The Body Burning Detail by Bill Jones

Author:Bill Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2018-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

The command element of the battery, along with the FDC, is headquartered in a tent. As the song continues, a couple of my Marines (who I know are married and have kids) clear their throats and walk outside to hide their misty-eyed emotions. Music, I quickly conclude, does indeed soothe the savage beast.

On radio watch one night an artillery round screams over the top of the tent and explodes behind us, setting off an inferno of stored fuel drums. Mortars are bad enough but these big arty rounds are far more destructive and scare the hell out of everybody. In what can be described as a moment of wild and sheer panic, we run from the tent for a nearby trench and pile on top of one another. After a few minutes it seems there are no more rounds on the way and nobody is hurt, so we amble back to the tent.

“Who has radio watch?” the Skipper asks. (He is the first one in the trench.)

“I do, Sir,” I answer. I am wondering where this is going.

“Well,” the Skipper says, “you left your post. You should never leave your post.”

I don’t answer or even attempt to defend myself. Perhaps I should have said I was following my commanding officer’s lead, but there is no way I would have stayed exposed in the tent, alone, while everyone else bolted and sought cover. It is not mentioned again.

The single artillery round, we find out later, has been fired from a U.S. Army battery some miles away. “Friendly fire,” it is determined, although once again it does not seem all that friendly to me. (They need to come up with a more appropriate name for these catastrophic errors.) We curse the Army as incompetent “dogfaces,” but our battery is guilty of the same offense some months before—only with far more tragic results. A short round, fired in error by one of our guns, kills several Marines. The baby-faced gun crew chief responsible, a young kid who didn’t want the job in the first place, is so utterly destroyed by the incident that he is sent to the rear. I don’t know what happened to him or if he faced any charges as a result of this sad affair, because we never see him again. Completely devastated, the kid is obviously grief stricken and will carry his mistake with him to his grave. An accurate figure of Americans killed by these so-called friendly fire incidents in this strange and confusing war with no front lines will probably never be known.

A USO show is held several days later on an improvised stage. Two- to three-hundred Marines, mostly grunts, assemble on a hillside that serves as an amphitheater. The band is from Australia and when three round-eyed, short-skirted women appear, there is a thunderous roar of approval and genuine surprise. Round-eyed women! Scantily clad beauties! Here? In this shithole in the middle of nowhere? This is unquestionably some kind of miracle.

The band leads off with a song popular at the time: Archie Bell and the Drells with “Tighten Up.

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