Run Between the Raindrops Read online

  RUN BETWEEN THE RAINDROPS

  DALE A. DYE

  Author’s Preferred Edition

  WARRIORS PUBLISHING GROUP

  NORTH HILLS, CALIFORNIA

  To the gallant Marine grunts who fought and won the Battle of Hue City. Even after all these years, it's still an honor to stand in your dwindling ranks.

  Author’s Foreword

  This book began in the worst possible way for some of the best possible reasons. That’s a fairly evocative comment to make about a work published some 25 years ago to scant critical notice and lukewarm sales that barely covered my meager author’s advance, so I’ll take the opportunity of this resurrection to render some thoughts on my first novel.

  Ironically, action on this book began on Okinawa, that far eastern island that served as launching point for so many of us who wound up in Vietnam anytime from about 1965 through the end of war ten years later. I was in a fairly stable three-year tour of duty out there having committed to a career as a U.S. Marine and managed to wangle a commission from the enlisted ranks. In a nod to upward mobility, I followed the urging of then Staff Sergeant Maggie Chavez, my wife at the time, and began pursuing a college education. It was a truly wonderful experience, but I was too ignorant to appreciate Maggie forcing me into a consciousness-raising pursuit that paid huge dividends later. Thanks, Maggie. And I’m truly sorry it took me until now to say that.

  Another person I need to thank for the experience at the University of Maryland’s University College out there on The Rock is Dr. George Sidney, who was my English professor and later became my literary mentor. George was a scrawny little guy with a big brain and heart to match. It was hard for me to credit the fact that he’d been a Marine rifleman during the bitter fighting in Korea, but he’d come through the Chosin Reservoir campaign and even wrote a book about his experiences. And that’s what tripped the trigger and launched the initial effort to write about some of my own wartime experiences.

  We were within sight of my baccalaureate degree in English Lit and looking for something that would grant me a final fistful of credits needed when George started talking about his war experiences and how difficult it had been for him to write about them. He spoke about some of the scenes in his book and they sounded so like things I’d seen in Vietnam that I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut. “I should write a book about Nam.”

  George squinted at me and pondered for a moment. It wasn’t the first time we’d shared wartime horror stories, but it was the only time I’d mentioned wanting to write about it. “If you do,” he said picking at the label on a bottle of Kirin Beer, “and if it’s as good as some of your other writing, I’ll check the blocks and grant you the degree requirements.”

  With multiple Vietnam tours under my belt between 1965 and 1970, each with their own ample dosages of unique experience and colorful characters, it was clear to me in the planning stages that I was going to have to narrow the focus. To do that, I simply had to open the flood gates and let the images flow from where they’d been dammed up in memory. Nothing crystallized as clear and nerve-jangling as three weeks in Hue City during Tet of 1968. It was right then, as I pondered the image of gore-stained Navy Hospital Corpsman binding wounds to get Marines back into the fight raging through Vietnam’s ancient imperial capital, that I came up with the title for this book.

  “Ain’t it a bitch?” Doc Toothpick asked me one night toward the end of the battle for the northside. “Seems like making it through this Hue City deal is like trying to run between the raindrops without getting wet.” And there was the title. Now I simply had to write the rest.

  Having read most of the greater and lesser war novels as part of my formal education and my abiding interest in all things military, I knew they ran curiously to type. The new guy flush with innocence arrives in a combat unit, meets a colorful cast of characters both princely and pathetic, becomes steeled or unnerved by the brutalities of combat, and either gets his ass blown away or survives, returning to an ungrateful nation that just can’t understand what he’s experienced. I wanted to write something different with trappings and observations on the gonzo model of first person, experiential screeds that would convey the surreal, often hallucinatory images I recalled from fighting in the mean streets of Hue.

  It was a scary prospect and I felt the need for reinforcements, so I communicated with my close combat buddy who had fought through most of the Hue City battle until he got riddled with rocket shrapnel. Both of us had harbored delusions of writing The Great American War Novel at one time or another over the years since Saigon fell. We were both writers. We were both angst-riddled and angry. Why not collude and collaborate on a book about Hue?

  Why not indeed? And we tried to make it work but our styles, motivations and schedules never quite came into sync. It wasn’t his fault. It was mine for insisting on a departure from conventional storytelling. The more I pondered, the more I became convinced that the tale should be as twisted and torturous as the fighting that formed its core. Historians, journalists, and other chroniclers could deal with the facts of the Hue City fight. I wanted to take readers on a head-trip that jangled, sizzled, and buzzed like a bad acid jag. In my view, the story—or the impact I wanted it to convey—demanded an erratic, staccato style with prose as raw as the scenes it described. That sort of tune could only be played by a one-man band, so writing the novel would be a solo effort.

  At this point, the story began to boil, bubble, and come alive. I thrashed away on a typewriter, often working through the night as Maggie got used to wearing earplugs and dealing with the night sweats prompted by recounting some of the most harrowing moments of my life. It was both rewarding and therapeutic. I learned that I’d been suppressing some bad memories that were prompting bad behavior. These days that’s called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Back then I thought it was just the stoic, manly way of dealing with painful experiences about which noble warriors did not speak publically. And I learned that like a resounding, healthy fart, such things are better out than in. Mentally reliving the experiences I recounted in writing “Run Between the Raindrops” didn’t cure me of my war nerves, but it did force me to confront some very lethal demons that would have eventually eaten my soul.

  Along the way I learned a lot about novel writing and about the weird way I engage in that lonely pursuit. I’m a very visual guy and what I do is close my eyes, let a scene unspool in vivid, living color, and then do my best to describe the movie I’ve just seen on the inside of my eyelids. Most writers don’t do it that way. But another thing I learned is that I’m not like most writers, which might account for my less than sterling notoriety in literary circles. Writing for most writers I’ve met seems to be a very cerebral exercise. For me, it’s a sort of low-impact PT session. I write with my body as much as my brain. In the course of composing a single novel, I’ve been known to completely wear the letters off a keyboard home row. I also talk to myself quite a bit, sounding out the dialogue and tasting the words. When I’m shouting or screaming in this effort, I’ve been known to frighten small children and set dogs to howling for blocks around the neighborhood.

  Fortunately, I’m fairly facile with language, but when I handed in a first draft to Dr. George Sidney, he thought it was too stilted. George felt I was over-structured and confining myself with conventional prose. “You’ve got to let it flow from your mind, onto the paper and into the imagination of the reader.” George thought it might be a good drill if I went back through the manuscript and tried to eliminate the first-person pronouns. I did that—mostly to appease him—and it turned out to be a brilliant exercise. Suddenly sentence structure lost its sharp edges and rounded into a burbling stream of consciousness. It was the ke
y that popped my story-telling instincts wide open and allowed me to include some very, very personal and painful elements that I’d been afraid to expose in the initial telling.

  That doesn’t mean “Run Between the Raindrops” can’t be improved. It’s full of literary naiveté and writing blunders that I would neither make nor tolerate these days. I’m a better writer—or at least more practiced at it—than I was back when I first composed this book. I’ve completed and published seven other novels since and learned a great deal from writing each of them. My prose is less derivative now that I’ve found my own voice, although I still tend to wield words like a meat-axe. I understand now that story-telling is an art that improves with age and practice. So, in that more polished voice and with nearly a half-century of distance at hand, I’ve consented to take a second look at this book, smooth some literary bumps, and try to improve the product.

  It’s been difficult to edit by revisiting those mind-numbing experiences in Hue, but I believe now as I did back on Okinawa many years ago that the gain is worth the pain. Some of that has to do with the war stories I hear these days from veterans of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Likely because these vets know I’ve seen the elephant and heard the owl, they open up to me and describe some of their own most seminal experiences in combat. And many of their stories contain the same sort of surreal, shocking elements that I recall so vividly from the battle for Hue City back in 1968. There’s a common denominator there that needs to be explored and explained to ensure this new generation of veterans doesn’t experience the ignorance and ennui we did on return from our war in Vietnam. If some of these folks read “Run Between the Raindrops,” they may see that common bond and realize their situation is hardly unique. Painful memories and haunting images are part of the dues you pay to play in the deadly and desperate game of mortal combat.

  If you’ve not read the book, I hope you enjoy this version. If you’re one of the few who read it when it was released back in 1984, I hope you’ll take another look and follow me once again, step by painful step, through the mean streets of Hue City during Tet 1968. Either way, I’m genuinely glad for your company.

  Prologue

  Most of the emotion-drunk survivors in the belly of this vibrating beast are higher than whatever the instruments in the cockpit indicate. Most of them are out of it one way or another. This Flying Tiger is removing mostly-whole bodies from the Land of the Lotus Eaters and that’s a huge jolt to the collective pulse. There’s an energy surge that seems to sweep and spark through long rows of uniformed bodies strapped into narrow seats. Layered over the hum of the engines propelling this big silver cylinder out over the South China Sea is a counterpoint of young male voices singing excitedly of plans and expectations.

  They run curiously to type, these young American males with dark leathery tans running from the neck up and the elbows down where skin shows through unfamiliar dress uniforms. Random seatmates become best buddies as they share plans to tear The World a new asshole beginning immediately after landing. But that’s 14 hours from now, a tiny tick in time compared to 12 months or more in The Nam. They will endure, calling on long practice in dealing with things in-county that they could not change regardless of how hard they wished or prayed.

  A sweaty soldier at my elbow wearing a Purple Heart under aircrew wings wants to show off an album he compiled flying as a door gunner with the 1st Cav. He’s chatty and chipper, providing detailed descriptions of the rice paddies and jungle-covered mountains he snapped from his seat in a Huey. There’s even an aerial shot of the Citadel in Hue. He wants to talk about that. No way…not yet…too soon.

  Searching for distraction I just nod and stare at scudding clouds outside the window. Door Gunner turns on the man sitting at his other elbow, a truck driver that wants to talk about a convoy ambush somewhere north of Danang. They play one-up with each other while I stuff stereo earphones into my head and click through recorded tunes. There’s some Motown. Philly Dog would dig it but he’s dead, cut down with his buddy Willis on the walls of the Citadel. Country channel blares with somebody singing about a ring of fire. Same song the Southerner used to sing off-key through his crooked nose, but Reb is gone, chopped nearly in half by some faceless gook gunner in Hue City. Janis Joplin strikes a chord: Nothin’ left to lose. That’s freedom.

  There it is—and images from Hue City flicker behind my eyelids. There it is among all the poor over-stressed, under-appreciated guys that fought through that shit-storm. Too many of them dead, crushed, or crippled and nobody celebrates what they accomplished with not much more than guts and a determination not to let each other down. It could have been me—probably should have been me—dead and bloated among the mist and moss on those walls. But it’s not over by a damn sight, not at the end of this flight, not at the end of some politician’s tunnel, and not until there’s some long-overdue light shining on those guys and what they do for a nation that doesn’t give a shit.

  There’s no end in sight and they’ll be looking for volunteers. That will be me with my hand waving in the air, ready to sign any waiver they demand from war-junkies wanting to return to the pointy-end of the bayonet. And like the man says in the old tune, I won’t be back ‘til it’s over over there—one way or another.

  Through the Looking Glass

  Kipling had it nailed. The dawn does come up like thunder in this part of the world. You can almost hear a roar and rumble as the sky slowly explodes into light. Staring at that crimson orb, spreading streaks of purple and yellow across the horizon as it rises from the South China Sea, you wonder if old Rudyard was really standing on the road to Mandalay when he wrote about it. He could have been standing right here on the southern banks of the Perfume River watching the dawn come thundering up over Hue, the seat of the Vietnam’s ancient mandarin emperors.

  Nothing—not even the incessant drizzle—mutes the beauty of the dawn. There’s serious mojo in a scarlet sun, warm and welcome as it chases an inky wet night. Imagine zooming out over the water to sit with your back to that sun where the struggle between light and dark seems prelude to a bloodier confrontation taking place below. From up there you’ve got a panoramic view of an Asian anachronism.

  There’s a long stretch of pristine white beach, bisected by a purple ribbon of water that runs east toward the South China Sea. At the high water mark, there’s a shimmering sand castle, complete with turrets, ramparts, and redoubts. And like the topsy-turvy world Alice encountered on the other side of a looking glass, things down below get curiouser and curiouser.

  It’s like staring at an ant farm. There’s surely pattern and purpose to it all, but if you’re not an ant, it’s hard to comprehend. There are things trying to kill other things down there. It’s a battle royal with flags flying and carcasses crumpled everywhere. As a bloody sun pumps more light onto the scene, an army of things swarms toward the walls of that sand castle where an army of other things tries to drive them back. The clash is horrible there.

  With a final rumble of Kipling’s thunder the dawn cracks full and dumps you off that high perch. And down in the mud and the blood, you are once again a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent assigned to celebrate or eulogize the things around you, the guys doing the fighting and dying in the Great Big Battle of Hue City. There are plenty of civilian reporters milling around down here, the ones who fashion themselves front-line war correspondents, but they’ve got a job much different than yours despite a similar title. They will interview, analyze, and dissect the fight from tactical or political perspectives. Your beat is down in the squads and platoons, writing quirky hometown vignettes about the grunts that know little of the tactics and care less about the politics.

  It’s a symbiotic relationship on this beat among the men who carry the fight forward on blistered, aching infantry feet. The way it works is the grunts fight the battles and combat correspondents march along with them, observing from close-up and picking up the little stories that civilian newsmen consider too petty o
r heroic to support national cynicism about an unpopular war. The military correspondents aim their stuff at the rural American weeklies and small-time fish-wrappers that need copy to fill the news-hole with local color. The grunts get a little recognition in their hometowns and the occasional shot of publicity often makes their miserable existence a little easier to abide.

  Among the very few of us assigned to the combat correspondent gig, there is little desire to put up with the misery, pain, and exhaustion of the grunt lifestyle on anything but an irregular schedule. We mostly stick with it because we know there’s an out when we want one. We carry orders that say we can come and go as required, which means when we please most of the time. The key is to maintain just a little distance. You can write knowledgeably and insightfully about infantrymen without having to be one every day all the time. At least that’s what we keep telling ourselves in an effort to maintain that crucial little distance between observers and observed. It doesn’t always work that way. We are, after all, trained U.S. Marines just like the guys we write about, and that’s a factor that keeps cropping up when times get hard.

  Times are most definitely hard and somehow out of joint here in Hue City. Modern warriors, fondling automatic rifles, stare across the water at the walls of the Citadel in the same way ancients must have stood near arbalests and catapults before the great siege battles of antiquity. Now it’s Yankee Doodle besieging King Nguyen’s Court and there are desperate defenders burrowed like moles into the walls surrounding his palace. And King Nguyen holds a valuable trump in this contest. Those walls and his palace are cultural icons filled with historically significant artifacts. Marines don’t give a shit about all that, but someone in Saigon does. There will be no air strikes or artillery barrages employed lest those life-saving methods blow big chunks out of Vietnamese history.