Guns Up! (37 page)

“The boots are getting their money’s worth tonight,” Striker mumbled.

“It’s kind of nice having that FO with us,” James mused.

“Is that who’s calling in all the stuff?” Striker asked.

“His name’s Elbon,” I said. “Do you know that crazy guy’s got a little tiny dog with him.”

“You’re kidding?” James said.

“No. He really does.”

“Does Lieutenant Lampe know that?” James asked.

“I’m sure he doesn’t.”

“He will tomorrow!” James threatened. All at once I got this aggravating urge to hit James in the mouth. The Marine Corps wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for punk corporals. I was spared a court martial by a sudden burst of M16 fire at the bottom of the hill. A scary silence followed.

Twenty minutes later a voice came from the dark path behind us. “Comin’ in!” A moment later the half-moon broke through a cloud long enough to light up Mike Flanagan’s freckled Irish face. I had begun to feel that all my friends were gone. It filled me with joy to see good ol’ Mike.

“Mike?”

“Johnnie?” he asked, straining to see me in the darkness.

“What in the world are you doing here? Daggone it’s good to see you!” I said.

“I think they’re trying to make me a grunt.” He moved in closer beside me and handed me an M16. “Here’s a bandolier.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Lieutenant Lampe wants me to take the gun out on an ambush.”

“My gun?”

“Just for tonight.”

“Got an A-gunner?”

“Allen,” he said.

“The professor?”

“Yep.”

“Well …” I hesitated. I didn’t like parting with the gun. “Take care of her now.” I gave the gun a friendly pat. “And, Mike, no more than twenty-round bursts, man. It makes a good target.”

“I’ll treat her like a baby,” Mike said. He picked up the gun and four hundred rounds of ammo and headed back to the path. Then he stopped and turned back. “Did you hear that shooting?”

“What was it?” Striker asked.

“Some boot panicked, heard a noise in the bushes near him and opened up. They killed that FO that came out with us.”

“Oh no! Joe?” I asked. I felt as though the wind had been kicked out of me.

“Did you know him?” Mike asked in a slow whisper.

Visions of Joe and his brother Harpo and the little dog forced me close to tears. I felt tired, sick, and angry. “Who shot him?” I blurted angrily and louder than I meant to.

“Keep it down!” James whispered quickly.

“I don’t know. I don’t think they were sure yet. I’m sorry, John. I’ll let you know what I can find out.”

“How ’bout his little dog?” I asked.

“I didn’t hear anything about a dog. I’ll let you know tomorrow.” Mike disappeared into the darkness.

“Shake it off, John.”

James’s voice broke me out of a numb, prolonged stare toward the dark path. I turned around. James and Striker were both sitting up and looking at another arc-light raid of 1,000-pound bombs crashing into the mountains of Thuong Duc. Darting spurts of abrupt orange spread
through the mountains, then reached into the sky, turning it crimson. It looked like the end of the world. A small
pop
followed by a bright light lifted my eyes up. Puff was dropping flares. The hills around us lit up from the reddish glare of twenty tiny suns swinging down under their midget parachutes. Now it was bright, as if daylight had shocked away the night. I looked down at my M16. Something hit the ground beside Striker. I ducked, covering my head. A violent explosion rolled me toward the path. Striker screamed piteously. I looked up. Ten meters ahead and slightly above on the slope of the hill an NVA sprang out of the bush firing full automatic from the hip. Corporal James screeched and fell backward on my right. I raised to my knees and fired full automatic. Suddenly I was lying on my face. My mouth was full of dirt. My thigh burned like no burn I’d ever felt. It ached like someone had knocked it off with a sledgehammer in one mighty blow. I raised my eyes with my chin still in the dirt and stared straight into the wide-open, dead black pupils of an Oriental lying stomach down ten inches away. Blood gushed from two small round holes in his forehead, one above each eye. Five or six straight black hairs stuck out from his upper lip in what looked like a futile attempt at a mustache. I could hear Striker screaming. Everything went gray, then black.

“Snap out of it!” Sam’s pitted face was in front of me. “Don’t go into shock, you moron!” He slapped me hard across the face. It stung. I felt anger and started to swing, but someone held my arm. “Are you ready? I’m taking you off the hill! You’re all right! Don’t panic!” he shouted into my face. His breath smelled like week-old cat food.

“My leg!” I heard myself shouting. “Is it on?”

“It’s there! It’s there! How many times do I have to tell you!”

Sam picked me up with a fireman’s carry over one
shoulder and around his neck. The path was steep and treacherous. My leg ached and burned. I wondered if I was crippled.

“James and Striker!” I shouted as we reached the bottom.

“James is shot in the calf!” Sam gasped for air before finishing. “Striker looks bad.” He gasped again. “But he’s alive.”

“How is he?” Doc yelled. “Bring him over here!” Sam carried me over to the Doc and Lieutenant Lampe. He laid me down gently onto my back.

“Here’s a souvenir for ya.” Sam laid an AK banana clip magazine on my chest. “Weak spring. It jammed. He put in too many rounds. That’s why you’re alive. Tell your kids.” He turned and ran back toward the path. Puff hummed overhead. Another batch of flares popped open, renewing the dissipating light.

“Thanks, Sam!” I yelled too late for him to hear. The pain in my thigh felt worse. Doc tore the top off a small plastic container. He pulled out a tiny needle and stabbed it into my throbbing thigh.

“Morphine,” Doc said. “You’ll feel better in a minute.”

“What’s it look like, Doc?” Lieutenant Lampe asked. He held a field phone in his hand. I’d never seen him look so confused. His eyes darted up the hill, back to me, then back up the hill.

Doc cut my pants leg away with his K-bar and looked close at the inside of my thigh. “Can you roll over?” I rolled. “Went clean through. Made a big hole, Lieutenant. He’s lost a lot of blood. We got to get him to Da Nang.”

“Can it wait till morning?”

“No way!”

Memories of Jack Ellenwood crept through the pain. I lifted my head to look at my leg. A flickering flare cast a pulsating light into the gaping hole on the inside of my
thigh. Dark red blood shot out of the hole between two pieces of torn muscle in steady spurts. I felt faint. I lay back down. Doc began wrapping the leg tightly. An M60 opened up somewhere. I closed my eyes. The war went silent.

“You got him?” a voice shouted. I tried to open my eyes. The steady cracking of AK fire resounded from every direction. A hard wind hit me in the face. A chopper! “Give ’em cover! Get out of here, quick!” Someone dragged me along a metal floor. I could hear the engine get louder. We were airborne. A bullet smacked through the thin walls of the chopper just above my head. Then another. The old helicopter shuddered and dropped. I felt my life ending. Just as suddenly as the drop, we pulled up. The door gunner blazed at flashes in the blackness below. I prayed. The door gunner stopped firing.

“Did they make it?” the door gunner shouted at the pilot.

“They went down!”

“Who?” I asked, but my voice trailed off. A stuffy, overpowering drowsiness grayed-out my mind. The choppy engine faded. I wondered if I was dying. Jesus save me … Jesus save me … Jesus … Black silence.

I felt cool. I moved my head. Soft? There was something soft under me. My leg ached all the way into my stomach. I groaned. My eyes felt heavy, almost sealed shut with old tears and dirt. “Guns up! Guns up!” I forced my eyes open. A bright white glow stung them shut again. I jerked my head to the side. Someone was laughing. A deep hearty laugh that made me wish I could laugh with him. Now I could hear others laughing. Their laughter echoed. I’m in a building, I thought. Pillow! I opened my eyes again. The room was white. Too white. “Guns up! Guns up!” a familiar voice called again. I lifted my head and felt for the gun like a blind
man. My blurry vision began to clear. It was a small, round-looking ceiling. A Quonset hut. I grew up in a West Virginia Quonset hut, and I know a Quonset hut when I see one, I thought. Men were laughing. “I knew that would get your butt up!” the familiar voice shouted from my left. I raised onto my left elbow and looked down a row of metal hospital beds. Men in blue pajamas filled each bed. They all laughed. I tried to focus in on the nearest one. Then I saw him.

“Chief!”

The room erupted into laughter. Now all the faces were clear. Staff Sergeant Morey lay in the bed next to him. In the bed after that was a Marine who looked familiar, but no one I knew well. He was laughing too. In the bed next to him was Corporal James, and next to him, at the end of the row, was Striker. I looked to my right to see more beds and blue pajamas but no familiar faces. Then one of the men on my right shouted, as if admitting the obvious, “Yeah, we’re Fifth Marines too!” Everyone started laughing.

“How long have I been here, Chief?”

“The better part of a day.”

“Where are we?”

“Da Nang. But cheer up. The Doc said you’re on your way to Japan with that wound.”

“Japan? Really?” I looked at my right leg. I had thick bandages from the knee to the groin.

“Your war’s over, John.”

“Chan! Did anybody hear anything about Chan?”

Swift Eagle’s face looked uncomfortable with the question, and my heart sank to the pit of my stomach. “I don’t know, John. I heard they took some more casualties, but no one knows who.”

I felt slightly relieved.

“Hey, Clark! We’re on our way to Japan!” Corporal James shouted from his bed.

“How’s Striker?” I asked.

“He’s going to Japan too,” James said.

“Striker got shrapnel bad,” the chief said quietly. “It went up his rear end and tore up his insides.”

“Is he going to make it?” I asked. A corpsman dressed all in white strode up to the front of my bed pushing a cart full of pills and needles.

“Yeah. I think so,” Swift Eagle said, watching the corpsman in a state of nervous discomfort.

“How ’bout you, Chief?”

“I’m okay. Just some shrapnel,” he said nervously, still staring wide-eyed at the Navy corpsman. “I want no shot!”

“Is this it? Are you going home? How many Hearts have you got?” I asked as the corpsman cleaned a spot on my arm with alcohol.

“Seven or eight, I think. They’re sending me home.” He winced and turned his head as the corpsman shoved in the needle.

“You’re not comin’ back again, are you?”

“I don’t know.” He looked away like the subject bothered him.

“Look, Chief, if we were going to try to win this war I might come back. I don’t know what we’re doing over here, but we sure aren’t trying to win, and you know it.”

“I know. I knew that on my first tour.” The corpsman pushed his cart past the chief’s bed. Swift Eagle took a deep sigh of relief.

“Then why do you keep coming back?” I asked.

He turned his eyes toward me and off the corpsman. “I don’t have anyplace else to go.”

“Go home!”

“I have no home. I was born on a reservation.”

His remark sounded terse. I didn’t like it.

“I wouldn’t try to compare my life to yours, Chief. But I grew up poor too. We lived in garages and Quonset huts. My dad was blind and crippled, and we lived off seventy bucks a month, and our food came out of those
green government cans for the poor that coal-mining towns are famous for, so you ain’t talkin’ to some spoiled brat. And you’re not ever going to convince me that America’s worse to go back to than this hole!”

Swift Eagle looked at me with a curious smile, and I wondered if I’d shot off my big mouth too much.

“You have the spirit of an Indian, John.”

I wanted to put that compliment in bronze. I felt sad that no one else heard it.

“But,” he continued after a pause, “you react like an Apache. I did not mean that America was at fault. I have no family. No reason to go back. No home or work. The Marine Corps is my home.”

“Then stay in the Corps.”

“I don’t think I could stand the spit-and-polish crap. Stateside duty sucks. That’s why I’m only a corporal. I get busted every time they send me home.”

“You can’t fight the war forever,” I said.

“I know. I’ve been thinking about it.” The chief put his hands behind his head, leaned back, and looked at the ceiling.

Two corpsmen wheeled in a double-layer cart stacked with trays of meals. A half hour later I shoved down the last bite just as a boot-looking second lieutenant walked through the swinging doors at the end of the room.

“Are any of you men from the Fifth Marines?” he asked somberly.

“Aye-aye, sir,” Staff Sergeant Morey replied.

“We need a positive ID on a Corporal Joseph Arthur Elbon. Did anyone of you know him personally?”

My heart sank. “I did,” I said hesitantly.

“Would you mind coming with me if your doctor says it’s okay?”

“Aye-aye, sir,” I answered.

A few minutes later the lieutenant and two corpsmen unhooked an IV from my arm and placed me gingerly into a wheelchair. The lieutenant wheeled me out of our
building and into the bright hot sun. Sweat popped out of every pore almost immediately. He wheeled me past two large gray Quonset huts and into a cold concrete one-story building with two heavy white doors. We entered a small room with a desk and a group of large Army-green file cabinets. He stopped in front of two wooden swinging doors that had no windows.

“Have you ever been here before?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“It’s not a very happy place. Get yourself prepared for it. We’ll get it over with as fast as possible. I just need you to sign a couple of papers saying whether or not this is Corporal Elbon.”

He turned me around and pulled me through the doors, then faced me toward what looked like a wall of giant filing cabinets. I knew they were filled with bodies. In front of the wall of cabinets lay ten large green plastic bags with heavy metal zippers. An irritating hum filled the cavernous room. I looked right to see the cause of the noise. Two men in blood-splattered white coats were busy embalming the naked, bloody corpse of a muscular young man lying on a long concrete table with a drain at one end. The noisy machine pumped fluids in while another machine sucked fluids out. The lieutenant wheeled me in front of the last one in the line. He bent over and pulled the zipper down the center until a pale, dead face showed.