All the crews sat atop their tanks, eagerly waiting to unload. Joe was acting as a ground guide, the guy who walks ahead of the tank and gives hand signals to guide the driver over to the waiting Mike boat. He and I were the only ones who knew about the bell. I wasn’t about to tell Embesi, because I wasn’t sure how he might take it.
Slowly the stern of the ship was lowered, letting seawater slosh into the well deck, up to where the tanks were located. A few minutes later, a Mike boat motored into the cavernous hold and dropped its ramp on the dry deck. The last tank to be loaded in California was now the first to slowly board the Mike boat for its run to the shore.
Finally it was the turn of the tank right in front of ours. Joe gave its driver the signal to move ahead. The engine revved, straining as its treads tried to overcome the unseen wheel chock of solid brass. Joe, pretending to be frustrated, motioned the driver to hurry. He, in turn, added more throttle.
No Navy bell could hold back 750 horsepower and fifty-two tons! Even so, the tank leaned slightly to the left as its right track passed over the obstacle before proceeding effortlessly toward the Mike boat. As the tank vacated the space in front of us, I tapped Embesi on the shoulder and pointed to what looked like a brass manhole cover lying on the well deck. He looked at me without realizing what I was pointing at. It was our turn to move, and he was preoccupied with talking our driver over to the Mike boat.
Goodbye to the Navy and the three longest weeks of my life!
Chapter 3
The Debut
After twenty-one days at sea, we made the kind of entrance rarely .seen this late in the war. Here was an entire company of twenty Marine tanks, together with their crews, landing at the docks of Da Nang. Nothing like this had happened since the Marines first arrived three years earlier, in 1965.
As if we had been beamed down from some unseen starship, we left one world and suddenly materialized on another. I didn’t realize how often we’d use the term “world” when referring to back home in the United States, as in, “I can’t wait to get back to The World.” All who served in Vietnam understood that universal term, for it was as much a truism as any description you could ever provide. Nam wasn’t so much a world away, as it was a journey back in time. It was as if we had emerged in the Stone Age, different from anything with which we were familiar.
As we came ashore, it wasn’t the heat that made the first impression upon me, but rather the aromas. We had been isolated for three weeks from anything but the ocean’s salty air, occasionally mixed with a whiff of the Thomaston’s smoke. Now, suddenly, our noses were overloaded with all sorts of smells, some of which I would never get used to and would permeate everything in the coming year. Along with the usual dockside odors, there was another dank aroma that smelled of dirt and decay that had a sweet, almost nauseating flavor. Part of that smell, I would later discover, was that of burning diesel fuel and human excrement—the ubiquitous fragrances issued by every American outpost in Vietnam. You smelled an American base long before you ever laid eyes on it. Midmornings, you could identify the location of an American base from miles away by the telltale columns of black smoke from the burning shitters. No exit off the northern New Jersey Turnpike was more offensive to the nose.
Second most noticeable were the heat and humidity. Having abruptly lost the artificial wind created by the ship, we found ourselves in the very uncomfortable mid-eighties with a humidity index that only a sauna could challenge. Added to all of this was the infrequent and random punctuation of very distant booms, like far-off thunder. But this thunder had a much sharper report, like very distant fireworks. We had heard this sound before, back on the artillery ranges of Camp Pendleton.
Reality began to set in. All at once, thirteen months seemed like a life sentence, totally unattainable. I’ll never get out of here, I thought. Some of us wouldn’t.
From the Mike boats that ferried us from the Thomaston, we drove the tanks up a dirt road and waited for the rest of the company to disembark. We just sat there, taking it all in. I noticed that we were parked next to a fenced-in holding pen containing military vehicles of every description. All were in a horrible state—heavy battle damage, mostly due to mines. The eerie sight of these vehicles was my first visible proof of the unhealthy environment that lay ahead. They were waiting to go back to The World, and after having arrived only a few minutes ago, I wished I could go with them.
Out of this lot of wounded and victimized vehicles, it was easy to spot the lone Marine tank simply because of its size. Our tank crew of four, sitting on top of our turret, naturally became curious as to how one of our own had won a return passage back to The World. More importantly, maybe we could get it to reveal the fate of its crew.
We climbed the fence and approached the tank on our wobbly sea legs, each of us commenting on how it felt like the earth was moving beneath us. As we got closer, our eyes scanned the vehicle, looking for any outward sign of why it had earned a ticket to go home. Unlike most of the other vehicles, it was definitely not a victim of a mine. We examined it like the crime scene that it was, looking for clues.
But the tank appeared to be fine; its suspension and track were intact. “Maybe it’s just a mechanical problem that couldn’t be fixed here,” I suggested.
As we got closer, Embesi said, “Keep an eye open for anything we can salvage.” His motives were totally different than ours: We wanted to know the past, and he was thinking of the future.
Embesi’s experienced eye spotted it first. On the far side of the turret was a small hole, about half an inch in diameter, surrounded by burn marks, as if someone had tried to use a blowtorch to cut a hole through the metal. We all recognized the hole as that made by a shaped charge. Tanks fired a similar—albeit larger—projectile that left the same type of marks. What astonished us most was the angle at which it struck the tank’s turret wall. We guessed it to be about 75 degrees off perpendicular. At such an oblique angle, it should have ricocheted.
“That’s an RPG hole,” Embesi said. An RPG-7, or rocket-propelled grenade, was the enemy’s equivalent of our bazooka—except that it penetrated ten times better. When striking a target with a contoured surface it seldom ricocheted—something a bazooka would do, all too frequently.
This little hole didn’t look all that menacing and was far smaller than the hole that one of our HEAT (high explosive anti-tank) rounds would make. Apparently its glancing blow had managed to penetrate through four inches of solid steel.
So this is what an RPG does? I wondered. While stationed in California we had all heard about RPGs from returning veterans, who talked about them only with the utmost respect. We had all heard stories of just how effective their shaped-charge warheads were against even the thickest areas on a tank. Now I was witnessing their capability first hand.
“Find me a piece of wire so I can check this out,” said Embesi.
The driver and I scoured the ground, looking for a piece of wirefor what, we had no idea. Finally the driver discovered a one-foot-long piece. Embesi straightened it out, inserted it into the little hole, and then pushed it all the way in. It met no resistance, confirming that the RPG had penetrated the turret wall.
It wasn’t hard to imagine the rest of the scenario. Without looking, we could visualize what lay on the other side of Embesi’s wire. Inside the turret, where the hole came in, was the ready rack—where the first and most accessible rounds of main gun ammunition were stored.