by Dale A. Dye
No question in my mind that the REMFs will put the entire outfit in jail looking for a culprit who can be singled out as an errant criminal and offered up to the Vietnamese Government for summary execution as an example of what happens to looters. I’m trying to decide how miserable I’ll be spending the rest of my life in prison when I spot the tattered ARVN pack lying crumpled in the corner of the schoolyard.
“Look, I maybe see a way out of this. You come along and back my play. Anything I say, you say its gospel and you’re an eyewitness.” Before Steve can ask any questions, I retrieve the ARVN pack and stuff the three banded bundles of cash inside it.
“Hey, Skipper…” The Company Commander recognizes us as we approach. “We’ve been looking for you.” I hold up the ARVN pack and give it a shake. “And it looks like we got here just in time.”
An Army full colonel seems to be leader of the inquisition. He eyes the pack and points at us. “Who are these men?”
“Division Combat Correspondents, sir…” The captain names us. “They’re often attached to us for operations.” He turns to me and points at the pack. “What’s that?”
“It’s an ARVN pack, Skipper. We took it off an ARVN during the fight for the Treasury Building.” The colonel makes a grab for the pack and I let him have it. He holds up a bundle of cash and squints at me like I’m an easy target—which I am if I don’t come up with something really credible in a hurry. “We’ve been looking around for someone to turn that stuff over to, sir. When we spotted the ARVN officers here, we figured they would know what to do with it.”
“They obviously stole this money, Captain. I want these men put under arrest.” He breaks out a notebook and GI pen. “Give me your full names, service number, and unit.”
“I’d like to hear what they have to say, Colonel.” The captain holds up a grimy hand and points at me. “I know these two and they are not thieves.”
“No, sir…” I thank God and Buddha for a good officer and paint a pained expression on my face. “We didn’t steal that money.”
“Then who did?” The colonel is angrily clicking his ballpoint, anxious to begin writing up charges.
“Don’t know his name, sir, but he was an ARVN soldier.” A spit-shined Army captain begins to translate what I’m saying for the Vietnamese officers. There is a spate of gabbling and gasping as I continue.
“Me and my partner were just coming out of the Treasury Building after Hotel Company drove the NVA out of it. So, anyway, we’re heading toward the CP when we see this ARVN soldier coming out of a rear entrance to the basement. He’s got that pack in his hands and running like a sonofabitch and he drops a bundle of cash. When he stops to pick it up, we were on him right away. See, we were warned about looting here in Hue City and it looked like this ARVN was committing a criminal act, so we knocked him on his ass. He got away but we retrieved that pack and the money. We’ve been looking around for someone to give it to ever since.”
The colonel turns beet-red and he’s making little scribbles in his notebook that can’t be legible. He’s stabbing the paper so hard pages are fluttering to the ground. “And why didn’t you turn it in immediately? Thought you might get away with keeping it?”
“No, sir…” Steve has picked up the drift and he’s got an answer to one that had me snowed. “See, we immediately got involved in another fight near Le Lai ARVN camp, and then there was the Cercle Sportif fight, and then the Hospital Complex and then we got side-tracked in the battle for the Provincial Headquarters. Truth is, we just couldn’t find the right time to turn this stuff over…”
“So—you’re telling me an ARVN soldier stole this money?”
“No, sir, I’m telling you that an ARVN soldier tried to steal the money. We recovered it and there it is.”
“I don't believe this bullshit for a moment.” The colonel points at the Company Gunny. “Sergeant, place this pair under arrest. We’ll interrogate them and take official statements at Phu Bai.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary, Colonel. And if you insist you’ll have to discuss the matter with my battalion and regimental commanders. They’re back at the MACV Compound, I believe.”
“I’ll damn well have you relieved, Captain!”
“You can try, sir. If my battalion commander says I’m relieved, then so be it, but I don’t take orders from officers who are not in my chain of command. This is a U.S. Marine Corps rifle company, Colonel, and we do things by the book. Seems to me you’ve got the money you were looking for and no harm done. If that’s not good enough, you can do as you please back in the rear. Meantime, we’ve got a war to fight right here.”
The Captain walks away from the parlay leaving the Army colonel gasping with rage and trying to decide on a course of action. When the ARVN cops start counting the money, we make our break and follow the company commander. The GVN national treasury might recover most of the missing cash, but there’s no doubt in my mind it will be minus a stiff finder’s fee.
Inside the schoolhouse, I find the Company Commander drinking coffee. He nods his thanks when I offer a slug of looted bourbon to give it a kick. He sniffs the brew and smiles. “You’ve got more balls than brains, you know that? Did you think you were gonna get away with taking that cash out of here?”
“I had my hopes, Skipper. But there’s no way I was gonna let that asshole roust Hotel Company over it. Your outfit’s always been good to us.”
He nods and winces at the bite of the laced coffee. “What was your plan if he pressed the issue? Or did you think that far in advance?”
“Well, Captain, he might not have bought that ARVN looting story, but I’ve got some buddies in the civilian press that would eat it up. “
He laughs and drains the canteen cup. “Don’t get the idea I approve of what you did, but I’ll be damned if that pompous Army shithead was going to walk into my outfit after what we've been through and arrest anyone for anything. You fought most of the way with us, so I guess you're included. Now, get out of here and let me get some sleep.”
One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor
“You better speak English, motherfuckers.”
We’re looking for a place to hole up near the Perfume River when the challenge freezes us in place. A guy from Charlie Company 1/5 sent us toward this two-story building that looked like it was some kind of factory but we couldn’t find it before dark.
“Christ, don't shoot. We're looking for Delta Company.”
A figure forms out of the shadows and we see a grunt with his rifle pointing at our bellies. “You the correspondents? Platoon Sergeant said a couple might show up tonight.”
“That’s us…” Steve names us but it doesn’t seem to mean anything to the sentry. He shrugs and points back into the gloom toward the building. “Company CP’s inside there. First platoon’s pulling security.”
We drift toward the dark and the sentry returns to his post behind a pile of leaking sandbags. “You guys gonna go with us tomorrow?” I can hear the nervous tremor in his voice.
“That’s the plan.”
“But you don’t have to right? You guys get to decide shit like that and go where you want to go? I got a buddy knows some correspondents and he said that’s the deal.”
“That’s the deal. Somebody’s got to make you famous when you do heroic shit under fire. Just do some heroic shit tomorrow and we’ll get your name in the papers.”
“Most heroic shit I’m gonna do is get my dumb ass out of here in one piece. Fuck them papers…”
It starts raining buckets while we stumble around in the dark looking for someone in Delta Company to inform that they have two strap-hangers for tomorrow’s river crossing. Inside the shot-up building, we find the Company Gunny and he writes our names and service numbers in his notebook. “You two can rack out with Corporal Martinez over there.” He points toward a dark corner of the building where we see someone moving around with a filtered flashlight. “I’ll assign you
to a boat tomorrow when H&S Company is ready to move.”
Corporal Martinez is the guy with the flashlight. He’s in a good mood and even shakes our hands. “Glad to have you with us. I got the three-five rockets plus some spare radio operators and S-2 scouts—all kinds of cats and dogs. There’s plenty of room in here.” Martinez points at a pile of musty mattresses under one of the windows. “We even got mattresses. Just find yourself a flat spot and rack out.”
We pull a couple of damp mattresses off the pile and sit down to cook up a C-ration meal. Grunts on either side of us are doing the same. Martinez returns from checking his sentries and flops down near us. He’s got a wide smile on his leathery face. “We never had no correspondents with us before. How do you dudes operate?” Martinez pulls off his helmet and I note from a scrawl on the camouflage cover that he’s apparently from San Antonio. There’s an intricate and well-rendered portrait of a matador on the back of his flak jacket.
“We’re just glorified grunts, my man. We go where you go and watch what you do, maybe write a few stories, shit like that. When it gets messy, we add some firepower. No big thing.”
“So if you write a story about one of us, what happens to it?” Martinez pulls a bottle of Tabasco out of his pocket, pours a healthy dollop into his ration can and offers us a taste.
“Depends on what it is, you know? Sometimes it winds up in the Sea Tiger or Stars and Stripes here in country, other times they send it to the dude’s hometown and it gets in the local rag—just depends on what the Lifers do with it.”
Martinez nods and chews. It’s clear he’s wondering what it might be like to have some say over whether or not he has to risk his ass. We’ve seen the reaction before and it makes us uncomfortable. There’s no use trying to compare what we do with what they do. There’s an enigmatic bottom line to it all. We often see more combat than the average grunt does in a standard tour of bush duty but we can—and sometimes do—avoid the worst shit they face just by climbing on a chopper and heading to the rear. We can rationalize that as part of our duty but it doesn’t keep us from feeling a little inferior. There it is.
I’m awake an hour after collapsing on the mattress. My silent alarm is ringing. Steve is crapped out on my right. The grunts are crashed and sprawled all around us and I listen cautiously to the standard sounds of fidgety bodies, snores, farts, and ragged breathing. I’m hearing something else that I can’t identify but it sounds like its coming from above us. Maybe the Gunny put some people on watch up on the second floor. Maybe it’s rats scrambling and scratching inside the walls. Crawling off the mattress I step carefully over sleeping bodies toward the staircase leading to the second story of the building.
Passage from the ground floor has been completely blocked by rubble and layers of shot-up sandbags. It seems odd. Unless there’s an exterior stairway, there’s no way anyone is going to get up those stairs with all the crap blocking the way. I’m on my way back to the mattress when a burst of AK fire sends everyone on the ground floor scrambling for weapons and cover. There’s another ripping burst that echoes off the walls and everyone flattens on the damp floor.
“Who the fuck is shooting?” The Company Gunny is pointing a red-lens flashlight upward. In the dim beam of light we see concrete dust explode from the ceiling as another burst of fire erupts. Whoever it is, he’s up above us on the second floor and shooting down through his floor and our ceiling.
The Gunny snaps off his flashlight and screams for everyone to stay put. He heads for the blocked staircase as a stream of green-tinted tracers plunges downward in the dark. “Martinez, you got any people up on the second deck?”
“Fuck no, Gunny! You said leave it alone when we moved in here. There’s all that shit blocking the stairs.”
“It’s fucking gooks up there.” The Gunny flinches as another stream of green tracer plunges through the ceiling and ricochets off the concrete floor. Grunts are all hugging the walls, staying as far away from the beaten zone as they can get. A couple of them shoulder their rifles and fire bursts up toward the ceiling where the enemy fire is raining down on us.
“Cease fire, goddammit!” The Gunny looks around at the grunts changing magazines and sprints across the room. “Martinez! Get me a rocket team—in a fuckin’ hurry.”
There’s a scramble at the rear of the room and I recognize two Marines fumbling with a 3.5-inch rocket launcher and digging for ammo. A nearby grunt with a sick sense of humor begins to sing a line from a Paul Simon tune in a nasal hillbilly register. “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor…” He gets a rewarding wave of chuckles from the twitchy grunts waiting for the situation to be resolved.
Another man across the room tries a Rolling Stones riff. “Hey, Gook, get offa my cloud…don’t hang around ’cause two’s a crowd…”
A couple more grunts with an under-developed sense of humor fire up toward the ceiling. The Gunny screams for sanity and leads the rocket team toward the blocked staircase. “Martinez, get some rifles and stand by…” While Cpl. Martinez musters an assault team, the rocket gunners kneel in position at the base of the stairs. The assistant gunner twists a round into the tube and locks the electrical connection.
“Firing the three-point-five!” The A-gunner taps his gunner on the shoulder and checks to the rear of the weapon. “Clear the back-blast area!” The armor piercing round impacts the pile of rubble blocking the stairs and the resulting detonation sends everyone prone. Martinez shoves four grunts through the opening and follows them storming up the stairs. There’s a single round fired as the lead man hits the second floor landing. He tumbles back cursing and holding onto a bloody spot just above his right knee. As a Corpsman rushes to his aid, we hear the crump of a frag grenade on the second floor above us. It’s followed by a volley of mixed AK and M-16 fire. It lasts only seconds and the last echoing reports from the second floor are clearly M-16s on semi-automatic. In the shocking stillness we even hear expended shell casings spattering onto concrete.
Two dead NVA troopers tumble down the stairs like wet sandbags. They are followed by Martinez and his surviving grunts. “All clear up there, Gunny.” Martinez steps gingerly over the dead bodies, stretches and checks his watch. He heads for his mattress, shucks out of his gear and collapses. There are still three hours until daylight and he’s not the kind of grunt who lets a little firefight disturb an opportunity to crash in comfort. Delta Company grunts all around us follow his example. There’s time to restore and replenish the adrenaline supply. Lots of that will be needed tomorrow when 1/5 crosses the Perfume River.
And we’ve got one last good story from the Southside of Hue City.
Northside
Waiting for word and getting to know some more of the key players in 1st Battalion, 5th Marines we will accompany on the Perfume River crossing, Steve is jotting in his notebook and giving a little military history lesson. Grunts with nothing better to do are listening avidly. Apparently he’s working on battles that might be compared to what we are about to face on the northside of Hue. Steve mentions Bastogne, Monte Cassino, the Siegfried Line, and all those fortified castles and villas in the mountains above Anzio. Switching to more familiar Marine Corps campaigns of World War II, he considers Corregidor, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and the Shuri Castle region of Okinawa, all fortresses of one ilk or another that simply had to be taken by frontal assault. He sees the looming battle for Hue’s Citadel like that and speculates that the fight will be a significant chapter in military history.
Nice pitch but its caveat emptor for my money. Maybe the fight will go into the military history books, but the way I see it, sending Marines up against that fortress across the river is the first leg of an all-expenses-paid ego trip for the American Command in Vietnam. We’re playing politics and propaganda in the same way the NVA are. They planted that big-ass flag and surrounded an ARVN headquarters inside those walls for a whole lot more than tactical leverage in a losing fight. If I’m an NVA commander, why screw around with the Citad
el? There's nothing inside those walls worth a last-ditch stand that’s bound to cost you a whopping shit-pot full of dead and wounded. Only a dumb-ass field commander engages in a set-piece battle against numerically and technologically superior forces.
You do a thing like that only if it will provide a significant propaganda gain. And the ancient seat of the Vietnamese mandarins provides that in spades for a wily communist. You grab the one landmark in the one city in both Vietnams that symbolizes the decadence of a hated class system and you show those running dog capitalist greed-heads in the south that motivated socialist soldiers can destroy the vestiges of an evil regime. You make your point in the press while your soldiers dig in to defend those walls glowing with revolutionary zeal. That’s what counts in a war of ideas. How the fight actually turns out is less important than the fact that you forced it on the enemy and made it as bloody as possible. That’s what I think but keep it to myself and let Steve talk about making military history in Hue.
Battalion Commander has a modicum of good news as his command group musters in a shot-up building on the south banks of the Perfume River. We finagle our way into the briefing trying to get a glimpse at his map and a feel for what might happen when 1/5 goes on the offensive against the Citadel. We’re going to take the fortress from the inside rather than just slamming up against the exterior walls. Some ARVN troops who got trapped by NVA surrounding their CP inside the Citadel complex have managed to keep control of one of the access gates. It’s called Truong Dinh Gate and it’s supposed to be open for immediate access which will lead 1/5 to a secure base of operations within the ARVN 1st Infantry Division compound near the center of the walled enclosure.
We’re told the 6th NVA Regiment plus reinforcements are holding the warren of houses and shanties behind the walls. They are also dug in like ticks all along the walls in positions to put plunging fire on Marines sweeping from north so south. The bottom line is that we will clear the Citadel complex from the inside out rather than from the outside in—and we’ll have a platoon of tanks in support. We are dismissed to get on with preparations for the Perfume River crossing. Steve thinks it’s all good news, but I’m afraid it won’t matter much which side of the walls we attack.