As I sat on a cot in a bunker shooting the breeze with some other Marines, Staff Sergeant Alvarado came down the trench line. I heard his jungle boots in the dirt. He stuck his head in the bunker and nodded at me. “You’re rotating home, Rodgers.”
I said, “Now?” The day I’d waited over twelve months for had finally arrived? A couple of days before he’d said the same thing and when I jumped up and ran out of the bunker, a different one, shouting, “I’m gone, I’m gone,” he stood against the wall of the trench with his arms folded before he burst into laughter and said, “Just messing with you.
This time he nodded. “You are going home. Get your gear.”
I gathered my web gear and wool blanket and poncho liner and then hurried to Supply for my sea bag before going to the platoon command post to make sure I was out of there. Lieutenant Dillon wished me well, and Alvarado gave me a package to mail to his uncle in Texas. I rushed to the company office for my orders and then to the command post to get my orders endorsed by the Skipper.
The bunker was packed with Marines: radio operators, the gunny, the executive officer, Mr. Long, and the Skipper looking battered by war and wearing an arm in a sling.
Mr. Long looked at my orders and told me I wasn’t due to rotate until the following day, but the Skipper looked at me, smiled and remarked, “He did a good job out there the other day. Let him go.”
Mr. Long said, “Okay, but you may get some resistance from Battalion when you go to get your orders endorsed.”
In the span of less than an hour, I saw the last of—at least for over four decades—the best officers I ever served under in the USMC: Ken Pipes, John Dillon, Ben Long.
At Battalion Headquarters I was routed into the office of a major whose name I do not remember. I reported, at attention, and said what I’d come to do. He looked at my orders and then at me and at my orders and said, “Were you on that patrol on the 30th?”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
“What was your job?”
“Radio operator for Second Platoon’s platoon sergeant.”
He nodded and looked at my orders, then looked at me with an icy stare before signing. My heart thumped and danced. I was going home.
Before handing me my orders, he stood and stuck out his hand. I was shocked. No officer had ever shaken my hand. I took it, we shook, he said, “You Marines are what makes the Marine Corps the finest light infantry the world has ever known. Semper Fidelis.”
He teared up and I did too and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
I went down the trench to the location where you caught choppers down to the coast. We sat in a low spot as CH-46s, Hueys and CH-34s came in and out hauling men and ammo and gear, taking body bags. I waited.
A Marine I served with before Nam came along, told me he’d been with 1/9 and was going home. We waited.
Dust blew when the choppers landed and took off.
We waited.
A breeze blew in and rattled the black body bags.
We waited.
Then we finally boarded a CH-46, circled the base once and then flew east. I didn’t sit. The crew chief told me to sit. I stood. I imagined flying over NVA emplacements and taking gunfire through the bottom of the chopper and I figured if I stood it would lessen the chances of taking rounds through the ass.
We crossed wild and green country pocked by bomb craters and then a land of rice paddies before we landed at Dong Ha close to the north coast of South Vietnam. At the transient barracks I checked in, grabbed a rack in a hooch, took a long, long, long shower, the hot water like memories of home. Then chow, hot, too…real food.
Later, a bunch of us stood around the hooches and smoked our nicotine. I kept imagining incoming. I looked for holes to hide in. There were slit trenches outside each hooch. I knew where I’d head. The entire time we stood there I never said a word about the ordeal at Khe Sanh, and the 1/9 Marine who’d ridden out of Khe Sanh with me didn’t either.
The next morning, I woke early, headed to the air strip for a ride to Phu Bai and our battalion rear. A Marine I’d served with at Camp Pendleton sat on a table waiting for a ride. We talked for a minute, where he’d been, where I’d been. Originally we’d both been in Bravo but then he got an opportunity to go to a cush job at Division as a courier. I remember when it happened. We were on 881 S in May of 1967. He came over and found me and told me he was leaving.
There at the Dong Ha airport, I told him he’d made the right decision. He nodded. A plane landed and I got on. I marched to Headquarters, turned in my weapon and assorted other gear and found a hooch full of men from Bravo Company. In the morning, I drew pay and we bought beer and got a galvanized tub and ice from the chow hall and took it all back to the hooch and started to enjoy a moment when no one was trying to kill us.
We hadn’t had a full can when the duty officer at the battalion rear, a 1st lieutenant, burst through the door with an indignant look on his face. I tried to explain. I said it was my fault, I was going home, so to hell with him.
He wasn’t sympathetic. So we hauled the iced beer up to the headquarters office. As we came in, there sat Major Bruce A. Green who liked to remind us that when he was a captain and our company commander, that BA stood for badass.
He was another officer I respected for his courage and integrity. I’d walked point for him many times during our occupation of Hill 881 South in the fall of the year.
When he first cast his fierce glance on me, I winced, but he never said a word. That night, my beer was shared with everybody in the transient barracks at Battalion Rear.
The next morning, I caught a flight to Danang.
I checked in at the new transient barracks.
A staff sergeant said, “You’re way behind on your inoculations. Time to get them caught up.”
I said, “I’m going home, Staff Sergeant, so I don’t really need any more shots.”
He said, “You want to go home?”
I caught a bus out to the dispensary and checked in. The corpsmen lined up on my right and left, needles in their hands, smiles on their faces. I’ve forgotten the list of inoculations. It was long and painful. I was a pincushion. They enjoyed delivering my discomfort. Later the lymph nodes in my underarms swelled.
I headed for the PX and on the way ran into Q Ray Jacobs, my old squad leader. We sat at a counter and ate cheeseburgers and drank milk shakes. What a glorious indulgence, a reward for still having all our limbs, the eyes, the body.
We headed to the Navy hospital to check on some of our comrades who’d been wounded on March 30, but when we got there, we found out they’d been transferred to hospital ships or to Japan.
Then we headed to the club over by the airfield. We started strong, beer and beer and beer, before we headed to see Jake’s buddy who was in a missile battery nearby.
We joined him at the enlisted men’s club to visit and watch a film. I ordered a case of beer for our table but the club manager, some staff sergeant, shut the club down because he suspected we’d create some mayhem even after I offered to spread the beer around. The usual dose of nightly beer ran at two cans so I figured by sharing, it was okay to go ahead and watch the movie. But he shut it down anyway.
Outside, Jake said goodbye to his friend, and we staggered off to find the transient barracks. Right before we exited the missile installation, Jake said, “Wait,” and we headed back to the club, darting from shadow to shadow like we were warriors.
When we got there, we noticed the lights were on inside and Jake said, “Get up on the roof.” I did.
He followed and whispered, “When that son-of-a-bitch comes out, let’s jump him. You get his legs and I’ll pound his head.”
And we did.
We awoke in a tent full of cots in a field full of tents, the sun shining, the sound of planes taking off and landing. Our heads hammered and our mouths were dry. Jake headed for the airfield and a flight back to Bravo and I headed to the transient barracks where I lay in bed all day and fretted about getting home.
That night I boarded a bus to the airfield and went through an inspection of all my gear. As I stood in line with the contents of my sea bag spread on a table, Michael O’Hara, who’d been in my fireteam in the fall of 1967, entered with another detail of men headed home. He grinned and laughed and said, “Three purple hearts, going home six months early.”
Outside, waiting for a ride, I saw another bus head out. O’Hara smiled at me through a window. My detail then went to the airfield, boarded a C-130 and headed for Okinawa.
When we departed the plane, a group of snappy Marine NCOs waited for us and began a litany of orders, suggestions, and how they too had been in Nam, so they understood everything that was going through our minds and thoughts.
I looked down the line at the two-hundred or so filthy, thin, gaunt-faced Marines and back at the starched utilities on the men doing the talking. Somone on our side laughed. The sound, for a moment, was alone and singular, but then, another and another until we all laughed.
The next morning, they stuck me on a work detail to clean the base officers’ quarters. I did it until noon and then went AWOL playing basketball by myself in a gym devoid of other Marines.
At night I hit the EM club and beer and beer and beer and the new music I’d never heard: Van Morrison, Spencer Davis Trio, Aretha.
On the day we departed for home—the day I’d wanted for almost thirteen months, on that day—we loaded onto a Continental Airlines 707 headed for El Toro Air Station outside Santa Ana, California.
We sat in the plane on the tarmac for over an hour as the pilot kept reassuring us we would go home and the civilian flight attendants, all women, moved back and forth, delivering soft drinks and water. It had been months since any of us had seen women like those. And if the others were like me, we dreamed.
I sat next to a porthole window on the side of the flight and watched B-52s lumber down the runway, their wings waving up and down as if they bid me farewell. I thought about their destinations and the bombs falling and the bodies blown into little bloody chunks and wondered if some of them were headed to my former Khe Sanh home where my mates might still be locked in deadly combat.
After we took off, I sat on the edge of my seat like a kid on the way to the Dairy Queen for his first ever soft serve cone.
As we flew east, the pilot pointed out the island of Iwo Jima. I looked out the window as we flew over and it was so small, so insignificant there in the miles and miles of sky and scudding clouds, the ocean.
I felt deep in my guts the rage and anger of the place, and wondered if, decades later, Khe Sanh might feel the same in posterity. And to me.
After arriving at El Toro, we were bused to the LA airport. I had called and called my folks from LA but there was no answer, so I called my best friend Mikel’s mother—funny how after over a year, her phone number was banked in my memory—and she said she’d pass the word.
As I waited to catch the plane, I found a bar and ordered a beer. I looked at all the hustle and bustle. I half expected people to welcome me home. But I don’t think they cared.
I was joined by a boot Marine headed out on leave before he hit the ground in Nam. He asked me what it was like. I tried to tell him.
I said the same thing I’d been told upon arriving in Nam, “Keep your head down.”
I arrived in Tucson greeted by Mikel, his fiancé, Susan, also a good friend, and my parents. We went to Mikel and Susan’s favorite Mexican food restaurant, El Charro, and as we ate tacos and burros and enchiladas, I tried to tell the four of them what I’d been through at the Siege of Khe Sanh.
As I talked, and the talk was disjointed and halting, not one of them looked at me.
After fifty-seven years, the salient image in my mind from that moment is the light shining toward me from the top of my father’s balding head.
~ Ken Rodgers
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