Run Between the Raindrops (7 page)

“You’re beginning to see it, aren’t you?”

“See what?”

“You'll know. When you see it, you’ll know.” And then he rolls up in his poncho. I’ve got the first watch tonight and in the morning we might split. Whatever he wants me to see better show up soon. One or both of us might be dead before this time tomorrow.

Mostly to keep from nodding off, I wander out into a garden area where Alpha Company grunts are setting up the night watch in the last glimmers of grey light. There is just time for a final smoke before the glowing ash will make me a sniper target. It starts to drizzle again and the grunts meet the weather change with a barrage of bitching. Seeking shelter under a large banyan tree, I squat next to a grunt on watch with his M-79 blooper in hand and a string of extra rounds close by. We’ve never seen each other before, but that doesn’t stop us from falling into a whispered conversation.

Grenadier wants to talk. He hasn’t been in the Marine Corps long, just a little over a year with four months of that in Vietnam. There is nothing much in common between us, but it doesn’t keep him from chatting like he expects me to be interested. He’s anxious to tell me about his family and girlfriend somewhere in Iowa. It’s too dark to see his face and oddly out of character for me, but I find myself actually wanting to
know
this guy as we whisper into the night. I’ve never even been to Iowa and can’t imagine anything that would take me there, but Grenadier has me convinced I should pay him a visit when we get back to The World.

MACV Compound

God knows snipers have enough targets around this area. Can I afford to fire up a smoke? Is the high worth the hurt? Looks like about 15 more minutes before the sky will be light enough to make it safe. A smoke is likely the last thing I need with the croupy, phlegm-filled lungs everyone is developing due to the wet air and rock dust. I’ll wait. A pre-dawn smoke might be comforting but a sniper round full in the face would roach the buzz completely.

It was relatively quiet last night and everyone is hoping that situation might maintain with the new day. A freshening breeze comes up as the sky grays around the edges with first light. The morning is gloomy with low clouds and the breeze carries mist into Hue from a weather front out at sea. The air is cold and most of us are miserable with chills when the word comes to saddle up and move.
      

We stumble toward the MACV Compound, moving like zombies in the dawn haze. Steve heads directly for the Compound gate, anxious to find the battalion commander who might provide some sort of contextual sitrep. The CO is inside somewhere. We know he moved forward to set up his command post almost immediately after Alpha Company cleared the area around the compound. We’ll shift to Hotel Company 2/5 today but it’s no big drama. We can move between units easily. The way things are going, outfits in Hue are unlikely be more than shouting distance from each other as they operate. There’s little room in a city fight for broad-ranging maneuvers. We are both anxious to reunite with the Horrible Hogs of Hotel Company, a stout, reliable outfit—a gang of hard-ass survivors who will welcome a couple of familiar strap-hangers.

According to a quick and dirty, almost rambling briefing we get from the battalion operations officer, Hotel spent most of the day yesterday trying to take the Vietnamese Treasury building. They didn’t make it, but their attack did a great deal to protect Alpha Company’s exposed flank as they moved on the MACV Compound. Hotel has been ordered to try again today and that gives us a short-term plan of action. Steve is adjusting his gear as we prepare to move, squinting through rain-speckled glasses at a sunless sky.

“Battalion Six says Hotel takes the Treasury Building today. No excuses. He also says transportation should be rolling for Phu Bai before dark tonight. We could get some of this early shit out with them. Got any interest in making a trip to the rear?”

The question is both rhetorical and ridiculous. We both have a great deal of interest in that but neither of us will go. There’s a mutual feeling that we are onto something big here, something unusual that needs witnessing. The stories can wait until we’ve got some idea how to end them. “I’m thinking we should stick with Hotel for a while. That Treasury Building deal sounds like good copy.” It’s superficial but sufficient to send us off in search of Hotel Company.

“You know,” he says as we amble off toward the area where a guide tells us we can find the 2/5 CP, “we could probably get bylines in every paper in the English-speaking world with our stuff out of here.” He leaves it hanging for the fantasy it is. The civilian scribblers and TV types will be flooding into Hue before long, and anything we might write won’t stand a chance against their sources, outlets, and big-gun reputations. Both of us have been down that road before.

A platoon of Horrible Hogs is hunched in a drainage ditch full of slimy water that echoes with colorful bitching from the yawning men waiting for word to move. All eyes are locked on the Treasury Building located about three blocks from us up a broad, tree-lined street running parallel to the Perfume River. The day’s objective is up there squatting like an ornate mausoleum beyond a large courtyard surrounded by a stout stone fence.

The shitty weather is disorienting. How can it be this cold in Southeast Asia? What happened to the land of tropical jungles and sweltering heat? Smelly water ripples around my shivering haunches as a grunt invades my space. He’s wearing a wide grin on his bristly face as he opens a conversation with a bog-standard Marine Corps introduction. “Where you from in The World, man?”

He doesn’t really give a shit about some little burg in Southeast Missouri, but talking beats staring and brooding. By force of habit rather than any real interest, I pull my weather-beaten notebook and a pen out as I return the query. He grins and nods while I scribble. “I’m from Amarillo, Texas. Name’s Autry—like the cowboy—first name Leon but they call me Gene. Figures, right?”

Scribbles record his responses to a few more obligatory questions about his job and his time in The Nam to date. Gene Autry digs out a plastic box that contains his smokes and offers me one. I’ve got a similar PX purchased box in my pocket and we talk for a while about how valuable things like that are in wet weather like the stuff that we are experiencing in Hue. Then it’s time to compare our Zippos. His is engraved with an image of Snoopy sitting on his dog house and giving the world the big middle digit. “Fuck ’em all,” Gene Autry says. “There it is,” I reply.

He’s a fairly handsome guy for a grunt rifleman with clear blue eyes and the scrubby vestiges of a mustache that his light beard won’t really support beneath his runny nose. Autry points to a scar beside his right eye and tells me that’s his first Purple Heart, grenade shrapnel that just missed sending him back to Amarillo as a one-eyed wonder. No biggie, he shrugs and launches into the life and times of PFC Gene Autry, beginning with how useless it is to keep reminding everyone that his real given name is Leon. We are becoming buddies in this reeking trench as we wait for the order to start up the street toward the Treasury Building. Autry probably has a bunch of friends nearby, but here I am with the potential for recording it all and what the hell. He’s never really talked to a reporter of any sort before this chance encounter. It’s a familiar tale about high school football, fast girls, illegal beer runs, and the big life-changer when he joined the Marine Corps to “get me a set of them fuckin’ dress blues, man.”

As I listen distractedly to Autry’s ramble, a time tunnel opens and I’m through the wormhole to a little Southeast Missouri town where I have been shuttled off to spend time with my Dad who is separated by the bottle from my Mom. On one of those sultry summer days just before I’m scheduled to start military school, a shotgun blast too close to my grandparents’ house sends me to investigate. And there’s my Dad—or what’s left of the chunky, intelligent, tow-headed Irishman that was my Dad. Now he’s dead by his own hand and I’ll never listen to his rambling stories again, never stand by his barstool and marvel at the way he could spin the simplest situations into fascinating adventures. It was so shocking that I couldn’t cry and simply stood there watching his blood pool around the new white basketball shoes he’d bought for me. The carefully folded American flag they gave me at his funeral served as a pillow for lots of long nights spent crying rather than sleeping. And then one morning I woke up dry-eyed with a firm resolution never to love anyone again as deeply as I did my father.

Of course, there were testosterone-fueled teenage years ahead, but I was never very good at anything beyond the hunt for frequent and fervent sexual encounters. It came to a head right after I graduated from that military school when a girl I felt slightly more passionate about than usual broke what was left of my heart. She’d hung in with me during a long, sultry affair then finally decided there was no future in it. She curtly handed back my graduation ring which had until that moment had hung between her luscious boobs, and walked out of my life. At a time of forced introspection, I had no idea where that life might lead. What I needed was direction, discipline, and distraction. I needed an outfit that didn’t ask many questions or expect many from its minions. It didn’t take me long to decide that outfit was most likely the U.S. Marine Corps, America’s version of a French Foreign Legion where sad souls can escape and forget. So, running away from one death that haunted me, I joined a lash-up that specialized in, sometimes even glorified death, as long as it was all done the Marine Corps way with attendant honor and glory.

Go figure—and there in that slimy ditch in Hue City listening to Gene Autry tell me about a much more normal adolescence, I had nothing better to do than figure. Life’s a bitch sometimes, I tell Gene Autry, and snap the notebook shut on his story and mine.

Treasury Building

Gene Autry elbows me back to Hue, nodding and pointing at the Treasury Building up ahead of our ditch. “I think I see them fuckers moving up there.” His grubby finger brushes my nose and I see shadows flitting back and forth in the courtyard fronting the building. Those gooks know for sure what’s coming their way and they’re getting ready for it, improving positions at street level and up high in the building. Not hard to see why they were able to hold off Hotel’s determined assault yesterday. It will be a mix of plunging and grazing fire when we get within their range. A clutch of dark clouds passes the sun, and in that brighter light I can see that the front of the building is torn up with bullet holes. It looks like some berserk architect has taken a jackhammer to it.
      

There is a dead Marine lying in a grotesque posture near the steps of the building. Autry tells me that it’s Stevens, a Hotel Company man that they couldn’t recover when they pulled back under intense fire. The Horrible Hogs are more concerned about retrieving their buddy than they are excited about a second shot at taking the Treasury Building. No one believes either task will be easy, but it’s aggravating to see Stevens’ body lying up there in a gook-controlled courtyard. Everyone seems a little embarrassed about that. No one says it in precisely textbook fashion, but everyone knows Marines don’t leave other Marines—living or dead—behind when they quit a battlefield. There’s no one to blame specifically and the situation yesterday was beyond their control, but a palpable level of anger is building up in Hotel Company. This second assault will be undertaken by a bunch of pissed off grunts, and there’s a certain reassurance in that anger. They won’t fail this time.

Activity begins all along the assault line as officers brief the squad leaders. There is an uneasy stirring among the grunts in our ditch, the ones that will make the first rush of the day. A rooster crows in the distance and it’s almost like a bugle call. Firing starts immediately. There is a steady roar of rifle and machinegun fire from both ends of the long drainage ditch and concrete chips begin to fly in the distance. Six Marines near me break cover in a tidal wave of watery slime and pound toward the building, running zig-zag paths, streaming water from soaked trousers and boots.

Before long the assault takes recognizable shape. It’s all about fire and maneuver as it always is in attacking a fortified position. One squad keeps gook gunners away from the windows with concentrated fire while another moves into defilade. Gooks are waiting for their time so there’s not as much return fire as everyone expected during the initial rush. It’s a mild shock when we realize the leading squad is safely tucked behind the wall surrounding the building. The lucky leaders signal for the rest of us to come on and we rush forward to join them, bounding from cover to cover on both sides of the street. We know the gooks are in there. We’ve seen them moving around. So? Where are they and what are are they waiting for?

Through a telephoto lens, I watch as two grunts crawl under cover of the courtyard wall toward a hole blasted by a recoilless rifle crew during yesterday’s action. Autry tells me that 106 was taken out by a B-40 fired from an upper story, but the gunner is nowhere in sight today.

One of the crawling grunts is carrying a Blooper, the short, shotgun-like 40mm grenade launcher that is proving to be a valuable weapon for infantrymen in Hue. Behind Blooper Man is another grunt hugging two green tubes containing LAAWs, Lightweight Antitank Assault Weapons. As LAAW Man sets up to fire, Blooper Man dashes across the open space in the wall and peeks to select a target. They are in position to rock and roll now, but before they can trigger the assault, the late-sleeper gooks inside the building decide it’s time to wake up and fight. AK rounds impact all around the assault team, tearing chunks of macadam up and down the street. Muzzle flashes light up windows all across the front of the building.

A lieutenant off to my left is screaming for covering fire and Marines in hides all along the street begin burning through M-16 magazines and belts of linked M-60 ammo. Sparks and rocks are flying from the front of the building in a noisy shower. Blooper Man swings around the opening to fire two quick rounds into a second-story window. He’s good. He fires and reloads so quickly that the two reports sound almost like a burst of semi-auto fire.