Run Between the Raindrops (11 page)

The interrogators cut loose on them with the stilted Vietnamese they learned in language school, but there’s no cooperation or even any sign that they understand the questions being asked. These are the kind of guys who wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouthful. After a Corpsman treats their wounds, the S-2 guys haul them to the rear, arms bound at the elbows with comm wire. Clearly Nguyen of the North is a much tougher customer than Luke the Gook from the south. The grunts are grudgingly impressed.

An artillery FO perched in a third-story window overlooking the city lends me a set of binoculars. We’ve killed a shit-pot full of gooks on the Southside, but there are bunches more over there across the Perfume River. And they’re dug in tight all along the perimeter walls of the Citadel. The FO says those walls are as much as 75 meters thick in some places, and I scope the area remembering our earlier visit with Tom Young. We’ve been wondering what happened to him and figure it’s likely all the AFVN guys were evacuated when the gooks staged the take-over. There hasn’t been much opportunity to get back to the MACV Compound and ask around. It’s on our list of things we need to do. I’m still staring at that irritating NVA flag flapping in a wet breeze that blows over the river when the lull ends as it usually does in Hue. People resume dying.

A rifle squad maneuvering near the hospital complex is caught by a wall of fire and stopped cold. Hotel Six checks with his flank units and then sends all hands forward into the attack. By the time I find Steve and maneuver forward, most of two platoons are cranking fire at the upper stories of various buildings in the complex. They are getting more than they’re giving from gooks in high positions and casualties are mounting. The situation is typical for Hue.
Code of the Grunt:
You can stay where you are and get killed or move and try to improve your odds. Just pick the lesser of the two evils and get on with it.

“Hotel Six, Hotel Two Actual. I need some sixty-mike-mikes to put a hole in the top right hand corner of the building to my right front. They've got a heavy gun in there and we can't move until we take it out, over.” The platoon commander is hugging a perimeter wall next to his radio operator. His glasses are so grimed with dirt and sweat it’s a wonder he can see at all. As a volley of machine gun fire rips chips off the wall, Steve opens up with his carbine, pouring tracers into a window where he’s spotted a shooter. I sling the Thompson out of the way and grab for my camera. Somebody’s got to record this goat-fuck, and it looks like I’m elected.

Through the lens I see a team of four Marines lurching toward the wall, carrying a stubby 60-millimeter mortar set up to fire. The mortar squad leader finds a spot at the mouth of an alley where he’s got overhead clearance and the crew plants the tube. Two of the gun’s crew fiddle with the weapon’s simple sights and bipod while a third man rapidly unpacks stubby high-explosive projectiles from fiberboard containers.

Swinging the camera toward the open spaces between the hospital complex buildings, I spot a ballsy rifle squad leader urging his men forward to closer positions where the gooks won’t be able to shoot at them without exposing themselves to the withering fire coming up from behind the perimeter walls. It’s a sharp dude leading that lash-up. I’ll get his name later if he lives. He’ll likely get a medal one way or the other. The way I see it, a man smart enough to do what he’s doing in the face of devastating fire deserves all the medals he can wear.

Another squad off to my right is running all over the courtyard killing NVA in spider holes at bayonet range. It’s incredibly close and vicious fighting; the most brutal stuff I’ve seen so far in Hue. Thirty meters beyond my hide, a grunt dives into a hole where he’s just killed an NVA at point-blank range and uses the body for cover as he picks off two more gooks in holes to his right and left. He shoots each of them once in the head, calm and focused as if he was firing for record on range qualification day.

The mortar squad leader crawls up next to the lieutenant looking for a target. The officer pulls off his grimy glasses and waves an arm in the general direction of a tall building on the right side of the complex. “There’s a heavy machine gun up high in that building near the far corner there. Start dumping rounds and I’ll adjust from here.”

The mortar man scrambles back to his tube and points out the target for his gun crew. In seconds the little stovepipe begins to cough and bark. If you know where to look, you can follow the rounds as they fall toward the top of the target building. Grunts begin to cheer all along the firing line as the 60mm rounds blast chunks out of the concrete. The crew is smooth and keeps up a steady, staccato fire on the building. The fire from their weapon sounds like a slow-timed heavy machinegun as the mortarmen carve geysers of stone, plaster, and debris from the roof of the hospital building.

A runner from the CP group slumps in next to the lieutenant with a message from the Company Commander: “Six says keep the mortars and machine guns working on this side. The gooks are comin’ out the rear of the building and Golf Company's cutting ’em to pieces.”

A second 60 mortar is firing now, using the same dope developed by the first gun and rounds are dropping through a hole blown in the roof of the most hotly contested building. Occasional belches of flame and smoke pour from second and third story windows. Radios crackle with new orders: Mortars cease fire and 2
^nd
Platoon is ordered to move a squad into the buildings to conducts sweeps. Golf Company on the other side is having a field day blowing away running gooks.

A Marine squad leader clutching a 12-gauge shotgun gets the assignment from the lieutenant. “Take your people in slowly and see if there's any left.” The squad fans out to approach the building, policing up Marines out of spider holes in the courtyards as they approach. Steve and I follow hoping there aren’t a bunch of stubborn NVA inside the complex caught between our sweep and Golf Company’s block of any escape routes. We crouch near a wide staircase in the lobby of the main building as Shotgun Squad Leader leads his guys upward on a broad staircase. Before I can jam a new roll of film in my camera, a furious fight breaks out somewhere above on a second floor landing. It’s brief but brutal, punctuated by several grenade detonations. We can see expended M-16 rounds bouncing down the stairs and twinkling in the pale light that shines through a blown-out window.

“We got ’em. Send a Doc up here right away!” Shotgun Squad Leader is pointing at me and I sprint for the door yelling for a Corpsman. Two Docs shoulder through a crowd in the courtyard, charge into the building and sprint up the stairs. By the time we follow, they are working desperately over a wounded man bleeding onto the tiles of the second floor corridor. One of the Docs taps his partner and they stand. No chance to save the guy. He’s bled out through three AK holes in his chest.

Steve wanders over to take a look while the Corpsmen unfold a poncho to cover the corpse. He nods for me to join him and I look down at the dead man. This fight was the last for Lance Corporal Numbnuts, the grunt who destroyed the Hasselblad. A corner of the little Sony tape player is poking out of his bloody trousers and I retrieve it as the Docs begin to wrap him for the long, lonesome trip to Graves Registration.

“You know this guy?” One of the Corpsmen eyes the tape player and his tone indicates he doesn’t care for ghouls stripping bodies. “It’s cool, Doc. I gave him this thing yesterday.” The Corpsman shrugs and lifts the body to get a better grip. “Don’t mean nothin’, I guess. He’s got no more use for it.”

We spend the night around the hospital complex. For some reason, none of the grunts seem to want to sleep on the empty beds in the wards. It’s odd. There is a rare creature comfort available but nobody seems to trust it’s safe to indulge. Could be combat craziness or it could be fear of a late night Chicom tossed through a window to kill grunts so thoroughly crashed on a comfy mattress that they die in a dreamless sleep. Of course no one curled up in his poncho liner on the hard floor is willing to admit that. There’s a batch of bullshit rationalization: Gook bugs, blue-ball fever, leprosy, the dreaded black syphilis, and ugly-ass bodily fluids permeating the mattresses are the main excuses tendered for ignoring the available beds.
Code of the Grunt.
Always look a gift horse in the mouth. If it’s free it will cost you somewhere, sometime. The easy way is always booby-trapped.

On a whim, I carry the little Sony tape player into one of the operating rooms where noise won’t bother anyone and press the play button to see what Lance Corporal Numbnuts was grooving on before he bought the big one. It’s Peter, Paul and Mary, Album 1700, with the statuesque Mary Travers wailing about leaving on a jet plane. And that’s what’s next for what’s left of Lance Corporal Numbnuts. He’s leaving on a jet plane, dumped into a big aluminum box, and never coming back. No foxy stews on the Freedom Bird to admire his medals and likely a closed-coffin funeral due to the garbage a gook made of his chest cavity. It’s gonna be tough on Mr. and Mrs. Numbnuts back in The World.

Poor Mama Numbnuts will be wailing for the Marines to open the box so she can be sure her offspring is really in there. Poor Papa Numbnuts, a stoic veteran of The Big Two, will insist she doesn’t want the last image of their flesh and blood to be a mangled lump of flesh and blood. They’ll make do with that smiling, dress-blues boot camp picture for the rest of their lives and that’s that for the Numbnuts clan.

The music is depressing in the circumstances, so I follow the example of Lance Corporal Numbnuts, USMC, deceased, and smash the Sony against one of the stainless steel operating slabs. Sleep comes quickly after I curl up in a corner of the OR, but my dreams are disturbing and warped around funeral images. The body in the dream box is mine. The funeral parlor smells like a verdant jungle rain forest. Or maybe it’s verdant jungle rain forests that smell like a funeral parlor. In the dream it doesn’t matter.

The dream corpse is casing the joint from some omniscient viewpoint. There are familiar faces in the quiet crowd. No wailing or gnashing of teeth at this gig. The uncles, aunts, and relations in somber funeral finery are simply opining that the dead dude got what he deserved. Why did the dip-shit join something terminal like the Marine Corps? All the other boys did their time in the Navy or the Air Force and stayed the hell out of that Vietnam mess. Lordy! All and sundry assembled just knew it would come to this.

The dream pallbearers come to get my dream corpse and they’re all filthy bastards in muddy boots and shredded jungle uniforms. They reek sufficiently to wipe out the cloying funeral parlor floral stench. One of them with the stump of an arm leaking blood delivers my eulogy. “Here lies another dumb grunt motherfucker. Don’t mean nothin’.” There it is. Plant my ass. Let the grass grow and the worms eat. And the whole scene is dreamed in livid color.

Grunts banging and clanging through the hospital complex wake me at dawn. Climbing to the top floor, I stare through the hole blown by the mortarmen, looking across the Perfume River at the Citadel slowly being illuminated by a rising sun. Word last night was that the first battalion of the 5
^th
Marines will likely be the meat fed into that grinder. They are heading for the city right now according to the CO’s radio operator. No doubt that will trigger blood-letting on an epic scale, maybe even worse than the Southside. Get involved in something like that and you don’t get out until you are sufficiently disabled to be of no further use—or dead.

A smart guy could avoid that, but I didn’t feel very smart and I was fairly sure when the time came to cross the river, I’d be there. That fight will rate a chapter in somebody’s history book: Twentieth century grunts laying siege to an eighteenth century castle, not something you see every day. We’re talking military history here, my man, and a fight that will doubtless be a double-decker shit sandwich. And how are you gonna take a pass on something like that?

Down below my perch, the 2/5 Command Group and some ARVN officers are running what looks like a three-ring circus. They’ve assembled the medical staff of the hospital to confront a gaggle of wailing patients. The Vietnamese are a sorry lot; mostly old folks, females and screaming kids, clutching at filthy bandages and trying to get someone to listen to their tales of woe. ARVN are in no mood to deal with sick civilians and looking for NVA or local VC they claim are posing as members of the medical staff.

One recent surgery survivor gets a little too vocal with an ARVN captain who rips the bandages off an incision and shoves the wailing patient to the floor. A couple of grunt Corpsmen try to intervene and there’s a tense stand-off between the Vietnamese and the Americans. A senior officer clears the spectators and orders us to leave it to the ARVN. Battalion Surgeon consults with one of the Vietnamese medical staff who speaks English. It’s a sad story. NVA took over the hospital and demanded treatment for their own wounded as battle lines pushed toward the medical complex. Civilian patients were either tossed out or killed to make space for NVA casualties. When a couple of nurses and attendants objected, the NVA executed them in front of the other staff.

While the sad tales are told, a couple of nurses in a back rank make a break for the rear of the building. One of them is waving a pistol in the air. ARVN soldiers make a grab and miss. There are two sharp reports from the pistol which drives everyone to the deck. The NVA females are nearly gone when they run into two grunts coming in the back way. These guys waste no time with questions. They grab the pistol-packing woman and spin her to the ground. Her head cracks into the concrete with a sound like a melon being thumped. The second nurse nearly dodges but one of the grunts snatches at her hair and her feet run out from under her body. He sits on her and jams his rifle across her neck. That’s two peoples’ patriots cold-cocked by a couple of running dog lackeys of the imperialist system. The ARVN love it.

Steve is eating beef slices in gravy out in the hospital complex courtyard. We swap spoonfuls of goop after I open a can of ham slices. The rubble underneath my ass is uncomfortable so I move to a fairly level slab of concrete and plop down. Something shifts underneath my butt but I don’t bother to investigate. Steve rises slowly and points his plastic spoon at my crotch. “Don’t move, man. Sit very still.”