Johnnie M. Clark - Guns Up!

A Presidio Press Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright 1984 by Johnnie M. Clark
New epilogue copyright 2001 by Johnnie M. Clark

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Presidio Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1984.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-77855-0

Our bunker shuddered under the numbing explosion. Dirt, rocks, and dust poured through the firing slits. We lifted our heads in time to see another rocket sizzling toward us.

Theyre inside the wire! Red pointed as he yelled over the clamor of the screaming NVAs. Silhouettes moved across the road to our right. Shoot anything that moves!

I knew the positions to our right were being overrun; self-torturing thoughts of hand-to-hand combat darted through my mind. I thought, God, I hate knives! A fleeing Vietnamese ran by our door. Red turned and fired a burst through the opening, dropping two ARVNs five feet from the bunker. I couldnt believe what was happening. I stared at the dead ARVNs for a couple of seconds until Red started firing again. I watched the tracers of the M60 ripping into the sappers on the bridge. Only three still stood. Others tried to crawl forward.

By Johnnie M. Clark

Published by Ballantine Books:

GUNS UP!
SEMPER FIDELIS
THE OLD CORPS
NO BETTER WAY TO DIE

To the Corps, Semper Fidelis.

My lifelong thanks to my wife, Nancy, for believing in me, to Fred Wright and Marvette Carter for teaching me, to Pamela Strickler for the break of my life, and to all my friends who prayed for me.

I dedicate this book to Jesus Christ for loving me in spite of me.

I CORPS, VIETNAM, 1968

This insanity really happened. It may sound like fictionit does to me, and I lived itbut its true the way youll read it. I didnt rely on memory alone. Recently declassified secret information from the United States Marine Corps History and Museums Division, Washington, D.C., helped me in documenting some of the stories. I also had the benefit of checking the facts as I remembered them with two of the men who lived through Vietnam with me.

I was seventeen when I joined the Marine Corps, extremely naive, and dangerously close to competence in several fields of endeavor that served absolutely no purpose: football, baseball, and basketball. Obviously I was in no danger of being classified a genius. I remember sincerely fearing that the war would be over before I got there. Like I said, in no danger of being a genius.

My first twelve years were spent in the West Virginia mountains and in poverty, one being synonymous with the other, I suppose. Dont get me wrong. I dont knock West Virginia. Poor or not, mountain people have character, guts, and down-home honesty.

My moms first husband was a census taker out in the mountains of Lincoln County, right up the holler from the famous Hatfields. He first found my mom plowing a field on the McClellan farm. She was a raving beauty in those days, and he grabbed her right up. Later he got killed in the Battle of the Bulge and left her with two kids, an eighth-grade education, and a job in a bomb factory. She married my dad, who promptly lost his job and everything else right after they had my sister. They gave the kids to the grandparents because the grandparents had food. I was the last one out of the shute. Mom couldnt part with another kid, so she decided Id starve with them before she gave me up.

Dad got in a car wreck and was blind and crippled for the last seven years of his life. After he died Mom and I took off for Florida on Moms guts and no money. She married a tough man from New York, a 1935 Golden Gloves boxer and a hard worker who helped me talk Mom into signing the papers that would get me into the Corps. I was inducted in Jacksonville. They put all the inductees up at the old Florida Hotel downtown. My first night there, some wide-eyed, shirtless lunatic ran into the lobby of the hotel waving a .45-caliber pistol. I stood on the stairway not believing my eyes until he scattered four shots around the lobby. One hit the stairway right under my foot. Then he turned and ran back into the street. A minute later two Navy Shore Patrol guys burst into the lobby with pistols drawn. The desk clerk started screaming and pointing. The SPs turned and ran out. I never did find out what happened or why, but I knew a bad omen when it shot at me.

It left me with that Oh no, what have I done? feeling. You know, the feeling you get deep in the pit of your stomach when you step in a pile of dog crap and dont realize it until youve walked across the living room carpet. I didnt smell anything, but my stomach said check your boots as the big green Braniff 727 touched down in Da Nang.

The one comforting thought was that I wasnt alone. The plane bulged with young Marine Corps faces. Private First Class Richard Chan was the only one I knew very well. We had been together since Parris Island, the Marine Corps boot camp.

Chan had been born in Red China. His father and mother smuggled him out as an infant. He wasnt your average Marine. Besides being Chinese-American, he had his pre-med degree from the University of Tennessee with a minor in ministry. He could have been playing doctor in New York, but he joined the Corps because he felt that he owed the country a debt for taking him in. Corny as it might sound, he also wanted to be the best, a Marine, a feeling we all shared.

We couldnt get away from each other. Bunkies at Parris Island, bunkies at ITR (Infantry Training Regiment) School, bunkies at jungle warfare school in Camp Pendleton, California. Now we sat beside each other on a plane landing in Da Nang.

The blistering sun stung my eyes as I reached the first step of the drab gray departing ramp. I tried to be ready to duck. Scuttlebutt had it that one planeload of Marines had gotten hit on the runway, but I couldnt hear any gunshots, just some moronic sergeant screaming, Move it! Move it! Move it! By the time I reached the bottom of the ramp, my eyes adjusted enough to see a hot blue sky without a single cloud. A sleek, impressive camouflaged Phantom jet whined to a stop nearby. Thundering artillery echoed across the airstrip. The Marine in front of me whistled. Man! They mean business. God, I thought, this is the real thing. Im in a war. I mumbled a quick prayer, something I hadnt done since I was fourteen.

A skinny-looking helicopter floated down one hundred meters to our right. Its camouflaged body bristled with rockets and machine guns. The roar of another camouflaged Phantom streaking down a runway snatched my eyes as it sprang off the ground and climbed sharply above the steep green mountains surrounding Da Nang.

We double-timed over to a processing area. It was a couple of hundred yards away, but by the time we stopped, I was dripping wet. The pilot of the Braniff had said it was 119 degrees. Id thought hed been joking.