Guns Up! (28 page)

The flickering candle gave off just enough light to drive me crazy, revealing a tight, muscular body. Her beautiful shoulder-length red hair waved naturally around a face that could have been doing soap commercials. She had the complexion of one of those people who probably couldn’t even spell the word “pimple.” She pushed a long red twirl of hair away from her slightly upturned nose and smiled enticingly. I fell immediately in love—or in lust. Definitely in something. I tried unbuttoning my shirt, but I couldn’t get my eyes off her long enough to find the buttons. For no sane reason the thought that this might be the last beautiful girl I’d ever see drifted into my mind.

The clang of an emergency bell erased my trip down paranoia lane, replacing it with a brand-new fear, the fear of getting caught. Heavy boots hustled across the asphalt, getting louder and closer. Someone opened the cab door of our truck. The truck rocked with the weight of a large man jumping into the driver’s seat. I froze.

“Maybe he won’t open up the back,” I whispered.

The starter whined. The driver stomped the gas pedal and cursed.

My lovely and naked accomplice was perfectly calm. I was ready to panic. She leaned back comfortably, observing me the way a psychiatrist might study a patient.

The engine whined again. How could she be so cool? I thought, rather angry at the idea.

Voices outside the truck made me hold my breath. The engine whined again. I didn’t think the candle could be seen from outside, but out of nervousness I started to blow it out anyway.

“No,” she whispered with her hand covering the candle. “Just relax.” I didn’t. The engine whined once more. The driver cursed. She put her finger up to her
thick red lips, reached into the bag that had held the beer, and pulled out a round black object.

In the flickering light the object didn’t look familiar. The engine whined. The driver cursed again. The truck rocked, then the door of the cab slammed shut. Boots stomped toward another truck. A door opened and closed. An engine started on the first try. I squinted to see the black object more clearly.

“Oh no!” I said. “It isn’t!” I said covering my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

“Yes, it is,” she said. “A slightly used U.S. Army distributor cap.” I tried to smother the noise, but it was no use. I laughed until I cried. “You’re a real redhead. I mean, everything matches. I mean I haven’t been with a girl in a long time. In the jungle, the war, ya know …”

“We’ll take care of that.…”

“Besides jungle rot, various worms, and what may be a touch of malaria, PFC”—the stern-faced doctor looked down at his chart with a slight hint of disgust—”you now also have gonorrhea.” I slumped against my pillow. I looked at Chan. His bed was cranked to a sitting position. He pretended to be reading a magazine, with his Snoopy grin plastered across his contented face. He said nothing.

Every morning during every humiliating, painful penicillin shot, he grinned and said nothing. Oh, one day he hummed and said nothing.

We spent over a month in the hospital. For over a month Chan held his tongue in check, not once succumbing to the temptation of “I told you so.” He drove me crazy.

Chan healed up first and was sent back to the bush. A week later the ax of health fell on me. The flight back to Da Nang gave me too much time to think. By the time we landed, my dread of going back to the bush was close to plain old fear. A few minutes after landing, a beer-bellied sergeant with a deep Southern accent pointed me toward a row of six big deuce-and-a-halfs with the engines already rumbling.

“That’s a convoy of Seventh Marines.” He clenched the remains of what looked like a week-old cigar between his teeth. “They’re goin’ to An Hoa. Tell ’em you’re hitchin’ a ride.”

“What about a weapon? I don’t have a weapon.” Two Phantom fighters roared down the airstrip and shot into the sky.

“What?” he shouted.

“I don’t have a weapon!” I shouted back.

“Pick one up at An Hoa.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s only twenty-five miles.”

“I know how far it is. There’s a war going on out there, Sergeant.”

“You got a whole company in those trucks. I’m sure they’ll take real good care of you.”

For the smallest part of a moment I tried to assess my chances of not going to the brig if I decked this fat jerk. No chance. The trucks honked their horns, then began moving. I gave up trying to reason with the idiot and ran
for the trucks. As the first two started picking up speed, clouds of dust and dirt rolled from under the big wheels. By the time I reached the tailgate of the third truck in line, I was no longer hospital clean. Two Marines held out the butt of their M16s. I grabbed hold and put a right boot on the edge of the tailgate. They hoisted me in. I spit out a mouthful of dirt. “Thanks.”

“Are you a boot?” a voice asked. I turned and saw a big black Marine with corporal stripes drawn on the front of his camouflaged helmet cover. A toothpick hung out of one side of his mouth, and a scrungy-looking beard covered his face. For an instant I felt insulted. Then I realized I had on new boots and new utilities.

“Where did you get that NVA pack?” he asked.

“I’m not a boot. I’m just coming back from Cam Rahn Bay.”

“You get hit?”

“Yeah.”

“Scoot over and give the man a seat.” He nudged the man beside him. His voice sounded friendlier.

I fell forward as the truck hit a small canyon in the road, landing where I was supposed to sit. A whiff of body odor from the men around me nearly brought tears to my eyes. These guys were grunts all right. I had never noticed how bad we smelled. Funny how bad odors don’t affect you when you’re part of the problem.

“Where’s your weapon?” the corporal asked.

“They didn’t issue me one. They told me to wait till I get to An Hoa.”

“Boy, you’re somebody’s fool!” he said, then laughed.

“Are we going through Dogpatch?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

The already insufferable odor was getting worse. I stood up to get a look at Dogpatch. Actually I just wanted some fresh dusty air. Dogpatch was a group of plywood shacks and bamboo hootches along the side of the potted dirt road between Da Nang and Hill 327.
There was nothing special about it except the name. It made a good reference point, since most Marines had been through it at one time or another.

Tall bamboo fence poles with three strands of rusty wire lined both sides of the road most of the way to keep the water buffalo away. Strangely enough, all the people were missing. Normally the kids would be shouting for handouts as we drove by. We rumbled by a shack on the left with a tin roof and sun-faded red cloth hanging where a door should have been. Between the house and the dusty road stood a piece of sturdy American chain-link fence stretched between two solid cement poles. A boyish face peeked from behind the red cloth. Fears of an ambush flashed through my mind. I looked ahead to the lead truck, instinctively feeling for my weapon, then fighting off a surge of panic.

Suddenly the cab of the lead truck lifted into the air, bringing the truck onto its back wheels like a horse rearing for a fight. One Marine flew from the truck and landed on the road. Two more fell over the tailgate and into the road and were almost run over by the second truck in the convoy. A deadening explosion followed. The convoy stopped. An orange and red ball of fire shot past the cab of the wounded truck and billowed into the blue air, then quickly evaporated into dark black clouds. The cab of the wounded truck crashed back to earth with a flat thud. Men scrambled out of the idling trucks. Everyone was shouting and pointing and running for the edge of the road to look for cover. I found mine beside the black corporal and regretted not punching the fat sergeant.

The corporal looked at me and laughed. “Somebody’s fool.”

The ambush never came. It was just a land mine. Every morning sweepers cleared the road of mines and every night the VC laid more. This one had been laid after the sweep, and the villagers in Dogpatch knew about it.
Twenty minutes later a bulldozer from Da Nang pushed the smoking truck off the road and we started for An Hoa again. The only casualty was the driver. He had lost both legs. I couldn’t help wanting to do things the Korean way. If they got ambushed or caught sniper rounds from a village in Vietnam, they leveled the village. But then, they were fighting a war, and we were fighting a police action.

The rest of the trip went by uneventfully. In forty minutes we reached An Hoa. I bid farewell to the Seventh Marines and started walking toward the Fifth Marines HQ. Nothing had changed. It was hot, and artillery kept it noisy. A layer of dust an inch thick covered everything, and it smelled like the inside of the New York sewer system. The tubes were the worst offender. They were open urinals, and at 115 degrees, they were always upwind. But compared to the bush, An Hoa was still a slice of heaven. For a minute or two I debated the pros and cons of reporting in, but I was too cowardly to go AWOL, so I finally forced myself into the Fifth Marines headquarters, a big dusty tent surrounded by sandbags.

I pulled open a screen flap and peeked in. A regimental clerk pounded away on a big IBM typewriter.

“Excuse me, Corporal.”

He stopped typing and looked at me like I was bothering him. “What do you want?” he barked.

I don’t like this guy, I thought. What is this pogue doing sitting here camouflaged from head to foot behind a typewriter? “Real cute camouflage, Corporal. Know where a grunt might find some?”

“You better have a reason for being here, PFC.”

I stepped up and inside the tent. It had a wood floor that was raised a foot off the ground. Half of the tent looked like the colonel’s sleeping quarters, separated by a camouflaged screen. To the right of the typewriter was a long table covered with maps. A large posterboard that looked like a graph hung on the wall behind the table.
On top of the graph in large red letters someone had neatly printed
SCOREBOARD
. I handed the corporal my release from the hospital and orders to return to duty.

“Alpha Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marines,” I said.

“You picked a bad time to come back, wise guy,” he snickered. For an instant I thought about punching him. Then I remembered Tijuana and the brig. I decided to be forgiving.

“It’s always bad out there, Corporal. What’s up?”

“We just sent out three gunships for the Second Platoon. They hit something big over in the Arizona Territory.”

“Any medevacs?”

“Not yet.” He dragged the words out as though he were bored. “We got resupplies going out in a couple of minutes.” He stood up from the typewriter and walked to the other side of the tent. He sat down in front of a large radio and called the airstrip. “Charlie-Tango this is Fi-yiv-Romeo H.Q.… Over.… Hold Chop-Wun for Alpha Two. We got a rider.… Over.”

While he talked to the airstrip I couldn’t resist the pull of an unfinished letter beside his typewriter. It practically reached up and begged me to read it, so I did.

Dearest Susan,

Each day and night the war takes its toll upon me. I’ve lain in this muddy trench for two days now, waiting for the enemy to attack…

“Get away from that typewriter!” the corporal shouted from his radio. His face was as red as a sunburned drunk. I started laughing at his face as much as at the letter.

“I bet this is why you pogues need the camouflage.”

“You better watch your mouth, PFC. Your next meal might be in the brig. Your chopper is waiting. Dispersing is next door. Tell them I said to issue you a weapon, and
beat feet over to the chopper pad. And for your information, I’m writing a book about the war!” He looked nervous. He turned back to his radio and picked up a pen. He started to write with the wrong end.

“Be careful, Corporal. You’ll get ink on your camouflage.” I walked out of the tent utterly pleased with my last comment and unable to restrain my laughter.

I picked up an M16 at dispersing and headed for the airstrip. The smile didn’t leave my face until the chopper left the ground. Five minutes later the safety of An Hoa was a brown dot on a green horizon. The sun was starting to drop. I could see the pilot and copilot leaning toward each other, shouting back and forth over the noise of the engine, then looking back at me. The copilot unbuckled himself from his cockpit seat and came my way. He bent down on one knee in front of me, removed his dark sunglasses, and shouted, “Your unit is under fire! We’ve been called off! We’re dropping you off at Fire Base Alpha!”

“Why?” I shouted over the roaring engine.

“Another chopper will pick you up tomorrow! We aren’t going back to An Hoa!” He stood up and made his way back to the cockpit. Almost immediately the CH-46 helicopter started downward. I stuck my face against a glass portal. We circled downward toward a large, muddy hill, the top of which had been bulldozed flat. It bristled with artillery barrels sticking above a network of sandbag bunkers. Concertina wire around the hill looked to be thirty to forty yards thick. We set down on a big square piece of corrugated steel matting. The copilot gave me a thumbs up and I jumped out. I nearly fell on my face. I’d forgotten how heavy a full pack, canteens, flak jacket, rifle, and ammo could be. The CH-46 lifted off, its giant rotors blew me forward as I tried to hold my helmet on. After it had pulled away, a cool breeze hit me, the kind of breeze we never felt in the stifling jungle below.

I felt ridiculously conspicuous standing on the landing pad with no idea of what I was supposed to do. A helmeted head popped up out of an underground bunker twenty-five meters to my left with two huge antennas sticking out of the top of it. He waved me over. In the center of the compound stood a flagpole. A yellowish South Vietnamese flag with three horizontal red stripes hung limp beneath Old Glory. Beside the flagpole, resting atop a fifteen-foot post, sat a large wooden birdhouse. Under it, a big, bearded Paul Bunyan of a Marine wearing nothing but cut-off trousers sat in a lawn chair, throwing seeds to a group of brightly colored birds and drinking a beer. Judging from his golden tan, this wasn’t the first time he’d done this.