A Few Regrettable Words

A Few Regrettable Words

By John A. Wilson

From time to time, we all do things that we later regret, sometimes for years to come. The things that we regret may not have been done with any intent of malice toward the person that we hurt. Sometimes our most regrettable acts stem from something as simple as a few words spoken without thinking, and once said, our thoughtless words can haunt us for years. For many years now I have borne the burden of a few words spoken thoughtlessly.

In 1973, the war in Vietnam was finally drawing to a close. Richard Nixon had finally taken the necessary steps to end "Johnson’s Dirty Little War." Our troops were pulling out, slowly turning a losing battle over to the people who lived there. I was a young enlisted Marine, as gung-ho as they come. Like many young men I had an overly romanticized view of war, and no sense of my own mortality. I was anxious to get myself into the war before it was over. To me, the war represented a chance for glory. If I could just get over there before it was too late, I could come home a hero, admired by children and sought after by countless beautiful women. I knew nothing about the reality, the true horror of armed conflict. I was about to get a crash course.

The one thing that suddenly brings the reality of mortal combat crashing down on you is to find out that you are about to get sent into the heart of it. I will never forget the feeling I got when I first learned that I was going to Khe Sahn, it felt like my guts had suddenly turned to jelly. For those of you that have forgotten, Khe Sahn is the place where U.S. Marines were held under siege by the Viet Cong for several months. The communists predicted that Khe Sahn would end up just like Dien Bien Phu did back in the 50's, with the base overrun and the garrison wiped out. They forgot to take into account that there is a difference between U.S. Marines and French Paratroopers. The Marines held. Of course this was 1973, the siege had been broken long ago, but that name, Khe Sahn, still sent a shaft of fear through any Marine that heard it. I handled my fear in the finest tradition of Marine enlisted men; I talked loud and tough. An eighteen-year-old Marine Lance Corporal is not supposed to show fear.

Living conditions at Khe Sahn were, to say the least, austere. We lived in bunkers that we called "hootches." A hootch is a hole dug in the ground about 4 feet deep, around the hole, sandbags are stacked about 2 feet high, then a roof is built by laying timbers across the hole and covered with plywood, more sandbags are then stacked on top of the plywood until the timbers can hold no more weight. You never feel comfortable with the number of sandbags on your bunker. If you put enough of them on to make the bunker really shellproof, then the roof will collapse. You don’t want that to happen if you happen to be inside. A narrow trench angling down to the dirt floor provided access into the hootch. The dirt floor was covered with wooden pallets to help keep your feet out of the mud. Some of the hootches had plywood thrown over the palletts to keep the legs of your cot from falling into the cracks between the boards. This was a luxury enjoyed by officers and those crafty enough to steal a few sheets of plywood. There were, of course, no windows in the hootch. The hootches were built to protect you during a mortar attack. A window would have defeated the purpose.

Shower facilities were a little primitive and were placed a minimum of 100 yards from the nearest hootch. They claim that this was for sanitary reasons, but I think it was just another way to mess with the enlisted men. You look pretty ridiculous hot-footing it out to the shower tent wearing a towel around your waist, shower shoes on your feet and a helmet on your head. The point of this is that not everyone took a shower every day. Now, the bunkers being built below ground level did help some toward enduring the heat and humidity of Southeast Asia, but with 8 to 10 unwashed bodies living in that unventilated, cramped space, the air could be a little hard to take. Sometimes to escape the fetid air in the hooch I would crawl up on top of it and sleep. The temperature at night was almost bearable, sometimes.

There were only six of us in our little unit. We were Detachment, 3rd FSR, which means that were a small detachment from our parent unit, 3rd Force Service Regiment. 3rd FSR was a maintenance unit stationed on Okinawa. We were mainly engineers and mechanics whose job was to keep the equipment of the 3rd Marine Division operating properly. When we were detached from our parent unit, we were supposed to go to Camp Fuji, Japan. Since we were such a small unit, we were ordered to board ship with an infantry unit that was headed to Camp Fuji for cold weather training. Halfway to Japan some genius decided that we needed a few more grunts in Khe Sahn to help cover the pull-out. I think that they forgot that we were on board. That’s how Det. 3rd FSR got sent to Viet Nam by mistake. We all didn’t make it back, one of us never even made it ashore. But that’s another story.

It’s been a lot of years ago and, sadly, I’ve forgotten some of the names, but I’ll never forget the faces. Sergeant Granger was NCO of the detail, he was a bit odd, but he was all we had. There was PFC Williams, short, ebony skin, built like a tank, a welder by Military Occupational Specialty (MOS), I don’t remember ever seeing him when he wasn’t smiling. Kelly was a big Pennsylvania Irish, a good man to have at your back in a brawl, believe me-I know. Eddie Franks, from Chicago, one of the best friends I had during my years in the Marine Corps. He was the one who didn’t make it ashore alive. Then there was Pvt. Blaire. I never did learn his first name, we just called him Blaire, that seemed to be enough. Blaire was a truck driver, you couldn’t help but like him, but he was a little dense even by Marine standards. He didn’t have a lot to say most of the time, and you had to keep what conversation you had with him pretty simple, but he was a good man. He worked hard at anything you asked him to do. He was convinced that I was some kind of a genius because he overheard me explaining a rather complicated electronics problem to Franks while we were still on board ship, and he took everything I said literally. I guess he thought that I was not capable of being wrong. That fact slipped my mind once; I’ve regretted it ever since.

The Marines tend to use terms that were outdated a century ago, for instance, the "Smoking Lamp." There is no longer a lamp that tells us when it is permissible to smoke or not. The word is simply passed, "The smoking lamp is lit," meaning smoking is permitted or, "The smoking lamp is out," meaning that it is not. Everyone knew that, after dark, "the smoking lamp was out" outside of the bunkers. The glowing end of a lit cigarette can be seen for several hundred yards in the dark. That’s a pretty good target for a V.C. sniper.

One night I was lying on top of my bunker when I became aware of the fact that someone was climbing up there with me. Even in the dark I knew who it was just by the way he moved and the silhouette that he made. It was Pvt. Blaire.

"What’s up, Wilson?" he asked

"Not much," I answered, "just relaxing."

Blaire stretched out on the sandbags beside me. "Been pretty quiet tonight?" he asked.

"Haven’t heard a thing all night."

Blaire was quiet for a while.

"Do you think there’s any of them out there tonight?" he asked. Blaire always seemed to be bothered by the fact that someone might be watching him. Especially since that someone probably had a gun pointed at him.

"You never know," I told him. "Why don’t you stand up and light a smoke to find out."

"Alright." Blaire said as he scrambled to his feet.

I had forgotten that he took everything I said literally. Too late I realized what he was doing. A match flared, illuminating Blaire’s face. I tried to reach up and grab him to pull him down, but I was too late. The unmistakable sound of a 7.62mm round splitting the air cracked above my head. Blaire collapsed on top of me. I pulled him to me. The round had caught him dead center in the chest.

Blaire whispered to me, "Yeah, they’re out there."

Then the light seemed to go out of Blaire’s eyes. I wanted to scream, to shoot back, anything. But there was nothing I could do for Blaire. My thoughtless words had cost Blaire his life.