After Max Murphy died and after we chased off or killed the sniper—it was impossible to tell which—and after we cleared the roadblock, the supply trucks ran the route safely for several weeks. I had almost five months left on my tour and was sick of humping along the DMZ at the beck and call of rear echelon colonels looking to make political points that might get them promoted to generals. I transferred to a special unit called a Combined Action Platoon that billeted in a hamlet south of Hue in Thua Thien province. The unit was small and designed to implement a program called “the winning of hearts and minds” by living with and training a village militia to run counter-insurgency operations against VC cadres and their units. The work created more danger, but there were no longer any large-scale operations to contend with and no more beating the bush for weeks on end. Everything in the war was a trade-off. Hell, maybe everything in life is.
One night during the Tet Offensive in 1968, my squad got caught in crossfire between NVA regulars and a group of ARVN Rangers. We hadn’t intended that to happen. Most of the boys looked forward to our usual night patrol because we had a regular spot about two clicks beyond the concertina wire and spent some time there in a tight circle passing around a joint, laughing at the white grape moon that hung ripe over the jungle. The break eased the tension of wondering for too long whether we might die before dawn. This patrol started different.
Henry Tauzin’s mother was a mambo priestess in some voodoo group in New Orleans.
Big Henry was our machine gunner. He stood about 6’ 4” and carried the M-60 like it was made of balsa wood. Henry always laughed about his mother’s three baptized drums and her house full of snake bone rattles, but he never laughed at the Rada Loa. They were the guardian powers that his mama conjured up to protect him while he spent his tour in Vietnam dodging shrapnel, tracer rounds, booby traps, and the clap. On this same morning, Henry had gotten a letter from her warning him to stay indoors from sunset to sunrise during the entire month. The warning had to do with another priestess named Mavis and a handful of graveyard dirt from the fresh-dug grave of a guy named Dr. Midnight.
I didn’t get the whole story from Henry because he spoke in a patois made up of French, English, and some western African dialect, but to the best of my memory Dr. Midnight suffered a fatal heart attack, and Henry’s mom suffered coitus interruptus at precisely the same moment and in the same bed. Henry seemed to view those two events as coincidence rather than cause and effect. Mavis, who happened to be married to the good Doctor Midnight, had the opposite understanding and became disconcerted by the means of his demise. She cursed all males in Henry’s family, strategically locating a pile of this graveyard dirt on his mamma’s front porch to coincide with some night astrological phenomenon that was to take place this particular month.
The curse worked against the Rada Loa and Henry was the only male in the immediate family. Having no reasonable way to explain to the platoon sergeant why we shouldn’t deploy for our night patrol and at the same time having knowledge that Henry, and by extension our whole squad, was cursed, caused a general feeling of imminent disaster. I don’t remember any other time during my whole tour when I saw so many letters to home being written and handed off, so many mojos, rabbit foot key chains, St. Francis medals, pocket-sized Bibles, and peace signs, come out of footlockers to adorn various body parts. Even I placed my most prized possession, Susie Fair’s garter belt left over from prom night, around the stock of my M-16.
So out we went past the wire, past the Claymores, past the Agent Orange-seared elephant grass, into the blackness of the jungle that surrounded the village with nothing on our minds except Henry’s fat mother who had killed us all with her lust. Even the usual macaws trilling and monkeys chattering were drowned out by the hollow thump of our own beating hearts. Of course, we had no idea at the time that our fear would soon be realized because some dumb ass in Danang wrongly coordinated a platoon-sized ambush for the Vietnamese Rangers right in the middle of our favorite sit-down spot and hadn’t bothered to tell our sergeant about it.
We reclined in the small clearing as usual, took off our flak jackets, and used our helmets as pillows. The night felt quiet. Henry lit a fat Thai stick and the rest of us stared through the stars. Our reasoning was simple. If we did everything the same as always and got stoned enough, the curse would ignore us to find more worthy sacrifices. No one had seen any trace of NVA in this whole area for several weeks. They had all migrated into Hue. The anger of a voodoo priestess ten thousand miles away just wasn’t enough to keep us alert after smoking an opiated joint. Henry stood and turned away from the circle to piss.
The open clearing, unlike the dense jungle, allowed moonlight to outline his body. In other words, our behavior was stupid to start with. On my right side, I heard the unmistakable swish of a B-40 rocket round leaving the tube and sizzling through the air like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. A dense thump and a loud explosion followed. Something fell from the sky into my lap. At first I thought it might have been a tree limb but it wriggled and twitched. So, then I thought it was a snake. I scooted backward on my ass across the ground and at the same time wondered why I felt no shrapnel from the nearby explosion. The thing stayed right with me. I tried to brush it off and when I did, I realized that it was Henry’s wet, black arm. The arm was pretty much all we ever found of him, which seemed weird because Henry happened to be about the size of a tree. Best guess—the rocket round must have caught him in the chest on its way across the clearing.
My screams were drowned out by the eruption of machine-gun fire from the tree line on the left side along with the whistle and crack of rifle rounds in response on my right. All my squad could do was hug the earth as the tracer rounds flew over our heads and pray for it to end. It did. The jungle grew quiet again. We ran back to our perimeter at full speed, stopping only once to fire a green pop-up flare and shout at the sentries, “Don’t shoot us.” No one had any idea what had happened till the next morning.
The company commander visited us from the safety of Phu Bai and called us in one at a time to make sure we each got his desire that we keep our mouths shut about the whole incident. He explained that there had been some confusion in patrol routes at headquarters. Evidently something was lost in the translation of map coordinates from English to Vietnamese. To top things off, a platoon of North Vietnamese regulars unexpectedly moved ammunition and supplies through the area at the same time in preparation for an offensive in Hue. “It was a freak occurrence and shouldn’t have happened,” he said. I’ve always felt Henry would have disagreed.
Jim McGarrah, Author 
Wow.
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