The plan, as reported to us by SSG Tucker, is this:
1st squad (SGT Price) will go somewhere and do something. I don’t know because I wasn’t paying attention. I’m in 2nd, squad.
2nd squad will stay right here and organize an ambush of our NDP. The “Dinks� have a bad habit of following us around and picking up what we’ve dropped or discarded, so we’ll be waiting for them here if they show up.
3rd squad (SSG Rose) will move out and go back to a “hootch� (civilian grass shack) we’d visited the day before in hopes of catching the inhabitants at home. No one had been there when we searched it yesterday, but it showed signs of having been recently inhabited.
Those of us in the 2nd squad move our rucksacks into the bushes and hide them, then get down into positions covering the trail which bi-sects our NDP under SSG Tucker’s direction. He places Ching, our “Pig� and I in a position to see, and fire on, everything. I have visions of cutting some poor VC slob who comes to see what we’ve left behind in two and relish the thought.
The 1st squad saddles up and moves out down the trail toward the valley below.
SSG Rose and his 3rd squad put on their rucksacks, mill around a few moments, getting themselves into single file, and move off into the brush up the hill, with Gray walking point.
Tucker tells me to remove some junk I’ve placed under the camouflage band, such as a pressure bandage, and while I’m doing that, “Pops’� squad disappears into the bush. A few moments later, a VERY few moments, we hear a loud explosion and a burst of automatic weapons fire. A cloud of dense, white smoke slowly envelopes us from the bushes.
I’m lying there wondering what the hell that was, but knowing all the while what it was. Someone was dead.
Almost instantly, the radio near LT Haines comes alive. I can hear it, but I can’t understand what the voice is saying, though I recognize the voice as belonging to Charles Surface, my friend.
LT Haines, our Medic, “Doc� Yubeta, and Tucker grab their weapons and disappear up the trail, leaving the rest of us in suspension.
After this, I don’t remember it all in sequence. My memories are disjointed and unconnected, yet vivid. I recall seeing LT Haines sitting on a log and weeping, bitterly, while Doc Yubeta engulfed him in his arms. I can remember ashen faces and shock registered on someone’s face, but I can’t say whose or when, or where. I know someone came to where I was and said, “Pops is dead� but I don’t even know where I was at the time, but I’m sure it was SGT Larry West.
Tucker says now that he raced back to our perimeter, gathered up our squad, and took us to the ambush site to secure it, but I don’t remember that specifically, though I do remember peering into the spot in the bushes, behind a pile of dirt, from which the dink had blown the Claymore mine on Pops and Gray and I vaguely recall seeing a length of bamboo, with battery cells from a discarded American PRC-25 radio stuffed into it, end on end, which he had used to detonate the mine. I can remember hearing the Dustoff arrive, but I can’t remember watching it land. Maybe I wasn’t there. Maybe I was. I don’t know.
In the years since, I’ve tried to make sense of it, but I can’t. Yes, I know all the theoretical’s about sacrificing to prevent the spread of communism; of duty and honor and patriotism and service and all that other stuff, but I still can’t find any real, personal reason for their deaths. What did it accomplish? Did it affect the outcome of the war? Did it cause the enemy to do anything? Did it cause a change of any kind? No. “Pops� and Gray got up that morning, went through their personal routine, walked down that trail and died, forever. That’s all there is to it and nothing else seems adequate. Pops left behind a wife and a couple of teenaged daughters. Gray left a fiancé, I think. What have they endured for all this time and what had it all meant? I don’t know. I likely never will.
The only thing of value which anyone can take from the deaths of these two men is that they were there that morning, putting themselves, and their futures and lives, at risk. That day, they got unlucky, but that was a chance we all took and in that risk is the only thing of any importance. Both of them could have avoided Vietnam and the war, but they didn’t. Why? I don’t know. I only know they were there, they died, and it “Don’t mean nuthin’�
