Guns Up!

Epilogue to the 2002 Edition

Glossary

I CORPS, VIETNAM, 1968

This insanity really happened. It may sound like fiction—it does to me, and I lived it—but it’s true the way you’ll read it. I didn’t rely on memory alone. Recently declassified secret information from the United States Marine Corps History and Museums Division, Washington, D.C., helped me in documenting some of the stories. I also had the benefit of checking the facts as I remembered them with two of the men who lived through Vietnam with me.

I was seventeen when I joined the Marine Corps, extremely naive, and dangerously close to competence in several fields of endeavor that served absolutely no purpose: football, baseball, and basketball. Obviously I was in no danger of being classified a genius. I remember sincerely fearing that the war would be over before I got there. Like I said, in no danger of being a genius.

My first twelve years were spent in the West Virginia mountains and in poverty, one being synonymous with the other, I suppose. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t knock West Virginia. Poor or not, mountain people have character, guts, and down-home honesty.

My mom’s first husband was a census taker out in the mountains of Lincoln County, right up the holler from the famous Hatfields. He first found my mom plowing a field on the McClellan farm. She was a raving beauty in those days, and he grabbed her right up. Later he got killed in the Battle of the Bulge and left her with two
kids, an eighth-grade education, and a job in a bomb factory. She married my dad, who promptly lost his job and everything else right after they had my sister. They gave the kids to the grandparents because the grandparents had food. I was the last one out of the shute. Mom couldn’t part with another kid, so she decided I’d starve with them before she gave me up.

Dad got in a car wreck and was blind and crippled for the last seven years of his life. After he died Mom and I took off for Florida on Mom’s guts and no money. She married a tough man from New York, a 1935 Golden Gloves boxer and a hard worker who helped me talk Mom into signing the papers that would get me into the Corps. I was inducted in Jacksonville. They put all the inductees up at the old Florida Hotel downtown. My first night there, some wide-eyed, shirtless lunatic ran into the lobby of the hotel waving a .45-caliber pistol. I stood on the stairway not believing my eyes until he scattered four shots around the lobby. One hit the stairway right under my foot. Then he turned and ran back into the street. A minute later two Navy Shore Patrol guys burst into the lobby with pistols drawn. The desk clerk started screaming and pointing. The SPs turned and ran out. I never did find out what happened or why, but I knew a bad omen when it shot at me.

It left me with that “Oh no, what have I done?” feeling. You know, the feeling you get deep in the pit of your stomach when you step in a pile of dog crap and don’t realize it until you’ve walked across the living room carpet. I didn’t smell anything, but my stomach said “check your boots” as the big green Braniff 727 touched down in Da Nang.

The one comforting thought was that I wasn’t alone. The plane bulged with young Marine Corps faces. Private First Class Richard Chan was the only one I knew very well. We had been together since Parris Island, the Marine Corps boot camp.

Chan had been born in Red China. His father and mother smuggled him out as an infant. He wasn’t your average Marine. Besides being Chinese-American, he had his pre-med degree from the University of Tennessee with a minor in ministry. He could have been playing doctor in New York, but he joined the Corps because he felt that he owed the country a debt for taking him in. Corny as it might sound, he also wanted to be the best, a Marine, a feeling we all shared.

We couldn’t get away from each other. Bunkies at Parris Island, bunkies at ITR (Infantry Training Regiment) School, bunkies at jungle warfare school in Camp Pendleton, California. Now we sat beside each other on a plane landing in Da Nang.

The blistering sun stung my eyes as I reached the first step of the drab gray departing ramp. I tried to be ready to duck. Scuttlebutt had it that one planeload of Marines had gotten hit on the runway, but I couldn’t hear any gunshots, just some moronic sergeant screaming, “Move it! Move it! Move it!” By the time I reached the bottom of the ramp, my eyes adjusted enough to see a hot blue
sky without a single cloud. A sleek, impressive camouflaged Phantom jet whined to a stop nearby. Thundering artillery echoed across the airstrip. The Marine in front of me whistled. “Man! They mean business.” God, I thought, this is the real thing. I’m in a war. I mumbled a quick prayer, something I hadn’t done since I was fourteen.

A skinny-looking helicopter floated down one hundred meters to our right. Its camouflaged body bristled with rockets and machine guns. The roar of another camouflaged Phantom streaking down a runway snatched my eyes as it sprang off the ground and climbed sharply above the steep green mountains surrounding Da Nang.

We double-timed over to a processing area. It was a couple of hundred yards away, but by the time we stopped, I was dripping wet. The pilot of the Braniff had said it was 119 degrees. I’d thought he’d been joking.

The Tet Offensive was in full swing, and the battle for Hue City had covered the front page of every newspaper back home. On TV the house-to-house fighting looked like World War II films.

Chan stood in front of me in the alphabetical line of Marines filing past a loud dispersing officer. Each man handed him a set of orders which he grabbed quickly and stamped with a big rubber stamp as he screamed, “Fifth Marines!” I tapped Chan on the shoulder.

“Why’s everybody going to the Fifth Marines? They can’t need this many replacements.”

Chan looked over his shoulder with one of those “Boy have I got news for you” looks. “Oh, I think they might have accommodations for us. That’s the regiment that’s taking Hue City.”

“Thanks, buddy,” I said with a hard slap on his back. “I can always depend on you to find a bright spot in all this.”

“Move it! Move it! Move it!” shouted the sergeant.

A moment later the big rubber stamp came down on my orders like the authority of God. “Fifth Marines!”

We marched to a large dusty tent that was surrounded by a four-foot wall of sandbags. As a darkly tanned corporal called out names, each man stepped into the tent. Inside, a corporal with a huge black mustache handed me an M16 rifle, five magazines, and two bandoliers of ammunition. One of the men got a rifle with a bullet hole through the stock. When they gave the same guy a helmet with a bullet crease on the side, he nearly came unraveled.

Twenty minutes later we were herded into a waiting C-130 for a short flight north to a place called Phu Bai. The flight would have been more comfortable with seats or windows and without rifles sticking in my ear. One guy said we were flying over the South China Sea to avoid potshots. I wanted to be mentally ready for people shooting at me, but I could tell already there was a fine line between ready and panic.

Phu Bai was the base camp for the Fifth Marines. It didn’t look like a dangerous place. One part even looked fairly civilized, with groups of tin-roofed houses made of wood and screen. Sandbag bunkers dotted the camp, and everything was colored beige over green from the dust of tanks, trucks, and jeeps rolling through the dirt streets. I soon found out that the civilized part of Phu Bai belonged to the Army. The Marine area was all tents. As usual, the Army was equipped far better than the Corps—a constant source of irritation to Marines.

Phu Bai sat fifteen miles from Hue City. Just a quick truck ride north on Highway 1 would take me to Hue. Another little longer ride would take me to a place called Khe Sanh.

We were taken to a large tent where an old, crusty-looking master gunnery sergeant with a giant silver handlebar mustache screamed, “Attention!” The chattering tent went silent.

“I am Master Gunnery Sergeant O’Connel. I will help
you in your indoctrination on the Fifth Marine Regiment.” The old sergeant gave his great mustache a slow proud twirl and turned to a large blackboard behind him. “This is the most decorated regiment in the United States Marine Corps.” He spoke as he wrote “French Forteget” at the top of the blackboard. “Some of you may remember hearing about the Belleau Woods in boot camp. The Fifth took the woods in twenty-four hours of hand-to-hand combat. You will wear on your dress uniform the French Forteget. We are the only Marines in the Corps allowed to wear any item other than Marine Corps issue. The Fifth Marines have taken Guadalcanal; New Guinea; New Britain; Peleiu; Okinawa; Tientsin, China; Pusan; Inchon, in Seoul, Korea; and the Chosin Reservoir. Now it’s Hue City.” He put his hands on his hips, standing with his boots more than shoulder-width apart. He beamed with pride as he stuck out his barrel-shaped chest. “We have the highest kill ratio in Vietnam. The colonel does not intend for that to change. Unless we are given permission to invade the North we shall continue fighting under the rules now in effect. You will not kill people who are not in uniform unless you are fired upon by them. You will kill anyone in a North Vietnamese Government …”