Run Between the Raindrops (13 page)

Over the unfamiliar machinery noise, I hear a sound like someone banging on an iron pot with a soup spoon. Suddenly there’s a shower of shell casings pouring onto the turret floor and I see the tank commander above me in the cupola triggering long bursts from the .50 caliber mounted up there. He’s screaming something into the microphone attached to his helmet, but I can’t tell what he’s saying without a comm helmet. The turret begins to swivel with a high-pitched whine and I lock onto the loader’s periscope. He’s busy with a batch of levers and twisting something that looks like the flow control on a garden hose. The hoses running through the turret suddenly stiffen and begin to vibrate under pressure.

Outside the tank there’s a firefight in progress. The platoon commander is standing in the middle of the street giving the double-time signal and pointing at a two-story structure on our right. A 90mm round from one of the gun tanks tears a ragged chunk out of the façade and I can see tracers arcing through the concrete dust. An NVA rocket team suddenly appears on the other side of the street but they are cut down before the gunner can shoulder the launcher. The machinegun mounted next to the gun tube begins to rattle as the gunner puts a burst of confirming fire into the dead rocket team. His hands twitch on the gun control console and I feel the turret slew to the left. Small arms fire rattles off the armor making a sporadic din that apparently only I can hear. It sounds like I’m on the inside of a runaway popcorn maker.

The Zippo commander is screaming loudly enough for me to hear him over the chaos. “Left front…ten o’clock…fire, goddamn it…shoot!”

There’s a loud whoosh and whine of liquid under intense pressure. A flickering stream of fire surges through the muzzle of the cannon tube and I watch wide-eyed through the periscope as the Zippo gunner hoses down two houses on the left side of the street. There are no grunts in sight and I’m twisting the periscope in an effort to see what’s happening when the tank suddenly lurches sideways sending all four of us inside the turret bouncing off each other and into unyielding bits of metal or machinery.

Zippo Commander is climbing back up toward his perch, screaming loudly enough for me to understand we’ve just been hit by a rocket. There is such a thick fog of smoke, muzzle gas, and diesel fumes inside the turret that I can’t tell if we’ve been penetrated or not. I’m reaching for the handle that releases the loader’s hatch when the turret swivels right and I hear the scream of air pressure pushing heavy fuel through the piping near my head.

Through the scope I see grunts emerging from cover and running forward as the long fiery tongue of flame washes over two more houses and then the tank lurches violently as the driver bangs the transmission into reverse. The Zippo crew is either out of fuel, nerve, or motivation. It’s time for me to transfer out of armor. When the vehicle stops behind one of the covering gun tanks at the intersection, I spend a few minutes screaming for the crew’s names and hometowns, jot the answers in my notebook and bail. The muggy air outside the tank smells sweet as if I’ve just climbed out of a rank sewer and into a cool mountain breeze.

Up ahead beyond the intersection, grunts and tank gunners are banging away at NVA running away from this fight. Several of the fleeing gooks are burning and batting at flames as they surge into the line of fire. It’s ugly as hell and I know some of the grunts are shooting just to put the crispy-critters out of agony. Better to get blown away than burn to death. But for the grace of God and the fact that the NVA don’t have Zippos—well, there it is.

Walking up the street behind the advancing grunts sweeping houses is like approaching a bad barbecue where the host has used too much fuel on the charcoal. The smell of burned meat mixes with the stench of diesel. Radio operator up-chucks into the street and kicks at a charred NVA corpse, black and shriveled like an overcooked turkey. Other grunts, sweeping through the burned-out houses, have tied bandanas over their mouths and noses. Steve and the fireteam he’s with at the far end of the street are wearing gas masks and staring at three charred corpses who got caught in the open when Zippo fired them up. The dead men look a little like overdone gingerbread men with lips burned away to reveal a snarl of stained teeth.

“You were in that goddamn Zippo weren’t you?” He peels the gasmask off and hands me a smoke. There’s not much to say. He saw me disappear inside the thing.

“That was you, right?”

“Guilty as charged. You got any chow?”

“Why?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Why the fuck did you get inside that flame tank?”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“You know they hit you with a B-40?” He points his carbine at one of the crispy-critters. “You could have ended up like that.”

“Got a pretty cool story out of it.”

“Bullshit, man. You know they won’t publish anything about flame weapons.”

“So Zippo becomes a gun tank. What the fuck difference does it make?”

“You need to get your shit together, man…”

“Yep…anytime now that’s just what I’m gonna do.”

Foxtrot Company is crossing the intersection to our rear. A passing squad leader tells me they are going to try and force a crossing of the Perfume River over one of the bridges. It looks like a bitch-kitty, he says, and I might want to stay put. That seems counter-productive so I fall into ranks and find the Company Gunny who says I’m welcome to tag along. “If you’re looking to get your ass shot off,” he croaks around a wad of chewing tobacco, “this is as good an outfit as you’ll find to make it happen.”

Sports Stadium

The bridge is a double-trestle railroad structure, one of several spanning the Perfume River and connecting the have-nots on the south with the haves on the north. We sit with a squad of grunts and a couple of 3.5-inch rocket gunners in the second story of a building that provides a terrific view of the bridge and the river. There’s a lot of speculative bitching about what might happen when the word comes to push infantry and armor across that span.

As the grunts ignite little balls of C-4 to heat their rations, I launch into a Bill Cosby riff from something I heard on one of his comedy albums back in The World. Cosby is a football ref explaining the rules of the game to General Custer and the captain of the Indian team about to wipe out the U.S. Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. My take has a ref explaining the rules and conducting a pre-game coin toss between team captains Vo Nguyen Giap and William Westmoreland.

“Cap’n Giap, meet Cap’n Westmoreland. Here’s the coin. This side is heads and this side is tails. You call the toss, Giap. Cap’n Giap calls heads; it’s heads. You win the toss, Giap, what are you gonna do? Cap’n Westy…Giap says his team will take up defensive positions on the other side of the bridge where your people can’t hit them. Then you’ve got to bring your team, bare-ass naked and with no supporting arms, running across that bridge. This will continue until every last one of you dumb bastards is dead as shit. Now shake hands and have a good game.”

The rap gets some laughs and leads the grunts to an argument about following the tanks we’ve been told to expect or leading them across the bridge in the distance. Five minutes later, the discussion becomes explosively moot. There is a thump that shakes the building and we see blossoms of flame and dark high-explosive smoke roiling up from the pilings supporting the bridge. That’s followed by the boom of the charges and we watch open-mouthed as the center span of the bridge collapses into the slate-grey water of the Perfume River. In seconds, the entire area is covered with billowing clouds of rust and metallic dust.

A rocket gunner scans the distance with his binoculars and whistles through a gap in his teeth. “Shee-it! They dropped the bridge. We won’t be going across that sonofabitch any time soon.”

“Bridges don’t mean shit to fucking Marines.” Cynic Corporal is running a cleaning rod through his rifle and obviously underwhelmed. “We do amphibious landings, right? You can bet your ass the next deal will be sending our asses across that river in amtracs or landing craft. You can take that shit to the bank.”

There are a few dispirited arguments but they peter out as we hear the clatter of helicopter rotors overhead. Two Hueys appear out of the clouds and mist to orbit over the downed bridge. There is an exchange of fire between door gunners and some gooks on the northside of the river. We can see observers leaning out of the helicopters wearing clean uniforms and fresh equipment that marks them as REMFs. They spend ten minutes inscribing figure-eights over the destroyed bridge and then clatter away headed south. It won’t be long before they send new orders forward.

When the word reaches us an hour later, we’re told to assemble along a nearby street and stand by to move back toward the Sports Stadium. There’s a rumor that I can’t confirm saying the first battalion of the 5
^th
Marines is going to relieve us for the river crossing. Steve shows up saying he’s seen troops moving up from Phu Bai and a bunch of ARVN Rangers and Marines are supposed to be assembling near the stadium. There has also been an unusual spate of inbound helicopter traffic. Could be we’ll catch a break and get relieved, but nobody is naïve enough to relax very much.

While we wait, I sit and smoke, watching Steve scratching away at a letter. He’s writing home. I can tell because he’s using the USMC stationery he keeps wrapped with a sheet of plastic in his pack. He’s focused, chewing on the end of a GI ballpoint, trying to find words that will mask what he’s feeling. I’ve seen him like this before when he lets his mind wander back to The World he left behind in Washington State. He told me all about that shit one time over warm beers in the Danang Thunderbird Club.

First thing to understand about Steve is that he’s a patriot and that shit runs deep. Back where he comes from the prevailing atmosphere is all wrapped around middle class morality. When it comes to military service, every guy has an obligation to go even if it’s a shitty war that no one really understands. He told me one time he was catching trout out of a freezing cold lake in Idaho with an ex-Marine uncle when he decided to join the Marines. That meant Vietnam and combat, but nothing his uncle told him about brutal campaigns of the South Pacific in World War II changed his mind.

Steve was raised by a respected, educated family that actually discussed things like Vietnam at the dinner table, but he could be bullheaded. He meant it when he said that Pledge of Allegiance in the classroom and he believed there was glory in sacrifice. There it is and political arguments are irrelevant. It’s every American’s duty to die for his country if called on to do so. It was summer of 1965 when push came to shove for Steve. He was out of high school where he starred as the editor of the award-winning school paper and being pushed toward a full-ride in a west coast college when the Marines landed in Vietnam. He was enlisted and on his way to boot camp the next month. And there was never a post-boot camp nosedive for him. Steve was never bothered by the politics of protest or the ambiguous nature of the war in Vietnam. He became the storyteller, the reincarnation of Ernie Pyle who loved relating tales about the raggedy-ass grunts he accompanied on patrols and operations. When his stuff appeared in the papers, he showed the clippings around like an actor with an Oscar. It was hard to make fun of Steve. If you tried, you came away feeling like a sacrilegious sinner or some kind of mewling, anti-American traitor.

It’s raining again when we finally move away from the river front and the destroyed bridge. Heading steadily southward, we recognize patrols and people we know in the 1
^st
Battalion, 5
^th
Marines. They are here in the city but don’t seem to be doing much except staring across the river at the NVA flag flying over the Citadel. We drop out of line as we pass the battalion CP group and an officer tells us the weather is clearing for increased helicopter operations. The first battalion is busy gearing up and planning for the assault on the northside, so the battered and bruised second battalion will hold a defensive line south of the Hue Sports Stadium.

Moving up into familiar terrain, we begin to gag from the stench hanging in the fetid air, a cloying, lung-wrenching spoor containing traces of charred flesh and burned camphorwood furniture. I stop at the Battalion Aid Station to see if a Corpsman will take a look at a bothersome shrapnel wound on my right bicep. Everyone is busy with more seriously wounded but I finally find a bloody and bearded line Corpsman who is changing the bandage on a festering wound below his right knee.

“I was gonna ask you to take a look at this…” I pull up my sleeve and point at what looks like a leaky boil. “But I think you got more pressing problems.”

The Corpsman struggles to his feet and takes a look at my arm. “There’s a chunk still in there. Sit down and I’ll probe a little. Won’t be comfortable, but we need to get that chunk of metal out of there so it can heal.”

“Fuck it, Doc. Don’t mean nothin’. You just take care of yourself.”

He shoves me down on a chunk of rubble and digs around in his Unit One medical pack. It hurts like hell but after a few minutes, he has a nasty little chunk of NVA mortar round gripped in the jaws of his forceps. “You want this fuckin’ thing?” He shows me a sliver of rusty metal about the size of my little fingernail.

“I didn’t want it when it hit me and I can do without it now.”

The Doc shrugs and tosses the shrapnel into the street. He is clearly in pain from the wound in his leg and I feel like a turd for bothering him with my minor wound. He is wrapping my arm with a battle dressing and gritting his teeth against the pain in his leg. “Doc, I’m fine, but you better have someone look at that leg of yours.”

“It ain’t gangrene yet.” He ties the battle dressing and begins filling out a wound report that will authorize me a Purple Heart sometime in the future when the clerks reach the bottom of their paper piles. “They need me up here, dude. We ain’t got enough Corpsmen to treat the wounded as it is. I’ll keep humping for a while yet.”

Steve has his notebook out and commences an interview to get the Corpsman’s name and hometown. The Doc wipes at the pus leaking from his leg wound and dabs on some sort of topical ointment. “Job’s pretty down and dirty for a line Corpsman. In Hue, we just set up the triage to the rear of the grunts and stand by for the wounded to come in from up forward. Next thing you know, the grunts come staggering in leaking blood or carrying a buddy who’s been butt-fucked by a B-40 or riddled with AK rounds. We screen ’em and work on the most seriously wounded first. We got enlisted Corpsmen doing major surgery, I can tell you that. And the shrapnel wounds? Jesus Christ, everything in this fucking Hue City produces shrapnel. Guys come in here looking like fucking Swiss cheese….”