Run Between the Raindrops (20 page)

Residents of a clutch of houses inside the Citadel walls near the southeast corner had either built or allowed to stand mounds of dirt between the back of their homes and the walls of the ancient fortress. A man standing on top of those mounds would be within five or six feet of the top of the wall. Even a dog-tired grunt could climb that far. The idea was to take two Charlie Company rifle platoons and see if they could grab a section of the wall as a sort of foothold. From that bastion, they could take the gooks under fire and allow the rest of the battalion to advance deeper into the Citadel.

Delta was resting and I could have stayed with them but Gene Autry wandered by as Charlie Company passed our position and wanted some familiar company. It seemed reasonable at the time to wander along with him as I was feeling fairly useless and underemployed. My camera was still wrapped in plastic and resting heavily in my pack and there was nothing much in my notebooks besides scribbles and senseless scrawls. So why not just tag along with old Gene and his other buddies and see if we couldn’t get up on those fucking walls? We get up there and it might be some magical moment, a historic phase of a historic battle. Guys like me were supposed to be there for historic moments, right?

Charlie Company Gunnery Sergeant led an element assigned to pass through two blocks leading to the southeast corner of the Citadel walls. There was no room or time for tactical subtleties. This would be the old belly-series from the line of scrimmage, right up the middle, with troops passing through houses along the way and avoiding the paved streets. It was shaky business from the start as we crawled through the abandoned homes. Never any telling what we might find in those houses and shops. What I found at the corner of the second block was just flat-out weird.

We took some fire in the approach but made our way to the portico of the structure where everyone waited for the signal to enter and begin clearing. Gene Autry and his buddies tossed several frags into the house and machinegunners at our back sprayed the structure sending brick shards and stucco flying everywhere. When the dust cleared, we waited a few minutes to see if the gooks would respond. They didn’t, so the squad leader hand-signaled for us to move in and start clearing. There was a clutch of grunts charging through the front door, so I opted for an easier approach and climbed in through a ground floor window.

What I entered was apparently a living room. There was some dark ebony, highly polished furniture, and a nice looking oriental vase on a coffee table. Beyond a layer of dust and some random bullet holes, everything looked quite civil, quite normal. I followed the muzzle of my rifle into the dark room and froze. My forward foot was resting on something soft and pliable. Sweat began to drip and I was sure I’d stepped on some sort of booby-trap pressure plate. When the expected high-explosive detonation didn’t occur, I slithered the rest of the way inside the room and discovered I was standing on a dead gook.

Squatting near the corpse, I surveyed the room for live ones, but it was quiet except for the squads clearing rooms on the other side of the walls. Gene Autry vaulted through the window staring with wide eyes over his rifle sights and asked me if the area was clear. Pointing at the dead man near my feet, I motioned for him to proceed. “Nobody here except this one. He’s dead, we ain’t. Carry on.”

Gene Autry shouted that he was the last man and headed for the door. Rising to follow, I took a second look at the dead man. There was something strange about this guy, so I popped on a light to take a look. It was a humanizing moment that I wish I hadn’t experienced. He was a basic gook trooper, complete with pack, pith helmet and an SKS carbine stacked against a wall near the window. He was well-fed and crew-cut and the expression on his dead face didn’t look overly pained or concerned. The weird thing was his right hand which was wrapped around his dick. This guy wasn’t just checking his package or adjusting, he was beating his meat when he was killed. There were two bleeding holes in his upper chest, wounds that he’d apparently suffered at an embarrassing moment.

His swollen penis was wrapped tightly in his dead hand. His other hand was tossed backward above his head and gripping something that I couldn’t immediately see. With a little bending and stretching, I discovered he had a death-grip on a photo of a pretty Vietnamese girl, framed from the waist up with her breasts exposed. NVA private dip-shit apparently died while fantasizing about that girl. And in that strange moment I realized that combat men are not much different regardless of their complexions, nationalities, or political ideologies. It was a seminal insight and from that time on I never touched my own dick without thinking about it.

On the other side of the house where I found the masturbating NVA, we ran into a bunch of his buddies who had their mind on business. They were spread out in a long line of shooters firing from windows, doorways and rooftops. Charlie Company was being pounded and would advance no further this day. While an 81mm mortar fire mission is being called, an M-60 machinegunner fires cover and we get set to pull back to safer environs. Looking for a break in the incoming fire, Gene Autry and his buddy peek from around a corner. That’s when the sniper across the street chalks up two more on his individual scorecard for the Great Big Battle of Hue City. During a pause in the dicey business of hauling the bodies to the rear, we find the beer store.

Same Shit Different Day

Charlie Company tries again to reach the walls the next morning. It goes relatively well for an hour or so and we make it through the area where the NVA stopped us so painfully in the previous effort. We’re in a second contested block now, full of ramshackle structures—they look like little shops or food stalls—that provide the access we need to get up on the walls. Company Gunny motions for everyone to hold and moves to re-position a squad to our rear. The plan is simple and deadly direct. While elements in covered positions on one side of the street provide suppressing fire, a designated squad will rush for the walls. The rest of us will follow if and when they got a foothold. We wait, staring through windows and loopholes as two machineguns are moved forward. We are now cocked and locked. The Gunny takes a last look around and then nods at the gun teams.

Over the roar of our M-60s we don’t immediately notice that we are taking a hard rain of incoming from gook positions on our flanks. There are no visible muzzle flashes to our front. It’s only when rounds begin to impact on the walls of our building and blow through the windows that we realize the NVA have set up a crossfire that covers the street we must cross to reach the walls. Crossing those 30 meters will be a bloody business, but the key is to reach defilade positions in one or more of the little alcoves that break up the otherwise straight stretch of wall.

Mortar fire from 60mm tubes just behind us begins to impact on the walls and the incoming decreases noticeably. Screaming for Marines to follow him, Company Gunny leads a squad into the street. He’s firing his M-16 on full automatic, changing magazines on the fly and running for one of the odd little loops and bends that the architects molded into the walls for no apparent reason beyond esthetics. He’s followed by six other grunts holding onto their helmets with their gear flapping and banging. As more mortar fire strikes to the left and right of where the Gunny and his assault party are crouched, the rest of us break cover and make our own mad dash across the street. The gooks are not completely cowed. We hear the snap and sizzle of close rounds chasing us all the way.
Code of the Grunt.
There's no cover between Point A and Point B, so don't bother looking for any. Just go for broke and hope for the best. Like it says in the song, what will be will be.

We make the defilade position which is now crowded with cringing grunts hugging the wall like a bunch of juvenile delinquents gleefully high on unpunished crime. At our rear, the platoon commander is waving and shouting. No one can hear what he’s saying but it’s obvious he wants us to exploit success. “Don’t get comfortable.” Company Gunny is panting and coughing around an unlit cigarette. “We still got to get the fuck up on them walls.”

Two grunts make a lift out of a rifle and hoist a third man up level with the top of the wall. He’s blown away before he can get a leg up and collapses among us where a corpsman starts to treat some very nasty wounds in his arm and shoulder. No one else seems eager to mount the rifle lift and the Gunny is about to try when a scrawny Boston Irishman with a shamrock inked on the back of his flak jacket elbows him out of the way. “Lemme do this, Gunny. I got it.” He stuffs a shotgun round into his M-79 grenade launcher, pulls his pistol, and steps up onto the rifle elevator. “Get me up there!” The grunts lift him and we hear the thunk of his blooper followed closely by the sharp crack of his .45.

“I’m up,” he yells and the rest of us follow as quickly as we can, pushed, tossed, and lifted over the top. Rolling behind a mound of dirt, I can see the logjam has broken. More Marines are flooding across the street and into covered positions at the base of the wall. We have a tactical toehold and I can hear someone in authority at my rear screaming into a radio, urging someone on the other end to join us. Marines are spreading out along a broad expanse, fragging anything that looks like it might be a bunkered position. There are NVA firing on us from the front and rear, but there’s enough cover up on the wall to survive that. It’s turning into a long-range exchange of fire in two directions but that’s progress.

From this vantage point, we can see deeper into the Citadel complex. We are in possession of two separate, 30-foot-wide paths of uneven dirt that comprise the earthen fill between the exterior and interior stone slabs of the walls. We can see parts of a moat surrounding the Imperial Palace and to our rear there’s a glimpse of that NVA flag that still flies over the Citadel. Firefighting peters out to a few desultory pops and bangs. That seems wrong after the wall of fire we’d been taking only moments ago. Maybe the gooks have given up on this fight. Maybe they don’t deem this stretch of the Citadel wall as important as we do. No one is very confident that’s the case as we spread out and begin to sweep north.

We advance cautiously through a stretch of bunkers and trenches dug into the dirt fill between the exterior and interior walls, carefully checking each hole or fold in the littered terrain, moving in brief furtive spurts to keep from being silhouetted on the sky-line. There are some desultory shots and shouts as grunts put insurance rounds into dead bodies encountered along the way. There’s just a few of us up here on the wall. The rest of the outfit is moving parallel, crawling through the houses across the street and keeping a close eye on us.

Terrain forces us into a single file, moving in a tense crouch along a trench that connects a series of abandoned fighting holes. Point man is about two places ahead of me when he fires a burst and dives into one of the abandoned holes. The rest of us crowd into cover, crunching into little cubbies and nooks as an NVA ambush party pumps fire straight down into the trench. Two men are caught with their legs exposed and get hit hard. Peeking around a little bend in the trench line, I can see four green Soviet-style helmets through the muzzle-flash of the enemy weapons. Company Gunny is yelling into his radio for suppressing fire from across the street.

Almost immediately there is the thump and pop of several M-79s and the incoming slacks off as the NVA duck for cover. Company Gunny uses the break to get everyone out of the trench and establish a firing line facing the enemy force. The radio squawks with a report that more gooks are rushing toward the area to reinforce those that are firefighting with us up on the wall. Things are getting intense as more incoming begins to chew up the ground around us. There’s no corpsman handy, so I worm my way over to a black Marine who is squirming in pain with most of his right foot missing. Blood is pumping through what’s left of his mangled boot and he’s in a lot of pain. Using one of his suspender straps, I manage to get a tourniquet on his leg just below the knee and slow the bleeding. He takes my rifle and keeps it pointed forward as I begin to drag him along the trench, back toward the point where we got up on the wall.

We are nearly out of it, just passing a pile of discarded enemy gear, when an NVA springs out of a hole to our right and lunges with a bayonet. Why he didn’t just open up on us will remain one of those welcome mysteries. Bayonet Boy misses me but manages to stab Footless Grunt in the thigh. He wrestles with our attacker which gives me enough slack to grab an abandoned helmet and bash Bayonet Boy a couple of good whacks on the head. He goes down hard, with his green pith helmet crushed and bloody on one side, but I keep swinging.

“He’s dead, motherfucker! Let’s get the fuck out of here!” Footless Grunt jerks the bayonet out of his leg and I continue to drag him toward the rear. He’s screaming on a massive adrenaline jag and telling me we’re going to make it. I’m hoping he’s right, but if there’s one gook laggard that we missed in our sweep of the trench line there could be more. He helps me in the withdrawal effort by scooting and pushing with his good leg as I retrieve the rifle to keep it handy. Maybe it’s survival euphoria or just a search for distraction, but as we work our way out of the fight, I’m thinking about two hours of hand-to-hand combat instruction in basic training. There was no finesse to the encounter, no karate kicks or other slick moves. It was troglodyte stuff—pick up a big rock and bash away until someone dies.

At the alcove where we climbed up onto the wall, Footless Grunt manages to scoot himself down to street level. Trying to decide whether or not to follow, I’m distracted by a machinegun team advancing across the street. It’s just a gunner and his assistant all alone out there in the open, draped in twinkling belts of spare ammo. Incoming rounds chew into the concrete around them as they advance, firing short, sharp bursts into the right flank of the gook position on the wall. There’s no reason I can see that they should be upright in all that fire but they are. The gunner has his helmet on backwards and there’s a demonic expression on his face as he swings the bucking M-60 left and right, hosing down the NVA position.