to the recurrent explosions. The barrage had lasted too long without any apparent damage. He began trying to locate the rounds in his mind, following their sound from one point in the perimeter to another. Awed by the skill with which each round was aimed, he identified with whoever was firing the blooker, as if he himself were doing the firing. With each additional round, Chalice began to experience the barrage more as an event of mysterious interest than one of great danger.

  Trippitt had called in Puff the Magic Dragon. It slowly circled the perimeter, spraying thousands of machine gun bullets around it. The roar of Puff’s guns seemed always an afterthought to the dotted red line of fire that sprang from its invisible underside. As if to taunt both the Marines on the ground and those above, the Phantom Blooker continued his barrage unaffected. Puff circled the perimeter for over an hour without being able to silence the incoming blooker rounds. They continued landing with undiminished accuracy. A round exploded to the side of Chalice’s hole. Globs of mud fell into it. Just as Chalice started to whisper “That was close,” an anguished moan sickened him.

  “I’m hit. Help me,” a voice called out in pain and disbelief.

  This same cry was repeated. It came from the position ten yards to the left of Forsythe’s. Chalice started to climb out of the foxhole, but Forsythe pulled him back. “What are you doing?”

  “Help! I’m hit.”

  “Pm gonna help him.”

  “Shhh,” Forsythe warned. “We’ve got to stay —”

  “Corpsman! Corpsman!”

  “— in our positi
ons.”

  “But he’s hurt bad.”

  “You don’t know who’s out there. If a Gook gets inside the perimeter, there’ll be a lot more people yelling for —”

  “Help me. I’m hit.”

  “— help. . . . What could you do anyway?”

  “We’ve gotta do something,” Chalice said nervously.

  “Just take it easy.” Forsythe turned to the foxhole on his left. “Payne, get a corpsman over there.”

  Hamilton’s angry voice replied, “Shut up! One’s on the way.”

  Chalice realized that merely for his sake, Forsythe had wrongly called to Payne.

  “Corpsman, get me a corpsman.”

  “Do you recognize his voice?”

  “No,” Forsythe answered irritably. “He’s from Third Platoon.”

  Chalice heard someone running towards the wounded man’s foxhole. The moaning continued, but more quietly and without words. He heard the same voice say in a calmer but still distressed tone, “See if Cox is all right.”

  “Quiet. Don’t worry about him,” came the reply.

  “He’s all right?”

  “He’s all right.”

  A round hit the opposite side of the perimeter. Chalice heard a faint, distant voice cry for help. No longer was he looking upon the blooker barrage as something to be experienced. Scared for his own life, horrified by the cries around him, and anguished by his inability to do anything but cringe within his foxhole, Chalice became increasingly nervous and agitated. He watched Puff shoot its line of fire directly in front of his hole, gritting his teeth and hoping that this would silence the Phantom Blooker.

  It wasn’t until an hour before dawn that the blooker barrage ceased. A few minutes later the sergeant of Third Platoon found two of his men dead in their hole. At first light, a helicopter was already circling above the perimeter. Someone set off a smoke grenade to guide it in. The wounded man in the foxhole next to Chalice’s was carried aboard unconscious. The other man from this hole went with him, wrapped in a poncho. Three more bodies were carried aboard. Five wounded men, who now regretted that they hadn’t dug their holes deeper, were also helped to the copter. Numerous other men walked around inside the perimeter wearing bandages for less serious wounds. It was not until he saw all this, that Chalice was able to comprehend fully the damage done during the night.