Thirty Days Has September

by James Strauss

  It would take me a full two seconds to pull the .45, operate the slide with my other hand, and then squeeze off the first round. Two seconds — a long time in a gun fight — even if the other men facing me had their automatic weapons decked, butt down on the surface of the mud. It might take them a full second to figure out exactly what was happening, and then maybe a second or more to get into action. Risky? Most certainly, but a risk I felt well worth it to take.

  I knelt on my right knee instead of squatting. Drawing it would be faster and the gun, less likely to catch on anything as it came out and I put it into action. I glanced behind me briefly to make sure Fessman wasn’t in the line of fire, or any of the rest of my team. It was clear. I was clear.

  The Gunny came walking out of the jungle growth just behind Sugar Daddy and his two accompanying Marines. He moved up behind Sugar Daddy. I could not shoot without fear of hitting him, either by mistake or because a .45 slug at close range doesn’t tend to stop when it hits a human body, not even one of Sugar Daddy’s size and not even it it’s a head shot.

  “Truce, you said?” he asked of Sugar Daddy, finally moving to one side and settling down to squat between the platoon leader and the Marine to his left.

  I made no move to do anything, frozen in position, waiting for just the right moment.

  “Did I hear you say truce?” the Gunny asked again, since Sugar Daddy simply concentrated on reheating his coffee over the burning explosive.

  “Some of my people bought it last night,” Sugar Daddy said, his eyes unreadable behind his purple sun glasses, impenetrable to normal light.

  I looked at the three men from Fourth Platoon with disgust, but showed nothing in my facial features. The Marines embodied everything that could go wrong with the Corps. They didn’t obey orders or follow traditions. They dressed the way they felt like in what appeared to be Halloween costumes. Personalized smashed flat hats of some sort, gold chains they’d found somewhere, with strange pendants hanging from them. None of them wore Marine utility attire except for their trousers.

  “So I heard,” the Gunny replied. “Rittenhouse and I’ll be doing the paperwork to send them home. That .50 took out a few more in the other platoons, as well.”

  “My guys were shot with a big caliber side arm,” Sugar Daddy said, taking his right finger from his canteen holder and pointing at my side. “Like the one Junior there wears. You can’t mistake them big holes. Each one got a round in the head at close range and then again in the body.”

  I would have shot the man then and there if I’d thought to load a round into the chamber before they’d appeared. I waited instead, for a better moment, hoping the Gunny would move away.

  “They were good Marines,” the Gunny said. “And it’s not likely that Junior here has enough experience or guts to shoot anyone. Not yet, anyway, so maybe the .50 on the hill is a more likely cause.”

  “That fucking green shitting thing tears a man to pieces and you know it, and not like any sidearm does,” Sugar Daddy replied.

  “You said something about a truce as I walked up,” the Gunny lied.

  I knew the Gunny had to have been waiting in the bush and heard the first exchange, or more likely was behind the whole meeting. I wondered why he hadn’t been in his hooch when they showed up. I also wondered if, when I killed all three of them, the Gunny and my scout team might think it was because Sugar Daddy called me Junior. Not that I would change my mind, I concluded, as I’d already learned that respect didn’t matter at all if you simply killed what didn’t respect you.

  “Truce,” the Gunny repeated, watching me instead of them.

  The man was prescient in some way, I realized, or he could read minds. I did not want him interfering or getting in the line of fire for what was going to go down, so I slightly shook my head without looking into his eyes, refusing to take my focus away from the three targets.

  “Junior here’s obviously a racist, like those clowns in First Platoon,” Sugar Daddy said, his two Marine buddies nodding, as if their leader’s speech was prearranged. “But it don’t matter out here ’cause, except for that artillery stuff, he don’t mean shit.” The two men with him grunted while continuing to nod. “Leave us be and we’ll leave him be. Just like before they sent him in.”

  “Deal,” the Gunny said, extending his right hand out toward Sugar Daddy.

  I could not believe my ears. I stared at the Gunny’s outstretched hand like it was some sort of alien artifact. That the black platoon wanted to go on like before was befuddling enough, what with a nightly KIA rate between the warring platoons greater than anything the NVA was inflicting, but that the Gunny, a long-time veteran of three wars, readily agreed and then shook hands with a lower enlisted man, as if they’d just negotiated some minor business deal, was astounding. My mind reeled in shock.

  After the Gunny and Sugar Daddy shook hands, everyone stood up as if by an unheard unseen command — everyone except for me. I knelt there with one knee sunk in the mud like an idiot. Frozen in place, I gripped the butt of my Colt while life seemed to go on around me. The three black Marines walked back into the bush. The gunny pulled out his canteen, poured some water into the holder and started preparations to make some coffee, ignoring me entirely.

  “Deal?” I hissed across the space between us.

  “Good morning, lieutenant,” he replied, not looking at me, making believe the fixing of his coffee took all of his attention.

  A minute went by. I finally stood up shakily and then hunkered down across from him. I took out my own canteen, hoping he had enough coffee for both of us because I was out and it would be an hour before resupply arrived.

  “You sold me on the artillery magic,” the Gunny finally said, getting his explosives lit. “You’re going to pull that off later this morning and I’ve seen what you can do. Booby traps are the worst we face out here. I don’t care if I get killed nearly so much as going home without my arms or legs, or even my balls.”

  He tossed a brown foil container of coffee to me, as if to punctuate his last sentence.

  “And so you made a deal with that black devil in my name?” I said, my anger evident, but accepting the foil coffee.

  “In your name?” the Gunny said back, his anger meeting my own in the space over the fire between us. “Your name is Junior, if you didn’t notice. And you weren’t going to get all three of them. They’re better than that. They’ve been out here for a while. They were locked and loaded and casually ready. And they know about you.”

  He stopped talking to take a sip of his coffee, looking over the lip of his canteen holder. Our eyes met for the first time in the early dawn’s dim light.

  “If I live,” the Gunny said, “which seems a pretty big if just now, I’ll be damned if I’ll go home to a dishonorable discharge, or worse.”

  I sat staring into the man’s coal black eyes, some sense of reason returning. Getting ready to kill Sugar Daddy and his men had consumed my mind like the focused blaze of an acetylene torch. The flame was gone but the heat remained, like a hazy red fog. A small tremor ran through my hand, the canteen holder I gripped shaking a tiny bit. The Gunny’s gaze flicked toward my hand, and then quickly back into my eyes. I knew that he knew I was not quite right.

  “So what are we supposed to do with his ‘deal’ you’ve made for all of us?” I asked, partly to understand what was going on and partly to cover my shaking.

  “Tomorrow night,” the Gunny said, and then sipped again, his eyes never leaving my own.

  “Tomorrow night?” I replied, not understanding.

  “You said that last night, about what we’d do when we got to the A Shau.”

  “It’s today with this ‘deal’ and we won’t get to the valley until late,” I said, starting to understand.

  “So that would make it tonight, instead of tomorrow,” the Gunny replied.

  I slowly removed my right
hand from its death grip on the butt of my Colt. I moved my canteen holder with my coffee in it to that hand while slowly reaching into my left pocket with the other. I clutched the letter, but not so hard as to crush it completely. It represented the only sanity left in my life. I’d get it on that coming chopper and then start another letter. The Gunny was telling me what I’d told him, and he’d already known. We were living from one day into the night following that day, and the days and nights were divided into segments without titles or names. We could only live from one segment to another, and we would do anything and say anything to make it through and on into the next segment.

  “Binoculars,” I said, thinking out loud. “I need them…and tracers. We need more tracers. They’re working I think.”

  “Tracers,” the Gunny repeated. “Do they make those for .45 automatics too?”

  twenty-four

  The Sixth Day : Second Part

  If you go chasing rabbits and you know you’re going to fall, tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call… played on Stevens’ little shoulder-mounted radio. As usual, Brother John’s fatherly deep-throated introduction made me feel better just hearing it. Fessman had the same transistor rig stuck in his helmet band and as I listened to the apropos lyrics, Fessman and Stevens got onto the subject of how stereo radio worked. Fessman argued that if a person stood between their two radios, listening to the same transmission over the Armed Forces Radio Network received by both, then the listener would be hearing the song in stereo. Stevens argued that the song had to be sent over the airwaves in separate frequencies from different positions around the singer for that to be the case. I saw where the discussion was going and decided not to step between them to be a part of it.

  “Stevens is right,” I said, my tone decisive, I hoped.

  “See, I told you,” Stevens said, the dialogue of both men giving away their young ages.

  I got out of my hooch and stretched, more to cover my examination of everything around me than out of a need to flex my muscles. I’d killed three men. Three young and frightened men. And I’d done it without one speck of resistance from my internal moral code. When the White Knight is talking backwards came through the little radios, and the lyrics seemed to describe my life and how it had all changed to run quickly and violently right off the rails.

  I could hear the choppers in the distance. Heading for the landing zone I hurried through the brush, concerned that if the choppers landed in the same place again as before, the spot might have been preregistered by an enemy very diligent about doing such things. But I could not stop myself from going anyway, even if the zone took fire. I had to mail the letter and nothing else had any real importance. There would be no mail coming to me. My wife was not the writing type and my genetic family, a “lifer” Coast Guard family, wouldn’t be writing either. Mary would send a package with the things I’d asked for earlier, but that would be it.

  The utility Huey dropped out of the air, both of the usual supporting Cobras flitting about hungrily, waiting for something to chew up and spit out. This time there were three gunships, however, instead of the normal two.

  “They always fly in pairs,” Fessman said from behind me, the whine and roar of the chopper blades not close enough to cut off conversation completely. “Wonder what happened to the other one?” he went on, until the roar of another helicopter swept across the landing zone in front of us.

  The fourth Cobra opened up on the relatively bare and muddy ground of the landing zone, its nearly flat surface covered with shredded bamboo stands, pieces of small ferns, and broken reeds. The gunship opened up with twin pylon-mounted mini-guns. We stood there, neither Fessman nor I having time to get to any real cover. All we could do was hunch over from the intense wind and the screaming fiery roar of the rotary cannons strafing the zone. And then the thing was gone, seeming to flow over the edge of the landing zone, disappearing into some unseeable valley.

  I pulled my hands down from my ears, knowing they would ring for the remainder of the day. If I could have called in a fire mission on a moving gunship at that moment, I would have done so. I knew, even with what little experience I had, that the gunship was showing off and trying out its brand new weapons. I’d heard of the rotary cannon, scaled down to fire 7.62mm NATO rifle rounds, but had never heard or seen one in real life. It was bad enough to be nearby when those exotic weapons went off. I could only imagine what it was like to be in front of them taking fire. How the Vietnamese had been able to resist, fight back, and even pull ahead of some U.S. combat units was almost impossible to conceive. The enemy had almost nothing in the way of truly modern or quality arms, yet it persisted to the point where American casualties were in three figures each and every day of the conflict.

  Zippo, Stevens, and Nguyen stood roughly back from where Fessman and I waited. I wondered if they were waiting for anything in particular from the resupply, or was it that the small scout team had, for whatever reason, become a tribe within our bigger tribe that wasn’t a tribe at all.

  The Huey sat nearly still on the two skids running the length of he aircraft, the pitch of its blades reduced to zero, although they whirled around at high speed. Macho Man appeared, jumping down from the craft’s open side door past a gunner moving the barrel of his M60 machine gun back and forth across the scene in front of him. Macho Man carried his precious Tommy Gun slung over his left shoulder. In his right hand he held a black leather package. I approached, automatically ducking down under blades that whirled safely at least six feet over my head. The man held out the package, which from its shape could only be a set of binoculars. I smiled and took the package, handing over my letter home at the same time. Macho man didn’t smile back. Instead his eyes swept the landing zone looking for potential trouble spots that might call for him to use the Tommy gun that appeared to have never been fired. I instinctively knew that he could not smile for fear that such a human reaction breaking across his combat charade might spread like a terminal crack running through safety glass.

  I retreated out from under the chopper to let others approach and do the actual work of unloading supplies. I watched the scene, with the swooping gunships flying and all the men running around below. Jungle bracken wafted upward, sucked into the sky, and then whirled about by the powerful blades of the helicopters. I watched the boxes of tracer ammo being unloaded. Soon tracers would be all the rounds left in the unit and then there would be no more secret shooting in the night, or so I hoped. Unless it was with Colt .45s, I thought, remembering the question the Gunny had asked in humor. Tearing my eyes from the wildly active but strangely hypnotic scene in front of me, I opened the binocular box. I pulled out huge binoculars manufactured by Nippon Kogaku, an outfit I’d never heard of. The field of view, at 7.3 degrees, was good and 7X50 power was okay, too. They lacked caps, a strap, and they had no range estimator, like the expensive Leicas the Army used, but they would do.

  The replacements piled off the chopper as I approached. I hadn’t given them a second look since I now knew there would be no officer among them. All FNGs. They’d be assigned by the Gunny. Hopefully, there’d be no more of McNamara’s Project 100,000 Marines. We had three. I had no idea what the allotment might be for disbursing the non-reading undereducated privates. As usual, with resupply, all anyone could do was requisition and then hope. The Gunny appeared with a line of Marines behind him carrying body bags. It took three men to a bag. Bodies were heavier and harder to transport in the field than anybody might guess. They didn’t cover that in training, either. I watched the moving bags while slowly grinding my teeth. Training made Marines look and act like they were ready for combat. It did almost nothing to prepare them for real combat, however, and not one person back in the real world had ever bothered to mention that.

  I went over to the Gunny, leaving Fessman and the rest of the team to meet with Rittenhouse and scavenge what they could from the supply load.

  “You shou
ldn’t be here,” he said, as I walked up.

  “We’re not taking any fire,” I responded, thinking he was concerned for my well-being.

  “Sugar Daddy’s platoon is going to be right behind me and they’ve taken your involvement last night a bit personally,” the Gunny said, pointing toward a spot he wanted the body bags placed. “Shit, where the hell are they going?” he went on, leaning around and looking upward before putting one hand up to shelter his eyes from the morning sun.

  The gunships had climbed to altitude and were quickly becoming invisible in the distance.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Where do they usually go?”

  “You gotta get the hell out of here,” the Gunny said, heading for the crew working at getting the supplies unloaded.

  “I don’t see anybody from Fourth Platoon,” I murmured to his departing back.

  The Gunny turned his head and yelled. “The gunships are gone.”

  My team ran by me, back the way they’d come, with Fessman saying “Come on, sir, we’re going to need you” as they passed.

  “What for?” I shouted at their fast departing backs, starting to lope after them until some sounds hit me like thudding drum beats. The extremely distinctive sounds that could only be one thing on earth. The sounds of mortar charges going off and launching their killing loads high into the air. Forty seconds, on average, before impact. I ran like hell, shouts of “Incoming!” behind me.

  In seconds I made it back to the area of our hooches. Fessman waited on my poncho cover, his radio already on the ground with the handset held out toward me.

  “Where?” I said, grasping the black plastic tube in my right hand.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “With mortars we never really know. They don’t smoke and they move them all the time.”

  My team looked up at me from their sitting and squatting positions nearby. They looked at me like I would know. I took the handset, having no clue as to where to direct the fire.