Battle Ready (2004) Read online

  "You'll have to take over the company if I lose consciousness," I told Bob. "Or worse," I added. Bob was a good man, and capable. The officer who would normally have taken over for me, my company XO, Dan Hughes, was at the battalion command post on some coordination task. He'd try to get out to us as soon as he could, but I knew that until he came, it would be up to Bob to run the company.

  All the while, I still had a company to run. I'd been on my stomach while they had dressed my wound. Now I raised myself up a little so I could see what was going on. I noticed a rise of high ground off to our left, and sensed the enemy was trying to get up to it. From there, they could fire down our flank with devastating effect. At the same moment, it dawned on me that we could do the same to him if we got there first.

  "Get a squad with a machine gun on the hill," I told Bob. He immediately tasked one of his squad leaders, Sergeant Bamber, to take the rise. The squad rapidly moved out and took it in a quick fight.

  Meanwhile, calls of "Corpsman up!" were coming from the point team in front of us. They were taking hits.

  At that point, Doc Miller gave me a rundown of what was wrong with me. "Your back is a mess," he told me, "I can see your spine. I don't know whether or not that's been injured. If it was, then we've got to be worried about paralysis. Keep pinching your legs to be sure you have feeling. You've also lost a lot of blood, so there's a good chance you won't stay conscious." And finally: "I don't know how bad your pain is. I can give you morphine, but you're better off without it unless you absolutely need it."

  The pain wasn't actually excruciating. And besides, I really didn't want to use the morphine, because once I did I knew I was no good to Bob Myers or anybody else.

  The calls for a corpsman were growing more insistent. I looked into Doc's eyes and said, "Doc, they need you." The area between us and the point team was being raked with fire.

  He looked up from me, stood up, and yelled "Fuck!," then charged off toward the wounded.

  "We have to get the point team and the wounded back," I told Bob. "Send a squad to get them." Corporal Rocky Slawinski, the squad leader whose team was on point, had heard me. He came over to us. "I'll get them. They're my Marines," he said. He and the remainder of his squad then ran up under fire and carried back the wounded.

  It looked like we had several wounded, including my Kit Carson Scout, who was shot in the shoulder.

  During the excitement, Loi had somehow grabbed a rifle (which really pissed me off), worked his way forward toward the enemy, and then crouched down in no-man's-land, looking desperate. His former comrades had obviously seen and recognized him, and this had brought on a crisis of conscience. "They are calling my name," he kept saying, over and over. It looked to me like he was about to make a crucial decision about which team he was going to play for.

  "Take the rifle from him," I told the ITT and Bob's platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Lambert. Though he was initially reluctant to give up the weapon, his hesitation died when Staff Sergeant Lambert jacked a round into his shotgun. His "crisis of conscience" over, he gave up the rifle and moved back in our direction.

  We had another serious problem.

  There was no way we could get medevac helos in. There were no landing zones, and the enemy was tightly mixed in with us in the thick brush.

  Just as this was sinking in, two Marine CH-46 helos came up and identified themselves as our medevac birds.

  "We didn't call for you," I told them, "and we can't take you now."

  The pilot said, "I know. I just want you guys to know we're here, and we'll come in whenever or wherever you ask."

  By then, a couple of hours had passed since I'd been hit, and I was feeling weaker than ever, and cold from the loss of blood.

  Bob, who had done a great job of consolidating our position, had also found a possible LZ for the medevac helos farther down the slope. There was a rocky outcrop butting out over a cliff (the drop was several hundred feet). The pilots thought they could back up the helos against it and lower the helos' end ramps. The wounded could be loaded while they hovered. It might be a sphincter tightener for some guys, but it should work.

  I was determined to walk down to the helos in front of my Marines; I didn't want to be carried. Though I knew I wasn't going to last much longer, I managed to march/stagger, with help, down the trail to where the other wounded were gathered. Before I moved up the ramp, I gazed out at my troops. The looks of comfort, reassurance, and concern for what lay ahead from those grim faces will always stay with me.

  As the helos hovered next to the cliff, a VC raised up to take a shot at them with his RPG (rifle-propelled grenade) launcher, but a Marine spotted him and opened fire, and the VC had to duck down before he could take the shot.

  The helo crew chief strapping us into the stretchers noticed that I was shivering on the bare canvas. He took off his white, fleece-lined flight jacket to wrap around me.

  "Don't do that," I told him. "It looks new. The blood will ruin it."

  "I don't give a shit about that," he said, and laid it over me.

  Before I got on the chopper, the excitement and my adrenaline kept the pain manageable. But by the time it lifted out, it was coming on full force. I felt worse than I ever had in my life--in body, mind, and spirit.

  SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, I received a letter in the hospital from Colonel Trainor. It read:

  "I don't know if Lt. Hughes [Dan Hughes, my XO] or any of the others have written you about the events subsequent to your evac. At any rate let me fill you in. Dan and I went down to Red's pos [my first platoon's position] and Dan took command of the company. We shifted Becket [my second platoon] to the low ground. You trained your team well, Tony, they performed magnificently. We stayed on the operation for two weeks and had a real war going. Alpha [my company] had most of the action. The VC tried to prevent us from penetrating, but when Bravo [Company B] came down on them from above, they skied [ran]. After that they kept firing at us from outside the cordon. Obviously they were trying to draw us away from the area. In this they failed. It was a grand war for a while."

  He went on to add that we had suffered three killed and nine wounded during the operation, and we had killed forty-one VC of the enemy's C-111 Company.

  The day after I was hit, my company found Loi's cave complex and eighteen thousand pages of documents: dossiers, pay rosters for agents, and agent lists with names and photos of senior South Vietnamese officials. Weapons and food caches were also discovered. The intel find was the largest and most important of the war.

  "It was a pleasure having you in my command," Trainor added. "I have put you in for the Bronze Star."

  Though Trainor liked to give medals to the troops, he didn't easily give them to officers. This endeared him to all of us, and made a medal he'd recommended a special privilege. It was a great honor to receive it.

  MEDEVAC II

  The medevac helo took the wounded to the 85th Evacuation Hospital, a U.S. Army field hospital south of Danang.

  Zinni's wounds were serious enough for an immediate operation. After the pre-op X ray (rounds were still in his back), he was cleaned up and prepped, and IVs were inserted. As he lay there on his stomach after the prep, he noticed an unexpected flurry of whispers and huddling among the doctors and nurses. Something was up.

  After a time, the huddles broke up, and a nurse pulled a chair up to his gurney, turned it around, and sat down backward, with her face almost touching Zinni's.

  "I'm the senior nurse," she said. "Can you clearly understand me?"

  "Yeah," Zinni said.

  "We have recently received an experimental drug called ketamine," she continued, "and we'd like to use it on you. An officer like you can give us good feedback on its effectiveness."

  Zinni gave her a tentative nod. These were medical people. He trusted them to know what they were doing.

  "The drug is experimental," she added. "We'll need your permission before we can use it. You should know that you'll remain conscious throughout the
operation and won't have tubes jammed down your throat, the way you normally might in an operation of this kind."

  "That sounds good," Zinni said. "But how can I be conscious?"

  "It's a hallucinogen," she said, "but it's an effective anesthetic without the ill effects of normal anesthesia."

  "I guess that's okay," Zinni answered, "and not having tubes jammed down my throat is appealing. So let's do it."

  "That's a good decision," she said. "I'm sure you won't regret it. And you'll be helping us."

  THE KETAMINE turned out to be living hell. Though there was no physical pain, he had nightmares so vivid that he actually felt he was living through them: One was like an out-of-body experience--floating above his body as the surgeons were cutting into it. In another, he horribly relived the chaos, carnage, and deaths of the battle where he had taken his wounds. In another, he was dead and in a box, returning to his wife and family back in the States. The nightmares were so present, powerful, and fierce that he started thrashing around wildly during the operation, and had to be tied down and heavily sedated.

  He woke up in a sweat, strapped to a bed in the intensive care unit.

  With him was his first sergeant, Alls, with tears in his eyes, grasping Zinni's hand. He'd been holding Zinni's hand since he'd arrived in intensive care (Zinni had been vaguely aware of the squeeze; it had been a small and welcome comfort). After giving Zinni a heads-up about his company--who had been hit and evaced--he left.

  "You went through a really rough trip," the nurse told him after he had gone.

  "I know," Zinni told her. "I still remember it."

  At that moment, he tried to move. And that was when he began to realize something was wrong. Not much above his waist worked right--like his arms.

  Later, the surgeon explained why. "As we removed the rounds from your back," he said, "we couldn't just clean the wound and put you back together. The injury had wrecked too much. What we had to do, in order to prevent infection, was to debride the wound. That is, cut away about a third of the muscle tissue on your back and side. You've got a pretty big crater back there," he added sympathetically.

  "What's going to happen," the surgeon went on, "is we'll keep you here for about a week, then we'll send you to Guam for extensive physical therapy. There they'll also take skin grafts taken from your legs and butt to cover the hole in your back.

  "I have to be honest with you," he concluded. "I doubt if you'll regain full use of your arms and back."

  This was a shock. "What will this mean for my family and my future?" Zinni asked himself.

  On his way out, the surgeon gave Zinni one of the rounds he'd dug out of his back.

  The next week was tough. Twice a day the medics literally ripped the bandages off the wound, with the most excruciating pain he'd ever known. Before this ritual, any troops on the ward who could move left the area. It was too painful to witness.

  "Sir, you're really fucked up," a wounded lance corporal told him. "You should see your back."

  "No, thanks," Zinni thought.

  AFTER A few days, he was able to get up and walk a little. It wasn't easy, but he was able to get himself upright and to shuffle around the ward. The troops on the ward did everything to help.

  One day, a nurse came in with disturbing news. Zinni's Kit Carson Scout (wounded in the same engagement and now in another ward of the hospital) was in bad shape.

  "He has a shoulder wound," she said. "It's not serious. So there's no reason he should be doing so badly. But we don't think he's going to make it. It's as if he's lost his will to live."

  This did not surprise Zinni. He'd experienced the fatalism of the Vietnamese many times before when he was an adviser. But that experience also gave him an idea how he might help his scout. "Can you move him into the bed next to me?" he asked.

  "We really shouldn't," she said. "Our policy is to keep the Vietnamese patients separate. But," she added, "in this case we can make an exception."

  Zinni spent the next several days keeping his scout going. His family on their visits also helped.

  After days of touch and go, he came out of his funk.

  One day, Zinni felt strong enough to try to find the troops from his company who'd been medevaced when he was; but after a search of the wards he only found one still confined to the hospital--Lance Corporal Maui, a big strapping Hawaiian kid from the point team. He'd been hit in the ankle and had a badly screwed-up leg. He and Zinni had a good talk, but it was clear he was depressed; he didn't know if he would fully recover.

  But that wasn't the only thing bothering him. Something larger was on his mind; and after the two men had talked for a while, he blurted it out. "Sir, why are we here?" he asked.

  Zinni gave him an answer, but it was the "party line" response; and by then he realized that was "piss-poor," as he thinks of it now: "I knew we were fighting a war that neither the South Vietnamese nor the American people were backing, and we were doing it with a lousy strategy, the wrong policies, and terrible tactics. After I walked away from Corporal Maui, I swore that from then on no troops of mine would ever again get such a shitty answer from me. They'd know from me why we were fighting. And if I felt something was wrong that put the lives of our troops in needless risk, I swore I would speak out, never hesitating to put my own career on the line for doing what was right by my men."

  AFTER A WEEK, Zinni's time in Vietnam came to an end. His stretcher was loaded on another medevac plane headed for Guam.

  Several hours later, lying on his bed in the ward of the Guam hospital, he began thinking about the dressing on his back. It had been there for two days. Removing it was going to be agonizing.

  Later, a corpsman came in to discuss his injury. "You're lucky," he said. "The finest surgeon in the Navy will be handling your case."

  At that moment, a doctor appeared at the side of Zinni's bed. "Let's take a look at this guy's wound," he said gruffly.

  Zinni began his ritual of rolling slowly over on his stomach and putting a death grip on the bed rails.

  "What the hell are you doing?" the doctor said.

  Zinni explained the procedure back at the hospital in Vietnam.

  "You're shittin' me," he said. And then he said to the corpsman, "Make him happy."

  Zinni got a shot in each shoulder that made him very happy. Then the corpsman soaked the dressing in a solution that loosened the adhesive. A few minutes later, he simply lifted off the bandage.

  "I wanted to kill the other medics who'd ripped it off twice a day," Zinni says now.

  After examining the wound, the surgeon explained what would be done. "In a couple of days, I'll close the wound," he said. "I'm going to reattach muscles in your back." In other words, he saw no need to take muscle tissue from elsewhere in Zinni's body. "If you're willing to do serious physical therapy afterward, you can be back to normal. But it's going to take a lot of work . . . not to mention good luck in avoiding infection."

  That was very good news. Zinni's morale was instantly raised higher than it had been since he was wounded; and he began to give serious thought to recovering and getting back to his company.

  Two days later, he was wheeled into the operating room. The operation was a total success, and the physical therapy soon started paying off--though he knew he had a very long way to go. His body was doing strange things; muscles and nerves were all mixed up; when something touched his back, he felt it on his chest. He had to get used to all kinds of new muscle "hookups." But they worked!

  During the next month, Zinni endured a few localized infections, requiring massive doses of penicillin, but at the end of the month he'd recovered enough to leave the hospital.

  Zinni begged to go back to Vietnam. He knew that was where he belonged. His time in the hospital had convinced him more than ever of that. Though the doctor was very reluctant, he liked Zinni's drive and his eagerness to get back with his guys. He gave in and released him to full duty, but with a promise to continue to work out.

  Zinni promise
d.

  His orders sent him to Okinawa . . . "a stop off on the way back to Nam," he thought.

  IN THE SPRING of 1975, Vietnam collapsed, abandoned by the U.S. whose people could no longer support the war.

  The Vietnamese Marines were badly mauled in the final battles. The remnants fought on in the hills for a time, and then the Marines ceased to exist.23

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE POINT OF THE SPEAR

  THOUGHOUT HIS CONVALESCENCE, Zinni remained unaware that the Vietnam War had ended for him when he was evacuated from the Que Son Mountains.

  By late December 1970, he had recovered enough to be transferred to Camp Hauge on Okinawa, where every Marine posted in the Western Pacific (including Vietnam) had to go for processing. When he arrived, Zinni expected a short stay, swiftly followed by return to duty to his unit in Vietnam. But new regulations, reflecting the growing reduction in U.S. forces, ended that hope: Since he'd been wounded and evacuated for more than thirty days, he was not allowed to return to combat. Neither could he go back to the States, since he had convinced the doctors, despite their strong concerns, to release him to full duty. Nor, finally, could he be assigned to an infantry unit based in Okinawa, such as the 3rd Marine Division, recently returned from Vietnam, since they were potentially redeployable to Vietnam, and Zinni could not be deployed there, by virtue of the rule previously stated. He had learned firsthand about catch-22s.

  Zinni spent the remaining eight months of his yearlong Vietnam tour in the 3rd Force Service Regiment (3rd FSR), a logistics unit based at Camp Foster, Okinawa.

  He expected to be bored. He was wrong.

  Camp Foster was not boring. In fact, if his wish had been for combat, then his wish was granted. Camp Foster proved to be not all that different from a "real" combat zone . . . in many ways tougher than Vietnam.

  After a few days of administrative processing, he set out to report in to 3rd FSR. His total possessions included a Red Cross-donated shaving kit and civilian clothes purchased out of his meager pay advance from the tiny post exchange at Camp Hauge.