Chapter 6
Time
There were two types of time in The Nam—“long” and “slow.” Long time was what you experienced, day in and day out. The worst kind of long time was standing watch at night. You peered relentlessly into the darkness, alert for any sight or sounds of Charlie. That was the kind of time that never moved, time that made you look at your wristwatch once every hour, to find that only five minutes had passed since you last checked it. A two-hour watch was the longest two hours you’d ever spend in The Nam—and you got to do it every single night, for more than a year.
SLOW TIME, THE OTHER KIND, could turn seconds into minutes, and several minutes into half a day—as I’d experienced in my first firefight. It was like throwing the slow-motion switch on a movie projector. Speech became slurred. Volume went down. The world moved at the pace of cold honey pouring out of a bottle. For me, firefights always occurred in slow time. But my strangest experience with slow time wasn’t during combat and was mysteriously shared with a fellow crewman.
We were one of two tanks guarding the Ha Dong Bridge, each on opposite sides of the river. Our tank was positioned just off the side of the road, where the southbound traffic had to bear right and go down the embankment to the pontoon wooden bridge. We rarely visited the other tank crew. It wasn’t the distance that kept us from socializing with them, it was the heat. It was too damned hot to walk, so why bother if we didn’t have to? Plus I had my own mantra: Never get off the tank. The farther I ventured from its safety, the more uneasy I felt.
Behind us lay the river and the remains of an old French railroad bridge of box-truss construction, similar to its many counterparts back in The World. Like all the metal bridges in this country, its back had been broken by an explosion in somebody else’s war, fifteen years earlier, its steel spans now half-submerged in the middle of the water, its railroad ties and tracks now long gone. But for its trestles, still connected at both ends of the river, we’d have never guessed that this well-traveled, busy road had been a railroad line in a previous life.
We had been sitting at this bridge for more than a month, so bored that we actually looked forward to the morning road sweeps, just for the chance to do something. A tank crew lived on its tank, ate meals on its tank, slept on its tank, and stood watch on its tank. About the only times we ever got off was to perform routine maintenance on the suspension system, take a bath, or relieve ourselves. During the day we watched the traffic but not, as you might expect, for security reasons—that was the grunts’ job. We just watched the hundreds of six-bys (the ubiquitous truck used by all of America’s military) hoping to recognize somebody from home. There was also a lot of civilian traffic as well, made up of mopeds, minibuses, and bicycles. And, of course, we always had a radio.
On this typical just-another-hot-humid day, a new grunt unit was moving in to relieve the infantry platoon that had sat with us for the past two weeks. Our tanks never budged, but the grunts rotated in and out every two weeks like clockwork. Accompanying them was their platoon leader, a Marine lieutenant.
If this war had a glossary of self-evident axioms, number one would be: The most dangerous thing in the Marine Corps is a lieutenant with a map.
No matter what anybody says, map reading is an art form. A lot of additional training was wasted on those who couldn’t understand that a military topographical map is a two-dimensional, spatial, and mathematical relationship of the three-dimensional world around them. In my experience, either you grasped that, or you didn’t.
When picking up a map, you first oriented it with landmarks around you, so that the map’s north was aligned with magnetic north. Only then could you establish your position and record your coordinates. The next step was finding the location and associated coordinates of your target—which could be anything from a true military objective to simply someplace you wanted to wind up.
When the shit hit the fan, it wasn’t unheard of for someone under lots of pressure to get his coordinates mixed up. I don’t mean mixed up, as in the wrong order. I mean that the guy on the radio might give his own grid coordinates instead of the target’s. You can guess where the first round landed! Well, on this particular day at the Ha Dong Bridge, we saw one of the Corps’ finest do exactly that.
None of us suspected that this incoming unit was any different than all the others that had passed through before. The platoon’s leader was a second lieutenant—the lowest kind of officer there is. Worse yet, he was a boot, a rookie, an FNG. Had any of us known that, we would have taken different precautions. Whenever a grunt unit was setting up in a new position, it was SOP—standard operating procedure—to register the supporting artillery unit’s guns.
Supporting artillery was often at a fire base miles away, but it could spell the difference between life and death during an enemy attack. Registering the guns was a way of getting artillery to respond on target during the hectic moments of battle; it was particularly valuable at night. The process involved the firing of a smoke round safely out in front of friendly lines from coordinates provided by the infantry leader.
The artillery battery recorded the setting on the guns after they fired the smoke round. Both parties—the infantry commander and the artillery battery—now had a reference point from which the infantry commander could direct the guns during an attack.
Little did we know that Axiom Number One had gone into effect. The lieutenant was standing on top of his CP (command post) about a hundred feet to our rear, at the base of the old steel bridge. Through his handset, he gave a set of coordinates to the gun battery back at 2/27’s fire base.
Everyone around the perimeter was alerted to expect an artillery round to come cruising overhead in a few minutes. Richards, the driver on our tank, and I climbed up and sat cross-legged on top of the turret to watch. It was always fun to see how good someone was when requesting an “arty” mission. (I did mention how bored we were, didn’t I?)
We were looking out into the field in front of us, waiting for the show to start. We heard the distant report of a 105mm howitzer from 2/27’s fire base. “Round out!” yelled the lieutenant, alerting everyone that a friendly round of artillery was on its way.
Richards and I waited for the sound of the shell cruising overhead just before impact. But we never got to hear it. Instead, from directly behind us came a startling explosion—Crack!—followed by what sounded like the largest, low-frequency Chinese gong ever heard: Thwong-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g!
The noise jerked our heads around. A cloud of white smoke showered over the still vibrating bridge. People were diving for cover including the LT, who had given the guns his own coordinates instead of those far out in the field. Fortunately for him, the shell had landed short—scarcely seventy-five feet behind him, but short nonetheless!
Richards and I were sitting about three feet apart. As we looked over our shoulders at the cloud above the bridge, we both said, “Holy shit!” We couldn’t believe we had just hit our own bridge! At the same instant, from out of the smoke, a large piece of black steel came whirling through the air, turning slowly on its own axis.
Already my brain had entered slow time; my real-life movie had suddenly switched into slow motion. As I watched the approach of the six-foot lawnmower blade, I could see that it was a huge piece of angle iron that must have easily weighed 150 pounds. We were directly in its path—about to be decapitated!
Yet in slow time, it was rotating ever so leisurely, spinning so tediously slow. Time had slowed so drastically, in fact, that I began to realize that it wasn’t going to hit us. Its flat spin appeared perfectly timed to pass harmlessly through the three-foot space between us! Richards and I wouldn’t need to budge an inch.