Read Online Run Between the Raindrops by Dale A. Dye - Free Book Online Page A

strap-hangers.
    According to a quick and dirty, almost rambling briefing we get from the battalion operations officer, Hotel spent most of the day yesterday trying to take the Vietnamese Treasury building. They didn’t make it, but their attack did a great deal to protect Alpha Company’s exposed flank as they moved on the MACV Compound. Hotel has been ordered to try again today and that gives us a short-term plan of action. Steve is adjusting his gear as we prepare to move, squinting through rain-speckled glasses at a sunless sky.
    “Battalion Six says Hotel takes the Treasury Building today. No excuses. He also says transportation should be rolling for Phu Bai before dark tonight. We could get some of this early shit out with them. Got any interest in making a trip to the rear?”
    The question is both rhetorical and ridiculous. We both have a great deal of interest in that but neither of us will go. There’s a mutual feeling that we are onto something big here, something unusual that needs witnessing. The stories can wait until we’ve got some idea how to end them. “I’m thinking we should stick with Hotel for a while. That Treasury Building deal sounds like good copy.” It’s superficial but sufficient to send us off in search of Hotel Company.
    “You know,” he says as we amble off toward the area where a guide tells us we can find the 2/5 CP, “we could probably get bylines in every paper in the English-speaking world with our stuff out of here.” He leaves it hanging for the fantasy it is. The civilian scribblers and TV types will be flooding into Hue before long, and anything we might write won’t stand a chance against their sources, outlets, and big-gun reputations. Both of us have been down that road before.
    A platoon of Horrible Hogs is hunched in a drainage ditch full of slimy water that echoes with colorful bitching from the yawning men waiting for word to move. All eyes are locked on the Treasury Building located about three blocks from us up a broad, tree-lined street running parallel to the Perfume River. The day’s objective is up there squatting like an ornate mausoleum beyond a large courtyard surrounded by a stout stone fence.
    The shitty weather is disorienting. How can it be this cold in Southeast Asia? What happened to the land of tropical jungles and sweltering heat? Smelly water ripples around my shivering haunches as a grunt invades my space. He’s wearing a wide grin on his bristly face as he opens a conversation with a bog-standard Marine Corps introduction. “Where you from in The World, man?”
    He doesn’t really give a shit about some little burg in Southeast Missouri, but talking beats staring and brooding. By force of habit rather than any real interest, I pull my weather-beaten notebook and a pen out as I return the query. He grins and nods while I scribble. “I’m from Amarillo, Texas. Name’s Autry—like the cowboy—first name Leon but they call me Gene. Figures, right?”
    Scribbles record his responses to a few more obligatory questions about his job and his time in The Nam to date. Gene Autry digs out a plastic box that contains his smokes and offers me one. I’ve got a similar PX purchased box in my pocket and we talk for a while about how valuable things like that are in wet weather like the stuff that we are experiencing in Hue. Then it’s time to compare our Zippos. His is engraved with an image of Snoopy sitting on his dog house and giving the world the big middle digit. “Fuck ’em all,” Gene Autry says. “There it is,” I reply.
    He’s a fairly handsome guy for a grunt rifleman with clear blue eyes and the scrubby vestiges of a mustache that his light beard won’t really support beneath his runny nose. Autry points to a scar beside his right eye and tells me that’s his first Purple Heart, grenade shrapnel that just missed sending him back to Amarillo as a one-eyed wonder. No biggie, he shrugs and launches into the life and times of PFC Gene