They’re right, to a degree.
Cell phones have changed the landscape, but so, too, has the increased use of handguns.
“You could,” I tell them, “except the guy might not be content just to follow you, as William did. And the guy might be certifiably crazy.”
My children’s reaction is proof that you must experience some things to fully appreciate them, and to not make the mistake of doing them again.
June 27, 1968
Cruz kept saying, “You don’t find Charlie. Charlie finds you.”
We stepped from the bush to a grove of elephant grass two meters tall and maybe twenty meters across to the next tree line. A fist went up from the marine walking point. Whippet. Cruz had insisted Bean take a mental break. The signal to halt was passed down the line. We dropped, waited, watched. No breeze blew the grass. No sound filled the bush. Late afternoon, the sunlight coming through gaps in the canopy were thin slants of green light filled with insects. We were being cautious. The grass is a good place for an ambush.
I waited for the hand signal to proceed. Instead, I got a signal that Whippet had eyes on three NVA. Within seconds I saw the soldiers marching through the bush to our right. Our lieutenant gave hand signals to stand down. Not to fire. Cruz told me the VC always march in threes. One soldier alone might surrender—Chu Hoi in Vietnamese. One might convince a second to also surrender, but one of three is likely a hardcore Ho Chi Minh true believer, and he will prevent the other two from surrendering.
True or not, I don’t know, but three more VC came down the trail, so close I could hear their whispers. They gave no indication they knew we were there. More hand signals. This time I didn’t need them. I could see a column of twenty, maybe twenty-five, NVA soldiers coming down the same trail. Now it was definitely on. There was going to be a brawl.
“Not good,” Cruz whispered. Then he said, “No. No.” But our lieutenant, Brad Dickson, he with a month of experience, signaled to open fire. He figured he’d found Charlie.
He was wrong. Cruz was right. Charlie had found us.
The column of twenty was just the tip of the spear, and the spear, we soon learned, was a company of NVA dug into the hillside across the elephant grass. The high ground. The column on our right had flanked us and placed us in the kill zone.
Charlie knew we were coming. The three soldiers served to give us a false sense of superior firepower.
Mines buried in the grass erupted. I dropped facedown into a shallow ditch. All around me I could hear the pop-pop-pop of M-16s, the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire as 7.62 mm rounds whistled overhead. Mortars and RPGs exploded. It was as if all hell had broken loose, as if Lucifer had opened the fiery gates and unleashed his demons. The tall grass provided no cover. Guys were getting hit, getting blown up, screaming “Corpsman” over the sound of war. I managed to get to my knees, lift my M-16, and open fire in the direction of the tree line. I fired on fully automatic, then dropped again, trying to get the goddamn rucksack off my back. I felt someone yanking on the straps.
Cruz freed me.
He was standing, as if oblivious to the chaos, like he was Superman and the bullets couldn’t kill him. I yelled at him to get down, but Cruz stalked off, yelling orders, yelling at our machine gunners to open fire. “Sixties up! Sixties up!” He waved the mortarmen to return shells. We had been trained to unleash firepower and push through the ambush. Each rifleman who carried a 60 mm mortar round handed the round to the mortarmen and provided cover fire as they moved up. Our job was to keep the NVA occupied, but Charlie had a bead on us, and their mortars were exploding on top of us. I heard our radioman call in coordinates for the gunships and air strikes.
I couldn’t tell a second from a minute or a minute from an hour. I just knew that I was popping off rounds—until I heard the rounds coming back at me, whizzing past me in the tall grass. Shit. We were sitting ducks.
Not this duck.
I switched to semiautomatic, fired three rounds, then belly crawled to a different, unoccupied spot. I fired again. Crawl. Fire. Crawl. I kept firing three-round bursts and crawling through the grass until I crawled out of it. I was positioned at a forty-five-degree angle to the hillside. I could see the NVA soldiers dug in. I switched again to fully automatic, and this time, with aim, I opened up. The hillside behind which the NVA had dug in popped. I saw NVA falling back and dropping down. I spotted the machine gun that was unrelenting, and I emptied another magazine. Then tossed two grenades. The machine gun went quiet.
Cruz shouted, and what was left of our platoon used the moment I had given them to let loose with everything we had—mortars and a hail of 7.62 rounds.