Читать книгу Cold World War - Marie Bravo - Страница 6

Chapter 1

The World

San Benito

As I stared in the mirror of the San Benito Hardware Store bathroom, I saw myself in my white dressy shirt with a black bow tie. I started to recall being back in the Vietnam jungle wearing my jungle fatigues, with the smell of gunpowder in the air. Oh man, how I missed that. I could sit on the jungle floor without worrying about my pants getting dirty. I especially missed firing my M16. I missed feeling the recoil as a gook went down. I missed the smell of napalm when it fell on the jungle.

After I got out of the military in the fall of 1970, I was hired right away at a hardware store. The owner wanted to have the prestige of having a Vietnam veteran working at the store and hung my accolades on the wall. He also needed to have a Mexican American to work at the store to handle the Spanish-speaking customers because the hardware store clientele was 80 percent Hispanic and was four blocks away from the Mexican bridge. It was the same boring job every day. I was hired to sell paint and appliances, but after a week I hadn’t sold a drop of paint or a single toaster. It’s not like I was a model salesman or anything. So the owner hired a Mexican American woman to help sell the appliances, and a Cuban who spoke broken English to sell the paint. With the extra help, it became even more monotonous. That’s why after two months, I missed being outside and being challenged by the environment and the excitement of chasing the enemy.

One afternoon I was invited out to coffee with my father and Sergeant First Class (SFC) Gonzalez. SFC Gonzalez was the recruiter who helped me join the army a few years back. I volunteered because two of my friends, a soldier and a marine, were killed in Vietnam.

He and my father were having a conversation about the old times when I arrived at the diner. Gonzales was originally from my hometown, so he’s considered a family friend. I sat down and greeted my father when Gonzales turned to me and asked me how I was doing at work.

“Man, I’m bored as hell,” I replied.

My father’s expression seemed concerned when I said that I was bored.

Gonzales then asked me, “How would you like to come back into the army?”

Out of respect to my father’s concerns, I told him, “Not really.”

“You can still keep your sergeant E5, and you got a two thousand-dollar bonus coming to you.”

I looked at my father, then back to Gonzalez, and said, “I could use that to pay some bills! Is there any way I could go to Europe?”

“Sure! I could send you to Germany. It’s wide open.”

I knew my father would be worried, but I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

I could hardly wait to get home and tell my wife that we were going to Germany. I knew she was going to be excited to have a European adventure. However, I had to tell her that she would be meeting me there a little later because I could not bring her right away without a command sponsor. Taking care of tickets and housing on our own would be far too expensive. I felt horrible asking my wife to help me pack my bags, but she eventually understood, and by the end of the week I was on a jet to New Jersey.

Fort Dix

The transition went smooth and soon enough I found myself reporting to Fort Dix, New Jersey, the location of a replacement center for minutemen training. The name was inspired by the swift and well-formed training given to the colonial militias while under pressured attacks from the British during the American Revolution. What really made the name was that the men were ready to go at a minute’s notice. Since the personnel present were made up primarily of sergeants who didn’t need the training, it ended up being more like a two-week break while you were waiting for your next station assignment. The incoming orders came daily to let soldiers know of their next overseas location before they were shipped out.

It may have been more like spring break than it was training, but the lack of freedom still made us feel like we were cooped up in a cell. I met a young Puerto Rican specialist named Lopez from New York City who was an extremely disrespectful over-glorified paper shuffler. One day he sent me to the mess hall for duty. A job that was supposed to be for low-rank soldiers, not sergeants. But I was hungry, so I went ahead and walked over to the mess hall anyways.

I walked right up to a staff sergeant and told him I was there for kitchen duty.

“Since when do sergeants have to pull kitchen police?” he asked amusingly. “I don’t know what you’re doing here. I apologize, I wouldn’t even put you on head count. Just grab a cup of coffee and sit around until it’s chow time.”

Later that Monday evening I was hanging around the barracks when Specialist Lopez slithered in.

“Huddle up,” he shouted, making sure he got all the men’s attention. “I got some good news for you guys. I can tell you how you can get shipped out of here earlier than next week, maybe even tomorrow! I can start working on your orders tonight for fifty dollars!”

This was all just carny talk. But the soldiers started to line up to give him the fifty dollars so they could get on the list. He knew that we had visited the finance office for partial pay that day, so we had money. I felt bad for the soldiers because most of them made less than three hundred a month. While he was talking about orders, I was reminded of one time in Vietnam when I had gone to the head shed to replace men that were killed in one of our line combat companies. The head shed was a large tin hut made of corrugated metal walls where high-level fucks worked.

While at the head shed, I went over to the personnel center and to my surprise I saw somebody that I knew, Specialist 6 Sanchez, who shared a sandbag-fortified foxhole with me during the Tet Offensive.

(The Tet offensive was the North Vietnamese D-Day. Within the first twenty-four hours, we lost six hundred men in second field force alone. The fighting, the heaviest and most sustained of the Vietnam War, coincided with the Lunar New Year, or Tet, and it has been called the Tet Offensive ever since.)

During the firefight we had been shooting our M16s at waves of Viet Cong trying to come in through the wire fence. The fence was formed in large coils of concertina wire, the coils stacked up ten feet high to keep the enemy from getting too close. That didn’t stop the gooks from trying to climb over it though. Many of them were killed while climbing, their lifeless bodies making its own wall in the wire when the battle ended. We were shooting over our sandbags when a gook tossed a grenade right in front the concertina wire.

When it went off most of the shrapnel hit the sandbags, but one piece hit one of Sanchez’s men who was stationed next to me. Although it was a small piece, it got lodged his eye and he was holding back the blood with his hands.

I yelled out in distress, “James has been hit! Medic! Medic!”

No response.

“Medic! Medic!”

No response.

“Get me a fucking medic over here!”

Still no response.

It felt like it took hours to get a medic over to us, but a medic was there within ten minutes, and Specialist Sanchez was there escorting him. I looked at James and told him, “You’ll be okay. You’ll be back in the world soon.” We referred to the US as “The World” because we felt like we were out fighting the war on some chaotic and remote planet. Since he was a walking casualty, the medic took him back to the aid station and Sanchez stayed to take his place in the foxhole with me.

When the firefight started to settle down, the enemy retreated to their foxhole positions, gunshots becoming more sporadic than constant. One of the gooks would pop up and down out of cover and take potshots at us.

“You see that gopher over there?” he asked me.

“What?”

“That gook is popping up and down just like a gopher in a whack-a-mole game. I’m going to time him, and when he pops up, I’m gunna to take him out.” Since Sanchez was headquarters staff, he was issued an M1 carbine, smaller than the regular M1 rifle that was used during the Second World War. Specialist Sanchez lined up his vision with the barrel, holds his breath, one…two…three…pop. Gopher down. I was surprised that this headquarters fuck was able to shoot this gook right in the head from 150 yards away.

But Sanchez recognized me when I walked into the personnel center at the head shed. His eyes opened wide when he saw me.

“Hey, Victor! Sit down, I think I know what you’re here for,” he said to me. “I didn’t think you were the snuffy they were going to send up country.”

A snuffy is a term that soldiers used to describe idiot privates who tend to make naive mistakes.

“Woah, can it be that bad?”

“Turn around and look at the board to see the unit you’re going to,” he said while pointing at the board behind me.

I looked over to a three-by-five-foot board hanging in his office to a long list of names with crosses marked next to many of them.

“Hey, man, what are those crosses for?” I asked while using my thumb to direct his attention to one of the lists.

“Those are the men that get killed in action. The names without the crosses are casualties,” he explained.

I could see that 30 percent of the Alpha Company had already made it to the board. (Ninety percent of the entire board were all minorities that had been drafted.) I had to mentally remind myself to wake up and put reality in check. This was not going to be a picnic in the park because it was time to put the armor back on that I had put down after the Tet assault. Where I was going, there would be no such thing as putting your rifle down.

I found out from Specialist Sanchez that the orders always came from above. There was nothing he could do to keep me from going up country. That’s not how orders worked on that level. There was a chain of command to shit like this.

The men in the barracks were lined up, each giving Specialist Lopez fifty dollars. I wasn’t in that line, but I followed him out after he left and kept pace with him up until we reached his office. Through the window, I could see him pulling out orders from a compartmentalized cubbyhole. I knew then what Sanchez had told me. So when he came out to go to his car, I followed him to confront him.

“One of those orders you pulled out better be fucking mine or there will be hell to pay for it. You wouldn’t want all your customers to know where those orders came from now, would you? Because they didn’t come from a typewriter, I can tell you that,” I said to him before he reached his car door.