365 Days (14 page)

“We’re into it,” the trooper yelled, jumping off the track and firing his M-79 as he hit the ground. Bullets skidded off the armor plate of the APC. Dennen saw a trooper cut down three VC no more than five feet away from him.

A cobra, roaring down, ran the length of the column.

“Pull back, pull back,” the radio squawked.

The column, still firing, picked up their wounded and, draping them across their armor, backed off, leaving the disabled tracks where they stood. Then they regrouped and spread themselves out in line, forming a half arc with every gun firing. A hundred meters of continuous automatic fire cut down the surrounding jungle as if it were a field of lunatic corn. Dennen called in artillery, and a few seconds later the shells came crashing over. He set the first ones close, no more than fifty meters from their front, and then systematically worked the shells to destroy everything ahead of them. Smoking and pitted, the tracks began moving forward again, keeping close to the lines of exploding shells, only to get hit again. A track went up, and the Old Man pulled them back again, calling in air strikes and leg units.

The gunships flying overhead pulled out, and soon the low-flying phantoms were screaming down the length of the front, dropping napalm. Then the cobras came in again, hovering over the tracks, literally hanging motionless at thirty-degree angles as they popped rockets into the jungle.

Infantry began moving up between the tracks. With the gunships moving out ahead, the column pushed on over ground still smoking from the air strikes and artillery. More tracks were hit, as satchel charges were added to the short, sharp crackings of the M-16’s.

Breaking out of the jungle, they hit the base camp. Hundreds of dead gooks were lying on the smoldering, pockmarked mud. They had built a mud rise around the base, and baked by the sun, it was hard as concrete. Two tracks were hit trying to climb over the rise. The rest pulled back and for twenty minutes raked the area with more gunships, H and E, air strikes, and artillery. Then they went in again, and two more tracks were hung up the same way. Again they pulled back and again they threw everything they had at the base. The smell of napalm was so thick in the air that they could hardly breathe. They took it the third time. They were still counting bodies in the morning.

The next day the company was pulled out of the line and sent back to base camp. During the days they spent resting and rearming, Dennen taught his crews how to skip their bullets into targets. “At 100 or 200 yards you can’t tell where your bullets are going. If the ground is flat, you can skip your bullets in. Put them down about ten or fifteen meters in front, and they’ll be coming off the ground at waist height. You can use the dirt being kicked up as a guide to where you’re aiming.”

He tried to figure out ways to save his men. He stacked things in the tracks in such a way that the ammunition was always surrounded by nonexplosives. He even thought of draining some of the gasoline out of the floor tanks, but the Old Man said no.

Three days later, not yet recovered and still short of men, they got pulled out of base camp and sent southwest to fill up the gap left by other mechanized units that had been knocked around themselves.

This time it was the low foothills and rice paddies. Dennen had expected the paddies to be flat, but they weren’t. It was the dry season, and they were empty. Their floors were rock-hard, pitted and bumpy. There was no way to move fast or to keep the 50’s on target. Hedgegroves ran along the paddies, great tangles of rocks and shrubbery, some big enough to hold whole villages.

As they humped along the uneven floor, Dennen shook his head disgustedly.

“What’s wrong, Lieutenant?” his RTO asked.

“Those groves—you could hold one of them with ten men.”

The trooper pushed the machine gun out of the way so he had a clear view of the nearest hedgegrove.

Here we go again, Dennen thought. The track tilted almost thirty degrees and then straightened. The dust closed in around them.

“Now they can see us coming. They don’t have to wait to hear us.”

That night they made a lager in a hedgegrove astride one of the dirt roads that cut through the paddies. There was a village a kilometer away. They took two mortar rounds, and while they couldn’t be sure exactly where the rounds came from, they were pretty sure it was near the village. The next morning they swept the area. They took some small arms fire from one of the groves and, wheeling in formation, attacked it. For a few moments the grove was completely hidden by dust thrown up by their rounds. Suddenly the ground shook and a track off to their right rose into the air with a tremendous roar and hung there ten feet off the ground.

“Jesus!” Dennen gasped, watching the twenty-five-ton armored carrier tilt to its side and come crashing down, burying itself in the hard-packed earth. One of the tanks pulled to the left and headed for the stricken track. The whole line stopped.

“What the hell was it?”

“A chicom mine. They put them in the ground on top of fifty-gallon drums of gasoline. They’ll turn over a tank, man.”

“Yeah,” Dennen said. “They really suckered us into that one.”

Afterwards they searched the place and found a tunnel that ran the whole length of the grove.

“Hey, Lieutenant, look at this.”

Dennen was staring at the track still smoldering in the field. He hated being had. He walked over to the trooper who had called him and was standing by the entrance to another tunnel.

“Look,” the trooper said, pointing to some spots of drying blood.

Dennen began taking off his web gear.

“I wouldn’t, Lieutenant.”

Dennen turned around. It was the Sergeant.

“They spike those damn things,” Smith said. “You can put your hand into a scorpion’s nest or have a punji stick fall on your head or trip a grenade. Honest, Lieutenant, it ain’t worth it.”

“If they have time,” Dennen said as he finished taking off his gear.

“They don’t need time. There are blind alleys in those things already dug.”

“Well,” Dennen said, “this one I want.”

“Here, Lieutenant.” His RTO handed him a 45. “It’s loaded.”

Dennen checked it to make sure. “Sergeant, keep ’em here till I get back.”

Taking off his helmet he got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the tunnel. After four or five feet it took a sharp turn to the right. It was stifling, and the dirt clung to his sweat. There was no shoring; the walls were kept up by zig-zagging the hole. With barely enough room to pull himself through, he could hear his breath coming back at him as he pushed himself along, keeping his right hand with the gun out and free in front of him. He must have been crawling for almost ten minutes when suddenly down a long length of the tunnel he saw sunlight ahead. Relieved, he moved toward it when, as suddenly, the light was blotted out. He fired the first round instantly, and followed it with half the clip. A few seconds later the light slowly reappeared.

The Old Man was furious.

“We don’t need heroes,” he barked. “Dammit, Lieutenant, if you do one more stupid thing, I’ll kick your ass from one end of Nam to the other. This is a mechanized unit, understand?”

A week later Dennen was hit. They were sweeping an area north of their base camp and had stopped for lunch. He was squatting on the ground studying his map when an RPG exploded in front of him. His helmet and flack vest took most of the frags; only his legs and arms were hit. They dusted him off to the 27th evac. All he could remember before they knocked him out was the sticky feel when they cut off his pants.

It took four hours in the operating room at the 12th to save his life. We got him in Japan five days later. He was well on his way to healing by then and seemed more concerned about what kind of medical profile we’d give him than his wounds. He did not talk much about the war, though it was obvious from the few things he said that he felt at ease with it and wanted to go back. He liked it—the command, the excitement, the obvious importance of it all. We had to leave in the smaller pieces of shrapnel and hope that eventually they’d make their way to the surface.

“Sure the Negroes don’t get promoted as

fast as the whites. You don’t see IBM

promoting them either, do you?”

Trooper, 1st Air Cav

Medical Ward

U.S. Army Hospital, Camp Drake, Japan

G
ENTLEMEN, YOU MAY SMOKE
. My name is Colonel Griger, Psychiatric Medical Adviser to the United States Army—Vietnam. This hour of your active-duty orientation has been set aside for a discussion of military psychiatry. I know what is on your minds; it is on everyone’s mind who is going to war. Let me first try to allay some of your fears. Since you are physicians, it won’t he as bad as you think. I’ve just recently returned from Vietnam and I can assure you that your chances of getting hurt or killed—unless you do something foolish or are somewhere you shouldn’t be—are much smaller than right out here on the streets of San Antonio, Texas. I am not saying that Vietnam will not be a difficult place. It is difficult for everyone, whether he admits it or not. The point is to make sure, whether it’s yourself or your patients, that when the tour is over those difficulties are left behind where they belong—in Southeast Asia...That is why I am talking to you this hour. To try to make sure that a year’s problem does not become a lifelong disability.

“The legs that are lost in Nam are unfortunately lost forever; the eyes that are gone are gone for good. I can assure you, though, that not everyone loses a leg or goes blind. But everyone is afraid and everyone does have his limit of endurance. To fight is to be afraid, and the enormity of that fear can shatter even the strongest man. It will be your job, whether you are a surgeon, internist, or general medical officer, whether you are assigned to a battalion aid station or evacuation hospital, to make sure that the fear is not compounded.

“Gentlemen, there are achievements that come out of any war; most are truly unimportant and hardly worth a campaign, much less a battle. Others are real advancements, a few major human achievements: Believe it or not—and I know it may be hard to believe—one of these major achievements has come out of the chaos of Nam. It is still controversial, but I believe over the years it will prove itself, not only in the military but in civilian psychiatry as well. Those of us in the military have seen it work already....”

“Major Kohler.” The corpsman stuck his head into the doorway. “The chopper’s in. They got some guy who won’t move. Say he’s paralyzed.”

“Okay. Be right there.”

The building began shaking again. A moment later another chopper, a Red Cross painted on its nose, inched past the sandbagged window of the office. Kohler watched it from his desk until the whirling blades disappeared from view, then walked quickly out of the room.

Halfway down the hall he heard another chopper passing over the building. They had been coming in like this for almost three days. To keep the beds of the evac hospital open so the new patients could be admitted, everybody who had been admitted before the offensive, even those in for only minor surgery, had been evac’ed to Japan. Whole wards had been cleaned out, and it hadn’t taken half a day to fill them up again. The internists were doing all the minor surgery while the surgeons stayed up in the OR on the major cases. The number of psychiatric admissions to Kohler’s ward had almost tripled. There just wasn’t time any more in the battalion air stations to fiddle around with the combat exhaustions. As soon as they were brought in, they were set aside and sent out on the next chopper. Kohler hadn’t slept for almost forty-eight hours.

The corridor was filling up with medics and technicians, and the wounded and dying soldiers were already being wheeled past him to the operating room. They were carrying them in right off the choppers just as they’d been hit, covered with the mud they’d rolled in, shredded apart, pants legs where their legs had been, filthy tourniquets wrapped around the raw, oozing stumps. Some, still in their battle gear, stared up at him wide-eyed, in bewilderment clutching their abdominal packs to their ripped-open stomachs. Others, with vacuum bottles swinging from the bottom of their stretchers, had dirty chest tubes stuck clumsily through their skins. Several, with bandoliers still slung across their chests, were being piled along one side of the blood-spattered corridor—dead.

Kohler reached the admissions and triage area at the end of the hallway. The noise was deafening. The choppers, their rotors still turning, were huddled outside the open doorway, and the medics, bending over to clear the blades, were loading the wounded and hurrying them into the building.

The triage officer with his medics and nurses, all in fatigues and combat boots, met each trooper as he came through the door. They checked his med-evac tags, examined him, and sent him either directly to the operating room, the adjacent emergency area, or the wards. Near the doorway a machine gun stood tilted on its tripod. A chopper, suddenly taking off, went banging through the air over their heads.

“Kohler...over there,” someone yelled, “near the door.”

A grunt, with a bandolier of filthy M-60 ammunition over one shoulder, stood leaning against the wall, cradling an M-16 in his arms.

Kohler was almost up to him before he saw the other soldier huddled on the floor beside the rifleman. He had a med-evac tag tied around his neck, but his fatigues were so dirty and cut up it was impossible to tell his rank or unit. The rifleman came to some semblance of attention, but the trooper on the floor didn’t move.

Kohler looked from one to the other. “What’s wrong?” he asked the rifleman. “What happened, soldier?”

“Don’t know,” the grunt said. “He come in just like that.”

Kohler had to wait for another chopper to clear the area to make himself heard.

“Who brought him in?”

The rifleman shifted his weapon. “Don’t know—wasn’t there. We was getting hit, too. Somebody carried him into our perimeter. The medics was just too busy to fuck around with him. The first Dust Off come in, we put him on it.”