Run Between the Raindrops (2 page)

There it is—and images from Hue City flicker behind my eyelids. There it is among all the poor over-stressed, under-appreciated guys that fought through that shit-storm. Too many of them dead, crushed, or crippled and nobody celebrates what they accomplished with not much more than guts and a determination not to let each other down. It could have been me—probably should have been me—dead and bloated among the mist and moss on those walls. But it’s not over by a damn sight, not at the end of this flight, not at the end of some politician’s tunnel, and not until there’s some long-overdue light shining on those guys and what they do for a nation that doesn’t give a shit.

There’s no end in sight and they’ll be looking for volunteers. That will be me with my hand waving in the air, ready to sign any waiver they demand from war-junkies wanting to return to the pointy-end of the bayonet. And like the man says in the old tune, I won’t be back ‘til it’s over over there—one way or another.

Through the Looking Glass

Kipling had it nailed. The dawn does come up like thunder in this part of the world. You can almost hear a roar and rumble as the sky slowly explodes into light. Staring at that crimson orb, spreading streaks of purple and yellow across the horizon as it rises from the South China Sea, you wonder if old Rudyard was really standing on the road to Mandalay when he wrote about it. He could have been standing right here on the southern banks of the Perfume River watching the dawn come thundering up over Hue, the seat of the Vietnam’s ancient mandarin emperors.

Nothing—not even the incessant drizzle—mutes the beauty of the dawn. There’s serious
mojo
in a scarlet sun, warm and welcome as it chases an inky wet night. Imagine zooming out over the water to sit with your back to that sun where the struggle between light and dark seems prelude to a bloodier confrontation taking place below. From up there you’ve got a panoramic view of an Asian anachronism.

There’s a long stretch of pristine white beach, bisected by a purple ribbon of water that runs east toward the South China Sea. At the high water mark, there’s a shimmering sand castle, complete with turrets, ramparts, and redoubts. And like the topsy-turvy world Alice encountered on the other side of a looking glass, things down below get curiouser and curiouser.

It’s like staring at an ant farm. There’s surely pattern and purpose to it all, but if you’re not an ant, it’s hard to comprehend. There are things trying to kill other things down there. It’s a battle royal with flags flying and carcasses crumpled everywhere. As a bloody sun pumps more light onto the scene, an army of things swarms toward the walls of that sand castle where an army of other things tries to drive them back. The clash is horrible there.

With a final rumble of Kipling’s thunder the dawn cracks full and dumps you off that high perch. And down in the mud and the blood, you are once again a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent assigned to celebrate or eulogize the things around you, the guys doing the fighting and dying in the Great Big Battle of Hue City. There are plenty of civilian reporters milling around down here, the ones who fashion themselves front-line war correspondents, but they’ve got a job much different than yours despite a similar title. They will interview, analyze, and dissect the fight from tactical or political perspectives. Your beat is down in the squads and platoons, writing quirky hometown vignettes about the grunts that know little of the tactics and care less about the politics.

It’s a symbiotic relationship on this beat among the men who carry the fight forward on blistered, aching infantry feet. The way it works is the grunts fight the battles and combat correspondents march along with them, observing from close-up and picking up the little stories that civilian newsmen consider too petty or heroic to support national cynicism about an unpopular war. The military correspondents aim their stuff at the rural American weeklies and small-time fish-wrappers that need copy to fill the news-hole with local color. The grunts get a little recognition in their hometowns and the occasional shot of publicity often makes their miserable existence a little easier to abide.

Among the very few of us assigned to the combat correspondent gig, there is little desire to put up with the misery, pain, and exhaustion of the grunt lifestyle on anything but an irregular schedule. We mostly stick with it because we know there’s an out when we want one. We carry orders that say we can come and go as required, which means when we please most of the time. The key is to maintain just a little distance. You can write knowledgeably and insightfully about infantrymen without having to be one every day all the time. At least that’s what we keep telling ourselves in an effort to maintain that crucial little distance between observers and observed. It doesn’t always work that way. We are, after all, trained U.S. Marines just like the guys we write about, and that’s a factor that keeps cropping up when times get hard.

Times are most definitely hard and somehow out of joint here in Hue City. Modern warriors, fondling automatic rifles, stare across the water at the walls of the Citadel in the same way ancients must have stood near arbalests and catapults before the great siege battles of antiquity. Now it’s Yankee Doodle besieging King Nguyen’s Court and there are desperate defenders burrowed like moles into the walls surrounding his palace. And King Nguyen holds a valuable trump in this contest. Those walls and his palace are cultural icons filled with historically significant artifacts. Marines don’t give a shit about all that, but someone in Saigon does. There will be no air strikes or artillery barrages employed lest those life-saving methods blow big chunks out of Vietnamese history.

Back there along the line of grunts waiting to cross the river, civilian correspondents are asking questions about it, trying to coax emotional quotes from numb survivors of the first half of Operation Hue City. Makes you wonder who the real dumb-shits are. People that ask questions like that or the befuddled bastards that try to answer them? It pleases me to hear several of the southside survivors tell the reporters to take a hike or get fucked. I’m a pissed off man at this point and I could do with some pleasing. See, I’m supposed to be in Hong Kong on an R&R that got summarily canceled when the gooks decided to stage a nationwide offensive during Tet 1968.

Let me tell you about that.

Danang

There is a standard ration of shit from a lifer in the rear who feels that seven months in the bush is no excuse for wanting to go on R&R. The unit is short-handed—not enough correspondents to stretch over the outfits operating in northern I Corps—and we all have to pitch in over the Tet period, et cetera, et-fucking-cetera. A big problem seems to be the unmitigated gall I display by leaving my post at Con Thien up on the DMZ to pick up orders for the R&R that had been scheduled by this very same lifer four months earlier.

“You should have stuck it out up there until we could send somebody to relieve you. Who’s going to cover Con Thien while you’re gone?”

Well, hell, let’s see if I can find enough MPC to pay for a call to someone who gives a big rat’s ass. The Captain can solve the problem, but he’s away at a briefing. Let it simmer while I head for Hooch 13 to wash away some of the accumulated DMZ slime. Its mid-day, so there might be some hot water left in the showers.

But there’s neither rest nor recreation down in the hooch area where combat correspondents share rear-echelon housing space with headquarters clerks and jerks. It’s like walking into a ward full of raving paranoid-psychotics. Everyone screaming about gooks moving all over I Corps and big enemy pushes on urban areas. Shitter rumors are flying and every shoe-clerk knows a guy who just told him the straight scoop.

It won’t be me, but somebody ought to tell these guys it’s almost Tet. Even the VC and NVA take a break for that deal, visiting their ancestors and trading money and banging on gongs and barking at the moon or whatever else they do to celebrate the lunar New Year. They can do all that and welcome to it without me in attendance this time around. After too damn long as one of the fish in the barrel up at Con Thien, ducking incoming and watching unlucky grunts turned into hamburger, I’ll be observing the occasion in Hong Kong, thank you very much.

Figures there’s only cold water in the showers but at least it’s wet.
Code of the Grunt:
If it’s good you can’t have it so just drive on, dude. Don’t mean nothin’. In a day or two I’ll shower in beer. Just plug a cold beer IV in my arm, order up a Chinese cutie and get into some serious sex. My shit is all in one bag. Five bills in back pay and all I need to do is hang out here in Danang until flight time. I’ll just change uniforms then slide on up to the CP and get it squared away with the Skipper.

The Captain wants to know if I’ve got any idea why the division cooks and clerks are all filling sandbags and running around with loaded rifles. He’s pretty sure the fact that I have no fucking idea why that situation attends is likely because I’ve been stuck up north and away from the larger war picture. I’ll give him stuck up north but we were damn sure as close to the war picture as I ever need to be. Skipper says recon patrols report large enemy forces moving toward the urban areas of I Corps and he’s putting all scheduled rotations on hold, including my Hong Kong R&R. This leaves me seriously pissed but you don’t say no to the Skipper—and I owe him for covering a number of prior misdeeds with the heavies who do not like the carefree attitude espoused by Combat Correspondents.

He wants me to grab my helmet and head back north to Phu Bai where the division has Task Force X-Ray on stand-by. If the flap fizzles, he’ll have me on the first thing smoking out of Danang for Kowloon Airport. The laughing lifers safe in the rear take umbrage when I call them a gaggle of rear-echelon pogues, but I’m out of the CP before they can do much more than bitch about it.

No flights north until morning which leaves me no option but to get roaring drunk. So that’s the plan, but there’s a problem with the execution. Freedom Hill PX, just down the road from the Division CP on Hill 327, stocks beer and whiskey for controlled consumption by soldiers, sailors, and airmen but Marines are barred from purchasing any of it. The Division CG apparently thinks Marines have better things to do than sit around drinking when they get the rare break from mortal combat. Even the portion of the standard MACV ration card that outlines how much booze an American is allowed to purchase is removed before it’s issued to a Marine.

Getting around this dilemma will take some serious criminal activity with which I am intimately familiar. Marines with an abiding interest in mood elevators or attitude adjustments have two basic options. See the little slicky-boys that hang around the perimeter fences selling potent varieties of Laotian Green or Cambodian Red marijuana or find a way to obtain the booze their ration card says they can’t have. Smoking dope just makes me see spiders and other threatening horrors that usually have me curled up under somebody’s rack in the fetal position, so I’m what we call a Juicer.

Smart Juicers in The Nam learn to operate within a thriving barter system. In the case of the Juicers among the 1
^st
Marine Division Combat Correspondents—and there are many of them—it’s a matter of becoming canny traders at the bargaining table. After a firefight out in the bush, grunts make a mad dash for SKS carbines or Chicom pistols, things they can claim as legal war trophies, stuff they can take home with them if they live long enough to rotate. That stuff is good as gold on the market and it’s about as hard to come by, so those of us who travel with the grunts make it a practice to pick up small items of NVA equipment that the grunts don’t bother to collect. Those gook belts, pouches, helmets, canteens, and entrenching tools are catnip to REMFs who never venture outside the wire.

As luck and an abiding thirst would have it, there is a clutch of gook gear stuffed inside my field pack. There’s a guy I know from previous barter excursions who is amassing a huge collection of stuff that he intends to take home and lie about, so I get on the road and out away from people milling around the CP looking for other people to put on working parties.

It takes me only three rides to hitchhike my way to the Naval Construction Battalion Compound outside Danang. Seabees seem to have unlimited access to alcohol, but they drive a fairly hard bargain. Grunts are always hitting on them for steaks or booze or building materials, all of which they have in abundance. Prices are high with Seabees, but they’ll always deal. I’m after white stuff, the booze that is least detectable when mixed in a canteen with Kool-Aid or the bug juice they serve in field messes. The trump I’m carrying includes two NVA AK-47 bayonets, very cool and desirable trade goods, and I’m betting my Seabee source will go for them like early rotation orders.

It’s early in the day so there’s no crowd at the Seabee EM Club. The manager, a crusty first class petty officer, stands in the doorway chewing on a toothpick with his foot resting on a case of Johnnie Walker scotch. He’s my guy, a hard man to finesse, but not as shrewd as he thinks he is. We’ve done business before and he’s vulnerable to a guilt trip so I make a slow, roundabout approach wearing my best war-weary, thousand-yard stare.

“Long time, no see, dude. Where you been?”

“Up north on the DMZ…” I let that hang for a while, staring down at my scuffed jungle boots. “Nasty shit up there, man. I’ve never seen so many gooks in one place. We damn near got overrun a couple of times.”

He chews on that for minute, eyes the NVA pack sitting at my feet, and then invites me inside for a beer. He knows the drill. I follow him into the dark, cool interior of the club Danang Seabees built to their own specifications and coil myself around a barstool. He pops two rusty cans of Black Label with the church-key he carries hooked to his dungarees and opens negotiations.

“Guess a guy’s been through what you have could use him a bottle or two.”

“That’s why I’m here. It’s always great to see you and all, but I won’t be in the rear for long and I need some supplies.”

He ponders that and pries a few war stories out of me while we work through two more beers. Cheap bastard casually extracts the price of the beers from a five-dollar MPC note that I put up on the bar. When I run down, he starts to bitch about his own problems, typical rear-echelon bellyaches, but talking makes him loosen up and before long he’s pouring tequila shots on the house.