by Barry Fixler
‘Fixler, You’re Dead!’
The flights from Camp Pendleton to Okinawa and from Okinawa to Vietnam on civilian planes in a way symbolized our transition from civilians only a few months before to the warriors we were expected to become.
I felt I was at war as soon as I stepped foot on Vietnam.
“We’re not joking around,” I thought. “The fun and games are over. This is for real, and some of us are going to die.”
Our time started when we landed in Vietnam, not when we hit Okinawa. We were obligated to thirteen months of combat for the Marine Corps.
“I’m fucking at war,” I said to myself. “Oh shit, thirteen months of this. Thirteen long hard months.”
The flight from Camp Pendleton to Okinawa was long. We all wore our day dress uniforms, and the stewardesses were all young and pretty, and I was thinking it was probably the last time I was going to see girls for a long time.
It was the middle of the night and we were sleeping, but I opened my eyes when this pretty stewardess walked past.
“Would you like some tea or some coffee?” she asked.
She was so pretty and I was so intimidated.
“Tea.”
I only said yes because she was pretty. If she had been ugly or male, I’d have said no. I really wanted to sleep.
So she went and brought me hot tea: hot, hot, hot tea.
I really wasn’t awake when she handed it to me, and the guy next to me shot straight up in the air. I’d dropped my hot tea straight on his lap.
“What the fuck?!” he screamed.
* * *
Everyone said Vietnam would be hot. The guys talked about it so often that I thought that when I got off the plane, my skin would boil.
I remember looking for the streets melting or something, like lava all over the place, going into hell. But it just felt like flying into New York on a hot July day: no big deal. But that was at the base in Da Nang. I learned all too soon that the jungle was a different story.
I was confident in my training, but on edge, definitely on edge.
“Will I be alive in thirteen months? How will I look? Will I have my arms and legs?”
We’d been briefed in Okinawa on our chances for survival: One-third of the guys would be killed; one-third would be seriously wounded; and one-third would return home fine.
In a way, I was anxious to at least get shot at and to shoot back. I wanted to get that over with.
We had trained as a group—150 of us—through boot camp at Parris Island, combat training at Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton and Okinawa. We were together the entire time.
“These are the guys I’m going to war with,” I thought.
But I didn’t realize that none of us were combat veterans, and the Corps wasn’t about to send 150 green Marines to fight the enemy together. We wouldn’t have known what the hell to do. We’d have been slaughtered.
I didn’t think about that.
Instead, we were each going to replace Marines who had been killed or severely wounded, or those that were rotating out of Vietnam because they had survived their thirteen months at war. We were the replacements.
We landed in Da Nang and walked down the stairs from the plane to a Marine sergeant waiting on the tarmac. He started in alphabetical order, handing guys their orders telling them their assigned units.
“Okay, Adams? You’re alive! Baker? You’re dead! Crawford? You’re a basket case!”
“Fixler?”
“Here sergeant!”
“You’re dead!”
I’d been in Vietnam for an hour and the sergeant was telling me I’m already dead. I turned to Mike Ali, my good buddy from boot camp. “Fuck, I’m dead!”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Sergeant just told me I’m a basket case.” We didn’t realize at the time just how ominous that label was for him.
If you were alive, that meant your unit was in one of the less dangerous places in Vietnam. If you were a basket case, your unit was in a pretty bad place. If you were dead, that meant you were headed straight into the deep shit. Your unit was in the middle of the worst of the worst combat.
They didn’t tell us that kind of stuff in boot camp. We trained and trained and were physically and mentally fit, but we were not combat veterans. Big difference.
We didn’t think the dead/alive thing was funny.
The Marines who indoctrinated us in Da Nang led us around like sheep. We were all split up in a matter of minutes, and I started to feel deflated. We came in 150 strong, and now—boom, boom, boom—and I was uno, one person, confused, mind going a mile a minute.
“Get on that Jeep and the corporal will drive you to a helicopter. The helicopter will bring you out to your unit. You’re going to Phu Bai.”
No one explained anything.
I got on the Jeep. I climbed on the helicopter. The guys on the chopper already were in the war, seasoned, and I was new. They wouldn’t have even given me the right time of day, and I didn’t have the balls to ask. No one respected me.
The helicopter landed in Phu Bai, and I needed to report to division, report to regiment, report to this, report to that. I was with the 26th Marines; that was the regiment. The battalion was the 2nd Battalion.
“You’re new here? You go over there. You have to go see the first sergeant.”
The first sergeants then had fought in World War II and Korea and had no respect for the guys from Vietnam, none at all.
“My war was tougher than your war. Don’t even tell me about Vietnam. We did Iwo Jima. We did Okinawa. We did the Chosin Reservoir.” They had to have twenty years in the Corps to be first sergeants, so to them, compared with World War II and Korea, Vietnam was a joke.
I wasn’t even a flea to those guys. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was confused, ready to fall apart, but I didn’t show it. I had a presence about me always, but I was going to war, and I might as well have worn neon lights saying, “I HAVE NO COMBAT EXPERIENCE!”
The first sergeant looked at my orders. “Get out of here and get your seven eighty-two gear!”
I didn’t know what that meant, and it showed.
“That’s your deuce gear! Get out of here!”
Damn, I didn’t know what a deuce gear was, either, but I wasn’t telling him that, so I left and found another guy my rank to ask.
“Oh, seven eighty-two, that’s your deuce gear, your war gear. Go to supply. Over there, that’s supply.” The private pointed at a building with sandbag walls. All the buildings had sandbag walls.
We arrived in Vietnam with only our dress uniforms, basically, so they issued me my war gear—canteen, k-bar knife, helmet, ruck pack, flak jacket, and rifle—and I reported to Echo Company 2/26.
The barracks in Phu Bai were very crude, all wood, no toilets, and built by the Seabees—a special naval unit capable of building and fighting. We called the barracks “hooches,” and each hooch housed about twenty Marines.
The only toilet was a fifty-five-gallon oil drum that was cut in half, and we just defecated into that. I didn’t find out until later that an oil drum toilet was a luxury. Relieving ourselves in the bush was far more crude.
I had to wait around for my platoon to get back from a combat patrol. They came in at four or five o’clock in the afternoon looking tired, salty, and tough.
They had to eat, write letters, clean their weapons and get some sleep, and at 0600 form up in front of the hooch ready for another patrol. That was it; no time to run around or bullshit. Sleep was paramount.
But I had no idea what was going on.
“Where you from?”
“New York,” I said.
“Ah, Walsh is from New York!”
“I’m from Long Island.”
That was always the first thing, “Where you from?”
“You’ll take Hayes’ rack,” they told me. “You’re his replacement. He stepped on a Bouncing Betty two days ago. Both of his legs are gone.”
“Shit! Fuck! I’m replacing a g
uy who just lost both legs?!”
I sucked all of this in, and the guys barely paid me attention. They were just so tired, taking off all their war gear, putting some chow down real quick, writing whatever letters they could before time to shut the lights off. We couldn’t have lights after dark. We’d have been targets. And we always had to clean our weapons. The M16s were our lifelines.
My new platoon mates ate C-rations, canned food, and they threw the little tin cans all over the place when they finished. These were Marines from the field, and they couldn’t have cared less about keeping the hooch clean. They were headed back out on another combat patrol first thing the next morning, and knew there were no guarantees that they would even make it back.
The other Marines stationed on the base were responsible for cleaning the hooches. Combat Marines in my unit called those rear echelon Marines “Office Pogues” or “Remington’s Raiders,” in reference to the Remington typewriters widely used by the military.
“Fuck them. They’re losers. They have to clean this shit.”
I wanted to ask a million questions, but I couldn’t in that situation, so I went with the flow. By nine o’clock, everybody was sound asleep, and food cans were scattered all over the floor.
I couldn’t sleep. I lay on my cot with my eyes open, still mentally severing myself from the 150 guys from training. Guys snored here and there, but otherwise it was totally silent.
Then I heard strange sounds, like thumping, and they kept growing louder, louder and louder. No lights were on in the hooch—this was a combat zone and lights were targets—but I could see shapes moving on the floor. Finally my eyes were able to make them out: rats! Hundreds of rats! I’m not kidding you. Rats flying over guys, on guys, up, down, sideways. Rats! After we shut the lights off, the rats went after the food scraps left in the C-ration cans.
The seasoned guys didn’t give a flying fuck. They were combat veterans. They’d seen so many worse things that hundreds of rats were nothing to them.
They were probably thinking, “Please bite my toe! If you bite my toe, I can get out of going out in the field, and I’ll catch up on some sleep. Give me an infection or something. I’ll spend three or four days resting in the hospital.”
They loved that shit. Sleep, I soon learned, was a precious commodity, and combat Marines were always deprived.
“Jesus Christ almighty!” I thought. “Fucking rats!”
I took my woolen blanket and threw it around me and went outside and tried to sleep on the steps of the hooch. But I couldn’t sleep.
Boot camp had toughened me physically and mentally, but now here I was across an ocean…and clearly in over my head.
12
Welcome to
a Hot LZ
“Get the fuck up! Wake the fuck up! Saddle up!”
The corporal acting as platoon sergeant was barking out orders. We had to go out in the field to back up a platoon involved in a major firefight.
There is only one way to become a seasoned combat Marine, and that’s to be thrown head first into the shit over and over again until you learn. I came as green and starched as my unsoiled war uniform, and that took some time to wear away.
I had my combat gear and my unit assignment; all I needed was combat experience. It was time to bust my cherry. No warm up period.
When a new guy came into Vietnam, they hooked him up with a seasoned guy. Then someone got killed or wounded and more new guys came and the process repeated itself.
Tom Eichler was my squad leader and one of my mentors. We called Tom “Ike,” because his last name was Eichler, and he was hooked with me because I was green. Ike was a seasoned guy, already twenty-five, twenty-six years old. I was all of nineteen.
We formed up in front of the hooch with the rest of the platoon. I was excited and clueless. Tom was cool, cool, cool. I was wide-eyed, watching everyone, listening to everything, trying to suck everything in.
I followed the platoon to the helicopter pad. There was a sense of urgency as we boarded the helicopters, and somehow Tom and I ended up on different birds.
We all wore war gear, and my heart pounded.
Guys started talking as we neared our landing zone.
“Pass the word, hot LZ! Hot LZ!”
“Hot LZ! Pass the word!”
“What the fuck’s a hot LZ?” I thought, but I had no balls to ask anybody.
It turned out that an LZ was a landing zone, and a hot LZ meant that the enemy knew where we were going to land, that they were ready for us. Choppers landed for ten seconds, dumped their Marines and got the hell out of there. As soon as the Viet Cong knew where we landed, they hit us with mortars—short-range bombs that weigh about seven pounds—and rocket propelled grenades.
When Marines landed in a hot LZ, we had to be organized to run. We couldn’t just go, “Aaahhhh!!!” and run for a tree or something.
I didn’t realize that I was already carrying so many weapons: my M16, grenades, pop-ups, gas grenades. I carried a rocket launcher on my back, and each rocket for it weighed seven pounds.
Green privates were essentially mules. They carried ammunition for the machine gunners and rounds for the mortar guys as well. If we were carrying fifty pounds, they gave us another thirty pounds of somebody else’s war gear to carry. The more shit we had in tow, the harder it was to walk in a jungle.
The helicopter was almost there, and the guys turned to me.
“Hey, you want a few more grenades?”
“Hey dude, carry this mortar round for me!”
“Hey, you want this? You want that?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I answered, and all of the guys gave me some of their gear. Part of me wanted to prove that I was capable, and the extra gear also made me feel more powerful.
I weighed about 130 pounds, and I must’ve put one hundred more pounds of equipment on me. It felt OK when I was sitting, but I might as well have been carrying suitcases. My heart pounded.
The chopper touched down and we jumped out, all organized. I ran two, three steps and fell down flat on my face; I was loaded with too much gear.
The Viet Cong shot mortars and rockets at us, and a corporal had to run back and get me. He stood over me and screamed.
“You fucking idiot! You fucking piece of shit idiot!”
He took all that extra crap off me and threw it to other guys and we got out of there. The other guys were just pulling a goof.
War warps your sense of humor, and someone willing to be your mentor can help you survive.
* * *
“Skinny” was one of the first guys I bonded with in Vietnam. I regret that I don’t remember his real name, but he was a thin guy, and we always called him Skinny.
Skinny was already seasoned when I hit Vietnam, but we took a liking to each other and he took me under his wing and kept an eye out for me even after he rotated back to the States. I can’t remember his real name, but I’ll never forget the man.
When you’re in a squad with ten or twelve other guys, you naturally get friendly with each other, even though instinct tells you that the guy next to you may get killed tomorrow. You get friendly, and usually with one or two of the guys, you get really close. Skinny and I got close, pretty much from my first week in country.
Sometime around my first week in the jungle, we were sent out with another squad on a night ambush. Our job was to wait along a trail at some distance for the first squad to engage the enemy in a firefight and then light them up when they tried to run.
The first squad’s job was to ambush them and force them to retreat toward our position, and then we were supposed to finish them off. A double ambush. I heard the explosion of gunfire when the enemy walked into the first squad’s trap, then we braced ourselves and waited for them to come our way.
What I didn’t know was that Skinny was watching me. Did I shake or grit my teeth or fumble around like some Gomer Pyle? Could the squad rely on me in a stressful combat situation? I was green, after all.
The firs
t squad tore into the bad guys big time, and those that may have survived never did come our way, but Skinny saw something in me that he liked.
The next morning, after daybreak, Skinny turned to me and said, “Man, I’m impressed. You held your own.” He didn’t sense nervousness or fear from me that night while we waited for the enemy. After that, in his mind, I was one of the guys.
Skinny was almost a short-timer with only about four or five months left on his tour, and guys that were about to get out of Vietnam often didn’t want to bond with new boots who still had a whole tour and a world of danger ahead of them, but that didn’t stop Skinny. We liked each other and we hung out, grew really close.
Now Skinny was a New Yorker like me, but from Brooklyn or the Bronx. Still, when he rotated out in the winter, he promised me that he would contact my folks in Long Island and tell them, “Your son is a good Marine who’s with a good group, and he will come home alive. Your son’s sharp and he’ll come home alive.”
Marines only received a ten-day leave when they were first sent home from Vietnam, but sure enough, Skinny and a couple of New York guys that he was sent home with took one of their precious days to go out to Long Island, which was totally unfamiliar turf for them, to go see my parents.
He kept his promise, and my parents were very welcoming and grateful. So was I. It was a small act, but the meaning was huge.
* * *
No Marines in my squad were killed on my first patrol, and experience later taught me to appreciate such days.
That afternoon, we ended up at another landing zone and waited for choppers to retrieve us.
The LZ was a flat, open field with a tree line about one hundred yards away. There were about thirty of us, and we were a little early for the choppers. No bad guys around, and no incoming. The other guys seemed relaxed. Then I heard a popping noise.
“What’s that?”
“We’re being shot at,” a guy said. “Probably some fucking old villager with a World War I, World War II rifle.”
“You gotta be shitting me?” I thought. They could tell by the sound that it was an old rifle, and they weren’t even flinching.