Bloods (5 page)

This was somethin’ that they never taught us in school.

This guy thanked me for saving his life and the life of his squad. And whenever we were back in base camp, I would always go with them. And since a platoon would always carry three or four combat engineers with them in the bush, I would always go with them.

When I came to Vietnam, I thought we were helping another country to develop a nation. About three or four months later I found out that wasn’t the case. In high school and in the papers I had been hearing about Indochina, but I couldn’t find Indochina on the map. I didn’t know anything about the country, about the people. Those kinds of things I had to learn on myself while I was there.

We had a Vietnamese interpreter attached to us. I would always be asking him questions. He had told me this war in Vietnam had been going on for hundreds of years. Before the Americans, they had been fighting for hundreds
of years against the Chinese aggressors. I thought we had got into the beginning of a war. But I found out that we were just in another phase of their civil wars.

And we weren’t gaining any ground. We would fight for a hill all day, spend two days or two nights there, and then abandon the hill. Then maybe two, three months later, we would have to come back and retake the same piece of territory. Like this Special Forces camp outside Dak To. The camp was attacked one evening. Maybe two or three platoons flew up to give them some assistance. Then somehow headquarters decided we should close down that camp. So they ended up closing down. Two or three months later, we went back to the same area to retake it. We lost 20 men the first time saving it, 30 or 40 men the next time retaking it.

And they had a habit of exaggerating a body count. If we killed 7, by the time it would get back to base camp, it would have gotten to 28. Then by the time it got down to Westmoreland’s office in Saigon, it done went up to 54. And by the time it left from Saigon going to Washington, it had went up to about 125. To prove we were really out there doing our jobs, doing, really, more than what we were doing.

I remember a place called the Ashau Valley. The 7th went in there and got cut up real bad. They had underestimated the enemy’s power. So they sent in the 9th, and we cleared the Ashau Valley out. All we was doing was making contact, letting the gunships know where they were, and then we would draw back. We had 25 gunships circling around, and jet strikes coming in to drop napalm. We did that all day, and the next day we didn’t receive any other fire.

Stars and Stripes
said we had a body count of 260 something. But I don’t think it was true.

By then I had killed my first VC. It was two or three o’clock in the afternoon, somewhere in the Central Highlands. I was point man. I was blazing my own trail. I was maybe 40 meters in front of the rest of the squad. And I just walked up on him. He just stepped out of the bush. I didn’t see him until he moved. I’d say maybe 50 meters. And then he saw me. We both had a look of surprise. And I cracked him, because it just ran through my mind it
would be either him or me. I just fired from the hip. And he hadn’t even brought his weapon down from port arms.

But what really got to me from the beginning was not really having any information, not knowing what I was gonna be doin’ next. We might be pullin’ guard for some artillery one night. Then the next day some choppers would come and get us. We would never know where we were going until in the air. Then we would get word that we were going to the LZ that was really hot. Or something ignorant, like the time we went over in Cambodia to pull guard on a helicopter that had been shot down. And we got stuck there.

It was in the latter part of ’66, late in the afternoon. I think it got shot down probably in ’Nam and just ended up in Cambodia. So they sent out a squad of us combat engineers to cut around the shaft so a Chinook could come in, hook up, and pull it out. We didn’t get there until six or seven, and it was getting dark. So the Chinook couldn’t come in, so we had to stay there all night. The chopper had one door gunner and two pilots, and they were all dead. It wasn’t from any rounds. They died from the impact of the chopper falling. I thought it made a lot more sense for us to get out of there and bring the bodies back with us.

When it got dark, we could see a fire maybe half a mile from us. We knew it had to be a VC camp. In the bamboo thicket right up on us we kept hearing this movement, these small noises. We thought if we fired, whoever was out there would attack us. We were so quiet that none of us moved all night. Matter of fact, one of the guy’s hair turned stone gray. Because of the fear. He was just nineteen. He was a blond-headed kid when the sun went down, and when the sunlight came up, his hair was white.

We didn’t find out they were monkeys until that morning.

That was about as crazy as the time we tryin’ to take a shower in a monsoon rain. We had no shower for maybe ten days in the bush. We was standin’ out there in the middle of a rice paddy, soapin’ up. By the time all of us got soaped up, it stopped rainin’. So we had to lay down and roll around in the rice paddy to get the soap off of us. We never did call that a shower.

It seems like a lot of green guys got killed just coming in country by making a mistake. I remember this white guy from Oklahoma. We got to callin’ him Okie. He said that the reason he had volunteered to come over to Vietnam was because he wanted to kill gooks. He was a typical example of a John Wayne complex.

It was a week after he had just gotten there that we got into any action. He was just itching to get into some. We went out and got pinned down by machine guns. They were on our right flank. He saw where the machine-gun net was, and he tried to do the John Wayne thing. He got up, trying to circle around the machine-gun net. Charge the machine gun. And never made it. Whoever was firing saw him move and turned the machine gun on him. We stayed down till we could call in some gunships. Then we moved back.

There was another guy in our unit who had made it known that he was a card-carrying Ku Klux Klan member. That pissed a lot of us off, ’cause we had gotten real tight. We didn’t have racial incidents like what was happening in the rear area, ’cause we had to depend on each other. We were always in the bush.

Well, we got out into a fire fight, and Mr. Ku Klux Klan got his little ass trapped. We were goin’ across the rice paddies, and Charlie just start shootin’. And he jumped in the rice paddy while everybody else kind of backtracked.

So we laid down a base of fire to cover him. But he was just immobile. He froze. And a brother went out there and got him and dragged him back. Later on, he said that action had changed his perception of what black people were about.

But I got to find out that white people weren’t as tough, weren’t the number one race and all them other perceptions that they had tried to ingrain in my head. I found out they got scared like I did. I found out a lot of them were a lot more cowardly than I expected. I found out some of them were more animalistic than any black people I knew. I found out that they really didn’t have their shit together.

At that time we would carry our dog tags on a chain and tie it through the buttonholes of our fatigue jacket.
Wearing them around our necks would cause a rash. Also, they would make noise unless you had ’em taped around your neck.

Well, these white guys would sometimes take the dog-tag chain and fill that up with ears. For different reasons. They would take the ear off to make sure the VC was dead. And to confirm that they had a kill. And to put some notches on they guns.

If we were movin’ through the jungle, they’d just put the bloody ear on the chain and stick the ear in their pocket and keep on going. Wouldn’t take time to dry it off. Then when we get back, they would nail ’em up on the walls to our hootch, you know, as a trophy. They was rotten and stinkin’ after a while, and finally we make ’em take ’em down.

These two guys that I can specifically think of had about 12. I thought it was stupid. And spiritually, I was lookin’ at it as damaging a dead body. After a while, I told them, “Hey, man, that’s sick. Don’t be around me with the ears hangin’ on you.”

One time after a fire fight, we went for a body count. We wiped part of them out, and the rest of them took off. There were five known dead. And these two other guys be moanin’. One of them was trying to get to his weapon. One of the guys saw that and popped him. Then another guy went by and popped the other one to make sure that he was dead. Then this guy—one of the white guys—cut off the VC’s dick and stuck it in his mouth as a reminder that the 1st Cavs had been through there. And he left the ace of spades on the body.

That happened all the time.

So did burnin’ villages.

Sometimes we would get to villages, and fires would still be burnin’, food still be cookin’, but nobody was there. The commanding officer, this major, would say if no one is there in the village, then the village must not belong to anybody, so destroy it. But the people had probably ran off because they knew we were comin’.

If we didn’t want people further down the road, like the VC, to know we were comin’, we wouldn’t fire the village. Or if we were movin’ too fast, we wouldn’t.
Otherwise, you would strike your lighter. Torch it. All of ’em were thatched huts anyway. I looked at the major’s orders as something he knew more about than I did.

And the villagers caught hell if they were suspect, too.

I remember at this LZ. We could sit on our bunkers and look across the road at the POW compound. The MPs had them surrounded by barbed wire. We would see MPs go in there and get them and take ’em to another bunker. Then we’d hear the Vietnamese hollerin’ and shit. The MPs would take the telephone wires and wrap it around the Vietnamese fingers and crank the phone so the charge would go through the wires. Papa san, mama san, would start talkin’. And then we’d see the MPs carry ’em back into the camp.

One day at the LZ we saw a chopper maybe a mile away, high up in the air. Maybe 300 feet. And we’d see something come out. I didn’t think it was a body until I talked to the other guys. I had thought maybe the chopper had banked and then somebody had rolled out. That was a fear that we always had when we were ridin’ in choppers ’cause there weren’t any seat belts in the choppers at that time.

What happened was they were interrogating somebody. And the interrogation was over with.

Outside An Khe, the 1st Cav built an area for soldiers to go relieve theirselves. Bars, whorehouses. It would open at nine in the morning. We called it Sin City. And it had soul bars. A group of us would walk around to find a joint that would be playin’ some soul music, some Temptations, Supremes, Sam and Dave. I would want to do my drinking somewhere where I’d hear music that I liked rather than hillbilly. But a lot of gray guys who wasn’t racially hung up would also be there.

The women were much more friendly there. We had heard that was because they thought of the black man as bein’ more stronger, more powerful, because Buddha was black. Take a good look at a Buddha. You’ll see that he has thick lips and has a very broad nose and very kinky hair. But I didn’t know that until I got in country.

We would go to a Class 6 store and get two half-gallons of Gilby’s gin for a $1.65 each. We take a bottle to papa
san. Buy a girl for $5 or $10. Whatever came by, or whatever I liked. And still have a half a gallon of gin. We would have to leave the area at six o’clock.

Another good thing about the girls in Sin City was that the medical personnel in the camp would always go and check ’em once a week. And if they got disease, they’d get shots and wouldn’t be able to work until they were clear. Nobody used rubbers because all the girls in Sin City were clean.

But the people got abused anyway. Like a lot of guys would have Vietnamese give them haircuts. And after papa san got through cuttin’ the hair, this guy would tell him that he wouldn’t like it and would walk off. He wouldn’t pay papa san. And the haircut cost no more than thirty cents.

And it seemed the Vietnamese were always hung up on menthol cigarettes. Kools and things. And they knew brothers all smoked Kools. And they would always ask us for a cigarette. So a lot of guys would start givin’ ’em loaded cigarettes to stop ’em from always askin’ us. One of the guy’s brothers had mailed him some loads from a trick shop. You take out some of the tobacco, then put in a small load of gunpowder. When the Vietnamese smokin’ it, it just blow up in his face, and he wouldn’t go back to that GI and ask him for a cigarette ’cause he was scared he’d get another loaded cigarette.

One night I saw a drunk GI just pull out his .45 and pop papa san. Papa san was irritatin’ him or botherin’ him or something. Right downtown in Sin City. After he fired, the MPs and a lot of soldiers grabbed him. They took him to the camp, and he got put up on some charges.

You could find plenty of women out in the field, too. We would set up our perimeter, and all of a sudden a little Coke girl would show up with Coca-Cola. And also some broads would show. We would set up lean-tos, or we’d put up bunkers. A guy would go outside the wire, take the broad through the wire to the bunker, knock her off, and take her back outside the wire. Normally, those kinds of deals was a C-ration deal. Or a couple of dollars. We would give the girl a C-ration meal. Ham and lima beans, ’cause nobody in the squad would want to eat ham and
lima beans. You would never give up spaghetti and meatballs.

One morning, we were sweepin’ a highway near Phu Cat. Four of us in a jeep with two M-60 machine guns mounted on the back. We were coming down the road, and we looked off on to a spur and we saw three black pajama bodies start runnin’ away from us. So one of the two white guys turned his gun on automatic and knocked all three down. The three of them ran over there to see what was happening and found out that two of them were women, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and one of them was a man. I stayed with the Quad 60, just pullin’ guard to make sure there might have been some more VC in the area.

As I was watching, I noticed one of the white guys take his pants down and just start having sex. That kind of freaked me out, ’cause I thought the broad was dead. The brother was just standin’ guard watchin’. It kind of surprised him to see this guy get off. After about 20 minutes, I ended up saying, “Hey, man. Come on. Let’s go.”