Street Fighting Man

Street Fighting Man

By Ed Staskus

   Ziggy was ready to go home. He was more than ready. He had been in South Vietnam for one year and 29 days. His tour of duty was going to be officially over on January 30, 1968, which was tomorrow. He had the date circled. Tomorrow was also the beginning of the Lunar New Year. It was a week when families reunited and honored their ancestors, praying for luck, prosperity, and health in the coming year. The morning the reunions got going was the morning he was going to be the first man in line for a seat on a Japan-bound C-141 Starlifter.  He was going to get the hell out of Southeast Asia. He was going to go home to Chicago. He would have dinner with his father at Healthy Food, a big Lithuanian restaurant on Halsted St., where the food was “as mom used to make at home.” He was never going back to the killing fields of the Vietnam War. 

   Nobody in the Marine Corps called Sigitas Marcinkevicius by his given name. Other than his by-the-book commanding officer everybody called him Ziggy. The men he fought with in the 3rd Marine Division called him Zig Zag for his uncanny ability to walk away unscathed from one firefight after another. Everybody wanted to be his best friend when on roving patrols.

   Ziggy volunteered for the Marine Corps in 1966. “I wanted to fight for our country,” he said. His father had fought Russians in the forests of Lithuania in 1945. “I wanted to fight commies like my dad and I wanted to be a hero. I thought I could get everything I wanted by joining the Marines.” He was sent to Parris Island for eight weeks. “I had no idea how grueling those two months of basic training were going to be. The DI’s worked us hard every day, and every night right before we hit the hay we had to do a hundred up-and-on-shoulders and a hundred squat thrusts. Everybody slept like the dead.”  

   He learned how to disassemble, clean, and fire the new M16 assault rifles. The target was the goal. “You can’t hurt them if you can’t hit them,” his small arms instructor said. “You don’t want to die for your country, son. You want the other guy to die for his.” He was issued a Gomer Pyle uniform. He was issued sateen t-shirts, 2-pocket shorts, and 4-pocket utilities. He was issued a combat uniform, combat boots, and a combat helmet. He became a Leatherneck. He shipped out to South Vietnam and reported for duty at the Marine base at Con Thien. It was less than two miles from the North Vietnamese border. He got there just in time for a year’s worth of the most bitter fighting the base had seen since its establishment as a Special Forces camp years before.

   Con Thien meant Hill of Angels. It was anything but. The 9,000 Marines there called it the ‘Meat Grinder’. It was a slice of hell, a treeless 525-foot high hill. The DMZ, where they repeatedly engaged the NVA, they called the ‘Dead Marine Zone.’ The base was shelled daily. Halfway through Ziggy’s tour of duty the NVA began hitting it with hundreds of rounds a day. During the last week of September more than 3000 rounds slammed into the base. In December Ziggy was assigned to a work detail adding a dozen deep bunkers, digging a new trench along the forward slope of the base, and laying down endless miles of razor wire. The NVA never stopped shelling the base with 135-millimeter artillery sheltered inside caves. Keeping your head down was the order of the day. 

   Ziggy was rotated out several times, but was always rotated back in. He fought in Operations Hickory, Buffalo, and Kingfisher. 142 Marines were killed in action during Operation Hickory. The NVA lost 362 men. When it was over all of the civilian population within sight was removed and everything within sight became a free fire zone. 159 Marines were killed in action during Operation Buffalo. The NVA lost 1,290 men. 340 Marines were killed in action during Operation Kingfisher. The NVA lost nearly 3,000 men, too many to count. American firepower was second to none.

   “We are fighting a war of attrition” was the way General William Westmoreland saw it. He was the commander of U. S. forces in Vietnam. He believed in body counts front and center. He explained that the enemy was losing about 2,000 men killed in action a week, while the allied forces were losing about 400 men killed in action a week. He believed the North Vietnamese would eventually run out of manpower and give up. He was wrong about them giving up. They weren’t dominoes like American foreign policy said they were. They were fighting for the right to define themselves. They were never going to give up if it took a hundred years.

   The base at Con Thien was meant to block North Vietnamese incursions. The McNamara Line, named after the Secretary of Defense, brimming with acoustic sensors and minefields, was ready to block them. “Being ready is not what matters, though,” USMC Lieutenant General Krulack said. “What matters is winning.” The Marines at Con Thien were always prepared to win and never lost a major engagement, but they were losing the war.

   “As soon as I got my discharge orders in late January I said goodbye to all my buddies, at least those who were still making it,” Ziggy said. A CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter came in fast during a lull in the constant shelling. “I had to wait my turn for the wounded and the body bags to be loaded. The minute we landed in Da Nang mortars started shelling the airfield. For a second I thought God didn’t want me to get out of there, after all.”

   The next day the Tet Offensive began with a bang. The goal of the North Vietnamese was to “crack the sky and shake the earth.” 84,000 VC and NVA attacked most of the district capitals in the country,  dozens of military bases, and Saigon itself, where they seized the national radio station. The  ancient walled city of Hue, which stood on the banks of the Perfume River not far from the DMZ, was overrun by a force of more than 5,000 VC and NVA. Most of them hunkered down, setting up defensive perimeters. The rest encircled the ARVN holding out in the historic Citadel. VC assassination squads spread out and shot those they accused of collaborating with the South Vietnamese regime.

   The 5th Marine Regiment was ordered to drive them back. “One of my buddies was in the 5th,” Ziggy said. “I couldn’t leave. We were Marines. I jumped into an M35 truck with him.” Da Nang was 60 miles from Hue City. The road was bad but most of the traffic was going south, the other way from them, fleeing to whatever place was safer. Those who fled north found themselves on the Highway of Horror, where the NVA shelled them hour after hour. The Marines got to Hue City soon enough. All hell had broken loose. It would be the longest and bloodiest battle of the Tet Offensive.

   “It was a different kind of war than at Con Thien. It was street fighting. Every crossroad and every house on every street was a battlefield. It was ugly fighting, room by room. We tossed grenades over walls and through windows and emptied magazines without even looking. We never stopped shooting, no matter what.” Howitzers fired nearly 20,000 rounds into close quarters. Naval forces fired nearly 6,000 rounds. Planes and helicopters unleashed fire and brimstone.

   Not knowing where the enemy might be was nerve wracking. “That was the worst of it,” Ziggy’s buddy Sam Jackson, Jr. said. “They would pop out of shadows and sewers and start spraying us with their AK’s. All we could do was take cover and shoot back, trying to stay alive, day by goddamned day.”

   Ziggy wrote “War is Hell” on his helmet cover and secured an ace of spades playing card to it. It was either him or them. There wasn’t going to be any winning hearts and minds. He lived in his combat uniform, combat boots, and combat helmet for nearly two weeks. His boots sprouted fungi and his feet itched bad. He found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and slathered it on his feet and groin. He smelled horrible, especially his arm pits, but the air was so filled with the smell of cordite, diesel fumes, and the decaying bodies of humans and animals that body odor was the least of anybody’s concerns.

   “I was into the tail end of my second week when I got knocked down by a blast,” Ziggy said. “Medics sewed up the gash on my forehead, but a piece of shrapnel got into my eye. I had to wear a patch. I could still shoot but I couldn’t shoot straight. I helped out on stretcher duty until I couldn’t anymore and was sent to the rear.” By that time the battle of Hue City was the only battle of the Tet Offensive still ongoing. It had taken American and ARVN forces a hard week to beat back the North Vietnamese attacks in the rest of the country.  It was harder going in Hue City.

   The battle there lasted five weeks. More than 6,000 civilians died during the battle. The day it started there were 135,00 residents of Hue City. The day it ended there were about 20,000 still there, scuttling for food in the rubble like crabs. Everybody else had fled to the countryside. More than 600 Marines, ARVN, and 1stCalvary Division forces were killed in action. Thousands of them were wounded. More than 3,000 VC and NVA were killed in action. Nobody knows how many of them were wounded. In the process of saving the city from each other, the Marines, the Viet Cong, the Army of South Vietnam, and the Army of North Vietnam destroyed it.

   After his eye was made good as new, Ziggy flew to San Francisco, and from there home to the Windy City. He and his father had dinner at Healthy Food. He found a job in the stockyards, the meat locker of the country. He joined the National Guard. “I did it so I could keep most of the benefits I got while in active service. I didn’t have to do much, except show up one weekend every month, pretend I was a soldier, and catch some shuteye in the barracks.”

   He didn’t have to do much until the Democratic National Convention happened in August. Lyndon Johnson earlier in the year had unexpectedly announced he would not seek re-election. The No. 1 issue was the Vietnam War. Activists announced they were going to gather in force at the convention to protest United States policies. “If they push us out of Grant Park, we’re going to break windows,” said Abbie Hoffman, co-founder of the Yippies. Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley declared that would happen only over his dead body. “All right, then maybe we will levitate the International Amphitheatre into outer space,” Abbie Hoffman’s righthand man said. 

   Mayor Daley didn’t know what to say to that. One of his aides said, “The protestors are revolutionaries bent on the destruction of America.” The mayor refused permission for “anti-patriotic” groups to demonstrate at the International Amphitheatre. He ordered the site ringed with razor wire. He put 11,000 officers of the police force on twelve-hour shifts. 6,000 armed National Guardsmen were called up to secure the International Amphitheatre. “If you’re going to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your hair,” said Todd Gitlin, one of the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society.

   “A Democratic Party convention is about to take place in a police state,” reported Walter Cronkite of CBS News. “There doesn’t seem to be any other way to say it.”

   Ziggy got a call from the Illinois Army National Guard base in North Riverside. “I thought they were going to pass out Billy clubs,” he said. “I thought we were being sent downtown to protect public places and keep the delegates safe.” Instead of Billy clubs, quartermasters started passing out flak jackets, bayonets, and live ammunition.

   “What are these for?” Ziggy asked.

   “They are for taking care of the commies and shitheads out there.”

   “They’re just a bunch of college students. My brother might be there.” Ziggy’s brother was majoring in political science at the University of Chicago. He had already been arrested once for disorderly conduct during an anti-Vietnam War march.

   “I don’t care if he’s there, or not. It’s time to suit up.”

   “I’m not going,” Ziggy said.

   “Get on the truck, soldier.”

   “I told him, hell no, I’m not going, and then I left,” Ziggy said. “I lost my benefits because I wouldn’t do it but I knew full well what locked and loaded was all about. I wasn’t going to kill some kid for getting excited and mouthing off.” He went home and watched what happened on TV.

   What happened was a riot, except it wasn’t the demonstrators who did the rioting. The Chicago Police Department took care of that. The Battle of Michigan Avenue was fought in front of the Conrad Hilton, where many of the delegates were staying. The police attacked protesters, bystanders, and reporters. They fired tear gas indiscriminately. Some of it wafted into presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey’s hotel suite. Police pushed demonstrators through plate-glass windows, following them inside and beating them as they lay on broken glass. 100 demonstrators were injured and and 600 of them were arrested. Recently introduced portable video cameras recorded the melee and TV stations nationwide featured the footage on their news shows. “The whole world is watching” the demonstrators chanted. 

   On the convention floor Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff denounced the brutality as “Gestapo tactics.” Mayor Daley was asked at a press conference why the police had started cracking the heads of anti-war protestors. Did he have proof of “acts of provocation by the demonstrators” against the police? 

   “I don’t know if we have proof,” he said, “but we know it happened. Now, let’s get the thing straight, once and for all. The policeman isn’t there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder.” Nobody knew what the mayor’s deeper meaning was.

   “When I left Hue City I left dog fighting behind,” Ziggy said. “I didn’t go downtown not because I didn’t believe in law and order, but because I believed in my country. What I saw on TV was surreal, like the show ‘The Outer Limits.’ The cops went nuts. It was un-American, beating up people to shut them up. They were grabbing kids who were speaking their mind, holding them down, and hitting them with nightclubs. I saw a cop who looked like he lived in my neighborhood beating up somebody who looked like me.I was the one who went face to face with Charlie every day for a year, not that bluebottle with a club.”

   In the end, a presidential commission concluded that what happened during the convention was a “police riot.” At the same time, a Gallup Poll revealed that nearly 60% of Americans approved of what the police had done in Chicago. The Tet Offensive in 1968 didn’t end the Vietnam War, like the North Vietnamese believed it would. It ended seven years later when their tanks rolled into Saigon and the last American helicopter lifted off from the roof of the American Embassy. 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans died during the conflict. Twenty years later, in 1995, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara admitted he had known the Vietnam War was a mistake all along.

Photograph by Horst Faas.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

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