If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home by Tim O'Brien

Author:Tim O'Brien [O'Brien, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography.War
ISBN: 0767904435
Google: n7hLTGrxEIsC
Amazon: B005FY5YSY
Barnesnoble: B005FY5YSY
Goodreads: 12453731
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 1973-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

April went on without lilacs. Without rain. When the choppers came in, they scooped dunes of red dust off LZ Minuteman, stirring the soil in their rotor blades, spewing clouds of rust color for a hundred yards. We learned to hide when the choppers made their drops. We stuffed our clean paper and clothes and apples into plastic bags. Minuteman was like the planet Mars. The place was desolate, hostile, utterly and vastly boring.

The days in April multiplied like twins, sextuplets, each identical. We played during the days. Volleyball. Gin. Tag. Poker or chess. Mad Mark had fun with his riot gas grenades, tossing them into a bunker and watching the artillery officer scramble out in tears. Captain Johansen and the battalion commander, Colonel Daud, flew overhead in a helicopter, dumping gas grenades onto the LZ. It was a training exercise. The idea was to test our reaction time, to make sure our gas masks were functioning. Mostly, though, it was to pass away the month of April.

At night we were supposed to send out ambushes, orders of Colonel Daud. Sometimes we did, other times, we did not. If the officers decided that the men were too tired or too restless for a night’s ambush, they would prepare a set of grid coordinates and call them into battalion headquarters. It would be a false report, a fake. The artilleryman would radio phony information to the big guns in the rear. The 105s or 155s would blast out their expensive rounds of marking explosives, and the lieutenant would call back his bogus adjustments, chewing out someone in the rear for poor marksmanship. During the night’s radio watch, we would call our nonexistent ambush, asking for a nonexistent situation report. We’d pause a moment, change our voice by a decibel, and answer our own call: “Sit Rep is negative. Out.” We did this once an hour for the entire night, covering the possibility that higher headquarters might be monitoring the net. Foolproof. The enlisted men, all of us, were grateful to Alpha’s officers. And the officers justified it, muttering that Colonel Daud was a greenhorn, too damn gung-ho. Phony ambushes were good for morale, best game we played on LZ Minuteman.

The rumors persisted. Near the end of the month they picked up steam; they became specific. Alpha Company would be CA’d into the My Lai area. A long operation. The helicopters would carry us to Pinkville before the end of the month. But the rumors had no source. To ask for a source was folly, for you would eventually be referred to the sun or to the rice or to a man who would have to ask someone else. Johansen only shrugged.

Four days before the end of the month, we were pulled off LZ Minuteman. We were given three days of rest in Chu Lai, a sprawling and safe military base along the South China Sea.

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