Recollections and Recriminations

Tough time today but they’ve been telling me since boot camp that the only easy day is yesterday. The only good thing to come out of what seemed like a wasted day is that a detail I’m helping to evacuate a couple of dead guys has the great good fortune to run across the abandoned shop of a neighborhood beer merchant. By nightfall, I’m settled with the grunts of Charlie Company swilling Ba Muoi Ba and wondering if maybe it isn’t time to see about getting out of Hue—at least for a while and just to turn in a few stories. The day was a tactical wash and I’m just sitting there, reviewing events, chasing spooks with bad beer.

Lost two faceless buddies before noon today—make that one buddy and an acquaintance, or make it one faceless acquaintance and one headless buddy. The acquaintance took an AK round right on the bridge of his nose. The buddy was headless when he went. The same gook sniper got both of them as they peeked around looking for a break in the incoming so they could pull back out of a shitstorm. The headless guy had been sticking by my side as we advanced that morning. We were old pals by Hue City standards. He was Gene Autry, the chatty grunt from Amarillo who once shared a watery trench with me on the southside.

He got his dumb ass transferred when the first battalion policed up able bodies as reinforcements for the move on the northside. Amarillo was now minus one of its favorite sons and I was brooding because of all the men I’d seen killed in Hue, I happened to know this one’s name and a good bit of his life story. When our push on the walls was stopped cold in mid-morning, he got nailed and I helped drag him to the rear. It was pointless, but at least it got me out of the line of fire for a while.

Before he got his head shot off his shoulders, Gene Autry had been pissing and moaning about the shitty weather in Hue. We were blanketed by a cloying layer of clouds that pissed rain and ushered in cold winds that blew over the walls surrounding our combat zone. There has been an increase in air strikes and heavy-duty rounds from the ships offshore, reluctantly authorized by the rear-echelon map mavens who cringe at the thought of damaging anything important to Vietnamese cultural identity. That’s not as helpful as it could be on shitty weather days, which seem to be most of the days in Hue.

So that morning, Charlie Company advanced without any support bigger or harder hitting than our own mortars. We were supposed to pull some kind of restricted flanking maneuver that would get us up on the walls and give us a better angle on the gooks scurrying through the area like cockroaches. NVA troops, operating in high-speed squads, crawled around everywhere inside the Citadel like phantoms, reoccupying buildings previously cleared, and sniping at us from the rear and flanks. The walls were pivotal to continued advances. They were also shot through with gooks dug in like maggots in a rotting tree stump.

Residents of a clutch of houses inside the Citadel walls near the southeast corner had either built or allowed to stand mounds of dirt between the back of their homes and the walls of the ancient fortress. A man standing on top of those mounds would be within five or six feet of the top of the wall. Even a dog-tired grunt could climb that far. The idea was to take two Charlie Company rifle platoons and see if they could grab a section of the wall as a sort of foothold. From that bastion, they could take the gooks under fire and allow the rest of the battalion to advance deeper into the Citadel.

Delta was resting and I could have stayed with them but Gene Autry wandered by as Charlie Company passed our position and wanted some familiar company. It seemed reasonable at the time to wander along with him as I was feeling fairly useless and underemployed. My camera was still wrapped in plastic and resting heavily in my pack and there was nothing much in my notebooks besides scribbles and senseless scrawls. So why not just tag along with old Gene and his other buddies and see if we couldn’t get up on those fucking walls? We get up there and it might be some magical moment, a historic phase of a historic battle. Guys like me were supposed to be there for historic moments, right?

Charlie Company Gunnery Sergeant led an element assigned to pass through two blocks leading to the southeast corner of the Citadel walls. There was no room or time for tactical subtleties. This would be the old belly-series from the line of scrimmage, right up the middle, with troops passing through houses along the way and avoiding the paved streets. It was shaky business from the start as we crawled through the abandoned homes. Never any telling what we might find in those houses and shops. What I found at the corner of the second block was just flat-out weird.

We took some fire in the approach but made our way to the portico of the structure where everyone waited for the signal to enter and begin clearing. Gene Autry and his buddies tossed several frags into the house and machinegunners at our back sprayed the structure sending brick shards and stucco flying everywhere. When the dust cleared, we waited a few minutes to see if the gooks would respond. They didn’t, so the squad leader hand-signaled for us to move in and start clearing. There was a clutch of grunts charging through the front door, so I opted for an easier approach and climbed in through a ground floor window.

What I entered was apparently a living room. There was some dark ebony, highly polished furniture, and a nice looking oriental vase on a coffee table. Beyond a layer of dust and some random bullet holes, everything looked quite civil, quite normal. I followed the muzzle of my rifle into the dark room and froze. My forward foot was resting on something soft and pliable. Sweat began to drip and I was sure I’d stepped on some sort of booby-trap pressure plate. When the expected high-explosive detonation didn’t occur, I slithered the rest of the way inside the room and discovered I was standing on a dead gook.

Squatting near the corpse, I surveyed the room for live ones, but it was quiet except for the squads clearing rooms on the other side of the walls. Gene Autry vaulted through the window staring with wide eyes over his rifle sights and asked me if the area was clear. Pointing at the dead man near my feet, I motioned for him to proceed. “Nobody here except this one. He’s dead, we ain’t. Carry on.”

Gene Autry shouted that he was the last man and headed for the door. Rising to follow, I took a second look at the dead man. There was something strange about this guy, so I popped on a light to take a look. It was a humanizing moment that I wish I hadn’t experienced. He was a basic gook trooper, complete with pack, pith helmet and an SKS carbine stacked against a wall near the window. He was well-fed and crew-cut and the expression on his dead face didn’t look overly pained or concerned. The weird thing was his right hand which was wrapped around his dick. This guy wasn’t just checking his package or adjusting, he was beating his meat when he was killed. There were two bleeding holes in his upper chest, wounds that he’d apparently suffered at an embarrassing moment.

His swollen penis was wrapped tightly in his dead hand. His other hand was tossed backward above his head and gripping something that I couldn’t immediately see. With a little bending and stretching, I discovered he had a death-grip on a photo of a pretty Vietnamese girl, framed from the waist up with her breasts exposed. NVA private dip-shit apparently died while fantasizing about that girl. And in that strange moment I realized that combat men are not much different regardless of their complexions, nationalities, or political ideologies. It was a seminal insight and from that time on I never touched my own dick without thinking about it.

On the other side of the house where I found the masturbating NVA, we ran into a bunch of his buddies who had their mind on business. They were spread out in a long line of shooters firing from windows, doorways and rooftops. Charlie Company was being pounded and would advance no further this day. While an 81mm mortar fire mission is being called, an M-60 machinegunner fires cover and we get set to pull back to safer environs. Looking for a break in the incoming fire, Gene Autry and his buddy peek from around a corner. That’s when the sniper across the street chalks up two more on his individual scorecard for the Great Big Battle of Hue City. During a pause in the dicey business of hauling the bodies to the rear, we find the beer store.