“The sergeant major had all three of our butts at once,” Carlos said, slapping his hands on his thighs.
McAbee said, “That was yesterday morning. He told us to have that thing green before the sun went down.”
“Is it?” the captain asked.
“Partially,” Carlos said. “The front still looks like a used car lot, though.”
McAbee beamed. “You want to hear something better than that? Carlos, tell him about the shower.”
“I don’t think that’s so funny,” Hathcock said. “We needed the convenience, Mack.”
“Just tell the skipper, Carlos,” McAbee said smiling.
“Well, sir,” Hathcock began, “you know how we are always having to go heat that water in the barrel over at the area head? Have to light off that jet engine they call a submersion heater?”
“Oh yeah. If you’re lucky the damn thing won’t blow up in your face,” Hoffman said. “Hell, I’d rather go dirty sometimes.”
“Well, I got tired of lighting that thing off,” Carlos continued, “and either getting the water too hot or not hot enough, or having that thing burn off all my hair.
“I found a wing tank that somebody lost. It holds about fifty gallons and is long and thin, and when the sun heats up that water all day and you open the little pit-cock valve, it pours nice warm water out.
“Now, we take real good care of our friends over at the supply tent, and they take care of us. It just so happened they had some scrap angle iron and a bunch of nuts and bolts, so me and Mack and Dave Sommers built us our own private shower.
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“No,” the captain said. “Sounds fine to me.”
“Tell him the rest,” McAbee said, elbowing Carlos.
“We needed canvas to cover it so that we wouldn’t be standing outside naked. And we figured that it would be kind of nice to be able to walk from our racks to the shower without having to go outside, so we cut this greeeeeat big hole in the side of our hooch, pushed the whole thing halfway through the hole and used the spare canvas to cover the outside. It looks beautiful.”
McAbee started laughing hard. “Sergeant Major Puckett lost it all when he came in to inspect our hooch. He turned green, and then he turned bright red. He yelled and fumed, but we got to keep the shower. Damage was already done.
“He told every staff NCO in that hooch that each man would have his pay docked for the price of that hooch.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s so full of bullet holes nobody will ever care anyway,” Carlos said.
As the three Marines sat in the shade of the six-by truck, telling stories, passing time, waiting, several more Marines joined the group. Orders had finally reached the last fire team and now the company was ready.
In an hour’s time, helicopters had lifted Bravo Company into the combat area called Arizona Territory. First Battalion, 7th Marines had assumed responsibility for the entire Arizona Territory, relieving units from the 5th Marine Regiment to participate in an operation called Durham Peak.
As the platoons disbursed across their areas of operation, the enemy watched. The enemy that the Marines encountered these days was more often North Vietnamese than Viet Cong. It seemed to Carlos that these days the NVA represented the real enemy, as opposed to the VC in 1966 and ’67. He saw few NVA then. Now NVA were the commonly sighted threat.
This enemy that now watched, restrained himself. Elements of the 2nd NVA Division, reinforced by the 90th and 36th NVA Regiments, along with the 577th NVA Artillery Battalion spent their major efforts gathering and storing rice for the monsoon season that would begin in October. They preferred to harass and outmaneuver their enemy rather than confront him with their full force. But, the tenacity of the 7th Marine Regiment, and Lieutenant Colonel Dowd’s 1st Battalion in particular, would prove too much of a liability for the NVA to face. Eventually, they would meet head-on.
“HOT, HOT, HOOOOOOT!” McAbee said as he walked twenty paces to the right of Carlos.
“Keep your eyes peeled for trip wires,” Hathcock responded. “That’s a bad way to go home, your bottom half-blown apart.”
McAbee looked cautiously ahead of his steps after the prompting, recalling the men he’d seen lose their lives by the explosives hidden beneath their feet, triggered by a piece of fishing line or a grass-covered pedal. He did not know which was worse. Getting blown apart by a booby trap or getting torn to shreds by shrapnel from the rockets, shells, and lob-bombs that the enemy dumped on the Marines who sat in compounds.
He thought again of the Marine he had watched die on his first day at the Hill. A lob-bomb sailed into a truck and blew hundreds of heavy metal pieces in every direction. One long shred of shrapnel, a chunk of iron that looked like an oversized lawn mower blade, sailed straight out from the explosion and struck a Marine who ran toward a nearby bunker. The ragged-edged, heavy piece of iron severed the man’s upper body from his lower, spilling him across the ground. He died in one long, sad cry.
“Mack!”
“Yeah, Carlos?”
“You look a little green. You okay?”
“Yeah. Just hot.”
“Maybe once we check out that bunch of huts up yonder, we can take a break,” Hathcock said.
The sun blazed in the cloudless sky as they walked from the tree line’s cover into the nakedness of a clearing 1,200 yards long and nearly 1,000 yards wide. The huts stood at one end of the clearing, next to a low stone fence that encircled the entire clearing, divided by low dikes that crisscrossed it like a checkerboard. Only weeds grew in the fields now, and the huts appeared long deserted.
Carlos and Mack squatted next to the lieutenant who led the platoon they accompanied. They watched as a fire team ran toward the huts, scouting for signs of a possible ambush. The four Marines took cover along the knee-high stone fence. One by one they vaulted over the wall and ran to the huts.
Five minutes passed and the fire team leader waved his arm above his head—all clear. One fire team at a time, the two squads crossed the open land while the third moved into the area of the huts. Carlos and McAbee followed them.
When the two snipers joined the squad leader, who squatted next to a hut, Carlos told him, “Mack and I are gonna sit here awhile and set up next to one of these huts. With all this thrashing around we’ve been doing, no telling who might be coming to visit us.”
The squad leader radioed the lieutenant who now waited at the far end of the clearing, 1,200 yards away. He agreed that it would serve the platoon well, and they could use the break. But the lieutenant ordered the third squad to move on to a hill where they could observe the area and warn the platoon of any approaching patrols.
Just as the third squad prepared to depart, a rifleman shouted, “Found something!”
Carlos and McAbee walked with the squad leader to a bare spot where a Marine squatted, scratching through the dirt with his knife.
“Careful of any booby traps,” the squad leader called to him.
“Got one right here,” the Marine answered.
“Blow it in place,” the sergeant ordered.
The Marine broke a chunk of C-4 from a long stick, pressed a blasting cap in it, and folded the claylike explosive over the small, metal primer, and formed a doughy ball. While he did that, the other Marines took cover behind the low stone wall.
“Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!” the Marine shouted as he jumped behind the wall and squeezed the handle of the small electrical detonator three times, sending electricity down the wires and setting off the charge.
A dusty bang opened the top of a gigantic crock buried in the earth and filled with hundreds of pounds of rice.
“Charlie’s gonna go hungry around here,” Carlos said, looking down at the gigantic round jar that was nearly five feet tall and four feet in diameter, and sat in a square hole that had been shored with thick wooden slats along the sides.
The Marines peeked down the black gaps between the outside of the
jar and the boards that covered the dirt on the sides of the hole.
“We’ll get rid of this rice. You better get on that hill before Charlie comes running. No telling whose attention that explosion may have drawn,” Carlos said.
The squad quickly moved away from the clearing where the huts stood and where Carlos and McAbee hid. They planned to drop a few of the one-pound sticks of C-4 down the sides of the jar and blow it when they departed. But for now, the two snipers took cover to wait and see who might come in search of them.
Carlos’s radio squawked five minutes after he and McAbee had settled into their hide.
“Get out of there, now!” the message came from the excited squad leader. “Charlie’s coming up the hill just below you two! Get going!”
Carlos looked at McAbee. Their closest fire support lay hidden in the ragged jungle on the edge of the clearing more than 1,000 yards away.
“Blow the rice! Blow the rice!” the lieutenant’s voice commanded on the radio.
“One thing for sure, we don’t have time to make up any fuses,” Carlos said. “We’ll have to go with the timed fuse in the satchel.”
McAbee pulled the forty-pounds of plastic explosive off his back and dropped it at his feet. “I’m not going to try to run from those clowns with that on my back! No way. It’s too damn heavy!”
“I’m not taking mine either!” Hathcock said. “Eighty pounds of C-4 is about seventy-five pounds too much, though.”
“I don’t care!” McAbee said. “They want this rice blown, they’re gonna get it blown good!”
Carlos chuckled as he stuffed his forty-pound satchel down the side of the rice and then stuffed McAbee’s on top of his. “Gonna make some kind of mess out of this rice.”
“Yeah,” Mack said. “Puffed rice. Shot from guns!”
Carlos pulled the round green lighter on the end of the time fuse and both Marines ran to the little stone fence, 100 feet away. They lay against the wall and felt the ground shake as though an earthquake had struck when the explosive charge detonated.
“Shit!” McAbee said, raising up and looking at Carlos. Hundreds of pounds of rice rained down on them, mixed with dirt and splinters. “It’s like it’s snowing!”
Carlos started picking rice out of his eyebrows and hair. Rice stuck to both Marines as though they had been tarred and feathered with it. The grain filled their ears and every opening in their clothes.
As they stood to run, rice kept falling, snowing, covering every inch of ground. Both Marines’ ears rang from the tremendously loud explosion and they laughed. They laughed so hard they couldn’t run. They could only stumble down the 1,000 yards of open ground to the jungle’s edge where the lieutenant waited with his platoon, on line, ready to engage the NVA patrol that now fanned into the village behind the two snipers who staggered, out of breath, howling hysterically like two drunks on liberty rather than two Marines running for their lives.
Automatic weapons fire cracked across the open ground while Carlos and McAbee could only stagger breathlessly, sprinkling rice with every step and finding that hilarious, too. Miraculously, none of the enemy bullets came near the two Marines.
14
Dance with the Devil
ATHUNDEROUS BOOM shook the staff NCO tent on Hill 55. The peacefulness of midnight suddenly came alive with the sound of Yankee barking his alarm and the clatter of Marines, roused from their sleep, searching for boots and helmets, and scurrying to shelter.
Carlos opened his eyes, blinking in the bright moonlight, listening for the sound of more artillery rushing through the air on their deadly arc into the lower fingers where Marines waited in bunkers, their rifles aimed outward, ready for an assault.
“They’re firing short,” Carlos called out in the darkness, but no one listened. The scurrying took priority over rational thought.
“Carlos! Come on to the bunker!” McAbee shouted. “Incoming! Incoming!
“Where’s my Army hat!”
“It’s short rounds, Mack. They’re going for the wire,” Carlos moaned, but his friend did not hear him.
McAbee found his helmet—a steel pot with a fiber liner that he called his Army hat. But the excited staff sergeant, who still wore his white Stateside skivvies, could not find both his boots.
As a salvo of Ketusha rockets devastated the side of Hill 55, as though some mammoth shotgun had blasted the lower slopes, McAbee forgot his boot and ran for the bunker, just outside the front door.
A singular clomp, thud, clomp, sounded down the plywood floor, pounding toward the door, and roused Carlos enough to look and see his friend hurrying to safety, one foot bare and the other booted, “Army hat” on his head, and baggy white long-legged skivvy shorts flapping in the breeze.
Carlos began to rumble with laughter. But when Mack fell into the bunker, Carlos lost all control and howled.
Lately, Carlos had been reluctant to go into that bunker because it had partially filled with water—some groundwater, but mostly water from the indoor shower. It was not the splash that made Carlos fall off his rack laughing—it was Mack’s scream and sudden stream of blue-tinted words after the crash and splash that sent Carlos reeling onto the floor.
After the shelling stopped, and Mack emerged, covered with mud and limping, Carlos apologized. Mack had not yelled from the near drowning that he took, but from the nail on which he had stepped, which caused him to leap forward and fall headfirst into the water-filled bunker.
WHEN THE CORPSMAN finished dressing McAbee’s injured foot the following morning at the regimental aid station, the lanky, blond-haired Marine hurried back to the hooch. He had news.
“Carlos, we’re moving. Gonna go over to LZ Baldy. I just got the word that we’re giving up part of Arizona for the Que Son Hills. Word is that we’ll be gone in a week to ten days.”
Carlos sat at his field desk and smiled. “I hear that area’s full of hamburgers. Word is that the Americal Division and the 196th Infantry Brigade has the 1st, 3rd, and 36th NVA Regiments giving them fits.
“Plus I heard Division is realigning tactical boundaries of the entire TAOR. So a move over to Baldy makes sense.”
“I got this from one of the guys in Operations,” McAbee said. “We’re gonna be spread all over creation down there. We’re gonna have Fire Support Base Ross and Fire Support Base Ryder, and we’re gonna build a new one called Bushwhack.”
“Bushwhack,” Carlos said with a look of inspiration, “I like that. Bushwhack. It sounds like a good place for snipers to live.”
“You’re talking September for that,” McAbee said, sitting on a straight-back chair and unlacing the jungle boot off his sore foot. “Meanwhile we’re going to live in sea huts that the Seabees will hammer together once we get there. It’s gonna be a mess.”
That night, Carlos and McAbee joined David Sommers in a long, green canvas-walled, hardback hut that served as a staff NCO club. A thundershower rumbled outside as a crowd of sweating men sat jammed together on low wooden benches watching and cheering John Wayne in the Green Berets. Water poured in on them from a thousand punctures in the tin roof—holes made from night after night of the enemy’s harassing fire.
As the 16-mm projector flickered through the pall of cigarette smoke and body steam, rain splashed on the small, flat sheet-metal cover that one of the Marines from 11th Motor Transport Battalion had erected above the movie machine to shield it from the overhead leaks.
Just after the first reel change, a bullet ripped through the tent—a prelude to this night’s bout. Outside, heavy gunfire erupted, yet the movie played on while bullets ripped through the tent and sent several of the newer arrivals diving to the floor and scurrying on their knees out the door.
“Crap!” Carlos said, flopping down on the wet, muddy floor, and carefully setting his drink in front of him. “I’m stayin’ put. They’re not gonna keep me from watchin’ John Wayne bust hamburgers in this movie!”
Mack rested on his elbows next to Carlos and nudged his partner. �
�There’s one more reel to this movie. When this one runs out, who’s gonna stick that last reel on the projector?”
Carlos looked at David Sommers, who also lay on the floor with several other John Wayne diehards, and chuckled. “He will.”
They watched the rest of the Green Berets that night, rain running through the sievelike roof and hundreds of bullets ripping through the tent at shoulder-high level. The projector, which sat on a three-foot-high stand in the midst of the fire, suffered only one shot through its sheet-metal roof.
Carlos changed the final reel.
It was the last movie Carlos watched on Hill 55.
ON THE MORNING of August 12, First Battalion, 7th Marines moved through Arizona Territory on a major sweep, searching out and destroying enemy strongholds and food stores. Lieutenant Colonel John Dowd led his Marines on this operation, searching in particular for the 90th NVA Regiment, reinforced.
The morning climaxed several days of random attacks when two of Colonel Dowd’s combat outposts came under heavy fire. As the day ended, Dowd’s battalion rushed in hot pursuit of two battalions of the 90th NVA, who would run, try to hold, but ultimately have to run again.
Carlos wanted in on this action and Captain Hoffman had extended him an invitation to go along several days earlier. In response to the captain, Carlos sent three sniper teams, but with the move coming up, he could not go and lead these men himself. Instead, the staff sergeant spent much of his time packing sniper platoon gear. On top of that, on this day August 13, he had the commander of the guard watch.
Already, word circulated of the heavy fighting from the day before and Carlos found it difficult to concentrate on his duties. He knew that out there, where tall plumes of black and gray smoke rose from the hillsides, he would not be so restless.
“I’m getting cabin fever, Mack. I wasn’t meant to hang around here and wait for the troops to report home. I’ll tell you, if I had the chance to pick up and go to the field—any excuse—I would. Duty or not.”
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