repeater
It was always hot. Hot and wet and muggy and uncomfortable. The brush and dirt had a pungent and unfamiliar odor that only added to the surreal quality of the night. We sat in mud and soaking flora crawling with leeches. In the daylight of morning we would inspect ourselves and each other, removing the blood suckers with the touch of a cigarette to their slimy bodies. But for now our eyes were trained on the darkness of the brooding bush in front of us. We strained to see any sign of movement, any kind of threat to us and the company of men whose perimeter we were helping to guard. It was 1966 and I was in Vietnam about 40 km north of Nha Trang atop an improbable knoll in the soaking greenness.
We did not dig the hole in which we squatted. We would curse the builders in quiet whispers for creating a hole that naturally gathered the water that seemed to seep from everything, everywhere. This was the only distraction to the hours of boredom that accompanied perimeter watch. Boredom which ceased with the suddeness of a lightning bolt as the explosion of a satchel charge some yards down the line bloomed.
The light from the blast was a strobe light that illuminated the panorama before us in a frozen white burst. We could see men in the tree line and we opened fire on them. They fired back at us, causing us to squeeze even deeper into the shallow pig wallow we had for a fox hole. Muddied all the more, we would pop up like prairie dogs and fire a burst from our M-16s before splashing back into the pit again. This went on for about 4 minutes before the volume of firing decreased. Suddenly it was only our side shooting, firing at shadows or firing at nothing because, in the end, it couldn’t hurt. Then it too stopped.
There were small fires in the tree line. Ignited by the tracers or explosive in the munitions delivered by adrenaline charged young men, frightened witless by the sudden savagery. They caused the shadows to dance tauntingly, stirring the urge to let loose even more bottled hell on the darkness. As if we could cleanse the fear from the night. As if we could reclaim the boredom we felt only moments before.
We heard the cry for a medic. It wasn’t a panicked scream, but a calm and firm call for assistance. Our perimeter had been hit at its weakest point. A single man was in a mere depression in the ground, his assigned space for the duration of his watch. They had divined him the weak link and it was his spot the satchel charge had targeted. The thrown bomb landed next to him and he grabbed it and threw it back down the hill. It exploded mid-flight and illuminated a squad of Viet Cong moving up on his position. He and the watches to his left and right opened up, certainly killing the insurgents. The VC fired back, of course, as did the VC remaining in the brush at the base of the knoll. One of our guys took a rock fragment to the cheek from a stray bullet strike. It was deep enough to merit a few stitches and a Purple Heart, but didn’t take him off his watch.
The rest of the night was uneventful. In the morning I found 28 leeches on me. Four days later I was at the Army Field Hospital in Nha Trang with malaria. They told me that the leeches carried both Falciprum and Vivax viruses; the female Anopheles Mosquito was not the sole malaria warrior on the hunt for our blood. But it was a war and so we knew that much.
The images of that night are still very fresh. At times I can smell the odor of the dirt, the mud, the brush, and sweat. And the coppery smell of blood, whose metallic taste was always mingled with the metallic smells of ordinance. I can recall it like it was just last night, because it was. It was last night and other nights, dreamed over and over again for no apparent reason.
