Run Between the Raindrops (3 page)

“Sometimes I wish I could just get out of here and hook up with some of the Seabee outfits operating in the field, you know?”

“You don’t want any part of that shit, dude.” I grab the bottle and re-fill the shots but he doesn’t seem to notice or care. “Seabees are dying like flies up north building base camps and carving out that big fucking chunk of the DMZ for asshole McNamara. You need to stay where you are so we can do some business.”

“What’re you lookin’ for?”

“Gin or vodka…” I reach into my pack and plop an NVA entrenching tool on the bar. He handles it for a while looking underwhelmed. “I got one or two of these that you brought last time. What else you got?”

Beer and tequila were stretching my bladder out of shape, so I slam the AK bayonets on the bar and trundle away toward the head. They have installed a flush toilet since my last visit so I take the opportunity to deposit a week-old C-ration shit in the Seabees shiny new commode. When I get back to the bar, my trading buddy has two fifths each of cheap gin and vodka waiting for me. The bayonets are nowhere in sight. It appears we have made a deal.

To make travel a little easier, I stop in a remote corner of the Seabee compound and pour the liquor into a clutch of extra plastic canteens and then stuff it all in my pack. There are a bunch of vehicles rushing out of the compound by the time I reach the main gate and the first one to stop takes me all the way back to the division compound on Hill 327.

Having spent most of the ride in the back of a truck nipping from the canteens, I arrive at my hooch just at dusk and fucked up like Hogan’s Goat which is entirely appropriate to the situation in the division rear area. Alarm sirens are wailing and panicky clerks are falling all over themselves trying to reach a row of defensive bunkers. The inky sky over Hill 327 is lit by parachute flares and roving patrols of combat shoe-clerks are rousting REMFs, shoving them into a leaky perimeter being formed around the division CP. Crawling into a dark corner of Hooch 13, I wrap myself in a poncho-liner and drift off to sleep. Anywhere in Nam is safer than out on a line with nervous pogues shooting at shadows.

15th Aerial Port Squadron

“Look, I've got to go north today and standing around here bullshitting with you isn't getting me there.” What a delight to be hung-over and arguing with a fat, sweaty, gum-popping staff sergeant behind the booking desk at the 15
^th
Aerial Port. We’ve been at it for half an hour while he works through a full pack of Spearmint and I deal with a head full of worms and wet sand. The sergeant is apparently too short to give a shit. While we’re bitching back and forth, he’s coloring little squares on a short-timer's calendar.

“You bush-beasts don't impress me for shit.” He sticks his pen behind an ear and pops his gum. “I'm the one who says
where
you go and
when
you go around here. No Marine birds going north today, and that's the way it is. Sorry 'bout that.”

Sorely tempted to reach over the desk, grab this prick by the stacking swivel, and commence field stripping his sorry ass, I realize it’s futile. And it’s too hot in here for a man with a world-record hangover. It’s another of Nam’s little conundrums. You can generally zip right up to the forward areas with minimum difficulty, but just try getting space on something headed for the rear. There’s a much better chance of finding a PFC in the Pentagon.

So, how to get myself and four canteens full of booze plus my field gear up north past this uncooperative sonofabitch at passenger control? Heat and frustration drive me away from the desk to ponder the gaggle of aircraft on the 15
^th
APS flight line. A transient breeze carries the familiar odor of the orient mixed with JP-4 jet fuel. An Air Force cargo plane taxies toward a forklift idling next to a stack of boxes. The gear is marked for an outfit based at Dong Ha, and it’s likely the incoming aircraft is due to carry it there. If I can snivel my way aboard that C-123, I might make Phu Bai before dark.

A pilot in a jaunty blue overseas cap is standing outside the airplane, watching the forklift operator load his bird.
Code of the grunt:
Innovate and adapt, do what you have to do when and where you have to do it. The Air Force lieutenant eyes my slovenly condition through tinted flight glasses and smiles like a man who knows he’s about to become a mark for a needy grunt. He’s been there and done that a bunch driving airplanes around The Nam.

“Excuse me, sir. I got a real problem and I thought maybe I could ask one of you officers for some help.” I give him everything but the tears and digging my toe in the dirt. “My brother's up at Dong Ha at Charlie Med. He got hit yesterday and I got permission to go up and see him. But the Marines say there ain't anything flying north.”

And here is a clear opportunity for this guy to demonstrate that the Air Force could and would fly where the vaunted Marines would not. “So you want the Air Force to take you up there?”

“Yes, sir, and if I don't get up there today, my brother might die and I would never see him again.” I am prepared to whine and wheedle further but it isn’t necessary. This guy sees his chance to trump the Marine aviators and be remembered for all time by a hard-pressed grunt as Really Good Joe. He motions for me to say no more and get my gear aboard the aircraft. “When you see your brother, tell him the Air Force got you there on time, hear?'

His dual-engine transport claws for airspace over Danang creating a peculiar but familiar sensation back in the cargo compartment. It’s as if the airplane doesn’t want to leave the earth and get up there in triple-A range with its ass hanging out. There is a reluctant little lurch when the wheels lift off the runway and the deal is done. I snuggle under a retaining strap stretched across the floor of the cargo bay, hoping the staff sergeant down below at the booking desk picks up a bad burst of clap on his first low-level mission over a female back in The World.

My delicate stomach wakes me from a sweaty stupor as the aircraft suddenly dips and tilts. Visible below is the red clay of Dong Ha and the pilots are taking no chances on incoming artillery. They manhandle the airplane around the pattern and roar into a final landing approach at the last possible moment. Dong Ha puts me close, but I still have to make my way to Phu Bai. Leaving me on a steel-matted runway, the aircrew unloads rapidly and then spins it around to head back for cold beer and clean sheets.

Dong Ha

Dong Ha is headquarters for the 3
^rd
Marine Division, but it looks more like a sleepy outpost. Somebody ought to let them know the yellow horde is about to descend according to the vaunted oxymoron known as military intelligence. There is just one lonely Huey parked on the matting in front of the shanty passenger terminal. Two or three Marines sprawl in the red dust near the building in various stages of stupor. Grunts are incredibly flexible in a lot of interesting ways. Despite the heat boiling up off the runway matting, these guys manage to arrange their limbs under, over, or around 60 pounds of bulky equipment and sleep like babies.
Code of the Grunt
: Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, and never lie down without going to sleep.

There is a familiar form crapped out on a Willy Peter bag inside the terminal door where dark shadow provides a little shade. I’ve humped enough clicks behind that rawboned body to recognize it from any angle. He doesn’t bother to lift the helmet covering his eyes when I walk over and kick at his scruffy jungle boots.

“On your feet, Douchebag! There’s a war to fight—or so they tell me down in Danang.”

“Hey, dude, I was wondering if I'd run into you on this deal.” My buddy Steve is a solid combat correspondent, competent in a firefight, with a weird sense of humor and a compulsion to emulate Ernie Pyle. We spent a lot of time together, back in the pre-Nam world and working with the 1
^st
Marine Regiment when they got sent north to reinforce the DMZ. Hooking up with him will make this whole exercise a lot more palatable.

He sniffs at the canteen I offer and a huge grin spreads across his sunburned features. “Well, you’ve been back to Danang, I see. What’s the word from the rear?”

“Major panic among the pogues who are sure the great piss-yellow hordes are about to descend from the north or something. Skipper sent me up here to join up with Task Force X-Ray and stand by to stand by.”

He takes another slug of gin and passes the canteen. “Thought you were scheduled for R&R…”

“I was—and if nothing happens in the next day or two, I’m out of here and headed for Hong Kong. Skipper promised.”

Steve gets to his feet and shoulders his gear. “You’ve been a member of our beloved Corps long enough to know the value of promises. They are much like assholes. They all stink.
Code of the Grunt:
Promise in one hand, shit in the other. See which hand fills up first.”

“Maybe we can wangle a trip to Hue, dude. Remember the last time we got up there?”

Hue—When it was Cool

We are sight-seeing in a borrowed Jeep, half-drunk and half-listening to a historical rap from a buddy who is based in Hue with the American Forces Radio & TV outlet in the city. Sergeant Tom Young, a pal from stateside, is hosting two bush-beasts buddies and trying to make us believe he’d rather be out in the bush with us than stuck in his plush job. It’s bullshit and everyone knows it, so we just gaze like lechers at tight little Asian asses molded to bicycle or motorbike seats, as winsome girls in
ao dais
offer coy smiles or covert waves. It’s all bright colors and happy people, the opposite of what we are used to in the dirt-poor villages we patrol out in the hinterlands.

Hue is a different thing, a sprawling impressive city shot through with national color like Rome or Paris where residents always seem conscious of living in and around their own history. Like a trio of tourists we visit The Citadel on the north side of the Perfume River, gawking at its splendor. It’s a fortress from an earlier time, a square mile of thick stone walls surrounding a sub-city that has grown up in the shadow of the ancient walls. There is a moat full of mud and pond scum surrounding the walls and all the measurements are precise. That moat is 40-feet across and 40-feet deep. It guards walls that are 40-feet high and 40-feet thick. Tom knows all the details.

In earlier times Asian bandits, warring hill tribes, rival rulers and Mongol hordes attacked the walls. Now lichens, moss, and tropical ivy encroach on the great stone slabs, but they are no less intimidating for their age. Vegetation rises unevenly up the walls toward the broad tops where bracken and bramble grow wild. In a few more centuries the encroaching growth might form a lush, living carpet, crossing the walls and closing on the Imperial Palace, centerpiece of the Citadel complex. Tom says it was designed on the Chinese model, patterned after parts of the Forbidden City in Beijing.

It was easy, staring up at those walls, to let your imagination run. The climbing ivy might be the gnarled fingers of attackers who die assaulting a hallowed fortress, casualties of another fruitless attempt to reach the inner city behind the Citadel walls. There are nine separate gates in the walls each one featuring a bridge that spans the moat. Inside the gates, string-straight avenues crisscross the Citadel’s interior which is a mix of stately homes and shanties. The shanties are new and crowded with people who look like they ought to be out in the villages wading in paddies. Many of them are war refugees who are seeking shelter behind Hue’s thick walls.

Still, there’s a distinctive sense of ancient history here. The Nguyen Dynasty emperors did a lot of building and beautifying before they were elbowed out of power by a more modern dictatorship in Saigon far to the south. The noisy, frenetic shanty sectors seem a blot on the pristine lay-out of the Citadel, mixing the worst elements of peasant poverty with the best of mandarin splendor. And right there in the middle of it all was the biggest anachronism of all: Headquarters of an ARVN infantry division. Strolling around the manicured drill square is a Palace Guard in polished boots and tightly-tailored uniforms. None of these guys seem worried about war. Stuff like that happens in the jungles on the other side of Hue’s walls.

When we viewed it as combat tourists, Hue was majestic, stately and beautiful, a little oasis of Vietnamese peace and prosperity where the war seemed reassuringly remote. That first visit was pleasant and reassuring. The second time sucked.

Dong Ha

Steve is swilling gin and bitching about the bad taste a plastic canteen imparts to his favorite booze. He’s only here with me because they ordered him from his beat up on the DMZ to reinforce a short staff of Combat Correspondents at Phu Bai, where elements of the 1
^st
and 5
^th
Marine Regiments are being pulled into a perimeter for some rest during the Tet ceasefire period. It seems like a great opportunity to circulate among the bush-beasts and pick up some stories to feed the mimeograph machines back in Danang.

So it’s getting dark, and we’re still sitting on the runway at Dong Ha in the shade of a Huey with its rotors tied down and no crew in sight. The option is to hit up our counterparts in the 3
^rd
Marine Division for a little overnight hospitality but they’d likely drink all our booze, so we decide to try and find a ride to Phu Bai.

Inside the Dong Ha passenger terminal, a bored Air Force clerk is paging through a Playboy at the passenger manifest desk. He looks like his counterpart down in Danang, the kind of guy who would ace an Asshole Aptitude Test. As we contemplate an approach, he playfully gooses an old Vietnamese woman in a conical hat and baggy silk trousers who is lazily sweeping up the joint. She pretends to swat at him with her broom each time he jabs at her butt. When we interrupt the game, he’s solicitous but firm. “There ain't a fucking thing flying north or south. Everything's locked on standby for combat commitments.”

“What about that Huey parked outside?”

“Emergency bird on Ready Five and it don't go nowhere unless there’s an emergency, which in your case, there ain’t.”