Journey Into Darkness

The three friends entered the bar with anticipation. Their work day was done and they looked forward to having a few drinks and, maybe if they were lucky, to hear a good story.

The three men stopped just inside the dark, smoky room and waited for their eyes to become accustomed to the light.

"There he is," Bill, the unofficial leader of the trio whispered to his two companions. He pointed to a table in the rear of the saloon. The table was empty except for a lone man.

Terry and Jack, Bill's two co-workers nodded eagerly as they followed Bill who had already begun to make his way to where the man sat, nursing a beer and staring at the table top.

When they got to the table where the man was seated, all three took a seat, uninvited. The man looked up and smiled a sad smile.

"Ah," he said softly, "So my three friends have come back to hear another story, I see." His eyes fell on Bill and held his gaze.

Bill, Terry and Jack were all large men, in their twenties, at least thirty years younger than the stranger but all three sensed something hard and dangerous in the older man. They had met him the previous night right here in this same bar and at this same table. They had no idea what his name was, though some other patrons who seemed to know the older man, called him simply, the Storyteller.

The three friends learned quickly that, for the price of a few drinks, the Storyteller would spin fascinating stories that were quite entertaining. The three friends found they loved the stories and promised to come back tonight to hear more, so here they were.

"What kind of story do you have for us tonight, old timer?" Bill asked lightly. He was not convinced that the man could top the night before. The other two friends leaned forward to hear the answer.

The Storyteller gave a wry smile and held up his nearly empty beer bottle for an answer. Bill quickly motioned to a waitress and ordered a round of drinks for the table. Only after the fresh drinks had arrived and the Storyteller had his new beer in hand, did he speak again...

His voice was low and melodious, his eyes stared fixedly out over the heads of the three friends and he began to tell his tale to his audience of three:



This is the story about one boy and his journey through darkness to manhood and the cost of the ticket for that ride.

What is his name? Funny you should ask that question. His name is not really important so let’s just call him “Doc” since that is what his men knew him by. You see Doc joined the navy to see the world, to sail the seven seas, and see exotic ports. He was seventeen and wild to be away from his father’s farm and experience adventure.

Unfortunately, Doc had the bad luck to join in a time of war and even more unfortunate for him he choose to be a medic.

Within a very short time Doc found himself serving with the US Marines and after all his training he was then put on a big jet and hurled into the nightmare known as Vietnam.

In February of 68, at the ripe age of eighteen Doc found himself attached to the 2nd Bat. 5th Marine Division Alpha Company. Upon his arrival in-country Doc was consumed with excitement. Here he was at the center of history in the making.

Doc, like most kids of his generation, had grown up with the stories of World War Two and the veterans of that great war and was ingrained with the movie exploits of John Wayne. He was ready to join the ranks of all the heroes he had grown up with. Visions of glory danced in the young man’s head as he reported to his new company.

This feeling of euphoria lasted until he jumped off the truck he had hitched a ride with. Standing there on the dusty road within site of the Perfume river, Doc’s senses were assailed by the smell of death, the bodies which had not been removed from the surrounding ground after the battle the night before, and the thundering artillery rounds screaming overhead.

Doc clutched his bag and sprinted toward where a group of new recruits were being mustered up by a gunny sergeant. All around Doc and the group of new arrivals, men ran and officers yelled orders as the company and the battalion made ready to push off to action. Through this chaos of sound and action the grizzled gunny sergeant stalked as if he owned the ground. With yells and curses he marshaled his young charges and began to direct them on to their new home units. When he got to Doc he stood looking at the young man a long moment.

“You the new medic for alpha company?” The gunny’s voice sounded like gravel in a cement mixer and his eyes bored into the young medic unblinking.

So it was that Doc was introduced to the marines with whom he would share the next thirteen months. Inserted into the gears of a giant war machine, Doc moved along with the flow of manmade energy that was poised to cross the Perfume river and assault the city of Hue and wrestle it away from the Vietcong who had taken it during the opening days of the Tet offensive. Every nerve was alive and surging with excitement as Doc, armed with is medical kit and a twelve gauge shotgun set off to war. He was ready. He knew his job and he was eager to begin and so he walked wide eyed into the meat grinder known as Hue.

Thirty days later, Doc sat at the opening to his bunker. Every muscle in his body ached, his uniform was dirty and caked with dried blood, other men’s blood. Men he had tried to save, men whose bodies he had protected with his own while he had worked feverishly over them. His face was drawn and haggard and his eyes stared off toward the outline of Hue which was finally back in friendly hands.

It had taken thirty days of continuous house to house fighting to kick the gooks out of Hue and somewhere along the way Doc had suffered his first “Death”, the death of ideals. Now Doc knew the awful truth; War was not glorious. There was no honor to be won. There was only the massive effort to stay alive as the gods of war fed man after man into the bloody madness.

Doc sat with his back against the sandbags of the bunker and reflected on the bloody fight. He remembered his first kill. It had been a young boy, not over sixteen. Doc had rushed out to help a marine who had been shot in the gut and as he worked over the stricken marine, the boy had burst out of an ally with his AK raised preparing to shoot. Doc hadn’t even thought, he just grabbed his shotgun and fired from the hip, cutting the boy almost in half with the load of double 00 buckshot, then dropped the gun and went back to working on the marine, only to find that he had already died.

Leaving the dead marine, Doc had sprinted back to cover behind a wall where he collapsed and threw up as he realized he had just taken a human life. After that it became easier. The killing took on a second nature to him and he had been surprised to find that he was beginning to hate the enemy for making him kill. A part of his mind wondered at that reaction. What could it mean?

Doc stood up from his seat at the bunker and shook off the morbid memories of Hue. The word reached him that they were leaving. After a week of rest in which the company had replaced their dead and rearmed their weapons, the Company was ready to move out. Doc moved to the staging area with the rest of the company. Silently the men of Company A mounted the Huey copters and went once more into the fire and steel of battle, their destination, Thoung Duc to relieve a fire base that had been surrounded by at least two divisions of the North Vietnamese regular army.

That operation had taken weeks to complete. Weeks of continuous fighting day and night. It was here that Doc had lost his temper. A young private had been shot in the leg and as Doc had fixed up the wound he had joked with the soldier that he had a great wound. “This is gonna get you back to the states boy!” He had laughed with the scared kid, slowly calming his patient and lifting his spirits.

“With a wound like this you are gonna be back in the real world in a week and will be a damn civilian inside a month you lucky bastard!”

The young private had laughed at this and started telling Doc all he was going to do when he got back to the world. Suddenly the boy went stiff, his mouth open and his eyes bulging, then he fell back onto the ground…..dead.

Only then did Doc hear the report of the rifle. A sniper had sighted in on Doc and when the young private had raised up to talk to him, the sniper bullet had taken him in the head. It had been a long shot, at least 800 yards.

Doc stared at the dead boy in disbelief for only a second, then, dropping his medic pack and seizing up his shotgun and the privates rifle, Doc gave a scream of anguish and sprinted into the jungle. He stalked the sniper. He offered himself as a moving target to keep the man shooting as he zeroed in on his position. Then, finally he found the tree where the sniper was hiding. He shot the sniper in both legs and when the man fell out of the tree Doc walked up to the man, kicked away his weapon and cut his throat. It was on this day that Doc suffered his next little death, the death of compassion. For Doc there would be no more prisoners. He made up his mind to kill them all.

After Thoung Duc came An Hoa then the Hai Van Pass where the company swept both sides of Highway One through the pass to make it safe for convoys. Doc’s kills mounted as he kept himself in the thick of the fighting.

As a medic he was not required to go on night patrols but he volunteered for them, even taking the point when he could over the objections of the platoon leader. He became a one man killing machine and the men started to whisper that Doc had gone “native”. He still took care of his men. He still went out under fire and retrieved the wounded, but his heart was not in it anymore, all he really wanted to do was close with the enemy and kill him.

A few times he left the lines at night alone. His face painted black and armed with a pistol and a knife, Doc would hunt the enemy, find them where they slept and kill them, returning to the camp before first light with a collection of ears as a trophy. Word soon reached the battalion commander of Doc’s nighttime forays and he was ordered to cease at once which he reluctantly did only because he no longer wanted anything to happen that might take him away from this place until the enemy was all dead.

Time began to pass in a blur. Days and nights ran together as the company went from one hot spot to the next. Doc became something of a legend in the battalion as his kills mounted and he became further and further isolated from the men around him. Doc’s legend gained mythic proportions when their forward fire base was visited one day by a Colonel from headquarters who had flown in on a Huey to see the front for himself.

The man had strode up to where doc was laying smoking a cigarette and demanded to know why Doc did not acknowledge a superior officer and why his uniform was in such sorry disrepair.

Doc immediately jumped up and came to attention. Standing ram-rod straight, Doc snapped off a sharp parade ground salute to the colonel.

“That’s more like it soldier.” The colonel sniffed and then turned and stalked off toward the perimeter wire.

The colonel had been gone only a few minutes when Doc heard the loud report of a rifle. As he well knew, a sniper in the jungle had seen that salute and now the marine corps was short one colonel!

“Fucking Butthead” Doc muttered as he reclined once again and light up a fresh smoke.
*******************************************************

After that episode, time, for Doc, seemed to compress. Over and over again he went into fire fights and patrols secretly seeking that final “death” that would end all his pain. He became more and more withdrawn from the rest of the marines, barely speaking for days at a time.

So it was that Doc embraced the lunacy of war and so it was that he flourished, not only as a healer of his men, but as a killer of some repute. Time passed. Days became months and the months passed in a blur of blood and smoke and fire.

Finally, after over twelve months of almost constant fighting, all of the rivers of Doc’s emotions came to convergence on the border between Cambodia and Vietnam. It was there that some brass hat officer at division headquarters came up with what he thought was a brilliant idea.

Long bedeviled by NVA regular troops who would strike the Americans then slip across the border into Cambodia where the Army and Marines could not follow, the genius at division came up with an idea. The next time his division was engaged by NVA regulars he would secretly airlift a force of marines into Cambodia to interdict the force and ambush it.

It didn’t take long for his chance to come. A company sized unit of NVA struck the base in Bien Hoa then slipped off toward the border. As fate would have it, it was Doc’s company that got chosen to cross the border into Cambodia and wait in ambush for the retreating Vietnamese soldiers.

The tactic worked well and the enemy was totally destroyed inside Cambodia where they thought they were safe. It worked a second time too. Then, like all good things, the tactic was overused. The third time it was tried it was once again Doc’s company that was airlifted into a blocking position, only this time there was a Division of North Vietnamese troops waiting just the other side of the border to spring an ambush of its own.

The North Vietnamese sprung their trap and suddenly Doc and his company found themselves in a fight for their lives. Greatly outnumbered, in a country they weren’t supposed to be in, the company split up. Doc’s platoon fought a rear-guard action while the rest of the company withdrew quickly toward the border.

In the savage fight that followed, Doc’s platoon slowly withdrew toward the border, buying time for their fellow marines. At times the fighting was close with the enemy, no more than yards from the marines who had to keep on the move to keep from being surrounded.

Twice Doc was almost overtaken as he stopped to treat and retrieve a fallen marine. Both times he picked up the wounded soldier and carried him over his shoulder as he slowly backed away from the oncoming enemy, firing his shotgun as he went, then after reaching the rest of the platoon he would leave the wounded soldier and go back toward the enemy.

Doc’s world became a red haze filled with deafening sounds of explosions and the zinging of bullets. He knew in his heart that this was his last battle, everything would end here in this godforsaken jungle near a river with no name and he was at peace finally.
.
Doc and the rest of the rearguard reached the river and there they threw up a hasty defensive line and began to transport the wounded over into Vietnam where the rest of the company waited for an airlift. The pursuing enemy division had been savaged by the retreating marines but were determined to close with their enemy and destroy the marines before they could escape.

In one final push they closed with the decimated marines and the fighting became almost point blank. It was then that Doc was knocked off his feet by a blow that felt like a fist in the stomach. Laying on the ground, Doc felt his midriff with one hand and felt a wetness spreading and running down his legs. Looking at his hand, Doc saw that it was covered in blood. This was it. This was the one that was going to kill him and when he realized this, something snapped in Doc.

He staggered to his feet and, discarding his empty shotgun, he picked up a dead marine’s m-16 and let out a primal scream as he rushed toward his enemy. Doc fired from the hip, point blank into the rushing Vietnamese soldiers who momentarily halted their charge in the face of this mad American.

From out of nowhere three more marines were suddenly at Doc’s side. One of them was his only real friend in the outfit, Jimmy Hooks who had been with him from the beginning.

“Uh Doc Ya might wanna rethink this charge.” He drawled. “That wound don’t look that bad.”

Doc was about to chance a look down at himself when a grenade exploded nearby, knocking him off his feet. He tried to rise but found his left leg wouldn’t support his weight.

Jimmy was there at his side again, the other two marines were both dead by then. Leaning down, Jimmy grabbed doc and hoisted him on his shoulder and turned and ran back toward the river. They made it to the tree line bordering the river where the remaining men of the platoon was putting up covering fire.

Just as Jimmy reached the trees he was struck in the back by a bullet. He tumbled into the trees dumping Doc hard on the ground. Doc hit the ground and rolled over grabbing his med kit with one hand as he crawled over to where Jimmy lay. Grabbing him by the shoulder, Doc turned the marine over and slammed a pressure bandage over the wound.

“Hang in Jimbo.” He yelled in his friends ear. “The bullet went in low and to the left so I think you are gonna be ok. Want a hit of morph?”

Jimmy looked at his friend and grinned. “Naw, its numb at the moment. Just hand me my rifle and lets finish this thing.”

Doc handed him his rifle and moved over next to him behind some fallen logs. They both began firing as the enemy rushed their position. Doc looked to his left and to his right. He could count less than thirty marines in positions and returning fire.

The Lieutenant and the First Sergeant were nowhere to be seen. A few yards to his left he spotted the body of the radio operator laying sprawled in the dirt, a bullet through his head. The radio was still on his back and seemed to be unharmed. It suddenly came to Doc what he had to do.

“Jimmy. I don’t see the ell-tee or first sergeant but the radio is over there. These gooks will be finished with us real quick at this rate and the rest of the company is just over the river and they will chew them up too. I gotta stop them here.”

Jimmy looked at Doc for a long minute then nodded his head. “Hell, we knew we weren’t gonna get out of nam alive….Make the call bud.”

Doc crawled over to where the dead radio operator was laying and grabbed the handset of the radio. All around him marines were fighting and dying. The enemy was almost into their lines and he knew they would overwhelm them within minutes.

He made the call for an air strike.

“Drop on my smoke.” He told the startled jet pilot, one of a group that had been circling near the border in case they were needed.

Dropping the hand set, Doc crawled back to where Jimmy lay firing his weapon. Doc reached in his web belt and took out a smoke grenade. Pulling the pin, he threw the grenade a few feet in front of his position and watched as the smoke began to billow up as a marker for the air force.

“It would have been nice if you could have thrown that damn thing just a bit farther buddy.” Jimmy grinned at him.

“Won’t do no good Jim, they are all over us now.” Doc grinned back savagely.

Just then three Vietnamese appeared right in front of their position coming on at a dead run and firing their Ak’s as they ran..

Jimmy dropped one then the other two were in their position. Doc grabbed one of the soldiers and pulled him forward as he brought his knife up into the man’s gut. Doc was carried backward by the enemy’s momentum and they both fell in a heap with the dead man on top of doc.

It was then Doc heard the scream of the incoming jets and he looked up in time to see the bombs tumbling toward the ground in front of him. He shut his eyes and said a prayer. The tremendous blasts and concussion turned his world first bright fiery red then it went to black and he knew no more.
**************************************************************

Doc woke up in the hospital in Siagon two days later. His first emotion was disappointment, he was still alive. Next came the numbness that invaded his soul. He doubted if he would ever feel anything again.

He was told that Jimmy had survived the fight and was already on his way home. Fifteen others had survived also. Fifteen out of almost eighty in the platoon……….how many, he wondered, had died because of that radio call.

Then came the visit by a general who congratulated Doc and pinned a couple of medals on his hospital shirt. Doc ignored the man as he babbled about what a brave thing he had done then he had turned his back on the general and lay facing the wall until the man had left. It was then that Doc finally allowed the tears to come. He cried until he fell asleep.

They judged him mentally and physically unfit for duty then told him he was going home. To Doc he WAS home. The world was now a foreign place to him.

It was not until he was on the plane and winging over the pacific that he allowed himself to hope. Maybe he could go home again. Maybe he could heal his soul and fit into normal society once more. By the time the plane touched down in Los Angles he had convinced himself that maybe it WAS finally over. Doc was about to suffer the last of the small deaths that had brought him this far.

When the plane landed and taxied to a stop Doc was one of the first men to get off. Carrying his duffle bag on one shoulder, he limped out the door of the plane and the first thing he saw was the large group of protesters standing holding signs behind the security fence.

The signs said “Baby Killer” “Murderer” and “Fascist Pig”. The kids carrying those signs were mostly his age, college students who had never heard a shot fired in anger.

Then it came crashing into Doc’s mind and soul that this was to be his welcome home. There would be no support, no parades, no “well done”, he was truly a stranger in his own land now. He and his comrades were outcasts.

Doc left the plane and walked across the tarmac looking neither left or right, ignoring the shouts and the taunts, even ignoring the eggs and other things thrown at him. He marched into the terminal and went straight to the men’s room where he changed into civilian clothes. He then crammed his uniform and his duffle bag and his medals and all things military into the trash bin and walked back outside………..into the world.

************************************************

The storyteller fell silent, his tale ended. The table was littered with empty beer bottles and full ashtrays and a smoky haze lay in the air.

Bill, Terry and Jack looked at each other then turned to the old stranger...

"Is that it?" Bill asked him. "What happened to Doc?"

"Yeah," Terry chimed in, "Is he still alive?"

The old man held up a hand to stop further questions. He sat back in his chair and smiled that same sad smile again.

"Is Doc still alive, What happened to him?" The old man repeated softly. "Well I tell you what, Doc is alive and he is doing ok , for an old man. I see him every morning when I shave and he is still hanging in there."

Before any of the three friends could say anything, the old man continued.

"I might just have another story in me," he said with a smile. "If , that is, you boys are still buying the drinks. Maybe I can tell you a funny story next, since I am no where near drunk enough yet to go home and sleep. What do you say, up for another one?"