Thirty Days Has September

by James Strauss

“Come on,” I said to my team, breaking into a loping run through the broken forest where the central path, no longer visible, had to be. I ran for several minutes without looking back, unsure whether at least Fessman followed me. I could use Pilson’s Prick 25 command rig to reach the battery but it would be so much better to have Fessman. The big green tracers became visible as the gun fired from high up on the side of Hill 110. Firing in five shot volleys meant that the invisible bullets, without tracer heads, probably numbered about twelve or fifteen more.

  The gunners up on the side of the hill could see that I was the only thing visible and moving, every marine I passed either lying behind fallen trees or pressed hard into the forest surface. The tracers came screaming by me, some so close that I thought I could feel their heat. Instead of dropping for cover I increased my speed. Suddenly I found myself face down on the forest floor.

  “Stay the fuck down! Without artillery we’re dead men,” the Gunny hissed into my ear.

  I looked around. The tracers continued, hunting the bracken for Marines and occasionally finding one, if the screams coming from the bracken were any indication.

  Fessman crawled up, the handset pushed out in front of him. I pulled out my binoculars before grabbing the plastic implement and shoving it under one arm. I leaned into the side of a fallen tree trunk, focusing in on the hill. Two thousand meters, I guessed, because I could actually see the gun and crew. It was as if the artillery before, and now the clearing operation, had made no impact on them at all. Four men seemed to man the gun, one doing the shooting and the three others supplying the ammo. I found it hard to see actual movements but I knew exactly what they were doing because the tracers, before they ignited, left the end of the barrel with a series of yellow flames, almost like a toy flame thrower if ever one existed.

  “In contact, break zone and fire mission, over,” I said into the handset.

  I wanted the 105 battery because the 155s would be in defilade from the side of the hill I wanted to target. They wouldn’t be able to get down on the hill where I needed fire. I called for one round up over the very apex of the peak. I had that grid and code memorized. The round came in less than two minutes later, dead on target. The white phosphorus, or Willy Peter, exploded like a chunk of giant fireworks and then showered its burning contents down into a big beautiful fountain.

  I dropped three hundred, hoping to establish a point between the machine gun and me. This time I asked for H.E. Due to my proximity, it would be easier for me to see the impact, even in the cloying clutter of the forest. The round came in about a hundred yards below the gun and I smiled a cold smile. The gun crew had stopped firing and started to pack up, but not soon enough.

  “Battery of six,” I called, “up one hundred and fire for effect.” Russ had been waiting at the FDC and alerted the gun crews. The first six rounds came in only seconds later. Then six more and so on, until 36 rounds shredded the small area, where the gun once sat. It was impossible, even with the binoculars, to see if there had been a gun there, or any humans nearby.

  The Gunny crawled over. “Jesus Christ, you blew the living shit out of them and you only called in two rounds. Wow. I’m putting you in for a medal for that run. That was classic.” He got up and took off toward the front of the path where he’d obviously been before the unit got hit. I lay there breathing hard.

  “A medal,” Fessman said, more to himself than me.

  From behind him jubilant laughter came from the rest of the team. I would have joined them if I’d been able to laugh anymore. A medal. What use was a medal to a bunch of dead men?

  I listened to the sounds of wounded men being cared for and shushed by their friends. My hand edged down and over the bulge in my trouser pocket.

  twenty-six

  The Sixth Night

  Booby traps that weren’t made with detonators or explosives subject to sympathetic detonation couldn’t be destroyed, disabled, or damaged by the rolling artillery barrage I’d designed, and that the battery had applied so effectively. The machine gun had caused significant casualties before the artillery had blown it and its emplacement to hell. And now three lowly punji pits, along with one sniper, had brought the company to a dead stop. Punji pits were made by digging a shallow hole and then inserting sharpened up-pointing sticks into the mud at the bottom of the little pits. The sharpened sticks layered in human feces, and generally barbed as well, penetrated the bottom of any Marine’s boot unfortunate enough to plunge through the disguised hole covering. I’d heard rumors that the newest issue of jungle boots had a triangular aluminum bar built into the soles that made them punji pit proof, but nobody had seen or been issued such a set in the company.

  The Gunny called me up to the point in order to attempt to deal with the sniper. The company came to a halt as the sunset. The evening mist and the lugging of casualties, along with packs and the other equipment necessary to operate a reinforced Marine company, had already slowed our progress to a snail’s pace before the sniper showed up and stopped it completely. As I moved forward the going became more difficult. Walking became climbing and the mist on the forest floor made the strewn plant life and blown-apart wood pieces as slippery as the mud. I labored toward the point, with Fessman cursing behind me as he carried the twenty-pound radio with extra batteries. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the company itself would never make the ridge before dark. The Marines I climbed around to get to the point were all digging in and setting up for a night that had not come yet.

  I finally arrived near where the Gunny lay talking on the radio, Pilson not far away with his Prick 25. Each platoon had small radios called “sixes” leftover from the Korean War. Most didn’t work at all unless the operators could see one another. They looked like giant bent bananas, green in color. A Marine with one of the six radios talked on it. I presumed him to be the acting platoon commander, probably talking to one of the other platoons over the limited range radio.

  A shot rang out from somewhere in front of us and everyone ducked down, even though anyone I could see already squatted, or lay under or behind, some sort of cover.

  “Anybody hit?” the Gunny yelled.

  No answer. I reached for the artillery net handset and Fessman complied instantly. I really appreciated his ability to sense my needs from a single gesture.

  “Fire mission, over,” I sent.

  “A lotta good artillery’s going to do when you can’t see shit,” the guy with the six radio said.

  “This sniper hitting anything?” I asked, surprised by the sniper’s last shot being placed to hit no one in particular.

  “He’s a lousy shot,” the Gunny replied. “Hasn’t hit shit but we can’t move past him until we take him out. They’re probably stalling us so they can set up an ambush ahead. Can’t flank him successfully because of the size of the clearing in front of us. If we’d taken Hill 110…” his voice trailed off.

  “In contact, one round Whiskey Papa,” I said into the handset, and then read off my second to last zone fire coordinate key, with code from memory.

  “Your position?” Russ asked, his voice coming over the little speaker built into the top of the Prick 25.

  I hastily calculated where we were likely to be, and although the body of the company lay strewn behind me for nearly a thousand meters, the battery only ever asked for one grid coordinate. The FDC would approximate “check fire” radius using its own numbers and approximations. I could have taken a bearing on Hill 110, visible on our left flank across the valley, but after my run through fire, however inadvertent it had been, I was in a wild guessing mood. I gave the battery a number and seconds later the Willy Peter lit up over the top of the path about a thousand meters in front of us.

  “Told you,” the six radio man said, as the sniper fired another round into the jungle bracken somewhere nearby.

  I motioned for Stevens to come, as the scout team had followed me in my move for
ward.

  “Watch the trees up ahead,” I said. “We have visibility for about a thousand meters. The sniper’s using an AK that’s well beyond its effective range, and he’s probably using metal sights. Spot the muzzle flash when he fires again.”

  “But when’s he going to fire?” Stevens asked.

  “The muzzle velocity of his rifle should be about six to seven hundred meters a second,” I said. “He’s such a shitty shot because he’s using shitty equipment. If I walk slowly and turn then he’s got to figure out where I’m going to be a second and a half or so before I get there. Watch the tree line.”

  I stood up, handing the handset back to Fessman, and walked forward toward a thick-trunked tree. I abruptly stopped, turned, and then went back the other way. A bullet seemed to whisper past the back of my head, the sound of the shot coming out of the barrel arriving a few seconds later. I dropped to the jungle floor.

  “You hit?” Fessman yelled.

  “You get his position?” I asked back.

  “Yeah,” Stevens said. “He’s about two fingers to the left of the smoke from that last shell and maybe a bit forward.”

  I grabbed the radio handset and called it in, dropping fifty meters and shifting the fire of the spotting round two hundred meters left, figuring that a finger held up translated to about a hundred meters at a distance of a thousand. I called in a battery of six.

  After the “shot, over” came through the speaker, I yelled for everyone to get down. “These are going to hit hard and close!” I covered my ears with both hands.

  The battery of six came in, wave after deadly wave, the nearer rounds impacting, by less than five hundred meters, the relatively open area between our position and the forward tree line where the sniper lay. Peeking over the edge of the fallen tree after the “splash” transmission, I saw the white blossom of a shock wave rushing outward and at me. I scrunched down to take the shock, but too late. The blast threw me a good ten feet backwards. Nobody moved to help me as the other six round impacts came down in waves with only seconds between them.

  “You all right, sir?” a voice I knew had to be Fessman’s said from a distance. Only Fessman called me sir.

  I’d dropped my hands when the last of the rounds impacted.

  “No more sniper,” the Gunny said, “and you are battier than bat shit,” he finished. “You never ever stand in front of a sniper,” he continued. “Not ever.”

  “He wasn’t a sniper,” I defended. “He was just the delaying action. We can move now.”

  In spite of holding my hands over my ears, they still rang, and my head felt like a big giant marshmallow from the shock wave of the round I’d been stupid enough to stick my head up to see. But I knew that I’d never ever forget what the white rolling shock wave looked like as it crushed the water out of the air in its passage.

  “White water,” I said, a bit giddy to be alive. “It’s white water, like in the waves.”

  “Water, give him some water,” the Gunny ordered, pointing at Zippo.

  I lay on my back, not wanting any water but figuring it was better that they thought I needed some than for them to really understand what I wanted to say. My mind would not come back from Sandy Beach on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. I wondered, if I made it home and back to that particular beach, whether I’d ever swim there and not see the white rushing aura of that artillery round’s expanding halo.

  The man with the six radio walked by my prone figure, glancing down as he passed.

  “You one crazy motherfucking dude, Junior…but you’re our crazy motherfucking dude.”

  I wasn’t sure whether what he said was a compliment or an insult, or an insult inside a compliment. I sat up. No incoming that I could hear. The Gunny squatted down beside me to make coffee. I moved to join him, although I didn’t have my pack. I knew Zippo or Stevens must have it somewhere but I wasn’t going to ask.

  “We can move forward,” I said, the Gunny sensing my predicament with the coffee and handing me a spare envelope.

  I heated my water, sharing the burning explosive with the Gunny. I read the coffee envelope. Made by the Coca-Cola Company, which seemed strange. Then the Gunny came up with a package of sugar. I didn’t know if California produced sugar but if I ever got home, I determined to support Dole, the only sugar producer left in Hawaii.

  “We’re setting in,” the Gunny said, confirming my previous thoughts about the Marines digging in further down the path. “The open area out here can serve as a landing zone in the morning. Find a place a bit back down from here. The perimeter will run along the edge of this clearing and First Platoon will be on watch. They may attack across there tonight because they’ve had long enough and besides, the A Shau Valley is Indian country.”

  I mixed the coffee and sugar and then drank the result, which seemed too wonderful to be what it was. I emptied the canteen holder and replaced it on my belt. Having my canteen full of water made me happy, too, although I realized that I was experiencing some kind of high from almost being dead but still alive and relatively unhurt.

  When I was done I got up and moved down the path. I had no good reason to be alive. None of the danger I’d been in since I arrived lessened one bit, but I could not keep a certain bounce from my step.

  My team struggled to keep up until I stopped about a hundred and fifty meters back the way we’d come. A small hill not far from the main course of travel looked like a perfect place to set up the Starlight scope. I worked through wet messy undergrowth to climb to the top, thinking one man could view the small area around us quite easily. The flattened top of the hill would accommodate all five of our hooches.

  I wondered who would be coming in the night, this night? The platoon of small-minded country racists or the platoon of angry black combat avoiders who still seemed to fight quite a bit, as long as it was inside the company. The platoon commanders were successful tribal leaders in the company, as was the Gunny. But I was not. I had no real place unless I could find a place, and the only thing I had to offer were my services. Those services had been badly needed, but mostly ignored or underplayed, before my arrival. Would I have enough to offer? Would I have enough to offer in time?

  Fessman joined me on the hill, dragging my pack up and turning on his little transistor radio. Brother John came on immediately with his last offering of the day. Some sort of Native American Apache War Chant, he said. Hena hawaya yo, hen na yo, hey ya hey ya a accompanied by beating drums with the same lyrics repeating over and over again. I had no idea what they meant but for the moment, I felt like an Apache sitting on a mountain top of the American Southwest so many years in the past. I thought about moving from the Go Noi Island area, called Arizona Territory by the men around me, and then on up to the A Shau, which they called Indian country. The Apache War Chant seemed most appropriate, indeed, and I wondered how Brother John, down country somewhere in a place called Na Trang, could know that.

  twenty-seven

  The Sixth Night : Second Part

  The rain came and the smell came with it. The temperature dropped, our altitude reducing the steam heat to an oily cloying mass of moving air that felt so intensely like spider webs that I constantly brushed my hands across my face to get rid of them. It was full dark and Stevens manned the Starlight scope, relieving Zippo from scope tripod duty because the team had fashioned our half full packs into a sort of raised mound for the Starlight.

  “What in hell is that smell?” I asked no one in particular. “It’s like the mosquito stuff, but worse.”

  “It’s snowing,” Stevens whispered, looking through the scope.

  I moved to his side, all of our ponchos and whatever bound together to form a lumpy inadequate roof against the rain. The Gunny had returned with Pilson. They’d set up a few feet further down the small slope, close enough to overhear the rest of us.

  “Rain looks like snow in the Starlight scope,” he
said, not bothering to whisper. “It’s because of the way it magnifies light. There’s three intensifiers in that thing. Each one adds fake photons to the real ones until it looks like there’s more light than there really is. And that smell is something called ‘Agent Orange.’ Don’t know what’s in it but that’s why the clearing is there — why all this is somewhat clear. Without spraying every couple of weeks, this place would be impenetrable jungle.”

  “Is it dangerous?” Fessman asked.

  The Gunny laughed first, and then the others. I stayed silent. It was funny. Was the stuff dangerous? We had all been sent out to die, and dying we were. What possible greater danger could some oily crap sprayed from the air be to us?

  “Oh,” Fessman said after a few seconds, finally getting it.

  “The only good thing is that the gooks don’t like it,” the Gunny said. “They don’t like storms either because they can’t hear. They don’t like the rain for the same reason. And they don’t like the night even if they have to fight in it all the time or be chopped to ribbons. Get some sleep if you can. I don’t think those clowns from the First and Fourth are coming in the rain, but Charlie probably will.”

  “I thought you said they don’t like the night, the rain, or that oily stuff,” I replied.

  “They don’t,” the Gunny said. “But they’re also tough as hell and they’re not killing one another to stay alive, they’re killing us.”

  Nobody laughed, although I saw the analytical humor in the Gunny’s remark. Killing to stay alive. That was funny, too, in a way. A stand-up comedian would be able to make something out it after the war.

  I crawled back to my hooch, or what part of the big hooch we’d jammed together belonged to me. I took out my flashlight and wrote a letter to my wife. I started it out with killing to stay alive, but then ran into trouble when I could not give her a rendition of what had happened earlier. She was smart. After a bit my descriptions of the fauna and flora were going to tip her off that I wasn’t telling her anything at all. I wrote of the men around me. Real Marines who acted more like shape-shifting pirates, with a good bit of Peter Lorre and Burt Lancaster thrown in. Difficult men to predict and nearly inscrutably impossible to form any kind of relationship with. Dying together was not a group thing. It was a bunch of lonely men moving in mass who found it impossible to share anything, especially death.