“Thirty meters,” the Sergeant said softly. “We’ll get hit inside of thirty meters.”
“Sooner,” a trooper offered drily. Twenty meters farther the firing began. Even as he hit the ground, Webb saw three figures tumble over in front of him. Within seconds the whole field was exploding. Automatic fire cracked and snapped through the dry grass. An RPD hidden off to the right began firing and caught a squad trying to move off that way. Two other machine guns opened up on the left. Seeing where they were falling, the gooks began skipping rounds into them.
Behind and overhead, Webb could hear the gunships thumping their way toward them. The VC stopped firing as the first loach, small and agile, swept in over their heads. A moment later a cobra swung in. Everybody was popping smoke grenades. Webb got to his knees and, seeing a trooper dragging a body toward a nearby rise, shook off his rucksack. Taking his helmet off and leaving it on the ground with his M-16, he got to his feet and began running toward them with his aid kit. He made ten meters before they got him: a clean straight round that caught him under his swinging left arm and came out the other side of his chest.
In the Ashau, an RPG landed next to the CP and buried itself in the ground before it exploded. Ignoring the explosion, the medic was reaching up over the trooper to open the albumin can he had just hung when an RPD swept the area. The first burst shredded through his flack vest, lifting him up and spinning him around before it dropped him back to earth five feet away.
Watson had been a troublemaker since he was six. He was a bitter, imaginative, hate-filled kid who had been drafted and somehow had survived basic training without ending up in prison. He was assigned to the medics at an evac hospital and then to the field. When he went on line, the hospital personnel gave him a week to be busted and sent back to the States in irons.
When I met him he had been up front with his unit for almost five months. He was soft-spoken, but marvelously animated and alert. The old abusiveness was gone; even the adolescent arrogance I’d been told had for so long been the central pillar of his personality had disappeared. He was perfectly at ease and open. Those who had known him before were pleasantly surprised, if still a bit leery.
Watson didn’t mind talking. “Why not go all out, man? They need me, and I know what I’m doing out there. Hundreds of cases—fucken hundreds. The big-shot dermatologists, they come down once a week. They look at all that rotting skin and shake their heads and leave. Know what we done? We got a mix-master, threw in a couple of quarts of calamine lotion, a few kilograms of mycolgue for the fungus, and figured some tetracycline and penicillin couldn’t hurt, just in case there was any bacteria around. Called it jungle mix and bottled it and handed it out. Fucken dermatologists couldn’t believe it. Wanted to know where we’d read about it, what medical journal. Sure, I take chances. That’s my job—to save lives. The VC—well, I ain’t got nothing against ’em. Guess they’re doing their job, too.”
On a routine sweep through Tam Key, a squad of the Americal Division was ambushed. Watson was hit twice, both rounds shattering his leg. He kept helping the wounded, dragging himself from soldier to soldier until he was hit in the neck by a third round and paralyzed.
All the medics talk the same and they all act the same, whether they come from the ghetto or from the suburbs. No one planned it this way. It was the kids themselves, caught between their skeptical seventeen or eighteen years, and the war, the politicians, and the regular Army officers. Growing up in a hypocritical adult world and placed in the middle of a war that even the dullest of them find difficult to believe in, much less die for, very young and vulnerable, they are suddenly tapped not for their selfishness or greed but for their grace and wisdom, not for their brutality but for their love and concern.
The Army psychiatrists describe it as a matter of roles. The adolescent who becomes a medic begins after a very short time to think of himself as a doctor, not any doctor in particular, but the generalized family doctor, the idealized physician he’s always heard about.
The excellent training the medics receive makes the whole thing possible, and the fact that the units return the corpsman’s concern and competence with their own wholehearted respect and affection makes the whole thing happen.
Medics in the 101st carried M & M candies in their medical kits long before the psychiatrists found it necessary to explain away their actions. They offered them as placebos for their wounded who were too broken for morphine, slipping the sweets between their lips as they whispered to them over the noise of the fighting that it was for the pain. In a world of suffering and death, Vietnam is like a Walt Disney true-life adventure, where the young are suddenly left alone to take care of the young.
A tour of Nam is twelve months; it is like a law of nature. The medics, though, stay on line only seven months. It is not due to the good will of the Army, but to their discovery that seven months is about all these kids can take. After that they start getting freaky, cutting down on their own water and food so they can carry more medical supplies; stealing plasma bottles and walking around on patrol with five or six pounds of glass in their rucksacks; writing parents and friends for medical catalogues so they can buy their own endotracheal tubes; or quite simply refusing to leave their units when their time in Nam is over.
And so it goes, and the gooks know it. They will drop the point, trying not to kill him but to wound him, to get him screaming so they can get the medic too. He’ll come. They know he will.
“We get a distorted picture over here in
Japan. We see the guys after they’ve been
fixed up a bit and acclimated to their
injuries. Over there it’s a kid suddenly
full of holes. You’re faced with the stark
reality of it—not just a sick patient, but
a dying healthy kid who’s just been blown apart.”
Chief of Surgery
Staff meeting
U.S. Army Hospital, Camp Zama, Japan
4
Final Pathological Diagnosis
THE CHICOM MINES THE VC and NVA use are plastic. They hold ten pounds of explosive charge and three pounds of fragments. They can be pressure-detonated, and the explosive charge can be set for whatever pressure is wanted—a tank, a jeep, a truck, or a person. If the mines are placed right they can blow an engine block through the hood or turn over an APC. Since the bombing halt, though, there have been enough to waste a few on recon patrols.
This one must have been a pull-release. It blew after he stepped off it—throwing him ten feet into the air. When the medic finally reached him, his left leg was already gone, and his right leg was shredded up to his thigh. The blast had seared through the bottoms of his fatigues, burning his penis and scrotum as well as the lower part of his abdomen and anus. The medic gave him morphine and started albumin. A Dust Off was called in, which took him to the twenty-seventh surgical hospital near Quang Tri, where they took off his testicles and penis, explored his abdomen, took out his left kidney and four inches of large bowel, sewed up his liver, and did a colostomy and right ureterostomy. During the procedure he was given twenty units of uncrossed O-positive blood.
After three days at the twenty-seventh, he was evacuated to Japan via the Yokota Air Force base. From Yokota he was taken by chopper to the U.S. Army hospital at Camp Zama. His left leg was removed by a left-hip disarticulation, and his right thumb and left index finger were sutured. There was not enough skin to close his surgical wounds completely, so his stumps were left open. Despite antibiotics, his wounds became infected. The fourth night in the ward he tried to kill himself. On the sixth day his urinary output began to diminish, and the laboratory began culturing bacteria out of his blood stream. On the seventh day his fever hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit; he became unconscious, and seven days following his injuries he expired. His body was then transferred to the morgue at Yokota airbase for shipment back to the continental United States.
FINAL PATHOLOGICAL DIAGNOSIS
1. Death, eight days aft
er stepping on a land mine.
2. Multiple blast injuries.
A. Traumatic amputation of lower extremities, distal right thumb, distal left index finger.
B. Blast injury of anus and scrotum.
C. Avulsion of testicles.
D. Fragment wounds of abdomen.
E. Laceration of kidney and liver, transection of left ureter.
3. Focal interstitial myocarditis and right heart failure.
A. Left and right ventricular dilation.
B. Marked pulmonary edema, bilateral.
C. Marked pulmonary effusion, bilateral (3000 cc in the left, 1500 in the right).
D. Congestion of lungs and liver.
4. Patchy acute pneumonitis (Klebsiella-Aerobactoer organism).
5. Gram negative septicemia.
6. Extensive acute renal tubular necrosis, bilateral.
7. Status post multiple recent surgical procedures.
A. Hip disarticulation with debridgement of stumps, bilateral.
B. Testicular removal bilaterally.
C. Exploration of abdomen, suturing of lacerated liver.
D. Removal of left kidney and ureter.
E. Multiple blood transfusions.
EXTERNAL EXAMINATION
The body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished, though thin, Negro male in his late teens or early twenties, showing absence of both lower extremities and extensive blast injuries on the perineum. There is a large eight-inch surgical incision running from the chest wall to the pubis. There is a previous amputation of the distal right thumb and left index finger....
“I liked it better in ’65 and ’66. Then it
was just you against them. Now you
just sit back and you get blasted away
or they do. That ain’t no fun.”
Special Forces trooper
Orthopedic Ward
U.S. Army Hospital, Kishine, Japan
5
The Shaping-Up of Macabe
MACABE WROTE HIS STORY about Vietnam during the fall term of his senior year, two months after he’d returned from ROTC summer camp. It was not a very good story, but he liked it, and the school’s literary quarterly published it. They had published a few of his other things—lyrical little pieces about growing up—which had earned him a certain literary notoriety. It had caused a bit of a flap among the campus intellectuals when he enrolled in ROTC, but there was a war on and he wanted to have a piece of it. Hemingway had his Spain; Macabe would have his Vietnam.
But Nam was not at all like his story, nor really what he had hoped for. In the twenty-seven days he had been there, the only village he had ever come near was the one he blew away. Women, children, dogs, huts, rice, water buffalo—the whole thing. He just sat there on his track half a click away and blew it apart. He did it two weeks after he’d been in country, and the fourth night after his unit had been hit three nights in a row.
The morning before Macabe destroyed the village, a squad sweeping through the village area found the imprints of mortar tubes 500 meters from the village. The Old Man asked for clearance to hit the compound, but was told that unless they were receiving direct fire, they were to leave it alone. That evening he told Macabe that on the first round that came in from anywhere—anywhere—he was to blow the village off the face of the map.
Before it got dark, Macabe plotted the village’s coordinates and pasted them on the front of his radio. A little after midnight, they took a single sniper round. The bullet cracked across the lager and was gone. While troopers turned over in the mud and tried to get back to sleep, Macabe, shaking himself awake, climbed up on his track. In the silence, he picked up the horn and, staring out into the black, cloudless night, called in an illumination round. Fifteen seconds later it came whistling in over his head, splattering the paddies into a dazzling, metallic silver. The star shell drifted gently in the air, and swung slowly back and forth above the village. With the radio crackling in the heavy air, Macabe waited a while to make sure the star shell was working, then pressed the button.
“69/51 fire mission, over.”
“69 fire mission, out.”
He checked the coordinates and then looked back at the village.
“51 D.T. 106 direction 0600; shell H and E, enemy visible; prox 800 meters, over.”
“51/69 corrective, shell WP, over.”
“69/51,” he said calmly; “shoot, over.”
“51 shoot, out.”
The first rounds came roaring in over the lager. Suddenly, with a reddish roar, the whole left side of the compound lifted up.
“69/51, right 50, add 100; shell H and E; request zone fire, three quadrant, 3 mills, battery 2, over.”
The radio crackled again with the corrective read back, and a minute later a second salvo came roaring in. The center of the village was suddenly gone. Hundreds of square meters of ground were being thrown into the air, tumbling over, twisting, in a conflagration of noise and fire. Far away he could see tiny figures running out of what was left of the village.
“69/51 mixed shell H and E and WP. Air burst—20 meters.”
White hot steel and phosphorous slammed down into the ground, taking everything and everyone with it.
When it was over, Macabe’s RTO patted him on the back. He put away his grids. This was not his kind of war; he would rather have been on his own, close up without all this noise and confusion. With the illumination round fading in front of him into a soft yellow green, he picked up his M-16 from the top of the track, climbed down from his APC, and began walking around the lager, checking the perimeter defenses.
He walked slowly past the great hulking thirty- and forty-ton shapes. Walking up alongside a tank he stopped, put his hand on it, and looked out at the razor wire. The steel, grimy from the mud, was still warm from the day’s sun. Drawing his hand thoughtfully along the armor, he walked on past the tracks and stood quietly near the driver’s hatch, the cannon reaching out silently above his head. Slinging his weapon, he took his hand off the armor and wiped it clean. He was still surprised—even after two weeks—at having been assigned as a forward observer to a mechanized unit. Even with a primary MOS of an artillery officer, he hadn’t expected it. He had gone into artillery during ROTC because he wanted to be part of a combat arm, and artillery was the only one the school offered. He thought he’d left artillery behind him at Fort Sill. He had complained, but no one at the 90th Replacement would listen. “We don’t need Rangers,” they said. “We need forward observers.”
It was not an uncommon occurrence in Nam; Rangers are dispersed through the Army. There are no Ranger units as such. The Army doesn’t like elite troops; they’ve always felt them to be more trouble than they were worth. The training, though, is good, so the Pentagon offers it, but then disperses the men in different units, officially to act as leavening for the rest of the Army, though unofficially to keep these highly trained elite men from getting together and feeling special.
Macabe was disappointed. He would have liked to use what he had learned. It was not just a romantic notion; Florida had killed the last of his fantasies. What advanced infantry training, Fort Sill, jump school, and Fort Benning hadn’t done, the swamps had.
The day after graduation from college, Macabe was out of ROTC and on active duty, on his way to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where the Army was sending him to learn more about artillery. He felt he was going as an interested observer rather than as a second lieutenant. At first he kept a little notebook, but after a while he gave it up, consoling himself that what he couldn’t remember later wouldn’t be worth writing down now.
At Fort Sill his first impression—one that never quite left him—was how big it was: not only Fort Sill but the Army itself. Sill was a country within a country. But it was more than the sheer physical size that affected him; it was the way the Army sat there, reaching out across the whole country, grabbing everyone and pulling people into it without the slightest concern for what they were, what they wanted to be, or what
they did. Those first few days, watching it function, unique and insular, saluting and being saluted, he marveled at how something that big and complex, something affecting so many people’s lives, could have been there all along, without his even knowing it. It was difficult to get used to, and if the cadre hadn’t been so serious about it all, the regimentation and the foolishly exacting concerns would have been laughable. But it was business, serious business, and they got right to it, quickly, with little humor.
“OK,” the instructor said, “you are officers. It is our job here at Fort Sill to make you artillery officers, so we shall start at the beginning.”
Survey, phone communication, laying the base piece, laying the battery, setting up the FDC, setting up the exec post, registering the guns, grids, firing from fixed points, scales, tables, logarithms, trigonometry—it went on every day: lectures, tests, discussions, reviews.
“Gentlemen,” the Major said, standing in front of the demonstration table until the class was completely quiet, “there are four kinds of fuses. Point detonating: it will,” he said, pointing to the first cone-shaped tube in front of him, “detonate on contact, though the pressure necessary for that detonation can be varied. Timed”—he pointed to the second—“the times can be changed—two seconds out of the barrel, five seconds. Delayed”—he picked up the third—“if the leg units are pushing the enemy, and they’re turning but don’t have a blocking force on the flanks, you can lay shells with these fuses into the flanking areas. These time fuses can be used as an instant mine field, any delay you want. This one,” he said, pointing toward the fourth, “this is the beauty—variable time. It is radar-controlled. On its way down, impulses are sent out from the detonator, and the time it takes these impulses to get back to the falling shell is measured and computed, and when the time span is equal to whatever height you’ve set, it will detonate.”
365 Days Page 5