Sgt. Nojoy

The relationship between the officers and the grunts was well established. In protocol and deference you went about your uneasy way around each other. I happened to cross that boundary once and had Staff Sargent Montjoy call me to attention. He meant it and it surprised the young lieutenant who had been talking to me just moments before. My casualness in discussing a book with the lieutenant after he had interrupted my meal was too much for old Monty. The two of them had just come into the room I was in at the Leprosarium. He saw my eating peaches while I spoke to the lieutenant as disrespectful. I put the peaches down and braced until the lieutenant’s embarrassment and the pregnant pause put me to ease. Good thing, too, as I was figuring out Sgt. Montjoy was not my friend.

Monty didn’t like me since Handgrenade Hill when I was busted by the old man. He didn’t like it much that the Captain grabbed my M-16 from me while I slept. He should have and now liked my punishment. When I awoke I remember looking for my rifle. Kinda groggy over to Flash’s hooch, I suddenly realized that I had to go to the command bunker. I knew that I had left it just outside my poncho lean to. That meant that it was with the old man. I went over and into the bunker and he was waiting with my rifle in his hands. He literally threw it at me when he saw me. I cannot to this day believe that I caught the hard thrown thing with one hand. He said, ”Fill me 400 sandbags. “ I turned smartly on my heel with my weapon at ready and double timed into the soft sand. That was one strike against me.

I thought about filling 400 hundred sandbags and decided that I could do it in one day. I figured out how many minutes per sand bag and timed my work the next day. I ate a big breakfast of C-Rations and took my e-tool and a bushel of sandbags to a good spot just inside the wire. Filling a sand bag by yourself, tying it off and stacking it smartly requires effort I well appreciated by now in the Corps. Away from the sharp drop and danger on the other side of this slight rise in a sand dune not far from the South China sea, I kept up the pace all morning and broke for lunch. By then the sight was attracting marines to look and wonder what. No one came out to me and I sat and ate a quick lunch and drank a lot of water. All afternoon and into early evening I was close to 400. Sargent Montjoy came out and said that I could quit. That was enough for him. I said no, I’m going to finish it and I did. That pissed Monty off even more.

Another time he accused me of not turning around during an ambush as the end of the column is supposed to do. My squad leader, Lupey, believed Monty and sneered at me. I was able to reply that I was not the end of the column, that I directed machine gun fire at the source of our frontal attack and the M-60 was behind and to the right of me. Ask Velo!. The demo guys were behind me. We got hit as we were running like hell away from some fuzed explosives. No telling where it might fly. And a lot of C-4 went into the bouquet to blow up the village we just left. This big Staff Sargent hogged the whole thing and I don’t know if I even got to string some det cord. My memory of that period is a little fuzzy around when all the guns started shooting. I know I didn’t turn around when the shit hit the fan. My keen eyesight saw the one shooter on the left just inside that bamboo line along a path. I pointed him out to Gonzoles and he and Velo trained some good fire from the 60 in on them. When I did look back after the initial burst was over I saw nothing. The explosion had left a nice cloud backdrop. I looked very hard at the grass to see any men stalking us but there were none. Monty didn’t see very well and he was suspicious of anyone as lucky as me. He knew my reputation for flushing them out. Lupey knew it too which made me mad that he did not believe me. I suppose it was a lifer thing where I made Lupey look bad because he was my squad leader. But again, Lupey was my smoking buddy , you know, with Amos and Cropp. He was a real short timer at this point and he didn’t want any trouble either. I was nursing some burns from my own hot shell casings. I had fired in the prone position; only rising to speak to the machine gunners. They looked up at me and then redirected their fire into the tree line along with me. I must have fired a clip. I was pissed that my sleeves were up. Getting to be a short timer myself.

I stopped going to the beer hooch where Sgt. Montjoy hung out. No cold beer unless I went to China Beach. That didn’t happen unless we rotated into a part of the TAOR that supported day patrols into Danang. You didn’t get to skate ambushes which made drinking risky. Velo shot at a pogue in a six bye after rousting a few at the Green Beret club. Put a 45 round over his head. The look on his face was priceless. That soldier’s disrespect almost cost him his life. Don’t fuck with grunts. We were hiking back out to our platoon position in a rice paddy near Marble mountain.We weren’t welcome there either. So what, that was just Velo…and I like having him there with me when the shit hits the fan. He comes through. In all fairness so does Monty. In the shit he stands up. For a thirty six year old man he could hack it. He stood with me against the enemy because I was a marine too. He just hated the fact that I was a slacker. He knew that I would sand bag any patrol. If I could talk the squad leader into it, the patrol was safer. That most of us only wanted to survive this thing and not necessarily win it in a tour of duty infuriated him. He was not alone in his gungieness. Most of the lifers were gung ho. A lot of men like me, after experiencing death often and unannounced, were in survival mode. Smoke some weed to mellow out and hack it.

I escaped Monty’s grasp when I went into radar training. A couple of days back in Batallion working the gear and catching signals off the traffic made Harley Granger and me the team. We took our gear back to the Leprosarium where the platoon with attachments was located. We set up to sweep the plain in front of us, away from the sea, for 270 degrees a sweep. We manned post and stood watch with the earphones to block out the night sounds. And the hiss from the radar set never came. If I were a gook I would never come in force across that sand plain; the pine forest on the sea side came up to the buildings. The radar was useless against trees so we looked the wrong way. I felt safer; safe, too from Sgt. Montjoy because I only manned lines. He had patrols and ambushes which I was safe from for a time.

I suppose my experiences with Monty make up a time line of sorts for my tour of duty. That tenacious thread between us.