Word: leathernecked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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 bursts 50 yards from him, gouging out a small crater through the slime. A breeze wafts away the cloud of smoke and detritus, the rifleman listens for a moment and then stands up. "Man!" he exclaims, scraping mud from his caked body...
...Leatherneck Square. The Communists fire their artillery at Con Thien on a random schedule to keep the Marines guessing when the next bombardment or the lone round of explosives will crunch into the camp. "Those single rounds are the most dangerous," says a young Marine. "But the barrages wear you down. You just lie there shaking and saying 'Please, Christ, just get me out of this...
...northwest corner of Leatherneck Square, Con Thien is well covered by U.S. guns. Approximately seven miles south of it lies Cam Lo at the southwest corner of the square. About the same distance east lies Gio Linh, at the northeast corner, with Dong Ha to its south. All four outposts, in addition to others farther south, notably Camp Carroll, can provide artillery support for one another or reinforcements if necessary...
...easy to take has been the choking dust, now damped down by the first northern monsoons, and the fact that the nearest liberty is the Marine headquarters town of Danang. "That's like being allowed to leave the state prison to go to the county jail," snorts one leatherneck. In Danang and Phu Bai, the rains have turned the infernal red dust into infernal red mud, in which a truck can sink to its door handles. On the perimeters, the marines and infantrymen live like soldiers on perimeters everywhere-primitively, with pup tents, ponchos and C rations. The airmen...
...year-old leatherneck is almost comically nonchalant in describing his space experience, "You just go up, fly around, do your job, and come down." It's like flying an airplane, but "you're much more dependent on your physical senses," he summarizes. The closest he ever came to rhapsodizing Friday was while showing a breathtaking color slide of an astronaut's-eye view of the earth. Said he, "It's nice to look at this thing in between your chores...