by Barry Fixler
Seasoning taught me to evaluate situations and make decisions. I decided from that point on that I would never let my M16 out of my reach again.
But the dinner worked out fine, and I was just healthily paranoid.
Guarding the bridge didn’t turn out quite so well.
We figured that the enemy planned to sneak in from the water and attach explosives to the bridge to knock it down. So our jobs were to take grenades and throw them in the water every fifteen minutes so that they would explode and kill anyone trying to attack the bridge from below.
What was nice about it when it was my turn on duty was that I wasn’t carrying or throwing my own grenades. If they had been mine, I wouldn’t have wanted to throw them because then I would’ve spent my personal supply. We kept a whole box of the things—sort of community grenades—at the ready on the bridge.
My first time on bridge duty, I really had no idea what I was doing. I relieved another Marine around midnight and found myself with only an ARVN for company. ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) troops were South Vietnamese military reservists, and we were guarding the bridge because they couldn’t hold it in the first place. They were our allies, but they were basically worthless. It was like us fighting with the Iraqi army. They were jokes, definitely not Marines.
So I relieved my fellow Marine thinking, “No big deal,” but the last time I had thrown a grenade was in boot camp. I never had the opportunity to throw a live grenade other than in practice.
I picked up my first grenade thinking, “Fuck, man, I forget. How long is the fuse on a grenade? How fast will this explode?”
Would it explode in the air? Deep under water? Would I accidentally blow up the bridge?
My Vietnamese companion became really scared when I grabbed that first grenade, and that made me even more nervous. I pulled the pin, tossed the grenade under the bridge, and took off running. The ARVN did the same thing. I jumped, and he jumped along with me.
The water was right there in front of us. I was afraid I might take out the bridge or something.
“Fuck, man, maybe the ARVN knows what he’s doing,” I told myself. I didn’t know what I was doing, that was for sure.
The grenade created a big bubble in the water when it detonated, like a huge fart in a giant bathtub.
“Whew! That was easy enough.”
By the end of the first hour, we were both totally relaxed about it. I threw the grenades at will. They weren’t my grenades, and they were plentiful.
I was off duty and asleep the next day when the enemy blew down the bridge. The Marine on watch was injured, and one of our helicopters lifted him out of there.
That was the end of our bridge guarding. We had nothing left to guard. The enemy just blew the bridge and disappeared into the night. We didn’t take it personally, like we would have about a bridge that was strategic for the Marines.
Our attitude was, “Fuck it; it’s a fucking village bridge. Let’s move on.”
19
The War Walks
Into a Temple
No official rite of passage existed for completing the metamorphosis from green to seasoned Marine. We had to learn the sounds of the jungle and the tactics of the enemy, and we had to learn to be composed enough under fire to apply our training.
I realized that I had become a seasoned combat veteran after three or four months in Vietnam, when one of the Jewish holidays came up.
My lieutenant, the platoon commander, came over and said: “Fixler, you’re in country three or four months; you’re entitled to an in-country R&R (rest and recuperation or recreation), and they say that in Da Nang they have some kind of Jewish services. You rate two nights, three days of in-country R&R. Do you want to go to these Jewish services?”
“Yes sir!”
I’m more spiritual than religious, and I knew it wouldn’t be the best rest and recuperation, but it was a novelty.
“I’ll do it, sir.”
Traveling south to Da Nang took nearly a whole day.
I took a helicopter first, but it didn’t exactly get me there. The crew just took me where they were going, and I had to keep catching rides on the ground from there.
I ended up on a cattle car, which is a huge troop transport capable of carrying about one hundred men. It looks like an eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer. The driver and another guy sat in the cab, and the transport was going from one side of the base to the other.
The truck had a slide on one side, so guys could board while it moved. Another Marine and I jumped on as it slowed, and we headed down a bumpy dirt road.
We only had to go maybe four or five miles, and by the time we came up on an Army soldier looking to hitch a ride, the driver had picked up some speed.
“C’mon! C’mon!” I told the guy, and he started running parallel to the truck. We were going about twenty miles an hour, and that was too fast. I put out my hand and the hitcher jumped, but he just missed.
One of his legs caught in the wheels as he fell, and we heard him scream. His leg snapped clean off, right above the boot. I know. We found the foot.
The driver didn’t see it happen. We had to keep yelling and banging against the back of the cab to get him to stop.
Me and the other guys—Marines, Army—jumped out and went to help the poor guy. We put a tourniquet on his leg, and lucky for him, we were near a little medical compound, not out in the field, where it would have taken longer to get medical help. I’m guessing that he lived.
That’s the way it went. We were young, mostly in our teens and early twenties, and we did things like that. Stupid accident. I think they classify those types of injuries as “misadventure” in the casualty reports.
I still felt bad for the guy when I got to Da Nang. I still wore forty, fifty pounds of war gear: my M16, about two hundred rounds of ammunition, my grenades, everything.
Da Nang had only been a short pit stop—a blur—when I first got to Vietnam, and after that, all that I saw for three or four months was jungle. My return shocked me. “Am I still in Vietnam?”
I never had an idea that the main base in Da Nang was so secure. People from the Air Force, the Navy, and the Army walked around without side arms, just like civilians. And civilians, Vietnamese, were all over the place: laundry people, that sort of thing. There were brick buildings, hot showers, air conditioning, and movie theaters. It all seemed unreal.
I found my way to the chapel. It was little, but it did the job: rows of pews, a wooden floor and a wooden frame. Crude, but not bad. Jews, Catholics, Protestants, everyone went there. The Jewish service already had started, officers only.
The Jewish officers were probably Navy surgeons, eye doctors, and dentists, about twenty of them, all in their dress white uniforms just like back in America. I walked in still wearing all of my war gear. I had a good month, month and a half of crud on me, but none of us in the field could smell each other because we all smelled that way. You can imagine how I must’ve stunk. I made a clunking sound walking across the wooden floor.
The rabbi saw me and his face froze; all of the officers turned around in their pews and looked, probably thinking, “Who the hell is this guy?”
The rabbi half stuttered. “A-a-are you Jewish?”
“Yes, rabbi,” I said, backpedaling toward the door and suddenly feeling totally out of place.
“Officer Country,” I thought. “Wrong place. Fucked up.”
“You’re Jewish?”
“Yes, rabbi.”
“Don’t go. You’re here for the services?”
“Yes, rabbi.”
It took him a little bit to regain his composure.
“OK. Please come in.”
The officers still stared at me.
“Will you please put your gun outside the building?”
I’d been in the jungle for three or four months. The M16 was my lifeline, like oxygen. We never lost touch with our M16s the field. If you had to piss, you put it on your thigh. Pissing, shitting, or sleeping, ou
t in the field we always had a grip on our M16s. Those weapons were our lives.
I had learned my lesson about parting with my M16 during that nervous meal with the Vietnamese family.
“Rabbi, I can’t put down my weapon, sir. I’ll just leave.”
I could see all the officers still staring at my rifle, and then everything else: helmet, cartridge belt, grenades, gas mask, gas grenades. I walked in to the religious service straight from the war, extra salty.
“It’s OK. It’s OK,” the rabbi said. He was about ten feet from me. “You do what’s comfortable for you.”
The rabbi wasn’t comfortable. He stared at my M16 throughout the service. It was as if he suddenly realized that a real war surrounded him. I just sat there, a seasoned warrior in salty combat fatigues surrounded by kempt Navy officers in white dress uniforms. I felt as out of place as I looked.
The rabbi came up to me right after the service.
“I apologize to you. You have to understand that I just flew in to Vietnam for services and I never met an Army fighting man before.”
He was a civilian rabbi and didn’t know Marines from Army. I didn’t correct him. He was just there for the officers. It was as if he didn’t know that enlisted men who were Jewish existed. He probably thought that if you were a Jew, you were an officer. I could see the confusion on his face.
He seemed to want to know my name, but he knew I was going back out in the field, and he didn’t know how to react. He was young, probably had not been a rabbi very long, and I could see that he was rethinking the idea of getting to know me any better.
He probably thought, “Why should I ask him his name? What happens if he dies? I don’t want to know if he dies. If I keep in touch with him and he dies, I’m going to be devastated.”
I left without him asking.
* * *
My hard-earned experience and my Jewish roots combined to pay dividends on an operation that dragged on days longer than we had expected. Nobody brought enough food.
Echo Company received orders to hump from our base in Phu Bai to a mountaintop deep in enemy territory. Company-sized operations were rare, and our commanding officer, Captain Earle Breeding, was with us. COs didn’t participate in normal operations such as ambushes or patrols, so we knew it was something big.
The mountaintop took a full day to reach, and what we saw after we scrambled up the steep, rocky, tree-covered slope was nothing short of a catastrophe. A U.S. plane had been shot down, and debris and body parts were strewn all over.
No one survived. Not one body was intact. We saw boots with parts of legs still in them, horrible things, but we had a job to do, and we did it.
Our squad leader just told us to take enough food and ammunition for three days. To me, it was just another operation, another day of facing the enemy in their territory. We didn’t ask, “Where are we going?”
But telling us to pack food for three days meant the mission was important, and the Jew in me told me to take more, just one extra can. Now, anything extra you took just made your pack heavier. A one-day supply of C-rations weighed about five pounds. So most guys only packed enough for three days.
In fact, I usually just carried enough for two or three and I was OK. This time, though, Jew Barry decided to bring extra.
When we went on missions that lasted more than three days, we usually found another Marine outpost where we could restock on ammunition and food.
But this mountain wasn’t near any outposts, and climbing it wasn’t easy. It was steep and covered with trees and rocks, and we had to ascend a single, crude path that Marines on point had cut with machetes through the heavy jungle foliage.
The climb took all day. Besides being extremely difficult terrain, the mountain belonged to the enemy, and we had to be careful. The enemy could have been hiding anywhere waiting to ambush us.
We had to climb the mountain ASAP, so we stuck to the single trail instead of keeping spread out. It left us vulnerable to ambush, which made it clear that the mission was important.
We could have been diced to pieces on a clear path. That was just the way the enemy did it. In addition to carrying all of our food and gear, we had to be ready to fire our M16s at all times, even when we were holding onto branches just to keep from falling off the mountain.
It’s easier if you have two free hands, but we were carrying our M16s and our gear. I had a rocket launcher, too, and two rockets, plus my ammo and war gear and chow.
Reaching the mountain plateau took a full day, and you never want to see what we saw when we reached the top: total death and destruction, and the dead were our guys.
It didn’t look as if the plane crashed into the mountain, more like it exploded above it. Trees were peeled back, but there was no main, bare, crash spot.
Our mission was to search for survivors, and then guard the site while the crash was investigated. It was immediately clear that no one had survived. It was as if you just took everything, shredded it, tossed it in the air and let it fall. Parts of plane and people were scattered everywhere. Nothing was intact.
Body parts were wrapped around trees. The carnage was all around us and the human remains were impossible to identify. We didn’t even see dog tags.
As Day One dragged into Day Two and Day Three, it became clear that nothing was salvageable. Pieces of flesh were no bigger than a few inches. We couldn’t even gather them after a couple of days because they became like Jell-O, decomposed. The flesh just became part of the earth. I don’t remember an overwhelming smell of death because everything stunk: the dead and us.
Maybe my brain has blocked it out. I had seen death three days into Vietnam, and from that point, it became routine. Dead enemy was a good thing. Looking at enemy bodies was thrilling; they were like trophies. It was cool.
But these were dead Americans, and I didn’t want to look. Some of the guys exclaimed, “Did you see the foot in a boot? Did you see that?”
I had seen an American foot in a boot on my way to Jewish services in Da Nang a few weeks earlier. That was enough.
“No, I’m not going to look,” I thought. “Everybody’s dead; nothing to bring back, nothing to bring back.…”
Early on, a day or two into the mission, a helicopter tilted and hit a tree stump or something and crashed. No one was hurt, but no place was clear for the choppers to land after that. We lost our air support, and we were expecting the enemy to attack.
We were on extremely high alert, and the days kept dragging on, two, three, four, five.… The guys all thought each new day would be the one when we received orders to return to base.
Each day the word would spread: “We’re going back to base today. Today, we’re definitely going back.”
By Day Five, all of the chow was gone.
By the night of our sixth day on the mountain, I had one can of food left, a little tin of ham the size of the tuna cans that you see in grocery stores.
I’d eaten all of my other rations by Day Four and toughed it out with everyone else, but by Day Six, I was shaking from the hunger.
That can was my emergency supply, and it was the only food in camp. Ten of us were sitting around when I told the guys I had it and pulled it out.
“Oh my God, food! Oh my God! Oh my God! Thank you! Thank you!”
The can held three pieces of ham, each about a quarter-inch thick, and we all took out our knives and cut them into even slices, like little slivers of pie. We each took our portion and ate it like it was the best food in the world. We were starved, and going to bed with a little food in our stomachs carried us through.
We finally received orders to come down on Day Seven, and the descent was a lot easier than going up. The trail became smoother, more gravelly, as men kept moving down, and at one point, this pudgy guy about four Marines up the hill behind me lost his footing.
He was loaded down like a mule, carrying his M16 and probably eighty pounds more of war gear, and he gained momentum the more he slid. I just stepped aside as he
went past.
“Fuck him,” I thought. “He could’ve wiped me out, too.”
We had that little bit of food in our stomachs and we were finally coming down the mountain. We were giddy, and we all laughed at the sliding fool.
I remember being so thankful for my Jewish upbringing.
20
R&R Adventures
If we could make it through five or six months in a combat zone, we were entitled to a break. The Marine Corps gave five days of R&R, and we could choose between Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand. Married officers could fly to Hawaii and meet their wives.
I chose Hong Kong. Wherever we were in Vietnam, the Corps flew us to Da Nang before R&R and assigned us to a captain. Mine was responsible for 150 Marines ready to relax, and at the Hong Kong airport, he gathered us around.
“OK, we use the buddy system on R&R. I’m going to pair each one of you guys up, and each one is responsible for each other. We’re all due back here in five days at exactly this time, 1300 hours. If you’re not here, you’re AWOL.”
AWOL means absent without leave, and it’s about equal to desertion. The Corps doesn’t screw around with something like that.
By coincidence, I got partnered up with one of the guys from my boot camp platoon. We headed out to one of the hotels in Hong Kong that catered to American servicemen. Our room was nice enough, just like a regular hotel room in New York City, but that wasn’t a concern of mine.
“To hell with the room. Let’s look for some girls!”
While the war was transforming us into men, we still were boys at heart. The military trained us to be killers, but looking for girls came naturally. Free time was rare, and we never knew which day could be our last, so instinct and desire took over whenever we were left to our own devices.