Tho An
The door gunner nodded at what he'd heard through his earphones, leaned back from peering over his weapon at the jungle below, and looked around at us. Helmeted heads turned to him. He made a quick down‑up motion with his right hand. We jacked the bolts of our weapons ‑ most of us carried M14 rifles; Lt. O’Neill carried a .45 caliber “grease gun”([1]) ‑ to chamber a round. We checked our safeties. Engine and rotor noise made it too loud to talk, but talk was unnecessary. Glances ricocheted from face to face with the spark of here we go. The men from "F" Company looked longer at Lieutenant O'Neill, Chituras and me than at one another. They already knew who they were, had been in enough combat together to know who'd do what when the shit hit the fan. The three of us were Marines from the air wing who'd come along as Tactical Air Control Party. Unknowns. I met their searching eyes with as much steadiness as I could muster.
The chopper dropped; waist‑high grass welled up under us and was flattened by rotor wash. The door gunner became a demon bent on clearing his aircraft so it could get back in the air: "Out!out!OUT!" We jumped out the door, bent low, ran to the edge of the clearing. No firing yet.
"F" Company, Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, had orders to approach the village of Tho An, about seven and a half miles southwest of Chu Lai, and, if fired upon from the direction of the village, to level it. Any villagers who wanted to leave could do so. They would be rounded up and taken by helicopter, with what possessions they could carry, to a refugee camp.
We fanned out, got on line with the grunt platoons leading and our headquarters group a few yards behind them, and advanced on Tho An, still walking in waist-high grass. Bayonets sniked onto bayonet lugs along the line. Lieutenant O'Neill nodded toward Chituras and me; my bayonet was already out of the scabbard and I was working its ring over the flash suppressor of my M14 when I heard Captain Love (no shit, that was his name), the "F" Company commander who was a few steps in front of me, say "That's it, that's what I like to see, gimme some steel on the end of it."
Someone did fire on "F" Company from the village, and we began the work of leveling it. First, the firing from the village was answered by the sharp cracks of the company's rifles; machine guns were set up and added their staccato voices. Then we pulled back and sat and felt the earth tremble under the artillery barrage, and heard those peculiarly sharp explosions made by the splintering steel casings of artillery rounds.
Next came the F4 Phantoms, sharks of the air, the sinister, howling jets with their grotesquely turned-down black snouts (grotesque, yet beautiful to every infantryman on our side), their wide, low-slung, swept-back wings and high triangular tails: the 250-pound bombs were dropped with a straight approach and a quick, turning pull-out, the bombs falling like a handful of pickles and going off in quick succession. The napalm runs were long, graceful arcs. As each Phantom began to climb away from the bottom of its arc, it would loose one long silver obelisk to tumble end-over-end, flashing in the sun, until it hit behind the trees and sent a cloud of red-orange flames laced with black smoke into the feathered border between green palm-fronds and blue sky.
Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began. Others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the F-4 Phantoms - sharks of the air with high triangular tails and turned-down black snouts - finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.
Attached to “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, I was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements or attempts to flee.
They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot Company's combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C‑4 from the blast. A sergeant cursed the engineer for using too much explosive. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.
I'd imagined battle, but I'd never imagined this. The children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers' arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, yet feared my rifle and bayonet more. They wailed in awful concert with their children. The older women joined.
But the old man: he didn't wail, cower, try to flee the explosions or shrink back from my bayonet. He just stared at me, afraid but with that resigned, calculated, limited fearfulness of one who is going to die before too long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I had ever seen on a human face.
Something happened, as I looked down my rifle and bayonet at the old man and women and children I was holding captive, which would determine the course of the rest of my life. I looked at those people, then looked around me. I saw, in the bright noon light, a veil dropping. There was even a feeling of the veil's movement having a direction: top to bottom, sky to earth. The veil seemed transparent, leaving the artillery-blasted fronds of the palm trees, their napalm-charred trunks, the flaming thatch and skeletal bamboo frameworks of the huts, the urgent movements of the Marines of "F" Company, the terrified people at my feet, all looking exactly as they had a moment before. Yet they also looked completely different. I can't explain that, except to say that suddenly, and ever after, I saw the world through different eyes.
But it wasn’t just my present and future which I saw differently. That day in Tho An, a process began of re-seeing my entire life, from as far back as I could remember, and of realizing that a gradual accretion of boyhood experiences, beginning long before I entered Marine Corps boot camp, were what had made me a warrior.
I was still guarding the screaming women and their screaming children and the one silent old man with the hate-filled stare. The transparent veil had dropped. I was looking around me with different eyes than the ones I’d been looking through when we entered Tho An.
A sergeant cursed the engineers for using too much explosive, not because it was terrifying the Vietnamese, but because they might injure some of us. The huts burned with a popping sound caused by the expansion of air trapped between joints of the bamboo; the sounds were a tragicomical mimicry of the heavy rifle fire of the earlier morning, and the resemblance kept both Americans and Vietnamese on edge.
The grass was black, the smoke was black and had that chemical edge lent to it by the burnt powder which lingered in the hollow where the village burned, bamboo popped and fizzled, women wailed and sobbed, and voices of the Americans lost that cracked, rusty‑razor edge they'd had in the heat of the fight. We herded the Vietnamese to the center of a rice paddy outside the village where the green pregnant-dragonfly CH-34 choppers sat with rotor wash flattening the green rice stalks and kicking some of them into the air; choppers swallowed the people and took off for someplace their passengers had never seen. We moved couple of hundred yards from what had been the village and spread out to eat C‑rations and tend to our weapons.
We set up in a rice paddy where irrigation dikes afforded some cover and other paddies made the approaches to our position visible on all sides. But there was no water, and most of the company's canteens were empty. A water detail was assembled to return to the village and fill them. One man went for each squad. I was always thirsty; I volunteered for Air Control Party.
The village well had a stone wall around it which formed a cylinder three feet across and about as high. We gathered around it and someone tossed down the large B‑ration can on the end of a hemp rope which the local people had been using to raise their water, and began filling canteens with it.
The shots came in one long burst of full automatic fire. We heard the bullets pass, then the report of the weapon. The bullets made snapping sounds as they passed, which meant that they were very close. A bullet sounds like a large bumblebee when it has come a long way and is nearly spent; it sounds like a smaller, faster, more determined insect when it is still at full velocity but passing at some distance; and it makes a whine if it is a ricochet. The ones that snap are the ones that kill you. Well. That one, that last one, you don't hear.
The canteens clattered and fell to the ground among us Marines who were already there, belly down. The First Sergeant in charge of our group, a tall, solid, quietly effective veteran alongside whose name I'd heard whispered the holy name Guadalcanal, remained on his feet off to one side where he had posted one of the security men for the detail. He bellowed "Well? I don't hear any return fire!" like he was scolding children.
Rifles opened up. The First Sergeant, called "Top" as they all are, stayed on his feet without stooping and without drawing the only firearm he carried, a .45 double‑action revolver in a leather holster on his left hip. There was no cover; a few thin saplings were the only vegetation near him.
As the burst of enemy fire ended, one of the men who had been picketed on the far side of the trail got up and hopped on one foot across to where we were spread out around and behind the well, holding his other foot in both hands as he hopped. I saw his face clearly as he hopped past, and it bore a perfectly comical expression which mixed surprise, fear, pain, and the relief that came, the instant after he knew he was hit, with the realization that he would not die from his wound. I remember his expression, though I didn't laugh; and I will always remember the reaction which forced itself upon me before any concern for the man who was hit: I'm glad it wasn't me.
"Automatic rifle up!" Top shouted above the rifle fire.
Nobody moved.
I wasn't part of "F" company; three of us had been attached to it for this operation. And this was the first time I'd ever been shot at, while all the others who now hugged the earth around the well were veterans of other fire fights. When Top called for an automatic rifle, no one had moved, which meant that no one in the detail was carrying one except me. If someone had had one, he'd have moved. These weren't people who waited until next week to obey an order in combat; they were Marines, and seasoned ones at that.
The M14 rifle converts to full automatic when a small selector is installed on the receiver; I had borrowed one from Angelo Walters for this operation.
Top bellowed again: "Give me an automatic rifle up here!" His command was echoed by several riflemen.
"Guess that means me," I said. The words either never left my lips or were caught by the din and swept away. I turned the selector so the little tit pointed up, made sure there was a round in the chamber, decided to leave the safety on. “Movin’ up!” I yelled through the din, jumped up, and ran. I trusted the men I ran in front not to shoot me as I crossed in front of them. They kept firing, but didn’t hit me.
It was only twenty or thirty yards, but a long way: space and time, and movement through them, are all different when you're being shot at. I remember being at once confused yet possessed of an incredible concentration and direction of my physical being. I remember the world being crowded past the bursting point with disjointed and powerful sights, sounds, and smells; and I myself seemed to be tight and strong but slightly disoriented as I moved through that slipshod universe. I especially remember the way I ran: the urgency of the situation seemed to call for non‑normal motion. Instead of using just what energy was required to move quickly from one place to the next, I slammed my foot to the ground with each step as though it would fail as a step if I didn't give it all my strength. Later, I was sure that I must have left very deep footprints in the dust of that clearing.
I got to where the first sergeant was standing, and stopped. The universe reeled, shuddered, down‑shifted, and allowed individual plants and trees to re‑proclaim their existence to me. I spun out of the world in flux, with no center to its play of forces, to look the first sergeant in the eyes ‑ they were ice‑blue and ice‑calm ‑ and then the world's forces had a center. It wasn't him, though ‑ or rather, for a moment it was him, then I felt it in myself. His gaze slipped past the skin of my face, got inside me, read me. He had never seen me before, had never fought with me before, and as a commander now had to decide whether to trust me to hold the most exposed flank of the detail in his charge.
"You okay?" he asked quietly. What wonderful knowledge: he'd been in so many firefights that he knew he could be heard above the rifle fire by speaking in a low voice close to my ear; he also knew the calming effect that could have on me. A less capable man would have shouted from four feet away, unnerving us both.
"Yeah," I answered, but I let his eyes hold contact with mine until he was satisfied with the answer he found there. He turned to go. "Uh...wait a minute...." I felt really sheepish. We'd come on the detail not expecting anything to happen, all of us without our helmets, and I, for one, without buckling my cartridge belt. It was hanging loosely from my suspender straps, comfortable but hardly functional. I needed both hands to buckle it, and there was this rifle: I didn't want to lay it down for fear of getting dirt or leaves in the barrel or the action ‑ that would be enough to explode it in my face if I fired ‑ and the skinny saplings afforded me nothing to lean it against.
"Hold this, willya?" I leaned the rifle towards him. He almost smiled. (Rifles were still firing, snap!snap! into the brush). A corporal doesn't normally ask a first sergeant to hold his rifle, especially when the latter has something as important to do as keeping a couple of dozen Marines alive. But the situation he was leaving me with demanded that I and my equipment be capable of sudden, violent, and efficient motion; and the belt, which carried my ammunition, fighting knife, bayonet, two canteen pouches, and several grenades, had to be buckled.
He held the rifle while I buckled the belt. I took the rifle back, raised it to level, and clicked the safety off as I turned toward the danger. The first sergeant pointed over my shoulder in the direction from which the fire had come and said quietly, with his mouth close enough to my ear that his voice came through the sound of the rifles, "Machine pistol, I think. Cover us while we pull back. You be the last man out.”
Well, friends and neighbors, I was not thinking about letters from home, cheeseburgers, duty to my country, or even women: I was one hundred percent there, in my skin, and my every cell had eyes that were looking into the wall of underbrush. And that beautiful rifle, which my buddies razzed me for cleaning so often and so thoroughly, was my father confessor, my mother, my long‑lost lover.
I saw every leaf, and the one behind it, and catalogued each slight motion and investigated it for the possibility of having been caused by something other than the slight breeze that stirred in the clearing. My right index finger moved forward in the trigger guard to make sure the safety was off, then came back again to rest lightly on the trigger. A flood of satisfaction came as I remembered having personally filed the sear and hammer lugs to lighten the trigger squeeze, having then completed the job in a painstaking, craftsmanlike fashion by taking first a fine whetstone and then emery and crocus cloth to the pieces I had filed, so the trigger release would be not only light, but perfectly smooth. And it was this very rifle, not some other of the thousands or millions like it, that I had fired to score 234 out of 250 on the range in California, the second highest score among over a hundred shooters.
These thoughts passed through my mind and into my hands, eyes, and reflexes as I scanned the brush. They summed themselves: I might die today, but as far as what I do will make a difference in that, I and my tools are ready.
Behind and to my left, there were groups of noises that chronicled the gathering and pulling back of the detail: shouts, the clanking of canteens suspended from the chains which keep the caps from being lost (we still had WWII era metal canteens), and rifle fire from those who were still covering the direct front of the detail. But my brain allowed entry from that part of the world only what I needed in order to function over in my corner: I heard what they shouted to one another when it had to do with how soon they would have their equipment gathered and pull back. One of the last men out, who apparently had been charged with gathering canteens still scattered around the well, yelled back at the first sergeant, "Hey Top! This canteen's got a bullet hole in it. Shall I shoot it up?" That communication registered because when the man who shouted it had gone, the forward-most riflemen would pull back, then it would be my turn. Back in the time‑distant, space‑distant, cold and foggy winter hills of Camp Pendleton in California, our training had branded on our souls the maxim that Marines do not leave behind anything the enemy can use: you take it with you or you destroy it. The emotional content of the shout was the same mixture of fear and the determination to do what was expected of him that had filled me during my ungainly sprint across the clearing, and was with me now. The realization gave me something I could use: I saw that, veteran or no, the Marine in the clearing was experiencing things pretty much as I was, and if the world was spinning, that was more the world's fault than ours, and in spite of all the unpredictable motion we would both do what we were expected to do.
I didn't hear Top's reply, if he made one.
The last canteens clanked off in the direction of safety. The people who had peopled the clearing, and who were the reason for my facing down the jungle welded around a rifle, left a plaintive void behind them. Something strong ‑ fear, exactly ‑ pulled me to look back toward the clearing, to go into it quickly and rush off in the direction of the clanging canteens and safety. But: Stay until relieved. I didn't move and I didn't turn my head. I chose to know, rather than merely believing, that someone knew I was still there, and would include me in their plans.
A voice from behind the well answered my knowing: "They're out. Come on. I'll cover ya."
Dope‑takers talk about a "rush": a flood of feeling which might be an onslaught of glittering perceptions, or a massive euphoria, or a burst of frenetic or creative energy; and once that word established its meaning, it came to be used outside drug situations to describe a person's being flooded with experience.
"Rush" is a good word for what coursed through me when I heard the words from behind the well. We were varsity players in the Big Game: here was where you moved in such select company that, while holding only half a hand, you bet your whole pile on a partner whose face you might never have seen.
"Okay," I answered, "I'm comin' out." I moved sideways and back, keeping my rifle and my attention pointed toward the jungle wall, and assigning a portion of my brain to live momentarily in my feet to make decisions as each foot came to the ground, unguided by eyes, about the footing there, so my lateral movement would not cause me to lose control over my bodyrifle.
I got to the trail, which came into the clearing from the direction of safety and left it in the direction of danger. I was a few yards in front of the well. The man behind the well had been firing into the jungle wall as I moved.
"I'm last man out. I got it. Go!" I said, crouching beside the trail, and pointing my rifle to cover the patch of jungle wall he was firing into.
He got up and moved, and my hearing of the rhythm of his steps told me that he was walking backwards to give me more support if I needed it, until I had backed free of the clearing. I began walking backward. He would fire past me, then say, "hold up" and I'd cover him while he backed up or reloaded, then resumed firing. He also guided my steps, knowing that I was our critical defender because I was farthest in the direction of danger and because I had the automatic rifle. This all meant that we couldn't afford to have me looking down at my feet unless he specifically took responsibility for covering our front. It's like what must pass between a pilot and co-pilot: somebody must always have responsibility for flying the airplane.
"Ditch," he said. I stopped. "I got it," he said, "go ahead and look down." I glanced back and down, knowing he would cover the clearing for me. I saw the ditch and crossed it as he fired a couple of rounds past me, and returned my attention to the clearing as I continued to move backward. We backed all the way down the trail, across a rice paddy, over a dike, and into the company bivouac, before I turned around. I opened my mouth to thank him. All I saw was a hundred Marines; he'd disappeared among them.
Some of the canteens had been filled; we drank, ate, and saw to our weapons and equipment, then saddled up and moved out. There was another objective; we were to move a few kilometers in its direction before nightfall.
It was still full afternoon as we made our way through the jungle, mostly climbing, often walking upstream in little streambeds that offered virtually the only way through the foliage. The officers and NCO's kept after us to keep several paces' distance between us so as not to afford a ripe target for automatic weapons or grenades, and alternate men carried their weapons pointed to opposite sides of the column.
Searching for a place to make camp in a combat situation is very different from searching for a place to make camp when you're camping. Shelter, fuel, water, and flat areas for sleeping make a good campsite; cover, visibility over the avenues of approach, and, in Vietnam, a clear space for resupply and medevac helicopters to land, were first considerations for a combat bivouac. Seldom do tactical requirements match those of comfort.
We spent the night not too far from Tho An, and marched all the next day, making our way through dense foliage by walking as much as possible in streambeds. It was hot and humid, and Chituras and I were trading back and forth the job of humping the fifty-pound single sideband radio, along with our personal weapons and gear. Sometime in the middle of the day, the heat got to Chituras and the whole company had to hold up while he rested and drank water and swallowed salt pills. Our position wasn't a good one for defense. The grunts weren't too happy about an outsider holding them up in such a spot, but they mostly kept their grumbling to themselves. The 50-pound radio was my baby from then on.
In late afternoon we stopped in an open place on a steep hillside, and set up in the middle of the space so that it was a long rifle shot to any jungle edge that could conceal numbers of the enemy. There was no water; a detail was sent back to the last stream we had forded. I went with that one too, so I could drink my fill in addition to the two full canteens I'd have when I got back. We weren't ambushed this time.
Company headquarters, including the three of us in the Tactical Air Control Party, was roughly in the center of the clearing, and the rifle platoons set up night security perimeter in the treeline. The company commander, Captain Love, a professional officer who considered himself to be in the prime of his life and would probably have been saddened by a promotion that would distance him from the richest set of experiences he knew ‑ commanding a company of Marine infantry in combat ‑ was seated on the ground a few yards away from me. I could hear him talking on the radio with battalion headquarters, and also with “Carnival Time,” a Recon patrol that was in the area, and again as he gathered his platoon leaders around him.
Not long after we had settled in, we began to hear small arms fire from beyond the ridge which formed one boundary of our clearing. The distance was such that we could barely hear rifle fire, but soon machine guns began working and their increased volume floated easily across the ridge to us.
We saw the captain looking at his map and then orienting it in relation to the terrain; he said the firing came from the village which was our objective for tomorrow. Then, as we listened, a new voice entered the arena, and all over our clearing, men stopped in mid‑stride, white plastic spoons paused before open mouths, prostrate forms bent suddenly in the middle as their torsos raised to listen.
"Fifty," Captain Love said quietly, affirmation that the rest of us hardly needed: there was a .50 caliber machine gun working in that village ‑ not just the standard infantry .30 caliber or 7.62mm, of which we had heard several, which fire more or less 700 rounds a minute and can kill a lot of people in a hurry. But this was the awesome, slower anti‑aircraft and anti‑vehicle weapon that takes the lurch of a man's whole weight to cock it, that sends a solid shock through you when you fire it, and that hideously dismembers humans who are struck by its thumb‑size bullets.
The skipper cocked his head, listening attentively to the conversation of exploding powders and splitting metals from beyond the ridge. The sound grew louder, fuller. We all looked at him. He had a better ear; he would sort it out. As the volume increased, he said, "There's another one." Jesus. A Viet Cong village important enough to have a fifty is home for a lot of angry people, a lot of angry weapons. Two fifties is really rare, really scary.
It got louder, sharper, and went on for a long time before it started to subside with the waning light. We were still watching the skipper for a summation. He gave it: "Two, maybe three fifties working over there."
"Any chance they're ours?" one of his lieutenants asked.
"If they were ours, I'd know about it," he said.
Just as dark was falling, he gave his instructions to platoon leaders: "Tell 'em to see to their weapons and grenades, and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning we go in standing up, fixed bayonets, the whole company on line, headquarters included."
I heard him, and Lieutenant O'Neill looked at me and raised his eyebrows in a question. I nodded. That exchange constituted his passing of the order, and my acceptance of it.
When we had stopped, it was still very hot, and Chituras hadn't fully recovered from his heat exhaustion. There were no trees or bushes to which we could rig a poncho for shade. I had fixed my bayonet on my rifle and stuck it in the ground for a makeshift tent pole. I'd carried Chituras' rifle with me on the second water detail.
I was fairly sure there was no grit in the barrel when I retrieved my rifle from under the poncho, but I broke it down, slowly, meticulously, and punched out the bore. I checked each magazine, removing the first few cartridges, wiping them off, making sure no sand or debris had gotten in to where it could impede the feed mechanism, and replaced each magazine in its pouch, with the cartridges pointing forward and the magazines upside down so that if I had to reload in a hurry I wouldn't have to turn a magazine in my hand.
As I worked on my weapons, I was thinking. It was like an experiment in qualitative analysis: certain ingredients, in prescribed quantities, few in number and accurately named, yielded a precipitate of a given color. I was surprised that there was no pulse thundering in my head and that my life was not passing in review before me and that I was not trembling before what would happen tomorrow morning. But my surprise was strangely mild: the situation had its own exigencies, they were clearly defined, and surprise was not useful there. The exigencies were that in a few hours I would be one of a number of men who would enter a fearful situation in which some would die; and I, like the rest, did not want to die. I had two choices about how to spend my time between now and then: I could sit and contemplate the sweetness of life, in case this should be my last taste of it; or I could do everything possible to increase my chances of being still alive tomorrow night.
Quietly, easily, I made the latter choice, as did, so far as I know, all the men in the clearing. At least, there was no blubbering, no whining, and hardly even any talk. Each man simply went about his business. It's not that no one thought about dying; that thought is unavoidable here. It's just that after being elbow‑to‑elbow with death in its reality, not much thought is needed to describe its possibilities: it's the end of all you care about. So you face it, acknowledge the possibility of its nothingness taking the place of your life, and then turn to those efforts which tend to throw the odds in your favor, perhaps spending a moment musing about what those odds might be.
I finished with my rifle and ammunition, checked my fighting knife and bayonet and their scabbards, checked to see that all my grenade fuses were tight, rolled the cartridge belt with its precious cargo into a pillow, pulled my beloved rifle up into a steady embrace, said goodnight to the night ‑ a fine, starry tropical night ‑ and slept soundly for eight hours.
The next morning, they changed our orders. We were pulled out by helicopter – this time, the larger CH-46s that could carry nearly a platoon each - and a three‑company battalion was sent in to do the job "F" Company had been about to take on.
[1] Once on the island of Ky Hoa, on a special security detail for a visiting general, I’d been armed with a grease gun because it was fully automatic and could do a lot of damage quickly at short range. When I looked it over, I saw the manufacturer’s stamp: Mattel Toy Company.
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