Flashing Saber: Three Years in Vietnam by Matthew Brennan

Author:Matthew Brennan [Brennan, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir, War, War.Vietnam, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781503102941
Amazon: B00UTKELYC
Goodreads: 26042925
Publisher: Matthew Brennan
Published: 1985-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

ONE KEG OF BEER

(October-January, 1967-1968)

Blue boarded slicks on my second day with the troop and was flown over the flat, rocky countryside west of Chu Lai. I missed the palm trees of the lush Bong Son Plains. Here was an ugly region of stunted trees that resembled dwarf cedars. As the lift birds raced “on the deck” at 110 knots past the southern outskirts of Tam Ky, lines of white dots appeared along the paddy dikes ahead of us. When the slicks reached those dots, the bare, smiling bottoms of hundreds of women, bracing themselves against dikes and squatting in paddy water, greeted us. The slicks flew close and low, hopping over the dikes behind them, wind-whipping shirts, and blowing off straw hats that weren’t tied on or held on. Blues on my side of the slick hopped up and down in their seats, waving and shouting. The others leaned over their seats to watch.

“Good morning, morning shitters!” they hollered. “Good morning, morning shitters!”

A few young women waved back. It became a daily routine. I looked forward to seeing those feminine derrieres in the early morning mist.

We didn’t remain at LZ Porrazzo for long. Sergeant Willy grabbed his harness and shouted, “Let’s go Blue! We got a mission!”

Pilots and infantrymen, all of whom had been lounging in the shade of their assigned slicks, climbed aboard.

The village below us was neat, its rice paddies ready for harvest. Gunships were diving, rocketing a hedgerow and the trees behind it. We jumped into ankle-deep paddies. Three North Vietnamese in green uniforms were dead behind the hedgerow. Three more broke from cover in front of us and charged, hunched over as if running into a headwind. A deafening volley from twenty rifles knocked them down. Random bullets clacked by from deeper inside the village. We belly-crawled among the bodies as a scout helicopter hovered over us. When the gunner fired into the first huts, at least a dozen AKs shot back. Willy listened to a message from the pilots.

“Pull back to the paddies! Pull back! They don’t want us in deeper! Pull back!”

The scout gunner was shooting with a continuous chatter, drawing enemy fire as we scooted along the paddy side of the hedgerow. Part of the hedgerow concealed a trench. Carter looked to the side as he rounded a curve near our rice paddy PZ, and saw two NVA below the bushes. He (probably) killed them with a long burst, and lobbed a grenade for effect. We hid behind paddy dikes as the slicks clattered in at rice paddy level to extract us.

That was my introduction to Chu Lai. The NVA garrisoned prosperous villages that were apparently untouched by years of warfare. The vacation with Dusty Delta was really over.

The next day I rode along with Chuck’s squad on a one-ship raid. The scouts had cornered a wounded soldier in a stream. The troop commander needed more information about the area and Chuck was under orders to capture the man. As we arrived out of breath at the stream, Hut stepped forward and fired his machine gun in an arc.

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