Elizabeth and I did.
Sometimes you make your own luck; I had learned this from William.
June 10, 1968
We’ve been out on search and destroy for a month. There’s been a lot of the former but not much of the latter. We hump in oppressive heat. Midday, the temperature is one hundred or more and the humidity matches it. It saps our energy. My uniform is stiff and white from dried sweat, and I can smell my own stench and the stench of those around me. We move, a listless, lethargic, silent column. I sweat more water than I can consume. I am constantly tired. The heat and the humidity, the loss of water, and the weight I carry on my back almost become too much. A part of me wants to just sit and give up, to give in to Vietnam, but Victor Cruz won’t let me.
We hump up one hill and down another. We enter villages, most are recently deserted. We approach them carefully, with a forward team experienced in ambushes and booby traps. We go through them carefully, looking for rice, weapons, tunnel entrances. If we find anything, suspect anything, we burn the village to the ground. If not, we use the huts for shade to eat another C ration and rehydrate, and to sleep in spurts. It is the grunt motto. “Why stand when you can sit. Why sit when you can lie down. Why be awake when you can be asleep.”
I can fall asleep standing up.
We have a good point man in Bean. He prefers to walk point. He told Cruz if he dies in the bush, he doesn’t want to do so because some dumbass missed a trip wire or a mortar. In the bush, Bean sticks to the side of worn paths, if they can be found, and he searches before each step. The trails he finds, or cuts, are narrow and wet. Nothing ever dries beneath the thick bush. The bush sweats from the humidity.
Cruz tells us to remain evenly spaced, to not bunch up, but the bush has an eerie presence that causes men, even marines, to close ranks, especially at night.
We do not occupy the villages, or even the hills. We do not stay in one place long. Our mission is not to win terrain or seize positions. Our mission is to kill as many communists as possible. Each day this is reinforced, and with each marine we lose, I can feel something stirring deep inside me, an awakening of something dark that I have managed to keep caged, a malevolent force that seeks only to kill, that seeks revenge for the horrific conditions I must endure and the constant harassment that has taken so many of my brothers.
We have lost thirty-two men, eight per week, to booby traps and ambush mines. We’ve lost another three to heatstroke. Sniper fire harasses us. It can take us five hours to travel a mile. The sniper fire comes from the unbroken expanse of green that stretches from one mountain to the next, but we have yet to see the fabled NVA.
We hump through thick bush, climb rocks, wade waist deep through the boot-sucking mud of the rice paddies, and pull leeches from our bodies as we move from one checkpoint to the next so headquarters can keep track of us. Every so often you leave the bush and someone spots Charlie in a straw hat and black pajamas running in the distance. Probably the sniper who has been taking shots at us all day, but he’s too far to hit. He disappears into the tree line and lives to snipe another day.
Late afternoon we hump to the top of a mountain. Our checkpoint. Some trails are so steep you look up at the boot soles of the marine in front of you. When the ground is wet, your feet slide and you grab at the undergrowth—vines and bamboo—to pull yourself up, but the weight of your pack makes you off balance. Guys fall, taking out marines below them, like dominoes.
Some marines don’t get up. They just sit there with their gear, too tired, too mentally defeated. Cruz and the other squad leaders yell at them to motivate them, but it’s like Cruz is telling them to lift a two-thousand-pound boulder, an impossible act. They don’t even bother to try. You walk by them on your way up the hill. They stare into nothingness, like zombies, alive but without a soul. A half hour to an hour after we dig in atop our hill, the stragglers wander into camp, because nothing is more terrifying than being alone in the bush at night.
Once on high ground, the squad leaders set their perimeter. They direct us where to dig our foxholes for the night. I set trip flares and claymores and tie the cans with my marbles to the concertina wire. Then I dig my foxhole with my entrenching tool and fill the sandbags that will surround me. The ground can be like picking at cement, or it crumbles like sandstone. Everywhere, red ants and flies bite, and the relentless mosquitos fly up your nose and into your ears, searching for blood. Marines digging foxholes unearth nests of scorpions and spiders as big as hockey pucks. I don’t even look for the snakes anymore, unless I’m hungry.