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.
Chapter 2
Germany
Schwaebisch Hall
The next day I boarded a plane and was on my way to Germany. I flew out of McGuire Air Force Base and got into Germany at ten o’clock at night at Frankfurt Air Force Base. From there we got picked up on a bus and were transported to a replacement center near Nuremberg, a town rich with history. Most people know it as the town that held trials for the Nazis after World War II, many of them hanging for their war crimes.
I was only there for a day before they took me to Schwaebisch Hall. It was still winter when I arrived, so there was a thick blanket of snow covering the roads and wilderness. Living in Texas all my life I had never seen such beautiful scenery, and there was no way in hell I would have ever seen anything like this in Vietnam either.
Since I was an E5 I got my own private room in the barracks, much nicer than the shitholes I was used to in Fort Polk. On a Sunday I decided I wanted to go off the kaserne, which was just another way of saying “post” in Germany. I wanted to go to a German guesthouse, or a tavern, to try some of the German beer because I had always been told it was delicious. Since I had just arrived to Schwaebisch Hall and it was required for us to dress up anytime we left post during our first two weeks, I put on my dressy uniform and went off to explore the economy.
I wasn’t in a rush to get to the tavern, so I decided to take in more of the beautiful sights of the country. Schwaebisch Hall is a town built roughly eight hundred years ago, with beautiful architecture and cobblestone roads. In the distance I could see an elegant castle covered in a blanket of snow. The closest thing we had to a castle in Texas was a large cathedral in San Antonio, but a cathedral looks nothing like these Disneyland castles.
I completely forgot it was New Year’s Eve, so I was surprised when the tavern I ended up at that night was holding a masquerade Fasching party. You needed a costume to get in, but since I was in my nice dressy uniform, I was able to pass it off as my costume. When I got inside, I wandered around looking for an empty table but couldn’t find any open ones left.
