I-21 - Erulisse - Tunnel Rat
Mar. 15th, 2012 10:42 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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b2memB2MeM Challenge: I-21 Maglor in History – Vietnam War, Artifacts and Weapons – Ring of Barahir
Format: Short Story
Genre: Drama
Rating: PG – minor cursing and talk of death
Warnings: None
Characters: Maglor
Pairings: None
Word Count: 1910
Summary: Experience Vietnam as seen through the thoughts of Maglor during a mission. Maglor has been walking our Earth for long Ages and fought in 1000’s of wars. His life in Vietnam is a bit more unusual though.
Tunnel Rat
I am too tall for this. But I am what they call ‘lanky’ in this era, and I have my elvish talents – I can see in almost total darkness and I have extremely acute hearing - I have a long history of survival too, although the Colonel wouldn’t know about that. My racial skills are proving useful in the tunnels, but … I am too tall for this job.
I was supposed to be assigned as a medic. That’s dangerous enough. Medics fly into combat zones in Hueys, then try to load the wounded while avoiding becoming another casualty. The next step is trying to keep the wounded alive through the flight back to home base while tracers and anti-aircraft rounds are going off all around the ‘choppers. I’ve done a lot of Huey runs and so far I’ve been safe and my injured troops have lived. I’ve been lucky.
Survival out here in the jungle isn’t a matter of skill it’s purely a matter of luck. The guy in the foxhole next to you who pokes his head up two seconds earlier than you gets popped, but you live on because you’re two seconds slower. Or maybe the platoon leader’s scouts missed a trip line which you were lucky enough to step over, but the guy five back wasn’t so lucky. More work for the medics then.
More work for the medics always. War is about death – killing the person who is trying to kill you. I’ve battled in thousands of wars on this misbegotten and forgotten land of Middle Earth and it never changes. The weapons change, the ability to kill from longer and longer distances and with greater and greater ease and precision changes, but it still comes down to us versus them. At the end of it all, trying to save and put back together the bodies that have been pulled apart, are the medics. We have thousands of medics on the ground. Every patrol has someone qualified to slap a shot of morphine into a fellow, wrap a bandage and treat trauma wounds and jungle rot. But there’s a big difference between that kind of medicine and mine.
I’m a healer and a darned good one. I could help in the surgery tents, and when I’m near the hospitals, I try to. But Command wants me here – wriggling my way through the narrow darkness – because I can find them. I can find the ones who are lost, and I can find the traps, the gas pockets, and the flooded sections. I don’t get lost, I bring my men back alive, I can find the wounded and the dead, and usually, I can get both the living and the dead out of these underground death traps. Other people can heal, not many others can find the missing in the tunnels.
Cu Chi isn’t the only complex of tunnels. But it’s been around for a long, long time. They were using some of these tunnels back when they fought the French at Dien Bien Phu. The French were smart. They left. The US moved into their vacuum and decided to help the South fight this civil war. Everything for democracy. Democracy – PLEASE! The Command isn’t fighting for fucking democracy, they’re fighting against communism. They don’t look at the long view. Governments come and go, but the people who live on the land are going to fight to keep their homes. Let the politicians talk. Their hot air won’t make a bit of difference in that long view. Men are dying here every day to achieve a victory that will never come, in a land where they have no roots. The people here want us out of Vietnam, if they are honest. They want a land without land mines, trip cords, and casual dead bodies. The people back home want us out of Vietnam too. Hell, I want out of Vietnam too, but the North isn’t giving up and my tour isn’t over until late November.
I’ve heard it said that they have more than 30 square miles in this tunnel system. When I think of how Command miscounts casualty and enemy numbers, I’ll bet that the tunnels are even bigger than that. We’re at the entrance now and I warn my guys to be as quiet as they can. No talking, minimal light. I tell them that I’ll lead and I arrange them in the order I want them deployed behind me. My two steadiest guys are positioned as Number One and Number Nine in my column. Number Ten is my brawn. He’ll be dragging the living and the dead back to the entrance for us.
So I crawl into the tunnels to find our guys. We have five missing from a scouting group of rats who went in a few hours ago. The Lieutenant’s sent ten men with me. I shivered at that number, the same number of elves who went with Finrod when he was presented with the Ring of Barahir by Beren. I wish I had ten elves behind me. Even one more elf would be a wonderful thing and I’d feel a bunch better about being alone in the dark mud with only humans behind me. Of course, Finrod and his men were uncovered by Sauron’s Song of Power, thrown into the dungeons of the werewolf’s lair in Tol-in-Gaurhoth, and were all killed except Beren. In that case it was the human who lived and the elves who died. I’m just going to hope that my men and I don’t have a similar fate. But right now I’m going to find our missing troops, alive or dead.
From early ‘67 through May that same year, two major military operations, Operation Cedar Falls and Operation Junction City, fell on the tunnels of Cu Chi. The US and its allies threw manpower and machine power such as had never been seen before on this small area northwest of Saigon. An army of bulldozers and more than 32,000 men flooded the land around Cu Chi, trying to knock these tunnels down. But here we are. The tunnels are still here, the Viet Cong are still here, and I’m still here. All that effort and nothing changed.
It’s quiet in the tunnels. There are parts that most of the guys can stand up in. I can’t, I’m too tall. I make a quick signal to Number One, my point man. I’ve found our first missing grunt. He’s been stabbed through from one of the side hidey holes that the enemy uses. He’s still living, but his breathing sounds bad. I start him down the line. Number Ten will hand him off for us since we’re still close to our entry point.
I tell the guys to stand pat while I look ahead for a minute. Moving silently down the tunnel, I come to a junction. That’s where our second missing soldier is, but dead. No chance of revival. I pull his body back and we leave it. When Number Ten gets back, he’ll drag the body out for us.
I signal the rest about the intersection. No talking down here, sound carries. We move ahead towards the east. Once the boys are in the larger corridor of the junction, I move ahead again. There’s a turn and a dip – bad air mixed with gas, and body number three lies on the ground breathing in the gas. Or he did, but no more breathing for him. Looks like the VC in the side holes got him while he was slapping on his gas mask. Just past the gas, I find the fourth grunt, but he dies in my arms. Damn. I had hoped he could hold on long enough to get him to the entry and get him some help. The gas isn’t as much of a problem as the mask. You get fast putting them on, but it’s still a momentary distraction. In here a distraction can be the last thought of your life, mere seconds are all that lie between life and death. I get the first three guys and we move carefully. We reach the two bodies and pass them back, two of us for each one of them. I’m don’t sense or hear anyone ahead of us, so we backtrack to the intersection. Choosing to go north, I lead us on.
Past the junction the tunnel constricts again. I’m back to crawling, the guys behind me are duck walking. Either way, it’s uncomfortable. I hope I can find the fifth guy quickly. I hear a soft whimper of pain ahead of me and quickly signal Number One to stop the line. I creep ahead slowly and find a floor trap. Nasty things, floor traps. They are covered lightly with a thin layer of bamboo and packed mud so they look like solid floor. But any weight on it and they collapse underneath you, throwing you onto spikes below. That’s where our fifth guy is, spikes in his leg and hand, but amazingly missing his chest. He's in pain though and lifting him off the spikes won't be a walk in the park. I slap some morphine into him. It'll help push the pain away a bit. We'll gag him as we pull him off to keep the sound down.
On my way back to the guys I run into one of our other tunnel guests, a snake – poisonous variety of course. A quick flick of my hunting knife and it’s wriggling in pieces on the floor. I bring Numbers One and Two up with me to the floor trap. Pushing a shirt and my leather gloves between the injured grunt's teeth, we pull his hand and leg off the spikes. It's painful, but his involuntary scream of pain is muted through the gag. Then he loses consciousness and our job is suddenly easier again. I slap a few quick pressure bandages on him, but we’ve got to get him out quickly. The stakes of the trap are nasty but he'll likely survive. The tunnels became his ticket home. The morphine helps. I’m just glad that poppy-based pain relieving drugs are still as effective as when I first used them while Morgoth still walked the earth.
We’re back at the entryway. All told, fifteen men – three dead, two injured, and ten grunts sent to find them - and one elf, a tunnel rat. We all got out though, living and dead alike, and as I pull myself out of the tunnel, I reflect. ‘When Morgoth still walked the earth.’ What a laugh. Morgoth might have been thrown out into the Void, but he still walks. Evil is still here.
A/N – I am well aware that in this story Maglor is not using the more “upper-class” vocabulary and manner of speech that I normally use for him. I feel that since he is blending into a human environment, especially one where people are naturally suspicious and are carrying high-powered weaponry, that he would prefer to fit in as much as possible, which would include changing his thought patterns to be appropriate cadence for his situation. I hope that his stream-of-consciousness adventuring within this alternative speech pattern does not throw too many people off the story.
Thanks to Surgical Steel for her invaluable help in determining reasonable reactions to both injuries and trauma.
Format: Short Story
Genre: Drama
Rating: PG – minor cursing and talk of death
Warnings: None
Characters: Maglor
Pairings: None
Word Count: 1910
Summary: Experience Vietnam as seen through the thoughts of Maglor during a mission. Maglor has been walking our Earth for long Ages and fought in 1000’s of wars. His life in Vietnam is a bit more unusual though.
Tunnel Rat
I am too tall for this. But I am what they call ‘lanky’ in this era, and I have my elvish talents – I can see in almost total darkness and I have extremely acute hearing - I have a long history of survival too, although the Colonel wouldn’t know about that. My racial skills are proving useful in the tunnels, but … I am too tall for this job.
I was supposed to be assigned as a medic. That’s dangerous enough. Medics fly into combat zones in Hueys, then try to load the wounded while avoiding becoming another casualty. The next step is trying to keep the wounded alive through the flight back to home base while tracers and anti-aircraft rounds are going off all around the ‘choppers. I’ve done a lot of Huey runs and so far I’ve been safe and my injured troops have lived. I’ve been lucky.
Survival out here in the jungle isn’t a matter of skill it’s purely a matter of luck. The guy in the foxhole next to you who pokes his head up two seconds earlier than you gets popped, but you live on because you’re two seconds slower. Or maybe the platoon leader’s scouts missed a trip line which you were lucky enough to step over, but the guy five back wasn’t so lucky. More work for the medics then.
More work for the medics always. War is about death – killing the person who is trying to kill you. I’ve battled in thousands of wars on this misbegotten and forgotten land of Middle Earth and it never changes. The weapons change, the ability to kill from longer and longer distances and with greater and greater ease and precision changes, but it still comes down to us versus them. At the end of it all, trying to save and put back together the bodies that have been pulled apart, are the medics. We have thousands of medics on the ground. Every patrol has someone qualified to slap a shot of morphine into a fellow, wrap a bandage and treat trauma wounds and jungle rot. But there’s a big difference between that kind of medicine and mine.
I’m a healer and a darned good one. I could help in the surgery tents, and when I’m near the hospitals, I try to. But Command wants me here – wriggling my way through the narrow darkness – because I can find them. I can find the ones who are lost, and I can find the traps, the gas pockets, and the flooded sections. I don’t get lost, I bring my men back alive, I can find the wounded and the dead, and usually, I can get both the living and the dead out of these underground death traps. Other people can heal, not many others can find the missing in the tunnels.
Cu Chi isn’t the only complex of tunnels. But it’s been around for a long, long time. They were using some of these tunnels back when they fought the French at Dien Bien Phu. The French were smart. They left. The US moved into their vacuum and decided to help the South fight this civil war. Everything for democracy. Democracy – PLEASE! The Command isn’t fighting for fucking democracy, they’re fighting against communism. They don’t look at the long view. Governments come and go, but the people who live on the land are going to fight to keep their homes. Let the politicians talk. Their hot air won’t make a bit of difference in that long view. Men are dying here every day to achieve a victory that will never come, in a land where they have no roots. The people here want us out of Vietnam, if they are honest. They want a land without land mines, trip cords, and casual dead bodies. The people back home want us out of Vietnam too. Hell, I want out of Vietnam too, but the North isn’t giving up and my tour isn’t over until late November.
I’ve heard it said that they have more than 30 square miles in this tunnel system. When I think of how Command miscounts casualty and enemy numbers, I’ll bet that the tunnels are even bigger than that. We’re at the entrance now and I warn my guys to be as quiet as they can. No talking, minimal light. I tell them that I’ll lead and I arrange them in the order I want them deployed behind me. My two steadiest guys are positioned as Number One and Number Nine in my column. Number Ten is my brawn. He’ll be dragging the living and the dead back to the entrance for us.
So I crawl into the tunnels to find our guys. We have five missing from a scouting group of rats who went in a few hours ago. The Lieutenant’s sent ten men with me. I shivered at that number, the same number of elves who went with Finrod when he was presented with the Ring of Barahir by Beren. I wish I had ten elves behind me. Even one more elf would be a wonderful thing and I’d feel a bunch better about being alone in the dark mud with only humans behind me. Of course, Finrod and his men were uncovered by Sauron’s Song of Power, thrown into the dungeons of the werewolf’s lair in Tol-in-Gaurhoth, and were all killed except Beren. In that case it was the human who lived and the elves who died. I’m just going to hope that my men and I don’t have a similar fate. But right now I’m going to find our missing troops, alive or dead.
From early ‘67 through May that same year, two major military operations, Operation Cedar Falls and Operation Junction City, fell on the tunnels of Cu Chi. The US and its allies threw manpower and machine power such as had never been seen before on this small area northwest of Saigon. An army of bulldozers and more than 32,000 men flooded the land around Cu Chi, trying to knock these tunnels down. But here we are. The tunnels are still here, the Viet Cong are still here, and I’m still here. All that effort and nothing changed.
It’s quiet in the tunnels. There are parts that most of the guys can stand up in. I can’t, I’m too tall. I make a quick signal to Number One, my point man. I’ve found our first missing grunt. He’s been stabbed through from one of the side hidey holes that the enemy uses. He’s still living, but his breathing sounds bad. I start him down the line. Number Ten will hand him off for us since we’re still close to our entry point.
I tell the guys to stand pat while I look ahead for a minute. Moving silently down the tunnel, I come to a junction. That’s where our second missing soldier is, but dead. No chance of revival. I pull his body back and we leave it. When Number Ten gets back, he’ll drag the body out for us.
I signal the rest about the intersection. No talking down here, sound carries. We move ahead towards the east. Once the boys are in the larger corridor of the junction, I move ahead again. There’s a turn and a dip – bad air mixed with gas, and body number three lies on the ground breathing in the gas. Or he did, but no more breathing for him. Looks like the VC in the side holes got him while he was slapping on his gas mask. Just past the gas, I find the fourth grunt, but he dies in my arms. Damn. I had hoped he could hold on long enough to get him to the entry and get him some help. The gas isn’t as much of a problem as the mask. You get fast putting them on, but it’s still a momentary distraction. In here a distraction can be the last thought of your life, mere seconds are all that lie between life and death. I get the first three guys and we move carefully. We reach the two bodies and pass them back, two of us for each one of them. I’m don’t sense or hear anyone ahead of us, so we backtrack to the intersection. Choosing to go north, I lead us on.
Past the junction the tunnel constricts again. I’m back to crawling, the guys behind me are duck walking. Either way, it’s uncomfortable. I hope I can find the fifth guy quickly. I hear a soft whimper of pain ahead of me and quickly signal Number One to stop the line. I creep ahead slowly and find a floor trap. Nasty things, floor traps. They are covered lightly with a thin layer of bamboo and packed mud so they look like solid floor. But any weight on it and they collapse underneath you, throwing you onto spikes below. That’s where our fifth guy is, spikes in his leg and hand, but amazingly missing his chest. He's in pain though and lifting him off the spikes won't be a walk in the park. I slap some morphine into him. It'll help push the pain away a bit. We'll gag him as we pull him off to keep the sound down.
On my way back to the guys I run into one of our other tunnel guests, a snake – poisonous variety of course. A quick flick of my hunting knife and it’s wriggling in pieces on the floor. I bring Numbers One and Two up with me to the floor trap. Pushing a shirt and my leather gloves between the injured grunt's teeth, we pull his hand and leg off the spikes. It's painful, but his involuntary scream of pain is muted through the gag. Then he loses consciousness and our job is suddenly easier again. I slap a few quick pressure bandages on him, but we’ve got to get him out quickly. The stakes of the trap are nasty but he'll likely survive. The tunnels became his ticket home. The morphine helps. I’m just glad that poppy-based pain relieving drugs are still as effective as when I first used them while Morgoth still walked the earth.
We’re back at the entryway. All told, fifteen men – three dead, two injured, and ten grunts sent to find them - and one elf, a tunnel rat. We all got out though, living and dead alike, and as I pull myself out of the tunnel, I reflect. ‘When Morgoth still walked the earth.’ What a laugh. Morgoth might have been thrown out into the Void, but he still walks. Evil is still here.
A/N – I am well aware that in this story Maglor is not using the more “upper-class” vocabulary and manner of speech that I normally use for him. I feel that since he is blending into a human environment, especially one where people are naturally suspicious and are carrying high-powered weaponry, that he would prefer to fit in as much as possible, which would include changing his thought patterns to be appropriate cadence for his situation. I hope that his stream-of-consciousness adventuring within this alternative speech pattern does not throw too many people off the story.
Thanks to Surgical Steel for her invaluable help in determining reasonable reactions to both injuries and trauma.
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-15 09:13 pm (UTC)I was under the impression Maglor wandered off mad as a hatter in the Silmarillion. Hmmm. Okay. Set's that aside.
I am intrigued with this. VN was my generation's war ... oh excuse me, it was never a "war"... not sure what they called it for legalities. It wasn't a "police action" like Korea. :P Still I like this. I shuddered more than once with his talk of the choppers and crawling thru the tunnels. Unlike any earlier war (and I'm a reader of WW1 stuff) Nam was the 5 o'clock news, it permeated everything we did back then. This story strikes that for me in a big way.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-15 09:41 pm (UTC)Vietnam was also my war. It was my dinnertime war, it was the war that my friends were drafted for and that some didn't return from. It was the war that some of my friends will never be able to forget.
I'm glad that this hit you as authentic. I did a fair amount of research on this to make sure that what I remembered about the tunnel rats was in fact accurate. Also, that my memories were correct in terms of names of things, appropriate weaponry, etc. I am a student of WWII, and have research that extensively. I understand your perspective.
That you liked this, despite the nearness and familiarity of the war, pleases me a great deal. Thank you for letting me know.
- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-15 10:41 pm (UTC)I was supposed to be assigned to the Medical Corps.
Perhaps you're not aware, but the Medical Corps, strictly speaking, is made up only of commissioned officers who have a medical degree. Army corpsmen, the enlisted folks who go out on the Hueys after wounded? Are not, strictly speaking, members of the Medical Corps.
I'm saying this as a former military medical officer.
I'll also say that in my time on active duty, I never once heard a helipcopter called a 'copter. 'Choppers,' yes. 'Copters,' no.
Also - it's not 'AdMin,' it'd be 'Admin,' and a field medic would've been far more likely to think of them as 'Command' - or if feeling particularly venomous toward them, as REMFs.
Also - this bit:
bad air mixed with gas, and body number three lies on the ground breathing in the gas.
What was mainly used in Vietnam was either dioxin as part of Agent Orange (used by the US) or CS. Dioxin's generally not immediately lethal - and CS, while unpleasant as hell, isn't lethal either. And even people in medical personnel are drilled on how to get a gas mask over your head and face quickly enough the CS wouldn't do much worse than get the guy's mask full of snot.
I've been hit with CS as part of gas mask training, so I speak from personal experience.
Also - this bit:
I slap some morphine into him. It wouldn’t do for him to scream when we lift him from the spikes.
Morphine isn't necessarily going to keep the guy from screaming. It's still likely to hurt a lot when they lift someone off of spikes. And he probably would have screamed when he fell onto them in the first place, if he's going to scream - in which case, the screaming thing would be a moot point.
So I'm afraid that this didn't really work for me.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-15 11:14 pm (UTC)In Vietnam, although there was a standard Medical Corps, there was also a large supplementary medical group who underwent a serious 12 week training program teaching them field medicine - trauma, jungle rot, morphine, etc. These weren't the surgeons, these were the people who were out on patrol with the rest of the grunts who would hopefully be able to keep the men alive until the Hueys could arrive and take the wounded back to the hospital tents and units. Often the CO's (conscientious objectors) were assigned to the Medical Corps and, sometimes after they arrived in-country, they suddenly found themselves out in the field hiding in foxholes with weapons in their hands despite what was supposed to have happened to them. It was a BIG war, it was a war before records were as meticulous as they are now, and it was a war of mistakes - lots of mistakes.
I know you speak from experience too, so here's what I'll do.
1) - I'll change AdMin to Command, I have no problems doing that, even though my friend's hubby who flew Hueys and still suffers from PTSD to this day has always spelled it as I wrote it. No biggie. I can change that.
2) - I'll change 'copter to 'Chopper
3) - since the tunnels were often made so that flooded areas would trap gas in pockets, and then the VC used side hidey holes in those pockets allowing access to kill from protected positions while the gas was distracting or causing greater issues for the soldier, I'll have to think about how to rephrase this small section. I need two bodies here, one living and one dead, so I'll make some alterations that will fit into how the gas pockets were used.
4) - the fact that number five screamed when he hit the spike trap isn't the point. That would have been expected. Having him scream when he was removed however, would alert the enemy and bring them back into territory that they had left for the time being. Couldn't a heavy enough dose of morphine push the pain enough into the background so that screaming wouldn't be an issue? I'm asking you because you would know. I haven't had that uncertain experience on a personal level.
- Erulisse (one L)
Vietnam was MY war - the one that my friends and relatives fought in and died in. And yes, it was a nasty war.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-15 11:26 pm (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 12:01 am (UTC)And please don't assume that because I didn't personally serve there that I'm not familiar with what happened in Vietnam. My father still has nightmares about his combat tour there, and I number Vietnam vets among former patients, co-workers, and family - in addition to being required to study what happened in the medical arena both as a serving medical corps officer and as a surgical resident.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 12:30 am (UTC)I don't assume that you don't know about Vietnam, just that you didn't serve there. It seems that both of us have a pretty firm grounding in that war so truce?
- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 12:37 am (UTC)I'll knock Corps out and just leave Medic since that seems to be the more "generic" term, unless you have issues with the complete term. If you do, then what would you suggest I replace it with?
I'm all ears here and am awaiting your response before making the next batch of changes.
- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 12:45 am (UTC)Either medic or corpsman would be an appropriate specific (not generic) term.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 01:12 am (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 01:14 am (UTC)I will figure out a way to address your concerns and make it a stronger piece because you care. And I thank you.
- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 10:15 am (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 10:28 am (UTC)Vietnam stories are always fascinating to me, since I grew up during this era. :/
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 10:56 am (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 09:57 pm (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-17 12:23 am (UTC)