Run Between the Raindrops (16 page)

“Cease fire, goddammit!” The Gunny looks around at the grunts changing magazines and sprints across the room. “Martinez! Get me a rocket team—in a fuckin’ hurry.”

There’s a scramble at the rear of the room and I recognize two Marines fumbling with a 3.5-inch rocket launcher and digging for ammo. A nearby grunt with a sick sense of humor begins to sing a line from a Paul Simon tune in a nasal hillbilly register. “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor…” He gets a rewarding wave of chuckles from the twitchy grunts waiting for the situation to be resolved.

Another man across the room tries a Rolling Stones riff. “Hey, Gook, get offa my cloud…don’t hang around ’cause two’s a crowd…”

A couple more grunts with an under-developed sense of humor fire up toward the ceiling. The Gunny screams for sanity and leads the rocket team toward the blocked staircase. “Martinez, get some rifles and stand by…” While Cpl. Martinez musters an assault team, the rocket gunners kneel in position at the base of the stairs. The assistant gunner twists a round into the tube and locks the electrical connection.

“Firing the three-point-five!” The A-gunner taps his gunner on the shoulder and checks to the rear of the weapon. “Clear the back-blast area!” The armor piercing round impacts the pile of rubble blocking the stairs and the resulting detonation sends everyone prone. Martinez shoves four grunts through the opening and follows them storming up the stairs. There’s a single round fired as the lead man hits the second floor landing. He tumbles back cursing and holding onto a bloody spot just above his right knee. As a Corpsman rushes to his aid, we hear the crump of a frag grenade on the second floor above us. It’s followed by a volley of mixed AK and M-16 fire. It lasts only seconds and the last echoing reports from the second floor are clearly M-16s on semi-automatic. In the shocking stillness we even hear expended shell casings spattering onto concrete.

Two dead NVA troopers tumble down the stairs like wet sandbags. They are followed by Martinez and his surviving grunts. “All clear up there, Gunny.” Martinez steps gingerly over the dead bodies, stretches and checks his watch. He heads for his mattress, shucks out of his gear and collapses. There are still three hours until daylight and he’s not the kind of grunt who lets a little firefight disturb an opportunity to crash in comfort. Delta Company grunts all around us follow his example. There’s time to restore and replenish the adrenaline supply. Lots of that will be needed tomorrow when 1/5 crosses the Perfume River.

And we’ve got one last good story from the Southside of Hue City.

Northside

Waiting for word and getting to know some more of the key players in 1
^st
Battalion, 5
^th
Marines we will accompany on the Perfume River crossing, Steve is jotting in his notebook and giving a little military history lesson. Grunts with nothing better to do are listening avidly. Apparently he’s working on battles that might be compared to what we are about to face on the northside of Hue. Steve mentions Bastogne, Monte Cassino, the Siegfried Line, and all those fortified castles and villas in the mountains above Anzio. Switching to more familiar Marine Corps campaigns of World War II, he considers Corregidor, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and the Shuri Castle region of Okinawa, all fortresses of one ilk or another that simply had to be taken by frontal assault. He sees the looming battle for Hue’s Citadel like that and speculates that the fight will be a significant chapter in military history.

Nice pitch but its
caveat emptor
for my money. Maybe the fight will go into the military history books, but the way I see it, sending Marines up against that fortress across the river is the first leg of an all-expenses-paid ego trip for the American Command in Vietnam. We’re playing politics and propaganda in the same way the NVA are. They planted that big-ass flag and surrounded an ARVN headquarters inside those walls for a whole lot more than tactical leverage in a losing fight. If I’m an NVA commander, why screw around with the Citadel? There's nothing inside those walls worth a last-ditch stand that’s bound to cost you a whopping shit-pot full of dead and wounded. Only a dumb-ass field commander engages in a set-piece battle against numerically and technologically superior forces.

You do a thing like that only if it will provide a significant propaganda gain. And the ancient seat of the Vietnamese mandarins provides that in spades for a wily communist. You grab the one landmark in the one city in both Vietnams that symbolizes the decadence of a hated class system and you show those running dog capitalist greed-heads in the south that motivated socialist soldiers can destroy the vestiges of an evil regime. You make your point in the press while your soldiers dig in to defend those walls glowing with revolutionary zeal. That’s what counts in a war of ideas. How the fight actually turns out is less important than the fact that you forced it on the enemy and made it as bloody as possible. That’s what I think but keep it to myself and let Steve talk about making military history in Hue.

Battalion Commander has a modicum of good news as his command group musters in a shot-up building on the south banks of the Perfume River. We finagle our way into the briefing trying to get a glimpse at his map and a feel for what might happen when 1/5 goes on the offensive against the Citadel. We’re going to take the fortress from the inside rather than just slamming up against the exterior walls. Some ARVN troops who got trapped by NVA surrounding their CP inside the Citadel complex have managed to keep control of one of the access gates. It’s called Truong Dinh Gate and it’s supposed to be open for immediate access which will lead 1/5 to a secure base of operations within the ARVN 1
^st
Infantry Division compound near the center of the walled enclosure.

We’re told the 6
^th
NVA Regiment plus reinforcements are holding the warren of houses and shanties behind the walls. They are also dug in like ticks all along the walls in positions to put plunging fire on Marines sweeping from north so south. The bottom line is that we will clear the Citadel complex from the inside out rather than from the outside in—and we’ll have a platoon of tanks in support. We are dismissed to get on with preparations for the Perfume River crossing. Steve thinks it’s all good news, but I’m afraid it won’t matter much which side of the walls we attack.

If the NVA are dug into bunkers and holes all along the dirt fill between the outer walls and the inner walls, how is one attack easier than the other? Walls are walls, man, thick and festooned with die-hard gooks. Walking away from the briefing, my head is suddenly filled with evil metaphors: Bugs creaming into the windshield of a speeding car, moths smashing into a porch light, and various night-nasty insects fried in a high-voltage bug-zapper.

Grunts are loading into Navy assault boats now. There aren’t enough of them, so the Vietnamese Navy has offered a trio of armed junks which will ferry some units across. We are assigned to an LCM-8, a Mike Eight, with other cats and dogs from H&S Company. A pair of speedy little Skyhawks is striking the Citadel walls as we board. They flash and zoom over the target so fast it’s hard to tell if they are Marine birds up from Danang or Navy planes from one of the carriers operating out on Dixie Station. It doesn’t matter. The key is that someone in the rear has finally loosened the lock on supporting arms. Maybe the gooks will split and try to get out from under the air strikes and big guns. Late word is that the Army has a bunch of troops on the outskirts of the city to cut off reinforcement and catch any NVA that try to escape. That makes me think the gooks over there inside the Citadel aren’t going anywhere soon. Maybe we’ll just surround the place and starve ’em out. How long could that take? We’ve surely got more time to waste than Marines.

There’s a silly tune running through my head as the little floating shoebox the Navy calls a Mike Boat rumbles into the river:
Joshua fit de battle of Cit-a-del. Hope de walls come a-tumblin’ down.
It’s a surprise to see some of the landing craft crewmen are U.S. Coast Guard. Who knew? Apparently, the situation in Hue demands intervention by shallow-water sailors fresh from manning lighthouses and LORAN stations. They look competent and committed, but it’s hard to keep from wondering how many of them joined the Coast Guard to keep from getting drafted and sent to Vietnam.

Code of the Grunt
: You can run but you can’t hide. Dodge for a while but in the end they’ll get you and very likely send you someplace where you’ll get your end shot off.

There’s some incoming fire from a little mid-river island as we churn across the river with the Citadel looming off to port and a flock of high-ranking observers off to starboard. As everyone in our boat shrinks below the scuppers, the PBRs surge ahead on the flanks of the landing craft convoy pouring streams of machinegun fire at the NVA shooters. We feel the coxswain turn our boat to the left and pour on the power. A lieutenant near me jabs a finger at a hand-drawn sketch. We’ve made a northward turn toward a landing at Gia Hao which looks to be about two city blocks from that gate that is supposed to get us inside the Citadel.

The boat beaches with a crunch and the landing ramp drops. We can see other landing craft on the left and right disgorging grunts that spread out and surge forward. They are moving cautiously into a hard right turn and keeping a wary eye on houses and doorways for shooters. There’s just a sprinkling of incoming making me think the NVA in this area are just luring us deeper into the streets that lead to the only open gate of the Citadel. If we make it that far, the real killing will begin.

Steve follows me inside a little temple structure while 1/5 grunts out on the streets get organized for the tactical move to the Truong Dinh gate. Outside there’s an ARVN trooper waving his arms, pointing up the street and screaming about beaucoup VC. Inside there’s another Buddha blessing all who enter but I’m not interested at this point. Steve moves toward the low altar and checks behind the statues to see if recent history might repeat but it’s clear. “No gooks and no tape recorder.” He plucks a yellow, plastic flower from a vase at Buddha’s feet and jams it into the camouflage cover of my helmet. “You’ll have to make do with this. It looks good on you.”

The move toward the gate has halted. We find Delta’s XO crouched in a stone portico, talking into a radio handset. Marines on either side of him are glaring at a high window across the street. There’s a deadly accurate sniper in there, and he’s gut-shot one the first platoon guys who is lying in the street moaning. A Corpsman vaults from cover behind a wall and runs to retrieve the casualty. He’s six feet from the wounded man when the sniper cuts him down with a round to the chest. The Delta grunts fire a fusillade at the window but the sniper has faded into the shadows.

The Lieutenant sends a squad maneuvering around through houses on the left side of the street, trying to flank the sniper. We can see a gate about a block away from where we squat. There’s what looks like a medieval drawbridge, but that can’t be the gate we want. It’s blocked with junk and debris. Once someone kills the sniper, we’ll be moving in the other direction flanking the base of the eastern walls and moving right out in the open. Hey-diddle-diddle and right up the middle; it’s the Marine Corps way.

A radio squawks to report the flanking squad got the sniper. I see a grunt in the second story window waving a scoped, bolt-action rifle, the weapon that did the damage. A steady drizzle begins to fall as Delta Company assembles to move. Up ahead we can hear the drum-roll of rifle and machinegun fire. That’s another outfit already inside the walls and pushing on some intermediate objective. We’re a little late to the dance, but no one is complaining. We can hear the occasional crack of 90mm cannons and the creak of tracks grinding over rubble. The tanks have arrived and that puts a little pep into Delta’s step.

The point squad calls a halt as a couple of grunts from another company suddenly appear carrying a casualty. A Delta Company corpsman takes a quick look and takes over while the grunts rush back to wherever the fight that caused the casualty is happening. The Doc tells a platoon commander that the wounded man needs to be carried to where he can be sent south on one of the boats crossing the Perfume River. The Doc volunteers to hump the guy back, but the lieutenant doesn’t want to lose his corpsman. We are standing around close enough to get drafted.

“We could use a hand here. Can you two get this man back to the rear? You can join back up with us shortly. We’re supposed to have a bunch of replacements coming this way.”

It’s a polite request that might as well be an order. There’s no way we can say no and still maintain any kind of credibility with Delta Company. The corpsman does what he can for the gut-shot Marine, cautions us not to give him any water, and indicates we need to hustle the guy back to the landing area and put him on a boat. We help slide the wounded man onto a poncho, lift him as carefully as we can and backtrack through the advancing ranks of Delta Company.

At a rest stop along the way to Gia Hao landing site, I check the wounded guy’s dogtags and find out his name is Wilson, he’s got a boot camp service number, he’s a protestant, and his blood type is O positive. He’s dipping in and out of consciousness, in no shape to fill in the blanks. It takes nearly an hour to stagger back to the landing area and find the casualty-collection point. Some corpsmen go to work on our guy immediately and we sit down to chug canteen water and fire up a smoke. There’s no way to tell if Wilson will make it out of Hue alive, but it’s enough that we helped improve his odds.

The landing area is beginning to look like a classic amphibious beachhead. Supplies and troops pour ashore each time a boat lands from the Southside. Wounded go out on the same boats. Southbound coxswains hit reverse and execute a quick, high-speed run back across the river. Support troops or inbound reinforcements are milling around everywhere helping themselves to chow, ammo, water, or anything useful they can find stacked along the riverfront. We pick up some extra rations and head back toward the walls. Delta Company shouldn’t be too hard to find. Passing the casualty collection point we look for Wilson. We’ve got a personal stake now in a guy we never met before we rolled him onto a poncho in Hue City. He’s nowhere in sight, so maybe he’s still alive. Continuing up the street with the walls on our left, we are passed by a Mule ferrying the first dead from the fight that’s already underway on the other side of the walls. The bloody, muddy ponchos wrapped around the bodies are covered with an ugly blanket of blow flies.