No light meant it wasn’t yet morning. Not even moonlight under the broken bamboo and soggy brush that cascaded down and over almost everything under it. I lay there, disturbed by the fact that I’d lost the ability to determine if I was asleep or awake. Had I slept or been awake for the whole night? Humans had to sleep. I’d read somewhere that the world’s record for going without sleep was only four or five days — about the same time I’d been in country. I didn’t feel rested or experience any of the relief I would have felt if I’d actually slept. It seemed that the night had been filled with one volley of green tracers after another plunging down on our position from the side of the untaken hill, followed by mortar rounds sent back by Lima Company’s on-loan mortar team.
For some reason the mosquitoes had let up. Had they taken in enough of the repellent to cause them to go soggy and inert? I wondered. I thought about the jungles of Vietnam — how they were nothing like I’d been led to expect from Tarzan and other Saturday morning shows from my youth. There was no “triple canopy” stuff, rising hundreds of feet into the air, with vines and liana strung everywhere. Tarzan would have had to walk like the rest of us in the lowlands of Vietnam, where lush green shoulder high brush and bamboo groves were interspersed with only an occasional large cypress, and there was plenty of mud everywhere. Reed clumps permeated every open area and allowed for hooches to be inhabitable with the monsoons approaching. The reeds could be easily cut and then laid under ponchos or the few air mattresses that weren’t filled with holes. I had no mattress since I’d never made it to supply.
My letter home was ready to go although I wasn’t sure I should send it. My wife was back home in San Francisco, waiting. My parents were in Florida doing whatever they were doing, what with my dad being a warrant officer in the Coast Guard. My brother was an army officer tanker serving in the Big Red One down South in a place called Bien Hoa. My letter detailed what was to be done when I didn’t come home. Ever. There was the government life insurance, the six month’s pay, a small private policy with a company called Mass Mutual and the pay I was owed but hadn’t been paid out yet. My list to Mary was eleven items long. I couldn’t believe that everything I had ever had could be easily described in eleven entries, wherein about six of them were rather meaningless.What to do with my Ace Double Science Fiction collection of books seemed idiotic. Would my wife react badly or understand that she had to do certain stuff without me in order to take care of herself and the baby? Would the contents of the letter be too much for her emotionally?
Dim first light allowed me to see the ground around me but not much farther. As the mist slowly lifted, I could make out where the incoming bouts of small arms fire had died out. The enemy entrenched on the sides of Hill 110 were probably wondering why no artillery had been dumped on them, I thought with a frown. The whole idea of making believe we’d taken a hill, lying to Command and then trying to survive nearby was so unlike any Marine operation that it was simply too much to take in. I wondered if I was a better more experienced officer whether I would have been able to actually command the unit and effectively take the required objective.
I struggled up and got my stuff together to make coffee. The Gunny came over, Pilson crawling behind him. Fusner appeared at my shoulder with Zero and Stevens not far behind. Only Nguyen hung back, barely visible behind everyone, his gleaming black eyes meeting mine. It was like seeing a leopard in the bush and like a leopard he disappeared after only a few seconds.
“Your nickname’s not Zero anymore,” I said to him, and the group in general. “It’s Zippo, like the lighter. Every time someone calls you Zero you correct him, and so will everyone else. Zero is a put down and you don’t have to take that here or anywhere.” I looked around but no one met my eyes except Fusner. He smiled. My first commands to the unit were about seemingly nonsense items, but where was I to start? I wasn’t even the real six actual.
“How many?” I asked the Gunny, over the too-hot lip of my canteen holder, the liquid slightly burning my lips.
“Six and three,” he answered, making his own fixings.
Stevens, Zippo and Fusner munched on crackers from the C-rations issued the day before. I accepted a cracker. Fusner handed me a tin of Peanut Butter (fortified) from somewhere in Georgia. I wondered what ‘fortified’ meant but gouged some of the stuff onto my cracker without comment. I took a few seconds to eat the whole cracker down. The peanut butter was some of the best I’d ever had in my life, although I knew some of the flavor might be enhanced by where I was and what was happening. The stuff was called Cinderella. I also wondered about why it had any name at all once packaged inside one of the rather anonymous looking ration tins.
“Six KIA and three wounded,” I noted, trying to get my tongue straight after clearing the peanut butter from my mouth. “All by small arm injuries I would presume. And why are there always more killed than injured. That doesn’t seem right.”
“The way it is,” the Gunny replied, his tone revealing a little exasperation.
“I’d like to see the bodies before they go on the chopper,” I responded.
“Sealed up, tagged and clipped,” the Gunny came right back. “Tomorrow, if we have any, maybe.”
I stared at him until he focused his eyes on mine. I waited, neither of us taking in any of our cooling coffee. I didn’t know what I was after but I knew I could not go on as the Fucking New Guy (FNG) who does nothing, yet doesn’t get sent out to be the point. The dead and wounded were my men, my responsibility, and there wasn’t much getting around that. Why there was any discussion about it at all surprised me. Not totally, because of the friendly fire casualties I knew we were enduring, but there was something more. I felt it.
“Fine,” the Gunny said, putting his coffee down and reaching into one of his cargo pockets on the outside of his right leg. I thought he was going for a cigarette but he wasn’t. He pulled out a small rubber-banded white paper package and held it out toward me with is left hand. With his right he picked up his coffee. It was his turn to wait.
I stared at the package. I’d gotten through the night frightened but not terrified. I’d gotten rid of the shakes. I wasn’t used to the dirt, grime and smell, but I had a feeling I was never going to get used to those. While I stared at the unwavering package held out before me, I vowed to never ever start another day, if I made it back to the real world, without taking a hot shower. The thought of such a shower made my mind waver a bit. Enough to make the Gunny comment.
“Well? he said, “you wanted this.” He shoved the package out a few more inches.
I took it into my right hand. The package was about the size of a child’s fist. My peanut butter fingers, undercoated with layers of grimy bug juice and dirt, made smudges on the outside of the paper. I looked over at the Gunny, who seemed positively clean and crisp compared to the rest of us. I wondered how he did it but brought my mind back to the package without asking him anything.
“What’s inside?” I asked, my eyes going back and forth between the Gunny’s and the package.
He didn’t reply. I noticed that the tableau had become frozen. Nobody was moving, eating or even breathing around me. They were all waiting. I looked over the Gunny’s shoulder, past Pilson, his radioman. Nguyen’s eyes looked out from low down inside a nearby bamboo grove. His head slowly nodded. I looked back down at the package and then back, but the inscrutable Montagnard was gone.
I slowly removed the two rubber bands, being careful not to break them. I set them gently down on my poncho cover. I unwrapped the paper. Nine morphine curettes fell into the palm of my right hand. I struggled a bit to hold them without dropping any. I looked closely. Each small lead curette was partially covered by a white label. Written in red on each were the words: “solution of morphine ½ grain .5cc”
“Morphine,” I said, feeling rather stupid. “Morphine, like with the corpsman.” I’d never seen morphine in any container before. I was surprised that the most effective and wonderful painkiller on earth came in such small packages. Each curette was no bigger than my little finger. I worked to get the package back together while my mind went into overdrive. What did the morphine, intended to be carried and applied by the corpsmen alone, have to do with being now in my possession and somehow associated with the dead and wounded?
I looked up when I was done, not sure whether I should hand the package back or hold on to it as I was seemingly intended to do. I noticed it was lighter around me. The resupply would be coming and it was an important one. The Gunny looked around at the Marines surrounding us. They all got up and left, as if he’d given them an order. But nobody had spoken. In seconds we were alone, only the faint chatter of birds starting their day sounding in the distance.
“What’s the mystery?” I asked. The Gunny said nothing.
“What is it, God damn it Gunny?” my voice rising slightly.
“When they’re hit bad enough and no medevac can come in because of the night or weather, then you have to do something,” he said, like saying the words was difficult for him.
“Yes?” I replied, not getting what he might be talking about.
“Company commander. It’s part of the CO’s job,” the Gunny went on.
“It was my job. Now it’s yours. I don’t know what to say about it. You’ll know when it’s the right time.”
“What?” I said, stated in more of a demanding tone than a question.
“When they’re too badly wounded to make it through the night you punch in three curettes, unless the Marine is really big, then it may take four,” the Gunny said back, forcefully.
I looked down at the package. I got it suddenly. My hand opened and the package fell down to the poncho cover, resting against the side of my old leather combat boot.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I finally said, in a whisper. “What in hell is this? Where is this? I’m supposed to what? Kill one of my men? Make the decision that he can’t make based on what? I’m the company commander, not God.”
“I did it last night,” the Gunny replied, his voice so sad sounding I didn’t know what to say back.
“Did it?” I uttered, not knowing why I said the words because I understood all too well what he’d done.
“How did you know?” I asked, for no reason I could think of, my mind in complete turmoil. I couldn’t believe we were having the discussion at all. I’d shot the Corpsman. I’d called in artillery dangerously close. I’d even targeted First Platoon and thought about dropping a battery of six down upon them, but the thought of injecting of an overdose of morphine into the agonized body of a living Marine kid hit me hard.
“Do the men know?” I asked.
“Please,” the Gunny answered, his voice almost a snarl. “The corpsmen tell you when it’s okay to do it. The men know. You think they want to hear one of their friends scream, cry and talk about his family while he’s dying through the night? You think they want him crying and attracting more fire that might kill them?”
I looked around. There was no one, not even Nguyen nearly invisible in the brush. No wonder, I thought to myself. No wonder no one was around. Who wanted a part of this? Maybe they’d go home one day. Maybe I’d go home one day. How was I going to tell anyone about this? What kind of war story would this be, and how many of them would there be? I thought of my Uncle Jim in that attic and I pitied him. He’d probably never told a soul on earth about what he’d done. Only a teenage kid in an attic once. Was that going to be me someday? Telling some kid in an attic about killing my own men to stop their suffering, to keep them quiet, to make an absolutely unbelievable and hellishly unexplainable situation somehow limp along and work?
“I don’t think I can do it,” I finally said, staring down at the deadly package.
“You ran from combat that first night,” the Gunny said, softly. “You haven’t run since. You learn out here or you die. You can do it. I did it. You have to do it. I had to do it.”
“Like we’re going to live anyway?” I said, shaking my head slowly, my tone bitter.
“I can’t fault your logic there,” the Gunny replied. “Pick up the package. It’s your package. You’re the company commander. You wanted to know. Now you know.”
I picked up the package. The Gunny was wrong. I’d pick up the package and carry it with me but I wouldn’t use it. I couldn’t use it.
“What were his injuries?” I said, more to cover the fact that I was not going to use the morphine than because I wanted to know.
“Private First Class Thomas Haxton from Toledo, Ohio. His dad’s running a coal hauler out of there back and forth to Taconite, Minnesota. He had three brothers and a sister. One of the grenades you might have heard in the night landed in his shallow hole. He was blown in half. Everything from his belly button on down was there but not connected anymore. He couldn’t live. He couldn’t really be alive but he was. He told me about his family, what he wanted to be, his girlfriend and even his dog. It’s a….”
“Stop,” I said, raising my left hand palm up. “Please.” My first emotion since landing at Da Nang coursed through me. Tears ran down my face. I was glad it wasn’t lighter yet. The Gunny could see them but maybe nobody else around. And then I felt worse. I realized I wasn’t crying for Haxton; I was crying for me. I was feeling sorry for myself while my men were dying like flies all around me.
“What was I supposed to do?” the Gunny asked.
I looked him the eyes. He hadn’t asked the question rhetorically, I saw. He was really waiting for some sort of answer from me. From me. I gripped the package in my right hand so tightly I was afraid morphine would squirt out all over. I brushed my face with my left hand as best I could. I felt a slight breeze. The resupply chopper would be coming in real soon. The medevac would be going out with the bodies and the wounded. A slight breeze swept some fresher air across my face and body. I was alive. Somehow still alive. The Gunny in front of me was alive too. And waiting.
“You did the right thing,” I said, forcing my voice to be flat and sincere. “You did the only thing. Nobody’s coming for us. You gifted Haxton out like a Marine instead of a weeping child.”
The Gunny’s shoulders slumped slightly. “Thank you, sir,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.
It was only the second sir I’d managed to collect from him and it was one I would rather not have had.
30 Days Home | Next Chapter >>
hello jim
i’m reading this out of sequence. a usmc friend sent me the ashau part. i find i can read for about 15 minutes and then i have to stop and do something else…even if it is just get up and walk outside.
i was patrol leader of partyline one (alpha co., 3rd recon bn). we were inserted onto the ridgeline bordering the southern ashau on 1 aug 67. a second patrol, monotype, was inserted 4 klicks east of us on the 2nd. lt. al weh (ran for gov. of new mexico) was the patrol leader. both 8 man patrols. like you mentioned, no arty support, comms via aircraft and a mountain top relay that was very sporadic, and lots of nva and montegnard spotters.
both patrols were in support of operation cloud. cloud was to be a raid into the valley by 2/4 (rein), a vietnamese bn, and the vietnamese black panthers (recon company). long story short, both patrols were hit, (partyline 3 aug, monotype 4 aug) and had casualties. 3 of my 8 man patrol and 1 ch-46 crewchief were kia, al’s patrol was shot up on extract and he was seriously wounded.
op cloud was cancelled on the 4th my III maf. hardly any references to it…you have to really dig. (hmm-164, 3rd recon, III maf, fmfpac). i had some written correspondence with the bn cdr. of 2/4 years later. he told me he wasn’t aware that any recon teams were in his area of operation, and that he had massive arty and air prep scheduled for the area around the old airstrip and lz. my patrol plan included reconing the airstrip and getting extracted with the birds that brought the lead elements (golf company) of 2/4 into the zone, however, we didn’t make it that far before we made contact. i have to assume, but still wonder, if that lz prep would have been caught by the higher-ups and cancelled or shifted.
those we left behind were finally recovered by the joint casualty resolution teams in ’96. they now rest in arlington and michigan.
bad place that lived up to its name.
afterthought…a section of army 175mm had moved into fsb cumberland the day before, but had not been registered. i called in a mission with a large offset. they fired a few rounds with no change on the guns and the splashes were widely dispersed. later told that the spades had not dug in sufficiently and that we were at their max range in any case.
semper fi…best vietnam writing i have read.
Thank you. Most sincerely. Alan Weh and I worked in Albuquerque New Mexico during the 80s.
He was DIA and I was CIA.
He had an air transport company and I had an insurance company.
Extraordinary that you should mention his name.
I was unaware of
his work in the A Shau just before I got there.
I knew he was a Marine Officer, of course,
and remained in the reserves (he didn’t get shot).
Thanks for the vital information you have provided and some of your own story.
Semper fi,
Jim
i passed this on to al
semper fi
bill
Thanks Bill. Always was proud of the work Alan did and his solid integrity.
Didn’t always agree with him but what the hell, this is America.
Thanks for that.
Semper fi,
Jim
Such good writing. I damn near got choked up reading this. Thank you for your service, and thank you for writing this.
Thank you, Dog,
Share the story with friends and have Merry Christmas.
Semper fi,
Jim
Anytime I talked to a Vietnam Vet about my regret that I didn’t go to Nam, ( USMC 0311 73-75) I hated when they said ” your lucky you didn’t miss anything “. After reading your experience I realize how true that is. I believe you didn’t choose the regrettable things that were done. They were there already waiting for you and you how to adapt or die. It’s despicable that you had to worry about getting killed by your own plus the Vietnamese. I’m glad you made it back to the World. Semper Fi
It was surprising more than dispicable. Not ready for that kind of stuff when you are so young.
At least not me. I am glad you didn’t have to go so we can enjoy this communication together.
If you’d gone witb me then it would be likely you would be fairly silent.
Semper fi,
Jim
James I just wanted to say how much I am enjoying reading about your Viet-Nam experiences. I was born in 53 and had a draft number of 39 got my draft notice and physical but Nixon stopped the draft and I wasn’t inducted. Even so this was my generations war and I was touched by it in many ways. I remember going to see the movie Green Beret with a friend and his brother who was shipping out to Viet-Nam and how gung ho he was but when he returned he was different. Another memory is of my neighbor across the street, a young sergeant of 22 with a pregnant wife, he used to play ball with us younger kids and we all looked up to him as our hero. I was home when the notification officer delivered the notice that he had been killed in action in a place called Long An in 1968.I still remember hearing his wife sobbing from inside their home. You are a talented writer who is touching the lives of many from that era in our nations history, glad you survived to tell your story.
Thank you so much Ken. I am working at it. The writing, I mean.
That war snatched some of our best young men and snuffed them out.
And there were so many ways to die out there in that damned jungle.
I write of many of them, many of the undiscussed and unmentionable ways.
Hope it helps some. I didn’t set out to help. The comments have made me want to.
Comments like your own. Thank you for the continuing motivation.
Semper fi
Jim
James–Enjoying your narrative. I was in M/3/9, 1968-69. I see you were also in a ‘Mike’ Company. Maybe I missed it, but what was your Regiment?
Go Noi Island….Brother do we have some memories there…in and out of the Arizona Territory…along the “trail of tears’…working up into the throat of the A Shau….waiting…knowing what was coming….climbing ropes hand over hand in the night, up the mud soaked, vine infested hillsides of the Que Sons…into the teeth of the 57 calibers they pointed down hill instead of into the sky because they knew the planes wouldn’t be coming til dawn…. glad my 81’s stayed with you…S/F
Well Larry, it’s strange to consider the Island without the misery and discomfort of the physical part of all that. You portray some of it like it was.
Air cover was so iffy in those times. The Phantoms were too fast and inaccurate, the B-52 strikes always so far away. Only the Skyraiders would come above at times and then orbit for hours and hours of God blessed droning quiet. But then they had to go home too. Thanks for your comments and so happy your life is anything but a ‘trail of tears’ now. semper fi, jim
Stories never before told. Riviting.
Thank you Tim. I’ve not seen any of this stuff or I guess I would be reading it avidly instead of writing it! Platoon touched a bit on a slight bit of it.
Full Metal Jacket and Fields of Fire caught some too, especially the training and in some ways the way it is supposed to be. This is just about how it
really was. But only in my little area of Gonoi Island in that time and with that outfit.
Semper fi,
And thanks Tim,
Jim
Jim,
When you re-read “Devils Guard,” you’ll see they did the same thing. Same sad necessity, same sad place, just different times and faces. I think it’s part of the unspoken “burden of command” they couldn’t tell us about at Quantico. If I had faced the same situation, I hope I’d have had the courage to do the same.
From the “for what it’s worth department,” I hope any guilt and nightmares have ceased for the brave warriors who performed this sad act of kindness in the midst of the unspeakable madness and survived… I’m sure those they helped do, too.
S/F,
Tim
Thinking back on Quantico Tim is interesting. We went through most of our
classwork at Presley Obannon Hall listening to the Tijuana Brass. It was
Major R.I.K. Kramer’s favorite music. We got no discussions or instructions about
what Vietnam was really like and nobody came back from there to be interviewed. In fact, now,
in retrospect, it’s not surprising. Who among us would have gone? If we had gone whom among us
would have allowed ourselves to be sent to the front line units in the shit?
Semper fi,
Jim
Amazing stuff….my Uncle was in Cu Chi ’66-67, 25th Div 2nd Brig 1st Bn Mech 5th Inf Reg, still won’t talk about it to this day. The realness you bring to my mind is unsettling and yet for me, necessary. He did tell me once when I was a teenager that the only way to have survived was to make yourself truly believe you were already dead and just waiting for the actuality of it to happen. I went into the USAF in ’76, I do not have the words to express the amount of respect I have always had for you guys, and the sadness for you at the same time. GOD Bless you all…
The ‘realness’ Richard. I have to be careful of admissions in this war odyssey. There are those who might feel that my conduct
was pretty piss poor in that I lived in such fear and ignorance of reality. I hope the revelations do allow for more people who were there
to read and ‘open up.’ So many war stories need to be told and so many of them are anything but self-gratifying or heroic, which makes them
pretty hard to tell. And some of them are down right incriminating! War includes a loss of law and decent human behavior but that does
not mean that laws and rules of behavior are not retroactively applied.
Semper fi,
Jim
Gripping to the point feel almost there.
Thank you Pete. I’ve worked at the writing over the years in many genres. I didn’t expect to
do quite so acceptably well, so far, in laying this out. I was re-writing my diaries and letters back there
and the ‘filler’ just came rushing at me.
Semper fi,
Jim
Hard times
I didn’t know those would be about the hardest times of my life. I was so young. And it wasn’t the circumstance that
was so very hard, although the circumstances were dire indeed. No, it was the social side that was so hard. The “Lord of the Flies”
decent into near anthropoid behavior on the part of my fellow man, Marine, civilian and enemy alike. That was hardest of all Jon.
Thanks for the comment and Semper fi,
Jim