Run Between the Raindrops (27 page)

Lieutenant Longlegs is screaming into his radio for fire support but everyone hugging the dirt up on the wall realizes something will have to be done before that if we intend to survive this close and deadly encounter. In one of combat’s never-ending flukes, the gooks waited too long to open fire. They should have hit us at greater range. As it is, several men from the leading element are nearly on top of a few gun positions and they don’t have to sacrifice much cover to start pitching frags into holes and firing slits. The rest of us start inching forward on our bellies or sprinting toward those mounds, sticking muzzles into any opening and triggering long bursts at the defenders inside.

Reb is just ahead of me, firing single rounds at a shooter under a pile of logs. He’s taking careful aim with each shot, just like he’s on a range for qualification day back in The World. When the muzzle-flash disappears, he pulls a grenade, arms it and runs for the log pile. He’s winding up to heave when a burst from a gook on his right cuts into him and sends the Southerner sprawling. The grenade rolls from his hand and detonates sending a shower of dirt and shrapnel over the rest of us. Doc Toothpick scrambles forward but it’s obvious before he reaches the body that Reb the Southerner is dead. Toothpick screams something I can’t hear and then grabs Reb’s rifle to begin firing wildly in all directions.

We are gaining momentum and I manage to reach Philly Dog’s body. It seems unlikely that he could have survived but I need to be sure. His guts are leaking through holes in his lower belly. The second burst hit higher, tearing off most of his lower jaw. I can see the gold teeth exposed through a mat of blood and gristle. The unsinkable Philly Dog, the bad-ass street fighter, lies dead on the Hue City walls. His gang-banging buddy Willis is just a few feet away, all the jive and life leaking out of him through a vertical row of bullet holes in his chest. Sunlight glints off something that catches my eye. It’s his straight razor and it belongs in his hand, so I pull it out of his boot and put it there. It’s dumb and they’ll strip it from him before they send the Dog back to South Philly, but it just seems like the right move. There will never be another thing I can do for Philly Dog or Willis.

Our M-79s, machineguns, and a few mortar rounds that begin to fall forward of us are breaking up the gook line and Lieutenant Longlegs is up and running from man to man, pushing us forward, urging us to move and shoot. For some reason, laying there on my belly surrounded by the dead bodies of Philly Dog, Willis and Reb the Southerner, it seems like a reasonable suggestion. We are, after all, in the business of climbing the walls and killing the gooks. As an assault line begins to form and move past, I stuff a fresh magazine in my rifle and scramble to follow the leaders. It’s a lot like riding a powerful wave with building speed and momentum as we surge forward, shooting and fragging holes right and left. There’s a brutal rhythm to it, an infectious sense of gritty determination that drives us straight at the enemy.
Code of the Grunt:
If I’ve gotta die it won’t be laying down and shaking like a dog shitting peach-pits. If I’ve gotta die, I’ll do it on my feet, moving, shooting and staring death in the beady-ass eyeballs. There it is.

We get a brief reprieve from some friendlies on rooftops across the street from this sector of walls. A machinegun carried to the top of a building over there somewhere sweeps the bunker line with plunging fire and we are suddenly moving forward faster. Enemy bunkers and fighting holes are flooded by a wave of screaming, pissed off grunts. It’s oddly like some sort of savage ballet. Gooks are leaping and bounding between the mounds, rising to meet the Marines running swivel-hipped right into them. Desperate, deranged performers wearing costumes in various shades of green, some topped by steel pots and others by pith helmets, clash, shoot, and scream in a bedlam chorus. Bodies whirl, twist and slump in odd contortions all over the bloody stage: The Dance of Death.

It is an awesome sight—and it’s very nearly the last thing I see. Just ahead of the path that I’m taking to keep up with Lieutenant Longlegs, there is a mound of trash that looks like a dump-site for old furniture or discarded household items. On top of it all is a bent and twisted fat-tire Schwinn, a bicycle almost exactly like one I rode when I was a kid. It’s even got the plastic frilly things sticking out of the handlebar grips. Those little multi-color plastic frills have me fascinated and I barely notice the movement at the base of the trash pile.

They say you don’t hear the one that gets you, but I heard the AK burst the gook triggered from under that mound, just below the Schwinn’s mangled rear tire. The fact that I returned fire was likely instinct or an involuntary muscle spasm in a trigger finger. It’s hard to say and I wasn’t thinking about it lying flat on my back with a freshening rain pelting my face. Toothpick is there and tugging at my belt for some reason. It hurts and I think I asked him to stop. I also think he told me I was gut-shot. There is a wave of horrible cramps and I try to pull my knees up toward my chest but Doc Toothpick is sitting on them with one morphine Syrette gripped between his teeth and another one jabbed into my bicep. And that’s about all I can recall about it.

To the rear…March

Two things surprise me laying on a stretcher just outside the BAS and fighting my way through a morphine fog. One is the pain which is not as bad as contemplated, or as intense as it was when they hustled me down off the walls and toward the rear. It’s just a dull, throbbing ache that extends from under my ribcage down to my knees. Taken medicinally rather than recreationally, that morphine is some wonderful shit, and they pump me full of it on a regular schedule while I’m waiting with a bunch of others for the medevac that will take us out of Hue.

The other surprising thing is that the crickets have returned to Hue. Their tuneful chorus of croaks and chirps echoes in my head but hard as I think on the subject, I can’t remember hearing them before; neither on the southside nor here on the northside while all the fighting and dying was happening. So maybe those buzzing chirps have a bigger meaning. Maybe the crickets sense the end of it all and are just getting back to doing what they do when wild-eyed humans aren’t screwing up the environment. Anyway, it’s nice to hear them, rumbling a steady, rhythmic bass-line under the song of war, as wounded men on my right and left, grunt and groan.

Staring straight up, it’s hard to ignore the chemical dawn that breaks over Hue on the morning they take me to the rear. It’s one of those surreal tequila sunrises that you sometimes see in the Florida Keys and it makes me think of Reb who will never see another sunrise in Florida or anyplace else. A corpsman gives me my morning shot and fusses with the bandages on my belly. He doesn’t say anything and I don’t ask him about the wounds. Good news or bad, they will tell me when it’s time for me to know. So, I just lay there and watched the sky. Very likely old Rudyard Kipling was hitting the opiates when he wrote that stuff about the sun coming up like thunder. Streaks of pink seem to jet across the lightening sky and the rising sun looks just like a sizzling meatball as it climbs over Hue.

Shortly after full light, they load me up with four or five other casualties on a truck that creeps slowly up the mean streets, headed for the gate we used to enter the Citadel just….what was it…a week, maybe ten days ago? Likely the driver is trying to take it easy and not jostle the shot-up passengers, but I’m wishing he’d put the hammer down and get us out of there. No telling what’s next for me, but it is hard to imagine surviving only to be killed by some stay-behind sniper looking to chalk up an easy target.

Lieutenant Longlegs came to visit last night. He seemed sheepish about my getting dinged. For a while, as we talked, I thought he might apologize for asking me to grunt along with his platoon. But that kind of thing is not his style. Every Marine is a rifleman. You pays your money and you takes your chances. Mainly, Longlegs wanted to deliver my pack and personal gear that Doc Toothpick rescued from the walls where I was hit. And he wanted to let me know the ARVN had finally overrun the Citadel and raised their flag. It was a major deal, he said, with all the press you could count and then some making it look like the brave South Vietnamese forces re-took their ancient capitol. It was utter bullshit, he said, and laughed long and hard, maybe a little too hard. I tried to laugh with him but it made my belly ache.

When war becomes a game of political football with every play called from the sidelines, you struggle under a strange and dangerous set of rules. The coaches controlling the imagery from Washington and Saigon decreed that Hue must look like an ARVN victory, a demonstration of their determination and fighting spirit, regardless of the reality. To that end, a bunch of dead and wounded Marines is neither here nor there.

For the most part it’s over in Hue except for the mopping up operations. The Marines will be pulling out soon and leaving that to the ARVN and the press that is flooding the area now that the shooting is nearly done. It is certainly over for me and I am thinking about all that—what it might mean in both long and short runs—as they haul me off the truck and load me on a Mike Boat with the other casualties. I am almost constantly thirsty but the corpsman have been really stingy with water. Mainly they just wet my lips and plug another IV into my arm. So when it begins to rain as we cross the river, I open my mouth and try to suck down some moisture.

A bearded Coast Guard crewman with a cigarette dangling from his mouth notices me and kneels to watch me gasp like a fish. “You OK, Marine?”

“I’d be better if I had a smoke.” He pulls a pack from his shirt, shakes one out, and lights it for me. As we smoke silently, I watch him trying to smile in some way that might cheer me up or reassure me. His glance keeps sneaking down to the big bandage covering my belly. “Ain’t as bad as it looks,” I tell him. “They missed my dick.” Coastie laughs, gives me a pat on the shoulder and wanders away toward the back of the boat.

On the southside, they tell me I’m going on a helicopter, either to Danang or maybe to one of the hospital ships out in the South China Sea. From there, who knows? I reach down to the cargo pocket on my thigh and feel the little brass dog stolen from the Emperor’s throne and close my eyes.
Code of the Grunt:
You ain’t Superman. You do what you can and then you try to live with the fact that it wasn't enough.

Charlie Ward, Yokosuka, Japan

Woke up jet-lagged and disoriented in either a morgue or mausoleum. Hard to tell for the first few days of drug dreams and rat-races up and down a maze of corridors staring up from a gurney and surrounded by knitted brows and half-faces showing above surgical masks. Eventually, someone visits and stays long enough to let me know I’m in a Navy Hospital in Japan where they are doing some judicious cutting on my guts.

There are plenty of drug dreams and body aches that have nothing to do with my belly. They’ve got tubes stuck in me everywhere and there’s no comfortable way to lie except flat on my back. That leaves me staring at ceiling tiles for long hours or turning my head to check out the guys in nearby beds. Most of the wounded in this ward are pumped full of pain-killers so there’s not a lot of lucid conversation. The Ward Corpsmen are helpful and solicitous, but they’ve got little time to sit around and shoot the shit. The Doctors who make their daily rounds just mumble medical jargon and won’t answer many direction questions. Even the Red Cross ladies who come by irregularly to see if there’s anything we want don’t stay long. Some guy always says what he really wants is a piece of ass, and they trundle on to the next ward where they’ll hear the same crude comments.

There’s a catheter in my dick that’s particularly annoying and they’ve got some arrangement of drainage tubes in my belly that require changing every so often. That’s painful, but given what I’ve seen of some of the other casualties, I can’t bring myself to bitch very loudly. There’s a guy two beds over that’s missing both legs and one ass-cheek. Another dude across the aisle lost his whole package, balls and all, to an AK round. He won’t talk at all and I’m thinking he’d rather be dead but he hasn’t figured out how to make that happen. We hear whispered conversations sometimes between him and a Navy shrink that visits.

A starchy Navy nurse comes by to see me at one point and tells me the cutting is mostly done and I’m off the catheter. The tubes will have to stay in for a while, so they can suck out the bad shit and pump me full of good shit to fight infection. While they were dealing with my intestines, they mostly fixed my left hand, saved the thumb and reduced the swelling a lot. So in a couple of days they move me to a post-op ward and begin to talk about sending me stateside. None of that concerns me and I’m mainly just happy to be off my back and allowed to tool around in a wheelchair, mostly wherever I want to go.

Three or four other wheelchair maniacs get me involved in drag races down the longer corridors but the nurses put a stop to that when we have a particularly spectacular crash that rips a long line of sutures out of one of the racers. We sit around a big, bright room called a solarium a lot. There’s a well-stocked magazine rack in one corner and if you pull it away from the wall a little bit you gain access to a fairly comprehensive stock of porn mags and fuck-books left for the Marines by kind and understanding Navy Corpsmen.

We quickly discover that there’s a little slop-chute on the hospital grounds where enlisted patients can get beer. The Docs tell me not to drink as it will interfere with my internal plumbing which needs to mend on a bland diet, etc. Nodding with a full appreciation of their sound medical advice, I ignore it most nights and drink a lot of cold Japanese beer. After a while, I stop pissing blood so they stop arguing with me about it. Apparently, I’m a quick healer and the internal damage is a lot less threatening than initially estimated.

Sometimes I sit with some recuperating grunts on a little outdoor patio where we can smoke and watch the incoming wounded from medevac flights. We play a ghoulish game making bets on what caused the wounds we see. Angled wound in the upper body: sniper. Multiple entry wounds in a horizontal or diagonal line: machine gun. Small, clean punctures in the legs or buttocks: shrapnel from grenade or RPG. We can tell the ones that come in from Hue. No farmer tans on those guys. Their skin is marble white and shriveled from the rain and most bear pockmarks from flying brick or concrete.