(FALL 1967 – SPRING 1968) The Killing Season

My name doesn’t matter.

I am so used to being a number now that I would answer to Sergeant 7-8-9-10 with very little sense of reluctance.

In all honesty, I have to admit to the fact that my current thinking is still a little bit scrambled after a recent losing battle with an anti-tank mine that left me without ability to hear and unable to formulate words because of the inability to hear my own voice. I generally wrote things down and did my best to understand the confusing sign language attempts of those around me.

Without the solid anchor of a fifty ton medium tank to guide me down the path to victory in Southeast Asia, I found myself walking down a dusty road accompanied by a Cat-4*(1) mine sweep tech by the name of Corporal Lopez. He was from Puerto Rico and his general topic of conversation was in a mixture of English and Spanish with a whole bunch of “fuck this” and “fuck that” thrown in for good measure. I didn’t even bother to try listening to him because I suspected he was a lot crazier than me and, besides, I still couldn’t hear worth a damn. Thankfully, that handicap slowly faded away with time and two weeks later the entire affair was just a compartmentalized memory like most of the other crap that happened In-Country.

I suffered from a bad reputation of losing crew members faster than most of the other tank commanders and I hasten to add it was more the luck of the draw rather than any spirit of “gung-ho” risk-taking.

*(1)Cat-4 (General IQ testing that had “Category-4” as the lowest intelligence classification). The average score in this group put the subjects in a class about the same as the average intelligence of mentally retarded students in a public school system.

I was in charge of our “orders” which were typed on two strips of carbon paper so narrow that I was concerned about losing them in the chaos of the moment. I put them in my zippered pocket right over my heart behind the metal cigarette case that I stupidly hoped would stop an AK-47 round coming my way from courtesy of some unknown sniper that probably couldn’t read or write and never bothered to wipe his or her ass for lack of either paper or concern about walking around with a shitty ass.

A pesky tiny girl with dirty bare feet and a hat that made her look like a dunce tried to con us into buying cans of coke cold with the ice she kept in a small cooler at her feet. I knew enough to limit my drinking to what was inside the can and not to ingest any of that ice because it was a quick trip to the unfunny world of intestinal parasites and not collecting two hundred dollars if you passed go.

I was supposed to drop Lopez off at the ammo dump (*2) in Da Nang with his tiny strip of so-called “orders”. It was verboten to question any orders from higher authority in our closed Marine society, but I couldn’t stop from wondering what a mine sweep tech would be doing inside an ammo dump.

The girl with the “only one American dollar” cokes made a last attempt to sell her gear to us soft-hearted easy marks with plenty of script in our pockets and nothing to spend it on. We were about due for a script switch-out to catch the black market operators with their pants down any day and I bought a couple of cans for Lopez and myself just because I felt sorry for the tiny girl working her ass off in the heat of the day and probably no food in the pot at home, if she didn’t get rid of the merchandise.

I remember I was in my heavily-armed modus operandi phase at that time due to being overrun in the blackness of a moonless night a couple of times and forced to use steel-tipped boots or sharpened entrenching tools as my main line of defense. That was the reason why I always carried two fully functioning M-16 rifles. I call them M-16s but with the caution that they were still early models and had some shortcomings regarding jamming and firing chamber pressure that made relying on just one at a time, a wee bit risky. I had a duct-taped trifecta of thirty round mags already inserted helping to keep the ever-present dust out of the inner works. That meant 90 plus 90 loaded and two spare duct-taped triple threats as back-up tucked into my shoulder belt adding 180 more rounds. It was a lot of weight, but a comfort for my worried soul.

*(2) Da Nang was the primary Marine Corps base in the Republic of Vietnam located in the Central part of the country and remains a valuable deep-water port to this day. The “ammo dump” was the largest collection of explosive materials in Southwest Asia except an abandoned French depot surrendered shortly after the loss of Dien Bien Phu way up in North Vietnam. The Da Nang ammo dump blew up spectacularly not long after I dropped Corporal Lopez off at the ammo dump guard shack. Rumor said it was either from a careless accident or intentional sabotage.

Years later, I discovered that the port city of Da Nang was surrounded by a ring of three separate defensive lines that were interlocked with covering artillery fields of fire and were successful in keeping the Cong out of the main Marine Headquarters. Of course, the airfield and the port docks were vital to the mission of the titled “Three MAF”(3) or “Eye-Corps”(4) that was responsible for northern sector of South Vietnam. Strangely, I felt safe when I was about a dozen clicks outside the city, despite the fact there was only a single line of defense to my front. It was difficult to give credence to the French-style defensive posture, but I had seen the maps in the Three MAF G-2*(5) briefing room and there they were all nice and interlocked like the old French forts dotting the countryside that smelled of urine and other things a whole lot worse.

The outfit that I hooked up with was unusual and not what one would expect in a military force as disciplined as the USMC.

It was called The Combined Action Program (CAP) (6). It had about 3-4,000 enlisted Marines broken up into village level defense forces that supported platoon-sized South Vietnamese forces deployed across the countryside. One of the primary missions of the far-flung and isolated units was to root out the Viet Cong (7) terrorists posing as innocent civilians in the midst of the terrified villagers. I was selected for that mission because I had been trained to speak the Vietnamese language in a special school in Arlington, Virginia with full day immersion that lasted an entire year. I found that I was able to speak, read and write Vietnamese of an educated variety that lacked the essence of dialects and the slang that ran rampant in the countryside and along the coastlines of the entire country. It took a long time in-country to pick up the language as actually spoken by the less-educated populace.