Several hours later, the chief informed me that we were approaching the harbor.
“Would you mind dropping us off—on the north side of the river?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Ain’t you gone north far enough?”
We rolled off the LCM, waved our thanks, and raced north up the beach with the same precious few rounds of machine gun ammo we started out with. Reporting to my platoon leader at C-4, I learned that we would be returning to Oceanview the next morning. We had no problem with that. After all, we had just spent five days off the Z.
The crew and I spent the next few hours reloading all sixty-two rounds of ammunition and all our small-arms ammo from a nearby bunker. Next morning, we sped on up the beach, back to our old position atop the sand dune. It was good to be home, even if it was the DMZ.
Two days later, my platoon leader came up to brief me on an operation about to get underway. We’d be going with a Marine battalion on a sweep into the northern area of Leatherneck Square. Immediately I got a sinking feeling. Leatherneck Square was the area between Con Thien and Gio Lihn at its northern corners, and Dong Ha and Cua Viet at the southern corners. The Square was infamous for its large-unit battles, more reminiscent of World War II than Vietnam.
Worse still was being told we were going out with a grunt unit from the 9th Marines. Of course my first question was, “Please tell me it’s not One-Nine?”
The look on his face telegraphed the answer I deeded. “One-Nine it is. Hope you had a nice vacation in Da Nang.”
“Sir,” I muttered, “I’m too short for this shit!”
Late the next morning, we joined up with the Walking Dead and went on line with them to sweep through the northern portion of the Square. As we advanced through a lot of low scrub mixed with tree lines we encountered the usual sniper fire that always followed a grunt unit around. We moved north at a slow walk with the grunts a hundred feet in front of us, everyone tense… waiting for the first sign of Charlie. Reportedly, an NVA battalion was in the area, and we were trying to flush it out.
Around ten in the morning, the grunts—previously close by—had distanced themselves from us. It was a common mistake for them, and you couldn’t blame them. A bad feeling washed over me; I didn’t like the looks of this at all.
Ten feet away, up jumped an NVA with an RPG launcher. He was at the one o’clock position, almost in front of our tank!
I reached for my M14, which lay across the top of the TC cupola. The driver reacted at the same time, adding full throttle and jerking our tank to the right. The NVA soldier was bringing up his RPG when we lurched toward him. The tank’s abrupt swerve and acceleration was something I never expected, but it definitely grabbed the NVA’s attention; it’s hard not to be distracted with fifty-two tons bearing down on you. I’m sure the noise of our engine’s revving and our tracks coming straight at him, block by block, had its effect on his aim.
His RPG fired wildly over us. He had started to turn when the track grabbed him and flung him to the ground like a rag doll. Without the slightest hesitation in the tank’s movement, the tracks pushed him down. I couldn’t see over our fenders, but I assumed we ran over the lower half of him.
“Got the motherfucker!” yelled the driver at the top of his lungs. He jerked the tank back to the left.
The adrenaline was really pumping in all of us now! “Nice job, driver! You probably saved us with that move,” I said over the intercom. Positive he had squished the shooter like a bug, I shot a quick glance back over my right shoulder. I thought it odd that I didn’t see a body, but I didn’t waste time looking for our freshly minted waffle. There could be more idiots like him out there, armed with RPGs.
I yelled to get the grunt sergeant’s attention and signaled him to bring his men in closer to us. But as the day wore on, the grunts kept edging farther and farther away from the tank. I had to snag the sergeant’s eye again and again; I didn’t want another eye-to-eye face-off with an RPG. Later that afternoon, they distanced themselves from us yet again, and once more I had to signal him to bring his men back in.
The sergeant walked over and looked up at me. “I can’t keep my guys around you!” he said with a smile, “The smell is killing them.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, incredulous.
“Can’t you smell it?”
I had been so anticipating another RPG shooter that my brain had switched off my sense of smell. Suddenly the odor overwhelmed me, almost making me nauseous.
“You got about eighty pounds of hamburger in your sprocket.”
Then I realized what had become of the RPG gunner. Somehow, the edge of our track had pulled him into the tank’s sprocket—which, we discovered later, was far more effective than any meat grinder.
The loader was standing next to me. “You think that gook has become attached to our tank?”
“Yeah,” I said, “He fell head over heels for us!” If there was one thing we all loved, it was sick humor. “Do you think we made a good impression?” Asked my driver over the intercom.
The afternoon heat had gotten to the raw meat, and our tank was really rank. Noisy as we were, you wouldn’t hear us coming before you smelled us.
“Hey!” I called to the sergeant. “We wouldn’t smell like this if your guys had been doing their job!” He grinned, held his nose, and directed his reluctant men to stick closer to us.
We continued the sweep, using our machine gun to recon-by-fire on suspected areas of scrub bushes. We fired at a tree line and suddenly tripped an ambush. They returned fire, and the grunts went down to protect themselves. Then a large artillery round landed two hundred meters off to our right. A minute later, several more shells followed, now coming toward us. An NVA artillery spotter—probably in the tree line—was making adjustments, walking the rounds toward us. We had no choice but to close with the enemy; it was our only hope of avoiding his artillery.
I didn’t have to give the order to button up. Our loader and driver had already closed their hatches. We fired while the grunts assaulted the tree line in rushes. We stopped about fifty meters in front of the trees and provided supporting fire. The incoming artillery got lighter. That meant we had gotten their forward observer, or he had simply taken off.
At almost the same time, two RPG shooters jumped up out of their grass-covered holes about twenty feet away. I grabbed my M14 and took out one of the NVA. The other one came under fire by the grunts assigned to our tank. This was getting too hairy; I was way too short for this shit.
That night, we learned we would spend two more days in the field. In the darkness, Mr. Charles probed us, looking for a weak spot and trying to get us to react to his poking around. But 1/9 was too good a Marine outfit to fall for such mind games. Their automatic weapons remained quiet, as did the tanks. It would take a full ground assault before these guys would open up.
The only reaction Charlie got from within the perimeter was one single rifle shot, by a sniper specially equipped with a Starlite scope. The following morning, it was discovered that Mister Charles had turned around most of the Claymore mines that 1/9 had placed out in front of them. The NVA were hoping we would fire them off and have all the ball bearings come back our way.
The remainder of the sweep was uneventful. We were none the worse for wear, except for being tired from lack of sleep. We were reassigned back to Oceanview. The run north along the ocean, half in, half out, helped clean up the mess we had in our sprocket. Taking up our familiar position atop the sand dune, we quickly downed a meal of C rats as the sun set behind the mountains to the west.
We all felt drowsy as we started our watch routine; I had the second watch, from midnight to 2 a.m. Around 12:30 the ARVN fire base at Gio Lihn, about five miles west of us, came to life. Green and red tracers flew in both directions. The hill was under attack, and sporadic flashes of artillery silhouetted it against the dark horizon. I immediately woke up the crew to be ready in case this wasn’t an isolated incident.