Woolwine - Part II

     Seems like I just wrote this thing but if I did it was in my dreams.  It's gonna be a triple whammy entry covering three incidents, all of them sharing one thing, Robert Lee Woolwine.  At least that's the way I recall his middle name.  Might just be a yankee prejudice of mine that all southern men have the middle name of Lee if they have the first name of Robert.  And if their middle name is Robert it's shortened to Bob, as in Rufus Bob or Jim Bob. Don't even want to get into Bubba.
     Before I forget, and I almost always forget to describe people, Bobbie was a tad over average height.  Like most of us in the Delta, he was slim, maybe slimmer than most.  Likable, easy going, no glasses, fair of skin, twinkle in the eye, narrow face, a nose longer than it was wide, and a hair color that gets lost in my memory seein' as how it was usually under hat or helmet.  Had a way of talking that slid off the sides of his tongue, rolled down towards the middle dent where it picked up a slightly raspy vibration off his molars and came out crisp and clear, like that makes any sense.  Started out as acquaintances till the Fates drew us together.  Don't remember if he was the first person I met in Bravo Company but for sure he was the last I saw (one year later: oops, the last was Tom Smith).
     Woolwine Loses His Second Point man
     Sunset was my favorite time of day in Vietnam.  By then we'd polished off what could be called with a stretch of imagination, supper. The Army provided us, free of charge, a variety of tasty meals. The cans were olive drab, as were the contents. Real men ate the, cans and all. The rest of us settled for peanut butter and crackers topped off with a can of fruit. As a result most of us grunts slimmed down something fierce over our days in the field.
     However, the best of the best moment came at the end just as the sun settled into the rice paddy muck. Last smoke and coffee. Smokes were usually whatever happened to be in the c-ration box and coffee was a personal concoction that today would be called a latte.  My latte involve dumping most everything from a c-ration box that was coffee related into a canteen cup, adding water, and heating the syrup over a C-4 burner.  Outside of not dying, burning C-4 was the most enjoyable part of being in Vietnam.  Burned with a sky blue flame - or was it green? -  that made me think of eating hamburgers at an outdoor picnic when I was eight years old.  Brought good into bad times.  Had I known back then that the fumes it gave off were poisonous I'd have burned it anyhow.  Poisonous fumes didn't mean shit in the land of agent orange, napalm, four kinds of deadly snakes, eleven varieties of gonorrhea, and a couple of million people who just didn't like you.
     The thing about C-4 was that it wouldn't explode unless you first fired off a blasting cap in it to get the white plastic excited. Or maybe beat on it with the butt of an M-16. Just put a match to it and C-4 burned hot and sweet.  A ball of it the size of a shooter marble was just enough to perk my brew of instant coffee, cocoa, sugar, and powdered creamer.  Marryin' that to the last smoke of the day was enough to almost tickle a smile onto a disgruntled grunt's paddy-smeared face.
     Wasn't as yet monsoon season and the paddy floors were bone dry concrete.  For us that was good.  We slept dry and were able to set up an ideal night position.  Paddies were laid out in a checkerboard pattern.  Chessboard if you were smart enough to not be in be in Vietnam but seeing as how all of us in the field were where we were, I'll go with checkerboard.
     The tactic was bedding the company down for the night in the center square.  There we'd have little mud walls to hide behind and views in all directions.  Hard for anyone to sneak up on us.  One platoon per corner with the command group holding down the fourth. The sun down, tropical dark coming on strong, it was time to hit the bricks, mosey on over to our night position.  Since we moved with the grace and stealth of bossie wearing a ten pound cowbell, how could anyone ever know where we were spending the night?
     Oops.  On that night we were spotted setting up and our Company Commander, we called him by his radio call sign of Bravo Six, threw a hickey fit, told us we had to move, set up in a new position.
     These were back in the pre-GPS days.  Map and compass was our guiding light, even in the dark.  To this day I believe the tree-filled swamp we had to pass through on our traipse to the new, improved night position, was somehow missed by the Army cartographers.  They also seemed to have missed the pond we had to wade.  And they sure as hell forgot the black as the ace of spades night all around us.
     Didn't mean nothin' (We said that a lot. Whenever things turned to shit, it didn't mean nothin'. Just the way it was. We were grunts. The bottom of the bottom). The Word came down, the Word was not good, and the Word came to pass.  We filed out, far enough apart to not trip over each other and close enough to not get lost.  Snaked our way into a mini-forest, mucked down into the swamp, and ended up rifles on shoulders deep in a two acre water hole.  Didn't give a thought to what might call the swamp or the muck hole home.  What lived there, lived there (might even live in me today).  Thinkin' about it just made it worse.
     You'd think there'd be as many exit points from a water hole as there were points on the compass.  Not so in this case.  Our point man saw a single opening in the tree line and bee-lined for it.  But couldn't make it up the steep, shit-slick bank on his own.  Needed a boost from the next man who just happened to be Bobby Woolwine.
     Even back in the middle of the pond I could hear the grenade pop.  Back when I was still new in country the pop of a grenade arming had a menacing sound. Some things, no matter how soft and inconsequential, just sound unfriendly. However, once you heard the pop, and in the Delta it was a familiar sound, you never forgot it.  The following boom came as no surprise.  Two men down.  Not dead, just peppered with holes from the GI grenade in the c-ration can booby trap.  Hell, who knows, maybe the trap had been set about the same time we entered the swamp?
     That set up was par for the course in the Delta.  Most booby traps were elegantly simple.  All a VC needed was a couple of yards of monofilament fishing line, a c-ration can, and a grenade.  American grenades were preferable to Chicoms (from Communist China).  Ours went boom most every time. Yup, we made good grenades. Their's were hit and miss (nowadays that kind of quality fills the shelves at Walmart and comes from the same place.  Call it ironic stupidity).
     The idea was to choose a location along a path American troops would traipse but locals wouldn't.  Tie one end of the line to a fixed point such as a bush and the other to the c-ration can.  Insert a pin-pulled grenade with handle still attached, into the empty can.  Finally, stretch the line tautly across the path and work it though any grass on the path so as to make it nearly invisible.  Tripping the line tipped the can, allowed the grenade handle's spring loaded action to release, and ejected the grenade. Pop!  Five seconds later, boom! They didn't usually kill, just sprayed a body with itty-bitty pieces of wire.
     I was pretty much slack-jawed.  Knew something had to be done but had no idea what.  Glad I wasn't in charge.  First off our medic headed up front. At the same time Bravo Six called in a dustoff.  The intention was keeping the wounded men alive and getting 'em on a chopper so the real doctors could work their magic, pluck the metal and sew up the holes. Most of them anyway. Some would lodge in tender parts, like eyes.
     Bringing in the medivac in the open rice paddies was decided too risky.  So, when it arrived, the chopper lowered straight down toward the waterhole.  Sounded easy enough.  But looking up told even an airhead like me it'd be touch and go.  The opening in the canopy had formed with little regard for someday allowing access by a UH1B helicopter.  Inch by inch the chopper slipped down, flood lamps lighting the area like an operating room, and rotor blades clipping branches on the way.  Had to admit the men in the helicopters were good at what they did.
     Down below we'd formed a line and passed the bodies from man to man, shoulder high.  One of those tasks you don't think about, you just do them.  They're your friends and would do the same for you.  Seeing as how I was the tallest of the group I stood chest deep at the chopper door and passed Woolwine and the point man up to the waiting medics.
       (Did that really happen?  I mean that.   Seems like a lifetime ago and it happened to other people.  I don't recall whether we ever expected to see the two again but suspect we did.  Yes, grenades rarely killed. That was good in an odd kind of way. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Vietnam but how many simply tripped grenade booby traps and are hobbling around, both physically and mentally today?)
    Woolwine was gone.  But he'd be back.  And that's another story filled to the eyeballs with irony.  God, I love irony.