Woolwine III

     As I recall, Bobby was gone for a tad over a month after being fragged in the swamp.  We were on stand down in Dong Tam when he showed up.  All of us in the first Platoon were happy to see him and check out all the scars and stitch marks on his legs.  The best part was having another night in warm, dry bunks before we headed back out.  Being a grunt in the field makes you appreciate being clean once in a while.  And a glass of cold milk.  I know it doesn't sound all that macho enjoying a glass of milk but it sure went down good.   'Specially when mixed half and half with chocolate milk.
     But the bunks remained unused that night.  Maybe cutting our fun short was just the Army's way of welcoming Bobby back. He was a top notch troop, why not put him to work as soon as possible?  Help get us a little closer to that light at the end of the tunnel General Westmoreland kept sayin' was there.  Woolwine wasn't back more than an hour when the word came down.
     Seemed one of the other Companies in the 3/39th was in a fix and we were supposed to go out and rescue them.  Put on our white hats and saddle up Old Paint. As it turned out that may or may not have been true.  Didn't matter, whatever the reason, we were told to drop it and grab it.  Be ready to fly out in a half hour.
     No problem.  About all that entailed was drawing my weapon and radio, putting on my boots and socks, scrounging up some c-rations, and exchanging my soft hat for a steel pot.  Oh yeah, and piss and moan about going out the whole time I was getting ready.  Can't say I was any different than the rest of First Platoon.  There were times when we knew heading to the field probably wouldn't be bad.  Then there were times like this.  It was gonna suck the big one for sure.  A Company was getting its ass shot off and we were gonna share in the fun.
     Time for another Eagle Flight to glory.  We landed in a meadow.  Big meadow.  Maybe five hundred yards wide and much longer.  A wood line on all sides but the one to our rear.  The grass was waist deep.  Guess the gardeners hadn't been there for a while to spruce things up.
     Here I run into memory problems again.  I distinctly recall Third Platoon lined up to our right, their far right end nearly tight to the wood line.  Second Platoon is out of my picture.  Probably they were lined up to our left.  Maybe this mission took place after the one I'm writin' up next.  If so, there wasn't much left of them to do anything.
      Decided here to bring in one of the methods of battle we used several times and it comes up big time in the next entry.  We did the sweep and block as a standard procedure.  Can't say I recall it ever working as planned.  The method is commonly used as a hunting technique.  A group of beaters work their way though a field or wooded area and drive animals toward certain death when they reach the heavily armed blocking force.
     A few weeks later on another such blocking operation, First Platoon, that's us, was fired upon with no effect by our buddies in the Second.  One of us was in the wrong position or just plain stupid.  That's how bad we were at it.  Couldn't even kill ourselves.
     The rains had set in by then and the paddies were flooded.  When Second Platoon opened up on us it was water be damned, swan dive time.  If I had a snorkel I'd have anchored my ass to the bottom till my time in country was over.  As it was, only my head was up and for my first time in country, I turned into a blood donor for a dozen or more leeches.  Truth was, they weren't as bad as I'd imagined.  Not much fun but a whole lot better than being killed by friendly fire.  A squirt of bug juice and they puckered up and dropped off slick as could be.
     On these operations there never seemed to be any VC caught between us and their deaths or they slipped out of our trap as easily as Vietnamese kids ran through our concertina wire back at Moore.  Yeah, they literally ran through our defenses during daylight hours.  And the little bastards stole our trip flares.  Played with them like fireworks on the Fourth of July.  We couldn't shoot them and they ignored any CS gas fired at them.  All they did was move up wind of the drift, then point and laugh at us.  There was a lesson to be learned in their shenanigans that went along the lines of their having a home field advantage that was worth way more than a touchdown.  No doubt we'd been pulled off the Las Vegas betting boards as possible winners of this conflict about a week after Tet in 1968.
     So there we were, back in the meadow on a rescue mission, First and Third Platoons in a line and moving forward.  For about thirty seconds, when Third walked into a beehive of bullets coming from the wood line to their front right.  Time for us all to lay down in the meadow and smell the roses.  When life gets too hectic you've just gotta do that once in a while.
     It was a typical Mekong Delta ambush.  A clip of bullets each from a handful of VC and it was over.  A hail of red and green tracers.  Real festive in a Christmas sense.  Almost immediately they seemed to be gone like ghosts.  Just shell casings on the ground said they'd been there.  That and one dead GI.  And another missing.  We pulled back and the brass reconnoitered.  A nose count told them that they were definitely short a man.  Probably out in the grass somewhere but, at the moment, no one in Third Platoon seemed interested in finding out where.
      To me, a missing man was a scary thing.  Visions of him being a POW came to mind.  Men disappear in war.  Simple as that.  What might have happened to them may never be known. That's the worst part for family.  Five years in a torture cell in Hanoi is a whole 'nuther deal for the missing man.  Our MIA was dead in the grass, almost no doubt about it.  Or dying alone out there with no one to help him.
     On the other hand, we were alive and kicking.  And hoping for a return to Dong Tam for cocktail hour.  Nope, we didn't smoke dope.  Just drank cheap canned beer for a dime a throw till the company fund was repaid, then it was free.  Hard to believe but true.  Maybe it was just that we never came into contact with pot.  Except for the one time at Moc Hoa when we told a papa-san on a bike to beat it with his devil's weed.  Maybe we were just too innocent.  More likely the thought of being stoned while in a fire fight was scarier to us than six months in the stockade.  Paranoia strikes deep, per The Buffalo Springfield.
     A decision was made to spend the night.  And to set up a defensive perimeter in the woods.  Holy shit!  In the woods for God's sake.  What the hell were they thinking of?  I was instantly tormented by the thought of eighteen year old boys more than willing to forgo a night of tropical sex so they could silently slither up on us like snakes in a pool of castor oil, with razor sharp, blackened blades in their camouflaged hands, aching to soundlessly open up our throats so we could never again go home to take out the garbage after a fine meal of steak and baked potatoes.
     Out in the open, like we usually did, it was possible to see if anyone was sneaking up on us.  But now, in the woods, it was another story.  And that story was too much like a Grimm fairy tale for me. Who the hell knew what might be out there in the shadows that were gonna surround us come sunset?    Oh well, I'd only been dreading this moment since I realized what the future held back when I was in AIT.  In short, it didn't mean nothin'.
     We moved in and started to set up as sunset drew near.  We always carried a few machetes and now they were put to use clearing out some kind of fire lanes.  No foxholes.  We didn't carry entrenching tools.  Not that we were atheists and innately feared hiding in holes.  No, the guy who said that atheists and foxholes didn't go together might have been blowin' smoke.  Or lookin' for a good sound bite back in the days before sound bites.
     Don't know if we would've dug any even if we had the shovels.  Who knew what kind of shit was living in the dirt?  Millipedes and whatnot a half foot long that would have poisoned us one at a time, then let us fester and rot till we were delectably delicious.  Too much like a horror movie for my tastes.
     Ahh, sunset in the tropics.  Once we were set up it was time to schmooze a bit.  Talk over the events of the day.  And what new high-jinx we might participate in come the morning.  Maybe a helicopter ride and seein' the sights?  Choose up sides and play war?  Guess there was no need to do that as the sides had already been chosen decades before.
     We paired up.  One awake while the other tried to sleep.  Staying awake was no problem.  Even when you were trying to sleep.  Long story short, nothing happened that night.  Probably Charley was back in his hooch with wife, kids, and Grandma, sleeping the sleep of the righteous.  Out there in the grass, our missing man was alone, as alone as any man could ever be. Maybe dead, maybe dyin'.
     Like I said, nothing happened.  Come morning Third Platoon went out and found their man, dead in the waist deep grass.  Also found a howitzer round rigged as a booby trap.  They left it for the demolition boys.  Some guys have all the fun.
     A dustoff was called in for the two inert bodies so they could be bagged up and sent home.  Sure not the way those boys would have had it.  No hero's welcome by loved ones as they got off the plane.  No sir, not the way they'd have planned it at all.  A flag draped casket and a hole in a national cemetery sure ain't much for having died for, or because of your country, in a land on the other side of the planet.
     Before the dustoff could land the field had to be swept for booby traps.  And the honors went to First Platoon's second squad, that was us.  Thirteen of us formed a line with me on the far right hand side, close to the wood line.  It was slow going 'cause the grass was thick and high.  Hard to see my boots on the ground much less a length of plastic fishing line.
     Some moments are frozen in time.  And they're not always earth shaking moments unless you happen to be part of it.  A half minute, maybe a little more, into the sweep there was a pop!  We all knew and feared that sound.  My head snapped left, as did the six others closest to me.  At the left end five snapped right.  In my mind's eye I'm standing there right now.  The man in the middle was Bobby Woolwine and he's looking right back at me, sadness and terror in his eyes. That's how it looks in my memory.  In reality, Woolwine was the only one lookin' at his feet.
     The two to be loaded on the dustoff was now three.  However, Bobby survived.  And once again returned to Bravo Company.  Together we were pulled out with the Ninth Division, were reunited in Hawaii in an infantry company and flew together on our post-Vietnam leave.  I last saw him at the Minneapolis airport.  There, Lois welcomed me home.  Bobby and she briefly met.
     The story came down that he never returned to the Army.  After taking the shrapnel from two grenades his legs looked like a railroad map drawn by a speed freak on acid.  I know.  I saw them.  His family doctor took one look and that was all she wrote for Bobby Woolwine's days in the Army.