Guns Up! - Johnnie M. Clark - Mass Market Paperback - REISSUE

WELCOME TO THE FIFTH MARINES AND THE BATTLE FOR TRUOI BRIDGE The one comforting thought was that I wasn't alone. The plane bulged with young Marine Corps faces. Private First Class Richard Chan was the only one I knew very well. We had been together since Parris Island, the Marine Corps boot camp. Chan had been born in Red China. His father and mother smuggled him out as an infant. He wasn't your average Marine. Besides being Chinese-American, he had his pre-med degree from the University of Tennessee with a minor in ministry. He could have been playing doctor in New York, but he joined the Corps because he felt that he owed the country a debt for taking him in. Corny as it might sound, he also wanted to be the best, a Marine, a feeling we all shared. We couldn't get away from each other. Bunkies at Parris Island, bunkies at ITR (Infantry Training Regiment) School, bunkies at jungle warfare school in Camp Pendleton, California. Now we sat beside each other on a plane landing in Da Nang. The blistering sun stung my eyes as I reached the first step of the drab gray departing ramp. I tried to be ready to duck. Scuttlebutt had it that one planeload of Marines had gotten hit on the runway, but I couldn't hear any gunshots, just some moronic sergeant screaming, "Move it! Move it! Move it!" By the time I reached the bottom of the ramp, my eyes adjusted enough to see a hot blue sky without a single cloud. A sleek, impressive camouflaged Phantom jet whined to a stop nearby. Thundering artillery echoed across the airstrip. The Marine in front of me whistled. "Man! They mean business." God, I thought, this is the real thing. I'm in a war. I mumbled a quick prayer, something I hadn't done since I was fourteen. A skinny-looking helicopter floated down one hundred meters to our right. Its camouflaged body bristled with rockets and machine guns. The roar of another camouflaged Phantom streaking down a runway snatched my eyes as it sprang off the ground and climbed sharply above the steep green mountains surrounding Da Nang. We double-timed over to a processing area. It was a couple of hundred yards away, but by the time we stopped, I was dripping wet. The pilot of the Braniff had said it was 119 degrees. I'd thought he'd been joking. The Tet Offensive was in full swing, and the battle for Hue City had covered the front page of every newspaper back home. On TV the house-to-house fighting looked like World War II films. Chan stood in front of me in the alphabetical line of Marines filing past a loud dispersing officer. Each man handed him a set of orders which he grabbed quickly and stamped with a big rubber stamp as he screamed, "Fifth Marines!" I tapped Chan on the shoulder. "Why's everybody going to the Fifth Marines? They can't need this many replacements." Chan looked over his shoulder with one of those "Boy have I got news for you" looks. "Oh, I think they might have accommodations for us. That's the regiment that's taking Hue City." "Thanks, buddy," I said with a hard slap on his back. "I can always depend on you to find a bright spot in all this." "Move it! Move it! Move it!" shouted the sergeant. A moment later the big rubber stamp came down on my orders like the authority of God. "Fifth Marines!" We marched to a large dusty tent that was surrounded by a four-foot wall of sandbags. As a darkly tanned corporal called out names, each man stepped into the tent. Inside, a corporal with a huge black mustache handed me an M16 rifle, five magazines, and two bandoliers of ammunition. One of the men got a rifle with a bullet hole thrClark, Johnnie M. is the author of 'Guns Up! - Johnnie M. Clark - Mass Market Paperback - REISSUE' with ISBN 9780345315076 and ISBN 0345315073.