by Dale A. Dye
At the intersection—a four-way near the Hue Sports Stadium with an abandoned traffic police podium in the middle—the leading tank commander, a lieutenant wearing a comm helmet and grungy coveralls, dismounts looking for someone to discuss the next move. A grunt platoon commander trots up while his guys huddle in street-side doorways trying to keep away from the tanks. “We probably shouldn’t go much further. We get caught in one of those narrow streets and we can’t traverse or maneuver much.”
Platoon Commander points down the road. “Recon was in this area last night and they say the NVA are holed up in that block of houses. We got orders to clear the area so they can get some Shore Party people into the stadium. That’s gonna be the LZ for resupply and medevacs.”
Tank Commander ponders, eyeing his vehicles, the narrow street and the neat little residences that look like a slice of quaint Asian suburbia. “Let me put two tanks here at the intersection in overwatch. Third vehicle is a Zippo. How ’bout you send some of your guys forward and I’ll have the flame tank follow?”
“How ’bout you send the Zippo in first and we follow?”
“Goddamn, Lieutenant…” The tank officer has a clear case of RPG jitters. “That fuckin’ flame tank’s got three hundred gallons of high octane aboard and you know what a B-40 would do with that.”
“OK…” The Platoon Commander signals for a squad leader. “I’ll send a squad up ahead of your Zippo. We’ll focus on any gooks with rockets, but if we get hit, you guys blow the shit out of ’em.” It’s hardly classic tank-infantry tactics, but everyone seems to think it’s the best they can do to get this street cleared and keep the gooks out of the Sports Stadium two blocks away to the east.
A squad of grunts forms up for the move with a file on either side of the street, preparing to sweep forward ahead of the Zippo. The two gun tanks move into positions left and right of the intersection and the Zippo driver grinds his vehicle into gear ready to follow the infantry. The sweep starts, and I fall in behind the flame tank with a sniper and a covering fireteam ordered to be on the look-out for RPG gunners. All of the riflemen except for the sniper have loaded magazines of tracer that they’ll use to mark any targets they spot.
There’s not much use watching it all through a camera lens. MACV in Saigon is telling the press that forthright American troops adhering to the provisions of the Geneva Convention don’t use flame weapons on enemy infantry. It’s a laugh-out-loud load of bullshit and every civilian correspondent who has ever watched one of our aircraft dropping a load of snake-eye bombs followed by napalm canisters knows it. Regardless, the lifers insist there will be no crispy-critter shots taken or released.
Grunts near me are bitching about proximity to an NVA sniper’s wet-dream: A big-ass tank and a guy with a scoped weapon. “This is bullshit is what this bullshit is…” A hulking black PFC points at the tank and drops back a pace or two. “Ain’t a motherfucker in the world can resist shootin’ at a fuckin’ tank. Don’t make no never-mind he can’t do no damage. He’s just gotta shoot at a tank and when the dude does that, we catch the fuckin’ ricochets.”
“Yeah? How ’bout that fuckin’ sniper?” His buddy points at the man with the long rifle who is sweeping the street with his scope. “A gook sniper sees that guy and it gets real personal real quick.” All valid points and it suddenly occurs to me I’ve never been inside a tank in combat. The itch is too weird to ignore, and when the Zippo halts to let the infantry scout forward, I climb up onto the turret and bang on the hatch with my helmet. Through a crack I see a battered comm helmet framing eyes that look like two piss-holes in a snow bank.
“I’m a Division Correspondent…” I show him the useless camera hanging around my neck. “How ’bout I ride along with you guys?”
“Inside here?” The tank commander looks at me with a mixture of fear and disbelief. “This is a fucking Zippo, man.” I can smell the diesel fumes seeping up through the cracked hatch. “We got no choice but to ride this sonofabitch and you want to volunteer?”
“Just wanting to see what it’s like. I won’t get in the way.”
“It’s your ass on the line, pal.” The Zippo commander pops the hatch and makes way for me to drop inside. The gunner and loader look at me like I’m nuts and make lewd jack-off motions. I tuck myself into a corner behind the loader as the hatch clangs shut and the interior lights cast a weird bluish glow over dials and mechanisms I don’t recognize. The interior reeks of petroleum products. It’s like someone dumped me inside an old gas can. The tank commander peeks through his vision blocks, mumbles into a lip-mike, and the Zippo rolls on following the infantry. I can’t see a thing beyond a jumble of pipes and hoses that surround me like bloated snakes. This suddenly seems like a very bad idea.
The loader shoves me forward and points to a periscope. Grunts are moving ahead of us, cautiously scanning houses on both sides of the street. View from here is not much different than it usually is for me on the ground: nothing but asses and elbows. The tank moves with a strange undulating motion and minus a comm helmet I hear all sorts of creaks, clanks, and machinery noises that make me think we must be having mechanical problems. It’s disconcerting, but none of the crew seems worried about much beyond what they can see through scopes, vision blocks, and gunsights.
Over the unfamiliar machinery noise, I hear a sound like someone banging on an iron pot with a soup spoon. Suddenly there’s a shower of shell casings pouring onto the turret floor and I see the tank commander above me in the cupola triggering long bursts from the .50 caliber mounted up there. He’s screaming something into the microphone attached to his helmet, but I can’t tell what he’s saying without a comm helmet. The turret begins to swivel with a high-pitched whine and I lock onto the loader’s periscope. He’s busy with a batch of levers and twisting something that looks like the flow control on a garden hose. The hoses running through the turret suddenly stiffen and begin to vibrate under pressure.
Outside the tank there’s a firefight in progress. The platoon commander is standing in the middle of the street giving the double-time signal and pointing at a two-story structure on our right. A 90mm round from one of the gun tanks tears a ragged chunk out of the façade and I can see tracers arcing through the concrete dust. An NVA rocket team suddenly appears on the other side of the street but they are cut down before the gunner can shoulder the launcher. The machinegun mounted next to the gun tube begins to rattle as the gunner puts a burst of confirming fire into the dead rocket team. His hands twitch on the gun control console and I feel the turret slew to the left. Small arms fire rattles off the armor making a sporadic din that apparently only I can hear. It sounds like I’m on the inside of a runaway popcorn maker.
The Zippo commander is screaming loudly enough for me to hear him over the chaos. “Left front…ten o’clock…fire, goddamn it…shoot!”
There’s a loud whoosh and whine of liquid under intense pressure. A flickering stream of fire surges through the muzzle of the cannon tube and I watch wide-eyed through the periscope as the Zippo gunner hoses down two houses on the left side of the street. There are no grunts in sight and I’m twisting the periscope in an effort to see what’s happening when the tank suddenly lurches sideways sending all four of us inside the turret bouncing off each other and into unyielding bits of metal or machinery.
Zippo Commander is climbing back up toward his perch, screaming loudly enough for me to understand we’ve just been hit by a rocket. There is such a thick fog of smoke, muzzle gas, and diesel fumes inside the turret that I can’t tell if we’ve been penetrated or not. I’m reaching for the handle that releases the loader’s hatch when the turret swivels right and I hear the scream of air pressure pushing heavy fuel through the piping near my head.
Through the scope I see grunts emerging from cover and running forward as the long fiery tongue of flame washes over two more houses and then the tank lurches violently as the driver bangs the transmission into reverse. The Zippo crew is either out of
fuel, nerve, or motivation. It’s time for me to transfer out of armor. When the vehicle stops behind one of the covering gun tanks at the intersection, I spend a few minutes screaming for the crew’s names and hometowns, jot the answers in my notebook and bail. The muggy air outside the tank smells sweet as if I’ve just climbed out of a rank sewer and into a cool mountain breeze.
Up ahead beyond the intersection, grunts and tank gunners are banging away at NVA running away from this fight. Several of the fleeing gooks are burning and batting at flames as they surge into the line of fire. It’s ugly as hell and I know some of the grunts are shooting just to put the crispy-critters out of agony. Better to get blown away than burn to death. But for the grace of God and the fact that the NVA don’t have Zippos—well, there it is.
Walking up the street behind the advancing grunts sweeping houses is like approaching a bad barbecue where the host has used too much fuel on the charcoal. The smell of burned meat mixes with the stench of diesel. Radio operator up-chucks into the street and kicks at a charred NVA corpse, black and shriveled like an overcooked turkey. Other grunts, sweeping through the burned-out houses, have tied bandanas over their mouths and noses. Steve and the fireteam he’s with at the far end of the street are wearing gas masks and staring at three charred corpses who got caught in the open when Zippo fired them up. The dead men look a little like overdone gingerbread men with lips burned away to reveal a snarl of stained teeth.
“You were in that goddamn Zippo weren’t you?” He peels the gasmask off and hands me a smoke. There’s not much to say. He saw me disappear inside the thing.
“That was you, right?”
“Guilty as charged. You got any chow?”
“Why?”
“I’m hungry.”
“Why the fuck did you get inside that flame tank?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“You know they hit you with a B-40?” He points his carbine at one of the crispy-critters. “You could have ended up like that.”
“Got a pretty cool story out of it.”
“Bullshit, man. You know they won’t publish anything about flame weapons.”
“So Zippo becomes a gun tank. What the fuck difference does it make?”
“You need to get your shit together, man…”
“Yep…anytime now that’s just what I’m gonna do.”
Foxtrot Company is crossing the intersection to our rear. A passing squad leader tells me they are going to try and force a crossing of the Perfume River over one of the bridges. It looks like a bitch-kitty, he says, and I might want to stay put. That seems counter-productive so I fall into ranks and find the Company Gunny who says I’m welcome to tag along. “If you’re looking to get your ass shot off,” he croaks around a wad of chewing tobacco, “this is as good an outfit as you’ll find to make it happen.”
Sports Stadium
The bridge is a double-trestle railroad structure, one of several spanning the Perfume River and connecting the have-nots on the south with the haves on the north. We sit with a squad of grunts and a couple of 3.5-inch rocket gunners in the second story of a building that provides a terrific view of the bridge and the river. There’s a lot of speculative bitching about what might happen when the word comes to push infantry and armor across that span.
As the grunts ignite little balls of C-4 to heat their rations, I launch into a Bill Cosby riff from something I heard on one of his comedy albums back in The World. Cosby is a football ref explaining the rules of the game to General Custer and the captain of the Indian team about to wipe out the U.S. Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. My take has a ref explaining the rules and conducting a pre-game coin toss between team captains Vo Nguyen Giap and William Westmoreland.
“Cap’n Giap, meet Cap’n Westmoreland. Here’s the coin. This side is heads and this side is tails. You call the toss, Giap. Cap’n Giap calls heads; it’s heads. You win the toss, Giap, what are you gonna do? Cap’n Westy…Giap says his team will take up defensive positions on the other side of the bridge where your people can’t hit them. Then you’ve got to bring your team, bare-ass naked and with no supporting arms, running across that bridge. This will continue until every last one of you dumb bastards is dead as shit. Now shake hands and have a good game.”
The rap gets some laughs and leads the grunts to an argument about following the tanks we’ve been told to expect or leading them across the bridge in the distance. Five minutes later, the discussion becomes explosively moot. There is a thump that shakes the building and we see blossoms of flame and dark high-explosive smoke roiling up from the pilings supporting the bridge. That’s followed by the boom of the charges and we watch open-mouthed as the center span of the bridge collapses into the slate-grey water of the Perfume River. In seconds, the entire area is covered with billowing clouds of rust and metallic dust.
A rocket gunner scans the distance with his binoculars and whistles through a gap in his teeth. “Shee-it! They dropped the bridge. We won’t be going across that sonofabitch any time soon.”
“Bridges don’t mean shit to fucking Marines.” Cynic Corporal is running a cleaning rod through his rifle and obviously underwhelmed. “We do amphibious landings, right? You can bet your ass the next deal will be sending our asses across that river in amtracs or landing craft. You can take that shit to the bank.”
There are a few dispirited arguments but they peter out as we hear the clatter of helicopter rotors overhead. Two Hueys appear out of the clouds and mist to orbit over the downed bridge. There is an exchange of fire between door gunners and some gooks on the northside of the river. We can see observers leaning out of the helicopters wearing clean uniforms and fresh equipment that marks them as REMFs. They spend ten minutes inscribing figure-eights over the destroyed bridge and then clatter away headed south. It won’t be long before they send new orders forward.
When the word reaches us an hour later, we’re told to assemble along a nearby street and stand by to move back toward the Sports Stadium. There’s a rumor that I can’t confirm saying the first battalion of the 5th Marines is going to relieve us for the river crossing. Steve shows up saying he’s seen troops moving up from Phu Bai and a bunch of ARVN Rangers and Marines are supposed to be assembling near the stadium. There has also been an unusual spate of inbound helicopter traffic. Could be we’ll catch a break and get relieved, but nobody is naïve enough to relax very much.
While we wait, I sit and smoke, watching Steve scratching away at a letter. He’s writing home. I can tell because he’s using the USMC stationery he keeps wrapped with a sheet of plastic in his pack. He’s focused, chewing on the end of a GI ballpoint, trying to find words that will mask what he’s feeling. I’ve seen him like this before when he lets his mind wander back to The World he left behind in Washington State. He told me all about that shit one time over warm beers in the Danang Thunderbird Club.
First thing to understand about Steve is that he’s a patriot and that shit runs deep. Back where he comes from the prevailing atmosphere is all wrapped around middle class morality. When it comes to military service, every guy has an obligation to go even if it’s a shitty war that no one really understands. He told me one time he was catching trout out of a freezing cold lake in Idaho with an ex-Marine uncle when he decided to join the Marines. That meant Vietnam and combat, but nothing his uncle told him about brutal campaigns of the South Pacific in World War II changed his mind.
Steve was raised by a respected, educated family that actually discussed things like Vietnam at the dinner table, but he could be bullheaded. He meant it when he said that Pledge of Allegiance in the classroom and he believed there was glory in sacrifice. There it is and political arguments are irrelevant. It’s every American’s duty to die for his country if called on to do so. It was summer of 1965 when push came to shove for Steve. He was out of high school where he starred as the editor of the award-winning school paper and being pushed toward a full-ride in a west coast colleg
e when the Marines landed in Vietnam. He was enlisted and on his way to boot camp the next month. And there was never a post-boot camp nosedive for him. Steve was never bothered by the politics of protest or the ambiguous nature of the war in Vietnam. He became the storyteller, the reincarnation of Ernie Pyle who loved relating tales about the raggedy-ass grunts he accompanied on patrols and operations. When his stuff appeared in the papers, he showed the clippings around like an actor with an Oscar. It was hard to make fun of Steve. If you tried, you came away feeling like a sacrilegious sinner or some kind of mewling, anti-American traitor.
It’s raining again when we finally move away from the river front and the destroyed bridge. Heading steadily southward, we recognize patrols and people we know in the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines. They are here in the city but don’t seem to be doing much except staring across the river at the NVA flag flying over the Citadel. We drop out of line as we pass the battalion CP group and an officer tells us the weather is clearing for increased helicopter operations. The first battalion is busy gearing up and planning for the assault on the northside, so the battered and bruised second battalion will hold a defensive line south of the Hue Sports Stadium.
Moving up into familiar terrain, we begin to gag from the stench hanging in the fetid air, a cloying, lung-wrenching spoor containing traces of charred flesh and burned camphorwood furniture. I stop at the Battalion Aid Station to see if a Corpsman will take a look at a bothersome shrapnel wound on my right bicep. Everyone is busy with more seriously wounded but I finally find a bloody and bearded line Corpsman who is changing the bandage on a festering wound below his right knee.