SERGEANT OF THE GUARD

Sentry duty can be boring as hell, and for those of us on the First Marine Division’s perimeter at Chu Lai, it often was.

     Except at night: you didn’t know if it was going to be a boring night, or not, until your shift was over. Meanwhile, you watched rocks and bushes that had been stationary in daylight, get up, move, creep, and dance, in the phantasmagoric light of parachute flares. Again and again, you’d flick off the safety on your rifle…        

                  Sergeant of the Guard    

     Those days, besides my job in the DASC, I regularly pulled Sergeant of the Guard duty, which meant that I didn't stand watch down in our machine‑gun bunker. But instead of the four‑hour shifts those men stood, I was on duty from dusk till dawn, and had to stay awake all that time and be responsible for security along our section of the perimeter, which included supervising the changing every four hours of the two‑man bunker details, making sure one man was always awake in the bunker, making sure their EE8 field phone to the guard shack was working, making sure they had the proper weapons and ammo and that everything was working right.

     This was about the time of the centipede. One night, in the wee hours before dawn, I rang up the bunker: "I'm bringin' down some coffee." I always called before I approached the bunker from behind in the dark, so that if the sentries were especially jumpy, they wouldn't shoot me, and so they wouldn’t hear an unexpected noise behind them and have to deal with any more fear than they already had to: fear of what was beyond the razor-wire in the dark.

     I walked down the trail to the bunker, picking my way by starlight and memory, taking my time but not trying to walk quietly. When I got close, I saw the two sentries and their M60 machine gun silhouetted atop the bunker against the bright light cast beyond the barbed wire by the floodlights mounted off to either side of the bunker. "What the fuck are you guys doin' up here?" I growled in my best NCO's voice. "You're sittin' ducks, against that light...."

     One of the sentries answered in a voice more resolute than mine: "I ain't goin' back in there."

     "Why not?"

     "'Member that centipede?" Just after they'd come on watch, they'd found, on the steps leading down into the bunker, a centipede about seven inches long and as thick as a man's thumb. It had a leathery shell, segmented like the curved plates of a medieval knight's armor. They'd killed it with a rifle butt, then called me down to show me.

     "Yeah?"

     "Have a look." He jerked his head toward the bunker's entrance.

     I stepped over to where the steps were carved into the earth, and turned on my flashlight, absorbing most of its beam with cupped fingers. The centipede was almost gone, replaced by a violently active swarm of ants that were ripping the last bit of the centipede's armor plate into pieces small enough to carry away.

     We’d been having trouble with a "boot" lieutenant, one who had just recently come to Nam from officer's training, didn't know shit from Shinola about Vietnam, and was trying to make up for it with that great old killer of warriors, the combination of career ambition, ignorance, and arrogance.

     Officer of the Day (OD) duty rotated among several small outfits like ours that each manned a bunker or two along that section of the 1st MarDiv perimeter. The boot lieutenant who was OD on this particular night had a favorite trick: he'd walk around in the dark and sneak up behind the bunkers, as quietly as he could instead of letting his presence be known, trying to catch sentries asleep.

     Sleeping on guard duty in wartime is an offense which carries severe punishment, and necessarily so. But our line had been probed several times lately, and we were jittery. This one night when I was Sergeant of the Guard, two of our younger guys were in one of the bunkers. They'd heard that the "boot" had OD that night, and had been jawing about him during their watch. That was the last straw: they had rats, they had VC, they had bamboo vipers whose bite could kill you before you took a dozen steps. They had centipedes right out of horror movies, and they had ants that could eat such a centipede down to nothing in four hours. Now they had to worry about noises behind them.

     They howled all this at me. In the Marine Corps, especially in combat, rank works both ways: you do what the man above you tells you to do, but you also are responsible for the performance and wellbeing of those below you, who can and will demand that you buck The Man if they're doing their jobs and are still being jacked around.

     I was as pissed as they were. It was three in the goddamned morning. We were sleepy and scared and cold and frustrated.

     Well, fuck it, I thought. I'm Sergeant of the Fucking Guard. These are my people. This is my ground. My job is to manage these people and their weapons in such a way that my ground is not penetrated by any unfuckingauthorized personnel until I'm relieved in the morning.

     "Okay, listen up," I said. "Here are your orders. I ain't gonna stutter, so get it right. Your job is to protect your front. I will be responsible for keeping anybody from approaching you from behind. From now on, the only person who may approach you from behind, for any reason, is me. I will not come down unless I call first. That means that any noise you hear behind you is an enemy noise. As your immediate superior, I authorize you, in fact, I hereby fucking order you, to throw a frag grenade at any sound you hear behind you. Do not challenge, do not say, Oh excuse me Sir, is that you?, do not say a fucking thing. Just throw the grenade. Be sure to pull the pin first. If you kill some chump who wasn't supposed to be there, and there's an investigation, just tell 'em what your orders were. It'll be my ass. Don't even worry about it. Now. Grenades only. You may not shoot behind you, because you could hit someone in our tents, or you might hit me.

     "Any questions?"

     Both guys grinned their thanks: awright: man wears his stripes.

     I got on the phone and called the OD shack. "We've been having some activity around here," I said. I described in detail the orders I'd given.

     I called our own Staff NCO tent and woke up the duty SNCO and told him the same thing. I didn't ask for permission; I just told him what I'd done. He chuckled and went back to sleep.

     That was the last we heard from the boot lieutenant.

WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE

         With God on Our Side

     Steve McLaughlin and I had been buddies at 29 Palms, had both gone through radio telegraph school at San Diego, and both ended up on Okinawa in 1964. My new outfit was the Twelfth Marines, an artillery regiment headquartered at the US Army's Camp Sukiran. Steve was in another outfit on Sukiran.

     One day I ran into Steve at the camp library. "C'mere," he said, and led me into the listening room where you could play records from the library's collection. He showed me an album cover; I looked at it while he put the record on and set the needle down on the song he wanted me to hear. The album was by this beautiful young folk singer with long, flowing black hair. Her name was Joan Baez. I'd never heard of her.

     The song Steve wanted me to hear was "With God on Our Side." It was by some guy named Bob Dylan. Never heard of him either. Steve wasn’t sure what the words of the song were getting at, and wanted to know what I thought. We played it, talked about it, played it some more. We were trying to figure out what it meant. It was clearly a song about war, about what an important thing war is, about how important it is to get it right if you do it. It seemed, on the one hand, a very reverent song. "...but you don't ask questions/when God's on your side." That made sense to us. It went perfectly well with how we'd been brought up, and with how the Marine Corps had trained us: Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die....

     But was there something else? The question nagged at us as we played the song again and again. The singer and the words were so sincere that we tended to take the song at face value. She was clearly pointing out that in wars, both sides often claim to have God on their side. What that seemed to us to mean was that one side had to be wrong, since God wouldn't be on both sides at once. So it must be a song about how important it was to be on the right side. That would be us, of course.

     But would it? Could she actually be saying that both sides might be wrong? Wow. We didn't think so, but maybe. We left the library without coming to a conclusion that satisfied either of us about what the song intended. What we did agree on was that we'd sure like to meet that babe on the album cover.