by Dale A. Dye
A second 60 mortar is firing now, using the same dope developed by the first gun and rounds are dropping through a hole blown in the roof of the most hotly contested building. Occasional belches of flame and smoke pour from second and third story windows. Radios crackle with new orders: Mortars cease fire and 2nd Platoon is ordered to move a squad into the buildings to conducts sweeps. Golf Company on the other side is having a field day blowing away running gooks.
A Marine squad leader clutching a 12-gauge shotgun gets the assignment from the lieutenant. “Take your people in slowly and see if there's any left.” The squad fans out to approach the building, policing up Marines out of spider holes in the courtyards as they approach. Steve and I follow hoping there aren’t a bunch of stubborn NVA inside the complex caught between our sweep and Golf Company’s block of any escape routes. We crouch near a wide staircase in the lobby of the main building as Shotgun Squad Leader leads his guys upward on a broad staircase. Before I can jam a new roll of film in my camera, a furious fight breaks out somewhere above on a second floor landing. It’s brief but brutal, punctuated by several grenade detonations. We can see expended M-16 rounds bouncing down the stairs and twinkling in the pale light that shines through a blown-out window.
“We got ’em. Send a Doc up here right away!” Shotgun Squad Leader is pointing at me and I sprint for the door yelling for a Corpsman. Two Docs shoulder through a crowd in the courtyard, charge into the building and sprint up the stairs. By the time we follow, they are working desperately over a wounded man bleeding onto the tiles of the second floor corridor. One of the Docs taps his partner and they stand. No chance to save the guy. He’s bled out through three AK holes in his chest.
Steve wanders over to take a look while the Corpsmen unfold a poncho to cover the corpse. He nods for me to join him and I look down at the dead man. This fight was the last for Lance Corporal Numbnuts, the grunt who destroyed the Hasselblad. A corner of the little Sony tape player is poking out of his bloody trousers and I retrieve it as the Docs begin to wrap him for the long, lonesome trip to Graves Registration.
“You know this guy?” One of the Corpsmen eyes the tape player and his tone indicates he doesn’t care for ghouls stripping bodies. “It’s cool, Doc. I gave him this thing yesterday.” The Corpsman shrugs and lifts the body to get a better grip. “Don’t mean nothin’, I guess. He’s got no more use for it.”
We spend the night around the hospital complex. For some reason, none of the grunts seem to want to sleep on the empty beds in the wards. It’s odd. There is a rare creature comfort available but nobody seems to trust it’s safe to indulge. Could be combat craziness or it could be fear of a late night Chicom tossed through a window to kill grunts so thoroughly crashed on a comfy mattress that they die in a dreamless sleep. Of course no one curled up in his poncho liner on the hard floor is willing to admit that. There’s a batch of bullshit rationalization: Gook bugs, blue-ball fever, leprosy, the dreaded black syphilis, and ugly-ass bodily fluids permeating the mattresses are the main excuses tendered for ignoring the available beds. Code of the Grunt. Always look a gift horse in the mouth. If it’s free it will cost you somewhere, sometime. The easy way is always booby-trapped.
On a whim, I carry the little Sony tape player into one of the operating rooms where noise won’t bother anyone and press the play button to see what Lance Corporal Numbnuts was grooving on before he bought the big one. It’s Peter, Paul and Mary, Album 1700, with the statuesque Mary Travers wailing about leaving on a jet plane. And that’s what’s next for what’s left of Lance Corporal Numbnuts. He’s leaving on a jet plane, dumped into a big aluminum box, and never coming back. No foxy stews on the Freedom Bird to admire his medals and likely a closed-coffin funeral due to the garbage a gook made of his chest cavity. It’s gonna be tough on Mr. and Mrs. Numbnuts back in The World.
Poor Mama Numbnuts will be wailing for the Marines to open the box so she can be sure her offspring is really in there. Poor Papa Numbnuts, a stoic veteran of The Big Two, will insist she doesn’t want the last image of their flesh and blood to be a mangled lump of flesh and blood. They’ll make do with that smiling, dress-blues boot camp picture for the rest of their lives and that’s that for the Numbnuts clan.
The music is depressing in the circumstances, so I follow the example of Lance Corporal Numbnuts, USMC, deceased, and smash the Sony against one of the stainless steel operating slabs. Sleep comes quickly after I curl up in a corner of the OR, but my dreams are disturbing and warped around funeral images. The body in the dream box is mine. The funeral parlor smells like a verdant jungle rain forest. Or maybe it’s verdant jungle rain forests that smell like a funeral parlor. In the dream it doesn’t matter.
The dream corpse is casing the joint from some omniscient viewpoint. There are familiar faces in the quiet crowd. No wailing or gnashing of teeth at this gig. The uncles, aunts, and relations in somber funeral finery are simply opining that the dead dude got what he deserved. Why did the dip-shit join something terminal like the Marine Corps? All the other boys did their time in the Navy or the Air Force and stayed the hell out of that Vietnam mess. Lordy! All and sundry assembled just knew it would come to this.
The dream pallbearers come to get my dream corpse and they’re all filthy bastards in muddy boots and shredded jungle uniforms. They reek sufficiently to wipe out the cloying funeral parlor floral stench. One of them with the stump of an arm leaking blood delivers my eulogy. “Here lies another dumb grunt motherfucker. Don’t mean nothin’.” There it is. Plant my ass. Let the grass grow and the worms eat. And the whole scene is dreamed in livid color.
Grunts banging and clanging through the hospital complex wake me at dawn. Climbing to the top floor, I stare through the hole blown by the mortarmen, looking across the Perfume River at the Citadel slowly being illuminated by a rising sun. Word last night was that the first battalion of the 5th Marines will likely be the meat fed into that grinder. They are heading for the city right now according to the CO’s radio operator. No doubt that will trigger blood-letting on an epic scale, maybe even worse than the Southside. Get involved in something like that and you don’t get out until you are sufficiently disabled to be of no further use—or dead.
A smart guy could avoid that, but I didn’t feel very smart and I was fairly sure when the time came to cross the river, I’d be there. That fight will rate a chapter in somebody’s history book: Twentieth century grunts laying siege to an eighteenth century castle, not something you see every day. We’re talking military history here, my man, and a fight that will doubtless be a double-decker shit sandwich. And how are you gonna take a pass on something like that?
Down below my perch, the 2/5 Command Group and some ARVN officers are running what looks like a three-ring circus. They’ve assembled the medical staff of the hospital to confront a gaggle of wailing patients. The Vietnamese are a sorry lot; mostly old folks, females and screaming kids, clutching at filthy bandages and trying to get someone to listen to their tales of woe. ARVN are in no mood to deal with sick civilians and looking for NVA or local VC they claim are posing as members of the medical staff.
One recent surgery survivor gets a little too vocal with an ARVN captain who rips the bandages off an incision and shoves the wailing patient to the floor. A couple of grunt Corpsmen try to intervene and there’s a tense stand-off between the Vietnamese and the Americans. A senior officer clears the spectators and orders us to leave it to the ARVN. Battalion Surgeon consults with one of the Vietnamese medical staff who speaks English. It’s a sad story. NVA took over the hospital and demanded treatment for their own wounded as battle lines pushed toward the medical complex. Civilian patients were either tossed out or killed to make space for NVA casualties. When a couple of nurses and attendants objected, the NVA executed them in front of the other staff.
While the sad tales are told, a couple of nurses in a back rank make a break for the rear of the building. One of them is waving a pistol in the air. ARVN sold
iers make a grab and miss. There are two sharp reports from the pistol which drives everyone to the deck. The NVA females are nearly gone when they run into two grunts coming in the back way. These guys waste no time with questions. They grab the pistol-packing woman and spin her to the ground. Her head cracks into the concrete with a sound like a melon being thumped. The second nurse nearly dodges but one of the grunts snatches at her hair and her feet run out from under her body. He sits on her and jams his rifle across her neck. That’s two peoples’ patriots cold-cocked by a couple of running dog lackeys of the imperialist system. The ARVN love it.
Steve is eating beef slices in gravy out in the hospital complex courtyard. We swap spoonfuls of goop after I open a can of ham slices. The rubble underneath my ass is uncomfortable so I move to a fairly level slab of concrete and plop down. Something shifts underneath my butt but I don’t bother to investigate. Steve rises slowly and points his plastic spoon at my crotch. “Don’t move, man. Sit very still.”
He crouches to look into the shadows beneath the slab. I can’t bend over far enough to see what’s got him so worried. “You’re sitting right on top of a mortar round. Just stay put until I can get someone to take a look at that fucking thing.” He comes back in a short time with a couple of combat engineers. They shine flashlight beams under my butt like a couple of mechanics diagnosing an engine noise. I’m starting get a little sweaty. “Is that thing live or what?”
“Probably is.” The first engineer decides it’s an NVA round. “That’s an eighty-deuce, my man. It’s been fired which means the set-back mechanism has been activated. It’s dented pretty bad up near the fuse so we got us a little situation here. You move wrong or disturb that slab you’re sitting on, the damn thing might detonate.”
Second engineer waves away a few curious grunts and adds his professional assessment. “Ain’t no percentage in fuckin’ around with fired mortar rounds and PD fuses. They tend to be touchy motherfuckers. If you weren’t perched on top of the goddamn thing, we’d just blow it in place and move on.”
“I am, however, perched on top of the goddamn thing. What do we do about that?”
“My partner is gonna keep some pressure on the slab and while he does that, I'm going to help you up off of it real easy.” He holds out his hand and grasps my forearm. “Now when I say go, try not to cough, gag, sneeze, or fart. Just up and off real easy. Got it?”
“You can trust that I’ve definitely got it. Anytime you’re ready.”
The other engineer reaches under my ass and puts pressure on the slab. I let his partner pull me off my perch. I’m cringing, waiting for the blast and even an expert like John Henry would be unable to drive a ten-penny nail up my ass with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer.
Nothing happens as I stumble away from the mortar round. Steve meets me grinning and hands over what’s left of the beef and rocks. Looking over my shoulder and trying to relax, I watch the second engineer slide the round out from under the concrete. He pulls a sliver of steel out of his pocket and sticks it through a hole in the fuse.
“She’s safe now.” He tosses the nine-pound round to me and I’m afraid to do anything but catch it. The grunts are gathering again and laughing like the whole situation was designed for their amusement. Nothing funnier than some dipshit sitting on a mortar round and nearly getting his ass blown off.
“Was it a dud?”
“Nah, that damn thing was hotter than a Georgia hooker on payday night. If you’d have scratched your ass the wrong way, we wouldn’t be having this pleasant interlude.”
Steve and I find another place to sit and finish our breakfast. Later, I dump the mortar round down a cistern, wondering if I’ll ever be able to shit normally again or just flop down on a couch without checking under the cushions.
AFVN (American Forces Vietnam Network)
A mud-spattered Jeep wheezes to a halt near the second battalion CP. It’s festooned with radio aerials and antennae and looks like a porcupine on wheels. There’s a full colonel riding shotgun and he wants to see the attached combat correspondents. A runner finds us wandering around with a platoon from Golf Company and leads us to the meeting like a couple of condemned convicts. Colonels don’t personally confront sergeants unless they’re pissed about something so gross it can’t be handled by a lesser entity.
The colonel is one of the guys running this show from Task Force X-Ray, and he’s up from his CP at Phu Bai visiting units in Hue. He eyes our disheveled appearance and unshaven faces for a long moment before deciding he’s got a more pressing issue at hand. “You two are Division Correspondents?”
We introduce ourselves. No salutes or handshakes. The colonel’s aide checks his notebook and nods. Apparently we are indeed the culprits his boss is seeking. “I understand you two know some of the Marines up here at the AFVN station?”
“Yes, sir,” Steve uses a snotty OD handkerchief to mop some of the crud off his glasses. “We were stationed with Lieutenant Dibernardo and Sergeant Young back in The World.”
“And when was the last time you saw them?”
“We spent a night with Sergeant Young just before Christmas, sir. We didn’t see the lieutenant. He was in Saigon or something.” I’m beginning to get an uneasy feeling about all this.
“So Sergeant Young was a buddy?” We note the past tense. Whatever this is, it can’t be good news.
“We know him pretty well, sir. Is he OK?”
“He’s dead. At least we’re pretty sure it’s him. One or both of you will report to the S-1 at the MACV Compound. We need somebody who knows Sergeant Young to positively ID the body.”
I’m struggling to formulate questions but the colonel has issued his orders and he’s got things on his mind more important than another dead Marine. “We don’t know what happened to Lieutenant Dibernardo and several others. They’re officially listed as missing in action. Apparently there was quite a hot little firefight around the station. MACV is looking into the situation. Meanwhile, we need to be sure this body they’ve got is indeed Sergeant Thomas F. Young. Get it done before dark. That’s all.”
That was all for us and an hour later we knew for certain that was all for our buddy Tom Young who showed us around Hue, got us laid, and shared his booze at Christmas. Things took a terribly personal turn for me and Steve seemed more shaken than I’d ever seen him. A little Vietnamese civilian employee of the AFVN Station told us Lt. Dibernardo and a couple of other Americans were taken alive by the NVA.
We wrote up a statement, found the colonel’s aide and handed it over: Sgt. Tom Young, confirmed KIA, 1stLt. Jim Dibernardo and a couple of other Americans, probably POWs. The little civilian said they put up a stiff fight but that was cold comfort. These guys would be nothing more than footnotes when the story of the Great Big Battle of Hue City was finally written. There it is and in the argot of our gallant allies, Xin loi, motherfuckers: Sorry ’bout that.
Zippo
“I’m serious, man. Call it bullshit if you want but these guys are just like the Marines who wrote history at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima and Tarawa and the Chosin Reservoir.” Steve is in storyteller mode. He’s channeling Ernie Pyle and in the midst of a serious infatuation with the reeking grunts crapped out all around us. I pass him an inch of gin in a frosted bottle but he waves it away. “You know I’m right. You can act like you don’t give a damn but I know better. How about that shit with the Zippo the other day. What was that all about, my man?” I can’t get a grip on it but I suspect he’s got a point given what happened yesterday afternoon.
It was around 1400 somewhere near the Thua Thien Provincial headquarters that 2/5 had taken earlier in the morning. Three M48A3 tanks are tearing up macadam, creaking, clanking, and grinding forward on a city street with a rifle platoon moving parallel and choking on diesel exhaust. The muggy air in this part of the city still reeks of the tear gas Marines used to flush NVA from a block of contested buildings, but nobody wants to be back choking and gasping inside the gas ma
sks we carry on our hips.
Armor crews are buttoned up tight and that’s unusual for tankers in The Nam. Normally they ride with all hatches open, preferring a quick exit to getting trapped inside a 50-ton coffin if a mine or an RPG penetrates their armor. Tanks make great pictures, and I’m tucked in somewhere in the middle of a fireteam on the right side of the push. Crouched inside the entryway to an office building, I watch the tankers sniff the air with the muzzles of their 90mm cannons. A radioman trots up with a message for the squad leader. Apparently some comm glitch prevents the CO from talking to the tankers. The squad leader contemplates breaking cover but as far as he knows that means climbing up on one of the tanks and banging on a hatch to get the crew’s attention.
“Use the T-I phone.” The answer seems obvious to me.
The squad leader is a Lance Corporal and he frowns as if I’m speaking a foreign language. “I never worked with tanks before.” The guy is clearly out of his depth and expecting an attached NCO to cover for him. Radioman feeds me the CO’s message and I sprint toward the rear of the nearest tank. The phone box on the right rear of the vehicle connects directly with the tank commander. I’ve done this shit before in training. It’s just like using a payphone. You open the box, grab the handset, and you’re talking to the crew inside the tank.
“Six wants you guys to advance toward the next intersection and set up overwatch positions. Grunts will move forward of you and search for targets.”
“You guys need to keep some grunts near the vehicles.” The tank commander sounds like he’s responding through a tin can on the other end of a taut string. “I don’t want any gooks getting inside B-40 range.” I cut a look at the squad leader. This is his deal. I’m just passing messages here. “It’s OK. The tanks are gonna move but you got to keep some grunts around to be sure they don’t get hit with RPGs.” Grunt squad leader nods and leaves to pass the word. I roger the tank commander’s concern and replace the phone. The tanks lurch forward, rattling and shaking like they are about to disassemble into shivering buckets of bolts.