If I Die in a Combat Zone (16 page)

We waited for the tracks. When they came, the Second Platoon took the lead through the village while the heavy stuff lumbered up a hill to give us cover with their fifty-caliber machine guns. The idea was to drive the enemy from the hamlet and into the open, where the tracks could gun them down.

The first hamlets were deserted. We went slowly. One of the men on point cleared a trail with a mine detector. But he’d never used one before, and no one believed the thing worked anyway. With twenty years’ shrapnel in the ground, the headphones are always clicking, mines or no mines. We poked around a little, trying not to touch anything, but you don’t find the Viet Cong that way. We just walked. That was the order, the plan, and we tried to do it silently and safely. The third hamlet was full of women and children. We herded them out into an adjacent paddy, and the tracks came off their hill, and we smoked and handed out C rations while Captain Smith and the track commander argued about what to do next. They decided to take the civilians along to our night position, and the logic was clear. Their husbands and fathers were the people we were looking for. We’d be safe with the women and kids sleeping with us. So we hauled up the old women, and the kids climbed aboard, and we churned out into the middle of a putrid, wet rice paddy. The tracks formed a circle. In silence, the civilians huddled in the middle of the perimeter, as if they’d done it before, and they went to sleep.

Captain Smith sat by the radio. “Pretty good strategy, huh, Timmy boy? ROTC’s pretty good trainin’, not so bad as they say. Hee, hee. Actually, to tell the truth now, it is pretty bad trainin’. Should’ve gone to the Point, I guess, but oh well, Daddy always said, start at the bottom. Hee, hee. An’ ROTC’s the bottom.” He paused a moment and changed his tone, going into the authoritative one. “Call headquarters. Tell ’em we got our night position. No ambushes. Code it up and tell ’em we’re moving out early tomorrow.”

We moved out at daybreak, leaving the civilians behind. Smith ordered us to check out bunkers and bomb shelters as we swept back through the villages. One of the grenades brought an old lady out of her bomb shelter. She was seventy years old and bleeding all over. The medics patched her as best they could. She was conscious. She watched them wrap bandages around her breasts. They jabbed her with morphine. Then we called a dust-off helicopter, and when it arrived the medics tried to help her up. She scrambled like a wet fish. She was nearly dead, but she crawled away on all fours, whimpering, trying to get back into her hole. The medics had to carry her. She hollered all the way. The bandages were dangling, blood was in her hair and eyes, she was screaming, but the bird roared and lifted and dipped its nose and flew away with her.

That was the end of the mission.

We climbed onto the tracks, hung our packs on hooks, removed our helmets, and dangled our legs over the sides. I felt good. I tied the radio to the side of the track and lay on my back to talk with the other platoons. We turned out of the villages and into the rice paddy. It was a marsh. The mud was up to a man’s thigh.

Rocket-propelled grenades came out of the village. They hit in front of the lead vehicles.

“Incoming! Jesus, get the hell off these tracks!” The fifty-caliber gunner was hollering at us. “Get off here, let me shoot!”

Small-arms fire came next, spraying the water.

We dived off the tracks. The machine-gunners seemed to start firing all at the same time.

We waded in the muck, almost impossible to move. We tried to reach up for our ammo and guns.

I tried to untie the radio, holding my rifle between my legs. The radio wouldn’t come. Silence, and
then
the enemy RPG fire resumed. Our own return fire stopped as everyone ducked and sweated. Men were shouting. Running.

The paddy was deep. It was dark brown and green, and we struggled in it. The tracks started to back up. It was, we learned later, the standard maneuver when they take RPG fire, they go into reverse, full speed.

They ran over us. There was no way to move, as in a nightmare when your legs are filled with concrete and not attached by nerves to your brain.

The tracks ran over Paige, taking away his foot. One of the lieutenants was hit, but he went to pull Paige out of the mud. Ortez was cushioned by the muck when a track went over him, but his leg was broken. He went stumbling past me, bloody and without his helmet or machine gun. He threw his canteen away, and his ammo belt. He stopped and turned and hopped away from a track, crying.

A track ran over a little guy named McElhaney. He couldn’t move because he carried a radio, and he was smothered and crushed dead.

The tracks kept rolling backward. The gunners poured fire into the village. More grenades came rifling out into the paddy.

It was the battle at Bull Run, all of us churning to escape the vehicles. We threw ammo and helmets and belts into the paddy. Gear was strewn everywhere. I left my radio dangling from the track and tried to catch the company. We finally stopped. We formed a skirmish line along a paddy dike.

The tracks stopped in front of us.

Smith walked over and said he wanted to call headquarters and get an air strike on the village. He wiped off his glasses and chuckled. I went to the track and took off the radio, and a company RTO came along to pull his out of the paddy. Then the jets came in for twenty minutes.

We watched them drop napalm.

Medics gave Paige morphine as he sat inside one of the tracks. He smoked and didn’t cry or smile, perfectly composed. He knew he was going back to the world; that was all that mattered. “Jesus, man, does it hurt? Christ, it must hurt like hell.” Some of Paige’s black friends were inside the track, talking to him and even laughing. “Man, you’re a lucky sonofabitch. War’s over.”

“Shit, man, just smoke that weed. You got yourself a million-dollar wound there. Home tomorrow, no problem.”

Smith poked his round head inside the track and told Paige to hold on, we had a dust-off on the way. When it came, I threw yellow smoke out into the paddy. The grenade fizzled smoke, then sank. Someone else tried red, the helicopter saw it, and we walked through a mudstorm, carrying Paige and Ortez and some others.

Then the tracks formed a straight line and moved out. We walked between and behind the monsters, looking for McElhaney. The mud came up to our knees, and the water was sometimes near the crotch, and we strutted like Fourth of July majorettes. But the steps were horrible to take. No one really wanted to be the man to find Mac. Captain Smith lagged behind. One of McElhaney’s friends came over to bum a cigarette and then walked with me. He talked about the old days, when he and I and Mac were the new guys in the company.

“I never thought you’d make it this far,” he told me. “An’ I guess I never thought Mac would make it either. Me, shit, I’m going into Chu Lai and re-up, next chance I get. Christ, I’ll give the army three years to get out of this shit. I ain’t bullshittin’, I’m gonna re-up, I don’t give a damn. Can’t take this shit anymore.”

Up front somebody found McElhaney under two feet of water.

Most of the blood was out of him. He was little to begin with.

He was white and wet, and the algae were on him. Some men gingerly rolled him into a poncho. We leaned against a track and smoked, not watching.

Captain Smith joined us. He joked, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t help with McElhaney, and he asked what we thought about all this.

“Sir, I think we should just turn the tracks around and get away from these villages. That’s my advice, sir.”

“Well, Timmy boy, that’s why I’m an officer. We’ve got our orders.”

“Okay, sir. But if the ground commander thinks it’s best to …”

Captain Smith jerked a finger into the air and did a comic double-take, acting, and he smiled like a fool, acting. “Right, Timmy boy. I almost forgot that. Maybe I’ll talk to the track commander about yer idea. Thanks, Timmy boy!”

But the two officers argued and then decided to move into the hamlet. So Smith ordered the first platoon to move out of the paddy into a dry, wooded area, covering our left flank. Then he sent one squad from the Third Platoon onto the right flank—a broad, very large paddy dike, perhaps twenty feet wide.

The tracks started rolling, and the troops moved behind them very slowly. We picked up a machine gun and some rifles and ammo on the way. It was stuff we’d thrown away during the retreat. We went fifty meters.

Then someone in the squad on our right flank triggered a mine, a huge thing. I thought they were mortaring us. Smith was just in front of me, and he hollered “Incoming,” and we both dived into the slime and sank into it.

Voices calling for medics started in small, bewildered, questioning tones, softly, afraid to say the word. Then we were all bellowing. A medic stumbled across the exposed paddy, running with high, fullback strides. He sank onto his knees and tried to help the dead ones until he saw they were dead. Other medics slowly came over. They were tired of putting their fingers into blood.

The tracks stopped and everyone waded to paddy dikes to sit down and wait. One of my friends walked over and showed me a two-inch hole in his canteen where shrapnel had hit.

“Not bad, huh?” Barney said. He was a very young soldier, and he was more amazed than frightened. He grinned. “Pretty lucky, there it is. I’ll have some good stories to tell when the Ol’ freedom bird takes me home.”

Captain Smith ambled over and sat down on the dike. “Got me a little scratch from that mine. Here, take a look. Got myself a Purple Heart.” He showed me a hole in his shirt. It looked like a moth had done it, that small. “My first big operation, and I get a Purple Heart. Gonna be a long year, Timmy. But wow, I’ve lost a lot of men today.”

Two Vietnamese scouts had been killed by the mine. When the dust-off choppers came in, we loaded up the dead scouts and eight wounded GIs. In half an hour Alpha had lost seventeen men.

After the helicopters had gone, Captain Smith and the track commander argued again. We sat on the paddy dikes, the enemy presumably still around, while the two officers debated issues of honor and competence. Smith said the track commander should have informed him that they had a policy of backing up when taking incoming fire. “Damn it, I’m going to suffer for this,” Smith said. “What’s my commander to think? He’s gonna see a damn casualty list a mile long, and it’s only my first operation. My career is in real jeopardy now.” And the track commander swore and said Smith should have known the rudiments of track warfare. He muttered something about ROTC.

Then they argued about what to do next. Orders from battalion headquarters were clear: We were supposed to sweep through the hamlet to a helicopter pickup zone a few miles away. Finally the two officers decided to forget the sweep. The tracks turned around. We would make a wide skirt around the village, let the Viet Cong have the place.

We climbed aboard the tracks, keeping our gear on, and the column moved ten yards and stopped. The track commander radioed Captain Smith and said the infantry would have to get off and walk, taking the lead.

“You want us to walk, huh?” Smith shook his head. “Now, why the hell do you want us to
walk
three miles?”

“Mines,” the track commander said. “This place is loaded with them. You’ll have to put a man up front with the mine detector and have all the troops walk ahead of us to look for the damn things.”

“My God, man, you want me to use my men to find mines for you? You
mean
that?”

“That’s affirmative,” the track commander radioed back. “The mines are pretty thick. We’ve got a mine detector, may as well use it.”

“Mine detector, hell. That thing won’t find a mine in a million years. Might as well tell my troops to roll along in front of your tracks to clear the way.”

“Look, be reasonable. What’s going to happen if one of my tracks hit a booby-trapped 105? It’ll blow us all to hell.”

“Reasonable. You tell me to be reasonable? You’re trying to tell me to use my men as mine detectors? What about the Bouncing Betties, damn it? One of my men hits a Betty and he’s dead. Christ, those things don’t even scratch a track.”

Smith called his platoon leaders over, explained the problem, and tried to talk them into going along with the track commander. The platoon leaders laughed and said they wouldn’t do it. Smith said he knew it was a crazy order, but what could he do? The platoon leaders walked away, ignoring him, but Smith told everyone to jump off the tracks. We lined up, ready to walk. When the platoon leaders sulked and delayed, Smith waddled over to the command track and continued the argument. In ten minutes he waded back and told us to get aboard. The track commander was tired of arguing, it was late in the day, and everyone was in a hurry to eat hot chow. We turned our backs on the village and rode away.

After this disaster, Captain Smith tried to regain his leadership, but the lieutenants gracefully avoided him. He was openly ridiculed by the men. There was half-serious talk about his being a marked man. The black soldiers hated him, claiming it was only a matter of time before someone chucked a grenade into his foxhole, and we were all careful not to sleep near Captain Smith.

His sense of direction was absurdly bad. We were late arriving at objectives. He was never certain where he was or where to go next. Calling for artillery rounds to mark the company’s position, he would sometimes motion at a piece of the sky, predicting the round would burst there; then the explosion would come directly in back of him. He would chuckle and holler at his platoon leaders for getting him lost.

In mid-July we were CA’d into a burning village. Jets were dropping tons of napalm. There was a company of GIs on the opposite side, engaged with the enemy in loud, desperate-sounding battle, and we could hear their calls for dust-offs over the radio as we went down.

We landed and spread out and moved in on the ville. The First Platoon was hit immediately. A grenade knocked off a lieutenant’s left testicle. The gunfire was close and loud. Smith hollered at the Third Platoon, and they ran up and lay down and returned fire into a hedgerow. The fire fight lasted five minutes. Then the First Platoon radio operator called. His friend was shot, he said. His platoon leader was mangled.