Run Between the Raindrops (17 page)

At the intersection where Delta’s first platoon killed the sniper, we spot two second lieutenants in stateside utility uniforms milling around and looking bewildered. They’ve got fresh high-and-tight haircuts, new flak jackets, rifles, and a single bandolier of ammo between them. One has a Military Airlift Command boarding pass peeking out of his pocket. Clearly less than a day or two off a flight from the States, they eye our ragged condition with a mixture of suspicion and gratitude.

“We’re headed up forward…” One of the lieutenants waves vaguely in the direction we’re headed. We just stare and nod. “Got any idea where we can find Delta Company? You look like you’ve been here a while and uh…” It just hangs there. He seems to want reassurance more than directions.

“Lieutenants, are you lost?”

Jaws jack momentarily. These new officers have heard all the jokes about little lost lieutenants. Neither of them is long enough out of OCS and The Basic School to challenge combat vets. “We’re assigned to Delta Company. Are they up this way?”

A burst of fire causes the lieutenants to flinch. It’s an M-60 and at least a block away, but there’s no way these guys can know that. “That’s probably them.” I point in the general direction of the Citadel. “We’re headed for Delta. You can come along with us, but best you pick up some deuce-gear first. You’re gonna need some more gear before you get too much deeper into this thing.”

We walk with the lieutenants back to the landing ramp and help them select belts, suspender straps, and canteens from a pile of medevac gear. “They rushed us up here so fast we didn't have time to get any.” One of the lieutenant shrugs into his new gear, reaches for a pack of cigarettes, and offers us one. “Back at the battalion CP they said we’d get whatever we needed from Delta.”

“Maybe so, Lieutenant, but you’d be better off reporting in with more than a rifle and one bandolier of magazines. Delta won’t have much gear to spare—until they start taking casualties.” The other lieutenant cuts a quick, questioning glance at his buddy. Are we kidding? We are not and they say no more as we start back up the street listening to the rattle of a firefight on the other side of the walls.

There’s a guide stationed at the Truong Dinh gate looking for replacements and ready to escort them forward. We let him know the lieutenants need to find Delta Company and he takes the officers off our hands. The lieutenants offer to shake. It comes as such a surprise that it takes me a while to reach out for their hands. We give each of them a grip hoping there’s some sort of comfort or reassurance in the contact. They clearly need it.

We’ll follow in a little while after we get a feel for the situation. There’s a Shore Party Staff Sergeant set up at the gate and he’s happy to share from a pot of coffee he’s got brewing over a little kindling wood fire. Several ARVN troopers are milling around the fire eyeing the coffee, but Staff Sergeant makes no move to share with anyone other than us. We sip coffee and watch the lieutenants disappear in the direction of the ARVN compound. Delta is apparently holed up there waiting for orders.

Shore Party Staff Sergeant nods in the direction of the departing replacements. “What’s chances those guys are alive tomorrow?”

“About zip-point-shit if this thing plays out according to predictions.” Steve shrugs, finishes his coffee and folds the handle on his canteen cup. “But there are always the exceptions.”

We find Delta occupying some sort of musty ARVN warehouse and waiting for orders. They had a fairly easy time walking from the gate to the compound. Just a few bursts of plunging fire from gooks on the walls along the route. Nothing to write home about, a platoon commander reports as we join his outfit. Apparently the battalion commander is making sure he’s got all his troops and supporting arms in place before he commences the sweep from here to the walls on the southside of the Citadel compound where that NVA flag is still flying.

The rest of 1/5’s rifle companies are strung out along a ragged line that meanders through a couple of city blocks around the ARVN Compound and angled to face the southern and eastern walls of the Citadel. The big push is scheduled for the morning, our second day on the northside of Hue. The first platoon leader admits he doesn’t have much of a tactical plan in mind. Just sweep through and take what comes, he guesses with a shrug. Clear the houses, climb the walls, and kill any gooks we run into. If there is some sort of broad, bold, and sexy master scheme of maneuver, the lieutenant says he missed the memo. Sometime around dusk he finds us crapped out and says there are several civilian correspondents heading his way. He’d really appreciate it if we could keep them out of his hair.

There are two of them. One AP scribbler and another guy who says he’s writing a piece for Esquire Magazine. We introduce ourselves and lead them to an out of the way area where we can determine whether or not we can help them without getting ourselves killed. The AP guy looks and acts like a veteran who can go the distance. The Esquire guy looks like a hippy and promptly rolls himself a fat joint once we’re settled into an abandoned house that faces the southern walls of the Citadel.

Around 1900, a first platoon rifle squad arrives to share our abode for the night. With dark descending rapidly and a cold rain starting to blow over the city, we settle in and speculate about sporadic firing around the ARVN compound. There’s a lot of nervous fiddling with gear and the rattle of grunts refilling rifle magazines or crunching P-38 openers into rations cans. AP and Esquire conduct interviews with the grunts but there’s not much to report. These guys have yet to get into the fight very deeply, so it’s just jive; mostly stuff they’ve heard rather than anything they’ve actually experienced in Hue.

It’s time to explore the digs and my little map light is dim enough to keep from making me a sniper target. The place looks like it was once a comfortable home for someone with bucks or influence; maybe both. The furniture is heavy, ornate, and expensive. There is even a functional flush toilet currently topped by a grinning grunt leaning on his rifle and noisily depositing what sounds and smells like about a week’s worth of congealed C-ration meals. There is a fireteam lined up outside the shitter, politely waiting for their turn on the throne.

Mortars are beginning to clang and bang into a night fire mission on something to the south of us. The mortarmen are firing mixed HE and illumination over the area we will assault tomorrow. Wind carries most of the illum rounds back toward our positions near the ARVN compound and grunts on watch are bitching loudly about it. There is an occasional crack from some NVA sniper’s rifle as the light silhouettes a Marine target. The relative calm is making everyone nervous and prompting the replacements to speculate about an easy day tomorrow. The veterans loudly and profanely disabuse them of that theory. The trash talk is a pressure relief valve. The only thing sure about tomorrow is that there won’t be much time for snappy patter.

Steve is crapped out in a corner cleaning his carbine and wrapping his camera in plastic for storage in his pack. He wordlessly hands me the wrapper from a spare radio battery so I can wrap my own camera. Both of us understand we won’t be doing much photography when the word comes to move. There’s a mutual agreement here. What we shoot tomorrow won’t be pictures. We’ll let the civilians handle that. With AP and Esquire along on the hump, Delta Company’s efforts will get all the coverage required. And the grunts will appreciate a couple of extra rifles. Listening to the owl hoot of falling flare canisters jangles my nerves and after a few minutes of rearranging gear, I’m off looking for a tonic to keep the spooks at bay until morning.

It’s hard to keep from tripping over grunts sprawled everywhere in this mini-mansion, wrapped in whatever they can find to keep out the chilly night air. A few have stripped thick velour curtains off the windows and spooned together for warmth and reassurance. My map light illuminates a framed photo in one of the bedrooms and I pause to contemplate the image of an Asian family in another place and another time. There’s a man and woman hugging two cute kids wearing Mickey Mouse ears and posing with Disneyland’s Matterhorn in the background. No telling where this family is now, but it’s likely not the happiest place on earth.

Relentlessly searching for booze, I continue to explore while picking up random objects that catch my eye and stuffing them into one pocket or another. It’s kitschy stuff, little carved figurines and an ornate letter opener. The kind of Asian baubles you can buy in any rear echelon gook shop; nothing that would yield much in trade or even rate space on a respectable coffee table back in The World. It’s just plain stealing little things that have no real value but I’m ready with rationalizations. It’s not like the money at the Treasury Building or the ill-fated tape recorder on the southside. That was big-time looting, premeditated felonies committed for purposes of personal gain. This is different somehow. The little things that disappear into my pockets just seem like perks or rewards for surviving this long in the fight for Hue City.

AP Reporter finds me wandering toward the kitchen of our commandeered house and wants to know if I’ve heard anything about the mission tomorrow. He says he needs a detailed plan of action for his story. AP wants to find the battalion commander and get a full briefing but I advise him to wait for morning. A map-drill won’t be much help. He just needs to understand there are only two missions that count from this point: Climb the walls and kill the gooks. AP thinks that might be a hot-shit lead for his story on the Citadel fighting and wants my name and hometown so he can attribute the quote.

In a little alcove off the kitchen I finally find the family liquor locker. A simple, delicate lock comes away with a twist of my K-Bar knife. The selection is ample and expensive. There’s a magnum of French champagne that opens with a loud pop. The noise attracts a few anxious grunts worried about boobytraps. We kill the champagne in a hurry while Apple Cheek Grunt rummages around the liquor cabinet and finds something more familiar. He displays a decorative bottle of Jim Beam that’s shaped like a pirate captain.

“My old man drinks this shit by the fuckin’ gallon.” Apple Cheeks breaks the seal, takes a hit, and passes the bottle. Everyone has a gulp or two, but there’s some left when Apple Cheeks retrieves and re-corks the bottle. “I’m gonna chug the rest of this right after we take down that fuckin’ gook flag.”

“Best you drink it all right now.” Fireteam Leader says while he herds his grunts out of the kitchen. “No guarantee your ass will be alive to enjoy it tomorrow.” Apple Cheeks uncorks the bottle and drains it. “I might get hit tomorrow—but I ain’t gonna feel it.” The last bottle in the cabinet is cognac. It’s half full and sufficient to knock me out of the mind games.

At dawn I’ve got a throbbing head that I’m trying to clear by deep breathing muggy air outside our overnight position when a four-man detail from another platoon passes carrying a casualty in a poncho. The guy is clearly a goner. Apparently gook snipers had a productive night in another part of our perimeter. The dead man’s eyes are still open and his head lolls toward me as the evac party stumbles by on the way to a casualty collection point. It’s one of the replacement lieutenants we met yesterday. He’s still got the MAC boarding pass peeking out of his flak jacket pocket. He lasted less than 16 hours on the northside of Hue and the real fighting hasn’t even started.

Steve is making C-ration coffee back inside the house. Everyone else is bitching about no chow and no resupply. They all ate what was in their packs last night and there’s no sign of more to come. Squad Leader wanders in with orders for everyone to pack up and stand by. He understands there’s no chow but there it is. Nobody promised us a rose garden and shit happens.

Seems to me there’s a simple solution. How about the ration and ammo dumps down the street? Squad Leader has no idea what I’m talking about but we found out yesterday that Shore Party people are stacking supplies everywhere to our rear. It’s a self-service buffet designed to keep the grunts re-supplied without a lot of bothersome bureaucracy. Why not just go grab a case or two of Cs?

Squad Leader chews on that for a while and checks his watch. He’s not very anxious to send a working party out with no telling what his guys might run into and orders imminent. On the other hand—he eyes me significantly and jerks a thumb over his shoulder—a guy who knows all about those supply dumps and doesn’t really have much better to do right now might be kind enough to go get some chow and feed everyone. How about that? Ain’t that a good idea?

I’m outside under a rapidly brightening sky and halfway to a knee-high concrete wall that fronts the house when a heavy machinegun opens up from somewhere down the street. Flat on my belly, I crawl for the wall and roll over to see the heavy slugs gouge huge rents out of the stucco façade of the house I’ve just left. A grunt peeks over a window-ledge to let me know he thinks it must be an NVA .51 caliber, the gook version of our venerable Ma Deuce. Steve shouts for me to crawl back inside as a squad of Delta Company grunts maneuvers past on the way to find the heavy gun and put it out of action.

Another burst cracks into the wall behind me as the NVA gunner adjusts his fire. He’s got me spotted but I can’t get any lower or move to the rear. Beats me how he can see me behind the wall but he keeps hammering away as if he’s got some kind of x-ray vision. The only option seems to be to crawl on toward the end of the garden where I’ll be hopefully out of his line of fire. Stay put much longer and the heavy slugs will blow a hole in the wall.

Hanging onto my helmet to keep it from slipping over my eyes, I get slowly up to hands and knees and wait for a moment. Gook gunner holds his fire. The supply dump is down the street, around a corner at the closest intersection that lies about thirty meters beyond the end of the garden wall. There’s cover beyond that and I can make a running break for the supply dump. It seems like a workable plan and I start to crawl on hands and knees away from the house.

Gook gunner seems to be following my progress with steady bursts that chip away at the garden wall and the nearby buildings. Drop prone and he stops. Back up on hands and knees and he fires. Somehow he’s tracking my movements. Near the end of the course, he sends a buzzing burst over my head that smacks into the building planned as my cover. The rounds are so close that I can actually feel the hot breath of their passing. Suddenly something droops down in front of my eyes and the conundrum of the gunner’s x-ray vision is solved.