Perfect Night for Leeches

by Jim Chaffee

It was one of those nights. The winter monsoon. Fucking rain so heavy even the flares up behind the Marble Mountains barely glowed, their phosphorescent trails wavering in and out of the dense atmosphere like fading memories of youth.

We were exploding leeches. We’d collected them from a bunch of Marines who’d spent most of the last twenty-four hours bleeding in a paddy somewhere around An Hoa, or maybe near Hill 10. Maybe in the Go Noi. Didn’t make a rat’s ass to us where they’d been. It was a surprise they’d been able to medevac them at all, with the rain so heavy. We stabilized the poor bastards, got them out of triage and off to surgery. Carefully collecting the leaches we’d picked off them, for later.

Now was leech time. Injecting their chambered bodies with acetone and lighting them, watching them explode in a mass of dark tissue and human blood. Living bombs.

Morrison came down to join us. He was off duty but couldn’t sleep, which was often the case with him. He was youngest among us but had more time in, mostly reserve, and liked to be called Pappy. Almost no one called him that. He looked more like a kid. He slept only a couple hours a night, usually joining us late to see what interesting events he could become part of.

There was a shit-load of noise from near the big mountain, the one the Marines called The Chin Strap for its profile. Nui Thuy Son to the Vietnamese. It sat on the beach, on the ocean side of the battalion road. We guessed it was the CAP unit on the far side of the Marble Mountains but were wrong. We got a call for an ambulance.

Morrison grabbed the call, pissing me off.

At least he was in boots and utilities. One night I’d grabbed a call in flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt, dressed like I was going to the beach. I showed up at the dump at the foot of Nui Tho Son, the Marble Mountain the Marine’s called The Crow’s Nest, a stark, naked rock outcropping rising straight up out of the sandy earth opposite the road from The Chin Strap. An ANGLICO spotter team and their 106 recoilless rifle perched on top, unseen in the night.

Actually we were near the beach, but the Marines had set up a perimeter and a lot of guys wearing flak-jackets and helmets were running around with M-16s. One of those jeep pick-ups was burning, five guys lying around it. From the color of their belts I could tell they were Navy, not Marines, probably security for the Seabee camp just beside the dump.

I heard someone mutter “Fucking crazy corpsman” when I hopped out of the cracker-box ambulance, dressed as I was, unarmed, with only a unit one, warily eyeing the burning truck. Helicopter gunships searched the base of The Crow’s Nest with spotlights. A couple fancy leather belts, not your standard issue web belts, smoldered in the dirt beside the burning truck, cooking off .45 rounds. Flares drifting earthward on parachutes, swaying like lamps hanging from the clouds, cast a flickering luminescence over the whole scene. Shadows mutated to the rhythm of their swinging descent. The reek of cordite peppered with the pungency of scorched hair and flesh hung in the air.

Didn’t make much difference, my being there. I could see by the flare light they were a hopeless mess. Burned and staring fish-eyed at the sky, except one guy who continued to breathe. But there was a little fire burning inside the cavity in his chest, and I figured it made no sense to work on him. His bladder let loose while I stood watching, backing up my silent argument. A crowd of onlookers encouraged me to save the wounded, as if I were a god. I gave them my best I’m sorry expression and said “Forget it.”

A cluster of Marines escorted me to the road, surrounding me for security, trudging through the deep sand like a green creature bristling with weapons. In the back of a jeep two young Vietnamese girls with a little of their intestines peeking out lay on their backs. No other wounds were visible, so I guessed they’d gotten eviscerated from the concussion they had caused by setting off a mine under the now burned-out truck. They had come from a nearby village, probably Binh Ky, where they had likely fled after their deed, nefarious or heroic a matter of viewpoint. I motioned to the hospital, just up a the road about a click or so, and sent them on their way. Not for me to judge.

Anyway, at least Pappy was dressed for the job.

The noise kept up all night, like a long, boring argument: the chatter of M-16s and staccato of a pair of M-60 machine guns responding to the rattling AK-47s, punctuated with explosions. Pappy didn’t come back until morning.

With morning, an oversized VC flag flew above the Chin Strap, overlooking all the American installations. Before we got Pappy back, we got a bunch of wounded Montagnards loaded inside a six-by. They were MIKE forces from the Fifth Special Forces camp just up the road, on the beach at the foot of the Chin Strap, inside the secure perimeter this side of the Marble Mountains.

Pappy showed up with his ambulance full of wounded Americans while we stood watching the brand new Cobra helicopter gunships work out on the mountain with rockets and machine guns, supporting the scrappy little Montagnards landed on the rocky, tree lined outer surface of the cave-riddled outcropping to root out the remaining sappers who had made a mess of their base camp.

Pappy was grinning ear to ear while he told me about his adventure with the famed Green Berets. At the gate the guards stood firing into their own compound, telling him he couldn’t get inside. He went anyway, the driver braving the fire as they headed for the dispensary. The Army medic was amazed to see a Navy Corpsman, unarmed and without any protective gear, as though he wasn’t really playing the game, show up at his door. He stayed inside, but suited Pappy and the driver up with the proper padding, gave them M-16s and sent them out.

Pappy laughed and said there were gooks everywhere, throwing satchel charges at everything. He found it riotously funny the Green Beret’s CO had been killed in the Command Bunker. Pappy hid and watched the war.
I remembered the CIA agent who had come into our care out of Dong Ha, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, loafers and wool slacks, carrying a snub nosed .38 we checked into the armory for him. He’d complained about the Green Berets at Lang Vei. He’d come down after the routing of their camp, with the crowd of refugees, glowing in the dark with jaundice. They were tough he said, those Green Berets, but they were shitty soldiers, posting no guards, not running any patrols. The NVA had snuck up on them, they said, in tanks. He’d laughed.
So here they were fucking up again, getting overrun inside a secure area and then letting the assaulting sappers place an enemy flag on the highest point around.

They fought on the Chin Strap all morning, the gunships blasting away in support of the Montagnards, more of whom were carried down to our triage. We all stayed on, this being mass casualties, but it was Pappy who had the best time.

When I looked in on him in pre-op he was bent over a wounded American with a tiny shrapnel wound on his back shoulder. Pappy seriously labored over the wound, cutting away dead skin, debriding the wound into the shape of a football so it would close properly. Whenever I went back up to pre-op he was still there, still cutting, the debridement growing. Finally, it was the size and shape of a flattened toy football. He winked at me.

Later he told me the wounded man was a Green Beret officer, arrogant as hell. The officer had asked the doctor if he would be able to make R&R in Hawaii to meet his wife in two weeks. The doctor had said certainly, it was only a small wound. Pappy saw to it he earned his Purple Heart, missing that date, ending up medevacked to Japan instead.

We cleaned out the remaining wounded from triage by noon or so. The VC flag came down an hour after the sun came up, but the Montagnards were coming in wounded all day. Not so many of them they needed us to stay on, so I left to drink a few beers and sleep. Pappy was still looking for more wounds requiring debridement.

It turned out that the Green Beanies, as he called them, had put him and the ambulance driver up for Bronze Stars. The Navy was wise enough to know he had most likely hidden out while the battle raged and rejected the citation.

Anyway, the next night was quiet. I found myself wishing for more leeches, settling instead for pinochle played on a makeshift table of two sawhorses topped by a blood-stained old piece of wood that served as a cardiac board. We played with the risk of interruption, always resenting the arrival of any cardiac arrest who would dare to destroy our game.

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