Semper Cool: One Marine's Fond Memories of Vietnam

by Barry Fixler

It has been a fact of war for as long as men have fought. It also is a fact that a Marine looking for girls might find trouble just as easily, no matter on which continent he might stand.

  * * *

  After my tour of Vietnam, I was sent on a Sixth Fleet “Med cruise,” which is what we called operations based from Navy ships in the Mediterranean Sea. Shore leave always meant trips to the brothels.

  The whorehouses in France looked a lot like Manhattan brownstones, five floors tall and very nice. I was in Marseilles, Cannes, Nice, and I always seemed to gravitate to the brothels there.

  All that I could think was, “God, these girls are gorgeous.”

  I was always very respectful, and afterward I took them out to cafes and for walks and enjoyed the feel of a pretty girl on my arm.

  The other guys would be jealous, “Who the fuck are you, walking around with a gorgeous girl?”

  All that I could ever think to say was, “I want to marry her,” and the girls would get a big laugh out of that. I actually meant it, too.

  At one point during our Med cruise we were on the island of Corfu, and our job for a month and a half was to participate in war games with the armies from European countries that were our allies in World War II. The Marine Corps still had us training together. The operation was really huge, about five hundred Marines and the same number of troops from the European countries.

  I had twelve guys under my command, and we trained all day, but the nights were a breeze compared with Vietnam. Nobody was going to kill us. We had our own little area out in the middle of all this farmland and could pitch two-man pup tents and build little fires.

  Greek villagers leading donkeys and mules would come around at night peddling ouzo to the Marines for about fifty cents a bottle.

  Ouzo tastes like licorice and is as thick as syrup. It is Greece’s answer to absinthe, and I knew from the start that I didn’t like it. It’s like getting drunk on wine. Makes me feel like crap the next day.

  After a little while, the ouzo peddlers expanded their product offering. “Girls! You want girls? Girls!”

  Girls caught my attention!

  When I’d gotten used to the routine, I started to get ideas, and one night I made a deal with one of the village men.

  “Tomorrow night I bring girls,” he said.

  The next night, the guy showed up in a huge, battered truck.

  “I must take you where girls are.”

  That wasn’t the deal I thought I had struck. There was a huge language barrier, but jerky me, with my horns straight up in the air, I said, “Yeah, OK, fine, fine, fine.”

  So I asked my squad, “Who wants to get laid?”

  Every hand shot up, the whole squad. That would be dereliction of duty for everyone to leave. I decided to make one guy stay and cover our area, in case some flunky or sergeant came along.

  I figured I’d still be in trouble, but it might not be as serious as dereliction of duty. With girls on my mind, I wasn’t thinking straight.

  So my men and I got on the beat-up truck and headed out into the dark, bouncing around blind in the back. I had no idea where we were, and I was in charge. I started to panic after a few minutes.

  “I can’t speak the language. What if the truck breaks down? Where are we? What do I do?”

  It was enough to lose a stripe, and I am a good Marine.

  I was about ready to demand that the driver turn the truck around and take us back when this hillbilly-looking ghost town village popped up.

  One building looked like a huge World War II era Quonset hut, and all of the lights were on. The driver pulled up beside it, and we all took that as our signal to jump out and go in.

  It was like a gymnasium inside, and one hundred or two hundred Marines were already there. Other Marines! I was so relieved. I thought I was unique, being cool, being the first one to do this. But I wasn’t the only horny squad leader in Greece.

  Girls were on eight to ten mattresses with their legs up in the air, and Marines were waiting on line in front of each girl.

  It was like chow line in a mess hall. Guys were talking, telling jokes, laughing, whatever. Then the line would move. The next Marine would mount, enjoy a few moments of intimacy, and then let the next Marine on line take a turn.

  Hump, hump, hump. Next! Hump, hump, hump. Next! Just like that. We had to give like $2 or $4 to the guy who drove us, and he probably split it with the girls.

  We had to be back at our assigned position at 0500, and we didn’t get there until about thirty minutes before. None of us slept a wink. At twenty years old, we had the stamina to march the whole day without sleep.

  I was proud of myself. I pulled it off, never got in trouble, except… When we were sent back to the ship, we infested the holds with crabs. The whole ship came down with crabs—crabs all over everything.

  I had crabs so bad that it took me more than a year to get rid of them. Even after I was discharged from the Marines, I still had crabs, Greek crabs.

  * * *

  My first R&R break from Vietnam left lingering reminders of different sorts.

  After six months of getting shot at in a jungle, Hong Kong was a shock, but a cool shock. I really appreciated civilization. I wasn’t in America, but it was great: stores, sidewalks, electricity, lights, hot food, bars—and girls.

  I took about $300. We usually couldn’t spend money in Vietnam. We got paid, but we had nowhere to spend the money, so we saved up for R&R and spent our pay on things that really didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

  Hong Kong is known for having good tailors, so my partner and I ended up getting fitted for clothes, and this tailor set me up with a suit, which would have done me no good in Vietnam, so I mailed it back to my parents.

  The package probably stayed in the mail for a month. When it finally reached my parents and they opened it, it stunk like formaldehyde.

  My mother couldn’t take the smell, so she took it to the cleaner. When he brought it back, the suit stood on its own! I swear! It was like cardboard. The cleaner came and said, “Mrs. Fixler, you’re not going to believe this, but your son’s suit is cardboard.”

  That’s how phony it was. We didn’t know! We were just teenagers fresh from a war zone. What the hell did we know?

  On our second day in Hong Kong, my R&R buddy and I decided to call home, and I told my parents that I’d sent the suit. My Marine partner was from a Navy family, and when he called his home, his father refused to talk to him.

  His brother told him, “Dad’s not going to talk to you. He’s pissed off that you joined the Marines and you didn’t join the Navy.”

  We had whiskey in our hotel room, of course, and his father’s rejection upset him. He started guzzling whiskey and I wasn’t really paying attention. I went about my business and didn’t realize that he was getting bent out of shape because his father wouldn’t talk to him.

  I found out when he started punching all the glass in our room: the window, the lamps, and the mirrors. Boom! Boom! He totally lost control! Boom! Boom! Boom! It was almost as if a bull came into our room and destroyed the place.

  Glass was everywhere, and so was his blood. I had to wrap towels around him and take him to the emergency center so that they could take the spikes of glass from his hand. He was insane.

  We probably spent half a day in the emergency room. What the Hong Kong doctors did was so crude; it looked like he was wearing white boxing gloves made of gauze. They just kept wrapping bandages around his hands until they were useless mitts. We were Americans, and they probably couldn’t have cared less. Not only were we Americans, we were moron Americans, so they just threw on a bunch of gauze bandages.

  He was in pain and probably still had glass in him. I’m sure the glass infected him after three or four days, and his R&R was ruined. They gave him painkillers and he lay in bed for the next three days while I ran out and got laid.

  On the day we had to meet back with the other Marines, the captain flipped out when he saw the guy’s hands
wrapped like two big boxing gloves.

  “What the fuck happened to you?! What the fuck did you guys do?!”

  I’m sure they had to put him in a hospital when we got back to Vietnam. Strange, but I was anxious to get back, very psyched.

  Returning to Vietnam meant going from the relative comfort of Hong Kong back to having our necks on the line 24/7. The first time I had set foot in Vietnam had been after Camp Pendleton. We were bombarded with training, and then all of a sudden we were in Vietnam going on combat patrols and ambushes every day.

  After I had been in the jungle and then received a five-day reminder of what civilian life was like, it was a little tough going back, but that didn’t last.

  There is a phenomenon that other people can verify: When you have bonded with a group of men, lived and fought with them, saved each other’s lives, you worry about them.

  I was thinking, “Brother, I just hope nothing major happened. I hope there were no firefights. I hope nobody got killed.”

  The last thing I wanted to hear was, “We lost twelve guys, four dead, eight wounded bad. We got overrun!”

  I would have felt guilty if something had happened and I hadn’t been there.

  “Why did I have to pick this weekend? Why did I have to go?”

  I would have been mad at myself, really mad.

  Fortunately, that never happened during the times that I went on R&R. Oh, I missed out on being soaking wet and humping in the rain for five days during monsoon season, running out of water, running out of food, but I didn’t mind avoiding those hardships.

  But if something had gone down and they had needed me and something had happened to them, I would’ve been torn apart emotionally. We all felt that way.

  KHE SANH

  21

  Making Men and Heroes

  “In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things—some celebrated but more often men and women, obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg, Normandy and Khe Sanh.”

  —President Barack Obama

  Jan. 20, 2009, inaugural address on the National Mall, Washington, D.C.

  * * *

  We either became men or we became statistics at the Siege of Khe Sanh. Those who became statistics were the real men. They were the heroes. Khe Sanh may not have altered the outcome of the war, but it added to the mystique of the Marine Corps because despite overwhelming odds, we refused to lose.

  Khe Sanh was a village in the Quang Tri Province of South Vietnam, just below the 17th Parallel and the Demilitarized Zone, and the site of the Marines’ Khe Sanh Combat Base and airstrip.

  The seventy-seven-day siege that the North Vietnamese launched on January 21, 1968, was the longest and deadliest battle of the Vietnam War, and was so important in the mind of President Lyndon B. Johnson that he had a sand model of the battlefield built in the White House situation room and demanded daily updates from his Joint Chiefs of Staff. LBJ feared that the battle would become his Dien Bien Phu, the battle the North Vietnamese won to effectively end French colonialism in Vietnam in 1954.

  Nobody agrees on the exact number of casualties on either side. No one even knows. Many men died weeks, months, and even years after the official siege ended, in cold, faraway hospital beds, and more still returned to their homes but left limbs or parts of their souls to wither in the blood-soaked dirt of those jungle hills.

  Regardless of whose numbers are used, Marines took the heaviest casualties of all the U.S. military branches that served at Khe Sanh. In his book Battalion of Kings, Chaplain Ray William Stubbe said that 456 Marines died at Khe Sanh from January 20, 1968 (just before the official start of the siege) to April 16, 1968 (a week after), along with 83 Army troops, 23 from the Navy and 7 from the Air Force.

  Marines easily caught the worst hell, accounting for almost three-quarters of the U.S. deaths, but inflicted far more on the North Vietnamese. Some estimates put their number of deaths at as many as 20,000 men. They hit us with everything they could, firing artillery from fixed positions in Laos and rockets and mortars from right under our noses, and we held our ground.

  The enemy moved so close to our lines that the Air Force, confident in the ability and precision of its B-52s and their crews, changed its tactics and began dropping bombs nearly on top of us, with devastating consequences for the North Vietnamese.

  The bombing never stopped, and one of my vivid memories is the near constant rain of dirt and rocks on our heads from the explosions of NVA artillery and our own “friendly” bombs.

  Even as we were defeating the North Vietnamese, the Tet Offensive was changing the nature of the conflict. But ours was a defined objective and a clear victory. I became a man at Khe Sanh, a man with a huge and lifelong extended family. In doing so, I saw many Marines killed and many more seriously wounded.

  22

  A Climb Into Hell

  The top of what became known as Hill 861-A was just virgin land covered with elephant grass and bamboo when I first saw it. My company, Echo 2/26, had to claw through the dense vegetation and up the steep slopes of what would become a bomb-scarred hilltop with trenches reminiscent of World War I battles. In fact, over the next seventy-seven days Khe Sanh would earn the dubious record of receiving the heaviest bombardment of a small area in the history of warfare.

  * * *

  All we knew in mid-January of 1968 was that we were leaving Phu Bai for a place called Khe Sanh and were loaded down with war gear, all that we could carry. I only knew of it as a company operation, and how it affected me, Lance Corporal Barry Fixler. I was unaware that we were part of a huge, regiment-size operation. None of us had a clue.

  They put our whole company in a huge C-130 transport plane, and it seemed that this operation might be a little bigger than most. But that was all. We knew we were going to an area closer than Phu Bai to the DMZ, so it probably would be worse than Phu Bai had been, but I was a seasoned Marine with six months of combat, so I was unworried, confident.

  The DMZ—Demilitarized Zone—was anything but. It was a narrow band of territory at the 17th Parallel through part of which the Ben Hai River ran. It marked the line of partition of Vietnam into North and South Vietnam in accordance with the Geneva Accords signed between Vietnam and France in 1954.

  The DMZ was intended to exist as a zone free from any military presence by either North or South for a limited period until national unification elections took place. But history didn’t follow the script written by the diplomats. The zone and the areas around it saw some of the greatest destruction and carnage of the war.

  After we landed at the Khe Sanh combat base and organized, we humped outside the lines and into the fields. We dug in on a small hill the first couple of nights. There was no outpost. We were the only Marines there, and we still did not know what our objective was or what actually was happening.

  We all had an eerie, uneasy feeling, though. Whatever we were doing, it wasn’t routine. We knew that we were in a bad spot; we just didn’t know how bad.

  We finally ended up at the base of a steep hill, a mountain almost, about 2,500 feet high. There was only one overgrown trail, so the 150 or so of us started up it in a single column. The terrain was horrible and took hours to climb.

  I carried a rocket launcher that looked like a huge bazooka, my M16 rifle and ammunition, all of my grenades, my gas mask and a minimum of two rockets.

  That’s a heavy load, and we
still had to be alert for an ambush at any second.

  The hill was very steep and the trail was overgrown, but carrying everything required both of my hands, so I couldn’t use them to help myself up. It was a real struggle, and the heat was oppressive. We were given no breaks to rest. We were screwed—very vulnerable and spread too thin. I still think we were lucky that we reached the top without being slaughtered. The NVA were probably saying, “What the fuck?!” They must have been able to see us.

  We fought the tangled growth and slipped on the sandy ground, and at one point, I lost my temper and began beating on my rocket launcher with my hands.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I can’t believe this! This is fucking tough!”

  We were the first Marines to reach the top of 861-A, and not a soul was there, just wild grass, bamboo, and other vegetation all over the place. We had obscured lines of sight, which would make it difficult to find targets when we had to shoot back at whoever would inevitably start shooting at us. The enemy could have sneaked up to within ten feet of us and we wouldn’t have been able to see him. It was horrible.

  So the first thing we did was start digging.

  Darkness was falling on us fast, and we were totally out of water. The only moisture that we could find was on bamboo shoots that were covered with mites. I remember snapping the bamboo rods and putting our tongues to them to catch the drops of water as they trickled out.

  It was that way for the next two or three days as we continued to entrench ourselves and clear our lines of fire. Someone erected an American flag. We didn’t get the barbed wire and concertina razor wire emplaced around our position for about a week, so it was a good thing that the NVA didn’t zero in on us quickly. It would’ve been really nasty if they had.

  Hill 861 already was getting pounded and had been overrun once, and within three days or so we started catching mortars and rockets on 861-A. Each day grew more intense, and we got the feeling that we might be there for awhile, but we had no way of knowing that it would turn into seventy-seven days of hell.