Thirty Days Has September

by James Strauss

  A form appeared from out of the nearly invisible mist.

  “Over here,” the voice said.

  The form moved back the way it’d come, and then away when Stevens and Nguyen settled in, their bodies pressed up against a beaten down hillock of reeds.

  I joined them, pulling out my map and my taped up flashlight with the small hole in the center of its lens.

  “Who was that?” I asked, unfolding the map and looking out to see what I could see of the hill in the dark, which was mostly nothing.

  “O’Brien, Second Platoon,” Stevens said.

  I recorded the name into my memory for no good reason.

  “The handset,” I ordered softly, holding my right hand out behind me.

  The handset magically entered my open hand.

  “Fire mission, over,” I said, knowing Fessman would already have changed the frequency to the artillery net.

  I put one round of white phosphorus above what I thought was midway up the near side of the hill. I used a super quick fuse since I didn’t care if anybody on the ground was injured or killed. Seconds later the shell exploded, briefly showering part of the hill with flaming particles of the horrible burning substance. For some reason wooden bullets, like the Japanese had used on some of the islands of the WWII campaign, were banned by the Geneva Convention, but not the use of much more horrible napalm and white phosphorus.

  The flash of light was enough to let me see the whole hill but gone so quickly I couldn’t adjust any fire using it. I called in for a battery of three using illumination rounds.

  “Your position is on the gulf tango line,” came back over the radio instead of “shot, over.” “Calculating casing and base impacts now. Are you in contact?”

  “Negative on contact,” I sent back.

  “What did they mean, sir?” Fessman asked, when I handed the handset back.

  I wasn’t intending to fire high explosives until incoming fire began. I wanted to have the layout and plenty of potential targets of opportunity, however, when that happened. I had not thought about the company’s position on the gun target line. That meant that the guns were directly to our rear and had to fire over our heads to reach Hill 110. Since we weren’t at the extended maximum range of the howitzers, that wasn’t much of a problem for regular rounds, but illumination ammo came apart in mid-air a good distance from the target. Where the canister and baseplate holding the parachuted flares landed was sometimes life or death information.

  I explained the delay as briefly as I could to the team. The fire direction center was busily calculating where each piece of every round was going to fall. They would not fire if any of those pieces were likely to impact on our position, unless we were in contact and absolutely had to have the light.

  Minutes later, Fessman answered the shot and splash warnings. The rounds came screaming in, distinctive pops coming down from on high when the shells opened to permit the flares to complete their travel and rain down on the target. The whup-whup-whup of the canisters sailing on through the air could be heard after the illumination rounds lit up the scene like an old black and white television screen.

  I studied the hill intently, making notations on my map, but I didn’t have long to work. The illume rounds were still up there doing their thing when the heavy machine gun opened up. Green tracers began stitching back and forth along the perimeter line. The company had set in earlier, leaving one rounding curve of reed covered hillocks to be the natural perimeter between the company and the hill.

  I burrowed into the mud. The giant fast-moving beer cans of green light fired by the gun blasted by. Terror swept through me, only relieved by the fact that I knew I had a twenty-foot thick berm of mud between the gun and me. That relief was short-lived, as a couple of lower rounds exited the berm right next to where I lay cowering. The fifty caliber bullets could go right through twenty feet of mud. That just couldn’t be, I thought, my memory of the weapons underrated capability in combat slowly returning. The .50 armor-piercing rounds would go through up to five inches of steel. Twenty feet of mud was no problem.

  The machine gun stopped firing. I peeked out but the illumination rounds had burned out so I couldn’t see anything to adjust fire on. I shrunk back down, slowly realizing my mistake. I had illuminated the entire area between the hill and our own position. The gunners on the hill had taken advantage of the light to register their machine gun so it could accurately deliver fire all along our perimeter without the need to see the target. My own Army training methodology had been used to good effect. On me. “You’re not in Fort Sill anymore, Dorothy,” I intoned under my breath to myself.

  “Why are their tracers green?” I asked Fessman in a whisper, just to make human contact. My hands were shaking badly again, but they only did it if they had nothing to do. I folded my map and then opened it again, and again, and again.

  “Ours are all red,” he answered, also whispering.

  I waited, but after a few seconds knew that that was all the answer I was going to get. It was a physics problem and Fessman was seventeen. Physics was still ahead of him if he went on in school. I also knew that the color had something to do with the composition of the material used in the tip of the round. Magnesium burned red in a lab using a Bunsen Burner. I couldn’t remember what burned green. Copper. But copper wasn’t a material that would ignite on its own and trace across the sky. I knew I was thinking about the composition of tracers because I was so afraid. “Displacement activity” it was called in anthropology. Anything to avoid facing the threat directly.

  I forced myself to rise a few inches and look over the edge of the berm again.

  “Assholes,” I breathed. “Fire your chicken shit little machine gun. I have artillery. Big boom.”

  I somehow felt better and my hands stopped shaking in saying the words, even under my breath. I also wanted the binoculars badly. It was hard to feel like a real forward observer without them. They also would help penetrate the darkness. Not like the magic of the Starlight scope, but some.

  I saw the machine gun open up again only because my head was up high enough over the berm. I ducked down, but I had an idea where the things were up on the hill, at least approximately. My mind had also recorded a second series of flaming bullets coming by me, from not thirty yards forward of our position.

  I hunched back down. I wanted to say something to Fessman but couldn’t get anything out. Artillery. I couldn’t call artillery. The battery wouldn’t fire this close and they knew where we were now. Thoughts bounced around in my head as the perimeter Marines opened up with their own machine guns and M16s. Somebody else had seen them coming. Grenade. I had two M33 grenades. I pulled one out, held the perfectly round little spewer of death and pulled the pin. And I lay there frozen. The spoon of the grenade was depressed with the death grip of my right hand wrapped tightly around it. In that position I’d become frozen, unable to get the grenade out with my body lying face down, the M33 and my fist crushed between my chest and the mud under me.

  I breathed deeply in and out, trying to get control of myself. My ears rang from the nearby gunfire. After a while the shooting stopped and a silence fell over the whole battlefield.

  “Fessman,” I finally grunted out, the side of my face in the mud.

  “Sir?” Fessman said back, leaning down close to be able to make out my words.

  “I’ve got a grenade under me and I pulled the pin,” I got out, my voice hoarse from fear and pressure. I still imagined the enemy racing up and over the small berm to bayonet me from above.

  I felt someone else move up to my right side.

  “Forget the pin,” Stevens said. “Just roll over and throw the grenade as far as you can out there. We’ll back up.” I heard Stevens slither away.

  I had control of my breathing. Could I simply roll to my left side and toss the grenade over the berm without killing myself or any other Marines? An
d what must my team think of the stupid predicament I’d put myself in?

  I rolled and threw the baseball size grenade, all in one motion, like I’d been taught in explosives ordinance disposal training back in Quantico. The spoon audibly clicked as it flipped itself away from the round body of the grenade. It was gone. Five seconds later there was a sharp crack as it exploded.

  I edged my way back up on the side of the berm and turned, sensing movement.

  “Fire mission?” Fessman said, pressing the radio handset into my hand.

  It took only a moment to call in the topmost registration numbers back to the battery. I called for a zone fire mission after the single adjusting round landed just where I’d calculated. The battery then dropped six rounds on the point I’d chosen and six more on four other points forming the end of an imaginary X calculated by the FDC.

  We set in to wait. If and when the fifty caliber opened up again, I would call for either a repeat of the same barrage or move the initiation point around until it was close to where a new position for the gun had been found. Ammunition, like for the 81s on loan from Lima Company, was limited in the field but there was no end to the amount of artillery that could be called throughout the night. The only real limiter was demand from other units in contact, if there were any.

  Things remained quiet for some time. Nobody moved about at all but nobody fell asleep either. I patiently marked where the Hill 110 rounds had impacted on my map. When I was done with that I started counting. One one thousand, two one thousand, and so on. If I could count the long night away — if I could just live until morning — I might have another day. I figured I would probably be on a hundred and forty thousand or so, before first light.

  “We’ve got company coming,” Zippo said, his nearby voice low and his words slow.

  I moved backwards and down from the berm, and then crawled across the mud flat to join him. Fessman trailed behind while Stevens and Nguyen were already next to Zippo when we arrived.

  “What have we got?” I whispered.

  “Some of my old friends from the Fourth,” Zippo said, moving aside from the Starlight scope so I could stare through the green lens.

  twenty-two

  The Fifth Night : Third Part

  The NVA Russian-made fifty caliber opened up, and the heavy green “flying lantern” tracers tore through the thick air over our heads. I popped my head up for a micro-second to confirm that they’d moved the weapon lower down on the mountain’s front slope. I adjusted my plan for an in depth response, this time for thirty-six rounds on each of the four points of the zone “X” I’d recorded earlier. It was a simple “drop two hundred, repeat in depth” mission, but I had bigger problems closer in than that. Instead of reaching for Fessman’s handset I crawled up next to Zippo.

  “Get the Starlight out,” I ordered.

  “How you think I see ’em,” he whispered back.

  “Where is the damned thing?” I asked, unable to see the black instrument in the dark.

  “I’m slipping it on my back,” Zippo replied, continuing to whisper, although the Marines or NVA approaching had to know exactly where we were anyway.

  I got hold of the slippery scope lying across Zippo’s right shoulder, then eased myself half way up onto his broad back. I stuck my left eye onto the rubber mount and my world turned green. I blinked, and then looked out into the night. I pulled back and blinked. The scope was an all or nothing night device, and I realized my night vision was shot. If you used it, then one eye would be night blind for some time and, since human eyes acted in sympathy for the most part, that meant night blindness. The bright green vista revealed by the scope drew me back. I used the focus knob to sharpen the flat area between our position at the back of the berm and the area out to the forested jungle. The scope moved slowly up and down, distracting me.

  “Hold still,” I ordered Zippo.

  “I gotta breathe,” he replied.

  “No, you don’t,” Fessman whispered, from behind us. “We don’t stop them right now, whoever they are, and they’ll kill us all. No witnesses.”

  The scope stopped moving as Zippo held his breath. What looked like three blobs of mud moved slowly across the open grassy field. One would move and then another, and then the third. “Fire and maneuver,” the movement was called in combat. Here we had a similar situation, without the “fire.” The three blobs had worked together in the past, I realized. They did what they were doing too well and too soundlessly. With all the mud and no head gear, we couldn’t tell if the slowly moving blobs were Marines or the enemy. I breathed deeply in and out, Zippo still holding his own. It didn’t matter who they were. They weren’t moving toward us to share rations, warn us, or to give us a message. They could only have one intent, and that made them the enemy, regardless of their originating outfit.

  I’d briefly examined the scope earlier and it didn’t have an attachment for any rifle in our company. The bottom screw holes on the device’s one flat side would probably allow it to be mounted on a sniper rifle, but I hadn’t seen any snipers since I’d joined the company. If snipers had been attached to our unit, they no doubt would have taken the scope to use on their own. Rittenhouse wouldn’t have had to pack it.

  “Breathe,” I ordered Zippo, speaking very quietly into his right ear, the scope sticking out over his big burly shoulder.

  I eased my .45 from my holster and brought it up. With no way to slave the automatic to the scope, in order to fire I’d have to parallel the scope with the short barrel of the gun. With one eye looking through the scope and the other out to steady the Colt, I’d have to accurately get the rounds down range with my night vision shot — a task unlikely to have positive results. But there was no other option.

  “Stop breathing,” I commanded, and Zippo stopped moving.

  I stared through the reticle of the scope with my left eye and brought the Colt up experimentally, to see what it would be like. Then I lowered the gun and re-inserted it back into the holster. We’d have to wait. In order for it to work, the blobs needed to be almost upon us, or I could call in an illumination round to light up the area. That would mean the blobs would be able to see us, too. And then there was the Battery problem. The Battery wouldn’t fire that close in upon our position anyway. I started to think of the three moving blobs as a puzzle.

  “Breathe,” I ordered Zippo.

  I still had unused pieces of my sundries pack in my leg pocket, jammed in with the killing morphine. I rummaged in the pocket, nervous about waiting for the mud blobs to get closer. I found what was looking for: a small box of Chiclets chewing gum. I threw the little tabs into my mouth and discarded the box. I chewed rapidly, waiting for the gum to soften before removing the wet mass from my mouth. I pulled it into three parts and leaned onto Zippo’s back again.

  “For your right ear,” I said, before sticking half the wet mass into his right ear canal.

  The .45 going off so close to his ear would deafen him, possibly for life, without some sort of ear plug. I stuck the other two smaller wads into my own ears.

  “Stop breathing,” I instructed, leaning onto him, jamming my left eye into the rubber grommet and then pulling my Colt out again.

  I clicked the safety off, the sound much louder than I intended. The three approaching blobs froze. I waited, gauging the distance at about fifteen feet. I wondered how long Zippo could hold his breath. I knew the blobs were not going to back up so it was a matter of time before they moved again.

  I raised the .45. I didn’t want to hold it up for too long since it was a heavy piece and accuracy diminished rapidly when muscle tension began to give way. I’d been raised with a similar Colt, although highly accurized. I was an expert on the Marine Corps course, but even better than that range test had called for. Even un-accurized, the weapon was plenty accurate at fifteen feet. The longer I could wait, the less would be my chances of missing.

&n
bsp; I steadied on the first hump, my sight going back and forth from focusing through the scope to lining up the gun. The humps moved. The Colt was no doubt sighted in for twenty-five yards, I thought, which would be standard sighting from the factory. I’d have to hold a bit low since they were closer than that. I aimed, if I could call it that, just short of the first advancing hump. I squeezed slowly, not knowing when the heavy trigger would release the sear, just as I’d been long taught to do. And then Zippo breathed and the gun exploded.

  “Shit,” I whispered, wondering if I should squeeze off another round. I stared through the scope, but it was moving up and down with Zippo’s breathing, screwing up the scene.

  My Colt was down to five rounds. I’d kept one in the chamber and five in the magazine, even though the magazine held seven. Dad had taught me that loading seven might cause the upper tang on the magazine to bend, making the normally dependable automatic a one shot device.

  The humps didn’t make a sound that I could hear with the gum stuck in my ears. The Colt going off had been loud anyway, but not ear-destroying loud. The humps did not move. Zippo took a deep breath and held it. The scope steadied. The two humps behind the leading one began moving in toward the front blob. Even with Zippo’s jarring breath, I knew I must have gotten some kind of hit.

  Then I realized that I was adjusting fire, and it was just like calling in artillery. I’d used the first round for a spotting round and it had been dead on. I held the .45 up again, just as before, then gently eased it left a little bit and at about the same angle the first shot had gone off at.

  “Left five feet,” I whispered to myself. The Colt exploded again. This time I kept my left eye right in the rubber grommet. The left hump stopped.