Day 5 & 6, Marine Operation Mauri Peak, Vietnam

Excerpt from Their War: Observations of an American Conscript in Vietnam

Copyright 1985

End of Day 5

Marine Operation Mauri Peak, Vietnam

October 10, 1968

Across the valley, NVA machine guns sporadically clattered and Marine gunners of the 5^th Regiment answered. The NVA’s persistent resistance meant we could not call in medivac helicopters to evacuate our wounded or theirs. After instructing Ishay and Homen to keep up their radio checks through the night, I returned to the side of the wounded NVA officer. 

He had calmed down considerably from when I had seen him two hours before. He now spoke more easily to the two ARNV medics and seemed calm probably from the injections of morphine.  When I approached, he surprised me and said, “Hello.”

I squatted beside him, and asked him his name. He said he was “Dao.” In better English than mine, he said he had gone to college in Kansas until his father, an NVA colonel, had called him home to fight in the war. We chatted on and he asked me if the Beatles were still together. He asked me why America was in the war; I could not fully tell him why, but said we had more-or-less drifted into it. 

South across the valley, recoilless rifles of the 5^th Marines and those of the NVA continued trading red and emerald tracer rounds, respectively, in an obligatory exchange that signaled the end of the day and marked territory for the night.

Dao told me his grandparents had a laundromat in a hamlet south of Hanoi. He then  struggled to fumble-out a black-and-white picture of them from of his wallet. His grandparents were robust and beautiful as they celebrated their 40^th anniversary. His father and mother beamed while snuggling him between them with fourteen of his proud family.

With all the seeping shrapnel wounds, I was amazed Dao had not gone into shock. Presently two ARNV medics arrived with a stretcher and took him down the hill for evacuation later.

As recoilless rifles continued their arguments across the valley, the violent day slowly turned into a restless night as our squad lay among the dead on the red clay of the shell-scarred hill. 

Day 6

Toward morning, I woke to a soft rain, more-like a heavy mist that had slowly collected mass to become almost droplets. Around the hill, the NVA dead and we the sleeping living lay with each other at random. Among the dead was an NVA soldier whose wounds the ARVN medics had judged hopeless: he had bled to death sometime early in the night in the mercy of “shock,” which is nature’s anesthesia, and morphine. As the sky lightened and signaled a new day, the ARNV cook for our squad rose and poked-at a timid fire in the soft rain to prepare breakfast composed of an expedient ration of rice-with-whatever. 

On this peaceful morning that contrasted to the Hell of the previous day’s battle, the sky had strangely shifted and its clouds were darkly curled and boiling. I poured a cup of hot water from the cook’s working helmet, that served as a kettle in the field, and tossed in some C-Ration coffee. It was harsh and dank but somehow symbolized “home.” (Seeking symbols of home, I had once even tried the caustic C-Ration cigarettes -- small, four-packs of Chesterfields, probably leftover from the Korean War. But when I tried to inhale one, the dry, harsh vapor caught in my throat. I  decided I was not so homesick that I would sucker for TV-ad nostalgia: I would not “Walk a mile for a Camel.”)

With my token cup of C-ration coffee in hand, I gazed over the silent battlefield and up into a strange, turbulent sky. The droplets gently tapped at the dank liquid in my field cup as I strained to make sense of clouds that boiled in ways I had never seen.

Meanwhile, the dead lay in twisted, anguished postures; frozen in their last convulsive movements, while the living nursed the ends of their fading dreams. 

Then from down in the rice paddies, a flight of Tiger butterflies, perhaps drawn by the sweet smell of our dead, fluttered up the hill and landed; tender and innocent as ballerinas, onto this lush, scared shoulder of earth. 

The graceful ​butterflies went directly to the six dead and ignored us breathing eleven. They crawled over gritted teeth and open, yellowed glossed eyes, to sip on scarlet wounds that darkened in the morning’s soft, thick mist.

Hundreds more of the golden angels traveled up from the valley to our dead – until each contorted body was covered with a golden, living shroud. 

Suddenly a thin break formed in the gray clouds and released a single ray of sunlight that swept over the hill. Perhaps sensing some sort of signal, the angels lifted in unison and drifted back down into the valley.

And we were 17 on the hill.

Bo McCarver, July 25, 2020

From Greater Wapanucka

For Free-Radio Oklahoma