by Barry Fixler
26
Mail Matters
Our world at Khe Sanh was blood, death, and filth with deafening gunfire and blinding explosions as a constant soundtrack. Mail was our only link to the lives we left behind, the one that I left in those manicured subdivisions back in Long Island. For our families and friends back home, mail was their only way of knowing that we were still alive, or at least had been on the date of the postmark.
Mail brought comfort and confidence. Mail reminded us that beyond those bloody trenches there were still beaches and beautiful women and warm hugs and hot meals and people who meant more to us each day that we were lucky enough to still be alive.
“Will I ever see my parents again? Will I ever see my house again? Will I ever make it home?”
You think those things every day as a Marine at war. “Will I ever see where I grew up again?”
What the people back home think and feel may be even more horrible and helpless. Our minds were occupied at Khe Sanh by fighting for our lives. Those of our loved ones, though, could be tormented by worry and paralyzed by fear, and each day without mail grew worse.
* * *
I wasn’t able to get mail out during the entire time that I was at Khe Sanh.
We were caught in the siege fighting every day; the shit was always hitting the fan. There was no way I could get mail out. When a chopper would come down, I would take a letter and just fling it on the helicopter and hope only that someone would pick it up from the deck as they were unloading the wounded and dead Marines.
I did that a number of times, and of course no letter ever made it home. Probably some guy stepped on them and ripped them and they just blew out of the helicopter.
Vietnam was a helicopter war, and those choppers were our lifelines at Khe Sanh. They were the main transports for men, food, ammunition, and mail. In the field, they represented the only way that we had of sending mail out and letting our families know that we still were alive.
Get in fast. Get out fast. That was the helicopter pilots’ mantra.
But the NVA was right there. As soon as they saw a helicopter land, Ba-boom! Ba-boom! Ba-boom!
If Marines were wounded seriously enough, the choppers would take the risk and attempt to rescue them. But the choppers had to be fast, like ten seconds on the ground, maximum.
Boot camp drill instructors loved to say, “You’ve got ten seconds, and nine are gone!”
I don’t think I appreciated the significance of that phrase until I carried wounded Marines to a chopper while the NVA hammered the landing zone with mortars.
One day, two of our guys got hit real bad. We carried them in ponchos to about one hundred feet from the landing zone. One guy grabbed a poncho by the feet and the other guy held it by the head and we picked up the wounded guys and ran to the Medivac chopper. We coordinated it so we got there just as the helicopter touched down.
I held one of the wounded guys by the head end of his poncho, making eye contact with him. Blood covered his body. How he was still breathing, I didn’t know. He was turned inside out; all of his organs were exposed. But he was still alive, and his eyes fixed into mine.
“You’re going to be fine; you’re going back to the world,” I told him. “Back home. You’re making it back fine. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”
I really thought, “Just die already.” The guy already was in shock, and there was nothing I could do.
The helicopters landed and four of us ran out with the two wounded Marines. We caught heavy fire: mortars and rockets.
The two guys carrying the first Marine went straight inside the helicopter. I was the last one on the ramp with the second injured man, and as soon as I got there, the pilot started taking off because shrapnel was riddling the helicopter. The cockpit windshield was a mess, and pieces of it protruded from the co-pilot’s bloodied face.
I was barely on the ramp when the helicopter lifted, and next thing I knew, I was dangling from the ramp clinging to the poncho, and I couldn’t reach anything else to hold.
I lost my grip. For one quick second, I opened my eyes and actually saw the tops of trees below me. I was falling from the sky, and the only thing I could think was that I was higher than the trees. I had enough time to tell myself to curl in a ball, like doing a cannonball at the swimming pool, and close my eyes and wait to hit the ground.
That’s what I remember, falling, waiting, waiting to hit ground, waiting for the pain…
I bounced. I swear, it was just like hitting a trampoline.
“What the fuck!?”
I had no idea what I’d landed on. The first time, I must’ve bounced ten, fifteen feet, but it felt like jumping out of a six-story building onto a trampoline: up three floors and down, and then up two floors and down, and then one.
My helmet flew off at the same time, and how I thought to do all of this, I don’t know, but I tried to flatten myself out so I was not such an easy target for the enemy.
The NVA must’ve laughed their asses off.
“Look at that bouncing idiot!”
I was still wondering what I had landed on by the time I reached cover.
Well, for about six weeks, none of us had wanted to get our mailbags. The helicopters came and dropped the mailbags, but no one wanted to run out the one hundred feet under fire to get them. We had to get our ammunition and food, but screw the mailbags. We weren’t about to get killed for mailbags.
So they piled up, and they may have saved my life. They must’ve been stacked four or five feet high and I landed right in the middle of them. That’s why I bounced: those stupid mailbags that nobody thought were worth risking their lives.
Our three guys who got stuck on the chopper made it back the next afternoon while I was eating C-rations in one of the trench bunkers where we slept. They had assumed I was dead.
“We seen Fix get blown out of the helicopter! We seen Fix get blown apart!”
Their eyes had seen me fly out the back of a helicopter in mid-air while under heavy fire, so their brains assumed that I was dead.
“Yo! I’m fine!”
They almost jumped out of their skins.
“But we saw you get blown out of the helicopter!”
“That’s right, but I’m right here. I’m good.”
They said they were happy to see me, but they looked like they’d seen a ghost.
* * *
When we were able to get the mail, even the smallest surprises seemed large. The girlfriend of one of the guys in my squad wrote him a letter and put her pubic hair in the envelope. She probably sprayed a little perfume on it. He opened it in a trench bunker.
“Oh my God! I got pubic hair from my girlfriend!”
The rest of us scrambled for a look. “Oh shit! Let me see! Let me see!” We all passed around the envelope. There were twelve, fourteen of us, and we never took out the hair; we just looked at it in awe: little curlicues. Each of us took turns sniffing.
“Let me smell it! My turn to smell it! What a great girlfriend you have! My turn! My turn!”
That guy kept that pubic hair on him the whole time.
* * *
I never paid much attention to our mailman when I was growing up on Long Island, but we had the same one for years. He always saw us outside playing and watched me grow into a young man who joined the Marines and went away.
He knew that I’d been sent to Vietnam, so the first thing he would do each day was sort through his mail sack for any letters from me to my parents. They were easy to spot because they had “Free Vietnam” stamped on them. People in the military didn’t have to pay postage.
The days that my letters did arrive, instead of putting them in the mailbox, he knocked on the front door and hand delivered them to my mother. It made his day, and he suffered along with my parents during the period when I couldn’t get any mail out of Khe Sanh.
The only thing that any of them could think was that I was dead. When the siege broke and one of my letters finally arrived, he ran hims
elf out of breath rushing it to my mother’s door.
“Mrs. Fixler, I have a letter! I have a letter!”
He told me that story when I came home from Vietnam, and he shook my hand and said, “I have known you since you were a little boy, and I am very proud of you.”
Letter carriers were invisible to me before then.
“Oh my God, thank you,” I told him. “You’re a stranger but you are not a stranger, and you really had heart for me.”
My carrier wasn’t unique.
My sister Vivian and I were close to my father’s oldest sister, Aunt Helen, and Uncle Joe. They didn’t have children of their own and treated us sort of as their surrogate kids.
They lived in a Miami Beach high-rise apartment, and I sent them a letter during the war, only I didn’t have their apartment number. I just wrote “Aunt Helen and Uncle Joe” and street address on the envelope; no last names. I always only knew them as Aunt Helen and Uncle Joe.
The mailman there asked around the high-rise a little with no luck, and then, looking at maybe twenty floors of apartments, decided that he would knock on every door until he found them. And he did.
Those carriers went far beyond their duties to make sure that people received mail that the carriers knew was so important to them. Ever since Vietnam, I have held the people of the U.S. Postal Service in the highest regard.
* * *
Because of the mail situation, my parents didn’t hear from me during that two-month period, and my father freaked out and got in touch with the senator asking for help locating his son.
I had made the mistake of mentioning Khe Sanh back when my letters were getting through, and then my parents saw all of the news from the siege. I didn’t know that the world was about to blow up there, and my letter didn’t get to my parents until February. By then Khe Sanh was receiving a lot of media coverage, and they had to read news reports like “26 Marines killed in Khe Sanh,” so by the time they received my letter, all they knew was that was where I was supposed to be.
They tried, but it was impossible to find me. My parents couldn’t get much information from the Marine Corps or from the New York senator, Senator Jacob K. Javits. My father was understandably upset, and he turned to a very influential rabbi who was politically connected.
My father did not say, “My son is at Khe Sanh.”
He asked, “Rabbi, what’s going on in Khe Sanh?” And the rabbi, very nonchalantly, said, “Looks like they’re all gonna die.”
My father collapsed. He got facial palsy. The muscles gave out from the nervous strain. He couldn’t go to work for six months, and he never fully recovered.
My father never was warm to my mother’s parents. His parents were warm and outgoing, and my mother’s parents weren’t, so my father never really took to them.
So no one knew what to make of it when my dad broke down crying at his father-in-law’s funeral.
My father was a good guy, but he was pretty cold to my mother’s family.
My mother was the youngest. She had three older sisters and three older brothers, and they all used to goof at my father.
He came out of World War II with nothing, and he was living off of slices of salami until he met my mother. He found out that her father was a jeweler and had a little money, and the story was that her father enticed my father to marry my mother.
“There is a little money in it for you. You marry my daughter, there is a little something in it for you.”
It was the family joke: Louis Fixler married Ronnie Gerstel for the money.
My father was a gambler and a partier. Maybe my mother’s family was a little bit too nerdy for him, a little bit too Jewish, a little bit too straight. They ran everything in their lives by the book and were as rigid as could be.
So everyone was bewildered when my father lost his composure during the funeral of my mother’s father. Everyone knew he wasn’t close with the in-laws, but he broke down crying during the services.
“Wow! This is a strange side of Louis, being so emotional,” my oldest aunt told people, and she walked over to my father. “Louis, why are you crying? Are you that upset that papa died?”
“No!” he told her. “I’m crying because I may be standing here at my own son’s funeral. He may be dead. He may not come back from Vietnam. That’s why I’m crying!”
My aunt turned to him.
“Louie, I guarantee you, I say to you, your son will come home.”
When I did come home my aunt told me the story.
“Barry, I’ve known your father for more than twenty years, and that was the first time I saw him cry, and he was crying because he was scared that you wouldn’t come home from Vietnam. He thought that the next funeral was going to be yours.”
27
Fatal Mistakes,
Illusions of Calm
From my trench on Hill 861-A, I could see our concertina wire about ten yards down the hill, but very little beyond that. It was a week or two after we first were overrun, and we were holding our positions under the heavy fire.
The enemy would walk their mortars in our trenches, which were about two-and-a-half feet wide and stretched around the hill. We expected waves of humans to come at us at any moment. We’d been overrun before, and we didn’t want that to happen again. We were getting shelled heavily by artillery and receiving mortars and rockets.
The fighting was so close and intense that it was incredible. We had to call in air support, and the NVA was positioned so close that the dirt and rocks from the explosions of our own bombs rained down on us.
We were fighting out of shoulder-deep trenches and had to duck our heads between bursts of fire, but if we ducked our heads the whole time, the enemy could just walk right up and say, “Now I got this hill.” And our part of the hill wasn’t very steep; pretty easy for the enemy to climb.
We had to have eyeballs outside there. We couldn’t hide. I would pop up, fire, duck, pop up, fire, duck. The Marine sharing that section of the trench with me just stayed up firing away—boom! Boom! Boom! He wouldn’t duck between bursts of fire.
His mentality was, “Fuck you, gooks! Come and get some!”
I ducked and he just exposed himself. A rocket must have hit the top of the trench right in front of us. The rocket acted just like a chainsaw and sheared the top of his head clean off right above the eyebrows. His nose was there, his eyes and eyebrows were there, but everything above was just gone.
I stared at him, amazed. Instinctively, he reached up to touch where his head had been, and then his body slumped to the ground. It must have been a reflex.
As he fell toward me, all I could see was that he had no head. His body was there, but no head, and all of his blood oozed toward me.
His uniform, and the skin on what was left of his face, seemed clean. I remember how odd that seemed because the top of his head was blown off, but there was no blood on him except on three fingertips on his right hand. Just the tips of the fingers, as if they had been dipped into a bowl of blood.
He just dipped his fingers in into his skull and fell and lay flat dead in front of me.
I still had to do my job, but I couldn’t help looking back and forth at him between ducking and shooting. I kept seeing the blood flooding out of his skull toward me and soaking into the dirt, but continuing to ooze closer. But as fast as his blood flowed toward me, it was being sucked up by the dirt. It would flow and flow, and the earth kept sucking it up like a sponge.
It was as if red syrup spilled on the ground and it wouldn’t stop flowing, like a stream coming toward me and seeping into the ground.
This was a guy I’d lived with for months, shared the same foxhole with, and now he was dead on the ground in front of me and the top of his head was gone. I just stared.
Forty years on, I can’t remember his name, but I’ll never forget the blood flowing into the dirt.
* * *
On April 17, after seventy-seven straight days of incredibly tense, do-or-die fighting, the ba
ttlefield fell quiet at sunrise. Rockets, mortars, small arms and artillery had rained on us for more than two months. Now it seemed as if the NVA had just packed up and left.
That morning, instead of having incoming, incoming, incoming, there was calm, peace. No one screaming “Corpsman up!” We were thinking, “Oh my God, the NVA just left. We fucking won!”
A sudden feeling of relief and pride came over us: We won. We had just won the battle, so we took a group picture to show our defiance.
It’s a great picture because if the NVA had seen us posing like that, all grouped, they would have lobbed everything they had at us. They would have said, “Wow, that’s the best target in the world.”
To me, the picture is a winning pose that symbolizes our victory at Khe Sanh, the moment we won. It’s my personal Iwo Jima flag-raising photo. By grouping like that, and taking my helmet off, we were sending a message.
“Fuck you! We won!”
I was cocky and feeling sure of myself, so I pushed it to the next level. I took my helmet off. No helmet. You can see in the picture that most of the guys were so conditioned that they kept their helmets on. Me, I took off my helmet. “Fuck you!”
We actually celebrated by taking those pictures. The enemy wanted to knock us off that hill and couldn’t. We were Marines. We won. We felt ten feet tall. That shot is hanging on the wall in my office and I look at it every day.
Finally, another company of Marines came in by helicopter to take our positions. The thing that I remember most is the look in their eyes. We never exchanged words, but the awe in their eyes said everything.
“Wow, these are the guys, Echo Company. They’ve been through the shit. These guys are fucking bad, bad to the bone.”