Old Home Week

Delta remains in reserve as three other rifle companies hammer away at enemy hard-points and pockets of resistance in the northern parts of the Citadel. Lieutenant Longlegs says it won’t be long before they’ve got the area secured. ARVN units are filtering in behind our sweeps to hold what’s re-taken. When the situation meets everyone’s satisfaction, we turn around and head south in the direction of the palace compound. It’s what will amount to a last big push. The Vietnamese Marines have got the place nearly surrounded and all that irritating amplified jabber we hear echoing through the city streets is ARVN psyops people trying to talk the remaining defenders into surrendering. There’s been enough damage to this cultural icon and the GVN wants to see if they can avoid turning the Imperial Palace into just another pile of ancient rubble.

Listening to the loudspeakers blare one drizzly night, two old friends suddenly appear in Hue asking for me. Lieutenant Longlegs leads them over to the little parlor where I’ve set up housekeeping with the four New Guys remaining in the third squad. And suddenly we are seven with the addition of Doc Toothpick and Reb the Southerner. Last time I saw the lanky redneck from the Florida Panhandle, he had just talked himself into a cushy job as an assistant supply clerk at a compound down near Liberty Bridge. It was just after they’d given him a Silver Star and a third Purple Heart, an epic story which I wrote up for his hometown newspaper.

“Thought you were out of here on three Purples, dude. What happened?” Reb dumps his field gear in a corner and offers me a hit from a canteen filled with a familiar concoction of gin and grape Kool-aid.

“They wasn’t movin’ fast enough to suit me.” He retrieves the canteen and passes it to Doc Toothpick. “I had me some words with an admin worm and then whooped his ass. All on a sudden, mah paperwork disappeared. They had me burnin’ shitters which ain’t no kinda business for nobody, so I told the Sarn’t Major he might just as well send my ass up to Hue City. On the way I run into Toothpick and he said you was up in here somewheres. Longlegs brung us right to ya.”

“What happened to your dick-skinner?” Doc Toothpick, a rangy, rugged Third Class Hospital Corpsman from St. Louis, picked up my bandaged hand, gave it a sniff and grimaced. “Either you’ve been wiping your ass with that hand or it’s infected.” While he peels off the filthy bandages to take a look, Doc plucks one of his trademarks out of a pocket, pops it into his mouth and begins to chew. You can generally gauge his mood by how hard he’s working one of his ever-present toothpicks. He told me once when I was interviewing him for a story about his rescue of three wounded men under fire that his mother sent them to him by the box-full, one box for every week in The Nam.

“How’d you get caught up in this deal, Doc? Last I heard they pulled you off the line and sent you to a Regimental Aid Station.”

“You got any idea how many corpsman been blown away on this fuckin’ op?”

“Got to be a bunch…”

“You fuckin’ A, Skippy. I took one look at them snot-nosed replacements and told the Chief he better just send my ass up here where I might could do some good.” He examines my swollen hand and discolored thumb under a flashlight. “And the first thing we better do is get you over to the BAS where we can pump some antibiotics directly into this hand.” He digs around in his Unit One medical kit and tears open some fresh bandages. “Meanwhile,” he says dumping two pills out of a plastic bottle, “take these with a hit of Reb’s Purple Jesus.”

“You heard about Steve?”

Doc Toothpick pauses in his bandaging and nods. “I was helping out on the southside when they brought him in off one of the Mike Boats. We got him on a chopper right away. I expect he’s in Yokosuka by now or somewhere on the way home.”

“How did he look?”

“How the fuck does anybody look that gets hammered by a B-40, dude? He’s tore up but I’m betting he’ll keep the arm. Not so sure about the leg, but he’s out of it and headed stateside. They got good Docs back there can probably save it.” Doc Toothpick finishes the re-wrap and checks his watch. “We ain’t doing anything right now and I know a dude over at the BAS. Let’s walk over there and get you treated before this thing shrivels up and drops off your fuckin’ wrist.”

Sentries on watch at various points along the route to the BAS challenge us several times but nobody shoots anything more damaging than insults about stupid bastards wandering around in the dark. “It seems like I’m always patching your ass up, Dude.” Toothpick pushes his helmet back off his eyes and we talk about another time on another op when he spent a long afternoon picking Chicom shrapnel out of my butt and leg. “You’ve got to take better care of yourself and stop playing grunt.”

“It ain’t playing up here in Hue, Doc.”

“Ain’t it a bitch? Seems like making it through this Hue City deal is like trying to run between the raindrops without getting wet.”

“There it is, Doc. There it is.”

Senior Corpsman at the BAS volunteers to wake one of the surgeons, but Toothpick says he’ll handle what needs to be done. Under a surgical light, the two of them look at my damaged hand and make little grunting noises for a while. When they’ve seen enough and decided on a course of action Senior Corpsman swabs my hand with some kind of topical anesthetic while Toothpick prepares a syringe full of thick white fluid. “Chew on this.” He pokes one of his toothpicks in my mouth and closes in with the syringe. “This might pinch a bit.”

It feels like a thousand fire ants attacking my hand as Doc probes and injects at various places, shooting a strong antibiotic directly into the infected flesh. When it’s over and my hand is re-bandaged into an even more unwieldy mitt, we duck out of the BAS and run into Lieutenant Longlegs who is checking on some of his wounded grunts.

“It’s on for tomorrow,” he tells us, the big push into the Imperial Palace area. We’ll get a detailed briefing in the morning but the broad brush puts us on the left of the Vietnamese Marines sweeping due south until we hit the palace grounds. And this time the battalion CO is taking a page from the NVA playbook. We’ll be moving under cover of our own shooters positioned on rooftops and upper levels of buildings all along the way.

By the time we get back to the squad, the South Vietnamese are once again loudly begging their northern cousins to give it up, be reasonable and rally to the Saigon side. Reb has polished off the Purple Jesus so there’s nothing to do but try to sleep while the propaganda echoes up and down the streets of the Citadel. Hopefully, it’s as hard on the NVA as it is on us.