The School was good and very much worthwhile, but the war did continue and we had our normal activities. I’d like, just for a moment to revisit guard duty—mostly because guard duty for us was not very much like the guard duty I have read about in hundreds of Vietnam memoirs and novels. Guard duty in a grunt unit was something very serious. Now, on the matter of Grunt guard duty, I cannot speak from experience and I suspect much of what I have read is exaggerated. Is it possible that our boys in camouflaged green clothing did not have flood lights pointed out from their camps so they could easily spot the guys in black PJs? Didn’t they all have colleagues viciously killed by sneaky VC because they nodded off a bit? That certainly was not how it was for me when I stood perimeter guard on Engineer Hill, but that's what I've read, so it must (in reverse Panglossian logic) be true.
Sidebar: What is a grunt?
Believe me, the only thing I know about this is from my reading and from the this is no shit war stories I have heard and read. And,m of course, there is the "MILTERMS" dictionary on the Internet: A US Army soldier - sometimes, but not always, specifically refers to an infantryman. Folklore has it that GRUNT was originally an acronym of Government Reject - Unfit for Normal Training.
I wrote a poem once about the East St. Louis guy I've spoken about before. To illustrate my own ill-conceived notions about the etymology of the word "grunts," I'll repeat it here:
Push-Ups
(Sgt. Smith, as the grunt's push up count went past 200: "He's gonna set the fuckin' batallion record")
That night, down on the floor
while we counted, your arms,
so fluid, pumped, stretched...
dropped your body an inch above
the tile, then lifted you so high
that something had to give--
the floor, the tiles, the sky--something
had to break. No sweat, just
repetitions, "100," "200," "299!"
and the you stopped.
I knew
why once: the time, the atmosphere,
the need to articulate something
that could not be grunted out
to prove something to yourself
and all of us. Goddamn but you
were cool when you held yourself so still,
looked up at all of us and laughed.
You lifted one hand from the floor, brushed
a drop of sweat from your lip, stood up
and walked away.
Perhaps other definitions: "the noise made by the RTO as he carried everything most people carried, plus a heavy radio, into the boonies. Or the sound the guy carrying the M-60 machine gun carried." Or the inability to express oneself in anything other than grunts. Kind of an insulting way to refer to the people who actually did the fighting and most of the dying, but there it is.
When I went on guard duty, I put on an old pair of fatigues, found my helmet and its liner, checked out my M-16 and filled my OD plastic canteen with wine, then strolled out to my assigned bunker. It was on the other side of the berm the engineers had thoughtfully circled the hill with and so was a bit more dangerous than being behind the berm. First thing we did on guard duty was climb to the top of the bunker (sandbagged metal container box that had been lifted from a ship— about the size of a small office cubicle with a smaller area on top that had a steel roof) and check the fifty caliber and the M-60 machine guns by firing short bursts. Then back down to make sure the Claymores were pointed the right way and armed. We did not test Claymores by firing them though that might have been fun to do.
After that, it was time to be bored, sip wine from the canteen, and stare out across three rows of concertina wire into the darkening night. Sometimes (well most times), if I had two canteens and enough wine, I would recite poetry into the dark after the other two guys at my bunker had fallen asleep. Usually, it was poems like Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Inisfree.” It begins, “I will arise and go now and go to Inisfree…” Or, maybe, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which begins, “Let us go then, you and I, / when the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table…” Or maybe Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and wonder what lies I might tell my grandchildren in some as yet unimagined future. If I had enough of a buzz on, I would lift my canteen to the sky and salute, as old Eben Flood did in the Robinson poem, the two moons I could make out quite clearly in the near drunken night. Most of the poems were about getting up and going somewhere else. In the same way, the most popular songs sung by the Filipina strippers who sometimes visited us were about leaving: “Ho-o-meward bou-ound…I-I wish I wa-as….” I would shudder at the failure to use the subjunctive but did join in on the refrain.
I didn’t always wake up the other guys if I got a bit too maudlin or was too happy in my own solitude. You didn’t get too many chances to be alone and think in Vietnam. Oh, we all did think, but usually, in the company of other people. Usually, I would watch the stars shining brilliantly above me in an area that had very little ambient light not made by the floodlights in front of me, and think about girls I knew back in Beaumont, Texas, and in Austin. Those were, I confess, sometimes erotic thoughts if not downright pornographic. Or about my high school students in Silsbee, Texas, many of whom were probably training to come to Vietnam as I stood out there on top of a bunker. In fact, some of my seniors from Silsbee, Texas, might well have already been in Vietnam. I had a full year and a half of training before being shipped over and that would have given them time to go through Basic Training and AIT. A few might have flown over me as the troop ship I was on waddled through the Pacific Ocean. I hope that somewhere at least one of them is reading this.
If, as happened on some nights, the VC fired rockets, the other two men standing (or sleeping) guard would wake up and climb up on top of the bunker. We rarely hunkered down behind the sandbags because they normally fired the rockets well over our heads and into the Air Force Base…we were much too small a target for anything except the occasional mortar attack. It was an interesting show, though, those nights when the VC came out to play.
At any rate, the sun would rise--it has a habit of doing so--and I would go back to my hootch and go to sleep for a few hours before walking over to the Ops Tent to get back to work.
One night, though, things were a bit different. My bunker came under attack.
Here’s what happened and to capture all the gory excitement, I'm shifting to present tense:
My normal state of boredom and mild wine-drinking is broken, but not by anything I can fire a weapon at. A horde of wasps has attacked. Back in the States, I know, wasps do not swarm like bees and certainly not at night. But these are VC wasps or may be some other flying critters that only look like wasps, and feel the night belongs to them. Ugly things. Within a few seconds, they have taken over the whole top of the bunker. Why? Because I desert my post. I jump off the side of the bunker at the first sting. I know damned well I can guard the perimeter just as well from the bottom of the thing. Besides, no one except these wasps has ever attacked us.
I go inside and call the OD (Officer of the Day? Why does he work at night?) to report enemy aerial infiltration and he refuses to believe me. I invite him to come down and take a look. He orders me back up to the top of the bunker and I tell him I will be happy to follow him. He drives his jeep down to the bunker and, while he does not exactly say, “Follow me!” does climb halfway up the ladder before being stung. “As you were,” he says and leaves.
So, that’s the story. One night in the war, my bunker was overrun by the VC Air Force and I shamelessly surrendered to superior forces.
No comments:
Post a Comment