by Jack McLean
Wayne Wood, Terry Tillery, and I were assigned to the 2nd Platoon. We quickly learned that we were not alone. Able, experienced marines were eager to help and would endure endless questions. The 2nd Platoon squad leader was Texan Robert Rodriguez, an exceptional marine who, like many of our new leaders, appeared to thrive under the pressure of combat situations. We listened carefully and learned well.
Every night the NVA would lob in a few rounds just to keep us honest. Occasionally someone would be injured, but mostly it was part of the daily give-and-take with the enemy. Our tender ears quickly learned to listen for the sound of the muzzle blast from the mortar—sort of a dull thwump sound. The first to hear it would yell “Incoming!” and all knew, given the high trajectory of a mortar, that we’d have ten seconds or so to find a hole.
We were mostly teenagers, full of bravado. We occasionally would yell back at them in defiance. “Hey, asshole, I’m trying to take a shit here,” or “Where’d you fuckers learn to shoot, the army?” Every night it continued. Every night we’d taunt. We developed a whole subculture of humor to respond to the nightly visits.
Days before our arrival at Camp Evans, Vice President Hubert Humphrey had visited South Vietnam and presented the Presidential Unit Citation Medal to General Bruno Hochmuth, our 3rd Division commanding general, based out of Phu Bai. The citation recognized the outstanding performance by the division during the previous months. This included our defense of Con Thien during the siege. Days after our arrival at Camp Evans, we learned that General Hochmuth had been killed in a helicopter crash in nearby Hue—the old provincial capital. He was replaced by Major General Rathvon McClure Tompkins, who held the post until the prophetic arrival of Ray Davis in late May.
Shortly after joining Charlie Company at Camp Evans, we ran several days of routine road security along Route 9, the main east-west road. This involved watching endless convoys of marines heading west from Dong Ha to the remote flrebases that lined the route. The farthest west of these was called Khe Sanh. I remembered seeing a sign that said KHE SANH back in the hangar in Da Nang. I previously hadn’t heard of it, and wondered what it was.
The convoys would be followed by hundreds of Vietnamese women and children who swarmed about selling Jim Beam, marijuana, and sex. (“She virgin, give number one boom-boom.”) It was difficult at first to discern our role. On the one hand, any one of these people could take out half the convoy; on the other hand, my fellow marines showed little concern, so as the new kid, I took their lead.
Within this context a most wonderful event occurred. After several miles of trucks and troop-laden tanks passed, I heard a familiar voice. My head snapped around to see the beaming face of Sid MacLeod, my friend since Camp Geiger, looking down from atop a passing truck. “Jackson. Hey, Jackson, how’d they let a second-rate supply guy get this close to the front?”
“Well, kiss my ass,” I replied. “Look at you, all dressed up like a marine.” My heart leapt out of my chest at the sight of Sid. I felt unbridled joy. He jumped down to the road and we just stared at each other. The encounter filled me with reassurance that I strongly remember to this day. Sid had been trying to get to Vietnam for a year, and now that he was here, he looked strong, focused, and happy. As strange and foreign as the whole scene was to me during those early weeks near Hue, the sight of Sid was reality. It reminded me that I was still sane. This friend from another time and place was seeing the same things that my eyes were seeing, and through his silent counsel, he was telling me that everything was going to be all right. This was what he had asked for. It was the happiest that I had ever seen Sid MacLeod.
With a lurch, the motors jumped back to life and the convoy began slowly to move forward. Sid grappled his way back up onto the truck, smiled, waved, and was gone. He was with 3/26, the 3rd Battalion of the 26th Marine Regiment. They were headed all the way west to Khe Sanh. We were headed all the way north to the DMZ.
We agreed to write.
Six months later, Sid was dead.
The following day, we began to get resupplied. It appeared that we were getting ready for a major operation. Word was that we were headed up to the “Firebreak”—a strip of land along the length of the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam that had been, under orders from Secretary of Defense McNamara, completely stripped of all vegetation. To the marines, it was affectionately known as the Trace. For the balance of my tour, our proximity to the Trace would be measured in meters rather than miles. Nothing living remained that way if it sat between us and the Trace.
We were the front line in a war that had precious few of them.
The early December weather was cold, cloudy, and rainy as we saddled up. We were choppered up to Con Thien, and then set off with Delta Company for the north. Our mission was to provide security for the Seabees who were building a road along the Trace between Con Thien and Gio Linh to the east. My every nerve and fiber was alert. The enemy could be anywhere and was certainly watching my every move. The old-timers spoke of their last visit to this area, where several boys had been killed and many had been injured.
“Right over there, McQuade. Remember? That’s the old road down to the A Shau Valley,” said radio operator Benny Lerma. “Isn’t that where the gook with the RPG hit you last summer? The little motherfucker. I’d like to see him come out now. I’d stitch him from toe to head.”
“You’re such an asshole, Lerma. Shut up and keep walking or he’ll stitch your ass,” came McQuade’s bored reply.
McQuade, a machine gunner from Baltimore, Maryland, had been on the back of a truck doing road security. Years later, he recalled seeing a spot coming at him out of the corner of his eye. It was a rocket-propelled grenade that hit the cab of the truck before he could wince. The explosion killed the driver instantly. The other gunner succumbed to wounds later that afternoon. McQuade and the three others on the team suffered shrapnel wounds.
Our boys knew the terrain well and were eager for some payback. My strength grew with their confidence and bravado, but I hoped that the little motherfucker would not reemerge just yet. My first taste of combat would come soon, but I was in no rush to speed the process.
The first night was miserable.
The rain poured down, it was viciously cold, and there was no protection. Yet we were able to dig adequate fighting holes in the mud, fix the perimeters and lines of fire, arm the claymore mines, and set the watch schedule. As dusk settled, we sent two ambush teams and two listening posts outside the lines to wait and listen.
That evening, we ate cold, wet C rations and tried to find a dry spot to sleep. Most of us had ponchos, but they were of little use. The water running below us made the water from above bearable by comparison. The fighting holes quickly filled with rain. Our first priority was to keep our weapons and ammo dry, clean, and serviceable. Our personal comfort was a far distant second.
Enemy mortars found us early and stayed all night. None of us slept. The previous day had been spent humping up and down hills, through rice paddies, across the Trace, and into the far northern stretches of the DMZ. We had nothing left to give, but we kept on giving. There would be three more days of this—humping, digging in, setting perimeters, and lying in the rain until the sun finally came out and ever so slowly began to dehydrate our clammy bodies, clothes, and equipment.
The DMZ looked like the surface of the moon. There were huge craters from the B-52S and artillery strikes. A horrible stench of cordite from the bombs hung over the landscape. However, despite our location, despite the occasional incoming mortars, we were in fact fortunate to have neither made contact with the enemy nor taken any casualties.
We changed positions with the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment on December 4. Holes had already been dug and lines of fire were well established, so the transfer was not difficult. That night was quiet. We sent out ambushes and listening posts, set out claymore mines and booby traps, and adhered to a normal watch schedule.
The following night, several squads from Alph
a Company went out on ambushes, so we manned their lines as well. There was some movement outside the lines, several grenades were thrown by us, and we sent up the occasional illumination flare to see if we could see anything out of the ordinary. Alpha sprang both of their ambushes to little avail and, after igniting a green pop-up flare, safely reentered the lines around midnight.
The following morning, given the activity, we were put on full alert—my first since arriving in country. I carefully looked for anything that I could see outside the line and studied each of my fellow marines inside for guidance on how to react. This wasn’t infantry training. This was the real deal. Here, as we had been told over and over and over again, mistakes cost lives.
Delta Company went out on a company-size patrol to the west and we stood their lines on the east side of the perimeter. All was quiet. We wrote letters home and cleaned our weapons. We could hear Delta Company, perhaps a thousand meters out, giving and getting small-arms fire and mortars. They returned several hours later. Near the end of the column, we noticed several marines carrying a body in a loosely wrapped poncho.
A rigid hand protruded from one side.
He was one of us.
He was dead.
My stomach turned and my heart began to race. Hours before he had been one of many heading off on a routine patrol, and now he was dead. I felt lonely, frightened, and very vulnerable. It could have been any one of them or any one of us.
Dead.
I redoubled my concentration to be certain that I was not missing any movement outside of the lines or an order within. All that I could do was rely on my training and those marines around me. That raised my confidence slightly, but had little impact on the unbridled fear that I felt.
Later in the afternoon, resupply choppers came in bringing mail and chow. I got a letter from my mother—my first from home—and devoured it. I read it over and over trying to extract every ounce of love and support that she could transmit.
The weather was chilly and damp, but it wasn’t raining.
Suddenly came the cry of “Incoming!” We could hear the now distinctive sounds of the mortar tubing in the background. We scrambled for cover in any available hole, pulling as many fellow marines in with us as we could. After the first barrage, we scattered to our own holes to secure the lines against a possible ground assault. Terry Tillery, like me, was in his first two weeks with the company, and he jumped into a narrow neck-deep hole with George Randolph as the second barrage began.
“Incoming!”
The explosions were followed quickly by small-arms fire. Looking up, Tillery could see a large rice paddy stretched out below him with a tree line on the other side. The tree line was the source of rapid machine gun fire. As their mortars continued, we returned fire, but there was little else to do until the mortaring stopped. With that, Randolph pulled a poncho over the top of the hole that he was sharing with Tillery.
“What the fuck are you doing?” asked Tillery, incredulously.
“Well, brother,” Randolph replied, “if you don’t see ’em, it ain’t as bad.”
It was hard to refute the logic of the veteran Randolph. He had been in country for ten months and he was alive.
The small-arms fire then really started coming in all around the perimeter. I was frightened and disoriented, looking for guidance from any available source. The veterans appeared cool, so I just did what they did—stayed low in my hole and returned fire with my M16 in the direction of the incoming assault, which was, in fact, every direction. The mortars seemed to be getting louder and closer, so we stayed low but kept firing. I heard my first cry for “Corpsman!” Several holes away, an incoming mortar had landed next to one of our squad leaders. They began to work on him furiously.
A helicopter medevac was called for.
As the UH-34 helicopter slowly lowered to land, it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade that took off the tail section. It spun wildly out of control for several seconds and then crashed right inside the perimeter. To those of us in our holes, it became increasingly difficult to focus with the escalating noise and activity. The helicopter was burning, the small-arms fire was incessant, and the mortars continued to come in all around with increasing accuracy.
In the midst of the attack, several of us were pulled back to stand in reserve, in the event that additional support was needed in a vulnerable area. Our orders were to stand watch and be prepared for whatever might happen. Being new, I had little idea of exactly what might happen or how I would know if it did. I was at once relieved and disoriented. Without a specific place to be and no hole dug, I found a bomb crater and lay inside, falsely believing that it would provide some security from incoming.
Expansive bomb craters, although deep, provided little protection from incoming artillery and mortar fire that came from high above.
An early lesson learned.
At dusk, another marine from the 2nd Platoon scurried up next to me to see if I knew what was going on. One look at his bright green utilities, new boots, and frightened expression told me a strange new truth: I was the salty veteran and he was the new kid. Whatever meager tidbit I possessed would be encyclopedic compared to his near complete ignorance of the situation.
I was scared.
He was petrified.
I was new.
He was newer.
He looked at me the way I looked at everybody else—like they were old veterans who knew exactly what to do all the time. To him I was the experienced one, so I acted the role and got the two of us through the most horrifying night either of us had ever spent. These were the circumstances under which I met PFC Dan Burton of San Diego, California.
Dan was California. He had a surfer’s body and an easygoing manner that endeared him to nearly all he met. He was a solid marine and worked hard like the rest of us, but he played hard as well. He loved to laugh, smoke dope, and make wonderful spirit-lifting jokes at times when our morale was down. There were no jokes from Dan this evening, however.
The NVA were heavily probing our lines looking for weak spots. Delta Company was in the worst position. They had no fields of fire, and the enemy knew that. Within the hour, the enemy had penetrated the Delta lines.
“Gooks in the perimeter!” came the call.
As I had been trained, I removed my bayonet from its sheath and carefully fixed it to the end of my rifle. I tried to recall any useful morsel from my Parris Island bayonet training, listened for any sound, and studied the dark foliage for any unnatural movement. None occurred. The attack apparently was being repelled without my help.
I had yet to see the enemy, but I knew that I was getting my first taste of combat. Feelings of fear, excitement, and anticipation overwhelmed me. Yet the fear dissipated as the training and adrenaline took over. I wanted a piece of the little motherfuckers, but remained relegated to backup duty in my bomb crater.
The word then was passed that a radar-controlled bomb would be dropped just outside the lines to keep the NVA from overrunning us again. A radar-controlled bomb? This was not a weapon that we had learned about in training. The five-hundred-pound bomb was to be dropped from an A-6 jet in about five minutes. We would be given fair warning to be safe in our holes.
“Bombs away, thirty seconds!” came the initial call. There was not a sound from the air.
“Bombs away, ten seconds.”
We could now hear the jet approaching, and then became aware of an increasing screaming roar from directly above.
Then it landed.
The impact ignited the night sky with an apocalyptic light. The ground beneath us shook ferociously, red-hot shrapnel flew like tracer rounds through the night blackness, and trip flares and claymore mines were set off by the concussion that exploded all around the perimeter.
Chaos was followed by horror.
The bomb had been dropped right on top of our lines.
The next sound, immediately after the explosion, was that of enormous pieces of shrapnel roaring inches over our heads
and thumping deep into the mud on the far side of the crater. This was followed by the sound of what seemed to be heavy rain overhead. Seconds later, we realized that the sound was not rain but thousands of tiny pieces of shrapnel flying through the tree leaves, instantly denuding all that was in their path.
Dan and I remained frozen until we caught sight of several marines hauling five body-laden ponchos to the LZ (landing zone) for evacuation. One whole section of the Delta Company perimeter had been vaporized. As reserve forces, we moved quickly to cover the gaps in the line.
In two hours, we’d experienced a crashed helicopter, a friendly bomb, and countless casualties. Terry Tillery, still huddled with his fire team, felt himself starting to give up. He curled up, pulled his poncho tightly around himself, and quietly muttered, “Fuck it.”
What could we do?
What were we gonna do?
It was bad enough that gooks were killing us.
Now we were killing ourselves.
Total confusion.
This was not a good place to be.
Despite its deadly effect on us, the bomb had succeeded in driving the enemy back, for the moment. Tillery emerged from his cocoon, Burton and I rose from the bomb crater that had become our home, and we all looked with disbelief at the battlefield around us.
The helicopter was still smoldering and the trees around the bomb impact either were gone or had been completely defoliated by the shrapnel. Our fellow marines were walking around with dazed what-the-hell-happened looks.
The word was passed to gather up our gear.
We were moving out, ASAP.
Gratefully, we packed up our gear, called in medevacs to take out the dead and wounded, and trudged two thousand meters back across the Trace to a position near Gio Linh, on the easternmost edge of the DMZ.