Day 6 Continued, Marine Operation Mauri Peak, October 1969

Excerpt from Their War: Observations of a Conscript in America’s War in Vietnam

Copyright 1985

Day 6 Continued

Marine Operation Mauri Peak

October 1969

In time, we living sleepers slowly rose and moved about and in the gray misty dawn; some urinated politely and privately off the side of the hill on small bushes or patches of rocks that they assumed no one would later touch. Bowel movements entailed use of an entrenching tool, part of every grunt’s gear, to dig a shallow hole; take a dump; then cover it – but not so well that the next person exploring the terrain could not spot and avoid it.

On orders from their squad leader, several ARVN grunts set about dealing with the NVA dead on the hill. The NVA had dug deep foxholes and those became their graves. One gaunt ARNV soldier took the lead in dragging and depositing the NVA dead. He did not want to touch their flesh, so he wrapped their ankles with his belt and pulled them one-by-one into the holes where he roughly dumped them at whatever angle they fell. 

Before each dead NVA soldier was deposited into the foxholes, an ARVN officer removed any personal belongings, photos and letters for any intelligence. Meanwhile, Lance Corporal Homen stripped one of the dead of his belt and wove it into his own trousers, proud to display an enemy souvenir. Ishay declined to participate in the grim harvest of souvenirs as did I.

Directed by an officer, the ARNV grunts collected NVA munitions and weapons from around the hill. At his invitation, I counted the hardware and radioed the inventory to Marine Command along with a note that NVA communications wires led off the hill to the east/northeast – along the shifts of my last fire mission. 

The rain continued off and on through the day as we lingered on the hill awaiting orders to move out that never came. As the deluge continued, the ARVN squatted on their heels with plastic “ponchos” perched above their helmets on the barrels of their M-16s, with the butts placed on the ground between their knees that formed short tent poles. Balanced on a tripod formed by their heels and their M-16s, they could maintain watch and remain dry. I sensed that their “squat” behavior was informed by an experience I had not yet had. 

Dusk came and we continued to camp on a rain-drenched hill that had become a graveyard with no markers.

Epilog: The Archeology of Battles

When you’re in a hand-to-hand battle between humans, it’s hard to know when it’s actually over. If you’re killed, it’s over for you -- and you’ll never know the statistics or the declared winner, as spun by the competing political states. Long after the news and local myths have run their courses, perhaps decades or centuries later, a residual history of your exit might be exhumed from the collective matter that resides around you, your neighbors, and the worms that feed a few inches under the Earth’s ever-evolving crust. 

Curious souls, perhaps gentle archeologists, might arrive to nudge the dirt around your splinters with spoons, or sweep with small brushes to discern, collect and weigh your bashed and segmented bones. They might run tests on charcoal found in ashes near your bones to speculate how long ago you ceased to move. If they are enthused and well-funded to pursue in their faint questions, they might then compile data about you and your fellow-dead who had similar DNA. If they gather enough data, they might then compare that mass with that of other “finds” of dissimilar DNA in the bones of your enemies. They might then declare a battle victor, based on a crude, mechanical scale that compares the exhumed weight of both sides. But they won’t – they will be peaceful, timid scientists, hesitant to cast a social verdict, no matter what history’s judges might have already declared. And they are sorely aware that their accumulations are always incomplete and thus shun conjecture about the politics of written history.

Until discovered, we the pacified fallen nestle in the vast, silent graveyards of the planet’s biological struggle; waiting to share with science what’s left amongst our pleasant worms and eroding munitions. 

​

Bo McCarver

From Greater Wapanucka, Oklahoma

August 3, 2020