The Kid
Re: LZ BUTTONS
11.8217°N X 106.9640°E
ARTY grid: Yankee.Tango.Zulu.50289
Song Be prov. RSVIETNAM >0600.03JAN69
Nightmares always come to the guilty. It’s part of the price paid when one’s soul is surrendered. Nothing of value is received. No treasures bestowed. No wishes granted. Nothing gained. Everything lost. It didn’t matter that we were just following orders. Once we were in, there was no way out.
Arm bones, leg bones, skulls, fingers, ribs, and jaws lay everywhere. Human remains protruded grotesquely from a berm the armored bulldozers piled into a freakish Gothic barrier seven feet high, topped by three rows of concertina wire. Hanging from the wire like bizarre wind chimes, three dangling peasant skulls made a hollow clacking sound in the hot breeze, defending our position with the desiccated bodies and lingering souls of the dearly departed.
One morning, a week after we destroyed the ancient graveyard, about a hundred angry peasants in ceremonial garb, some carrying colorful paper prayer offerings, walked two miles from the old village of Song Be and assembled at LZ Button’s main gate. They’d heard the rumors and demanded to see the graves of their loved ones.
I was on bunker duty with two PFC’s near the gate. We were armed with our M16S and an M-60 machine gun. The bunkers flanking the gate had 50 cal M-2 heavy machine guns, four or five guys, and an MP, all armed with M-16 rifles. As the crowd gathered, officers from Charlie Company showed up, telling everyone to “Stand by and stay ready, ” and yelling, “Don’t shoot, keep all weapons on safe.” Ten minutes later, fifty grunts who’d been filling sandbags were recalled and assigned to bunkers near me. At my position, a crew from 1st/21st Artillery set up a 106mm recoilless rifle and loaded it with a beehive.
A couple of senior officers I had never seen before walked out to meet the villagers, hoping to calm them down. As they made their way through a zig-zag concertina corridor, I thought, “These guys are crazy.” The razorwire passage led to the crossfire point in front of the gate, right between the 50 cals, where the villagers had assembled, in the Hamburger Zone. After speaking to the crowd for twenty minutes, a second group of officers joined them. For a while, they nodded, gestured, waved their arms. When the fed-up villagers replied with angry yells, the officers rapidly retreated back inside the wire.
By noon, under the fierce sun, the growing crowd had turned into an angry mob and began pressing against the gate. It was a terrifying sight. I knew that many of us regretted destroying the graves. Everyone knew this was all about the graveyard. But I had only been in ‘Nam for two weeks and wondered how many of the villagers were Viet Cong. How could you tell? Fear made the answer obvious. To me, they were all VC.
As the minutes ticked past, the shouting became louder. People lose their minds in a mob. Things go bad fast. Someone in the crowd fired a pistol into the air, and LZ Buttons switched to Color Red. When some dipshit GI shouted, “Lock and load”, a hundred M16 bolts snapped into place. With our voodoo necklaces around our necks, we stood ready and willing to open fire, even though we knew we were about to do something truly terrible, something that would destroy us all. Platoon sergeants yelled “Stand by! Don’t shoot!” but it was probably the CS6 gas that stopped a massacre, certainly not our officers or Non Coms.
People cannot stand firm against CS, and the angry mob broke up the instant our MPs lobbed half-a-dozen grey canisters into the crowd. Choking, screaming, vomiting, the men, women, and children stumbled blindly in all directions in their trampling rush to escape the gas. Some became trapped when they ran into the maze of tangle-foot and concertina wire which surrounded the main gate. Impaled on the cruel steel, several of them were bleeding badly, held fast by the stabbing barbs, powerless to free themselves, gasping for breath in the dissipating gas. The jagged steel dug deeper each time they moved.
With the crowd neutralized by the gas, we put our weapons on “Safe”, and some of us, still wearing our gas masks, used cable cutters to free the villagers trapped in the wire. Two grunts from my squad worked as fast as they could to free one little girl who was badly entangled. She had passed out from the agonizing CS and from loss of blood, but suddenly awakened, she began to scream. I will never forget the sight of her thin, bleeding arms outstretched on the glinting wire, suspended mid-air like a tiny Christ on the Cross, unable to fall, as her grandmother shrieked and wailed, reaching through the wire to grasp her badly injured grandchild’s hand.
The grunts worked at cutting away the razor-sharp coils, trying their best not to further injure the child, but her thrashing made things much worse. She lost so much blood that it was clear she was dying. To keep her alive, a medic inserted an IV into her limp arm, and seconds later, as the last barbed strand was cut, the child slumped to the ground.
But suddenly, before the medic could lift her away, the grandmother viciously ripped out the IV, tore off the medic’s gas mask, and violently clawed at his eyes with her jagged fingernails. Spitting and howling like a banshee, she grabbed the girl by her dangling arm and dragged her off, all the while screaming into the faces of the three soldiers to keep back from the half-conscious, whimpering child… to leave her alone!
“KILL YOU!” she shrieked. “KILL YOU! KILL YOU!”
Stunned by her fury, the men stepped back as the outraged grandmother pulled the child through the dirt, dragging her by one arm, bouncing her over the rutted ground, leaving a trail of blood in the powdery dust, getting as far from the Americans as fast as possible, screaming, “KILL YOU!”
Our newly-hired local interpreters, armed with bullhorns, called out to the villagers. “You go way!” You no come back! You come, you number ten Vee Cee,” they said in broken English for us, and something entirely different to their families, their people, in their dialect, words we didn’t understand.
The villagers never returned, but not long afterward, the VC began taking their revenge. A couple of Cong would silently creep to within 50 yards of our bunkers, dig an angled hole, and place in it one of the ubiquitous 32-gallon oil drums with one end cut out. They would insert a stick of dynamite in the bottom, a couple of rolled-up blankets on top of that, a satchel charge on top of the blankets, take cover, and detonate the dynamite. When it worked, the primitive monster lofted the fifty-pound satchel charge deep inside the LZ. When it exploded, it left a crater twelve feet across and eight feet deep. The shock wave was so powerful that it ruptured blood vessels, blew out eardrums, and killed men without leaving a mark. It created a pressure wave so intense it exploded shaving cream cans inside our bunkers, turning the dirt walls milky white in a blizzard of foam. No matter what we did to stop the attacks, two or three times a week they struck. We called it the Song Be Express.
Because of what happened that morning on LZ Buttons, for the next year, I was somewhat sympathetic to civilians, though after a time, emotionally, spiritually, morally, I began to erode, gradually not caring about much except for my buddies in Echo company. Still, I hadn’t totally given up on making it home. For a short time after LZ Buttons, I believed that my life would return to normal after Vietnam, and everything would be okay. I was wrong.
Jack Parente served with Echo Recon 1-7 First Cavalry Division in ’69-’70. He was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal, and twice received the Purple Heart. He retired from the video/film production field as a producer/director in 2014. He writes the 1st/7th First Cavalry column of The Saber, newsletter of the First Cavalry Association.
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