And so it came to pass. Neither of us ducked or so much as flinched as that enormous piece of angle iron whirled harmlessly between us. We just turned our heads to follow its flight for another hundred feet until it finally hit the ground, skidding along the road and raising a cloud of dust.
Slowly Richards and I locked eyes with each other. For the second time, we both uttered, “Holy shit!” in unison. Then, it was just like someone threw a switch. The movie projector’s speed went back to normal. I couldn’t believe that we had come within inches of becoming headless.
Stranger still was the way we each recollected the event. As Richards and I recounted what had just happened, it suddenly became obvious that we had both seen it happen the same way, in slow time!
Several grunts ran over to our tank. “Hey, are you guys all right? You coulda been killed! Why didn’t you duck?”
“We didn’t have to,” was our reply.
Our shocked audience left, shaking their heads. I turned to Richards. “Why didn’t you duck?” I asked.
As I suspected, his answer was the same as mine, “I didn’t have to. It wasn’t going to hit us!”
The grunts couldn’t believe how calm, cool, and collected we were. Or appeared to be, at least. Seconds later, both of us got the shakes and—as if a wave had just crashed over us—began laughing like schoolgirls as we started to shiver. It felt like the air temperature had suddenly dropped thirty degrees. It was our brains’ subconscious half trying to tell its conscious side that we had just felt Death’s scythe breeze by.
Over the next few weeks, Richards and I shared our experience with several other men. They listened to us but couldn’t understand, except for a couple of guys who had experienced terrible car accidents back in The World. They confirmed our recall of the slow-motion experience. Each of their accidents seemingly took forever to play out, and they witnessed it more than experienced it. All these victims confirmed that during the entire accident they were totally helpless—as if they were just along for the ride, as if the outcome was already certain. But Richards and I never experienced helplessness. Time had slowed for both of us, yet we were absolutely convinced we weren’t going to be hit, certain that we were in no danger.
Yet in the back of our minds, Richards and I had a nagging question we never shared with anyone else. If we had realized the metal was going to hit us, could we have moved to avoid it? Neither of us was really sure. At that split second it wasn’t even a consideration. But could we, if we had had to? It gnawed at us for months.
There were several ways to measure long time in The Nam. Many grunts wrote their rotation date on their helmets. Sometimes they listed all thirteen months on the side and put an X through the months served, like notches on a gun. Tanks afforded a lot more space to display the time remaining for a short-timer—anyone with less than one hundred days left on his tour. If the crew included a short-timer you could probably find his calendar posted on the inside wall of the turret, a proclamation taped to the steel, like the ninety-five theses that Martin Luther nailed to the church door, for the rest of the crew to witness. A tank crew always knew who their “shortest” guy was. The shorter he got, the farther they often tried to distance themselves from him. Short people could drive you crazy.
The most common design for a short-timer’s calendar was the picture of a nude girl, divided up into ninety-nine areas or boxes, with each one numbered. The junction of her thighs was reserved for the final box-number zero, his rotation date. The short-timer began coloring in the boxes, one day at a time, starting ninety-nine days out. It gave him a way to measure his time left in the insanity that was Vietnam. I only wished I had a hundred days left; I was still looking at 300-plus days. In-country, that was a lifetime.
How could you tell how long a tank commander had been in-country? Simply by observing him out in the field. If you saw only his head sticking out of his hatch (or cupola, as it was called), he was an FNG. If you saw only his eyes sticking above the cupola, he was a short-timer. But you can’t lead effectively if you’re hiding down in the turret. So between those two extremes—or for about nine months of his touryou would find him chest-high, exposed and doing his job.
BY AND LARGE, we spent the huge majority of our time in utter boredom. Time was something we had plenty of, and in the Marine Corps, that meant busy work. You often got burdened with mind-numbing work like filling sandbags or, if you were unlucky enough, disgusting work like collecting drums from the shitters.Time also came in unequal increments. It never passed swiftly except on R&R, when it flew by all too fast.
My time in personal hell was about to end. Not with a ticket home, but when my mother’s rescue package arrived.
I don’t remember why, but our platoon found itself back together again, inside the perimeter of 2/27’s fire base. The mailbag came to us by truck every few days with other supplies, and the latest one had just reached us. Before handing out the letters, Embesi removed several small packages from inside the bag and set them on his cot.
One box jumped out at me, because it bore my mother’s distinctive handwriting.
To say we lived for mail would have been a gross understatement. Letters were something we could never get enough of. A package, however, was a gift from God, appreciated by everyone. Because tank crews shared everything among themselves, we all enjoyed the arrival of a box. But I wasn’t about to share the contents of this particular box because Mom had done the impossible. Inside, I knew, lay my long-awaited bottle of twenty-year-old Glenlevit Scotch.
I had received some letters too, which I tore open and dove into, keeping one eye on Embesi all the while. When he finished reading his mail, I went over and sat down on the cot across from his, keeping one hand behind my back.
He looked at me, sharing an easy smile. “How’s it been out at them damned bridges?”
“Sergeant Embesi,” I asked, “if you could have one thing right now, what would it be?”
His smile grew wider, and his eyes twinkled to life. “A piece of round-eyed pussy!” he instantly replied, flashing a big white grin from beneath his black mustache.
Why had I bothered to ask such a dumb question? “Can’t help you there,” I said, presenting the bottle from behind my back, “but I may have the next best thing.”
His eyes focused on the bottle’s label in disbelief. Speechless, as his grin got even bigger as he comprehended the two-month-old debt he never expected, much less asked me, to repay.
Whatever special occasion Embesi had planned for that first bottle of his, it was lost forever that day. Cracking open the seal, he removed the cap and simply inhaled its fragrance.
“God, I love that smell! Go get your canteen cup.”
He poured a couple of shots into my cup, then shared it with Lieutenant Gilliam, who was sitting on a cot on the other side of him. We all clicked cups and chugged in one swallow.
“I’d written that bottle off,” Embesi laughed. “Never expected I’d ever see another one. Not here, at least.” Tickled to death to get his replacement, he couldn’t believe my mother had gotten it through the mail unharmed, much less undiscovered. But he didn’t know my mother.
There’s more to this story that begs to be told. Knowing that my mother had gotten one bottle through the mail successfully, I implored her to send another one to my friend, John Wear. He and I first met in tank school and upon graduation were both assigned to Charlie Company, 5th Tank Battalion. John went to 1st Platoon, and I went to 3rd. Four weeks before the mount-out of Bravo Company he received his orders for Vietnam and like ninety-five percent of all those who served in Vietnam, he flew across the Pacific. Only on his arrival was he assigned to a unit. That was always a risky affair because you were never sure that once you got there you’d end up doing what you were trained for. If they needed grunts—hell, you’ve already seen how that worked.