Robert E. Peavey
PRAYING FOR SLACK
A MARINE CORPS TANK COMMANDER IN VIETNAM
To those who answered their country’s call. Heroes, all.
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
Acknowledgments
Wile struggling to write this book, I used (and in some cases, abused) several friends and relatives. As the last person anyone ever expected to attempt such a project, I sought help and advice from anyone who would read the countless drafts, rewrites… and re-rewrites.
My best source of encouragement was my wife, Alica, who had faith when I doubted my abilities and kept me motivated to continue. My sons, Ian and Douglas, were both kind, but Doug pointed out the missing ingredient in an early manuscript by asking, “Dad, I read what you did. But I don’t know how it felt.”
Friends like Mark Anderson and Dean Kirby kept me on track and were of great help keeping me within grammatical bounds. My cousin, William Cocchi, also a good sounding board, helped me evaluate things from a nonmilitary perspective and keep terms understandable for all. Tom Flanagan will always be a friend for the fine maps he created for me.
And there’s nothing like finding people who were there! The miracle of the Internet has put me in touch with countless veterans who I served with. Bob Embesi, Gary Gibson, and Tim Mayte in particular helped recall the details. After Bob read a short story of mine he suggested someone had to recount Operation Allen Brook, which had gone untold for thirty years.
Most important of all was the one person who kept giving me the positive feedback and support I needed through draft after draft: my mother. Without her and the letters of mine she had kept for thirty years, this book would have been impossible.
Thanks for the fireman boots, the bottles of Scotch, the dozens of care packages, and the endless letters that you sent during what was an equally horrible year for any mother.
You will never know what they meant to me.
Preface
Writing a book about one Marine’s Vietnam experience was never my intent. What you are about to read was originally written in the form of several short stories. As I put the stories to paper, a hidden and suppressed anger surfaced within me. Writing, I found, was a catharsis for thirty years of pent-up frustration I had not previously been aware of.
After two years of work on these various stories, I saw that they could be strung together in roughly chronological order. I asked two close friends, both Vietnam-era Marine tank commanders, to take a look at what I had written and was surprised by their reaction. They encouraged me to turn the stories into the book that you now hold.
This, then, is a chronicle of experiences ranging from the humorous to the tragic. I wrestled with the dilemma of including derogatory slang words like “gooks” and “dinks”, because the words we used aren’t politically correct by today’s standards. Nevertheless, those are the phrases and the language used by the men who fought that war. For me to change them to anything else would be unrealistic; doing so wouldn’t honestly represent who we were or what we felt. It would not give you a true flavor of the men and our war. They are terms I left in Vietnam and don’t represent who I am today.
The process of writing put my feelings in perspective. I was able to weigh and assess my anger, and deal with it constructively. More importantly, I realized just how very lucky I was to come out alive.
Chapter 1
How It All Began
It was a pitch-black night on the northernmost outpost in all of South Vietnam. The breeze off the ocean brought with it a chill that went right through me as I stood my watch. That’s funny, I thought; this place can be so goddamned hot, and here I am shivering. The chill running through me was probably due more to the adrenaline pumping through my veins than the weather. I had no idea what to expect as I nervously scanned the sand dunes that lay before my tank. It was November 2, 1968, the first night after the bombing halt, LBJ’s presidential order restricting offensive action against North Vietnam.
I was peering into the night for any signs or sounds of movement, scanning the dunes directly to the west and the China Sea two hundred meters directly behind me. As tank commander, I had the night’s first watch—another ordinary watch, on an all but ordinary night, for Charlie now enjoyed unrestricted access into the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), which lay just five hundred meters to the north of us.
It was close to midnight, near the end of my watch. Even today, I don’t know what made me turn my head. Maybe it was a sixth sense, some kind of premonition.
Something tickled my consciousness and caused me to look to the northeast, almost over my right shoulder, toward the darkened North Vietnam coastline.
Out of the corner of my eye, something caught my attention. That’s when I saw them. I picked up my binoculars and focused on them. “Motherfucker!” I said, half out loud, to no one in particular.
“You see something, TC?” asked Bob Steele, my loader, who always referred to me by the abbreviated title for tank commander. He had been trying to sleep on the back of the tank, above the engine.
“Yep. And you ain’t gonna believe it!”
What I saw—so faint and so far off, several miles north of the DMZ—was so bizarre and so fantastic that I couldn’t believe my eyes at first.
Coming toward me, straight down the coastline, was a long line of lights. Since the war had started, no one had witnessed anything like this. Moving lights were the last thing you expected to see across the DMZ. Then came a complete mental disconnect, for I began to realize just what they were—headlights. And if they were, then all of us were dead men—not tonight, maybe, but in a few days at the very least.
The rest of my tank crew had been trying to sleep, but had never really dozed off. None of us were ready to sleep on a night in which Charlie had a free timeout in the game. We were all just a little jumpy—this place would do that to you. Suddenly they all joined me, standing on the fenders next to the turret, wondering what it was that I had spotted.
Bob Truitt, my gunner, had already dropped down into the turret to swing the main gun in the direction of the faint lights. He located them in his sights then switched to the more powerful telescope. “Holy shit!” he muttered, his head up against the eyepiece.
It took each of my three crewmen a while to reach the same, hard-to-believe, conclusion. We were looking at an endless freeway of trucks driving due south, right down the beach.
Until now, Charlie wouldn’t so much as smoke a cigarette at night. But after LBJ’s order to restrict any offensive actions against North Vietnam, the NVA knew we couldn’t shoot at them. So there they were, driving boldly down the coast and rubbing it ever so sweetly in our faces.
The sheer gall they were exhibiting really fried us. “Those little bastards!” I said through clenched teeth.
“The fuckin’ nerve!” said Steele.
None of us could believe—or wanted to believe—they were so bold as to turn on the headlights of a goddamn convoy of trucks. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to guess what those trucks were loaded with—ammunition, food, and supplies—courtesy of the President of the United States. It would be only days before the lethal contents of those trucks would be put to use on our side of the DMZ.