by Dale A. Dye
As I listen distractedly to Autry’s ramble, a time tunnel opens and I’m through the wormhole to a little Southeast Missouri town where I have been shuttled off to spend time with my Dad who is separated by the bottle from my Mom. On one of those sultry summer days just before I’m scheduled to start military school, a shotgun blast too close to my grandparents’ house sends me to investigate. And there’s my Dad—or what’s left of the chunky, intelligent, tow-headed Irishman that was my Dad. Now he’s dead by his own hand and I’ll never listen to his rambling stories again, never stand by his barstool and marvel at the way he could spin the simplest situations into fascinating adventures. It was so shocking that I couldn’t cry and simply stood there watching his blood pool around the new white basketball shoes he’d bought for me. The carefully folded American flag they gave me at his funeral served as a pillow for lots of long nights spent crying rather than sleeping. And then one morning I woke up dry-eyed with a firm resolution never to love anyone again as deeply as I did my father.
Of course, there were testosterone-fueled teenage years ahead, but I was never very good at anything beyond the hunt for frequent and fervent sexual encounters. It came to a head right after I graduated from that military school when a girl I felt slightly more passionate about than usual broke what was left of my heart. She’d hung in with me during a long, sultry affair then finally decided there was no future in it. She curtly handed back my graduation ring which had until that moment had hung between her luscious boobs, and walked out of my life. At a time of forced introspection, I had no idea where that life might lead. What I needed was direction, discipline, and distraction. I needed an outfit that didn’t ask many questions or expect many from its minions. It didn’t take me long to decide that outfit was most likely the U.S. Marine Corps, America’s version of a French Foreign Legion where sad souls can escape and forget. So, running away from one death that haunted me, I joined a lash-up that specialized in, sometimes even glorified death, as long as it was all done the Marine Corps way with attendant honor and glory.
Go figure—and there in that slimy ditch in Hue City listening to Gene Autry tell me about a much more normal adolescence, I had nothing better to do than figure. Life’s a bitch sometimes, I tell Gene Autry, and snap the notebook shut on his story and mine.
Treasury Building
Gene Autry elbows me back to Hue, nodding and pointing at the Treasury Building up ahead of our ditch. “I think I see them fuckers moving up there.” His grubby finger brushes my nose and I see shadows flitting back and forth in the courtyard fronting the building. Those gooks know for sure what’s coming their way and they’re getting ready for it, improving positions at street level and up high in the building. Not hard to see why they were able to hold off Hotel’s determined assault yesterday. It will be a mix of plunging and grazing fire when we get within their range. A clutch of dark clouds passes the sun, and in that brighter light I can see that the front of the building is torn up with bullet holes. It looks like some berserk architect has taken a jackhammer to it.
There is a dead Marine lying in a grotesque posture near the steps of the building. Autry tells me that it’s Stevens, a Hotel Company man that they couldn’t recover when they pulled back under intense fire. The Horrible Hogs are more concerned about retrieving their buddy than they are excited about a second shot at taking the Treasury Building. No one believes either task will be easy, but it’s aggravating to see Stevens’ body lying up there in a gook-controlled courtyard. Everyone seems a little embarrassed about that. No one says it in precisely textbook fashion, but everyone knows Marines don’t leave other Marines—living or dead—behind when they quit a battlefield. There’s no one to blame specifically and the situation yesterday was beyond their control, but a palpable level of anger is building up in Hotel Company. This second assault will be undertaken by a bunch of pissed off grunts, and there’s a certain reassurance in that anger. They won’t fail this time.
Activity begins all along the assault line as officers brief the squad leaders. There is an uneasy stirring among the grunts in our ditch, the ones that will make the first rush of the day. A rooster crows in the distance and it’s almost like a bugle call. Firing starts immediately. There is a steady roar of rifle and machinegun fire from both ends of the long drainage ditch and concrete chips begin to fly in the distance. Six Marines near me break cover in a tidal wave of watery slime and pound toward the building, running zig-zag paths, streaming water from soaked trousers and boots.
Before long the assault takes recognizable shape. It’s all about fire and maneuver as it always is in attacking a fortified position. One squad keeps gook gunners away from the windows with concentrated fire while another moves into defilade. Gooks are waiting for their time so there’s not as much return fire as everyone expected during the initial rush. It’s a mild shock when we realize the leading squad is safely tucked behind the wall surrounding the building. The lucky leaders signal for the rest of us to come on and we rush forward to join them, bounding from cover to cover on both sides of the street. We know the gooks are in there. We’ve seen them moving around. So? Where are they and what are are they waiting for?
Through a telephoto lens, I watch as two grunts crawl under cover of the courtyard wall toward a hole blasted by a recoilless rifle crew during yesterday’s action. Autry tells me that 106 was taken out by a B-40 fired from an upper story, but the gunner is nowhere in sight today.
One of the crawling grunts is carrying a Blooper, the short, shotgun-like 40mm grenade launcher that is proving to be a valuable weapon for infantrymen in Hue. Behind Blooper Man is another grunt hugging two green tubes containing LAAWs, Lightweight Antitank Assault Weapons. As LAAW Man sets up to fire, Blooper Man dashes across the open space in the wall and peeks to select a target. They are in position to rock and roll now, but before they can trigger the assault, the late-sleeper gooks inside the building decide it’s time to wake up and fight. AK rounds impact all around the assault team, tearing chunks of macadam up and down the street. Muzzle flashes light up windows all across the front of the building.
A lieutenant off to my left is screaming for covering fire and Marines in hides all along the street begin burning through M-16 magazines and belts of linked M-60 ammo. Sparks and rocks are flying from the front of the building in a noisy shower. Blooper Man swings around the opening to fire two quick rounds into a second-story window. He’s good. He fires and reloads so quickly that the two reports sound almost like a burst of semi-auto fire.
The upper left corner of the Treasury Building explodes in a dark blossom of high-explosive. Through the smoke, an RPD machinegun with gook gunner still attached tumbles slowly to the courtyard and impacts with a sickening thump. LAAW Man strips another rocket and sets up to fire again as a rifleman next to him pours half a magazine into the dead gook. It’s as good a break as we are likely to get and the lieutenant charges down the street waving for his grunts to follow.
Pounding along behind a grunt carrying at least a thousand rounds of machinegun ammo draped all over his body, I glance right and then left trying to locate Steve. He’s nowhere in sight and I’m too nervous to conduct anything more than a cursory search. Something tells me if I stay tied in tight behind this hulking, ammo-festooned grunt, I just might make it all the way to the Treasury Building. If I can just stay right behind his broad butt I’ve got some sense of direction and purpose here, maybe a chance that he’ll catch the first rounds aimed at us and I might skate. It’s not very manly or heroic, but I’m going with it.
In a couple of minutes that seem like hours, we make it to the wall and dive to find cover. I’m left all alone when Broad Butt crawls away to re-supply a machinegun firing on the flank of the new assault line. Plunging fire from the upper floors is cracking overhead but not doing much damage. There are maybe six or seven lying in the streets; some bleeding out while others crawl for cover. The lieutenant flops down next to me and peeks over the wall. He’s chew
ing on a lower lip and trying to decide how to get some of his people across the courtyard and into the building.
He’s still thinking about it when a squad leader decides he’s had enough bullshit and leads his guys into the open screaming for covering fire. They are fully exposed, running and gunning at NVA shooters in spider holes dotted throughout the courtyard. There’s still deadly fire raining down from the building’s upper reaches, but more and more Marines are taking it on themselves to follow the first squad’s lead. Two by two or in single rushes, they close on the building and hug the structure which puts them in defilade and safe from shooters inside the objective.
The lieutenant vaults the fence and sprays a magazine full of ball ammo toward the roof. By the time I find the guts to follow, a unit of maybe four or five guys have made it into the Treasury Building. I can hear them banging away in there. More Marines flood in through doors and lower level windows as I shove a dead NVA out of the way and take cover in his little fighting hole. On a side of the building, there are more grunts firing and fragging, forcing open a side entrance covered by one of those accordion-type security gates.
The lieutenant maneuvers forward past me to join them with his radio operator in tow. He pauses at the entrance to radio a report on their progress and then inside the building. There’s a roar of rifle fire and detonating grenades blowing out of the building and over my position in the courtyard. There’s a serious fight going on inside that building, but there’s no telling from here who is winning and who is losing. In about ten minutes by my watch, a Corpsman comes forward to reclaim Stevens corpse and haul it away out of sight. The noise inside the building begins to taper off to an intermittent rattle of single shots.
Hotel Company Gunny appears in the doorway with his shotgun dangling and a cigar clenched in his teeth. It’s a classic image and I record it on a couple of frames as he signals for the rest of the company to advance. The Treasury Building belongs to the Horrible Hogs of Hotel Company. Those not engaged in sweeping the building quickly arrive and fan out into defensive positions around the courtyard against an NVA counterattack.
Before I head for the building to find out what happened in there beyond the obvious, I take a few minutes to strip the dead NVA from the spider-hole of anything that looks like valuable trading material. There’s not much of interest beyond a clutch of letters covered with stamps extolling the virtues and fighting spirit of the People’s Army and a full-face gas mask of the sort I’ve seen dopers in the rear turn into what they call a grass-mask. Stuffing the enemy gear in my pack, I head for the building and duck inside. The air is thick with dust and cordite through which grunts are running in all directions. It seems the safe bet is just to stay out of the way for a while, so I slump down against a marble bench and catch my breath.
Two grunts suddenly appear in the broad main corridor of the building, walking backwards and dragging two gook bodies. They head for the entrance and then fling the rumpled forms out onto the front steps for the security squads to examine. I hear a ragged line of cheers erupt from the grunts in the courtyard. Hotel Company has captured a major objective in Hue, a key piece of urban terrain and that’s a story, so I rise to find someone who can tell me about it.
Sprawled along a series of polished marble hallways throughout of the Treasury Building, live grunts are doing what they always do after a firefight: Smoking or munching on something saved in a pack or pocket, sucking on canteens, staring at their boots, the opposite wall or the ceiling. They scrutinize anything but each other. In another couple of minutes, the ringing in their ears will clear. They’ll accept the fact that they survived again and the trash-talk will commence. Safe for a precious few minutes, they will critique the fight, focusing on the dark, near-fatal moments when somebody fucked up and got away with it.
Code of The Grunt. If you can’t say something funny about a shitty situation, don’t say anything. Keep the emotions buried until everyone comes to believe you don’t have any. The thing to be—the thing to look like when anyone is looking—is just another grunt motherfucker who doesn’t give a shit. There it is.
It starts with a PFC in horn-rimmed glasses, reloading his rifle magazines and yelling at another Marine sitting across the hall munching on a C-ration candy bar. Because neither one can hear very well, the exchange is made in high, croaking shouts.
“You the dude that pounded that cocksucker up topside with the LAAW?”
“Me and Blooper Man blew that motherfucker right out of his jock. You dudes find the leftovers up there?”
“We seen four of them assholes lying around in the area where you put the round. But they wasn’t the same ones had us pinned down outside yesterday.”
“How the fuck do you know that?”
“There was three more of ’em up there smelled like they been dead for a while. We got them motherfuckers yesterday is what I think. You got their replacements.”
Another grunt enters the conversation in mid-quibble. “Who gives a shit? You got ’em, we got ’em; what fucking difference does it make as long as they’re dead?”
There’s more but I wander away from it. The littered, blasted hallways inside the Treasury Building are taking on the atmosphere of a locker room after the big game which is no surprise. Most of these guys aren’t long out of high school and some of them are still coping with combat like they would a football or basketball game. That won’t last long.
Steve is propped up against a marble archway sucking on a canteen. He offers me a hit and lets me know his story notes plus a couple of rolls of film are on their way to Phu Bai. “I found a dude they were medevacing for pneumonia. He promised to drop the shit off on his way to the hospital.”
He was in on the initial assault, right there with the leading squads, but he doesn’t have much to say about it. “Bitch-kitty, gooks everywhere tucked in little cubbyholes and all over the upstairs.” That’s it. From the blood pools, scorch-marks, wounded Marines and shell-casings scattered everywhere there was clearly a whole hell of a more to it than that, but he’s not in a mood to expand or expound. When I probe, he simply holds up an empty cloth bandolier draped over his shoulder. When he started for the Treasury Building it contained ten fully loaded magazines.
We sit side-by-side reloading magazines from a spare bandolier. I’m punching a cleaning rod through my rifle when he digs around in his salty old NVA pack. In a moment I hear his high school ring clinking on glass. He grins and shows me the neck of a bottle.
“What is that—double-rectified busthead?”
Sheltering his prize from prying eyes, he shows me enough of the bottle to recognize Benedictine brandy. “Found it stuffed into some sandbags back at the MACV Compound. You’re looking at the kind of rare shit that prevents pneumonia in weather like this.”
“And that is the problem, my man. Looking at booze does not prevent pneumonia but I have it on good authority that drinking it is definitely prophylactic.”
We have a swallow or two each and the hot liquid works as advertised. Sitting there in a rubble-strewn hallway listening to blast-deafened, mind-numbed grunts bleat and bitch, we relax into a warm survivor’s cocoon where nothing much beyond the moment is worth the effort of worrying about it.
Steve wanders off leaving me to watch the gear. He returns in a half-hour flipping through the pages of his notebook. “We hold here for a while until the rest of the battalion ties in on the flanks…”
There is more but it’s rudely interrupted by a loud detonation that seems to send a shock-wave up through the floor. Something or someone has exploded in the basement of the building. Grunts are scrambling and falling all over each other, screaming for information. Didn’t anybody clear the fucking basement? From a rubble-strewn position flat on the tiles, I look to the right and see a thick door hanging nearly off its hinges. Smoke is billowing up from a stairway behind it and grunts are heading for the area with rifles shouldered.
Two NCOs are shoving anxious grun
ts back into overwatch positions and yelling at someone on the other side of the door. “What the fuck happened down there?” From below, excited voices bellow through the noise. “Come on down here. You ain’t gonna fuckin’ believe this shit.”
We waddle toward the door and peek into the dark. Acrid smoke billows up a stone stairwell as I crane to see what caused the commotion in the basement of the Treasury Building. A heavy object lands at my feet.
“Grenade!” We hit the deck and roll in a desperate effort to escape whatever was tossed our way. Hugging my helmet I hope for the best. If it’s a Chicom, we about to be peppered like a pin-cushion but nothing fatal happens. When we peek up from under our helmets, we see an NCO squatting near the doorway examining a bundle of paper. He grins and shakes the bundle at us.
“Here’s your fucking grenade. It’s gook money.” He shows the cash to curious grunts beginning to gather and celebrate surviving another close call. The bundle of Vietnamese currency is about four inches thick and neatly bound with gummed paper. The top bill is a one hundred piaster note or about $1.10 in American currency.