My arrival in Viet Nam was not what I expected. My rank as corporal came with the responsibility of leading men into battle. During the eight-hour flight from Japan to Viet Nam, I mentally prepared myself for combat and was ready to fight my way off the C-140 Hercules when it touched down in Chu Lai. Most of the men slept during the trip, somehow impervious to the dangers that lay ahead. Upon deplaning in Chu Lai I was somewhat disappointed to find that the only enemy in sight was a tough old gunnery sergeant ordering us into formation. Amazingly even deep in a battle zone, the Marine Corps could locate a broken-down, pot-bellied, red-nosed old bum to promote to gunnery sergeant. But there stood Gunny, barking commands just like a real leader of men. To him my rank of corporal meant nothing. To Gunny I was no different from the rest of the men, I was just another boot.
The steam-room climate, an enemy as merciless as Gunny, began to rust my rifle and bayonet before my eyes. Sweat immediately stained my freshly dyed, green combat uniform. Gunny marched us to the hootches that were our new living quarters. I said to Thornton, “At least the sun goes down at night. Gunny probably never rests.” The beauty of the area surrounding our hootches distracted me momentarily from the rolls of barbed wire stretching in each direction. Never before had I seen such unbelievable shades of green. The mountain range served as an acoustical curtain for the deep blue ocean, which noisily washed miles and miles of pure, white sand. The barbed wire defensive emplacements put things back into perspective. I was just one of a bunch of little green men marching through fantastically abrasive sand. The pure, white, and beautiful sand worked its way through my green jungle boots and continued through my green jungle shorts to reach the crack of my ass.
We finally reached the hootches where we would stow our gear and sleep, and were dismissed, for the moment, but the gunny in his best bad-ass voice. I dropped my sea bag in one of these buildings, which was really nothing more than a tent with a wooden floor, and rifle in hand went looking for the truck which had brought the rest of my equipment from the plane. Most of my buddies had sent their valuables home, but I was too confidant a warrior to enter a battle zone without a few of the comforts of life. I found the boxes containing my stereo tape recorder and speakers and carefully carried them back to the tent. It was at this precise moment that I made a most important discovery. There were no electrical outlets in my tent. There also were no sheets, pillows, hot water, toilets, refrigerators, or any other of the niceties of civilization; not even a PX (post exchange).
Then it dawned on me that I was not a tourist. I was going to remain here for thirteen months, surviving with only those few things I had brought from Japan. The panic I felt from the lack of civilized comforts, I could also see in the faces of the men with whom I shared these unpleasant quarters.
So with my natural optimism to guide me, I unpacked my stereo gear and hooked it up to the portable battery I wisely brought along. After all the Marines hand-picked me, Frank Wettegren, for a leadership role. Corporal Wettegren remained undaunted and in a matter of minutes, the silky sweet voices of Diana Ross and the Supremes attracted a crowd around my tent. Music lifted the gloom from the men’s faces and transformed them into the happy faces seen in the many bars and whorehouse of Iwakuni.
As if to remind us that these experiences were now only a part of our memories, Sergeant Rauser walked through my tent flap. Sgt. Rauser missed Iwakuni and its 147 bars more than any of us because of the pleasures of his lady Sumiko whom he shacked up with on Iwakuni, but he had spent his life as a gung-ho Marine preparing for, and engaging in, war. So Sgt. Rauser came back for his second tour in the Nam and no buck corporal was going to steal his scenes. He reminded me of a Marine Corps poster I had seen in my youth, dressed in his saltiest combat fatigues, every metal insignia and ornament carefully dulled with flat black paint so as not to present a reflecting target in the sun. A 45 caliber handgun strapped to his side and day-old stubble accenting the squareness of his jaw was definitely not the same Sgt. Rauser I met in Japan a week ago crawling through a benjo ditch in a drunken stupor. A benjo ditch is an above ground sewer which transports all the waste and filth of the city to the Sea of Japan.
Sgt. Rauser’s shack-job deposited him in one of these vile smelling ditches in the hope that he, too, would reach the purifying ocean. Sgt. Rauser was not crying now, as he had been then, about how the bitch had to get rid of him now that he was going back to the Nam, how she had already taken up with a sailor fresh from the States with a wallet full of personality chits. His head was not covered now with the intestinal scum of several Iwakuni residents, but with a camouflaged helmet, chinstrap firmly in place. His eyes were clear and hard today as Sgt. Rauser instructed me to turn off the recorder. He was the marine leader now, so we quickly followed him outside where he began to brief us. I didn’t pay much attention until he got to the part about how every morning for the past three days several Marines got their throats slit while they slept. I can still recall his exact words, “Gentlemen, Chu Lai has a night visitor and he isn’t the sandman. Be on the lookout tonight, and rest if you want, but remember the enemy never rests.”
I don’t remember much about the next few days except that we spent the light hours setting up our flight line and its associated maintenance shacks in anticipation of the arrival of our new planes. The CB’s built revetments which are large metal rectangles filled with concrete and sand to protect our planes from enemy fire. This excited me because it meant our birds couldn’t be far behind and I was anxious to get to work.
During the nights I laid awake fully dressed for battle with one hand on my rifle and the other covering my throat. Several times large black rats tried to share my tent and scared the hell out of me. Aside from that, I didn’t hear artillery fire, rifle fire, or choppers beating the night air with their blades. I heard only an occasional curse from someone stubbing his toe on the way to the 55 gallon drums we cut in half to form our john.
The fifth day I remember particularly well. On this day our planes flew in from DaNang. We carefully tucked each one between the revetments and made them ready for the first of their many missions over the Nam in the morning. It was also on this day that two Viet Cong had been discovered hiding in the water buffalo. A water buffalo is a mobile tank with spigots that holds several hundred gallons of water fro drinking and personal hygiene in the field. I had drunk the water from this tank every day since my arrival, had brushed my teeth there with my finger because I used my toothbrush to clean sand from my rifle in case those bastards tried to cut my throat. I had not yet learned to use it as a cleaning tool for my rifle and my teeth that would come later. I was greatly relieved to know that our uninvited guests had been caught, but even now I remember the revulsion I felt in the pit of my stomach when I saw the brown deposits these two had left in the bottom of the tank during their week of hiding. No wonder the water tasted so strange. And I thought it was the purification tablets.
We had been told on the fifth day to expect a practice alert during the night. When we heard the siren go off we were to evacuate the tents and man the foxholes surrounding our area. I remember kicking a little sand into the foxhole outside my tent as I returned from the flight line that night, thinking to myself what a pain in the ass this drill would be. Four nights in a row with only the shallowest of sleep while waiting for someone to try to slit my throat and now when they finally catch those bastards, we still don’t get a whole night’s rest.
I wrote to my parents that night and told them not to worry. There was no war here; it was all a big hoax to bolster the economy. I wrote how I actually felt safer here than in Japan, away from all the booze and broads. To get a laugh, I told them how we had painted a big bull’s-eye on our tent. It seems odd now, that they never asked later why I didn’t write again for so long after this letter. I guess in their wisdom as parents they understood.
Well, hell with the drill, Corporal Wettergren would get some rest tonight. I put some Johnny Mathis on the recorder and placed my earphones on my head so the drill siren wouldn’t disturb me too much. I lay on my cot thinking of my girl back home, trying hard as a good Marine not to feel sorry for myself. I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, someone was shaking the hell out of my legs. It was Thornton, yelling at me through my headset. Old Johnny was halfway through the Twelfth of Never and old Thorton kept screaming, “We’re gettin hit. We’re getting hit.” It was difficult for me at that moment to understand either of them. I vaguely remember telling Thornton it was just a drill. As Thorton disappeared through the tent flap he yelled, “Oh no it ain’t”
It only took one mortar round to convince me he was right. The mortar sounded different than the one in infantry training because it had something additional on the end of it, the sound of shrapnel ripping through canvas. Thornton displayed great courage in leaving his foxhole when he remembered me still asleep, but not so much courage as to let me beat him back to the foxhole. I jumped into the hole just as the next round slammed in front of me somewhere. To my horror I discovered I was resting on several squirming bodies whose mass prevented me from completely submerging my own body below ground level. I kicked and dug, but always some part of me was exposed to the hot metal ripping through the tents and trees.
Then above the muffled and garbled voices below me, I heard someone crying. It was coming from a nude and skinny body crawling along the side of my tent in the darkness looking for a place to hide. I grabbed his leg and pulled him toward me. To him I meant protection and he wasted no time burrowing in under me. He buried his head in my left armpit and clamped his arms around my waist. Now my entire head and shoulders were out of the hole and as tightly as my hands covered my face, I could still see the flash from each new explosion. Every time a round would land, the man holding me would scream for his mother and squeeze the air out of my lungs.
As the mortars landed every closer my fear grew. I remember thinking how badly I didn’t want to die this way, without even seeing my enemy, when suddenly between explosions, I heard him. The enemy was out there, nervously clinking the mortars around before dropping them down the tube. Next came the small explosions as the rounds fired…thunk, thunk, thunk, and then while waiting for them to hit the ground I heard men in foxholes praying to their respective Supreme beings as clearly as if I were sitting in a church at home. The enemy was real. I could hear him. I knew where he was. All at once I was grateful that I was not as scared as the miserable bastard clinging to me.
Just then, the first and second of those three mortar rounds hit the road about thirty feet in front of me and I remember telling myself out loud that a round would have to land right in the hole to kill me. The third round hit dead center on my tent a few feet away. My self delusions proved correct this time I thought as I regained consciousness outside the foxhole, face down in the sand. For a long time it seemed as if none of my senses were operating correctly, save the sense of taste. I tasted blood in my mouth, but before I could discover why it was there, someone picked me up and handed me a rifle. “The gooks are coming through the perimeter,” he said, “They’re blowing up our planes with satchel charges. Get your butt down to the flight line and try to stay alive.” I recognized the voice of Sgt. Rauser, but it sounded so fast and excited that for a second I almost laughed.
Instinctively I clutched the M-14 to my chest and started after the one or two men I could see running in the darkness. I was relieved to find I felt no pain anywhere and that my arms and legs were where they belonged. When I reached the crest of the hill behind our flight line, I was surprised at the activity going on down there. Men were appearing out of holes in the ground, running like they were mad, and then disappearing into new holes. They seemed to be moving against their will, forced to keep pace with the painfully slow cadence set by the blast from each new missile dropping from the sky. Many fires were already burning. I heard screaming. It might have been my own.
My reaction scared me. It seemed automatic. I spotted a row of new Skyhawks down near the fuel pits, and I felt compelled to go there. Before I was halfway down the hill the thought occurred to me that it was stupid to go charging into an area as volatile as the fuel pits with nothing more than a rifle and one clip of ammo, but some powerful momentum had already carried me to the bottom of the hill.
In a crouch, I ran to the nearest revetment and hit the deck just as a plane close by erupted into flames. I hugged the revetment wall and looked for the guy I had felt behind me coming down the hill. I was terrified to find he was gone and that I was alone. I decided to crawl to the other end of the wall. When I was about five feet from the corner, I stood up and looked behind me. Again, no one was there. As I turned back, my heart jumped to my throat and I nearly dropped my rifle. The enemy was there loaded with bags of explosives. I must have scared the shit out of him too, because he yelled something I didn’t understand, dropped his bags, and took off running. I tried to tell him to halt, but the sounds coming from my throat were not words. The plane was in my line of fire, so I moved out behind it to get off a shot at the running man. As I raised my rifle up to my shoulder, I got nailed from behind from the running man’s buddy.
I heard him coming a second too late to avoid being hit by his rifle butt, which glanced off the side of my head. I didn’t go down, but lost hold of my M-14 and it clattered as it hit the steel matting of the runway. I wheeled around just in time to grab my enemy’s rifle barrel with my left hand and pushed it aside as it went off. As the rifle fired, I let go for an instant, but grabbed it again near the receiver. My enemy kept jerking backwards trying to get free as I fumbled desperately for my bayonet with my other hand. But I couldn’t get the bayonet out of the scabbard and stay away from the muzzle of the rifle at the same time. Suddenly, my enemy gave up jerking and started chopping my left arm with his free hand. I knew I couldn’t hold on much longer and grabbed again for the bayonet, but this time my hand came up with a screwdriver I had unknowingly left in my back pocket.
I rammed it at his face as hard as I could. It hit the left side of his nose, deflected off through his eye and didn’t stop until it hit the inside of his skull. As he fell, the weight of his body pulled the screwdriver handle from my grip, and when he hit the ground, his head turned sideways facing me. My enemy stayed that way, he did not move as I expected him to. He did not make the noises I had been told men make when they die. He just lay there, resting on the screwdriver. I rolled him over and tried to pull it from his face. For some horrible reason, it did not come out. I let it go and his head bounced on the steel matting. I wanted to puke and I anted to cry, but could do neither. My ears were ringing so loudly I covered them with my hands.
Later, someone found me sitting there and took me to where the wounded were being treated. A corpsman bandaged my head and wrote my name on a long list. “You’ll get a purple heart for this,” he said.
I said, “I don’t want a fucking purple heart.” As I walked away, the corpsman muttered something about crazy-ass Marines.
The sun started rising and it was almost light out by the time I reached my unit. A guy came running over and apologized for the way he had behaved in the foxhole. I told him I had already forgotten it. He left. I got to what remained of my tent and sat on an ammo can while I looked at the mountains. They seemed closer somehow.
Thornton and another guy were already digging a deeper fox hole. A little time passed, and then Sgt. Rauser, looking quite unrested, walked slowly up to me with something in his hand. It was my screwdriver. “Here boy,” he said, “I found this sticking in a dead gook on the flight line. Good thing your initials were on the handle. By the way, you know it’s against the regs to deface government property.” He laughed. I said nothing.
This account was written by Frank Wettegren. I received a copy of this in 1985 and revised in 2004.
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