Same Shit Different Day

Charlie Company tries again to reach the walls the next morning. It goes relatively well for an hour or so and we make it through the area where the NVA stopped us so painfully in the previous effort. We’re in a second contested block now, full of ramshackle structures—they look like little shops or food stalls—that provide the access we need to get up on the walls. Company Gunny motions for everyone to hold and moves to re-position a squad to our rear. The plan is simple and deadly direct. While elements in covered positions on one side of the street provide suppressing fire, a designated squad will rush for the walls. The rest of us will follow if and when they got a foothold. We wait, staring through windows and loopholes as two machineguns are moved forward. We are now cocked and locked. The Gunny takes a last look around and then nods at the gun teams.

Over the roar of our M-60s we don’t immediately notice that we are taking a hard rain of incoming from gook positions on our flanks. There are no visible muzzle flashes to our front. It’s only when rounds begin to impact on the walls of our building and blow through the windows that we realize the NVA have set up a crossfire that covers the street we must cross to reach the walls. Crossing those 30 meters will be a bloody business, but the key is to reach defilade positions in one or more of the little alcoves that break up the otherwise straight stretch of wall.

Mortar fire from 60mm tubes just behind us begins to impact on the walls and the incoming decreases noticeably. Screaming for Marines to follow him, Company Gunny leads a squad into the street. He’s firing his M-16 on full automatic, changing magazines on the fly and running for one of the odd little loops and bends that the architects molded into the walls for no apparent reason beyond esthetics. He’s followed by six other grunts holding onto their helmets with their gear flapping and banging. As more mortar fire strikes to the left and right of where the Gunny and his assault party are crouched, the rest of us break cover and make our own mad dash across the street. The gooks are not completely cowed. We hear the snap and sizzle of close rounds chasing us all the way. Code of the Grunt. There's no cover between Point A and Point B, so don't bother looking for any. Just go for broke and hope for the best. Like it says in the song, what will be will be.

We make the defilade position which is now crowded with cringing grunts hugging the wall like a bunch of juvenile delinquents gleefully high on unpunished crime. At our rear, the platoon commander is waving and shouting. No one can hear what he’s saying but it’s obvious he wants us to exploit success. “Don’t get comfortable.” Company Gunny is panting and coughing around an unlit cigarette. “We still got to get the fuck up on them walls.”

Two grunts make a lift out of a rifle and hoist a third man up level with the top of the wall. He’s blown away before he can get a leg up and collapses among us where a corpsman starts to treat some very nasty wounds in his arm and shoulder. No one else seems eager to mount the rifle lift and the Gunny is about to try when a scrawny Boston Irishman with a shamrock inked on the back of his flak jacket elbows him out of the way. “Lemme do this, Gunny. I got it.” He stuffs a shotgun round into his M-79 grenade launcher, pulls his pistol, and steps up onto the rifle elevator. “Get me up there!” The grunts lift him and we hear the thunk of his blooper followed closely by the sharp crack of his .45.

“I’m up,” he yells and the rest of us follow as quickly as we can, pushed, tossed, and lifted over the top. Rolling behind a mound of dirt, I can see the logjam has broken. More Marines are flooding across the street and into covered positions at the base of the wall. We have a tactical toehold and I can hear someone in authority at my rear screaming into a radio, urging someone on the other end to join us. Marines are spreading out along a broad expanse, fragging anything that looks like it might be a bunkered position. There are NVA firing on us from the front and rear, but there’s enough cover up on the wall to survive that. It’s turning into a long-range exchange of fire in two directions but that’s progress.

From this vantage point, we can see deeper into the Citadel complex. We are in possession of two separate, 30-foot-wide paths of uneven dirt that comprise the earthen fill between the exterior and interior stone slabs of the walls. We can see parts of a moat surrounding the Imperial Palace and to our rear there’s a glimpse of that NVA flag that still flies over the Citadel. Firefighting peters out to a few desultory pops and bangs. That seems wrong after the wall of fire we’d been taking only moments ago. Maybe the gooks have given up on this fight. Maybe they don’t deem this stretch of the Citadel wall as important as we do. No one is very confident that’s the case as we spread out and begin to sweep north.

We advance cautiously through a stretch of bunkers and trenches dug into the dirt fill between the exterior and interior walls, carefully checking each hole or fold in the littered terrain, moving in brief furtive spurts to keep from being silhouetted on the sky-line. There are some desultory shots and shouts as grunts put insurance rounds into dead bodies encountered along the way. There’s just a few of us up here on the wall. The rest of the outfit is moving parallel, crawling through the houses across the street and keeping a close eye on us.

Terrain forces us into a single file, moving in a tense crouch along a trench that connects a series of abandoned fighting holes. Point man is about two places ahead of me when he fires a burst and dives into one of the abandoned holes. The rest of us crowd into cover, crunching into little cubbies and nooks as an NVA ambush party pumps fire straight down into the trench. Two men are caught with their legs exposed and get hit hard. Peeking around a little bend in the trench line, I can see four green Soviet-style helmets through the muzzle-flash of the enemy weapons. Company Gunny is yelling into his radio for suppressing fire from across the street.

Almost immediately there is the thump and pop of several M-79s and the incoming slacks off as the NVA duck for cover. Company Gunny uses the break to get everyone out of the trench and establish a firing line facing the enemy force. The radio squawks with a report that more gooks are rushing toward the area to reinforce those that are firefighting with us up on the wall. Things are getting intense as more incoming begins to chew up the ground around us. There’s no corpsman handy, so I worm my way over to a black Marine who is squirming in pain with most of his right foot missing. Blood is pumping through what’s left of his mangled boot and he’s in a lot of pain. Using one of his suspender straps, I manage to get a tourniquet on his leg just below the knee and slow the bleeding. He takes my rifle and keeps it pointed forward as I begin to drag him along the trench, back toward the point where we got up on the wall.

We are nearly out of it, just passing a pile of discarded enemy gear, when an NVA springs out of a hole to our right and lunges with a bayonet. Why he didn’t just open up on us will remain one of those welcome mysteries. Bayonet Boy misses me but manages to stab Footless Grunt in the thigh. He wrestles with our attacker which gives me enough slack to grab an abandoned helmet and bash Bayonet Boy a couple of good whacks on the head. He goes down hard, with his green pith helmet crushed and bloody on one side, but I keep swinging.

“He’s dead, motherfucker! Let’s get the fuck out of here!” Footless Grunt jerks the bayonet out of his leg and I continue to drag him toward the rear. He’s screaming on a massive adrenaline jag and telling me we’re going to make it. I’m hoping he’s right, but if there’s one gook laggard that we missed in our sweep of the trench line there could be more. He helps me in the withdrawal effort by scooting and pushing with his good leg as I retrieve the rifle to keep it handy. Maybe it’s survival euphoria or just a search for distraction, but as we work our way out of the fight, I’m thinking about two hours of hand-to-hand combat instruction in basic training. There was no finesse to the encounter, no karate kicks or other slick moves. It was troglodyte stuff—pick up a big rock and bash away until someone dies.

At the alcove where we climbed up onto the wall, Footless Grunt manages to scoot himself down to street level. Trying to decide whether or not to follow, I’m distracted by a machinegun team advancing across the street. It’s just a gunner and his assistant all alone out there in the open, draped in twinkling belts of spare ammo. Incoming rounds chew into the concrete around them as they advance, firing short, sharp bursts into the right flank of the gook position on the wall. There’s no reason I can see that they should be upright in all that fire but they are. The gunner has his helmet on backwards and there’s a demonic expression on his face as he swings the bucking M-60 left and right, hosing down the NVA position.

Boots are thumping and grunts are shouting up the trench we’ve just used to escape the ambush. We are pulling back, apparently ceding our hard-won stretch of Citadel wall to the defenders for the time being. Company Gunny arrives and begins shoving his people down onto street level. The two dead men carried back by the squad have no objection to being unceremoniously dumped down off the wall. Windows across the street light up with muzzle flash as Charlie Company grunts fire cover for our retreating squad. We make the street and sprint across into cover among the houses on the other side dragging the dead men along like floppy pull-toys.

When I’m safely tucked in behind cover, there’s time to take a look at the machinegun team still standing out there in the middle of the street, still alive for some reason despite the NVA fire blazing around them. Grunts are shouting their names, screaming for them to back off, that everyone is safely down off the wall, but it doesn’t seem to register. The assistant gunner is still snapping belts together as the gunner continues to stand there hosing into the NVA flank. Company Gunny finally picks up a rock shard and heaves it at the team. The rock hits assistant gunner on the flak jacket and he turns to see Company Gunny waving frantically for them to pull back.

Assistant gunner jerks on his gunner’s right arm which sends a shower of red tracers in an arc over the NVA position. Gunner shrugs off the distraction and continues to fire until A-Gunner finally twists the belt of ammo to stop it feeding into the smoking gun. Gunner looks startled, even puzzled for a moment and then gets the picture. They’ve got huge grins on their dirty faces as they chug toward cover. They reach safety, chased all the way by NVA fire, only to be called idiots, assholes and dumb-shits by a laughing line of grateful grunts. Was it bravery, intense focus, or just insanity? Company Gunny says he’s not really sure but he’s going to write them up for decorations regardless.

Charlie Company assault platoons are ordered to pull back away from the street, away from the walls, to establish an outpost position. We’ll try for this stretch of walls again but not today. Company Commander wants to wait for some air support or naval gunfire to soften up the defenders.

On the way back to that outpost position, we encounter an NVA sniper who haunts us for days and becomes known among the grunts as The Dinger. He opens up on a squad chugging across a street near our new position and takes down a man with a headshot. Then he gets one of the two grunts who go out to retrieve the body. I’m peeking around a wall, watching all this when I spot a muzzle flash about 100 meters distant in a second-story window of what looks like a garage or mechanical repair shop. My shout alerts a squad leader who peers around the corner and tries to follow my pointing finger. The window is dark at this point, and we can’t see anything. “You sure you saw him?” Squad Leader thinks I might be spooked which I most definitely am but there’s no mistaking it. Some sonofabitch stuck a weapon out that window and cranked off a round at the rescue party.

Squad Leader hands me a magazine full of tracers and yells for his people to watch where I fire. With the tracer ammo loaded up, I take aim, trying to keep as much of my body behind the wall as possible. It’s a lot easier on me since I’m naturally left-handed and don’t have to expose as much as a right-handed shooter. Two rounds streak off toward the window and then there’s a blinding flash in front of my eyes that sends me reeling back to fall flat on my ass. First thing that crosses my mind is that the rifle blew up in my hands. One of those hands, the one that was wrapped around the M-16 pistol grip, is throbbing painfully. There’s a ragged burst of fire from the surrounding grunts mixed with a shout from Squad Leader who is summoning a Corpsman. Somebody’s been hit and it gradually dawns that someone is me.

Vision is gradually returning and I’m shocked to see my chest covered with blood. There’s no pain from that part of my anatomy and I reach up to seek the source. There’s a gash under my chin and I manage to pull out a sliver of black plastic embedded there. The blood on my chest is flowing from the chin which means I have not suffered the dreaded, usually fatal, sucking chest wound. That’s the good news. The bad news is that my left thumb looks like it’s hanging onto the rest of my hand by a sliver of mutilated flesh. When the Corpsman arrives, I stick the mangled digit up for him to see like a kid asking Mom to kiss his boo-boo.

“It ain’t as bad as it looks.” Corpsman goes to work with antiseptic and bandages. The thumb needs stitches—maybe even a few in the chin—and he’ll tag me to get it all repaired back at the BAS. Still trying to figure out exactly what happened when Squad Leader arrives holding what’s left of the M-16 used to fire tracers at the sniper hide. “That motherfucker’s a dinger. I’ll give him that much.” Squad Leader hands me the weapon which looks like it’s been carved into by a hack-saw. Most of the plastic stock and forearm is shattered and there’s a huge gouge in the receiver just above the magazine well. “He was aiming at your gourd and hit the rifle looks like.” Squad Leader pulls the magazine of tracers out of the mangled weapon, inspects it and jams it into a pouch.

Corpsman takes a moment from bandaging to look at what’s left of the rifle. “I’m guessing the impact of the round shattered all that plastic. You took a piece of it in the chin and the pistol grip blew up in your hand—which accounts for this.” He points at my left mitt which now looks like a boxing glove wrapped in bandages. “Damn sure could have been a lot worse, my man. You’re one of the lucky ones.”