I paused a moment to let our new lieutenant digest what I had said, words I perhaps should never have uttered. Then I continued.
“Finally, getting someone hurt is what we do around here, and we’ve been doing it rather well lately. Now, I want you to understand something, Lieutenant. You have, without question, one of the finest fighting platoons—undoubtedly the best platoon sergeant and point man—in all of Vietnam. I will not allow you to change that in any way. Understand?”
He nodded obediently.
“Dick, that mountain behind you there,” I said in a somewhat kinder voice, “belongs to Charlie Company. It’s our playpen, and nobody runs us out of our playpen. So I want you to take your platoon and get back up that mountain, find that large enemy force, and kick the shit out of ’em. Understand?”
He did.
As he was turning a very disgruntled platoon around and starting back up the mountain, I walked over to Lieutenant Norwalk. “Hey, Bill, saddle up One Six. We’re going up the hill. Bring your claymores.”
O’Brien and Two Six accessed the mountain by way of the main east-west trail, their route of regress just minutes before. In the meantime, we began working our way upward along a secondary trail (one we had used several times in the past) fifty or sixty meters to the north of Two Six. It was about three-thirty in the afternoon, still plenty of daylight left. Still time to make a hit!
Shortly after reaching the main north-south trail running parallel to the mountain’s face, we were suddenly overwhelmed by the stench of rotting flesh. These were the decaying corpses of enemy soldiers who had fallen victim to our claymore ambushes over the course of nearly two months. The odor was nauseating, and several of us found it difficult to refrain from gagging.
“Whew! Talk about ripe!” Andy commented.
“Yeah, and to think we did this to ourselves,” Blair responded.
Norwalk, meanwhile, began searching for an ambush site, preferably at some point on the trail without enemy dead astride it. Within ten minutes or so he found a place tactically sound and where, if the breeze remained calm, the stench was bearable.
While Norwalk set up his two-point north-south ambush, I contacted O’Brien, passed our location to him, and asked for a sitrep.
“This is Two Six. Enemy seems to have withdrawn from the area. No sign of Charlie now. Over.”
“This is Six. Roger, go into a trick or treat somewhere in that general area. Maybe one of us will get lucky. Good hunting. Out.”
So our two platoons went into ambush and waited for the enemy that had wreaked havoc on the people of Binh Dinh the night before.
“What do you think happened last night, sir?” Bill Norwalk whispered as we sat straddling the trail about midway between the two ambush sites.
“I mean, with Charlie hitting all over the province like that.”
“Beats the shit out of me, Bill. I’m more concerned ‘bout our new platoon leader right now. What do you think he ran into?”
“Beats the shit out of me, Six,” he responded, smiling. “Could’ve been a sniper, chance engagement, or maybe just overwhelmed by his own imagination, you know, being new on board and all… or maybe he just couldn’t stand the stink.”
“Well, I can relate to that! Damn, we gotta find us a new mountain to play on, Bill. It’s all I can do to keep from puking anymore. Mean, this is a facet of combat they never taught us about at Benning.”
“Yes, sir! Ought to have subjects in the curriculum like ‘Coping with the Messy Battlefield’ or ‘Secondary Uses of the Gas Mask.’”
I nodded, grinning, then said, “But shit, Bill, I don’t know how we could’ve done it any different. I mean, we couldn’t have carried ’em out of here, and there’s no way we could’ve buried ’em.”
“Yeah, I know. But it sure brings it close to home, doesn’t it? I mean, the sight of them, still in their uniforms, rotting away like that. And you notice the uniforms are okay, but their flesh has turned that ghastly greenish gray, and you think to yourself, I’ll bet when he put that uniform on he didn’t know it’d outlast him—and then you find yourself starting to look at your own uniform.”
“Yeah,” I said, “there but for the grace of God, and so forth. Bill, you still philosophizing?”
“No, sir. No one ever accused me of that except Mac, and he’s the one who majored in it!”
He paused a moment and then said, “But speaking of Mac, I wouldn’t worry too much about his replacement. He’ll come along. Just takes time. These first few days are hard on a new platoon leader. Big adjustment, from a Stateside BOQ. Mean, here’s O’Brien, Army puts him through the basic course and then lets him spend five, six months in a training command—which does absolutely nothing to prepare him for what he’s about to be thrown into. Then one bright and sunny day he steps off a slick and it’s welcome to the real world, or maybe that’s the surreal world, Lieutenant! It’s tough. At first you’re kind of numb, but then after three, four days, maybe a week, you’re suddenly struck with the awesome realization that you’re gonna live this existence, if you live, for the next twelve months! And that can be a very traumatic awakening. Fortunately, it doesn’t last long. Pretty soon you reenter the numb phase, just living from day to day, looking neither forward nor backward.”
“Until you pack it up and go home, huh?” I commented.
“No, sir. Not according to Mac and others. They say you’ve got one more phase to go through, maybe the toughest one. That’s the short-timer’s phase, when you start to look forward again, and in doing so get nervous, cautious, hell, even paranoid in some cases. But your new lieutenant doesn’t have to worry ‘bout the trials of the short-timer for a while yet. And again, I think he’ll do just fine.”
Norwalk was right, of course, and Dick O’Brien would turn out to be a fine combat leader. As were all the lieutenants in Charlie Company.
“But you did the right thing by sending him back up the hill,” Norwalk commented. “He’ll sleep better tonight because of it. Just like getting back on a horse.”
“Why, thank you for your confidence in my decision, Lieutenant,” I jested.
“Also did right by putting us up here in a posture to give him an assist if need be,” he added.
“Well, thank you again.”
Whoom! The claymore exploded! Our hit man to the north had a target.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat! The M-60 machine gun sprang to life; and so did we.
Being within thirty meters of the ambush site, we reached it in a matter of moments. The machine gunner was still working the area in and around the fallen bodies when we arrived.
“Got four of ’em, LT!” the hit man said excitedly, still clutching the claymore’s electrical detonator tightly in his hand.
Norwalk and I stared momentarily at the shattered, lifeless bodies lying in disarray at our feet. And their uniforms have outlasted them.
Indeed, such is the way of war, Bill.
“Good show, One Six. Super!” I said. “Now retrieve their weapons, do a quick body search, and let’s go back to the ranch.”
I called O’Brien and told him to “regress” to the NDP.
By dusk we had our night defensive positions dug and awaited the evening log bird, thankful that one of our longest days in the Nam was about to end.
But it wasn’t.
“Three’s on the horn, sir,” Blair said.
Uh oh! He can’t move us again, not now! Shit, it’ll be dark in another forty-five minutes.