When the chopper landed, we received incoming rounds. The second round hit Charlie Company’s tube on its yoke. The gunner and assistant gunner flipped slowly up in the air like rag dolls; both men were dead by the time they hit the ground. To set up near where a helicopter would land was clearly asking for trouble.

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Later, a snuffie killed an NVA forward observer. In his pack was a hand-drawn map of dry rice paddy squares, labeled A1, A2, B1, B2, etc. All he had to do was wait for the Marines to pass through B3, then call in Bingo Three and fire for effect. From then on, we moved along the edge of the paddies.

While we were dug in on a hilltop near the DMZ, we got a single mortar adjustment round inside our perimeter, which wounded one Marine. Sometime after he was medevaced out, Brig. Gen. Louis Metzger, the assistant division commander of the 3rd Marine Division, landed by chopper to talk with yet another new company commander, Captain John Ryan. His chopper let him and his aide out, then proceeded to circle the hill. As the general and the captain talked, the thump-thump-thump of a mortar tube sounded from the jungle valley below. ‘Tubes, sir, tubes!’ I screamed, racing up to the captain. In response I got two blank stares, then the captain’s look saying, ‘Evans, get lost. I’m making points with the general.’

General Metzger dove into our mortar pit. His aide lay outside the hole, taking his flak jacket off and putting it over the general. I remember thinking he was very brave or very stupid. He was the one who needed a flak jacket, since he was outside the hole. The general was cool under fire, not shaking like we always did during mortar, artillery and rocket fire. He mentioned that he had just returned from R&R in Hawaii, and this was a hell of a welcome back.

‘Why don’t you fire back?’ the aide asked. We knew the direction, but in the vast jungle valley the distance was anybody’s guess. We fired a round, dropped half a turn, fired a round, dropped half a turn, walking the rounds through the jungle. The NVA mortar stopped! The enemy must have thought we had spotted them, that we would only fire if we had a target. The NVA carried their rounds down the Ho Chi Minh Trail on their backs and would not want to waste any.

Two of my men died while I was a section leader, both at Con Thien. One new guy was killed so soon after he arrived that nobody knew his name. We were sitting along a trench line, cleaning weapons. At first, all three new guys dove into the trench at the sound of artillery, incoming or outgoing. To a veteran, the sound of incoming is as distinct as a drill instructor’s marching cadence. To a new guy, there is no distinction. Eventually, one of the new guys steeled himself not to dive into the trench when outgoing was fired. He would flinch, but not move. Suddenly, there was a bang-bang–recoilless rifle fire–and the rest of us dove into the trench. That fire was the worst incoming of all, since it was a direct-fire weapon and the NVA sometimes snuck up to the wire about 100 yards away. The round had hit just above our trench line, slamming into the hillside. The new guy’s head was completely gone. The other two new guys vomited into the trench. After a few minutes, I lectured them: ‘Follow your instincts. If he had, he might be alive.’

The second Marine killed was a black man from Alabama who we called ‘Lightning.’ He kept buttoned up at all times, helmet and boots on, flak jacket zipped up to the neck, even at night in the bunker. One day at dusk he got a small shrapnel bruise in his Adam’s apple. He wanted to register his wound with the company corpsman, but I told him dusk was an especially bad time to be moving around the hill because the NVA fired their big guns out of North Vietnam from the west, knowing we couldn’t spot them in the set-ting sun. We told him that we would verify his wound the next day. (After receiving three Purple Hearts, a Marine rotated home.) Lightning was afraid that the bruise would soon disappear, so he headed out anyway.

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