REMFs at War #1
We were REMFs once and young, but we did occasionally have to stage battles of a sort. Was it Michael Herr in Dispatches who said a real war story always begins with “This is no shit…”? Well, this is no shit:
Once upon a time, on a day that was neither too hot nor too cold, a day like almost any of 365 minus the 21 or so we spent crossing the Pacific Ocean, on one late afternoon, the sun descending behind high hills that we called mountains, some imbecile reported that a sapper had crossed the three continuous circles of razor-sharp concertina wire, had crawled beneath other barbed wire obstacles, had managed not to set off any mines or make noise with jingling tin cans, and had, in short, managed to get in through all the barricades surrounding Engineer Hill and was thought to be lurking somewhere within our portion of the outpost.
Our company commander was not amused.
Historic Sidebar: Colonel Harry Summers, in his Vietnam Almanac, goes back into medieval wars to define what a sapper is: a special unit that worked with tunnels to undermine a castle-like fortification. He refines that for sappers in the Vietnam War to include units that mined roads, cleared mine fields and “breached defensive fortifications.” Henry V, in the play of the same name by William Shakespeare, famously exhorts his troops: “Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more!” or words to that effect. The “breach” in that case was the first opening bombed into the walls of a fortification. It was dangerous for the troops who went into the breach first; few of them survived. Those of you who read Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe novels will remember that Sharpe became an officer by being the first man into the breach at a battle in India. It’s kind of like all those movies where the first guy up the scaling ladder (unless he is our hero) almost always dies (see the orcs scaling the wall of Helm's Deep in the film version of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers). Our alleged sapper, though, was more like the Vietnamese communist who squirms under the wires as a demo for troops in The Boys in Company C: sly, dedicated, heroic, coated with mud, deftly lifting the concertina away from his body and rising silently with a bayonet to kill the dumb American soldiers.
We had heard recently about one sapper who came upon a three-man guard post, all of the soldiers asleep inside the sand-bagged Conex. The sapper had allegedly locked them into the thing before moving into the interior of the post and shooting up the hootches. Did that actually happen? I have no idea. I don't remember anyone saying "This is no shit..."
Anyway, a report made its way, more quickly than normal, to our company commander, from what source no one seemed to know--perhaps a note tied to a brick and thrown into the HQ Bunker?) that we had one (1) sapper suspected to be in our company area.
The C.O., visions of bronze stars undoubtedly dancing in his head, called all of us who were not otherwise engaged in secret doings in the Ops Tent into formation. I wold tell you what was going on in the Ops Tent but that would either be "R"-rated or the government would treat me worse than they have treated Julian Assange (not too badly, really) Back to the story: The C.O. divided us into two groups, lined us up on either side of the compound, M-16s loaded and locked (I have been told by experts that the popular phrase "locked and loaded" does not apply to M-16s), and marched us toward each other.
By then, the sun had almost set completely and shadows streaked the compound. All of us seemed slightly nervous—not because of a vicious VC sapper who might rise up with a bayonet and sever our heads from our necks, but because of the other dozens of men on the other side of the place marching directly toward us with M-16s loaded, locked, and ready to fire. Had some poor, befuddled sapper stood up in the middle of all that, we might well have fired at him and killed each other! If some rodent had raced by the same thing might well have happened and that would have played hell with the numbers game.
We finally all came together in the middle of the compound, looked around, said the F-word a few hundreds of times, aimed our fingers at each other and said "Bang! Bang! You're dead!" and wandered back to whatever we had been doing. It was a lot like those games we had played when we were kids: Korean War or even WWII, Asian people talking about being "educated in your country" before killing us.
The Aftermath:
A few months later, we had a parade. Please be aware that the 330th never had parades, but this one was for the awarding of medals. A few of us (not me!) had received minor shrapnel wounds from the mortars the VC must have accidentally dropped on us (or maybe they thought all the antennae we had actually signified something of importance and deliberately aimed their mortars at us). And we had one guy, his first name was Bill, who had been transferred to the 330th from my old unit at Chu Lai. He had actually done something worth receiving a medal for and that made me even happier that I had been transferred out of Chu Lai! Still, seven purple hearts to mildly wounded REMFs and then, drum roll please!!!!, a bronze star without a “V” device to our brave commander who had led us into action against a deadly sapper. Bill got the same medal, sort of: his had a "V" device for valor.
Medals? Except for the really important ones, they were handed out to officers like...well, anything not for heroism can pretty much be discounted most of the time.
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