Common to all were the sections of track bolted along the outside of their turrets to afford extra protection against RPGs. In front of the driver’s position, welded homemade brackets holding a dozen sandbags gave him a little more protection. Several tanks had their .50-caliber machine guns mounted outside and on top of the TC’s cupola, in a configuration called a sky mount—their solution to the jamming problems associated with the .50. It looked cool, but I knew it was foolish. Embesi agreed with me that a sky mount required the tank commander to stand far too high out of the turret to operate the gun.
Finally, I realized why we were the object of so many flabbergasted stares, why the sight of our twenty brand-new stateside tanks drew nothing but laughs and guffaws. We were the new guys pulling into the veterans’ tank park with our glistening chariots. In the Marine Corps, you never wanted to look like an FNG, because that immediately singled you out for any shit detail when someone needed a warm body.
Back when I was first assigned to Tank School in California, I had just finished Advanced Infantry Training at Camp Lejuene, North Carolina, and had been in the Corps fewer than five months. Our brandnew green utility uniforms, or work clothes, had yet to fade like those of veteran Marines. Some of us would go into town to an Army/Navy store to buy used, faded uniforms so as not to look like the rookies we really were. Now, sitting in this “real” tank park, I wished I could buy a used, faded tank!
One of the veteran vehicles had a noticeable list to one side, and I went over to investigate why. It was obviously the victim of a large mine; most of its roadwheels were missing on the far side. The name painted on its gun tube—Mother’s Worry—reflected the concern of somebody back in The World. From the looks of this tank, Mom had every right to be worried. Was her boy okay? I hoped so.
Looking around in the park, I saw that all the veteran gun tanks had names on their gun tubes. There were also two flame tanks, sometimes called Zippos after the cigarette lighter manufacturer, capable of shooting a stream of napalm several hundred feet. Flame tanks all had one thing in common—they always had great names. Thirty years later, I can still recall some of them: Looks Like Jelly, Burns Like Hell, Crispy Critters, Dante’s Inferno, Devil’s Disciple, and Baby Burners.
I decided we had to come up with a name of our own. After securing the tank, we got our stuff together and were led to temporary living quarters—tents stretched over wooden frames. But they did have wooden floors and were up off the ground, plus the compound had electricity, hot showers, and hot food.
Our driver came into the hooch and said, “You ain’t gonna believe this, but they got movies too!”
“A movie?” I asked in total surprise. “In The Nam?” Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all!
Once we got situated and unpacked, we walked around to get the lay of the land and stumbled across an enlisted man’s club where beer was served after working hours. Things were really looking up for us. I found the mess hall and planned on eating dinner that night. Overall, I was feeling pretty good about my first day in-country.
Next day we worked on the tanks, had a warm lunch, and worked some more. That evening, after chow, I grabbed an early seat for the movie. I still couldn’t believe we were going to watch an outdoor movie in The Nam! Hell, I thought, I just might be able to do this year thing standing on my head, no problem at all!
The movie theater was an open area with rows of benches; the screen was a building with one side painted white. That evening turned out to be as surrealistic as any I would ever experience in Vietnam. It felt like we were at a drive-in movie, but without the cars. Odder still was the random and distant rumble of very distant artillery; the war would continue as we watched the movie. I found it quite disconcerting, as I sat in the open with a large group of people, that I couldn’t help thinking that one lucky incoming mortar or rocket could take out the entire crowd of people. How could this kind of entertainment go on at night in the middle of a war zone? At that moment, we were all certain that the war was nearby. After all, we could hear it and see its flashes on the horizon. Little did any of us FNGs realize just how far we were “in the rear with the gear.”
The most ludicrous thing about the entire evening was the movie itself. A more absurd film could not have been shown to a group of Marines. John Wayne’s The Green Berets brought ninety minutes of nonstop catcalls and laughter at Hollywood’s interpretation of the very war in which we were now immersed. The fact that it was an Army story made it even funnier. But we FNGs totally missed the highlight of the evening. One of the last scenes of the film brought a cacophony of outbursts, finally drowned out by a hysterical laughter that grew in intensity. But I didn’t understand the joke.
There was John Wayne, standing on a beach somewhere in Vietnam, watching the sun slowly set on the ocean’s horizon—an impossibility unless the Earth changed the way it turned! In front of me, once I was clued in, was a gross error made by Hollywood. That scene later confirmed to me just how little anyone back home understood this war.
We remained in the tank park to load ammunition off numerous supply trucks. It was hot work and took two entire days. The 90mm ammunition came in wooden boxes, two rounds per box. Each crew had to carry thirty-two boxes to its tank, cut the metal bands, and take out each projectile, which was enclosed in its own cardboard tube. Then we had to break the seal around the tube and pull off the very tight top, much like a large mailing tube, and carefully slide the round out.
Each 90mm round was actually a giant rifle bullet four feet long and weighing around thirty-five pounds. On the bottom of the round’s base was the primer, just as you would find on a bullet, only much larger. It was the primer that, when struck by the firing pin, would detonate the powder in the shell casing. It required only twelve pounds of pressure to set it off. Needless to say, you didn’t stand the projectile on its base. You always held rounds with one hand over the base to protect the primer as you carefully loaded them into the tank. It was slow work that took all four crewmen. Two of us on the ground broke open the boxes and passed each round up to a man standing on the fender next to the turret. He then passed each round down through the loader’s hatch to the loader himself, whose job was to store the ammo.
There were several different types of main gun ammunition and each was suited for a specific job. Canister was our favorite for its shotgunlike properties that threw out a wall of 1,100 quarter-inch diameter chopped steel rod, each of which was about a half-inch long. It was extremely effective out to 300 meters and would lay a swath through the thickest of grasses—or masses of people. The next most common round we carried was high explosive or HE, which was an artillery-like projectile that would throw shrapnel in all directions at the point of impact. It was good against people when they were beyond the reach of canister. HE’s best feature, however, was the delay setting that could easily be made by the loader that permitted the round to penetrate a structure before detonating. It was excellent against bunkers.
A new round had just been introduced into the tank arsenal called flechette, more commonly referred to as beehive. What made this round unique was that it had a plastic dial on the nose of the projectile. It was the loader’s job to turn the dial to the range of the target, which the tank commander would give him. Beehive was an antipersonnel round that was full of 4,400 one-and-a-half-inch long nails that had fins on the back of them; they looked like miniature darts. When the round left the gun tube, it would explode at the preset range and set up a wall of darts 100 meters in front of the target. It was a good round against massed enemy troops in the open, which wasn’t a common occurrence. Its one drawback was that it didn’t have any “knock-down” effect. An enemy soldier could be hit by several darts that served only to really piss him off. Close in, canister was, by far, the better round.