Welcome To The Jungle
After my first night patrol, things quickly became routine, or at least they started to seem routine in what felt like a damnable dream I was living. Day patrols out to the east and then the west, night patrols conducted in the hot, humid weather — rain or shine. We looked for things out of place — tunnels, people, anything. The nights felt interminable. We’d move positions for a couple of hours and then return to Tu Cau Bridge at early light the next day. The only upside at the time was that no shots had been fired since that Christmas Eve.
During this time, I made my first rookie mistake, reaffirming to myself that I could never be a Marine. On one night patrol, the squad set up in a drainage ditch to stage for an ambush by anything that moved and wasn’t Marine Corps issued. During the wait, I had my back to the ditch and was dozing off when I felt something crawl over my shoulder. I didn’t move my body. I merely shifted my eyes and lo and fucking behold there was a snake crawling over my left shoulder. I stood straight up, and yelled, “Someone get this fucking snake off of me.”
Mind you this was in the middle of the night, zero dark thirty, silent night, no-holy night, and there I was, a Navy corpsman, standing straight up and screaming. I forgot who the squad leader was then, but I’ll never forget how angry he was at my rookie ass for screaming like a child. I have no idea what type of snake it was, or what size it was for that matter. The two things I really hate are snakes and spiders, and there I was, in the middle of the jungle, where both were in abundance. I was the butt of a few jokes for a while, but I didn’t care — well, really I did, but a bruised ego was better than a snakebite. That night still brings back chills.
Back at the bridge, Marines would either be on patrol, or on the wall (looking out over paddies to one side and an old brick factory on the other), or randomly tossing pieces of C-4 explosives into the river to keep the Viet Cong from swimming up and planting explosives on the pilings. The one squad that was standing down did more pleasant things, like swim in the river (a privilege a lot of us missed when we left). This made you feel clean for about 5 minutes before the heat and humidity claimed you once again. A clean uniform came from either swimming in it or just washing it.
Sometimes a bottle of rice wine would make the rounds. The fact we called it rice wine denotes the sense of humor we developed since it smelled like kerosene and tasted much like it smelled. It helped to soothe the psyche for a moment or two and was only $10 a bottle, or so I was told when it came my time to buy. So between bridge security, cheap booze (if you can call it that) and a routine not marred by bang-bang shoot’em up stuff, I was starting to feel ok — still a bit fearful, but nothing like that first night. Since my arrival, I had yet to treat my first battle casualty, or even a twisted ankle.
Chavez, Keller and I spent some evenings in the corpsmen tent on the side of the road, drinking rice wine with anyone who cared to join us. A few weeks after my first night patrol (must’ve been mid-January then, although dates and times were not something I tracked that carefully, and it’s not as if we had seasons to go by), a Marine by the name of Hartiman showed up just wanting to talk. He was in a serious and introspective mood, talking about growing up and high school.
This is what seemed to consume most of us — remembering what for some were the glory days of high school: football (or in my case basketball); making out in the back seat of their parents’ car; hunting and drinking with their friends back home. Considering that many of us had just recently gotten out of high school, it wasn’t as if we had much else to discuss.
The following morning, we were told that there would be no day patrol. Instead, there was to be a company-size sweep of an area and two of the squads would be joining up with the company to conduct the sweep. Chavez selected Corpsman Keller to go with the squads while he and I would remain at the bridge. (I was grateful because the snake incident still haunted me). Early that morning, a couple of tanks and Amtracs came rolling in from battalion. It was the first time I ever saw grunts riding on top of the tanks and Amtracs. The two 1st platoon squads loaded up and off they went, real-life Marines, on top of real-life armor going out to find the real-life, elusive enemy.
Over the radio, one maybe two hours later, we got a call. Incoming shots fired. A Marine was down, no name, only a zap number. A zap number is the first initial of your last name and the last four of your service number. We had service numbers then, not social security numbers like they use now. There was no way to look this up. We just had to wait, and wait. A bit later an Amtrac came rolling onto the bridge road and when the door to the trac opened, there was a pair of jungle boots sticking out from under a poncho. Chavez peeled back the cover and there was Hartiman, the Marine who had been drinking with us the night before, his face caved in from being hit in the forehead by a round from a rifle. He was wet from falling into a rice paddy.
Someone told us that the company was on a sweep line heading to check out a tree line. A tree line is usually a boundary created by a series of rice paddies. You can have several acres of rice paddies and then a strip of land with nothing more than an undetermined number of trees and perhaps a path. The path usually leads between Ville’s and was referred to as a dry oasis in the midst of a swamp of muddy paddies. A single round had been fired and struck Hartiman in the face. By the time the company got to the tree line, they found nothing to indicate anyone had been there, which was the VC’s MO.
I quickly learned the mourning period for casualties was short. No one really had time for it. Although I think it had more to do with soldiers not wanting to face their own mortality. Looking at a dead friend brings home the fact that anyone at anytime can cease to exist, and the guy next to you is in the same boat. You think it will probably be him, not you, who’s next.
Nobody wants to consider it for too long. Eventually, the fallen Marine becomes a story, forever embedded into Marine lore, not necessarily at 8th and I (the Marine Barracks in Washington D.C.) but for those that knew him. The good, the bad and the, “Really!! He was there for that?” memories. Never to be forgotten.
