Run Between the Raindrops Read online

  Back there along the line of grunts waiting to cross the river, civilian correspondents are asking questions about it, trying to coax emotional quotes from numb survivors of the first half of Operation Hue City. Makes you wonder who the real dumb-shits are. People that ask questions like that or the befuddled bastards that try to answer them? It pleases me to hear several of the southside survivors tell the reporters to take a hike or get fucked. I’m a pissed off man at this point and I could do with some pleasing. See, I’m supposed to be in Hong Kong on an R&R that got summarily canceled when the gooks decided to stage a nationwide offensive during Tet 1968.

  Let me tell you about that.

  Danang

  There is a standard ration of shit from a lifer in the rear who feels that seven months in the bush is no excuse for wanting to go on R&R. The unit is short-handed—not enough correspondents to stretch over the outfits operating in northern I Corps—and we all have to pitch in over the Tet period, et cetera, et-fucking-cetera. A big problem seems to be the unmitigated gall I display by leaving my post at Con Thien up on the DMZ to pick up orders for the R&R that had been scheduled by this very same lifer four months earlier.

  “You should have stuck it out up there until we could send somebody to relieve you. Who’s going to cover Con Thien while you’re gone?”

  Well, hell, let’s see if I can find enough MPC to pay for a call to someone who gives a big rat’s ass. The Captain can solve the problem, but he’s away at a briefing. Let it simmer while I head for Hooch 13 to wash away some of the accumulated DMZ slime. Its mid-day, so there might be some hot water left in the showers.

  But there’s neither rest nor recreation down in the hooch area where combat correspondents share rear-echelon housing space with headquarters clerks and jerks. It’s like walking into a ward full of raving paranoid-psychotics. Everyone screaming about gooks moving all over I Corps and big enemy pushes on urban areas. Shitter rumors are flying and every shoe-clerk knows a guy who just told him the straight scoop.

  It won’t be me, but somebody ought to tell these guys it’s almost Tet. Even the VC and NVA take a break for that deal, visiting their ancestors and trading money and banging on gongs and barking at the moon or whatever else they do to celebrate the lunar New Year. They can do all that and welcome to it without me in attendance this time around. After too damn long as one of the fish in the barrel up at Con Thien, ducking incoming and watching unlucky grunts turned into hamburger, I’ll be observing the occasion in Hong Kong, thank you very much.

  Figures there’s only cold water in the showers but at least it’s wet. Code of the Grunt: If it’s good you can’t have it so just drive on, dude. Don’t mean nothin’. In a day or two I’ll shower in beer. Just plug a cold beer IV in my arm, order up a Chinese cutie and get into some serious sex. My shit is all in one bag. Five bills in back pay and all I need to do is hang out here in Danang until flight time. I’ll just change uniforms then slide on up to the CP and get it squared away with the Skipper.

  The Captain wants to know if I’ve got any idea why the division cooks and clerks are all filling sandbags and running around with loaded rifles. He’s pretty sure the fact that I have no fucking idea why that situation attends is likely because I’ve been stuck up north and away from the larger war picture. I’ll give him stuck up north but we were damn sure as close to the war picture as I ever need to be. Skipper says recon patrols report large enemy forces moving toward the urban areas of I Corps and he’s putting all scheduled rotations on hold, including my Hong Kong R&R. This leaves me seriously pissed but you don’t say no to the Skipper—and I owe him for covering a number of prior misdeeds with the heavies who do not like the carefree attitude espoused by Combat Correspondents.

  He wants me to grab my helmet and head back north to Phu Bai where the division has Task Force X-Ray on stand-by. If the flap fizzles, he’ll have me on the first thing smoking out of Danang for Kowloon Airport. The laughing lifers safe in the rear take umbrage when I call them a gaggle of rear-echelon pogues, but I’m out of the CP before they can do much more than bitch about it.

  No flights north until morning which leaves me no option but to get roaring drunk. So that’s the plan, but there’s a problem with the execution. Freedom Hill PX, just down the road from the Division CP on Hill 327, stocks beer and whiskey for controlled consumption by soldiers, sailors, and airmen but Marines are barred from purchasing any of it. The Division CG apparently thinks Marines have better things to do than sit around drinking when they get the rare break from mortal combat. Even the portion of the standard MACV ration card that outlines how much booze an American is allowed to purchase is removed before it’s issued to a Marine.

  Getting around this dilemma will take some serious criminal activity with which I am intimately familiar. Marines with an abiding interest in mood elevators or attitude adjustments have two basic options. See the little slicky-boys that hang around the perimeter fences selling potent varieties of Laotian Green or Cambodian Red marijuana or find a way to obtain the booze their ration card says they can’t have. Smoking dope just makes me see spiders and other threatening horrors that usually have me curled up under somebody’s rack in the fetal position, so I’m what we call a Juicer.

  Smart Juicers in The Nam learn to operate within a thriving barter system. In the case of the Juicers among the 1st Marine Division Combat Correspondents—and there are many of them—it’s a matter of becoming canny traders at the bargaining table. After a firefight out in the bush, grunts make a mad dash for SKS carbines or Chicom pistols, things they can claim as legal war trophies, stuff they can take home with them if they live long enough to rotate. That stuff is good as gold on the market and it’s about as hard to come by, so those of us who travel with the grunts make it a practice to pick up small items of NVA equipment that the grunts don’t bother to collect. Those gook belts, pouches, helmets, canteens, and entrenching tools are catnip to REMFs who never venture outside the wire.

  As luck and an abiding thirst would have it, there is a clutch of gook gear stuffed inside my field pack. There’s a guy I know from previous barter excursions who is amassing a huge collection of stuff that he intends to take home and lie about, so I get on the road and out away from people milling around the CP looking for other people to put on working parties.

  It takes me only three rides to hitchhike my way to the Naval Construction Battalion Compound outside Danang. Seabees seem to have unlimited access to alcohol, but they drive a fairly hard bargain. Grunts are always hitting on them for steaks or booze or building materials, all of which they have in abundance. Prices are high with Seabees, but they’ll always deal. I’m after white stuff, the booze that is least detectable when mixed in a canteen with Kool-Aid or the bug juice they serve in field messes. The trump I’m carrying includes two NVA AK-47 bayonets, very cool and desirable trade goods, and I’m betting my Seabee source will go for them like early rotation orders.

  It’s early in the day so there’s no crowd at the Seabee EM Club. The manager, a crusty first class petty officer, stands in the doorway chewing on a toothpick with his foot resting on a case of Johnnie Walker scotch. He’s my guy, a hard man to finesse, but not as shrewd as he thinks he is. We’ve done business before and he’s vulnerable to a guilt trip so I make a slow, roundabout approach wearing my best war-weary, thousand-yard stare.

  “Long time, no see, dude. Where you been?”

  “Up north on the DMZ…” I let that hang for a while, staring down at my scuffed jungle boots. “Nasty shit up there, man. I’ve never seen so many gooks in one place. We damn near got overrun a couple of times.”

  He chews on that for minute, eyes the NVA pack sitting at my feet, and then invites me inside for a beer. He knows the drill. I follow him into the dark, cool interior of the club Danang Seabees built to their own specifications and coil myself around a barstool. He pops two rusty cans of Black Label with the church-key he carries hooked to his dungarees and opens nego
tiations.

  “Guess a guy’s been through what you have could use him a bottle or two.”

  “That’s why I’m here. It’s always great to see you and all, but I won’t be in the rear for long and I need some supplies.”

  He ponders that and pries a few war stories out of me while we work through two more beers. Cheap bastard casually extracts the price of the beers from a five-dollar MPC note that I put up on the bar. When I run down, he starts to bitch about his own problems, typical rear-echelon bellyaches, but talking makes him loosen up and before long he’s pouring tequila shots on the house.

  “Sometimes I wish I could just get out of here and hook up with some of the Seabee outfits operating in the field, you know?”

  “You don’t want any part of that shit, dude.” I grab the bottle and re-fill the shots but he doesn’t seem to notice or care. “Seabees are dying like flies up north building base camps and carving out that big fucking chunk of the DMZ for asshole McNamara. You need to stay where you are so we can do some business.”

  “What’re you lookin’ for?”

  “Gin or vodka…” I reach into my pack and plop an NVA entrenching tool on the bar. He handles it for a while looking underwhelmed. “I got one or two of these that you brought last time. What else you got?”

  Beer and tequila were stretching my bladder out of shape, so I slam the AK bayonets on the bar and trundle away toward the head. They have installed a flush toilet since my last visit so I take the opportunity to deposit a week-old C-ration shit in the Seabees shiny new commode. When I get back to the bar, my trading buddy has two fifths each of cheap gin and vodka waiting for me. The bayonets are nowhere in sight. It appears we have made a deal.

  To make travel a little easier, I stop in a remote corner of the Seabee compound and pour the liquor into a clutch of extra plastic canteens and then stuff it all in my pack. There are a bunch of vehicles rushing out of the compound by the time I reach the main gate and the first one to stop takes me all the way back to the division compound on Hill 327.

  Having spent most of the ride in the back of a truck nipping from the canteens, I arrive at my hooch just at dusk and fucked up like Hogan’s Goat which is entirely appropriate to the situation in the division rear area. Alarm sirens are wailing and panicky clerks are falling all over themselves trying to reach a row of defensive bunkers. The inky sky over Hill 327 is lit by parachute flares and roving patrols of combat shoe-clerks are rousting REMFs, shoving them into a leaky perimeter being formed around the division CP. Crawling into a dark corner of Hooch 13, I wrap myself in a poncho-liner and drift off to sleep. Anywhere in Nam is safer than out on a line with nervous pogues shooting at shadows.

  15th Aerial Port Squadron

  “Look, I've got to go north today and standing around here bullshitting with you isn't getting me there.” What a delight to be hung-over and arguing with a fat, sweaty, gum-popping staff sergeant behind the booking desk at the 15th Aerial Port. We’ve been at it for half an hour while he works through a full pack of Spearmint and I deal with a head full of worms and wet sand. The sergeant is apparently too short to give a shit. While we’re bitching back and forth, he’s coloring little squares on a short-timer's calendar.

  “You bush-beasts don't impress me for shit.” He sticks his pen behind an ear and pops his gum. “I'm the one who says where you go and when you go around here. No Marine birds going north today, and that's the way it is. Sorry 'bout that.”

  Sorely tempted to reach over the desk, grab this prick by the stacking swivel, and commence field stripping his sorry ass, I realize it’s futile. And it’s too hot in here for a man with a world-record hangover. It’s another of Nam’s little conundrums. You can generally zip right up to the forward areas with minimum difficulty, but just try getting space on something headed for the rear. There’s a much better chance of finding a PFC in the Pentagon.

  So, how to get myself and four canteens full of booze plus my field gear up north past this uncooperative sonofabitch at passenger control? Heat and frustration drive me away from the desk to ponder the gaggle of aircraft on the 15th APS flight line. A transient breeze carries the familiar odor of the orient mixed with JP-4 jet fuel. An Air Force cargo plane taxies toward a forklift idling next to a stack of boxes. The gear is marked for an outfit based at Dong Ha, and it’s likely the incoming aircraft is due to carry it there. If I can snivel my way aboard that C-123, I might make Phu Bai before dark.

  A pilot in a jaunty blue overseas cap is standing outside the airplane, watching the forklift operator load his bird. Code of the grunt: Innovate and adapt, do what you have to do when and where you have to do it. The Air Force lieutenant eyes my slovenly condition through tinted flight glasses and smiles like a man who knows he’s about to become a mark for a needy grunt. He’s been there and done that a bunch driving airplanes around The Nam.

  “Excuse me, sir. I got a real problem and I thought maybe I could ask one of you officers for some help.” I give him everything but the tears and digging my toe in the dirt. “My brother's up at Dong Ha at Charlie Med. He got hit yesterday and I got permission to go up and see him. But the Marines say there ain't anything flying north.”

  And here is a clear opportunity for this guy to demonstrate that the Air Force could and would fly where the vaunted Marines would not. “So you want the Air Force to take you up there?”

  “Yes, sir, and if I don't get up there today, my brother might die and I would never see him again.” I am prepared to whine and wheedle further but it isn’t necessary. This guy sees his chance to trump the Marine aviators and be remembered for all time by a hard-pressed grunt as Really Good Joe. He motions for me to say no more and get my gear aboard the aircraft. “When you see your brother, tell him the Air Force got you there on time, hear?'

  His dual-engine transport claws for airspace over Danang creating a peculiar but familiar sensation back in the cargo compartment. It’s as if the airplane doesn’t want to leave the earth and get up there in triple-A range with its ass hanging out. There is a reluctant little lurch when the wheels lift off the runway and the deal is done. I snuggle under a retaining strap stretched across the floor of the cargo bay, hoping the staff sergeant down below at the booking desk picks up a bad burst of clap on his first low-level mission over a female back in The World.

  My delicate stomach wakes me from a sweaty stupor as the aircraft suddenly dips and tilts. Visible below is the red clay of Dong Ha and the pilots are taking no chances on incoming artillery. They manhandle the airplane around the pattern and roar into a final landing approach at the last possible moment. Dong Ha puts me close, but I still have to make my way to Phu Bai. Leaving me on a steel-matted runway, the aircrew unloads rapidly and then spins it around to head back for cold beer and clean sheets.

  Dong Ha

  Dong Ha is headquarters for the 3rd Marine Division, but it looks more like a sleepy outpost. Somebody ought to let them know the yellow horde is about to descend according to the vaunted oxymoron known as military intelligence. There is just one lonely Huey parked on the matting in front of the shanty passenger terminal. Two or three Marines sprawl in the red dust near the building in various stages of stupor. Grunts are incredibly flexible in a lot of interesting ways. Despite the heat boiling up off the runway matting, these guys manage to arrange their limbs under, over, or around 60 pounds of bulky equipment and sleep like babies. Code of the Grunt: Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, and never lie down without going to sleep.

  There is a familiar form crapped out on a Willy Peter bag inside the terminal door where dark shadow provides a little shade. I’ve humped enough clicks behind that rawboned body to recognize it from any angle. He doesn’t bother to lift the helmet covering his eyes when I walk over and kick at his scruffy jungle boots.

  “On your feet, Douchebag! There’s a war to fight—or so they tell me down in Danang.”

  “Hey, dude, I was wondering if I'd run
into you on this deal.” My buddy Steve is a solid combat correspondent, competent in a firefight, with a weird sense of humor and a compulsion to emulate Ernie Pyle. We spent a lot of time together, back in the pre-Nam world and working with the 1st Marine Regiment when they got sent north to reinforce the DMZ. Hooking up with him will make this whole exercise a lot more palatable.

  He sniffs at the canteen I offer and a huge grin spreads across his sunburned features. “Well, you’ve been back to Danang, I see. What’s the word from the rear?”

  “Major panic among the pogues who are sure the great piss-yellow hordes are about to descend from the north or something. Skipper sent me up here to join up with Task Force X-Ray and stand by to stand by.”

  He takes another slug of gin and passes the canteen. “Thought you were scheduled for R&R…”

  “I was—and if nothing happens in the next day or two, I’m out of here and headed for Hong Kong. Skipper promised.”

  Steve gets to his feet and shoulders his gear. “You’ve been a member of our beloved Corps long enough to know the value of promises. They are much like assholes. They all stink. Code of the Grunt: Promise in one hand, shit in the other. See which hand fills up first.”

  “Maybe we can wangle a trip to Hue, dude. Remember the last time we got up there?”

  Hue—When it was Cool

  We are sight-seeing in a borrowed Jeep, half-drunk and half-listening to a historical rap from a buddy who is based in Hue with the American Forces Radio & TV outlet in the city. Sergeant Tom Young, a pal from stateside, is hosting two bush-beasts buddies and trying to make us believe he’d rather be out in the bush with us than stuck in his plush job. It’s bullshit and everyone knows it, so we just gaze like lechers at tight little Asian asses molded to bicycle or motorbike seats, as winsome girls in ao dais offer coy smiles or covert waves. It’s all bright colors and happy people, the opposite of what we are used to in the dirt-poor villages we patrol out in the hinterlands.