Guns Up! (7 page)

“Saddle up!”

My stomach started churning. I missed Chan already. A sense of foreboding smothered my excitement as the small column meandered through the village.

Two thousand meters out we crossed the last rice paddy. One hundred meters beyond that we crossed a small muddy strip of water that looked ankle deep. On the first step the muck was up to my chest. The rancid odor clung to me for the next few miles; unfortunately, that wasn’t all that clung to me. Big black leeches stuck to anything they touched, anything going through the water. They’d suck blood until they swelled up like a balloon, then they’d drop off. Red turned around in time to see me trying to pull a leech off my neck.

“Don’t do it! If you pull it off, the head stays in your skin and you get infected. You have to burn ’em off.” He lit a match and touched it to the leech. It fell off.

The terrain rose slightly and changed from the swampy areas in and around the paddies to hard, rocky, rolling hills with not a tree anywhere. My pack straps were ripping into my collarbone. The four 100-round belts of machine-gun ammo already had my neck bleeding, and stinging flies were feasting on the blood. I tried to walk fast to get in front of Red, but the weight of my gear made it hard to walk at all.

“Red,” I called quietly from behind him.

“Yeah.”

“These flies are killing me, man. My neck’s bleeding.” He slowed his pace until I got beside him.

“You’re packing too much gear, boot!”

“I already know that!”

“First time we cross a deep river, ditch that E-tool.” His expression turned to disbelief. “Hey, you jerk! You’ve got the gun ammo facing in!”

“What?”

“The bullet casings should be facing your neck, not the bullet points! Well, you can’t do anything now but turn the belts over when we stop.” Red managed to yank my collar up, shielding my bloody neck from the flies and direct contact with the ammo. It helped, but not much.

After four hours of humping in the general direction of the mountains that surrounded Tra Ve, I hurt everywhere. My feet managed to cause enough pain to take my mind off my shoulders, back, and neck, but not for long. Finally we climbed to the top of a small, rock-strewn hill and set up a perimeter.

No one knew where we were going. Somebody shouted, “Dig in!” I pulled my E-tool off my pack and tried to puncture the hard ground. A parking lot would have been easier.

I finally gave up on the idea when I noticed I was the only one shoveling. Red was already heating up a can of meatballs and beans.

“Aren’t you diggin’ in?” I asked, wondering why he had told me to ditch my E-tool.

Before Red opened his mouth, the hollow thumping of a mortar round leaving the tube echoed across the hilltop, bringing a wave of quiet over the chattering Marines. Some men looked up, while others flattened against the rocky surface of the hill.

The first round exploded against the base of the small hill’s southern side. The second round hit fifteen meters up the slope of the southern side. I stuck my face into the dirt and put my hands over my helmet. I wanted to hide, but there wasn’t even tall grass available. The third round hit the crest of the hill. I heard a scream. I clawed into the rocky earth with my fingernails. I heard another thump, followed by a faint whistle. Then a violent explosion
shook the ground I was trying to become a part of. I peeked from under my helmet just in time to see another explosion ten meters to my right. Rocks and dirt came down on my back. The mortar rounds walked across the top of the hill like a giant’s footsteps, mangling anything in their path.

I shoved my face into the dirt and waited for the pain.

“Guns up! Guns up!” The command came from the other side of the hill.

Red jumped to his feet with the M60 in one hand and ammo belts in the other.

“Come on, boot! Guns up!”

I got to my feet with my M16 and two belts of ammo for the machine gun. Red shouted, “Gung-ho!” at the top of his lungs and darted up the slight incline toward the crest of the hill. His shout went through me like a shot of adrenaline. Suddenly I wasn’t terrified anymore. The emotional high that comes when life or death is on the line swept all fear to the back of my mind. An odd sense of exhilaration, almost pleasure, pounded through my system as we weaved across the top of the hill. More explosions behind me heightened the thrill. I was Superman and John Wayne. Nothing could stop this dash. I heard myself screaming, “Yeee-hii!” like a cowboy on a bronco.

I could see the lieutenant ahead, pointing at another hill one hundred meters south. Red hit the dirt and opened up on the hill. As quickly as it had started, it stopped. The mortars ceased. We had no target.

One man was wounded. Sudsy, the radioman, called for a medevac. The wounded man’s name was David Blaine. He was from Kentucky. His butt was peppered with shrapnel. He didn’t seem to mind a bit. It was a painful ticket out of Vietnam. I felt a bit of envy. I started daydreaming of ticker-tape parades and a hero’s homecoming.

“Hey, John! That’s a hard-Corps way to lighten your load!” I turned away from the bleeding Marine to see
who was calling me. It was Red. He was holding something up and laughing.

“What is it?” I moved closer to inspect the object of his laughter.

“I think you need a new pack.” Red tried to restrain the laughing when he saw that I didn’t think it was all that funny.

My pack was in shreds. A direct hit. My writing gear, food, and my little Instamatic camera—gone. Red gave my helmet a couple of pats.

“Don’t worry about it. You better thank God you didn’t have it on. Marine Corps packs aren’t worth crap anyway. We’ll get you an NVA pack like mine.” I looked at Red’s pack. I had admired it since I first saw it. It was bigger than ours. The straps were made of a much softer canvas, more comfortable. Only an old salt would have a pack like that; Chan and I knew that the first day we saw it.

“Where did you get it?”

“Hue City. It’s in good shape, too, except for this one M60 hole here.”

Red was still looking for the hole when I spotted a piece of my own pack twenty meters down the side of the hill. As I started toward the remnants, a sharp burning pain high on my right thigh stung me so badly that I bent over.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Red.

“I don’t know.” I felt the warm slow trickle of blood running down my leg. Two small holes in my trousers near the groin were the only evidence I needed.

“Red! I’m wounded. I’ve been hit!”

“What? Where?” Red dropped his pack. In a flash he was kneeling on one knee in front of me.

“Unbutton your pants, stupid! Let’s see how bad it is.”

“I wonder why I didn’t feel it sooner?”

“It just happens that way sometimes.”

“Wow! My own little red badge of courage!”

“This could have been real tough on your love life. Are you hit anywhere else?”

“Will I get a Purple Heart, Red?”

“Are you sure you aren’t hit anywhere else? What’s this?” He pointed to a tear in my left chest pocket. “What’s in that pocket?”

“My Bible.”

“Pull it out.”

I unbuttoned the flap over my pocket and pulled the small Gideon Bible out. A hole right under the word “Holy” sent a stream of goose bumps down to my toes. The hole went three-quarters of the way through the little book. A splinter-sharp piece of shrapnel one-quarter inch long had made it all the way to the book of Hebrews.

“Could that have killed me?”

“It took us an hour to find out what killed my last A-gunner. A tiny sliver of shrapnel went under the back of his helmet and into his brain. It was in his hair, so we couldn’t even find any blood, but it killed him.”

“Will they medevac me?”

“No way. Not for those two little holes. Go see the doc. Tell him to put something on it before it gets infected.”

I did what Red told me to do. The doc, our corpsman, tweezered out two splinters of shrapnel while I looked through my little wounded Bible. On the inside cover someone had written a long passage in red ink. It was Chan’s handwriting; I didn’t know anyone else who could print that small. I wondered when he had written it. I started reading it, and each line made me feel a little better.

Romans 8:35–39

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

Just as it is written, “FOR THY SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG;
WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED.”

But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us
.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord
.

Romans 8:28

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose
.

“Are you okay?” the doc asked. He looked up and seemed to be studying my face.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” His concern surprised me. “I’m just reading something really neat out of the Bible. You should hear this.”

“No thanks,” he said with the slur of a spoiled snob. He was a Navy man from Massachusetts, and was generally disliked for his attitude of resentful superiority, but for some uncharacteristic reason I didn’t get mad at him. I found myself wondering what his parents were like. The doc threw on some red stuff that burned and a couple of Band-Aids. I gave him a thanks that I didn’t mean and headed back to the gun position.

A chopper picked up Blaine twenty minutes later. The moment it lifted off, Swift Eagle shouted, “Saddle up!” A collage of thoughts rambled through my mind as the hump through the bush started again. I was a Spartan on my way to Thermopylae. We looked like Spartans. Red looked like one. Everyone looked meaner than me. Their eyes were serious, almost menacing. They all had mustaches. I had peach fuzz.

I started scuffing my boots as we walked along. One of
the best ways to recognize the grunt Marines was their boots.

The terrain turned hard and hilly with little vegetation. At 1900 hours the seventeen-man column stopped. We dropped to one knee and waited to be placed in ambush position. Corporal Swift Eagle swept through the column, taking three men at a time and quickly placing them in position for the night. When he finished we had a textbook L-shaped ambush.

It was that eerie time of the day. The lighting was just right for your eyes to play tricks on you. A pinkish yellow twilight filtered across the brown and green earth, casting odd shadows that made me nervous.

Tactically we were on our own except for possible artillery support from Phu Bai about five miles north. There was supposed to be an enemy battalion out here roaming around. The logic of sending seventeen Marines to make contact with an NVA battalion had escaped me, but I was only a private first class. I was contemplating the prospects of finding an NVA battalion when Red woke me up with a stiff elbow to the shoulder.

“Do you see movement?”

“Where?” I asked.

“Straight ahead. Keep looking straight ahead.”

I strained to see what he was now aiming at. Then I saw movement. Shadowy figures, silhouetted by evaporating sunlight, looked to be moving thirty meters away. I felt myself trying to crouch lower as I took aim. I covered my mouth and whispered in the direction of the Marines on our left.

“Gooks!”

I started linking up ammo for the gun. Suddenly green tracers shot across our position from the left flank. Then another burst of fire came at us from straight ahead. Seven khaki-clad NVA appeared from the shadows in front of us. They were led by an officer who suddenly ran toward us firing a pistol. The others carried AKs. They
looked surprised, maybe as surprised as we were. A couple turned and ran from us, but the others followed their leader. Red opened up first, making us the only real target they had. The officer was lifted off his feet and blown backward with the first twenty rounds. The gun stopped firing. I started firing my M16, but the targets disappeared. All firing ceased. I knew Red was hit. My face was wet with blood, and it wasn’t mine. He was slumped forward onto the gun.

I rolled him off the gun. Two dime-sized holes sunk into one cheek. His eyes were open—lifeless and blue. I could hear myself calling for a corpsman. My voice sounded dreamlike. For an instant I thought I was dreaming: I’d wake up and find none of this had really happened. Swift Eagle flattened out beside me. He looked at the back of Red’s head with no expression. Doc slid in beside us, breathing hard.

“He’s dead, Doc,” Swift Eagle said.

“Red?”

“Yeah. Put his poncho over him. I’ll get an A-gunner for the boot.”

“He only had a month to go, Chief.” Doc’s voice sounded far away.

The night crept by sleeplessly, congested with weird, fully awake dreams of home, friends, and the Marine Corps. I felt numb. It started drizzling. The sound always reminded me of French fries in a pan.

By first light it was still raining. The air smelled fresh and crisp. It was a stateside rain, not the normal pounding rain of the monsoon that sounds more like a war than the war itself. Raindrops formed tiny puddles on Red’s poncho. His huge Viking boots stuck out of the poncho like out of a blanket that’s too small. I was thankful for the rain. It kept away the ants and flies and hid my tears. How could he be dead? Men like that couldn’t just die. He told me if you got past the first two months you’d make it. I wanted to pray; I needed it now, but I just
didn’t know God well enough to do it right, I thought. Chan always told me you had to talk to him regularly if you wanted to get to know him. I missed Chan. I felt more alone than I could remember ever feeling. The others weren’t crying. Maybe they didn’t know yet. I remembered the gunny’s warning about being eighteen. I looked around again and the lieutenant was walking my way. His young Annapolis face couldn’t hide the loss. No tears, but he was frowning. He pulled back the poncho, grimaced, and covered him again.