Full dawn would not come. I lay there, looking at my little Fusner-dug moat. The mist had stayed all night, which I now knew to be the precursor to the monsoon season. It could get worse. It would get worse. Just how in hell God would figure out a way to make it worse, I didn’t know. Only that it would definitely get worse. If I hadn’t lost my sense of humor I would have laughed. How about keeping every little bit of “Dante’s Inferno” the way it was written while adding pouring rain for twenty-four hours a day? I’d read in college that the highest suicide rate ever experienced fully by any organized body of humans occurred in India after the British took over the tea plantations up north there. It had rained for two hundred and twelve days and nights straight. Fifteen percent of the entire occupying British force committed suicide before the rain let up. Many of the dead were the wives of the English officers.
I rubbed my face with both hands, the repellent oil now a part of my skin structure so it felt like rubbing a soft lubricated pumpkin. I knew why morbid thoughts dominated my mind. I’d just killed three men up close. I hadn’t seen their faces, but guessed they were black Marines sent on a mission to kill me. They’d crawled across the mud flat, probably scared to death, and they’d died the way they feared they might. Killed by an insanely frightened lieutenant who didn’t know, or couldn’t figure out, what else to do. The fact that I didn’t care enough also concerned me. I couldn’t reach any center of my soul where guilt, sorrow or contrition should be. It reminded me of being a kid again after confession at the Catholic Church. As soon as I’d confessed my sins, then repeated the appropriate ‘Our Fathers’ and ‘Hail Marys’, that was it. Done. Sins forgotten. I knew I should feel bad. Now there was no confession. No forgiving Catholic priest smiling wisely down upon me, assigning punishment prayers. Just me, the bugs, the mud and my .45.
“Fuck,” I whispered to myself.
Tomorrow, if it would only come, would probably be the last time I saw the light of day. I doubted even the Gunny could save me from the two opposing factions, both now committed to making sure my existence on the planet was over. I tossed and turned about killing the men and whatever feelings I should have had, but didn’t. When I stopped thrashing about, my thoughts congealed back into my own personal world of terror. Thoughts of what discoveries the morning would certainly bring faded to backstage as a plan began to hatch itself in my mind. I grabbed my flashlight with it’s little hole cover in place, took my one-to-twenty-five-thousand photo map from my pocket and crawled out of my hooch.
They do make tracer rounds for the .45 Colt automatic. I had a case of them in my ammo bunker at Bien Hoa. They crud up the barrel up like nothing you ever saw before and make the pistol a bitch to clean!
You know I heard that, but never in the Nam. I heard it after I got home but never saw or used any of those rounds.
Thanks for that knowledge. How did they work? How much stand off distance did the rounds have before lighting up?
Interesting stuff.
Semper fi, and thanks a lot,
Jim
Was it 4th platoon men or 1st , here you say they were Sweet Daddy’s men but later you say they were Jurgen’s men
Your writing is brilliant,,,,from another chapter I never saw any crocodiles or tigers in Viet Nam but they were there,,,,just one deer one night that tripped our trip flares and was almost blown away by a claymore and snakes,,,,mostly bamboo vipers the three pace snake,,,,while we did have tension in our company I saw a civilian murdered that i did not know would happen or i would have tried to stop it and I was worried about those men putting a round in me in the next firefight but the tensions in your company are riveting as writing and the stress was bad enough about being killed or wounded by the NVA or VC without it being compounded by being killed by your own men….Training was totally inadequate everyone should have been cross trained from fire missions to weapons to a medics work,,,,great story!!!
Thank you for the compliment. Means a lot, especially on a rainy miserable Sunday morning in Wisconsin!
I am about my work and yes, it was truly sad just how little training we got in any area that might have really
made a difference. Thanks for the comment and for putting it up here.
Semper fi,
Jim
This is compelling writing. It brings to life what some of my friends quietly told me about their experience in Viet Nam. Thank you
Thanks for your input, Richard. So many have kept “quiet”.
Is this a book your going to put out? If so I’ll buy it first day it goes on sale! Waiting on next story as each one goes deep and I go back in time and start breathing slow again.
Thank you James. It makes me feel like I’m being successful reaching back in time to the
guys who served like you. It’s important to me that this interpretation of what really happened back there be as accurate a portrayal as I can make it.
Thy guys then and the guys and gals of today coming off more modern battlefields deserve it.
Thank you for reading and then expressing yourself. I will put the chapters together as best I can
and put out three books, breaking September into three equal parts.
Semper fi,
Jim
I’m hanging on ever word!! But you took the chewing gum ear plugs out twice. Once when you got back to your hooch and drifted off to sleep. Also when you woke up Gunny. Not picking just trying to help out. It’s all to real.
Hell Carl, I’m getting old! Memory is a funny thing. Thanks for pointing that
out.
Semper fi,
Jim
Excellent writing , storytelling with the quality of Louis L Amoure
Jim, as an FO I really appreciate this story and having lived in the area with both the USMC and 2nd ROK BlueDragons. We didnt experience the racial conflicts until later in 68. But I must say you have me drifting back to as one of my men said “”the greatest days of our lives” thank you Brother. Semper Fi
Al, thank you for the really, neat comment. Those were definitive times, yes.
And calling fire from the 105s under difficult circumstance and having it work
so damned well was extraordinary. I was trained for the FDC but never served in
one outside of training. I always wondered how I’d do in that analytical critical environment.
Thank you and Semper fi,
Jim
Excellent read. Second sentence, did you mean new or knew?
Thank you for catching the flaw, Mark K.
The gnomes have corrected the problem.
That “Catholic” thing. Another shared stitch of this common fabric we’re woven from. I was somewhat of a rarity in our Irish, Catholic, rural school in that I took the confession thing pretty seriously. I knew the “seriously sorrow for our sins” requirement was the key part of the time in the dark confessional. I couldn’t always get there. I would even add several more Our Fathers and Hail Marys as a self imposed tax to try to even the scales, but it never worked. That you could recall that added guilt to your already over-loaded conscience speaks volumes to who you really are. As with your previously painfully articulated combat fears, these “from the soul” remembrances are heart aching for me to read. None of us are going to condemn you. I’m betting God doesn’t either.
SF,
PFJ
John. I don’t know what to write here in response to such a deeply heartfelt and well crafted paragraph.
You’re own writing potential is up there, whether you have ever exercised it elsewhere or not. Most of what I’ve
written so far in TDHS has just come pouring out, with the remembrances falling like a bag of ping pong balls let loose,the balls plunging down a mental basement stairway. I sit at the bottom, fielding those I can, and scribbling down what’s on them. I can catch only so many, and have to let the others
regrettably bounce by. Some of those memories are ‘caught’ better than others, like the sequences about Starlight Scope usage. Those bit so deep, the
remembrances, that I found an old AN-PVS 2 on Ebay, and am buying it! Just to recall what it was really like, and if my memory is
as accurate as I think. Your comments are simply the best, Conway!
Simper fi,
Jim
High praise, indeed! My writing is a bit like my talking: I do it a lot, just not particularly well. And the “Conway” salutation certainly pulled on the flashback trigger. Even today, the guys I went thru OCS and TBS with call each other by our last names. I don’t think I even knew their first names until after OCS. The last name defined us day and night with the name tags over the breast pocket, the “CANDIDATE CONWAY ON THE DECK FOR 20! NOW!!!” reverberating thru the squad bay. To paraphrase what I often say about a good singer I admire: “If I could write like you, I would”.
Hang in there, Strauss, we’ll be reading everything you throw out here as soon as you put it up.
SF,
PFJ
I went to OCS, as well. What a fucking 10 weeks that was. I became
the house mouse because of my ability to spit shine (I came out of military
school). I was second in my class and Reynolds, the guy who was first
came to me to tell me I really deserved the honor but my Platoon Sgt.
Preferred ex-enlisted and not college guys. I didn’t really care. I was
so stoked just to be a 2nd lieutenant. I am at it, continuing the story.
Semper fi, Concway.
Strauss
We lived from one segment to the next. I walked point and when we left the wire to go out on an ambush nightly, I would think, I just have to make it to the ambush site. Once there I would think, made it here, now if I can just make it until we head back in the morning. Then when morning arrived, the thought would be, if I can just make it back to the wire.. Day to night or hour to hour, segments were how we lived. In a firefight it was second to second. Long term thoughts were just a dream… Semper Fi
Yes Jack, you have it exactly as it was. There was only right now. The only
future we had was lived in secret never discussed hope. The land of the round eyes
was this magical OZ and so many of us, when we did live and got back found that our
glowing remembrances had been skewed and that was a difficult adjustment too. Plus the
fact that nobody would believe what we’d really ben through.
Semper fi, my friend and brother,
Jim