Word: leathernecked
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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...
...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...
...rifle-a one-in-a-million shot that burst his weapon and gashed his face. Yet another private stepped into the gaping steel jaws of a Viet Cong mantrap, and when a fourth marine rushed to his aid, the rescuer stumbled onto a sharpened bamboo stake-injuring his leatherneck pride more than his derri...
...buzzing with rumors that a beefed-up U.S. Army division of nearly 20,000 men might be sent over to guard key bases. The fact that 6,000 marines were moved out of Hawaii last week to replace the 3,500 who landed in Viet Nam might indicate further leatherneck reinforcements at any moment...