Run Between the Raindrops (12 page)

He crouches to look into the shadows beneath the slab. I can’t bend over far enough to see what’s got him so worried. “You’re sitting right on top of a mortar round. Just stay put until I can get someone to take a look at that fucking thing.” He comes back in a short time with a couple of combat engineers. They shine flashlight beams under my butt like a couple of mechanics diagnosing an engine noise. I’m starting get a little sweaty. “Is that thing live or what?”

“Probably is.” The first engineer decides it’s an NVA round. “That’s an eighty-deuce, my man. It’s been fired which means the set-back mechanism has been activated. It’s dented pretty bad up near the fuse so we got us a little situation here. You move wrong or disturb that slab you’re sitting on, the damn thing might detonate.”

Second engineer waves away a few curious grunts and adds his professional assessment. “Ain’t no percentage in fuckin’ around with fired mortar rounds and PD fuses. They tend to be touchy motherfuckers. If you weren’t perched on top of the goddamn thing, we’d just blow it in place and move on.”

“I am, however, perched on top of the goddamn thing. What do we do about that?”

“My partner is gonna keep some pressure on the slab and while he does that, I'm going to help you up off of it real easy.” He holds out his hand and grasps my forearm. “Now when I say go, try not to cough, gag, sneeze, or fart. Just up and off real easy. Got it?”

“You can trust that I’ve definitely got it. Anytime you’re ready.”

The other engineer reaches under my ass and puts pressure on the slab. I let his partner pull me off my perch. I’m cringing, waiting for the blast and even an expert like John Henry would be unable to drive a ten-penny nail up my ass with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer.

Nothing happens as I stumble away from the mortar round. Steve meets me grinning and hands over what’s left of the beef and rocks. Looking over my shoulder and trying to relax, I watch the second engineer slide the round out from under the concrete. He pulls a sliver of steel out of his pocket and sticks it through a hole in the fuse.

“She’s safe now.” He tosses the nine-pound round to me and I’m afraid to do anything but catch it. The grunts are gathering again and laughing like the whole situation was designed for their amusement. Nothing funnier than some dipshit sitting on a mortar round and nearly getting his ass blown off.

“Was it a dud?”

“Nah, that damn thing was hotter than a Georgia hooker on payday night. If you’d have scratched your ass the wrong way, we wouldn’t be having this pleasant interlude.”

Steve and I find another place to sit and finish our breakfast. Later, I dump the mortar round down a cistern, wondering if I’ll ever be able to shit normally again or just flop down on a couch without checking under the cushions.

AFVN (American Forces Vietnam Network)

A mud-spattered Jeep wheezes to a halt near the second battalion CP. It’s festooned with radio aerials and antennae and looks like a porcupine on wheels. There’s a full colonel riding shotgun and he wants to see the attached combat correspondents. A runner finds us wandering around with a platoon from Golf Company and leads us to the meeting like a couple of condemned convicts. Colonels don’t personally confront sergeants unless they’re pissed about something so gross it can’t be handled by a lesser entity.

The colonel is one of the guys running this show from Task Force X-Ray, and he’s up from his CP at Phu Bai visiting units in Hue. He eyes our disheveled appearance and unshaven faces for a long moment before deciding he’s got a more pressing issue at hand. “You two are Division Correspondents?”

We introduce ourselves. No salutes or handshakes. The colonel’s aide checks his notebook and nods. Apparently we are indeed the culprits his boss is seeking. “I understand you two know some of the Marines up here at the AFVN station?”

“Yes, sir,” Steve uses a snotty OD handkerchief to mop some of the crud off his glasses. “We were stationed with Lieutenant Dibernardo and Sergeant Young back in The World.”

“And when was the last time you saw them?”

“We spent a night with Sergeant Young just before Christmas, sir. We didn’t see the lieutenant. He was in Saigon or something.” I’m beginning to get an uneasy feeling about all this.

“So Sergeant Young was a buddy?” We note the past tense. Whatever this is, it can’t be good news.

“We know him pretty well, sir. Is he OK?”

“He’s dead. At least we’re pretty sure it’s him. One or both of you will report to the S-1 at the MACV Compound. We need somebody who knows Sergeant Young to positively ID the body.”

I’m struggling to formulate questions but the colonel has issued his orders and he’s got things on his mind more important than another dead Marine. “We don’t know what happened to Lieutenant Dibernardo and several others. They’re officially listed as missing in action. Apparently there was quite a hot little firefight around the station. MACV is looking into the situation. Meanwhile, we need to be sure this body they’ve got is indeed Sergeant Thomas F. Young. Get it done before dark. That’s all.”

That was all for us and an hour later we knew for certain that was all for our buddy Tom Young who showed us around Hue, got us laid, and shared his booze at Christmas. Things took a terribly personal turn for me and Steve seemed more shaken than I’d ever seen him. A little Vietnamese civilian employee of the AFVN Station told us Lt. Dibernardo and a couple of other Americans were taken alive by the NVA.

We wrote up a statement, found the colonel’s aide and handed it over: Sgt. Tom Young, confirmed KIA, 1stLt. Jim Dibernardo and a couple of other Americans, probably POWs. The little civilian said they put up a stiff fight but that was cold comfort. These guys would be nothing more than footnotes when the story of the Great Big Battle of Hue City was finally written. There it is and in the argot of our gallant allies,
Xin loi
, motherfuckers: Sorry ’bout that.

Zippo

“I’m serious, man. Call it bullshit if you want but these guys are just like the Marines who wrote history at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima and Tarawa and the Chosin Reservoir.” Steve is in storyteller mode. He’s channeling Ernie Pyle and in the midst of a serious infatuation with the reeking grunts crapped out all around us. I pass him an inch of gin in a frosted bottle but he waves it away. “You know I’m right. You can act like you don’t give a damn but I know better. How about that shit with the Zippo the other day. What was that all about, my man?” I can’t get a grip on it but I suspect he’s got a point given what happened yesterday afternoon.

It was around 1400 somewhere near the Thua Thien Provincial headquarters that 2/5 had taken earlier in the morning. Three M48A3 tanks are tearing up macadam, creaking, clanking, and grinding forward on a city street with a rifle platoon moving parallel and choking on diesel exhaust. The muggy air in this part of the city still reeks of the tear gas Marines used to flush NVA from a block of contested buildings, but nobody wants to be back choking and gasping inside the gas masks we carry on our hips.

Armor crews are buttoned up tight and that’s unusual for tankers in The Nam. Normally they ride with all hatches open, preferring a quick exit to getting trapped inside a 50-ton coffin if a mine or an RPG penetrates their armor. Tanks make great pictures, and I’m tucked in somewhere in the middle of a fireteam on the right side of the push. Crouched inside the entryway to an office building, I watch the tankers sniff the air with the muzzles of their 90mm cannons. A radioman trots up with a message for the squad leader. Apparently some comm glitch prevents the CO from talking to the tankers. The squad leader contemplates breaking cover but as far as he knows that means climbing up on one of the tanks and banging on a hatch to get the crew’s attention.

“Use the T-I phone.” The answer seems obvious to me.

The squad leader is a Lance Corporal and he frowns as if I’m speaking a foreign language. “I never worked with tanks before.” The guy is clearly out of his depth and expecting an attached NCO to cover for him. Radioman feeds me the CO’s message and I sprint toward the rear of the nearest tank. The phone box on the right rear of the vehicle connects directly with the tank commander. I’ve done this shit before in training. It’s just like using a payphone. You open the box, grab the handset, and you’re talking to the crew inside the tank.

“Six wants you guys to advance toward the next intersection and set up overwatch positions. Grunts will move forward of you and search for targets.”

“You guys need to keep some grunts near the vehicles.” The tank commander sounds like he’s responding through a tin can on the other end of a taut string. “I don’t want any gooks getting inside B-40 range.” I cut a look at the squad leader. This is his deal. I’m just passing messages here. “It’s OK. The tanks are gonna move but you got to keep some grunts around to be sure they don’t get hit with RPGs.” Grunt squad leader nods and leaves to pass the word. I roger the tank commander’s concern and replace the phone. The tanks lurch forward, rattling and shaking like they are about to disassemble into shivering buckets of bolts.

At the intersection—a four-way near the Hue Sports Stadium with an abandoned traffic police podium in the middle—the leading tank commander, a lieutenant wearing a comm helmet and grungy coveralls, dismounts looking for someone to discuss the next move. A grunt platoon commander trots up while his guys huddle in street-side doorways trying to keep away from the tanks. “We probably shouldn’t go much further. We get caught in one of those narrow streets and we can’t traverse or maneuver much.”

Platoon Commander points down the road. “Recon was in this area last night and they say the NVA are holed up in that block of houses. We got orders to clear the area so they can get some Shore Party people into the stadium. That’s gonna be the LZ for resupply and medevacs.”

Tank Commander ponders, eyeing his vehicles, the narrow street and the neat little residences that look like a slice of quaint Asian suburbia. “Let me put two tanks here at the intersection in overwatch. Third vehicle is a Zippo. How ’bout you send some of your guys forward and I’ll have the flame tank follow?”

“How ’bout you send the Zippo in first and we follow?”

“Goddamn, Lieutenant…” The tank officer has a clear case of RPG jitters. “That fuckin’ flame tank’s got three hundred gallons of high octane aboard and you know what a B-40 would do with that.”

“OK…” The Platoon Commander signals for a squad leader. “I’ll send a squad up ahead of your Zippo. We’ll focus on any gooks with rockets, but if we get hit, you guys blow the shit out of ’em.” It’s hardly classic tank-infantry tactics, but everyone seems to think it’s the best they can do to get this street cleared and keep the gooks out of the Sports Stadium two blocks away to the east.

A squad of grunts forms up for the move with a file on either side of the street, preparing to sweep forward ahead of the Zippo. The two gun tanks move into positions left and right of the intersection and the Zippo driver grinds his vehicle into gear ready to follow the infantry. The sweep starts, and I fall in behind the flame tank with a sniper and a covering fireteam ordered to be on the look-out for RPG gunners. All of the riflemen except for the sniper have loaded magazines of tracer that they’ll use to mark any targets they spot.

There’s not much use watching it all through a camera lens. MACV in Saigon is telling the press that forthright American troops adhering to the provisions of the Geneva Convention don’t use flame weapons on enemy infantry. It’s a laugh-out-loud load of bullshit and every civilian correspondent who has ever watched one of our aircraft dropping a load of snake-eye bombs followed by napalm canisters knows it. Regardless, the lifers insist there will be no crispy-critter shots taken or released.

Grunts near me are bitching about proximity to an NVA sniper’s wet-dream: A big-ass tank and a guy with a scoped weapon. “This is bullshit is what this bullshit is…” A hulking black PFC points at the tank and drops back a pace or two. “Ain’t a motherfucker in the world can resist shootin’ at a fuckin’ tank. Don’t make no never-mind he can’t do no damage. He’s just gotta shoot at a tank and when the dude does that, we catch the fuckin’ ricochets.”

“Yeah? How ’bout that fuckin’ sniper?” His buddy points at the man with the long rifle who is sweeping the street with his scope. “A gook sniper sees that guy and it gets real personal real quick.” All valid points and it suddenly occurs to me I’ve never been inside a tank in combat. The itch is too weird to ignore, and when the Zippo halts to let the infantry scout forward, I climb up onto the turret and bang on the hatch with my helmet. Through a crack I see a battered comm helmet framing eyes that look like two piss-holes in a snow bank.

“I’m a Division Correspondent…” I show him the useless camera hanging around my neck. “How ’bout I ride along with you guys?”

“Inside here?” The tank commander looks at me with a mixture of fear and disbelief. “This is a fucking Zippo, man.” I can smell the diesel fumes seeping up through the cracked hatch. “We got no choice but to ride this sonofabitch and you want to volunteer?”

“Just wanting to see what it’s like. I won’t get in the way.”

“It’s your ass on the line, pal.” The Zippo commander pops the hatch and makes way for me to drop inside. The gunner and loader look at me like I’m nuts and make lewd jack-off motions. I tuck myself into a corner behind the loader as the hatch clangs shut and the interior lights cast a weird bluish glow over dials and mechanisms I don’t recognize. The interior reeks of petroleum products. It’s like someone dumped me inside an old gas can. The tank commander peeks through his vision blocks, mumbles into a lip-mike, and the Zippo rolls on following the infantry. I can’t see a thing beyond a jumble of pipes and hoses that surround me like bloated snakes. This suddenly seems like a very bad idea.

The loader shoves me forward and points to a periscope. Grunts are moving ahead of us, cautiously scanning houses on both sides of the street. View from here is not much different than it usually is for me on the ground: nothing but asses and elbows. The tank moves with a strange undulating motion and minus a comm helmet I hear all sorts of creaks, clanks, and machinery noises that make me think we must be having mechanical problems. It’s disconcerting, but none of the crew seems worried about much beyond what they can see through scopes, vision blocks, and gunsights.