Major Moose told Mr. Guy to pack up his gear. We were taking him back to our base at Chu Lai to await further instructions. The zips had probably caught this mass meeting on the side of a hill in the middle of nowhere, and pretty soon mortar rounds would be raining down on our heads. We all helped him pack up, and the Major told the CIA Air America guys to stop being pussies and take a ride in a gunbird for a day and become warriors! The CIA guys wanted no part of real bullets being shot at them. They were having too much fun driving ARVN Generals around for drug deals, getting overpaid for doing nothing, and living like kings in Thailand. They looked at the Recon team as if they were Attila the Hun and tribes. They got into their spotless white UHIE helicopter and headed out to another secret deal or whatever they did over there—no one really knew. The Captain from G-2 said, “Okay, keep your eye on Mr. Guy,” and left confused. Then the rest of us shook his hand. He was like Davey Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Jeremiah Johnson all rolled into one. He had more balls than all of us put together. We took 17 various firearms, grenades, VC maps and other assorted stuff back with Mr. Guy.
The Major called the ready room and asked the Gunny Sergeant who ran the flight line to have some cold beer for a returning hero. We asked permission from the control tower to do a fly over, which is where we come in but don’t land. We circled the field once, showing off. We only do this on a “Great Happening Day,” as I called them. The whole base soon realized what Mr. Gene Guy had done, all on his own, all five-feet six-inches and 145 pounds of him. It’s not the size of the dog that counts; it’s the size of his bite!
We had a multiple-squadron party for Mountain Man Guy. The Colonel made a speech that a man who wasn’t good enough to join the Marines was now an honorary Sergeant in Klondike. Mr. Guy showed us all the qualities that we should all strive for in our lives. Duty, honor and country! He had courage beyond the normal call for courage. The Colonel also said, “We are not allowed to tell this great man’s story to the media. It is a classified incident!” The next day the Colonel personally flew Mr. Guy and his weapons collection up to III MAF Headquarters to meet General Walt. They all had lunch together, then the Colonel gave Mr. Guy a quick tour of the hill where his brother had been killed, so he could see the site for himself. He took pictures with his camera to take back to Montana. Mr. Guy had to sign some kind of statement that he wouldn’t talk to the press, and the next day he was flown back to the US.
General Walt personally thanked Mr. Guy for his total devotion to our cause and said he would become a folk legend among those who knew his brave tale. So he faded into the tall mountains of Montana’s wilderness, knowing in his heart he had looked the tiger in the eye and lived! Whenever we now sit by campfires late at night, we pass his Viking saga on to those young warriors who some day will rise up and also look the tiger in the eye.
CHAPTER 5
DAILY LIFE AT CLUB MED, CHU LAI
THE PHANTOM FAGGOT
Our hootches at Chu Lai had tin roofs, and were made of wood with screens, with wood to cover the screens in monsoon weather. Rather than a beach, we had about a 100-foot cliff overlooking the ocean. There were large boulders and stones by the water, so you really couldn’t walk too well on the shore behind the barracks. Farther down, the Sergeants had a private lagoon and a small beach that came with it. The whole shore area had bunkers on the hillsides and double concertina wire. The zips never came in by sampan boats to attack us at the seaside of our base.
One cold monsoon night, when it was so miserable you would stick your dick out the screen to take a piss rather than get wet, a young PFC came running into our hootch claiming that someone had tried to grab his dick in the four-man shitter. “You’ve had too much to drink,” I said, “there aren’t any faggots in the Marine Corps.” To which he replied, “Bullshit!”
By this time, Major Moose had gotten me promoted to Lance Corporal. I told everyone to take their K-bar knife or some other weapon when they went for a shit. About two weeks went by and the same thing happened again, only this time to another guy in the hootch next door. I made the announcement that if any queer grabbed my dick I’d cut his arm off. I then stabbed my machete knife into the floorboards next to my rack and went to sleep.
Nothing happened for about a week and we all forgot about these two isolated incidents. Then one night, Lance Corporal Iron Leg, who was a Blackfoot Indian, started bitching about how the Indians got fucked by the government. I told him Iroquois Indians had massacred the Gebhart family on Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania. They even tomahawked a baby and dumped his dead body down a well, so I did not want to hear about how we had mistreated the Indians. There were disputes and heated arguments between us, but we were blood brothers and would kill for each other. Lance Corporal Iron Leg was a crew chief and they were getting ready to promote him to Corporal, since he knew the UH-IE inside-out.
On this night he woke up around 3:00 AM in our hootch screaming that the Phantom Faggot was sitting on his cot sucking his dick. He grabbed his grease gun and chased the guy out of the hootch in his underwear, then started shooting his grease gun. We all jumped up and got our pants and boots on, grabbed our rifles and helmets and ammo belts, and ran out into the cold, pouring rain to see what was going on. Lance Corporal Iron Leg didn’t bullshit. He wasted half a magazine on the faggot. He was ringing wet and super pissed off.
Meanwhile, the mortar pits shot-up 81mm flares and the sirens all went off like we were under attack. Every time this happened, everyone on guard duty got a mad minute of shooting their weapons. We had a Marine grunt who had a German Shepherd to guard our beach area. We grabbed the Marine and his faithful dog Tide from the command post. The attack was canceled when the Lieutenant heard the story. He was pissed that Lance Corporal Iron Leg shot his gun in the compound area and wanted to bust him.
The grunt Marine let Tide go. He followed the trail down the cliffs and onto the rocky beach with all of us running after him, including Lance Corporal Iron Leg still in his boxer shorts. The dog caught the Phantom Faggot stuck in the double concertina wire on the Sergeants’ private beach. We all climbed down the private steps that were chopped into the cliff to the beach below.
Who did Tide catch, but none other than a black Marine who lived in our very hootch—PFC Blowjob. I often wondered why he was always putting Vaseline on his lips—my lips were never chapped, but who knows? None of my business! He had seemed okay, and worked in the office next to mine at S-2 Intelligence. He had even volunteered to be a door gunner. I thought he was kind of a sissy, but he never caused any problems. By the time the dog handler called Tide off, he had ripped the meat off PFC Blowjob’s leg. He was covered with blood from the barbed wire and the dog bites, crying and begging for his life.
We all decided we were going to kill him. I wanted to hang him, but we didn’t have a rope or a tree. My buddy Lance Corporal Iron Leg wanted to finish the magazine of his grease gun on him. The Marine grunts with the dog didn’t want any part of his execution, and put Tide on his leash and left. Corporal Boozer and Sergeant Irish came down the cliff with a case of beer, and we all started drinking while we decided how to proceed. PFC Blowjob was so scared he shit his pants. PFC Blackbeard said, “Since we are on the beach, let’s dig a hole, put him in it, and let the incoming tide drown him.” He even volunteered to run up the cliff and get entrenching tools. He said this was how pirates in days of old killed their enemies on the outer banks of North Carolina.
Next thing we saw was a jeep driving up the beach from the other end of the base. It was First Sergeant Doright and he was super pissed. He was in his boxer shorts with a poncho thrown over his head and his .45-auto in his hand. The grunt with the dog must have filled him in on what we had in mind. He parked the jeep and stepped into the hole PFC Blackbeard was digging, and broke his left ankle. Then he was beyond being pissed. He cocked his .45. He was in extreme pain and told us to drive him to the 93rd Army Evacuation Hospital and to throw the faggot in the jeep before he bled to death.
PFC Blackbeard was ordered to drive, so Lance Corporal Iron Leg grabbed the faggot, threw him in the jeep, put his grease gun to his head, and away they went. We all thought it was a lot of fun and drank the rest of the beer. By the time we got back up the cliff and changed into dry clothes, Headquarters called to say they were sending down a Lieutenant from their legal department to take statements. We went to chow, and then lined up at the S-1 Office for our interview.
III MAF Headquarters sent down a real gem, First Lieutenant Truth. He was skinny, all business, and afraid he would be killed leaving the air-conditioned safety of III MAF Headquarters in Da Nang to travel to our barbarian outpost at Ky Ha. People told their story according to their rank—Sergeant, Corporal, Lance Corporal and PFC, and he took each Marine’s deposition. First Lieutenant Truth was out of his element when he met our crew of ruthless killers. I went into my interview wearing my helmet, on which I had written, “BJ’S HIRED GUN.”
He said that just because a person is gay doesn’t mean he deserves to be killed. I told him I was from a town in western Pennsylvania where they killed faggots for sport on Saturday night. He took my statement and couldn’t believe there were people like me on the planet.
Just about every Marine made fun and jokes out of the investigation and cut up Lieutenant Truth, who was feeling sorry for PFC Blowjob. Sergeant Irish gave him a long story about daytime 122mm rocket attacks on the base. This scared the Lieutenant and he left, taking the Phantom Faggot with him in handcuffs to III MAF Headquarters. That was the last time we saw the Phantom Faggot—someone from S-1 came in and packed his shit. Another empty bunk. Since he had an air medal and air crew wings, the Marines gave him a general under honorable discharge and sent him back to Los Angeles so he could be with his fudge-packing beach bum buddies.
Thank God, we had one less problem to deal with. But from that time on, everyone who took a shit at night took his K-bar or pistol with him for good measure!
THE TWIN BROTHERS
We had a tall, blond guy named Corporal Brewer who spent most of his time fixing helicopter bullet holes. When he wasn’t working as a metal smith, he was listening to tapes from his girl back home. He was truly love-struck, and his bunk was decorated with his girlfriend’s pictures. He either wrote her a letter or made a tape recording for her everyday.
He was an okay guy who never caused any problems, even when we occasionally got him drunk at the club. His only problem was that he was in love. Then his father took deathly ill, and he was granted a Red Cross emergency leave to his hometown of Yuma, Arizona. He flew home and returned five days later. The only problem was, it wasn’t him. It was his twin brother.
We soon figured out the scam, but we really liked Corporal Brewer, so we taught his twin brother all the Marine Corps stuff that he needed to know. First we gave him a Marine Corps guidebook to read, then we taught him how to salute an officer. We taught him all our names and nicknames and showed him all about the M-14 rifle. Luckily, he was mechanically inclined, so his fellow metal workers did not figure out who he really was. Each day he got better at being a Corporal in the Marines. We covered for him as much as possible and told him to act like he was in love, and he even wrote letters home each night to his girl back home. We got away with this scam for the whole of the monsoon season. Finally it stopped raining and the sun came out. We didn’t need ponchos anymore and you could see everyone in the sunlight.
One unfortunate day, Corporal Brewer Number Two ran into a pain-in-the-ass junior officer we shall call Lieutenant Pain. To give an idea of his chickenshit ways, I here diverge to recount how he once wrote me up for the unauthorized use of a military jeep. Major Moose had told me to grab a jeep and get the Colonel back from the chow hall as quickly as humanly possible, and I grabbed the wrong jeep. After I returned and was parking the jeep, Lieutenant Pain jumped out from behind the S-1 Office wall and said he wanted my name, rank and serial number. He was writing me up for stealing his jeep. I saluted him and laughed, and told him that before he wrote me up he had better learn the facts behind why I had taken the jeep. He gave me all his Quantico, Virginia officer shit, saying he was a First Lieutenant and I was a Lance Corporal, soon to become a PFC again. I told him to check with Major Moose, and that I didn’t have time to play Mickey Mouse games with him. I had to get to Lucky #7 Gunbird. We had a real bad situation on Hill 882.
He told me I was not dismissed and I laughed again. I left with Corporal Cross in an ammo mule and went out to the flight line. I later learned he stormed into the ready room and demanded that the Colonel schedule office hours for me. The Colonel told him to stand by and be quiet while he talked to Wing Headquarters about how many gunbirds we were going to launch.
The day Lieutenant Pain ran into Corporal Brewer Number Two, he received a typical Chu Lai half-ass salute. He took out his little black book to write up Corporal Brewer, who lost his cool and told Lieutenant Pain to kiss his ass. Lieutenant Pain went nuts and called the MPs to arrest Corporal Brewer, who calmly walked away laughing. The next thing I knew, First Sergeant Doright was trying to get Corporal Brewer out of the hole he had just dug for himself. First Sergeant Doright did have a heart, once you got to know him.
But Corporal Brewer II had had enough of filling sandbags, standing guard duty in the teeming rain, and putting up with asshole First Lieutenants. He simply said he was a civilian, a tourist so to speak, and he would no longer pretend he was a Marine. He said his real name was Norman, Corporal Brewer’s twin brother. He had come to ’Nam to kill VCs, not fill sandbags and patch holes in shot-up helicopters.
First Sergeant Doright tried to get the fake Corporal Brewer to shut the hell up, and told him he would get him transferred into the 7th Marine grunt outfit where he could kill all the zips he wanted. By this time the whole outfit knew about our scam, and we prayed that Corporal Brewer would pack and get into the grunt outfit before Lieutenant Pain threw the book at him. There was a storm of yelling from the S-1 shack. The Colonel said Corporal Brewer was getting an immediate transfer—this was against all the rules, and Lieutenant Pain knew the rules by heart.
He caused such an uproar that we couldn’t save Norman from the MPs and a complete III MAF investigation. They took his fingerprints and locked him up at III MAF Headquarters in Da Nang. He told the brass that he was a tourist in Vietnam, and they said, “Americans are not allowed to be tourists in Vietnam because it is a war zone.” He then said he was writing to his Senator, Barry Goldwater. The brass issued desertion orders for his brother, who moved from Yuma, Arizona across the border to Mexico and married his sweetheart. The brass then told Norman to shut his face about talking to the press and flew him first-class back to El Tora, California. Believe it or not, he had originally tried to join the Marines with his brother and was rejected for flat feet or some other dumb thing.
We all got over on the heavies with the fake Corporal Brewer, and soon he became a legend in our outfit. We especially liked the part where he told Lieutenant Pain off. Lieutenant Pain was later shot by accident, sneaking up on a bunker trying to catch Marines sleeping on guard duty. We all thank God they shipped this wounded piece of aggravation back to the USA. I even heard rumors in the shower area—just idle gossip, mind you—that someone snapped a cap on his worthless ass on purpose.
THE ISLAND
Seabee Builtright lived at the very end of Ky Ha, Chu Lai Air Base. Every day, he looked across the river and saw a zip island. Every day, he wanted to travel over there to check it out, go to the village to get laid and all the rest, but it was off limits. The Marines had a missile site on a hill on the island, so if North Vietnamese MIG-21s attacked we could shoot them down, and no one was allowed on the island unless they belonged to the missile battalion. The MIGs never attacked, and most of the Marines in this particular unit were bored out of their minds with a million petty Stateside rules. To make matters worse, the site was run by some chickenshit officer who required polished brass, haircuts, starched utilities and shiny boots. Being in
a shit outfit like this ruins ’Nam for you—no glory, nobody to shoot your rockets at, and a prick running the boring show. They spent all day and night looking at radar blurs on their radarscopes. Even the VC didn’t attack them. It was a cheerless, sorry-ass place to waste 12 months playing rocket man.
We had heard from our Vietnamese secret agent interpreter that the VCs came down to the village on the island at night to visit their families, then left at dawn to paddle up to the Tam Ky area in their sampans. Seabee Builtright wanted to take a box of cigars over to the village chief and meet his daughters. One day after I got tired of hearing him talking about this adventure, I agreed to go with him. We gave a Vietnamese fisherman $2.00 US to boat us over about a half mile to the island. I was carrying my MP .38-caliber pistol with about 40 extra bullets. Seabee Builtright had an M-14 rifle with five magazines. I felt we had enough firepower for a short two-hour trip.
We found the village and I took a million pictures of all the kids. We had fun, met the village chief, and Seabee Builtright gave him a box of Tampa cigars. The Chief was overjoyed and invited us to have some Tiger 33 Bomb-de-Bomb zip beer and Red Fox whiskey, and invited us to dinner. He lived in a real stone house with clean, whitewashed walls. We had a good time, drank too much, and ate a lot of fish and rice that was all very good. The sun started going down, and we were too drunk to go anywhere, so the chief said we could sleep in this one room that had candles and incense and an alter with a Buddha on it.
I told Seabee Builtright to keep a sharp eye out. We would sleep four hours each, with one guy on guard. He passed out almost immediately. I lay on a table with my .38-caliber pistol in my hand and my K-bar stuck next to me. I tried to keep awake, but kept falling asleep. I felt that any minute we would be attacked, but I was too drunk and tired to do much. Around 1:00 AM, I heard a rifle shot hit the white wall outside the house. Next thing I knew, the place was getting shot up with a lot of single shots. I put out all the candles except two and tried to wake up Seabee Builtright. I smacked the shit out of him and poured a hot beer over his head and he still didn’t budge. I grabbed his M-14 rifle and tried to chamber a round. His magazines were all shot with broken springs and rusted, and his 7.62 bullets were covered with mold. I checked all five magazines—they all were in sad shape. Thus his M-14 became a single-shot rifle.
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