got yer back, rags
There was a stranger dude hanging around our cluster of hootches in base camp. He had been sleeping in the one next to ours for four or five days. I wondered if he had a buddy there sheltering him with enough floor space for a sleeping body. Could be he was waiting for Army orders to redeploy somewhere else, or is going home, I thought.
He looked like a grunt from the bush, judging by the jungle fatigues bleached white from sun and sweat, and floppy bush hat and pants wrapped tight around his legs and cinched below the knee with a stretch cord (to reduce the leg profile for sound and for brushing trip-wires strung to explosives). He carried his M-16 rifle in a nonchalant swagger over his shoulder, barrel pointing out –an absolute Army manual no-no – but a good way to piss any off by-the-book brass who might be around.
We’d see daily troop foot-traffic coming and going and thought little of it. Most were incoming FNG’s (fuckin’ new guys) heading to their new assignments, others in-country troops in-transit to Danang for transport to R&R (Rest and Recuperation) or the lucky ones clutching orders to take them back to “The World” upon completion of their tour of duty. After a while it became easy to tell the difference, just by casual observation.
Next day I asked my buddy Cardo (short for Ricardo) if he knew who this guy was. He told me they called him “Rags”, surname Ragland, James Ragland. (Few of us went without nicknames, which stuck like chewing gum under school desks.) Cardo and Rags were high school football teammates and fellow graduates from the public school in Fort Wayne, Indiana. They were casual friends in school, he said, and never close. He lost track of him after graduation, but they shared a lot of the same friends from their hometown. Rags knew Cardo was in division headquarters for they came in on the same in-country flight north from Long Binh Air Base.The next night Rags and Cardo had a reunion party of sorts in Cardo’s hootch. Cardo and his buddies joined in – any pretext would do – drinking rusted, dented cans of Falstaff beer shipped in to camp by the pallet. And of course there was the always plentiful weed flowing in from the local black market outside base, often brought up to the perimeter wire by Vietnamese kids hawking pot or a sister for other pleasure. They listened to the sounds of Hendrix and Chicago til early morning, passing weed and throwing back beer, reminiscing about their home towns, sexual conquests, sports heroics play by play, and souped-up cars. Cardo and Rags crashed on the floor, Rags wrapped in a camouflage parachute he found somewhere. I’d left before the others crashed.
As officer in charge of the Death and Casualties Unit, I had both a wide-angle and close-up lens of the ground troop movements in our division’s ever-moving areas of combat operations, and had access to all the names and rank of soldiers from battalion level on down to individual companies. It took little time to locate Rag’s unit. It was the 1st of the 506th Infantry Battalion. For months it was taking the highest casualty count against the NVA pouring in and around the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the A Shau Valley in Laos, and they guarded it tenaciously. The A Shau was just over the border in the northwest region of Vietnam below the DMZ. Continuous aerial and artillery bombardment had little effect.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the news of our troops’ presence in the A Shau reached the folks back home, who’d already grown weary of the war and no longer paid any mind to pacification campaigns, military strategies, or attempts to redefine our political aims with the country’s leaders. Letters from home confirmed my suspicions. For many of us the feeling was we were abandoned, left to count down days on short-timer calendars and fend for ourselves – and our buddies – in this hornet’s nest.
I got to know Cardo early on in my tour of duty. We arrived on base a month apart. He was in the Awards and Decorations section, responsible for field-grade officers, majors and above. Battalion and brigade commanders’ field reports were piped in to him, from which he’d write a capsulized citation in a canned format. Citations covered valor, merit and achievement. Not many creative writing skills involved. Cardo’s sardonic phrase was, “They’re padding their field reports to snap up rapid promotions back home in The World.” A major or colonel’s second or third tour meant lots of “tickets punched” in gaming the system toward career advancement, and they knew it.
“They’d circle in choppers high above the action and radio orders to troops below. Never see the bleeding red, only at night sometimes they’d see the red tracer rounds,” Cardo commented once, bitterly.
We hit it off right away for our common love of things Mexican. He was born there and came to the U.S. at age four, and was first in his family to go to college. He graduated with a major in South American History. The son of a barkeep and nurse from Boston, I majored in Anthropology at the state college and spent a year at the University of Mexico to study the Aztec culture. We were instantly simpatico.
Next time bumping into Cardo, I asked, “How’s your old buddy Rags doing? Is this dude sick or bonkers, or going through family shit back home?”
“It’s no big deal, he’s on an extended leave from the bush. He’ll be going home soon after he’s cleared for emergency medical leave,” he said. I had my doubts.
I’d bump into Rags now and then in the days that followed, usually after dark when he was taking a short breather from the hootch, where he’d stay all day as if allergic to sunlight. He knew I was a buddy of Cardo’s so he’d say a friendly word or two. He offered nothing about his extended presence, and seemed eager to end the conversation.
Then, one night after he’d had more than a few beers, I stopped by the hootch and asked him about his unit, the 1st of the 506th. He was surprised I knew. He straightened up from his lean against the wall and, slurring his words barely heard, said something about firefights and buddies blown away – then stopped, as if his head suddenly caught up with his vocal cords. Lighting a joint and cracking open another beer, he mumbled something about waiting for authorization to go on emergency family leave. His father had a stroke and was in the hospital.
A week later, Rags moved out of Cardo’s hootch and into the sandbagged bunker behind it, making this his new home. He hunkered down in it in daylight hours and slipped out at night, always with the cautious moves of a grunt.
Some of the guys in camp started whispering their suspicions about Rags being in deep shit with the Army – AWOL – though those I talked to made it clear they’d never spill the beans on him.
Catching up with Cardo late one night after guard duty, I asked him what to do about Rags: lay low like him, or leak it to the division commander, since we could possibly be accessories to his AWOL or possible desertion? Cardo grew quiet, and then, with an angry edge to his voice, told me he’d never betray him. He wasn’t a snitch. I gave him time to calm down, grinning sheepishly while holding up the two-fingered peace sign. After sucking in a few breaths and composing himself, Cardo insisted we couldn’t be complicit just because he had chosen our unit as his hiding place. Besides, it wasn’t up to us to report that we found him; it was up to his commanders and the MP’s to locate him and file charges – and all said and done, he’d have to decide to own up or be rounded up as a loose renegade. Either way he was screwed, but screwed “less to confess,” said Cardo, tickled by his clever rhyme. But he’d talk to him.
I caught up with Rags in his hideout bunker. His beard was at least a week’s growth, his eyes sallow and sunken, fixed in a trance. I told him we knew.
“It’s not your problem,” he repeated three times as if in some ritual chant. True, it really wasn’t my problem – but it felt like it was. I pleaded with him to turn himself in, the sooner the better, that not to do it would make things much worse – and maybe, just maybe, they’d eventually see it as some sort of combat trauma or temporary amnesia.
“The blood on my hands, our hands, theirs, the faces, bodies, you don’t know,” he blurted out of nowhere, his intense gaze fixed on the half-clouded crescent moon.
Two days later, Rags was gone. No one knew what had happened to him or where he’d gone. Two months after that, a few weeks before the end of my TDY (tour of duty), I got a letter from Rags in a rumpled 5x7 envelope from the naval hospital in Okinawa.
He wrote…….
Hey hombre, you shithead. I know Cardo must be State-side by now, back home screwing, drinking beer with old buddies and telling war stories of the real war he wasn’t in, that REMF (Rear Echelon Mother Fucker) son of a bitch. I had the medic make a copy of this letter. I sent it to Cardo’s parents’ address back in Fort Wayne. Hope he gets it. He’s good people. Will never forget what you guys did for me back in ‘nam. You could’ve refused to let me stay there at the base camp, or turned me in to the brass. Got to say I appreciate your friendly advice to get my shit together and work things out with the Big Green Army Machine. I was way too fucking pig-headed and scared to listen at first – but came to my senses (what was left of them). I’m in the Navy hospital in Okinawa, where serious injuries go. They flew me in from the medical field hospital in Danang. The doctors say I’ll be going home in a few months or more for rehabilitation back in the States and should get back my legs if things go as planned. They treat me like king-shit here, and the military nurses are boocoo (French, beaucoup) beautiful. And they serve real fucking food, I mean REAL hot meals, all you can eat, even steak if you want it. I’m still stuck in bed and getting fed through an IV, but just started eating soft foods yesterday. Pretty soon I’ll be able to order steak or pizza, or whatever my sorry ass wants.
Four days after we talked in the bunker, I turned myself in to my company commander, a big-time dickhead, who showed up that same day with two MP’s. They choppered me in handcuffs to my battalion base up north. They stood me in front of the brass there and told me I had a choice: I could do lots of time in the stockade at LBJ (Long Bin Jail) for combat desertion and in the end get a bad-paper discharge that would follow me the rest of life – or I could return to my platoon and they’d drop the charges, BUT I’d walk point, no questions asked, for the rest of my tour. Major Dickhead says, “They’re getting a world of hurtin’ out there, and you let them down, you son of a bitch, and I’d beat the living shit out of you right now if I could get away with it”. Nice fucking guy, right! So, I thought about picking my poison and started leaning toward the stockade at first, but finally chose to get back to my platoon in the A Shau Valley and walk point for the remaining 4 months of my tour of duty. Dickhead said, “You walk point on every mission, every patrol, shithead, or your ass will be mine.”
What a fucking deal – to rot in a cell and get bad paper or get ripped to shit in hell on point. Well, what can I say, I was an asshole then and still am. I told them I’d go back to my buddies in the bush, the ones I let down, that was the real guilt I felt. But the killing, it got to me, it was my mind spiraling down, going into hellish places. As we say in ‘nam, don’t mean nothing, man. So back I go to my platoon next morning, to the A Shau, Firebase Stonewall, to meet up with my buddies. There was no way to say sorry, and if I did, they’d spit in my eye. Except for one of the new dudes, who told me he’d do the same if he could get away with it. We got to be tight, him and me. His name was Ramon from South Side, Chicago. What really hurt was when my best buddy, Patch (for being part Apache), refused to give me his C-rat (C-rations) lima beans, my favorite, and walked away without a word.
I know what you’re thinking, so what the hell happened to you, Rags? Well, here it is, what I can remember, anyway. I was walking point (surprise) in the bush and got a little ahead of my platoon, maybe twenty yards, when an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) landed some distance to my left on the trail, and I could feel the shrapnel in my left arm as I dropped to the dirt for cover. Then the shit hit hard and heavy. I felt a terrible burning in my back, which overpowered the pain in my left arm. I stayed down with my nose in the dirt, and soon realized I couldn’t move. The firefight lasted about 10 minutes maybe. My platoon held off the NVA ambush. Our lieutenant called in artillery and gunships. They hit the gooks hard, only 2 clicks away from us and running. I couldn’t get up. The medic bandaged my back and put up a bag of morphine drip. That was the last I remember.
I woke up in the Danang field hospital. They removed the bullet from the middle of my back and the pieces of shrapnel from my left arm. From there they flew me here, to Okinawa. The doc here said I was really fucking lucky because the round just nicked my spinal cord and missed my aorta by a fraction of an inch. Don’t know why, but the guy up there is looking out for me. Sorry, Holmes, this letter is getting too damned long.
Oh yeah, by the way, that bullet in my back, it came from an M-16, not a gook AK-47. They told me just a while after I got here.
Was an accident, friendly fire, they kept saying. Don’t you just love that term, “friendly fire”?
Just like those draft notices fired at us in the mail – Friendly Fire.
May we meet again back in The World or in the Next. Yours truly, Rags
The short stories appearing on this website are fiction. The plot-line, characters and events in these pieces may contain traces drawn, consciously or unconsciously, from the author’s life experience. There is no intent, however, to present them as memoir or factual anecdote.