by Barry Fixler
Captain Breeding gave us these orders every morning, and as I got used to being a squad leader, I began to notice, “Whoa, another new face! Oh my God, another new face!”
I saw the same faces for a few days, and then one would be gone and replaced by someone new. Sometimes guys just got rotated back to the States, but most of the time they were wounded or killed. I would think, “Oh my God, another new face! Oh no! That guy got fucked up! That guy replaced Wilson. Wilson got fucked up.”
I’d wonder, “Whoa, who’s going to replace me when I get it?”
Years later I saw the movie Spartacus with Kirk Douglas, and for some reason one of the scenes reminded me of our morning meetings with Captain Breeding.
Before they called Spartacus and his opponent into the ring in which one of them would die, the two warriors sat in a little room and stared at each other, knowing that one of them was doomed.
That’s the exact feeling I had when I sat in the squad leaders’ meeting. It was just like the two gladiators in Spartacus. I would look at the faces and know someone was going to die. It’s just a very heavy feeling. No one wanted anybody to die, but that was the situation. Somebody was going to die.
I would look at their faces and think, “Who’s the next one to die? Who is the next one to die? Am I next?”
I never thought, though, that it might be from a bullet from one of our guys. That nearly happened.
One of our jobs at Khe Sanh was to patrol the valley between Hills 861 and 861-A. The valley was total death. It was from there that the NVA launched mortars at us. They were down there in their territory and we were up on the hills, and they did everything they could to knock us off. The valley was nothing but jungle, the worst of the worst. We would walk down into it, and about thirty or forty feet outside of our perimeter, we would just disappear into the dense vegetation.
Each mission lasted a few hours. We would hump down one hill, through the valley, and up the other hill. Sometimes we stayed there overnight and came back the next day, but other times we made the trip in one day.
These patrols were always during the day. Night patrols would have been suicide missions. As it was, walking out there was just the same as saying to the enemy, “Please shoot at me.”
Fortunately, I never had to walk point. That was the most dangerous patrol job, for obvious reasons. I was in weapons platoon and it was not our job to walk point. Walking point took elephant balls.
On one patrol between the hills, I was about three or four guys behind the Marine on point. There were probably eight of us, and we walked slowly, serious as can be. We just knew that the enemy would hit us. We were about halfway between the hills when I heard a loud BOOM and felt a burst of air between my boots.
My brain told me that I’d just stepped on a Bouncing Betty. They could shred you. I saw guys get hit by Bouncing Bettys, and it always was ugly. I had seen enough combat by that time to know that the odds of losing my legs were far greater than they were of getting killed. Making it out of Vietnam without losing at least one leg seemed almost impossible.
“Don’t look now, Barry,” I thought. “Wait for the pain.”
The other Marines took cover as soon as they heard the explosion. I froze and waited for the pain to come up to my head and to go back down. I didn’t want to look at my legs. I had heard the explosion and felt the pressure and dirt flying, and I just waited for the pain.…
Nothing.…
After a few seconds, I looked down and saw feet, normal feet. My feet.
My brain already had started coping with losing my legs.
“It caught up to you, Barry. You’re going to lose your legs, just like everybody else. We all lose our legs.”
But I looked down and everything was normal, and then I heard a Marine behind me.
“Fuck, it was me!”
Everyone was still on the ground. He and I were the only ones still standing, and I turned to him.
“What do you mean it was you?!”
“I wasn’t sure if my safety was on or off so I pulled the trigger; I really thought that my safety was on. It was stupid.”
His rifle was pointed exactly between my boots when he pulled the trigger. I was extremely lucky. We had close calls every day, but that one stands out because it was unusual to get shot, or nearly shot, by another Marine.
We regrouped and got up the other hill, and then we took the time to say a few “What the fucks!” But we didn’t dwell on what had gone down. Anything can happen at war.
25
Magnet Mike Lucas
The siege of Khe Sanh was living hell only if you were lucky enough to stay alive, hunkered down in trenches under constant artillery, mortar and rocket fire. It was as crude as things get, but we were Marines: Our morale was up.
It got to a point when we were being mortared that we didn’t ask, “Did anybody get hit?” It was, “Who got hit?”
We took casualties at all hours and from all directions. Sometimes the helicopters would drop in reinforcements, but they were never enough.
Strange, but a person gets used to being bombed every day. It’s the truth. You really do. It’s survival of the fittest. You could pitch a pup tent in the middle of one of New York City’s busiest streets, and after a while, you learn how to survive there, given the opportunity.
We always were low on food, at best two meals a day instead of three, if you rated what they compressed into two little C-ration cans as a meal. The cans were tiny, maybe an inch tall and three inches in diameter. We had to ration our water, too.
What each of us got in our cans was luck of the draw. Each case of rations had twelve different types of meals, and someone would flip the box and we’d pick from the upside-down cans so that no guy could see what he was getting.
Lucky might mean beef chips. My favorite was compressed spaghetti in tomato sauce; it looked like dog food. When I knocked it out of the can, it would hold its shape just like dog food. I had to mash it up some to make it a little more edible.
Unlucky meant ham and motherfuckers. Ham and motherfuckers were lima beans and chips of ham. Lima beans! They were disgusting, so we called them ham and motherfuckers. Nobody wanted ham and motherfuckers, but out of a case of twelve meals, one guy in the squad had to get the ham and motherfuckers. Guys would get their cans, and soon enough we would hear, “Fuck! Ham and motherfuckers! Fuck, man, I got the ham and motherfuckers!”
We were always ready to exploit new guys who didn’t know any better, to con them into a trade and stick them with the ham and motherfuckers.
“Hey, cool! I got the ham and motherfuckers! You wanna switch?”
* * *
One day in mid-February, during a rare break in the incoming, Mike Lucas called to me from two foxholes over. Mike was one of my best friends, and for whatever reasons he always thought that it was really funny that one of our Marines almost shot me in the legs.
“Hey Fix! Fix! Fix! Hey Fix, I got something cool!”
“What the hell could he have that’s cool?” I thought. Nothing had changed for weeks. No mail, ham and motherfuckers, nothing had changed. “What could he have that’s cool?”
“I have cupcakes!”
“How the fuck could you have cupcakes?” I asked him. We were under siege, living in trenches, men dying. How could he have cupcakes?
We would get these tins of compressed pound cake, and every so often our C-rations included miniature Hershey bars. Mike got creative.
We always had C4, which is an explosive that’s a little like Play-Doh. During the day, but never at night, we could use little pinches of it to heat our food. Without a detonator, it wouldn’t explode, but it would burn. We would light the C4, place an empty can upside down over it, then put the can with our food in it on top of that. It was like a little burner, and it made the food a little easier to get down.
Mike must have formed the pound cake into three little cupcakes, and then melted his Hershey bars and dripped the chocolate over the pound cak
e. He presented it to me and another Marine, Lance Corporal James Anthony Wood, really nice on a piece of cardboard, like he was a chef or something.
Like a jerk, I didn’t catch on right away. It didn’t dawn on me that he could have just made the cupcakes.
“Where did you get those cupcakes?”
“Some helicopter guy just flew in them in for us.”
It really didn’t matter. Mike, James and I probably spent ten minutes just admiring those little cupcakes, and then we only ate them in nibbles, nice and slow—three tough Marines giggling like school kids and eating cute Khe Sanh cupcakes.
That was James Wood’s last treat.
* * *
On February 25, 1968, the NVA had zeroed in on one area so well that it was almost certain death. Around sunset, one of the corporals found me.
“Fixler,” he told me, “we lost three Marines; no one has their hole. Give up one of the men from your squad. Someone has to be in that hole.”
The position was totally vacant. We had lost so many Marines in that foxhole that I just knew whoever I put in that hole was a dead man.
Mike Lucas and I met back in July 1967 in Phu Bai. We were both from New York, and we hit it off right away. We had similar personalities. We were buddies from then on and stayed on the same operations and in the same platoon.
Then James Anthony Wood was attached to our squad, and he and Mike Lucas became extremely close. They shared the same hole and always were hanging out and laughing. I was nineteen years old, and I got a little jealous: “Jesus Christ! I’m losing my best friend.”
So when the corporal told me I had to give up a man to replace the ones who had been blown out of that doomed foxhole, I had to make a decision real quick. It was almost a certain death sentence.
I made a call—Wood—and he manned that hole. Knowing the kind of guy he was, Mike volunteered to go with him.
“We’re going in together.”
Wood was killed within hours of my decision. The foxhole took a direct hit from a mortar after dark.
“Minutes before, we were talking about home, watching through binoculars,” Mike said years later, “and the mortars started coming in and he was completely disintegrated, no head at all.”
Somehow Mike survived it, and when daylight came, he looked down at his flak jacket and saw part of James Wood’s face. There were pieces of flesh, and the stubble from Wood’s beard was impaled in the protective jacket, little hairs just standing erect.
It was a heavy blow to Mike and I could tell it shook him up. Mike was a tough Marine, a great Marine. That means James Anthony Wood was, too.
But as hard as it hit him, Mike had to shake it off, like we all had to. We were fighting a war, in a pitched battle, and we were taking losses daily. There was no time to reflect on our situation. We simply endured what had to be endured.
* * *
As much as I can still hear the echoes of the mortars and rockets in my head, I can also hear, “Corpsman up!”
That meant somebody was wounded and needed immediate medical attention.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
“Corpsman up! Corpsman up!”
Boom! Boom! Boom!
“Corpsman up! Corpsman up!”
It was that way all day, every day, and that made every day a tough one. The few men who rotated out were the lucky ones. Most only left if they were wounded or killed.
A Marine who received three Purple Hearts in one tour of duty would be rotated out and sent home.
Mike was a good Marine, a real good Marine, but he was a magnet for things like shrapnel. He was my friend, so I got him the hell out of Vietnam.
We were fighting on Hill 861-A when Mike caught shrapnel from a grenade, and it riddled his body. One piece lodged near his spinal cord, so close that doctors couldn’t operate.
They evacuated him to a medical ship, the USS Repose, which was basically a floating Navy hospital, but two weeks hadn’t passed before he was back on the hill.
“Holy shit!” I said. “What are you doing back here?”
He showed me all of his unhealed wounds from the grenade. It looked like he had been stabbed with a knife repeatedly. There were puncture wounds all over his neck, shoulder and chest, and each one was sutured.
“How the fuck can they send you back like this?”
“They sewed me up,” he said. “I’m good to go! I got a Purple Heart!”
It wasn’t a week later before Mike Lucas took it again, and he was back off to the floating hospital. The second wounds weren’t as bad as the first ones, and the doctors did the same thing, stitched him up and sent him straight back to the hill with wounds that hadn’t healed…and another Purple Heart to show for it.
I couldn’t believe it.
“Mike! What the fuck are you doing back here?”
His body was covered with unhealed wounds, but he hadn’t lost his arms or legs, so it was another Purple Heart and back to the hill. It would have been laughable—except it wasn’t.
Not long after, my squad was sent out on a patrol from Hill 861-A to 861, and the NVA mortar and rocket fire was relentless.
Bbbbboooom! Bbbbboooom! Bbbbboooom!
Guys were getting ripped apart left and right.
“Corpsman up! Corpsman up! Corpsman up!”
That’s what we heard all over the hill, and it got in my brain that Mike had all of these stitches all over him and two Purple Hearts, and a third Purple Heart would be his ticket home.
I kept hearing explosions and Marines screaming, “Corpsman up! Corpsman up!”
I didn’t plan it. I just grabbed my little can opener that we used to open our C-rations. It was about one inch long.
“Corpsman up! Corpsman up! Corpsman up!”
I wasn’t thinking, really, and Mike wasn’t looking. I took the razor blade part of the can opener and slashed it across his face.
Mike jumped, startled, and blood gushed from the wound.
“Corpsman up!” I screamed. “Corpsman up!”
Mike looked at me bewildered.
“If you’re bleeding from incoming, it’s a legal cut on your face, Mike! It’s your third Heart! You’re out of here, man!”
And that took him out of Vietnam. I took the man out of Vietnam.
We never talked about it afterward. He never said to me, “You know, Barry, you probably saved my life,” or, “Thank you, Barry.”
He wasn’t trying to get out, but he wasn’t upset with me either. It was a mixed blessing.
Mike spent all of his time in combat. He was a Marine’s Marine, but that man was a magnet for shrapnel.
* * *
More than 58,000 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam, but many more were casualties of the war.
Mike Lucas had about a year and a half until his enlistment was up when he was sent back to the States and Camp Lejeune with his body riddled with shrapnel. He had metal floating near his spine when he was medically discharged from the Corps, and one piece was so close to his spine that doctors told him that sooner or later the metal would affect his spinal cord and he would lose the ability to walk.
Fortunately for him, that didn’t happen, but his body bloated up and he became almost like a hermit. His legs became infected by Agent Orange and grew progressively more disgusting over the years.
Agent Orange was a herbicide, a defoliant that was sprayed from the air over huge areas of jungle and bush to kill all vegetation and deny cover to the enemy. It turned out to be deadly for many of those, friend and foe, exposed to it, even long after it had been deployed.
I didn’t see him right before he died. He had moved to Florida, and we spoke on the phone several times a year for hours each time, but I didn’t see him often. His legs got infected and he just let it go, let it get so bad that when he finally went into the hospital, he had death written all over him. He was only fifty-five, and doctors couldn’t do anything for him.
He died on November 21, which is my daughter’s birthday. November 2
2 is my birthday. Even though we didn’t see each other much in the years after Vietnam, Mike was one of my best friends, the best man in my wedding. The bond always was there.
I came home from work the night Mike died and was eating dinner, just like any other night. Linda, my wife, stared at me. She had received the call from Lizzie, Mike’s wife, and Lizzie told Linda that Mike had died. Lizzie had been Mike’s high school sweetheart and they had been together since they were sixteen years old.
“What a blow,” my wife probably thought to herself. “I have to tell Barry, and it’s our daughter’s birthday.”
You know, when you lose a good friend, you don’t want it to be on a family member’s birthday, an occasion that you expect to be joyous. Linda waited until I had finished eating.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
“What?”
“Mike Lucas died today. Lizzie called me. They’re not having a funeral. He didn’t want one.”
“Why didn’t you tell me when I got home?” I snapped at her.
“I didn’t want to upset you before you got a chance to eat.”
Most of the conversations that Mike and I had after the war were about doing patrols out of Phu Bai and Khe Sanh. We really never talked about me giving him his third Purple Heart. He never said, “Well, Barry, thanks; you gave me my third Purple Heart;” or, “Barry, what the fuck did you do that for?”
Deep down, he knew it was a good thing. We just never discussed it. The bottom line was, he had no more control over what I had done than he did over the wounds he had received from the NVA.
He lived every day after Vietnam expecting that shrapnel to move near his spine and paralyze him. That’s why his body bloated. He just didn’t want to move, and it haunted him. He spent all of his time reading.
When Mike died, his body was riddled with Agent Orange…totally fucked up. He had huge sores all over his legs.
Mike Lucas got riddled with Agent Orange and died from it, and I wasn’t affected by Agent Orange at all even though we served together almost the whole time. I can’t question that. I can only hope to honor Mike and the rest of the fallen Marines in how I live.