Word: bunkered
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Crawling out of his sandbagged bunker, the helmeted Marine blinks in the afternoon light, cocks his head for a moment, listening intently, and then starts jogtrotting down the hill. With frayed trousers flapping and a cumbersome flak jacket jiggling against his bare chest, he makes his way through the debris of cartridge boxes and C-ration cans. Deep, viscous red mud sucks at his boots and oozes up to his knees as he struggles down the slope. Suddenly, from high above, comes a familiar, chilling whine. "Incoming!" someone yells, and the leatherneck flattens himself in the mud. The artillery shell...
...something less than an enviable position. The 100 or so Communist guns that are trained on them with lethal accuracy are difficult to spot and almost impossible to wipe out except by direct hits. With ranges of up to 18 miles and guns as big as 152-mm. "bunker crackers," enemy ordnance plasters the Marine outposts almost at will. By firing only a few rounds and then quickly moving their artillery pieces or hiding them-in bunkers scooped out behind thick jungle foliage, in caves or under houses-the Communists have been largely successful in preventing U.S. forward observers from...
Meals are served three times a day in an underground bunker, but only to five men at a time-so that there will never be too many men in the same place in the event of a direct hit. No one ventures above ground without his flak jacket and helmet, although most Marines carry their helmets and go bareheaded in order to hear incoming shells better. The first warning is the boom of the gun across the Ben Hai River separating the two Viet Nams. Then comes the quavering whistle of the shell tearing through the air, followed quickly...
Next to the shells, the Marines' biggest complaint is the company they must keep in their bunkers: rats, mosquitoes and flies. "The rats jump right on top of you when you are asleep," says Pfc. Robert Smith, 19. One particularly large rat is named Rockefeller, "because he always gets the best of everything." The standard tour of duty in one of the DMZ camps is 30 days, a brevity that helps make possible the grim humor with which the Marines accept their defensive watch. Atop Major Froncek's bunker stands a six-foot-high handmade catapult, which...
...Echo in the U.S. Well aware that a successful turnout would destroy their claim to represent the South Vietnamese people, the Viet Cong condemned the election weeks in advance as a "hoax." It was so rigged, they said, that its results would be on U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker's desk days before the actual balloting. By clandestine radio, furtive pamphlet and whispered word of mouth, they warned the peasants to boycott the polls on pain of death. To make sure that their message was understood, during election week Viet Cong terrorists killed 190 civilians, wounded 426 and kidnaped another...