Thunder looks back at us and says, "Black John Wayne is being overrun."
Black John Wayne's squad of black Marines is standing tall in the perimeter trench.
Black John Wayne stands flat-footed above the trenchline, bigger than King Kong, and fires his M-60 machine gun point-blank into a rolling wave of about one million NVA gooks.
Black John Wayne and the bloods fight hand to hand until they are cut off and surrounded.
Thunder, Daddy D.A., and I are all out of the bunker quicker than a gook can shit rice, hauling ass down the slippery catwalk, jerking New Guys to their feet.
By the time we double-time to Black John Wayne's position there are fifty Marines with us, from four different platoons, and we're pumping, pumping, a little adrenaline cocktail to cleanse the blood, pumping on wild animal anger and righteous indignation, pumping, pumping, we are United States grunts and we have come down to battle, and by God we can't wait to kill anybody who fucks with our friends, we're running into the black metal whirlwind like big-assed birds, we are all going to die and we just can't wait because life in the shit is a rush and we feel alive and perfect and goddamn beautiful, because we are being who we came here to be, and we are doing what we came here to do, and we are doing it really good, and we know it.
Black John Wayne hangs tough, firing his M-60 until the barrel glows red and white. But an NVA flame thrower roars across the trenchline and then Black John Wayne is a black man wearing fire as formal attire and his bulky body jerks like a puppet and he dances as M-16
rounds in his bandoliers cook off, and then the M-60 in his hands blows up, and Black John Wayne is still standing, while advancing NVA troops move around him and out of his way.
He holds on to his throat with both hands, like a man trying to strangle himself, or like a man trying to pull off his own head. And he falls.
We hit the rice-propelled Communist gooks in the left flank and we cut them up good. We pop their arms and legs off. We spread out above the perimeter and isolate each pocket of NVA grunts inside our wire and we blast them until they are unrecognizable chunks of dead meat wrapped in dirty rags. We shoot them at such close range that powder burns set fire to their khaki shirts.
We jump down on top of them in the trenchline and we beat them to death with entrenching tools and we stab them in the face with K-bar knives and we chop off their heads with machetes.
Then we stand up in our perimeter trench and face outboard and fire a blinking stream of hard red iron into balls, bellies, and thighs, and we cut them down as they come up the hill.
Somewhere someone is swearing at God and somewhere a chorus of November Hotels, non-hackers, begs, "CORPSMAN! CORPSMAN! CORPSMAN!"
We don't care. Fuck the wounded and fuck their candy-ass personal problems. We don't have time to listen to their crying. The flood of little yellow soldiers is falling back, out of our reach, and this drives us crazy.
We climb out of the trenchline and slide on our asses into our own wire and we climb over dead gooks piled three deep and we kick tangled, blasted strands of barbed wire out of our way and we chase the retreating wall of noise and muzzle flashes, and at every movement, scream, and sound we fire our hot rifles blindly until we run out of ammunition. Then we rob ammunition from our dead.
By battle magic a gook pops up in front of me. He runs at me, firing as he comes. Magic jerks my M-16 out of my hands. The gook is busting caps with a full banana clip, spraying the area with thirty rounds of AK to cut himself a path.
Dirt jumps up off the deck and hits me in the face.
I draw my Tokarev automatic pistol from my shoulder holster and I shoot the gook in the chest. He comes on, firing, bayonet fixed. I can see his clean-cut teenage face, his flat nose, his crudely cropped black hair, his black gook eye. I shoot him in the chest twice and the rounds jerk him up, but he's still coming.
Fingers of hot air tug at my jungle utilities like magic. I feel like a clown without any lines to say in a slapstick comedy war movie. I'm expected to stand here and look tough while this gook magician guts me with a bayonet. The situation is pretty damned embarrassing. How far can dead man run?
I don't know what I'm supposed to do, so I shoo the gook four more times before he slams into me like a miniature linebacker and knocks me down and runs over me and then I'm falling and when I hit the deck with my face a major earthquake hits Khe Sanh and my eardrums burst.
After the blackness fades to sunlight and the earthquake is over, I'm sitting on the deck among butchered things, works of the black art I have helped to create. The NVA dead all look like failed contortionists. Stretcher bearers and corpsmen are picking through the dirty red driftwood of battle, gooks, half-gooks, and pieces of gooks. The stretcher bearers load up with friendly wounded and carry them away, leaving behind dead Marines wrapped in muddy ponchos.
Grunts walk by without speaking, their eyes locked on the horizon but not seeing, eyes rimmed with red, eyes locked inside sweaty faces caked with dust thrown up by the shells, the unfocused eyes of the half-dead staring in astonished disbelief at the strange land of the half-alive--the thousand-yard stare.
Daddy D.A. is standing over me, yelling, but I can't hear anything. I put my hands on my ears.
Dead on the deck beside me is a gook with pink plastic guts piled on his chest. The guts are crawling with black flies. On the dead gook's ankles are loops of comm wire his friends would have used to drag his dead body off into the jungle.
A squeaky elf's voice real far away says, "You shot his heart out! You shot his heart out!"
I say to Daddy D.A.: "Huh?"
Suddenly my field of vision is invaded by the ruddy face of the Grim Reaper, the dumbest twenty-year Major in the Marine Corps and the biggest shitbird on the planet. He's yelling.
His voice fades in and out, which is okay with me, because judging from the scowl on the Reaper's face he's not saying anything I want to hear.
"I'll run your ass up on charges!" the Reaper says to me. He leans down, thumbs out his collar, taps his gold rank insignia with a bony forefinger. "I will bust you below private!"
Smiling, I say, "You're on my list, Reaper."
The Reaper snears, struts away.
As my hearing returns, Daddy D.A. gives me the straight skinny. The Reaper is going to write me up on an Article 15, office hours, because the Beaver told the Reaper that the reason we were caught off guard by the ground attack was because I was sleeping on guard duty.
But I won't face a court-martial because the Beaver, as my Platoon Sergeant, stood up for me and asked the Reaper to go easy on me because I'm crazy.
The ground attack was only a probe in force. Our gungy counterattack was a waste of time and good grunts. The Reaper had already issued the order for the rifle companies on our flanks to retreat. Khe Sanh would have fallen on its last day in existence if the B-52s had not arrived. The bombers dropped a tight pattern of two-thousand pound blockbusters one hundred yards outside our wire, saving our asses, one more time.
The Beaver, D.A. explains, is being put in for the Silver Sat for heroism under fire because he claims he personally led the counterattack. And the Beaver will be awarded a Purple Heart for a painful mouth wound he received during brutal hand-to-hand combat with elite North Vietnamese troops. Finally, the Reaper plans to recommend the Beaver for promotion to Staff Sergeant due to meritorious service.
Daddy D.A. is asking me if I feel okay and am I sure I'm not hit when the Reaper and the Beaver dittybop by. The Beaver glances over at me, preens a little, and smirks a lot. Eddie Haskell and Lumpy follow three paces behind. Eddie Haskell gives me what is supposed to be a real mean look, then gives me the finger.
The Reaper puts his arm around the Beaver's shoulders and says, "I do like to see the arms and legs fly!" The Beaver nods and nods, tries to smile, tries to speak, winces in pain, and Daddy D.A. and I get a quick glimpse of the heavy black thread knotted through the tip of the Beaver's tongue. Daddy D.A. is confused when I start laughing har
d enough to crack a rib.
The Beaver looks over at us, puzzled, and I roar.
Some salty Corporal from Third Platoon souvenirs us a couple of warm beers. There's mud in my beer but I don't care; there's mud on my teeth. All I can think about is how the rising sun hurts my eyes. I want to crawl up into my Conex box and sleep for one thousand years.
Daddy D.A. helps me to stand up. But before we climb back up to the perimeter, Daddy D.A.
and I drink a toast to the Viet Cong grunt dead on the deck at our feet, an enemy individual so highly motivated that he KO'd my fat American ass even after I dinged him and zapped him and waste him and killed him, in so many, so many times.
I say, "We can't beat these people, D.A. We can kill them, sometimes, but we are never going to beat them."
Daddy D.A. crushes the empty beer can in his hand and throws it away. He looks at me and says, "There it is."
Somewhere a corpsman says, "This one's still alive. Stop the hemorrhaging and clean away the mud."
After the battle I strip naked and curl up inside my Conex box and I have nightmares about the Viet Cong.
All Viet Cong are press-ganged at the point of a gun, brainwashed, shot full of heroin, then taken to the basement of the Kremlin, where evil Communist scientists insert tiny control monitors into the backs of their heads.
Viet Cong farmers are like the land itself and their bodies are made of earth. The Viet Cong have magic powers which allow them to sink into the soil and disappear.
Like yellow sharks the Viet Cong glide through an ocean of brown Asian soil. With cold lidless eyes, with predator's eyes, the Viet Cong swim silently just under our feet, preparing to strike.
The Viet Cong hump away from Khe Sanh carrying their heads and arms and legs. Back in their villages they will sit in shadows while their pretty Viet Cong girlfriends sew the shrapnel-torn extremities back on with oversized needles and heavy black thread, and apply leaf-bandages. During the night the pretty Viet Cong girlfriends will heal the red-edged and black-stitched wounds with herbs and the root of the wild banana tree and hot bowls of rice and lots of kisses.
The Americans fill up the soil with Viet Cong bones, really fill it up, totally, so that the Viet Cong farmers can't find one ounce of earth in which to plant a rice stalk. The Viet Cong refuse to surrender, and choose to starve. The bones of the staring Viet Cong stack up and cover the surface of Viet Nam and pile up higher and higher until they blot out the sun.
Americans fear the dark, so they leave Viet Nam and call in victory.
On a night when there's no moon to shine on their magic, the Viet Cong bones reassemble themselves into people. Finally, talking and laughing, the Viet Cong are free to walk hand in hand across the surface of their own land, the land of their ancestors.
In my nightmare my friend Cowboy is down, shot through both legs, his balls shot off, an ear gone. A bullet through his cheeks has torn out his gums. Cowboy is being shot to pieces by a sniper in the jungle. The sniper has already zapped Alice, the big black point man, and has mutilated two Marines who went out to save Cowboy--Doc J., and Parker, the New Guy. The sniper is shooting Cowboy to pieces so that the rest of the squad will try to save him and then the sniper can kill us all, and Cowboy too.
One more time, in my nightmare, Cowboy stares at me with eyes paralyzed with fear, and his hands open to me like language and I fire a short burst from my grease gun and one round goes into Cowboy's left eye and rips out through the back of his head, knocking out brain-wet clods of hairy meat. And Cowboy is dead, shot through the brain.
Click. Click-click.
What is that sound? I wake up. I grab my piece. It must the Phantom Blooper. The Phantom Blooper has come to gut me.
Click. Click-click.
I track the clicking sound until I find Daddy D.A. inside an empty Conex box a few boxes down from my next. Daddy D.A. is hunkered down in the dark, dry-firing his .45 automatic into his head.
I climb into the four-by-four-foot gray metal air-freight container. I squat down into a shadow. I don't say anything.
I don't look at his face. Daddy D.A. is a recruiting poster Marine, with a square chin, steel-gray hair, and a neatly trimmed mustache. But now his face is oily with sweat and contorted.
His eyes are wild. He looks like a drunk who's about to cry. But he won't.
Daddy D.A. is a lifer, a career Marine, but he only just decided to be one, so he's still almost human. And since Donlon rotated back to the World and I lost my last link with reality, Daddy D.A. has been my best friend.
I'm afraid to die alone, but even more afraid to go home.
About a month ago, D.A. and I were riding security for a convoy of Coca-Colas. I was hitching a ride with D.A. and one of his squads in a six-by mounted with a 50.
We were rolling through one of those jampacked cardboard villes that straddle Route 1. The gooks were picking through garbage piles to find something to eat.
We saw this little gook kid trying to eat a piece of Styrofoam, and it made us laugh, because the little gook would take a bite, make a face, spit it out, then take another bite.
The squad was cutting Zs, lying on the double layer of sandbags in the bed of the truck.
Daddy D.A. and I were standing by the 50, eyeballing the gooks.
Going by like a Technicolor movie was a parade of skinny gooks in white conical hats and squares of rice-paddy water and half-ton water buffaloes with brass rings in their noses and Arvin Rangers in red berets and firetearms of teenaged whores who flashed bee-sting tits at us, and we watched farmers hunched over, knee deep in paddy water, pulling at rice stalks.
I was eating fruit cocktail out of a gallon can with my fingers, pawing through the sticky fruit, picking out the cherries.
The convoy slowed down in the ville, and this ugly gook kid with a cleft palate comes running up, selling pineapple slices on toothpicks. "You give me one cigarette! You give me one cigarette!"
Suddenly the ugly good kid swung his cardboard box full of pineapple slices up into the truck bed.
Daddy D.A. was the gunner in the 50 mount. He swings the 50 around and his whole body shakes boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom and the kid exploded and was splattered all over the side of the road like a butchered chicken.
Then the six-by came apart and D.A. and I floated up and squad was sucked into a vortex of translucent black fire and then as suddenly as that it was all over and Daddy D.A. was trying to help me up out of the road.
My head had hit the road hard. Daddy D.A. lifted me p and I spat out grit and on the deck all around us were pieces of men. Some pieces were moving, some not. All of the pieces were on fire. The six-by was on its side and on fire and every one of Daddy D.A.'s people was a legless ball-less wonder.
"You're plain fucking crazy," I say to D.A., trying not to think about the painful past.
Daddy D.A. looks at me, then looks at the gun in his hand. "There it is."
I shrug. I say, "Sorry 'bout that."
Daddy D.A. says, "I'm a lifer, Joker. Hell, I love this damned Marine Corps an' shit. But Khe Sanh was never a battle: it's been a publicity stunt. And green Marines are not elite troops; we're movie stars. The Marines at Khe Sanh were just show business for Time magazine.
We're straight men, feeding lines to the gooks. The brass has demoted us to being live bait for supporting arms. We're nothing more than glorified forward observers, recon for an avalanche of bombs and shells. Guns have made war less than a gentleman's sport. Modern weapons are taking all of the fun out of killing. We might as well just prop up some wooden Marines like duck decoys and dee-dee back to the World and get pogue jobs and make lots of money."
I don't say anything.
"Hunker down, they say. Dig in. But Marines are not construction workers. We don't dig.
We get wired. Dee-Dee Mao is not part of our creed. We are stone-hard kickers of enemy ass."
I say, "I heard that."
"Last week there must have been two platoons of civilian
pukes in spit-shined safari jackets strutting around Khe Sanh, making exciting TV shows, telling the civilian pukes back in the World that we'd won another big victory and that the siege of Khe Sanh had been broken and how the American Marines had held Khe Sanh, blah-blah-blah, but how it sounded was that somehow the TV viewers at home deserved to take a bow for what Marines did alone."
I say, "That's affirmative."
Daddy D.A. looks up at me. "So now we're sneaking out the back door like hippies who can't pay the rent. The evacuation of Khe Sanh is a secret back home but it's not a secret from Victor Charlie."
"There it is."
"So whose side are we on?"
I say, "We're trying to be the good guys, D.A., but we're trying too hard."
Daddy D.A. says, "Before we came to Khe Sanh, the VC slept in the old French bunker.
Tomorrow night they'll be sleeping in it again. What goes around comes around. But what about the twenty-six hundred good grunts that got hit here? Do you think those guys will ever forget the price we paid to hold Khe Sanh? And what about the guys who died here?
What about Cowboy?"
"Well," I say, "if I felt that bad, I wouldn't kill myself. I'd kill somebody else."
"Get out of my face, Joker. Asshole."
"You're short again, D.A. Don't extend this time. You're short. Rotate back to the World.
Cut yourself a piece of slack. You owe it to yourself."
"Hell, Joker, I wouldn't know what to do with myself back in the World. The only people I've ever understood and the only people who ever understood me are these hard-headed raggedy-assed grunts."
"So stand on the block and count the women."
He looks at me, almost laughing. "Shit."
I grunt. "Shit."
Daddy D.A. says, "Remember back when Cowboy was our squad leader in Hue City?
The Phantom Blooper Page 5