Guns Up! (26 page)

“What?”

“I can’t play ball!”

“Hold it, you’re okay.”

“Am I crippled?”

“If you’d avoid catching frags with your fat head I wouldn’t be lying here bleeding and having this absurd conversation!”

The exact words I needed. My panic subsided. I found myself giggling and feeling ashamed. I’d always wondered how I would react if I got hit. Now I knew, and my pride hurt more than my knee. Heavy boots splashed into a puddle of mud behind us. My night vision was still a useless series of yellow spots from the blast.

“I can’t believe it. Hit you right in the head!” Chan started giggling. “Oh, it hurts to laugh!” He laughed again, trying to smother the sound with his hand.

As always, the laugh was contagious. I started giggling and crying at the same time.

“If one of you isn’t wounded, you soon will be!” The
threatening whisper belonged to Corporal Swift Eagle. Another pair of feet hustled up behind us.

“Who’s hit?”

“Is that Doc?” Chan asked.

“Yeah.”

“We’re both hit. Check John first.”

“Then what’s funny?” Swift Eagle growled.

“The frag …” Chan started to giggle.

“It hit me in …” I started snickering. I couldn’t talk.

“Let’s get ’em back to CP,” Swift Eagle said. “Grab an arm.”

“Think they’re in shock?” Doc asked.

“No. They’re both too crazy to be in shock.”

The chief pulled me up like he was either mad or in a hurry. I came up on my right leg. “Can you walk?”

“No.” The laugh was over. I started to straighten my left leg but the pain said no. I forced the leg to straighten. “I think I can hobble.”

“Need help?”

“Yeah, Lieutenant. Grab an arm and leg. We’ll carry him back to CP.”

“Can you get Chan, Doc?”

“Yeah, right behind ya.”

In the center of the perimeter was a small grass hootch. They carried me inside. I could hear Sudsy calling for a medevac.

“How ya doing, son?” a familiar voice asked from the darkness.

“Is that you, Gunny?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. My knee hurts.”

“How bad? Is it shrapnel?”

“It’s not too bad,” Doc said. “Looks like some time in Da Nang.”

“I didn’t know you guys found a hootch,” I said.

“You and Chan will be sleeping in a real bed tomorrow night,” Doc said. “Maybe tonight.”

“No way. Can’t get a medevac,” Sudsy said.

“Chan, you in much pain?” Doc asked.

“Yes.” Chan sounded weak.

“How bad is he, Doc?” I asked. Doc lit a match and quickly moved it all around Chan looking for wounds.

“A few shrapnel holes, but he’ll be okay. Gunny, hold a match over my pouch for a second.” Gunny lit a match, and Doc fingered through his pouch until he found what he wanted. “Okay, got it.”

I sat up to get a look at my leg. My trousers were covered with red mud. “Wow! I’ve lost a lot of blood!”

A moment later Doc stuck something in my leg.

“This is morphine. You won’t feel anything soon.…”

“What’s all the bouncing?” I opened my eyes, then shut them. The sun was bright. Someone had my legs. I opened my eyes again, squinting to see what was happening.

“I hear a chopper.”

“You sure do, girene.”

“Swift Eagle?”

“I’m here, Johnnie. You’re in for a good time in Da Nang, buddy. Your taxi’s here.”

I focused in on the chief’s voice. His mud-spattered face showed no emotion, as usual, but I sensed friendship in his tone. It felt good.

“Don’t catch any of those rare diseases in Da Nang, now.” The lieutenant’s voice surprised me. He was helping Swift Eagle carry me to the chopper. First-class service, I thought. “See if you can bring back some dry writing paper.”

“Sure will, Lieutenant.”

“Hurry up!” I couldn’t see who was shouting. The wind from the chopper rotors blew water into my face. “Hurry up! Get him on!” It was the door gunner. They lifted me in. Swift Eagle shouted something, but the noisy engine drowned out his words.

“Where’s Chan?” I shouted.

The chief gave me a thumbs up. The door gunner dragged me away from the open hatch. I couldn’t understand the speed at which things were taking place around me.

“Go!” he screamed.

The rickety H-34 helicopter sounded like it might not get off the ground. Once it did, it climbed quickly, circling as it gained altitude. For an instant I could see the guys below. They were moving out again. I felt guilty for leaving them.

“Sit back, dummy, before you roll out.”

“Chan! I was wondering where you were.”

An odd sucking sound followed by a loud smack against the chopper wall on my right made me cringe. The gunner started firing at muzzle flashes below. A loud metallic thud came from the cockpit.

“Woooooo-we!” the pilot shouted. “Thank you, Uncle Sam, for this steel plate I got my butt on!”

A moment later we were out of range. The door gunner slid back toward Chan and me. “Are you okay?” His bushy mustache made him look like a walrus.

“Yes, but your aircraft has a new hole in it,” Chan said.

“That’s par for the course. We picked up a medevac in Dodge City about a month ago and got hit thirty-seven times in an old bucket just like this one. We still made it home.”

“No one got hit?” I asked.

“Yeah, the copilot, but he lived.”

“We’ve spent time in Dodge City, only in the mud. We’re gunners. Wouldn’t want to change places, would ya?”

I knew the answer, but I wanted to see if these fly-boys had proper respect for the grunts.

“Ain’t no way, dude! I’ve been down there once too often already.”

“You were a grunt?” Chan asked.

“For one week. With the Ninth.”

“How’d you get out of the bush? I heard you have
to have three Purple Hearts to transfer from gunner to chopper gunner,” I said.

“Yeah. That’s what I heard too, but I had a good buddy who was an office pogue in the rear, and he wrote me up a duty change.”

“Are you feedin’ me some bull?” I said.

“Nope. It’s the truth.” He held up his right hand as if he were swearing in.

Chan and I looked at each other in disgust.

“Can your friend do it again?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Rotated home.”

“Is there actually a movie theater in Da Nang?” Chan asked.

“Sure is. On Freedom Hill. Got cold beer, too.”

“I bet you guys get beer every night, don’t you?” I asked.

“Yep. We even have our own little refrigerator.”

“It feels like we’re going down. Are we at Da Nang already?” I asked.

“No. We’re picking up some KIAs on Hill 188. See it?” He pointed at a muddy hilltop surrounded by barbed wire. It stuck out like a brown-cratered thumb in a sea of green.

The chopper settled into the muck of the mountain with a squish instead of the customary bounce. Four solemn-looking, helmetless Marines hustled toward us from a nearby sandbag bunker. They were shirtless and splattered from head to toe with dried mud. They carried a dead Marine wrapped in a poncho liner. Ten yards from us they sank into green muck up to their knees. When they reached the open hatch, they heaved the corpse in. It landed at my feet. The expressionless face just stared. Chan and the door gunner dragged the stiff, heavy corpse away from the hatch. Two more shirtless Marines came toward us carrying another dead man wrapped in a poncho spotted with dried blood. They heaved the corpse in and stood staring with the same
blank faces. Then huge tears started streaming uncontrollably down the cheeks of one of the young men. I’d never seen anyone cry such huge tears without a sound or the slightest change of expression.

The chopper lifted off grudgingly from the sucking mud. Not a word was uttered by anyone. Wind swirling through the open hatch lifted the poncho nearest me, revealing a blond-haired, handsome boy.

“Look at his face, Chan.”

“Yes. He was a good-looking guy.” Chan leaned back with a sigh. “I wish we’d try to win this war.”

“I wonder why we don’t. I mean the real reason.”

“We’ll probably never know.”

“Did you hear what old MacArthur said?” I asked.

“When?”

“My mom wrote in her last letter that he was appalled at what the government was doing to the American fighting man. He said he could take the First Marine Division, sweep to Hanoi, and end the war in three weeks.”

“You know he’s right.” Chan sighed. “And I know and the gooks know, but I’m beginning to think we’ll never do it.”

“My leg is starting to hurt pretty bad.”

“Mine too. The morphine is wearing off.”

“I’m a PFC, and I could have told the morons that after one month,” I said.

“Told them what?”

“That we could end the war in three weeks if we went to Hanoi.”

“If we don’t do something offensive, we’re going to look just like the chicken French.”

“How long has it been since you two slept in a bed?” the door gunner shouted from his position near the open hatch.

“I don’t even remember!” I answered.

“I do!” Chan said. “At least seven months!”

“Well, get ready for a real bed!”

“Welcome to Da Nang!” the pilot shouted from the cockpit.

We came down on a portable landing pad about fifty yards from a group of gray Quonset huts. NAS was painted in large red letters on the roof and side of the nearest building. I could see people running from hut to hut. Others ran toward us carrying stretchers. Another medevac chopper lifted off to our left. It wasn’t one hundred feet off the ground before another landed in its place. A drab green truck pulled up beside us. Two corpsmen jumped out, opened the back doors of the truck, then rushed over to us.

“Give us the stiffs!” a tall young corpsman shouted at the door gunner.

Two other corpsmen ran up to the open hatch. “Wounded first! Who’s hit the worst?”

“After you,” Chan said with a motion of his hand.

“Where am I going?” I asked as I struggled onto a stretcher.

“Your friendly Naval Aid Station,” a corpsman answered.

A minute later they dumped me onto an operating table and rushed off again. Chan was close behind. Two corpsmen laid him on a table beside me. He looked like he had just gotten off a roller coaster the hard way. Fifteen tables lined the wall to my front with muddy Marines, all of them bleeding. Tubes ran in and out of each man. Plastic bags of blood and glucose and God knows what else drained over each bed.

Doctors shouted for instruments while others shouted for thread or bandages. The large room was a pandemonium of noise. No one seemed to be in charge. Bright lights glared off white walls. Even the doctors were dressed in blood-spattered white, with only their eyes showing. Medical personnel rushed about, colliding and shoving each other out of the way.

The pain was getting worse. A whiff of ether smacked
my nostrils. Normally, the smell of hospitals made me sick, but it had been so long since I smelled anything but the stench of the jungle and unwashed bodies that I found the antiseptic aroma strangely comforting.

I felt like a caveman. The electric lights fascinated me. The air felt abnormally cool. Maybe the loss of blood, I thought. Air conditioning! “Chan! It’s air conditioning!”

“Where are you hit, Marine?”

I looked to my left to see the harried face of a young corpsman.

“My legs.”

He reached for a large pair of scissors and started cutting up one leg of my trousers to the hip. A grenade fell out of one of the huge trouser pockets and bounced between the corpsman’s feet. He turned pale. Then he lost control.

“You jarheaded moron! What are you doing with a grenade in here!”

His panicky scream startled everyone around us into silence. He was still too stiff with panic to pick up the grenade from between his feet.

“Haven’t you heard, Squid?” I said with as threatening a tone as I could muster. “There’s a war going on out there, and frags are tools of my trade.” The frightened corpsman squatted slowly, delicately picked up the grenade with a forefinger and thumb, and ran out of the room holding it at arm’s length.

The wounded around me were getting quite a chuckle, especially Chan, and I must say I was feeling rather pleased with myself until a doctor appeared from nowhere and shoved a pill in my mouth.

“This is Darvon, Marine. It will help relieve the pain a little. I can’t give you anything else for now. We’re out of nearly everything. We have to save what’s left for the more seriously wounded.”

He turned to the frightened corpsman, who had by now reluctantly disposed of my grenade.

“Cut his boots off and dig the shrapnel out.”

The most serious wound was just under my left knee. The doctor was pointing to that spot when he said the word “dig.”

A moment later three very large characters, all dressed in white, waltzed up to my table and proceeded to hold me down by my hands and feet. Things were beginning to look very grim again. I wanted to resist being held down, but six months of C-rations and humping fifteen to twenty miles a day had turned me into a walking skeleton. I was too weak to put up a struggle.

It felt like he was digging for clams. I screamed until someone gave me a towel to bite. He finally ceased the torture, stepped back from the table, and made the most ludicrous statement a man in his position could possibly make.

“Well.” He paused, looking into the now gaping hole in my left leg, scratching his head like Stan Laurel, and sounding like a female impersonator. “I guess it’s too deep to dig out.”

My head dropped back to the table. I kept waiting to hear the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s
Messiah
. The pain felt worse now than when I got hit. It convinced me that these fools were using me for on-the-job training.

The brunt of the Tet Offensive was over, but the combat was still heavier than at any other time in the history of the war. That fact became more alarming to me after they sewed me up, cleaned me, and wheeled me into a long Quonset hut filled to the limit with wounded Marines.

I fought back a loud sigh at the touch of clean white sheets. It felt so clean, cleaner than anything I could remember. I drifted into a deep sleep.

“How are you feeling, Marine?”