Chapter 1

JUST LAST NIGHT

Narrative:M. McDonald-Low

June 2009

 

 

 

Heavy rain beat against my bedroom window and it startled me awake, momentarily pausing my dream. My heart was pounding. I was in a cold sweat.

Given the dangers of the location and terrain, we moved slow and deliberately in single file, spread-out every ten to fifteen feet. The North Vietnamese Army had made no secret of their strength here. This was their home turf and base camp, and they were willing to stand and fight to keep it. More than that, they were committed to inflicting as much carnage and death on those American infantry units who dared oppose them in their mountain fortresses in the Que Son Valley.

My dream jerked and stuttered forward like an old silent movie.

After a while, it seemed we were always trudging and plowing our way out of the rice paddies heading uphill; we were following the rain fed streams that ran down from the mountains. When I looked at our topography maps it was easy to pinpoint trouble and potential hotspots; we all knew the NVA were coming down from their strongholds in the mountains towards us, or lying in wait near streams that ran down from the many ridges and hilltops that stretched to the populous valleys and flatlands of the coast.

Water also meant leeches.

The brown leeches were everywhere and as if by magic, they clung to our boots, gear, clothing, and skin. Dirty little bastards, they methodically looked for openings in our clothing and boots, gravitating to the warmth of our body. Inching forward, leeches were as relentless as they were stealthy. You rarely recognized them until you had ten attached to you, or you discovered a bloodstain beginning to bloom on your uniform.

I remembered using my cigarette to burn a big, fat, brownish-red, blood-engorged leech off my arm as I watched my radioman, Macintyre, squirt mosquito repellant on several leeches that had attached to his boots. He then passed me the repellant and I doused my boots. I watched the leeches fall off, writhing from the liquid.

“Your head is bleeding again, LT.”

I hadn’t noticed, but when I reached up to my forehead, I could feel that the wound pad covering the gash was wet. When I pulled my hand back, my fingers were smeared with blood.

I looked at Mac. “Are the stitches coming loose?”

Macintyre looked at my forehead carefully and turned my head to the right and left as he peaked under the gauze pad. “No, I don’t think so, but your forehead is definitely swollen and bleeding. It looks like shit, LT. There’s a small flap of skin that has opened near one of the pieces of tape and that’s where the blood is coming from, but it hasn’t torn all the way open.”

“Okay, okay, I’m good,” I said, patting my forehead with the back of my sleeve. I really didn’t have the luxury of time to stop and do anything about the oozing blood.

Ahead of me, Van Artsdalen and Zapata were on point leading the platoon and company up the trail. It had been raining on and off all morning. We were soaked. Macintyre had come up from behind me and tapped me on the elbow to let me know I had a call on the radio. That’s when we had both noticed the leeches.

When Mac passed me the telephone handset that ran from a coiled, black cord to the top of the radio strapped to his back, it was automatic for the movement of the platoon to stop: hand signals and whispers would go up and down trail. The whole company would gradually lurch to a stop behind us. Spread out like we were, it took a while for the entire string of men to come to a complete stop.

Passing the repellant back to Macintyre, I put the handset to my ear and spoke into the receiver, "One Six, go."

"What's the hold up, One Six?" It was Sonata, my company commander.

"Six, there is no hold up. We're just taking our time up here. It’s slow, wet, and I really don’t want to hurry on this trail, over."

"One Six, we have our asses hanging out all over these village hooches and open areas. We need to get moving. Do you roger?"

"One Six, I roger. We’ll step it up, out."

I passed the handset back to Macintyre. I looked ahead to Lockhart and in a low whisper said, "Pass it up and tell Van Artsdalen everything is good. Let’s keep it rolling. Everyone is cluster-fucked behind us in the village."

Lockhart, who was calmly smoking, his M16 held in the crook of his arm, nodded at me and gave me the thumbs up. All good.

Thirty seconds later we started our climb again in that herky-jerky, stop-and-go infantry style we all loved.

I wasn’t real happy. I had been ordered to break the rules and follow the trail leading up the hill towards LZ Center. I wasn’t comfortable with the order, because I knew the NVA would be looking to hang close to us, trying to slow us down and stop us from reaching the safe confines of the fire support base. I also knew that Sonata was in a hurry and he had been told to make haste in that particular direction, “Quickest possible route,” is what he said to me. I still felt that he was pressing me to hurry too quickly on a trail I knew could be trouble. I didn’t like it, but I quickly dumped the thought. It was my job to get us there. Enough said.

The numerous casualties from our six days of combat on Hill 352 hung on the men, their expressions a mix of anguish and dread. It wasn’t so much fear as it was the speculation that something terrible was about to happen. The unexpected had occurred so frequently here that each soldier hoped it didn’t happen to him. I watched as their backs bent and their shoulders sloped forward under the enormous weight of their water, ammo, gear and weapons. The 100% humidity and cloying heat of the jungle had each of us in a dead sweat and it was just 0800 hours. The standing joke among us was that the insidious heat was a constant reminder that we were all in hell.

We moved without talking, one well-placed step at a time, focused on

The images of my dream fast-forwarded, stopped, and then continued.

I remembered Mac and me pushing Sonata and his RTO, Jenkins, over the small rocks at the edge of the streambed when we heard the big NVA machine gun go off, rounds ripping the ground around us. When we landed, I was practically on top of Sonata, face-to-face. His helmet had been knocked off. We both looked at each other and I said, “That was close.” I liked to keep it upbeat.

Sonata nodded at me and in a calm voice said, “Mike, get’em up and moving or we're dead meat.”

I rolled away from Sonata, and crawled over to the rock wall. Macintyre had also regrouped and was beside me. I peeked over the wall and couldn’t see a damn thing, but the machine gun had momentarily stopped firing. Taking advantage of the pause, Mac and I stood up, jumped over the wall, and with our M16’s in hand, started running down trail passing three soldiers who were just starting to raise their heads. I yelled at them to return fire as we ran past. I had one thing on my mind and that was to get back to the rest of my platoon and get them moving forward. Moments later, the chaos of the ambush erupted again behind us. Mac and I grabbed some dirt and flattened out.

Time slowed.

Men littered the trail. Doc Nelson had fallen and was just sitting there with an eighteen-inch long spring of an M16 magazine protruding out of the side of his chest, bobbing up and down. I said something when I ran up to him but I didn’t know what. Across from Nelson, Cerutti had a big bloodstain on his pant leg, but he was up and blasting away with his M60. The spent shell casings from his machine gun spewed out in a golden arc, landing on his two ammo bearers who were lying wounded or dead at his feet. Down trail from Cerutti, two other men were spread eagle and face down on either side of the trail. Their steel pots were lying next to them, their M16’s held by their lifeless hands. Both had bloody, gaping holes that had burst from the backs of their jungle shirts. I saw others down trail from them hunkering down behind rocks and brush, dazed and in shock from the heavy machine gun, AK47 fire, and grenades that were exploding from the “Y.”

The screams for "Medic!" had begun.

I jumped involuntarily. Beads of sweat covered my forehead. My heart was pounding. It startled and surprised me every single time: the nightmare of 11 May 1968.

I paused and let out my breath. I looked carefully around the room, my head barely moving on the pillow. I was searching the shadows for any aberrant movement or shift in their shape. “It was the subtleties that killed you,” I thought.

My hyper-vigilance was on overdrive.

I listened to the darkness. I attempted to subdue my breathing so I could hear the smallest of creaks. New houses were the worst. The home I lived in now was like an arthritic old crone, though it was only ten years old. It groaned. It popped. It would snap like a bare foot with a broken toe on a hardwood floor. On windy, rainy nights like tonight, it was always worse. It took me much...