Bunkers

What am I doin' here?

Please Mr. Custer, I don't want to go

—from De Lory, A., Darian, F. and Van Winkle, J. (1960). Mr. Custer [lyrics]

Early February, 1970, our company was hacking through thick bamboo over our heads, deep in the stomping grounds of the 9th Division NVA (North Vietnamese Army), investigating some funny business the Duck had spotted in a locality we were unfamiliar with.

Back in the world, Jean Dixon, the gossip prophet, had marked our regiment (Custer’s 7th Cavalry) for destruction. If that wasn’t enough, the anniversary of the Tet Offensive was also hanging over our heads.

Late that afternoon, the point stopped chopping; I almost crashed into Bob. Something piqued the man’s interest—a fresh path. Normally, we didn't touch one, follow one, or cross one. Better to break bush than mix with heavy traffic and ignorant crowds.

Patient, soft-spoken Capt. Jackson, our CO, didn’t waste lives to make a name or a point. He felt the weight of each man on his shoulders. He took no unnecessary chances and preached no sermons. It rubbed off, and we responded. We didn’t bitch at each other or at him. We cared deeply for one another. No slackers or trolls—instead, results and boatloads of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

After a pow-wow with the platoon leaders, he picked a squad to go in, look around, and check for booby traps. We slipped safeties and held our breath until the news came in. The path led straight to a bunker complex hidden behind a dense bamboo screen, odd as a load of furniture consigned to the jungle.

The scouts saw no present danger or bad vibes, so we began poking around. The bunkers were not mere curiosities. Some were open trenches. Others were dug into the ground and domed like igloos, with slits for visibility and firing—weaponized termite mounds—two feet high, hidden from eyes in the sky, scattered about and connected with tunnels. The ground around the bunkers had been freshly disturbed, but the ground atop the tunnels looked ordinary and harmless.

Fucking clever, but what did it say? The tunnels of Củ Chi? Too remote. Training? Food and weapons depot? Not likely. Favorite haunt? Deserted fortification? No way to tell. Nothing incriminating, like warm embers or rice, had been left. Bob pulled out three film cartridges from one of the larger bunkers, likely training or propaganda. Ho! We didn't expect Hollywood! The adjacent bunker was twenty feet deep, although most were smaller hidey-holes. Bob thought an NVA regiment had been here recently. Mmm-hmm. Intuition is a funny thing. When you get that flash, “something isn’t right here,” you’d better listen.

In the past, Capt. Jackson gave us plenty of time to set up for the night in a safe haven, but with daylight slipping away, he didn’t say no—he circled the wagons in a place likely to be hot. We cleared only the necessary areas, filled sandbags the best we could, marking our territory with less than Roman-like thoroughness. Some bunkers were even incorporated into our defensive perimeter. Jackson adopted one for his CP (command post).

Our squad dug shallow trenches and deployed smack dab on the three-foot-wide path, directly in front of the CP, stuck in the middle between Killer's squad on our right and another squad on our left.

Everyone had their own feelings about it, but I wasn't thrilled we had trespassed and put ourselves at risk, though thus far Jackson had made us feel at home in the jungle. We were well-armed, prepared to inflict maximum pain on anyone. At four hundred rounds per man, we had the oomph—twice as much ammo, mano a mano, than the average NVA trooper.

A vet on TDY sporting a handle-bar mustache was grooming Big Papa, a Chicago-style Thompson submachine gun. Our centerpiece, Walt's twenty-three-pound sixty (M60 machine gun)—what Rambo used in First Blood—sat perched on its bipod, parked at the front door, aimed squarely down the path. We rested our long black 16s against sandbags, barrels pointed outwards.

The perimeter was in place, the guard doubled, but we weren’t sitting on the veranda at the club, watching the yachts bob up and down. We were nervous rabbits in a pea patch. Dusk was coming fast. The tide turns quickly in Vietnam. The guards better stay awake.

Fear can strip you naked when you’re in a situation and you wonder if you’re miscast. To counter the butterflies in my gut, in went the earplugs; the Rolling Stones took me to another dimension.

Shortly after midnight, the guard saw lights darting to and fro in the dark, behind a wall of heavy bamboo. They were already here—bad guys taking our measure, searching for tripwires in a defense not made sure. The silence; were they two or two thousand? Frontlines don’t exist. We didn't know them and they didn't know us. The stage was set. The fog of war dictated that we stay low, keep down, stay ready, and hope that luck, God or fate was with us and not with the other poor devils. I dug a little hole and buried my transistor radio—I wasn't going to let them get it.

 The Hour of the Wolf is the half-lit world where magic holds sway, dreams come true and most people are born and die. It was then, in the peculiar predawn light, that our investment brought a clumsy visitor who tripped a flare. A scream rang out across the jungle in the chill stillness. Sam squeezed the clacker and blew the Claymores, sending the guy to kingdom come—mine, all mine, so to speak.

A burst from a lone AK-47, then all hell broke loose. Heavy metal poured in with incredible speed. I had a feeling that Jean Dixon was about to crush us under her wheel. We answered, “Kill the bastards!” Our high-pitched guns fired in a rush, theirs cycled slower. Pop-pop–pop-crack, enemy bullets busted above my head. (Bullets crack when they’re close. You hear a dull pop when they hit a body. Well, I never heard that—ever.)

It was going to go heavy in one direction or another. Trees toppled like dominoes. By some miracle, the incoming flew over our heads. Our lead salad or their muzzle climb perhaps kept the incoming up just high enough. There was no friendly fire—the squads at our back were kissing the ground, eatin’ dirt. Big Papa clattered in the distance, but the big heat came from our squad and the two that flanked us, especially the blazing fury from Killer’s riflemen. 

The enemy chose to carry the war against men with no place to flee. They were finding out how dangerous that was when the temperature rose; we fought with the desperation of those who chose death over the danger of flight.

Walt lay on the front porch without much protection, behind a hell-gun worth its weight in gold, rippin’ 600 rounds per minute everywhere, leveling the area with his bullet spread, a huge morale booster. Bobby Parris hooked ammo belts together, fed ‘em to Walt in an endless string and blasted his 12-gauge when he could. (Belts were plentiful; each man carried one.) Walt and Bobby were alone together—who wants a shower of red-hot links?

I laid aside Thumper, my single-shot grenade launcher. The fat little 40mm grenades might bounce off an overhanging branch and be back on top of us before we knew it, or get stuck in an enemy's gut. I couldn’t see behind the bamboo, so I worked ammo for the shooters (we rolled frags down the path). A few steps to the right of Walt, I collected bandoliers for the M60, took magazines out of ammo pouches, and fed ’em as fast as I could to the 16s in the neighborhood.

Field note: we never fully charged our magazines. The quirky, zigzagy way the bullets fit into the twenty-round magazines made the last two bullets unusually tight. Over time, dust, dirt, moisture and metal fatigue could make the spring fail, jamming a 16. “Can I get a whistle? My gun's broke!” Or, a spent cartridge case could fail to eject from the firing chamber. The new round would bump into the old casing and cause a jam, a failure to extract. Our 16s had been bored-out to eliminate that, too.

We didn’t know exactly what we were shooting at, but our resounding roar had kept the rage of our adversaries at a distance and nearly drained our ammo. The storm was rushing to a climax. If we didn’t do something pronto, they’d come in and grab us by the belt.

Capt. Jackson had foreseen that. He kept the radio open after the first shot, calling for a load from Bien Hoa's huge runways. The enemy was listening and might pop matching smoke. Killer waited till the last second to ID our camp with lefty lemon (yellow).

Capt’n was still talkin’ to the forward air controller when a pair of swept-wing fast movers (F-4 Phantoms) came screaming in low like batshit-crazy banshees, skimming trees, dropping high-drag 500-lb shakes and dashing out, trailin’ thick black smoke from their twin GE turbos.

I hate noise.

Concussions from the ill-natured bombs pounded our chests, kicked fountains of dirt and dust high in the air. It scared the living shit out of us, and we were expecting! It must have been an eye opener for the other side—imagine the looks on their faces! As soon as the music stopped, we ran to the nearest tree to shelter against the dirt balls raining down from the sky.

The North withdrew đi đi mau ("go quickly"). Vietnamese believe that the souls of the dead will wander the battlefield forevermore if the body is not buried properly on family soil; they drag them off with a hook, a custom that obfuscated our body counts (on purpose).

If you have a tag on your toe, you know you’re dead. We had no casualties except the half-dead lieutenant who went poof. What the hell? Ashmore stayed in his bunker and was hit by a dirt ball a foot in diameter. It knocked him ten feet in the air, breakin’ his thigh bone. He was the latest recipient of the million-dollar wound; the lucky lieutenant would be on his way home after the MEDEVAC arrived.

The molten sun was up. We were the victors, like Edward III after the battle of Crécy, yet there was no joy in Mudville (apart from being alive!). Shit happens. Your survival instincts kick in. Your training takes over and you react to the chaos around you second by second, moment by moment. A thousand thoughts go through your mind but you don't have time to think. Blind force and momentum in the most hostile environment I’d experienced, fighting over a few feet.

It felt like falling off a cliff. I was wringing wet and exhausted, numb, in shock. I took a gulp from my canteen. It was our moment, but what did we know? A squad went out to take stock. I saw a dead enemy in a bomb crater. Bob took off with a patrol and came back with a bag of meat, blood and bone meal. He threw it on the pile. “Take a look at this. You fuckers figure it out!” He estimated 200 coonskins on the wall.

Oops. The North didn't like what we were doing to their country, but they’d miscalculated. We valued the lives of our soldiers so much and they had joined a battle in which they died in great numbers. But, “Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die on this Earth. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little.”—Gen. Võ Nguyên Giáp

Like the gentleman said, the Vietnamese would endure and live through the American War.

Platoon leaders added up the number of bloating bellies left for the birds and the beasts, combined it with estimates of those hauled away, inflated the total and gave the anonymous figure to Capt. Jackson. In this way, the kill ratios and body counts from our exploits accrued to the balance sheets of the lifers and those who had never fired a shot, pissed in their pants or witnessed the carnage of a battlefield, making us resentful and suspicious of the higher-ups.

After a wild, one-night stand, order had been restored; those who launched the brutal assault and sought our lives were gone. It would be easy to rest here, but to go in and get out was Capt. Jackson's motto. We skipped breakfast, saddled up and rode out, ceding a territory baked in blood. Air-strikes would obliterate the site. That such an effort would yield limited profit or no profit at all (except for our lives) was painful, all part of the game. 

We crossed an open field and halted in front of a wood to rest our asses in the elephant grasses. Sam, our John Wayne, stood up and spoke in his slow Texas drawl, “Well, gentlemen, the party's over.”

Two figures were following us a hundred yards distant. Trackers? Curiosity seekers? Sometimes people do things and they don't know why. Sam let fly. Others, too. Thumper lobbed a few grenades in the general direction. The after-action patrol found a body.

Jean Dixon foresaw the assassination of Gandhi, MLK, JFK, RFK, the launch of Sputnik and the sinking of the Thresher, but she misfired on us; we dodged the bullet—several, in fact.

Ha! I never believed in horoscopes.