Now They Call Me Gunner

by Thom Whalen

  * * *

  It was a cool day – sunny with a fresh breeze blowing across the hilltop ­– but Randal was sweating in his sleep. I knew the symptoms. He was back in ‘Nam. I wondered how often his sleep was disturbed by bad memories.

  He began muttering. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Something about Charlie. Then he said, clear as anything, “Stay cool. Keep your head down if you wanna get through this.”

  I thought that was good advice for a lot of situations.

  His eyes popped open and he looked around wildly. I don’t know what he was seeing, but it wasn’t me sitting beside him in Roscoe Conkling Park in Utica, New York.

  “Don’t do it, Roger! Don’t do it! They’re going to get you! Roger!” His voice had risen in crescendo until he was screaming, “Roger!” Then he fell silent. He rolled over to grab handfuls of turf and drew himself into a ball.

  I could hear him sobbing.

  After a few minutes, he pushed himself into a sitting position and looked at me. Sanity had returned to his eyes. “Hope I didn’t freak you out too much.”

  “No. It’s all right.”

  He looked around. “I’m in Utica, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t sleep too well. Haven’t since I got back from ‘Nam. Nightmares.”

  “It must have been bad over there,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  We sat in silence for a while, watching the sun sink lower toward the city.

  Then Randal began talking, low but clear. He was facing away from me and might have been talking to himself. I don’t think he could have told his story if he were looking me in the eye. The way he spoke, halting and uncertain, it sounded like he hadn’t told his story often. “I was over there for eleven months when we drew a bad mission. A squad was getting cut up out in the jungle. They’d lost half. The rest made it to a clearing but they were still under heavy fire. We were tasked with extracting them. The clearing was small but Zip, our pilot, figured we could make it in and out. I laid down suppression to shut down the hostile fire and Zip brought us in. He was wrong about the size of the clearing. The tail rotor hit some brush. Not catastrophic, just enough to bring us around hard and tilt us sideways. When the main rotor grazed the ground, it was game over. I was in the door so I was thrown clear. Everyone else in the Huey was killed.

  “Charlie opened fire again. Mowed our boys down. I was in the bush, almost unconscious, so they didn’t see me until they were mopping up. I don’t know why they didn’t shoot me. Maybe they thought that they could get strategic information out of me because I was in the chopper instead of infantry. Maybe they just wanted a living trophy from their victory. Or maybe they figured that at least one American deserved worse than to die quick from a shot in the head. I never could tell what Charlie was thinking.

  “I was marched north for two days, passed from one squad to another, until I got to a little prison camp. I think they went through Laos to go around the DMZ because I definitely ended up in North Vietnam.

  “The place was hardly worth calling a prison. There was a bamboo hut, the kind that we called a hooch, that was guarded by a handful of kids barely in their teens. When I got there, I brought the count up to eight prisoners. Three of them were navy, taken off a swift boat that ran aground. One was a navigator who bailed when his bomber was hit by a SAM. The other three were infantry officers. All lieutenants. Charlie was partial to killing enlisted men and taking officers prisoner.

  “My first week there, they beat the navigator to death. A Viet Cong captain came to camp and supervised it. We watched through the cracks in the bamboo wall. It was brutal. It takes a long time to beat a man to death with bamboo sticks. The captain, named Thieu, spoke some English. He asked the navigator questions during the beating so I guess it was supposed to be an interrogation, but no one bothered listening to his answers. Mostly, they just wanted to hurt him. They did. He screamed until he died.

  “That was the pattern for the next four months. Captain Thieu would come by every couple of weeks. They’d pick a man out of the cages and kill him hard. Not always beatings. They were imaginative. Thieu drowned one of the lieutenants with a few teaspoons of water by turning his head upside down and dribbling it into his nose. I wouldn’t have believed that so little water could kill a man if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

  “As we were killed off, one at a time, other prisoners arrived to take our places. At one point, we were down to four men, another time we were up to thirteen.

  “For the last two months that I was there, I talked a lot with a Marine lieutenant named Roger Clayton. Roger was from Stockton, California. He wanted to be a movie director. They sometimes shoot movies in Stockton. The TV show, The Big Valley, was shot there, too. Who knew? He joined the Marines because he figured that Hollywood would pay more attention to him after he served a tour in Vietnam.

  “He was a good guy. Tough as any of us, but every man’s got his limit. One day he couldn’t take it any more. The regular guards been rough on him for a couple of weeks. Taking him out and beating him every day. He could barely walk but he said that he was going to run next time.

  “We all told him not to do it but he didn’t listen. Everybody figured that running was his way of committing suicide.

  “The next time they came for him, he shuffled out of the hooch. Then, soon as he was outside, he shook off the guards and ran for the bush.

  “The way they handled us was to have unarmed guards pull us around while a couple of other guards with rifles stood back, ready to shoot.

  “When Roger ran, they cut him down before he made it halfway. Didn’t even bother chasing him. One of the armed guards just shot him in the back with a single bullet and let him bleed out on the ground.

  “A couple of days later, he was beginning to smell so they grabbed me and a guy named Kit and made us dig a grave right there beside the corpse. When it was about three feet deep and getting water leaking into the bottom, we had to roll Roger into it and cover him up.

  “He was crawling with maggots and stunk to high heaven. His gut was bloated with gas. When we began to shovel the dirt on Roger, his gut exploded in a steaming cloud of stink and I started vomiting. That made the guards laugh. I’d take a step toward the jungle and heave. Take another step and heave. They were empty heaves. We only got fed a handful of rice a day. That day I lost the few grains that I’d eaten in the morning.

  “As I heaved and moved, mostly I was trying to get away from the rotten-meat smell of Roger but I was also getting closer to the jungle than I’d been since arriving.

  “I made a chance for myself. I got positioned so that the laughing guards were standing between me and the guys with the rifles. When I made a break for the bush, one of the guards opened fire, but he hit his own man in the leg. Nobody was laughing then. The wounded man was screaming in pain and anger as I disappeared into the jungle.

  “There were mice around the camp. No rats that I ever saw – I guess because there wasn’t enough food for rats – but a mouse could find the occasional grain of rice. I’d been watching the mice for five months and I knew what they did when they were chased. They turned somewhere unexpected then squeezed themselves into the smallest crack they could find and waited, not making a sound, until the danger went away. A mouse can squeeze into such a tight crack, you wouldn’t believe it.

  “That was exactly what I did in the jungle. As soon as I was out of sight, I ran sideways and squeezed under a log. The two guards with rifles came roaring past, heading straight into the jungle, following the trajectory that they’d seen me taking.

  “I listened to them crashing through the bush, getting farther away with every step. But I stuck tight under my log, not budging an inch because I knew that they wouldn’t give up easy.

  “Sure enough, the other guards, the ones who hadn’t been watching the grave digging, came creeping past, rifles at the ready, looking and listening for any sign of me. Jungle is dense. Unless they go
t within a few feet, they couldn’t see me and, if I didn’t make any noise, they couldn’t hear me. They figured that I must have kept running, so they didn’t look too hard close to where I’d entered the jungle. They didn’t start fanning out until they were another hundred yards or so further in.

  “I stayed there until dawn. Spent sixteen hours jammed in the mud under that log thinking about all the snakes and bugs that hunted at night. The krait was the worst but the vipers and cobras were nothing to ignore, either. Then there are scorpions and poisonous centipedes.

  “Mostly, though, I was praying that the ants wouldn’t find me. ‘Nam is thick with ants that sting. Red ants, black ants, fire ants.

  “I would have got out in the night, but it was too dark. Living in cities, you don’t know how dark it gets in a jungle at night. You can’t see a thing and I didn’t dare risk crashing around in the bush when I was less than a hundred yards from the camp.

  “At first light, though, I was on the move. Snail slow and just as quiet. A broken branch would be the death of me. The sun was high before I was a mile away.

  “It took almost a week for me to get back to our own troops.

  “There were a couple of close brushes with Charlie, but I took care of them. I got a rifle from the first one, but it wouldn’t have been smart to use it. The sound of a bullet would have brought half the Viet Cong in the area down on me. It was heavy, so I threw it away after carrying it for a couple of hours.

  “That NVA also had a knife. You saw it. The long, thin, grooved blade with the bamboo handle that fitted into the bamboo sheath. That was more useful than a gun when I came across the second hostile.

  “When I was travelling, I tried to drink only fresh rainwater. You can do that when it’s raining half the time. I ate raw rice from paddies when it was night and the farmers were asleep. You got to be careful eating raw rice. It swells in your stomach so you can only eat a bit at a time. If you fill your stomach and then it swells, you can bust your gut. Literally. Also, the swelling takes fluid out of you so you can end up dehydrated if you don’t drink a lot. And I didn’t want to get sick drinking out of stagnant pools.

  “It hardly mattered much in the end. By the time I found a friendly patrol and got airlifted back to a hospital, I was almost out of my head with fever. It took a month of heavy-duty antibiotics to get my health back and start gaining a little weight.

  “But I got lucky. Not just because I survived, but because I didn’t get any permanent injury. Except the nightmares. It’s been two years and it still seems like every time I fall asleep, I’m back in ‘Nam, fighting Charlie all over again. I don’t know if I can ever stop fighting Charlie in my mind. It happens to other guys, too, when they get back, but it seems to be worse with me. That’s what the doctors tell me.”

  His voice had grown rougher as he spoke and he said this last in a rasp that I could barely hear. Then he fell silent.

  I thought about what he did for a couple of minutes. “What about the rest of the prisoners?”

  “I told some intelligence guys what I remembered about the camp. We figured out where it was and a couple of gunships ran a raid across the DMZ. They got most of our guys out.”

  “They should have given you a medal,” I said.

  “They did. A couple of them. I appreciate the gesture, but medals don’t buy groceries. I let my parents keep them.” The sun was touching the horizon. “Gus’s shift must have started by now. Let’s go do some business.”