Semper Cool: One Marine's Fond Memories of Vietnam

by Barry Fixler

  The NVA became increasingly better at aiming their mortars, rockets, and artillery. They would rain mortars up and down the lines. Ba-boom! Ba-boom! Ba-boom! We even were hit with our own artillery a few times. Things like that just happened, and we felt helpless against it.

  23

  Learning to Survive

  The first week of February 1968, the NVA really turned it on. They shelled us hard, worse than usual. The rockets and mortars were almost constant.

  On February 4, a chopper came in to evacuate the wounded and bring in replacements and supplies. The new guys ran off the chopper, and I ran on to offload supplies.

  Heavy rockets and mortars showered the landing zone, and as the chopper lifted off, I jumped into a trench and ended up next to one of the new guys. He had been in Vietnam for a day or two, and on the hill for all of one minute. He was clearly shaken by the intensity of the situation.

  “How long you been in country?” he asked.

  “Six months,” I told him

  “How could you live that long? How’s that possible?”

  I remember the conversation because the new Marine’s name reminded me of the actor Humphrey Bogart. He was killed the next day.

  Too many Marines were killed on Hill 861-A on February 5, 1968, when we were totally overrun.

  The North Vietnamese swarmed in from all directions. They were all over the hill. Three or four Marines were right there when the first NVA popped up, and they just got overrun. The shooting was intense, and waves of enemy soldiers just kept coming, coming, coming, coming, coming, coming, coming.

  Everything went down at once: artillery, rockets, mortars, small arms, bayonets, even tear gas. It took us all night to kill all the North Vietnamese in our lines.

  I heard more of the fighting on February 5 than I saw. I spent the night back-to-back with another Marine holding our position in the trenches. The enemy was so close, swarming over and through our trenches that there was a serious risk of shooting one of our own guys.

  So another Marine and I instinctively ended up with our backs to each other, holding our position in the trench line. It was total chaos, pitch black, and the constant explosions from rockets, artillery, and grenades created a strobe-light effect.

  And we used gas grenades on the NVA. Tear gas is heavier than air and it blew back on us and filled our trenches. So we also had to wear our gas masks that night, which limited our vision even more. Our ears rang from the constant explosions, and each flash of light from the blasts briefly illuminated a portrait of death through the gas mask goggles.

  It was like being blindfolded and spun around fifty times. Then they take off the blindfold, flip the lights on and off, blast your ears with noise loud enough to make your nose bleed, and you have to try to identify and shoot the enemy…all night long.

  You don’t have time in a situation like that to note individual acts of heroism, but as I found out later, my mentor, Tom Eichler, was a hero that night.

  Hill 861-A could well have fallen if Tom hadn’t done the things that he did, and that would have changed the entire course of the war. His actions were emblematic of what made Khe Sanh a part of Marine Corps lore: perseverance against overwhelming odds.

  Three of our men manning a machine gun were injured when the NVA overran their position in the initial assault. Three times Tom dodged enemy fire to carry each of the men to safety.

  He killed three NVA in hand-to-hand combat, stopping them from firing a rocket into a trench filled with Marines. When the enemy managed to establish a machine gun position inside our perimeter, Tom wiped it out with grenades, and he sprayed cover fire that allowed our own machine gunners to move into a position to defend us.

  He stood above the trenches to throw grenades down on the advancing enemy, and the entire time he made sure that we were kept supplied with ammunition. Tom was seriously injured early in the assault but his injuries never slowed him.

  When dawn came, we counted 109 North Vietnamese bodies sliced and diced all over the hill. I remember thinking, “What? Another one? Fuck! Another one. Another one.”

  I was impressed because I expected to see about half that number.

  Even spread over maybe two acres, 109 was a lot of bodies. We had seven Marines killed, and far too many wounded.

  I remember taking Marines out of the trenches and carrying them in ponchos to our landing zone to be evacuated to a field hospital.

  I don’t know the exact numbers, but I remember personally seeing at least thirty seriously wounded Marines: guys missing limbs, or so damaged that they probably died within a few days. At best, they lived but never fought again.

  We waded through the trenches and gathered the wounded and dead. And after a corpsman had stabilized a wounded Marine, we wrapped him in a poncho and carried him to a staging area near the LZ.

  One of the guys I helped suffered multiple severe injuries, and I talked to him to try to keep him from going into shock. He asked me to find his hand.

  “I need my hand. Can you look for my hand?”

  I asked where his fighting hole was and told him I’d look for it. I meant it, too. But when I got to his area and started looking around, reality set in. Debris and body parts were everywhere.

  “Barry, it’s hopeless,” I thought. “Even if you find a whole hand, there’s no way to know if it’s his.”

  One of the guys in my squad, Jim Kaylor, saw a severed leg fall out of a poncho as two Marines carried a wounded Marine to the LZ. Jim picked up the leg and handed it back to the wounded Marine boot-end first; It’s inconsiderate to hand a wounded Marine the bloody end of his leg.

  It was brutal. We just kept lining them up, and helicopters came and choppered them away. The dead NVA outnumbered our casualties about ten to one.

  We needed immediate reinforcements, and when they came from other units, they all wore looks in their eyes that said, “Oh my God, I’m fucked! I am fucked!”

  We didn’t put their minds at ease.

  “They’re definitely gonna attack us again tonight,” I told the green Marines. “Be ready because they’re coming back. Those motherfuckers are coming back tonight!”

  The new guys all were wide-eyed and solemn, and you could tell that they were thinking, “Ah shit, I’m gonna die tonight! Fuck! I’m gonna die tonight!”

  Those of us who had been on the hill since the beginning didn’t think that way. By that time, those of us who were still alive were tough Marines.

  I looked at myself sometimes and couldn’t see the green Marine who had landed in the country only six months earlier. I was just fucking hell-bent to kill the enemy, just fucking kill ’em, kick their motherfucking asses.

  It was more like, “C’mon, you gave us your best shot yesterday, and now give us your best shot today!”

  “We kicked your asses last night and we’re gonna fuck you up again tonight!”

  In no way could I show fear to the new guys. I had to raise my confidence to a new level.

  Those guys picked up on that real fast, and pretty soon, the ones who survived, they talked the same shit. They needed to see the example to have that confidence, and then they fed off of it.

  When they overran us so early into everything, we didn’t expect it. But thereafter, it was, “Motherfucker! Bring it!”

  I don’t know what the proper term is. It rattled us but it didn’t scare us. It was more like, “Yeah, come on, let’s get it on! Here, you want to fuck with us?! Let’s try this again! Come on!”

  And they did. The NVA continued to bring it. They never overran our position again, but they laid siege to us for another two months, even longer, throwing everything they could at us: artillery, rockets, mortars, and grenades.

  * * *

  Long after the siege, when my ears had quit ringing, I still thought sometimes that I could smell the gas.

  Anyone who ever has been gassed will tell you that things can’t get much more fucked up. Unless you’ve experienced it and found the discipline wit
hin yourself to apply your training and overcome it, you can’t control yourself. You can have the best rifle in the world, but it’s worthless against gas.

  The night the NVA overran us, I was moving from off watch to on when the skies lit up and we scrambled to organize and fight back, and then I smelled the gas. The odor is distinct and unforgettable. I didn’t know that we were using the gas. I assumed it was the NVA gassing us, or that a Marine had been blown up and his gas grenades exploded with him.

  I was seasoned then and thought I was cool, and I’d let my hair grow nice and long. I didn’t panic, but as I held my breath and put on my gas mask as I had learned in boot camp, the band of it tangled in my hair, and the only thing that I could do was start yanking my hair out by the roots. It was like pulling clumps of grass out of an overgrown lawn.

  My head had been shaved during boot camp, the last time that I had do the gas mask procedure, but doing it with long hair while under enemy fire was a whole different matter. I cleared the tangled spot, fit the mask on and blew to clear the gas from inside and I was ready to fight, but I was pissed at myself for not getting a haircut.

  Fighting a real enemy while wearing a gas mask is more than difficult. You’re looking through goggles, and it doesn’t help when one of the first things that you can see is that a lot of your guys are dead or seriously wounded. We lost a lot of Marines that day. They can’t simulate that experience in boot camp.

  * * *

  It’s not that the drill instructors at boot camp didn’t try.

  At one point during recruit training at Parris Island, South Carolina, the drill instructors had a platoon of eighty or ninety of us seated on bleachers outside.

  We were seated at attention, our backs straight, our faces expressionless and all eyes and ears trained on the drill instructor standing in front of us. He held a live rabbit, a nice, little, white bunny rabbit that he petted as he talked. I forget his topic because, as it turned out, that wasn’t the day’s lesson.

  He kept talking and petting the rabbit for several minutes, until it became almost invisible to us. We listened intently to him and paid little if any attention to the rabbit. Then, in a flash and for no apparent reason, the drill instructor seized the rabbit tight and snapped its neck, just snapped it!

  Blood gushed from the rabbit’s mouth, and some poor recruit reacted.

  “Aaaghhhhhh!”

  We all were caught off guard, but the one guy showed it more than the rest of us, and the drill instructor hurled the bleeding bunny into his chest, and it fell into his lap. Its guts oozed from its throat.

  The recruit had no choice but to sit there covered in the rabbit’s blood and guts as it lay dead in his lap. He couldn’t move.

  “Holy shit!” I thought, but the lesson was pretty clear: Always be ready for the unexpected, and show no fear or any other emotions.

  Learning to use gas masks was much the same.

  Before we ever went in the gas chamber, they taught us how to put on a gas mask while we were seated as a group on bleachers outdoors. Several hundred of us recruits were out there, and a drill instructor demonstrated the proper technique.

  If you already have been exposed to gas and you just put on the mask tight and breathe, you’re going to suck up that gas. So there’s a way—after you get it on tight with the rubber straps while holding your breath—that you hold the edges and blow out, and that expels whatever gas already was inside the mask, and then you can breathe.

  That’s the procedure, and it’s hard to do at first. You can’t see, and you have to hold your breath because if you inhale too much gas, you’re done for. You’ll shit, you’ll piss, and all sorts of crap will come out of your nostrils while you’re gasping for air. You’re blinded. You want to touch your skin because it’s being affected, but if you do, you will only irritate it more. It’s hypersensitive and painful to the lightest touch.

  You have no control of your body, and you’re in no shape to fight. All you can think to do is run away, screaming like a lunatic.

  I didn’t really understand all of that while sitting in a group in the bleachers, practicing putting on the masks, holding my breath for a minute or more, blowing to expel the imaginary gas, doing all of that.

  It seemed easy. It took some time until everyone could get the technique down to where we all could do it in less than a minute, but still, we were outside in nice fresh air, and it was easy.

  Then, the drill instructor yelled, “Any recruit that needs to practice more, let me hear it! Does every recruit know how to do this within one minute?”

  “Yes, sir!” we answered in unison.

  “Are you ready to go to the gas chamber?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Half of us weren’t—hell, hardly any of us were—but nobody wanted to be the guy to admit that. You never want to be singled out in Marine Corps recruit training.

  What we didn’t know was that two other drill instructors were sneaking beneath the bleachers while we sat above them lying.

  “Yes, sir! We know! Yes, sir! We know! Yes, sir! We can do it!”

  But we all were scared shitless of the chamber because once you’re in there, you’re fucked. You’d better know what you were doing.

  The drill instructor in front of us gave a signal and the two drill instructors that we didn’t know about under the bleachers set off gas grenades, and all hell broke loose.

  Half of the recruits, including me, tried to run. It was a cluster fuck. We were blind, stumbling and bumping into each other and pissing ourselves, shitting ourselves, nasty chunks and goo flying from our nostrils.

  We couldn’t function.

  I saw everyone else gasping, gagging and flailing, and then I realized, “Holy shit, I’m doing the same fucking thing!”

  But that was a lesson that we all had to learn. It took several minutes for things to calm down, and about half of the guys did well. I was in the half that didn’t, but at least I wasn’t singled out.

  “Now fucking pay attention!” the drill instructor barked. “Because this shit is not gonna happen when you get in the fucking gas chamber!”

  “ Yes sir!” we all answered.

  The gas chamber didn’t come until near the end of boot camp, and all recruits feared it. The feeling is like being put in a coffin and having the lid shut over you and sealed.

  But by the time we actually went into the gas chamber, almost all of us were ready. I did just fine. Out of the thirty or so recruits that went in together, only one guy would freak out and turn into a lunatic, and the drill instructors just let him go wild.

  The guy would be trying to escape the gas chamber through the steel hatch, and the harder he tried, the worse it got for him. We didn’t feel sorry for those guys. You had to fucking learn. I was glad that it wasn’t me.

  24

  Somebody is

  Going to Die

  Second lieutenants and squad leaders passed through a revolving door of death at Khe Sanh, which was where I was promoted to a squad leader. It wasn’t long before I began asking myself how long I could last.

  New second lieutenants were always coming in. More men in that rank were probably killed, by percentage, than those in any other rank, and squad leaders couldn’t have been far behind.

  Second lieutenants had no credibility; that was something that had to be earned. Second lieutenant was the lowest rank for an officer. They had just finished training in the States. What war did they have in the States? No war.

  On top of that, second lieutenants came into units full of seasoned Marines who had been in combat for a year or more. The officers probably trained as hard or harder than the enlisted men, though. First they had to go through four years of college, and then through officer’s candidate school and training, but they had no combat experience.

  Second lieutenants had to be in the worst spot at all times because they were leaders. They had to be where the bad stuff was happening at every moment, and so they were vulnerable. The position of s
quad leader among the enlisted men was based on who had been in the squad longest when rotations came, and on who still was alive and able to fight.

  Becoming a squad leader meant the world to me, but I suddenly had responsibility for anywhere from seven to twelve guys.

  Every morning, squad leaders from my platoon had to report to the command post (CP). The order would get passed down the trench line, “Squad leaders up!”

  That meant that I had to run as low as possible through trenches to get to the CP, where Captain Earle Breeding waited. I usually was ducking from mortars and rockets.

  The CP was a little sandbag hut in which six to ten guys could fit, but we had to sit. There was no room to stand because a taller structure would have been a big target.

  Captain Breeding barked out orders, telling us our jobs for the day, what our plan was.

  “OK, first platoon, you’re doing good. Mortars. Where’s mortars? Where’s machine guns?”

  Maybe Captain Breeding would want an extra listening post, an LP. That was the worst of the worst. They sent two men out at night past the edge of our perimeter, the other side of the razor wire, to listen for the enemy and notify us if they heard them. It was like throwing them to the dogs. They were cannon fodder.

  Or he could order a squad to go out and clean up C-ration cans that were carelessly thrown out past the perimeter.

  “First platoon? Send a squad out to police the area south of your line. We have animals out there scavenging your C-rats and we’re gonna get complacent. Next time the enemy probes the line, we’ll think it's rats!”

  Maybe he would order us to repair the concertina wire. A working party. “Third platoon, send a working party out there and throw more wire.”

  We were always busy. There was always something to do. We never sat around. We survived by staying busy, and if we weren’t assigned to a working party, we had to dig deeper and pile sandbags higher.