Marines in Skivvies
"Metcalf, get the five‑ton and organize a shower detail."
I spread the word in the enlisted and NCO tents, stripped to my trousers, grabbed my rifle and cartridge belt, and pulled the truck up near the tents and waited while eight or ten Marines in glaring white boxer skivvies straggled out with towels over their shoulders and climbed in the back.
"If it isn't too fucking much trouble, would a couple of you gentlemen mind bringing along a rifle and at least one loaded magazine?"
Fucking tight‑ass corporal, grumblegrumble.
Fucking dumbshit candyass wingwipers don't know there's a war on, I grumblegrumbled back.
Aloud: "Alright, folks, I realize this is kind of sudden, seein' as how we've only done this once a week for a coupla months now. Harris. Get your rifle, and a magazine. Magazine in rifle, safety on, chamber empty. In case you didn't recognize it, that's a fucking order. Yes. Sorry to disturb you. Garza. Same order. Do it now, not sometime this week. I don't want us comin' back along this road in the dark, and you don't either. One rifle on either side, facing outboard. You might even watch for VC, if it's not too much trouble."
I pulled out onto the main road. The six‑by towed a giant snake of red dust behind us. We got to the shallow channel between the mainland and Ky Hoa Island just at low tide; the ford was easy. I drove around the end of the island and parked at the base of the cliff, where the wide, light waterfall splashed onto the rocks. This had been our favorite shower since we'd been outposted on Ky Hoa; we organized shower details whenever weather and tide and VC activity allowed.
It was the end of a sunny tropical day; the sun's dropping behind the top of the cliff drove its shadow across the rocks, the beach, out onto the bright water of the South China Sea. Shower‑time banter was mostly about what a pity it was to have to share such a perfect place with a lot of ugly assholes like you guys instead of a bunch of babes in bikinis, hey, how 'bout babes without bikinis, I ain't proud ‑ that kind of thing.
I drove back slower, trying to kick up less dust on us now that we were clean and still half‑wet. We piled out of the truck and straggled up the hill to where our tents were pitched just below the ridgeline. A certain languor had settled over us: the waterfall shower, the bright daylight, the waning afternoon that was balmy rather than hot, had seemed to put the war at some distance. Cold and dark and fear and shivers are of a piece; warmth and relaxation and being able to see a long way are their opposites.
So we weren't ready for the surprised yelp that caused us to raise our heads and notice the neon‑red, thumb‑sized orb that floated by just over our heads. More came, seeming to come at a lazy speed as they barely cleared the ridge, then accelerating wondrously as they passed overhead.
For me, it was slow‑motion time again. The next instant stretched itself, took up all the space and time it wanted, wandered out to the horizon in all directions, then wandered back and settled into my synapses forever. I had known immediately, but the softness of the evening light had disarmed us all. Besides, I assumed that all the other men would know as I knew, and move as I was now moving.
But: Hunh. Men? I looked around, and saw a gaggle of high‑school boys, fresh from the locker room, standing in their clean white skivvy drawers and shower shoes, their chins dropped, mouths open, their most innocent imaginable faces upturned, watching the .50 caliber tracers pass a few feet above their heads like kids staring at the lights of the first Ferris wheel ever to come to their town.
The shout came from deep inside me. I meant it to be an explosion that would shatter their reverie.
"Get rifles, boots, helmets, flak jackets, nothing else. Get in the holes. There's no time. They're at the perimeter."
I was moving as I shouted, snagging my helmet from my cot. Since the time when, as a kid, I'd badly cut my foot on broken glass playing barefoot in the sand, I'd had a fear of walking around with my feet unprotected, so I never left my cot without boots on.
They couldn't believe it, or else the instant stretched even longer than I'd thought. They were still standing, mouths agape, when I tore through them on my way up the hill. I bumped two people hard with my body, shouted into their ears “MOVE!...
MOVE!” knowing that the stunned mood was somehow a single organism that had settled over them all, and that once I had chipped one or two of them loose from their communal reverie, the rest would follow.
There was no time for more than that. The VC must be at the wire. Fuck! they never do this in daylight. But... I'd have to hold alone for a very long time, maybe two, three minutes, way longer than it takes to die. Oh, they'd come. They were kids, but they were Marines. But they were nearly naked, and this was their first time. The tents would be a sea of flailing bootlaces and flak jackets and "Where the fuck's my helmet?"
I desperately wanted a machine gun, but they were unloaded and put away. There just wasn't time. I slammed myself into the Conex‑box guard shack, grabbed an ammo can we used to store fragmentation grenades, and sprinted over the ridge and down its other side thirty yards or so to the line of fighting holes we'd dug as a last‑ditch line to fight from if the enemy ever got through the wire. This is it. I dumped out the grenades on the berm in front of me, jacked a round into my rifle's chamber, and looked down toward the wire for muzzle flashes. I would just have to hold. That was all.
It was a false alarm. A South Vietnamese gunboat operating below our position on the Song Tra Bong River had strafed a suspected VC position on the near riverbank, and the .50 caliber bullets had glanced up the hill and arced directly over us.
Howard's Hill
June, 1966. Staff Sergeant Jimmie Earl Howard was in command of an 18-man patrol of Marines from the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. These were the guys we’d see trooping past our tent on their way to the nearby chopper pad on their way to make an insertion like the one today, where a chopper would drop them on an isolated hilltop and they’d call in artillery and air strikes on enemy activity they could see below them.
I had come on duty for the midnight to 0400 watch at the Direct Air Support Center. Howard and his seventeen men had been surrounded since dusk on top of Hill 488, named Nui Vu on Vietnamese maps, near Chu Lai. The surrounding force was a highly trained, well‑equipped North Vietnamese Army (NVA) battalion.
Apparently the NVA wanted to eliminate one of the recon units which had caused them so much grief by entering their territory and calling in strikes on their training and staging areas. So they committed over two hundred men in the attempt to kill eighteen Marines whose perimeter was less than twenty meters across.
The fight went on all night long. The Marines held the crest of the hill; the Vietnamese assaulted again and again with automatic rifles, mortars, machine guns, grenades, bayonets. Several of those charges ended in short, violent, hand‑to‑hand fights. By the time the second charge was beaten back, every Marine on the hill was wounded, and ammunition was so low that they had to fire semiautomatically. By the middle of the night, the Recon boys could see, by flarelight, NVA reinforcements swarming in the valley below. PFC Joseph Kosoglow said later it had looked "just like an anthill ripped apart."([1])
We sent up flight after flight of helicopter gunships and jets to strafe and rocket the steep slopes around our men. An Air Force flare ship orbited above the hill to drop parachute flares; it was always supposed to be relieved on station when it was low on fuel. We coordinated that relief from the DASC. On the radio, I heard one Air Force pilot say he had to leave before his relief arrived because he was low on fuel, and heard a Marine piloting one of the helicopter gunships ‑ I later heard he was a major ‑ tell the Air Force pilot that he would personally shoot down the flare ship if it left before relieved. The major didn't live to be court‑martialed. He was killed before morning, flying rocket runs again and again down the throat of one of four NVA .50 caliber machine guns that were tearing up the men on the hill. The gun got the major. I don't know if the major got the gun, but he sure kept it busy for a while.
When I left the DASC just before dawn, I could see the fireworks over Hill 488: flares, rockets, the long lovely parabolic arcs of red tracers.
With dawn came better visibility, more air strikes, an airlifted company of Marine infantry. Later, we heard stories from the Recon guys, whose tents were near ours in the 1st MarDiv compound. One marine and one NVA soldier were found dead with their rifle muzzles touching each other's chests. Two of the marines' entrenching tools were found, bloody, in a circle of "mangled" NVA. One dead Marine was embracing the last man he'd killed, still gripping his KABAR knife where he'd buried it in the back of the enemy soldier in his embrace.([2])
But they'd held Hill 488. Of the eighteen Recon Marines, twelve were still alive. All were wounded. They had eight rounds of ammunition among them. The hill was called Howard's Hill by Marines after the fight. It still is, among those who remember. But the
9 West, Ibid.
Marines left the hill the day they won it.
Jimmie Earl Howard got the Medal of Honor. Years later, I talked with Jack Shulimson, a Marine Corps Museum historian who said that Howard’s hair had turned white within days after that fight, that he’d been a decorated veteran of Korea before he ever went to Vietnam, but had had a rough time of it after Nui Vu.
Howard's call sign, by the way, was "Carnival Time."
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