Battlefield Commission: Iii Marine Amphibious Force

By Curt Munson

Idealistic Marine Charlie McDowell represents the third generation of his family to serve his country in time of war. But after two years in combat, Charlie has a battlefield commission and wound so serious it threatens to waylay his military career. Hes forced to return home to conquer the rehabilitation that stands in the way of his return to active duty.

While there, he also plans to finish his education and reconcile with the girl he loves. Before any of that can happen, though, Charlie is rocked by trauma-related depression, nightmares, and hallucinations that threaten to turn him into an emotional as well as physical cripple. He realizes he must learn to deal with the horror of what he has seen and done overseas.

Charlies fight to recover also demands he survive his new commanding officera bitter man with an old score to settle who seems determined to drive Charlie from the service. From the battlefield, to the bedroom, to the halls of academia, Charlie McDowell is a man of his time and so much more, but can he conquer his own demons to become the hero of his aspirations?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504971812

Curt Munson

Retired Marine Curt Munson has authored two previous novels, Tales of the Wide A Wake Cafe an Oklahoma Book Awards finalist, and Battlefield Commission: Third Marine Amphibious Force. He is married, the father of two sons, and has three grandchildren.

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2016 Curt Munson. All rights reserved.

Cover Photo by Mike Krall, USMC

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/10/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-7180-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-7179-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-7181-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015921440

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1 The Arizona

Chapter 2 Getting to Mike Company

Chapter 3 Lost

Chapter 4 Neutralizing Phuoc Luc

Chapter 5 Moving On

Chapter 6 Third Force

Chapter 7 First Force

Chapter 8 Back to the Quesons

Chapter 9 Kicked Upstairs

Chapter 10 The Land of the Big PX

Chapter 11 Returning to Vietnam

Chapter 12 VMO – 2

Chapter 13 Yokosuka

Chapter 14 The University of Oklahoma

Chapter 15 Jennifer

Chapter 16 Colonel Malin Murphy

Chapter 17 Changes Afoot

Chapter 18 Ground Truth

Chapter 19 Richie

Chapter 20 Evelyn

Chapter 21 Jennifer

Chapter 22 Spring 1972

Chapter 23 Maggie

Chapter 24 Maggie Redux

Acknowledgements

Dedication

To my Grandchildren, Eli, Cai, and Emory,

And to every Marine living and dead who has upheld the motto, Semper Fidelis

And to those warriors of any branch and any country who have paid the price of their service in the years that followed their wars. God bless you and those who have stood with you.

And to the Veterans Administration, late to the party, but finally aboard - go forward from here.

Foreword

America’s ten years of increasingly large-scale combat operations in Vietnam involved more than 2.7 million US service members. Of that number, approximately 1.1 million were actually involved in armed combat with the enemy. None of those 2.7 million soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines existed in a safe environment in which the tentacles of the North Vietnamese Army or the indigenous Viet Cong could not reach.

Unconventional warfare, the term coined to describe the sort of war being waged in Vietnam, involved fighting an enemy who recognized he would have little chance in a stand-up fight with heavily armed and supported US troops. In response to that, his tactics involved local guerrillas, stealth, booby traps, night operations, sappers, and other methods not previously encountered by American troops as well as occasional fights with well-equipped soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). US service members spent their years at war in a twilight of confusion, fear, anxiety, and worry about what would happen next.

In addition to the hazards posed by the enemy, Vietnam veterans were exposed to experimental drugs designed to protect them from tropical diseases, but which all too often carried dangerous side effects, and chemical agents like Agent Orange, a defoliant whose dangerous capabilities were known to exist, but ignored by the manufacturers and those in government aware of its dangers.

When those warriors returned to the United States after what was typically a 12 or 13 month assignment, they were met with misunderstanding, neglect, and all too often, outright hostility. In addition, they carried within themselves the seeds of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome not even named until 1981, six years after the end of US involvement in the war. In the interim, the problems encountered by our veterans were ignored or denied by the US government, the Veteran’s Administration, and their own branches of the service.

By the early 1970s, veterans had begun combating the impact of a government that was leaving them to their own devices to recover from wounds not always visible, but crippling none the less. They solicited elected leaders, testified before Congress, and demonstrated in the streets. Virtually none of these steps moved their targets, the government and the VA to treat their problems seriously.

Following more recent wars, the incidence of veteran suicides has become a national scandal that has finally motivated the services to treat the problems of PTSD seriously, and the Congress to finally fund the VA with the resources they need to provide counseling and medical help to our vets. What is under-reported in the suicide scandal is that among the twenty suicides per day that are reported among veterans is that the overwhelming majority of those suicides are committed by Vietnam Veterans - not those of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have received almost all of the attention. Moreover, veterans have been ending their own lives at the rate of twenty per day for over forty years, with the majority always coming from Vietnam Vets.

In the wake of the shattering silence of the government following their homecoming, and in recognition that something had to be done, Vietnam veterans began supporting one another in small group settings without national connection or government support. For many vets, these unofficial support groups were the connection that quite literally saved their lives.

Battlefield Commission: III Marine Amphibious Force tells of one such veteran. It is the story of his time in combat as well as following his return to the world, his home in Oklahoma. Charlie McDowell is unapologetic about his part in the war. In fact, he is proud of it, as he is proud of the Marine Corps. That pride is not a bulwark from the malaise that cripples him at times following his return to the states. His dealings with that trauma are a story of progress, not victory. Like so many others, his struggle doesn’t end, he simply soldiers on. If there is a triumph, it lies only in his growing ability to maintain an even strain.

Curt Munson

Edmond, Ok. 2015

Preface

While I was watching Gunnery Sergeant Cauthon, Co. M, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines company gunny, he tripped what we later guessed was a forty pound box mine, quite literally, a box packed with approximately forty pounds of Composition B or TNT. One moment the gunny was just walking along and an instant later he disappeared in a pink mist. We never found so much as one of his dog tags. If there is any sort of good news in that, you could say he never had a chance to be scared, or even hurt. He just was one moment and wasn’t the next.

Co. M, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines

First Marine Division (Rein)

After Action Report dtd. 12 June 1969

Excerpt from eyewitness testimony

I

Charlie McDowell

I’m a bastard.

Bastard is one of those words like fuck that has come to mean a good many things, but it has a legal definition as well. A legal bastard is one who was born out of wedlock. Synonyms include: adulterine, bantling, nothus, nullius filius, and my personal favorite, spurious issue. That’s the kind of bastard I am. Legal.

I was born in Beirut, Lebanon to a beautiful young secretary at the American embassy named Amina Ayoub. Her lover was the military attaché, a young army major who happened to be married.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century when a third of all babies and a good many celebrity infants are born out of wedlock, the stigma of illegitimacy is virtually gone. In the west. But I was born on June 5, 1950. My mother was Lebanese, and although her family was Christian, they were not so far removed from their Islamic culture that an honor killing would have been out of the question. My birth mother could have been shamed, banished, even killed and many of the people in her country would have considered it all justified. Actually, the only shaming occurred when the American Charge de’ Affairs summarily fired her when she began to show.

Fortunately, my grandfather was not one of those who thought his daughter had not suffered enough. He brought Amina home after she lost her job, paid for our pre-natal care and my birth, and when the time came, he recognized me as his grandson. But with no job, no husband, and no prospects, and in the hope that she would someday get beyond all of this, he convinced her that for the good of both of us, I had to be put up for adoption.

Amina knew how unlikely an adoption was going to be. In the event, I would be going to an orphanage as soon as possible after I was born. After a lot of crying, she finally agreed.

Following the civil war that began in 1975, most westerners have come to think of Lebanon as a war torn country as though it has always been that way. In 1950 it was the jewel of the entire North African region. Lebanon was the most westernized of all Arab countries, and Beirut was a popular tourist destination called the Paris of the Middle East. Despite all of that, an orphanage for a mixed race bastard child from a Christian background would be no bed of roses for me, and the prospects for my survival were not good. The likelihood of me being adopted by an Arab family would have been every bit as poor as my chances with a Western family. For one thing, although I looked middle-eastern to western eyes, I looked western to those of my mother’s culture, partly because as my birth mother told me when I got to know her later in my life, I had eyes as blue as a Caribbean lagoon. The only Caribbean lagoon my mother had ever seen was in the pages of National Geographic, but others, mostly girls, have told me much the same thing. Further complicating my looks was the fact that despite my dark complexion, I am the spitting image of my old man.

Major Ian McDowell, US Army Corps of Engineers, a Scot so dour he could have been created by a Victorian novelist, was a thrice-wounded bona-fide hero of WWII, the most decorated combat engineer to survive the war. Upon receiving his orders to the Lebanese capital, he’d left early to arrange for housing, expecting Helen, his wife of four years, and their baby son, Brian, to follow in a few weeks.

While Helen McDowell was waiting, she was surprised to discover that she was pregnant, a discovery followed by violent morning sickness and some bloody spotting. Her parents, a Stanton, Oklahoma farm couple with a total of eight years of formal education between them convinced their college educated daughter she could not risk having a baby in a furrin’ country. To placate them, and a little worried that they might be right, she finally agreed, notifying her husband by cablegram. He replied via the same medium with a reluctant acquiescence. She waited out her pregnancy in Muskogee, Oklahoma, growing larger and sicker with each passing month.

The pregnancy ended early with a complicated breech birth in which both mother and child almost died. Despite the alleged advantages of western medicine, Helen’s baby daughter was born sickly and weak and the doctors performed an emergency hysterectomy to save Helen’s life. Following a two-month convalescence and while she was once again preparing to depart for Lebanon, the baby contracted whooping cough and died on the first of May.

Because the baby came early, my father had not returned to the States for his wife’s confinement. They mutually agreed that rather than have Ian travel to the states to no good effect, he should come when Helen was ready to move herself and her two children to Beirut and accompany them back. He was also absent for the medical crises and his daughter’s death because they both occurred over such a short divide that she was sick and then dead before he even knew about it. Eager to be away from the site of so much heartache, Helen begged her husband to stay where he was, and she would join him as soon as possible. She bore her loss alone, dividing her attention between her desolation and her remaining child, Brian, now almost two years old. After nearly a month of grieving for the child she’d lost and the others that would never be conceived, and frankly, sick and tired of hearing her mother describe the worst event of her life as the will of a bountiful and merciful God, Helen determined it was time to bring her family back together. She left Oklahoma to rejoin her husband. They’d been apart for over a year.

II

Helen and Brian arrived in Beirut on May 28, 1950. Dad, determined to resume his married life, had found a beautiful apartment overlooking St. George Bay and the Port of Beirut, complete with a small staff that included a housekeeper and cook.

Nobody bears their guilt with less skill than a Scot, and when, less than a week later, my mother went into labor he left his wife and son alone and went to be with Amina. I was born shortly after midnight on June 5th. Later that same day, Dad told Helen everything.

In one of our rare frank discussions, on the night before Helen’s funeral fifty-one years after I was born; Dad related to me that he’d expected her to pack up and be on the next plane to Reno, Nevada and a quickie divorce.

Instead, her first words to him were, I want to see him. In fact, I want to see them both, the baby and the mother.

Fearful of what she might do, my father flatly forbad it. He learned later not to flatly proscribe anything regarding his wife, but at that point, he didn’t really know her that well.

During the hospital’s visiting hours the very next day, Helen O’Hara McDowell left Brian with the housekeeper and took a taxi to the Hotel-Dieu de France Hospital on Alfred Naccache Boulevard, her first trip on her own since she’d been in the country.

Helen’s first stop was the plate glass window of the nursery. One quick scan of the babies told her which one was her husband’s. She then went in search of Amina. My poor mother had no idea who the glamorously dressed American woman was who entered the ward and walked directly to her bed until she introduced herself.

I’m Helen McDowell, she said, I believe you know my husband.

Amina panicked and immediately began to cry. Please do not hurt my baby, she pleaded.

Helen sat down on the edge of the bed and took Amina’s hand before she said, My dear, young, and beautiful Amina. Is it any wonder that a healthy man would fall in love with you? It would be easier to blame a tree for growing leaves in the spring. As to harming your baby, I could never. Perhaps we adults could all have done better, but as near as I can see; so far, he’s been perfect.

Mother took a moment to make sure her English was up to what had just been said. This woman showed not even a trace of anger. What do you want? Why are you here? Amina asked in a quavering voice.

I am here, Helen said, speaking distinctly, to beg you for my husband’s son.

In less time than it takes to tell the story the two women were crying in one another’s arms, ruining Helen’s carefully applied make-up and to the enormous chagrin of my father, forging a kinship that in time turned into one of the most important friendships in either of their lives – one that was nourished by visits, correspondence and a common interest in me over the ensuing five decades and lasted until my American mother’s death.

I’ve told that story very rarely over the years. Telling it has always generated one of two results. For those who don’t know my American mother: incredulity. For those who have known her, their response is always, That sounds just like Helen.

I was already an American. Amina had put my father’s name on the birth certificate, and Dad had been there when I was born and named me Charles Allen McDowell, which would have gone over great in the Beirut orphanage. My US citizenship was assured. I was also Lebanese. When Amina and I were released from the hospital, I went home with Helen and she was mother to me for the rest of her life. Until I figured out what had happened on my own when I was about six, I never had an inkling except that Brian and I were of such different shades. If there was a difference between the love my mother had for Brian and the love she had for me, I never saw it. I’m certain there must have been many who wondered at this Mediterranean hued McDowell and the older one who looked as though he’d just been sent over from the cast of Brigadoon, but they never got an explanation from Mom. She simply introduced us as her children and left it at that.

III

When I was eight years old and our family was stationed in Germany, I told my parents that I wanted to know my other mother. Following an exchange of letters and cablegrams, Amina came to Mannheim to escort me back to her home. I spent the three summer months of 1959 in Beirut at the home of my grandparents, Georges and Soha Ayoub. On the day I arrived the old man brought me to his knee, pointed to himself and said, Jaddi or grandfather. Jaddi was a retired high school principal, and he spoke excellent English, but never to me. He was determined that I had to learn Arabic and would only address me in and respond to his native tongue. You already know English, he said to me, I cannot give you that. I can give you our family’s tongue, and I will.

The only exception was French. He would converse with me in that language since, according to him, It is the language of diplomacy. That was no help. I’d learned pan and fromage on the way to Beirut and once I’d said bread and cheese, my Gallic vocabulary was exhausted.

I can attest to the efficacy of total immersion, because by the time I went home that first summer I was getting along pretty well in the language of my ancestors. For seven years, until my grandfather died, I spent most of every summer in Lebanon. I learned to speak, read, write, think and even dream in Arabic. Thanks to my grandfather, my French is pretty good as well, although my mother, Amina, always complained that I speak it with a Dixie accent.

I do not have a Dixie accent, neither in English nor French.

IV

Dad retired from the army in January 1963. Mom’s parents, Maeve and Sterling O’Hara had been farming 172 acres outside Stanton, Oklahoma since 1919 when Granddad got back from France. A farm of less than 400 acres in Oklahoma that doesn’t have oil or gas wells on it is also known as starvation acres and nobody just farms a place of that size. Granddad was also a house painter and by 1963 had finally put enough by to retire – at least from painting, and he wanted his son-in-law to take over that business. We moved to Stanton, Oklahoma, where mother had grown up. A town of approximately 8,000 souls with a small state college that added about 5,000 more, Stanton was not where mother wanted to wind up, but as she always did, she accepted it and ultimately treated the decision with the same enthusiasm she’d have had if it had been her idea.

Over the next several years, Dad’s business mirrored the growth of Stanton that almost doubled in size, carrying him from being a house painter where he did everything himself, to a painting contractor with over a dozen people working for him. Somewhat ahead of his time, Dad began hiring women painters while I was still in high school. In time, customers began requesting the female staff members due to their reputation for doing a great job and keeping the site clean (artful marketing since Dad fired painters that didn’t do those two things – men or women). About the time I was leaving home, and it was too late to do me any good, Dad finally started making some money for the first time in his life.

I didn’t really know my grandparents when we moved to Stanton. Actually, since they were mother’s parents, they weren’t my grandparents at all, a fact that grandma chose to emphasize. Most family visits between the folks and them had occurred in the summer time when I was in Lebanon, so they didn’t know me either.

My grandfather was a crafty old Great War veteran with a limitless repertoire of almost off color jokes. For a couple of years he continued to paint when Dad had more than he could say grace over and I would frequently go with him as his helper. Neither of us wanted to be house painters and he worked less and less as Dad found others who were reliable. What Granddad wanted to do was farm, and he was good at it! I loved being out there with him. He could castrate a bull, slaughter a hog, and set fence posts in a line so straight they looked like an artist’s rendering. He could sit in the bleachers at the sale barn and within a second of an animal entering the ring, know if it was worth buying or not, and if it wasn’t, what was wrong with it. Sterling also played the violin, Blue Grass mostly, and he taught me to accompany him on the piano. The first time we played Bringing Mary Home together we were best buddies.

My grandmother loved her children and her grandchildren - period. Like some who have lived their lives in the isolation of farms or desert islands, she had an abiding fear and suspicion of outsiders that bordered on hostility. In public, she loudly professed a Christian love for all of God’s children, despite the dearth of evidence. The closest non-blood person to her, my grandfather, lived in a limbo of disapproval because of tobacco, an occasional beer or glass of wine, and the absence of financial success. Virtually everyone else was tolerated as an unwelcome intruder or derided as an outright enemy. She spent years coldly furious with my father, but if she hated him for his indiscretion with Amina, it was scarcely worse than her antipathy for her daughters-in-law who’d done little to engender it. My aunts bonded over Grandma’s enmity and gratefully included my father into their circle because of his insouciance in the face of Granny’s bile. In time, she allowed a grudging acceptance of her three son’s wives; a watershed always preceded by show trials of forgiveness during which she would enumerate their failings in great detail and a certain amount of fiction.

If Grandma’s love could scarcely cross the blood-line, it never came within a hundred miles of the color-line. For all of her self-congratulatory love of her family, I was neither her son nor her grandson – nor, was I, as she was perpetually ready to point out, white.

As a Hard Rock Baptist, she believed that the sins of the father would be visited on the offspring to the seventh generation – (the bible says third and fourth generation, but what the hell) and that I was a descendant of Ham and then she’d whisper and an A-rab bastard who shouldn’t be around my other grandchildren. She always whispered bastard like old people say cancer. Later I learned that they do that so the devil can’t hear them and afflict them with whatever condition they’re talking about. Granny may have been safe from becoming a bastard as I’m sure the devil would never have listened to her, but if I wasn’t actually in the room, she assumed I couldn’t hear her either.

Ironically, after years of staying with her daughter despite the stony silences he’d always endured from his mother-in-law, Maeve finally forgave my father, a favor about which he could have given a shit less.

But, she never forgave me.

Mom had a solution. She told Grandma that until she could act like a real Christian instead of a crazy person, she would no longer be welcome in our home and that none of us were ever going to enter Grandma’s.

After twenty years of her daughter being all over the world, Maeve couldn’t bear the estrangement she’d brought about herself. She caved – sort of. They say that, If you change my mind against my will, I’m of the same opinion still. That was Granny, I’m afraid. Because she was fearful of losing her prodigal daughter (I’m not making this up) she did her best with me, and if it was something mechanical like baking a cake for my birthday, or a family dinner with my favorite foods before I left for the summer, she was all over it, but when it came to accepting me, she was the worst actress in the history of faking it. I called her Granny or Grandma, just like my brother and sixteen cousins, but until she died, we circled one another like punch-drunk fighters. In a family in which love was at the center of everything, the L word never escaped her lips where I was concerned.

I discovered pretty early on that I could thoroughly creep her out by saying I love you, Grandma, and then hugging her. I should have gotten an Oscar, because I totally owned that little farce. I think she’d have preferred pulling a rattlesnake out of her garden to having my arms around her. It took a while, but when my mother finally noticed what I was doing with Grandma, she thought it was hilarious.

V

On February 9, 1964 my family gathered around our only TV and watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. I was 13. As I watched I had this epiphany that everything was going to be different from then on. While they performed, images whizzed through my mind that were somewhat disconnected but highly significant. John Kennedy, murdered just a few months earlier, had been the coolest guy on planet earth. Now that mantle was being donned by four guys from England and nobody from JFK’s generation would ever be thought to be cool by anyone from my generation again. I also flashed John Jr. saluting the flag draped caisson, an image that led me to soldiers with rifles slogging through the rice paddies. This called to mind a stylized image of the murder of President Diem in Vietnam and then more soldiers being carried to helicopters on stretchers. I was being swept along on an emotional roller coaster powered by the songs the Beatles were performing. In my mind, images of my debt to all three of my parents, mixed with an almost erotic pleasure at the music, and suddenly, I was crying. In my ardently charged state, it seemed like everything that had ever happened in my life had relentlessly led to this indelible music set. I can do no better to explain it than that, except to say, it was the first time I’d ever been moved emotionally by something artistic. I sat there with tears streaming down my face; my lower lip quivering. Brian looked at me with incredulity and laughed his ass off. I didn’t care. I’d been taking piano lessons since I was five. I practiced endlessly because it was what my mother wanted, but before that night I lacked the psychic connection with music that I’ve had ever since. I finally got it. I got it as thoroughly as I could see with just one glance that my parents had failed to get it. It was in their expressions as their eyes went from me with my tears to those four guys on TV who seemed to them to be screeching and shaking unsanitary hair. The generation gap had arrived at the McDowell’s house.

Whether it was for fear of appearing ungrateful, or because my father granted so few of them, I had always been reluctant to plague my parents with wants. After that night, I badgered my mother endlessly until she bought me a guitar. It was a used acoustic and cost $5. I played it until my fingers bled, until holding a pencil in class or putting my ragged fingertips on the piano keys was torture for me – and then I played it some more. I figure I’ve had maybe 50 guitars in my life, I’ve bought them, I’ve sold them, I’ve traded them, and on one memorable occasion apparently thinking I was Pete Townshend of The Who, I smashed one. But, I still have that first one.

VI

My Jaddi died in 1966, shortly after I returned from my summer trip to Lebanon. We didn’t have the money for me to go back for the funeral, and the following spring, Amina came to the U.S. for a visit. I had my driver’s license and a car by then, so she and I took a road trip following the surviving portions of Route 66 for over six hundred miles during Spring break rather than have Dad spend a week in the same house with the mothers of both of his children. After she went home, I did not see Amina again for over a decade. To maintain my language skills, I wrote to her in Arabic once a week, a practice I still maintain, although email and Skype feature more prominently in our correspondence today.

The summer after my junior year in high school, I was playing in a pretty successful band, fronted by my best friend, Randy Jakes. We were busy every weekend, following the wheat harvest, a series of good paying gigs in small towns and almost cities from Blackwell, Oklahoma to Minot, North Dakota, with stops in Kansas, Nebraska and across the Dakotas - always travelling farther and farther north every weekend to play in clubs and halls that catered to the itinerant wheat harvest workers as well as the locals. Although I would have preferred to stay on the road between gigs, just drinking beer and going steady with whatever girl I’d met that Friday night, my mother insisted I come home every week as a condition of her approval of me going at all.

It meant, that every Sunday, Randy and I, sometimes accompanied by other band members and sometimes not, would drive back to Stanton intending to spend the next few days getting ready for the following weekend or helping out other local bands that might be missing one of the instruments we played. When we weren’t playing for money, we were jamming with bands that were – usually after hours. That meant I was arriving home early in the morning and then wanting to sleep all day while my parents and brother, home from the University for part of the summer, were at work.

Originally, Mom had wanted me to get a job during the week while I was at home. I argued that making money in a band had to be as valid as baling hay or making Pizzas.

She said, PFFT, which translated roughly as, That may be true, but no child of mine is going to stay in bed all day.

Fortunately, she could do arithmetic. Not even counting my share of the tips for playing requests, I would be making on Friday and Saturday nights on the road and occasional local paying gigs what the old man made working five days painting houses. She didn’t make me get a daytime job. What she did though, was thoroughly educate me in the roll of protection, vis a vis the girls I was meeting, and then enroll me in six hours at the State College in our town. My classes met Tuesdays and Thursdays from eight am until five pm. The moment I was out of class on Thursday, we piled into Randy’s van, traveling all of Thursday night and as far into Friday as it took to get to the next town on the band’s tour. It was a ball-breaker, and after getting back on Sunday night, I really did sleep all day Monday.

Allowing a high school junior to enroll at the state college may have been irregular, but Mom was not only an alumna, she was also the college’s Assistant Registrar, and nobody ever said ‘no’ to her, including me. I aced both classes, so she had me repeat the process for the second summer session. When high school started again I was enrolled in night classes at the college totaling six hours each during both semesters of my senior year. I’d become very interested in girls; one in particular, and I think mom was trying to insure I didn’t have much time for them.

College and high school at the same time wasn’t as tough as it sounds, and it had benefits, believe it or not. My collegiate classmates all thought I must be some kind of genius, or like Kurt Russell in the movie, The Computer wore Tennis Shoes, instead of a kid bored out of his skull with public school, whose mother was willing to use the little bit of influence she had to protect her child from himself. My high school classmates figured I had to be getting it on with college girls, (not even close) and my high school teachers didn’t know what to do with me. Instead of a slightly above average boy who pulled down A’s and B’s without too much effort, they now tended to view me as someone screaming ahead of the pack. As I observed the manner in which my teachers dealt with me, vs. the other students, I began to realize that anything out of the ordinary tended to intimidate the provincial faculty at Stanton High. As a result, I think they decided to err on the side of caution. I didn’t get a single B my senior year.

I actually studied for my collegiate classes. I couldn’t continue my practice of listening in class and never cracking a schoolbook at home. In college, the professors test you on things that are in the books but not the lectures – something that never happens in public school. As a result, the most important benefit I gained was that, however imperfectly done, I developed study habits for the first time in my life. A whole year of straight A’s helped, too. I graduated eighth in my class of 168 students from Stanton Senior High School of Stanton, Oklahoma.

Despite the insanity of my schedule, I did find time for a specific girl named Jennifer Lewis. We’d had a few dates when I was a junior and she was a sophomore, and before we were half way through football season my senior year, I was in love. I scared the hell out of her mother. A foreign looking boy with his own car and a rock and roll band was not what she wanted for her little girl.

VII

With all of my activities came another phenomenon; I was flaming out. I am not Superman, and burning my candle at both ends had slap worn me out.

Unbeknownst to my parents, half way through second semester of my senior year I drove to Muskogee and met with the Marine Corps recruiter. I was so sick of school I could just barely stand the prospect of finishing high school, much less completing my freshman year of college at the same time. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the result Mom wanted when she enrolled me at her school, but there it was.

I was only seventeen, so I couldn’t enlist without my parent’s permission. I considered a number of strategies all of which involved some type of fraud or forgery. Finally I just showed up at breakfast one Sunday morning and said, Mom, Dad I am going to enlist in the Marine Corps instead of going to college.

There was this moment of stunned silence when you could have heard a pin drop before my mother’s strangled voice demanded, What?

I am sick of school, we are at war, my country needs me, and I’m going to enlist. The Marine Corps guarantees me I will go to Vietnam. Why I thought that would be a selling point I have no idea.

What in the hell are you talking about? My father bit off each word like a Doberman snapping at a stranger.

You volunteered for the draft in 1941, you stayed in the army until 1963. I am doing something like that. . .

You’re doing nothing like that, my mother interrupted me, a note of panic in her voice. When your father volunteered for the draft it was so he could get a one year obligation out of the way. We were at peace. He didn’t know that a war would start. You want to volunteer for a war that is already underway, a war under attack by people who think it is both illegal and immoral. I’m not about to let you enlist.

I need your signature only until I’m eighteen, mom, I countered. Right now I can enlist under what they call the 180 Day Delay Program. It is designed to allow enlistees to finalize their affairs before they report for training. I don’t have any affairs to finalize, but the program has some other very distinct advantages. If I enlist using the delay, I actually start my six years of reserve time the day I sign up instead of the day I am sworn in. Second, I will automatically be promoted to private first class after infantry training, and will be paid for being over 2 years of service months before my two-year enlistment is up. Those are all significant advantages for which I will not be eligible if I have to wait until after my birthday. I already spoke to the recruiter. He promised he would save a spot for me in the company organizing on June 25 in San Diego, whether I enlist now or after June 5th. Tell me mom, quicker rank, more pay, completion of my reserve time earlier, all benefits if I can enlist now. What benefit do you see by withholding your signature?

Maybe you’ll come to your senses, Dad responded ahead of Mom, that’s one advantage. Fine, if you want to be a Marine, join the Naval ROTC at the University, you would graduate as a second lieutenant and maybe start on a career instead of just running away to join the circus like Toby Tyler.

Is that what you think I’m doing? I tried to sound affronted, but in the moment after Dad spoke I realized that was exactly what I was doing. I drove on anyway, deciding to use a Hail Mary stratagem.

Mom, Dad, listen to me. I have been going ninety to nothing since I was six years old trying to make you guys think you didn’t make a mistake by taking me in. I’m burned out. I need something else in my life besides four more years of school, at least right now. It is a two-year enlistment. I’ll barely be twenty when it is over, maybe even still nineteen if I’m released early to enroll in summer school at the University. Every bit of it is better if you sign, every bit of it is worse if you don’t. I need your signatures.

What about your night school classes? Mom asked. Holy shit, I thought, she was bargaining!! At that moment I knew I was going to get what I wanted.

I’ll finish them, I promised, I’ll graduate from high school. I’m not leaving until the end of June.

We went on like that a while longer as Mom extracted promises and concessions from me, but in the end they went with me to Muskogee and signed the form. As we were leaving the recruiter’s office I said, I appreciate you doing this. I was going to go find a drunk to pretend he was my dad if you didn’t come. I’m glad the recruiter doesn’t think I came from skid row.

Very funny, Dad replied, I only hope this doesn’t become something we all regret in time.

Whatever happens, I replied, you guys are off the hook. I was going to do this with or without your help.

Chapter 1

The Arizona

This is the very kind of bullshit that is going to get us killed one of these days.

I

Co. M, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines

First Marine Division

The Arizona Territory

Quang Nam Province, I Corps,

Republic of Vietnam

0015 hours

5 June 1969

Using the green towel I always wore around my neck, I wiped the sweat from my face and out of my eyes. While I was at it, I picked a mosquito from under my ear and squashed him between my thumb and forefinger. In the states we’d have mistaken an animal that size for a humming bird, and he was full of my blood. The insect literally burst when I squeezed it. Like an idiot, I looked at my fingertips in the inky darkness preparatory to wiping the blood onto my tee shirt. That distraction was just what it took for me to walk off the side of the creek bank we’d been traversing. The ground disappeared beneath my feet and suddenly I was falling.

For over six hours Mike Company, Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division had been humping down-mountain from a recon outpost where we’d been dropped the previous evening by helicopter. Even after midnight, it was still over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, with humidity in excess of 90 percent as well. When I stopped falling, I was on my ass in water up to my sternum in a creek that I knew damned good and well we were crossing for the third time that night. As I pushed off the muddy bottom of the stream to get back on my feet, I happened to look at the radium hands of my watch. It was 12:15 am, or 0015 hours.

Well, I croaked to myself in a rasping whisper as I sat back down in the water, happy birthday asshole. For the past 15 minutes I had been nineteen years old.

Charlie, Mike Kelter, my radioman, called out to me in a stage whisper that still managed to convey concern.

I’m here Mike, I whispered back. Mike slid down the bank of the stream into the water, and while he had avoided the indignity of falling, he was now just as wet as me. As I turtled onto my knees and before I struggled to my feet under the weight of my flak jacket, M-16, maybe 400 rounds of .556 mm ammunition in twenty round magazines, a K-Bar knife as well as a bayonet, 4 canteens for water, two C-rations stuffed into my gas mask pouch, four fragmentation grenades, a thermite grenade, two BA-4386 batteries for Mike’s PRC-25 radio, and two 60 millimeter mortar rounds, I pointed at the fluorescent hands of my watch to indicate the time to Mike even though it was much too dark for him to see what I was doing.

Hey Killer, I whispered, guess what day it is?

I know what day it is, he growled at me, you been talking about it for a week. Happy birthday, asshole.

I smiled at the coincidence and considered the likelihood that we could communicate an entire day using only asshole, fuck, and shit, words routinely spoken as every part of speech from a verb or participle to the pluperfect subjunctive.

Come on, move, Mike admonished me in a concerned whisper. If we get separated from the company, we are fucked.

I lost my helmet, I hissed back at him. He dropped to his knees and in a few moments we located my steel pot in the shallow water of the stream, but the guys in the column behind us had kept on moving and were almost immediately swallowed by the unrelieved blackness of a world without electricity. Within seconds of passing us by, the last man was out of sight. After we found my helmet I unscrewed the caps to my two empty canteens and held them under the water for long enough that the air quit running out of them. Mike was freaking for fear we’d get permanently separated, or even worse, shot when we tried to rejoin the company, but I calmly finished what I was doing. I dropped an iodine tablet into each canteen, rotated them quietly to mix the purifying tablet into the water to make it safe to drink and terrible to taste, and returned them to the pockets of my flak jacket. I knew we’d need the water later. If it was this hot at midnight, what would it be like in the late morning or early afternoon after we reached our objective and might even be engaged in a fight. Finally, in acknowledgement that he couldn’t hurry me, Mike shrugged, swore, and filled his own canteens. We had been on the trail for over six hours and had probably lost three times as much in sweat as we were now adding to our water supply.

Gimme your fucking iodine tabs, he snapped. I gave him the little brown bottle. Dammit, Charlie, he added, barely audible even a foot away, this is the very kind of bullshit that is gonna’ get us killed one of these days!

You’ll thank me later when the other guys are sucking on rocks to get some saliva into their mouths.

By this point, Mike and I were separated from the rest of the unit by several minutes. I didn’t spend ten seconds worrying about it. For one thing, Mike did all of my worrying for me. He was an actual adult, twenty-one years old, and in the province of a rifle company in Vietnam, it made him Methuselah. Also, except for the fact that other than being pretty sure we’d crossed this stream before, I was lost. It wouldn’t have helped us find the company if we had known where we were, because it was pretty obvious Lt. Smith, Mike Company’s commanding officer, was lost as well. That meant the company was wandering aimlessly through one of the most dangerous places in Vietnam, the Arizona.

The operation codenamed Arizona Territory was long over by the time I arrived in Vietnam, but the geographic area between the Song Vu Gia, the river that ran south of Hill 52, the fire support base on which Mike Company 3/5 was stationed, and the mountainous ridge we called Recon Ridge further to the south, still bore that name among the Marines serving nearby. For the most part, the Arizona was a free fire zone. If we saw evidence of enemy activity in there, which we frequently did, we could shoot at it, call in supporting arms, or drop bombs on it with a minimum of coordination. Like its namesake, the Arizona was a wild and wooly place, and as Marines assigned to I Corps, the northern most military district in the Republic of South Vietnam inevitably learned, there was always some kind of shit going on in the Arizona. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it was exactly why being separated from the company didn’t bother me too much. It was a simple matter of relative safety, the question being: in Indian country, were we safer as part of the human snake of groaning, panting, farting, clanking and exhausted Marines making their way through the night, or just following them as a two man element in stealth mode. Mike informed me that I was crazy if I thought he was going to wander around all night in the company of an idiot when the relative safety of our entire outfit was somewhere just ahead.

I let him outvote me, so with our canteens filled, we started out in pursuit of the company. For all of Kelter’s worry, it wasn’t that tough to find them. We just followed the churned up earth of the trail until we could hear the sound of movement ahead. Finally, I knew we were close to the last man in the company’s column because I heard somebody say, fuck much too loudly, when he tripped or stumbled up ahead. I figured there was probably a Vietnamese word for the big nasty that a Viet Cong would have used so the guys we could hear up ahead were most likely our Marines, and at least one of them was an undisciplined jackass.

Joining back up was the dangerous part, I needed to say something with L’s in it so the last man in the column would at least have some reason to believe I was an American.

Looky Lou, Leatherneck, it’s 81s and his romeo oscar, I said to the tail end Charlie, just loud enough to be heard.

Holy shit, the Marine up ahead spat in an aggrieved whisper, Goddammit, you fucks, you scared the shit out of me, I almost shot your asses.

I told him again who we were and responded to the challenge with the password, and then while we were walking past guys on our way to our spot, the C.O. called a halt for a breather and we kept moving. Pretty soon we were back where we belonged, next in the column behind the artillery forward observer and his radioman.

Where in the hell have you two been? Lance Corporal Larry Wright, the artillery FO’s radio operator whispered to us.

I needed a bath, I replied, Mike scrubbed my back.

You fucking dildo, he responded with a chuckle, that sounds about like you two butt pirates.

II

Along with my radio operator, Corporal Mike Kelter, we were the 81 mm mortar forward observer (FO) team for Mike 3/5. It’s pronounced Mike three-five. That’s Company M, Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division (Fleet Marine Force [FMF]) Reinforced. Marine Rifle companies don’t have 81 mm mortars, so called for the diameter of the rounds the guns fired. Those guns, sometimes called the battalion commander’s personal artillery, belonged to the 81s Platoon of Headquarters and Services Company of the battalion. Our team belonged to H&S Company, and was simply attached to Mike Company from the table of organization of the mortar platoon. Our job was to call in support from the mortars that were spread out across the battalion’s area of operations in two gun sections on the various hills our companies occupied. We also had an artillery FO team, forward air controllers (sometimes, but not on this operation), responsible for controlling attack aircraft that would bomb or strafe targets for us, the beach party people, known simply as the A-4 that helped bring in helicopters for medevacs and resupply, and our Navy Corpsmen or medics. None of us belonged to Mike Company, we were all assigned from somewhere else.

In Mike Company we referred to ourselves as The Attachments as though we were a one hit wonder band from the mid-sixties. With the exception of the artillery FO and when we had them, the forward air controllers, who were usually lieutenants, the rest of the attachments were almost all junior enlisted Marines, picked because we were above average in intelligence and were motivated to do a good job. The non-Marine element of the attachments were the Corpsmen, who were sailors, equally motivated to do a good job, inevitably among the smartest men in the company, and when the chips were down, without exception, had the sort of courage that pushed them to put the welfare of the Marines in their unit ahead of themselves. If it sounds like I’m fanboy for Navy Corpsmen, you’re right, but believe me, Corpsmen have earned my respect the hard way and in every unit to which I was ever assigned.

Perhaps because we were not really of Mike Company, just there for the duration, and had so much else in common, the attachments almost always got along great. This was made more likely because we had common cause in two arenas. First, we all wanted to get out of there alive, and second, we shared an enemy: the Company Gunnery Sergeant. At that moment, the company gunny was a long service veteran named Cauthon, but the one before him was just as bad, and the one who came after was worse. We almost never found ourselves at loggerheads with the officers in the company. Except in the performance of our duties, our lives rarely interfaced