Jon Rumble – One Last Time

I was in the rear healing up from injuries and decided to take in a movie at the Rest & Recuperation Center.  The movie was The Green Berets with John Wayne, a comedy at the time for the Marines in the seats.  Hollywood’s view of war was laughable.

As I walked back out into the sunlight I heard someone behind me say, “Mike!” so I looked over my shoulder but saw only the other jarheads squinting in the afternoon sun.  “Scott!” was the next thing I heard but my glance to the rear still didn’t result in anyone I knew.  I continued to walk until I heard, “Mike Scott!” so I stopped and turned finding myself face to face with a stranger.  I guess my blank stare gave it away, I had no idea who this guy was or what he wanted.  “You don’t know who I am do you?”, he said laughing, “It’s me Jon, Jon Rumble!”  I said, “No you’re not”  “Jon is a friend of mine I went to High School with and you’re not him”.  This was the start of a two-hour conversation.  It was Jon Rumble, just not the one I remembered from Woodson High School.  He had a lot of weight stripped off by the Marines and he now had a mustache.  He was an extrovert in school to say the least but now, he had a more of an edge, he was very sure of himself.  We swapped stories about the days back in DC area until I believed it was my friend.  Then he began to tell me about the unit he was in, 2nd Combined Action Group.  He was excited about what they were doing.  He felt good about job.  Here was a group that worked in a village at the villagers invitation.  They protected the village and taught the local militia to defend the people as well.  They did projects that helped the village such as digging wells, building schools, helping with the harvest, etc, etc. but this was not the Peace Corps.  The teams saw more combat than any other unit in Vietnam and suffered high losses yet, more Marines volunteered for another tour with the CAP teams than any other unit in the military.  Once a team pacified a village it moved on and never had a village fall back into communists hands.  They were winning the hearts and minds of the people and the war.  Jon was so over the top with enthusiasm for the program it didn’t take  long to talk me in to sending in an application for consideration.

I was accepted and sent to CAP School in DaNang were I attended language  and culture classes as well as small unit tactics.  Two weeks of sun up to sun down classes.  I wrote home to my girl friend, Ace Tally telling her about seeing Jon and how I was going to visit his team as soon as I could.  Just after arriving at my assigned team 2-2-2, I got a letter back from Ace that began with, “I guess you haven’t heard about Jon…..”.

While his brother, Jed was visiting him, the village was attacked and Jon died, defending a small village thousands of miles from his home.

I can’t help thinking that these things happen for a reason.  A one in a million meeting on the other side of the earth, why, what for.   I drink a shot of rum every Marine Corps Birthday and whisper names as I slam the glass to the table.  I will never forget, and maybe that’s it.   Semper Fidelis

The Hole

Once again it was very hot.   Something like 115 degrees.  If it wasn’t raining there it was hot.  That day was hot.  It felt like my back was actually cooking under the heavy flack jacket and pack as I hacked my way through the elephant grass.  I was walking point for the platoon.  Normally the pointman was watching for everything, ambushes, booby traps, freshly used trails etc, etc.  But, not today, not in the elephant grass it was too thick.  If there was an enemy soldier in there with me, we would be face to face before we saw each other.  He would be as pissed off as I was at the elephant grass, also known as razor grass.  This stuff is like the grass on your front lawn except it’s 12 ft high and it’s edges cut you as you brush past it.  Because it cuts you a long sleeve shirt has to be worn,  making you hotter if it was possible.  I hacked away with my M-16, using it like a really dull machete, knocking down the endless grass and getting hotter and hotter.  Rick Martin walked away effortlessly behind me.  His path had been cleared for him by my agony and hard work.  The heat had a way of making you forget the danger all around you.  I forgot that I was just a few miles away from North Vietnam in 1968.  One minute I was fighting my way through the wall of grass the next minute I was falling.  My first reaction was to stretch out my arms to get hold of something to stop my fall.  The hole I was in was only about three feet wide so I just dug my elbows into the dirt.  I managed to stop myself from going to the bottom of the hole.  Below me, just darkness and my mind raced for an explanation of what happened and where I was.  Was this an enemy tunnel, or a man-trap, were there bamboo spikes below me or were there NVA soldiers aiming their AK-47s up at me.  I stretched out my toes to try to feel for spikes and felt nothing.  My elbows and arms were shaking and I knew I couldn’t hold on much longer.  A pair of hands grabbed my pack straps and lifted me back into the daylight.  Martin had been walking about fifteen feet behind me watching me beat the grass out of the way.  He looked briefly to the side and when he looked back to me I was gone.  Just a perfect path in the grass but, I wasn’t there anymore.  He said the first place he looked was up.  He couldn’t figure where else I could have gone.  When he got to the end of the path there was my helmet below him.  I had fallen into a dud hole.  A B-52 had once dropped a bomb here and it had not gone off so it just made a very deep hole hidden in the tall grass.  If I hadn’t dug my elbows in to stop myself I would have fallen another thirty feet or so and hit the fins of the old bomb.  If it had gone off you wouldn’t be reading this.  My elbows still give me a little trouble now and then.

Post & Pages

As I learn more about WordPress I am cleaning up my blog and making it easier to work with.  For those of you that find the war related stories a bit too heavy I have moved them to the Vietnam Page.  I will continue to organize.  I also inadvertently deleted some comments today and I am sorry for screwing up.  Please don’t think I’m blowing you off, far from it.  Mike