1968 Read online

  Murphy watched them with growing nervousness. “This sucks, man. You want to hurry up with the fuckin’ lesson?”

  “He’s right,” Batman said. “We’re pretty exposed.”

  Moses finished explaining about the blasting caps, where and how to put them, and all four retired out of the clearing, back into the relative safety of the bush. At Murphy’s suggestion, they went far enough back so that he could see a couple of the right-flank riflemen. Batman stayed within sight of the clearing. Spider and Moses took up intermediate positions, hiding behind trees.

  Spider tried to relax. The worst thing that could happen would be that the gooks come running down the trail and hit the ambush. That was hundreds of yards away. He looked around at the quietly rustling rain forest. No, the worst that could happen would be a thousand VC popping out from behind all those trees and killing everybody. Spider scrunched down a little more and waited, smoking, trying to look at everything at once.

  Murphy was studying a book titled Thongs, whose cover featured a naked woman tied spreadeagled to an oldfashioned brass bed. He moved his lips while he read. Spider took out his Heinlein book and tried to read it. He couldn’t concentrate. He could feel a thousand eyes on him, aiming. He put it away.

  “That your real name, Spider?” Murphy asked.

  “No, Speidel. Not supposed to use our real names.”

  “Oh yeah. Buncha happy horseshit.”

  Names (2)

  Every person was given a code name for use in radio transmissions. The medic was always Doc. A person with a college degree was usually Professor. (Spider’s platoon had had a Prof until a couple of weeks before Spider arrived. He’d gotten his educated kneecap ruined in a chainsaw accident.)

  Sometimes, as in Spider’s case, they asked you what code name you wanted. Sometimes you were given one based on appearance or ethnicity: Ears, Moses, and Tonto. Sometimes circumstances prompted the platoon sergeant to change your name. Spaz had been named Frosty at first, since he came from Alaska. Then one day he stepped out of a helicopter carrying a flat of two and a half dozen very precious fresh eggs, and dropped them.

  In some outfits, like Spider’s, you were encouraged to forget your comrades’ actual names, and only use code names even in everyday conversation. Then you couldn’t slip up and use a person’s real name in radio communication, which was usually monitored by the enemy. Once the enemy knew where you were at a given time and day, they could send a bogus telegram from Washington, through the Polish embassy, supposedly from the Army, regretting to inform your parents or wife that you had been killed in action there and then. Thus undermining morale on the home front.

  Spider went along with it, but he did notice that Sergeants Miller (code name Papa) and Wilkes (code name Sarge) used their actual names. He assumed it was just another one of those things the army did to take control of your life.

  A walk in the park (1)

  No more artillery rounds came over and there was no more gunfire from the fire base. After about an hour, somebody whistled and waved them back. Spider and Moses retrieved the demolition stuff, repacking the three broken chunks of C-4 into their plastic wrapper and rolling the det cord back onto its spool.

  Murphy was moving into point. He reminded Spider to “safe” his weapon before going back to the end of the line: take the round out of the chamber and replace it in the magazine. Spider pulled back the arming lever and the round didn’t eject.

  “Murphy. Look at this.” Spider showed him the ejection port. The cartridge was stuck in the chamber at an odd angle.

  “Son of a bitch.” Murphy wiggled the cartridge out and cocked the weapon, then slid the arming lever back again. Same thing. He handed it back. “This piece of shit don’t work. Better get it replaced when we get back. Tell the RTO to call the armorer.”

  Spider went back down the column and found the radioman squatting on his haunches, smoking intently. He explained the problem and the man nodded wordlessly over and over, then spun the generator on the Prick-25 and told Ivy Four-niner Bravo that an X-Ray Echo Mike name Spider wanted to DX a Mike One Six and trade up. He listened for a moment and then nodded at Spider.

  “What they say?”

  “They said ‘That’s a Rodge, out.’”

  “Do I get a new gun?”

  He shrugged. “I guess if they got enough.” Spider started to walk away. “Hold it; let me see that thing.” He cocked it and pried open the ejection port with his fingernail. The round was at the same useless angle. “Be damned.” He jiggled it out and reseated it, straight, then removed the magazine and cocked it again. This time it worked. “That’s what you gotta do. Seat the round manually. Give you at least one shot.”

  “But then won’t the second round jam it up again?”

  “Prob’ly. One round’s better than none.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” Spider walked on back to the rear and took up his position. After a few minutes the column started moving.

  He felt just as exposed here as he had walking point. He’d heard that in a box ambush, they hold their fire until the last man comes through. And he knew there were enemies behind him, unless the OP had been shooting at ghosts.

  Of course they were always behind you in this country. And in front of you and on both sides, and up in the trees and even underground. And he had a weapon that fired one round at a time and had to be reloaded manually.

  The Black Death (2)

  The M16 that Spider carried in 1968 was the retarded child of an elegant parent, the Armalite AR-15, designed by weapons genius Eugene Stoner. The AR-15 was an ideal weapon for jungle warfare—lightweight, reliable, deadly. Its tiny 5.56-millimeter bullet was more lethal than the 7.62-millimeter one it was designed to replace, because it tumbled end over end inside the victim’s body, tearing a wide swath of destruction rather than punching a neat hole straight through. If it hit a bone, it could glance off at any angle; there were stories of bullets that would hit a man in the leg and rip all the way up through the body to exit through the top of his head.

  But the U.S. Army did not accept the AR-15 without modifications. The bullet tended to wobble at minus 65 degrees Fahrenheit, which could be a real disadvantage if we declared war on Antarctica, so they increased the “degree of twist” in the rifling, which stabilized the round in frigid weather, but also reduced the amount of tumbling inside the victim, and thus the weapon’s lethality.

  Another problem was lubrication: The technical manuals that accompanied the M16 recommended the same lubrication procedures as for its predecessor, the M14, but the two weapons are as dissimilar as a sportscar and a pickup truck. The conventional lubricant, VV-L-800, decomposed in Vietnam’s humidity.

  What really destroyed the M16’s efficiency, though, was a change in its propellant powder, from IMR (“improved military rifle”) to slower-burning conventional “ball” powder. This increased the cyclic rate of fire from 700 to 1,000 rounds per minute, which caused the weapon to jam. It left a residue that gummed up the barrel and the action. When Colt tested M16s in 1965, it found that none of its samples failed if they used IMR, but half of them did on ball powder.

  At first the military denied that this was the real problem. The real problem was that soldiers were being lazy, not cleaning their weapons properly. The U.S. Congress didn’t think much of this attitude when one of their number read them a letter a wounded marine wrote home to his mother:

  We’ve been on an operation since the 21st of last month.… We left with close to 1,400 men in our battalion and came back with half. We left with 250 men in our company and came back with 107. We left with 73 men in our platoon and came back with 19.…

  You know what killed most of us? Our own rifle … the M16. Practically every one of our dead was found with his rifle torn down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.

  After some years, too late to help Spider and his contemporaries, the M16 was retrofitted with a chrome-lined chamber and a buffer modification to slow down the cyclic rat
e of fire, which made it a little more reliable—though still not as good as the original, using IMR. Why did they continue to use ball powder? It was a complicated skein of interservice rivalry, bureaucratic inertia, and porkbarrel politics that has never been unraveled, and never will be. A pity, since it would be nice to be able to point a finger: This man’s inefficiency, or ego, or avarice, killed more American GIs than any division of Vietnamese.

  Foreign influences

  After an hour or so the word came back to Spider to take ten, scarf some chow. He dropped the rucksack with relief and flopped to the ground. His neck and shoulders and back and thighs ached. He was in prime shape—he’d worked out every day from the time he got his draft notice until he left for Basic Training, and Basic had been a constant aerobic hell of running and calisthenics—but this would take some getting used to. It wasn’t just the weight of the burden, but also the stop-and-go shuffling. And his muscles couldn’t relax, shift the burden around, any more than his brain could relax.

  He rubbed his neck and looked around uneasily. He couldn’t see either of the flanks. The only person visible was Killer, about ten feet up the trail, looking through his rucksack.

  He was hungry but didn’t feel like challenging his nervous stomach with a can of cold greasy food. He rummaged through two boxes of Cs and took out their jungle chocolate and cookies. The jungle chocolate didn’t melt in the heat, but it didn’t taste like chocolate, either. It wasn’t too bad with a cookie and warm Coke. His mother used to give him warm Coke to settle his stomach; the association was comforting.

  Murphy came quietly down the trail to take up the rear position. He sat down next to Spider and slipped out of his rucksack. “Havin’ fun?”

  “Tired.”

  “You get used to it.” He frowned into the pack and pulled out a C-ration box. “Can’t eat the eggs unless I’m fuckin’ starvin’.”

  “You short?”

  “Hundred and two days. Guess in three days I’ll call myself short. You got a while?”

  “I’m not even countin’ yet. November twenty-ninth.”

  “Jesus.” He opened a can of beans and franks and popped a beer. “This your first hump?”

  “Yeah. I was a clerk for a couple weeks.”

  “Quartermaster?”

  “Naw, Graves. Over in Kontum.”

  “Shit, I’d get out of that, too. Gotta be a fuckin’ bummer.” He spooned a piece of fat out of the beans and threw it away. “But you got a X-Ray MOS?”

  A man’s Military Occupational Specialty was determined by stateside training. “Oh yeah,” Spider said. “Did Basic and AIT at Fort Leonard Wood, that’s all engineers. But I got incountry and they asked if anyone could type. I was the only one who raised my hand, wound up in Graves.”

  “Go to college?”

  “One year. Learned to type in junior high.”

  “Flunk out? College, I mean.”

  “Yeah, yes and no. Got shafted. Filed an appeal but then I got my draft notice. I think the fuckin’ college got in touch with the draft board.” Spider did have a legitimate grievance. He flunked out of college because of an F in a five-hour chemistry course. He’d been getting Bs all along and studied hard for the final, and in fact breezed through it with no effort. He was the first person to hand in his blue book, which turned out to be a fatal error: the graduate assistant left it lying on the table when he collected all the others, and, not knowing one student from the other, assumed Spider had not been there and recorded his grade as a zero. When Spider got his F, it was his word against the graduate assistant’s. By the time his appeal was processed, the graduate assistant had gone home to Iran. Ten years later he would die, defending the Shah. Spider would have cheerfully killed him now. “You go to college?”

  “Shit, no. Got a wife and kid, kept me outa the draft for a while. They’re gettin’ hard up. Be draftin’ college guys before long, don’t even have to flunk out.”

  Spider was tempted to tell him the whole story, the fuckin’ towel-head grad assistant who lied, but he’d told it too often and sometimes people didn’t believe him, especially if they hadn’t gone to school. “How’re they gettin’ along? She got a job?”

  “No, she went back with her folks. She could get her old job back, waitin’ tables, but you know. Fuckin’ Jody.” “Jody” was the archetypal civilian, probably a draft-dodger, who had an insatiable appetite for soldiers’ wives and girlfriends.

  “Get to see her at R&R?”

  “Naw, no way we could afford Hawaii. I just went to Bangkok, try some of that slope pussy.”

  “How was it?”

  “Out … standing.” He closed his eyes. “I couldn’t fuckin’ walk for a week.”

  “Sounds great.” Actually, Spider didn’t have much information to go on (see “Spider’s sex life [1]”), other than pictures. Everyone who went to Bangkok brought back Polaroids.

  He didn’t think he would go to Bangkok if he were married to Beverly. But he wasn’t sure, of that or a lot of other things.

  Love letter

  January 6th, 1968

  Dear Spider,

  Thanks for the long letter. I’m sorry you aren’t safe in an office any more, but it must have been awful, working with all those dead boys. It made me want to cry and throw up at the same time, you know what I mean, the way you wrote about them.

  You know there was that red dust all over your letter, inside and out. I can’t imagine, it must be like flour.

  I went with some friends down to a demonstration at the White House last week. Nobody got hurt, though there were a lot of police, riot police. A band started playing but they confiscated all the amplifier stuff. So we sang anyhow.

  I’m getting to be a real peacenik. I hope you still feel the same way. I don’t want you over there, I don’t want anybody over there. Except maybe Lyndon Johnson and his gang.

  It was exciting, with all the singing and chanting. Some of the cops, the young ones, looked like they wanted to be on our side. Some of them looked like they wanted us to drop dead. Everybody looked cold!

  Afterwards we went back to College Park where a church had hot cider and cookies for those of us who were there. One guy could do great Phil Ochs songs, even the fancy guitar playing. He was SO cool.

  After the church thing shut down we went down to the Starlight, but they were checking IDs. I wonder how many kids get killed because they can’t get served near the University and so they drive into the District and get loaded, then try to drive home. That must seem pretty remote to you. I wish I could send you a cold beer.

  Better hit the books. Keep your head down and your chin up, as they say.

  Love,

  Beverly

  Love letter

  10 Jan 68

  Dear Beverly,

  It’s funny how sometimes your letters get here in a couple of days and sometimes it takes a couple of weeks. We’re out in the boonies now, the boondocks, and I didn’t think I’d hear from you until we got back to the fire base. But a helicopter came in with mail and hot food! (Never thought I’d love spaghetti and meatballs and wilted salad.)

  This morning we went out to “hump the boonies” or what the newspapers call a search & destroy mission. We didn’t find or destroy anything, we just walked around as quiet as possible. I had to walk point for an hour, which was pretty scary until I got used to it. Walking point is when you’re in the front of the line.

  We stopped once in the morning when we heard a machinegun. Turned out to be nothing but some triggerhappy grunts back at the fire base, but we had to put out ambushes and sit around. Us X-Rays had to find a place to blow an LZ in case of a fire-fight, so we were out in the jungle by ourselves for a while. That was not cool. But Moses showed me how to set the charges to blow down the trees but we didn’t do it, we just gathered up all the stuff and went back to humping again.

  I met a grunt named Murphy who walked behind me most of the time. Other outfits, people don’t have to call each other by their code
names.

  About 3:00 we stopped near the top of a hill and dug in. I went out to chop down some trees while Moses and Killer dug a hole. You cut down a few trees about 4 inches in diameter and then cut them into two short logs and a bunch of long ones. Gave me two good blisters on my palms.

  We took the logs back to the hole, which looked a lot like a grave! About three feet by six feet by five feet deep. There was a sandbag for each corner; we put the short logs on the three-foot sides and then laid the long ones out in a roof. Then we filled more sandbags with the dirt out of the hole and put them on top. They say four layers of sandbags will stop a mortar round. We did five.

  You don’t sleep in the bunker. It’s just in case of an attack during the night. We sleep outside on our air mattresses, just like at the fire base. It won’t rain at night until monsoon season, and then it won’t stop. Sounds pretty awful. Sure wish I was with you in all the snow and cold. I’d go down to the White House and give them hell too.

  Could you send me a newspaper, or at least some clippings you think I might be interested in? Back at Graves I at least got Stars & Stripes and sometimes Time or Newsweek. Out here we don’t git nuthin’.

  Mother sent me some Christmas cookies but they were all moldy. Don’t tell her! I’m going to write how good they were.

  Love,

  Spider John

  P.S. My gun doesn’t work. But I never wanted to shoot anybody anyhow. (They’re getting me a new one, they say.)

  Beverly’s sex life (1)

  The “SO cool” guitar player who had impressed Beverly at the peace rally and the church-sponsored afterglow was Lee Madden, a housepainter and sometimes hippy who lived in San Francisco. He’d left after the Summer of Love and come to Washington for the march on the Pentagon in October, ’67, and had been staying with local people in the Movement since. He got along with odd jobs and by retailing a little marijuana every now and then. A friend with a farm outside of Berkeley sent him a coffee can full about every two weeks, on consignment; Lee sent back a scrupulous 50 percent of the money he got, after holding back a few Baggies for smoking and barter.