Last Man Out (13 page)

“Clever little bugger,” I said, although there was some gratification in knowing that there were VC operating outside our lines and we weren’t shooting at shadows.

That same day we received orders for a battalion-size patrol
operation twenty kilometers to our north. My platoon led the battalion north, and at dusk four hundred infantrymen of the 1st of the 28th Infantry were in position along a VC supply trail.

Around three o’clock in the morning Lyons crawled over to the tree where I was sleeping. He shook me awake and said he thought some men were carrying things down the trail. I couldn’t fathom what was going on. Lyons didn’t see things that weren’t there, and it hadn’t been raining. If Viet Cong were walking down the trail, units on either side should have fired at them. The whole battalion was near the trail. I told him to go back to his position and if he saw anybody else walking down that trail, shoot him. Lyons crawled away and disappeared in the dark jungle. I had just decided to follow him and see these men on the trail for myself when he started firing his M-14 on full automatic.

The night was suddenly filled with tracers and the thunderous sound of automatic rifle fire. It finally died down and then stopped completely as the word circulated: “Hold your fire.”

In the quiet that followed we heard a man groaning. He called out in Vietnamese. Around him, from my platoon and down the line, men fired toward the sound. I yelled to stop the firing. There was quiet. Then I heard the man groan again. A long painful wail. Some men fired again. I yelled again to stop the firing.

Colonel Haldane and Captain Woolley crawled up with a Vietnamese interpreter. Out in front the man babbled Vietnamese. Haldane asked the interpreter what he was saying.

“He says he is shot and he says he hurts. He asks us to help.”

Woolley and Haldane exchanged looks without comment.

“I think … I think, maybe trap. Maybe other Viet Cong around. He has gun for sure,” the interpreter offered.

“Yeah, well what’s he saying?” asked Haldane.

“He says he hurts a lot,” the interpreter said after a pause.

“Continue talking to him. Try to find out if he is really alone,” Haldane ordered in a hushed voice.

In the jungle to our front, the groans had no accent; the tremor in the low wails were an international human expression of pain. But could that be faked? Were we being baited to come out of our perimeter?

The moaning continued for an hour or so, but became gradually weaker. It stopped before the sun came up.

At first light my platoon moved out toward the area where the sound had come from. The young Vietnamese man was dead. He had taken off his watch and tried to hide it in some bushes near his outstretched hand. A bag of rice lay some distance away. The man was unarmed. The first Viet Cong killed by the battalion was an unarmed porter. We had come halfway around the world to kill a laborer.

“Ain’t war fun,” Spencer said, standing near the dead man. Surprisingly, I did not feel much remorse, although I had listened to the man as he died. It had been frightening in the darkness, not knowing if other VC were around us, getting ready to attack. Plus I had been frustrated by our lack of catching the VC who had probed our part of the perimeter at the base camp. Last night, in the dark, we had reached out to get the enemy and had only gotten a porter, but it was a start. We had much to learn about jungle fighting.

I walked away from the dead man without looking back, saying under my breath, “Don’t probe my perimeter anymore.”

The battalion swept the area from the trail down to the river and uncovered a large store of rice. Some of the bags had the sign of clasped hands across the ocean on them, which indicated that the rice was part of U.S. aid to the region.

While burning down a hootch near the rice cache, Patrick was standing by, lighting a cigarette, when suddenly he heard a shot. He dropped to the ground, brought his rifle to his shoulder, and looked around wildly for the enemy. The rest of the men in his squad did not react.

“The bamboo,” De Leon said. “It’s the bamboo burning. Sections popping. Get up. Nobody’s shooting at you, sweetheart.”

The bamboo continued to pop as Patrick got to his feet.

Later when we broke down into platoon patrols for the move back to the base camp, a grenade on Manuel’s web belt came unscrewed and fell to the ground. The firing pin was still on his belt.

“Grenade!” he yelled, as he dived away.

He lay there, his mouth wide open and his eyes shut tight, waiting for the explosion that would take his life. After a minute the men around him got to their feet. Bratcher walked up and saw the fuse, pin, and handle still on Manuel’s belt, who continued to lie on the ground with a confused look on his face.

“Good God almighty,” Bratcher said, “how can we be expected to fight in this war when we got dumbbells for soldiers? Get your fat ass up, Manuel. You ain’t going to die. Fix your frigging grenade and move out.”

Over the course of the next few days the platoon was assigned to work details to fix up the company area, erect tents, dig latrines, and string wire. Ernst, Duckett, Pete, and I moved into a tent next to company headquarters, near the mess hall. My platoon was in two similar-size tents down the company street. We changed our routine from having the whole platoon on the line each night to posting a small twenty-four-hour guard detail.

Periodically at night, the mortar platoons, including Pete’s in our company and the 4.2-inch mortars at battalion, shot harassment and interdiction (H&I) fire at randomly selected road junctions or trails. The purpose was to keep the Viet Cong, if there were any out there, on their toes and wary of mindless wandering near our position.

One night one of the battalion’s mortar platoons misfired an H&I round into a group of huts northwest of the friendly village of Phuoc Vinh. The local ARVN unit advised our battalion about the accident early the next morning. Company A was sent out to investigate.

The huts were separated from the main part of the village along a river, and the mortar round had landed directly on top of a hut in the center. A woman and two men had been killed and several other people wounded, including some children. The dead were lying in the shade by the side of a hut when we arrived, their bloodstained night clothing only partially covering the gaping holes in their bodies. The villagers were wailing and crying. Most of the wounded had been evacuated to a hospital in town, but a few of the lesser wounded were standing around, displaying fresh bandages. Through an interpreter, we took information about the time of the accident, the number of casualties, and the exact location of the huts.

The hit occurred at approximately the same time that an H&I round was fired by the battalion 4.2-mortar platoon at a road target near the huts. Our unit had killed the civilians. It was a mistake, and everyone was sorry.

“Things like these happen in wars,” Bratcher said, twitching his jaw. “We just got to hang in there and learn how to do it right. War ain’t never been easy. Or error-free.”

Two nights later to the west, near the huts we had accidentally hit with our mortar fire, several rockets were laid in wooden V wedges and ignited by a small group of people, probably Viet Cong. The rockets soared up and into our base camp and landed in Company B’s area. The west side of the perimeter was probed at about the same time.

Within ten minutes from the time of the first rocket explosion, everything became quiet. I reported to Woolley that there was no activity in my sector, but I continued to stand in the command bunker and scan the edge of the jungle line. There was no conversation on the radio. Finally the field telephone rang. My RTO said it was Lieutenant Peterson.

“Dunn’s wounded,” Pete said. “He’s at the aid tent.”

I took a flashlight and made my way to the aid tent near the center of the base camp. Haldane and Allee were just coming out through the blackout curtain. Haldane said Dunn was going to be all right. Inside the tent, three men were lying on stretchers on the floor. Dunn was on the operating/examination table. He was talking fast to the battalion surgeon, Dr. Isaac Goodrich, and the corpsmen attending him.

“Goddamn that hurts. Quit it. Goddammit. Quit it. Quit it.”

“Lieutenant,” said Goodrich, “if you don’t shut up, we are going to quit it and leave you alone to sew up your own mess.

Shut up.”

Dunn had shrapnel wounds on his chest, arms, stomach, and legs, but they did not appear to be life threatening. The corpsmen were probing in the open wounds to find the shrapnel, occasionally extracted bits of metal, and dropped them in a stainless steel pan on a nearby table.

“Owweeee,” Dunn moaned, though not very seriously. “Don’t you have some laughing gas or opium or something? Aren’t there supposed to be some female nurses around here? Owweeee.”

“Bob,” I said, “I just talked with some of your men. They did it. Threw grenades at you. Don’t like you. Tried to kill you. They’re standing around outside, some of them, taking bets on
whether you live or die. Only no one wants to take bets that you live.”

“Owweeee, Jimmy. Ohhhhhh, Jimmy. I don’t like this. You gotta help me.”

I took out a .45-pistol round and put it in his mouth. “Bite on this,” I said. “It’s the way they do it in the movies.”

Dunn was flown out to the 93d Field Hospital in Bien Hoa the following day. The doctor opined that he would be back in the unit within weeks. He had lost some blood and had some nicks, but he was going to be all right.

Shortly after Dunn left the battalion received orders to provide protection to a truck convoy traveling between Phuoc Vinh and Bien Hoa. We were deployed along the road in advance of the convoy and spent several days in relaxed platoon-size positions as the trucks sped by. We received mixed reactions from the civilians in the area. Some of the older men and women ignored us and stayed out of our way. Others, especially the children, were fascinated and watched as we approached, smiling when we smiled. Rumors circulated that we should not buy drinks from the locals because glass and poison had been found in Cokes sold by children in other areas.

After the convoys passed we were trucked down to the edge of Bien Hoa, where we were to camp while the trucks were loaded. We expected to be in the bivouac area for several days. The day we arrived there, Pete, Duckett, and I borrowed a Jeep and went into Bien Hoa. I went to a furniture maker and placed an order for a bar for our tent at Phuoc Vinh. The furniture maker promised to have it finished by the next afternoon.

We wandered from the furniture maker’s shop down to a strip of bars and noticed that we were dirtier than most of the U.S. soldiers we passed, who we assumed worked at the Bien Hoa logistic command.

“It’s like the Wild West movies, you know,” Pete said. “These here are townies and we’re just in from the range, covered with trail dust.”

An Armed Forces Radio station was on in the bar we finally entered, reporting on an upcoming Bob Hope concert. We envied the way the local GIs seemed to know their way around the bar,
playing darts and talking with the girls. One of the soldiers came up to Duckett and asked if he had any souvenirs for sale. “Beg your pardon?” Duckett said.

“Viet Cong stuff, flags, AK-47s, hats,” the soldier clarified. “Big price for it at Bien Hoa, though they make VC flags in some of the shops better than the real thing.”

“Nope, we ain’t got none of that,” Duckett said as McCoy came in the bar and joined us.

“I tell you what,” he said. “This is the way to do the war—inside work, light lifting, air conditioners, bars, girls, cold beer.”

“You’re going candy ass, George?” I said.

“Ah, the romance has gone out of being in the infantry,” George said. “A little logistic command assignment, two or three months down here—I could do that.”

We noticed a drunk soldier, with pressed fatigues and shined boots, groping at a bar girl.

“Well, I don’t know,” George said. “Maybe it is better out in the boonies. The beer tasted better when you could get it cold. You’re thirstier, you know what I mean? Didn’t have to worry about dressing up for any Bob Hope concert.”

The next day I commandeered an empty deuce-and-a-half truck and, with Manuel driving, returned to the furniture maker. The bar was everything I had expected. Nicely curved on one end with adjustable shelves behind. A water-resistant top. We took it back to our bivouac area and put ponchos over it, more for protection against the possibility of rain than to hide it. When the convoy was assembled the following day, I located a driver who was taking supplies to our battalion, and he agreed to put the bar on top of his load. I assigned Manuel as the bar guard and told him to ride in the back and protect that bar with his life.

I was standing by Woolley as the convoy passed. Manuel was on the back of one of the first vehicles. The bar, obvious to me because of its shape, was under wraps. I waved to Manuel. Woolley put his head to one side as he looked at me, quizzically.

Manuel had the bar in our tent when we finally arrived three days later. Woolley came in and asked where it came from.

“Damned if I know, but it sure is pretty,” I said. “Something to come home to from those long camping trips we take around here.”

An hour later Colonel Haldane and Major William E. Panton, the battalion G-3 (operations officer), walked into the tent, looked at the bar, then at me, and walked out without comment.

I wrote to several liquor companies at the addresses on their bottles and asked for bar accessories, napkins, shot glasses, anything to give our bar a professional touch. Within weeks I began to get packages. Each liquor company responded and was generous with gifts. Our bar soon had all the machinery of a first-rate neighborhood gin mill.

Mail call was the most important part of the day to most of the soldiers. Late in the afternoon Bratcher picked up the platoon’s mail from the company clerk. He called the men into the company street and yelled out the names on the packages and letters. Ayers was always in the front, but he never seemed to get any mail. Bratcher said that it was painful for him, when he had to tell Ayers that he got no mail; the big lug always looked so hurt. It wasn’t that Ayers didn’t write to anyone. Every couple of days he gave the company clerk a painfully addressed letter to someone in the Midwest. As far as we knew, no one ever responded.