Run Between the Raindrops (10 page)

Steve returns from taking a leak and then signals for me to join him on the other side of the compound. He leads to a rickety flagpole near the perimeter fence and points to a pool of water at its base. Floating atop the muck is a pile of crumpled red and yellow silk. “Look at this shit. The ARVN di-di’ed and just dropped their flag right on the deck.” There are several bullet holes in the fabric and a stain that looks suspiciously like blood in one corner of the flag. I unhook it from the halyard and we hold it up. Steve shakes his head. “Those chicken-shit fuckers shouldn’t have left their flag like this.”

“Look, why don’t we keep this thing?” I squeeze all the muddy water I can out of the flag and try to fold it. “Somebody in the rear might pay big bucks for a thing like this.”

Steve chews the top off a Sharpie marker, spreads the damp flag on the flat of his pack and begins to print: Captured by 1
^st
MarDiv Combat Correspondents, Hue City, RVN, Feb. 1968. He shows me the inscription and grins. “It needed context.”

“How’s this for context? It’s a
South
Vietnamese flag. The
South
Vietnamese are supposed to be our allies, right? So how come we capture their flag?”

“In ten years who’s going to know one gook flag from another?” There was time for a nap before we were due to move and the folded flag made a nice pillow.

It’s dark when the sound of Marines preparing their gear wakes me. I stare through an open window at a huge moon breaking through the mist and gloom. With nothing better to do until ordered to do something, I stare up at that moon until it hurts my eyes. Shifting the flag beneath my head, I think of another banner and what it meant to me when I was a weepy kid at the side of my father’s nondescript grave. Somehow the whole incident doesn’t seem so tragic or traumatic anymore. Lots of people die in lots of horrible ways. You can live with it or you can die with it but it won’t change. Never has and never will. Best you can hope for is maybe one good friend to be around at the end.

Cercle Sportif

Mid-morning on what I think must be our sixth day in Hue and the rain continues. Our notebooks are getting soaked and it’s hard to write legibly with fingers wrinkled and swollen like prunes. Somehow we are compelled to write it all down despite the indelible nature of the images seared into our memory banks. We make a point of noting it all, the sights, sounds, smells, feelings, and thoughts. There’s still that little distance between observer and participant that we are trying to maintain, but it keeps shrinking every day in Hue. Under the cover of a poncho somewhere on the Southside near a well-manicured riverside garden spot
,
I examine my notes and wonder what really happened yesterday when I clearly closed that gap.

A gaggle of hard-core gooks were manning several machineguns, at least two RPGs and one M-79 which had everyone pissed off and sweating in the cold rain. We were holding in a row of houses along a broad promenade were the abandoned residences were particularly well-appointed and richly furnished. People who lived in them before the NVA served a sudden eviction notice were clearly members of the local gook country club set. Somebody from the S-2 section told me the country club itself was just up the street at a place called the
Cercle Sportif.
On that day in Hue, the membership committee was being chaired by the Phantom Blooper.

The misty, muggy air that morning was filled with arcing tracers flying in both directions up and down the street. Hotel Company pushed steadily westward and ran into a bunch of NVA holding a thin line, oddly willing to give up their positions and let us push them back toward a boat basin along the Perfume River. It was strange behavior that continued until we drew within sight of the big country club building and the pristine park across the street from it. That’s when the Phantom Blooper started doing some serious damage. He killed two and wounded three with his first couple of HE rounds. The attack stalled.

When the weapon first barked from behind one of the hedgerows in the park no one caught the significance. We’d all heard that sound hundreds of times when one of our M-79 guys blooped a round at the gooks. The first shot, expertly dropped, sent shouts up and down the assault line. Some gook sonofabitch up ahead is firing a captured blooper and he knows how to use it.

Officers and NCOs were urging their guys forward but there was a strange hesitance among men who had faced significantly worse situations. There was something about being hit with one of our own weapons that threw an extra hitch in the leash holding veteran grunts at bay and it got worse in short order. Corpsmen crawled forward to check the wounded after a three-round volley that landed directly on the leading squad. Two of them went down to another precise volley from the Phantom Blooper. It was bad
mojo
like friendly fire and the grunts knew it.

Hotel Six surged forward through the stalled formation and pointed to a short-handed squad huddled in doorways along the street. Get in there, kill that bastard, and repossess the blooper. How can the Horrible Hogs of Hotel Company get frozen by one sonofabitch with an M-79? Unacceptable! For reasons I really didn’t buy in the few introspective seconds before the designated squad moved out, I stuffed my camera in my pack and joined them, wiping rain off the Thompson and snatching the bolt to the rear making it ready to fire.

Steve wasn’t around to see it and that’s likely the real reason I followed those grunts toward the
Cercle Sportif
. He was somewhere around the Battalion Aid Station looking for something to stop the gut-wrenching diarrhea that struck him during the night. He wandered away to shit and wound up banging away at a sniper with that carbine he carries. Nervous sentries nearly blew him away and we decided he needed to see a Doc in the morning. It left me on my own and I was discovering that was a dicey proposition.

The park portion of the
Cercle Sportif
was carved into the promenade ahead of us, a green maze of hedges, statuary and fountains some 200 meters south of the damaged railroad bridge that connected the two sides of the city. The S-2 guy said it was one of Hue's most popular attractions among well-heeled gooks. It was laid out in concentric circles—a pristine remnant of French colonial days. Three walkways cut through the grass circles, each lined with dwarf shade trees. NVA shooters covered each of those walkways and somewhere in the center of it all was the Phantom Blooper who handled an M-79 like a three-tour veteran.

The squad of eight advanced along the river’s edge, staying below the street level, with me tagging along at the end of the line. We could clearly hear the Phantom Blooper firing and breaking the weapon down to reload. We could also hear his rounds impacting among the grunts to our rear and the cries for Corpsmen to assist the wounded. Every once in a while one or more of his covering machine gunners added to the din and we cautiously moved toward the sound of their bursts. We ran out of defilade at the south entrance to the park and there was nothing left to do but break cover and go for it. Just short of the first hedgerow, the Phantom Blooper shifted his fire and put two rounds close to the rear of our line.

Two men went down and two more blooper rounds impacted off to my left. There was no going back. It was either stay here and be slammed for sure or break through the hedge and take our chances. A Corpsman sprinted into view heading for the wounded but he got his legs cut off by one of the covering machine gunners. Looking around for a better position, I noticed some movement to my left front. It was just a flicker in my peripheral vision, something dark against the white background of a plaster cupid pouring water from a vase into the base of a fountain.

“I got movement…left front!”

The squad leader crawled over beside me and stared where I was pointing at the fountain. He eyed the Thompson and grinned. “Put a burst into him. Cain’t hurt…” He struggled with his gear trying to get at the LAAW strapped across his pack. By the time I had a good sight picture, he had the LAAW ready to fire. He nodded at me and I squeezed the trigger. Chips of white plaster flew off the fountain for a few seconds until it disappeared in the detonation of the squad leader’s rocket.

The explosion seemed to spark some life back into the rest of Hotel Company. I could see them scrambling up the street toward us. The machine gunners opened up immediately and it was clear that we would have to deal with them in a hurry. Somewhere behind them, the Phantom Blooper was still cranking accurate rounds and sending rents of shrapnel into the assault line. “We got the angle on ’em.” The squad leader waved us ahead and we headed for the center of the park while the defenders focused on the assault line advancing up the street.

Maybe it was the close back-blast from the LAAW or an auditory shut-down caused by sheer terror, but I couldn’t hear the rounds that were clearly running through the Thompson. I could feel the recoil and see the ejects streaming out of the chamber—even watched myself change magazines in mid-sprint—but I couldn’t hear anything until we reached the mangled fountain and hit the deck behind a pair of dead NVA sprawled in the rubble. That’s when I heard the bark and realized the Phantom Blooper was near.

Spinning toward a white, wrought-iron park bench, I saw him dropping an HE round into the chamber of his M-79. He wore a pith helmet and a homemade vest with little pouches for extra rounds. The Phantom Blooper was just closing the action for his next shot when I squeezed the trigger of the Thompson and emptied the magazine.

The squad leader said I could have the Blooper but I didn’t want it. One of the grunts carried it the rest of the way to the railroad bridge. And then he tossed it into the Perfume River.

The Hospital

Hotel Six looks like a frustrated phone-tree victim with the radio handset pressed against his ear. Wonder if the MACV Command in Hue has an answering machine?
You've reached the MAVC Compound but we're busy deciding your fate just now. Please leave your name and number at the beep and we’ll get back to you.

We’ve been stalled for too long here, waiting for Echo, Foxtrot, and Golf Companies to consolidate positions and form some sort of an assault line for the continuing push through the Southside of Hue. Hotel Six is waiting for the orders he’s been expecting to advance on the city’s main medical complex, the Catholic Hospital, with his sister units on flank or vice versa. Nobody knows for sure what’s planned but everyone wants to find out. In a scratchy, fucked up fight like Hue, waiting is often worse than walking toward the enemy.

Steve is over his rabid case of the Hershey Squirts. He’s in a corner of an abandoned building teaching replacements how to make edible potions out of C-rations. He’s turning to the grunt side, no question. We didn’t speak at all yesterday and when he showed up at nightfall, he had four frag grenades hooked onto his gear. The carbine was in his hands. The camera was nowhere in sight.

And this morning I had to coax him into going along to a camera supply store I’d spotted. Some grunts pulled the door off its hinges and it looked to me like the shelves were well stocked. Somewhere in that store, I was hoping to find a weatherproof 35mm Nikonos like the ones carried by some of the division combat photographers. It was just a block up from our position along a stretch of street being held by a Hotel Company rifle squad. The squad leader was a kindred spirit who believed what some people considered looting was really liberating gear from an evil enemy.

A couple of grunts are rifling the showroom shelves when we arrive. We paw through the debris and pocket a few lenses and filters when we hear a loud thumping noise accompanied by vivid curses coming from a storeroom at the back of the building. Among the scattered boxes and bags at the rear of the store, a couple of wild-eyed grunts are slamming cameras against a workbench. One of those cameras is a very expensive Hasselblad.

“Holy shit, man! Don't do that! Give me that fucking camera.” Steve retrieves the expensive instrument, looked at it for a moment and then sadly shakes his head. “Trashed…”

Lance Corporal Numbnuts, the grunt that did the damage, is indignant and not at all appreciative of the fact that he’s just ruined one of the finest cameras ever made. “Them other assholes got all the good shit while I was on watch! By the time I got here, there wasn’t nothin’ left but this old box camera piece of shit!”

“My man,” Steve dumps the camera on the workbench, “this particular piece of shit is a Hasselblad, worth a thousand bucks or more. Or it was before you beat the crap out of it.”

“How the fuck was I supposed to know?” Numbnuts pokes at the trashed Hasselblad. “I seen some good cameras at the Freedom Hill PX and none of ’em looked like that thing.”

“Let me look around…” I walk back toward the front of the store. “Maybe I can find you a Polaroid.”

“That’s cool. I’d give you a couple of bucks for one of them.”

We don’t find a Polaroid or another Hasselblad, but the grunt is delighted with the little Sony tape recorder I hand him on the way out of the store. “Outasight, dude! Fuck a bunch of cameras. Who wants to take pictures of this bullshit anyhow?” Good question, my man, and I’m having a hard time coming up with an answer. All the film we pilfer has an expiration date in the summer of 1967.

We’re maneuvering slowly toward the Catholic Hospital complex. The move is replete with fits and starts as the battalion’s rifle companies try to keep up with each other and cover flanks. During one of the halts, a squad reports to the CP with two bloodied and dazed NVA prisoners. They draw a crowd when interrogator-translators from the battalion S-2 come up to look them over while the Company Gunny yells himself hoarse trying to keep curious Marines dispersed.

Pissed off grunts apparently jacked them up a little on the way back to the CP from the look of their bruised and swollen faces. These guys are no local rice farmer part-time guerillas. Both are tall, erect, and well-fed. They look tough and stocky compared to the lean, beanpole VC we saw on operations south of Danang. They are wearing the OD uniforms of NVA regulars and the shorter of the two has some kind of rank chevrons on his collar.