Woolwine - Part I

     Dates get lost in my mind but the order of events remains.  Also, it's not like the order jumps out at me either.  Usually I've got to sit a moment and think it over till logic comes stumbling around. This had to happen before that, that kind if thinking.  From the distance of forty-four years my time in Vietnam tends to jumble together and fade.  Of course it's all fading as time passes.  From the outside of the picture toward the middle.  Or from the top to the bottom like a shirt that's been in the display window too long.  But there, in the crystal clear center, stand a few stories that once actually happened and the people who were there.  Woolwine remains, as do Papa-san, Weasel, the Farmer, Tom Smith (all three of them), Constatino, Jim Smiley and the dead.
     I was a fortunate man.  Only two of the men I called friends were killed in combat.  The remaining seven dead during my four months in the field were in the second and third platoons, as good as if they were in another country.  Odd how that works.  You see them most every day, maybe know a few by name but you don't share loads with them, bed down with them, or sit with them on a break like you do with the men in your own squad.  They remain faces seen at a distance.  And now they're faded faces off on the edge of the painting.
     This is the story of how Woolwine lost his first point man.
     Don't remember if the operation we were on was my first carrying the radio.  Probably not.  Before the PRC-25 found a home on my back, like every other rookie I was just another rifle bearing grunt.  A few days before the radio became my baby, I'd been given a shot at carrying the M-79 grenade rifle but was unable to hit the bush Constatino was pointing at.  Simple as that.  Two rounds popped in the right general direction, no better, no worse.  Said to the world I had no innate touch for the weapon.  Probably a genetic defect on my Swedish side.
     More likely, my true ability was being the mindless minion of Irony with a capital 'I'.  Ironic circumstance was my fate in the Army and no matter my ability with the grenade rifle, Irony wouldn't let me hit the broad side of a barn even if I was inside.  Instead, the M-79 passed into the hands of a man who could hip shoot a grenade into a rabbit hole at fifty yards.  His bad luck as you'll see.
     When the radio slot opened up all I had to do to make it mine was say yes.  I had all the necessary attributes, could speak intelligible English, was big enough to carry the extra weight and wore glasses.  The glasses said to the world, at least the world around me wearing jungle fatigues, that I was a nerd who'd ruined his vision reading instruction manuals for anything involving electricity when I could more productively have been leafing through Playboys and exercising my right hand.  Little did they know.
     Whatever the reason, the radio was mine.  And I cherished the job.  At night I had first choice of which watch to pull.  Meaning a relatively uninterrupted, full night's sleep whether I took the first or the last.  Also, in a fire fight, my primary obligation was to never jeopardize my sorry ass by doing something heroic but to keep those ever important lines of communication open.  Dead men can't do that.  In short, my job was to not bitch about the load, stay alive, keep near my squad or platoon leader and my mouth functional.
    One last thing.  There was a pecking order as to which of us would be shot in an ambush.  The first three to go down would ideally, from the VC point of view, be the man next to the radio, the man carrying the radio, and the M-79 man.  We went out of our way to choose someone with real ability to carry the grenade rifle.  And our grenadiers were good.  And they were dangerous.  So, of course, they were shot first.
     Snoopy's Nose.  And I ain't talking about the beagle on the dog house fighting the Red Barron.  Down in the Delta we all came to know and dread the words Snoopy's Nose.  So when the word came down that's where we were going, there was a lot of muffled muttering involving mothers and the Diety in our stand-down barracks.  Enough to let me know something was in the wind.  I suspected it was our shit but asked around anyhow.
      'Bout all I could get out of anyone was, "You don't want to know but you're gonna find out."  
     What the hell, I didn't know what their problem was, this was exciting.  We were gonna get an Eagle Flight to a place I'd never been.  A regular road trip in the air.  Just like Apocalypse Now if it had already been filmed.  Robert Duvall and all that happy napalm shit in the morning.
     Made me mad I didn't have a camera to take photos of me and the boys mugging in front of all the neat stuff we'd see.  Send those pictures home to the family with captions sayin' stuff like, "This   here is me and Li'l Joe and the Dripper just before the Dripper got shot in the ass and sent home to the World.  Lucky bastard."
     Ridin' in a Huey was usually a good time.  On a hot day the ride was air conditioner cool.  There might be water aboard.  We were riding, not humping.  And the view was worth the price of admission.  Rice paddies and river and then, river and rice paddies.  Being up in the blue on an Eagle Flight made me feel like we were fast, graceful, powerful, and ready to pounce down on stray kittens and roadkill at a moment's notice.
     Don't remember how it came about but my spot on the chopper was in the doorway, legs hangin' in the breeze.  I sure didn't end up there 'cause I was a daredevil or I wanted to be number one out the door so I could have first shot at the VC.  Most likely I was slower than the rest of my squad on my first ride.  Once in the doorway - there were no doors on the Hueys in the Delta - I found I liked it and since I lacked the imagination to sit anywhere else, that's where I stayed.
     However, there were disadvantages to the doorway.  Should we be fired upon, the doorman was the most easily hit.  Never gave that a thought.  But if we were ever shot at, I was never aware of it.  Kinda disappointing, ain't it?  And for us Bravo Company boys, it was never anything like the movies where choppers smokin' into a hot LZ went down in blazes of glory but somehow the grunts survived and came sprintin' out of the fireball with M-16s spittin' out a slipstream of death.
     In my case the disadvantage had more to do with daydreaming.  Most times when I found myself up in the sky, my mind was lost in the ozone, with visions of the World dancing in my head, anywhere but where I actually was.  Then this one time, on a descent, the sight of the treetops coming level with my eyes woke me up.  And I stepped out.  Into space.  Not a smart move.  Rule number one for exiting a helicopter was: Don't step out until you have to.  Rule number two was: Free fall ain't free. 
     I have no recollection of my chopperless flight other than complete surprise.  The landing I remember clearly.  It was toes first, knees second and face third.  The coup d'gras was when my pack and PRC-25 hammered my head home.  As my platoon leader said to me while I was cleaning my glasses with spit and jungle shirt, "Peters, that was the dumbest, f***ing thing I've ever seen."  What could I do but grin like a man who'd just done the dumbest f***ing thing ever seen by another man who'd seen a lot of dumb f***ing things?
     Anyhow, after landing at Snoopy's Nose, we stood around for about fifteen minutes killing time while the brass made up their minds about where we were supposed to go if we were where we thought we were and which direction where we were going might be (that's supposed to sound something like Pooh Bear and Christopher Robin discussing their imminent expedition in the Hundred Acre Wood - a place I'd much rather have been than Snoopy's Nose.  Don't know if that's the first use of A.A. Milne in a remembrance of Vietnam but I have my hopes).
     So there we stood, me, Woolwine, Shorty, Constatino and Smiley, kickin' dirt and passin' time.  Shorty, our point man, wandered off looking for treasure and returned a minute later with a smile on his face brought on by the six-foot long stick in his hand.  Just the right size for a five-foot, four-inch man.  His plan was to use it to sweep the area ahead of him as he stepped out at his usual breakneck speed.  Bravo Six, our Company Commander, loved Shorty 'cause he covered ground like no other point man.  Fearless.  That's why First Platoon always walked point when Bravo Company was out and about.  And why Bravo Company set the pace on a battalion operation.  All the brass loved Shorty.  Now, armed with his staff, we feared he might pick up the pace even more.
     As for the rest of us paddy-pounders, we liked Shorty 'cause he was a good man, fun to be with.  And never blamed him for always putting us in more than our share of jeopardy 'cause he was so good at what he did, after all, he was just being Shorty.
     We blamed the higher ups.  Why not?  They called the shots.  Wrong call?  Some of us died.  Didn't mean nothin'.  But you see, the entire mess of Vietnam was a learning curve, for them and for us.  They didn't really know what they were doing till they had a little experience under their belts.  We were the lab rats, they were the guys in the white coats (but not necessarily white hats).  But we did nothing more than grumble about it, saddle up and set off at a trot behind Shorty before he was out of sight.
     The story in Bravo Company had Snoopy's Nose as a supply depot for the Viet Cong.  I've pulled up maps of the Ho Chi Minh Trail coming down from North Vietnam and none showed it going farther south than Saigon.  We figured it went all the way to the Delta with Snoopy's Nose being one of the end points.  But that was pure guess on our part, even though it made sense.  Whether or not it was a supply cache was also a guess.  About the only supplies we ever found were the shell casings left from the bullets sent to us at high speed by unseen riflemen (they were always unseen).
     Into the woods we went in order of Shorty, Woolwine, Smiley, Constatino (squad leader), me, the M-79 man, and six-dozen unseen others.  This was unused land, maybe abandoned.  We passed beside and through wooded areas and untended rice paddies that looked like they hadn't seen a water buffalo since Ho Chi Minh was a teenybopper.  All was quiet save the thump of boots, rustle of uniforms, and plastic and metal clank of equipment.  No more than fifteen minutes later, while walking atop a major dike, we took fire from the woods to our right.
     We must have looked like the Radio City Rockettes when we hit the ground in precise, instant unison.  Not at all what we were taught back in AIT.  Proper military etiquette would have had us turn toward the rifle fire and assault.  The reasoning behind that tactic said we'd take less casualties and win more medals.  On the other hand, hitting the ground seemed to work just fine.  No one was shot.  Of course, after the initial burst of fire, the woods once again grew quiet, like no one had been there.  Shot at by ghosts.
     We laid there for a while as the command group, off to our rear somewhere, talked things over.  Their assessment was we'd been fired upon and since the shooting had stopped and didn't look like it would start up again, we should move on.  Made me want to sing the virtues of West Point or the Officer's Candidate School at Fort Benning.  Secretly I was hoping it was the former 'cause they had a jackass - actually it's a mule but jackass seems so much more appropriate -  as their school mascot.
     Up again and following Shorty like a train with the cars each ten meters apart.  Finally, the woods opened to our left and were replaced by scruffy, bare, concrete-hard, rice paddies.  Shorty dropped off the booby trap dangerous dike and shot straight down the middle of the paddies.
     I recall it being the third paddy, no more than the fourth, when we stumbled upon another burst of fire from several points, front and right.  Shorty took an AK-47 round through his forehead.  He was dead before he hit the ground.  Guess it didn't matter how long his staff was.  The man behind me carrying the M-79 was shot through the shoulder and chest.  Not dead but unconscious.  Don't remember his name but he's not listed as dying on the roster of Bravo Company's KIAs from that day, so, long may he live.
     Woolwine, Smiley and Constatino, up ahead of me, were down in a few straws of either last year's rice or whatever Mother Nature had planted since the area had been abandoned.  I was layed out on a bare patch of what might have well have been a lumpy parking lot and facing the tree line that had been to our right.  There wasn't shit but atmosphere between me and the two VC who seemed to want to silence my radio.  That it would be easier, since I was bigger and easier to hit, to put me out of commission than the radio, seemed to be fine with them.
     All I knew for sure was there was no cover fire from anybody to my rear (or right seeing as how I was facing the wood line).  It sure seemed to be okay with them if Woolwine, Smiley, Constatino or I were shot just so long as they weren't exposed.  Can't say I'd have done any differently.  Remember rule number one, get home in one piece.  Doesn't matter how many medals are on your chest if you're dead.
     For five minutes, maybe ten, maybe an hour, time came to a halt on the paddy floor.  Ain't a drug in the world that can give you a surreal feeling like a couple of men drawing a bead on your head with a decent chance of putting an end to your life.  The man slightly to my right, almost straight ahead, no more than twenty-five meters away and probably in a paddy-wall spider hole, was a decent shot.  Each one of his bursts was a tad closer to my sweating carcass than the last.
     The man farther to my right seemed to be up in a tree.  Both positions were and are guesses.  Never saw either.  No motion, no rifle flashes, no faces, not shit.  At least the tree man didn't seem to be able to zero in on me.
     Between bursts I created cover.  The idea of burrowing into the paddy floor was appealing but would have been time consuming and would also horribly dirty my nails.  That left the PRC25.  Actually, getting it off my back was a necessity.  Each time I raised my head to return fire, the frame pack and radio jammed my helmet forward over my eyes.  Even if I could've seen the men firing at me I couldn't have seen them. Honestly, I have no idea how I wormed the pack and radio off my back but I did.  And slid it around front of me for a tiny bit of protection, communication be damned.  Rule number one trumped them all.
     The M-16 was not a dependable weapon.  Or so we were told.  And there were enough of them in Bravo Company that jammed when fired to make me a believer.  Also, the story was that the barrel raised when fired on automatic.  Put it on full rock n' roll and you'd be winging monkeys in the treetops. Since those days I've read the barrel rise was not true.  But back there on the paddy floor I went with rumor, clicked my rifle on semi-automatic and returned fire.  Memory tells me I was the only one to do so.
     I chose the closest man, the one who seemed to be firing from a spider hole, made my best guess as to where he might be, snapped off three rounds, and turtled back behind the radio.  Immediately, a classic hale of bullets came to visit.  Seemed he could see me just fine.  All cracked past my right ear.  One slapped my boot heel. Another tore through my shirt sleeve and burned the meat of my upper arm as it passed through.  Shit!  I'd never been shot before and didn't know what it would feel like.  That I felt nothing after a few seconds didn't tell me a thing.  Maybe it was nothing, maybe my arm was in shock.  I didn't know.
     When the burst stopped, my head popped up and I cracked off three more toward the front.  Turtled back behind my buddy the radio, and a second return burst came flying by.  I didn't like this game one bit.  My rifle fire was at random in a general direction.  His return fire all seemed to be within inches of my body.  Sooner or later he was gonna get lucky.  So I tried his buddy up in the tree.  Same result.  Three exploratory rounds from me.  The same or more returned and way too damned close to my precious bodily fluids.
     There was a lot going on in my head at the moment.  Floating at the top and beating on the inside of my skull was wanting to get the hell out of there but had no idea how that could come about.  Oddly enough, the thought of death never entered my thoughts.  Maybe that was a good thing.  All I knew for sure was I had a serious problem that wasn't going away.  Then logic kicked in.  It seemed every time I fired at the VC, they fired back.  If I didn't shoot, they didn't shoot.  I stopped shooting.  So did they.  Maybe they figured I wasn't worth the effort anymore.  Being worthless was alright with me.
     After what seemed like hours but was minutes, the four of us out in the open still had no cover fire from the M-60 man hiding behind the dike to our rear.  Since he refused to get his machine gun up and running I won't mention Ward by name and embarrass him unduly.  Oops, guess I let Joe's name slip out.  Oh well, doesn't much matter 'cause the last time we saw him he was heading over the hill as an AWOL and for all I know he's still in Vietnam.
     Eventually a call came over the radio from Bravo Six wondering what was going on up front.  Seemed he needed to know if we'd like coffee and scones sent forward in case we wanted to call time out for a ten minute break from the war.  Immediately, Bravo One-Two answered.  Now I was really confused.  In my fevered little mind Bill Constatino was our acting squad leader, and as such, was Bravo One-Two.  And he was nowhere near a radio 'cause the radio was right in front of me.  That it might be our other Sergeant who alternated with Constatino, never entered my head.
     Back in AIT radio training we were told that the North Vietnamese sometimes got on our frequencies to send out conflicting information to confuse us good guys.  That the voice on the radio spoke perfect English with an East Coast accent should have tipped me off that the caller was legitimate.  But no, I quickly cut the Sergeant off and ran the show up front.  Sounds impressive but all I did was give the names of the KIA and the WIA.  And request cover fire to get our asses out of there.
     Meanwhile, back at the rice paddy dike, our brand new, first day in the field with Bravo Company, Platoon Leader, Lieutenant Olson, decided it was time to bring in some artillery.  To do that he had to shoot an azimuth with his compass.  To shoot an azimuth he had to get up on his knees so he could see the approximate location of the VCs.  Lt. Olson was about six foot seven.  When he raised himself to his knees he was about the height of an average Vietnamese standing tall.  Like Shorty, he was dead before he hit the ground.
     Finally, the Sergeant I'd cut off on the radio managed to pry the M-60 machine gun out of Ward's hands and lay down some cover fire.  This time there was no return fire.  Most likely the VC had skedaddled and those of us caught in the ambush could have gotten up, dusted ourselves off and strolled out of there.  But we didn't know that and we didn't get up.  Maybe if we'd have politely called out and asked, the boys in the black pants would have let us know they were done playing for the day.  But we didn't.
     Finally a command decision was made to bring the remainder of first Platoon forward to the protecting dike where they could lay down a withering wall of fire, allow the mobile four of us to flee to safety and a couple of volunteers to drag the M-79 man out of there.  Sounds easy doesn't it?  Unless of course all ten of them were firing directly in your direction.  To dodge was to die.  Our Tiger Scout Thim came as close to shooting me in the head as had the VC in the spider hole.  I distinctly recall my frame pack tearing at my back as I ran to cover.  How it was returned to my back is as lost in my memory as how I got it off.
     By now the VCs who shot at us were in the next county.  No doubt about that.  But the 105s back at Moore needed target practice so our Forward Observer thought it might be fun to call in an artillery barrage.  Somehow it seemed both fitting and a summation of our efforts in Vietnam, at least as far as I saw in the Delta.  Let's blast the shit out of some people who ain't there any more.  Never having seen or heard a barrage, I was both excited and feared for my life.  I mean, just how good was our FO with a compass?  And at judging distance.  And how accurate was our artillery?  A half degree here and a couple of yards there and we were gruntburgers.
     First off was a marking round.  That was a best guess with the hope that it would be a little long, as opposed to a little short.  And it was a little long.  Landed about a hundred yards away and right on line.  Normally an FO would do a couple of bracketing rounds, long-short-long-short, till they were dead on target.  Kind of like Goldilocks looking for the right chair.  Not possible in our case.  A short round would have landed on top of us.  So he made his best guess on how far to back off from the marking round and still not kill us all.  Then called in a fire for effect, all of our howitzers at once.
     At the same time we were laying as low as we could go.  Kissing the earth, hands over heads, with a couple of "Oh me, oh my's" thrown in for effect.  All six rounds hit hard and right on target, twenty-five meters to our front.  Had anyone been under them they'd have shit themselves to death out of fear.  Instead, a lot of clay was moved, a few branches severed and a wall of shrapnel came whizzing by our buried heads.                                            
     To top it off, add a cherry and whipped cream to our demolition dessert, a navy jet was called in.  Their specialty was napalm.  The idea was to make anything or anyone in the wrong place into a 'crispy critter.'  Crispy Critters was a breakfast cereal back in the States favored by children of all ages who were into massive doses of sugar and food dye.  In the Nam it pretty accurately described people who were killed by massive doses of flaming, jellied gasoline.  Not much of a true tactical weapon but it sure did kill people in a painful way.
     Our napalm came in over the tree tops right behind the jet that dropped it.  Didn't look much like a bomb.  More like a randomly tumbling barrel as it passed by a hundred feet up.  Strangely enough the jet dropped it nowhere near where the VC had been.  Hit with a whump! followed by a rising black cloud.
     It was one weird battle.  As far as I could tell I was the only one who actually fired in the general direction of the enemy while they were there.  And I sure as hell couldn't see them.  And the truth be known, the only reason I was shooting at them was to get them to stop shooting at me.  Personally speaking, I didn't care if we won the firefight, I just didn't want to die.  And that's why when they stopped shooting, so did I.  The rest of the bullets, bombs, and artillery was nothing more than ignorance.
     We pulled back a couple of paddies and took a break.  It was there that Bravo Six came up, sat beside me and asked how I was doing.  To that point I hadn't as yet checked out my wound.  I rolled up my sleeve and immediately decided I'd live.  Beside the holes in my sleeve there was an inch long crease in the meat of my shoulder.  Any blood that may have flowed was long gone, washed clean by my sweat.  And lordy did I sweat out there in the paddy.  Soaked through my fatigues.
     Bravo Six asked if I wanted a Purple heart.  The temptation to say yes was strong but then I thought of Shorty and Lieutenant Olson.  A moment's pause and I said no.
     The Captain said he was gonna put himself in for one. "While the fight was going on I puckered so hard my asshole bled." 
     Under the circumstances both comments were the right things to say.  Many times I've thought I should have said yes to Bravo Six.  Having a Purple Heart would have been cool.  Took a bullet for my country.  War dog-hero-son-of-a-bitch.  Who'd ever know the wound didn't truly justify one?  Except me. Glad I said no.
     A couple of minutes later Woolwine got up and said he was gonna go get Shorty.  Oh yeah Shorty, we almost forgot about him.  His cold body was still lying where it had fallen.  About twenty seconds after Woolwine left, guilt got the better of me and I trailed after.  For sure the VCs were long gone but in my mind there gnawed a thought that one of them might be up a nearby tree with a bead drawn on the body waiting for the fool who came out to get it.  Bobby was willing to take the chance.  Guessed I'd better give him a hand.
     As confident as I was no VC remained at the ambush site I still had my doubts.  Even back then I knew I could be wrong about most anything.  Let's say I didn't exactly run to catch up with Bobby.  By the time we met he'd already hoisted Shorty and was on his way back.  We walked together for a few yards then it was my turn.
     Holy crap!  How could a hundred and twenty pound man weigh so much?  Guess that's what's meant by dead weight.  Two hundred yards and I'd had it but by then, the Farmer had come out and took Shorty from me.  Cold, soft, unresponsive, with a hint of fish smell, that's what death is like.
     Bobby Woolwine received the Silver Star for going back for Shorty.  When battles were written up in Vietnam, large or small, the story had to reflect our loss of life.  Since the reported kill ratio in Vietnam was almost always nine to one in our favor, our battle story must have been written up as a humdinger.  And it needed a hero.  Why not Woolwine?  He was the only one with the wherewithal to remember and head back for Shorty.  No matter the circumstances it was a gutsy move.
     We spent the night at Snoopy's Nose.  Fifty percent alert.  Nothing happened.
     That's the way I recall it.  May not be perfectly accurate but it's close.  Who knows why I wasn't killed lying out on the bare rice paddy floor?  Might have had a lot to do with us fighting farmers without any formal training.  None of us wanted to be where we were, doing what we were doing.  They just wanted us to go away.  We just wanted to survive and go home.  Seemed like we could have worked something out that woulda made both of us happy.
     On that day I came to realize my mortality.  Going to the field had a new edge to it.  The possibility of dying grew from a vague possibility to a gut feeling.  I changed that day from a kid growing up in near ideal circumstances back in the Free World to one who knew that life was a gift to be thankful for every day of my life.  What lies around the next corner is always a mystery, nothing is certain and worrying about it changes nothing.
     In Memorium:  PFC Ismael 'Shorty' Solis and Lt. John Olson