~Recollections by "Yukon" John Harris~
Lima 3/5 1966

Introduction 

The following is a day-by-day personal account of the events leading up to the worst period of time in life - Operation Hastings (July 18 - 24, 1966).  Tomorrow, July 18, 2000, marks the beginning of what has now become a 34-year vigil to commemorate it.   Those ‘brothers of valor’ of Lima Company 3/5 ('66), the other companies who were there (India, Kilo, and Mike Company), and anyone else from the 3^rd Battalion 5^th Marines (corpsmen, weapons, artillery, etc.) who wish to join in this recollection (what were your thoughts, feelings, actions etc.?) are invited to do so.  If not, I apologize for the intrusion into your cyberspace.  

Let me say that writing about the war-time events of my life, while serving as a rifleman scout for the company in 1966, has helped me to come to grips with those sometimes chaotic excursions into turmoil.  I've shared other stories about the Nam with you, with hopes that I might awaken an urge for you to also participate in recording these historic revelations into our past.  Possibly even preserving them for others to view one day.  My hope has also been to encourage members of the company who came after me - to add their histories as well.  Those men who fought the battles of Union I & II, Swift, Tet, The Mothers Day Massacre - and so many other heart-wrenching campaigns while serving our Corps and Country through trying times.  The Vietnam War.

First, let me introduce myself.  My name is Johnnie F. Harris.  Friends now call me Yukon.  A lot of us ended up with nicknames.  Sometimes, I think it was the nicknames helped us keep things less personal.  Sometimes it was hard to get close to a guy.  Sometimes you just didn't want to.  I think the term FNG is one of the most impersonal of nicknames, but that broaches another subject I'd like to get into another day.  

I served Lima Company as a rifleman scout.  I was a Pfc. most of the time, and then a LCpl. - before being wounded the second time and med-evaced out.  I spent most of my time in the 3rd fireteam - with the 3rd squad - of the 3rd platoon.   I joined Lima Company in late January 1966, and left her in late November of the same year.  I had been an avid outdoorsman before joining the Marines.  And, I was a pretty good tracker.  So, I spent a lot of time on point.  (Although now I'm not even sure we called it that back then.)  Some of you may remember me from that position (I was the skinny blonde kid).  There were a couple of us that traded off the point position all the time.  Soney was one, and Robert Stallings was another, that come to mind.

Something else that has helped me is a handful of letters I wrote home from the Nam.  They were discovered in my mother’s belongings after she passed away in 1990.   Some heavy stuff, but accurate in detail.  The bottom line, though, is that we really couldn't discuss where we were or what we were doing most of the time.  So, I could sure use some help now filling in the blanks. Okay then.  The first of this episode will come to you first thing tomorrow - the morning of July 18th.   On this day, 34 years ago, we flew by helicopter into LZ Crow . . . Man!  Was it hot!

Till then, Semper Fi.
Yukon John Harris 

Hastings At 34
Part 1  
(July 18, 1966)

I guess one of the few words that can sum up combat is confusion.  As hard as you may train, and as agile a warrior as you may be, there’s just always a little confusion when the shit hits the ‘ole fan.

So here I was, scrambling to get on board a chopper.  Any chopper, because when you get a Sgt. barking up your ass - you do what you’re told.  I’d just have to try and sort things out later.  Hopefully I’d never be missed, and when I got back to the ship - I’d just do a teaberry shuffle back to my own company.  Nope!  Wrong again!  I realized after a very short time in the air that we weren’t going in the direction of the ship, and therefore out to sea.  I could only guess where we were going and was already trying to formulate a plan as to how to get back to my squad.  I had managed to get on the chopper last, and was closest to the hatchway (door).  This was probably due more to instinct then any direct intention.  Or maybe it was  because whoever was barking at me had made it perfectly clear that I would be on THAT chopper...NOW!  (I was, after all, just a Pfc., you see.)  In any case, I found myself in the same position that I normally would have been in, if had I boarded with MY helo-team on the right chopper.

Helicopter Etiquette

It amuses me that a lot of people think that during a war you just hand a bunch of guns (rifles) out to some young guys with helmets and boots, and put them out there where they’re needed.  Then, to get them there, you just cram them into a tank, or a truck – or whatever, and send them into battle.  Same thing with helicopters.  Just throw ‘em on board the little gizmatrons, and get them quickly into action.  Ha!

The Marine Corps (and I’m sure it’s probably true with the Army) has certain procedures to cover everything they do, and how they go about doing it. One such procedure is how to embark and disembark from a helicopter. Groups are put together into what is called helo-teams. These teams are the exact number of men that can safely travel through the air on a helicopter with lightest (greatest?) of ease. I think with the SH-34, it was around nine guys – or two complete fireteams with weapons (machinegun, etc.). Sometimes less, if the pilot was running out of fuel – or time. Sometimes more, like trying to leave an area during overt hostilities! (like… “F*** You! I don’t care if there’s too many of us!Just get us the f*** outta here!”)

It was important that this procedure be followed for the obvious reasons of orderliness, but also to try and protect the next helicopter coming in as much as possible.  (The slow moving SH-34, was very vulnerable.)  Along with this strategy was the protection provided by the chopper as well – in the form of armament (rockets, guns, etc.).  Unfortunately, at this time in the war the SH-34 only had a single door gunner.  The door gunner was equipped with an M-60 machinegun fixed to a swivel device that could be aimed in just about any direction out the hatchway (door) of the ship (chopper).  If he was good, he could lay down some protective fire if needed.  It was his duty also, to shout out any orders or commands from the pilot, as he was directly connected to the cockpit with a built-in headphone in his helmet.  Now you know about as much as I do.

The first indication of trouble that I can remember was the little light holes appearing in the fuselage.   I remember just seeing them appear, but really not (at least immediately anyway) associating any danger with this strange phenomenon.  You see, the 34 made so much noise that you could hardly hear yourself think.  Any type of exterior noise (like enemy machineguns, et.) was masked by the noise of the huge engines directly under the pilot, and just forward of the troop compartment (where we were). 

So on this day, after I don’t know how many other uneventful landings, we made a “hot” one.   Hot, as in bullets penetrating the fuselage around us.  And, HOT as in…more to be expected upon landing.  When those light holes started to appear, the door gunner started firing his weapon and cursing at the top of his lungs out the door.  The chopper began to lurch heavily one way, then another.  I don’t think that it was because of the bullets hitting it.  I think the pilot was doing everything that he could to lessen the profile of the chopper, and make it less of a target.  (If I’m not mistaken, it’s a maneuver commonly referred to in aeronautical circles as ‘jinking’).

The gunner turned and screamed at us to get out. “OUT!  OUT!  OUT!  NOW!”  Being closest to the door, I could plainly see that we had not landed (in any way, shape, or form.)  We weren’t even close to the deck (ground).  But, the gunner grabbed my arm and shoved me, physically, out the hatchway.  I was off balance as I hit the ground, and tucked and rolled to one side, trying to regain my footing.

Just recently, while going through a reenactment of this landing in order to try and remember more (My girlfriend, Tess, had me squat just inside the French doorway at home…as if it were the doorway of the chopper I was on).And I remembered seeing a horrible sight.  A sight, which up until then, had been buried deep in my subconscious.

As I was rolling out from underneath the chopper, I saw a chopper in the distance hit the ground sideways and crash.  It erupted into heavy flames as soon as it splintered against the deck, and pieces of it went flying into another chopper close by.  That’s it...  I remember I kept rolling until I regained my footing, and then ran, zigzagged towards a tree line in the distance.   I remember the terrain being flat and gravelly, with sparse brush dotting the immediate landscape.  I remember being in extreme danger.  It seemed like the whole world was flying apart in all directions.  There wasn’t anybody going towards any type of imaginary clock…the clock was scattered, as the chopper I just left, tried to get others out.  It was like some big bumblebee scattering pollen.  It would jink one way and someone would fly out the door – go a few yards further, and do it again.  Guys were scattering in every direction, and I just focused on getting to some cover.  I still hadn’t figured out what all was happening.  It was as if one minute we were bumping along real easy, and the next - all hell broke loose.  It was, for me, complete and utter confusion…

Some have said that everything, so far, was about the way I remembered.  Some had a different perspective.  Most guys say they remember a large stream or river there.  And that we had to cross it, in order to form up eventually.  But I don’t remember any type of water that day.  I was distinctly aware of being in a riverbed however, with a lot of gravel and sparse vegetation.  At least briefly, until I got out of the open – which was fairly quick.  If there was any water around, it had to have been behind my forward progress.  Maybe I was in an old dry bed of a river…like an abandoned oxbow.   As I’ve said:  I think I may have been with Mike Company on landing.  Wherever they were… (I’ve found out in the years since that this landing area was designated LZ Crow.  Yup! It was HOT alright! )

God knows, I don’t know how I survived those first few moments at LZ Crow.  I wasn’t a battle-seasoned Marine.  Sometimes I think the only difference between surviving and dying is some inner instinct.  Something in your genetic code, that hasn’t been measured yet.  Something passed down for generations… Some infinite measure of energy that causes you to react the right way.  Something that feeds an impulse to your brain that makes you to turn right instead of left, or duck instead of stretch.  Some just call it Luck.   Whatever it was, I managed to rapidly put two and two together.  The first place I hit the ground (after zigzagging off the landing zone) was an old hollow log at the edge of the riverbed.  But, there was an enemy machine gunner that had me in his sights who decided it was my time to die, and he started blasting away at it.

I had no place to go, but I was dead meat if I stayed there.  At first, I just tried to burrow into the log like a termite.  I remember my body desperately trying to disappear into the profile of it. Twitching back and forth as the log started to splinter apart.  Then, I remember thinking ‘This isn’t working!’…letting out a yell, and going for it as I raced towards the hill directly in front of me.

When I got to the base of the hill, I just laid there for a moment panting like a dog on a hot summer day.  No more bullets coming at me.  Whew!  It’d been close.  For the first time I could decipher where the fire was coming from.  The top of the hill above me!  Shit! Now what?  Okay, okay – you can do this.  This is what you’re supposed to be here for.  This is why the Marine Corps spent thousands of dollars on your training.  This is what you’re getting paid for. To take apart machinegun nests . . .  I know I must have looked behind me at this point and seen others still struggling off the landing zone. 

I started to work my way up the hill.  The hard way.  Run and drop – kneel, crouch - and do it again.  There was another guy close to me, and a little behind me.  He was doing it too.  I had help.  We didn’t say a word.  If we’re quiet, the enemy won’t see or hear us.  Took a while.  Bush to bush, and then into the trees.  I had a feeling others weren’t far behind.  I didn’t see them, but they had to be coming to help wipe out the threat.  I felt confident.  But, I was so scared the adrenaline must have been poring from my body.   It was darker there in the shadows of that hill.  I don’t know what time of day it was.  I’d lost all track of time.  It was late afternoon (I think).  I moved on, again and again.   It was like a game.  Like hide and seek when I was a kid.  (How long ago had that been?)  I was good at that game.  I was even better at sneaking up on animals in the forests where I grew up.   But this wasn’t fun.  This was real, and it was scary.   (It was almost like John Wayne and Audie Murphy - all rolled into one.  Shit! I started having mental pictures of the enemy just about to overrun the pill box, then at the last moment, they get picked off by the good guys.  Shit! that could be us!)

I could hear the constant chatter of that machinegun up above us.  The trees were dark and foreboding, as we inched along.  A yard here…a couple yards there.

Then, all of a sudden, there was this huge roar right on top of us.  It was the unbelievable sound of man-made rage…an F-4 Phantom!  So close I could hear the metallic clicks of a million rounds of ammo slamming into chambers, and then the unforgettable roar of twenty-millimeter cannons letting go, all at once – tearing into the hill just above our heads!  SHIT!  There was this sudden pause of energy, then a massive effort to back pedal down hill.   All of a sudden, it occurred to me that an  air strike had been called in, and they didn’t know we were there!  And even worse, we had no way of telling them where we were!

When my ears stopped ringing, I stopped my backward momentum.  I don’t know why, other then if I could hear again, then maybe the gook could too.  I waited for a minute.  Nothing.  Good!  They must’ve gotten him.  Then, just as quickly, my heart sunk - as once again I heard the unmistakable and familiar (by now) chatter of the machinegun. 

I was no longer aware if the other guy (Marine) was nearby.  Don’t care.  Gotta get out of here quick, before the jet comes back in on us again.  Might see us and think we’re gooks... Whoa boy!  Shit!  Stop! Stop! STOP!  If that pilot sees me, I’m dead.  Now I’m caught between a rock and a hard place.  Don’t move, idiot...

Just then, the world just literally turned upside down.  The wind in my lungs was suddenly sucked out of my body, and my hearing (what little there was after the twenty millimeter canons) shut down completely as my ear drums felt like they’d been shot to the twenty thousand foot level of Mt. Everest in one second.  The impact of the ground slamming against my torso, caused me to levitate upward, as if I had been drop kicked by a giant.  

The five hundred-pound bomb released by the Phantom’s second dive must have hit pretty ding-danged close.  I watched silently in slow motion as brush and trees were mowed down by a wall of shrapnel right before my very eyes!  Shit flying in every direction!

I lay there for what felt like about five minutes waiting for my senses to somehow take control.  I wasn’t sure if I were alive or not - for a few of those five.  When most of my hearing came back (I had a ringing in my ears for a couple of days afterwards), I was pretty sure they had gotten the machine gunner.  And, by then, I was pretty sure that I needed to get off that hill as quickly as possible.

The rest of that day is rather vague.  I sort of remember getting back with my guys, but I remember being with friends from Mike Company as well. A few of the guys I served with can’t remember a thing about the first few days, aside from landing at the hot LZ.  But, for the rest of the operation, it would be the same.  Life flashed by in a heartbeat…as action, constant action at every turn, became the rule of the day (and night). 

I remember something else that as the years slowly eroded my youth and time has slipped away… It was exciting!  I hate to admit it now, but it WAS exciting.  The taste of the horrors that came later with bitter combat - had not yet tainted my youthful exuberance. 

Compared to the little scraps with the Viet Cong that we’d experienced in previous operations, this was for all intents and purposes – conventional warfare.  We found ourselves fighting an enemy that wasn’t afraid to duke it out face-to-face.  This enemy, whoever they were (we didn’t find out until much later, that they were contingents of the North Vietnamese Army – NVA), were good.  And, we would learn the hard way (as our numbers slowly dwindled), they were just as good as us.  Not only that - I figured out real quick . . . that they out numbered us. 

Before the 18^th of July was over, three of our best had been killed in action, and a handful more had been wounded.  I think Mike Company had been hit even harder.  (I don’t know this for a fact – just a piece of information stashed away in my subconscious for so many years.)   And, I had no idea where the other two companies were – or even if India and Kilo Companies had been on this operation.

Hastings At 34
 Part II 
(July 19, 1966)

Now he had him! Had him dead to rights!  After all of these years, the piece of shit crouching and quivering in horror at the end of the barrel of his M-16, was doing just what he expected.  Just as he had imagined so many times over and over again.  Pissing his pants.  The yellow puddle spread slowly across the dusty sagging floor of the run-down old motel.  A distorted and crooked smile started to unfurl at the corner of his mouth, as the finger on the trigger, began to twitch uncontrollably.   The other man’s eyes became as wide as saucers, and then tears began to pour forth as he squeezed them shut for the last time.

“Well Dak!  Guess you never thought you’d see me again, huh?  You slimy pile of grunt shit!” As the words slowly left his clenched teeth, the flashback began to play across his brain…as it had so many times before. 

The electronic impulse of a VCR, plugged into the deepest dark recesses - hit ‘Play’.  In slow motion, he was running across a rice paddy somewhere in Vietnam.  Mortars were coming down around him like rain.  Mud and green slime splattered in every direction, as explosions twisted him one way, then another, as he zigzagged towards the waiting Huey.  Then, suddenly he was hit!  Just as his hands touched the skids of the hovering chopper, he was hit yet another time.  As he looked up into the shadows of safety, he noticed the door gunner slumped silently over his weapon.  Dead!

And, Dak was just sitting there…smiling wickedly, down at him.  His mind was spinning.  Reeling from exertion, and from the pain of multiple wounds…yet another bullet slammed into his body.  A hand reached down for him, as the chopper started to lift away, and with one last giant effort he let go of the skids to grasp it. 

“EAT DIRT, MAC!!  MAYBE YOU’LL THINK TWICE BEFORE YOU TAKE THE LAST OF THE B2’s..!!”  were the last words he heard from Dak through the noise of the whopping rotor blades.  The hand had turned into a fist, and then there was darkness, as the slow pulsing rotor blades faded into silence.

            He shook his head, as if to ward off sleep, and it brought him back to the scene before him.  For six years after that scene, he’d clung to life in a prison camp.  The only thing that kept him alive, was the thought of someday exacting revenge on Dak. Then, there were the long years of tracking him down…all the sleepless nights, scummy hotel rooms, and greasy burgers.  Almost getting the worthless maggot in his sights at time or two – only to be denied his just cause, for one reason or another.  Sure, maybe he was just another no-count Vietnam Vet – but he had a purpose.

   And now, there he was twitching on the floor before him, cowering like a rat.  Like some quivering glob of Jello.  His pale, sallow skin was like puke in a Tijuana alleyway.  He paused for a moment, taking it all in.  Savoring every second.  This was going to be even easier than he thought, as he slowly reached into the faded pockets of his worn trousers.  The feel of the cold steel against his finger tips, brought a shallow sense of pleasure flickering across his brain like the flames of a burning hooch.      

“Here you go, Dak!”,  he seethed as he slowly brought the cylindrical object into view.  “I’ve been saving this for you . . . For a long, long time.  NOW EAT IT!”

(Click!  I turned off the TV with the remote…and sat in the darkness.  Thinking.)

Why can’t I have flashbacks that play out like a movie script?  Why are mine just snippets of scenes, like the flash of a meteor through a dark night?  Like a piece of a photograph.  Rarely a complete picture.  Never a moving film.  Nothing in color. Is there something wrong with me…?  With my brain…?   

For years I’d think I wasn’t quite normal.  A smell, or a sound, or even the feel of something – would trigger a snippet.  ZAP!  It would flash by.  That quick.  And then be gone, leaving me hollow – sometimes shaking.  Many times I’d stare at something, like I could almost see it.  But I couldn’t – it was always too far away.  Sometimes, someone would catch me.  (Like a wife.  I had three.)

“Hey!  What’s wrong with you!?”  I’d ponder that for a moment.  Try to make sense of it.  Then, just as quickly, try to cover it up and go on.  I got pretty good at that.  But, I couldn’t make it go away.  Sooner or later…there it would be again.  ZAP! 

Even worse when something hits me in my sleep.  Nightmares.  Sit straight up, in a cold sweat.  Many times, scaring the hell out of the woman next to me.  But, I couldn’t put anything together.  Sometimes, the remnants of the dream would take over my life for days.  I’d get moody, and snappy–not knowing why.  And I’d drink.  Drinking would always make me feel better.   And I found out soon after coming back from the Nam, that if I drank hard enough - I wouldn’t have the nightmares.  Or if I did, I’d seldom remember them.  Good enough for me. 

So, I’d escape.  One way or another.  I was generally pretty responsible.  Had a good job, and kids.  The sort of things that most of the time I could use to smother things.  But sooner or later . . . ZAP!   Another piece of the past would pop up and whack me as if I’d been slapped on the face.  What’s wrong with me?  I must be losing my mind!

If it got really bad, I’d just run away.  That’s right.  Just up and disappear.  Go to the mountains (sometimes the sea), and get lost.  Take a fishing pole with me, and some C-rats, and go so far back into the mountains that I wouldn’t see anyone for days.  I even got me an M-37 Weapons Carrier w/winch, so I could really get into nowhere land.  It helped…(mostly?).  The trouble was, I could never seem to explain to my wife (any of them) adequately enough…  Why?

I had a lot of troubled times after leaving the war.  After thinking I’d left it behind me, I became pretty convinced that something was wrong with me.  After all, I’d had a bullet rattle my brains on Hill 362 during Operation Hastings.  But I was afraid to do anything about it.  I wouldn’t have known what to do anyway.  Shoot, our fathers didn’t have any problems after WW II, or at least they never gave the impression that they did.  Just changed their swords back into plowshares, and got on with their lives. 

I served my Corps honorably.  So what if the Country never gave a damn?  I never had anything to be ashamed of . . . so I was sure, eventually, things would just go away.  Yup! (Wrong.)

Well to make a long-story short, I did eventually get help with my ‘dilemma’.  Been working at it ever since.  It takes time, and it takes…dealing with it.  The war. But, to be honest with you, and although I’ve had a great many things come back to me, some things are just (still) foggy.  Take for instance, the 19^th and 20^th of July, 1966.  A lot happened over these two days…and on throughout the whole operation.   I’ve tried over the years to systematically separate things out.  Trying to remember day-by-day.  I have a hard time of it.  I think it was because back then, there was so much happening.  I was just getting inundated with so much all of the time.  It was just constant, through those days.  But, I’ll give you what I’ve got...   

After the chaos at the landing zone (LZ Crow), things moved pretty rapidly.  I think the Company pretty much spent the rest of the day (18^th) trying to link up.  The platoons were scattered, as you can imagine.  I’d like to think that we’d caught the enemy off guard.  But I’m not so sure anymore.  I’ve read some accounts of 3^rd Battalion, 4^th Marines (I think) who had already been skirmishing with the enemy. Was that why we had been called up?  

A couple of Medals-Of-Honor were won (earned the hard way) in the same general area, during actions only a couple of days before.  (...even hours maybe?)

Note:  Included with Part 2., are the citations for the two Medals Of Honor awarded Captain Robert J. Modrzejewski, Commanding Officer of Company K, 3^rd Battalion, 4^th Marine Regiment, and SSgt. John J. McGinty III of the same company.  Reading these will give you some idea of the tenacious enemy, we hadn’t yet fully begun to appreciate.

In the meantime, we lost several of our best men during furious, albeit brief, skirmishes.  I don’t remember anyone ever telling me who we had come up against during those first few days.  Had they, I’m sure I’d have reacted this way, “NVA?  Who are they?” After all we had trained specifically to deal with the shadowy but  ill-equipped Viet Cong (VC).  Even back in ITR (Infantry Training Regiment), we had been taught of their conniving little tricks.  Why…they were just slimy little mole people, who could pop out of a spider hole and try to shoot you in the back.  They couldn’t even shoot straight…their weapons were so ancient they were lucky to hit the broad side of a barn. 

Hell, I believed it!  Particularly after the last two operations we’d been on.  Our dead and wounded were just fluke accidents.  (Right?)  I even joked that we had started the war (which up till then, had just consisted of a few minor battles).    On the very first night we came in to save the country and win the war, someone thought they heard a human wave attack coming across the rice paddy.  Lock and load, baby – we unleashed the fury of a Marine Corps rifle company.  Devastating!  I mean, it was one awesome display of pyrotechnically interlocking fields of fire.  One helluva earth-shaking destructive force! 

The next morning, there was this dead water buffalo laying with all four feet sticking straight up in the air.  And, one mad Ho Chi Min looking farmer, jumping up and down on a rice paddy dike - screaming that we’d cost him his livelihood.  Our Captain quickly ordered us to pay for our sins, by anteing up three dollars MPC (Military Pay Currency) apiece. 

I’ve always maintained ever since, that the word quickly got out and the whole country had a crash course in capitalism.  I never said they were dumb. 

In recent years I’ve heard folks remark that communism would fail in Vietnam, and it will relearn capitalism again.  Hell yeah, they will - we taught them pretty good as far back as 1966.  

So, instead of reeducating ourselves- we assumed (the first couple of days) that we’d just uncovered a highly organized bunch of VC.

I’m pretty sure that I spent the first night of the operation (July 18^th) on ambush duty.  I kind of remember that instead of being able to kick back a little the next day (July 19^th), we were moving pretty fast up these creek beds.  (Normally we would have had a break if we’d just spent the whole night on ambush duty.)  I was being traded off with a couple of the other points in the company.  We went from a more open river bed area (of the day before) up into narrow streambeds and rugged gorges.

We were hitting pockets of resistance along the way.  Because it was getting narrower and more difficult to climb up and down these big boulders scattered everywhere in a canyon like area – we began trading off platoons for the head of our company sized column.  (It was too difficult for any flanking maneuver.)  Making progress was tiring work – especially without getting any sleep the night before. 

I remember that we started to uncover caches of enemy supplies along the way.  Lots of them.  The one thing I remember most, was the huge amount of .51 cal. machinegun belts we found.  They were boxed up in spot-welded galvanized boxes.  No kidding!  It took us most of a drizzly morning to move the boxes, fire-bucket style, to the rear.  (Wherever that was?)  Slipping and sliding in the red clay mud.  Every time a box was passed to me, my mind would flash to metal shop class in high school, just the year before.  Shit – we had made boxes like that…bending the galvanized sheets in a huge press, and then spot welding them together.

Something else that that brought back old memories almost surrealistically, was winding our way up through the canyon areas, and along fast-moving streams.  It reminded me of the trout fishing excursions I’d taken into the mountains as a kid.  Again, not that long before.  Instead of following the trails and the easy way up these canyons, we had to leap frog around.  The reason for this is because the gooks would place an automatic weapons guy along the trail to slow us down.  It worked, too.  A couple of our guys got hit, before we started changing tactics.   It got to be real tiring climbing around on those boulders with all of our gear on.  Banged up knees were the rule of the day.  A couple of times, before we moved too far into the canyons, we had air support drop in.  Usually they’d be these neat prop planes like a P-51, that would come down, drop their ordnance, and then barrel roll out of the canyon.  I felt like we were in WW II or something.    

As I finished this last piece, I decided to take a ride down to the stables where we keep our horses.  The pieces and snippets were starting to come at me, and I needed a break – if you know what I mean.  Anyway, I find peace around nature.  It’s been that way for most of my life.  Growing up as a kid, I had a lot of elbow-room.  The solitude of the mountains in Northern California, and the wide-open prairies of Montana were a kid’s best friend.  Hunting, fishing, exploring – you name it.  I was lucky then, and probably never really appreciated it until the war.  I was lucky, because I had both worlds, the mountains and the plains, and knew how to find adventure.  And, I was comfortable with solitude.  As I am now.  It helps me think.  And, it soothes my soul, when I think about things relating to the war.

I’m pretty certain (now) that I spent the night of the 19th with one of the new guys.  He wasn’t really new, because I’d seen him before, and I think he was from one of the other platoons.  His name was Cpl. John C. Holoka, and they stuck him in our platoon as a squad leader, because we were short a few guys.  (I don’t remember who he replaced because things were changing practically every day.)

John was one of those guys you just liked right off.  His smile, maybe, and/or his easy style and demeanor.  We dug our hole and started the normal 50% alert for the night – one guy on, for each guy off.  I remember being apprehensive that night, with the way things had been going since we started the operation.  I made it known to him that I wasn’t sure who we were up against, but that to me they appeared to be better supplied and better equipped then us.  And, I could tell even at that time – we were outnumbered.  He tossed it aside, and said we’d be alright because we had lots of air support, and even naval and field artillery to back us up.   He made me feel a little easier, and I think he realized I was concerned enough to stay awake a little longer to keep me company.  I was just dead tired too, and I think he may have been worried that I’d fall asleep.  (Something that I would never have done under any circumstance.)  I’d glance over at him from time-to-time as he talked to me.  I could tell he was writing someone, by cupping a match for a second - then trying to write real fast before it went out.  I think he might have been writing his girl friend, because he mentioned when he got home, he was going to spend a lot more time with her.  And, he said he was going to go back to school, and further his education.  That got me to thinking.  I supposed I wasn’t the only one there that night thinking about doing things a little differently, if given another chance.  I found out that he didn’t even have to be on the operation.  He had volunteered to go because of the men…  He hadn’t wanted them to think that he’d bug out on them until they made it back from the operation.

On July 20^th, we pretty much repeated what we’d done the day before.  We came across Mike Company again.  At this time, we were rotating our platoons. One would let the other move ahead whenever they got too tired.  So, it may have been true with the other companies (India & Kilo) as well.  I saw my buddies, and was disturbed to hear a couple of guys I’d been through Boot Camp with, had been killed on the first day.  (Could they have been on those choppers that I’d seen going down?  I didn’t think those choppers were ours.)

We kept hitting enemy base camps.  We kept getting sporadic fire trying to hold us down.  But, we’d work around them, and get them in the end.   We found  more and more of their stuff.  Uniforms drying on bamboo racks and fires with kettles of rice and fish over fires that were still burning.   I found myself thinking,  “Who were these guys?”

Hastings At 34
Part III 
(More of July 20, and 21, 1966)

WHO ARE THOSE GUYS?

A friend called me last night.  Said, “I don’t remember that Dak character, but I sure do remember the C-ration incident with the B2’s.”  We laughed about it, and a couple of other things I’ve covered so far, and then talked about the first few days before the ‘Hill’.  Remembering is hard.  For some reason, many of the guys of Lima Company have a hard time going there.  It may very well be, that the situations that came later in the operation took precedence over the smaller details. I still think they’re important.  Even down to the C-rats we were eating, which by-the-way were few.  The details trigger memories.  (..and may help others remember?)

So, I’ll start with that.  Food.

We came charging into one base camp, on or around the 20^th of July, only to find that once again we had caught our enemy off guard.  Once again, there was a brief, but violent, gun battle.  The gooks lost.  This time though, along with various pieces of clothing and other paraphernalia, we found food still cooking on their fires.  They must’ve been real close.  What else was new . . .   It was frustrating to be right on top of them (whoever ‘them’ was) and keep finding they’d gotten away. 

As usual, I’m mentally trying to calculate how many had been there.  Guess who’s coming to dinner?  Then it hit me, as if I had been slapped right upside my head.  Shit!  The balls of the little f***ers!  To be eating supper at my table!  Where art thou, Goldie Gook?  Wait a minute . . . If they’re so brazen to be eating over open fires, knowing full well that we’re not only in the area, but right on their little tails – then . . . Damn!  They’ve gotta have more guys than we do!  Must be . . . we’re not a threat to them at all!

I mentioned this to someone of importance, but the point gets lost with the excitement of finding all kinds of papers and stuff around.  Not to mention more food, because along with whatever it was they were cooking (dirty rice with bits of fish or some other meat mixed in it).  There were also some cages with live chickens - and even a couple of pigs.  (Several of these items made it to the palates of some of our more rank-conscious brethren later that evening.)  I sat down and thought about things for a moment, while the rest of the troops came through.  I looked around.  Real hard.  I bet that it was a staging area.  Had to be, with all of the stuff laying around.  The paths leading in every direction were well worn.  And, there were bunkers dug into the side of the creek bed.  God knows what they’d carried off just before we got there.  I was starting to piece together what I’d been sensing all along.  Whoever they were – they wasn’t VC.

I hadn’t really seen any enemy bodies up to that point (but that was rapidly about to change).  Somebody had remarked that these guys had uniforms of a sort we hadn’t seen before.  What did they mean?  I looked around me.  Scattered in the brush was something that caught my eye.  I went over and fished the item out from underneath some bushes.  A canteen and cartridge belt.  They were the first like them that I’d seen.  The canteen was made of plastic, I noted with disgust.  Ours were made of aluminum.  Solid.  This one had a red star raised in relief towards the neck.  The cartridge belt was kind of like our web gear, but different.  Cheaper, I noted again with disgust.  Someone found a bunch of pith helmets (in some boxes, I think).  They had red stars on them too.  We had found some weapons in the last two base camps.  They still had packing grease on them (cozmoline?).  I carried one for a while, until Gunny Dias decided he wanted it, and relieved me of it.  Okay by me, because it was a strange-looking rifle, and I had plenty to carry already.  That one looked like it had been stamped out of a sardine can or something.  Banana shaped clip and all.  In fact, that’s what I called it –‘the banana gun’.  (I didn’t know at the time, that it was the infamous AK-47 assault rifle.)

The clothes we found laying around?  Well, they weren’t the black pajamas we’d come to associate with the VC.  Hmmm . . . I sort of remember that these were an OD-type green and there were some that were khaki or brownish-color.  Well, didn’t matter.  I’d just be a little more careful when tracking them.  Along with everything else, there were plenty of samples of their footwear laying around.  It was interesting . . . they looked a lot like tennis shoes.  I still hadn’t found any mines or trip wires yet.  (That, too, was about to change . . .)  Besides, we had them on the run.  As long as we could keep them off guard – it would be to our benefit. (That would change . . .)  Each time we hit one of these ‘base’ camps, it would slow us down until we could sort through everything and check it all out.  Usually we’d go into a perimeter-type defense around the general area.  (As if the gooks would be so foolish as to come back for their stuff.)  

“Harris!  Keep it moving!”  I guess I’d been sitting down a little too long.  I remember already starting to feel dead tired.  I was on point nearly all of the time.  If not with the Company, then with our platoon, and that takes a lot out of you.  As I got up, I thought about keeping the canteen and cartridge belt as a souvenir.  Then, just tossed it back in the brush.  Figured the S-2 (3?) guys might need it.  They were the ones who were supposed to make heads or tails out of all of this.   I noticed one of the guys walking by with some gook money.  He gave me some paper bills (piasters, dong?), and I ended up stuffing them in my shirt pocket.  I wondered if they got paid as much as us - about $125 a month, with combat pay.  I still have some of that gook money laying around in a shoe box in the attic. 

  I don’t think it was more than a couple hours later, that I was coming around a bend in the streambed, and all hell broke loose.  I’d just been admiring the beauty of the place.  The tall trees were almost dusty looking as rays of light filtered down into the shade of the streambed.  I was wading upstream in the water trying to be quiet, and at the same time staying off the trail.  Pieces of the tree next to me started to fly by me, almost before I heard the noise of the automatic rifle.  But I’d already started a dive for cover.  How is that?  I thought about it afterwards, and surmised that already my senses were so keyed into everything around me, that the slightest thing out of place registered ‘real quick’.  Survival instincts – that’s what I called them.  I began to trust that sixth sense or whatever it was that made all of my  senses combine to 100% alert.  That saved my can more then a few times.  And they stayed with me long after the war.  Have you ever had someone startle the hell out of you unexpectedly by coming into your peripheral vision?  Happens all the time with me.  It can be downright embarrassing at times, let me tell you.

I let off an instinctive shot, as I dove into the water behind a boulder, spotting a muzzle flash in the tree line to my left.  And, damned if I didn’t hit the little f***er!  No kidding!  I just couldn’t believe it – probably the best single shot I ever made in the Nam.  The guy just flipped to his side as if he’d been hit by a frying pan.  But, the thing that really scared the living shit out of me was the guy behind me about a hundred feet.  He let go of his M-14 automatic. (He was one of our guys!) Tracers went zipping past my head.  I almost swung around and shot him too. That was it . . . I was done for the day.  I asked for someone else to take my place at point.  I didn’t even bother going over and looking at the gook.  The other guy claimed the kill anyway.  I was shaking like a leaf.  Geez, that’d been just too damn close (both of them).  Had I blinked, I’d have died.  (It wouldn’t be the last time…not by a long shot.)

Later, after the sun had slipped down behind the hills, we dug in for the night.  I drew Pfc. Robert Stewart for a fighting-hole partner.  Man, did we luck out.  Captain Tatum must’ve been aware that we were all dog-tired or something.  Because, instead of climbing the highest hill around for the night (which was his typical thing), we found a little knoll which stretched into a small meadow just before ending at the tree line.   My platoon (3^rd Platoon) dug in about one hundred yards from that tree line.  For the first time on this operation, the ground was soft and easy to dig.  Fine by me, because I was dead tired.  Stewart and I dug a really good hole.  It was deep for a change, and had a grenade sump and everything.

While I was rummaging around in my pack and setting the last of my C-rats out on the edge of the hole, Bob crawled over to the fighting hole next door and began to barter his stuff for some good (better?) rats.  It was almost dark.  Then, suddenly, there was a burst of automatic weapons fire, just as the dirt of our hole started kicking up.  Several of the cans we’d set out went flying.  To this day I don’t know why I wasn’t hit, because the can I’d set directly in front of me hit me in the helmet covering me with ham and limas.  As I instinctively squeezed down into the hole (puckering my little you-know-what into the size of a peanut), Bob comes flying in landing right on top of me.  The ensuing, rapid exchange of words and gunfire  went something like this:

“Jesus f***ing Christ, do you always have to land on me like that!!?”

(As if this happened all of the time. . .) 

“Didn’t realize I was so hungry!” he quips, letting off a burst with his M-14 on automatic.

“Well, dinners shot!” I said with disgust, wiping off a chunk of lima bean with my sleeve.  

Then we both opened up, even though we couldn’t see a thing.  I liked Bob.  He always displayed a sense of humor – even in the damnedest of situations. 

JULY 21, 1966

I started the day out dog-tired again.  After the initial automatic weapons fire from the night before, we’d been placed on 100% alert (everybody stays awake).  And, who could sleep through mortars anyway?

I was placed on point again… for most of the day.  To me, it was an honor to be on point, although to this day, I cannot explain why.  Guess I felt like I was good at an important job or something.  Being able to see things that others couldn’t.  At least hoping you could see things . . .

My squad leader, Cpl. Bill Troy, first noticed that I had a gift for tracking on Okinawa.  We were up in the Northern Training Area (NTA), on a night maneuver, moving along the same kind of creeks we were dealing with now.  After trudging along for most of the night, or what seemed like most of the night, I said to Troy,

“Are we supposed to get ambushed tonight?”

“No, you idiot.  Why?”  He whispers back at me in the dark.

“Well, because there’s been a lot of traffic in front of us for about the past hour.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”  he sez to me, a little irritated.

“Don’t you see the heel marks on the trail?” I sez matter-of-factly.

“No, I don’t see any heel marks.  Show me!”  (So, I practically put his face in   them trying to point them out in the dark.  More touch than see.)

“How can you tell how long ago they’ve been here?”  he snaps.

I found myself musing over it after I’d shown the others.  I wondered how my obituary would’ve read? Twentieth Century Marine warrior – killed by a crossbow.   

THE AMBUSH