Dancing With the Devil

I served in Vietnam from July 1970 until September 1971. I did not choose the fate of a draftee, but I met many wonderful people during my tour. It is also impossible to spend fourteen months of total hell. There were moments of total hell but most of the time was almost normal, some moments even fun.

I was remembering an event I still cannot believe, even after all these years. To say that I had fun is a lie because my rear end stayed puckered the entire time. The event took place almost four decades ago, at the non-com club in Bien Hoa.

I spent the first six months of my tour in the boonies as an infantry foot soldier. I've told the story of getting poked in the eye with a bamboo limb. Recuperating in Song Be - relative civilization compared to where I had been - I played chess and became close friends with the company clerk of Headquarters Company. When a position as a clerk-typist came open and I offered the job, I did not have to be asked twice if I was interested.
A time came when the Top Sergeant asked to fill in as Battalion Courier for a soldier on R & R. Long before the days of personal computers, the courier physically transported a satchel of papers and documents from our outpost in Song Be to the main headquarters in Bien Hoa. I was a spec 4, the equivalent of a corporal but not considered a NCO. A friend that I will call Sergeant Brown was going to Bien Hoa at the same time and wanted me to accompany him to the NCO club later that night.

"A hell of a place," he told me, "With the best steaks, beer and whiskey in Nam."

"But I'm not an NCO. I'll get in trouble."

"No one knows you in Bien Hoa. I got sergeant's stripes for you. Tonight you're going to be an E-5 sergeant."

We made it to the club that night. It was dark, smoky and loud, a Vietnamese rock band playing on stage. We ate our steaks and were well into our second whiskey when my worst nightmare suddenly appeared. It was E-8 Sergeant Roper (I will call him). Sergeant Roper was big, easily three-hundred pounds, and he was black - a little scary for a southern boy that had never known many blacks, much less ones in authority. I had never seen him smile.

Frightened of the man, I once witnessed him take away a live grenade from a drugged sky trooper that was threatening to blow up an officer's hooch. To say that my heart was in my throat was an understatement and I fully expected to spend the rest of my tour locked in the infamous Long Binh Jail.

I waited for the other shoe to fall. Instead, he asked, "How are you tonight Sergeant Wilder?"

When I noticed the man standing behind him, I realized why I was not already in handcuffs. It was our company commander, Captain Ahab (I will call him). Officers, like enlisted men, are also unwelcome in an NCO club. Captain Ahab, white like me, was wearing sergeant stripes - he was an E5. That night I was his equal, Sergeant Brown his superior.

Sergeants Roper and Ahab joined us and we all proceeded to drink, listen to the band and even exchange a few pleasantries along the way. I fully expected court-martial the following day, as I am sure did Sergeant Brown. Instead, nothing was ever said of the incident and we never again acknowledged even a passing hint that we may have consorted illicitly.

Years have passed and I still wonder about the incident. Why had I taken the chance of court-martial to visit a place where I should not be? Moreover, why had a Captain, the company commander, taken the same chance? The answer surely has to be that there is a deeply buried need in all of us to visit that one place, at least just once, from which society forbids us to enter. It is a location where everyone is equal. Most of us never visit but there is surely no better place on earth.

Eric'sWeb

Machine Gun

I watched a program on the cable channel Encore about Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsys. On the show he played a song called Machine Gun and it evoked a memory of Vietnam that I hadn’t thought about in years.

I went to Vietnam in 1970 as an infantry mortar man. For awhile, in addition to my M16, I humped the base plate of an 81 MM mortar in the mortar platoon of an infantry line company. I was in Charlie Company, 1st of the 8th Cavalry, First Cavalry Air Mobile. We were operating off a hill bulldozed bald amid a jungle of green that could literally swallow you whole. The Cav had just made their first sanctioned incursion into Cambodia, formerly off limits, and we had dealt a near-mortal blow to Charlie. For the following months, Charlie played a game of duck-and-run while we tried desperately, and with little luck, to finish him off.

After several months of fifteen days in the jungle, five days on the firebase, and almost no success in encountering the enemy, Brass devised a new tactic of having us fly around in helicopters until we started taking ground-to-air fire. Once we did, the choppers would swoop down and drop us off in hopes of making contact – something that rarely happened because of Charlie’s weakened state.

During this time, Brass also decided the 81 MM mortar was too unwieldy for rapid deployment and all of us in the mortar company suddenly became infantry foot soldiers, grunts, 11-bravos, also known as 11-bullet-stoppers. I was given a twenty-six pound M-60 machine gun to carry since I already had experience toting a twenty-three pound base plate. I had never shot an M-60, even during basic training at Fort Polk in Louisiana. This is because mortar men weren’t ever supposed to use the gun.

Around this time artillery began shooting sophisticated listening devices into the jungle using specially designed 105 MM rounds. Intelligence mapped the locations of these devices and we soon had a good idea of where there was movement - of a military nature - in the jungle. The devices weren’t always correct and we once found a large family of monkeys instead of Viet Cong or North Vietnamese regulars. This wasn’t always the case.

Reports of intense enemy troop movement in a nearby swamp had the Brass salivating. My company was soon loaded into choppers, flown to the area and dropped out of the birds – and I mean this literally. With no LZ cut into the jungle for us, the choppers hovered 10 feet or so above a large swampy pond while we jumped out. This was no easy feat while carrying 100 pounds of gear.

We soon found ourselves in a maze of trails and something very anomalous – there was movement all around us. Charlie wasn’t even trying to cover it up. This could only mean one of two things – either we had caught the enemy very much by surprise, or else they had us outnumbered and knew it. We were all pretty nervous because one thing we had never really done was surprise Charlie.

Our company had about 100 men divided equally into four platoons. We set up a camp and then our platoon started out on patrol. Soon as we were out of sight from the rest of the company we began hearing movement. After months in the boonies we were all attuned to sounds of the jungle and there was no doubt in my mind that there was a large number of enemy soldiers very close to us, and that they were paralleling our movement through the jungle. This bothered me and everyone else because we were on Charlie’s home turf – likely smack-dab in the middle of a large enemy camp and staging area. We could hear movement in every direction and if I told you that I was anything but piss-in-my-pants scared, I’d be lying through my teeth.

Jungle warfare is like no other. You can be 10 feet from the enemy and never see him. You have to rely on your nose, your ears and your wits because otherwise you may as well be blind. My nose, ears and wits told me we were about to have the living shit kicked out of us and I expected, any minute, to be shredded by AK 47 bullets. The platoon leader decided on a quick ploy.

I was the machine gunner, the “gun.” When Super Sarge tapped my shoulder and pointed to a slight concave just to the side of the trail, I knew my time had come. It was an instant ambush. Charlie was following close behind. My assistant gunner and I set the M-60’s bi-pod and started stringing every round of ammo we had into the gun’s chamber, locked and loaded, ready to kill – and likely be killed. It didn’t matter that I had never pulled the trigger on an M-60. What mattered was that I was getting ready to. Just as quickly as the sergeant tapped my shoulder and motioned me what to do, the two of us were left alone on the trail to mow down anyone coming up from behind. From the sounds we heard, we wouldn’t have long to wait.

I could tell you that we ambushed Charlie, wiped most of them out and set them dropping their weapons and running for cover. That didn’t happen. What did happen is almost as strange, but true. It was monsoon season. Every day the skies would part and rain would fall in torrents – almost like being under a waterfall. My finger was on the trigger of the M-60, my heart in my throat, when it began to rain. My assistant gunner and I lay there on our bellies for an interminable time, rapidly flowing water soaking our fatigues. When the rain stopped there was no sound. I mean none. Charlie had taken the opportunity to clear out and we never heard him again.

That night we camped in the middle of the swamp, mosquitoes and leeches sucking our blood. It rained so hard that Charlie could have gotten close enough to cut our throats and we wouldn’t have seen him. The next morning the Captain let me shoot the M-60, for practice, while we waited for the choppers to extract us. We stood single file, knee-deep in a wide pool of stagnate water. With five-hundred rounds locked and loaded, I stood like Rambo, the big gun at my waist, and began mowing down vegetation across the pond. I didn’t take my finger off the trigger until the sound of imminent death finally ceased and the pungent odor of spent rounds wafted up into my nostrils.

It was the first and last time that I ever shot the big gun, but I’ll never forget the sound it made or the power of life and death I felt for as long as I live. Tonight, while watching the piece on Jimi Hendrix, I remembered that sound and that feeling vividly.

Eric'sWeb

Seven Lucky Charms

While walking to the mailbox, I picked up a circular bit of metal on the street. It turned out to be a penny that someone had bored a hole through to form part of a necklace. A good luck charm, I thought, since it was so lucky that I had even glanced down at that exact moment. As I put it in my pocket and continued up the hill to the mailbox, I remembered the seven good luck charms I carried during the time I served in Vietnam.

Am I crazy or just plain stupid to have carried seven lucky charms? While I am not sure, consider this. As an infantry foot soldier, I served in a line company, Charlie Company, 1/8 Cavalry, First Cavalry Division, in a part of Vietnam that was supposedly the hottest area of operation in the country at the time. Despite this, I survived unscathed.

Yes, I understand my good luck may have had nothing to do with the seven charms I carried. Common sense and intelligence tells me as much. Still, I did not want to take the chance that I was wrong, and I continued to carry the charms long after I had returned to the real world.

Over the years, one by one, all seven charms were either lost or permanently misplaced. I never tried to replace them because I could not remember why I had considered them lucky in the first place. Today, it does not matter much anymore. They had already done their job.

What job did my new charm have in store? Not worrying about it or anything else, I rubbed the penny pendant in my pocket between my fingers and continued up the hill with a smile on my face and a little extra bounce in my step.

Eric'sWeb

Spirits of the Dead

We had a torrential rainstorm in central Oklahoma today. When I left my office to meet friends Terry and Debbie at nearby Louie’s Restaurant, red muddy water was gushing from the vacant lot near the office. The rain and incessant dampness caused me to remember something from my past.

It happened almost forty years ago in the hills of Vietnam, near the Cambodian border. I was a machine-gunner for the 1/8 Cavalry (1st Cav). Deep in the jungle, we came on a deserted Montagnard village situated by a stream.

The North Vietnamese hated the Montagnards because they supported the South Vietnamese regime. They killed every Montagnard that they could and I felt certain that some atrocity had occurred at the deserted village we found on the outskirts of the jungle.

It was monsoon season and it rained every day. It didn’t matter much to us grunts because we wore the same clothes until they became as stiff as cardboard. We didn’t worry about dirty underwear. We didn’t have any underwear, dirty or otherwise – well, except for socks.

Like everyone else, I wore jungle boots. I usually kept them on for fifteen days at a time because I didn’t want to have to run through the jungle barefooted in case we came under fire at night. Snakes and scorpions also had a tendency to crawl in your warm smelly boots when you took them off.

My memory is faulty after forty years, but I remember a few desecrated structures made of brush, and a few campfires in the Montagnard encampment. The ground was bare of grass, which told me that someone had lived there for quite a while before vacating the premises, probably in haste. Something that happened later that night told me that they didn’t all make it.

We luxuriated in the stream, washing away days of mud and grime. That night, it rained so hard that the weight of the downpour almost took down the poncho liners Gary Clark and I shared as shelter from the storm. Water gushed through the tiny village, lifting my air mattress and washing me into the rain.

Falling water awoke me immediately, although I wasn’t fully asleep because you never really achieve deep sleep in a free fire zone. Grabbing my air mattress and other possessions that had floated out into the rain, I quickly poked them back under the poncho liners. It was then that I turned and saw something that I will never forget.

It was the villagers, men women and children. They weren’t real, just spirits of the dead, their lives destroyed by several decades of war. They weren’t alone. Behind them were the ghosts of North Vietnamese regulars, Vietnamese villagers and several dozen American soldiers. I stood there in the pouring rain, watching until the vision flickered and disappeared into the darkness.

Forty years have passed since that night so long ago. Tonight, as torrential rain dropped more than three inches of water on central Oklahoma, I remember the looks on the faces of the dead and realize you don’t have to be a genius to know what they wanted to convey.

Fiction South

Floating the Boonies

The recent rain in Oklahoma and resultant gloom reminds me of a similar night many years ago in Vietnam.

I was in the Army with the First Cavalry, humping the boonies near the Cambodian border. We came upon a Montagnard village beside a stream in the jungle. It was late when we found it and we decided to stay there for the night.

The village was tiny, only a few destroyed huts. The North Vietnamese hated Montagnards and always killed them - men, women, children and animals - and razed their villages whenever they encountered them. We were in a free fire zone and sort of hoped they would try the same on us.

It was monsoon season. Every night, as the sun went down, it would rain. It was the height of the season and heavy rain sometimes continued throughout the night. My best friend was Gary Clark from Seattle Washington.

He was a polysci graduate from either the University of Washington or Washington State. I can’t remember which. I do remember that he was a political junkie and that his favorite beer was Olympia, unfortunate because the only kind we got in the boonies was Black Label in steel cans, usually rusted by the time we drank the contents.

Many of us had air mattresses. We would blow them up at night and make a makeshift shelter by attaching two poncho liners. Clark and I had gone into the jungle the same day, from the same helicopter, and had started sharing such a shelter.

It was perpetually wet and humid in the jungle so we kept our letters and personal belongings in M-60 ammo containers. The containers were waterproof and there were always extras whenever rear support re-supplied us with food and bullets.

That night, it rained harder than usual – much harder than usual. Water in my face awoke me from a Technicolor dream. I was still lying on the air mattress but I was out in the rain, quickly floating away from the makeshift tent. If I hadn’t awakened, I would have ended up in the nearby stream, swollen up to its banks.

The scene was so surreal that I didn’t know whether to curse or to laugh. I think I did both. The next morning I learned that the ammo containers weren’t perfectly waterproof as all my personal belongings inside were now damp, or worse.

Shortly after that rainy episode, I bought a hammock from a group of Vietnamese and spent the rest of my nights in the jungle hanging safely – well, at least out of the water – off the ground.

I lost touch with Gary Clark, much like everyone else I knew while I was in the Army. I hope he’s safe and dry somewhere, keeping an eye on politics and drinking an Olympia, or two.

Fiction South