Then the rotten, God-forsaken, cock-sucking, mother-humping, shit-headed, dick-brained, asshole-licking, fucking GOOKS began dropping mortar rounds into the LZ. One after another the explosions walked toward the green smoke lingering in the still, scorched air. How did the bastards know that the choppers would land no matter how hot the landing zone was from small arms, but they couldn’t land during a mortar attack? I saw them abort their landing just short of the zone, peeling off to the south and west in pairs. Around me the Marines who weren’t face down in the dirt trying to escape the shrapnel flying through the air looked at me as if it were my fault the choppers were hauling ass without picking up the wounded or dropping ammunition.
“Fish Barrel Three, Jelly Belly lead.” It was the lead chopper.
“Go ahead, Jelly Belly.”
“We’ll hang around southwest of the LZ for a while, Fish. Can you get some strikes on those mortar tubes? You must be taking ten rounds a minute. How’re you holding out?”
“Jelly Belly, I’ll try to get more fast movers and Sandys up here a-sap. We’re …” I thought better of what I was about to say, “We’re making out okay. We would like you to get those wounded out of here if at all possible. Fish, over.”
“We’ll do our best, Fish. Get rid of those tubes.”
I received word of two more flights of fighters on station and began directing them. Wing asked me over and over how many flights I thought I would need, and I finally told them to go fuck themselves, I had no idea. I was beyond all fear of authority, all fear of man, God, and anything else I should fear. I knew that I was going to hug dirt in this paddy until I could silence the mortar tubes, which were now dropping rounds every thirty seconds into the zone. Surely they would run out of ammunition. I called for more Sandys. The Cobras came back, sniffing like terriers around the treeline until one of them jerked up suddenly and then cartwheeled into the edge of the LZ.
A Marine lying near us, hugging his M-16 alongside his face like a favorite teddy bear, looked over at us during a lull, when only the almost peaceful popping of small arms was in the air.
“How many strikes will they send, Lieutenant?” He seemed fearful of my answer.
I looked at Granger’s notebook, required to be kept for the operations officer to pass back to the air wing. It recorded each sortie and the amount of ordnance expended. The notebook was torn, filthy and full. Granger was keeping record on the back.
“They’ll never, ever quit, Marine. They’ll send strikes for god-damned ever.”
Late in the afternoon the choppers landed. Not only did they bring ammunition, they brought fresh troops who joined our company as we slowly advanced on the treeline in front of us, the incoming fire decreasing noticeably with each rush the Marines made. Before dusk they were in the treelines. An occasional crack was heard when they encountered a sniper and flushed him out.
In the landing zone, I sat on my helmet and smoked a cigarette that it had taken me three attempts to light, each time the shaking of my hands extinguishing the match before it reached my cigarette. To keep my mind off of the immediate past, I wrote up my after-action report while waiting to be lifted back to the base near the beach. Barker and Granger lay sleeping in the late afternoon sun. Barker had already asked me if he could not have a medal but just get shitter detail forever. Not being all that used to combat, he fully expected that he was going to get a medal for cowering in a shallow ditch blubbering for a day. I asked God—why did I think of him in loud pants and a pullover?—if He would forgive me for wishing that Barker had been shot.
Yosemite Sam walked over to where I was sitting and waved me down when I started to get up. I tried quickly to think of how to appease him so that he wouldn’t report me to the battalion CO as a sniveling weasel. I hoped that the LZ had been chaotic enough that he had not heard my wimpful pleadings with the saints and goblins to kill everybody but save me. Maybe he hadn’t noticed that I had often directed bombing runs far beyond their target until I was more certain of my ability to bring them in close.
“Thanks, flyman,” the major said as he stuck out his filthy hand. “You saved our ass on this one. We’d a been a fucked duck if you hadn’t stayed on that horn all day. Most of the FACs are back there with me in the center of the zone. You’ve got balls laying right on the perimeter, son. But that was goddam fine air work.” He let go of my hand and motioned for me to follow him back to the center of the LZ to be picked up by the choppers.
I looked at the slack-jawed faces of Barker and Granger.
“What were we doing out here on the perimeter?” I asked, for future reference.
“What’s a perimeter, sir?” Barker asked. Now that the action was over, he was becoming the more animated of the two. Granger was sinking back into his silent state. I looked at his idiot face and knew the meaning of “dumbfounded.” I also knew why he had survived all of the other FACing missions. He was too damn dumb to be shot. Shooting him wouldn’t make any sense. But he had saved my ass today, and that’s the way it was.
I learned something that late afternoon when the sun came thinly through the trees, the trees almost devoid of branches and leaves, the quiet so pure that you could hear a Marine scraping the bloody mud from the soles of his combat boots, the hesitation of the knife as pressure was applied near the heel and then the release as it moved the gore to and off of the toe. A skinny corporal came shyly up to the major, who was sitting beside me writing his after-action report. The corporal was stripped to the waist and had a sunken chest.
When the major looked up at him, the corporal nodded over his shoulder toward the thirteen bodies. “When do you want to load the meat, major?” he asked.
I looked at the major to see his reaction. He didn’t look up.
Where was Gearheardt when I needed him? I did not want to be a grunt.
At the base I had an attack of nerves as the adrenaline wore off. After I stripped off my clothes, I had to sit on the side of my bunk for a while before I could stand up, let alone walk to the shower.
Cleaned up and feeling better about myself, I decided to drop by the troops’ chow hall to check up on them. If the major thought I had done a pretty good job, maybe some of the troops wanted to say something to me also. Before I reached the door, I saw a number of the company lounging in a circle next to the water buffalo, sipping beer and smoking.
“What the fuck was the point of that little excursion?” one of them asked rhetorically.
I tried to enter into the discussion with the grunt lieutenants in the O Club tent, but it was another day at the office for them. I couldn’t let down to that level and knew that I would embarrass myself. I kept walking and sipping warm beer hoping that what was waiting for me in my tent would go away.
And what was waiting for me was the sight of the thirteen dead marines that were lying in a neat row in the center of the landing zone when I finally got there to be picked up. The company had no body bags, so the kids were lying on ponchos with tent halves on top of them. When the first chopper landed, it blew the tent halves off, and we had to look at the mostly naked bodies. Three were whole and the rest had grotesque shapes with missing body parts. One had only half a head.
When I finally had nowhere else to go, there was a Captain Fowler waiting impatiently on my cot. “Where the hell have you been, Lieutenant?”
“Fuck you,” was the only reply I could think of. Luckily he was an administrative pogue and that was the only response I needed.
“The major said for you to write the letters to the next of kin.” He stopped and held up his hands toward me. “You don’t have to have known them. Just write the letters.”
He thrust a file into my hands. “Here are their names and addresses. By the way, that shithead humper of yours, Barkley, or whatever the hell his name is, wrote the last bunch, but we can’t send them. He wrote a bunch before we read any, but that can’t be helped now. You can redo these we caught and send all of them at once. The major wants them to go out tomorrow. We
care about these kids, you know.”
When he was gone, I dropped to my cot and rigged a lamp so that I could read and write from my bed. The thirteen names and their next of kin were on the top of the folder, held there with a paper dip. I took it off and straightened it, marveling at the mundaneness of it. Then I picked up the first of the letters that Corporal Barker had written to wives and parents, the letters that Fowler had said weren’t to be sent.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jackson
Yore boy is dead. Land mine blowed his legs off and maybe his arms to. I am sure he is happy dead cause he don’t have a dick or nothing after steppen on the land mine. I didn’t know yore boy so I cant say if he was queer like Davis says. I think you get some money but not a hole lot. Better then nothing. And the skipper says to tell you that he was one of the finest young men he ever saw. Ever one killed that day was to. Also something about him helping his country but Davis was maken stupid noise and I didn’t hear everthing. Davis didn’t like yore boy but at least he is dead now.
Yore friend
Corporal Frederick W. Barker US Marines
Oh my God, I thought. How many letters had that dickhead Barker sent out before someone thought to check them? I looked up and Barker was standing in the tent-door.
“You send for me, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“I didn’t, Barker, but I’m glad you’re here. What in the hell were you thinking with these letters? Are you a complete moron?” I sat up on my cot.
Barker took a step back as if I had hit him.
“Lieutenant Caldwell told me I was to write those letters since he knew I liked readin’ and everthing. He told me that the mommas and daddies needed to know how their boys died and everthing so they could feel better. He said you cain’t just have ‘em thinking they went to shit and the hogs et ’em.”
I grabbed another letter and read from it.
“I think yore boy was screaming mostly cause his guts was hanging out and maybe ants was eatin on them. He was sure enough a loud screamer. Davis said to shoot him our ownse/f but Davis don’t like anybody and nobody likes him.
“Do you actually think that some parent is going to feel better after they read that?”
“Lieutenant, that was Freedman. He got hit right over there by the fence by a mortar. I heard him, Lieutenant. He screamed about all night before someone could get out there to him.”
“That’s not the point! Oh, shit, never mind, Barker. What did you want? You know damn well I didn’t send for you.”
“Sir, they’s making up the shitter burnin’ detail this evening. Me and Granger—”
“Get out of here, Barker. Tell your pal that he doesn’t have to worry about getting aced off the shitter detail. I’ll take care of it in the morning.”
I wrote for two hours. Every letter made me harder, less compassionate. Afterward I sat alone in the dark tent, smoking and thinking. I couldn’t handle any more warm beer or company. I had to decide if I had the balls to suck it up and bury all this shit. It was a choice between John Wayne or lipstick and a purse.
The next day we were off the rotation to go out into the boonies. But the following day we made an assault at the base of the first range of hills to our west, and the enemy was dug in deep. We lost “only” three men. Over the next few weeks, we averaged losing about four Marines a week. I became numb, rising and riding the choppers into the landing zones, calling down fire from above, and hugging the shit-packed ground for all I was worth. I wanted to be back in the squadron so bad that I forced myself not to think about it, imagining that I was serving a sentence of some kind. I thought of Gearheardt back in Chu Lai, about thirty miles north of where I was now. I wondered if he was worried about me and was surprised that he hadn’t figured out a way to fly down to see me.
I got rid of Barker but kept Granger. He never changed. A mute at the base and a competent, mechanical radio-man in the landing zones.
At three weeks into my time with the grunts I passed Barker in front of the chow tent one evening.
“Hey there, Lieutenant, you ain’t dead yet?” he asked. “You gonna beat Lieutenant Vervack’s record near four weeks pretty soon. The gunny tole me he already lost a bunch of money on you.”
In my bunk I told myself that Barker was an idiot. Taking care of yourself, doing a good job, being with good men was how you stayed alive. Statistics didn’t matter in individual cases. Then I put my head under my pillow in case the shakes came back.
Gearheardt stuck his head into my tent.
“Olly, olly, ox in free, or something like that. Hey, pal, you don’t look so good.”
“Take that flashlight out of my face, Gearheardt. I am statistically dead.”
“Heard you were a big hero around here. Kill anybody we know?”
“I’m telling you, Gearheardt, it’s not funny. What the hell are you doing here anyway?”
“I got your papers, my friend. The President said my buddy Jack needs to be with his buddy Gearheardt. In fact I asked him to get the orders cut to say just that. Here.”
He held up a document and pointed his flashlight at it from top to bottom. Amid all of the official SecDacNavDD118cc crap a single sentence read, “Lieutenant Armstrong needs to be with his buddy Gearheardt.”
“That sent ’em through the roof up at Wing HQ, I’ll bet. And look at this.”
He held up a copy of Stars and Stripes, the armed forces newspaper. On the front page a headline read POLL SHOWS PUBLIC TRUST FADING.
“Listen to this, buddy. ‘In a poll released today by Apgard Polling, it was revealed that the U.S. public by an overwhelming margin would prefer movie stars run foreign policy. Mickey Mouse was the most trusted public figure again, followed by Mickey Rooney, Mickey Mantle, and Mikii Tita, a Las Vegas dancer.”
“What the hell is that all about, Gearheardt?”
“Don’t you get it, Jack? President Larry Bob, not his real name, is covering his ass again. Before this is over, they’ll have Mickey Mouse strapped in Old Sparky, and the Prez will be totin’ tacos on the Mexican Riviera. America is fried, and the Prez’s future is lower than a short order cook.”
I sat in silence for a moment. I could see Gearheardt outlined against the tent opening.
“Compared to that, the war seems almost sane in light of what happens in the world. Maybe I want to be a grunt. At the end of the day, if you’re alive and can feed yourself, you’re happy.” I paused. “Is that so bad?”
Gearheardt grew serious.
“I’ve got to get you out of here, Jack. You’re going nuts.”
While I was musing, Gearheardt was throwing my gear into a parachute bag. He tossed it out the door and turned back to where I sat on the edge of my cot.
“We can go right now.”
We left and walked through the night toward the sound of a helicopter idling. When I looked up I saw its running lights and it felt good. The rotors were stopped and drooped awkwardly. A giant exhausted insect.
At the last row of tents, Gearheardt stopped and shined his flashlight on a sign that hung from the last of the last. It was the tent where the bodies that hadn’t been flown out yet were kept until they could be shipped to the big walk-in reefer in the sky, as the troops called it. The sign was new and hand painted. It read, NO SNIFFING THE DEAD.
“When I was walking up to your tent some beanpole was hanging that sign. What the hell is it supposed to mean?”
I sighed and moved him along by the arm. Goddamn Barker.
“It’s because dead men have molecubes floating around them and it’s like eating the dead if you sniff them.”
Gearheardt said, “Oh.”
12 • Roll Out the Barrel, We’ll Have a Barrel of British Spy
Gearheardt and I found our contact, or rather he found us, in a small bar near the Air Force hospital in Qui Nhon. The squadron had moved there, settling in semi-livable huts alongside the runway, to support the Korean troops who had arrived, evidently to bring a taste of barbarism to our side. One of
their tricks was sending their Viet Cong prisoners back for interrogation inside an empty 55-gallon gas drum. Three or four to a barrel. Unsurprisingly, they were quite ready to be turned over to the Americans or South Vietnamese for questioning when they were unloaded.
“You know, Jack,” Gearheardt said, watching the South Vietnamese soldiers pry the lid off a barrel just unloaded from his helicopter, “you paint those barrels yellow, add some wheels and an ooga horn and you’ve got yourself a circus act.”
“Seems a bit cruel, Gearheardt,” I said, watching the groveling prisoners unravel from the knot.
“They should have thought of that before they became Vietnamese, Jack.”
We were relaxing in the stolen-air-conditioner comfort of Mama-San’s Number One Beer House when the contact came out of the pisser. He stopped by our table and smiled at Gearheardt.
“Devil of a war, ain’t it mate?” he said.
“Yes,” Gearheardt answered. He sipped his beer. He hated to be disturbed when he was off the flight schedule and only had a few hours to drink beer.
The contact seemed uncomfortable for a moment, looking around the dark room as if seeking assistance. All we knew was that the President had told Gearheardt that a contact would find us in Vietnam. There was a password, but Gearheardt had forgotten it.
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