365 Days (9 page)

They learned how to pass through different kinds of danger areas, how to go through mine fields and claymores, how to cut through razor wire and dismantle trip flares. They were taught to cross any river, field, or road free or under fire, how to set up for traveling, how to camouflage. Experts were flown in from all over the States to teach them. For the first time Macabe began to feel the privilege of it all.

Self-defense gave way to infiltration and ambush. The discipline was taught just as calmly as traversing and repelling. No great emphasis was placed on these killing techniques. They were simply taught as another tool. The important thing was to get to your mission, accomplish it, and get out again.

The last week it snowed. They were on a patrol when it started—and for five days they pushed through four-foot drifts. Two boys were frost-bitten, but they all finished. They returned to Benning and after two days of briefing and lectures they went to Florida.

They were issued their jungle gear at Benning, so that when they landed at Eglin Airforce Base it was already like being deployed. They got off the planes black-faced, fully dressed and armed, and went directly from the plush, semi-tropical airbase into the jungle. The airmen from the base watched with amusement as they marched past. It annoyed Macabe. It annoyed them all. It was like walking through a foreign country. “Fuck ’em,” he thought. “Simple bastards, simple fucken bastards.”

The swamp soon undermined his pride. It was the foothills of Georgia again, only worse. They were in the jungle all the time; they patrolled in the swamps, and their base camp was in the swamps; they never got out of it. The bugs and leeches were everywhere. The men were never dry. It was incredibly hot and stinking. They slushed through the filthy water for hours, weapons at port arms to keep them dry, stopping only to pick off leaches or kill a spider. Two were bitten by snakes the first week. They slipped on sunken roots and hidden rocks and they ate C-rations when they could, eating and drinking only what they carried.

To survive, they developed a water ecology. They learned to cut holes in their pants so that the water could drain out and how to protect each other from water bugs. The emphasis was always on the immediate. Long-range concerns and feelings were simply shoved aside or didn’t matter here. An attitude of thinking began to develop: decisions couldn’t be postponed; they had to be made right then and there. What to do now? What to do when this happens, and that? They were learning how to live with someone trying to kill them.

For the first time they were issued M-16’s, instead of the M-14’s they’d been using. They gave up their Thompsons for the M-60’s and began carrying M-79 grenade launchers. Macabe packed claymores into his rucksack and carried shotgun rounds. The instructors began to talk about killing now, and Nam was at last brought up.

“You never—I repeat, never—use a track that’s already there, or come back the same way you went in. The gooks will booby-trap it for sure.” The instructors put out traps for them. “Hold it, Craig. Don’t move. There, by your foot.” “Christ, Macabe, look out, will you? You tripped it. You’d be dead if you were in Nam.”

“When you’re in Nam,” the instructor said, wiping the sweat off his face, “you don’t jump off the track—ever. Charlie will put one sniper up on a path, fire a round, down it, and wait for you to go into the bushes and just tear yourselves apart on the punji spikes and booby traps. If anything looks wrong, rocks lying the wrong way, twigs bent—anything, remember the gooks have to let each other know where the shit is too. A piece of bamboo where it shouldn’t be, wood chips, a bullet hole in a tree. They’ve got to know, too—remember that, and look for the signs yourself.”

They set up their own ambushes: L’s, V’s, and X’es, and lay in the slime for hours to pull them off. They went through mock-up VC villages. They were ambushed themselves. “No, no, no. You charge toward the firing, dammit, it’s your only chance. Now get the hell up and do it again.” They got used to the noise of being shot at and the confusion. Macabe, twisting through the water, learned to read from the noise and the splashing of the bullets what kind of ambush it was and where the bullets were coming from.

“If you fall into an X-type ambush, you’re just fucked,” the instructor offered, kneeling down to draw an X in the mud. “Whichever way you come into it, they got you; any way you move they can light you up. If you come in through this side of the X,” he said, drawing a line from the outside of the X to the place where the limbs crossed, “and you move this way”—moving the line down through the lower side of the X—“the other two limbs, just by turning around, can still have you.” He looked up. “Just roll up and die, because there’s nothing you can do. The L’s and V’s are different. If you move fast enough you’re out. Like the L,” he said, wiping out the X and making an L.

They listened and then went out to practice again; it was endless. What they did well once, they did a second time, to do it better. They went on night amphibious patrols, pulling their rubber boats through the jungle tangles, launching them into the shallow water, paddling silently, cautiously, down the narrow waterways. Watching the banks as intently as if their lives depended on it, they sat in the boat, listening to the soft rippling of the water moving past them, feeling singularly alone and ageless.

The jungle training was to end with a night jump at low level into the cypress swamps of southern Florida. They were to be dropped twenty miles from the coast, and were given ten days to get to the coast for an offshore amphibious pickup, followed by a water insertion farther up the coast.

The 197th Brigade stationed at Dalton and support by SF troopers were to be out in the swamps to stop them. It was understood that if the offshore pickup was missed, they would have to hump it to the second objective. It was that simple.

“Nervous?”

“Yeah, a little,” Macabe said, carefully placing his C-rations into his rucksack.

“What do you think it’s gonna be like? I mean, low level, in the dark. You wouldn’t see anything until you hit.”

“Probably as bad as we all think,” Macabe said.

He sat on the flight line with the rest of them, listening to the wind whistling through the open darkness above them, hoping it would build up so the mission would be canceled. It wasn’t and they jumped, black and lonely at low level, on a windy Florida night.

Just as they jumped the wind shifted, setting into them. It took Collins into a tree and broke his pelvis. It took Macabe and slammed him into the ground. He hit hard, and rolling reflexively, cut open his cheek on a rock. Before he could get up to collapse his chute, it had puffed out and dragged him through a small patch of water. Struggling, choking, trying to keep his head above the slime, he finally managed to get to his knees and cut himself loose. Disgusted, he knelt there gasping, soaked in three feet of muddy water. Forcing himself to vomit, he threw up as much of the foul liquid as he could. To drown, to die in this, he thought. Fuck it! And he left the chute unburied.

It took four hours to regroup. For five days they moved east through the swamp. Sweating, sleeves rolled up, chewing salt tablets and drinking the smelly, chemically treated water, watching, point out ahead, they sloshed through the water. Gradually the swamps thinned, the water began forming itself into little creeks and then streams. They had to start rigging lifelines to get across the wider ones, and all the time they kept falling behind their schedule.

The group paused and Macabe pointed out their position on the map. “We’re here and we’re late,” he said. “What do you think?”

“We couldn’t have kept on schedule, even without the rivers,” one of the troopers said.

“That’s not the point. The point is what do we do...? OK,” Macabe said, getting to his feet. “There’s no choice.”

That evening, instead of stopping, they kept on the move. Grueling days merged into grueling nights; unable to see, they followed the fluorescent tapes on the cap of the man moving in front. They switched point every hour, the front man leading the way through the blackness as best he could. Cut and bleeding, they pushed through the swamps, slipping and sliding, occasionally falling. The sixth day the point spotted an ambush; doubling back, they moved around it, but it cost them a good two hours. They just hunched over and pushed harder. Toward evening on the eighth day they finally broke out of the last of the swamps.

Macabe was point then. He was taking the patrol down a water reach, moving perpendicular to a thick, bush-lined peninsula, when he noticed something flashing in front of him.

Stopping, he held up his hand to halt the column. On his right, the reach continued around the peninsula in a kind of dog leg. He saw the flash again, and leaving the rest of the patrol motionless against the swamp line, he moved cautiously through the knee-high reeds. Nearing the bushes, he dropped his rucksack and crept forward, crawling over the roots of the cypress trees that hung onto the sandy soil. From behind the hedges he could hear light, tinkling noises. He cradled his weapon and inched forward on his hands and knees until he reached the hedge.

It took him a moment to overcome his surprise. Beyond the hedge, out in the open, a patrol—two squads, and three Green Beret advisers, were setting up for dinner. They were joking and laughing as if it were a picnic.

Macabe moved silently back to the edge of the water and brought the rest of the patrol on line. He sent one half wading through the reeds off to the right; the other half he brought up through the swamps to his left.

“Don’t fire until you hear my burst.” Macabe crawled back to the hedge. He slipped the safety off his M-16. Unconcerned, the Green Berets were busy with their dinner; through the bushes, Macabe could hear snatches of their conversation. We must have been moving too fast, he thought; caught ’em before they had a chance to set up for us. Another few hours and it could have gone the other way. Pressing himself against the ground, he pushed the barrel of his M-16 through the tangle and settled its sights on the back of the Green Beret officer sitting in front of him, no more than six meters away. Squinting down the sights, Macabe slowly raised the barrel until the open sight was resting directly below the soldier’s skull. Slowly and calmly he pulled the trigger.

Everyone on the plain was labeled as killed. There were a few jokes, but not many. The patrol stayed just long enough to clean their weapons and take all the food they wanted, then moved off again.

They were almost to the coast now; the vegetation was thicker and more substantial, and they had to sling their weapons to fight their way through. After a half-day’s march they cleared it, and they could feel the cool sea breezes blowing in from the coast. As they were moving out over some low hills a spotter plane came over, and they scrambled for cover, but no one could be sure they hadn’t been seen.

“Spotter planes...shit!”

It would be a race now. Already brutally exhausted, they had to push even harder. The rest of that day and that night and all the next day they stopped only once for C-rations. The vegetation gave way to flat, sandy areas. Hunching up their rucksacks, they slogged on, expecting any minute to get hit. A little before midnight, too exhausted even to speak, they reached the ocean and threw themselves down on the reedy rise overlooking the shoreline and the moonlit sea.

It was an incredibly beautiful night, cool and peaceful, with the moon lighting a broad path across the ocean that was as calm as a lake. Out at sea, silhouetted against the horizon, they could see several freighters.

“The moon’s like a fucken searchlight,” someone muttered.

Lying on the sand, Macabe swept his eyes along the moonlit coastline. As far as he could see, the beach was empty. For a moment he wondered if it would not be best to go back and find a more sheltered part of the coast.

“How long?” someone whispered.

“Three hours.”

Macabe closed his eyes and rested his head on the stock of his weapon. If someone had reminded him that this was the coast of Florida, that he was at home, and that those ships out there were friendly, he wouldn’t have listened—or even cared.

“When we’d go into a possible VC village

and the elder said no VC, no mines, we’d

say fine, and then push him along in

front of us till we got out again. If he

hesitated, we’d just keep pushing him

till he set off the first one.”

Paratrooper, 101st Airborne

Surgical Ward

U.S. Army Hospital, Kishine, Japan

I
T WAS 115 DEGREES
in the sun, and what little shade there was offered no relief. A dull, suffocating dryness hung over the paddies, making it almost impossible to breathe. By seven-thirty, the troopers were already covered with a thin, dusty layer of salt. Instead of swallowing their salt pills, they walked along chewing them two or three at a time. A few visibly hunched their shoulders against the heat, but there was nothing to be done about it so they kept walking, trying as well as they could to shelter the metal parts of their weapons from the sun. The sweet smell of marijuana drifted along with them. A little before noon, the point man, plodding along a dusty rise, sweating under his flack vest, stepped on a pressure-detonated 105-mm shell, and for ten meters all around the road lifted itself into the air, shearing off his legs as it blew up around him. The rest of the patrol threw themselves on the ground.

That evening, the company was mortared—two rounds that sent the already exhausted troopers scurrying for shelter. After the attack, those who had been resting found it impossible to get back to sleep. The heat that the sun had poured into the Delta during the day continued to hang over them, covering them like a blanket; despite the darkness, it was still over 90 degrees. The troopers lay on the ground, smoking grass or just looking vacantly up at the empty sky. It was the fifth night that week they were hit.

Before breakfast, a patrol was sent out to sweep the area around the nearby village. The troopers got up while it was still dark, put on their webbing and flack vests, and without saying a word, went out. All they found were the usual, uncooperative villagers. The patrol, against orders, went into the village, searched a few huts, kicked in a door, and left.