Perfect Night For Leeches - Part 1

By Jim Chaffee

One of those nights. Winter monsoon. Fucking rain so heavy flares up behind the Marble Mountains barely glowed, their phosphorescent trails wavering in the dense atmosphere like fading memories of youth.

We were exploding leeches. We’d collected them from a bunch of Marines who’d spent most of the last twenty-four hours bleeding in a paddy somewhere around An Hoa, or maybe near Hill 10. Maybe in the Go Noi. Didn’t make a rat’s ass to us where they’d been. A surprise they’d been able to medevac them at all, with the rain so fucking heavy. We stabilized the poor bastards, got them out of triage and off to surgery. All the time carefully collecting the leaches we’d picked off them, for later.

Now was leech time. Injecting the chambered bodies with acetone and lighting them, watching them explode in a mass of dark tissue and human blood. Living bombs.

Morrison came down to join us, an off-duty insomniac with no place to go. He slept only a couple hours a night, often wandering in late to see what interesting events he could become part of. The youngest corpsman in triage, he had more time in, mostly reserve, and liked to be called Pappy. Hardly anyone called him that. He looked like a kid.

A shit-load of explosions and small arms fire blasted the tedium, red and white star clusters and trails of tracers arcing into the dense night like fireworks in the deluge, all of it from near the big mountain, the one the Marines called The Chin Strap for its profile. Nui Thuy Son to the Vietnamese. It sat on the beach, on the ocean side of the battalion road. We guessed an attack on the CAP unit on the far side of the Marble Mountains but were wrong. We got a call for an ambulance.

Morrison grabbed the call, pissing me off.

At least he wore boots and utilities. One night I’d grabbed a call in flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt, dressed like I was going to the beach. I showed up at the dump at the foot of Nui Tho Son, the Marble Mountain the Marine’s called The Crow’s Nest, a stark, naked rock outcropping rising straight up out of the sandy earth opposite the road from The Chin Strap. An ANGLICO spotter team and their 106 recoilless rifle perched on top, unseen in the night.

Actually we were near the beach, but the Marines had set up a perimeter and a bunch of guys wearing flak-jackets and helmets ran around with M-16s locked and loaded. One of those jeep pick-ups blazed like a beacon, bathing five figures scattered in the sand around it in the vagaries of firelight. From the color of their belts I could tell they were Navy, not Marines, probably security for the Seabee camp just beside the dump.

I heard someone mutter “Fucking crazy corpsman” when I hopped out of the cracker-box ambulance, dressed as I was, unarmed, with only a unit one, warily eyeing the burning truck. Helicopter gunships searched the base of The Crow’s Nest with spotlights. A couple fancy leather belts, not your standard issue web belts, smoldered in the dirt beside the flaming truck, cooking off .45 rounds. Flares drifting earthward on parachutes swaying like lamps hanging from the clouds cast a flickering luminescence over the whole scene. Shadows mutated to the rhythm of their swinging descent. The reek of cordite peppered with the pungency of scorched hair and flesh hung in the air.

Didn’t make much difference, my being there. I could see by the flare light they were a hopeless mess. Burned and staring fish-eyed at the sky, except one guy who continued to breathe, a little fire burning inside the cavity in his chest. I figured it made no sense to work on him. His bladder let loose while I stood watching, backing up my silent argument. A crowd of onlookers encouraged me to save the wounded, as if I were a god. I gave them my best I’m sorry expression and muttered “Forget it.”

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