“Negative, Two-Four. The tiger just went over the far ridgeline.”
Meanwhile, of course, someone back in Dong Ha was monitoring this entire conversation. I never gave a thought to what it must have sounded like, until over the radio came a strange voice, asking for my tank by its number: “Charlie Two-Four? This is Charlie Six.”
I was surprised, because our company CP seldom interfered with a tank commander in the field. What the hell can they want with me at a time like this?
“This is Two-Four,” I replied. “Go ahead, Six.”
“How many tigers can you identify?” the voice asked.
I couldn’t imagine what his interest was. “Just one, and it disappeared over a ridgeline about a klick away.”
“What’s your poz?” he asked. (Poz was short for position.)
I glanced at my map and gave him a coded position report: “From Thunderbird, up eight hundred meters, west five hundred meters. Over.”
“Wait one!” he replied, short for wait one minute or hold the phone.
Now, more than ever, I was convinced that the guys in the rear didn’t have enough to do. Looking back on it, I don’t recall ever seeing a tank officer in the field with us during an operation, except on Allen Brook. They always seemed to have to be at the CP for some reason. Now they wanted to bother me out of the blue. Were they looking to grab my trophy tiger skin?
I looked over at my other TCs, who were gazing back at me with SEGs (shit-eating grins), shrugging, and shaking their heads. But I had the distinct impression they knew what was going on.
After a couple of minutes, the same voice came back on the radio. “Charlie Two-Four, this is Six.”
“Go ahead, Six,” I replied.
“We’ve got two fast movers inbound to your position to take out the tiger. Over.”
Fast movers meant jet aircraft! The fear of running into an NVA tank was on everybody’s mind, and someone back in the rear with the gear had overreacted.
“It’s just a… “Then it dawned on me: They thought we had been talking about an enemy tank and were about to engage in the first tank-versus-tank confrontation of the war. Two F-4s were now inbound to bag one large feline with stripes.
“Six, negative on the air,” I replied. “It’s just a tiger.”
“There are no friendly tigers in your area,” The voice told me sternly. “You’ll have air support in five minutes!”
“It’s just a tiger!” I yelled. “Like in a zoo! Over!”
“We’ll take it out in a few minutes, Two-Four.”
“You don’t understand, Charlie Six. It’s not a machine, it’s the animal. You know, the one with stripes, razor sharp teeth, and a tail? Negative on an enemy tiger.”
We went back and forth a few more times, until I was able to convince Dong Ha of what we had actually seen. Whoever the voice belonged to, it wasn’t the CO, or he would have referred to himself as Charlie Six Actual. He rebuked me mildly for using improper radio procedure. Was there a code word for a live tiger that I wasn’t aware of? The other TCs were now in hysterics over the whole situation.
Jeez! I thought. When we wanted air, we couldn’t get it—and now that we didn’t need it, it was only moments away.
Before it got dark that night, after we had set up a perimeter, I visited with each of my TCs. We all had a good laugh over the whole incident.
Today, older and wiser, I’m grateful the tiger got away.
Chapter 18
Twenty-nine and a Wake-up
“Twenty-nine days and a wake-up” was another way of saying you only had thirty days left in The Nam. Your final day was never counted, because all you had to do was wake up. It was an easy way of reducing the number of days left in this damned place. Twenty-nine days and a wake-up was all that remained of my thirteen-month calendar just one more month.
Twenty-nine days and a wake-up placed you in a new category, known to all as being a short-timer. All Marines were convinced that reaching this plateau put your life expectancy in grave jeopardy, because in The Nam, only two kinds of Marines ever seemed to get killed—FNGs and short-timers. Anyone in between seemed to be impervious to enemy action. At least it seemed that way, and therefore, it was that way. When you heard of someone’s demise, the first question out of your mouth was, “How short was he?”
Twenty-nine days and a wake-up caused early symptoms of paranoia to appear that, for some, became almost debilitating. All of a sudden, decisions that had been a snap were now loaded with implications and what-ifs. Tiny details took on life-threatening implications. Should I pee off the back of the tank as I’ve done a thousand times before—or use an empty shell casing as a receptacle, inside the safety of the tank? Should I leave the earthen bunker I’ve slept in for months, or should I take my poncho and blanket inside the tank and sleep on the turret’s cramped floor?
You began to try to see if you could wear two flak jackets at the same time. You weren’t worried about their bulk keeping you from exiting the tank, because there was no way you were leaving it for the next thirty days.
My last month in The Nam didn’t render me ineffective, but I did experience the paranoia. I began to wear my helmet and flak jacket to the latrine. Hey, we all dealt with being short in our own ways. Also, I paid $100—the winning bid—for a flak jacket attachment some guy auctioned off the day he rotated home. This seldom-seen device, sometimes worn over a standard flak jacket by helicopter crews, attached to the front, went between your legs, and connected to the back of your flak jacket—it was basically, a bulletproof diaper.
But it turned out to be a very wise investment, because thirty days later I was able to sell it and double my money off another paranoid Marine. I actually did rather well on my last day in country, because my M14 was also in demand. I would sell it to a grunt for an additional $200—but that was a whole month away. For right now, I had to concentrate on surviving the next twenty-nine days.
I was still way up north at Oceanview. Each day, the wire surrounding the perimeter seemed to get lower. In fact, it seemed to get proportionally smaller and thinner, the shorter I became.
The tank began to look more vulnerable, and I began to wonder if it sat too high on the sand dune. The wall we had built in front of the tank—was it thick enough? Should we make it higher? Or maybe double the men on watch at night?
My mind started to concoct all sorts of ridiculous scenarios that might keep me from going home alive. Suppose the North Vietnamese tried an air attack using their MiGs? Did the NVA have Marines who could perform a beach landing here at Oceanview? I never asked myself why I hadn’t worried about this stuff before. Questions like that would have kept things in perspective, could have kept me in touch with reality when I became convinced that everyone was out to kill me—and not only Charlie, either!
I grew convinced that every sweep or search-and-destroy mission was deliberately scheduled just to get as much as possible out of me before my return to civilization. It added to the conviction that someone, somewhere just didn’t want me to leave this place. Why else would they send a short-timer out on another sweep? Every time a shorttimer ventured outside the wire, any short-timer, he would repeat his mantra, “I’m too short for this shit!” And keep repeating it for his next twenty-nine days.
In what we later termed the “Miracle of the Immaculate Ejection,” Pray for Slack’s main gun miraculously began to shed tears of red liquid, as if God was trying to prove his existence to me. At first, I hadn’t given it much thought, for it wasn’t pouring on the floor. It was a couple of dozen drops every day. But each time we fired the main gun, it got worse.