Run Between the Raindrops (8 page)

The upper left corner of the Treasury Building explodes in a dark blossom of high-explosive. Through the smoke, an RPD machinegun with gook gunner still attached tumbles slowly to the courtyard and impacts with a sickening thump. LAAW Man strips another rocket and sets up to fire again as a rifleman next to him pours half a magazine into the dead gook. It’s as good a break as we are likely to get and the lieutenant charges down the street waving for his grunts to follow.

Pounding along behind a grunt carrying at least a thousand rounds of machinegun ammo draped all over his body, I glance right and then left trying to locate Steve. He’s nowhere in sight and I’m too nervous to conduct anything more than a cursory search. Something tells me if I stay tied in tight behind this hulking, ammo-festooned grunt, I just might make it all the way to the Treasury Building. If I can just stay right behind his broad butt I’ve got some sense of direction and purpose here, maybe a chance that he’ll catch the first rounds aimed at us and I might skate. It’s not very manly or heroic, but I’m going with it.

In a couple of minutes that seem like hours, we make it to the wall and dive to find cover. I’m left all alone when Broad Butt crawls away to re-supply a machinegun firing on the flank of the new assault line. Plunging fire from the upper floors is cracking overhead but not doing much damage. There are maybe six or seven lying in the streets; some bleeding out while others crawl for cover. The lieutenant flops down next to me and peeks over the wall. He’s chewing on a lower lip and trying to decide how to get some of his people across the courtyard and into the building.

He’s still thinking about it when a squad leader decides he’s had enough bullshit and leads his guys into the open screaming for covering fire. They are fully exposed, running and gunning at NVA shooters in spider holes dotted throughout the courtyard. There’s still deadly fire raining down from the building’s upper reaches, but more and more Marines are taking it on themselves to follow the first squad’s lead. Two by two or in single rushes, they close on the building and hug the structure which puts them in defilade and safe from shooters inside the objective.

The lieutenant vaults the fence and sprays a magazine full of ball ammo toward the roof. By the time I find the guts to follow, a unit of maybe four or five guys have made it into the Treasury Building. I can hear them banging away in there. More Marines flood in through doors and lower level windows as I shove a dead NVA out of the way and take cover in his little fighting hole. On a side of the building, there are more grunts firing and fragging, forcing open a side entrance covered by one of those accordion-type security gates.

The lieutenant maneuvers forward past me to join them with his radio operator in tow. He pauses at the entrance to radio a report on their progress and then inside the building. There’s a roar of rifle fire and detonating grenades blowing out of the building and over my position in the courtyard. There’s a serious fight going on inside that building, but there’s no telling from here who is winning and who is losing. In about ten minutes by my watch, a Corpsman comes forward to reclaim Stevens corpse and haul it away out of sight. The noise inside the building begins to taper off to an intermittent rattle of single shots.

Hotel Company Gunny appears in the doorway with his shotgun dangling and a cigar clenched in his teeth. It’s a classic image and I record it on a couple of frames as he signals for the rest of the company to advance. The Treasury Building belongs to the Horrible Hogs of Hotel Company. Those not engaged in sweeping the building quickly arrive and fan out into defensive positions around the courtyard against an NVA counterattack.

Before I head for the building to find out what happened in there beyond the obvious, I take a few minutes to strip the dead NVA from the spider-hole of anything that looks like valuable trading material. There’s not much of interest beyond a clutch of letters covered with stamps extolling the virtues and fighting spirit of the People’s Army and a full-face gas mask of the sort I’ve seen dopers in the rear turn into what they call a grass-mask. Stuffing the enemy gear in my pack, I head for the building and duck inside. The air is thick with dust and cordite through which grunts are running in all directions. It seems the safe bet is just to stay out of the way for a while, so I slump down against a marble bench and catch my breath.

Two grunts suddenly appear in the broad main corridor of the building, walking backwards and dragging two gook bodies. They head for the entrance and then fling the rumpled forms out onto the front steps for the security squads to examine. I hear a ragged line of cheers erupt from the grunts in the courtyard. Hotel Company has captured a major objective in Hue, a key piece of urban terrain and that’s a story, so I rise to find someone who can tell me about it.

Sprawled along a series of polished marble hallways throughout of the Treasury Building, live grunts are doing what they always do after a firefight: Smoking or munching on something saved in a pack or pocket, sucking on canteens, staring at their boots, the opposite wall or the ceiling. They scrutinize anything but each other. In another couple of minutes, the ringing in their ears will clear. They’ll accept the fact that they survived again and the trash-talk will commence. Safe for a precious few minutes, they will critique the fight, focusing on the dark, near-fatal moments when somebody fucked up and got away with it.
      

Code of The Grunt
. If you can’t say something funny about a shitty situation, don’t say anything. Keep the emotions buried until everyone comes to believe you don’t have any. The thing to be—the thing to look like when anyone is looking—is just another grunt motherfucker who doesn’t give a shit. There it is.

It starts with a PFC in horn-rimmed glasses, reloading his rifle magazines and yelling at another Marine sitting across the hall munching on a C-ration candy bar. Because neither one can hear very well, the exchange is made in high, croaking shouts.

“You the dude that pounded that cocksucker up topside with the LAAW?”

“Me and Blooper Man blew that motherfucker right out of his jock. You dudes find the leftovers up there?”

“We seen four of them assholes lying around in the area where you put the round. But they wasn’t the same ones had us pinned down outside yesterday.”

“How the fuck do you know that?”

“There was three more of ’em up there smelled like they been dead for a while. We got them motherfuckers yesterday is what I think. You got their replacements.”

Another grunt enters the conversation in mid-quibble. “Who gives a shit? You got ’em, we got ’em; what fucking difference does it make as long as they’re dead?”

There’s more but I wander away from it. The littered, blasted hallways inside the Treasury Building are taking on the atmosphere of a locker room after the big game which is no surprise. Most of these guys aren’t long out of high school and some of them are still coping with combat like they would a football or basketball game. That won’t last long.

Steve is propped up against a marble archway sucking on a canteen. He offers me a hit and lets me know his story notes plus a couple of rolls of film are on their way to Phu Bai. “I found a dude they were medevacing for pneumonia. He promised to drop the shit off on his way to the hospital.”

He was in on the initial assault, right there with the leading squads, but he doesn’t have much to say about it. “Bitch-kitty, gooks everywhere tucked in little cubbyholes and all over the upstairs.” That’s it. From the blood pools, scorch-marks, wounded Marines and shell-casings scattered everywhere there was clearly a whole hell of a more to it than that, but he’s not in a mood to expand or expound. When I probe, he simply holds up an empty cloth bandolier draped over his shoulder. When he started for the Treasury Building it contained ten fully loaded magazines.

We sit side-by-side reloading magazines from a spare bandolier. I’m punching a cleaning rod through my rifle when he digs around in his salty old NVA pack. In a moment I hear his high school ring clinking on glass. He grins and shows me the neck of a bottle.

“What is that—double-rectified busthead?”

Sheltering his prize from prying eyes, he shows me enough of the bottle to recognize Benedictine brandy. “Found it stuffed into some sandbags back at the MACV Compound. You’re looking at the kind of rare shit that prevents pneumonia in weather like this.”

“And that is the problem, my man. Looking at booze does not prevent pneumonia but I have it on good authority that drinking it is definitely prophylactic.”

We have a swallow or two each and the hot liquid works as advertised. Sitting there in a rubble-strewn hallway listening to blast-deafened, mind-numbed grunts bleat and bitch, we relax into a warm survivor’s cocoon where nothing much beyond the moment is worth the effort of worrying about it.

Steve wanders off leaving me to watch the gear. He returns in a half-hour flipping through the pages of his notebook. “We hold here for a while until the rest of the battalion ties in on the flanks…”

There is more but it’s rudely interrupted by a loud detonation that seems to send a shock-wave up through the floor. Something or someone has exploded in the basement of the building. Grunts are scrambling and falling all over each other, screaming for information. Didn’t anybody clear the fucking basement? From a rubble-strewn position flat on the tiles, I look to the right and see a thick door hanging nearly off its hinges. Smoke is billowing up from a stairway behind it and grunts are heading for the area with rifles shouldered.

Two NCOs are shoving anxious grunts back into overwatch positions and yelling at someone on the other side of the door. “What the fuck happened down there?” From below, excited voices bellow through the noise. “Come on down here. You ain’t gonna fuckin’ believe this shit.”

We waddle toward the door and peek into the dark. Acrid smoke billows up a stone stairwell as I crane to see what caused the commotion in the basement of the Treasury Building. A heavy object lands at my feet.

“Grenade!” We hit the deck and roll in a desperate effort to escape whatever was tossed our way. Hugging my helmet I hope for the best. If it’s a Chicom, we about to be peppered like a pin-cushion but nothing fatal happens. When we peek up from under our helmets, we see an NCO squatting near the doorway examining a bundle of paper. He grins and shakes the bundle at us.

“Here’s your fucking grenade. It’s gook money.” He shows the cash to curious grunts beginning to gather and celebrate surviving another close call. The bundle of Vietnamese currency is about four inches thick and neatly bound with gummed paper. The top bill is a one hundred piaster note or about $1.10 in American currency.

“Shit, there must be about a thousand dollars here.” The sergeant has an odd, mercenary gleam in his bloodshot eyes. Grunts yell for him to break the binding and share the windfall. He begins to hold an impromptu payday formation and everyone gets a few bills from the bundle.
Code of The Grunt:
When it comes to cash, get some while the getting’s good. Candy is dandy but money won’t rot your teeth.

With everyone preoccupied and squabbling about their share, Steve and I descend the stairs and head for a light glowing in the dark at the end of a marble corridor. Smoke from whatever caused the detonation is clearing as we round a corner to find three dirty, disheveled grunts wallowing in a huge pile of cash. An iron-filigreed door hangs crazily off its hinges and a large chunk of plaster sits crumbled on the floor where the door joined the wall before the grunts used C-4 as a skeleton key. Beyond the door is what looks like a standard bank vault lined with safety deposit boxes, but any resemblance to your local savings and loan ends there. As we try to compute the amount of cash that must be just lying around in that vault, the grunts began pelting one another with bundles of money. It’s like watching kids in a snowball fight or tearing into their presents on Christmas morning.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Steve wades through an ankle-deep morass of cash and scoops up some of the bills. “I’m thinking a wad or two of this stuff would go a long way toward financing some really great shit given current black market exchange rates.” There are bundles of bills and sacks of coins everywhere. One of the grunts is stuffing cash into the cargo pockets of his trousers and pointing at a buddy who is lighting a C-ration cigarette with a large-denomination piaster note.

“We was supposed to sweep the basement for gooks, see? And fuckin’ Manero over there, he looks in here and sees all this fuckin’ money lyin’ around, so fuckin’ Manero, he breaks out a quarter-pound of C-4 and a cap, see? We blew the fucking gate and—look at all this shit, man! How much you think this shit would be worth if a dude could get to Saigon or someplace?”

“You‘re never going to find out…” The lieutenant’s voice is the ultimate buzz-kill. He walks into the light and points at a wall of the cash cage where the crest-fallen grunts line up for the lecture they know is coming. They look like kids caught shoplifting as the officer advances on the yeggs and potential bank robbers in his platoon. The grunts mostly hang their heads except for the corporal on the right who looks like he’s wondering if he can blow the lieutenant away and make off with enough money to buy a new life. I shuffle toward the rear of the cage as the lieutenant points at their bulging pockets and watches them unload cash into the canvas bag he’s holding.

“There will be no looting in this city by people in my unit. Get all that cash into the bag and bring it topside. The Gunny will search everyone before he leaves the building.” Grunts are too busy bitching and stuffing cash into the bag to notice the three bundles I kick under a table. Off to my left I spot a barred window that’s been left open for ventilation.

“Easy come; easy go…” One of the formerly wealthy grunts stuffs the last bundle of cash into the bag and knots it securely at the top. “We coulda been
huge
with what’s in this fuckin’ bag…” His buddy shoves him toward the staircase. “In your fuckin’ dreams, Manero. You wouldn’t get no chance to spend it anyway. You’re gonna die in this fucking Hue City.” With loss of assets comes a serious slump in morale.