The Phantom Blooper (16 page)

The squad leader is talking into a radio handset which has been taped inside a clear plastic bag. He tosses the handset back to his radioman, then raises his hand, fingers spread wide: stop. The radioman talks into the handset. The whip antenna wagging above his field radio makes him a beautiful target.

I feel like standing up and yelling at them, "Keep your interval, people. Keep your interval or you
will
draw fire."

It's high noon and hot. The jungle is green fire. Marines are setting in for chow. Slack time, smoke 'em if you got 'em. It's a Marine rifle company, probably scouting an LZ--the
blat-blat-blat
of massed helicopters echoes along the horizon. It's harvest time; a battalion must be planning to nail some VC rice caches.

The fighters wait. We don't move. We are so close to the Marines we can see the salt-ring stains under the armpits of their jungle utilities, evidence of months of nonstop sweating. The plodding workhorses of the infantry are loaded down with heavy gear. We can hear the clink and rustle of their web gear as they groan and drop their packs.

A grunt sits down on his helmet and lights up a C-ration cigarette. Enjoying the relief from the hated weight of the helmet, he rubs the dark red line indented into his forehead by the band inside the helmet liner. He breaks out a green plastic canteen from the rack of four slung on the back of his brass-grommeted web belt.

Somebody's Funny Gunny appears, spooning a bite of C-rations into his mouth. The Gunny swats away a mosquito with a white plastic spoon and breaks out a small plastic squeeze bottle of bug juice, insect repellent, from a black band of inner-tube rubber around his helmet. He's a typical grizzled bleary-eyed twenty-year Gunny with a beer belly, not too bright, prematurely cantankerous, hard as a tank hull. "Bradfield, you shitbird. Get your head out of your ass and crack out your E-tool. Or is sitting on your ass what they taught you down in Dago in the Hollywood Marines?"

The Gunny turns away and addresses the lead platoon: "Okay, people, all I want to see is assholes and elbows. Home is where you dig it. Make them titty-deep, people, most ricky-tick. "

Private Bradfield grunts, field-strips his cigarette, drops off his sweat-soaked flak jacket, then, like a farmer, proceeds to till the soil with his entrenching tool so that he can plant himself in a temporary grave. He hits the deck with the E-tool, hard, looking at the Gunny. He wipes the sweat from his face with an OD towel bung around his neck and says, "God damn every son of a bitch in the world who ain't here."

Commander Be Dan gives the order and we crawl, slowly, inch by inch, for maybe fifty yards. We are beginning to think we have safely broken contact with the Marines when a single shot punches a hole into the hot day. One of our scouts has fired a signal shot. The shot is answered by automatic rifle fire.

For some reason we'll never know, somebody issued a movement order and the Marines saddled up. There is only one marching order for Marines: he who hesitates will be left behind.

Having stumbled into us by accident, now the Marines close in for the kill; movement to contact, better known as killer instinct. The rifle company throws out an angry crackle of recon-by-fire.

Nothing is as scary as that silence between breaths after you hear shooting and you don't know if it's going to hit you or not.

The fighters feel better when Commander Be Dan says,
"Ban!"
The section opens fire. It's better to have something to do, then you don't have time to think too much.

"Di di mau!"
is the order--"Move and move fast."

We are not going to "grab the enemy by the belt." If we were going to fight we would move in closer to the enemy so that the Marines can't use supporting arms against us, land-based artillery, naval artillery, and Tac-Air close air support.

I'm watching for a chance to make a break for it. A firefight is not the best time to be showing yourself to an advancing force, but maybe I'm too big to be mistaken for a Charlie. Or maybe the grunts will shoot me first and measure me later.

Suddenly the section breaks cover and we fall back toward the heavy jungle, firing as we go.

M-60 machine-gun bullets bite deep into the trunks of trees and whine as they ricochet off boulders. Explosions rock the earth and shrapnel snaps harmlessly through layered green leaves.

From nowhere appears a big black grunt with an M-60 machine gun, double-timing toward us, grasping the bipod legs, his hand in an asbestos glove, firing from the hip, playing John Wayne, some gungy brass-balls son of a bitch, a natural born eye-shooter and apprentice widow-maker, hard-charging toward a Bronze Star by way of a Purple Heart.

I reach for a weapon but all I've got is a megaphone. It's a reflex action. I feel silly. Before I can return fire with the megaphone or
Chieu Hoi
or think of a way to cool out this black Marine gunner who's as big as a tank and who can chop up brass faster than a spider monkey jacking off, the big black gunner goes down, sinking in slow motion behind a golden sparkle of ejecting shell casings.

Ha Ngoc, the radioman, pulls me to my feet while Commander Be Dan lays down covering fire.

A hot spasm of pain running up my right side is my first hint that I've been hit. I look down. I've seen a lot of gunshot wounds. I'm standing up, I'm moving, and I haven't bled to death yet. As I'm helped along by Ha Ngoc I diagnose it as a T&T wound in the right thigh, through and through, no bones hit, no major arteries cut. Now I've got a golden oportunity to prove that sea story bullshit about how one-legged Marines know how to hop.

I look back and I can see a Corpsman cutting off the black gunner's pants with a K-bar. The Corpsman, ignoring the firefight in progress all around him, stands up and calls for a dustoff, an immediate medevac. The Corpsman is wearing two .38-caliber revolvers in tied-down holsters, like a Wild West gunfighter.

As we move away, we can hear the Black Rifles calling out to one another: "Throw a few rounds in there!" "Where are those fucking gunships?" "Check fire! Check fire!" "Have you got movement?" "Recon that treeline!"

Ha Ngoc is little, but incredibly strong. He helps me stumble toward a treeline as bullets hiss over our heads like pieces of hot air.

A bullet hits Ha Ngoc in the back of the head and comes out of his face. He looks at me, surprised, his face only inches from my own. There is an ugly wet cavity between his nose and his cheekbone. Ha Ngoc breathes his last breath into my face and falls dead at my feet.

Looking back, I see a Marine Corps Captain, a squared-away honcho of the lean and the mean. Officers wear no rank insignia in the field, but his age and bearing, his neatly trimmed mustache, his hair high and tight, mark him as a captain.

He's carrying a pump shotgun. Across his chest is a belt studded with all-brass service rounds for the shotgun.

The Captain is wearing yellow pigskin shooting gloves, a starched-and-blocked tiger-stripe utility cover, a black leather shoulder holster with a .45-caliber automatic pistol, and aviator sunglasses. A wristwatch hangs from the top buttonhole of his jungle utilities jacket. He is pumping his arm up and down like a piston. "Go. Go. Go."

The Captain has never seen a white Viet Cong. He looks at me and he doesn't know what to do, shoot me or buy me a beer. The rule under Grunt Law is shoot first and forget about asking the questions. I give the Captain a thumbs-up and he looks at me like Moses looking at the burning bush.

While the Captain hesitates, Commander Be Dan fires.

The Captain goes down, hit in the legs.

The Marines are advancing on line, shooting everything that moves.

I turn away and run like a big-assed bird, clumsy, limping, but ignoring the pain, thinking only that I either find cover most ricky-tick or my health record is going to be turned into a fuck story. A treeline used to mean danger; now it means safety.

In the treeline Commander Be Dan is waiting for me. As I stare at the silent jungle, seeing nothing, Commander Be Dan and the
Chien Si
materialize as though by magic. I never had a chance to escape. I was somebody's favorite sight picture every step of the way.

Commander Be Dan orders me to lie down on a hammock. Fighters lift me up and carry me, and we move fast, deep into the jungle where everything is black and green or green and black. We ignore the thumping shells and the thuds of bombs and the mechanical buzzing of gunships as the Black Rifles in their helpless impotence and fury drop tons of iron onto Comrade Lizard.

So much for my best chance to escape.

The section humps half a day, climbing higher and higher into the Dong Tri Mountains, up cart trails that are steep and rugged, until we are so far away from the war that it seems impossible that the war ever existed. Up here the silence is awesome, like in a church, and is broken only by the gentle warble of jungle streams; no matter where you are in the rain forest, the soft murmur of rushing water is always heard. The sound of the water is soothing.

The whole rest of the world seems like a dream. It's spooky here but it's beautiful, and the shooting war is nothing more than a bad memory we have left behind in some bad place in a valley far below.

I wonder why we don't throw away our guns and file claims to homestead and stay up here forever. Let them fight like fools in the lowlands. We'll stay up here and be mountain men.

But the peace is a false peace and the silence is only another form of military camouflage.
Bo Doi
scouts greet us on the trail. The
Bo Doi
guide us past sentries, antiaircraft guns, artillery pieces, and bunker complexes manned by rifle companies of elite North Vietnamese troops.

The
Bo Doi
open a tree trunk, revealing a tunnel entrance so ingeniously concealed that you could sit down next to it and never see it. We step into the tree and climb down into the tunnel. As usual, I'm a problem, because my shoulders are too big to fit through the frequent trapdoors connecting the various tunnels. When I get stuck, the fighters ahead of me pull and the fighters behind me push. I feel like a fat lady trying to get down into a submarine.

Down under the ground the tunnels expand until they are big enough to drive a truck through. We hump into a tunnel complex that is vast and well equipped, a city of people buried in a mountain.

As we go deeper, the tunnels become cleaner and more squared away. The cave walls are no longer damp and spider-webbed. We are no longer attacked by black clouds of screeching bats. We see green canvas tents pitched in perfect alignment, mounds of wooden crates neatly stacked, electric lights running on generators, a hospital with clean white sheets and staffed by white-gowned doctors and nurses.

It's Victor Charlie's Big PX.

We are assigned a bivouac next to a printing press. The fighters sling their hammocks on hitching posts conveniently provided.

We try to sleep. The printing press goes
ka-chunk ka-chunk
all night--if it is night--and never stops.

When I wake up there are a dozen
Bo Doi
troopers standing over me, staring at me. I am
The Thing
that just arrived from outer space aboard a UFO.

The
Bo Doi
are in full uniform and look like schoolboys. As I sit up they giggle, embarrassed, and hurry away.

Someone has removed the battle dressing from my thigh and has replaced it with a clean white hospital bandage.

Commander Be Dan squats down next to me and hands me some tin-skinned food. The food is a Chinese version of C-rations. We cut open the cans with Commander Be Dan's homemade knife.

The food is mostly vegetables and noodles, with mystery meat, and smells like dead fish. I'm trying to decide how to decline gracefully when Commander Be Dan spits out a mouthful of food and throws a half-eaten can of beans into a trash pit. I'm stunned to hear him say in English: "Chinese food is shit."

After chow, I walk over and watch the printing press cough out freshly printed sheets of pulpy yellow paper.

The printing press is very old, a heavy block of steel and chipped black enamel, manufactured back when things were made to last forever. Every mechanical part in the press is badly worn, yet clean and well oiled. Obviously the printing press is well cared for or it would not work at all. It's like the old John Deere tractor we had on the farm back in Alabama. My dad would always say, "It's held together with spit and baling wire. Don't look at it the wrong way or it will fall apart."

The printer comes over and greets me with a smile. He is a fat little man with a jolly Buddha-face, wearing an ink-splattered white shirt. He tells me in English how proud he is of his press, how it was smuggled out of Saigon and transported in hundreds of pieces by hundreds of people and then reassembled one piece at a time in the tunnel.

After asking me if I would like to have some tea, the printer says, "Do you know Jane Fonda?" He hands me a big piece of type as heavy as shrapnel. He smells of ink and has ink under his fingernails. "She's an American too."

"No. Sorry," I say. The printer looks disappointed.

"Do you know the writings of Mister Mark Twain?"

"Sure. I've read a few of his books."

The printer nods, satisfied. As I examine the strangely accented letter on the piece of type, the printer takes out a pocket notebook and a fountain pen and says, "
Chien Si My
, why do your armymen go ten thousand miles from home to live a helluva life and to die on this land? This country is not yours. We do no harm to your homeland. Why have you come here to kill our men and women and destroy our homeland?"

I don't know what to say.

The printer continues: "You cannot defeat us. You do not even know who we are. You cannot even see us. Your country lives inside a dream and tries to kill anything outside of the dream, but we live in the real world, so you cannot kill us. We have fought for twenty years and we will fight on until weare victorious, until we have freedom. Just as your forefathers did two hundred years ago. Uncle Ho began the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence by quoting the American Declaration of Independence: 'All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' American armymen no longer fight to protect their liberty but to steal ours.
Chien Si My,
how did your great and heroic country lose its greatness and allow itself to be taken over by gangsters?"