War Year Read online

  The next morning we went out to a rifle range and learned how to use an M-16. Some of the guys had them in Basic Training, but most of us hadn’t ever shot one before. The stock and grip are hollow fiberglass, so the gun’s really light, as light as my .22 at home. But it can really shoot ’em up—put the selector on AUTO and hold down the trigger, and eighteen bullets come out all at once. We learned how to zero them in so the bullets went about where you aimed, and spent the rest of the time murdering tin cans.

  In the afternoon we learned how to use explosives. That was kind of interesting, since, being a combat engineer, I’m supposed to know all about them. But I was on KP all the time we’d studied explosives in training, so it was all new.

  “These are the things you’re gonna be using most often.” The guy teaching the class was a Spec/5 not much older than me.

  “TNT.” He held up a block about half the size of a brick, covered with green paper.

  “C-4 plastic explosive.” It looked like an overgrown piece of taffy, a white rubbery stick about a foot long.

  “Det cord, detonation cord.” Looked just like plastic clothesline.

  “Time fuse.” Looked like the det cord, but orange.

  “And, of course, blasting caps.” Skinny silver tube.

  “Mostly you’re gonna use the C-4, because the TNT doesn’t work too well if it gets wet. And everything gets wet during the monsoon season.

  “Now here’s all you have to do, to make a big noise. First you take the crimpers”—he held up a funny-looking pair of pliers—“and crimp a blasting cap onto some fuse.” He blew in the end of the cap and slipped a length of fuse into it. Then he squeezed the end of the cap with the jaws of the crimpers, and gave it a couple of tugs to show that it was securely fastened to the fuse.

  “Now when you get out in the field you’re gonna see hard-core engineers crimp these caps with their teeth, like in the movies. If you’re real lucky you might see one of them get his jaw blown off. Don’t do it.

  “In all this bag of tricks,” he waved an arm at the pile of various explosives behind him, “the only things really dangerous to you are the blasting caps. The rest of it, you can burn or shoot full of holes, nothin’s gonna happen.

  “But drop one of these blasting caps on the sidewalk—if you can find a sidewalk—and you’ll be lookin’ for a new pair of balls.

  “Now to put the cap in the C-4”—he broke off a piece of C-4 a few inches long—“you just punch a hole in it with the pointy-ended handle of the crimpers. The other handle’s a screwdriver, which you’ll never use.

  “Make the hole about as deep as the cap and push the cap in. Like this. Now follow me.” He led us over to a hole in the ground, big enough to hide a truck in. He set the piece of C-4 inside the edge of the hole.

  “Let me use your cigarette.” He took a cigarette from a guy and touched it to the fuse and blew on it. “You can use matches, but a cigarette works better.”

  The fuse started to sputter and he said calmly, “Get away and get down.” I ran like hell, not knowing whether to expect a firecracker or an H-bomb.

  “That’s far enough,” he shouted. I hit the dirt and the thing went bang, a little louder than a rifle. We went back and sat down again.

  “Most of you prob’ly won’t ever use this stuff. Explosives are the engineers’ job. But you’ve all gotta know how to do it in case of an emergency, like all your engineers getting killed.” Oh yeah.

  “You almost never use these things as weapons—you’ve got plenty of explosives made for that purpose. Mostly you use the C-4 for blowing down trees, either to make an LZ—helicopter landing zone—or to clear away enough of the jungle so that Charlie can’t come too close without you seeing him.

  “You don’t want to blow down your trees one by one, so you use the det cord to make all the charges go off at once.

  “This stuff”—he held up a coil of the white cord—“is nothing more than hollow plastic tubing filled with an explosive similar to C-4. If something goes bang at one end, the bang travels down the cord to the other end. To make sure everything goes off all at once, you ought to put a cap on each end of the det cord. But in a pinch, you can just wrap it around the explosive a few times.”

  He used the det cord to string together a bunch of different kinds of explosives, to show us where the caps went in each one. There were cratering charges, a Bangalore torpedo, a Claymore mine, a dynamite stick, and a number of other things that I never saw again. At the end of the session, he blew the whole thing up. Even scrunched down in a foxhole a block away, it was so loud it made my ears hurt. They rang all the next day.

  The week went by pretty fast. We learned about weapons, booby traps, jungle survival—even spent a night out in Charlie’s Country, on the other side of the barbed wire. Nothing happened, but it was spooky.

  It was like Basic Training all over again, but boiled down and concentrated and with all the bullshit taken out. In Basic they treated you as if you were a boy, and a moron at that—but there’s no room for tots or stupids in the jungle.

  When the week was over, they posted lists telling where everybody was assigned. Willy and I both drew B Company, Fourth Engineers.

  FOUR

  The supply sergeant just looked at us when we walked into the supply room, stood there behind the counter and looked at us without saying anything. He rolled a dead cigar butt from one side of his mouth to the other, and back again.

  “New guys.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, I’m—”

  “Lemme see a couple copies of yer orders.” We handed them over.

  “Farmer. Horowitz.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at Willy. “Joosh?”

  “Huh?”

  “You Joosh or what?”

  “Oh. Yeah, I’m a Jew. What about it?”

  “Lucky sumbitch.” He shuffled the papers around.

  “Lucky?”

  “Yeah, we gotta let ya go t’ Long Binh fer those crazy holidays. No synagogue around here.

  “Had a Joosh guy till a coupla months ago. Useta go ta Long Binh fer a coupla days an’ come back really fucked up. Lucky sumbitch.”

  He got out two copies of a list titled “COMBAT ISSUE—B Company, Fourth Engineers.” At the bottom there was a place for your name. He printed our names in the blanks, slowly and carefully.

  “Says here plain as day, ‘please print,’ but none o’ you fuckers c’n read so you just put some squiggly fuckin’ line that’s s’posed to be yer name. So I gotta write it.

  “Okay.” He started at the top of the list. “Rifle, M-16, Serial number such-and-such.” He clumped over to a rifle rack, unlocked it, and pulled out the first two M-16s.

  “Take good care o’ these.” He tossed them on the counter with a plastic-sounding clatter. “Gon’ save yer life someday.”

  He slapped two pens on the counter. “Serial number’s on th’ enda th’ barrel. Write it inna blank.”

  He put his finger on the second item on the list. “Ammunition, 5.63 mm, 100 rounds. You don’t get none o’ that.”

  “No ammo?” I said.

  “Tha’s right. Otherwise you fuckers get drunk an’ start shootin’ each other in th’ ass—”

  “Then what the hell are we going to do in case of an attack?” Willy was indignant.

  “Son, I been here goin’ on twenty-one months—”

  “You came back?” I couldn’t believe anybody would spend more than a year here.

  “Shit, yeah. Twenty-one months, like I say, an’ I ain’t once had to shoot my M-16. Don’ even know if th’ fucker works.” He put a finger on his chin and frowned. “Hey, jus’ a second.

  “HEY, FUCKFACE!” he yelled.

  “Yeah, Sarge,” came a tired voice from a back room.

  “Where them fuckin’ manifests come in this mornin’?”

  “Second drawer down on your right. Where I always put—”

  “None o’ yer fuckin’ lip, Private.” He opened the drawer
and fished out two little tickets.

  “Yeah, you get ammo. Yer shippin’ out in th’ mornin’.” He went back to the gun rack, unloaded a box, and brought back two cartons of ammunition. Then he added four hand grenades.

  “The rest o’ this shit, we already got made up.” He pointed to two big plastic bags, the kind laundries use, standing up in a corner. They were filled with various objects, mostly green.

  He turned the lists around so we could read them. “That oughta be it.”

  The rest of the list went like this:

  1BANDOLIER

  1HELMET, STEEL

  1LINER, HELMET

  1NET, CAMOUFLAGE

  1BAR, MOSQUITO

  2JACKETS, FATIGUE, JUNGLE

  2TROUSERS, FATIGUE, JUNGLE

  2UNDERSHIRTS, GREEN

  2DRAWERS, GREEN

  1BOOTS, TROPICAL, PROTECTIVE SOLE, PAIR

  4SOCKS, GREEN, PAIR

  1PACKFRAME, ALUMINUM

  1RUCKSACK

  1PONCHO

  1LINER, PONCHO

  1MATTRESS, AIR

  1PACKET, FIRST-AID

  1BELT, PISTOL

  2GRENADES, HAND, FRAGMENTATION

  1BAYONET

  2CANTEENS, FIBERGLASS, GREEN

  “What are we supposed to do with all this crap?” Willy asked.

  “Do with it? Lemme see.” He looked at the list. “Well, y’carry the gun. Stuff the ammo in the bandolier and sling it across yer chest, like a Mexican bandit. Put the liner in the helmet and the camouflage net over the helmet and dump it all on yer head. Put the bayonet and the first-aid packet on the pistol belt and hang it on yer hips. Then buckle the rucksack on the packframe and stuff everything else into the rucksack. Got it?”

  “Then you put the rucksack on your back and try to walk. Right?”

  The sergeant laughed. “You poor fucker. Son, that ain’t thirty pounds worth of stuff. Wait’ll you get out in the field and they give you a week’s worth of C-rations and 200 more rounds of ammo. Lemme see, and a carton of butts and ten pounds of C-4 and an ax and a few more grenades—when you go back to the world you’ll have the strongest back on the block.

  “Anyhow, I’ll show you how to put the rucksack on the packframe. Get everything together tonight—you’re leavin’ bright an’ early tomorrow for Ban Me Thuot. You oughta take shavin’ gear and stationery, but leave the rest of your personal shit here, in your foot locker. Remember, everything goes on your back.”

  We managed to get the stuff together and staggered out to where the supply sergeant said the billets were. Had to be more than thirty pounds!

  I had a pretty good night’s sleep, but it was still dark when a guy came in with a flashlight and shook us awake.

  “Farmer and Horowitz? Saddle up—there’s a jeep waiting for you outside.” The guy smoked a cigarette in the darkness while Willy and I dressed.

  “Who’re you?” I asked.

  “Masters, PFC Masters. I’m the supply clerk.”

  “Don’t suppose you need another supply clerk… or anything clerk.”

  “Nah. We got clerks out the ass in this company. You oughta be glad you don’t hafta stick around here and put up with all the bullshit.” He ground his cigarette out on the floor. “Yeah, I kinda envy you guys. Out where the action is.”

  “Trade you all the action for your typewriter,” I said.

  “Man, you don’t know—half the guys out there go all year without ever gettin’ shot at. Just sit on their butts an’ take it easy. Free cigarettes, lotsa beer, Red Cross broads….”

  “Still trade. Somebody’s gettin’ shot. I’d just as soon it was somebody else.”

  He lit another cigarette. “Yeah. Guess I could get reassigned to combat if I really wanted to. Think about it, too, every time the supply sergeant gets a bug up his ass.”

  I heard Willy grunt as he hoisted the pack. “Ready to move out, Willy?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be. Still asleep, though, goddammit.”

  By the time the jeep got to Pleiku it was getting light. Masters suggested we should poke our guns out the window, just in case, as we drove through. We did, but nobody paid much attention to us.

  When we got out of the jeep, Masters handed us a manifest, a plane ticket, to Ban Me Thuot. I took it into the little stucco building by the airstrip, and the guy at the desk told us it’d be loading in another hour or so. We sat and wrote letters until he called us.

  The pilot of the C-130 made us leave our hand grenades behind—the supply sergeant should have known they wouldn’t allow them on the plane—and we had about a half-hour’s ride to a run-down airstrip in Ban Me Thuot. The strip was full of holes, filled with gravel.

  There was a sign on the airstrip: INCOMING FOURTH DIVISION PERSONNEL REPORT TO FOURTH DIVISION TRAINS AREA. That was us, but neither of us had any idea what the hell a “trains” area was. There were a bunch of tents at the end of the airstrip, so we headed for them. It turned out that the whole shmear, about a hundred tents, was the trains area. We wandered around for a while—nobody else in sight—’til I finally stuck my head in a tent and some sergeant gave us directions to the engineer’s outfit. He was shaving, looked like he’d just gotten up.

  “This place don’t look too fuckin’ dangerous,” Willy said as we walked down the dirt road.

  “What do you think made those holes in the airstrip—termites?”

  “Well, yeah. Still, you don’t see anybody gettin’ ready to fight a war.”

  “I don’t see anybody at all. It’s only seven o’clock—maybe they don’t fight until after lunch.”

  “That must be the place.” Willy pointed at a tent with a sign that had the Fourth Division cloverleaf and said ENGIN. B CO. We went into the tent.

  Inside, there was a guy asleep in a chair in front of a radio set. Willy went over and shook his arm. “Hey, fella, wake up.”

  He sat up straight and looked around. “Jesus Christ—was I asleep?” He looked at his watch. “Captain’d have my ass in a sling… thanks. Who are you guys, anyhow?”

  “I’m Willy Horowitz and this is John Farmer. New guys.”

  “Just two? They said five or six… you just get in?”

  “’Bout fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Hey, do me a favor, the mess tent’s just across the street. Get us some coffee, OK?”

  “Sure.” Willy went out the flap.

  “Take off your pack and have a seat. I gotta find the papers for you guys.”

  I sat down and took out a cigarette, decided to wait and smoke it with my coffee. “How is it out here?”

  “Here? Oh, pretty much like base camp. Not as much spit-’n-polish. Three hots a day and beer at night, if we’re lucky. Only had two attacks all the time I’ve been here. Nobody hurt.”

  “Sounds pretty good.”

  “Oh, it is—hell of a lot better than where you’re goin’.”

  “We aren’t gonna stay here?”

  “Nah, you’re goin’ out to either Brillo Pad or, uh, two-one-two-four.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Hills nearby. Fire bases.”

  “Fire bases. So what’s a fire base?”

  “Man, a fire base. That’s where they keep the big guns, artillery. Safest place in the world, forty, fifty big guns and mortars, two grunt companies—two hundred men, man, no way Charlie’s gonna fuck around with you. That’s a fire base.”

  “How come one has a name and the other has a number?”

  “Oh, the number is the name—the ‘2’ means infantry; ‘21’ means A Company and ‘24’ means D Company, that’s the two infantry companies on the hill.”

  Willy came back with the coffee. It tasted terrible.

  A tall man, the first guy I’d seen with creases in his pants, came into the tent. “Morning, David.”

  “Morning, Captain.” Willy and I started to come to attention but saw that the guy at the radio stayed in his seat. We stood up anyhow.

  He grabbed my hand while I was still
deciding whether to salute. “I’m Cap’n Brown, your company commander.” He shook hands with Willy, too. “You must be replacements—where are the others, getting chow?”

  “Uh, sir, we’re the only ones they sent.”

  He bit his lower lip and picked up a clipboard. “I see. What’re your names?”

  We told him. “Yes, you’re on this list. But so are four others.” He sat down on the table and leafed through the papers. “We’re under strength. Way under. Those God-dern base camp commandos. We need men out here for soldier work—and they grab half our replacements for permanent KP and paper-shuffling.”

  Why couldn’t I have been one of those lucky four? I can wash a mean dish.

  “Well, you-all go get some breakfast. Then get a couple of cases of beer from the mess sergeant and head out to the helicopter pad. Tell the pad man to put you on a slick to 2124.”

  Breakfast wasn’t too awful, but we had to go back and get a note from the captain before the mess sergeant would give us any beer.

  The pad was quite a ways away from the trains area. That case of beer was getting mighty heavy by the time we got there.

  No helicopters, just a bunch of supplies lying around, and the dirtiest guy I’d ever seen, sitting on a crate, drinking beer.

  “You the pad man?”

  “Nah, he went to get some chow.” He gave us the once-over. “New guys?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Bravo Company engineers.”

  “You won’t be clean again for a long time. Better enjoy it while you can—pull up a box and crack a beer.”

  It sounded like a good idea. He let us use his church key. It was on a chain around his neck, all wrapped up in green tape. His dog tags were wrapped the same way; I asked him about it.

  “That’s so they won’t jingle, man. You gotta be quiet. Don’ want to jingle in the jungle.” He laughed, a dry cackle. “Where you two goin’?”

  “Place called 2124.”

  “2124? Oh yeah—2124!” He cackled again. “That’s where I’m headed, too—but that’s not what we call it.”

  “Place has a name?”

  “Yeah.” Cackle, cackle.

  “Alamo. Alamo Hill.”

  FIVE

  The first “slick”—that’s a helicopter big enough to hold about six people—was headed for the Alamo. He didn’t even shut off the engine; we three just piled in and he lifted off again.