The First Night
by Mark Orr
I like the night because it's consistent.
Rain or shine... it's always dark.
Our platoon Sgt. had been right there with us checking out
I.D.'s of the civilians in the rice paddies all afternoon. When
we finally located our night time perimeter somewhere in the
Eight Click Ville it became apparent that he'd been also
thinking up the little speech he would give us when we were
finished with the day's patrol. He rounded up the three or four
of us "cherries" and we had an informal meeting right there in
the front yard of that bombed out and half roofless old house
that would serve as the command post that night for our half of
the platoon. It was one of those "this is how it's gonna be"
lectures that any good (or bad) leader should give the new guys.
To tell the truth it was pretty generic. "I'm the boss. Here's
the rules.... Any questions?"
I had a question. I wanted to know what was that sweet smelling
smoke cloud just hanging there in the thick wet heat of the
evening behind him?
(I swear I heard a chuckle somewhere)
"That's Davis and I'm glad you brought that up. My feelings on
smoking pot are this and this etc..." Basically, he explained
that he did not smoke pot and that he'd better not ever catch
anyone stoned when they were on guard or any other time when
they were supposed to be alert. His concept was quite logical.
"What you do with your life is up to you, but if you put MY life
in jeopardy... I'll kill ya."
"So what's that cloud?"
"Well that's Davis, and apparently he's lit up a joint over there .
Davis is crazy, but he's a good man. He won't be on guard for a
couple of hours and he knows it. He always takes the last guard shift."
"Well how long have you been here and who's been here the
longest?"
The Sgt. explained that he was "short" with only
something like 200 days left in the field before his year was
up. Further, that the "shortest" guy in the platoon was "Swede"
who only had about sixty days to go.
[lingo: Short. (adjective) Pronounced "short" Always spoken
loudly or shouted. When shouted, the word short declared to everyone within earshot that the one shouting had only a "short" time left to serve in Vietnam. It might be followed by an exact count of the days such as: "Short!! 150 and a Wakeup!" which meant the soldier had 151 days left to serve in Vietnam. The last day was not counted. It was called a Wakeup.]
I never understood that wakeup part. How could you wake up when
you're never allowed to sleep? It must have started with someone
who had a rear job.
Anyway, I decided to hang out with Swede for a while. He was the
shortest and therefore had lasted the longest. I had to find out
how he'd done it. Swede was a Spec 4 in rank
which is average for a normal groundpounder near the end of his
tour. One can get promoted to E-5 (Sgt.) from there, but you
gotta shine or be a suck-up. Swede did not care about either
one. He just wanted to get home.
Fortunately, he was a nice guy and willing to answer all my
million questions pertaining to how he lasted so long. When he
spoke of being "too short for this shit" I couldn't relate...
and he said that often. As for me, I was about 356 and a wakeup at the time.
That's nothing to shout about... believe me.
We were eating C-rations at the moment, so the first lesson was
not to use those stinky heat tabs that come with the C-rations
to heat your food. If they don't get enough air when burning,
they give off a gas that's awfully similar to tear gas . The
best thing to use was a plastic explosive called C-4 which you
could carve out of a broke open claymore mine. A quarter sized ball
could thoroughly heat a can of whatever. Boiling a cup of water was a snap.
One claymore was
sacrificed every week or so for it's C-4 content, and replaced by a new one that came
out with resupply. That much (1 lb.) took care of a squad pretty
much, and the platoon sergeant would usually try to order a
couple of sticks of the same substance packaged in 1/2 lb.
strips and intended for use in making shape charges. The C-4
would burn much hotter than the tabs and wouldn't go out once
it really started burning. It was a perfect way to heat the
canned meals quickly. The perfect begining to any good fire was
a little bit of C-4.
After chow I talked to Davis for a while. He wasn't smoking at
this point but he was still smiling and that was good to see. I
figured if one can do what we gotta do and still smile once in
a while... it won't be so bad. If his calmness and coolness
under fire (which I would soon witness) were
the result of his habit... well you certainly can't say it was a
bad habit. Pure logic would have you saying "...more power to him."
When dusk came I went with Swede just outside our perimeter
where he showed me how to rig up a trip flare. Another shortcut.
"Get yourself a couple of matching bamboo sticks and tape the
flare to one of them. Then if you wrap about fifty feet of trip
wire around the other stick and lash them both together you've
got a portable trip flare system that you can just roll up in
the morning and pack on your back until the next night." It was
kind of a hassle and he was "too short" to be doing it, but
he'd rather roll up an un-tripped flare every morning for the
next sixty days than to ever see one go off again.
No sooner did we get back to the command post than the platoon
Sgt. told Swede he'd have to go back and take down his flare.
And order had come over the radio that we were to make a night
patrol, and we'd be going right down the trail that Swede had
just wired. You have to be very cautious when taking down a
flare since they are set to ignite by the slightest touch. And
it was getting too dark to see anything, so that made it all
the more dangerous. A trip flare wouldn't kill you probably, but
the molten magnesium they spit out would definitely piss you off
and give you something to remember.
Swede was again "...way too short for this shit," but he was
the only one (besides me) who knew where the well hidden flare
might be found. He went off grumbling and came back in a few
minutes having been successful at disarming the flare. The Sgt.
picked several volunteers for the night patrol mission and we
took off out into the village an hour or so after complete
darkness set in.
We were looking and listening and moving very quietly in and
around the Eight Click and along the small river. I remember
something dropping in the water and getting our complete
attention for a while. It was probably a rat or something. All
the safeties were clicked off and we covered the area for about
15 minutes very quietly. When there was no further movement or
sound, we moved on. After about an hour and a half we ended up
back at the command post. The night patrol had been very tense
for nearly every step. They always were. And it was always good
to make it back to the command post even though it meant that
we'd now have to pull guard and sleep in the dirt. The only
other good part of the night patrol was that usually you could
leave your heavy equipment at the command post and carry nothing
but your weapon, ammunition, and a couple of grenades.
I pulled first or second guard duty and as soon as my shift was
over and I layed down, the guy who replaced me got startled by automatic
rifle fire close by. It was no more that 25 or 30 yards from us
in the opposite direction from where we had patrolled. We all
got up and ready for the worst, but it just turned out to be
some ARVN's (South Vietnamese Army sldiers. pronounced "R Vins") shooting something they'd
seen moving in the river. Probably the rat. The other platoons
were far away but they heard the firing and radioed us to see
what was happening. When our platoon Sgt. told them "it wasn't
us" the Captain must have checked out his map for the location
of other "friendlies" working our area and deduced that ARVN's
were doing the shooting and that it was probably nothing.
"ARVN's will shoot at anything."
After the alert was over, I asked what would have happened if
we'd run into these ARVN's while on patrol. The Sgt. snickered
and said that "ARVNs don't go on night patrols." Apparently
someone in our high command knew where those ARVNs were located
for the night and had thus arranged for our night patrol to
steer clear of them.
"Great!" I thought. "Another way to get killed." Besides the NVA
and the Vietcong we could just as easily get killed by ARVNs
who were notoriously nervous at night and apt to shoot at
anything.
I didn't sleep well that night if I slept at all. (Come to think
of it, I haven't slept well since.) It wasn't the ARVNs
shooting up the river or the night patrol so much as it was
the complete and permanent lack of any hope of ever having a
solid eight hours to sleep. Every night in the field, every
grunt had to pull guard for two or three different shifts. Four
hours of sleep at one time was the very best you could ever
hope for.
It's sometimes stated how Vietnam Vets looked aged 10 years when
they came home and something about the way there eyes looked
vacant or just unexplainably strange. I saw a picture of myself
that was taken as soon as I got home and yeah... I looked dead.
But shit! I hadn't slept or bathed for a year... whad ya expect?
Orr