Thirty Days Has September

by James Strauss

  “Chickenman” played on Fessman’s small radio. Chickenman had boarded a jet liner in mid-air on his way to Minneapolis to be the guest speaker at a chicken and egg convention. I didn’t find the plot funny except for the part where Chickenman presents his Chickenman identity card to the stewardess to get her to let him on-board.

  “What kind of super hero shows an identity card?” I asked absently of Fessman, sitting right next to me.

  “I wonder if Chickenman wears dog tags,” was his response.

  I looked up from working on my letter home — the follow-up to the one I’d written the day before telling my wife I would not be coming home. Chickenman was a welcome interruption, revealing the rather obvious fact that Fessman hadn’t even heard my question. It reminded me of the exchange I’d had earlier with Sugar Daddy. Only the Gunny had figured out that I was going to shoot the man right where he squatted. Sugar Daddy hadn’t had a clue. He hadn’t picked up on a thing, like Fessman with the Chickenman question. Maybe under extreme tension, anger, despair and fear, people didn’t really understand much of what’s said to, or around them.

  “Chickenman wears dog tags,” I answered. “He’s Army, so of course he wears dog tags.”

  “Army?” Fessman replied, looking over at me intently.

  “Yeah,” I said. “No Marine would ever wear feathers.”

  “Hmmm,” was Fessman’s only reply.

  I wrote to my wife about the possibility that the company would come together and I would be alright. I wrote about the Gunny being the wonderful father figure I sort of believed him to be. I wrote of Fessman, Stevens and Zippo, hoping that she would not take the previous day’s letter too seriously, although I was glad I’d written about the things she’d have to do. That I wasn’t coming home, that part, would only reveal itself on a later day.

  Brother John came on, from Nha Trang, with the final musical piece of the day. Fessman’s tinny radio pumped out a song called “Holy Moly” by Quicksilver. Brother John, announcing the title in his comforting baritone, sounded better than the song itself.

  I finished my letter and then thought about the coming of night. The night before I’d lain in fear of Jurgens and his angry Marines coming to do me in, while I’d also twisted and shuddered from the plunging small arms fire intermittently raining down from high positions on Hill 110. What had changed? Now fear chilled me to the bone that Sugar Daddy and his Marines would come in the night to take care of what Jurgens’ men had failed to do, although First Platoon was obviously not out of the ‘kill the lieutenant’ game with its ambush plan. I could think of no other reason for the ambush. The only road leading between the peaks and running half the length of the A Shau valley was Highway 49, but that road ran directly inland of Hue, many miles to the north. With no road, where was the ambush supposed to be set up? In spite of what I’d said about sending my scouts to check out positioning, I couldn’t. I wasn’t going to risk them getting caught in the net Jurgens intended to pull over me.

  I got up and walked toward the Gunny’s hooch. The Gunny would know what to do. He came out from under his poncho cover upon my approach. I waved off Fessman, ever attached to my right shoulder. He backed off, but not far. I straightened my shoulders. A very few of the Marines around me were caring and protective, while almost all of the others were uncaring or murderous. It wasn’t right but it was the way it was.

  I’d brought a block of the Composition B. I tore off a chunk, lit it with safety matches from a sundries pack, and settled down to heat the water I carried in my canteen cup holder. The Gunny sat on the end of his poncho. I noted that his exposed skin didn’t seem to be sodden with repellent, like mine. A crazy thought flashed through my mind about the possibility that his being Hispanic gave him some sort of extra protection.

  “The ambush,” I finally said, since he obviously wasn’t going to mention it.

  “First Platoon,” he replied, answering without telling me anything.

  “Yes, First Platoon,” I said. “What happened a while ago, with the ambush that killed First Platoon’s lieutenant?”

  “Who told you about that?” the Gunny asked back, confirming everything I didn’t really want to know was true. The discussion back in the bush hadn’t been my imagination, or slanted the wrong way.

  “What was the lieutenant’s name?” I asked, trying to draw him out.

  “Harrison,” the Gunny replied. “I’ll join you.” He moved over to his pack and combat rig to get his own cup and coffee. I knew he was stalling for time, so I just waited, stirring my own coffee, which was more than hot enough.

  “Was he a good man?” I asked, when he got settled in. I pulled my cup aside so he could use the still-burning explosive.

  “Yeah, he was okay,” he answered. “Like you. He could read a map and call artillery.”

  “So, what happened?” I said, going for broke.

  The Gunny made his coffee, ignoring the question. I waited.

  “You think they’re connected?” he finally got out.

  “There’s no road,” I informed him. “There’s probably a path not far from here leading up between the peaks. The last time they pulled this stunt there was a road. Jurgens didn’t know he was giving anything away when he mentioned it.”

  “That’s it?” the Gunny replied, taking a sip of his steaming coffee before going on. “You figured all that out from his using that one word?”

  I didn’t reply. There seemed no need to. I might have shared the story I’d overheard in the bush with the Gunny but what was the point? Nobody in the entire company was coming clean about anything, at least not where I was concerned.

  “What are you going to do?” he finally asked.

  “Oh,” I said, pausing, and then faking a laugh. “I’m just going to slither around in the mud tonight wondering if I’ll somehow end up inside an ambush intended to kill me, or maybe run into one or two of Sugar Daddy’s Marines trying to cut my throat sometime before dawn.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” the Gunny said, “and you know it.”

  “For one thing,” I said, thinking while I talked, “I’ve got to move us off that hill to some supposed nearby position so we can suppress fire that’s going to come down from there again. And this is our second day in this position. They haven’t been asleep up there.”

  “Heavy machine gun,” he replied. “Yeah, I was thinking about that, and maybe RPGs and some other junk too. We could move out.”

  “Can’t move out until they tell us,” I said, pulling out a map from inside my right chest pocket. I unfolded it. “Here’s where we are, exactly. The river is there, at our back, too deep to cross. Hill 110 is right here, and there’s only steep paths on each side of it starting the climb necessary to reach the A Shau.”

  I pointed at each place.

  “There’s not only no place to go but there’s also the fact that the NVA commander’s probably going to figure out we’re headed into the valley. Those paths will be littered with booby traps when we start the climb tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” the Gunny finally said, after staring at the map for a few minutes. “What are you going to do?”

  He’d returned to his earlier question. He’d told me about Harrison. I owed him something for that, although not the whole truth. Nobody was owed that where I was.

  “I can’t call artillery on our own position because the battery won’t fire, and in order to fire on the hill, I’ve got to report our new position as being right where we are, so you can stop worrying about that being an option.”

  “This can’t work for long like that,” the Gunny replied, dumping the remnants of his coffee onto the still burning explosive. The coffee had no effect, however, and the Comp B burned on. “It won’t work if everyone in the company’s afraid of being killed by artillery or in some other manner.”

  The Gunny stared at me intently. “By you.”


  The Gunny raised his voice in saying the last sentence. Fessman openly laughed. I turned to glare at him. He immediately retreated back to Stevens’ hooch, where Zippo and Nguyen sat working on their short-timer’s calendars. Almost universally distributed and carefully maintained by nearly everyone in the company, the calendars were all similar in one respect — each had a full page frontal nude drawing of a woman, her body divided up into 395 tiny blank pieces, all numbered. The number one was always printed on the small triangle of the bottom of the figure’s pubic region. One day and a wake up, when that box was filled in, was all you had left in the ’Nam, given that tours were all thirteen months long.

  “I’m going to suppose that the men here were all frightened to death of the other sets of officers who served here before me and went home in body bags.” I stared at the Gunny after falling silent.

  “There’s that, but still…” he commented.

  “Those officers are all dead, but here you are,” I said. I realized my error when his expression changed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that to come out that way,”

  I followed up at once. I needed the Gunny desperately. I couldn’t hold him to any moral standard because there were no moral standards where we’d found ourselves. That the Gunny was still alive after surviving with the company in continuous combat for over a month was surprising, no matter how he accomplished it.

  His features softened following my apology. “So what about Jurgens and Sugar Daddy, and all of that?”

  “I think we may have bigger problems tonight if they’ve brought in heavy stuff up on that hill, and then there’s the trail we’ve got to climb up tomorrow. We don’t have many 81 millimeters rounds left. I’ve got to suppress fire all through the night and then put one round every fifty meters up that trail until we’re out of range of the battery. But that part’s for the morning, if you’re still worried about First Platoon’s ambush.”

  “There’s no ambush,” the Gunny said, his voice dropping to just above a whisper.

  “True,” I replied.

  The ambush was a façade to be used only as a device to lure me into some killing ground. It wouldn’t take much of the night for Jurgens to figure out that a repeat of the Harrison murder wasn’t going to work.

  “So, what about First and Fourth in the night then?” he went on.

  “I need the Starlight scope,” I said. I’d thought of telling him he could move his hooch further away but bit my tongue in time. It would have been a snotty emotional comment. And, I didn’t want him to move away.

  “For what? The damned thing’s near useless,” he replied. “We can see them running around like wild chickens across the barnyard but can’t use the scope to aim or shoot them. By the time we look up from the thing our night vision’s gone and so are they. And it doesn’t magnify anything either, so anybody more than a hundred yards away is invisible.”

  “I don’t need it for range.”

  “Then what,” he asked.

  “All of that, as you said,” I replied.

  “Rittenhouse’s been hauling it around on his back,” the Gunny mused, almost to himself. “He’ll be happy to part with it. Maybe your scout team can hump it from here on. That Zippo’s huge. Useless, but huge.”

  Zippo was perfect for my needs, however. I could not use pre-registered fire to protect us from a heavy machine gun position on the hill. The NVA regulars weren’t stupid or inexperienced. They’d been fighting for longer than I’d been in the Corps. They’d simply move under fire. Which meant the artillery rounds had to move, too. I would have to adjust fire and I could only do that from moving positions close to the base of the mountain. I needed to see where the artillery rounds I called in were impacting. I’d need Zippo to haul the stuff, Stevens to be the lookout, Fessman on the radio, and Nguyen for the other stuff. The other stuff being those Marines from First and Fourth who would be out hunting for me while I was trying to save them from the NVA.

  I moved back to my hooch in the waning light, darkness closing in on me. I’d never been afraid of the dark growing up but now it terrified me. I promised myself that if I lived, I’d never spend another night without light. I couldn’t help but wonder what my great Fort Sill instructors would have thought about the real job of an artillery forward observer in the combat world I’d dropped into. Of course they’d have trouble believing it. I sat with my envelope home, wondering if this would be my last letter telling Mary everything was going to be okay.

  twenty-one

  The Fifth Night : Second Part

  Zippo didn’t get back from retrieving the Starlight scope from Rittenhouse until full dark. There’d been no fire from the hill. I’d registered our new position but not ordered a fire mission. I knew it wouldn’t be long. I wasn’t afraid of taking fire from a heavy machine gun nearly as much as I was from the prospect of the NVA attacking and penetrating our lines, or what might come of the obvious threat from First and Fourth platoons internally. By the time I moved to Zippo’s hooch to try out the scope, I realized my shaking hands were back. Longer than an M16, the scope weighed twice as much. It was like handling a thick length of sewer pipe with a big rubber grommet on one end. The night mist returned, combining with my repellent soaked hands to make the black metal hopelessly slippery. Handling the ungainly scope, in conjunction with my shaking, was nearly impossible. The case for it had to be bigger than Fessman’s radio. I wondered if the thing was worth the effort until Stevens flipped a switch and I pushed my eye into the rubber grommet and stared into the lens. A strange whirring sound came from the device. Strange but reassuring.

  Green light everywhere. Shadows of green light in the distance. I knew I was seeing things in the dark that were impossible for a human eye to detect, but I couldn’t make them out. Everything moved too much and the scope seemed to be slowing things down. If I moved the scope at all it seemed to take part of a second for the green scene to catch up.

  “You’ve got to prop it up on something,” Stevens said. “It came with a tripod but that got lost somewhere.”

  I laid down on Zippo’s poncho cover and propped the “sewer pipe” across the back of his pack. I pulled the scope and pack closer, and then stared at the jungle not far away. I knew it wasn’t far away because I’d seen it during the day, but I also knew because I was seeing it at night. The view was astounding. The wind wafted across the tips of different kinds of jungle growth. I watched, feeling like I was hypnotized. I could even see the moisture falling and blowing around in the air. It looked like rolling green mist. I watched the Gunny light a cigarette in his hooch twenty yards away. His lighter flared briefly, like a street light burning out. I saw every green feature of the Gunny’s face. Gazing through the scope took some of my fear away, and I didn’t want to stop looking through it.

  “It works best across cleared areas,” Stevens said, “and tracers coming in make it impossible to see anything because it takes a while for the tubes, or whatever, to recover from bright lights.”

  I pulled away from the addictive device. I noted that my hands had stopped shaking.

  “What case does it come in?” I asked, wondering how much space on Zippo’s back it would take. I’d already decided that I never wanted the scope far from me at night if I could help it.

  “Case?” Stevens said, “It straps to the outside of a pack with a sock on each end.”

  “No case,” I replied, shaking my head. “Lost somewhere, no doubt. Let’s move out,” I ordered. “We’re headed straight for the perimeter just short of the hill. Maybe we can use the scope to find the best way through the muck.”

  “There’s a path not far from here,” Fessman pointed out, getting strapped into his radio rig.

  Nguyen leaned out of the dark and whispered to Stevens.

  “No path,” Stevens said. “We’ll break some trail south and come around along the western perimeter,” he went on. “Wouldn�
��t want to run into an ambush,” he finished.

  I wasn’t sure about whether my team was looking out for me or for themselves, or both. But I appreciated it.

  “When we get set in to observe, I want the scope out and operational, pointing behind us,” I ordered.

  My team had picked up on the phony ambush routine, or seen it before, so I fully expected they’d understand what I was trying to do.

  “Everyone’s got tracers now, sir,” Fessman said, standing nearby and ready to go. “The scope doesn’t work around tracers.”

  “I’m not worried about anyone shooting,” I replied. “At least not until they find us. I want to see them coming first.”

  Zippo carefully slipped two socks on the ends of the Starlight scope and slipped it over his shoulder. He’d found a rifle sling from somewhere. The heavy scope was like an invisible twig on his broad back. I noted that he carried a mostly empty pack in his right hand. We didn’t wear packs inside the wire, especially when we expected to engage the enemy. Without a deep foxhole to dive down into the only protection available from some threats was the ability to move.

  Creeping through the brush was hard work, even with Stevens and Nguyen breaking trail in front of me. Fessman and Zippo followed up. If visible in daylight, I’m sure we resembled hunched over dirty lobsters as we crept around and then straight up to the perimeter.

  “Who the fuck is at our six?” came back from up ahead.

  We automatically slunk down into the mud on our hands and knees.

  “Arty up,” Stevens half-whispered toward whoever manned the perimeter ahead of us.

  “What do you think this is?” the voice hissed back. “Fucking officer country?”

  I listened to the exchange, knowing that I was crazy and not caring. I wanted to take out an M33 grenade and lob it forward. That would take care of the problem. A craven need building inside me to do something about the flagrant insubordination and the lack of one shred of respect toward me was a basal force driving my emotions. I knew it, and what remained of my sanity made me hang on. Instead of replying or taking action I simply waited in silence. My normal role.