Bloods (18 page)

I still dream about Vietnam.

In one dream, everybody has nine lives. I’ve walked in front of machine guns that didn’t go off. When they pulled the trigger, the trigger jammed. I’ve seen situations where I got shot at, and the round curved and hit the corner. I’d see that if I had not made that one step, I would not be here. I think about the time where a rocket-propelled grenade hit me in the back, and it didn’t go off. We were in a clear area and got hit by an enemy force. The RPG hit me. Didn’t go off. Didn’t explode. We kept walking, and five of us got hit. I got frags in the lower back and right part of the buttocks. I didn’t want to go back to the hospital ship, so I just created the impression that I could handle it. But the stuff wouldn’t stop bleeding, and they had to pull the frags out. There was this doctor at Quang Tri, Dr. Mitchell, who was from Boston, a super guy. He painted a smile on my rear end. He cut a straight wound into a curve with stitches across so it looks as if I’m smiling. When I drop my trousers, there’s a big smile.

I dream about how the kids in my platoon would come to talk to you and say things about their families. Their
families would be upset when they heard I was black. But then some guy would give me a picture of his sister. He would say, “She’s white, but you’d still like her. Look her up when you get back to the States.” And there would be the ones who did not get a letter that day. Or never got a letter their whole tour. In those cases, I would turn around and write them letters and send them back to Vandergrift.

And you dream about those that you lost. You wonder if there was something you could have done to save them. I only lost two kids. Really.

Cripes was a white guy. I think he was from St. Louis. He was a radio operator. You could tell him. “Tell the battalion commander that everything is doing fine.” He would say, “Hey, Big Six. Everything is A-okay. We are ready, Freddie.” You know, he had to add something to whatever you said. Otherwise, he was a very quiet guy. But one big problem he had was that he wanted to get into everything. He was trying to prove something to himself. If he saw somebody move, he was going to follow him. No matter what you could do to tell him not to fire, he’d fire. One night, after we got out to Fire Support Base Erskine, we got hit. It was about eleven. Cripes got shot. We don’t know if he got hit by our fire or their fire. I just know he crawled out there. He must have seen something. Cripes just had a bad habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lance Corporal Oliver was a black kid from Memphis. He carried an automatic rifle. He had been with us maybe three months. He was a very scary kid. He was trying to prove a lot of things to himself and to his family, too. So he was always volunteering to be point. It was very difficult to appoint someone as a point man. A lot of times when you had a feeling you were going to be hit, you asked for volunteers. Oliver always volunteered.

We were on Operation Dewey Canyon. In February of 1969. We had been told the NVA was in there that night. One platoon had went out and got hit. And we got the message to go in next. I got the whole platoon together and said, “Listen. I’m going to walk point for you.” My troops said, “No, sir, you don’t need to walk. We will arrange for someone to walk point.” So the next day the
whole platoon got together and said, “Who wants to walk point today?” Oliver stuck up his hand. I said, “I’ll be the second man.”

Now we had this dog to sniff out VC. Normally he would walk the point with the dog handler. His handler, Corporal Rome from Baltimore, swore Hobo could smell the Vietnamese a mile away. If he smelled one, his hair went straight. You knew something was out there.

One time, when we were walking a trail near Con Thien, this guy was in this tree. At first we thought he was one of the local indigenous personnel, like the ARVN. He turned out to be something else. He had his pajamas on and his army trousers. He wasn’t firing. He was just sitting there. Hobo just ran up in that tree, reached back, and tore off his uniform. He was armed with an AK-47. Hobo took that away from him, threw him up in the air, and grabbed him by the neck and started dragging him. We learned a lot from that guy. You put a dog on a guy, and he’ll tell you anything you want to know.

Another time at Vandergrift, Hobo started barking in the officers’ hootch. We had sandbags between us. And Hobo just barked and barked at the bags. Nobody could figure out what was wrong. Finally I told Hobo to shut up, and I walked over to the sandbags. There was this viper, and I took a shotgun and blew its head off.

We used to dress Hobo up with a straw hat on his head and shades on. All of us had shades. And we used to take pictures of Hobo. And sit him on the chopper. And he’d be in the back of the chopper with his shades on and his hat, and he would smile at us.

We got to the place where we could feed him, and put our hands in his mouth. We would give him Gravy Train or Gainsburgers. If we ran out on patrol, we would give him our C-rations. He really liked beef with spice sauce.

Hobo was so gullible and so lovable that when you had a problem, you ended up talking to him. You could say, “Hobo, what the hell am I doing here?” Or, “Hey, man. We didn’t find nothin’ today. We walked three miles and couldn’t find nothin’. What the hell are you doing walking this way?” And he’d look at you and smile, you know, in his own little manner. And he’d let you know that he should really be here to understand all this shit we’re
putting down. Or he would do things like growl to let you know he really didn’t approve of all this bullshit you’re talking. It’s hard to explain. But after eight months, Hobo was like one of the guys.

Hobo signaled the ambush, but nobody paid any attention. We walked into the ambush. A machine gun hit them. Oliver got shot dead three times in the head, three times in the chest, and six times in the leg. Rome got hit in the leg. Hobo got shot in the side, but even though he was hit, he got on top of Rome. The only person that Hobo allowed to go over there and touch Rome was me.

It never got better. It seemed like every day somebody got hurt. Sometimes I would walk point. Everybody was carrying the wounded. We had 15 wounded in my platoon alone. And the water was gone.

Then on the twelfth day, while we were following this trail through the jungle, the point man came running back. He was all heated up. He said, “I think we got a tank up there.” I told him, “I don’t have time for no games.” The enemy had no tanks in the South.

Then the trail started converging into a really well-camouflaged road, about 12 feet wide and better made than anything I had ever seen in Vietnam. Then I saw the muzzle of this gun. It was as big as anything we had. And all hell broke open. It was like the sun was screaming.

I thought, my God, if I stay here, I’m going to get us all wiped out.

In front of us was a reinforced platoon and two artillery pieces all dug into about 30 real serious bunkers. And we were in trouble in the rear, because a squad of snipers had slipped in between us and the rest of Charlie Company. My flanks were open. All the NVA needed to finish us off was to set up mortars on either side.

Someone told me the snipers had just got Joe. He was my platoon sergeant.

That did it. I passed the word to call in napalm at Danger Close, 50 meters off our position. Then I turned to go after the snipers. And I heard this loud crash. I was thrown to the ground. This grenade had exploded, and the shrapnel had torn into my left arm.

The Phantoms were doing a number. It felt like an earthquake was coming. The ground was just a-rumbling.
Smoke was everywhere, and then the grass caught fire. The napalm explosions had knocked two of my men down who were at the point, but the NVA were running everywhere. The flames were up around my waist. That’s when I yelled, “Charge. Kill the gooks. Kill the motherfuckers.”

We kept shooting until everything was empty. Then we picked up the guns they dropped and fired them. I brought three down with my .45. In a matter of minutes, the ridge was ours. We had the bunkers, an earth mover, bunches of documents, tons of food supplies. We counted 70 dead NVA. And those big guns, two of them. Russian-made. Like our 122, they had a range of 12 to 15 miles. They were the first ones captured in South Vietnam.

Well, I ordered a perimeter drawn. And since I never ask my men to do something I don’t do, I joined the perimeter. Then this sniper got me. Another RPG. I got it in the back. I could barely raise myself up on one elbow. I felt like shit, but I was trying to give a command. The guys just circled around me like they were waiting for me to tell them something. I got to my knees. And it was funny. They had their guns pointed at the sky.

I yelled out, “I can walk. I can walk.”

Somebody said, “No, sir. You will
not
walk.”

I slumped back. And two guys got on my right side. Two guys got on my left side. One held me under the head. One more lifted my feet. Then they held me high above their shoulders, like I was a Viking or some kind of hero. They formed a perimeter around
me
. They told me feet would never touch ground there again. And they held me high up in the air until the chopper came.

I really don’t know what I was put in for. I was told maybe the Navy Cross. Maybe the Medal of Honor. It came down to the Silver Star. One of those guns is at Quantico in the Marine Aviation Museum. And the other is at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. And they look just as horrible today as they did when we attacked them.

Rome lost his leg. From what I’m told, they gave him a puppy sired by Hobo. So Hobo survived Dewey Canyon. They wanted to destroy him at first, but he got back to the kennel. If anybody would’ve destroyed that dog, it would have been me.

But Hobo didn’t get back to the States. Those dogs
that were used in Vietnam were not brought back. The Air Force destroyed all those dogs. They were afraid of what they might do here.

If I had Hobo right now, he wouldn’t have to worry about nothing the rest of his life. He was a hell of a dog. He could sense right and wrong. I would have trusted Hobo with my own children. If somebody got wrong or was an enemy of my family, Hobo would have brought his ass to me. There ain’t no doubt about it. Yet he was a nice dog. He would give me a kiss on the jaw. I loved that dog.

But the thing that really hurt me more than anything in the world was when I came back to the States and black people considered me as a part of the establishment. Because I am an officer. Here I was a veteran that just came back from a big conflict. And most of the blacks wouldn’t associate with me. You see, blacks are not supposed to be officers. Blacks are supposed to be those guys that take orders, and not necessarily those that give them. If you give orders, it means you had to kiss some body’s rear end to get into that position.

One day I wore my uniform over to Howard University in Washington to help recruit officer candidates. Howard is a black school, like the one I went to in Texas, Jarvis Christian College. I thought I would feel at home. The guys poked fun at me, calling me Uncle Sam’s flunky. They would say the Marine Corps sucks. The Army sucks. They would say their brother or uncle got killed, so why was I still in. They would see the Purple Heart and ask me what was I trying to prove. The women wouldn’t talk to you either.

I felt bad. I felt cold. I felt like I was completely out of it.

I was going on nineteen when I got drafted. I had graduated from high school the year before, and I was working as a engineering assistant in this drafting firm. My mother went to the bus station with me to see me off to Fort Bragg for basic training, and she said, “You’ll be back a man.”

I didn’t feel anything about Vietnam one way or the other. When you are black and you grow up in urban America in a low-income family, you don’t get to experience a lot—if your parents protect you well. My mother did. My mother raised all four of us. She was a hospital maid, then she went to G. C. Murphy’s company. And now she’s director of security for the stores in Washington D.C.

Mom is not college educated, so all she knows is what the propaganda situation is. She programmed us to be devoted to duty, to God, state, and country. She said you
got to do all these good things—like military service—to be a citizen here in America. “You’re not white,” she would say, “so you’re not as good as they are, but you got to work hard to strive to be as good as they are.” And that’s what you’re brought up to believe.

I guess I knew that Martin Luther King was against the war. But I couldn’t relate to what he was doing about it or even about discrimination because I wasn’t old enough. Nor was my mother in a position to explain to me what that whole power struggle was all about.

I was just brought up to believe that when the opportunity presents itself to you to stretch yourself out, you do it. Subconsciously or consciously you’re trying to satisfy your mother’s dreams even before you even deal with what you even want to do.