I don’t remember the exact day Tibiletti got the boots. He ran into the barracks that day and told a story of a wild send-off given to this Special Forces sergeant.  Tibiletti said the sarge threw the boots from the back of a cargo plane as it lifted off the runway. The boots were genuine — not the ordinary, puke-green, canvass-tops worn by most G.I.s in Vietnam, but leather with a zipper up the middle and just a hint of the former shine. These were flight boots for sure!

“Damn!” Tibiletti, the newest of the new in Vietnam had had a pair of jump-boots literally fall into his possession from the sky. I was as envious as hell.  Already three months into Vietnam, I had not so much as a shoestring handed down to me by a vet, and here, Tibiletti had a pair of Special Forces jump-boots. “Damn!”

Seemingly every Vietnam soldier either had in his possession, or was actively seeking, some special lucky piece. These charms were acquired by design mostly, but these boots came to Tibiletti by blind luck — so unlike what typically befell him. 

Tibiletti, a past, basic training spastic, was as likely to trip over a pair of boots as to wear them. Nevertheless, he had the boots and for the next weeks would keep them with him constantly, either on his feet, or under his bunk. 

At DaNang it was customary to send off a buddy with an all-night beer bash.  The Bien Hoa-bound C-141s would drone into DaNang around 0500 hours and by that time we would be a drunken rabble. The whole event served as group anesthesia from the pain of being left behind. A fire would have been started, and the soldier who was leaving would have burned nearly everything except the clothes on his back, the contraband that he intended to slip through customs, and that special piece of gear that would be left behind for some lucky soldier.

It was an accepted, howbeit asinine ritual that showed more bravado than brains. If Charlie had chosen that hour to lob a few 125-millimeter shells onto the base, our fire would have been like a homing beacon guiding the rockets in. But when a buddy had done his time in Vietnam and was headed back to the States in something other than a box, his good fortune was a special event, and we celebrated. With a mixture of relief and suppressed resentment, his barracks-mates ushered him through his final day in ’Nam in the spirit of teammates carrying a star player on their shoulders. A bonfire and beer seemed little enough to acknowledge the occasion. And to end the occasion with a special piece of gear being left behind by a departing vet, that made it even more worthwhile. The thinking was that if it had been lucky for him, it just might be lucky for you. Still, guys who were leaving typically passed on their treasures to some special buddy who had been in Vietnam with them for a while. My God, Tibiletti was just a newk! He had only been there two weeks.

I had first met Tibiletti in basic training. He was from California, Los Angeles, I think, but he didn’t look or act like the proverbial, sun worshipping, Californian. Rotund and loping, he was constantly poking his glasses back atop his nose as he moved awkwardly through one basic training exercise after another. His full name was Raymond Charles Tibiletti. His father was some big shot in radio. I’m sure that somewhere along the line one of the family’s lawyers had goofed and Tibiletti had been issued induction papers. He quickly became the drill instructor’s whipping boy. Believe me, he was nobody’s soldier back then, just a slow, uncoordinated, mild-mannered guy who had gotten drafted. It was because of this, or maybe it was in spite of this, that I befriended him.

Tibiletti had the uncanny ability to tell which city you came from if you would give him the call letters of a hometown radio station. I had tried to stump him with “WESL,” but he shouted back without hesitation, “East St. Louis, Illinois.”

He had come to DaNang two months after I had arrived. He was assigned to my squad and from that day on we shared a stall in the barracks and just about everything else, except those newly acquired boots of his. It was on the night that Tibiletti was teaching me the subtleties of Bob Dylan’s music that sappers got onto the base and blew up an ammo barge. After we got off the floor, I noticed that Tibiletti was clutching his boots and stroking them the way you would a talisman. 

On that early morning when rockets slammed into the barracks area killing seven guys, everyone had run for the bunkers with little thought of anything else but getting there. Tibiletti, on the other hand, stopped long enough to get his boots.  Huddled in the darkness of the bunker, we talked in whispers of the dead outside. No one had seen them die, but we had heard the unmistakable sounds — the whistle of the falling shell, the slightly muffled explosion that signaled the splattering of bunks and flesh. In the darkness Tibiletti did not talk, but just held onto his boots. 

“Direct hit,” the first-shirt had said. The first-shirt knew the sound all too well.

As the days went on, Tibiletti took to spit-shining the boots and calling attention to them during conversations. “These babies are gonna take me home,” he would say, “They’re going to take me home!”

Hell, maybe he knew what he was talking about, I thought. After all, he had begun to act more like a soldier than ever before. On patrols he was as cool as anyone and his reaction time was getting faster. I had given up believing in charms, but respected whatever “ism” got a guy through this mess and back home. Tibiletti and his boots were as good a device as any, I felt.

We were on our way back to the compound following duty one night, about ten of us in all. Tibiletti was behind me about 20 paces, those boots of his snug on his feet. Jack and Vince had the point. The others were screwing around further back, throwing rocks. The mood was light.

If you can will your mind past the reality of the situation, it is easy to lose yourself in the blackness of the Vietnam sky after dark. A conical canopy, it seems no more than a couple of hundred yards overhead at its highest, all atwitter with stars fighting for a view of the earth below. Darkness had the habit of sneaking onto DaNang Airbase. Slipping over the mountains at the base’s southern perimeter, it would smother the sun’s rays and then claim all but the defiant searchlights and road markers that winking, pointed the way back to the compound. Breezes came too at those times, but never as stealthily — rolling heavily over the base, they were pervasive. 

It was in this kind of setting that we picked our way leisurely back to the barracks, easing up to a run-off ditch along the right side of the road. My thoughts were back on Lawrence Avenue — summer nights in the ’50s, wandering from yard to yard playing games, the old folks sitting on the porches waving at the heat with newspapers, smoke-pots choking off attacking mosquito hordes. In my mind I saw my mother. . .saw my girl.

It was Vince’s voice that broke the mood.

“Sarge, look. Look!”

I had spotted the orange-red tails of the rockets before Vince could finish shouting. They curved across the darkness in all directions. 

“Incoming,” Vince shouted, “Incoming!”

Instinctively I turned to my right and dove for the ditch. As I landed I saw Tibiletti and the others entering the same ditch a few feet back from my position.  Tibiletti had been the last one in, as usual, but he made it. We all burrowed our faces in the mud as the base siren wailed. Engineers shut down generators giving DaNang back to the night and we each found a private, muddy womb in which to ride out the attack. 

The rockets fell without pattern or rhythm for nearly half-an-hour. The barrage was heavy, but hit mostly in other areas of the base. Only a few had hit nearby. I had actually felt the impact of one as I lay buried in the mud — a thudding, slightly muffled sound — probably the result of the shell slamming into the moist earth. 

Fifteen minutes of silence was enough to bring us from our muddy hideouts. I spent another minute removing the goop from my eyes. Up on the road the guys were scurrying around searching the shadows with their flashlights. 

“What’s wrong,” I shouted.

“Tibiletti. Tibiletti’s missing,” a frantic voiced responded! 

I ran towards them, thinking as I went, “I saw him go into the ditch. He made it in time. Damn, I know he did. He’s just slow. He’s always slow.” I stopped near the spot where I had seen Tibiletti dive in. The others were grouped behind me.  The eeriness of the situation chilled me, even in the warm DaNang air. Our flashlights shown on the spot where Tibiletti had gone into the ditch. He was not there, but the earth was splayed before us — black clumps in an irregular, oval pattern, with the odor of sulphur.

He was not there. Instead, in his place, in the midst of the clumps of dirt, smoldering in the half-light, twisted and torn, lay Tibiletti’s boots.