MACHINE GUN - Vietnam War Story

 I was in graduate school working on a Master’s in geology in 1969 when the first Vietnam draft lottery was held. Having already graduated with my bachelor’s degree, I no longer had a 2-S deferment from the military. My draft number was 38, and I was called to the military shortly after the lottery in December. I believed in our country but didn’t believe in what I considered to be an absolutely senseless war. Because of this, I declined repeated offers to go to officer’s training school. I went instead to basic training and advanced infantry training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and was on my way to Vietnam by the summer of 1970 as a private. I spent just short of six months in the boonies patrolling the Jolly Trail system near the Cambodian border. During my months in a “free fire zone,” I made 52 combat assaults out of a helicopter, earning an Air Medal and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, for which I am very proud. Amazingly, I was neither killed nor wounded. Since I was and still am a crack typist—a skill that serves me well now as a writer—I got a job back in the rear as a clerk-typist when an opening came up. After coming home, many years passed before I told anyone that I was a Vietnam vet. This is because Vietnam vets were all thought to be drug-crazed baby killers and all manner of other nasty things. I don’t know, but I think this was also true for both World War II and Korean War vets. I’m so glad that the perception of people serving in our military has changed for the better.

Machine Gun

I watched a program on the cable channel Encore about Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies.  On the show, he played a song called Machine Gun, and it evoked a memory of Vietnam that I hadn’t thought about in years.

I went to Vietnam in 1970 as an infantry mortar man.  For a while, in addition to my M16, I humped the base plate of an 81 MM mortar in the mortar platoon of an infantry line company.  I was in Charlie Company, 1^st of the 8^th Cavalry, First Cavalry Air Mobile.  We were operating off a hill bulldozed bald amid a jungle of green that could literally swallow you whole.  The Cav had just made their first sanctioned incursion into formerly off-limits Cambodia, and we had dealt a near-mortal blow to Charlie.  For the following months, Charlie played a game of duck-and-run while we tried desperately, and with little luck, to finish him off.

After several months of fifteen days in the jungle, five days on the firebase, and almost no success in encountering the enemy, Brass devised a new tactic of having us fly around in helicopters until we started taking ground-to-air fire.  Once we did, the choppers would swoop down and drop us off in hopes of making contact—something that rarely happened because of Charlie’s weakened state.

During this time, Brass also decided the 81 MM mortar was too unwieldy for rapid deployment, and all of us in the mortar company suddenly became infantry foot soldiers, grunts, 11-bravos, also known as 11-bullet-stoppers.  I was given a twenty-six-pound M-60 machine gun to carry since I already had experience toting a twenty-three-pound base plate.  I had never shot an M-60, even during basic training at Fort Polk in Louisiana. This is because mortar men weren’t ever supposed to use the gun.

Around this time, artillery began shooting sophisticated listening devices into the jungle using specially designed 105 MM rounds.  Intelligence mapped the locations of these devices, and we soon had a good idea of where there was movement—of a military nature—in the jungle.  The devices weren’t always correct, and we once found a large family of monkeys instead of Viet Cong or North Vietnamese regulars.  This wasn’t always the case.

Reports of intense enemy troop movement in a nearby swamp had the Brass salivating.  My company was soon loaded into choppers, flown to the area, and dropped out of the birds. I mean this, literally.  With no landing zone cut into the jungle for us to land and deploy, the choppers hovered 10 feet above a large swampy pond while we jumped out.  This was no easy feat while carrying 100 pounds of gear.

We soon found ourselves in a maze of trails and something very anomalous— there was movement around us.  Charlie wasn’t even trying to cover it up.  This could only mean one of two things: We had caught the enemy very much by surprise, or else they had us outnumbered and knew it.  We were all pretty nervous because one thing we had never really done was catch Charlie by surprise.

Our company had about 100 men divided equally into four platoons.  We set up a camp, and my platoon started out on patrol.  As soon as we were out of sight of the rest of the company, we began hearing even more movement.  After months in the boonies, we were all attuned to the sounds of the jungle. Now, there was no doubt that many enemy soldiers were very close to us and paralleling our movement through the jungle.  This bothered me and everyone else because we were on Charlie’s home turf—likely smack-dab in the middle of a large enemy camp and staging area.  We could hear movement in every direction, and if I told you that I was anything but piss-in-my-pants scared, I’d be lying through my teeth.

Jungle warfare is like no other.  You can be 10 feet from the enemy and never see him.  You must rely on your nose, ears, and wits because otherwise, you may as well be blind.  My nose, ears, and wits told me we were about to have the living shit kicked out of us, and I expected, any minute, to be shredded by AK 47 bullets.  The platoon leader decided on a quick ploy.

I was the machine gunner, the “Gun.”  When Super Sarge tapped my shoulder and pointed to a slight concave just to the side of the trail, I knew my time had come.  We quickly prepared for what we called an instant ambush.  Charlie was following close behind.  My assistant gunner and I set the M-60’s bi-pod and started stringing every round of ammo we had into the gun’s chamber, locked and loaded, ready to kill—and just as likely, I knew, to be killed. It didn’t matter that I’d never pulled the trigger on an M-60. What mattered was that I was getting ready to.  Just as quickly as the sergeant tapped my shoulder and motioned what he wanted, he left the two of us alone on the trail to mow down anyone coming up from behind.  From the sounds we heard, we wouldn’t have long to wait.

I could tell you that we ambushed Charlie, wiped most of them out and sent them dropping their weapons and running for cover.  That didn’t happen.  What did happen is almost as strange but still true.  It was monsoon season in Vietnam.  Every day, the skies would part, and rain would fall in torrents—almost like being under a waterfall.  My finger was on the trigger of the M-60, my heart in my throat when it began to rain.  My assistant gunner and I lay there on our bellies for an interminable time, rapidly flowing water soaking our fatigues.  When the rain stopped, there was no sound.  I mean none.  Charlie had taken the opportunity to clear out, and we never heard him again.

 That night we camped in the middle of the swamp, mosquitoes and leeches sucking our blood.  It rained so hard that Charlie could have gotten close enough to cut our throats, and we wouldn’t have seen him.  The next morning, the Captain let me shoot the M-60 for practice while we waited for the choppers to extract us. We stood single file, knee-deep in a wide pool of stagnating water. With five hundred rounds locked and loaded, I stood like Rambo, the big gun at my waist, and began mowing vegetation across the pond. I didn’t take my finger off the trigger until the sound of imminent death finally ceased, and the pungent odor of spent rounds wafted up into my nostrils.

It was the first and last time that I ever shot the big gun, though I’ll never forget the sound it made or the power of life and death I felt, and that will never leave me for as long as I live.

Tonight, while watching the piece on Jimi Hendrix, I remembered that sound and that feeling, and it chilled my soul.

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Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma, where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He authored the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans, the Paranormal Cowboy Series, and the Oyster Bay Mystery Series. Please check it out on his Amazon author page. You can also check out his Facebook page.

Grunt

I was at the barber’s the other day. The barber shop, located in a strip shopping center near my office, is part of a national chain. The barbers don’t seem to stay around long. They always do a credible job, although I’ve only had the same hair cutter on one or two occasions. This time, my hair cutter was an older man of Vietnamese heritage.

After inquiring how I wanted my hair cut, he asked if I had been in the armed services. I told him that I had.

“Navy or Air Force?”

“No, I was in the Army.”

He asked if I served in Vietnam and smiled when I told him I had.

“What did you do there?”

Tiny hairs on back of my neck abruptly rose at his question. The last time I was in a barber’s chair with a Vietnamese barber was on the Army base in Bien Hoa, South Vietnam. Even though I knew the man was friendly, I had a difficult time not reacting when he shaved me with a straight razor. After all, the Vietnamese were our enemy, and I couldn’t help but fret that the man so close to my jugular vein with a straight razor might be a barber by day and Viet Cong by night.

“Infantry,” I answered.

“Oh, what weapon did you carry?”

“M60 machinegun,” I said.

“Then you weren’t an officer.”

“No, a private.”

“When were you there?” he asked.

I had to think a minute before answering, “Parts of 1970 and 1971.”

“I was an officer from 1971 to 1975,” he said, still not offering if it was for the North or the South. “Where were you in Vietnam?”

“We operated in triple canopy jungle off of Firebase Betty, not far from the Cambodian border. At least during the six months or so I spent as a grunt patrolling the Jolly Trail System. Later, I got a job as a company clerk on Firebase Buttons, near Song Be. Did you lose friends or family in the war?”

“My family survived. I lost a few close friends. I was drafted into the Army after two years of college. Following the war, I was imprisoned for three years. When I got out, I escaped the country on a boat. The journey took fourteen days and there were many of us on board.”

“I’m glad you made it,” I said. “Sounds like you should write a book.”

“A book, yes,” he said, smiling, his accent making his words hard to understand. “America lost many men—58,000.”

“Vietnam lost 1,500,000 people,” I said.

“Yes, from both the North and South.”

The half-grin on his face looked contrived, almost as if he were trying to keep from crying.

“No one even remembers the war anymore,” I added. “It was a senseless conflict. I didn’t believe in it, even then, and that’s why I refused to be an officer.”

“I hate war,” he said. “I worry about our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

After dusting loose hair off my shoulders, he led me to the cash register, nodding when I said, “Nice talking to you.”

As I walked out the door, I realized we’d never exchanged names.

I was shaking when I reached my car. More than forty years have passed since boarding a jet plane leaving Vietnam. I’d almost forgotten. Funny how old memories come flooding back when you least expect them.

Eric'sWeb

The story above really happened. Some of my Vietnam stories were fictionalized in my novel A Gathering of Diamonds. Tom Logan, a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD, battles his demons as he participates in an epic adventure and the romance of his life, high in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas.

Wind Chimes and Bad Times-a Vietnam War Story

It’s the 4^th of July. Tonight, as I sat in my backyard listening and watching the nearby fireworks display, I was reminded of an event that I’d witnessed many years ago. As a grunt with the 1^st Cav, somewhere deep in the jungles of Vietnam, I’d experienced, up close and personal, a B-52 attack. The planes were carpet-bombing a bunker complex; softening it up for infantry foot soldiers, of which I was one before we had to go in on the ground the following day. To say that the explosions dwarfed any fireworks display I’ve ever seen almost goes without saying. Now, I’m a bleeding heart liberal who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Then, I was praying the 1000-pounders would kill every enemy soldier in the compound we were set to attack the following morning. Tonight’s fireworks also reminded me of another memory of Vietnam that I’d chronicled several years ago. I was in the boonies for almost six months and memories have a way of fading and running together. I saw several B-52 attacks during my tour and this story doesn’t mention the bunker complex. Whatever, after reading the story I re-experienced the same abject dread that I’d felt some fifty years before when the event occurred.

Wind Chimes and Bad Times

Marilyn’s wind chimes are performing a chaotic symphony tonight because of an approaching storm. Their resonance reminds me of an incident that happened in Vietnam, but not because of the weather. I had the same eerie feeling—a warning from somewhere deep in the primitive portion of our brains that scientists never discuss: our animal brain that screams at us whenever something very bad is about to happen.

The mind plays tricks, even the animal part of our brains. This is particularly true when the elements rob your senses. Such is the case after darkness falls in triple-canopy jungle. I was a grunt in an infantry line company. We were somewhere near the Cambodian border. Hell! We were probably in Cambodia.

The area was hot (firefight hot) and our sister companies had all made contact with the NVA during the past days. Earlier that night we had watched and heard a B-52 attack as the big planes carpet-bombed a nearby patch of jungle, hoping to disrupt Charlie’s intricate system of trails that somehow managed to keep supplying arms and supplies to their soldiers in the south.

I sat in a damp hole in the ground, my senses disrupted and seeing nothing, not even an occasional flash of light. It’s true that when you have no vision your hearing becomes acuter. I was aware of the sounds of the night. A tiger stalked in the distance and I could track its progress through the jungle by the low growls it periodically emitted. I could also hear elephants and horses – yes, horses. Don’t ask me how or why they were there in the jungle but their sound is unmistakable. I also heard other things.

Helicopters supplied us every three days. After cutting a landing zone in the jungle—a small LZ (landing zone) barely large enough for the chopper's rotors—the birds would bring us food, water, and fresh ammo. They also brought us beer and pop and each of us got three beverages of our choice every three days.

You didn’t want to drink your beer immediately because everyone would beg a sip and there would be little or nothing left for you to drink when the can came back around. Most soldiers savored theirs while pulling guard duty because it was about the only time you were ever truly alone while on patrol. As I sat there, listening to the tiger, elephants, and horses, I heard someone pop the top on a Black Label. Then I heard something else—the low moan of a soldier, thinking of his wife or girl as he masturbated in the darkness. I knew very well how he felt because I was thinking about doing the same thing myself.

Tension mounted as days went by without encountering Charlie. As we cut our way slowly, single file through the jungle, a signal began being passed back to the rear. The soldier in front of me pointed at a snake in the branches over our head. I didn’t know its real name, but we called it a three-step snake because that’s about how far you could go before dying if it bit you. Not far from the snake, I witnessed something as eerie as I have ever seen.

It was a thousand pound bomb lying flat on the ground amid broken jungle vegetation—a relic of a B-52 attack, a monster bomb that had not detonated but still had the stark power to blow a forty-foot hole in the ground. Everyone in the row of soldiers realized as much and to say that I was frightened would be lessening the aching fear throbbing in the pit of my gut. The bomb was longer than I am tall and even lying flat it came up to my chest. We snaked around it, no one touching it for fear that it was booby-trapped by the NVA.

Fifteen days passed without encountering the enemy and I still remember climbing the incline to the firebase hewn out of a Vietnamese mountain. We were stopped at the perimeter and told the bad news that instead of our expected five-day stand-down, we would be re-supplied where we stood and then sent back into the jungle for another fifteen-day stint.

One of the men—a southern black man—heard his animal brain louder than the rest of us. Pulling off his pack, he sat down and refused to move. I remember our idiot Lieutenant holding a .45 to the man’s forehead, threatening to blow his brains out if he didn’t get up from where he sat. He ignored the lieutenant’s threats and military police from the firebase soon led him away at gunpoint to an inevitable stay in the Long Binh Jail. As we watched them leave, all the rest of us wondered if he wasn’t the smart one in the bunch and perhaps doing the right thing.

We stayed on the perimeter of the firebase that night, not allowed on the safer side of the razor wire. Next morning we reentered the jungle for another fifteen days. At this point, my mind numbs and my memories become blocked by the events that ensued.

Tonight, as wind whistles out my back door, distant thunder rattles the windows and lightning illuminates the western sky like a fiery B-52 attack, I get that same eerie feeling that I had so many years ago.

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Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He is the author of the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans and the Paranormal Cowboy Series. Please check it out on his Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBook author pages. You might also like to check out his website.

Humping the Boonies

I once posted a list of the ten strangest things I have ever seen and quickly noticed three had occurred in Vietnam. It made me think of something else that happened in Nam that was not so much strange as it was surreal.

I was an infantry machine-gunner in the First Cavalry. I don’t know exactly where I was at the time except that it was somewhere near the Cambodian border. My company was on patrol from either Firebase Betty or Firebase Dragon Fire. I can’t remember which. The terrain was hilly and covered with thick, triple-canopy jungle. I was in Charlie Company, 1/8 Cavalry. The year was 1970.

There were a hundred men in my company and we usually hiked about a kilometer every day. This doesn’t sound like much but the temperature was always well over a hundred degrees and every man carried about a hundred pounds of food, water, ammunition and assorted paraphernalia on his back. We humped single-file, cutting our own trail through the jungle because Charlie’s trail was usually booby-trapped or an ambush waiting to happen.

We usually got an early start and made camp long before dark. The captain would then send out a patrol or two to check out our surroundings. The day that I remember, we got a very late start and were moving slowly because of the jungle’s thickness. It was late, deep shadows beginning to form beneath the green roof of vegetation that kept out most of the light at any time of day. At night, it was black as a cave.

I was walking near the rear of the single-file line. I had already stepped over a dead boa constrictor that the point man had encountered and chopped up with his machete. The man in front of me also pointed out several small green snakes hanging from the vegetation.

"Three-step snakes," he said. "They bite you, you take three steps and you’re dead."

It was then I followed the trail around a slight bend and saw perhaps the strangest and most frightening thing I had ever seen. It was a large bomb, stuck nose-first into rich jungle loam. The bomb was enormous and oh so deadly. It was so big that no one could have carried it into the jungle. It had fallen from a plane and failed to detonate. This wasn't unusual because we dropped seven million tons of bombs during the Vietnam War. Like the bomb that we'd just encountered many had never detonated

My heart was already racing from seeing the snakes. The sight of the bomb almost caused it to seize. Every man in the line passed the bomb with reverence as if it were an angry god – probably the god of war. Charlie sometimes found such bombs and wired them to explode when soldiers walked past. The thought crossed my mind during the seemingly interminable time it took to pass from its sight.

The power of that image has stuck with me now for many years and reminds me of a scene from the Planet of the Apes series. Apes have taken over the earth, the human survivors of a nuclear holocaust living in caves. During a very surreal religious ceremony, they each reveal their horrible deformities as they worship an unexploded hydrogen bomb. The remaining humans revered the bomb for the awe it imbued. After skirting a smaller though no less frightening explosive weapon in the sweltering heat of a Vietnam jungle, I understand how they felt.

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Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He is the author of the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans and the Paranormal Cowboy Series. Please check it out on his Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBook author pages. You might also like to check out his website.