Run Between the Raindrops Read online

  Hue is a different thing, a sprawling impressive city shot through with national color like Rome or Paris where residents always seem conscious of living in and around their own history. Like a trio of tourists we visit The Citadel on the north side of the Perfume River, gawking at its splendor. It’s a fortress from an earlier time, a square mile of thick stone walls surrounding a sub-city that has grown up in the shadow of the ancient walls. There is a moat full of mud and pond scum surrounding the walls and all the measurements are precise. That moat is 40-feet across and 40-feet deep. It guards walls that are 40-feet high and 40-feet thick. Tom knows all the details.

  In earlier times Asian bandits, warring hill tribes, rival rulers and Mongol hordes attacked the walls. Now lichens, moss, and tropical ivy encroach on the great stone slabs, but they are no less intimidating for their age. Vegetation rises unevenly up the walls toward the broad tops where bracken and bramble grow wild. In a few more centuries the encroaching growth might form a lush, living carpet, crossing the walls and closing on the Imperial Palace, centerpiece of the Citadel complex. Tom says it was designed on the Chinese model, patterned after parts of the Forbidden City in Beijing.

  It was easy, staring up at those walls, to let your imagination run. The climbing ivy might be the gnarled fingers of attackers who die assaulting a hallowed fortress, casualties of another fruitless attempt to reach the inner city behind the Citadel walls. There are nine separate gates in the walls each one featuring a bridge that spans the moat. Inside the gates, string-straight avenues crisscross the Citadel’s interior which is a mix of stately homes and shanties. The shanties are new and crowded with people who look like they ought to be out in the villages wading in paddies. Many of them are war refugees who are seeking shelter behind Hue’s thick walls.

  Still, there’s a distinctive sense of ancient history here. The Nguyen Dynasty emperors did a lot of building and beautifying before they were elbowed out of power by a more modern dictatorship in Saigon far to the south. The noisy, frenetic shanty sectors seem a blot on the pristine lay-out of the Citadel, mixing the worst elements of peasant poverty with the best of mandarin splendor. And right there in the middle of it all was the biggest anachronism of all: Headquarters of an ARVN infantry division. Strolling around the manicured drill square is a Palace Guard in polished boots and tightly-tailored uniforms. None of these guys seem worried about war. Stuff like that happens in the jungles on the other side of Hue’s walls.

  When we viewed it as combat tourists, Hue was majestic, stately and beautiful, a little oasis of Vietnamese peace and prosperity where the war seemed reassuringly remote. That first visit was pleasant and reassuring. The second time sucked.

  Dong Ha

  Steve is swilling gin and bitching about the bad taste a plastic canteen imparts to his favorite booze. He’s only here with me because they ordered him from his beat up on the DMZ to reinforce a short staff of Combat Correspondents at Phu Bai, where elements of the 1st and 5th Marine Regiments are being pulled into a perimeter for some rest during the Tet ceasefire period. It seems like a great opportunity to circulate among the bush-beasts and pick up some stories to feed the mimeograph machines back in Danang.

  So it’s getting dark, and we’re still sitting on the runway at Dong Ha in the shade of a Huey with its rotors tied down and no crew in sight. The option is to hit up our counterparts in the 3rd Marine Division for a little overnight hospitality but they’d likely drink all our booze, so we decide to try and find a ride to Phu Bai.

  Inside the Dong Ha passenger terminal, a bored Air Force clerk is paging through a Playboy at the passenger manifest desk. He looks like his counterpart down in Danang, the kind of guy who would ace an Asshole Aptitude Test. As we contemplate an approach, he playfully gooses an old Vietnamese woman in a conical hat and baggy silk trousers who is lazily sweeping up the joint. She pretends to swat at him with her broom each time he jabs at her butt. When we interrupt the game, he’s solicitous but firm. “There ain't a fucking thing flying north or south. Everything's locked on standby for combat commitments.”

  “What about that Huey parked outside?”

  “Emergency bird on Ready Five and it don't go nowhere unless there’s an emergency, which in your case, there ain’t.”

  We are apparently locked in a no-fly zone but outside the terminal there is a serpentine convoy of Army supply trucks staging along a perimeter road. The vehicles bear the tactical markings of a doggie outfit we know is co-located with the Marines at Phu Bai. For a couple of healthy belts from one of our canteens, we get a reserved seat up front with one of the drivers.

  “Where you dudes heading?”

  “Hard telling. We’ll probably find out at Phu Bai.”

  “I wouldn’t drop my pack if I was you. My lieutenant says the shit has hit the fan in Hue. They sent a bunch of Marines up there this morning. Looks like the ceasefire is bullshit just like every other fuckin’ thing in The Nam.”

  “You shittin’ me?”

  “Gospel, dude. They say gooks are raisin’ hell all over the fuckin’ country. You dudes are in for some serious shit.”

  The Canals

  There is a light, irritating rain falling at dawn. It alternates with heavier showers throughout the day, and we are either soaked with hot sweat or drenched with cold rain as we climb in and out of issue rain suits. There’s an ambient hiss in Hue as the rain washes over us. It’s like a noisy snake slithering through the streets and it leaves a musty, cloying odor of wet canvas, mildew, and decay in its wake. It’s chilly for bush-beasts used to clammy jungles, but that doesn’t keep the sweat from pumping. That bodily function has nothing to do with ambient air temperature on the outskirts of Hue City.

  We wake up on either side of a comatose grunt who shared a billowy featherbed with us in a house we cleared on our first day in Hue. Velour curtains ripped from the windows kept us warm during the night and soaked up some of the moisture we leaked into the bedding. There was a wonderful warm and dry feeling at dawn, but that didn’t last long. Grunts sprawl in the living room of the shot-up house that serves as our temporary platoon CP. No one seems overly interested in anything that’s happening outside this sanctuary. If it’s serious and it’s going to involve us, the word will be passed.

  Meanwhile, the morning ritual of field troops continues. There’s a nearly ravenous need for hot coffee. It’s rarely going to be a good day in The Nam and little things like inhaling coffee vapors at the start of one means a lot. Steve cadges a wad of C-4 from an attached combat engineer and has a canteen cup of C-ration coffee ready in moments. Burning volatile plastic explosive to heat coffee is one of the trade tricks that differentiate a veteran from a new guy who will wheeze with watering eyes over an issue heat-tab and still not have his stuff ready to drink before the order to move comes down the line.

  With the bitter coffee boiling in our stomachs, we step outside, glare up at the low cloud layer hanging over the Phu Cam Canal area, and watch grunts dragging bodies into a heap. Some of the dancing shadows we saw darting through the alleys last night were not specters. There are five bodies, all in NVA uniform, all fat and sleek, and all very dead. A similar number of Marine dead from Alpha Company, 1/1 has been moved to the rear and out of sight. For some reason, the gooks didn’t get around to blowing the little An Cuu Bridge over the canal which leaves the main supply route between Phu Bai and Hue open for units flowing into the city. Maybe Alpha Company caught them on the way to rig the charges. Yesterday there was a short, sharp firefight in this area that stalled our convoy and caused the CO to drop off a platoon in place to hold the bridge. We spent the night with them.

  We slither into wet web gear and fall into a line of grunts forming up on the sides of the broad avenue leading deeper into the city. A squad leader stops near us and bums a light from the end of my cigarette. “Gunny says we’re supposed to link up with the rest of the company near the MACV Compound. They’re sendin’ some dudes from 5th Marines up behind
us.”

  He flinches and squints up the street in the direction of three explosions followed by sharp exchange of machinegun fire. “That’s the MACV Compound.” Squad Leader has been monitoring his radio all night. “Gooks tried to overrun it and got their ass kicked. Bunch of doggie MPs and advisors are holdin’ the place. And that’s where we’re headed.”

  Nodding nervously and trying to keep my cigarette stoked in the drizzle, I glance at his helmet. He’s drawn a detailed depiction of the Marine Corps eagle, globe, and anchor emblem on the camouflage cover and modified the Semper Fidelis motto to Simply Forget Us.

  “How soon we movin’?”

  He points at an idling truck where a Corpsman is working on a wounded Marine. “Soon’s the Doc gives me the word on Franklin.” It doesn’t look like the word on Franklin will be encouraging. He’s been hit by plunging fire from a gook up on one of the roofs across the canal. Two rounds drove through his body from shoulder to hip. The Corpsman kept him alive all night, but Franklin has that fish-belly pale look that says he’s lost too much blood. Likely Franklin is doomed and like most doomed grunts, he’ll go quietly with no fuss. There’s rarely any drama when a wounded man dies. It’s almost anticlimactic. The damage has been done. And maybe it’s better to avoid the lingering and angst that comes with bleeding out or shock. Grunts often argue the point. Maybe it’s better for all concerned if life gets snuffed out violently by high explosive or a burst of small arms in a vital area that takes you down so hard that you’re dead before you hit the deck. We saw a lot of that shit yesterday.

  Yesterday

  A staff officer from Task Force X-Ray at Phu Bai blazed through the base camp leading a pressgang of grunts. Everyone who was available—whether he thought he was or not—got shoved into a provisional rifle company built on the skeleton of Alpha Company, 1/1. Gooks had grabbed Hue City and the Marines were going to grab it back. We loaded up with the convoy headed east and tried to find a grunt squad we thought we could trust. Every Marine is a rifleman, but label-lickers and box-kickers somewhat less so.

  It didn’t take long to make the eight-mile trip, and it took even less time to realize we were smack in the middle of a shit sandwich. Gooks bunkered in buildings on the city side of the An Cuu Bridge over the broad canal that drains the south side of Hue took serious issue with attempts to blow through and relieve the pressure on the MACV Compound near the banks of the Perfume River. A wall of incoming smacked into the lead trucks and we bailed out to assess the situation. Grunts and people trying to imitate grunts fanned out to engage the NVA in spider traps and machine-gun positions spotted around a traffic circle on the outskirts of Hue.

  The fight rapidly turned into a series of Keystone Kops sight gags, but there wasn’t much funny about it. On the good news side of the ledger, we’d run into a platoon of five M-48 tanks headed for Hue to board water transport for some other destination. The tankers were drafted to provide us with an armor shield which got a couple of the stalled platoons moving. On the downside, Alpha grunts were fresh from jungle fighting along the DMZ and having trouble adjusting to a very different sort of combat. There on the outskirts of Hue, bad guys in concrete buildings had all the advantages and the shrapnel effect of every round fired was doubled or tripled by rock shards and flying glass.

  Hanging around the CP, we listened to the radios and tried to make sense of the squawk and chatter as Alpha pushed toward the MACV Compound. We were taking casualties in return for not much progress. That much was clear as Alpha Six checked in with the command group and discovered that a company from 2/5 was headed in our direction to shove us from the rear. Meanwhile, he planned to press on behind the tanks now engaging targets with grunts huddled behind them like ducklings.

  We chose to avoid that exercise. There’s not a rifleman on a modern battlefield that can resist shooting at a tank and the ricochets can be just as lethal as direct fire. We passed the time watching Alpha Six stew and steam and speculating on why he didn’t just call for a massive artillery strike from the batteries back at Phu Bai or dial up some Snake and Nape from close air support.

  The lack of artillery, air support—even naval gunfire since we were close to the coast—didn’t seem to make much sense given the Marine Corps penchant for spending metal over meat. And then we got to thinking about the special prominence of this city, the convoluted process sometimes required to clear fire missions, and the attitude we’d often seen displayed by our gallant ARVN allies. Given that context, the high command was highly unlikely to bring a sledgehammer to bear on this tough nut.

  Suppose Alpha Six gets really pissed off and starts screaming for high-explosive fire missions from everything available that flies, floats, or shoots long range into Hue. ARVN commanders, who have the final say since we are nominally just here supporting their fight, refuse the request. Not one round gets stuffed into any tube pointed at Hue. Marine commanders argue hotly. We’re losing Marines up there trying to get your showcase city back from the evil northerners. So what’s the deal? Well, see, the ARVN badly want you to kick the bulldog shit out of those evil northerners occupying Hue, but it must be done gently, gentlemen. No heavy artillery, no airstrikes, and you’ll just have to go through the houses and buildings one by one and kill all the NVA without dirtying any carpets or breaking any china in the process.

  What’s unfair about that? Aren’t you the vaunted American freedom fighters pledged to save our country? Don’t you possess special skills and spirit to defeat an enemy that’s foiled and frustrated us for two decades now? Well, OK then, and why can’t you kill the northern invaders without also destroying the sacred city? Why should it be necessary to damage the homes of the rich people who live in that fabled city? Perhaps what we have here is a massive cross-cultural failure to communicate. We should adjourn to the conference table while your Marines get on with the bleeding and dying up there in Hue.

  That doesn’t sit well with Alpha Six. He’s an attack-trained dog on a choke-chain and his outfit is rapidly losing momentum. He charges toward the head of the stalled convoy when he hears another of his Marines is down by fire up there. Before he can do much about dragging the wounded man out of the impact area, Alpha Six is also down, blown back into the concertina wire flanking the canal. For some reason, that finally trips the trigger and we start maneuvering forward, shooting pictures of grunts shooting gooks.

  Three platoons are maneuvering rapidly now. We spring forward and join an outfit being run by a tough Tex-Mex sergeant playing whack-a-mole with NVA shooters bobbing up and down in second-story windows. He’s trying to get a tank forward to relieve the pressure and in between times, launching rockets at the enemy from a supply of LAAWs he’s got piled behind a stone porch. Steve knew this guy Gonzalez from earlier actions south of Danang and recommended we latch on to his outfit. They didn’t look like they were skating and most of them had bloody battle dressings covering some sort of wound, but I was in no position to argue due to the distraction of incoming rounds.

  Alpha’s 3rd Platoon—of which we were hesitant members—was ordered to occupy a two-story building they had just cleared and keep watch on an open area of paddies and farm-fields with a large blockhouse in the center. We could see troops of some sort milling around that building, but no one could tell if they were NVA or ARVN. Gonzalez set up a machinegun to cover Alpha’s 2nd Platoon which was moving toward a fork in the main road leading into the city from the Phu Cam area. Snuggled up next to the gun-team, I watched the shadows.

  Code of the Grunt: Shadows will kill you. No veteran gook is going to show you a silhouette or move from dark to light. If you are motivated to see an enemy before he gets close enough to rattle a grenade inside your position, you watch the shadows. If one of those shadows looms, blow it away.

  The shadows below that building were taking a pounding from the 3rd Platoon grunts. Everyone was on full alert, with adrenaline alarm clocks keeping them awake out there on a jagged edge. Grunt on the other side o
f the window from me fondled his M-16 with one hand and his crotch with the other. Bloodshot eyes bugged from their sockets as he searched the shadows. We could see 2nd Platoon moving below us. Helping the assistant machinegunner link belts of ammunition was sufficient distraction and I started to drift away from Hue City.

  Worlds Away

  In this place and at this time, my parents are dodging their own brand of threatening shadows. Mine was a simple mantra: Shut up and do your homework, shut up and study to make good in military school, shut up and be a good soldier. Just shut up and it doesn’t matter if what you have to say is interesting or intelligent. No one wants to hear it. No one has time with all those looming shadows out there. And I started writing just to avoid those orders to shut the fuck up.

  At Missouri Military Academy, there was a solid, demanding English professor who thought I might have some talent and showed me the mechanics. He taught me to be a keen observer: to keep all my senses open and record everything I saw, felt, heard, smelled, or tasted when I told a story. My notebooks were always filled with more than facts. But they had all the keen observers they needed at the auto plants in St. Louis and the service academies all thought I should have something more tangible than a vivid vocabulary to make it in the pursuit of military sciences. Look for a prolix grocery store bag boy, underage with a full bottle of illicit booze, if you’re reviewing that New Year’s Eve party back in 1963.

  Trying to talk to anyone who would listen at that party; trying to network my way into a gainful pursuit that didn’t involve returning to Southeast Missouri with my tail between my skinny legs. Only the drunks would listen. I joined the drunks. And then I joined the Marines. As soon as I was sober enough to write, I signed the line intent on becoming a big fish in a relatively small pool. The hard-asses at boot camp had other notions.